Learning what God means to others

Just finished binging Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access. It's the best Star Trek since Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is where Jean-Luc Picard was introduced. And unlike TNG which was episodic, this first season of Picard was serial, which is a big plus in my book.

I really enjoyed the first season of Altered Carbon. I enjoyed the second season even more. It was sharper, tighter, more effective in narrative in just about every way.

To be blunt: I thought Emergence 1.8 was, well, a weak episode. Here's why:

A fast-moving episode 1.7 of Emergence. I hope the rest of the season continues at this pace.

Emergence checked in with another strong episode — 1.6 — and brought us to two surprising revelations. Both concern Kindred.

I've been saying ever since Trump began running for President with his anti-immigration polices that The Man in the High Castle and its alternate reality of literally Nazi America had special relevance to the reality in which we now all reside, in which the Allies not the Axis won the Second World War. In the final season of this extraordinary adaptation of Philip K. Dick's extraordinary 1962 novel, immigration plays a major role in the story, especially in the very last scene of the series.

With last night's episode 1.5 of Emergence, Piper has moved from the category of someone with superpowers to Supergirl. That's because she clearly has more than one incredible superpower.

A revelatory episode 1.3 of Emergence last night, in which we learn that definitely robots and maybe androids are involved in this series.

A good second episode of Emergence last week, in which the main action are the bad guys, or superior people, or people from the future, or whoever; they are trying to clean up all traces of what happened the previous week.

Emergence, which debuted on ABC last week, is another example of a recently well-worn theme back on network television yet again: a child or teenager who mysteriously appears, and turns out to have some kind of superpower.

I was going to entitle this review of The I-Land on Netflix, "Lost Opportunity." You know, that ABC series Lost, which had an excellent beginning, an absolutely out-of-the-ballpark brilliant third and fourth season, and then took a turn very much for the worse, with one of the worst series finales ever on television? Except ...