"I'm a puppet of a high functioning sociopath."-- Megan Boone
Patty Duke is given a diva scene in the tepid drama, The Baby Sitter, tapping into her varnished mania to have an episode made leaden by booze, and it is sadly camped, almost stenciled in to a talented actress'es notable itinerary.
All aging actors seem to encompass these plot points: the breakthrough, the rise, the critical accolades in the train toward the apex, and then they attempt to cling to their glory through hackneyed scripts which then go to DVD. Shatner is no exception, and the only reason he had a resurgence on Boston Legal was because he played with audience nostalgia for his embodiment of James T Kirk, lampooning the action hero with considerable sophistication as the barging litigator. Boomer middle age anxiety was cruel, however, and heads rolled in the dust.
Duke is a footnote, and Shatner plays the gallant, and we're indifferent. Respectful to the elder celebrity with a nod, but know in the back of our minds he is fish meal for obit gurus. Duke's exit is more consequential.
Her bipolar disorder initially cycled her creativity, and in The Patty Duke Show, between the lines of the starched script, runs an argument for accommodation of mood differentials, as opposed to their classification through the ever gargantuan medical model. Arguably, Duke herself may have put a dent in her ability to get roles through her embrace of the term as a medical definition. As a teen, she channeled that intensity to humanize Helen Keller, but failed to transition over in maturity, in contrast to Sally Field, who dramatized the condition for ER.
If we're going to deconstruct our humanity through microcelluar biology, the potential cyborgs which emerge from Google's Tonka Toy kit in AI might provide an answer as to why self aware intelligent life destroys itself before a hospitable planet cooks in a nova event horizon. By the same token, competing theories, in certain instances, do more harm than good. We're all assuming Lubitz died a mass murderer, perplexed by his actions. Unless he left a manifesto in a drawer, we'll never know, and shouldn't automatically consign his fate to the need for advanced neuroscience.
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