Revelation 6:8.

It's Labour Day, and with Labour Day comes the start of the school year.*  Every now and then I look around for courses dealing with my area of interest - I've often thought it might be interesting to study science fiction or fantasy on a scholarly basis.  Over the years I've looked at a wide variety of courses, but it just never seems to work out for me in terms of time and scheduling.

One of the more intriguing options available in the current year comes from the Langara College English Department:  Apocalypse Now: Literary Narratives of Pandemic.  It's an interesting choice for a topic: unlike the more speculative disasters such as global warfare or the destruction of fossil fuels, humanity has actually experienced at least one pandemic event. In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death swept across Europe like a dark curtain, killing uncounted millions of people - some estimates place the death toll as high as 60% of the population, if not higher.

I'm quite curious as to how this course approaches pandemics in a literary framework, but sadly, the Langara web site provide no more specific information other than the following:

Students in this course will study prose fiction in a variety of forms with the goal of improving their strategies for reading and writing about 20th and 21st century prose. Course themes and content, as determined by the English Department, may vary each semester. Check the Registration Guide for details.

As a result, we have to extrapolate - how does one approach pandemic writing from a literary perspective?

Depending on how you define your terms, there would certainly be plenty of grist for the mill. The earliest fictional (as opposed to Biblical) take on a global apocalypse is Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, which tells the tale of an end to the world very much like the near miss of the Black Death. The late 20th Century is thick with novels where a disease of some sort wipes out 99% of the population**: The Stand, Oryx and Crake, I Am Legend, Earth Abides, The Last Canadian, and so on. If you broaden your definition of pandemic to include the walking dead (caused by a contagious medical condition transmitted by biting, rather like rabies) the list grows exponentially.

Most of this fiction deals with the immediate aftermath of disaster: finding food and shelter, seeking allies or companions, defending against cannibals and raiders, etc.  It almost goes without saying that this is a pessimistic literature, a literature of life lived in the present. It's rare that these stories look very much further down the road than the immediate crisis.***

A rare longer term view of the challenges - and consequences - of attempting to rebuild a broken world can be found in Some Will Not Die, a 1961 novel by Algis Budrys, which paints a brief multi-generational picture of the years following the fall of civilization in terms of ends and its justification of the means used to achieve them.

The White Plague, by Dune author Frank Herbert, presents a very different view of justification. This 1982 novel is the story of a microbiologist deprived of his family by a bombing in Northern Ireland, and his decision to punish all of the participants in the conflict with a similar loss, now and forever: the eponymous White Plague is fatal only to women. The book concludes with a brilliant description of a journey through the tortured remnants of Ireland by the biologist and the bomber as the plague escapes the bounds of the United Kingdom and begins to infect the entire world.

As it turns out, this display of erudition in the area of apocalypse is fruitless - I don't have the prerequisites which would allow me to take the Langara course.  Although, to be honest, I might find it more interesting to take a shot at teaching a class or two than attending them...

- Sid

* Those of you involved in multi-semester education, just work with me here.

** I'd love to add The Andromeda Strain to this list - I grant you that it's more of a failed pandemic, a pandemic manqué if you will, but the scenes set in the Arizona town which finds the crashed probe so clearly show the horror of an alien disease set loose on Earth.

*** It would be interesting to see an episode of The Walking Dead set in a future time when Carl is his father's age or older.

Doctor Why?

While we were lying in bed last night, Karli looked up from her iPhone and said, "Oh look, Doctor Who is going to be filming in Vancouver!"

I glanced at her suspiciously over my glasses and said, "Well now you're just toying with me..."

After recovering from my fanboy reaction to confirmation of this exciting bit of news, my first thought was, "But why?"  The new Doctor Who - okay, it's been eleven years, perhaps we can stop calling it "new" - has a fairly impressive record in terms of location shooting for a TV series:  Arizona, Venice, New York, Croatia, Istanbul and so on.  However, those locations were selected due to their unique nature - there aren't many spots near Cardiff that you can make look like the Sonoran Desert or Venetian canals.

