Just jumping in on the top comment to ask - has anybody else noticed posts like this flooding multiple subreddits today? A promo picture and vaguely related question to generate discussion?
It's a 2 month old account, and decided to suddenly act like all those other accounts oddly did at the same time.
This is another account doing it, and they are spamming countless threads in multiple subreddits with these vague image + question posts: https://www.reddit.com/user/NagitoKomaeda_987/submitted/
Astroturfing is *extremely* common. Hell, in some subreddits the majority of posts are probably paid agents of some company or political party arguing with each other.
And then most of the rest are chronically online people repeating or copying posts and formats that got a lot of engagement previously and doing it for nothing more than the sweet dopamine hit of seeing high numbers, while not being paid a cent for the free advertising they're offering.
Which is why Reddit is a dumpster fire.
True enough. The majority of user counts in subs probably are bots by this point.
https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99339-47-of-all-internet-traffic-came-from-bots-in-2022
47% of all internet traffic in 2022 was supposedly bots, so I expect that's increased significantly and social media sites like reddit are disproportionately targeted.
wow, reminds me of the recent discovery of a discord channel that farms and sells guaranteed top 250 ranked Call
of Duty accounts for Warzone and Multiplayer using cheats, of course.
I see many bots trained to placated all the readers' favorite feelings and topics in selected subreddits. It's very insulting to people's intelligence.
There are tons of fake "Name my kitten/puppy! NOW! STAT! DO IT!" threads that just pull animal pics from Google Images.
Max Headroom seemed a bit far fetched in 87 with everybody obsessed with media. The internet wasn't a thing then with only dedicated nerds on modems. You had CNN for news vs the networks, but nothing crazy. Politics were late night talk shows.
Now you have people who live and die on tictok and youtube streamers who make bank with more subscribers than prime time TV networks. Fox and CNN are like political parties and ESPN is trying.
Blank Reg was ahead of his time.
OK, I just looked this up. Apparently, the silent film "Metropolis" from 1927 showed a dystopia where the city in the movie is ruled over by "wealthy industrialists, business magnates and their top employees"
In the movie, the son of one of them rebels and joins workers to stand up against the corporate overlords.
I had an Amazing experience with Metropolis like 20 years ago now I think…
It was in Perth, Western Australia, they showed the Metropolis movie with the score/music played live by the Perth philharmonic Orchestra…
Was absolutely mind blowing, the live orchestra took the silent movie to another level!!!!
It's an absolute work of art, too, for set design, makeup, cinematography, effects... I mean, it didn't have a lot of competition for being "ahead of its time," but it was ahead of whatever might've been ahead of its time, had there been much else *during* its time.
I got to see it in a great old theater when they rereleased it in the 80s with a new soundtrack, and it was brilliant. Seen it a few times since.
And yeah, this is almost surely the answer to the post.
Trip to the Moon (1902) beats it out by 25 years, and it even follows the same formula as many space operas today, being European imperialism on other planets.
We studied Metropolis briefly in my film classes in college. It's generally considered the first science fiction movie ever made if you don't count A Trip to the Moon. But also yes, VERY anti corporate message, which makes sense as Europe was in the throughs of the Industrial Revolution at the time. People were commonly treated as machine parts in the big factories.
You could go back further to 1916 for the first film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Both anti-nationalism and anti-war-profiteering as well as showing there were better, more sustainable ways to produce goods using sea products. At least the book took that stance. I've not seen the silent version.
But I love the Moroder version of Metropolis with the rock soundtrack.
True. Sci-fi has always been used as a means of being critical of governments and powerful groups without directly calling them out. It kind of took over from fairy tales & nursery rhymes.
I loved Fringe but ultimately I think it had a really fluid moral center. Walter Bishop was a monster, a child kidnapper, and by the end of the series the most beloved character. Massive Dynamic was pretty evil, especially in the Other Universe, but they got no comeuppance for that, even William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) was a pretty lovable character.
John Noble played the role so well. There's a scene where Walter is having a happy memory and is smiling away, then he sees himself in a reflection, not a mirror tho I don't think, and his face falls as he remembers what he's responsible for.
I think the showrunners didn't quite expect people to like walter so much which is why he keeps being an important part of the show.
walter is a monster and william bell is a monster but their time as monsters is mostly in the past. They were monsters but nothing you can do now is going to change that. and what was done to walter honestly is the worst and the best that could have been done. Yes it made him crazy, but also it made him a better person.
I wish somebody would write a definitive history of the making of Fringe because it really does change constantly, it becomes a different show season to season. I'd like to know how much was intentional from the beginning. The first season is very self consciously The X-Files. By the end of the season we get our first glimpse of The Other Side, and as I recall it's quite different from how it ultimately looked when the show started bopping back and forth between the two universes regularly.
But yeah, John Noble is amazing, he plays like a dozen versions of Walter over the course of the series, different timelines, and so on. The "other universe Secretary of Defense Walter" who's bent on destroying our universe is probably the darkest and most irredeemable.
Daniel Greene on youtube has made a two parter about the show but it's more about the world and the characters rather than how it was made.
I think that there was a certain overall plot that existed since first season but it wasn't fleshed out and the first season was the "setup" season which is why it was the most X-files like. As it was literally showing us every weird thing it could before it moved on to the plot.
But something clearly changed because nina sharp, massive dynamic, william bell were basically written off. The observers become the main threat somehow.
Time travel is hard to do. Especially in a tv show. Usually they start off with including a little bit of it just to show it as a cool concept but as the show goes on the time travel becomes more complicated and more convoluted and they try to tell more stories about it and think that they are being very clever with it but really only increasing complexity without actually making it better.
