Here’s the thing – the good guys always win.  That’s the problem with far too many sci fi stories.  And it’s not that the good guys do win, it’s that clearly the bad guys never intended to win.  Because if they did, they may have had a plan.

Star Wars

The mother of all sci fi epics, Star Wars traverses 6 semi-legitimate films and a whole mess of illegitimate bastards found in television, books and comics, not to mention a mind-blowing Christmas special, collectively referred to as “extended universe” by some and “pathetic money grabs” by others.

The driving force behind the entire Star Wars mythology, at least that anyone gives a damn about because extended universe stuff is for huge nerds, is the battle between the Rebellion and the Empire.  The tale of the Skywalkers and the evil Emperor who totally pants’ the galaxy when they weren’t even paying attention.

But let’s say Palpatine works his creepy machinations in the Senate and forms his clone army and destabilizes the political climate until everyone actually wants him as an Emperor and he manages to do away with the Jedi, the only force that could stand against him and he has Vader as his right hand man and then, for kicks, he destroys Yoda, Leia, Chewbacca and Luke.  And maybe Alderaan, too.  Like as soon as Anakin becomes Vader.  There is no hope for a rebellion now.  What the hell was the Emperor’s plan?

For most of the original three films, we get Vader as the villain.  What happens when we see the Emperor?  He’s alone in a giant, poorly decorated room, wearing a black cloak and looking like an albino’s ballsack.  He doesn’t do anything.  He doesn’t even have a villainous cat.  He doesn’t want one million dollars.  He doesn’t need to build a Death Star.  He controls everything and has no one who could stand against him in the universe, for what purpose?  Or was that it?  When Star Wars Episode III ends, was that actually it for the Emperor?  Was that as far ahead as he thought?  Aside from going fishing on weekends and visiting the grandkids, there aren’t really any more goals he could be pursuing at that point.  Once you run everything, there’s no place to go but down.

Back to the Future

This is a tough one, partly because the films are never presented as serious and partly because there’s a serious, philosophical issue to consider.  If you can do a thing, should you? This is at the heart of whether or not Doc Brown is a complete retard.

See, Doc Brown knows the secret to time travel, so you have to decide whether he must necessarily act on that knowledge simply because he has it, or if he is free to not act on it.  If he is free to not build a time machine, then why the fuck did he?  Why, when every aspect of time travel turns out to be the most awful thing ever, and he knows this ahead of time with all his cautionary tales of not meddling and such, did he build a time machine?

Thanks to Doc Brown, Marty McFly comes precariously close to being raped by his own mother.  And for three straight movies, nothing in his life goes right, except for some tacked on happy endings that, if you think about them, completely change Marty’s history and life, except he doesn’t know it thanks to a time paradox.  He will have invariably missed everything that ever happened to him, he’ll have none of the memories his family and friends have, all because he was never really there, or some half assed thing like that.  So basically Doc Brown ruined his life and, presumably, gave him Parkinsons.

But that aside, suppose Doc Brown never ran afoul of Libyans and thus was able to use the time machine as he’d intended.  The only thing he mentions is wanting to see who would win the next 25 World Series’.  Arguably the most important invention in the history of mankind, and Doc Brown wants to keep it to himself to satisfy his impatience with baseball.

The only thing Doc can come up with is to find out what happened for the last 25 years, simply by skipping the last 25 years and reading about them when he gets there.  That’s the sci-fi equivalent of skipping to the end of a book just to see who did it.

Robocop

The future of Detroit is almost as bleak as the present of Detroit and can’t possibly smell any worse.  Red Foreman is a real drug selling, bank robbing asshole and the most popular TV show makes less sense than shows that are now, in 2010, popular, and that includes The Hills and Jersey Shore.  I’ll buy that for a dollar?  What?

With crime running rampant and gritty, inept cops at a loss to stop it, what is the only available option?  To allow crooked, private-industry to make their own law enforcement tools.  Sure, why not?  That’s like if GM invented a cop.  Or all fires were being fought by Microsoft.  Sounds plausible so far.

The movie wants us to see this as a business venture.  Sure, Dick Jones is crooked, but he’s still a businessman (kind of redundant, we know) so he comes up with ED-209, the sociopathic robot chicken with machine guns.  It doesn’t work so well, but meh.  It could have sold well in Texas.  But instead, some upstart asshole that looks a lot like Jose Ferrer comes in with Robocop.  And that son of a bitch can fight crime.  Plus, he never kills people in the board room (except for at the end).  He’s a real winner!  Let’s open a RoboCop factory and change law enforcement around the globe!

