The Only Winning Move

Wow do I love the Senate Republicans right about now!!! They actually managed to grow a pair and vote down the auto industry bailout. And their line of reasoning was rock solid: no government money until the UAW agrees to wages that approach sanity. Currently, you see, UAW workers earn 1.4 - 1.5 times as much per hour as Toyota workers (source). This includes benefits, etc. So there’s PLENTY of room for wage cuts. Plenty. And there’s simply no reason why US taxpayers should hand GM a pile of money for overpaying their workers and underinvesting in innovation. If Toyota makes better cars more efficiently at a lower cost to you and me, the conclusion is simple: they should be in charge of making cars.

My favorite part about the whole thing is that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are calling it “irresponsible” to pass on the bailout. You know, because the Republicans are going to “let” all these workers “lose their jobs.” Wrong place to put the blame, there, babe. It bears repeating: the UAW was offered and rejected a deal whereby they would agree to an immediate wage cut to the level of Toyota workers. It is the UAW putting American workers out of jobs by refusing to be rational - NOT CONGRESS for refusing to force taxpayers like you and me to fund GM’s mistakes.

What I want for Christmas: the biggest Chapter 11 hearings in national history. Baring that: mass unemployment in Detroit and Ontario.

(Poster courtesy of The Beast.)

Blakes 7, as I’ve said before, isn’t just a send-up of Star Trek, but it’s frequently at its best when that’s what it’s doing. No surprise, then, that I’ll be counting Season 1’s “Duel” among my top ten episodes.

This one isn’t a subtle jab so much as an outright taunting - for not only are we inverting Star Trek’s moral sensibilities like usual, we’ve actually singled out a specific episode to pick on. That episode is the first season’s Arena - you know, the one where some powerful aliens (the Metrons) decide to teach Kirk a lesson by making him fight that giant lizard bareknuckled on an empty planet. There’s enough stuff lying around to let whichever of the two is more intelligent (Kirk, of course) cobble together a cannon and kill the other. Kirk’s shot wounds but does not kill, and at the last moment Kirk declines to kill, thus demonstrating to the super-powerful aliens that put him in this jam that humanity may some day be civilized. (Any resemblance to any other episode is, naturally, entirely coincidental.)

By now this is a stock plot in science fiction. Arena was based on a short story and may well have been what started it all. I say this because in Frederick Brown’s original (1944) short story “Arena,” the Kirk analogue actually does kill the creature. Self defense, you see.

As usual, the problem with the Star Trek version is that it’s treating its morals as a luxury item. They’re not there to guide or inform or to help anyone grow so much as to flatter the viewer. Back here in reality, when a powerful alien race puts you and a murderous lizard on a planet to fight to the death, you either band together and try to find a way out, or you kill before you get killed. Only on goofy 1960s science fiction shows do things “just work out” so that you wound without killing and then have the luxury of showing off how merciful you are. The whole purpose of that ending is nothing more than ethical pornography for the viewer - so that he can pat himself on the back and say “yes, like Captain Kirk, I would have spared the giant aggressive lizard who destroyed Cestus III and Redshirt O’Herlihy and who was trying to kill me too because killing is WRONG. If only, if only the rest of humanity were as advanced as I am.”

As every 9 year old knows, killing is wrong with one glaring exception: self-defense. The only people who reach adulthood honestly believing that it’s not acceptable to kill in self defense are hippies trying to avoid the Vietnam draft - and even they don’t really mean it. It’s just a huge moral perversion to go around telling people that killing is always and under every set of circumstances wrong. People who believe that don’t survive. But that’s why the flattery works, of course. The viewer can only convince himself that he’s on a higher plane than the rest of us apes if what he’s supporting is so counterintuitive that it’s either collossally wrong or only seems so to feebler minds.

So of course in the Blakes 7 version Blake has no ethical issue with killing Travis, and the reason he spares his life is … well, complicated, but probably not based on mercy. But that’s only the beginning.

How is “Duel” an inspired improvment on “Arena?” Let me count the ways.

First, Blake is set to fight Travis, someone he conveniently is already on the run from. This is a huge improvement over it being Some Random Space Monster - since it was never really clear what the fight between the Federation and the Gorn was really about in Arena anyway. From the audience’s point of view, the Gorn were just being unreasonably hostile, and if these überpowerful Metrons that wanted so badly to teach Kirk (and the Gorn captain) a lesson in pacifism that they put him in a deathmatch (wait, wha…?) hadn’t been snoozing they surely would’ve noticed that … and just spiffied the Gorns across the galaxy or something. So good - at least now we’ve got real history and motive.

For our second neat twist, no one actually learns anything from the goofy ellaborate lesson, and indeed it’s made clear early on that the person who most needs to learn isn’t actually Blake or Travis but one of the godlike and (not-so-)morally superior aliens themselves. The whole time Blake and Travis (and Jenna and Travis’ mutoid pilot - another nice touch is that the aliens want Travis and Blake to experience the death of a friend as part of their lesson in pacifism, but of course Travis ironically doesn’t have any friends and ends up paired up with one of the Federation’s genetic slave class which he regards as a piece of equipment more than a person) are fighting, one of the pair keeps interfering to make things more violent since she apparently gets off on watching people fight. Unlike Kirk at the end of his encouner with the Gorn, Blake and Travis leave unimpressed with and unaffected by the whole ordeal.

And actually, that is rather the point not just of this episode, but indeed one of the major themes of the series: you can’t change people, not really, and you certainly can’t control them. Social engineering just doesn’t work. The entire Federation is a giant failed social engineering project - and there’s no better proof of that than that Blake is running about at all after all the mental conditioning he went through. And if these aliens’ little social engineering experiment with Blake and Travis doesn’t work either - it’s not the least because they themselves apparently haven’t learned the lesson they’re trying to teach.

