Category: TV

It is February 7 through 15, 1988. Tiffany holds the number one position on the Billboard Charts for both weeks with that song that isn’t “I Think We’re Alone Now”. Springsteen, Pet Shop Boys and The Artist make their way into the top ten. Manuel Noriega has been indicted on drug charges. Anthony Kennedy is appointed to the US Supreme Court. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals strikes down the ban on gay people serving in the Army, though the decision is quickly overturned. The Soviet Frigate Bezzavetnyy rams the USS Yorktown in a complicated display of international policy: the US and USSR held differing opinions about the details of the right of innocent passage under maritime law, and resolved this via the time-tested method of “The US sends some ships through some water that the Soviets don’t want them to while shouting ‘If you don’t like it, do something about it!'” Though the Yorktown was not badly damaged, in keeping with tradition, the Bezzavetnyy won the right to mate with the Yorktown’s girlfriend. The incident eventually led to the “Agreement on the Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities”, wherein the superpowers basically promised not to go to war over each other’s boats wandering “accidentally” into each other’s territory, and to give each other fair warning before firing lasers in each other’s general direction. International politics is weird.

The Winter Olympics begin in Calgary, and that takes up a good chunk of this week’s TV time. The Wonderful World of Disney shows something called “Rock and Roll Mom”, whose commercials I dimly remember. In theaters, She’s Having a Baby and Action Jackson are released.

Star Trek the Next Generation airs “Too Short A Season”, wherein an elderly admiral takes a youth-drug so that he’ll be fit and young to face down the dictator of a primitive planet he’d sold arms to early in his career. It’s not bad to start with, but it gets really good when it suddenly occurs to you that Admiral Jameson’s backstory is basically the plot to the TOS episode “A Private Little War”, and Jameson is clearly an expy for James T. Kirk: the whole thing is really an indictment of TOS’s shortcomings. Then next week, it’s business as usual with “When the Bough Breaks”, in which aliens abduct Wesley Crusher and the crew spends the episode trying to get him back for some reason. I mean, it’s pretty good as Wesley-centric episodes go, and has a wonderfully weird bit with an eight year old complaining about having to do his calculus homework. Weak but not offensively bad.

[raw]Captain Power, meanwhile, does something that’s simultaneously important and unwise: a two-part whole-episode flashback. We pretty much sideline the entire cast for two weeks to provide an origin story. Of sorts. As origin stories go, this is kind of an oddball. Pilot, Tank, and Scout are entirely absent, and though Not-Yet-Cap is present, played here by — Wait, really? Hold that thought.

It’s Dylan Neal (Not my son’s namesake.) as Young Johnny Power. You may know him from such roles as Dr. Ivo on The CW’s Arrow, or Jack Griffith on The Hallmark Channel’s Cedar Cove. Only not that second one because I can not imagine there is much of an overlap between my readership and Big Hallmark Channel fans. He also played Doug Witter on Dawson’s Creek, The Young Handsome One in Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers, and appeared alongside fellow Guy-Who-Isn’t-Tim-Dunigan-But-Played-Captain-Power David James Elliot in JAG. He was also in a show called Hyperion Bay, because apparently he likes doing shows named after waterfront towns in New England. But somewhat more relevant to us here in the nexus, he was Aaron Jacobs, the dude Sabrina left at the altar for having the wrong-shaped magic soul rock. Oh, and he’s in Fifty Shades of Grey. Yeah.

Anyway, while Not-Yet-Cap is present, we don’t actually get to see him become “Captain Power”. Yes, we see a formative incident that we’re supposed to understand as being the catalyst for making Cap into the man we know today, but it’s an incomplete story. Hothead Young-Not-Yet-Cap is reckless and gets his dad killed, and presumably this is why he’s such a square and why Dread pushes his berserk button. It lacks closure though. It’s also an origin story for Dread’s costume, I guess. Continuing our Star Wars parallels, it’s akin to the “reveal” of Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith: going through the motions as though this was to be a shocking reveal because it is in a sidereal sense, even though the audience already knows what’s coming because the story has been told out of order. But I don’t think it works as well here because although we’ve seen a pre-Dread Taggart, we’ve seen approximately ten seconds of a pre-evil Taggart: there’s no real character transformation, just a costume change.

It’s also a not-quite origin story for Hawk, played here by Peter McNeil with a different haircut; his role in the narrative is fairly minor. We don’t talk about his family or how he fell in with the Power family, but we do get to see him Power On for the first time. Really, the only character for whom this is a straightforward and unambiguous origin story is Mentor, who actually does originate in the course of this story.

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We open on a weird little montage, mixing clips of the series so far with clips from later in this very episode. There’s ominous close-ups of Dread and Soaron, some digitization, even Jessica Morgan getting shot in the face (more on that later). Which is weird, since this montage is supposed to be Captain Power having a bad dream. The montage ends on Dylan Neal outrunning a very cheaply composited fireball, which gives way to modern-Cap waking in his bunk, sweaty, with an expression of abject… well, dull surprise, really. Seriously, Captain Power is so damned stoic most of the time that I’ve decided I really kinda like pretending that he’s secretly a violent psychopath who’s keeping it covered up so he can lull his victims into a false sense of security. Also, he sleeps in his uniform, and apparently has plastic sheets.

The broad outline of the story is much the same as the Continuity Comics version, but the emphasis is very different. We don’t learn anything new about the backdrop of the endless metal wars that was emphasized in the comic version, nor do we get any but the sketchiest of details about Papa Power’s resistance. All the emphasis here is on that last day, when Taggart became Dread, Hawk became a Power Ranger and Stuart Gordon Power became an ex-parrot.

There are still some directly parallel scenes, though. We start off in one of them: Captain Power and Hawk have a terse exchange the gist of which is that Hawk should hold down the fort while Cap goes off to mourn. Pilot is there too, but unlike in the comic version, she already knows where Cap’s going, and has apparently been around long enough to recognize what it’s all about. There’s none of that business with her being shocked to discover who Cap’s dad is, or any need for Hawk to expo-dump on her. That would track pretty well with the notion of the comic framing story being a prequel, set a year or two earlier than the series, but of course, there’s the complication that Blastarr already exists in the comic. As per usual, it’s probably best to just treat this as an alternate continuity.

Cap takes the Power Jet XT-7 to his father’s grave-site, which isn’t a proper cemetery here as it was in the comic, but just the base of a tree near a small pond in an otherwise barren landscape. Doctor Power’s grave marker gives his birth and death years as 2092 and 2132, which is a lot better than the comic’s “maybe 2024”. If Young-Captain Power was meant to be about the same age as Dylan Neal when he played him, that would put Stuart in his early twenties when Cap was born. Reasonable. I mean, early twenties is a popular time in one’s life to have kids. People who get “Dr.” in front of their names tend to hold off a bit on that, but still, entirely plausible.

The grave Video Toasters into the Power Base, still under construction, circa 2132, where Dr. Power tells Nameless Nerdy Sidekick he can double his salary if it makes him happier about the fact that he and all the other folks involved in building the Power Base have to be blindfolded when they’re brought in to maintain the secrecy of their location. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, is Stargate Command NORAD. I mean, the total secrecy here makes perfect sense as a laudable goal, but there’s something just a little off about the fact that their secret base is being built inside basically the best known place to build a secret base on the planet. I mean, Cheyenne Mountain is such an obvious place to go when you want to find a secluded place where you can be protected from the effects of an all-out global war that Robert Heinlein was extremely pissed when he found out that NORAD was building itself in his back yard (Seriously. He pulled out a map, worked out where he’d be safest in the event of nuclear war, and moved there. Then the government did basically the same thing and stuck a nuclear bunker there.).

The fact that people are still thinking in terms of “salaries” is telling about the state of the war at this point: civilization hasn’t collapsed yet. But you’re going to have to keep telling yourself that, because honestly, we’re not going to see much that backs that up. Dr. Power does acknowledge that money isn’t going to be relevant soon, which kinda seems pessimistic as he also seems like he’s pretty much on-track to turn the tide of this war.

We join Peter McNeil with a different haircut and young Dylan Neal in another part of the unfinished base. Hawk explains how clever bio-mechs are strategically, able process information fast enough to block any predictable movement. Again, this makes perfect sense, unless you have actually been watching this show and know that they’ll typically fall for a straight right, a left hook, or that trick from old Bugs Bunny cartoons where you bend the barrel of their guns around to point back at them. We get a live-action version of Young Captain Power’s training battle against the mechs. It’s not as flamboyant as the serial art version — he doesn’t get a sword for one thing. Dylan Neal’s Young Johnny Power comes off as a lot less of an arrogant jackass than the cartoon version. That’s kind of a shame, though, to my mind, since having him be more flawed and teenager-y gave some extra depth to the character.

Hawk cautions young John about overconfidence, which seems kind premature from what we actually see. I mean, there are bits and pieces where, yeah, I’m kind of reminded of Chris Pine’s Young Jim Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, but Young Jon seems primarily to be eager to help and self-sacrificing rather than cocky or self-aggrandizing. Really, if they wanted to sell “Young Brash Hotshot Jon Power”, they should have made him more rebellious and eager to take big risks and chances. Instead, he’s just an enthusiastic young man who follows orders and is willing to place himself in harm’s way, but only to help others.

Neal’s Jon is a lot more expressive than Tim Dunigan’s though: seeing him really light up when his father congratulates him after the training session is an angle we’d never see from the older Cap. And man, is Bruce Gray on the stick here. Finally free to use his hands, he claps them in approval of his son’s performance against the mechs, claps the boy on the shoulders, then punctuates his words with a finger point as he orders Jon on a supply run.

But even better, his demeanor changes with context. He’s warm, friendly, and proud with Jon, but in other scenes, he’s much more stoic and businesslike — I’d even suggest that he’s playing Stuart Power as a kind of prototype for the adult Captain Power: Stuart, like his son will be, is stoic, and, like his son, is haunted by a tragedy from his past. But in just a few scenes, Stuart comes off far more balanced than Cap, able to relax and express emotion openly around those he cares about. He and Hawk retire to the Jumpship to discuss the impending activation of the Jump Gates. Waving a pen around for illustrative purposes (I am really glad the show is backing me up on my earlier guess about Bruce Gray liking to use his hands when he acts), he explains the jump gates to Hawk in a bit of expospeak that I’d accuse of wasting valuable screen time except that Bruce Gray is so damned good at it. They continue their trend of treating the invention of instantaneous wormhole travel (Hawk calls it “short range teleportation”, which, okay, but this thing’s range is at least coast-to-coast, so what would “long range teleportation” be in this context? Mars?)

The conversation drifts onto how this whole war is basically Stuart’s fault, as he laments, with a mixture of sadness and contempt, about how they’d intended to end all wars with Overmind until Taggart had fused himself with it and become an evil overlord. This abbreviated version, along with a few oblique references back in “The Abyss” are most of the explanation we’re going to get about Taggart’s transformation. I’m underwhelmed by Hawk’s response, though you’ve got to imagine that he’s heard it all before, since, y’know, it could not possibly be the first time he’s heard this story. I don’t know how I feel about the fact that Hawk’s response is entirely supportive, largely disclaiming Stuart’s guilt in light of the fact that he’d meant well. I mean, Hawk lost two kids on account of this war, so I think a little bitterness would be called for. It’s not unlike last week’s “Judgment” in that sense, far too quick to let the “good guys” off the hook for their sins. Kudos to the comic adaptation here — when Hawk learns of Stuart’s work on Biodreads there, he actually gets angry about it and accuses Stuart of insanity.

Back at Volcania (which looks like it’s still under construction, a nice touch), Overmind gives birth to Soaron. It’s not as dramatic as in the comic, and the strengths of serial art really shined there, with the next-page juxtaposition of young Cap in triumph after his training scene with Soaron’s sudden almost orgasmic coming to life.

After a commercial break, we see Soaron’s effectiveness as he easily overwhelms resistance fighters. It’s nice to see them try, though; aside from the Wardogs, we’ve never really seen any other bands of resistors do much. We can see that things aren’t as bad yet as they’ll eventually become: the resistance is far more organized, there are regular supply chains, even a reference to the President — you may or may not recall back in “The Abyss”, Cap found the idea of those troops waiting on orders from the President ludicrous. So in this flashback, we’re seeing the way things were before everything collapsed.

A transmission from the fighters as they’re defeated tips off Stuart, who recognizes Soaron as a Bio-Dread — unlike in the comic, he doesn’t say how he knows this — and explains its nature with horror that’s slightly underplayed until he remembers that Jon is still out in the field. Back at Volcania, Overmind warns Taggart that Stuart’s technical background would cover how to fight Bio-Dreads. In the comic, Overmind goes on to check out resistance logistics and determine the supply depots where Power’s been getting what he needs for the Power Base. In the televised version, it’s Taggart’s idea. I read that as a hint to how the relationship dynamic between Taggart and Overmind has evolved over time. At this point in the relationship, Taggart still has some power.

Young Captain Power’s delayed getting his supplies, because dad’s access was erroneously revoked by a message on “Blue Seven,” which, as it turns out the Romulans Overmind has cracked, which means that Soaron shows up just about a second later. When it becomes clear that the resistance doesn’t stand a chance, Young Cap orders everyone else to safety, remaining to buy time. He’s no match for Soaron, not even managing to hurt him enough to make him angry as in the comic. All the same, Soaron prepares to kill him, but is called off by Taggart, who orders Jon brought in alive.

And then something amazing happens. Soaron picks Dylan Neal up and flies away with him. I was just talking about this in last week’s episode: this is the only time in fifteen episodes that we’ve seen Soaron touch something.

Back at the Power Base, Stuart activates “Project Phoenix”, mostly to set it up for later. It causes a clothes rack to extend out of the wall with the spandex-form Power Suits on it. He makes his own captain’s log about them, the most interesting element of which is that he gives a stardate of 39-7.13. If, as we have been in every other instance, we assume that this should be read “July 13, 2139”, that would place this episode seven years after Stuart’s death-date. Of course, maybe the dates don’t work that way. But then, everything else we know about dating from the other episodes is up in the air. It’s just such a weird mistake to make — it’s not like there are other things in the show with a ’39 date.

He’s interrupted by a priority incoming transmission: Taggart calls up, announces that he’s got Jon, and invites Stuart to Volcania. Bruce Gray, in a few short gestures, conveys pain, fear, and above all fatigue, before, while breathing heavily, he orders his computer to activate the “Mentor Program” the next time Hawk comes in. He scrunches up his shoulders, sighs heavily, then closes up the Power Suits, takes off his ID badge, and walks out. With everyone being so stoic all the time in this show, it’s just amazing to see a character convey such a range of emotions, most of it nonverbal, and have all of it come off sincere and natural. I freaking love the fact that there’s no discussion, no agonizing over the decision: Taggart has his son, so — knowing full well that he is going to his death — Stuart sets everything up for Hawk to take over and just goes. It makes me kind of regret that Bruce Gray isn’t the lead in the other twenty episodes of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.

Taggart apologizes to the captured Jon for all the inconvenience, promising that he’ll “understand” when he’s older. And something kind of remarkable happens with Dylan Neal at this, because for the first time, it actually feels like you are watching a younger version of the same character Tim Dunigan has been playing. He promises that if his father is harmed, he’ll spend the rest of his life making Taggart wish he’d killed the younger Power instead. It’s a promise and a threat, and it’s made without any real emotion other than grim determination: gone are all the emotions he’d expressed so clearly in his early scenes — pride after the training montage, fear at the supply depot, indignation at his capture — replaced by the same grim, cold stoicism we’ve come to associate with his older self.

At this point, we leave the flashback to find ourselves in Volcania, where Lakki basically shames Dread into doing something about the fact that Cap is out in a known location unprotected and in mourning. When Overmind chimes in that, “You have the moment,” Dread grabs Lakki and hops in the Phantom Striker.

Though presented as coequal in the toy line to the PowerJet XT-7, this is going to be just about the only time we see the Phantom Striker in action, and we’re not even going to get a decent dogfight out of it. Soaron’s Dread’s wingman on this mission, and Dread orders him to “Capture if possible, obliterate if necessary,” a far cry from his order, “I want him dead!” in the comic.  As Soaron cackles menacingly, we’re informed that this episode is “To Be Continued…”

And because I am over three thousand words, this article will be too….

Previously on Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future…

Don’t ask me to explain it, but it is January, 1989. In Japan, Hirohito dies, ending the Shōwa era, and ushering in the Hisei era with the enthronement of His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Akihito, and causing news-watching Americans to be surprised that Hirohito had been (a) still alive and (b) still emperor, because we’re crap at remembering things like that. Besides, it’s the 1980s, so for most Americans, Japan is barely a real place, just a sort of quasi-mythical wonderland which emits high-energy rays of video games, cars that are incredibly good value for money, VCRs, violent quasi-pornographic cartoons, cyberpunk aesthetics, and Godzilla, and would almost certainly be ruling the world in a few years due to their incredible work ethic and business acumen. I mean, unless they had some kind of massive stock market crash in a couple of years, but what are the odds of that?

Stateside, Ronald Reagan hands over the reigns of government to his Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush, who won a landslide victory over Democratic hopeful Mike Dukakis due to Bush’s unbeatable one-two punch of accusing Dukakis of being a pussy for his death penalty opposition and swearing that under no circumstances would he ever raise taxes, and as long as he sticks to that and doesn’t get us into any wars, he’s sure to cruise easily through two terms.

There’s also a major plane crash in the UK, a major earthquake in the Tajik SSR, a major school shooting in California, a major loss for the art world when Salvadore Dali dies, and a major meal for Ted Bundy, who is executed on the 24th. And I turn ten.

On TV, The Arsenio Hall Show, The Pat Sajack Show and Shining Times Station all premier. Ryan’s Hope, Snorks and Simon and Simon end their runs. On the other side of the pond, Doctor Who‘s quadranscentennial season ends with the final part of “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy”. ITV premiers Agatha Christie’s Poirot, which will run until 2013, and Press Gang, a children’s show created by future Doctor Who-ruiner Steven Moffat. It sounds like the sort of thing I’d like, but since it’s highly recommended by people who think Steven Moffat is the finest showmaker in television history, I have to assume I will actually sink into a deep depressive spiral if I ever watch it. Also, it’s hella expensive to import it on DVD.

But we’re not here for TV this time. Five months after issue one of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Continuity Comics published the second and final issue of Captain Power. It was strange enough when issue 1 came out months after the series had ended. But I don’t know the full timeline for the cancellation of the series — they had a batch of scripts written for the second season, so I don’t know when exactly Hasbro pulled the plug. But I have to assume that by the following January, everyone knew it was over. I couldn’t turn up any specific reason for why this comic came out when it did, beyond the fact that Continuity was kind of infamous for their releases being late. Maybe this was a last-ditch attempt to keep interest in the property alive in some form, or maybe they were just halfway through drawing it when the plug got pulled so they decided to finish it off in their spare time rather than write off what they’d already put in. In any case, by January, 1989, I’m pretty sure Captain Power was fading fast in the public consciousness. We’re getting close to the extreme tail end of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future as a “thing that is happening”; soon enough we’ll have moved into Cap’s version of the Wilderness Years. If the Internet had been a thing in 1989, rather than the specter of a thing-to-come, maybe it would have been different. But it’s 1989 and Captain Power never managed to hit critical mass.

Kudos to the cover artist for trying for a nicely dynamic action shot rather than another group shot, but it’s pretty janky. I mean, Soaron’s reaching out like he’s about to sweep Captain Power up in his arms and give him a hug, while raking the ground behind him with laser fire. Cap’s looking intensely at something off-panel to the right — I think he’s supposed to be looking at Soaron, but he’s just, well, not. Heck, they managed to get the sight-lines mostly right in the televised show, so how could they be so far off here? Cap’s shooting Soaron in the knee, despite the fact that he’s not even close to aiming that way. Cap’s calves are drawn the same size despite the fact that the bend in one leg means it should be several feet forward of the other, and it looks like his ankle is broken. They’re basically anatomically reasonable at least, but the perspective doesn’t make any sense. Is this secretly a tribute to Dali? Also, Captain Power is doing his “Dongs” face (If you missed my last review, I’ve noticed that the art-style for this book is heavily oriented around pictures of people with their mouths open, lips pursed, in a position that kinda looks like they’re about to eat a hot dog.) again.

And that scene, for what it’s worth? Does not occur in this comic. We open with a quick recap of the previous issue’s dong-mouth highlights which makes explicit that the Metal Wars Overmind had been created to stop weren’t, as I’ve been claiming, caused by human leaders being stupid and venial and starting pointless wars now that the press wouldn’t have juicy pictures of dead nineteen year olds to discourage the public, but rather were the result of a simple malfunction in the mechs which caused them to refuse the order to stand down. Huh. That’s… Really really lame.

The story proper picks up mid-flashback, on the battlefield of 2132 (Which is kind of confusing as the recap explicitly gives the setting as 2147. Not an error, just an awkward narrative decision to start out in a flashback without explicitly signifying it.). There’s some nice artwork here, showing a soldier comfort his mortally wounded colleague, and possibly a reference to the style of the show in that we don’t actually see who the soldiers are shooting at, aside from a tiny little mech in the background. As with Overunit Drucker last time, I’m a little put off by what seems to be power armor on the soldiers — There’s one panel where I thought one of the soldiers might have been Scout. If that sort of powered armor isn’t unique to Captain Power and his team, it’s not really clear what’s so great about them. I mean, sure, they’re still an elite fighting force, but it’s just not as satisfying if everyone’s got power armor, even if Cap and Company are the only ones who can summon theirs from spandex.

