Guest Post: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2026)

Imagine If LOST Took Place at a Norms

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die could have been a piercing satire. Instead, the current apocalyptic comedy settles for scattered brilliance. The film is packed with provocative ideas and anchored by a game cast, but director Gore Verbinski’s tone veers wildly off, and the climax falls flat like a plate of frozen nachos.

A zany, manic stranger (Sam Rockwell) storms into a Norms diner with a bomb strapped to his body, claiming the world is ending. He insists he has time traveled to this exact moment, and this same group of customers, countless times before. Each time, his mission fails, forcing him to blow himself up and start over. This round, he’s altering the variables, recruiting different diners to join his mission to stop AI from destroying the planet. Is he insane, prescient, or both? With no proof beyond his frantic conviction, those dragged along must risk their lives on the word of a man who may be either a time cowboy or a complete lunatic.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson, who co-authored the charmingly intimate yet epic horror comedy Love and Monsters, brings a similar sense of whimsy amidst the gore. His characters have real bite, and the script doesn’t shy away from provocative territory - America’s frighteningly blasé response to school shootings, youth’s obsession with social media, and an exhausted humanity that would rather be swallowed by the Matrix than confront the real world. Unfortunately, these ideas never coalesce into a satisfying or meaningful conclusion.

The talented cast does its best to keep the humor dry and grounded. Rockwell, reliable as ever, channels his frenetic energy into something genuinely funny. Juno Temple is both pained and hopeful as a mother fiercely protective of her clone child, while Haley Lu Richardson, drifting through the chaos in a grimy princess dress, seems intentionally checked out yet remains oddly compelling.

I’ve always been a Verbinski fan. Pirates of the Caribbean redefined what audiences expected from a theme-park adaptation, The Ring was a model of tight construction, and even his much-maligned The Mexican was brilliantly subversive. Here, though, he loses control of the wheel - and the whole thing careens off a cliff. It is possible to satirize flippancy without being flippant, but that’s exactly the trap Verbinski falls into, and it grows tiresome fast.

With a surer directorial hand, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die could have been a classic end-of-the-world comedy. Instead, it’s as lost as its characters. Early in the film, Zazie Beetz asks, “Are you high?” It’s a fair question - one that could just as easily be directed at the filmmakers.

 

Guest Post: Project Hail Mary (2026)

The Heartwarming Tale of a Boy and His Rock

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

Project Hail Mary should not work. Since Steven Spielberg introduced the world to a squishy, childlike alien in 1982, we’ve endured decades of imitators trying to cash in on the man-and-alien friendship. So, on paper, Ryan Gosling cozying up to a rock-shaped extraterrestrial sounds brain-numbing. Then again, a comedy about sentient toy blocks didn’t exactly sound like a humdinger either. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie), however, have made a career out of bringing impossible stories to dazzling life, and Project Hail Mary - like the implications of its title - is a winning touchdown.

Set in the near future, the entire solar system is in danger of extinction - well, even more so than we are at this precise moment. Gosling plays a scientist who awakens on a spaceship as the lone survivor of a suicide mission to discover what is dimming our sun. Along the way, he teams up with an alien, and the two form a bond as they slowly learn each other’s languages and customs. Together, they attempt to uncover why one specific planet in a damaged region of space has remained immune to the organism attacking our sun and other celestial bodies.

Part of what makes Project Hail Mary so compelling is Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel. Goddard and Weir previously partnered on 2015’s The Martian, and like that Oscar-nominated film, the screenplay translates heady scientific concepts into something relatable for those of us who aren’t exactly science-minded (my hand’s raised). Even more than The Martian, though, Project Hail Mary leans into the comedy of watching an unprepared, untrained, non-astronaut attempt to operate a massive space vessel. That clumsiness becomes part of the charm, endearing Gosling’s character to the audience.

The script also earns its flashbacks - not as a cheap storytelling trick, but as memories slowly returning to Gosling’s character after awakening from a coma. These trips into the past feel organic, motivated by character rather than convenience.

Gosling himself is a key component of the film’s success. He plays everything with complete sincerity, never winking at the audience or undercutting the absurdity of his situation. Most importantly, he treats the alien as a living being, which gives the audience permission to invest emotionally in their relationship.

Instead of leaning entirely on CGI, Lord and Miller smartly cast puppeteer James Ortiz to portray Rocky, an alien who looks like several boulders fused together. Backed by a team of puppeteers - the “Rockyteers” - Ortiz’s vocal performance grounds the character in surprising warmth. The directors also have fun with perspective, occasionally rotating the camera, even on Earth, to remind us that what we perceive as “upright” is merely the magic of gravity doing its job.

Most of the supporting cast only gets a line or two, but Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) makes the most of her time as a determined scientist - cold, exacting, and quietly devastated by the implications of the choices she’s forced to make. Karaoke scenes have become a tired cinematic trope but watching a tightly wound Hüller wail Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” as a desperate plea to save humanity is unexpectedly - and deeply - moving.

Somehow, Project Hail Mary makes molecular biology, the end of the world, and a rock puppet feel intimate. It’s a film grounded not in bravado, but in problem-solving, awkward communication, and the slow realization that survival isn’t a solo mission. That a story this strange ends up feeling this sincere is its greatest strength - and like its implausible friendship, it’s one that remains after you’ve left the theater.

50 Year Ago: Who Can Kill A Child (1976)

There's an old saying in Hollywood warning actors not to work with animals or children.

