Through the Looking Glass, Darkly

Okay. So. I watched Black Mirror. And while I generally liked it, I don’t know, you guys. There’s some serious shit going down in this one that needs talking about.  And that shit is all about the way the speculative fiction show from England’s Channel 4 treats women.

So, here’s the thing: there’s really no way I can talk about the misogyny issues in Black Mirror without getting spoiler-y, so I’m breaking this into two sections; The first will be spoiler-free (and largely reflect that things about the show that I really liked) and the second will unpack the, let’s call them problematic, issues the show struggles with.

Metaphor! Metaphor!

Part I: Stuff That I Like! (Spoiler-free!)

Black Mirror has been compared positively to The Twilight Zone, something that to my mind is more or less accurate. Just like its predecessor, Black Mirror is an anthology series with each episode being a different story with a different cast and a different setting. Unencumbered by any kind of continuity, it makes for an easy watch knowing that you literally don’t have to know anything at all going into any given episode.

What the show really excels at is being unnerving, which is different from being scary or creepy. Black Mirror is not a horror show; there are no monsters or ghosts or demons or other things hiding under the bed just ready to pounce. If anything, the villains in the show are to the letter all human. For as much as the show has been sold at least partially on the notion of it being about the dangers of technology, the show itself is pretty agnostic on that point. If anything, it suggests that technology is a blank thing, neither good nor evil. In each story, it’s always a human who ends up being the scary one. That notion of ten minutes in the future and There But For the Grace of God Go I is what creates that unnerving feeling you get watching it.

You are 100% guaranteed to make each of these faces at some point while watching.

In that sense, the show wears its anti-transcendental attitude on its sleeve. Each episode gives us another story of people more or less always being forced into making hard choices. The first episode details the British Prime Minister being presented with a revolting choice in the face of a terrorist threat.  One episode pretty ably mocks reality TV by showcasing a class of people whose lives are geared toward literally nothing more than winning a television talent show. Another one presents a woman whose new husband has died when she is given a vaguely Monkey’s Paw-style option for getting him back. The show presents no easy victories.

It also looks great doing it. You could easily confuse almost every episode for a mini movie with high production value, talented actors, and a broad scope. The end result is entertaining certainly and tailor-made for Netflix binging, a fact that Netflix apparently was keen to since they’ve announced that they are going to take over production of the show in its third season from Channel 4.

Now to talk about the ugly bits. If you don’t want spoilers, jump ahead to Part III below.

Part II: Things That Make You Go, “Hmm.”

Clearly, there are things that Black Mirror does very well, which is what makes the rest of it so confounding. Amidst all that really cool speculative fiction stuff, there’s a really unsettling vein of misogyny that I had a hard time dealing with. Let’s unpack, shall we? (Again, a reminder: Here there be spoilers.)

The first hint is in the second episode, “Fifteen Million Merits”, starring a de-Downton Abby’d Jessica Brown Findlay. The episode is about a future where people, possibly everyone, live in a confined building and must spend each day cycling on a stationary bike to earn merits which can be used to buy food, clothes, and of course, avatars for their online selves. The episode tries to say a lot, but its primary story comes from a woman who is gifted the requisite merits needed for the most expensive purchasable item – a chance to compete on a reality talent show and liberate yourself from this dreary life. Findlay’s character performs for a panel of judges who deem her not talented enough as a singer, but perfectly suited to, ahem, other services. This episode almost gets a pass from me given that it’s sort of blatantly underlining the use and abuse of women for others’ pleasure and if that were the end of it, the message would be received, albeit in a heavy handed way. 

"Being sold into pornography and dying giving birth. Note to self: Get new agent."

But let’s look at another example. The next episode, “The Entire History of You” is set in a future where the must-have technology device is actually an implant in your head that allows you to replay everything you see and do and even share those memories with people around you. A man, struggling at his job as a lawyer, comes to believe after a dinner party that his wife may have slept with another party attendee years ago. The jealousy leads to fights between the two as he comes to insist not only that she’s lying to him about having had an affair but also to demand that she show him her memories of the time in question to prove her fidelity to him. If this episode ended there, it would have simply left the main character as an insecure douchebag, but by forcing the issue we learn that his wife did actually have an affair and that, in fact, their young daughter was the product of that affair. In other words, the wife’s character, in the eyes of the show, was not entitled to the privacy of her own memories and the man’s frankly line-crossing behavior is utterly justified because of her lying ways, even after establishing that the man is borderline abusive, demeaning and jealous over perceived slights. While in the end his insistence on learning the truth leaves him hollow and without his family, that fate is cast as the result of her affair, not his inability to not be an ass to his family.

