Fringe 2.4 Unfolds and Takes Wing

Fringe 2.4 finally dished out some significant answers tonight. In the process, we got a tender romantic moment for Walter, a resolution for the shape-shifter Charlie, and a good, welcome dose of William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) - all in all, making for the second best episode of the entire series so far, second only to the Season One finale last year, in which Bell and the alternate universe were first and breathtakingly revealed.

Walter figures out a way of eliciting Olivia's memories of her alternate-universe visit, and we see for the first time the conversation she and Bell had last year, or, rather, what Bell told her. It's pretty much as we expected - an alternate universe, much like ours, except alternate decisions (unspecified) which, among other results, kept the Twin Towers standing. Bell also explains what the shape-shifters are up to, and, if we believe him, that Massive Dynamic is on the side of the angels in this. Well, I believe him. Spock doesn't lie.

No, I believe what Bell told Oliva because it makes sense.

Back on our side, Olivia is almost taken in by the ersatz Charlie. She gets his face on her cell phone - the face of the shape-shifter, courtesy of a nifty algorithmic program - just in time. Even so, bad Charlie almost kills her. But another FBI guy (good) distracts Charlie, and Olivia prevails. She proves again, as Bell has told her, that she was the best of the children he and Walter had trained.

Which brings us back to Walter. He seeks out the co-ed he experimented with - via LSD - decades ago, to help with the cases at hand. She's grown up into someone who loves him, or at least has strong, positive feelings for him. She's played by Theresa Russell, a fine actress, who brings vibrancy and sincerity to the role. Walter goes back to her apartment. She wants to sleep with him, but settles for kissing him, because Walter, in one of his most human moments, demurs. He apologizes for what he did to her years ago, including taking advantage of those circumstances.

Theresa also gave Peter a look, before she left for her house and the kiss with Walter. The meaning of that look? Even if there was no chemistry at all now with Walter - which in fact there's plenty of - she must know or sense that Peter is from the alternate universe. This in itself is reason enough to look forward to more from her in this series.

Roger Cross - Curtis of 24! - also puts in an appearance in this excellent episode, as a shape-shifter, less shifty-eyed than Charlie and now likely picking up for him. And just to top things off, with another nod to the classic science fiction which is the well-spring of Fringe, Peter and Olivia talk about Invasion of the Body Snatchers - pod people masquerading as humans - only mentioning two of the umpteen versions, though. (Pod people also do podcasts nowadays, as science fiction critic Gary Wolfe suggested.)

Well, there'll be time to mention some of the others later on, as Fringe unfolds and really starts to take wing this season...

See also Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People ... Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb

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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10-min podcast review of Fringe

FlashForward 1.3: Conflicting Visions and Futures

The riveting paradoxes of FlashForward continue to be lit most clearly in the person of Agent Demetri Noh, who in episode 1.3 sees his possible futures ratcheted up one additional, wrenching level. A foreign agent (played by Shohreh Aghdashloo, Behrooz's mother of 24, Day 4 fame) calls Demetri and tells him she saw a report of his death in her flashforward vision. But Demetri's fiance - Zoey Andata (played by Gabrielle Union) - had a much happier vision of Demetri on FF Day: the two were getting married.

So which vision is true?

Now would be a time to point out, again, that when you're dealing with time travel - or, even vision of the future as in FlashForward - there is no way of telling which of competing visions is true, and therefore whether a given vision of the future that any character has is true. This is the case even when parts of someone's vision are confirmed. Even when someone's complete vision is confirmed. Even when everyone's complete vision is confirmed.

Why are such visions so unreliable? Look at it this way: Demetri has a vision of the future, call it vision 1 in reality or universe 1. Because of that vision, Demetri changed his behavior, acts differently, with the result that something is changed before the future in the original vision. At the instant that changes, universe 1 changes, and so, therefore, does vision 1. Demetri is now living in universe 2. If he has another vision of the future, that would be different from vision 1. It would be vision 2, etc.

The fun of FlashForward and all time travel stories which try to change a future already seen or experienced is figuring out what actions of which characters are resulting in which futures. Sometimes the very attempt to avoid a future causes that future to happen. Sometimes acceptance of a welcome future is the thing that prevents it from happening. Time travel's tricky - see my The Enjoyable Trouble with Time Travel and The Plot to Save Socrates for more.

The other part of FlashForward tonight was less paradoxical and more of Mark in deep research. The name and photo of an old Nazi - Geyer - was up on Mark's future wall. In our present, Geyer contacts the FBI and says he has information about the blackout. Turns out his most useful information puts Mark on the trail of a blackout that happened in the early 1990s.

