Religious Discourse in Lost and Battlestar Galactica

Yesterday I received my contributor’s copy of a new volume edited by Oklahoma City University’s Marc DiPaolo, Godly Heretics: Essays on Alternative Christianity in Literature and Popular Culture (published by McFarland). The book examines how storytellers, filmmakers, and philosophers have reinvented Christianity again and again, how they have explored new interpretations of the bible, and how they have struggled with questions such as free will and the existence of evil.

While this might strike some of you as an unexpected project for me to be involved with (I’m not what you might call a religious person), Godly Heretics provided the perfect opportunity to discuss something very much in my ballpark: Lost and Battlestar Galactica, two hugely popular science-fiction television series which both leaned on the interrogation of religious certainties as an integral, arguably essential element of their overall stories. While the theological inquiry proffered by these shows was often received and rejected without consideration for what the writers were trying to articulate, both Lost and BSG had profound messages to communicate about life, belief, community, and the dangerous tendency of organised religions to divide humanity into ideological factions rather than unite people into truly accepting societies.

My chapter tackles the divisive (to put it mildly!) reception of both series head on, exploring the dialogues about religion which they attempted to open with pop cultural audiences. I consider the purpose behind Lost and BSG’s use of heretical notions such as apathetic deities, resurrections that are not, and the deliberate collision of contemporary belief systems with archaic or esoteric forms of worship (and, along the way, I call out patently incorrect pronouncements about the shows by the likes of George RR Martin). While my chapter doesn’t shy away from the fact that a great many people were dissatisfied with the endings of these shows, it is an effort to demonstrate how the theological underpinnings of Lost and BSG are more coherent, and indeed more important, than generally accepted.

A fine volume, I intend sitting down with Godly Heretics over the next few weeks and spending time with the essays from the other contributors. In particular I’m looking forward to Grace Moore’s chapter on A Christmas Carol, Scrooged, and Groundhog Day, and Eric Michael Mazur’s chapter on Peanuts and The Far Side. There’s also work here on Kieslowski’s Decalogue, Kubrick’s The Shining (by another Irish contributor, Trinity’s Dara Downey), as well as chapters on Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Shelly, Whitman, Thomas Jefferson, and the varying representations of Jesus in literature. It’s a book which I think will interest a wide range of people, both academics and those with a more general interest in how Christianity has been portrayed over time, so please do order a copy for your local or university library.

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Other posts which may be of interest:

• Some Notes of Fringe‘s Scientists, ‘Mad’ and ‘Bad’ alike.
• ‘Prometheus has landed’: a Defense of Damon Lindelof.

Some Notes on Fringe’s Scientists… ‘Mad’ and ‘Bad’ Alike.

Walter Bishop and Friend

If I’ve been quiet lately it’s because I’ve been writing a book chapter on the topic of “The Scientist as Villain, the Scientist as Hero” for a forthcoming volume on the Fox series Fringe (probably my favorite TV series of the post-Lost/BSG era; because, as I told a friend of mine once, “yes, that’s an era now”). My draft is currently with the editors and, subject to their acceptance, there’ll be the regular process of review and revisions to go through before publication of the book sometime next year.

In the meantime I’ve been picking through the material which I cut out of my draft (mostly on account of space; there was a strict 7,000 word guideline for chapters, which I might not have entirely succeeded in keeping to, but I’m sure the piece will slim down through the revisions). I thought it might be interesting to share some of the off-cuts here as a kind of parallel argument to what, hopefully, you’ll eventually read in the published volume. Please note: spoilers abound here for much of Fringe, from the early seasons right up to the currently airing final episodes…

1.

The appearance of the Observer in Walternate’s lab, distracting him at a key moment in “Peter” (2.16) and so inadvertently setting in motion the conflict between the two universes, is not merely a development necessitated by plot, but, in actuality, Thomas Kuhn’s “apparently arbitrary element,” the “personal and historical accident [which] is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time”.[1]

2.

The manner in which Walter Bishop and William Bell are compared forces viewers to consider the moral consequences of values such as self-mastery, self-cultivation, and self-direction, upon which western, capitalist success is built. Bell personifies such values and has been handsomely rewarded for them, successfully adapting his scientific brilliance to a modern world of patents and commodified knowledge. Meanwhile Walter, deprived control of self and life, is left isolated from civilization and contrasted unfairly with Bell by the general public: one man “rotting away in a padded cell”, the other “rich and famous”, a true contemporary champion (“Over There, Part II”, 2.23). Of course, the reality of the situation is quite the opposite. Walter’s status as a hero-scientist, one who’s madness stems from his rational (to him) decision to have part of his brain – his own evil tendencies – removed, is usurped by Bell, a villain who has tainted the world with the evil from “the Walter that was”. Indeed, Bell’s literal implanting of Walter’s excised neural material into the brains of others (“Grey Matters”, 2.10) is the figurative expression of the way in which he used the pair’s scientific knowledge for unethical purposes.

3.

Separate the show’s control figures from their productive comparison with Walter, and one finds that the roles played by Bell and Walternate (and even David Robert Jones and villains of the week) in the development of fringe science correspond to Kuhn’s assertion that “the early developmental stages of most sciences have been characterized by continual competition between a number of distinct views of nature, each partially derived from, and all roughly compatible with, the dictates of scientific observation and method”.[2] Indeed in Season Five, with the original Fringe team forced to become fugitives and terrorists, their revolution is built upon the knowledge and experience of the bad scientists they have previously tangled with. “Will the villains rescue the heroes?” asks Harvard geneticist Jon Beckwithe in a 1995 American Scientist article on the changing culture of science.[3] Well, says the action of Season Five, their knowledge might, but only when combined with Walter’s morality and humanity.

4.

The future Walter of “The Day We Died” (3.22) – his dishevelled mad scientist appearance restored – acknowledges the importance of Human emotional connection, the power of love, in his design of The Machine (intrinsic to its operation is the presence of both Peter and Olivia together). Equally, Peter’s Season Five experience with the Observer technology “echoes the myth of science invading human identity” however his decision to extract the device from his head, much as his father once had pieces of his own brain removed, is a victory for feeling Human beings over calculating and machine-like rationalists.[4]

5.

