Intelligence Season 1 Finale: The Stars and the Chips

An excellent Intelligence Season 1 finale tonight, which tied up some loose ends, and brought out at least one new one to dangle before our eyes and beckon to a second season.

You can analyze this episode by a look at the stars.

Tomas Arana, who played the bad guy in the 1992 movie The Bodyguard - who portrayed the assassin who masquerades as a bodyguard - reprises much of that role in Intelligence.  He plays an intelligence chief who in fact is one of main bad guys - Iranian super spies deep undercover, out to kill a governor on her way to likely being elected President, and anyone who gets in the way.

Lance Reddick plays another intelligence chief who turns out not to be such a bad guy, after all.  But his character doesn't have much luck, and suffers the same fate as his character over on NBC's The Blacklist, also on Monday night.  The character dies.   Reddick played two memorable, long lasting characters on The Wire and Fringe, but his characters haven't had much longevity since.

And Peter Coyote, an outstanding character actor for decades, and Lillian's father on Intelligence, turns out in a nice twist to be the bad guy who hired Mei Chen.  We'll need a second season to find out why.

Gabriel's mother, played by Debra Mooney, makes her first appearance in the series, and is an important new character who lends humanity to Gabriel.  Not that he needs it - as Riley and everyone who knows him sees - he's a human being enhanced not degraded by his chip.  And that's really the thesis and essence of this story, and what makes the series so good.  It has a balance of tech and human, of digital and flesh-and-blood, which is right where it should be, and where I think it will indeed be in our real future.

My one criticism is the continued refusal to mix pleasure (aka sex) and business by Gabriel and Riley. But that can be easily remedied, and is one of the many reasons I hope Intelligence gets the future on CBS it deserves.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry ... Intelligence 1.5: The Watch ... Intelligence 1.6: Helix meets Rectify and Justified ... Intelligence 1.7: Nanites ...Intelligence 1.8: Heart of Darkness, Cyberstyle ... Intelligence 1.9:  EMP Amnesia and Children ... Intelligence 1.10: Lillian's Daughter ...Intelligence 1.11: American Chernobyl Countermeasures ... Intelligence 1.12: Cyber Adam and Eve

#SFWApro



Like stories about near-future high-tech counter-espionage?  Check out The Pixel Eye

Intelligence 1.5: The Watch

Another excellent Intelligence tonight - 1.5 - with another completely different kind of story.  This diversity of story style, an almost different genre every week, keeps viewers on their toes and is one of Intelligence's most appealing characteristics.

Tonight we get Gabriel and Riley out to rescue a Senator's daughter kidnapped by a Mexican drug king, in a story that could have been on NCIS-LA.   But Gabriel of course has all the fancy computer connections and graphics in his head, which makes for far faster response time than on NCIS-LA, and a minimum of trivial chit-chat in the control center.

We also get to meet Lillian's father, played by Peter Coyote, always good to see on the screen.  Lillian, who's proving to be a more interesting character than first I thought, has a difficult relationship with her father, as she would with any government bigwig who marches to his own "greater good" drums. Lillian's going against her father's orders in the end is one of the best moves she's made in the series to date.

But my favorite part of this episode concerned an old-fashioned analog watch - the kind with second, minute, and hour hands - and the way it helps Gabriel crack the last part of the case.   This is good writing and an example of something else that puts Intelligence a cut above the rest.   A lesser show about a chip in the brain and cyber-command would wield nothing but digital super tech on behalf of its stories.  But Gabriel has an almost MacGyver-like affinity for anything that does the job, anything he can press into service which happens to be at hand, however mundane.

One last thing: it's good to see the stirrings of attraction between Gabriel and Riley.  This can be trite if handled clumsily, but I have a feeling Intelligence will roll it out in the unexpected and satisfying way it's shown us everything else so far.

See also Intelligence Debuts ... Intelligence 1.2: Lightning Changes ...Intelligence 1.3: Edward Snowden and 24 ... Intelligence 1.4: Social Media Weaponry

#SFWApro

Review of Connected: A Triple Threat Movie by Tiffany Shlain

Just saw Tiffany Shlain's new documentary Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology via private online screening.  I saw an earlier version about a year ago, and was well impressed both times.

The movie is actually three in one -

1. Connected is a sagely and even delightfully presented story of our interconnectedness as a species - among ourselves, all living things, and the technologies through which we extend ourselves and give substance to our imaginations, plans, and desires.   In its warnings about what we can do wrong - such as Mao's killing of sparrows to improve harvests (sparrows eat seeds) which resulted in massive crop failure (fewer sparrows resulted in more locusts, also eaten by sparrows) - Connected is cousin to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth.  In the hope it holds out for our new media, it is the kind of movie Buckminster Fuller might have made.

2.  Connected is a passionate biography of Leonard Shlain (1937-2009) - Tiffany's father - whose The Alphabet versus the Goddess (1999) argued that the advent of the alphabet over earlier forms of writing encouraged masculine thinking and dominance.   In its daring media determinism and historical sweep, the book put Leonard Shlain on a par with Julian Jaynes as a worthy successor to Marshall McLuhan in provocative and mind-opening hypothesis.

3. But Connected is most of all an autobiography of Tiffany Shlain, who recounts her inspiration by her father, her struggle with his passing, her struggle to make sense of the curves the universe has thrown her, and in one way or another, throws at all of us.   That's what it means to be an intelligent being in this world, someone who doesn't just accept what she or he finds, but seeks to understand it, get a little on top of it, and thereby have a little bit more say and control over the course of our lives and the world.

Narrated by Tiffany Shlain and Peter Coyote. Animated bits by Stefan Nadelman (of Food Fight fame). Highly recommended for students of media - indeed, for students of life.

Connected opens in major cities in America in September - here 's a list - and Fordham University will be hosting a special free screening on September 25 as part of its Media at the Center McLuhan Centenary symposia.

Note added October 14, 2011:  I was at the premiere screening in New York City - at the Angelika Film Center - earlier this evening.  The movie's better than ever on the big screen, and the audience loved it.  It's become increasingly clear to me, in the past few weeks, that Tiffany Shlain's movie is the story of humanity, and recent history in particular, leading up to the healthy resurgence of direct democracy in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street - triggered, stimulated, facilitated by the advent of social media, or what I call New New Media.  Which is what I'll be talking about when I lead a discussion with the audience after the October 19, Wednesday, 7:15pm screening, at The Angelika.