Mark realizes that blackouts (with possible flashforwards) in the past could provide information very valuable to understanding his present predicament. Did those earlier flashforwards come true?

It was also good to hear The White Rose mentioned in this episode - the group that tried, with just a photocopying machine in 1940s, to spread the truth in Germany about the Nazi Government (see New New Media for more). The White Rose failed in the end, but they gave it a brave, noble try, and should what be done with a new medium of that time against overwhelming totalitarian odds.

Will Mark succeed against the seemingly overwhelming odds arrayed against him?

The problem - and the fun - of FlashForward is that success is different, even for the same person at different times, and so we don't even know what success in this time-bending context means...

See also FlashForward Debuts and Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost and 1.2: Proofs and Defiance of Inevitability

Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer

8-min podcast review of FlashForward

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

FTC Wrong to Regulate Deceitful Bloggers

This is the second post in my continuing series, What's Newer Than New New Media, which examines developments in the world of blogging, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc - what I call "new new media" - since the publication of New New Media in September 2009.


The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced yesterday that, starting December 1, 2009, bloggers could be held liable - to the tune of up to $11,000 in fines - for not disclosing that they were paid to write favorably about a product or service. As the FTC put it, "bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service."

This has been brewing for some time. I address it extensively in New New Media, published in early September. The issues and possible consequences bear repeating.

First, I think that a blogger or anyone who fails to disclose a paid endorsement - who gives the impression that he or she likes or approves of something, when in fact the main motivation for the blog or whatever statement is payment from the purveyor of the product or service - is behaving unethically. Such non-disclosures are lies of omission, pure and sample, and deceitful practices warrant being publicly called out.

But they do not warrant a Federal or any governmental fine, which is quite another matter.

To begin with, such lies of omission are not the kinds of false assertions which are already prohibited by the FTC. Claiming that a car gives you 25-miles-per-gallon when in fact the best it can do is 15 is a bald-faced lie of commission. Such black-and-white falsities bear little resemblance to paid-for appreciations of products that masquerade as genuine endorsements. The first kinds of lies can pump false statistics into the public realm. The second kind is likely to do no more damage than making consumers feel good about a product, which would only happen if the consumers already had confidence in the blogger. As word of the blogger's deceit spread, such confidence in the blogger would shrink - without the need for government fines.

More important, government regulation of any communication, especially backed by hefty fines, is in danger of contradicting the First Amendment insistence that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." Clearly, blogging - even for undisclosed payment for endorsements - is a form of press. And where would such regulation end? Are reviewers of movies, rock concerts, even books, obliged to disclose that they were given free tickets or copies of the book under review? Is a rave review undermined when it flows from media content provided gratis? Should our major publications and broadcast media be fined for such non-disclosures?

If you would say no - as I certainly would - then you must consider why bloggers should bear this burden. Is not the FTC beating up on a new new medium, most of whose practitioners lack the legal clout - as in in-house attorneys - to stand up to the government on this issue?

In view of these serious concerns, I would say the best policy is criticize and condemn deceitful bloggers - but don't let the government fine them.





See also:

What's Newer Than New New Media, Post 1, about Amazon, 1984, and the Kindle

What's Newer Than New New Media, Post 3, Taliban on YouTube: A New Entry in the Dark Side of New New Media

The Saving Hitler Quandary on House 6.3

A classic ethical quandary for doctors is: If you were able to go back in time, and found Hitler suffering from an illness that could be fatal, would you save him, as your profession's ethics require, or let him die, as an ethics geared to the general good of humanity suggests. This could apply to firefighters, police, or anyone able to intervene in a life-and-death situation. There is no easy answer, since either choice violates a profound set of ethics.

And that's why it made for such good, important television tonight on House 6.3, as the team - now Foreman in charge, with Cameron and Chase on board, and House on hand in an advisory capacity - gets to treat a genocidal African dictator, President Dibala, played by James Earl Jones.

Cameron's initial take is that Dibala doesn't deserve to be saved. Chase thinks they have no choice but to save him, and in fact shouts out to deflect a human assassin. (I'm reminded of William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, and its view that humans are beset by two kinds of assaults, microbial and by other people.) But before the episode is over, Chase will reverse positions with Cameron, and fake a diagnosis with blood from another patient - deceased - to get Foreman to go with the wrong treatment, which results in Dibala's death.

Foreman plays a crucial role in this, which tells us a lot about his innermost workings, and how they can be influenced. He's feeling guilty and defensive about firing 13. Cameron plays on this - telling Foreman he's being defensive about the treatment he's ordering - when Foreman objects to the fake diagnosis provided by Chase. Foreman says that despite the new (faked) evidence - which he doesn't know to be faked - the general pattern still supports Foreman's original diagnosis. This of course proves to be correct, but Cameron is able to guilt Foreman to move away from it.