The next two pages are mostly taken up by a spread showing… Soaron’s back. Not their finest hour; it’s basically a full two pages of gray broken by some geometric lines to indicate the contours of his wings. The exploding chaos below him is basically indistinguishable and it just feels cheap. A small mitigation, the bottom third of the pages show Hawk and Stuart Power at their command center. It’s not explicit that this is the future Power Base, but I think we can guess that it’s still under construction from the fact that the command console appears to be plugged into a random power strip. Hawk and Stu watch in horror as one of the soldiers from the previous page reports the death of his companions at the hands of Soaron, who digitizes the soldier — whose name was “Benson” on one page, but “Peters” on the next — on the following page. The narrative frame pulls back a bit, so around the individual story panels you can see 2147-Hawk telling the story to Pilot over coffee.

I mostly just complained last time instead of admitting that I really like the way Hawk’s drawn in this book. Sure, he looks nothing at all like Peter MacNeil, but he’s got a very classic “Old Soldier” look to him, and there’s something nicely cartoonish about the way that his hair sweeps up at the sides to give him a slightly aquiline aspect. The background is also a nice touch; they probably could have gotten away with a splash of color or something, but instead, you can see bits of stairs, a door and the Power-On podium.

All the praise I’ve given to the art, though, does not extend to Pilot. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a less distinct look than Pilot. Generic blonde woman in a brown shirt. With that same dongs-face expression as everyone else. More and more, I get the feeling that the character brief for Pilot never really got beyond, “She’s the girl,” in the minds of most of the writers. We’ve seen it again and again in the series that, outside of the pair of times she’s put front-and-center, the writers barely seem to remember she’s there at all.

Stuart explains digitization to Hawk — this is apparently a new development with Soaron. The series bible was very adamant that only the Warlord-class Biodreads had digitizers, which holds true (with a caveat we’ll get to as the series winds down) on-air, so we should probably accept this as the origin of digitization. It’s not explicit in the show, however, even though that does seem the obvious implication. I have a hard time with this, just on the basis of how Dread’s plan from pretty much day one was to fuse human minds with immortal machines, which seems kind of weird in the same way that, say, Power Rangers Time Force was apparently called “Time Force” even before they invented time travel.

Stuart also gives a very terse explanation of Soaron, claiming that he and Taggart had been developing the “Warlords” for (you guessed it) peaceful purposes, but had shelved the project due to, “A flaw in our plan… big enough to drive a truck through.” A flaw so big that it will not be elaborated upon further.

Overmind’s worked out one of the supply bases Power is using, and in a nice touch, you can actually see a hint of sadness in Taggart’s bandaged face before he orders Soaron to attack.

Of course, it’s the very base where young Captain Power is at that very moment picking up supplies. But his suspicious are already up due to a “funny delay” when he gave his code cards to the computer. He orders everyone to safety as he tries to buy time, narrating to himself as he fights. “They can’t change their programming fast enough to shoot low,” he claims, and basically avoids being hit by ducking. He grabs a mech to use as a nonhuman-shield, then throws himself into a, I dunno, ventillation shaft? It mystifies the mechs, who conclude that the resistance must have invented teleportation.

Yeah. They don’t see him duck into a hole in the wall, and therefore conclude that the only logical possibility is teleportation. He pops out of a manhole behind them and dispatches the mechs, then turns his attention to Soaron. Though stronger than the others, young Cap concludes the Warlord is just as dumb when it moves in close to digitize the seemingly unconscious boy, allowing Young Cap to get in a shot at point-blank range. Soaron’s returned fire disarms Cap, and Soaron is so rattled to have been injured that he picks Cap up by his shirt, declares him unworthy of digitization, and prepares to punch him to death. Thinking his only chance is to anger the Biodread into making a mistake, young Captain Power says a line you’d never in a million years expect out of this franchise:

It doesn’t work, but Taggart is watching from Volcania and orders Soaron to bring Cap in intact.

This being an exciting place for a cliffhanger, the story gods oblige us by having Tank and Scout call in to interrupt Hawk’s storytelling. Hawk shows them a picture of Scott Bakula in the hopes that he’ll help them finish killing off the franchise. Out in the field, Tank and Scout are running down a rumor that a local gang was “spreading some oil” that they might have that Professor Malenkov guy who was the ostensible macguffin of the framing story. Remember him? Former Dread scientist who’s absconded with information vital to the resistance. It’s really not important. The gang turns out to be some proper Mad Max-type dystopia punks, of the sort we really should have seen more of in the show. The bottom third of the page depicts them, partying and speaking in gibberish, with bald Steven Segall declaring “Party Treef an’ Besto!” while Tina Turner asserts, “Rad and bad, gato. You tags make me warmest.”

Disguising himself as a punk, Scout tries to barter for information about Malenkov, but even his mighty slang is no match for true post-apocalyptic punk, as they suspect him immediately, and think their suspicions confirmed when a Dread Patrol also arrives. While Tank deals with the mechs (who curiously warn him that his “criminal charges will be recorded on digi-disk”, and order him to remove his armor for digitization), Scout roughs up the leader of the punk gang. Once the fighting is over, they call home to let Hawk know that Malenkov had already been traded to a “local warlord”.

Another one of the nice touches about this comic is that they paint a seedier side of the civilian populace. The series bible and some of the released information about season 2 talks about the possibility of threats emerging from bandits, opportunists and crime gangs. On screen, most of the civilians we see are just refugees, and the only threatening ones are either working for Dread or are convinced that Captain Power is. Here, we see hints of local strong-men carving out little fiefdoms for themselves. And the punk Scout roughs up even dismisses Power as “a drug for the brain dead.”

But that part of the story is done for now, so Hawk awkwardly segues us back into his flashback. A manic Stuart shows Hawk the untested Power Suits — actual suits, not just spandex, then Hawk is called away mostly as a plot contrivance, so that Stuart is alone when Dread calls. Dread has Johnny, all dong-faced with indignation, of course, and orders Stuart to come to Volcania and exchange himself for his son.

He’s already gone on the next page, and Hawk’s return triggers the “Phoenix Project”, which declares Hawk, “Acting commander-in-chief.” So… Stuart was the president? Hawk notes that the computer “Sounds like Stuart,” so I guess that’s Mentor’s intro, though he doesn’t actually manifest visibly. Learning what’s happened, Hawk is so upset he nearly eats his own jaw, then resolves to put on the untested Power Suit despite the 50% chance of, y’know, death. The last we will see of Hawk-2132 in this issue is his limp form crumpled on the floor, possibly killed by the uncalibrated “bio-leads”. I mean, except that he’s the one telling the story so plainly he’ll turn out to be okay. There’s also a sort of strange parallel here, with Hawk’s screams about acid shooting into him as he transforms being reminiscent of Taggart’s interface with Overmind in the previous issue.

The flashback ends with Jon in Volcania. Soaron basically yells at him a bit then tosses him at Dread’s feet. Present-Hawk explains that Dread planned to “Bend Stuart to the will of the machine. With Stuart gone, the resistance would be crushed,” which for some reason prompts generic-female-character to ask, “But how?” A question so awkward that I’m not even sure it works grammatically. Wasn’t she paying attention?

We cut away to Stuart Power’s grave, where Captain Power has just finished telling his dead father about the events of the previous year. Hey, what’s he doing powered-down? He was powered up when we last saw him.

Oh, that’s right. The plot says so. Because no sooner has Cap finished than Blastarr appears. Cap’s insults are no match for the Biodread, who, pretty much without hesitation, digitizes the hero of our series.

Yeah.

That is how this comic book series ends. With Captain Power being digitized. I know the show itself was a bit schizophrenic when it came to “how big a deal” digitization was, sometimes treating is as nothing more than a kid’s show-friendly way to remove characters from play without having to technically kill them, while other times drawing a straight-up analogue to rape. But this comic seems to come down on the side of “really really horrific.” There’s no guarantee that Cap would have come back from this experience unchanged.

Nor, for that matter, is it guaranteed that his return would be immediate; the fact that all the present-day action is shifted over to Scout and Tank suggests to me that Neal Adams and the folks writing the comic had a stronger understanding of Captain Power as an ensemble show than its live-action counterpart could consistently manage. It wouldn’t be unprecedented to actually remove the lead character from the story for an extended period before building up a “The Return of Captain Power” event — Optimus Prime had been killed off exactly two years earlier in issue 24 of Marvel Comic’s Transformers series (He committed suicide out of guilt at cheating to win a video game. Really.) and wouldn’t return until July of the following year.

Where would this plot have gone? I have a strong suspicion. The key hint to me is in what the mechs who accost Tank say — as I mentioned earlier, this is the only time it’s suggested that a mere clicker can wield a digitizer. But it refers to a “digi-disk”. In context, it sounds like a physical artifact of digitization. Looking back to the series bible, the original concept for digitization involved reducing a victim to a microchip, which the Biodread had to hand-carry back to Overmind at Volcania, with the possibility that, were the chip recaptured first, the digitized victim could be restored by Mentor.

The evasive Professor Malenkov is described as a Dread scientist who possesses some key piece of information that could turn the tide of the war. I think they were building up to the reveal that Malenkov is capable of building an un-digitizer. The story arc would continue to follow Tank and Scout as they tracked down the professor, segueing into a quest to find the necessary parts from which to build the un-digitizer, while Hawk and Pilot would be engaged in a protracted hunt for Blastarr to recapture Captain Power’s “digi-disk”. As I mentioned, although Hawk mentions the computer having Stuart’s voice, we never actually see the Mentor — and back in issue 1, Pilot didn’t know about Cap’s heritage. Perhaps in the comic version of events, it would only be with the contribution of Malenkov’s un-digitizer that the computer records of Stuart Power would be fully transformed into Mentor as we’ve seen him in the show.

As always with this show, we’re left lamenting what might have been at least as much as we celebrate what was. This was a much more promising start than I thought it would be: I’d started out questioning the wisdom of doing the first two issues almost entirely as flashbacks that didn’t even star the actual heroes, and retreading a televised story. Sure, they flesh some things out more — the events leading up to Taggart’s alliance with Overmind, the Metal Wars, details about Stuart’s involvement with both Taggart and the Resistance. These are all things, though, that I think should have taken a back-seat to getting on with some cool adventuring. But right at the last minute, they pitched a curve-ball. The digitization of Cap changes the status quo, and the quest to restore him that surely would have followed is exactly the sort of thing to start off a new comic series with.

Had that actually happened, and this not turned out to be the franchise’s swansong. And in conclusion: Dongs.

This was a big moment for me; this is very likely the absolute most distant point in the official Captain Power universe for me: I’ve seen it all now. I mean, unless I can turn up a copy of the 1989 Captain Power Annual, I’m never going to get to experience a piece of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future for the first time again.

At least, not until the Phoenix rises….

It is the last day of January, 1988. INXS tops the Billboard charts with “Need You Tonight”, one of those songs people tend to use a second-long clip from as part of an audio montage to indicate “The Eighties”. They unseated Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel”, which last week dethroned George Harrison. Whitesnake, George Michael and Whitney Houston fall out of the top ten in favor of Expose, Roger, and Eric Carmen (with “Hungry Eyes”, the song which usually follows “Need You Tonight” in those eighties audio montages). A Washington football team whose name I will not repeat wins their second Super Bowl, defeating Denver. Their quarterback, Doug Williams, is the first African American Quarterback to play in and win the Superbowl, while tying the then-record for most touchdowns thrown, and breaking Joe Montana’s record for most passing yards. In the past two weeks, Skrillex was born, Canada’s supreme court has struck down an abortion ban, Vice President George Bush appeared on the CBS Evening News and gets in an argument with Dan Rather over the Iran-Contra Affair, The Phantom of the Opera opens on Broadway, Biggles, a movie Leah liked as a kid, premiers, and I turned nine.

Immediately after the Super Bowl, ABC premiers The Wonder Years, starring Fred Savage as a kid growing up in the 1960s, with Daniel Stern narrating as the same character reflecting on his youth from the present. In a minor coincidence, in the late ’90s, Savage would star in Working, a failed over-the-top satirical workplace comedy, while Stern would voice the title character in the failed animated TV adaptation of the over-the-top satirical workplace comedy Dilbert.

Captain Power took last week off, leaving Star Trek The Next Generation unopposed in the war for the hearts and minds of geeks, insofar as there was ever an actual fight going on. Correspondingly, TNG softballed it with “Angel One”, about which the nicest thing I can say is “at least they tried. I think.” It’s pretty much one of Roddenberry’s original example premises from the initial 1960s Star Trek pitch: a planet where the women are dominant and men are the underclass, isn’t that wacky? I guess the basic idea of “See? You wouldn’t like it much if you got treated that way, would you?” isn’t terrible, but there’s the whole undercurrent of “Women in charge? That’s not right!” that ruins it. Also, this was apparently meant to be a direct parallel to South African apartheid, but that really only comes across at the end, when the local leader decides to banish the uppity menfolk rather than executing them, having conceded that the current system is unstable, and resigned to just slow down the inevitable.

They bring their A-Game this week, though, with “11001001”, an episode that’s actually good, provided you can get past a handful of really stupid things that the plot hinges on. Such as the bit where the Binars, members of the Federation, hijack the Enterprise to save their planet, because if they’d just mentioned to the Federation that their planet was doomed and needed to borrow a Galaxy-Class Starship’s main computer for an hour, the Federation “might have said no” (See, because they think like computers, they are unable to — actually, no, I have a fucking master’s in this stuff, so I am not going to belittle my education by pretending there is any logical way to explain their actions that isn’t predicated on complete nonsense masquerading as discrete logic), or that the captain and first officer of a Galaxy-Class starship get distracted by an attractive holographic woman and fail to notice the entire ship getting evacuated. But these are intensely ordinary “People who write for TV don’t have a damned clue about how computers or formal logic work,” and “Starfleet Bridge Officers are notoriously incompetent,”  sort of problems that you expect from Star Trek, not the particular incompetence of the first season. Plus Minuet is a neat character, and the Binars are the most interesting and exciting new race to be introduced, hence us never seeing them again.

Up against what’s pretty much universally considered one of the stronger season 1 TNG episodes, Captain Power responds with “Judgment”, an episode that has enough promise that Stargate SG-1 will go on to do basically the same plot twice. I should be up-front about this. “Judgment” is an important character-development episode for Pilot, an important bit of enriching the world, it has some of the best CGI work in the series, and complex themes, it’s got a really surprising guest cast, and Jessica Steen got a Gemini nomination for her performance (Also nominated that year: Sarah Polley, who is not quite three weeks older than I am, which, as previously mentioned, was nine while all this was happening. Okay, dad, you can commence comment about what a slacker I am). And I just don’t like it very much, and I don’t really know why. It’s just kind of… Meh. I don’t know. The pacing is weak in the first act, and the resolution is too pat, and even as the least-action-packed episode we’ve had, it still feels like it’s bitten off more plot than it can chew. I don’t hate it or anything; I’m just underwhelmed by it.

We open, unusually, on Scout giving the Captain’s Log. I haven’t mentioned the Captain’s log framing device much because it hasn’t really mattered much. Just a short voice over giving the date and establishing the context for the episode, usually something like, “We intercepted a signal from Lord Dread and are going to Sector 3 to investigate”. This time, it’s a bit different, since Scout is informing us that Cap and Pilot have gone missing while bringing back an intercepted “data tape” with critical information about Project New Order. We’re actually seeing these events play out on-screen, so the main contribution of the voice-over is to establish what they’re doing out there. Also, I guess, to justify Maurice Dean Wint’s paycheck, since neither he nor Tank nor Hawk appear at all in this episode.

For no obvious reason, Captain Power is riding bitch on a hoverbike with Pilot, rather than doing what they have otherwise always done and take the Jumpship, or at the least, do the obvious thing and ride separate hoverbikes. But then the plot wouldn’t happen. They’re being chased by Soaron, and while it’s sweet of the effects artists to try, the hoverbike’s “shadow” on the landscape is so wrong that I half expect Peter Pan to show up and try to stick it back on with soap. Cap manages to take off one of Soaron’s wings and his leg with that laser bazooka from last week. But as the CGI menace spins off out of control, he gets in one good shot and blows up one of the hoverbike’s hover-things, causing a not even close to seamless crash scene that ends with Cap and Pilot being very gently thrown to the ground.

For such a gentle tumble, though, Cap really failed to roll with it: though we don’t actually see the injury that’s rendered him unable to walk, Pilot’s able to assess it just by looking once she cuts a hole in his pants, and that suggests a pretty bad break, possibly a compound fracture. He orders her to take the data tape and make for the nearby oasis. She begrudgingly agrees, then kind of awkwardly gives him a kiss on the cheek. This is supposed to be heartwarming, I guess. She’s worried about her friend, and we’ve been very slowly establishing her feelings for Cap all the way back to “Shattered”. But the sudden escalation here makes me kind of uncomfortable. It’s not that it comes out of nowhere per se, but it feels forced that she’d suddenly pick this moment to make a move. The impropriety of it bugs me. I’m not saying it would be wrong for any character to react like that, but this is Pilot. Her whole characterization so far has been based on little subtle reactions and stoicism. The sudden jump here is something that feels out of character for Pilot. You can have a character like her do something like that, but you need a proper build-up and payoff. You know what there isn’t? A sense of urgency. There ought to be; Cap is injured, they’ve got crucial data, and the Bio-Dreads know their proximate location. But it doesn’t come off in the way the scene is shot. Things feel serious, but not urgent. It’s kind of ironic, even; their banter in this scene is good. Great even, very natural and conveying a sense of camaraderie that usually gets glazed over with any pair of characters that doesn’t include Hawk. But in context, it ends up working against the sense that they’re in a tense, time-critical predicament: it feels normal. In fact, it’s the most normal pretty much any pair of characters in this show has ever felt. And there’s the rub: suddenly giving her boss a peck on the cheek is not a normal thing for Pilot to do. It’s not the right context for a character like Pilot to make that leap.

[raw]Cap, for his part, reacts with pretty much just dull surprise. There’s a fraction of a second where it looks like he might crack a smile, but it’s so quick that I’m half-convinced Tim just flubbed the take. Back at Volcania, Dread makes his contractually-mandated appearance this episode and orders Blastarr to go retrieve the data tape and capture Cap. I guess this is the episode where we really establish the relationship dynamic between Soaron and Blastarr, who haven’t really interacted before. The series bible likens Soaron to the Red Baron — a sort of old-school “noble villain” type, who wouldn’t shoot an unarmed opponent as it’d be unsporting. I guess I can see a little of that having made it through to the screen. As a child, as I’ve mentioned, I was inclined to imagine Soaron as a weaselly, Starscream-type character. I think what I was picking up on was really the sense that he considers himself above the rest of Team Evil. Blastarr, on the other hand, is much more brutal, straightforward, and short-tempered.

Despite the basic jankiness of 1987 computer-generated effects, this is probably the most effective scene we’ve had with the CG characters in Captain Power so far, just because when it’s Blastarr and Soaron, the Bio-Dreads can do something that we’ve never seen them do before: physically interact with something. Neither Soaron nor Blastarr normally touch anything; they don’t even share the screen with another character or moving object that often. That works against both of them, but especially Blastarr. It’s easier to justify with Soaron, not only since his thing is aerial combat, but also because you can very easily imagine Soaron as being the sort who would consider actually physically striking someone to be too proletariat for him. But with Blastarr’s emphasis on brute, physical strength, I think we really all just want to see him pummel someone with his bare hands, and it seems wrong that he never does.

This was especially evident back in “The Intruder”, when Blastarr is interrogating Jim. It’s a standard clicker who forces Jim to the ground, restrains him, and holds him at gunpoint, but it’s Blastarr who hovers over him and demands information. After the actual sequence of Jim being taken down, the clicker vanishes save for its foot and the barrel of its gun. Because it really shouldn’t be a nameless goon in that position: it should be Blastarr. That fact shoulds so hard that the first time I watched it, my mind just kind of implicitly registered Blastarr in that position. The scene is edited to trick you into forgetting that he’s not actually the one physically interacting with Jim: filmmaking convention suggests that when the camera is on Jim, we’re seeing Blastarr’s POV, and when it cuts back to Blastarr, symmetry tells us it should be Jim’s POV. And the angle on Jim is clearly POV of the same person pointing the gun at him — it’s basically shot straight along the gun barrel. The scene is framed like Blastarr is standing directly over Jim with his foot on him, and the scene just works better if you can make yourslf forget that’s not what’s happening.

When Blastarr finds the injured Soaron, this comes to a head: Soaron wants the honor of the kill, and refuses to give Blastarr Cap’s last known coordinates. Blastarr responds by picking Soaron up and throttling him until he gives in. Then, after he’s dropped the other Bio-Dread to the ground (or at least, to be composited in as close as they could to making it look like he’s lying on the ground), for good measure, he picks up Soaron’s severed leg and tosses it some distance away.

