Oldskooler Ramblings

I loved the first season of Heroes, the X-Men-style soap opera that ran on NBC from 2006-2007 — that is, I tried to love it, but threw my hands up in despair at the last episode of the season. As a fan of comics and sci-fi, I grew increasingly disappointed that, throughout the run of the season, there were more and more moments of missed opportunities and direction. Sylar, a truly creepy villain with a streak of vulnerability, grew increasingly powerful; for example, he could stop bullets using telekinesis. Yet in the final episode of the season, he is killed by a slow-moving weak individual who runs at him for at least 3 full seconds before impaling him with a sword. He didn’t even have his back turned. How do you go from stopping bullets to being unable to stop a chubby nerd running at you from a distance of 18 feet? I’m not a hollywood writer; I’m just a fan.  But even I thought that killing Sylar using the chubby nerd’s power (the ability to stop time, and also teleport) would have been much more believable and satisfying. What about stopping time, wrestling with the decision to kill a human being, slowly and tearfully doing it after much deliberation, and then resuming time to see what must be his victim’s incredibly surprised reaction? Or hell, go the dumbass route and teleport Sylar into a brick wall or something? I know I’m just an amateur, but surely something better could have been done as a finale to the character.

The season had brilliant moments, such as properly resolving the Peter/Nathan storyline (brothers at odds), and also having the courage to show — graphically — what happens when you transmute your fist inside someone’s head. But as it dragged on, the number of missed opportunities started to outweigh the number of cool moments.  I am still waiting for the scene where Sylar picks up Claire using telekinesis and starts slamming her into everything, only to become more and more frustrated as she quickly regenerates.  I can dream.

Hey, it was a first season. Many first seasons suck; for example, we simply do not speak of the first season of ST:TNG in my household. So it was with high hopes that I started watching the 2nd season, the first episode of which I just now saw (thank you ReplayTV). In it, we see that the spectacular explosion of Peter (more powerful than Sylar; he absorbed everyone’s powers automatically) was survived by his brother Nathan, who could fly and flew him out of harm’s way before he (Peter) exploded as a result of being unable to contain one of his powers. Peter is assumed to be dead, as one would normally be from a crazy powerful explosion. Nathan, depressed and drinking in a bar, looks at himself in the mirror and for a split second sees not his own face but the face of his brother Peter, charred and melted (presumably from the explosion). He looks away, looks back, and his face appears normal in the mirror.

At this point I got really excited, because what that scene hinted at was that Nathan was actually Peter in disguise. Why would that make sense? Because Peter had absorbed a regeneration power, which would account for him surviving the explosion. He had also absorbed a power that allowed him to disguise his appearance. Masquerading as Nathan would be Peter’s way of dealing with the enormous guilt he must feel at being the cause of his brother’s death, as his brother gave his own life to fly Peter out of New York to go explode harmlessly over the ocean. It’s one of those brilliant MY GOD IT ALL FITS moments, and would make for one incredibly kick-ass storyline. I told Melissa what I was thinking, and, for a moment, we were in awe of how clever such a storyline would be.

And then ten minutes later, Peter is found, alive and well somewhere. So much for being clever. My hopes dashed, I kept watching, only to find that Peter has…wait for it… amnesia! Yes, amnesia. Most episodes of Full House have deeper revelations than that. Hell, I’ve seen Teletubbies episodes with more cunning and insight. So it’s now obvious that Heroes is pretty much a soap opera that appeals to nerds without them realizing it’s a soap opera, because nerds don’t (normally) watch soap operas.

I don’t hold much hope for the series. I would probably ditch it if it weren’t for the fact that my wife enjoys it, which is the closest I will ever get to her sitting down and watching Sci-Fi with me on a regular basis. But personally, at this point it’s just something that is keeping me from catching up on my Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, and Farscape.

PS: The best show you all missed the last three months was Burn Notice on the USA network. Torrent it, catch reruns, whatever — it’s clever, it gets better with every episode, and I’m thankful USA is giving it a second season.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was battling depression using several techniques, one of which was a mystery fourth ingredient.  That ingredient was the complete immersion into the world of Star Trek: Voyager.  To whit, I have completed the following:

1. Watched seasons 1 through 5, in order
2. Played and finished Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
3. Watched seasons 6 and 7, in order
4. Played Elite Force II’s first mission (fills in some of the Endgame story)

On completing this, I have now seen every single Star Trek regular series episode (I did the same saturation with DS9 last year).  Actually, that’s not entirely true; I haven’t seen every Enterprise episode.  But I never will, due to its overwhelming suckitude (when the season finale is essentially a mediocre TNG episode and is one of the best episodes of the entire series, you know your series should have died on the vine a long time ago).

