Moebius

Jean "Moebius" Giraud, the brilliant and uber-influential French graphic artist/comic book auteur has died. This is a huge bummer. His sci-fi visions influenced filmmakers and fans alike, and his Western work is legendary. He just had such a huge imagination and such a clean yet personal style, sparse yet voluptuous, his panels and pages blow open the doors of the reader's imagination.



Tom Spurgeon has the best obit I've yet seen. Just one selection, about his name and Heavy Metal magazine (the American import of Metal Hurlant, how I came upon his work:

Giraud created the powerful "Moebius" handle for the loose, satirical work he had done for the magazine Hara-Kiri in the early to mid-1960s. He simply liked the name, and didn't even know if it referred to a person with whom he might have to share the appellation. In 1975 he resuscitated the name for the new group he co-founded Les Humanoides Associes and their magazine Metal Hurlant. Described by Giraud as a natural reaction to a groundswell of storytelling from comics-makers that had no natural place to put this material -- you can see precedents in some of the short stories Giraud did for Pilote just proceeding these newer comics -- and therefore needed to create a new press to do so, all in the tradition of the French avant garde. That magazine would become the home of two of Giraud's best-remembered series, Arzach and The Airtight Garage. Giraud would later describe the revolution driven by his work and others as one of creative choice rather than content, that the feeling of the artist inhabiting the work was more important than the kind of work being done. He drew a connection to the undergrounds and cartoonists like Robert Crumb, although he felt that the work of he and his peers existed in an entirely different cultural context.

Even his one Silver Surfer story, with Stan Lee scripting, is legendary:



He will be missed.

Science and Its Opposite

IBM is putting our brain processes on a computer chip. This is distinct from the way computer chips have worked up until now. Get ready for the Matrix.

On the other hand, the newest candidate "doesn't believe in science." Perhaps he's not so evolved himself.

Smart Code

I'm sure it'll be viewed long into the future on all kinds of devices, but since it's only been in theaters two weekends you still have a great opportunity to see the new mindbender sci-fi movie, Source Code, in a movie theater. It's good to see there for a number of reasons.

For one, it's legit. A good "what if" science fiction concept, a few really controlled settings, and these big long shots of the train moving into the city of Chicago and, repeatedly from all different angles, blowing into smithereens. Lots to think about, and then "boom" again. Until he gets it right.

For another, it's the second feature from director Duncan Jones, who's Moon with Sam Rockwell was reportedly another excellent picture. That one had very little budget, this one is clearly at another level, and one imagines the next one could be very big. In the Christopher Nolan vein, Jones appears to be a cinematic Brit who makes some highly suspenseful sequences, has a good eye for shots, and still delivers an engaging story. Even though Source Code is one of those brain-twisters where someone will post the inconsistencies and impossibilities on IMDB, the logic is good enough that you stop worrying about it and go along with the character's emotional ride. Kudos to writer Ben Ripley.

The third reason to see it is Jake Gyllenhaal delivering his best (to my mind) leading man job to date, the first one where I felt he was completely snapped into the role and I was with him all the way. I've loved him in more character work, like Zodiac and, of course, his really brilliant work in Brokeback Mountain, but I like him as the sci-fi hero, a driven soldier in a hellish purgatory that he's forced to work out the way he's being told by Vera Farmiga over a television monitor.

It's a nightmare situation, leavened with the opportunity to repeat and, standing out in the thankless girl role, Michelle Monaghan. They do have a repartee reminiscent of 1940's screen dialogue rhythms, especially in the variations, sometimes subtle, in the repetitions.

Ultimately what gives Source Code resonance is the core value of the "do-over." It's a common wish for one to go back in time to change something, thwart a negative outcome. Fixation on this wish can lead to questions of free will. Is it better that we have some sort of destiny to blame -- or thank, thus absolving ourselves of responsibility, or is Free Will the only way out of the trap of predetermination via genetics, upbringing, God's will?

