Sunday night links.

* I can't bring myself to watch the murder of Neda Soltani on YouTube, but a lot of other people have. It's remarkable how quickly her face has become that of the protests in Iran.

* The New York Times has an article exposing abusive practices in the freelance textbook market in New York, with my good friend and old co-blogger PClem providing some of the ugly details.

* Polls show widespread public support for a public health care option. Will this remind Democrats in Congress that they swept the last two elections?

* Buffy vs Twilight.

* Infinite Summer begins tonight. Kottke kicks things off.

The Buffy rebooters have "reached out" to Joss Whedon. Whedon has demurred.

Late night shouldn't-have-taken-that-nap links.

* Stephen Colbert to guest-edit Newsweek. That's just weird.

* Yesterday marked the first night in my life where I had any real desire to see The Tonight Show; the Daily Beast has a few highlights. For my part I thought Conan did pretty good, despite some jackass fans who demonstrated that adoration and heckling meet again someplace on the other side. Someday I may even watch the Tonight Show again.

* But you don't have to take my word for it: Conan's got the coveted Obama endorsement now, too.

* Anthony Stewart Head is still teasing a Ripper spinoff.

* 'No Lifeguard on Duty': empty and abandoned motel pools.

* 75% of Americans now convinced terrorists have superpowers. Advantage: idiocracy.

* Production design for Pixar's Up.

* And ethanol still sucks.

Sunday!

* Great Archie comics experiments of 1989-1990.

* This ruling of Sotomayor's, it must be said, was a little douchebaggy.

* "You almost get the sense guys like Thiessen are hoping for an attack so that they can blame Obama when it happens." Almost?

* Republicans who happily sat through three-and-a-half years of Bush vacations are outraged! that Obama took a night off.

* Tough times at Harvard U.

* Non-Whedon directors for the Buffy reboot. Wes Anderson snubbed again, though I bet Tarantino could do a good job with it.

Thursday night links.

* Is the rumored Buffy reboot just a ploy to get Sarah Michelle Gellar on board?

* This brief history of Star Trek reboots makes a persuasive case for the centrality of the "reboot" in the logic of SF franchise.

* Manga collector faces 15 years for comics collection. More at MeFi.

* Hulu has a desktop client.

* Alan Moore's "Future Shocks" goes digital. These are all good, get to iTunes immediately.

* Today's bizarre outrage of the day is a Fox-News-backed conspiracy theory that Obama is selectively closing Republican-owned Chrysler dealerships. Nate Silver and Kevin Drum debunk.

* Also at FiveThirtyEight: Operation Gringo: Can the Republicans Sacrifice the Hispanic Vote and Win the White House?

Wednesday!

* I have a review in the Indy this week of Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright. Keywords: copyright Constitution Buffy pornography Superstar Mystery Science Theater 3000.

* Cases for and against Buffy without Joss.

* Sarah Connor creator: I won't be back.

* Some days I think Marvel just doesn't get women. Via MeFi.

* theauteurs.com: Streaming video of Criterion Collection films. (via Vu)

* And the year of Senatorial madness shows no sign of ending: Joe Sestak intends to unseat Arlen and Burris's scumbaggery is caught on tape.

Buffy relaunch without Joss? I'm trying to think of a more surefire way to ensure failure for the project than deliberately alienating the worshipful Whedon fanbase, but nothing comes to mind.

A few quick Dollhouse reflections in light of tonight's "season" finale. Spoilers below, naturally.

* All in all the Alpha plotline was fairly disappointing, my appreciation for Alan Tudyk aside. It reduced a little too neatly to a run-of-the-mill serial-killer plotline when there seemed to be much, much more potential there. I'm not calling network interference, necessarily, but things seemed rushed and a little undercooked. Joss fumbled this one.

(UPDATE: To be more precise, he fumbled the plotline in almost exactly the same way he fumbled the Adam and First Evil storylines on Buffy. The composite event—which shouldn't have been caused by a mechanical malfunction—should have made Alpha actually Godlike. Alpha's portrayal in this episode ruins almost everything about what was interesting about the character to begin with. It's also somewhat inconsistent with the way the event had been portrayed in earlier episodes, especially with regard to Topher and Adele's puzzlement over how it happened—which is not to suggest Dollhouse has a particularly good record on the consistency front in any case.)

* Called the Fred situation last week, though I was hoping she'd known she was a Doll all along. I think the character had significantly more potential that way—though it's interesting to think that she was just set up to be the hero of the second season, the Dollhouse's only self-aware victim and the audience's new clearest focal point for narrative identification.

* Which also makes her a pretty good candidate for season two's Big Bad.

