Superhero Movie, or not

So the plan was to go to Superhero Movie tonight. I know it's going to be a bad, mass-produced comedy full of cheap laughs and physical humor. I saw the hero throw the old lady out of the path of a bus and into a chipper-shredder. But I've seen one of the more recent Scary Movie flicks on TV and it was entertaining in a cheap laughs and slapstick way. I also just wanted to see a movie. Maybe it would make for a review.

Yeah, that was going to happen. I was going to go to the first evening show, by which time it should be dark and my pasty skin would thus not burst into horrific flames. I would not have to scream and pinwheel my arms as I staggered, flames trailing behind, over to the point where the camera could cut away for a second and then a dummy wearing the same clothes could be knocked into the river. I can take a little pain, but I don't think I have two of the exact same outfit so I would have to set myself on fire in the clothes that go into the river, then strip naked in front of everybody, dress the dummy in the still-burning clothes, and then shove it into the river and go home naked. Maybe I'm just lazy, but that seems like a lot of hassle.

That was the plan until I got on my email and saw that my City of Heroes friends had a planned event and their guy with radiation powers had to back out at the last minute. Others could substitute, but it would have meant that the group was still missing a key component. Plus I'm a sucker. No problem. I'll go to the early showing and be home by 7:30 for the event.

I went on the internet and the internet told me that Superhero Movie is showing at 5:00 and has a running time of about 85 minutes. Once you lop off the commercials at the beginning and embedded in the movie as product placement, we'll be left with Leslie Nielsen and an interchangeable teenage boy in spandex having a five minute conversation about gladiator movies. The scheduling works out.

It's spring now, almost kind of if it wasn't where I actually live. I live by Lake Huron. The warmer seasons all drop back about a month and a half or two months. It can be pretty cold here through June because the prevailing winds come off the still-cold lake. We start to get spring in April and May before they shift, then they do and it's all cold again. When I was little it snowed in late June. Fall trails on and it can be pretty warm during the day up through the middle of October, even into November in a good year, but the nights cool off very fast. Evenings are chilly in mid-August most of the time.

So late March in town usually means it's very bright outside and not quite as cold as February. I haven't braved full daylight in quite a while and I know if I put off seeing the movie I'll probably forget all about it until it's gone. Films do not last long in the two local theaters with their one owner. I've missed some because they were only in town for a single weekend. I got all my layers together, got my Unabomber look going on, and hopped in the car.

I passed a police car headed the other direction and the cop gave me a funny look, but it's bright out. I'm allowed to wear shades in this level of illumination. Drove to the theater with no parking lot except the public lot down by the river half a block away and got out of the car sweating like crazy, ten minutes in advance of the showtime. I walked across the two busy streets, one with a bad blind corner that I try to avoid, and came up on the theater. There's my film's poster, with a guy that's supposed to look like Hugh Jackman in the one corner. Above it are the showtimes: 4:25, 7:00, 9:30.

Thanks, internet. I glanced ahead and saw on the door that they opened at 3:45, which sounds about right for a showing at 4:25. Yeah, it's not a mistake. So much for that plan. Maybe tomorrow. It can't be Sunday evening. I have an event I signed up for in the first place to attend.

Stargate: SG-1. The Ark of Truth

So that's what season eleven would have been like. You know, it was really, really good. If you just saw the movie from '94, ignore that. The Egyptian guys are all dead. Their badass soldiers are friendlies now. The false gods were all overthrown. The friendly aliens from the early seasons are also all dead, but they handed over their technology first. The following is the continuity that matters.

History as we know it on Earth is mostly the same, except that until around 5000 years ago the evil aliens who possessed people ruled as living gods. We successfully rebelled and they left, never to return. Then we went out and found them again, killing their head bad guy in the process. This 1) wrecked their political unity and left them more fighting each other than us and 2) told them not only that we existed but that we had reached a level where handwaves and magic at the end of an episode can defeat them. They were the main bad guys on the series for five years.

They're all dead or in hiding now. Along the way of kicking them out of power, we met some ancient aliens, the Asgard. They're Greys, but pinkish. The Asgard knew us from way back before there was an us. It turns out that millions of years ago, humanity evolved. Millions of years early, that is. This species explored the galaxy, created crazy wild technology, explored at least two other galaxies, made friends with the Asgard, the Nox (who we see rarely), and the Furlings (who we have never seen). The Asgard live in yet another galaxy and seem to have been fighting the evil possessing people and posing as gods crowd. Their tech is considerably better, but they are fighting an enemy in their own galaxy, and also losing the race to keep their species alive. So Asgard help is limited, though they become more helpful as the series goes on.

The Asgard's enemy is the Replicators. They're pure machines that exist only to create more of themselves. Since their numbers are limitless and they feed on energy weapons, the Asgard were pretty screwed against them. They have a mental block that made it impossible for them to conceive of projectile weapons, maybe as a result of all being zillionth-generation clones downloaded into new bodies time and time again. We beat them too, using some of the first humans' technology.

These first humans, the Ancients, were just like us but with more technology. But they were decimated by a great plague which wiped out almost all live in the galaxy. The survivors built the weapon we used to wipe out the Replicators to reboot live in the galaxy. Apparently they arranged things so that the human form would re-evolve. Then they went off and ascended to a higher plane of existence where they live on as energy beings.

But before they did that, they had a bit of a donnybrook amongst themselves. It turns out that the Ancients weren't all sweetness and light. The good guys believed in learning, science, reason, and (and this is the clincher) free will. The latter is philosophically dubious, but it provides a good deal of narrative space for them to still be around and watching, but refusing to help out of respect for our free will. This can fit into their worldview if you allow that one must be persuaded by evidence, not coerced.

The bad guys, the Ori, were Ancients who disagreed. They believed in power for its own sake and wanted to be worshipped as gods because they could harvest the energies generated by that worship to further increase their own power. They created a religion that amounts to a well-veiled Space Christianity (though you could make arguments for Space Islam or any other aggressive monotheism too). Most of the Ori seem to have been located in a distant galaxy, and there they did battle with the Ancients. The Ancients lost the war due to greater numbers (which seems to be why the Ancients lose everything) and the fact that the Ori were harvesting brain-happies to throw at them which the Ancients presumably refused to do. The Ancients made a stand for integrity and proclaimed that they would rather be destroyed than abandon the cornerstone of their beliefs.

The Ancients eventually managed to isolate the Ori in their one galaxy and set things up so that they could not act further against the Ori unless the Ori used their ascended being mojo in this galaxy. They could, however, be invited in by normal beings of this galaxy.

So after the evil false god alien possessors are out of the picture, and the Replicators are out of the picture, SG-1 needs a new villain. That's when the evil Ancients get invented and I have to wonder how many of the writers are some kind of atheist because the Ori religion is very, very dead on. We get to hear it from their own mouths many times. The possessors just cowed people with shows of force and superior technology that they called magic. The Ori actually built up a philosophy complete with priests, promises of an afterlife, hellfire, etc.

Our Heroes discovered an Ancient communications device and accidentally got their brains beamed to its other end in the Ori galaxy. Now that the Ori have a legitimate, mortal plane excuse, they start using all their knowledge to build ships to launch a vast crusade. They create artificial black holes to power gigantic Stargates they can fly ships through and generally get a complete advantage over all we small mortals. They unleash plagues, burn people alive, preach a lot, and show off through their mortal tools, the Priors. A Prior is more or less a guy that the Ori give lots of special powers, but he's not actually ascended so he doesn't break the rules. They they conceive and implant in the uterus of one of Our Heroes their very own Space Jesus. She's a super Prior plus.

In the off chance Kim ever finds this blog, she's going to go ballistic many, many times reading this post. Good thing she doesn't like the internet.

Over the course of the last season of the show find out that one of the Ancients realized that the Ori would come back through those gigantic loopholes some day. So he de-ascended himself and went to work on a weapon that could kill ascended beings, who are otherwise immortal and invulnerable. He was making good progress, but another Ancient caught him and locked him away in stasis.

Our Heroes found him, unfroze him, managed to make the weapon and send it off to the Ori galaxy. All the Ori are killed, but their priors still have powers and Space Jesus survived. Also their armies and ships didn't go away, so the war continues. For that matter, it intensifies since the Priors seem to think that the Ori not setting fire to the Space Vatican like they usually do is a sign of disfavor.

So we're in dire straits. Then Space Jesus dies and ascends. Now she has all the mojo the Ori used to have to share amongst themselves.

Remember that weapon? Turns out that's not the real weapon. Myrddin (Merlin) made that one, sure. But he also created a thing called the Ark of Truth, or at least knew about it if others made it. It's a box, and if you open it it will convince you of the truth of anything it's programmed to. Except it can only do this if the things you program it to convince people of are actually true.

So SG-1 is off to the Ori galaxy to get the Ark of Truth. Along the way, their bosses who have doubts about the Ark enact a plan to make Replicators and unleash them against the forces of the Ori. Only they get loose on our ship instead. This is the main conflict for the action-oriented part of the movie. Meanwhile down on the planet, the science-minded part of the team, sort of, finds the Ark thanks to what they think are memories left behind by Merlin when he borrowed the brain of a team member for a while.

They find the Ark, but are then immediately taken prisoner. The Priors torture them, and Space Jesus and her Space Pope get to dialog menacingly. At this point, Merlin's old foe Morgan La Fey shows up. It turns out she's been posing as Merlin ever since he died for real to help them along. She's come to realize that Merlin was right to want to fight the Ori, but for helping them the other Ancients exiled her. Despite the fact that we mortals did them a big favor by killing off the Ori. The smart guy on the team implores her to help them directly and damn the rules, since it's the right thing to do. She agrees, but Space Jesus has all the power of all the previous Ori. She'd wipe the floor with Morgan. It's up to Our Heroes to crack open the Ark and show the truth to just one Prior. They're all linked, so when that happens every Prior in the galaxy will get the message. This apparently breaks the connection between the Ori and their worshippers.

Then we have our grand, final confrontations and they're excellent. Stargate has always been pretty good at building up the tension for the last five minutes, and this is no exception. Space Jesus's mother distracts her and the Space Pope while the smart guy figures out how to turn on the Ark. It gets cracked open right in Space Pope's face and he's bathed in a white light. Space Jesus claims she still has enough power to burn them all, and presumably given time she can rebuild. The Ori don't seem to have too much trouble making new Priors out of willing hosts.

At this point, Morgan steps in and they have a brief but intense CGI fight. I'm not really doing it justice, but it's an incredible finale and for a fantasy series it comes out with a decent moral too. This is the only time the series has ever succeeded in articulating the good Ancients' reasons for how they believed in a way the audience could buy, but they must have been saving up because it's a rousing success. It amounts to a reason bomb going off and destroying the gods in one stroke. It's even uplifting. Voltaire would be proud.