This theme of control and power is introduced a bit clumsily in the space battle that opens the episode. Liberator is low on power and cornered by three Federation ships. It’s a desperate situation, so Blake resorts to the desperate measure of ramming the one of the three he thinks is Travis’ ship to get out. Where the scene is implausible is that Blake actually consults with the crew. Probably when time is this much of the essence you just tell them to trust you and ram full speed ahead - but never mind, because we get this brilliant bit of dialogue out of the confrontation between Blake and Avon:

BLAKE Have you got any better ideas? [Violent impact. As Blake and Avon reel back, Avon clutches Blake protectively, perhaps to steady him]
AVON As a matter of fact, no I haven’t.
BLAKE Does that mean you agree?
AVON Do I have a choice?
BLAKE Yes.
AVON Then I agree. [Lets go of Blake]

Maybe not the time for Avon’s wit (and it’s certainly out of character for Avon to be arguing about this - he’s the rational one who should have seen the merits in this plan even before Blake did), but the point is a good one. You can’t “agree” to anything you don’t have a choice about. And indeed, we’ve already seen this earlier in Giroc’s (Giroc is one of the two aliens who put Travis and Blake in the “arena” to fight) complaining about how she had no choice in becoming “The Keeper” (whatever that is). It comes full circle in Travis’ unsuccessful taunting of the mutoid pilot about her original identity. You see, mutoids are people who have been converted into cyborgs - or something. This one, like most of them, remembers nothing of her past and has been completely reprogrammed. But Travis knows who she was before and during some down time during the battle clearly hopes to tease her with the knowledge. He’s visibly disappointed when not only doesn’t she beg him to reveal her old identity, she’s not even the slightest bit interested.

MUTOID Memory is an encumbrance. All trace of it is removed and with it all trace of identity.
TRAVIS And it doesn’t concern you?
MUTOID Why should it? That identity doesn’t exist, even in the central computers.
TRAVIS Yes it does. I know who you were. Your name was Keyeira, Keyeira.
MUTOID Keyeira.
TRAVIS You were very beautiful, very much admired. Shall I go on?
MUTOID As you wish.
TRAVIS [Obviously disappointed] This doesn’t interest you at all, does it?
MUTOID How could it?

Which reinforces the theme - that there’s a paradox in the very idea of wielding power. No one thinks of having power over a computer: it’s just a machine. For Travis to have real power over this mutoid that obeys his every command it too would have to be human. And so he is disappointed to learn that it is indeed just a machine. It doesn’t resent his orders in any way - and there’s no fun in lording power over something that exists to be controlled! The irony of power is that one can only enjoy it when he doesn’t completely have it. Travis’ total control over the mutoid is meaningless because it is total.

The reason Blake is the good guy is that he understands this. He’s already made the decision to ram Travis’ ship, and Avon already knows that it’s the right choice. It’s still important to both Blake and Avon that it be clear that Avon is acting voluntarily and not under orders. As Avon wryly points out - one cannot “agree” if he hasn’t been given a choice.

But the critical scene in the whole episode - giving us what is probably the best line of the whole series - is that scene where Avon decides to go to sleep while everyone else is watching Blake on the viewscreen. This was satisfying on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.

First, there’s the silliness of the fact that they’re allowed to watch Blake and Travis fight at all. To what end? That was an even harder question to answer in Arena. Even if we deign to buy this hugely implausible story that some demigods whisked Kirk and this Gorn to an isolated planet to let them fight it out hoping that the winner would somehow learn that killing was baaaad, there’s really but really just really no explanation for these aliens’ need to show the whole thing like a movie on the Enterprise’s viewscreen. Nor is it any more plausible here in Blakes 7 - but Avon at least gets that. It gets dark on Blake’s planet, and he and Jenna climb a tree to get some rest. Watching from the Liberator’s control center, Avon promptly announces that he is going for a kip as well.

VILA Have you thought of another plan?
AVON Yes. I’m going to get some sleep.
VILA How can you sleep with all this happening?
AVON With all what happening? Blake is sitting up in a tree, Travis is sitting up in another tree. Unless they’re planning to throw nuts at one another, I don’t see much of a fight developing before it gets light.

HA! But here’s the clincher:

GAN You’re never involved, are you Avon? You ever cared for anyone?
VILA Except yourself?
AVON I have never understood why it should be necessary to become irrational in order to prove that you care, or, indeed, why it should be necessary to prove it at all. [Exits]

Hear, hear! Point, set, match to Avon (as usual). There’s nothing they can do to help Blake, and in any case there’s nothing going on. Why NOT sleep? And why, indeed, does Avon have to prove he cares? There’s the dagger in the heart of the vanity that was Star Trek. In order to prove humanity’s “civilized,” Kirk has to do somthing as irrational and sentimental as refusing to kill in self defense? Really? What kind of dope-smoking aliens are these? More to the point - would Kirk make the same gesture if he didn’t know the aliens were watching the whole thing? Is it all just for show? We never know - but we do know it’s stupid whatever the motive. Having to go to irrational lengths to prove that you aren’t a natural born killer sort of betrays the whole thing as a sham. It’s the lesson of King Lear, actually - the people who put on a show of feeling something generally don’t really feel it. If your answer to the question of “when did you stop beating your wife” is “My God I would never hit a woman! Hitting women is ALWAYS WRONG! I would rather cut off my hand, even if she started the fight!” - then I take your answer to be “just last week.” The crux of the whole matter for me is indeed why anyone should have to prove affection at all. Affection’s either there or it’s not. Surely it matters more whether one really cares than it matters how much he shows it. More than that - caring is the default assumption among a crew - even a mutually antagonistic crew - that lives on a ship and goes into battle together. OF COURSE Avon cares!

