Chuck Todd interviews me about alternate histories
Showing posts with label telepathy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label telepathy. Show all posts

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Sense8 Season 2 Finale: Love



The name of the 2 and 1/2 hour Season 2 finale of Sense8 on Netflix, Amor Vincit Omnia or Love Conquers All - or, more precisely, passionate, erotic love - was indeed the dominant theme of this powerful and joyful episode, though it inevitably had plenty of violent threads of human nature as well. 

Actually, erotic love was always the theme of this extraordinary and deeply original series.  People who literally share each other's thoughts have to be in some kind of love with one another, and if we're talking about a cluster of eight such people, the possibilities are beyond counting.   In Sense8, these entail most combinations known to humans, with the additional overlay of homo sensate and homo sapiens in many of the relationships.

Indeed, the clear message of Sense8, all along, is that we humans on the other side of the screen, we viewers, would do better if we exulted in or at least accepted all kinds of erotic love.   Given the world we live in today, love in any form is certainly something we could use more of (sounds like that Jackie DeShannon song), and there's no reason that could not include carnal pleasure.

Meanwhile, the dialog has its customary wit. "I've been staring at the screen so long even my glasses are sore," Nomi says early on.  But when the screen with Sense8 was done, my eyes were yearning for more of it.  There a lots of fun examples of a better life through telepathy, such as Will speaking French through Riley, later reciprocated by Riley knowing how to use guns via Will.  And sex isn't the only pleasure of the flesh in this luscious episode - there was a scene of eating pizza in Napoli, and I would've run out and gotten any kind of pizza, the pizza in the scene looked so good, but it was too late.

As for the violence, it was enjoyable, as always, to see our team utilize each other's talents in the battles.  But in case you haven't yet seen this, I won't tell you who survives or what happens to the bad guys of both sexes.

I will say that this ends with some great music, and an orgy, and hey, you can't go wrong with that.  As I said in my very first review (see links below), telepathy is rarely shown in science fiction movies or TV shows, and Sense8 would've been welcome for that reason, alone.  But the series did much more than that and I predict it will become a classic.


Sunday, May 20, 2018

Westworld 2.5: Telepathic Control




There were two big shockers in Westworld 2.5 tonight, at least one of them totally game-changing.

Let's start with that.  Maeve has the telepathic power to voicelessly command hosts - both individually and a whole army of them, as in an army of Samuri warriors.  This is an extraordinary power, that instantly ups the science fictional ante of the whole series.  Till now, that ante was to what extent androids could break free of their programming - wake up, to use the current parlance - and go their own way, which could and does include killing guests and programmers who get in their way.  But Maeve can do much more - she can get presumably order an unlimited number of hosts to do her bidding.

Do other woke hosts like Delores have that ability, yet to awaken?  Remains to be seen. But even if Maeve is the only host who has this, it certainly evens the odds against the human armies that will surely descend upon the sundry parks if order isn't restored.   What it means is that every host can be be mustered to the task of fighting the humans.

Which gets us to the other shocker, not so much game-changing as revelatory.  Delores loves Teddy.  But she's willing to lose him, by subjecting him to some kind of radical reprogramming, to make him more violent and/or compliant to her will, or who exactly knows.

But what's clear is the decent Teddy who was coming into his own as a liberated host who would not kill except in self-defense, or in defense of Delores, or in response to most of her commands, unless he thought the victim didn't deserve to die - that ethical Teddy will be gone (unless Delores has a change of heart between this week and next).

Westworld keeps getting deeper and deeper, raising the ante with every episode, as a good science fiction drama should do.

Sunday, January 14, 2018

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police



Telepathy is another favorite but not-as-well-known-as-some-other themes of Philip K. Dick - appearing in the aforementioned (i..e, mentioned in my review of episode 1.3 of Electric Dreams) "Beyond Lies the Wub" in 1952 - and its combination with police procedural in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams episode 1.5, The Hood Maker, makes for a classic Dick amalgam.

It's also a great story, compellingly rendered.  Honor is a telepath or TEEP teaming with Agent Ross to maintain order, which includes controlling the TEEPs, whose ability to read normal human minds sows unease and disorder (understandable).  The situation is brought to a boil by the "hood maker" who makes hoods which, when donned, block out the TEEP probes. 

The Hood Maker is smartly written for television by Matthew Graham (who also wrote the TV adaption of Childhood's End and the British version of Life on Mars, much better than the American, by the way), and he has Honor saying such memorable things as "I could read people before I could read books" and Ross telling Honor "you can read minds but you can't read my heart".  I just love quintessentially science fictional lines like those.

And there's a nice symmetry between Holliday Grainger (from The Borgias) playing Honor and Richard Madden (from Medici) playing Ross.  Good directing, too, by Julian Jarrold.

I've been a sucker for telepathy in fiction every since I read Alfred Bester's Demolished Man as a kid at the end of the 1950s (which, by the way, was also a police story).   And I put Sense8 as #1 on my list of best 2017 television series for the same reason (it also has a strong telepathy and police element).  I put The Hood Maker in the same company,

See also Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams 1.1 Real Life: Mutually Alternate Realities ...  1.2 Autofac: Human v Machine ... 1.3 Human Is: Compassion or Alien? ... 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries ... 1.6 Safe & Sound: This Isn't A Drill ... 1.7 The Father Thing: Dick from Space ... 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eye of the Beholder ... 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval ... 1.10: Kill All Others: Too Close for Comfort



not quite telepathy, but some strange mental powers at large here



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