If you happen to find yourself in a vintage 1970s-era horror film, however, you should amend that proverb a bit. May I suggest: don't piss off animals or children?

Because they will have vengeance, and there will be blood....

Case in point, the rather remarkable, half-century old Who Can Kill A Child? (1976), a tense, Spanish-made genre gem. Like all great films (and great horror films) Who Can Kill A Child? reveals something important about the times in which it was crafted, a context which also gave rise to other child-centric horrors such as It's Alive (1973), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976).

As David Frum, the notable conservative scholar wrote in How We Got Here, The 70s: The Decade That Brought You Modern Life (For Better of Worse): " It's hard to remember an era when American popular culture was as nervous of children as in the 1970s." (page 106).

Frum further points out that the number of births dropped to its lowest level since the Great Depression in the year 1974. This was despite the fact that the baby boomer generation -- a huge generation -- was now of child-bearing age.

So what the hell was occurring in America during the 1970s to turn innocent children into icons of fear, anxiety and terror? Well, a recession and gas/energy shortage made children an expensive proposition, to start with. Plus, there was the contentious war for sexual equality (characterized by the controversy around the Equal Rights Amendment...). One front in that war concerned reproductive rights. The latest salvo was the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court.

Also -- especially where horror movies are concerned -- it is virtually impossible to separate the idea of "children" from the idea of "tomorrow." Kids are an explicit and recognizable representation of the future...our shared legacy. If something terrible happens to the children, the future becomes grim. If the children turn evil, again our outlook is desperate. If the children happen to turn against adults for a valid reason, then we have failed totally, and our civilization is doomed.

These notions are at play in the unsettling Who Can Kill A Child?, which depicts a British married couple, biologist Tom (Lewis Fiander) and pregnant Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), as they countenance true horror. The couple decides to take a vacation on the remote island of Almanzora, a place where "very few tourists ever go." It's a four hour boat ride from the mainland to Almanzora, and though the island "certainly looks peaceful," nothing could be further from the truth.

At first the island appears deserted, but before long, Tom and Evelyn learn from a shattered, lone survivor that all the adults are dead. Worse, the islanders were killed by their maniacal children; tykes who suddenly and inexplicably turned homicidal a night earlier. Before long, Tom and Evelyn are fighting for their lives as roving bands of murderous children block their escape route at every turn.

"Its as though they thought we - the adults - were their enemies," Tom realizes (a bit too late...).

On Almanzora, Tom witnesses a multitude of horrors, all while protecting his expectant wife. He sees a violent pinata game involving an elderly man strung up by his feet, a circle of giggling children, and a sharp sickle. He also sees the grisly aftermath of several massacres, including a beating death, and a vaguely sexual attack inside the island church. Finally, Tom and Evelyn -- now going into labor -- take their final refuge in a police station. The children arm themselves, and Tom finds a machine gun....

He's left with an unenviable choice. For...who can kill a child? Another important question: if our children rebel against us, could we, would we and should we fight back? As the film's climax reminds the viewer, making the terror identifiable, "There are lots of children in the world..."

Who Can Kill A Child? is the sort of horror film that gets under your skin through stealthy but effective means. It opens like a routine travelogue, as we follow Tom and Evelyn through the apparently mundane experience of their foreign vacation. The hotel at Benavis is booked, so they're sent to a house in the "old part of the city." They settle in, get directions to the beach, and then purchase rolls of film. That night, Tom and Evelyn enjoy fireworks and share an intimate (and well-written) discussion about Fellini, death, and the future in their rented bedroom. Nothing earth shattering at all...just ominously normal and "human." These moments establish the characters as real, but not in heavy-handed or soap opera fashion. It simply feels like we've gone abroad with them for a few days. Tom and Evelyn are likable and easy to relate to, a fact which serves the movie well.

Once we reach the island with Tom and Evelyn, the horror mounts. In little, clever bursts at first. For instance, there's a portentous moment early on (before the nature of the children is revealed...) in which Tom sees a little boy fishing on a pier. Tom tries to peek under the lid of the boy's fishing basket to see what he's caught, but the boy won't permit it. He shoots Tom a murderous, aggressive look. We never actually find out what's under that lid, but the moment is disturbing, and your imagination takes flight.

Other moments are crafted with more than a modicum of skill. There's an absolutely brilliant shot featured deep in the third act, an awe-inspiring reveal over one character's shoulder and head...to a background mountaintop populated by "watching," unnoticed children. The move in question is a simple camera pivot, but one perfectly executed.

Or notice the manner in which the camera doesn't move at all during a critical juncture, as a central character slips slowly and inexorably out of lower right-hand corner frame for the last time, making the death all the more significant and powerful. And the director appropriately moves to hand-held, immediate camera-work during the siege in the police station, which ramps up the anxiety.

When Who Can Kill a Child's narrative calls for bluntness, we get that too, with shocking and egregious results. Late in the film, Tom is confronted with a barricade of children, three or four rows deep. They won't budge and just stand there, smiling at him. After a moment's hesitation, Tom opens fire with a machine gun, bloodying and murdering his youthful opponents. The gun fire is like a slap in the face...we're not used to such screen violence leveraged against children.