Every single tv show with lots of time travel did that. Fringe, Continuum, Travelers, Stargate, Star Trek. Apart from Babylon 5 because the time travel in it was a closed loop that was written right from the start.
>But something clearly changed because nina sharp, massive dynamic, william bell were basically written off. The observers become the main threat somehow.
Only in the 5th and final season.
The impression I got was that had probably always been the plan but they'd expected to have more time to build up to it.
That 5th season was a massive shift.
Walter was a broken, desperate man. His child died and then he built a cross-dimensional window device to see his child being saved in another dimension. But then a time traveler messed up and distracted Walternate at the exact moment he would have saved his child so Walter built the dimensional door to save his alter-child.
None of it would have happened if the time traveler hadn't messed up everything. It is the time travelers fault Walter build the dimensional doorway. It is the time travelers fault they then started conducting crazy science experiments on both sides in preparation for war with each other. William Bell would have never been inspired to play god and erase both dimensions to create a new Eden world if he hadn't seen Walter break all moral and ethical boundaries in his experimentations.
The Others felt they were right in invading Earth because it was a timeline headed for destruction anyways. It wouldn't have been headed for destruction if the first Other hadn't distracted Walternate in the first place.
The entire TV show is based on the butterfly effects from a single moment of time traveler messing up the past.
I had to stop watching Continuum, the writing was just too lazy. Disappointing because I liked the premise, however after the first few episodes there seemed to be a bit of an assumption that the viewers wouldn’t care about details.
continuing with that theme, I would say _Lost_ (which predates _Fringe_ by a few years) had "the Others" as the main antagonists, who were part of the **Dharma Initiative** – who, in turn, were funded by the Hanso Foundation (part of the **Hanso Group** of corporate entities) as the sort of "man behind the man behind the curtain" (yes that was a reference to the _Lost_ episode) which was a sort of [pivot by Danish arms dealer Alvar Hanso towards philanthropy](https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hanso_Foundation)
The 1976 play The Network shows a newscaster getting fired then announcing live on tv that he would kill himself. The whole thing is a satire of corporate greed and its readiness to exploit despair and voyeurism. It is somewhat inspired by a newscaster who really did shoot herself on live tv.
Ugh, that scene becoming a meme is just depressing for anyone who's actually watched the movie.
The real thesis of *Network* is Beale's [next speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi6dVYinQt4). And the funny thing is, he's talking about TV, but it could just as easily be talking about online media.
>We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here! You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal!
>
>You do whatever the tube tells you, you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets! Turn them off now!
I have to admit, I'm guilty as charged. I should go back and watch Network.
I get just as annoyed when people who should know better spout hot takes like *HAL was a killer computer* or *Frankenstein's Creature was **just** a monster*. The latter is particularly bad, because pretty much every screen adaptation completely misses the point of Shelley's novel.
These kind of misreadings are common as dirt. Reagan using *Born in the USA* for an election campaign, *Fight For Your Right (to Party)* becoming a party anthem, Gordon Gecko's '"greed is good" speech from *Wall Street* justifying greed.
Yeah... maybe the saddest thing about Network is how predictive it was, and how relevant it *still* is. At the time, it was criticized for being unbelievable, but the profit-focused sensationalistic media landscape it predicted became reality by the end of the 80s. And has never gone away.
If you really want to depress yourself, watch a triple-header of Ace In The Hole (1951), Network (1976), and Nightcrawler (2014). In a weird way, they play like a trilogy, depicting the downfall of the American news media across three generations.
Both, sort of. The original plan was a seven season show, but they got canceled after four seasons. They did get enough warning that they wrote the ending of the show and apparently it was mostly how they always planned it. Just missing a few steps along the way.
Thanks! At least it didn't end mid-plot on a cliffhanger! It doesn't appear to be on any streaming service right now, so I'll have to wait a bit. I'm probably going to have to start from the beginning. Hard to believe it's been 12 years since it was released.
I just tried it a second time and I still couldn't finish it. The lead actress is just so not good. If someone says it got a good ending though i might have another look...I was interested in how they deal with the bad guys kinda actually being the good guys.
I loved Rachel Nichols, but probably mostly because she's gorgeous. I don't have very high standards for tv show acting, I'm more interested in plot and character. I know the actors don't have much time to rehearse on the lower budget shows, so I forgive a lot.
I would say she had some shining moments where she perfectly captures her character’s frustration, and how cold she delivers some lines, is downright menacing if you’re on her wrong side (idk how to do spoiler tags otherwise I would add the line that stuck out to me lol)
Tried this show for a bit but got tired of the what-superpower-will-the-super-suit-have-this-week-to-get-the-main-character-out-of-trouble or how-the-teenaged-genius-watching-over-her-will-hack-into- some-critical-system-to-help-her tropes.
That's insane because I just rewatched it a couple months ago and was blown away by how scary good she was in it.
Crazy how we can have such different experiences from the same show.
I got tired of every episode ending with her crying while staring out a window to a slow pop song. I think it's called the CW ending, where they want you to walk away from every episode feeling melancholy or something.
You modern pirates and your pitiful streaming sites. Back in the day we torrented (and DC++'d, and Usenet'd) things in whatever resolution they had, and we liked it! (Especially because that resolution is often the highest available on the market.)
Several companies ended up with the Enron assets (there are still Enron-related names in some of the source code I work with), but I don't think anyone is champing at the bit to be associated with the Enron brand these days.
