Author Archives: Bob Evans

More Thoughts on Star Trek Strange New Worlds

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As I write this, we are one episode away from the conclusion of Season 2 of Star Tre: Strange New Worlds. This season has brought more episodes that swung at new things and new styles than season one, a crossover episode with an animated Trek Series, and the franchise’s first foray into musical territory, while also exploring the deep dark of some of their characters.

The series remains straddling the two worlds of television, being both episodic with each episode pretty much a self-contained story but also with one foot in the saga format as events

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

from previous episodes reverberate both in plot and emotion for the characters.

The series is Canon breaking. The events and experiences of the characters cannot be reconciled with the depictions first aired more than 50 years ago. I am fine with that. The nature of televised story telling has changed dramatically over the last half century and what was acceptable writing and plotting in the middle of the 1960s would never fly for today’s audiences. I would rather the series creatives break Canon and continuity in the furtherance of good character development and story revelations that commit to slavish devotion to a Canon that wasn’t adhered to even during the original broadcasts. There are of course limits. A story that requires that James Kirk joined Starfleet because he was on the run as a serial killer would be a Canon breaking event far too great to accept but having original series characters meeting people that in the first broadcasts that they had no knowledge of. No big deal if the final effect is to tell a good story.

The entire cast continues to deliver stellar performances. (Pun intended, fully and without regret.) The storylines give most of them more to do than any series airing in the 60s would have dared. This season’s treatment of Jim Kirk has felt more in keeping with the original character than his guest appearance in season one. It is quite pleasant to see some of the more supporting characters from the original series getting a deeper backstory and more emotional exploration than they received originally. Spock’s stories seem to create the greatest conflict with ‘Canon,’ but I remind you that even the original series couldn’t make-up its mind on what exactly was the truth. In the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before he refers to an ‘ancestor’ that one married an Earth woman and later this is simply ignored to make his mother human. Having Spock explore and experiment with allowing his human side to be expressed more freely may be a Canon violation, but I find it fascinating.

The characters I am most interested in and have the greatest emotional attachment to are Dr M’Benga, La’an Noonian Singh, and most of all Christine Chapel.

La’an, torn between her nature, button-downed and controlled, and her desire to be more open, expressed in her solo in the musical episode but contained within Christina Chong’s performance well before that is emotionally powerful.

M’Benga and Chapel’s traumatic war wounds are touching and heart rending giving each of them far deep characterizations that the original series ever allowed. While the war itself was explored in the series Star Trek: Discovery, which didn’t quite work for me, I am thoroughly enjoying the exploration of war’s lasting effect on the people forced to endure it. Like Frodo they carry wounds that will never fully heal.

One more episode to go but since this is a not a season long story but a series of interconnected ones, I do not feel that the finale is as critical to the whole season as it would be for another series. So, I can render a judgement without episode 10 and I am enjoying the series even more than I had during season one. In my opinion the best Trek since the original.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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“Magical” Effects in ‘Soft’ Science Fiction

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‘Hard Science Fiction is the sub-genre where no detail contradicts the know laws of physics.  in this there is no faster than Light travel or communication or any form of telepathic psychic ability. It is a rigorous artform practiced by only a few. Once you diverge away from ‘Hard’ SF and into less rigorous applications of scientific fact and theory the art because far wider, encompassing everything from Star Trek the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Often at some point a piece will require some extraordinary effect that upends expectations, introducing new and often unreproducible effects. What is interesting is that in various historical periods there has often been a consensus on what can produce these transformative events.

In the first few decades of the 20th century ‘Rays’, light beyond the visible spectrum, were a common fantastical effect. In 1931’s Frankenstein, Victor boasts of discovering a ray beyond the violet and ultraviolet, a ray that first brought life and one which he harnesses to give life to his creation. In Captain America: The First Avenger is the writers tip their hat to Frankenstein and use a period appropriate ‘Vita Rays’ as per of the process that created Captain America.

By the post-war era ‘rays’ had become a tired trope and in the new atomic age ‘Radiation,’ which really were rays all along, because the empowering effect that grew insects and people to impossible proportions, created powerful mutant abilities, reanimated the dead to cannibalize the living, and endowed several comic book superheroes with the flashier abilities.

