A Sneak Peek at The Magicians

Over the weekend, I found that the first episode of The Magicians, which starts with the first two parts tonight, was available on demand, so I gave it a shot.

I wasn't crazy about the book. I liked the idea of it because I wanted more contemporary fantasy that was about wizards and magic rather than vampires and werewolves, but the book itself struck me as cynical and derivative. It seemed to me more a case of "fantasy" about fantasy fans rather than a book written for fans of fantasy. It seemed to be trying too hard to be "edgy" in the sense of "Harry Potter, but with drinking, sex, smoking, and drugs!" and that made me dislike the characters. I never bothered reading beyond the first book, especially because the way the characters were at the end of the first book made me really intensely dislike them. It seemed to me that the fantasy tropes were all obviously taken directly from well-known works, and in some cases from a superficial understanding of those works.

However, I kind of liked the first episode of the series, though there's still a chance that I'll turn against it (since I was still okay with the book that far into it). In a nutshell, (VERY MINOR SPOILERS) the series (the book is slightly different) is about a young man who's getting ready for graduate school but who is still obsessed with a series of fantasy novels (basically Not!Narnia) that provide his escape when the real world is too intense. He goes to a grad school interview in Brooklyn and finds himself at a school in upstate New York, where he's being tested on magical aptitude. He gets into the school for magical training, but he starts having strange visions of that fantasy world from his favorite books, with one of the characters giving him cryptic warnings. Meanwhile, his best friend also ended up at the aptitude test, but she failed and was sent home, supposedly with her memory wiped. But she does remember and becomes obsessed with the idea of magic and wanting to learn to use it.

They seem to be aging it up from college to grad school in the series, and on the one hand that's good because it avoids making it a teen thing (see the Shannara series) and it makes some of the goings on at school a little less sketchy if these are all 20-something adults. On the other hand, a guy in his early 20s who gets annoyed that his friends aren't as into the series of kids' books they were obsessed with in their teens does sound a little weird. Mostly, I like the imagery in the series. I like the world they've created, and I think they've done a good job of making it its own distinct place rather than Not!Hogwarts and Not!Narnia. I could never get the originals out of my head while reading the book, but the series creates its own world. I still feel like they're trying way too hard to be edgy, but that's just my personal taste.

Bottom line: I'll check out the next part and then see if I want to keep up with it.

The Expanse

I was a little late getting around to watching The Expanse because it premiered in the middle of the holiday busy season, but then after the new year I watched the first three episodes OnDemand, then had to wait until they had a marathon earlier this week to catch #4 on the DVR since that one wasn't available OnDemand and they just skipped to #5. I haven't yet caught last night's episode because I was a few minutes late getting to it and for some odd reason my DVR wasn't letting me watch it while the recording was in progress (which I thought was what the DVR was supposed to be for, but I digress) and I didn't want to stay up to watch after it finished recording. So, these thoughts are based on the first five episodes and for all I know, they've blown it all up since then.

This is a new SyFy show that's sort of space opera meets film noir detective story. There are two parallel plot lines that seem to be converging and that turn out to be about more or less the same basic issue. In the space opera side of things, there's the crew of a ship that answers a distress call and finds something very unexpected that pretty much turns their lives upside down, so that they lurch from dangerous situation and crisis to dangerous situation and crisis. In the film noir side of things, we're on a base in the asteroid belt, where the workers who provide resources to the planets aren't too happy about not getting a share of the resources, and on these mean streets/station corridors, a jaded cop in a fedora makes a halfhearted effort to keep the peace -- until he gets an off-the-books assignment to track down a missing heiress.

I'll admit that I'm not overly keen on the very dystopian look at the future, with all the "rich people are evil and oppress poor people" (as written, produced, and performed by people who probably make more per episode than much of their audience makes in a year) and "we're all going to die of global warming" messages that seem mandatory in any vision of the future produced by current Hollywood. But it's a science fiction show taking place primarily in space, on space ships and space stations, on the SyFy channel, which is kind of exciting. They went through a phase of veering more toward paranormal, which I like, but with two summer shows (Killjoys and Dark Matter) and now this show taking place in space, they seem to have returned to their roots.

I also haven't yet really latched on to any particular character. In the first few episodes they've done a good job with the "no one is safe" concept, so it's not entirely clear who the regular cast of characters is going to end up being. That makes for a lot of shocks and surprises, but it also means I started pulling back emotionally and not wanting to get attached to anyone. They're going for gritty, which means there's no one who's entirely a truly "good guy." That means I'm mostly watching for plot because I'm curious about how all these things are coming together and what it all means. I don't think I'm going to end up really obsessed with this show, but it's interesting, and they're doing some good stuff with worldbuilding (being based on a series of novels probably helps there). The acting is pretty good. I'm just not finding any real heart to it, even as I'm eager for the next episode to find out what happens. We'll see how long that curiosity about what's going on will sustain me in the absence of any characters I actually care about.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Once Upon a Time: The Hate Begins

In season 2 of Once Upon a Time, my love started to tilt toward love/hate. The end of season one had left me excited. I couldn't wait to see what life in Storybrooke was like now that the people had their memories back and knew who they really were. How would they react to what Regina had done to them? How would they cope with life in modern America? And what about the Charming family -- Emma finally believed that Snow White and Prince Charming were her parents, and they finally knew who they were and knew who she was, and had the weird, bittersweet awareness that they'd missed their daughter's entire childhood, and now, thanks to the time freeze of the curse, they had gone seemingly in an instant from having a newborn to having an adult daughter who was the same age as them.

And then the show barely dealt with any of that. In the season premiere, Emma and Snow were sent away through a portal. There was one angry mob scene, but after that everyone seemed to have forgotten about Regina tormenting them. There were mentions of Missing posters and an attempt to register the various fairy tale people to help them find their loved ones in this new world, and there was one episode in which most of the people considered leaving the town so their memories would be re-set to their cursed selves so they wouldn't have to cope with basically having two identities stuck in their head. And that was it. As a fantasy writer, this drove me insane. How could they create this incredible situation and then do absolutely no worldbuilding with it and not mine it for all its potential? There's a whole town full of people with two identities in their heads, a fairy tale persona and a person who grew up in modern America. We know of at least one married couple who were split up and put with other partners by the curse, and at least one child put with a different family. Were there more? How would they cope with this? There's someone you spent 28 years married to -- though without the sense of time passing -- and then there's the person you were married to before that. Did people try to go back to their fairy tale occupations or stick with what the curse gave them? There was potential for so much fun here -- did fairy tale elements start creeping into the town and come up against the modern American elements now that people had their fairy tale memories? How would these fairy tale characters incorporate modern American stuff? The town should have ended up as an odd hodge-podge as people chose various things to keep or discard from their lives.

