I have finished writing the first draft of my novel and it is now being read by someone else for the first time. Then it goes out to readers and I will do another draft based on their feedback. Then we go shopping for an agent. Novels are a very slow process. It is very different from the quicker gratification of seeing your work published in magazines or on the Internet.
Now that I have a little break from it, I have a little time to catch up on some television science fiction. I wrote earlier about how I watch the television series La Brea with the same fascination some people watch a car wreck. It also makes me feel better about myself as a writer. I was amazed that it got renewed and even more amazed that it manages to be worse in the second season, a feat I did not think possible.
It is science fiction, but without much in the way of science. Seems like the writers have never cracked open any science books. They have the Hollywood sign collapse into a sinkhole in a way that would make geologists guffaw. The CG effects continue to be embarrassing. The way they have a wolf fall shows the CG artists missed some important things about Newtonian physics in their education. It is the only show where I dislike every single character.
It was also the only science fiction series on network television, until the return of the late 80’s show Quantum Leap. I am a little hesitant to call QL straight science fiction, as the original had Sam Becket believing that God was in control of his leaps. That is not science fiction. That is using the Deus ex Machina plot device. They never went all the way with that, but it does move it more to the fantasy side of things since any god is technically beyond science.
So far, I have enjoyed it, but I hope they stick with scientific explanations of things. The Halloween episode teetered very close to the line, but ultimately science was the explanation. Still, the character Dr. Ian Wright said in the episode that in Quantum Mechanics, if you believe in something, it helps to make it true. No, dear god, no. Quantum Mechanics is profoundly strange, but the idea that it allows you to manipulate reality with thought is idiotic. It comes from a complete misunderstanding of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
One of my fav sayings, attributed to Richard Feynman (although not definitively), is “If you think you understand Quantum Mechanics, then you don’t understand Quantum Mechanics.” It sure sounds like him. One of my favorite for certain quotes from Feynman is “Physics is like sex. Sure, you can get some interesting results, but that’s not why we do it.” He was a physics quote machine.
Manifest, which just premiered season 4 on Netflix, was another problematic network science fiction series for me. It started on NBC for the first three seasons. I liked the premise and all the mysteries, although I found several of the characters annoying or unlikeable. The acting was only okay. It stars the blandest actor from Once Upon a Time.
As they went along, it seemed to be focusing more on the agency behind the mysteries being God. That starts to turn it into fantasy and not science fiction. No, I am not calling God a fantasy, but once as a writer you go down the rabbit hole of God did it, you are no longer in the realm of science fiction, because if God is beyond science, then God is also beyond the realm of science fiction. You might as well use alien space bats to explain the time travel in your story. Alien space bats and time travel are a thing in science fiction, by the way. You can Google it.
From what I have been reading they plan to lean even harder into the God did it explanation, which is how evangelicals basically explain all science that does not conform to their more literal interpretation of the Bible. It is the laziest and most uninteresting form of storytelling and doing science. It would explain why all the “science’ in this show is so terrible.
Sure, it could just be the writer’s way of spreading their religious convictions, which are the convictions of Biblical literalists. That becomes clear with the absolutely ridiculous connections to Noah’s Ark in season three. There are also Easter eggs like the plane being flight 828, which many of us with a Christian religious education will recognize as a reference to Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”
That Biblical passage seems strangely like the direction they are going in. That is also probably why it became such a hit on Netflix after it was cancelled by NBC. It would have appealed to the Touched by an Angel and God Friended Me crowd who finally caught on to what it seemed to be about. At least those shows never claimed to be anything other than what they were.
The show is not coming from a fundamentalist Christian viewpoint, though. The Manifest creator is Jewish. It could be argued that he is incorporating symbolism from many religions for a more generic divinity, but there are a couple of tells. They discover a “piece” of Noah’s Ark and everyone including the scientists instantly accept the reality of the mythical tale about Noah, perhaps the least likely story in the Bible to be literally true. Only a Biblical literalist would just assume that Noah’s Ark was a true story. Here they do it with no questioning and no attempt to come up with alternate explanations.
