The Orville 3.4: The Captain's Daughter

An excellent episode 3.4 of The Orville up on Hulu today, which connected to a momentous, disastrous US Supreme Court decision today which couldn't have been known when the episode was made.

[Spoilers follow ... ]

The Union is pursuing a treaty with the Krill to fight their mutual enemy the Kaylons.   High stakes diplomacy ensue, including the best admirals on TV these days, Halsey and Perry, played Victor Garber and Ted Danson (you can't go wrong with that).  But before the treaty is concluded and signed, the head of the Krill is beaten in an election by the fascistic Teleya.  This is just the beginning of the resonances in this episode to the present USA.

Teleya has been on The Orville before, in its two prior seasons.  In 3.4, she's not only elected President (presumably -- perhaps she and her party fixed it), she turns out to be the mother of a daughter fathered by our one and only Captain Mercer (the two had an affair).  Ed gets to meet her, and it's a great scene.  The fact that Teleya kept the baby is not surprising -- an abortion is a crime in their culture, and couples who have them are forced to interact with a hologram of what their child would have been like.  (See The Talmud vs Today's Supreme Court Decision Overturning Roe v. Wade for at least some of my thoughts about what U.S. Supreme Court did in our reality today.)

Back on The Orville, I won't tell you how all of this turned out, though you'll of course know that Captain Mercer survives.  I will say there are some crackling battles in space, Ed and Kelly have a tender moment, and I like the art deco look of the Krill big city,

See you back here next week with my review of episode 3.5

See also The Orville 3.1: Life and Death ... 3.2: "Come and Get Me ..." ... 3.3: What Do Bill Barr and Ed Mercer Have in Common?

And see also The Orville 2.1: Relief and Romance ... The Orville 2.2: Porn Addiction and Planetary Disintegration ... The Orville 2.3: Alara ... The Orville 2.4: Billy Joel ... The Orville 2.5: Escape at Regor 2 ... The Orville 2.6: "Singin' in the Rain" ... The Orville 2.7: Love and Death ...  The Orville 2.8: Recalling Čapek, Part 1  ... The Orville 2.9: Recalling Čapek, Part 2 ... The Orville: 2.10: Exploding Blood ... The Orville 2.11: Time Capsule, Space Station, and Harmony ... The Orville 2.12: Hello Dolly! ... The Orville 2.13: Time Travel! ... The Orville Season 2 Finale: Alternate History!

And see also The Orville 1.1-1.5: Star Trek's Back ... The Orville 1.6-9: Masterful ... The Orville 1.10: Bring in the Clowns ... The Orville 1.11: Eating Yaphit ... The Orville 1.12: Faith in Reason and the Prime Directive

watch The Chronology Protection Case FREE on Amazon Prime

I'll Follow You Down: Excellent Time Travel Movie

I just saw I'll Follow You Down - an excellent small-scale but large-idea time travel movie, panned by myopic critics, such as in this review last month in the Hollywood Reporter.

By small-scale, I mean that the movie concerns one family only - grandfather, daughter and husband, and their son and his girlfriend.  There's no gunplay (except one time), no history of the world at stake, none of the things we've come to expect in time travel on the big screen, and which, by the way, I also very much enjoy.

But I'll Follow You Down has something else, more rare in time travel stories.  We see the effect of time travel on a few human beings - in this case, the time traveler's family.   To do this well, a movie has to make the time travel seem plausible, real enough so that those characters who realize what has happened to their family can take action to correct it.

At the same time, the story has to respect the paradoxes of time travel, especially the chestnut of, if I travel to the past to correct a problem, and I succeed, how will I know about the problem in the first place, in the future?  Multiple universes or realities are one good way of dealing with this, as I explain in this 2-minute video on Vidoyen: How can I get around the grandparent time travel paradox? posted by Paul Levinson, PhD on Vidoyen.

I'll Follow You Down takes great and rare care in treating these paradoxes seriously, in both the set-up and resolution of the story.   The acting is excellent - with Haley Joel Osment, Gillian Anderson, Victor Garber, and Rufus Sewell in the major roles - and the plot is satisfyingly tight in both the interpersonal relationships that power the story, and the science in the science fiction that makes it possible.  Little details such as a pocket watch being left on the ground in a mugging, and a character commenting I don't know the reason the muggers left the watch, create a straightforward verisimilitude that lends credence to the entire story.  That's a better way of handling loose ends than coming up with a convoluted explanation.

The ending in particular is outstanding (don't worry, I won't give it away) - motivated, shocking, and ultimately ...  well, see the movie.   It's not perfect - there's a crucial scene in which a father should have recognized his son a little sooner - but this movie comes pretty close, and scores on all the issues that count in a narrative about the impact of time travel on a family that could almost be living next door.

Other reviews of off-the-beaten-track recent time travel movies: Dimensions: Watercolor Time Travel and 95ers: Time Runners: Original and Entertaining

 
another kind of time travel

#SFWApro

And The Chronology Protection Case movie


podcast review of I'll Follow You Down and
two other time travel movies

The Americans: True and Deep

The Americans, with Keri Russell as one half of the Soviet sleeper spy couple so deeply undercover in Washington they're more American than most of us, debuted on fx last night.  It was superb.

First, about Keri Russell, there are two interrelated things about her past as an actress that make her appearance in The Americans especially interesting.  She is best known for her breakthrough Felicity roll a while ago,  one of J. J. Abrams' early series about a college student.  And Abrams' next series was Alias, which featured Jennifer Garner not Russell as graduate student turned spy, but which had a major continuing storyline about a Soviet agent under cover in the United States - Sydney Bristow's (Jennifer Garner's) mother, Irina/Laura.   I like these sort of complex prior histories to television series.

In Alias, the Soviet spy (played by Lena Olin) was married to an American spy (played by Victor Garbor) - all powerfully acted, by the way.  In The Americans, both Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) and her husband Phillip (Matthew Rhys) are Soviet spies, and their acting is top-notch.  In fact, just about everything in this series seems to be, so far.  Plot twists, unexpected bursts of action, frank sexually vivid (not quite explicit) language combine with the acting to made the premiere never a dull moment.

Russell, especially, has a way of getting just the right pitch in her voice.  When her husband, wanting to show her a little affection and getting rebuffed, protests that he's her husband, Elizabeth responds "is that right?" with just the right slight cutting sarcastic edge.  This is because their marriage is their job as spies, not a true aspect of their lives.  But, as William James the American psychologist noted more than a century ago, when you go through the actions of something, often enough, you begin to grow real feelings for those actions, too.

Elizabeth and Matthew have been at this for more than a decade.   They have two children, a daughter age 13 and a son a little younger.  So of course they have some real feelings.  It's just that, at the beginning of the show, Matthew is more in touch with them than is Elizabeth.  But that changes at the end, in a sequence of events which show that, as much as Matthew has become a truly happy suburban American father, he's still tough as nails underneath.

The one part of the premiere episode that jangled a bit is the FBI guy who moves next store.  This can't be coincidence - which Elizabeth and Matthew seem to realize - but so far the show is playing it as coincidence one-hundred percent.  I expect we'll find out before too long what's really going on with the neighbor.

There's also great 1981 scenery, with talk about Reagan as a lunatic from the Soviet perspective, Walter Cronkite on television, and all sorts evocative 1981 music.  At this point, The Americans is looking to easily be one of the best new shows on television, with only The Following as any real competition.