D'oh! Had I waited a few minutes, my praise for the anti-spam poetry embedded in the 1000 last comments would have appeared here instead of in thread 102...

Posted March 13, 2008 12:26 PM by protected static

Maybe it's just me, but part of that description of the Flash Gordon future sounds about right -- for about 65 years in the future from when it was made. Maybe not the clumsy innocence part, so much.

But then I'm a cynic.

Posted March 13, 2008 12:39 PM by pat greene

I have to say that, if you're looking for an example of a series wherein you can't distinguish the heroes from the heavies, Dr. Who is about the worst possible choice.

Posted March 13, 2008 12:42 PM by Lila

I don't know; when I hear nonsense on Doctor Who it still sounds like nonsense to me.

Maybe I need to watch some more Tom Baker episodes.

Posted March 13, 2008 12:47 PM by Dave Weingart

I liked the part where the old serial's Zarkhov was forced to keep Vultan's fortress up in the air by literally shovelling radium ore into the furnaces. On the other hand, 1980's version had Ornella Mutti.

Posted March 13, 2008 12:47 PM by Serge

Lila @ 3 - Doctors 9 and 10 have certainly muddied the waters much more than previous incarnations. The lines are still clearly demarcated in comparison to something like Battlestar Galactica, however, where the premise is "The humans are good. The Cylons are evil. But if the humans and the Cylons look, act, and think alike, who's on which side of the line?"

I'm sure there's a better example, but I've been watching clear-cut TV recently. Chuck, Torchwood, that sort of thing, where even if the good guys do bad things, they're still very clearly the Good Guys. And then there's Pushing Daisies, where Our Heroes are equivalent to children too innocent to be stained by sin, incapable of doing anything truly bad.

Posted March 13, 2008 1:07 PM by shadowsong

James was not taking into account that Flash Gordon was a projection of the Western, while Doctor Who began in post-War Britain, and involved a kindly old man (at least that's how my seven-year-old mind processed him).

Posted March 13, 2008 1:10 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Dave,

I watched all of the Tom Baker episodes, and as time went on I increasingly wanted to strangle him with that stupid scarf. I liked Peter Davidson well enough, but in general I could do quite well without Dr. Who.

But now my husband and kids have gotten me hooked on David Tennant. My all time favorite Dr. Who episode -- from any Doctor -- would have to be "The Girl in the Fireplace."

Posted March 13, 2008 1:12 PM by pat greene

shadowsong, I liked it better when the Cylons were clearly and absolutely The Bad Guys, because that meant the good guys were polytheists and the bad guys were monotheists, just like the real world which is unusual on American television.

Now it seems like they're going to justify the Cylons' attempted genocide, and have them turn out to be the ancestors of a new human race. With nice monotheistic beliefs. :-P

Posted March 13, 2008 1:19 PM by Xopher

The 1930s may have seemed like a more innocent age looking at most of its tales of the Future. But what of its tales of the Present? And if you were black of Jewish, or just not a White Anglo-saxon Protestant, did the world seem so innocent?

Posted March 13, 2008 1:19 PM by Serge

I am old enough to remember when there were only 103 chemical elements.

Posted March 13, 2008 1:24 PM by RichM

I'm a recent Doctor Who convert, but I'm especially a fan of Torchwood, if only for the rather narrow reason that the Captain's bisexual.

It's decidedly few and far between when I get to see a relationship that looks sort of what I want on a sci-fi show.

True, the had to go the route of Everyone is Bi to get there, but I still sort of cried at the penultimate episode of the first series.

The most interesting thing that the quotes above lead me to think about is how we view the future in current fiction.

Perhaps I'm just reading to many dark authors, but we seem to have a rather dim view of the near future. In the popular series, Battlestar Galactica and Heros, we seem to think that we need to go through a period of pain and discord. There might be that hope out there in the future, but it's still a long way off.

In fact, the most hopeful near future work that I've read recently is Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, and even that has some serious antagonism in it.

Posted March 13, 2008 1:29 PM by Spherical Time

I quit watching BSG because the relentless darkness, brutality, and gore were getting to be too much for me. If I want a TV show to bring me down for days, I'll watch the news.

I'm still reading fanfic, though. I especially like a ST:TNG crossover--wait, wait, don't go!--that features excellent characterization and dialogue, lots of neat details that make the quasi-first-contact situation come alive, and a great explanation of the Cylons:

The chrome jobs are really running things. They developed the skin jobs in order to infiltrate and exterminate the last of the human race. Their religion is a construct (but then, so is the Colonies' religion, but that's a whole 'nother subplot). They are actually human; their superhuman abilities and extra lives come from the nanites that are present throughout their tissues. The nanites are supposed to keep them sterile, too; Sharon Agathon's just had a glitch . . .

Posted March 13, 2008 1:48 PM by Jenny Islander

Lila #3:

So, what are some examples of SF where the identity of the good guys is somewhat ambiguous? I'm finding it hard to think of good examples off the top of my head.

It's not clear that either Mal or the revolution for which he fought qualify as "the good guys" in Firefly. (Note what life looks on most of the back-end-of-nowhere planets they visit.)

It's not clear to me whether the Maquis were good guys or bad guys in the pre-Dominion-war story arc of DS9. (By contrast, it was easy to tell that the Dominion, the Cardassians, the Romulans, and to a lesser extent, the Ferengi and Klingons, were bad guys.) And on DS9, they managed two important characters (Quark and Garrek) who were not obviously good guys or bad guys through the whole show.

The Moties in _The Mote in God's Eye_ and _The Gripping Hand_, as well as the major factions in the Empire, are not bad guys. A major theme in those works is the idea of powerful people pursuing their duty (oybpxnqvat gur Zbgr naq qrfgeblvat nal fuvcf gung gel gb yrnir) despite not seeing their enemies as evil or crazy.

Similarly, in the _Ringworld_ and Known Space stories, Niven portrays the different characters/species as following their nature, without being obviously evil. Puppeteers simply will space their close friends of many years to buy themselves a 1% improvement in survival probability, absent some measure (possibly just a promise) to keep them from doing it. Kzinti simply will respond to insults by trying to kill the insulting person. Nothing personal, this is just what I do.

Similarly, there's loads of gray in _The Watchmen_.

And I find that a lot of my favorite stories have very clear good guys and bad guys, though most of life doesn't really work out that way. Frex, all of Vinge's books I've read so far end up with pretty clear good guys and bad guys, even if specific characters (gur ornhgvshy Crnpr Nhgubevgl fcl/fbyqvre in The Peace War) manage to be morally somewhat ambiguous. Similarly, I enjoy most of Spider Robinson's work, but his books pretty routinely have opposition to the good guys' cause be carried out either by evil people or people who have some tragic flaw that makes them unable to accept the good guys'

Posted March 13, 2008 1:58 PM by albatross

The new doctor (Tenant) freely admits to making stuff up, as in The Girl In The Firplace, when he explains that he made up the techno babble because he didn't want to say, Magic Door."

And from 1976, I bet the current Battlestar Galactica series looks like sheer anarchy.

Posted March 13, 2008 2:00 PM by Keith

That talk of not telling "the heroes from the heavies" is absolutely reminding me why I like Battlestar Galactica so much.