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While that’s going on, though (Confession: I’ve flipped the order of these scenes since it makes this article flow better), Pilot has hiked the ten miles to the nearby shantytown. She barely gets in a hello, though, before the one teenager in this town literally decides to murder her with an axe.

See, it seems that back in her Dread Youth days, our beloved Pilot was involved in the destruction of the boy’s previous home, Sandtown. We’re treated to a flashback of a young Pilot — well, actually she looks exactly the same age as in the contemporary scenes. How long has she been out of the Dread Youth anyway? I know back in “Gemini and Counting”, I claimed that she’d been out for about ten years, as per the series bible. But that was plainly bullshit even when I said it (The uniform still fits, after all). This flashback suggests that it couldn’t have been more than a few years. Less if we assume Pilot’s no older than 20 (If, say, she’s 24, I could buy that the flashback was five years ago. But if she’s 19, no one ages that imperceptibly in their teens). Equally convincing: the Bling Nazi who’s in charge of the operation is the same not-Erin blonde from last week. None of this fits with the bible’s notion of Pilot having left the Dread Youth young and working her way up through the resistance in her teens. Instead, it seems like Pilot can’t have left Team Evil more than about a year ago. That scans with the comic’s implication that she wasn’t around at the previous anniversary of Daddy Power’s death. But it’s a bit hard to swallow that she’d go all the way from Dread Youth to Power Ranger in such a short time. I mean, when Cap turns down Chip’s application in “The Intruder”, he makes it out to be about how it takes time to earn trust. Pilot has evidently earned Cap’s trust very quickly. The compressed timetable also works against the implication of “Gemini and Counting” that her conversion away from the cult of the machine was a process that took time, a long “journey”. You could salvage it if we interpret Sandtown as an event after she’s already started questioning her allegiance, but this episode is going to unfold in a way that argues against that. Unlike the origin-story-by-proxy we were shown in “Gemini”, here we seem to be implying a much more TV-cliche “Complete character reversal due to a single traumatic incident” origin for Pilot. Which, hey, okay, things become tropes because they work. But now they’re making me really want to see that origin. When Erin’s story seemed to be a direct analogue for Pilot’s that was a clever way of telling us about Pilot’s backstory without resorting to flashback. If the two characters aren’t really all that parallel, it leaves a hole where there should be an origin. There are three characters in this show who joined up with Cap but we don’t know the details (Hawk worked with Cap’s dad, as we’ll be learning next week), and of them, Pilot is the most compelling (“How did Tank end up here?” is a less interesting story, to my mind, than “Where did Tank come from?” and Scout is such a blank character at this point that it’s hard to care one way or the other about him. It seems perfectly in character to imagine that he’s simply a hard-working guy who worked his way up through the resistance by doing his job well until he got promoted to Cap’s team, with no particularly eventful backstory. Not that it wouldn’t be nice for him to have one; we just haven’t established enough about the character to make me feel like there ought to be one).

To make matters more complicated, the locals claim that the sack of Sandtown was “years ago”, long enough that the boy, Randall, was a small child at the time. He basically just keeps shouting “Kill her! Kill her!” and swinging an axe at her until he’s restrained. The town is quickly swayed by the persuasiveness of his argument, which pretty much boils down to, “She’s lying! Kill her!” and it looks like a lynchin’ is about to ensue until Pilot finds a really unlikely ally.

I know, right? That’s William B. Davis, best known as the “Cigarette-Smoking Man” from The X-Files. But here, he’s kind of freaking me out in the role of Arvin, the local authority figure, who strongly opposes vigilante justice and wants the rule of law and the democratic process to prevail. Pilot agrees to stand trial in return for two of the locals going back to find Cap.

Unfortunately for them, they arrive at the crash site at roughly the same time as Blastarr. Cap, who had been biding his time by apologizing to and then murdering a cactus, drags himself behind some rocks to cower while Blastarr easily murders the townsfolk, leaving their armored vehicle to crash harmlessly into a boulder. Blastarr intercepts their radio call for help, and sets a course for the Oasis.

Pilot’s trial mostly consists of Randall demanding people kill her, intercut with flashbacks that kinda belie — deliberately, I hope — his claims that Young Pilot had been particularly gleeful about it. His uncle Gaelan confirms that Pilot was there and involved, but shows a suspicious lack of bloodlust, even going out of his way to defend her: she wasn’t an Overunit; she was just following orders; she was a “child spouting slogans,” who didn’t have any way of knowing what she was getting into.

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And this leads into Pilot’s big speech, which is almost certainly what got her the Gemini nomination.

It’s true I was in the Dread Youth. And I was in Sandtown. There’s something you have to understand. I never had a family. The Dread Youth was my family. It was my whole world, there was nothing else. From the day that I was born, I never knew about having parents. Or friends. Or feelings and love. I knew nothing about being human. I served the machine, and I was so proud. To be “Youth Leader Chase”. And I knew all my lessons, and I knew my destiny as part of the new order.
But there’s something else you have to understand: that night, everything I knew, it fell apart. Into the lie that it is. I wanted to shout out. I wanted to stop them. If I could’ve told you, that I didn’t know. I didn’t realize what was going to happen. That night, I did. I saw the true meaning of the slogans and the uniform that I was wearing. And I started a journey. And it later led me to Captain Power. And he has taught me what it is to be human. Things that I never knew.

If I could go back and change that night, I would. But I can’t. And I try every day of my life to make up for it.

It’s a nice speech. She talks about what it was like to grow up as a child of the Machine, and how she never had a real family or knew what it was like to be properly human.

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But.

Let’s be frank here. This speech boils down to “It wasn’t really my fault and I felt super bad afterward, and besides, that’s totally not me any more.” And on top of it, she gets all weepy and cries at them. Pilot.

I don’t like it. It’s cheap and emotionally immature, and it comes off to me like she’s trying to dodge responsibility for her actions rather than take it.

As I said before, Stargate SG-1 more or less did this plot twice. The more straight-up of these is the first season episode “Cor-Ai”. Teal’c, the former First Prime (read: Chief Henchman) of Apophis (read: The Bad Guy), who’s switched sides and joined SG-1 (read: The Good Guys) is recognized by the locals on a planet they visit as the dude who carried out the ordered execution of some of the locals. He’s put on trial and will be executed unless he can persuade the son of a man he killed not to.

Yeah, like I said, it’s close. Even up to the part where, in the end, the bad guys show up and the condemned prisoner demonstrates having turned face by risking themself fighting to defend the place, which is going to happen to Pilot in a couple of minutes.

The first season of Stargate SG-1 is generally understood to not be all that good. This is true, but “Cor-Ai” is one of its high points. And a big part of the reason that the story works so well is that, unlike Pilot, Teal’c doesn’t break down and protest that he’s changed. He confesses. And more, he refuses to defend himself. Teal’c defense falls to his teammates. Because Teal’c believes that he does deserve to be held accountable for his crimes, and that if his execution will make some kind of recompense to the people he’s hurt, it’s only fair: the fact that he’s reformed doesn’t make him any less guilty of his past crimes.

I think that’s what’s really lacking here. Pilot’s whole thing is that she’s stoic: thanks to her upbringing, expressing emotion doesn’t come naturally to her. In this, her most important character focus episode, though, she basically spends the whole episode out of character. Kissing John, then breaking down in tears at her trial, it’s like the writers are trying to cram her into the “Action Chick” stereotype that she’d thus far mercifully avoided.

Teal’c also gets a better twist to his story. The laws of dramatic necessity tell us that it is a real problem for one of our heroes to have something like this on their record. We can forgive them, but only if they throw us a little bone: we need something to offset their guilt. For Teal’c, the reveal is about why he specifically executed his accuser’s father. Dad was crippled, and Teal’c knew that the local custom was strictly “leave no man behind.” So, given that he couldn’t outright disobey a direct order from his god-king and therefore had to kill someone, he chose the person whose sacrifice would improve the community’s chances to evade recapture in the future.

Notice how Teal’c isn’t entirely let off the hook here: he still shot a dude, and he still did it deliberately and with premeditation. Jennifer gets off lighter. Uncle Gaelan triggers a flashback to Volcania shortly before the raid. Through a stroke of incredible coincidence, Pilot just happened to overhear Gaelan, at the time a prisoner, break under interrogation and pony up the location of Sandtown. Turns out that while, okay, Pilot was there, and she was involved, it’s not like she had any actual say in what was going on.

It’s too damned easy is what it is. And really, it displaces the crowning moment of the story onto Gaelan: the moment we see him locked in a cell with some kind of evil Occulus Rift strapped to his face muttering, “Please, stop, I’ll tell you anything,” it stops being Pilot’s story and starts being the story about an old man in an impossible situation who did the only thing he reasonably could have done, and spent years consumed by guilt over it — it becomes his redemption story, not Pilot’s.

News of the approaching Bio-Dread interrupts the trial just as The Cigarette-Smoking Man is about to ask the jury for their verdict, so, after all his impassioned insistence on observing the rule of law… He gives Gaelan his gun is just like, “Well, I guess you get to decide whether or not to shoot her,” as he runs off with the others to prepare the town defenses. There’s nothing in the way Gaelan’s acted so far to suggest that he’d even consider offing Pilot, which makes it seems a little unnecessary and kind of cruel that Pilot’s immediate response is to not-very-subtly let him know what she knows. It’s played entirely wrong, and comes off like she’s trying to shame him out of killing her. Naturally, he gives her the gun and releases her to go aid in the town’s defense, while he hangs back to confess to his nephew.

The scene is played precisely wrong. I mean, in the first place, no one seems to even suspect that something is Up with the fact that they sent two dudes to the location Pilot gave them and ran into a Bio-Dread — no one jumps up and says, “Well hey, obviously she was lying about Captain Power being there and it was all a trap.” I mean, except Randall, but “She’s lying! Kill her! Kill her!” is basically the extent of his dialogue for the whole episode. And it really feels wrong for her to try to shame Gaelan like that. They should have tried to convey a sense of kinship between them, like with Erin a few episode back. How hard would it be for her to say something like, “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. But I was scared, and I was hurt, and I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. I think you know what that’s like.”  I don’t know, maybe that is what they were going for, but color me unconvinced.

The townsfolk’s puny blue lasers are no match for Blastarr’s superior pink lasers, so Pilot powers on and faces him down, even though her suit’s triple-A batteries are only at ten percent. Her intervention comes just in time to rescue one townsman from a chronic hysteresis:

It’s nice to see Pilot in a one-on-one fight for once. Unfortunately, as is always the case for the first few minutes of a Blastarr fight, she’s utterly ineffectual. Even a random bazooka she just happens to find lying around can’t bail her out — Blastarr may be dumb, but he’s got the capacity to learn from past mistakes. She takes some finger-lasers to the chest and de-morphs in a sequence that rather bizarrely involves her boobs teleporting about a foot upward.

Blastarr hovers threateningly over her, waving his digitizer and threatening her in a way that will totally not seem prescient later. But just as it looks like Pilot’s number is up, Gaelan comes running out shooting a laser-revolver. Blastarr promptly murders him, but the distraction allows Pilot to… Not do anything. Blastarr turns back to her, but apparently he too is surprised that she’s still there waiting for him, because it takes him forever to line up his shot.

And that gives Cap time to unexpectedly arrive unnoticed in that armored vehicle from a few scenes ago. Which he drove by telepathy or something because he’s in the gunner’s position rather than the driver’s seat.  I mean, seriously, we’re meant to believe that Cap pulled up next to them, got out of the driver’s seat, got into the gunner’s position and got off a shot without anyone noticing he was there? With a broken leg?

The truck-mounted gun knocks Blastarr to the ground, and Pilot finally does something about it, retrieving that bazooka and giving the Bio-Dread a few in the chest as he stands up. This whole “Blastarr is completely invincible the first few minutes, then suddenly becomes vulnerable for no reason,” thing is kind of weird. The most sense I can make of it is that Blastarr can basically take any blow that he’s prepared for, but it requires some kind of conscious effort on his part, so he’s incredibly vulnerable to any shot he doesn’t see coming. This is a little backed up at least, since they do make a point of showing Blastarr catch the shots he takes on his shield or arms. Though one of Pilot’s ineffectual throwing-snowflakes did explode directly in his face earlier.

I really like the way the end of the battle plays out in spite of the fridge logic. Pilot’s allowed to remain the center of the action even after Cap arrives. He hangs back, doesn’t even power up (It’s implied that his suit is out of power), just gives her a thumbs-up after getting his shot off. It’s very Action-Movie-Sidekick of him. Pilot’s still allowed to land the “kill”-shot herself rather than Cap becoming the default center of the action.

Pilot promptly ignores her injured commander to go emote over Gaelan’s dead body as everyone pointedly doesn’t do anything about the unconscious killing machine a few feet away. Arvin shows up and apologizes for that whole trial thing, though I don’t know what he’s got to apologize for. “Sorry we put you on trial for a crime you did commit and frankly responded entirely reasonably under the circumstances.” She declares the whole thing no harm no foul, and the editor stops paying attention for a second, because they let the shot linger on William B. Davis too long after he cracks a smile so that it kinda looks like he’s now looking down at Gaelan’s dead body with a grin that drifts onto the border of “lecherous”.

Everyone evacuates the town in the time it takes to change camera angles, in order that the animators don’t have to account for anything moving when they composite in Soaron for one last appearance where he berates the recovering Blastarr a bit, then it’s an evening funeral scene in a geographically disconnected bit of sand and rocks. The townsfolk bury Gaelan while Pilot and Cap — who’s on crutches, so at least they remembered that much — watch. Afterward, Randall apologizes to Pilot for that whole attempted-axe-murder thing. Pilot’s magnanimous. After all, they, “Both have things to be sorry for.” Yeah Jennifer. He’s sorry for attempting to extract violent revenge for the murder of his family; she’s sorry for her complicity in multiple war crimes; it all balances out I guess.

I guess that really sums up what I don’t like about this episode. They’re so determined to exonerate Pilot that they end up stripping the character of any tension; Pilot’s story can’t be one of redemption if the narrative is going to go out of its way to apologize for her. It’s Gaelan who ends up having the compelling story here, not Pilot: he’s the one who makes the noble act of self-sacrifice at the end. At the end, he’s dead, having died to save Pilot, and the cherry on top is that this convinces Randall to forgive her and view himself as the one who was out of line. When this happened to Teal’c? The Randall-equivalent character doesn’t apologize. In fact, he can’t even bring himself to forgive Teal’c, not fully: instead, he claims that he made a mistake, and Teal’c clearly isn’t the same person that killed his father. He’s willing to grant legitimacy to the new man Teal’c has become through his redemption, but even still he doesn’t forgive his father’s killer. That could have worked here too. Have Randall say something like, “I was wrong. A Dread Youth Leader killed my family. You aren’t Dread Youth.” But the way this episode is written, even that would have laid too much blame on Pilot; they prefer the idea that she was there but can’t permit her to have actually had any agency in those flashback scenes.

You know what would have made this episode better? Scout. I’ve said so many times that his character is pretty blank, and this would have been a great opportunity to fill him out a little. We know from the Captain’s Log segment that Scout had been tracking Cap and Pilot. So have him arrive at Oasis looking for them. Have him defend Pilot at her trial. He seems like a people-person, far moreso than the others. He could tell stories about Pilot from his perspective, which would flesh out both their backstories. And you don’t put Pilot in the position of trying to justify, y’know, having been a Nazi.

I’m loathe to take Pilot’s big speech away from her. I mean, the Gemini folks thought it was pretty good (Though not quite as good as Sonja Smits in Street Legal), even if I think it’s kind of a betrayal of the character. So let’s keep the speech, but have her give it to Scout, privately. Yeah. You can even let her cry Scout feels like the right person for her to cry to, not a bunch of strangers. Of all the members of the team, he’s the closest to her equal. It’s hard to imagine her being willing to show that level of vulnerability to Cap, or even Hawk. And Scout — admittedly, this might just be through neglect — seems the least wrapped up in a “soldier” persona; battlefield-formality suits him less than the others (In fact, if I were writing Scout, I think I’d give him a non-military background. Make him a civilian communications expert who was drafted to Power’s team out of necessity, rather than an officer who worked his way up through the ranks).

The key thing to making this episode work for me would be to make Pilot actually accept responsibility for her past. We can still have the karmic saving throw with Gaelan, but Pilot shouldn’t be making the argument that she was young and didn’t have a family and didn’t know what she was doing. And we need her to have had actual agency in Sandtown. Yeah. Go all-in. We need to see her actually pull the trigger. Maybe we shouldn’t go as dark as having her personally gun down Randall’s family, but we can have her be the one to set fire to their house. Or at least give the order. Heck, Gaelan calls her a “Child spouting slogans,” so how about in one of those flashbacks, she actually spouts a slogan? You can’t have redemption if you can’t own up to having done wrong. We need to see that Pilot herself believes that she deserves punishment for her crimes.

Admittedly, adding Scout to the mix complicates matters for the climactic battle. But that’s not too hard to solve. Let’s do something with that data tape that was the Macguffin for setting up the episode. Make the data on it time-sensitive, so Pilot sends Scout away with it ahead of the attack, and we play this as Pilot firing her defense because she’s resigned herself to losing this trial. Boom. Problem solved.

As it turns out, pretty much every criticism of this episode I have boils down to, “SG-1 did it better,” so it shouldn’t be surprising that my “fix” for the episode is “Pretty much make it the same as the SG-1 episode.” Of course, Stargate SG-1 is literally a decade away at this point. In fact, this is weird. “Cor-Ai” aired almost exactly ten years after Captain Power aired “Judgment”. Like, five hundred and twenty weeks. (It is January 23, 1998. Savage Garden tops the charts with “Truly, Madly, Deeply”. ABC is so desperate that they’re showing Sabrina The Teenage Witch twice tonight. In the past weeks, Ted Kaczynski has plead guilty to being the Unabomber and accepts a life sentence without parole, the UN has banned human cloning, Sarah Polley turned 19, Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, and President Bill Clinton was accused of sexual harassment. By Monday, the Queen Mother will have a new hip, Grease will have closed on Broadway, Posh Spice will be engaged to David Beckham, the Broncos will have won the Super Bowl, and President Clinton will have said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”) So maybe telling that kind of story properly is still in the future. A little specter of it has popped its head up here, fully ten years too early, and Captain Power couldn’t quite nail it.

But, all my complaints aside, it got it really really close.

It is January 17 and 18, 1988. Earnest Byner fumbles at the 3-yard line, losing the AFC championship for the team which would later become the Baltimore Ravens. The top song on the charts is George Harrison’s cover of “Got My Mind Set On You”, which old-me is ashamed of young-me for liking so much. Compared to last week, Elton John, Tiffany, and The Bangles have entered the top ten with “Candle in the Wind”, Not-“I Think We’re Alone Now”, and “Hazy Shade of Winter” respectively.

Disney’s The New Adventures of Winnie The Pooh premieres on The Disney Channel, which is at this stage in its history, a commercial-free premium network. At the moment, my family has a weird cable package which consists of the broadcast DC and Baltimore stations, plus, for some reason, CBN, which is going to start evolving into The Family Channel (now ABC Family) later this year; it’ll be another year or two before we get the rest of basic cable, to say nothing of the pay channels (Most of which we eventually get through the happy accident of the cable company not really having their act together and turning on the premium channels for everyone on the block whenever anyone subscribed). The New Adventures is a far more mundane and traditional Winnie-The-Pooh adaptation than the Disney Channel’s previous attempt, Welcome to Pooh Corner, an early 80s series done in live-action with animatronic-faced costumes, which is sort of magnificently bizarre and creepy and totally worth watching. Sadly, only about a dozen of the possibly more than a hundred episodes were ever released in home video format, and even fewer are still findable today. In broadcast-Disney, The Wonderful World of Disney airs the first half of a failed pilot called Earth*Star Voyager, a not-very-good show about a space ship crewed for no good reason by children with a plot that is actually surprisingly similar to Star Trek Into Darkness (I’m serious; the plot boils down to “Evil Admiral wants to build a super-giant-warship, so he strikes a deal with a renegade to help build it, and sends off the flagship deliberately under an inexperienced commander planning for him to fail”). For absolutely no reason, I keep running into people who remember this show, though I personally do not. Although it was nominated for two Primetime Emmys (Sound editing and mixing), it is almost entirely forgotten, and Disney would prefer everyone forget it ever happened, the usual fate for TV shows with asterisks in their titles. TVTropes helpfully describes it as “The Mickey Mouse Club meets Star Trek.”

Speaking of Star Trek, this week’s episode of Star Trek The Next Generation is “Datalore”, a story which is very important for introducing Data’s off-switch. And also his evil twin brother, I guess, but that’s really just an excuse to let Brent Spiner have some fun and ham it up for a change. It’s kind of a weak episode, made all the weaker for the fact that Wesley Crusher once again has to save the day by being the only one who can tell when Data is secretly replaced by his moustache-twirling evil twin. Seriously, it feels like a recurring theme this season is “No one but Wesley Crusher pays a damned bit of attention to how their co-workers are behaving.” But at least it’s a weak episode that lays the groundwork for much better episodes later, including the Augment arc of Enterprise.

Captain Power this week is a big episode for Hawk and Tank. That’s a pleasant change after a sequence of episodes that have leaned more heavily on Cap and Pilot, though I do note with some derision that Maurice Dean Wint still hasn’t gotten a character focus episode yet.