Radiation, like the rays before them, eventually passed out of favor as the magic system of less than demanding science fiction stories.

What replaced ‘radiation’ as our go to we need something fantastic to happen here effect?

Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics, and in particular the many worlds interpretation of wave form collapse, had been used the furious wave hands and craft stories are in effect blatantly impossible. You want a ‘rational’ reason why the devil is in a jar of goo in the basement of a Los Angeles Catholic Church? Quantum Mechanics. You need a method of time travel to collect some shiny stones and reverse the villain’s victory? Quantum Mechanics. You want a musical episode where the characters react to diegetic musical and sing their truths? Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum Mechanics is no more likely to induce a ‘musical universe’ than gamma radiation is to transform a normal man into an eight-foot tall several hundred-pound monster. These are artifacts of very soft science-fiction employed to wave hands past the impossibility of it all in order to deploy the story the writers want to tell. As long as we remember that these stories are not reality, not a possible future, but the modern equivalent of ‘Once Upon A Time…’ then we can enjoy them for the myths that they are and remember that truth that matters in these stories is not the science but the emotions of the human condition.

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A Dream That Disturbed With Its Pleasantness

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Computer and email issues this morning so this post will be brief.

Wednesday night I had a dream that in itself was quite pleasant but upon awakening was very depressing.

I dreamt I visited a friend of mine who due to health issues is now in an assisted living facility. In the dream we talked, nothing of any terrible importance, just friends chatting.

Then I awoke.

It took the customary few seconds to sort out reality from the dream and as that process played out, I became depressed.

You see my friend is in an assisted living facility suffering from a degenerative neurological illness that gas robbed him of many motor functions including the ability to speak. This is not something one recovers from and that simple dream, sitting and chatting, is quite impossible.

It is not surprising that people flee from reality when reality is so often cold and cruel.

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July Was Not Productive Month

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Writing-wise I could have had a better month. It fell off the cliff with the flu that struck me down July 6 and remained as a powerful and painful cough through the 21st. In addition to the days spent at home sweating and coughing the illness robbed me of all opportunity and motivation to sit at the keyboard and keep working on this strange non-outlined werewolf novel.

Then once the flue had departed and the cough subsided to a mere annoyance, dental issues raised their troublesome head. Some of these had started in June, a need to remove a bridge, extract a tooth and cap another one had at first seemed fairly straight forward. However, the temporary crown kept falling off, making eating a challenge, and when it came time to affix the permanent crown, that failed a new crown needed to be fashioned, setting me back two more weeks. That would have been trouble enough but new jaw/tooth pain on the other side of the mouth caused additional worries and examinations which luckily concluded yesterday with a clean prognosis.

All in all, July saw little progress on the novel with the working title The Wolves of Wallace Point but there was some.

The manuscript currently stands at 32,000 words of a projected 90,000. The second act is about to close with the showdown between a gang of neo-Nazi bikers and the pack of werewolves that lord over this small, isolated Idaho mountain town.

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Nothing Will Change

Yesterday, the latest set of indictments were charged against Donald Trump, these related to his direct assault on American Democracy and the attempt to overthrow the election.

There are those who hope, futilely I believe, that this will finally break ‘the fever.’ There is no fever. There is no madness gripping the Modern Republican Party from which sanity can be restored. This GOP is the GOP that is logical and inevitable result of decades of committed action. The party Trump usurped was once crafted to believe the big lies, to reject reality, and one motivated by hate, primed for a man such as Trump to come and take it away from the monied interests who foolishly believed such a monster would remain forever in their control.

So, one more set of charges, one more barrage of criminality, one more assault on democracy will matter not at all to a base cultivated to reject reality for their own twisted and hateful fantasies.

Within the GOP primary I suspect Trump numbers will move no more than the usual amount dictated by statistical noise. Old School Republican Pols such as Mike Murphy will continue to cling to their own delusions of a weakening Trump and the spineless will continue to supplicate themselves for breadcrumbs of power from this poisonous party.