However, when I got the DVDs after the third season aired, I found that I quite enjoyed the first half of the second season. It wasn't what I wanted it to be, and there were so many missed opportunities, but there was still some good stuff there. I like Emma and Snow White's chance to bond as they tried to make their way back home, and Emma getting to see her mother in her own element and not as the mousy schoolteacher the curse had made her. Regina's mother, Cora, made for a fun villain. And then there was Captain Hook. If you've read my books, you've probably figured that I have a type, and while he wasn't immediately obvious as my type (I don't do bad boys, and the black leather does little for me), we soon started seeing something beneath his facade, and yeah, he was my type. In season two, he fit the Shapeshifter archetype, as you never were sure exactly where he stood. He could lie with a straight face, but was also the character most likely to cut through the nonsense and speak the truth. He had a laser-like focus on his own agenda, which meant he switched sides often, teaming up with whomever he thought was most likely to help his cause. He had an odd mix of swagger and vulnerability. You never knew for sure what he would do or how he would react. He was a villain, but his cause was actually somewhat sympathetic, and they kept his karma in balance because every time he did something wrong, he immediately got smacked down.

But then the second part of the season hit. When I look back at this series, I suspect that I'll still believe that the show's Jump the Shark moment came in mid-season 2, when the narrative focus seemed to make an abrupt shift and the morality got massively wonky. That was when Emma and Snow returned home and the family was finally reunited, and the camera focused on Regina looking sad as her former victims all went off together for their first family dinner, ever. The way it was framed made it look like they were just a bunch of meanies excluding poor, sad Regina, the victim, and in interviews the writers are actually proud of this scene because they think they've created a complex, sympathetic villain. And that was when everything shifted. From that point, poor Regina was the biggest victim who ever victimed. She never took any responsibility for her past crimes. The good guys were made to grovel at her feet for any perceived wrongs done to her, but she's yet to really apologize for what she's done to them or even indicate that she knows she was wrong to do what she did to them. Even after that point in the story, she went on to set things in motion to kill all of them, so this wasn't even a real turning point for her. She didn't change, but the tone of the narrative around her did. 

They talk about how there's not just black and white, there are shades of gray, and it's all more complex and nuanced than in the fairy tales, but in this case they actually made it more black than in the tale. In the fairy tale, the Evil Queen was only shown to do bad things to Snow White. There was no indication that she had her husband murdered, slaughtered entire villages, or destroyed a civilization with a curse. That's what Regina has done. She's actually worse than the fairy tale character, and yet we're supposed to see her as more complex and sympathetic. In the writing for this show, that "there are shades of gray and it's more complex" only seems to apply to villains. If the heroes put one foot wrong, they're terrible, horrible people -- and things like telling a secret are seen as equal to mass murder. That's why I say this show's morality makes A Game of Thrones look like Sunday school because even though that show depicts evil in graphic detail, it never tries to make evil look sympathetic, never tears down people for being good (for being stupid, maybe, but not just for being good).

Somewhat related to this is the way that around this period in the show, they quit letting most of the characters have realistic emotional reactions. Regina got to cry and look sad over every little thing, but the good guys weren't allowed to be upset at all. Their lives had been totally disrupted over a misplaced vengeance quest, people they love have been murdered, there have been murder attempts made against them, and they don't act like any normal person would in response. When they do respond realistically to news of a betrayal, it's shown as a sign of darkness. This gets increasingly frustrating as the series continues and the characters start looking like plot devices instead of like people. They're so seldom allowed to react to things and have real feelings. We have to lurch onward to the next big twist.

And there are some other warped things, like their attempt at the Beauty and the Beast relationship. I'm okay with them conflating some fairy tale elements -- I think making Red Riding Hood also be the wolf was brilliant -- but they made Rumpelstiltskin, the overall villain of the piece, also be the Beast, as in Beauty and the Beast, and as in the story, Belle sees the goodness beneath his fearsome exterior. Except we never really see any goodness in him. He's utterly selfish and driven by a need for power at all costs. He doesn't want his curse broken because he wants to keep his power. When Belle first showed up in season one, she realized that he chose power over love and left him, essentially saying "call me when you're not evil." But in season two, she's back with him, and nothing seems to change her mind about him, not seeing him do evil things, not learning that he was deliberately keeping her away from her father, not learning that he murdered his first wife for leaving him, not watching him beat people nearly to death. She still constantly bleats about his good heart, which makes her look like one of those women who write love letters to serial killers.

I almost rage quit the show when Snow White had a crowning moment of awesome in taking out the villain in a creative way that was loaded with poetic justice, and the show (and all the characters) told us that was wrong, and she ended up groveling in apology and wallowing in guilt about it. The only thing that kept me hanging on for season 3 was Hook's big turnaround -- actually admitting that his entire revenge scheme had been wrong and that he'd been wasting his life -- and the voyage to Neverland that ended the season.

From there, things got better for a time, and then we got to the point where I no longer fast forward past the scenes I don't like. I have to fast forward to find the scenes I do like.

My Love/Hate Relationship with Once Upon a Time -- the Love

The series Once Upon a Time in many ways seems like it was created just for me. It's a fun mash-up of fairy tales that juxtaposes these elements with the real, modern world, which is right up the alley of someone who writes contemporary fantasy that plays with fairy tale elements. I actually have a love/hate relationship with this series. Sometimes I love it. Sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I hate to love it. Sometimes I love to hate it. When it's good, it's outstanding. When it's bad, it's so absolutely atrocious that I can't believe people aren't being fired for writing that crap (and the failures are about 95 percent the writing -- the casting and acting are responsible for a lot of what's good about the series).