I've always thought one of the main differences between shows that muddy the line between heroes and villains and those that... don't, is that the latter are usually "return to factory settings" shows. What I mean is, they are often shows where, during the course of an episode or story arc, the characters have adventures and experiences, and maybe learn a few lessons along the way, but get reset into their original moulds as soon as the episode or arc is over. You start with the same hero (or villain) fresh from the factory with each new story, and any muddying that went on before that is more or less wiped clean, so your hero is always essentially a hero.

Shows like Flash Gordon are always going to be more prone to this than Doctor Who (where Doctors and companions changed regularly enough that you at least had new characters from the factory on a regular basis, as well as some growth in the ones that stick around.)

But a show like Battlestar Galactica actually allows you to switch allegiances, over and over, to constantly evaluate what YOU think is right and wrong and interesting and clever and wise, rather than assuming that you'll accept whatever your favourite characters do as being The Right Thing. And even very likeable (and favourably portrayed characters) do terrible things. (A good example of this is President Roslin, who both outlaws abortion and then comes incredibly close to ordering a forced abortion on Athena- and is only stopped by selfish motives. There can't be many audience members who would approve of both decisions, and there probably are many who disapprove of both. But Roslin has a consistant motive: species survival at all costs.)

So the characters don't come out of the box with a "good" or "bad" tag permanantly attached: they evolve, and "good" and "bad" is very much what they're doing, more than what they are. I do love that. Even Baltar has his good points, although he doesn't deserve Caprica Six. (Whose first major action in the show was a baby killing. But that was a long time ago...)

(But I love Doctor Who too.)

Posted March 13, 2008 2:01 PM by Sian Hogan

there is a beast beneath each human skin

you find that out when you reach that odd ground

where each of us finds out that we could win

a kind of monster whose nerves are most thin

and ready to break out at the least sound

there is a beast beneath each human skin

this is a creature of the dragonkin

moving with haste towards the sacred mound

where each of us finds out that we could win

the sky above us seems with speed to spin

what we have learned is wisdom most profound

there is a beast beneath each human skin

we throw all hesitation in the bin

the past in all its foolishness is drowned

where each of us finds out that we could win

the hero learns to take it on the chin

and let the villain fall before the hound

there is a beast beneath each human skin

where each of us finds out that we could win

Posted March 13, 2008 2:06 PM by Fragano Ledgister

I did once see Tom Baker performing Macbeth.

Posted March 13, 2008 2:12 PM by Dave Bell

I will take advantage of this open thread to flack my new blog just one (1) time. It's about fringe music and SF/F and it's located here.

Sample topics: The Armageddon Rag, NZ noise musician Antony Milton, Moorcock's album New Worlds Fair, etc.

Posted March 13, 2008 2:24 PM by Rob Thornton

As far as scientific gobbledygook goes, I don't think it has to do as much with a society's vision of the future as it does with the language that's floating around.

In 1936 the hot science buzzwords were radio, radium, vitamin, and, uhm, that was pretty much it.

In 2008 is there anyone(at least in the SF demographic) who hasn't at least heard the words string theory, antimatter, DNA, neutrino, wormhole, plasma, nuclear, subatomic, hormone, polarity, gigabyte. Our nonsense sounds like science because we have more science words to string together:

"The plasma drive emits a stream of ionized neutrinos that invert the spin of the tachyons in local space..."

"You mean---?"

"Yes. A transmogrifying time machine."

Our time has the equivalent of shoveling radium: how many times have Star Trek captains solved a problem by "reversing the polarity."

Posted March 13, 2008 2:42 PM by pb

"Captain Kirk!"

"What is it, Scottie?"

"The dilithium crystals aren't working anymore."

"Again?"

Posted March 13, 2008 2:49 PM by Serge

Since it's come up, I guess this is a good time to put in this request:

Seeing as how the fourth season of BSG is about to start, and the Powers That Be consistently work to ensure that I'm always one season behind on that show--in my world, the occupation just started--can any substantial discussion of it that may arise be rot13ed? I would greatly appreciate it.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:00 PM by ethan

I love technobabble! If it's well done, it's like poetry. Like some kind of improvisation over a general idea of what science is and ought to be. And also a play with wonderful and unusual big words.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:08 PM by wokka

Ethan @22: I'll do my best. Season 3 comes out of DVD next week, though and Amazon has it 40% off.

And of course there's our old friend BitTorent...

Posted March 13, 2008 3:09 PM by Keith

In fairness to Mr James, the most recent Doctor Who story to be shown before he wrote his column (and I think the one from which his quote comes, though I can't be sure) is The Seeds of Doom, a horrific gore-fest in which the Doctor is grim, ruthless, and quite uncharacteristically violent.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:22 PM by Iain Coleman

RichM @ #11: I remember when there were only 94 elements, and Dr. Zarkov didn't make any sense then, either. But I sure loved me them Jacob's Ladders.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:24 PM by theophylact

theophylact @ 26... Dr. Zarkov didn't make any sense then

Must be those radium fumes.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:27 PM by Serge

I have what seems to be an infallible method of noticing fiction in which there are clear lines between Good and Evil and everyone is at a single place on that line in: I get bored or irritated very quickly.

Of course, it could be that fiction whose implicit moral universes match my own very well don't _appear_ to suffer as much from this, both because I'm lulled into acceptance and because finer-grained distinctions seem more important (I'm sure that to a Randroid the differences between Guilt and D'Ananconda seem major, and it's damned white of Ayn to show that even a relatively evil person can be redeemed.)

In any event, I'd like to see a Readercon panel entitled: "Masking the Sound of a Grinding Axe: making your ideologically-correct fiction palatable to the general public".

As for Dr Who and Battlestar...*, suddenly all I can think of is the Zappa song Cheepnis and the SubGenius admonition to discard mature speculative fiction in favour of "cheezy sci-fi".

*It says a lot about the new series that I can't quite call it Cattlecar Galaxative as a few I know did the older show...to me, the new series would be better if it didn't know how important it was....

Posted March 13, 2008 3:29 PM by Michael Turyn

Serge @ 27: I hear them new-fangled radio waves can travel through your brain! Any day now we're going to see some scary mutant fellers coming from the "radio station". Probably some government secret installation, you mark my words.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:30 PM by Ginger

Coming at that statement from my immersion in media fandom, I can only add that fans can always obscure the line between good guys and bad guys. There is a persistant and noisy sector of Buffy fandom which views vampires as an oppressed minority race, for instance.

And let us not even try to summarize the moral ambiguity of what should be a clear cut "Good Terrans and Humans versus Evil Space Vampires" situation on Stargate Atlantis, where there's sufficient intended ambiguity over who's at fault for the current unpleasantness that the fan's metaconcerns with racism, sexism, and the ethics of destroying machines that pass the Turing test are sort of superfluous.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:37 PM by JESR

pb #20: I dunno. ISTR some fairly hefty technobabble of the vaguely plausible variety in the Lensman books.

wokka #23: SF writers simply aren't in the big leagues with inventing technobabble. Marketing droids and sales folk in the tech industry have them beat cold. And there is no feeling in the world quite like attending a talk at an industry trade show in which the CEO of a company explains what his product does and how it works, while the techies sit in the back with mouths agape and wide eyes, at the realization that the boss doesn't know what the h-ll the product we're selling even does.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:40 PM by albatross

It is also interesting to look at such Science Fiction on tv from the perspective of its ability to reflect on moral and ethical issues of the time. I always see the original Star Trek episodes as a series of elementary moral plays (some of which hardly fit the prevalent morals of the historical period when it was created -- or perhaps are just as ahead of their time from a moral perspective as a technological one). For example, I remember one episode with two aliens both with half white and half black faces that discriminated because one had its white on the left side of the face and the other on the right side (a difference that no one really notices until it is pointed out in the final scene). At a time of discrimination, it is impressive that Gene Roddenberry would take that kind of a risk on tv (or that any station would let him). In a sense, he slipped concepts into the minds of young men and women that helped shape the morals of the next historical period for the better.

