Spoilers Ahoy!
Paradox finishes tonight, with a kill-or-cure ending that will be very clever . . . or very disappointing. Life on Mars managed to pull it off. Well, at the end of the second series anyway.
Last two episodes gave an ongoing sense of being a serial by stretching the threads, and what a surprise ending: two events so-near-and-yet-so-far apart, in the process of which throwing up a moral dilemma: which one to attend?
I'm not sure if this was an attempt to distract from the lack of discussion about the philosophical dilemma of whether it is possible to change to outcome of a known event; if so, it didn't work.
Hmm, and wasn't "the double event" used to describe a night in the life of Jack the Ripper?
Paradox: the Camera Obscure no comments
Posted at 8:20 PM in camera, Paradox, Prometheus, satellite
Spoilers ahoy!
Well, there's the hook - the threatened party was the DI's freshly-ex other half. Bit of a sudden split, that. Why do all TV cops have to have a dysfunctional relationship?
So this time they managed to save the day - so did they change the future? No one said it , but therein lies the paradox. If they saved the boy how could the photographs exist of an event that never happened? It felt a bit soon for a definite we-did-it episode, so unless a later story revisits it and reveals some hidden twist we've got a very uncertain future.
King isn't so sure, he prefers the multiple worlds theory: every decision made splits the world into two, one for each outcome. Anyone familiar with binary, or the chessboard problem sees that this leads to a colossal number of worlds in a very short time. (Computer geeks like myself instinctively know that eight yes/no decisions gives 256 worlds - how many decisions do you make each day?)
And if, in addition to conscious decisions made by people, you allow for random events with many outcomes, that number becomes practically infinite very quickly. So I exist in one of the half-infinite worlds where I didn't choke to death on a Malteaser (it can happen!), but there's an equal number where I didn't.
From a dramatic standpoint this is unsatisfactory. There are no heroes; for each time Bond survives being shot at there's an equally valid world where he didn't. You don't forge your destiny, you just meander through the worlds where your luck held. Until it doesn't.
One of the weaknesses of the second episode is that half the pictures were taken indoors. In the pilot it looked like they were taken from above. (Perhaps the Prometheus II had a powerful camera on board, or forwarded the pictures from a spy satellite.) But the second eight (always eight - another binary link?) showed a boy in a cellar, inside a shed.
No spy camera is that good so, even ignoring the who and why, there'll have to be conjecture on what is taking the pictures and where from. Tonight will have speculation that a 'higher power' is involved. But for good or ill? Even trying to save someone's life can be a bad deed if it muddies the future. Read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, by Stephen Donaldson, for an extended example of do-gooders getting themselves in deeper!
Paradox Lost no comments
Posted at 8:23 PM in Emun Elliott, Paradox, Tamzin Outhwaite
(Couple of spoilers included, but you've got a back button.)
So here I sit, waiting for the second episode of Paradox, the BBC's new sci-fi/police drama.
Last week's opener was a pleasant surprise: a policewoman DI Flint, played by Tamzin Outhwaite, was inveigled into looking at images which had been received from a satellite which were apparently sent twenty hours in the future.
Initially skeptical (you wouldn't be?), she keeps an eye on the proceedings as elements of the image come together at the right time and place, until she comes to believe that an explosion will occur as predicted.
The game seemingly afoot, she then fails to prevent it by sitting and watching it happen. Seems a bit daft: all she had to do was block access to a bridge for ten minutes and either be a heroine . . . or preside over a damp squib.
This slight faux pas was, of course, a plot device. The starting red herring of is-this-a-terrorist-trying-to-taunt-us? had already petered out. There were too many unconnected elements for it to have been planned by the pet mad scientist Dr Christian King (played by Emun Elliott).
So we're left to conclude that the images were from the future, somehow linked to solar flare activity, whilst leaving open the question: could she have stopped it if she'd tried a wee bit harder, or is the future fixed and only observable?
Tonight she gets a second crack at that one as a colleague appears in another set of images - must be in the middle of a sunspot cycle - prompting further involvement.
The hook provided from the pilot worked for me. It's nice to see a program where the good guys fail to save the day once in a while, instead of the formulaic last-second rescue. But do they have the courage for an X-Files style killing-the-cast moment?
I don't see why not. It's only the second episode so no-one (except Flint & King) is too well established to be expendable. But excepting a clever did-we-help-or-did-we-misinterpret ending they'll have to keep the balance by being able to alter the outcome or, like the viewers, they'll be limited to being spectators.
So here I sit, waiting for the second episode of Paradox, the BBC's new sci-fi/police drama.
Last week's opener was a pleasant surprise: a policewoman DI Flint, played by Tamzin Outhwaite, was inveigled into looking at images which had been received from a satellite which were apparently sent twenty hours in the future.
Initially skeptical (you wouldn't be?), she keeps an eye on the proceedings as elements of the image come together at the right time and place, until she comes to believe that an explosion will occur as predicted.
The game seemingly afoot, she then fails to prevent it by sitting and watching it happen. Seems a bit daft: all she had to do was block access to a bridge for ten minutes and either be a heroine . . . or preside over a damp squib.
This slight faux pas was, of course, a plot device. The starting red herring of is-this-a-terrorist-trying-to-taunt-us? had already petered out. There were too many unconnected elements for it to have been planned by the pet mad scientist Dr Christian King (played by Emun Elliott).
So we're left to conclude that the images were from the future, somehow linked to solar flare activity, whilst leaving open the question: could she have stopped it if she'd tried a wee bit harder, or is the future fixed and only observable?
Tonight she gets a second crack at that one as a colleague appears in another set of images - must be in the middle of a sunspot cycle - prompting further involvement.
The hook provided from the pilot worked for me. It's nice to see a program where the good guys fail to save the day once in a while, instead of the formulaic last-second rescue. But do they have the courage for an X-Files style killing-the-cast moment?
I don't see why not. It's only the second episode so no-one (except Flint & King) is too well established to be expendable. But excepting a clever did-we-help-or-did-we-misinterpret ending they'll have to keep the balance by being able to alter the outcome or, like the viewers, they'll be limited to being spectators.
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