The obligatory Avatar post

What has not already been said about Avatar, James Cameron's new SF/action/3-D money magnet?

Visually stunning? Check.

So predictable I could have diagrammed the entire story based on the trailers? Check.

Noble savage nonsense cranked up to 11? Check.

It's almost pointless to ask if Avatar is a good movie or not, which is the first thing most people want to know, the first post-theatre question they ask each other. "Did you like it? What did you think?" The answer has to be broken down into parts.

Well, as a visual spectacle, it's of course staggeringly good. The Na'vi make Gollum look like a paper cutout being waved on the end of a stick (much as Gollum made all previous CGI characters look like finger puppets).

As an action movie it's also quite strong, and I think not enough is made of this. It's actually not that easy to make a good action movie. A dozen or so big Hollywood action flicks come out every year, and most of them contain terrible action sequences. The virus of quick cutting that infects everyone from Michael Bay to Peter Jackson annoys the crap out of me.

The dialogue, I was impressed with, even if only because I had very low expectations. There are no really memorable lines, except from Colonel HeadScars, but I'd say less than half of them were actually painful to the ear. Compare and contrast with Transformers, for example.

How about the racism? Well... if I were being very charitable, I'd say that of all the possible forms of racism that still show up in genre films, noble savage condescension is probably one of the least toxic varieties. At least it wasn't also misogynist in any notable way; Grace and Neytiri are clearly the strongest characters in the film.

I knew about the Dances With Smurfs thing going into the movie, and that didn't bother me nearly as much as the blankness of the main character. Jake Sully literally arrives in a box and is popped out as though he's an action figure being unpacked. He has about that much personality. He also seems dumb as a brick, and that's difficult to reconcile with him having an identical twin who was an accomplished scientist.

My final question about Avatar came about an hour after leaving the theatre: would this movie have pushed the buttons of my inner 10-year-old?

After I saw the original Star Wars films, or Indiana Jones, for the first time, I'd run around my back yard with my friends for weeks pretending to wield a light saber or a whip. I'm sure there are 10-year-olds out there now playing with toy wands and shouting "Expelliarmus!" or swinging wooden swords through a band of orcs. I can see my 10-year-old self wanting to be a giant, blue half-naked monkey man. On the Star Wars Kid Inspiring Scale, I give Avatar a 7 out of 10.

You never get past it, it just becomes a part of you: Dollhouse thoughts

Having been kicked out of my non-blogging funk by the !Peter Watts! madness, I thought I'd get back to talking about Dollhouse. Many spoilers, etc.

So many highs, so many lows.

I've been talking about the show a lot with my girlfriend, She Who Is Awesome, and we've come to slightly different conclusions. I like Dollhouse a lot, in spite of its flaws. She's been feeling more ambivalent about it. In fact, before last night's back-to-back episodes of "Meet Jane Doe" and "A Love Supreme," she was pretty much not even going to buy the DVD of the second season.

I see her point. Dollhouse has been wildly uneven, even compared with the first and second seasons of Buffy and Angel. And Firefly, when looked at in proper order is remarkably low on filler episodes and/or craptastic ones.

So here are my complaints about Dollhouse's second season, in particular:

• Slow start. Boy, it didn't exactly get going at a good pace. It felt like we were back in client-of-the-week mode there.

• Lack of focus. After the slam-bang ending to the previous season, plus "Epitaph One," it felt like the show was on track. It wasn't a hint of what was going on, it was a friggin' roadmap. And it was a map to very cool places. The fact that we didn't immediately jump into the "Epitaph One" storyline was a bit of a letdown.

• Echo? What Echo? This is only partly a complaint. Having a blank slate as your main character is, well, kind of a weird choice. But in the first few episodes, and even in some of the better, later ones of the season, Echo is either marginalized or bounces back and forth between various states. It doesn't feel like a linear evolution from doll to fully realized person. In fact, in the first three or four episodes, it sometimes felt like they were being shown out of order, with Echo farther along in earlier shows than later ones.

But I think these flaws are compensated for by both the good that's made it onto the screen, and by the potential the writers are finally starting to mine.

Ah, potential. It's been the show's bete noir in some ways. Defenders like myself point out what an awesome, mindblowing concept the show is playing with. Those of a more critical bent point out that the potential has often been squandered in favour of "Echo's a dominatrix" jokes.

But the potential, and the way it's being realized, is the core of my defense of Dollhouse. In SF novels, you often see a single idea worked out in full, with all its myriad implications fleshed out. In TV SF? Not so much. Remember that transporter malfunction on ST:TNG that turned Picard, Guinan, Ro, et al into teenagers? Fountain of youth, or single-episode plot device never to be mentioned again? Just Star Trek alone will give you hundreds of dropped SFnal threads.

Dollhouse, however, is rigorously working out the implications of its technology. We start with programmable dolls, the Swiss army knives of the doll world. Since then we've seen post-imprinting dolls, multi-persona dolls, dolls with their own persona, upgraded. We've seen the awesome "Epitaph One," which dragged everything to its dystopian conclusion. We're seeing the technology advance, from slow imprinting to faster, all the way to distance imprinting and wiping, and how that changes the balance of power between those who control the technology, and those who are its victims.

Perfect television? No. But Dollhouse is arguably the most well thought out SF premise on television in the past several decades.

Oh io9, no!

So I was just dipping a toe in Asking the Wrong Questions, and I find that its proprietor has become embroiled in a wee bit of a controversy with i09. Short version: i09 is promoting the hell out of District 9, a movie which actually looks pretty interesting. i09 also gave it a rave review and named it the most buzzworthy thing at ComiCon.

A couple of commenters (possibly not so politely) pointed out that this looked an awful lot like a conflict of interest, and were promptly banned.

Wow… just wow.

John Scalzi weighed in on the comment thread there and noted that it is possible for media outlets to review things that are paying their salaries. This is entirely correct. What io9 is doing, however, is the exact opposite of the way you're supposed to do it.

But let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and assume that their opinions about District 9 are entirely on the up and up and not influenced by the wads of cash their advertising folks are getting from the film's promotion team. You do not ban people from commenting because they have noticed the possible conflict of interest.

I normally avoid any hint of my real life on this blog, but I'm going to now. I'm a reporter at a smallish suburban newspaper. This means I have many jobs, including writing a weekly column, covering local politics and crime, and sometimes writing the editorials (we sign our editorials, as they do in Quebec, by the way). When you piss people off (and you will piss people off) and they send you an angry letter, YOU PRINT IT!

Oh, I'm sorry, did I just yell? Well, maybe I'm a little ticked that io9 doesn't understand the basic rule of running a media business that says disagreement is actually good. Sure, you can delete posts and ban users, and no one will be left after a while to criticize. They will tell you how awesome you are and stroke your ego. And slowly they will slip away, and you will be an irrelevant joke.

I actually like io9. I know it exists mainly to be all ZOMG NEW IRON MAN TRAILER!!!!1!, but I like that they actually write about books on a regular basis. They even interviewed Samuel Delany a while back. It's refreshing to see a site that gets 99 per cent of its hits from people interested in the next cheap pseudo-SF blockbuster, and devotes 10 to 20 per cent of its time to talking about stories printed on dead trees. Considering how often they update, you actually get more book reviews, recommendations and author interviews out of io9 than out of almost any other SF-related site on the web.

If io9 would like to explain how their actions are anything less than petty protection of their sponsorship, I'd love to hear it.

