On Helix, evil transhumanists are the world's worst mad scientists onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com On Helix, evil transhumanists are the world's worst mad scientists

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Last night's episode of Helix took us further toward the final showdown between Ilaria's private army and our ragtag gang of vectors, scienticians, and silver-eyed somethings. We've discovered what Illaria represents, by the way, and it involves a lot of silly science talk. Spoilers ahead!

So basically what we're dealing with are a bunch of evil transhumanists who've figured out how to live forever by lengthening their telomeres without telomerase. Which, as Sarah explains to us in an embarrassingly awful monologue, could also cure cancer! Because you could take out telomerase and then cancer would die! Ohhh, sciencey! I honestly have no idea why this show keeps trying to bring in actual science if it's going to be so painfully bad. Honestly I would be much happier if we got one line about handwavium and just got back to the plot.

As Orphan Black has already proven, evil transhumanists are the new vampires. Helix is running with that idea in a major way, which we see when Julia and Alan race to an abandoned station to track down the random scientist who stole the black good virus. He's using the barely-operating radio to call Illaria and sell them the virus. And even though Illaria supposedly has an army on the way, they send one guy with a helicopter to pick up this item that is basically the most precious item in the world to them. That one guy quickly dispatches random scientist, and chases Julia and Alan into tunnels below the station — where they find a silver eye chained up like Damon in an episode of the Vampire Diaries.

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"Free me," mumbles silver eye. He's half-crazy, but Julia tries to get information out of him about his eyes and what Hiroshi's plan is. Turns out Hiroshi has had this guy chained up for almost 30 years. All the dude wants to do is kill himself to "be free," which he does after a series of growly speeches. Apparently he's one of "the 500 immortals," which Hiroshi later explains are the people who run Illaria. Hiroshi also spills a few other facts, including the fact that Julia's mother left him when she found out that he was kidnaping Inuit kids like Miksa. But it's OK, because "most of them" went to childless families.

In a hamhanded bid to draw out suspense, Hiroshi refuses to tell Julia about how the silver eyes came to be. Obviously they've been around since the earliest days of transhumanism, since the guy Hiroshi chained up has been there since the 1980s. Maybe they're even holder, though. As many commenters have already suggested here, maybe they're actually aliens or vampires, instead of transhumanists who simply act like them. We know they're immortals with telomerase powers, but that's about it.

So let's return to what we do know. At some point, Alan tells Julia matter-of-factly that Hiroshi had a bunch of Inuit kids he was experimenting on. Which — what? Did we already know that? I mean, Hiroshi admitted he was kidnapping the children, but he never said anything about experiments. So now we just assume that he was experimenting on them, and then sent them out into the world to be adopted with Illaria's blessing? Given that this subplot involves a major character, Miksa, and a major revelation about Arctic Biosystems, I could sure have used a little more explanation here. You know, like maybe we could have cut Sarah's "so science very telomere such cancer wow" speech and actually solved the mystery of Miksa's upbringing?

Speaking of Miksa, he's rounded up the Inuit villagers with Sergio's help and they're "scattering to the winds" to escape Illaria's incoming army. I guess they're going to go hide in snowbanks or something? Anyway, who cares because Miksa's sister has told Sergio that he's a nice guy for saving their village and now she and Sergio are making out! I can't help liking this scene because, well, let's face it — Sergio is hot and his main role in this show is to make us happy by kissing people and looking shmoopy. Plus, at least nobody is telling me about telomeres and cancer.

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On that note, let's return to Sarah's epic quest to solve the mystery of Julia's genome even though she's now officially got cancer in her brain. (But don't forget we can cure that by doing things without telomerase! Next time I order a sandwich I'm totally going to try ordering it "with mustard but without telomerase" to see if that has any salubrious health effects.) Hiroshi comes in to help her and tell her she's a good scientist in a rather fatherly way. And then she gives Hiroshi the same absolution that Miksa's sister just gave Sergio. She tells him that even though he kidnaped kids, it's OK because other doctors in history experimented on children too and now we have vaccines! So it won't matter if he destroyed a bunch of families if they can figure out this miracle cure for everything.

