TV Review: Tomorrow and I

In the future, humanity is the same, but we find new ways to complicate our lives

The anthology miniseries Tomorrow and I, produced in Thailand and released last year on Netflix, explores near-future scenarios where personal identity, social mores and class divisions intersect with digital tools, biotechnology and climate change. Although the stories told in the four episodes have universal appeal, they are related to topics that are deeply important in today’s Thailand: the struggles that trans people still face in conservative families, the government’s hypocrisy that keeps sex workers out of the formal economy, the rapidly changing attitudes about the place of religion in the 21st century, the dangers of rising sea levels for a coastal country, and the slow distribution of coronavirus vaccines.

The first episode, Black Sheep, is a bittersweet tale of selfless love. The story is about a closeted trans man who has been so far resigned to a life of unhappiness. He finds a measure of satisfaction in his job as a doctor who does cutting-edge research on 3D printing of organs for transplantation. It turns out that growing living tissue into the desired shape works better in microgravity, so he’s been recruited for a space mission where his experiments have more promising chances. However, his return trip results in a fatal accident, and that’s when his husband sees an opportunity to use forbidden cloning technology to bring him back—this time in the right body.

We don’t learn about the protagonist’s gender dysphoria until after his death, when the cloning technology scans the memories from his brain. Most of the episode actually follows the husband, whom we see grieve for a while before he comes up with the cloning idea. There’s a very interesting scene where he argues with his in-laws about the process: they strongly oppose it for religious reasons, and he has no time for talk of the afterlife. The Buddhist doctrine that the material world is full of suffering takes a central place in the discussion.

This episode makes good use of the narrative rule that victories must have a painful cost. For our astronaut doctor, it’s the legal limbo of existing as a cloned person (not unlike the real-life legal limbo of trans people in Thailand, who still can’t change their ID to one that reflects their true gender). For the husband, it’s a prison sentence for stealing the head from the morgue, and after that, the separation from his spouse, who miraculously got his job back, but is now permanently stationed at a lunar research lab.

Pros: Great casting for the role of the astronaut doctor, with separate actors for the scenes before and after resurrection/transition.

Cons: The reveal of this character’s history of gender dysphoria is handled without much tact, almost crossing the line into sensationalism.

The second episode, Paradistopia, is a warped reflection of real life through a neon lens. The protagonist is a businesswoman who founds a sex robot factory with the dual goal of relaxing the tight social expectations regarding sex in Thailand and giving less arduous white-collar jobs to aging sex workers. The story of her rise to commercial success is interweaved with flashbacks of her childhood as the daughter of a sex worker, struggling to finish her studies and dreaming of leaving her slum behind. In the present, she’s returned to the same slum and transformed it into a proud red-light district where every desire is catered to with the latest robotic technology.

There are several scenes of talk shows discussing the planned launch of a robot brothel; cabinet members warn that men who get too used to consequence-free interaction with a machine may carry the same behavior to their real relationships, while our protagonist insists that Thailand needs to develop a more open attitude about the varieties of erotic desire. These scenes have the clear intent of inviting the viewer to side with the protagonist, but she’s not above playing dirty herself. She bribes several government officers to secure the legal permits for her robot brothel, and even orchestrates a false-flag smear capaign against herself to draw public sympathy.

The resolution of this episode is rather abrupt and inelegant, but it does pack an implied punch: just because the authorities aren’t ready for a world with robot sex doesn’t mean demand will magically vanish.

Pros: The fabulous retrofuturist aesthetic in every detail.

Cons: The cringeworthy attempts at humor.

The third episode, Buddha Data, is about the meeting between digital culture and ancient tradition. We follow a Buddhist monk who starts questioning his purpose when the whole country becomes obsessed with a new mobile app that adds gamification to acts of charity. The creator of the app resents the Buddhist priesthood for cheating his parents out of all their possessions in the form of offerings, and has given himself the mission to bring actual, material consequences to good deeds. Instead of accumulating merit for the next life, users of his app receive karma points they can exchange for discounts. It doesn’t take long for some people to perversely game the system and earn points for technically fulfilling the quests.

So our monk, who happens to have coding experience, teams up with a former colleague and launches his own spiritual progress app. While his competitor turns charity into a performance for selfish motives, this app guides the user through the steps of enlightenment with the help of wisdom extracted from the brains of veteran monks. All seems to go well for this project, until a scandal blows up and brusquely reminds the viewer that scanning a monk’s brain is no guarantee of holiness.