My favorite image in Source Code is of Gyllenhaal's head on the tracks, like a Perils of Pauline cliffhanger from movie theaters circa 1914, the ultimate expression of pre-destiny. History is just a train rolling relentlessly down the tracks on its fixed schedule (the overhead shots of the train approaching the city, passing other trains) and it'll run us over sooner or later. Universal human mortality -- you keep trying to stumble away, frantically try another blind path to a distant solution, rail at your fellow man, yet there you find yourself on the train again, and the only break in the inevitable forward motion is when -- bam! -- the lights go out for good.

Not with a whimper, but a bang.

Here's the trailer. It's not exactly spoilerish but does explain a lot of the basic premise, which maybe is a good thing. But be forewarned:



Looking forward to more exciting stories from director Jones.

Hard Sci-Fi

This one is definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK viewing, but shockingly funny, especially if -- like me -- you were a big fan of legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury back in high school. It's just too good not to share with you, valued reader:



S if for Space, L is for Love. Of course!

Think young comedienne Rachel Bloom might have made her own breakthrough to stardom?

Pretty on the Inside

The first one-hour episode of Caprica did not disappoint, beginning with all kinds of trippiness from inside the artificial intelligence copy of Zoe and a super-huge CGI sweep through the gargantuan stadium used to play Pyramid, the big sport on the planet, as the Caprica planetary anthem played, everyone with both hands crossed over their hearts. And the opening titles, sort of Dallas on acid but without spoiling the images with the actor names (the transition from statue hand outstretched to Polly Walker's is a nifty hook) sets the dominant tone as well: semiotic labyrinth:



The SyFy embed is a little dark, but you get the idea. The series creaters, Rene Aubuchon and Ron Moore, are leading us deeper and deeper into this world that, as they state, seems beautiful on the outside but is corrupt on the inside. Each week, if the pilot and first real episode are any indicator, will give us more clues about this world: its customs, its art and technology, and its clues to its own impending downfall.

But the most interesting question by far is that of replicating what's inside of an individual human being, the personality, intelligence, responses...the soul. Now that Zoe Greystone is dead but her AI version lives on, most often trapped inside of a big ugly metallic robot, her best friend still relates to her as if in continuity with her dead friend. Her father is seeking something of the same.

And even Adams/Adama, who Greystone pere gave an opportunity to meet his daughter's avatar in black empty space at the end of the pilot, where she cried in tearful terror, "Daddy, my heart's not beating!" and cause him to turn against the project, even he now asks if that version of his daughter is currently living in abject fear somewhere in that cyberspace. Even he is wanting her rescued or otherwise put out of her misery in some way.

We normally ascribe feelings to stuffed animals, animated characters, even Transformer-type robots. The question Caprica asks is whether a perfect AI is somehow less human than we are, when we can relate to it exactly as we would to the real thing. Further, it edges towards asking us exactly what we're made of -- and if we're no more than a very advanced biological form of AI, and what does that mean to our sacred value placed on being individual, soul-delineated human?

My biggest counterveiling thought here is that the one thing that makes a conversation with my kids different than with their avatars is that they are constantly growing. In a year they won't have the exact same size and shape, and neither will their brains. The open question is AI learning, and as we know from BSG, cylons do learn. But is that the same as biological growth? Isn't the natural cellular growth/decay of the brain something that affects the very core of consciousness, the storing and accessing of memory, so that it would not be duplicable?

It'll be interesting to see if the show addresses it.

The composer, Bear McCready, does as great a job contributing to mood and thought as he did on Battlestar Galactica, and on his blog he describes the stark differences as well as certain similarities between the scores. In essence, Caprica is more chamber orchestra, as befits an advanced society, but as with the first series there is a melancholy running underneath the sophistication.

For your listening pleasure, his End Titles music, pulling together the major themes (characters, etc.) from the show:



I'm in for more -- take me through this maze on Caprica as well as the innerspace of AI Zoe and others who make up this brave new foreboding world.

