Geez, PDR, it’s been more than a year since you last made a post on your site about Surrounded By Danger, the game you have been making slowly. Ought to do something about that.

As I announced last time, I put the version I was working on on hold so I could work on that, because the first version was so complex. Well, I have indeed continued working on the Zombie Mode version of Surrounded By Danger. Look, it’s going slowly, I admit that. I’m not the best at focusing at the best of times, and playtesting a game requires me to actually play it with people. This isn’t easy for me. But as of about a month ago, I got the game to roughly the same point in development that it the first version had been when I stopped it. That may sound like I’m back where I started, but the whole point of Zombie Mode was that it required a lot more at this point. I’m much closer to being done Zombie Mode than I was to being done Story Mode, and that’s good. Now I just need to close that last bit of distance somehow.

I liked Earth 2 more, I’ll say that. It makes sense to me that as I watched through Earth 2, I could tell I had stuck with it all the way to the end as a teenager. With this show, I don’t think Teen PDR stuck with it. That may be because I lost interest, or it may have just aired when something else I watched was on, I have no way of knowing, but nothing in the latter half of the show rang a bell as anything I had seen when I was young. Who knows, maybe I watched it all and it just washed out of my brain.

I’m not saying I think Space: Above And Beyond was a bad show. It’s more militaristic than I prefer, sure, but within that framework I was impressed with the wide variety of different military stories they managed to tell. I may not have ever really cared about West or Vansen, but I liked Wang and Damphousse, and the whole thing with the In-Vitros was quite interesting to me. This show was perfectly adequate sci-fi television, especially for the era in which it existed.

I know they had hoped to make more of the show, so I can’t harp on them for not finishing up everything in a nice package. I’d’ve been interested to see if Damphousse’s supposed psychic powers (or the fact that such things exist in the setting at all). But what I mentioned as I went, and what I really want to know, is how religious the show would have gotten. We never got any answer to what the deal was with the comet that did the Christmas miracle in that one episode. Was it really meant to be the same comet that led the Wise Men to the manger? Was it connected to the comet that hit Earth and spread organic compounds to the Chig homeworld? With all the life forms on the show originating from Earth, is that planet some sort of God-created centre of the universe, or are they going for more of a Red Dwarf thing. I’ll never know, but somewhere out there exists a universe where this show was brought back after the September 11th attacks to serve a world hungry for militaristic might and religious right and I want to be able to watch that show. I bet that version of the show would have lasted as long as the War on Terror!

If you don’t know it by name, “The Chase” is the episode of The Next Generation where they reveal why most of the aliens in Star Trek look just like humans with funny ears or whatever.

I haven’t rewatched the episode before making this post (if I can’t bother to check for typos when I do these, I’m certainly not adding homework) but I have seen the episode probably about five times in my life, so I know the gist. The Enterprise is one of a group of competing ships who go on a rollicking adventure around investigating the DNA of various alien cultures to find clues to some great treasure. The find it and it all comes to a head with all the groups meeting at the final place, they turn the stone and look beneath it, “Peace On Earth” was all it said. Or whatever.

The gotcha moment of the episode is the humans and the Klingons and Cardassians and Romulans all being embarrassed when an old alien pops up and is like “I’m from the species that seeded all your planets and I’m happy you found this because it means you all worked together” but actually they hadn’t. It’s supposed to be a lesson about how, deep down we’re all the same or some baloney. I don’t like that lesson. Even beyond Star Trek, we shouldn’t use “we’re all the same” as a reason to get alone, because large or small, we have differences and the lesson that paints our similarities as the thing that connects us implies that our differences are actually bad. That’s not good. We should celebrate our differences. Star Trek especially is supposed to value Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Instead we get this episode as an excuse to not make aliens look different. Is that better?

But furthermore, evolution just doesn’t work like that! Even if life was seeded onto the planet Earth millions of years ago (something I believe is contradicted by “All Good Things” anyway), it does not follow that that microbial life would then evolve to humanoid form because that is the form that seeded the planet. Evolution is not the process of life going “forward” in a march toward humanoid form. Evolution just goes every which way finding whatever works. Even if we assume the progenitors encoded their DNA with instructions so that it was closer to intelligent design than actual evolution, what happens when life becomes humanoid? Does it just stop? Does it act as if it has reached the pinnacle? What about all the rest of the life on Earth? Do ants just keep evolving until they become humanoid? And dogs and bats and whales? Are they all on the path to humanoid form? Is Bojack Horseman the future of the Star Trek universe?

“The Chase” is a decent but dumb episode of TNG that proves something proved by other episodes: Star Trek writers don’t understand evolution. And those other episodes are even worse. I’m sure I’ll get to them at some point.

Picking up right where the last one left off, the Secretary General from previous episodes gives a speech about the alien envoy and how peace is in sight! How happy! The peace talks go badly pretty quickly, culminating in an explosion in which McQueen is badly injured. The war is back on, and our main cast are now at increased risk because the show is cancelled.

One good thing does come of the peace talks, though: the colonists taken prisoner in the pilot are being transferred back to the humans and, when the talks deteriorate, the prisoners are still on a ship in space where the Wild Cards can fly in and rescue them. This is the last episode of the show, so it all comes back around to West’s missing girlfriend, who is confirmed to be among the survivors. But the mission goes only slightly better than the peace talks. Main Character Powers are dimmed by season finale stakes and series cancellation, so Vansen and Damphousse are shot down and are last seen crashing down onto a planet, trying just to make the crash survivable. It probably would have been, if the show had continued, but it didn’t, so I assume they’re both dead. What’s more, Damphousse is unconscious for this, so she doesn’t even get to have a final moment of import. Wang is killed in this fight, but he does get his moment, going down in a blaze of glory by fending off enemies and doing it in the names of allies who have died over the course of the series. He’s still dead, though. Also, in this episode Commodore Ross has a cold. Is nobody safe?!

So West and Hawkes are all that remains of the Wild Cards. West does get his reunion with the love of his life, though it’s brief. She’s saved from imprisonment, but she’s off back to Earth and he has to continue doing war. Hawkes, meanwhile, was forced into the military in the first place as a form of punishment, so in theory he could go home. I bet he doesn’t though. The show ends on a downer, and that’s appropriate. Usually the show tries to have it both ways, saying that war is bad, but also look how cool this war is. I like that, in the text as given, war is bad wins that particular tug-of-itself.

CHIG STUFF: The envoy reveals a bit about their motivations. When asked why they attacked the Colony in the pilot, they say that the Aero-Tech company ignored their warnings to stay away (warnings Areo-Tech claims to have not been capable of understanding). More significantly though, the Chigs do not recognize human claim to own Earth. Their science determined that their homeworld was seeded by organic compounds from another world, and they believe that world was Earth after a long-ago comet impact. Furthermore, they say they evolved on their world long before we did on ours, so really they have more claim to be the first rightful children Earth than we do. It’s interesting to see panspermia go this way. I’ve seen so much that uses it to explain how life got to Earth, less often do I see it as how alien life arose. I wonder why the show went that way with it… and is the answer very Jesusy?

Anyway, show’s over. I’ll be back with a final thoughts post, but for now that’s it.