I’m not an ENT fan.  I gave up on it shortly after the pilot.  But I have to chime in on the ENT program finale.  It’s neither awful nor brilliant.  It’s just pathetic.

It’s the perfect capstone to the Berman & Braga era, a testament to their dramaturgical tone deafness.  The vast array of missed opportunities and self-congratulatory gestures is just typical of their work these days.

Days?  More like the last few decades.  And that’s what gets me.  They’ve been working in one capacity or another on the Trek planation for almost a generation.   And they still don’t know what they’re doing.

Study the 20-year mission of the USS B&B:  to constantly explore the same old, same old…to seek out weak plots and mental shortcuts…to blandly go to the same ol’ place we keep going to.  Going where no one has gone before?  No way.  It’s hard work.

In the creative decisions that were the foundations of this finale, they demonstrate a fundamental lack of skill or interest in making noteworthy Star Trek.  With B&B, it’s all about killing time.  Fill the time slot.  They insist on a certain kind of Trek story, calling it quality control, to avoid creativity or thought.  Berman himself said, “Star Trek is a formula.”

So, Trek fans, how do you like your formula?

B&B’s attitude comes through loud and clear in the ENT finale.  Check me on this.   “These Are The Voyages….” is the final episode of Enterprise.  But it’s about Commander Riker.

¿Que?

No, really.  Riker is busy noodling a moral crisis, so naturally he’s on the flippin’ holodeck.  He, Commander Troi, and the rest of TNG crew are the only “real” people in the episode.   Basically he’s playing with a holonovel about the holographic crew of the holographic original Enterprise’s final holographic mission.

(“Oh sure, I always fire up a video game whenever I have an existential quandry on my hands.  And if I’m being attacked by alien invaders, I’ll drop everything and make the time.”  C’mon!  Is everyone in the 24th Century that morally abstracted from reality?  Sometimes the holodeck idea feels like a mistake, in many ways like another well-intentioned trope of the Trek universe, namely the Prime Directive.  Cute, clever, problematic, mishandled, and eventually ruined.)

The NX-01 crew, who should be the dramatic focus of the show, are treated as little more than props for Riker’s benefit.  They get the most screen time, but Riker’s moral crisis define the plot structure.   He zips through the events of Archer’s last mission, interacting with the crew, hoping all this will help him solve his problem.

Archer and company are handled with indifference.  Oh sure, Riker and Troi make semi-reverent about these historical figures (from their perspective).  But it all comes off as smug, self-indulgent, and self-absorbed.  Riker’s plight is the only one with any dramatic weight.  Riker and Troi show little, if any, emotional involvement in the fate of Archer’s crew.  Troi mentions in passing, with dull displeasure, it’s a shame Trip dies on this mission.  You can hear the halfhearted shrug in her voice.

Yeah, the show’s most popular character dies.  And it happens in such a pointless, half-assed way.  Not because he was cornered, not because it was necessary to the plot or continuity—he died because B&B ran out of ideas.  They couldn’t find a better way to build some drama, so they laid the foundation for Trip’s death in a casual mention and kept the audience waiting to see how long it’d take them to drop the other shoe.  That’s all it was.  They can’t make the distinction between that and a noble, tragic, inspiring sacrifice like Sydney Carton, Ranger Marcus Cole, or that guy with the ears.  That’s the best they can do.

Even when Archer is about to make history, the big payoff of the entire ENT series, Riker stops the holoprogram—and the story—dead.  Why?  He got what he needed.

His needs.  Screw ours.  That’s the message.  B&B claimed their message was something else, a Valentine card, a tribute to the Trek universe.  They can make that case.  But it doesn’t stack up against the preponderance of evidence.  One series, one cast, became props for another, diminishing one to prop up another.  Their colleagues and their audience are left to fend for themselves.  The finale’s overall subtext is that of a hard plink on the nose:

“Screw you, I got mine.”

