Sami on Childhood's End 1.3

Childhood's End was a three-night special event starting on Monday 12-14-15 and closing on Wednesday 12-16-15.

It's been a whole night, and I'm still salty about this miniseries, and since everyone seems to agree that it's pretty close to the book, I'm now salty about the book, too.

I like Arthur C Clarke as a person, and I like most of what I've read from him. I think he had amazingly good ideas and really wanted to do well for the world, and move us into the future. But this story? This is fatalistic and pessimistic, and the second and third parts didn't feel, tonally, like the first. I really liked the first. I feel really let down by the rest.

So. Jennifer-the-demon-queen is now several years old, and she's controlling all the Children of the Corn, everyone born since the aliens survived, apparently. Karellan shows up and tells everyone that there will be no more children--to the point where a woman who was already pregnant wakes up suddenly and finds that her baby has disappeared from inside her body, and she's the only one in the story who has a problem with that. He also says the children don't belong to us anymore, and we're to just peacefully live out the rest of our days because humanity is obsolete.

I have so many problems with that.

And then the kids all go all Rapture-imagery and literally float up into the sky. Out of the whole world, only one parent holds onto their kid and so only one kid stays, Jennifer's older brother Tom. But he doesn't stay long, he doesn't help a single person understand what's going on or make sense of it, and then he flies off into the sky, too.

So now the world has no kids, and everyone loses hope, and the only person in the world trying to do anything about it is Milo--and he makes a dumb choice to go to the hellish homeworld, even though it'll take a hundred years to get there and back, almost, since they're traveling at near-light-speed, and by the time he gets home he's the last human on earth. There's only minutes left to live. The aliens let him have Rachel back, but she's frozen and she shatters all grossly, and there's no debate or anything about why they thought that would be a good idea. He goes home and watches as the world is dismantled by a still-child-shaped Jennifer who is consuming the world...for whatever reason. 

They say she's a direct line to the Overmind that controls creation, that all the kids are now god. They say nothing about why Humans were used as breeding stock to make more god if there was already god, why they couldn't have uplifted the whole species, or why, now, the conduit needs to destroy the world. It just happens. The story ends with none of the motivations clarified.

Meanwhile, they also let Ricky die without ever saying why he had to, though he did finally reject the ghost of his first wife and choose his second who was still alive, for whatever that even meant in the end.

And the last thing the aliens do is preserve Milo's memory of music as a testament to Earth...after it's been destroyed and he's died and everything but those animals they took home is gone. 

Seriously, guys, cold comfort at best.

How was any of this helping the humans to evolve? Why did no one really question what was going on, even in the end? Why was death and suicide the only answer? Why did the aliens not even try to explain anything, why did no one ask them to, and why did neither side spend much time trying to understand the other? Why did the only people who wanted answers get portrayed as wrong and probably evil, and were given only angry and flimsy motivations, and then were never seen again after the first episode?

The whole thing turned out so fatalistically pointless, that I'm glad it was only three nights, because damn. And this is considered Great Scifi. No thanks.

I will say that it was gorgeously done; the ships and the aliens and everything else were all fantastic. The worldbuilding was detailed and neat looking. But scifi abhors a Utopia, and it was all lies and no one even cared, so why should I?

What did you guys think? Am I missing some vital detail that will reframe the whole thing? Share in the comments, or come talk to me on Twitter!

• Episode Two
• Episode One

None. I'm just really annoyed and disappointed.

Sami on Childhood's End 1.2

Childhood's End is a three-part mini series airing between Dec 14-16 2015. This was part 2.

Guys, the show about lost me this episode. I love me some scifi, but I really really dislike when scifi gets itself into a philosophical debate with religion--there is literally no way to win, no way to prove either side, and it winds up being a bunch of jerks being jerks at each other.

That's what happened this ep.

There's another time-jump, and now it's several more years in the future. Milo is a scientist in a world where science, as they keep saying, is dying*, and he's not giving up inquiry. The newspaper people are gone, replaced by a groundskeeper who happens to have a wife about to give birth to a demon-baby named Jennifer of all things, and a rich guy who has been collecting up animal samples for an Overlord zoo that is of course not at all creepy, despite being totally creepy. The girl who was leading the youth-faith group before is now an adult councilor (also a dying breed, as they keep telling us), brought in because Jennifer-the-demon's big brother keeps having night terrors and screaming fits and tossing people across the room with telekinesis.

