The Matrix Resurrections: Great Mix of Deep Philosophy and Fast-Moving Action

I just saw The Matrix Resurrections on HBO Max.  It may be the best Matrix since The Matrix -- that is, the first movie, so I'm saying Resurrections may be better than the two earlier sequels, certainly better than the third in the original trilogy, Revolutions.

One of the reasons I'm thinking this is how well the meta angle is handled in Resurrections.  We find Neo working as a programmer, whose great accomplishment was writing a computer game called "The Matrix".  He's sucked into a journey in which reality vs. fiction as an explanation for what is happening vie for our attention at every incandescent turn, and there are many of them.  

[Note: For once, or as a rarity, there WON'T be any big spoilers ahead ... ]

Let's talk about the acting.  Keanu Reeves as Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity were excellent.  I was prepared to be annoyed at Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Morpheus and Jonathan Groff as Smith, because their original incarnations by Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving were so brilliantly, searingly memorable.   But the new actors for these crucial characters were quite good.  In the first three movies, Smith was for most part the more keenly acted and therefore more unforgettable character -- delivering such now immortal lines as, to Neo, "How can you speak if you have no mouth?" with perfect laser, razor precision --  and even though Groff is not quite as knife's edge as Weaving, his Smith will be somewhat memorable, too.

Among the new characters, by far my favorite was Neil Patrick Harris as The Analyst -- a big step up from Doogie Howser, MD but in a related medical profession -- and I very much liked the unpredictable villainous kindred relationship between him and Smith.  Both had a fair share of bon mots, and if I had to choose the most profound it would be The Analyst's observation that feelings make fictions real.  In addition to these lines that could have come from Plato -- who notoriously distrusted both feelings and art (see his Republic) -- we also get some good ultra-contemporary commentary from some of the characters.  I guess my favorite would be the Merovingian's, a returning character, who lashes out at both Facebook and Wikipedia in a tense, verge of bursting into action scene.  It's probably worth noting that Facebook didn't exist when we last saw Merv in Revolutions in 2003, and Wikipedia was just a tiny three years old, so his denunciation of these two social media giants is understandable, if not fair to Wikipedia, which has done far more good and much less damage than Facebook.

Without telling you anything more about the plot, I'll say it's plausible, exciting, and works well with its three predecessors.   The action and special effects were outstanding, as always, and the characters' awareness of the deep philosophic issues that underlie their exploits endows this movie with a refreshing intellectual heft.  I'd say The Matrix Resurrections is a triumph of a reboot, and one of the best now around in the burgeoning genre.

Bliss: The Music and the Acting Not So Much the Movie

Just saw Bliss on Amazon Prime Video.  In a phrase, it's another well-acted simulation movie, with an obvious, even hackneyed story, but it's very well acted by Owen Wilson (Greg) and Salma Hayek (Isabel), with an appearance by Bill Nye the science guy, and excellent music, especially a really beautiful, captivating song under the closing credits, written by Will Bates and sung by Skye Edwards.

Just to be clear: Bliss is no Matrix, not even close, but then again, what is? Matrix, the first movie in particular, is the best simulation movie ever made, which touches almost all of the bases and invents some while it's at it.  Bliss, in contrast, asks us once again what is real and what is simulation, and likely doesn't even provide an answer in the end, unless that answer is both are real, which is something we've also seen before.

But the micro-stories are good.  Greg and Isabel make an effective, even memorable couple, with Hayek giving one of the best performances of her career.  Isabel apparently is from the simulated, drug induced, or whatever engendered world, and she's ultimately in competition with Greg's daughter, who wants him back and with her in what presumably is the real world.  [Spoiler: It seems that blood is thicker than mercurial water.]

I have a suggestion: I think what I just saw in Bliss would have worked better as the debut of a 10-episode television series, rather than a standalone hour-and-three-quarter movie.  The problem is in the three quarters -- Bliss the movie seems like three quarters at best of a possibly much better narrative.

But I'd say, see it, because, who knows, we may get a couple of sequels.