The previous storyline of “Demons” and “Terra Prime” was a better coda.  It gave Archer a chance to be heroic, a chance for characters to grow a little, and a glimpse at the birth of the Federation.  They could have gone with that.  Then again, ENT “isn’t the Manny Coto Show.”  They couldn’t let that stand.  They had to stomp that sand castle flat.

They attribute the end of ENT to the overexposure of the entire Trek franchise.  (God, I hate that expression.  They make it sound like a fast food joint.)  Ironically they’d spent years denying such a thing was taking place.  Apparently they changed their minds when the only other alternative was taking responsibility for its poor quality.  And yet everyone knows they killed the goose that laid so many golden eggs.

The only question that remains in my mind is whether they’re that devoted to the crocodile god, as my wife Jamie would say…or are they really that stupid?

Big news, folks:  We’re on the radio!

Jamie and I heard about a radio station back in San Francisco switching to an all-podcast format, basically broadcasting the best contributions from folks on the net.  As one part lark, several parts ambition, we sent in the Afterhell pilot.

KYOU-AM has accepted “Dark Descent.”

AAAAAAAAAH!!!!

Er, I mean…cool.

Ironically we’d been talking about doing some kind of podcast on the website, whether as audio blog or a broadband showcase of individual eps.  I’ve been downloading podcasts for a little while, and it’s been a blast for me.  It’s a really convenient way to get quality, customized content.  (Say that three times fast.  Ouch.)  Anyway it’s gotten me thinking that folks might like some kind of Afterhell podcast.  And hopefully this’ll get us a few more hits.

Meanwhile we’ve been busy even before we found out about KYOU-AM.  This weekend we’re hitting the studio to lay down dialogue tracks for Brian Rust’s “Dying on Stage.”  We had a rehearsal a few weeks ago to nail down comedic timing.  Back in in Massachusetts, Neil Marsh has already started on what folks with a film background might call Second Unit duty.  Things are going well on both sides of the country.

And while the cast and crew here are in the studio, we’re going to let them check out the script a copy of our next episode.  This might be the third or fourth time someone’s asked to read an Afterhell script in progress.

Yeah, right, and the fish that got away was how big….?  No, no, really!

Bamf…sorry for disappearing.

As I’ve said elsewhere, work and illness conspired to eat up what little free time I had left for the last month or so.  It got kind of daunting after a while.  Writing—doing—anything, anything at all has been a physical drain.  It’s getting better.  At least now it doesn’t involve as much caffeine to bluff the flesh and spirit.  Each forward lurch becomes less half-hearted.  Eh.  Whaddaya do?

Speaking of half-hearted, this li’l entry probably won’t be too coherent.  I’ve got a few points, so I’ll be jumping all over the place.

Weather

While the supposedly liberal media lauds the virtues of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, the weather is getting strange out here in the real world.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s dry as a bone, pushing the mercury up to the 75-degree Fahrenheit mark.  Down south in California, it’s raining to the point of flooding.  North and south, glaciers and the polar icecaps are getting smaller.  Melting.

I’m on a marginally regular basis with several people across the country; my wife, with several more people worldwide.  Why are so many people complaining about how weird the weather has been?  It seems as if everyone’s climate is acting screwy.  Granted, anecdotal evidence isn’t entirely useful.  And yet there is a great preponderance of said evidence.

If there’s no such thing as global warming, what the hell’s going on with the weather?

I’ve stumbled on a few reviews and articles that shed light on Crichton’s latest, but this line from David Roberts’ review at Grist Magazine makes a telling point:

But what’s the reality at the core of State of Fear? Crichton’s not asking
us to believe that environmentalists really run a ruthless transnational
cabal, of course. But he is asking us to believe something more fanciful:
that in the real world, they have engineered a global scientific and
political consensus on climate change without one.

Two Girls in Need of Lemons

You’d have to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie to follow my meaning.

Jamie and I went to see it last night.  We have to watch it again.  Not because we liked it.  I mean, we did.  But the whole experience was ruined for us—for everyone else in the theater, for that matter.

Except for two girls.

