It’s entirely beside the point to say that the Left Behind movies are not very good, but on a Friday afternoon before the theoretical Rapture, there is room for movies that are so bad they’re kind of delightful. I must say, if the goal is getting the message out, it’s not very strategic to have only Tribulation Force on Netflix Instant, since it means I had to pick up with the story already started, though I guess it makes sense to try to lock in at least some of your DVD sales up until the last minute at the end of days?

All that said, Left Behind: Tribulation Force is not actually the worst movie I’ve watched this year—that would be Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood. It’s got its plot holes, for sure. If the Antichrist is going to pull together a united world government, starting at the United Nations is going to be a bad bet, especially since taking over the assets of American financiers doesn’t buy you control the way it used to. The folks behind the Tribulation Force could probably use some training in how to run a counterinsurgency. And I need to check in with my generous host here and the other rising young journodudes to make sure they’re prepared to run a large global news network should Buck Williams not be available for any reason. The revolution will apparently be lead by a young, fast-rising writer who turns 30 right around the Rapture, works for a big media conglomorate, and then jumps to an independent outlet to bring the truth to the people. You do the math.

But really, what strikes me most about the movie is that everyone, no matter their perspective on religion, deserves better movies than this about faith, depictions that go beyond scratchy fake beards on prophets and badly-written professions of belief. One of the things that’s great about Kings is that it has an actual artistic sense of the majesty of the divine, the terror of what it would be like to live without deity you believed in profoundly. If you want to use art to debunk organized religions or faith in general? Well, there are creative stories to tell about the damages and disappointments of religion, or about the power of human experience unmediated by a higher power. This isn’t it.

I’ve been meaning to dive into this GeekDad post arguing that British science fiction is superior to its American counterpart for a bit, but it wasn’t until after starting Torchwood this week that I figured out exactly what I meant to say. I want to separate out sci-fi and fantasy, which Donahoo conflates here, because I think there’s actually a difference between British sci-fi and British fantasy, and some of the things Donahoo singles out as strengths, like a tendency towards localism, are much more present in the fantasy shows he names than the science fiction ones. Being Human is phenomenal, but it’s not science fiction. And fantasy and science fiction do similar, but different work.

British science-fiction is very good at using the tropes of the genre to take on issues ranging from the rise of the security state in response to crisis, national control of nuclear weapons, torture, the impact of reality television on society, nuclear power, and cloned organs. It’s an issue-of-the-week approach to procedurals instead of a body-of-the-week one. But I wonder if the reason shows like Doctor Who and Torchwood, even Red Dwarf, are able to do this is because they’re less committed to consistent world-building. That’s not to say that there aren’t long-running and well-developed concepts behind all these series, but the point of Doctor Who isn’t to get to be fully absorbed into Galifrey, but to jump around and explore different worlds and times, just as the institutional culture of Torchwood establishes the parameters for alien investigations. And there’s no real effort to integrate all the phenomena and aliens and technology into a set of coherent rules about how science works, however nebulous.

There are a lot of American shows that operate on these terms, of course, Star Trek chief among them. But a crop of American shows like Battlestar Galactica, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and Fringe explore smaller numbers of issues through longer arcs. Even The X-Files is centered around one main question, though it’s more procedural. The rules may be loose, but the real work is in figuring out the parameters of the universe you’re watching, how science works, and how humanity and human institutions change in response.

I think it’s more a matter of preference than anything else. I love world-building (particularly if there’s a good juicy fictional religion for me to think about), so I like some of the work American shows do, and I get irritated by things like the lack of clarity about Torchwood’s relationship with the British security agencies and the metropolitan police. But I love the rhythms of procedural as well. And with shows like Doctor Who starting to air simultaneously in the U.S., there’s more opportunity for trans-Atlantic cross-pollination.

Holy spoiler alert, Batman. Definitely don’t read this unless you’ve watched last night’s Bones season finale.

Hart Hanson, Bones‘ creator, can be a fairly devious guy. He’s promised he’ll get his heroes, anthropologist Temperance Brennan and FBI agent Seely Booth, together only to deliver a dream sequences, and come up with baroque scenarios to keep his will-they-or-won’t-they couple apart. But last night, on the Bones finale, Hanson pulled the trigger:

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