Category Archives: Television

Travel Time

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Pink Pine Buds

Pink Pine Buds

2016 was a year that many people wish came with an undo list and as we begin the New Year, those same people wish that they could somehow retreat to a happier time and place. Perhaps these feelings formant desires to fix past mistakes. As if only we could go back and change one little thing, then maybe things would be different now, maybe even better. But what if that happier time and place was here and now? Such a situation forms the premise for the Netflix science fiction TV series, Travelers (Trailer).

The past is history,
the future a mystery,
but today is a gift.
That is why it is called the present.

Time travel is such a well-worn troupe that by now it is hard to mine anything more of value from it. It is then a testament to this Canadian born show that it does so well with it. Hundreds of years in the future, after a sequence of catastrophes, humanity finds itself on the doorstep of extinction, when time travel is discovered. Teams of numbered travelers from the future project their consciousness back in time and into the bodies of host victims moments before the time of their recorded deaths. These travelers assume the identities of their hosts and then working as a team take on missions to change the future.

Creator Brad Wright’s Travelers revolves around one particular team of five that is led by a FBI agent (Eric McCormack) and comprise an intellectually disabled woman (MacKenzie Porter), an abused single mom (Nesta Cooper), a high school senior (Jared Abrahamson) and a heroin addict (Reilly Dolman), an eclectic group of people to be sure. Short on special effects for a Sci-Fi drama, this show makes the most out of the everyday difficulties that these foreigners find, while trying to fit into their newfound lives and our then modern times.

While they come from a dystopian future, where even a high school cafeteria’s cream corn tastes like a rare delicacy, the overall tone of the show is rather upbeat. The mantra that is voiced over in the trailer speaks to these character’s rather healthy sense of altruism. The team abides by a set of protocols that are reminiscent to Star Trek’s prime directive and the show is laced with humor. As in the casting-against-type of a school bus load of Reverend Jim Jones like octogenarians, whose bodies are repurposed as fire support for our team, at least while they’re not having to run off to the bathroom to pee again.

Travelers is not great TV, but it is enjoyable TV. It doesn’t make great demands upon its audience. What serious issues that are dealt with in this show are handled rather lightly. The action is not too rough and the tension is never too great. Think of it as comfort television that is pleasant to watch and escape with for a while to a happier place and time. What’s past is past and the future is unknown. So, on these cold winter nights enjoy this little present for now.

The Expanse

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JPL's Ceres Travel Poster

JPL’s Ceres Travel Poster

The Syfy TV network has renewed the series, “The Expanse” for a second season. This show is a space opera, set 200 years in the future, in the 23rd-century. Mars has been colonized and is its own political entity, separate from Earth and none too friendly with it anymore. The asteroid belt is the next frontier and also a no man’s land. The belters are a discontented lot, living in tin cans will do that. Their current gripe is an unexplained scarcity of water. The dwarf planet Ceres is the capital of the belt, where a downtrodden gumshoe is looking for a girl, read by inference Deckard of “Blade Runner” fame. What he is really looking for though is the show’s McGuffin, who happens to be a missing girl. The series is a bit derivative, but still ably performed and I love the genre and enjoyed watching the three episodes that were available on YouTube. There are flecks of originality in the show, like Mormon missionaries on Ceres and a Martian interrogator who uses drugs to enhance his ability, not to read minds, but faces. And there are themes greater than just the genre, like terrorism, climate change and the current wrestling between the US and China. I had watched the show several weeks ago, but when I came across the latest batch of space tourism posters from NASA’s JPL, I knew that I had to write about it. The line on the poster, “last chance for water…” is just serendipity.

Doubting Alley

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Do Not Visit with Cubicle Operators

Do Not Visit with Cubicle Operators

[Mr. | Mrs. | Miss. | Ms. | Other] Regen Axe,

We regret that due to our downsizing here at Doubting Alley, your viewership is no longer required. You will be expected to catchup on all past episodes and then turn in your remote, by next Sunday. Current PBS contributors are allowed one additional week and episode, but are then also expected to clear out too. We regret these necessities, but our support of English aristocracy, even fictional ones, has become too politically onerous and way too damn expensive for us to continue any further. You have no idea how much Maggie Smith’s tea service costs. All that being said and then as we move forward, we are willing to give you references to Hulu, Amazon or even Netflix, or whatever expensive pay-per-view venue we choose to host the remainder of our final season on. Good luck and goodbye. We have valued you as a viewer and thanks for the service.

Bob Crawley

This is how we feel about this and about having to go back to work today.

Owl Prowl or the Game’s Afoot

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Charles Is Back!

Charles Is Back!

Pictured to the left is Charles, the greatest Great Horned owl in Forest Park. I have been following his story for years now, both through personal observation and more often, both vicariously and virtually through the writings of Mark H. X. Glenshaw of Forest Park Owls fame. Last summer, Mark announced that Charles’s long time mate, Sarah, had mysteriously disappeared and was feared dead. This pair, Charles and Sarah have raised many owlets over the years, a few of which I have seen myself. This week, Mark announced that Charles has a new mate, who he has dubbed Olivia. We were walking in the park yesterday and with this good news in hand, decided to try to look Charles up and to my own personal amazement, we found him straight off the bat. I had kind of lost track of Charles, a few years ago, when his favorite tree died, but now that I know where his new favorite tree is, he should be easy to find in the future. He is such a creature of habit. He was also fast asleep in the afternoon sun.

