Subj : Calabi-Yau Shapes & Threshold Review To : alt.tv.star-trek.enterprise From : jlwn777 Date : Tue Oct 04 2005 09:44:00 From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.enterprise Review of Threshold ( from my Blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/jlwn111 ) Review: I'm giving THRESHOLD a 93 (a [nearly] Solid "A")! Current Mood: satisfied Current Music: Octane (SIRIUS Ch. 20 - DISH Network Ch. 6020) Kudos to you, Brannon Braga! You've at least partially made up for the disastrous ST:ENT Series Finale. Here's some of what I loved about the premier of THRESHOLD last night (which has become, in my book, an Instant Classic) --- - Brent Spiner's "former hippy radical" scientist character. Perfect! - All of the characters, in fact, seemed very real. Very believable. And the way the ensemble cast just seemed to click almost immediately - a real pleasure. - To be sure, the storyline is a familiar one but I'm giving high marks for the new approach and the dramatic and very dark way it's playing out. - No cutesy Show Beginning. It's not needed and I'm glad someone said "you know what, we don't NEED a cutesy beginning - let's just roll with the story." The beginning is just the word THRESHOLD against as dark background. Done. - Cheers to the mostly correct use of actual, real-life mathematical terminology (except the next person who misuses the term "Fourier Analysis" is gonna get clobbered!) - Cheers to reminding people about FRACTALS. The "symbol" (watch the show to see what I mean) is, apparently, a fractal. It appears to be a fractal spiral. We're led to believe, from the first episode, that it represents our double-helix DNA morphed into a triple-helix DNA. I know an awful lot about fractals, and this requires a pretty big leap, but I'll reserve judgment. For now. - Cheers to quickly breaking away from that cutesy "You're Gonna Make It"-ish cutesy-wootsey song right into a deep dark nightmare about the Trees Made of Glass. - This show is taking us into the Dream World. Which may not actually be a dream after-all. It may be a much closer relative to our "regular" world than we think. - High marks for realism with pointed questions being put to the Feds by Red Team members concerned about their constitutional rights being violated. They were, in essence, forced (kidnapped?) onto the team against their will. - There were many references to the so-called "higher order" dimensions. - There was a humorous reference to KLINGONS. - The whole thing is broadcast in HD and we watched it on my 42-inch Dell Flat Screen TV. I swear, it actually looked 3-D. - Any show that has a reference to 221, 22, and 22:10 in the first 15 minutes has got my attention. What I didn't like: - That it was only two hours long - That I actually had to sit through commercials! I usually digitally record nearly everything, but last night I wanted to see this thing as it went out. Live. With The Normal People who are used to watching commercials all the time. I hardly EVER watch commercials. So it was a bit of a shocker. - Points were deducted for the cheesy "zoom-out on all the cars and people and lights and see the fractal pattern thing again from above" ending. He didn't need to do that. Unless (and this is a big unless) it was to show how in-control THEY already are. If that's what was meant, then please remove this from the "what I didn't like" category. All in all, great work! Perhaps it will get up into the mid-90s next week. One would hope for 100%, but of course that never happens. Not on regular old network TV, at least. 1by1as1, I AM Jala*AN. Lawrence, KS, USA p.s. --- My brother, who's even more of a techno-wizard than I am, called right when it started and left a message saying he was actually going to watch it. "The last show I watched on a regular basis was Seinfeld, so I think we'll give this a try," he said. I'll find out what he thought during our weekly call on Sunday night. Added a week later: I got a chance to share THRESHOLD with my Dad (a big-time sci-fi fan). I brought back the DVD I burned of the first episode (which was in the Top 20 in the ratings, BTW) and he watched it. Then we watched the new episode last night. This is the guy who, you know, took me to see PLANET OF THE APES MOVIES when I was a little kid! So he was thinking he recognized the shape that came out of the water and it was bugging him that he couldn't remember where he had seen it before. So this morning he says, "I found it!" and tells me to come downstairs. He's got his copy of Brian Greene's THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS out and he's on page 369. "See, there it is!" And he's right. The thing that came out of the water and "infected" everyone on that ship looks just like something called a "Calabi-Yau" shape. This is a six-dimensional object. Which makes sense - they actually said that it was probably a higher dimensional object, somehow, becoming visible in our 3-D world. So anyway, here are some pictures of Calabi-Yau shapes: http://images.google.com/images?q=calabi-yau&hl=en You'll see what he means, I'm sure. .