Current Binge

Normally, I prefer not to watch again something I have watched before, and I have never understood the mentality of people who say, proudly, “I’ve seen that film 56 times, I just love it so much!” After one viewing, you know how it ends. After a few viewings, you’ve probably got the best lines memorized and you can play the whole thing back in your head. Where’s the tension? Where’s the mystery? What’s the point?
But, Netflix is so out of anything I want to watch that, a couple days ago, I decided to watch the first couple of episodes of Travelers and, by golly, I was sucked right back in. After only two days of watching, I’m at least halfway through the 3 season series. If you’ve never seen it and are into science fiction at all, I highly recommend it.
One thing I noticed this time around was how closely the COVID pandemic was mirrored by their plague episode. Time compressed, of course, because problems have to be solved in a one hour episode, but there were many aspects of it they got exactly right.
But, it leads me to more questions. Why are we so obsessed with dystopian futures? They outnumber utopian futures in science fiction by about 99 to 1. The Star Trek universe is about the only major exception, and they encounter other species that are going through their own dystopian futures just about every damned episode.
If we had a perfect world, without war, hunger, poverty or pollution, where would be the tension?