To me, the least plausible thing of all about Star Trek episodes like Arena (and the hundreds of others just like it) is the hugely pessimistic view of humanity they operate under. It just doesn’t square with the humanity I am a member of and with which I interact every day. In my experience, most people are not cold-blooded killer savages, and Kirk (and Picard, at Farpoint) should rather have been insulted (or, actually, amused) that anyone was questioning humanity’s generally caring nature to begin with. These aliens that forced Kirk and the Gorn to fight to the death may think we’re all barely literate bloodthirsty savages, but that seems a really irrational thing to think about a species that managed to survive long enough to build warp capable ships and traverse the galaxy! If humanity were anything like as mutually antagonistic as most Star Trek aliens constantly accuse it of being it’d hardly be capable of reaching their planets to get trapped into playing their games to begin with. And of course, Blakes 7 understands this. The aliens who force Blake and Travis to fight are, to all appearances, the last survivors of their civilization, which destroyed itself in a war. Note the contrast with the relatively stable Federation. It takes one to know one, in other words, and indeed, Giroc - one of the teachers - is the only character on the stage who actually seems to enjoy violence for its own sake. (Travis might - but it seems more reasonable that Travis is just obsessed with killing Blake in particular.)

So right - Avon has the right idea. When it’s night and there’s nothing you can do, you sleep. Irrationally keeping vigil doesn’t prove anything, and why should anything need to be proven at all? It’s rather the same point that Blake makes to Sinofar at the end of the episode.

GIROC Why didn’t you kill him?
BLAKE Too weak? Or maybe I didn’t entirely trust your motives. Besides, as long as he’s alive, he’ll be the one chasing me. And I know I can beat him.
GIROC [Laughs] At least you’re not stupid.
BLAKE [To Sinofar] I need time enough to get my ship away and to recharge the energy banks.
SINOFAR They have been recharged. I will see that your ship gets away.
BLAKE Another reason why I didn’t kill Travis: I would have enjoyed it.
SINOFAR Perhaps there was nothing for you to learn.

Blake never really answers Giroc’s question because he feels he doesn’t have to. “At least you’re not stupid,” she says - which, along with Avon wanting to sleep through the aliens’ filmschool project, nicely encapsulates the point of the show. Blake and his crew aren’t stupid - unlike some other interstellar dogooders we could name - and the outcome is so predictable you might as well wake me when it’s through. (Nor do I think anyone’s missed the fourth wall point that it’s actually Arena Avon is opting to sleep through.) To Sinofar he gives a somewhat better answer: I already knew what you were trying to teach and you needn’t have wasted your time.

Giroc and Sinofar’s lesson doesn’t teach anyone anything. Travis is a psychopath, and so forcing him to kill someone with his bare hands is unlikely to be a life-altering experience for him. Blake, for his part, knows better even before the fight starts. He’s already got his morals straight about killing, so he stays focused on getting out alive. Giroc (who might be the actual pupil the lesson is intended for?) only discovers she enjoys the violence - a fact which doesn’t stop her from laughing at Blake and calling him a savage at every possible opportunity. Sinofar is no closer to understanding killing when it’s all over. The whole episode has been a pointless, staged sideshow. Meant to be a moral lesson, it ends up more than anything just being entertainment for Giroc.

Thought experiments are useful to the extent that they help us discover our hidden assumptions. And science fiction is interesting as a literary genre in part becase it has a wider range with the thought experiments it can pose. But this only works IFF (a) some minimal effort is made to render the implausible situation plausible and (b) there’s actually something to be learned from the whole ordeal. Arena, of course, fails on both counts. As for the first - the writer is God. Any time you have to resort to omnipotent aliens to explicitly drop your characters into the situation you want to write about you’re probably not trying hard enough. And for the second - the “lesson” Kirk is supposed to have learned is neither useful in any way, nor does it really follow from the situation he was placed in. It’s moral pornography - an implausible situation contrived not to teach and explore but so that viewers can imagine they’re morally superior to the rest of humanity by kidding themselves that they agree with and understand Kirk’s “decision” not to kill the Gorn.

Blake’s reaction is more realistic: reject the lesson as a pointless waste of your time and go about your business as though it hadn’t happened. I love it.

And then there was one.

Bob Rae has dropped out of the Liberal leadership race and endorsed Ignatieff. It’s the right move.

Yes, no doubt Rae had an actual shot should it have gone to voting. Not as good as Ignatieff’s, mind you, but let’s call it 30%: respectable. Still, as went Dion, so goes Rae. The salient difference between Rae and Ignatieff - the only one likely to be a major consideration after the events of the past two weeks - is that Rae was a vocal proponent of coalition and Ignatieff was not. Rae wants to take Harper down as soon as possible and at apparently any cost. Ignatieff favors a more measured “wait-and-see” approach. Ignatieff’s approach is the right one - both morally and strategically. Morally it’s just sort of irresponsible to replace an already not-ideally-stable government with an even less stable one, especially with means as questionable as these. Strategically it’s not clear what the Liberals would gain from going in guns blazing at this point. Dion led them to one of their worst federal election defeats ever and then compounded the problem even further by staging his barely legal “coup.” The first move from here has got to be to suck out the poison and go to work regaining credibility. When you’re down, you dust yourself off and get up to fight another day to be sure - so consider this the dusting off. Dion’s been axed - so there’s that taken care of. Now with Rae graciously declining to drag out the infighting everyone is so tired of, the party can actually get back to work.

Ignatieff is the best choice not only for restoring party credibility, but also for going toe-to-toe with Harper. It’s exactly what the Conservatives were NOT hoping for (and what they indeed used under-the-table tactics to prevent in the leadership race of 2006), and I guess I should be disappointed now for that reason. But I think everyone is glad to see the situation stabilize.

Well, the good news is that it looks like the Liberal leadership race is winding down in Ignatieff’s favor. The bad news is that it looks like the Liberal leadership race is winding down in Ignatieff’s favor.

I mean sure, given how decisively Dion’s ass was handed to him on this latest toe-to-toe with Harper, it’s clear to everyone that he needs to resign sooner rather than later. The last thing the Liberals want at this point is Dion across the bench from Harper on January 27th when the new budget is on the table. Nothing drives home the urgency of limiting the damage Dion is doing to his party better than the unpopular Harper’s 20-point lead in the polls. And of the two remaining choices (the other being former Ontario PM and NDP provincial faction leader Bob Rae), Ignatieff is clearly the right choice. Why? Put simply, because while Bob Rae was a vocal supporter of the coalition with the NDP (no shock there - Rae is former NDP himself), Ignatieff was always skeptical. Given that the public isn’t a big fan of the deal, that indeed the unpopular Stephen Harper and the Conservatives are leading the Liberals by 20 points at the moment as a result of its failure, probably the Liberals will be able to regain some face putting a coalition skeptic and moderate like Ignatieff in the driver’s seat over the left-leaning agitator Rae.