We open in a Toronto Subway, where Cap and company (Minus Pilot, of course; can’t waste Jessica Steen on non-character-focus episodes) are trying to warn “Cypher” that they’ve intercepted some Dread plans involving his resistance group and an evil experiment. While Cap and Scout forge ahead, Tank and Hawk hang back so that Tank can down the contents of a random canteen he just finds lying around. This may seem like an incredibly stupid, or at least somewhat impolite thing to do, but hey, the show’s only 22 minutes long, so we can’t really afford to dawdle on the plot. The camera does us a solid and follows the discarded canteen so that we’ll know it’s important.

[raw]Cap and Scout find the resistance cell mostly incapacitated or dead. Their investigation is spied on by one of Dread’s ubiquitous spy drones, which, of course, he never has any trouble getting into any resistance bases anywhere. Back at Volcania, Dread privately taunts power, and dismisses Lakki when the little playskool toy suggests that maybe letting Cap in on the “Styx” project might be a touch counterproductive.
They find Cypher and some of the still-capacitated resistance after Cap’s forced to stun one of them in self-defense. Cypher explains that a “madness” came down on them all, causing pain, hallucinations and fits of violence. Cypher himself is clearly meant to be affected, speaking in broken sentences and clutching his chest and head from time to time. Though he affects this mostly by talking like a three year old.

This is the first time we’ve met Colonel Cypher, but it won’t be the last. He’ll return in “The Eden Road” and “Freedom One”. He’s played by Lorne Cossette, whose filmography is pretty sparse. He was in a handful of British things in the sixties, then appears to have given up acting until a little flurry in the late ’80s. He passed away back in 2001, five years after his last film roles, minor parts in a Sandra Bullock romcom and Darkman III. But you may know recall him from one particular role: he played Captain Maitland in the early Doctor Who serial “The Sensorites”.

I kind of wonder if there’s anything deliberate about that in this casting: the plot of “The Sensorites” revolved around two major elements which are echoed in this episode: characters driven violently insane by an outside influence, and tainted water supplies.

Dread has summoned some troopers to attack the base, prompting a reasonable if over-long fight scene in the subway. It’s a nice setting for a fight scene, as has been well-established by Michael Jackson and the Wachowski Brothers. When our heroes, along with the resistance survivors make it back to the Jumpship, they’re confronted by Soaron, which of course means that it’s time for Hawk to jump into action. We cut back to Volcania for just long enough for Dread to shout a Big “No!!!!!!” as Power and his gang escape.

[/raw]

Back at base, Cap notices that Tank’s looking a little unwell, so he sends him to bed early, then asks Mentor about this whole “Styx” thing. Mentor helpfully explains what the adults, older children, and more intelligent domestic animals have already worked out: that the resistance cell’s water supply was tainted with a chemical agent that induces temporary insanity. Hawk, in what’s either a rare display of the characters being as clever as they’re supposed to be, or a common display of “we’re 10 minutes in and have to get the plot rolling,” puts two and two together, and sorts out that Tank’s likely infected. Pilot puts on her rarely-seen Power Suit, and the two of them go to visit Tank, who’s kept it together enough to power on himself, but just shouts, “Monsters! You won’t get me! I’ll kill you all!” over and over, and one-shot knocks them out, though, curiously, it doesn’t disperse their suits.

Meanwhile, Mentor, who’s leaking a little more emotion than usual, has sorted out that some random Dread base they’d previously destroyed had produced the Styx bioweapon, and that Dread’s planning to use short-range rockets to deliver it into the aquifer that apparently provides drinking water to the entire west coast. This show has absolutely no idea how geography works. We obligingly cut back to Volcania, where Lord Dread orders the immediate deployment of Styx, since his whole, “Let Captain Power sort out your evil plan with plenty of time to stop it,” strategy has, shockingly, backfired. He’s so fired up that he only pauses briefly to yell at Lakki, who kinda evokes Kiff Kroaker from Futurama with a hint of a sigh before his usual, “I live to serve.” I’ve mentioned before that Lakki is usually described as a spy for Overmind, but “spy” really has the wrong connotation. He’s more of an instrument of passive-aggression by Overmind: transparently saddling Dread with a robot Scrappy Doo just to demonstrate that he can.

Cap rushes off to collect the others, and rouses Hawk and Pilot. Having determined that Tank’s been reduced to a psychotic killing machine, our leader decides that the best strategic move is for him to take Pilot and Scout off in the Jumpship to prevent the launch of the Styx missiles and leave the concussed old man to take care of the drugged-out heavily-armored giant. The camerawork here is very disappointing: we stay on Cap and Pilot rather than cutting to a close-up of Hawk, which is a shame because we’re treated to another one of those famous Peter MacNeill Reaction shots as his lips say, “Sure,” but his face says, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

So we get something approaching a real A/B plot structure here, with our heroes heading out in the Jumpship while Hawk pursues Tank through the base. Cap does a strafing run against Dread’s launch facility (played by the same weird Egyptian-inspired tomb entranceway we’ve seen three or four times by now) in the Power Jet (Which I’m confused by now, since I was fairly sure it was only ever shown once or twice, but it seems to have become a staple now), but then abandons it to approach on-foot with Scout while Pilot… Basically just keeps the Jumpship warm I guess. For some reason, Scout has a bazooka now.

A young, blonde, female Dread Youth who isn’t Erin from last week but probably should have been oversees the launch sequence from within the base. Scout and Cap try a reprise of the strategy from “Wardogs” by having Scout do his Lord Dread impression, but the camera moves to Not-Erin’s left to shockingly reveal Blastarr, whose video-toaster-vision reveals that he isn’t fooled by Scout’s holograms. Scout crumples to his first shot, but luckily for our heroes, Blastarr’s aim is utterly shit, as he only gets within the neighborhood of hitting anyone one more time, and Cap just shrugs that one off. Not-Erin decides to leg it while Cap and Blastarr exchange useless shots for a bit until Scout wakes up. Since apparently, Scout isn’t allowed to upstage Cap, he doesn’t actually do anything effective to Blastarr, but his ineffective firepower does prompt the Bio-Dread to turn, so his shield is pointed the wrong way when Cap retrieves the bazooka and lets him have it. There’s a nice little sequence of Blastarr howling in pain, then we’re treated to the same loop of Blastarr falling to his knees we’ve seen in every other Blastarr fight, though this time, Cap head-shots him while he’s down. As per usual, once Blastarr stops moving, everyone forgets about him rather than continuing to shoot until he’s reduced to rubble.

In accordance with the laws of dramatic necessity, our heroes reach the control computer just as the countdown reaches 1, and play a video clip of a rocket exploding in the air. Which is weird since I had assumed the countdown was time to launch. But hey, no time to celebrate yet: we’ve got that pesky B-plot to resolve. (Okay, technically, the B-Plot has already been resolved because they’d been cutting back and forth between them during the last two paragraphs, but it’s awkward to write it that way in prose, so I demuxed them for the purposes of my recap).

The long-awaited Hawk-vs-Tank fight scene is fairly straightforward. Hawk finds Tank. Tank picks Hawk up and pitches him at a computer bank. Hawk demorphs and cowers. We fall back on the old Captain Power standard plot resolution here, since just as it looks like Tank is going to beat the now-defenseless Hawk to death, it turns out that Tank’s not quite completely gone mad, and with some stock, “You’ve got to fight it!”-type encouragement from Hawk, shakes off the effects of the Styx drug long enough to power down and let Hawk take him to bed.

Later, we’re told that Mentor has synthesized a “serum” that will treat Tank… By rendering him unconscious until the poison wears off naturally. I choose to believe that “serum” is a euphemism for “A gallon of scotch.” Everyone has a hearty laugh at the thought of Hawk nearly being murdered by a good friend. Curiously missing is the usual scene where we cut back to Volcania to hear Lord Dread complain about his latest failure.

This episode isn’t great, but I don’t really know why. The structure should be solid, with a traditional Action-Adventure A/B plot structure, and our heroes actually accomplishing stuff — they manage to foil the Styx phase of Project New Order and they save Colonel Cypher — who, let me remind you, is a recurring character. We do get an at least minor variation on the typical Scout scene: rather than what we’ve seen every other time, with Scout using his disguises to cause a single moment of confusion before dropping the charade, his disguise is actually completely unconvincing this time.

But as a whole, this episode just feels weak. The plot with Tank is dealt with too quickly, and having Hawk simply talk him down is both cliche and unsatisfying. This could have been an opportunity to talk about Tank’s genetic enhancements and his own concerns about the violence in his nature as per “Final Stand”, but instead he spends half the episode just muttering, “Monsters! I keel you all!” There’s no rhyme or reason to why he’s able to shake it off at the critical moment — this would have been a great place to get into Tank’s character a little. You know that bit in The Avengers where Mark Ruffalo says, “I’m always angry”? You could play with the idea that Tank is always fighting to control his genetically engineered violent inclinations, and that’s why — even though he loses control temporarily — he’s ultimately able to overcome the Styx drug when the resistance fighters couldn’t.

But, y’know, we needed an extra few minutes of Cap and Blastarr shooting at each other instead. They pull out all the stops for the action in this one. There haven’t been any episodes until now that used this many of their fight scene resources all together: the Power Jet, Soaron, Blastarr, the Jumpship, and all five heroes in powered-on mode. But the price they pay is that the non-action sequences are greatly abbreviated. And honestly, fight scenes with Blastarr just aren’t that interesting for the most part. With Soaron, you at least have something dynamic going on with a dogfight. It may look cheap and the visual effects don’t quite work, and sometimes Soaron doubles in size, and there’s that tendency to have laser beams hit empty space and explode, but still, there’s stuff moving. Blastarr fight scenes are mostly like boss battles in a cover-based shooter. Blastarr just kind of stands there, shooting, and the heroes occasionally pop up from behind something hoping to get a lucky shot in. Then Blastarr drops to his knees and blacks out.

Scout plays an unusually large role in this episode: with Tank and Hawk shunted off to the B-plot, he’s the one who has Cap’s back in the big climactic fight, where it would normally be Hawk. But he still doesn’t do much. His dialogue is sparse, and he mostly just gets knocked down. Scout and Pilot have almost always been under-utilized, and Scout doesn’t even get a character focus episode this season.

This episode also falls short as the culmination of Styx. Pretty much since “The Ferryman”, we’ve been building up Styx as the next major checkpoint on the season-long plot arc. Styx figured into the plots of “And Study War No More” and “Flame Street”, but there’s no sense of this week’s plot being connected to anything that came before. The Styx information cap got from the Cyber Web has never come up since. Cap’s opening monologue explains that they’d intercepted a transmission leading them to go check on Cypher — they could just as easily have said something like, “We found a reference to Colonel Cypher’s resistance cell in the information we retrieved from Tech City,” and tied the ongoing plot together. Likewise, we actually saw barrels with the Styx logo in Haven. Instead of some random Dread Base we’ve never seen before, Mentor should really have just identified Haven as the source of the poison (Of course, to complicate matters worse, “And Study War No More” has a stardate of 47-9, while this one is 47-8, which means that diagetically, they haven’t been to Haven yet, and they discover their involvement in Styx only after Styx has been foiled, yet no one mentions the obvious irony in the pacifistic Haven manufacturing a chemical that induces violence.). Instead, after weeks of hinting at it, Styx proper just appears out of nowhere and is fairly easily foiled.

The nature of Styx is a bit weaksauce too. I mean, the cure is a good long nap. Actually, now that I think of it, “An outside influence causes people to become murderously violent. The cure is to induce a good long nap,” is the plot of an old Tomorrow People serial (“The Blue and the Green”. Cuckoo alien children need to induce strong violent emotions in their host species as part of their maturation cycle. They’re not crazy about the damage this is going to cause, but it’s the only way their species can induce menarche. Our heroes resolve the situation by inducing the entire human race to take a nap, so that the aliens’ balls can drop with the harm to humanity limited to some bad dreams and also car and plane crashes I assume.). It’s passable — the real threat isn’t the poison per se, but the the contamination of the water table, which would leave the west coast resistance without potable water. But that’s a fairly subtle and complex masterplan to lay out in the space of a couple of minutes between fight scenes. Both the flu strain from “Gemini and Counting” and the sleeping sickness from “Pariah” are much more straightforward illness-based threats, and I think it probably would have made the season overall stronger if they’d all been tied together: swap the flu from last week for a new form of the Pariah virus, and make the culmination of Styx be contaminating the water table with a waterborne variant. First we establish what the virus does, we show that it’s still communicable and it taxes the heroes’ resources to combat it even on the limited scale of the outbreak in the passages, then we confront them with the threat of it proliferating too fast for them to distribute a cure. You have a great “Oh crap” moment of escalation when you see that it took a dangerous gambit with Pilot putting herself on the line to stop the first outbreak, then discover that Dread’s plan will lead to an outbreak many times larger.

Instead, Styx as portrayed in this episode basically comes out of nowhere and disappears back into nowhere. It just doesn’t hang together. For those who are keeping score, Project New Order seems to pretty much be Dread’s masterplan of four totally unrelated schemes to wipe out humanity. He’s been working on these for years, and so far, our heroes have discovered and foiled two of the four stages in the span of about half an hour each. We didn’t even get a new Bio-Dread out of this one.

Oh well. Next week’s another character-driven episode, so maybe things will look up…

Happy New Year! It’s the tenth and/or eleventh of January, 1988. Since we went on hiatus back in November, George Michael has owned the top of the charts with “Faith”, except for the week of December 5, when Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” held the top spot, nudging George Michael down two spots. Michael Jackson, INXS, George Harrison, Whitesnake, Taylor Dane, and Jody Watley also chart. Whitney Houston has finally unseated George Michael as of this past Friday with “So Emotional”. A bunch of notable movies opened in December, including the Robin Williams hit Good Morning Vietnam, the iconic ’80s flick Wall Street, and The Hanoi Hilton, the biggest film role for he who must not be named, but since the first of the year, the only things on the new release list I’ve even heard of are Eighteen Again and Light Years(nee Gandahar, after the novel on which it was based, Les hommes-machines contre Gandahar) , a French animated film with an English translation by Isaac Asimov, which I found utterly incomprehensible as a child, but whose weird tagline (“In thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed; a thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved.”) stuck with me all the same. Margaret Thatcher is now the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and William Gladstone took turns serving about thirteen years apiece of the 34 years from 1868 to 1902 (Yes, I know it doesn’t add up. Benjamin Disraeli and Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery took turns in there too, the history of British Politics being an elaborate trap set up to cost valuable points on the AP European History Test). But not all long-serving leaders are as bad as Thatcher: for example, Robert Mugabe just became president of Zimbabwe. The Soviet Union has announced that they’ll be participating in the upcoming Seoul Olympics — a big deal since the US and the USSR took turns boycotting the last two out of spite. In the upcoming week, SCOTUS will rule that school boards can censor school newspapers, Sportscaster and Bookie Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder will make some racist comments about black athletes, and because it’s 1988 and not 2012, he’ll get fired for this but will not become a poster boy for how the “liberal media” has “gone mad” over “political correctness”. Sony concedes the First Great Home Video Format War and starts making VHS recorders. Employees and employers are stunned when health insurance rates go up 10-70%, but I’m sure that will be the wake-up call we need to get health care costs under control. The Justice Department announces that it’s going to start going after pornographers with racketeering charges, which surely will make it much harder for people to access images of people having sex over the next decade. It is very snowy.

Not much worth commenting on in the rest of the TV universe, though the second half of Flight of the Navigator was the Sunday movie on ABC. Star Trek the Next Generation is back with “The Big Goodbye”, which I think is one of the season’s highlights. It’s a Holodeck Malfunction episode, with Picard, Data, Crusher, and Lieutenant Bucky getting stuck in a pastiche film noir. Guess which one gets shot! The science is rather worse in this one than in the later Holodeck Malfunction episodes, but on the other hand, in 1988, there had never been a Holodeck Malfunction episode before, so this was all very fresh and exciting, rather than being very hackneyed and cliche. It is also, as part of its B-plot, the first instance of the Diplomatic Meeting Where Protocol Requires You To Perfectly Recite Some Long Speech in An Alien Language Your Tongue Isn’t Designed For On Threat of Death if You Mispronounce Anything, which would later turn up in Futurama and Star Trek Enterprise, but here it’s still very fresh and new, and there is really nothing too bad about this episode other than the fact that they shoehorn in another “Wesley Crusher Saves the Day” bit. At the time, it was criticized for being too similar to TOS’s “A Piece of the Action”, on account of it containing people in fedoras and the critics having stopped paying attention after they saw the people in fedoras, because other than that, the two have balls-all to do with each other.

Elsewhere, “Gemini and Counting”. Twelve episodes in, and we’re finally going to get a character focus episode for Pilot. It’s another episode where the plot is kind of secondary to what the episode is really doing, which is one big character scene in the middle. In fact, the plot is almost depressingly simple: there’s a flu bug going around in the passages, they don’t have the ingredients to cook up the vaccine, so Pilot breaks into a Dread Youth-staffed pharmaceutical lab and steals some. If this were MacGyver, the episode would feature a series of problem-solving scenes where Mac uses his ingenuity to get past locked doors and evade guards. If it were Doctor Who, there’d be a series of the Doctor getting captured then escaping at least six times. But this show is half an hour long, so we don’t have time for that: Pilot breaks in, finds what she needs, and leaves. There’s no twist or complication that ever seriously jeopardizes her mission, or any serious danger that she’s going to be caught or killed. Yet.

Which is not to say that this episode is conflict or tension-free: it’s just that all that is, essentially, an aside to the overall plot of the episode. We open in the passages, the heretofore unseen, nebulously defined place where Cap occasionally sends refugees who don’t meet some arbitrary definition of already having a suitable hovel in which to cower. The establishing shot is nice, but sadly, we don’t have time to really get any sense of what life is like down there, or where “there” is, except that I’m pretty sure it’s a redress of the Tech City set from last episode. It’s got that same kind of underground-strip-mall thing going on. Cap and company are warned that there’s a serious chance of an epidemic if they can’t get the supplies they need to manufacture large amounts of flu vaccine, and presumably George Bush and John Kerry start posturing about which of them is manly enough to forgo vaccination (Yes that was a thing. Not even making it up. There was a big thing in aught four where rather than compelling drug companies to take a loss on stepping up vaccine manufacture, the political propaganda machines of the US tried to turn skipping vaccinations into a machismo thing, implying that a healthy man who got vaccinated was just being a pussy. It was like a weird reversal of those WWII-era propaganda ads telling women that smoking was unwomanly and asking them to save our country’s strategic cigarette reserve for “those for whom God intended them: our fighting men overseas”. Yes. Really. God wants soldiers, not women, to smoke.).  Fortunately, Pilot remembers from her Dread Youth days that there’s a pharmaceutical factory, which I assume is in sector 3 (Sector 3: where everything in the fucking world is) staffed entirely by The Littlest Nazis as part of the Dread Youth’s Summer Internship Program, and she’s fairly sure they could shoot their way in and steal what they need because a bunch of kids playing Nazis would be like lambs to the slaughter before Captain Power’s fighting force sneak in unnoticed and steal what they need, and Pilot, with her inside knowledge, volunteers to go under cover.

I’ll point out that, according to the series bible, Pilot was ten when Cap liberated her from the clutches of the Dread Youth, and she’s presumably in her early twenties now, so we’re talking about some decade-old knowledge. Even Cap questions her on this, but Pilot just kind of waves it off. She also insists that she has to go in unarmed, as she couldn’t possibly hide her spandex leotard under a Dread Youth uniform, even though the thing covers so much skin that even a Victorian would probably suggest they’re a bit repressed. Fortunately, her old Dread Youth uniform still fit, and we get some great physical acting from Jessica Steen as she emotes half a dozen flavors of discomfort, shame and anger while she adjusts it.

There’s an obligatory action scene as the rest of the team dispatches a patrol outside to stop them noticing the Jumpship, because we’ve forgotten that it has a chameleon circuit, then sneaks inside. She dispatches the first guard she meets, apparently using the Vulcan neck pinch, but is forced to shoot the second one in the leg. I’m not sure, and can’t find any credits to back it up, but I think this second soldier, Erin, is the same one the camera stops on for an otherwise inexplicable close-up during the Dread Youth Graduation scene back in “The Ferryman”. Of course, since that was graduation, she really shouldn’t be Dread Youth any more but an “Overunit”.

That’s Laurie Holden from The Walking Dead by the way.  Her performance here is nothing special, but she does a really good job of playing the character she’s clearly written to be: a younger version of Pilot. She’s unsure, but masks it with indignance and bravado, accusing Captain Power’s gang of being barbarians. Jennifer restrains and gags her, but promises to return. Inside a hastily redressed set recycled from every other time they’ve needed a “clean-style future” set, Pilot cold-cocks a technician, and swaps her Dread Youth uniform for a technician’s, because this somehow will be more discrete. She politely declines to take his key card as well, instead relying on her sonic dildo to unlock the door to the lab. There’s a few nice touches here, though. Namely, a Lord Dread propaganda poster that looks suspiciously like the Nick Gaetano Ayn Rand covers. Those date from about five years after Power, so it’s probably just coincidence with a splash of “they’re both intentionally trying to conjure up a 1930s deco sort of feel,” I mean, and yes of course I am being deliberate when I make this comparison, it’s also kinda reminiscent of this poster for The Triumph of the Will.

