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The newest series entry in the Star Trek franchise, Starfleet Academy got its cancelation announced yesterday to cheers from the quarters that despised the program and tears from those who adored it. If you populate or have visited the SF and Trek communities online then it’s no news flash that the series prompted some intense feelings with many going on extended ‘explainer’ videos dissecting the show’s faults, failures, and lack of respect for the ‘good’ Trek that had preceded it. This was a discourse that I did not participate in and avoided consuming whenever possible. Not because I had any particularly strong love or any emotion for the show but because such emotionally driven tirades are tiresome and not worth the energy to even briefly consider them.

Star Trek to me has always first and foremost been the original series produced and broadcast in the 60s, a very different time from today in nearly every major way. Next Generation presented a new crew and several seasons where I enjoyed the program but also several seasons where it was tedious, tiresome, and quite preachy. Deep Space Nine had some interesting ideas and characters and I watched a few episodes here and there, but it failed to fully hook me as a viewer. Voyage? God, that was stuff I simply could not swallow with the exception of a couple of episodes I watched out of loyalty to my friend that had written them, I abandoned the series after the third episode. The next series, Enterprise I abandoned after the pilot as it was quite clear to me that the creatives behind that project had a very different vision for how SF and Trek in particular should be written than myself.

Discovery tempted me back with some very interesting casting choices and there was much I found intriguing about its set up – I have never been one overly concerned with ‘canon’ for a series that was never designed to have it — but ultimately I lost interest and the series just slipped out of my viewing habits. Without a deep devoted sense of nostalgia Picard failed to keep me engaged (pun very much intended) and again after a few episodes it slipped away.

Strange New Worlds is a very different story. The first ‘new Trek‘ series that gave me the feeling of that original series, even as they took their own quite large liberties with the supposed canon. Not only did i follow the show and watch every, admittedly too few, episode, I purchased the first two seasons on physical media.

So, with that background established I watched Starfleet Academy with an open but wary mind and heart, hoping for a new Trek that I could be a fan of. Sadly, Starfleet Academy prompted in me the worst reaction any film or television program can generate in the viewer, apathy. There is no worse reaction that indifference.

The series did not repel or offend me, even as it offered up recycled ideas from some of the previous programs that I certainly did not like, but neither did it engage me. None of the characters hooked me with an interest to know them any better, the situation didn’t pull me in, and the cast choices were at best a distraction. I did not avoid episodes but other programming kept displacing it as my sweetie-wife and I decided on which things to watch for our evening’s entertainment. The news of its cancelation brought no disappointment only a sense of acknowledgement. At the time of this writing, we hadn’t finished the first season and last night we made the decision to not finish. It wasn’t out of animosity, the program didn’t provoke enough to generate such a response but simply a recognition that we didn’t care enough to keep at it.

I am sorry for those who did find a connection with this series, it is always a bitter blow when the forces at networks remove from the offerings the thing that spoke to you. To those who are celebrating its demise, really? Is that the best use of your brief and valuable time on the planet, taking joy in even the minor suffering of others? There are better things to do, go do them.

If you have not been in the SF fandom community very long you may not have heard or experienced the devoted base of fans, known as ‘Browncoats’ for the failed television series Firefly.

Created by disgraced talent and Buffy creator Joss Whedon, Firefly a space western inspired by Whedon’s reading of The Killer Angels ran for 11 episodes on the Fox network before being canceled mid-season. Three years later Universal released feature film, Serenity, written and directed by Whedon, who hadn’t yet torched his reputation and career, wrapping up one of the show’s central plot lines while dispatching a couple of the main characters. From there the cast dispersed to their various projects and careers, while fandom possessed enough of an interest and hunger for the series that it lived on primarily in comic book and graphic novel form.

Now, more than two decades after the show’s aborted run on television and its middling performance as a feature film its central star Nathan Fillion has announced that the series is being revived as an animated series with all of the surviving cast returning to voice their characters. Ron Glass who portrayed the mysterious Reverend Book passed away in 2016. Whedon reportedly has blessed the project but also is reportedly not involved with this reincarnation of his creation.