The “bad news” bit of it is, of course, that Ignatieff is a worthier opponent. He’s smarter, more even-tempered, and generally less politically connected than Rae or Dion. I assume that if Ignatieff wins the situation with the Liberal Party is finally settled, and I’m really not so sure Harper can win a fair fight in Canada. Against Bob Rae - sure. Against Ignatieff? Well, maybe, actually. Ignatieff is a essentially a college professor, a relative newcomer to politics, having first stood for election in 2006. So maybe Harper can trip him up on general lack of experience and familiarity with domestic politics. It’ll be interesting to see whether the general lack of Liberal Party connections is a blessing or a curse. It could be a blessing in that it finally ends the feud between the Chretien and Martin factions. But in a party as patronage-addicted as the Liberal Party, it’s got to have its downsides as well. If hard to see anyone sticking around for very long who doesn’t know exactly which palms to grease.

But I expect most actual Canadians see this as a good thing. The unsettled nature of politics up there has got to be making everone a little nervous - especially with the world economic situation being what it is. Most Canadians would probably rather put all the Liberal leadership questions behind them and let the government get back to functioning … however it is that it functions.

Dion is expected to resign on Wednesday - for real this time. January 27th is plenty far away for the Liberals to sort out their leadership situation now that it’s down to two popular candidates. Whichever way they decide, things just got harder for Harper. If it’s Bob Rae, though, we can probably expect more of the same, just with a higher level of general competence. Since it’s the approach that’s wrong and not - as many commentators would have it - the communications angle or Dion’s superior attitude to party infighting, I guess Rae wouldn’t be too difficult for Harper to fend off. But since Ignatieff understands that the coalition is wrongheaded and that the Liberals are just going to have to ride out another year or so of Harper government, he’s an easier opponent in the short-term but a much, much more difficult one in the long term.

Ignatieff winning means Harper’s here to stay until at least October, I’d say. But it also makes me wonder whether he’ll make it through the next election. Ignatieff, like Obama down here, is a great unknown. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

As a veteran fan of 1970s science fiction, I’m good at suspending disbelief. Wobbly sets? No issue. Pitiful special effects? Bring ‘em on. Rubber suits and facepaint? I eat it for breakfast. Hell, I could probably even take someone standing with a sheet over their head as a ghost if I really thought the budget was that bad.

I can do all this and more, provided the plot works. But screw with the story, and we have issues.

Now granted, there are plot holes and there are plot holes. No one gets it right all the time; even in the best-planned series it’s inevitable that minor slipups will happen. And of course sometimes you let things go just for the sake of the story. For example, I couldn’t stomach Next Generation’s 5th season episode “Next Phase” because I could never get over the fact that invisible/semi-immaterial people who can walk through walls should also fall through (or at least sink into) floors, and yet Georgi and Ensign Redshirt seem to walk about just like everyone else. Worse than that, they can handle tools sometimes, when you’re not paying too much attention, but other times other things slide through their hands. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and I’m certain someone along the editing process noticed it - but since explaining it all would’ve been little more than a distraction from the story, I guess they just quietly decided to let it go.

But then there are plot holes that are just … spectacular. The kind of thing that not only is it so obviously wrong that there’s no way anyone with even a barely adequate daily caloric intake would miss it, but that the writers have hidden right there in plain sight, apparently hoping you’ll be so stunned that you blink and shake your head and say “naw….” That’s the kind of plotholes I had to sit through in “Mission to Destiny” just now.

“Mission to Destiny” is an episode of cult BBC scifi series Blakes 7 - arguably my favorite TV show of all time, which just makes this all the more painful. I guess I should cut my losses and take as consolation that Blake never did anything half-assed: if they’re going to screw up, they give us the full royal fanfare.

The “plot,” such as it is, goes something like this. Jenna notices a ship on long-range scanners holding an odd pattern: it’s circling endlessly. The ship is an obsolete model, which makes it likely that it’s been abandoned years ago and just left. But on teleporting aboard, Blake, Cally and Avon find that the crew is simply sleeping. They’re victims of sabotage: someone has put tranquilizer gas into the air filtration system.
It’s a crude job, and Avon and Cally fix it quickly. When the crew comes back awake, it’s discovered that one of them is missing and one of the lifeboats launched. Dum dum dum.

The captain instantly worries that their precious cargo has been stolen. It turns out (and this, at least, is very cool) that they’re from Destiny, a small agricultural colony on the edge of the galaxy. Due to a deficit in light along a certain spectrum range, a terrestrial fungus is eating most of their crops and will soon consume the entire planet. They’ve mortgaged their whole economy to buy a specially-manufactured light refractor that they’ll put at a specific position between their planet and their sun which will bend the light to the necessary wavelength and kill off the fungus. Since the object - called a “neutrotope” - has been so expensive to manufacture and is worth the entire GDP of Destiny for several years, IF someone could manage to sell it (and give the writers credit - they make that point three times) they would be wealthy beyond imagination.

So, probably what’s happened is that the missing crewman has knocked out the crew and taken the missing neutrotope with him in the shuttle.

Bucept … they check and find the neutrotope right were it should be, in a “molecularly-locked” box in the captain’s quarters to which only the captain knows the combination. And then shortly thereafter they discover the body of the missing crewman. He’s been MURDERED. Oh, and by the way, the pilot’s been found MURDERED as well.