Pros: The dialogue scenes between the monk and his robot sidekick.

Cons: The plot relies on too many convenient contrivances.

The fourth episode, Octopus Girl, is the show’s pièce de résistance, although the budget was clearly spent more in set design and casting than in scriptwriting. We’re introduced to two adorable schoolgirls who live in a slum during a worldwide three-year-long rain caused by a collapsed climate cycle. Most people have become accustomed to the perpetual rain, and some animals have begun showing impressive adaptations, but tropical diseases are out of control. The United Nations have developed a vaccine prepared with octopus genes; the only side effect is that your face grows little tentacles. In Thailand, the comically inept Prime Minister makes a big show of banning the vaccine from the country while proposing instead to enclose flooded towns under glass domes.

Meanwhile, our girls sneak into a TV singing contest and steal the nation’s hearts by bringing attention to the way the government neglects poor neighborhoods. The scenes in their slum have a cute slice-of-life vibe that is only hurt by the tonal mismatch of a sense of humor more appropriate for an audience of children (which is hard to believe, given this is the same series that had an episode about sex robots). But the biggest tonal whiplash is the episode’s ending, which just wipes off all the goodwill the episode has laboriously tried to earn.

Pros: Excellent set design.

Cons: Very strange humor, needlessly mean ending.

Taken as a whole, Tomorrow and I is pessimistic about the potential of technology. Even when people seem to achieve their goals with the help of advanced genetics or robotics or informatics, the situation invariably turns more adverse and the achievement becomes unusable or unenjoyable. However, this doesn’t mean that the stories take a nihilistic stance about the human search for happiness. This is no Black Mirror. What these stories are saying is that, while technology makes our faults more notorious and therefore more consequential, that doesn’t negate the sincerity of our efforts. Fundamentally good people find themselves in defective systems that don’t allow for neat, clean solutions.

The nuances of this humanist stance are hindered by the show’s painfully simplistic and obvious dialogues. I must admit that I watched with English subtitles and can’t understand Thai, but to the extent that each plot can be followed, what is gained with great visual effects is lost with lackluster scripts, by which I mean that the characters’ reactions can get too melodramatic, or too predictable, or too hackneyed. One can believe that the future will be hard to navigate, but not that we will lack the capacity to describe it.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Herrrrrrrrrrrre we go again

It takes chutzpah to give the name "Rebirth" to a sequel that fails to make the case for why your franchise shouldn't stay dead. It takes even more chutzpah to admit as much in your movie's actual script: as our expert characters explain, people used to queue enthusiastically to see a good dinosaur show, whereas now they can't be bothered, and the only reason these bizarre abominations haven't been put out of their misery is that they're super expensive to make and the company still hopes something useful may come from them.

At least this time there's encouraging news: Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are mercifully out of the picture, and in their place we get actors who can act. But the spectre of those two still haunts Jurassic World: Rebirth, because the dialogues haven't gotten any better. Fortunately, the latter half of the movie is mostly action set pieces, so there's not much talking to cringe at, but the beginning, when the characters are convincing each other that returning to the land of people-eating monstrosities isn't an obviously bad idea, is full of tortured technobabble and predictable jokes.

The script sticks so faithfully to established movie tropes that the cast can be neatly classified as follows:

• Family of innocent bystanders who of course won't get eaten because they're adorable;
• Trio of heroes who of course won't get eaten because their names are on the poster;
• Suddenly introduced crew who of course will get eaten because someone has to.

That being said, the actual confrontations with various types of dinosaurs are put together with proper care for the rhythm of dramatic tension, so there are many moments when one truly fears for the characters who can't die. Also, after a shipwreck splits the cast in two teams, the editing maintains a good sense of when to cut between their respective subplots. The flow of action is consistent and engaging. As survival adventures go, this one is quite enjoyable. But the movie doesn't do the core part of the assignment, which was to justify its own existence.

When 2015's Jurassic World introduced the concept of hybrid dinosaurs, it was a clever allegory for the arms race that was taking shape between increasingly unimpressed moviegoers and increasingly desperate moviemakers. But the sequels that followed haven't known what to do with that idea, and became further incarnations of what that first reboot wanted to criticize. The moments of Spielbergian awe at the majesty of primeval colossi have ceded the stage to instinctive revulsion at uglier and uglier experiments that make for curious action figures but don't have a narrative reason for being in the story.

