Virtuality

[seriousfic]

For those of you worried Ron Moore had lost his edge after BSG, this is the first time I've seen a sexual assault victim comforted with "maybe you have a rape fantasy" on network TV.



I was hoping for BSG season one and I felt like I got reheated season four, only without the characters I loved from season one (and I'm pretty sure the lesson you learn from BSG is not "we need less of the old actors"). I mean, I like Kara Thrace as much as the next, but did we really need to hire Clea DuVall to play her again?

And it seems like it wants the central question to be what is reality and what is fantasy, only it can't come up with any good examples. Like, if you have an affair in cyberspace that is exactly like the real thing only you're not swapping semen, is that cheating? Yes. If you're raped in cyberspace, have you still been raped? Yes. So not very compelling watching people debate over that.

And for another thing, we have the assassin in VR with mysterious motives, kinda like the angels in BSG, and when people die in VR they just wake up in the real world, kinda like how people downloaded in BSG. And of course someone feels arbitrarily suicidal and then has an arbitrary religious experience. Thankfully he gets airlocked, but then he's managed to upload himself into the VR system... exactly like how people downloaded in BSG. I just really think you should only go the quasi-mysticism route in sci-fi if you can pull it off, and clearly from BSG we know that Ron Moore can't.

And, okay, so the mission starts off as a reality show so the mission can be sponsored, but then it turns into them looking for a new home for the Earthlings (kinda like... can't put my finger on it) when it looks like Earth is getting flooded. So... why do they keep the reality show going? Wouldn't the first thing you do be to get rid of the distraction? I realize they're going for meta-commentary on sponsors and network notes and blah blah blah, but really, if the captain is dead, who is sitting down to talk about how they feel about it on camera? I just don't think reality TV had to be parodied that bad and if it did, they just should've made it a more low-stakes mission so you can buy that people would bother to, or feel compelled to, go along with the reality show angle.

The ship's psych officer is the show's producer! Why would you keep that conflict of interest going one minute?

And of course the holodeck starts malfunctioning with this mysterious assassin who kills some people and messes up other people's surfing and rapes one person, but only a woman and not any of the guys, because those evil computer viruses, they ain't fags. And it seems like Ron Moore is trying to open up a dialogue on rape, but it ends up with this horrid Lifetime movie of the week scene where all the guys in the crew conclude that, since someone used the term sexual assault instead of rape as justification for shutting down the only form of recreation for ten years, surely it must just be a polygonal feel-copping. Now, come off it. I mean, it's a series of holodeck episodes! If the show went to air, how many seasons would they continue to use the VR while it fucked with them? I don't care if you invent some sort of Rose McGowan Machine, if it rapes an eighth of the users, I'm sticking with my Playstation.

They don't have a database of books and movies for when someone isn't in the mood for VR? They don't have hard copies of the software in case it crashes? I have a CD with WordPerfect 5.0 lying around, I'm not even using it to save the world.

And of course it ends up that Clea DuVall, who was also raped in the backstory, is sympathetic to the raped woman and they come up with this brilliant plan to deal with it which is to go back into the virtual world and hunt the rapist down and shoot him. Which is the kind of thing I would've expected back in the 90s, but we're coming up on the Tens. He's lines of code! Just press delete! You don't need to dramatize it as running around with machine-guns, that's just silly.

And, obviously, I don't find Clea DuVall so abhorrent that you need to make all the other characters misogynistic pricks just to point out that she can act human.

Oh, and there's also these two guys who are possibly gay, possibly Italian. I couldn't tell. I think if they were Italian, they would've kissed more.

All in all, it feels like a combination of the deep-space mission genre, which I've seen before and on better budgets, with the virtual reality genre, which I don't think needs to be revisited in this format. Dire.

Comments

[jlbarnett.livejournal.com]

they have the equipment to air it, they have told people it's being aired. Why not air it? The modern space program continued even after they stopped broadcasting every little thing.