Community Season Four

Community quickly became my favorite show on television relatively early in its first season (the Halloween episode was the clincher,) and I have been a devoted fan of the show through its first three seasons. The show managed to have a kind of "have its cake and eat it too" quality, with solid, grounded characters who were nevertheless able to go off and do some of the most absurd and ridiculous things on television (admittedly, the two non-study group members of the main cast, Ken Jeong's Ben Chang and Jim Rash's Craig Pelton were never all that grounded - though the Dean gets one episode in season three that shows some of the underlying cause to his bizarreness.)

The show has been a place to engage in a kind of child-like, inventive play, but because the show is written by adults, it also explores the underlying psychological imperatives that inform that play.

Sadly, behind the scenes at the show, there has been a great deal of drama, particularly between stunt-cast regular Chevy Chase and the show's creator and show runner Dan Harmon. After a public feud between Chase and Harmon, at the end of season three it was announced that Harmon had been fired. The result, then, is this strange beast known as Community Season Four. At the time of this writing, Dan Harmon has been hired back to run the show's fifth season, after Chase quit the show some time during season four (the producers wisely got coverage of him for the finale before he quit.)

I'm not particularly interested in the drama behind the scenes, particularly as it casts a shadow on the rest of the cast, which is one of the best television comedy ensembles I've ever seen.

I'll admit, though, that I avoided season four. The show was so much Dan Harmon's baby that I worried that the tone would be off, and the humor might become broader, and the balance between the outlandish and the grounded would be off.

Reports among my peers suggested that this was the case, that the show had lost its magic, and that it was terrible.

Well, I just watched the fourth season, and I actually have to disagree. Terrible? No. All of the worries I mentioned two paragraphs up? Well, they did come to pass, but not to their full extents. Yes, the show lost a bit of its character polish, and I felt like we really missed out on a lot of Greendale campus life stories that give the world of the show much of its depth (I adore how the show brings back one-line characters time and again.)

But I think that the core of the show - using over-the-top ridiculousness to deal with real character issues - remained the same.

If I were Dan Harmon, I'd be mortified at what I was looking at, and it does almost feel unfaithful to like the show without its mad inventor at the wheel, but I am also a huge fan of the show itself, not to mention Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ken Jeong, and Jim Rash (and truth be told, I actually thought Chevy Chase's Pierce Hawthorne was good for the show when they weren't writing him as much of a jerk as the actor who played him.)

On the other hand, it took a while to get me to watch through it, even if I did so in basically one long binge. The fact that Dan Harmon is coming back (I don't want to imagine how awkward that must be for the folks at Sony) in a way makes this easier to watch than, say, West Wing after season four. The danger now is to set our expectations too high.

Yes, they shoehorned in some paintball, and yes, the character of Greendale was not as present as much as we might hope, but I think that people need to chill out. It was still Community.

Looking forward to Season Five! (Hey, so… did season four just last a semester? Jeff graduated early, but if it was a full year, then everyone would have anyway, so… Yeah. Must have been. Ok.)

Orphan Black

All right, well, I've taken a look at a couple of new sci-fi TV shows in the past couple months, and there's been a lot of potential, without a whole lot of great execution.

But then I watched Orphan Black, and I felt compelled to watch the entire first season in a day.

While the promos and such for Orphan Black - a BBC America original production set in Toronto - basically spoil what would otherwise be regarded as a twist at the end of episode two, the plot and particularly the characters are so well constructed that the spoilers aren't really what matter.

So, to discuss the show any further, I'm going to head into spoiler territory. I'll try to stick only to the early stuff.

Almost Human

With Agents of Shield (wow, the last post here was about its pilot) having shown a lot of promise, and, several weeks in, having yet to deliver a really solid, exciting and entertaining episode, I've basically put it on the back shelf. I'll be happy to pick it up again if I hear it gets good, but I think that without Joss Whedon actually running the show (and what I suspect is a ton of meddling on the part of ABC to keep it bland) it's not going to live up to the expectations we had. I mean, Dollhouse seemed pretty crappy at first, but as the executives gave Joss more control of the show (due to its impending cancelation,) it managed to do some fantastic things before it burned through its fuel.

Before I begin to talk about the pilot to Almost Human, I wanted to mention a certain show that really proved the "give it a chance" mentality can sometimes be right.

Fringe was the first show to come out of JJ Abram's head after Lost, and it hit a bit of a rocky start. It felt pretty much like an X-Files clone with less of a sense of humor about itself. A big part of that, I think, was the religious devotion to keeping it a case-of-the-week mystery show. As anyone who saw Fringe in the later seasons, the idea of that show being a string of stand-alones is utterly absurd.

I actually gave up on Fringe once or twice in its early seasons, but I think somewhere in late season two, the whole show seemed to click into its appropriate groove, and it became something really unlike anything I'd seen before. (I will admit that not everyone might be ok with all the massive upheavals the show went through in its later seasons, but I think they managed to keep the show interesting, even if it sometimes didn't feel like the same show.)

So, Almost Human.

This is one of those shows where the pilot was pretty underwhelming, but I nevertheless will be following it to see how it develops. It is a Bad Robot show, though it was not created by JJ Abrams (who is probably busy being emperor of the nerds and making new Star Wars and Star Trek movies.) The show was instead created by J. H. Wyman, who had served as an executive producer on Fringe. Merely having that connection suggests that we could see some really interesting Sci-Fi mythology develop.

Yes, this is a cop show, but then again, so was Fringe, so I'm confident that after a few seasons, we might get past the procedural, case of the week stuff. In the meantime, I hope that we'll get the kind of Star Trek/Buffy the Vampire Slayer model, where each episode is an opportunity to play around with a funky sci-fi concept and the philosophical ramifications thereof.

So far, Almost Human finds itself aping many of the Sci-Fi of the 1980s (a popular source these days) for its aesthetic. So far, I'm not very impressed with the look of the show, as it's clearly trying to be Blade Runner (many, many references there) but it feels more like Hill Valley in 2015 in Back to the Future II. The main police office, where every digital display is blue for some reason, is almost nauseating (and blue is my favorite color.)

Personally, I think the 80s Sci-Fi style is a little played out. It's driven by nostalgia, but when you consider how a lot of the computer systems that looked futuristic in the 80s would be laughably outdated today, it doesn't feel believable as a destination we could arrive at somewhere down the road from 2013. Given the level of comfort we in the modern day have with computers, it doesn't feel like in the future all things "technological" necessarily need to call attention to themselves. It's a shame that the current look of the show (and it's just the pilot, so this could evolve) comes off as so rote, because the premise holds a lot of promise.

Our lead is the very 80s-sci-fi-ly named John Kennex, a badass cop who spent almost two years in a coma after his entire squad was killed during a raid. He's lost a lot of his memories from that event, which he is now trying to recover through some black-market biotech - the very stuff that seems to fuel the gangs that he's been fighting.

In a semi-dystopian future, these biotech-backed bad guys have become so dangerous that cops are now assigned an android bodyguard. These androids are totally logical, like Data without the charm, and they have no sense of empathy or the ability to simulate it. During that infamous raid, it was one of these androids who refused to help Kennex's buddy (calculating that the guy was going to die anyway,) and indirectly caused both Kennex's coma and the loss of his leg.

With all of that in the past, the department wants Kennex back, but after he pushes his new robo-partner out of a moving car, they instead give him one of the older models that had been discontinued, and that's how we get Dorian.

Dorian, of course, is the "inferior" model that actually acts like a human, and claims to be a sentient, empathetic person, even if he is a robot.

Kennex isn't having it, of course, and does everything he can to ditch the guy (except pushing him out of a car,) but after the two of them uncover a plot to wipe out the entire PD with some kind of chemical agent that will kill them all gruesomely, and there's a big shoot-out, it looks like we've just got our series team assembled.

The pilot is a bit generic, and I'd like to see the world fleshed out with a little more than just CGI shots of hover-cars and such flying overhead. There are some good hooks for series-arc mythology here, such as Kennex's mysterious, apparently turncoat girlfriend. Likewise, I'm sure that the "Syndicate," (or is it "Insyndicate?" I couldn't quite tell) is more than just some criminal gang. And there's probably something sketchy going on with the androids as well.

But at the moment, with only this episode to go on, it feels like we're in a well-worn road. One of the biggest dangers in genre entertainment is getting too bogged down in references. This, actually, is my biggest complaint about Abrams' Star Trek reboot, the second film being a particularly egregious offender by being a stealth remake of Wrath of Khan. Yes, if you've got a Sci-Fi show, people are going to appreciate themes or motifs that refer to their old favorites (I caught a bunch of Blade Runner and also a bit of Total Recall in there,) but the best goal is to try to come up with something we haven't quite seen before. Other Bad Robot shows have done this. Lost did it, and Fringe did it. That's why I'm holding out hope that Almost Human will become a great show.

Will it take a season and a half to do it? That's a possibility, but I'm hoping we don't have to wait that long.

Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D

Ahem, and that's the last time I'm going to type that all out. From now on it's either Agents of Shield, or just AoS for short.

Moving on.

Yesterday saw the premiere of Joss Whedon's newest television show, set in the Marvel universe and connected to his work on The Avengers. Joss Whedon, for those heathens who don't know him, was the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, as well as the universally-adored-too-late Firefly, as well as the dead-due-(we-assume)-to-meddling-by-Fox Dollhouse.

Oh, and he co-wrote Toy Story.

Anywho, Whedon made a name for himself with these adored cult-favorite and critically-acclaimed TV-shows before landing a gig as the director for Marvel's The Avengers, which made all the money in the world and basically gave him a ton of weight to throw around Hollywood.

