very 90s hair, especially on the (blond?) hacker(?) teenager
Right on all counts!
If I were a psychic employed by even the most benevolent of governments -- and I have no recollection at all of how much that was the case for SeaQuest --
It's also really unclear! The world government of seaQuest is the United Earth Oceans, a vaguely defined alliance of underwater confederations and surviving "upworld" states. It is presumably analogous to the United Nations; we haven't heard much about how it developed out of present-day politics, but the tipping point doesn't seem to have been World War III so much as an ecological breakdown combined with the economic boom of ocean exploitation that redrew all the maps, most of them underwater. The Alexandria episode confirmed that a bunch of contemporary Mediterranean nations still exist—Egypt, Libya, and Israel all got diplomatic representation1—and we know the seaQuest was built in San Francisco and headquartered in Pearl Harbor, but I'm not actually sure of the position of the United States in the UEO. The seaQuest itself is heavily American, as is the other military infrastructure we've seen so far; it's an American show. So far it isn't presenting itself as the kind of science fiction where the government is the enemy, but the very first episode features the Navy essentially tricking Roy Scheider's Captain Bridger back into service, so I'm not sure if we're supposed to believe it.
There is no sense whatsoever of the number of people in the world with psychic abilities or the degree to which their existence is widely known. One of the telepaths2 recollects consulting for the police on the case of a missing child whose abductor was in a coma, so their work can't all be globally vital and clandestine; her parents fled the Soviet Union before her birth in order to avoid their abilities being used by the government, but her father has spent the last thirty years feeling that he ended up in exactly the same position with the UEO, just without the secret police. ("'No' is a powerful word."–"They come to the door anyway.") Nonetheless, when it transpires that the captain himself has a strong "psi factor"—to which the Rossoviches attribute his excellent intuition and career-making ability to judge motives and intent—it's going to make absolutely no difference to his life because he's under no obligation to report this discovery to the UEO and get himself mentally trained, to which my reaction was dude, are you lucky the Psi Corps are the next future over.
1. I really did like that the deciding artifact of that episode was Phoenician—the great sea-empire of the ancient world, whose cities and colonies reached from Syria to Spain, evoking a shared heritage of the ocean. It was one of the show's few genuinely subtle moments so far and I found it very effective.
2. The dialogue refers to them misleadingly as "parapsychologists"; the plot makes it quite clear that they can read people's minds, albeit not in the clear book-like fashion popularly believed. I am therefore calling them telepaths until the show comes up with a preferred terminology. Incidentally, I was correct that nobody talks to Tim about his dolphin telepathy. Missed opportunity.
no subject
Right on all counts!
If I were a psychic employed by even the most benevolent of governments -- and I have no recollection at all of how much that was the case for SeaQuest --
It's also really unclear! The world government of seaQuest is the United Earth Oceans, a vaguely defined alliance of underwater confederations and surviving "upworld" states. It is presumably analogous to the United Nations; we haven't heard much about how it developed out of present-day politics, but the tipping point doesn't seem to have been World War III so much as an ecological breakdown combined with the economic boom of ocean exploitation that redrew all the maps, most of them underwater. The Alexandria episode confirmed that a bunch of contemporary Mediterranean nations still exist—Egypt, Libya, and Israel all got diplomatic representation1—and we know the seaQuest was built in San Francisco and headquartered in Pearl Harbor, but I'm not actually sure of the position of the United States in the UEO. The seaQuest itself is heavily American, as is the other military infrastructure we've seen so far; it's an American show. So far it isn't presenting itself as the kind of science fiction where the government is the enemy, but the very first episode features the Navy essentially tricking Roy Scheider's Captain Bridger back into service, so I'm not sure if we're supposed to believe it.
There is no sense whatsoever of the number of people in the world with psychic abilities or the degree to which their existence is widely known. One of the telepaths2 recollects consulting for the police on the case of a missing child whose abductor was in a coma, so their work can't all be globally vital and clandestine; her parents fled the Soviet Union before her birth in order to avoid their abilities being used by the government, but her father has spent the last thirty years feeling that he ended up in exactly the same position with the UEO, just without the secret police. ("'No' is a powerful word."–"They come to the door anyway.") Nonetheless, when it transpires that the captain himself has a strong "psi factor"—to which the Rossoviches attribute his excellent intuition and career-making ability to judge motives and intent—it's going to make absolutely no difference to his life because he's under no obligation to report this discovery to the UEO and get himself mentally trained, to which my reaction was dude, are you lucky the Psi Corps are the next future over.
1. I really did like that the deciding artifact of that episode was Phoenician—the great sea-empire of the ancient world, whose cities and colonies reached from Syria to Spain, evoking a shared heritage of the ocean. It was one of the show's few genuinely subtle moments so far and I found it very effective.
2. The dialogue refers to them misleadingly as "parapsychologists"; the plot makes it quite clear that they can read people's minds, albeit not in the clear book-like fashion popularly believed. I am therefore calling them telepaths until the show comes up with a preferred terminology. Incidentally, I was correct that nobody talks to Tim about his dolphin telepathy. Missed opportunity.