We'll likely learn what happens to Chase next week. Tonight Foreman figures out what Chase did, who informs him that Cameron had nothing to do with the false diagnosis. Is he covering for his wife?

We also learn a little tonight about one of the most wrenching dilemmas possible, served up in inimitable House style. Foreman reminds Chase in their last scene that taking anyone's life, even a monster's, diminishes your own. Would you save Hitler under these circumstances? What about Dibala?



8-min podcast review of Mad Men


See also House Reborn in Season Six? ... 6.2: The Gang is Back and Fractured

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

August Flights in Mad Men 3.8

Almost nothing took place in the office of Mad Men 3.8 tonight, which only makes sense, since it's August 1963, and everyone is literally or figuratively on vacation.

Betty Draper is actually on both, and given a tour-de-force performance by January Jones. She lets Rockefeller's assistant kiss her - after he comes through (at least, for a short time) on the reservoir - and the look on her face was priceless. A hint of self-reproachment, a flash of satisfaction, and much more in the mix of conflicted attraction that's Betty vis-a-vis men other than Don. But we've rarely seen that mix so clearly.

And this is only warm-up for her trip with Don to Rome, on Hilton business. She has the Italian men eating out her hand, as she segues into play-acting with Don as an "ugly American" who succeeds where the Romans have failed. It's like a brief scene out of Fellini, capped off with her half undressed in black with Don in their hotel room - in their most erotic interlude of the series - and their making love not only that evening, but the next morning when Don says he has to get to work. Betty's at the height of her power as a woman whom every man, including Don, spins around.

But the bubble bursts when they're back in Ossining, no Rome in any way. Betty doesn't want to be that wife, and now that we've seen what she can be, now that she has seen it, we can understand a little better why it's so difficult for her back in New York. But the trip has made her a better mother, as she gives good counsel to Sally (and herself) about kissing and boys.

Meanwhile, Pete has an instructive adventure in the warm evenings of August, too. With Trudy away, he makes a play for an au-pair down the hall in his building, helping her replace a gown she ruined. She resists, but, typical of Pete, he gets his way with her anyway, all but against her will. Her employer has to subsequently warn Pete, Trudy's back, and after a day or two of brooding, he tells from now on he'll accompany her when she goes away with her family.

Lots learned by most concerned on these summer excursions, and the momentous Fall of 1963 looms ever closer in this season of Mad Men...




5-min podcast review of Mad Men


See also: Mad Men Back for 3 and 3.2: Carvel, Penn Station, and Diet Soda and 3.3: Gibbon, Blackface, and Eliot and 3.4: Caned Seats and a Multiple Choice about Sal's Patio Furniture and 3.5: Admiral TV, MLK, and a Baby Boy and 3.6: A Saving John Deere and 3.7: Brutal Edges

And from Season Two: Mad Men Returns with a Xerox and a Call Girl ... 2.2: The Advertising Devil and the Deep Blue Sea ... 2.3 Double-Barreled Power ... 2.4: Betty and Don's Son ... 2.5: Best Montage Since Hitchcock ... 2.6: Jackie, Marilyn, and Liberty Valance ... 2.7: Double Dons ... 2.8: Did Don Get What He Deserved? ... 2.9: Don and Roger ... 2.10: Between Ray Bradbury and Telstar ... 2.11: Welcome to the Hotel California ... 2.12 The Day the Earth Stood Still on Mad Men ... 2.13 Saving the Best for Last on Mad Men

And from Season One: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarette Companies and Nixon ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 3: Hot 1960 Kiss ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men ... Mad Men 6: The Medium is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes

20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Freebies in Paul Levinson's Science Fiction, Music, and Media Theory!

I thought I'd create this page, to give you an updated list of freebies of my writing and music that are out there on the web for your reading, listening, and viewing pleasure:

• continually updated ... songs from my 1972 album Twice Upon a Rhyme and my 2020 album Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time on Spotify .... podcast with  TV & movie reviews, interviews, political commentary
• science fiction: "In the Dybbuk's Pocket" Vocal Media, August 2025
• media theory: "The Beatles and Podcasting" The Journal of Beatles Studies, Fall 2023
• media theory: "The Explosive Growth of Social Media: Trump, COVID-19, The Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and Elon Musk" Studia Humanistyczne AGH, Summer 2022
• science fiction: "It's Real Life" new alternate history story about The Beatles, 10 January 2022
• media theory: "I'm a First Amendment Scholar, and I Think Big Tech Should Be Left Alone" The Conversation, 20 January 2021
• media theory: "Tetrads and Chiasmus: A Reclamation of the Tetrad Wheel" new article by Matt Lindia & me in New Explorations, 27 December 2020
• media theory:"The Missing Orientation" space exploration & religion, Religions, 26 December 2020
• philosophy: "Popper & Evolution Over the Decades" how I met the philosopher, 22 December 2020
• science fiction: "Foreseeable" new story in debut issue of Academfic, 22 December 2020
• media theory:  “Prohibiting Presidential Blocking of Twitter Critics Is Good for Democracy” The Globe Post, 17 July 2019.
• media theory:   “Trump’s Prime-Time Oval Office Speech is Debasement of Hallowed Tradition” The Globe Post, 9 January 2019.
• media theory:   “Trump, Google, and Hitler” The Globe Post, 3 September 2018.
• media theory:    “The First Amendment in the Post-Truth Age” Garrison Institute, 15 May 2018.
• media theory:    “Government regulation of social media would be a ‘cure’ far worse than the disease” The Conversation, 28 November 2017.  (Expanded and republished, 16 February 2018)
• media theory:    "Why Time Travel Is So Enjoyable" - short essay, Omni, 14 April 2017
• media theory:    65+ scholarly papers & popular press essays online first time on Academia
• science fiction:  "The Paradoxical, Irresistible Appeal of Time Travel" - brief essay, F. W. Fife, June 2015 
• science fiction:  "The Enduring Test" - short story in Nature, April 2000
• science fiction:  "Sam's Requests" -  new short story in Buzzy Mag, January 2015
• science fiction: "The Last Train to Margaretville" - audio recording of short story published in Walk the Fire 2, May 2014
• science fiction:  "Synchronicity"- new short story in Buzzy Mag, April 2014
• science fiction:  "The Seder in Space", excerpt from 2001 novel Borrowed Tides
• science fiction:   complete, original novelette: "The Chronology Protection Case" on Wattpad!
• science fiction:   sample from the beginning of The Consciousness Plague
• science fiction:   free chapter from Unburning Alexandria on SF Signal!
• media theory: "Obama vs. Romney as Social vs. Mass Media" - brief article in Centro Argentino de Estudios Internacionales, which furthers the political analysis in New New Media
• science fiction:   samples from The Silk Code:  Sample 1 ... Sample 2
• media theory: "Everyone a Diplomat in the Digital Age"- essay (July 2012) in Public Diplomacy Magazine, which furthers some of the analysis of The Arab Spring in New New Media
  
• science fiction:   "Extra Credit" - new short story in Buzzy Mag, July 2012
• science fiction:    first chapter of my science fiction novel, The Plot to Save Socrates (2006)
• science fiction:   the complete radio play of my novelette, "The Chronology Protection Case," performed at the Museum of Television and Radio ... you also might enjoy Jay Kensinger's 2002 short film of The Chronology Protection Case, available for free
• science fiction:   Shaun Farrell's free, complete, 2007 podiobook of my Locus-Award-winning first novel, The Silk Code (1999)

You can also see free clips from many of my lectures on YouTube - about the First Amendment, mass media and politics, etc.

not free, but not too expensive
The Phil D'Amato series:  The Silk Code, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel of 1999 ...  The Consciousness Plague ...  The Pixel Eye



get the series here


Sierra Waters trilogy The Plot to Save Socrates ... Unburning Alexandria ... Chronica



get the series here
covers illustrated by Joel Iskowitz

Fringe 2.3 and the Human Body as Bomb

Fringe 2.3 went in for some fine, classic science fiction again last night, with a current twist - people that explode, not because they are wired like suicide bombers, but because their body chemistry has been changed to make the body itself a deadly, explosive weapon. Alfred Bester had something like this in The Stars My Destination - or, at least, explosives activated by telepathy - and I had exploding rodents in The Pixel Eye.

Fringe does well with these classic themes, but I'd like to see a bit more of the central story - Olivia's journey and back to another dimension - explored a little more on a weekly basis. The coming attractions promise this for next week.

This week, Fringe felt more like Alias, as Peter and Olivia go on a mission in Iraq. Peter is a far more active, important character this year.

The exploding humans were engineered by someone convinced that the Earth will soon be under attack - by people from the other dimension, by the terrorist ZFT, by Massive Dynamic? Not known, as yet.

But it was good to see The Eternal Bald Observer having something to do with this...

See my All the Odd Fringe Stuff You Need to Remember for details on the above - ZFT, The Eternal Bald Observer - from last year.