And here's where it loses me.

A kid telling stories of visiting a hell-like place and developing weird force-like powers is not enough of a concern for a family also having a demon baby that took them by surprise because the dad was sleeping on the couch the night it was conceived. He's a little like "um, what's going on?", but he's not really seeming scared or disturbed, and he's not doing research or looking for others with the same problem, or seeking advice other than sometimes talking to Jones and sometimes kicking her out of his house. And the mom is not concerned at all, and spends the whole middle of the episode being totally fine with two creepy demon kids.

Even after Jones's bent-up cross (that almost strangled her on it's own) seems to fend off the alien pod as if they really were the actual demons they look like they are.

Meanwhile, Ricky-the-farmer, who was fired from being the liaison, is dying of some terrible unknown disease, and the aliens aren't doing anything to save him, despite all he did for them. He's also still having encounters with his dead first wife, despite it being like almost twenty years since she first showed up, and that was already five years after she died and he was engaged to someone else. Ellie isn't having any of this, but she doesn't seem able to do much about it, and her whole story is hinged around her wanting kids like everyone else has, and them not being able to. Which brings back Karellan.

See, he made Ricky sterile specifically so they wouldn't have kids, because he knows what's coming next, and he didn't want his only human friend to suffer whatever that is...but he doesn't tell them what it is, nor did he ever warn them or do anything about it other than sterilizing the dude. Which is enough to convince Jones, who has made friends with Ellie, that he needs to die.

She shoots him, and she's totally not fried by a pod like the guy who shot Milo was, and he's not healed by one like Milo was; it takes Ricky giving Karellan his only cure to save him, and Jones jumps off a building because she's lost her faith--even though she has wrestled her life with the meaning of her mother doing the same thing, and it's dumb.

But back at the totally-not-creepy-why-do-you-keep-saying-that Animal Collection Place, a new room with a Ouija board device builds itself in minutes, and the mother of Jennifer-the-demon-baby uses it to communicate with someone by way of the most obvious tower of light ever. That allows Milo to decipher a letter he'd been missing and decode something vague that leads him to studying demonology texts**, and he figures out where the Overlord homeworld is.

That stuff was kind of cool, but there was still that icky mingling of science and religion with no clear stance on either.

This whole chapter felt...diverted. There were no free-the-earth things, and there had been no resolution to that story in Part 1. There was less than no indication of what any of this demon-baby stuff was. Karellan seemed to be playing both sides of the things happening, but neither side was clear enough to tell what was meant to be happening, and he wasn't around enough to make it clear that he even had a plan.

And...Okay, you know when all the way through Lost, we were told that it wasn't supernatural, no matter what it looked like, that there was a scientific explanation, and then at the end it actually WAS supernatural and there was no science? It's feeling like that. It's like it was set up like an alien invasion, when really it was Rosemary's Baby, and no matter how cool it looked, it's a disappointment because that's not the story they said they were telling.

There's still a third part, and so there's two more hours to bring it back around to where the story makes sense--where people are acting like people and not prop devices, where the aliens are actually aliens and not arguments with god given faces, and where there's a point to this wandering middle. I'm hoping it comes back. I really liked part one, and I didn't like part two, like, almost at all. I want to like part three--that's the one that will decide whether the whole six hours were worth it, so it's got to be good!

What did you guys think of it? Am I missing something? Share in the comments, or come talk to us on Twitter!

• Episode One: The Overlords

*I don't like that idea. I don't believe that just because we met an advanced species, all the scientists in the world will just go "whelp, I guess I'm unneeded now" and go become gardeners or something, and never even try to catch up. The aliens will know stuff they don't, so the logical and scientific thing to do would be to fill in the gaps, answer the questions you've been chasing, and then pick up where the aliens left off and keep going. The show is unclean about whether that's what happened or whether the Overlords actively shut down the whole process, but it's acting like it's the first one despite one half-assed mention of the second, and it's dumb. We have a scientist main character; SHOW science being systematically shut down the way you showed war and inequality being shut down!

