Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Review of Reviews: Recent Science Fiction TV

 


Have I been watching more TV during the pandemic? Maybe. I've never been good at binge watching, though. I'm re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, but a lot more slowly than the first time I watched it in syndication in the early 90's (every night at 9pm!). Disney+ has 31 seasons of The Simpsons, which makes for a nice thing to watch while eating lunch or when I don't know what else to watch (a conundrum: they have an option to "skip intro"... what kind of monster would skip the intro to The Simpsons?). I've also been enjoying WandaVision lately, and I just started Truth Seekers.

I might say more about those shows another time. But I thought it might be good to do a review of reviews of recent science fiction TV! So here are a few thoughts about recent seasons of The Mandalorian, Star Trek: Discovery, and The Expanse and two other shows: Raised by Wolves and the new adaptation of The Stand.


The Mandalorian, Season 2

I loooooooooove Baby Yoda. I basically spend every minute of the show as follows.


Other than Baby Yoda, I felt like most of Season 1 was... fine. It played it pretty safe (compared to The Last Jedi, which I loved). And a few episodes weren't that great. I also have to admit that I've always felt like Boba Fett is overrated. 

But Season 2 finally made me care about the non-Baby Yoda parts of the show. There was even an episode without Baby Yoda at all, which I begrudgingly watched. We meet more characters, many of which I would have been more excited to meet if I had watched all those cartoons. And Mando himself gets a lot more depth. But what really makes the second season work is the deeper exploration of Mando's relationship with Baby Yoda. Sometimes unexpected relationships turn out to be the most important. Even in a galaxy far, far away, as Carl Sagan once said, "For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love."

Will the show's magic continue after the events of the season finale? And what about the dozen or so other Star Wars projects Disney has in development? May the Force be with us.


Star Trek: Discovery, Season 3


I've enjoyed Discovery since Season 1. It got more of its footing in Season 2, but it was Season 3 that I was most looking forward to. What started out as yet another prequel took us further into the future than any Star Trek show has gone before. I have to delve into spoiler territory a little bit here. So be warned. 

Spoilers: We get 930 years further into the future (for reasons set up in Season 2)... and it's not that great. It seems the Federation and Starfleet barely exist anymore. And even worse, something called the Burn wiped out all the dilithium, making space travel way more difficult. Bummer! Eventually our heroes meet up with the last remnants of Starfleet, meet new friends, discover some clues about the Burn, and fight some new baddies. It's fun to see how different the far future is, but if anything, I'd expect it to be even more different. But I guess they can only stretch things so far while remaining Star Trek. And the new character Book is great, and his cat is even better. I also really liked Adira and the little family unit they form with Stamets and Culber. And Emperor Georgiou is with us, now a traveler in both dimensions and time (it gets complicated). Michele Yeoh is awesome as ever. And we get to spend a little more time with the bridge crew along with some really nice arcs for favorites like Tilly, Saru, and Michael.

Discovery has carved out a unique place in the Star Trek franchise. More than any other iteration of Star Trek, Discovery interrogates how to live your ideals in seemingly impossible circumstances. How to adapt without giving up what makes Starfleet Starfleet? While Deep Space Nine and Picard delve into similar topics, Discovery does so in a more ... existential way, both because Starfleet is in danger of extinction and because it delves a little bit into the human (and Vulcan and Kelpian) condition. Are the ideals of Starfleet still worth living and promoting in a hostile universe? Why chose those ideals rather than something else? Are those ideals meaningful in a special way? Obviously I'm a big enough Star Trek fan to think highly of these ideals, but I love that Discovery prompts these questions.


The Expanse, Season 5


The Expanse has been pretty consistently awesome. The universe is complex enough that it took a few seasons to really get going (we're talking Game of Thrones level complexity, which may not be a surprise since George R. R. Martin is friends with the authors of the books). Even though I've read the first few books, I found the first season pretty confusing. But once the major pieces are in place and viewers finally start to remember the who's who of Earth, Mars, and the Belt, it's all pretty riveting stuff. (Not to mention the fact that every single member of the cast is like, super hot).

