Tonight I watched the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica “prequel” (what language sadist invented that word?) Caprica. It seemed to start a little slow but eventually got going and had some interesting features. In no particular order, here are my thoughts (note: there are spoilers)

The terrorists are teenagers. Historically, it takes a little longer to become radicalized to the point of blowing yourself up. In the real world terrorists are more likely to be college age or older.  However, just as we’ve seen the average age of violent gang members decrease (and the sex of violent offenders widen to include a greater portion of females than used to be the case) in an advanced society where young people have access to sex and death clubs (albeit only as virtual reality) this is certainly possible. It is still different from reality at the current time.

The hedonistic virtual club shown a couple times in there, where bored teenagers (and presumably a lot of older people) went is not possible with current technology. In real life, clubs are not (to the best of my knowledge) this depraved. Close on the sex end maybe, but rarely if ever are there human sacrifices. But when technology makes this sort of thing possible, can anyone doubt they will come into existence? What kind of world will we have when teenager’s avatars lose their virginity before their physical selves do? This may not be more than a decade or two off.

Monotheists as terrorists. This could be taken by some as greatly insulting. Religious people who look for insults in popular media will certainly consider this to be one. I don’t think it’s meant that way, though, any more than the human sacrifice bit in the club was meant as an insult to polytheists. Really, this is almost required by the story this is supposed to precede. In BSG, the Cylons were monotheists (who, according to the series finale, may have had direct contact with their deity). They also annihilated billions of humans. The logic that one of the earliest cylons contained the personality of a teenage, psychopathic, monotheist, mass killer actually explains a lot. And really, is it even possible to have the same sort of terrorrism with polytheists?: “The many gods will drive out the One” just doesn’t sound quite as inspiring as what the kid actually shouted before blowing himself up. Maybe it’s just me?

Taurons approximate Sicilians (mafiosi). Or some other ethnic gang culture, taken to an extreme. Heavy handed but, again, it fits the story line. There were several references in BSG to the mixed legacy of Admiral Adama’s father. He was a brilliant lawyer but also a bad person (gee, who would ever have thought of that? A lawyer who’s not nice? Yeah. They’ll never see that coming.) Hey! Is that the future Admiral Adama at the game with his dad? He was kind of a snot, wasn’t he?

The sheer horror and also lure of having your kid recreated as an artificial life form is shown well both from the parent’s side and the ersatz kid’s.This was what had me thinking that, in some ways this show is much better science fiction than BSG was. I was surprised to enjoy it as much as I did. BSG made me mad at the lost opportunities or sheer stupidity even more often than it amazed me with its genius. I didn’t expect this much from Caprica. Interesting bit: “My baby! She couldn’t feel her heart!” My first thought was that they had made a robotic vampire but, no, it was actual drama. Close call there. (Warning to producers: This show could easily be reduced to self parody!)

But then there’s the silly theme. One of the characters (Adama?) made a comment about “the things that make you cry, make you feel. Those are the things that make you human.” This was always a big subtext in BSG. It was hard to avoid what with the Cylons being indistinguishable from humans and all. The truth is, though, that the human/machine duality question is too hackneyed for words. EVERY show, every book, every short story that deals with robots seems to feel obliged to consider “what makes us human.” If the people making Caprica think they’ve hit on a winning philosophical thing here, the show is doomed to have as hideously lame an ending as Galactica itself did. Please please please get beyond this and do something actually good!

Those are my initial impressions of the show. Because of the track record of BSG (and the lameness of  “BSG: The Plan” which should have just been part spliced into the series. Both would have made lots more sense that way) I had and have serious doubts as to whether Caprica is worth the effort. So far, though, they’ve managed to keep my interest.  There seems to be some serious exploration of the effect of technology on society. On the other hand, there’s an unfortunate tendency toward what Isaac Asimov called “The Frankenstein Complex.”

So I have concerns but I’m going to watch it again.

