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Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
It was fifty years ago today, on March 8th 1975, that the BBC transmitted part one of the Doctor Who story "Genesis of the Daleks".
It has since gone on to be regarded as one of the very best Doctor Who tales in the history of the franchise and one of the greatest science-fiction stories ever committed to the visual medium. "Genesis of the Daleks", written by Terry Nation, packed a lot! The part that I most often think about is when The Doctor (the Fourth, played by Tom Baker) is agonizing over the choice that is his to make: to either destroy the Daleks before they can become the universal menace he knows them to be, or to save them and let history run its course. It was pretty strong stuff for a show still considered to be made for young audiences.
So it is that today is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Davros, the genius-but-insane creator of the Daleks. Personally, I think that Davros is one of the greatest villains in fictional history. When you consider that he has only one hand but that hand is stained with the blood of trillions of innocent lives... that is incalculable evil.
And to celebrate, here is a video that I discovered many years ago that someone very brilliant compiled and posted to YouTube. This predates Davros's appearance in the series that has been running since 2005, so it's almost all from the classic productions.
Oh dear Lord. It was so much worse than I was ready for.
I keep hearing Peter Capaldi's last words as The Doctor, now several minutes after watching "The Star Beast": the first of the three hour-long specials "celebrating" the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who.
Because that is what I'm feeling now.
This GIF that I made a few years ago, taken from the Mel Brooks film Silent Movie, somehow expresses the disgust and sense of being let down that I'm experiencing at this hour:
I had been a fan of Doctor Who ever since I was six years old, and sneaking in watching it WAY past my bedtime when WFMY in Greensboro aired episodes of it after the 11 o'clock news on Sunday nights. Those were mostly from the Tom Baker era, and I'll never forget the first time I heard that theme by Ron Grainer. Then I discovered that PBS ran Doctor Who at respectable hours on Saturday afternoons, and I got to see those and not have to worry about Dad catching me out of bed.
I was an on-and-off fan of Who throughout childhood and adolescence, and then came the day when a lady from PBS (standing in front of a graphic of the TARDIS) announced that there would be no further broadcasts of Doctor Who on public television.
So began the show's "time in the wilderness", apart from the "Dimensions In Time" 3-D special for Children in Need, when there was no new Who. It seemed the show had finally run its course. But I never lost my appreciation for it.
And then one night in the fall of 1994, I was logged into the bulletin board system run by a friend. His BBS featured FidoNET, which was sort of a USENET (remember that?) connected to bulletin boards all around the world. And there was a group on it called the Doctor Who Echo.
It was like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where everyone realized they've had similar experiences with the UFOs. It was finding others, out there, who were just as much Doctor Who fans as I was and indeed many who were much more Whovian than I thought possible.
A few months later I got Internet access for the first time. Rec.Arts.SciFi.DoctorWho was one of the first newsgroups I subscribed to. Using the Netscape Navigator browser I found (and bookmarked) the Doctor Who Home Page and discovered reams of text files of not only serious information but also bloopers, a "drinking game", just gobs of humor that had my sides hurting from laughter (literally!).
January 1996. I had just gotten my first apartment. My roomie was off in England as part of Elon's winter term. Days before I was going to get seriously started moving in there threatened to be a fierce winter storm. Mom convinced me to take the bare essentials and some clothing on to the apartment, 45 minutes away. On the way I stopped at the mall in Burlington, looking for some entertainment. I found the Doctor Who 1983 special "The Five Doctors" on VHS. I bought it, got my things into the apartment and watched that tape while eating pizza from Little Caesar's. I felt like I was king of the world, or at least my little corner of it. I watched "The Five Doctors" a few more times while being iced in with nowhere to go. It has become a tradition: every first night I spend in a new home, I've watched "The Five Doctors" while dining on pizza.
Then came the buildup to the premiere of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor (regenerating from Sylvester McCoy's previous Doctor). Some were disappointed in the TV movie. I thought it showed great promise and it was a let-down that it gained no further traction.
But true to form, The Doctor refused to die.
I need not go into the return of the Doctor Who series in 2005. Even if you're fairly new to Who you probably know something about how long its "Nu Who" incarnation has been around, beginning with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor.
Russell T. Davies was the showrunner then. And I thought he pulled off a magnificent job in bringing the show back. Oh sure, there were some fits and starts. There were a few rough edges. And maybe a little "progressiveness", but that never overwhelmed how amazing the new series was. I was willing to overlook those. The first of the new episodes I saw was "Dalek", featuring the return of The Doctor's most classic enemy. And then some weeks later I downloaded (the revived series was strictly on the British side of the pond, not legally available in the States) the two-part story "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", written by a chap named Steven Moffat. That tale completely blew me away with its awesomeness. And when Moffat brought us "The Girl in the Fireplace" during the following season, David Tennant's first as the Tenth Doctor...
...that one genuinely brought on the tears. I couldn't remember any television story that had so moved me.
I could go on. But I wanted to establish my credentials first. If I haven't driven home the point yet, here it is: I GET Doctor Who. Arguably better than many if not most modern fans can.
When it was announced that after Peter Capaldi's time in the role ended, that The Doctor would regenerate into his/their first female incarnation as Jodie Whittaker in the role, well... I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't cautiously optimistic. I was willing to give her a chance. But such a change was fraught with risk, and I'll say something here that I've said many times in the past few years: there is a dynamic at work throughout the Doctor Who franchise, between The Doctor and his companions, and that should never be "tinkered" with.
But I still was willing to let Whittaker, and new showrunner Chris Chibnall, prove themselves.
Folks, I will readily admit to being one of the Chibnall era's biggest detractors. For the first time it was readily obvious that THE MESSAGE(tm) really was seriously becoming more important in the show than... GASP!... actual character and plot. And then there was the "Timeless Child" notion that completely obliterated most of the canon about The Doctor's very existence. Strangely I don't blame Whittaker herself. She was just playing the role, she had no say in what the show's execs intended for her time as The Doctor. I absolutely believe that in better hands she could have been an amazing Doctor.
But that wasn't to be.
And then it was announced over a year ago that Russell T. Davies was coming back to helm Doctor Who. And again, I found myself cautiously optimistic. Ideally it would be Steven Moffat, who took over the reins following Davies' first tenure, as THE ONE who would restore order to the Whoniverse. But it seems that is not going to ever happen again, leaving Moffat's era - which encompassed Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi's respective Doctors - a brilliant diamond forever shining bright across the annals of the television medium.
"Cautiously optimistic". I really was.
Then came the past few weeks, and Davies' insane changes to much-beloved villain Davros. One fan posted an eloquent defense of the original Davros design on X/Twitter. Davies replied: "Tough". Which was definitely not an act becoming a conscientious and responsible steward of the Doctor Who mythos.
And then the advance word of "The Star Beast" special started filtering down. And even the BBC admitted that the special was being driven by "The Message".
Much like what happened that night on the Doctor Who Echo on FidoNET nearly three decades ago, I began finding other devoted Who fans, who were becoming increasingly rattled by these developments and Davies' attitude. Some serious dissent was brewing across the Intertubes.
I read a lot of those tweets. I made a few of my own also, sharing some thoughts about how liberalism corrupts and destroys everything it touches (it really does). And could it be that liberalism has now brought down Doctor Who?
