Warning! There’s a prediction/possible spoiler near the end!
In my less-than-humble opinion, a TV series based on a movie based on a graphic novel is never going to go well. It’s a bit like the sci-fi view of cloning: successive copies are always a little less perfect than the first generation.
The Watchmen franchise has managed to get around this by making a perfect copy of the original, and then pretty much rewriting the original for the TV series. So far, the results are … encouraging. Couple of things to bear in mind though:
The humans haven’t learned that if they find the melted remains of a cyborg killing machine from the future, then don’t use them to build an AI killing machine in the present.
The AI hasn’t learned that by sending cyborg killing machines back in time to prevent its eventual destruction, it will cause its eventual destruction.
It’s not rocket science!
Now, to start with, Dark Fate (bad title) asks you to forget every other Terminator movie since Judgement Day: this is the sequel; the one in which Sarah Conner drives by and saves humanity’s future.
So I was watching an episode of the oddly excellent Another Life: the one where the captain is floating in space, watching her spaceship searching for her. She knows that there’s no chance they’ll see her in the void so she makes a win or bust decision: she vents the last of her oxygen into space in the hope that someone will see the vapour trail and rescue her.
I have definitely seen this episode before. In fact, I’ve been seeing this episode since the late 70s.
The first time was in Star Trek. The crew had ventured down to a hostile planet, lost everyone wearing a red pullover (aside from Mr Scott, whose red shirt was blessed by wood elves), and had to escape from the surface in a damaged shuttle running on … er … shuttle fumes. Anyway, the good ship Enterprise had no chance of seeing the shuttle which was already falling back to the planet. Then, in a move that apparently defied logic, Mr Spock jettisons the last of the fuel to create … yes, a vapour trail.
Now, I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen this happen in sci-fi, but it does seem to be a favourite way of getting spotted in thousands of kilometres of empty space.
