WB 5

Dear English 110.01 students,


Get ready, because you're in for a stressful yet rewarding ride! I know that sci-fi might sound like a really boring topic to study, believe me, that's exactly what I was thinking too. But after I found out that I could watch a show that I actually liked (because it was considered "sci-fi") I got excited. When I found out I had to write an 8 page paper on it, I got a little less excited. When the paper was finished, I got excited again. That has to be the most stressful part of this class: the writing. Thankfully you guys will have an awesome teacher in Leslie who really helps you improve your writing, she really does everything to help keep you from writing a crappy paper!
The best part about this class has to be the blog writing that you do. For someone like me who is really shy and doesn't talk a whole lot in class, the blogs were a way that I could get my ideas out there and acknowledged by my classmates. Plus it's really cool getting feedback from everybody on what you're thinking and on what they were thinking about.
The best advice that I can give all of you is to keep up with your blogs and don't procrastinate on your papers. Trust me, these things take time to complete and if you're rushing it at the last second, they won't be nearly as good as they can be!



Good luck to all of you next quarter, you'll have a fun time in this class. :)

Farscape

Before this class, whenever I'd thought of the term "sci-fi," this show would have been the epitome of my thoughts. It has everything: aliens, space travel, robots. The only thing missing is dinosaurs. This episode, to me, was really entertaining to watch for those reasons. In this series, the "humans" (the peacekeepers, I'm not too sure if they're human or something that just looks like a human) are the heels and the aliens are the baby faces, which is a really neat idea in itself to reverse the point of view so that the audience can see what's going on from the "monster's" (the alien's) POV. The episode starts off with a human getting sucked into a wormhole (I personally think it would've been neater if it were a black hole, that way we could get someone's opinion as to what happens after being sucked into one) and he is in this alternate universe of sorts, where the aliens are odds with the peacekeepers.


In comparison to the other sci-fi episode that we watched in class, I like a dislike this series more than the others. I like it because it's more than just humans flying in space sorting out problems in their lives and the lives of everyone else on board their ship, but it's another race doing those same things and trying to coexist with different races and learning from each other. I dislike it because the plot (in this episode) didn't seem as thick as it was in the other series.' Again, switching it up so the audience sees what we might have perceived as the bad guy's point of view is something that the other shows didn't have. We always saw the good guy, what they did, and why they did it, but we never saw what had motivated the bad guys to fight back. I think that, with a better plot line, this show could have the potential to be better/ more entertaining than the other episode that we've watched.

STNG

There's one thing in this episode that stuck out, and that when the judge can't determine if Data has a soul. When they were trying to figure out whether or not Data should not be opened up and figured out, the judge stated that she cannot determine whether or not he has a soul. This goes along with Angel in both Buffy and Angel because Angel has a soul and does good things and Data, who may have a soul, does good things. Neither are killed/ examined because of this fact. even though neither are human, both are praised for being human-like.


The episode as a whole was actually pretty interesting. It was the first one I've seen of "The Next Generation" and, at first, I thought it was going to be pretty lame, but I was wrong. It was really intriguing and I wouldn't mind watching another. I actually think that way about the original Star Trek too and came really close to watching it last night. I think it's safe to say that this class has definitely given me a few more shows to watch on TV.

Star Trek

I watched “The Trouble with Tribbles.” The episode starts out with Captain Kirk getting a distress call from another ship. Once there, the capp’n finds out that nobody was in trouble, but instead there was a large shipment of grain that needed to be guarded. Meanwhile, the Harold Hill of outer space (a man named Cyrano Jones) gives a tribble (a furry furby puffball) to Uhura (the only chick on board) and, at first, the animals are cute (even to Spock!), but later they start to reproduce in large numbers and before anybody knows it, the whole ship is infested with them. Eventually, the tribbles get into the wheat (that Kirk wasn’t guarding), which started to kill them off because the wheat was laced with poison. In the end, all of the tribbles were beamed over to the Klingon ship as payback for the trouble the Klingons have given to the people on the Enterpirse.

