I learned on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio this week that the Canadian single-payer health-care system came about after its successful adoption in a single province, Saskatchewan. It's this fact of history that makes me think progressives should be directing much more money and support to groups like the single-payer movement in California, organized around support for SB 810.

Dollhouse fandom can't figure out if it's getting good news or bad news. With DVR numbers, it turns out Dollhouse's ratings are 50% higher. But this only puts the show's total viewership about even with the live viewership during mid-season last year. Fox is promising to air all 13 episodes, which is also a good sign—but a strong "And that's it" seems to be fairly loudly implied. And Stargate Universe beat it again.

At least last Friday's episode was decent—best of the season so far, though not near the heights of episodes 1.6-1.11 or "Epitaph One."

Elsewhere in televised SF news, ABC is so happy with Flashforward's ratings they've ordered 9 more episodes. Who mourns for Bill Simmon?

Next time Bill Simmon gives me grief for not liking Watchmen, I think I'll just direct him to the comments of Mr. Terry Gillian.

Quint: That’s what we love about you guys. Now, did you see WATCHMEN? Did you end up seeing it?

Terry Gilliam: Yeah, I thought it strange. I thought it was too reverential. That’s what I really thought it was.

Quint: Faithful to a fault, yeah. I would agree with that.

Terry Gilliam: And you look at it and he’s tried really… so much is stunning. It got trashed, but there are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way.

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.

Speaking of Star Trek, the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast got deep into the weeds this week on Dollhouse, The Prestige, clone "immortality," and how the transporter on Star Trek is a fax machine that shreds its input when it's done with it. (Bill has more on his home blog.)

Having spent a good portion of my childhood working out the metaphysical implications of such technology, I myself was moved to comment. As someone with a well-documented and simply unhealthy fear of death, I must admit that the consciousness-as-Ship-of-Theseus direction these discussions invariably take is both the only possible solution to the problem as well as a clear ontological horror in its own right.

Nine words you might think came from science but which are really from science fiction. Via Boing Boing and Poli-Sci-Fi Radio.

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)

Scott Eric Kaufman finally gets around to watching Watchmen. Special attention is paid to the absurd ubiquity of the Twin Towers throughout the film, something my viewing group mocked afterwards but which hasn't come up in discussions here thus far.

My review was also a focus of the discussion on the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast this week, to which my rage-filled rebuttal is currently being shouted impotently into the void.

As if you might ever get sick of hearing about Watchmen, Bill's review at Candleblog takes mine as a starting point but goes on to defend the movie against me/Moore/itself.

Top 278 Star Wars lines improved by replacing a word with "pants." Via PSFR.

Poli-Sci-Fi Radio took my Urtexts posts from Sunday (1, 2) and ran with it on the show last week. The podcast (free!) is here; the conversation about SF and my post starts about 25 minutes in. Who knew so many of us had once been Star Trek geeks?

Sunday.

* Uncool: A U.N. resolution on the right to food passed 180-1. Via Lenin's Tomb.

* Lots of links floating around to this revisionist interpretation of It's a Wonderful Life:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation.

... Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.

* Will Obama gut NASA? Nice followup to last week's discussion on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio.

* On the plus side, Obama pledges allegiance to science.

* Ultimately, these disputes can't really be resolved until Obama is in office. Only then will we know whether Obama's embrace of every establishment and even right-wing figure he can find is a reflection of what the substance of his governing will be, or whether -- as many of his supporters claim -- it's a master strategy designed to diffuse tension and hostility in order to enable easier enactment of his progressive agenda. If Obama devotes genuine efforts to repealing DOMA and don't-ask-don't-tell, I doubt anyone will care how many times he hugs Rick Warren -- just as if Obama really closes Guantanamo, withdraws from Iraq and forges a diplomatic peace with Iran, few people will care how much he embraces Joe Lieberman -- though obviously those are very, very large "ifs." Only time will tell. Via Open Left.

* Arctic melt 20 years ahead of climate models. Response to global warming 20 years behind rational policy-making.

* Hadley Center study warns of “catastrophic” 5°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path. Did I mention we're screwed?

Links!

* The podcast of my appearance last night on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio is already up.

* Lots of anxiety today over Google's commitment to Net Neutrality after a report in the Wall Street Journal that they were looking to sell a "fast lane" to their services. Google denounces the report, but questions remain.