My boss and I have an ongoing disagreement that sometimes flares up (loudly), about who was the better detective: Hercule Poirot, or Sherlock Holmes? The boss takes the point of view that Holmes relied on “parlor tricks” while Poirot used pure intelligence to reason out the solutions.

I contend (very reasonably and with only enough shrillness in my voice to convince people to listen) that this shows a lack of understanding of Holmes’s true skills as a detective. The famous parlor tricks – where he figured out people’s life stories by observing tiny clues he noticed in a glance at them – are NOT how he solved cases at all. Unlike the indolent Poirot who seemed to get most of his information by eavesdropping, Holmes investigated cases. He used disguises to infiltrate locations and spy on suspects. He had a network of informants (The Baker Street Irregulars). He studied shipping and train schedules and knew the map of London intimately, in order to understand the movements of people and things related to his cases. He did experiments in order to improve his understanding of potential evidence. He worked at the business of investigating.

To be honest, it’s been decades since I absorbed the complete Sherlock Holmes novels and stories and I never did get into the Poirot stuff because I find Agatha Christie’s writing style to be dull. Really really really dull. Maybe it’s a British thing. Odd, really, since my mother has everything Christie ever wrote. Most of what I know about the brilliant Belgian detective I got from watching the series with David Suchet on TV. I enjoyed them and often found the solutions to be quite clever. But to compare Poirot’s skill at thinking to the monomaniacal investigative prowess of the great Sherlock Holmes is silly.

This argument and a related thought about a currently popular TV series came to mind yesterday when I saw a new movie inexplicably titled “Sherlock Holmes.” The movie was very entertaining, with humor, explosions, suspense and period (like) costumes and settings related to Victorian England. It even had characters with names confusingly like some of the ones in the Holmes stories. This is confusing because anyone expecting (possibly fooled by the title) a Sherlock Holmes story will not find it. Maybe this movie should have been named “Greg House, Consulting Detective, but in a Past Life.”

Ever seen House?

It’s a funny show about a more or less psychopathic doctor who is miles smarter than everyone else around him but who is so dishonest, manipulative, childish and insulting that almost no one can stand him. I’ve believed for years that the character House was probably inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, who was, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

Like Holmes and House, Dr. Bell was uncommonly good at noticing seemingly small details about people and figuring out from them huge amounts about their lives, personalities, circumstances. This skill is what my boss referred to (not necessarily unfairly) as a parlor trick. It amazes people and often annoys them or even frightens them. The kind of person who can practice this sort of skill must be very confident to the point of arrogance and willing to be disliked for discovering things that people may have (mistakenly) considered private. A big mouth seems to be part of the package too.

The similarities between these different characters is significant because the relationship between Holmes and Dr. Watson in yesterday’s movie reminded me of the relationship between Dr. House and his best (possibly only) friend Dr. Wilson. In particular, Holmes’s clumsy attempts to meddle in Watson’s romance with Mary had much of the petty selfishness and childish humor of House, with none of the stuffiness or personal obliviousness that Holmes showed in Conan Doyle’s stories. Wilson and House often play pranks on each other and it is normal for Wilson to lie about his relationships for fear his friend will sabotage them.

Why would anyone re-write the Holmes-Watson relationship to make it less Victorian and more like House-Wilson’s adversarial version of friendship? There are three possible explanations:

1. Didn’t know any better. Just too ignorant of the Holmes stories to know what would work and what didn’t. This would certainly explain much about the movie, not just about Watson punching Holmes in the nose, or Holmes intentionally offending Mary.
2. Thought it would be funnier. No arguing with that. There was very little humor in the Holmes stories and Watson was one of the most unfunny characters ever written. The movie had a small amount of humor.
3. Not a good enough writer to get it right. The simplicity of the “mystery” in the movie and the reliance on explosions and stunts (like Holmes jumping out a high window and diving into the water) would tend to bear this explanation out.

