TV for me, me: In which Seanan takes umbrage with HELIX.
I love me some SyFy Originals. Be they movies or television shows, the giddy lack of logic, ridiculous plots, flagrant violations of the Square Cube Law, and craptacular CGI just make me feel at home. So when SyFy announced that their next show would be about genetically engineered viruses, I was so there. It's like someone decided to bake me a delicious cake, and then when you cut the cake, instead of strawberry jam, it's full of Ebola monkeys and screaming.
Mmmmmm, cake.
I'm a pretty uncritical television viewer. I expect you to a) set your rules and stick to them, since you're the arbiter of reality, b) have a reasonably diverse and interesting cast of people, not stock character stereotypes that I've seen a thousand times, and c) amuse me. I thought I could go into Helix with these perspectives in mind and live a long and fruitful television life.
Turns out I was wrong. Who knew, right?
So we open with a nicely creepy lab, monkeys screaming, lights flashing, two people in hazmat suits strolling along after a sweaty infected dude while a pleasant female voice drones "CONTAMINATION. CONTAMINATION. CONTAMINATION." Shades of the Red Queen. I kept expecting Alice Abernathy to drop from the ceiling with a shotgun in her hands. Since anything that makes me think of Resident Evil is automatically awesome, I was totally onboard...
...until we switched to the next scene, wherein Generic Grizzled Handsome CDC Doctor Guy (whose name I swear I forgot twelve times over the course of the show) is looking for the Broad Street pump handle. You know, one of the greatest artifacts of epidemiology's history? And see, this is where my critical mind came online, and refused to be shut back down. You can't have Dr. John Snow and his amazing ghost maps of London and also refuse to acknowledge the basic rules of epidemiology. Like, I'm serious here. Make something up. Talk about some exciting outbreak of a fictional disease, use all the big scary flags-"hemorrhagic" is a good one, as is "worse than Ebola," or even "the return of smallpox"-and move on. Don't act like your GGHCDG is somehow so amazing that he would have the Broad Street pump handle, knowing what that sets him up as in the minds of your virology nerds (and we exist) while baffling the part of your audience that doesn't know the history.
Oh, wait! Now they're telling the story! Only they never mention Dr. Snow by name, and apparently a bunch of CDC doctors getting ready for their first field assignment would have never heard a story I heard, in detail, in an introduction to epidemiology lecture, because as GGHCDG lectures, all the dewy-eyed baby docs stare at him like he's dropping unheard gospel. And he's so metal that he tosses a vial of cholera at his assistant! Gasp! You know, when I want to terrify baby epidemiologists, I totally do it with a disease that's difficult to catch and relatively easy to treat if you have access to modern medicine. That's totally terrifying.
(Seriously. Given that there's a fake out of "it was Scotch all along, see how manly and tricky I am," why not claim smallpox? Or measles? Something that's, I dunno, airborne?)
Blah blah blah plot happens, more stock characters are added to keep GGHCDG and Sexy But Inexperienced Assistant Doctor Dame company. We have Older But Still Sexually Attractive Ex-Wife Who Is Also A Doctor Because Outbreak Came Out A Long Time Ago So The Trope Is Totally Fresh Again! We have Army Guy From USAMRIID (who is a plumber, which is actually sort of refreshing). And we have Sassy Fat Doctor Dame. SFDD is named Doreen. I remember her name solely because it's refreshing as shit to see a fat woman presented as competent and smart and capable of doing SCIENCE, even if it's dumb as fuck science.
The characters define R-naught incorrectly. I begin shouting at the screen.
OBSSAEWWIA...okay, fuck it, Ex-Wife decides that listening to Generic is bad, and goes tooling off on wild goose chases, leaving Inexperienced to try dealing with the lab work and their quarantined victims by herself. Because that's a great plan. Doreen does some shit with monkeys. Ex-Wife defines "zoonotic" as if that were inherently a spillover event. I begin thinking about drinking. Plot shit also happens, but the bog-awful science, combined with the generic cast, has actually put me into a state of so few fucks given that I can no longer concentrate.
Apparently, this secret Arctic base has been tinkering with reteroviruses (which is a terrible idea), and since that wasn't stupid enough, they've moved on to prehistoric reteroviruses, because fucked if I know, that's why. I'm sure there's a reason for it, and I'm sure the show will eventually tell us, but if they don't melt a few more people, and grow personalities in a nice agar base for some of these characters (read: everyone but Doreen), I'm going to need a bigger boat, and a sea of port to sail it on.
Science. You're doing it bad.