There are a few clinkers along the way. I'm not sure the Replicator subplot was really worth it. It seems more like an excuse to have some space battles, but the tension is good. I can believe the team's bosses would think of something like that, but it adds more flash than substance. I could have gone for more ascend being telekinesis fights myself, or more speeches about reason and evidence, but it's still a thorough success at what it's trying to do. It's a worth end for the plot that took up two years of shows, and done well enough that it doesn't feel like a long episode or something meant to be cut into several.

The New Lost

Much, much better. We're back to a psychological thriller with Ben manipulating everyone, and one of his plans (at least, maybe two) is collapsing. It's great, but I think I'm going to miss Mira Furlan.

I say maybe two of Ben's plans went awry, because this would hardly be the first time Ben's sent people to their deaths. So far as we know, whoever Ben considered a good person from the ship could already be on the island.

I was surprised to see the ship's crew practically tell Michael they were there to kill, and in large numbers. This raises questions about what Faraday and Charlotte were doing at the Tempest. Is it to Widmore's and Ben's advantages both for the gas to be disabled? If Widmore is going to kill everyone but Ben anyway, why be squeamish about the gas? Maybe just to deny Ben recourse to it. I could see that.

seaQuest: Better than Martians

Originally aired: January 2, 1994

We open on a montage of doctored stock footage of 50s-era rockets launching and red-tinted footage from the Apollo missions to the Moon. I understand what they're trying to do, but it's such a transparent copy and paste job that they just don't pull it off at all. It turns out this is a news broadcast from Earthcast News. The guest star voiceovers about how his mission was to map the Martian polar ice and how some people said it was a waste of money that could have been better spent elsewhere. I hear you, guest star. Mapping the Martian poles could be done by satellite. In fact, we sent one to do it. The extra expense of sending humans and safely returning them is very questionable. Guest star voiceovers that these people have a point. Thank you, guest star.

Then he says it's ok because it's a PR event. Not really, he says it's an inspiration to a generation of explorers to spend three years of their lives with three other people in a tiny man-can in space. One wonders how they passed the time. But he means it's a PR event. I don't necessarily object to heightening the profile of science or that sort of thing, but four hundred billion dollars? Granted that's 1993 money. Given our current situation, by 2019 that will only buy a homeless kid a cheeseburger with no cheese or meat.

We pan off the screen to show everyone on the bridge, or every extra they could cram in there plus O'Neil and Ortiz. Everyone is gaping at the broadcast like they've never seen the news before, or they're about to see the first steps on Mars at least. We know they're not, since it's clear from the broadcast that the "Martian" footage is all a year or two old. So why do we care? Why do they care? I don't think a lot of people would still be awestruck by the Moon landing footage in 1972, and isn't that about what we're talking about here? Crocker wanders in and tries to say something, probably about Texas, to Ortiz. Nobody is moving.

We cut to somewhere on the lower decks where the science contingent is doing the same thing. Or rather a much smaller group of extras is. Lucas wanders up in a grayish jersey and checks out the chest of a blonde extra that looks older than Hitchcock, and not in a good way. Then again, how long has Lucas been stuck under water? At some point, anything with breasts must start to look good. If he ogles Crocker in the finale, I'll give the writers credit for thinking of this.

Krieg comes up and sticks a finger under Lucas's chin, pulling it towards the news because...why? And isn't that the most insulting way possible to redirect somebody's attention? Jonathan Brandis's chin comes to an extremely fine point and Krieg could have cut his finger off, but that's beside the point. I can believe him being this condescending, but for Lucas to just take it is a bit much. Did he learn his lesson about standing up for himself last episode or not?

Krieg loses interest and Lucas's eyes go right back to the jumpsuit stuffers on that woman pushing forty. That's not really fair. She's probably twenty-five, but by Hollywood casting standards she's downright homely.

We cut again, to the Ward Room. Ford is punching things into his laptop-like thing as if it were an adding machine. The camera pans across a pile of folders and crap to Hitchcock, who is spellbound by the TV. Ford looks up at the TV and becomes intensely interested himself because TVs in 2019 must include photon-administered cocaine or something to get that level of fascination out of so many people at once.

Water outside. CGI Darwin is clicking and swimming. Stock footage of a reef. We pan over to cgi divers as Bridger and Westphalen voice over. Nathan is all into the reef. Look at that reef! The growth is incredible! It's like they rammed a huge hand full of reef viagra into its throat and we're not going to invent that until next season after we fight the giant crocodile! OMFG! LOL!

Westphalen wants to go back in. She says Nathan only wants to stay out to avoid something. Nathan agrees and gives up on it.

Moon Pool. When are we going to hit the credits? The redshirts are all mooning over the news broadcast still, even though it's only showing a news ticker in Times Square or somewhere. Westphalen comes up in her pink wetsuit. No pink was visible on the cgi divers, who were mostly flippers with leg-shaped tinting. Nathan comes up and he's wearing the standard seaQuest blue-on-black wetsuit that we have previously only seen on Lucas back when he wanted to go to the Library of Alexandria. The ratings were terrible this season. Did they throw more money at the show in hopes of it helping, or is that the same wetsuit Lucas was in? Brandis and Scheider did look to be the same height, and Lucas never zipped fully up so we could tell if it was big on him. Do all the men of seaQuest have to wear that one wetsuit? Do they draw lots to see who gets in pink if two guys have to go out at once? And wouldn't that get nasty? I mean, I understand that people usually wear something under a wetsuit at least to cover the sex organs but a whole crew of two hundred in one wetsuit? The back of the season two box has the whole cast in no less than three visibly different cuts of wetsuit. I guess when the UEO rebuilt the boat they figured that one suit was getting pretty skanky.

Westphalen mentions that the astronaut is apparently a friend of Nathan's. She's afraid that renewed interest in space travel will slash their budget. They'll trade living reefs for a few alien rocks. Nathan says the pendulum will swing back eventually. Bridger phones O'Neil and suggests that they listen in on "his old friend Scott". O'Neil hops to it because everyone wants to get in on the dirty calls Scott is making to his wife on the ground right now.

Breaking into the secure channel takes O'Neil exactly two keystrokes to accomplish. Would that even be on the UEO network? Is there no concern that their tap could be putting static on the channel? Or is Bridger trying to cut off contact with the capsule as it glows red across a generic shot of the ocean from space in hopes that NASA will lose track of Scott and he'll drown alone in the sea, saving Bridger's budget? You decide.

Space capsule. Scott is talking about coordinates and I don't care. The capsule is pretty spacious, with a domed ceiling, two floors, several vertical panels with red lights cycling inside, control panels, and at the bottom are a couple of people in quad seats. There's a Chinese woman (perceptive) a woman in a bowl cut who I think is supposed to be European or Russian or something, and Scott who is American by gum.

The technobabble ratchets up and the camera tilts as things go wrong. In the Moon Pool, Lucas looks concerned. Then Scott proclaims to Houston that they are toppling. They technobabble in emergency mode. Nathan tells Scott to get his act together. Cut to cgi capsule way too small to fit all that stuff inside it. Mission control loses contact. Concerned faces all around on the ship. The feed cuts out and the news is back in time for the reporter to declare everything to be going A-OK. Bridger purses his lips.

Credits. The cheesy curtain of bubbles before Scheider's headshot is less than impressive. I just noticed that right before Westphalen's card, we have a shot of one of the more phallic launches entering the seaQuest. Coincidence? You be the judge, Gentle Reader.

A newscaster is telling us about the tragedy. Noyce is on the phone. Welcome back, Admiral Noyce. Kidnapped anyone lately? Noyce is explaining that Scott got some control back about thirty miles up, but they crashed in the Andaman Sea off the coast of Burma. Bridger says this is ten hours away. Why can't Noyce send some jet helicopters? Does he mean a gyrodyne? Noyce points out that since the capsule hit at six times the safe speed, it isn't exactly bobbing around. Bridger did not think that his submarine might be sent after a submerged space capsule? Noyce expositions that we have some hope because a buoy went up from the capsule ten minutes ago. It can only be turned on manually, so someone had to be alive to turn it on. It's also tethered to the capsule by a wire, so when Lucas, Ford, Westphalen, and Krieg are all marooned in a hurricane they can find it and nearly get electrocuted, but Crocker will bust out his sea shanties and everything will be fine.

Noyce says they have no recovery assets in the area and I know what he means, but isn't the entire purpose of his call to send seaQuest to do the recovery because it is in the area? Was he just phoning to discuss his latest bedroom conquest with Bridger? You see I had her legs up and spread wide and then rattlesnakes started coming out! My god, it was the most horrific thing I had ever seen. It was sickening. She must have had a thousand of them. Hitchcock chimes in that it was more like ten, and Noyce is a total girl for freaking like he did.

Bridger sends Hitchcock and Ford to prepare to chart a course to get there and save the drowning astronauts. The first step is to close all shops in the mall and the three-ring circus. Noyce stays on the line and warns Bridger that he shall be entering Montagnard territory and he should go on military alert. I don't know how to spell that exactly. It's French for "mountain people" I think. Nathan wants to know why, and Noyce pans his camera around the Oval office to show the president, who I think is the same guy who played X in the X-Files. The mean one that threatened to shoot Mulder but then carried his ass out of an exploding train car. Skinner beat him up.

President X explains that there's a war going on over mineral rights and this is now a military rescue. This means seaQuest has been loaned to the US for a while. The president points out that it was our tax dollars that built it in the first place, and everybody on board except for Westphalen is obviously an American, but that is no concern for an international peacekeeping organization and its flagship. Why wouldn't an international ship have an entirely American crew, armed with nuclear weapons and called upon to be totally impartial? I can't see any problem with that at all. The president tells Bridger to do things his way.

Aerial shot of "Southeast Asian Penninsula" which looks suspiciously like a retouched pine forest. We cut to the Montagnard Confederation Presidential Villa, which is a Buddhist temple with a reflecting pool. Probably from Hawaii. A convenient storm lets them fog it up and make the shot a bit murky to hide the fact. Some doors open and the Montagnard president is speaking in precise, Oxford English. He says he's given the president (X, I guess) his assurances. Jabber that's probably one guy on the crew who speaks Chinese, erupts momentarily as a bunch of junior officers leave the president alone with a guy that looks just a little bit like Pat Morita. He's dressed in a Soviet army tunic to let us know he's a bad guy.

Tranh, our general, tells the president he just doesn't trust the United States. But the president says it's a new world. Tranh does not trust the Americans because they tend to stick around and make colonial projects. The president things he's paranoid and would loke to beat seaQuest to the capsule as a PR coup.

WHSKRs fly over seaQuest. On the Bridge Hitchcock and Ford are showing Bridger the map. Westphalen is looking on wearing a fairly big perm. She must have done this since she got out of the water. Where does she find the time? Bridger orders her to quarantine the Mars rocks in case they have any crazy viruses on them or turn out to glow and thus be worth billions to Krieg, who Bridger calls over. Nathan puts him in charge of the rescue and goes over to chat with Ortiz and O'Neil. Then he chats with Darwin. Then Bridger tells Crocker they're on military alert.