"Caroline"

This little review of Echo, the original pilot for Dollhouse, contains spoilers. Back away now and nobody gets spoiled.

I never read the script for the original pilot that was floating around out there. I guess it's part of my own spoiler-averse nature to avoid reading a script like that. Besides, what-might-have-been is profitless when it comes to TV. We have what the creator ultimately gave us, network bungling or not. So when I sat down to watch Echo last night, it was with the view that I was seeing an experiment, an early draft put down on film, an alternate world version of the characters.

Boy, I was not wrong about the alternate world part.

The basic plot sysnopsis is this: we get a whole big chunk of exposition right up front, with DeWitt narrating as we see Echo go through several missions: a pro bono drying out a young woman, a jealousy-inducing date at a wedding, and as a negotiator in a million dollar drug deal. Once that's out of the way – and we're talking a good long part of the episode here – we get into the main plot, which is once again Ballard's search for the Dollhouse and its attempts to throw him off.

They're not exactly subtle on this first draft of the plan. They have Victor/Lubov send him astray, and when the Caroline photo draws him right back in, they try to use Echo for the same project. When that fails, she tries to kill him, twice. Meanwhile, Topher is worried about the actives already, especially Echo. Apparently she's already developing somehow, and he has several talks about the issue with Boyd, and an awkward confrontation with Dr. Saunders.

DeWitt and Mr. Dominic, however, are notable mostly by their near total absence. DeWitt seems in control when dealing with the client and serving up spoonfuls of exposition near the opening of the show, but when we see her later she's being yelled at by her superiors over the phone (re: Ballard) or ordering his failed killing. She's less of a mighty and mysterious ice queen here.

In fact, while DeWitt is one of the major ensemble cast members by the latter part of the first season, in this pilot I'd have to say there are two protagonists: Ballard and Topher. Yeah, Topher. He gets a lot of screen time, and he's actively moving a chunk of plot forward. Echo/Caroline, on the other hand, feels sidelined.

A lot of things feel rushed, including the Doll/handler relationship, the imprinting process itself, and the question about where they get their "volunteers."

After watching Echo, my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful, said that Ghost, the in-continuity pilot, was better structured. In many ways, I have to agree. There was more show and less tell, we saw the original Caroline before she was wiped, and we saw Alpha rather than simply hearing him mentioned. Of course, Ghost is saddled with a boring procedural kidnapping plot weighing it down.

I'm going to say that Echo is not a great pilot, not in the way that Serenity was for Firefly for example. It's flawed in more interesting ways than Ghost, however.

Ghost gives viewers a straightforward explanation of the show's central idea, and introduces the characters and their traits fairly well. Echo is all over the place. It's like an excited puppy, fun and cute and really packed with energy, but scattered. It feels like Joss Whedon had been sitting on his cool ideas for so long he couldn't not let them out all at once. Fly, my monkeys, fly! He takes the show almost to the place it was at the end of the first season in less than sixty minutes, but the ride is a little rough.

So I'm going to say something weird here: I understand why Fox ordered a second pilot. This pilot would have snagged me, but it is weird and frenetic and talky. Ghost is not a better pilot, but it's a much more conventional one. It has the kind of flaws that networks seem to think make for good TV. Echo has the kind of flaws that might signal greatness if the writer can rein him or herself in.

And having seen Whedon's other work, and the latter half of the season, I'd say greatness is still possible.

Oh, season two, where are you when I need you?

"I hope we find me alive"

Warning: for the purists out there who have not yet put their money down for the Dollhouse DVD set, this contains spoilers for the final episode, Epitaph One. Reading any further will sour your enjoyment not only of the episode, but of life itself. Food will be as ashes in your mouth, and your lamentations will drive nearby squirrels to commit seppuku.

Okay, the lightweights are gone? Good.

Like everyone else, I heard the basic plot outline of Epitaph One months ago: Felicia Day (Mag) and an intrepid band of survivors whose names I never quite picked up, are trying to survive in the far-off future of 2019 after Dollhouse technology has made everything go kerblooey.

The basic plot is this: the survivors stumble into the Dollhouse while taking a shortcut through the sewers, trying to avoid the signals that can turn you into a reaver killer angry person. Realizing it is the origin point for "the tech" that's driven the world into its current zombie apocalypse/rise of the machines state, they use a mindwiped refugee they're dragging around as a template for a series of memories they find programmed into the chair. So we get a series of sequential flashbacks, showing events both before the first episodes of Dollhouse, and later, possibly up to just a year or two before 2019. Meanwhile, someone is killing off the survivors one by one, and a spooky, Dollish Whiskey, sans facial scars, shows up to offer them some help.

This is another Dollhouse episode that feels far, far longer than its actual running time (in a good way). There's a lot going on here, and each flashback is crammed with both exposition and character development. In general, it's extremely well done, and if it were just a vehicle for a "Days of Future Past" style storyline, it would get an A+ just on that score. But the main plot thread isn't bad either, even if it does revolve around the "and then there were none" contrivance of having the survivors killed off one by one. This is another way the show is good: who is killing the characters should be an obvious twist, but I didn't have even five minutes when the show slowed down to let me actually try to puzzle it out.

So this brings the number of really good Dollhouse episodes up to seven, meaning the first season was more than 50 per cent awesome after all! Hooray!

Up next, a review of the original pilot, and some of the special features.

Underworld: Why did I rent this movie?

Well, mostly because I thought there must be a Rifftrack for it. Sadly, there is not. I had to make up my own jokes, and after a while mocking the ridiculous gothy/bondage outfits of the vampires, the endless blue-black darkness of every shot, and the repeated script failures grew difficult. At two hours long, Underworld is a movie that will make you believe in immortality, because it seems to go on for three or four hundred years.

This is a movie about vampires in which we never see them feeding. It's a movie about werewolves in which we never see them mauling innocent townsfolk. We're told about both of these things, but considering how much money they spent on a half dozen FX-laden battles, you'd think they could have fit that in.

This is a film in which the most important distinction is between vampires and werewolves, and yet they're almost impossible to tell apart. It's all long sweeping dark coloured coats. You can tell the costumer took a shot at making them distinct, only to have the directed call for more darkness, more rain, more shadows, making it a moot issue.

This is a film in which characters have only two modes: lack of affect and snarling scenery chewing.

This is a movie in which werewolves claw their way along walls and ceilings, rather than running faster on the floors. Even though Spider-Manning their way through the world means they are easier to shoot.

This is a movie in which six hundred-year-old vampires get up and say, "Hmmmm... what to wear... leather fetish gear again? Uncomfortable corset? Something with a stiff, high collar? Maybe something that seems both highly weird looking and is impractical if I'm attacked by giant hairy monsters." Nobody wears jammies and bunny slippers.

This is a movie in which the action seems to continue for three or four days, but it is never daylight.

This is a film which Bill Nighy cannot save. No Bill, you tried, but nobody can spit out that dialogue and not look like a total headcase.

But what does it all mean?

Thomas Harlan's House of Reeds is in no way a bad book. But it is not a book that made me want to jump up and down in glee, either.

House of Reeds is apparently the sequel to Wasteland of Flint, and the story of its protagonists will continue in Land of the Dead (which, according to Wikipedia, is out next month). I haven't read Wasteland of Flint, because my library doesn't have it, and neither do my local used book stores. With that disclaimer out of the way, on to the meat of the book.

