inconsequence

Jack Vance (found on Wikipedia) -- he has loved boats and travel his entire life

This is me, Jack Vance! is an odd title for a pretty odd book. I have been a fan of Jack Vance for over thirty years, and for most of those years I have considered him my favorite writer by virtue of a single gendankenexperiment — suppose every writer in the world were to have a new book released, which one would you pick up and read first?

Overly analytical readers (if you haven’t introduced yourselves, please do — since we may be kindred spirits) will observe that this experiment does not necessarily discern what one might consider the “best” writer. Greater writers may be prone to writing difficult or lengthy books, and while one might admire their works greatly, one would not necessarily reach for them at any hour of the day for light entertainment. Vance’s books are not, to use a phrase that was in vogue when I was younger, “deep and meaningful” — they are generally both slim and entertaining. One evening many years ago some friends of mine and I (all of whom I had successfully hooked on Vance) were arguing over the names of the planets in the Rigel Concourse (part of the setting of Vance’s “Demon Princes” series) and — in an attempt to settle the argument — I resorted to the text, found the answer, and promptly reread all five books before going to sleep. Of more modern SF writers, Iain Banks — say — is equally light, but hardly so economical.

Well, that is more than enough of me. This is me is a sketch outline of an autobiography that comprises, roughly speaking, three parts. The first covers Vance’s early life, looking for and generally finding work pretty much anywhere around California during the Great Depression. This part is interesting chiefly in that it gives you some idea of the sources of several story threads repeatedly figuring in Vance’s novels — childhoods surrounded by mystery and tragedy (an improbable number of his classmates came to sticky ends, including one unsolved murder), the child raised by one parent, the well-born character who finds himself hard up and struggles to earn back a more comfortable place in society, and the scheming and cheating of relatives (unpleasant aunts in particular). It’s clear that Vance is no stranger to tough, even dangerous, work, and exactly the kind of cautiously self-reliant character who is often the hero of his stories. Several of Vance’s most amusing anecdotes are self-deprecating accounts of his misadventures in the California mining industry.

The narrative goes into fast forward when Vance joins the merchant marine — in large part to avoid the draft — and aside from some sketches of certain port visits tells us little of how he spent most of WWII. We learn almost in passing that his writing career began, in essence, with the enormous amount of spare time available to seamen.

Things slow down again when Vance returns to California, enters university, courts various women, and eventually meets and marries Norma, who becomes both his life and career partner. Vance’s account of married life becomes more-or-less a travelogue (he did much of his writing “on the road” when money was available, and travelled extensively in Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and Africa) omitting any detail of his life in the US, unless it is parties or visits to other parts of the country. The travel stories are interesting (again, Vance’s descriptions of food, strange lodging places, and dishonest innkeepers are frequently hilarious and — it seems clear — based on extensive personal experience) but even they are very sketchy.

When Vance goes blind in the 1980s, his life — in the narrative sense — ends, since he cannot travel, there is little more for him to say. The final part of the book is a very cursory discussion of his work habits and writing ethos. There’s probably little more that he could reveal about his writing than he does say (he himself has little time for writers who write about writing) — perhaps the most enlightening information for me was that, for as long as he could see, he wrote longhand (Norma typed his longhand drafts, he then revised them by hand, she retyped, he checked, and they submitted).

It seems to me that writing longhand perhaps imposed a discipline and brevity on his work that typing might not have. Indeed, when he switched to using a computer system to accommodate his failing eyesight the resulting books (notably Lyonesse and Cadwal) are suddenly much longer — although I think most readers would count five of the six books among his best work (the third Cadwal book is relatively weak and almost unnecessary).

Overall, I’m happy to have read This is me, but I found it a very melancholy experience — perhaps because its dedication immediately impresses upon the reader that Norma — the love of Vance’s life — died in 2008. Vance says somewhere that he always avoided dictating his books, but this is how he wrote This is me, and it seems to have turned out all right. It’s interesting that his authorial voice is a constant — I would not have guessed that Lyonesse was written by a nearly blind man working at a computer while the books just preceding it (e.g. The Book of Dreams) were written in longhand and This is me was dictated.

The only hints of changes in methodology are the creeping in of uncharacteristic errors in his very late works (e.g. This is me repeatedly states that he could not stand the title given to To Live Forever, and a footnote explains something or other the second time it appears in the narrative rather than the first). It’s easy to see that, as a writer, Vance is remains a consummate professional and composes each sentence carefully in his head before committing bits to memory.

