In search of common ground: July 4th 2018

               

            Every time the fourth rolls around, I think about writing something like this. A little performance review, if you will, taking a look at the part of the country I’ve experienced and, maybe, set some goals to improve for next time. Every year I don’t end up doing it, because I’m doing other stuff or I’m worried how much of a blowhard I’m going to come off as, or, you know, laziness. Let’s be real, the last thing anybody needs anymore is one more opinionated white hetero male telling them what to think about the country. But the thing about it is, this year I’m a little more worried about the things I see than usual. Yes, the president I want is not in the office right now. Yes, the Supreme Court is about to become predominantly conservative and there’s a very real chance that things like Roe v. Wade may be in actual danger. And yes, the small undercurrent of race and sexism the country’s had my whole life has now decided that it’s cool to walk around in the daytime and throw itself in all of our collective faces, whether we like it or not.

To paraphrase the opening crawl of Empire “It’s a dark time for the Republic.”

               I find myself, honestly, considering the possibility that things have taken a turn for the worse from which we may never recover, but not for the reasons you think. Certainly not because of those things above, but rather the underlying mechanisms that are making them possible. These things are symptoms, in my opinion. They’re not the disease. What I think has really happened today is a two-fold problem: it’s harder for people to get ahead in this economy than a lot of us were taught it would be, and the two sides of the political spectrum have lost the ability to talk to each other. The reasons for this are numerous and go beyond what I want to blather on about here (I’ll blather about completely different things, naturally.) But regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, I have a feeling that you’re not happy (or at least vaguely uneasy) with the way the country is going right now, and you’re pretty sure the other side is the reason. If we could just get these neo-cons/libtards/Nazis/snowlflakes out of the way, things would get better. Right?

               But here’s the thing. No matter how divided we’ve let ourselves become, we’re still Americans. We’re still in this together. We’re on different sides of the political spectrum, but we’re all in the same boat. The government’s not looking out for us unless we’re part of the lucky few with enough money to make them look out for us. For a lot of people in our country, things really ARE bleak right now, and it’s easy to blame somebody else, especially if they’re different than us. For the first time in a while, a lot of the arrows aren’t pointing up for the United States. The economy’s not growing like it did for several decades after all the other big economies blew themselves up in the World Wars (go figure.) We’ve spent several decades making enemies worldwide and effectively playing Team America World Police, and that’s starting to catch up to us economically and politically. Maybe this is a blip in our history, or maybe this is the beginning of a downturn that all civilizations go through at some point, but we’re probably reaching a point in our history when we’re going to have to honestly reevaluate our place in the world and maybe even take a step back from the #1 spot and give somebody else a turn.

And yeah, that’s kinda scary.

But the bottom line is, we’re stronger together than separated, and we need to remember that if we’re going to get past these problems. A divided populace with each side constantly at each other’s throat are EXACTLY what the bad guys (whoever you think the bad guys are) want. I kind of doubt that the Russians who screwed with the last election cared who ended up President, because at the end of the day their goal was to put us right where we are: a country without faith in their leadership. I’m not calling for blind loyalty and patriotism, of course, but we’ve gotta find a way to talk to each other again. When we can’t even agree that taking kids away from their families and locking them up in cages isn’t an ideal solution to the immigration problem, well, that’s a problem folks. It’s like we’re so far apart that we can’t even agree on a base-level of what “facts” are anymore. And I stress, all of this comes from the fact that we’ve let ourselves get pushed into these boxes (or bubbles or silos, whatever euphemism you prefer) and don’t take the time to poke our heads out and see how the other half is living.

Every time I’ve sat down to talk with a person with different beliefs than me, I’ve come away with a better understanding of the issue as a whole and a better idea of what the right choices may actually be. I’m in favor of tighter gun laws in this country, but I also think you’re the worst kind of naïve if you really believe that will stop mass killings. I can’t fathom how anyone can still believe that climate change isn’t happening, but discussions with my father about what working with the EPA really entailed on a ground-level basis for manufacturing and agricultural workers helps me understand why so many people vehemently want to see it broken down. I believe health care should be a right in this country, but I can tell you with certainty that the ACA is a half-measure that needs to fixed and/or replaced if it’s ever going to correct the spiraling costs in the health care industry.