Two of our three possible explanations boil down to incompetence. Doesn’t sound good when you look at it that way, does it? Most of the reviews I’ve seen went with that explanation, too. To be fair, whenever trying to work with well known material like Holmes, there will always be people like me to nitpick over historical accuracy (so to speak). Remember the debacle of the so-called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” It turned out to have very little resemblance to the Stoker version of the story. The use of the name was, to be kind, a miscalculation.

By contrast, House is a show that is (or was, in the first couple seasons) inspired by Holmes in a way, while being unique in its execution. It’s a bit of a mystery why the movie Sherlock Holmes was named for Sherlock Holmes when so little of Holmes made it into the story. Sometimes it seems that the culture of Hollywood is determined to avoid creativity at all costs.

So we have two lessons we can learn from this little farce:

1. Be observant. It won’t make you liked but it will make you seem very smart. You could maybe even be a great doctor or great detective if you can learn not just to observe but to reason about what you observe.
2. At least try to be creative! Change the names, for God’s sake! How hard would it have been to make the main character a brilliant detective who’s NOT Sherlock Holmes? Then instead of annoying fans, you could be lauded for doing something different.

Never mind. Who wants that anyway?

So someone thought it would be a good idea to remake Patrick McGoohan’s 1960s classic The Prisoner. Why? My current favorite candidate for a reason is that Hollywood hates creativity. They also remade V, after all and that was a show that was crying out to be forgotten (while the remake – which I’ve stopped watching – performed the amazing and unforgivable feat of making Morena Baccarin boring).

I could criticize the casting of The Prisoner but what would be the point? Jim Caviezel seems to be a competent enough actor but no where near Patrick McGoohan’s caliber. But then, who is there alive today who is of that caliber? But my problem with the show isn’t with the acting. It’s with the entire show.

Did I mention they’ve also canceled Dollhouse? (See here and here) This was a somewhat creative show that had all the interesting stuff leached out of most of the first season and all of the second season that had aired before its cancellation. The rumor is that the creator of the show, the brilliant and always interesting Joss Whedon, was not allowed by the network to do the show the way he wanted except for a few (brilliant) episodes in the first season. Whether this is true of not, the resulting show was dull. It’s a shame to lose a show with such an interesting premise (programmable people) but the execution was so poor, I guess it’s no great loss.

The Prisoner didn’t have the advantages of a brilliantly creative creator or an interesting new premise. It’s had a lot of hype, though, and of course Ian McKellen. And it has lots of feelings.

As I’m writing this, Jim Caviezel’s character just willed his evil twin to go away, giving Ian McKellen an excuse to smile an evil smug little smile. The evil twin plot is an old old old science fiction type plot that almost every such show tries at one time or another. Or one time AND another. It’s a classic head game and these days head games are what Hollywood likes best.

This is getting to the heart of my problem with this and lots of other shows. Science fiction is about ideas. Remember that rule. It’s so important, I think I’ll repeat it: Science fiction is about ideas.

How people respond to those ideas, how they order their lives around them and within them, are things that can make great stories. But in today’s Hollywood, there are few ideas. There are people talking about their feelings. There is Number 6 of The Prisoner, standing at the gate of Number 2’s house, shouting, “I’ll make you feel!” As if this is somehow a dramatic moment, rather than a merely self-important and pointless one. Anyone can see that 2 feels. He feels contempt. He feels amusement. He feels like screwing with 6’s head.

Is there an idea behind all this? The Village seems to be some sort of matrix (as in The Matrix) and Number 6 is Neo (though, thankfully, played by a better actor than Keanu Reeves, a man who has made a career swimming against the Hollywood grain by putting absolutely no feeling into the majority of what he does).

The new show Stargate: Universe has taken a similar tack. The original Stargate series was basically action adventure. The idea was that other worlds were opened up for humans before we were ready and survival was going to take a lot of new discoveries and desperate fighting for a long time to come. The premise allowed a lot of other ideas to be tossed in at will (sometimes without much sense, but at least with a sense of fun), like time travel, alternate worlds, and unstoppable killer robots. Well, at least it was fun.