Well, they sounded like girls.  Giggling, immature, cute in voice if not in conduct, jailbait girls.  Jamie told me (and now you) that only one of them was.  The other one was a grown woman.  I didn’t look.

Much as I try not to contradict my esteemed freckly better half, I must in this case.  Girl #2 might have looked Jamie’s age, but I’m judging it was a girl, an immature female, based on existential instead of phenomenological evidence.  In other words, the airhead sounded too vacuous to be a grown-up.

Anyway, a few rows behind us, at our four o’clock, two girls yakked through the trailers.  Through all three “please silence your cellphone” signs.  Through the whole damn movie.

When a trailer for a new movie about Herbie, the precocious sentient VW Bug that won’t fraggin’ die, was blasting past us, one of them bubbled, “Oh, I love Herbie!”  When a Vogan construction fleet comes to Earth with bureaucratic tidings of steaming hot doom, one of them giggled, “Yup, there’s the Vogons!”  When Marvin made his first appearance, they blurted out, “Marvin!”  Apparently they expected their amygdala-deficient ardor was going to make him wave or something.  At the sight of dolphins, one of them squealed, “Ooh, the dolphins are coming back!  Yay, dolphins!”

As I’d said before, I didn’t look.  Stopping myself from turning and making eye contact was the only way to keep myself from leaping out of my chair and eating their flesh.  I mean, that would’ve been the sensible thing to do, isn’t it?  So there I was, trying to leave such thoughts where they belong.

At work.

Clearly, these girls were convinced that they and they alone were capable of enjoying Douglas Adams’ master work properly.  They prided themselves on knowing the story, knowing where everything in it went, and knowing their knowing that they knew.  In the presence of such sagacity, only a heat-stricken wombat would fail to gouge out its eyes and wail in reverence.

And yet these Hitchhiker mavens didn’t sigh or cheer or praise God for answering that one teeny prayer when “Journey of the Sorcerer” made a triumphant entrance.  They didn’t seem to recognize the original Marvin or the original Arthur Dent when they appeared.  They didn’t wail when Douglas Adams’ face appeared in a semi-subliminal flash.  And they didn’t seem at all aware that some of us were Hitchhiker fans back when it was just a radio show, whose hearts broke when Adams died, who brandished our towels proudly in his memory a year later, and that we’ve been waiting for only 20 bloody years to see this movie.

A ten-year-old boy was also there.  He didn’t say a word.  He made them look stupid.  A gaming console wasn’t even involved.

Girls, word to the unwise.  Nobody in that theater thought you were cool froods who knew where their towels were.  But we did think you were morons.  Several minus billion for being rude, self-absorbed little twits.  j00 F4Il.

Last Refuge of the Scoundrel

            He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot,
but don’t let that fool you.  He really is an idiot.
—Groucho Marx

If you’ve been following my little bloggy rantings, you might remember a few mentions to the neocon mouthpiece Mark Levin.  Wretched little man, sort of like the opposite of a TARDIS.  Big on the outside, really small on the inside, goes absolutely nowhere…unless UN black helicopter territory is considered somewhere.

I was following his show for Media Matters for America for a while, but technical difficulties got in the way for a while.  When I wasn’t able to get captures of his radio show, I figured I could just leave him behind.  He was a big fish in a little pond out on the east coast, I thought.  He’s not like the Pope or Mitch Hedberg, somebody who’s been everywhere and left a positive mark on the world, however small.  I told myself he was best forgotten.

No such luck.  Here’s another far right wingnut with a book out.  This one is a collection of screeds pushing the myth of judicial activism, of liberals making law from the bench.

He can argue his way out of a wet paper bag, sure—but he needs fangs to do it.  His arguments stand up to the light of neither sun nor moon.  Heaven help him in the event of an eclipse.  Without cheap shots, name-calling, or factual distortion, he’d have nothing.  His answer to any caller he disagrees with, “Get off the phone, you big dope!”  When cornered, the best retort he can unload on a worthy opponent is, “Who cares?!”  His witticisms are limited to elementary school scatology and sound board buttons.  His answer to the first anniversary of the breaking of the Abu Ghraib story is singing along with the holiday song parody “Walkin’ Round in Women’s Underwear.”  His ethical and empathic muscles have atrophied.  They work only for call-in sycophants.

