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June 26 'Virtuality' Could Have Been a ContenderFOX today (Friday) is airing "Virtuality," what was supposed to be (and may still, if the stars align) a pilot for a series from Ron Moore, one of the honchos behind "Battlestar Galactica." "Virtuality" is about a crew on a deep-space mission with huge potential implications for the human race.
FOX is billing this as a two-hour telemovie, and being mum on whether it's just burning off something that they happen to have in the can, if they are going to for sure bring the concept back in some form, or something in between. Having watched a preview of it, I do hope Nielsen families out there give it a try.
The trouble is that the "Virtuality" pilot is, at the end of the day, a pilot. No matter how good it might have been (and there are definitely areas where it needed work), it's not going to have the same beginning, middle and end that even a subpar movie will have. And without that completeness, "Virtuality" feels like it's wanting. I almost wish they had recut it to give it more of feeling of wholeness.
In the two hours, we get introduced to a dozen crewmembers: the commander, his second-in-command, his pilot, the ship's doctor, the ship's psychiatrist, a computer programmer, a botanist, and others. The premise is that Earth is running out of resources and has launched a mission to a distant galaxy to figure out if colonization is possible. (Maybe it's the Browncoat in me, or its's that the episode starts with Civil War stuff and is about an Earth that's all used up, but it seems like it's in a sense trying to have a homage to "Firefly.")
Because travel will take so long, the ship is equipped with virtual reality tech. The idea is that crew members would go stir-crazy stuck in a big metal tube with one another and problems would fester. So instead they can slap on some goggles, lie down and find yourself in all sorts of fictional settings and meet all sorts of fictional people.
The pilot has crew members re-enacting the Civil War, mountain climbing, participating in a crime-fighting singing group, resolving personal crises about their families and engaging in virtual affairs with one another. But in the midst of this, there's a mysterious figure who sometimes interrupts the virtual scenarios violently.
Who or what is he, and what is his agenda? Obviously, this would have been grist for speculation in a series. So I don't consider it much of a spoiler that it's not resolved here.
There's a lot of other things that get touched on that would have been interesting if developed further. For starters, "Virtuality" refers to a Consortium that has a lot of clout. There could have been a lot of commentary on how that came about and how that is analogous to today. It also has a subplot that the crew is recording a reality show which apparently would have resulted (or will result) in webisodes if the show had gone to series. Some of the characters seemed like they would have been at least different from the standard TV fare. Two of the crew members are gay (albeit closeted), and that's one of the first times I can remember regular characters in a sci-fi series being portrayed in an ongoing homosexual relationship. The second-in-command is disabled, making his involvement with the virtual landscape more profound. And ultimately, it would have been good to explore tensions in such areas as technology versus humanity, loneliness and privacy versus intimacy and a group setting, imagination versus reality, and the need for diversion versus the need to be focused on a crucial task.
Because I trust Ron Moore, I have a feeling that the show could have rivaled "Battlestar Galactica" in being that sort of intelligent sci-fi that gets critical acclaim from across the board.
Which, of course, is not to say that there's not about 100 things I would nitpick about it. For starters, the ship in question is called the Phaeton. Phaeton in Greek myth was the son of Apollo. He asked dad for a chance to pilot his sky chariot, but couldn't control it and ended up burning to death. So someone calling a spaceship "Phaeton" would be like calling an ocean liner "The Titanic." It's just not going to happen.
For another, I thought that the fantasies were relatively and generally uninspired. Compared even to the anything-goes nature of the virtual club in Moore's "Caprica" -- where people engaged in fights to the death, human sacrifice and orgies, we didn't really get to see people push any boundaries with what they could do in this virtual world. And it seems foolish to have a virtual affair with an actual crew member (and risk discovery) when you can have VR sex with a simulated copy of that crew member (and for that matter, with an additional half-dozen partners of your choice).
For a third, people seemed to be underwhelmed by the notion that an entity who shouldn't have been there was shooting them, pushing them off cliffs or worse. I know if that happened to me, I would a) told everyone on the ship about the glitch and b) stayed the hell away from the technology until I had some assurance that the glitch was fixed. But with one exception, there didn't seem to be much urgency to what was going on in the virtual world. Maybe that's just me; I've seen enough "Star Trek" episodes to know that malfunctioning holodeck=bad medicine.
For a fourth, there's not much action in the first episode. As I watched, I kept half-remembering some sci-fi writer criticized "Star Trek" for having too many plots depending on the holodeck. He said essentially if you're a writer and you have a series set in space and you have to rely on holodecks for plots, you're in the wrong business. I kept wondering if he had a point.
And finally, it seems like with as many characters as there were, people are going to tend to come off as flat and people are going to get shortchanged in their development. I think the series easily could have condensed the cast to six, which would have given enough room for everyone to breathe.
With those and other flaws, I can understand why "Virtuality" got (or may have gotten) shelved. But that doesn't mean I have to like it.
- posted by Raoul
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