Meanwhile, if Star Trek is for kids, BSG takes morality for adults and really shows the number of shades that can exist between a black and white decision. Perhaps people could afford a simple Star Trek morality back when they first come out -- yet in a post-911 world, there are no easy answers and stories are necessarily much more complex.

It makes me sad though for some reason -- I liked that original Star Trek innocence. Yet, I can't imagine a show would even be willing to try and capture it again today.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:49 PM by Mike Adelstein

Ginger @ 29... You need more tinfoil.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:52 PM by Serge

Albatross @14,

Ambiguously good / Unreliable narrator SF exists--I recall a conversation about it here within the past few [unit of internet memory time]--but I can't name them because that's a spoiler.

These aren't the "oops, thrff gurl jrer fragvrag nsgre nyy" OSC's Ender's Game type stories, although I suppose that could be a sub-type: the ignorant hero.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:59 PM by Kathryn from Sunnyvale

One thing has bugged me for a long time with BSG... There's nobody who does gallows humor.

Posted March 13, 2008 3:59 PM by Serge

I gotta admit that I enjoy the technobabble as well.

A couple of weeks ago, I bought the first season of Lost in Space, and I've enjoyed revisting the dumb stories and cheesy FX and wondering what Dr. Smith had that prevented them from chucking him out the airlock.

There was never any pretense of adhering to any science at all. But once in a while, the stories had some genuine power.

Posted March 13, 2008 4:07 PM by Steve C.

>And then there's Pushing Daisies, where Our Heroes are equivalent to children too innocent to be stained by sin, incapable of doing anything truly bad.

Really? I disagree--I think, despite its candy-colored visuals, Pushing Daisies asks some interesting moral questions and even has its lead assert at least one morally troubling position.

The main moral issue raised so far has been whether or not Ned had the right to restore someone's life in exchange for someone else's. Ned himself has known the price since childhood, and twenty years later, he's still eaten with guilt about Chuck's dad's death.* But he not only resurrects Chuck, at the cost of someone else's life, he later asserts that, even knowing what would happen, he would make the same choice again. He even tries (lamely) to rationalize his decision, pointing out to Chuck and Emerson that the person who died so Chuck could live was a criminal. Neither Chuck nor Emerson buys this; Emerson in particular responds (rightly) that the man's innocence or guilt doesn't matter a whit, but that Ned is making decisions that he has no right to make. Ned's response seems to be that it's his ability, so it's his call; basically, that he does too have the right to decide who lives and who dies. I think that Ned's position here isn't moral, though I do understand how he arrived at it and how his experiences during his life helped drive him there.

Also note Ned's, Olive's, and Emerson's complicity in keeping Chuck from her aunts; and Olive's role in covering up a crime for personal financial gain.

So: I think that the heroes of Pushing Daisies, far from being children incapable of sin, are in fact making moral decisions in practically every show, and not always defensible ones either.

*Ironically, the death that Ned feels most guilty about is the one I that I think he bears NO moral culpability for, because he didn't know what would happen.

Posted March 13, 2008 4:10 PM by Nicole TWN

Babylon 5 had both moral ambiguity and people who were clearly on the right and wrong side. (And at least some nods toward Newtonian physics, too :))

"Though no man can draw a line between the confines of night and day, yet on the whole light and darkness are tolerably distinguishable" (Burke)

Posted March 13, 2008 4:15 PM by Tony Zbaraschuk

I'm reminded of Kevin Maroney's description of Stan Lee as someone who improved comics by writing two-dimensional characters at a time when one-dimensional characters were the norm.

I guess if you're used to Flash Gordon, Doctor Who looks pretty sophisticated. His technobabble contains the occasional scientific word. His shoestring special effects are forty years more advanced.

Posted March 13, 2008 4:18 PM by Avram

Personally, I grew up as a Buck Rogers fan. With some Brick Bradford thrown in.

Posted March 13, 2008 4:27 PM by Serge

Watching some circa 1940 Flash Gordon last year, I had a sudden insight when I realised the big chunky walkie-talkies they were using were (in 1940) actually extremely advanced, highly minaturised radios.

(Or as I put it at the time, think how much work it is to make vacuum tubes that small! I discovered that one of my friends can't take vacuum tubes seriously and keeps laughing whenever we mention them)

Posted March 13, 2008 5:00 PM by Neil Willcox

Nicole TWN @ #37: Nice take on Pushing Daisies. I knew there was a reason I like that show.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:01 PM by Carrie V.

I don't know what your friend will make of this video, which shows the process of making a vacuum tube.

I merely watched in awestruck wonder.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:11 PM by Dave Bell

Serge @ #35: My viewing of BSG after early Season 2 is spotty, so I can only offer my early-series observations, but I always found Gaius Baltar hilarious. (He doesn't intentionally crack jokes, of course, so if that's what you mean by having someone who does gallow humor, I have to agree.) And it's almost entirely, I think, due to the actor's take on that character, who could have been purely unpleasant in the hands of another actor.

("I really need...a thermo-nuclear warhead.")

Posted March 13, 2008 5:15 PM by Sylvia

I confess, the reason that I posted this quote is that every time I read the line the technology has made giant strides towards authenticity I get the giggles. Beeb skiffy did many things well, particularly clever dialogue*, but authenticity? Sporfle.

I may be thinking too much of Blakes Seven here, which once featured a ship explosion in space, complete with debris falling and smoke rising. And I wasn't exposed to the stuff till it was 20 years old; sfx has a shorter shelf life than that.

But still.

-----

* Avon: "I'm not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going." Not till Firefly did I hear that much snappy dialogue per episode again.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:28 PM by abi

Abi... Avon is what made Blake's Seven worth watching. The scripts by Tanith Lee didn't hurt either, but he was it.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:43 PM by Serge

abi #45: I blame it on the difficulty of creating actual vacuum* in Shepherd's Bush.

As opposed to actual vacuity, as anyone who remembers 'Pinky and Perky' could tell you.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:44 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Sylvia @ 44... That's not quite what I meant by BSG unbelievably lacking in gallows humor. Yes, their situation is very grim. But... Take Law & Order's Lenny Briscoe. He'd seen the worst that humans could do to each other, and yet he kept going, and he handled it with wisecracks.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:48 PM by Serge

Serge #46: The interplay between Avon and Vila, and that between Avon and Servalan certainly provided much of the dramatic force of Blake's 7, especially after the departure of Blake himself.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:48 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Neil @ 41

You think vacuum tubes are improbable. Back when I was a TA, I found myself attempting to convince a class of undergrads that once upon a time there really had been such a thing as a steam-driven automobile. They were convinced I was pulling their legs. When I mentioned the brand name of Stanley Steamer they knew I'd slipped up beyond redemption because everyone knows Stanley Steamer is a brand of rug cleaning machine.

