Non-Blog | Channing Whitaker

What I've Been Watching: Nov. 2019

 Permalink
I've recently started watching the sci-fi series, Another Life, on Netflix. I'm about halfway through the season. So far, I have mixed feelings on this one.

The show features Katee Sackhoff, who you may remember her from Battlestar Galactica, or even from Longmire, which I rather enjoyed. We'll now she's Niko Breckenridge, a captain in some space-exploring government agency. Presumably of the US, but not stated outright. The series begins with an alien ship or probe from an unknown corner of the galaxy arriving on Earth, landing, and erecting a crystal-like structure that starts sending a signal. It appears to be un-manned. Soon after, a ship is launched on a mission to travel to where they believe the probe originated. There Niko and her crew are to investigate and/or make contact with whoever sent it.

Some things I like:

· Sackhoff's character is complex. She's outwardly confident, but also carries a lot of guilt for leaving her family and because of troubles in a previous command. Thus, she grapples with a lot of self-doubts. On top of this, she is a bad-ass who can fight and doesn't back down when challenged. Early, she is tested by an egotistical man who thinks he should be the one in command, and without spoiling anything, let just say, it doesn't go well for that guy.

· The story alternates between events on the ship and events back on Earth, both involving the crystal probe, and the captain's husband and daughter. It adds layers of drama and tension.

· The ship has an A.I., which presents itself as a human via holographic projection. It has flirted with issues of ethics and sentient A.I. though it hasn't gotten into this deeply...yet.

· Dabbles in reflecting modern social issues with one crew member being transgender, though little focus is placed on this. It's treated more like a regular aspect of life in this near future, which is pretty cool.

· Everything is built around the underlying tension of humans having a first contact with an alien species. Will they be hostile? Benevolent? Will we be hostile and undermind any chances of a fruitful relationship?


Some things I question:

· Disiplin is extremely poor on the ship and creates a great deal of the problems. We're not led to believe that the space organization is a military one, but they assign a captain and a second in command, so one would think that the ship is not a free for all where every member of the crew does what they please. Most merchant vessels and science vessels alike still tend to have a captain-down hierarchy, which, if not followed, yields some negative consequence. Not so for this ship, and if they did, so far, it would have headed off most of their troubles. I'm not saying insubordination has no place in a story, but then the disobedience should be the conflict, not the routine genesis of other trouble. In a way, it feels like lazy writing. If anyone is familiar with Star Gate Universe (2009-2010), you'll get a similar feeling among the crew on Another Life. They're always at odds with a failing ship, and always at odds with one another in a power struggle. However, in SGU, they were a bunch of random people who ended up the crew of an ancient Alien ship by happenstance, so they didn't know how to operate the ship and weren't ever intended to be a crew. The same just doesn't seem to fit the narrative for Another Life.

· The technology doesn't seem to match society. The ship is traveling to another star in the span of months. For this to be practical, they must have faster than light capability. They even talk in one episode about making a detour, which is only four light-years, as if it is an inconvenient distance but not a debilitating one. Yet, as of halfway thought the season, there has been no talk of other ships currently out traveling space. The mission that haunts the captain happened near Saturn, so still in our solar system. There is no mention of space stations or other vessels that have been out anywhere near them. At the same time, they don't talk like this is some substantial new accomplishment, as if no other human has been out this far before. Likewise, the alien probe got to Earth's atmosphere apparently without detection. One would think that a society capable of traveling at the minimum to nearby stars would have means to detect an approaching ship, and with a space fleet, potential meet it prior to its landing on our home planet. It's all just a little odd and feels like it wasn't thought out. When you've got FTL, cryo-sleep, synthesized gravity, and the ability to stock a ship with food and water for a large crew and for months of travel, it just seems like certain little things that seem to come up as trouble, should be accounted for already.

· More trope than originality. As an author myself, I've read a lot of genre writing advice that suggests writers know their genre's tropes well. The general idea being, that while certain things might seem cliche, if you ignore them all, you're not likely to satisfy the audience. This could be good advice. If you made a sci-fi story set in a future where humans were able to travel deep into space, but you didn't have advanced computer systems, or alien contact, or ship malfunctions, which can all be sci-fi tropes, then you likely wouldn't have a very well-liked product. But at the same time, you can't have a story that is all trope. Even if you hit all the routine points viewers and readers tend to like; it can still fall flat without at least one new-ish underlying premise. For Another Life, I can't quite put my finger on what that extra something was intended to be.


