Netflix Synchronicities - or Coincidences

I doubt I could link these Netflix coincidences in any meaningful way, but it was kind of spooky at the time. Some shows we watched, more or less consecutively over a few nights, all had themes of identity change, and they were in no way intentional choices for that reason.

Beginning with a movie, The Cobbler: a fantasy tale with threads of a mild thriller or mystery threaded through it. This film was directed by the same guy, Tom McCarthy, who directed The Station Agent (mentioned in this post).

When his modern stitching machine breaks down, a shoe repairer in New York finds it necessary to use an old pedal-operated stitching machine he found stored in his cellar. He discovers, after repairing a pair of fancy crocodile shoes using the old machine, then trying on the shoes - which happen to be his own size - then catching sight of himself in a mirror, he is, to put it mildly, amazed to find that he has transformed in appearance to the shoes' owner, a snazzily dressed gang hoodlum. The cobbler experiments with other shoes of his size, repaired using the old machine, and finds that he can change appearance in many ways, as long as both borrowed shoes are on his feet. Adventures of various kinds ensue - and a mystery.

It was all a bit Quantum-Leap-ish, not to mention that old saying, "walk a mile in his/her shoes!

The next night we set about watching a 2-part X-Files segment, titled Dreamland in which we were surprised to find that Agent Mulder, after being in line of a wave of time-space warp, had swapped appearance with another individual standing nearby at the time, a man of quite different temperament and aims from Mulder's. Scully isn't aware what has happened... dangerous muddles occur, at length!

Third coincidence, next night - or was it even the same night - don't recall, we decided to watch the pilot episode of a one season series titled Awake. Guess what? No...not exactly changing appearance this time, but a guy (played by Jason Isaacs) involved in a car accident which we are told had killed either his wife or his son (or both?) appears to be living in two different existences, one where his wife is alive but son dead, the other with his son alive and his wife dead. This guy is a police detective (a stumbling block for me), he has a different psychiatrist in each "reality", deals with different cases in each, and has different detective partners in each - but some strand of linkage is always present in the cases involved. The show is shot in two different "hues" too, reddish tinged when wife is alive, greenish when son is alive. The detective wears a red wristband or green one to help both himself (?) and the audience keep track of what's going on.

We can't decide whether this was meant to be heavily disguised sci-fi , or a story that will be rationally explained eventually. It's definitely a series where one's attention must not be allowed to wander! The show didn't receive sufficient interest, so NBC cancelled it after one season. We shall wander through through the 13 available episodes to see how it was all tied up, or if it was. My own pet theory is that the guy remains in a coma and is dreaming it all - highly complex dream though! I shall resist looking for spoiler information online.

Dramatically Licentious Syzygy

In an X-Files episode titled Syzygy, Episode 13 of Season 3 (via Netflix) astrology played a role!

Scully and Mulder were sent to investigate a series deaths all involving boys from the same high school. They find the town in uproar, rumors of a satanic cult are spreading. Everyone in town seems to be acting slightly out of character, including, eventually, Mulder and Scully.

Mulder's visit to a local astrologer, Madame Zirinka, reveals that an unusual planetary alignment is currently in place. The astrologer tells Mulder that the planets in question, Mars, Uranus and Mercury come into such an alignment only once every 84 years. If certain additional alignments are present, anyone born on January 12, 1979 (birthdate of two female school friends mentioned in the episode) will have all the energy in the cosmos focused on them.
See HERE and HERE.

The planetary alignment which was stated to be the cause of the problems was between Mercury, Mars and Uranus. The alignment was shown onscreen in the episode and was depicted at night near a full moon. A full moon is always opposite from the sun and so Mercury could never be in a visual alignment with a full moon. Additionally, Uranus is not visible with the naked eye.
(See HERE)

Dramatic license was obviously in play, but did the episode's writers bother to consult an actual astrologer, I wonder? The 84 years equates roughly to the time it takes Uranus to orbit the Sun, so it's Uranus' party we're dealing with, I guess. On 12 Jan 1979 Uranus was at 20.7 Scorpio, but that doesn't tell us much. It's all about those "additional alignments" happening on the uncertain date of these X-Files events. Crafty scriptwriters!

It was nice to see astrology given a role in an X-Files episode. Not before time! It was all a bit nutty, lots of X-File in-jokes, an episode not meant to be taken too seriously. Whenever astrology manages to edge its way into drama, the only way the writers know to go is "nutty". Pity! Still, I did enjoy the Syzygy episode.

FAR OUT!

A good proportion of our TV time lately has been taken up visiting
The X-Files, via Netflix, starting from the pilot episode of Season 1, first aired in 1993. It's surprising how fresh these old episodes still feel, in spite of the clunky looking computer monitors, cellphones, and some of the fashion styles of Dana Scully and other female cast members. None of that takes away from decent dialogue, engaging plots and fascinating subject matter. We're now into early episodes of season 2. Lots more still to enjoy! And, slipping back to yesterday's topic, there's that haunting theme music.

Maybe a steady diet of X-Files encouraged me, last week, to click on a heading which eventually led me to its source in The New Scientist -

Is this ET? Mystery of strange radio bursts from space (31 March 2015 by Sarah Scoles). "Mysterious radio wave flashes from far outside the galaxy are proving tough for astronomers to explain. Is it pulsars? A spy satellite? Or an alien message?"

"BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.
Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometres across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.
The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics....................................
Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Neukirchen-Vluyn, Germany, and John Learned at the University of Hawaii in Manoa found that all 10 bursts' dispersion measures are multiples of a single number: 187.5...................."

More in another article HERE.

Maybe, just maybe, those signals are echoes of messages sent by our far-future selves; or perhaps remains of messages bouncing back, sent long, long ago by far distant ancestors of ours, about whose civilisation we know absolutely nothing, yet. Is the truth really out there?

I spied a little more far-outness yesterday, this at Mother Jones website:
ETs for Hillary: Why UFO Activists Are Excited About Another Clinton Presidency