Of course, I suppose I brought it on myself because I was in the habit of beginning every semester by telling the class that at some random point I would tell them something utterly bogus and that I expected them to notice and call me on it because I considered critical thinking and the challenging of authority to be one of the most important things I could teach them.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:54 PM by Heather Rose Jones

Nicole TWN @ 37:

It might just be me, but I get the impression the show wants us to think that no matter what bad things the characters might do, they're still inherently good people, and their bad actions have no lasting negative effects.

Arq nppvqragnyyl xvyyf Puhpx'f qnq? Fubeg grez rssrpgf: fur yvirf jvgu ure njrfbzr nhagf. Ybat grez rssrpgf: Arq naq Puhpx znxr zbba-rlrf ng rnpu bgure. Jura Puhpx svaqf bhg, fur uvqrf sebz Arq sbe - jung, bar rcvfbqr? gjb? - orsber sbetvivat uvz.

(Probably not spoiling anyone, but just in case.)

Hell, even most of the villians aren't really evil, in my opinion. They fall into three categories (sometimes more than one category per villain): didn't really mean to hurt anyone, bug-fuck crazy, not actually a character. The first episode villain isn't actually a character. The fourth episode villain didn't mean to hurt anyone. The ninth episode villian is not right in the head.

Also, the humorous responses of newly-reanimated victims minimize the effect of the crime, since the victims aren't in pain and often don't even seem to be upset about their death.

It's (modern) fairy tale violence. The bad guys are just behaving according to their nature, and their punishment balances our their crimes, leaving everything to come out neutral in the end.

Posted March 13, 2008 5:57 PM by shadowsong

Sian 16: Caprica Six...[w]hose first major action in the show was a baby killing.

I interpreted that as an act of mercy. She knew the world was about to be consumed in flame, and killed the baby quickly and cleanly so it wouldn't have to be burned to death. This interpretation is in line with what we later learn of her character, and I frankly can't think of any other motivation she would have for doing that.

Posted March 13, 2008 6:08 PM by Xopher

Fragano @ 49... Vila was the thief, right?

Posted March 13, 2008 6:11 PM by Serge

Here's a somewhat scary story about a wrong number.

Posted March 13, 2008 6:20 PM by Steve C.

albatross, #14: In Conquest Born and The Wilding by C.S. Friedman are both pretty good examples of "who's the good guy here?" fiction. And she's sneaky about it -- starts out painting things to look like a standard black hat/white hat confrontation, and then muddies the waters severely.

Mike, #32: Even at age 10-12, some of the ClassicTrek episodes (of which Let That Be Your Last Battlefield is definitely one) seemed awfully ham-handed to me. Beating the audience over the head with a Message often comes at the expense of storytelling. OTOH, I do agree that Roddenberry stuck his neck way out there; the symbolism was so blatant that not even the stupidest network exec could possibly have missed it.

What really got me, though, was when NextGen suffered from the same kind of ham-handedness; the episode about the planet of hermaphrodites (where wanting to be het instead of bi was a Major Perversion) and the host-gender-changing Trill episode being the ones that spring to mind.

Posted March 13, 2008 6:36 PM by Lee

I doubt everyone here would want to regularly read a web comic about twenty-something indy rock fans, but you all may be able to relate to the last line of this episode.

Posted March 13, 2008 6:39 PM by Allan Beatty

Xopher @52- Oh, I completely agree that the baby-killing was an act of mercy (at least from Caprica Six's perspective). But after all, she was saving the baby from the chaos and destruction which she had orchestrated. I just love that the baby-killing, world-destroying robot is the one I think deserves a better true love/mind-to-mess-with/boyfriend. (Although Baltar is so far from being a paragon of virtue that it isn't saying much to affirm that Six deserves better, she really, really does.) I like Six. I care about her. I think that her decisions, over time, are becoming (overall) better attempts at moral decisions, whilst the decisions of a lot of the Galactica crew are, overall, becoming worse attempts. It surprises me.

As does the fact that throughout the show, I have been truly astonished by the amount of maternal instinct that all known female Cylons have been ?programmed? with, and the way that this was all signalled by Six's actions in the mini-series. Again, it's just not what you might expect from evil robots out to destroy humanity. And that's good.

Tony@38- WRT Babylon 5 and moral ambiguity, I'll certainly give you Mr Garibaldi. And several other characters, now I come to think about it. But I rarely felt truly shocked by the actions of B5 characters: there was a sort of innocence about it, even when things were dangerous or ambiguous. In a slightly Lord of the Rings way, I think. Most of the characters (although not Mr Garibaldi, and possibly not Londo) felt like they would have played nicely with others in Tolkien's world. Which isn't a criticism, I liked that show a lot. (And the Lord of the Rings, for that matter.)

Posted March 13, 2008 6:44 PM by Sian Hogan

#22, ethan: don't watch "what the frak" then at the BSG site. It was rather entertaining though and got one ready for the new season.

Posted March 13, 2008 6:54 PM by moe99

Serge #53: Right.

Posted March 13, 2008 6:56 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Fragano @ 59... That was a good balance of characters. By the way, would it be sacrilegious to say that I found Blake's character rather oh-hum?

Posted March 13, 2008 7:22 PM by Serge

Serge #60: No.

Posted March 13, 2008 7:33 PM by Fragano Ledgister

Lee #55: Yeah, I think the "lessons" in both old and new Star Trek tended to be delivered with a club. And the "gay rights" episodes in TNG were just bizarre. If they wanted to address gay rights, they could simply have had a few openly gay sideline characters--folks at the Barclay level, say, if they thought it would be too hard on ratings to have Geordi come out of the closet or something. (How could anyone rationally object to, say, Data finding a male lover. Looked at one way, he's just a sentient (and fully functional) vibrator.)

But this raises an issue with Star Trek's universe. We're very far in the future, and yet we essentially never see gay humans. The explanations available appear to be something like:

a. In the 23rd century, they've cured being gay. (It's a standard treatment, in which they reverse polarity on the backward-biased singularity generators.)

b. In the 23rd century, all the gays are closeted out of fear of being subjected to above treatment. (Apparently, having your singularity generators' polarity reversed isn't any fun.)

c. Starfleet still follows a "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Are there other alternatives, here?

Somehow, this all makes me think of the "War Stories" episode of Firefly. ("I'll be in my bunk!")

Posted March 13, 2008 9:05 PM by albatross

We stood on a hill at the Bosworth battlefield. Our guide recounted the numbers of armed men who were supposed to be on it, and I wondered how they all fit on it, let alone fit one another. Down below, puffs of steam marked the path of something nobody could see, and because I didn't know anybody well enough yet, I resisted the temptation to suggest that it was a Stanley Steamer.

Posted March 13, 2008 9:11 PM by Kip W

Serge @ 33: Tin foil?!? You're not one of them secret government agents, are you? Because we don't hold with them furrin agents around here. We're decent, law-abidin' citizens here. Cheesecloth was good enough for our forefathers, and it's good enough for us.

Posted March 13, 2008 9:21 PM by Ginger

albatross @ 62... I seem to remember that David Gerrold had written a TNG story that dealt with something not unlike AIDS, but somebody got cold feet, I think.

Posted March 13, 2008 9:23 PM by Serge

Ginger @ 64... On the other hand, if tinfoil was good enough for Mel Gibson, it should be... Oh, wait...