6-min podcast review of Fringe

See also Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season ... Fringe 2.2 and The Mole People

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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Bones 5.3 in Amish Country

The Amish have long fascinated me, ever since my parents took me to Lancaster on a summer trip back in 1960s. Witness is one of my favorite movies. My first novel, The Silk Code, is still one favorites, and the Amish play major role in the story. As an historian of technology, I've written about how the Amish careful selection of technology - not a wholesale rejection, as is popularly (and incorrectly) believed - provides a significant example of humans coming to terms with the technological world.

I was therefore looking very much forward to tonight's episode of Bones (5.3), and I wasn't disappointed. It was a sensitively rendered, emotionally satisfying gem. True to the principles of the Amish faith, and true to the needs of good mystery writing, with an ending that was a real surprise.

An Amish boy, on his Rumspringa - a time to get his "wild" out, before fully committing to the faith - goes from Lancaster to Washington, DC to test of his dream of becoming a great pianist. He has enormous talent. He's murdered.

Who is the killer? The father, angered over his son's apparently imminent rejection of the faith? Or the brother of the pianist's Amish girlfriend, angered that he would likely be jilting her?

Neither - the Amish are nonviolent.

Other less likely suspects prove to be innocent, too. In the end, the murderer is ... well, see the episode, if you haven't already.

Bones continues to be a series that Poe and Dickens would have enjoyed.





5-min podcast review of Bones


See also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and Bones 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes

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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

FlashForward 1.2: Proofs and Defiance of Inevitability

A powerful second episode of FlashForward tonight, which pulled all the right emotional strings, and bodes well for the continuing success of the series.

Boding - for well or otherwise - is what FlashForward is all about, and the single most riveting story of foreboding tonight was Demetri's - Mark Benford's partner. Demetri, as we learned last week, had no flash forward. And although that might well only mean that he was sleeping six months from now - as pointed out by Janis (pregnant in her vision of the future, no relationship now) - it could also mean that Demetri doesn't survive. Demetri would therefore like the visions, including lack of visions, to be meaningless hallucinations rather than glimpses of the future.

But he gets wrenching proof tonight that they're not, when another agent, in Utah, tells Demetri and Mark that she had no vision during the blackout either. She's shot to death minutes later.

Mark is struggling not against death, but the death of his relationship with Olivia, who is with Lloyd Simcoe in her future vision. But his work, in particular the case he's investigating tonight, is inexorably filling in the pieces of his vision, putting them literally up on his board. Tonight the same action that kills the Utah agent provides Mark with a photograph of a burned doll which was right up there on his future wall.

Why doesn't Mark just refuse to put the pieces of the puzzle up there - why not just throw the photograph away, rather than use it to flesh out a future he doesn't want to occur? Mark can't bring himself to do that - so far - as an FBI agent. But he can try in his personal life, and in a powerful moment tonight he burns the friendship bracelet his daughter gave to him.... It will no doubt turn up, or another bracelet that looks just like it, before this season is over....

Not everything in the visions is profound. Courtney Vance's Stanford, head of the FBI LA Office where Mark, Demetri, and Janis work, found himself on the can six months from now, which is where he was in our present when he had his vision.

But the deft kaleidoscope of philosophic puzzle and human touches, action and agonizing, humor and hints of conspiracy, means that the can is the last place FlashForward is likely to land.

See also FlashForward Debuts and Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost

Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer

6-min podcast review of FlashForward

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Oceanic Airlines as a Portal Between FlashForward and Lost

I mentioned in my review of the FlashForward’s fine premiere last week the Oceanic Airlines billboard that appeared in a Los Angeles scene. I said it was a nod to Lost. I think it’s worth another blog post to say it’s much more.

What that billboard does is proclaim that FlashForward and Lost are taking place in the same universe. It’s a universe alternate to ours in which there is no Oceanic Airlines. But it’s a universe in which all the strange phenomena of Lost – including Oceanic Airlines and an island and people that can jump through time – exist or existed.

Oceanic Airlines in FlashForward is in effect a portal that connects both ways between the people and events of Lost and the people and events of FlashForward. Since FlashForward takes place in the present and six months into future, and Lost takes place a little and much further back in the past, that can work.

The people part of the portal are especially significant to consider. Jack in Lost could end up in some episode of FlashForward – not just the actor Matthew Fox but the character Dr. Jack Shephard. Mark Benford from FlashForward could appear in Lost.

