There was also EVENT HORIZON in which a spaceship is possessed or something like that. (I actually edited the novelization, but that was a LONG time ago and my memories are fuzzy.)
Agents of Shield - Season 4
- Thread starter MarsWeeps
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There was also EVENT HORIZON in which a spaceship is possessed or something like that. (I actually edited the novelization, but that was a LONG time ago and my memories are fuzzy.)
IIRC, that was actually not dissimilar to the premise in the MCU, of supernatural phenomena being the physics of other universes. What appeared as a "hell dimension" was an alternate continuum whose different physical laws were hellish for beings from our universe to experience. It's also similar to a concept from the novella "The Way of All Ghosts" by Greg Bear.
There's a lot of Japanese SF that blurs the distinction between technology and the supernatural -- not surprising from an animistic culture where material objects are all presumed to have their own spirits. A lot of Super Sentai/Power Rangers seasons have portrayed the robotic mecha/Zords as living, mystical beasts or spirits. The Japanese counterpart of the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers Megazord was literally a god. So was GoLion, the basis for Voltron. There's also the Digimon franchise, where the Digital World, the realm inside computers, is an essentially spiritual plane in which computer constructs/game characters have become living entities, imbued with life and sentience by the belief or emotional energy of human beings. A more adult-oriented take on a similar idea is in the anime Serial Experiments Lain, in which the Internet, the "Wired" (play on "Weird"), is maybe itself becoming God, or something similar. I'm not sure about demonic entities linked to technology, though, aside from things like evil Digimon.
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When an AI starts covertly expanding its own programming, I think we're supposed to take that as ominous.
Sounds a lot like the kind of psudo-science that Aykroyd used as the basis for the Ghostbusters. IIRC the much more sci-fiy original concept had some mention in there of our increased use of technology eroding the barriers between realities and that the "ghosts" weren't dead people extra-dimensional manifestations that took on their appearance or some-such. Though I may be misremembering.
I can't fault the logic, but I don't know...I mean an advanced robot gets exposed to some cosmic artefact, turns evil and goes on a self-improvement binge? I feel like I may have seen this story before somewhere.
I'm not saying I have a better idea, but it seems a bit odd to go back to that particular well a second time and with a much lower production budget to boot. Seems more likely that they'll play on the audience having just this exact expectation in order to flip the script at some point.
Side Note: Does the "ghost" jumping bodies like this confirm that Johnny Blaze can't still also be a Ghost Rider? I know in the comics one or more existed at once, but this is making it look like it's a one entity/one host at a time type of arrangement.
They can start with the same basic premise and take it someplace completely different, especially as an ongoing season arc...the "Age of Ultron" was two hours.
Seeing as the show is playing with the elements rather than using them as they were in the comics, it's pretty hard to say one way or the other for sure. It definitely seems like Zarathos has moved to Robbie from Johnny (my original thought when it happened, that he was passing it on and freeing himself), but for all we know Johnny still has his own GR thing still going on.
I can't fault the logic, but I don't know...I mean an advanced robot gets exposed to some cosmic artefact, turns evil and goes on a self-improvement binge? I feel like I may have seen this story before somewhere.
I'm not saying I have a better idea, but it seems a bit odd to go back to that particular well a second time and with a much lower production budget to boot. Seems more likely that they'll play on the audience having just this exact expectation in order to flip the script at some point.
Which is exactly why I don't expect Aida to become evil. More likely the other characters will assume that what she's doing is bad, but it'll turn out not to be.
"Evil" is a pretty simplistic strawman. She can become a threat to humanity without being "Eeeeevil."
Even the Spirit of Vengeance isn't "evil", it's just disturbed and angry.
I wonder if anyone would see a graphic novel with pictures and word balloons. Maybe if that's all they grew up with. And what of someone who was never exposed to written language?
Good premise for a Stan cameo.
