Everybody's a Redshirt!

Death, where is thy sting? How about on primetime

Twenty years ago, television tested the waters of suddenly eliminating a major character in a popular series when Patrick Duffy's Bobby Ewing -- a staple of the infamous soap "Dallas" for nearly a decade -- was killed off by the show's writing team to the shock of viewers worldwide.


The series then, however, went into a ratings slump, leaving the network with no other choice than to pull its punch and bring dead Bobby back; turns out he didn't really die after all. It was only a dream.


Such dramatics are the standard for soap opera entertainment, but in an age where franchise series run nearly a decade with the same lovable (or lovably detestable) cast members, the killing off of major characters is typically shied away from by ratings-hungry networks -- until recently.

It's hard to feel the suspense when you know full-well that character won't get killed. Slasher movies work because you never know if any of the characters will survive, but with a TV series, generally it's pretty obvious who will and won't be in any real danger of getting killed off. Series regulars can only be killed at the end of a season, due to the nature of the contracts, and at that there are certain categories of regulars that are immune even to end-of-season slaughters: title characters, for instance. Hard to have a series about Ms. Bones or Dr. House if they get killed, hmm?

On the other hand, the reason for the rise in series-regulars' mortality rate is pretty apparent, too: formulas get old, and something new needs to be done to shake things up. When the audience can predict the entire plot from the opening clip, you've gotten too stale and need to do something different. Unfortunately, it looks as though there's a lot of "me, too" going on here - do the cynics have it right when they say no one in Hollywood has an original thought anymore?

"On 'Lost,' the story dictates all," writer and executive producer Damon Lindelof says.

Am I the only one who sees this as the way all fiction should be, barring actual damage and fatality to the performers?

"This is a show with tragic undertones that deals with life and death," he explains, "and in order to prove the lethality, someone has to die. But it has to come at a time when we feel these characters have had their stories told. We always try to progress the characters each year. What is important is how the surviving characters grow through death."


Actor Sean Astin, whose CTU director Lynn McGill was eliminated midseason, feels the challenge for writers is to keep the material fresh.


"That was the fun for me," he offers, "not knowing what was going to happen with my character. And there is electricity that goes through the cast; as ambassador of your character, you hope your guy makes it. But I was at a press conference where Kiefer Sutherland said as clear as day that he wants the show to outlast his character. I'd say that was a warning, a titillation, whatever you want to call it, that even Jack Bauer isn't safe."

The characters have to make a connection with the audience before their deaths can have any impact; there's a reason the geek audience uses the term "redshirt" to refer to minor characters who show up just long enough to get killed. Will they have the nerve to kill off Jack in 24? I have no idea, but it would certainly have an impact. Of course, in scifi, characters get killed all the time and come back anyway; it's not quite as bad as "it was all a dream," but it weakens the threat, and with it, the overall impact of the story.

The evolution of television writing seems to have come to this: an arena championing the progression of plot above the maintenance of popular key characters, even in the face of potential fan backlash.

Well, glory be. It almost sounds like television writing is growing up.

Geordi! Sort of...

"Seeing machine" offers legally blind view of world

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A legally blind poet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed a "seeing machine" that allows people with limited vision to see faces of friends, read or study the layouts of buildings they intend to visit.


The device, which MIT estimates costs about $4,000 to manufacture, plugs into a personal computer and uses light-emitting diodes to project selected images into a person's eye, allowing visually impaired users to see words or pictures.


In perhaps its most practical application, a visually impaired person can use the seeing machine to study a three-dimensional computer rendering of a room or public place in order to familiarize themselves prior to traveling there. To use the machine, one looks through an eyepiece and navigates through the image using a joystick in an effect similar to playing a video game.

Perhaps the predecessor to Geordi's visor, then - it's still not enough for the totally blind, and doesn't actually do anything to fix the nearly-blind person's vision, but even so, it's pretty cool.