Harlan is a good goddamn worldbuilder. He's apparently written a whole whack of alternate history/fantasy epics for Tor, as well as working as a game designer, and it shows. In this series, he's merged alternate history with space opera and military SF, creating a weirdass background that sucked me right in. The basic story is this: sometime around the 1500s, the Aztecs conquered the world. They could do this because a few hundred years earlier, a big fleet of Japanese refugees, fleeing the Mongol invasion of Japan, washed up on the shores of North America. So Aztecs got to learn all about things like steel and horses and gunpowder, and then they went and beat the crap out of most of Europe. Take that, Columbus! Flashforward a few hundred years, and the joint Aztec-Nipponese space navy is still kicking ass and taking names. Our heroes are all either members of the Aztec-Nipponese empire, or they're on its fringes trying to survive.

The story takes place almost entirely on the planet Jagan, where the Aztec secret police/priesthood is planning to deliberately incite a small brushfire war, a flowery war. They want to throw one of the younger sons of the Aztec emperor into the mess. He's a drunken idiot, so he'll either man up and cover himself in glory, or die and please the gods that way. His Scottish bodyguards will have to try and make sure it's the former. Meanwhile, Gretchen Anderssen, the xenoarcheologist and hero of the first book, has been ordered to Jagen to study a possible ancient and powerful artifact, and Captain Mitsuhara Hadeishi of the Imperial Navy has just come into orbit after a long patrol, looking to resupply and refit his battered ship.

The elements of a great epic story are there, but Harlan never quite makes them gel. Characters are defined well to start with, but we don't get below the surface of most, probably because there are so many conflicting plot threads – there are at least four viewpoint characters that I can recall just from Hadeishi's ship. Then there are Anderssen and her team, the bodyguards, the wicked old spy pulling everyone else's strings, diplomats, the various alien locals, and so on.

A word on those aliens: Harlan can't do original alien critters. We get a cat-alien, a whole bunch of lizard aliens, and a brief cameo by bug aliens and a super shapeshifer alien. They all fall into categories such as fierce predator, wise old mystic, or barbarian warrior. The fact that they come off like the clichés of how other races were portrayed in Victorian fiction isn't a good thing.

Just when it seems things are settling down in the plot, Harlan suddenly pulls out the big guns, ignites the war, and turns the last third into one long chase scene/gun battle. It's not that I don't like action sequences, but these go on and on and on. They're also disturbingly colonial. Almost every fight involves small numbers of well armed humans holding off hordes of less-well-armed local lizard people. It's like Rorke's Drift, one of the battles of the Sepoy Revolt. Or maybe I'm going too far back, and it's just a Black Hawk Down homage. Harlan lovingly describes how the massively overpowered weapons of the humans chew up hundreds of lizard guys at a time.

The plot about the alien device of great power also never comes together. I'm not actually sure what it did, in fact. I think it did something, and there was some attempt to explain exactly what near the end of the book, but it seemed sort of inconsequential by then. Another key plot, a thread involving a hidden alien and the prince's bodyguards, seemed to be deliberately leading into the next book in the series, and was left dangling.

For fans of well-written military SF or space opera, I'd say give it a try, especially if you can find the first book in the series for background. But it just never quite came together for me.

Things I learned from 300

Coming late to this party, but I finally watched Zack Snyder's/Frank Miller's 300 on the weekend, and boy, did it stink.

Not to rain on the parade of thousands of fanboys who claim to enjoy it ironically, but that was one of the worst movies I've seen in years. And I watched The Rocker the same weekend. It also makes the achievement of Watchmen even more amazing; Watchmen isn't great but it's far from bad, and where it modifies the original story it usually does so carefully and in a not-moronic way.

Not 300. I felt like every addition to the Frank Miller comic went in the wrong direction. You have a comic that's already ludicrously stylized? Let's make the film adaptation even more stylized! There's basically no female roles in the comic? We'll put one in the move, so she can be raped! Some of the dialogue sounded cheesy and lame the first time around? A big spoonful of that please!

Seriously, 300 is one of those milestones in Frank Miller's career, the kind labeled "25 miles to Suckville." The guy's been going slowly insane for decades, and 300 was written at the point where he was just starting to move away from his Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns projects and beginning to walk the road that would take him to "I'm the goddamn Batman!" So it sort of works, but it's also loaded with the kind of stuff that would mark Miller for the rest of his career: enough testosterone to make a rhino explode, a style that is so extreme it constantly calls attention to itself, loads of blood, the valorization of violence, a lack of good characterization, and a big ol' Girls Not Allowed sign on the front door.

Politically, the movie was painful. I think calling it fascist is a little unfair. Even fascism, as a political philosophy, is more nuanced than 300. The movie was more a blend of unthinking nationalism wrapped up in some default American values. (Freedom be good!) Of course, those values are left undefined and unexamined, so we never question why the people fighting for freedom have a king, for example. Who orders them to cheerfully murder wounded soldiers while he eats an apple. Ha ha! It's funny because in any other movie that's how you'd be able to tell who the bad guy was!

Now, things I learned from watching 300:

• The ancient Persians were mostly African-American or east Asian in origin.

• "Phalanx" means everybody runs around slicing up people in slow-mo.

• Athenians were gay. Not the Spartans.

• The Persian army included the Uruk Hai and Sloth from The Goonies.

• In a related note, you can put ninjas in anything!

• Ancient Greek oracles were really just nude interpretative dancers.

• When going on a long mission, all you need to carry as a Spartan warrior are you weapons, shield, and red cloak. Food is not necessary, probably because you'll just murder and eat anyone you run across.

• Physically disabled people are inherently evil.

• Breastplates are for sissies.

• But not shaving your chest. A smooth, hairless torso, much like a Ken doll's, is super-manly.

• Gerard Butler has huge fucking teeth!

• Peasants don't really exist. Probably because if they ever showed up, the movie might have had to talk about how the Spartans ritually declared war on their peasants yearly, and murdered the troublesome ones as an initiation ritual for young men.

The seas are red because they're full of blood, get it?

Scott Lynch's follow up to The Lies of Locke Lamora is the almost as good Red Seas Under Red Skies. Two of the protagonists from The L of LL are back, Lamora himself and his good buddy Jean Tannen. They've relocated to a new city, two years after the bloody denoument of the last book, and are working a long, long con.

The first half of the book is split between the con itself – they're trying some complicated theft/swindle targeting the richest and most dangerous casino owner and gangster in town – and the back story of how they got there. At the end of Locke Lamora, the title character was half dead and Jean wasn't in much better shape. Lynch shows Lamora diving into a big pool of self pity, with Jean forced to repeatedly fish him out. Lamora puts himself back together slowly (in the movie version, there'll be a montage of him re-learning card tricks) until he's ready to take on the big con.

Just as the con gets going, however, it's derailed. The military dictator of their new home town decides to press the two Gentlemen Bastards into service. He's on the verge of a civil war with the town's wealthy merchants. He wants a fake pirate scare, so he has Locke and Jean given a crash course in seamanship and sent out with a crew. They'll ravage the annoying merchants and give the dictator the excuse to make his army and navy even bigger.

Then there are mutinies, battles at sea, numerous assassination attempts, new love, betrayal, more sea battles, more betrayal, and Jean and Locke are squeezed tight between so many clashing factions they're almost squished. The book concludes with an orgy of finales – to the con, the pirate wars, and the fates of half a dozen characters.

