Image Caption: Promotional wallpaper for NBC’s upcoming Fall 2007 television series Bionic Woman

[Commentary] | [Spoilers]

Jaime Sommers is now a bartender with an angry kid sister and a professor boyfriend outside her socio-educational demographic. After a horrific car accident, her boyfriend has her rebuilt, because it turns out he is also working for a top secret bionics program. Sommers becomes the new Bionic Woman and at this point the viewer could care less.

NBC’s Bionic Woman is both a disaster and an insult in a long history of anti-technology storytelling. English actress Michelle Ryan as Jaime Sommers is wasted in a plot that attempts to convey angst, history, and mythology via relentless exposition and hurt looks. The characters speak exposition-ese without the audience getting any opportunity to truly know them or care for them. The accident comes after rapid-fire angst and tears, unexpected, yes, horrific, true, but without any emotional investment.

Superhero origin stories are difficult to tell on film. Audiences who eagerly anticipate heroic actions and special effects must wait while the protagonist is introduced, experiences an accident, evolves into a transhuman entity, and begin to learn about his or her new powers. Origin stories told well allow the audience to feel for the protagonist almost immediately, with nuanced scenes that whisper “See? I’m just like you!” until the character is no longer like you at all.

The worst, like Bionic Woman, paint angst with broad strokes, just annoying filler leading up to the inevitable accident and transhuman capabilities. Even worse, in this telling Jamie Sommers, rapidly cured and enhanced, hates her apparent health and new capabilities. She is so angry and hurt that her boyfriend would successfully attempt to save her life that she throws him across the room, screams, cries, and walks sullen in the pouring rain. When she is reunited with her sister, she immediately lies about her whereabouts as both characters attempt to out angst each other in the limited time they are given.

More pain is ahead. The original bionic woman 1.0 - Katee Sackhoff, so good as Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica and badly acting here - is a violent wreck, presumably because someone also successfully attempted to save her life. Throw in mysterious figures, other actors from Battlestar Galactica, and hints at a larger - and dark! - mythology, and the result is a great depression for the characters AND the viewers.

Show creators apparently hate technology, especially when used to successfully save lives. At what price, they want to explore, do we do so? A character who suffers terrible trauma must continue to suffer long after they have transcended their human weaknesses and been relieved of their pain. The price, we learn, is generally too high, and it would have been better if the character had just died. Because they did not die, they now must spend the seasons performing altruistic acts, to give back to simple unenhanced humans who are owed some unexplained debt. The moment the transhuman start enjoying her powers, she will be taught a terrible lesson.

This bionic woman is a creation of nanotechnology and cybernetics, packaged in a beautiful and indistinguishable-from-human body. A simple bartender enriched by her involvement with a man of education and science must now pay the ultimate price for becoming transhuman. We do not learn in one episode, of course, exactly what price she will pay during her upcoming ordeals, but we can be sure it will be gratuitously gory and tearful.

Modern medicine is marvelous and technologies in labs and on the horizon suggest great things ahead. We know from experience that most people in pain, experiencing great suffering, or nearing death, will, no matter what their prior belief system, embrace relief. Relief is so obviously joyful that relief as horror as depicted in fiction simply rings false, yet writers go back to that same dark well over and over again.

Could there be conflict in a depiction of a transhuman that was joyful and thankful for her transcendence? Absolutely. We have already seen one such character on television, albeit with her own moments of angst and depression and confusion. Her name was Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and she was always at her best when she gave into the morally valid pleasures of her power.

And Buffy Summers, of course, was partly inspired by another woman of incredible power who could, sometimes at least, enjoy her powers. She was the original Jaime Sommers in the original 1970’s Bionic Woman. If her joy was not always apparent, she was a superior role model compared to the current ungrateful incarnation. Until writers embrace the potential joys of transhuman existence, they will continue to “re-image” old material while popular storytelling continues to stagnate.

[Commentary] | [Spoilers]

The first episode of the new season of Doctor Who was the last place I expected to see a rant against cloning, life extension, and transhumanism. In the new episode, written by Russell T. Davies, [spoiler alert] a race of feline nurses in the distant future has secretly grown and experimented on human clones to learn how to cure all diseases. By the end of the episode the Doctor has expressed his outrage, freed all of the imprisoned clones, and convinced a grotesque transhuman enemy that she must give up her pursuit of beauty and life extension and instead die like she is suppose to [end spoiler].

Clearly, popular fiction is the last place I should expect a thoughtful exploration of issues. Why popular fiction continues to depict scientists and transhumanists as villains and progress as “yucky” is unclear, but it is unfortunate that these fallacies also continue to play such a huge role in the ongoing debates over stem cell research, nanotechnology, life extension, cryonics, etc. Like Davies, critics create from their incorrect notions frightening futures of science gone awry to scare people into resisting new technologies.

