I watched the pilot for the series Virtuality. It aired on Fox last week; I watched it on Hulu this week, when I wanted to I might add. Virtuality was made by some of the creators of the successful Science Fiction TV series, Battlestar Galactica. Fox has not picked up the series, Virtuality, but instead it decided to air its pilot as a made for TV movie. My review is that as a pilot it looks like it would have been a fascinating TV series, but as a movie its ending will leave you hanging.
The storyline goes like this, as Earth is ravaged by global warming and is rapidly becoming unlivable, a small crew aboard the starship Phaeton begins its ten year mission to find a habitable planet orbiting a nearby star. The crew of twelve men and women not only have to negotiate the personal politics of the ship, but are also subjected to a Big Brother like reality TV show that is being beamed back to stricken Earth. The crew’s only sanctuary is the virtual reality module that lets them escape into their own personal fantasy worlds. However, there is bug in the virtual reality module. The bug is personified by another actor who proceeds to murder and rape the individual crew members, at least the virtual sense. The show kind of devolves into a murder mystery.
It is hard to go further without divulging too much. The crew’s quarters look like they were designed by Armani and not NASA. The exterior video cam shots still look like twentieth century NASA technology on a foggy day in space. The actor that plays the Phaeton’s captain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, also starred in another all too quickly terminated Fox series, New Amsterdam. I wonder if he is getting gun-shy of Fox. You know, he bears a striking resemblance to Lance Armstrong. I wonder if he can ride a bike?
Today’s header shows a Great Blue Heron that I saw from the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge last Sunday. The picture above shows some of that heron’s tracks in the Mississippi’s mud banks. Below is a nice picture of a Great White Egret among some yellow flowers in the Park. I biked in the Park before work and got fifteen miles. Anne biked around noon and got twenty-two miles.