And of course from here the story falls apart rapidly. Blake suggests that he be allowed to take the neutrotope on to Destiny while Avon and Cally stay behind to help them with repairs. Incredibly, the captain agrees and doesn’t even insist that anyone from his crew accompany Blake to Destiny! That’s right, just hand the most valuable object in the known galaxy to a complete stranger based on his word that he’ll deliver. Oh, and the fact that he’s leaving behind two “hostages” in the form of Avon and Cally, though it’s not clear what good killing them will do if Blake absconds with the device and sells it. Even if Blake did care, he could presumably simply show up again in a day, claim to have delivered the goods, teleport Cally and Avon off and no one would be the wiser. But the BEST part is that the captain doesn’t even hand over the neutrotope himself. He orders Sara to go fetch it - not 5min. after he’s just told us that only he has the combination.

It helps a bit, I suppose, that Sara turns out to be the killer. So maybe Blake’s just too thick to notice that Sara must also know the combination … but surely Avon noticed? And yet, Avon spends most of the episode being completely wrong about who the killer is. And the thing is, when he does figure it out, it has nothing whatever to do with Sara knowing the combination - which would’ve been a clever way for him to figure it. No, it’s because the murdered pilot had helpfully written her name in blood - only not very neatly so for most of the episode the letters look like numbers.

Of course, Sara has done all this without her husband/boyfriend/whatever being in on the deal - so of course she tells him about it now that the die is cast and there are strangers running about on the ship. When he decides not to join her, she kills him too. ANOTHER MURDER. But the thing is, apparently he had decided to join her as Cally has only just seen him stuffing a Mysterious Device into another crewman’s bag. She retrieves the Mysterious Device to take it to Avon and ask him what it is.

Ok - so we’re expected to believe that Sara told Mandrian about her Nefarious Plot only after Blake et al show up, he then declines to join her, AND she lets him run about on the ship a little longer killing him ONLY LATER? AFTER he’s had a chance to go blab the whole thing?

And then there’s the matter of this homing device. Now - at the beginning of the episode, we saw Liberator scan the ship for any signs of life. Presumably this includes checking the entire known spectrum of communications frequencies for signals. And yet, they failed to detect this Mysterious Device that turns out to be a homing device to lead the rendezvous ship to them? Also - CALLY fails to notice that this is a homing beacon and has to ask AVON to tell her? Cally, who is a communications specialist, has to ask Avon the computer expert what a homing device is, and yet Cally who is not a computer expert but a communications specialist recognizes before Avon the computer expert that the sabotage was specifically designed to keep the ship in a holding pattern. Um… (And just why was the ship put in a holding pattern anyway? Why not just stop it dead in space? I mean, if it’s a homing beacon that’s going to signal your getaway car, it isn’t really necessary to have the ship going ’round in circles - a feat which requires a highly specific kind of sabotage of the kind that can’t be disguised as an accident.)

And of course, there’s the nagging question of why Sara’s knocked out with the rest of the crew at all. This is apparently her brilliant plan to sell the most valuable object in the galaxy. She’s going to knock out the entire crew with stun gas - herself included - and wait for a rendezvous ship to come pick her up. Why can’t the rendezvous ship just leave her sleeping and take the neutrotope itself? Well, presumably because it’s locked in that supersafe. But then, they’re going to have to wake her up selectively to get it opened, since we know she knows the combination. So I ask again, why is she sleeping with the rest of the crew and not wearing a gas mask or something? That way, at the very least, she would’ve been awake to kill Blake and Cally and Avon when they teleported aboard. More importantly, what is the point of framing Donovan (remember, she’s killed him and then launched off a lifepod, a plan that was disrupted when she discovered that moving his body to the lifepod was harder than she’d thought - apparently they uninvented the handtruck and the forklift when they developed faster-than-light travel)? Was she honestly planning to just hand off the most valuable object in the universe and then stay on the ship to avoid suspicion? Come now - even if she COULD trust her pals to cut her in for her share, she’s surely going to have some trouble explaining to the tax authorities back on Destiny why she’s suddenly worth their entire economic output for a year?

But the best, most stunning, display of plot holes is in the beta plot - as Blake and the Liberator crew go to deliver the neutrotope to Destiny. They need to do it in the Liberator because Liberator can make the trip in four hours - compared with five days for the Ortego. Fine. But halfway there they encounter a giant asteroid field. Going around it would add a day to the journey, and Blake is unwilling to do that. So what he does instead is burn out the forward force shield plowing straight through. We know that he burns it out because Zen forces him to choose at the last minute between power for drive and power for shields and - apparently unaware that even a dust particle will destroy a ship that impacts it at faster-than-light speed - Blake chooses drive instead of shields. Ohhhh-kaaaay. But they make it. Of course, as they’re coming out of the field the hermetically sealed box with the neutrotope conveniently slides off the table. Worried that the most valuable object in the galaxy might have been stored in such a way that allows it to shatter if the box it’s in has dropped (never mind that this thing is designed to hang in space and presumably collide with things from time to time), Blake decides to open the box (and, apparently, he has the combination, since we see him enter it successfully - I guess it’s available at openmylockedboximmediately.com), only to discover that the neutrotope is - gasp! - not inside. Because, you see, Blake undertook this critical mission to save the planet Destiny without bothering to check that the registration was there in the glove compartment. You almost wish the writers had skipped with the whole asteroid field thing so that Blake could’ve made it to Destiny and handed them an empty box with lots of ’splainin’ to do. THAT would’ve been entertainment!

But no, they decide they have to head back immediately to get the neutrotope. Which is sensible - and what’s even more sensible than that is that they decide to just ignore the asteroid field on the way back. You know, what with their forward shield being completely burned out and all. Maybe they backed through?

In any case, they’re back at the Ortega in no time. Meanwhile, Avon is playing Hercule Poirot. He has everyone gathered in the captain’s chamber so he can give us a normal detective speech about every minute detail about how clever he is at finding out the killer. Of course, at a crucial moment he turns his back on the killer whose identitly he supposedly knows long enough to let her pull a giant laser gun out of her tight-fitting suit (where was she keeping it? O.O). Because hey, it’s no fun for the audience if you arrest the killer BEFORE the big revelation scene and deny us our chance to be in little-to-no suspense as she pulls a gun on everyone!