Well, I made up my mind as I was working throughout most of the day. I had to see "The Star Beast" for myself. And make up my own mind about it. A longtime reader of this blog made it available to me.
I just spent an hour watching "The Star Beast".
People, it's impossible to shine a turd. But it can sure have lots of glitter thrown at it, in the desperate hope that some of it will actually stick. However in the end all you're left with is glittery sh-t.
Words cannot possibly contain or convey how much I absolutely hate this "special". It was so much WORSE than anything I was braced for. So many times I wanted to give up, but noooooo I had to ride it out. Had to be willing to give it a chance to redeem itself.
There is no redemption for "The Star Beast" and it's glaringly evident that there is no redemption for the Doctor Who franchise in Russell T. Davies' grip.
Yes, THE MESSAGE does loom large. Like the atrocious Absorbaloff from the reprehensible "Love & Monsters" episode (don't go looking for that, please), it gobbles up and dissolves into nothing everything it touches. The only people who are apparently crazy about this hour-long chapter are hardcore leftists, the sexually deviant and trans-activists of the kind that lately stalk J.K. Rowling like so many rabid hyenas. Not even the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate to the saga can raise hopes that the Davies era is going to be anything but "progressive" in your face as long as he's in the big chair.
("Binary gender" is now a superpower. And The Doctor must now take care not to tread wrongly and "mis-gender" anyone. Just two of the atrocities committed during the running time of this... thing.)
I have a theory. I've shared it on X/Twitter a few times. Here it is: Russell T. Davis has become aware that he is mortal. That one day he will shuffle off his mortal coil. As a homosexual man he has no children. He has no posterity, other than his body of work. But that's not enough to satisfy him. Davies is suddenly aware of the ingrained NEED to perpetuate himself. And that's what is driving him most with his return to Doctor Who. Russell T. Davies of 2005 was not like this. THAT Russell T. Davies also had no issue with bringing Davros back in his classic form. But TODAY's Russell T. Davies is now cognizant of the reality that he will DIE someday, and maybe sooner than later. So he is now hell-bent on proliferating his sexual politics and hard-left agenda through Doctor Who and impose that upon generations to come.
Perpetuating himself through his creations, which are only meant to tear apart and destroy.
Clearly, Russel T. Davies has become that which he claims to hate. Davies has become Davros.
I feel like I'm just getting started with how much "The Star Beast" let me down. And apparently it let a lot of other people down also. Broadcast figures from its premiere indicated that only about 5 million or so people tuned in. Definitely not the ratings that "The Day of the Doctor" special ten years ago on the fiftieth anniversary earned.
The next special, "The Wild Blue Yonder", transmits this coming Saturday. Followed by "The Giggle" and then the Christmas special that sees Ncuti Gatwa becoming the Fifteenth Doctor. I have to wonder what these upcoming specials will gain in terms of viewership... if they gain anything substantial at all. I kind of feel sorry for Gatwa. I've seen some of his work and he would make an outstanding Doctor... but then again, Whittaker could have been an outstanding Doctor already, had it not been for The Message(tm) having the priority over everything else.
Okay, that's it. I'm done with Doctor Who. Maybe forever. This show died in that blinding white light at the end of the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration. Nothing since has been up to snuff and it sure looks like nothing yet to come is going to be proper Who either.
Incidentally, I spent Thanksgiving Day afternoon - the sixtieth anniversary of "An Unearthly Child", the very first Doctor Who episode - watching some of my many DVDs of the show's classic era. First was the Fourth Doctor story "The Deadly Assassin" and then there was "The Five Doctors". I celebrated The Doctor and everything good that he has stood for, for decades. I'm very thankful for those DVDs (and I still have that VHS tape of "The Five Doctors").
To me, there is no more Doctor Who now. It began with "An Unearthly Child" in 1963 and it ended with the final Peter Capaldi episode. Everything since has been about nothing but forwarding THE AGENDA. Doctor Who is now in the hands of people who do not now and might never have truly appreciated The Doctor and his universe.
But as Russell T. Davies put it so beautifully: "Tough".
Let us be grateful that we had The Doctor and his companions and their adventures for as long as we did. And for now, there is still physical media of the classic series (and even many of the revived show) that can be purchased and archived away. I recommend that you do that now, before Disney+ becomes the only means of watching the show at least here in America. There is some genuine value in physical DVDs and Blu-rays and even videocassettes.
But as for what Doctor Who has now become?
Maybe there is some value in what the show is turning into. Perhaps people better than I will look at what Doctor Who is morphing toward, and politely tell Davies and his woke minions that "oh yes that's nice!" when secretly they loathe it. Kind of like a grown-up looking at the mad scribblings in crayon of a five-year old, who insists that it's a beautiful work of art. And maybe the drawing will be put on a refrigerator door, before eventually being taken down and relocated to the basement. Where rats and roaches will finally chew up its fading paper.
The Doctor - the titular hero of the long-running BBC series Doctor Who - has had many, many enemies in his sixty years of saving the universe. Everyone from Cybermen to The Master to the Weeping Angels to... well just about anything you can come up with has been a potential threat.
But there is one foe who is above and beyond the rest: Davros. The insane creator of The Doctor's oldest nemesis, the Daleks.
From his first appearance in the 1975 Tom Baker-era story "Genesis Of The Daleks", Davros has gripped viewers as few Who characters did. Bound to a life-support vehicle, only one usable arm, his natural eyes blinded necessitating a cybernetic replacement... Davros is someone who sought to perpetuate himself through his creations. And he never cared who got in the way. That one mechanical hand of his is stained with the blood of trillions of sentient beings across the span of thousands of years. It could be readily argued that Davros is the greatest villain in fictional history, in terms of people killed and civilizations destroyed.
And now, returning Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davis has gone and ruined Davros in the name of leftist insanity.
Davros returned the other night for a Doctor Who "Children in Need" special. And though it was billed as a comedy sketch, Davies has been most forthcoming in declaring that this is the Davros we are going to be seeing from now on (or at least as long as Davies is in the big chair).
Behold "Davros" on the left, compared to classic original Davros on the right:
Yup. Davros is now just a regular Joe Shmoe, without ANY of the accoutrements that obviously inspired him to create the Daleks in his image.
Speaking on new BBC Three companion series Doctor Who Unleashed, Davies said: "We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he's a fantastic character, [but] time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there's a problem with the Davros of old in that he's a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there's a very long tradition of this.
"I'm not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes and when the world changes, Doctor Who has to change as well.
"So we made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without the wheelchair – or his support unit, which functions as a wheelchair.
"I say, this is how we see Davros now, this is what he looks like. This is 2023. This is our lens. This is our eye. Things used to be black and white, they're not in black and white anymore, and Davros used to look like that and he looks like this now, and that we are absolutely standing by."
This ranks right up there with how the show fired Colin Baker back in the day. It's even right up there with the reason American network ABC cancelled Police Squad! forty years ago (ostensibly because people actually had to WATCH the show in order to "get" it).
Where does this stop? Will Cybermen now be referred to as "Cyberpeople"?
Hey, I know: Disney is the American distributor of Doctor Who now. Let's go all out and get rid of Darth Vader's trademark breathing, since it's obviously unfair to asthmatics!
I say not for the first time: leftism corrupts and destroys everything that it touches. There is nothing progressive about "progressivism".
