I very much want to like SyFy’s Defiance, its new alien-invasion story, which is set to arrive on the network in April of next year, but this initial trailer has me feeling somewhat uncertain:

On the plus side, I appreciate that SyFy is selling that what happens when an alien and human culture meld is one of the things that makes the show distinct and worth watching. I want to know what it means that “It wasn’t exactly Earth anymore. Something new had been created.” That sense of our planet not being precisely Earth anymore, and that question of how humans and aliens will deal with each other once the possibility of staying separated is gone, was what made District 9 such a fantastic movie. Defiance could be an opportunity to move closer to those points of conversion than District 9 was. In District 9, the people who had commercial and sexual relationships with aliens were black Africans, rather than people like our white protagonist, immigrants rather than South Africans, criminals rather than citizens. It would be interesting to have a show that interrogates what it’s like to cross over those boundaries, to feel friendship, or attraction, or love for someone who is profoundly other, to have a show grant the other that humanity at all, rather than to keep those interactions, that mingling of worlds, at a distance.

But on the other hand, Defiance is being released in conjunction with a video game, and from this footage, looks it. These are some very cheesy-looking alien invaders. And the fact that Defiance isn’t just comfortable telling a society-building story and is continuing the invasion is worrisome. If you feel like the world you’re placing your characters in isn’t interesting enough without posing holdouts on Helm’s Deep-like battlements, that the conversations your characters will have are less engaging than CGI-shootouts, you have a problem.

I know. There aren’t a lot of competitors for the mantle. But I’ve been catching up on SyFy’s Alphas, a show about people with remarkable abilities, the people who want to exploit them, and those in their number who want to declare independence from humanity, and I’m increasingly impressed by its political savvy. While at first blush, Alphas might seem like a rip-off of X-Men, it’s turning into a deeply thoughtful meditation on extremism, equality, and the profound difficulty of achieving political consensus.

Many science fiction or fantasy franchises have a range of villains who stand in for a series of big ideas, like Magneto’s representation of mutant superiority in the X-Men, or the Lizard’s advocacy of evolution beyond humanity in Spider-Man. Alphas has one big question—how people with abilities can live in a world where they are a minority—and a lot of people who believe they have the correct answer to it.

Dr. Rosen believes that integration, including channeling his charges’ abilities in service of law enforcement and helping them manage the manifestation of their abilities so they don’t do damage or make other people uncomfortable, is the best way to go. Red Flag, the terrorist organization the advocates for Alpha dominance, isn’t a monolithic organization. The first member of it we meet, Anna, an autistic woman with the ability to translate languages and invent them, believes that Red Flag is necessary as a way to force a truce with normal humanity. If humans had their way, she believes, they’d prevent people like her from being born, both because they’d see her autism as a defect, and because they find her gifts threatening. Later, Brent Spiner played Dr. Kern, an Alpha who went a step further, sowing active DNA in prenatal vitamins in the hope his experiments on non-consenting women would result in the birth of more of the people he sees as a miraculous improvement on humanity’s base state. And lately, the show’s been spending time with Stanton Parish, an apparently unkillable Alpha who’s murdered more moderate members of Red Flag.

It’s a fascinating approach, turning a villain-of-the-week formula into a more deeply nuanced exploration of a question that deserves that kind of sustained interrogation. Gary, an autistic member of the core team, complained in an episode in the first season “Why do we always have to fight people with abilities? It’s annoying.” It’s a question that almost anyone who cares about politics has asked themselves at some point, wishing it was easier to get it together to win an election or a legislative vote. But the answer is that the big questions aren’t resolvable quickly or easily. It takes time to reach a consensus, and even then, there will likely remain people outside of it. Alphas is the rare science fiction program smart enough to understand that, and it’s making for fascinating television.

The bridge is yours.

-You should be allowed to review The Avengers without being attacked for not showing fealty to it.

-Beyonce really is the world’s most beautiful woman.

-io9 is more confident than I am about SyFy bringing the sci-fi back.

-Yes, Denis Leary. Emma Stone is awesome.

-Shia LeBoeuf and Tom Hardy would like to see you some corn whiskey:

The bridge is yours.

-The end of the Red Sox decade.

-Joss Whedon on The Avengers and creative frustration.

-More details on SyFy’s new series Defiance.

-Morgan Spurlock, having written a shallow love letter to Comic-Con, is moving on to male grooming.

-Great: more ammunition for the men and women can’t be friends lobby:

The SyFy network’s announced that they won’t be moving forward with Blood and Chrome, a prequel to their critically acclaimed hit Battlestar Galactica, which would have flashed back to the first war between humans and their robot creations, the Cylons. For Battlestar Galactica fans who have missed the space opera, which drew parallels to everything from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to student protests in the 1960s, since it went off the air in 2009, and the show’s prequel Caprica, which finished its run in 2010, this may be bad news. But it’s a good decision by the network. Battlestar Galactica was terrific, but it’s time for SyFy to stop milking the same concept, and to find a new great science fiction show worthy of the network’s name.

In recent years, one of SyFy’s most pronounced trends has been towards fantasy programming rather than science fiction. Alphas, its flawed-superheroes show, is wonderfully fun, but its characters’ abilities are of the X-Men-style, Children of the Atom mumbo-jumbo variety. The biological explanations are for the most part (Gary, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, is a notable exception) more hand-waving than serious exploration of the human body. Eureka, the network’s show about a town inhabited by the descendants of America’s greatest scientists and their cantankerous creations, is entering its final seasons. The artifacts that are stored in Warehouse 13 and hunted down by FBI agents gone steampunk are decidedly the stuff of literature and legend, rather than scientific discoveries that are key to American hegemony. Haven is about a town with supernatural troubles. Sanctuary is about a monster scientist. The network has no fewer than four shows about ghosts. And its latest mini-phenomenon, a syndication of the Canadian show Lost Girl, is delightful, but that doesn’t make it any less about a succubus making her way in the fairy community.

