The Entropy Pump

While I actually liked the fourth movie of the Terminator franchise, there was something lacking. Sure, it managed to move beyond the then tired plot of sending a machine back in time to kill someone named Connor, but it still was only a good but pretty predictable action movie that did nothing new. Before I saw the movie, the only piece I got from it was the teaser, which left me with the impression that the story would be more ambitious, that the actions in Terminator 2 had changed the timeline to such a degree that the entire nature of the war with Skynet had changed. Nothing like that really appeared in the movie, which was a minor disappointment. Nothing new under the sun.

When I first heard about the Terminator TV-series it sounded even more boring. Just a rehash of the old plot. That might have been the reason that not enough people watched it, which got it killed after two seasons. Shame, as it’s one of the smartest science fiction series I’ve seen in years. Using the end of the second movie as a starting point, but still referencing events from the third (the death of Sarah due to cancer), it goes along expected paths (Terminators from the future try to help Skynet by killing people in the past), but manages to break entirely new ground. A mjor plotline is about the creation of a friendly AI that might one day help against Skynet.

This is not a friendly AI like Data, a machine pining to be human. Even the not antagonistic machines in the Sarah Connor Chronicles can be ruthless killing machines, not inhibited by the framework of the human mind. They want to understand us, but that doesn’t mean they want to be us. You want post-humans on TV, watch this series. Most overly optimistic science fiction about the post-human condition forgets what it actually means, to go beyond human. It’s an entirely different frame of mind, one most humans can’t cope with or even accept. Most of the characters on the show, despite knowing for example what Cameron is, still act as if she were human, anthropomorphizing her every step of the way, framing her actions in a human narrative.

When James Allison tried to teach the friendly AI human values, he forgot that there was a third option beyond Skynet’s genocidal tendencies and his own values. John Henry could change the rules and make up his own mind about which rules he wanted to follow. If the series had been allowed to go on, it might have been interesting to see how Henry’s morality developed (if you wonder why that might be interesting, consider embodied cognition, sure, humans have different morality codes already, but they are all based on the same source). Now we’ll never know. But those two season were pure gold.

An anime series that mixes Sherlock Holmes with steampunk and anthropomorphic animals (dogs to be precise). Its biggest claim to fame is that six of the 26 episodes were directed by Hayao Miyazaki, but overall the series is pretty unspectacular. Disappointingly the villain of each episode is Professor Moriarty, apart from the first one where Sherlock Hound and John Watson meet for the first time. The series in general is less serious; even it’s more adventure and action than humor-driven. People never get hurt, even if they fall from a height and there are other sense and physics defying moments.

Sherlock Hound and Professor Moriarty are both disappointing as characters. Moriarty is depicted as short-tempered and only smart when devising new machinery. His plans are elaborate and overly complex, but never give the impression of being smart or useful (from an economic point of view his machinery seems more costly than anything his crime could bring in). Also I prefer Moriarty as a cool logician without morals, a dark counterpart of Sherlock Holmes, not as a loud buffoon. The Holmes character is equally disappointing, since he always seemingly intuitively guesses how a crime is perpetrated. The skill of Conan Doyle was to make the reader believe that Holmes was actually quite brilliant, not by intuitively arriving at the solution of a crime, but by showing a far fetched chain of reasoning that still managed to be believable.

Last Exile is a show that’s initially quite dazzling: throwing interesting plot developments at the viewer at a frightening rate. Another point of interest is the setting: a world that mixes futuristic elements with elements from nineteenth century Europe. Two big countries are eternally at war, divided by something called the grand stream, which both nations cross with air ships. The war is fought using a code of chivalry, which is enforced by a third, technological superior faction: the guild.

Like I said, initially the show is quite cool, but midway I realized that the characters never came alive for me and I had completely lost interest in them. And while the initial pacing of the story was excellent, the second half of the show was big on stalling and delaying the inevitable conclusion. I still like the first batch of episodes, but the rest of the show never managed to captivate me as much. I was quite disappointed with the guild members, who turned out to be annoying instead of interesting. A static aristocracy whose defining characteristic was arrogance instead of smarts, blärgh. I prefer smart villains.

