/** ***************************************************************** * ****************************************************************** * The Non-Sequitur Express * *Zen master not included. * Published weekly, or at other random intervals, by Phillip Thorne * http://home.earthlink.net/~pethorne/Reviewer/ * * Volume 1, Issue 8: Saturday 4 December 1999 * ****************************************************************** * *************************************************************** */ In this issue: UPCOMING: Cinema, Saturday, Primetime, Voyager REVIEW: Ultimate Trek SOMNABULATIONS: 1993: Pizza chef critiques starship CD tinkerer! NANOWATCH: Quintara, Red Dwarf, Cassini, EFC, Sherlock ERRATA: Roughnecks airing schedule plus Legalese, acknowledgements and opt-in/out instructions. /** ***************************************************************** * Upcoming Media * * Cinema through 14-jan-2000 * Saturday cartoons for 4-dec-1999 * Primetime TV through 15-dec-1999 * Star Trek Voyager through 15-dec-1999 * *************************************************************** */ Cinema: Bicentennial Man f 1217 Robin Williams as Asimov robot. Stuart Little f 1217 Talking mouse CG tiny person E.B.White. Galaxy Quest z 1225 Washed-up SF cast? Abduct as saviors! Fantasia 2000 z 0101 Disney evades Y2K. Supernova f 0114 Boom. Boom boom. Boom boom boom. BOOM! Saturday Morning FoxKids: SH22 (has moved to Mondays 16:00) --- z 1204-0800 29 * X9 Ikira's Secret 110 z 1204-0930 29 * TFBM Techno-Organic War 1: The Key 111 z 1204-1100 29 * Avg 105 z 1204-1130 29 Primetime TV: N+A (Pre-empted) --- f 1203-2100 3 * EFC In Memory 309 z 1204-1600 17 SG1 Serpent's Lair 201 z 1204-1700 29 r SG1 Spirits 211 s 1205-0400 29 Ros (Pre-empted by Captain Simian) --- s 1205-1130 48 Cap "Capt Simian and the Space Monkeys" 1205-1130 48 Sim Simpsons Bible Stories 1014 s 1205-2000 29 r Fut A Flight to Remember 110 s 1205-2030 29 * XF Rush 706 s 1205-2100 29 RD Back in the Red 803 s 1205-2320 12 r EFC Pad'ar 308 s 1205-2330 17 r Buf The Freshman 401 t 1207-2000 17 * Dil The Dupey 205 t 1207-2030 57 r Ang Lonely Hearts 102 t 1207-2100 17 7D Walter 120 w 1208-2000 57 N+A (Pre-empted by Candid Camera) --- f 1210-2100 3 r Ang City Of 101 f 1210-2100 17 * EFC Cloister 310 z 1211-1600 17 SG1 In the Line of Duty 202 z 1211-1700 29 SG1 Serpent's Lair 201 s 1212-0400 29 * Fut A Head in the Polls 203 s 1212-2030 29 XF The Goldberg Variation 702 s 1212-2100 29 RD Cassandra 804 s 1212-2315 12 r EFC In Memory 309 s 1212-2330 17 * Buf Hash ??? t 1214-2000 17 Dil Elbonian Trip 106 t 1214-2030 57 * Ang Parting Gifts 110 t 1214-2100 17 * 7D Love and Other Disasters 209 w 1215-2000 57 Upcoming episodes of STAR TREK VOYAGER: Time and Again 103 m 1206-1900 Unkill civ via time rupture? The Cloud 106 t 1207-1900 Mine space being for fuel. Ex Post Facto 108 w 1208-1900 Paris murder sentence deja vu. Think Tank 520 w 1208-2100 Evil braniacs want Seven! Emanations 109 r 1209-1900 Harry visits wrong afterlife. State of Flux 111 f 1210-1900 Kazon get Fed tech? Traitor! r Think Tank 520 z 1211-1800 Ibid. Faces 114 m 1213-1900 Vidiians split Torres in two. Jetrel 115 t 1214-1900 Restore Neelix's dead family? Learning Curve 116 w 1215-1900 Tuvok trains Maquis. Warhead 525 w 1215-2100 Alien missile hijacks Doc. /** ***************************************************************** * Review * ULTIMATE TREK * Wednesday 1 December 1999 20:00 UPN * 60 minutes * *************************************************************** */ This "Star Trek" 33rd anniversary special was unbelievably lame. Paramount has traditionally been rather stodgy about its SF cash cow; e.g. the only blooper reels available have been smuggled out the back door, and send-ups have been relegated to specialized purveyors such as "In Living Color" parody. Therefore, when they did get around to authorizing a parody-based retrospective, it was one that missed the mark on every possible comedy beat. The premise: The continual broadcast of the 20th century TV series, "Star Trek," have ceased, and the Enterprise-nil is dispatched to investigate and restore it, lest galactic chaos ensue. Kirk (Jason Alexander), Spock and McCoy (clad in TOS-era yellow and blue) beam down to the source, which happens to be 1999 Los Angeles. So far so good. But then they start to (1) overact, (2) reuse lines ("Ah may be jus' a simple country dahctah..."), (3) confuse their own continued existence with the aired adventures, (4) confuse Kirk's career with William Shatner's, and (5) ignore the fourth wall ("Captain, we have only two minutes to set up each segment"). That's just the beginning. They also (6) ignore continuity. Is the Y2K bug responsible? Of course not; everyone knows it "didn't dim a single lightbulb" (Kathryn Janeway's own ancestress said so in "11:59"). They know about the Borg, contact the computer via communicator (where's Uhura?), carry wallets, and return to an Intrepid-class bridge full of modern uniforms. The trio wanders through the Valley searching for the transmitter, perambulating through "Lingerie by Borg," NBC Studios, the Paramount front gate and the "Voyager" bridge set. Each stop occasions a huddled consultation around Spock's tricorder, for segments like "Time Travel," "Galaxy's Most Beautiful Women," "Best One Liners" and "Bloopers." Sometimes the clips are subtitled with episode name -- or not -- and often multiple clips from one episode illustrate a category, rather than a wider survey. The bloopers barely managed to be funny, being heavily weighted by four clips of John DeLancie ("Q") mispronouncing "omnipotent." Commercial bumpers include trivia questions and homages from other shows -- "Frasier," "Suddenly Susan," and so on -- most abusing Trek's fanboys. (C'mon, the nerd who lives in his parent's basement is not only as stale as a lawyer joke, it's now practically the U.S. demographic norm.) The "Dilbert" clip featuring a Seven-of-Nine alarm clock is the only truly funny one, IMHO. Viewers are also exhorted to visit startrek.com and vote for their favorite episode of all time. Finally, on the bridge set, Spock's attempt to restore the signal not only fails, but sets off an alarm. McCoy bashes the console, which obligingly explodes, fatally wounding him. He paraphrases Spock's death speech from "Star Trek II" which is (1) a travesty of a genuinely moving scene and (2) out of character. Then they beam up, he's alive again, and literalist Spock uses the metaphor "the fabric of the space-time continuum" in an aborted explanation. The poll results arrive at the special's conclusion. The four candidates featured two tribble stories, and two Borg: TOS "The Trouble with Tribbles," DS9 "Trials and Tribble-ations," VGR "Scorpion," and the eventual winner, TNG "The Best of Both Worlds." Bravo; the second Borg story, when they were still creepy, and featuring one of the best cliffhangers in SF history -- will Riker kill Picard/Locutus? The final word: if you taped "Ultimate Trek", keep it for the opening music video (heavy on the starship battles) and the bloopers, but delete Alexander and the rest -- unless you're collecting evidence for a trial against every meanspirited self-referential parody writer. In that case, this can stand as Exhibit A. /** ***************************************************************** * From the secret mixed-up files of Phil's head, it's... * His Wackiest Somnabulations * * 1993: Pizza chef critiques starship CD tinkerer! * *************************************************************** */ Marcie had that look in her eyes -- not just any look, but The Look, the look that meant she was about to start tinkering -- and not just any small adjustments, not tweaking the fuel/oxidizer ratio, or modifying the solar array, or realigning the forward thrusters. This was The Look that meant half the ship's systems would be offline for the next fortnight. That the crew would be tripping over assorted unidentifiable components for weeks after that. The Look, the tinkering, that would culminate in performance that was almost but not quite nearly measurable as marginally better than before. Some people labored under the erroneous belief that the ship's "brain" was some sort of huge, heaving pinkish-grey mass of protoplasm, suspended in a bubbling froth of nutrients. The reality was somewhat more prosaic; the main computer