So Long, Farewell

Published June 25, 2018 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey Guys,

First, I wanted to say what a great job you’ve done all season. I have been posting links to your shows everywhere, because you really do an excellent job. Thanks for the great accompaniment to the show. It’s been fun.

Secondly, just once more, for posterity, the accent is on KEY. Even when you get close to the pronunciation, you keep wanting to accent the CHE-ta. It’s ah-KEY-ch’ta. You can really shorten that final vowel sound, because it isn’t accented. When you’re putting the accent there, you’re often say CHEETAH or CHEDDA. Accent on the KEY. No big deal, but you know, it’s nice to say it right.

Finally, I’ve only heard the instacast so far, so maybe you’ll correct this on the deep dive, but the forge AI isn’t Logan, or being represented by Logan like in the movie Contact. He said he plays all of the parts where the humans have a memory of someone, but he doesn’t have that person’s data. He has people in there that remember Logan, so Logan exists in their fantasy world too, but he’s not a consciousness, so the AI plays him. It was Logan, so that Dolores would know he didn’t belong, because Logan never went back to the park.

-John G.

p.s.

Contact was not stupid for making that decision about her father. Some human idea of what this alien would look like would have been really stupid. Aliens work when they’re monsters like the alien franchise, cute and cuddly like ET, or in a scifi show like star wars/star trek where there are thousands of different aliens. When you’re meeting an alien race that’s just one alien race in a movie about humanity’s first contact, you have to play it like Contact did. What do you picture that alien looking like that would have been good? Some insect creature? A human with prosthetics? an amorphous blob? Anything would have been stupid. They always are. The actual thing that makes Contact bad was that Robert Zemeckis taking Carl Sagan’s story about first contact and the language of science and math being the universal language of the universe and made it a peon on faith. “Oh, look, that smarty pants scientist now knows something true and can’t prove it. Now, she knows how we religious people feel. Ha ha.” That is the exact opposite message than the one Carl Sagan put in his book.

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