Maybe that makes me a fence-sitter, but I think the worst thing that’s happened to us is the “Primary” effect where only the fringes ever get any air-time and only one solution can ever be considered to address a problem. So what am I telling you to do? Step outside your comfort zone for a while. Stop listening to the news network of your choice (again, whichever one it might be.) Go to your 4^th of July BBQ, find somebody who thinks differently than you, whether they’re a different skin color or just a different color on the political map, and have a calm discussion with them about why they think the way they do.  And, if they’re interested, tell them why you think the way you do. I would put money on the table right now that you’ll find common ground. And I truly, down to the core of my being, believe that this, more than any other thing, is how we can turn this great-big Red, White and Blue ship around and point it in the right direction again.

*waves a sparkler*

How Not to RPG

Or, are you?

            A long time ago, my ex-wife and I tried to go play a roleplaying game with some friends of hers that I had never met. This was in the days of 3.5 edition D&D, when Wizards of the Coast allowed third party companies to use their basic ruleset as a framework for basically anything they wanted to build, with mixed results (I’m looking at you, Book of Erotic Fantasy…) This particular game used an adaptation of the ruleset that I’m rather fond of to play in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time setting. We met, exchanged pleasantries, and sat down to the game. I’m the person I am, so I had of course built a male channeler, which meant that by my character’s very nature he was going to ultimately be driven mad by his magic and would be shunned and feared by basically anyone we met. The Gamemaster, a likeable enough fellow, had built a story somewhere in the middle of the second or third book, I think (it’s been more than a decade since the game, and I haven’t read any of the books in nearly the same amount of time.)

I noticed right away that he was doing a lot of the things I would call “New Gamemaster Mistakes.” The story was tied into an established fiction storyline that we couldn’t change because it was in the novels. We met the main character of the story mainly so he could show us how cool he was and how not cool we were by comparison. Our characters didn’t have much in the way of agency in his world, and when I tried to take a left turn to do something unexpected I was quickly nudged back onto the railroad tracks.

That said, I wasn’t exactly the ideal player for them, either. When a combat broke out, I immediately fell into the type of high-end, tactical gameplay that my group always used (some of our campaigns have, at times, essentially turned into more of a miniatures wargame than a roleplaying game.) I tried to take advantage of flanking rules, and was met with puzzled looks in exchange. Once I realized the amount of structure and flow that the GM and his wife wanted to impose on the game, I immediately tried to buck it and shake it off. Nobody was arguing and we all had some fun, but it was awkward and we weren’t invited back. For a long time, I thought that the fault lay with him for being a newer GM, reasoning that if they were able to play at my “level” that we would have gotten along just fine. Basically, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

How people have the balls to listen to Posehn, Oswalt, Agee, and co. playing an RPG for their amusement and say "God, L2P newbs" I'll never understand.

Fast forward to today and I’m a little wiser and more experienced, and I can see now the mistakes I made. RPG players are, for the most part, a more accepting lot than gamer community at large, but we still have our issues. The people that play online through Twitch or Youtube could probably tell you about the worst of them, namely the need to explain that the way you’re playing your roleplaying game is somehow wrong, and the way I’m doing it is right. Brian Posehn’s Nerd Poker crew get a lot of this since his players learned to play in 2^nd edition and have essentially kept the skill system from that game in their 4^th and 5^th edition games. They say up front that they don’t play the rules as written in the book, not because it’s better but just because that’s what they know and don’t want to have to learn something different. And yet, you can tell from the occasional mentions on the show that nerds are still emailing them with metaphorical “push-up-the-glasses-and-tell-them-actually-you’re-doing-it-wrong” BS constantly. This idea of Wrongbadfun is weirdly pervasive amongst RPGers, and I’d be lying if I said I don’t still have a twinge of it today, but I’m working on it. I realize now, looking back, that I was just as bad when I went to those people’s Wheel of Time game. So what if I didn’t typically play the same style of game that they did? Why should they have to adapt to what I liked? They wanted to hang out with Rand al’Thor and relive the feelings they got from reading the books, not tactically dismantle an ambush by skillfully maneuvering miniatures around on a map. What right did I have to show up in their house and try to yuck their yum? Truth be told, the player I am today would have been right there with them (but I’d still be trying to set his tent on fire. Rand needs to lighten up.)