On a page to page level, the book is almost as good as LoLL. Locke and Jean are still compelling characters, and the pirates, casino owners, various henchmen and others are colourfully drawn. The new city – I still can't remember the damn place's name – just isn't as lively or as fully realized as Camorr, however. The pirate ships prove a better setting.

My key complaints with the book are twofold. First, the flashback structure doesn't work as well here as it did in The Lies of Locke Lamora. In that book, we were learning about the education and allegiances of the Gentlemen Bastards as we watched them doing their job in the present day. In Red Seas, an enormous amount of time is spent in the first few flashbacks on Locke being miserable, but we already know he gets over this in time to jump into the big con game. It all feels too drawn out, and it hurts the book's forward momentum. Second, the grumbling and personality conflicts between Locke and Jean feel a bit contrived. They seem to constantly be offending, disappointing or annoying one another. It never amounts to anything, though. There just isn't enough conflict to tear the duo apart.

Oh, and yet again the love of Locke's life is referred to, but does not appear. Two books running is a bit much to drag out such a key plot point.

Still, it's very deserving of the label swashbuckling. Fun characters, a fun world, and a fun adventure. If you liked the first book, by all means read it and move on to this one.

Locke Lamora is stealing your wallet right now

I'm a little late to this party, but I finally got around to reading The Lies of Locke Lamora over the last few days. And by "reading" I mean "absorbing as fast as my eyes would allow." This is one of those books that, if you like it, you will stay up until 3 a.m. reading the damn thing, just to find out what happens next. And you'll stay up until 4 a.m. to find out what happens after that, sleep and an early workday be damned.

The title character is a street urchin when we meet him, with a gift for thieving and deceit. He's so good at it, in fact, that he's being sold by his current owner/unsuitable parental substitute, the Thiefmaker, to a crooked priest. While the Thiefmaker runs a sort of wholesale Fagin-style operation in training orphans for crime, the priest, Father Chains, is running a boutique business. He needs clever apprentices who can be trained for the long con.

The story follows Locke through intercut scenes, part in the present as he and his band of thieves try to gull a rich nobleman and avoid a brutal gang war, and part in the past as we see how he and the gang grew up and trained together.

All the characters are vivid, particularly Father Chains, a priest of "the thirteenth god," the god of thieves and swindlers. There's also Jean Tannen, Locke's portly best friend who happens to be lethal with a pair of hatchets, the card sharking Sanza twins, and Bug the adolescent apprentice of the gang. Their gang moves through the city of Camorr, a Venice-like creation peopled by nobles, gang leaders, thugs, merchants, assassins, shark-fighters, priests, and guards. Camorr itself is one of the most memorable characters, with its numerous islands and canals, and its mysterious glass-like structures left by a vanished elder race. (I'd say it has about 700 milli-Crobuzons.)

Locke's character, or lack thereof, is at the centre of the story. He's physically a little short and slight, with a forgettable face, no particular skill with weapons or hand to hand combat, no magical ability, and no noble title or destiny handed down by the gods. He's just too clever for his own good, and very skilled at deception and fast talking. Part of the time, he reminded me of a trickster figure like Loki or Coyote, morally ambiguous and talking his way in and out of ever problem he encounters. In modern speculative fiction, Locke most closely resembles Miles Vorkosigan, from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. It's refreshing to see characters in genres (fantasy and military SF, respectively) who usually rely on brawn and machismo using their brains and mental toughness, instead. (And if you liked Locke Lamora and you haven't read any Vorkosigan books, boy, are you in for a treat. Get yourself to the library right now. You'll thank me for this.)

Are there problems with the book? Yes, of course. There's the love of Locke's life, who is mentioned frequently but doesn't even get a cameo in one of the flashbacks, which makes the book feel less than whole. If you like moral characters, you may be troubled by Locke's utter lack of most ethics; his primary motivations are loyalty, revenge, and a need to outsmart people. There are also moments that stretch believeability thin, even in a novel like this; a sequence in which Locke tries to infiltrate the same building three times in three different disguises in one day comes to mind. 

Still, those are minor problems compared to the book's primary virtue: it is fun. This book is swashbuckling, an updated successor to the novels of Sabatini or The Princess Bride. Looking back over the past half dozen SF and fantasy novels I've read, the number that is just fun is sadly small. Books that inspire a grin should be treasured.

I long for the quiet dignity of William Shatner: A Star Trek movie review

I didn't like original Trek when I was a kid. I was born in '78, which means that by age 10 I'd seen all three original Star Wars movies. By age 11, thanks to my neighbourhood pushers local librarians I'd read Heinlein, some Asimov and Clarke, and dozens of more forgettable names. Compared to what George Lucas could do, and especially compared to the images authors were pumping into my head, Star Trek looked slow, cheap, and lame. (Even 10-year-old Ouranosaurus thought miniskirts on female crewmembers was stupid.) I didn't get into the franchise at all until TNG came along, with better special effects and a captain who didn't chase women in beehive hairdos.

But I saw a fair bit of original Trek, regardless. It was on in endless reruns on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, or in the summers when there was nothing else to watch. And it was nominally SF. So I caught an episode here and an episode there. I learned about flat-foreheaded Klingons, energy beings, pon farr, styrofoam rocks, evil computers the size of Buicks, and "show me this Earth thing called 'kissing.'"

Now that I'm older and (theoretically) less easily distracted by shiny objects and big explosions, I've come to appreciate that there was often solid storytelling behind original Trek. In preparation for seeing the movie on the weekend, I've collected the whole series from my local pushers library and I've been watching season one.

Holy crap, is that a contrast to the original movie.

I know the movies are another animal compared to the TV show, but the more episodes I watch the deeper the gulf seems. The film is all about proving there's no such thing as a no-win scenario. It starts with Kirk cheating his way through the Kobayashi Maru test. It ends with him recapitulating the events that led to the death of his father – except that he saves the captain and the ship and Earth and all the important cast members and gets a promotion and a medal. He never learns a damn thing about loss. He never faces loss.

Compare that to original Trek. I just watched "Space Seed," the famous Khan Noonien Singh episode. It has some egregious bits of 1960s stuck in there, especially the sexist plot about the female crewmember who falls so hard for Khan she'll help him take over the ship after 20 minutes in his presence. 

But – there's a scene in which Khan has seized control. He needs the crew to help him steal the Enterprise. He locks Kirk in a decompression chamber and starts pumping out the air while the senior crew watches. If one of you will join me, Khan says, I'll let him live. They all sit there, impassive. Khan points out that he'll throw them in there one by one until someone cracks. Still they sit there. They're prepared to let the captain die, and then die themselves, because helping Khan is against everything they stand for.

That keeps coming up again and again in the original series. Characters stand for things. They stand for them because they think they're right. Spock opposes killing hostile aliens in "The Galileo Seven," for moral reasons. Kirk wants proof that an actor really is a genocidal dictator in "The Conscience of the King," he won't just go in guns blazing. Characters argue about logic, reason and ethics.  

Can you imagine the film's Kirk and Spock having a discussion about ethics not conducted at full volume, ending with a fistfight?

Every action by Spock and Kirk in the film is undertaken for personal reasons. Neither joins Starfleet because they believe in its mission. And saving the Earth? Well, I think we're pretty much all in favour of that.

