Fans of Canadian publicly-funded TV might recognise Cosmic Odyssey, the Bill Shatner-narrated science series on the BC Open University’s Knowledge Network. The most recent installment was “Extreme Astronomy”, about “high-energy cataclysms in space and the people who track them down”. The visuals were good, the cosmic rays looked like Aquafresh. The writers had a bit of fun with Captain Jim by making him attempt to make gamma-ray bursts interesting despite the fact that “luckily, they’re not dangerous”. However if you watched all the way to the VERY end the value of these things were revealed in that they caused mutations and thus might make us eventually evolve into another species! I was watching this very stoned on BC bud with some old people so I immediately flashed on that 2001 scene where he sees himself aged 103, and as if that wasn’t enough for the paranoia to kick in the next show was about these Canadian immigration cops grabbing people (“we like to get ’em when they’re going about their business completely unawares!”), then interrogating them with demoralizing questions (lots of closeups of squirming suspects) before inevitably sending them back to Jamaica. The pigs were really evil (“our enemy is the public”) and the filmmakers cleverly left you in the dark as to what the suspects actually did, making it even more claustrophobic! One of the names in the credits was “Michelle Hozer”. If you’re in BC and you want to check out some science programs or just get weird you could do worse than channel 7, as Bill says, “It’s so paradoxical, it’s almost alien. Whether it scrambles our chromosomes, or gives us…something!”