Dollhouse, Flashforward, and a few SF links.

* Both Dollhouse tonight and Flashforward yesterday were noticeable improvements over a string of weak episodes, but problems persist. On Flashforward, the characters remain essentially interchangeable ciphers, with almost no tension or mystery surrounding their relationships or their individual participation in these events. (This is perhaps the one area where the show really should have cribbed more from Lost.) But the tease that China may have been involved is a nicely paranoid reading of the disastrous consequences of the Flashforward for the Western hemisphere and a clever post-9/11 twist on the novel, which has no such subplot—and the connection of the isolated L.A. office to a larger investigatory framework has been much needed. And the episode was just more fun.

The Sierra episode of Dollhouse was good, but I can't help feeling as though the show is being quietly retooled yet again; the actions of most of these characters just aren't commensurate with either half of last season. In particular, most of last season was devoted to a multi-episode arc in which the Dollhouse staff struggled to stop the dolls from "glitching"—but now the exact same glitches are considered perfectly acceptable to everyone involved. Echo is allowed to openly discuss her newfound continuity of memory without consequence or even particular interest from the staff, while Victor and Sierra are apparently now allowed to openly date. What has happened to account for this radical shift in Dollhouse policy? Dr. Saunders's disappearance and the generally chaotic atmosphere that plagues the Dollhouse week to week should incentivize them to keep a closer eye on the dolls, not give them freer reign.

Likewise, the idea in the episode that the Dollhouse staff had been "misled" about Priya's situation—a fairly clear attempt to retcon one of the characters' most heinous crimes—doesn't really hold up to scrutiny; patients in mental institutions can't consent to secret medical experimentation (or, for that matter, sex slavery) any more than kidnapped women can. There's no excusing what's been done to Priya either way, and that Topher supposedly believed he was somehow "helping" her barely qualifies as a fig leaf. I think I preferred the harder edge of Original Recipe Adelle and Topher 1.0.

Other things rankle, too. The violent final scenes in the Evil Client's House are well-acted, but the sequence of events makes little sense outside the heat of the moment. What did Priya and Topher think was going to happen, and why were they so utterly unprepared for what obviously would? Topher would have given her a ninja update at the very least.

Seeing so much praise for this episode from critics and the Twittotubes just shows again how badly people want this show to be better than it really is. I'm still enjoying Dollhouse, but abandoning the 2019 arc and failing to sign Amy Acker as a regular are starting to look like fatal flaws for the series. Even an heavily hyped episode that (for once) didn't focus on Echo doesn't compare to last season's stellar second half (1.6-1.11 and 1.13). I hope the upcoming focus on Senator Wyndham-Price and the inevitable introduction of Summer Glau help pick things up.

No new episodes until December, in any event.

Meanwhile:

* Harlan Ellison has won $1 from Paramount Pictures in his suit regarding Star Trek's "The City on the Edge of Forever." In fairness, $1 was all he asked for.

* Christopher Hayes reviews Ralph Nader's "practical Utopia," Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!.

* And Gregory Cowles reviews Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City for the New York Times.

Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate-­reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human-­interest ­stories. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.)

Looks good.

Why Charlie Stross hates Star Trek.

As promised, some Sunday links.

* Jon Stewart had odious liar Betsy McCaughey on his show Thursday night, and you should watch it; video at Crooks & Liars. Kevin Drum says Stewart shouldn't have had her on at all; I think the video made McCaughey look terrible and in that sense was an important public service.

* Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

* Mandatory pre-Mad-Men reading: Pandagon's defense of Betty Draper.

* Have we reached Peak Crazy? Fox forces Glenn Beck to take a vacation.

* Responding to Krugman, Glenn Greenwald considers whether Obama has lost the trust of progressives. More on the latest polls showing progressives' loss of faith from Steve Benen, while Matt Yglesias ponders the meaning of GOP approval numbers that "appear to be stuck near some kind of theoretical minimum" and TPM reports Sarah Palin winning the all-important Birther primary.

* Margaret Atwood blogs her book tour.

* Cynical-C has the trailer for Michael Moore's next film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

* Lt. William Calley has apologized for the My Lai massacre, though the MetaFilter thread suggests there may be significantly less here than meets the eye.

"In October 2007, Calley agreed to be interviewed by the UK newspaper the Daily Mail to discuss the massacre, saying, "Meet me in the lobby of the nearest bank at opening time tomorrow, and give me a certified cheque for $25,000, then I'll talk to you for precisely one hour." When the journalist "showed up at the appointed hour, armed not with a cheque but a list of pertinent questions", Calley left."