"Reviewing memories now...damn, turns out there was a 'it's all my fault' clause in the marriage vows..."

The trend continues in the episodes “Be Right Back” and “White Bear,” the third and fourth episodes. In the first, a woman (Hayley Atwell) becomes inconsolable after the death of her husband before learning that a company has perfected a way to create a sort of digital copy of his personality based on his online and social media activity, allowing her to get emails and phone calls from her “husband” before eventually even purchasing a life-sized artificial copy of him, a shell that can contain program files to recreate his personality. Throughout the episode, Atwell’s character moves through the stages of grief but becomes shrill and unreasonable. Again, handled differently this could be a powerful story about grief, or at least about how much of our personalities we leave in the world without thinking about it. In the end, what we get is a story about a woman who can’t handle not controlling her husband and so banishes the last remnants of him to an isolated existence.

Likewise, “White Bear” deals with a woman who awakes in a house she doesn’t recognize, unsure of who she is, and is quickly confronted with a kind of zombie-apocalypse style horror where the population has become mindless, focusing only on recording her every movement on their cell phones while she is chased by mysterious people in masks who want to kill her. In the end it’s revealed that she is actually in a kind of correctional facility for the crime of allegedly murdering a young child with her boyfriend and filming the murder and her punishment is to be tortured in front of a live audience every day with her mind wiped clean every night. Despite the presence of another woman (played by Tuppence Middleton) who actually has some agency of her own, the entire episode is one torturous sequence after another for a character who is hardly proven to have committed the crime she’s accused of.

An apt summation of the show in one image.

Part III: Conclusions (Come Back, Spoiler-phobes.)

So there’s my dilemma about Black Mirror: It’s an extremely well-produced and creative show about how humanity relates to technology and each other, but it’s got some major issues with the unstated politics of the show. Your mileage may vary as to how much this of value to you when watching. I’m not usually one to get caught up in a show’s political underpinnings. I can usually shut down that part of my brain and just enjoy the story. Something about Black Mirror made that hard for me, though. And once the switch was flipped in my brain, it made it really hard for me to go back.

I should also mention that I don’t think any of my issues with the themes in the show suggest that it isn’t well written, well-acted, and generally well done. It just makes for some sticky watching for me. Regardless, Netflix has already commissioned 12 episodes, almost doubling the existing seven that have already aired. Look for them on Netflix now with additional episodes due out in 2016. 

From the Depths of Netflix: Psycho-Pass

So, as I said, I spend a lot of time surfing Netflix's recommendations to see what's up. Sometimes, however, I get a recommendation.

My brother recommended the anime Psycho-Pass to me. Things I watch with my brother tend to be hit or miss; even though he's a real film buff, we never end up watching Fellini or Godard together; we usually end up seeing something like The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug, which is fine, but ultimately slightly unsatisfying.

According to official nerd lorekeepers, 

it's "smOWg," not "smAHg."

While I did enjoy seeing It Follows (the best horror film about a sexually-transmitted, slow-moving, partially invisible, relentless murder demon you will ever see, even if the Disasterpiece soundtrack made me feel like I left Kavinsky's 1984 on repeat and too loud), Psycho-Pass is back to the usual "not horrible, but not better than average."

There is no "business casual" in the future.

The setting is in a future Japan in a new state of Tokugawa era-style isolation, where society is controlled by a personality-reading supercomputer system called Sybil (possibly an abbreviation, definitely a reference to the oracle). The following things are true in this future Japan:

1. The Sybil system can determine your mood and propensity for criminality through its nationwide network of surveillance cameras.
2. If your mood and/or criminality are aberrant, Sybil sends the mental health cops out to involuntarily commit you to a mental institution (often indefinitely).
3. The cops have guns that kind of make them like the Sandmen from Logan’s Run.