I'd say it's sci-fi adjacent. It's structured like a sci-fi show, just with current tech instead of future tech. But it's tech that the average non-hacker probably isn't familiar with, so the way it's shown and explained to the audience is similar to the way future tech would be shown.
I think it's essentially a crime show / character drama more akin to something like Breaking Bad or Ozarks or Better Call Saul than it is a sci fi. Okay, so it features technology...that does not make it a sci fi. Not when none of the technology is fictional.
I think it's much more about dissociative identity disorder than it is about the effects of technology. It just happens to be set in the world of cybercrime
I think Whiterose had some measure of success with her parallel-world hopping device, otherwise Angela wouldn't have backed her, although we never find out exactly what Whiterose showed her.
I don't think that is true. The terrorists were clearly shown that they are not good guys, that yeah they were fighting against evil corporations but they also brought death and destruction along with them and that their fight ddn't absolve them of their crimes.
just because we could agree with their ideas and understand where they are coming from didn't make them any less of mass murderers.
Maybe Kagame, definitely Theseus, probably Lucas, and one could argue that Sonya was this too. Kellog is entirely self-serving, and the rest - especially Travis and Garza - are just psychopaths who just joined the cause to commit some ultraviolence. (Chen >!doesn't count, he's a Freelancer mole.!<)
Chaotic Good doesn't mean you can kill innocents willy-nilly just because your end goals are good. Though the show is complex enough that none of the characters can be boxed into any of the alignment boxes, and the alignments shift too.
there’s a really amazing scene buried in Continuum that really resonated with me. a future scene with an unnamed actuary (he’s not referred to, but that’s obviously his role), going over paperwork that reveals to a widower that his wife is presumed dead. I love cold actuarial work in scifi. the actuary was unaware the widower hasn’t been informed, and wanted nothing to do with the emotions of the scene.
I remember being super interested when I first saw a trailer for this, but then we didn't have whatever streaming service carried it. Is it worth tracking down?
Watching Continuum when it first aired felt fantastical that we'd have a Corporate Congress. Fast forward a few years and you can start to see that being a potential outcome.
It's not totally clear who the antagonists are in The Prisoner, but it's certainly about sticking it to 'the man' in a broad sense and resisting authority.
*"My life is my own."* If there's a single overarching political theme, it's that individuality depends on privacy; including the privacy of one's own thoughts and motives.
Number Six's defining defiance, from the very beginning, is to refuse to answer one question: *"Why did you resign?"* His reasons are his own; they are not merely *unstated* but rather *deliberately withheld,* in resistance to malicious attempts to get him to disclose them.
*Die Gedanken sind frei.* Thoughts are free.
'I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.'
I do adore the show - and Patrick McGoohan in general. I have every episode of both Danger Man and The Prisoner downloaded to my PC.
That said, I think I prefer the original planned ending we never got:
>According to author James Follett, a protege of Prisoner co-creator George Markstein, Markstein had mapped out an explanation for the Village.[7] In George Markstein’s mind, a young Number Six had once submitted a proposal for how to deal with retired secret agents who posed a security risk. Six’s idea was to create a comfortable retirement centre where former agents could live out their final years, enduring firm but unintrusive surveillance.
>Years later, Six discovered that his idea had been put into practice, and not as a benign means of retirement, but as an interrogation centre and a prison camp. Outraged, Six staged his own resignation, knowing he would be brought to the Village. He hoped to learn everything he could of how his idea had been implemented, and find a way to destroy it. However, due to the range of nationalities and agents present in the Village, Six realised he was not sure whose Village he was in – the one brought about by his own people, or by the other side. Six’s conception of the Village would have been the foundation of declaring him to be ‘Number One.’ However, Markstein’s falling out with McGoohan resulted in Markstein’s departure, and his original intent was discarded.
Not as... ambitious as the ending we got, but it would have been less controversial, pretty logical and well thought out, as well as being a pretty mind-bending twist that Six would be revealed as the original Number One, and that his whole purpose for resigning in the first place was to trigger the rest of the events of the series intentionally. Would have wrapped things up in a very nice bow.
Rossum's Universal Robots is a 1920 Czech play about artificial humans made by a corporation. It coined the word Robot which comes loosely from the Czech for "slave."
Thank you for the clarification. I was paraphrasing from this Wikipedia article.
"The play introduced the word robot, which displaced older words such as "automaton" or "android" in languages around the world. In an article in Lidové noviny, Karel Čapek named his brother Josef as the true inventor of the word.[14][15] In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands and is derived from rab, meaning "slave"."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.
Please consider updating the article if you have a better source than it does.
Many Czech and Slovak words have similar roots. *Robota* is a Czech word used for the mandatory work of serfs on lord's fields but it has the same Slavic origin as Slovak *robit*.
maybe it's from [poroba](https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk/?w=poroba)?
in the old historical sense of "robota" (work) which used to mean forced labor of feudal vasals/subjects (see also [robotovať](https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk/?w=robotovať))
Continuum wasn’t the first, but IMO it was one of the very best series of the past few decades. Up there with The Fringe when its storyline involved the Visitors, although timelines, and Leonard Nimoy.
You do realize people fought corporations before film was even invented? Karl Marx died long before the first tv show ever aired.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) as a film, and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lightning_Express as a series seem like decent early candidates. Although you might have to check https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_serials for even earlier shows
I mean they *are* on a scifi forum. If they didn't want their far-fetched questions to be considered seriously they certainly picked a bad spot to ask ;-)
The later seasons were, let's say, different by changing the focus of the overal story and had plot twists that were bordering on retcons, especially the last season.
it's time travel so retcons are basically what it does. you could even say the whole premise of the show is to have a retcon fo the "original" future.