Even that spiky moment is superseded by a final, high-speed, nail-biting confrontation on a pier, with an attempted escape in a row boat. Children launch an ambush from the pier, jumping off and attacking Tom in the boat with ferocity and velocity. He frigging beats them back with a wood board, a knife, and any other weapon he can find, and the movie doesn't shy away from revealing the bloody results of the massacre.

Of course, I don't encourage violence or even the depiction of violence against children, but horror should be about the shattering of societal taboos and movie decorum. And horror is also - indeed - about nightmare scenarios rendered real, and asking the viewer to identify with "what it would be like" to face them. Who Can Kill a Child is both taboo-shattering, and identification-provoking, and by my reckoning that makes it a great bit of genre cinema. You'll be shocked at what you witness, yet at the same time, you may want to slap Evelyn silly when she refuses to reckon with the "reality" of the situation that the children on the island are homicidal.

The film's ending is comparable to Night of the Living Dead, with a slow-to-adjust society failing to understand the nature of the enemy and making a bad mistake. In a strange way, the movie is also a kind of "revenge of nature flick," like Day of the Animals or Hitchcock's The Birds...only with kids instead of animals. And of course, it's harder to shoot down a giggling child than a grizzly bear or pecking bird, right?

Who Can Kill a Child? is not perfect. The film mis-steps badly by opening with a nine minute, documentary "atrocity reel" about real crimes committed against children across the globe. We see starving children in Africa, murdered children in Pakistan, and young victims of the Korean and Vietnamese conflicts. These scenes are true and appalling and powerful, but I question their necessity in a horror film. They start the movie off with a gruesome, unnecessary heaviness, which, in some senses, undercut the very ordinariness of the travelogue and the slow-escalation of horror that follows. Essentially, they make the movie less effective because they telegraph the point of the narrative before the very narrative has begun.

The images in the mini-doc are powerful, but unnecessary. The director makes his point (about the world's cruelty to children) without them all-together. In the body of the film proper, Evelyn sees footage on a camera shop TV of children dying in the Philippines. A shop owner says "the world is crazy. In the end, the ones who always suffer are the children." Message transmitted and received. The graphic imagery at the beginning is therefore just heavy-handed overkill.

Also, non-horror fans might rightly complain that Tom and Evelyn have apparently been born without the gene that allows them to sense the warning signs of incipient danger. This is something horror aficionados (like myself), willingly accept...because what fun would it be if Tom and Evelyn did recognize the danger and abandoned the island in their boat before the horror escalated? Horror fans will willingly (and happily) suspend disbelief, but non-genre fans may be screaming at the film's characters to get off the island NOW!!!.

Who Can Kill A Child? also shares much in common with the Children of the Corn franchises of the 1980s and 1990s, yet I should be absolutely clear: it's also a better-made scary movie than any one of them (even the '84 original). After watching this film, you may even want to amend a second proverb.

Forget "never trust anyone over 30." How about, "never trust anyone under 12?"

Library Journal Recommends Horror Films of the 2010s

To my delight and gratitude, Library Journal has reviewed my new book (and final contribution to this series), Horror Films of the 2010s. 

 Here is an excerpt of their review:

"Horror reflects the anxieties of an age, and Muir connects the films from 2010-2019 to economic unease, political polarization, and institutional mistrust in the post-Great Recession era... Muir goes out on a high note, documenting 275 movies with his trademark insight and wit." — Library Journal. 

Watch Abnormal Fixation: The Complete Season 1

 

30 Years Ago: Space: Above and Beyond: "R & R" (April 12, 1996)

Imagine a "gritty, gutsy" (per TV Guide...) futuristic war drama colored in hues of mood battleship gray. It takes place in deep space following a devastating sneak attack on humanity by an unfathomable and merciless enemy.

Our protagonists in the war effort (which we are "losing badly") are young, attractive (but headstrong and angsty) pilots. Much of the action occurs inside the cockpits of cramped space fighters and in military briefing rooms. The universe depicted by the series is one of murky morality and hard truths which shift in the troublesome and ambiguous sands of wartime. For instance, the specter of torture (here termed "re-education") is brought up in one installment.

You don't think I'm talking about the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, do you?

Instead, the first paragraph of this review describes the Glen Morgan/James Wong sci-fi war drama, Space: Above and Beyond, a mid-nineties-era TV endeavor that aired on the Fox Network for one season (and twenty-three hour-long episodes), and which concerned a squadron of rookie - but committed - soldiers serving in the United States Marine Corps Space Aviator Cavalry aboard a mobile space headquarters; not the Galactica, but the Saratoga.

Set in the year 2063, Space: Above and Beyond sets its stories in the immediate aftermath of a devastating ambush on an Earth Colony ship bound for distant Tellus, ("the furthest any human has ever ventured,") and thus this nearly-forgotten series imagined a futuristic 9/11 scenario...six years before 9/11 (and eight years before the Ron Moore remake of BSG). The enemy in this case was not the Cylon race, but the menacing and mysterious "Chigs," a derogatory slang name which refers to chiggers... fleas which burrow into the skin.

What remains so interesting about Space: Above and Beyond is not merely that the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica co-opted so much from its look, feel and narrative without so much as a "by your command," but rather that the creators' of this cult series seemed to understand - far earlier than most of us - how truly divided Americans were becoming as a people; and how - as bad as it might be - a war effort could conceivably bring us together.

