Well, I was letting my fingers do the walking through the Netflix offers, and I’d just started a show called Nightflyer when my wife got home. She wanted to watch her soap operas, I was about to step out onto my balcony and smoke a big fattie, and I could see I wasn’t going to like the program much, so I haven’t even gone back to it.
This blog is about my reason why.
I do like science fiction, of course, and I’m not terribly discriminating. Something can be a fantasy, and not very science fictiony at all, and I’ll enjoy it if the stories good and the characters compelling. I enjoy post-apocalyptic movies, and view them as sort of an instruction manual. If the apocalypse ever comes, the person who will lead the ragtag band of survivors, outcasts and mutants will be the person who’s seen The Postman the most times. I particularly enjoy sci-fi with themes of space travel, robots, and AI. That’s all stuff that I think is coming, it’s totally physically believable, and it’s important that they keep making lots of films about it so we can explore the ethical considerations. I like sci-fi with lots of aliens, because aliens make very interesting people. Of course, if we ever do make contact with an alien species, they are likely to make all films made up to that point seem quaint. I even like time travel themed stuff even though it’s way beyond our current technology and I actually think it’s not possible. I enjoy history as well as sci-fi, and it usually makes for a great story.
What I don’t like is telepaths. While some people are good at cold readings, and can figure things out from watching body language and analyzing tone of voice, that’s not the same as actual mind reading, or being able to see the future, or stuff like that.
And, it’s a cheap plot device. In the future, there will be all sorts of cool spy software, foolproof lie detector tests, future prediction algorithms, and more. This whole ‘ship’s telepath*’ thing is kind of crap. Why do they even need to bring telepaths into it, with nary a mention of how they came to be that way?
It’s a bit too much like magic. No matter how dark the situation, somebody will come along and magic you right out of it. That’s too easy.
*DeeAnna Troy was an empath. That’s totally different.
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