{"id":6282,"date":"2015-10-15T13:23:49","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T21:23:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6282"},"modified":"2015-10-15T14:14:18","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T22:14:18","slug":"intellectual-fortitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=6282","title":{"rendered":"Intellectual Fortitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1971, barely into my teens, I went to a movie with my dad: The Andromeda Strain<\/em>, based on Michael Crichton’s bestseller, and one of the more faithful adaptations of an SF novel put to film. It’s not a perfect movie. Even back then I could see it wasn’t great on character development. There was a lot of expository dialog in which scientists told each other things they would already have known, if not for the need to fill the average movie-goer in on what amino acids are. But there was one way in which the movie stood out from others of its kind, in which it continues to stand out even today:<\/p>\n

It portrayed scientists doing science.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, depending on how low you set your standards you can see that all the time. Tony Stark invents Strong AI overnight, all by himself. Some goofball biologist hooks himself up to a brain in a vat and intuits the genetic complexities of Pacific Rim<\/em>‘s monstrous Kaiju. Anne Hathaway’s character in Interstellar<\/em> witters on about the transcendent properties of Love as a Universal Force. A thousand movies portray scientists either as goofy caricatures or charismatic lone wolves, pulling conceptual breakthroughs from their asses through the sheer force of their own intellect.<\/p>\n

Of course, these characters were invented by screenwriters who have no clue how science works, and who couldn’t care less. Their goal was to provide mindless entertainment to hordes of popcorn-munchers. The Andromeda Strain<\/em>, with its average-looking everyday researchers and their plodding scientific method, would never get made today. (If you don’t believe me, just look at what Robert Schenkkan did to Crichton’s story when A&E rebooted it as a miniseries back in 2008).<\/p>\n

At least, that’s what I thought before I watched the first season of Fortitude<\/em>. I mentioned that show back when I was complaining about the (significantly inferior) Humans<\/em><\/a>, but I couldn’t go into detail until a certain overseas embargo had expired.\u00a0 And here we are.<\/p>\n

Fortitude <\/em>is an offbeat British\/Norwegian co-production which made it to North America this year, despite the fact that its glacial pacing and delayed payoffs should have been a death sentence in any demographic raised on instant gratification. Set in the Norwegian arctic, it begins with a man being mauled by a polar bear. It begins with two children finding a mammoth carcass, barely frozen in melting ice, and a short-tempered Russian facing off against a Norwegian sheriff with poor impulse control. It begins with a woman in a hotel room, aiming a rifle at the closed door while a man on the other side raises a tentative knocking hand. It begins with infidelity and fever, with a plan to carve a hotel from the heart of a glacier, with a scientist being hacked to death by a mysterious assailant wielding a potato peeler.<\/p>\n

That’s some of what happens in the first episode. None of it is explained in that first hour. The characters are ciphers, their motives hidden from the viewer. If you want everything spelled out in nice bite-sized chunks\u2014 if you prefer Transformers <\/em>to 2001<\/em>\u2014 this is not your movie. Hell, Fortitude<\/em> doesn’t even tell you what genre<\/em> you’re in until almost the end of the season.<\/p>\n

Don’t go to Wikipedia for help on that score. It classifies Fortitude<\/em> as “Psychological Thriller\/Drama\/Mystery”. In fact, it’s science fiction\u2014 but the science elements, while speculative, are so utterly plausible that I feel as if I’m misusing the term. It hinges on science, yes: on speculative biology, on events that have not yet happened but which could. <\/em>Isn’t that the very definition of hard SF? And yet, having watched all those cryptic pieces coming together over eleven hypnotic hours, “SF” still doesn’t do it justice to my mind. Fortitude<\/em> is more immediate than that label suggests, as if I were to describe a story about an Ebola epidemic as “science fiction” six months before an outbreak happened in the real world.<\/p>\n

\"Not<\/a>

Not quite the exact recipe, but you get the idea.<\/p><\/div>\n

If I had to sum it up in thirty words or less, I’d describe Fortitude<\/em> as a cross between Twin Peaks<\/em> and John Carpenter’s The Thing<\/em>, as written by Michael Crichton. Ostensibly a crime drama revolving around a series of brutal murders in a small town\u2014 “fortitude” might be exactly what you need when they show the bodies, by the way\u2014 it mixes in subplots involving cancer, infidelity, politics, shamanism, climate change, rape, mob justice, wildlife biology, and food-related sexual obsession. (Also a pig in a hyperbaric chamber\u2014 still not sure what that was doing there.) Everyone has dangerous secrets to hide, and you can’t shake a creepy sense of something supernatural<\/em> in this icebound berg. But the payoff, when it comes, is far more down to earth. The season’s almost over before you see the science behind the fiction\u2014 and even then, with that element revealed, you might mistake it for just one thread in a messy tapestry.<\/p>\n

Tug on it, though; you’ll see a whole web of connections.<\/p>\n

All of which would be enough to give Fortitude <\/em>my personal seal of approval. But it goes one step further, serving up perhaps the most understated and accurate portrayal of working scientists that I’ve seen in a genre show. Blind alleys abound. In contrast to Tony Stark’s infallible intuition, hypotheses\u2014 when tested\u2014 turn out to be wrong. Researchers worry out loud about confirmation bias. Unexpected findings inspire literature searches for real-world precedents. And Fortitude<\/em>‘s scientists are more than delivery platforms for exposition, they’re people as well as professionals. The local wildlife biologist, at ease in a world of hungry polar bears, delights in mocking a visiting biologist brought in for his first-hand experience with “apex predators” (turns out he did his thesis on badgers); she uses her lab equipment to cut up reindeer steaks. The characters muse over beers on Darwin’s thoughts about God.<\/p>\n

It’s not to everyone’s taste. A friend of mine threw up his hands in confusion after the first episode, plaintively wondered if it got better. I’ll tell you what I told him: no, it does not get better. It pays off<\/em>. It demands more patience than the average eyeball bait, and it rewards that patience more richly.<\/p>\n

For all its crypsis and glacial pacing, that strategy seems to have worked\u2014 well enough to get Fortitude<\/em> renewed for a second season, at least. I don’t know where they’ll go from here. The central mystery has been resolved, and besides, half the cast is dead. Then again, the solution to that mystery turned out to be just one manifestation of an environmental meltdown that contains within it the seeds of myriad disasters. Perhaps the next season will explore one of those. Perhaps it will go in some other direction entirely.<\/p>\n

I hope we’re still around to see what that is.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1971, barely into my teens, I went to a movie with my dad: The Andromeda Strain, based on Michael Crichton’s bestseller, and one of the more faithful adaptations of an SF novel put to film. It’s not a perfect movie. Even back then I could see it wasn’t great on character development. There was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6282"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6287,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6282\/revisions\/6287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}