The second tell that we are dealing with a more fundamentalist, albeit Jewish view, is that people in the narrative do what fundamentalists always do with science. If they can’t explain something, they jump to the conclusion that God must have intervened. Here the characters come to the God explanation without considering other alternatives. It could be aliens. It could be scientists from the future, sending them back in time striving to put right what once went wrong, ala Quantum Leap. Maybe it is actually being done by the Quantum Leap project itself. Those are all better explanations, and more interesting ones, than God did it and Noah’s Ark is real.
I will take back everything negative I have said about the show if they have Dr. Ben Song leap into the now much older Cal and explain that the callings are coming from scientists from the future trying to restore the original timeline. Then he and the entire Stone family leap to go find Sam Beckett.
The show feels like bait and switch. Lost, which it has been compared to, also had a mythology, but they created their own, they did not just try to tag on their own personal religious views. Manifest was never particularly good, but there were glimmers of potential. I suspect that the final season will not rise up to that potential and reveal a fairly hollow and more openly religious narrative.
Network television remains mostly a wasteland for good science fiction, but cable has an overwhelming wealth of it. I certainly can’t complain. Oh wait, I can. The Discovery channel, which gave us shows like the incredible Mythbusters and then went way downhill with a renewed focus on super cheap staged “reality” shows, now pumps out crap like Moonshiners and Naked and Afraid. It has gobbled up a bunch of channels, most recently HBO. That was a horrible fit, as Discovery’s focus is on low-cost schlock aimed at older white people. HBO was more popular with a younger and diversity supportive crowd..
One of their first actions was to cancel the highly successful and extremely well-done Westworld, along with many other shows to reduce costs. Cheap, not quality, is the hallmark of Discovery-Warner. Remember that Warner Brothers is the company that takes great DC comics characters and makes terrible movies that basically rip off Marvel concepts. Shazzam was entertaining and Wonder Woman was great, but the rest I thought I could see better done in the Marvel movies they so closely copied.
The guy now running HBO, and the entire Warner Brothers Discovery merger, is David Zaslav. He is more wrecking ball than a creative type, but at least he is getting paid hundreds of millions to do it. Zaslav killed the Batgirl movie that had already been nearly finished just to take it as a tax write-off, screwing over everyone who worked so hard on it since it can never be shown. He supports the Flash movie despite the star, Ezra Miller, being a teen groomer and credibly accused of abusing children. Ezra also has had many run-ins with the law and has serious mental health issues. It seems that they should have done the opposite and killed the Flash movie instead, but then again, this was a black version of Batgirl. As you learn more about Zaslav, it is not difficult to understand his decision.
Zaslav has massively reduced the amount of content on HBO and cut way back on original content production. HBO has had some great original and diverse science fiction, but I am betting those days are over.
He is not limited to ruining entertainment. Using his lackey and close friend Chris Licht, he is transforming CNN into a more conservative network where they have been ordered not to refer to the “Big Lie” of Trump claiming the 2020 election and every election he or his endorsees don’t win is stolen. The biggest shareholder of Time Warner is a major right-wing financier who wants CNN to be more like Fox News, and that seems to be the direction they are now going.
They have laid off a lot of their creative talent at HBO, with what appears to be an emphasis on reducing diversity. He is a right wing “anti-woke” (can we just admit that is another term for racist) Trump supporting Republican. He has specifically said that gender and racial diversity are not important to him. That seems to be very clear already.
His reign is being dubbed the “great white male makeover.” The six new additions to the Discovery board are all white men. He fired one of the top woman executives in show business, Warner Bros chief Ann Sarnoff. All the new hires are pretty much white male executives. Can’t have wokeness in hiring, you know, or apparently, you can’t have anything but whiteness.
My advice is to watch the last season of Westworld before they take it off. Zaslav has already shown a willingness to get rid of popular content they exclusively own and throw it in a vault where no one can ever see it, especially if it does not follow his extremist political point of view.
This may be the way everything is going in America. Tomorrow is election day. We’ll soon know if the U.S.A. will remain a democracy or if the Republicans take over and do as they promised- create a permanent Republican minority to rule over the majority who will have no say. They have made it very clear that it will not be a welcoming place for women or people of color. This is one cliff-hanger I am not enjoying.