I've said this before, but people do sometimes act based on ethics and ideology they've arrived at on their own. That's why original Trek, for all its cheese, is growing on me. It's why I'm tired of the modern trend of having every character action be motivated by nothing but selfish, petty, personal concerns. I don't care of Kirk gets over the death of his father. I care that he has some goddamn ideals.

As a couple of hours light entertainment, the movie is fine. There are shiny objects and big explosions, and the folks playing Spock and McCoy and Uhuru did a good job. Simon Pegg was hilarious as Scotty, and in a film so inconsequential, he could have been introduced earlier. But really, you'd get more storytelling out of two or three hours spent watching Shatner and Nimoy dodge styrofoam rocks.

Summer reading for Dollhouse fans

Ahhhhhhhh... Dollhouse has been renewed. I admit, I didn't think it would happen, while my girlfriend (she who is both wise and beautiful) always kept the faith. It'll be nice to see some more episodes, hopefully of the interesting variety, and not of the "Echo has an assignment as X" style.

But what to do for the next five or six months before we get another fix of Dollhouse? We go to the library and the video store, of course. For my fellow Dollhouse fans, a selection of stories that cover the same themes: body swapping, identity, reality when the mind is a commodity.

• Altered Carbon, by Richard Morgan. I've already mentioned this one, but both this book and its sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, explore the possibility of wholesale body swapping and immortality through cloning and downloading. It's dark, grim, noirish post-cyberpunk with lots of sex and violence. The politics become more explicit with the follow up books, but they never take over the story.

• The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides, and Last Call,  by Tim Powers. Again, body swapping and dark quests for immortality, but in Powers case using magic. The best of the bunch is probably The Anubis Gates, although my favourite will always be On Stranger Tides for its sword fightin', piratical ways. Far, far superior to any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

• Dark City, directed by Alex Proyas. A year before The Matrix came out and everyone started talking about bullet time, there was a much quieter, much better film that covered the same territory and then some. Dark City is about a man who wakes up next to a murdered woman, seemingly her killer. But he can't remember anything. He flees through a shifting city that never sees dawn, and in which people are swapped from home to home and role to role much like... dolls in a dollhouse? With its synthetic personalities, it's the closest analogue to Dollhouse you can find. Plus, a chance to see Keifer Sutherland before he got all annoying as a torture-monkey on 24.

• Diaspora, by Greg Egan. This staggeringly brain-twisting novel concerns both AI and uploaded personalities. In similarly-themed short stories, Egan has also explored creating multiple copies of oneself, in some cases to undertake suicidal scientific research, such as travelling into a black hole.

• The City of Lost Children, directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. A mad scientist kidnaps children in order to harvest their dreams and save him from his nightmares. A steampunk setting with clones, blind radar-enabled cultists, and Ron Perlman with a bizarre hairstyle, speaking French.

I love you, John Bellairs

One of the best things about having a mother who works in a school library is getting discards, the books that are too old or grubby or beat up to keep in circulation anymore. This was obviously really cool when I was a bookwormish nine-year-old, but even as a bookfanaticish 30-year-old it's pretty neat.

So this Mother's Day, after doing some mildly backbreaking yard work to thank Mom for bringing me into the world, she gave me a sack of books. Well, most of them are intended for my girlfriend, she who is both wise and beautiful and will be a teacher soon. But I'm calling dibs on the two John Bellairs books.

Back in the 1990s, there was this big craze for horror novels for kids. R.L. Stine novels in particular. Well, I spit on your R.L. Stine novels, do you hear me! They cannot hold a candle to the fiendish works of Mr. Bellairs!

Do your Stine novels have covers by Edward Gorey? I think not! Do they build their horror slowly, using realistic settings and character development? Do they weave a tapestry of horror from commonplace items – a ring made from a bent nail, a cheap Egyptian-style souvenier? Do they leave the reader certain something is wrong but not entirely sure what? I think not!

Mostly, I've read the Johnny Dixon novels, so I'm eagerly re-reading The Curse of the Blue Figurine for the first time since I was about 12 years old. I'm struck by some of the details – the intensely Catholic background of the main characters, the blunt attitude toward death and injury – that I didn't recall. I did recall that Johnny was a fairly nerdy, bright kid with glasses. I have no idea why he appealed to me as a young reader. None whatsoever. There's also the crotchety and eccentric professor, who frankly puts Dumbledore to shame as a weird old mentor figure.

I've also got a copy of The Dark Secret of Weatherend, which stars Anthony Monday. I don't think I've ever read any of the Anthony Monday books so this will be an interesting little treat.

About a year ago, I re-read what must be the most terrifying of Bellairs books. It's a Johnny Dixon book, and the premise is both bizarre and unforgettable. A realistic baseball-playing automaton has been created by a mad scientist. But it only works if human eyes are inserted in its head. Go. Go now and find a copy of The Eyes of the Killer Robot. It's high octane nightmare fuel for 10 year olds.

"I know who I am."

It seems like the consensus around Omega, the penultimate-but-last-to-air episode of Dollhouse, is that it wasn't quite as good as last week's stellar outing. I'd agree, but I'd like to see the parts of this episode that were left on the cutting room floor before making a final decision.

Spoilers ahoy.

From last week's cliffhanger, everyone's running around like chickens with their minds wiped. It only takes DeWitt, Boyd, Ballard, Topher and Whiskey/Saunders to put together Alpha's whole scheme, but by then Echo's gone, and all the data wedges containing her previous imprints, including her original Caroline persona.

The plot threads play out, with flashbacks showing how Alpha changed from being just another doll to letting threads of his original personality slip through – something we've seen all season with Echo, and even with Victor.

Boyd and Ballard wind up teaming up, buddy-cop style, to hunt down Alpha. Dr. Saunders finds proof that she's a doll, and we see that her face was carved up even before Alpha went totally batshit. (About five minutes before, but still.)

Alpha pours more than 30 personalities into Echo's mind using his homebrew imprinting chair, and she promptly (and not particularly surprisingly) beans him in the head with a pipe. Alpha, it turns out, was a psycho on his way to serial killer status before he ever became a doll, while we know that Echo/Caroline has deep reserves of empathy and personal strength. She tries to save the hapless waitress Alpha's kidnapped and loaded up with Caroline's mind. She fails, but between her efforts and those of Ballard, she does save her original Caroline wedge. Alpha scampers like a bunny.

Of course, there was also that plot thread in which November and Sierra were made into badass bounty hunters to help chase down Alpha, too. And they just... what? Went for coffee instead? We never see them after they're imprinted.

That's the main problem with this episode. There's at least five minutes, maybe more, that didn't make it onto the screen, and I think that contributes to the anticlimactic nature of the ending. There's no final throwdown with Alpha; he simply disappears after dropping the Caroline wedge. I suspect the edits are also partly responsible for the suddenness with which Ballard finds himself working at the Dollhouse as a contractor to track down Alpha. His turnabout on Mellie/November doesn't seem warranted based on what we saw.

Criticism aside (please, please, Fox, release an extended version of this on the DVDs!) there's a lot to like about this episode. Among other things, we see three different reactions to a doll realizing its true nature. Alpha becomes an egomaniac. Echo just feels empty, despite having so many personalities to choose from, and rejects the artifice of her personas. Whiskey/Saunders reacts partly with despair, and partly with a strange acceptance. I think that last is the most interesting. Saunders as Saunders knows that the dolls are often fleeing something horrible. She must know that she is there for some similar reason. Does she think that being Saunders, a good person and a healer, is preferable to the alternatives? Or is she just broken down?