This complete immersion into all things Voyager has raised me to Grand Flaming Nerd Echelon 5 Alpha, where I’ve been enlightened by a few new pieces of information:

• Voyager was better than most people credit it.  There was a little too much reliance on hologram technology as a major plot point, and the Borg weren’t nearly as threatening as they were in TNG (due to overexposure), but overall it wasn’t nearly as bad as the criticism it has received.  If you want to check Voyager out, I highly recommend renting (or downloading) entire seasons at a time, so that you can quickly skip past secondary plots you don’t care about, episodes you’ve already seen before, etc.
• Like most Star Trek series, Voyager follows the “thirds rule” pretty faithfully:  One third of the episodes are best forgotten, one third are average entertainment, and one third kick ass in one or more ways.  (The only series to not follow this rule is Enterprise.  I leave it to you to figure out the percentages of good/avg/bad on that one.)
• Jeri Ryan made the best of her situation (ie. “let’s bring in a sexpot to raise the flagging ratings”).  There are about five episodes where she genuinely acts — skillfully — and the story is much better as a result.  That’s about 5 percent of the episodes she appeared in, which sounds like a slam, but it’s not meant to be.  I don’t think any fan of the show was expecting her to hold her own with the other actors as well as she did.
• With the exception of Kate Mulgrew, most of the actors had two basic categories of operation:  Flustered or Jovial.  This unfortunately caused some of the story progressions to become predictable, as the writers fed off of the actors’ portrayal of their characters.
• Kate Mulgrew is a much better actress than most people realize.  She manages to find the right, subtle notes for almost every scene that requires her to say something more than the standard stock library of “Shields!”
• Some stories should have been rejected as duplicates.  We have two stories where a bomb needs to be defused by reasoning with its computer A.I.; four (or more, I lost count) stories where characters on the holodeck either become aware of the holodeck, escape the holodeck, or both; multiple stories where characters are killed then revived; etc.
• The attempt to fit some of the Endgame story in the Elite Force II game was a dismal failure.  The game’s portrayal of what happened inside the sphere lacks any sort of urgency or coherence.  It removes all skill from defeating the Borg (evidentally all you have to do is shoot power couplings here and there to defeat an entire Sphere) and there’s no consequences for taking too long to do something.  (It also didn’t help that the voice actor for Ensign Munroe is also the voice actor for the new animated The Batman series — it was unsettling playing Bruce Wayne disabling a Borg vessel).  In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t bothered.

Believe it or not, I’m not a die-hard ST fanboy; I don’t own any collectables, I’ve never been to a convention, and I never will.  I just like science fiction that, while sometimes average and predictable, explores areas that aren’t normally explored in conventional drama, including new takes on moral dilemmas.  Some of the episodes deal with things I can find in conventional fiction, like Neelix’s decision to commit suicide when his entire faith and belief system is dissolved (”Mortal Coil”, exceptionally written and a showcase episode for Ethan Phillips), or how history is inevitably written by the victors (”Living Witness”, also excellent), or whether or not it is ethical to use data from experiments conducted by a war criminal to save the living (”Nothing Human”).  But where else can I experience fiction that deals with things like:

• Trying to reason with a bomb to convince it not to explode (”Dreadnought”)
• Being captured by a race of semi-sentient robots and being coerced to mass-produce them (”Prototype”)
• Two people being merged into one by accident, and the ethical dilemma of whether it is right or wrong to seperate them again, since it means the death of the new individual (”Tuvix”)
• A scientist unable to publish his new findings on the definitive origin of life for his species due to an oppressive regime (”Distant Origin”)
• A holographic servant with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder who finds organics repulsive (”Revulsion”)
• Experiments on a race where the race is sentient and doesn’t wish to participate, and how far they’ll go to stop being experimented on (”Scientific Method”)
• Trying to prevent the loss of one race by committing genocide against another through the manipulation of history (”Year Of Hell”)
• Selectively wiping a section of memory from a person to prevent them from going insane (”Latent Image”)
• Being digested by a pitcher plant, from the perspective of the fly lured into it (”Bliss”)
• Switching one personality for another due to an accident, and the moral implications of whether or not to switch it back (”Riddles”)
• Whether it’s ethical to genetically engineer your unborn child’s appearance (”Lineage”)

I mean, come on, it’s not like I can get this stuff on the typical network dreck shoveled to the masses these days.

Melissa and I like to watch the show Beauty and the Geek, currently starting its second season, because she’s attracted to the intelligent nerdy type (lucky for me!) and I live vicariously through them as the nerd who didn’t get that kind of advice when he needed it and wants to see what happens to nerds that do get it in time. However, watching the season 2 premiere, it became increasingly apparent that the contestant named Chris is undiagnosed autistic, probably Asberger’s Syndrome. He may have come off as a jerk, but having been around many autistic people in my life (not to mention my own son, who is on the autistic spectrum), I’ve come to recognize the traits of a high functioning autistic person.

This really bothers me, because one of the hallmarks of an autistic person is an inability to pick up on social and facial cues — it’s like they’re aliens living in our world and trying to figure out our customs. They simply don’t pick up on non-verbal body language, and as a result grow up not really knowing how to relate to others properly (depending on the level of their affliction).

I don’t know if the producers of the show knew this or not; if they didn’t, they made a mistake and I hope for his sake that Chris is voted off the program quickly. All of his “jerk” behavior, such as the arrogance, the methodical quizzing of all the other contestants, choosing not to participate in the first night’s social gathering because “he didn’t want to embarrass them” (complete misreading of social situations), etc. — these are all hallmarks of a high-functioning autistic person. Keeping him in the show will be the social equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel and will do more harm than good.