I think that the biggest difference between the sci-fi today and the sci-fi from the Star Trek days is the plot. Nowadays people wouldn’t find a bunch of furby-like creatures infesting a ship that entertaining, compared to the other shows out there now where there are life and death battles going on in every episode. I think that the sci-fi now is more relatable because the struggles of the main characters seem more human-like than they did back then. For instance, in Buffy, the slayer has to ward off all of the evil in the world while still going to high school, dealing with the pressures of being a teenager, and dealing with the stress of a family. In Start Trek, their biggest problem is trying to keep furry animals from destroying the ship. The sci-fi now is more realistic and believable, which really makes it more entertaining to watch and more easy to relate to.

Battlestar Galactica miniseries

In the opening sequence of Battlestar Galactica’s miniseries, we see the words “The Cylons were created by Man.

They were created to make life easier on the Twelve Colonies.

And then the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters.”

I can’t help but to be reminded of “I, Robot,” where the robots that were created to serve and to aid the human race ended up turning on everybody and trying to kill them. No matter what technology is created and how advanced it becomes, there will always be a glitch. Nothing is perfect, nothing ever will be, even if it looks like it is, it’s not.

Here, the Cylons turned on the very people that made them in order to gain power over the humans (for reasons which I still don’t really know). In order to do this so efficiently, they (specifically, Number Six) become more human like, living the way that humans do, doing the things that humans do. Once the humanistic robots gains the trust of the real humans, that’s when they strike. For example, when Number Six asked to see the woman’s baby, she carefully holds it and cradles it like any normal person would. Once the mother knows that the “woman” means no harm and can be trusted, she turns her head and talks to her husband. In that moment, the “woman” kills the baby and disappears without anybody noticing, leaving the mother to cry out in horror when she finds her baby dead in its stroller. This goes to show all of us that the things that we trust and depend on to do the things that we need the most can betray us. Who knows, maybe someday our iPods will take over the world (Scary Movie 4 anybody?)

Poem- "My Papa's Waltz"

"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke


The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

There are two (at least) different connotations to this poem. One is that a father and son are dancing (horribly) around their kitchen, much to the mother's chagrin. The second is that the father is actually drunk and beating his son, again, much to the mother's chagrin.

When I first read this poem, I took the positive road and believed that the first scenario was true. The father, off from a hard day's work, had a little drink and decided to dance around the kitchen with his son, missing a few steps and stumbling all over the place. However, the second second scenario is, unfortunately, what I believe the poem is about now. The father is so drunk that a small boy (his son?) could get dizzy on the fumes of his breath. The mother was looking on, afraid to stop what the father was doing because there was always the chance that he would turn on her next. The father "beat time on [the son's] head, and then walked him off to bed, with the boy "still clinging to [his] shirt." Even though the boy may have just been beaten by his father, he still loves him and forgives him just as easily.

I really like this poem because it is really open to many different perceptions. It could be a pleasant family charade, or it could be some horrid event that scars the child for life, or it could mean something completely different. Not only are the perceptions different, they are polar opposite, which is something really difficult to do when writing a poem. Though I'd like to believe that the first scenario is what's happening, I can't hep but to be more convinced of the second. What do you think?

"Normal Again"

This episode of Buffy was pretty confusing, but I guess that’s how it was written to be. It’s definitely a thinker and something that we all could be experiencing without even realizing it. Could the slayer really just be a figment of Buffy’s imagination? How much of our lives is actually real and how much is what our minds perceive it to be? Did we even watch that episode, or do we just think that we did? This episode (that I'm pretty sure we watched) show us that the things that we create in our minds can sometimes get the best of us. Buffy tries to escape to a life where she isn't a slayer, or to where her life would be right now if she hadn't become the slayer, and she believes in this world so much that her mind convinces her that it's her real life. She used to have visions of past slayers and she chose to become one, so the alternate world in this episode essentially is her life as a normal human being, which--oddly enough--is actually worse without demons, vampires, and 3 nerdy boys toying with her mind.