He has fans that worship him, people who think ad hominem attacks on his opponents make him a hero and a genius.  There’s the slimmest of chances they might find this single lame-ass blog post on a Google quest.  I doubt it, but they get seriously, painfully, mortally wounded by any slight against their guy.  I can only assume it really hurts them because they get really mad about it, wherever and whoever the source of that slight.  Anyone who fails to squint at the brilliance of their golden idol is called names.  “We called that lib ‘jerk,’ ‘moonbat,’ and ‘loser.’  Then we nailed him on his typos.  That’ll show ‘im.”

Stuff like this used to depress me; to think, grown men and women resort to playground epithets and blind worship to feel good about themselves.  Now it’s just sadly amusing.  They’ve glommed onto the biggest, loudest bully on the block, offering their lunch money, their thinking, and their sycophancy to him just so that nobody else beats them up.  There’s no real concern for America’s future going on.  If someone is reduced to poverty, if a woman is beaten, if a dark-skinned man is tortured, if a child is made into a sexual slave, they don’t make a move.  But if their hero comes yelling into their homes, warning them about an evil conspiracy, they’ll call in and love him to death.

I guess I see the benefits.  It’s easier than hearing out a contrary view.  Easier than actually doing something.  giving someone a sandwich.  Easier than seeing a common darkness within themselves, something we all share.  Easier than holding a kid’s hand.   Instead they dismiss an electrocuted sand N1Gg3R with mockery and laughter, then sacrifice their compassion and their minds to a demagogue, all because they’re afraid of the world.  Poor things.

If they ever bother to approach a cosmic nobody like me, I’ll try not to laugh, I swear.

***

Let’s not end on a dark note, hm?  (For once.)

A quick shoutout to some nice folks.  First, my old friend Frank Shaw in San Jose.  I haven’t buzzed him in, like, a century.  But I think about you and Jeong Hee all the time.  The Mars Attacks! flying saucer toy helps.  Brrr-zap brr-zap!  Ack, ack ACK!  Ack ack!

Second, for my next trick, I’m gonna suck up to a fan.  Maybe not a fan, but it’s nice to know I have a few supporters.  And no money exchanged hands or anything, either.

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from a kind lady named Jessica who was wondering where I’d gone to.  She’d read the stuff on my old Blogger account, but lost track of me.  The way I flitted across two or three blogging services, it was bound to happen to someone.  She tracked me down to the Afterhell website.  Apparently that wasn’t enough to run screaming.   Anyway, I brought her up to date and sent her links to my other blogs.

Now, whenever I get burned out or frustrated, I sneak another look at her e-mail.  I try not to care what people think.  It’s a dangerous thing, especially for folks with pretenses toward art, truth, or individuality.  But it’s good to get some positive feedback, a little support, some warm human contact.

And one thing about e-mail:  You don’t have to worry about finding mysterious strands of long red hair in it.  I just don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I’ll explain later.  Nightie night.   [thud]

People have called me weird all my life. I might have stumbled on further proof.

Like most couples at the end of the workday, yesterday my wife Jamie and I said our hellos and brought each other up to date on what happened to them earlier in the day. She told me about meetings, moving to a new cube, e-mail and memo exchanged re weekly reports. So what did I do that afternoon, she asked. I watched “Freddy vs. Jason” and offered my thoughts.

Boy, am I weird….

I blew off the movie for a long time. I’m into horror these days (in case you couldn’t tell), but I don’t have patience for most horror movie fare. Out of morbid curiosity, I’ve taken occasional glances at the “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13th” franchises. Rolled my eyes. And moved on. In the end, curiosity got the better of my judgement. As usual.

My rationalization for checking out drivel of any kind often involves some combination of the following:

A) It doesn’t cost me anything to try.
B) A snap judgement means very little, but an informed opinion counts for something.
C) I might learn something.
D) Well, how bad can it be?