* Franken +200? So says the AP. More at First Read and TPM, which reports that optimism in the Franken camp is at very high.

* Does Harry Potter poison young minds? Richard Dawkins hates puppies and sunshine, too.

* The IEA says we're screwed starting in 2020. That's actually sort of good news; there's good reason to think we may already be screwed right now.

* Whose poetry will be read at the inauguration?

There's buzz about all sorts of names. Among them: Philip Levine, a Midwesterner whose writings are attuned to the working class; Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate who created the Favorite Poem Project; Yusef Komunyakaa, whose work is heavily influenced by jazz; U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan.

* Epic collection of sci-fi ray guns.

If all goes according to plan, I'm the guest on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio today from 4-6 PM. (Listen live here.) I have no idea what we'll be talking about or how articulate I'll be, but that's how it is...

Jaimee and I are in Vermont this weekend visiting family, so posting will be light. I'm secretly the special guest on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio this Sunday from 4-6 pm (listen to the livestream here), but other than that my Internetting will largely depend on my ability to leech WiFi from my mother's neighbors.

Poli-Sci-Fi Radio (live 4-6 every Sunday!) turned me on to Confessions of a Superhero, an excellent independent (but Netflixable) documentary about the people who walk Hollywood Blvd. dressed in superhero costumes, taking photos for tips. Naturally, the subject matter makes for a sort of perfect tragicomedy.

Here's the trailer:



Once you've seen the film you can also check out Wonder Woman's MySpace page...

Monday, Monday.

* The Criterion Collection Bottle Rocket is out tomorrow. Here's the Amazon link.

* Nate Silver projects Al Franken will win by 27 votes.

* The World's Best Colleges and Universities. Duke clocks in at #13, but more important, longtime domestic loser Case Western (#90) beats Tufts (#156) in the far more important world rankings, finally giving Neil the humiliation he deserves.

* Amanda Marcotte had the bright idea of reading Mad Men alongside some of the literary texts it makes allusions to, most notably the Frank O'Hara poem that bookends the season, "Meditations in an Emergency."

* Longtime reader Eli Glasner has a great new film blog.

* 10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss stories. Thanks, Lindsay!

* "Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture." Via Neilalien.

* A school in New York has already been renamed for Barack Obama. Students initiated the renaming.

* The things you learn from Poli-Sci-Fi Radio: Val Kilmer is mulling a run for governor of New Mexico. Kilmer's only the second-worst Batman, but the one I think I'd want least in elected office.

* Top 25 Comic Book Battles. #1: Batman vs. Superman from The Dark Knight Returns.

* Heroes creator Tim Kring has apologized for calling his fans dipshits. Remember, a gaffe is when you accidentally tell the truth...

Predictions. Who's got them? Leave 'em in the comments.

I was on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio yesterday (podcast forthcoming) and they cajoled us all into making predictions. Unexpectedly, I was among the most optimistic people on the show, expecting Obama to cross 360 electoral votes and over 50% in the popular vote. I stand by this. To the extent that the polls are wrong, I (honestly) believe they will be wrong in our favor, underreporting Obama's depth of support and his GOTV operation and underestimating the level of Republican demoralization and widespread discomfort, in different registers, with Bush, Palin, and McCain all.

I've been predicting / hoping for a Reaganesque landslide since January—it was one of the biggest early factors in my decision to support Obama in the primaries in the first place—and I think that outcome is finally at hand. If things go the way I think / hope they will tomorrow, 2008 will come to be seen as a realignment election along the lines of 1980 or 1932.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I've been very wrong before—but that's my prediction.

So let's have two numbers, the EV spread and the popular vote spread. (Use 270towin to calculate the electoral votes.)

I'll go first with what will surely be way-too-high estimates of 397 EVs and eight points in the popular vote, 52%-44%. In my heart of hearts, I think we'll run the table, including taking Omaha.



But of course I'll be just as happy scrapping by with 269...

Late notice, but I'll be on the Poli-Sci-Fi Radio podcast again this week, sometime around the 5 PM hour.

That episode of Poli-Sci-Fi Radio I guested on is now online. I come on about halfway through the show, and in twenty or thirty minutes there's only two or three things I regret saying. A new record!