Plenty of fodder for the next season. Now let's just hope we get there.

ETA: It's just before midnight Pacific time, and the Dollhouse DVD is number 18 and climbing on Amazon's bestsellers list. Not too shabby. A few tens of thousands of sales might be the only thing now to convince Fox not the axe the show.

Killing the Hollywood orcs

Most of the Internet, at least the nerdishly-inclined parts, have now probably seen The Hunt For Gollum, the 40 minute fan film created by a pack of crazed Brits. And boy, was I surprised as I watched the trailer and the film itself.

Yeah, it's pretty good, especially for something that apparently cost just 3,000 pounds, or about $4,400 US. You couldn't do the catering for a movie in Hollywood for that little. But, as a fan film, no one drew a salary and the producers begged, borrowed and stole before they shelled out money. That's just standard.

What's not standard is the overall quality. It's only a degree less professional looking than Peter Jackson's films. The orcs look like orcs, not like guys with Halloween masks. The Rangers are wearing realistic weapons and gear. The beautiful scenery is lovingly filmed. There are aerial shots of snow-capped peaks which they got from... where? Who cares? It looks damn good.

The plot is drawn from the appendices to the Lord of the Rings, and it's briefly referenced within the films itself. Gandalf warns Aragorn that there's this nasty little post-Hobbit thing called Gollum and that it's making its way towards the Shire, searching for its lost ring. Meanwhile, Sauron's troops are massing and may be looking for Gollum. Gollum can't be captured by the orcs, or the enemy will know where to find the ring.

Aragorn heads out and tracks Gollum, first by rumour, then by luring him into a trap. Gollum spends most of the rest of the film in a burlap sack, because no matter how well funded the film is, you just can't motion capture Andy Serkis for 30 minutes. That's going to blow your budget.

The remainder of the film is orcs hunting Aragorn while Gollum tries to escape. There are several moments of real tension, the acting is creditable, and the director clearly knows more than which way to point the cameras. And there's a massive fight scene in which Aragorn takes on a patrol of about a dozen orcs and kills them all.

The fight scene needs a little more attention. I'm actually going to argue that the fight scene in The Hunt for Gollum is slightly better than most of the fight scenes in the actual LotR films.

Whoa, whoa, hold up! It's not about the skills of stuntmen or the ability of the fight coordinators. It's about directorial choices. With a few cool exceptions, Peter Jackson belongs to the quick cuts school of fight direction. You will occasionally see a cool moment, like Legolas stabbing an orc with an arrow, then shooting it into the next orc, or Aragorn jamming a torch into a Ring Wraith's face. But more often, you get a bunch of guys running at each other and then there's some sword swinging, some quick cuts, sound effects and screams, and an orc keels over. You don't see move-countermove very often. The Hunt for Gollum has just one big fight scene, and it has several cool fight combos packed in, including the skewering of two orcs, and the final boss fight with the patrol leader. It's a good fight scene for any movie, let alone a fan film!

It's only in one way that The Hunt for Gollum disappoints, and that's in the way it falls into the fanfic trap. This part of the tale, Aragorn's search for Gollum, really isn't necessary. It's filling in a blank spot in the story that could have been left blank. We already know how everyone's story here ends. I'd frankly rather have seen a story from another chunk of Middle Earth's history, maybe with original characters. Still, it made my geeky heart glad, and I was quite happy to let it entertain me for 40 minutes.

On the other hand, this film should have Hollywood quaking just as much as the Pirate Bay does. The entertainment industry's been so focused on cracking down on illegal downloading that they haven't bothered to look at the other side of the equation: what happens when anyone with a dream, a couple of credit cards and a gaggle of willing volunteers can make something that looks this damn good?

In the past, Hollywood wasn't threatened by people who made legendarily cheap films. Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000, but his goal was to become a professional film maker. So Hollywood could deal with him. He wanted to join the club. 

What do you do with people who have no interest in joining the club? I'm sure some of the folks in The Hunt for Gollum want to move on to "real" acting, makeup, or stunt work, and probably some of them already are in the field. But a lot of them just did it because they love LotR. There are fan film communities for every big cult property out there, from Star Wars to Star Trek to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And time I spend watching fan films is time I spend not watching professionally made, for profit stuff. Eyeballs equals money.

Hollywood keeps telling us they're struggling to make money because of piracy (and we're not far from the point where every shack in the Sahel can download and watch Wolverine and Transformers 2). Meanwhile there are gangs of film makers who learned their trade as unpaid volunteers and do it for the love of making a movie. If the quality of amateur film rises while the financial rationale for professional film plunges, it could really upend the entire Hollywood system. I doubt that we'll ever see a day when nobody makes money off of films. But we could be close to a day when fewer people make a lot less money, even as we get a lot more movies available to us, the fans.

The next 10 years are going to be really interesting.

"My prince"

Briar Rose, last night's episode of Dollhouse, could best be described as kick ass. But before we go any further...

SPOILERS!

Oh, sorry I shouted there. No, don't worry. I'm just excited because it turns out that freakin' Wash is Alpha! 

Yeah, I did not see that happening. I watched the ep with three others, and our surprised gasps at the reveal would have sent a barometer spinning. We knew Alan Tudyk was in the episode, from the trailers. We knew that Alpha was in the episode. Did we put those two things together? No. Because he's Wash! He plays with dinosaurs and gets speared! He doesn't slice people up and kick ass!

Well played, Ms. Espenson and Mr. Whedon. Well played.

Aside from that, it was also a taut and well-written episode on just about every level. The bit where Echo is trying to help the sexually abused kid, which could have been cringe-inducing in so many ways, turned out to be well written and well acted. It dealt with its awful subject matter head on and without histrionics – the moment where Echo talks about how she would plan escapes and then give up was very well done. It also introduced the Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty theme, which would have its own twist at the end of the hour.

We got to delve deeper into the creepy and messed up psyche of Agent Ballard as well, when he refuses to rescue November/Mellie. Why? It's not really been spelled out well, but I'm thinking he doesn't consider Mellie a real person, and he's been too personally hurt by that. He's built a tower in his mind, and at the top there's a real princess named Caroline. 

But that gets at one of the central questions Dollhouse asks. Mellie is undoubtedly a synthetic person, programmed to love Ballard. But what she feels is plainly no less real to her. That's the crux of it; Ballard doesn't think Mellie is real, so she doesn't count. Caroline does. I don't think he's right. The Dollhouse committed a moral crime when it created Mellie and fixated her on Ballard, but Millie herself is a victim as surely as the young girl in the group home. She couldn't run away either. They'll find you, after all. They're bigger and stronger.

Then there's the ongoing plot about Dr. Saunders, who I'm now almost certain is a doll named Whiskey. I don't think Mr. Dominic wanted a drink at all, there. Alpha seems to know it too. I'm almost certain that "Saunders" is either the memories of a dead person, or is a synthetic persona. When Alpha escaped, he sliced up Whiskey and left her alive, probably killed the doctor. The Dollhouse looked at their dead doc, and their doll who wouldn't be going on too many more tricks dates and said "Waste not, want not."

Problems with the episode? I'm just going to mention the implausibility of Alpha and Ballard's easy access to the Dollhouse. Come on, people, no alarms in the only external systems access point? Not even a lock on the grate, for Christ's sake!

Let's review, shall we?

The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear Plexiglas visors, not face concealing ones.

