Category: Film and TV

Last night they started airing the penultimate episode of Star Trek Enterprise. Next week is the big finale.

I won’t spoil too much here lest folks haven’t seen it yet. (CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS.)

I do, though, want to comment on a few things.

The episode is better than I expected.

From the previews, I knew that it featured sci-fi regular Peter Weller (a.k.a. Buckaroo Bonzai a.k.a. RoboCop) in the role of an extremist leader who makes fiery speeches. Something about seeing this in the previews gave me a sinking feeling that they were going to do the standard things of giving it a religious/moral values overlay that would allow the series creators to make a veiled statement about "the religious right" (the way they did in that stupid, stupid Deep Space 9 episode where Fundamentalism and the Moral Majority was portrayed under the name "Foundationalism").

But they didn’t!

They had Weller playing a character named Paxton who leads a purely secular extremist group. No talk about religion or values or anything like that.

Paxton’s group is concerned with alien immigration and influence on human society.

The episode also starts setting up the founding of the Federation (to be seen in the series finale, next week).

It’s understandable that many in human society would be hesitant about joining the Federation.

Folks here don’t want to give up their sovereignty to the United Nations (and justly so! thoroughly corrupt and unjust body that it is). Why should people go unhesitatingly into a federation of planets?

It’s natural that there would be a xenophobia problem (particularly if Earth had just been attacked by an alien race like the Xindi!).

The show’s producers even let Weller’s character get in some good points–like the fact that Starfleet has been galavanting around the galaxy giving other, possibly hostile species’ knowledge of the whereabouts of Earth.

There is also mention of the fact that there are numerous "unregistered" aliens on Earth–a deliberate allusion to the U.S.’s current illegal immigration problem.

But despite these fair points, Paxton’s group is still, at bottom, evil, and the episode makes that clear.

What I found suprising was the name of the group.

"Terra Prime."

Y’know what that means in (fractured) Latin?

Earth First.

(It’s fractured Latin because it should really be Terra Prima.)

Still, "Earth First" is a good name for a xenophobic, Earth-centric organization.

Like that there xenophobic, Earth-centric group on Babylon 5, which was also called . . .

"Earth First."

Guess that name was already taken or something.

EXCERPT:

‘The Monastery’, a new reality TV show slated to air this month on the U.K’s BBC 2, has reportedly left a deep spiritual impact on its five male participants, one of whom, an atheist pornography producer, who gave up his trade and became a believer.

The men, none of whom are Catholic, spent 40 days and 40 nights living and abiding by the rules of a Catholic monastery in an effort to show whether or not the monastic life, instituted by St. Benedict over 1,500 years ago, still has relevance in the modern world.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

EXCERPT:

‘The Monastery’, a new reality TV show slated to air this month on the U.K’s BBC 2, has reportedly left a deep spiritual impact on its five male participants, one of whom, an atheist pornography producer, who gave up his trade and became a believer.

The men, none of whom are Catholic, spent 40 days and 40 nights living and abiding by the rules of a Catholic monastery in an effort to show whether or not the monastic life, instituted by St. Benedict over 1,500 years ago, still has relevance in the modern world.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

There’s this Ridley Scott movie coming out called Kingdom of Heaven that’s about the Crusades. Word I’m getting is that it is problematic, though not an all-out Christian bashfest.

For some of the problems, here’s films critic Peter Chattaway semi-fisking the NYT-noids at the New York Times and their comments about the movie.

EXCERPT:

The article continues: "Mr. Scott and his screenwriter, William Monahan, have tried to be balanced. Muslims are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything. And even when the Christians are defeated, the Muslims give them safe conduct to return to Europe."

Um, this is balanced? All the extremists are Christian and all the Muslims are nice and peaceful? I think the film, to say nothing of history, is more complicated than that, though I don’t think the New York Times is.

GET THE STORY.

For some time there has been talk that George Lucas was thinking about a live-action Star Wars program.

He is.

The series is still a ways off, but Lucas has confirmed that it’s being planned. The series would be set between episodes III and IV and, he says, be similar in tone to the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Like the latter series, the scripts for the first season would all be written in advance. It also would focus on previously minor characters in the Star Wars universe, leaving the actions of the big dogs to the big screen. (Though we might get an occasional Darth Vader or emperor cameo, I s’ppose.)

Lucas is also planning an animated series, this time using computer-generated animation. It also would be set between Eps III and IV.

GET THE STORY.

