SF in SF

Thanks to the writers's trike Heroes suddenly sprung a load of cliffhangers and wound up 'volume two' prematurely on Monday night. Even creator Tim Kring has admitted that, barring one or two ey-catching incidents, the second season has underwhelmed. It has become a soap with superpowers. Some of the tricks of LOST's writers have been imported (allowing most of the key characters to drift towards moral ambiguity, chronological leapfrogging etc.) but not that show's ability to regularly tease viewers with the ineffable presence of profundity.

And so I turn to Journeyman, essentially an update on Quantum Leap with some of LOST's sense of grand conspiracy. It stars Scottish actor Kevin McKidd, last not seen dying as Lucius Vorenus at the conclusion of Rome (and now rumoured to have been cast as Thor.)

I've only watched the first two episodes, but so far so good. I'm not minding all that much that this sort of premise goes against everything that I personally believe about the nature of Time: that instead of being an objective linear pathway it is a subjective labyrinth; one reason I feel that Borges was probably the greatest Sci-Fi writer of the last century!

Maybe this is why the logic of plotlines based on linear time don't do my head in so much!

The show's hero Dan Vasser has a favoured method of tell whether he has shifted backwards in San Francisco time: checking his iPhone for a signal! This gives Apple two of three placements per episode. Dexter has been whipping out his iPhone quite a bit lately too. I still think that is the best of the US serials that I currently follow, for whilst it may lack some of the postmodern trickery of the others, it outpaces them in terms of characterisation and dialogue.