First things first: if you’re not watching Alphas you are missing out on a great show. What’s refreshing is that I don’t need to provide any caveats to that. Yes, I’m a science fiction nerd, so I’m more inclined to give these sorts of shows some slack when they underperform. That means I end up watching random mediocre sci-fi because it’s sci-fi. I’m glad to say that in this case, we’ve got a smart sci-fi show that is also genuinely good irrespective of the trappings of its genre.

The finale of this first season — SyFy has already ordered a second season — aired on Monday and it delivered on the promise of so many previous superhero shows with a finale that is explosive not for its action but for its words. Leigh Rosen, played by an inexplicable David Strathairn¹, ends the season with a dramatic action that will spin the story off into exciting and unknown territory that I trust the writers can follow through on. My one fear with the show’s direction is that it might hew to the path of The 4400, whose creator is working in the writer’s room on Alphas, because that show had similar stories to tell, but I think the creative team here is smart enough to resonate with that world without echoing it.

The second thought I wanted to get across here is that the existence of Alphas proves just how ridiculous the people who mock SyFy, or refuse to pronounce the name the way they want, or say the channel’s more interested in putting wrestling on the air than putting out good sci-fi are. This is the sort of show they want to make — technically they want to make this show and have it be a wildly popular and critical hit but let’s not split hairs in this moment of triumph — and when there are people out there who explicitly refuse to watch a show simply because it’s on SyFy, it infuriates me. It infuriated me even before this show was put on the air, but it’s now obviously a stubbornly ignorant position.

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Footnotes

1. I’m so glad he’s doing this show, and I hope that the events of this finale aren’t a way of writing him out of the series barring the occasional guest appearance, but I never would’ve guessed his next move to be a jump to a SyFy series. [↩]

I love Pam and Jim Halpert even more.

The Office always manages to take the cliched ‘special event’ episodes old-style sitcoms used to overhype, and subsequently underdeliver, and offer up to its audience a naturalistic tale. And what’s more, they manage to be funnier through that quality.

And while I didn’t like the newlyweds’ stance on that awesome wedding ceremony video, I understand it. I remember when I saw that video thinking it’s the sort of thing Michael Scott would try to instigate. So it’s natural that they’d be averse to it.

I only like it a) because it removes the sedateness of a ceremony I find overly stuffy and b) it’s an abstract event right now.

Regarding the first point, that’s only a valid stance it you find weddings to be an unnecessary event. Clearly, Jim and Pam don’t. Jim has dreamed of marrying Pam for years, and Pam has similarly had that idea of a dream wedding. Maybe I’ll one day meet the person that makes me feel like I need that moment, but the one semi-successful — obviously not wholly successful or it would be an ongoing condition — long-term relationship I’ve had was amazing and I still didn’t have the desire for a wedding.

But, getting to the second point, I’m not in the scenario of going through with a wedding. I talk a big game about ‘being yourself’ but in the real world I’m a huge pussy who never talks to girls he likes, can’t carry a conversation with most people, shies away from virtually all social obligations, and gets almost violently nauseous when heading to virtually any event where people I’m not very close friends with will be. So while I like the idea of a ‘fun wedding’ in principle, in reality if I did end up having a wedding I’m pretty sure I’d totally cop out and do the calm sedate thing.

Regardless, even with the dancing and cavorting down the nave of the church, Jim and Pam had the wedding they wanted. The one where the only people there were the ones that mattered: PB & J. Two great people that go great together.

I’ve spoken before about how overrated I think House is, but I was arguing in favour of Chuck, a show with a very different structure. Chuck operates in a more serialized storytelling realm, whereas House is a procedural. The thing that chafes me about House is the show offers up the appearance of serialization, but quietly hits the reset button regularly. For every time House crosses a line or has a moment of growth and/or realization, there’s another instance not long after returning him to his default state.