Some context: Space: Above and Beyond premiered just a year after the 1994 "Contract with America" Republican Congress swept the elections, a stinging rebuke to President Clinton and a victory for Nute Gunray...I mean Newt Gingrich. This was post-Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas America, when the buzz word "sexual harassment" was all the rage. On a personal note, it was around this time that I first heard the name Rush Limbaugh, and began to meet otherwise seemingly-normal people who followed his every rant like he was some kind of cult leader.

Space: Above and Beyond reflects this reality in nineties America by featuring a diverse group of pilots, the men and women who will fight the Chig attackers. In particular, one of the pilots is Lt. Cooper Hawkes (Rodney Rowland), who is part of a new minority in America called a "Tank," a term which is more derogatory slang, this time for "in vitros," citizens who were conceived and born in artificial gestation tanks.

America is still land of the free and home of the brave in 2063, but that doesn't mean that the "in vitro" class can expect total equality. As one character states bluntly in the pilot, "we believe in civil rights for in vitros, but not at the expense of our rights." This is EXACTLY what the debate was in the country at the time: women and African-Americans should have equal rights, as long as we didn't establish any laws that gave them privileges over the white man, some believed. 

Meanwhile - on the show - racism towards the in vitros still flourishes in the ranks of the space marines, mostly out of ignorance. "Tanks are lazy and don't care about anyone," reports one soldier, relying on an old stereotype. Later, a character registers surprise that "Tanks" actually dream. It's always easier to demonize the enemy (even a domestic one...), when you can somehow render them sub-human. Even the military equipment on hand in the Corps. doesn't fit the "Tanks," and Hawkes has to cut off part of his space helmet to accommodate a common "Tank" birth mark. "They don't make nothing with In Vitros in mind," he laments.

So this is the cultural context that Wong and Morgan were working on with Space: Above and Beyond. And the episode "R & R," directed by Thomas J. Wright, takes the characters of the 58th to yet another new horizon: furlough.

Specifically, the squadron is exhausted after multiple tours-of-duty, and the In-Vitro pilot Hawkes (Rodney Rowlands) is injured during a Chig attack on his patrol. Colonel T.C. McQueen (James Morrison) is relieved when the group is assigned 48 hours of vacation on a pleasure ship called "The Bacchus." 

This vessel is described as "Vegas, New York City and Oz all rolled into one." I immediately thought of Sinoloa in the Buck Rogers episode "Vegas in Space" and "Space City," the so-called "Satellite of Sin" in Blake's 7.

In Space: Above and Beyond, this viper's den looks like a Trump Casino in space, and the futuristic Cabaret's master-of-ceremonies is none other than Coolio (!). He promptly informs the visiting soldiers that Bacchus is the place "where what you can only imagine, we make happen."

He also notes that this is not a world of virtual reality or "phony Holodecks," a pointed line which clearly differentiates Space: Above and Beyond's gritty, hard-bitten universe from that of another 1990s outer space franchise, Star Trek: The Next Generation. Remember, Star Trek off-spring dominated the 1990s, and Space: Above and Beyond was a first dramatic step away from that Utopian world of plenty. Again -- today, we might not appreciate the pioneering aspects of Morgan and Wong's space combat series as much as we should. Not entirely unlike Space:1999, this program ventured to present a realistic look at man in space; rather than going for an idealistic approach.

Back to "R & R." In short order, the pilots of the 58th start to let their hair down. On Bacchus ,Lt. Shane Vansen (Kristen Cloke) sets about winning some dough in the ship's pool hall, only to be verbally upbraided and relentlessly "played" by a psychologically-adroit android pool-shark, Alvin...an uncredited David Duchovny. This characters snarls like Clint Eastood and even asks Vansen "do you feel lucky?" I loved this subplot because it played on expectations (the audience's and the character's): Vansen arrives in the pool hall in a slinky black dress, manhandles her pool cue seductively (!) and vamps it up...expecting to get one by the other players on sex appeal.

Didn't count on a robot, I guess...

Meanwhile, Hawkes has to deal with the specter of drug addiction because of the pain medication he's been prescribed, for his injury. On The Bacchus,  gegoes in search of sexual comfort. A virgin, Hawkes soon meets up with a beautiful in-vitro hooker who is far less glamorous than she appears. She's addicted to drugs too (so she doesn't have to think about how she earns her cash), and she's the mother of an infant.

And yes, this distinctly un-romantic subplot indeed sounds familiar if you've seen the re-imagined, second season Battlestar Galactica episode "Black Market."

As "R & R" continues, another sub-plot: West (Morgan Weisser) learns that the seemingly-humorless colonel, McQueen, has a fondness for old, black-and-white, W.C. Fields movies. Before long, however, the brief respite from war is called off, and the pilots are back to combat. Hawkes, for his part, has trouble leaving the events on The Bacchus behind. The Colonel, who has also faced drug addiction, tells him "There is there. And here is here."

What we get in "R & R," which aired originally on April 12, 1996, is a dissection of virtually all the program's dramatis personae. Sometimes that dissection is explicit: Alvin (Duchovny) finds the right words about Shane's family life to shake her; to make her lose at pool. Sometimes the character dissection is more subtle: the episode tackles everything from loneliness and virginity to the way "closeness" in combat sometimes creates a false sense of intimacy. James Morrison's character, McQueen doesn't have a tremendous amount of screen time, and yet we learn a lot about him here.