The intercession from the future seen in “The Day We Died” foreshadows Fringe’s final control subjects in its experiment with the mad scientist archetype: Walter as human versus the Observers as post-humans, characters heavily augmented by technology and therefore the show’s ultimate rebuke to the Instrumentalist Conception that science and technology are value neutral. “Scientists”, humans from “many generations after your lifetime”, the Observers have – like the mad scientist villain of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) – been “converted into the apparently perfect scientific-technocratic man without a trace of human emotion” (“The End of all Things, 4.14).[5]. They are “fundamental inhuman”, the manner in which evil scientists have long been depicted in Romantic Literature in particular.[6] The question posed by the Observers – what is human? – again foregrounds Walter’s choice of so many years before. What makes us Human, his actions suggest, is our ability to choose between good and evil, an ethical declaration which has a long pedigree in Science Fiction. While Walter made his choice a surgical reality years earlier, and while Fringe has tested its assertions against nature in general, the show’s fifth season tackles the character of the mad scientist with regard to Human nature itself.

6.

To restore Walter’s neuro-pathways, degraded as a side-effect of his being in amber for twenty years, the brain tissue removed by William Bell is re-implanted (“Letters of Transit”, 4.19). While the procedure inspires Walter’s brain to heal, it also begins to alter his personality, returning him to the scientist he once was. Villainy has been restored, physically, and Walter’s struggle in Season Five is thus against “the Walter that was” (“Black Blotter”, 5.09). The transformation which ensues slowly brings him closer to the man he once feared he was becoming, a short-tempered genius prone to seeing people as disposable. Nevertheless the struggle itself defines him anew. Walter fights to maintain the personality which has allowed him to reconnect with those around him. His resulting arc throughout Season Five is thus as much a private war to preserve his view of the world as it is a public one to save the people who inhabit it.

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[1] Thomas S. Kunh. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3^rd Edition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4.

[2] Ibid.

[3] John Beckwith. “Macroscope: Villains and Heroes in the Culture of Science.” American Scientist 86:6 (Nov-Dec 1995). 152.

[4] Peter Weingart, Claudia Muhl and Petra Pansegrau. “Of Power Maniacs and unethical Geniuses”. Public Understanding of Science,12 (2003), p.281.

[5] Alan Woolfolk. “Disenchantment and Rebellion in Alphaville”. In The Philosophy of Science Fiction. Ed. Stephen M. Saunders. Lexinton, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2008. 192.

[6] Wager, W. Warren. “The Mad Bad Scientist”. Science Fiction Studies 22:1 (March 1995). 115

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘Too Brief a History of a Great Man of our Times‘; my Irish Examiner review of Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work.
• ‘Flann, Fantasy, and Science Fiction: O’Brien’s Surprising Synthesis.

Star Trek Insurrection: How Michael Piller Wrote it

Michael Piller, on the set of Star Trek

Today I read a book which was never officially published: Michael Piller’s Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft, the story of how he wrote the underrated yet still disappointing film Star Trek: Insurrection. Though freely available online, at its time of writing (1999) Fade In was apparently ‘suppressed by Paramount’ (TrekCore’s words) and was only released on the Internet because it never found a publisher even after the studio lost interest in it. For his part, Piller considered the book ‘his last great gift to the fans and to aspiring writers everywhere’.

Piller, who died in 2005, wrote some of the best episodes of modern Star Trek  (‘Booby Trap’, ‘The Best of Both Worlds’, ‘Emissary’) as well as un-credited rewrites – in his role as Executive Producer – on scores more. Fade In so is much like Russell T. Davis’s volume about his work on Doctor Who, The Writer’s Tale. In it Piller traces his friendship with post-Roddenberry Trek guardian Rick Berman, his early days on Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as the inspiration for and the evolution of the ninth Star Trek feature. I won’t do a full review of the book (other to say it’s generous, informative, and worth reading in its entirety), but I do want to quote here from those sections which I found most interesting:

• When Piller took over as head writer, ‘the entire writing staff of Star Trek: The Next Generation was so frustrated and angry with Gene Roddenberry they were counting the days before their contracts expired (and indeed every one of them left at season’s end.) He wouldn’t let them out of the box and they were suffocating.’ Yet, as Piller progressed, he ‘began to learn how Roddenberry’s Box forced us as writers to come up with new and interesting ways to tell stories instead of falling back into easier, familiar devices.’

• Rick Berman’s first idea for Insurrection was to do a Trek version of The Prisoner of Zenda.

• On the other hand, Piller’s original intention with the movie was to to emulate the warm and funny Star Trek: The Voyage Home’; a ‘Heart of Lightness’ after the darker material of Star Trek: First Contact. Says Piller, ‘I wanted to write a film that was uplifting and optimistic in the Roddenberry tradition. I wanted to explore the intellectual, moral leadership that I felt set Picard apart from other heroes. I wanted to show how this crew is a family that love and support one another.’

• Piller stresses how he ‘started out with a vision of man standing alone on a mountainside holding a phaser rifle, defending a weak and helpless people against two of the most powerful forces in galaxy. A true mythic hero against impossible odds. That’s not quite how it turned out […] I keep thinking back to how the script might have changed if we had faded in to find Picard weary from two years of war, first with the Borg and now with the Dominion, having lost many crew members fighting to protect the ideals of the Federation. Now, he discovers his own command is about to sacrifice those very ideals to steal the Ba’ku planet. In that scenario, the peaceful world would have provided an immediate contrast to Picard’s dark days of war.’

• Though only roughly outlined, his first treatment for the story might – in my opinion anyway – have made an excellent film. The short version: ‘We open at Starfleet Academy in Picard’s youth, establishing Picard as a curly-haired, high-spirited cadet. We give him a best friend, another cadet who is as close to Picard as any man has ever been and ever will be. Flash forward to the present day and find adult Picard being given a mission by Starfleet Command. His old friend is now a wanted man — he’s been attacking ships in an unexplored region of space and no one knows why. Picard has to track him down and if necessary, kill him […] We ultimately learn that this is a Fountain of Youth and somebody is trying to steal it from the people who live there. Picard’s friend has been defending the natives on the planet.’ It had Boothby the gardener in it. I would have watched that.

• This version also had a promising space battle between the Enterprise and Romulan ships in the skies over a Federation colony, two apparently epic bat’telh fights between Worf and an antagonistic Romulan (modeled on Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), and Picard defending the ideals of the Federation on the floor of the Federation Council itself, an ending which left the future of his command, as well as that of his crew, somewhat unresolved.