Getting rid of his limp a few seasons ago only to have it return because he can’t be a good doctor without it was one of the stupidest decisions the show ever made. The limp, House’s acerbic misanthropic personality, the dangerous risks he takes on a regular basis, all of these things are crutches. It was an interesting set-up for the show, but to play the audience with the appearance of growth for House but failing to follow through and soften his character over time is basically the writers being afraid to mess with their formula. I understand that to a degree, but that doesn’t mean I accept it. The writers should be able to do better. They should be able to keep the show interesting and compelling without keeping their characters essentially stagnant.

An excellent counterexample to House is Numb3rs, a show that seems to me to be consistently underrated. It’s your basic procedural on the surface, but the characters are always growing and changing. Sometimes, a character goes away, other times they’ll return, relationships will be born, the aftermaths of their orders are reflected on, and they’re not afraid to tell a story where the FBI is the bad guy, or the villain we knew wasn’t the villain at all. It’s all around a great show, and for the geek in me it’s much more interesting than House because each week mathematics is used in some way to analyse the crime and help solve the case.

The point I’m trying to make here, something I didn’t in my previous attack on House, is that despite my dislike of House’s faux-serialized format, there are procedural shows I enjoy and Numb3rs is one of them.

What follows is me discussing things my mind lingers over as I watched the season premiere of Dollhouse. Plot will be discussed but not described, arcs will be examined but not articulated. This ain’t my old-style Dollhouse review, and I’ll likely continue to experiment with form and focus as the season continues. I got tired of the relentless crutch of the recap template so the style will drift dramatically from week to week I’d imagine.

Being human is not an easy thing. It seems easy because we’re born ready. But to teach something to be a human, to construct a mind that offers even a simulacrum of the complexity of the human experience, for a true “blank slate” to grow to be a person is riddled with trials we can’t imagine.

The Dollhouse doesn’t create from a blank slate, they cobble together minds from a vast and growing collection, and still they suffer the consequences of ignoring the risks involved in such a construction. Creating an inviolate mind from an aggregation of violations tends to result in some failures.

Dr Saunders is a creation of ‘sociopath in a sweater vest’ but she stumbles to a sense of identity, after suffering through a noted numbness during the first season. She sees her flaws — some with which she was imbued, others she generated as a consequence of being alive — as a curse inflicted on her by her ‘creator,’ she fails to understand that in many ways we are all broken, that we are little more than a collection of flaws.

All the Dolls we care about are broken in important ways. In some ways it’s a commentary on the conceit of drama itself. We rarely watch stories with truly normal people living their lives. Conflict, drama, and extraordinary events are all essential to compelling storytelling, so we end up seeing troubled people more often than not. But that conceit comes from the essential truth that we each react to the world in a wholly unique manner. The integration of external stimuli and internal processes is what people see when they look at you, so exposing people to the unexpected, bringing out their internal strengths and weaknesses, is a method of examination.

So Dollhouse continues to watch the Dolls fall (or get picked) apart, breaking down their identities only to have them self-coalesce. The mind, whether innate or implanted, is more robust than we know. But at the same time, the veneer of the Dollhouse staff also cracks, though with more subtlety. Victor’s scars are a painful reminder of the damages the Dollhouse can inflict, one that DeWitt can’t stand to see on someone she’s come to love.

We’re seeing the continuation of themes about what it is to be a person. And the show seems to be settling in on the idea that the Dolls can be people too — Saunders is the best current example of this, though the other Dolls are all exhibiting symptoms of personality. And the idea that Dolls can be people is to me very comforting but also striking and perhaps terrifying.

The ideas brought up in the unaired episode Epitaph One of mindless slaves to violence are more akin to tech-savvy zombies than to questions of identity, and so less interesting to me. That we could be supplanted by entirely different people is much grander in scope; it’s a subtler debasement, in fact it can even be argued that it is not a debasement because the replacement is equal to you. The personalities Dolls get imprinted with may be constructed but that doesn’t imply they are somehow lesser than natural minds. And that’s a terrifying non-implication.