The next Stargate show, Stargate Atlantis, was mostly based on the same ideas as the original only with less fun. And now the newest show has almost completely abandoned the ideas except as a backdrop for pseudo poignant pretend recorded  discussions of the character’s feelings. “I worry about my mom.” “I never meant to hurt you.” “I always wanted to act in a soap opera.” Even by TV standards, this show is boring.

There are many successful soap operas. Hey, I even used to watch one, long ago (Dark Shadows). So I guess I can’t say that they aren’t entertaining or that they have no place in the world.

But that ain’t science fiction. I’m not going to watch the rest of The Prisoner. Or Stargate: Universe. In fact, there’s so little on that’s worth watching, I may have to start reading again. Now if I can just find some new science fiction books that don’t have a TV or movie tie-in …

Update

I seem to have accidentally watched the rest of The Prisoner while finishing this post. I wish I hadn’t. I enjoyed making fun of the show more than the show itself. I wonder if I could get funding to start a parody channel?

One of the things that makes being a fan of science fiction a little difficult is the traditional absence of creativity in Hollywood products. That is, even on the rare occasions when Hollywood tries to do science fiction, they don’t generally try very hard to make it good or interesting. An even worse problem is the traditional ignorance of science in Hollywood and journalism. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is that staple of TV science fiction: The Genius.

Notice that the word is capitalized. Not mere genius but more like Super Genius. The person with an intellect so enormous that he (usually, though sometimes a she, as characters Amanda Tapping played very well in Stargate: SG1 and much less convincingly in the deeply inferior Sanctuary) is a master of every science and all technology. Often these people are so brilliant they not only understand everything, they go far beyond what the rest of the world knows, inventing whole new sciences and extending existing ones to unimagined new heights.

In stories, these people have two functions. Those are to explain what is going on to the audience (and incidentally to the folks around them) and to come up with the one great idea that can save the day, or save the world, or at least save the story from a depressing ending.

The third, often unintended function, is to annoy the living hell out of the audience, especially those of us who know that that’s just not the way things work.

The Genius is an easy gimmick that dates back at least to the golden age of science fiction when Doc Savage was still a new character and John W. Campbell was writing his stories of over-the-top heroism in the face of universe-sized threats. For the last 4 decades or so, the quintessential Genius has been the comic book character Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four. This is a guy who can develop a portal to open up a portal to parallel universe before lunch, then reprogram an alien robot to turn on its creators (who, except for their easily hacked robotics, are much more technologically advanced than Earth people), thus saving the world by dinner.

Famously, these geniuses who can do anything are often insane and horribly evil. Dr. Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime comes to mind. And, of course, Dr. Doom.

It’s always amazing how very much these lone geniuses accomplish that involves more than just thinking. Dr. Doom invented a time machine. Currently, there is no working theory of how one of those would be made. Time, so far as we know is one-directional (it may have to do with quantum forgetting| ). But even if we had a good theory of time travel, someone who has spent decades learning the math and physics to develop the theory has not also spent decades learning how to build the equipment, or earning the money to buy the parts (and the electricity!)

Often what these geniuses do involves other genius things first. Building an android sounds simple on paper:

1. Build robot
2. Make robot look and act human
3. Send robot to conquer the world, Pinky!

But in reality, there are dozens of lesser problems involved in building a robot, and making it look human, and making it act human. Computers that can interpret pictures well enough to be considered able to see do not yet exist, despite some brilliant people working for years to develop them. It turns out, vision is a hard problem.

Thinking is a hard problem too (for robots I mean. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out I walked into that one. Just let it go). So is walking. Just ask any 8-month-old.

Talking is a problem. Sure, robots can repeat noises like any myna bird but connecting complex ideas (like “kill the master” or “Build me a girlfriend”) to complete sentences is really hard. Just ask any College English professor how many students have mastered this. Then drink heavily to counteract the depression.

Even if you could figure out how to build an android, it would take one person years to type out the software to solve all the attendant problems!