In some cases, though, it could get a little complicated. Olivia Benford in FlashForward is played by Sonya Walger, who also plays Penny in Lost. So the actress would pretty much always have to be Olivia in FlashForward, and Penny in Lost, lest the viewers get totally confused and crazy. If Simon, played by Dominic Monaghan in FlashForward (we haven’t really met him yet on the series), were to show up in Lost, viewers would have a hard time understanding why “Simon” looked just like the late Charlie Pace.

Fortunately, Robert J. Sawyer, the author of the FlashForward novel upon which the series is based, doesn’t look much like James Sawyer from Lost, so we would be ok on that score.

But whichever ways these two series go, we could be in for some fascinating crossovers, or, who knows, maybe none at all.

See also FlashForward Debuts

Listen to 40-minute interview with Robert J. Sawyer

review of Lost Season 5 finale, with links to reviews of earlier episodes


6-min podcast episode about Oceanic

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Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Rent-a-Car, eBags, eHarmony, eMusic, Nutrisystem

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House 6.2: The Gang is Back and Fractured

Well, the gang's back at the hospital on House 6.2 tonight, but House is not, and that means neither will the gang before too long.

House has his license back, but quits his job at the hospital, on the logic that he can't just go back to his old way of life and stay clean and sane. We've seen this before in earlier seasons - House presumably cured, and what he think he has to do to stay cured - but not quite like this.

Foreman wants House's job, and Cuddy reluctantly agrees to give it try for one case - one strike for Foreman and he's out. The case he and the team get is a tough one, involving a video-game designer who's suffering from some sort of weird illness. (Hey, maybe Jack Thompson is right that video games have dangerous effects ... nah, only kidding, see my debate with Thompson on CNBC a few years ago.)

The case at first stumps Foreman and everyone - just as it would likely have done if House were there. But the pressure and working without House is having an additional impact on the team. Taub quits - nothing against Foreman, but he signed up to work with House. And Foreman and 13's romantic relationship is suffering.

In the end, Foreman does come up with the right solution, just as House would have done. So does 13 - but, actually, as she explains, she saw the solution online, in responses to the patient putting his case on the Internet (another victory for New New Media).

I guessed that House provided it, as indeed he did. He can't keep away from diagnosis - embracing rather than leaving it may be the only he can stay cured. His leg had started hurting again ... will coming back to the hospital keep him off drugs, when that was where he got so deeply into vicodin in the first place?

Well, it will be good viewing for us to see if it does. But we won't be seeing 13 on the team in the next episode and maybe more, either. Foreman, not happy with the toll his being boss was having on their relationship, fired her.

That makes at least two ways Foreman was like House tonight, and that's good viewing, too.


6-min podcast review of House



See also House Reborn in Season Six?

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Mad Men 3.7: Brutal Edges

A brutally honest episode 3.7 of Mad Men tonight, that starts with Peggy out cold with a man in bed, Don beaten unconscious on some hotel room floor, and centers around Don's unwillingness to sign a three-year contract with Sterling Cooper.

In the flashbacks which mostly roll out the story, Conrad Hilton wants Don and Sterling Cooper to do the ad work for three big Hilton hotels in the New York area. Don thinks Connie's happy to do this on handshake, but as Cooper puts it, apparently Hilton's lawyers are not, and neither are the execs at Sterling Cooper. They all want the security of a contract with Don - which he, clearly, does not.

The reason, as Don explains to Betty in a tongue-lashing in which he also says that she understands nothing about his work, is that without a contract, Don holds all the cards. Sterling Cooper has to try harder to please him, since he can walk at any time.

But tonight's episode is less about what Don really wants, and more about his ugly side, which is once again revealed. Peggy gets a tongue lashing, too, when she tries to learn what is going on with the Hilton account - with an eye towards being part of it - by coming in to Don's office to talk him on a pretext. Don not only tells her he resents the pretext - perhaps fair enough - but then proceeds to tell her he can't think of one thing she's done for the company since she was exalted from her secretarial post that he "couldn't live without".

Peggy is more shaken by Don's verbal brutality than Betty - Betty's a little more used it - and this is likely what drives Peggy to Duck's hotel room, to personally decline his offer to hire her away from Sterling Cooper. But she doesn't decline his passionate offer to spend the night with him, and Duck indeed is the man in bed with Peggy the next morning. I've got to say that Duck is a much better character this year than last, and I was glad to see the two together. After they wake up, Duck tells her he really likes the morning, and that's enough for another roll...

As for Don, he winds up in a hotel room that same night, too, with not so fine results. He has driven away from home after the argument with Betty, picks up a couple on the road, and accepts the Phenobarbital and alcohol they offer him. Once again, when Don's personally under pressure, he gets self-destructive (in contrast to when he's needed by others, which brings his better instincts). He's beaten and passed out. At least the couple don't steal his car.

