"If you want, we're concerned with systems, and so are you, or at least you want to be, or else you wouldn't be a cowboy and you wouldn't have a handle, right?"
William Gibson - Count Zero
Though I generally avoid television, I finally cracked some years ago and made a Netflix account and have repeatedly re-activated it while lying to myself about the wasted money. Unless you're dying to watch Yet Another Zombie Movie or Dating Sitcom #4593 their lowest common denominator line-up has precious little to offer beyond classic Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes. However, I confess to being downright impressed by Dark, a low-key German Science Fiction series with a plot requiring several flowcharts to follow. Literally. As in, they're on Wikipedia.
Rounding the halfway point of the third season, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the finale to do it justice. This entails repeating two mantras:
1) Please don't pull a "Lost" - remain a Science Fiction show instead of retreating into facile supernatural excuses.
2) Cool it with the stupid sex scenes already.
I merely rolled my eyes at the pilot episode opening in medias ingress and wrote it off as a bearable attention-grabbing concession to mass appeal. But instead of leaving it at that and focusing on more relevant details, later seasons stubbornly waste more and more screen time showing us the central characters humping. Will the heroine's mathematically precise panting pattern turn out to decode a diary's cipher? Will the hero's swiveling his hips before thrusting unravel a causal paradox? If not, there's no excuse for continuing to include such scenes. By the second season, much less the third, either you managed to grab your audience's attention or not. You should be done with the gratuitous gimmicks.
For many years now (ever since playing The Witcher) I've been meaning to write more on the issue of gratuitous sex scenes and romantic subplots, and the medium does not particularly matter. For the purposes of this post, it's the endless repetition of sex scenes, episode after episode, which lowers Dark's value and which I struggle to explain. Time and again, apparently, the audience must be permitted to transpose themselves into the form of limber, photogenic adolescents mindlessly reiterating mammalian pair-bonding rituals, to identify with the characters on screen via the basest, lowest of all common denominators, "young love". For my own part, the character whose lines even remotely echo my own conclusions so far is Adam. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, let's leave it at that.
I do not easily identify with either fictional characters or the personas of others. As far as games go, the mere existence of Twitch TV turns my stomach. Granted, I was never big on old-fashioned spectator sports either, but "e-sports" in particular make me want to strangle you cretins with your mouse cords. For actual sports, real-world sports, sports which merit the designation of sports, at least doing and watching were separated by a significant gulf in activity level, but I cannot for the life of me fathom the mindset of sitting in front of the same screen at the same keyboard yet watching some degenerate mouthbreather across the world play the same game you yourself could be playing right now at the same moment on the same machine... I... how? What? Huh?
The answer once again looms in this mystical "identifying with" the object you observe, that in passively devoting your attention to the perfect tragic romance or the perfect rocket jump you somehow feel yourselves included in, invested in, profiting from, the perceived value of the act. While not immune to this mental disease, this spiritual communion and prayer unto higher realms of base commonality, I cannot imagine a life of endlessly repeated enrollment, of being caught up, constantly, in shared experiences. So many times I've sat amidst a crowd and felt a communal action flow into being around me, whether it's a chant, a peal of laughter, a pattern of motion, a round of applause, yet I can no longer discern either its origin or its beachhead upon your herd psyche. What can it be like, to live one's entire life as a vehicle for others' thoughts, to have notions, impulses, scenes, continually enter and exit one's head unaltered, unanalyzed, to be ridden with and by memetic cacodemons, to have forsaken one's existential foundation as an individual pattern of information processing. Processing, not absorption and automatic reiteration.
Fads are bad enough. Slogans are worse. But cyberspace handles have perplexed me more and more. I took it for granted, when I started playing games and posting online, that I was taking the reins of my personal fable, a far greater control over my own becoming, a knowing means of "making a soul" as Ursula K. LeGuin's characters might say, wandering in introversion among a planet full of introverts. I became a symbol of myself as naturally as breathing. I have been Werewolf, Werewolfe, Werwolfe, for two decades now. Imagine my consternation every time I see anyone using throwaway aliases or worse still, some variant of real-world names like "SuperBob1234" - how do they avoid collapsing into miniature black holes under the negative pressure of their own inactive synapses?
Thus, with black holes, we return to Dark. I've repeatedly made a distinction on this blog between Science Fiction and Fantasy based on personal agency. Fantasy, clinging to the supernatural, hinges on top-down cosmologies, power flowing mysteriously down to supplicants from an ultimate source of its own accord. Science, on the other hand, is a bottom-up process in which rational agents construct solutions via materialistic means. The show indulges in some heavy religious symbolism via names, but in the end it could go either way. Adam and Eva could master their chosen roles or be subsumed by them, could "identify with" their tulpas or define a mythology unto themselves.
Robert Heinlein, an early master of such stories saw the potential in foreknowledge and framed the temporal paradox not as a trap but as the ultimate opportunity for self-determination.
"I know where I came from -- but where did all you zombies come from?"
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