Rebirth closes off the opportunity that the ending of Fallen Kingdom created and Dominion squandered: the repercussions of a world where dinosaurs are running loose and interacting with today's ecosystems. The new status quo declares that, actually, dinosaurs aren't compatible with the environmental conditions in most of the planet, and they've settled in a narrow band of territory near the equator, where it's hot enough for their tastes. OK, I can buy that. But the excuse to visit them this time is too contrived: a pharmaceutical company needs living tissue samples from the biggest dinosaurs because something about their massive hearts can provide a treatment for coronary disease. Can you use DNA from their fossils? No, it has to be from living animals, for reasons. Can you make your own clones and take the tissue samples from their embryos? No, it has to be in the restricted island where every government forbids to go, for reasons. Can you use blue whales, which are actually twice as big as the mosasaur? No, it has to be from the scary ones that eat people. For reasons.

So the plot makes zero sense, but at least the characters aren't annoying and the action is competently directed. If only the script hadn't yielded to the temptation of adding yet another dinosaur hybrid for no reason. What could have been a thrilling ending to the adventure ends up delivering a titan-sized eyesore that turns out to be too easy to get rid of. There's even a prologue that foreshadows this monster, with a deadly accident that could have served to comment on the dangers of our modern way of life (a lab is destroyed because someone was eating a chocolate bar), but that plotline goes nowhere. If you can get past the mediocre dialogues, lazy comedy, and shoehorned character motivations, Rebirth clears the bar of not being terrible, which by this point seems to be all we get to ask of a Jurassic sequel.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

The Jurassic franchise has gone the way of the dinosaurs

With its disregard for theme, characterization, or plot logic, Jurassic World Dominion is unworthy of the franchise's revered legacy

The last time I wrote about the Jurassic franchise, I warned that Fallen Kingdom was trying to be so many things at once that it exhausted the possibilities for the story to keep growing. Time has proven me correct: its sequel Dominion is a flavorless purée with so little sense of its own identity that it's made of moments stitched together to pose like a movie. A monster meat market (stolen from Pacific Rim), an extended motorcycle chase (stolen from James Bond) or a cave detour with pointless hat rescue (stolen from Indiana Jones) hint at a world that is more interesting than the tightly contained glimpse we're given. And even within all the constraints this movie imposes on itself, it's remarkable that such an overcomplicated plot needs so many perfect coincidences to keep moving.

How did we get here? At the end of Fallen Kingdom, two world-shattering events happened: dinosaurs were released into the world, and we learned that the same dinosaur-cloning technology had been used to clone a human. Either of those two twists should have resulted in drastic changes in everyday life for the sequel to explore. But the start of Dominion pays just the most perfunctory lip service to that new state of affairs before jumping right back to a tiny ensemble of protagonists who, three movies in, haven't earned a reason for us to care about them. Chris Pratt's Owen Grady is somewhere in Nevada playing cowboy, taming a herbivore dinosaur we never meet again, while Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire Dearing is still trying to redeem herself with petty acts of heroism. These two establishing scenes are so disjointed from each other that it comes as a jarring surprise when we learn that Owen and Claire are actually back as a couple.

After these multiple skippable prologues with no consequence, the story proper begins when Maisie Lockwood, the aforementioned human clone, is kidnapped along with a velociraptor clone. Where Fallen Kingdom tried to establish a thematic parallel between dinosaur cloning and human cloning, here it's made explicit: the quest to save both victims is the same, the miraculous tale of their birth is told with the same reverence, and the ethically compromised scientist wants them for the same technobabble reasons. But if this rescue plot feels too small and remote from the somewhat more urgent fact that there are dinosaurs loose all over the planet, the plot behind the plot is even more obscure: an evil corporation wants to control the world's food supply, so they create both mutant locusts with dinosaur DNA, designed to eat everything, and proprietary mutant seeds that the locusts won't touch.

All this is so much unnecessary material added on top of the basic Jurassic premise that you could cut the fluff and make totally different movies with it. This might have been a movie about mutant locusts and mutant seeds, and not be a Jurassic movie at all. This might even have been a movie about the quest for a cloned child, and not be a Jurassic movie at all. The whole reason why we go to see a Jurassic movie is for the simple, primal delight of watching dinosaurs munch on people, so it's strange (although perhaps not so much if you recall that this movie has two casts' worth of unkillable protagonists) that Dominion features more violence committed against the dinosaurs than by them.