There’s very little in This is me that the close reader of Vance’s books would not have guessed, barring particular details. Indeed, I had even guessed some of the particulars (e.g. The Gray Prince — perhaps Vance’s most “deep and meaningful” book — was published very close to the time the Vances travelled in South Africa and Rhodesia — which he drily notes was subsequently renamed by native people not wishing to memorialize Sir Cecil Rhodes). I wonder if The Anome coincided with a visit to Thailand — he was certainly in the area at roughly the right time, but he makes no mention of the book or any such visit.

So, it’s an entertaining book (modulo the general air of sadness mentioned earlier), but neither enormously enlightening nor compelling. There are no salacious details — indeed Vance has nothing nasty to say about anyone (the closest he comes is a matter-of-fact account of transactions with a Greek landlady, and perhaps the side-by-side descriptions of Poul Anderson and Frank Herbert, which tend to leave the latter in a poor light). Oh, and there’s one extremely funny non-account of Norma’s reaction to mixing Guinness and liquor. If you’re not a fan of Jack Vance, I doubt this book will turn you into one — and if you are a fan, I doubt it will add much to your mental image of The Author. Like everything by Vance, it’s beautifully written with his trademark concise-but-evocative descriptions and wry humor, but like most of his later works — i.e. everything since Cadwal — it feels underdone and unsatisfying, almost as if he got tired of the exercise before he was really finished.

Vance has said both in This is me and elsewhere that this is his last book, and that there are no more stories left in him. If so, farewell Jack Vance, and thank you.

I finally went back and played through Mass Effect. I was originally turned off by the interminable elevator rides and dialog. It turns out you can skip through the dialog (sometimes it pays to read manuals, I guess) but there’s no avoiding the elevator rides. (Perhaps even more annoying than their duration is the way that you and your two buddies put away your weapons and stand around looking like dorks every time you climb in an elevator — not what I’d be doing in the middle of a 50,000 year old alien ruin infested by hostile zombies.)

Mass Effect is interesting in many ways as — until Mass Effect 2 ships — it represents the most evolved playable form of Bioware’s thinking on RPG design, and its gameplay bears a pretty striking resemblance to the videos I’ve seen of their upcoming Star Wars MMO. It’s particularly interesting to consider it side-by-side with Fallout 3, which is built on Bethesda’s platform, but is itself a sequel to Bioware’s original RPG.

One of the most annoying constraints in Mass Effect — perhaps a holdover from Knights of the Old Republic — is its hardwired dualism. You’re either a “paragon” (light side) or “renegade” (dark side) and all of your meaningful decisions are framed in that light. Except, of course, that whether you’re a paragon or a renegade, you’re actually going to save the Galaxy, so you really don’t get to be nearly as evil as I’d like. In fact, you don’t even get to be as rude as I’d like. (It’s quite annoying to pick a dialog option such as “So what?” or “This is meaningless” and discover that you in fact say something (a) quite polite, and (b) verbose.)

In the Fallout series (even in Fallout 3) there are sometimes multiple outcomes, and it’s not necessarily clear which is the “good” outcome. What’s worse, is that some morally ambiguous outcomes in Mass Effect are shoehorned into the paragon/renegade dualism. For example, there’s a “quest” involving the grieving husband of a dead soldier who is trying to get her body for burial — and you have two completion options: convince the guy responsible to release the body, even though it’s being held for research that might ultimately save the lives of other soldiers, or go to the husband and tell him why the body isn’t being released, and to deal with it. If you do the first, you get “paragon” points, and if you do the second you get “renegade” points.

More interestingly, Bethesda treats quests as being far more organic than Bioware currently does. Fallout 3′s quests have the ability to branch, fork, and adapt to external events. You can achieve degrees of success or discover that the quest has become impossible as originally conceived but still complete it in a different way. Bioware’s quests appear to simply allow you to aim for a “nice” or “nasty” outcome. It’s also possible that you might be able to fail them or make them impossible to complete, but I haven’t bothered to try to — for example — assassinate quest NPCs just to see what the engine does. I suspect nothing interesting.

Admittedly, paragon and renegade points are chiefly of interest to people trying to get “achievements”, but they do highlight an underlying needlessly simplistic and linear story structure. This is a pity, as Mass Effect is a very fine game. Its lack of moral complexity and actual plot variation prevents it from being as great a game as Fallout and Fallout 2 (which were not without their flaws).

Fallout 3′s character creation system may be only a shadow of the quite interesting system in its predecessors, but it’s also much more interesting and sophisticated than Mass Effect’s — suffice it to say that Mass Effect has character classes, and I doubt that you’d any interesting differences between any two characters of a given class at level 20.