That’s one of my main points. That even for geniuses, turning an idea into reality is hard. Teams of brilliant people worked together for years to come up with technological advances like the microwave oven or the TV or the personal computer. These things don’t spring full grown from one person’s brain. They take work!

But TV, movie and comic book geniuses always skip past such difficulties without even noticing them. Then, more often than not, they get in trouble because it never occurred to them to check and see if the bad guy was still breathing after the monster robot stepped on him. Somehow, that force field that saved his life last week never comes to mind when wondering what’s going to happen this week.

And this is one of the serious problems with having supposed geniuses being written by people of average (or, judging from the quality of most of television, far below average) intelligence. Fictional entertainment is overpopulated with idiots of near infinite intelligence who can create technological wonders beyond the wildest dreams of Asimov, Clarke or Heinlein but still only survive because the equally brilliant nemesis forgot to lock the door, or some such idiocy.

The other day I found a funny and sickening blog post that explained part of this problem. Basically, on some allegedly science fiction shows, the writers simply insert place holders for high technology and let someone else fill in the details. “We’ve built a [fill in technological words here] to beat the aliens!” The genius problem in reverse: People who’ve spent years learning to write for TV haven’t learned enough about technology to write even bad techno-gibberish – which is about all they usually end up with anyway  (It’s a very funny and informative post. Read it here).

The new show StarGate: Universe has a slightly unusual approach to the genius problem. In recognition that no one genius can solve all the problems there are (or more likely because they thought the character mix needed a likable computer geek), they have two. There’s the older, grouchy and sinister genius and the young, innocent, kind of dorky but friendly and likable genius who is probably smarter than the old guy but is too naive and inexperienced to know it. If this sounds like Dr. Smith and Will Robinson, it’s a pure coincidence. They’re on a ship they can’t control, careening around a universe they don’t understand, but they aren’t lost in space. They’re just misplaced. And they don’t have a robot (yet).

The older genius solves all the simple problems like how to stay alive. The younger one finds and miraculously understands the alien technology that just happens to be what they need right now. More importantly (from the point of view of the writers), the younger one will almost certainly act as the older one’s conscience, since it’s so hard for the Great One to relate to mere humans.

The blog post I referred to above laments the use of technology as a sort of substitute for divine intervention, to be called up to get them out of problems and otherwise ignored. In most stories, genius is pretty much the same. It’s a magic wand to call up miracles when needed and otherwise hide away, affecting nothing. It has no consequences of its own, has no influence on the characters (no, being obsessive about working in the lab or uncomfortable with members of the opposite sex are not consequences of genius. Those are just stereotypes). It means nothing.

Where genius is concerned, sloppy, uncaring writing is the norm. It’s no surprise then if the rest of the show seems a bit lost in stereotypes too.

One of my simple yardsticks for whether or not I like a TV show is the question, “Do I like the main character(s)?” This is not a hard and fast rule. I hated most of the characters in Battlestar Galactica – and most of the stories, especially that ridiculous lame ending! – yet kept watching the show. It’s an important factor, though. If I’m rooting for the characters to get killed or maimed, I’m probably not enjoying the action, either. Especially when they win.

This at least partially explains why Torchwood has never been one of my favorite shows. I just don’t much like the main character, Captain Jack Harkness. He’s too full of himself, too smarmy, and the way every story has to relate to his personal narrative strikes me as hackneyed and unnecessarily limiting.

How many shows have you seen where a mysterious female (not a given in Torchwood but never mind that) appears who turns out to be the hero’s long lost love and she has a child who may or may not be the hero’s? This sort of fake character development is a TV staple that gets exercised far too much in shows that take themselves too seriously (like Torchwood, or the execrable Sanctuary). Rather than revealing anything about the character it just provides contrived and manipulative melodrama that got old back when Gunsmoke still had smoking guns and Little Joe was still alive (I know he was on a different show. That’s how staples work. They bind multiple things).