• The movie’s subtitle went through many revisions: Stardust, Regeneration, Prime Directive, The Betrayal, Breach of Promise, Dereliction of Duty, The Dishonor, High Treason, The Enemy Within, The Resignation, Apostasy (!), Where Time Stands Still, Forever, Beyond Paradise, Revolution, Sacred Honor (the last two words of the Declaration of Independence),and others.

• Rick Berman ‘would often have cottage cheese and fruit. He had a continuing struggle with his weight, the only sign I ever saw of the overwhelming stress from producing two TV series and a feature film simultaneously.’

• Piller recommends every writer read Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. ‘In the book, Gallwey suggests that within every player, there’s a self (#1) that seems to give instructions and make judgments (“Dammit, you idiot, keep your eye on the ball,”) and another self (#2) that seems to perform the action. The book shows you ways to get self#1 to give up control and trust self#2 to perform successfully. It’s the difference between making it happen and letting it happen. The two selves also exist in the act of writing. The worst thing a writer can do is show his hand.’

• Brent Spiner ‘was not as comfortable with me,’ Piller admits. ‘He was extremely polite about it but finally after discussing ideas for the film over lunch, he leaned forward and said, “I’m kind of worried that you don’t know how to write my character.” […] Brent could only judge my contribution to the series based on scripts he read that had my name on the title page as the writer. He said he’d never seen my name on any of the scripts that featured Data and he was absolutely right. But he didn’t know how much rewriting that head writers do without credit. […] I had written some of Data’s most memorable scenes, but Brent never knew it.’

• Veteran Trek writer and producer Ira Steven Behr never takes off his sunglasses. Unless he doesn’t like your script.

• Legendary Trek Production Designer Herman Zimmerman always wanted to be an actor. He even read for the part of The Doctor when Star Trek: Voyager was in the casting phase.

• ‘I’m no stranger to failure,’ Piller admits. ‘No writer is. In fact, there’s something perversely comforting about failure. Success is the aberration. We don’t trust it. Because we know our next failure can’t be far behind.’

• Once Piller turned in the script, ‘Don Granger [Paramount Executive Vice President of Production] called to say he thought it had the best character work in a Star Trek feature script since the whale movie and a deep humanistic quality in the best Roddenberry tradition. Michelle Manning told Rick that she’d never connected emotionally to any of the Star Trek storylines, but she loved this one. John Goldwyn particularly liked the relationship between Data and the alien boy. Everyone’s favorite scene seemed to be the one in which Geordi saw his first sunrise.’

• The cat among the pigeons then was Patrick Stewart. His response to this first stab at the script was that ‘it has no surprises. It has no scale. It has little humor. And what it has is clichéd and tired. It has no romance. It is not sexy. It breaks no new ground. It under-uses our cast. It has little fun. It is dull. I think what dismays me most about the story is the dredging up of the Romulans – a race already unexciting in TNG – as the bad guys. It is revisionist and backward looking in a most disappointing way. After the Borg – the Romulans? Oh, my’. Rewrites continued. The Romulans were dropped.

• The shuttle dogfight early in the picture owes its elaborate nature to notes from Granger and the other executives (as does “The Riker Maneuver”).

• The producers also asked if Piller would ‘consider reducing Barclay’s role and filling this void with Beverly, Worf, or a new character. Barclay had a great cameo in First Contact, but his popularity is questionable’ (Barclay was eventually cut altogether). They also wanted a role created for Tom Hanks.

• ‘At the same time the studio was telling us we needed more action to make the picture better, they were also telling us we needed to lose action to meet the budget.’

• After reading one re-write of the script, Rick Berman ‘went home and told his wife, “I think Michael’s starting to lose it. He wrote a scene today in which a llama pees on Beverly Crusher”.’ Needless to say, that scene didn’t stay in the picture.

• The widely held perception of Insurrection as ‘an extended episode of the series’ seems to have originated with Patrick Stewart’s thoughts on the script during its latter drafts. As did the film’s Gilbert and Sullivan sequence, with the great Shakespearian actor feeling that a series of King Lear references weren’t working.

• However there was one note from Stewart which flummoxed Pillar and his Fountain of Youth storyline: ‘Please,’ the actor said, ‘don’t let’s start growing hair on Picard’s head. Something else, eh?’

• That said, Stewart (along with the other actors) was very pleased with the final script. The only exception was Brent Spiner, who continued to have ‘reservations’.

• Almost as soon as a draft of the script leaked on the Internet, Pillar received a letter ‘from an unhappy librarian who condemned me for perpetuating a negative stereotype of librarians’ (though the Enterprise librarian eventually ended up cut from the film entirely).

Towards the end of Fade In (which includes long extracts from various versions of the script), Piller does well to contextualize the reviews, good and bad, within the creative process which led to those aspects of the film praised and panned by the critics. His final verdict on the film? ‘The true villain in the picture is the Federation leadership, but as written, their crimes are mostly philosophical. That leaves the Son’a, whom I described in dialogue as “petty thugs”, to provide the entire threat. I think the film might have had more scope if I’d pitted Starfleet forces as well as Son’a against Picard and crew.’ He ends Fade In by criticizing the ‘new kind of action writing in Hollywood that I simply don’t know how to do. It begins – even before a word is put down on paper – with identifying “set pieces”, big self-contained action moments that are thrilling and memorable, and then finding some way to string all your set pieces into a coherent narrative.’ Sounds exactly like how John Spaihts pitched Prometheus.

‘The only suggestion I give to young writers,’ Piller says, ‘is to listen to the universe. The ideas are all around you – in newspapers and magazines, television, stories people tell you and most often in your very own life experiences. Sooner or later, something will resonate.’

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• Thoughts on Doctor Who 06×13: ‘The Wedding of River Song’ 
• You’re Inside the Source Code (And It’s Not What You Think It Is!)

Star Trek into Darkness: Who is the Villain?

Update (May 10th 2013): Well, the below theory proved incorrect! That said, I’m much happier for having not figured out Cumberbatch’s character (or many other elements of the film). Well played, Abrams and Co., well played. 

Update (December 10th 2012): So,  an official press-photo caption described Benedict Cumberbatch as playing a character called “John Harrison”… I’m not convinced; I think it’s a red herring to disguise the presence of Gary Mitchell as discussed below. Here’w why: the name “John Harrison” is shared by an 18th Century British clock-maker who invented the Marine Chronometer. And Marine Chronometers are used for… what? Navigation, that’s right! They’re especially useful in Celestial Navigation, and what position did Mitchell fill on the Enterprise bridge crew in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”?! Yes, he was the starship’s *Navigator*!

