The situation is different if the empty wave bullet on its way “kills” an “empty wave” cat, see Fig. 3.
John George, who scorned foreign delicacies, had been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf’s ears, or pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant’s head as a signal for more. He was not a confirmed drunkard; his brain when he was sober was perfectly clear, and he drank through habit and good fellowship rather than weakness. But he drank too much and too often. Later on it became the fashion to say that whenever he made an inept political decision that he had been far gone at the time, and the dispatches of one ambassador at least are punctuated with such remarks as, ‘He began to be somewhat heated with wine’, and 'He seemed to me to be very drunk’. It made diplomacy difficult.
Quite mindless beings could “in principle” harbor memes – teenagers, for
instance. (Joke)
Consider a fictional world wherein mathematics developed hundreds of years ahead of physics. Then it would have been in principle possible for a character to exist – call him “von Newton” – that invented an
axiomatized operator-based Koopmanian classical physics before Newton came on the
scene.
gallifreyanimmigrant asked: Thoughts on the latest episode of Legion (Episode 5)?
Ha, I actually haven’t been able to watch it because I just moved and hadn’t gotten internet at my new place yet! But I’ll watch it tonight or tomorrow
Having watched it … fun episode, but not much there to comment on?
A lot of action and characters throwing their powers at each other. Which is kind of inevitable when a show sets up a bunch of superhumans with cool powers who hate each other, but in this case the powers are super enough that one expects Mutually Assured Destruction to apply, and indeed it did, and now everyone’s like “oh no, pressing the figurative nuclear launch buttons was a terrible mistake, we must go back in time to undo it! But wait, is that … like … okay?” So it feels more like a stepping stone that moves the time travel plot along than a set of events that can be coherently reacted to on their own.
As I said earlier, the show is clearly trying to use time travel ethics to further its existing themes, but its attempts have been sort of muddled. If anything this episode muddles them further, since it introduces a disaster no one is able to just take in stride. David’s willingness to meddle with time is clearly supposed to be a bad thing – that much would be clear even if it didn’t literally conjure up “time demons”! – but it wasn’t what got everyone into this mess (again, when you have a bunch of superhumans with cool powers who hate each other…) and it looks like it will get them out of it, if perhaps into something equally bad or worse.
So it feels like we’re going through the motions of a time travel drama without that drama being sufficiently linked to the pre-existing story. “The show’s about time travel now! Time travel is cool.”
There were some moments that felt very “!” at the time (the Lenny moment, the Syd moment) but don’t seem so much so now that it’s fairly clear (if not certain) that this will all get relegated to a doomed offshoot timeline. I mean, every action is significant insofar as it illuminates character, and insofar as people (fictionally) experience it and its consequences, but they still feel like striking chess moves in a game that’s now going to be rewound because the ref caught someone breaking the rules.
It was interesting to see explicit nods to SK’s untrustworthiness and especially his manipulation of Melanie, but then it turned out they were just being made instrumentally to further a gambit in the superhuman chess game. I guess this at least establishes a lower bound on how oblivious the writers could be about said issues? Not that I really thought they could be totally oblivious, but one never knows with these writers. One continues not to know. Three more episodes.
Edit: oh! and the multiple personalities thing is coming to fruition now, I guess. It comes with the source material, and could potentially be taken in lots of interesting directions, but so far it’s only been used to illustrate ordinary kinds of internal conflict and to signpost upticks in “””insanity””” and I don’t expect much more to come of it than that.
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last modified 2003-03-13 01:40:56
“Where Discourse is our Main Course”