I was recently rewatching some of the earlier episodes to prepare for this weekend's premiere, and while the series later goes off a cliff, develops one of the worst Mary Sues ever created by supposedly professional writers, and has a moral sensibility that makes A Game of Thrones look like Sunday school, the pilot is one of the most wonderful bits of television ever, and the first season, for the most part, is fun and full of potential.

Spoilers for the whole series may lie ahead

The concept alone is so brilliant and unique that it would be impossible to file the serial numbers off and use it as a jumping-off point for a story that fixes the later faults. The residents of the fairy tale world have been brought to a modern small town in Maine by a curse, where time hasn't moved for 28 years and they have no memory or awareness of their true selves. Enter the one person to escape the curse: the infant daughter of Snow White, who's grown up in our world, entirely unaware of her real heritage. So we have a tough, cynical Disney princess who doesn't know she's a princess and isn't ready to accept her identity, surrounded by fairy tale characters who don't know they're fairy tale characters -- except for the Evil Queen, who's not at all happy that the one person who can break her curse is in town. And then there's the backstory of how all this came to be, told in flashbacks in the fairy tale realm, bringing the old tales to life with some twists, and not necessarily told chronologically, so it's like fitting together pieces of a puzzle.

The concept has so many of my personal "yes, please!" story elements it's not even funny. We have fleshed-out fairy tales, where the archetypes are turned into actual characters and there's a lot more plot. We have fun twists on fairy tales -- the story isn't quite what you thought it was, while it still respects the spirit of the original tales. We have juxtapositions between the magical and the ordinary. We have fairy tale elements moved into the real world. We have secret/hidden identities. And there's non-linear storytelling (something I'd love to try but don't yet have a good idea for).

Not that the season is entirely perfect. There are a few obvious filler episodes. There are some incidents of Idiot Plotting, where the plot only works because some of the characters act like total idiots in a very out-of-character way. We get the first hints of the later moral wonkiness when Regina, the Evil Queen, is shown to be forcing the Huntsman to basically be her sex toy, since she ripped out his heart and can control him through it, and she's ordering him into her bedroom. I can't think of a way that isn't rape, and yet the writers don't see it that way and still don't understand the fuss about it. And when the reason the Evil Queen really hates Snow White is revealed, it's a big case of "Seriously? That's it?" I suppose that the very concept of the curse is mostly plot device because it makes no sense if you think about it. It has to be one of the dumbest revenge schemes ever (until the fourth season, when we see an even dumber one). We didn't know it at the time, but these minor flaws were harbingers of what lay ahead.

Of the good: I absolutely loved the twist about Prince Charming's true identity and the way it was revealed. The show has become dependent on Big!Shocking!Twists! (sometimes in lieu of actual pacing and development), but that was a twist and a shock that worked. In a flashback, we saw our Prince Charming acting like a total jerk. I figured that we were probably going to see him learn A Valuable Lesson that would show how he came to be the good man we know, but then a second later he was killed. And then we met the guy we know of as Prince Charming and learned that the prince was really a poor farmer's son who was adopted by the king. Now his twin, the one the farmer kept, has to step into the role of the prince in order for the kingdom to fulfill a treaty. The death of the prince was a huge shock, but then the revelation that our prince wasn't really a prince was a fun twist on the story.

Another fun bit of fairy tale fleshing out was the way Snow White became a badass bandit after being driven out of the palace by the Evil Queen. She didn't run into the dwarfs until later, so instead of immediately becoming a housekeeper, like in the story, she learned to survive in the woods, became an expert tracker and archer, and robbed the Evil Queen's carriages (is it robbery if all that stuff is rightfully hers?). She was good friends with Red Riding Hood, who turned out to be a werewolf, so she was also the Big, Bad Wolf, and Granny was a tough old broad good with a crossbow (or knitting needles). There were a lot of strong female characters who weren't the usual "strong female characters" (who are usually more like Rambo in drag).

I also enjoyed seeing the parallels between the fairy tale stories and the way these people's lives were going in our world. Hansel and Gretel were homeless kids hiding out in an abandoned house and shoplifting candy from the drugstore. Jiminy Cricket is the town psychiatrist. Cinderella is a hotel maid.

The season finale was another one of those near-perfect hours of television. After a whole season of Emma, our heroine, going toe-to-toe with the Evil Queen, with the deck heavily stacked against her, everything came to a head, and it was all about faith, love, belief, and just desserts.

And then season two happened, but that's another story ...

Doctor Who Returns

I suppose as a good geek (even if I am stealthy about it), I need to talk about the Doctor Who season premiere. Oddly, though, I don't have a lot to say. I haven't really been feeling it for the past year, and I can't tell you why. There's nothing I can point to and say I dislike. I just don't care quite as much as I used to.

Then again, there is the possibility that what I have is a more normal state of caring, downgraded slightly from a state of rabid obsession.

I wonder if it has something to do with easier access making it feel less special. Before last season, I didn't get BBCAmerica on my cable service. The episodes were available OnDemand, usually the next day, but if I wanted to see it live, I had to depend on other people, who sometimes used other means to obtain the episodes. I frequently got together with friends to watch, and premieres and finales were usually special occasions. Now that I can just turn on the TV when it comes on, maybe there's less of a sense of anticipation and excitement.

Anyway, it's hard to talk about a two-parter after seeing only the first part. It feels like the whole episode was setup for a big conclusion.

But there were fun things. Making an entrance on a tank while playing electric guitar in medieval England gets bonus style points. There was lots of continuity. And I think we're going to get some fun with time travel in the way this plays out. I'm a big fan of time travel as a real story element rather than just being a means of getting to the location where the story will take place -- all that wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. And I do love the fact that they based an entire episode (or more) on a hypothetical question asked in the classic series.

Hmm, now maybe I have talked myself into getting excited. I ought to rewatch the episode OnDemand.

For the rest of the week, be prepared for some ranting about Once Upon a Time. I've been rewatching previous seasons and veering wildly between swooning and wanting to throw things at the writers.

The Return of Continuum

The new (and final) season of Continuum starts tonight, in the post-prime time slot on SyFy (10 Central).

For those who haven't seen it, this is a series about the ramifications of time travel -- can you change the future by changing the past, and what are the ramifications of that? It's about a cop in a dystopian, corporate-controlled future who gets caught in the wave when a group of terrorist sets off a device to send them back in time so they can change the past and create a different future. She just wants to get home to her husband and son, but doing that will require finding a way to travel in time, and that requires catching the terrorists. The other issue is that if anything is changed, it might change the future so she might not have a husband or son to go back to, so she has to be very, very careful how she goes about things.