It isn't often in Space: Above and Beyond that audiences got see the characters relate to one another and their universe outside of the battle situation, and their time on the Bacchus (except for the W.C. Fields movies...) doesn't seem relaxing at all. But perhaps that's part of human nature too: our need to pursue love, money and yes, danger, even when we're off the job, supposedly taking it easy. Of course, there's even more danger in pursuing these things when outside the confines of "responsibility. It's hard, as Vansen might say (especially after her encounter with Alvin), to "keep your head screwed on straight" in an environment like the pleasure ship.

Space: Above & Beyond is a remarkably prophetic show. I write often about the sense of anticipatory anxiety evident in the works of Chris Carter, and I think you might detect that quality here too, in the efforts of Wong and Morgan. It's the belief that the apparent good times don't last forever, and bad times are imminent. The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica of the 21st century also highlighted artificial people, sneak attacks, hookers, R & R, psychological mind-fucks, and gritty space combat, yet it's hard to ignore that Space: Above and Beyond hit the same notes (and without some of the more questionable soap opera plotting) almost ten years earlier. Also, Space: Above and Beyond always remained humanistic, rather than telling us that we are all the fools of the Gods, the victims of a fate we can't control.

So much of success in Hollywood is based on timing. Space: Above and Beyond in the Roaring Nineties, apparently didn't resonate with a wide audience (though its ratings were higher than many genre shows airing on television today). If the program aired after 9/11, maybe we would have gotten to know Morgan and Wong's intriguing characters and solid writing for four seasons, or more...

30 Years Ago: The X-Files: Jose Chung's From Outer Space (April 12, 1996)

Darin Morgan’s stories for The X-Files (1993 – 2002) are something of a philosophical anomaly. 

Where Mulder and Scully typically voice facets of belief or skepticism, Morgan often populates his episodes with a lead character who is a surrogate for his own belief system: nihilism.

That surrogate in “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” is an opportunistic “non-fiction/science-fiction”writer, Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) who is seeking  a quick buck by writing a history of an alien abduction experience.  

And at one point in the episode, Chung directly diagrams this episode’s theme: “Truth is as subjective as reality.”

This statement of principle, as you may detect, is deliberately and distinctively at odds with a series which made famous the catch-phrase “The Truth is Out There.”   

How can truth be subjective, if it exists in some definable place, “out there?” If it is subjective, is the truth even worth seeking?

This thematic tension represents merely one glory of The X-Files as a multi-layered and meaningful work of art. The Chris Carter series can accommodate different points of view and different philosophies so long as Mulder and Scully remain true to their beliefs and histories as the audience understands them.  Morgan’s episodes are so much fun -- and so provocative -- because the scribe stretches the boundaries a bit, but never totally breaks them. In this case, the lead protagonist role is taken by Chung, an act that permits the storyteller to present a different philosophy while sacrificing nothing we know in terms of continuity.  

To wit, the alien-abduction and Mulder and Scully’s role in its investigation is largely recounted in flashbacks this episode.  Under this creative paradigm, memories, essentially, are “portrayed” or dramatized as answers to Chung’s probing interview questions. In true Rashomon (1950) style, the viewer has no way of knowing or verifying the honesty or veracity of each account.  In other words, the author’s point that the truth is subjective becomes manifest in the very absurdity of many witness reports.  

This is a funny development, to be certainly but also a complex one, for it leads to Darin Morgan’s final, existential truth about our human existence. Since there is no objective truth for us dwelling here on Earth, only interpretations of it, we are truly -- in a variation of Close Encounters’ (1977) ad campaign --“alone.”

Two teens in Klass County, Washington are imperiled by dueling aliens on the way home from their first date. A popular author, Jose Chung (Reilly), interviews Scully (Gillian Anderson) about the case and she recounts her perception of it.

Scully and Mulder (David Duchovny) have a difference of opinion about the truth of the case, however.  Mulder believes there was a genuine alien abduction while Scully believes the matter was date rape and ensuing post-traumatic stress. 

Meanwhile, a witness to the odd events of that night, Rocky, claims that a third alien -- one from the Earth’s molten core and named Lord Kimbote -- was involved, as were two unearthly Men in Black.

Unable to discern the truth for himself, Chung hopes to interview a reluctant Mulder about what really happened that fateful night…

I’m not passing judgment on this aspect of the episode, but a deep cynicism shines through in “Jose Chung’s From Outer Search.” 

That cynicism concerns humanity’s eternal quest to know the truth.  Through a series of re-enacted events related to one bizarre alien encounter, this episode by Darin Morgan suggests that human memories are inherently and fatally flawed and therefore unreliable arbiters of fact or history.  For one thing, humans may lie on purpose, without others knowing it. To this end, we learn that the teenagers involved in the close encounter actually had sex on their date, and are desperate to hide this fact from their parents.

So memory being wrong is one thing, but some people encourage wrong interpretations because they boast hidden or unknowable agendas.

Morgan’s critique of truth goes further.  “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” also expresses doubt in truth-searching tools, ones developed under the auspices of man’s science; tools such as hypnosis.  Here, hypnosis is termed explicitly in the dialogue as a procedure which “worsens” rather than “enhances” human memory.  In other words, human memory is bad but memories re-surfaced during hypnosis are even worse.

Intriguingly, “From Outer Space” also indicates that the desire to know the truth -- in this case to believe in alien life forms -- is merely a primal scream shouted in response to a nihilistic human existence, and a delusion or blind alley fostered and encouraged by a complicit mass media.  The episode’s first shot, for instance, is of an object (actually a work crew’s crane…) that could easily be mistaken for a UFO.  