Pilot grabs what she needs and sneaks out. This feels like maybe a bit of a cheat, since she grabs a little satchel of bottles which is roughly the same size as the little satchel of bottles that hadn’t been enough back in the first scene. But maybe this is concentrated or something. It’s a minor complaint. She also snags a first aid kit so she can clean up Erin’s leg. They have a little heart-to-heart where they take turns reciting the Dread Youth oath:

The world is imperfect
We will make it perfect.
Mechanized, immortal, human minds
In undying metaloid bodies
We are the body electric,
Dread’s eyes
We are his fist.
With our blood and our trust,
He shall mold the new tomorrow

She explains a bit about being human and having feelings and all that jazz, though there’s not much meat to it; her argument basically boils down to, “Hey, did you know that the side you are on is actually evil? Why not try good for a change?” It’s not clear to me whether this argument is working for her, and anyway, someone finally notices that missing patrol from earlier. Dread is, as always, personally notified, and dispatches Soaron, because, again, Lord Dread does not believe in middle management.

As Pilot makes her escape, Cap has to fire up the Power Jet, which surprises the heck out of me because I coulda sworn that the Power Jet only appears in “The Ferryman” and “A Summoning of Thunder”. After how Hawk-heavy the first quarter of the season was, it seems like he’s really vanished into the background for this part. I think he only has one line in the whole episode, and it’s to tell Pilot, “You took a big risk.”

Pilot shoots her way past some mechs, but Erin briefly channels the powers of a slasher movie villain and manages to be just behind her despite having a severe limp and possibly still having been tied up. She insists unconvincingly that she’s still loyal to Dread, but since she’s reluctant to actually shoot, they basically just stare at each other until Tank shows up on a hoverbike. Tank’s apparently read the script, because even though Pilot cautions him not to shoot, it’s not like he raises his weapon, or really even acknowledges Erin’s presence at all. Pilot invites her to come with, but politely offers the alternate suggestions of shooting her to become a hero among the Dread Youth, or just going home and pretending none of this ever happened. Erin chooses option C and allows Pilot and Tank to withdraw unmolested. Later, Pilot speculates that she’s “cracked her armor” and hints that she may have planted a seed that might lead to Erin someday making a heel-face turn. Presumably these seeds of disloyalty lead to her being caught and digitized by her comrades, because we never see Erin again.

The stardate on this episode places it just about a week after “Flame Street” — based on the best guess I can make about how stardates work, “Final Stand” and “The Mirror in Darkness” both took place in July, while “Flame Street”, “Gemini and Counting”, and next week’s “And Madness Shall Reign” are in August, as is “Freedom One”, though that one, like “A Summoning of Thunder”, which should have fallen immediately after “The Intruder”, were aired out of order.

Which makes this one kind of an oddball. It feels very much like the episodes from earlier in the season. The plot of course is very similar to “Final Stand”, down to the contrivance of the hero not being able to wear their power suit, and it’s got the same kind of structural problems that plagued all the episodes up through “The Ferryman”: everything feels forced and obligatory. Obligatory mech battle at the five-minute mark, obligatory Soaron aerial battle at the fifteen. No real obstacles for the heroes to overcome, and in fact, the actual plot is entirely secondary and superfluous to what this episode is about. Dread himself is barely in the episode either, and frankly I think it would have been better to leave him out altogether. His appearance seems quite literally down to, “His contract says he has to be in every episode,” and really adds nothing. The best thing I can say about it is that our heroes actually accomplish something in the main plot of the episode, unlike so many of the early-season episodes where the presence of the Power team is more or less irrelevant. Also, Blastarr and Lakki are conspicuous by their absence — this is the first time we’ve had a Blastarr-free episode since he was introduced. There’s also absolutely nothing to do with Project New Order in this one, after it’s dominated the narrative for weeks. And we’re only a couple of weeks away from Pilot’s other character focus episode, “Judgment”. It seems strange to put two so close together — of course, that one’s another “out of order” one, with a stardate in November.

Regardless of what order you put them in, though, this is our third “evil counterpart” episode, after pairing Tank with Kasko in “Final Stand” and Cap with Jason in “The Mirror in Darkness”. Now that I think of it, I really wish “The Abyss” had done something to parallel Hawk as the “good” soldier against General McCrazy as the “bad” soldier, because we’d have some really nice symmetry going then. And it does work a lot better here than it did in the other two: Kasko’s too much of a cartoon and Tank’s too much of a cypher; Cap seems to go bizarrely mental and Jason’s too thin of a character. But with Erin set up so straightforwardly as being “Basically just like Pilot was in the past,” we’re basically getting a backstory-flashback for Pilot without actually having to sideline Jessica Steen in favor of a child actor for a whole episode (Which is, of course, what they’re going to do with Cap in a couple of weeks). The best part of this is that by translating what was a backstory about Cap and Young-Jennifer into story between Pilot and Erin, we completely bracket the (very slowly) building arc about Pilot carrying a torch for Cap: whatever Pilot is meant to be doing to “crack” Erin’s “armor,” it’s not based around happy pantsfeels. All the same, this episode doesn’t really have the solid footing around its emotional center that the better episodes have had. It’s hard to swallow that Dread Youth indoctrination is so flimsy that “One of those rebel scum I’ve been taught to hate and view as mindless barbarians bandaged my leg after she shot me,” is enough to give Erin an existential crisis. It’s good, great even, that Erin ends this episode still asserting her loyalty to Dread — that Pilot only accomplished as much as to plant the first seeds of doubt rather than prompting her to full-on reject her Dread Youth upbringing — but I still feel that their interaction never gets around to actually conveying this alleged armor-breaking. And for that matter, Pilot’s sense of Erin as being like a younger version of herself is kind of weaksauce too. It seems to amount to no more than, “She’s a blonde girl who is loyal to Dread because that’s all she knows,” which, yeah, is entirely valid, but how is Erin any different from anyone else in the Dread Youth? She wordlessly dispatches another soldier just seconds before meeting Erin and never gives him a second though. Why does Erin merit this chance at redemption and not Nameless Dread Soldier #456? There’s no answer other than “Because the plot says so,” and it seems kind of venial and capricious for it. Pilot puts her life on the line to help Erin rather than cold-cocking her and being done with it her basically because she’s a pretty blonde girl. Pilot’s calling her, “my young twin,” but all I keep thinking is, “You let one of them go, but that’s nothing new. Every now and then, a little victim’s spared because she smiled, because he’s got freckles, because they begged. And that’s how you live with yourself. That’s how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind’s in the right direction, you happen to be kind.” I don’t mean to accuse Pilot of being like Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, but Pilot doesn’t have so much as a second thought about knocking out anyone else she happens upon and just leaving them tied up in closets, so the fact that the one she stops to have a heart-to-heart with just happens to look a bit like her is… suspect.

Nothing I’ve read about season 2 suggests that there were any plans to bring Erin back in the future, which is a shame. Much like “The Intruder”, “Gemini and Counting” feels like a story that would have been better as the first chapter in an ongoing narrative than as a stand-alone piece never to be revisited. Grooming Erin to be Pilot’s replacement would be too obvious, but I think she’d be a great foil to have the characters encounter repeatedly over time — we could see her react differently to each member of the team, building up to a fateful meeting with the Captain himself. And having a sympathetic enemy character would do a lot to make the conflict of the show more interesting, and give us some more variety to how the villain side of the story is told. What might have been.

Next week’s episode will bring us back to the “Project New Order” story arc, but I’m thinking that before we do that, there’s one more little diversion I want to go on. See you then.

Let us skip ahead a bit in time. I have no particular grand overriding reason for this beyond the fact that I feel like it and mentioning “Whackets” last time reminded me of something. You know that thing you have in shows sometimes where you’ve got one character who’s a kind of an intellectual weirdo, possibly a high-functioning sociopath or even someone with a spectrum disorder, and they’ve got a partner who is (at least in an academic sense) not as smart but is able to act like a normal decent human being, and They Fight Crime? It’s not exactly an unusual trope — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle kinda made it the default way to write crimefighting duos back in the 19th century. Holmes and Watson. Poirot and Hastings. KITT and Michael Knight.

Some time around the turn of the ’90s, though, it seems like one particular configuration became really popular — popular enough that I’m kind of surprised I can’t find a TVTropes page about it. I’m specifically talking about the Mulder-n-Scully combination: a smart but weird and offputting man and a more traditional, socially-ept woman.

You see this pattern repeat a bunch of times over the following decades: Abby and Connor on Primeval; Linley and Havers in The Inspector Linley Mysteries; Jane and Rachel in The Mentalist; Grissom and Catherine (or Sarah. Whichever) in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation; Johnathan and Maddy, Carla or Joey in Jonathan Creek, Castle and Beckett in Castle; Monk and Natalie in Monk; Jacob/Ian and Rachel in Eleventh Hour; and probably the most recent and obvious example: Sherlock and Joan Watson from Elementary. (By the way, is it just me or are a lot of these examples British? Is this a thing British people particularly like?)

There’s a lot of variability in the way the roles are played, but the setup boils down to “Holmes and Watson, only Watson is (shocking twist music) a girl!“. The stereotype is for The Watson to be kind of stupid, thanks largely to the flanderization Nigel Bruce took the character through over the course of his long career as sidekick to Basil Rathbone. But plenty of instances of the trope avoid that, drawing from the canonical Watson instead: obviously, Mulder and Scully are both hypercompetent professionals, but due to the world they live in, her job for the first five seasons or so is pretty much “to always be wrong, except in the clever subversion episodes.”  The real constants seem to be that the male character is a “defective” genius, and the female character is “normal” — by which I mean “not a genius”, though she could still be entirely competent in her field. Indeed, one of the more common variations is for the female character to be, say, a police officer, fully competent at being a police officer (while her counterpart lacks, say, the discipline for it), just lacking the special gift that makes the “real hero” worth keeping around. (In this regard, the female Lestrade of Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century might count too.) It’s absolutely a sexist trope, drawing on the whole mythology of women being “closer to earth” and men “closer to heaven”, with the male genius needing, in essence, a woman to keep him from floating off on flights of fancy, while, naturally the woman would be more socially ept and more possessed of “common sense”. It’s a shame, too, since it seems pretty clear to me that where the trope comes from is a genuine attempt to be more egalitarian, taking the traditional “Holmes and Watson” or “Man Friday” setup and making it less of a sausage party (The rather noisome thought occurs to me that this too may be a bit problematic, as I imagine some of these started out by someone wanting to do Holmes and Watson but suddenly worrying that it might be “a bit gay”) by swapping one of the men for a woman. But of course, it’s only ever the “Watson” who is a candidate for gender-swapping. The only example I can think of that goes the other way is Bones, and then she’s surrounded by a team of also-insufferable genius lab rats.

What seems a little strange to me is the difficulty I’m having thinking of older examples. You could maybe stretch The Avengers or Adam Adamant Lives! to fit, but neither Adam nor Steed really fit the “defective genius” mold. You could maybe stretch Sapphire and Steel to fit, but Steel doesn’t really fit the “genius” mold and Sapphire only fits the “normal” role by comparison to Steel. And maybe you could fit Doctor Who into this mold, but the dynamics are a lot different there. Also, that last little litany of examples really hammers home just how British this trope is. In fact, I can only think of one really unambiguous example predating the ’80s: Encyclopedia Brown. And he didn’t get his own show until 1989.

I don’t rightly know what kicked it off. The earliest TV example that’s a real solid match I can remember is a backdoor pilot made-for-TV-movie called The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which aired (checks IMDB) Well holy crap. 1987. The nexus of all realities strikes again. In this adaptation, Margaret Colin, who has been in lots of things none of which I have seen, plays Jane Watson, the great-granddaughter of the Ur-Sidekick. She inherits some of her ancestor’s belongings, leading her to the cryonically preserved Sherlock Holmes (Played here by Michael Pennington, who has also been in a bunch of things I’ve never seen, but also played “The guy Vader says ‘The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am,’ to in Return of the Jedi), who’d placed himself in suspended animation after Moriarty’s brother infected him with the bubonic plague using the exact same trick that Holmes had easily seen through in The Adventure of the Dying Detective. Modern antibiotics sort the problem out easily enough, leaving Holmes to travel to the US with Watson to solve a particularly tricky case based on deduction, since he apparently doesn’t remember that it’s the exact same plot as The Sign of Four. Also, there’s a really funny scene where Holmes tries to update his knowledge of the world by visiting a bookstore without giving Jane a chance to explain what an “Adult Bookstore” is. And they go to London Bridge in Lake Havasu. Also, little bit of trivia: Margaret Colin guested in an episode of Elementary‘s second season.

Unless you count those times Basil Rathbone’s Holmes fought the Nazis, I think that was actually the first time someone did a literal “Sherlock Holmes in the modern day.” (It is not, oddly enough, the first female Watson; there’s two separate, unrelated movies from the ’70s which both revolve around a modern man suffering from the delusion that he is Holmes under the care of a female psychiatrist named Watson). I mean, the actual literal Sherlock Holmes rather than “A modern crime-solving duo clearly based on Holmes.” This is the original Sherlock and the original Elementary. And since the setup is “The canon Holmes is resurrected many years later by a gender-flipped descendant of a a canon character to solve crimes lifted pretty directly from the canon, though Holmes doesn’t recognize this despite the assumption that the canon stories also all happened,” rather than just the modern day being his natural time and place, it’s even moreso the original Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (Though, in a weird move for a children’s cartoon, their Holmes was not frozen, but dead; Lestrade uses 22nd century nanotechnology to reanimate and restore youth to his well-preserved corpse centuries after he’d died of old age. The fact that the police can cure death is never brought up again.). That said, this was “Sherlock Holmes collides with the audience’s actual world” in a way that neither Sherlock nor Elementary are: the “present day” Sherlock occupies is one in which Sherlock Holmes exists as a character. It’s “our world” (or at least, the world where the Literary Agent Hypothesis is true, and Doyle was really just the “editor” for a real Watson) in that if a tall man in a deerstalker cap with a calibash pipe introduced himself as “Sherlock Holmes”, everyone would assume he was a cosplayer — and indeed, Holmes uses the pseudonym “Siegerson” when dealing with strangers, realizing that no one would believe him if he used his real name (Whereas only a Holmesian would tick to something being up if a tall, thin guy who’s good at sleuthing called himself “Siegerson”).

The pilot never went to series, which isn’t too surprising (What is surprising: they did pretty much the exact same movie again in 1993’s 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns). It was good enough for a TV movie, sure, but the idea wasn’t quite baked enough to keep going for more than a week. There’s too much of an inherent problem in having Sherlock be both the world’s greatest detective and also a fish-out-of-water who has to stop and marvel at things like electric lightbulbs and pornography if you stretch it out past about ninety minutes. If Holmes remains a kind of “funny foreigner” archetype who doesn’t understand the world he lives in, it undermines his intelligence: the whole thing becomes a succession of “Oh yeah? If he’s so smart why doesn’t he know what a digital watch is?” jokes. Alternatively, if he acclimatizes himself to his surroundings, he ceases to feel authentically Holmsean, so why bother with the whole reanimation nonsense instead of just creating a new Holmes-like character? Besides, Michael Pennington is, again, a perfectly good actor, but I don’t think he has the charisma to carry the series — at least not this series. He’s playing your classic-style Sherlock, in the deerstalker-n-calibash tradition that originated with William Gilette in 1899. But Jeremy Brett had already been doing his more book-authentic “straight” version that for a few years now, and frankly, once you’ve watched Jeremy Brett’s Holmes, there is really nothing new anyone is going to bring to the role until Robert Downey Jr. Robert Downy Jr.s the character up a few notches in 2009. With its Watson as a capable private detective in her own right, the setup is within spitting distance of trying to be Remmington Steele: a competent female detective, despite being good at her job, can’t quite cut it on her own without that little something extra that only a man can provide. That setup has some nasty implications in it. Remmington Steele works around this because the details of its setup make it a critique of the problem rather than simply embracing it: Laura Holt invents Steele as a public face for her agency because society won’t accept a woman in the role of a detective. He is her judgment on her culture’s gender roles: you won’t hire a good detective because she hasn’t got a penis? Fine. Here’s a vacuous moron with testicles. Hire him instead. (It’s a little interesting to me that this is almost exactly the same premise of the Holmes parody Without a Clue, with “respectable physician” in place of “woman”) The joke just doesn’t work as well here. They get it right by making Jane Watson a competent detective in her own right, but for this whole “Defective Genius Man / Effective Babysitter Woman” thing to work, they need to move away from the model of “She needs him because a woman isn’t good enough on her own,” to the model of “He needs her because his genius isn’t worth much if he can’t function in society.”

Which brings me, finally, to the point of this article.  It is March 7, 1988. Divine and Robert “Bob” Livingston die. Star Trek The Next Generation is on week 2 of a two week break. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future ended on a cliffhanger which I will get to in time. We are in the back nine of the nexus of all realities, but we have hit upon a key moment in musical history, because some time between last Friday and this Friday, George Michael’s “Father Figure” will be unseated from the top spot on the BIllboard Hot 100 in favor of a little ditty by a fellow named Rick Astley, making YouTube as we know it possible.

This week’s episode of MacGyver is “The Negotiator”, a story in which a woman murders a dog to prove to the audience that she’s evil (This is a thing in TV. Villains and natural disasters will go out of their way to avoid killing dogs or babies, so showing a villain actually deliberately kill a dog is a shorthand to signal that someone is utterly irredeemable and isn’t going to pull any of that “Lady villain has a change of heart because the male hero is so studly,” bullshit). Immediately afterward, a new show premiers.

Friends since junior high, William Link and Richard Levinson had a long history of successful collaboration in the mystery genre. They’d created Columbo, Mannix, Ellery Queen, Murder She Wrote, and a pile of television movies. Levinson had unexpectedly died almost exactly a year earlier, so for this one, Link teamed up with Isaac Asimov.

Depending on how versed you are with his work, you might find that a strange pairing, but it’s not. Golden-Age Science Fiction and Whodunnit-style Mystery aren’t really all that different as genres: they both rely heavily on very clever and intricate set-ups, they tend to prioritize world-building over plot and character, they both tend to build toward a big reveal at the end, and they both tend to be judged good if the reveal is something the audience could have anticipated but didn’t, such as “The butler did it” or “It was Earth all along”. When they’re good, writing these kinds of stories is a bit like building a theme park, essentially a matter of setting up an enjoyable ride and then inviting the audience to come along with you (people like Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon are supremely good at this). But Science Fiction and Mystery both suffer from the tendency, when they’re done inexpertly, to rapidly devolve into the writer waging a one-sided competition against the reader, waiting to jump out and yell, “Gotcha!” as they reveal that they’re so much cleverer than the audience, and haven’t they earned a cookie and a gold star? You see this with the kind of mystery writers being mocked in the movie Murder By Death, or, say, season 7 of Doctor Who (Except that one, oddly, kept oscillating between screaming “Look how clever I am!” and “Silly nerd! You keep expecting it to make sense? Clearly you’re just supposed to turn off your higher reasoning and just enjoy the cheap emotional manipulation!”).

More to the point, Isaac Asimov wrote mysteries. On balance, I personally prefer his mysteries to his science fiction. For example, his “Black Widowers” series revolves around a cadre of men who meet once a month for dinner, and have taken to playing amateur detectives as they try (and fail) to solve a problem posed by a guest attendee, until the correct solution is inevitably deduced by their steadfast butler, a man described as being so pathologically honest that he is hypersensitive to deception. The stories read very much like Encyclopedia Brown stories if Sobol had been as good a writer as Isaac Asimov.

The two of them came up with a show that was a kind of science-themed Whodunnit, using the “Defective Genius / Babysitter” model, a model which, as close as I can tell, they invented. That show was Probe.

Parker Stevenson, winner of the Katee Sackhoff Award For Successfully Growing Out of Looking Like Dirk Benedict, plays Austin James, a reclusive eccentric genius, who founded the Random-hi-tech-stuff company “Serendip” but detests actually getting involved in its goings on. For reasons I can’t quite understand, the company doesn’t like their reclusive genius letting them do pretty much whatever they like except when he occasionally gifts them with a profitable new invention. I mean, I think it has something to do with them not wanting to pay the bills for the many projects he never brings to fruition, but no one ever comes out and says this in a way that doesn’t sound short-sighted and cartoonishly evil. To reign Austin in, Serendip foists a secretary on him, Mickey Castle, played by Ashley Crow (Who, in another ironic twist, would later guest on The Mentalist, another one of these shows about a reclusive weirdo genius and his female babysitter). They fight crime!

I mean, that’s about the size of it. Austin either happens into a mystery or Mickey nudges him onto it. Austin uses his superior knowledge of science science-flavored TV bullshit to solve the mystery, while Mickey does a lot of being wrong, being ditzy, suspecting ghosts, or saying, “What is it Doctor Austin?”

It probably sounds a bit CSI, and it is, but it’s even more The X-Files, bordering on Scooby-Doo Where Are You? with just a touch of MacGyver. We’re not talking about Austin and Mickey taking on your traditional serial killers here: Austin and Mickey face off against homicidal computers, faked alien invasions, and a killer who uses holography in his crimes. The modern show it reminds me of most is Eleventh Hour, which similarly had its detective/babysitter duo investigate crimes based around TV-superscience such as human cloning, cryonics, and weather control.