The salvation of this nation, this democratic experiment, lies outside of the Republican Party. The GOP must be defeated everywhere and at every level of political power. Not just in the next election or the one after that but for the next twenty years. Saving America is a generational project and only a new generation of Republicans might be trusted with any power at all.

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Where Barbie and Star Trek Intersect

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This post will contain spoilers for both Barbie (2023) and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998).

Paramount StudiosThe movie Star Trek: Insurrection centers on a conflict between the Ba’ku a species of alien luddites rejecting all technology and the Son’a a specie that hates and despises the Ba’ku and who have allied with Federation elements to steal the Ba’ku’s planet which bestows eternal youth and immortality. During the unfolding of the plot it is revealed that the two species are in
fact the same and that the Ba’ku faction exiled the Son’a for not sharing their luddite philosophy condemning that faction to death. The Ba’ku created their own mortal enemy and at no point in the movie is this concept acknowledged in any fashion. The filmmakers elide past the concept that it is morally acceptable to effectually sentence to death a people for the crime of not believing as you do. The Son’a campaign of revenge who not justified is understandable.

Barbie interrogates the power dynamic between men and women contrasting Barbieland a Warner Brothers Studiosfantasy domain of unquestioned matriarchy with the ‘real’ world. It should be noted that even the film’s depiction of the real world is strewn with elements that reveal it is as fantastic as Barbieland such as the view from the Mattel offices.

Ken, who has been dismissed and whose feelings have disregarded by Barbie, after visiting the ‘real’ world returns to Barbieland and transforms it into a fantastic and exaggerated version of patriarchy. In the film’s third act Barbie frees the other Barbies from the influence of the corrupted Ken but also comes to understands that her apathy towards Ken’s hurt and pain contributed to his own fall. It is important to note that Ken does not get what he wants, Barbie’s feelings towards him remain aromantic but his feelings are acknowledged he is no longer ‘just Ken.’

The writers and filmmakers of Barbie have a firmer grasp on causality and how pain transforms into anger than the people who crafted Star Trek: Insurrection. With Barbie there is understanding and even eventually empathy for how one becomes a villain where with Insurrection there is only the unrealistic view that good and evil are simplistic ideologies. What a world we live in where a film based on a toy presents a more nuanced and complex take on morality that a leading SciFi feature film.

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Movie Review: Barbie (2023)

Warner Brothers Studios.

Great Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie exits in a state of quantum superposition. Observed from one perspective it is a light, frothy summer movie, exploding in pink and pastels, full of fun, escapism, and the ahistorical innocence for childhood. From another perspective it is a slashing, scathing satire, scorching its targets with sharp, pointed commentary, ridiculing the inflated egos of the self-important and mocking the political patriarchy. And from yet another perspective is nearly a platonic example of everything wrong with modern cinema as a grubby I.P. driven cash-grab, weaponizing naive nostalgia as it concocts from a plotless, storiless, corporate property a feature film script joining the ranks of Battleship, Clue, and The Country Bears.

This is a very difficult film to discuss as its three natures are all worthy of intense study and interrogation.

First let’s review the film in a non-spoilers fashion, covering nothing that was not one of the several trailers.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives a perfect life of frolic and fun in her dreamhouse in Barbieland alongside all the variants of Barbie and Ken. Disturbed by intrusive morbid thoughts which disrupt her ability to live carefree Barbie journeys with Beach Ken (Ryan Gosling) to the ‘real world’ in search of answers. Their adventures and transgressions across the realities endanger Barbieland and Stereotypical Barbie returns to Barbieland hoping to repair the damage and restore its perfect existence.

The film is a masterpiece in the cinema arts. Production design and cinematography embraced the candy cotton nature of the script, abandoning all attempts at ‘reality’ within Barbieland and in doing so created a suspension of disbelief that allowed the film to achieve a verisimilitude that transcends all artificiality. The actor’s stylized performances, particularly while in Barbieland, create their superposition state being both unreal and emotionally truthful. Gerwing’s direction and Rodrigo Prieto’s camera work are flawless, capturing character, scene, and story in a seamless fashion that belies the difficulty of their objective.