Caprica

On Friday night SyFy premiered the new Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, which takes place not in outer space but on a planet very much like our own, 58 years before the events of Battlestar. The creators of the earlier show (the sequel to this prequel?) have applied the same sharp political edge that invigorated the space series, except here we're watching the highly advanced society that made whatever mistakes that led to the revolt of the cylons (both human-like and chrone plated robots) and the planet-wide destruction of Caprica by the very devices they originally manufactured to serve their needs.

Bottom line up front: the pilot is brilliant.

This is clearly a comment on our own society with some interesting differences and one key reversal. The event that sets off the plot and eventually leads to the downfall of humanity is the death of two daughters in a terrorist bombing. One is the teenaged child of Daniel Greystone, played by Eric Stoltz, an engineering visionary who is the cornerstone of a huge corporation that is currently working on the first crude cylons, all exposed metal and clumsy artificial intelligence, hoping to keep the huge defense contract. The other daughter is that of Joseph Adams, played by Esai Morales, who's surviving son will become Galactica Commander William Adama in the years to come.

Making friends through their shared loss, Greystone uses Adams to get something he needs to begin bringing his daughter back to life -- as a cylon. The conflict between the two men begins. The second major conflict is one that runs through the original series as well -- that of religion. Caprica is polytheistic, but as we learned in Battlestar, the cylons are seeking the "one true God," and their anticedents are here already, an underground network of human beings who want a single God who knows right from wrong -- like the one that's dominated all major religions in our real world since the beginnings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

So while the series looks to bend the mind with the question of what really makes us human and whether a human-based artificial intelligence is itself a being with the same worth as a flesh & blood person, by far the most transgressive element of the series is the questioning of our very own monotheism. This is using science fiction in the best possible way, by positing an alternative reality that rips open otherwise unmentionable questions and letting us reconsider our most precious assumptions in its light.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that Caprica posits monotheism as a source of violence based on the certainty of the faithful. On another level (thus far -- the series is just beginning) it is also an abdication of personal morality, arguing that the reliance on a single all-knowing God is a way not to wrestle with morality on one's own.

On the other hand, Caprica is already a decadent society, with a gangster syndicate (from the Tauron colony planet, where Adams/Adama hails from) and young people entering holo-clubs using technology originally invented by Greystone, clubs where sex, drugs, violence and even human sacrifice are all part of the scene.

And there's a Shakespearean element to the drama as well. We're looking at the characters who's actions will set the groundwork for the fate of the planet six decades down the line, and their very human grief, yearnings, desires, lusts in steady conflict with each other have a weightier feel for our knowing what will come. This series is by nature a multi-season tragedy.

The cast is well-prepared for it. Stoltz seems more handsome than he did in his youth, and fellow '80's film veteran Morales is a great match. Greystone's wife is played by Paula Malcomson, whom I'm so pleased to have back after her breakthrough as Trixie on Deadwood. Polly Walker, another HBO vet, from Rome, is great as the headmistress of the school where Greystone's daughter went, and where his daughter's best friend (Magda Apanowicz) is coming under the influence of the One-God underground. The rest of the cast is terrific as well -- Alessandra Torresani as Greystone's daughter, Zoe and Sasha Roiz as Adams' violent gangster brother are the other regulars thus far.

I predict another peak sci-fi experience from Ron Moore and company. It's a nice change-up from the setting of the first series, and the themes may cut even closer to home.

Gold from Junk

Having finally (if a week and a half after it's opening can seem like a long time) gotten to see the sleeper hit of the summer, District 9, last night, I came away as impressed with the movie, and rookie director Neill Blomkamp as I'd been hearing. There are a number of factors that make District 9 impressive, from being a science fiction thriller with more on its mind than just pyrotechnics -- although delivering a highly satisfying stream of those -- to actually telling a coherent story with characters worth caring about.

