Fox Show "Virtuality" Cast promo photo
Lack of understanding in relativistic physics aside, I really enjoyed this show. It was as if producers Ronald D. Moore; of Battlestar Gallatica fame, and Michael Taylor put the 1998 SkyTV show “Space Island One”, the Denzel Washington/ Russel Crowe film “Virtuosity”, Kubrick’s “2001″, space horror movie, “Event Horizon”, and reality show “Big Brother” into a blender and created a tasty smoothie. It’s not Orange Julius or Smoothie King but more like one of those Asian mom and pop mall smoothie stands. It’s still good and also has some gems of Bobas at the bottom.
The plot starts six months into the trip to a far off hospitable planet for the team of space explorers. The hope is to find a way to escape earth’s growing ecological meltdown with this journey to a new possible settlement. But to help pass the time on this ten year expedition the crew have been given state of the art virtual reality headsets. Fulfilling fantasies of being a Union Civil War general, J-Rock pop idols, painting mountains akin to a god’s paintbrush, surfer dreamed perfect waves, and erotic beach front love bungalows. All for the amusement of a wanting reality tv watching world audience, desperate for distraction from the coming global ecological downfall of earth.
But there is a fly in the ointment for the crew in their only form of escape from their mission at hand. A ghost in the machine, an unknown virtual assailant who is turning the crew’s pleasurable fantasies into dreaded fear filled nightmares of death, violation, and panic. To make matters worse the ship begins to malfunction after the point of no return for the trip. And the captain is left wondering if anything is real or not, ending in an accident and eerie message from beyond the grave in the same virtual reality that is leaving everyone asking questions.
The show is a nice near future semi-realistic; loosely stated, take on the possibility of space travel for research and ecological solutions to problems on earth. I hope the show is picked up just for the sake of bringing near future space exploration back into the public eye and even showing some of the considerations such long journeys might take. If Fox decides to turn this into a full series, and if anyone who works on the show reads this, hire more Physics and Aerospace Grad students. You got some issues to fix with the science that would aggravate the heck out of any other hard science sci fi geeks like my self.
