Science Fiction Interpretations

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Subject: Science Fiction Interpretations

Posted by: brm50diboll
Date: Jan 02 17

I have debated with myself starting a Virtual Blog for months. I have so little free time nowadays that I may not be able to keep it up, but I think I'll at least try. This is intended to be wide-ranging, so it wouldn't fit in the Television, Movies, or Literature boards categories and I don't want to clog up General with just my observations but here I can rant if I choose and people can choose to ignore me or engage my flawed analysis if they wish.

469 replies. On page 10 of 24 pages. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

terraorca

Heinlein wrote to promote the subtle messages in his stories. A couple of his less subtle messages were anti-Communism and anti-colonialism.

Reply #181. Dec 28 17, 3:53 PM

brm50diboll

Although there are several more characters in Watchmen, I will finish my little series by discussing Rorshach. The entire story is actually told with a background narration from Rorshach into his diary. The diary turns out to be the "twisted ending" of the story that will eventually undo all that Ozymandias and Dr. Manhattan had tried to do (including Dr. Manhattan vaporizing Rorshach near the end.)

Rorshach is a true sociopath, although, like the Comedian, he is considered to be a "hero". He uses torture and vigilante tactics throughout, is absolutely convinced he is right and everyone else is wrong or "weak", and does not care if he is destroyed because telling "the truth" is more important to him than his own life.

He psychologically terrorizes the psychiatrist who examines his background. The psychiatrist believes in redemption and rehabilitation and sincerely wants to help Rorschach. Rorschach proves he was wrong, and spooks him so badly he abandons psychiatry altogether.

My favorite Rorschach line that illustrates his attitude is what he screams out to the other inmates when he is sent to the maximum security prison full of violent offenders: "You think I am locked in here with you, but you are all locked in here with me!"

Of course, Rorschach doesn't remain in the prison for long, as he is broken out by two of the other Watchmen (Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II), but he manages to kill quite a few of the inmates (in full riot) as he escapes.

Rorschach's ability to be incognito as his "secret identity" of the crazy sign-bearing end-of-the-world street person allows him to see all sorts of things he couldn't do as Rorschach, including attending the Comedian's funeral and seeing what the other Watchmen were up to.

In DC comics revival of Watchmen, I see they have somehow resurrected Rorshach. Not surprising. The character was too intense to remain dead for long.

Reply #182. Jan 15 18, 1:19 PM

brm50diboll

Ugh. I've just reread what I wrote. How could I have such awful typos? I'm guilty of both inconsistent spelling and improper use of the possessive form of pronouns. I definitely know better than that.

OK, the character's name is Rorschach, not Rorshach. The possessive form of it is its, not it's, which is a contraction meaning "it is".

But while I'm here, I'll just mention that Rorschach's real name was Walter Kovacs, although he considered himself only his "true self" when he wore the shape-shifting Rorschach mask. Without his mask, he felt he was only a shadow of himself.

I should do the Bart Simpson writing on the board 100 times:

Its is possessive, it's is a contraction.
Its is possessive, it's is a contraction.
Its is possessive, it's is a contraction....

Reply #183. Jan 16 18, 8:38 PM

brm50diboll

I have recently come across the Seth MacFarlane show The Orville and I must admit I was pleasantly surprised by it. Seth MacFarlane is best known for his cartoon Family Guy (which I have always considered quite crude and vulgar, although it has its moments), so I expected a crude parody of Star Trek. Actually, while there are occasional crude jokes in it, it was actually pretty interesting in that it was like Star Trek but liberated from Gene Roddenberry's "rules".

I should explain myself. Gene Roddenberry was the creator of Star Trek, which is actually a very bright, optimistic view of the 23rd century and definitely not a dystopia. So far, so good. I don't actually have a problem with optimism about the future. But Roddenberry, to protect his optimistic view of the future had set forth certain "rules" that writers for Star Trek had to follow, some of which were quite unrealistic. Now, admittedly, after Roddenberry's passing, the rules were relaxed quite a bit on successor Star Trek series such as Deep Space Nine. But I'm not looking for Star Trek to become dark, just not hamstrung by unrealistic ideas about human nature in the future. For example, I fully expect that money will still exist in the 23rd century, as will greed, and not just among "Ferengi". People will not risk their lives in long dangerous space missions just for self-actualization. And the vices that afflict our present day society will still exist in at least some form: crimes, both petty and severe, alcoholism, addiction, political corruption, lust, etc. So I suspect that bitter feuds and struggles will continue.

