By Kai-Arne Zimny

Dr. Hen­ry Mor­gan (Ioan Gruffudd) is British, works as a med­ical exam­in­er for the New York Police Depart­ment, and likes scarves and clas­si­cal music. Oh, he is also immor­tal and utter­ly clue­less why.

Fear not, this is not a spoil­er to the show and not even to its pilot as the first episode begins with Morgan’s words about his “first death” two cen­turies ago. Since then he hasn’t aged a day, main­tain­ing the look of a man in his mid to late thir­ties and has nev­er died. Well, actu­al­ly he has died many times but always came back to life with­in sec­onds and with­out a scratch. Hav­ing pre­sent­ed that brief state­ment about his “con­di­tion” – as he calls it – Dr. Mor­gan assures us that we know as much about it as he him­self does. What fol­lows is the unrav­el­ing of the first clues about a mys­te­ri­ous­ly emerg­ing oppo­nent – dan­ger­ous and unpredictable.

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By Lynette Kirschner

The lim­its of my language
mean the limits
of my world.

- Lud­wig Wittgenstein

Does time only flow in a con­tin­u­um? Does a sen­tence have to con­tain a verb? The answer to the first ques­tion hasn’t been defin­i­tive­ly answered. The answer to the sec­ond one is def­i­nite­ly no. Both play a role in the sci­ence fic­tion movie Arrival, direct­ed by Denis Villeneuve.

For once, the U.S. gov­ern­ment doesn’t bomb first and ask ques­tions lat­er. When aliens arrive, they send the lin­guist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to try to solve the mys­tery of their lan­guage so that peace­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion can take place. This is where my lit­tle geeky lan­guage heart starts to beat faster. Con­cepts such as the Sapir-Whorf hypoth­e­sis (the cor­re­la­tion between lan­guage and world­view), logograms (sym­bols stand­ing for words and not a sin­gle sound), and palin­dromes (words read­ing the same back­wards and for­wards) are used. The movie does an excel­lent job explain­ing these con­cepts so that non-lin­guists under­stand and lin­guists don’t get bored.

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