* Neil and I spent a lot of time last week talking about Dr. Saunders and whether or not her Dollness suggests that the Dollhouse is able to do direct editing/programming of memories ("imprint code"), as opposed to a fuzzier, less exact approach ("imprint soup"). (I'd always assumed imprint code, and that most of the characters would turn out to have been modified in some way or another; Neil was more skeptical.) At first glance, this episode suggests they can edit directly—but the more I think about it it seems more likely that every Dr. Saunders is a Doll.

UPDATE: Though the fact that Fred/Saunders remembers a version of the Alpha attack that explains her scars may shift the balance back towards direct editing / imprint coding again.

* Is Victor really gone? He was one of the best actors on the show, that's just not possible.

* It will would be interesting to see whether Mellie is really released. I'm also curious what deal Ballard signed; "I'm nobody" suggests he agreed to do the rest of her service as a Doll, whereas I think most people were expecting he'd be hired as a handler.

* Since the Dollhouse's contracts aren't legal, of course, there's no reason not to have your cake and eat it too. Once Ballard is enslaved, bring Madeline back in for a treatment.

* It also remains the case that you'd want every employee to be a Doll, all things being equal; see Dr. Saunders above. Why would they even let Dominics, Boyds, and Tophers in the door, when they can cook up compliant and perfectly loyal substitutes in-house? One possible answer to this might have to do with the exact nature of the Doll programs; if they're imprint-soups as opposed to imprint-codes, maybe there are structural limits to how long they can be used before the personality imprint goes bad or breaks down.

* Echo/ED remains, by far, the least interesting thing about this show. I was really hoping they'd kill off the Caroline wedge so at least something interesting would happen there.

* Well, that's a little unfair; apropos of the Great Transporter Debate this episode makes it a little hard to see how the process of being "wiped" isn't itself necessarily death. If we accept that continuity of consciousness is required for metaphysical identity—and we wave our hands at things like sleep for just a moment—then it would seem to be the case that "Caroline" can be hypothetically restored after her five years are up and she's hypothetically released from her contract. But it's equally clear that the person who wakes up in Chrissy Seaver's body is not metaphysically identical to the original Caroline. So how can the one revival result in a "real" resurrection and the other in a "false" one? What's the difference between "copy" and "restore"? It could only be Ballard's "soul," which, like Topher, I scoff at. So it seems to me that when you're switched off, that's it, you're dead, which has some pretty serious implications for comas, head injury, amnesia, insanity, aging, sleep, and just about everything else having to do with what we naively believe consciousness is.

*Hope you noticed and enjoyed the brief Firefly shout-out as much as I did. Take that, Fox. (UPDATE: Missed at first the Angel bit about souls in jars—it was a double shoutout to both his unjustly canceled shows...)

Sadly, despite the hopes of all good nerds, that's probably it for Dollhouse. But "Epitaph One" comes out with the DVD this July, and there's even rumors today that Joss might spin-off that into a new show. Because spin-offs of failed one-season flops are so very common.

The human ecology of vampires.

In case you're wondering, Buffy's Sunnyvale reaches a stable equilibrium with a population of about 36,000 humans and 18 vampires.

And so Buffy emerges as the deeply anti-ecological force she is, disrupting nature's balance with her pointless persecution of an endangered species...



Via Pharyngula.

Fun: 137 uncomfortable plot summaries. Some highlights:

ALIENS: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.
BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Teenage serial killer destroys town in fit of semi-religious fervor.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.
SERENITY: Men fight for possession of scantily clad mentally ill teenage girl.
GROUNDHOG DAY: Misanthropic creep exploits space/time anomaly to stalk coworker.
HARRY POTTER: Celebrity Jock thinks rules don’t apply to him, is right.
JFK: Family man wastes life for nothing in crusade against homosexuals.
JUNO: Teen fails to get abortion, ruins lives.
JURASSIC PARK: Theme park’s grand opening pushed back.
KILL BILL: Irresponsible mother wants custody of her child.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
RAMBO III: The United States provides arms, equipment and training to the terrorists behind 9/11.
RED DAWN: Despite shock-and-awe tactics, a superior occupying force is no match for a tenacious sect of terrorist insurgents.
STAR TREK: Over-sexed officer routinely places crew in danger.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE - Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
SUPERMAN RETURNS: Illegal immigrant is deadbeat dad.
TERMINATOR: An unplanned pregnancy leads to complications.

Via MeFi.

Here comes a "Buffy" movie? The story checks out; I read it on the Internet. Via io9.