   

   A Sandman, for reference. I liked the selective-fire chambers of the Gun in the book better.

   In Psycho-Pass, they're called "Dominators," because (sarcasm) that's not fascist at all. The guns don’t fire unless Sybil decides the gun is pointing at a criminal, at which point the gun generally unlocks to a stun mode. If the target’s criminal rating gets really high, Sybil unilaterally switches the cops’ guns from “stun” to “grotesquely murder.” There’s also a “vaporize with plasma” feature that I am pretty sure the writers did not come up with consistent rules for; it shows up twice and then is never heard from again.

   

   The "dominator" in "someone's about to explode like Deacon Frost/La Magra at the end of the first Blade film" mode.
4. The cops are mostly “latent criminals” who get to not be institutionalized all day in return for stunning and/or grotesquely murdering other folks who set off alarms. They are supervised by a small cadre of supposedly psychologically healthy people, but apparently hanging around "latent criminals" whose job it is to explode their fellow citizens in a shower of blood tends to push the supervisors towards latent criminality themselves, so for some it's a small slip from supervisor to supervised.
5. Japan is still a place where, after weeks of running around with a firearm chasing fugitives, a young professional woman will still continue to wear a pencil skirt as her primary criminal-chasing outfit. Look, I get it, there's a slit in the back so the wearer isn't mincing everywhere. But it's not really designed for one to sprint all over the place, which is what the job entails.

   

   Look at this skirt that Akane is always in. Just try to imagine being in that skirt and running up and down all the stairs that are in this show. And yet, pants are verboten for the whole season.

   It’s like pants are reserved for the lesbian cop (who is a latent criminal, as most of the show’s lesbians are either latent criminals or outright criminals). Stay classy, Japan.

The show starts out following a group of mental health cops as they find their way onto the trail of a sort of Moriarity of future crime, a puppet-master who aids the disturbed in committing really sick crimes and getting away with them. He has hair borrowed from Berzerk’s Griffith (that’s how you know he’s truly evil, bishounen with long white hair are always really evil).

"I feel pretty! Oh so pretty!" I was considering putting in one of the available images of the guy above murdering one of the various people he kills with a straight razor, but hey, let me just put it down here - this guy is more violent with a straight razor than Sweeney Todd and he's not the sickest murderer in the show.

This first part is entertainingly diverting in a police procedural way, although the crimes tend to be aiming toward maximum squickness factor. If you like watching Law & Order:SVU, you should be OK.

Then, about halfway through, someone involved in writing the plot realized, “hey, wait, a society where a nigh-omniscient supercomputer determines your destiny and then sends the Sandmen after you if you get stressed out about it is really screwed up,” and suddenly everyone, good and evil, is engaged in a much larger struggle against the system itself, which is also entertaining, but if you were really getting into the police procedural part, you might be thinking, “how did I end up in something that feels like a book in the Divergent series?”

At least Tris gets to wear pants in the supercomputer room. Akane does not. And there are many, many stairs up and down to the supercomputer room in Psycho-Pass.

Psycho-Pass is sufficiently amusing and plotted with enough cliff-hangers that, if you’re not careful in your binge-watching, you’ll blow through all seven-some hours of it just to see what happens. You’ll feel a little empty afterwards, because the tonal shift robs satisfaction from the season-ender victory over the Napoleon of Crime type. 

But if you like Blade Runner-style shows and anime, and you're not really doing anything else for that seven hours, it's better than Flame of Recca.

Almost Human

This review is going to be a bit shorter than most. First, because it is such a gross, rainy, cold day and all I want to do is crawl into bed and pull the covers up over my head. And also, I don't think it's going to take a lot of words to get the point across.

Almost Human is a fun buddy-cop sci-fi drama series. It's I, Robot meets Alien Nation with a pinch of Lethal Weapon thrown into the mix. It's great-looking, from the actors to the sets, and you can tell FOX really wants it to be a hit.


