This week, I misdirect your attention with some odds and ends, while I desperately try to think of something new to say about STAR WARS.

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A number of readers seem to be under the impression that the title of this column is supposed to refer to either the tone of its contents or my demeanor. Nope. I think the pop culture sense of the word “edgy” went out with the macarena and anyway, I’ve been on my very best behavior here. Edgewise refers only to me getting a word in same.

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A paragraph was dropped from my (mostly favorable) review of THE MATRIX. The gist of it was this; no conceivable variation of the line, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto,” is clever. It wasn’t even clever in THE WIZARD OF OZ, where at it least had the virtue of freshness. Really, if that line is anywhere in your script? Cut it.

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In the now-classic second installment of EDGEWISE, I inadvertently referred to the second movie in the PLANET OF THE APES series as “ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.” Of course I meant to say “BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES.” This is the first error I’ve ever made in my entire life. Now I know how the rest of you must feel.

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Apropos of nothing but the preceding item, John Rozum, writer of the late, lamented XOMBI and X-FILES comic books, used to refer to the seventies’ spin-off TV series as “Starsky and Hutch On The Planet Of The Apes.” It made me laugh.

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I want to do a column about the single strangest show in TV history, LIDSVILLE but the cruel and tyrannical overlords at FANTASTICON claim this show is outside my purview. What do you guys think? It’s an action/adventure show about hats. I mean, c’mon!

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The McDuffie Genius Grant is a cash award of one dollar American that I give solely at my own discretion to anyone who does something that I think is particularly bright. Today I’m announcing a special McDuffie Genius Grant to anyone who can figure out a plan to prevent the seemingly inevitable extinction of the comic book medium. If you can save my industry, I’ll pay you five bucks cash money from my own pocket. Serious inquiries only. And hurry, SPAWN’s under a hundred thousand copies a month, we can’t have much time left.

***

That about does me for this week, be here next time when I explain at length how STAR WARS ruined prose SF. Can THE PHANTOM EMPIRE make things any worse?

As I’m writing this, THE PHANTOM MENACE is still over a week away and that means just one thing. Yes, it’s back to my seemingly endless overview of Star Trek.

I’ve previously reviewed STAR TREK, the original series (thumb’s up) and STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (thumb dislocated). Let’s whip through as many movies as we can this week, shall we?

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN

This is probably the best of the movies, although I’ll accept arguments for IV. The cast is all in fine form, everybody’s got at least one good bit and Ricardo Montalban’s Khan is the single best villain in the entire series. Let’s face it, Mr. Roarke’s got it all. He’s got the accent, he’s got the pecs, he’s got the worm that crawls in your ear and later crawls out for no adequately explained reason unless, like Paul Winfield, you shoot yourself with a phaser first (And how cool was that?). Also, everybody gets jackets and Mr. Spock dies for a while. Rent it and watch it again. It’s still good.

STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK

It’s an odd-numbered one. Nothing more need be said but why let that stop me? They find him. Big surprise. What we’re they going to do, give us all our money back afterwards? Maybe they should have anyway.

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME

They have to go back in time to get a whale. Unlike the previous entry, this one’s funny on purpose. I laughed a lot but I still wonder what the whale said to the pissed-off cosmic thingy that came to Earth looking for its buds, the whales. “Don’t worry about it, big guy, the humans hunted us to extinction. Go home.”

STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER

This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen that didn’t have Jeff Conaway in it. On the other hand, at the premiere, big-time movie star Halle Barry mistook me for Michael Dorn (the actor who plays “Worf”). Like I was going to correct her. On second thought, it was a fine film.

STAR TREK IV: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

This should have been the last time we saw the original cast. A very strong entry, entertaining and thematically sound, it was both textually and metatextually a fitting send-off for our old friends. So of course they had to go to the well just one more time…

But my review of STAR TREK: GENERATIONS, and my fan boy scheme to ret-con it out of existence, will have to wait for a couple of weeks. Next time, I’ll talk about STAR WARS, if I can get a ticket. Two weeks hence, we’re back in the saddle with a quick pass at the rest of the STAR TREK movies and a look at STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.

Okay, no goofing around this week, let’s jump right into the EDGEWISE VIRTUAL MAILBAG.

Dear EDGEWISE,

-John Rozum, California

No I don’t and neither do the brains. In fact, they’re counting on it. But, you got me, they aren’t really brains. They’re extradimensional creatures whose true shape is too horrible and complex for our puny, human minds to fully grasp. Who’s got the space to describe all that every week? H.P. Lovecraft stories with less plot than a MARS ATTACKS trading card often spend thousands of words just describing the tentacles. I’m doing you a favor here, show some appreciation.

Dwayne,

-Ray Washington, Michigan

Well, I read almost everything, until STAR WARS and the dreaded fantasy trilogies ruined the medium. Off the top of my head, the stuff that stuck with me includes Harlan Ellison, Robert Sheckley, Robert Heinlein (with an explanation) and Robert Silverberg. Anybody named Robert, apparently. My favorite science fiction novel is Frank Herbert’s DUNE but I was 12 when I read it, which probably explains that.

Mr. McDuffie,

-Virgil Hawkins, Dakota.