I think that it would take a wise old owl like Charles to explain to me last night’s new Sherlock episode, The Abominable Bride. [Spoiler Alert] Was it all just a dream or some cocaine induced hallucination? We are reintroduced to Holmes and Dr. Watson as they first meet, again, this time in Sherlock Holmes’s traditional setting, 1885 Victorian London. The atmosphere is murky and thick with fog, read coal smoke and the game’s soon afoot. The bride, with blood red lipstick a pair of blazing revolvers is first met as she proceeds to empty said guns from her balcony, into the scattering throng below. She effectively garners everyone’s attention, without hitting a single person, until she eats the last bullet. Unusual, but hardly Holmes worthy until the next night, when the bride is again seen discharging firearms in public, this time both barrels of a shotgun into her estranged husband’s chest, “a shotgun wedding”. What we have next is one part mystery, one part ghost story and two parts WTF? Were the murders perpetrated by cabal of really pissed-off suffragettes, or was it all the doing again of Moriarty or was it just a dream? You tell me, because this convoluted plot then starts bouncing back-and-forth between 1885 and the end of the last episode in 2014. Thank God that this special episode is a one-of-a-kind and should have no relevance for future shows. I hope.

Curse Of The Axe

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Mohawk Pipe Tomahawk, 1750, New York

Mohawk Pipe Tomahawk, 1750, New York

“Curse of the Axe: Rewriting American History” is a 2012 Canadian documentary that plays more like a detective story than a documentary. The film begins at a recent archeological dig, on the outskirts of Toronto, called Mantle. The site is so named for the farmer who owned the land where it was located. Soon it is slated for development as another suburban subdivision ringing the city. Archeologist are busy excavating Mantle that in 1500 AD was a Huron village of some 2,000 inhabitants. The dig site is a literal gold mine for archeologists. So much material was being discovered that the site’s greatest and most mysterious object went unnoted for years. It was a bit of forged iron similar to the last 2” of the pictured tomahawk’s edged blade. It had been deliberately buried 500 years earlier. In 1500 no Native Americans had the skills to forge iron and Huron and European contact was still a hundred years in the future. So how did this iron axe blade get to where it was found?

The pictured tomahawk sits in the Smithsonian and is of European manufacture. It was made to be a trade item, but it was made 250 years after the Mantle axe. In 1500 Huron axes used stone blades that looked like the bit of iron found. It was theorized that the tip of a full European axe blade was cut off to mimic the Huron model, because that is what they were used to. The documentary goes on to validate the authenticity of the artifact and develop compelling evidence for its origin and how it found its way to Mantle. Additionally, we learn how the Huron loved. They were corn farmers and to such an extent that their cornfields covered most of present day Toronto, but soon after 1600 all of the Huron were gone. European diseases killed 75% of their population and the remainder relocated to Quebec. It is theorized that the Huron people became wary of this artifact of first contact and buried it in an effort to halt its impending doom. Anne and I watched “Curse of the Axe” on Amazon Prime, but the full show is also available on YouTube. Here is a link to the trailer.

Live Long And Prosper

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Star Trek Insigna

Star Trek Insigna

This is e-week or in the vernacular, Engineering Week. The purpose of this week is to celebrate engineers and all that they do for us. Being an engineer myself, this celebration is more than a little self-congratulatory. Still, it is a relatively arcane discipline, practiced by many of the most eccentric folks that I know. To non-engineers, my colleagues must appear as the very embodiment of geek-dom. The Fashionista would be appalled with our dress code. Our body images tend to segregate themselves into either pencil neck geeks or overweight fatties, with few of us in the happy middle. As a group, we are not even the most personable of people. If we were still in high school, we would all be trying on locker overcoats for size. So we are not much to look at or be around, but then we are not being paid for are good looks or personality anyway. We do things. We create things. We make our modern life possible. When you buy some new techno-bauble it is me you should thank. When your car starts it is me you should thank. When your toilet flushes it is me you should thank. You’re welcome!

This celebratory week was tinged with sadness with news of Leonard Nimoy’s death today. An actor that has been ambivalent about his role as Mr. Spock on Star Trek, he served as a lightning rod for my kind. I heard him speak once at a Star Trek convention in Dallas. My brother Chris and I went there together. Jewish, he spoke at length about his then upcoming series of Hanukkah stories that I later listened to on NPR. His talk was an interesting departure from the rest of that convention’s program, still he held the audience. I still hear his voice daily. I play a video game, Civilization that tracks humankind’s progress from the Stone Age to tomorrow. Every time a new technology is invented, Nimoy’s voice recites an appropriately famous quote. His spirit will be missed.