For all that Fallen Kingdom closed off narrative avenues, it left a valuable one open, a theme that until then had only been implied: that the Jurassic franchise is at the same time a moralizing fable of environmental preservation and a monster/survival/horror/thriller, but the three original films didn't explore that ambiguity to the degree that Fallen Kingdom did. Perhaps The Lost World came closest to making that kind of statement, the thorniest conflict in monster movie tropes: that you have an ethical responsibility toward the monster that's trying to eat you. The choice in Fallen Kingdom to introduce a human clone, who can tell us how she feels about her existence, is an apt substitute for the impossibility to articulate the dinosaurs' point of view (and it's no coincidence that it's this clone character who makes the crucial choice to liberate the dinosaurs). But also, on a more honest reading, we need the character of Maisie because the franchise ran out of things to say about the dinosaurs. Owen's speech about mutual respect with raptors doesn't really pay off (much less when most of his scenes with raptors involve running from them), and his ridiculous trademark posture with her palm stretched out, as if he's cosplaying Iron Man, gets tiresome really fast. Maisie should have been the heart of Dominion, but instead she's a hot potato jumping from set piece to set piece.

The action scenes are fine, and the dinosaurs are adequately scary, but you can only keep replaying the greatest hits from "high-tech compound fails to contain dinosaurs" so many times before it feels predictable. When all the named protagonists are movie superstars that you know the plot can't let die, the threats feel hollow, and the fights therefore fall flat. Nevermind how these characters are capable of keeping their perfect hairstyle after each scene: it's amazing that they can run so fast with all the plot armor they're carrying. But you can't have fight scenes without someone getting injured, and that pushes the movie into an ethical contradiction: our heroes are supposed to be environmentalist defenders of the very same wildlife they spend two hours stabbing, punching, and tasing. At some point, you have to ask: does Jurassic World Dominion want the dinosaurs to survive or not? And when is it going to make a case for us to care either way?

After the day is saved, nothing really changes. The looming food crisis is averted as suddenly as it was introduced. Dinosaurs are still part of daily life, but daily life appears much the same. Maisie is still profitable to every biotech company in the world, but miraculously no one tries to kidnap her again. There's still a black market in dinosaurs, which our heroes are content to leave be. A big speech is made about the need for humility if humankind is to coexist with the dinosaurs, but we don't get to see what that coexistence really looks like for ordinary people. As soon as the named protagonists achieve what they want, the outer world ceases to matter.

The Jurassic franchise has fallen prey to the same malaise of every big IP in our era of sequelitis: it forgot to be about something, and has opted to use big, flashy spectacle to disguise the lack of substance. With its too numerous contrivances, painfully unfunny jokes, uninspired dialogue, and confusing editing, this movie hits the franchise like the proverbial meteorite that put an end to the era of the big lizards. Just like Ghostbusters: Afterlife committed unforgivable necromancy in reanimating both its plot and its star, Jurassic World Dominion is guilty of cloning an inviable descendant of a fossilized relic.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10.

Bonuses: +1 for some visually stunning shots.

Penalties: −1 for dragging back the original cast to give them zero character development, −1 for having on its hands the prefect premise of dinosaurs walking among us and wasting it entirely on promo featurettes.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Interview: Sue Burke, Author of Immunity Index

photo by Daniel Lewis

Sue Burke is an author and translator who has lived in Madrid and Milwaukee, and currently resides in Chicago. Her newest novel, Immunity Index, comes out on May 4th.  She is also the author of the novels Semiosis and Interference,  her short stories and non-fiction articles have appeared in Asimov's, Clarksworld, Slate, Tor.com, Supersonic, and elsewhere, and she has translated multiple novels and short stories from Spanish to English. Along with many translators and linguists, her dream is to talk with aliens. 

Her forthcoming novel, Immunity Index, takes place in the not so distant future on Earth, yet much of what happens feels like it could have happened in the last year: a pandemic that leads to uncertainty and chaos, scientists racing for information, political protests, and people realizing that anything can be weaponized.  And since Burke writes science fiction, there are also secret sisters, a woolly mammoth, and a whole population of clones who are sick of being treated like second class citizens.  If you're a fan of Orphan Black and What Happened to Monday, you'll likely enjoy Immunity Index.

