Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 3

I really liked this episode. I kind of wish that everyone had their own point of reference. We know "Groundhog Day" and "Cause and Effect" were used but what if MIck mentioned the Stargate episode "WIndow of Opportunity" and maybe Sara mentions the Buffy episode that did it.

To me this is also the episode were I am now sold on Zari as a character. She was kind of in the background and didn't feel all that useful but I loved her in this though her superpower seems to kind of suck. I hope she can do more than just make things really windy and if your going with that I would like her to really make some wind and create tornado's.


Jason

 

So? We've seen police detectives solve mysteries before, but they still make shows about that. We've seen car chases before, and they still happen. Why is it that when a trope is used hundreds of times for decades on end, nobody questions it, but if a trope is used two or three times, people start griping about overuse if it happens a third or fourth time?

Besides, Dark Matter's Android isn't an avatar of the ship's sentient AI, she's a separate AI that interfaces with the nonsentient ship in order to operate its systems. So she's more like, say, Gypsy from Mystery Science Theater 3000, a symbiont with the ship/satellite rather than a mere extension of it. A better example of an android avatar would be Rommie from Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. Or the DC Animated Universe version of Brainiac, a disembodied AI who builds robot bodies as interfaces. Or Danger, the android manifestation of the sentient Danger Room in Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men comics and afterward.

 

No Andriod from Dark Matter simply interfaced with the ship's systems.

Best example is probably Rommie (Lexa Doig) from Andromeda (have mentioned that show I'll go get the brain bleach).

 

Thats what I said.... physical extensions and interfaces for the ship. That covers both (near identical) categories.

 

No, there's a fundamental difference between a sentient starship operating a robotic puppet with no mind of its own and a sentient android operating a ship with no mind of its own. Although I think Aya from Green Lantern started out as the former and became the latter, transferring her consciousness from the ship to the android.

The Dark Matter Android's interface with the Raza is akin to R2-D2's interface with a fighter he's plugged into. The AI is able to interface directly with the ship's systems and thereby operate and diagnose them more quickly than a human could. But being able to interface with the ship is not the same as being nothing more than an interface operated by the ship. The Android didn't come with the ship and wasn't created to operate it. She was created to serve an entirely different purpose, and the only reason she ended up aboard the Raza is because she came with Portia Lin when Portia joined the crew.

If Gideon got an android avatar, it'd be more like Rommie, and also sort of like Zephyr in my original novel Only Superhuman. Zephyr is the sapient AI mind within Emerald Blair's scout ship of the same name, and he's able to use the ship's "soligram" facility -- sort of like Trek holograms but using a shapeshifting nanotech gel to create actually solid constructs -- to generate a physical avatar that he can speak through and use to interact physically with people. But as far as he's concerned, the avatar isn't him, it's just a tactile interface device that he occasionally operates. He is the ship.

Ooh, another good example is Poe from Altered Carbon. Poe is an AI hotel -- his intelligence resides in the building itself -- but he generates a human-looking avatar out of nanotech "smart dust," which works similarly to my soligrams, but allows him to dematerialize and rematerialize in a different location within seconds, like a more standard sci-fi hologram.

 

Its the SAME THING. Its a piece of AI code that operates and inhabits machinery. Are you really trying to say which piece of tech is hosting the code (the ships computer and circuits vs the robotic shell) actually matters?? The code is sentient and alive, inhabits machinery, can take human avatar form, and interfaces / controls ship's systems. There is absolutely no difference. The code is the important thing. The shell it inhabits is completely irrelevant. Either the humanoid form or the ship could host the code. It doesn't matter.... its *code.*

 

That's kind of like saying it doesn't matter whether you call someone male or female because they have the same brain anatomy regardless. It matters because of how the personality identifies and embodies itself. As I said, Zephyr thinks of himself as a ship; his avatar is just a puppet he operates. Mistaking his avatar for him would be as insulting as mistaking a trans woman for a man, because it's ignoring their chosen Andromeda initially regards Rommie the same way, as merely one of her many, many robot and hologram avatars, although Rommie eventually develops a more independent personality. I would never treat an AI character who considers herself a starship to be interchangeable with an AI character who considers herself an android. The two would have different attitudes about who they were and how they engaged with the world. Indeed, that was part of why Andromeda and Rommie diverged in personality. What body you're in matters to who you are.

After all, we're not talking about a question of programming and code, we're talking about how characters in works of fiction are defined. If you plug R2-D2 into an X-Wing, which one is the character?

 

I was sold on her in the ET episode when she hung out with kid Ray, so I'm glad that her first "solo" episode was this fun.