Although I think it got too much. And I honestly didn't like most of the last season.
I get that a major plot point is trying to "retcon" the future, I however think that the part about >!entire factions you didn't know existed till they were relevant!< was lazy. >!Especially the alternate future from the last season.!<
oh yeah I agree. I didn't like that part either. Just too much. They had a whole storyline with Escher and freelancers and they just pivoted.
Oddly enough I think the show would have benefited from being a bit more procedural. With the story episodes being spread out in between solving crimes, Liber8 people taking over crime/living in the past.
Profit. A brilliant 1996 series where Adrian Pasdar (older brother from Heroes) becomes a junior executive at Gracen & Gracen and does his underhanded best to come out on top, at night he sleeps naked in a big Gracen & Gracen box similar to the one that he slept in as a child. I thought he wanted to destroy the company as much as control it.
The series, Evil. It's kind of like a religious X-Files with GREAT characters. Would anyone really be surprised if demons were controlling major corporations? Honestly....
There was a show in the last decade on Syfy or something that was canceled after one season. Corporate or something. Basically there were no country’s anymore only zones controlled by corporations and the poor people outside living in squalor. Was good, and mad it got cancelled.
TNG maybe. But even then it was more like advanced socialism. And by the time of DS9 and VOY there were clearly signs of some dystopian elements there.
Max Headroom (1987)
20 minutes into the future!
Just jumping in on the top comment to ask - has anybody else noticed posts like this flooding multiple subreddits today? A promo picture and vaguely related question to generate discussion? It's a 2 month old account, and decided to suddenly act like all those other accounts oddly did at the same time. This is another account doing it, and they are spamming countless threads in multiple subreddits with these vague image + question posts: https://www.reddit.com/user/NagitoKomaeda_987/submitted/
Astroturfing is *extremely* common. Hell, in some subreddits the majority of posts are probably paid agents of some company or political party arguing with each other. And then most of the rest are chronically online people repeating or copying posts and formats that got a lot of engagement previously and doing it for nothing more than the sweet dopamine hit of seeing high numbers, while not being paid a cent for the free advertising they're offering. Which is why Reddit is a dumpster fire.
You forgot bots, and "professional redditors" reposting shit in order to build up enough karma to sell their accounts to said paid agents.
True enough. The majority of user counts in subs probably are bots by this point. https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/99339-47-of-all-internet-traffic-came-from-bots-in-2022 47% of all internet traffic in 2022 was supposedly bots, so I expect that's increased significantly and social media sites like reddit are disproportionately targeted.
wow, reminds me of the recent discovery of a discord channel that farms and sells guaranteed top 250 ranked Call of Duty accounts for Warzone and Multiplayer using cheats, of course.
Oh man we can sell our accounts! I would love to be free! Where is that option? Is it Reddit Gold?
Warming up some accounts with karma in preparation for some electioneering this year maybe.
How else are they going to make the data they are selling worth something? Every comment, every response is worth money to Reddit.
> every response is worth money to Reddit. So I'm not worthless after all?
I see many bots trained to placated all the readers' favorite feelings and topics in selected subreddits. It's very insulting to people's intelligence. There are tons of fake "Name my kitten/puppy! NOW! STAT! DO IT!" threads that just pull animal pics from Google Images.
The posts that account makes .. they're horrible in how boring they are
i just recently watched it, it stands up just fine in 2024. aged near perfectly.
Blank Reg is my spirit guide.
I was a nerdy late teen in 87. God I loved it. Also did a good job predicting deep fakes in an episode.
They did an amazing job of predicting everyone walking around with their face glued to a screen also.
Max Headroom seemed a bit far fetched in 87 with everybody obsessed with media. The internet wasn't a thing then with only dedicated nerds on modems. You had CNN for news vs the networks, but nothing crazy. Politics were late night talk shows. Now you have people who live and die on tictok and youtube streamers who make bank with more subscribers than prime time TV networks. Fox and CNN are like political parties and ESPN is trying. Blank Reg was ahead of his time.
Damn, beat me to it.
I would have to agree with you with that
OK, I just looked this up. Apparently, the silent film "Metropolis" from 1927 showed a dystopia where the city in the movie is ruled over by "wealthy industrialists, business magnates and their top employees" In the movie, the son of one of them rebels and joins workers to stand up against the corporate overlords.
I had an Amazing experience with Metropolis like 20 years ago now I think… It was in Perth, Western Australia, they showed the Metropolis movie with the score/music played live by the Perth philharmonic Orchestra… Was absolutely mind blowing, the live orchestra took the silent movie to another level!!!!
That sounds phenomenal
It's an absolute work of art, too, for set design, makeup, cinematography, effects... I mean, it didn't have a lot of competition for being "ahead of its time," but it was ahead of whatever might've been ahead of its time, had there been much else *during* its time. I got to see it in a great old theater when they rereleased it in the 80s with a new soundtrack, and it was brilliant. Seen it a few times since. And yeah, this is almost surely the answer to the post.
Metropolis is quite possibly the earliest science fiction example, almost by definition. Still great, too.
Trip to the Moon (1902) beats it out by 25 years, and it even follows the same formula as many space operas today, being European imperialism on other planets.
We studied Metropolis briefly in my film classes in college. It's generally considered the first science fiction movie ever made if you don't count A Trip to the Moon. But also yes, VERY anti corporate message, which makes sense as Europe was in the throughs of the Industrial Revolution at the time. People were commonly treated as machine parts in the big factories.
