Space and the City
sci-fi
Geek Swimwear
Jul 12th
Usually when you hear “geek” and “swimwear,” it’s awesome. This time, clearly not.
Falling The Game of Thrones Skies
Jun 27th
One quick way to fix this problem.
It’s taken longer to gets into Falling Skies than I expected. Let me back up. I’ve just paused this week’s episode thirteen minutes in, and I’m pretty sure I’m watching a scene where some sort of serious conversation is being had between a murdering Steppenwolf (dressed, obviously enough, like a member of Steppenwolf) and Battlestar Galactica’s Col. Tygh. Except that it seems to be more like a job interview so that the guy who, in the previous episode led a group of raping racists, can now be a cook.
I just rewound to confirm, and yes this is the case.
Did it really end with the line “for the love of God could somebody please fine me some Olive Oil.” ugh, why is this so corny? Already.
From here on out, there are spoilers for both Falling Skies, and Game of Thrones.
Most frequently, I hear Falling Skies compared to Jericho. And, I think that’s unfortunate because that’s a good example of another show trying to do something different that just wasn’t up to the zeitgeist. Obviously they’re both post-apocalyptic action dramas helmed by leading men that are famous for playing someone else. Clearly, and I would say unfortunately, the same number of dollars per frame were spent (for serious, a lot of basic cable shows look a lot better than this. Pony up some of that NBA Playoff money, TNT). Will they suffer the same fate as series? Months from now, will I be reading about efforts to send bags of Skittles to TNT programming executives?
There are little things I don’t like about the series, like how Dr ER is always reminding us about how he’s the history professor on this show and that the doctor is actually the lady who you think is River Than at first because the lighting isn’t good.
And how the kid who’s being lead back to camp so he can ransom his dad suddenly decides to try to overpower his captor when he has no idea where he is and without any reason. You were being set free, dummy! And with the opportunity to save Professor Pops! Oh, and really is the best cultural reference for a leader that the writers could come up with Poppa Smurf? Is this some kind of weird product placement for the incredible thud of Smurf movie that is coming to help kill of 3D later this summer?
But these are little things. And when I09 says it gets better over seven episodes, I believe them. But I have to wonder, how much Will Smith dragging the alien/kiddo pep-talk in a high-school hallway corballery am I going to have to sit through between now and then?
It’s good timing, on the one hand, to have this show now. Basketball and hockey are over and for most of the country interest in baseball is a long way off. On the other, Game of Thrones has really thrown down the good TV gauntlet. And coming as it does, opening up after THAT powerful of a season finale…well it hardly seems fair.
The scratch I toss HBO every month is up there with the lawn guy for the title of Easiest And Most Rewarding Money Spent Monthly. Game of Thrones was flawless. It’s a high bar to meet. And I wonder, could I see myself continuing to operate in an actual Sunday must-watch TV mode?
Or will one too many chef jokes just keep me away? Here’s to hoping for the former.
SCIENTIST: STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE TOTALLY HAPPENED
May 21st
V'GER, SON!
HEY. At lease three way excellent things happened in 1977: I was born, a movie named Star Wars was made by people who actually know how to make good movies and not by people named George Lucas, and NASA launched the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts. Of course, that same year Elvis died and INTERPOL came up with those obnoxious “FBI WARNING” things that you still have to sit through at the beginning of every vhd/dvd/blue-ray; so it’s not like the year was all roses. But on the balance, a pretty good set of 365 considering the Voyager program is so rippingly whips.
A Typical Hot NASA Scientist.
At present, Voyager 2 is about 8.6 billion miles from Earth, carrying with it all manner of scientific instrumentalia and thefamous “Gold Record,” containing recorded greetings in a number of languages, some ‘sounds of Earth,’ and then a music section with Humanity’s greatest hits. Perhaps if you’ve been obsessively watching The West Wing lately, you’ll recall that one of those songs (“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” by Blind Willie Johnson) is featured in the episode The Warfare of Genghis Khan after Josh falls for a hot NASA scientist. Oh scientists, how hot you all are (you’ll be stoked to know that Chuck Berry also made the cut for the record).
The probe sends back regular updates to Earth, but in April someone odd happened. It stopped transmitting and then started back up again, but was sending strange messages that scientists could not decipher. Even really hot scientists. I can think of only one possibility. Fortunately, someone more credentialed said out loud what we all were thinking. Tell us about it, The First Post:
German academic Hartwig Hausdorf believes the change could be down to extraterrestrials. He says that because the rest of the spacecraft is still working normally there may be more to the cryptic messages than meets the eye.
“It seems almost as if someone has reprogrammed or hijacked the probe,” he told German newspaper Bild. “Thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth.”
MERGE WITH CREATOR YUSS.
YUSS. THE ALIENS ARE COMMUNICATING WITH US USING THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT! CAN A TOTALLY BALD, TOTALLY SMOKIN’ CARBON-BASED ENVOY WALKING AROUND IN A BATHROBE BE FAR BEHIND? OH CARL SAGAN! OH DON PIANO!
Oh. Wait:
But if Hausdorf is correct in assuming that aliens are trying to send messages there could be trouble ahead, even if they understand the information on the Golden Disk.
Last month, Professor Stephen Hawking, the renowned British astrophysicist and believer in aliens, warned that advanced extraterrestrial life forms would aggressively seek to colonise Earth should humans ever make contact with them.
SIGH. That’s no good. Dealing with an alien invasion is totally a complicated post and outside the scope of this discussion. While most people will likely cite V or Independence Day as the touchstone examples for how to organize our resistance and ultimate liberation, anyone who isn’t considering Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall is doing themselves a great disservice. Especially considering the latter has aliens that are man-sized elephants. Probably least likely (but somehow still on my to-read list) is Harry Turteldove’s Worldwar series, in which WW2 is interrupted by alien invasion, and we have the upper hand because the aliens hadn’t swung by since the Crusades and weren’t expecting us to be so good at developing killing technology.
Unfortunately Fortunately, it turns out that NASA had some scientists on the job and they were able to figure out what is going on. Boringly, it was just some software glitch, which has subsequently been fixed and totally not having anything at all to do with Explorers. Guh. I think my weekend has been ruined in advance.
WATERWORLD II: COSTNER VS. OIL
May 20th
Dances With Crude
Remember Waterworld? It was that Kevin Costner post-apocalyptic tanker that proved, definitively, that children in Sci-Fi films are vastly more off-putting than even the protagonist drinking their own urine. If it wasn’t thrown in the same mental junk-drawer where you keep The Postman and Star Trek: Insurrection, you might recall that the bad guys in this multiplex Multisanto (who were called The Smokers) rode around in an apparently refurbished Exxon Valdez.
Not content to have his exploits combating the pinnacle iconography of crude-based environmental cataclysm eclipsed by the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, Costner and his brother Dan headed down to the gulf to lend a hand, as reported by the Chronicle’s Celebrity Buzz Blog:
The brothers run Costner Industries Nevada Corporation (CINC), and have previously promoted a filtration system, designed by Dan Costner, to recycle oil.
Now BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles has agreed to test out six of the devices on the oil spill this week.
I’m not one of those people that thinks BP is dragging their feet or incompetent or being impertinent in all this. Far from it. But, I am going to go ahead and say that, following on the heels of describing a shut-off method as involving golf balls and old tires (rather than, say, ceramic spheres and strips of radial-steel reinforced rubber), they really should stop giving the late-night comics such ready and easy fodder as enlisting Costner for help. Please leave your best Costner entendre in the comments. If you spill it, he will come.