Please note: This episode contained more than one scene where we were supposed to ponder the awe-inspiring similarities between science and miracles. I hope you were sufficiently blown away.

Sense of wonder aside, are we any closer to knowing what the virus was really for? We've got this immortal 500 making deadly virus, presumably to clear the planet of other pesky humans who might get in the way of the immortals doing whatever they do. But Hiroshi has rebelled against his fellow silver eyes by making some other virus that creates vectors. And those vectors have now made Peter into their barf-drinking god. Unfortunately, all Peter wants to do is break into Hiroshi's office and steal pictures of Julia from the My Stalker Workbook so he can stick them to the wall of his cozy duct and cry. What the hell are the vectors for? And why do they have this weird hive mind and creepy voicebox thing?

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Don't be surprised if the answer is revealed in some offhand way in a conversation about how Alan has unresolved feelings about Julia, and Sarah has unresolved feelings about Alan, and Hiroshi has unresolved feelings about Illaria. Next week, Alan will say: "I'm so sorry I didn't go to your award ceremony while that vector hive mind was busy controlling the citizens of Earth." And then Sarah, all rebooted on Julia's spinal fluid, will reply, "Yeah, but now you can have sex with me while the 500 evil transhumanists fight with their Singulatarian enemies to have the least scientific perspective on the future."

Seriously, though, next week there will be more black goo zombie action so maybe we really will find out what those vectors are doing with their barf network. That should be fun.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com On Helix, evil transhumanists are the world's worst mad scientists

On Helix, scientists go completely nuts in zombietown onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com On Helix, scientists go completely nuts in zombietown

We're on episode three of Helix, which means it's day three of the black goo zombie outbreak in a remote arctic research station run by a mysterious scientist and his hunky Canadian sidekick. And the hunky CDC people who've come to rescue them can't do their jobs because scientists are crazy!

Spoilers ahead.

Helix is a stylish show, and its zombies move fast but its plot moves really slow. This episode was packed with scenes like the one you see above, where nothing happens other than screaming and slo-mo. It's atmospheric, but it prevents us from going anywhere with the story. Let's break it down.

One of the scientists has become a "vector," a black goo zombie who infects other people by barfing into their mouths. When the other Arctic Biosystems scientists on the isolation floor find out she's running around loose, they just lose their shit. "She's killing people!" yells the guy who has been kind of a pain in the ass from the beginning. Then the rest of the scientists become a screaming, angry mob yelling and running around. This kind of scene makes sense in many zombie stories, but here it feels like incomprehensible padding.

First of all, these scientists know exactly what's going on, because they've signed up to work at an unregulated research facility that handles things like smallpox and other infectious diseases. This is one of the big "reveals" of the episode — Hiroshi tells Alan that Arctic Biosystems was trying to come up with some kind of cure-all for every disease in the world (um, OK), and therefore they had a special stash of smallpox and probably stashes of every other dangerous microbe as well. In fact, one scientist actually came up with a beta version of the cure-all, which worked. Unfortunately, only 25 percent of subjects who got the cure-all actually survived to enjoy it.

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So every scientist at Arctic Biosystems is familiar with isolation procedures, and they know the risks. They know that they are there to work on horrifically deadly diseases. Plus, in the scene we're discussing, they know they're locked in. So why are they behaving like people who have no idea what's going on, and who think that if they run into the hallway they'll be able to get somewhere?

This show is lucky enough to have a premise that involves a building full of over 100 scientists. Why not use that, and have them act like scientists, instead of trying to wedge this group into your standard "crowd goes nuts" scene from every other zombie story? I'm not trying to say scientists don't go nuts. But these are scientists who know they are working in a facility full of potential black goo zombie microbes. They aren't ignorant. There has to be a more plausible way to show them losing their shit than this.

