Blogs / Science Not Fiction

Last night’s episode of The Middleman did not disappoint, easily being one of the best episodes of the season. In a clever riff on the Austin Powers concept, Kevin Sorbo guest starred as a Middleman placed in suspended animation in 1969, brought back to life once it is surmised his arch-nemesis has returned. Amidst an ever-escalating spoof of 60s spy movies, the current Middleman and his sardonic sidekick Wendy Watson must work with the 1969 Middleman to save the world.

Freezing someone in order to revive them later is a common idea in science fiction. And it’s probably one of the areas where people are trying their hardest to turn science fiction into science fact.

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Science Not Fiction’s recommendation for today’s viewing pleasure: check out The Middleman on the ABC Family channel at 10 pm (9 central). The Middleman is a show about a low-key superhero and his sidekick, struggling artist Wendy Watson. Tonight, pulp science fiction TV legend Kevin Sorbo (star of Hercules and Andromeda) is guest starring in an episode titled “The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown.” A la Austin Powers, Sorbo plays a Middleman who was cryogenically frozen in the 1960’s and who now has been revived to battle his old nemesis. If you haven’t seen The Middleman yet, you should, not least for it’s sense of humor, which is so dry it could used for sandpaper.

Nowadays, many TV shows spend as little time as possible on the opening credits, racing to the main action after a few seconds. There are reasons for this (shorter credits can mean more time for the actual show for one), but a side effect is that there is less room for a theme to hit its stride. This is a pity, as a great theme can not only pull you into a program’s world, it can also become a shorthand for the entire show’s vision: just whistling the first few notes of The Twilight Zone theme still speaks volumes, nearly 50 years after the show first aired. So, as nod to a fading art, here are my favorite science fiction TV themes from the good old (pre-1980) days:

• The Twilight Zone: (1959) Yes, it has those distinctive notes, but also has Rod Serling’s mesmerizing monologue.
• Doctor Who: (1963) Not only a great theme in itself, it is an important composition in musical history that introduced electronic music to a mass audience.
• Star Trek (1966): William Shatner’s “Where no man has gone before…” monologue might have been a little too much Horatio Hornblower without the fast-paced music that evoked adventure on the high frontier.
• Captain Scarlet: (1967) Actually, I love the theme music of all Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s classic Supermarionation shows such as Thunderbirds or Stingray, but Captain Scarlet’s theme wins for being the perfect expression of space-age pop.
• The Six Million Dollar Man: (1974) It just doesn’t get any more iconic than this. Incidentally, Bruce Peterson, the test pilot whose real-life crash provided the film for the introductory sequence, was none too fond of seeing the accident that cost him an eye and his testing career constantly replayed on television.
• Battlestar Galactica: (1978) While I prefer the re-imagined version over the original in many respects, have you ever tried humming the new theme music? The sweeping orchestral score of the original perfectly set up the grand tone needed for the space opera that followed.

The L.A. Times Show Tracker blog has broken the news that the Sci Fi channel will air another Battlestar Galactica stand-alone movie after the final season wraps up in 2009.

Edward James Olmos, who plays Commander Adama, will take the helm as director, and several cast members that play cylon characters have already been attached to the project. Written by Buffy alum Jane Espenson, the movie will follow events in the Colonial’s home system following the cylon attack and the exodus of the Galactica and its rag-tag civilian fleet.

Last night’s episode of Eureka, “What About Bob?” centered on Lab 27, a huge biosphere carved out of the rock underneath the Global Dyanmics research facility. The biosphere is a completely enclosed artificial ecosystem — apart from energy and information, nothing is supposed to come in or out of the biosphere, not even air. All of the food, water, oxygen and so on needed by any inhabitants of the biosphere must be produced by biological processes that recycle every ounce of waste. Like most real-life attempts to construct biospheres, Lab 27 was built for the sake of research that supports human exploration of space.

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Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder has been out in paperback for just over a year now, but it’s one of those books that lodges in your brain permanently after you read it.

Perhaps that’s appropriate. It is, after all, about a man who suffers a traumatic brain injury after being hit on the head by something “from the sky.” He then sets about spending his personal injury settlement on an escalating series of elaborate recreations of very specific memories.

Many reviewers have read the book as an examination of the “pursuit of total control” or of “normalcy.”

Here at SciNoFi, we’re going to argue that it’s a book about neuroscience. After all, it’s brain chemistry, as opposed to conscious thought, that shapes our memories and compels us to return again and again to the activities that provide pleasure.

Or you can just enjoy it as the trippiest beach read of your summer. Either way, it’s well worth your $15 and your time.

Read more about Tom McCarthy here, here and here.

Bill Christensen over on Technovelgy has a story and a bunch of links about a new emotive robot being demonstrated in the UK, the Heart Robot. The idea is that it can provide emotional feedback to small children. While it’s not quite human-enough looking to ping my uncanny valley detector, it’s still awfully creepy looking. Especially as it’s mostly a loose limbed puppet, putting me in mind of nothing other than a dying goblin or somesuch.

Now, while I’m in favor of children being exposed to a certain amount of useful scariness (e.g. listening to unsanitized fairy tales, or watching Doctor Who from behind the sofa), on the grounds that they deserve to be given some hint that world beyond their family’s protective embrace can have some rough edges, being faced with a glowing monster that just wants to hold your hand in its own cold, dead, plastic fingers seems the stuff of nightmare. But, to be fair, the kids seem to take it in their stride. Hopefully they’ll have learned some fear by the time we need them as soldiers in the coming war against the robots.

Since I watched Stargate Continuum last week, I’ve been thinking more about the Grandfather Paradox, a puzzle that sooner or later crops up in all good time travel-related science fiction.