Lost in Space Gives Us a Great Story Sans "Woke" Cringyness

What I appreciated about the 3 season reboot of Lost In Space, was its handling of male and female characters and their relationships. Maureen Robinson was at once a smart strong woman, but she was also a mother and the wife of a strong man too. With a few hiccups, they became a powerful, mutually supportive team. It also didn't bother trying to make us all accept the idea that the human race would colonize another star system with a bunch of LGBQTLSMFT genetic dead end "self-gendered" colonists. 

 

In this strikingly good series, humans were portrayed as they largely are in nature and didn't focus on the 1 in a hundred sexually befuddled members of our "woke" culture in a ham-handed attempt to educate the rest of us (as so much TV/Movie writing does these days. LIS handled race the way it should have been handled - it ignored racial issues altogether. The writers didn't show us any systemic racism. People were of diverse skin color but all were of one race - the human race as it mostly is these days. Even despite deep misunderstandings with the alien robot race, the people come out triumphant and manage to span the cultural divide between man and AI machines.

John W. Campbell, editor of Analog in the 40s and 50s, used to refuse to publish anything in which the human race came out badly. He shaped science fictions conservative wing for generations to come. Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson, Orson Scott Card, Jerry Pournelle, Michael Flynn, Michael Crichton, CS Lewis et al. Campbell would have thoroughly approved of Lost in Space.

Lost in Space got it right for serving a large audience. There was little crude language and a whole lot of good stuff in it and not any detectable in-your-face wokeness. If any of the writers were trying to be "woke", they missed the point. They wrote to the values us conservatives believe in. And even some of the bad guys get redeemed.

Hey, it may have been an accident that this series appealed to the conservative in me. It was, after all, a Netflix production, but there it is. I liked it!

© by Tom King

The Detectorists - Poignant and Sweet

 

At first I thought this was another British comedy about unlovely people of the post-modernist "life sucks and then you die" genre. Toby Jones, after all, plays a lot of unsavory characters. But pretty quickly I came to really like the two main characters -Mackenzie Crook (from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) as Andy and Toby Jones (from Sherlock) as Lance. Neither is a pretty person. They play oddball friends scouring the English countryside for treasure with metal detectors. Diana Rigg (Mrs. Peel from the Avengers) also appears as Veroinica in this quirky little series which is fun. 

A friend recommended this series to me and I respect her opinion on things like this. The series won a BAFTA Award. The show follows a group of "detectorists", amateur archaeologists searching for and finding military buttons, Roman coins and odd bits of old appliances. The six episodes I watched took us through their search for a buried Roman treasure that the Jones character is convinced is somewhere in the field.

There are rivals for the search grounds and all sorts of problems come up that you'd not expect would plague a bunch of guys who spend their weekends running metal detectors up and down an open field. The story, like all good stories, lures you in softly and holds you to the end. I found it on Amazon's Britbox which I get with my Amazon Prime subscription (which with the free shipping and all the free movies and TV shows is well worth the annual bill). If you're looking for a gentle diversion for a Sunday afternoon, I recommend this funny little series.

Stars:  Mackenzie Crook, Toby Jones, Pearce Quigley, Diana Rigg

"Anne of Green Gables" vs. "Anne with an E"

I'm binge-watching the PBS Wonderworks/Disney mini-series version of Anne of Green Gables. Megan Follows, Colleen Dewhurst, and Richard Farnsworth were brilliant and the series was faithful to the book. It is the definitive version and truly perfect. There was never a need to remake the Lucy Maud Montgomery, who was by the way a pastor's wife. That matters in the telling of this story. 

For me, binging the original was a kind of way to flush the last few episodes of  "Anne with an E" out of my head. Once again, Big Hollywood has found a way to gay-up a lovely book with a Christian theme. I was so disappointed in "Anne with an E" from Netflix. they eliminated the pastor and his wife, they added gay characters and made Anne a budding militant feminist with a shrill temper. I don't think I can bear to see Mrs. Montgomery's work butchered by a lot of social engineering feminazis. 

 

While Lucy Montgomery was something of a progressive for her time, I'm pretty sure her progressivism was tucked safely in amongst her Christian values and principles. In some ways the Netflix Anne is rather closer to the Anne of the books, which actually gave me hope for the story. Unfortunately, the story very quickly veered off course into one of those social justice indoctrination pieces. It was sad because the director started off well.

Fortunately, PBS was respectful and the three editions of the story they produced were beautiful. My kids used to pile up for a weekend and we'd all binge watch the series on VHS. It was one of those rare films in which the parents and the kids all cry and laugh at the same places. 

 

Micah and Meg used to binge watch it by themselves sometimes. A couple of times Meg would pile up with her old man and watch it. She used to pick on me when I'd tear up over stuff. I couldn't help it though. It's so seldom that in a movie you see actual kindness and decency portrayed so well. When Matthew tells Marilla they should keep Anne even though she might not be of use to them, but because they "might do some good for her," my mushy old heart takes a joyful little leap. Of such moments, I believe, are our steps toward heaven made up.

My VHS tapes are growing fuzzy from being many times played and from being 25 years old. I'm going to look for the DVD versions and add them to my odd collection of films. Meanwhile, Anne and Gilbert (Jonathan Crombie) have walked off across the field together having settled their old feud. I never get tired of watching two people find each other in forgiveness. The tape is done rewinding now and I need to cue up the sequel and get a fresh hankie. This one's kinda soggy.