This is a lesson I’ve tried to adapt with the game I’m perpetually trying to start with my “not-so-into-RPGs” kids. They’re new to table top gaming, and similarly disinterested in rules crunch. I’ve essentially started from a full-fledged RPG system and, over time, cut it down over every iteration to try and find something that will get out of the way and let them just PLAY. My current effort is using one of the most minimalistic systems I’ve ever seen, a game designed for kids by Monte Cook Games called No Thank You, Evil that only has four stats and resolves everything with a d6 roll. I’m trying to run them through a version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight from the Dragonlance setting, but if it goes somewhere else that’s alright, too. My girls’ characters are an archer who, after we finished character design, ended up blind from a goblin ambush and a dancer who fights with rainbow colored energy whips, a far cry from the much more traditional Tanis Half-Elven and Raistlin Majere for whom the module was originally written. We didn’t get a chance to actually run through the first session before they left for the summer, but when my turn comes around to pick what we’re doing on family Friday night, they’ll be headed for the Inn of the Last Home. Hopefully I’ll be a good enough GM to get out of their way and let them play the game they want, not the one I want them to play. 

Family Vacation to Castle Ravenloft Pt 1: Welcome to Barovia, Here's A Dead Body

*blows dust off the blog*

Last spring, I tried an experiment on with my family. I'm an avid roleplaying gamer, having played D&D since I was in high school. I have kids that enjoy playing games with me and always want to play more. The games they play are often not particularly fun after the first few times (Beat the Parents being one example that springs to mind.) I should share my passion for roleplaying games with them, I thought. And so, inspired by this blog, I started my kids off on the hobby. I kit-bashed together an easy to run system that resembled 5th Edition D&D and Castles and Crusades' bastard love child, and we rolled up some characters.

I tried very hard to point them towards the simpler classes, and they of course ignored me. Lilly the at the time 10 year old picked out a bard, and I had to then scramble to make bards cool enough that she wouldn't get bored and quit. Sage the 8 year old made a druid, and I suddenly got a headache figuring out how to explain Vancian magic to someone who hasn't even gotten to fractions yet in math class (answer: spell points represented with glass beads!) My wife even slapped together a halfling rogue for when she was with us, and they were off for their first adventure. I've liked Skaven since I first encountered them in Blood Bowl, so there was a pack of ratmen burning down a farmhouse and generally being jerks to a kid and his dog. The party dispatched the rats, saved the day, acquired the dog, and that was the end of it for about 6 months. The kids leave to stay with their Bio-Dad over the summer and they started going to a local play club on the night when it worked best for us to play, so the campaign went into indefinite hold.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, Sage asked me when we would play "that game with the minis again" (Author's Note: insert image of Gary Gygax facepalming here.) I hadn't prompted her, though I had always kind of regretted that the game hadn't taken off. I told her "Well, depending on how you and your sister behave, maybe we can try Friday night." She seemed satisfied with this (she usually is) and I was left with trying to figure out what to run for them. I'm a busy guy, and I run other games, so I didn't want something that was going to require a ton of prep time for me. Additionally, it needed to be something I really enjoyed which I knew could grab their attention and hold it, because gaming for younger kids can have unique challenges (Pro-tip: keep your sessions short. Their attention spans are not going to stay for three-hour long marathons.) The solution was, of course, to throw my family into Ravenloft.