And it gets more complicated from there.

Her primary ally in all this is the genius kid she knows will grow up to be the architect of their future -- a kind of unholy mix of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who runs the corporation that seems to control all technology. He's certainly good now (though with some issues), but whether or not his future self is good is rather ambiguous. It's also ambiguous whether his future actions suggest that he remembers these events, so that they've already happened.

It's kind of headspinning, but in a good way. I'm a sucker for time travel stories that actually play with the nature of time and traveling in time as a plot device (as opposed to the "travel to a place/time where our adventure will happen" stories). The original Terminator film is one of my all-time favorite movies. I'm less enamored of the sequels, though I did like the TV series. I love Connie Willis's time travel novels, which get into chaos theory and whether the timeline is self-correcting so that it's impossible to mess things up without something else happening to set everything right. The SyFy web site has a decent Continuum 101 page to refresh yourself, though I'm not sure this is a series you could just dive into at this point.

I'll be watching tonight because my future self sent me a reminder, which means she watched it, which means if I don't watch it I could be creating a paradoxical split timestream, and that never works out well.

Incidentally, I'm sure this series will come up at FenCon this year, since our theme is time travel, and there are lots of panels about time travel books, movies, and TV.

The Stealth Science Fiction Series

I was late to the game with Person of Interest, due to a scheduling conflict. I was always out when it was on, and at the time it wasn't available on demand, and though I was intrigued, I didn't really think of setting the VCR for it since I hadn't ever seen it (yeah, I'm behind the times and don't have a DVR, but I do have plans to correct that). I caught episodes, usually during reruns, on weeks when I had a break from the activity on that night, and then picked up the series for real during the second season. By then, the science fiction elements were really coming out.

Last weekend, I finally got to see the earlier episodes via the WGN marathon, and wow, they really did manage to sneak a science fiction series onto the procedural-heavy CBS under the guise of a procedural. In the first season, this looked like another good-guy vigilante series along the lines of The Equalizer or Leverage, where there are good guys with some advantage that allows them to intervene on behalf of ordinary people. We knew the good guys were getting information from a surveillance-oriented supercomputer, but otherwise the plots were all about the intervention of the week.

And then once they were entrenched, things started to change. Yes, they were still doing that intervention thing, but the computer became more important, and issues of artificial intelligence and what counts as a "being" came to the forefront. By the end of the latest season, the series was full-on science fiction, about a war between two intelligent -- sentient, even -- supercomputers who had very different ideas about how to carry out the task of protecting humanity. One still saw individuals as important and even seemed to have some affection for its human colleagues, and the other wanted perfection for all, at all costs.

They'd never have been able to sell that storyline up front, and I think the show is the better for it because they were able to start with a focus on the human characters and gradually build the science fiction elements as the characters themselves became more aware of what was really going on. Now that they've gone all-in on the concept, there's no telling where this could go. Are we seeing the birth of something like the Skynet system from The Terminator? Will the battle of machines go global? It's all rather riveting, and definitely worth watching if you like a dash of science fiction in your crimebusting.

Plus, possibly the most awesome dog on television, a former police/military dog with a taste for first editions and played by a dog who seems to take more pleasure in his work than any human actor (seriously, there is sheer glee all over that dog in all his scenes. That dog loves his work).

Follow-up: The Heirs to Firefly

They've announced that both of the Not!Firefly shows, Dark Matter and Killjoys, have been renewed, so I guess they'll live longer than the real thing did.

What did I end up thinking about them after seeing the first season of both?

Dark Matter had an intriguing premise and a lot of promise, but I often found it frustrating. The episodes themselves weren't all that great, to be honest. The plots were usually killing time until they got to the big twist or revelation at the end of the episode, and that was what kept me watching. Usually the revelation was a big enough "oh my!" to have me anxiously waiting for the next episode to see how it would play out.

Only a few of the characters managed to emerge from the shadows of their Firefly predecessors. And there were a few episodes that you could map pretty easily to Firefly episodes.

One of the things I found frustrating about the premise of a group of people waking with no memories of who they were was how we ended up learning about them. I was hoping for more of them running into people and situations where they were known and having to piece it together from there, or them doing any kind of investigation, but for the most part, they were just told. A facial recognition search gave their identities (for the most part). Some memories were recovered with a technobabble solution. There were only a few cases where there were twists that came about through action.

And then there's the ill-advised attempt to fit a romantic plot into the mix. They never did much with it, never showed the relationship enough for us to be at all invested in it so that we'd care whether or not the latest revelation would throw a monkey wrench in it. What we learned about those people should have made us desperately concerned about what it would do to them, and instead it was kind of a non-event. We never saw what they were getting out of the relationship, never saw it as something they needed that was helping them or changing them. When it stopped (if it did -- it was vague enough to make it hard to tell), it didn't seem to change anything for either of them or for the dynamic.

It's a show I'll keep watching because I'm intrigued by the questions and answers, but the actual episodes aren't that much fun.

Killjoys, on the other hand, feels more like the rightful Heir to Firefly. It's more of a tone and feel than a direct mapping. The world feels rough and lived in, and the characters have a real sense of history with each other. The episodes on their own were fun and exciting.

Again, relationships were a weak spot. I'm not sure why they felt the need to hook up two of the leads so soon, and it was a pretty bland, nothing relationship, other than the serious fallout that resulted, which they then got over pretty quickly. It's hard to tell if what they really have going is a potential triangle, or if that's just something it's easy to read into it based on standard TV patterns. I guess they wanted to quickly intensify the relationship between the two characters without a history with each other, and sex was an easy way to do it.

TV writers so seldom get romance right, though. That's probably going to be my gripe with 99 percent of TV series.

The finale of this one launched it into a potentially interesting direction, and I'm along for the ride.

Not!Firefly

I've really missed Sci Fi (now SyFy) Fridays. I don't know how long they've been showing wrestling in that spot, but it seems like forever since the golden age of three (or more) solid hours of science fiction programming on Friday nights. Usually, there was at least one Stargate show, often two (SG-1 and Atlantis), sometimes Battlestar Galactica, sometimes Doctor Who. And for a brief time they showed the entire series of Firefly in the pre-prime time slot. I'd settle on the sofa with a pizza at six and watch all night.