* Also at MetaFilter: SIGG admits to misleading the public about its water bottles and BPA.

* Inglourious Basterds as alternate history.

* Game of the night: Max Damage.

* And the Smart Set looks at The Martian Chronicles in the context of 1960s optimism and the New Frontier. My Writing 20 for the spring ("Writing the Future") begins there as well (though with Star Trek instead of Bradbury) before veering off into The Dispossessed and, later, Dollhouse.

In an interview with slashfilm.com, Blomkamp said he wanted to make a film that “didn’t depress the audience and kind of ram a whole lot of ideas down their throat that maybe they didn’t feel like hearing.” Could there be a more disheartening statement of purpose by a young artist, or a more cynical underestimation of an audience’s intelligence? — Chris Stamm, Willamette Week (via)

There's a lot to be said for District 9, but I'm afraid I really don't connect with the reviews calling it the best SF of the year. (Both Star Trek and Moon were, I think, better films, just off the top of my head.) District 9 is good, and there are aspects of it that are very good—I'm especially fond of the gorgeous establishing shots with the mothership hanging in the sky over Johannesburg—but while the South African setting is a nice change of pace at its core this is still a fairly pedestrian alien-refugee story of the kind we've all seen umpteen thousand times before. (And I find there's something a little bit embarrassing in all the reviewers jumping to name apartheid, as if merely being able to recall the word were criticism enough. Apartheid is surely a red herring in all this; the film is much more about directly about the apartheidic horrors of globalization's slums than about apartheid proper.)

The film's best section is its first half-hour, which is presented to us in the form of documentary footage that darkly hints at events to come later in the plot. (During this period I thought it might actually be the best SF of the year.) It's spellbinding; the entire film could and should have been like this. But the film, bizarrely, abandons this structure—it begins to show us nondiegetic scenes which were not and could not have been filmed interspersed with the documentary material, undercutting and ultimately destroying its own formal conceit. Likewise, the film's striking setup—the arrival of a dank, apparently damaged mothership filled with starving insectoid worker drones whose temporary sojourn on Earth slowly turns permanent, much to the frustration of their human "benefactors"—seems largely forgotten in a plot that rapidly degrades into a silly fight over futuretech lasers and a MacGuffin rocket fuel that also (funny coincidence!) magically recodes human DNA. Important questions about global capitalism, the dark side of humanitarianism, and the legally precarious outsider status of the world's poor are raised, only to be abandoned. Even the Eichmannesque unlikeability of the film's protagonist goes essentially unexamined; he suddenly morphs into a conventional hero when the clock demands he must, and that's that.

This film should be great, but it's merely good, because it suffers badly from the aesthetic cowardice that causes mainstream films to retreat from their own best ideas, in favor of banal familiarity, whenever things threaten to get completely awesome.

What I'm saying is, District 9 is a romp, and a fun one—but it's nowhere close to pushing the boundaries of cinematic SF. Let's not lose our heads.

Two well known "celestial hieroglyphs," or semi-magical, semi-scientific mainstays of science fiction, are time travel and travel that exceeds the speed of light. The latter is considered a sheer impossibility by physicists, the former a hopeless paradox by philosophers. But no telling what those black holes will do! "Science fiction writers don't admit magic, they don't admit UFOs even, but they accept as given these two magical properties, so that, in a sense, even their science fiction is built on fantasy," Sawyer comments.

'How fantasy took over science fiction.' Contrary to the theme of the article, I don't think it makes much sense to talk about anything being "taken over"; rather, think of the tension between "fantasy" and "science fiction" as both a defining characteristic of genre fiction and one of its most productive creative engines. Finding the device (what Darko Suvin calls the novum) to justify and motivate the fantasy at the story's core is a huge part of what science fiction is all about.

In that sense, the two categories are essentially inseparable.

Wednesday 3.

* First Read considers the curse of the 2012 GOP candidate, noting that only Mitt Romney has avoided total credibility implosion. But stay tuned: it's a long way to Iowa, and I believe in the Mittpocalypse.

Of course, it's also worth noting that Obama's political opponents tend to be cursed in this way: consider that his main opponents for Illinois State Senate were pulled from the ballot for insufficient signatures, that his original run for Senate was facilitated by the scandal surrounding the divorce of Jack and Jeri "Seven of Nine" Ryan, and that his opponent for the presidency actually thought Sarah Palin was a credible vice presidential candidate.

* More on Kay Hagan and health care from Triangulator. Contact information for Hagan's Senate office is here.