Posted March 13, 2008 9:29 PM by Serge

Serge: Yeah, I think they had an episode that at least seemed to be sort of about AIDS. But my complaint is that they didn't just have gay characters wandering around, as normal a part of daily life as they are in real life. By contrast, they managed to integrate the crew racially at least a bit more over time, ending up with Sisko as a really powerful, interesting character in DS9. (Though I am still not too clear on why the majority of 23rd century spacefarers are white Americans. Did we nuke the rest of the world?)

Posted March 13, 2008 10:15 PM by albatross

albatross @ 67... But the only way for us to have known if this or that character was a homosexual would have been for him/her to have indulged in some Public Display of Affection, and most of the crew of the NCC-1701-D seemed to have evolved beyond any PDA or PDE. Except for Geordi. And O'Bryan. And Keiko.

Posted March 13, 2008 10:30 PM by Serge

albatross@14: for ambiguous characters, try A Sorcerer and a Gentleman; one definitely dark but not black, and several that profess good motives but execute less well. Or notice what Mike did with the Klingons in The Final Reflection.

For something at the other end of the spectrum, see almost anything by Dickson. Once, when driven to explain one of his books, I said "If a Dickson hero slips and mentions looking west at the sunrise that morning, the sun will immediately reverse course.

Posted March 13, 2008 10:44 PM by CHip

Gays in TNG? Considering that the show premiered over 20 years ago, and ended in 1994, I just don't see that it could have happened.

As much as I enjoyed the show, it (like most SF on TV) was inherently conservative.

Posted March 13, 2008 10:48 PM by Steve C.

I may just be in a crabby mood, but that quote sounds like nonsense to me.

a) In 1936, the ideas like rocketships, cloaks of invisibility, other planets populated by multiple separate species, etc., were possible marvels, not s-f cliches. The charm of Flash Gordon was in the fantasies it spun for kids from dawning pop awareness of new ideas in the infrastructure of science. In 1936 science was just beginning to discover the world of subatomic particles and the difference between particles and waves. In context of that era, maybe all those rays as plot levers might not seem so ridiculous. Crossing a bridge made of light. Far out! ("You first, Earthman.") In Doctor Who, you've got nanites and other biotechnology, addressed with a similar mystical awe.

b) In Dr. Who, it is often possible to tell the heroes from the heavies. (In Flash Gordon, you

you've got Princess Aura: a heroine or a villainess?)

Posted March 13, 2008 11:33 PM by Lenny Bailes

albatross @14: So, what are some examples of SF where the identity of the good guys is somewhat ambiguous?

Nobody's mentioned Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan books. The father of the men who attacked Cordelia and caused Miles's disabilities ends up supporting Miles in a Council vote. The Cetagandans who invaded Barrayar and killed 5 million people turn out not to be faceless minions of evil. The Betan psychologist sent to "help" Cordelia when she goes home after the war refuses to believe that she is sane and tries to get her brain wiped. The soldier who rapes a terrified prisoner spends the next 20 years trying to make it up to the child she bears. "Ambiguous" is just a word for "really human."

Posted March 13, 2008 11:50 PM by Tehanu

Anyone going to Lunacon and want to meet up?

Today I was accosted by an overly friendly postal worker who wanted to show me her tattoos and give me a bookmark advertising her fantasy novels. Is there something written on my forehead in invisible ink that says "weird fannish chick, bond with me" or what? Is buying a book because one's postal worker brought one FOUR packages (including a bathing suit which hopefully will cover up all surgical scars) more or less likely to produce a good reading experience than other ways of finding books?

Posted March 14, 2008 12:10 AM by Susan

Tehanu:

Avoiding spoilers in case someone hasn't read the books, but was Ezar Vorbarra a good guy or a bad guy, given the plans laid down in green silk rooms?

Posted March 14, 2008 12:11 AM by Susan

Susan, I seem to give off a very mild 'friendly to pagan lesbians' vibe.

Regarding Ezar... um. It's been too long since I read the books (meaning a year or two; I took my time devouring them) and what I remember is that he did his best, but we did not get to see him enough to know if he felt bad about certain things. A little too smug and low-key gleeful for me to trust him.

Posted March 14, 2008 12:32 AM by Diatryma

One of the many pleasures of BSG is the absence of technobabble. Once in a great while there'll be a bit here and there - Baltar explaining how Cylon blood works, for instance - but for the most part the show seems to operate on the assumption that there's nothing at all mysterious or even very interesting about technology.

And it's right. "Why are the Cylons monotheists?" is a much more interesting question than "How do the Cylons work?" or "What's with the dramatic oscillating red eye?"

Posted March 14, 2008 12:53 AM by Bob Rossney

Steve C #70: Gays in TNG? Considering that the show premiered over 20 years ago, and ended in 1994, I just don't see that it could have happened.

See, this right here is one of the reasons I have no respect for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Original Star Trek was ahead of its time in these matters, showing American TV's first interracial kiss at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in many states.

Star Trek: TNG, on the other hand, trailed behind regular TV. Network TV was dealing with occasional homosexual themes as early as 1967, and had out gay recurring characters in the seventies. (Billy Crystal's character on Soap is commonly considered the first, but there were a few others on less well-known shows as early as 1972.) Tony Randall played a gay main character in Love, Sidney, from 1981-83.

LA Law showed two women kissing in 1992. That's the same year Star Trek: TNG showed "The Outcast", which deals metaphorically with the issue of homosexuality and shows Riker kissing an androgynous alien obviously played by a woman. Jonathan Frakes himself complained that the episode wimped out, and the alien should have been more masculine.

Posted March 14, 2008 12:55 AM by Avram

I wouldn't call TS:TNG so much conservative as chicken. Not cowardly, just safe . . . bland. And not just for not dealing with homosexuality.

Deep Space 9 took some chances. B5 pushed things much farther. BSG, Mk. II . . . whoa!

Posted March 14, 2008 1:11 AM by Stefan Jones

I'd add that virtually any SF written by Delany, Iain Banks, Ursula LeGuin, or many other modern writers involves moral ambiguity and often unclarity as to the "heroes" and "villains".

Posted March 14, 2008 1:54 AM by Clifton Royston

Part of what turned me off DS9 fairly early on was how completely it backed off from what it originally promised. According to early reports, Sisko was supposed to be a crippled, embittered war hero who'd been given command of Deep Space 9 in order to force him to retire: sorry about your severed spinal cord and your dead wife, here's this skeevy backwater post...

The series was supposed to explore the darker side of the Federation: how *did* the Federation maintain such remarkable harmony? What kind of police and spy networks (internal and external) would be required to maintain that system? How disconnected from the Federation ideal were the outposts and frontier worlds? What pain, intentional or accidental, would a massive bureaucracy like that inflict in order to survive?

DS9 promised to swim in deep, murky waters; instead, it wound up splashing around in the kiddie pool, pretending it was, well, boldly going and all that... Was it darker than ST:TNG? Sure - but only by comparison.

Posted March 14, 2008 2:32 AM by protected static

albatross @ 14: "It's not clear that either Mal or the revolution for which he fought qualify as "the good guys" in Firefly. (Note what life looks on most of the back-end-of-nowhere planets they visit.)"

I always saw that as fallout from losing the war/the reason for the war in the first place. Far more morally ambiguous in Firefly was Jayne, and the way he reflected the worst in all the rest of them. (There's little that Jayne does that the rest of them haven't considered--yes, including what happens on Ariel.)

I think that TV sf's sophistication tracks better with the sophistication of TV in general than with sf. TV has been getting more sophisticated both morally and conceptually in recent years, and TV sf has reflected that.