Eleventh Hour is perhaps a bit less whimsical. They’re going for a more “Ripped from Gizmodo headlines” sort of deal, where they take actual headline-making science, and just present it as being slightly better by delivering a thing which real-world scientists genuinely think they might soon accomplish, and just handwaving away practical rather than theoretical unsolved problems. So in Eleventh Hour, you have a rogue geneticist who’s found a practical way to do human cloning — we’ve been cloning animals since at least the fifties, and really by the time the show aired, the technical impediments to human cloning had been mostly solved (The actual genius thing their mad scientist had done is actually fallacious; she’d “solved” the problem of clones made from adult donors being born “genetically old”, that is, with the shortened telomeres of the donor rather than the longer ones of a newborn. But clones aren’t born with short telomeres; that was just popular unfounded speculation when Dolly the Sheep, cloned from a 7-year-old, died at 6 rather than at the more sheep-normal 12. But there was no evidence that early senescence was involved; she died of a common sheep cancer at the age that cancer usually kills sheep.).  In Probe, by contrast, you’ve got an orangutan with artificially-boosted intelligence who murders an animal-rights advocate (She didn’t want those PETA folks shutting down her cushy gig) because her sense of conflict-resolution came entirely from watching Westerns, and then frames herself because her knowledge of criminal justice came entirely from cop shows (Since we all know, the person who seems obviously to have done it in the first five minutes is always innocent). You laugh, but it’s like 2/3 of the way to being the plot of The Murders at the Rue Morgue.

If we imagine “science-flavored mystery” as existing along a spectrum, at one end, we can put a show like Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, a fun little teen series from around the turn of the century which is basically what you’d get if you took leftover Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or more likely, the animated spin-off they’d talked about making at one point) scripts, crossed out “magic” and pencilled in “science”: a boarding school is built on top of a hellmouth wormhole, and shenanigans ensue, which the heroes pretend are fully explicable as being due to Science! and which they solve using their own greater Science!, such as “a computer virus makes the species-jump to infect buildings,” or “If you don’t feel like people notice you, your quantum state changes causing you to stop interacting with light, thus turning invisible (Yes! It literally is the same plot as an episode of Buffy).” At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got stuff like CSI and MacGyver: approximately real-world situations being solved by real applications of real scientific principles, it’s just that putting those principles into practice works a whole lot better (and faster, and more visually appealing) than they would in the real world: PCR DNA amplification is a real thing that really works, it’s just a lot slower in the real world. Luminol is a real thing that really works in the real world, it’s just not as visually impressive and you need a lot more control of the ambient lighting. And you really can make thermite from rust and aluminum shavings, but scraping a rusty bicycle with your Swiss Army Knife is not a feasible way to do it (Though I wonder if I could start a fire with my magnesium pencil sharpener…). Eleventh Hour is up near the CSI end. Something like The X-Files is down toward the Blake Holsey end (Its more science-flavored episodes at least, like the one about the man whose body was made entirely of cancer, thus ending the short run where fans all referred to the guy who would later be known as the “Cigarette-Smoking Man” as “Cancer Man”).

Probe falls somewhere in the middle. The first episode, retroactively titled, “Computer Logic” pits Austin against a mainframe that’s been placed in charge of public utilities. The computer’s developed an intelligence, as mainframes sometimes did in the ’80s, but rather than wanting to take over the world or anything like that, it just wants to maximize shareholder value by murdering pensioners, the disabled, and anyone else whose continued survival doesn’t meet its threshold for being a positive contributor to society. That’s a really beautifully ’80s science fiction concept and all, but we’ve probably moved past “Modern-day Holmes and Watson fight crimes with science” as this show’s high concept. Though we do get to see Parker Stevenson take a fireaxe to a computer while shouting “Sing Daisy!” There’s actually a vaguely similar episode of Eleventh Hour, but instead of an AI mainframe, the culprit is a child prodigy who’s killing off under-performing classmates to bring up test scores.

In the second episode, “Untouched by Human Hands”, Austin has to investigate a death when he can’t get to the body due to radiation from a proton decay experiment gone wrong. This is kind of a blast from the past: the setup is very “Ripped from the cover of Popular Science.” The equivalent would be if someone did an episode of, say, the Mentalist, where someone is murdered by someone sabotaging a Higgs Boson experiment. Proton Decay was an exciting area of research back in the ’80s. Like the Higgs, it’s one of those things which the popular theories of how the universe works predict, but which had never been observed. Unlike the Higgs, it still hasn’t been observed, and the evidence suggests that the universe isn’t old enough for a proton to have actually decayed yet. The big twist comes up when Austin uses his Sherlock Holmes skills to determine that the murdered man isn’t who he appears to be. The alleged victim does turn out to be dead, though, murdered by his accomplice: a lab robot. He’d intended to fake his own death by having the robot kill a hobo, but then foolishly triggered the murder-program while making his escape. Then Austin gets the definition of a palindromic prime wrong. He gets it so wrong that he claims prime numbers are divisible by 11 (Palindromic numbers which aren’t prime are divisible by 11. Except for 11, which is palindromic, prime, and divisible by 11).

Episode 3, “Black Cats Don’t Walk Under Ladders, Do They?” is, on the surface, the B-plot from Metal Gear Solid: a series of murders are carried out using deadly bacteria that have been genetically modified to attack a specific victim, with a B-plot about the power of suggestion. Then we get “Metamorphic Anthropoidic Prototype Over You,” which is the one about the killer ape, and “Now You See It”, the one about holograms — someone looking to ruin Austin’s company fakes deadly elevator malfunctions using holograms to lure people into empty elevator shafts. Unfortunately, this show is no Star Trek the Next Generation: the “hologram” effect is a pretty amazingly cheap split-screen shot. I mean, technically, I guess it may actually look a bit more “realistic” by virtue of the lack of visual swirlies and suchlike, the same way that the ’70s live-action Spider-Man looked more realistically like a dude wearing a home-made spandex costume. Except right at the end where Mickey’s hand passes through a holographic file box and comes out the other side about ten feet closer to the camera than it entered.

Episode 6, “Plan 10 From Outer Space,” is practically a Scooby-Doo homage. An eccentric writer reveals that his novels have all been coauthored by an alien visitor, who has now turned violent, and promptly murders him. Austin determines that the “alien” is actually ball lightning caused by the presence of a large chunk of meteoric iron under the house, coupled with the writer’s presumed schizophrenia. For his next trick, he manages to trigger a ball-lightning strike, during which he tricks the real murderer into a confession using a slide projector. There’s a variation on the urban legend about a murder victim’s eyes retaining the murderer’s image, as Austin’s set-up is a farce based on the claim that the victim’s electrocution could cause sunglass lenses to act like film.

For my money, the best episode of the series is its last, the reason we’re talking about it today: “Quit-It” pits Austin and Mickey against a small community whose denizens have turned into Stepford Smilers and have become strangely subservient to their delinquent children.

This episode is one of my strongest early memories of major plot misdirect in a show like this. As the title suggests, Mickey and Austin spend most of the episode working from the theory that the culprit is a smoking cessation aid. The twist comes near the end when Austin analyzes the “Quit-It” pill and finds it to be a placebo. The actual mind-control vector is subliminal messages hidden in the cassettes being played on the Hi-Fi’s in nearly every scene. It turns out that the smarmy ad exec dad in town had lucked onto discovering a method of embedding ultra-powerful, ultra-precise subliminal messages, only to fall victim to his own creation when the neighborhood’s many delinquent children discovered the equipment and started recording messages of their own. You can see now why “Whackets” put it in my mind. I think it was the two of them happening within a few months of each other that burned this pair of episodes into my memory. “Whackets” and “Quit-It” are the episodes of their respective programs that I remember the best, and concept of subliminal mind control is something I worked into a half-dozen short stories I wrote over the next few years. Austin produces a counter-message, freeing the town, then uses one last message to induce everyone to forget the whole thing, lest this technology be exploited again.

Unfortunately, Austin may have turned his subliminal signal up too high: the show vanished without a trace six weeks after its premier. It’s so vanished that I couldn’t even find any fansites whose web design didn’t scream late 90s (A few had dates later than that, but it’s hard to deny the evidence of the <marquee> tag) and were full of broken geocities links.  It’s not really hard to see why. It was up against The Cosby Show for one, which either shows a great deal of faith by the network, or that they’d already given up. The theme music is almost painful. I can’t find a name for it, so I don’t know if it’s an original composition; it sounds classical, (but then so does the theme from Knight Rider, if you ignore the synth), but performed on a Cassio keyboard during a long, long, long, long, long, long collage of black and white photos that young Parker Stevensons and Ashley Crowes have been airbrushed into. And, to be completely honest, I have an easier time buying Parker Stevenson as a lifeguarding lawyer than as a super-genius.

But that’s all superficial. Really, the show is just much better on paper than in practice. I love this concept. I love it every bit as much as I would love it twenty years later when they called it Eleventh Hour. But this wasn’t the right way to do it. There are a few problems here. First, half the plots in seven episodes involve Austin begrudgingly stepping in to help his own company out of a jam. There’s a pleasant old-timey “Wealthy Self-Made Man who Loathes Actually Being Involved in Business” vibe to Austin’s backstory — the sort of “rich guy slumming it” routine that used to be a popular adventurer backstory. It’s more than a little problematic, but if you can bracket it, there’s a well fleshed-out tradition to enjoy dating back to its origins in the “Victorian Gentleman Adventurer” archetype. But to a great extent, Probe wants to be not just “Holmes and Watson in the 80s”, but “Columbo with superscience” — with Austin clearly drawing from Columbo’s “Clever weirdo whose eccentric behavior exasperates criminals into revealing mistakes.” That’s a setup that just works better when you juxtapose the upper-class criminals with the working-class detective. When the plots compel Austin to leverage his role as the president of Serendip Inc., it becomes difficult to bracket the fact that Austin is, essentially, a rich white guy protecting what’s his in those stories.

Really, they just don’t hit the sweet-spot for the “Defective Genus and Normal Babysitter” trope. Austin isn’t defective enough and Mickey isn’t normal enough. Austin’s described as an eccentric, misanthropic introvert. But in practice, he’s more of a smug asshole. It takes very little effort to get him involved in things and his social awkwardness boils down pretty much entirely to “He’s pathologically unable to let any chance to show off his superior intellect or insult someone else’s inferior intellect.” The setup notwithstanding, there’s no clear reason why Austin needs a babysitter; yes, he’s weird. He sleeps in a cabinet (A habit he’d developed as a child because he wanted a sensory deprivation tank). He makes silly gadgets. But it’s not clear who his behavior inconveniences or how exactly Mickey is supposed to make things better.

And conversely, Mickey isn’t “normal”; she’s almost serenely clueless. Her basic purpose here is strictly to be wrong. All the time. I mean, there’s a few attempts to have her be the one who pulls Austin back on his flights of fancy, but the show always qualifies this by throwing out the suggestion that Mickey was in fact just falling victim to some of Austin’s obfuscating weirdness: he’ll turn around at the end and insist it had all been a clever ruse, either to trick the villain of the week, or, in some cases, purely to shame her. That’s ugly enough in itself, but when you couple it with the fact that she’s basically playing Nigel Bruce at his worst (Bruce played Watson quite a lot, and sometimes he does play a compelling and/or canon-accurate Watson, but at other times, he’s basically responsible for the until-recently-universal notion of Watson as a complete moron), only cast as a “ditzy secretary”, it’s just painful. Her purpose is to be pretty and provide sexual tension and to make Austin look smarter by virtue of her being profoundly, profoundly stupid. I want to like her. I almost like her. But the person I actually like is a sort of imaginary “meta-Mickey”: one who’s engaging in a bit of obfuscating stupidity of her own, and is actually subtly manipulating Austin this whole time. Unfortunately, there’s no actual evidence for that interpretation based on the handful of episodes we got.

[raw]I don’t know if this show could have been made to work here in the nexus. Maybe it’s just too early to pull it off. But Probe feels to me like it’s within spitting distance of The X-Files. Maybe, just maybe, they could have pulled it off. But not without some tweaking. Austin needs to be more, well, defective. When Austin James deigns to come down off his cloud and walk among the common man, he’s fine. A jerk, yes, but able to easily dominate the world of mere mortals. It’s all a bit Adam Adamant Lives!

In case you’re not familiar, Adam Adamant Lives! was what Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert did with themselves after creating Doctor Who. It’s about an Edwardian superspy who gets himself frozen for sixty years, waking up in the swinging sixties, whereupon he resumes his duties as a super-spy, foiling your standard James Bond-style plots with a small amount of “help” from his mundane, kidnapping-prone, mod secretary, and lots more help from his superlative skills at murdering people with his bare hands. Yes! It pretty much exactly is Austin Powers except serious and with the ’60s at the wrong end of the story. Except that Adam doesn’t do the “fish out of water who learns to appreciate that the modern day is better,” thing; he spends the entire series convinced that the ’60s suck and his time was much better. It’s like 90% a very straight 1960s Spy-Fi Thriller in the mold of The Avengers or Danger Man — with perhaps even more a bit of similarity to Star Trek‘s backdoor pilot “Assignment: Earth”, only with just a small hit of psychedelia to make the whole thing that much weirder. Season 1 is available on DVD, but the final season, sadly, is mostly lost due to the use of an archival system developed when a time traveler suggested they store it on Amazon’s color tablet system and the 1960s BBC misunderstood what was meant by “Kindle Fire”.

, with brilliance replacing a penchant for violence. But to the extent that Adam Adamant Lives! succeeded, it succeeded because it juxtaposed the superhuman Adam with a highly stylized, sort of camped-up version of the 1960s; it wasn’t trying to be a serious drama set in a recognizably real world: it was trying to be psychedelic spy-fi.

[/raw]
That approach doesn’t really work for Probe, which wants to play by the rules of crime drama rather than spy-fi: it may have AI supercomputers and enhanced apes, but it’s still a world that works by our world’s rules, where people kill people for love or money or anger, not one where supervillains want to take over the world by turning parliament into plant monsters. Adam was a man who was extraordinary in one direction in a world that was extraordinary in the other. Austin is just an extraordinary man in a mundane world. He needed to be vulnerable. The closest we get is in “Plan 10”, when Mickey deduces that he’d been terrified at being placed on a Mall Santa’s lap as a small child — a throwaway moment that’s gone in a flash and never followed up on. No, for this show to work, he needs an actual overt flaw. Make that (alleged, not demonstrated) introversion into a pathology. Give him social anxiety disorder. Make him actually need Mickey because he can’t handle stressful human interactions. Make it Mickey’s job to cover for him and jump on grenades for him. That can be the character arc for these two: rather than the clumsily forced sexual tension, which three episodes in has already extended to “Austin covertly sabotages her dates out of petty jealousy,” focus on their professional relationship: Austin starts off uncomfortable around her and resentful of her presence; Mickey interprets his anxiety as him being an asshole. But very quickly we get to a point where Austin has to proactively ask her for help. Then, later, as their relationship progresses, we show Mickey increasingly anticipating his needs and knowing when to interpose herself to “rescue” him, but leaving room for Austin to occasionally surprise her by unexpectedly being able to handle a tense social situation — only to reveal that he’s learning to cope because he has the security of trusting her to have his back.

The other half of this of course, is that we’d need a more competent Mickey. Drop the whole bit about her being credulous and assuming aliens (“Plan 10”), psychic powers (“Black Cats”) and pod people (“Quit-It”) are at work. Don’t conflate “Has no scientific background” with “Is an idiot”. Make her confident and competent: she doesn’t understand the science, but she doesn’t care; it’s not her field. She doesn’t engage in speculation about the science in the crime. What she knows is people. I’d even say that Austin should be wrong for the first half of the episode. He only sees the science, and it leads him astray because he’s applying it without understanding the context. He can sort out the what and the how, but only when Mickey provides the why (and, I hope it goes without saying, she does this because she understands human psychology, not because of “womanly intuition” or something.) The setup of her being a secretary hired by Serendip to reign him in doesn’t really work either. One of Elementary‘s cleverer innovations is to introduce Joan Watson as Sherlock’s “sober companion”, hired to help him recover from his drug addiction. It gives her a reason to be there that amounts to more than “She’s his sidekick.” I don’t know what would work for Probe. I abstractly like the setup of her being, say, a private detective, but that’s a bit fished out. Having her be his therapist works well with the dynamic I’ve described, but I don’t know how you’d set it up. Maybe Austin has a panic attack at a shareholder meeting and she’s forced on him to keep the investors happy. I don’t even know if that is a thing that can happen, but this is a show with murderous super-apes after all.

I think it could work. Because it has worked. Just not yet. The nexus is haunted. Like so many of the things we’ve encountered here, Probe is like a ghost sent back from the future. Austin James and Mickey Castle are like half-formed specters of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. This show could have been something. Some people blamed its failure on an audience that wasn’t ready for the kind of intellectual, attention-required storytelling that Probe was doing. I don’t know if the audience was ready to watch Probe in 1988, but I’m pretty sure the Hollywood TV industry wasn’t ready to make it.

(Once again, I mean to meander meaninglessly through my ancient television memories. You have been warned)

As with last week, I don’t really have much to say about this topic. That’s one of the disadvantages when it’s 2014 and you’ve decided to talk about something nostalgic that isn’t as ridiculously obscure as Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. You know how I complained about the fight scenes in the first six episodes of Captain Power, how they felt like they were only there out of contractual obligation (Which, after all, they were. Got to sell those toys after all)? That’s kinda how I feel about this.

But I’ve spent years now writing about science fiction television in 1987. Omitting this one would be like talking about the greatest train wrecks of history and neglecting the 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami rail disaster. Or like trying to talk about the worst cars ever made and forgetting the Pinto. Or like talking about the greatest train wrecks of history and neglecting Katherine Heigl’s career. It’d be borderline incompetent to talk about television in the Fall 1987-Spring 1988 Nexus of all Realities without mentioning Max Headroom.

The history of the character is almost over-documented; I can find a lot of material, but it’s contradictory. All sources agree, for example, that Max’s debut was in the 1986 British telefilm Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Or perhaps it’s called Max Headroom: The Original Story. Or maybe just Max Headroom.  In any case, it aired on April 4, 1985, and based on its success — everyone agrees on this — it was spun off into The Max Headroom Show, which first aired two weeks earlier, on March 22, 1985, at least according to Wikipedia. This was a music video show, with linking bits featuring Max as a parody of a late night talk show host, The talk show host bits were expanded for the follow-up, The Max Talking Headroom Show, which was made for either Channel 4 in the UK or Cinemax in the US, or maybe that didn’t happen until 1988; sources are conflicted. A Christmas special, Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey was part of that series. Or maybe part of the previous series. Or maybe a stand-alone special between the two or after both of them, and it aired on either Christmas or Boxing Day in 1986 or 1987 or 1988 or all three. In 1986, Cinemax aired an extended version of the TV movie, padded out with an extra half-hour, mostly of Max riffing. By 1987, the US market had fully appreciated the commercial power of Matt Frewer in a latex mask, and remade the British film as the pilot episode of Max Headroom. Or possibly this was the one called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Or maybe that was just a tagline. And maybe The Max Talking Headroom Show was a follow-up to that. Confused? Good.

To put things very, very simply, Max Headroom is quite possibly the single most ’80s thing in the whole of the ’80s. I mean, sure, there are things more iconic of the ’80s, and there are things that more accurately capture the look and feel of the ’80s. But if you took the whole of the ’80s, and pureed it, and rendered it down over low heat like some good leaf lard, the slurry you produced would congeal into the plastic Kryten-face of M-m-m-m-max Headroom. It’s a hyperbolic caricature of everything that made the ’80s what they were: that particular brand of cynicism that knew the end was coming any day now is reflected in the dystopian setting; ’80s counterculture’s angst about the increasing power of corporations is the overarching theme of all the series’s episode plots. And Max himself is the epitome of the ’80s obsession with artifice and performativity: a character who is himself pure performance: a character without an actor, very deliberately played as all the most “fake” attributes of a TV talk show host. Max also reflects the last remnants of the 80s belief in The Future: the idea that it was just “twenty minutes into the future” before we’d be able to upload a person’s mind into a computer and more-or-less recreate him as a latex-coated head or grow fetuses into babies in labs using the same technology we had, in 1987, only recently perfected as a means of growing raw meat and vegetables into a delicious pot roast.