By-the-by, a related press release says Alice Eve is playing the role of Carol Marcus, and while that would seem to rule out the “Mysterious Blonde indicates Mitchell is the Villain” argument I made last week (if she’s Marcus, she’s definitely not Elizabeth Dehner), there’s still a clear link to Mitchell here: Remember, in ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ he recalls introducing Kirk to a “blonde lab technician” (who Kirk almost married), a figure long held by fans to be Carol Marcus.  This would also be a great way to set up her presence for future installments of the franchise (possibly even one involving Kahn).

Anyway, back to my original post:

Even though the first teaser for next year’s Star Trek Into Darkness was released this morning, and even though it spotlights the film’s villain as played by Sherlock’s Benedict Cumberbatch, the identity of that character is still up for debate. Director (and champion mis-director!) JJ Abrams clearly wants us to think it’s Kahn – as in The Wrath of – and the teaser gives us plenty of bravado which would not be unexpected from that character (let alone that evocative hands-on-the-glass visual in the Japanese version of the teaser which is so reminiscent of the end of 1982’s Star Trek II). That said, I’m now fairly sure the film’s big bad is Gary Mitchell, antagonist of the Original Series episode (and “second” pilot) ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ (1966). While Mitchell has long been the other classic character bandied about alongside Kahn by those us playing the Abrams/Trek Guessing Game, he had been dismissed by many on account of his more esoteric nature and because of how his story has already “been told” in the new continuity.

Allow me to direct your attention to IDW’s Star Trek ongoing, written by Mike Johnson, illustrated by Stephen Molnar, godfathered by film writer Robert Orco, and considered canon by those involved in the Abrams productions. This series is set in the JJ Abrams timeline but often providing re-imaginings of classic Trek episodes. For issues #1 and #2, Johnson and Molnar took on ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ and, as in the Original Series, the Enterprise encounters an energy field at the edge of the galaxy which has an adverse affect on crew member (and old Academy friend of Kirk’s) Gary Mitchell. Mitchell develops uncontrollable psychic abilities, grows murderous, and eventually becomes such a danger to the ship that Kirk, on Spock’s advice, is forced to kill him on a desolate planet.

The modern Gary Mitchell sporting a similar black Starfleet undershirt to that of Cumberbatch’s character (Star Trek #001, IDW)

The main difference in this authorized Abramsverse version of the story is the absence of ship’s psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Dehner (who withdrew her request to serve on account of a prior relationship with Dr. McCoy which ended badly). Originally  Dehner too developed psychic abilities but maintained control long enough to help Kirk defeat Mitchell. In the modern retelling, it is Spock, sneaking up on Mitchell while his powers are focused on Kirk, that finally subdues him. Mitchell is then shot by Kirk and buried in space (or, at least, we see a torpedo-casing coffin in space; we do not see a body).

While it must have been tempting for Abrams and company to re-do Kahn, I’m convinced now that Star Trek Into Darkness is going to feature Gary Mitchell, returned from deep space for vengeance against Kirk (who marooned/”killed” him), and Starfleet (who promoted Kirk ahead of him even though the former wasted his “youth on farmgirls and motorcycles while I was already training at the Academy”, Star Trek #002, IDW). Indeed, Mitchell’s jealousy of Kirk’s success is played up in Johnson and Molnar’s comic more than it ever was in the original episode.

IDW’s Gary Mitchell (left) Vs Benedict Cumberbatch’s as yet unidentified villain

The final piece of evidence for a Mitchell story is the presence of Alice Eve’s also as yet unnamed character, again featured prominently in the teaser, a Starfleet officer with a haircut very reminiscent of Elizabeth Dehner’s:

Elizabeth Dehner from the original series (left) and Alice Eve’s as yet unidentified character

I know it’s bad when we’re reduced to speculations based on the hairdos of characters in teaser-trailers (I suppose it’s just as likely that she could be playing Yeoman Rand), but is it at all possible that the character of Dehner was kept out of the new continuity comic-book retelling of ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ precisely so she could contribute to the defeat of Mitchell in Star Trek Into Darkness?

I think it is. And my money is now on Mitchell as the villain. It explains the identity of Eve’s character, the animosity and motivation of Cumberbatch’s, as well as explaining certain inconsistencies in his behavior (he is seen to almost “fly” in the teaser at one point, a fairly strong indicator of “god-like” powers, but yet he still threatens Kirk with a phaser rifle; why not kill him psychically? Perhaps because Kirk shot him with a rifle in the comic and it’s part of the character’s ’vengeance’). What’s more, I think Mitchell would also be a braver, smarter choice for the film’s antagonistic  as opposed to giving a certain generically engineered superman a do-over and forever being compared to the incomparable Wrath of Kahn.

Guess we’ll find out…

Three and a Bit Thoughts on Last Resort 01×02: ‘Blue on Blue’

Speedman and Braugher as Kendal and Chaplin

I won’t blog about Last Resort every week, I promise (!), but I did just want to comment on how much more successful I found Episode Two compared to the pilot.

In terms of pacing, writing, and characterization, the Karl Gajdusek scripted ‘Blue on Blue’ is a step-up from the incredibly messy premiere. While subtlety is still not the show’s strength, there were a couple of good ideas deployed here in aid of a reasonably successful soldiers-invading-the-island storyline. Though it’s not amazing television yet, this week it definitely became a watchable series.

Three things which come to mind after ‘Blue on Blue’:

• While Scott Speedman’s Lt. Cmr. Kendal gets more attention (and the beginnings of some much-needed conflict with his CO), Andre Braugher’s Captain Chaplin still seems like a crazy person, which I know is something the show is trying to make a point of, however thus far he just seems crazy; not, as we’re told, a keen tactical mind who has decided on acting crazy to terrify his enemies. Actually, for about half the time here what he really seems like is a bully. Which, you know, isn’t good. Braugher does get some solid material to work with towards the end of ‘Blue on Blue’, but every time the show cuts to Washington and the TV news portrays him as a “nuclear madman”, I’m almost inclined to agree.

