Five for Wednesday

* Chocolate drought: 2014!

* In a strong rebuke of President Obama and his domestic agenda, all 242 House Republicans voted Wednesday to repeal the Asteroid Destruction and American Preservation Act, which was signed into law last year to destroy the immense asteroid currently hurtling toward Earth.

* The Village Voice profiles my friend Michele’s charter school in Harlem. Go Michele!

* People with last names at the end of the alphabet are just different from you and me.

* And Fringe has defeated death itself. Go Fringe!

Alas, Poor Fringe

Via Blastr.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (and Several More)

* Between the tax compromise and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, I think Obama did a tremendous amount to help his chances for reelection this week. Rachel Maddow rightly calls the DADT repeal the president’s victory:

Politically, the thing to not lose touch with here is that this is the President’s victory. This is something about which the President took a lot of criticism, a lot of abuse, a lot of skepticism from his otherwise most loyal supporters. He continually insisted that this was possible that it would get done.

Guilty as charged. I confess I also love the sweet sound of right-wing screams, especially when their own caucus collapsed in the face of this “generational change.” Even Richard Burr voted the right way!

* It looks like Harvard and Yale will return ROTC to their campuses in light of the repeal. Frankly I’d prefer to see the trend going the other way—we need tighter restrictions on military recruiting, not loosening of the few restrictions that already exist—but I suppose this was unavoidable.

* Seen on Facebook: Obama wants to let gays vote. That’s why I’m voting Tea Party.

* Watch out Texas: bad news coming.

* Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions…

* The message to Nicky Wishart and his generation is very clear: don’t get any fancy ideas about being an engaged citizen. Go back to your X-Box and X-Factor, and leave politics to the millionaires in charge. Via MeFi.

* And still more trouble for Britain: There are a growing number of grassroots organisations campaigning about the over-professionalisation of childhood football. Give Us Back Our Game launched four years ago. “The game has been taken away from children by over-competitive coaches and parents,” says founder Paul Cooper. It has several offshoots, including Football Football, an initiative to revive inner-city football. Then there’s the Children’s Football Alliance, which champions “mixed ability” football, and the Don’t X The Line campaign against over-the-top parental behaviour at children’s football matches. Also via MeFi.

* Consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs is evolutionarily novel, so the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to consume these substances.

* And Fringe announces its move to the Friday night death slot with style.

Dollhouse Canceled

Dollhouse canceled.

Links!

Links!

* November 18th is International Science Fiction Reshelving Day.

Join us this November in a new and unique celebration of science fiction and fantasy literature. Many books from our fine genre are regularly placed in the wrong section of bookstores. This not only hides the books from us, but it prevents readers of those books from discovering the rich tradition to which they belong.

On November 18th that changes. We will go to bookstores around the world and move science fiction and fantasy books from wherever they might be to their proper place in the “Science Fiction” section. We hope that this quiet act of protest will raise awareness of this problem and inspire new readers to explore our thought-provoking genre.

Shouldn’t the protest go the other way, moving SF and fantasy books to “Literature”? Also, isn’t it weird to direct a “protest” like this so directly at Margaret Atwood of all people?

* What is causing our apocalypses? io9 reports.

* More on the irony that New York City may be America’s most ecologically friendly place to live.

* NYRoB considers prison reform and publishes a rather fawning love letter to James Lovelock.

* Cheating referees in the NBA? I’m shocked, shocked!

* How to cheat in the New York City marathon.

* House didn’t significantly improve on Dollhouse, and when DVR numbers are included may have actually underperformed it—but that’s still not a good outcome for Dollhouse fans. House reruns are, after all, from Fox’s perspective essentially free programming.

* American musicians want to know whose music was used as part of the torture regime at Guantánamo Bay. Colbert responds with some love for the Boss. It’s probably too much to hope for, but I’d sort of love for a copyright infringement lawsuit to be the engame in all this.

Saturday Night

Saturday night.

* The first eight minutes of the ABC V remake. Some of this footage you’ve probably seen before.

* Canuxploitation!: your complete guide to Canadian B-film.

* Dollhouse ratings dip back down again after a week off. My thoughts on this week’s episode here; in general I thought it was very good but not as good as everyone else seems to want to think. The show, never all that certain what it wanted to be about in the first place, is showing serious strain from being pulled in so many different directions at once. Is it a critically acclaimed loss leader or is it supposed to have high ratings? Is it an Eliza Dushku vehicle or an ensemble show? Is it serial or episodic? Are its characters tragic or villainous? Is it a feminist critique of late capitalism or a machine for generating sexy girls in miniskirts?

* Glenn Greenwald considers why debt matters for domestic spending but not for military spending.

