NASA Thinks It’s A Good Idea To Bring Alien Life Back from Mars

I’ve Seen That Movie and I say, OH HELL NO!

NASA has launched it’s the latest mission to Mars. The expedition is called Mars 202 Perseverance and its objective is to return to the Red Planet d search for signs of life, ancient or otherwise, collect it and somehow return to earth with it. There has been a lot of hoopla surrounding this declaration from many in the egghead community of scientists and the nerd world. The excitement is nearly palpable. This mission will introduce a new piece of hardware into the exploration of the surface of the planet. There will be the Mars Helicopter making aerial maneuvers for a wider view to the surface that the Mars Rover could not accomplish. The Perseverance rover has better state-of-the-art technology for exploration of the Jezero Crater and a long-dormant lake bed on the surface of the planet. It will be able to bore into the surface with better proficiency algorithms. It is NASA’s contentions of finding any signs of life, collect it, and return it back to earth. While this may be a scientifically genius of an idea, I would ask, has anyone ask this question, “What if we bring back something that will wipe out life on this planet?”

If Mars had life, what caused it to disappear? Most kids and some adults have envisioned themselves taking the helm of some version of a starship exploring the stars. It’s a healthy avocation to dream in such grandeur while remaining earthbound. We envision being James T. Kirk, discovering new planets and new civilizations. But James T. Kirk’s star trek had protocols in place when it came to not interfering with civilizations that were not technologically advanced in order for them to avoid upsetting their own pace into advancing their civilization.

I don’t know if NASA has any policy or procedure when it comes to them removing signs of life from another planet? If I were on a starship and I came across any lifeforms, living or dead, one of my top ten protocols would be to keep those particular lifeforms, living or dead, on that planet and not introduce it into earth’s atmosphere.

When NASA brings back whatever sample they discover, are there any protocols to keep that sample quarantine for the duration it’s in this atmosphere? They know nothing of what this sample may contain. Would it by a biological threat or not? If they want to witness what an agent that so far can’t be contained, they should take a closer look at what COVID-19 is doing to this planet. As of this writing, there are over 18 million with the contagion and over 671,000 deaths with no signs of abating.

Who’s bright idea was this to bring back Mars samples in the first place? Who was the deciding factor in greenlighting this? It’s not just the NASA took an action that is beyond the scope of their decision making prowess, it’s a decision that should have been made by a committee of an across the board panel of people from all walks of life and by other countries as well. NASA is wanting to bring an alien to this planet and we’re cool with this? NASA is not an autonomous body. It’s a government agency spending billions of dollars on taxpayers' monies on space travel, space stations, shuttles, satellites, etc. Now they want life from Mars. Shouldn’t we get a vote on this because this is really important? Somewhere in the national election, there should have been a referendum on whether or not we should bring back any life from Mars.

It seems as if I’ve seen this movie before with some thick-as-a-brick, arrogant, hardheaded, pompous, asshole of a scientist who is hellbent on ignoring opposing facts, the science or anything else that tells him (it’s always a man) that his science is flawed and should not be attempted. But the knucklehead obfuscates, cajole, lie and does the unthinkable and gets the project off only to find that his bullheaded logic was flawed and now the whole planet is doomed.

We’ve seen this before in countless TV and movies. The X-Files covered the subject of alien parasites. Of course who could forget Alien and the sequels. That would be my second protocol should we land on an alien planet. Do not go near any plants that open up when you get near it and don’t just stand there waiting for something to happen because if you come back with something that has eaten through your spacesuit and is stuck on your face, neck, back or any part of your human anatomy, your ass will be left behind.

Is it too late to stop this particular option of bringing back alien life from another planet? Should we consider initiated certain protocols that could easily affect things on Earth? Should NASA not take it upon itself to make decisions of this nature that could have an impact on more than just the United States but also having an impact on a global spectrum?

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington has stated that “Perseverance is going to make discoveries that cause us to rethink our questions about what Mars was like and how we understand it today. As our instruments investigate rocks along an ancient lake bottom and select samples to return to Earth, we may very well be reaching back in time to get the information scientists to need to say that life has existed elsewhere in the universe.” That may be all well and good but when your face is slowly being melted off, the last thing you are thinking about is rethinking about where we are in the universe, your face is melting thanks to a Mars alien spore.

Mars has been there for billions of years. Our puny understanding of Mars is like being on the scale of a 1,000-year-old Sequoia tree and a seedling. We’re the seedling of limited knowledge. These NASA scientists are talking about converting Martian carbon dioxide into oxygen. I believe that was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, Total Recall, where they worked on Mars and didn’t know that an ancient civilization had machines that could convert the atmosphere into breathable air. It seems as if NASA is starting to believe in science fiction than scientific facts. There is the old saying that you must learn to crawl before you walk. Well, we’re not even in the crawling phase as yet. We’re still in the Fallopian tube traveling down the canal waiting to get introduced to the sperm but wait, there some sort of sheath preventing the sperm from reaching that egg of knowledge. We’re not ready for that journey, it’s still too far away. We still haven’t mastered the speed of light yet and until we do, let’s leave the alien life resting comfortably on their home planet.

Netflix’s Warrior Nun Is Pretending to Be a Lukewarm CW Show

It Never Rises to The Level of Its Own Derivative Cliches

Sometimes Netflix can give us some movies and TV shows that keep us enthralled from the moment it presses play. We love Lucifer and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and we stood on the edge of our sofa for Sandra Bullock’s heart pulsating movie, Bird Box. So we know Netflix can produce some hits and it can rescue some hits. Such is not the case for Warrior Nun in its first season run ten-episode premiere.