Also too much of the plot was designed around the mystery of what exactly the Last Exile was. The problem with that approach is that it fuels expectation and only a brilliant revelation to that mystery could have satisfied. Discovering that the Last Exile was the colonization ship with whom the first settlers came from Earth just didn’t cut it for me.

I really hated that one. Two kids fall in love, one of them gets turned into a human weapon. A war breaks out, with no explanations given why or what it’s about or who is actually fighting whom, apart from the fact that Japan gets attacked. Since we don’t know anything about the war, the narrative successfully forces the watcher to either accept that the end of the world is night or to stop watching this stupid exercise in gloom and doom. The point of the series is to show something dramatic and tragic, it’s not interested in a realistic approach to war. It’s all about emotion, about making you feel sad, not about facts or reality. The show ends with the two being the lone survivors on Earth, albeit the girl turned human weapon has lost most of her humanity.

I have no problem with depressive outcomes or end-of-the-world stories, but they have to be convincing (see Peter Watts output or some stuff written by William Barton) and offer a reasonable explanation how it came to past. Drivel like Saikano annoys me, because its main purpose is to manipulate the viewer on an emotional level, which is a cheap and effective but ultimately hollow tactic.

Mezzo DSA is the sequel to the Mezzo Forte OVA, only with a slightly smaller budget for the animation. It’s one of those series that makes you wonder whether it was completely designed by committee and not by people who really cared about doing it. I liked the original OVA because it had slick animation and well paced action sequences, not because of the story, which barely managed to be of average quality. Strip the high quality animation away and the rest doesn’t look that good: a series that doesn’t have a clear basic concept (we never really learn what kinds of Jobs the DSA Agency is looking for), no idea what kind of stories it wants to tell (so it tries everything, from ghosts to aliens) and characters who are nothing more than walking cliches. For example Mikura Suzuki, the fighter of the team. We never learn how she got her seemingly superhuman skills, especially at her young age.

Overall it feels more like the creators of the show threw in all the cool elements they could think of, without any thought for how well they would fit together. There are also androids that always turn up when the show has been written into a corner and a neat deus ex machina is needed to solve a problem. Apart from that one bit of futuristic technology the rest of the world looks very much like the present. Makes you wonder whether having perfect androids would have a bigger impact on society.

Still, despite the braindead approach to setting and plot, the show manages to pass the time, so I shouldn’t be too critical. There are far worse (meaning boring) things out there.

I think one of the biggest reasons for Voyagers failure was that the main concept was never good to begin with. One of the draws about Star Trek and similar series is the promise of exploration, an expansion of the known sphere, a journey into the unknown. Voyager is at its heart an inversion of that. It’s all about going home, going toward what you know. That there’s exploration along the way doesn’t negate that fact. We know where the voyage is going and it’s not an interesting place.

All that said, I did watched it from start to finish when it aired. I’m just a sucker for Star Trek in all its incarnations. But while I enjoyed some episodes, the overall impression that stayed with me was that of a muddled concept that endlessly repeated the same, boring pattern until the disappointing finale rolled in. The best they did toward the middle of the series was to introduce 7of9, mostly because with her appearance the Borg became a big story element, which really gave the series a much needed boost. It still wasn’t as good as TNG or DS9, but at least the Borg were a far more interesting enemy than the Kazon.

Enterprise, the last Star Trek TV-series, turned out to be one big heap of missed chances and unfulfilled potential. After Voyager had nosedived, there was the need for some rejuvenation. Making a series that took place even further in the past wasn’t the smartest decision to move the franchise forward, but it could have gone well. The first obvious break with the past, the intro sequence, was marvelous done with a fitting song that evoked the spirit of the space race of the 20th century. Imagine a TV-series that tried to tap into the same themes that made the movie The Right Stuff successful, albeit with more advanced technology. This could have been a gold mine.

Sadly the series soon settled into the pattern of the doing the same, tired stuff most of the other Trek series had done before. But even then potential still existed. Especially the concept of a temporal cold war seemed interesting (and I truly wish someone will manage to make something good out of that idea). Sadly, the writers never managed to use it in any interesting way. Still, among the junk there were some good elements, some episodes that were quite excellent. One spark of brilliance was that the show presented the Vulcans in less than idealistic way. Gone were the noble creatures from the earlier incarnations of Star Trek. Some of the best episodes involved both them and the Andorians, with humans in the middle.