And now it's back. They've moved wrestling to another night (it still doesn't belong on the network, but I guess if it helps pay the bills and keep the other stuff on, I can live with it), so we have three hours of science fiction shows on Friday night. And, wonder of wonders, two of those actually involve spaceships, something SyFy has avoided for a long time while they've focused on shows that were more "paranormal" than science fiction. I like a lot of the paranormal stuff, but I also enjoy spaceship shows.

The first hour is devoted to the returning Defiance, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic Western with aliens on earth. The next two hours are new shows that both fall into the category of Not!Firefly. Otherwise known as "we loved Firefly, so we wrote fanfic and then filed off the serial numbers and added a twist or two." I can hardly criticize, as my very first attempt at writing was Star Wars mental fanfic with the serial numbers filed off. In my defense, I was twelve. And I didn't get a TV development deal out of it. But hey, I liked (loved, obsessed over) Firefly, so a couple of hours of Almost, but Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Firefly (Really! It's Totally Different!) is fine with me.

So, the first hour of Not!Firefly Night is Killjoys, which has only had one episode so far. Basically, Not!Inara is the captain, except her mystical special training seems to have been as a ninja-like assassin instead of as a courtesan, and it seems like Not!Simon is her first officer, only he's a thief instead of a doctor, and Not!Simon and Not!Mal are brothers, and they're all bounty hunters instead of smugglers. The world is very, very Firefly. We even have the evil corporation that seems to be in charge of everything. I liked the pilot, although the weak link is Not!Mal, who has none of Mal's personality or charm. Maybe he'll warm up as they go along.

Then the next round of Not!Firefly is Dark Matter, where they barely bothered filing the serial numbers off the characters, though they're in a totally different situation. It's basically Firefly Alt-Universe fanfic with the character names changed. A group of people wakes up from some kind of cryosleep on a spaceship, with no memory of who they are, why they're there, or where they're going, but they do seem to each have some kind of skill that comes to them without any memory of having learned it or having used it. The woman who just falls into the captain role is Not!Zoe. Then there's Not!Simon and Not!Jayne. There's a young girl who's a blend of Kaylee and River, and RivLee is so obvious in her origins that I can't even put the Not! in there. I'm thinking that the Asian swordsman is maybe a gender-flipped Not!Inara (for the mystic exoticness, not so much for being a courtesan, though who knows?), and then we have Not!Book. The only slight twist is a rather snarky android with homicidal tendencies, who did not appear in Firefly (unless maybe she's our Not!Mal). We don't learn any of the characters' names until the very end of the pilot, and they refer to each other by numbers that I can't keep straight, which doesn't help my tendency to refer to them by their Firefly character names.

I was a little ho-hum on this one, mostly amusing myself by mapping all the Firefly parallels, until the very end of the episode and we learned who they were, and that intrigued me enough that I immediately watched the next episode (I was watching OnDemand). I'm kind of a sucker for "blank slate" stories, the idea of what would you be if you didn't know who you were, and I have a feeling that the identities we learned about may not be that straightforward (I have theories, based on the obvious Firefly 2.0 situation, but we shall see if I'm right).

It's not Firefly, nowhere near the same level of writing or acting, and I wouldn't recommend that they re-run the real deal in that pre-prime time slot because the newcomers would suffer in comparison, but if you have the original memorized and want something new that kind of scratches a similar itch, check these out.

That Game of Thrones Episode

Although there's been a lot of disturbing stuff on the Game of Thrones TV series, the ending of last week's episode really irked me, enough that I fired off an angry tweet. Now, after thinking about it and reading other responses, I think I've unpacked what exactly it was that bothered me so much. Spoilers ahead for books and TV series.

1) It was a breaking point/final straw about lazy writing
It's a sad reality that the kneejerk reaction to a woman doing something on the Internet that displeases a certain kind of man is a rape threat. I've been fortunate to have avoided that, probably due to being too obscure an author to get that kind of attention, but I've seen it happen to way too many other female authors. "You should be raped/you deserve to be raped/I ought to come rape you" is used to mean "I disagree with your opinion," "what you said made me feel uncomfortable," "you aren't writing fast enough and I want more books," "you took a character in a direction I didn't like" or "the e-book of your newest release didn't download onto my reader at precisely the stroke of midnight even though I pre-ordered it."

The Game of Thrones TV series is starting to feel the same way. They need to show that it's a dangerous, gritty world? Rape. They need to show that women are vulnerable and aren't safe? Rape. They need to show that a man is a twisted jerk? Rape. They want to shock the audience? Rape. An exposition scene might be boring? Rape of a topless or naked woman.

So, basically a team of supposedly professional writers for a highly praised, award-winning TV series is functioning on the creative level of your average Internet troll. It's lazy writing, prurience masquerading as "grit."

2) "But it's realistic!" "There's rape in the books!"
Yes, women have been raped throughout history. Yes, there's rape in the books. But there was lots of other unsavory stuff going on in those historical eras and in the books. The books depict the terrible aftermath of a war, showing how it's the common people who are suffering even after the nobles have wrapped up their war over which nobles will be in power. There's starvation because crops were destroyed in battle. Homes were destroyed. There's a flood of refugees on the roads. Lawless bands of former soldiers abruptly cut loose at the end of the war are roaming around, terrorizing the population. And, yes, this includes rape. The show mostly boils this down to rape, skimming over the rest. It's the shorthand for "things are tough all over." Also, most of the key rape scenes in the TV series were not rapes in the books or happened to different characters in a different context. They're adding bonus rape to major characters.