In fact, this inaugural image knowingly harks back to the first sequence in Star Wars (1977), with the triangular Star Destroyer intersecting the frame, as well as a moment from Close Encounters (1977), wherein Roy Neary spots a large object overhead, hovering in the dark Muncie sky. 

Those productions nurture in us, the episode seems to indicate, some sort of romanticism about the nature of life and the universe.  It’s a false or unfounded romanticism, according to Morgan/Chung.

More important, however, is the fact that in this shot we believe we’re seeing a spaceship at first glance.  As we watch longer, however, we become aware that we are actually seeing something much more mundane, something utilitarian and man-made.

This visual joke thus perfectly reflects the idea that we can’t ever be sure that we are correctly seeing, registering, and interpreting external stimuli.  Our desire for the romantic (look, it’s a spaceship!) supersedes our rationality (oh, it’s a work crane!) and our brain seems to respond to our deeply-held desire see that which isn’t, plainly, there.  And if this is so, it means that our perception, our memory, our very truth, is suspect.

At the end of the same scene, we witness the appearance of an intentionally silly-looking “monster,” Lord Kimbote.  This hairy, cyclopean thing seems based on an amalgamation of creatures from 1960s Ray Harryhausen films.  No matter -- our eyes immediately discount Kimbote as fake or corny.  

Here’s the point, however.  We don’t visually “read” the Greys nearby in the same dismissive fashion.  On the contrary, they seem “real” in a way that Kimbote just does not (perhaps because the Greys reflect 1990s mythology instead of 1960s mythology/fantasy…) 

Morgan’s message is thus that we shouldn’t stand in judgment of other people’s belief systems, because they are all equally flawed and yes, silly.  Why accept dome-headed Greys from space without question, but nit-pick Lord Kimbote from the center of the Earth?  Is one “being” intrinsically a nuttier idea than the other?  Or are they insane on a co-equal level?

It’s a little like saying that you believe in the literal meaning of communion (eating and drinking from the literal body of Christ), but that you draw the line of believability at the Pope’s infallibility.  

Everyone draws this line differently…

And, of course, if we draw that line differently and can’t objectively support our belief system, then we are, for the most part, alone in our belief system.  

What I find so interesting, however, is the last few moments of “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.”  Here, Morgan establishes how the abduction has influenced each “alone” individual to change his or her life for the better.  A teen girl at the center of it has become an activist hoping to save the world.  The boy she was with that night, contrarily, has been reconfirmed in his (unrequited) love for her, and has made this love the center of his (meaningless?) existence. 

And Mulder, of course, tilts forever at Morgan’s impossible windmills, looking for answer to things that aren’t really questions in the first place.  Why seek truth when there is no truth?

“What really happened to those kids on that night?”  Chung asks Mulder.  His answer is “how the hell should I know?” 

For Mulder such an answer might result from a lack of facts, or a need for more investigation and research.  But for Chung it’s a validation for the belief that we are all animals trapped in our cages of subjectivity, unable to know the truth or reality of any event in our lives.

Undeniably brilliant and categorically funny, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” is another signature X-Files episode.  I appreciate it intellectually, and it always makes me laugh.  Yet it is not among my personal favorite episodes of the series because I tend to believe that we, as humans, must search for the truth, even if it is, finally, a fool’s errand.  

The journey is worth the trip, and even if truth is ultimately found infinitely subjective, it still may be enough to help us sleep better at nights, or accept our limitations as flawed, mortal creatures. Sometimes, a little bit of self-delusion isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it can keep us looking to the stars, or to the next horizon. 

An Abnormal Fixation Short: Special Delivery

 

An Abnormal Fixation Short: Season's Packing Day

 

Abnormal Fixation 2.7: "Der Geist"

 

Discussing Abnormal Fixation Season Two on Roy's Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner!

Abnormal Fixation 2.6: "Firewall Farewell"

 

30 Years Ago Star Trek: Voyager: "Deadlock" (March 18, 1996)

If Star Trek: Voyager (1995 – 2001) had played its cards right, it would have added an alien nemesis to the enduring outer space franchise as terrifying and fearsome as the Borg once were.  

In particular, the first seasons of the 1990s program featured an alien race of the Delta Quadrant known as the Vidiians. These aliens were hideously deformed, technological advanced beings who suffered the effects of an incurable plague. 

What made the Vidiians truly so terrifying, however, is the fact they weren’t out to explore other worlds peacefully, or make new friends.  

Instead, they wanted to harvest the organs of any compatible life form they could find. Certainly, the Borg wanted to “assimilate” new technologies and drones to their vast collective, but the Vidiians would kill you in a heart-beat for a healthy liver. They had no choice because a plague was destroying their civilization.

The Vidiians were at their dreadful, menacing, and merciless best in the second season Voyager episode “Deadlock” by Brannon Braga. 

The story, not unlike “The Best of Both Worlds” on The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) features a scarifying sense of momentum and inevitability. It's one of those episodes that moves fast, with great purpose, and events seem to overwhelm both the characters and the audience.

In “Deadlock,” Voyager discovers that it is entering a region of space controlled by the Vidiians.

Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) decides that it may be prudent for the ship to cloak itself inside a nearby “plasma drift,” and hopefully remain out of sight. But the ship encounters some sort of subspace turbulence in the drift.  The warp engines stall, as if they have “sprung a leak.”

