Sadly it was marred by an ending that would have embarrassed a Star Trek TNG writer. Torchwood might as well have saved the day by reversing the polarity on the deflector shields. It was that bad. I can think of at least five preferable and more plausible endings: (Light spoilers follow)

The Ultimate Creepy Ending

The aliens win. The government hands over the children as promised.

I actually thought this might happen since Episode 5 left so little time to resolve the story. Sadly, Davies just reversed polarity on the deflector shields instead. :-(

The Independence Day Ending

Torchwood hands over some children but first infects them with a virus that kills the aliens. This would have fit well with the general theme of choosing between awful and even more awful alternatives that underlay the whole miniseries. It’s closest to the ending they actually did, but would have been at least somewhat more plausible if it had been set up right, and somewhat more time had been devoted to it.

The Good Star Trek Ending

A Star Trek: Best of Both Worlds variant could have somehow used Clement’s connection to the 456 to reveal a weakness Torchwood could exploit. As is, he just proved to be a colossal red herring with no real purpose in the story at all.

The Hollywood Blockbuster Ending

Episode 5 goes in a completely different direction with Torchwood somehow invading and destroying the enemy ships with lots of ray guns and big space battles.

The Turning the Tables Ending

More in keeping with the theme of the series (and on a much cheaper special effects budget) Torchwood takes advantage of the aliens’ addiction to manipulate them. Once you know someone’s a drug addict, and you control the supply of their drug, you can make them do just about anything. No reason to think the 456 are any different aside from their drug of choice.

No Deus ex Machinae Please

I suspect the bottom line is that Davies just wrote himself into a corner; and had too little time and too few pages left to resolve the conflict between the 456 and Torchwood. After all, the real focus of the episode was on the conflict between Torchwood and the government. Nonetheless a little more prior thought could have told pretty much the same story with a much more satisfying ending. Instead, it was more like a great murder mystery until the author introduces a new character on the second-to-last page and reveals this never before mentioned individual as the culprit. Davies can do better.

Lots of folks and critics seem to have liked this movie, and indeed liked it more than almost any other Star Trek movie/episode; and that’s the key point. The people who never liked or cared about Star Trek before, didn’t really notice or care what Abrams just did to the characters and universe they grew up with. They just admired the modern special effects, the well-plotted action, and the better-than-the-original-series acting. But those of us who did love Star Trek since 1966 because we had been able to see beyond the bad makeup and the occasionally corny dialog to the real heart of the show? We walked out of the movie with a very bad taste in our mouths that for once didn’t come from the popcorn. Spoilers follow.

At first I thought the destruction of ****** and the death of ******* ****** (if you’ve seen the movie you know what I’m talking about. If not, I won’t spoil it.) were necessary. Suddenly what had been a ho-hum experience, as prequels usually are, picked up. There was real tension. After all, if they could do that in complete contravention to everything we knew about the Star Trek universe from the original series on, then absolutely anything could happen. In fact, that’s probably why Abrams wrote that into the script in the first place. And since it was done with an appropriate amount of time travel, it wasn’t a complete retcon.

However, I kept waiting for another bit of time travel to reverse the problem, much like Picard and crew went back in time to reverse the Borg takeover of Earth in the single greatest Star Trek movie ever made (though I won’t argue too hard if you prefer Wrath Of Khan). In fact, I don’t think that’s the first or last time we’ve seen a double time travel restore of the future. (Bonus points for anyone who can list all the episodes in which this occurred.) Unfortunately, the expected reversion of the disaster never happened; and while that’s in some ways more realistic, it also means that Abrams just threw five series, 10 movies, and years of people’s lives and work in the garbage. Rodenberry, Barrett, Okuda, Berman, Stewart, Shatner, Doohan, and too many others to name deserved better than that.