Still, it’s science fiction and I’ll usually give science fiction a try, even after all the times I’ve been disappointed (such as EVERY Star Trek series made after the original). Besides. It’s summer and there’s even less on worth watching than usual.

So I was looking forward to the 5-part miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth with mixed feelings. Five nights of an epic story told in the context of an intensely mediocre show. Hmmmm. Maybe, for the sake of the epic, they would pull out all the stops and make an effort to surpass their usual limitations. Why not? Weirder things have happened.

Unfortunately, in this instance that wasn’t what happened. By the fifth night I was bored with the story and the people, except for 2 bright spots (Gwen and Lois) who exceeded my low expectations for supporting characters on this show (and everyone who’s not Cap’n Jack is a minor supporting player. Torchwood was never a true ensemble show). There was even one point where Lois (a new character) stood up to the Prime Minister, in spite of her obvious fear, and I felt truly proud of her. She was kicked out of the story shortly after that, though, leaving behind a sea of less interesting and much less admirable people.

Interestingly, one of the least admirable people in the show was also among the most interesting. I forget the character’s name (apparently “interesting” and “memorable” are not synonyms!) but “Dr. Strangelove” conveys enough of the description to make him fairly recognizable. He was a brilliant and very nasty old man, right up to the end. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so much the character as the actor’s brilliant portrayal that attracted my attention. The cast of this piece was much better than the material they had to work with, by the way.

One of the things that writers have historically found makes science fiction stories interesting to tell is that people can be shown reacting to situations and stressors that simply don’t exist in the real world. Alien contact. Annihilation of the entire race. Children acting really weird.

Okay, that last one is a bit of a red herring. In Torchwood, it was children acting weird simultaneously all over the world. On the last night of the show, a sort of kind of half way explanation was offered for this. Actually, it wasn’t so much an explanation as a hint that they had tried to think of one … and failed miserably. Science fiction often deviates from actual science, of course, but this deviated to the point of not making the slightest sense. I wonder – do aspiring TV writers learn about logic or cause and effect? That’s a red herring too. Obviously, the answer is no, which explains a lot of what happens on TV.

This leads to my biggest complaint about the mini-series. It violated the same basic rule many times throughout: Important events (children all talking simulataneously, important characters being killed, etc), happened solely so there could be a dramatic scene, not because they had anything whatever to do with the story. The logic (there’s that nasty word again) of the story was bent, twisted and mangled in order to fit these scenes. Consequently, rather than being truly dramatic, they were just too much.

Crude melodrama at its “finest.”

It is probably true that science fiction needs a coherent, logical narrative even more than other types of stories. They all need it but science fiction is making a greater demand on the “suspension of disbelief” than other types, so it needs to compensate by not abusing that any farther than necessary. Plus, it attracts people like me, with some science education and a mind that is always trying to fit the pieces together into some kind of reasonable order. It can be annoying when that order just isn’t there.

None of this means that Children of Earth wasn’t worth watching. It was still way better than the soap opera about monsters (I mean, vampires and werewolves and stuff) that started on the same network tonight.  Sometimes you wonder how the people who develop TV shows manage to stay employed. Then you wonder if it’s their very inability to tell a coherent story that does it. Maybe that’s what I’m doing wrong. At least I hope so.

For some people, one of the things that makes science fiction interesting is the way it deals with ideas. I’m one of the old school that prefers the scientific and technological ideas over philosophical ones, as I find most philosophy (particularly when it’s in the context of science fiction) to be pretentious and illogical. Technology is a tool for building things and making people’s lives longer and more comfortable. It can’t change who we are (which could be a reference to the exceptional TV show Dollhouse or it could just be a segue into the discussion that follows. Don’t ask me which. I just write this stuff, I don’t analyze it).

Lately, due to the release of the new Terminator movie (Terminator: Salvation – a title apparently chosen more for dramatic impact than for anything that happens in the movie), there has been a slew of articles about how technology – especially robots – will shape the future of the human race. Usually the headline is something like, “Real life Terminators: How much time do we have?”