Taking a step back, Mass Effect is actually a pretty amazing achievement. It’s a fairly hard science fiction space opera set in a quite detailed and original setting with a pretty decent story line that makes sense, has some genuine twists in it, and even manages to be pretty non-sexist. While in places it is decidedly overwritten, it is by and large well-written. It’s even pretty non-sexist, and the characters are almost not two-dimensional. (Well, the character you play is pretty one-dimensional…) I like the fact that, for example, the tough female marine NPC has a pretty convincing back story, including being a bit xenophobic and a conservative Christian, and yet remains plausible and sympathetic. It does all this and managed to be a commercial and critical success.

Matter

I also finally read the latest (?) Iain Banks Culture novel (it’s actually explicitly labelled “A Culture Novel” — I’m guessing that after The Algebraist, which I thoroughly enjoyed but apparently many others did not, his publishers are anxious to reassure potential buyers that they won’t have to digest a new setting or something).

I won’t say much about it, but it’s not his best work. It seemed about halfway through that it would be another Excession in the sense that it would reveal another “surface” of the Culture. We’ve seen how the Culture deals with slightly inferior enemies it wants to spank (Consider Phlebas), annoying empires it wants to mess with (Player of Games), primitive societies it wants to mess with (Use of Weapons), and stuff it’s actually scared of (Excession). These are, in my opinion, the best Culture novels — the others are simply fun to read.

Matter introduces a new peer-level involved civilization — dominated by elastic sea anemone-ish blobs — that the Culture cannot simply bully or manipulate or ignore, and an intriguing and extravagantly bizarre new object of interest — the Shell World — each a set of concentric spheres, each with its own environment, atmosphere, and collection of artifical stars, held apart and joined by elevator shafts. Its plot trajectory appears to be heading towards the intriguing question of how the Culture might settle its differences and/or merge with a civilization of similar power and scope. Instead, it peters out into a more-or-less trivial shootout, and manages to exhibit almost all of Iain Banks’s worst traits as a plotter.

Almost every Culture novel (and most of his other SF novels) feature a long, often arduous, urgent journey from A to B by a central character who’s not really clear on why the heck they’re supposed to be doing this in the first place. (If it was ever his intention to satirize fantasy novels with this kind of plot — which is hardly necessary given Terry Pratchett’s body of work — it’s long past that now.) This journey essentially serves to do little more than hold the front and back parts of the book apart and provide a sense of scale that could be achieved far more economically. It may, in fact, simply be the best way Banks has of padding out his ideas to an acceptable length for modern “novels”. It’s more palatable in some of the earlier books because Banks is introducing a lot of entertaining Culture “stuff” (ridiculously huge Culture spaceships with entertaining personalities, wonderfully crazy societies, and so on) — but as the series has grown, we get more repetition and less invention. Matter has pretty much (aside from the pretty ridiculous and contrived Sphere World) nothing to offer aside from not especially vivid new alien races. Even the Culture spaceship names are both few and weak.

(It’s probably worth mentioning that Use of Weapons (the best — in my opinion of course — of the Culture novels) is also the only one that isn’t essentially built around a really long journey.)

The Wikipedia description of Matter, which is far more sympathetic (and spoiler-ridden) than mine, asserts that the themes of Matter are the mentoring of lesser civilizations and simulated versus actual battle (this is where the title comes from — in naming the book, Banks is quoting himself rather than — as has been more usual — T. S. Eliot). The former is certainly described (but not in detail, and very little actual mentoring takes place) while the latter is merely touched on.

So the best that I can say for Matter is that it suggests that at least one more good Culture novel is possible (i.e. one that actually answers the question Matter poses but never addresses — how might the Culture attempt to mess with a peer civilization?). I think Matter might even have been saved — i.e. rate a B rather than a C, say — by a nice epilogue, but in fact its epilogue is quite weak. (My favorite is at the end of Consider Phlebas, and it pretty much does lift that book from a B- to an A- simply by putting the events of that story into a larger context.)

I wonder if perhaps Banks meant to write the novel I was hoping for when I got halfway through, but he just didn’t get there.

The King is dead. Long live the King. NBC's best new drama is best viewed on Hulu, where it is only interrupted by 15-30s public service ads, because NBC and most ad buyers are retarded.

It’s quite strange to see the TV networks self-destructing alongside the Newspaper industry. The death of the latter is widely accepted as inevitable, while many are still on the fence about the former.