From the FOX website (so watch out for hyperbole):

Almost Human is an action-packed police procedural set 35 years in the future, when police officers are partnered with highly evolved human-like androids. The year is 2048. Detective John Kennex (Karl Urban), is a cop who survived one of the most catastrophic attacks ever made against the police department. After waking up from a 17-month coma, he can't remember much – except that his partner was killed, he lost one of his legs and he is now outfitted with a highly sophisticated synthetic appendage. Suffering from PTSD and the “psychological rejection of his synthetic body part,” John returns to work at the behest of longtime ally, the police captain (Lili Taylor).

By mandate, every cop must partner with a robot. And despite his passionate aversion to androids, John is paired up Dorian (Michael Ealy), a discontinued android with unexpected emotional responses. Although such responses were deemed flaws, it is in these “flaws” that John relates to Dorian most. After all, John is part-machine now, and Dorian is part-human. John and Dorian's understanding of each other not only complements them, it connects them.

Almost Human will follow the week-to-week missions of John and Dorian, as they fight crime across this futuristic landscape, while the mysteries surrounding John's attack and the larger mythology of this new world unfold. 

See? Get it? They're both ALMOST human. So we can explore all these hard-hitting questions about what it  means to be human, and what makes a person, and can an android truly feel.

Or we could also just blow a lot of shit up. I am particularly fond of that part.

There's nothing particularly earth-shattering about the premise here. Future cops, mismatched partners, blah blah blah. But what Almost Human has going for it are the lead actors. Karl Urban has gone from a little known New Zealand actor who popped up in Xena: Warrior Princess....

Hey there, I'm Cupid.

....to a full-blown movie star whom you probably recognize from Lord of the Rings and JJ Abrams' Star Trek movies. I've liked Urban for a while, but Michael Ealy, who plays the android partner, Dorian, was unknown to me.

I am happy to report that they are both great in this, especially Ealy who has the difficult task of playing an android who can feel. He has to walk a fine line between robot and human, but does it seemingly without effort. When watching the show, I actually believe that he is an android, and for a tv-watching cynic like me that's a hard feat to pull off. The two actors have great chemistry together and when you toss Lili Taylor into the mix, you have a first rate cast.

Three episodes have aired and while I haven't found the plot particularly riveting, it's the actors that are the real draw here. Oh, and the previously mentioned explosions. Hurray for blowing things up! I am also hopeful that we'll learn more about the "futuristic landscape" the characters inhabit since that seems pretty interesting, but a focus on the relationship between the characters is ok by me too.

In short: I recommend the show, especially for fans of sci-fi and buddy cop movies. Ratings have been solid, (not spectacular), but I am reasonably certain that we'll at least get a full season out of it. So if you are afraid of commitment to a show that might get cancelled, I think you're safe with these guys. You can also watch the complete episodes on the FOX website so catching up will be easy.

Almost Human airs Mondays at 8pm EST on FOX.

Summer Laziness

So I know this review is about....(checks watch)....6 weeks too late, but I just couldn't help it. Blame it on the heat, blame it on laziness, blame it on whatever you want, but I just couldn't work up the motivation. It's nothing against the show itself, which I actually enjoy, for some reason I have just been stuck in a summer rut. But now! Look, a review of the CBS series, Under the Dome!

My Dad looked at me last week and said, "I figured out what bothers me about Under the Dome. It's the same plot as The Simpsons Movie."

Ok, fair enough. Yes, a giant dome descends over the town of Chester's Mill, which is also what happens to the Simpsons' hometown of Springfield. And wackiness ensues. But that's pretty much where the similarity ends. Also, the tv series was actually ripped off (I mean, adapted) from a Stephen King novel, so there's that.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the "naked skateboarding around the dome" scene happens in the season finale.

I get tired of saying that the networks are all looking for the next LOST, but once again, the ghost of the dearly departed series hangs over the proceedings. Basically, everyone is always trying to find the next big science fiction show that will leave the audience guessing and waiting breathlessly for answers. It doesn't hurt if there is also the potential for tie-in merchandising. While Under the Dome has much in common with LOST, from the mysteries to the large cast, we are thankfully spared boring flashbacks. If only Once Upon a Time took the same approach.

Alrighty, the basic concept is pretty simple. Chester's Mill is your typical small town USA (or is it??) and one day a giant invisible dome descends over the town separating it from the outside world. You can see through it, air comes through, but pretty much nothing else, including sound. Oh, and it interferes with electromagnetic signals meaning you don't want to get too close with your cell phone up against your ear. Your entire head could explode.