Look dammit, that is NOT a "wheelchair". That is a mobile life-support system, that gives Davros a range of movement after he was direly wounded in an attack by the Kaleds' mortal enemies the Thalls. Davros can't live without it. That it gives him lower body mobility is beside the point... or not. After all it did inspire the look of the Daleks.
I honestly cannot believe the BBC is letting Davies eviscerate such a renowned character. It is beyond crazy.
Well, if this is the way they want to go, let 'em. I don't have to watch Doctor Who and neither does anyone else. But the beautiful thing about this series is that there's no real consistency. Perhaps someday a more sane showrunner will bring back Davros as he is most known and feared. Just as I look forward to the "Timeless Child" being retconned out eventually.
Until then, Who has lost me. And I imagine it will have lost a lot of older and more dedicated fans as well.
Greetings good sir! I know this is a very exciting time for you, so I thank you for taking the time (I hope) to read this proposal. Please know that I have been a fan of your helming of Doctor Who since that very first episode with Christopher Eccleston as the Ninth Doctor. I am looking forward to where you are taking the series next, especially with the return of The Toymaker and the debut of Ncuti Gatwa as the next Doctor.
However, Mr, Davies, I am somewhat dismayed that you are apparently not turning some attention toward addressing the matter of "the Timeless Child": by far THE most controversial thing that has happened to the franchise in its entire history.
Kindest sir, I am not alone in the belief that the Timeless Child subtracted from and even destroyed the mystique that The Doctor has had since the very beginning. We are NOT supposed to know The Doctor's origins. The Doctor is a cipher, for all that is best within us. The Doctor is our surrogate in a magnificent universe and he belongs to ALL the ages, whoever or whatever he is supposed to be. Your predecessor brought that to a grinding halt. And indeed, I know a few who have stopped being fans of Doctor Who entirely, they were so disappointed by the development.
It's an issue I have devoted maybe too much time toward pondering about. How does Doctor Who regain its sense of original mystery again?
So let me cut to the heart meat of the matter, my good fellow:
I have come up with a solution to the problem of the Timeless Child.
It is simple. It is elegant. It makes The Doctor an entity shrouded in mystery once again.
Here's the kicker: it does NOT invalidate or repudiate the work of your predecessor, Chris Chibnall. It actually BUILDS upon that, in a pretty cool way.
I am presently living in South Carolina, in the United States. Currently I am an aide to students with special learning needs. I have also been a mental health worker, a filmmaker, and technical writer among many other professions. I would not want monetary compensation or even any acclaim, if you might permit me to come to the United Kingdom and offer my assistance. All I want is a chance to bring The Doctor back to his/her/their place of enigma.
Okay, there is ONE thing I would ask for, if you happen to have a spare one around. I would like a full-size Dalek. The classic design from the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras. Because that's the style that most sent me hiding behind the sofa when I first discovered Doctor Who as a child in the 1980s. That would be a very nice conversation piece in my living room.
Well, that is my proposal. If you believe this is something you would be interested in, please feel free to contact me at theknightshift@gmail.com and we can discuss moving forward from there.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. And again, I am most eager to see what you have cooked up for Doctor Who's sixtieth anniversary!
Doctor Who needs a hard and fresh return to the franchise that that we know and love, above and away from the mess of the Thirteenth Doctor era (which if we're going to be honest really can't be pinned on Jodie Whittaker, she was just working with some really bad material).
I don't know if that's what is coming in the next few months with the specials commemorating the show's sixtieth anniversary (seems like just yesterday we were celebrating its fiftieth) but the pics and the new trailer that dropped over the weekend have me warefully optimistic.
The last time we saw The Doctor, she (ugh!) had regenerated - clothes and all - into a perfect facscimile of the Tenth Doctor, once again played by David Tennant. However the showrunners seem to insist that Tennant is playing the Fourteenth Doctor. Which means this is really Tennant's fourth or fifth character with the Tenth Doctor's face he's portrayed since 2005 (just work with me 'mkay?).
So going into the sixtieth anniversary specials it will be David Tennant as... Doctor Who-ever... and joining him is none other than Donna Noble, again played by the delightful Catherine Tate! Although one seems to remember that last time we saw The Doctor and Donna together it was made clear that they couldn't see each other again.
Clearly, the BBC is throwing caution to the wind...
Here's the trailer for the specials, which materialized about 48 hours ago:
And at last, the BBC is confirming that Neil Patrick Harris, who had long already been announced as being in the specials, is going to be playing The Toymaker: a villain not seen since the William Hartnell era in 1966.
Is it just me, or does Harris as The Toymaker seem poised to chew up the scenery more than any Who bad guy since Davros?
The big celebration kicks off in November. And I'm very much hoping we get at least a fleeting cameo of Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor.
The announcement already came a year ago, that the Fifteenth Doctor on the British television series Doctor Who is going to be portrayed by Rwandan-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa. Now as things begin really ramping up for the show's sixtieth anniversary in November, the BBC is showing its cards a bit.
Here is Gatwa giving us a glimpse of what's to come:
Number Fifteen's attire reminds me a bit of Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor. The way he's got his hand gesturing brings to mind the early photos of the Twelfth Doctor played by Peter Capaldi, or maybe Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. Gatwa's Doctor looks like he means business, as if he's saying "Okay, fun and games are over, let's get down to brass tacks."
Be mad at me if you will, but I'm very glad the Doctor is a man again. No offense to Jodie Whittaker, but there is a dynamic between the Doctor and his companions and you just don't mess with that. My personal favorites to be the Doctor after Thirteen's regeneration were Idris Elba, and Tilda Swinton playing against gender and portraying a male Doctor. But I think Gatwa will be fine.
Now, if new/previous showrunner Russell T. Davies can just fix that STOOPID "Timeless Child" nonsense...
It was released earlier today. I've watched this trailer for Babylon 5: The Road Home at least five times now... and I am stoked. It looks beautiful. And it seems that they've done an excellent job at casting the voice actors for the characters whose original portrayers have "gone beyond the Rim" over the years.
(I'm hoping that we get at least one look inside Garibaldi's quarters aboard Babylon 5. Just to see if the painting of Daffy Duck is still there.)
Anyhoo... enjoy!
Babylon 5: The Road Home hits digital download, 4K, and Blu-ray on August 15th, 2023.
I was reminded of something earlier today, and I can't believe that this somehow slipped past the radar screen...
Last week, May 1st, was the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of the NBC television miniseries V.
That doesn't seem possible. It's like it was only yesterday that creator Kenneth Johnson unleashed his nightmarish vision of fascism on a global scale. The Visitors came to major cities across the planet, in fifty ships each three miles in diameter. They looked like us. They came from a dying planet and they needed humanity's help. They came in peace.
And it was all a damnable lie. Their intent was to rape the Earth, seizing every precious natural resource. And the fate of mankind? Something truly horrifying. Four decades later and the scene of all those humans in cold storage still sends a shiver up my spine.
It was a grand endeavor. What if Nazism had conquered the planet? V was about that. Every aspect of true-life fascism was portrayed, magnified through the lens of science-fiction. But it was also about hope, and taking a stand and fighting back. More than it frightened us, V inspired us. The film was dedicated to the resistance fighters, wherever they have been found, past present and future.