Because I am a loving and kind step-father.

Wait, wait, come back. Look, I know this setting is one of the most polarizing in all of RPG history. The people that like Ravenloft love it, and everybody else hates it. I am well aware of this fact. However, I am also aware that the REASON most people hate Ravenloft is because most DM's that ran campaigns in it just took it as an opportunity to be dicks to their players with the justification that "Well, the Dark Lord has absolute power here, so bad stuff happens. Deal with it." I am not that guy (anymore.) I love Ravenloft because I've loved the Gothic period since I read Frankenstein for Academic Decathlon in high school (god, this is a nerdy paragraph) and I especially love Gothic Horror. Fans of the Dread Realms have kind of always felt like a maniacal dedicated cult, and I count myself among their number. I've been in a Ravenloft game in one form or another for pretty-much the last decade and a half. Yes, it plagiarizes constantly from other literature.  Yes, one has to walk a very fine line to keep the players from falling into hopelessness because everything gets so dark. And yes, there are things I'll probably have to tone down for kids. But I6 is and always will be my favorite module, ever, bar none. The castle is amazing. The maps are amazing. And the villain is just that right combination of bully, monster, and tragic figure to continuously inspire me and infuriate players. But most of all, I KNOW Strahd. I never have to stop and think "What would he do in this situation," because I've run him so many times he's like a second skin to me. This, then, would be how I would keep myself from going crazy trying to be ready from week to week, and would hopefully be interesting to the kids and Jen as well. The fact that we were starting in October was just icing on the cake.

Sweet, pumpkin flavored cake. Possibly with pumpkin spice. And horror.

And so, on a dark and stormy (I guess it was just cloudy, but go with me) Friday night, my old vinyl gaming mat was unrolled and Acizia the Gnome Bard, Ariela the Human Druid, and Rascal the Farm Dog got lost in the mist while searching for kidnapped farmers. They soon stumbled upon the wrought iron gates that marked the border to Barovia, and felt the same chill as thousands of PCs before them as they screeched open on their own and swung closed behind them. And, yes, they promptly found a dead body with a message warning them not to go any further towards town, which they ignored because they are adventurers. They travelled down the road, finding a pumpkin farm being ransacked by Zombies while a halfling with an odd Germanic accent cursed them for it (Lilly has been shouting "Mein Poompkins!" every time I mention D&D since). The zombies seemed to be loading pumpkins of all things onto the wagon which THE HEROES HAD BEEN TRACKING ALL ALONG. They charged into the fight, being joined by the pumpkin-farming halfling's nephew Keill (my wife's character. She missed the first game so I thought I could introduce her here. Plus it will be useful to have a local in the party to "know things" later.) The fight got a little desperate, and Acizia's attempt to commander the wagon failed when she realized that the horse attached to the front was also among the ranks of the Living Dead and refused to move. Finally the last of the zombies and their ratman handler fell beneath the party's weapons, at which point Zombie Horse decided it was going to start bolting at top speed towards town. I gave Acizia a chance to roll an intelligence check before bailing out, which she failed, and she managed to jump clear to safety before being hauled off to who-knows-where in the cart. It was only afterward, when the party was greeting Otto the Farmer and learning that they were a long, LONG way from where they started, that the unfortunate gnome bard remembered that the farmers they were trying to rescue were tied up in the back of that cart, which was now sprinting away towards the village at top speed.

Welcome to Ravenloft.

Numeneralance: An Introduction

It all started with a box of books.

I don’t know who the previous owner was. Mom said it was a coworker whose son had gone off to college and didn’t want them anymore. I also can’t remember why they thought to give them to me, since I can’t recall having read any fantasy novels prior to this (I was pretty much a through-and-through Sci-Fi kid.) But, for whatever reason, when I was in fifth or sixth grade I received a cardboard treasure chest full of paperback novels from  the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Sword of Shannara series. The Realms stuff I could give and take over the years to come. I never actually read the Shannara stuff. But man, did I fall headlong into Dragonlance. Whoever this kid was, he had managed to collect pretty much the whole run up to that point in time and, being the child I was, I decided to start with them in chronological order in the storyline, rather than which books were published first.