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

Come on! It's number two on the list, right there! DeWitt, you are not doing your homework. The guys at the Centre are going to be pissed.

Not as pissed as I am when the show is cancelled, though. One to go, and one extra episode on the DVD boxed set with Felicia Day. Then, that's all she wrote.

The Ends of the World: Notes toward a taxonomy of apocalypses

Riley: Buffy. When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.

I just finished Saturn's Children by Charles Stross (short review: good!) and it only occurred to me about halfway through the book that I was reading a completely new kind of post-apocalyptic novel.

For those unfamiliar with the story, it concerns the lonely sexbot Freya, who was activated shortly after the death of the last living human being. Indeed, a wee accident with the biosphere and global warming has boiled the Earth and left nothing alive in the inner solar system. Robots – thousands and thousands of conscious, human-equivalent robots – have formed their own society in the absence of human life. Much of the plot concerns various robot factions trying to clone and bring back human beings. This would itself be a kind of apocalypse for the robot society, because with their Three Laws conditioning, they would be enslaved anew.

Science fiction and fantasy are the only genres that regularly deal with the end of the world, outside of religious fiction. Naturally, they've come up with more than one variation on the idea. I thought I'd try to break them down by type. At first I thought it would be easiest to divide them up by the way the world ends, but I soon realized that it's the kind of stories the authors tell in the aftermath that are most distinctive. Here's a partial and incomplete list.

• Rebuilding from the ashes

Everything's broken, probably because it got nuked or maybe hit with an asteroid. But don't worry! Our intrepid heroes are going to make it all okay again. It'll just take some common sense, a little engineering know-how, and probably at least one fight with a group that wants chaos and madness. Before you know it, we'll all be growing crops in USA 2.0! This type of story allows authors to give citified 20th and 21st Century characters the pioneer/survivalist spirit. It has much in common with stories of colonizing uninhabited planets.

Classic Example: Lucifer's Hammer, by Niven and Pournelle.

• We're doomed!

The grim counterpart to the novel of rebuilding is the story in which it seems that no recovery is possible. More common in short fiction, this is the story that often stars the last few humans on Earth. Maybe some of them will make it, but it's not likely. Themes are more personal and literary, with a focus on moral choices.

Classic Example: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

• Biker barbarians from Hell

Adventure stories in a post-apocalyptic setting often borrow more from the Mad Max films than from previous novels. These stories are about conflict, especially conflict between a remnant of civilization and the ever-present goons who want to loot it, burn it, and piss on the ashes. 

Classic Example: The Road Warrior

Not So Classic Example: Waterworld (Christ, that was like a punch to the groin.)

• Inhuman hordes

Most people are familiar with this story thanks to George Romero's movies, but it doesn't have to be zombies that swarm over civilization. Vampires, mutants, infected folks, even aliens or demons will do just as well. Stories are about the survival of small groups, often thrown together. Interpersonal dynamics are key, and the threat from within the group, or from other surviving humans, is often as important as the threat from without.

Classic Example: I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson

• The quiet end

Sometimes the apocalypse isn't so bad. Some stories step back and take a surprisingly relaxed approach to the death of 99 per cent of the population. These stories often include dreamlike descriptions of cities returning to nature, and human survivors determined not to make the mistakes of their ancestors. By necessity, these are often plague stories, so as not to have to deal with too much radiation or nuclear winter.

Classic example: The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy

• The replacements

Humans are entirely gone, but something else has come to take our place. Maybe it's aliens, or maybe chimps have evolved intelligence, or maybe it's robots and AIs. Often, these stories are about the protagonist's attitude towards the vanished human species.

Classic Example: Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross

• The surreal aftermath

Sometimes the end is just weird. Maybe magic comes back and causes chaos, as in Sean Stewart's excellent Galveston books. Maybe consensual reality actually breaks down, as in The Gone-Away War by Nick Harkaway. Whatever happens, all bets are off. Strangeness and coming to terms with a new and fantastic landscape is the order of the day, and elements of horror and fantasy slip into the tales.

Classic Example: Pollen, by Jeff Noon

• Earth is gone, but we're okay

In some tales, Earth is a talisman, a land that is now cut off from humans, even as they move off-planet. Dan Simmons Hyperion stories and even the Cowboy Bebop series both explored an Earth that was destroyed or seriously damaged, even as human life thrived elsewhere. The destruction of the Earth in these stories is often a symbolic touchstone, rather than a plot point.

Classic Example: Steel Beach, by John Varley

"You're dead"

Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.

Dollhouse's latest episode, Haunted, didn't do much for me on the level of basic plot. The idea was good – someone who's brain has been scanned comes back from the dead to solve their own murder. But the execution felt like an episode of Murder She Wrote more than anything as cool as the last couple of episodes.

Really, the best part of the main plot was Boyd's comment that this really means the end of the world. If the rich can buy themselves new bodies when they die, what's to stop them from going on and on forever, erasing the poor but young once every twenty or thirty years? 

I don't normally mentally re-write episodes, but last night I was fervently hoping that the murder would turn out to have been a suicide. If you knew that a friend would bring you back, and temporarily store you in the body of a super-healthy 25-year-old, wouldn't you be tempted to kill yourself and then hijack the new body? Sadly, no.

Side note: anyone interested in these plots from a more SFnal perspective should read some of the British SF that's come out over the past few years. Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod have both written several stories over the past few decades about downloadable, copy on demand minds. However, the best of the British brain-scanners is probably Richard Morgan and his Takeshi Kovacs series. Altered Carbon, the first in the loosely connected trilogy, is about an ex-soldier and ex-con who has to investigate a millionaire's apparent suicide. The millionaire – backed up from a copy – doesn't believe he killed himself. It's a world where the rich are immortal, and where bodies can be swapped around like cars. No synthetic personalities, but it's a very good, very grim look at similar technology.

Back to Dollhouse. The episode's saving grace was its two sub-plots. Predictably, Agent Ballard can't stop himself from abusing the privileges of the Dollhouse. It's also becoming clear just how vile the programming of Millie was; she's his willing slave without even being aware of it.

Topher's creation of a friend for his birthday was even more interesting. This seems like it was intended to showcase the positive side of the Dollhouse. What if you are alone, and strange, and no one gets you? Who do you turn to? Topher made a friend (someone who was probably 80 to 90 per cent based on himself) for his birthday. It was both heartwarming and creepy at the same time. I'm so glad they didn't have sex.

Not too many episodes left now. Fox is apparently going to announce the show's cancellation or renewal mid-May.

Who's your daddy? Lost's sad obsession

I've been an intermittent watcher of Lost for the past couple of seasons. It looked like things were getting better last year, and I started watching again regularly, only to have my hopes dashed this year. 

I've already written about how I don't expect Lost will ever make any goddamn sense at all. Today I'm going to rant about something even worse than the show's total lack of narrative coherence. Today we're going to talk about Daddy Issues.

Here's a brief list of all the characters I can think of who have serious issues with at least one parental unit.

Jack (dad)

Hurley (dad)

Sawyer (dad, plus Locke's dad)

Sayyid (dad)

Kate (dad and mom)

Sun (dad)

Jin (dad and father in law - bonus points!)