In my opinion, TV is going to become — and is becoming — exactly like radio. In other words, cheaply produced disposable content of no interest ten minutes after it’s broadcast. There’s no TiVo for radio, because no-one wants to timeshift radio — except for NPR (or similar public broadcasters elsewhere), and they give away everything online as podcasts anyway. (And unlike the rest of radio, TV, or newspapers, NPR is gaining market share.)

I started work at the University of Alabama last Monday and discovered that one of the perks of the job is access to free copies of the New York Times (and USA Today, but I’m not sure that’s a perk). Reading the Times is kind of an elitist wank, and being an elitist wanker I tried to actually read a physical copy of the Times for the first time in years. (Pretty much the only time I buy newspapers is when I’m bored out of my skull — e.g. when I was stuck in hospital when my daughter was ill (don’t worry, not serious) a few months back or when I’m flying and run out of interesting stuff to read.)

Penny Arcade describes the situation in a nutshell

What immediately struck me is how little the New York Times seems to have learned about being a newspaper, let alone a media outlet. I recently saw an interesting video from TED of a fellow who has actually increased the circulation of several European newspapers by redesigning them — not in the purely graphic sense, but in the Apple sense. Design and function being considered synonymous, rather than the former being merely a thin veneer on the latter. It’s an interesting talk, but so short and lacking in detail that I’m not exactly sure whether I would be terribly impressed by the papers themselves. But, I imagine that they might have considered:

• Abandoning the idiotic broadsheet format (why is it that “good” newspapers must be incredibly inconvenient to unfold and read, unless they’re financial papers?)
• Figuring out a way to put articles on a single page (why do we have short leaders, and then articles vomited across random subsections of different pages?)
• Making the paper actually interesting or attractive to look at

This is all of course a tangent from the more important point that the New York Times needs to redefine itself as a vendor of time-sensitive written articles subsidized by advertising, and not a newspaper. (There was a nice little back of envelope calculation on Twitter a few weeks back — if the New York Times could abandon printing altogether the cost savings would allow it to give a Kindle to every subscriber.)

And all of this is beside my original point that Hulu (and other things like Hulu) is going to kill television. It may not actually become a viable business in the process, but TV is dying. Oddly enough, in its death throes it is going through a Golden Age of creativity, as network programmers thrash about desperately looking for ways of attracting audiences and — belatedly — consider that good, original writing might work.

The quality of TV programs in the United States right now is nothing short of breathtaking. Consider that in the last few years we’ve had:

• The Wire
• Battlestar Galactica
• Dollhouse
• Damages
• The Closer
• House M.D.
• Heroes (Season One)
• 30 Rock
• The Office
• Arrested Development
• You Can Call Me Earl
• Scrubs (until about season six)
• Weeds (until season three)
• Entourage
• The Sopranos
• And now Kings

I keep thinking of new shows to add to this list, all produced in the last five years. It’s ridiculous.

There are also-ran TV series made in the last few years (e.g. Life, Saving Grace, or Law & Order: Criminal Intent) that would have qualified for many people’s top ten lists if they hadn’t been facing ridiculous levels of competition. In the last five years, most comedies have — finally — ditched the laugh track, the distinction between “comedy” and “drama” has been removed (including the “drama equals one hour, comedy equals a half hour” rules), “reset to zero” has been discarded: even sitcoms have arc plot — consider that I’ve failed to mention so far such shows as Stargate SG-1, Firefly, Six Feet Under, Lost, and Desperate Housewives. Everybody Loves Raymond — a conventional half-hour laugh track comedy — ranks alongside the best such comedies of yesteryear, and is thoroughly outclassed by innovative shows like Scrubs. Even a pretty-much-ignored show like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is both more coherent and has better production values than any TV action show made five years ago.

And the best way to watch most of this stuff is online via something like hulu or via iTunes. And yet there are so few ads being sold on hulu that most of the ads I see are 15- and 30-second Ad Council back fill. The networks can find four advertisers to annoy us with hopelessly untargeted TiVo-skippable ads on broadcast, cable, and satellite — but allow us to watch a show in high-def on a computer and we get told to switch off lights to save power and speak up about dangerous teen drivers.

In the long run, TV and newspapers are dead. But there’s money to be made before then if they get a clue. In the long run the iPod is dead too, but Apple is doing just fine in the interim.

Edit: I can’t believe I misspelled the name of the show!