Combining Disney/Marvel's confidence in him post-Avengers with his background making awesome TV shows, the result has been this new show, based on SHIELD, the benevolent Men in Black of the Marvel Universe.

Whedon's work has always had a comic-book feel to it, and indeed the man has written plenty of stuff for comics as well, so it's a pretty damn fine fit. Agents of Shield will focus on a group of... Agents of Shield helmed by the breakout recurring character from several of the various Marvel movies, Agent Phil Coulson, who got killed off in the Avengers, but has been somehow resurrected. The nature of that resurrection is a mystery, as Coulson believes that he was merely injured and unconscious and sent to recuperate in Tahiti (which he says is a "Magical Place," and the fact that he uses this phrase multiple times is certainly ominous.)

This is a Whedon show, so it's all about the cast of characters. Obviously, there's Coulson, the leader-man with the lion's share of Whedonesque quips.

Next, there's Grant Ward, the hyper-competent secret agent man who's not happy about having to do a job that doesn't involve beating the crap out of people. Ward threatens to be the least interesting character, but given that this is the pilot and character development hasn't had a chance to get going, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

Malinda May is basically the Zoe of this series - badass warrior woman who doesn't like to take any crap. She's apparently a legend in the agency, but had taken a desk-job to get away from the action, only to be dragged back in by Coulson.

Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons (collectively known as Fitzsimmons) are the resident nerds (and also both British, the former a Scot and the latter English.) Like most of the characters in the pilot, we know very little about these guys yet, but with any luck they'll be a constant source of awkward nerdy snark before one of them gets brutally and suddenly killed because Joss Whedon is sustained by your tears. Leo seems to be the squeamish one, while Jemma is the one who sees radioactive goo dripping from an alien device and goes "cool!"

And finally, there's Skye, the outsider who is some kind of hacktivist/superhero groupie. Inevitably, she's won over by Coulson to join his team by the episode's end.

The pilot's plot involves the team trying to track down Michael Peterson (played by J. August Richards, who played Gunn on Angel,) a man who's developed super-powers, before said powers make him explode and kill a bunch of people. Peterson's super-strength gives him the ambition to become a super-hero himself, but the psychological (and possibly neurological) effects of the serum that gives him those powers has caused him to obsess over the arc of a superhero, defining "bad guys" to beat down and seeing his descent into madness as an "origin story."

It's all a rather self-contained story, but we have further hints at a greater plot, mostly involving the people who gave that serum to him in the first place.

As with all Whedon show pilots, this episode is enjoyable, but may leave you feeling a little underwhelmed. The thing is, Whedon's shows are all about the characters. The pilot needs to introduce the world we're living in, but it also has to be action-heavy, which doesn't leave a ton of time to bring out personalities. We get a decent bit of Coulson (who had the advantage of a couple movies to exist in beforehand) and also Skye, who is our audience surrogate in exploring this new setting (which is not to say she doesn't have her own mysteries.) But half the cast, namely Malinda May and Fitz-Simmons, don't really get enough time to shine, but hey, it's an hour-long pilot. Can't do everything. Once we get farther into the season, and perhaps have a few episodes that get to slow things down a little and work on who these people are, I expect things will pick up considerably.

And that's not to say it was a bad pilot. In fact, it was fairly elegant, as well as enjoyable. It's a good place from which to start.

For my part, I'm mostly just happy that we've got another Joss Whedon show on the air. I don't think he's going to be quite as involved here as he was in the other shows, and I'm sure Disney and Marvel will have a lot of veto power (though Marvel's probably more amenable to Whedon's cast-massacring ways than Disney,) but I think that the pedigree here is promising, and with a property this popular and the good will Whedon's probably attained, we could see something pretty damn awesome.

Oh, and as an aside, we had two Whedon alumni show up, with J. August Richards as the guest star and Ron Glass playing what I can only hope will be a recurring character. Likewise, Cobie Smulders reprised her role of Maria Hill from the Avengers, and given that How I Met Your Mother is ending after this season, she may become a regular on AoS. (Whedon will then only need to cast Josh Radnor and Jason Segal to have a full set of HIMYM actors within his arsenal.)

The World's End

Wow, remember my last post? Holy crap did I just watch the utterly perfect movie to follow up that melancholy reflection on nostalgia and home towns.

The World's End is the third (and final? I kind of hope not) installment in the "Blood and Ice Cream" or "Three Flavours Cornetto" series, made by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost (if you are a fan of the films, check out their late-90s TV show Spaced on Netflix, which admittedly has the look of a pre-millenial British TV show, but is otherwise fantastic, and has the same sort of humor. Also, you'll recognize a ton of the actors.)

Like the whole trilogy, this film deals with the issues of arrested development (and a community that seems like it's out to get you,) where the protagonist is clinging to his youthful life in the face of the greatest monster of all: adulthood. More than the previous two films, World's End really delves deep into the tragedy of growing up and seeing the life one remembers so fondly now faded and taken away.

Flipping the series' convention, Simon Pegg now plays the absurd engine of comedy, while Nick Frost is the best example of maturity. While Pegg is still clearly the protagonist, once again the story is about their relationship, this time set against a backdrop of an Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers-style alien take-over plot.

Pegg plays Gary King, who had at one time been the leader of a group of friends in the town of Newton Haven (see, it's even got nearly the same name as my hometown!) For reasons that are revealed later on, Gary has decided that he must now complete the epic pub crawl that he and his friends failed to complete when they were eighteen (which is the drinking age in the UK, in case that set off any kind of alarm for you.)

So, he gathers his friends Pete, Steven, Oliver, and finally Andy (Frost,) with whom he had a falling-out long ago. They attempt to recreate their pub-crawl, also encountering Oliver's sister Sam, who had been a mutual romantic interest of Gary's and Steven's (thankfully, this romantic plot does not overwhelm the film, though this does relegate Sam to "the girl" for much of the story.)

And then, after quite a long time (standard for the series,) we encounter the first truly strange moment, when a sudden brawl in a pub's bathroom reveals the presence of the paranormal.

The film is hilarious. The theater where I was watching was in a constant uproar of laughter. These are the same guys, after all, and they have not lost their groove. As other reviewers have pointed out, the justification for continuing the pub-crawl in the middle of an alien invasion begins to erode, but that's part of the fun. While the film avoids being truly escapist due to the actually quite serious problems Gary has been dealing with, it's still about fun and action. And shockingly, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, not at all gory (unless you count breaking robots.)

Being an Edgar Wright film, this has an absurd number of clever visual puns and motifs, and the script is, again as usual, a triumph of the set-up/call-back. It's the sort of thing that makes a screenwriting student utterly nerd-out.

But more importantly, I think that amidst the craziness, it's saying something true about nostalgia and the pain and loss that comes with becoming an adult. Let's hope this is not the Spaced/Cornetto team's way of saying they're hanging up their collective hat, but if it is, this was a worthy way to take a final bow.

Newton!

I'm back home in New England on vacation, staying in my childhood home, and I've got to say it's a wonderful feeling. While I love Los Angeles, I am truly a man of New England (ironic, given that my parents grew up in and around Los Angeles.)

My hometown, Newton, just west of Boston, is filled with trees. When living in an urban environment, like New York or Los Angeles, trees have their place - they are planted in specific locations along the road, or they are given a little more freedom in parks. In Newton, however, the trees seem to have free reign.

It is late summer now, with fall approaching. The air is humid, but thankfully the stickiest parts of the season that often come in late July and early August are receding. Instead, I can sit peacefully and enjoy the chorus of crickets and cicadas. This is quite a change from the truck that blares "La Cucaracha" over and over through my L.A. neighborhood.

This is a great time of year to be in New England. Sure, autumn is the most often romanticized season here, and I think that my neighborhood is at its most beautiful in the beginning of June. But it is still quite nice. The smells easily take me back to those long, lazy summer vacations of childhood.

Newton is divided into several "Villages," each of which has its own little town square. Despite being large enough to count as a true city, Newton maintains a small-town feel - the kind of thing Walt Disney was trying to re-create with Main Street U.S.A., only this is New England, so it's even older than that.

And yet, part of me says that in the long run, this is not where I am going to wind up. More and more friends of mine are moving away, as friends will do. I try to deny it, but one day my parents will move away, and this house will be someone else's, which is, in a way, disturbing. Yet things change. After all, I moved away five years ago, and while I spent my summers during college here, I haven't truly lived here year-round for about nine years. I love Newton, just as you might love a family member, but I also know that we may, in the end, remain separated by a continent.

The painful part of nostalgia is the melancholy that comes with it. Somewhere in our minds, we are certain that childhood will come again, and that the comfort we miss will be experienced in full once again. The melancholy comes from the rational, logical part of our minds that tells us: No. This was the past. There may be joys to be found in the future, but they will not be the same joys.

Concerning Hobbits...

Well, I finally, finally got around to seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Considering that the Lord of the Rings series from ten years ago are among of my favorite films, it's a shame I didn't go to see this in the theaters, and something I intend to do with the other two entries.

A lot has been and can be said about the Hobbit film and the oncoming trilogy that brings up unfavorable comparison with the Lord of the Rings. Chief amongst those is that the novel on which it is based, The Hobbit, is shorter than any of the individual volumes that make up Lord of the Rings, and thus to stretch out an entire film trilogy that aims to be just as epic in length and scope as the original is, well, perhaps a little odd.

When Lord of the Rings came out, you didn't really see many fantasy films (LotR and Harry Potter were really the two instigators of the revival.) Sadly in the decade that followed, we didn't really see a renaissance of original stories or passion projects so much as we saw cash-grab after cash-grab, soaking up every property or public domain story. We even saw things like Alice in Wonderland transformed from surreal puzzles into dragon-slaying, a sin I will never forgive. Thus, it is not without justification that one could consider the Hobbit to be another example of film studios jumping to capitalize on the memory we have of that great film series, and stretching it to three films so they make three times the money.