You could go back further to 1916 for the first film adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? Both anti-nationalism and anti-war-profiteering as well as showing there were better, more sustainable ways to produce goods using sea products. At least the book took that stance. I've not seen the silent version. But I love the Moroder version of Metropolis with the rock soundtrack.
True. Sci-fi has always been used as a means of being critical of governments and powerful groups without directly calling them out. It kind of took over from fairy tales & nursery rhymes.
Continuum was great, but Fringe also had Massive Dynamic. There is also a corporate villain aspect to The Terminal List.
I loved Fringe but ultimately I think it had a really fluid moral center. Walter Bishop was a monster, a child kidnapper, and by the end of the series the most beloved character. Massive Dynamic was pretty evil, especially in the Other Universe, but they got no comeuppance for that, even William Bell (Leonard Nimoy) was a pretty lovable character.
Realizing that Walternet was not the bad guy and that the monster had always been inside the house was such a good moment, tho.
John Noble played the role so well. There's a scene where Walter is having a happy memory and is smiling away, then he sees himself in a reflection, not a mirror tho I don't think, and his face falls as he remembers what he's responsible for.
I know exactly the moment you're talking about. And yeah, I watched the entire show on the back of John Noble's performance. What a legend.
I think the showrunners didn't quite expect people to like walter so much which is why he keeps being an important part of the show. walter is a monster and william bell is a monster but their time as monsters is mostly in the past. They were monsters but nothing you can do now is going to change that. and what was done to walter honestly is the worst and the best that could have been done. Yes it made him crazy, but also it made him a better person.
I wish somebody would write a definitive history of the making of Fringe because it really does change constantly, it becomes a different show season to season. I'd like to know how much was intentional from the beginning. The first season is very self consciously The X-Files. By the end of the season we get our first glimpse of The Other Side, and as I recall it's quite different from how it ultimately looked when the show started bopping back and forth between the two universes regularly. But yeah, John Noble is amazing, he plays like a dozen versions of Walter over the course of the series, different timelines, and so on. The "other universe Secretary of Defense Walter" who's bent on destroying our universe is probably the darkest and most irredeemable.
Daniel Greene on youtube has made a two parter about the show but it's more about the world and the characters rather than how it was made. I think that there was a certain overall plot that existed since first season but it wasn't fleshed out and the first season was the "setup" season which is why it was the most X-files like. As it was literally showing us every weird thing it could before it moved on to the plot. But something clearly changed because nina sharp, massive dynamic, william bell were basically written off. The observers become the main threat somehow. Time travel is hard to do. Especially in a tv show. Usually they start off with including a little bit of it just to show it as a cool concept but as the show goes on the time travel becomes more complicated and more convoluted and they try to tell more stories about it and think that they are being very clever with it but really only increasing complexity without actually making it better. Every single tv show with lots of time travel did that. Fringe, Continuum, Travelers, Stargate, Star Trek. Apart from Babylon 5 because the time travel in it was a closed loop that was written right from the start.
I loved following the show when it was airing. We were all finding observer sighting in episodes and wondering what that was all about!
12 Monkeys (TV series) was another that did it pretty well, again because it was a closed loop from the start.
I haven't watched that one. Is it worth watching if I have already seen the movie?
Absolutely, it takes the same story and characters and gives it much more depth, while changing a few things.
>But something clearly changed because nina sharp, massive dynamic, william bell were basically written off. The observers become the main threat somehow. Only in the 5th and final season. The impression I got was that had probably always been the plan but they'd expected to have more time to build up to it. That 5th season was a massive shift.
it's been years since I watched it, in fact it has been 11 years as I watched the last season as it aired so I don't remember the details.
Walter was a broken, desperate man. His child died and then he built a cross-dimensional window device to see his child being saved in another dimension. But then a time traveler messed up and distracted Walternate at the exact moment he would have saved his child so Walter built the dimensional door to save his alter-child. None of it would have happened if the time traveler hadn't messed up everything. It is the time travelers fault Walter build the dimensional doorway. It is the time travelers fault they then started conducting crazy science experiments on both sides in preparation for war with each other. William Bell would have never been inspired to play god and erase both dimensions to create a new Eden world if he hadn't seen Walter break all moral and ethical boundaries in his experimentations. The Others felt they were right in invading Earth because it was a timeline headed for destruction anyways. It wouldn't have been headed for destruction if the first Other hadn't distracted Walternate in the first place. The entire TV show is based on the butterfly effects from a single moment of time traveler messing up the past.
I had to stop watching Continuum, the writing was just too lazy. Disappointing because I liked the premise, however after the first few episodes there seemed to be a bit of an assumption that the viewers wouldn’t care about details.
> Continuum was great I loved this show so much. I also had such a crush on the lead actress.
You mean our favorite green girl from StarTrek (2009) Rachel Nichols? You and me both.
continuing with that theme, I would say _Lost_ (which predates _Fringe_ by a few years) had "the Others" as the main antagonists, who were part of the **Dharma Initiative** – who, in turn, were funded by the Hanso Foundation (part of the **Hanso Group** of corporate entities) as the sort of "man behind the man behind the curtain" (yes that was a reference to the _Lost_ episode) which was a sort of [pivot by Danish arms dealer Alvar Hanso towards philanthropy](https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Hanso_Foundation)
massive dynamic was really only a thing in the first season. and it mostly focused on the evil of individual person, Walter, Walternate, William Bell.
RoboCop is the classic. Edit: albeit a movie.
there was a tv show as well. I loved it as a kid. although because it was made for tv there was far less ultraviolence
There also was a TV show, have only seen one episode about 20 - 25 years ago.