Barbie has been called, liberal, leftwing, and ‘woke.’ This is so blindingly obvious and intentional that film might as well be wearing a beret, speaking in a French accent, with knuckles bloodied from street fights with Fascists for how proudly it wears it political and philosophical colors. Criticizing Barbie on such accounts is as ridiculous as disparaging the conservative nature of 1984’s, Red Dawn as it is the point of the project. It is a film with a message, one it does not shy away from, one it does not attempt to slip unnoticed into the plot, one that it fervently believes in.

Barbie is also a two-hour commercial for Mattel’s doll and its sundry accessories, an I.P. focused product intent on producing profit from already possessed property, joining the ranks of G.I. Joe, He-Man, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Its self-awareness and its cutting satire add value and depth to the film but do not erase the corporate goals it also incorporates.

It is easy to see how Barbie infuriates some, from its appropriation of cinema classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey to its dismissal of the Snyder edit of Justice League the film stakes out positions and holds them with conviction. The movie that came to my mind as I watched Barbie was not its cinematic fraternal twin Oppenheimer, but 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection and the relationship between the pair I will have to explore in spoiler containing post.

Barbie is several films coexisting together on that silvered screen, all of them expertly crafted and worth the time and money to see in a good theater,

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Series Review: Secret Invasion

Marvel Studios.

Thirty years after the events of Captain Marvel Nick Fury and Carol Danvers, now aware that the
shapeshifting Skrulls had been the oppressed and not the oppressors and had promised to find
the aliens a world to be their new home, it is revealed that the search for a home has failed and some Skrulls are intent on removing humanity from the Earth and taking it as their own. Secret Invasionfollows Nick Fury as he attempts to save the Earth and humanity from the rebel Skrulls and their genocidal plot.

While Secret Invasion did not actively repulse me as did some non-MCU series such as The Rigand Silo, it failed to engage or enthrall my attention and failed as an example of its subgenre the MCU rendition of a spy story.

Spy fiction exists along a spectrum with Ian Fleming’s super-spy James Bond, filled with gadgets, glamor, and megalomaniacal villains at one end and John le Carré’s George Smiley’s world of disloyalty, moral compromises, and cynicism at the other. Secret Invasion however seems to exist outside of the spectrum, playing closer to the superhero nature of its universe and ignoring the spy element of its central protagonist, Nick Fury. The series is neither the clear good vs evil romp that many Bond plots are nor does it delve beyond the surface concerning the moral costs and corruption of intelligence work. Without either element the series floats from set piece to set piece, each other its own escalating stakes but missing the essential tones that creates genre. This is not a failing due to due to the story being placed within the MCU, WandaVision embraced, exploited, and satirized the American sitcom genre while still exploring grief, destiny, and superpowers. Captain American: The Winter Soldier, while remaining an extension of Steve Rodgers’s MCU journey, captured the paranoia and feel of a 70s political thriller. Secret Invasion’s failure at genre leaves it lackluster and pointless, serving only to setup other franchise entries and having no essential reason for its own existence.

In addition to its failing as a spy genre Secret Invasion also presented plot inconsistencies that undermine the show’s suspension of disbelief. For 30 years Captain Marvel and Fury has searched for a new home for the Skrull population and failed to find a single planet for them. Really? In a universe as teaming with life among the star, see all the aliens represented in Guardians of the Galaxyfranchise, which also posits that there are abandoned habitable worlds, the failure to discover a place for the Skrulls becomes a leap of logic too great for a setting that includes magic and talking trees.

For a story about shapeshifting aliens and a secret world-wide threat, Secret Invasion does so little with this element that it is utterly lacking in paranoia. The story doesn’t utilize the concept that everyone is suspect because anyone might be the worst person to interact with. Bond usually had the ‘bad Bond girl,’ le Carré is rife with ‘who can you trust?’ issues but Secret Invasion rarely employs such a rich plot point and when it does it lacks any real weight.

Secret Invasion is not bad, but neither it is good. Of the newest television series, I have added to my recent watching it is the least interesting. I do not regret the time I spent with the series, but I shall not be looking to experience it again as I did with Loki or WandaVision.