The soundtrack cues up a riff of the theme and we montage. O'Neil is holding a book on Vietnamese. Crocker checkes out the armed guards. The montage ends when O'Neil gets the Wayfarer. This is the name of the capsule. Scott is claiming he knows someone is listening as the CGI capsule drifts along. Bridger phones and says that their signal sounds like they're under water. Really? You think? Gee, Bridger, did you think that in going to save a submerged capsule you might actually find it submerged?

Inside the Wayfarer, Scott is helping the Asian woman with the bandage on her head.

"You have a very familiar voice," Scott husks over the radio.
"Nathan Bridger, Scott," Nathan husks back to him. He's almost drooling down O'Neil's neck.

Nathan and Scott trash talk each other and their ships while the situation is explained to those of us who just came in. He's about to put some of his people on when Scott asks about their security clearances. Everyone's cleared except for Lucas and he'll find out anyway even if he's down in the Moon Pool. Bridger asks about signs of life. Yes.

Moon Pool. Lucas is still in his gray jersey and dark turtleneck. So Westphalen's day was diving with Nathan, expositioning, finding out about an emergency, perming her hair, and then going to tend to the emergency rescue preparations? Nice, Kristin.

Lucas is playing with the vocorder and Darwin. He explains Mars to Darwin. Bridger walks in. He observes that Mars is "about a hundred trillion dollars away." Westphalen finds this extremely funny. She and Nathan reminisce about him lobbying Congress for seaQuest funding. That was the night they got the call that his son was dead.

Westphalen pulls up a slide on the big screen and expositions about this being what Scott found. She says it's a prehistoric snail and proves Mars had water back in the old days. You know, I'd say that if an exact fossilized earth species were found on Mars it would say a hell of a lot more than that.

The ship shakes and Ford orders it to back up. They've come up on a minefield. It's brand new. So Hitchcock wants to send out divers to clear a path. That would take time. So would going around, which is Ford's idea. Bridger wants to make sacrifices, starting with Krieg and the WHSKRs. Ortiz is upset about his toys, but Bridger promises new ones later.

Scott on the phone. He's saying they're still slowly sinking and they can't abandon ship because the Russian can't be moved. Also, they haven't felt gravity in three years. Westphalen whispers in Bridger's ear that this means their muscles have atrophied. He can't relate until she explains that this is the same reason he needs Viagra or the smell of one of Lucas's jerseys. Bridger promises to drive faster while Westphalen gets on the horn to discuss their condition and tell them what to do.

Ok, Bridger's plan is just to fire WHSKRs at the minefield. Because the ship has what, three? And there are only three mines? Or the minelayer was so dumb that the field got set up so exploding one mine wipes out half the thing? But Ford announces their through, with no toys left. Bridger asks Ortiz how he's holding up. Ortiz hams it up about how they died a good death and his entire job was to run them, so he's on leave until they get back to Pearl. He's going to spend some time in the Moon Pool snorting a ground mix of fish food and cocaine off a dolphin's ass.

Bridger: "Oh, the Nathan Bridger Memorial dolphin coke binge!"
Oritz: "You're familiar with it?"
Rest of the crew, in unison; "We're familiar with it."

Darwin squeals and Lucas laughs this too-loud laugh as he falls into the water.

Bridger makes a plan. The ship shall dive into a trench to get off the map and Hitchcock and Crocker, plus no more than five and no less than three rattlesnakes shall take a launch trailing two hundred feet of those reflective streamers they got for Ford's birthday party. The ones with the pink unicorns and topless women. They're a decoy and are encouraged to skirt the border constantly while seaQuest sneaks away. Eventually they will be caught and killed, but in season two no one will remember them.

He goes over to O'Neil, who is speaking what might be Chinese. Actually it sounds more like random words of French and Spanish with a few chao-chings thrown in. The president would rather yell at X. Bridger suggests that they cut out the middleman and speak directly.

Wayfarer. It's about knee-deep in water. Scott is arguing with Bridger over the phone about the length of their ships. Or the size of their budgets. Scott has the bigger budget, but Nathan says it's all about how you use it and some women, er, governments, prefer a shorter man. Nathan is playing with his nuclear launch key. They get into a fight about little critters. "Four hundred billion dollars for a snail!"

Launch. Hitchcock is on the phone telling Ford that nine ships are on their tail. Crocker says his father fought alongside the Montagnards in Vietnam.

Bridge. They have found the buoy, but without Ortiz's toys they can't pinpoint the capsule. It's thirty miles out still. Bridger orders the rescue launch, er, launched. The same cgi we always see of a launch leaving seaQuest goes out. Launch. Extras in the seaQuest wetsuits, the real ones, are fiddling with something while Krieg is geeking about talking to the astronauts.

"They lived on Mars for a month."
"We live down here for longer than that," Westphalen points out. Her hair is growing larger by the minute. She smarts about comparing hurdling through space in a closet with building a livable habitat underwater. One with free pizza and lots of games. Many kids live there. Wait, that's the bad place that Lucas had to leave last episode. Then she admits she sees her funding vanishing.

Krieg suggests messing with the snail samples, which Westphalen thought was a funny goof.

Ortiz spots a sub coming in. It's putting out a lot of noise. They know where it is, but not who it is. Bridger orders it targeted.

Presidential Villa. Tranh is complaining about seaQuest beating the guys who love next door to the capsule. He mentions that the sub is targeted. The president says it's over and they'll support seaQuest any way they can. Bridger tells Ford that he did a nice job, making the president cave like that. Even though neither one of them knows it. They just know the sub turned around.

Krieg phones that they have trouble. The signal buoy wasn't attached. Scott flips out and wants to know where the hell seaQuest is. Nathan helpfully tells him they're in the wrong place. Meanwhile, Hitchcock and Crocker are getting shot at. Lights flash over their faces.

Nathan is explaining to Scott over the phone about how wires can break, but they're locked on to Wayfarer's radio now. Then he starts insulting the ocean. The other launch is down, no signal. Bridger tells the UEO to send out choppers. Then he suggests Ford melt the drive train and burn down the engine room. That's a good way to get to the capsule.

President X is on the phone and wants to know wh Bridger hasn't delivered. Noyce is defending Bridger, but the president doesn't care. X wants to know why Bridger was pulling stunts with decoys. Bridger floats a trial balloon about not getting his crew killed. Small detail. X thinks Bridger threw the rescue on purpose. Lucas cuts in to express his indignation at this.

X thought that was a secure channel. From now on he only meets in the Watergate parking garage. Noyce introduces him to X. Bridger tells him to buzz off and offers to pretend the question was not asked. X lets him go.

Ford is being pensive. This is not how he is supposed to be. He's supposed to be the gung-ho three year old military guy. This is how he was pretending to be in the pilot. Bridger asks if he thinks Bridger is subconsciously undermining the mission.

Ford: "You doubt yourself because others do, because you do."
Bridger: "I know I'm not perfect and today it really worries me."

Ford says if Bridger had really left his friend to die, he wouldn't be asking these questions. That dialog actually made sense.

Bridge. Ortiz and Nathan are looking at the Montagnard anti-sub ships dead ahead, and the submarine also ahead. They figure out that the sub is Montagnard.

Ward room. O'Neil gets the Montagnard president on the phone. Nathan apologizes for their aggressive posture provoking people, and the decoy scheme. Nathan floats the sub laying mines. President M floats an apology, but Nathan says the astronauts aren't safe yet and he needs to go into their waters to get them back. Why is this tense? We have no reason to take the Montagnard's seriously. Even when speaking for themselves their concerns are petty.

President M brings out Crocker and Hitchcock. They'll be his guests until they're sent for. Tranh comes up and explains that the mines and so forth were the only way to slow the ship down. M says Tranh does not make policy. So this is a rogue operation? The writers are really good at undermining their own aims. It turns out the sub is closer than seaQuest. They could still have their PR coup. He orders no more interference, though.

A torpedo interrupts Westphalen's talk with Scott about the ways they can die. Nathan refuses to turn around, but will launch countermeasures. Ortiz, who could not track a capsule earlier, now can track torpedoes. The CGI countermeasures take out one torpedo but not the other, and seaQuest dives out of the way in CGI. One more torpedo an this one takes a fin off the end of the ship. They lost a rudder and propulsion. Who shot? Tranh's sub? Now they're slowed down.

Bridger walks out of the Bridge and sits down on the steps. He phones Scott. They're going to get into their spacesuits and he will not be able to talk. Scott is telling him not to blame himself. By the way, his daughter had a baby. Scott asks Nathan to meddle in his granddaughter's life. Then he says he chose space because he knew it would be the only way to get above Nathan. Lame. He puts on his helmet. Bridger tongues his headset.

Hyper-Reality Probe. Bridger is driving it. Westphalen is on the launch complaining about them being past the point of oxygen toxicity. The astronauts are already dead. The probe reaches the capsule. Bridger spots an oddity. The compartment with the Mars rocks is missing. They start speculating and he's mad because he still thinks people might be alive inside. The probe pans around the capsule. Turns out the Wayfarers blew the hatch and tried to swim for the surface. Bridger throws down his gloves and furrows. Scheider is the only guy selling this scene. Everyone else is just monotone.

CGI of seaQuest with the capsule hanging from it. He reports to X that no bodies have been found. The whole cast is in the ward room with him. I'm sure Lucas is the person X most wants to see. X is after the rocks. They discuss ways to find the rocks, and Lucas says something about ultra-mafic rock. X says they're busy and he doesn't care, but Bridger wants to hear what Lucas has to say to redeem himself to the guy who beat up Skinner.

Turns out the Wayfarers took samples form Olympus Mons. It's bound to be highly magnetic, and they have instruments to find that. X is on board and they break off to make it so, with Westphalen calling Lucas smarty-pants. Ford makes sure Bridger is ok.

Cut to the surface, a jungle. A jeep pulls up and Scott gets out. Of course. Even though they weren't anywhere near fit enough to swim to the surface at half that depth earlier in the episode. Scott greets President M. M asks to be included in Scott's book. Tranh wants to hold off on telling the world they have the Wayfarers. He's going to take them to a hospital, cover the bases. M is a sucker.

Tranh asks about the core samples. Scott plays dumb. One of the guards on the other Wayfarers pulls a gun. Turns out Tranh is going to extract a finder's fee for the rocks. Seven figures. Maybe eight. Scott confesses to jettisoning the container when he saw the sub was not seaQuest.

Moon Pool. They're getting Darwin into his SCUBA gear. All the men are in the standard seaQuest wetsuit now. Bridger is wearing some kind of turtleneck that sticks out of the top of the wetsuit. It's in a matching blue. Westphalen is in her pink suit again. If all the science people had pink wetsuits that would be fine, but it's just cheesy that she is the only one. She and Nathan chat about Scott for a bit and then he and Darwin get going.

Underwater. This looks like a real underwater shot. It's very cramped and dark. They're probably in a swimming pool with the lights turned off. Westphalen, in her pink, and Ford are visible. They're holding the big, plastic container that survived reentry. Movement is spotted. It's divers, imagine. They have harpoons. Bridger suggests not provoking them. The new divers arrive speaking Chineseish and for some reason the camera watches Darwin swim by. Darwin pushes one away and distracts the rest long enough for Ford and his goons to...move over and ask that they come quietly? There's no fight. No tension.