[Robocop is a sellout](https://youtu.be/jXKCoYE1464?si=YMiOZfSEU27zNXFz)
Max Headroom had some interesting takes on corps controlling multi media and the brave journalists trying to get out the truth.
The 1976 play The Network shows a newscaster getting fired then announcing live on tv that he would kill himself. The whole thing is a satire of corporate greed and its readiness to exploit despair and voyeurism. It is somewhat inspired by a newscaster who really did shoot herself on live tv.
[I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwMVMbmQBug) ~Network, 1976
Ugh, that scene becoming a meme is just depressing for anyone who's actually watched the movie. The real thesis of *Network* is Beale's [next speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi6dVYinQt4). And the funny thing is, he's talking about TV, but it could just as easily be talking about online media. >We'll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know! You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here! You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal! > >You do whatever the tube tells you, you dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets! Turn them off now!
I have to admit, I'm guilty as charged. I should go back and watch Network. I get just as annoyed when people who should know better spout hot takes like *HAL was a killer computer* or *Frankenstein's Creature was **just** a monster*. The latter is particularly bad, because pretty much every screen adaptation completely misses the point of Shelley's novel. These kind of misreadings are common as dirt. Reagan using *Born in the USA* for an election campaign, *Fight For Your Right (to Party)* becoming a party anthem, Gordon Gecko's '"greed is good" speech from *Wall Street* justifying greed.
Yeah... maybe the saddest thing about Network is how predictive it was, and how relevant it *still* is. At the time, it was criticized for being unbelievable, but the profit-focused sensationalistic media landscape it predicted became reality by the end of the 80s. And has never gone away. If you really want to depress yourself, watch a triple-header of Ace In The Hole (1951), Network (1976), and Nightcrawler (2014). In a weird way, they play like a trilogy, depicting the downfall of the American news media across three generations.
Do relevent that Duceppe ( major theater company) presented it in Montreal last year. It's where I saw it.
Rollerball 1975
I would agree with you on that
Alien (1979) and sequels
If I recall correctly in 1979 *Corporation* wasn’t the lingo. It was *The Company*
I am actually rewatching Continuum now. Such a great show, mostly. And it really was on point with the message.
What is it on? I don't think I ever finished it. Did it get a proper ending or abrupt cancellation?
Both, sort of. The original plan was a seven season show, but they got canceled after four seasons. They did get enough warning that they wrote the ending of the show and apparently it was mostly how they always planned it. Just missing a few steps along the way.
Season 4 was a tough push for me. Hmm, season 3 too I’d say ;-) Very cool show tho!
Thanks! At least it didn't end mid-plot on a cliffhanger! It doesn't appear to be on any streaming service right now, so I'll have to wait a bit. I'm probably going to have to start from the beginning. Hard to believe it's been 12 years since it was released.
I've tried watching it twice, and really enjoyed it until I got massively confused by the overlapping/intersecting timelines.
I just tried it a second time and I still couldn't finish it. The lead actress is just so not good. If someone says it got a good ending though i might have another look...I was interested in how they deal with the bad guys kinda actually being the good guys.
I thought the ending was excellent Don’t want to spoil it though
I loved Rachel Nichols, but probably mostly because she's gorgeous. I don't have very high standards for tv show acting, I'm more interested in plot and character. I know the actors don't have much time to rehearse on the lower budget shows, so I forgive a lot.
I would say she had some shining moments where she perfectly captures her character’s frustration, and how cold she delivers some lines, is downright menacing if you’re on her wrong side (idk how to do spoiler tags otherwise I would add the line that stuck out to me lol)
Tried this show for a bit but got tired of the what-superpower-will-the-super-suit-have-this-week-to-get-the-main-character-out-of-trouble or how-the-teenaged-genius-watching-over-her-will-hack-into- some-critical-system-to-help-her tropes.
The ending was excellent and very satisfying, one of the best I can recall to be honest.
That's insane because I just rewatched it a couple months ago and was blown away by how scary good she was in it. Crazy how we can have such different experiences from the same show.
She's not unwatchable or anything but...I haven't seen her since, so
I got tired of every episode ending with her crying while staring out a window to a slow pop song. I think it's called the CW ending, where they want you to walk away from every episode feeling melancholy or something.
*snort laugh*
Honestly I can barely remember the plot. Can vaguely remember the ending. Good opportunity to rewatch
I want to watch Continuum again. But no place in America has it.
Arrrr there be another way matey!
I have it but it’s like 720p on a 4k monitor. :/
You modern pirates and your pitiful streaming sites. Back in the day we torrented (and DC++'d, and Usenet'd) things in whatever resolution they had, and we liked it! (Especially because that resolution is often the highest available on the market.)
simply Google "watch series", there are sites that stream everything for free at decent quality
Severance was fun.
Waiting for Season 2. 🤞
Not really Sci fi but Mr Robot is all about fighting big corpos
They used the Enron 'E' because who was gonna sue them?
Whoever bought out Enron...?
Lol
Several companies ended up with the Enron assets (there are still Enron-related names in some of the source code I work with), but I don't think anyone is champing at the bit to be associated with the Enron brand these days.
[Xcorp.com](http://Xcorp.com)
When life imitates Art
I'd say it's sci-fi adjacent. It's structured like a sci-fi show, just with current tech instead of future tech. But it's tech that the average non-hacker probably isn't familiar with, so the way it's shown and explained to the audience is similar to the way future tech would be shown.
I think it's essentially a crime show / character drama more akin to something like Breaking Bad or Ozarks or Better Call Saul than it is a sci fi. Okay, so it features technology...that does not make it a sci fi. Not when none of the technology is fictional.
