Angry Puppy

It’s been a little over 10 months, but Heroes returned to the small screen last night. Even if you consider the webisodes part of the small screen, I’m excluding them, because, frankly, they were pretty awful.

We’ll be talking about “The Second Coming” in episode 36 later this week, but I wanted to post a few notes about the characters here in the meantime. Overall, I thought this was a successful premiere, and the writers did a great job of easing us back into the story after such a long break. I’m easily amused, though, and the complaints (especially concerning time travel) are already appearing elsewhere online. I’d love to hear what you all think about Heroes as a whole and this episode in particular.

If you haven’t seen the episode and don’t want to know anything, don’t click through. Everyone else should feel free to comment without fear of spoiling. The latecomers have been warned!

[SPOILERS AND TWO-MINUTE REPLAY CLIP AHEAD]

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“Hey what’s up with this Dune business? I mean, I know it’s one of the all-time best-selling sci fi novels and is widely considered to be the greatest sci fi novel written, but what’s up with the books, the prequels, the pre-prequels, the postquels and the midquels? And what are Patrick Stewart, Kyle MacLachlan, and Linda Hunt doing in a movie that has Sting levitating in leather underwear?”

How many times have you asked yourself this very question and not known how to find out or even where to start looking?

Exactly.

Thus, we present Angry Puppy’s handy review guide to discovering the Duniverse.

So, Dune. Is It All That?

Yes indeedy. Dune, at least the original novel, does live up to the hype. Don’t try to figure out whether it’s more Star Trek or more Star Wars, because there’s no point comparing it to any other franchise; there isn’t anything remotely like it.

Frank Herbert was staggeringly imaginative in creating this complex society and characters and in so fully developing this fascinating tale of politics, religion, economics, mysticism, ecology, and ultimately an insightful exploration into what makes humans human. At the heart of the story is a highly sophisticated and incredibly well-thought-out question about not only what happens when a society crosses the technological singularity, but also what impact that event might have on the subsequent millenia. It’s Battlestar Galactica on a much grander scale.

“Aaah! No Spoilers, No Spoilers, LA LA LA LA LA…”

Don’t worry. I won’t give any spoilers here. But I will give you a word of caution: generally speaking, if you read anything about the Dune universe, you’re likely to encounter massive spoilers because of the way the series unfolds over vast periods of time and out of sequence. For this reason, we suggest you stay away from anything that talks about the Dune universe in broad strokes. Everything written here is safe, though.

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No, it’s not any sort of gay pun. We’re really just cleaning out the closet to make room for some new stuff we’ll be reviewing in the next few weeks. [Angry Puppy Episode 35]

In between the hilarious cleaning scenes, we talk about:

• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
• Spore
• Murder Party
• Iron Man DVD features
• The Making of Me: John Barrowman
• Fringe “Pilot” and “The Same Old Story”
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles “Samson and Delilah” and “Automatic for the People”
• Sandworms of Dune
• Hellblazer “The Laughing Magician”
• Plus, the answer to last week’s Mystery Geek Challenge!

Kodos and I just watched Fantastic Planet (La Planète Sauvage), René Laloux’s 1973 Czech/French animated film about a future in which humans (here called Oms. Get it? Hommes/Oms?  Uhhh.) are kept as pets by a giant race called the “Traag” or “Draag”, depending on whether you use the subtitles or the dubbing.

At first I thought the humans were meant to be the dogs of this society. Their subsequent treatment, frankly, made me feel a bit of remorse for the poor neutered puppy sitting next to me. Luckily, the metaphor flipped when the Traag started exterminating wild Om as vermin, making the Om more like, I guess, rats than dogs. So now I’m thinking of rats, and Kodos has wandered off somewhere.

So, anyway, Q.E.D., the Oms are the rats of this society. The Traag, on the other hand, are almost supernatural in their control over their environment, both technologically and spiritually.

Fantastic Planet is generally referred to as science fiction, but I’d classify it as fantasy. The way I see it, science fiction is when the science may be more or less advanced relative to current times, and perhaps a physical law or two may be broken here and there, but things just sort of “work” the way we’d expect them. That goes even if the setting is Vagra II. And the sole inhabitants are sentient oil slicks. And the oil slicks are pissy.

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The real problem with Primeval is that there’s not enough historical accuracy.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

[Via a friend by e-mail, source unknown]