Things to like (or not) about Masters of SF.

Two things to like about Masters of Science Fiction, which premiered last night:
1) It reminds millions of TV viewers that SF is a written genre. It is not just about blowing up CGI robots onscreen; it can also be about blowing up cities on the page.
2) It returns the anthology format to the small screen.

One thing to like about the first episode, "A Clean Escape," which debuted last night: Judy Davis looks great at 50something. Perhaps a trifle too great to be a dying of cancer, but I’m almost willing to give them a pass on that. They DID try to show her as over-stressed and frayed, which is perhaps a television producer's understanding of "dying of late stage terminal cancer."

It’s been years since I read the story by John Kessel that it was based on. I remember it as being more elemental, focusing on the drama between doctor and patient, without the filler they threw in to stretch it out, and I’m almost certain there was no breakdown moment in which the amnesiac character played by Sam Waterston has a breakthrough moment, which he subsequently forgets.

(If this is a part of the original story, I repressed it, because it makes no sense. People who have suffered a brain trauma leading to loss of short term memory don’t suddenly retrieve lost memories only to forget them again.)

Normally, I think it’s not only unfair but downright silly to denigrate a work for not following its source material. TV, short stories, and movies are different genres. (Robert B. Parker once complained of the producers of Spencer for Hire turning down one of his scripts because it wasn’t about "their" Spencer, but they were right to do so.) By calling themselves Masters of Science Fiction, the producers created a problem for themselves, putting front and center that this is material adapted from "masters." Still, let’s pretend that this an episode called "A Doctor and a Patient In Search of Rod Serling or something Like Him," and judge it on its own merits.

I still don’t like the patient’s "breakthrough," in which he suddenly remembers who he is. Worse, I don’t like why they did it. This moment of regret, and the speech they gave Waterston, was in line with a few other changes they made to highlight the "relevance" of this story to the Bush pre-emptive war strategy and insensitivity to climate change.

Why did they make these changes? Because they think we’re all blithering idiots who wouldn’t "get it" if they didn’t spell it out in small words.

Seems to me that if that’s their attitude they should have played out the final therapy scene as a chase scene around the compound. Maybe they could have staged on it on Segway scooters! Judy Davis on her scooter, Waterston on his, while she fires shots. "How do you feel about your wife?" she shouts, then Blam! Then, when he hits his head, which everyone knows is how you cure amnesia on TV, she would stand over him and laugh maniacally. "I have you now! You thought you escaped. Ha, ha, ha." Then, Blam!, she shoots herself.

Only a slight improvement, but it might have helped.

I will tune in next week, just like I used to watch Space: 1999, because it wasn’t REALLY as bad as it could have been. A "D" is still passing.

Let me make a short attempt to relate this to the topic of this blog, post-humanism. One of humanism’s great themes is restoration of a lost self. That’s the return-to-Eden theme which is at the heart of psychoanalysis. This episode, "A Clean Escape," is about a loss that is irreparable. Unable to face that, it gives us a moment of restoration, to satisfy its humanist soul. Let me put this another way: this show is basically a drama about the complete loss of humanity, an irrevocable transition to new state of being. Our good doctor, Judy Davis, is absolutely unwilling to accept this loss. The president’s breakdown is summoned not by the logic of the therapy, which would disallow it, but by the logic of her own need for it (and the Hollywood desire for such a moment by George Bush). It also becomes the moment of her death: having enforced a return to a humanistic framework for one moment, she is unable and unwilling to accept its loss; ergo, her suicide, which in this case can be seen as an assertion of self over the circumstances of the world. Basically, this is an unwitting drama about humanism as nostalgic, resentful wish fulfillment.