**Not even looked at scientifically. Ugh,

Sami on Childhood's End 1.1

Childhood's End is a three-part miniseries that started Monday Dec 14 at 8pm on Syfy.

It looks like Syfy has remembered that they're actually supposed to be the go-to channel for science fiction and other speculative TV, and they've kicked it off with a really awesome night of new programming. First up was Pt 1 of Childhood's end.

At the very beginning, they mentioned how the book this story was based on influenced a lot of SF that came after it, and they seem to have decided to give back by visually echoing a lot of that scifi that came after. There's the ships-coming-through-the-clouds like in Independence Day. There's a Monolith-looking thing like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, there's the farmhouse from Signs (and probably also any number of other movies). And it's all really well done--the effects are stunning!

Here's how it went:

In 2016, everything sucks. And then huge alien ships come down and hover over world capitals and tell us--through the images of our dead loved ones, which is not creepy at all--that they're not invading, they're fixing. Everything that's wrong will now be right, and everything they declare wrong--war, pollution, violence, illness, etc--is all over, full stop, no question. The militaries are shut down. Diseases are cured in one fell swoop. Saudi Arabia's oil pipeline is closed and refitted to carry much more vital water into irrigation systems being set up in the desert. The world's navies are refitted to take all the wasted food from the developed world to hungry people in the developing world.

All very neat and tidy.

But the aliens won't let anyone see what they look like. And people in power don't like turning over that power. And some people just don't trust anything ever.

There's a group that wants to free the world. (and creates propaganda videos the show plays like regular commercials, which makes the drastic number of actual commercials in these two hours a little easier to look at)

There's a news magnate that "would rather see the world go down the toilet under our control than flourish under theirs".

There's Ricky-the-farmer who is meant to be the intermediary between the Overlords (not at all intimidating) and the humans, even though he's just one guy and no one really believes him. The aliens won't give him a lot of actual information and keep taking his dead wife's image to talk to him, which upsets his now-almost-wife.

There's a very religious girl who talks against the aliens because when her mom saw the ships she decided that means there's no god and committed suicide. There's a lot of religious discussion in the middle of the show.

And there's a kid in a wheelchair who is a genius, but who is also really poor, with a druggie single mother and a bunch of poverty and violence around him. A drug dealer shoots him for sticking up for his mom, and the aliens heal him--which sets off the free-the-Earth people because they also kill the drug dealer because their stance on violence is there won't be any or else.

Then, fifteen years later, when everything is green and clean and people don't need to work for a living because a living is provided, when everyone is wearing the scifi-standard taupe to show that everyone is equal*, the Overlords decide that humans are ready to see what they look like.

So of course they look like the devil.

All in all, the show is pretty awesome. It's made from an old story, so there's a lot of talking and not a lot of action for big chunks of the show, and people are sort of idealized--there's a sudden and complete end of wars as soon as the aliens show up, rather than panicked riots and people shooting at the sky for the first act. There would likely have been more sex and violence if this was a newer story. But there's also a lot of really cool ideas, and it's visually very neat. If Syfy is setting the bar here for the quality and content of their new shows, they have chosen a good miniseries to do it. This is actual scifi, classic and basically optimistic, even with the underlying uncertainty that these aliens showing up out of nowhere bring with them.

I haven't read the book. I'm watching live with no idea how the story goes, and so far, I'm intrigued and impressed, and both happy and excited to see what happens in part two.

How about you guys? Have you read the book? What do you think of it, whether you have or not? Tell us in the comments, or come talk to me and the girls on Twitter!


NOTES:
*I hate the idea that the future has no color. Like, ugh. What a terrible fate, visually, sartorially, and decorationally.

What the Professional Fangirls have to say about Childhood's End and The Expanse

Childhood's End:

Tweets about #childhoodsend from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

The Expanse:

Tweets about #theexpanse from:pirategirljack, OR from:sineater_danyi, OR from:kiddle, OR from:trincynna, OR from:ohgress, OR from:manisandmakeovers, OR from:acciolacquer include:retweets

Look for other talks from individual Fangirls as we all process the wonder and remember how to use our words!