A gentle reminder that I have my own SF novel available from any bookseller. Vulcan’s Forge is about the final human colony, one that attempt to live by the social standard of 1950s America and the sole surviving outpost following Earth’s destruction. Jason Kessler doesn’t fit into the repressive 50s social constraints, and he desire for a more libertine lifestyle leads him into conspiracies and crime.

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The Real-World Trolley Problem

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With the release of Oppenheimer, the debate, one that will never be resolved, over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have once again become more active.

Pondering these issues for an uncounted time it struck me that these bombings and the decision to proceed with them are a real-world example of the famous philosophical ‘the Trolley Problem.’

The Trolley Problem posits an out-of-control streetcar hurtling down a track. The car cannot be stopped and without any action taken will strike and kill five pedestrians. However, if a switch is thrown it will go onto a different track where it will kill ‘only’ one person. The unresolvable question is which is more ethical to do nothing and allow five to die or to take an action with intent that will kill one?

World War II in the Pacific is the out-of-control trolley. It will kill people until it is ended. The course of the war prior to August 1945 supports the assumption that an invasion of the home island will result in massive loss of life for both the invading allied armies and the Japanese population. One can argue that a demonstrate display of the atomic bomb might have prompted an unconditional surrender, but a counter-factual cannot be proven and even after two cities had been struck with the terrible weapons the militarist faction wanted to continue the war. One can also argue that the requirement that the surrender be unconditional could have been dropped to end the war, however the United States was not the sole combatant allied against the Empire and it is doubtful that the Chinese would have settled for a conditional surrender. These other histories remain counter-factual.

On the other side it can be argued that the Invasion of the home islands may not have caused such horrific casualties as the level of starvation already striking the populace would have prompted a total collapse. Again, a counter-factual cannot be proved and the actions shown earlier in the war displayed an almost unimaginable resolve by both the armed forces of Japan and its people.

The conclusions debating if the bombings were justified, if they were an evil, if they saved more lives than they cost, all depend on the counter-factuals accepted as given and the ones rejected as unsupported rendering the debate not only unresolved but unresolvable. Not matter where you stand on the issue just be aware that you stand on counter-factual interpretations of the war, and no one has a lock on the ‘truth’ of what would have happened had events proceeded differently.

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Movie Review: Oppenheimer

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While I certainly enjoy Christopher Nolan films and consider many to be truly great, I would not count myself as a Nolan Fanboy. Some of his films are simply too flawed for my tastes, with Interstellar far too cynical to the point that it confuses cynicism for wisdom and Following has a plot that in my opinion is less credible than Tenant.

That said the three-hour opus Oppenheimer dramatizing the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer from University through his later years is a magnificent piece of cinema and an outstanding
Universal Studiosachievement. The runtime passed for me quickly as the film propulsive plot, and not entirely about the development of an implosion plutonium device, is always compelling and never without character driven human drama. I have watched movie less than half-as long that felt twice the runtime.

Robert Oppenheimer [Oppie] played by Cillian Murphy, a complex man driven equally by ego and curiosity, is most remember as the project head for the Los Alamos Laboratory that developed the first functional, practical atomic weapon. The film touches on the major elements and challenges of Oppie’s life, his association with Communists before the war and during the first ‘Red Scare,’ his elevation to a media figure for his work in the Atomic bomb project, his philandering and affairs including with the tragic Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), and his hounding from government programs for being a suspected communist.

In a film that is packed with star power, the story is principally carried by two performances, Murphy’s as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr Lewis Strauss as the story’s antagonist. Much of the film is told with the Strauss’s confirmation as Secretary of Commerce hearings acting as both as a framing device and tool to jump to specific points in the Strauss/Oppenheimer feud.

Photographed beautifully by Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema Oppenheimer presents a lush, lavish, and sweeping frame well encompassing Hoytema’s talents and Nolan’s passion for large format cameras.

Oppenheimer, Nolan’s first feature for his new home at Universal Studios, is an achievement in scope, scale, and humanity that the filmmaker has been building towards for decades, and a movie well-deserving of as theatrical viewing.

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