Dollhouse, on the other hand, really was pretty decent. Definitely the best episode of the series so far. If I have complaints—which I do—it's with:

1) The Echo reprogramming / mole bit, which drew a little too bright a line around the silliness of the show's premise. How did the mole accomplish the insertion of such a detailed, uh, parameter, in the fifteen seconds Topher happened to be away from his desk? It reminded me of a classic bit from Family Guy:

Brian: Hola! Um...me, me llamo es Brian. Ahh, uh, um lets see, uh, nosotros queremos ir con ustedes.
Mexican: Hey that was pretty good. But actually when you said, "Me llamo es Brian," you don't need the "es." Just, "Me llamo Brian."
Brian: Oh, you speak English.
Mexican: No, just that first speech and this one explaining it.
Brian: You...you're kidding right?
Mexican: Que?

2) The attempted rape and murder of Mellie is an illustrative example of how hard it can be to separate commentary on misogyny from misogyny itself. (See Joss's interview at NPR for more on Joss's self-awareness about this problem.) The violence in the scene is exceptionally brutal, and the way it is shot is a deliberate quotation of the Jenny Calendar scene from Buffy Season 2. The audience is primed first to think of the usualness of this sort of filmic violence, in other words, so that the subversion of the woman-in-refrigerator trope has more salience.

On the other hand, the scene can only be described as pornographic in its composition, from the way the characters are dressed and blocked to the camera's fixation on Mellie's body. It's the same sort of problem that arises when Dollhouse (which is at its essence as show about misogyny and rape culture) uses Eliza Dushku in short skirts speaking in a breathy voice to promote itself. Joss has a lot of feminist cred and you certainly want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I'm sure we're all cognizant of the realities of the television marketplace and corporate interference—but this remains a needle that Joss will have to be very careful in trying to thread.

On the more global level of mythology, Dollhouse 1.6 works very hard to expand the show past the tight hermeticism of the first few episodes. Through the Wolfram-and-Hartization of the Dollhouse and the urban legend trope this world has suddenly grown a lot larger and a lot more interesting. Now this is a show that's as much about global capitalism as it is about sexual violence, and really about the intersection of the two—which seems very promising. I'm excited to see where Joss takes these ideas now that he has a freer hand.

It's official: the Joss-Whedon-penned sixth episode of Dollhouse is being hyped to the stratosphere.

Cribbing from an email conversation that went out to some Poli-Sci-Fi Radio regulars early in the week, I must admit I still have some pretty serious reservations about Dollhouse. My enjoyment of the show rises each week, mostly because the much-more-interesting supplementary cast is getting more to do and some of the B plots are starting to take shape. (The less Eliza Dushku is on the screen, the better the show is, in other words.)

But some of the show's basic premises remain, frankly, poorly thought out. The economics of the Dollhouse don't make any real sense; the overhead involved and the stated price structure would make almost any of these missions cost-ineffective. (Echo as a midwife? Why? There are *already* midwives.) As Neil reminds me each week, nearly every episode contains several scenes in which characters laboriously sign contracts that would never in a million years be enforceable. Even the character of Topher is deeply problematic; if the Dollhouse were "real" he'd be one of the top executives of the company, because real companies start with a product/idea/whatever and then build a company around it, not the other around. (You wouldn't say "I want to start a company that uses brainwashed people for illegal purposes. Now I just need to find a guy who can brainwash people!" You'd start with the technology, which means you'd start with Topher. This is why I think Topher is a Doll, FYI, and Amy Acker too. And arguably the whole cast.)

But the biggest apparent flaw in the premise of the show is that the narrative structure of episodic television requires there to be major screw-ups every week, but the characters nonetheless have to believe the technology is trustworthy. So, every week they are shocked to discover the Dolls are broken, even though the Dolls are broken every single week. Not to mention that the very first one went on a huge killing spree they all witnessed.

When we combine these sorts of nitpicky logical problems with the fact that all of Eliza Dushku's characters reduce to Faith—even the blind biblethumper says "move your ass!"*—we have a series-rebooting sixth episode that Joss really needs to hit out of the park.

Unabashed Whedonite that I am, though, I think he may actually pull it off. The episode description for the eighth episode [photos] certainly sounds as if it will be actively good, as opposed to just passable...

--
* I am familiar with the fan-wank that these may be moments in which Caroline's original personality is shining through. And that's as fine a cover for Eliza Dushku's acting limitations as I'm likely to get, and it's good enough as far as it goes. But unfortunately it takes us right back to the far bigger problem of the Idiot Plot Device. It is completely implausible for these people to insist over and over that this technology is foolproof when on both macro- and micro-scales it's obvious to anyone it isn't. Unless there's a saboteur, or something else that accounts for the recent spate of serious systemic failures, the machine plainly doesn't work right.