It can easily be shown that these futures are simply not possible. For example, progress in stem cell research, organ tissue engineering, and artificial organ replacements have already rendered obsolete the human clone slaughterhouses envisioned by Davies and other critics. Why feed, store, clean, and otherwise maintain human clones when you can just grow or replace the required organs more cheaply and in much less time? Human clone farms, clone armies, clone basketball teams and all the other nonsense proposed as reasons for banning human cloning are neither economically feasible nor worthwhile to even the most despicable villain.

Science fiction has always been important for exploring the events and issues of the times. What we need are new archetypes that live within future worlds extrapolated from our own reality. Prose continues to offer just such fiction. I wonder if and television and movies will catch up.

Dear Apple (with greetings, and apologies, to Disney/ABC),

Thank you. Thank you for finally providing legal downloads of television shows. I just deleted all the episodes of “Lost” I downloaded via Bittorrent and from now on I will pay US$1.99 per episode (plus tax in my state) the day after that episode airs on the ABC network. It took only ten minutes to download an episode of “Lost” using iTunes, compared to several hours to complete a download using Bittorrent. There were no commercials (making the US$1.99 price absolutely worthwhile to me.) It was convenient and legal.

Please continue to add other television series to your lineup and consider offering older series at US$0.99 per episode with a discount for purchasing an entire season (please, bring me “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”!) Here are a few other changes and future additions that will keep me happy and eventually wean me from Bittorrent forever:

• Double or quaduple the file size for better quality video. Episodes downloaded using Bittorrent still have the advantage in quality (an hour of television looks great at 340 MB and absolutely fantastic at 700 MB.) Currently, the episodes through iTunes look about as good as standard television. Let’s bring on high definition…
• The first season of Lost is available for US$34.99. If I buy all 24 episodes of this second season of Lost, I will pay nearly US$48.00. Please offer a subscription to a full current season of a show for the same price as full past seasons. I will prepay before the season even starts.
• Please consider adding in extras that would normally show up on the DVD release of a television series, for no extra charge, when purchased with a full season.
• More series, including obscure series, classic series, series that were cancelled early, Internet-only series, independent series, public-access series, series from around the world (hello, “Dr. Who” and “ReGenesis”,) and free series. Oh, and “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer”!
• Movies - no more than US$9.99 to own, no more than US$0.99 to watch one time. All movies. I will pay, I assure you. Just please, please, please, build a complete movie library of all known titles from the dawn of movies until the present, accessible at any time (like those sleepless nights when just one particular treasured movie or genre will do.)
• Let these movies be displayed on my iPod video, computer monitor, big screen television, refrigerator, glasses, sunglasses, retina-writing contact lenses, etc. In other words - buy once, own forever, play anywhere. If I cannot buy once, then at least let me buy everything for one-time playback at US$0.99 or less. I promise I will spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year.

Again, thank you, Apple. Thank you, Disney/ABC, Pixar, and the music video publishers, for your early offerings. I no longer require physical media for my entertainment content. Put everything on the Internet, let competition work on the prices, and let me have immediate access to it all whenever I want.

Best regards,

Richard Leis

[Commentary] | [Spoilers]

I have always been a fan of Star Trek. The first three series are wonderful. Then came Voyager. The series premiere was promising and then the series quickly tanked. I skipped most of it but decided to check out the finale. Horrible.

Then there was Enterprise. Started out promising and then quickly tanked…until this season, when they brought in new writers and remembered that the series was related to Star Trek. The last four or five episodes were quite entertaining, including the second-to-last episode with its alien/human pathos and emotional ending.

Enterprise should have ended there. Instead, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga created something horrible to spit on everyone around them, including the fans.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Problem 1 - The finale was not an Enterprise episode. It was a Next Generation episode.

Problem 2 - Same as number one, but instead of being a new Next Generation episode, it is filler for a season seven episode. Should Riker tell Picard about the cloaking experiment? Lets ask the Enterprise crew for advice!

Problem 3 - Riker and Troi do not look the same age at all! Nothing fit in!

Problem 4 - Data? Wow. That’s right, he use to be alive, before he was killed off (more horrible writing in Nemesis.) And as thanks we get a few lame jokes?

Problem 5 - Tucker dies. The brilliant engineer cannot come up with a different plan? And then, no one seems to be all that broken up about it. Oh, and for some reason it is important to know that after the death of their baby, T’Pol and Tucker dated for awhile, broke up, and now he is dead. WTF?

Anyway, I could go on and on but it just makes me more angry. Sure, the show was already horrible (until those last few episodes.) Sure writers can write whatever they please. But to piss on the fans in this way…I’m sure it comes out of anger that Berman and Braga had been demoted by Paramount, anger that the fans had turned away from their tripe long ago, anger that they were not getting the praise they use to get on Next Generation.

What a way to end such an incredible part of my life. It is funny…this is the year that both Star Trek and Star Wars come to an end. Maybe there will be future spin offs, but the core of both have come to an end. Both mean a lot to a lot of people, but I think it means something very special for those of us in our 30s, who were little kids when they were first exposed to both Star Trek and Star Wars, and now as adults get to watch them both end.

I really hope George Lucas treated Revenge of the Sith with more respect than Berman and Braga treated Star Trek.