Virtuality

I just watched Virtuality, which was supposed to be a new TV series on Fox. Instead the two part pilot was aired as a movie last month. It doesn’t look like Fox is going to pick it up as a series. You can watch it over on Hulu for free, legally.

I liked it for what it was and would watch it as a series. But there are a number of things about it that bother me and since I like to rattle on and complain about such things, I will.

First of all these people aren’t the type of people you’d send off on a long range space mission. The people who you’d find on this type of mission would be the super a-type personalities, the do or die achievers, the people with the right stuff. They are the kind of people who continue on toward their goal no matter what. The goal is their whole purpose in life. The people on the show, however, are a bunch of mental loons. Everybody has a personality problems and half of them are more irritable than I am when trying to explain why I don’t like baby-doll waistlines on women’s dresses.

The show throws in my two least favorite and ultra tired plot devices. The evil giant mega-corporation that is operating with shadowy, deceitful methods to achieve unknown goals that basically boils down to money and power. And, the whole global warming is going to kill us tomorrow thing. Note that is “kill us tomorrow” not “eventually make the planet unlivable at some distant point in the future.” Though to be fair there is a suggestion that the evil giant mega-corporation may be making up the whole global catastrophe thing to influence the crew.

Another tired thing is the over simplifying of technology in the form of some “Ghost in the Machine” figure who keeps popping up in everybody’s virtual reality program and doing bad things like killing or raping them. The crew keeps referring to it as a “glitch” and that just annoys the hell out of me. That is like playing Chess on your computer and suddenly because a computer programmer messed up, the program bugs out causing you to have to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe every time you want to capture a pawn. Well actually in this case a Tic-Tac-Toe program that shoots you. Glitches don’t do that. A stack overflow error doesn’t create a whole other game inside the program, especially one that has its own motives. These characters wouldn’t call it a glitch, they would know it was something more purposeful.

And since the whole show was just a pilot, it doesn’t really end which sucks if you just sat through the whole thing.