Here’s my take on the end of the best Science Fiction TV series in history: it hit the right emotional notes, and it was reasonably satisfying, but it was not a worthy ending to the series, and I suspect that as we all go back and watch the whole thing through we’ll find a lot of threads left dangling or essentially forgotten by the writers.

Now, as usual, I’m more interested in what went wrong with the show than what went right. It was very well acted and generally well written, the special effects were unbelievably good, and it took on ambitious themes and generally handled them well. Having gotten all that out of the way, there’s quite a bit to criticize.

Scale

One of the details BSG kept returning to was just how many survivors remained. It starts (if I recall correctly) slightly under 50,000 and eventually drops to around 30,000. This is, in essence, the size of a small town. It seems slightly ridiculous that the writers seem to forget just how small a community they’re dealing with. The political and legal wrangles are treated as though they were taking place in a huge nation, not a small community where pretty much everyone knows everyone. While I can believe that the people in charge might have grandiose notions about themselves (they are, after all, the last remnants of their civilization) it seems like the writers might well have tried to bring them back to Earth from time-to-time. Just what proportion of the survivors constitute the press corps? Rather a lot, it seems.

Technology

The basic assumption in BSG is that humans have pulled back on their use of computers because they went too far and ended up getting Skynet … er, I mean the Cylons … as an emergent behavior of their computer system. OK, I’ll accept that, but you do not go back to analog phones and switchboards. The whole “retro-future” technology of BSG is cute from a production design viewpoint, but it makes no sense from any other perspective. We know that our current level of computer technology has not given rise to Skynet or the Cylons, and presumably the folks living on Caprica can remember that their electronic microwave ovens and pocket calculators never gave them grief. In any event, it’s quite impossible to expect human pilots with no advanced avionics to be able to defeat cyborgs flying computerized spacecraft. But they do. In the end, it turns out that Battlestar Galactica was sufficiently networked that they could just plug a Cylon hybrid in anyway. How odd.

Warning, Spoilers Ahead!

It was God What Done It

Perhaps the worst aspect of BSG was well-and-truly foreshadowed from day one, which is the centrality of religion and prophecy to the story. The final resolution is literally a Deus Ex Machina. We are to accept that the figmentary Six and Balthar are angels of some kind and that Starbuck is Jesus, and that the basic resolution is summed up by “All this has happened before and will happen again” (which was the great revelation at the end of an earlier season). It’s particularly annoying that a show with such a sophisticated take on — say — the nature of terrorism, should come down so squarely and definitely in the “there is one god” camp.

We Will All Go Together When We Go

The worst aspect of the Finale (as opposed to the series itself) is that we’re required to accept that the entire fleet agrees to throw away their technology and become hunter gatherers. I could accept some of the forty-odd-thousand survivors doing this, but every single one? These are people who were fractious in life-and-death situations, and every single one of them is going to give up advanced medicine and hot showers so they can start fresh? I don’t think so. (Having a character say something like “wow, I wasn’t expecting everyone to agree” would be OK in a comedy like Buffy, but it’s just stupid in this case.)

Hurry Up And Wait

The pacing and structure of the Finale are odd too. The rescue is resolved rather quickly, and most of the two hours is spent on scenes which could have been much shorter or simply omitted. It’s nice to have some time to wind down from the very exciting climax, and accept that the journey is over, but it’s not long before we, or I at least, are screaming for them to get on with it. How many scenes of Adama with Roslynn heading off to die (or whatever) do we need to see? (And, the wasting of time in the Finale is particularly galling when you consider just what a waste of time the second last episode was.)

I Knew Honda Was Up To No Good

The closing sequence, where Six (the devil?) and Balthar (the angel?) are speculating as to whether this latest incarnation of human civilization will self-destruct the same way the others all did, is somewhat undercut by the final shot of primitive robots in action in some kind of ad or documentary on a TV set in a store window. Battlestar Galactica (the remake) managed to touch on many complex issues, so returning to a not-so-subtle reminder of the perils of [robot] technology seems almost imbecilic. Not our biggest problem, sorry.

Unanswered Questions

So what the heck were the Cylons doing? Apparently, we’re going to have a spin-off movie or mini-series called The Plan explaining things from a Cylon perspective. I’d be fascinated to find out exactly how they can rationalize Cylon behavior.

And, when they said “All of this has happened before and will happen again” did it include the humans ditching all their technology and becoming hunter-gatherers? Because it sure doesn’t seem like the last two iterations did anything of the sort. And if the answer is no, then the final conversation between figmentary Six and figmentary Balthar makes no sense. (Really, they should have said “it turns out that even after giving up everything, they still ended up recreating Kobol” or something. And instead of ending with footage of ridiculous humanoid robots they had chosen footage of robot planes and vehicles being used in Iraq and Afghanistan…)

And exactly how was Starbuck the harbinger of doom?