* The MTA is trying to sell name rights for subway stations. Can't we get a court to bar this kind of silliness? "Atlantic Avenue" is a useful and informative name for a subway station; the name of a bank in London is not remotely. UPDATE: I'm 99% less outraged upon realizing that Barclay's is building a basketball stadium near that subway station.

* Michael Bérubé on the futility on the humanities. Said futility is not a bad thing.

* Žižek on Iran (at least allegedly).

And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.

The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.

* Soccer in South Africa, at the Big Picture.

FML for the Star Trek fan: @FMLmccoy.

Woke up in 1930s, tried to save a woman's life but ended up indirectly killing a hobo and giving Hitler the A-bomb. FML

(Thanks Kate!)

Jay Leno's evil twin goes on Late Night with David Letterman c. 1984 to rant about Star Trek and venereal disease. This is so far before my time I can't even begin to make sense of this clip. More on YouTube.

Saturday!

* The first of the last three Pushing Daisies is on tonight. Bryan Fuller's not satisfied, and not done with the story yet.

* Alien prequel on the way.

* More on the sci-fi future that failed from CNN.

* Related: Star Trek as religion.

* Scenes from trailers that aren't in the finished film. I suspect I would have liked Terminator Salvation a lot more if the "This isn't the future my mother warned me about" scenes had been retained.

* Wondermark has a good riff take on Terminator-style action franchises: 1, 2, 3.

* Tales of the New Frontier: a web comic set in a mythical alt-history Kennedy administration.

* 'Jesus Killed Mohammed': Christian dominionism and the U.S. military.

* Brace yourselves for Toy Story 3.

* Weekend games: Heavy Weapons, Panic Breakout, Fail-Safe, and Redstar Fall Pro.

* And this just in: Delaware still sucks.

Friday night links.

* Gingrich: "If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything," Sotomayor must be barred from the Supreme Court. Who does he think won the Civil War?

* Tom Tancredo: "I don't know" if the Obama administration hates white people.

* Sonia Sotomayor, notorious racist, ruled against people claiming illegal discrimination in 45 out of 50 cases. This goes along with Dave Sirin's piece on Sotomayor in The Nation to demonstrate that she is a moderate—likely too moderate—not some leftist firebrand. Anyone Obama picked to replace her would, from Newt's perspective anyway, likely be significantly worse.

* Earlier this month, a Twitter user in Guatemala was arrested, jailed, and fined the equivalent of a year's salary for having posted a 96-character thought to Twitter. @jeanfer faces ten years in prison.

* Nuclear power, too cheap to meter.

* Uhura, Dualla, and "Blacks in Space." I really think some nuance is being lost here; to take up just one point, Uhura isn't marginalized in the new Star Trek; if anything she replaces McCoy as the third lead.

* Jason Schwartzman's (fake) new sitcom on NBC, "Yo Teach," a viral ad for Judd Apatow's Funny People.

* Wikipedia has barred edits from known Scientologist IP addresses. Xenu weeps.

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?

Sensors indicate someone at NRO has gone completely off their nut.

Lots of open tabs from the last few days. Here's a first crack at it.

* 'Parasitic flies turn fire ants into zombies.' You heard it here first, get ready for zompocalypse.

* By request (hey, Tim) my last two Star Trek posts for a good long while.

* Star Trek: a military analysis.
* Star Trek vs. Star Wars.

* See also, God help me: The Duck Tales theme song gone horribly wrong.

* First pages from DC's Elseworlds 80-Page Giant. Via MeFi.

* Famous movie misquotes. I defy anyone to quote the line from The Graduate accurately. Also via MeFi.

* Oldest piece of art determined to be porn. Via Cyn-C.

* Top PhD programs shrinking. Still trying to figure out whether this is good news or bad. See also: 'The Universities in Trouble.'

Geekfight: Whedon vs. Abrams. It's true, Abrams has had the better year.

Sorry about No-Post Monday; my summer course starts tomorrow and I'm scrambling to get everything ready. I have a few links before I declare this No Post Tuesday.

* Eliza Dushku is twittering that Dollhouse renewal talks are going on as we speak. A better indication than if they weren't.

* Miscellaneous Star Trek links:

* A fairly well-known story about TOS and MLK.
* Ultimately, then, “Star Trek” was prescient not for its futurism, with the Enterprise crew using communicators that look like flip-phones, but for exploring a universe absorbed with pop-culture history. David Hadju on Star Trek and popular culture.
* Continuity errors as honeypot.
* "Star Trek sucked so bad I can’t even think of a title for my rant."