The Orville was surprisingly mild about its violations of Roddenberry's "rules": a few suggestive jokes, some discussion of the consequences of infidelity, and practical jokes. One I remember was the robot Isaac cutting off one of the helmsman's legs while he was asleep because he didn't quite grasp the concept of practical jokes and he thought he was being funny. (Fortunately, in The Orville universe, regrowing a leg is a fairly routine affair with their level of medical advancement.) I found The Orville to be much in the spirit of the original Star Trek, but a little more realistic about human motivation. There were only twelve episodes in the first season, but the show has been renewed, and I am glad to see MacFarlane is not planning 24-26 episodes (more like 14) for the upcoming series because he wants to maintain higher production values, which I thought were quite good for a network TV show (Fox).

Reply #184. Feb 03 18, 7:10 PM

terraorca

I am not a fan of Family Guy, but I was a fan of Star Trek. I will look for The Orville on my cable system.

Reply #185. Feb 03 18, 8:13 PM

brm50diboll

Now let us consider The Giver, which was a novel by Lois Lowry and also a 2014 movie. Like most movie adaptations of books, The Giver movie had significant differences from the book. One of the major differences was the characters in the movie were a few years older than in the book (teenagers vs twelve year-olds, which was probably a good decision). I enjoyed both versions though.

Once again, a foray into my favorite subgenre of science fiction: the dystopia. In the case of The Giver, however, the true dystopian nature of the society is not immediately apparent. Instead, it masquerades as a utopia. Without giving away too much of the plot, the basic idea is that the appearance of a utopia is maintained by not simply preventing the characters from exercising free will, but, more insidiously, by keeping them in a sufficient state of ignorance and manipulating their environments so much so that they don't even know what their choices *could be*.

A few of the most odd characteristics of this society. Reproduction is strictly controlled. Only designated "birth mothers" are allowed to have children, and then only three, and the babies are immediately taken away from them after birth and, after a year in the community nursery, are placed with foster families consisting of a father and mother who have no sexual relationship (as all adults in this society take pills which eliminate any libidinous thoughts) and a maximum of two unrelated children which must be of opposite sexes. At the age of 12 (in the book, older in the movie), the children are sorted into training for the career the society seems them fit for for the rest of their lives. The main character is a rare case, a "Receiver", who is under the tutelage of "The Giver", a mysterious and unique character in the community who has access to all sorts of "communal memories" forbidden to everyone else. The environment has been so altered that all members of the community are completely color blind, seeing only black and white. Even the words for colors are unknown to them. The land is flat, with no hills, the temperature is uniform year round, there is no winter or snow, and any contact with the world beyond their community is cut off, and is referred to simply as "Elsewhere". There are more terrifying aspects of the community which are later revealed to the Receiver, but I will skip them here.

It is easy to find flaws with the story of The Giver. There are so many places where I wanted to scream "Who would ever want to design a society this way and how could they possibly get it to work?!" I have the same criticism for The Hunger Games and Divergent, by the way, but I still enjoyed all of them, despite the severe strain on credulity.

The isolation of the society in The Giver was curious to me and reminded me in a strange way of an episode from the rare *fourth* season of The Twilight Zone: "Valley of the Shadow". The fourth season differed from the first, second, third, and fifth seasons in that it only ran half the season (January through May, 1963), contained a mere 18 episodes (instead of the 30-36 in the other seasons) and, most importantly, contained hour-long episodes instead of the half hour episodes found in all the other seasons. For that reason, fourth season episodes have been shown in reruns much less than episodes from the other seasons. "Valley of the Shadow" also had in its cast James Doohan, who later became famous on Star Trek as Scotty the Chief Engineer. In "Valley of the Shadow", a character has his car break down in a small isolated town in New Mexico that seems cut off from the outside world and the citizens there behave very strangely. In his narration for the episode, Rod Serling asked "Have you ever wondered what people do in these small towns you drive through?"

Have you, indeed? Both The Giver and "Valley of the Shadow" will make you think and possibly creep you out.

Reply #186. Feb 24 18, 2:02 PM

Blackdresss

Brian, I need your help in the "Supernatural Corner" Blog. Or maybe just your input.

Reply #187. Feb 26 18, 8:22 PM

terraorca

Brian,

You mentioned Dystopian Novels.
Last summer I took a class on that very subject.
The books we read and wrote about were:

The Catcher in the Rye
The Great Gatsby
The House on Mango Street
Orange is the New Black
Fight Club
Less Than Zero

Reply #188. Feb 26 18, 11:02 PM

brm50diboll

I've read the first two. Never really thought of Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby as "dystopian", though. I've seen movie versions of the last two. I liked Less Than Zero and Fight Club, but again, I don't really see how they could be called dystopian. My idea of dystopian is that there is something pervasively wrong with the entire society, not just with the central characters. Not that I didn't like the stories. I certainly did. I just don't see them as dystopian. And as a teacher, I will confess to having no sympathy at all for Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. Just seemed like a spoiled punk to me.

Reply #189. Feb 27 18, 8:20 AM

Blackdresss

I loved "Fight Club" and anything by Chuck Palahniuk. Did you read "Choke?"