resembled nothing so much as an old twentieth-century compact disk, with sparkling rainbow fringes dancing along its finely-patterned surface -- except *this* disk was a meter wide and twenty centimeters thick. Marcie studied said disk intently. She pulled a length of self-bonding optical cross-connect from the toolbox beside her. Hunting across the sparkling surface, she found one chessboard-patterned block that blared some invisible deficiency at her. She stuck the cross-connect to it, its micrometer fibers reaching out and bonding with microscopic interface ports on the surface. Reaching across the disk, she attached the other end to a second offensive sector. Half an hour later, the computer looked like some bizarre basket- weaving class gone wrong, or a 3-d map of the Internet, or the pattern left when fifteen dozen high-energy particles collided in the detector chamber of a particle accelerator. Marcie stood back from it, arms folded, a smug grin on her face. "So howz zit a-doo-in?" asked Luigi, the pizza chef from Deck 35, in that annoying pseudo-Italian accent that hadn't been native to anyone for the past three centuries. /** ***************************************************************** * NanoWatch: Citations of Nanotechnology in Popular Fiction * * Insta-Drols in Jack Chalker's "The Quintara Marathon" * Kryten's mutinous micromaints in "Red Dwarf" * Spacesuits with humor in Ken MacLeod's _Cassini Division_ * DNA washing in "Sherlock Holmes" * Shapeshifting and xoxing in "Earth: Final Conflict" * *************************************************************** */ Series: "The Quintara Marathon" Title: Book 3, _The Ninety Trillion Fausts_ Author: Jack L. Chalker Date: 1991 Synopsis: The pyramidal hierarchy of the Mycohl Empire demands a massive underclass of disposable workers, human or otherwise, generally endowed with brute strength, crude intelligence and cruder manners. Though upward mobility from this "drol" class is available for exceptional individuals, demotion is also possible, using an injection of nanobots that convert the body over a period of months. Series: "Red Dwarf" Title: 708 "Nanarchy" Date: 7-mar-1997 Title: 801 "Back in the Red" Date: Synopsis: Kryten, a three megayear-old DivaDroid Series 4000 mechanoid, was originally equipped with self-repair "subatomic nanobots," but they deserted after an incident with a despair-inducing alien squid (506 "Back to Reality"). They weren't missed until infection by a sentient cold virus forced the amputation of Dave Lister's right arm (707 "Epideme"); Kryten explained they could create a new one from excess tissue, just as they could create diamonds from a graphite pencil. The mutineers were eventually located exploring the contents of Lister's laundry hamper, which finally explained _Red Dwarf's_ disappearance objective centuries earlier (601 "Psirens"); bored with Kryten's body, they had created a "subatomic version" of the ship and stored its excess mass as an anonymous moonlet. Once captured in a glass jar, they were persuaded to replace the arm, and bulked up the rest of Lister's musculature to boot. The ship, however, they did not recreate as they'd found it; instead, they worked to its original design specs, and resurrected its dead crew (killed in a radiation leak in 101 "The End"). Title: _The Cassini Division_ Author: Ken MacLeod Date: 1999 Synopsis: Nanomanufacturing of consumer goods is widespread, but rigid custom limits dissemination of engineering knowledge about replicators; humanity has had too much bitter experience with "outbreaks" both biological and nanotech. Members of Cassini Division use AI-driven spacesuits of great versatility. They can split into multiple components; shapeshift into any type of clothing, armor, a radio dish or climbing ropes; extend tendrils to patch into the optic nerve; and absorb-and-utilize any organic excretions of the wearer. The Division's fusion-torch ships have a similar appetite for organic compounds; they can duplicate any foodstuff they happen to absorb. Medical tablets ("surgeries") are available to delete substance addictions, and to reverse aging-related tissue damage (brain and body); but