The Warrior Nun moniker sounds like it was born in the ’80s and made by the Israeli film company Golan-Globus/Cannon Group who gave us such film titles as Revenge of The Ninja, Fist to Fist, The Delta Force, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, and Gas Pump Girls. Some of the titles sound like porn films if you’re not careful.

With Warrior Nun bestowed on this series, you’re already assuming certain things if you went by the trailer and you’d be oh so wrong. Warrior Num is a comic book adaption of Warrior Nun Areala by Ben Dunn. The trailer was presented was a deceptively insidious magic trick of the lowest order because what you saw was not what you got.

To begin with, Warrior Nun stars people whom you never heard of. The lead performer is a woman named Alba Baptista. Her character is Ava, a quadriplegic 19-year-old woman who has been in an orphanage since she was seven after she and her mother were in a car accident that left her mother dead. Ava’s first scene is that of a dead girl. Her death was attributed to suicide but we come to learn that this wasn’t the case. Her body is in the basement of a religious order. The Warrior Nuns, there is an order of them, have just returned from a battle that has left one of them, their leader, gravely injured. The Warrior Nuns are battling evil forces as they are after what they are calling, the halo of Adriel. As the contingent of evil makes their way into the inner sanctum of the church, Sister Shannon, played by Melina Matthews, carries the halo embedded in her back. As the forces move closer, Sister Shannon lay dying as Sister Beatrice, played by Kristina Tonteri-Young, comes forth with what looks like a branding iron and removes the halo from her back. She takes off with the glowing halo as it is held fast in the branding iron. A bad guy tackles her and the halo is knocked loose to the floor. He attempts to pick it up and you understand why Sister Beatrice has transported it with the branding iron. The bad guy picks up the halo and his fingers immediately dissolve.

Sister Beatrice retrieves the halo and continues her journey to the basement and places the halo in the back of dead Ava as a temporary hiding place. There are some decent fight sequences in this scene as we watch Ava flinches her way back to life. As she returns to the living, she wakes up to the battle with a newfound ability to use all four of her limbs again. So, what does she do, she takes off. Now here is where this series starts to go off the rails and I place every aspect of this derailment on the writing.

For the next four episodes, Ava is a poorly written character. In this first episode, we go along with Ava as she gives an internal monologue about what she is experiencing. For someone who has just risen from the dead and is walking around town, she is rather composed and not grasping the entirety of what just happened and why? As a viewer and a person with working common senses, the main thing you are asking yourself is that twelve years, Ava’s muscles have not worked so there should have been some serious muscle atrophy involved. She also should have had some weight loss in her legs and armed and also demonstrated some weight loss with her body and some bedsores judging by who took care of her. Ava pops up full-breasted and ready to go. We move off these glaring observations that have been overlooked or ignored and now this show has become a formulaic checklist of teenage angst issues. We see them being checked off one by one. The first checklist, the prospective love interest. Ava runs into JC, played by Emilio Sakraya, a grifter of sorts who, along with three of his friends, take up residence in luxury homes while the people are away. Ava joins JC and company as they take up residence in these people's home, wearing their clothes and eating their food. Here is where Ava is just a one-dimensional character. Her current concern is hooking up with JC. But here is the flip side of that. She’s never had a sexual experience, not even kissing, and yet this is the focus. You want to like the character but she makes it too easy not to like the character because the character is too involved with her won selfish needs to care about the ramifications of her reborn life or her absence of the quadriplegic life. She’s enjoying the lifestyle JC is giving her.

JC and company abandon her at a party they crashed and somehow, he finds her on the beach days later. That’s just too convenient and improbable to fathom.

This drawn-out exposition goes on for four episodes. There is little Warrior Nun action and when there is, it’s sparse. The saving grace in character development goes to Toya Turner who plays Shotgun Mary. Shotgun Mary is not a nun but is a warrior in her own right and knows how to use a shotgun, thus the moniker, as she does effectively on the bad guys. I would have preferred more action with her and Sister Beatrice’s fighting style. We do get to see that in later episodes but that’d short-lived. It seems as if the producers of this show were looking at the insurance premiums and deciding that it was too expensive to shoot more than two action sequences in an episode so they just brought back the drawn-out exposition thing again.

The checklist thing continues, Ava and JC have sex, and the whole “she’s a virgin” thing is never discussed. JC is never mentioned again after the demon shows up and she takes off running away again. Why did they devote so much time, emphasis, and five episodes to this character only for him the completely vanish? There is the requisite bad guys' checklist. There is the double-cross checklist. There is the “she’s a dumb as cotton candy” checklist and “she’s a naive twat” checklist as well. Overall, this felt worthy of being a CW show in the Supergirl/Batwoman vein in that it’s totally convoluted and saddled with poor writing.

To be fair, the Ava character is poorly developed. The path she takes is purely illogical. The self-narration is annoying and should be eliminated and is unnecessary. This was nothing more than a paint by numbers teen wannabe drama with nothing left in the tank. The strange thing about Warrior Nun is that it ended on a cliffhanger but after seeing these ten episodes, do I really want to make a return visit if the writing doesn’t improve and I mean, hire some writers who know how to write action and not waste time with seven and a half episodes on exposition, long, drawn-out, adds nothing to the plot, boring exposition.