This franchise deserved better! Johnson's original plan as he presented it to NBC was that after the original miniseries, there would be three or four television movies each season, depicting the Visitors' occupation of Earth in various places. But the executives didn't want that. They wanted a second miniseries and using that to launch a weekly series. They got that, but the follow-ups lost a lot of the spirit of the original. V wasn't something like Star Wars, it was about a much deeper notion. And then around 2009 ABC tried to reboot the franchise, but it failed for various reasons (I thought it was quite an admirable effort though).
It was an awe-some television experience. So many moments from it that no doubt still stick out in the minds of many.
But here is my favorite moment. Not just of the miniseries, but one of my most favorite moments in television, ever. The final scene of Part One of V, the original miniseries. Abraham, the elderly Holocaust survivor and his friend Ruby, find a group of teenagers who are vandalizing Visitor propaganda posters. He stops them.
No, I won't say anything else. Let the scene speak for itself:
And from that moment, humanity has a symbol of resistance.
It's a little dated now, but what do you expect from a television miniseries forty years old? Don't let that stop you from watching it. And you'll probably be like the rest of us were at the time: wondering how the HECK did any major broadcast network get away with all the stuff that they showed in this movie?
The show's creator J. Michael Straczynski unloaded the news on Twitter earlier this afternoon. More details are coming soon, including the movie's title and release date.
I cannot emphasize enough how stoked I am about this. Babylon 5 was like an extra few years of education on top of what I got in college. The five-season story about that miles-long space station all alone in the night, the "last best hope for peace" in a galaxy rife with plotting and intrigue, shattered the ceiling both as a broadcast series and for what the medium was capable of giving viewers. Had it not been for Babylon 5 paving the way, there may have never been a rebooted Battlestar Galactica, or Lost. Or The Walking Dead for that matter, along with an armful of other shows.
I'm really looking forward to seeing how this goes. One thing that popped into mind: wouldn't it be really sweet if we saw an animated Garibaldi watching Daffy Duck cartoons? That would be soooo meta.
If this show has always been just off your radar screen and you want to "get a feel" for it, I wracked my brain trying to think of a clip from the show to put in this post, just a little iota of what it's about. Someone on Facebook found one and it's perfect. From the third season episode "Passing Through Gethsemane", Brad Dourif as Brother Edward, telling Delenn (the late Mira Furlan) and Lennier (Bill Mumy) about the last night that Christ spent before His death:
Yes, a science-fiction series that is respectful toward the concept of religion. Just one of many such moments that Babylon 5 came to be renowned for.
This would be something that would compel me to get HBO Max, just to watch this. I've always loved this show, its universe and this amazing cast of characters. Ever since first reading about it in Starlog several months before it premiered in the winter of 1993, I've been enchanted by what this series was attempting. And it pulled it off beautifully.
And now, more is coming. Thing I'll celebrate by making some bagna cauda. Hey, it's easier to find than Zima...
Okay, this has apparently been up for a decade or so already but only now am I learning that Internet Archive has a collection of EVERY issue of Starlog: that tome of science-fiction goodness that many of us savored every month. Originally devoted to keeping the embers of Star Trek burning in those years between the original series and the movies, Starlog soon expanded to cover anything and everything pertaining to sci-fi and fantasy, be it in film or on television or in literature or whatever. In the decades before the advent of the Internet, it was magazines like Starlog that kept our appetites whetted for whatever was coming new out of the genre. I dare say that it broadened a lot of minds, to things that they otherwise might not have considered. I for one might never have read a Philip Jose Farmer novel, were it not for an amazing two-part interview that Starlog did with him in 1990. That's in this collection. So too is the night in 1977 that George Lucas went to a convention and replied "he's Luke Skywalker's father" when asked what was the deal about that Darth Vader guy. There was a lot of thoughtful material, some really inspirational stuff and more than a little humor to be found in the pages of Starlog and it makes me feel good knowing that it's out there to be discovered by new generations of geeks. Mash your mouse down here to find it again, for the first time.
On July 1st I was having a severe headache, that had persisted since the night before. I went home early from work and took some medicine and quietly prayed that I would be feeling better soon. Because I did not want to miss volume two of the fourth season of Stranger Things on the day that it had dropped onto Netflix.
I haven't written nearly enough about Stranger Things on this blog. Actually, I don't think I've written about it at all. When this is a series that for the past six years has absolutely arrested me whenever a new season has been released. The first part of this latest season premiered on the same day as Disney+'s Obi-Wan Kenobi and having seen both of them in their entirety now, there is no question as to which is the superior show... and I say that being a hopeless lifelong Star Wars fanatic.
So, about Stranger Things. This show debuted in the summer of 2016, when Tammy (my dog) and I were journeying across America looking for a new home. We were in Albuquerque, New Mexico when I finally decided to see what the big to-do about this show was about. So one morning after taking Tammy out for a walk around the hotel (where she had become a big celebrity, they let her run up and down the hallways to her heart's content) I showered and shaved and put on clean clothes and then pulled out my iPad Pro and curled up on the bed and began watching the first episode, "The Vanishing of Will Byers".
My friends, it is RARE that any television series sucks me hard in from the start. I can probably number them on one hand: Twin Peaks, Lost, maybe a few others. Stranger Things had them all beat, with even fewer episodes. After witnessing the death and destruction going on inside Hawkins Laboratory and the title credits (which I will never fast forward past, not for this show) the episode cuts to the basement of Mike Wheeler, whose friends are engaged in an hours-long Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
That's what did it. That's what hooked and reeled me in.
This is a series about "my kind" of people. I grew up in the Nineteen Eighties also, just as Mike and Will and Lucas and Dustin are in Stranger Things. I "get" them and the world they inhabit. This show has captured and conveyed that perfectly. Stranger Things is a homage, a love letter, a monument to all that made the Eighties so amazing. Ronald Reagan was President of the United States. Vietnam wasn't long ago at all and our country was locked in cold war with Russia. Comic books were mostly read, not adapted into blockbuster movies at the drop of a hat. We listened to Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper and Devo and Eurythmics. On television He-Man was constantly outsmarting Skeletor and Mr. T was shouting "Suckal!" on The A-Team. We quoted from movies like Star Trek II and we speculated about Star Wars Episode One which was probably just three years away. And kids still did things like ride their bikes to their friend's house and hang out for hours after school before the phone rang and it was Mom telling you to come home for dinner.
We were young people who lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation at any time and chose to make the most of the moments we were given. I think that when The Day After aired in the fall of 1983, it drove the point home that much more. It made us cling ever more so to that fleeting sense of childhood. And now, forty years later, I think many of us are still clinging to it. There isn't going to be quite the same reminiscing about the Nineties or the Aughts as there is now about the Reagan years. In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell and I think we all knew that the Iron Curtain's days were numbered. It was the sheer weight of the Eighties come smashing against that bulwark of the old ways. If only that same spirit could still prevail against people like Putin who seem determined to restore the Soviet Union to it's former borders. But, I digress...
Back to Stranger Things. I had watched the first two episodes and then came the only interruption that day was when housekeeping came around about eleven. I picked up Tammy and we went and got lunch and went for a quick walk and came back to our room. And I binged the HECK out of the rest of that season. It is VERY seldom that I binge watch anything... but I kept having to see "what happens next?!?" At last we came to the Byers house at Christmas, watching this family that had endured so much over the past month... before shrieking anew at the sight of that thing from the Upside-Down coming out of Will's mouth.
