Friday, July 10, 2015

MISSING LINKS - "VR.5" & "STITCHERS"?



It's been twenty years since 'VR.5' first appeared on our TV screens.  And sadly, as often happens with sci-fi shows over the years, it ended on a cliff-hanger with no hope for resolution: Sydney Blume was able to get her mother's mind free of the VR.5 technology, but at the cost of her own.  She was left trapped within that matrix of an alternate world.
 
So much could have happened in the two decades since that happened.  I'd like to think Sydney was finally freed herself from there.  Perhaps with the help of the Doctor.  (Of course I would suggest that!)  As a matter of fact, the Doctor might have also been able to save the mind of ('Nowhere Man') whose mind had been trapped in such a computer matrix for just as long.  (However, his body may not have survived and so the Doctor had to transfer his consciousness into another type of host.)
 
But that's another story.
 
Twenty years on and the technology for computers and artificial intelligence and mind transferrence (a somewhat established practice by the 1960s in Toobworld) has grown by quantum leaps and boundsin Earth Prime-Time.  For example - the government is able to install a micro-chip into an agent's brain so that he can access the internet instantly.  Another agent - but only conscripted into service after what happened to him - had all the information... information... information... gathered by the government in their mega computer known as the Intersect downloaded into his brain.
 
The interface between human mind and computer didn't mesh right off the bat; it involved evolution on both sides of the equation.  And Sydney's parents may have also developed the technology in other areas, leading to new frontiers of discovery.  In turn, this could have led to such programs as the current experiment in "stitching".....
 

Stitching allows a researcher to enter the memories of a deceased  person, ostensibly to learn how that person died and if possible, bring any guilty parties to justice.  (But the TV show is suggesting that the government might have an ulterior motive for the technology.)
 
It's unlikely that the Blumes will ever be invoked in any future episode of 'Stitchers', but it's just nice to know that it's pozz'ble, just pozz'ble, for there to be a connection to 'VR.5'....
 
BCnU!
 
 

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