This seems like a real missed opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, and fantasy can set up moral dilemmas as well as science fiction: power is power, and decisions about how to use it can be fascinating whether it’s a new scientific discovery or a newly discovered supernatural ability. But, to go all Southland Tales on it, the future is going to be more futuristic than we imagined, and it’s getting here awfully fast. There are so many pressing questions that would also make for fabulous entertainment. What will it mean for space travel, something we once thought of as a scientific frontier and an escape hatch for humanity, to become a luxury tourism industry? What will it mean to be human as we’re increasingly integrated with our technology, perhaps to the point of having smart implants, like Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, or a bunch of the characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s forthcoming 2312? How will technology, medical advances, and the ability to augment ourselves exacerbate our class divides?

These questions are imminent, not theoretical. And they all lend themselves beautifully to television devices. You could do an office comedy about running a space tourism company, or a drama about corruption in the industry and an interstellar land grab. You can have chatty, snarky AIs as characters, or show humans growing overly invested in their technology—Apple clearly means for us to attach to Siri, and as she works better, I can see that happening. When there’s this much potential available, there’s something kind of unfortunate about turning away from the possible and the probable to the purely fantastical. Fiction doesn’t have an absolute responsibility to help us work out our problems, but it’s an incredible tool for helping us think through them. For a network with the motto “Imagine Greater,” that ought to be an exciting prospect.

On Monday, I asked what the impact would be if the Supreme Court a) takes a case accusing SyFy of stealing an idea for a television show and b) rules that the network had implicitly created a contract between itself and the people pitching a show. Copyright lawyer Michael Salerno explains that it’ll likely lead to more specific contracts, rather than easier entry into the business for people who aren’t established but have original ideas:

The Court can’t allow for ideas to be copyrightable or a numebr of writers will just submit any number of rather generic scripts and then sue the pants off of networks that develop similar shows. Can you imagine a writer being able to have a copyright in an idea like “six friends live in New York and have their love lives intertwine”? There goes just about every 30-minute sitcom ever. If the writers win on a contract basis (which is MUCH more likely), studios will just create more specific contracts that state any screenplay submitted is either a) a work for hire whose copyright resides in the studio, or b) that the network reserves the right to develop a series based on the idea within the script without remuneration for the writers. Tough terms, to be sure, but that is what will likely happen.

And Rhys Boyd-Farrell suggests that among the things that could get included in such contracts is a requirement that disputes be settled by arbitrartion rather that the courts, something that’s been a significant trend in employment and contract law in any case.

Zack Stentz suggests that it could also bring about changes that, in addition to helping avoid idea-stealing claims, would be total catnip for nerdy television critics like yours truly:

I think if this brings about any changes, it will be to force the studios and networks to more carefully document their development process. I don’t know what the facts are in this case, but simultaneous creation does happen all the time. When we meet with producers or studios and they pitch us ideas, we’re always really careful to say “that sounds great, but unfortunately we’re already working on an idea like that and we don’t want to step on it.” If NBCU already had a paranormal investigator idea in the works, they should have documented it somewhere and told these people when they came to pitch them.

I may be a little burned out by origin stories for characters, but I do like a good origin story for a piece of art.

-Why would Matt Damon take Michael Moore’s suggestion and run for president when he gets to hang out Neill Blomkamp and wear crazy cyborg suits? Being POTUS is a really terrible job in comparison to being an A-list actor.

-You know who probably doesn’t need immigration waivers? Also A-list actors.

-I will only watch a Bewitched remake if it’s a horror story a la the episode of Charmed where Phoebe turns into Samantha.

-Pretty confident video games didn’t cause the London riots.

-Hell yeah steampunk lady scientists (also, SyFy’s H.G. Wells spinoff strikes me as the only way we’re going to get a lady Doctor).

In comments on this post that have since, frustratingly, been eaten by the system (we’re investigating), Stephen Eldridge and Chuchundra raise what I think are two useful and provocative points about how to make superhero art.

Stephen suggested it might be more interesting to have a show or movie about a world where everyone had some sort of unusual power, rather than a single individual or small group of people. I think that makes sense, particularly because of the way superpowers can magnify and metaphorize conflicts. I’m don’t know that the depiction of Venom as turning Spider-Man into a jazz-playing ladies man in Spider-Man 3 was the way to go, but Anthony Lane is dead-on about the brilliance of Elastigirl as sexy multitasking mom in The Incredibles. And that’s what works about Eureka, SyFy’s show about a town full of superpowered geniuses sequestered by the government so they can work in peace and in a place where they’re unlikely to alarm the general populace. What Eureka ends up needing is someone average who can see conflicts between the town’s citizens—and sometimes their inventions—for what they are, instead of as national catastrophes. I also think in an era of specialization, and at a time when people are getting more comfortable with the idea of enhancements, be they steroids, replacement hips, mental performance stimulants, etc., we might have to spend more time getting used to the idea that there are people who are unusually good at certain things among us—and we’ll need people who are unusually good at other things to compensate.

And Chuchundra wrote:

I see the same issue here that I noted in No Ordinary Family. The distribution of powers is right out of the Silver Age. The men get the combat-oriented powers. The women get the support/informational abilities. The big, black dude gets the super strength. The hot chick gets the mind control. The geeky-looking guy gets the geekiest power. You can pretty much predict how the stories are going to play out.

He’s dead right that superheroes would be more interesting if their powers brought out things about themselves that aren’t obvious attributes, or things that people were uncomfortable with. Superpowers don’t just have to be a magnifying lens: they can be a microscope, and much more revealing.