All four came into play this time. And this time, all four turned out to have some merit. Go fig!

A lot of these observations probably won’t be new or unique to me, but this movie turned out a little better than I expected. Hardly a classic, though. Compared to the nourishing psychic feasts of classic horror movies, “Freddy vs. Jason” is junk food. It’s mostly empty calories. But it has its moments.

Okay, spoiler warnings…in case someone actually cares!!!!

SPOILERS
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Now I’m going to use this token effort at a spoiler buffer to rant a bit.
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<redguy>  Aw, is widdle widdums not in the mood of some stampin’ on the soapbox? Tough cheese, little snuggums. My blog, my rules.
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Okay, so I watched too much “Cow and Chicken.” Not following the reference? Are we unable to keep up, hmmmm? WELL, THAT”S TOO BAD!!!! </redguy>
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All the spoiler nonsense is endemic of Western civilizations adoption of the Elizabethan ethic of dramaturgy, where the unveiling of plot takes on greater emphasis than interpretation. On the other hand, the ancient Greeks had it the other way around, that the interpretation of the artist and the audience took precedence. You’d think from all the gratuitous remakes Hollywood pumps out so much, you’d think they must’ve hung out with the same Greeks. But whether it’s SF, sports, or soaps, spoilers are all that matter. Concern over spoilers are such horse-hockey, I swear. I mean, seriously! If people were this conscientious about all media consumption, we wouldn’t have to worry about impartial juries! F***ing nuisance.
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Whew. That was fun. I’m almost too tired now to get on with the “Freddy vs. Jason” thing. Okay, okay! Lookie, I’m dropping the other shoe!

You can probably tell from the title, the film’s mainly a bone thrown at fanboys. “Who’d win in a fight, Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees?” That’s high concept for ya, folks.

But the writers threw in something else. A little psychological subtext. This is a carryover from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies, where character motivations fed plot as well as token attempts at surrealism. The writers of “Freddy vs. Jason” kept that aspect. And that was a smart move. It lent some intellect to an otherwise pointless gorefest.

As established in earlier films, the parents of Elm Street have gone to extreme lengths to stop Freddy Krueger. Their conspiracy of silence, to conceal and prevent the existence of Krueger, has taken downright Stalinist extremes. Kids who know too much about him have been carted off to a private asylum, drugged to keep them from dreaming. (How they’re expected to get any rest without going into a REM state…is totally beyond me.) The town has censored any reference to Krueger in official records and newspapers.

But like most ideas, Freddy Krueger resurfaces. Now forgotten and trapped in Hell, he hatches a plan to revive the town’s memory of him and free himself. He chooses a fellow lost soul. A fellow killing machine.

…with all the personality of a defective Cuisinart. Enter–or rather, exit– Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked, machete-swinging 4F nutboy of the “Friday the 13th” movies.

No, I don’t have much regard for this character. I mean, he’s not really a character, is he? Even Michael Myers, the equally anonymous and unstoppable knife-wielder from the “Halloween” movies, had more personality.

That’s where the cleverness in the original “Elm Street” concept salvages something from even the “Friday the 13th” movies. In this flick we see the true motivations, however shallow, of Jason Voorhees. We get a glimpse of his childhood (or at least Jason’s view of it): a mistreated Down’s Syndrome child, hounded and tormented by others, powerless to resist the soul-twisting influence of an oppressive mother during the late 1950’s.

Oppressive mother. The 1950’s. Did anyone pay Robert Bloch for this?

But anyway, this explains a lot. There’s no justification for his puritanical killing spree, but it does provide context. He’s acting on the lopsided ethics of his upbringing. He doesn’t know better. He didn’t have the chance. At heart, Jason is a victim. Without hope or direction. And out of control.

Of course I’m reminded of one of the better lines from Thomas Harris’ “Red Dragon.” To paraphrase: I feel for him as a child. As an adult, he needs someone to blow the sick f*** out of his socks.