On the other hand, this isn't just cooked out of nothing. Even the stuff that doesn't happen in the book (ok, except Azog being alive) has a basis in Tolkien's writings. And as I've noted about Game of Thrones, in a way a longer series is a more appropriate way to adapt a true novel to the screen. Feature films are actually very short, when you see them on the page (generally 100-120 pages with a whole lot of double-spaces and blank areas.) Any novel adaptations has to cut enormous swaths, but if you give it more room to breathe, you can save more of the original piece.

The point I'm getting to, before I've even addressed the film itself, is that for all the complaints, I actually really liked this movie.

One of the challenges of the Hobbit is that there are way too many characters, and even Tolkien seemed to be too overwhelmed by them to give them unique names. Thus we have Dwalin and Balin, Kili and Fili, Dori, Nori and Ori, etc. As Dwarves, these guys have lots of comic relief built in. Despite this, the dwarves do have a certain sadness to them. Tolkien based the Dwarvish language on Semitic tongues, and I believe has actually said that the dwarves were supposed to be reminiscent of the Jews. Sure, there are some unfortunate implications there, given the dwarven fixation on gold, but ultimately what they are is a tough, resilient people who have lost their homeland. And with that lost to them, they are treated poorly by the people with whom they are forced to stay. The Hobbit was written before the establishment of Israel, but I would guess that Tolkien was an advocate of Zionism.

One thing I found pretty interesting is the way that the "monstrous" races have a great deal more personality here than they do in Lord of the Rings. In part, I believe that's true of the book (Tolkien was writing for a different audience.) But basically, this actually enriches the world a bit more. Sure, the orcs, trolls, and goblins are all evil, but you can sort of understand that there is, in fact, a kind of culture to which they belong. Without the presence of Sauron (well, not entirely without...) the monsters don't really have any sort of centralization. In Lord of the Rings we were dealing with the armies of Isengard and Mordor (and the Moria goblins/orcs.) Here, we have sort of independent bands. Azog is a warlord with his own pack. The Goblin King (with a disgusting "beard" made out of some kind of cyst) is a leader of his own people.

Bilbo's discovery of the Ring was done very well - in that it looked almost exactly as I remembered reading it (many years ago.) Andy Serkis (who was the 2nd unit director on these films) doesn't get a lot of time to inhabit this incredible role, but he makes the most of it.

Oh, and let us not forget to talk about Martin Freeman. As always, I love his performance. Martin Freeman excels at playing the everyman, from Arthur Dent (say what you will about that movie, but he and Mos Def were perfect casting) to John Watson and now Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo is of course a very different kind of hero than Frodo, who allows the other three Hobbits to covey the innocence and naiveté of Hobbit-ness while he's a little wiser and quieter. Bilbo, on the other hand, is basically the first Hobbit to leave the Shire, and it takes him a long time to adjust. There's plenty more for him to do, so let's keep an eye open.

Now, the biggest insertion into this story is that of Gandalf's travails with the White Council and "the Necromancer." In the book, we only hear tiny bits of this after a long absence by Gandalf. Now, however, we get to see a little more of the workings of the Wizards and other powerful people. While the two, unnamed Blue Wizards don't get to make an appearances (some sort of legal thing, I believe, with Tolkien's estate,) we get to see Radaghast, who is a far sillier than Gandalf and kind of a super-nature-hippie (birds in his hair, ok. Bird shit down his face... a bit much.) Some sort of evil presence is killing everything in the forest, and when he goes to investigate the old fortress of Dol Guldar a very familiar Ringwraith shows up, except as a total ghost. So I guess they were undead? I guess that was kind of implied anyway.

So we have Elrond and Saruman (who is not yet evil, which is kind of cool to see. Seems Saruman's old personality before, you know, Mussolini to Sauron's Hitler, was that of the stubborn but benevolent father - ever authoritative and calming, even if he's wrong) who are skeptical that this is anything more than just a human doing a little black magic (actually, one of the things I've never been totally clear on in Tolkien's world is the capabilities of mortals performing magic. Apparently they can.) Galadriel is with Gandalf and Radaghast, and I'm sure we'll see a pretty epic confrontation by the end of the films where they push Sauron back, but allowing him to escape to Mordor.)

The Hobbit manages to escape most of the problems of prequels. Part of that is that the book, was, in fact written first. It also concerns itself with an entirely different villain, and while the stakes are not low, they are nowhere near as high as that of the Lord of the Rings. And Middle Earth, being such a well-conceived fictional setting, is rich enough that I'm happy to spend more time there.

I cannot look into the minds of the filmmakers, but unlike a lot of the last decade's blockbusters, this doesn't seem like a heartless cash-grab. I think that there was a story there that deserved telling. Is the story groaning under the weight of three films to support? Actually no, if you ask me.

So, Hobbit. Good. Fun. Will see next one.

Saving the Shire

After far too long, I've started to watch the Lord of the Rings (extended editions) again. I'm still very early in the films (one hour, roughly, when they're just arriving in Bree,) but I was thinking about how the series works at setting the stakes.

Fantasy is one of those genres where you can really ruin a story by sacrificing clarity for spectacle. Lord of the Rings, despite being the real codifier for the entire genre, has a few things working for it that some pieces don't. First of all, despite its taking place in a world filled with magic, very little casting of spells takes place. Basically, Gandalf occasionally shoots light out of his staff, and the Ring itself has a corrupting influence on those around it. Most of the stuff that takes place in the series (ignoring the ghost soldiers) is basically just armies clashing in a standard medieval fashion (well, a romanticized version of it.)

But that's not as important as the Shire is. The films spend a full hour with the Hobbits just existing in the Shire (well, ok, some of that is Gandalf doing research on the Ring and getting beaten up by Saruman.) Before we even see Rivendell or Gondor or any of these grand fantasy locations, we get the Shire, which is the absolute embodiment of "goodness," a land of people whose chief interest is basically just having a good time, dancing and drinking with their friends.

Throughout the films, that's the thing we're rooting for. We want the Shire to survive. It's the world we'd all like to live in (though I wouldn't mind if my Shire were a little closer to a major city with a good library or something - whatever the Middle-Earth equivalent of a movie theater and array of foreign restaurants is.)

In a sense, "Hobbit-ness" is innocence. If I recall correctly, in the mythos of Middle-Earth (and Tolkien wrote reams and reams of this stuff,) the Hobbits are actually just an off-shoot of humanity. The "men" humans like Aragorn have a more complicated world that involves political backstabbing and heavy suits of armor, but the Hobbits are basically humanity with all the unpleasant complications taken out.

Now, obviously, Lord of the Rings being such an influential series has led many to use it as a target for deconstruction. But as an original piece, it's very effective.

Second Run at a Game of Thrones Post

Ok, my first post was way too long, and had me sputtering off in different directions. This time, more focus. Instead of doing a review of the latest, shocking episode, I figured I would do some speculation, both on how the show is going to adapt stuff that is already written and where things might go in the rest of the book.

Spoilers for all the Books Incoming

Television that is Never Television - a new era is dawning

I've been watching House of Cards, the Kevin Spacey-starring series on Netflix co-created by David Fincher, which is (a remake of a British show and earlier a novel) about a ruthless and powerful congressman who decides to respond to a professional slight by utterly tearing down those he now perceives as enemies and destroying anyone who stands in the way of his rise to power.

It's good stuff, and Kevin Spacey, one of the few recognizable mainstream American actors who truly radiates gravitas, is a terrifying monster despite (as of yet) committing no act of violence except for his introductory act of putting his neighbor's dog out of its misery after it is hit by a car.

This past weekend also saw the release of the long-rumored, long-awaited season four of Arrested Development, a show that we all discovered was one of television's most brilliant comedies only after it had passed the event horizon into cancellation.

The line to draw connecting the shows? Both are "Netflix Originals," being shown on the Netflix streaming service without ever being broadcast on a network or cable. Technically speaking, neither of these is really a television show anymore, and that fact actually lets some of the rules slip a little.

Act structures are more film-like than TV-like, in that there is no explicit act break, and thus you can play a little with the formatting (Premium Cable of course also operates in this way, so perhaps it's not entirely new.) Beyond that, though, run time is now totally up in the air and flexible. On television, a show that occupies a half-hour block has to be pretty close to 21 or 22 minutes, and an hour-long show is really more like 42-44. Conventional television not only relies on commercial breaks (the old cliché is that television is there to sell you soap, and the shows are just there to keep you watching the commercials - hence "soap operas,") but also discreet blocks of time that a show has to fit within. A television episode needs to be crunched down to fit within its allotted time, or in other cases, a thin episode must be padded out to fill out its block of time, and that's something that even HBO has to deal with.

But with a streaming show, you have no such problems.

The thing is, people of my generation like to watch shows via Netflix. The idea of scheduling your time around a television show is, even for people like me who are actually invested in the art-form intellectually and professionally, burdensome and antiquated. We like to be able to watch (and re-watch) a show when we so choose, and thus a service like Netflix is ideal.

This distribution format also works tremendously for more serialized programs. One of the old tensions running in TV is the conflict between making sure that someone can drop in and enjoy an episode on its own and making sure that those who watch the series regularly are rewarded for their investment.

The dawn of the "TV on DVD" era in the last decade or so made the latter far more practical, and as a result, you started seeing far more shows that embraced serialization. This streaming era is a logical extension of that concept, but until now, it's still been the home of only shows that were already shown in a conventional way. Arrested Development's fourth season, for instance, is kind of a fascinating experiment in what this new form of the medium (or is it a new medium entirely?) can allow you to do.