Brian, you are the only other person I have ever met who didn't love poor little Holden. I loathed "Catcher In The Rye," and just to be sure, I read it again recently, in about an hour.

Anyone could have written that book. It's about teenage angst. I have no clue why it garnered so much critical acclaim. It isn't even well-written.

Reply #190. Feb 27 18, 3:42 PM

brm50diboll

I teach teenagers. I have no problem with teen angst. For example, I loved The Breakfast Club. But I just couldn't stand Holden Caulfield. He gets kicked out of several private schools for good reason, I thought. No, I haven't read "Choke". Sometimes I wish I could comment more, but I'm really busy with Chemistry test grading this week and don't have the time to express my thoughts as clearly as I would like to. I apologize.

Reply #191. Feb 27 18, 4:38 PM

Blackdresss

My point. It's about teenage angst; therefore, anyone could have written that book. It's not well-written! He either never experienced teenage angst, or he couldn't remember it. My guess is the latter.

Everyone loves "The Breakfast Club" -- it's a classic.

Reply #192. Feb 27 18, 5:30 PM

terraorca

I think "Less Than Zero" could be called dystopian in regards specifically to the Los Angeles area.
I really enjoyed "Orange is the New Black", I think probably because there was a goal, an end, a time to look forward to. She was doing whatever it took to get her to that point in time.

Reply #193. Feb 27 18, 6:47 PM

brm50diboll

You may be right on Less Than Zero, Mark. I didn't read the book. I saw the Robert Downey, Jr. movie a long time ago and remember it was about out-of-control drug use, but I don't remember much about what it said about Los Angeles except everyone seemed very rich. I don't know anything about Orange is the New Black except I heard it was about prison.

Reply #194. Feb 27 18, 7:02 PM

brm50diboll

I must admit I've had some fun watching the CW version of The Flash over the past several months. Yes, the special effects are limited because of the show's budget and yes, it plays like a dopey soap opera most of the time, but I like it all the same. It is fun how the show itself doesn't take itself too seriously and throws off pop culture references (mostly from the character Cisco Ramon), but it has a sort of endearing loyalty to the genre and has had multiple guest appearances by actors who had appeared in the short-lived 1990 Flash TV show on CBS, most notably John Wesley Shipp, who had started as the Flash in that show, as well as Mark Hamill who had played The Trickster (a sort of downscale Flash version of Batman's Joker, which Hamill has voiced in cartoons for years.)

The appearance of Tom Cavanagh as Harrison Wells (in various alternate Earth incarnations) has impressed me. Cavanagh is a talented actor I remember for playing JD's older brother Dan on Scrubs. He has quite a range of skills, from villains to comics to complete weirdos. I also enjoy seeing Jesse L. Martin (who I remember from Law and Order) playing Detective Joe West, who must be the only character on the show who doesn't have any sort of super power.

As far as the plot goes, the idea that the villains are "metahumans" who developed super powers from exposure to "dark matter" is quite intringuing. Since we know very little about actual dark matter, why not use it in science fiction to give people super powers? And the Flash's ability to go backwards in time, change timelines, and visit parallel universes with alternate earths has been a blast (as long as you can suspend disbelief, a tough thing to do sometimes as powers are given and removed as the plot requires for any given episode.)

When I was a kid, I read DC comics, not Marvel. The minor heroes that were in the Justice League seem to be all over the CW nowadays. The Flash itself is a spin-off of The Arrow. But strangely enough, I've seen no mention anywhere of what was my favorite minor hero in the Justice League on The Flash or the other "Arrowverse" CW shows, namely, Green Lantern. Oh well, can't have everything.

Although The Flash episodes are self-contained, there are season-long story arcs which present a central villain that the Flash must defeat in the season finale each year. In the first season, it was the Reverse Flash. In Season 2, it was Zoom. Season 3 featured Savitar as the primary antagonist and now, in Season 4, the Flash is headed for an eventual showdown against The Thinker. At this point in Season 4, The Thinker seems way ahead of the Flash and his team at Star Labs, but maybe all Clifford Devoe's "stealing bus metas' bodies" is beginning to cause him to crack up mentally.

Reply #195. Mar 17 18, 7:10 PM

terraorca

As much as I enjoyed Science Fiction, I never did take to Comic Books, even Superhero Comics. I suppose I held books in higher stead than a paper pamphlet that (to me) masqueraded as a book. No offense intended to those who have loved comic books.

Reply #196. Mar 21 18, 8:01 PM

brm50diboll

Each to his own. I present a wide variety of things here, including (as I frequently note at the time I discuss them) things that may only be considered science fiction in a very broad sense.

Reply #197. Mar 21 18, 8:27 PM

terraorca

Just my opinion, I meant no disrespect.