(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)

Daffy Duck made his first appearance April 17, 1937 in the short "Porky’s Duck Hunt" and was an instant success.

Audiences couldn’t stop talking about the screwball duck and he quickly supplanted Porky Pig in popularity.

Porky gracefully recovered, eventually accepting the role of straightman for the daffy duck.

As a prima donna, though, Daffy never recovered when he himself was supplanted by Bugs Bunny and has become obsessed with reclaiming the spotlight he lost to Bugs.

That’s no reason not to pay tribute to a true comic genius, though.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAFFY!

The final batch of episodes for Star Trek Enterprise start tonight!

While the series has been much better this season, I don’t know how good tonight’s episode is going to be.

From what I’ve read about it, it sounds like it features green Orion slave girls prominently and might ought to be titled "Capt. Archer’s 3-D House Of Slave Chicks."

CHECK YOUR LOCAL LISTINGS.

I know what you’re thinking: "It already has been!"

Yes, it’s true.

Star Trek Enterprise has been spiked in the sense that it’s been cancelled after its fourth season (when it finally got really worth watching).

As Larry Niven would say: "TANJ!" (There Ain’t No Justice.)

There’s only a few new episodes left before the series goes where four Star Trek series have gone before.

Well, Enterprise may get spiked in another sense.

TURNS OUT THAT SPIKE TV IS INTERESTED IN POSSIBLY PICKING UP THE SERIES FOR A FIFTH SEASON.

Fans may want to contact Spike.

I’ve never watched Spike TV before, but if they pick up Enterprise, I’d tune in to check out their version of the show.

I was in a bookstore last night, and right there in the first display inside the main door was the novelization of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

It was sitting right there.

With a complete novelization of what will go down on movie screen across the country just over a month from now.

It had all the spoilers one could want (shy of a bootleg copy of the finished film itself, of course).

And it’s available not only in hardback but also in CD and audiocasette, both abridged and unabridged.

At very reasonable prices.

Next day shipping available.

But be warned: If once you start to read it, forever will it dominate your experience of the film.

YOU MUST FACE YOUR GREATEST TEMPTATION, YOUNG PADAWAN.

So the other day I’m sitting around watching a Stargate SG-1 episode, and they’re going through this wormhole. Looks like this:

And I’m thinking: Why does it look like that? Why does it look like anything? The event horizon of the Stargate wormholes is supposed to disintegrate you into your component molecules and transmit them thorugh the wormhole. If you were totally discombobulated, you shouldn’t see anything.

But then we have evidence on the script-level of folks experiencing things in the wormhole, talking about what a "wild ride" they are and such.

So I think: Maybe when the wormhole disintegrates you, it doesn’t totally de-pattern you, it simply restructures your body in such a way that it can travel through the wormhole, but all the while you and your consciousness are still functioning. Your body’s been re-arranged, but it’s all still operational.

So then I thought: Hey, there’s evidence of the same thing on Star Trek. In that there Realm of Fear episode of Next Gen, Lt. BroccoliBarclay has some unusual experiences in the transporter beam (which he’s deathly afraid of [left]).

He even gets into a tussle with some critters that are up to no good in the transporter beam, though they later turn out to be something other than they appear (right).

The thing is: He’s conscious during all of this. So on Star Trek, like on Stargate, we have evidence of people remaining conscious and in some sense "together" during a period of de-materialization.

Now that may shed light on a long standing "mystery" in Star Trek: Namely, why you don’t simply die and get cloned each time you enter the transporter.

They recently referred to this problem in the episode of Enterprise where they had the inventor of the transporter guest star. During one scene they referred to all the "metaphysical" worries of folks about whether the transporter killed you and made a copy, at which point Trip looked around the dinner table and noted that, if that were true, "We’re all copies here."

Well, despite the fact I once saw a very neat cartoon on PBS exploring this premise (an animated character made a transporter transmitter and receiver out of two refrigerators then transported herself and pondered the moral implications of having done so, only to discover that despite the fact she died in the transmitter, she is now a "guiltless clone"), it would seem that Trek (and SG-1) ahve both provided evidence that this is not the case.

It seems to me that if your consciousness remains functional through the experience of being de-materialized then that’s at least presumptive evidence that it’s still you on the other end.

So the transporter and the Stargates are not killer+cloner devices.

Of course, since consciousness can exist independently of physical form, this leaves open the question of whether they are killer+resurrecter devices or just "repackaged for easy transport" devices.