Max Headroom comes from a dystopian near-future (Probably around 2006) ruled by vast, impersonal megacorporations run by the Japanese, where governments have become mere puppets of the major media conglomerates, where the poor are forced to dress like 1970s punk rockers and popular entertainment has degenerated into perverse bloodsports. See what I meant about it being the most ’80s thing in the ’80s? Also, you can smoke literally everywhere. Max’s backstory is that he’s a flawed AI reconstruction of ace reporter Edison Carter, made by his corporate masters in anticipation of having to off him because he Knew Too Much — specifically, that the network’s new high-speed commercials (the origin of our now-somehow-cromulent word “blipvert”) occasionally caused some viewers to explode. Max took his name from the overhead clearance sign Carter had seen immediately before a near-fatal motorcycle crash.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Max Headroom is the origin of pretty much everything in the public consciousness about Cyberpunk that didn’t come from Blade Runner. Emphasis on the “punk”. Max’s world is one of tremendous disparity: there’s a neat, clean, whiz-bang neat-o high-tech future full of 80s hair and shoulder pads and neon for the rich, while everyone else is left scrounging in the world’s many scrap heaps, unable to afford education (now only available via pay-per-view) or sleeves for their leather shirts, or even hair on the right or left sides of their head. They’re represented on the show primarily via “Blank Reg”, played by W. Morgan Sheppard, one of only three actors retained from the original telefilm (The other two are Matt Frewer as Edison/Max and Amanda Pays as Theora Jones, his “controller”, basically a combination of researcher, technical director and line producer). Reg runs the pirate station “Big Time Television”. One of the major differences between the original film and the series is that in the film, Max gets dumped in the trash almost immediately and spends the rest of the movie with Reg — Big Time being designed as an analogue to Channel 4, framing it as a plucky underdog compared to the Big Powerful Corporate Networks. Max and Edison never meet in this version — Max is essentially a side-show to the actual plot, making occasionally-relevant riffs, but not interacting with other characters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the version made for one of the US’s three major networks, Max and Edison become partners, with the network holding their nose and accepting Max’s anti-establishment antics because he brings in the viewers, and besides, the network itself isn’t really bad — they’d totally choose to not-be-evil if it weren’t for their responsibility to the shareholders and the advertisers.

Max Headroom became a cultural phenomenon, appearing in parodies, commercials, music videos. But for my money, the character from Max Headroom that had the most lasting influence wasn’t Max, but the series antagonist Ned Grossberg. Grossberg is basically the archetype for corrupt corporate villains in a science fiction setting. It would be easy enough to say that Ned Grossberg is just a Made-for-TV Gordon Gekko, but as Wall Street didn’t premier until December, 1987, it’s actually the other way around: Gordon Gekko is a Silver-Screen upgrade of Ned Grossberg, down to the slicked-back hair. He’s very much a 1980s-style Bond Villain: I’d even say that the Grossberg/Gekko archetype pretty much is Ernst Stavro Blofield reimagined with ’80s trappings. He’s the sort of guy who’d be mildly offended if you suggested that murdering someone should perhaps not be your first choice for how to deal with, say, being outbid on eBay. We meet him in the first episode pushing this excitingly lethal new advertising method and ordering the murder of his star reporter. He’s ousted from his position as president of Network 23 when this comes to light (In the film version, Edison simply threatens him with violence until he confesses on camera; in the series, Max is able to replay the incriminating evidence from Edison’s memory live on network TV), but returns later in the series to interfere with an election. The election doesn’t go his way, but it’s not clear whether this was his plan all along: he scuttles his own candidate in order to create a power vacuum that lets him take control of Network 66. He turns up again in the last episode to air, “Baby GroBags”, masterminding a plot to, ahem, kidnap newborns with a genetic predisposition toward intelligence to star in a “Baby Geniuses” series. Because Grossberg can just do stuff like that.

Pretty much everyone other than Carter and Theora are flat-out evil in the British version — their Grossberg is more of a thug than a corporate power-player. Bryce, the technical genius who creates Max, proposes the idea because he wants to kill Edison, and thinks the AI could be used to cover his disappearance (Hence Max’s fate for the rest of the movie: when it becomes clear this plan won’t work, they simply ditch him), and he’s sociopathically callous about the lethal side-effects of Blipverts. The American Bryce creates Max in the hopes of saving Carter: he’s trying to read the injured Carter’s memories, as Grossberg would spare the high-rated reporter if it turns out that he hadn’t seen anything too incriminating. Rather than being the brains of the operation, as in the TV movie, he’s more Grossberg’s misguided pawn, who, despite being a bit of an asshole, tends to do the right thing when he’s forced to think about the impact of his actions. The British version is very much “Evil Adric”, the American version, “Douchier Wesley Crusher”. Part of this, I’m sure, is the difference between American and British culture when it comes to humor, satire, and unlikeable characters, but on the other hand, they were shooting for a weekly series. There wasn’t really any way forward for Bryce and Max as recurring villain and comic relief, but there was as Edison’s sidekicks. Correspondingly, you can’t really imagine Edison continuing to work as a hard-hitting reporter for Ned Grossberg, so at the end of Blipverts, he’s voted out of power in favor of Ben Cheviot in a scene which is basically the same as the end of Robocop, only with less defenestration (I’m serious. The end of Robocop is “Robocop exposes the chairman of the board for his supervillany, and the board votes him out in favor of the Old Guy with Old Timey Business Values about doing the right thing instead of murdering the poor for profit, thus releasing Robocop from his contractual obligation to Never Enforce The Law Against a Board Member. So he tosses him out the window”). The “Old Man” represents a kindlier more old-fashioned sort of Robber Baron. He’s still beholden to ratings and advertisers, but you get the feeling that he’s got those Old Timey Values, and that he wants to win by producing a better product, contrasted with Grossberg, who would really prefer to produce no product at all and just obtain ratings from, let’s say, sacrificing orphans to Mammon.

In the context of the meander through 1987 I’ve been taking, we’re somewhere in the month of December. And that means that it’s been a couple of weeks since Max Headroom was cancelled. The last episode to air was “Whackets”, which I remember very well, because it introduced me to the idea of subliminal mind control. The basic outline of the episode is that an execrable game show gains a disturbingly dedicated following, which is eventually traced to a subliminal embed. There’s a particular image that’s stuck in my mind for years, of Bill Maher (Yeah. He’s the guest star in this episode) brainwashing a police officer through a video-watch so he can off him. ABC pulled the series, halting production on several scripted episodes, including one by George RR Martin. The remaining episodes would be dumped the next spring.

If Max was the cultural phenomenon that we all seem to recall him being, what went wrong? I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising. While Max was ostensibly a veejay on Channel 4, stateside he was more known for his New Coke commercials, and, even if the words “New Coke” don’t send you running for the hills, “Let’s adapt this commercial into a TV series,” is not an idea with an exactly sterling track record (cough The Mommies cough Cavemen). And on top of that, the British Max Headroom film came out in 1985. Two years is kind of a long time to milk what is, for all the Eightiesness of it, basically a viral internet meme trying to work out what the words “viral internet meme” mean, since it’s 1987.

But more than that: in what possible reality did anyone think that this show was the ideal vehicle for Max Headroom?  Don’t get me wrong: this is an awesome show. Think about the two parenthetical examples in the last paragraph though: the Geico Cavemen got a sitcom. The Reynolds Wrap Mommies got a sitcom. Max Headroom got an action-thriller-drama. What? People still remember Max Headroom even today. They remember him as a comic character, with his mildly subversive witticisms and snarky commentary and characteristic verbal tics. They do not remember him from a hard-hitting thriller in a dystopian world. Heck, Max Headroom isn’t the star of Max Headroom: Edison is. In fact, if you forget the hype and the marketing and the surrounding cultural context, the capsule summary of Max Headroom should be, “In a corporate-dominated dystopian future, a hard-hitting investigative journalist tries to expose corporate corruption and protect the lower classes from exploitation.” (And the thought occurs to me, he’s probably one of the best journalists in all of speculative fiction. Your Lois Lanes and your Carl Kolchaks and your Sabrina Spellmans and your Sarah Jane Smiths tend to spend more time covering up big stories than actually reporting on them) The fact that he’s got a comedy AI twin brother isn’t what the show is about: it’s the twist — there’s only a handful of episodes where Max’s nature is relevant to the plot, and only, as far as I know, three where it’s specifically relevant that he’s an AI copy of Edison (Blipverts, Neurostim, and Dream Thieves). At the conceptual level, the fact that Edison’s sidekick is a computer based on his own subconscious is something on the level of “But they’re black” or “They fight crime!”

Max Headroom feels almost like a character out of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, but the world he inhabits is reminds me more of Judge Dredd. In fact, aside from the fact that crime is met by police apathy rather than disproportionate force, you could almost convince yourself that the unnamed city (It’s London in the British version, but even there, you’d only know that if you didn’t blink when a map flashes up on a monitor) was Megacity One, and that if Edison ever left its confines, he’d find himself in the Cursed Earth. It’s an awesome show, a mind-blowing show. What in the world is this doing being the backdrop to Max Headroom? It doesn’t make sense for this wisecracking, ’80s pop-culture referencing transhuman Coke mascott to be in this show, and it certainly doesn’t make sense for him to be headlining.

Or does it? If you’ve been paying attention, you probably already know the answer. As I said, Max Headroom is the single most ’80s thing in the entire 1980s. So maybe I should let you in on the subtext for a second: the ’80s were wrong. I love the ’80s, but they were wrong. They didn’t make any sense. We feared corporate power, but at the same time shouted how greed was good. We camped up everything we could get their hands on, but were so incredibly backward about gay rights that they consciously avoided doing anything to curb the spread of AIDS in the hopes it would, as epidemics (never ever) do, limit itself to killing “those people”. We made a left-coast Hollywood-type into the anthropomorphic representation of the abstract concept of conservatism. We were sure the world was going to end any day now and we were cool with that. I mean, come on: we made a post-apocalyptic science fiction series whose central conceit was based around a protracted rape metaphor, for kids. (And don’t even get me started on the fact that the ’80s gave us a post-apocalyptic series about library science). So to go back a few paragraphs, “In what possible reality did anyone think that this show was the ideal vehicle for Max Headroom?” Shrug. It was the ’80s. You could do things like that in the ’80s. Things were weird back then. So the real fate of Max Headroom is likely explained better like this: Life imitates art. Max Headroom, like Max Headroom, was put on the air by a massive corporation in spite of its strongly anti-corp leanings on the assumption that it was worth taking one on the nose in exchange for those sweet, delicious ratings. But unlike Max Headroom, Max Headroom may or may not have done well enough to remain afloat all else being equal, but it never provided the ratings it needed to make ABC overlook them talking smack about how evil and corrupt TV networks are.

You know, every once in a while, someone or other will speculate on whether or not it would be possible to reboot Max for the modern day — obviously the ’80s trappings wouldn’t work, but surely the commentary about corporate greed and the decline of television would be just as relevant today — perhaps moreso. But I don’t know. I think that if you changed Max enough that it addressed the concerns of a world that isn’t all wrapped up in its obsession with performativity and artifice, you’d have changed so much that it would no longer make sense to reuse anything identifiable from the original show. It’s absolutely key to the whole point of Max Headroom that Max himself is a creation of the very thing the show is on the whole suspicious of: a fake image for a fake and image-obsessed world. In that sense, Max is a bit of an ’80s Frankenstein (Adam Frankenstein, not Victor. He’s got every right to his dad’s surname, and denying it to him is tacitly allying yourself with the creator who rejected him): a homunculus who rises up to expose and condemn his creators’ moral failings. Max Headroom isn’t something that follows as a logical product of today’s television industry projected “twenty minutes into the future”, so he wouldn’t work on that level today. If you wanted to take that concept and modernize it, you’d probably have to do something about a social media darling who develops a social conscience. Wait. Crap. Did I just explain why Selfie is a 21st century adaptation of Max Headroom?

Besides, no network would pick it up. It’d be cheaper to just make a Reality Show instead.

A coincidental final note. On Max Headroom, Jeffrey Tambor played Murray, Edison’s producer. As I was writing this article Jeffrey Tambor guested on The Colbert Report to talk about his new show, Transparent, which I guess is kinda in my queue, but as I’m still on TV shows from 1987, don’t hold your breath. Tambor plays, going by his description, Wikipedia, and some ads, a woman who, late in life, decides to stop performing the gender she’d been presumptively assigned at birth, and create a new self to present to the world that matches her own perception of herself.

I can’t seem to go more than a few paragraphs talking about how, in the ’80s, we lived our lives as a performance. Pop your collar. Spike your hair. Get a mohawk. Get a mullet. Get yourself a pair of wayfarers. Pad your shoulders. Roll your cuffs. Choose from any of these five colorful Breakfast Club characters to be. And then the ’90s hit and, like a teenager who’d just read The Catcher in the Rye, we declared everyone a bunch of phonies and determined ourselves to get Real and Authentic and Sincere. In the here and now, some twenty-seven years after Jeffrey Tambor played a supporting role in a weird sci-fi drama based around a Coke mascott, I think maybe we’re just starting to get that who you are, the person you present to the world, is always a performance. You can play the role that society tells you to play, or you can play the role that fits. You can create the character you want to be in your story, or you can let the world create it for you. When someone tells you that the role — the identity — that you create for yourself is fake and the one society creates for you is real, be cautious. They’re probably trying to sell you something.

(The following article is largely a stream-of-consciousness ramble where I complain like a grumpy old man about what’s wrong with television these days in ways which are occasionally self-contradictory. You have been warned)

It is December 5, 1987. Belinda Carlisle’s Heaven is a Place on Earth, a song which to my mind is pretty much the iconic piece of late ’80s female pop, unseats (I’ve Had) The Time of my Life in thnumber one spot on the Billboard charts. The rest of the Top 10 consists of Sting, George Michael, Richard Marx, Debbie Gibson, Whitesnake, Whitney Houston, Jody Watley, and REM, who are going to be bumped off next week by George Harrison. Connie Sellica is on the cover of TV Guide, along with a headline asking if it’s reasonable to expect TV news to issue corrections when they get important facts wrong, because it’s still the ’80s, and we haven’t yet decided that the answer is “Nope. Not even if they do it on purpose.” In prime time, there’s a repeat of The Twilight Zone‘s adaptation of “Button, Button”. They change the ending, and I think their ending is a lot better. Richard Matheson disagrees, but what would he know, he’s just the writer. That story is also the basis of the 2009 movie The Box, which mangles the whole thing into an international conspiracy action-thriller.

In the backwoods of syndication, Out of this World has its last episode before the winter break. It’s a show I’ve mentioned before, one of that cluster of late ’80s high-concept sitcoms. I don’t have a huge amount to say about it really, but I am shamelessly padding out a buffer of spare stories to run so that I can pretend I am working to some kind of a schedule for the benefit of the six or seven people who read this blog on a regular basis. I feel like I watched a lot of TV as a child, but I’ll be damned if I can remember much of it. This is kind of doubly strange because I can remember re-encountering a lot of shows from my youth later and being surprised by how little I remembered. I remember remembering that I had forgotten. Meta enough for you?

When I started watching, for instance, Knight Rider reruns on USA around 1995, it quickly became clear to me that I basically remembered nothing at all about that show from my youth other than the fact that it had existed (I very distinctly remember, at 16, being absolutely sure of the details of one particular episode which turned out to be a pastiche of random plot elements and lines of dialogue from “Soul Survivor”, “KITT vs KARR”, “Knight of the Juggernaut”, “Lost Knight”, and “Junkard Dog”). I remember the details of it better now, thirty years after it first aired than I did twenty years ago.

And this little cluster, ALF, Small Wonder, Out of this World and the rest, by 1995, there’s just nothing in my recollection about them, and we’re talking about less than five years here. That’s about the same length of time as I’ve been married. Poking back at one’s childhood memories can be distressing. The memory cheats, as some dead asshole used to say. Much of what you think you remember is fabricated. You forget a lot, but even more than that, you’re a different person now than you were then, and like a botched OS upgrade, not all of the old software is compatible.

I keep bringing up 1995 because 1995 is in one sense where “me” started. Plainly not in the literal, physical sense, of course. But in 1995, I got my driver’s license, and I had proper internet access for the first time and started doing things like posting in online forums like USENET and The Dominion (The once thriving user community for the network now known as SyFy, back when it didn’t suck.) and buying seven year old clearance VHS tapes. This was the first time I really existed — peripherally at this point — in the domain of “grown-up” rather than “child”. The “me” that exists now, the one that pretty much popped into existence on December 12, 2011, is very much a descendant of 1995-me, much more recognizably so than of the “me” that opened his eyes in the living room, in his pajamas, some time very late in 1982 and was suddenly surprised to discover his own existence as a continuous conscious entity with extension in space and time who maintained an identity from one moment to the next, and had no idea what any of that meant, but all the same instantly recognized that something very important had just happened, even if he’d never be able to explain it. The 1995 version of me would be able to explain that, because when the 1995 version of me was four years old, he took a Modernism class.

The thing that led me, eventually, to remember that Out of this World had existed, some time in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and subsequently track down an incomplete set of bootlegs, was its theme song. Out of this World‘s opening theme is an adaptation of “Swinging on a Star”, a song which I most often see credited to Sinatra, but was first recorded by Bing Crosby, though pretty much every major crooner of the era has done a cover. Appropriately, there’s a corresponding level of confusion about who did this cover; I’ve seen it attributed to David Lee Roth and/or Van Halen (probably by people who looked it up, saw who wrote it, but stopped reading at “Van H” before going on to “eusen”), and, unsurprisingly, Sinatra. The show itself isn’t much help here; the only music credit is music director Kevin Kiner, who in the intervening years worked his way up through shows like Super Force and Carnosaur 3 and Walker Texas Ranger, to the point where now he’s a properly renowned soundtrack composer doing stuff like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and CSI: Miami and is way too famous for a guy like me to pester with an email asking him who sang the Bing Crosby cover for a sitcom he worked on twenty-five years ago for the sake of a stream-of-consciousness-y blog post that’s being written largely as filler and purely for the benefit of the tens of readers I get. (But, like, Mr. Kiner, if you happen to be googling yourself one day and see this and remember who it was, feel free to leave a comment).

A few years ago, in some context or other,  I heard Tony Bennet’s cover of “Swinging on a Star”, and was surprised that I didn’t recognize the lyrics: the verses of the song offer cute caricatures of the limitations of various animals, proposed as an alternative to the potential of humanity. The version I remembered, on the other hand, was told from the point of view of some higher form of life, waxing affectionately about the pastoral simplicity of the “plain as can be” humans. The proper song evolved out of an admonition from Bing to one of his children, specifically, “By the way, if you hate to go to school, you may grow up to be a mule”, and ending with the suggestion, “You can be better than you are: you could be swingin’ on a star.” My remembered version instead suggests, “If you take my advice for what it’s worth, you could be happy here on Earth.”  So I did a little poking and managed to sort out the name of this obscure old first-run-syndication sitcom from a year that increasingly strikes me as the nexus of all realities.

First-run syndicated sit-com. There’s a phrase you never hear any more. Heck, “first-run syndication” isn’t a phrase you hear much any more. The nexus of all realities, the fall 1987-spring 1988 broadcast television season, may have been its high point. Bizarre as it may seem now, in 1987, there were something like 245 independent television stations in the United States. I’m talking about television stations which weren’t part of any of the broadcast television networks — not ABC, not NBC, and not CBS. And for the first time, also not FOX: this was the inaugural season for FOX as a prime time television network, and that’s really the reason that first-run syndication would never be as big again as it is here in the nexus.

When I was a child, we were lucky, in that with a fair wind, we could pick up 13 broadcast stations (admittedly, not all at the same time). If the wind was south-southeast, we got the Baltimore channels, WMAR-2 (NBC), WBAL-11 (CBS) and WJZ-13 (ABC) (If you are about to tell me I got the network affiliations wrong, Baltimore did a “network shuffle” in the 90s, with the big three moving over one. This was characterized in the media as hopelessly confusing and possibly a sign that the end times were upon us), along with the unaffiliated channels WKJL-24, WNUV-54 and WBFF-45, as well as the Annapolis PBS station, WMPT-22. If atmospheric conditions were more favorable over central Maryland than over the bay, our channels were WRC-4 (NBC), WJLA-7 (ABC) and WUSA-9 (CBS), with WTTG-5 and WDCA-20 as independents and the DC-area PBS affiliate WETA-26. There was also an independent channel on WFTY-50, but I think we only actually got that one during hurricanes.

It was a wild and free time for a while. WKJL was ostensibly a Christian-themed network, but for a span of a year or two, just before the nexus, they padded out their lineup with a couple of hours of black-and-white reruns: The Twilight Zone, The Honeymooners, and Laurel & Hardy shorts. This was my introduction to all three of them, and one of my fond early childhood memories is reclining with my dad in his bedroom, staring intently at an ancient thirteen-inch TV with the wire coat hanger pinned behind the UHF leads, watching Rod Serling or Jackie Gleason or Oliver Hardy as he drifted off to sleep. By the time the nexus hit, WKJL had been sold to the Home Shopping Network, WBFF and WTTG were owned by Fox, and WDCA and WNUV had developed a loose affiliation with Paramount that would eventually evolve into UPN.

In 1987, it was novel and slightly risible that some Australian upstart would have the uppityness to declare itself a fourth network. Heck, the old timers were still making jokes that challenged the legitimacy of ABC. By the late 90s, there would be UPN and the WB and later the CW, and later still “MyNetworkTV”, which I only know exists because I had to look up channel 50’s callsign, because I joined the TiVoLution back in 2003 and have not watched broadcast TV in about a decade. But in 1987, there were a lot of channels that needed to buy their programs one at a time — and for that matter, there were a fair number of hours in the day when the networks weren’t responsible for local programming.  You had TV shows — successful ones — that weren’t affiliated with one particular network, that didn’t air in every viewing area, that didn’t even air at the same time across the country. Captain Power was one. Star Trek the Next Generation was one. Even weirder, network sitcoms frequently eked out a few declining years in syndication: Silver Spoons, Webster, Too Close for Comfort, WKRP in Cincinatti, Charles in Charge, Punky Brewster and many other shows which you have not heard of but which I fondly remember as… having… existed….