In fact, there's a list on Film Junk of the "5 Lessons Hollywood Can Learn from District 9" (the list with my thumbnail descriptions -- for the full thing read the piece):

1. Audiences Appreciate Originality

Yes, there are lots of elements from other pictures mashed into this one, but it has a new attitude, i.e. in the alien apartheid theme, resonantly set in post-real life apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa.

2. Experience Isn’t Everything

Director Blomkamp was backed by producer Peter Jackson to direct a huge budget version of blockbuster videogame Halo when Hollywood got nervous, backed out, leaving them to rebound with this proof of talent.

3. Blockbuster Budgets are Bloated

See the movie and try to wrap your mind around this: District 9 only cost $30 million to make, i.e. the equivalent of about fifteen minutes of Spiderman 3. Guess which one is richer and more entertaining.

4. Mystery Draws People In

And I'll try not to spoil too much, but there will be MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

5. Action is More Thrilling When It’s Rated R

No argument here.

I find it interesting that the site I've quoted has the word "junk" in the title because what I'll address in this post is the success of the "junk aesthetic" in the movie.

District 9 takes place in the midst of tremendous amounts of junk. This is the essential poverty experience, the Soweto of the movie, with Nigerians running black markets in the alien quarantine area as a reminder of the world's biggest slum in Lagos. In this incarnation of poverty, aliens pick through huge garbage piles to survive, decorate or build elements of their shacks with garbage, and even look something like collections of junk themselves, albeit in the "prawn" form that gives them their negative nickname.

Lead actor, an unknown until last week, Sharlto Copley, looks a bit of mess when we first meet him (and gets worse as the picture goes on) and is in essence a non-valuable item in Hollywood terms, i.e. a leading man with zero name recognition (or negative, considering how unusual and new to pronounce his name is to non-South Africans), i.e. junk. And director Blomkamp was junked by Hollywood prior to making this picture.

Indeed, District 9 is almost entirely shot documentary style, with surveillance camera POV's popping in for visual continuity here and there, as handheld is essentially the "junk" style of shooting, i.e. "run 'n' gun", rather than the majestic tableau shot of classic science fiction films from the 1920's through the 1950's, peaking with Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey but just as much the dominant style of the Star Wars hexology. Prior to, say, Battlestar Galactica, which made space battle seem like documentary war footage, old matte technology and even motion control cameras required some degree of stasis or stability in shooting in order not to reveal the seams of the layered fx compositing. Here the jerky footage of CGI aliens picking through junk heaps or mixing it up in spasmatic, bloody confrontations with humans seem 100% genuine, a you-are-there feel.

In the real world, it's poverty that makes those stricken human beings appear expendable to the more fortunate. How often have we heard, "Bomb them all!" in reference to corruption infested slums or the poor-as-dirt terrorist breeding grounds of the Middle East? Clean people up and they suddenly have value, but in their most degraded state, starving and emaciated in Ethiopia, or refuges ravaged by war, how often is the reaction that they should just go ahead and die, we'll all be better off -- themselves included.

Here it's the aliens whose non-human, insect or shrimp-like appearance, caked in poverty, who seem infinitely expendable. So it is the linchpin achievement of District 9 that we develop empathetic feelings towards two in particular, father and son prawn. And herein lies the key to the movie's originality, actually a synthesis of underground or counterculture aesthetics that have been building from the hippies through the punks all the way to Burning Man and beyond, the turning of what other people discard into something useful, fascinating, useful, valuable, beautiful.

The core storytelling trope here is the second look, the reversal that comes from Copley's transformation from go-along mid-level bureaucrat to self-sacrificing action hero, the shack that can be a key, the weapons that are junk unless a being with the right DNA pulls the trigger (and then marvel at the plasmatic destruction that follows), the prawns who can be more than the drones you've come to expect. Like the magnetic powers of one particularly brilliant alien weapon that collects the bullets fired at it and then blasts them all back, Blomkamp revels in the expectations about himself and his "little" film that he fashions with whizzing speed and rock-solid cinematic expertise into a great big science fiction action classic.