Advantageous: Shimmering Teardrop from the Future

For some reason, I missed Advantageous (Netflix, 2015), and just found it on Uproxx and saw it tonight after searching for the best science fiction movies on Netflix.  It's an apt description.  In fact, Advantageous is an excellent science fiction movie anywhere.

It's been compared to Seconds, the brilliant, pathbreaking 1966 movie, in which older personalities are transferred or cloned into younger bodies.  But Advantageous, though it's about the same theme, is much more hi-tech - in a quiet way - and thus bears resemblances to Blade Runner (original and sequel) and even The Matrix.

But Advantageous is different from all of those movies in that it's more personal.  Gwen wants to transfer her persona into a younger body not for vanity, nor because she's dying or sick or (like the character in Seconds) just bored with her existence.  She needs to transfer because she needs the money she'll receive from it.  She needs this to send her daughter Jules to a good school in this future world.  She'll otherwise lose her job, and her family has let her down.

Director Jennifer Phang does a deft job of portraying Gwen and her daughter close-up, against a backdrop something like Bladerunner and a phone system maybe a few decades into the future.  In addition or underneath or maybe overlay would be a better description there's a watercolor ambience that runs through a lot of this, including a scene that looks like a reflection of Monet's lily pond. Phang co-wrote this with Jacqueline Kim who gives a sensitive performance as Gwen.  Even Samantha Kim (I don't know if they're related) does a fine job as Jules, as does James Urbaniak as her boss and Freya Adams (New Amsterdam!) as Gwen2.

So what we have in Advantageous is a delicately rendered, highly intelligent and provocative science fiction movie.  It may be a minor classic already, on  its way to being just a softly focused, shimmering-like-a-teardrop classic, period.

 

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...

Predestination: Treat for the Intellect and the Senses

Just saw Predestination on Google Play.  The movie is based on Robert Heinlein's "All You Zombies," in some to many ways the best time travel story ever written. Accordingly, a movie in most to all ways faithful to the original story should be in many ways the best time travel movie ever made.  Predestination was and is.  I enjoyed it just immensely.

Of course, I saw it having already read the story - how else would I be able to say it's in many ways the best time travel story ever written.  I therefore can't quite fathom what it would be like to see the movie without having read the story first - which, to spell it out, means you know the secret that ingeniously weaves its way throughout the entire story.   The last thing I'll say here without getting into that secret - which is to say, the last thing in this review which will be spoiler free - is that possibly the best way to see the movie if you haven't read the story is on Google Play, or some other suitable site that allows you to stop, ponder, and re-wind if necessary.   That, combined with the fact that the movie is largely narrative, with no big action scenes involving armies or mountains, may mean that the best way to see this movie if you haven't read the story is not in the theater.

And that secret, so brilliantly executed in the story as well as the movie, is that all the major characters except one - Mr. Robertson - are the same person.  That includes people who look not at all alike, male and female, baby, child, teenager, and old man.   And the story that ties them together - literally - is not only plotted perfectly, but given to us in just the right details.

My favorite touches in time travel stories are those that are almost casually dropped, having no seeming earthshaking significance at the time, but turn out to be major pointers to what is really going on in retrospect.   Shortly after we meet the character played by Ethan Hawke, whose face is badly burned, we come to see that he looks like Ethan Hawke because of the plastic surgery to repair his face. Not long after the hermaphroditic character played first by Sarah Snook claims her->his manhood, he gets the good news that he's no longer "shooting banks".   This sets up the biggest payoff in the story, in which he (still played by Snook) sleeps with her (younger) self, she gets pregnant with a baby that is her (yes, both her and hers, and, for that matter, also his, making the baby a kind of clone), and eventually she turns out to be the he who becomes Ethan Hawke.   If all of this sounds a little awkward and a lot complicated, it is, but the magic of both the story and the movie makes it mostly mind bogglingly wondrous.