This stopped happening in the ’90s, near as I can tell. The only ones I could find dating later than 1993 were Saved By the Bell – style Teen Comedies. First-run syndication remained the dominant model for sci-fi and fantasy adventure series through the 90s, but that too petered out as cable got bolder and anything worth watching got gobbled up by Sci-Fi and Spike. Even children’s programming, which was pretty much 100% syndication, declined greatly as kid-oriented cable channels became more popular, leaving broadcast to a profitable future showing talk shows and infomercials. These days, first-run syndication is pretty much down to gameshows and the somehow-even-less-good unscripted “reality” shows.

Why did syndicated sitcoms go away? Beyond the general decline of first-run syndication, sitcoms in general have also been in a bit of a slump for years. I think probably Seinfeld and Friends had a lot to do with it. Suddenly, the requirement for a sitcom stopped being “Show about a family, probably in suburban California, with a mouthy kid and an interesting quirk, such as ‘Working Mom/Stay at home dad’, ‘Wealthy and successful African Americans’, ‘Green Card Marriage’, or ‘Alien houseguest with a dong-shaped nose’,” and started being “Let’s hire a well-known performer, preferably a stand-up comedian, with an enjoyable quirk and basically have him play himself.” And that required more of an investment than you could make without network backing. Meanwhile, the visual and storytelling style of TV evolved and merged with that of film, and that called for a more “naturalistic” frame, doing stuff like shooting on film and having big sets and no studio audiences and one camera that moved around with the actors, and that was a problem for sitcoms in two ways: first, the sitcom thrives, even revels in artifice. Sitcoms are fundamentally a construction of cliches, catchphrases, stock setups, stock reveals: they are in a certain sense a kind of comedy ballet. And ballet is many things, but “natural” isn’t any of them. Sitcoms are part of the theatrical heritage of TV that wasn’t inherited by film: the format is an evolution of comedy sketches from variety shows — literally in some cases: The Honeymooners (from The Jackie Gleason Show), Mama’s Family (from The Carol Burnett Show), and even The Simpsons (from The Tracy Ullman Show), and that heritage is a big part of what was jettisoned to make TV work more like film. More to the point, the biggest sell for sitcoms, to broadcasters at least, has always been that they are exceedingly cheap. But you start requiring a big star and film stock and a steadicam and actual writers instead of a Cards Against Humanity deck and an electric card shuffler, and the economics just don’t work out.

Also, as successful as Seinfeld and Friends were, about ten minutes after they ended, we all woke up and realized that they were utterly loathsome shows about utterly loathsome people and could we go back to the mouthy kids (So far as I know — and admittedly, the only sitcom I’ve watched in years is The Big Bang Theory, and even then I mostly just glower at how mean-spirited and unfunny it is between the occasional clever punchline — sitcoms don’t do Mouthy Kids much any more. The majority of them look to follow the Friends model of following a group of childless or infant’d twentysomethings, and even the ones that do have children in them push them to the background in favor of adults-who-act-like-children. Even the “and-a-half-man” seems like he fills a very different role in the show than, say, Wesley Owens or Mike Seaver or Alex P. Keaton) and phallic aliens please.

But let’s get back to business. The high concept of Out of this World is that on her thirteenth birthday, Typical Suburban California Teenager Evie Ethel Garland learns that the reason that she hasn’t seen her father Troy since she was an infant is not, as she’d been told, that he’s a government agent on a deep-cover mission abroad, but rather that he’s an alien from the planet Antareus, who was recalled shortly after she was born to fight and or mediate in a space war. Hijinks ensue. Now that she’s hit menarche, she gets to be let in on the family secret, which comes with a cuboid glass sculpture that lets her summon the voice of Burt Reynolds and the first of several magical alien powers that start out rigorously defined but get sort of vague and lacksidasical as the series progr– you know what? Let me simplify this for you: It’s Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It just is. Like, half the episode plots are the same.

Sabrina Spellman was a character created in the 1960s for Archie comics. Yes, that Archie. The one who teamed up with The Punisher. She’d already been adapted for TV in the 1970s in the Filmation mildly-animated series Sabrina and the Groovy Ghoulies, which had roughly the same plot as Duckula, but the canonical version of her backstory is the one used by the 1996 ABC sitcom: Sabrina, born to a human mother and a witch father learns on her sixteenth birthday that she, like the aunts who’ve raised her, possesses magical abilities. And a talking cat. It was probably the best work Melissa Joan Hart has ever done (though possibly not as important to the history of children’s television as Clarissa Explains it All, which I’m told is very good, but was on at an inconvenient time slot for me, and probably proved female-led tween comedy was commercially viable, thus creating the universe in which the existence of Miley Cyrus was possible), unless you are a masochist and prefer Melissa and Joey.  The series would follow Sabrina over the course of seven seasons and a network hop as she learned to use her abilities and deal with life’s challenges in both the mortal and supernatural worlds.

Only not really; the one moral lesson of this series turns out to be “Don’t use your supernatural powers for anything ever.” Learning this takes Sabrina approximately one hundred and sixty episodes of spells backfiring, misfiring, having unexpected side-effects, or working to spec but being morally wrong because it impinges on someone’s free will or makes life too easy or undermines the premise of the show. She finally does get it late in the show’s final season, whereupon the moral, realizing the gig is up, promptly changes to “Don’t deny your true nature,” in order that she can continue being wrong for the remaining three episodes as she tries to not use magic to solve her problems.

I was only vaguely aware of Sabrina for most of its run, but some time prior to its last season, I discovered that Soleil Moon Frye had joined the cast and took an interest largely because its mid-morning basic cable rerun was the only show that my TiVo considered worthy of recording during the hour between when I watched the previous night’s The Daily Show and when I got home from my grad school database class. I found the early seasons fairly tedious, but on balance, it was a nice enough show, a bit like Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie, but with the reactionary fantasy elements downplayed — there was still that nasty element of “Young Woman has to hide the fact that she is powerful and hypercapable in order to avoid spooking the squares,” that you see in pretty much every show with a magically empowered female protagonist, but it was comparatively downplayed, largely because Sabrina so frequently interacted with other magical characters and because the ensemble cast was predominantly female. Even better: though the cast was predominantly female, the majority of stories weren’t specifically coded as female-narratives — Sabrina’s typical life-challenges were things like learning to drive, getting and holding a job, balancing competing responsibilities, making amends after accidentally injuring Santa Claus, or discovering the magical secret hidden in her family tree; love triangles, make-up and mean girls, while present, didn’t dominate the narrative.

So the areas where I found Sabrina grating weren’t its gender politics, but its hamfisted morality. Sabrina’s driving test is administered by an unfair proctor who orders her to park in a space visibly smaller than her car, so she uses magic to enlarge the space: moral failure, prompting karmic revenge when she immediately crashes her car since she isn’t really qualified to drive it as she doesn’t know how to… violate the basic principles of geometry without using magic. To fully qualify as a witch, Sabrina must determine her “family secret”. Cue a season of her constantly being berated for her stupidity and laziness for not having solved it yet. Except that the family secret can only be revealed by solving a rebus, which is given to her one image at a time, with all the important words left till the very end, meaning that it would be, again, literally impossible to solve it from the clues she has until the very last episode of the arc. The one time she actually does try to take initiative to sort it out herself ahead of time, it turns out that’s cheating too since it counts as using outside help.

And then there’s Harvey. Sabrina’s boyfriend for the first four seasons is written out for half of season five with the explanation that they’d broken up off-screen after he finally learned of her true nature in the fourth season finale. His character arc for the remainder of the series is, roughly, that Harvey now has to be the butt-monkey in order to achieve karmic redemption for the breakup — he’s only ever characterized as having been scared, or shallow, or bigoted or whatever. Never once does anyone suggest that his motivations in the breakup might have had something to do with the realization that his girlfriend had been lying to him for years, occasionally placing him in mortal danger, rewriting his personality to her whims, physically mutilating him, and then erasing his memory to maintain the charade. Because, y’know, that’s no big deal.

Harvey gets the girl in the end, of course he does; that’s TV-law: when a man has paid his dues, he gets the girl, just like Ross Geller and Steve Urkel and a hundred other sitcom protagonists I want to punch. This in itself is saved from being abhorrent by the fact that, aside from the outcome, Harvey doesn’t follow the That Guy archetype: he doesn’t stalk, doesn’t passive-aggressively pursue, doesn’t get turned down time and again but keep persisting. He doesn’t do anything but try to be a genuine friend, and when he does acknowledge his continuing feelings for Sabrina, he leaves rather than become That Guy. But just to complicate things, the show’s morality goes all over the place as it comes to a close: after years of being told, week-after-week, not to use magic to solve her problems, Sabrina decides to give up magic for good, only to learn that her magic is part of who she is and it’s wrong to hide from that. In the series finale, as she prepares to marry this season’s love interest, she predictably runs to magic for a solution to what seems to be an ordinary case of pre-wedding jitters, and finds that the magic stones representing her and her betrothed’s respective souls don’t properly interlock. What follows is a two-parter hammering home the long-standing series moral about how she shouldn’t rely on magic to solve mortal problems and should follow her heart and do the thing she wants to do and not listen to magic rocks, so… She decides to run off with Harvey (whose magic soul rock of course interlocks perfectly with hers, IYKWIM) instead. So… I guess the moral is “Actually, magic rocks know how you really feel and you should yield to their judgment.” Blecch.

But I have now spend most of four thousand words of an article about Out of this World talking about shows that aren’t Out of this World. This article’s gone a bit pear-shaped. The hamfisted moral dimension of Sabrina the Teenage Witch is the area in which the show is most different from Out of this World. Out of this World is very big on silly walks and one-liners, and not so much on the Aesop. Actually, that’s saying too much. OotW is fairly normal for sitcoms of its period about delivering heavy-handed life lessons, usually some variation on “Don’t go jumping to conclusions based on having partially overheard one side of someone else’s conversation (ie. “The moral of every single episode of Three’s Company“),” just not so much on the Space Whale [Space Whale Aesop: A heavyhanded TV show moral which, while abstractly a valid moral lesson, relies so heavily on overtly fantastical elements to establish its moral parameters that the moral point fails to have a clearly applicable analogue to real-world behavior, such as, “Don’t eat the larvae of sentient beings or they will get angry and eat your children,” “Don’t vat-grow an alien-human hybrid in order to have sex with it,” “Don’t reanimate the dead,” or “Don’t torture space whales.”] side of it. When Evie uses her magic alien powers to win a music competition… She’s allowed to win and reap the rewards. When she stops time to give someone unpleasant their comeuppance, they are come-uppened and the whole thing does not backfire on her for the sin of not just passively accepting the unfairness of the status quo. You’d occasionally have Troy deliver a Full House-style moral to Evie at the end when she called him on the cube for the tag, but as often as not, any moral weight would be undercut by the cultural differences between Antareus and Earth (ie. “The cheap joke where Troy’s advice to Evie would only be applicable in a methane atmosphere.”).

Stopping time is her major power, by the way. And in a diagetic way, not like how Zach Morris could call a time-out to have an aside with the audience. In fact, I probably should have lead with that, because half of you would have known what show I’ve been talking about if I’d started out with “It’s the one about the girl who could stop time.” She gains other abilities as the show goes on, primarily “conjure non-plot-breaking objects out of thin air,” and one time she gave herself a sex-change, but stopping time remains the one people remember. Out of this World was in most respects, a simpler kind of show than Sabrina. Evie had a smaller repertoire of powers, and the alien world, unlike Sabrina’s Other Realm, was only present via Troy’s phone calls. Accordingly, while almost every episode of Sabrina juxtaposed mortal-world teenage struggles and tribulations with Sabrina’s unique difficulties as a supernatural being, Out of this World more often stayed closer to earth, only making a point of Evie’s alien-specific challenges on occasion. Most of the time, the extent to which her alien heritage was relevant to the unfolding of an episode amounted to “At a critical moment, she stops time so that she can discreetly disabuse her mother or uncle of a key misconception before it leads to an awkward social situation.”

Relatedly, while the laugh track disagrees with me here, the actual humor in the show is not hugely situational. I suppose it’s a bit amusing when they freeze-frame an obligatory vase mid-fall, and presumably someone still finds humor in “Fat uncle Beano desires romance despite the fact that he is fat and named ‘Beano’, and we all know people like that do not merit love,” but much more of the comedy comes in the form of, as I said before, one-liners and silly walks. The funnier bits of Out of this World are Evie’s snappy retorts. Sure, they feel very performative: it’s not how real people talk, and real teenagers aren’t that clever. But Maureen Flannigan has surprisingly good comedic timing and delivery for such a young actress. She strikes me as being very much like an ’80s version of Kristen Bell. It doesn’t seem like she’s gotten the prominence her work merits since OotW; her most prominent post-Evie role was as a girlfriend on 7th Heaven.

The “funny walks” are provided by the rest of the cast, primarily Buzz Belmondo as “Buzz”, and later Peter Pitofsky as “Peter” (A lot of Tony Danza-ing in this show. Evie’s mother, Donna, is played by Donna Pescow). They both play these weird cloudcuccolander-types who are just sort of there, not usually integrated into the plot of the episode at all, but just turning up to do a brief physical comedy sketch for no clear reason based around slapstick and pratfalls, structured quite a lot like a Mr. Bean sketch done on the cheap. Buzz is also doing a Funny Foreigner schtick, like Cousin Balki turned up to eleven. I’m struggling to remember if this was a “thing” in late ’80s sitcoms, and I’m coming up blank. Sure, the “wacky neighbor” archetype is one of the most Arch of the Arch Sitcom Tropes, but I’m hard-pressed to think of one so obviously and shamelessly tacked-on as Buzz. It’s almost like he’s actually just visiting from another show that’s taking place down the street or something.

Another thing that’s slightly weird about Out of this World is that all the male characters — every single one of them — is really goofy. Sure, it’s a sitcom, so you expect people to be a bit on the goofy side, but this is 1987, well before the standard “mode” of male characters in comedy became “Mentally handicapped sexually precocious toddler.” You expect some silliness, but also at least one “straight man”, and you expect there to be a “dad”-archetype who sits the kids down at the end of the episode and explains the moral to them while the simulated orchestra plays something sappy — I mean, it’s 1987, Full House has literally just premiered. Instead, our male characters are Buzz, Peter, Uncle Beano (Really, just saying his name should tell you everything you need to know about Uncle Beano), and a character played by veteran western actor Doug McClure (you might remember him from such things as being half of the inspiration for Phil Hartman’s “Troy McClure” character on The Simpsons), who’s called “Kyle Applegate”, but is pretty much just Doug McClure — a veteran western actor whose star has long-since waned, who got himself a vanity job as mayor of a small town out of a desperate need to feel important, despite the fact that he’s dangerously unqualified to govern so much as an ant farm. Did I mention the cast is very very male? There’s a lot of recurring characters of both genders, but Evie and her mother are the only female regulars. That’s not too surprising: Hollywood wasn’t great at creating female characters outside of a few narrowly defined types back then (a fact which is easily proven by noticing that Hollywood isn’t great at it now, despite having gotten consistently better over the past quarter-century), but it’s strange to see it in a show where all the men are goofy, while the women are the more serious characters. I’m not used to seeing women as the moral authorities in a comedy show of this era except in the female-dominated shows. The sitcoms I can recall where a woman is the sole (You had, of course, lots of shows in the “Mom and Dad are both responsible adults” vein, of course) “responsible adult”-type character tend to have between zero and one male regulars. I mean, contrast with Second Chance from a couple of weeks ago, where the idea of a single mother being the “responsible adult” ensuring a teenager’s evolution into an upstanding and moral adult was treated as something that required literal divine intervention to fix. There is never any implication that Kyle, Beano or Buzz are anything even remotely like surrogate fathers for Evie, nor is it ever seriously entertained that she might need one. On the contrary, Evie is consistently more mature and more moral than any character on the show other than her mother.

In all, it’s a weird and funny little show. The ’90s are going to see the face of sitcoms change dramatically, but I think you can see little hints of new trends emerging here: while it still follows a variation on the “classic” sitcom setup, it’s drawing a lot of its humor from “weirdo with a funny schtick” characters, much more than you typically did in an ’80s sitcom. It leaned heavily on “Male characters are hopeless buffoons rather than competent leaders” years before Home Improvement and The Simpsons would elevate that model to be the new standard (The Simpsons, I note, has already premiered by now in its Variety-Show-Sketch form, but at this stage, Homer’s buffoonishness hasn’t become the character’s defining trait yet).

I know I started out promising this would be a pointless ramble, but I think I may yet find a point to get to in all of this, and it’s why I meandered off for half of this article to talk about a different show altogether. If there’s one point I’ve tried to hammer home in this series, at least since I’ve been back from hiatus, it’s that the past is very much a different country, and TV Past is an even more different one. In 1987, DL Wood had an idea for (At least, I assume he did. There’s a weird credit to him as “Based on a format by,” which I have otherwise only ever seen on game shows. I am guessing it means the same thing as “Original concept by”) a show about a cute blonde teenager who inherited weird powers from her non-human father. Nine years later, Nell Scovell came up with more or less the exact same idea. But despite the fact that the two shows have the same brief, a lot of the same episode plots, an a large number of similar characters (Though Sabrina starts out much more venial and ends up much more socially conscious, her temperament and sense of humor are very similar to Evie’s; Harvey’s personality is very close to Evie’s off-and-on boyfriend Chris; and there’s a lot in Zelda and Hilda that can be compared to Donna and Beano, and Salem often fills the same narrative role as Troy), the shows are very different stylistically. Out of this World is a lot more straightforward and a lot less anvilicious about its morality. Sabrina is more — I’m not sure about my word choice here — holistic. All the parts of the show just go together better in Sabrina. Nearly every episode features Sabrina dealing with one issue in her mortal life, and one issue in her secret life, and the meat of the episode is about the interplay between those issues. Even as many of the same events happen in Out of this World, the show is hardly ever about that tension. Sabrina hardly ever feels like we’ve just put the show on hold for three minutes so the audience can enjoy a short slapstick sketch about how those hilarious Europeans take the directions on the bottle too literally and get stuck all day in an infinite lather-rinse-repeat loop, and its plots usually only require the non-humans to act like non-humans.

Hm… All the parts not quite fitting together. Where have we heard that before? When I dove back into the shows of my childhood, it finally became clear to me just how much TV had changed in the late ’90s and early aughts. It’s easy to dismiss older shows as being simply “bad” or “unrealistic” or “cheesy”, but ultimately, they’re just products of a different set of values and expectations. No one goes to see Shakespeare and complains about the iambic pentameter, and 1980s sitcoms are hardly Shakespeare, but the point, I think, still stands. See, for us twenty-first century folks, it seems natural to think of films and television as two peas in a pod. But that’s a modern invention. Film and TV developed during the same time period, but their evolution was largely separate. Both are descended from a common ancestor, the stage, but neither is really derived from the other. Film grew directly out of the “high” theatrical tradition, with its big spectacles and classical storytelling, and larger-than-life actors. Television’s evolution was less direct: TV grew out of radio drama, and radio drama, to a large extent, grew out of the “low” theater: vaudeville. Traveling variety shows. Stand-up. Pantomime. Punch and Judy. Morality plays. These weren’t traditions trying to make a mimetic experience designed to bring about catharsis through the application of spectacle to a situation the audience identifies with. These were traditions based on delivering an audience experience by presenting a new arrangement of familiar tropes and stock characters. Audience engagement was generated not by presenting a character recognizable as real, but through repetition: the “funny foreigner”, the “mouthy kid”, the “sassy black woman”, the “emotionally distant father”, these don’t have to be characters we recognize from real life; it’s enough that we recognize them from the other TV shows we’ve been watching for our entire lives.

But something happened around the turn of the century: the plates shifted and a land bridge opened up between the continents, and the once-separated populations of Filmasia and Televisonica started to interbreed. And in the grim darkness of the ’90s, when we’d culturally turned our backs on the performativeness of the ’80s and obsessed with proving how “genuine” and “sincere” and “authentic” we were, those Method Acting genes of the film world had a clear evolutionary advantage over the catchphrase-spewing artifice of television. The narrative and visual style of film and TV converged: modern TV is basically “Movies in long-format with a smaller budget.”  And yeah. it’s good. I wouldn’t trade the narrative style of CSI for Hill Street Blues, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer for She-Wolf of London. But something was lost. And sometimes I miss it.

Final note: In 2012, Maureen Flannigan teamed up with other former child stars such as Brice Beckham, Josie Davis, and a bunch of people from shows I didn’t watch to speak out against former child-star and born-again-evolution-denying-evangelical-“movie”-star Kirk Cameron’s statements opposing gay rights, under the banner “CCOKC” (Child Celebrities Opposing Kirk Cameron), in a FunnyOrDie sketch which kind of hilariously degenerates into a bunch of former child celebrities making obscene hand gestures, until she accidentally stops time while trying to mime frottage. It is absolutely hilarious, especially if you missed the first title card and couldn’t remember who she was until time stops: