Dr. Huh-uh

I'm a sucker for almost any science fiction show that shows up on TV. Even the really bad ones, like Lost In Space and Land of the Giants. I even watched Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, even though there seemed to be something indefinably wrong with the show. There still is - reruns of it give me the uneasy feeling that there's something wrong with it, that I shouldn't like it.

I even liked the SF shows that Sci-Fi Channel used to run, before it changed its name to Syfy (what the hell is a siffy anyway?) and clogged its schedule with bullshit ghost-hunting shows. Things like Farscape and, uh, well, Farscape.

Here are some of the SF TV shows I've watched and liked:

UFO

Star Trek (in all its various forms)

Babylon 5

Battlestar Galactica

Lost in Space

The Time Tunnel

The Starlost

The Adventures of Briscoe County Jr. (not technically SF, but it DID have an orb)

Space: 1999

Buck Rogers in Whatever The Hell Century This Is

Farscape

Firefly

Space: Above and Beyond

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea

Land of the Giants

I liked all these shows, and some of them I liked an awful lot.

I mention this mostly to demonstrate that I'm not some realist literary type who thinks science fiction is mere "pornography of ideas", as someone once said (it might have been me, upon seeing the cover for the Space Plumber novel. It wasn't called Space Plumber, but that's what the hero was. I wonder if a plumber in a spacesuit would exhibit butt-crack. But never mind.) I mention this so when I say that there are two wildly popular SF shows that I don't like, never liked, can't like, never could stand, you understand that I'm not exactly a hater of the whole genre.

The first is The X-Files. Honestly, the whole men in black government conspiracy grey aliens Zeta Reticuli business wears itself out on me very quickly. Like Brylcreem, a dab will do me, and for quite a while. Since I don't really dig that whole dark gummint UFO conspiracy business, I didn't really dig the show, and was always kind of mystified by its wild popularity. And it isn't because there were aliens and UFOs in it. Got no problem with aliens and UFOs - for years I had posted on my office wall certain choice quotations from G'Kar, and I think personally it would be really cool if there really were alien spacecraft at Area 51. But the whole conspiracy thing quickly turns into drudgery for me.

The second is Doctor Who. The wild popularity of this show remains a complete mystery to me. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I was supposed to do some reading before watching the show. But man, is it ever tedious and uninvolving. Back in the days when Tom Baker was the Timelord, people at work used to change their work hours so they could get home in time to catch it on PBS in the afternoons (this was before TiVo, obviously). I tried to catch the wave, and failed utterly. I could list a whole series of defects, like the fact that the Daleks were the least convincing villains in the history of television. I mean, come on, you could stop the Daleks dead in their tracks by spreading a little gravel on the sidewalk. They'd get high-centered, spin their wheels, and that would be that. But fundamentally, I didn't like the characters and didn't care if they lived or died. And I got really tired of people at work blathering about their sonic screwdrivers and debating the significance of Dr. Who's scarf. To paraphrase an alleged quote of Dr. Freud, sometimes a scarf is just an affectation. The only good thing that I could see in the whole tedious mess was, frankly, Elizabeth Sladen.

So that's that. I never got into the whole paranoid conspiracy theory angle of The X-Files, and Doctor Who never convinced me that I should give a rat's ass what happened to anyone in the show.

I'd much rather watch Space: 1999 than either one of those clunkers.

I am forced to withhold judgment on the whole Stargate business. The movie was kind of goofy but worth watching a time or two, but I have no idea what the show is like. As a matter of principle I don't watch "Syfy" much anyway. If they're that embarrassed with the label "science fiction", they probably wouldn't want me hanging around their channel anyway, what with all my Star Trek models and Alien mission patches and G'Kar quotes.

Just to give you a taste, here's my favorite G'Kar quote:

G’qon wrote that the war we fight is not against powers

and principalities, but against chaos. There is a greater

darkness than that which we struggle against, and

worse than the loss of life is the loss of hope.

-- G’kar

Stuporcars

Lately I've been watching Top Gear on BBC America. The one-word review? Fun.

I know squat about supercars, and I really don't want to know. I can hardly tell everyday cars apart as it is, let alone half-million-dollar Italian supercars that I'll never see in my lifetime, let alone actually drive. So that part of the show is lost on me - the breathtaking news that Jeremy Clarkson doesn't like the Porsche 911 is about as meaningful to me as the news that Captain Kirk doesn't like left-threaded sideways manipulators in the deuterium injection matrix (all the more true considering that a Porsche 911 is a better car than any car I've ever driven).

But other parts of the show are fun. I like the "celebrity laps" where various musicians and assorted glitterati thrash a little blue economy car around the track, sometimes so vigorously that the car sheds wheels entirely. That's fun. Jeremy Clarkson's advice, apparently well-taken for all I know, is "Never lift."

I enjoy their senses of humor. Clarkson can be a bit biting at times, but that's okay. He doesn't seem to care for Americans very much, but that's okay too; there are a lot of Americans I don't care for very much either. I remember the time he had been tasked with building an amphibious automobile, so he mounted an enormous outboard motor on the tailgate of a Toyota pickup truck. He later said something like "The outboard alone weighs almost 600 pounds! That's almost as much as the average American!" I would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been shoveling Cheetos and Fiddle-Faddle into my mouth.

But the best part is the way the three hosts ("presenters", I guess they're called in the land where people drive on the wrong side - yes, I said the wrong side - of the road) hector one another. In a recent episode, Richard Hammond and James May were racing Jeremy Clarkson from London to a ski resort in Switzerland. Richard and James did it the proletarian way, using buses, trains and an airplane. Jeremy went the regal way, in some high-endish Ferrari gran tourismo machine. Beats me what it was. A Ferrari Rigatoni, I don't know. The point is that Jeremy got pulled over by the French police, and James May did the honors for the camera. "Jeremy is here," he said, pointing at a spot on a French road map, "talking to a gendarme. In a few hours' time, he'll be here." He then pointed at Paris. "In a place called la Bastille." Once again, I would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been cleaning my guns with pork fat. (The outcome, if you're interested: Richard and James got to the town first, but Jeremy got to the hotel first.)

But the best part of the show is the observation that driving should be fun, no matter what you drive, or where. All three of them would likely have unflattering things to say about my car, a dusty green Hyundai Elantra, and one imagines that Jeremy Clarkson's comments might actually be interpreted as rude by those with delicate constitutions. But I always enjoy driving my dusty green car more after I've watched Top Gear, even if I can't tell a Porsche Blitzkrieg from a Ferrari Minestrone.

A couple of thoughts on the UK. Once I flew to London on business, and when the driver picked me up at Heathrow, he inquired with earnest concern whether I'd been shot at on my way to the airport in America. What exactly do they think America is like? I personally only get shot at when I go to the local store; the airport is fine, perfectly safe. One of the guys I worked with asked me how many guns I owned, and seemed almost unsettled to find that I owned none at all. He probably thinks all Germans own a pair of lederhosen and all Argentinians like to invade the Falklands too.

And a final note. The British shouldn't be too fond of their "driving experience", because I found driving in England (I only drove in England, so I'll only blame them) a miserable experience. It isn't because they drive on the wrong side of the road, though they do. And it isn't because the weather was constantly wet and foggy, though it was. And it wasn't because the roads were very busy, though they were. It's the fact that once you get off the motorway, there isn't a single straight road anywhere in England. They do more winding and meandering than my small intestine, and seemingly for even less reason. And the signs! I'm used to America, where roads are generally marked by signs indicating the name of the road. In England, it seems that the roads are marked by destination, not name.

I was trying to find a hotel in Basingstoke, but the map and the road signs never seemed to agree and I kept ending up on the road to Aldermaston. Who knows, maybe Aldermaston would have been more fun; I should have tried it. I hear they do nuclear research there.

Lately I've been watching Firefly, the one-season science fiction show from the mind of Joss Whedon. It's quite nice. You'd think a show that didn't make it a full season would stink, but it actually doesn't. It inverts many tradition science fiction themes and tropes and maybe its deliberate blurring of the line between science fiction and western rubbed critics the wrong way. For example, it has no aliens, no faster-than-light drive, no blasters or other energy weapons, no swooshing sounds when ships zip by, and no particular emphasis on military matters. At one point the ship ends up carrying a herd of cattle as cargo; how often do you see that in a Star Trek episode?

Firefly feels a lot like the old role-playing game Traveler to me. If you mentally block out the Third Alliance, jump drive, and any non-human intelligent species, it's pretty close in general feel to Traveler. Not that I'm implying that one was cribbed from the other, merely that Firefly feels a lot more like the Traveler game than any other science fiction show I've seen.

Which is good.

Traveler fails to do Firefly justice in some areas, though. Traveler was, even in its earliest incarnations, overtly militaristic - characters were almost always military veterans and were not infrequently in their thirties or forties, and I don't think the system could produce characters like Kaylee, Simon, Inara or Book. The technologies don't line up either. In some areas Firefly seems pretty advanced technologically, and in other areas it seems fairly primitive. And the show is a study of characters, while characters as such in Traveler tended to be pretty vanilla - good players could work up their own motivations, but the rules themselves don't cover such things. (Deliberately, I'm sure - Traveler could be hugely complicated when it came to things like designing starships, but in actual play the rules were pretty short and sweet.)

But the odds that I'll ever dig out my old Traveler books and dink with them are just about zero. There are too many other things to do and I'd have to win the lottery to ever find enough time to do that. But it wouldn't be an uninteresting exercise.

Jacques

I spent most of yesterday watching big chunks of a Jacques Cousteau marathon on Turner Classic Movies.

First, permit me to thank TCM for the effort. I can't even log on to check my email without being involuntarily exposed to crap about Kate Gosselin, Lindsey Lohan or other celebutards, and sometimes I forget that there really ARE people out there who give a shit. Thanks, guys, I needed that!

Jacques Cousteau was a big hero of mine back in the 1970s. I suspect he was to a lot of people. My heroes at the time were Neil Armstrong, Jacques Cousteau, and Roger DeCoster, a Belgian motocross racer - you can't be a boy without having at least one sports hero, I guess, even though I remain torn to this day on whether racing is really a sport or not.

So I watched the Cousteau specials, many of them narrated by Rod Serling, and couldn't help but feel that we'd lost something over the years. Imagine it - a TV documentary that doesn't insult the intelligence of the viewer! That doesn't rely on irritating camera tricks to conceal a basic lack of content!

But I will say this - sometimes I saw just a little too much flesh in them. I'm no prude, but I don't really need to see a French scientist wearing a swimsuit the size of a piece of toast. Really.

Alas, the marathon is over, and the world moves on and sinks back into its trough of celebutard dissipation and irrelevance.

Sigh.

Still, I draw some solace from the fact that in a hundred years, more people will remember Jacques Cousteau than Kate Gosselin.