Okay, I admit a good chunk of the previous season when our heroes were stuck on that weird planet got a little bit dull. But this season sees the intrepid crew of the Roci split up. In D&D, you rarely want to split the party, but for some reason it works here. Naomi gets in touch with her son in the Belt, which leads to a whole thing with her terrorist ex (it's complicated). Alex ends up back on Mars, where he runs into Bobbie the space marine and investigates strange happenings with the Martian Navy. Holden is jetting around doing good in his Holden manner. Avasarala (maybe my favorite) deals with no longer being head honcho of Earth, but still eats everyone else for breakfast. Maybe the improbably most interesting story is Amos's trip back to Earth, where he gets caught up in Baltimore of all places. No wait, I guess my favorite this season is Drummer and her crew of ... well, let's just say the crew is very close.

The Expanse is engrossing in its plot and characters, but it's not as obvious with its philosophy as Star Trek. But one thing I always think about is the kind of future it is. Star Trek (yes, even Discovery) is pretty utopian, and I love that about Star Trek. The Expanse isn't an outright dystopia like Mad Max (unless you're a poor Belter or unemployed Earthling), but it's a lot grittier than Star Trek. What kind of future should we hope for? I'm hoping for Star Trek, afraid we'll get Mad Max, but The Expanse seems more likely than either. We could do better, but we could do worse. Maybe I'll change my mind next season.

In the meantime, I should really read the rest of the books one of these days.


Raised by Wolves


Raised by Wolves is weird. That's probably the least controversial thing you can say about it. Science fiction royalty Ridley Scott is somehow involved, although Aaron Guzikowski gets the creator credit.

The plot... well, it starts with two robots ("Mother" and "Father") landing on Kepler 22-b with a load of human embryos, which they gestate in artificial wombs (sort of?). They raise the kids in mysterious, harsh conditions, complete with cool stuff like fossilized giant snakes and occasional predators. Later some ... "space crusaders" (as I started to call them) show up fleeing from Earth. Turns out the robots and their human children are from an atheist faction that was involved in a disastrous war with the space crusaders back on Earth. And there's a couple that killed some crusaders and took their place on the ship with the help of cosmetic surgery. And they spend the voyage in suspended animation in a weird dream land, where they meet the son of the people they killed.

And that's just the first few episodes. Even weirder stuff happens later that I couldn't describe if I wanted to.

One of the strengths of the show is its unique imagery. From the bizarre landscapes (filmed in South Africa) to the space crusaders' uniforms to Mother's "necromancer" mode of badassery to a criminal in a spiked helmet that will kill him if he misbehaves... there's plenty to occupy the viewer visually even if you have little idea what's happening.

I started watching this show soon after I came home from the hospital after surgery for a broken arm. I figured it would be a good show to watch while taking some heavy pain medication. Still, it took me two or three episodes to decide that I liked the show.

While I thought the religion vs. atheism angle was a little ham-fisted at times (occasionally feeling like Richard Dawkins fan fiction), it gained some subtlety as it turned out the atheist faction had its share of militaristic zealots as well. While this point is well taken, having at least one basically decent religious person might drive this point home even more.

An axe I will always grind about the whole idea of "atheism" in places like the United States is that it relies on a Eurocentric notion of atheism as specific reaction to Abrahamic religions, especially the more annoying right wing Christian fundamentalisms of late 20th and early 21st century America. The idea that "atheist" is an identity that means something like "science loving secular humanist critic of Abrahamic religions" is weird to me. But maybe that's because I spend too much time reading about Hinduism and Buddhism where the concepts of atheism and religiosity come apart (you can be a Buddhist atheist because Buddhism just isn't centered on any particular conception of a creator deity, and many Buddhist philosophers have been atheists because the concept of a permanent personal creator is utterly antithetical to Buddhism).

Okay, I'll get off that soap box. As much as the space crusaders are "21st century American atheist's idea of what a religious person is like", I did find the religion of the god Sol to be really interesting, even if it's basically just Christianity with a few extra ancient Roman bits. I do wish science fiction could just once deal with religion in a subtler way. Why not Quakers in space protesting injustice? Or mild mannered Lutherans in space playing bingo with aliens? Sufis in space seeking mystical experiences on sparkling ice moons? I did write a story about Buddhists in space somewhat in this vein.

Some other philosophical questions that come up along the way: Do you sometimes need violence to defend a nonviolent way of life? How do you raise children with a specific identity in a conflict-ridden universe? Even if humans were to rid themselves of religion (whatever "religion" is), will we always find some excuse to create divisions and kill each other? Are robots any better on this count?