This turn of event couldn’t happen at a worse time, because not only are the Vidiians nearby, but Ensign Wildman is very pregnant, and going into labor. When the ship's systems start to fail, the baby's life is imperiled, even after a "fetal transport."

The plasma drift also causes all of Voyager’s matter to double, creating a duplicate ship, but one joined at the heart -- the warp-drive -- with “our” Voyager. This means every person, from Janeway down to the newborn child is also duplicated.

The two Janeways confer about the crisis and the possibilities of separation, but before long, the Vidiians find Voyager in its hiding spot, and 347 of their shock-troopers board one of the ships to begin organ harvesting…

The opening acts of “Deadlock” are laden with terrible techno-babble that means nothing, a common problem of both Star Trek: Voyager and the episodes written by Brannon Braga. Yet despite this pitfall, “Deadlock” works, in part because it possesses the (brutal) courage to play out its nightmare scenario: a Starfleet vessel overrun by Vidiians. 

In short order, we see Tuvok (Tim Russ) and Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) shot down by the soldiers, their organs cataloged and harvested for return to the Vidiian population. The episode also shows us Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) dying during a hull-breach, but it is the deaths associated with the Vidiian march that, for me, remain the most terrifying. One of the most upsetting images of the episodes sees the Vidiian away team practically salivating at the thought of taking the Wildman baby, a new-born.

"Deadlock" is also abundantly clever in the way that it plays with audience perceptions of “our” Voyager. At first, the version of the starship we have followed all along seems hopelessly crippled, and Janeway must contemplate destroying her own ship.  

Then, a second Voyager is found -- with a whole crew and a functioning ship -- and we breathe a sigh of relief because, essentially, we know our beloved characters won’t die. Then the kicker is that it is the other Voyager -- the whole Voyager -- that is boarded by the Vidiians, leaving the other Janeway to destroy her ship….which she promptly does.

"Welcome to the bridge..."

“Deadlock” is a particularly strong episode for Kate Mulgrew -- and for Captain Janeway -- as she plays the same individual attempting to “cheat” death in two, essentially, hopeless situations. 

And making matters worse, Janeway must consider not only the safety and well-being of her own crew, but the safety and well-being of the other crew, which is also, paradoxically, her own crew.  It’s enough to make the head spin, but one quality I admire about Janeway (especially here) is how she takes the weird situation at face value and -- based on the available science and the facts -- works her way through the danger. I’ve always liked Janeway quite a bit as a character, and she’s actually my second favorite Star Trek captain, after James Kirk.  

In part, this is because Janeway is actually an expert in a field other than diplomacy. She’s a scientist and engineer first, not just an ambassador with a portfolio like Picard, and many episodes (including “Parallax”) reveal how her training in those fields help bring about good outcomes in crises. Given our anti-science culture today, I find Janeway especially refreshing. She's smart as a whip, and never uses the excuse that she's "not a scientist" to avoid grappling with a problem. Instead, science is one of her key allies.

Voyager was always at its best when it verged on being a horror show, which is another reason that "Deadlock" works so effectively.

I also absolutely love “The Thaw,” another second season story, wherein Janeway must outwit a devilish, holographic clown (Michael McKean), and I am similarly fond of the third season episode “Macrovirus,” in which giant, airborne germs decimate the crew, leaving Janeway to single-handedly combat them and save the ship.  

These episodes come closest to fulfilling Voyager's potential. It  is a series about a starship alone in the great unknown, without the resources of a command structure to fall back on. Episodes like the one I mention focus on the danger inherent in such a scenario. They are more Space:1999 than your typical episode of Star Trek.

Later seasons of the series brought the Borg back again and again and again, watering down their threat substantially, but those return visits, while demanded by Star Trek fans, I suppose, are not that effective.  

Imagine, instead if Voyager had continued to use the Vidiians as a primary villain.  

We could have had five or six years of some really scary stories about contending with a race that sees humans only as organ donors… 

50 Years Ago: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

In 2011, film critic Marc Mohan termed the late Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth a "dreamlike, disjointed and frustrating piece of work." It's a good description of a film that speakings in the language of sunning visuals and symbolic imagery, but features a confusing plot. Like the late David Bowie himself, The Man Who Fell to Earth is beautiful to gaze upon.

Yet in the final analysis, this science fiction film is impenetrable, or at the very least, emotionally distancing. 

It's entirely possible that this Roeg film seeks to express how the innocent or weak are often destroyed in a toxic, contemporary culture of luxury, vice, addiction, and sin.  But somehow even that perspective is not enough to render the film entirely successful.

It's one thing for the alien -- an apparent Christ figure -- to suffer for our sins, but need his innocent family suffer too?

I understand some people mourn The Man Who Fell to Earth as sort of the last of its breed before science fiction films such as Star Wars (1977) premiered and changed the nature of the genre.  I get it.  The Man Who Fell to Earth feels very individual, very personal in the way it moves and expresses itself,  and should be commended for that virtue.  It's a film worth watching at least once, even if, when it's over, you're left feeling a little cold.

Steven Rea termed The Man Who Fell to Earth  a "strange creature," and that too is a description I can appreciate, even as I admire the film's unforgettable and occasionally haunting imagery.