For the most part, I am pleased with the show. The central mystery (what is the dome??) is pretty interesting and I think the writers do a good job of teasing out clues. It's clear something sci-fi or supernatural-like is happening here, especially since some teenagers in the dome are having seizures and whispering creepy things like, "the pink stars are falling." Ok, then. There's also some indication the town elders, the sheriff, the councilman, and the reverend, knew something like this was coming and are involved in some way. I love a good conspiracy.

But where Under the Dome needs to improve is in its smaller character subplots. Some of them are truly ridiculous, like the crazy teenager who kidnaps his girlfriend and locks her in his bomb shelter. Yeah, it's THAT dumb. Or the lesbians whose daughter is full of angst and not pleased about being stuck in this small town for the foreseeable future. Actually, it seems most of the plots that bother me involve the teenagers. So less angst, more seizures for them please.

They always find a way to keep the pretty people apart.

I also had a problem with how the town as a whole reacted to the dome. With the exception of one dude freaking the fuck out, everyone just pretty much went about business as usual. Uh, excuse me? If this really happened, you know people would be rioting and stripping the local Wal-Mart of every piece of food and survivalist gear they could get their hands on. In Chester's Mill, people still wander around paying for shit and one guy's idea of stocking up is to buy an extra pack of cigarettes. Come on people, get with the program. How do you expect to survive a zombie apocalypse with that attitude?

But these are all minor quibbles. For the most part, Under the Dome has an interesting concept, and while it may not have the most diverse cast (except for the lesbians), there are a lot of characters I am invested in. Also, it's summer, so the original scripted programming options are kind of limited. If you want to catch up, I say check it out online or on On Demand and enjoy the ride.

 Did I mention that when the dome comes down it cuts anything in its way in half? Obligatory Twister cow quote: "Another cow." "Actually, I think that's the same one."

Under the Dome airs Mondays at 10:00pm EST on CBS. 

Alphas gets an A

Do you all remember how excited we were during the first season of Heroes? Finally we were getting a fresh, contemporary take on the superhero's journey. As expected, we started with our heroes discovering their powers, setting off various chains of events that all converged in an epic boss battle. At the end, the heroes were collected together for the first time - IMHO, the obvious next step was for them to form a superhero team. This would allow them to explore their super-powered nature as an identity - one person with powers might be a fluke, two people might be a coincidence, but twenty, thirty, one hundred people? That's a subculture. Sadly, instead of moving these characters forward, the creative team of Heroes decided to hit a giant "reset" button and scatter the heroes to the wind. This is part of why the series fizzled, but not before churning out two more seasons of diminishing quality. 

From Heroes to Zeroes.

Weep no more, my fellow Heroes fans - SyFy's Alphas is here to save the day. This show picks up where Heroes dropped the ball. It focuses on a group of super-powered people (known as Alphas) who have been recruited by the government to form a task force that investigates crimes perpetuated by similarly super-powered individuals. Their leader is actually a non-Alpha who also serves as a psychiatrist, and the team doubles as a support group. This is an elegant little set-up - we have the perfect structure within which to explore these people's superpowers, their basic humanity, and how the two an play against each other. 

Alphas also does something that Heroes never did - it imposes limits on particular powers, by trying to make them fit within known biological frameworks. Often it's a bit of a psuedo-scientific stretch, but it's interesting nonetheless. More importantly, it means that there are significant downsides to various powers. My favorite character is a man who can see electronic signals and other sonic wavelengths, who also has high-functioning autism. It doesn't hurt that he's played by one of my favorite Bones alums, Ryan Cartwright (aka Vincent Nigel-Murray). The first season also had a couple of cameos from sci-fi standard bearers/fan favorites Summer Glau and Brent Spiner - squee! 

The internet scuttlebutt is that Alphas has about a 50/50 shot at renewal, and that the actors will be told by Thanksgiving. In light of this, I urge all you Heroes fans to check out this series - TiVo it, rent it, buy it, watch it TODAY. The entirety of the first season is available on Netflix Instant Watch, and five episodes from the second season are available on SyFy Rewind. And keep your fingers crossed for good news later this month! 

