Comments on: Thoughts on Virtuality http://www.scifinow.co.uk/news/thoughts-on-virtuality/ Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:19:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: In the news…29 June-3 July 2009 | SciFiNow http://www.scifinow.co.uk/news/thoughts-on-virtuality/comment-page-1/#comment-775 In the news…29 June-3 July 2009 | SciFiNow Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:46:43 +0000 http://www.scifinow.co.uk/?p=3588#comment-775 [...] aren’t good, and neither are its prospects for series. Let’s hope SciFiNow’s stellar reccommendation sways heads at Fox. Never mind, at least we have Megan Fox being incapable of keeping her fool [...] [...] aren’t good, and neither are its prospects for series. Let’s hope SciFiNow’s stellar reccommendation sways heads at Fox. Never mind, at least we have Megan Fox being incapable of keeping her fool [...]

]]> By: wotty http://www.scifinow.co.uk/news/thoughts-on-virtuality/comment-page-1/#comment-737 wotty Tue, 30 Jun 2009 23:40:33 +0000 http://www.scifinow.co.uk/?p=3588#comment-737 Oh, bullcrap. There was nothing intellectually challenging in the show, provided you've read more than a few high concept SF novels in your time. Sure, a lot of themes were covered, but none were handled with subtlety or finesse - quite the opposite, in fact. Then there's the "usual inter-crew tension", all of which sounded hollow and artificial. Fake, in other words. By the way, what sort of an agency would pick such a dysfunctional crew for such a mission? Not NASA, that's for sure. Then there's the completely unbelievable ship of theirs. Have you seen photos of what the Space Shuttle looks inside? How about the International Space Station? They don't look like knock-offs of the Big Brother house, for one. And no-one in their right minds would fill a spaceship with all that unnecessary weight. A "minor" glitch in VR would be something like a flickering graphic or an incorrect perspective. A character which doesn't freeze with the rest of the program, which the computer has no knowledge of and which kills the human characters is not a "minor" glitch. Especially not after it rapes a human in a VR environment. It's a crucial, sanity-threatening glitch in a mission-critical system which should have become the crew's top A1-priority the moment it first occurred. But naturally that was impossible, as the crew would have uncovered too soon the ghost in the machine, or the insane sentient AI, or the alien that infiltrated the computer system, or the fact that the whole mission takes place in VR, thus spoiling the surprise in the first episode. Virtuality might have worked if they had dropped the entire Big Brother aspect of it, along with the bland, overlit and flat visual look of reality shows. Make it look like Sunshine, for example, and crew the ship with intelligent professionals, not these poor excuses brimming with unresolved mental issues. Crew the ship with idiots like these, and you can expect to see them wrestling with life-threatening problems caused by their own inept bumbling about week after week. I have no respect for such a crew and therefore no interest in viewing their "adventures" - most of which would probably involve screaming catfights about who slept with whom. I love what Ron Moore did on Star Trek and BSG, but Virtuality does not work in its current form. Mixing two TV genres from the opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum only succeeded in lobotomizing a potentially fantastic SF series. Oh, bullcrap. There was nothing intellectually challenging in the show, provided you’ve read more than a few high concept SF novels in your time. Sure, a lot of themes were covered, but none were handled with subtlety or finesse – quite the opposite, in fact. Then there’s the “usual inter-crew tension”, all of which sounded hollow and artificial. Fake, in other words.

By the way, what sort of an agency would pick such a dysfunctional crew for such a mission? Not NASA, that’s for sure.

Then there’s the completely unbelievable ship of theirs. Have you seen photos of what the Space Shuttle looks inside? How about the International Space Station? They don’t look like knock-offs of the Big Brother house, for one. And no-one in their right minds would fill a spaceship with all that unnecessary weight.

A “minor” glitch in VR would be something like a flickering graphic or an incorrect perspective. A character which doesn’t freeze with the rest of the program, which the computer has no knowledge of and which kills the human characters is not a “minor” glitch. Especially not after it rapes a human in a VR environment. It’s a crucial, sanity-threatening glitch in a mission-critical system which should have become the crew’s top A1-priority the moment it first occurred. But naturally that was impossible, as the crew would have uncovered too soon the ghost in the machine, or the insane sentient AI, or the alien that infiltrated the computer system, or the fact that the whole mission takes place in VR, thus spoiling the surprise in the first episode.

Virtuality might have worked if they had dropped the entire Big Brother aspect of it, along with the bland, overlit and flat visual look of reality shows. Make it look like Sunshine, for example, and crew the ship with intelligent professionals, not these poor excuses brimming with unresolved mental issues.

Crew the ship with idiots like these, and you can expect to see them wrestling with life-threatening problems caused by their own inept bumbling about week after week. I have no respect for such a crew and therefore no interest in viewing their “adventures” – most of which would probably involve screaming catfights about who slept with whom.

I love what Ron Moore did on Star Trek and BSG, but Virtuality does not work in its current form. Mixing two TV genres from the opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum only succeeded in lobotomizing a potentially fantastic SF series.

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