Indeed, the story is so seamless, and seamlessly portrayed, that even Mr. Robertson (a Mr. Smith ala The Matrix kind of character, not in Heinlein's original 1959 story) looks a little to a lot like Ethan Hawke, which only increases our growing awareness that almost everyone is everyone in this time looped masterpiece.   The environments are filled with nice touches, as in the bar scene with the lady's and gent's rooms right next to each other in the background, subtly symbolizing that the lead character - who in the bar is literally talking to himself  (Snook, now a man, with Hawke) - is both a man and a woman at one time or another.    And the scene between Snook the man and slightly younger Snook the woman is also perfectly played:  he falls for her because he's in love with him/herself, the supreme narcissist, and she falls for him because he knows her so well, something everyone wants from someone they've just met.

I have no idea what you'll think of all this if you don't have a taste for time travel.  But as a connoisseur and practitioner of the genre - I wish I could say of the actual activity - I can tell you that if you are similarly inclined, you'll find Predestination a preternatural treat and feast for the intellect and the senses.  

podcast review of Predestination and 12 Monkeys


 three time travel novels: the Sierra Waters trilogy


two time travel stories (with more to come)


The Chronology Protection Case movie

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#SFWApro

John Wick: A Man and His Dog

John Wick is being billed as Keanu Reeves' best film since The Matrix.  It is.   And, if no-holds-barred shoot-em-ups like Banshee are your glasses of tea, you might like it even more.

John Wilk, played by Reeves, is a hit-man who, against all odds, managed to get out of the business alive and relatively happy.  In this, John Wilk shares a provenance with movies like Assassins with Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas, in my view the very best of this genre, in which there's of course always something to get the retired assassin drawn back in.

In Wick's case, it's a double punch.  His wife, whose love got him to leave the business, dies of natural causes.   She arranged to send him a sweet little puppy to keep him company after she's gone. But the headstrong son of a Russian mob boss makes the mistake of cruelly killing the puppy when stealing the keys to Reeves' car.

The death of the puppy was a highly effective and moving scene.   It certainly made me want to bring those bad guys to justice, and it was the motivation that set Wick back to his lifetime profession.   When the dog killer wonders to Wick and others why Wick is so upset about the puppy's death - "it's just a fucking dog" - we know, having witnessed its killing and what happened with Wick and the puppy before that, why that little puppy was so much more.

The action is great, even though there were a couple of easy shots that Wick missed, in service of the plot, and there were a couple of holes in the plots logic, too.  But, on the other hand, the supporting cast was outstanding, including Lance Reddick of The Wire, Lost, and Fringe fame, who's always good to see on the screen, and Willem Dafoe as another hit man.

If the Russian mob, bigger than life killers, and hotels for assassins with rules of the house that must be followed if you don't want to be killed yourself, take a 90-minute break and check out this fine movie.

Revolution 2.15: Not Time Travel

Well, it turns out in Revolution 2.15 that Aaron did not travel back to 2014.   He was dreaming, courtesy of the nanites, of being back in 2014 - which as Charlie in his dream tells him, is like The Matrix.   In other words, a much less impressive gambit than time travel - though I liked the first Matrix movie well enough - with a few clunkers and some good sequences mixed together.

The first inkling we get that this is not time travel is when Aaron sees Chris Hayes on MSNBC on the morning of March 5, 2014.   In fact, not only was Hayes not on this very morning - today, in our reality, a nice touch - but he's not on any weekday morning.  He used to be on weekend mornings, but Steve Kornacki took over that spot when Hayes was promoted to weekday evenings on MSNBC.

So rather than our reality, Aaron is a victim of a nanite induced dream, for the purpose of getting him to fix their defective code.  It was fun seeing our characters in this nanite induced vision - also reminiscent of Star Trek's famous "Menagerie" episode - even if Charlie in the dream did get shot in the head.  But the various inducements that Aaron's own legitimate mind used to get him to snap out of it - like jumping off a roof to induce fear - we're a little obvious.

