Not long ago, two people I follow on Twitter were talking about Star Trek.

The first was, based on my knowledge of the tweeter and the context of the here and now, I see as (most likely) a comical remark about the nature of our current culture of politics and how distrustful we are of foreign powers¹. The reply was less clear. It seems pretty obvious that, in the context of the Star Trek universe, the Federation is a peaceful organization. The only wars we’ve seen them take part in have been defensive, and they establish political and economic ties with neighbouring civilizations, including former enemies.

The only two rationales I can see for that second tweet are 1) that he agrees with Matt Yglesias that the Federation is not to be trusted and he misspoke intending to say it is absurd that they insist on claiming to be a peaceful organization; 2) he believes that an organization as large and powerful as the Federation should be a non-peaceful organization, perhaps expanding and annexing nearby planets and civilizations by force. The former is ridiculous when you look at the canon of Star Trek, which clearly shows the Federation as a benevolent force. The latter is ridiculous for a few different reasons.

Arguing for any nation/organization to be aggressive and possessive toward non-members is very odd to me. I’d thought the days of moral superiority, Manifest Destiny, or American Exceptionalism — all the sorts of ideas that lead to thinking a people are above another in some fundamental way — were gone but I can reluctantly accept that some people still linger on some of those thoughts. The even odder thing is that we’re applying 20th century precepts to a fictional 24th century organization, created by a man trying to construct a futuristic utopia. The political realities of today probably won’t apply three hundred years from now, and they definitely won’t apply to the fictional, preconceived-as-peaceful, time of Star Trek.

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Footnotes

1. It’s entirely possible he is genuinely positing that the Federation doesn’t deserve to be trusted, but if that’s the case, this post remains relevant. [↩]

Fridays’s episode of Dollhouse was yet another in a string of strong episodes bring the show to its rushed but still enthralling conclusion.

The best part about this episode to me, though, wasn’t the big reveal, which I’ll get to in a minute, at the end but the way the story was told. Using flashbacks to Caroline’s past life that were tied thematically and emotionally to the modern day events was a great way of telling this story; the flashbacks let you give some emotional resonance and depth to the characters by tying current events to the character’s past, while also revealing long-standing mysteries, and to top it all off you can let the main storyline barrel forward without getting bogged down in explicit character building. It’s one of the smartest storytelling techniques out there for long-term serialized shows, and I think was one of the reasons Lost was such a hit right out of the gate. Granted, Dollhouse isn’t telling a story that’s particularly well-suited to this device most of the time but the improvements in the dramatic thrust of the episode brought by it are obvious and substantial.

On to the story. Caroline three years ago broke into the Dollhouse and found out about Bennett so she befriended her, ultimately giving up on using her because they grow close. But Bennett wants to help her so they go through with her plan to bomb Rossum. But things go awry and to make things worse DeWitt is headed there and so they’re screwed. So the memories of Caroline that Echo received from Bennett a few episodes ago aren’t exactly how it played out; rather than Caroline abandoning her to evade capture, she was running away so no one would suspect Bennett of helping her when she was captured. At which point she is brought to meet the top guy, the man behind the curtain as it were. And it’s…. well, like I said, I’ll get to that in a minute.

Meanwhile, in the present day, they’re trying to imprint Echo with Caroline so they can discover who is running Rossum but her wedge — the harddrive containing her personality to everyone else — is missing, luckily Topher kept the backup that Alpha destroyed last year in the hopes of restoring it and it just so happens that Bennett has previously restored a damaged wedge. So, while DeWitt clears out the Dollhouse telling all the Dolls their contracts are up, Topher and Ballard kidnap Bennett to help them restore Caroline. As all of this is happening, Boyd brings Dr Saunders, who he’s been banging and sexting on a regular basis ever since she disappeared, back into the Dollhouse.

Dominic finds his way out of the Attic, DeWitt is ordered to relinquish command of the Dollhouse by Rossum for letting people get out of the Attic, and Boyd killed all the Rossum minions sent to take over the Dollhouse, getting shot in the process. To avoid drawing attention, she said Boyd was behind it all and sent him on the run so the Dollhouse had more time to get ready.

Topher and Bennett work to repair the wedge — Bennett also stops working on it for a while because she hates Caroline, but eventually Echo promises to let Bennett do whatever she wants to Caroline afterward, and because of what happened next it’s a pretty pointless diversion so I really probably shouldn’t have included it all but there you go — all the while flirting voraciously. Because they are so adorable together, and in fact they share a few smooches, and because of that I knew that something would go wrong. Which is why when Dr Saunders started talking to Bennett about how much Topher loves her my heart didn’t go pitter-patter so much as my brain started saying goodbye to Bennett. And, right on cue, a bullet races through Bennett’s skull.

As a sidebar, I’m getting really tired of Joss Whedon’s relentless nihilism with respect to healthy relationships. Not only is it lazy — it’s much easier to write the beginnings of a relationship than it is to keep a healthy relationship going long-term — but it’s also really boring and it detracts from pretty much any long-term character involvement. I mean, I loved the Topher-Bennett pairing, it made me squee in delight, but the second it was consummated it’s like my brain flipped a switch and I stopped caring. Precisely because I know that Joss Whedon will end these things. Always.

So Bennett is dead but Topher continues the work and repairs the wedge. Rossum soldiers storm the Dollhouse just as Topher begins to imprint Echo. A soldier approaches Echo mid-imprint but before he can do anything his neck is snapped from behind by a returned Boyd. Yay Boyd! Except that whole thing about Caroline meeting the man behind Rossum? It was Boyd. And he had plans for her. Um…. WTF?

OK, so the elephant in the room is Boyd. I think it’s a great twist, and if the reveal was properly scheduled — I think it probably wouldn’t have happened until maybe season three or four, maybe a cliffhanger twist at the end of season two, if the show were a success and Whedon could play out his plan over the full five years he originally envisioned — it would have been one of those epic moments in television that would be talked about for years.

That said, it’s still potentially great. I’m not going to presume brilliance or stupendous failure  for the follow through on this, but I’m also not making my final decision about the Boyd twist until I see next week’s episode; depending how they play out present day Boyd-as-villain this could be brilliant or terrible.

The rest is a bit of a wash. We got a little more info about Caroline’s past and got to see more of Echo wishing Caroline wasn’t around to have a claim on the body she considers hers. Topher is deepened once again; in fact he’s been given so much focus this season it’s almost overkill. But it’s all still pretty damn good but as the season comes to an end and the mythological arcs start to climax the little character moments start to taper off.

This episode really solidified Dollhouse as one of the more tragic tales of the past decade. Not on a story level, though a pending apocalypse is hardly cheery, but on an administrative level.

Dollhouse suffered for many reasons. The show’s high concept sci-fi concept, Fox’s early meddling, and Joss Whedon’s notorious series beginning jitters, something he only escaped once with Firefly.

If the show had managed to gain a strong audience and last long enough for Whedon to stretch out this story properly, it would’ve been a thing of beauty even with the occasional weak episodes. But that didn’t happen and next week we get the penultimate episode which will probably condense a season’s worth of storyline into an hour. Should be fun.

I remember a few years ago when commercials for Medium were played on the radio. I’d heard the basics of the show and the commercial clued me in as well, and yet despite my love of sci-fi and supernatural stories I had absolutely no desire to watch it. The reason is because it sounded horrendous.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

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Footnotes

1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it. [↩]

The cool thing to do now in TV and film is to go “dark.” That is, to take a character down a turbulent, depressing, and possibly disturbing path to bring greater depth to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong with the idea that merely having “dark” stories brings character development or that it improves the quality of your stories. (There is also the implied assumption that to bring depth to your character you need to take this darker path; if you need an example of excellent character growth without the trappings of “dark” storytelling just watch The Office.)

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

After seeing this comic over at Cyanide & Happiness, who I hope to hunt down during comic-con and thank for hours of disturbing humour, I immediately googled “Masturbating Snowman.” Amazingly, there was only one truly relevant result (though it’s a good one).

If this comic doesn’t tickle your funny bone, or at least two other smaller bones in your body or of those in your possession, well clearly it was not meant to be.

I recently came across an… interesting blog that is written by a supposed proponent of incest, bestiality, and the killing of so-called “useless” members of society (which he mislabeled euthanasia). For the most part, the posts I read seem to be a devil’s advocate look at the extremes of human rights and freedoms that our society will likely tackle in the next few decades, though sometimes — like, say, when he’s writing that children from first cousins are not particularly at risk for defects, therefore direct sibling incest is equally acceptable, genetically speaking — I’m not so sure.

Here’s a post, with some editing and spelling liberties taken on my part, asking for some arguments on moral relativism, which are especially targeted at an atheist reader.

Today I will play the role of an atheist who subscribes to humanism and the relative nature of morality. Shall we begin?

THESE ARE MY TWO CORE BELIEFS:

1. I believe that certain nonproductive members of society – i.e. the terminally and painfully sick, unemployed and alcohol-addicted street vagrants, serial criminals, and those too old to contribute anything meaningful - should be euthanized for the greater of good of society and mankind.

Resources that they consume can find much better use in advancing civilization and the happiness of other (and more) people. The good and survival of the human species takes precedence over selfish and petty individual needs.

2. I believe that bestiality as a sexual choice should be given the same legal rights and social respect as heterosexual and homosexual human-human relationships.

I am a practicing zoophile who regularly engages in group sex with my fully-mature rottweilers (both male and female) who willingly and often actively reciprocate the intimate eroticity.

We all enjoy it immensely, so what’s wrong with it? For some reason, most people – even the supposedly enlightened individuals at PFLAG – think my sexual choice is disgusting, morally repugnant and unnatural. To me it’s incomprehensible and inexplicable why.

Now please tell me why my stance is MORALLY WRONG from a atheistic, humanist point of view.

Quotes from the Bible or other holy scriptures will not be accepted. Arguments that some god or another forbids it will similarly be ignored. As a atheist, I WILL NOT ACCEPT ANY RELIGION OR PHILOSOPHY BASED ARGUMENTS.

I welcome and eagerly await comments which attempt to persuade me that somehow, my beliefs and practices are fundamentally wrong from a relativistic, humanist, liberal and pluralistic point of view.

Convince me.

Usually, when I read stuff like this on the Internet I just sigh and move along, but this time I couldn’t resist responding. What follows is a comment I posted on that blog in its entirety. Normally, I also don’t repost comments I write on other blogs on this site, but this one is fairly well written and much longer than I originally anticipated. Plus I haven’t posted in a while so I needed to put something up.

First of all, you say that you reject any philosophy based reasoning which is possibly the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. Philosophy strives to create logically valid reasoning. If the premises of that logic are true, then the reasoning is also true so to say you reject philosophy (but accept “atheistic” arguments which wouldn’t exist without philosophy) is really dumb.

As for your first point, there’s a difference between euthanasia and what you propose. Euthanasia is about ending the suffering of people who wish death. You’re talking about killing people against their will because they are no longer useful to society. That’s an egregious attack on the freedoms of people. Not only that but you then need to define usefulness to society. What if someone is intelligent, went through university and even went through medical school and graduated at the top of their class. But once that was all done they decided to make crappy clay sculptures that everyone agrees are not only a terrible waste of their talents but also just in general terrible. He is no longer useful to society and was even a burden on society by going through an unused education process so your proposal would be to kill him, but hopefully you can see that that is no more than cold blooded murder.

Secondly, regarding bestiality. I have a very specific opinion about sex: you don’t do it without consent. Until animals can be proven to be sentient and are capable of communicating with humans their thoughts and opinions, you cannot have sex with one without it being rape. If you want to stick your ass up in the air and wait for a dog to figure out that you want it to fuck you, well that’s fine by me, but you can’t do anything to the dog or any animal because you can’t reliably convince me that it’s consensual.

One final note. Your basic argument seems to be that without God all morality is completely relative. That may be true, but it’s a problem philosophers have discussed for millennia without making any real headway, so you shouldn’t assume your stance to be true. For one thing, morality may be a genetic trait, or a part of the structure of our brain. If those, or something similar, are true then there very well may be an absolute moral code built into us, or at least some moral absolutes from which we can extrapolate the rest. Regardless, a godless world is not necessarily a morally relative world. Furthermore, a morally relative world is not necessarily a world where you can do anything. Morality is a societal construct because morality defines the behaviour between members of a society. Which means the members of society need to agree on the basic terms. Agreeing on the basic terms of a morality, relative or not, will lead to certain limitations. Always.

(Before anyone starts accusing me of teaching Parrots to say “fuck me good” and then going wild, I should say that I personally would never fuck an animal other than a human; I’m just that kind of guy. But I also don’t think that I have the right to tell people who have those bizarre desires, along with animals intelligent enough to have and communicate those desires, that they shouldn’t do that funky business.)

So there’s my thoughts on those particularly grimy and unpalatable. I hope that I’ve both made some sense and also not completely grossed the fuck out everybody reading this.

P.S.: After having looked at a few other posts on the blog, it seems pretty clear that this guy is either bipolar and has two distinctly opposite personalities or he’s a racist neocon who likes to argue that atheism leads to rampant dog fucking and murdering by playing the part of a crazy atheist who thrives on dog fucking and murdering. C’est la vie, but maybe my arguments manage to convince him that supporting someone’s right to do fucked up shit is not the same as wanting to do fucked up shit.