Practicing Random Acts By Sarah Stegall Copyright ©1999 by Sarah Stegall “Monday” Written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban Directed by Kim Manners In Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, mathematician Ian Malcolm attempts to explain chaos theory using the “butterfly effect”: depending on whether a butterfly in Beijing flaps its wings, there is or is not rain in Central Park. Small, seemingly haphazard events add up to enormous, unpredictable consequences beyond our knowledge and control. And yet, in the midst of all these innumerable random events, there is order. The cynics among us may say that we humans, who specialize in…
The X-Files: “Agua Mala”
Revenge of the Flukeman Copyright ©1999 by Sarah Stegall Writer: David Amman Director: Rob Bowman Pauline Kael, who dismissed “Alien” as a “haunted house in space”, missed the point: the real horror of that movie was not the skull-crunching monster stalking the ship’s crew (including Veronica Cartwright, most recently seen as Cassandra Spender in last week’s “One Son”). The real horror was the nasty invasion of John Hurt’s body by the tentacled creature intent on turning him into a host for its young. To this day, it’s the “chest-burster” that most viewers recall most vividly and graphically. Being hunted by…