LATEST COSMOS PROVIDES ESCAPE, HEROES

In this grim time a little escape and new heroes to admire are certainly welcome, and this week’s recommendation for where to get them cites a familiar source. Neil deGrasse Tyson, everyone’s favorite astrophysicist, is back on the Fox Network with his second re-imagining of the popular Cosmos television show first created by Carl Sagan and wife Ann Druyan in 1980.

This time the show is titled Cosmos: Possible Worlds, and uses the fictional trick of the “ship of imagination” to take us both back in time to view our Earth’s creation and our human species’ rise, and out into space to explore other possible life-nurturing planets in the galaxy. The ever-optimistic Tyson is our host for these journeys, explaining everything in a way that’s scientifically based, graphically displayed and easy to understand. Ann Druyan serves as lead writer on the series. She’s also an executive producer, along with comic Seth McFarlane, well known as a space geek.

I hope you have a decent television set at home to watch this show, because the visuals are stunning. Whether you are in a location here on Earth, or looking at the stars, everything is awe-inspiring, which I imagine is the point.

I do have one criticism of this latest iteration of the Cosmos franchise. The various historical segments are done in a kind of weird stop-action-looking CGI animation rather than using real actors. This, combined with Tyson’s tendency to lecture in maddeningly simple terms, made me think I was watching a science special aimed at fourth-graders at times, rather than the Carl Sagan show of old, which always pitched the material way over my head. 

Unfortunately, I think there’s a reason for that. We no longer respect, value or bother to learn science (or history) in this country. A show like Cosmos: Possible Worlds has to dole out its information in small, easily digestible bits or risk losing the audience. That doesn’t exactly explain why real actors couldn’t have been used instead of CGI for the historical parts, but I can understand that the producers might have wanted to reserve a limited budget for more WOW-factor location shots and onscreen recreations of exploding stars.

Nikolai Vavilov

A recent episode provided an example of the show’s underlying philosophy, and its ultimately uplifting inspiration, even though the production aspects were frustrating. Episode Four, titled “Vavilov,” told the story of an unsung hero of science, Russian agronomist, botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. In the years before World War II, Vavilov traveled the world collecting seeds and roots in a search for the earliest, purest genetic forms of common food crops. He believed knowledge of these base forms would provide a starting point for improving the seeds used for agriculture. 

Vavilov wanted to build on the theories of Gregor Mandel and Charles Darwin to solve the age-old problem of crop failure and famine in Russia. To that end he established the world’s first global seed bank in Leningrad and began work in genetics that became recognized throughout the world. But in the poisonous political atmosphere following the death of the revolutionary Lenin and the rise of the authoritarian Stalin in the USSR, a young man Vavilov had taken under his wing turned on him.

Trofim Lysenko began to denounce Vavilov’s theories and put forward his own, nonscientific ideas. The politically astute Lysenko found easy favor with Stalin, a man with no patience for learning or science. But Lysenko’s simplistic theories only encouraged Stalin’s foolish political ideas with regards to state agriculture. The result was mass famine on a scale seldom seen even in Russia. Millions died in 1932-33 in an event the Ukrainians named the Holodomor (death inflicted by starvation).
 

Vavilov, by contrast, lost favor with Stalin. By 1939, the famous scientist had lost the right to travel abroad, and in August of 1940 he was arrested. A year later he was condemned to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison, but in reality, Vavilov was forced to slowly starve to death. He died in prison in January, 1943 at the age of 56.

During the two-and-a-half year siege of Leningrad by Nazi forces, during which approximately 1.5 million citizens of the city starved to death, a handful of Vavilov’s colleagues lived in the basement at the Leningrad seed bank and guarded the a cross-section of the precious genetic material Vavilov had collected with their lives. Nine of the scientists themselves starved to death, but none of the staff touched the seed compilation, though it contained rice, wheat and other edible food grains. (Today’s Global Seed Vault, the modern embodiment of Vavilov’s idea, exists in Svalbard, Norway within the Arctic Circle.)

The Global Seed Vault in Norway

I knew about the siege of Leningrad, Stalin’s famines and the Global Seed Vault, but I had never heard the name of Nikolai Vavilov before this episode of Cosmos: Possible Worlds. And I had certainly never known of the heroism of Vavilov’s fellow scientists in Leningrad. It was worth putting up with the irritating CGI production on the episode to gain this useful knowledge and a historical reminder that a refusal to accept the facts of science in the pursuit of a political agenda can lead to death and destruction.

  

There was another upside to this episode. Viggo Mortensen provided the voice acting for Vavilov’s character. If you’ve seen the excellent movie EASTERN PROMISES, you know he can do a terrific Russian accent. (The man speaks five languages, after all!) That makes it even more disappointing, though, that we didn’t get to see Viggo act the character. 

