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A Programming Note

To my Subscribers:

I’m busy re-posting items from the version of Voenix Rising that I deleted prior to moving to Denver via The Wayback Machine, so if you get email notifications of new posts, they aren’t actually new…they’re just…rediscovered.

Because I’ve got nothing better to do. Like cataloging my vinyl collection.

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Wait…

…I thought that’s what university libraries were for.

(At least they were when I was at University. And the Student Union, and Bear Down Gym, and the Old Chem Building Basement… )

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It Started So Well…

I stumbled upon this via Amazon Prime. The first season did a good job of putting a new spin on this well-worn story. Engaging characters, lush sets and cinematography, beaucoup interpersonal and familial drama (some with a oversize “ick” factor), some decent eye candy (who unfortunately seem to get killed off all too often), and aliens who were decidedly not what you normally encounter in this kind of story.

Boston Dynamics at work.

When I was finished with that first season, I was disappointed that the second and third seasons were not available via Amazon; that I’d have to subscribe to EpixNOW to see how the story played out. I was engaged, so I laid out $15 for a six-month subscription.

And then…Season Two happened.

Dude, that was my reaction too.

[Spoilers ahead, not that I’m sure any of you care.]

So the aliens presented in Season One weren’t actually the aliens. They were just the aliens’ tools. And the real aliens? As revealed in the final episode of Season One, uniformly Caucasian, English-speaking humans…who (revealed in Season Two) share DNA with several earthly humans in the story. How could this be?!

“For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!”

Sorry, wrong fandom.

Early into the second season, it’s determined that the attacking humans are indeed human, albeit with a plethora of genetic defects. (This explains why the alien robo-dogs were abducting babies and cutting fetuses out of pregnant women – it was for the stem cells.) In the blink of an eye, all the sick aliens are back to full health but still on the offensive, killing as many of the remaining human residents of planet earth as possible. Because reasons.

I made it about halfway through the second season before I hit the internet and got the whole story (at least through where we currently are in the third season) and gave up actually watching any more of it.

Time travel, parallel universes…and pretty much every worn out sci-fi trope out there.

Le sigh. And it had such promise.

Maybe there’s something else on EpixNOW I can watch. If not, $15 is less than the cost of three coffees, so it’s not like I threw away a lot of money.

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Just a Little Reality Check

From Reluctant Rebel:

David Frum:

But if both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, suffer political violence, the same cannot be said of those who celebrate political violence. That’s not a “both sides” affair in 2020s America. You don’t see Democratic House members wielding weapons in videos and threatening to shoot candidates who want to cut capital-gains taxes or slow the growth of Medicare. Democratic candidates for Senate do not post video fantasies of hunting and executing political rivals, or of using a firearm to discipline their children’s romantic partners. It’s not because of Democratic members that Speaker Nancy Pelosi installed metal detectors to bar firearms from the floor of the House. No Democratic equivalent exists of Donald Trump, who regularly praises and encourages violence as a normal tool of politics, most recently against his own party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. As the formerly Trump-leaning Wall Street Journal editorialized on October 2: “It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell. Many supporters took Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about former Vice President Mike Penceall too seriously on Jan. 6.”

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