• Last week, my main problem with the pilot, indeed with the premise of the series as a whole, was the decision to use the tropical island as a central location. While I still have issues about that, I can almost foresee a situation whereby the island – isolated, fractious, and slowly spiraling out of Chaplin’s control – becomes a metaphor for the submarine… However we’re not there yet.

• The military aspect of the series too still seems very casual, especially the interactions between the officers and also Kendal’s mission against the invading commandos. I don’t have hard numbers, but he seems to have lost up to a third of his team and his reporting of this seems an oddly throwaway moment considering the subplot about how losing men on a previous mission affected him.

In short, there’s potential to Last Resort and ‘Blue on Blue’ moves a little further towards fulfilling that, even if there remains a sense of unreality to the production. By that I don’t mean the surprising nature of the situation these characters find themselves in, I mean the verisimilitude whereby these situations are portrayed. I’d also like to see some evidence that Shawn Ryan, Gajdusek, and their fellow producers have a game-plan for this show beyond the first few episodes (say, right up to the season finale and beyond). Hopefully that will start to become apparent soon. I’m put in mind of a series which feels surprisingly similar, CBS’s Jericho, which structured its only full season around a series of three and four episode arcs (its second season comprised a continuous, seven-episode storyline). Such an approach could pay dividends with Last Resort’s sprawling cast and the myriad prospective entanglements of their characters.

But, then again, anything that gives some sort of form and function to the show’s spinning plates would suffice really.

Twelve Thoughts on Last Resort 01×01: ‘Captain’

Last Resort was a show I heard about relatively late in the summer. The concept, as initially explained to me, seemed like a great – if potentially short-lived – idea: Crimson Tide as a TV show. That said, my enthusiasm evaporated pretty much entirely when I saw the first trailer… even if I was willing to believe at the time that the promo in question was just a case of poor editing.

Now having watched the pilot – ‘Captain’, written by Karl Gajdusek & Shawn Ryan – I can safely say that I found Last Resort to be a massive disappointment. While I’m buoyed, if you’ll pardon the pun, by those reviewers who say the next few episodes are more much solid, this is a show which needs to improve a lot and needs to improve fast if it’s to have any hope of success . In particular, here are twelve thoughts on the opening hour:

• This show could have been Crimson Tide meets Battlestar Galactica but instead it’s a cliché crossed with a cartoon crossed with no sense of claustrophobia whatsoever. Nothing seems real, the stakes never seem high, and the drama seems contrived. Keep in mind that, ostensibly, this is a series about mutinying submariners and nuclear weapons. Where is the danger? The excitement? The nail-biting tension?

• Martin Campbell directed this. Let me say that again: Martin Campbell directed this! Seriously, I’m stunned to discover that. The direction is so flat and uninspired. Certainly it was the Campbell of Green Lantern and not Casino Royale sitting in the chair, that’s for sure. Honestly, if I hadn’t seen his name in the credits I would have thought this the work of some anonymous Hollywood director-for-hire and not a man with a BAFTA.

• The CGI submarine moves too fast in the water. There, I said it. (Set-wise, it all seems way too spacious on the inside too).

• This is a 43 minute pilot and it tries to do too much in too short a time. The result is a literal throwing of everything Gajdusek and Ryan can think of into the script as fast as possible, seemingly in the hope of something sticking. It doesn’t work. The pacing is horrible, derailed constantly by lurches and tonal inconsistencies. Was this possibly cut down from a 90 minute pilot or script? It certainly feels like it.

• The writing too is problematic. Gajdusek and Ryan’s script flails from set-piece to set-piece (a line-crossing ceremony, battlestations!, questionable orders, an attack!, etc.) almost as though it was written with the DVD chapter titles in mind. Moreover, scenes often fail to build upon those which came before. In one scene, Andre Braugher’s Captain Chaplin – having been relieved of command – is visited by Scott Speedman’s Lt. Commander Kendal (the boat’s XO) in his cabin. Kendal asks for his superior’s help and experience, imploring him to resume his role as Captain. Chaplin, however, tells him that the crew have a new captain, Kendal himself, but one scene later he’s back on the Conn giving orders. Sure, there’s a brief question about the legitimacy of his authority, but it’s still an incredibly awkward transition. Finally, and I kind of dislike saying this but it happened a few times so I think it’s worth raising the issue, Show-Don’t-Tell is not repeatedly showing us photographs and telling us about them.

• What I noticed too is how ‘Captain’ lacks a convincing grasp of military terminology. I never for an instant believed that these were genuine military officers and crew. Does anyone from the Navy consult on the protocol, procedure, and terminology in these scripts? If not they really ought to, because SeaQuest DSV seems like a more realistic depiction of life on a submarine (and BSG – a show set in space – seems a more credible depiction of military life in general).

• I see “Sexposition” has jumped from Game of Thrones into the general TV writer’s toolkit, with Autumn Reeser’s weapons industry lobbyist Kylie Sinclair listing – Wikipedia style – the submarine’s tactical capabilities while straddling a man in her underwear. It’s not a high water mark for the pilot.

• The dynamic between Braugher’s Captain Chaplin and Speedman’s Lt. Commander Kendal is non-existent. Their relationship is supposed to be at the heart of the show and yet, where they should be some kind of spark, some kind of palpable bond or even watchable conflict, there’s just empty space. Chaplin and Kendal are no Adama and Tigh, Ramsey and Hunter, or even Bridger and Ford.

• Robert Patrick seems weirdly miscast here as Chief of the Boat Prosser. Though it’s not that he’s bad, it’s that he has far more character and gravitas than anyone else in the cast. By not being bland, he stands out. 

• I’ve heard a lot of people calling this “the new Lost” but, as a big defender of that show and its legacy, I disagree. Last Resort is “the new ‘the new Lost’”, the latest in a long line of shows which sought to emulate the mysterious mythology and sprawling ensemble of that series and have come up short.

• Actually, if anything I think this is the new Terra Nova: An objectively disappointing series which I’ll probably continue to watch in the vain hope that it improves before cancellation.

• They should never have left the submarine. In fact, having the tropical island as a key element of the series is perhaps my biggest problem with Last Resort. Is it possible this was pitched as a properly claustrophobic submariners-on-the-run series with only occasional sojourns to the surface world – again, somewhat like BSG – only for the concept to be hijacked by producers fearful of audience reaction to such a willfully self-contained show? That’s entirely speculation on my part, mind, but in any event it would have required a better script.

