in the open space: God & culture

“One ship against the three of us? They are outnumbered.” ~ Sergeant Azima Kandie in the “ Detect, Deceive, Destroy” episode of  The Last Ship If you read this blog, you know I’m a fan of disaster and sci-fi stories, so it will come as no surprise that  The Last Ship   is part of my regular summer viewing. The TNT action-drama, which wrapped up its fourth season this month, centers on the crew of the   U.S.S. Nathan James   after a global pandemic wipes out over 80 percent of the world’s population. The crew of the U.S. Navy ship spends the first three seasons finding and distributing a cure and the fourth tracking down and finding the solution to a plant virus that threatens to wipe out the world’s food supply. The last season or two has slipped into a more formulaic format than the first two. As Captain Chandler has transformed from a vulnerable father and mourning husband struggling with the consequences and costs of leadership into your stan...

Lynch/Frost Productions In May, Showtime released a limited series revival of Twin Peaks , a 1990 quirky two-season television crime drama set in a small town in Washington and centered on FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper’s investigation of the murder of a teenager named Laura Palmer.  I hadn’t watched the original series, so when I ran across it on Netflix, I thought I’d try to give it a go before Showtime’s series aired. From the opening scene, however, I was utterly confused. The characters made references to other characters as if I  should already know who they are, and I couldn’t really grasp what was going on from scene to scene. At first, I chalked it up to creator David Lynch’s surreal style, but half-an-hour in I discovered why I was so confused: I was watching the first episode of the second season instead of the first season. The memory still makes me laugh, but it also reminds me of the way many of us approach Scripture. We often start in the middl...

If you are looking for something to binge watch on Amazon Prime, consider the one-season CBS comedy-thriller BrainDead , a political satire set in a present-day Washington, D.C. that’s been invaded by extraterrestrial insects which both feed on the brains of and take control of people, including congress members and staffers.                                                     As the bugs take over, they cause their hosts to become more extreme in their ideologies and tactics—so much so that the Democrats and Republicans mirror each other to the point that it gets hard to distinguish one from the other. The bugs’ agenda? To keep people distracted: while the humans fight each other, the bugs take over the planet. As the po...

photo by Carmen Andres Recently, friends of mine who are software developers told me about Netflix’s data collection, which not only tracks everything we watch but also every time we fast-forward, rewind, pause or abandon a movie or show altogether. Netflix uses this information to personalize recommendations as well as make decisions about what programming to feature or create. In “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood,” Alexis Madrigal explores how Netflix also “microtags” every movie and show (from the plot, director and actors to the main characters’ jobs), incorporating that data into a system she compares to Facebook’s Newsfeed—“but instead of serving you up pieces of web content that the algorithm thinks you’ll like, Netflix is serving you up filmed entertainment.” I find all that pretty impressive (and handy)—but others are a bit more wary. In “How Netflix is Using Big Data,” Ritika Tiwari notes that some critics are concerned that Netflix is abusing the...

I expected a typical British police drama when I queued up the six-episode miniseries, Broadchurch . Instead, I discovered a gripping tale along the lines of P.D. James that pulls us not only into the mystery behind a murder but also an unsettling exploration of who we are. Broadchurch is a small community on the coast of England suddenly unraveled by the death of an 11 year old boy found murdered on the beach beneath a looming cliff. As Danny’s death is investigated by newly appointed Detective Inspector Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and town resident Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman), we are confronted with the brokenness of human nature and our capacity for (self)deception, narrow-mindedness, and destruction—and how actions born of those things affect us and those around us. Broadchurch explores the things that bring us together and tear us apart. It explores how we see the things we want to see and don’t see the things we need to see. And it wrestles with our ba...

CBS Artificial intelligence. Robots and cool tech. Space stations and possible alien encounters. An unexplainable conception. And the promise of explorations on the definition of life, souls and meaning. While the premiere episode of CBS’s new soft sci-fi series Extant was a bit sluggish and even clumsy at points, I am intrigued by its near future world and the questions it poses. Boasting Stephen Spielberg as an executive producer, Extant revolves around astronaut Molly Woods (Halle Berry) who has just returned home from a one-year solo mission on a space station. Readjustment to life with her family—husband and robotics engineer John (Goran Visnjic) and their “son” Ethan (Pierce Gagnon), an artificially intelligent android John created—is complicated when she learns that she is unexplainably pregnant despite infertility and having no sexual contact since before her mission. During flashbacks, however, we learn that Molly has kept secret a mysterious encou...

CW The 100 is uneven, eye-rolling and yet, at times perplexedly moving. Its strongest moments are those that flirt with the edges of deeper truths, especially those that revolve around a dominant theme exploring the temptation to act on self interest in environments that beg us to give into a “survival of the fittest” worldview. I am particularly intrigued with the way the series explores the unbinding and unwinding power of sacrifice as way to navigate through that challenge. The 100  is set about a century after a nuclear war on Earth. The only survivors were 400 inhabitants of 12 space stations in orbit. The 12 stations linked and reformed into one station called the Ark, and three generations later, they now number 4,000. With limited and dwindling resources, the leaders of the Ark enforce harsh measures—like population control and capital punishment for even minor crimes—to ensure humanity’s survival. When chief engineer Jake Griffin discovers that Ark’s li...