...is the best city in the world in which to spend a summer. Maybe I'm a bit biased.
Or maybe not. Who knows. Saturday's fireworks by South Africa were fantastic. The music had a few of my all time favourite tracks, the finale was excellent, fork lighting was flashing in the background throughout the entire show, and before it all we got an unbelievable sunset.
Awesome.
"Armstrong is on the Moon. Neil Armstrong, a thirty eight year old American, standing on the surface of the Moon, on this July twentieth, nineteen hundred sixty nine."
- Walter Cronkite
I didn't watch the on-air version of "Virtuality", which Fox finally aired a couple of weeks ago in a Friday night, mid-summer death slot. Just looking at the clips I saw online, however, it didn't seem to be much different, if at all, from the cut I saw months and months ago when we finished the project.
I enjoyed the premise of the show, despite the fact that Ron Moore may have ripped it off from sci-fi author Joe Haldeman, about a small crew on a long-term mission to another solar system. It was nice to see a more realistic depiction of a space ship, and of space itself, even though the "nuclear bomb propulsion" idea has been discredited for decades. It's disappointing that so much of the science in this supposedly high-brow sci-fi story is bunk, and so obviously so even to someone with moderate knowledge like myself. From the global warming mission imperative, to the slingshot past Neptune, to the size of the ship's gravity ring, all of it is wrong, wrong, wrong. Just because you want to advertise your show as being "very '2001: A Space Odyssey'" doesn't make it "2001: A Space Odyssey". It's a shame because, like most poorly thought through sci-fi science, it didn't have to be that way.
You need a reason to leave Earth? Fine, go with the old standards of pollution, or overpopulation, or even good old fashioned exploration. Well, scratch that last one, since no one does that anymore. It's not "dramatic", or something. If global warming is really so bad, what's the point of sending ten people in one ship to another solar system hoping to find a home? We can spot potential Earths via telescope, and as far as I know, even the outside chance finds we've made are a lot farther than 10 years at sub-light speed. Any ship or object that we'd want to slingshot out of the solar system would go past the Sun, not an outer gas giant. Even if we were to slingshot past a gas giant, it would be from hundreds of thousands of kilometres away, not right through its damn ring system until we're skimming the atmosphere itself. I understand that doing a slingshot from far away isn't very exciting, which is why a solar fly-by would in fact make a lot more sense, while also being far more dangerous and dramatic. Whatever.
I was mostly bothered by the characters, however. Not even six months in to their 10 year trip and the Captain is already in bed with another crew member's wife, albeit within their virtual environments, others flat out hate each other, and the entire command structure falls apart at the first sign of difficulty. Besides all of that, the reality show angle just doesn't make a lick of sense at all. The show isn't presented that way often enough, so we're still privy to private moments and virtual happenings the "audience" back on Earth is not. It's just this gimmick in the background, and by the way, is an added stress which would never be put onto even the most compatible and functional crew in the Universe by any professionally run space agency. Now you can make the argument that the whole thing is fake, or whatever, which is all semantics at this point since we'll never know with no show being made from this point on. The bottom line is that it's another group of slutty, back stabbing psychological nutjob characters used by Ron Moore as, in my opinion, a dramatic crutch to avoid having to create personalities that might actually exist in real life. Somehow it's just worse in "Virtuality" because, unlike "Battlestar Galactica", we're expected to believe these people are not just professional astronauts, but the absolute best of the best our entire planet has to offer for a civilization-saving mission. Well, anyone who knows me at all knows that I think Ron Moore can take his "Humanity as a disease" attitude and shove it.
I'm actually glad this show died before it was even aired. It's more proof, in my mind, that this kind of critic-chasing sci-fi isn't what real people, out here in the real world, want to see.