By Patricia B. Max
“One more reason to stay home Friday night” my ass. VR5, touted as the best thing since spliced cables, sucks more than a black hole.
It just goes to show you the power of a production budget the size of Gibraltar and Fox’s advertising. For those of you who did stay home in the hopes of witnessing the new era of television, I share your pain. The ones who got away—feel very, very lucky.
The premise of VR5 is promising: a twenty something, geeky-yet-beautiful girl, through some fluke in her homemade cyber-system, can turn Virtual Reality into Real Reality where she communicates on a subconscious level with those she contacts.
However, this is where the show quickly falls apart. First, in order to reach the destination of her choice, the girl types in the name of the place. In this episode, she wants to go to Lookout Point in her neighbourhood to anticipate how a date will go with her coworker. So she just types in “Lookout Point” on her computer and it magically creates a Virtual landscape, without any pre-programming. Then, the girl puts on her little visor and…picks up the modem to call her co-worker. Her modem? Hello! Modems communicate between computers, not people.
Now, the two people are connected subconsciously, so the guy has no idea he’s being tapped into. When the link is terminated after about 10 minutes, the guy’s still saying “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there!” Since when is time no a factor in VR?
That would be fine if all you had to do was suspend your disbelief and let clever story-lines and complex character development carry you off into the netherworld. But VR5 decides it’s done enough work for one episode and proceeds to make it into a mindless mystery. The real pain in all this is that the show could have been really good. Instead, the creators opted to insult their viewers’ intelligence and use cheesy graphics and a terrible script, virtually nullifying any credibility they might have had. Their only way out now is to relocate to Honolulu, throw in some gratuitous cops and call it VR5-0. And hope that nobody remembers.
Leave a Reply