Scott thinks Tranh is going to kill them. Tranh is on about the how treacherous the road to the hospital is. Guns are cocked. Lots of them. Tranh jumps. All the guns are pointed at him, and here's President M suggesting it would be better if he drove the Wayfarers to the hospital. M shames Tranh about trying to shame a half billion people for his personal profit. M offers his apologies to Scott and hands him over to Hitchcock and Crocker. Poor bastard. They'll probably eat him on the way home.

In the ward room, M phones to apologize to Bridger. Bridger wants M to host the press conference.

CGI of seaQuest. In the quarantine chamber is a huge snail shell. Scott is in a wheelchair joking around with Bridger about getting Westphalen into space. Bridger introduces Darwin. Top secret project. Right.

This could have been two different episodes. It could have been a rescue, where seaQuest is racing against time to save the victims of the week. You can build tension in those. It's a stock plot and you know they'll be rescued, but it could make for some drama. They didn't pull it off.

This could have been a political episode where there's a real risk of war in antagonizing the Montagnards. But their threat is not built up at all. There's no visible international tension. No need to fear them or what might happen. They could have done that and still made Tranh an interesting subplot, but they did not and he's just a slimy profiteer. The synopsis says that seaQuest's opposition is a drug syndicate battling the local government. Is that what Tranh was supposed to be about? That could have made a half-decent show, but must have vanished in the cutting room floor.

This is just a pure fizzle. It needs tension to work and tension is never built up. We don't know or care about the astronauts or their Mars rocks, which aren't exactly a missing nuclear weapon or whatever. They're important to scientists, but not earth-shattering in the context of the show. We don't know the Montagnards. We don't have any reason at all to be concerned about the ship being loaned back to the Americans. Any of those could have been built into a real plot, or even a whole arc. But instead they're just trifles thrown in to make time. No need to watch this one again.

DS9 is on. It's the one where the crew has a baseball game with the vulcans. Sisko was kind of a psycho about baseball, you know.

If you threaten violence against a large group of people...

...you are a terrorist. Or a politician. Yeah, this one isn't about seaQuest. I need to watch some more, though. I've been thinking about maybe getting a cat and that's involved a fair amount of research. Happier things later tonight or tomorrow.

Jesus. These are truly hateful people. You have to wonder what this man would do if he had a child who didn’t’ fit gender norms, or was gay/lesbian. This man is justifying the tragic deaths of people because of discomfort some have with extending basic civil rights to a group of taxpaying citizens. This is sick.

Thoughts on the last two episodes of Lost

I really liked the one with Juliet and the poison gas. It's exactly the kind of episode I want to see. The island plot chugs along, we find out more relevant information, Ben's a bastard, etc.

Then we went from that to a by-the-numbers Jin and Sun episode. These are always well-done. The writers really have a handle on them and the actors are very good fits for their roles. We can see more of what's essentially the same story about them as it has always been and it doesn't get tired. But it's not the episode I wanted to see. This season has been happily heavy on plot arc episodes and light on character-driven minor nods at the plot of the show.

That's where I part company with the Lost writers. The list of characters on the island I find compelling for themselves and their circumstances is, well, pretty much down to Ben. He's evil in a fascinating way, even when he's shaking his money-maker as he stomps off from Juliet. I am taking a strong liking to Faraday, but Locke can feed Miles a grenade and walk away any time. I haven't cared about Kate in two seasons, and Jack is about a tenth of the character they seem to think he is. Locke is wonderfully insane, and dumb as a bag of hammers most of the time, but they can't seem to take him from his old character arc into a new one. Did he kill his father? I don't remember. I liked Charlie a lot, but I'll take their word on it that the writers were out of ideas that didn't amount to him falling off the wagon again and again. It was time for him to die. But I'm digressing. I'm not in this show for the characters, and I'm definitely not in it for their love lives. I'm in it for the island's story.

Can they run out? Please?

This post owes a considerable debt to Dave Neiwert.

I don't write about politics. It's not that I find it boring. I just made a post that in part dissects an episode of seaQuest for points on political philosophy. I'm not indifferent; I care. But it's not the most cheerful stuff. Often it's very depressing and caring can be very exhausting. This post isn't exactly about politics, but it's related.

You know, Pat Robertson's getting old. Also his real name is Marion. Falwell's gone. Is the end of an era coming? Could be we out of holy-rolling bigots? That would be nice. I'm not saying that they should all be done away with or anything like that, but they're old men. They're not going to live forever and it would be nice to think that we're getting them out of our national system like we got out the slaveholders and the segregationists. But it's not that easy.

Back in the bad old days, the Democrats were the party of white power. The newcomer Republicans were the anti-slavery, pro-civil rights party. We had a slight disagreement over the direction the nation ought to go in vis-a-vis this question, which was won by the Republicans. But they got tired of it and a few years later cut a deal to more or less drop the racial equality business in exchange for a presidency. They got rid of slavery, but its replacement with Jim Crow and sharecropping was an incremental improvement. Those slaveholders and their sympathizers that lived through the war rarely changed their minds about the issues under contention, with the possible exception of James Longstreet.

By the way Lee's ambivalence about slavery is a little bit overstated. He inherited some slaves he was allowed by the terms of the will to work for some years before setting them free. Lee could have let them go right then, but he decided to keep them for pretty much every day he could get before he was legally required to let them go. The man was not a stealth abolitionist.

Anyway, these slaveholders didn't stop thinking they ought to own slaves. They didn't get over losing the war. The vast majority of them probably went to their graves thinking slavery right and proper and abolitionism a profound evil. Their descendants grew up thinking the same thing about segregation. Now we're up to a century after the fact and these third-generation segregationists are promising massive resistance and segregation forever.

In between here, something happens in the US political system. The Republicans, thanks to Lincoln and Grant, are the soundly preferred party of black people. Both parties have their more liberal and more conservative wings. The Republicans were the conspicuous reformers of the Progressive Era, but over time came to gravitate more towards the big business, conservative end of the spectrum. At the same time, the Democrats were out of power for more than a decade while the GOP put Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover into the White House.

FDR started a healthy movement of black voters over to the Democrats. The New Deal was partly about alleviating the plight of the poor and while the Democrats were still the party of the Sold (read: white, racist) South, poor blacks could rightly note that they were getting a lot more help from the New Deal than from Hoover's program to float loans to rich people. Incidentally, whites noticed that too. Southern whites were skeptical of the power of the federal government, relating back to that slight disagreement in the 1860s. (They did not, despite claims otherwise, have all that much problem with it prior to 1860.) Some of them even noticed that, while they received some benefit from New Deal programs, their black neighbors were getting the same. Maybe more. Maybe too much more for their liking.

FDR was not a great progressive on racial issues. He repeatedly blew off civil rights leaders that visited him, waving away their concerns. He was much more concerned with keeping the support of the Solid South, where advancing civil rights would serve to aggravate some of his more balky supporters.

FDR gets a terrific headache (Those were his last words.) and dies in 1945. This leaves us with Harry S Truman (no middle name, just the initial). Truman thought about joining the Klan back in his Missouri days and was generally to the right of FDR. He was way to the right of FDR's previous VP, Henry Wallace. But Truman heard about what happened in the Battle of the Bulge, where black soldiers were consigned to driving supply trucks and other menial tasks and forbidden combat positions. Woodrow Wilson had segregated the US government a while previous. Early in the Bulge, it looked like the Germans might achieve their breakthrough and perhaps make lasting gains just as the war was looking to be going our way. This was one of those any-warm-body situations and a large number of black soldiers on hand volunteered for combat duty and the loss of rank that would go with it. Truman considered that given they were prepared to do this, how could an armed force be justifiably segregated?

That kind of thinking is trouble for the Solid South, which is ultimately a single-issue block concerned with maintaining white supremacy. When a civil rights plank is voted into the party platform in 1948, Strom Thurmond led a contingent out of the party and ran on his own "states rights" platform as a Dixiecrat. Dewey did not defeat Truman, but lines were drawn. Truman desegregated the military through executive order, something Bill Clinton could not be bothered to do in a similar situation, and that was that.

Except for a few years later when the civil rights movement really gets going. Strom is still around and he's still got his supporters. In the Fifities, Thurmond launched the single longest filibuster in Senate history against a civil rights bill. The Solid South was promising massive resistance and turning fire hoses on peaceful protestors, when it didn't just kill them. Strom and his buddies didn't change their minds, they changed their parties.

Barry Goldwater, the founding father of modern American conservativism, ran on a pro-segregation platform. He observed, infamously, that the GOP was not going to be the party of black people in his lifetime so it should hunt where there are ducks. This was his way of saying that the white racist vote, now alienated from the Democrats, ought to be picked up. Over the Seventies and into the Eighties, the Solid South flipped its party of choice. Politicians changed parties or retired. Over time, appeals to explicit racism were phased out but the subtext never left.

My point isn't that modern conservatives are a bunch of Klansmen, or cops with fire hoses. I don't think that young conservatives are necessarily as racist as their ancestors. My point is that these guys never shrugged and changed their minds. The vast majority of the racists died as racists. They didn't reconsider. They didn't have changes of heart. They just grumbled, listened for the code words, and voted accordingly. Their children undoubtedly learned some racism at home, but also had to deal with a culture becoming less permissive of it. Their attitudes are not as extreme or ingrained. Provided things don't turn the other way, the same can be said of their children. As long as the pressure is kept on, one can expect prejudice to decline in a generational fashion. Most people will not make radical changes in their positions. They might shift a little, but their children will shift more.

So too with the antigay lobby. Falwell's dead and, as Chris Hitchens noted, for lack of an enema could have been buried in a matchbox. The leaders are aging, but they are not gone. Attitudes have been changing very rapidly about this sort of thing, perhaps more aggressively and rapidly than they changed about race. Unless you were a member of a multiracial family, in which case your racial prejudices are bound to be a bit subdued already, or one of your loved ones brought home a partner of different heritage, it was pretty hard to end up with one of those scary minority people in your family or any kind of intimate association.

By contrast, it's pretty easy to end up with a gay person in your family. I saw reports of a study a few years ago that listed knowing one as the chief factor in changing someone's opinions about gay people. It's pretty hard to segregate yourself away when your son, or sibling, or cousin, or whatever might turn out to be one of those scary minority people. I still think the prejudice is pervasive and very strong, but it seems brittle. It's very hard to maintain a harsh bias against a group that turns out to include a loved one, and doing so has personal costs more immediate than might be the case with skin color prejudice.

I don't know. Maybe when their leaders are gone the homophobes will go home and stop bothering everybody, gay and straight, bisexual and asexual, with their nonsense. There are certainly indicators that this prejudice may go away more easily, but I wouldn't want excess optimism to lead us into complacency. There aren't enough non-heterosexuals around to embed one in every family and conservative Christians in the US do very well at forming their own tightly-sealed little worlds. Self-segregation will inhibit the spread of tolerance. But still the fact that even the leading haters for Jesus are worried about their replacements not appearing is good news. (Generally speaking, anything they worry about is probably good news.) If their network of propaganda fails, then the machinery of tolerance has one less hindrance. It would be nice.