But as with any new things, the ground rules have yet to be established. Both House of Cards and Arrested Development came out in one big chunk - allowing people to either marathon through them or consume at their leisure. On one hand, this does give the viewer great freedom, but one could imagine that without the breathing-room afforded to some shows, the enjoyment could suffer. Half the fun of a show like Lost, for example, was calling up your friends afterward and hashing out all the newly-revealed details to come up with your theories.

With this "big chunk o' show" style, it's unlikely that you'll be synched up with your friends except before either of you have watched the show or after you've both finished.

It's a grand experiment, but honestly I think it's clear that this is the direction that TV is going in, and kudos to Netflix (and I think Amazon is doing similarly) for reaching toward this new future of episodic entertainment.

Darkness, and the entrance into said thing

Today I saw Star Trek Into Darkness, the second of J. J. Abrams' series of, as I've heard them referred to, "reborquels." Make no mistake, it's a fun movie, with enjoyable, banter-y dialogue, some cool actions scenes, and a heaping helping of fanservice. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is great (as he tends to be.) But I think some of the same criticisms I had of the 2009 Star Trek film apply here as well. It's an action movie, first and foremost, and things will not slow down for any long period of time.

Spoilers will follow, so if that's something you care about, stop reading now. Yes, I'm going to tell you who Cumberbatch's character really is, and a bunch of other stuff.

What's in a Name? Especially when "The" comes before it?

(Revamped) Doctor Who's seventh season (or series, if you're British, which I think they do just to confuse people - the same way they spell color "colour,"as if it's meant to sound like "allure")  is an odd beast, considering how really, it was two short seasons.

Oh, naturally, Spoiler Alert, etc.

My City

Maybe it's premature to write about this at the moment, but I felt the need to get something down.

Today there was a terrorist attack in my hometown of Boston. As of yet, there are two confirmed deaths and many, many more injured. Some have lost limbs, and while I hope dearly that no one else dies, I think it is unlikely that this will remain the case.

I got the news while sitting in a diner on Pico. I saw their television was showing footage of a reporter with a familiar Fox 25 news microphone, and who seemed to be shouting about something happening. In Boston, 25 is Fox's channel, where I grew up watching the Simpsons, so I knew that something big had just happened in my home town. I checked my phone to discover that there had been a bombing.

As a child, one of our annual traditions was to head out to Beacon Street, near Newton City Hall, to watch the runners come by during the marathon. My sister and I would stand there with paper cups filled with water or orange slices for the runners to take if they needed them.

It's a great big gathering, where people bring their kids. The marathon itself is something more than a race. Sure, you get the real athletes out at the front, who actually intend to finish first, but the marathon is, for most people, just a self-challenge, and a way to be part of the Boston community. Just as the runners contribute by racing, we felt part of the action by cheering them on.

There is nothing ugly about the marathon. The competition is perfectly friendly. I remember that there were even a number of people who ran the marathon as a way to entertain. I distinctly remember a man who ran the entire thing with a hat that held a beer can suspended on a wire in front of his face, and he acted like a cartoon character, chasing that beer all 26 miles.

I left home for college when I was 18, and while I spent summers there, Boston has always been my city of childhood innocence. Sure, I know that it is not a perfect utopia, but the image of it in my head is one of that simpler conception of the world that one has as a child. To me, Boston was the city. It was the place where you went to see more exciting things, to experience culture or the grand events that only a big city can pull off, like First Night at New Years or watching the fireworks over the Charles River on the 4th of July. I spent many a Saturday at the Museum of Science, or the Children's Museum. My mom would walk us around the Freedom Trail.

I do not know who died in the attack, though I am deeply sorry for them and their loved ones. I am deeply sorry to the people who were hurt there, who may have injuries that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. I am sorry for everyone who shared in my deep love for Boston, who saw an act of violence against our city and an act of violence against our most innocent pleasures.

In time, we will move on. The city is not about to crumble because of this. The shock of the event will wear off, and Boston will continue to thrive. When the smoke has cleared, and when hopefully everyone else is saved, we will begin to search for whoever was responsible for this cruel and unconscionable act.

And people will misinterpret, and people will capitalize. People will be disrespectful or misguided. I know that that is what happens after these sorts of things.

I only hope that we do not allow this crime to drag our hearts and dreams and memories into darkness.

UCB Sketch Class and an Attempt to Get Better at Posting Here More Often

I'm currently taking the introductory sketch comedy writing class at Upright Citizens Brigade, which I signed up for half on a whim and half because I had been thinking about it for a while, and figured I might as well go for it.

My circle of friends growing up was, if I may say so, a really funny group of people. Now granted, everyone thinks their friends are hilarious, and I'm well aware of the fact that I could simply be seeing this through my own limited perspective. At the end of High School and throughout the summers between college years, my friends and I put together a bunch of movies in what we called "Genetically Delicious Films," our mock-production company. These movies were done on the absolute cheap. Oftentimes, when I mention these to people, they treat it as if these films were some kind of indie production with actual crews, and they will ask me if I've ever submitted the films to any festivals. I don't think I'm able to translate to people who react this way just how low our production quality was.

Yet I had a hell of a time making these things, and even though they were pretty much made to only be fully enjoyed by the people who were in them, I look back at them with a lot of nostalgia.

The thing is, my own writing is rarely comedic. I don't know if it's just that I'm an overly-serious person or that I've been burned too many times by people reacting more with a "huh?" than laughter to what I think is funny.

So a comedy class seemed like a good challenge to myself. Don't get me wrong, I'm still doing my Dispatches from Otherworld, still working (slowly, very slowly) on my novel set in the same universe, but I'm trying to push myself just a hair outside my comfort zone.

With two classes through, we've learned the absolute basics of the UCB sketch philosophy. The basic idea is that you have a premise - such as "a man finds out his closest family and loved ones have been lying to him his whole life," and then find a "game" to it, wherein you find a unique way for that premise to be explored. The example we got, in "The Truth" by Charlie Sanders, is that the lies he's been told go from fairly believable to utterly ridiculous, such that by the end, we realize that he is just incredibly gullible.

Now, I've probably butchered what the "game" is there, but hey, I'm still in the 101 class.

My first sketch written for the class involved a space alien arriving on Earth. The premise was that the alien's culture caused many difficulties in forming a friendly rapport with the humans, but the game of it was that that culture was one of acting like a mooching, obnoxiously inconsiderate friend. The alien moves into the human's apartment without asking, invites a bunch of other aliens over to get stoned there, steals and wrecks the human's car, and finally reveals that he is sleeping with the human's mother - all in the name of establishing a friendly relationship between their two species. The problem I ran into (that was pointed out in class) is that the initial beat, in which the alien throws a rock at one of the humans' foreheads by way of greeting him, and the last beat, where the alien benevolently removes the aforementioned human's brain as a kind of medical treatment, don't really fit the game.

Sure, this violence against the human is not what we would consider friendly, but it doesn't fit the overall game.

Still, I got some laughs, which were a little few and far between in the room (something about writers not wanting to validate each others' work? I don't know.)

The Series Adaptation and Surprise

Like what I imagine is the vast majority of its viewers, I saw the first season of Game of Thrones before reading the Song of Ice and Fire books upon which the show is based. I had heard of them, knowing them to be a popular fantasy series, but I knew next to nothing about the plot until I saw the show. However, upon finishing season one, I quickly read through the existing books, the last of which, A Dance with Dragons, came out the same year (or perhaps the year previous) to the television show.

I did manage to spoil the biggest twist at the end of the first season for myself accidentally, but for the most part I was seeing everything with fresh eyes.

Of course, it's unlikely that I will see any more of the show without knowing at least roughly what's coming, unless they make huge changes to the narrative.

The thing that inspired me to write this post in the first place is that last night, a new episode aired, but I'm not in the middle of a mad rush to see it, even though I fully intend to see it at some point, hopefully before next week's episode comes out. Ultimately, I do know what's going to happen, pretty much, and I feel ok to even read spoiler-filled reviews of the episode online because it's not like I'm going to find much in the way of plot that will be spoiled for me, and typically a thousand-word review is not going to delve deeply into any expertly filmed scenes any farther than simply saying "look out for this."

The question, then, is whether this harms the enjoyment of the show. Would I be more engaged if I didn't know where Arya was going to eventually head, or what was going to happen with Mance Rayder and Jon Snow?

Lost, for instance, was an amazing experience to watch, even if in retrospect there were some flaws or characters who got sort of soap-opera-y drama injected into them for the sake of conflict. There were so many mysteries going on that it was a whole lot of fun to just speculate. Now granted, George RR Martin (what is it with fantasy writers with two Rs for middle initials?) hasn't finished the series, and especially after Dance with Dragons there are a lot of things to speculate about, but for the show itself, anyone who's read the books has about a two or three-season lead.

There is, of course, always danger in adaptation. By adapting a book or other original work, you actively invite a comparison between yours and theirs, and even though they wisely went with a television format to accommodate the dense plotting and multitude of characters, things still need to be cut out for time and budget reasons.

So you inevitably get the "it's not as good as the book" complaint, which I honestly think is usually a knee-jerk reaction, even in cases where it's true.

But setting aside that usual problem, there's a paradoxical element to an adaptation like this: we are happy to see visualized what we had only imagined in our heads, but we also are, by necessity, less surprised, awed, or shocked by the events of the story. I can't imagine I would feel the slightest bit let down by the use of the Wild Fire in the second season's episode about the Battle of the Blackwater if I hadn't read the book and been hoping to see the Bridge of Ships and the armies clashing on the ruined vessels clogging the bay.

