Didn't These Humans On Star-Crossed See District 9?
And other not-quite-burning questions about The CW's new sci-fi teen drama.
In case any of us forgot for a second what The CW is really about (we didn't), the network has reached back into its glorious WB ancestry to bring us Star-Crossed, a Roswell for our times, except it's set in the not-so-distant future (ten years from now), plus everyone knows who the aliens are. The pilot did its best -- as most pilots do -- to anticipate and answer the viewer's questions about this new setting and its characters...I have more.
So this version of 2014 America didn't see District 9 five years earlier?
As the real action of the episode begins, we're ten years after a race of aliens -- the Atrians -- crash-landed on Earth. After a skirmish between the surviving aliens and terrestrial authorities, the Atrians were rounded up and relocated to a reservation Sector -- but now, in a daring new pilot program, seven Atrian teenagers are enrolling in a human school. The Atrians have held, this whole time, that their arrival on Earth was not an attack or invasion, and their crashed ship is still hanging around, so basically, it's District 9? Except instead of looking like giant shellfish with arms, the Atrians are attractive humanoids whose only physical difference from humans is their facial tattoos -- hence the hateful slur "tatties." It's apparently taken a decade for human authorities to accept that the Atrians are fit to mix in society, yet they still have to live in a segregated ghetto, under curfew? Never mind District 9: no one in this America has learned anything from the various shameful chapters of America's history? The ACLU never got involved? And speaking of civil rights...
How much of an idea do contemporary kids have of the allegorical elements?
I have a lot of fun at the expense of Today's Young People, and I know they're not actually dumb, but seriously, do they know about desegregation and stuff? I mean, I keep reading about how cool they are with their trans classmates and how they actually don't see race, so will they care enough to get invested if they don't understand the references? (Or does it even matter if they aren't able to relate it to real life, and I should just be happy if they don't because it means that this generation actually is legitimately less bigoted than their forebears?)
What are all the other teenagers doing?
After a bad first day in the pilot program, one of the Atrian teens comments that he never thought he'd say it, but that he misses his "Sector school," which we may safely assume is shitty and inferior, but we don't know. What are all the other poor bastards doing? How much crappier is the Sector school? What do kids do for fun when they're inside, on curfew? What kind of future are they actually being trained for?
Why wouldn't the Atrians win over their human antagonists by coming clean about their miracle cure?
Okay, so our protagonist, Emery, is also just starting back at school after being hospitalized for months and months due to an "immune deficiency." Julia, with whom Emery bonded when they were both long-term patients, tells Emery midway through the episode that she's ending treatment and going home, presumably to die. But! They've heard tell of a medicinal herb the Atrians grow, called cyper, and they want to get some to see if it will cure Julia, but Roman (Juliet to Emery's Romeo) tells them "cyper" is just the Atrian word for "saffron." But THEN, at the end of the episode, Julia takes a turn for the worse, and Roman sneaks into her hospital room, pricks himself with a cyper petal, makes his veins glow blue, draws some of his glowing blue blood, injects Julia with it, and totally cures her! I mean, I guess the reason the Atrians wouldn't want this to become common knowledge is out of fear of getting all their blood harvested because there's nothing humans love more than exhausting a natural resource with no regard for the future...BUT couldn't they have slowly collected their own blood bank over time and made the glowing cyperized version available to prove their usefulness and benevolence to their human neighbours?
When can Matt Lanter and Aimee Teegarden stop playing high school students?
I realize how absurd it is for me to complain about the age of actors who play teenagers on TV shows when I revere Beverly Hills, 90210 and Gabrielle Carteris was like sixty when that series started, and yet. Matt Lanter, who plays Roman, has been playing TV teenagers since he was Geena Davis's son on Commander In Chief...in 2005. Let me put this another way: he's only a year younger than Seth Rogen. He's old. Aimee Teegarden is more convincing -- she'll only be twenty-five this year, compared to Lanter's thirty-one -- but she already played a college student on Friday Night Lights, and that was several years ago. She's the only kid from Dillon High whose career hasn't fully graduated yet. Lyla Garrity's a futurecop on Almost Human, and Jason Street already got to rough up a bunch of people on The Good Wife! Let Julie Taylor put her binders and highlighters away already.