Blah...

So I doubt this will be a long post tonight. I'm not terribly in the blogging mood (been fighting some health issues this week, again), and my smegging internet connection has been acting up every time I've logged into my lap top today. Heh. Can you tell I've been reading Red Dwarf?

Anyhoo. I wanted to be writing today about getting to see the forthcoming Battlestar Galactica telemovie Razor in a theater last night. Every once in a while Sci Fi Channel does something cool and not evil and one of those things was to arrange free screenings in several big cities across the U.S. a few weeks before actually premiering it on television. One of those cities happened to be the metroplex in which I find myself so as soon as I could I went and registered me and the hubby to go. Of course, enter the aforementioned health issues and I really really wasn't up to going, since we would have had to be out pretty late and have much car time, which isn't really my friend at the moment. So...I guess I'll just have to wait and see like the rest of humanity.

Is anyone else out there thinking April is way too far away for us to wait for new Battlestar episodes? Seriously...they're just going to tease us in November with a two hour special and then nothing until April. Plus...they haven't even released season three on DVD yet. There is something seriously wrong with the season four lead-in telemovie getting released on DVD and season three's release date not even having been announced yet. Grr.

Okay, rant over.

So, instead of Battlestar awesomeness, and in attempt to avoid Battlestar bitterness, I shall instead speak of Torchwood.

This week's episode was really nifty. Titled "Out of Time" it featured, wait for it...no aliens whatsoever. The crux of this episode was three people from the 1950's taking a short half hour flight from one part of the U.K. to another who just happened to fly right through a rift in time and end up in 2007. The episode featured no frenzied attempts to send the people back to their own time because, wait for it again...there was no way to send them back. Each of these individuals was faced with finding themselves fifty plus years in the future, all of their family dead or dying, and learning not only how to move on but how to do so in a world nothing like the one they had left. Each victim of the time rift was more or less adopted by a member of the Torchwood gang (which sadly left poor Tosh and Ianto with no screen time whatsoever), and the episode follows these people coming to terms with what has happened to them and deciding how to get on with their lives (or not). By doing this, the writers also managed to give the audience a profound insight into each of the three Torchwood members who interacted with our friends from the past. This was an excellent way to reveal these characters to us and make them all the more real, and very much fallible in their own ways.

This episode was beautiful to me in that it really reinforced that good science fiction isn't actually about "science," but about people. The point of science fiction (as with the point of most fiction in general) is to take a possible, impossible, probable, or improbable situation and put people just like you and me smack dab in the middle. Then we sit back and see how they roll. I enjoy science fiction because it allows the imagination to roam a little more, in my humble opinion. But the core of the story is always about the people and what they do when presented with aliens, or people from the past, or learning that their "perfect" Utopian society is anything but (I have a whole post planned on dystopia's once I get around to re-watching Jericho, just you wait).

So anyhoo, this is an episode of Torcwhood I would heartily recommend to even just the casual viewer because it's one that speaks to the heart of humans and how we meet change.

That's about it from me tonight. I want to express my best wishes to the WGA for their ongoing strike effort. I wish they didn't have to do it, but I totally get it. I can only hope, for their sake and ours, that a happy compromise for writers and studios alike can be found sooner rather than later--though I find that highly unlikely. I've never understood why fair compensation is something we, as people, are so unwilling to give. Perhaps I should start digging through my collection of science fiction to see if anyone has held a mirror up to that aspect of society yet...

As ever,
Ciao

-C

Recent Acquisition: Shrek the Third