Good twist, though, in the way the nanites ultimately succeeded, first in getting Aaron to believe their induced dream that he escaped them, his then realizing that this was a dream, too, but ultimately fixing the defective code because he saw that the death of the nanites could result in the real death of his friends and loved ones.

So we're left with a pretty good standalone episode - which also has echoes of some of Fringe - and a world without electrical power (except in lightning) in which the nanites, at least for now, continue to hold sway.

At very least, this paves the way for some good subsequent episodes.

See also Revolution 2.1: "The Last Surviving Friend" ... Revolution 2.2: Reanimation ... Revolution 2.4: Nanites and ... Maybe Aliens? ... Revolution 2.7: Firestarter Aaron vs. the Creepster ... Revolution 2.9: The Boy and the Attitude ... Revolution 2.10: Mexico and More ... Revolution 2.11: Captives and Nanites ... Revolution 2.12: Eugenics and Lubbock ... Revolution 2.13: Steve Tyler, Mummy ... Revolution 2.14: Time Travel!

And see also Revolution: Preview Review  ... Revolution 1.2: Fast Changes ... Revolution 1.14: Nanites and Jack Bauer ... Revolution 1.15: Major Tom and More 24 ... Revolution 1.16: Feeling a Little Like the Hatch in Lost ... Revolution 1.17: Even Better Nanites ... Revolution 1.18: Whodunnit? ... Revolution 1.19: Cheney's Bunker ... Revolution Season 1 Finale: Good Pivot

 
Like real time travel in fiction?   Try The Plot to Save Socrates ...

Almost Human 1.2: Sexbots

Almost Human was back for its second show tonight - about sexbots aka bangbots - and was as good as the first.  Lots of cool future tech on hand - from "DNA bombs" that bad guys use to erase all DNA evidence in a crime scene, to mechanical toy giraffes that move like the real living kind - all wrapped together in a story with heart and style.

Dorian, as we know, is capable of emotion.  He's attracted to a sexbot who is starting to bond with him - as per her programming - but has to be deactivated aka killed, because her skin is made of human DNA, and that's illegal.

The DNA from human skin is the centerpiece of the story and the police investigation, because the DNA is harvested from human woman who are kidnapped and eventually killed in the process.  One might think that, by the 2040s and with all of this tech savvy, human skin DNA could be rapidly grown from a few cells - which could be grabbed from people without they're even knowing - but that's ok. The destruction of the human hosts in suitably future creepy labs lends a Matrix atmosphere to show, a good combination with the Bladerunner vibe.

Apropos Freud and his thanatos and libido as the motivating forces of life, Almost Human also deals with Dorian's attempt to understand the nature of death, which, of course, Kennex doesn't completely get, either, because none of us humans ever do.   Kennex's view that the departed live on in the memories the living carry of them is as good as any view about how to transcend death, and it's better than most.   This helps Dorian come to terms with the death of the sexbot that he never got to make love to, and Kennex with the death of his partner four years ago, as he pays a visit to his partner's home to tell his son about his father.

But back to libido, there's clearly some ahead, at least for Kennex, with Detective Stahl.  And good humor - not one of Freud's basics, but still important - throughout the episode and, in particular, in the future tech guy, who looks and sounds like a young Ducky from NCIS.

I'll be back next week.

See also: Almost Human debuts: A Review





#SFWApro

Cloud Atlas, Space Travel, and Souls

I saw Cloud Atlas tonight, and I must say my favorite part was at the very end, with its revelatory punchline about space travel.  This was not only satisfying but appropriate, because, after all, the movie does have "cloud" in its title.   Before the digital cloud there were and manifestly still are clouds above us in the real sky, and I take our capacity to get beyond them - now just to our solar system but someday far beyond - to be one of the most inspiring aspects of our existence and therefore of this movie.

There were other good things in the movie.   Speaking of digital, the neo-Seoul segment had lots of that, along with a powerful, exciting mini-story of clones and heroes that rang with the best of The Matrix, which is probably why the hero of this segment looked so much like Neo.