The best moment in the episode comes when Blake literally does That Thing that you were always waiting for to happen on Star Trek but which somehow never did: he beams down at precisely the moment that will distract Sara long enough that she can be disarmed, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Apparently concerned that we might have missed two of their biggest, most artfully crafted plot holes, the writers then treat us to a final scene on board Liberator, where Blake has helpfully decided to take the entire Ortega crew with him to Destiny. That’s right - what someone, ANYONE, on the ship would’ve/should’ve suggested earlier (”Why not take us all with you, and they can send someone back to salvage our ship later?”) is now happening. So just in case there was someone watching out there in TVland who missed this angle, we can now rest assured that everyone now gets just how silly the earlier part of this episode was. To add insult to injury (’cause hey, why not?), the closing line of the episode is Vila asking Blake to take them ’round the asteroid field rather than straight through it this time. So - in the extremely unlikely even that anyone missed that they had to come back through the asteroid field after having burned out their shields and power reserves, Vila has helpfully reminded them. Unless, you know, it’s a one-way asteroid field - one of those that is there if you approach it from one side but transparent otherwise?

I can only hope that this was intentional self-parody - but as the 7th episode in the entire series run, it seems more than a little unlikely.

There are signs, to be sure, that more was going on than met the eye. For one thing, there’s that scene where Avon turns his back on the killer just as he’s sketching out who she is for everyone to see. IF I could believe that it was intentional, it would’ve been a brilliant satire of the locked room armchair detective fiction genre - certainly in keeping with a show whose whole MO is turning Star Trek on its head. You know, Avon’s strutting back and forth being clever even though he doesn’t actually have a clue who the killer is - he’s counting on intimidation to make him (erm, her in this case) reveal himself. Maybe. Given the way that scene was played, I can almost believe it (of course, since he does say her name before she announces she is pointing a gun at everyone it doesn’t quite work…). Also - there’s the matter of Mandrian stuffing that homing device in another crewman’s bag - apparently framing him. That just doesn’t square with the official story that Mandrain wasn’t in on the plot. Why would Sara just give him the homing device that is her only escape route if he hadn’t agreed to join her? And if he’d agreed to join her, why kill him? Or, if you’re going to kill him anyway, why kill him just in time to broadcast to everyone that the killer is still on board and hasn’t escaped in the lifeboat? Why not just wait until you’re rescued and kill him then? Something about the whole setup with Mandrian doesn’t add up - and not in a “plot hole” kind of way - more in a “there’s actually another story going on here if you’re clever enough to catch it” kind of way. It is interesting, after all, that Avon admits to suspecting Mandrian for no good reason.

CALLY I agree. So who do you think it is?
AVON Mandrian.
CALLY Why?
AVON Instinct. I discount Dr. Kendall.
CALLY I thought you mistrusted instinct.
AVON I do, so I am probably wrong.

That line sort of tickles at my brain. The hyper-rational Avon actually admits, for the first (and last) time ever, to going on instinct, and that he’s probably wrong for this reason. This is soon after we’ve been shown a scene of Mandrian planting a homing device on someone - an action that squares with no possible explanation for the plot, but would make sense if Avon’s instinct were right. WAS Avon right about Mandrian? Conveniently, we never really know since Mandrian gets snuffed soon afterward.

But of course, no matter how convincing this line of reasoning, nothing makes up for the one-way asteroid storm. That’s just … wow.

A lot of the reviews I read online of this episode were unfazed by the plot holes. Everyone seems to notice at least some of them but likes the episode anyway. And I can see that. It WAS fun, in spite of itself. But more than that, I think it’s because whatever went wrong with the main plot, the characters stayed consistent - and in fact we even got some good development scenes. Why does Avon agree to stay on board? Why - to be with Cally, of course. It’s hinted throughout the series that he’s attracted to her - and here’s yet another hint. His “I don’t like leaving mysteries unsolved” explanation certainly isn’t the real reason! Even better is the way Cally rolls her eyes when Avon is berating her for having bet their lives on Blake returning. If everyone else is convinced that Avon is completely callous and selfish at this point, Cally at least sees through the charade (as does Blake, actually, but that’s always been more obvious). And I think that’s what explains everyone’s affection for this obviously broken episode: we get to see Avon and Cally up close, and neither slips out of character. Some people have pointed to Blake’s booby trap at the end (he plants bombs on the entry hatches so that when the rendezvous ship arrives to pick up the neutrotope from Sara it will be destroyed) as inconsistent, but I don’t think so. Quite the contrary - we know from plenty of other examples that Blake is highly conflicted about the use of violence. Ideally he would avoid it, but realistically he knows it’s necessary. When he does use it, it tends to be because he’s getting restless, plauged by the feeling that he’s accomplishing nothing in his fight against the Federation. So blowing up the rendezvous ship seems perfectly consistent to me. Blake is a man with an itchy trigger finger but the morals not to use it. Here is a situation where he can be reasonably sure he’s killing people who would’ve condemned an entire planet to death by selling the means of survival they had purchased at huge expense on the black market. They’re clearly a legitimate target - IFF, of course, we’re right about the situation and IFF the rendezvous ship isn’t something like a passenger ship with conspirators placed on board. The beauty of this setup is that Blake can be reasonably certain he’s right, but he doesn’t have to stick around to take any unintended consequences that might arise from factors he failed to foresee. It seems like the perfect time for someone with an itchy trigger finger but the morals not to use it to do just that.

But let me not kid myself. Despite some bright patches and some unexplained plot twists that I would like a second look at, this was a horrible episode, absolutely eaten to shreds by plot moths. Even for the 70s, even for the BBC, it’s hard to see how this one made it past the script editors and the director and even the actors, and onto film.