Fragano Ledgister @ 17: Amazing. That opening bit is awe-inspiring. Bravo!

Michael Turyn @ 28: "In any event, I'd like to see a Readercon panel ent"itled: "Masking the Sound of a Grinding Axe: making your ideologically-correct fiction palatable to the general public"."

"And then, of course, we return to Heinlein once again..."

Serge @ 35: "One thing has bugged me for a long time with BSG... There's nobody who does gallows humor."

Yes, BSG takes itself way, way too seriously.

Posted March 14, 2008 3:17 AM by heresiarch

China report attacks U.S. human rights record as "tattered and shocking"

"Er, actually, you're quite sooty yourself," said the kettle.

Posted March 14, 2008 3:31 AM by heresiarch

heresiarch @ 81... There is that, yes, but, like I said to Sylvia @ 48, I really was deploring the absence of humor as a coping mechanism. That being said, this is the last season and I wonder what'll happen when the BSG does get to Earth.

"Oops! Sorry for bringing that bunch of nasties to your doorstep."

Posted March 14, 2008 6:14 AM by Serge

Susan @ 73... Is there something written on my forehead in invisible ink that says "weird fannish chick, bond with me" or what?

If you had been in a Star Trek episode, the explanation would probably be that there was a leak in the warp core, which reversed polarity, and that led to quantum defects in local pockets of Reality and...

Posted March 14, 2008 6:18 AM by Serge

I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned SKZB's Vlad Taltos as a contender in the Morally Ambiguous Hero category.

OK, he tries to do good, but he's nonchalantly killing people (well -- Dragaerans...) left and right, at least in the first couple of books.

Posted March 14, 2008 7:10 AM by Christian Severin

Clifton @ 79: In general I agree with you, but what's going on with the the Archimandrite in The Algebraist? Here's your unambiguous villain with a slice of gleeful cheese, and then Banks seems to say that for all that dictators are a real part of humananity and horrible, they're ultimately uninteresting. That such a character (or such a conception) falls short of the true horror we're capable of. A sarcastic comment on the banality of evil?

Spherical @ 12: You've read Vonda MacIntyre's Starfarers series? Not great idea SF, but lovely lovely soap opera in space.

Posted March 14, 2008 7:19 AM by Ralph Giles

It's Vonda McIntyre, sorry. Using Google as a spelling check only helps if you notice the autocorrection.

Posted March 14, 2008 7:23 AM by Ralph Giles

heresiarch@81

fallout from losing the war/the reason for the war

Fallout, partly, in that the war probably worsened already existing differences in wealth between the various planets.

Reason, indirectly (if I recall correctly). The impetus for the war appears to have been the view of many in the core worlds that the non-core worlds would be better off if the whole system was unified under the "benevolent" guidance of the core worlds.

This was not an entirely ridiculous viewpoint, unfortunately it did not take into account the fact that many of the non-core worlds strongly disagreed with the notion of "reunification".

Posted March 14, 2008 7:35 AM by Michael I

80: I might actually have watched that one. Sounds good. Especially if they forcefed the writers on John Le Carre and Graham Greene beforehand.

Posted March 14, 2008 7:36 AM by ajay

ajay @ 89... f they forcefed the writers on John Le Carre

Hmmm... Wasn't there an episode of DS9 where Doctor Bashir goes to some Peace Conference inside the Romulan Empire? There he meets Romulan Adrienne Barbeau, who's working hard toward detente, but things do not go well because the Romulans have a hardliner who politically destroys it. The surprise about the hardliner isn't a surprise if you ever saw (or read) The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Posted March 14, 2008 8:45 AM by Serge

Since this is an open thread ... As some of you might know, Pat Cadigan has started a "Match it for Pratchett" campaign to match Pterry's donation of £500k to Alzheimer's research. A friend made a button for people to use if they want to copy it and link to the campaign on their sites. Blogenspiel

Posted March 14, 2008 8:54 AM by Another Damned Medievalist

Clifton #79: It's interesting--I've only read Banks' Culture stories, but in those, the characters are often drawn in shades of gray, but the Culture mostly isn't. One thing I liked about _Remember Phlebas_ was that it wasn't 100% clear that the Culture were the good guys, though you clearly were supposed to come to that conclusion by the end.

Posted March 14, 2008 8:56 AM by albatross

Re Firefly:

I always felt that the historical analogy provided enough moral drag on Mal's side of the war. I could easily see Mal as a "man of honor in a den of thieves" even among his own side.

Absent broader information, I confess that I didn't immediately leap to the idea that the Browncoats were the good guys in the abstract, nor did I expect that we were seeing the best side of the victors.

Peripherally, does anyone else think Mal's family might have been killed by reavers while he was away at war? His reactions to both the reavers and the time Saffron gets him to talk about his mother make me wonder.

Posted March 14, 2008 9:08 AM by abi

abi #93: I never had any intuition for what had happened to Mal's family.

My sense was that the outer planets varied a lot, maybe agreeing on little except that they didn't want to be ruled from the core worlds. So, there were pretty decent planets like Persephone, and awful ones like the one where Jayne is a hero[1].

Firefly seems a bit like The Matrix or Star Wars to me, in the sense that the ideas and images and sense of life in these shows were wonderful, but the plots and world descriptions weren't sewn together quite tightly enough to bear much careful thought. And I kind of wish I hadn't watched the Serenity movie, which I thought kind-of ran the series into the ground.

[1] I'll admit that this was my favorite episode.

Posted March 14, 2008 9:26 AM by albatross

abi @ 93... I think that Mal's side of the war was supposed the good guys. The original episode (which was aired last) showed the people under his command wearing the helmets of American troops during WW2. Yes, it's a silly clue.

Posted March 14, 2008 9:28 AM by Serge

95: and the Alliance wearing German WW2 coalscuttle helmets! Yes, I noticed that too. But by the time of the series they'd moved on to wearing leftover helmets and body armour from "Starship Troopers", and carrying (poor buggers) British SA80 rifles.

Ahem.

OTOH, the first episode also makes it clear that slavery is a part of the rim worlds - Badger's looking over some woman as a possible buy before he meets Mal. Clearly the Alliance hadn't got round to stamping that out.

Posted March 14, 2008 9:36 AM by ajay

#74--Susan: was Ezar Vorbarra a good guy or a bad guy, given the plans laid down in green silk rooms?

I know you didn't ask me, but I think by the time he got around to making those plans in that greeen silk room, Ezar was holding on desperately to the duty he'd taken on years before, during the invasion: To protect his own people as best he could. Which means he gets points for sticking to an important committment at the expense of his own preferences, but that he's a bloody-minded old devil all the same.

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Posted March 14, 2008 9:37 AM by fidelio

ajay @ 96... And the Alliance Navy looks like the Kaiser's.

Posted March 14, 2008 9:49 AM by Serge

Albatross @67 Though I am still not too clear on why the majority of 23rd century spacefarers are white Americans

If this is the darker Federation alluded to in #80, I guess that as a career open to talents, this is one of the few exit routes from the white American ghetto.

While typing that, I then had a second thought - if the utopia of the Federation is still fairly new, but arrived in America first, maybe everyone else is still getting used to it and enjoying their new found freedom and prosperity. The Americans in Starfleet are rebelling against their parents: A life of plenty, freedom and fulfillment? The hell with that. I'm going under (para)military discipline to suffer hardship and deprivation out in space!