Now, I really hope that announced American Gods series wasn't just a fantasy or a cruel joke. I want to see who they cast as Mr. Nancy!

New Pilot and other life updates

Well, this is supposed to be a blog about me, and me as a writer, so it seems appropriate for me to announce that I'm working on a pilot script. I won't say much about it yet, but it's a science fiction story, with some fantasy elements (of course, as I've written before, the line between the two is not very easy to draw,) and I think there would be a lot of potential in it, though it would probably be expensive to produce (unless it were animated, but there's not a huge amount of non-comedic, non-childrens animation in the US.)

So far, I just finished Act Two and I'm on page 55. This will require cutting.

In other news, I've moved along with with my friend Tim and his girlfriend Rae to the west side, which is probably more convenient in the long run, but I'm feeling sad about leaving the Eagle Rock area. For one thing, Eagle Rock is maybe the most badass name for a neighborhood one could have. Also, I just kind of like it there.

So, while I'm working on the pilot script, Dispatches from Otherworld is on a hiatus. Once I get the first completed draft, I'll try to get back to updating that soon. (One of these days I've got to actually finish the damned novel, and hopefully get it shopped around a bit.)

Meanwhile, I'm listening to the Zelda 25th Anniversary CD that came with my copy of Skyward Sword. I love that there's a fully symphonic version of the Dark World theme from Link to the Past, even if it's a short part of the 25th anniversary medley (and there's a weird little piano frill that kind of undercuts the epicness of that theme.)

I've actually been contemplating getting a Wii U. I'm a die-hard Nintendo loyalist, and I figure I'll probably get it eventually (haven't been hearing a huge amount about the library, though, which is a little disconcerting.) But I've got to be there for the new Smash Bros. and the new Zelda. I've had every Nintendo system since SNES.

Ok, fine, a few details about the pilot: It is set on a space station after a really bad war, and one of the main characters is a Synthetic Human (don't call him a robot - that's racist.)

We finally got internet in the new apartment. It's glorious!

The Enterprise. You know, the first one. I mean, the first chronologically, but the last...

So I've got to say, I owe Enterprise an apology. I had always heard that it was a crude facsimile of the Star Trek world, and that it got everything wrong and kind of stunk.

Yet, having just finished the series (with a somewhat abrupt ending, indicative of the frustration over the cancellation after Next Gen, DS9, and Voyager were able to have their entire planned 7-year run,) I have to say that the series was not bad, and was actually becoming close to what I'd like to see in a future Trek series.

There were a few issues that made things tough for Enterprise. First, I'm just going to talk briefly about the awful intro theme song. It felt tonally off. The images of the history (and imagined future history) of exploration are cool, but the song is really corny and lacking nuance. I realize they wanted to differentiate Enterprise from the 24th Century shows, which all had symphonic themes, but I don't think this one hit the mark.

The other thing is that a prequel is always a very tough proposition. Obviously, given that Star Trek is an optimistic vision of the future, we're not going to see Earth or the Federation obliterated (at least not without some kind of time-travel-related fix,) and because we're talking a full century before the original series and two centuries before the Next-Gen era, the isolated issues that occur to particular ships won't necessarily have huge ramifications. With the space of centuries, you've got some wiggle room.

Part of the goal of Enterprise was to link modern space exploration with the intrepid space adventures of the other shows. Enterprise certainly has plenty of that, but people look more modern, and Starfleet really does feel like an evolution of NASA. The characters' uniforms look like flight suits instead of spandex space clothes, and the ship feels a little tougher, a little more metallic.

Another opportunity provided by Enterprise was that, given that this was Earth's first true era of interstellar exploration, we could meet some of the original aliens and delve deep into their cultures. The Vulcans are one of the two iconic Star Trek races, yet we had never really delved into their culture to the extent that, say, we did with the Klingons, despite having two series regular Vulcans before T'Pol. Enterprise deals with the inner workings of Vulcan and the history of Vulcan/Human relations in great detail. Additionally, the Andorians, who were introduced in the original show, got a great deal of development thanks to Jeffery Combs' Shran (Combs also played Weyoun and Brunt in DS9, and was one of the shortlisted contenders for Riker when they were casting Next Gen.)

Enterprise did encounter its fair share of weird space thingies, but in the third and fourth seasons, the show embraced serialization, which allowed for far deeper exploration of the interstellar politics of the Star Trek universe. Season four's arc about the reformation of Vulcan society gives us a lot of insight into how the Vulcans went from super-advanced aliens who looked down on us to acting as equal partners in the Federation.

Some characters certainly got more time to develop than others. We got plenty with Archer, T'Pol, and Trip, a bit with Phlox and Reed, and very little with Travis and Hoshi. Star Trek shows are typically built on the strength of their ensembles, but this show was weighted a bit toward certain characters. Still, with a less episodic nature, it's not as easy to go with the standard Star Trek formula of "time for a Geordi episode" or "time to throw Tuvok and B'elanna together and see what happens." episodes. You want to use your cast, but you also don't want to force it at the expense of your narrative.

I wonder if this show would have done better if it had begun ten years later. Enterprise was darker and grittier, and benefits from Netflix as a venue. We had also just come off of Voyager, which, along with DS9, had carried on the legacy of Next Gen, both in its later setting and its visual style. Enterprise shifted both of those, which may have come as a shock for people who wanted more of the same.

In fact, Enterprise looks more modern than Voyager (big surprise, given that it's more recent) but in 2000, the new, more cinematic look of television was only just getting started. And while Enterprise continued into 2005, it was unable to pick up the steam it needed in the earlier seasons to be a success.

So I've reversed my former position on the series, and I'd say that if you like Star Trek, it's definitely worth checking out.

Just try to tune out the theme song.

The Apotheosis of the Reboot

It's no secret that over the last decade or so, Hollywood has gone utterly batshit crazy over remakes, reboots and sequels. It's a fairly broad issue, with accusations of pure money-grubbing and creative cowardice - studios unwilling to bet on new IPs when they know they can at least make a bit of cash if you've heard of the thing before (Dishonorable Mention goes to Battleship.)

And yet, I would argue that this trend started with what was actually a good movie: Batman Begins. The Dark Knight trilogy was actually good, because unlike a lot of these written-by-committee cash grabs, there was a clear creative incentive behind them. The Dark Knight trilogy (and isn't it interesting that the series is named after the middle film?) set aside the campiness of the latter half of the 90s era Batman movies and took it to a darker, grittier, and more realistic place than even the better-remembered Tim Burton films of that era. It attempted to boil Batman down to its basic mythology - a superhero who becomes more frightening than the villains - and puts it in a reasonably believable modern Gotham. The Scarecrow isn't a madman with crazy gas - he's a psychiatrist who has embraced a radical ideology. The Joker isn't just a violent prankster - he's a genius who had dedicated himself to entropy.

Anyway, the point I'm making is that there is nothing inherently wrong with sequels, remakes, or reboots. If you come at the form with genuine artistic intention, it can be a great work of art. Think about how many Shakespeare plays were based on previously-written stories. They may have existed in other forms, but there's a reason why we talk about Shakespeare's versions.

Yet Shakespeare's stories were from a time when there was a kind of canon of stories people told. That's not to say that there weren't a lot of them, but it's interesting to note that complete originality is a relatively recent thing. Greek plays were based on previously-established mythology, tweaked to be relevant to then-modern audiences, but, for example, none of the Oedipus plays that have survived were actually part of the same trilogy.

To clarify: In Ancient Athens, every year there would be a theater-going festival that served as your annual worship of the god Dionysos (I imagine a lot of wine-drinking and partying was involved as well.) The theater was, literally, the Temple of Dionysos. Each year, the festival would involve watching a set of plays: the main event was the Trilogy - typically a series of three plays that told an evolving tragic narrative (though thanks to Deus Ex Machina, you could have happy endings,) there would also be a comedy, and something called a "Satyr Play." As I understand, no one today has any idea what a "Satyr Play" is.

The thing is, new plays would be written every year, but they would often go back to familiar wells for stories. The only surviving trilogy from the same year - as in, the three plays were meant to be performed back-to-back - is the Orestia, telling to story of Orestes, which is comprised of The Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Kindly Ones. But you've probably also heard of Oedipus Rex. Another Oedipus play is Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, which are all by Sophocles and all about Oedipus and his family, but the three plays are believed to have been written and performed different years.

The long-winded point I'm making is that going back to old material is not a new practice.

So now I'm getting to the point of this article: the creation of Grand IPs.

Of course everyone is talking about Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm and the obvious consequence that a new Star Wars film is in the works.

Star Wars is one of those stories to spawn an immense fictional world that many feel an intense tie to. Beyond just the movies (all three of them) there have been probably hundreds of books written about the series, expanding the universe with its own canon. The Star Wars "EU," or "Extended Universe," has become its own landscape of fictional material, serving as a kind of secondary canon that, unless I'm mistaken, is regulated by Lucas' company. The movies are of course allowed to contradict the EU as a kind of "primary canon," but writers in the EU take that world pretty seriously.

And now, with a rumor floating around that there could be a Yoda-centric film, perhaps telling his life story, I think Star Wars may be evolving into something very different.

While we do have myths in this time (no offense to the religious, but the stories in the Bible serve the same function to its adherents as classical mythology did to the Greeks and Romans,) these grand works of science fiction and fantasy give us an entire "Age of Heroes" to work within. Star Wars is now coming to a third generation (well, sort of - less of a gap between the prequels and this than there was between the originals and the prequels) and it even appears that it's spreading into other areas.