Abrams has pretty much eliminated 5 of the 6 Star Trek TV series from continuity, pretty much everything after Enterprise. Picard never left France if he was born at all. The Borg are still in the Delta Quadrant. Harry Mudd probably died in a Klingon jail. The Death of Tasha Yar? Unlikely. The Dominion War? The Maquis? Voyager’s trip to the Delta Quadrant? Deep Space 9? Never happened. Reunification? Pretty much impossible now, I’d say. In fact, if we take the events in the movie to their logical conclusion, the Federation is going to lose at least one and probably the first of the upcoming wars with the Klingons. Earth’s going to be a Klingon colony. The Alpha quadrant is going to be split up between Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and Ferengi.

Yes, there were some cheesy episodes over the years. (Half-naked Aryan joggers anyone?) No series can extend for hundreds of episodes and 40 years without hitting an occasional wrong note. But there was a lot more good than bad, and all of that is now just a distant memory. In the Star Trek universe, they’re not even that. Abrams should have left Kirk and crew in peace and gone forward instead of back. If Star Trek taught us anything over the years, it’s that we need to look forwards to the future, not backwards to the past. A new series or movie set 10 years after Voyager might even have been able to do this particular story without stomping all over established future history. Or if one had to go back and revisit the characters we all remember, it would have been better to wait 50 years, and then do an Ultimate Spider-Man or Sandman Mystery Theatre like reboot of the entire franchise that didn’t take place in the same universe. But this? This is the ultimate fuck you to the people who’ve kept Star Trek Alive for more than four decades.

It’s out September 9 according to Amazon. I don’t have any other details yet, but I’m digging.

Looks like it’s set sometime in the future. According to Amazon.co.uk,

Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.

Al Billings somehow snagged an advance copy, but doesn’t reveal much except that:

The book came with a CD of music, which I must say was surprising. It says it is “IOLET: Music from the World of Anathem.” There are seven tracks:

1. Aproximating Pi
2. Thousander Chant
3. Proof Using Finite Projective Geometry
4. Cellular Automata
5. Quantum Spin Network
6. Sixteen Color Prime Generating Automation
7. Deriving the Quadratic Equation

Each of these is between four and eleven and a half minutes long. There is a note with it stating that “In order to conform to the practices of the avout, this disc contains music composed for and performed by voices alone.”

I’ve just listened to several of the songs on this CD and, frankly, this is some weird shit. I say this without reservation. The musical styles are all over the map except that they all only use human voices (and occasionally hands). Some of it is similar to Western, Christian, styles of chanting. Other tracks are more Classical vocal arrangements with singing. The rest of the tracks seem to be heavily influenced by Eastern, Buddhist, styles of chanting, especially Tibetan Buddhism with its use of harmonics and overlaying voices. It varies quite a bit from song to song. Additionally, when there are recognizable words, they are not in English (nor in any language that I recognize). “Celluar Automata” is the weirdest track of this sort with multiple voices weaving in and out, along with some clapping and exclamations in an unknown language. “Thousander Chant” would be at home on some of the collections of Tibetan chanting that I have and whoever is performing it is obviously trained in the throat chanting used by Tibetans and others in Asia.

“Anathem” is apparently a made-up word (like Cryptonomicon) though it reminds one of both anathema and anthem.

Are we finally going to find out once and for all what’s up with Enoch Root? maybe not. According to Gretta Cook, who saw him speak at Google Kirkland,

He’s writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It’s set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It’s really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books. He’s nearly finished writing it, and if he doesn’t finish by the end of the calendar year he’ll have to give some money back. If everything proceeds according to schedule, it should be available in stores in about a year.

Needless to say I promptly ordered the first few episodes (along with my wife’s anniversary present). Now if they’d waited until a year+ went buy to release, I’m sure I would have already seen it on the Sci-Fi channel or downloaded it from YouTube, or in some other way grabbed hold of a copy. But giving viewers what they want when they want it? That gets me to open my wallet. How brilliant! If only Hollywood were this smart.