After all, utopias are boring*, which is why stories about them take place on the edges (Star Trek, the Culture etc.)

Dave Bell #43 - I'll ask him when he gets back from holiday. I especially like the soundtrack. (I note that that video is longer than an episode of 1940 Flash Gordon).

Thinking about this, there's various levels of implausability. So in Flash Gordon there are pistols where the barrel emerges from under the hand (which makes no sense in any time period, because how do you aim? and is just there to make them look exotic); Mings forces wear full helmets which not only allow intruders to wander around his palace undetected, but don't even stop them getting knocked out in the first place (this is a standard of adventure fiction, but is still somewhat unlikely);then there's various rays and gases** which are only limited by Ming or Zarkov's imaginations (less plausible today than at the time, although contemporary biochemists and physicists were snorting); and things like rocket-planes and minature radios*** which made perfect sense at the time, and do today, but just didn't turn out quite like that.

I have a feeling I had a point when I started typing, but have lost it along the way, as well as missing the moment where I was going to put the link showing when a wall of vacuum tubes was the height of computing.

* Just had a thought - is this why in fictional suburbias, everyone is having an affair? Both the characters and the authors find the utopian suburbia boring.

** There's a scene in which one of Ming's minions has created a gas that only kills people of intelligence; it seems that they're the people who rebel against Ming. Ming takes this in his stride.

*** I keep wondering if some real thought went into the size of the radios. "Hey, what if they have radios that they can talk to anyone on the planet and they can carry them in their hands!" "How small shall we make them? The size of a telephone handset? No, just a bit bigger, to leave room for the little tiny vacuum tubes". Or did they just put them together from whatever was at hand (in the way that Arboria clearly doubles as a Robin Hood set including the costumes).

Posted March 14, 2008 9:56 AM by Neil Willcox

Neil Willcox @ 99... contemporary biochemists and physicists were snorting

They were then all arrested as part of Mongo's War on Gases.

Posted March 14, 2008 10:04 AM by Serge

fidelio:

Well, if I was only talking to one person I'd have used email. :)

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Posted March 14, 2008 10:23 AM by Susan

Peripherally, does anyone else think Mal's family might have been killed by reavers while he was away at war?

Shadow, Mal's home planet, was subjected to a scorched-earth policy by the Alliance; everyone who was on-planet at the time is dead and the place is unlivable barring a repeat of the terraforming process. Which is why he literally can't go home.

OTOH, the first episode also makes it clear that slavery is a part of the rim worlds - Badger's looking over some woman as a possible buy before he meets Mal. Clearly the Alliance hadn't got round to stamping that out.

Oh, they call it "bonded"--Inara gets Mal out of hock in "The Train Job" by claiming he's her bonded servant who ran away. And since a high-class lady like a Companion clearly wouldn't lie about such a thing...

Posted March 14, 2008 10:29 AM by Carrie S.

heresiarch @ #82:

One of the myriad things that makes me Angry! Angry! Ångry! about the last seven years is that our differences from China have become quantitative rather than qualitative. We don't - I hope - have the same magnitude of human rights problems, but we've lost the moral high ground. "We're sooty but not as sooty as you!" is a weak defense.

Posted March 14, 2008 10:32 AM by Susan

Bob 76: Baltar explaining how Cylon blood works, for instance

I only saw that one once, but my impression at the time was that he was saying that Cylons have O– blood. That's all he was saying. And, of course, incluing that no human does, which (if they follow through on it, which they probably won't) could make things interesting on Earth, where O+ is the most common blood type and O– is not rare. If taken to its logical conclusion, that would mean the Fleet would conclude that most Earth people are of partly Cylon descent. I, for example, am A+, but my father is O–; they'd have to conclude that my whole family are Cylon-human hybrids. But I'm betting that won't be a plot point in the final season.

"Why are the Cylons monotheists?" is a much more interesting question than "How do the Cylons work?" or "What's with the dramatic oscillating red eye?"

I agree. My speculation is that "God" is what they call the Cylon who made the humanoid Cylons, and who had a very definite purpose in mind for them. That would be cool, but it's probably wrong, because the series is based on Mormon mythology, so probably they'll conclude that it's the same God worshipped by the CJCLDS on Earth, and that wiping out those durrty polytheists was the right and proper thing to do. In which case they'd still be making the point I liked, which is that monotheism leads to genocide! (Yes, I'm kidding. I don't really think they'll conclude that the attempted genocide of humans was right.)

Stefan 78: BSG is pushing some boundaries, yes, but homosexuality is not one of them. The closest they come is Baltar's implied threesome with Caprica and Biers (or another Three), which was designed to scandalize, not enlighten. Not a single ongoing gay character, not a single gay recurring, not a single gay guest star, not even an implied same-sex adventure in adolescence. Also, note the assumption inherent in making all the Cylon women hot (so I'm told) and all the men skeevy (IMO, pace Leoben fans): in this universe, human men (but not human women) are susceptible to manipulation through sex, and none of them are queer, because there are no Cylon models designed to manipulate people who like men in that way. Otherwise there'd be a male equivalent to Caprica Six, who would look more like Jamie Bamber than Dean Stockwell!

ajay 96: OTOH, the first episode also makes it clear that slavery is a part of the rim worlds - Badger's looking over some woman as a possible buy before he meets Mal. Clearly the Alliance hadn't got round to stamping that out.

I didn't think the Alliance is interested in stamping out slavery. Most of the worlds they go to have some kind of slavery; even in "The Train Job" it's clearly understood that indentured servitude exists. And the identity of the "owner" in that case makes it clear that the inner worlds have it too.

Which is interesting, because if the series is a Western translated into the future, Mal is a former Confederate; I might speculate that one of the things they were fighting against is that the Alliance allows slavery and indentured servitude, and the Independents (or maybe only some of them) didn't like that. If true, it's an interesting reversal. Mal clearly doesn't like people being treated as property, but is that an Independent stance, or his own moral conviction in contrast with both sides?

Posted March 14, 2008 10:37 AM by Xopher

albatross @ 31

Oh, HELL, yes. I remember one crazy year or so when I was the tech lead on a new product and had to follow the CEO around mopping up after him. Now this guy had a PhD in physics and this was his, I think, third high-tech startup. And he had absolutely no clue what the product did, or why a customer would want it. At one point we met with some highly placed people at Sun, with the tacit understanding that if they liked what they heard, acquisition talks would occur sometime soon. Our CEO's cluelessness completely ended that possibility; all my singing and dancing couldn't overcome that handicap.

Oh, the VP of Marketing, who'd been at Apple durin the first Jobs era, was almost as clueless. He sort of understood what the product was, but thought it would be dangerous to tell the customers.

Posted March 14, 2008 10:46 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Serge @ 83: Agreed--the fact that no one on BSG ever notices how funny (in a morbid way) their situation is, is a little peculiar.

Michael I @ 88: "This was not an entirely ridiculous viewpoint, unfortunately it did not take into account the fact that many of the non-core worlds strongly disagreed with the notion of "reunification"."

My readings on the history of the developing world suggest to me that "unification under our benevolent guidance" generally translates into something like "economic exploitation under our tyrannic bootheel." I've gotta say, the idea of being ruled by a futuristic fusion of the Chinese and American governments definitely gives me the wiggins.

abi @ 93: "I always felt that the historical analogy provided enough moral drag on Mal's side of the war."