Star Wars has grown past George Lucas to become something bigger, and that fascinates me. As of yet, it's still unclear whether it will grow linearly - simply adding onto the ongoing saga - or begin to branch out, but I hope for the latter.

Imagine, if you will, a Star Wars film that breaks with the conventions - existing within a different genre, telling a different scale of story. You could have a Film Noir set on the rainy streets of Coruscant, or a personal drama about a Jedi Knight losing his faith.

I'm just spitballing here, but imagine if Star Wars were to ascend to become a mythological setting that anyone could use. Clumsy self-insertion Fan Fiction could transform into real art, utilizing the mythological context that we are all familiar with to tell a powerful and relevant story.

It's high hopes, and perhaps it would be foolish to expect anything other than big-budget spectacle with cash as its primary purpose. But a guy can dream, can't he?

That Wing on the Left Side of the Building

So I've started watching the West Wing. This was always one of those shows that I knew was good, and had heard was good, but for whatever reason I never watched it.

One of the fascinating things about West Wing as a show is that, unlike most TV shows, the head writer was really THE writer for much of the series' run. Aaron Sorkin is one of those writers whose voice is pretty clear in whatever he writes, and the West Wing is kind of the greatest vault of Sorkin available.

Even if I wind up a successful writer, I doubt I'll be able to do what Sorkin did, churning out entire seasons of intricate and snappy scripts (yes, I know there were other writers, but at the very least every episode is credited as "written by Aaron Sorkin.")

Part of the appeal of the West Wing, even though it began in 1999, with a full season and a half before George W. Bush took office, was that it portrayed a White House run by intelligent, thoughtful people who you could actually get behind.

I realize that this is a polarized nation, and that the current President turns quite a few people off, but by the end of Bush's administration, most Americans were sick of his "I'm just a dumb guy like you" antics and the duplicitous bullshit coming out of the White House. If you're a conservative, you probably didn't come to this realization until the second term, but for us liberals, the fact that Bush was an awful President became clear once he started pushing things like the Patriot Act and rattling the saber at Iraq while we were just figuring out the lay of the land in Afghanistan.

So, much as Jon Stewart's brilliant mocking on the Daily Show articulated many of the problems with Bush, the West Wing provided a kind of alternate reality where we actually had a good President.

I don't really want to make this a political blog, nor do I want to alienate any conservative readers who like my thoughts on science fiction and fantasy, but in the age of Obama, I don't really feel the need for a better President. Or rather, I would like a version of Obama who could kick the Republican Party in the correct area of the balls to convince them it was time to start compromising.

So watching the West Wing during the administration of a President I voted for in both elections, and for whom I was happy to do so, there's not the kind of wistful "oh, if only..." feeling that I imagine a lot of West Wing's audience felt at the time.

But the show continues to hold up, if you ask me. I've just finished the first season and the opening two-parter at the beginning of the second.

Part of it is due, of course, to Sorkin's mile-a-minute dialogue. West Wing was infamous for its "Walk and Talks," a sort of cheap trick to make scenes that were really nothing more than talking heads into something that felt like action.

There's a scene where Josh and Sam are doing one of these. Sam asks where they're going, Josh replies "I don't know, I was following you." Later, 30 Rock would spoof Sorkin (whose Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip began the same time as 30 Rock and just about everyone predicted it would be Sorkin's show that would succeed and Fey's that would tank immediately) by having Liz and Peter do a Walk and Talk that actually wound up doing exactly the same joke that Sorkin had on his own show.

The thing that strikes me about West Wing is that you could almost call it a sitcom. Every character is flinging witticisms around all the time, and those who aren't tend to be fairly ridiculous as well (such as Leo's secretary Margaret, who makes you wonder why the Chief of Staff, who's supposed to pick everyone who works for the President, got stuck with the most space-cadet-like PA.)

But of course, it's not really a comedy, because this is the White House, where serious stuff happens, and the show never tries to soften that fact. Really, the main thing that the show conveys is that working in the White House must be insanely stressful. Martin Sheen's Jed Bartlet makes it look easy, partially because he's a walking encyclopedia and partially because he (Bartlet, as opposed to Sheen) is capable of playing the part of a man who always knows exactly what he's doing, even if he can confess with no hesitation to his trusted staff that he's really just improvising.

And as if the normal stress of making sure that you convey the message you want to convey without any room for misinterpretation or misrepresentation isn't enough, we also get the added stress of a fictional setting where writers are free to be cruel to their characters, like having a couple of white supremacists shoot the President and Josh. That's not to say that this sort of thing doesn't happen ever, but it is a thankfully rare event in this country (the last President to be shot was Reagan.)

The show is still in its early seasons, and this is a show that came out of the gate well. At the beginning of the second season, I imagine I'm currently watching the show's golden age, so we'll see how it does as it goes on. Still, given that people still seemed to care about the show when Bartlet's second term was coming to an end, I'm fairly confident that this will continue to be a good watch.

I'm also watching Enterprise. Once you get past the crappy theme song, it's actually pretty good. More on that later, but for now enjoy the break from Star Trek.

Voyaging Home

Today I finished Star Trek Voyager. As usual, after watching a long-running television show, I'm experiencing a kind of withdrawal (though one of my roommates is watching Enterprise. It's not quite the same, but it's better than nothing.)

I have to say, I think that the show's been judged harshly. Admittedly, they don't take the premise as seriously as they ought to - Voyager has an easy time getting repaired, refueled, rearmed, and seems to have an infinite supply of shuttles, not to mention that the Delta Flyer gets literally blown to tiny pieces in one episode and by the next one, they've completely rebuilt the thing.

Yet I like the cast of characters, and that's a huge part of making a show successful. Janeway's a badass,  Tuvok is an awesome grumpy grandpa, Seven of Nine is inherently interesting (and not just because she's attractive) and everyone in the cast is likable.

Starting with the Next Generation, the makers of Star Trek created a huge consistent world of the 24th Century, building on the foundation laid in the 60s with the original and creating something that, at least so far, seems to be aging more gracefully (if you ignore the first couple seasons of TNG or some of the less-believable CGI of the mid-90s.)

Part of what makes me sad about seeing Voyager come to a close is that it's the last of the 24th Century setting (well, other than Star Trek: Nemesis.) As I've said before, I was raised on TNG, and the 24th Century is my default "future" setting.

Despite Voyager's lower popularity than DS9 or TNG, the makers began Enterprise the following season, and while I appreciate the idea of seeing the sort of bridge between our modern, underfunded space program and what would become the Starfleet of Kirk and later Picard, Sisko and Janeway, it doesn't really have the same feel (also, the opening theme to Enterprise is a hate crime against nerds.)

The finale of Voyager has the problem that I think most episodic shows have, which is that it comes sort of out of the blue. I started watching TV by the season with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and in that show, and indeed most of the shows of the past decade, season finales, and especially series finales, are built to (if the show doesn't get cancelled, that is.)

There's little hint that there's about to be some big discovery that finally gives Voyager the shortcut they need in the seventh season (other than that we know the show's going to end and it would be really depressing if they didn't make it back to the Alpha Quadrant.) So we get a story about time travel (a common theme for Voyager) as well as the Borg (Voyager was, of course, the show that most thoroughly explored the Borg.) We get to see Janeway be incredibly badass, sacrificing herself to cripple the Borg Collective and take out the Borg Queen, who was the closest thing to a series Big Bad that they had. But then, because it's a time-travel episode, we also get to keep our Janeway, who gets to bring everyone (minus those who've already died, and of course Kes and Neelix, who went back to be with their people) back to Earth.

It's a pretty cool finale, and it's awesomely satisfying to see Unimatrix One go up in flames. It might have been nice to see get a bit of an epilogue to see how everyone turned out, though A: we get most of that with Admiral Janeway's alternate future, and B: the awful Vic Fontaine-soundtracked epilogue to DS9 nearly ruined my impression of the entire series (really Vic Fontaine in general,) so perhaps we should be grateful that we got a huge action sequence and then just watched as Voyager was escorted by an armada of Starfleet ships back to Earth.

Star Trek's current incarnation is all about the JJ Abrams alternate-timeline-reboot. That's all well and good. I enjoyed the first one and look forward to the second, but I do hope that at some point, somehow, we get to see more of the 24th Century. And if it's another TV show, I would like to write for it.

Jabrams and Star Wars

So, the latest announcement regarding the new, Disney-produced Star Wars films is that JJ Abrams is going to direct the newest one.

Abrams is one of the most powerful operators in Hollywood right now. Making his name first in TV-show creation (most notably Lost, as well as the aforementioned Fringe,) Abrams has, over the last few years, made his presence known on the big screen as well, both as a producer and a director.

Abrams is clearly setting himself up as an heir to Steven Spielberg, and has a great sense for spectacle and blockbuster. He had a success in his Mission Impossible III, and created an impressive homage to Spielberg films of the 70s and 80s with Super 8 (produced by Spielberg himself.) He's also behind the very successful Star Trek continuity-friendly reboot.

It's actually this project in particular that makes me optimistic about an Abrams Star Wars. As argued in the Red Letter Media review, Abrams's Star Trek is more of an action/adventure film than what one typically expects from Star Trek. Trek '09 dispenses with most of the philosophical quandaries and ethical conflict in favor of a super-charged action flick with lots of ass-kicking starship battles.

Abrams is big on emotion, and favors emotional stories over cerebral ones, which made Trek '09 a very fun movie, even if it was not exactly a Trek movie in the traditional sense (in fairness, the Next-Gen era films at least were fairly action-focused as well, which made Picard seem very un-Picard-like.)

But the thing about that is that this emotional, visceral approach to sci-fi might feel odd with Star Trek, but it's absolutely perfect for Star Wars. No one ever goes into the details of how space ships work, or how alien biology works, or how the Force works in Star Wars. It's about order and chaos, selfishness and selflessness, and good and evil.