Speaking of which, Hugo Weaving played a major role in Cloud Atlas - actually, major roles, as did all of the major actors - and delivered some of his patented brilliant sheer evil, soulless bad guy, along with  a bad guy who may have turned to good guy in the neo-Seoul segment.   Tom Hanks also put in some fine performances, especially as the lead in the two farthest future segments, including the final one that finds his character along with Halle Berry's as grandparents on a planet far from Earth.   These two future segments also offered some fine future evolved English - I thought I heard the Hanks character say he needs to "cog" a situation, meaning he needs to understand it, for example - which gives Cloud Atlas a bit of Clockwork Orange resonance.

There was even some good comedy on hand in the final parts of the Cavendish segment - set in 2012 Britain - well played by Jim Broadbent and company.   Not every segment was too my liking, though.  For some reason, the music segment in 1936 Britain didn't ring as true as it should have, or maybe it's just that I'm not a big fan of suicide.   And although the 1848 segment had some moments, I found it slow going.

But all in all, Cloud Atlas deserves to be called a tour-de-force, not only because of the stories which were stunning, but because of the quiet way the lives all did seem to play - in the musical sense - so well together through history into the future.   This is no time travel movie, but that's ok.   Cloud Atlas tells us souls are inherently connected through time just by their very being.




#SFWApro

Fringe 5.5: "You Don't Even Know What You Don't Know"

"You don't even know what you don't know," Peter's captive Observer advises in Fringe 5.5, expressing the consumate disdain Observers hold for us lower cast humans.  The same Observer has the other great line of the night, explaining to Peter, Matrix-like, that "you think the black over your head is dark skies when it is really our shoe," in this superbly written, dark episode, which later actually does have a shoe of an Observer closing in on Peter's head.

But the deeper darkness of the show is the dark in Peter and Olivia's hearts over the loss of Etta, and the episode draws not only on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," but Plato's "Meno" paradox, or a reversal of its axiom that that you can only know what you already know or have knowledge of, otherwise how could you know that you were really knowing anything?

Peter and Olivia each struggle with the darkness and their lack of knowledge in different ways.  Olivia's   new world is falling apart with her daughter gone, and Walter and she fear that she may lose Peter again.  In the end, an unambered videotape of Etta as a little girl brings Olivia back.

Peter's path is a little different.  The Observer's mocking him about his feelings for Etta pushes Peter to torture and kill the Observer - good - and also take the chip out the Observer's head and place it in Peter's.  Is that also good? The tech reveal of the episode is that part of the Observers' superiority is indeed tech - ala Borg - in the brain.  In this masterfully written episode by J. H. Wyman, not only philosophy reigns supreme, but The Matrix meets Star Trek.

What will the Observer tech due to Peter.  Will he be able to absorb the Observer powers and retain his humanity?  Will he be able to truly love Olivia, as he has up until now?

Fringe continues in its brooding brilliance towards finale.




See also Fringe 5.1: Paved Park and Shattered Memories ... Fringe 5.2: Saving Our Humanity ... Fringe 5.4: Ghosts of Fringes Past

See also Fringe Returns for Season 4: Almost with Peter ... Fringe 4.2: Better and Worse Selves... Fringe 4.3: Sanity and Son ... Fringe 4.4: Peter's Back, Ectoplasm, and McLuhan ... Fringe 4.5: Double Return ... Fringe 4.6: Time Slips ... Fringe 4.7: The Invisible Man ... Fringe 4.8: The Ramifications of Transformed Alternate Realities ... Fringe 4.9: Elizabeth ... Fringe 4.10: Deceit and Future Vision ... Fringe 4.11: Alternate Astrid ... Fringe 4.12: Double Westfield / Single Olivia... Fringe 4.13: Tea and Telepathy ... Fringe 4.14: Palimpsest ... Fringe 4.15: I Knew It! ... Fringe 4.16: Walter Likes Yiddish ... Fringe 4.17:  Second Chances ... Fringe 4.18: Broyled on Both Sides ... Future Fringe 4.19 ... Fringe 4.20: Bridge ... Fringe 4.21: Shocks ... Fringe Season 4 Finale: Death and Life