You mean with the Confederates? I've often wondered if the Browncoats were Joss's attempt to disassociate what was admirable in the Confederates (defending their right to self-determination) from what was despicable (that they had "self-determined" to enslave half their population).

"Peripherally, does anyone else think Mal's family might have been killed by reavers while he was away at war?"

I always figured that the Reavers were very recent phenomenon, and basically entirely post-war. I'm not sure, though.

albatross @ 94: "Firefly seems a bit like The Matrix or Star Wars to me, in the sense that the ideas and images and sense of life in these shows were wonderful, but the plots and world descriptions weren't sewn together quite tightly enough to bear much careful thought."

I hear this pretty regularly, but I never understand why. What part of the world-building didn't work for you? It all fits together pretty well for me, but it's always hard to tell what bits I just assumed into existence.

Also, the Browncoats wearing Allied helmets is the most ham-handed attempt to establish audience loyalty that I totally never even noticed at all. In other words: awesome.

Posted March 14, 2008 10:53 AM by heresiarch

Also, the Browncoats wearing Allied helmets is the most ham-handed attempt to establish audience loyalty that I totally never even noticed at all.

I didn't either, I think because American WWII helmets are just in my mental database as "what modern soldiers' helmets are supposed to look like". Which says something about WWII movies and/or the way my brain works, if you think about it. :)

Posted March 14, 2008 11:01 AM by Carrie S.

It might just be me, but I get the impression the show wants us to think that no matter what bad things the characters might do, they're still inherently good people, and their bad actions have no lasting negative effects.

Don't they? Chuck's bad decision at the travel agency was what led to her death. Ned STILL struggles with the consequences of actions he's taken years before. So does Emerson. Olive seems to have quit a profession she liked and was good at, after the events detailed in "Girth".

We've also seen people who, while charming on the surface, aren't very nice people underneath. The Balsam siblings, for instance, react irrationally and poisonously to Ned's overtures of friendship. Nobody in the dogs episode is particularly nice. In the Le Nez / Vibenius rivalry, we're meant to sympathize with Vibenius--but he's still creepy and not entirely trustworthy.

Ned accidentally kills [redacted]? When Chuck finds out, she hides from Ned for - what, one episode? two? - before forgiving him.

Well, I still think that that particular death isn't on Ned. He 1) was nine years old; 2) didn't know what would happen, and 3) it being one of the very first manifestations of his power, he had no reason to suspect what would happen. My thinking is that Chuck must have come to a similar conclusion, which is why she forgave him--but not right away, and not easily.

Also, I don't think that Chuck's aunts, picturesque as they are, were the best people to be raising Chuck. Their social phobias meant that they relied on Chuck to take care of them, knowing that they were preventing her from living her own life. That stunted Chuck's development and contributed to her own intimacy issues (on a show where EVERYBODY has big honkin' intimacy issues, so at least she's not alone). End result: a 28-year-old woman who's so naive that she accepts a too-good-to-be-true offer of a free cruise.

Hell, even most of the villians aren't really evil, in my opinion. They fall into three categories (sometimes more than one category per villain): didn't really mean to hurt anyone, bug-fuck crazy, not actually a character. The first episode villain isn't actually a character. The fourth episode villain didn't mean to hurt anyone. The ninth episode villian is not right in the head.

What about the villain in "Dummy": fb qrgrezvarq gb oevat uvf pne gb znexrg gung ur'f jvyyvat gb fnpevsvpr crbcyr'f yvirf?

Also, the humorous responses of newly-reanimated victims minimize the effect of the crime, since the victims aren't in pain and often don't even seem to be upset about their death.

Well, yeah... but the alternative is the Torchwood approach, where the newly-reanimated spend their entire minute basically freaking out.

It's (modern) fairy tale violence. The bad guys are just behaving according to their nature, and their punishment balances our their crimes, leaving everything to come out neutral in the end.

Is everyone punished? Ned's dad--was he ever punished?

Posted March 14, 2008 11:06 AM by Nicole TWN

Lee @55: Perhaps I wasn't a very sophisticated 11 year-old, or perhaps it was just a consequence of growing up in a small, mostly mono-ethnic town, but Let That Be Your Last Battlefield was one of the episodes that stuck in my mind for years. The moment at the end of the first act where the police officer points out the difference between him and his quarry with such vehemence was such a mind-opening event for me, both for the anger the two actors portrayed, and for Kirk and Spock's understated "WTF?" reactions. The contrast between the protagonists' high technology and their mutually destructive passionate hatred was another thing. And, of course, the sequence of them seeing their homeworld in ruins, the slow realization, not of a desire to rebuild, but to pursue blind vengence on one another, and the final shots of them running through the ruins -- all in all, I found it a powerful episode.

Yes, perhaps it isn't how we'd do it now, if we felt a need to do it at all, but the past is a foreign country and all that.

Posted March 14, 2008 11:08 AM by NelC

ajay @ 89 -

80: I might actually have watched that one. Sounds good. Especially if they forcefed the writers on John Le Carre and Graham Greene beforehand.

I think they got a lot more ambiguity - and smarts about such things - later in the series, (In The Pale Moonlight, Honor Among Thieves, etc.), but even in the beginning, there were distinct differences between DS9 and TNG - Kira Nerys is unequivocally a former terrorist (and not at all ashamed of what she did in the Resistance), Garak was apparently a Cardassian spy (although we later find out his position is much more... interesting... than we are first lead to believe), Quark is a war profiteer, intelligence broker, smuggler, gambling-hall owner, and if he isn't a pimp, it's only because Nerys would string him up by his ears, and so on.

My personal opinion is that DS9 was probably closest in spirit (except maybe season 4 of Enterprise, when Manny Coto became executive producer) to the original series - the main characters are flawed, but still generally good, people, who try - but don't always succeed - in doing the right thing. Humans have changed, and evolved (socially and morally), from what they were three centuries before - but the shadows of what they were remain, and you can see that there is still that struggle in each of them.

[War] is instinctive. But the instinct can be fought. We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands! But we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers...but we're not going to kill...today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill...today!
-- Captain James T Kirk in 'A Taste Of Armageddon'

Jim Kirk could certainly have empathized with Benjamin Sisko over the outcome of In the Pale Moonlight - I'm not sure that Jean-Luc Picard (pre First Contact, anyways) could have.

Posted March 14, 2008 11:37 AM by Scott Taylor

Susan @ 103: "One of the myriad things that makes me Angry! Angry! Ångry! about the last seven years is that our differences from China have become quantitative rather than qualitative. We don't - I hope - have the same magnitude of human rights problems, but we've lost the moral high ground. "We're sooty but not as sooty as you!" is a weak defense."

One of the most angering experiences of my adult life has been learning that the difference has always been quantitative. The real change in the last seven years is that we've stopped outsourcing quite as much.

Posted March 14, 2008 11:43 AM by heresiarch

#103--Susan:

I agree with your conclusions about Ezar--I'm interested in how he ended up capable of seeing that choice as his best choice, but I believe your conclusions on the ethics are correct.

I'm not sure what I make of Cordelia in that--I don't know if she indeed agreed, or was so far through the looking glass from her own worldview that she was taking this sort of thing as a given in Lookingglass-land and was just too overwhelmed to react as she would have in a more familiar environment.

Posted March 14, 2008 11:45 AM by fidelio