3) Did these writers even read the books?
I feel like in the latest scene involving Sansa that the writers were so eager to include a rape of a major character (perhaps not coincidentally played by an actress who recently became "legal") that they entirely missed the point of this segment of the books. The theme of that story line was fakery because there was a lot going on that wasn't what it seemed. While a woman was raped at the corresponding part of the story in similar circumstances (the consummation of an arranged marriage), the point was that the Boltons were trying to cement their hold on the north by marrying Ramsay to "Arya Stark," who was actually an impostor. Which meant this marriage actually did nothing to solidify their hold. Meanwhile, the Lords of the North who were gathered to witness this wedding were actually plotting against them and undermining them. Even the minstrel playing in the hall was actually someone else in disguise. It looked like the ultimate Bolton triumph, but readers could tell that they were actually building a house of sand that was in danger of collapsing completely. Although the events were horrifying, there was an iota of hope that it was all about to turn around. But the TV show replaced the fake Arya with the real Sansa Stark, so this marriage actually does solidify their claim. The lords aren't there. Mance isn't there in his minstrel disguise. So it's a very different event from what happened in the book.

4) It was given a really creepy context that wasn't in the book.
In the book, Ramsay is a monster, all the way through, with no redeeming qualities. There might be a few twisted individuals who identify with him, but that's on them because I don't get the feeling that Martin is in any way trying to make him sympathetic. On TV, this character is played by a handsome actor with a lot of charm and charisma. When we meet him, he's tormenting Theon, a traitor who bears a lot of responsibility for what happened to the Stark family, so although Ramsay is cruel, there's the sense of "the enemy of my enemy." He gets the snarky one-liners and clever quips. We actually see his degradation of Theon instead of it being something that's already happened by the time we catch up with the character again. Show-Ramsay has a bevy of beautiful women at his beck and call to help him with his sadism. When he tortures and castrates Theon, there are naked women on the screen. Ramsay is depicted in a consensual relationship with a beautiful woman who's even jealous of his arranged bride. In short, on the show, he's shown to be kind of a cool dude, and is pretty much the way the Internet trolls would like to see themselves -- they're irresistible to beautiful women, but they also get to force themselves on the women who think they're too good for them. That makes the scene in question feel like it was written to cater to the worst elements of the audience.

5) It actually does make a difference that it happens to a secondary character.
This sequence in the book is mostly about Theon's growth, how the way Ramsay treats his wife is what breaks Theon out of his tortured conditioning and Stockholm Syndrome and makes him help the girl and defy Ramsay -- it's his redemption arc. While it is kind of icky that a woman's rape is used for a man's growth, the woman is a supporting, secondary character, and that's what supporting characters do. They help create and support the plots for the major characters. There are plenty of major female characters in the books, most of whom are not raped and who have their own arcs that aren't about supporting the emotional growth of men. I'll withhold judgment until I see how the aftermath plays out here, but the camera did focus on Theon's face and his reaction, so there's a good chance that this arc will still be largely about his growth. The problem here is that Sansa is a major character in her own right who has her own story and her own arc, so one of the major female characters in the story (who has not been raped at the point where the books leave off so far) may have been demoted into a position of supporting the arc of a male character (who is arguably a less important character than she is in the books), and they're using a rape of her to do so.

So, all this is why my reaction to this episode was "Seriously, guys? Oh, come on." I'm not going to stop watching because I want to see how the story plays out (and goodness knows if we'll ever get to the end of the books), but I did want to raise my voice. I don't know if the outcry will actually make these guys think, but I don't want anyone to have any illusions that no one has noticed what they're doing here. It would be lovely if the freedom offered by HBO weren't just used to make television with all the maturity of a 13-year-old boy. "Mature audiences" really should mean more than "hee hee, boobies!"

TV news and Defiance Review

First, Warehouse 13 is coming back April 29, but the season premiere (the resolution of last season's cliffhanger) is currently available online via the SyFy web site and OnDemand (depending on your cable company). I watched that last night, but I may have to rewatch the older episodes they've also put OnDemand because I'd forgotten a lot.

I also watched the series premiere of Defiant, the new SyFy show. I'll definitely watch it again, but I'm not in love with it yet. I've found that the shows I get really into have some character or some question (or some question about a character) that makes me eager to see what happens next, not so much for the plot but because I can see that the mix of character and situation is going to be interesting. A lot of it comes from a sense of surprise. For instance, one of the things that got me intrigued about Firefly when I saw the first episode that was aired ("The Train Job") was the revelation that on this ship full of criminals pulling off heists, the one who was wanted by the Feds was the prim and proper doctor. I remember that sense of "Oh, now this could be interesting." So far, there's none of that in Defiance. I don't dislike it, but there was nothing that had me really curious about how things would work out.

From what I could tell of the backstory, there was an alien invasion by an alliance of races that planned to terraform earth to be a new home for them, but they weren't prepared for earth already being inhabited. There was war, until the soldiers decided not to fight anymore, and now there's a tenuous peace in a weird postapocalyptic landscape. Our Hero is a Mal Reynolds/Han Solo type, a former soldier who's an embittered veteran of a famous battle who's now something of a mercenary/scavenger, and he travels with his adopted alien daughter, a war orphan he took in and raised as his own. They get robbed by a roving gang and then are rescued and taken to the town of Defiance, formerly known as St. Louis, and if you've ever seen any movie or TV series ever, you pretty much know everything that will happen after that.

It has a bit of a Firefly vibe, with the Western tropes in a science fiction situation, and there's a dash or two of Mad Max in there, as well. I find a few of the characters interesting, though not all that intriguing (there's no real mystery to any of them, nothing I'm dying to find out). I'm a little worried about the teen Romeo and Juliet plot because the kiss of death for most of the recent science fiction series (V, Terra Nova, Revolution) has been the annoying teens put front and center. But my main problem with the pilot was that there were no surprises whatsoever. Starting about five minutes into the show, I had outlined pretty much what would happen. A lot of these tropes are right out of famous movies, down to the scenes and even some of the lines. Even the big "shocker" in the episode's tag was a bit of a "well, duh!" Granted, I'm hard to surprise because I know too much about story structure, but it would be nice to have one or two developments that I didn't see coming or that didn't seem so horribly telegraphed. I feel like I can even see how the series is likely to progress, so I hope they throw in a few monkey wrenches along the way to shake things up. Maybe the obvious triangle won't happen or the obvious budding relationship between the currently at-odds younger people won't come about, but I won't hold my breath. Still, it's science fiction on television. There are spaceships and aliens, and so far the teens aren't too prominent, so I'll be watching unless something else gets in the way.