* The secret history of Jughead's hat.

* Goonies reunion video.

* Larry David is Woody Allen as Larry David in Whatever Works.

* Apocalypse and the academy in The New Yorker.

* And some sad news: Craig Arnold is now believed to have died while traveling in Japan.

Trek: boffo at the box office.

Star Trek nostalgia photos (lots). Via MeFi.

Star Trek and bad science. Frankly Phil lets J.J. off easy.

Old theory: The Star Trek franchise has become too permanently associated with hopeless nerdity to ever be commercially viable again.

New theory: The world has been secretly filled with a huge number of closet Star Trek fans all this time, all waiting for the right moment to shed their self-loathing and strut their stuff in public. And now it's here.

UPDATE: I'm switching 50% of my loyalty to Vu's alternative theory:

alternate theory: appropriate amounts of 'hot young talent' will perk up any aging franchise, spurring non-nerds to quickly gain superficial knowledge of the mythology as a way of displaying authenticity.

But only 50%; there's some genuine nostalgics mixed in with all these Johnny-come-latelys.

Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations or heretofore unexpected reserves of good will for the franchise—or maybe J.J. just nailed it—but I found Star Trek surprisingly good. And "good" is an amazing accomplishment given the self-contradictions inherent to the project:

1) innovate and revitalize a franchise that, let's face it, is built almost entirely on the bedrock of nostalgic repetition;
2) do so while further hamstrung by the excruciating prequel format.

But Abrams strikes a more or less successful balance, aside from a few hamhanded "R2-D2, meet C-3PO" moments and a little too much handholding and lampshade-hanging.

As is probably to be expected, the prequelization provides both the worst parts of the movie and its primary source of narrative pleasure. As a certified member of the Nitpicker's Guild I confess I was a bit annoyed to see how little effort was made to stick with the original continuity, even granting the timeline shift. Many of the gadgets had different behaviors and limitations than in the original show; no one knew Romulans were related to Vulcans until part of the way through the original series; Chekhov didn't join the ship until later; Pike wasn't the first captain of the Enterprise; etc, etc, etc. (You can fanwank most or all of these away with "The USS Kelvin Changed Everything," but that's not very satisfying. Clear lines of cause-and-effect matter, especially in time travel stories.)

That this cherished original continuity is essentially bulldozed permanently by the film is pretty unfortunate and will, I think, permanently damage the franchise in the eyes of its loyal and notoriously defensive fanbase, especially as fifty years of strict adherence to Roddenberry's particular Utopian vision has not prepared them well for our heroes to lose a planet, much less the entire timeline.

But at the same time it is quite fun to see these characters meet each other, and Abrams does an amazing job of capturing the feel of the original series (all the way from aesthetics right down to the level of contrivance and occasionally nonsensical plot points). That the actors playing McCoy and (especially) Spock are very good mimics of the original actors helps things along a lot as well.

It's also astounding how apolitical the film tries to be; I went in with the idea of writing a post about neoliberalism and Star Trek and it just didn't give me much to work with. Now, this is a neoliberal, United Nations fantasy of the future, to be sure, in which difference only exists to be flattened out—but that's really true of almost all Trek, DS9 and some other choice episodes excepted. (There's also a making explicit of the longstanding metaphorical connection between Vulcans and Jews, with a Vulcan Holocaust followed by a choice between diaspora, assimilation, and resettlement in a "new colony," but I don't know what to do with that yet.)

Star Trek (2009) is no better or worse, politically speaking, than what Star Trek's always been: a fantasy of what the world would be like if consumer capitalism had no labor or environmental costs and American military-cultural hegemony was pure, stable, and uncomplicatedly good. It remains our defining ideological fantasy, in other words, the thing that blinds us still to the sort of world we're really living in and the sort of future we're actually creating.

So it's no surprise that at this point my thoughts turn to the mediocre, to the unchosen, to the radicals and the subaltern and the dissidents. What becomes of difference in this future? We see these people only sometimes, in the background: Sisko's dad, Picard's brother. Usually they exist only to be made Star Fleet officers or good Federation citizens by the end of the episode, and we see no one like this in this movie at all. The lack of flexibility in this narrative template has grown, I think, exhausting, and it's for this reason that over the years I find myself much more drawn to presentist and mundane SF, or apocalyptic futurity, or to anti-Trek futures like Firefly, the first few seasons of BSG, or Samuel Delany's Triton.

But all the same every so often it's nice to come home again.

Just one request: no more product placement, please; there's no money in the future, much less corporations...