No, it's a shorthand for a casual conversation, meaning that I don't expect her to become a threat, period. After all, that would just be a rehash of the Ultron story, so what would be the point? As I said, I expect the other characters to assume she's going to be an Ultron-like threat, but to turn out to be wrong. A counterpoint to the story they've already told seems more likely than a simple repetition of it.
The road to Hell can be paved with the best of intentions.
Maybe the book is guiding her into bringing itself into existence and is building the brain for it?
Probably either simple pictograms or abstract images that only mean something to that particular person.
I think the way it works is that it's really just downloading the information straight into the brain of whoever is trying to read it and the words on the page aren't really there, it's just a visual hallucination caused by whatever it's doing to the visual cortex.
An interesting idea is that Ada may be immune to the malevolent nature of the books since she's a machine with no soul/astral form for the book to corrupt. To her it's just information.
With Ultron I was always under the impression that his mind was a twisted version of Stark, created via contact with the mind stone. The scene where he and JARVIS first interact seemed less like he'd been created and more like he'd woken up with no memory. As if at least part of him was already extant within the stone and Stark's sub-conscious patterns were partially imprinted over that. Which is why Vision turned out differently since his "source code" mind was imprinted with JARVIS's protocols instead.
What's happening with Ada may be similar but approached from the opposite angle. Instead of a base consciousness being imprinted, her code is being patched to expand the capabilities of what's already there.
^Also a strong possibility. If so then the real big-bad for this season could be Chthon?
On second thought, wouldn't that just feel like Hive all over again? Primordial evil, trapped in another realm, brought back to earth with an ancient artefact?
Seems as though it's a choice between a recycled AoU concept and a recycled AoS concept. I wonder what the third option could be? And does it tie in at all to the bloke in the cocoon? I mean that subplot has been sitting on the back-burner for a while now with no clue as to it's significance.
Redjack from TOS springs to mind, although that's another example of an alien entity masquerading as a supernatural being. I think there are other examples, but I can't think of them at the moment.
I think we should fight this kind of prejudice.
When you put it like that, I realize that's why the Dr. Strange film left me vaguely disappointed. Barring a few notable exceptions, the magic in the film was, functionally, not all that different from the farfetched super-science of the other Marvel films. Yeah, it was done with the gestures and talismans instead of big, sleek machinery with blinking lights, but the effects -- portals, energy blasts, time manipulation, and so on -- are the same kinds of things we see in sci-fi flicks. Only the tools were different. I went in hoping for something different but instead got, at least in this respect, just more of the same.
What's the scientific or technological spin on a guy with a flaming skull who is possessed by the spirit of vengeance and drives around in a self-repairing Dodge Charger?
But that's because Marvel "superscience" has always been fantasy anyway. The reason sci-fi and fantasy concepts blend so smoothly in comics is because their sci-fi is of the loosest variety and is usually functionally indistinguishable from fantasy. And there's a long tradition of comics blending the lines between the two. Look at Kirby's New Gods from DC. They're supposedly actual gods, yet they live on an alien planet and have an intelligent supercomputer and travel through wormholes.
And I prefer the idea that, if a universe has both science and magic, they're variant facets of the same overall laws of nature. It makes no sense for a single universe to have two completely unconnected, even contradictory sets of rules governing it. The consistent theme of physics ever since Isaac Newton has been unification -- the realization that what we thought were two different sets of rules were actually different aspects of a deeper rule, enabling us to gain new insights that took us closer to the truth. Newton realized that Earthly gravity and heavenly orbital motions were aspects of the same thing. Maxwell realized that electricity and magnetism were aspects of the same thing. Einstein realized that space and time were aspects of the same thing. And so on.
So if there were magic in a universe, it would be part of that universe's physics, not something outside of them. It would be a different expression of the same underlying phenomenon, just as the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces are different expressions that "froze out" of the same unified force that existed when the universe was far hotter and denser. Thus, it stands to reason that magic and science in that universe would not be too fundamentally different in how they worked, that there would be a degree of overlap between them. That's logical worldbuilding. If it were two completely incompatible and unrelated things crammed together, I would find that sloppy.
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