Culture from the darker side

WARNING: This Review contains spoilers!!!!!!! Read at your own Risk!!!!!

In 2003 Joss Whedon of Buffy and Angel fame started a new series called “Firefly” on the Fox network. I admit that I tried to watch and episode and just didn’t “get it”. So I passed on it and really didn’t shed a tear when it was cancelled shortly after.

Now in 2005 Serenity comes to the bring screen which continues the story of the crew aborad the Firefly class cargo ship, so I went back and watched the series and: Boy, did I miss out on something.

So I did “stand in line” with all the other fans waiting for it to show up in theatres, and to make it short and sweet: I wasn’t disappointed.

In order to earn her continued passage on board Serenity, a fugitive from theAlliance, the telepathic River Tam, accompanies Captain Reynolds, Jayne, and Zoe on a mission to steal the payroll of an outer planet security company financed by the Alliance. During the robbery, River senses the presence ofReavers, the sub-savage humans who dwell beyond the outer planets. After advising the occupants of the bank to lock themselves in the vault, Captain Reynolds and his companions flee to Serenity, narrowly averting capture by the Reavers.

River’s brother Simon, the crew’s doctor, angrily reacts to the captain’s willingness to put his younger sister in such grave danger. Captain Reynolds responds by ordering them off the ship at the next planet they land on, Beaumont, where the crew expects to sell their loot. The Tams do indeed disembark at Beaumont, but while the captain haggles with the buyers, River receives a subliminal message via a video terminal, mumbles “Miranda”, and proceeds to start fighting with people in the bar. Despite being a 90-pound girl, she manages to knock out everyone, including Jayne, and is about to shoot Captain Reynolds when Simon arrives and shouts something in Chinese, causing her to fall asleep.

Simon explains to the captain that, during her captivity by the Alliance, she was trained and conditioned to become an assassin. The only thing that can stop her after this conditioning has been triggered is the “safe-word” he uttered. Despite knowledge of this new danger, the captain allows Simon and River to continue traveling on Serenity, as they attempt to unravel the mystery of “Miranda” and its connection to River’s past.

The crew contacts Mr Universe, a reclusive techno-geek who dwells with his robotic wife on a planet surrounded by an opaque ion cloud. After watching the security camera footage of the bar on Beaumont, Mr Universe discovers that River’s outburst was triggered by a subliminal message in a seemingly harmless cartoon that had been broadcast all over the Alliance during the previous weeks. He also notes that the footage has been viewed by someone else, an Alliance operative.

Shortly thereafter, the captain receives an urgent plea for help from Inara, a former passenger on board Serenity. Knowing that an operative is hunting for his ship, he suspects a trap, but decides to visit Inara anyway. His fears are realized; Inara is held hostage by a ruthless Alliance operative. The operative offers to let the captain go on his way if he turns River over to him, but thanks to Inara’s quick thinking, she and the captain escape the operative and return to Serenity, which takes off undetected.

Another of River’s outbursts shows the crew the meaning of “Miranda”. It is an outer planet, which had once been inhabited but has been deleted from official records. Traveling there would require crossing through Reaver territory, which the crew members agree would be suicide, so Serenity heads for an outpost run by Rev Book, another former passenger, to think things over.

On arrival, however, the crew discovers that the outpost has been ravaged by Alliance forces, and its inhabitants massacred. Several other outposts that had harbored Serenity in the past have also been destroyed. Captain Reynolds receives a message from the Alliance operative claiming responsibility, and promising more of the same until River is turned over.

The captain responds by heading for Miranda to find the secret the Alliance is willing to commit mass murder to protect, hoping to evade the Reavers by using a clever yet gruesome technique. Meanwhile, the operative sets his sights on the one man in the ‘verse who can help the crew of Serenity air the Alliance’s dirty laundry to the inhabitants of thirty planets…

Do yourself a favour: Watch the show, but even if not, watch the movie, it has some goodies in there that I really don’t want to go into too deep, but let’s just say there was one in there that outright shocked me, not because of what happened but to whom it happened.

Rating: 5/5

Interesting new show on Teletoon: Station X.

I am not quite sure what this is really all about, it seems to mix some small story with elements of pop culture…. I like the drawings, but as I didn’t catch the full show I am not so sure it is really something that is worth my time.

Strangely enough: IMDB has nothing on it.

There are lot of movies and TV shows produced in Canada on a regular basis. In fact it has gone so far that Vancouver is called “Hollywood North”. Unfortunatly most of those productions are american productions coming up from the south and the result tends to be Toronto as New York or Vancouver as $Any_other_US_Location.

There are also many many very talented writers out in the industry who hail from the great white north, unfortunatly they tend to write as “americans” as well. The few TV Shows that make it out of the country tend to be either news driven or on a very very rare occasion it is even a drama (Degrassi in the 1980’s comes to mind).

So it is a bit with a surprise when suddenly to private PPV networks produce a show that is not only entertaining, well written, but doesn’t suffer from a lack of production value.

The Story:

The website has the following blurb which I think sums the story up quite nicely:

The future is here. Bioterrorism. Designer babies. Frankenfoods. Suddenly Humanity possesses the ability to play god. But is it progress—or madness? Will cutting-edge science be our salvation? Or our demise?

ReGenesis is a new, 13-part one-hour, dramatic series about NorBAC, an organization formed to investigate questionable advances in biotechnology.

The Pandora’s box of biotech is wide open. It’s a modern gold rush, where billions will be made and geo-power will be staked. And everyone’s involved: governments, multinational drug companies, rogue states, and terrorist. But ideas can’t be put back in—once they’re out, they’re out.

Now, let’s take the theatrics out a bit of this text and you have pretty much a good description: Things are happening, they are affecting peoples lifes and the majority of people has no idea what is going on, so NorBAC is called in to “figure it out”. Think of our heros as the Miss Marple of Biotechnology.
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Last year the SciFi Channel in the US broadcast a two part Miniseries with the new Battlestar Galactica. The new series featured quite a departure from the original 1970s series.

The miniseries was hailed and blasted at the same time, mainly by die hard fans of the original series who had problems “adapting” to the idea of Starbuck being a girl. Personally I was never a fan of the original series, the story telling was too simiple for me, the stories were pretty cliche driven and let’s face it, the production value was lousy.

In comparision to this the new miniseries showed a lot of promise and now, with the series upon us, it becomes very clear that it has retained all of the good of the miniseries, but now in a weekly package.

The first season of Battlestar Galactica is only 13 episodes short, but what a treat it is. The series sharply departs from most scifi that is currently on the TV in the US or for that matter in probably any other place. Where can you find Robots (Cylons) who philosophize about God, life and their place? Where have you writers who don’t treat their audience like little children?

The series in the beginning is slow, that much has to be admitted, it puts a huge emphasis on character development for the first half of the show, but even with taking all this time one can’t help but think that the canvas Ron Moore and his team are painting on is vastly larger than what we have already seen (and he pretty much hints at it in his blog).
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[Now listening to: Changes from the album "Away From The Sun" by 3 Doors Down]

Angel has shown up today with season five. I wasn’t quite sure what I would expect from it. I liked the series so far because of it’s darker humor in comparison to Buffy and the fact that they had a real story arc going, something Buffy tried later but never quite worked out.
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… I was actually going to write something about the third season, but Warren Ellis beat me to it, so instead I steal his email and post it here, save myself a lot of typing and tell you all to get over to his website for more fun.

And before anyone wonders: He wrote pretty much what I was going to write, thank god I checked my email before I started hammering my own throughts into the keyboard, his are definetly more polished.
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