Author: Mark

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

Stargate Universe, Complete First SeasonThanks to a lucky purchase at our local used book/music/movie shop, I recently picked up Stargate Universe, The Complete First Season on DVD[ref]At $13+tax, it was a must buy.[/ref]. Since picking it up I’ve been rushing through watching it as fast as I can; partly because I really enjoy it and partly because I wanted to loan it to a friend. As I’ve completed watching the discs, thought I’d post a few notes on the show.[ref]Excluding the commentaries, but including all the rest of the special features.[/ref]

Things done well

  • Usage of music, particularly where the show’s creators have selected a single song as a theme for a particular episode (e.g. Flogging Molly’s The Worst Day Since Yesterday, SGU S01E09: Life) is stunning.
  • Despair of ever seeing home again is handled fairly well, though the most interesting characters[ref]Eli & Rush[/ref] tend to spend more screen time in enjoying the experience of being where they are rather than pining for home.
  • Special effects and set design: To understand how impressive this really is, you need to watch the special features on the DVDs to see how things look without the special effects and to see how much of their set can be reconfigured to work as different areas of the ship.

Things done poorly

  • Leaving people behind on a planet and getting them back again in the very next f**king episode. If you’re trying to convince viewers that the plight of people on that ship is so deadly serious; once a character gets left behind, they should be gone permanently[ref]Unfortunately they can’t seem to help themselves with bringing people back; as they do it again in the second season. Though in season 2, at least the character wasn’t brought back in the very next episode.[/ref]
  • They don’t handle the portrayal of limited supplies well. Sure, we get a lot of talk about food, water & medicine (with the occasional note about ammunition), but….
    • They never seem to run out of bullets and sometimes use them in seemingly wasteful ways (e.g. in S01E06: “Water” they used their guns to carve chunks out of a frozen waterfall).
    • Some characters suddenly have different cloths (e.g. Chloe starts off with an ugly dress but ends up with a rather nice pantsuit).
    • Rush never seems to run out of those little notebooks.
    • Almost everybody’s clothes or uniforms look spotless all the time. With the exception of a character who just got back from a planet[ref]This is only true towards the end of the first season. Paying close attention to the clothes in earlier episodes shows bloodstains & whatnot on a variety of characters.[/ref]
  • No real sense of isolation and there should be, but they spend a fair amount of time using the ancient communication stones to pop back to Earth. Doing so helps them to explore character back-stories and motivations but it also severely undermines how isolated and far from home they really are.
  • Chloe, Eli & Matt: SyFy[ref]*shudder* I still hate that you guys changed the name of your channel.[/ref] you’re writing a show that caters to geeks and we geeks like to see the geek get the girl. Keeping Eli as the best friend to both Chloe & Matt, is at best annoying.

Sunday, last day of the con. Most attendees are wandering the halls a bit bleary eyed. While everything is winding down, there are still a few interesting panels. Unfortunately I missed the last Build-A-Blinkie workshop but at least I caught Cory’s last panel of the con, “No User Serviceable Parts Inside”. During that panel Cory and Dave Stagner covered a variety of topics, from feral robot dogs to DRM to the openess of Android phones vs the stability of iPhones. During the mobile phone platform discussion Cory was talking about how Apple’s curating of the app store and how they had infamously kept out certain apps based on content, but later relented. Cory summed up this as:

Angry blog storms is a poor basis to decide what apps I run on my mobile device.

Shortly after that, it was closing ceremonies and ICON 35 came to an end (for most). There was a dead-dog party after clean-up, but we were rather tired and just headed home. Of course the tiredness of last night was nothing compared to the tiredness I feel this morning, as Cory’s needed picking up from the hotel at 4:30 AM to get to the airport in time for his flight. Naturally this means I got up at 3:30 AM to be able to get up/awake/ready and over to the hotel on time. *blargh*

A refreshing night’s sleep –in my own bead– and then back to the con. I started off the day listening to Cory read from the new book he’s working on. It’s another young-adult novel, dealing with social-technological issues and sounds pretty interesting. After the reading was over Cory took questions for a bit and somebody in the crowd asked a question along the lines of “was he concerned that he’d ever run out of ideas”. To which Cory replied,

It’s the 21st century; if you can’t come up with nine science-fiction ideas before breakfast, you’re not even trying.

After the reading was over, I fetched the New-Pi salads we’d picked up for Cory and waited in the autograph line so I could give them to him. The line got down to the last 4 people, 3 males and one female. The first guy’s name is Mark, he gets his book signed and walks off. The second guy comes up to get his book signed and his name is also Mark. The coincidence of having three Marks all right there got to Cory a bit and he remarked on it. The women in the line popped up with a “reassuring” comment that her name wasn’t Mark. To which I replied that it was “no mark against her”. Appropriate groaning accorded and it my was turn to reassure her that my wife would beat me later for that pun. Then I gave Cory his salads and he disappeared off to his room for lunch.

While I went off and played some board games. Puerto Rico was fun, but rather complicated for us to be playing in the very noisy game room with a bunch of people who’d never played it before. Then it was time to head off to the Guest of Honor Interview panel, where Rusty Hevelin was interviewing ICON’s author, artist and fan guests of honor. It was a fun time, both for the answers and for the guests’ reactions when Rusty asked some of his questions. After the interview panel was over, I found out Cory was really feeling the jet lag and wanted to lay down for a while. I told him that worked great actually, because there was a longer break after his next panel which meant we could take him a bit farther from the hotel for a nicer dinner.

So Michelle & I helped out at the con-suite for a bit, then I caught the end of another panel and it was suddenly 7 o’clock and time to take Cory to dinner. It turned out that a friend of ours was looking for somebody to go eat with and Cory graciously allowed her to join us. We all trooped out to the car and drove out to our favorite Indian restaurant, Taste of India. The food appeared to be a hit all-around1. The dinner conversation though made me really glad our friend joined us.

She works on really interesting space/science stuff, analyzing research data from satellites and what not. So naturally we introduced her to Cory as our “resident rocket-scientist”. Cory immediately jumped onto that topic and started asking all sorts of questions about her work. It was while he was questioning her that I realized how intimidated Cory makes me feel. Intimidated isn’t quite the right word, though it is a part of the problem. My real job doesn’t have any of the possible broad, social impact like Cory’s writing and I also don’t want to be “that guy” geeking out at Cory when he’s trying to eat a nice dinner2. This means I can’t talk about work, I can’t talk geek (too easy to cross the geeking out line) which leaves me with topics I feel totally under prepared to discuss with somebody who’s spent years working on at very high levels. *sigh*

1There were comments earlier in the day that indicated Cory liked the New-Pi salads better than Panera as well.
2Geeking out like that in my mind would be a rudeness that a host should never show to a guest.