Well, TV science fiction, that is. According to the Guardian, that is.

This is science fiction for the 21st century. What’s more, it’s sci-fi about the 21st century. Fans of the genre have long known that quality sci-fi and its sister genre fantasy hold up a mirror to the times in which they were created, but never before have the TV shows involved seemed so resonant or indeed so influential. Science fiction has never been more now, fantasy never more real.

Discuss. My thoughts:

1. I always considered the ’90s to be something of a golden age, personally — Babylon 5, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Deep Space Nine, Buffy, Angel, Farscape, plenty of others — and have felt we’ve been in the doldrums somewhat for the past five years.

2. Still, it’s true that Lost and Doctor Who have spawned a new wave of US and UK sf shows. Unfortunately, to date most of them have been rubbish. We’ll see if this autumn’s crop is any different.

3. I would object to the assertion that “the event that has made sci-fi and fantasy palatable, and indeed positively appealing, to a mainstream audience is 9/11”, except that I have this horrible feeling it’s a little bit true, at least for the types of sf the article focuses on.

4. The article concludes, “Why gaze at navels when you can gaze at the stars?” But is there really anything that goes after that sense of wonder? Doctor Who may aspire to it occasionally, but the current incarnation is primarily Earthbound. The end of time was notably uninspiring. Meanwhile, Battlestar Galactica is arguably a perfect example of a show set among the stars that chooses to gaze at its navel. The new shows seem to be following the same paths. There’s nothing as expansive as Farscape, or even the best of Trek.

5. And of course, as MKS points out, it is a discussion utterly divorced from written sf. But that’s pretty much par for the course.

6. That said, ITV is planning “Lost in Austen, in which a woman finds a gateway to the Regency era in her bathroom.” Cheap attempt at crossover cash-in, or inspired concept based on knowing full well that Jane Austen is incredibly popular among sf fans? You decide!

(Again, the Doctor Who episode.)

Three thoughts:

1. I still can’t decide how much I like John Simm’s Master. On the one hand, he’s often very funny (the double-thumbs up during the gassing, “Ooh, you public menace!”, “Oh all right — it’s me!”), on the other hand he’s utterly unthreatening. Someone, in a comment I now can’t place, said that they thought we were meant to view the Master’s insanity as on some level tragic. That makes a lot of sense, not least because in principle it makes the Doctor’s conviction that he’s going to save the Master, not kill him, more powerful. But as acted in the episode, there’s nobody there for the Doctor to save; Simm is just an evil cartoon. I think part of the problem is that Simm’s Master is so clearly Evil Tennant, with all the flightiness that implies; I think one character needed some weight to ground the serious exchanges the characters have, like that telephone call. (Can you imagine what Christopher Eccleston and Derek Jacobi would have done with that exchange?)

2. I’m finding Doctor Who‘s treatment of its present-day timeline increasingly fascinating — specifically, the fact that it is now so radically different to our own timeline. It’s still set now, but it’s got alien invasions and giant flying airbases and all sorts, and the extravagance doesn’t quite seem to square with the show’s reticence to go to other planets. One of my favourite scenes from the new show’s run is the end of “The End of the World”, when the Doctor and Rose step from the death of the sun to the utter normality of a crowded London street. I don’t think that scene would work any more, because there is no normal for the show to return to. I mean, as of “The Sound of Drums”, Earth has just had a tenth of its population massacred, and unless “paradox machine” is code for “big reset button” (which I’m not ruling out; when Martha teleported at the end of the episode, I was actually surprised that she was still in the present, rather than having jumped back to a point at which she could change events), that’s got to have serious knock-on consequences for future episodes.

3. Last week I hazarded a guess that Martha was being set up to do something that would force the Doctor to notice her, setting up a more equal partnership for season 4. I still think that’s more-or-less where they’re going, although Martha has been forced into a situation where she has to act, rather than (as I would have preferred) seizing a moment. But now I’m wondering what the set-up for the Christmas special is going to be. The previous two specials have been transitional: the first dealt with the Doctor’s regeneration, the second with his post-Rose trauma. But we’re not expecting either Tennant or Agyeman to leave the series in the next episode, which suggests a more straightforward standalone episode. However: assuming they don’t do a big reset on the timeline, what if, given (a) the evident devastation on Earth and (b) Martha’s gradual facing-up to the fact that the Doctor has absolutely no interest in her — what if Martha decides to stay behind and help out, rather than continue travelling? Thus setting up a Christmas episode in which the Doctor, realising what he’s lost, has to win back her friendship? I think I’d like that.

(Saturday’s Doctor Who episode, that is.)

Not bad, in parts, but I can’t help feeling that doing an end-of-time episode and not getting Stephen Baxter to write it is rather missing an opportunity.

EDIT: I have to admit, this is not an objection I’ve seen about new Who before.

it seems like the premise has always been about someone who is, by choice or by chance, the perpetual outsider. Now that seems like a superficial aspect of the show, a way to increase a character’s social status rather than increase understanding. It seems to no longer be an inclusive universe; certainly it feels like one where I’m not particularly welcome, simply for being female.

The short version? I thought it was interesting. The critical reception of John From Cincinnati has not been kind. A cynic might point out that since almost every review can’t help measuring it against either Deadwood (David Milch’s previous show, cut down in its prime if you believe its supporters) or The Sopranos (the finale of which was the lead-in to John‘s premiere), or both, despite the fact that John From Cincinnati is plainly ploughing a different furrow, this is not entirely surprising. And some of the objections do seem odd: I didn’t feel the least bit assaulted by bombast; neither did I find it maddeningly uneventful and cryptic. A better comparison, which some of the reviews do make, would be with Carnivale (an even better comparison is tickling the back of my brain, and I’ll let you know if I manage to pin it down), although for my money what makes John is actually the ways in which it’s different to Carnivale. The atmosphere is less overwhelming and certainly less exotic, while the characters, principally the three generations of Yost men (surfers or ex-surfers all, from wearily angry Mitch through his son, washed-up Butchie, to his son, prodigy Shaun), cast smaller shadows; all of which means that the small miracles that attend mysterious John’s arrival seem somehow sharper, more out-of-place. John’s pockets seem to contain whatever the person talking to him wants them to contain (money, ID, a phone); Mitch briefly floats a few inches off the ground for no apparent reason; and when a series of improbable coincidences bring most of the cast together for the episode’s dramatic high-point, one of them comments on how “circumstances have intervened”. He doesn’t seriously mean it, but we’re left wondering. Some of the criticisms, though, are fair. The claim that the series needs a compelling antihero to center the drama and bring it to life may be daft, but it’s heading in the direction of the most obvious absence, which is the absence of a story. My guess is that this is intentional, that John will catalyse events (he has, literally, no personality of his own, bouncing back almost exclusively learned phrases at those he speaks to, plus a couple of others — “the end is near” and “some things I know and some things I don’t” — that he may have learned before we met him, so it’s hard to imagine him being involved in or changed by events directly), that the point of the show will turn out to be its characters finding a story to live. But a lot hinges on how far Milch wants to go with his fantasy.

So it seems that Heroes is killing Lou Anders’ love of episodic television:

What [Heroes is] doing that is making it for me is that it seems to be leaving the episodic nature of television behind completely. Sometimes they’ll run a “To be continued” and this just blows my mind, because in a show where everything seems to be carried forward and thru, I can’t figure out when they decide something is “to be continued” and something isn’t. I think it’s just to give us a break from the horrid voice overs, since the TBC episodes don’t have one at the end and start. What Heroes is doing to me and my wife is showing us the absurdity of dramas that start out at the beginning of the hour with a problem and resolve it by the end.

I am actually very disturbed by this.

Because that’s how most television has been written since the medium’s inception.

I always prided myself on not being one of those people who can’t watch black and white film or refuse to watch things because they are old or the special effects aren’t up to today’s standards. My excuse was always that it’s the story that matters, not the set dressings. But Heroes is doing fundamentally different things with story. I know this began with St Elsewhere and Babylon 5 and a dozen other shows over the last decade, but the level of inter-connectivity, non-episodic format is to an entirely new degree. Rome does this too — they are really neck and neck for my affection and it’s probably just that I’m more into comics than history that puts Heroes ahead — but Rome feels just a touch more episodic.

What I’m realizing is that changes in the sophistication of narrative may forever remove me from the garden and I’m not sure I can go back.

To put it mildly, I have some problems with the value judgements being made in this argument. Before I get to them, though, a quick defining of terms: by “episodic”, I am assuming Lou is talking about series in which installments can be treated independently, even if they are embedded in a larger continuity. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, was an episodic show, although it became less so as it went on (to its detriment). I’m going to call the non-episodic format “serial”, by which I mean series like 24. You can watch, say, “Band Candy” with minimal knowledge of previous Buffy, and it’ll work fine. You can’t do the same with episode 13 of the fifth season of 24. The term “arc”, I would argue, is somewhat meaningless when applied to a serial show, because in a serial show there is only arc — there’s no “non-arc” for contrast.

Next up, areas of agreement. Television drama — or at least US television drama; British tv has certainly had short self-contained serials for as long as I can remember — evolved primarily as an episodic medium. More recently — again, particularly in the US — there has been a shift away from episodic storytelling and towards serial storytelling, although I don’t agree that Heroes represents anything more than, at most, an incremental advance in this trend. (And believe me, I like Heroes a lot.) I don’t know how long the current absurd practice of an October-to-May “season” punctuated by sweeps months and periods of hiatus has been operating, but you only have to look at the way shows like Buffy would “save up” showpiece episodes and/or big plot developments for November, February and May to see how it’s affected the structure of US shows, to the point where the decision a few years ago to start the season of 24 in January and run straight through — without breaks! — to May felt genuinely radical.

This, not unnaturally, leads to the assumption that a given number of episodes in a season are filler, just there to make up the numbers. I think this is a deeply suspect assumption, but I also get the impression it may be one of the factors that leads to Lou talking about Heroes as an example of narrative sophistication: a series where every episode is essential is obviously superior, right? But that’s not the part that really gets me: what I object to most are the assumptions in the idea that Heroes is an argument against “the absurdity of dramas that start out at the beginning of the hour with a problem and resolve it by the end.”

On any given day, my list of favourite Buffy episodes — which of course I’d argue is representative of the best episodes — would include “Lie to Me” or “Earshot”, possibly both; my list of favourite Angel episodes would include “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been”; my list of favourite Farscape episodes would include “…Different Destinations”. My list of favourite West Wing episodes would probably be comprised almost entirely of standalones, because with a couple of exceptions (end of season two) that show didn’t do much serial storytelling. All of the episodes I’ve named start out at the beginning of the hour with a problem and resolve it by the end. But “Lie to Me” is the finest articulation of Buffy‘s core morality the show ever produced, “Earshot” possibly the finest articulation of the high-school-is-hell theme; “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been” is a devastatingly powerful story about, among other things, race in 1950s America; “…Different Destinations” is arguably the best televisual time travel story of the past decade; and The West Wing never failed to deal with whatever issue it chose in a thoughtful and engaging way. Put bluntly, the point is this: an hour (or rather, 45 minutes) is plenty of time to tell an interesting, powerful, self-contained story.

Nor is the difference between the individual episode and the serial one of sophistication, any more than the difference between a short story and a novel is one of sophistication. That’s an imperfect comparison, but the basic point is easily demonstrated: probably my favourite Firefly episode is “Out of Gas”, which has a narrative that weaves between three time-frames with an almost breathtaking economy and grace. It is, by any measure, a sophisticated narrative. Heroes hasn’t produced an episode to match it yet — even “Company Man”. I would go so far as to say that Heroes taken as a whole doesn’t match it yet. Certainly serial storytelling has qualities that episodic storytelling can’t replicate: an accumulation of detail, a more sustained period of engagement with the tale. But consider Battlestar Galactica, which has been alternating unevenly between periods of serial storytelling and periods of episodic storytelling since its inception. The serial episodes are, almost without exception, the better episodes of the show (the creative peak is probably the start of season two), but — though I’ve seen the suggestion made several times — the disparity has nothing to do with the inherent qualities of the two types of storytelling. Serial is no easier or harder to get right than episodic; they’re different skill sets. So the problem with Galactica is not that it’s turning out standalone episodes, it’s that it’s turning out bad standalone episodes — ones that do offer too-easy answers, that rely heavily on melodrama, convenience and cliche. Serial storytelling is just as easy to do badly: look at Lost. If I wanted to, in fact, I’m pretty sure I could construct an argument that the pleasures of serials are often ultimately simplistic, familiar, consolatory pleasures — but I don’t want to, because that would be just as much a misrepresentation as the idea that a serial is more “sophisticated” than a standalone.

I feel a little weary typing all this, because I’ve been coming across variations of Lou’s argument more or less since I came online. One of the most succinct rebuttals I’ve seen in that time is, perhaps not surprisingly, by David Hines, from his review of the Angel episode “Through the Looking Glass” (the penultimate episode of the second season, while they’re in Pylea). As it happens, I think “Through the Looking Glass” is an odd choice to use as a defence of the principle, since it’s part of a mini-serial, just a mini-serial that appeared less related to the show’s larger continuity than many people would have liked. But on that principle, I think Hines is dead right.

Did I enjoy the Darla/Dru arc? You betcha. Have the writers stepped away from that a bit for more standalone-ish episodes? Yeah. Is there anything wrong with that? Nope. I enjoy story arcs as much as the next guy. But there’s something more important than story arcs — and that’s telling *good stories.* I don’t care what ANGEL tells stories about, as long as the show tells good stories. If the writers felt inclined to make season three an all-standalone year, that would be fine by me; many of ANGEL’s very best episodes (even this season) have been standalones, and I’ll take a story like “Untouched” over one like “Redefinition” any day of the week. Other shows, including one from Mutant Enemy, have gone story-arc crazy and suffered. Give me a good tale well-told any day.

Two contrasting views in the Times, keeping up the standard we expect. Caitlin Moran is (slightly incoherently) for:

Many of my acquaintances have been “fat-piping” this off the net for weeks — mainly, I thought, for the thrill of being 43 years old and otherwise fairly respectable, but then being able to say “Whoo-wee, I’ve been fat-piping Heroes off the net” and making it sound like hot drugs or something. But, of course, Heroes is drugs. The tape I was sent had the first two episodes on, and even though I had had four hours’ sleep the night before, and didn’t finish watching the first episode until 1am, I didn’t hesitate for a moment before putting on episode two. Frankly, if they’d sent me the whole series, you’d be sitting here looking at a blank page, and my emaciated children would now be in care.

[…]

But the big news is that this is big news. Heroes is going to ruin your life (and if not now, then certainly when it comes to BBC Two in a couple of months).

You have now been chosen.

You’re going to find yourself interlinked with a shadowy brother-ship of “special” people across the world — geeks with fat tubes. You could be Heroes, just for the next couple of years.

Kevin Maher is (snarkily, and in the end somewhat tiresomely) against:

Holy creative inertia, Batman! Not more crypto-fascist fantasies of omnipotence disguised as mainstream entertainment and peddled by an increasingly decrepit and, frankly, comic book-obsessed popular culture! If anything, the much-hyped Heroes (Sci-Fi Channel) proved conclusively that, given the right flashy production values and cod-philosophical Weltschmertz, there are no subjects and no areas of modern life that cannot be infected by the inane juvenilia of comic-book lore.

Here the set-up was achingly familiar. A group of anodyne mostly white American catalogue models discovered that they had hitherto unexplored superpowers. “Tiny variations in man’s genetic code are taking place at rapid rates,” explained the show’s Indian, and thus quasi-spiritual, narrator Sendhil Ramamurthy before introducing us to a quintet of protagonists who could variously walk on air, stop time and live for ever — although noble-hearted internet stripper Niki (Ali Larter) clearly drew the short straw here by being lumbered, it seemed, only with the ability to see a sneering, slightly smug version of herself every time she looked in the mirror.

Naturally, ever keen to reveal its own genetic heritage, Heroes repeatedly treated us to scenes of characters reading comic books, painting giant comic-book pictures, and discussing comic-book stories — you just know you’re in a Geek Tragedy when X-Men and Star Trek are referenced in the same line of dialogue. Which might, in theory, have been fine if Heroes had stayed within the kitschy world of fantastical narratives established by the likes of X-Men and The Fantastic Four. But, no, this show had bigger thematic fish to fry.

Hence, before the first 20 minutes were up Heroes had invoked the political crisis in the Middle East, bus bombings in Israel and, of course, September 11. All of which were going to be solved, the show announced in its opening title crawl, by a handful of modern mutants with special abilities.

Now, personally, I find it both morally and artistically repugnant that the most urgent political crisis of our time, one that’s currently claiming thousands of lives every month, can be denuded of all context and cheerily coopted by the wish-fulfilment fantasies of some insular adolescent jerks. It is, surely, a sign of growing American political apathy when the cultural response to the Iraq crisis is simply to send Magneto into Baghdad. What’s next? Spider-Man for president? Wonder Woman at the UN? Or would that just be silly?

I’m a sucker. I was genuinely looking forward to My Science Fiction Life. Yes, on the one hand, it was a documentary about science fiction fans, and we know how those turn out. On the other hand, though, it was on BBC4, and it was coming at the tail-end of a perfectly respectable season of sf-related programming, and they’d gone to the trouble of sending a camera crew to a First Thursday, and they were going to be drawing talking heads from the general public. The signs were good, I tell you.

But look how it turned out. For starters, the format was a million miles away from The Martians and Us. I don’t mean that My Science Fiction Life should have been deadly serious — clearly that would have been disastrous in its own special way — but that it would have been nice to have got a sense that the programme-makers respected their subjects. Many of the contributions from the real people who contributed to the MSFL website (including Paul Cornell! Of whom more anon) were saying perfectly reasonable things, in good humour, in response to some pretty daft questions. But the frame that was built up around them made them seem, by association, like pedigree oddballs.

The opening narration, even, was quite promising, saying things like “science fiction fascinates everyone from bus drivers to brain surgeons, up and down the country”. The programme proper, though, was divided into segments, each of which was built around an interview with A. Person with a Science Fiction Life, and supplemented with the aforementioned MSFL interviews, and clips from sundry sf shows and films, and you can see where this is going already, can’t you? So, yes, under “They came from outer space” we got Jeff Wayne and Nick Pope, and under “Man & Machine” we got the ever-more-bonkers Kevin Warwick (and an atrociously misrepresentative piece of narration along the lines of, “From Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL to Isaac Asimov’s renegade I, Robot, that recently starred alongside Will Smith, science fiction writers have been imagining the damage that out-of-control machines could do”), who revealed that he had been first inspired by none other than Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man. Under “Designs on the Future” (probably the best segment) we got Will Alsop, who revealed that Blade Runner is an architects’ favourite, and talked about redesigning Barnsley; and under “The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything” we got everything from Scientology (although that was introduced with a rather nice interview clip: “L. Ron Hubbard, do you ever think that you might be mad?” “Oh, yes.”) to the vicar who uses Star Wars and Star Trek in his sermons.

It rapidly became staggeringly obvious that for all that My Science Fiction Life had looked like it was going to be about the communities that have built up around science fiction, what the producers actually wanted to make was a programme about the people who take sf, or sf-related pursuits, to extremes. I’m trying not to be either too flippant or too grumpy here, since I realise that arguably any attempt by sf fans to explain the fundamental appeal of sf — to say that, yes, thinking about the future and about possibility matters — is liable to end up looking either over-earnest or just a bit barmy. But as it turned out, the gestures My Science Fiction Life made in that direction were superficial at best. The narration would make the (quite reasonable) point that sf can be a venue for looking at moral and ethical questions; cut to scientology and the sf priest. The narration would make the (perfectly understandable) point that our living spaces are likely to change in the future; cut to the man who’s made his flat into a Star Trek flat. And they didn’t use any of the footage from their trip to First Thursday, after all, although in the final analysis that’s probably a blessing.

But there was a bright spot, at least for me: Paul Cornell, who (bafflingly) was just listed as a MSFL contributer (rather than as, say, a writer of Doctor Who and other sf), but whose oblivious enthusiasm for his science fiction life shone through every time he was on-screen. He got the last word before the credits, too, with the rather endearing observation that “Oddly, without science fiction, I would be unmarried, lonely, and penniless.” Which is, it seems to me, as good a note as any on which to say that I’m off to the wilds of York, with little more than an 1,100 page Thomas Pynchon novel to sustain me, to spend a few days with people I wouldn’t have met except for my science fiction life. I’ll be back next Wednesday or so with best-stuff-of-the-year posts. Happy New Year, everyone!

Can you resist a first line like this?

It’s absolutely clear to me that the true predecessor of The West Wing, the great science fiction show that ended its seven-season run this spring, is the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

No, I didn’t think so. The whole essay, by Graham Sleight, is here.

EDIT: Martin has the inevitable poll.

FURTHER EDIT: Abigail on The West Wing as fantasy.