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<\/a>Really awesome opening credits, at least.<\/p><\/div>\n
Over the weekend we binged on this Sense8<\/em> show everyone’s been raving about, curled up on Big Green with cheese and wine and Lexus<\/a> (Kelly<\/a> was supposed to join us, but was abducted by an employer with urgent deadlines to meet). Despite the glowing reviews, I approached it with a combination of hope and dread; it was, after all, the love child of J. Michael Straczynski and the Wachowski sibs, three bright flawed gems of the genre. Straczynski’s Babylon 5<\/em> was consistently brilliant in scope and ambition but only intermittently so in execution; the Wachowskis, after proving they could rock both indie (Bound<\/em>) and SF (The Matrix<\/em>), squandered their enormous cred on increasingly lame sequels and standalones. Sense8<\/em> might represent a return to form, or the last gasp of three has-beens clinging to each other as they circled the bowl.<\/p>\n I watched the first episodes with a sense of relief. The premise was intriguing. The performances were pretty good (some of the writing and characterizations were a bit clunky, but nobody who cut early B5<\/em> or Next-Gen<\/em> the necessary slack can begrudge Sense8<\/em> a few episodes to find its feet). It was cinematically beautiful; and given the Wachowskis’ involvement, I don’t have to tell you the fight scenes rocked. I didn’t even mind that the science seemed shakey, at least to start with; only one of the characters had any kind of science background, and that was in pharmaceuticals. Eight minds scattered across the globe, suddenly finding themselves linked one to another? You’d expect them to figure out the rules through trial and error (which they did), but they’re not gonna have a clue about underlying mechanisms. Any speculation they indulge in is going to be loopy pretty much by definition. I was happy to wait for explanations: happier than I would have been if, for example, one of the newly-awakened “cluster” just happened to be a quantum neurologist who could exposit the technical specs by the end of the pilot.<\/p>\n And Jesus, wasn’t it nice to see such a diverse range of characters in a show whose premise doesn’t hinge on diversity and\/or marginalization? Not one of those self-conscious shows about<\/em> being trans or gay or black or viking, but a show about something else entirely in which the characters happen to be those things because that’s just the way folks are? That was pretty great.<\/p>\n In fact, the further the season progressed, the more apparent it became that that was maybe the only<\/em> great thing about it.<\/p>\n Look past the hokey promo shot. And the fact that one of the characters is named Ann Coulter.<\/p><\/div>\n The idea that there are two distinct and competing species of modern Humans is a very cool one, ripe with SFnal potential. (It’s already been done on TV, in fact, back in 1998\u2014 in a pretty good, lamentably short-lived series called Prey<\/em><\/a>.) Judging by the first season, though, Wachzynski don’t seem especially interested in the biological, ethical, or philosophical implications of their premise; they seem focused on character, almost to the exclusion of logic. Caitlin likens the series to Lost<\/em>\u2014 a show which drew in viewers with three-dimensional characters and deep biographical back stories, only to alienate them when it failed to pay off all that setup in any coherent way.<\/p>\n Just how disinterested were Sense8<\/em>‘s creators in exploring the ramifications of their own creation? You can get a pretty good sense in Episode 10\u2014 “What is Human?”\u2014 when one of the newly-awakened Sensates wonders, with understandable skepticism, how it’s possible for two distinct species to look so indistinguishably similar, to coexist in the modern world without everyone being aware of the fact.<\/p>\n “Evolution is frugal”, explains the show’s expository guru. “One small chromosome here or there and you walk on two legs instead of four … we are closer to humankind than the bonobo is to a baboon.” Except a single human chromosome contains up to 2000 genes, which is not exactly a “small” amount of variation (I’m guessing that “gene”, in fact\u2014 not chromosome\u2014 was the word the screenwriters were groping for). And if you want to illustrate how two distinct species can resemble each other to the point of indistinguishability, you might want to go with a different comparison than:<\/p>\n My God, it’s like they’re identical twins<\/i>!<\/p><\/div>\n Okay, you might say. So Hollywood writers can’t be bothered to learn the difference between a gene and a chromosome. It’s not as though those guys are especially renowned for their biological erudition anyway. If you’re feeling generous you can write these shortcomings off as the equivalent of a typo, nothing for anyone but compulsive nerds and antisocial biologists to get upset about.<\/p>\n But it goes deeper than that. It’s not just that Sense8<\/em>\u2032s plays a bit loose with its techspeak; it’s that the show’s premise contradicts its own plot<\/em>.<\/p>\n Consider: we’re told that the mind-hive state is baseline, that back in the Pleistocene the whole species was connected this way. We modern humans are a stunted offshoot, a mutation that lost the psychic interface; this gave us a competitive advantage allowing us to take over, because “killing’s easy when you feel nothing”. (This is presented as informed speculation by one of the characters\u2014 hence not definitive\u2014 but Straczynski’s on record<\/a> stating that them’s the rules, so consider it canon.)<\/p>\n Right there I have problems. Sure, losing mind-to-mind empathic contact makes it a lot easier to kill without remorse\u2014 <\/em>but there’s more to murder than attitude. There’s the fact that your supposedly-disadvantaged victims are still part of a telepathic network that allows them to be in a dozen places at once, that lets them instantaneously pool skills and knowledge and resources (and apparently muscle tone, given that untrained noncombatants become kick-ass killing machines when linked into the mind of a martial-arts expert). Every time you try to take out one, you’re actually fighting many. You were once part of such a network; but you traded it all away in exchange for a muffled conscience.<\/p>\n Not much of a threat, really.<\/p><\/div>\n It’s as though someone rewrote the The Walking Dead<\/em> so that zombieism resulted not via some contagious pathogen, but by a process of random mutation. A cosmic ray tears through a germ cell: a critical base pair flips. One person becomes a walker. One person<\/em>. They are now a shambling killing machine, utterly devoid of conscience and remorse. And this would in fact give them an edge when it came to slaughtering their former fellows, were it not for the fact that the rest of us still had mass communications, flame-throwers, and F16s. Also, good luck finding a mate who just happened to experience exactly the same random roll of genetic dice in time to found the new lineage.<\/p>\n I fail to see how such a trade-off constitutes an evolutionary advantage.<\/p>\n![\"Look](\"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Prey-logo.jpg\"){kind=logo}
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