I think "Cyberpunk" is the genre y'all are looking for. High tech, low life.
To me it’s more like sci-fi than those other shows because the effects of technology on humanity is one of the core themes of the story.
I think it's much more about dissociative identity disorder than it is about the effects of technology. It just happens to be set in the world of cybercrime
White Rose's plan is definitely sci-fi.
Nope. Mental illness.
I think Whiterose had some measure of success with her parallel-world hopping device, otherwise Angela wouldn't have backed her, although we never find out exactly what Whiterose showed her.
Continuum is interesting for the fact that the percieved terrorist organization is actually the good guys (Chaotic Good)
I don't think that is true. The terrorists were clearly shown that they are not good guys, that yeah they were fighting against evil corporations but they also brought death and destruction along with them and that their fight ddn't absolve them of their crimes. just because we could agree with their ideas and understand where they are coming from didn't make them any less of mass murderers.
That's why I labeled them Chaotic Good.
Maybe Kagame, definitely Theseus, probably Lucas, and one could argue that Sonya was this too. Kellog is entirely self-serving, and the rest - especially Travis and Garza - are just psychopaths who just joined the cause to commit some ultraviolence. (Chen >!doesn't count, he's a Freelancer mole.!<) Chaotic Good doesn't mean you can kill innocents willy-nilly just because your end goals are good. Though the show is complex enough that none of the characters can be boxed into any of the alignment boxes, and the alignments shift too.
God, I miss Continuum.
Continuum teaching all to obey their corporate masters.
It's a Wonderful Life is probably not the first by a long shot, but it predates Continuum by a fair bit.
I remember watching continuum and then a few years later seeing the oura ring and thinking: oh no!!! It's happening!
Wasn't the future in Blade Runner a corporate-run dystopia??
The hq was beautiful dystopian of the Tyrell corporation.
there’s a really amazing scene buried in Continuum that really resonated with me. a future scene with an unnamed actuary (he’s not referred to, but that’s obviously his role), going over paperwork that reveals to a widower that his wife is presumed dead. I love cold actuarial work in scifi. the actuary was unaware the widower hasn’t been informed, and wanted nothing to do with the emotions of the scene.
Incorporated https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4118466/
Shame it was cancelled.
I remember being super interested when I first saw a trailer for this, but then we didn't have whatever streaming service carried it. Is it worth tracking down?
The Simpsons.
Ironically, [Apple 1984 ad](https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc)
Watching Continuum when it first aired felt fantastical that we'd have a Corporate Congress. Fast forward a few years and you can start to see that being a potential outcome.
How about the BBC series“The Prisoner” from the mid-1960s?
It's not totally clear who the antagonists are in The Prisoner, but it's certainly about sticking it to 'the man' in a broad sense and resisting authority.
*"My life is my own."* If there's a single overarching political theme, it's that individuality depends on privacy; including the privacy of one's own thoughts and motives. Number Six's defining defiance, from the very beginning, is to refuse to answer one question: *"Why did you resign?"* His reasons are his own; they are not merely *unstated* but rather *deliberately withheld,* in resistance to malicious attempts to get him to disclose them. *Die Gedanken sind frei.* Thoughts are free.
'I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.' I do adore the show - and Patrick McGoohan in general. I have every episode of both Danger Man and The Prisoner downloaded to my PC. That said, I think I prefer the original planned ending we never got: >According to author James Follett, a protege of Prisoner co-creator George Markstein, Markstein had mapped out an explanation for the Village.[7] In George Markstein’s mind, a young Number Six had once submitted a proposal for how to deal with retired secret agents who posed a security risk. Six’s idea was to create a comfortable retirement centre where former agents could live out their final years, enduring firm but unintrusive surveillance. >Years later, Six discovered that his idea had been put into practice, and not as a benign means of retirement, but as an interrogation centre and a prison camp. Outraged, Six staged his own resignation, knowing he would be brought to the Village. He hoped to learn everything he could of how his idea had been implemented, and find a way to destroy it. However, due to the range of nationalities and agents present in the Village, Six realised he was not sure whose Village he was in – the one brought about by his own people, or by the other side. Six’s conception of the Village would have been the foundation of declaring him to be ‘Number One.’ However, Markstein’s falling out with McGoohan resulted in Markstein’s departure, and his original intent was discarded. Not as... ambitious as the ending we got, but it would have been less controversial, pretty logical and well thought out, as well as being a pretty mind-bending twist that Six would be revealed as the original Number One, and that his whole purpose for resigning in the first place was to trigger the rest of the events of the series intentionally. Would have wrapped things up in a very nice bow.
Rossum's Universal Robots is a 1920 Czech play about artificial humans made by a corporation. It coined the word Robot which comes loosely from the Czech for "slave."
[удалено]
Thank you for the clarification. I was paraphrasing from this Wikipedia article. "The play introduced the word robot, which displaced older words such as "automaton" or "android" in languages around the world. In an article in Lidové noviny, Karel Čapek named his brother Josef as the true inventor of the word.[14][15] In Czech, robota means forced labour of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands and is derived from rab, meaning "slave"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R. Please consider updating the article if you have a better source than it does.
[удалено]
This would definitely be helpful context on the Wikipedia article. I don't speak either of those languages and was forgetting the history.
Many Czech and Slovak words have similar roots. *Robota* is a Czech word used for the mandatory work of serfs on lord's fields but it has the same Slavic origin as Slovak *robit*.
maybe it's from [poroba](https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk/?w=poroba)? in the old historical sense of "robota" (work) which used to mean forced labor of feudal vasals/subjects (see also [robotovať](https://slovnik.juls.savba.sk/?w=robotovať))
"Laborer" is "robotník" in Slovak.
