I seem to have some time...or rather, I have nothing urgent at this exact moment.  I know there's another vortex of responsibilities crouching just around the corner, ready to pounce (vorteces can crouch and pounce, you know).  I know my summer is going to end up being just as hectic and stressful as my spring.  A lot of that stress will, ironically, come from socialization.  I watched this happen last year, with the Puffin: the closer she got to leaving town, the more desperate her friends became to see her, and yet the more conflicted and anguished their time together was.  She lucked out, in a way, by holding her farewell party on the hottest weekend of the summer.  Everybody showed up, but they were too sweaty and dopey to get fretful about her departure.  It was like holding a dinner party for all your close friends, and then drugging the punch.

I don't know quite how it's going to work in my case; I have no plans for a farewell party, but I am doing a farewell show of sorts.  Maybe I can invite everyone to see it, and then duck out the stage door when the curtain goes down.

Anyway, here are some out-of-date sci-fi reviews, mostly here just to get them out of my brain.


Dollhouse:  Joss Whedon's new action/romance/sci-fi/prostitution series had a shaky first season, and I was as surprised as Joss to hear that Fox had chosen to renew.  Halfway through the season, I still couldn't tell if the writers even had a handle on their concept, much less its torturously complex morality.  It seemed like they were writing episodes just to see what might work.  Some tightly scripted, arc-driven episodes in the season's latter half went a long way towards crystallizing the show's potential, and even though the season finale was a let-down, I'm still more intrigued by the show than I thought I'd be.

One thing the series did right: episodes like "Man on the Street" and "A Spy in the House of Love" exposed the Dollhouse's moral paradoxes without making us lose sympathy for its employees.  None of Joss's characters are anywhere near the Magnificent Bastard status of an Al Swearengen (even his Big Bad of the season, Alpha, seemed to have more issues than evil), but that's because he's a humanist, and he works hard to provide motivation for all his characters, even the ones doing dirty jobs.  By the end of the season, we can see that Dollhouse's memory-wiping slaver ring is much, much bigger than any of the players we've met so far; that gives Whedon a lot of room for ethical maneouvring, justification, redemption, etc. before the whole dollhouse of cards gets knocked down.  In season 2, this moral ambiguity will likely be embodied by Paul, the lawful good FBI agent turned Dollhouse enforcer.  But I'd love to see moral face-heel turns by other characters, especially Topher or Adele.

Unfortunately, at the heart of the series, we have a clutch of characters whose morality is just as blank as their faces: the actives. It's hard to understand how Whedon thought he could generate sympathy for a group of characters who don't retain any salient characteristics from episode to episode.  To make matters worse, Whedon is indulging in a fairly obvious game: pulling back the curtain on a succession of characters to reveal that they, too, are cylons actives. Some of these revelations are well-handled, but each one loses juice in the wake of the ones before.  At the moment, five of the 8 main characters are actives.  If they keep this up, they'll need to introduce some new regulars soon, or else we'll have a show full of programmed airheads running around and programming each other.

Incidentally, the show's memory-imprint conceit has led to some nifty applications, and I look forward to seeing what else they can cook up...but at the end of the day, it's an old SF device.  Watching Dr. Saunders cope with the news that she isn't really Dr. Saunders has a SF currency at least as old as 1982, when Rachael struggled to process Tyrell's neice's memories in Blade Runner.  The debate between Echo and Alpha in the season finale was like posthumanist pot-pourri, and I found it more interesting in execution than in concept.  But as I said, I can handle at least another season of "we can remember it for you wholesale" before I start looking for fresher SF fare.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:  Here's the show Fox didn't renew.  It had a good run.  I realized halfway through Season 2 that it was the kind of show that benefitted from DVD-style watch-a-thons, not weekly installments.  The pace of individual episodes was often slow, and the plot didn't point forward clearly enough to offer viewers a carrot to justify the show's inexhaustible angst.

Like Dollhouse and their mutual TV hive queen, Battlestar Galactica, T:SCC loved to pose posthumanist questions: what does it mean to be human? Can you love a machine more than a person? Can a machine define or preserve a person's identity? Can you teach a machine to be ethical? And I'm glad so many shows are asking these questions, because I think they're central to 21st century western cultural identity.  Just replace the word "machine" with "corporation" and you'll see what I mean.

A lot of those questions rose to a boil in the final few episodes. The writers managed to tie some of them into fanservice, crafting a couple of intimate and disturbing scenes between John Connor (human) and Cameron (sexy robot).  The implications of one scene in particular continue to trouble me, which I think is actually a good thing.

In the episode "Born to Run," John Connor suspects his mother is dying of cancer. He confronts Cameron, whose power source might be leaking radiation.  Cameron responds by taking off her shirt (fanservice!), lying down on the bed and telling John (robotically) to get on top of her (fanservice! + squick), then handing him a knife and telling him to cut her torso open so he can feel her power source (squick!!!!).

John: "It's cold. That's good, right?"
Cameron: "That's perfect."

Robot sex is cold, dehumanized. We're not supposed to be turned on by it.  And, at the same time, I can't help wondering how many teenage viewers might just fixate on the first half of the scene. John is a teenage boy himself, and he's got this sexy robot who follows his orders and never cries or freaks out.  It's almost like she's a slave with no memory except the programmed instructions to serve...hmm.  I guess Fox has cornered the market in soulless sex-drones.  At least the cylons had personalities.

Anyway...T:SCC exploded into chaos at the end, tearing characters apart, pulling out chips and flinging John into the future with no apparent thought of what the show was really about (Sarah Connor).  It was a season finale reminiscent of Lost or (shudder) Heroes, both of which are soap operas first and sci-fi shows second. It was a desperate attempt to get the show renewed, and it backfired spectacularly, annoying fans without raising the interest of Fox execs.  The weak box office performance of Terminator Salvation makes this show's revival a foregone conclusion. Glad it happened; not so sad it's gone.

I haven't seen Salvation, and I haven't heard any indications that it's worth paying $Stupid.00 to see in the cinemas. But I did shell out the cash to see...

Star Trek: Bright, shiny future wars courtesy of J.J. Abrams.  Thrill to the pathos-driven death of Kirk's father!  Swoon over the tough-guy antics of Kirk, the genius rebel without a dad!  Or, if he's more to your taste, swoon over Spock, who's also a rebel with Daddy issues (and Mommy issues, by the end of the film).  Laugh at all the supporting characters, whose funny traits you vaguely remember from the original series ("oh, yeah, that Russian kid really did have an accent!")!

Folks, this film is eye candy, brain candy, and even groin candy if you dig Kirk or Spock or green-skinned babes.  It retains the humanist spirit of the original show only long enough to slap a boy-scout badge on each Federation starship, just before it kicks into Awesome with All Guns Blazing.  Its low-minded morality becomes obvious at the end, when Kirk offers his adversary amnesty only because he knows the offer will be rejected, and then proceeds to blow him out of the stars.

When I was a kid, I dug that sort of stuff. And I still dug the movie, while I was watching it.  I'm glad that Abrams didn't tarnish Roddenberry's lofty goals by delivering a dark, edgy, gritty reboot: Star Trek always worked best when its heroes were noble, striving to overcome their own human shortcomings to earn our idolatry, and there was a decent amount of that here.  But it was empty optimism -- a cheerful vision of a twentieth century future, not a considered reinterpretation for the 21st century.

Probably the best evidence for this is the role of Uhura, the original series' only black crewmember and only major female character.  In this new version of the monomyth, this post-third-wave cultural product, this age of Obama, you'd expect her role to be expanded from galactic telephone operator.  And it was!  Now she's a very talented galactic telephone operator...who also has a thing for Spock!  Congratulations on your promotion to Cheerleader, Nyota (and you got a first name, too! That's so cute!).  Maybe, if you prove yourself an exemplary member of Starfleet, you can get promoted to Damsel in Distress for the sequel!

So, there you go: three recent sci-fi franchise products that all mishandle female characters. Plus la change, plus la meme chose.  When is Caprica coming out again?