The biggest question of them all: What the hell is Raised by Wolves really about?


The Stand (2020-2021)



I've been looking forward to this new adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand since I first heard about it in 2019 or so. I'm a big fan of the book, which I first read as a teenager and recently re-read. The 90's miniseries by Mick Garris actually holds up pretty well, but I was excited to see another take on it with a larger budget and contemporary TV sensibilities.

The pandemic seemed to threaten the release of The Stand, even though the show was pretty much complete before the pandemic. Who would want to watch a show about a deadly pandemic during a deadly pandemic? Some fans wondered if CBS would still release it at all. I'm glad they did.

A lot of people complained early on about the non-linear story telling, which breaks from the book and the earlier series. Instead of following our characters as they live through the destruction of civilization and make their way to their respective destinations, we jump back and forth between their earlier stories and their settlement in Boulder (Vegas comes later). 

I guess the complaint is that people won't know what's going on, but I think this gives audiences too little credit. Besides, I think it was a genius way to propel the plot forward for the audience. Although this was denied by some of the people involved, who said that other media like the movie Contagion had already given people a morbid pandemic fix, I personally think watching a few whole episodes of living through Captain Trips would maybe be a little bit too much right now. I'd watch it, sure, and what they do with the disease is plenty horrific as it is (those neck swells! Yikes!). But do we really want to watch that right now? I don't know. 

Some other controversial choices were to focus on the character of Harold early on, somewhat to the detriment of other characters (the female characters like Frannie and Nadine don't get much attention until later and we barely get to know Nick and Tom or Trashcan Man at all), a few other changes (Larry's tunnel scene is different than in the book, although we do get the character of Rita back, who was dropped in the earlier series), and some of the casting was controversial (for my part I thought it was great, especially Alexander Skarsgaard as Flagg, but I also really like Odessa Young as Frannie, Jovan Adepo as Larry, and Greg Kinnear as Glen).

This version of The Stand also has one of the funniest Stephen King cameos, and also look for Mick Garris at one point, too.

My biggest criticism of this new adaptation is that it feels a bit... enclosed and small. And if there's anything a sprawling epic like The Stand is not, it's enclosed and small. Part of this comes from the decision not to dwell on Captain Trips, which I otherwise liked as noted above, because this makes for a tighter focus on a small set of characters. The book does an excellent job evoking just how massive and brutally decimating this disease is, especially in the "no great loss" chapter. You get a sense of this in the new series, but it feels more like they're filming in a few carefully chosen and staged locations (I mean, it's TV, so of course they are filming in staged locations, but it shouldn't feel that way if you know what I mean). It wasn't until we get to Vegas in later episodes that I really felt like, "Okay, this is an expansive, world-altering epic." On that note, I really loved the way they did Vegas in this adaptation, and the take on Lloyd is really different than the earlier series, but I think it works really well.

Probably the biggest thing to be excited about for Stephen King fans is that Uncle Stevie himself was writing a new ending as the final episode. I can't decide how much to spoil here, but I really, really loved that he gave Frannie something more to do, since she's one of my favorites from the book and her character didn't get as much attention in earlier episodes as she deserves. Just as I was loving this, though, King doubled down on the "Magical Negro" trope, which I felt like Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abigail had largely managed to avoid earlier. I can't decide if I'm looking at this wrong and should rethink it, or if I should say, "Goddamn it, Uncle Stevie, have you learned nothing?" 

While I continue to think about that, I should note that I also loved that the last little coda of the book made its way into the end of the show.

Philosophically the new adaptation pretty much preserves the philosophical bits of the novel, albeit in broad brush strokes. Good, evil, destiny, science/religion, etc. How would you rebuild society if you could? Do people ever really learn anything? Where do you make your stand?

So... all in all I did really enjoy this new version of The Stand. Was it perfect? Hardly. But neither are the 90's miniseries or the book itself. If anything, I was happy to see an adaptation try something different even if it didn't always work for me. I'll probably watch this one again sometime, maybe next time I read the book.

(Speaking of the book, I really recommend the Company of the Mad podcast, where a panel of esteemed horror creators including Mike Flanagan and Tananarive Due discuss the book in depth over several episodes).

No comments:

Post a Comment