Photon Bullet, Take Two

I let it sit a couple of days and right now I'm watching the episode again to get my thoughts in order. Not being half-asleep helps with this a lot. Additional thoughts as I watch.

Lucas's jersey has the same brand marking as Walmart's house brand. I don't know baseball to say if these are real teams with real jerseys and I'm just seeing a similar logo, or if this is really Walmart wear.

The group of random geeks behind Mycroft while he greets Lucas and the awet team don't look anything like minors. Some of them have wrinkles. I wonder if they were real extras, or they just got people from the crew to fill the scene. It's not much of a crowd. Maybe they were a last-minute decision? The extras later on look like teens or twentysomethings (dialog later establishes that most of the "kids" are college-aged) which means they're all in their thirties and have four kids. Hollywood casting.

When Lucas started playing the game with the cubes, I think the script probably said Lucas was spellbound or something. I don't think Brandis played a lot of video games, since he looks more stoned or aroused. Odd response for three-dimensional Tetris. He would have been like seventeen when this was shot, so he's of an age to have had the NES. Maybe I'm just reading his expressions wrong. He has a couple of ambiguous faces that come up when Hitchcock's breasts bob inches from his lips and when he's simply impressed with the coolness of a guest star. Unless Lucas was meant to be sexually attracted to the Regulator. In later scenes he's much more convincingly having fun playing. Did someone hold a funny monkey up off-camera?

Continuity. Lucas, according to Bridger, did not even have a toothbrush. Yet now he's in different clothes from when he arrived. He will change at least once more. Does Node Three have a large cache of clothing you can just paw through and take? There's nothing that says they sent over a package of his stuff before they left. Are we to believe that Mycroft has people change into clothing he approves of too? What is he, the UEO? The absence of a line of throwaway dialog here leaves us with this. I can buy it in a Microsoft in 1995 sort of way, but nobody even talks about it. Just like when the guest cast come on seaQuest and are forced to strip at gunpoint.

More continuity. If Lucas is on seaQuest as some kind of punishment (since he's a "disicpline problem") and his father pulled strings to make it happen, how is he able to get off the boat so easily for an indefinite period as Bridger and he both think he's going to do with Node Three? If he really was just dumped, then that says a lot about his parents. But Lucas seems to have only average issues with authority. You would think he would have more. Especially if his parents were emotionally abusive or neglectful. I like Lucas as a character, but his background isn't making a lot of sense.

Ok, I think there are several intertangled issues with this episode. I like it. It's a good character piece for Lucas. But I want to try to parse out each issue separately to see where it falls short and where it delivers.

1) It's a character episode for Lucas.
This isn't really a character-driven show, but with an ensemble cast it can be good to have episodes that are really about one or two characters instead of the full load interacting with some situation. Most seaQuest episodes so far are in the mold of presenting a situation which the crew must resolve. The plot walks to them and they play around with it, either on board or though awet teams. In this one we step away from that formula to deliver a single character into a situation where there are elements of a real dilemma which is not easily, or obviously, solved by putting the technobabble into the Captain's judgment and giving Darwin a few lines. This is both a stronger format for a show that aspires to continuity (seaQuest does not) and provides more engagement with the character focused upon. We do learn some things about Lucas from taking him out of his customary environment, even if these things leave a mixed impression.

2) It presents an interesting dilemma.
What responsibility do intellectuals have to society? Chomsky says their role is to expose the lies and confront power with truth. Plato says they're the elite masters, philosopher kings with a right now only to rule but to construct lies that aid them in that practice. Mycroft is definitely in Platonic mold here. He knows best. The story helps by making him right about some things. He stops aid money from going into private coffers and he gets in the way of election fraud. These are clearly good deeds. However, his plan is to do this secretly and with secrecy comes freedom from accountability. Not only did no one elect him, but no one is able to scrutinize his actions. He would be power without responsibility, a technocratic tyrant.

If Lucas rejected Mycroft's plan on those grounds, it would be an excellent principled stand and do a great deal to develop his character. But that's not what he does. In the climax dialog, Lucas does point out that no one elected Mycroft. That may be a valid objection to taking corrective action against a democratic state, but Mycroft could still have been a whistleblower. He could have exposed the corruption he found. Direct action against a non-democratic state is more reasonable, since the democratic option simply is not available. Or to put it another way, you can't run against Hitler and good luck getting an investigative committee running. But Mycroft could, for example, take his evidence before Congress or Parliament, to the media, and so forth. This isn't talked about at all. Instead we are left with accepting, even endorsing and being a silent party to, the evils of the world as the only alternative.

As the story moves on, Mycroft becomes more and more obviously unhinged as well. This also undermines the point. If Mycroft were measured and sensible, in addition to being right, it would make for a more provocative story. Instead he turns into a leftist loon. Lucas rejects his plan to help people not because of accountability, or even lack of democratic mandate. He simply says you can't help anonymous people. I'm sorry, but if you feed someone who is starving you don't have to learn their life story to conclude that you've helped them out a bit. This ends up being an extremely parochial philosophy that ends with you only helping close personal friends. It's easy to help your friends. You like them.

Then, after having dismissed the notion of helping anybody on a large scale as impossible, Lucas's choice is further nullified by having the technology failing. Node Three could not have controlled the World Bank network anyway so whatever Lucas decided didn't matter. You can only pull that trick if you're going to have the character take this as a setback and try the same thing over again.

3) This is an episode about Lucas's identity.
This is related to it being a spotlight episode for him. Lucas's peers are not on the ship. Nobody on the ship can meaningfully challenge him in a field he cares about. They are not his people. This is not his home. Node Three is both of those and the show sensibly plays up the appeal. But the status quo must prevail, so Lucas has to choose the strange people on the ship. Does he really have friends there, aside Darwin? Bridger isn't a friend; he's a parent. There's reference to him paling around with Ortiz and O'Neil, but he doesn't actually do that. We've only seen them hang out when one of them needs Lucas or there's money involved. If the writers wised up to that, it explains Mycroft being turned into a cult leader even if it harms the rest of the episode.

But this brings me back to geek fandom. Lucas is the geek on the show, not O'Neil. O'Neil is a geek, but he is not the audience surrogate. O'Neil is a spaceman. He's one of the UEO pod people. If he were in the science contingent maybe, but they only exist with Levine is polishing his crystals or they remember that they're paying for Westphalen whether Stephanie Beecham gets screen time or not. Lucas is the average person, the point of view character. This is doubly so for a fandom that has high opinions about its own intelligence considering he's portrayed as a genius. If anybody is like the fandom, as the fandom itself perceives itself, it's Lucas.

Yet Lucas does not choose to be with people like him. He decides to hang out with the guys on the football team. The normals. The people that much of scifi fandom seems to define itself in opposition too. This is more of that dichotomy between a self-realized exceptional person in a minority position who is confident and secure being an outsider and the one who only says he's happy as an outsider but really wants to be a part of the in-crowd.

seaQuest: Photon Bullet

It's that time again on Midnight Roamer. Time for your Wandering Roamer to put away the disc two that has been sitting watched in his DVD player for these past days and muse about Jonathan Brandis's gigantic hairdo on the plastic case thingie that Universal gave us instead of the customary cardboard fold-out. I like the plastic cases, but between Mr. Brandis's gigantic forehead and his antigravity coiffure, between his selection of jerseys and his solid-color t-shirts, between peace and war, between love and hate, between 1993 and 1995, between his pissed off expression and his pissed off expression, is something I forgot while I was writing this sentence. What? You want quality? Ok. Between all those things are Funyuns. And also the clothes that members of the supporting cast must change into on boarding seaQuest to show their appreciation, the difference the crew has made in their lives, and their unwillingness to catch bullets with their foreheads. I guess the crew will have to keep using Crocker's spleen for target practice, even if the Regulator complains about the noise in his Pleasure Prison.

These reviews have continuity. This show? Not so much.

Photon Bullet (no The. They learned from The Regulator's The Punishment Dungeon)
Originally aired: December 19, 1993.

Any views expressed in features or commentary...these DVDs have features and commentary? All I see are deleted scenes? It would be funny if they got together the alumni that are ashamed of this stage of their careers, recorded a commentary, and then did the same for those who peaked on this show. Separate tracks. Then two more, each where they're watching and commenting on the commentary of the other group.

Anyway, I remember this being my most favoritest episode when I was a kid. It's the big Lucas episode of the season. This one is just about Lucas being Lucas. He's an actual protagonist, maybe. He talks to Seth Green. Since I loved it back then, now I'm going to probably hate it all the more. Especially with how all over the map Lucas can be. One minute he's a happy criminal. Then he's the tattletale to Bridger. Then he's shaving Hitchcock's back hair and feeding her rattlesnakes because while what he did was wrong, it's even more wrong to try to fix it. Oddly enough, both jobs involve killing lots of mice and a few tree sloths.

Universal Bump.

Close up of a hallway. A man's hand reaches in. There's what looks to be a dark-colored bathrobe on it. The arm, not the hand. It reaches for a keypad, but it's not a modern keypad. It's a 1970 black plastic in a stainless steel case thing. The numbers form not a square pad but rather two rows of what looks to be four. That means they're missing two digits. There's a red-lit niche under that I think we're meant to believe is a palm scanner but really I can just see where the set builder sunk the screw into the wall. Up top are a pair of lights, the bottom and currently lit light is yellow. The other is green. It's the security pad for the seaQuest's espresso machine and toenail clipper. Those things go together in the far-off future of 2018. One time, Crocker forgot his code and asked Lucas to hack into it. Lucas smarted off and told him to security the keypad's ass into submission. Then Crocker put his rings on, pulled out his belt, and a horrible scene occurred. It all ended with Lucas being punished by having to whip Crocker because he didn't squeal like Bridger liked.

Did I mention I paused about twenty seconds into the episode to write all of that?

Oh, there's the other two digits. The hand was hiding them. Now it punches in some code and the camera pans up to show us some Chinese characters on a sign on the wall as Mr. Hand puts on the stripped innards of a Nintendo Power Glove. It's got fingers and a circuit board is taped to the back of the hand. Multi-colored ribbon cables lead away down to nowhere probably. Power Glove gets put into the hand slot. Light turns green.

The captions tell us that this is a Chinese military compound somewhere. Mr. Glove takes off his globe and puts it in his satchel. The date is March, 2010. That means eight years ago in Questie. Gloves pulls out a stick with a mirror on it. We can see a red light down the hall. I bet he's foiling a laser! Nope, just pariscoping the camera. Now he has a hook on a stick he uses to turn the camera to point at the ceiling. I think the guys in the security office are going to notice that eventually, when they look up from their obesity-related heart attacks, diabetic comas, pornography, and donuts in that order.