Every once in a while there's this kind of independent triumph, recalling the sleeper success of the first Terminator movie, with "junk" actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, an unknown director and cast, that can instantly turn into a major franchise. Blomkamp pokes sly fun at the Halo debacle late in the picture when, in file documentary footage, Copley's character proudly displays a wallet-sized snapshot of his wife in her bridal veil, emphasizing how much it looks like an angel's halo.

Well, if any studio wants to resume making the movie version of Halo with Blomkamp I'm betting he won't come half as cheap as he would have the first time around. And Blomkamp would have to ask himself why bother with someone else's intellectual property, now that he has a not-dissimilar human vs. alien District 10 sequel squarely set up by the conclusion of this picture.

With the reversal of District 9 winning hearts, minds and box office, he's turned an original i.p. (i.e. "junk") into a potential entertainment industry. And with the same achievement, ironically, devalued Halo as late-coming movie competitor.

Junk into gold. Gold into junk.

Alchemy.

Visionary

I'm ashamed to say I've only read three of J.G. Ballard's visionary novels but I think I've always thought I'd read more, they'd be there for me. Well, as of today the author isn't, as Ballard died after several years with prostate cancer at 78 in England. Something interesting said about his work:

His influence stretched across a modern world that he seemed to see coming years in advance.

His dark, often shocking fiction predicted the melting of the ice caps, the rise of Ronald Reagan, terrorism against tourists and the alienation of a society obsessed with new technology.

As Martin Amis once said of him: “Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different – a disused – part of the reader's brain.”

The bands Joy Division, Radiohead, The Normal, Klaxons and Buggles all wrote records inspired by Ballard stories.

I read High Rise decades ago, which Stanley Kubrick should have made into a movie, the story of a fall of a great new modern building, new yuppies and better off increasing to the highest levels, which drifts into primordial chaos as the floors begin fighting each other. Like watching a slow motion car wreck, which is fitting with Crash (made into a sleek, disturbing flick by David Cronenberg) all about auto accident fetishists, and the second one I read about seven years ago, Concrete Island, about a businessman who crashes his car on the way home one weekend and ends up dropping out of civilization by not leaving that piece of highway for a very long time.

His most adventurous piece is evidently The Atrocity Exhibition (that title used by Joy Division) which is actually a number of separate pieces deconstruction and reconstructed together, including his riff on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the main character's psychosis brought on by mass media causing his mental illness.

By coincidence I read his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, published after short stories and other pieces in 1961, which has never gotten a lot of press. I found the vintage edition in a used book shop, and while his work certainly deepened, it's a wild ride, very hard to put down. There's a wind that's been building for a few weeks, growing every day, imagine a single wind blowing West to East around the world, non-stop, unidirectional. Pretty soon pieces of buildings start breaking off and water bodies move, flooding begins, the decimation of houses, the inability to go out doors without being swept away. Relentlessly building, as we follow several intersecting characters in different parts of England, desperate to find a safe place, no end in sight.

I can't wait to read my next Ballard book, and while his death is sad it'll surely renew interest in his books. And the movies from them -- Steven Spielberg's adaptation of his memoir, Empire of the Sun, about how he survived gamely as a child during the WWII Japanese invasion of Shanghai. There's a load of Ballard material here, albeit laid out all Anglo-techie, and a clip of him interviewed very cool montage style embedded with this obit.

I'm reminded of writing about the passing of Polish visionary writer Stanislaw Lem a little over three years ago, soon after I'd started this blog. It's a bummer to be marking the passage of time like, by losing another seminal literary hero. But, of course, there will be more.

Ballard knew how to commit and his visions were lucid. So considering his subject matter, the degree to which our veneer of civilization can easily strip down to primal savagery, meant he was transgressive, especially to his times. And I'd say there's a Fight Club because there was a Ballard and maybe a Caprica.