Cheers, Donna

FALL SF TV: A TALE OF TWO STARSHIPS

THE ORVILLE

Imagine you have the wherewithal to create your own TV space adventure series. You’ve always been a fan of Star Trek, so you model your universe on the one presented in that classic show: your crew is diverse, your captain is both decisive and flawed, your ship is beautiful and your conflicts reflect those of today’s society. But imagine, too, that you’re Seth McFarlane, creator of the irreverent animated comedy Family Guy and the Ted movies. That means your space adventure/homage to Trek must be funny, too.

The result, of course, is The Orville, McFarlane’s new SF show, now running Thursday nights on Fox. Instead of the bleak dystopias dominating television these days (Walking Dead, Colony, The 100, The Expanse), The Orville offers a vision of a bright future full of shiny starships, abundant energy and peaceful cooperation between species. 

Early-Trek optimism infuses McFarlane’s work, from the sleek ship exteriors to the clean, colorful interiors lit to banish all shadows. Plot lines may bring some conflict among the crew that includes not only humans of color, but also beings of several alien species. (After all, Captain Ed Mercer’s ex-wife Commander Kelly Grayson is his Executive Officer.) But The Orville is no Rosinante; no one is getting killed in a disagreement with another crew member here.

Largely because of McFarlane’s true love of Trek and his dedication to the underlying principles of that show, The Orville has some strong points right out of the gate. The characters are likable, the universe is a place you want to spend time in. Watching the first episode, I felt like I was exploring an old neighborhood. It was familiar, but just different enough to intrigue me. I even enjoyed watching McFarlane ham it up as the Captain. There was love behind every Kirkian pause and posture. And, after a while, I stopped thinking of Mercer as a Kirk wannabe, seeing him as a new, slightly wacky, but touching, character.

The second episode is even better, as the captain and crew of The Orville deal with an ethical dilemma drawn from our own times. A mated pair in the crew from a planet of all males reproduce and deliver a female baby. (Don’t ask. I have no idea how this works.) This happens only rarely on their planet, and almost always the baby is given a sex-change operation immediately. But the Chief Medical Officer on the Orville refuses on ethical grounds. Which is the set-up for one of Trek’s cultural sovereignty vs. universal ethics debates. You can probably guess that the universal right of a being to choose its own path wins out. The only thing missing is an impassioned plea from Jim Kirk. 

Fox just moved the fledgling show from Sunday nights (where it would have been subject to interruption throughout the football season) to Thursday nights. It already has a solid audience, debuting in the Top Ten in its first couple of weeks, according to TV Guide magazine. The move should help, not hurt. McFarlane has his own huge following who will go with him, but The Orville has a wider appeal to the vast Trek audience that is currently being dissed by CBS. (More about that later.)

The Orville’s biggest drawback is that it seems McFarlane’s not sure just what he’s doing with the show. Is it a comedy? The jokes fly fast and furious, and several characters seem included just for laughs, but some topics seem more serious. Is it a spoof? The plots are generally not broad enough for parody, so I’d have to say no. Should we watch the show as a straight-up space adventure? Umm . . .

No matter what the thing is, I’ll continue to watch. It’s too much fun to miss, and I confess my DVR is already full of dark and depressing.

STAR TREK: DISCOVERY

For the first time since 1966, I haven’t bothered to watch the pilot episode of a new Star Trek series. This latest iteration seems promising enough, set ten years before the original series five-year mission, at a time when the Federation is at war with the Klingon Empire. The stories are told not from a captain’s POV, but from that of a junior officer, a woman of color at that. There’s even a gay couple on board the ship. So, what’s not to like?

CBS All Access, that’s what. The network and the producers of the show propose to air only the pilot on broadcast television. (That happened this week.) If you want to watch the rest of the series you’ll have to pay for CBS’s new All Access streaming service. Um, no.

Unlike the producers, who obviously live in New York or Los Angeles, I live in rural North Carolina. Maybe some of you out there can relate—maybe you live in a small town, or out on the prairie or in an underserved suburb. Here in the hinterland, streaming is slow and expensive. I’ve got enough Internet connection for social media and work. But downloading a show? Takes hours. I only do it (through my free On Demand service) if I absolutely have to, and then I download, record and watch later. The idea of paying for a streaming service—Netflix, Hulu or CBS All Access—doesn’t make much sense.

I can’t help but think that Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, is rolling in his grave right now. He would have hated to think his creation would increasingly be available only to an elite few. The future he envisioned was more open and democratic by far.

Cheers, Donna