Reply #198. Mar 21 18, 9:35 PM

brm50diboll

A few things happened that somehow reminded me of the original series Star Trek episode "The Deadly Years". In this relatively obscure episode, the Enterprise is transporting a commodore (Stocker) and a young female endocrinologist (Dr. Janet Wallace, who (naturally) is an old flame of Captain Kirk who ended up marrying a much older scientist who has since died) to a Star Base when they get a distress signal from a planet with a few young Federation scientists on it. When the landing party beams down, they find most of the scientists there have already died of old age, and the one survivor dies of it shortly after he is beamed to the Enterprise. Since all the scientists were young (20s), this is very mysterious.

A few hours after returning to the Enterprise, the members of the landing party (except, for unknown reasons, Chekov) show signs of rapid aging. Spock, since he is a Vulcan (Vulcans have life spans of over 200 years), seems only slightly affected, but he reports he is quite impaired by the accelerated aging effect even though physically he doesn't show much. All the other landing party members, including Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty, are seriously aging very rapidly. Spock believes unusual radiation from a passing comet is responsible, but McCoy has no way of reversing the effect, so the focus is on Chekov and why he was the only landing party member not affected. All the senior officers' attempts to deal with the problem are aggravated by physical and mental infirmities, and then...

The Enterprise is attacked by the Romulans. Kirk is unable to deal effectively with the crisis as his memory appears to be slipping and his mind wandering. Commodore Stocker calls for an immediate competency hearing on Kirk, and when Kirk is declared unfit for command (and his other senior officers cannot step in because they also are affected), Commodore Stocker himself takes command even though he has never commanded a Federation ship in his career, as his duties had always been administrative. But Stocker has no idea what to do about the Romulans, and the situation is rapidly deteriorating.

Dr Janet Wallace appears to be visibly flirting with the now-advanced aged Kirk (which surprisingly, to me, Kirk rejects and accuses her of having some "thing" about older men), but helps the seriously confused Dr.McCoy discover that the reason Chekov wasn't affected is that he had been very scared on encountering a dead body on the planet, and adrenaline has an antidote effect to the rapid aging caused by the comet radiation. McCoy and Wallace begin preparing antidotes to give to the other officers, but...

The Romulans nearly destroy the Enterprise in the attack. Kirk, despite his advanced age and infirmities and the fact that he had been relieved of command by Commodore Stocker, rushes to the bridge to take over from the obviously incompetent Stocker. Kirk comes up with a plan to deceive the Romulans with a false message in a code he knows the Romulans have broken, so they will intercept the message and be fooled by it, allowing the Enterprise to escape. Finally, at the end, Kirk himself gets the antidote injection and returns to his normal age.

I usually don't put this much detail into a plot description, but as this episode is fairly obscure and I wanted to make a couple of observations about it, I felt I needed to tell more of the plot for my commentary to make any sense.

First, the theme that experience trumps both rank and physical ability is important. Stocker outranks Kirk and Stocker was not affected by the aging effect because he had not been on the landing party, but he had no right to take command of the Enterprise from Kirk, despite Federation regulations, because he didn't know how to command a starship and Kirk did, despite his infirmities. This is one of many cases that goes to prove how blind adherence to bureaucratic regulations can be disastrous.

Secondly, the relationship between Kirk and Dr. Janet Wallace is interesting to me because it goes directly against the pattern established throughout the Star Trek series. First, much of the entire series is devoted to Kirk's serial womanizing of female guest stars younger than himself. But here we have Wallace chasing after Kirk, despite the fact that he was (physically, anyway) over 50 years older than her (and Kirk actually rejected her advances, which I found quite stunning.) Furthermore, we see Wallace was a widow who had already married a much older man shortly before his death. Kirk was quite interested in her motives. But she was not a golddigger. This wasn't an "Anna Nicole Smith situation". She was actually an intellectual who fell in love with strong, intelligent men, and her attraction to them only increased as their physical condition deteriorated, perhaps out of pity, Kirk thought.

The recent death of Stephen Hawking and his marriages brought this episode to mind for me. His first wife married him long before he became the rich and famous person the world eventually knew him as. The dynamics of relationships like this are worth exploring (and the movie The Theory of Everything, which was about Hawking, did get into this.)

Reply #199. Apr 14 18, 3:14 PM

C30

Hmmmmmmm............Not being well versed in Federation Rules and Star Fleet Regulations, I can only comment...........

Should a Commanding Officer become incapacitated and forced to relinquish command, then the command of the ship falls upon the next senior EXECUTIVE BRANCH person in the crew, irrespective of those of a more senior rank but non-Executive Branch, carried on the ship. This includes supernumeraries, that may be onboard at the time.

In the case of Star Trek, using above regulations which is how things work in present day navy, command should go to SULU, if Kirk had to step down, followed by CHECKOV, not Spock and certainly not an unqualified Commodore.

Reply #200. Apr 14 18, 3:43 PM

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