Thank you PBS and Wondework for such a beautiful and uplifting set of movies. And thank you, Megan, Colleen, Richard, and Jonathan for creating such wonderful characters.

© 2018 by Tom King

The Handmaid's Tale - Feminist Fantasy

Note the corpse dangling in the background.

"BETTER NEVER MEANS BETTER FOR EVERYONE"

I've resisted watching this TV series since they started advertising it on Hulu. It's been nominated for something like 13 Emmys. That should have been my first clue. They've been running promos for it for months and what I saw I did not like. So let me be up front about it. I came into this show with more than a little prejudice against it. The wife wanted to check it out, so we did.  It was exactly what I expected. 

Here's the bullet point backstory.

1. The United States has fallen to the gun-toting religious right dominated by oppressive males who believe they are superior to women and have a right to a better life just because.
2. The remnant of the loyal US military is fighting it out somewhere in Alaska. All the good progressives, LGBTQ et al people and Marxists tried to escape to Canada.
3. Women are immediately denied property rights, their money is confiscated.
4. Gays, transgenders and liberals are hung from a wall and their bodies left hanging as a warning to the disobedient.
5. Young tough looking guys with guns are everywhere making sure the oppressed stay oppressed.
6. In a flashback to a feminist protest, these young toughs with machine guns mow down lesbian women and metro-sexual men.
7. The greedy corporations have wrecked the environment and caused most women to become sterile.  The few women that are not sterile are kept in religious gulags where they serve as baby machines for the "commanders" - elite male leaders of the new regime.
8. Lesbians are murdered if caught, but not if they are fertile. Men treat women as objects. Books are burned. Women aren't allowed to read.
9. Women who are not useful or who are uncooperative are sent to work cleaning up toxic waste or presumably working farms and factories. As women in nun-like outfits pass on the street on their way to shopping, you see corpses of the typical people Christians are supposed to hate hanging from the sides of buildings.
10. In the backstory, "they" set up false attacks on the US and blamed it on terrorists and then proclaimed marshal law and took over the government. The US Flag now flies over Alaska and only has 2 stars.
11. God is the bad guy here. All good liberal churches (Catholic or Episcopal churches for instance) are burned down and wrecked by these fanatic Protestants. The Bible is quoted in church and taken quite literally where punishments are concerned (although the texts get taken out of context.
12. Liberals are the oppressed and slavery is back - fertile women are being traded on the international market.

The Hand Maid's Tale Earns 3 Raspberries - my lowest
rating. Watching this thing is like having a root canal.

Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the producers of "The Handmaid's Tale".  That's some seriously sneaky propaganda going there. The idea that is being promoted here is this.  Christian conservatives have apparently decided to overthrow the government and set up a strong oppressive central government that deals in human trade. In doing so, they have apparently adopted Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals in a twisted sort of Westbrook Baptist Church sort of Facist Nationalism. Note this, like Hitler's version is not called socialism, although it bears all the earmarks of socialism - gulags, stormtroopers, oppressive government, militarism, uniforms, propaganda and fear tactics. They accuse the obviously conservative oppressors of abolishing the constitution and the rule of law, which is, of course, and Alinsky tactic used frequently by the left.With the slave trade and all, it looks like the Democrat South won the second Civil War, except it's couched in conservative/libertarian memes.

The main protagonist is the quintessential oppressed female. In the opening sequence, she and her black boyfriend and their child are pursued by paramilitary soldiers. The boyfriend is shot, the child stolen and she is taken to the women's cow barn to serve as breeding stock. She is pale, thin, and they make up her eyes with dark circles under them so she'll look like one of those abused women from Auschwitz.

It's a feminist/liberal fantasy of how oppressive a male-dominated Christian society would be.

Moral of the Story:  This is what it will be like if we don't oppress these awful Christian right wingers first. The only way to achieve the worker's utopia is to rid ourselves of the guns and the religion and the conservative opinions.

The writers of the story are wonderfully dishonest people. The trouble with this kind of story is that it doesn't fit with reality at all, unless you live in a surreal fantasy world, which I'm beginning to believe is where most progressives live these days. Even with one of my favorite actresses, Yvonne Strahovski, who played Sarah on "Chuck", the series falls short. It's absolutely depressing and miserable and insulting to me as a Christian, but the progressive left, unlike if I were Muslim, does not allow me to feel insulted when my religion is maligned.  Catholics and liberal Protestants are given a by with "Handmaid's Tale". They are, after all, progressives by and large.

Women seem to particularly like this show, oddly enough. Even the Christian women being maligned in this TV show seem mesmerized by it. I believe that this is how it happens that we slowly shift the culture toward some really awful ideas and attitudes. How else do you get people to become Nazis, Communists, or Maoists. How else do you get people to stand above a field full of human beings with a 50 caliber machine gun and mow them down row on row or drop gas pellets into a shower room full of Jews.You pound people with the kind of ideas that, true or not, make enemies and not people out of some segment of the population. Hitler did it with the Jews. The progressive left is doing it with the Christian right. Once we reach a tipping point where there are more progressives than conservatives, then the hunt will be on.

It's propaganda like Handmaid, masquerading as entertainment that will do it to us.

© 2017 by Tom King