(most links via the indispensible Whedonesque)

Potpourri!

* MetaFilter has a post on gay-rights activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold elective office in the U.S. and subject of a new Sean Penn biopic, assassinated twenty-seven years ago this week.

* Also via MeFi: the Star-Tribune has an online database of 600 challenged ballots in the Franken-Coleman race. The vote totals on the main page don't look especially good for Franken's chances, nor does the early word from elections guru Nate Silver:

The vast majority of challenges on both sides are frivolous, often utterly so. Perhaps 1 in 10 challenges -- maybe slightly more than that -- actually required a judgment call of some kind.

For what it's worth, Silver's projections now slightly favor Coleman, though "projecting" anything at all strikes me as a significant overreach on Silver's part on garbage-in-garbage-out grounds. Until we know something real about the character of challenged ballots vis-a-vis nonchallenged ballots, there's just no way of projecting what the final vote total will look like.

* In twelve-country poll, 43% see climate crisis as bigger problem than economy. Technological civilization is the chain-smoker who has also broken his leg: they're both big problems, one's just slightly more immediate at the moment.

* Bush is still president, but local leaders are getting the message: the mayor of Los Angeles has proposed a major solar initiative. Good on Villaraigosa, but the depth of our civilization's chain-smoking becomes evident when you read the fine print:

This massive solar proposal is nested in a larger commitment to reduce Los Angeles’ greenhouse gas emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2030.

35% below 1990 is a fairly decent number for a single initiative, but 2030's a long way off—the bad stuff is already starting to happen right now.

* The Dr. Horrible DVD is available for pre-order and coming out before Christmas. I'd also be remiss if I didn't link to Buffy! Movie! News!, but come one, there's absolutely no way.

Thank God it's Tuesday.

* Were you watching the time-travel show Journeyman on NBC this year? You'll never get another episode, but at least you can find out how it all would have ended.

* Bush 'antagonizing environmentalists' on his way out of office.

Just months before President Bush leaves office, his administration is antagonizing environmentalists by proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants.

The proposal, first reported by The Associated Press, would cut out the advice of government scientists who have been weighing in on such decisions for 35 years. Agencies also could not consider a project's contribution to global warming in their analysis.

This is nothing we haven't seen before.

* Honda to debut hydrogen-fuel cell car in 2008. We're saved! Unless, you know, the debunkers turn out to be right about hydrogen...

* Fraggmented's John Seavey makes one his storytelling engine posts about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explaining why the show was never the same (and could never have been the same) after the characters graduated high school.

* A Mac utility that automatically shuts down your Internet connectivity for any length of time you specify. I wouldn't be attracted to something like this if I had any willpower at all.

* Fred Pearce argues the Neo-Malthusian "population bomb" has been defused. We're saved!

Why then is the world’s population still rising? Currently at around 6.7 billion, it is 70 million higher every year. The problem is that the delivery wards are being visited by the huge numbers of young women born during the earlier baby boom. They may only have one or two children each. But that is still a lot of babies. Probably nothing will stop humanity reaching 8 billion by about 2040 and many demographers predict that world population will peak at around 9 billion by the end of the 21st century. But once those baby boomers have had their babies, the falling fertility rate will be translated into a real decline in the world’s population — the first since the Black Death of the 14th century.

The question remains, I think, whether 9 billion will be a Malthusian crisis all by itself.

* And it may be time to rethink climate change in the face of the polar bear menace.

AICN has spec video from Buffy: The Animated Series, the much-anticipated, never-produced 2004 midquel series.

Sci-Fi has a trailer up for the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, while Joss Whedon is frantically running around trying to reassure everyone that the shooting of a new Dollhouse pilot doesn't mean that Dollhouse is the new Firefly.

Also in Joss Whedon News, there's been some pushback on Dr. Horrible over the fact that he's once again killed over a female love interest in order to provide character development for male characters. I guess not even the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer can escape the siren song of a woman in a refrigerator.

David Eick (Bionic Woman, Battlestar Galactica) is working on a small-screen adaptation of Children of Men. The Alfonso Cuarón film joins Buffy, Ferris Bueller, Logan's Run, Clueless, Highlander and Planet of the Apes in the coveted film-to-TV remake arena...

A long time ago, Joss Whedon won the heart of nerdy lesbians everywhere when Willow realized she was a lesbian in season four of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

A few years later, things got pretty rocky for Joss and the lesbians, for reasons that should probably be left unspoiled.

Once, Joss tried to make it up to the lesbians, but things didn't pan out.

Tomorrow, he tries again.

The Republican presidential field as Buffy villains. Just perfect. Via Candleblog's linkdump earlier this morning.