Dangerous prose, so highly readable.

Bye-Bye BSG

Just a quick note on the grand finale of Battlestar Galactica since there's other stuff written that goes into detail here and here, and a fabulous interview with chief creative officer Ron Moore here. And lots more out there if you've got the Google. I'll try to avoid SPOILERS but probably won't.

So there's a lot of fan comments against the ending, as if one could expect anything else, and I think they're all wrong. While I was watching the finale and the huge battle, the biggest since the rescue on New Caprica several seasons ago, I realized they were going for the title of "Best Science Fiction Television Show Ever" in a big balls-out way. Not only were the climactic battles huge and reminiscent of the best science fiction book covers from the 1970's, with scale like Larry Niven's Ringworld, but thematically the capper took in maybe 155,000 years of history, give or take a few, and successfully consummated the marriage of docudrama science fiction (think Outland) with the mindbending sci-fi tradition, the kind that keeps you thinking and discussing and even arguing long after the show or book or movie is over.

The character closures were tremendously satisfying -- Baltar becoming a pivotal agent of good, the end of Roslyn's journey and Adama's grief so realistically and bravely captured by Edward James Olmos, Tory's evil act suddenly returning like the repressed always does and with such disastrous consequences, Athena thanking Boomer for delivering Hera with a round of bullets, Lee staking claim as the nearly mythological adventurer and Starbuck realizing her true nature with tremendous peace.

If there's a character who could carry on it would be Starbuck, but while it might be spectacular to follow her travels (the Route 66 of science fiction shows?) there'd have to be some invented drama to make her character interesting now that she's so clear.

And I loved the cameo by Ron Moore, perhaps aluding to the moment where he gets the idea for the series?

The previous Best Science Fiction Television Show of All Time was the first two seasons of the original Star Trek series. No other show had so consistently delivered on the promise of sci-fi literature, even as it had been building for decades. The Twilight Zone was the previous master, and The Outer Limits had its moments, but the combination of heady concepts and pulse-racing moments has never been bested until now, and what makes it so interesting is that BSG is so very different -- more sociological, with the biggest "supernatural" elements being saved for the resolution, focused more singularly yet more grandly in the overall arc, as ultimately revealed.

The conceit that this show happens not in the present nor the future is the biggest part of the reveal. The godlike force is the one that plays in the imagination -- is it science, perhaps, by another name?

A finale like this means the series will have a huge life post-initial broadcast. Not only will audiences pore over it for clues to the ending, but the reputation it'll develop for having ended so well (despite the more hardcore fans who might try a little fanfic if they can't handle the creator's own vision) will drive interest.

As for me, I missed the second half of the first season and all of the second, including the Pegasus arc featuring the always excellent Michelle Forbes.

So I've got something to live for.

So say we all.

Battlestar

I could write about Obama on greed or Biden's new Middle Class Task Force or McCain defending Limbaugh or House Republican Leader John Boehner lying that there is $200 million for contraception in the stimulus package (it's actually a $200 million savings in the same area) or Michael Steele -- congrats to the GOP for breaking the color line in party leadership, even if it did have to be with a Republican. But all that really matters is that Battlestar Galactica ends in seven episodes, and tonight it once again proved why it is so far and away the best dramatic series currently on television.

Yes, SPOILERS.

No other American series (or one anywhere?) is dealing seriously with the ambiguities of armed insurrection by a democratic populace. I don't know another series that would even try. It seems like a feature film theme, Costa-Gavros or Winterbottom or Greengrass. Or Warren Beatty. But BSG (the acronym isn't exactly proper, but it's what's caught on) is going all the way, every single character we care about in a jackpot situation at tonight's "To Be Continued" card -- the President about to be assassinated, the Commander of Galactica and his first mate are cornered, holding off a squadron, the first cylon mother of a human-cylon hybrid is imprisoned with her child and wounded husband and threatened with rape, and the Commander's son and their best flyer, the young romantic leads, with a skeletal crew of loyalists, are the only hope for retaking the ship from the mutineer uprising.