Next morning, Peggy and Don arrive at the office the same time, neither of course having a clue as to what happened the night before to the other. Peggy is likely not aware that Don being cruel to her was the impetus, but if we think her being with Duck is good for her, then Don's words to her had an unintended positive result.

And what about Don's contract? Cooper in effect blackmails Don, by reminding Don that Cooper knows Don is not really Don, and Don signs his - Don's - name to the contract.

Those Mad Men - or, least the Mad Man who is "Don Draper" - live and work in a rough world indeed, which nothing, not even booze and women, can really take the edge off...


8-min podcast review of Mad Men


See also: Mad Men Back for 3 and 3.2: Carvel, Penn Station, and Diet Soda and 3.3: Gibbon, Blackface, and Eliot and 3.4: Caned Seats and a Multiple Choice about Sal's Patio Furniture and 3.5: Admiral TV, MLK, and a Baby Boy and 3.6: A Saving John Deere

And from Season Two: Mad Men Returns with a Xerox and a Call Girl ... 2.2: The Advertising Devil and the Deep Blue Sea ... 2.3 Double-Barreled Power ... 2.4: Betty and Don's Son ... 2.5: Best Montage Since Hitchcock ... 2.6: Jackie, Marilyn, and Liberty Valance ... 2.7: Double Dons ... 2.8: Did Don Get What He Deserved? ... 2.9: Don and Roger ... 2.10: Between Ray Bradbury and Telstar ... 2.11: Welcome to the Hotel California ... 2.12 The Day the Earth Stood Still on Mad Men ... 2.13 Saving the Best for Last on Mad Men

And from Season One: Mad Men Debuts on AMC: Cigarette Companies and Nixon ... Mad Men 2: Smoke and Television ... Mad Men 3: Hot 1960 Kiss ... Mad Men 4 and 5: Double Mad Men ... Mad Men 6: The Medium is the Message! ... Mad Men 7: Revenge of the Mollusk ... Mad Men 8: Weed, Twist, Hobo ... Mad Man 9: Betty Grace Kelly ... Mad men 10: Life, Death, and Politics ... Mad Men 11: Heat! ... Mad Men 12: Admirable Don ... Mad 13: Double-Endings, Lascaux, and Holes

20-minute interview with Rich Sommer (Harry Crane) at Light On Light Through

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

Fringe 2.2 and the Mole People

A rich, tight episode of 2.2 of Fringe tonight, which told a fine new macabre story, as it advanced the central, underlying one.

Actually, underlying was the subject of the new story, too, as people near a rural Pennsylvania house get pulled underground - literally, as in The Mole People, one of my favorite 1950s science fiction movies. Makes sense, because the 1950s is often the science fiction field tilled on Fringe, with teleportation and creatures and whatnot.

The science and story underneath what is going on under the ground around the house is good: a scientist impregnated his wife, who had lupus. This would ordinarily have prevented her from coming to term, because the immune disorder at the basis of lupus would have attacked and destroyed the fetus. So the scientist got some scorpion and mole-rat DNA into the embryo - according to Walter - and this worked, sort of. The mother died. The baby apparently died. But it dug its way out of the little casket, and proceeded to take up residence underground...

Meanwhile, above ground, Olivia is still not quite herself. She almost shoots Peter in the head. Her hearing is super-acute. She has no specific memory of her visit to the alternate universe. But Walter tells her that's where she's been, and pseudo-Charley - still taking his orders from another dimension via typewriter - also broaches the topic, needing to find out what she knows. Olivia is at the very beginning of getting a little suspicious.

But most interesting of all, Nina comes to Olivia, and gives her the name of someone who can help her. Sam Weiss works in a bowling alley. People with strange powers in common, everyday places.

Gimme that ol' time science fiction!

See also Top Notch Return of Fringe Second Season

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



6-min podcast review of Fringe




And this Fringe 101 refresher that SciFi Wire commissioned ... and Fringe Bloggers Roundtable about Season One Finale

Bones 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes

I thought the two best parts of Bones 5.2 tonight were outside of the central James Bondian story, but crucial to the story of the central characters.

Wendell, one of the group of brilliant assistants, is losing his scholarship - not because of any bad work, but because of the bad economy. Sufficient money from anyone will save his job. But Jack, who's fabulously wealthy, says the economy has tied up his funds. And Bones, who's making a bundle from her best-selling novel, isn't offering.

In the end, anonymous donors come up with the money - enough to provide for three times the scholarship Wendell requires. Ok, Jack came through, and so did Bones. But who was the third donor? Any guesses? Or did Jack or Bones each contribute twice the money needed?