Beltway elites have health insurance and thus the costs and suffering for those who don’t are abstract, distant and irrelevant. Identically, with very rare exception, they and their families don’t fight the wars they cheer on — and don’t even pay for them — and thus get to enjoy all the pulsating benefits without any costs whatsoever. 

* And, via Vu, Žižek explains hipsters.

Client Acquisition and Retention

A memo from Adelle DeWitt concerning client acquisition and retention.

Good News, Bad News, Good News, Bad News

Dollhouse fandom can’t figure out if it’s getting good news or bad news. With DVR numbers, it turns out Dollhouse‘s ratings are 50% higher. But this only puts the show’s total viewership about even with the live viewership during mid-season last year. Fox is promising to air all 13 episodes, which is also a good sign—but a strong “And that’s it” seems to be fairly loudly implied. And Stargate Universe beat it again.

At least last Friday’s episode was decent—best of the season so far, though not near the heights of episodes 1.6-1.11 or “Epitaph One.”

Elsewhere in televised SF news, ABC is so happy with Flashforward‘s ratings they’ve ordered 9 more episodes. Who mourns for Bill Simmon?

Sunday Links

We’re off to sample Detroit today. While we’re waiting for showers to finish here are a few links I never got around to yesterday.

* Dollhouse 2.3, which I haven’t seen yet, ticked upwards in the ratings, managing this week to beat reruns on ABC. Related: Ten TV Spin-offs That Were Better Than the Original Shows includes Angel—I agree in the main—Daria, Xena, DS9, and, The Simpsons. Also related: Flashforward is falling fast, endorsing Bill’s thesis that the show is blowing it. Related and ridiculous: “Is science fiction becoming feminized?” Mary Shelley will be heartbroken.

* Josh Marshall on the Nobel: [T]he unmistakable message of the award is one of the consequences of a period in which the most powerful country in the world, the ‘hyper-power’ as the French have it, became the focus of destabilization and in real if limited ways lawlessness. A harsh judgment, yes. But a dark period. And Obama has begun, if fitfully and very imperfectly to many of his supporters, to steer the ship of state in a different direction. If that seems like a meager accomplishment to many of the usual Washington types it’s a profound reflection of their own enablement of the Bush era and how compromised they are by it, how much they perpetuated the belief that it was ‘normal history’ rather than dark aberration. More from Steve Benen.

* Something, something, something, Detroit.

* The big Moon bombing appears not to have gone so well. Did the aliens step in?

* Iceland, an epicenter of the last financial crisis, looks to recover with data centers that offer free air-side cooling.

* The L.A. Times discusses the Fantastic Mr. Fox directing controversy. (via)

* Some bad news: Universe To End Sooner Than Thought.

* And more bad news: time has not ceased its unrelenting march.

Goodbye, ‘Dollhouse’

Dollhouse ratings find new floor.

UPDATE: It lost to Stargate? Really? Even I don’t watch Stargate.

Saturday!

Saturday!

* Early ratings for the Dollhouse premiere are not exactly promising. (What genius thought Brothers would be a good lead-in?) AICN points out that Friday ratings were down across the board, and it’s not down much from last year’s finale—but it certainly doesn’t reflect hoped-for DVD buzz, either. The episode itself was pretty well put-together, though writing Amy Acker out due to her unavailability kills possibly the single best thing about the show. (No advancement on the 2019 thread, either, though apparently a sequence with Felicia Day was filmed and cut.) Let’s hope Happy Town fails quick.

* Also re: Dollhouse: Alyssa Rosenberg interviews Joss.

Whedon: The world will expand. Oh holy boy will the world expand. And then, unless our ratings tick up a bit, it will very suddenly contract.

* All 156 Twilight Zone episodes in 9 minutes and 59 seconds. More TZ links at MetaFilter surrounding the Rod Serling Conference in Binghamton, which I wish I could have gone to.

* Polling the GOP landslide: the gubernatorial races in both NJ and VA have narrowed to the margin of error, while GOP polling continues to seek its bottom.

* Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.

* The sad death of an uninsured twenty-three-year-old Ohio woman from H1N1 has become bound up with the fight for health care reform.

* Jackson Pollack, egomaniac.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Dollhouse to return?

UPDATE: Nikki Finke says it’s official.

Dollhouse Finale Rankings

The ratings for the Dollhouse finale show the slide continuing: only 2.8 million viewers, 1.0 million in the 18-49 demo, down 50% from the premiere. Bring on the spinoffs!

Bonus: the script for “Omega,” which looks like it may have been somewhat better before it was cut for time.

Dollhouse Still on the Bubble?

Quoth Variety:

In recent years, the nets have mostly turned Friday over to unscripted fare. With the exception of CBS, which wins the night with middle-of-the-road dramas like “Ghost Whisperer,” the nets’ more recent attempts to launch scripted dramas have come up short.

