The Entropy Pump

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.

This should have been great, having a similar approach as Spider-Man: a teen gets powers and starts the whole superhero gig. It’s an animated version of a character from the Dakotaverse, a superhero universe with a focus on black characters as superheroes. The comics were published by DC (due to a publishing deal between DC and Milestone Media), but initially the comics took part in their own, separate universe, until their company Milestone went under. Presently the Milestone characters have been merged into the DCU. This is just a long-winded way to explain why this was set in the DC animated universe.

Together with the Zeta Project this was the least interesting series of the DCAU. Too much trimmed to get the label kid-friendly. Too much political correctness. Often they even tried to incorporate some lame morals. Not that I have something against convictions, but there’s wide difference between hitting you over the head with something and trying more sophisticated approaches.

And to be honest, the show was often boring. Always the same, lame villains, unchanging character cast and generic plots. Also, for a show about a school kid playing superhero, mundane school interactions were rarely seen, something that’s been used quite effectively in the Spectacular Spider-Man show or the new Iron Man: Armored Adventures show or the various animated X-Men shows. Apart from the black angle, there’s not much the show had going for it. Sadly, the best episodes were crossovers with other DC animated universe series, and even those episodes weren’t that good.

All in all, disappointing. Excellent art, ingenious realized augmented reality setting, but then the whole thing falls into the same trap that happened to many narratives with a cyberpunk or virtual reality setting, with whom it shares similar conventions (after all, augmented reality is merely physical reality with a partial virtual reality overlay).

I sometimes feel like some people just can’t grasp the basics of information in computational devices. I find the idea of limited resources of kirabugs and metatags highly annoying, as one should be enough to reproduce them infinitely (you can’t stop people copying digital information, just look at the whole content industry trying to grapple with that fact). I could go on.

There’s the whole quantum magic consciousness transfer thing, the connection through augmented reality to another plane of existence, but all that can be explained away without giving up completely on thinking the setting follows mostly the same physical laws as ours. In a way, Greg Egan, the master of hard SF, did something similar in Cybercity, even if it’s not quite the same.

No, the thing I regret about Denno Coil is that it misses the chance to say something meaningful about augmented reality. Instead of embracing the world it creates and showing how such a technology might impact on peoples lives, the narrative cripples its own setting and follows common paths (there’s even a lame revenge plot). Here was a chance to do something new, but the series utterly failed to embrace its own potential. Instead we got, well, imagine Neuromancer being about Case finding a path through cyberspace to the fairy realm. I doubt anyone would still remember the book.