Meaning I read this first. I do not recommend this strategy to others.

Miraculously, a novel about Sturm and Kitiara flying to the moon in a gnomish airship didn’t scare me off (though I can remember seriously wondering what the hell was going on as I read it.) I went on through Kendermore and the novel with Caramon and Raistlin (this series is now considered apocryphal, which is probably a good thing) before finally coming to the Dragonlance chronicles, the story of the War of the Lance that really launched the whole series and created a franchise, and that was all she wrote. I was a goner, committed to life to this setting and the characters therein. I endured the Summer Flame years. I bought the 10^th Anniversary rerelease of the modules in second edition, wondering what this Saga card game nonsense was. I hung on through the War of Souls, wondering why Weiss and Hickman couldn’t come up with a new ultimate antagonist rather than just having it be Takhissis over and over again. And when the Age of Mortals came around and Weiss put together a publishing company to do a brand-new series of modules set in the current era, I was at the front of the line to get them and run them with my group. That campaign is, to this day, the greatest I’ve ever had the privilege to play a role in, and the stories from those games still come up around the table just as often as the old gems about Orc and Pie or Paladins vs. Gazebos.

I’m a Dragonlance fan, is what I’m saying.

Anyway, one of the things that never quite landed for me from the beginning was the idea that this setting, as initially conceived, was to have two main themes. One was the idea that Krynn was supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world. The Cataclysm happened some 350 years prior to the start of the Chronicles, ushering in an era of darkness that was to have disrupted society and torn down civilization, opening the door for the Dragon Armies to attempt to conquer the known world while mankind was scattered and defenseless. This never felt very true to me. Now, admittedly, part of the failing came from the fact that I didn’t read Autumn Twilight until much later (strangely, it was missing from the box) which means I didn’t get the discovery of the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth or the stories with the plainsmen or the tree village of Solace. But still it almost felt like, as the authors passed into the greater storyline, it felt like they set that aside and focused more on the romanticism and the epic storytelling, which certainly seems to have worked out for them. Strangely, Weiss and Hickman would go on to basically perform two more cataclysms (three, if you count the death of Paladine and Takhissis at the end of the War of Souls,) and it still just felt like that particular theme was never fully explored.

Enter Numenera.

Most of you haven’t heard of this game, I’m going to go ahead and guess. Numenera was released by Monte Cook games last year, and is a campaign set in a very distant future (the Ninth World) where civilization has basically risen and fallen eight times previously. The current humans live among the leftovers of these previous ages in a world that has literally been shaped from the molecular level by ancient technology. They have basically become a medieval society, and this creates one of the major features of the campaign setting since, as the Arthur C. Clarke puts it, any sufficiently advanced technology becomes indistinguishable from magic. Adventurers in Numenera wander through ruins of the bygone ages, exploring weird tech and bizarre creatures that are so alien they seem like they can only have been the result of magic.

There’s a lot of things I enjoy about the Numenera game. The system is simple, light, and intuitive, which is a breath of fresh air from the last several years of rules heavy Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, and various iterations of D&D. I played it for the first time shortly after the release in a campaign run by an enthusiast who had jumped on early and convinced the rest of us to give it a try. I was a bit skeptical at first, to be honest, but I knew Monte Cook games from back in the day and his name carries a lot of cache and value with me. The campaign was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the “weirdness” of the story and the feeling of discovering ancient, mysterious leftovers from a previous age.