And I couldn’t help finding a certain aptness to the vulnerabilities that inevitably brought these two monsters down. Oppressed and submerged by wills greater than his, Jason is always left at the botton of Crystal Lake. Sexual deviant Freddy Krueger is powerless against fire, the force that deprived him of his bodily existence, the only thing that gave his lfe meaning.

I’m sure a lot of the symbolism and Jungian resonance I find in this horror schlock-fest wasn’t intentional. But hey, when you’re watching crap–even good crap–you start looking for psychological footholds.

It’s been a century, maybe even three, since I resurfaced and kept folks in the loop.

We’re making a slight shift in the production schedule.  Originally I wanted to tackle Vol 2 one story at a time, but we’re going to maximize our resources.  While “Sleepless Days” is still in post, we’re taking Brian Rust’s “Dying on Stage” into the production phase.  The main characters have been cast, so we’re scheduling a rehearsal and pencilling in a date for studio time.  If the new schedule works out, we’ll have principal dialogue recorded by mid-May.

Meanwhile, I just finished writng the last script for Volume 2.  The working title is “Deep in the Red.”  I don’t want to reveal too much about it, but it’ll be in keeping with the dark comedic tone we seemed to have stumbled on.  If I did my job, this one might freak a few people out.

And while hammering that story out, I started a treatment for yet another story.  Looking into the future:  It could go on Volume 3, maybe even Volume 4 if the length demands it.  We’ve touched base with prospective writers while working on new stuff of our own, so now we have…let’s see, about nine stories in various stages coming down the pipe.  Ten, if we include the final episode which would wrap up the series. 

If we don’t slow down, we’ll never catch up on the backlog!  Ack!

Things are moving along steadily. Here’s the latest on the cd art for the second CD of audio dark fantasty stories that’s in production. The first is for the cover, leaving plenty of room right now for text and changes. The second will be on the inside tray, the ring holding the CD in place falling between them. A little over the top? Yes, but that’s one of the goals. 😉

Also in the near future expect some products to appear thanks to Cafepress. Journals, t-shirts and all that good stuff to go along with the show.

They get elected.

Editorial:  “No. 1?” Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages
Commentary:  “Struggling with Our Own Inhumanity,” SFGate
“The New Face of America?”, ACLU
New Poll Finds Bush Priorities Are Out of Step With Americans, New York Times

And thank God this one didn’t.
“Jael Phelps Says Gays Should Die,” Crooks & Liars

Some things, you can’t just laugh off.

But could anyone use a GMail invite?
[ducks]  INCOMING!!!!!!

Man, I’ve been swamped.  Being able to set aside 90 minutes just to watch a schlocky vampire flick felt like an accomplishment.
I woke up this morning to an interesting wrinkle.  Not to brag, but…I just got a GMail account.

It was my crazy scheme to contribute something to GMail4Troops.  I signed up for one and forgot all about it.  The first thing in my mailbox every morning is usually a posting from some mailing list or a private e-mail from a friend who hasn’t seen me since the Hyborian Age.  This time…I found an old ticket for the cyber-lottery was actually worth something.

I’ve spent the morning going on a crazy unsubscribing/resubscribing spree, convincing myself this was going to help me clear out the junk in my main mailbox.  I just hope I haven’t screwed anything up….

 I’m knee-deep in work for upcoming episodes, so just a few quick notes:

Tuesday was major studio time this week.  The rough mix of “Sleepless Days” is almost complete.  The hardest part was getting into the studio, actually.  Illness and weather kept me well out of it.  And I had to climb five flights of stairs once I got there.  Fortunately I wasn’t there to do voice work!  Anyway, it’ll take two more mini-sessions, one to add effects, another to add music and polish the chrome.  Or in this case, add cobwebs.

Next week will see a new edition of the first Afterhell CD, sporting its own UPC code and a lower price.  “Dark Descent” will retail for $12.99, about three dollars off our original price.  (I wanted to make it $13, but maybe it was too obvious….)   Our CafePress shop will have Afterhell swag for the brave, but our CDs will be available through CD Baby and, eventually, Amazon.com.  Spread the word!