Albuquerque did many things to me, in the five weeks that I was there. Leaving town as a new fan of Stranger Things is one of them. I don't lend my fanship to many things from pop culture. But Stranger Things more than earned it. And when we hit the road again the first season soundtrack was playing loud from my car's stereo. It was as good as anything to listen to as we set out again across the New Mexico desert.
Season two came a little over a year later, and we were in decidedly different environs: living for awhile with friends in South Carolina. It hadn't been the ending of our traipsing across America that I had originally intended. But for the situation, it sufficed and even bore some fruit that I had not imagined. Once again, I binged Stranger Things on my iPad Pro, pausing only to take Tammy out. Season two ended well, but lacked the "bang" that I was expecting. It did have a resolution that I was happy with though, especially Mike and Eleven dancing at the Snow Ball.
Season three... ahhh yes. July of 2019. Months before "the plague" hit and stopped everything in its tracks. Who could have guessed that this would be the last Stranger Things that we would get for another three years? "Not I, said the dog." Speaking of which, by this point Tammy had become WELL trained to use the pee pads I set down for her. So there was very little interruption while binging season three. I started at about eleven and finished with "The Battle of Starcourt" around 8 and by that time was wiped out. What a rush! And not for the first time I thought that the show had perfectly captured the Eighties. We really did use to hang out in shopping malls, ya know. Most of them didn't have Soviets tunneling beneath them though, thankfully.
And that was all until May of this year, when I watched the entire series again, only now taking time to pause every so often and tend to other things. I wanted the show to have room to "percolate" in my mind, instead of assaulting the senses full-blast. By the time season four premiered I was refreshed and ready for the new episodes. I took half a day off from work so that I could get home and started watching the next season... which is something I have not done at all for the Star Wars series on Disney+ and likely never would either. Season four was split into two "volumes" by Netflix, because the last two episodes are so long. After finishing volume one's "The Massacre at Hawkins Lab" I just sat there stunned and dazed. And all I could think of was "how are they going to top THAT??"
Well, the last two episodes of the season came out three days ago. I took a few hours break between them. And it dropped my jaw hard on the floor too many times than could be counted. And then came those final minutes, as Stranger Things theme music began then developed into a full instrumental composition, as our heroes see what's falling around them...
Yowza! Season three had cliffhangers. Season four has everyone dangling from that cliff by their fingernails. It was eight hours before I could fall to sleep. No episode of television since Lost's "Through the Looking Glass" has had that kind of effect on me.
So now we're awaiting the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. I am hoping and praying that there will be a panel for the show at this year's Comic-Con, and that they'll announce production of the new season beginning soon after. But I will trust them to get it right. The Duffer Brothers, the creators of Stranger Things, have done all right so far. They have given us what is perhaps the best written and finest acted television series currently in production. I can wait. Even if it's another two years, by which time I'll be fifty.
Which seems the perfect time to enjoy a series about the years when many of us came of age.
Hey, do you have HBO Max? Because if you haven't heard already, all the cool kids are binging on Babylon 5.
Yes, THATBabylon 5. The Nineties-era science-fiction television epic. The story of that five mile long space station and the people inhabiting it, "all alone in the night." Some have argued that it might be the single greatest television series of its time. It was certainly ahead of that time. Had it not been for Babylon 5 breaking the path ahead, a lot of series might not have seen the light of day. It set out to tell a story spanning the length of five seasons, and it pulled it off magnificently.
And it has received a remaster of sorts. The video has been cleaned up and its legendary CGI effects (which I think still hold up even today) have been sharpened a bit. All five seasons plus the two-hour pilot movie "The Gathering" are now on HBO Max. And it has become a raging success on that platform.
Having been a fan of Babylon 5 since first hearing about it in the pages of Starlog, I am having a hoot watching the reaction of others who are just now discovering this series. It's definitely binge-worthy, indeed it seems tailor-made for binging. You'll want to "watch just one more" every step of the way, especially when things crank up around the mid-point of season two (if your jaw doesn't drop during "The Coming of Shadows", you need dental work). Actually, I envy the new fans. They don't have to spend long months waiting for the next batch of episodes to drop. I still remember well agonizing for "The Fall of Night" and its promised reveal of a major character. Good times, those were!
If you don't have HBO Max, the remastered series is up on iTunes also. I bought "Midnight on the Firing Line" - the first episode of season one - and it definitely looks much better compared to the DVD (I own all five seasons plus the TV movies collection and "The Lost Tales"). Who knows, I may spring for the entire series on iTunes eventually.
So if you've a hankering for solid television that will make you think, laugh, cry, and everything in between, you can't go wrong with Babylon 5. And if you want to delve even further into the series, the legendary Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 is still online, looking just as it did when it appeared in 1994. Well worth visiting its episode guide as you progress through the show, especially for the notes and commentary by series creator J. Michael Straczynski.
Look, I love Star Wars as much as anyone (maybe far too much more than anyone. But what came out of the Disney Investor Event a few days ago worries me:
Ten... count 'em TEN... new Star Wars projects going on for the next few years. Those are in addition to The Mandalorian. Most of these are likewise going to be streaming series on the Disney+ service. Ahsoka and Rangers of the New Republic are said to be spinoffs of The Mandalorian. We knew that Obi-Wan Kenobi was coming (it begins filming next month) as well as the series about Andor from the movie Rogue One. Ditto the animated series about the Bad Batch (introduced in the final season of The Clone Wars).
Do we really need... or were we at all asking for... a series about young Lando Calrissian though? No offense to Donald Glover, I thought he nailed it in Solo: A Star Wars Story. But seriously, it's going to have to be something special to keep me tuned in every week. The Rogue Squadron movie to be directed by Patty Jenkins piques my curiosity. Done right, it could be a real homage to the fighter pilots of World War II (which George Lucas based the space fights in the original trilogy off of).
But to be honest, the only ones from this list of Star Wars projects - along with The Mandalorian - are the Star Wars: Visions animated anthology series (I have long argued that Star Wars needs an anthology series of fresh stories and new perspectives) and The Acolyte. The latter said to be set some two hundred years before the time of the Empire, and focusing on the Dark Side.
THAT is what I want most from Star Wars right now. Some new eras to open up and explore. Instead it's as if Disney is to afraid to move away from the well of the Clone Wars-Empire times.
How much more are they going to milk that? When there is some twenty thousand years of potential Star Wars lore to draw from and expand out into?
I want more Star Wars, no doubt about it. But of greater import I want good Star Wars. I want a saga that is fresh and full of surprises. And what came out of the investors event fell short of fueling anticipation for anything like that.
The good thing about Star Wars though, is that you don't have to imbibe of all of it. There's a lot of freedom to pick and choose which parts of the saga you will follow along with and which don't really satisfy your appetite. So I can maybe skip some and still thrill to The Mandalorian. Just like I have come to disavow The Rise of Skywalker almost completely.
(Hey Disney, give us that rumored "Lucas cut" of that movie instead!)
There is likely no disputing that Christopher Nolan is king of high-concept cinema. With Tenet I am wondering if maybe he went for TOO high-concept. It was ten years ago this summer that Nolan gave us Inception: a movie that I have watched many times since and continues to enthrall.