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3 ... Fringe 3.21:  Ben Frankin, Rimbaldi, and the Future ...Fringe Season 3 Finale: Here's What Happened ... Death Not Death in Fringe  

See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ... New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ...17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ...Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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Fringe 5.1: Paved Park and Shattered Memory

Fringe opened its fifth and final season tonight with a great episode that picked up right where - not last season's finale - but episode 4.19 left off, that is, in the 2036 brutal dystopia ruled by the Eternal Bald Observers. In other words, they're not Observers any more. They're would be and to a large extent already in power masters of humanity. They've paved over Central Park, for crissakes, in an effort to make our world more habitable to them. They come from our future, where the air is really bad, and they're using Central Park to literally pump noxious gases into the air.

Walter, Peter, and Astrid survived from our time to 2036 in amber, that wondrous technology from the alternate reality of Fauxlivia and Walternate, which may now be closed forever (though I somehow doubt that) to our reality, whatever the year. Henrietta - better known as Etta - has survived into the future in real time, which is to say, she's lived day by day, the hard way, into 2036. She's fighting the bald be-hatted Masters as part of an underground, which makes sense, given that she's Peter and Olivia's tough and beautiful daughter.

The two last saw her when the Masters unleashed their attack, a little in the future of our time and reality. The first part of tonight's episode features Peter, Etta, Walter, and Astrid finding Olivia - who was not in evidence in 2036 in Fringe 4.19 - and freeing her. Unfortunately, Walter gets captured in the process, making it more a tradeoff than a victory.

Walter may have the ability to defeat the Baldos, one of whom, an especially nasty piece of work who reminds me of the guy who plagued Neo in The Matrix, proceeds to torture Walter. In the process, he destroys a part of Walter's mind, putting Walter back in the same leaky boat he in was for most of Fringe seasons past.

So we have an excellent foundation for the final season. I've always thought that Fringe was at its best when it dealt with overarching story lines - like the alternate reality - and not with the standalone insanities which were only sometimes really outstanding. From the looks of it, Fringe will be concentrating on nothing but defeating the bald ass hats now in charge, which means we should be in for a superb last season indeed.





See also Fringe Returns for Season 4: Almost with Peter ... Fringe 4.2: Better and Worse Selves ... Fringe 4.3: Sanity and Son ... Fringe 4.4: Peter's Back, Ectoplasm, and McLuhan ... Fringe 4.5: Double Return ... Fringe 4.6: Time Slips ... Fringe 4.7: The Invisible Man ... Fringe 4.8: The Ramifications of Transformed Alternate Realities ... Fringe 4.9: Elizabeth ... Fringe 4.10: Deceit and Future Vision ... Fringe 4.11: Alternate Astrid ... Fringe 4.12: Double Westfield / Single Olivia ... Fringe 4.13: Tea and Telepathy ... Fringe 4.14: Palimpsest ... Fringe 4.15: I Knew It! ... Fringe 4.16: Walter Likes Yiddish ... Fringe 4.17:  Second Chances ... Fringe 4.18: Broyled on Both Sides ... Future Fringe 4.19 ... Fringe 4.20: Bridge ... Fringe 4.21: Shocks ... Fringe Season 4 Finale: Death and Life

See also Fringe 3.1: The Other Olivia ... Fringe 3.2: Bad Olivia and Peter ... Fringe 3.3: Our/Their Olivia on the Other Side ... Fringe 3.5: Back from Hiatus, Back from the Amber ... Fringe 3.7: Two Universes Still Nearing Collision ... Fringe 3.8: Long Voyages Home ... Fringe 3.10: The Return of the Eternal Bald Observers ... Flowers for Fringenon in Fringe 3.11 ... Fringe 3.12: The Wrong Coffee  ... Fringe 3.13: Alternate Fringe ... Fringe 3.14: Amber Here ... Fringe 3.15: Young Peter and Olivia ... Fringe 3.16: Walter and Yoko ... Fringe 3.17: Bell, Olivia, Lee, and the Cow ... Fringe 3.18: Clever Walternate ... Fringe 3.19 meets Inception, The Walking Dead, Tron ... Fringe 3.20: Countdown to Season 3 Finale 1 of 3 ... Fringe 3.21:  Ben Frankin, Rimbaldi, and the Future ... Fringe Season 3 Finale: Here's What Happened ... Death Not Death in Fringe 
 
