ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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There's are some interesting differences between the movie and the upcoming series. Detective Sullivan has been changed from a macho man to a very hot gal — Devin Kelley, who bears a resemblance to Adrianne Palicki. (Be still, my foolish heart . . . .)


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In the new series, the deceased father she chats with across times on a ham radio isn't someone she loves and misses, it's someone she reviles and resents. And her late father is also a police officer himself, whereas Dennis Quaid was a fireman in the movie.

The freak accident that converts the radio into a temporal communications device has been changed to a bolt of lightning which zaps the antennae, instead of intense solar radiation from sunspots.

It all seems to work, based on the trailer (which gave me chills), even the lame lightning thingie, because the producers want the radio's conversion to be permanent and not temporary, like it was in the movie. And since it's all science fiction, there's no reason for us to object to the clever switcheroo.

Here's IMDB description of the show's premise.
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A police detective in 2016 discovers that she is able to speak via a ham radio with her estranged father; Frank Sullivan, a detective who died in 1996 and the two must work together to change the history of tragic events to come while also getting the chance to heal their complicated relationship.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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My first impression is that this series imitates the great movie in some ways, while it tosses out important aspects of it in others.

One of the two important things they changed that annoyed me was the relationships between the daughter (in this version) and her father. In the movie, the father was idealized and missed, a heroic fireman who died trying to save a girl in a burning warehouse.

In this version, the daughter resents her father for leaving her (and her mother), and for apparently turning into a bad cop just before he died.

Big change. But they do redeem this change for the most part at about the mid-point, so that doesn't entirely work against it.

The other change pertains to her father's old ham radio. In the movie, the radio is affected by a powerful solar flare that causes unusual auroras which fill the sky all the way down to New York. That's not strictly scientific, but it's at least imaginative.

In the new series, a lightning bolt hit the rooftop antennae and lights up the radio, giving it magical time-crossing powers.

When lightning strikes near my house, it screws up my equipment — it doesn't give it remarkable new abilities.



The episodes goes on to imitate great moments in the movie, but in confusing and annoying ways. My final analysis is that this show is made for a short-attention-span young audience, and it's afraid to slow down long enough to tell the tell the story, because it thinks its viewers will start texting each other during the "slow" moments.

Damn. I'm disappointed. I hope it will get better.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[orzel-w]

[Bud Brewster]

[Bud Brewster]

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Well, Frequency has been on a few weeks now, and I continue to be impressed by it. My previous complaints about the changes they made to the great movie's premise have proven themselves to be both justified and imaginative.

This is one of those shows which is so good I actually wish I hadn't started enjoying until it had been on for a few years, so I could binge watch several episode per day, starting right after breakfast and ending right before dinner.

Having said that, I'm preparing myself for the crushing blow when the idiot executives at the network cancel this great series. It's practically inevitable, because it's just too good to last.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

Gee, lightning just gave me super speed!
Musta been that heavy water I was drinking at the time!

[Bud Brewster]

[Bud Brewster]

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The episode which aired on November 9th was a hell of a lot more enjoyable than the election results last night, a date which some of us are going to wish we could change eventually by radioing urgent advice to ourselves when political situations in this country start going very badly on a national scale.

In this episode, Raimy meets a convict imprisoned for murder because he killed a man he knew was going to cause the deaths of a group of children on bicycles when his alcoholic neighbor plowed into them while driving drunk.

The imprisoned inventor did this because his temporal communications device does what Raimy's ham radio does — allows him to talk to himself in the future.

This changes Raimy Sullivan's Magical Ham Radio that allows her talk to her dead Daddy into a marvel of technology which spans the space/time continuum!

In other words, this series is now science fiction again! This is a pivotal episode for this show.

On an unrelated note, the photography in this series is breathtaking. Raimy is played by the lovely Peyton List, and I can't find a single jpeg of her as good as the wealth of close-ups she gets during her many dramatic scenes.

When I eventually buy the DVDs of his series (not the Blu-rays, because my laptop can't make screen grabs from BDs, and I think that BD's are overrated), I'll be able to post a few Brewsterized images for this thread with brightness, color, and clarity enhanced.

Meanwhile, for those of you who love intelligent science fiction series, I can highly recommend this one.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

Two things I've told to my sons,

1. "And this too shall pass."

2. "Just be happy you live in interesting times."

[orzel-w]

[Gord Green]

----Or a reality.

[Custer]

It's an entertaining series — almost time travel, with clues and tips travelling into the past, and having a large effect on the present. There's a lot of it about, with "Timeless" and "Legends of Tomorrow" both battling Nazis recently . . . and of course "Travellers" is about coming from the future to change the present, and thus avoid some horrendous future occurrences. SF-wise, there's more time travel than space travel lately...

[Bud Brewster]

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I continue to watch and enjoy this series. It requires the viewer to pay close attention, because each episode switches back and forth between Frank Sullivan in 1996 and Raimy Sullivan in 2016.

The series is perhaps creating more viewer frustration than necessary by refusing to have the two main characters tell anybody about the "time talking radio" — even Raimy's mother, who is destined to be a victim of the Nightingale Killer, doesn't know that her estranged husband is talking to his grown-up daughter.

A scene in an early episode showed us Frank sitting this wife down at the radio and begging Raimy to talk to her mother. Raimy remained silent because she feared that knowing about the strange temporal communication would somehow increase the danger to her mother.

Wait . . . what?

Nope, I don't buy it either. But I guess they have to save a few things for the season finale.



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

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I continued to watch and enjoy this series right to the end. It required the viewer to pay close attention, because each episode switches back and forth between Frank Sullivan in 1996 and Raimy Sullivan in 2016.

The series created more viewer frustration than necessary by refusing to have the two main characters tell anybody about the "time talking radio" — even Raimy's mother, who was destined to be a victim of the Nightingale Killer, and she doesn't know that her estranged husband is talking to his grown-up daughter.

A scene in an early episode showed us Frank sitting his wife down at the radio and begging Raimy to talk to her mother. Raimy remained silent because she feared that knowing about the strange temporal communication would somehow increase the danger to her mother.

Wait . . . what?

Nope, I don't buy it either. I guess that's why the series was cancelled for poor ratings

Too bad . . .



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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)