Emotional arcs set in motion back in the first season (this is #4, or 4.5 as it seem to have broadcast) are paying off big-time, and based on the preview for next week it seems there's cashing out to be had as well. Ron Moore and David Eick, and their team of writers have been grappling with all the darkest questions that have run through the Bush years, and its fitting that the series is ending now, one wonders if it might be a note of ambiguity or a definitive verdict on the ability of humankind to both survive and evolve. Because ever since the cylon fleets destroyed all known human planetary populations, leaving us finally with @ 39,000 nomads looking for a new home, it's been a very material jackpot situation for humanity itself.

While this sci-fi series is played for real, nothing hokey, never metatextually jokey, it does have one particularly larger than life character at the center, and that's Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck. When Starbuck finally kicked into what she does best tonight, i.e. devastating righteous violence, I stood up in front of the TV and stayed there for the rest of the episode. Sackhoff is leaving it all on the floor now, ever since hollering "What am I?" over and over two episodes ago on Earth, maybe before, but she's created a new kind of female hero, the next generation past Sarah Connors of Terminator fame, the most lethal character with the strongest, simplest code. It's a more extreme form of role reversal than we've ever seen on television before, and the directness, the sudden firmness of her move to kiss Lee Adama in their strategy huddle between action sequences was her signaling her return, her leadership, her assurance.

And then there was other kiss between Commander Adama and President Roslin, the elder romantic leads and leaders of our civilization,finally revealing their love without pretense on the forgotten storage flight deck, their friends around them for the first time, an on-the-fly wedding, on the edge of their dangerous parting. Olmos, McDonnell, Sackhoff all Emmy-worthy.

They got John Dahl to direct and he did a feature-style job, particular Adama and Tigh setting up their last stand -- all Kurosawa and Peckinpah in masculinity and camera placement, especially the three shot sequence of Adama firing at the door just before the grenade is thrown in on them.

Unlike more typical series, BSG has rarely sat still, and the tension has been up and down over the past four years. But this is something bigger, and I hope it does turn out to be both surprising and satisfying in the conclusion. Where is that destination? I can't say for sure, but tonight I had an epiphany.

The ultimate arc of the series is about human evolution. There hybrid babies were all flukes, unprecidented, hence the product of either a plan we don't understand or, more likely in retrospect, natural evolution, Darwin 101. The natural mutations that occur and are needed to survive external changes in climate, food source, and interspecies threat.

So my theory is that the drama we're seeing played out is, with a step back from the intricate human stories taking us through, really about winnowing out the race to those most equipped to survive, in this case those willing to accept that the very machines we created are now independently sentient enough for us interbreed with them in order to survive as a species. Yes, we'll be different. But (and this is where the cylon search for God folds in) we'll still have a soul.

It's not dissimilar from the ultimate theme of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an alien race intercedes with our species every 200,000-odd years to goose our evolution. In that film a signal trace sends a crew of humanity's best and most fit -- astronauts -- to reach the signal source. However, only one representative of humanity makes it all the way, ultimately being evolved (after "death") into the Nietzchean Star-Child. Our best and our brightest, the individual apex of humanity as he has proven himself -- ironically (in light of BSG) by disabling mankind's most advanced tool, the mutinous H.A.L. supercomputer.

So while BSG doesn't have the particular formalism of Kubrick's masterwork, it is grappling with similarly monumental themes, albeit within the rubric of the best action show on television since Band of Brothers. It's obviously more character-oriented than 2001 (what isn't, the dictionary?) and warmer for that reason, but it doesn't skimp on bad news, hard choices, good guys doing questionable things like, say, America for the past eight years.