See also reviews of Season 2: Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb ... Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing ... Fringe 2.5: Peter in Alternate Reality and Wi-Fi for the Mind ... A Different Stripe of Fringe in 2.6 ... The Kid Who Changed Minds in Fringe 2.7 ... Fringe 2.8: The Eternal Bald Observers ... Fringe 2.9: Walter's Journey ... Fringe 2.10: Walter's Brain, Harry Potter, and Flowers for Algernon ...  New Fringe on Monday Night: In Alternate Universe? ... Fringe 2.12: Classic Science Fiction Chiante ... Fringe 2.13: "I Can't Let Peter Die Again" ... Fringe 2.14: Walter's Health, Books, and Father ... Fringe 2.15: I'll Take 'Manhatan' ... Fringe 2.16: Peter's Story ... Fringe 2.17: Will Olivia Tell Peter? ... Fringe 2.18: Strangeness on a Train ... Fringe 2.19: Two Plus Infinity ... Fringe the Noir Musical ... Fringe 2.21: Bring on the Alternates ... Fringe 2.22:  Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming ... Fringe Season 2 Finale: The Switch

See also reviews of Season One Fringe Begins ... Fringe 2 and 3: The Anthology Tightrope ... 4: The Eternal Bald Observer ... 7: A Bullet Can Scramble a Dead Brain's Transmission ... 8. Heroic Walter and Apple Through Steel ... 9. Razor-Tipped Butterflies of the Mind ... 10. Shattered Pieces Come Together Through Space and Times ... 11. A Traitor, a Crimimal, and a Lunatic ... 12, 13, 14: Fringe and Teleportation ... 15: Fringe is Back with Feral Child, Pheromones, and Bald Men ... 17. Fringe in New York, with Oliva as Her Suspect ... 18. Heroes and Villains across Fringe ... Stephen King, Arthur C. Clarke, and Star Trek in Penultimate Fringe ... Fringe Alternate Reality Finale: Science Fiction At Its Best

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"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

"Daddy, this is the best book I've ever read!" -- Molly Vozick-Levinson, age 12 at the time

"cerebral but gripping" -- Booklist

John from Cincinnati is ... Neo in the Matrix!

All right, as a final post (I think) about John from Cincinnati, I thought I'd offer a little more than how beautifully incomprehensible the series is/was...

Here's my best guess about what is going (I just thought of this about 10 minutes ago, and for all I know, it's been realized by other viewers, already) ... but -

I think all of John from Cincinnati - everything that we're seeing in Imperial Beach - is taking place in a virtual, Matrix-like world.

That's why John (and in the last episode, John and Shaun) have nothing to say about where they were when they were gone from IB.

That's how John was able to bring Shaun back from the dead or near-dead - the player outside the virtual world made that happen. Same with the levitation, etc - all the things that seem unreal to us are games the game-player is playing in his/her control of the virtual world.

Possibly the Howard Hesseman character - the chemist - is the creator, designer, or just player of this game - and that's why Mitch went to him. Or maybe it's Linc. Or - hey - could be Dwayne with his computers.

In any case, it would explain why so much of John's powers are on screens, why Linc gave the rant about the Internet, etc... (It might also explain the dead-guy in the motel.)

I give this theory about a two-percent chance of being right (I read yesterday in the New York Times that some philosophy dudes think there's a 20-percent chance that all of us are in a virtual reality sim - I have no idea how one could come up with any percentage of probability for this.)

So, there you have it - have at it...

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book