Ultimately this scene also proves to be the pivotal moment in the episode where all the plot developments so far are reset to zero. Sarah figures out a test to determine who is infected by black goo and who isn't. Everybody takes the test, which is why there are about 50 people down on the isolation floor — they're the ones who tested positive.

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And yet, despite the fact that Peter barfed goo in Julia's mouth, she tests negative. At that point, we're not sure whether Julia even remembers the shower time with Peter, so it makes sense that she takes the negative test as a sign she imagined everything. Until this scene, when she watches the zombie barfing goo into some poor sucker's face. We see the realizing dawning on her face that Peter did infect her — and within minutes, she's realized that Sarah's test didn't work. (FYI: THIS is the kind of thing an infectious disease expert would do in this situation — freak out a little, and then geek out in the lab.)

So the plot arc of this episode was that we had a test, and now we don't have a test. Back to square one: We have no idea who is infected and who isn't. At least Julia has isolated herself in the isolation floor, unlike Sarah, whose keeps showing disease symptoms but insists she's fine.

Meanwhile, snarky CDC scientist Doreen and army guy Sergio have teamed up to figure out whether they can isolate the disease-causing microbe by grabbing a tissue sample from the popsicle monkey field outside. It seems that Hiroshi or hunky Canadian Daniel has stolen her unfrozen monkey sample. Luckily, due to science, the frozen monkey sample yields a big of microbe action.

There's a genuinely creepy, Species-esque scene, where Doreen and Sergio try to grow some of the microbe on a petri dish. When they put it in an incubator, it instantly blooms into an enormous swirl of black tentacles that look like Cthulhu's diarrhea.

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So obviously this microbe is, um, a little different. Before we all start hoping it will be aliens, what's actually interesting about this subplot is how Sergio reacts. He warns Doreen to keep it a secret from Alan — because then Hiroshi will find out, and this experiment will disappear the same way her monkey did. Doreen buys it, and keeps the goo powers a secret.

The weird thing is that Sergio is working with Hiroshi, right? But as he tells Doreen, he and some other Army folks think that the black goo didn't get out by accident. Did Hiroshi unleash it to call the world's attention to the evils unfolding at Arctic Biosystems, thus making him a good guy? Or did he do it to advance a plan to destroy the world, thus making him a silver-eyed alien/mutant who, um, something something?

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Either way, we have learned almost nothing about the black goo by the end of day three. Sorry, we learned that it makes you super strong and barfy. And, given that Peter finally turned himself in, muttering, "Help me," we know that eventually the zombie super-strength goes away. And we did see the Cthulhu thing.

Still, I really don't feel like that's enough. There are too many scenes of people freaking out and talking in jump cuts, and not enough plot-advancing excitement. I want to see things happening that don't add up to being in exactly the same place, story-wise, that we were when the episode started.

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That said, as the episode ends, we do learn one more thing. Sergio is on a mission to make this show one, long bottle episode.

When Alan says he's lost control and will call the Army in for help the next time they have a "satellite window," Sergio takes matters into his own hands. For whatever reason, he wants this shit kept secret, and he's apparently willing to die to do it. He blows up the satellite communications dish, which means he's now the only guy who can talk to the outside world (he's got a pocket satellite setup that he used in a previous episode).

Also, for some reason, the satellite dish also relayed communications between phones inside the facility, which makes absolutely no sense. So now, when Julia calls Alan on the phone from the isolation floor, her message about the test is cut off. Alan doesn't know that the test didn't work, and Julia is left banging on the door yelling "It didn't work!" Which, again, why does this base have 1) no internal wired network and 2) no cameras? Maybe the show is actually set in the 1930s and that will be a big reveal?

I hate that Helix is turning me into the kind of fan who grouses about dumb details like why there are no security cameras. Seriously, there should be so much cool shit happening in this show that I don't even remember to think about whether the containment facility is realistic or not. I want blistering weirdness, and plot twists that make my eyes pop out of my head. I really hope those developments are in there, waiting to burst out of the next 10 episodes.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com On Helix, scientists go completely nuts in zombietown