Surviving the SyFy Movies: Chupacabra vs. the Alamo

I have to admit to having a slight fondness for some of the Saturday-night SyFy movies. I prefer the Fantasy Cheese genre to the Mockbusters or the Horror/Monster types (though Mansquito was highly entertaining), but any of them can be fun when I'm in the right mood.

I was really looking forward to Chupacabra vs. the Alamo because it pretty much writes itself. You know from the title exactly what's going to happen. Sadly, this one was just plain bad, not awesomely, entertainingly bad. Spoilers below, as if you can't figure out everything based on the title.

To start with, I suspect that no one involved with the film has ever been to the Alamo, to San Antonio or to Texas (after this movie, they probably won't be allowed to visit Texas). They also apparently haven't looked at a map of Texas. The basic plot is that the chupacabras have migrated from Mexico to near San Antonio via the drug smuggling tunnels. That's some pretty impressive tunneling technology, considering that San Antonio isn't a border city and that would be a really, really long tunnel, not to mention the fact that there's a <i>river</i> between Mexico and Texas. Oh, and there's apparently a lush forest with ferns all over the ground 80 miles from San Antonio.

So, anyway, Erik Estrada (who has not aged badly since his CHiPs glory days, but who also hasn't taken acting lessons since then) plays a DEA agent (with the troubled relationships with his teenage kids that seems to have become mandatory in these movies -- the horror will end up bringing them together as a family) investigating the slaughter of a group of cartel members in one of these tunnels right outside San Antonio. But those wounds don't look like anything a human would have made! From there, we get a lot of badly CGIed "chupacabra" attacks, with the chupacabras looking like they took photos of chihuahuas and digitally altered them. The effects are so bad that the actors look like they're just flailing for no reason and the CGI chihuahuas are in a different plane of existence. But that's not the worst effects failure.

You know how in old movies, it's pretty obvious that Cary Grant is sitting in a car in a studio while scenery is being projected on a screen behind him? There's a lot of that here, where Erik Estrada rides his motorcycle past all the major San Antonio landmarks on his way to the crime scene outside the city, and it's so fake that it's laughable. In fact, the effects are at "spoof" level, without the filmmakers seemingly being in on the joke. I know these movies generally have a "here's five bucks, go make a movie, kid" budget, but if you can't fake it well, fake it with style.

I will give them props for a scene in which two teenage girls are in the house alone when the monsters invade (we won't get into how the rabid CGI chihuahuas can get through closed and locked doors), and they actually do things that make sense instead of just screaming like idiots. The girl in the kitchen takes out one with an electric carving knife and pulls a Gremlins on another in the microwave (yes, our fearsome monsters are small enough to fit in the microwave). The girl in the bedroom takes out one with a hot steam iron to the face.

I skipped past a few more scenes of various attacks, though it does look like the beasties followed the DEA agent home and are now on his trail through San Antonio, but somehow, a hardy group of random people who've survived previous attacks ends up at the Alamo (of course, given the title) right at closing time, where they team up with the tour guide in a Davy Crockett hat (of course) who knows the place better than anyone, and they prepare for a last stand, using antique weapons they take from display cases. No mention is made of finding ammunition for these weapons. In fact, they fire them without having to load them, so I guess loaded weapons were on display, and they still work more than 150 years later. But when all their plans fail, they mention the legend that there was an escape tunnel dug, but no one's ever been able to find it, in all these years of the Alamo being thoroughly explored -- oh, wait, here it is, behind this crudely boarded-up wall in a utility room (yes, a utility room that apparently existed in an early 19th century mission/fort). And since they have an escape route, they decide to trap all the chupacabras in the Alamo, rig a bunch of explosives (that they conveniently happen to have handy) and escape through the tunnel. Mind you, the tunnel -- supposedly built in 1836 and lost since then -- comes out in a parking lot, where there's an easy-access hatch. Yes, the parking lot pavers somehow knew to put in a hatch over a tunnel lost since 1836.

So, yeah, not only do they blow up the Alamo (sacrilege!), but they don't seem to realize that the Alamo is right smack downtown in a major city. Why would the wee beasties focus on chasing a handful of people into the Alamo when there's an entire smorgasbord of people just milling around on the Riverwalk across the street? Not to mention that San Antonio is a military city. If they're under attack from an invasion of strange creatures, they aren't going to have to rely on a few DEA agents, a couple of street thugs and an overeager tour guide. If it's anything like my last visit to San Antonio, about half the US Air Force is probably across the street at the Riverwalk. Also, the Alamo itself isn't all that big.  Here's a picture from my last trip. If you tortured yourself with this movie, you can see the difference. It's no longer a highly fortified position you'd retreat to in a crisis.

X-Files Nostalgia

The sf/fantasy/related stuff blog tor.com has started doing a rewatch of The X-Files, and that's brought me right back to my Stealth Geek roots. When that show first came on, I had one long-distance friend who watched it, and every episode left me dying to talk about it. At the same time, people were starting to really talk about this "Internet" thing, and we'd finally got access at work. I was working at a university medical center and had a pre-Windows computer, so Internet access meant a VAX, text-only, which mostly meant e-mail. I read a magazine article about how X-Files fandom was really taking off on the Internet in this USENET group called alt.tv.x-files, and I set out to find a way to access it. I ended up finding a way to use gopher to get to a read-only newsgroup server to read the messages, and then found a mail-to-news gateway for making posts. It was like a whole new world opened up for me. I'd usually been the solitary geek in any group I hung around with, barring the college years when I had a big group of geek friends. This was like finding my college friends all over again, but there were hundreds of them, all over the world. It was awesome.

I even got lured away to another job based almost entirely on the basis that the new place offered full Internet access. I could finally get onto a real USENET server. Then I really started posting and having conversations. I made some friends I'm still in touch with (and at least one person who turned out to be someone I knew from my professional life). The term "Stealth Geek" got coined when we were discussing Mulder. He had very much a geeky personality, but was kind of a sex symbol and not the way the media usually portray people with his interests. The Lone Gunmen are the more typical media geeks. The term "Stealth Geek" really touched a nerve, and next thing I knew, it had become this thing that took on a life of its own.

Eventually, I made friends at the new job who were also into the show, so I had real-life people to discuss it with. I developed a few other interests so I was less focused in my obsession. And, let's face it, the show started kind of sucking. Still, I went to an X-Files convention, where I won a trivia contest and got to meet William B. Davis, the Cigarette Smoking Man himself (who may be the most charming man I've ever met -- I switched my character loyalties on the spot. Mulder who?). My now-defunct pen name was an X-Files reference (although it later became a character on SG-1, but I had it first).