Burke was kind enough to chat with me about where she got the ideas for this novel, how to stay safe when you've just found your secret siblings, that the customer is not always right, her hopes for the future, and that even megafauna get hangry from time to time.  To learn more about Burke and her fiction, translation, and non-fiction, visit her website at sueburke.site, or follow her on twitter at @SueBurkeSpain.

Let's get to the interview!

NOAF: What can you tell us about your new novel Immunity Index? What's the elevator pitch?

Sue Burke: The United States is on the verge of a mutiny, human clones are second-class citizens, and three young women discover they are clones and sisters. When a sudden epidemic produces chaos, a scientist begins to unravel what’s really happening. Each of the women must fight to survive. One is an essential worker who hates her job, one is a rebellious college student, and one is caring for a genetically engineered woolly mammoth doomed by the chaos. Amid the mutiny and epidemic, their quest for freedom will lead them to each other. 

NOAF: Secret sisters, a geneticist studying illegal technology, and a deadly virus. What inspired this story, and how did all those elements get into the story?

SB: The initial central question of the story is identity. What makes us the same and different? Some of it is genetics, and some of it is life experiences. What makes those differences stand out? People show their true nature in a disaster. Because the story is about genetics, I brought more genetics and more disaster into it. The elements posed a lot of questions, and the story resulted from one set of answers.

NOAF: When the three women meet each other and realize everything they have in common, how do they react to learning who they are? Are they surprised? Had any of them been suspecting this truth? Is there any sisterly bonding that happens?

SB: The women manage to find out about each other well before they meet, but as a kind of sisterly bonding, they also don’t contact each other to keep each other safe. I don’t want to say much more and give away the plot.

Each one reacts differently, though, because they are different people. Life prepares all of us to deal with surprises in different ways. The same thing that seems like a disaster to one person can be an opportunity to another. What if you had a sister you never knew about? Your reaction would depend on everything that has happened to you so far.

NOAF: Who was your favorite character to write? What made that person so interesting to you?

SB: One of the sisters works in customer service, and I’ve done that too. She must be subservient and pleasant to all the customers all the time … until, in the chaos, she can finally speak her mind. She says things that I and every customer service worker have always wanted to say.

NOAF: I hear there is a woolly mammoth in this book? Tell me more!

SB: Two words: charismatic megafauna. These are the big animals that we love to love, like tigers, elephants, whales, and gorillas. What could be bigger and more lovable than a six-ton hairy mammoth? I realized that I could bring one back, at least in fiction, so I did. But I had to be honest about it. This would be a demanding, cranky beast that would eat everything in sight, need constant care, and do poorly in captivity. Still, he captures the heart of one of the sisters, and eventually, she gets to ride him!

NOAF: What is your writing process like? Do you plot everything out ahead of time, or do you just start writing and see where the story goes?

SB: Many writers praise the creative, organic exhilaration of “pantsing” or writing by the seat of their pants without an outline, uncovering the story as they go along. So, I thought, I’ll give it a try. It didn’t work for me. My first draft was limp and only half as long as it needed to be. Nine complete re-writes later, I had the final version of Immunity Index. And I learned a lesson. Planning saves time and trouble for me, although maybe not for other writers; whatever works is the right method for you. Now I’ve gone back to my old ways. I use an outline detailed enough to serve as a roadmap, and I discover a lot of interesting sights and stops along the way.

NOAF: You were recently at the virtual Capricon41 Science Fiction convention, and you hosted a few panels. On your blog, you mentioned that the theme of the convention was “Creating the Future We Want”. What is the future that you want? What do you hope to see in the next 5 years, the next 20? 

SB: I would like a quiet future. Slow but sure, we work through our problems. We make decisions that save us from dramatic disaster. People get opportunity, equity, and a chance to be their best and to lead good, productive lives. We bring climate change to a halt, and we live more lightly on the Earth.

I don’t actually expect this to happen, though, at least not in the next five to twenty years. Instead, I hope for noise — good noise, to paraphrase the late Senator John Lewis. Most of all, as we create this future, I don’t want to leave anyone out. We’ve done that in the past, and we’re living amid the wreckage.

NOAF: Thanks so much Sue!

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.