The best season was the last and fourth season, were they actually managed to do something interesting with the setting. They showed the first steps toward the foundation of the federation, the first stirrings of the Romulan-Earth war and other good stuff. Too late. The series died with an abominable holosuite-episode. Yet, despite some of the awful stuff, I still miss the show, unlike Voyager.

When I started watching this I was put off because the humor seemed totally quaint and far too mild-mannered. This is probably due to shows like South Park and Family Guy, who have totally corrupted my sense of humor. But this impression remains the same, even when you compare Shaun the Sheep to old Warner Brother’s cartoons. Which makes this ideal for small children, but occasionally I feel the need for more bite, or at least some bite at all.

That said, the stop-motion, clay animation done by Aardman Animations looks gorgeous as always. Gorgeous enough to make me forget that I don’t care about the content too much. Clay animation is fare too rare too pass up such an excellent example. I especially liked the interior design of the farmer’s house. It has character of its own. You really get the sense that the farmer has lived there for a long time; it’s the typical apartment of an old geezer who has accumulated stuff for years.

In the end, it’s nice and playful cartoon, which never really manages to
surprise you or really make you laugh out loud, but which still manages to be some fun.

Harsh Realm was a short-lived TV-series by X-files creator Chris Carter. The premise was kinda interesting, but the execution presented generic stories and a developing backstory that went nowhere really fast. A soldier is sent into a virtual world to kill another logged-in outsider (Santiago), only to realize that he’s far from the first to enter the Harsh Realm and that he can’t log out if he doesn’t complete his mission. Also the old and tired and supremely stupid cliche that getting killed in a virtual world kills you for real also rears its head.

Like always with Chris Carter shows there’s a conspiracy angle as well. First and foremost the soldier is declared dead to his fiancée, which is part of the conspiracy that at least makes sense, since losing control of a virtual environment that is populated by illegal scans of every real world person is not something the military would want to disclose to the public. Aside from the fact that this is a highly impossible scenario from a technical viewpoint (perfect virtual copies of all humans on Earth with only slightly advanced 20th and 21st century tech) and that the scans are illegal, the virtual copies were subjected to death, torture and other unpleasantries for war game simulations (to start the Harsh Realm scenario countless atom bombs were deployed in big cities), which is as deplorable as the worst evils of the 20th century, considering that these virtual copies are human in every aspect apart from being non-corporal.

There’s another conspiracy going on, with Santiago trying to deploy atom bombs in the real world to make Harsh Realm the only thing left. This one makes less sense, because even considering that the server structure to host Harsh Realm is safe from atom bombs, without civilization and its infrastructure to maintain the servers and the connections between those Harsh Realm will inevitable go dark. But the makers of the show probably weren’t thinking as far as that or they would have explained it away with some unlikable feat of technology.

So far I’ve talked mostly about the setting. There’s a good reason for that, as I found the actual episodes (only 9 were made) pretty bland. The show had a great intro and the concept seemed initially interesting, but the execution was mostly bland and boring. It’s interesting to note that Harsh Realm’s approach (real 20th century, virtual post-apocalyptic world) was an inversion of the famous Matrix movie (post-apocalyptic real world, virtual 20th century) from the same time, which did, at least in the first movie, something far more interesting with the virtual world concept.

Glen Morgan and James Wong never had much luck with their television work, first their brilliant second season of Millennium was followed by what can only be described as a mutilation by Chris Carter and then their excellent SF series Space got canned after only one season. Both of them were prodigies of Chris Carter, but they refined his mix of stories with a conspiracy angle.

It’s not that they were highly original, Space easily stands in the tradition of military fiction that can be found all over the place in prose fiction. But they were very good at establishing a mood and sticking to it. In case of Space this was a mix of despair and bleakness only rivaled by the first two season of the new Battlestar Galactica, interspersed with a neat conspiracy angle.

Apart from the mood and the style of the show, the pacing was excellent. You really had the feeling that things were happening and moving forward. This was very much not like the X-Files, which was a gigantic attempt to stall its own narrative force, to prolong the inevitable. It also helped that the characters of the show really made you care about them. When the final episode rolled in it was hard not to feel something when most of them met their final fate.

While the bigger story is incomplete, that one season is better than most TV-shows and it’s unique mood is something to savor.