WHAT’S CONSIDERED CUTTING EDGE ON DEMAND: PART IApril 14, 2010
Syfy
On Demand Weekly's contributing writer Jon Shurkin looks into the popular Cutting Edge On Demand folder in a multi-part series. Let us know what your favorite Cutting Edge series @ mailbag@ondemandweekly.com.
PART I
Science Fiction and TV have not had the best of relationships. The original Star Trek was cancelled after three seasons and Joss Whedon’s latest shows were banished to Friday Nights and quickly cancelled. Sure, there was the “X-Files” and somewhere in the midst of polar bears and magical Lighthouses there’s “Lost” but that’s about it.
Right now there isn’t much in the way of Sci-Fi on TV but there is a place on Comcast VOD where you can go and find some of the best. That would be in the Cutting Edge folder on the Comcast VOD menu where you can find both SyFy’s “Caprica” and the great Japanese cartoon “Ghost in the Shell.”
It’s in the “Cutting Edge/SyFy” folder where you can find TV’s best, non-Smoke Monster related science fiction show, “Caprica.” “Caprica” is the “prequel” to maybe the best sci-fi show ever put on TV, “Battlestar Galactica” and takes place 58 years “before the fall”-- when those glowing eyed androids and their long-legged blonde partners wiped out the Twelve Colonies.
The show is more soap opera than space opera, techno geek than meditation on humanity, and exists almost completely separate from it’s big brother. It follows the lives of two families-- the angst-ridden family of tech maven Daniel Greystone and the immigrant family of Joseph Adama (father of Bill)-- as they navigate an ever-expanding world of virtual reality, non-blue avatars, organized crime, religious cults, and terrorism. It’s smart and literate and moody and as the show has moved on during it’s first season, slowly peeled intriguing layer after intriguing layer of it’s universe.
The other great piece of Sci-Fi on Comcast VOD are episodes of the notorious Japanese animated cartoon “Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.” The series, which you can find in the “Cutting Edge/Adult Swim/Action” folder is one part of a very large empire of “Ghost in the Shell” media which includes comics, TV shows, and movies. “Stand Alone Complex” is the first of the TV series’ about an intelligence agency, Section 9, running around in 2030 Japan. Some of the series consist of stand-alone episodes but most of it involves the team’s investigation of the “Laughing Man” incident, an incident involving the attempted kidnapping of a business executive by an unknown computer hacker.
And, yes, if you guessed that the incident involves conspiracies involving high-level officials and super-huge corporations, you would be correct. Like “Caprica,” “Ghost in the Shell” is heavy on the techno-geek but falls more along the lines of cyber-punk as it involves such fun things as micro-machines, computer hackers, and people attaching themselves to computers using big black tubes all done in that edgy, wide eyed anime way.