Glove goes down a hall and pulls out a drill or something with a really long bit. He puts his glove back on and jimmies another lock with its techno-whammy. By the way, these keypads are gigantic. You could hide two squirrels inside one. He sneaks in and comes up on a Chinese man, played by an actual Asian person I think, sitting in a chair. Our Asian victim (Mr. Glove appears to be white) gets up from his chair and wheels around as the drill bit gets pushed towards him. Music swells and the action goes offscreen in time for us to hear a little pew pew that I guess means he got shot. The camera lingers on a small monitor with a game of Tetris up (seriously, it has what looks like a large block descending) and a white keyboard backlit with blue LEDs beneath. The keyboard looks snazzy, but that kind of thing would keep me up days.

The screen changes to a block art image of a duck right before credits. Beneath the surface lies Krieg's collection of pornography. Especially the tentacle rape hentai that Ortiz starred in.

Mildly grainy stock footage of a whale pod. Whalesong is piped in straight from Star Trek IV. The one with the whales, right before Vulcan Space Jesus. Shatner screams "BRIDGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!"

We are informed that it is now January 2019 in the central Pacific. This is about halfway through the seasom, and aired towards the end of the year. Were the writers trying for real continuity, or is this just a seasonal reference? Smart money is on B. WHSKR zooms up on whale.

Bridge. Whales are on the screens and Lucas is playing with a notebook or a clipboard or something. He's in what looks to be a white jersey with black stripes and a navy (the color, not the military) turtleneck. He presses in on Ortiz, the only crewman who hasn't signed his yearbook yet. Ortiz gives him the brush off. He was on the swim team. He doesn't have to deal with nerds half his age with more hair than he's allowed to keep. Lucas gives Ortiz a look and moves along, grimacing to show his dimples because we need something to keep the teenage girls interested. You know, his dimples are nothing like Seth Grabel's on Dirty Sexy Money. Brandis's only seem to appear when he's trying to make them appear. I wonder if that's just lighting and makeup or if Grabel has a more pronounced version in general?

The special guest star is Tim Russ. He will be teaching Lucas how to mind meld with Darwin.

Lucas walks around the bridge and gets in someone else's way. He's still holding his yearbook. He gets in Ford's way. Ford brushes him off and Lucas gives him a dirty look over his shoulder. You know, I have had days like this. If I were Lucas I would be mad by now too. He goes to climb up a ladder or steps or something and O'Neil is coming down. They each try left, then right. Then O'Neil carps "Lucas! Do you mind?" You know, you both got there at the same time and you were both making good faith efforts to get out of the way. But don't tell that to Tim O'Neil. He makes Lucas swing off the ladder to get out of his way.

Lucas gets up the ladder just in time to run into Hitchcock. Writers, the point has been made. Lucas feels like he's in the way and unwanted. He doesn't belong here with Ortiz from the swim team, O'Neil from AV club, Ford from the football team, creepy Coach Crocker who looks at the boys when they're changing, Hitchcock the snake-handler, or Bridger who always whines about how he's not half the man Picard is. An extra hurries across, face away from the camera, and nearly adds another collision to Lucas's list.

Lucas's notepad really is a notebook and he's jotting something down as he backs right into Ford. Ford seizes him by the throat, lifts him off the ground, uses his free hand to punch the kid in the gut a few times, and takes off his belt before Westphalen steps in and hands him a taser with the instruction to go for the groin. It worked for her with Krieg.

Not really. Lucas wheels and looks like he was about to blow until he realized it was Ford. Ford grabs Lucas on the shoulder and tells him to go stand in the corner behind the pool. For some reason this instruction is accompanied by clapping Lucas's left breast (Seriously, right under the arm.). I think that's supposed to make Lucas feel better. It's not every day the first officer makes a grab on your nipple.

Lucas goes towards his corner, but just turns and walks out instead. In the clam doors, he gives the bridge a good-bye glance and starts smacking the notebook with his pen. Ben and Crocker run into him and Crocker asks about a security program, which is code for his Grade-A Cambodian Heroin shipment.

"Uh no, Chief, actually-"
Crocker cuts him off and he's waving his hand at Lucas, "Don't tell me you're going to do something if you don't intend to do it. All right?"
Lucas glares at him, "Yes sir."

Lucas gets into the maglev, which you have to sit down on or it will kill you. Yet it starts moving and we can still see his back standing up. He whisks him away to be one of the stars of season two.

You know, this isn't bad so far. It's a bit heavy-handed, but we could grant decent writers that the episode might be written from Lucas's POV. Good writers on good shows can do that pretty well. There's just never been any sign they do it, or try to do it, here.

An anvil smashes into the deck as Bridger comes up on Crocker. Was that Lucas? Yes, yes it was. Crocker would know that jersey anywhere. Bridger asked Lucas to stay on the bridge because it's supposed to be a part of his training.

Ok, continuity please. Is Lucas actually in a military training program now? Because they don't normally act it, but sometimes the crew seem to think so. His training? If this is really how Bridger thinks of it, we can only conclude that Bridger never went to boot camp. Shouldn't Lucas be in some of that civilian seaQuest wear that the guest stars always get? For that matter, when he was bunking with Bridger did that count as training? Because that's really creepy.

Bridger and Crocker enter the bridge and we cut to a video screen. A voice welcomes us to Internex. Internex is supposed to be the internet (this comes out in a later episode I remember) but right now it's a company name. Internex Communications Systems. Lucas logs on as Frankenstein and his access code is 2402484.818. The controls on the Internex whatever look a lot like DVD player controls, except there seems to be an emoticon button.

Cut to Lucas at the controls just to let us know it's him logging in. Back to the screen and a bad CGI Frankenstein lumbers on screen in full Karloff. The blue background has a castle on a mountain like no real castle would ever be built. It's impregnable, but you could never build that without modern cranes and great expense. FrankenLucas asks for Wolfman. Wolfman arrives.

FrankenLucas suggests a game, but Wolfman is still licking his wounds from that time Buffy almost staked him. FrankenLucas has wounds of his own. Who beat him? Nobody. He's sick of being pushed around. Push back. Not that easy. Cut yourself. I'm already missing three fingers. Wolfman blows him off. Lightning strikes in the background. All this for a chatroom?

Lucas's Frankenavatar desperately pleads "WOLFMAN!" but he's gone and Lucas turns it off. Darwin is in the tube. Lucas complains about how he has it easy and can take off whenever he wants to. He wanders over and sits on his bed, next to a stack of three power supplies. He has his back to the tube and doesn't see that Darwin is taking off because I'm the only person that cares about Lucas's angst. Lucas crosses his legs. He pulls down some flippers and at this point in the show would Lucas have his own flippers? He doesn't really seem like much of a watery person in general. He starts drumming on a pipe, but the phone rings and he's wanted on the bridge.

Cut to a screen displaying a text message from one Node Three, which needs some parts and Lucas. Lucas is specifically requested. I guess you can order him out of the UEO catalog between lingerie and lug nuts. Anyway, Node Three wants Lucas to come see the toys and candy it has in its van.

O'Neil is sitting at the comm station. Ford is over his shoulder. Krieg is to Ford's side. Bridger is to the other side in profile. They leave a perfect Lucas-shaped gap for Lucas to slide into.

"Lucas, why'd you leave?"
"Captain, nobody wanted me here."
"I did. Did you mention that to anyone?"

Ok. So Lucas is not supposed to rat people out. He is not supposed to stand idly by when he could be implicating himself in schemes. But he is supposed to tell the crew that if they don't put up with him, Daddy Bridger will pull the car over right now? At least this establishes that training Lucas is Bridger's thing, not a boat policy or something like that. So it's not weird that nobody else knows about it. Does Lucas know he's being trained? Lucas says that he did not mention that. I can see why. He gets huge mixed messages from Bridger. Bridger suggests that maybe Lucas should have called on Daddy Bridger's name. Is he trying to emasculate the kid? Is this all some sick mind game to get him used to arbitrary authority?

They show Lucas the message, which has top security clearance. Bridger calls on O'Neil to exposition that Node Three is the central crossing point for all the lines across the Pacific, because in the future no one uses communications satellites. But ok, I can still buy that. This one is just me nitpicking. It's unlikely that satellites would completely replace land lines under oceans. Everything from the phone, to the internet, to military communications (now I wonder about satellites again) goes through there. Lucas identifies the parts requested and says they have a lot. I can believe he would be stuck with inventory for that stuff.

By the way, Lucas is staring at the screen with the message on it and Bridger is reading it to him. This is a bit insulting, but we learned last episode that Ford normally does all Bridger's reading for him. Maybe Nathan's been studying very hard and wants to show off. He says Lucas is specially requested and Lucas smarts off.

"Oh, I see... So as soon as there's a computer problem, I'm back in favor?" That's unfair of him, but it's unfair in a teenager kind of way. "Well I'm not going there and you can't make me, he smirks."

Kid, Westphalen has mood-altering drugs and Nathan can order her to dope you up. Bridger can make you.

"There are such things as child labor laws, you know." And that's a good point. What kind of hours does Lucas put in? Ben puts his hand on Lucas's shoulder and tries to shut him up, but he's not having it. Bridger wants to know where this is coming from. The Progressive Movement.

Lucas wants to get paid. Everyone else gets paid. Why can't he? That's a good question. Honestly, he doesn't go to school. We never see him in classes. His formal education must be finished. And Lucas doesn't want an allowance. He wants a salary. Bridger is nodding along, because he knows Lucas wants to be paid in nose candy from Ben's stash and no one considers Krieg's property sacred. Then Lucas says he's the one that keeps everything running, because Hitchcock is the most incompetent chief engineer ever to live.

Bridger: Orly?
Lucas: Srsly.
Bridger: No wai!
Lucas: Yah wai!

No, Bridger gives him oh really and Lucas realizes he's stepped in it and alienated everybody. He storms off, jersey billowing behind him. They should have given him a cape.

Exterior CGI of a sea station made up of a bunch of domes and spheres with lights around them. The ship comes into the frame and a launch takes Lucas over. Cut to inside where the seaQuest docking bay has been re-dressed. Lucas is in his black jersey with a red turtleneck. He, Bridger, Crocker, and Krieg come up and Tim Russ greets them with a neck pinch. Tim is dressed in a paisley sort of shirt with a sweatervest on over it. Behind him are a group of redshirts dressed a little bit like graduate students.

Bridger introduces Tim around, but he only has eyes for Lucas. If I were Bridger I would be worried at this point. Lucas is the last to be introduced and Tim grabs him up in a hug, "Frankenstein!" Lucas has public humiliation written all over his face, especially considering how Tim Russ's hands drift as he pulls back. He tries to smile it off.

You know I feel a little guilty about using the actor's real name in these remarks here, but I don't have his character's name yet. In the incredibly remote chance you're actually reading this, Tim, no offense is meant. I remember liking you a lot in this episode. Also the one where Kes cooked your brains. I can't remember her real name.

Ben is mystified by what Lucas just got called. Tim Russ explains that it's a "hacker tag" that they use online. Like a nickname. Apparently no one in the near future grew up with the internet. Or the concept of nicknames, Benjamin. Lucas grimaces, but Crocker is behind him and who knows what just happened. There could be a bullet in his kidneys right now because the ol' chief thinks Lucas ripped a little girl with a flower in half and then did terrible things to her corpse without inviting him along.

Tim tells the crew that Frankenstein's a legend. Really? How legendary can you be if you were introduced as an unspecified "discipline problem" and not the guy who destroyed 10% of the internet or something? Or does Tim just mean that Lucas is really, really good at Space Invaders? He takes the modules off Lucas's hands. They're in a big yellow plastic case. Lucas is charmed to learn that he's a legend. I feel the same way whenever people introduce me as the famous Midnight Wanderer, of Midnight Roamer. Fame has its perks.

Tim wants to show Lucas something and asks the rest of the crew to "hang" while he does. Not many people get a chance to see this. Tim has some awesome nose candy in his van. Despite the fact that Tim only asked Lucas along, Bridger and the others follow. Tim expositions that he has 21 sysops here, all geniuses. All minors. So he's alone with a bunch of minors for months on end in a small sea station? To hit up the rest of the stereotypes, are they also his scout troop? Does he hear their confessions? Tim glurges about how the young learn computers so easily, because it's 1993. He's also happy because he asks who else would enjoy being trapped in a bubble out in the ocean floor for a couple of years? Besides Bridger's harem and Ford. Oh, and Hitchcock because she isn't allowed to go out on dry land anyway. Restraining order. She left her rattlesnakes in a McDonalds once.

Tim tells the guys that adults want more. Cars, houses. They never last more than a couple of months. But this is the candy store to kids. Everything is free. He really did say candy store. We cut to Lucas meeting the locals. He starts to hold court, but Bridger notices he's gone and calls for him. The PA tells us that Interstellar Virtual Combat finals are continuing somewhere on the network.

Cut to a security panel. No keypad. Tim Russ holds his hand up, well away from it, and lasers go to work. It confirms that he's one Martin Pleven so I shall stop abusing your good name, Mr. Russ. His password is Mycroff. The Holmes character is Mycroft. Somebody didn't do the research. Lucas is stunned to hear the name and repeats it. Could it be that Mycroff is famous enough that the typo he made when he set up his account ten years ago has been forgiven?

We cut do a door with shadows over it and a red light to one side. It swings open to reveal a large, mostly empty room with three gigantic widescreen monitors, five workstations with smaller monitors, a circular lighting arrangement over it, and a circular dais with steps on which it all rests. This is actually a pretty cool set.

Mycroff explains that no one knows how much bandwidth they've got, which I don't buy. If they set up the network, they know it's maximum load. He claims they lost count. Lucas is so impressed he's gasping and needs new pants. He should have worn the wetsuit. He declares it unbelieveable. Mycroff goes on about how it's the highest information density anywhere and leads Lucas up to the dais. He's offered a chair. Mycroff has it set up so he can play around with vital international communications security, but not do any damage. Just compromise the security of every nation on earth to listen in to phone sex calls from Thailand. He's given a little headset because some of the interface is by voice. I wish it worked like that one game in the TNG episode and got him stoned. That would be cool. You just know he'd take copies of the game back to seaQuest to get everyone hooked and it doesn't work because none of them can beat the game.

Some kind of cube matching game appears on the screen and Lucas plays with the controls as it plays itself. The geeks come over to coo and root for him. He's most interested in this one girl that comes and looks over his shoulder. So what is this supposed to be? It's a game. This is supposed to be some kind of network interface? Mycroff proclaims Lucas a genius for making it to level four.

Bridger is ready to go and wants Lucas to come along, but Lucas does not want to go. He's getting high off playing 3-d tetris. Mycroff says he's welcome to stay and Lucas makes the point that the ship is in the area just following whales in a circle anyway. Crocker and Krieg tell Bridger to lighten up. That headset can't possibly be stimulating Lucas's pleasure centers and getting him addicted because that's not how he behaves when he gets his exquisite pleasure electronically inflicted on him in Krieg's boudoir.

Bridger relents and says he'll call Lucas. He waves his hand in front of Lucas's eyes, but Lucas isn't paying any mind. He doesn't even blink. You could not have missed that hand and you think Lucas would try to wave it away or something. Is this really meant to be addictive? Lucas doesn't even change expressions. Come on.

They walk down a hallway and Bridger complains to Mycroff about how Lucas doesn't even have a toothbrush. If you put him in front of a computer he'll forget to eat. I think the writers were trying for genuine here, but it comes across as very codgery for a supposed intellectual like Bridger. Now if it had been Crocker, this I could buy. They ask Mycroff about provisions. They have a five person staff that handles administrivia like food and air.

The awet team leave and the ship goes away. We cut to a room full of teenagers, none of which are probably teenagers. Lucas is explaining to somebody about something. He's very into it but no one else is really paying attention despite being all around him. Mycroff comes back in and chases everyone back to work hacking and cracking. He introduces the girl, Red Menace aka Juliana. She'll be Lucas's designated girl for two seasons, I think. She reappears sometime in season two. The other introduced is Seth Green, fresh off his appearance on the X-Files. He's the Wolfman and Lucas is happy to meet his internet buddy. His name's really Nick. They're about to converse when Mycroff drives him back to work.

Mycroff grabs Lucas on the shoulder and starts glurging about how photons going through glass tubes and how the station gets them where they need to go. Wolfman interjects to say the money is on the move. On the big screens, various flashing lights and lines indicate transmissions. They're on a map. This would never be practical, but it's a good visual.

Wolfman complains that they're going to miss it. Mycroff is only interested in Lucas. What does Lucas think of the world? Is it good, bad? Is this supposed to be a cult now? Lucas thinks the world sucks. Mycroff floats the notion of making it better. Would Lucas? Yeah he would. A line crawls across the map as Wolfman counts down and Mycroff gets in the seat, puts on his headset and explains that this is a money transfer meant for humanitarian aid but being redirected to a Swiss bank account. The clock is running down. Mycroff captured it and sent it to a rural Chinese hospital.

Lucas: You don't even worry about getting caught.
"The money's already been stolen. Who is going to complain?"

Mycroff explains that they're doing the right thing. He preaches for a little bit and I know we're supposed to find this slightly dubious. Lucas is supposed to be letting his alienation make his decisions here. But Mycroff kind of has a point. Again Lucas is presented with the notion of improving the world. He gapes at Mycroff and we fade to commercial and come up on whales.

Moon Pool. Westphalen is holding a mug and telling Bridger that when her daughter was seventeen she shaved off half her hair and dyed the other half bright orange. Lucas must be seventeen now. Kristin goes on about how kids irritate you, no matter how bright. Bridger angsts about falling into the trap of being parental. Isn't that what he's supposed to be doing? Why is Lucas on the ship if not? Why has Bridger concocted conscious plains to train Lucas if not? If anybody on board would be a natural parental figure to him, it would be Westphalen. She has that den mother thing going for her.

Bridger says he should know better after one kid. Westphalen says he wants to be with kids his own age. Really? She suggests calling up on Lucas. Bridger says that would be checking up. Bridger is bothered by the fact that he knows more about the whales now than Lucas. She wants him to send a WHSKR to monitor Lucas. He waves it off as tempting. He knows Lucas wants to be on his own, but this does not stop him worrying.

We're supposed to buy this. They have presented us with Bridger the father figure. But what has he done to win Lucas's trust? To endear himself? Not much.

Mess hall on Node Three. Close up of microwaves and Juliana talking about how pizza and hot dogs, and whatever else Microsoft feeds them, is fine except for sushi. It never thaws right. We pull out to see her chest and then follow Lucas's eyes up to his face. He's in a red plaid shirt and a sky blue t-shirt which I think I owned about that time. They were everywhere. He asks how Julie got here. She graduated college at sixteen. Lucas says that's him too. So his education is over. And every other kid there is the same too. She says it's a great place for her.

Lucas begins to explain his plight. He did not fit into his parents' notion of a lifestyle, so they sent him to the ship. Bridger sends a report card every few months, which he doubts they read. Rather than asking his friend directly, Lucas asks Julie about Wolfman. He's a slow learner. They didn't let him out of MIT until seventeen. One year older than she was. Honestly, the guy is two feet away and that kind of difference could be because his birthday is earlier in the year than hers. If they were going to play up his status as an outsider, that might work. Now it's just filler.

They go over to Wolfman, who is sitting with Mycroff at a very tiny table. Mycroff asks if he scared Lucas earlier, because he really is Mycroff. Mycroff expositions about how Lucas was two when he crashed the ARPANET. Somebody did some homework now. Brought down the entire US defense system for twenty-four hours. Now that's how you get to be famous. Has Lucas done something like that to warrant his geek fame? If so, why wasn't it the first thing we heard about him? Mycroff did three years for it. THen he got "cozy with corruption" before coming to Node Three. He leaves them.

Lucas asks the obvious question. Oz explains that Mycroff worked for the government for a while before disappearing. He saw something bad. Then he got the job at the station when it went online. Lucas asks them if the social engineering (This is what Mycroff calls his hacking.) scares them. Oz says that's why they're here. It's not worth it if it doesn't scare them. I can believe this part. Oz warns Lucas off the sushi. He shrugs and picks up some toast with jam on it, managing to flip his tray and dump his tall glass of orange juice. We get a close up of it shattering.

Close up of screens doing computer things. Mycroff is telling Lucas to do something. He's in the hot seat. He uses the voice interface. Mycroff talks about Brazil and its civil war. This looks like a real interface now. So what was the point of the cubes before? It's a simple graph of locations where trouble is going down in Brazil. They focus on election fraud. Lucas explains the interface to anyone who fell asleep. Mycroff tells him to pick a trouble spot. He does and declares that someone is cheating. Mycroff tells him to fix it. Lucas starts working and watching the map. He hits the keys fast and inserts a monitoring virus into their systems to phone home if any fraud goes on. Mycroff congratulates him and there are smiles and laughs all around.

Hallway. It looks like they made up a college dorm. Regular doors and everything. Lots of crap on the walls and party decorations for no discernable reason. Julie is asking how Lucas did it. She tells Oz to get lost. Then she kisses Lucas and bails herself. Lucas looks stunned. She closes the door behind her, then opens it and invites him into her dorm room. It's overdecorated with huge palms. She talks about how she imagined Lucas. She didn't expect cute.

"You think I'm cute?" I have the feeling Brandis had this conversation a lot. It is a pocket t-shirt like I had, by the way.

Julie says that the Frankenavatar doesn't really convey cute well. Oh by the way, when she and Oz were hacking UEO codes they guessed what he looked like. What codes? They didn't need the modules. They sent the message just to get Lucas. He's impressed by the feat of hacking. Why? Wolfman wanted to meet so they could undress one another and debug naked for hours on end, their bodies sensuously draped over one another. In the spare moments, he could whisper stories about how David Played-Mulder-Can't-Spell-His-Last-Name acted on set into Lucas's ear. "This one time he let his pet gerbil run all over the craft services table..."