Ben (dad)

Walt (dad)

Claire (dad abandoned her, was also Jack's dad)

Miles (time travel dad)

Penny (dad)

Locke (dad - possibly the worst dad in the history of bad dads)

This list is by no means comprehensive. I'm sure we'll later find out that the smoke monster's creator never tucked it in at night, and also that the flight attendant who died on impact had a troubled relationship with her step father, and that the guy who gassed up the plane has always wondered who his sperm-donor father really was (it was probably Christian).

Last week we got the big reveal that Miles' dad had abandoned him, he never knew the guy, blah blah whatever. If I rolled my eyes any harder I'd detach a retina. It's just not interesting. It's not a surprise any longer, not after five seasons of bad dad whining.

John Locke is the standard bearer for this. While Jack's relationship has been given a massive amount of back story, Locke is the only character to lose not one, but two major organs to his father. 

I remember when my girlfriend and I watched the Locke loses a kidney episode. After a while, as his father kept screwing up his life, I started making a joke about it. "If his dad stole his spine too, you owe me a Coke," I said. Damned if I didn't get a Coke a season later. 

I don't hate this contrivance just because it's overused to a truly ludicrous degree. There are two reasons why I think this is more than simple bad writing.

First, I worry about what this says about the writers. Why is the only plot that ever recurs on Lost with any frequency, the only thread never dropped, the plot that suggests you've never really gotten over the time daddy didn't come to your little league game? To me, it says that Lost's writing staff doesn't actually know how to write an adult relationship. They don't have a lot of characters who are parents, or even in stable marriages. The bad-dad trope indicates a show by, and about, immature man-children who refuse to stand on their own. You know what? Some of us liked our fathers. Some of us are actually happy with how we were raised. If we had issues as kids, we've gotten over them. As audience members, we're just fucking baffled.

Second, I think it actually says something about American society at large that this is the sort of plot that not only gets trotted out on Lost constantly, but on a lot of other so-called serious dramas. (Battlestar Galactica was not averse to using it.)

I have a hypothesis that Americans no longer have any ideology. Sure, they think they believe in political causes. But America is one of the most politically homogeneous democracies in the world. In continental Europe, almost every country has far right parties and far left parties, and by right I mean "they have SS uniforms in their closets" and by far left I mean hard line communist. The middle of the spectrum is generally broader, with labour and social democrat parties competing with liberals, neo-liberals and conservatives who'd be more recognizable in the States. This means that there is a larger philosophical spectrum – people may have actually thought once or twice in their lives about the ethics of private property vs. public, about political economy, about nationalism.

Even in Canada, where I live, there is still a shadow of a social democrat movement. Britain also has a wider spectrum of political opinion.

Despite the fact that Americans generally only disagree with each other on a handful of issues, they take sides as though it was Nazis vs. Soviets. The divide is pretty wide. Weirdly so, to an outsider. 

What that means, in practice, is that TV writers don't have very strong opinions on a lot of issues, because on average, Americans don't either. And where they do have strong opinions – usually only on Culture War hot buttons – they don't dare risk slipping them into their stories. So they can't write stories about big ethical and political issues that are invisible to most Americans, and they won't write about the few issues Americans actually care about, because it would alienate too much of their audience.

So you wind up with a strange phenomenon on American TV: no character thinks about ethics. Characters seldom take sides over well-defined moral or religious positions. What are the differences between Locke and Jack, the differences that the writers yammer on and on about in interviews? Faith vs. Reason? Bullshit! 

Whenever possible, the writers use the flashbacks to show us that Character A took Action X on the island because Event Y happened to him in the flashback. Most often, this event was something involving a bad dad. So the characters aren't acting based on ethics or beliefs. They're automatons, mechanistically reacting to what has come before. It's like the whole thing is a giant trick pool shot, with one ball bouncing off another until the plot is resolved. It robs the main characters of agency, choice, and free will.

Do other popular SF shows employ this trope? I've mentioned that BSG does it from time to time, but not nearly as often. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is notable because the main character actually has a deadbeat dad – whom we almost never hear about. Buffy barely mentions him. She's over that crap. Fox Mulder famously had issues with his father, but they were a tiny fraction of his overall fucked up personality, and we didn't get episode after episode in which Scully and Skinner and Cancer Man and Krycek trotted out their daddy issues. The Star Trek franchise barely touches the issue. Deanna Troi's mom is mostly used for comic relief. If the other characters have issues, they're often resolved in the space of one episode. 

Which leads me back to J.J. Abrams again, and the upcoming Star Trek movie.

I swear to god, if Kirk becomes captain of the Enterprise because he's mad at his father, I'm going to burn down a movie theatre.

ETA: It would be unfair of me to not mention Charlie, the only character who we know had a good relationship with his father. In his final episode with flashbacks, one of his favourite memories is being taught to swim by his father. This was also one of the best uses of the flashback structure since we learned that Locke was paraplegic, way back in season one.

The Fringe-Gnome business plan

I've previously watched two (2) episodes of Fringe. The first was the pilot, which was meh. The second involved the mysterious albino boy in the sub basement last week. I was thinking of getting back into it. Hey, nothing else was on, Dollhouse appears to be on the verge of cancellation. I need my SF TV.

Anyway, the teaser for this week's episode, Unleashed, intrigued me. Frankly, I was hoping for werewolves. No such luck. Spoiler time now.

So a bunch of animal rights activists break into a lab, they find a dark and ominous door lit with red light bulbs, it's obvious bad news. Really, the only way it could be worse is if it contained the rage virus. Instead, it's a big scary thing that kills them and infests their corpses with larvae. The Steward of Gondor, Pacey, Token Black Woman, and Scully-the-Lesser are called in to investigate and decide it's some kind of chimera, created by putting lots of animals together in a blender and pressing "Evil." Denethor's all "Oh, boo hoo, maybe this terrible monster is based on my research," like he's the only mad scientist on the block. Nope. Turns out that a totally different group had the same idea he did. And they did more than draw awesome snake/scorpion hybrid sketches. Which will totally go on the cover of my first metal album, by the way.

Boring story short, FBI Agent Scully-the-Lesser tracks down the last of the animal rights activists and discovers his dad runs a local animal testing firm. Son decided to free the animals, stumbled on Dad's seriously ill conceived lab project. Our heroes kill the beastie in the sewers; there is angst and sexual tension, and it is boring.

Here's the thing: who in their right mind would create a hybrid wasp/tiger/snake/scorpion/bat? And how can I not comment on the impossibility of melding together creatures with such divergent basic bodyplans? No matter how much you know about Hox genes, I don't think you can just successfully weld a wasp and a bat together. They're not like multiple Lego sets; you can't just snap castle parts on the spaceship. 

And what was it for in the first place? It's like an Underpants gnome scheme. 

• Step 1: Create hideous, giant, violent, uncontrollable monster

• Step 2: ???

• Step 3: Profit!!!

What's worse, no one in the episode asks either Denethor (who's done this kind of work before) or the eeeeevil animal testing guy why they would want to do it. That's a pretty good question, yes? 

Possible answers:

• "The villagers were getting uppity. They needed a good scare. What do you want? I'm mad, mad I tell you, bwah hah hah hah!"

• "Dude, it's so fucking cool! Can we give version 2.0 retractable adamantium claws and teach it to say 'Bub'?"

• "I don't know, Blackwater ordered it. Crowd control for Katrina victims. We may have overdesigned it a bit."

• "Well, if you don't spend all the money the Pentagon gives you every year, they give you less next year."

You know the first thing people would actually create, if they could make crazy hybrids? They'd make real-life Turducken. And that would be way cooler than this episode.