Tenet however, I might watch once or twice again. Three times tops. Just enough to try to figure out what the heck is going on. Because there is some Grade-A gray matter warping at work in this movie. The publicity for it has been clear that it's NOT a film about time travel. Instead it's about "inversion". Reversing the entropy of an object - or people - so that it appears that they are going backward when instead from the perspective of the object... say, a bullet... time is progressing forward linearly. And I can understand that much. But more exposition would have been appreciated.
It would have also helped matters if the sound wasn't overwhelming the spoken dialogue. Straining to make out what the characters were saying became an exercise for the eardrum. Was it deliberate? I mean, it's a pretty discombobulated plot to follow along as it is. Something about arms dealers and a fraudulent Goya drawing. Distracting it with sound and fury just made things worse, intentionally or not.
But if Tenet has something going for it, it's absolutely the visual effects. Nolan and his crew used a real Boeing 747 for this movie. And the battle scene toward the end is incredible to behold if also bewildering to keep up with. It's apparent that Tenet's production team went for practical effects whenever and wherever possible... and that's something I can definitely approve of.
I will give Tenet a score of 7 out of 10. For comparison's sake I would give Inception a 9.5 out of 10. Tenet is a strong effort from Christopher Nolan. Unfortunately this time he came short of making the mark. For further comparison's sake, a perfect 10 of a time-centric movie is the 2004 film Primer. Produced for a miniscule seven grand, Primer proves that a solid high-concept movie can be made without a major studio backing it with a few hundred million dollars.
There is a rumor... rumor mind ya so take this with an industrial sized salt lick... that somewhere in the Disney Vault there rests a cut of Star War Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker that is drastically different and better than what was released theatrically last Christmas. This cut was allegedly assembled by George Lucas: the Maker himself. This edit supposedly adds new material, removes several elements we saw in The Rise of Skywalker's theater version and perhaps even has a new ending. The result is a film that is at least forty percent altered from the original cinematic release.
It is supposed to fix the problems that The Rise of Skywalker has, as well as many of the problems that the entire sequel trilogy is rife with.
It is the hope of many fans that "the George Lucas Cut" - IF it exists at all - will be released eventually, and sooner than later. One possible venue would be Disney+ (where The Mandalorian and the complete The Clone Wars series have made their home). One must wonder how much the Disney execs will be watching the upcoming release of the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League on HBO Max. Success for that cut would certainly compel Disney to cast an eye upon potential product for its own streaming service.
I bring up the Lucas Cut rumor because I am increasingly finding myself hoping and praying that it's true. And that it will get released. And that it is just as magnificent as it's being made out to be.
Because at this point that's what it's going to take to make me respect the Star Wars sequel trilogy.
Yes folks, there it is. I am going to always and forever be a Star Wars fan. But going forward... I'm going to try to forget that Episodes VII, VIII and IX ever happened. Because there are substantial problems with what should have been a final fulfilling arc in the Skywalker saga. Problems which can not be ignored any longer. As far as I'm concerned the Skywalker tale on film ends with Vader's redemption, the Emperor's death and Luke's reunion with his friends amid the celebration on Endor.
Because it is now abundantly clear that Disney had no idea what it was doing when it produced the sequel trilogy.
It was Daisy Ridley's comments this past week that made the kill shot. It seems that even after the cameras stopped rolling there was indecision about Rey's parentage. At one point or another she was related to Obi-Wan Kenobi, or was Palpatine's granddaughter, or just what Kylo told her in The Last Jedi: "no one". I wish she had been nobody special. It would have made Rey a much more potent character. Better than that: it would have reinforced the notion that the Force belongs to anyone and everyone. That it was not the sole provenance of favored lineages like the Skywalkers or the Palpatines. One of the major themes of A New Hope was that a hero can come from the most humble of beginnings. Rey was set to follow that theme. And then they made her a granddaughter to Palpatine...
Did these people seriously understand Star Wars at all? Did they even care?
Blame can be assigned across the board. I'm not going to bother divvying it up. But mistakes were made. Atrocious mistakes. The components were there for a majestic trilogy, the one we had been long promised but had come to believe would never be made. All of the pieces were within ready grasp. They even had the cast of the original trilogy willing to sign aboard for the project.
The sequel trilogy had everything going for it, seemingly. And they messed it up.
Personally, what was most unforgiving about what happened in the sequels was how Snoke was treated. Here was a new character - a fantastic character - perfectly set up to be a truly
horrific and fascinating villain. Snoke brought about the reaction that Darth Vader evoked during his first onscreen appearance: even without knowing anything about him, we knew he was evil. And we hated him for it. And we wanted to see more of him. Snoke had presence.
I can look past how Snoke was killed in The Last Jedi. What I can not look past is how sloppily it was made out to be that Snoke was just a puppet for Palpatine. It was complete laziness, and trepidation, and a failure to give Snoke the respect he deserved. He deserved much better.
Star Wars deserved better. It still does.
Could I somehow come to give the sequel trilogy enough lenience that it takes a rightful place with the six core saga films that came before? Yeah. Yeah, I could. And I think that many if not most of the Star Wars fans put off by the sequels - and there are loads of them - could accept the sequels. But not like this. They treasure this mythology too much than to accept second or third best. And Disney erred grievously when it took those fans for granted and saw their wallets more than their hearts.
If the rumors are anywhere accurate, there is a cut of The Rise of Skywalker that is a true chapter of the Star Wars saga. A film that addresses the problems of its immediate predecessors and not only complements them, it makes them better.
I hope that rumor is a true one. Because if Star Wars has taught us anything, it is that nothing is beyond redemption.
EDIT 09/14/2020: Had a moment of realization this morning. Obi-Wan Kenobi said that a ship the size of a TIE Fighter could not get so far out into space on its own. Yet in the sequel trilogy we see TIEs swooping in and out of lightspeed all the time. They even follow the Millennium Falcon, aka "the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy". What kind of consistency is THAT?!?!?
Many of you by now are hearing the rumors: that Kathleen Kennedy is on the way out as matriarch of the Star Wars franchise. That the operation will soon be run by either Jon Favreau or Dave Filoni. That the entire sequel trilogy is going to be scrapped and "re-made".
Personally, I doubt that last one is going to happen. Because I can't but think of all the little girls I've seen dressed as Rey for the premiere of the past few Star Wars movies. Rey is a true heroine to them. Heck, she is for me too. But especially to young girls who look to Rey as a role model. Not I or anyone else should take that away from them. Besides, Star Wars was ripe for a female character on par with Luke Skywalker and young Obi-Wan Kenobi. Rey fits the role perfectly.
But I won't deny that the sequel trilogy is the worst of the three. I first had a bad feeling about this when it became clear that too much of The Last Jedi was going to be spent on the Resistance fleet fleeing from the First Order. And then Snoke getting killed. And then the reveal that the enemy of The Rise Of Skywalker would be a resurrected Emperor Palpatine...
I've had a theory for many years. It's about Star Trek, the original series. So many episodes of that show are timeless classics. And then there were the utterly hokey ones like "Spock's Brain". You know, the episode where aliens run off with Spock's gray matter so it can serve as the new computer running their indoor plumbing.
How hokey can you get? But it begs the question: did the over-ridiculous premise of the episode disqualify it from being canon? Because it just doesn't seem, you know... "Star Trek"-ish.
