Illegal Contact

As I’ve mentioned before, there are advantages to having your kids get a little older. When you first see them they’re adorable, tiny little miracles of nature, and you treasure them, and love them, and thank your lucky stars for them every day of your life until they have a massive Stage V diaper blowout at the DMV, and then it occurs to you that it’d be nice when they outgrew the stage of life that requires you to carry a fucking Hazmat bag with you wherever you go.

So not having to clean shit off of strangers in line at the DMV is pretty cool. Another nice thing is having your children get old enough to appreciate some of the things that you liked when you were younger. My daughter, 13 going on 30, has gotten old enough to enjoy movies that don’t include dancing, anthropomorphic tea sets (Beauty and the Beast), show-tune singing meerkats (Lion King), or glue-huffing donkeys (Shrek). And because she now likes movies that don’t have accompanying action figures, I can show her some of the movies that I really like. Like Contact.

If you haven’t seen Contact, it’s a movie about mankind’s first encounter with alien intelligence, which causes quite a stir in the United States government because they’re not used to dealing with anyone with an IQ over 14. The movie deals with the religious implications of such a discovery, how mankind would best be represented when encountering alien life, and how goddamn irritating Tom Skerritt’s character can be. Seriously, that guy is a fucking douche.

Sorry, Ellie. I know you wanted to take this trip, but what if the aliens need someone to look at them smugly?

But it was a strange plot twist that caught my attention this time around, although without my daughter to bring it to my attention, I would’ve missed it. “Daddy, why does the alien look like her dead father?”

“Well, because he said that they thought it would be easier for her to deal with things that way. They read her thoughts.”

And then I thought to myself, “I wonder how Jodie Foster feels about that?” Those aliens must be pretty evolved because if they weren’t, that conversation would have gone a lot differently.

Ellie: You… You’re not my father!

Alien: We thought it would be easier for you this way. We read your thoughts and…

Ellie: You read my thoughts? … All of them?

Alien: Yeah.

Ellie: …

Alien:  …

Ellie: Even the time…

Alien: Yep. We’ve decided to fling your planet into the sun.

Ellie: …

Alien: Skank.

Then the headlines on Earth would read, “Aliens To Destroy Earth Because Of Filthy Pervert Astronaut”, although FOX News would try to blame Obama as well. And it would’ve been even worse had we sent Tom Skerritt because just looking at that dude you know that he’s keystered some pretty freaky shit in his time.

But thankfully the aliens were above all that, and instead decided to send Ellie back to Earth with absolutely no evidence of her journey. Then they watched Ellie getting blasted on the stand on CSPAN while they laughed space-beer out of their 7 noses. What a bunch of fuckers.

I can’t say that I blame them, though. If you were a member of an advanced race, the urge to fuck with your inferiors would have to be pretty strong. That’s probably why in Star Trek, the prime directive is to not do exactly that. They’ve learned from experience.

General Nevins: Sir, we’ve got a problem in the Gamma sector.

Admiral K’Tang: What’s wrong?

General Nevins: The inhabitants of Rigel 7 have developed photon technology and are threatening to attack our starships.

Admiral K’Tang: Why would they do that?

General Nevins: Well, the last time we were there we kind of TP’d their planet. Like, the whole planet. Also…

Admiral K’Tang: Yes? Also what?

General Nevins: We beamed their genitalia to the other side of the galaxy.

Admiral K’Tang: Not again!

That’s a textbook Federation Double Facepalm right there.

All of this swirls through my head in a few seconds, and I smiled to myself as my daughter digested the information I’d given her, that the aliens had read Ellie’s thoughts. Then she smiled and looked at me. “Ellie’s all like, ‘You read my thoughts?’, and the aliens are like, ‘Gross, Ellie. That’s disgusting’.” She’s definitely my daughter.