I was a fan of the series when it aired way back in 2002. I recognized some of its shortfalls and limitations and thought it leaned a little too heavily into its mashup of the Western genre with the SF elements. Its science was patently preposterous but that I had long accepted as the price for seeing any SF on television at all. I mourned its premature cancellation and attended ComicCon in San Diego to see the panel discussion with the cast prior to the release of Serenity, so while I am not a ‘Browncoat’ I am not hostile to the series. I even own it and the feature film on BluRay, but for me this announcement stirs no excitement.

All art is a product of its time.

The people who made Firefly in 2002 lived in a different world than the one we live in today. Everything that is in the artist’s world, the grand and world changing to the small and scarcely noticed impacts on who they are influencing how they perceive humanity and its place in existence. Making Firefly or Doctor Who or Star Trek today will not recreate those properties as they existed in the early 2000s or in the 1960s. That presumes that the creative team on the animated series, sans Whedon, were the team that crafted the original series, and I haven’t seen any reports that those writers are returning. Which means that the writing will be done by people whose connection to the characters and settings is one driven by nostalgia, creating yet another layer of transformation beyond that imposed by the passing years. The actors have been changed by time as well and that will change how they interpret their characters, it is an inevitability.

Perhaps this animated Firefly will fly high and stun everyone who watches with its insight and engaging stories, but it will not and cannot be the same as that beloved cult series. Time flows onward and you can never truly go home.

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I have finished all the episodes of Pluribus season one and all of the mainline companion podcast episodes and as such I am ready to expound on the series.

Apple TV

First off, I really liked it. Its premise, that a radical infection, induced by an alien signal, unifies nearly all of humanity into a single group consciousness that is compelled as a biological necessity to non-violence and an irrational reverence for life is unique and compelling. That of the dozen or so ‘survivors’, individuals who due to their genetic makeup are immune to the ‘joining’, our protagonist is a person who, at least in her former life, was quite the anti-people person and now finds herself as the agent to save humanity is also very compelling. Carol Stucka, played by Rhea Seehorn, is a different kind of hero and that is welcome. I look forward to season two and what it brings. I have no doubt that show runner and creator Vince Gilligan has an ending in mind, just as he did with Breaking Bad.

So, theories.

I think the Pluribus effect is an alien weapon system that has been targeted on Earth. The signal originated from a stellar system 640 lightyear distant, meaning even if we caught the broadcast just as it started the aliens that transmitted it did so when the Earth was in the year 1386, without the technology to receive much less interpret the alien signal and its recipe for an RNA virus. It was transmitted blindly for whoever and whenever the people of Earth became able to utilize it,

The Pluribus effect is pretty devastating, both in the short term, where nearly a billion people died from the sudden global disruption, to the long-term effects which look to be an extinction level event.

The effect renders the ‘joined’ or the ‘others’ go with whichever term your prefer, pacifistic and compliant to the transformed. They seek to satisfy every desire and whim of the people who are cut off from the group mind, even delivering weapons of mass destruction if that is what they desire. The ‘joined’ seem wholly and utterly incapable of engaging in violence even in self-defense. A planet so infected presents no threats.

The ‘joined’ are also unable, by biological compulsion, to willingly and knowingly take any action to end any life. About halfway through season one we learn that this prohibition extends to plant life as well, rendering the ‘joined’ unable to harvest anything for food. Once the planet’s population has been transformed, their food source is what was harvested and manufactured before the event and the bodily remains of those that have died.

This means extinction.

The planet, post-event, has a store of calories available for consumption and a population consuming those calories without replenishing that store. Consuming the dead only delays the inevitable mass starvation of the population but with a planet untouched and unmarred by warfare. A far better result than even with Neutron bombs if you want nice welcoming planets around but without their pesky inhabitants.

This dire situation is exacerbated by the fact that the ‘joined’ are also compelled to ‘share the gift.’ That is to construct the massive antennae and power-supply to transmit the signal onto new stellar systems dooming other civilizations to the same fate as Earth, With the fantastic resources required for such a project (neatly described in episode one before anything has really transpired), the ‘joined’ population is diverted from working on a technological solution to the caloric conundrum the event has thrust them into.

The final element that leads me to believe that this is a weapon system is the fact that Carol learned that the process of the ‘joining’ is reversible. So, if the originator or an ally of theirs became infected, it could be undone. Safety for the initiator of the infection, death for the infected, that makes for a pretty good weapon.

