Sanctuary: the place for speculative fiction in a modern world.

Why are all science fiction shows chock full of the scary business? I had been seeing ads for the new show Sanctuary for months before it appeared, so my anticipation was high. I couldn’t watch even 30 minutes of the pilot. Too much darkness with things jumping out. Hollywood seems to think of science fiction as a haunted house and I read science fiction and fantasy to explore interesting ideas like interactions between vastly different cultures. So I think of sff more like anthropology or politics or history. You don’t hear anthropologists and historians going around passing judgement before they have researched or talked to people. Assuming things that are different are going to be scary is a very non-sff concept, one I think is bad for society as a whole. Many people who read science fiction want to become scientists (despite the way scientists frown upon fictional science and its readers, there are a lot of people who treat their reading preferences as a dirty little secret) because they want to know more. If the books were all about how scientists’ need to know destroys the Earth and kills everyone, wouldn’t that discourage some of the brightest people? Many people who read some of the great modern fantasy absorb tolerance— I don’t know anyone who has read and liked Lackey’s Valdemar series who really thinks being homosexual is a killing offense, there are some who are still skeeved if they think about it too much, but we all got to know Vanyel and it’s hard to think he deserved to be tortured because he wasn’t attracted to women.

Personally I’ve read books that started from an Islamic basis, the story wasn’t about that, but there was an underlying premise. I got to know a little bit about what the differences are compared to my own upbringing. I find it impossible to assume every Muslim is inherently a terrorist. Because the fundamental core beliefs are not about that.  But if the story had been about being a woman in Saudi Arabia, I would have been too angry to keep reading and then I would have no connection to the characters.

Science fiction and fantasy differ in what powers everything, but they are both fundamentally about exploration of the human condition, regardless of shape or color or background or belief.

Hollywood’s tendency to make all science fiction and fantasy scary enough to be horror really undermines the globalization of society. Hollywood is trying to make us afraid of each other by making everything that is different jump out of the darkness with guns blazing.

It makes the title of the new show Sanctuary rather ironic.

Deja Vu, Thy Name is Eleventh Hour

Somewhere in the ether I have bits and drabs of a post about the British series Eleventh Hour (starring Patrick Stewart) which I got from Netflix this last Summer. I remember thinking that it was more a series of one-hour movie specials than a series, kind of like one of the Miss Marple movies on PBS (where she goes somewhere different each mystery, sees entirely different people, and the friends she talks about are disjoint from the friends mentioned in other movies). I thought some of the Eleventh Hour stories were vaguely interesting, but Patrick Stewart was not especially believable as top of the game at most major sciences. (Scientists, in my experience, tend to get stentorian as their grasp on the cusp of discovery laxes.) Some of the stories were blatantly offensive, especially the first one about human cloning.

Now, fast forward out of flashback, Eleventh Hour was remade for American audiences and the premiere episode aired this week. It’s starring Rufus Sewell, famed in song and dance as being eye candy to a lot of my female friends of a certain age. He was more believable as the scientist because his knowledge was more of the “You would need X years of specialization to do this, so it cannot be this suspect.” type. Plus he doesn’t bring that stage actors’ tendency to play to the rafters.

However, the show was almost word for word the exact same script as the first episode of the British version. They changed the main character’s name from Ian to Jacob— but surprisingly he hasn’t gone all Biblical yet (that’s the only reason I can think of to make the change, to make his character more Christian seeming.) And there was a lot less dialogue and interplay between supporting characters. But they preserved all the diatribe about how cloning humans is an abomination before God but cloning sheep is not. And they preserved all the plot about how the surrogate mother is willing to risk her life so her son is not taken away from her, even though he would undoubtedly be better off with adoptive parents. (She’s 19 in the show, her son is 4, she doesn’t have parents in the picture, you know she has zero prospects.)

I found it was hard to sit through a show I’d already seen. Deja Vu the whole way through. The second problem is that I really didn’t understand why the man who lost his son would spend a billion dollars trying to have him cloned. Perhaps because my expenditures are all the other way, toward preventing pregnancy, I find myself completely flummoxed by the concept. Why on Earth would someone want a child enough to waste a billion dollars cloning it? Wouldn’t the world be better off if the rich dude had spent the money funding a private orphanage to creche 10,000 unwanted babies? Or traditionally adopting 10 and actually being their dad?

It’s a bizarre story to have started a show with unless you wanted to get your show cancelled.

