The Future of Television - Lost. In Space

I thought of an excellent idea for a new science fiction television show that would follow a similar pattern of Battlestar Galactica, at least as far as revamping seriously a laughably camp old sci-fi hit from the 1970s. I’m thinking about Lost in Space. Consider the basic premise of the show: An exploration ship is sabotaged and crash-lands on an unknown world, the crew being forced to work with the very saboteur who caused the mess in the first place. Of course, apart from the first and last episodes, the original series executed this premise as if it was Gilligan’s Island in space (with a comparable budget). But with a few tropes lifted from recent critically acclaimed hit sci-fi programs, and a few ideas of my own, I think I have a pretty good pitch. It could be worth developing further, at least.

The Ship and Its Crew.

The setup of the original show was too simple: The Robinson family of scientists and their best friend are the crew of the ship, and the only foreign entity in the crew is the villain-turned-walking-joke Dr Smith. What we’ve learned from shows like Lost and Stargate: Universe is that a larger, more diverse cast can constitute more complex storylines simply by their being stuck together. A large ensemble cast of singular characters with diverse histories and many different reasons for being on the ship provides a comparatively large potential for different character arcs as individual stories are developed, and different people come into different kinds of conflict as they try to survive on an alien world.

How to Travel in Space.

I only thought of the idea this afternoon walking back from the market, so I haven’t yet considered all the details of how this technology would work. I’m imagining some kind of wormhole creation and manipulation technology. This is partly why they’re stranded so hopelessly for quite some time into the series. Only ships carrying a wormhole generator can travel faster than light; signals can’t. So they can’t send a decent distress signal at all, because they’re too far away from human worlds, and can only signal them at light speed.

Key to the narrative is that humanity didn’t invent the wormhole technology - they discovered and reverse-engineered it on a sublight expedition several centuries ago. So a major narrative arc of the series would be that the cast slowly discovers evidence that they are wrecked on the homeworld of the beings who invented the wormhole technology.

The Villain.

I’m a pretty big Doctor Who fan, as regular readers will have discovered by now. And one of the Doctor’s favourite aliases, especially when he was stuck on Earth working for a planetary defence task force, was Dr John Smith. So I thought of making the central villain, the saboteur, a remixed version of our favourite Time Lord. The Dr Smith of the regenerated Lost in Space would be a manipulator of the rest of the characters, with his own nefarious ends regarding the planet's mysteries.

No one, not even the audience, would know he sabotaged the ship, and engineered it to crash on the Mystery Planet. Dr Smith would be a brilliant, eccentric, manipulative asshole. He would, effectively, be the charming rogue scientist at the centre of the show, using his considerably wide-ranging expertise to take at least partial charge of the cast.

There would probably be some other characters who would take charge of the day-to-day problems of survival for the cast on an alien world. And those characters would drive ongoing power struggles with Smith because they’re more obviously helping the cast survive on the planet. The cast also grows more suspicious of Smith over time, as they become conscious of his manipulating them, and his investigations into the planet’s mysterious nature.

One idea I had for the character is that he would be an older man, with some echoes of the Hartnell and Pertwee versions of The Doctor. And a story arc for the first couple of years would involve him discovering technology on the island to build an android body that would eventually resemble a young man, and eventually copy his own personality into it, cloning himself into a practically immortal body. This brings me to my favourite idea for the new Lost in Space.

The Android (or, Danger Will Robinson My Ass!)

At the 24 Hour Art Marathon in St John’s this summer, I wrote a short story about a future society that has invented a race of android servants and companions, whose brains were powerful computers and scanners based on chaos mathematics. Their long lifespans and incredibly fast learning curves make them intellectually and perceptually superior to humans. Because the intellectually successful androids were built as companions, they were basically T800 style robots with flesh that repaired itself by absorbing ultraviolet light, and couldn’t eat or drink, because the light would recharge their power plants as well. Pretty much every power source built to work in terrestrial environments, of course, would be solar or wind based by this point in human civilization, androids included.