This particular game was played over Google +, and one of the problems with this format is that, when your character isn’t currently involved in the action, your attention can tend to drift. It happened that my bookshelf was right next to my computer desk, and as I would sit there waiting for my turn in initiative I would see my unused Dragons of Autumn, Winter, and Spring modules from Margaret Weiss publishing sitting there. I thumbed through them, feeling some sort of odd draw pulling me back into the story. I started rereading the novels, and suddenly one day things clicked for me. I could bring that post-apocalyptic feeling back to Dragonlance by putting it in the Ninth World!

Since then, we’ve played through the first chapter, with the heroes recovering knowledge of the true gods from Xak Tsaroth (prior to their flooding it) and have been arrested in the destroyed ruins of their hometown prior to being sent to an enemy fortress for slavery. The adaptation process, to be honest, has been even simpler than I anticipated, assisted by the fact that I’m so inspired right now that it doesn’t feel like work when I have to sit down and do the GM prep ahead of time.

Really, the secret is just to work in a hint of mysterious tech in place of “magic” at various significant points. The blue crystal staff was replaced with a gem that emitted a hardlight staff at will. The elves and dwarves are replaced with the Varjellen and Lattimoor, respectively, while the other races are the result of mutations that occurred from radioactive fallout after the fiery mountain fell on Istar. When the PCs are thrown into prison cells that were on wheels and pulled by horses in the books, in this the cages have mechanical arachnid legs to walk there. The Cataclysm needed to have happened within recent enough history that people knew of it, and some of the abandoned ruins needed to have been built within known history (like the aforementioned Xak Tsaroth,) so I guess the Numeneralance world is sort of a “Nine and a half-th world,” with some of the ruins and mysteries left over from before the Cataclysm while others are from much further back.

And then, of course, there’s the dragons. On one hand, dragons actually kind of fit with Numenera. They’re clearly the result of some pretty unnatural evolution, since a giant reptilian winged monster that breathes fire is not something that comes about through nature. On the other hand, with experienced roleplayers the word dragon immediately pulls up images of Smaug, or at least that one red dragon that ate your whole D&D party when you were 14. They make a lair on piles of coins. They kidnap princesses. All the usual tropes come flooding back, and things that have that kind of preconceived baggage attached are the enemy of creating the sense of wonder and mystery it requires for a game to work. For a time, I struggled as to just how to get the point across that, rather than being classical dragons, these guys are bio-engineered horrors from a bygone age that are like nothing you’ve ever seen.

Then Michael Bay came along and gave me an assist.

The big robot dinosaur is the important bit. Not Optimus Prime. Though if I could find a way to work him in, I think I would ascend to some sort of Geek nirvana.

I posted this picture to my PCs, and I think it got the point across. These ain’t your daddy’s dragons. These don’t belong in the world, and when you discover that they don’t really care about treasure, and might have been around for even longer than the gods, it shouldn’t fly in the face of your preconceived notions. You shouldn’t have preconceived notions. Furthermore, their minions, the Draconians, could frankly be run as written since they’re so bizarre that they fit pretty well with the general weirdness of the ninth-world anyways. After all, what's stranger than bipedal man-sized lizard men that have been modified so that, when they die, some of their bodies turn to stone while others become a pool of acid or flat-out explode?

The game is well underway at this point, and I’m excited to share some details of it as we go along. I’ve got a few other ideas for pieces of the story to look at in detail, so I’ll put together articles on the subject down the line. For now, I welcome your comments. Every week I’m excited for Thursday night, and I’m glad to share. 

Review of Steven King's "Desperation."

Desperation by Stephen King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The opening to this book is truly terrifying, with the author clearly having a moment when he'd been pulled over and realized that we are truly helpless at that moment, and a police officer who chooses to take that opportunity to violate your rights or cause you harm is free to do just that with no real possibility of retribution. Officer Entragian is truly chilling in his casual, mad violence. However, as the mystery of what's going on in Desperation becomes more and more unraveled, the story seems to lose a little of its grip on the reader. There are still frightening moments, and the idea of simply seeing the stone statues is enough to warp the minds of Steve and Cynthia slowly and insidiously was effective. Some of the horror of the snakes and spiders in town were effective. I think the biggest problem was the unexplained presence of a full-on prophet in the form of David Carver, with Deus Ex Machina literally coming down to save the characters in buildup and during the climax. I think the book could have ended about 20-40 pages earlier (was it necessary to do the thing with the smoke cloud?) and having Tak completely neutered at the end after obligatorily killing off David's father seemed to sort of hinder the poignancy of the ending. A good book, particularly at the beginning before you know what's going on, but some clunkiness at the end prevents it from being great. Now to go read something a bit less horrible.