It's often been said that Trek '09 was the Star Wars prequel we had all been hoping for in the previous decade. With the same, super-capable filmmaker at the helm, my expectations have been raised.

Optimism for the Future

So, as has been a theme since I started this blog, I've recently been on a huge Star Trek thing. I'm excited about the movie coming in a few months, but I tend to think it's a setting that works best in television (frankly, the more fleshed-out a world is, the more I think a TV show - or series of novels - serves it best.)

One of the refreshing things about Star Trek is its optimism.

I was a sophomore in high school during September 11th, 2001. Now, I realize that's a date we drag out a whole lot, but I doubt many could argue that it hasn't had a profound impact on the American consciousness. When I was younger, there was a great deal of optimism about the future. The 1990s were, frankly, pretty good (even if the seeds for the subsequent decade were already being sewn.) The Cold War was over, and things were feeling very stable - the economy was in great shape, and it looked like we had a great new millennium to look forward to.

It is maybe unsurprising that Star Trek did really well in the 90s. Next Generation (which was admittedly about half 80s, half 90s) spawned two other shows, and even though DS9 went fairly dark on occasion, the overall concept of the Star Trek world is one where we find ourselves in great shape in the future. We manage to expand as explorers, yet avoided any of the sins of imperialism by adhering to strict ethical standards (The Prime Directive being the foundation of these ethics.)

Star Trek was a future you could feel good about. We'd turned the Klingons from fierce enemies into close allies (like the Russians!) and the attitude of Starfleet boiled down to: "You guys are our enemies now. Our goal is not to defeat you, but to become friends." It didn't hurt that Starfleet also happened to be an incredibly powerful force in the galaxy, so they could reach out to others without endangering humanity (usually.)

Star Trek's Federation is basically America in its most ideal state - equality achieved by elevating everyone to the top without pushing anyone down, and providing that "City on a Hill" for the rest of the galaxy but with a very, very strict "only if you want it" policy. It's a society in which cultural diversity is celebrated, and anti-intellectualism is basically non-existent.

After witnessing both the horror of our own vulnerability on 9/11, and also watching the Bush Administration's Orwellian power-grab in the aftermath, sending the nation into two big wars without clear objectives (it took waiting for a new president to define objectives and actually start to get us out) and watching as we, the "good guys," began to argue in favor of torture, many Americans felt as if the whole world had been turned upside-down on them.

And it's reflected in art. Battlestar Galactica, for instance, begins with an apocalyptic attack that was clearly drawn to resemble 9/11, and we watch as humanity struggles both with our fear of additional attacks but also our own inhumanity, released by the trauma. We've had apocalyptic scenarios in shows like Jericho or the Walking Dead, or movies like the Road, or the Book of Eli, or I Am Legend (remakes count.) We've also seen humanity as the bad guys more frequently, like in Avatar or District 9.

The reasons for this are not hard to figure out.

So the question, then, is how to bring back the optimism.

The thing about Science Fiction is that it can have a serious impact on people. I'm all for art imitating life, and by no means to I begrudge the people who made these pieces their right to tell the story they're thinking of (a lot of my writing tends to be dark as well) but I also wonder what effect a brighter take on the future would have - one that looks forward not to a post-apocalyptic wasteland or some sort of global totalitarian state, but instead sees the current problems as a phase that we are simply enduring for the time being.

I'm attracted to the notion of the reconstruction. You're probably familiar with the idea of a deconstruction, but I enjoy writing about things, so I'll give a basic breakdown.

A deconstruction takes a well-known trope or genre, and creates a version of that trope that shows all the inherent problems one tends to ignore. The deconstruction can be thought of as a counter-argument to the original piece.

For example: Let's say you have a space-adventure story. Your intrepid heroes travel to other worlds, meet with cool aliens, fight bad guys with ray guns and save the day when things go bad. The deconstruction would recognize that your space-adventurer is actually a thoughtless brute, most likely colonizing that new planet in much the way that the British colonized India, and the "bad guys" he's fighting are actually a complex people who have a perfectly good reason to fight your protagonist. The hero might win the battle, but in so doing, he causes irreparable harm to an environment that was getting along just fine without him.

The reconstruction is kind of like the rebuttal to the deconstruction. In another way, it's a kind of synthesis between the fun, original genre or trope and the valid complaints made via the deconstruction. Effectively, it rehabilitates the original piece by acknowledging its flaws, and dealing with said flaws in an intelligent way.

This can be a tricky thing to pull off, but when you do, it's magic, because it allows you to enjoy something similar to the original trope or genre without the guilt that encourages deconstructions. You've got your healthy vegetables along with your cake.

The problem with bringing optimistic visions of the future is that most of the ones we know of, even the reasoned, ethical Next-Gen-era Star Trek shows, can provoke a bit of cynicism. Arguably (and this could be a whole other article, but I don't have time for that) Next-Gen was a reconstruction of Star Trek, acknowledging the thorny issues of interfering with other cultures and the responsibilities of a fleet of explorers/diplomats (such as not getting a crew member killed once an episode.) Nowadays, however, we might consider the Federation to be way too trusting and diplomatic for their own good, and that the bleeding-heart attitude they have could get them into trouble - or, on the flip-side, that we don't believe that humans could ever become totally unified behind an enlightened philosophy because some of us are just damned warmongering assholes.

But if we're ever going to turn things around, and start seeing a future in which humanity is on the track toward a brighter future, we've got to start imagining what that brighter future would look like.

Long story short, I want a new Star Trek show.

The Coming End of Fringe

JJ Abrams became a household name when Lost, the show he created, became one of the most influential programs of the 2000s. While there are of course many who felt that the show did not live up to its expectations by failing to satisfyingly answer the mysteries it came up with (my only major disappointment, personally, was the explanation of the "flash sideways" universe in the final season - well, and never finding out what made Walt so special,) the show nevertheless created a whole society of people who were obsessed with discussing the possibilities for what would happen next.

Lost was hugely responsible for the current TV audience's comfort with and even expectation of more serialized dramas. Lost had a great hook - in each episode, the stuff happening on the island would play from one week to the next while the flashbacks would be largely self-contained, usually.

After a few years of Lost, (and it should be noted that Abrams handed the reins of the show over to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse fairly early on,) Abrams went on to start another show. This show was going to be less serialized, and more of an episodical sci-fi procedural: Fringe.

The premise of Fringe when it began was fairly simple, even if it was willing to do fairly complicated plots in each episode. Our intrepid group of three: FBI Agent Olivia Dunham, brilliant scientist and mental patient Walter Bishop, and similarly brilliant estranged son/underworld player Peter Bishop solve bizarre, science-fiction-type crimes.

The appeal of Fringe (to executives, I would guess, as opposed to the kind of audience who'd want this show) was that it would be more episodic, and less obsessed with giant mythological arcs than Lost. Ironically, in its later seasons, there were very few "mystery of the week" type episodes, and it largely became all about the long-term plots.

In the beginning, Fringe was actually not all that great. It had the very difficult task of differentiating itself from the legendary X-Files, which had kind of done the whole FBI-Paranormal-Investigations angle, while also attempting to live up to its quality.

Early plots for Fringe involved a radical but nebulously-motivated group called ZFT who seemed to be conducting terrorist attacks that doubled as experiments. We also began to see, fairly early on, that there was a fellow known as the Observer - a Man in Black with a nice hat and no hair - who would actually show up almost as an easter egg in each episode, though as time went on, we would find out more about him.

One of the strengths that Fringe always had (though it got better at it as it went) was that the case-of-the-week episodes, or even the arc episodes, had a Star Trek level of pure Sci-Fi - using the genre to create situations that would raise very interesting philosophical questions. Yet Fringe was also deeply concerned with tying this into humans as emotional beings. The horrors we witness in this world of technology altering or destroying our organic machines makes the search for spiritual truth all that more desperate.

After the first season, things picked up considerably, and what I would consider one of the defining themes of the series really got its first exploration: Alternate Realities. For most of the show's run, the plot concerned the underground conflict between two parallel universes - our own, and a slightly different one that had been terribly damaged thanks to the accidental effects of Walter Bishop's efforts to save Peter as a child.

For the rest of the series, we would continue to be reintroduced to new versions of reality - new versions of the people we already knew, because of parallel universes, changed timelines, and simple jumps into the future. In some ways, there's something very brave about this kind of storytelling, yet at the same time, it demands a huge amount from the audience, and can potentially alienate them.

There's a lot to recommend Fringe, though. It is very much an X-Files for the post 9/11 world - one where the thought that people in our own communities may be something other than what they seem, and one in which our enemies feel fully justified to commit atrocities. The X-Files explored the ramifications of a world with a single super-power and the fear that all the Cold War mechanisms would be turned on America's own people, while Fringe concerns itself largely with how human life can be devalued when we treat people as simply organic machines.

So here we are, with the final episode imminent. I actually have to confess that I have not kept up this whole season - another one in which there's been an enormous shift in the world we experience. Fringe has been one of those shows where every time it gets a new season, we've been breathing a sigh of relief. Given this final season to close up shop, it's nice to know that they'll be able to end it on their terms.

In a way, it's almost better to watch a TV show after it's ended. That way, you'll never have to worry about hitting a wall and needing to wait for the next episode or season to come out. Given that Fringe takes a little time to hit its groove, I could see the cult of Fringe growing quite robust farther down the road, once people can see the whole thing on Netflix or some such thing.

Like Lost, this is one of those shows where Abrams got the ball rolling, but left it to others to keep it going. JJ Abrams has moved on up to the big screen (reinventing Star Trek, for example,) yet I think that Fringe is another example of his influence on TV, making it a more cinematic medium.