That kind of depends on how valuable your time is, doesn’t it? Actually, I think I’m relatively easy on this crap. Here’s the stuff I’ll watch if I’m not doing something else: XENA, FUTURAMA, DEEP SPACE NINE, BUFFY, the SUPERMAN cartoon – I’m probably forgetting a bunch of things. I’m reconsidering FARSCAPE, either it got funnier or I’m just getting used to the Muppets. I also recommend COPS, which takes place on a parallel Earth where the police are always trustworthy, patient and helpful. A little over the top, even for sci-fi but what the hell.

Dear Edgewise,

-Dwayne McDuffie, Florida

Well, yes. I thought it would kill some space and maybe encourage my readers to send real letters. So far, I’ve only received one legit letter. Even though it was unsigned, I guess it’s only fair to print it:

Dear so-called Dwayne,

You suck!

True, but only as a physical manifestation of a deeper emotional connection. And that’s all the time we’ve got for now, see you next week.

I don’t care what the superintelligent, disembodied brains who run FANTASTICON have to say (and FANTASTICON is not, as is rumored, merely a front for said brains plans to conquer and build military staging areas on our “primitive but strategically important planet”). I’m taking a break this week from my recent, ongoing struggle to review all of STAR TREK “before they make any more.”

I know, I’m relieved too.

WARNING: If you haven’t yet seen THE MATRIX, tread carefully, all right? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I used to write comic books for a living and if years of precipitously dropping sales weren’t enough to depress me, I had to go sit through THE MATRIX, only the most recent of a spate of “comic book movies” that’re way more enjoyable than your average actual comic book. Just shortly before the Earth finished cooling, when I was but a editor-ling at Marvel Comics, I was taught comic books’ main advantage over moving visual media was that “comics have an infinite special effects budget.” For what it’s worth, I thought our main advantage was the interplay of prose and pictures unique to the medium. The argument, such as it was, is now moot. See what happened is, the movies finally caught up to us visually. It’s pretty clear now that any image you can think up can be done on film. All I could think of, watching folks leap through the air from building to building and running up walls and swinging from ropes in front of explosions is this: This may actually look cooler than when Ditko was drawing Spider-Man. Okay, it ain’t as cool as Kirby yet but give them a couple of years. I hereby pronounce big, dumb action as a comic books’ raison d’être, dead and buried. It is now the proper province of 100 million dollar plus movies. Mainstream comics better find something else to do, before everybody’s got a DVD player.

Edgewise #3

Last time I promised I’d be talking about STAR TREK but any dedicated reader of this column should know by now that I am easily distracted and seldom keep my promises. Anyway, I was only going to talk about STAR TREK to kill time. What I really wanted to do was review a contemporary genre show (in contrast to my usual habit of writing only about things that happened before you were born). So I watched X-FILES three weeks in a row (I’d never watched the show before, at least not all the way through) and mostly liked it. I was going to write about why I liked it but my Fantasticon overlords, possessed of intellect vast, cool and dispassionate, told me that my first review shouldn’t be too positive, or I’d lose the respect of my new audience. Fortunately, that’s not a problem this time.

FARSCAPE is one of a number of new series that recently debuted on cable’s Sci-Fi channel. The Sci-Fi channel, once merely a home for awful reruns of science fiction programs, has now upped the stakes considerably by co-producing awful first run science fiction programs. By this standard, FARSCAPE succeeds admirably.

Before we go on, I should introduce you to Dwayne McDuffie’s first law of enjoying science fiction and not being such a damned nerd: It doesn’t require a great deal of intelligence to prove that a Science Fiction story can’t happen. You can’t look smart doing it. You don’t.

Hence, never tell me there’s no sound in space and that I therefore shouldn’t be able to hear the spaceships whizzing by. Don’t tell me that you can shoot a bullet straight through a gas tank and it won’t blow up the car. And for God’s sake please don’t tell me you figured out how fast Warp nine is and have therefore determined that the starship VOYAGER should be home already. I mean really. Spare me. That being said, the premise of FARSCAPE was so stupid, I came very close to changing the channel to a dreaded seventh season episode of HOMICIDE (the program formerly known as “the best damned show on TV” and currently known as, “I wonder if NASH BRIDGES is any good tonight?”).

In FARSCAPE, astronaut and “his own kind of hero” John Creighton has a radical theory: If you accelerate towards a big mass, like a planet, you’ll go really fast. Apparently, gravity is related to acceleration. I’m with him so far. John tests his brilliant supposition by going up into orbit and dive-bombing the Earth in a special craft of his own construction. The experiment doesn’t end up in the way I would have expected: the creation of a big crater with a very flat spaceship at the bottom. Instead, the ship opens up a wormhole and transports our hero light-years from home, into the middle of cosmic jail break. He also accidentally kills the brother of this guy dressed like Rick Moranis in SPACEBALLS. He swears revenge. Not Rick Moranis, the other guy.

Our hero is captured by a diverse crew of alien inmates; one blue, scaly girl, who is sometimes naked; one Rasta-dred, PREDATOR-looking guy; two “cute” robots; one regular-looking space babe, for romantic interest later, I presume; and a couple of Muppets. I would have bitched about the Muppets looking all fake and whatnot but I’m giving the producers extra credit for the lack of aliens that look like humans with bones in their forehead. Despite all of this going on, other than when he gets a Babel fish stuck in his ear, our hero basically spends the entire hour in jail, waiting for something to happen. I know how he feels. Big pass on this one, folks.