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Goodreads review of Moby Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Finished Moby Dick last night. I didn't realize how much time Melville spends just wandering off the story to do an essay on whale classification, whaling methods, or even various types of rope. Some of the chapters are written more like a play than a novel. One chapter is literally a paragraph of one of the harpooneers singing a song to try and make the thunder stop in a typhoon.

It's a tough read, but the beginning when Ishmael makes friends with Queequeg (something that is basically ignored at the end) and the final 60 pages when Ahab finally moves toward his fate are the reason this book is a "classic."

Until I reached that last stretch I was literally only reading just because I had made it this far and wasn't going to be defeated by it. The irony of this is not lost on me.


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Almost…A Great Show

In mid-November, Fox premiered a new science fiction program called Almost Human, a story of a police officer in the near future paired up with an android partner. Detective Jon Kennex, played by Karl Urban, has a long history of distrust for the standard issue models of androgynous, emotionless android that the rest of the force utilizes from a traumatic firefight earlier in his career. As such, when his partner is replaced with an older, decommissioned model named Dorian (Michael Ealy) their initial friction is overcome by the fact that Dorian’s model was designed to emulate human emotion and behavior, described as having a type of synthetic soul. Together, the two take on a case of the week, investigating crimes oriented around the rapidly growing technology of the age.

The show is essentially a science fiction police procedural. In an era without much in the way of strong sci-fi on television, and having been a fan of Urban’s from Lord of the Rings and his portrayal of Judge Dredd, I gave this show a shot when it premiered and have kept up with it since. I’m not going to lie, though, it got off to kind of a shaky start. Urban’s character isn’t exactly breaking new ground being a cranky, hard as nails detective who resists new things. You know everything you need to know about him from essentially the first moments of the pilot, and he has not significantly developed since. The real gem of the show is Ealy, if only for how human his portrayal of Dorian is. Far from following the stiff, robotic delivery of Commander Data from Star Trek, if one was unaware of the show’s premise and simply jumped into the middle of an episode it would be possible not to realize he is playing an AI until you see the glowing lines on the side of his face when he is performing a computational process or accessing a server (one of the coolest effects on the show, by the way.) The rest of the cast is functional but not impressive, mostly from not having anything particularly impressive or interesting to do in the stories thus far besides being conveniently present when needed to shuffle the plot along.

Once past the pilot, the early episodes suffered from some less than inspiring plotting and technique. The fourth episode in particular ended on a very rough note, obviously having been rewritten and dubbed over with some bad ADR to change a scene where Detective Kennex shoots a traitorous Captain from another precinct, obviously trying to soften it from cold-blooded murder to more of a vigilante justice situation but, in doing so, frankly hurting the episode and taking away a chance for some interesting character development for John.

I came close to moving on, but what has kept me watching is the intriguing science fiction premises presented in a number of the more recent episodes, including witnesses who testify in court cases via hologram projector, “intimate robot companions,” and a man’s clones committing murders while he is in custody and, in doing so, damaging the case against him and nearly freeing him. The episode “Arrhythmia” is possibly one of the most interesting in this regard, presenting a case of illegal bio-mechanical replacement organs fitted with timers to ensure continual payments from the unsuspecting patients, with a sub-plot where Dorrian finds another android of the same model which has been forced out of police work. These give me hope that, as the series’ writers get their feet under them, this show has some real potential for interesting stories down the line.