(Yes, there was more of a plot, and a potential bad guy who had more than a few negative racial overtones, especially when stacked against the all-white science team, but I didn't focus enough on those to make this a recap. So instead, this is a science rant. SCIENCE RANT.)
Mmmmmm, cake.
I'm a pretty uncritical television viewer. I expect you to a) set your rules and stick to them, since you're the arbiter of reality, b) have a reasonably diverse and interesting cast of people, not stock character stereotypes that I've seen a thousand times, and c) amuse me. I thought I could go into Helix with these perspectives in mind and live a long and fruitful television life.
Turns out I was wrong. Who knew, right?
So we open with a nicely creepy lab, monkeys screaming, lights flashing, two people in hazmat suits strolling along after a sweaty infected dude while a pleasant female voice drones "CONTAMINATION. CONTAMINATION. CONTAMINATION." Shades of the Red Queen. I kept expecting Alice Abernathy to drop from the ceiling with a shotgun in her hands. Since anything that makes me think of Resident Evil is automatically awesome, I was totally onboard...
...until we switched to the next scene, wherein Generic Grizzled Handsome CDC Doctor Guy (whose name I swear I forgot twelve times over the course of the show) is looking for the Broad Street pump handle. You know, one of the greatest artifacts of epidemiology's history? And see, this is where my critical mind came online, and refused to be shut back down. You can't have Dr. John Snow and his amazing ghost maps of London and also refuse to acknowledge the basic rules of epidemiology. Like, I'm serious here. Make something up. Talk about some exciting outbreak of a fictional disease, use all the big scary flags-"hemorrhagic" is a good one, as is "worse than Ebola," or even "the return of smallpox"-and move on. Don't act like your GGHCDG is somehow so amazing that he would have the Broad Street pump handle, knowing what that sets him up as in the minds of your virology nerds (and we exist) while baffling the part of your audience that doesn't know the history.
Oh, wait! Now they're telling the story! Only they never mention Dr. Snow by name, and apparently a bunch of CDC doctors getting ready for their first field assignment would have never heard a story I heard, in detail, in an introduction to epidemiology lecture, because as GGHCDG lectures, all the dewy-eyed baby docs stare at him like he's dropping unheard gospel. And he's so metal that he tosses a vial of cholera at his assistant! Gasp! You know, when I want to terrify baby epidemiologists, I totally do it with a disease that's difficult to catch and relatively easy to treat if you have access to modern medicine. That's totally terrifying.
(Seriously. Given that there's a fake out of "it was Scotch all along, see how manly and tricky I am," why not claim smallpox? Or measles? Something that's, I dunno, airborne?)
Blah blah blah plot happens, more stock characters are added to keep GGHCDG and Sexy But Inexperienced Assistant Doctor Dame company. We have Older But Still Sexually Attractive Ex-Wife Who Is Also A Doctor Because Outbreak Came Out A Long Time Ago So The Trope Is Totally Fresh Again! We have Army Guy From USAMRIID (who is a plumber, which is actually sort of refreshing). And we have Sassy Fat Doctor Dame. SFDD is named Doreen. I remember her name solely because it's refreshing as shit to see a fat woman presented as competent and smart and capable of doing SCIENCE, even if it's dumb as fuck science.
The characters define R-naught incorrectly. I begin shouting at the screen.
OBSSAEWWIA...okay, fuck it, Ex-Wife decides that listening to Generic is bad, and goes tooling off on wild goose chases, leaving Inexperienced to try dealing with the lab work and their quarantined victims by herself. Because that's a great plan. Doreen does some shit with monkeys. Ex-Wife defines "zoonotic" as if that were inherently a spillover event. I begin thinking about drinking. Plot shit also happens, but the bog-awful science, combined with the generic cast, has actually put me into a state of so few fucks given that I can no longer concentrate.
Apparently, this secret Arctic base has been tinkering with reteroviruses (which is a terrible idea), and since that wasn't stupid enough, they've moved on to prehistoric reteroviruses, because fucked if I know, that's why. I'm sure there's a reason for it, and I'm sure the show will eventually tell us, but if they don't melt a few more people, and grow personalities in a nice agar base for some of these characters (read: everyone but Doreen), I'm going to need a bigger boat, and a sea of port to sail it on.
Science. You're doing it bad.
(Yes, there was more of a plot, and a potential bad guy who had more than a few negative racial overtones, especially when stacked against the all-white science team, but I didn't focus enough on those to make this a recap. So instead, this is a science rant. SCIENCE RANT.)