I have watched a lot of science fiction on television this
year. A lot of short series, which I appreciate because there is less padding.
Some of the science fiction was very good, some of it inconsistent, some of it pretty
ordinary. Let’s start with the good.
The Good.
SBS2 screened some good science fiction this year, much
of it second seasons. The standout series was the second season of Real
Humans. A series set in an alternative Sweden where robots called
Hubots are common. The series tackles the issue of androids interacting with
society from many angles. It explores the robots as sentient beings and ponders
if they will attempt to take over the world. It has humans being infatuated with
androids, and also using them as sex toys. It has humans, one dead, one badly
burnt, uploading themselves, or at least attempting to, into hubots. It also
explores the violent reaction of those afraid of technology against the androids.
So it covers many areas through a number of stories that overlap. Real Humans
is a brilliantly written series that is full of ideas and mostly believable
characters. The second series was as good as the first and left enough storylines
unresolved for a third series.
Utopia and Orphan Black also had
their second seasons on SBS, but they weren’t as good as their first seasons.
Their second seasons while good to watch, did not add a lot to the world’s they
had created.
Utopia is set in a near future
England where a group of people have stumbled upon a plot to….well you will
have to watch series one first to find out what the conspiracy is. It is an
extremely violent series, full of quirky characters and visually unique as
strong greens, reds and yellows are in many shots.
Tatiana Maslany in Orphan Black still amazed with her multitude
of cloned characters. But the series did not seem to go anywhere. Additional
layers were added to the conspiracy surrounding the clones, but at the end a
solution seemed no closer. Still it made enjoyable viewing.
Series three of Continuum was screened on Syfy this
year. It is a time travel series. A group of terrorists escape their execution
and travel back in time to try and stop the world being controlled by a mega
corporation. A police officer is caught in the time travel wash of their escape
and finds herself trying to stop them from altering her future.
The series had a slow start, but I am glad I persisted,
because in the third season it really picked up. There has been a long story
arc of the police officer questioning the future she was fighting for, in the
third season her agenda changes, as does that of the terrorists.
Another show I persisted with was Extant. An astronaut in a
solo research station in space for 13 months returns to earth and discovers she
is pregnant. While her husband has created an android child which he is trying
to turn into a sentient human being. It took a while for Helle Berry to nearly
convince me that she was an astronaut, and it took even longer for Goran Visnjic
to convince me that he was more than just a nervous stilted actor. The series
had a few gapping plot holes, like why wasn’t the astronaut placed in isolation
for months after being exposed to a deadly parasite. But the two main story
arcs did manage to come together at the end of the series. I don’t think they
should make a second season.
The Inconsistent.
Guess, come on, anyone who is a science fiction fan will
have this series on the tip of their tongue when inconsistency is mentioned. It
is a series that has maintained this inconsistency for years. And this year,
many of us were hoping that a new lead actor would get the writers, especially
the head writer, to write more consistent good quality scripts with lots of
suspense. The massively inconsistent show was Doctor Who. This year
there were fewer bad episodes. If the season had been full of episodes like Flatline and Listen, it would have easily been the best science fiction show of
the year. I thought the narky and serious Peter Calpadi a vast improvement on
the flippant Matt Smith.
The Bad.
The 100 should be retitled the 100 Gaping
Plot Holes. It is set a couple of hundred years in the future, earth has been
devastated by a nuclear war and the survivors live in a large orbiting space
station. But their systems are failing so they decide to send 100 juvenile
offenders down to earth to see if they survive. I was willing to let the
writers get away with having the earth habitable only 100 years after a
nuclear war, but then…
The 100 morons, I mean juveniles, are packed into a
shuttle which is supposed to land near a large warehouse of food, but because
of two extra-stupid morons, the shuttle crashes 20 kilometres away from the
warehouse. I was stunned at how stupid the writers think viewers are when they
sent five people to walk the 20kms and carry back food for the other 95. According
to an acquaintance who has watched the whole 13 episodes the plot clangers don’t
improve. I only watched two episodes.
Starcrossed is about original as all
those terrible rip-off movies on the syfy channel. Aliens crash land on earth. They
just happen to be nearly exactly like humans except for some tattoos on their
necks – so their pretty faces aren’t messed up. The aliens go to school and try
to fit in. They might as well be African Americans in the sixties, that is how
old this story is. I watched only one episode.
The writers of the remake of the Tomorrow People should
have watched the vastly superior Alphas before sitting down to write.
Then they would have learnt a bit about original characterisation, instead of
creating a show with lots of pretty boys who spend an awful lot of time bare-chested.
This is obviously a show for teenage girls who daydream about having a pretty
boy use their special powers on them. The show has a premise, but who cares
about that.
Undecided.
I still have to watch a few more episodes of the second
season of Revolution to judge it. Like Orphan Black it seems to
want to cover much of the same ground as the first season, but with none of the
ideas and no superb acting. I am also yet to watch series three of Falling
Skies and series two of Under the Dome, which I wish had
followed the book a bit more closely and only gone for one season.
