Altered Carbon on Netflix

FINALLY A NEW SCIENCE FICTION SHOW WORTH WATCHING

Yes I know this came from a book series. And I know it's a little derivative, paying homage to Blade Runner and other Noir detective fiction. And I know it exists in a well-established genre of cyberpunk. But can't we just rejoice in the fact that Netflix pulled off something no one's done in a long time: an original sci-fi concept  pushing all the right buttons while simultaneously pushing some boundaries.

I've maintained that a good TV show is essentially beautiful people in dangerous situations wrapped up in an episodic arch that connects to a larger whole (season). Altered Carbon does this in spades. Beautiful people? Check! We've even fit some nudity in there. Violent situations? Check! We spent so much money on gore effects some of our CGI cars look a bit wonky. Story arch? CHECK! We get well-encapsulated stories that build on one another until they come to a tightly satisfying ending even your English professor would be stoked about.

There's even a scene in which a beautiful woman kills fifty naked clones of another sexy woman as they come alive attack her. It's creepy, sexy, violent, and creative.

Altered Carbon sells us a universe with as little exposition as possible and trusts its audience to go along for the ride and figure it out as we go. There are a couple clunky lines in there, but who cares? We're having fun piecing it all together. And even when the show introduces a good soldier vs. bad soldier scenario, we at least have some motives in play. And that's hugely refreshing. The terrorists might be the good guys, or they might not be; you decide! 

I still don't know why the Star Wars Empire is going around blowing up planets? Tax collection?

NO CHOSEN ONE!!! NO PROPHECY!!! They could have gone down that road for expediency, but instead they put characters and events in motion creating a protagonist worth following around. I'm so sick of Harry Potters and Luke Skywalkers and Alices and Neos ad nauseam. It's cheap story-telling, and we'll have none of it here. Instead we get women of agency and men who aren't idiots and men playing women and even a black man playing an Asian woman playing a black man. That's Shakespearean!

Music. The music is fantastic in this thing. Two stand-outs were the More Human Than Human cover by Sune Rose Wagner and A Nyughatatlan's God's Gonna Cut You Down cover. There's a Nine Inch Nails song in there for measure, too. Check out this track list!

The plot moves dexterously through some big blink-and-you'll-miss-them points but still addresses some major themes. Obligation is a big one: Familial, friend, class, state loyalties are questioned and investigated. We get to ask what mortality is, what power is, and even what God is.

In the end we get to ask my favorite sci-fi question: What is it to be human?

OK! But is there anything you hated?

Yes. I hated this stupid tattoo Takeshi and Reileen had. This tired old symbol, Ouroboros, is the most boring, lamest symbol they drag out on TV. It's a dragon biting its own tail in the shape of an infinity loop, and it's featured heavily in the opening credits sequence. I rolled my eyes every time I saw it. It reminded me of Hemlock Grove, and this is leaps and bounds better than that early Netflix attempt. It's unneeded and loud.

The ending was a little rushed, but it was satisfying and didn't leave a ton of question marks like most science fiction does. Altered Carbon also plays by the rules of its own universe. There are some Chekhov's guns in there that seem a little elastic, but that's OK; they all pan out.

Over all, it's a wonderful new show. Aren't you tired of Disney trotting out more Marvel shit to see what sticks? Aren't you just a little bit bored by Star Wars by now? Doesn't the Pacific Rim sequel look ridiculous and stupid? This breath of fresh air is worth every moment spent watching it. 

Have You Read Live Nude Girls?

LIVE NUDE GIRLS

Hope might be a trap. It might be what keeps us all going, but it might destroy you. Or it might just be what gets you on Oprah.

Kevin Postupack wrote this incredible novel ostensibly about a bisexual stripper with an overactive mind and who's maybe too much of an autodidact. She's a voracious reader with ADHD and an extreme imagination. But what the novel's really about is identity.

What's in a name?

Every character in the book has an alias, and you'd think this'd be a little confusing but it isn't. People are able to be two things at once, and rather than make this liminal space off-limits to the reader, Postupack invites you to inhabit it with Daphne and her assassin cat, Noodles. It's easy to do because the narrator is operating under the assumption that we all contain multitudes.

Like Schrödinger's cat, we're alive and dead at the same time, but rather than keep that proverbial box closed, Postupack spends his time ripping the tops off them like Cracker Jack boxes looking for prizes. Sometimes there's a prize, and sometimes you get a dead cat, but the courage to keep opening them is something worth celebrating, and I think Kevin Postupack's novel does that with aplomb.

Live Nude Girls is sexy without being crude, deep without being preachy, and hilarious without being corny. Those are all hard balancing acts.

There's even a Nazi-hunter, a self-declared goddess/restaurateur, and a Cuban strip-club-owner who claims to have prescient visions. The name of the strip club? Pandora's. You can't help but open that one.

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Prometheus could see the future, and Epimetheus could see the past. Epimetheus is often called the "foolish brother" but how could he be? Wouldn't an accurate and crystal clear remembrance of the past endow you with great wisdom? Wouldn't you almost be able to predict the future based on the events of the past? After all, that's how statistics work.

Anyway, the box: It was given to Pandora as a dowry after Hephaestus built her with beauty and cunning. But it was Zeus's plan to unleash plagues onto man via her box to take them down a notch. They'd recently been blessed with agriculture and fire. So out of her jar came disease and famine and hard work and all the other evil fates that befall men. . . but only one is mentioned by name. Elpis, hid under the lid, claiming instead to be the only palliative to assuage the plight of man. Elpis means Hope.

But I think Elpis was simply the most clever of the fates, endeavoring to stay close to us in order to inflict the most constant, enduring pain of all.

Starkiller Base Is the DUMBEST Thing in Star Wars History

You already know about Starkiller base, the First Order's planet-sized space station/weapon/Macguffin. It's by far the dumbest thing in Star Wars canon, and one of the dumbest things in Sci-Fi history.

It destroys Coruscant and all of the planets in its system. There's some debate to that statement, but it doesn't matter here for my purposes. They definitely destroyed five planets.

There are only a few ways for this to occur:

They didn't build it from scratch.

Maybe they weaponized an existing planet.
How do you weaponize a planet without the neighboring planets not noticing. It has a breathable atmosphere and trees growing on it. No one wants to live there? Did they just kill everyone already living there and drill into its core to create a superweapon that converts star energy into ammunition? How do you test that without destroying a star? The worst part of that plan is that it's a one-time-use weapon. You just get to destroy one solar system and then have to abandon the planet or try to use it as a base of operations until the debris from all the exploding planets destroys it. Planets don't travel from one system to another.

They built it far away.

How do they get it close enough to target and destroy the solar system? There are several projectiles travelling slowly enough for lens flares and for Kylo Ren to behold the impending destruction from a window. Consider it takes months to get to Mars, and that's only possible every other year. Even if these missiles "blast through hyperspace" (which is not what we see in the film) the movies have established nothing can be tracked/targeted through hyperspace. So, unless they want to fire these interstellar missiles and wait around for potentially years to see if they land properly, they're not going to shoot from too far. But that means they need to move this space station unfathomable distances to get into range.

Now, range matters. Star Wars weapons have ranges, and vehicles have fuel ranges, too. How much fuel would it take Starkiller base to travel from one star system to another? All the other ships that are jumping in space have visible blue exhausts. Not Starkiller. It's simply not built for travel.

It has to be super-long range weapon. Its size makes it able to launch plasma ridiculously long distances and it houses boundless computer capacity to target very faraway places. And the First Order is incredibly patient. That would be like the USA launching missiles at china and waiting 20 years for them to hit their marks. That's a long time to hold a grudge. 

Distance in space is usually overcome in Sci-fi by faster-than-light drives, subspace mumbo jumbo, wormholes, warp-speed, teleportation, etc. It's a necessity that some universes ignore (Firefly) to their detriment. Sci-fi has to do some work your brain won't in the suspension of disbelief. Star Wars used to not give a shit about what you thought about anything. But they've since talked about midichlorians and kyber crystals. And they always had the Force (which is just magic) and hyperspace (which is just sci-fi magic) to dismiss the impossible.

Anyway, the Starkiller base is idiotic, and anyone saying this movie was superior to episode VIII or any other Star Wars movie should start thinking about why they like these movies in the first place. They're stupid, bad movies we like despite all that. They're Fast & Furious in space. It's OK to like garbage. Garbage is fun sometimes.

Let's say they built a planet-sized weapon in the same solar system they were bent on destroying even though Hux says they're attacking planets in a system far away. How did its construction go unnoticed? The whole solar system thought it was normal somebody was building a whole new planet? Cloak?  That would still throw off the tidal patterns of nearby planets. It's simply impossible for the thing to have been built anywhere near their intended target. Meanwhile, the natural resources involved in building your planet would mean basically dismantling an entire world, to create a new weaponized one. So we have to take Hux at his word here.

Abrams can't function without an explanation-free MacGuffin. That's his power over his audiences, and he wields it with frustratingly successful results. 

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I always imagined that the Death Star could move faster than light. You don't see any blue engine burns on the Death Star either, but maybe you just never get to see them in the movies. How would Alderaan not see it coming? It'd have to jump in and destroy and then refuel or recharge and jump to its next destination. Maybe that's why it just sat around waiting for the rebels to attack it; it wasn't able to escape the scene of the crime back to its secret location in time.

Kyle Hill has a fun article about Starkiller base here »