I’m not going to link to any of those articles because they are, almost without exception, not worth the paper that no one is bothering to print them out on (Sorry. This isn’t supposed to be a “what’s wrong with newspapers” post). For the moment it should be enough to say that the technology to build terminators doesn’t yet exist. Not the hardware and not the software. The robot apocalypse proposed by the Terminator movies is not just around the corner. Those movies came out of a different time and a different generation that grew up with the idea that some kind of apocalypse (probably a nuclear one) was always around the corner.

In any case, I found that the movie was good enough that I only mildly resented the $7 charged for a matinee ticket. This was the first of the Terminator movies that did not feature Arnold Schwarzenegger, so they were able to do something a little new and a little different. They actually made an attempt to develop the story, though at times the story looked like Mad Max with robots. For those of us who like action, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In true science fiction tradition, the technology displayed in the movie appeared to be quite a bit beyond even the stated time frame, which was not far from now (2018). But then, a massive artificial intelligence might be able to push the boundaries of technology in very interesting ways and we know from the recently (and moronically) canceled Terminator TV series that someone – possibly Skynet, possibly future Terminators sent back in time, or maybe someone else entirely – has already developed some of the flying devices shown in the movie. We know from Iraq and Afghanistan that there are already unmanned flying machines with military applications, though these are not yet independent of remote human control. So some small portion of the tech is there.

A self-aware computer might be able to set up and run countless simulations to determine useful technological configurations. And it might be able to direct its own servant robots to run vast numbers of tests to see if those configurations work. Seems like a lot of trouble to be going to during a war, though. It was never stated in the movie but the war seemed a bit too even. Too many humans survived against a relentless and powerful enemy. This is something good science fiction could be used to explain (something lacking in almost all movies these days). When Skynet set off Judgment Day (the nuclear devastation of the planet), it must have destroyed much of its own infrastructure for building robots, along with most of human civilization.

Also, apparently, by the time of Judgment Day, there was no human presence in space that could strike back or rally the resistance or rescue survivors and take them off to another planet to restart the human race. When the first Terminator movie came out (1984 according to imdb.com) maybe the writers could have been forgiven for that. At that point, the Apollo program was done and NASA essentially just going through the motions without any actual plan for a real space program.

Hmmm. Come to think of it, not much has changed since then. Maybe we should work on that before Skynet or some other planet killing threat becomes a reality. Colonies in space might come in very handy at that point. Just a thought.

Anyway, the central question of Terminator: Salvation, asked more than once in not very subtle terms, is, “What makes us human?” The movie explores this a little by tackling an issue that always annoyed me about both the movies and the TV series: Why were terminators referred to as “cyborgs?” In the old Six Million Dollar Man series (based on the infinitely better books), the main character was referred to as a cyborg (cybernetic organism) because he was a human with highly sophisticated cybernetic components replacing his lost parts. He was part human, part robot. What made him human was largely his hatred of being part robot (You saw this more in the book than the show).

In the first three Terminator movies, the terminators were called cyborgs without any evidence that there was anything human about them. They seemed, at best, androids (robots that appear human). The latest movie shows that at some stage of their technological development, at least some of them may have had human components. Not just killer robots but robot shells with the brains of biologically based killers (not to be confused with Daleks).

Fortunately, this movie left the existential question of what makes us human and not them as an exercise for the viewers. There was lots of action, nice explosions and plenty of room left for another sequel or four. There are some things I would like to see in the sequel(s), such as a return to the question of alternate time lines that the TV series was getting deeply into (at the time it was so stupidly canceled – did I mention that?). It would also be nice if the next movie explored the question of what Skynet hopes to accomplish with its technology besides the eradication of humanity. What is the sense, after all, of making cyborgs that can only be distinguished from people by their vast capacity for violence, if you don’t want people around? What do you do when the war is over and these super-dangerous cyborgs don’t want to be turned off?

Maybe then Skynet will have to recreate humans to terminate the terminators. Or something.