To hear the press tell it, Canada’s Governor General made a “controversial” and “unprecedented” decision in agreeing to prorogue Parliament until late January. I think this is both true and misleading. On one level, it’s true that anything is “controversial” about which people argue, so in that sense the decision qualifies. But it’s disingenuous to imply that it’s really all that controversial among constitutional scholars. The press has taken pains to quote those scholars who disagree with it, but a more even-handed view is that precedent would suggest she’s right. A similar line of reasoning holds for “unprecedented.” It’s true enough that this decision is “unprecedented” on the basis of a lack of comparable past examples. But it’s the situation that’s “unprecedented” more than the Governor General’s decision. Calling her decision “unprecedented” without mentioning that there weren’t really any available precedents for her to follow isn’t the most honest telling of the story.

What opponents of prorogation need to sit back and consider is the Governor General’s job and the choices she was offered. Without calling an election, her choices came down to these. In one corner, there is Stephen Harper, who is tested in office, heads the largest faction in Commons, and who recently stood for election and won an increased mandate. In the other corner is a coalition of two parties plus one hanger-on that “gives its word” to support the coalition on confidence motions, but hasn’t actually signed any papers to that effect. The two official members of the Coalition add up to fewer seats than the Conservatives. With the unofficial member they have more - but stop and think who that unofficial member is. It’s a separatist party that runs candidates in exactly one of the ten provinces and represents no national constituency. To add insult to injury, the man who is supposed to keep this super-shaky alliance in order so that the country can function has already resigned the party leadership under pressure and will be replaced by someone as yet unknown in May.

Now consider that the Governor General’s job description is ensuring the stability of the Confederation. She is not supposed to make policy decisions, she is simply there as a final arbiter to make sure the government functions. If national stability is your main concern, can anyone maintain with a straight face that a maybe-two-maybe-three member coalition with uncertain leadership will be preferable to a single-member efficient voting block with a tested and competent leader? What else was she honestly supposed to have done? Granted, she could have called an election, and maybe she should have. But opinion polls suggest that it would have been a waste of time: Harper’s support has grown over this, not abated. More to the point, constitutional precedent does suggest that on having his prorogation request denied, Harper would have been expected to stand down anyway.

The Governor General is obligated to first meet with the Prime Minister and overrule his requests only when they threaten national stability or are unconstitutional in some way. Whether or not she likes him personally, Harper is a capable leader in charge of a disciplined caucus which had recently successfully stood for election. In addition, his prorogation term is reasonable. He’s only asking for an extra week’s recess all told, a suspension of activity for just over a month, which is a plausible amount of time to take care of the job at hand: putting together a budget the Opposition can stomach. The idea that she is supposed to have said “no” and turned around and handed government to the coalition of two, no three!, no two! opposition parties lead by Dion someone not yet chosen rather than give Parliament an extra week’s worth of a cooling off period is just crazy.

Yes, she could have called an election. It wouldn’t have been a popular decision, but at least there’s an argument there. I don’t really see an argument that her duties would have permitted her to hand power to an unelected and soon-to-be-replaced Dion.

The most disingenuous argument of all is the idea that Harper has somehow sidestepped the confidence motion. Wrong. The very first thing Parliament will do when it reconvenes is hold exactly this confidence motion. Harper is due to present another budget the failure of which will most definitely - and rightly - be interpreted as a vote of no-confidence, triggering elections. He hasn’t sidestepped it, merely postponed it - which is only fair, really, given that the alternative was to hand a shaky coalition of last election’s losers control of government.

Again, I can see the case that she should have called an election. But there is simply no convincing argument that Dion et al should be in government come Monday.

If this Globe and Mail article is to be believed, Bob Rae is using the Liberal Party’s disarray over prorogation to muscle his way to the front. The leadership battle apparently now comes down to positions on the coalition. Rae is very much in favor of it, while it seems Iganatieff is not and was, in fact, the very last prominent Liberal to sign the letter that Dion sent to the Governor General opposing prorogation.

Since the public seems pretty disgusted with the Liberals’ tactics of the past week, I’d say this gives Mr. Ignatieff the long-term advantage. Bob Rae may be jockeying to be Dion’s snap-judgement replacement, but if cooler heads prevail (and they will - Parliament is closed until late January after all) it’s becoming increasingly clear that Ignatieff is the better choice. Which is too bad, really, as I think Harper will have a harder time with him than with Mr. Rae.

Now and then real poetic justice does happen. Stephen Harper is riding high in polls after the Coalition’s failed attempt at a power grab. However letter-of-the-law legal it may have been for last election’s three runner-up parties to propose they be allowed to govern instead 7 weeks after these decisions were made official, the general public - and here’s a novel concept - isn’t too keen on the idea of a change in government without an election to certify it. Polls show the Tories fully 20 points ahead of the Grits - and well over the 40% mark generally necessary to win a majority government.

Analysts are saying the lead will vanish before Parliament resumes in January, and they may be right. Popularity spikes like these don’t tend to last - and I’ve yet to see the kind of alchemy that would make someone like Stephen Harper permanently popular in a country like Canada. I imagine the public’s opinion of him is pretty much what it’s always been: competent, icy, inhuman - the kind of guy they want managing their hedge funds, not necessarily their welfare state government.

Still, I wouldn’t bet on the analysts being right this time. It’s true enough that Harper isn’t personally popular, and when all is said and done the Canadian public by and large still thinks like the Grits. No other western country can boast so close a match between a political party’s general position and what the public wants than that between Canada and the Liberals. But if Harper is mildly unpopular then Stephane Dion is congenitally so. And let’s not forget why Paul Martin isn’t Prime Minister. The Liberals are in time out right now for general corruption - a treatment they get every 20 years or so. A display of party unity behind a charismatic outsider - a la Trudeau in ‘68 - would instantly solve all their problems. But of course, Dion is a weak compromise candidate who is no one’s idea of Prime Minister material, and the only reason he’s still around at all is because the party so obviously hasn’t resolved all its infighting issues. This was absolutely the worst time imaginable to stage the kind of oily gamble Dion and Layton just pulled. Now, things are worse.