I will wrap up this post with what looks like an oversight and a scientific error in the series.

As I discussed above, the ‘joined’ seemingly are prohibited from taking any action that would end any life, but they are more than willing to administer antibiotics, the very word means ‘contrary to life’. Apparently, their prohibition doesn’t apply to single cell organisms. I think more likely is that the series writers simply forgot that life goes all the way down to single cells. (A very competent argument can be made it does not extend to viruses.)

The scientific error deals with a major plot element. The ‘joined’ discover that they can tailor the RNA strand to the un-joined, bringing them into the single consciousness but the process requires stem cells from the individual. Carol refuses to give them the consent to collect her stem cells and believes herself to be safe.

Stem cells are cells that can be differentiated into any kind of cell in the body, they can become nerve cells, liver cells, blood cells, from a stem cell you can produce any tissue of the host.

Okay, I can buy needing stem cells, it is a little bit of a stretch but not a terrible one. The ‘joined’ reveal to Carol that they are using her frozen eggs, human eggs not chicken, to create stem cells to bring her into the collective.

Umm, I cannot see any way for that to work.

Human egg cells do not have the entire DNA of their host. They have only half of the chromosomes which will combine with the half of chromosomes provided by the father to create the full set of a new human being. You cannot create a stem cell with only half of the chromosomes required.

But all SF shows have their errors, some more than others, and this one I can look past as I wait for season two.

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I have been a science fiction fan ever since my older sister caught me trying to write a book report on a non-fiction book about Mars and took it away and put Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein in my hands. Now, in the era of streaming, the streaming wars, and the dominance of geek culture with so many SF movies and shows the question can be posed: which is the best service to subscribe to for science fiction?

To me, the answer is pretty plain: Apple TV.

While Paramount+ boasts pretty much the entire Star trek Franchise from the original series to the newest iterations, it’s really no deeper than Trek.

Apple TV has an impressive catalog of original and interesting SF. (In addition to even more beyond genre fiction such as Slow Horses and Bad Sisters.)

Here is a partial list of the SF you can find on Apple’s streaming service. I have bolded the ones that I have watched and as you can see the unwatched outnumber the viewed.

1. For All Mankind
2. Silo 
3. Foundation 
4. Severance 
5. Dark Matter
6. Invasion
7. See
8. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters 
9. Hello Tomorrow!
10. Constellation
11. Amazing Stories
12. Brain
13. Sunny
14. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
15. Circuit Breakers
16. Murderbot
17. Pluribus

Of the six shows that I watched, and I watched at least the entire first season for all of them, only one did not work for me and left me cold and uninterested in continuing, Silo. While it had a cast that I enjoyed and an intriguing concept there were world building issues that I simply could not get past to suspend my disbelief. The underground world of the show is simply not run with the absolute need to recycle everything, most of all biological material, that such a system would demand. All the other programs have worked at levels from simply enjoyable to shows that I love. Foundation, while diverging significantly from the source materials, source materials I found too dry to hold my interest, has been forking fantastic. Murderbot hewed much closer to the novels and managed to capture the inner monolog that is so essential to the property’s comedic tone. It took me a little longer to get into Severance. The split nature of the characters, I suspect, created an emotional distance, but once past that and especially once the big reveal of season one was deployed, I was hooked. Monarch was just monstrously fun and I cannot wait to see where Gilligan takes Pluribus.

I initially enrolled with Apple TV because a package deal with Apple music, storage, and TV cost less than the satellite radio services in my car, but now you can have my Apple TV when you pry the remote from my cold frozen fingers.

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I am only 3 episodes into Pluribus and it is possible that these questions bouncing around my skull have been addressed in some manner later in the series. If that’s the case, then I am looking forward to Vince Gilligan’s take on the matter but if not, I am deeply curious how it all shakes out.

Apple TV

In Pluribus a global event has melded nearly every human into a single consciousness sharing all of their thoughts, skills, experiences, and emotions as one. The protagonist of the show, Carol, along with roughly a dozen others, is for some reason immune and is decidedly not pleased with the new love and harmony of a world at peace with itself. Carol’s reasons are intense and understandable, but are not the subject of my ponderings.