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Other Posts You May Be Interested In:

• ‘Alcatraz: Live-blogging the Pilot. Kinda’
• ‘Prometheus has landed’: a Defense of Damon Lindelof.

The Avengers: 1920s

A bit of fun for a Bloomsday evening… Which is exactly what this, in its previous one-image incarnation, started out as. Then I got a little carried away, thus Marvel’s Avengers as they might have been portrayed by the literary and artistic types of the 1920s…

Clicking embiggens throughout…

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Happy Bloomsday, everybody! In every medium and genre!

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘Another Win for the Newspaper of Record’ (The Irish Times on the Justice League).
• ‘The Higgs Boson? It was just here in the bar…’

Prometheus Has Landed: A Defense of Damon Lindelof

Prometheus

This post contains considerable spoilers for the new Ridley Scott film Prometheus. If you haven’t seen the film yet then, for now, I suggest you avoid both this and the spoilerific trailer…

Still here? Excellent.

I saw Prometheus on Friday but it’s taken me until now (Sunday afternoon) to resolve my feelings about it. On the one hand, it’s difficult to fault Scott’s eye and direction here. The picture is a visual treat, although it ababdons the “used future” astethic which defined Scott’s earlier Science Fiction milestones Alien and particularly Blade Runner (one of my favorite films of all time). Conversely, there are some major issues with how this film is written and, evidently, how it was conceived. I’ve seen a lot of comments online to the effect of “One of those guys from Lost wrote it, so no wonder it sucked”. But of course no part of that is fair…

Yes, Prometheus was co-written by Damon Lindelof, one of Lost’s showrunners and a screenwriter with many years experience in both film and television, but Lindelof was brought onto the film to work on the original script at a point where the project was well established. Scott himself requested that the Lost veteran rewrite an earlier version of the film which was written by Jon Spaihts, a relative newcomer to the screenwriting business. The resulting screenplay, as Spaihts himself says, ‘is still very much the story I wrote to begin with, with my cast of characters, my structure and big set pieces. There’s a lot of new work in there, there’s a lot of Damon in it, but it’s still very much a lot of me.’

So, the characters, the structure, the big set pieces… Or, with due respect to Mr. Spaihts’s obvious potential and talent, the most problematic elements of Prometheus.  Numerous scenes in the picture seem to have no purpose other than to create impressive visuals, which a film obviously needs… just not at the expense of logic. In fact, the lack of logical reasoning behind almost anything in Prometheus, along with the film’s unwillingness to answer any of the questions it asks, speak to issues rooted deep in Spaihts’s – not Lindelof’s – conception of the project. Consider:

• The protagonists are led to the alien world by a star-map they discover in the cave art of many ancient peoples. Only why would the alien ‘Engineers’ leave a map to what is essentially a ‘military installation’, an outpost where weapons of mass destruction are constructed?

• How is this mission supposed to go well when the characters have obviously not planned ahead or, in many cases, even met each other before emerging from hypersleep? The idea of briefing this group just before they arrive is ridiculous. The fact that they haven’t trained together, or perhaps even trained at all, for what they may encounter on a mission to another solar system stretches credibility.

• LV-223 is obviously the moon of a gas giant, however it has Earth-like gravity and a world the size of Earth is a big place. Yet Prometheus just happens to immediately discover the alien facility without doing any kind of survey, any kind of extensive investigation? I know it’s a film and that excessive scientific verisimilitude would kill the pacing, but still. It just happens because it has to happen, because it’s part of Spaihts’s structure.

• What purpose do the alien holograms serve? They’re a snazzy visual, and they clue the reader in on the fact that something bad went down in the tunnel system, but other than that…? Nothing.

• Why the giant head? Sure it’s a great set-piece, its huge, Olmec-like visage sitting silently above the vases containing the ampoules of bio-toxins, but… why? Why would any anyone store biological weapons like that?

• For that matter, why are the ampoules stored in a room where, once the door is open and the environmental conditions change, their contents are released? That’s like storing Ebola samples in a room where, once you open the door, they begin to leak out of their canisters.

• Are the biological weapon chosen by The Engineers, née Space Jockeys, really the best way to destroy humanity? Let’s work this through. The Engineers are going to deliver the aliens from Alien to Earth in order to wipe out Humanity; they’re going to infect Earth with millions of unstoppable killing machines. Now maybe they have a kill-switch for the aliens but, really, how is that better than, say, orbital bombardment? Do they intend to kill just Humans or all life on the planet? (Indeed, once you start questioning the role of The Engineers in evolution on Earth, the more problematic this strand of the story becomes).

• When Shaw and Vickers are running way from the crashing, rolling, spaceship, why don’t they just run away from it at a right angle instead of – essentially – running directly in front of a giant wheel? Because it’s a great set-piece, that’s why.

All these things look good but, essentially, don’t make any sense. Why? Because this is a picture built around set-pieces, Spaihts’s set-pieces as he admits himself: ‘It was in that first conversation [with Scott’s people] when I was asked what I would do to return to the Alien universe, that I found myself galvanized by the question, found an answer leaping forth fully formed from my head even though I hadn’t thought about it before. I talked for 45 minutes and outlined a pretty detailed story, including honestly, things as specific as set pieces and visual images, which are still present in the final film’. As answers go, it’s difficult not to read that asI made it up on the spot and now I’m stuck with it.

What then was Lindelof’s contribution to the project?  Well sorry, Lost-bashers, but it’s arguably the thoughtfulness which occasionally threatens to turn Prometheus into the film we all wanted it to be: ‘We’re exploring the future… away from Earth and [asking] what are people like now?’ Lindelof says. ‘Space exploration in the future is going to evolve into this idea that it’s not just about going out there and finding planets to build colonies. It also has this inherent idea that the further we go out, the more we learn about ourselves. The characters in this movie are preoccupied by the idea: what are our origins?’ These are questions closely related to the arc of Noomi Rapace’s Dr. Elizabeth Shaw in the film, and I suspect that her characterization may be among the ‘new work’ Lindelof contributed.