Anyway, it's a good show. Check it out.

(PS: One knock against Fringe: the original premise had it set entirely in the Boston area - the main "hangout" set was Walter's lab at Harvard. As the series went on, they started setting more and more of it in New York and less in Massachusetts. There's plenty of shows in New York, and Boston is way cooler, so boo! This message brought to you by a proud Bostonian.)

The Warriors: Gritty to the point of Mythic

I just sat down and watched The Warriors, a 1979 film set in an anarchic New York City where gangs outnumber cops three-to-one, and the eponymous gang struggles to make it back to their turf in Coney Island after they are framed for killing a would-be Gangster Messiah. Cyrus.

On one hand, the film attempts to portray the dystopian feel of New York in the 70s - the sense that no one is safe from crime, and the police are only there to track you down and beat you with nightsticks. Our Warriors, who function as a single protagonist, even if they do get split up from time to time, are not necessarily good guys. They're a gang, and they act like a gang (albeit a small one.) The point is not that these are a bunch of model citizens fleeing rabid criminals - it's that they are just trying to survive an entire city sent against them.

The various gangs in the Warriors often skew toward the ridiculous. The Baseball Furies, for example, are all dressed in Yankees uniforms (so you know they're evil!) and wearing makeup in the style of KISS. For the most part, the film is almost episodic, having the Warriors travel from one gang's territory to the next, encountering various levels of resistance. All the while, the Rogues, whose leader was the one who actually killed Cyrus, search for them while Cyrus' gang, the Riffs (which is more of a paramilitary group than a street gang) coordinates the hunt for the people they think killed Cyrus.

I'll admit I've lived a relatively sheltered life, and I've grown up in areas where "gangs" of young people would be more laughable than threatening. For these people, though, there does not seem to be an alternative. The gang is your family and your sole support structure. The Warriors may not be "good" guys, but they're as honest as one can expect, and only want to get home safe.

The New York where I went to college was a much safer place - the 90s led to a huge reduction in street crime, and in Post-9/11 Manhattan, people might look at you funny if you seemed Middle Eastern (I do not,) but for the most part people were relatively friendly and gave you space. Yet I am also aware of the state that New York was in through the 70s and 80s, and this movie was made right smack dab in the middle of that era.

Honestly, even though I think the film tapped into the zeitgeist of the era, I don't know if I'd classify it as a "good" movie. The sole female character who appears in more than one of the vignettes (apart from the Tokyo Rose-like DJ) is a little ill-defined, except that we can perhaps sense that she has the same lost, nihilistic despair the drives the guys into gangs, but does not even have that outlet, capable only of watching (I assume) her brother mis-manage his somewhat pathetic gang, the Orphans. She's not alone in this - most of the characters are a bit generic, a hazard of making a story with a group protagonist.

One interesting segment is when three of the Warriors are approached by a group of women and invited back to their apartment. The women attempt to seduce them, and succeed with all but the youngest member of the gang, Rembrandt, only to reveal that they are actually only trying to kill the Warriors and earn favor with the Riffs like the other gangs.

The all-girl gang, revealed to be the "Lizzies," gives off a strong lesbian vibe, even though it is never stated explicitly (there is a long take of two of the women dancing sensuously with one another, so the implication is pretty clear at least to me.) Attitudes toward homosexuality, both male and female, have generally shifted considerably since 1979. Today, it seems the bigger issue for the portrayal of lesbians in fiction is the male gaze, co-opting female homosexuality as entertainment for men. If a story like this were made today, one would think that as Rembrandt notices the increasingly lesbian vibe among the women, he would be more excited to be around them, rather than less-so (and these are, for the most part, not particularly "butch" lesbians either.)

So are the Lizzies a plot element of female empowerment, punishing the Warriors for never considering that women could be a threat to them? Or are they meant as a new level of horror - that in this city of moral decay even pretty women are man-hating killers?

I may not find myself racing to the nearest DVD store to buy a copy, but I do get a sense that this film captured a certain attitude and aesthetic that defined its era. There's value in that as a cultural artifact, and as a work of art.

The Sliding Scale of Fantasy and Science Fiction

First off, let me do you the favor/injury of pointing out TVTropes.org, which is a fantastic resource for looking at fiction in all its myriad forms. If you're afraid to follow the link (someone has warned you of it, perhaps,) TV Tropes basically catalogues in Wiki form every trope that people can think of. This can be anything from "Did we just have tea with Cthulhu?" where characters find themselves interacting with a villain (usually a horrifically powerful one) in an unexpectedly pleasant manner, to "Drop the hammer," describing situations where a character is known for using a large hammer as a weapon, to "Freudian excuse," where a character's traits or actions are justified in the story by some past trauma.

You can find yourself spending hours there, linking from Trope pages that have lists of works where the tropes appear, to Work pages where they have a list of the tropes you'll find in that story.

It's fascinating, and I think it's a great tool to use to analyze your own stories. I'll make references to stuff on that site a lot in this blog, so I recommend checking it out.

Anyway, what I thought I'd write about here is the difference between Science Fiction and Fantasy. The two genres are closely related, and there is an argument to be made that they are, in fact, the same genre.

If one is to merge the two (and perhaps include Horror as well,) something that people have taken to calling "Speculative Fiction," you can basically describe the supergenre as stories in which things we have not seen in the real world appear. This is a somewhat clumsy definition, of course, because we've never seen Jean Valjean in the real world, but what we are talking about are creatures, technologies, or phenomena that do not, as far as we know, exist.

Yet Fantasy and Science Fiction have very different feels to them, and we can usually tell the difference with ease. Often, the difference is the setting: Science Fiction often takes place in the future, and often takes place at a time when people are able to travel through the cosmos with relative ease (most either ignore or create some plot device to get around the issue of the speed of light and the vast distances between things in space.) That is not to say that all science fiction is like this. For example, Steampunk, a subgenre of Sci-Fi, is typically set in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, and usually on Earth. Typically, Sci-Fi explores the way that scientific and technological breakthroughs will impact individuals or society on whole. For example, the existence of time travel could create logical paradoxes, or the development of space travel could lead to the discovery of other forms of life.

Fantasy, on the other hand, tends to be less rational. The typical setting for a fantasy story is often a different world with a different history that nonetheless appears similar to Medieval Europe (or other periods of Earth's past.) Fantasy will often have non-Human, yet human-like races (such as Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs) though many authors decline to do this. If there is one real focal-point to what defines Fantasy as a genre, it is the existence of magic. Different authors use magic in different ways, but it is quite rare indeed to find a story that creates a different world-setting that does not include some kind of magic.

The problem in drawing a clear line between the genres, then, is defining magic. Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, said "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." One could simply read this to mean that until we understand something, we will see it as magic, but I think there's a more profound question inherent to this, which is "what do we really mean when we talk about magic?"

Science Fiction, after all, often deals with discovering some phenomenon that seems to act magically - it does things that were previously thought impossible. Frequently, the hero of a Science Fiction story must solve the mystery of exactly what is going on, and then apply that knowledge to resolve the conflict of the story.

If someone had a gun to my head, I might say that the difference between the genres at its core, is that Sci-Fi ultimately believes there is an explanation for what is going on - that through scientific reasoning, one can eventually just figure it all out. Fantasy embraces the mystery - Gandalf can come back from the dead because it is the will of Eru Illuvatar. Harry Potter is a wizard because, well, he's a wizard. He might have inherited it from his folks, but it's not exactly a clear dominant/recessive gene, because there's a chance for those who have Muggle parents to be born wizards/witches, and vice versa. And even if the ability to be a wizard is genetic, the way all that magic actually works is, well, just magic.

Until the Star Wars prequels came out (and let's just pretend they never did,) there was no explanation for why someone would be "strong in the Force" as opposed to being just a normal schmo. Again, it looked like there was an inheritance to it - Anakin's kids are both Jedi-capable (it just occurred to me that if the Jedi-capability is based on "midichlorians," and we assume these are organelles like mitochondria, Anakin couldn't have passed them on because as the father, he provided the sperm, which does not have mitochondria.) But the nature of the Force had a more of a spiritual explanation than a scientific one.

So I'd actually classify Star Wars as a Fantasy story, even though there are spaceships and aliens. It's more of a story based on emotion than reason. Tellingly, the way Luke saves the day in Return of the Jedi is to reach his father emotionally, to make Vader feel love for his son once more.

Of course, this itself may be an overly simplistic distinction. Sci-Fi (at least the better-written stories) is not devoid of emotion, and often the implications of new technology or natural phenomena lead to an emotional story. In Next Gen, there's a great episode where Picard goes home to France a few months after being temporarily assimilated by the Borg, and the entire episode is focused on the emotional toll that this experience has exacted on him - the guilt over the responsibility he had for the deaths of thousands and the doubt over his life's work, as well as the sheer horror of knowing what it was like to be transformed and used like that.

Ultimately, the two genres are linked in their willingness to stretch the willing suspension of disbelief, to invent new rules by which the world will operate, and examining the implications of that new world - both on a larger, sociological scale, and the smaller, personal scale.

Yet, to paraphrase Potter Stewart, we know the difference when we see it. Most works conform to a standard setting (swords and wizards: fantasy, ray guns and spaceships: sci-fi,) and even when they play with those settings a bit, we can often identify which is which.

I like to think of the two genres as being like the oceans. The Pacific and the Atlantic are different oceans, yet what do you call the waters south of South America? The two blend together, and there's a lot of overlap. One can also argue that the viewer's opinion can change the genre of a piece.

The real point in all of this really boils down to one thing: I like both. Hooray!