 

One of many laugh out loud moments for me.

 

Violett Beane (Jesse Quick) to guest star

 

In a brief time Zari seems far more interesting a character than Amaya. I can not not imagine them changing out the two characters in that episode and it working at all. Marie Richardson-Sellers is beautiful but has very limited emotional range as an actress. Yet Tala Ashe is very versatile and to me at least even more attractive.

Until Tala Ashe, I have felt Caity Lotz was the only female regular cast for more than her looks. The Hawkgirl actress was not that impressive an actress. They are really good at guest actresses though. The actress who played Stein's daughter is far from "Hollywood Pretty" but I always enjoyed her apperances.

 

I'm also not a big fan of Amaya. I mean what's their to say other than she is just boring. I think Stein's daughter would also be a good character. If they were looking for more female characters to someday replace Amaya or just add for regular reasons then I would love them to do something like adding a older woman to the cast. You don't see older women much in the Arrowverse.

Jason

 

That is an excellent point! It was noted before the season started that Vixen and Isis have similar magical based powers. They generally are both similar physical types too. For a show, shows, that like to promote progressive values they have a bad track record when it comes to showing mature female characters.

 

If R2's code was permanently transferred and stored inside an X Wing, then of course the X Wing would be R2. R2 is the AI code running inside the robot. KITT was the Trans Am, but he was still KITT when in a 57 Chevy or Pontiac Banshee. The AI code doesn't care what shell it is in... the programming makes it what it is. Everything else is merely cosmetic.

 

Of course that would be true in a story where such a thing actually happened. There are multiple stories where such things have happened. The point is, it didn't happen in this story. The point is that different stories approach their AI characters differently, so the question isn't what could be done in general (because it all can be done), the question is how each story approaches it differently. Some stories have AI consciousnesses in ships, others have them in robot bodies. Some stories have villains switch sides and become heroes, some stories have villains stay villains throughout. Some stories have couples get married and live happily ever after, some stories have couples get married and have one spouse murder the other. Of course it can happen either way, but you still need to keep straight which stories take which approach.

 

You're taking examples of basic machines and trying to extrapolate them to higher consciousnesses. We really don't know what it takes to create a true consciousness in either a mammal or robotic lifeform, so we don't know if it is transferable or, even if it is transferable, what it would take to allow a true transfer. The new entity may indeed be the same person, or it may just contain some of the data imprints of the prior form.

I'm not just talking about the concept of a soul. Think about what makes up your memories and personality. Is your personality just the sum of your memories, or is there something about the physical storage system (the body, brain, nervous system, etc.) that impacts a good percentage of your personality? Also, what is memory? Is memory just data that can be transferred, or is there something about the storage system itself (the manner in which particular neurons have learned to interact with each other) that determines what and how we remember certain events?

 

More to the point, it depends on the story. Let's not forget that we're talking about fiction. Everything you talk about is possible if the storyteller wants it to be possible, but different storytellers will approach AI characters in different ways. That's the point I've been making -- that you can't overgeneralize, because each story handles things differently.

On the subject of consciousness transfer, my 2016 Analog story "Murder on the Cislunar Railroad" was written, in part, as a counterargument to the common sci-fi assumption that AI (or human) minds could be casually transferred or copied between computers like ordinary programs. In the universe of the story (which is the same universe as most of my original fiction), a copy of an AI mind is not the original, but more of a clone/offspring that develops its own distinct personality due to the dynamic nature of consciousness (even if the starting conditions are the same, the emergent processes that result from them will be distinct) and inescapable errors in the copying process. The story revolves around oppressed AIs trying to convince aspiring liberators that copying their minds and erasing the originals will kill them rather than rescuing them.

But if someone writes a story in which an AI (or human) mind can be successfully transferred from one host to another, I may not agree with the science of that, but I'll still accept it as real within the context of the story, just as I'll accept that magic and dragons are real within the context of Harry Potter or The Magicians. A discussion of what works in a given story is different from a discussion of what's plausible or likely in real life.

 

Well Moira Queen was a big part of Arrow's first two seasons, and then Supergirl had Cat Grant in S1, Rhea and Lilian Luthor as the villains in S2, along with recurring characters of President Marsdin and Eliza Danvers, all women over 50.

It's not great, or even good, really, but it's still better than most comic book stuff out there...

 

And The Flash has Cecile, who's in her mid-40s, plus Tina McGee as a recurring character. And Black Lightning has Lynn -- and Lady Eve, if we're counting villains.

 

Not going to deny it Marie Richardson-Sellers is much more natural and effective when allowed to use her real life British accent. Huge improvement!