Moreover, while many may complain about the picture’s open-endedness, attributing it to Lindelof because of his writing on Lost, it actually derives from Spaihts’s conception of Prometheus as a multi-picture story (possibly a trilogy) and from Scott’s desire for ‘ambiguity’. As Lindelof has said, ‘I think that Ridley was very interested in ambiguity […] There were drafts that were more explicitly spelled out. I think Ridley’s instinct kept being to pull back, and I would say, “Ridley, I’m still eating shit a year after Lost is over for all the things we didn’t directly spell out, Are you sure you want to do this?” And he said, “I would rather have people fighting about it and not know then spell it out”.’

If anything so, the more interesting and most engaging aspects of Prometheus – the interrogation of belief, the crisis of faith, the place of Humanity in the cosmos – all seem to stem from Lindelof’s work on the screenplay. This is particularly apparent in the version of Elizabeth Shaw who makes it into the finished film, a woman of both science and faith, a creatively profitable dichotomy Lindelof utilized to great effect throughout much of Lost. Her belief, combined with Lindelof’s comments about ‘what happened 2,000 years ago’ that ‘The Engineers decided to wipe us out’ confirm to me that Prometheus – and the films which will inevitably follow – are about religion.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. More and more, stories about religion, faith, belief, and so on are being overtly played out within a Science Fiction context (and I’d be remiss here if I didn’t plug my essay ‘All of This Has Happened Before: Considering Religious Discourse in Lost and Battlestar Galactica’, soon to be published in the Marc DiPaolo edited Controversial Theology in Fiction). Looked at from that perspective, the Prometheus mythology exhibits the potential to be a far more revealing and allegorical series of pictures than the original Alien films. That said, it’s a new direction which is off to a rocky start. Prometheus, for all its heritage and potential, struggles to deliver anything more than an expensive prologue. A lot of story elements here are not just opened-ended but are acutely lacking any meaning without the second and third films. Which, again, is attributable to Spaihts’s work and not to Lindelof’s.

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘Travels in Saucer Country‘: my review of Paul Cornell’s new Vertigo series.
• ‘You’re inside the Source Code (and it’s not what you think it is!)‘.

Scenes from a Weekend of Grading

Right, sorry about the lack of updates lately. It’s exam-marking season at the University and I’ve been focused on grading papers for the last week or so. Difficult to get much else done when you’re faced with a mountain of student scripts and a pressing deadline but as long as one stays sane it’s entirely possible to survive.

In my case I tend to watch a lot of TV to decompress after marking. It’s the entertainment equivalent of stress eating, I suppose, and combined with a couple of reasonably adventurous bike excursions over the weekend, it’s been keeping me sane in this mixed-up, passing grade world. On Friday night I watched Episodes for the first time, the transatlantic Matt LeBlanc vehicle where the actor plays an exaggerated version of himself. In fact, I caught up with the whole first season on Friday (come on, it’s only seven episodes) and, while it took me a little while to synch up with the show’s humor, I was thoroughly enjoying it by the end. Actually, I think watching it all straight through is an ideal way to go about it and I wonder if it would come across as well on a week-to-week basis, but then again it wins awards so I guess it does. Episodes is perhaps not as self-aware as it likes to think it is, but LeBlanc and Tamsin Greig have barely a misstep between them and the show’s depiction of Hollywood is hoot. An obvious hoot, but a hoot nonetheless. I’ll definitely sit down with Season Two some rainy Sunday after it’s finished airing.

On a more ambitious scale, the big TV event for me this week was the Season Four finale of Fringe, ‘Brave New World’ parts I and II (I held over last week’s first installment so I could watch them together). I’ll avoid detailed spoilers, I know a lot of people haven’t seen it yet, but I think that may be one of my favorite Fringe finales thus far (at least on par with ‘Over There’ I and II). It was nerve-wracking and horrifying and shocking and happy and tied into so much of the show’s rich mythos and filled with so many wonderful moments for its characters… Plus it had its special guest star reciting a Yeats poem; difficult to go wrong with that! I really don’t get the people who are so down on this show; it’s clever and touching, sharply written and beautifully acted (the fact that John Noble doesn’t have an Emmy is a crime), with overarching plotlines and arcs that snap together perfectly about 95% of the time (because no, the massive, collaborative undertaking that is a multi-year network television series never comes together 100% perfectly; deal with it, interwebs). Fringe is without a doubt my favorite series of the post-Lost-BSG era and I’m delighted that it’s been renewed for fifth season.

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As you can probably tell, I’m not doing an enormous amount of non-exam-paper reading at the moment, though I did recently finish Dermot Healy’s Long Time, No See, which is just out in paperback. My review of that will be in next Saturday’s Irish Examiner. I also have a stack of books I’m looking forward to losing myself in soon (Banks’s Stonemouth, Reynolds’s Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days, not to mention the promise of KSR’s 2312 in a fortnight), but – out of fear of distraction – I’m keeping things simple until I push through my grading and writing commitments for the next week or so. That leaves mostly comics on the menu right now.

I’m sure DC would prefer I be excited about the ‘Court of Owls’ event this month but the simple fact is I’ve always been a sucker for a good parallel universe story (part of my great love for Fringe derives exactly from this) and so, a little bit behind as ever, I’m happy to give a thumbs-up to two of DC’s ‘second wave’ New 52 titles: Earth 2 and Worlds’ Finest (the latter containing what I interpret as a subtle, page-one reference to the recent forged Irish passport controversy). Two more alternate Earths crop up in Grant Morrison’s Action Comics #9,  another book from two weeks ago which deserves a lot of praise and attention. An almost perfect done-in-one featuring the ‘President Superman’ character from Final Crisis #7, Action Comics #9 is probably my favorite issue of Morrison’s run so far.

Speaking of, a few days ago I had an abstract accepted for the ‘Grant Morrison and the Superhero Renaissance’ conference which will be running at Trinity this September. Because what’s the point of academia if you can’t write about the things you enjoy? I was originally going to submit something on Final Crisis (one of my favorite comic books and a ‘story about stories’) but reading the aforementioned President Superman tale sent me back to Morrison’s Action Comics from the beginning, which in turn convinced me to tackle something bang up to date: ‘Superman Done Right: Action Comics and the Reconstruction of the Original Superhero’. Using issue #9 as a lens, the paper is going to examine Morrison’s present reimagining of Superman as ‘a bit more pro-active and a bit more socialist,’ a ‘blue collar, rough-and-ready character’ who stands in opposition to contemporary fan desire for ‘violent, troubled, faceless anti-hero[es] concealing a tragic inner life’. I’m looking forward to putting that together slowly over the summer months, re-reading the series at regular intervals and letting it all percolate through my brain. Always the best way to enjoy Morrison’s writing.

In the more immediate future though, I have to mop up the grading and write another abstract over the next few days (this time for a collection of essays I’d like to contribute to), then finish a book chapter before the end of the month.

After that (hopefully) I’ll have a block of time to get back writing fiction from about the start of June…

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• ‘The Beta-Level Co-Author and the Quantum Academic’.
• The state of the campus at NUI Galway.

Alcatraz: Liveblogging the Pilot. Kinda.

Title card

I’ve never liveblogged anything before. Seems like less fun than enjoying what’s going on. Nonetheless, I’ve just watched Episode One of the new JJ Abrams produced Alcatraz (though he neither created the series nor wrote or directed the pilot). I’ve been looking forward to it since it was announced and so I thought it might be fun to take notes as I was watching and type them up as a kind of Liveblog After the Event. Because yeah, that’s a thing now. Either way, I suppose it’s how you find out what watching TV with me is like…

Some brief comments first. Overall, I enjoyed the pilot though I found it somewhat low-key. I can only assume that to be intentional. In terms of production and story, it really doesn’t reach the high water marks of previous Abrams ventures like Lost of Fringe. The acting is quite good though, however no one really got that much to do. There was a disproportionate amount of time given to what I presume was a villain of the week and I found this odd. Sam Neill and Jorge Garcia have fun with the material they’re given (but why didn’t they both get more screen time?). On the other hand, Sarah Jones’s character failed to leave an impression (um… she was blonde?). Seeing as how she’s our nominal protagonist, that’s a little less than successful. I suppose it didn’t help that her storyline was quite similar to that of Olivia in the Fringe pilot. Except in no way as cool.

Anyway, follow with me now as I watch the proceedings! It goes without saying that pretty much everything from here on out is a spoiler or, at least, is spoiler adjacent…

• Okay, here we go. Lost meets The Rock, right? That’s what I’m expecting.
• Two guards enter, one guard leaves…? Nope, looks like everyone else has left. Plus the younger guard is going to grow up to be Sam Neill, yeah?
• Here’s Jeffery Pierce as our villain, Jack Sylvane.
• And we’re spending a lot of time with him. The whole teaser in fact.
• Hey, outdoorsiness! Is this filmed on location? I suppose it would have to be. San Francisco looks great though; someone send me back!
• Sam Neill time. Doing his bad-ass routine.
• Hurley! And he owns a comic book store?! Awesome.
• Also, I love that TV characters always have two Ph.Ds (Hi there, Dr. Jackson!). Here, Hurley’s character (yes, I know it’s really Jorge Garcia’s character) has qualifications in Criminal Justice and Civil War History. As you do.
• And now he’s telling us Sylvane isn’t that rotten an egg. The show is really trying to make the bad guy sympathetic.
• I don’t know if I’m enjoying the flashback to Sylvane’s time in Alcatraz. Are the flashbacks going to be an ongoing element of the show? Worked on Lost, sure, but here they feel off. At least for now.
• And Hurley writes comics too?! Seriously, why are we only meeting this character now?
• Also, I really need to learn his name in this show!
• Back then to our second lead, Plucky Female Detective Without a Partner. Shades of Fringe.
• Hurley’s Wisdom (TM): ‘Smart doesn’t always make you happy’. True that.
• Wow, the location stuff really works. It’s not popping, or anything, but it just looks really nice. Hope we get this every week although, I get it, location work costs money…
• Sam Neill: Surprisingly awesome creep.
• ‘You built the Batcave underneath Alcatraz?’ Overselling it a bit, aren’t you, Hurley?
• Though I suppose this is our main set for the show? It’s a little sparse…
• Mind you, it comes with Parminder Nagra as Sam Neill’s computer guru. Always liked her on ER.
• Jack Sylvane: The show keeps telling us he’s not that bad, or at least misunderstood, but he just gunned down two cops. Seems like a pretty cold-blooded killer to me.
• Chase scene! Down those San Francisco hills!
• No, no I was wrong. That didn’t last very long.
• Oh. My. God. It’s Dr. Beckett from Stargate: Atlantis! Looks like that cameo in JJ’s Star Trek has really paid off.
• Interesting: We’re still spending a lot of time with Sylvane. Feels like half the episode.
• ‘I only did what they told me’. Kind of a generic, X-Files style conspiracy at work here, I guess.
• 256 missing prisoners, 46 missing guards. Plenty of stories for years of this show so.
• Though, how has no-one questioned how these people are travelling through time?! Seriously, that’s the first question I’d be asking! (And I know, I know, it’s because the show doesn’t want to scare people off by pointing to the sci in fi, as it were, but still!
• Ha! The kid guard from the start was Sam Neill.
• Ooh, twist! The blond detective woman (yeah, remember she’s in this show?) recognizes her grandfather amongst the missing people files… but he wasn’t a guard like she always thought, he was a prisoner.
• Double twist! He’s the one responsible for getting her original partner killed. Though I refuse to say he killed her partner because, let’s face it, Sarah Jones’s character kind of dropped the ball on that one herself.
• Hurley seems to be the surrogate for the audience here. Guess nothing changes then.
• Aaaaaaand… Cut to a forest?
• Yeah, that’s creepy; Sam Neill has an unsettling (it’s all the bright white walls) recreation of Alcatraz in a bunker underneath the forest.
• Though couldn’t they have built something, I dunno, more secure or modern for the criminals we’ll apparently be depositing here week after week?! Just a suggestion, Sam Neill; don’t headbutt me and lock me away.
• Fin.

Okay, so I’ll definitely watch a few more episodes of Alcatraz but the pilot didn’t leave me with the same expectation or excitement as the first episodes of Lost or Fringe did. It’s probably unfair to compare the show to its Abrams stablemates (especially as he didn’t have the same hand in the creation process) but that’s how these things go. I’d like to see more of Jorge Garcia and Sam Neill’s characters of course, preferably having adventures in space-time and generally being awesome, but if the show is going to follow the pattern of Episode One and spend half its airtime focusing on villains of the week with little or no input form the core cast…? Well, I’ll certainly be less enthused about it, let’s say that.

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Other posts you may enjoy:

• Thoughts on Doctor Who 06×02: ‘Day of the Moon’.
• ‘Prometheus has landed’: a Defense of Damon Lindelof.