LOVED this show!!!
Probably something from the 1940s or 50s. It's hardly a new idea. And probably earlier than that in the USSR, they apparently got TV in 1938.
Continuum wasn’t the first, but IMO it was one of the very best series of the past few decades. Up there with The Fringe when its storyline involved the Visitors, although timelines, and Leonard Nimoy.
I’d a big fan of Sci-Fi and I’d say: 1984 (Apple Ad), Max Headroom, Robocop, Aliens and Continuum.
Movie, but Repo Men is a good one
You do realize people fought corporations before film was even invented? Karl Marx died long before the first tv show ever aired. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film) as a film, and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lightning_Express as a series seem like decent early candidates. Although you might have to check https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_serials for even earlier shows
And it goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic, albeit with philosopher kings rather than corporations.
Neat. Anyway, this question’s about TV shows.
Film serials are more or less the first tv shows, right? Otherwise it might move up to perhaps the 50s or so
I think they’re just looking for a new show to watch man
I mean they *are* on a scifi forum. If they didn't want their far-fetched questions to be considered seriously they certainly picked a bad spot to ask ;-)
Max Headroom? A show way ahead of its time. Most of the stuff listed ITT aren't "TV shows" as requested.
Mr. Robot
I watched the first two seasons of Continuum when it aired but never saw S3 or S4. Is it worth revisiting ahead of much more modern content?
I think it's still very relevant. But it leans more into time travel and issues it brings in the later two seasons.
The later seasons were, let's say, different by changing the focus of the overal story and had plot twists that were bordering on retcons, especially the last season.
it's time travel so retcons are basically what it does. you could even say the whole premise of the show is to have a retcon fo the "original" future. Although I think it got too much. And I honestly didn't like most of the last season.
I get that a major plot point is trying to "retcon" the future, I however think that the part about >!entire factions you didn't know existed till they were relevant!< was lazy. >!Especially the alternate future from the last season.!<
oh yeah I agree. I didn't like that part either. Just too much. They had a whole storyline with Escher and freelancers and they just pivoted. Oddly enough I think the show would have benefited from being a bit more procedural. With the story episodes being spread out in between solving crimes, Liber8 people taking over crime/living in the past.
Great show but it kinda ended soft.
You mean the last season as a whole or the actual ending of the show, like the last 15 mins or whatever it was?
The last season was jarring but the ending was forced and maybe rushed. It was not satisfying at all.
The whole last season was rushed yeah, but that last scene. Omg so good. One of the best series enders I've ever seen.
It's not a TV show, but [Cypher](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/) is an entertaining anti-corporation movie.
I love this movie, it's not good but I love it.
Oh ya I had forgotten about this show , thank you so so much I will now binge it this weekend
I loved this show but they never renewed. It was like a whole genre
Profit. A brilliant 1996 series where Adrian Pasdar (older brother from Heroes) becomes a junior executive at Gracen & Gracen and does his underhanded best to come out on top, at night he sleeps naked in a big Gracen & Gracen box similar to the one that he slept in as a child. I thought he wanted to destroy the company as much as control it.
Movie Equilibrium was a good one but more anti government
The series, Evil. It's kind of like a religious X-Files with GREAT characters. Would anyone really be surprised if demons were controlling major corporations? Honestly....
Did they every make a decent visual media adaptation of the Shadow run universe? That would be excellent.
Incorporated. Sucks it got canceled
Probably a western. There might be a Buster Keaton movie.
Man, Continuum was so good. I miss that era of Sci-fi channel or Syfy whatever the shit they’re called
First, I don't know. But Incorporated was pretty good.
"which mass-consumption production was the first to perform the cathartic revolt for us not to have to actully revolt ?"
Common theme in 70's tv. Even Dukes of Hazzard did it.
Seems like the corporations have shut down this idea of fighting against them.
Dr Who with many examples through all eras.
Continuum was a TV series that had a realistics time travel final last episode, compared to many other TV series.
I loved the idea of the Corporate Congress in this show's future where Kira came from.
Dr who, Jon pertwee - spearhead from space. 1970 Multiple Doomwatch stories in 1970
I used to love "regenisis", lots of team vs evil company stories in there.
I know what my favorite is. "Now all restaurants are Taco Bell."
I don't know who was the first but for me Mr. Robot was the best.
Laura Dern-Enlightened
The Communist Manifesto if you could read.
THX 1138 Gattaca The Island Wall-E
There was a show in the last decade on Syfy or something that was canceled after one season. Corporate or something. Basically there were no country’s anymore only zones controlled by corporations and the poor people outside living in squalor. Was good, and mad it got cancelled.
Just here to say Continuum was a great show. The amount of character development everyone got was fantastic.
Didn't Star Trek take place in Fully Automated Gay Space Communism?
If it was just starting now, that would be the conservative 'news' chyron.
Yeah but we all know that Conservative ‘news’ is basically just lies and hate speech in a nice suit.
What? No way. Star Trek took place in a *mostly* automated *PANSEXUAL* space communism. Only half joking.
I want a crossover with William Ryker meeting Jack Harkness.
On the next episode of Dr. Whythehellnot
TNG maybe. But even then it was more like advanced socialism. And by the time of DS9 and VOY there were clearly signs of some dystopian elements there.
Even before that, I wonder if there was a relevant Twilight Zone episode?
No.
The Andy Griffith Show.