I've a solution to that. How the bad Trek can co-exist with the good. Those episodes are actually fake captain's log entries that James Kirk made when at times he was feeling extra bored. And then decades if not centuries later the data dump of the U.S.S. Enterprise is being researched by historians who don't know any better. And they find the stuff about the brain stealers and the space Nazis and whatever else and they assume that those things "really" happened. When in fact it was just Kirk having his fun.
That's my theory and I'm sticking by it.
So what bearing does that have on a post about Star Wars?
I've re-watched The Rise Of Skywalker at least a dozen times now since it became available on iTunes and then Blu-ray and now on Disney+, and... how should I put this? It's frustrating the heck out of me. Part of me likes it. Part of me is "meh" about it but the larger part of me can't stop thinking how much makes no sense. Like travel times through hyperspace: it shouldn't be that instantaneous. And how Palpatine is brought back so late into the entire saga. A lot of small issues that accumulate. Plenty enough of them lingering from the previous film The Last Jedi.
And now... I sadly lament that the Star Wars sequel trilogy - episodes 7, 8, and 9 - are the weakest of the entire series. When they should have rivaled the original trilogy in greatness.
But then something hit me. And this is going back a ways...
George Lucas was saying as early as 1982 how the entire Star Wars saga was one story being told by the droids Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio. It was the tale of the Skywalker Family, being shared with the Whills: a mysterious sect that among other things recorded the history of the galaxy. And their collection of such stories became "The Journal of the Whills": something that Lucas later described was a larger work of which Star Wars "was just a piece".
Let's assume that was and is and ever shall remain George Lucas' notion about how the story of the core Star Wars legend came about. We can be assured that hundreds of years after the events of the Skywalker saga, Artoo and Threepio are passing it along to the Whills. We can trust their word. They were THERE during that time. They saw it all happen. Especially Artoo. At least, they saw everything from The Phantom Menace through Return Of The Jedi.
But did Artoo and Threepio necessarily witness the later events with such clarity?
No. They did not. Apart from traveling aboard the Millennium Falcon during Rey's search for Luke Skwyalker, Artoo went nowhere. He had been in near-total shutdown for years prior to Rey and Finn's arrival. And Threepio? He certainly wasn't off on any cosmic adventure. Not without his little blue buddy. Threepio was just hanging around the Resistance base, in Leia's company.
It can be safely assumed that the true chronicle of that part of the Skywalker legend ended with Return Of The Jedi or thereabouts.
So does that mean the sequel trilogy is all trash? Nope. Not at all.
Because there was another droid who was witnessing those events. From the first moments of The Force Awakens, BB-8 was an active and integral part of the sequel trilogy. And we can rest assured that he chronicled as best he could the larger events around him.
The thing is, BB-8 might well be what is termed an "unreliable narrator". And if he is sharing his knowledge with Artoo and Threepio (who go on to share it with the Whills) it may not be entirely accurate. BB-8 is a plucky little droid but he seems confused at times. Maybe he has a circuit burn out in his memory, as a friend has suggested. Maybe he's just in way over his cute lil' head. However it is, BB-8's accounting of history might be severely handicapped when compared to that of Artoo and Threepio. Those two have a counterpart-level base of understanding. They are check-summing and error-correcting each other. BB-8 has no such advantage. And so it is that, sadly, BB-8's recording of many details is spotty at best.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that BB-8's part in the chronicle is ALL bad. In a general sense his chronicle is accurate. And if he tells Artoo that Rey goes to Tatooine to bury Luke and Leia's sabers and that she assumes the Skywalker surname, we can be confident that's what really happened.
It also allows for a lot of leeway of interpretation. Snoke? He could have been "made" by Palpatine. He could also have been some Dark Side shlub who existed long before Palpatine was even born (and The Last Jedi novelization indicates that he was). Hyperspace travel? That's BB-8's interpretation of what he was told by Rey and others. The casino? Okay we can take BB-8 at his word that's what happened. There are dozens of elements of the sequel trilogy that defy logic... unless we can accept that they're being conveyed by an unreliable narrator.
I put it to the test. I re-watched The Last Jedi and The Rise Of Skywalker, per my new paradigm. And lo and behold it works. It really, honestly works! The sequel trilogy is much more palatable now. After fanwanking my synapses to the breaking point trying to "suss it all out" with the problems of the final three movies, suddenly there is a silver bullet for it all.
But in a funny way, I can still accept the quirks and at times misfires of the sequel trilogy as being part and parcel with being true Star Wars films, even without having BB-8's flaws being the cause of it all. Because in the end, Star Wars is a legend. And legends are rarely if ever clean cut affairs. They don't need to be, either.
It's just that it's nice now to have a reason to accept the sequels as belonging with the other six movies after all.
It seems like an entirely other world ago now. When the wait between new episodes could be not just weeks but months away. There was no "binging" a series on a regular basis. And streaming television was still yet to come.
I was in a different place also. Still reeling from a divorce. Wrestling with the worst symptoms of manic depression. Alone. Confused. And, well... lost. Looking for a purpose, as John Locke was.
There had never been a television series like Lost. And there never will be again, ever. At least, there never can be for me.
The medium has changed too drastically. Viewer expectations have become too impatient. The audience demands definitive answers, when once upon a time such a thing as "exercise for the reader" was a treasured virtue. To be sure, some series - such as The Walking Dead and Game Of Thrones - followed admirably in the wake of Lost. But those are basic and premium cable, absent the restraints of broadcast network television.
And as frustrating as "The Iron Throne" was to many Game Of Thrones fans, it only remotely approached the level of controversy as did Lost's final season leading up to "The End".
Always live together, and you'll never die alone.
Lost's series finale came ten years ago tonight. It capped off six years of a phenomenon that had engrossed millions, fueled so many classroom and workplace discussions on the mornings after, and unleashed countless online forums where fans dissected everything from the sounds of the Smoke Monster to Egyptian hieroglyphics. From those frantic first moments of Oceanic Flight 815's wreckage on the beach of an uncharted island Lost was mythology painted with a broad, broad brush. And it was going somewhere, was set to give us closure. Right? Right?!?
But here we are, ten years later, and the fans seemingly more galvanized than ever about "The End" and what preceded it.
Me? I thought "The End" was not a perfect episode, but it didn't have to be. It was as fitting a conclusion to Lost as there was likely to be. And while we will forever be debating whether there was some master plan that was followed - with every element having an appropriate reason and backstory behind it - it must be admitted, however begrudgingly, that "The End" was pure Lost. And really, would we have wanted it to be any different?
Others will have already written with more eloquence about "The End". But on this occasion, I thought it might be fun to share some of the theories I've had over the years about Lost. A series that we will forever be theorizing and conjecturing about. Why not add my own into the mix?
First off...
WHERE was the Island? How can it move?
I don't believe the Island was something "movable". It had a solid geological basis somewhere and we can know that because of its volcanic origin. But I do think that access to the Island was something fluid and malleable. It's the approach to the Island that is constantly moving. Going back to the quantum physics that the DHARMA Initiative boffins were messin' around with, the Island is somewhat "superpositioned" in the real world. It might be geologically located in the midst of the Pacific, but the access points to it change from time to time so that someone flying over the Atlantic might come upon one of the "windows" that Eloise described. Or arrive at the Island by boat in the Mediterranean (as Claudia and her people did). So think of the Island as a fixed point, with spacetime warped around it seemingly haphazardly. Going back again to what Eloise told Jack and his friends however, the windows through the warp could be calculated (with the help of an Apple II computer and that really strange Foucault's pendulum down at The Lamp Post station).