By the time of Lost in Space 2.0, the androids will have long ago won their rights to self-determination, integrated into society, and to some degree have been forgotten. The android character from my story, Alice Chesterton, would be on the ship. A major narrative arc for her would be the crew’s eventually discovering that she is an android. Her immensely powerful brain would cast her as a rival to Dr Smith, and his envy and conflict with her would be partially what drives him to create his android replica.

Probably the most important element of Alice that the writers would have to keep in mind throughout the show is that Alice’s intelligence and learning speed is beyond the greatest of human geniuses. All androids are this way. Probably a very fascinating part of the Lost in Space 2.0 mythology is discovering the history of how the prominence of androids in society would have disappeared over the previous centuries. They are intellectually and physically superior to humans in every way. So one of the great mysteries about human history in this universe would be how and why the androids disguised themselves, or hid themselves away. Perhaps there's a secret society of androids somewhere in the human worlds, something like the Freemason conspiracies.

After Dr Smith created his android replica, he would have to be written with the same caveats as Alice. After that point, both Alice and Dr Smith can perceive all the possibilities of every object they see, giving them a fantastically fast learning curve. But Alice, unlike Dr Smith, is already centuries old, and was built by a corporation that became massively successful building high quality android companions. Android Smith, however, would not be built by such experts, and would be hampered by mechanical problems.

One of these would be impotence, because Alice was originally designed as a sexual companion for a professor on Earth, and so the physical processes for sexual activity would be an integral part of her brain. Her sexual relationships with other members of the cast would be excellent narrative fodder as well. Dr Smith's android would be something of a patch job. This would just add to the conflict between them, even as Android Smith begins to sympathize with Alice more than the human crew as he learns to exercise the immense potential of his brain. Alice has always been an android, so comes from a much more enlightened ethical perspective. Smith built his android self for egocentric human reasons, like envy of Alice and yearning for immortality. The breakdowns of his mechanical body would be quite ironic, given his advanced age as a human in the first two seasons of the show.

The Planet.

This is where the direct analogue to Lost comes into my idea. A mandatory feature in the hypothetical show’s bible would be that nothing like the God-ish aspects of Abrams and Lindelof’s island would ever come into play in Lost in Space 2.0. It’s a standard trope that most stories about stranded people take place in some jungle environment, but I’d prefer to set the crash site on a steppe near a mountain range, the kind of environment that would make shooting in British Columbia or California fairly easy.

All the long-range arcs of the story, again riffing from Lost, would have to do with the mysteries of the planet where they’re wrecked. Over the course of the first series, the cast, particularly those more loyal to Alice, would discover that human expeditions have visited the planet before, and evidence of these prior investigations (and perhaps some of their sticky, violent ends).

The steppe-mountain setting departs from the tradition of stranded stories, and would give the writers extra flexibility in setting. Some episodes would take place on the steppe, some at a nearby lake, and some exploring the mountains. Another narrative arc of the show would be a quest by some characters to discover the sea on the other side of the mountains, and that would probably integrate with the reveal of the indigenous species, described a bit later.

Most important about the planet’s mythology is that there is an alien race that lives there, the descendents of the inventors of the wormhole technology. And I would have them be as absolutely unlike humanity in every way possible. Perhaps they’d be a species something like amphibious cephalopods. The most important scientific consultant on the show would be the biologists who would brainstorm ways that intelligent amphibious cephalopods could evolve and become the dominant technological species on a planet.

The cephalopod culture would have to be immensely detailed as well, because the major narrative of the show would be the cast discovering their technology, culture, and mysteries, eventually learning to communicate with them. This would probably be the most difficult part of designing Lost in Space 2.0, even more than having one (and later two) major characters who are advanced android geniuses. At least androids and humans share a common history. The cephalopod culture would have nothing at all in common with Earth, but with a history just as detailed, and ethically complex, as humanity's.

There could also be conflicts because some of the humans (probably Smith and his cronies) would catch small cephalopods to eat at the beginning of the series. But because androids can perceive all the possible states of an object as well as its current actual state, Alice would stop the cast from eating them, and provoking the adult intelligent cephalopods. The human-cephalopod misunderstandings and conflicts would be another central story arc of the show.

I think this show sounds like a really cool idea. Let me know if you have any character ideas for anyone other than Alice and Dr Smith, because they’re the only people I’ve thought of so far. I don’t really want to see anyone who is too much like a character from Lost or BSG. If this whole academic career doesn’t work out, or it turns out that I can make more money as a tv producer, I know I at least have a good idea I can attach my name to.

The Perfect Way to End a Story, But It Will Never Happen

I discovered a while ago that Steve Carell is likely to leave The Office when his contract is up at the end of the 2010-11 season. I think it’s clear that the show itself would have to end at this point. Michael Scott is the show’s central protagonist and the point around which all the major action of the show revolves.

The Office is past its prime, generally speaking, but is still one of the most entertaining and well-characterized shows on American television. Seven years is a terrific run for any show, and all the actors can look back on it as a point of high quality in their careers. This would be true for the successful post-Office careers of people like Carell, Craig Robinson, Ed Helms, and Ellie Kemper. It would also be true for the people who will be utterly forgotten or typecast beyond all hope of return like John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, Mindy Kaling, and Rainn Wilson. I’m not sure what will happen to B. J. Novak. Perhaps he’ll become a time traveller.

The most interesting part of an Office finale for me is how it’s going to end. Taking a cue from the original British version would be no help. Having run for just two years before Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant began their other projects, Extras and the Ricky Gervais Podcast, the UK Office ended with Tim (US=Jim) and Dawn (US=Pam) getting together, an event the US version long moved past.

I had a wonderful idea how the show should end, but I think you’ll agree when you read it that it would horrify almost all the fans of the show. Then again, it could also be executed very happily and optimistically, though not without a good chunk of unhappiness. And combining laughs with gnawing depression is what The Office is best at.

I took my jumping off point to be the current plotline involving Sabre printers being defective and catching fire when carrying out large jobs. It’s plausible that, with the story of Michael’s illicit relationship now having been wrapped up, the last episode of the season would concentrate on the rest of the staff discovering the Sabre hardware scandal. The next, and presumably last, season would then see the fallout of the scandal on the Sabre corporation. This could set off a chain of corporate blunders and coverups that would eventually lead to the collapse of Sabre, the parent company of Dunder-Mifflin. The seventh season would end as Dunder-Mifflin goes down with the corporate ship and everyone loses their jobs.

An extended epilogue of the last episode would show what happened to the different characters. Jim and Pam move to Philadelphia, where Jim gets a sales job with some other office supply or furniture sales company and Pam stays at home with the kids for a while. I also see Pam getting pregnant again. Dwight would retire to his beet farm, Angela following doggedly with Dwight’s child, not named Morpheus. Darryl would get a job in another warehouse, bitter after his brief brush with the corporate lifestyle. Andy would find himself rewarded for his initial activism on the printer scandal with a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, an office which would prove to be even more insane than Dunder-Mifflin. Kelly would callously manipulate her way into a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the investigation of Sabre. Ryan would mopishly become her househusband.

Oscar and Stanley would find other, equally mundane, jobs in the Scranton area, and Stanley and his former mistress Cynthia would get married. Kevin, Phyllis, and Meredith would remain unemployed for the foreseeable future, although Kevin and Phyllis may begin a relationship. Creed would disappear into the Canadian wilderness. Toby would commit suicide.

For some reason, I’m imagining that after initial awkwardness is overcome in social situations, Michael and Erin getting together. They had a very nice moment after her breakup with Andy, and I want to see how that develops. And they would try to get the Michael Scott Paper Company off the ground again, perhaps diversifying into office supplies of all kinds.

Welcome to Jam

Chris Morris, Britain’s most brutal and uncompromising provocateur satirist, created a six episode sketch show several years ago, called Jam. The sketches are not what most people call funny, and are mostly terrifyingly disturbing. The tone of sketches are unsettling, with most of the rhythms of comedy removed, and the cinematography sometimes starkly from another world. Here’s a sketch typical of its unsettling insanity, where a man comes to fix a television that has had lizards pouring out of it for the past day.



And this one, which is just plain strange.



I encourage you all to see all the Jam that youtube has to offer. But it’s not for the easily (or possibly) offended, or those whose personality isn’t already disturbed enough to find this funny. I laughed like a beast, especially the man who launches himself into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment by being shredded to sludge in a woodchipper.

Television that Keeps Me Watching TV

I’ve been very impressed by the new season of Doctor Who, especially Matt Smith, who embodies the role of the Doctor in a way that implies gravitas, joy, and strangeness, sometimes all at once. I find him much less self-consciously pop than David Tennant, which endears him to me, though perhaps not to all the casual fans of the show. Steven Moffatt’s ability to craft such an involved and complex story arc is quite a selling point as well. For all I admire what Russell T Davies was able to do resurrecting the show in the first place, his season arcs were usually a little too simple, amounting to little more than teasers for the finale. This year, the Doctor is discovering clue after clue about the nature of the mysterious cracks and silences in the universe that seem centred around new companion Amy Pond and the oddly insular town of Leadworth.

Treme has been remarkably engaging television for me too. I particularly like the show’s favourite asshole, Steve Zahn’s Davis. Davis is a pompous musician and radio DJ whose uncompromising exuberance and total inability to tell how people will react to his actions before he does them combine, little by little, to ruin his life. In the second episode, he got fired from his radio job after letting a local musician sacrifice a chicken live in studio. By the end of that episode, he got his second job as a desk jockey at a hotel on Bourbon street, but lost it after directing a group of twentysomethings in New Orleans with a church group cleanup crew to a bar outside the hotel’s designated comfort zone. It didn’t help Davis that they didn’t make it back to the hotel for two days.

As a Spaced fan, one of the happiest things we experienced was that the US remake of the beloved show was never picked up. However, I realized this week that there is an American Spaced, and it’s called Community. It’s not just because of the inter-generational unlikely friendships in an eccentric environment, though the nuanced and self-aware characterizations of the protagonists and Greendale College residents is key to its charm. Edgar Wright is a rare director, in that he knows how a camera movement can tell a joke. And the creators of Community understand this as well. One recent episode saw the campus collapse into a paintball war zone, and the climactic last battle of Jeff and Britta with their deranged Spanish teacher Señor Chang would have just looked kind of silly and lame if it had been filmed with an ordinary series of camera shots. But the slow motion of Chang’s entrace, the low angles at which the diminutive teacher was shot, and the kinetic flow of Britta’s attacks and Jeff’s escape heightened the surreality of the moment. It’s still a very revolutionary, and very difficult technique for a camera to be made so pivotal to the humour of a scene. But Spaced and Community have successfully achieved that.

Proliferating Television and Visions of Airships Over the Jungle

A by-product of my trip to Ecuador was another idea for a novel, which I think is the most promising I’ve had, with at least equal or higher potential than Write My Name In Hangul, my story about English teachers in South Korea. Travelling around Ecuador from city to city seems rather difficult, because it’s such a mountainous country with wide swaths of protected jungle area. So land transportation consists of tricky mountainous roads, which often take an entire day to travel the distance which would be only a few hours’ journey on Canadian highways. The most efficient way of getting from one city to another is by plane. Ecuadorians are very ecologically minded people, so this high carbon footprint of travelling around their country is a little paradoxical.

I realized the best kind of inter-city transit industry for this country would be airships, blimps, zeppelins. Helium gasbags with large passenger and crew cabins, spacious enough for a small ferry with the capacity of a standard inter-city plane, but much more comfortable. It would move at maybe half the pace, but could still get you from Quito to Cuenca to Loja in three hours. And it would be much more comfortable than a cramped airplane.

I don’t really have the entrepreneurial acumen to start this business myself, but I definitely have the creative mind to write a book about it. I already have most of my main characters, a couple of which I’ve used already in other projects, and the bare outlines of a story. Really, in terms of story, I just have the framework of everyone’s lives bumbling along while they fly from city to city on the flagship, L’Altavida. And there’s one incident that I want to include.

There’ll be a drunken documentary filmmaker, Norberto Krieger from either Argentina or Chile, who basically makes a home out of the airship, specifically the airship bar. About two-thirds of the way through the book, he’ll be comically thrown out of the airship over the jungle, but about a week later, he’ll walk back onto the airship when it stops in Cuenca. When asked how he survived the fall, he’d say “You have to tuck and roll.” When asked why he came back, he’d say, “I left my laptop in my crew cabin.”

And I have a title: The High Life.
•••
One of the things that I find pretty cool about television today is the degree and obviousness with which a franchise migrates from country to country. Now, this has happened pretty much ever since television existed in multiple countries, with executives licencing remakes of shows that have been successful in other countries, and the success rate of the new shows being reasonable at best. The Office is probably the most obvious example, with eight versions now existing (the original UK, the United States, Quebec, France, Germany, Chile, Russia, Brazil). I find it interesting how differences between the shows can reflect the differences in culture between the different countries, but that’s not the piece of news I’ve discovered now.

No, what I found out is that a much more mediocre American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, has been ripped off almost exactly by Belarus. The characters even have the same name, the scripts are practically translations, and the actors are disturbingly old compared to their US counterparts. It’s completely unlicenced and absolutely impossible for anyone to get them to cease production. All television in Belarus is owned by the authoritarian state, which exists outside all international legal systems.

We Interrupt South American Stories for a Party Political Broadcast

This is pretty much the only political issue I can get excited about, since my own country's leaders are arrogant imbeciles. Stewart, Colbert, and Conan are the only people I can believe in anymore. I think I'm not alone here.

Philosophy and the Essential Ambiguity of Film

To begin, an example of how my thought processes work. Monday night, after Conan was over, tv inertia found me switching over to Bravo and watching the last half of an old episode of Without a Trace. The plot was about a missing teenager whose girlfriend had been involved in a near-daily series of sex parties held at his best friend's house. The girl had been a regular at the parties until she met her boyfriend, when she stopped going. But after the host started spreading rumours that the boyfriend had cheated on her, she returned, and the fight they had when he discovered this fact happened right before his disappearance.

The actors playing the party host and the girlfriend looked incredibly familiar, but I couldn't remember the name of the episode, or the names of the actors. But this morning, as I woke up, I remembered where I had seen the party host before: Canadian teen sitcom Student Bodies, which I used to watch semi-regularly when I was in high school. The actor was Jamie Elman, and on his imdb page, they had listed the name of the Without a Trace episode, "Sons and Daughters." The girlfriend in that episode was Kat Dennings, who starred last year in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Michael Cera.

Now, here's the idea I had in the shower this morning, after looking up this thread of interconnecting movies. I noticed another item on Jamie Elman's filmography, When Nietzsche Wept, in which he played a young Sigmund Freud. After searching through some reviews on the internet of this movie, I discovered that there were none, except a couple of forum posts on nytimes.com, one of which was a one-sentence endorsement, and the other of which said it was fit for MST3K. Apparently, Armand Assante had a decent performance, but the film was a gross oversimplification of his views.

It reminded me of an opinion I've held for some time about philosophy movies: that they should not be made. Why they shouldn't be made is a matter of the very different form of philosophy and film. Philosophy is a clearly written argument or exploration of an idea. Philosophy is largely making declarative statements and arranging them to articulate a concept or an argument. It is a matter of words, and occasionally illustrative diagrams, but mostly words. The purpose in philosophy is to explain, and interpret those explanations.

But film is a medium of images, and images don't declare anything: they just are. Sure, you can film a lecture, but a fascinating lecture is a boring film, and attempts to represent philosophies in film are best done through characters whose motivations can be understood as being rooted in or inspired by particular philosophies. If characters actually talk about their philosophical motivations, usually in long, ludicrous speeches, it becomes boring. Philosophy strives for clarity, but films strive for ambiguity. A well crafted image is a display that can consist almost entirely in interpretation. Interpretation in philosophy only begins after the text has been clearly stated. Philosophical interpretation must begin from a clear standing point in the text, and if the starting text itself is obscure, the interpretation will collapse. This is the key difference between the image and the text.

This is why novels work so much better in stating philosophical ideas. The works of Marcel Proust, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera are three examples that come immediately to mind. The adaptation of Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an excellent example of the difference between novels and films when it comes to philosophy. The novel was largely an exploration of Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche, and his interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return concept. (I think Kundera committed the common mistake in Nietzsche readers, thinking of the eternal return as the sameness of repetition, when it's actually the repetition of difference, but that's neither here nor there.) The characters were cyphers for the philosophical exploration. The novel was a philosophical exploration that happened in a political and personal narrative context, and as such, it was a brilliant success.

In his adaptation, Philip Kaufman understood exactly what to do with his film. To have the characters state explicitly Kundera's philosophical engagement with Nietzsche and have the film revolve around that would have sent the audience to sleep. Instead, Kaufman's film focussed on the articulation of these ideas in the actions of the characters themselves. The audience sees the characters engage with the world, and we can work out through their actions the ideas that animate them. There are some wonderful images of Daniel Day-Lewis in the film that illustrate his philosophy of being's lightness much better than any speech ever would. Wondering whether he should rejoin his wife Juliette Binoche, who has fled the superficial and selfish society of Zürich for Prague, he stands in a pond playing with ducks, his arms outstretched on a foggy afternoon. After finding tranquility together working on their farm in rural Czechoslovakia, Day-Lewis, driving a tractor, raises his arms in mocking thanks to God, sitting on a line between the brightnesses of blue sky and green fields, Binoche watching and laughing. These images are ambiguous in themselves, and their explanatory content depends centrally on the audience.

After first conceiving this idea, I thought of a narrative inspired by that Without a Trace episode that would be an excellent philosophical novel, and if I eventually decide to pursue it, would be the first genuinely philosophical novel I write. I hope you don't mind my spoiling the end of a six year old episode of Without a Trace. At the end of the episode, we discover that the county sheriff was engaged to Kat Dennings' mother, and had discovered that his own daughter from his previous marriage was a participant in Jamie Elman's parties. Irrational with rage over seemingly having lost his biological daughter to a nihilistic lifestyle, he follows his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law back home. That night he sees the boyfriend visit and try to reconcile, only for Kat Dennings to turn him away. Dennings had told her mother that she was raped to cover up her involvement with Elman's parties. The sheriff, thinking the boyfriend was Dennings' rapist, captures him as he leaves Dennings' house, and takes him into the woods where he strangles the boyfriend to death. The end of the episode sees him confessing to Anthony LaPaglia and being led away to jail.

I wondered what could the motivations possibly be of a lawyer who would try to get him off, someone whose defense strategy would have to consist in badgering the highly traumatized witnesses to force them to break down on the stand and tricking them into contradicting themselves. This lawyer would have no ethical values other than his own power in convincing people that his desires were the truth that should motivate them. I can think of no motivation for anyone to convince a remorseful confessed killer to plead not guilty and allow his lawyer to destroy the psyches of the prosecution's witnesses. This lawyer would go ever farther than not believing in an absolute good, because you can believe in a plurality of good and still be ethical. That's me. This lawyer would have to believe that there is not, and cannot be, any good at all. Each case would be, for him, an expression of his own power. He would be a living exercise in what we could call, paraphrasing Nietzsche, a monstrous nihilist, a man happy to have overcome the values of the society in which he lives, but who sees no need to create new values.