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The Decreasing Impact of Death In Sci-fi
brumgrunt writes "Are science fiction TV shows and movies overusing death as a plot device? And, more crucially, do any of us believe that a dead character is really dead any more?"
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Characters dying on television and being brought back at the convenience of the show has been a staple of television for decades. This rather lame plot device has been abused most egregiously on soap operas (both daytime and nighttime), where this sort of thing has been the norm almost from the get-go. Everyone who came up in the 80's remembers the infamous Dallas "missing season" that was dismissed as a mere amazingly-long dream sequence after Patrick Duffy decided he wanted his big Dallas paycheck after all. Evil twins, faked deaths, clones, cliffhangers where the character miraculously survives, etc. have been used by soap operas again and again as bargaining ploys against cocky cast members whose contracts are up for renewal and as ways to generate buzz for shows with flagging ratings.
Even genre shows have been using these ploys for a long time. Forver Knight was infamous back in the early 90's for killing off characters and bringing them back (or sometimes not). And the "Did they really kill off Fox Mulder?" cliffhanger became such a cliche on the X-files that even the most gullible fans eventually caught on to the fact that the network wasn't about to kill off the star of the series (by the time they did finally get rid of him briefly, no one even cared). And of course, replacing Dr. Who's became the norm back long before most of us were even born.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... at least we didn't see Greedo get up off the cantina floor.
Trolling is a art,
Ever since the death of Superman woke up an audience for DC, every couple of years they kill or maim someone iconic just for the publicity. Ho hum. Whatever the news, even if it's only a costume change, you know everything will be put back the "old way" in a year.
Marvel sacrificed their rich continuity by getting in on the "reboot" fad with the Ultimate line, and at DC, lots of epic stuff happens, but after you read for a couple years, you realize that none of it really matters to the DC universe's history.
I want canon, with changes that "stick" as it develops over time.
Ruining death for everyone.
We are all God's parents.
Scotty was 'resurrected' in a way that was totally plausible for the character. It worked, and technically he never died. Spock's resurrection was much less plausible
Good-bye
This is absolutely true. The most egregious example is a character from the blockbuster Sci-Fi series "South Park", a character named Kenny seems to die almost every week. Long live Mysterion!
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
I guess we can give the guy a little bit of a break. He opens the article with "When I was a child..." and proceeds to talk about watching a movie with his mum... a movie that came out in 1993. Little wonder that he doesn't realize that the story with Gandalf and the white robes was written 40 years before he was born.
Breakfast served all day!
Is jumping the shark really a bad thing when the shark has a fricken' laser beam on its head?
Complaining about Gandalf's resurrection is a bit thin, since it hadn't really been abused all that much when Tolkien wrote LotR.
We should probably kill him again, just to be sure.
technically he never died.
NOMAD would like a word with you.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
So let's say you've got mind backups and cloning in your setting. The conventional approach is that you have one version of you at a time and weekly backups. You die, your clone is decanted and given the most recent update. Life goes on.
But that's thinking conventionally. Why not have multiple instances of you running in parallel? If we presume cloning and resurrection is expensive, only really important people will have it. Your best secret agent, your top scientist, sadly probably your typical reality TV bimbo.
Then you take it one step further. What makes you you? Consider how vastly people can change based on life experiences. How long can two of you exist apart, experiencing things until you're no longer indiscernibly the same?
Charlie Stross took this to some pretty wild extremes. It feels like a mix of disaster recovery software and mindfucking. So you have a general "you" that's what gets backed up. You can create multiple instances that you call vectors. You can live apart as real people. You might split a vector to go deep cover in an organization. Maybe you're involved in war and swap out your orthohuman body for a killing machine instead. You spawn off another dozen instances and you're a regiment of killing machines, all operating in concert. Each vector's accumulated experiences represents a delta from the original split point. Those new experiences can be merged back into the primary backup that is "you." If the experience is too painful, you may elect to excise it from your memory instead.