This premiere did such an excellent job of giving me everything I want from a show, along with a few things I didn’t know I wanted, all without leaving the Dollhouse. The real world events were nice, but mostly unneeded. I like the direction the show is taking — I sort of hope they quietly ignore Epitaph One for a good long while — though I still hold out hope that the real world stories will improve at the same rate the in-house ones are.

Flashforward got a lot of hype as the next Lost — a laughable prospect to anyone aware of how brilliant Lost is — and while it certainly was one of the more promising pilots of the last few years, it is with equal certainty not the next Lost.

The one advantage it has over Lost is that it wears its science fiction on its sleeve; unlike Lost, which cloaked its science fiction with mystery, intrigue, and vague fantasy, Flashforward is from the outset delving into the implications of time travel and discussions of free will vs predestination. Unfortunately, that’s also Flashforward’s greatest weakness.

The first two acts which detail the initial cataclysm — in case you were wondering what the fuck Flashforward is, the essential premise is that for 137 seconds everyone in the world blacked out and during that time they all saw a vision of their future, specifically April 29, 2010 10PM — are great stuff. The carnage of the aftermath is visceral and jarring with lots of great short shots of people suffering through the fog of war slowly lifting over them allowing a clearer picture to form.

But once that fog lifts the show devolved into a series of conversations pondering the implications of what they’ve experienced. Because of this, there’s not nearly enough time devoted to giving the characters some much needed depth. Joseph Fiennes’ Mark Benford is given some level of history, and somewhat necessarily his wife as well though not with the same depth. I find Benford’s AA sponsor one of the more fulfilling of the characters right now so I take that as a sign that the show knows how to develop characters well, it just opted to utilize the pilot to explore directly some of the headier concepts the show’s dealing with. Not the choice I’d make but it doesn’t ruin the show, unless it becomes a running pattern.

Though the geek in me appreciated the explicit geeky discussions of free will vs predestination, I’ve come to appreciate the character driven exploration of these sorts of ideas that Lost does so well, and so the lack of character development bothered me. Of course, the show managed to make me almost forget about my issues with the show’s characters by ending off on the excellent cliffhanger with the lone person walking amongst the blacked out masses during those fateful 137 seconds. All told, I’m excited for more, though I’m also hoping for more from the show as it finds its way.

Well, not really. I’m probably gonna keep writing here until someone pays me to stop, because I like writing and ranting. But this blog is dead from a monetary perspective. These words will never make me money, because my blog is not a niche blog. I don’t focus on one thing alone. Sure most of my posts involve television in one way or another, but I don’t limit my words.

And niche blogs are the only kind that can last in this new web, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, with a large majority of them being useless chatter about whatever’s on the author’s mind. That is, just like mine. So I’m a drop in an ocean. The sheer density of the blogosphere makes it nigh impossible for a blog that doesn’t have very frequent very insightful very narrowly focused content to be seen amid the detritus.

But, as the little subheading of my blog says, everything matters. I could very easily devote this blog to television, or to science fiction, or to science fiction television, or to mid-90′s science fiction television, or to any number of painfully constructed microverses, but I’d rather do my own thing.

One factor that comes into play is my generally lackluster writing capabilities. I don’t consider myself a bad writer, and on certain days I might even be a good writer, but it takes more than that to be noticed. For every well-written insightful niche blog there are dozens more that write about the same things but with less clarity and fewer readers. So, in my particular case, the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t problems inherent in my unexceptional prose also decrease my incentive to overspecialize.

But there’s more than just that pragmatic urge at work when I make the active decision to write broadly¹. Good storytelling does more than focus. While my material on this blog is primarily “non-fiction” I generally draw my writing inspirations from the world of fiction. The best television shows out there are the best because, aside from creating a compelling foreground, the effort exerted on the background reifies that world.