This spring, that has included Fox’s sci-fi duo “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” which isn’t expected to return, and “Dollhouse,” which remains on the bubble.

Pair it with Fringe for half a season; it’s obvious and perfect. If it helps, I recant everything I said last night. Best episode ever!

Dollhouse

A few quick Dollhouse reflections in light of tonight’s “season” finale. Spoilers below, naturally.

* All in all the Alpha plotline was fairly disappointing, my appreciation for Alan Tudyk aside. It reduced a little too neatly to a run-of-the-mill serial-killer plotline when there seemed to be much, much more potential there. I’m not calling network interference, necessarily, but things seemed rushed and a little undercooked. Joss fumbled this one.

(UPDATE: To be more precise, he fumbled the plotline in almost exactly the same way he fumbled the Adam and First Evil storylines on Buffy. The composite event—which shouldn’t have been caused by a mechanical malfunction—should have made Alpha actually Godlike. Alpha’s portrayal in this episode ruins almost everything about what was interesting about the character to begin with. It’s also somewhat inconsistent with the way the event had been portrayed in earlier episodes, especially with regard to Topher and Adele’s puzzlement over how it happened—which is not to suggest Dollhouse has a particularly good record on the consistency front in any case.)

* Called the Fred situation last week, though I was hoping she’d known she was a Doll all along. I think the character had significantly more potential that way—though it’s interesting to think that she was just set up to be the hero of the second season, the Dollhouse’s only self-aware victim and the audience’s new clearest focal point for narrative identification.

* Which also makes her a pretty good candidate for season two’s Big Bad.

* Neil and I spent a lot of time last week talking about Dr. Saunders and whether or not her Dollness suggests that the Dollhouse is able to do direct editing/programming of memories (“imprint code”), as opposed to a fuzzier, less exact approach (“imprint soup”). (I’d always assumed imprint code, and that most of the characters would turn out to have been modified in some way or another; Neil was more skeptical.) At first glance, this episode suggests they can edit directly—but the more I think about it it seems more likely that every Dr. Saunders is a Doll.

UPDATE: Though the fact that Fred/Saunders remembers a version of the Alpha attack that explains her scars may shift the balance back towards direct editing / imprint coding again.

* Is Victor really gone? He was one of the best actors on the show, that’s just not possible.

* It will would be interesting to see whether Mellie is really released. I’m also curious what deal Ballard signed; “I’m nobody” suggests he agreed to do the rest of her service as a Doll, whereas I think most people were expecting he’d be hired as a handler.

* Since the Dollhouse’s contracts aren’t legal, of course, there’s no reason not to have your cake and eat it too. Once Ballard is enslaved, bring Madeline back in for a treatment.

* It also remains the case that you’d want every employee to be a Doll, all things being equal; see Dr. Saunders above. Why would they even let Dominics, Boyds, and Tophers in the door, when they can cook up compliant and perfectly loyal substitutes in-house? One possible answer to this might have to do with the exact nature of the Doll programs; if they’re imprint-soups as opposed to imprint-codes, maybe there are structural limits to how long they can be used before the personality imprint goes bad or breaks down.

* Echo/ED remains, by far, the least interesting thing about this show. I was really hoping they’d kill off the Caroline wedge so at least something interesting would happen there.

* Well, that’s a little unfair; apropos of the Great Transporter Debate this episode makes it a little hard to see how the process of being “wiped” isn’t itself necessarily death. If we accept that continuity of consciousness is required for metaphysical identity—and we wave our hands at things like sleep for just a moment—then it would seem to be the case that “Caroline” can be hypothetically restored after her five years are up and she’s hypothetically released from her contract. But it’s equally clear that the person who wakes up in Chrissy Seaver’s body is not metaphysically identical to the original Caroline. So how can the one revival result in a “real” resurrection and the other in a “false” one? What’s the difference between “copy” and “restore”? It could only be Ballard’s “soul,” which, like Topher, I scoff at. So it seems to me that when you’re switched off, that’s it, you’re dead, which has some pretty serious implications for comas, head injury, amnesia, insanity, aging, sleep, and just about everything else having to do with what we naively believe consciousness is.

*Hope you noticed and enjoyed the brief Firefly shout-out as much as I did. Take that, Fox. (UPDATE: Missed at first the Angel bit about souls in jars—it was a double shoutout to both his unjustly canceled shows…)

Sadly, despite the hopes of all good nerds, that’s probably it for Dollhouse. But “Epitaph One” comes out with the DVD this July, and there’s even rumors today that Joss might spin-off that into a new show. Because spin-offs of failed one-season flops are so very common.