Lucas says he's cute and stupid now. Lucas is seventeen and spends all his time holed up on a sub with a dolphin and nobody his own age. Julie is coming on to him. If he has any blood left in his skull at all by now, I'd be amazed. Lucas doesn't seem exactly experienced with girls. But he wants to know what's going on. On Node Three, not in his pants. He presses for more. She kisses him and he kisses back.

Cut to a new screen. Many woots and cheers from the peanut gallery as Frankenstein is beating Wolfman at some game played on three stacked boards that tilt and rotate. Lucas is beating him pretty badly. Julie spots Mycroft (she says it correctly) and everyone starts to disperse.

M: Has anyone ever beat you? I was like you: too smart and too young to know it. And it hurt too. He has a bit of Jesse Jackson diction here. He says his sanctuary was in the streets, so he probably sees things through different eyes. Lucas is listening intently. M proclaims the node his apology. He could do bad things with the node. Pain. Death. Right out on the internet. Now he works to end the pain. He calls up the logo of the World Bank.

M proposes Lucas hack the World Bank. Lucas says it's impossible. Like hacking UEO codes? That's just hard, like when Lucas was with Julie and trying to get enough blood to his brain to stay conscious. Mycroff lays into Lucas about how this isn't just a playground where he shows off. He's here to hack the World Bank. Lucas looks hurt. M goes on about how this is big money that controls armies. It's not just Apple Computer buying Microsoft. Heh. Mycroff is getting really unhinged here. Oz is unperturbed, but Lucas is not buying. He wants to know what he has to do with this, because he didn't read the script for the last six scenes.

M explains that everyone else has tried and failed, and offers Lucas the headset. Lucas takes it and puts it on. Why? He looks very reluctant. Or is it scared? Hard to tell. Tense music plays as he goes to work. A window pops up on the screen and we see a cube rotating. I guess this is going to visualize levels of protection. Not a bad device, but it was just a game earlier. Montage continues. Lucas gets a slice of pizza as the blue cube gives way to a green diamond, which opens into a red dodecahedron. Now a yellow-orange dodecahedron as the montage ends and Lucas proclaims it impossible.

Oz gives a pep talk about being so close and Julie rubs his shoulders. They technobabble at it. Wolfman suggests some technobabble, which works. They're in. Mycroff declares that Lucas did good and can stay. So this was a loyalty test too? Lucas is thrilled to succeed. Apparently all that fear and doubt vanished. Julie kisses him and Oz hugs both. So Lucas is amember of the cult now.

The ship. Bridger is going through Lucas's things. Lucas phones and wants to know what Bridger is doing pawing through his stuff, besides looking for porn. He makes up a story about Lucas borrowing some music and not returning it. Then he says Darwin misses Lucas. How long has it been? Lucas is still in his clothes from the day of the confrontation with Julie and the hacking. Did this all happen in one day? Bridger is missing him that much already?

I take that back. He's in new clothes now. Red shirt under a parchment-colored shirt. He proclaims the node the greatest place on Earth. He loves it. He wants to stay "a while". Bridger is ok with this (Doesn't he have some kind of custody? Can he just give it up like that?) but tells Lucas to tell his parents, who don't care even if it is Lucas's responsibility to tell them. Lucas is in a phone booth. Other people are outside waiting in line. They knock on the door. Lucas agrees to think about it, and Bridger says he'll call on the morrow.

Bridger and Darwin talk about Lucas leaving. It sounded like he was having fun.

Cut to Lucas and Julie kissing. Oz walks in. Julie is wearing vintage 1983, an oversize sweatshirt that leaves one shoulder hanging out in the breeze. Visible black bra strap. Oz explains that tomorrow they'll be in complete control of the World Bank. Lucas wants to know what Mycroff did when he was off the grid, but he's a complete enigma. Lucas suggests hacking in and finding out. It would be a great hack. Julie isn't really curious. Oz and Lucas start talking strategy technobabble, which upsets Julie. But boys will be boys. This is about the first time I buy Oz and Lucas being friends. He leaves Julie to hack with the Wolfman.

The big screen room. Lucas and Oz mount up and go to work. Oh, Martin Clemens. M worked for NorPac. No, the CIA. Julie walks into the room. M was working both sides. He was connected with the Chinese border closing nine years ago. Lucas expositions that his parents were scared then and it's weird to see your parents afraid. This incident could use some fleshing out. Lucas correctly pronounces it Mycroft. It reads that on the screen. Everybody else forgets the final consonant. M was trying to get into the Chinese military computers. The Chinese had a team working against him.

Lucas gapes. M killed somebody. Oz denies it, but it's on the screen. Then M comes on all the screens and declares, "Give me the room." He tells Lucas and Oz to stay. So does Julie. M comes in and keys up old security footage. It's the Chinese guy from the teaser in B&W. He gets shot and a guy that looks a little bit like M (but the guy in the teaser was definitely white and M definitely is not) leans into the camera to get a good head shot of himself. Lucas looks near tears.

"I put a photon bullet in his head. It was a time of great fear..." And so on. M was a new kind of soldier to fight a new war and crash the Chinese computers. Oh, a plot hole is closing. M orchestrated things so a junior counterhacking believed one of his seniors was working for the other side. He more or less manipulated the guy into offing his boss. M says it was a game to him, until it happened. They kicked him off the team for not telling them how he did the hit. Now he's going to show them they're wrong with the World Bank.

Julie's room. Lucas, Julie, and Oz storm in and Lucas is ranting about how this is all about M and he's lost touch with reality. Julie says he's chickening out. Lucas says that even if it's morally right, what gives them the right to do it? Who asked? Even if it works out, where do they get off? Points to Lucas for considering democratic accountability, but that raises questions about non-democracies. Now Lucas wants to know what if they blow it. Chaos. Disaster. They could hurt more than they help. He wants to do something to stop it.

Bridger's room. He's sleeping with a book in hand, in his robe. Who sleeps in a robe? The phone rings. It's Lucas. He looks like he's terrified. Lucas starts in about responsibility and figuring out what is the right thing. Bridger offers trial and error. Lucas floats harming someone. Bridger speaks vaguely, saying nothing. Lucas hangs up, having apparently gotten something out of that.

Hallway. The kids are moving into the Room because it's on. Lucas is in a brown plaid shirt. Oz hauls him along to see the festivities. M preaches about how they're going to capture the network and it'll be great. Lucas eyes him. They start taking over the network. There's Africa. Oz says he has some network trouble and they technobabble, then he gets on his headset and calls out for Lucas. M is two feet away again. What is it with these people and private conversations two feet away from the people you don't want to hear?

Julie is in too. Oz says the network is too unstable to keep control of. Well there goes giving the character any moral responsibility or a real dilemma. The technology failures will save us from it. Lucas resolves to stop it all and starts hacking even as the network is fully trapped. Then the screens go down. Lucas says he shut the node down, because it's wrong. M gets in a seat to hack around Lucas and they have a hacker fight.

M: I've been here before.
"Yeah, you killed a man."

Screens flicker. Lucas speeches about how this is not a game. M goes on about how he took a live. Lucas gets the screens down and M lifts him out of his chair and starts choking Lucas. Oz calls up the security video and that does it. M freaks out. He's pleading now. Lucas goes on about how M is hiding behind the machines and it's not human. M is cracking pretty well now.

"You can't help someone until you know who they are."

M plops in a chair. Lucas tells him to net the network go, and it goes. Then he apologizes.

Epilogue. Oz wants Lucas to stay, but Lucas left some people behind he didn't meant to. They agree to stay in touch and hug. Then Oz leaves and Julie comes up. M is going to be shipped off on seaQuest. Julie is apparently in charge until his replacement arrives. They have awkward good-bye speeches and a hug. As they hug, the door opens and Bridger and Ford come in. Bridger says Julie is cute.

M walks up and thanks Bridger for the lift. Bridger treats this like a visit. Ok, so no one knows? The order came right from UEO command. M and Lucas share a glance. So M wrote his own ticket and is going to vanish again or something.

Ford hands over Lucas's paycheck, retroactive. We close on Lucas walking into the launch saying the salary isn't enough.

Ok. This one was good until the final crack up. I can see that Lucas is wrestling with a legitimate ethical dilemma. Is it ok for them to secretly and anonymously thwart the actions of a democratic government? Doesn't that make them dictators? That's a good issue to wander around and look over. But Lucas's decision to turn his back on it makes very little sense if he was using the advice Bridger gave. That would bless or condemn any action. It's just not useful. The story would have worked better if Bridger wasn't involved at all. Lucas had legitimate, principled qualms. It worked, but then they let technology shortcomings rescue him from any responsibility in the choice. He did the right thing, maybe, but only when he had two friends ratifying it for him and certainty that they couldn't have accomplished controlling the network anyway.

But it's really unclear what we're to take from the Node. Was all that just meant to reconcile Lucas to his fate on seaQuest? If so, I suppose it works. But it works by taking one of the central conflicts of the character, his alienation from his surroundings, and shooting it in the head. The writers get points for showing the node as a relatively positive environment for Lucas, compared to their anti-intellectualism in the past, but ultimately he chooses against it. Sure, it's because they paid him for the whole season. But it's a weird choice still. I know we're supposed to get that he cares about Bridger. Fine. But what else?

There are some gestures towards making the Node a cult of personality around Mycroft. M acts it and the only two noders we see with personality buy in, but that fades off as the episode goes on. They're just anonymous seat-fillers. No lines. No actions of consequence. If the node were nurturing, but ultimately cult-like, that might be an interesting angle and counterpoint to seaQuest. The ship is only sort of nurturing to someone like Lucas, at best. The military aspect could be played up in cultic tones. At times Lucas is responding like he's being indoctrinated, but if the writers were going for that they changed their mind halfway through and M turned to more generic crazy like the Regulator was.

If it's meant as a clique piece, it just fails. Lucas wasn't being adopted by a clique that demanded he reject his old friends from the After School Special. He clearly qualified long before he ever got to Node Three. Likewise there's no real rejection scene to demonstrate any element of betrayal which he will have to atone for. He just decided he wanted to life there for a bit. He wasn't made to disown anybody.

But overall, this is a good episode. It's not stunning TV, but we get to explore some of Lucas's issues in a more native environment for him. He gets to demonstrate that he's good at hacking instead of having it all happen offscreen so he can feed exposition. We get to talk about his relationship to the crew. This is the first episode since the one with the mad scientist that I feel like I could enjoy watching many more times. It's a good character piece, even if it does fall apart at the end. Maybe the writers realized they'd written the pilot for a Lucas, Oz, and Julie show instead of a seaQuest episode (It does feel like a backdoor pilot. Lucas aside, the regular cast are very absent.) and had to dial it back.

This isn't a great ending, and I think there's more to write about these issues. But I'm getting pretty tired and the sun will be up soon. It's time for this Wanderer to hit the sack, even if violence isn't the answer.