not to cure spacesickness. Series: "Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century" Title: 108 "The Resident Patient" Date: 13-nov-1999 Synopsis: Perry Blessington M.D., the world's foremost authority in anatomic reconstruction, develops a new "anatomorphing" process that not only changes a person's facial contours, but also improves on standard "DNA washing" techniques by "[using] nanomachines to alter DNA retroactively." Moriarty's gang obtains his services; they commit thefts in full view of security cameras, lead New Scotland Yard to their hideout, then walk out as different people. Fortunately, the procedure leaves telltale marks on the temples, and wears off after a few days. Series: "Earth: Final Conflict" Title: 307 "A Little Bit of Heaven" Date: 20-nov-1999 Synopsis: Doors International has been experimenting with nanotechnology. Renee Palmer presents to Zo'or a featureless tangerine-sized lump of clay; when placed in his hand, it dissolves into a skittering pile of spherules that reform into a preprogrammed shape, a bust depicting himself. Later, she extracts Liam from the Taelonville jail by slipping him a lozenge-sized lump that reforms into a lockpick. She also releases a ground-crawling swarm programmed to seek out interdimensional power sources; the individual bots (or naked-eye- visible clusters) scatter across town at several meters per second, then transmit their findings to her global. Series: "Earth: Final Conflict" Title: 308 "Pad'ar" Date: 27-nov-1999 Synopsis: In 212 "One Man's Castle" the series introduced "biosurrogates": human-seeming androids based on Jaridian replicant technology, to be operated by the downloaded minds of human soldiers. The athletic "Pad'ar Warriors" in this episode, though they look as different as any random selection of normal humans, share identical DNA; they're second-gen biosurrogates, containing brains copied with Doors nanotech (307) from elderly volunteers. /** ***************************************************************** * Errata * *************************************************************** */ ROUGHNECKS schedule correction: From the POV of an issue published Tuesday 23 November, "The Ice Men Goeth" (125) aired on *Thursday* the 25th, and the repeat was not Friday, but the next Tuesday, the 30th. I was confused by the format of the airing list I downloaded. /** ***************************************************************** * Legalese * Acknowledgments * Opt-in/out Instructions * *************************************************************** */ All books, movies, television shows, toys and other creative works reviewed or analyzed herein are the property of their respective copyright holders. No infringement is expressed, implied or intended. The original reviews and analyses are themselves copyright 1999 by Phillip Thorne. Some data may have been relayed via aint-it-cool- news.com, foxkids.com, tv.excite.com, upcomingmovies.com, and others. (Insert acknowledgement here.) You're receiving this newsletter because you're a friend, former classmate and/or former or current coworker of Phillip Thorne, or have specifically subscribed to it. Want to earn Imaginary Brownie Points? Convince your former and/or current friends/classmates/coworkers/ relatives to subscribe. Then they, too, can clutter their brains with useless albeit amusing trivia. For the most part. Sometimes I lapse and write something vaguely useful. To receive the ninth and subsequent issues, send an email message to pethorne@earthlink.net with the words "SUBSCRIBE NON-SEQUITUR" or 'subscribe nonsequitur' in the subject line and/or body. To stop subscribing, s/subscribe/unsubscribe/ig. Capitalization and punctuation doesn't matter. /** ***************************************************************** * ****************************************************************** * The Non-Sequitur Express * http://home.earthlink.net/~pethorne/Reviewer/ * Volume 1, Issue 8: Saturday 4 December 1999 * Copyright 1999 Phillip Thorne, pethorne@earthlink.net * ****************************************************************** * *************************************************************** */