Battlestar Galactica Season 4 and Sucker Punch

I am watching BSG season 4 right now . . . about half way through it. It's o.k., but the story is stretched pretty thin. The lawyer character introduced from season 3 is really the only interesting character left, though Tom Zarek and Rosselin are interesting on occasion. I also hate how Apollo is portrayed as being naive for looking for a democratic solution to problems. Typical Hollywood love of dictatorial regimes, which Rosselin's certainly is.
Sucker Punch looks like an interesting movie, but I heard that the reviews are not good. Still, five cute Elvish-like girls kicking German butt is bound to appeal to the best (and worst) in us. Let me know if you like or hate Snyder's latest contribution to film (or as the snots at my school call it, 'the visual medium').

Working Class Sci-Fi Narratives

I recently finished Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, an above average sci-fi (or at least potentially sci-fi) novel about a Hispanic woman (Connie) who periodically comes into mental contact with a future Utopian society. The novel is compelling because it is one of the few sci-fi novels I've read that reads like the working class narratives of the early 20th century: Martin Eden, Mcteague, Sister Carrie, etc. It still shocks me how few sci-fi novels feature working class protagonists or situations. There's Clockwork Orange, Woman on the Edge of Time, Iron Heel, and one or two novels from Ian Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson. Overall, however, the genre seems devoted to upper class scientists and politicians, or soldiers whose identity is safely nebulous. Some series, like Battletech and Star Trek, are particularly notorious for giving an overall middle class vision of the world, with very little emphasis placed on working class experience. Though I sometimes think Marge Piercy occasionally slips into excesses of politically correct rhetoric, I still admire her faith in her working class character, and her painful attention to making Connie appear as realistic as possible. Woman on the Edge of Time is a feminist novel I can at least relate to, which is more than I can say for Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, or Margaret Atwood. I suggest you check it out.

V for Vendetta and Psychiatry

The class I teach just got done discussing V for Vendetta, Alan Moore's classic graphic novel. One element I found particularly interesting in V is its use of the Milgram experiment as a metaphor for fascism. The psychiatric politics of V for Vendetta are decidedly ambiguous. On one hand, V is labeled a schizophrenic by the state, yet Moore indicates that the diagnosis of V's insanity is solely arbitrary, based on Doctor Dellia Surridge. This seems to indicate an anti-psychiatric critique, much in line with the writing of R.D. Laing. However, Alan Moore has also expressed a great deal of sympathy for anti-Scientologist forces, like Anonymous, that have adopted the V mask as a symbol of their crusade. In any case, I think V's politics, with his emphasis on personal responsibility, fits more into an anti-psychiatric critique of what is wrong with mentally ill people. A fascinating graphic novel nonetheless.

Has anyone seen Das Experiment?

I've ordered Das Experiment, a German movie about psychological experimentation on people, that borders on sci-fi. I was wondering if anyone has seen it and had thoughts on it. It looks pretty interesting. An explanation of the movie's plot is here.

Where are Sci-Fi Television's Colleges

A good question. Very little effort has been made to portray the college of the future. What would it look like? What would be studied in fields like literature, history, psychology? What fundamentally new concepts would these colleges have come up with, differing them from the colleges of today. Most depictions of colleges in space operas and cyberpunk TV shows show them to be little different from colleges of today, either hyper-militaristic West Points or stereotyped stuffy academic institutions like those shown in season 4 of Babylon 5. Who would be the hated Heideggers and Foucaults of future generations? What would they be set up against? It's a good question. I wish I had an answer to it.