So as Bush goes out, leaving behind the stench of his doomsday, mounting in his wake (will we eventually count over 100,000 jobs lost this past week?), the question BSG asks is whether we've got what it takes to survive and prevail. It's the question we're asking ourselves as our one sliver of light has taken office. And it's going to take all of us making choices, all of us balancing our perceived needs for our selves and our families with a sense of the common good.

Will we pull together enough to survive?

Surrender

I've been moved twice in the past 24 hours by women on TV surrendering to something larger than themselves and, in doing so, achieving an evident state of grace. Both women are closely associated with the word "President."

Last night's episode of Battlestar Gallactica (SPOILERS COMING FAST) had the most moving ending to any episode I've seen, and there have been some very powerful ones. President Laura Roslin, cancer-stricken but on a life-or-death mission for all of humanity, has visions of her own death that lead her to finally, in the last minute of the episode, admit her love for Admiral Bill Adama.

While that may sound all space opera on the surface, Roslin and Adama are played by master thespians Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos. Thrown together then the Cylons wiped out all but 40,000 human beings in the known universe, they started out fighting for governance over the remaining humanity, appeared to become intimate sometime last season (as Adama became able to admit to Roslin's wisdom), and seemed to fracture recently as Roslin's cancer drove her to a coldness about her decisions, a lack of regard for anything but her own rightness.

So McDonnell gave a shattering performance last night, culminating with those three most dangerous words to say in a movie or TV show, "I love you." And it was Adama's response that brought it home: "It's about time." Considering everything they're up against, the stakes and the cost, it was quite the rewarding moment for show followers. Roslin gives herself over to the truth, and it wouldn't be surprising if the writers have her cancer going into remission.

Then today another woman, who did not achieve the Presidency this go-round but appears to have taken Third place (actually Second since she out polled McCain in the Primaries) gives what is easily the best speech of her career, as she surrenders to Barack Obama, as I did the night he won Iowa in January.

While I've already heard the narcissism charge leveled at this speech, I agree with Matthew Yglesias that:

Far from an egocentric outburst, the talking about herself and her supporters made the speech the great speech that it was and helped a lot, I think, to break down the mutual barriers of bitterness that had built up. Something nominally more focused on Obama might well have come off as half-hearted. What she delivered was perfectly sincere and utterly in keeping with the main themes of her campaign, but also led to the desired conclusion. I think it was very skillfully put together.

And the visuals were the best -- entirely epic -- of her campaign.

What I think we saw as well, and which could not have been possible Tuesday night, or before her private meeting with Senator Obama, was that same post-acceptance rejuvenation that Al Gore started glowing with during his concession speech in 2000. She's free to take non-consultant risks now (like they did such a great job for her), free to seek her bliss elsewhere (won't be VP), free to support a guy she actually seems to like off-trail. She already looks like a new woman, to me much more appealing, in photos like this.

At a certain point, whether her supporters come aboard or not is their problem. Some may stay home, a smattering may vote McCain out of spite or white, but I honestly think the guy below has what it takes to win this election:



Towards the end, when he's telling the staff about the burden on them to not let down all the Americans now looking to them for help, for a better deal at such a dark time, that's when his gravitas comes through.

And I don't think McCain's comes close.

The Final Final Cut

Blade Runner is back, but it never really left us. Somewhere in the world, always, it's on someone's screen. And in some cities you can look out the window and think that you're still there. (Shanghai, anyone?) But there's yet another director's cut, this one the ultimate, and it sounds magnificent.

There's no underestimating the impact Ridley Scott's film version of Philip K. Dick's novel (original title, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?) has had on pop culture, movies, music, society. I'm loving how the opening titles of AMC's Mad Men TV series is Saul Bass-style figures against a kind of Dove soap version of Blade Runner city imagery. As Scott says:

“Here we are 25 years on,” Mr. Scott said, “and we’re seriously discussing the possibility of the end of this world by the end of the century. This is no longer science fiction.”

I predict solid box office for this specialty release. It's one to see on the big screen, even if for the third, fourth, or fifth time.