So no, the Island itself was not moving. But how you came to the Island certainly was!
How old is the Island? When did the Egyptians, the Romans etc. get there?
The Island itself is probably a few million years old, give or take an eon. But we're wondering how long people have been coming there.
A major clue comes in "The End", when Desmond enters the Heart of the Island. See those characters carved in the walls and on the "cork"? Those are Phoenician: predating ancient Egypt. It can be surmised that the Heart of the Island was primarily the work of this earlier culture. As for what purpose: who knows. But they're the ones who are ultimately responsible for all of the crazy on the Island.
The Egyptians came some time after, and they built the statue of Taweret, the wheel chamber, etc.
Then came the Roman castaways of which Claudia was one. And who gave birth to Jacob and his brother.
Wait... it was the Man in Black and the Romans who built the wheel, right?
The Man in Black and his compatriots were building a wheel, not THE wheel. Not the one that we see Ben Linus turning in the fourth season finale.
The evidence? The Egyptian hieroglyphics on the wall of the chamber. The fact that Mother destroyed the Man in Black's own chamber before he could finish his wheel.
Are you saying that Jacob and the Man in Black came after the Egyptians were on the Island?
Yup.
That's impossible! The Egyptians had the Smoke Monster in their wall carvings. So the Man in Black was before they came!
The Man in Black and the Smoke Monster were two different entities.
Work with me here. We ARE theorizing after all...
The Smoke Monster has long, long been part of the Island's place in the scheme of things. Way before the birth of Jacob and his brother. The Smoke Monster is a tangible representative of evil itself and that evil must always be contained. Just as Jacob told Richard when he was showing him that bottle of wine: the Island is a "cork" keeping the bottled-up darkness from spilling out. And for a time, whether by the Phoenician culture or the Egyptians, that representative was held back.
Until Jacob threw his brother into the Heart of the Island. Which was the catalyst for everything that came after.
Entering the Heart killed Jacob's brother. We can know this after the tearful farewell that Jacob gave his brother and the Mother. Jacob didn't treat the Smoke Monster as if it were a new incarnation of the Man in Black. But what happened at the Heart did free the Smoke Monster from captivity. And Jacob would spent the next two thousand years trying to make up for his mistake.
What would happen if the Smoke Monster got off the Island?
Hell would come to the world.
We got a glimpse of it with Sayid, after he was resurrected in the corrupted water at the Temple. It was "the sickness" that had been spoken of before, and now we know what it did: it darkened the heart of the infected. As Lennon translated from Dogen, Sayid had been "claimed" by the darkness. And later on Sayid described how he couldn't feel anything: that he had become emotionally deadened.
Now imagine that same deadening happening to millions, if not billions of people across the face of the Earth.
Jacob was right: the Island was a cork and it was holding back something that if it became free, it would spread.
Maybe "The End" didn't make it clear enough but those were REALLY high stakes that Jack was playing for when he fought the Smoke Monster's Locke form.
What is the meaning of "the numbers"?
Ahhhh yes: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. And how mad we did get trying to figure those out.
The answer is at once ridiculously mundane and metaphysical. And it helps to bear in mind the Valenzetti Equation that was written about on the blast-door map. In The Lost Experience real-life game at the time, it was revealed that the numbers are factors in the Valenzetti Equation: a formula calculating how long manking has before driving itself into extinction. One of the purposes of the DHARMA Initiative was to change at least one of the factors, and thus stave off that extinction.
Basically, the numbers are intrinsic to the fabric of the universe. THAT is why they keep showing up. They surface because... well, it's their nature. And DHARMA is trying to change the numbers and consequently, the universe itself.
So the numbers are at once pretty boring and also utterly fascinating.
Who was that in Jacob's cabin?
My gray matter has discombobulated itself a zillion ways from Sunday trying to figure out who it was we briefly saw in that chair when Ben took Locke to the cabin. And later the same figure apparently appeared very briefly when Hurley found the cabin.
It wasn't the Smoke Monster-as-Christian Shepherd, we can disregard THAT possibility by process of elimination. And it obviously wasn't Jacob himself. Even though it seems that Jacob was using the cabin at some time or another, given the dialogue when Ilana and Bram arrived with their group.
I've no idea who it is and the showrunners probably never knew who it's supposed to be either. It's almost a disappointment, albeit an intriguing one.
What DID happen at the Swan site?
Basically, Daniel screwed up with his calculations. And the Island proved him wrong: changing the variables did not affect the past. Jack, Kate, Sawyer etc. had to be on the Island in the present day, and the Island brought them there. That's the best that I can come up with.
What about the polar bears, the "Hurley-bird", the source of the DHARMA food shipments, some other stuff?
Those got answered in "The New Man In Charge": the eleven minute "mini-episode" that was included in Lost's home release. Here it is if you've never seen it. It's pretty much the very last moments of the Lost mythos that were produced.
Who was David? Jack never had a son in life. Why does he have a son in the "flash-sideways" afterlife?
Of all of my theories, this is my most favorite. Because not once have I ever, ever seen anyone who has come up with this...
David Shepherd is the son of Jack and Kate.
Dylan Minnette was perfectly cast as David. I mean, just look at the features he shares with Jack and Kate. Especially Kate's eyes. And Jack's hair.
But how and when did David come about? Ahhhhh... now that IS an interesting question and the answer is an astounding one.
Before leaving for the Ajira Airlines flight, Kate came to Jack's home and was pretty adamant about the two of them making love. I believe now that doing so was part of the plan: that Kate had to become pregnant
Because... what did Eloise tell Jack, Kate and the rest? That they had to replicate, as closely as possible, the conditions of the original Oceanic 815 flight. Which, among other things, had a pregnant young woman aboard.
Kate was proxying for Claire, who was nine months along with Aaron at the time of the Oceanic crash. Locke's dead body was proxying for that of Christian and now it was Kate who was a stand-in for Claire.
Nine months later, after Kate and the other survivors returned home, she gave birth to David. And it was in the flash-sideways that Jack got to be the father he never had the chance to become in life, to his own son.
That is where David came from. He wasn't some "figment" of the flash-sideways. He was flesh and blood, and presumably lived a long life and then was united with the father he never knew.
That's my VERY longtime theory about David Shepherd. And I'm quite proud of it.
And the voices?
The Island's mega-electromagnetic qualities "trap" the souls of some. The ones who can't "move on". But as "The New Man In Charge" implies, such people are not beyond the realm of helping. And that's the very best that I can come up with. Okay smartie pants, what about...
I would love to be able to figure out the reason for the Egyptian characters on the Swan Station's countdown clock: the one that turns red and black if the numbers aren't entered in time (some have translated it to mean "cause to die"). Why did women who conceived on the Island die during pregnancy (a fate Sun avoided after escaping and giving birth in the outside world)? How exactly did that lighthouse - the thing that spied on more people than Alexa - work? Who was...
Look, I am not going to attempt to answer ALL of the mysteries about Lost! That's for others to work out on their own. Who am I to deprive others of intellectual exercise? Just watch the show and suss it out for yourself! Besides, it's more fun that way.
Anyhoo, here's saluting you, Lost. Gone, but NEVER to be forgotten.