There are a couple of caveats. As far as I can tell, the DVDs are only available in the UK so far. However amazon.co.uk will ship to the States. Presumably other retailers will as well. Furthermore, it’s region 2 encoded, which means U.S. viewers either need a region-free DVD player or a tool like Mac the Ripper to make a region-free copy first. This still isn’t ideal, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

My belief was shaken a little bit at the beginning of the episode when Desmond appeared to have made a complete circle going due west. However, if he was navigating by the compass that could easily have turned him around. It’s obvious something funny is going on with the magnetic field on the island. What the others told Michael at the end of the episode also suggests that. (Even if they were lying, they presumably want him to get somewhere in particular.) If only Desmond knew how to navigate by the stars instead of the compass.

Which brings up another point: if they were on another planet, then presumably someone on the plane knows enough about the constellations, to recognize that they’re on a different planet. That they haven’t suggests that they are indeed on earth, and not too incredibly far in the future. And of course the very last scene strongly suggests that they aren’t that far away from reality.

Then again what the heck is up with the four toes? I do remember once hearing that over time Homo sapiens might lose their little toe to evolution. How widespread that belief is (or whether it’s at all plausible) I don’t know.

P.S. Our Mutual Friend is notable for the train crash that occurred while Dickens was writing it. Plus the plot involves a man who was thought to be dead by drowning but wasn’t. Coincidence? I suspect not.

What I saw nearly blew me out of my seat. Even my Who-hating wife agreed. This is a great show.

I’m sure this is all old news to U.K. viewers, but this series is astonishing. It’s faster paced, more exciting, and has far superior production values to anything we’ve ever seen before. The whole series is vastly edgier and more compelling than it ever was. While we used to get episodes about the stupidity of war or the stupidity of pacifism (depending on who was writing that week) now we get episodes about prime ministers who lie to the public about nonexistent “massive weapons of destruction” to launch wars in order to fill their own pocketbooks. (Where did they ever get that idea? :-))

Christopher Eccleston is a wonderful choice to play the doctor. He’s got just the right level of mania for the part. And while he still maintains the humor that always characterized the previous doctors at their best, he’s got a new deeply tortured side as well. This is a doctor who experiences the full gamut of human emotions. Most importantly this is a doctor who’s exoperienced failure in way the other doctors never did. They could be clownish and silly but always intelligent and powerful. They could be alone but never lonely. They never evinced fear or hate or sadness. They were peeved but not angry, annoyed but not spiteful. Eccleston’s doctor is for the first time ever a character with some real problems. He’s moving a million miles an hour to keep his past from catching up with him. The previous eight doctors did interesting things. This is perhaps the first doctor who is an interesting person.

Following along those lines, the new series is a far more adult show than it’s ever been before. I can imagine Tom Baker delivering a line like “It’ll never last. He’s gay and she’s an alien”; but the BBC would never have broadcast that before. While there’s still plenty of straight-through excitement for the kiddies, the deeper themes are very grown-up: war, genocide, racism, ethnic cleansing. Class is front and center in this series, from his companion Rose (Billie Piper) who has all the signifiers of modern Britain’s lower class, to the hotel workers in The End of the World, to the maid in The Unquiet Dead, the backbenchers in World War III, even the Bill Gates-type in Dalek. This show reeks of modern British class anxiety in a way that’s unfortunately likely to confuse and befuddle American audiences.

Most importantly all these issues seem to be treated with the darkness they deserve: not the cartoonish “War is bad” platitudes found in most children’s programming. Watching the Doctor express his almost irrational, visceral hatred for the Daleks in episode 6 is truly disturbing. Maybe events yet to be revealed will explain why the Doctor is now simultaneously both deeply afraid of and intensely hateful of the Daleks. Still it’s a total shift from his more rational approach in previous series. He used to treat the daleks much as one might treat a rabid dog: you put it down because you have to, but you certainly don’t take pleasure in doing so. This episode definitely makes you rethink the whole-Doctor-Dalek relationship over the years. (By the way: if more is revealed about just what’s going on here after episode 6, please don’t spoil it in the comments. I’m still working my way through the series.)

Which brings us to another point: with the partial exception of the key to time series, Doctor Who has always been a relatively self-contained set of stories. Each story was aplit over two to six episodes, but it didn’t really matter what order you watched the stories in. Companions came and went, and the Doctor regenerated; but otherwise what happened in one story didn’t much affect what happened later. The new series moves away from that in both directions. The individual episodes are now about twice as long, but they usually tell a complete story. Extended stories seem to last two episodes at most, and usually take only one This makes the show much faster paced and more exciting than it used to be. In hindsight, a lot of the old four-episode stories could have been compressed to 45 minutes, and would have been better off for it. However, on the longer side, there’s now an ongoing plot that extends over multiple stories. Most importantly, what the heck was the Time War? Presumably more will be revealed in seasons two and three.

The one downside is plotting. In just the first six episodes, I think I’ve encountered almost every science fiction cliche imaginable. The End of the World managed to rip off the worst parts of The Phantom Menace, Star Trek, and Galaxy Quest! at the same time! The scene with the big spinning tear drops was so bad I can almost believe it was deliberate satire, but if so it didn’t work. Even five billion years in the future, nobody, but nobody, is going to hide the emrgency reset switch for a space station behind a long corridor of spinning clubs! The number of magic technobabble dei ex machina in this series would embarass Rick Berman.

But I’m quibbling here. Plot and hard SF have never been the strong point of any Doctor Who series. It’s always been about the characters and the wild, almost psychedelic experience of the show. The Daleks may not move as fast as Darth Maul, or have flaming swords and incredible command of kendo; but somehow they’ve always conveyed more menace. Doctor Who has always been about atmosphere, character, and humor; and on those fronts the new series more than delivers. At the same time it ramps up the sheer excitement to new heights. Maybe a fifteen year hiatus was just what the doctor ordered.

• Number 3: Lucy Lawless (D’anna Biers)
• Number 5: Matthew Bennett (Aaron Doral)
• Number 6: Tricia Helfer
• Number 8: Grace Park (Sharon Valeri/Boomer)
• Number unknown: Rick Worthy (Simon, the doctor from The Farm, Season 2, Episode 5)
• Number unknown: Callum Keith Rennie (Leoben Conoy, Cylon tortured by Starbuck in Flesh and Bone, Season 1, Episode 8)

Am I missing anyone?

I am assuming that Conoy was lying when he claimed Adama was a Cylon. I could be wrong about that. We still don’t know what the Cylons actually want. From what Number 6 has said, it seems possible they are deliberately avoiding destroying Galactica and the fleet to protect Sharon and Helo’s child.

Until now I thought there were two possibilities to explain Number 6′s presence in Baltar’s head:

1. It’s all in his head. The guilt has simply driven him mad.
2. The Cylons planted Number 6 in his head somehow.

However now that we know Baltar is also in Caprica 6′s head, I think something else is going on. My current theory is that something happened to mix these two up together in each other’s heads. What it is hasn’t been revealed yet; but I don’t think it’s a Cylon plot (unless just maybe it was supposed to be a one way transfer and accidentally went both ways) and I think it’s too much of a stretch to claim they’re both crazy in exactly the same way. There’s a reason this is happening (other than simply a plot device) and that reason has not been revealed yet. Perhaps it’s been hinted at, but if so I missed it. However, even though the Number 6 in Baltar’s head is a Cylon, she’s not in contact with the rest of the Cylons.

There’s another possibility, which is not necessarily exclusive of the above: Baltar is a Cylon sleeper agent, possibly one not even known to most Cylons, Number 13. I’m not sure about that, but it would explain a lot. Of course if this is true he’s in even deeper denial than Sharon was. And if it is true, why did Number 6 have to subvert him in the first place? This is a long shot.