--- Jenny Kaye jennycat55@hotmail.com wrote: >

Sally wrote about 'Terminal':

...

Servalan is IMO talking absolute rubbish, and if

Avon wasn't in a state of

...

shock from the 'Blake is dead' bit, he'd have

probably taken some

...

pleasure in pointing this out.

What do you think he would have said?

Something to do with Chaos theory I imagine. It is difficult enough to predict weather patterns over a period of a few days (UK people may remember Michael Fish reassuring the public that there wasn't going to be a storm in 1987 just before it broke loose.)Trying to predict them over a period of several million years, which is the sort of timescale evolution works in, is going to be impossible. If you can't predict the climate you can't predict how evolution is going to happen.

More simply why would natural selection consistently favour link like traits against intelligence and not ripping the head off anything you meet ?

I am open to correction on this from anyone who has a better knowledge of evolutionary biology but I don't think that a Terminal type experiment would do more than give you one possibility for how things would work out. It would be cheaper and more effective to use computer modelling I would think.

Avon of course would have put all of the above more elegantly and succinctly.

(The links are the one thing about

...

Terminal that really annoys me, they're both idiotic

They are not very well realized. But's that BBC production at fault.

(IMHO-only) and

...

completely unnecessary to the episode).

I don't agree. They are crucial to the underlying subtext of Terminal. Want to discuss it?

They are indeed crucial to Nation's ending. The Federation is in tatters. Servalan is dead. Blake is dead. The Liberator has been destroyed. Jenna is mia. And in the long run it has all been for nothing. In the end it has all been for nothing as we are all going to evolve into links. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Mind you I think he's wrong. Leaving my religious prejudices out of the argument, and conceding for the sake of argument that if the history of the universe can be summed up in an hour of meaningless noise containing a few seconds of Bach, this does not make the Bach any the less beautiful. If our species has an allotted time frame of a few million years before we evolve into men in bad monkey suits then let us make the life of our species worthwhile while it lasts.

Stephen.

(Who obviously read way too much Albert Camus at university).

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