So yeah, on the one hand, popularity spikes are temporary by nature, and it would take more than this to endear Harper to the public. On the other hand, the fundamentals of the Liberals’ problems are unchanged, and the crisis will only have reminded people why they didn’t vote Liberal in October. So while I can see the case for a drop in Tory popularity ahead of January, I wouldn’t care to put money on it.

Stephen Harper is unusually crafty and even-tempered for a national leader. I don’t think they’re spending “every waking minute” between now and January 26th hammering out the world’s most perfect budget like they say. What’s going on in those cloistered meetings is the Tories scheming a way to wrangle a new election out in January - or at least some time before the Liberals can hold their leadership conference in May. I sincerely hope they come up with something good. And given that it’s Harper we’re talking about, I won’t be surprised at all if they do.

Ok, so yesterday I wrote a bit about media bias.

You want media bias? I got yer media bias. Right here.

Under the charming title “Canadian Prime Minister Shuts Down Parliament to Keep Power” comes this quote from the AP:

Less than two months after winning re-election, Harper successfully asked the unelected representative of the head of state for the power to close down Parliament until Jan. 26, hoping to buy enough time to develop a stimulus package that could prop up the economy.

Yes, let’s just completely neglect to mention that that same “unelected representative” would be necessary to certify the proposed new coalition government, which would, of course, assume power without an election.

Governor General Michaelle Jean, who represents Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, granted the unusual request to suspend parliament. Had she refused, Harper would have had two choices: step down or face a no-confidence vote Monday he was sure to lose.

Harper would not offer details on their conversation.

Did anyone ask her?

“He’s trying to lock the door of Parliament so that the elected people cannot speak,” Layton said. “He’s trying to save his job.”

(NOTE: ‘Layton’ refers to Jack Layton, head of the NDP - Canada’s Socialist party.) Wrong. Harper asked you guys to call an election, which is, after all, the normal procedure after you defeat a sitting government in a confidence motion. Why not simply agree to hold elections after the confidence motion? Had you done that publicly, the Governor General wouldn’t even have agreed to meet with Harper in the first place, and proroguing parliament would not have been an option.

The Liberals, New Democrats and Bloc Quebecois, which together control a majority of parliament’s 308 seats, signed a pact agreeing to vote this coming Monday to oust Harper and setting the structure for their proposed coalition government.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be that any single party aligned with the Conservatives would “control a majority of parliament’s 308 seats.” Yet another way of looking at it would be to mention that the second-place Liberals have roughly half the number of seats the Conservatives have, and that the third party in this coalition doesn’t even run elections outside of Quebec because its only agenda is to break up the confederation.

Analysts said a governor general has never been asked to suspend parliament to delay an ouster vote when it was clear the government didn’t have the confidence of a majority of legislators.

Analysts also said that this was the only time in Canadian history that anyone has tried to form a new government without an election. But it wouldn’t be fun to quote that bit, eh?

What really kills me about this article is that there isn’t even a single mention of the Conservative side of things anywhere to be found. And there really should be - if for no other reason than recent polls show 64% (that’s a majority, in case the AP hasn’t noticed) of Canadians disapprove of the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition takeover attempt. At the very least, the AP should mention that if an election were held tomorrow - which is an option in this Westminister system nation - that the Coaltion would lose on account of public outrage.

Crisis averted. Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean, after meeting with Stephen Harper for two hours today, has approved Harper’s request to prorogue Parliament. This is an unusual measure that puts the government on ice temporarily. Parliament will close until January, when Harper and the Conservatives will be expected to table another budget.

For those of you not following this (by which I mean, roughly speaking, the entire world) - budget issues are always confidence motions. If a government fails to pass a budget, it stirs up all kinds of constitutional issues, sometimes triggering new elections. Since the budget announcement, the opposition parties (of which there are three in Canada) have been threatening to band together to form a coalition government to replace Harper. The math works out such that no two of them can do it, but if all three sign on, they have more total seats than the Conservatives in Commons. Upon failure of the budget, they could (and were threatening to) ask the Governor General to hand the government to them without an election. Stephane Dion - current but temporary leader of the Liberal Party - would’ve become Prime Minister in Harper’s place.

The reason they can kinda sorta get away with this without an election is because Harper and the Conservatives don’t technically have enough seats to form a government. Generally, you need an absolute majority - either from your own party or in a coalition deal with some other party. The Conservatives have what’s called a “minority government,” whereby they don’t have enough seats to pass legislation without help from the Opposition. Since Harper’s government doesn’t have a clear victory in the last election, it’s not technically ouside the law for a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition to ask the Governor General to nullify the last election and let them form the government instead. In fact, they had that option at the end of the last election and neglected to take it - mostly becuase by tradition the party with the most votes gets the first chance at forming a government, and Harper and the Conservatives had formed the last government with fewer seats than they have now. It’s hard, under those circumstances, to deny the Conservatives a second mandate.

It must be stressed: contra to what Harper keeps claiming, everything the Coalition is doing is perfetly legal. It’s just that it’s unorthodox and doesn’t show much inclination to let the Canadian public have a say.

I think that given the circumstances, the Governor General has made the right decision. Parliament is closed until January, meaning the confidence motion coming on Monday that would’ve toppled the government and given the Opposition the chance to form a coalition government without an election to replace Harper will not take place. Meaning that Harper is still Prime Minister until at least January 27. Meaning, more importantly, that everyone has time to cool off and sort things out rather than resorting to melodramatic, legally questionable, and in any case undemocratic power grabs. If Dion and Layton (and Duceppe, but no one cares) have concerns with the federal economic policy in general and Harper’s leadership in particular, they now have a chance to air them publicly. And the government has a chance to address those concerns. This is the right choice: take your finger off the trigger for a minute and think about what you’re doing.

This isn’t at all how I expected things to turn out. GG Jean, it seems pretty clear to me, is no Stephen Harper fan. It’s to her credit that she passed on the easy opportunity to oust him and instead opted for a cooling off period. That, in other words, she did her job.