Altogether I'd call Another Life and pretty middle of the road sci-fi series. It's got a Ripley from Alien sort of leading lady, a Star Gate Universe kind of hodge-podge crew, and an Arrival type of first contact puzzle. But it's a lot like listening to your favorite band's greatest hits album. It's all familiar, there's a lot you like, but you're not going to find anything you haven't heard before, and the elements don't all quite fit together the way they would on a regular album.


The characters have been compelling enough that I'll likely stay tuned to finish the rest of the season, but I won't be surprised if Another Life never gets a second.
 Comments

What I've Been Listening to: Nov. 2019

 Permalink
Ok. Hear me out. I thought I'd be talking about Niel Young and Crazy Horse's resent new album this month, and I enjoyed giving it a listen. I even plan to give it another go, but I found myself into an out-of-left-field album far more, Doja Cat's Hot Pink. But let's be clear. It's forward, crass even, very sexualized, and very sexually explicit. If that might rub you the wrong way, better to forget this post and check back in with me in a month. Otherwise, here's what I like about it.

I'd never heard of Doja Cat until a few weeks ago, maybe because she seems kind of cutesy. The artist's name and the album's name, Hot Pink, make me picture Hello Kitty. If you listened to a small snippet of her performance, you might think the same of Doja Cat's voice. It's high pitched and youthful, in a way that almost makes me think of K-Pop, yuck. But the album reels you in with solid, deep bass rhythms, all with a little bit of a funk aspect, which is far from cutesy. Then Doja Cat hits you with crass, emotional, sometimes vulgar, sometimes vulgar to the point of humor, lyrics - all in tightly written rhymes wich invoke compelling imagery. Plus, she dabbles in aggressive speed changes and brutally honest themes. Doja Cat even captures a taste of the body-positive elements I enjoyed in Lizzo's album a few months ago.

Altogether, I think there's a huge juxtaposition between the surface presentation and the actual lyrics and performance, and it's just damn entertaining. Imagin Taylor Swift covering an NWA song, and you'd be on the same track. I'm not sure I'd personally be as interested without the dichotomy, but all that aside, Doja Cat is a legit MC and might be the next Lil' Kim.

 Comments

What I've Been Reading: Oct 2019

 Permalink
After Finishing Penny Dreadful (see my Watching for this month) and after years of being familiar with the Dorean Gray character but not having read it, I finally decided to get a copy of the Oscar Wilde novel. I'm not quite through it, so I'll share my thoughts on this classic next time. Until then...

It's not horror or connected to Halloween, but Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries #3, Rogue Protocol, spilled over into the month. I like the series. They're all novella-length, science fiction books. The first, All Systems Red, introduced the murderbot protagonist, a snarky security/battle android. Book one showed what he could do, then book two got more into the character internally. While book two created depth, which readers should want for a multi-book protagonist, the character's demeanor began to grate on me.

One can only listen to cynism and pessimism for so long. I was glad the book was short. The outward story was enough to keep my attention, and still interested enough for me to pick up the third in the series after a few months to clear my head. I'm glad I did.

Rogue Protocol, of course, had Ren's (we're calling the Murder Bot Ren by this point) cynical criticism of humans, but it eased back on how much of that we get in favor of more action, as well as introducing another android which truly admired humans, and considered them friends. This was a great juxtaposition that makes Ren's pessimism more palatable, and maybe even teaches him a lesson or two. This installment picked up the pace for me, and I liked it. It also delved deeper into the circumstances of Ren's existence, the past he can't remember, answered a few questions, and posed more to pull readers into the 4th Novella, which I'll be picking up as well.
 Comments

What I've Been Watching: Oct. 2019

 Permalink
Penny Dreadful, a Showtime series from a few years ago, featured Dr. Frankenstien, his monster(s), Werewolves, Dracula, Dorean Gray, and much more. What could be better for Halloween?

I started this series, available on Netflix, around 2016. But I was late to it. I think I started about the time the news broke that Season 3 was to be it's last. I gobbled up the first two seasons, then my enthusiasm faded. I don't know if it was just burnout from binging the first two seasons, or if knowing that series was all but over made me not want to jump into the final season. It can't end if I don't keep watching?