Vancouver is normally used as a stand-in for American locations by production companies looking to take advantage of tax breaks and an advantageous exchange rate. If you're starting in Los Angeles, you can actually drive here in 20 hours if you have a lot of props that you need to bring along.  In the case of Doctor Who and the BBC, what does Vancouver bring to the table that couldn't be matched with a short European flight that didn't involve a seven hour jet lag debt?

Perhaps this will be another one of the rare cases where Vancouver plays itself.  I don't think that the Doctor has ever addressed the mystery of Bigfoot, which would very much require a Pacific Northwest location.  Let's hope it's something like that, and we'll have the opportunity to see the Doctor and his new companion Bill doing the Grouse Grind, running across Lions Gate Bridge, or enjoying the night life in Whistler. (I think it less likely that he'll show up at Number Five Orange, although that would certainly bring a whole new direction to the character.)

The bad news?  I'm going to be out of town for a week at the start of October...you just wait, they'll arrive the day after I leave, have some kind of huge fan event while they're here, and be gone before we're back.  Sigh...and I made all those reservations...

- Sid

P.S.  Astute fans of the Doctor's production history will be aware that this is not the first time that the last Time Lord has visited Vancouver, at least as a shooting location. Vancouver stood in for San Francisco in the 1996 made-for-TV movie that featured Paul McGann as the Doctor, and Eric Roberts as the Master - the second-to-last Time Lord.

Beyond or behind?

 On Saturday afternoon, Karli and I saw Star Trek: Beyond. The new cast continues to do brilliant imitations of the original characters, the special effects were impeccable*, the villain is suitably villainous, and the day, as always, is saved in an epic fashion. It’s got some issues in terms of exposition, there are a lot of holes in the bad guy’s back story, but generally the movie builds very well on the foundations erected by the first two offerings from the rebooted voyages of the starship Enterprise. 

Coincidentally, I’ve also been watching episodes from the original series on Netflix during my stationary bike cardio workouts at the gym.  Here's the thing: why do I find myself preferring the old shows?

It’s an unexpected question.  In spite of the lasting popularity of the original series, no one denies that it had its problems, and I'd like to think that lessons were learned. (Although you'd never know it from the Qpid episode from The Next Generation.)  Star Trek: Beyond would have been a perfectly acceptable original series episode, but that's the problem: acceptable, rather than excellent or challenging or thought-provoking. And there's a very logical explanation for that - no Spock joke intended.

A movie, even one that’s part of a franchise with a 50-year legacy, is unlikely to make the same creative decisions as a series - especially one that’s as episodic as the original Star Trek. Some critics point at the show’s lack of serialization as a flaw, but really, it’s one of the great strengths of the original series.

The stand-alone nature of the episodes allowed for a huge creative variety in stories:  the taut, tense conflict of Balance of Terror versus the cheerful comedy of The Trouble with Tribbles; The Doomsday Machine, with its echoes of Moby Dick and references to the Mutually Assured Destruction standoff of the Cold War, or Ricardo Montalban’s suave villainy as Khan in Space Seed.  Amok Time, The City on the Edge of Forever, Mirror, Mirror, A Taste of Armageddon - there’s a substantial list of episodes that are considered to be excellent stand-alone examples of science fiction storytelling.

I acknowledge that there's also a substantial list of failures – The Omega Glory, Spock's Brain, The Way to Eden – but even the bad episodes of Star Trek were still attempting to do something original and interesting. 

Contemporary movie makers are faced with the challenge of trying to maintain that flavour of creativity and variety without being able to vary too widely from the formula.  It’s hard to imagine a two-hour Star Trek movie that would be as deliberately comedic as The Trouble With Tribbles – instead, the movie scripts have to strike a balance, mixing elements of humour, conflict, suspense and romance in an action movie framework.

It's one thing to roll the dice on an unusual idea when you're doing 26 episodes - it's a completely different thing to take a chance when you're releasing one movie every three or four years.

Regardless, if I could send a message to the creative team for the next Star Trek film, I would tell them to do exactly that: to play the long game with the movie franchise and treat it like a really extended version of the series. Take some risks, people! Challenge us, impress us, startle us! Come on - let's boldly go someplace we’ve never gone before.

- Sid

*  Karli might not agree with this statement - she noticed a couple of things that didn’t quite work.