Meanwhile, Booth still has residual mental loss - he's not the plumber he used to be. Bones buys him a book - "An Imbecile's Guide to Plumbing," as she says - and the last scene finds the two of them working on the pipes, in another almost erotic scene. Predictably, the pipe that they fix springs a leak - but that's it.

Well, it makes sense that Bones would have no special talent for pipes. Her specialty, after all, is the skeleton not the circulatory system. But she does have a heart, and someday ... well, the ways of true love move slowly in television...


See also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love?




6-min podcast review of Bones

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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

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

FlashForward Debuts: Irresistible Human Stories and Science Fiction

Before I review the first episode of FlashForward - which I thought was splendid - I should tell you, in the spirit of full disclosure, that the novel FlashForward upon which this ABC-TV series is based was written by my good friend, Robert J. Sawyer. That said, I should add that I'm especially delighted that I enjoyed the premiere of this series so much, because I would have had no choice but to be honest with you if I did not, or I might not have reviewed the series at all. And I promise to give you my candid views of every episode that I review.

The second preambling point I should make is that the series story is different in many ways from the novel, and at the same time it draws upon many of its powerful themes, but I won't spend any time here at all with comparisons pro, con, or otherwise to the novel. Instead, as I have been doing with True Blood - based also on a series of novels - I'll be reviewing the television series FlashForward totally on its own terms.

So here goes ... (as with all of my reviews, expect spoilers) ...

Everyone in the world (or, as is revealed near the end of show, everyone other than at least one) blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seventeen seconds. But it's not really a black out, because almost everyone (again, minus at least one, and not the one indicated above), has a vision of the future six months into the future.

The first important point in the plot, confirmed in a variety of effective, emotionally compelling ways, is that the vision is proven as in some sense real, not a mass hallucination. An FBI guy in Los Angeles recalls being in a meeting with his counterpart in New Scotland Yard six months from now, and she confirms it, too, down to the detail of a bird flying into a window.

The most compelling confirmation comes from Mark Benford (well played by Joseph Fiennes), an FBI agent married to a doctor, Olivia. She's played by Sonya Walger, who is always a pleasure to see in any role on the screen, including The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Tell Me You Love Me, and, of course, as Penny in Lost. Mark's vision provides the foundation of the investigative part of this story - he sees himself in the future looking at names on a board as part of a case, and this gets the case started in our present (more on this in the next two paragraphs). Olivia's vision sees her happy and in love with another man - a vision which upsets her, to say the least, since she is very happily married to Mark, and this in effect sets her and Mark on a path of making sure the future she saw does not come into being, even if it might have benefits for other people. A part of Mark is hoping that the vision may somehow not be real - but the hope is dashed when his young daughter asks him in a quietly wrenching last scene to put on a friendship bracelet she made for him. Mark has seen this on his hand in the future.

The issue of pre-determination versus free-will is always on the table when people see the future, either by traveling to it, or somehow viewing it, in science fiction. Indeed, one of the reasons I think time travel is impossible, though I love to write and read and see it, is that I believe in free will. If you know the future, and that has any meaning, that must mean you have no free will - you cannot change what you saw or otherwise know about the future.

An appealing intellectual game for people who like time travel is a future, which hasn't happened yet, causing itself to happen by influencing the past. FlashForward has this intriguing reversal of cause and effect, in Mark's investigation in the present ignited by what he saw in the future, and that in itself makes it exceptional television.

Lost has some of this, too, and there are some similarities - for the good, I'd say - between the two series (as well as a billboard for Oceanic Airlines in an early FlashForward scene). A kangaroo running through Los Angeles, a mysterious hooded figure who did not black out (he's caught on a video taken at a stadium - I suspect he's the character played by Dominic Monaghan, by the way, but that's just a guess), and of course people who know what's going to happen (obviously just about everyone in FlashForward) all have echoes of Lost.

But FlashForward has a multiplicity of powerful stories all its own, including one character, Mark's partner Demetri (John Choe), who has no vision of the future at all. Does that mean he's bound to die? The answer will no doubt not be even close to that simple, but the tableau of conflicting interests, ranging from wanting to ensure to wanting to prevent the glimpsed future, makes for an irresistible story.

The premiere of FlashForward will be on ABC again tomorrow evening - well worth seeing if you missed or didn't TiVo or DVR it. I'll be back here next week and every week it's on - which I suspect will be years - with a review of FlashForward.

You might enjoy my in-depth interview with Robert J. Sawyer from last week.

10-min podcast review of FlashForward 1.1

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another kind of time bending

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