Whatever the case, I shelved the series, moved on to something else, and then two years slipped by. With my yearning for the eerie as October sets in, I finally returned to finish the series.

Altogether, I enjoyed Penny Dreadful. I am a bit hesitant when it comes to new spins on old material. I generally like to see something new, so the reimagining of Frankenstein, Dracula, and so on, into one intermingled web of a story is something on the surface I might turn my nose at, but this series does pull it off well and delves into new depths of character development for these familiar stories. It also creates a wonderfully dark atmosphere and a compelling mystery. Penny Dreadful structures all the intersecting story arcs around a character new character, at least to me, named Vanessa Ives, played by the always compelling Eva Green. I think this was a good move, as not to rely on the old monsters, but rather to flirt them in and out of Ms. Ives' story.

As for season three, it wrapped things up well enough and left viewers with a few things to think about later. But I felt it was a bit rushed and pushed a lot of plot points and fewer character scenes, which was a contrast to the first two seasons. I assume that the showrunners had planned another season or two in which to complete everyone's storylines. In fact, they introduced Dr. Jekyll in season three but never got around to a Mr. Hide. I suspect they made quite a few developmental sacrifices in order to seem to have a planned wrap up to end the season. At no surprise, that leaves viewers feeling a bit slighted and wishing for more.

Thus, I recommend this series for classic horror enthusiast but consider season three the necessary cap to a series, and while falling a bit short, is far better than no series finally at all.
 Comments

What I've Been Listening to: Oct. 2019

 Permalink
I was a little young when Nine Inch Nails burst onto the scene in the 90s. I became aware of them but not a fan. Through the years, as a student and a fan of Cinema, I appreciated several NIN music videos, many of which, frontman, Trent Reznor directed himself. Still, I'd never have considered myself a fan of their music. Then came Old Town Road.

If you're not familiar with the silly, record-setting, country rap cross over, from Lil' Nas X, that took the Billboard charts by storm this year, then you probably just don't know it was what you kept hearing at sports arenas, malls, wedding dances, et al.

My six-year-old son loved it, so I heard it a number of times, which I'm sure should be scored by the hundreds. What I didn't realize until recently, however, is that the song sampled from a 2008 Nine Inch Nails instrumental song, which was, in fact, from an entirely instrumental album called Ghosts I-IV. Curiosity got the better of me, so I went to check it out. And I liked it.

Ghosts I-IV might be a new go-to for me when I'm writing horror or darker material. It's hunting, which fits the name, it's often subtle, but not over the top when it does get a bit heavy in the sound. The music isn't competing with vocals, so it stays atmospheric. And that's just what it does, sets an amazing atmosphere of eerie and haunting music. If you're hosting a Halloween party, and want something a bit more grown-up than the Monster Mash and Thriller to loop on the stereo, look no further than Nine Inch Nails' Ghost I-IV. Plus, at almost two hours of run time (basically like four albums), you won't notice it circling back for quite a while.
 Comments

What I've Been Reading: Sept. 2019

 Permalink
Reading:
A bit of a throwback, but a short read and a solid, creepy choice to kick off one's Halloween lead-up: Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan.

The story was disjoint, following several different characters in a few different places and jumping time. I found the telling of the story similar to Bram Stoker's Dracula, drawing from several sources to compile one storyline. I enjoyed the book, and as is needed for such a disjoint presentation, all the parts came together in the end to a satisfying conclusion. The characters were interesting, though I'll note the characters we follow were not particularly diverse.

My only issue with the novel would be the clarity of characters. In fact, I was thoroughly confused by the last chapter, as to what character we had returned too, and I couldn't grasp the story climax without knowing. I read it twice and ended up having to go look up online which character was narrating the last chapter. What I found was the final chapter had three distinct sections, each with its own narrator, each a return to a previous character. With that knowledge, It all made sense.

I was satisfied with the end, and the copy I got of the story was many times removed from the story's original publication. I suspect, the story has aged to public domain, and I believe the publisher took some short cuts to get the story on fewer pages. Thus, I don't know if a better-formatted edition might not have left me confused on that last chapter. As a result, I don't feel right to rate the story lower because of this narrator confusion issue. You get the benefit of the doubt Mr. Machen, five stars.
 Comments
Off Speed Cinema, Off Speed Press, Channing's IMDB, Privacy

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.