An alien from a dying world, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) lands on Earth and begins developing patents based on his world’s incredibly technological innovation so that he can fund a space program that will take him home to his wife and children, and save the famine-stricken population from extinction.

Once on Earth for some time, however, Thomas meets a young woman, Mary Lou (Candy Clark), who introduces him to vices such as sex and alcohol, and which leads to Thomas losing focus on his task.  

Thomas is eventually captured and interrogated by the CIA, and prevented from carrying out his mission of mercy.

Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of an alien world called Anthea that through dozens of nuclear wars, now suffers from a life-threatening, planet-wide drought. 

Only a few Antheans, a mere three hundred, survive. One of their number, named Thomas Jerome Newtown is selected as hardy enough to survive a trip to Earth, where he will construct a larger spaceship to pick up his people so that they can seed the planet. 

Part of the reason for the Anthean plan and choice of destination is that Earth seems to be mirroring Anthea’s path, and within ten years it could destroy itself too.  

Thomas’s mission is therefore not only to save his own people, but our people as well.  

But Earth people, he finds, are emotional and illogical, and he is drawn into their petty squabbles at the expense of larger issues.  He becomes a victim of politics, and man’s self-destructive nature in a story that is about the futility of the Cold War, among other issues.

Nicholas Roeg’s film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth does not coherently convey Walter Tevis’s story, and if a viewer seeks that particular story, he or she will not find it. 

Instead, Roeg’s film is a visually dazzling but often maddening “abstract” approach to the story, one that focuses not on the details of Thomas Jerome Newton’s mission, or the history of his world, but rather on his seduction here on Earth to the human “way of life.” 

At first a kind of perfect or messianic being, Newton eventually becomes a fragile, broken thing instead, and his story is very much a variation or inversion of a Christ parable: A God comes to Earth, and man makes him as weak and mortal as he is. Newton suffers and suffers for our sins, and in return provides man a (technological) paradise.   

The story also seems to play like a coded biography of Howard Hughes in that reclusive, lonely, oddball geniuses get used up and exploited by society, but are never fully understood or loved.  

The emotional core of the two-and-half-hour film is Newton’s haunting memories of his family on the desert world, and the struggle to survive in his protracted absence.  

He imagines their existential miseries, while he lives in a veritable paradise of wealth, sex, movies, and booze.  

Although Thomas realizes that if stays on Earth, he “shall die,” he doesn’t make very meaningful moves to leave the planet before it is too late, and the government swoops in to experiment on him just when he is about to make good his escape and his family’s rescue.  

By movie’s end Newton is a free man, but one who has surrendered to the nihilism he sees all around him.  It’s too late to save his family, and he will never return to his world, he realizes.  The very things that distracted him -- the pleasures of his own flesh -- are the only company he has left.  The movie tags religion, sex, alcoholism and Hollywood movies as the seductive factors that turn him away from a meaningful life and a meaningful purpose.  

By the movie’s last sequence, Newton has contextualized his existence as a film noir, a format in which good, law-abiding men get transformed, through circumstances and life, into a life of crime, or a life of sin, or become victim to his own unsavory desires.  The film noir format is considered erotic and multi-layered, a comment which could be applied to The Man Who Fell to Earth as well. 

Rather than live in ugly reality, Newton’s decision to “go Hollywood’ and dress in the manner of a film noir anti-hero like Humphrey Bogart suggests that he has moved permanently to the realm of fantasy.

Clumsily-written but brilliantly directed, The Man Who Fell to Earth has also been considered a metaphor for the stages of alcoholism, and the way that the addiction can consume an entire life, step-by-step.  

This may interpretation may be accurate, and even profound, and it could explain the film’s lack of narrative clarity as well. 

Newton lives in a hazy world of drunkenness, and can’t pull himself out of the death spiral.  And his death spiral, incidentally, takes down his wife and children before it takes down him, another reflection of alcoholism as a “disease.”

Although it is gorgeously-made, The Man Who Fell to Earth isn’t an easy science fiction film to love because the filmmakers boast no genuine interest in Newton’s alien world, its history, or the specifics of his journey. 

All the concrete details of Tevis’s novel are given short-shrift (a n approach that Under the Skin apes, but more successfully).  

Instead, the movie functions entirely as a chronicle of one man’s deterioration from well-meaning genius to irrelevant, dissolute burn-out.  

But the science fiction veneer is almost entirely unnecessary to the movie’s core themes, even though those moments in the alien desert, with a lonely family in waiting forever, prove absolutely haunting.

In 1984, John Carpenter’s Starman also contextualized the story of a man who fell to Earth, an alien life-form.  And that story too featured elements of the story of Jesus Christ.  Although the imagery may not have been as dazzling and abstract, the story made sense on a concrete level and touched the heart even more deeply.  

Roeg has made at least two masterpieces of modern cinema, Walkabout (1972) and Don’t Look Now (1974), but The Man Who Fell to Earth can’t join that select list because how it tells its story -- in stylistic, avant garde fashion -- doesn’t give the audience a better understanding of the character’s inner life, or his choices.  

In this film, we’re always outsiders to Newton’s decision process, and though we can chart his disintegration and mourn it intellectually, we never feel it as deeply as we should.  

Instead, we grow impatient with him.  Part of the problem may rest with David Bowie's performance.  He is great to look at and appropriately strange in appearance and mannerism, but we don't ever see and understand his true nature.   We don't even really understand his crippling inertia.  

His family is on the line. Why doesn’t he act?