And while I’m not creating a world, I am defining a world: the world as I see it. If this blog were focused on one thing in particular, you would know that that one thing is important to me, but that’s all you’d know. And I don’t think that’s enough. I think that to find my stance on anything to be of value, you need more than just that stance. You need to see the words written here as coming from a person, to judge them beyond their surface structure. It needs to come from a living person. So this blog is dead, but I am very much alive².

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Footnotes

1. The next example is going to be about television, so I hope you’ll enjoy the irony. [↩]
2. If you’re reading this after I’ve died, clearly that last point is no longer valid. [↩]

I said I was going to meticulously go through the entirety of Star Trek Voyager and describe the many ways the show went wrong (and the few ways it didn’t), and I’ve been taking notes as I go along. But a problem has come up.

Yesterday, I downloaded a few of the Babylon 5 movies and began downloading the series proper — I already own them on DVD but AVI files are less hassle most of the time and I don’t want to rip them myself — but once I had some downloaded I made a crucial mistake: I watched one.

And another. And another.

You see, Babylon 5 is one of the best television shows I’ve ever watched. And it is unequivocally the best science fiction I’ve ever seen. So once I watched one of the movies, I couldn’t stop. The story is too good, the characters too rich, the morals too strong. And in the meantime, Voyager was busy pumping out generic episodes with generic characters and little to no character development. So, quite frankly, I can’t stand to watch that shit with the beauty that is Babylon 5 fresh in my mind.

I still plan to write up a few subsequent posts about the first half of the first season — I originally planned to write only one post for this chunk of episodes, but there’s so much wrong in there I think it deserves more than one post (I’m still not sure though) — but I’m not going to continue on my torturous little mission. I might return to it at some point — there’s too much Voyager love out there for me to just let it stand — but, for now, I’m just going to enjoy Babylon 5 all over again.

A few weeks ago, when discussing the sad fate of Kings, a high-concept low-ratings drama on NBC, I said that it was “as dead as Dollhouse.” Clearly, I exaggerated Dollhouse’s demise as Fox has picked it up for a second season.

I’m really excited about this — despite it meaning I will have to write detailed recap/reviews of each episode — because the first season was, aside from a few weak moments, really great: entertaining, funny, brave, contemplative, and so many other things.

I’ve had my gripes with Fox in the past; they canned Firefly without giving it a chance, the cancelled Futurama despite it being the funniest animated series they ever produced, and of course the brutal prolonged death they offered Arrested Development was visceral and painful to me. That said, Dollhouse was never a strong performer in the ratings — though it fared better than most of the programs Fox aired on Friday nights — and Fox is giving it another chance. So Kudos to you, Fox: you’ve regained a modicum of fanboy respect.

Lost broke my brain on Wednesday. In the best way possible. If you’re not watching that show, I don’t know what to say to you.

Chuck is a fantastic series. When it started, I put it beside Reaper and said they were pretty much the same show with any given week being a coin toss as to which would be better. In many important ways, that was true of their first seasons, but this year Chuck has rocketed into the stratosphere of awesome. Before, it was simply a show I watched, one among many, but this year it’s become one of my top five favourite shows on television. Unfortunately, the ratings are not that great. I’ve lamented Chuck’s poor ratings before, especially in light of the weak fare it’s put up against most weeks, but it never really hit me that the show might not come back.

But that’s the truth of the situation. Chuck has yet to get a greenlight for a third season, and as much as I hold out hope that NBC will keep one of their few genuinely entertaining shows alive for another year, I know that NBC has done little to warm me to their cause; Surface, The Black Donnellys, Andy Barker, P.I., Journeyman, and The Book of Daniel are all shows that were cancelled too quickly by NBC.

I’m leaving my hovel to venture out into the real world tonight, so I won’t be able to watch Chuck, live and vibrating with excitement as I normally do, tonight. But don’t let me stop you. Watch Chuck. You won’t regret it.