Plausible aliens, please.
Asking for a friend.
Pull up a barstool for the musings of “A Patched Fool,” a weekly newsletter on all things “artsy” — books, movies, music, plays, and, woebetide to us all, streaming television. Really, just idle thoughts not related to sports or general culture.
There was this movie…
Since I’m about to, uhm… strongly criticize the film, I shan’t name it. Suffice to say it started with some promise and then, well….
We begin with a deep space mission that discovers a huge alien ship. Inside are bat-like creatures, dessicated, and three humans in suspended animation. Silly astronauts retrieve one bat-creature and the humans. Communication with the ship is lost. After the ship’s return to Earth, the three apparently dead humans are recovered from the now burnt-out interior of the ship.
During the autopsy, a dead woman revives and sucks the life force out of the coroner. He dies, she’s revivified and… we’re off.
Okay. A vampire-like story with a twist. Dried out husk of a woman sucks life force, becomes pretty and naked lady while the coroner becomes a dried-out husk; he wakes and sucks life force, revivifies, and the cycle is continued.
It’s only a matter of time until all of London will be either husks or life force-sucking vampires from space!!!
Except… somewhere in there, life force-sucking vampires from space™ became zombies. Legit, Roger Corman-inspired, growling flesh eaters.
Uhm… WTF? Where did zombies come from?
It just shows to go you (chapeau David Mamet) that nerdlings will forgive a lot as long as there’s a naked lady vampire involved.
Well, nerdlings don’t forgive everything. At a minimum, we do ask content creators at least to deliver consistent plausibility.
… if “Computer, please make me a 5-carat blue diamond” would yield the world’s riches, then, maybe, money might not be a thing anymore.
There may be elves, dwarves, halflings, dragons and one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them, but, as “The Silmarillion” attests, J.R.R. Tolkein’s world has a huge backstory to keep all the threads straight and tightly woven. Outside of some intra-family confusion between Luke and Leia in the beginning of Episode V, the Empire is evil consistently and the rebels are just scrappy and unlucky enough to be consistently the underdogs.
One interesting thing in Stephen Coonts’s “Saucer” was the idea that the production of the titular space vehicle would require an uncommonly vast amount of resources and brainpower dedicated just to the design and building of it. As globally interconnected as Earthlings are, that kind of mass cooperation didn’t exist yet. Earthlings didn’t have a 140,000-year-old flying saucer because scientifically and, critically, socially, we weren’t there yet.
If that idea holds, I got some thoughts…
Gene Roddenberry’s “Wagon Train” to the stars envisioned a future where money wasn’t really a thing and the design, building, testing and flying of wildly complex interstellar vehicles… kind of happened. No need to import the world’s poor to fill critical construction jobs; happy people who don’t own legacy family vineyards will happily toil their days away welding and running cable on the next Constitution-class starship.
Okay. Nerdlings can stipulate that replicators would solve the problem of hunger, which is not for nothing; and, if “Computer, please make me a 5-carat blue diamond” would yield the world’s riches, then, maybe, money might not be a thing anymore.
Even the Klingons make a kind of sense. Warrior clans bent on death in battle so they can hang out and drink in Sto’Vo’Kor for all eternity seems plausible; taking their internecine conflicts to the stars might be a natural extension of a society in love with conquest and battle.
But, as much as I enjoyed the episodes, a “Star Trek: Voyager” species, the Hirogen, seem an anomaly. They are a space-faring species that are presented as hunters, specifically of other sentient species they regard as prey.
How would that work? How much global cooperation would exist on a planet where the strong prey on the weak, taking great pleasure and pride in torturing victims and fashioning trophies from their remains? Which stupidhead would violate the Prime Directive and gift spaceflight to such a culture? Can’t imagine how the Hirogen would have developed warp without help.
Gotta say, as much as I enjoyed some of the movies, the culture of these predators doesn’t make much more sense than the Hirogen, who certainly don’t bear any literary resemblance to their cinematic forebears in all their iterations.
Please don’t make me dive too deep into evil alien conquerors. Bad, bad, anti-green-new-deal aliens prowl the universe, murdering entire worlds of people, only to strip mine natural resources and then move on?
What are they using for food? Do they listen to music? What were they like before despoiling their home world to such a degree they were forced into space foraging? If they were always bad, bad, anti-greens, how did they get all those spaceships to begin with?
I asked you not to make me do a deep dive; I love the movie not because of its minor fallacies, but despite them. Will Smith is awesome but, apparently, never said this.
Okay. Consistent almost plausibility, people; that’s all I’m asking for.
You can buy my memoir, A Watermelon Life, here.
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The latter end:
I’m most likely the wrong person to write this post.
I liked “Lost in Space” (1965) in reruns before becoming slavishly devoted to “Star Trek”(1966). The former had a late series episode titled “The Great Vegetable Rebellion” that, well… the IMDB synopsis says it all:
Smith lands the pod on a planet where plants are the highest form of intelligence. The Robinsons land only to be captured by Tybo, a giant carrot. He plans to turn them into trees while Dr. Smith becomes a stalk of celery.
Dude wore a carrot suit from the halloween aisle. Decidedly, I am not disparaging the hardworking costumers who were tasked with the costume’s creation; decidedly, I am disparaging the show runners who led us all down the primrose path of sub-mediocrity.
“Star Trek” had its odd moments of head-scratching silliness, but even their late stage low-budget era featured excellent episodes. There may have been many ladies, alien and otherwise, who got randy-man Kirk going, and his legion of tween fans as well, but there were also moments of inspiration. I’ve always appreciated “Spectre of the Gun” (S3.E6). The IMDB synopsis:
As punishment for ignoring their warning and trespassing on their planet, the Melkot condemn Capt. Kirk and his landing party to the losing side of a surreal recreation of the 1881 historic gunfight at the OK Corral.
And surreal is right. Tombstone is comprised of half-finished buildings, partial walls, all misty and moody, and all backed by a monstrous scrim bathed in red. The sheriff enters the scene from his office — a front wall with door, some windows and a sign and nothing else. It all reminded me of the surreal dream ballet in “Oklahoma!” (I must cop to having only seen the filmed version directed by Fred Zinnemann. The staged musical and I have never crossed paths.) That scene in the musical and 1955 film seems wildly ahead of its time. Roddenberry could have done worse than crib from the genius of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
I’ll finish with a plug for Netflix’s re-imagined “Lost in Space,” with Parker Posey in a delicious interpretation of Dr. Smith and even some nice musical quotes of the series’ original theme song in the new version. And a plug, too, if you haven’t discovered it yet, for Ronald Moore’s take on “Battlestar Galactica” (BSG to fans), a distinct joy. I watched the original in the 1970s, own some comic books from the original and the remake, and I dug just about everything Moore threw down. Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama (later Admiral) lent the proceedings a moral gravitas that carried the show.
So true! I love the reference to David Mamet; awesome. The new BSG is still one of my favorite science fiction shows. Great one!