Each individual of the new human collective presents as a serene, happy individual with a unified goal of making Carol happy in whatever way possible, all while espousing the utter contentment of their new states of existence, hoping that they can eventually bring Carol into this magnificent joining.

So, peace on Earth and perfect brotherhood for all of humanity, right?

I hate to break it to people, but humanity can be a right nasty bastard.

Pluribus’ thought experiment creates a unified human mind that would also include all the horrible experiences people around the globe have suffered; everyone is both the victim and victimizer. What exactly is that like? To be both a sexual assault victim and your assailant? To be both war criminal and war crime victim? What does it mean now that all of humanity has the direct emotional and psychological experiences of every serial killer on the planet?

I wonder if the series will get anywhere near these questions. It sort of reminds me of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and his quest to fully understand humans, but how can you fully understand if you aren’t engaging with the terrible darkness humans are so easily capable of?

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Antagonists and Villains are tricky characters to craft. Make them too simple in their motivations and action and they become cartoonish targets, forgettable and easily swept aside by the protagonists. Develop them too well and they become so sympathetic as to displace the actual protagonists as read and audience identification grows. A careful balance between evil goals and representing their full humanity is an ideal that is so rarely achieved.
But achieved it was with Andor’s Syril Karn and Dedra Meero, agents of Star Wars’ dread Galactic Empire, lethal opponents to the protagonists, but fully realized and capable human beings trapped by circumstance and their environments.

Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) begins the series as midgrade police officer working for corporate

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

security, desperate to prove himself and with a fierce passion for law and order. Syril gives no indication that he has ever given any thought to the politics of the empire. Syril has a much more grounded view of life: there are rules and they are the only thing that keeps the chaos at bay. Rules must be enforced and rule breakers must be dragged into the light and subjected to the legal system for correction. His rigid view of the law and justice sets him on a course for tragedy when he cannot accept his superior’s plan to sweep the murder of two fellow corporate cops under the rug. Refusing to participate in a cover-up that would allow a lawbreaker, a murderer, to escape justice, Syril ignites a series of events that lead to riots, the Empire displacing the corporate security, and his collision with Dedra Meero.

Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), a sector chief for the feared Imperial Security Bureau, ISB, has an

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

equally rigid but more political worldview than Syril. Taken from her criminal parent and raised in an Imperial ‘KinderBloc,’ Dedra is a true believer in the Empire. For her, it is not law that brings order to the galaxy but power and the Empire’s power must be unquestioned or there will be chaos. Laws and rules are, for Dedra, permeable, but only insofar as rule breaking advances and protects the Empire’s power to provide stability, peace, and security. Frustrated by a bureaucracy which keeps sector heads and Imperial departments quarreling and warring for resources, Dedra violates rules and protocols pursuing a growing rebellion that others either cannot or will not see. Cold, competent, ruthless, and intelligent, Dedra Meero represents the Empire’s best bet for killing the Rebel Alliance before it even forms beyond the odd terrorist attack or heist.

By the second season this pair have formed both a romantic and professional union. We aren’t shown the courtship, but with the series time jumps we are presented with the couple living together in the imperial capital. When Dedra puts Syril’s overbearing mother in her place, establishing the firm boundaries required to protect her partner, it is clear that Dedra truly cares for Syril. Later Dedra pulls Syril into an intelligence operation that when he learns its true scope and purpose rattles his steadfast resolve, providing their relationship’s tragic conclusion.
Syril isn’t an evil man, he’s a man with solid understandable belief in law and order, but who by temperament doesn’t look at the hand that wields the law for its own self-interested purposes. Dedra, unbothered by both genocide and torture, is evil. She engages in torture and terrorism, putting aside what qualms remain within her withered conscience to advance a system whose true nature is revealed with the annihilation of the Ghor. Her desire for order at any price finds that even genocide is not too high a price to pay. This devotion to power brings the eventual conflict which shatters Dedra’s relationship with Syril and his rigid moral code.
Andor presents the audience with Imperials that are true characters, that are people with complex inner lives and for whom the Empire is not a setting but an environment that shaped them and that they shape. This is writing at its best.