Warning: Depending on your tolerance level, this post could contain minor spoilers for The Island, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Flightplan, Terminator 2, Red Eye, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, uh, possibly World of Warcraft… and somebody’s car, I guess. Seemed only fair to warn you.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about spoilers. For hours at a time. Really.

A few weeks months ago [I’m late in posting this entry], the Sci-Fi channel made the purchase of my HTPC completely worthwhile with just three blocks of programming. They aired the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica, the entire first season of Stargate Atlantis, and the entire eighth season of Stargate SG-1. Three days in a row, 7am to 2am, the little PVR in my media PC wrote episode after episode to its hard drive.

When all was said and done, I had literally hundreds of Gigabytes of new sci-fi programming. But there was a problem. I couldn’t leave it all on the HTPC because the software would automatically start removing programs to make way for newer shows. I thought about watching them on at my computer desk, but it didn’t have the most comfortable seating arrangement. The obvious answer was to burn them all off to DVDs – especially since they were already encoded as a decent-quality MPEGII stream.

If I was going to archive them to disc, I wanted to make sure that the quality remained high. Granted, there was nothing I could do to get rid of the Sci-Fi logo imprinted over each episode or, more annoyingly, all the little promo bugs they threw up (“You’re watching the SG-1 Marathon!”), but I could at least edit out the commercials. Next step: Find a program that would allow me to do that without a multi-hour recompression of each episode.
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I like science fiction. I’m hooked the way lonely housewives are addicted to romance novels and the Lifetime Network. I’ll watch the movies, I’ll quickly commit to a season of episodic television, I’ll read the novels and the short stories. I doubt there’s any one reason why I’m drawn to fantastic descriptions of utopian or dystopian futures, rather it’s probably the same combination of events in my youth that nurtured my fondness for hi-tech gadgets, comic books, and computer games.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about one of the big conceits of sci-fi – interspecies communication. For each movie, show, or book there is usually a God-like device inserted to enable the author to get past the language barrier. Douglas Adams imagined the improbable Babel Fish (appropriately adopted by Altavista search engine geeks as the name for their web page translation tool), but it was Star Trek that introduced The Universal Translator into the public conscience.

Whatever the contrivance, the intent is the same: To shelve the language barrier in deference to the story being told. It’s understandable. As a viewer, can you imaging watching every sci-fi story with a realistic alien language barrier? You would either have to read a lot of subtitles or miss out on half the story. Of course, if written well, the process of communication barriers could be very interesting – but how many authors or scriptwriters have the ability to create entire languages while telling a compelling story?

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