I actually kind of liked the last season because the original characters had started irritating me. Although I will confess to having had a crush on David Duchovny (we share a birthday! It must have been fate!), by the end of his run on the series, he seemed to be phoning it in, and his attitude as seen in talk show appearances irked me because he struck me as being almost embarrassed by his claim to fame, like he wanted to distance himself from those crazy people who liked this show. Now, when a commercial where he's done the voiceover comes on, I have to mute it. I was also an extreme anti-shipper. For one thing, Scully could do better, and Mulder would have needed a lifetime of therapy to be good boyfriend material. For another, I remember all the interviews with Chris Carter from the first season in which he constantly said that Mulder and Scully would never hook up romantically, that he wanted to explore the idea of a man and a woman working together and being friends without going the usual romance route, and I felt rather betrayed that he changed his tune. Then there's the fact that the show lost total control of its own mythology, the outcome of the underlying plot question of the entire series (what happened to Samantha) was incredibly anticlimactic, and the series devolved into self-parody, with way too many self-referential comedy episodes.

Sadly, I find that the show hasn't aged well for me. I've caught reruns when the Sci Fi channel shows them, and I can only watch that last season because it's less of a jolt -- I expect those episodes to be weak, but when it's one I remember as good, I get that embarrassing "I liked this?" response.

I taped the whole series while it was on because at one time, I'd watch it multiple times each week, all the better to discuss all the trivial nuances. I realized this summer that I haven't watched any of those tapes in nearly a decade, and I made the momentous decision to start taping over them instead of buying new tapes (yes, I still use a VCR and don't yet have a DVR). Season 2 of Haven is now where the X-Files used to be (a later season, I think).

So, I guess I won't be participating in the rewatch, although I think I remember the rewatch recapper and some of the commenters from my a.t.x-f. days. I do have the pilot on official VHS (from before the days of DVDs -- and this is a series I'd lost interest in before DVDs became available), so maybe I'll give it another whirl to see if going back to the beginning recaptures my interest. It would be a little sad if something that once was such a huge part of my life had become something that now just irks me.

Stealth Geek of the Week: Ben Wyatt

The general idea of the Stealth Geek grew out of a way to describe someone who doesn't fit the usual stereotypical image of a geek but who still is into geeky stuff and who may have geeky traits (see the first post on this blog for the full FAQ).

For an example, I bring you the Stealth Geek of the Week.

This week's Stealth Geek of the Week is the character Ben Wyatt of NBC's Parks and Recreation (played by Adam Scott, and I have no idea if he's a Stealth Geek).

At first glance, Ben seems like your typical buttoned-down business type. He enters the story as a state auditor come to fix the town's troubled finances and ends up staying in town to be assistant city manager. There's nothing obviously geeky about him.

But then his new colleagues get to know him and start understanding the depths of his geekiness, which he constantly denies, claiming that his geeky interests are actually pretty mainstream. Yes, he may refer to Jedi mind tricks in meetings, but everyone's seen Star Wars, right? And there's no point in making jokes about him staying home to rewatch the Lord of the Rings trilogy because he's actually not a huge fan of Peter Jackson's interpretation. If he looks like he's having a bad day, it's silly to ask if it's because A Game of Thrones was canceled. They'd never cancel A Game of Thrones because it has mainstream appeal, and really, it's just telling human stories in a fantasy world.

Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

But his inner geek came out loud and proud when his friends encouraged him to treat himself by buying something that would really make him feel good, even if it's silly, useless and expensive -- and he bought a full-on Batman outfit.

What was lovely was that his friends remained supportive and encouraging instead of mocking him (and, really, they're super Twilight freaks, so they have no room to talk).

However, if he wears the Batman outfit anywhere other than to a costume party or possibly a science fiction or comic book convention, he loses the title of Stealth Geek.

Do you have suggestions for a future Stealth Geek of the week? Let me know! I may not do one every week, and my choice may have nothing to do with recent events, just something I thought about.

Geeky TV

I grabbed this blog address years ago when it became available and have just parked the old Stealth Geek FAQ on it, but I've been thinking it might be fun to have a blog devoted solely to my more geeky interests. There may be some overlap with my writing blog, but here I can go all-out.

Some people are comic book geeks. Others are gamers. Some might like movies. I guess I'm mostly a TV/book geek. I like my science fiction and fantasy, and one of my main reasons for diving into the Internet back in the mid-90s was to find other people I could discuss my favorite TV shows with. I had a phase where I didn't seem to watch anything that didn't involve either vampires, spaceships or aliens. I've since come to be repulsed by vampires (please, make them go away), and I've branched out a bit in my viewing.

Although the Channel Formerly Known as Sci Fi (aka -- shudder -- SyFy) has not lived up to my expectations, they do seem to be pushing all the right buttons for me in most of their summer series. I love the quirky action/humor blend of Warehouse 13, though this season didn't quite work for me and I don't think they've recaptured the essence of what I loved in the first season. The season finale was rather mindblowing, but I don't think I was as freaked out as a lot of people were by some of the events.

Like, for instance, Hitler. I had no idea it was an Internet meme to have "Hitler" respond to various things, using movie clips with made-up subtitles (this same clip seems to be popular), but this made me laugh until I cried, even though I don't entirely agree with the sentiments. It's probably funniest if you don't understand German, and it's loaded with spoilers for the season 3 finale:



I'm rather impressed with how they fit the subtitles to the rhythm and cadence of the speech and the body language.

But my real favorite SyFy summer series is Haven, and that got renewed for a third season yesterday. I'm not a Stephen King fan, but I love this series that's extremely loosely based on his novella "The Colorado Kid." Strangely, the book is a straight mystery while the series is very King-esque paranormal. I get the sense that the writers have spent way too much time on the TV Tropes site, so they know all the usual cliches and deliberately set out to undermine or break them. I've been writing long enough that it's hard to surprise me, plot-wise, but they frequently surprise me. In their podcasts, the writers refer to lots of other things I like, including The X-Files, Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, so I figure they're stealth geeks, too.