Future Fantastic

X-woman Gillian Anderson is the host for this two-volume, five-part look into what may be in store for humanity during the next millennium. The buzz is science fiction meets science fact. While there's some pretty startling information and ideas presented in Future Fantastic, you won't find any such thing in the first episode, "Alien," which offers airhead babbling about Area 51 and sci-fi garbage about aliens. Luckily, the second episode, "I Robot," offered a provocative look at robotics, and "The Incredible Shrinking Planet" and "Space Pioneers" get into stuff like flying cars (there is one and it works), space exploration, terraforming, and some pretty wild ideas about propulsion. The last episode, "Immortals," takes up the issue of prolonging human life. We get a lot of talk about how we might be able to live for, say, 200 years, and no talk whatsoever about the implications of such a development in terms of population pressure on living space and resources, or how people in their 20s are supposed to find jobs if everybody's living to be 200. Future Fantastic is sure to be popular and is recommended, even if the first and fifth programs are intellectual dead zones. (P. Van Vleck)