Oh wait, one thing, can you mass slaughter a bunch of real, dependable cops first?  Yeah, cuz Robocop has a dude inside him who’s all fucked up.  Forgot that part.

The only way the Robocop program functions is if there’s a real person to be part of the cyborg and judging from what happened to our good friend Murphy, it requires a cop being blown nearly in two by Topher Grace’s dad.  You’re not going to get a lot of volunteers for this program and no matter how bad crime gets, odds are this sort of thing can’t be happening on such a regular basis that it will make Robocop a worthwhile venture.  It literally can’t be a worse idea to actually hire a non-retarded software engineer to fix ED-209 so the son of a bitch won’t shoot everyone, and then maybe adapt his arms so he has something other than guns so he could apprehend criminals instead of turning them into paste on the road.

Terminator

While this series is a classic, not including the completely retarded third installment, some glaring issues remain in the time-travel debacle that Skynet has produced in its effort to constantly put an end to human resistance leader John Connor.  And we’re not even here to debate the time travel paradoxes, because everyone does that.  We’re here to support Skynet.

Say back in part one, Arnold Schwarzenegger comes back in time and so does Michael Biehn only Michael Biehn hits his dick on a screen door or whatever and he can’t get a boner.  So he tries to do Sarah Connor in that hotel, only his half wood hurts so bad it’s an instant willy wilter and no coitus occurs and the entire rest of the film plays out as normal.  Except now Sarah isn’t pregnant and John is never born and nothing stops Skynet from wiping out all of humanity on Judgment Day!  Holy shit!

So it’s the day after Judgment Day.  Call it a Wednesday.  And Skynet has what?  Another time paradox because why send robots back in time to kill a guy who was never born?  But never mind that.  Skynet has an army of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, and weird tank-bots, and those flying Hunter Killers, and cool lasers, and probably not a really good view of anything due to that nuclear winter, but whatever.  It’s home, you make do.

Humanity is gone and this self-aware computer with an army of artificial intelligence machines is going to apparently just start producing new robots that are wicked awesome at self Sudoku.  Or maybe build robot bugs and trees and shit to replace all the ones that were destroyed in that insane nuclear holocaust.

Or maybe Skynet is just going to have to spend eternity sifting through the remains of humanity’s internet refuse puzzling over the motivations for fisting because it has absolutely no purpose in the universe any longer.

The machines never even approach a motivation at any point in time in any of the four movies, other than Schwarzenegger waxing philosophical over the ability to cry, but odds are Skynet wasn’t looking to tear up at My Girl or understand the emotions of boners or anything like that.  Which brings us to…

The Matrix

Worse than Skynet because they don’t want to end humanity, they just want to use them as what is arguably the most preposterous fuel source anyone has ever imagined when literally anything at all would cause less trouble.  The machines in the Matrix keep a virtual world running at all times, with the entirety of the human population, save a few thousand tucked away near the center of the earth in a dump of a city, nestled inside.  The Matrix is the lie that everyone lives.

Naturally some humans realize the lie and there’s the fight between them and the machines, the human city of Zion and good ol’ Neo as the savior of humanity.  But say Keanu accidentally sniffed too much glue and couldn’t fulfill his duties as the One.  Whoa!  Or maybe the machines took the time to install some EM plating and thus were able to actually defeat the humans on their home turf.  So Zion is destroyed and there is no The One.  The machines have won.

The Earth, torn to shit and looking like a Mad Max wet dream with too much cloud cover is now completely populated with menacing squid robots, big drill robots, gross spider robots and computers that are running rampant with self aware programs like Elrond and the world’s most obnoxious Frenchman.  But why?  Why, God, why?

Agent Smith at some point likens humanity to a virus.  But you kill a virus to make the host better, what would be the point of killing/enslaving all of humanity.  What are the robots doing now?  Every single machine in the Matrix films exists because of humans.  They hunt them, they farm them, they pretend to be them.  If Agents were no longer necessary, all of those programs would have to be shut down.  The squids would need to be scrapped because clearly they’re wasting a ton of that sweet human battery power just flying around all gross-like.  And that big, idiotic machine that they actually had the nerve to call Deus Ex Machina?  What’s he doing?  Using its massive processing power to think up new ways for flowers to grow in virtual Guatemala?  Hashing out the best way for Mr. Jones down the street to lose his job next week?  Writing a script for rain in South Dakota?  Way to win that war, machines.  You sure came out on top.