Decoding Doctor Who

Last week, fans of Doctor Who got to see the long-hinted at farewell to Amy and Rory, the current Doctor’s only real long-standing companions.  The mid-season finale, “The Angels Take Manhattan” was a greatest hits of the current era with Amy, Rory and the Doctor once again teaming up with River Song to fight the Weeping Angels, this time in 1930s New York. SPOILERS AHEAD – I’l let you know when I’m done with them.

The departure of Amy and Rory has been a known quantity for a while now, however the exact circumstances of that departure were carefully guarded prior to the episode airing. What we saw was a plot by the Angels to abduct people and send them back in time, as per their traditional motivation, and then house all of these time-tossed unfortunates in an apartment building in Battery Park. Once Rory is attacked by the Angels, the rest of the team goes back to find him, inadvertently messing up the timestream every which way such that the Doctor can purportedly no longer go back to that place and time ever again without undoing all of the universe.  There were a number of twists and turns to the plot, and a fair amount of dramatics, but the end result is that Amy and Rory are permanently sent back to the 1930s to live out the rest of their days there, forever away from the Doctor, but at least with each other.

As an emotional note, the farewell to these characters is earned and bittersweet. Amy tearfully saying goodbye to the Doctor by referring to him as her “raggedy man” was a nice throwback and you got an appreciation for how much the Doctor hates goodbyes. The episode also hit on an even more interesting theme – that the Doctor is so emotionally unable to deal with endings that the people around him have to go to great lengths to hide it when they fail him or even to show that they’re getting older. Given what little we know about the Doctor’s background in possibly destroying his entire race, this gives some compelling emotions for Matt Smith and other future Doctors to play with.

As a plot device, however, the story fails on a number of points. For starters, we’re assured that the TARDIS simply cannot go back to the point where Amy and Rory are sent and that to go there at all would unmake the universe. Ergo, Amy and Rory are forever in the past. The problem, however, is physics. The writers of this episode seem to forget that humans are, each of us, time machines, albeit ones that only travel in once direction. Why the Doctor couldn’t just wait until, say, 1940 and then go back up his two best friends remains a mystery. I can’t believe that the show is forever swearing off World War II stories after all.

Okay, spoiler-phobes. You can come back now.

So with a fond (Pond?) farewell, we see off Amy and Rory and anticipate the arrival of the newest companion played by Jenna-Louise Coleman. Which leads to the inevitable question of just what is going on this season in Doctor Who?

The shape of things to come

Show runner Steven Moffat has somewhat remarkably said that, unlike the past two years, this season will carry no long-form story-arc and instead will treat each episode like a big blockbuster movie. Simply put, I think he’s lying through his Scottish teeth at us. While we haven’t seen anything as explicit as a widening crack in reality or the appearance and disappearance of The Silence yet, there has been one major feature that has bound together each episode: has anyone else noticed that the Doctor is slowly disappearing?

Just follow me on this one: Each episode has had either a major or minor moment focused on the notion that the Doctor, who just two seasons ago had gotten so notorious that he managed to stand on a rock and talk an entire invading space fleet of bad guys into not obliterating him with a ray gun of some kind, is routinely running into people who don’t know him and can’t identify him. Starting in the first episode, “Asylum of the Daleks”, the Doctor is effectively erased from the memory banks of every Dalek everywhere. In “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship”, the collector’s computer-of-instant-knowing-things has no record of the Doctor. Last week, we learn that River Song has long ago been freed from prison because it seems the man she murdered, the Doctor, actually never existed. It’s implied this is some kind of computer error, but I think it’s more than that. I think The Silence is slowly erasing the Doctor from all history.

We know from last season’s finale that there is a terrible question in the universe, something that references “the fall of the eleventh” and that a question that could unmake reality (or something) will be asked and that question just might be, “Doctor who?” We know The Silence is dedicated to eliminating the Doctor as a threat to creation, and so it stands to reason they might be behind all this.

If it’s the case, then, that there is in fact a long-form arc to this season about the Doctor’s identify, conveniently timed to dovetail into next year’s 50^th anniversary of the show, it makes sense to also wonder how the new companion will factor in. We’ve already seen Jenna-Louise Coleman in a somewhat puzzling role in the first episode this year as a woman who (again, SPOILERS) was turned into a Dalek and didn’t even realize it. Might she have something to do with all this erase-y nonsense as well?

How Did All This Opera Get in My Space?

Someday, probably far off in the future, science will discover a verifiable, reproducible explanation for why it is that people like me willingly subject ourselves to the torture of watching television shows that are smart and cutting-edge and challenging and thus have no hope of surviving the season on network TV. Sadly, that day has not yet arrived and thus I am still living with Cancelitis.

My latest flare-up comes in the form of a multi-nationally produced sci-fi drama that actually leaned much harder on the “sci” than the “fi” called Defying Gravity. The 2009 show about a manned space mission to explore the solar system was a joint project between ABC in America and CTV in Canada. It was notable for featuring a multi-national cast playing multi-national characters.

Sickness Ahoy!

The Plot: About 70 years in the future, eight astronauts, four men and four women, board the Antares for a six-year cruise to visit Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Europa, Saturn and Pluto. The show alternates between the astronauts in space and Mission Control back in Houston. Conflict comes from mysterious happenings that begin on the ship and the fact that select members of the Mission Control team seem to have a darker plan for the mission than they’re letting on. Meanwhile, characters who don’t always get along with each other are literally forced to live and work (and, let’s be honest, have sex) with each other.

And while the interpersonal tension is a major plot point, before long the astronauts are facing strange occurrences, some frightening, some awe-inspiring, tied to some kind of mysterious cargo being stored on the ship. Referred to only as “Beta” by the Earth-bound Mission Control, Beta is mucking about with the mission, literally altering the astronauts on a cellular level and causing them to come face-to-face with events from their own pasts. As Antares moves further away from Earth, the astronauts become more isolated and more fragile while Beta becomes more prominent and possibly more dangerous.

"If anyone gets a vaguely chest-bursting feeling during dinner, I'm turning this spaceship around."

Comparisons to other shows flew pretty fast and loose while Defying Gravity was on the air. Critics found it to be equal parts Lost, Babylon 5 and even Grey’s Anatomy, although in my opinion that last one is a bit out of left field. The show placed a high premium on telling a very modern story about science – about the only sign that this show couldn’t be set today is the show’s in-universe explanation for artificial gravity to explain why the actors don’t spend all their scenes floating – but one that would still, at its core, have a much more, ahem, alien driver.

Defying Gravity definitely had its weak points – like many first season shows, the writing started off clunky with some odd characterization and awkward dialogue while the writers got a better sense of who these characters were. Ironically, for a sci-fi show at least, one aspect that the show didn’t lack for was effects. Because the show was so grounded (if you’ll pardon the pun) in reality, there’s no beaming down to the planet, no faster-than-light travel, none of the typical sci-fi tropes that, in addition to putting a further barrier between the show and the viewer, also jack up the costs of filming. The ship, Antares, is much more akin to the present day International Space Station than it is to the starship Enterprise. The sets were built to look technical and modern, not glamorous and sleek. The computer and launch technology in particular, while cutting edge, wouldn’t be that out of place in any high-tech thriller set in today’s time.

It goes without saying that this show did not last long. For a grand total of only 13 episodes, viewers at least got the first full season, but like so many that went before it, we never got to see the resolution of all the mysteries. Unlike other “brilliant but cancelled” shows, however, Defying Gravity did actually get an ending! Sort of… Once it was confirmed that the show would not be coming back, creator James Parriott released highlights from the show’s Bible, including details about what each mystery for each main character meant and what was planned for them for the remaining years of their mission. Reading it points to one of the crucial lessons that sci-fi shows need to learn: never put all your cool set pieces in the third season. Defying Gravity learned that partway, so while there were plenty of storylines left floating about (sorry, I seem to be overly pun-y today), watching the entire series at least gives you some of the answers you wanted. All of which makes reading about where the show would have gone that much more frustrating because you can see how cool the final story would have been. 

 "No, it's cool. You can cancel us. I'll just wait here for the next smart science show to come along. Should arrive any minute now."

For a space opera that’s light on the opera, do yourself a favor and check out Defying Gravity.