Raises some interesting questions. If you don't believe in an immaterial soul, then the sense of self is just a conceit within the neural net of your own meat brain. If you make a copy of your mind and upload it to machine, which you is you? The one outside the machine will think "Gee, I'm glad I'm still here" and the one in the machine thinks "Gee, I'm glad I made it in here." Can you both be right? Now let's say that you come out of the clone vat and you have a conversation with yourself. "I'm the original," says the one meeting you. "I'm asking you to go off and do something dangerous, possibly suicidal." Do you do it? There's a backup, will you really be dead? This instance of you, yes. But how long does this instance of you last, really? Are you the same person you were as a child? As a young man? As an old man? Those parts of yourself are just as lost as if they died in the past. A parent watching a child grow up to be a drug addict killing himself one injection at a time, can he really say the child who bounced on his knee is still alive? A corpse was once the child and yet given up living perhaps, but that child is gone.
A Strossian future gets convoluted very quickly. See Accelleando and Glasshouse.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... until McCoy says, "He's dead, Jim. He's dead."
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
You want hardware agnostic machine code? Of course he needs to be properly ported...the Dr. can't run natively on just anyone. And like any port, good or bad, there are slight differences.
Hey. At least it wasn't a car analogy.
Well, it depends on the exact religion and period. Egyptian religion changed quite substantially over its 3 millennia of existence, ranging from just a Ka and a parallel world, to a Ka and a Ba, to rebirth. So it's probably misleading the casual readers to say anything as applying to Egyptian myths generally, much less the whole Mediterranean area religions.
That said, it's kinda interesting.
The original Egyptian myth afterlife was more like ours than what many other religions had, in a sense. And in another sense, it wasn't exactly heaven either, but rather a parallel world which doesn't work very differently from the normal world.
I could rant for pages about peculiarities of those myths, and, well, I _do_ tend to rant lots. But in this case I'd say that the main motif of the hero who gets killed, is somehow near or past the point of no return (e.g., already buried), then *poof* he/she's alive again, much to everyone's surprise, is already there.
Maybe Osiris is the bad example, there. While an actual resurrection of him in the physical world can be supported too (if in their crops, rather than as a guy: they actually have paintings of wheat stalks growing up of a buried corpse, and that was actually a resurrection scene for them), it actually does require a wall of text to even scratch the surface of. So we're probably better off just forgetting about him entirely.
But there are plenty who don't remain in some afterlife as a resurrection. E.g., Dionysus is killed and actually his body destroyed, eaten by the Titans even, except for his heart, in one version of the myth. That's way beyond what you'd expect even Jesus to be able to resurrect any more. But Zeus implants that heart in his thigh, and Dionysus is born a second time.
Sure, it's not the same kind of resurrection as in the Bible, but it's nothing you couldn't use, say, for a superhero story after you offed them once. Since, you know, that's the thread's topic.
And the thing is, that seems to be exactly how these old religions evolved. Each tribe or city state had one patron god, and as power dynamics shifted, so did god hierarchies. They made up stories as to how god A got to rule over god B, as the faction worshipping god A came to have power over those who liked god B.
And gods and heroes (demigods) were routinely killed or disabled in stories, too. E.g., Akhenaten made up a whole story in which Amun is killed, when he wanted to replace the solar worship with his own cult of Aten. Then, a dozen years later, Akhenaten's reign is over, an suddenly Amun lives again.
That's the 14'th century BC, not 20'th century Marvel and DC comics :p
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You should be okay so long as you're not a redshirt.
The defective red uniforms were replaced in the late 23rd century.
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Three words for an awesome TV show:
Forever
Knight
Rider.
David Hasselhoff is a Vampire with a talking computer car that can telekinetically open mechanical locks. "KITT, the Sun's coming up, Tint the windows!" "I'm sorry Michael, the tinting circuits were damaged by KARR." "Then Turbo-boost!"
EXT: WOODLAND MEADOW, HAPPY FLUFFY BABY JOKES AT PLAY
VOICEOVER
Every year, thousands of baby jokes are clubbed to death by needless explanation
and exposition.
Hordes of Explanations armed with cudgels descend on the meadow, splashing blood
among the flowers. Comically high-pitched screams echo through the forest.
VOICEOVER
With your help, we can help end this atrocity. With your support, even if we can save only
one joke from senseless needless death...
PUSH IN ON THE WET QUIVERING EYES OF A BABY JOKE HIDING UNDER A LOG.
AUDIO BEGINS OF "WE CAN SAVE THE LAUGHTER" BY PEABO BRYSON
VOICEOVER
Won't you please help?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."