To Every Season, Turn Turn Turn (the channel)

This has been a season for heavy television watching. The summer mini-season from cable networks kicked in right before the fall season from broadcast started. I have to say that I love the summer mini-season idea. There was so much stuff, especially with the marathon of Tru Calling, that I never even noticed the olympics were on, much less the political conventions.

I loathe the Olympics. We’ll get that out of the way right now. But it doesn’t hold a candle to my rage about the political conventions. We knew who the nominees were before each convention started. It’s not like there were going to be any surprises. It wasn’t “news”. They could have put the transcripts out on the web in advance so people could read them and someone could sum up. The whole thing would have taken about 15 minutes per party. Instead everything was disrupted for weeks while people read their canned patter of lies to the world. It’s a waste of time. And I don’t mind if people want to have pep rallies to get supporters jazzed up, but I really mind that it pre-empts stuff I want to see—- like the actual news.

Speaking of news, the MSNBC scheduling department really sucks. Constantly they’ve changed their timeslots around for the new Rachel Maddow Show and not bothered to tell anyone about it. So I get random crap instead of the show I was expecting. If someone has a recommendation for non-political news from a liberal slant, I could really go for that. I like Countdown because it’s actually talking about stuff I don’t hear about otherwise—- though they’ve been slow lately, scooped by The Daily Show for most major stories. But the sheer volume of fluff makes me crazy. I hate that liberal news must be tempered by humor lest someone take it as criticism of the king— if the news media must play the court jester, then it’s not news.

Burn Notice was my favorite show of last season. This year, I’ve been bored. It seems like Michael is spinning his wheels and making no progress toward finding out who burned him. So we see him interacting with his mother and she’s horrible enough to justify ignoring. We see him taking yet another case just like the previous ones. The caliber of the writing has really faltered. The show is still good, but it lacks the desperation to get the contract renewed quality that it used to have.

I watched the season finale of In Plain Sight, (yeah, I’m a little slow) but was told the rest of the episodes weren’t like that. If they were all like that last 2-parter, eh, it’s okay.

The new series of Bones has been strange with all the Zack replacements and the season opener in London.

I enjoy Eureka, but I wish they would go back to the emphasis on smart people that the show started with. Lately it’s been a lot too much normalcy. But the huge problem is that the plots are not just telegraphed or foreshadowed, the writers made a metaphorical video and served it up canned so everything that happens is dead-obvious and feels almost plagiarized. About 5 minutes into an episode, I know what’s going to happen, that the “unblamable villain” will be that guy we’ve never seen before (they don’t wear red shirts, but they might as well).

((I’m still kind of appalled that they let a man (the character Sheriff Carter) have custody of his child-of-statutory-rape (seriously, the character bios originally showed that Carter could not have been more than 16.5 when his daughter was conceived.) After a while, someone else must have noticed because the ages were not both incremented for the next season. It’s really hard to take him seriously as a parent because he says he expects his daughter to take after him and be an upstanding citizen, except she’d have a baby now if she’d followed his example. I would like it if they got rid of the whole Carter family on the show and just concentrated on everyone else.))

We attempted to pick up some new shows for the season, Raising the Bar… lawyers on opposing sides of every case shown were in a relationship with their opposing counsel. I don’t know much about law or NYC, but it rather seems like someone would notice how they’d paired up and claim malfeasance. My comment was, “Doesn’t that seem a little incestuous?”

I’ve got a flag out for Santuary and Leverage. First ep recordings scheduled for the new Knight Rider and The Mentalist. Saw the Fringe thing, thought it was terrible, though if I’d known the guy who did Lost was behind it, I wouldn’t have bothered. If I’d known they were marketing it as akin to X-Files I wouldn’t have bothered.

With all this, I have not watched many movies. I finished the last DVDs of Cadfael, I can see why they stopped, really scraping the bottom of the barrel there. We got The Last Detective and thought it was OK enough to get more.

Forthcoming new episodes of NCIS, Chuck, NUMB3RS, and a handful of other things. If I’d been wise, I’d have put my Netflix subscription on hold, but I really thought I was going to need material to bridge the month-long gap of content from the Olympics and the political conventions. I wish Netflix and TiVo could have gotten together so I could download movies to my TV… instead there’s the business with Amazon downloads (which confuse me) and TiVo makes a stand-alone device. My TV doesn’t have any more input device slots though.

I have read a stack of books lately, but between those reviews being hard to write and my not feeling like anyone cares what I think of them (true among friends, let alone strangers)— I find myself lacking in ambition. So I close one and start the next without commentary and that has taken away from blogging about them.