Oh, and twelve four digit numbers doesn’t give you a very precise location within our galaxy. That’s plus or minus five light years in two dimensions. So, did the music point to Earth, Alpha Centauri, or Barnard’s Star? (There are quite a few more options, actually.)

Addendum

Another blogger points out that Earth’s fauna and climate were very different 150,000 years ago (I’m kicking myself for not noticing this, but with so many self-contained clangers it’s almost nitpicking to actually consider “facts”). Even if we accept that by 150,000 years ago they mean “roughly 150,000 years ago” and that therefore they picked a time which was by amazing coincidence relatively similar in climate to our own, this doesn’t explain away all the megafauna (mammoths, 25′ tall sloths, sabertooth tigers, wolves the size of horses, etc.) that made it through to the late stone age.

No spoilers!

The basic concept of Dollhouse — a service that imprints custom-designed personalities into people tailored to clients’ wishes, and then erases them afterwards — doesn’t seem to me to be something I’d want to base TV series on, so, despite being a Joss Whedon fan, I pretty much decided I would wait until the show got axed and then maybe see it on DVD.

Circumstances — in the shape of the everyone in the house getting sick — led us to run out of stuff to watch on TV, so Rosanna TiVoed the current episode (“107″ in TiVo parlance — season 1, episode 7) and we watched it together, then immediately went to Hulu to see which episodes were available online, and after watching episodes 2 to 6, we paid $1.99 for the first episode on iTunes.

The fact is, I haven’t really cared for most of Joss Whedon’s shows’ underlying premises. Cheerleader who kills vampires. Good vampire who hunts bad vampires and lawyers. Even Firefly‘s basic setup — tramp freighter eeking a living out on the fringe of an interstellar civilization the crew doesn’t much care for — isn’t exactly earthshaking. What makes Joss Whedon’s shows great is his execution.

To begin with, Dollhouse pretty much lays out all of the moral implications of its central idea on the table. E.g. it assumes that the most common service is prostitution and that it’s a job only someone who had no choice would accept (the “doll” is indentured for five years, after which — we assume — their old personality is restored). It doesn’t disingenuously put forward a whitewashed version and then treat the obviously outrageous implications as shocking twists in later episodes. Pretty much every bad thing that you would assume might happen given the scenario is essentially assumed to have happened at some point or another. Indeed, the beauty of the Whedon’s take on the basic premise is that the technology doesn’t work perfectly. Or maybe even at all.

Oddly enough, the basic premise of Dollhouse is almost identical to the recently (and deservedly) cancelled Christian Slater show My Own Worst Enemy. But My Own Worst Enemy fails precisely because it assumes the technology has always worked perfectly (up until now), that there is no tolerance for glitches, and — worst of all — the technology’s main role is completely senseless — in what universe is it helpful to give your agents cover identities, but wipe their skills and knowledge when they’re under cover?

Next, Whedon clearly has a lot of stuff figured out in a way that the writers of Lost and Battlestar Galactica did not. To begin with he’s actually willing to reveal the answers to questions because he has more stuff to follow up with. Contrast this with Lost which never answers any questions satisfactorily, and simply tosses in more random detail (I’ve described elsewhere as “adding another layer to the onion”). I won’t go into details here since this would just spoil it for you.

Finally, this show is just really well written. There’s no fat in the scripts. In the first scene in the first episode (where Caroline is being persuaded to sign on to become a doll) we get to a point where she’s deciding what to do and then BANG action cuts to a scene which may be a flashback to the way she got into her predicament, but turns out to be one of her engagements. This is not a show you can watch while doing something else — blink and you miss serious plot developments. And there’s a lot of care taken with the different personality “imprints”: when they imprint Echo (the main character) with an expert hostage negotiator’s personality, or a midwife’s, or an extreme sports nut, she is totally credible. It really seems like something that would be hard (on writers, actors, and film crews) to do each week, but so far they’re pulling it off.

I do wonder whether Whedon has a five year arc in mind, or started with the assumption he’d be lucky to survive for one season (it is on FOX after all). Certainly the plot is advancing fast enough for a satisfying conclusion to be reached by the point at which Firefly got axed. It occurs to me that he intends to have the initial arc end mid-season having altered the basic premise enough that the show will take on a rather different form beyond that. We shall see!