Care? Why should I care? ... There are people dying all over your world, yet you do not care about them. -- Cyberman Regos Krang, Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet

The Only Choice We’re Given is How Many Megatons (Captain Power: Flame Street)

It is the last two days of November, 1987. Three Men and a Baby and Planes, Trains and Automobiles have recently opened in the theaters. Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes dethrone Billy Idol with (I’ve Had) The Time of my Life from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack. Dougie Poynter of McFly is born.

HavenFor both of this season’s Science Fiction Events, this is the last week of 1987. Star Trek the Next Generation and Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future will be on break until January. Trek opts to go out with “Haven”, a mostly unremarkable episode based around Troi being strongarmed into an arranged marriage, because this is the enlightened 24th century, not the backward, amoral, greedy, pig-fucking twentieth century, and a Starfleet Officer would totally promise his infant daughter in marriage to someone, and she’d be expected to fulfill that obligation decades later when her dad was dead and she was an officer herself, and she’d just go along with it and the only reason they end up not getting hitched after all is just because the guy backs out due to a prophetic vision and decides he would literally (by “literally”, I mean “literally”. This episode’s resolution is that he beams himself over to a plague-infested ship to help care for the survivors) rather contract the space-plague than marry a Season 1 TNG character. Also, technically, this is the best Season 1 performances by Wil Wheaton and Michael Dorn, because they aren’t in this episode.

Captain Power, on the other hand, goes on hiatus with “Flame Street”. It’s the one About The Internet. But, of course, it’s 1987, so saying that it’s “about the internet” is about as accurate as saying Le Voyage dans la Lune is about the Apollo mission. But it’s about cyberspace, and that means, rather tragically, that we are going to have to talk about cyberpunk.

You may have gotten the impression from my posts, particularly since returning from hiatus, that I rather like the 80s. The truth is more complicated than that, and it wasn’t always true anyway. While I think of myself as being squarely “from the ’80s”, My memories of the ’80s are the memories of a small child, and my properly formative years were during the ’90s, so for a lot of the ’90s and a lot of the ’00s, I was working from an internalized very ’90s view of the ’80s which said, Gordon Gecko“The Eighties were terrible. We were always at the brink of nuclear war, no one gave a damn about the damage we were doing to the environment, we idolized wall street bankers who sought to trickle down golden showers on the proles, there was an AIDS crisis going on and the official government position was ‘Ignore it because it’s only killing those people,’ and everyone had mullets. Mullets!”

It’s only with distance, and with the Bush II era to compare it with that I came to appreciate the ’80s. Y’see, the 1980s were a strange mix of optimism and pessimism (while the 1990s were exactly the opposite). As I’ve said many times before, nothing that happened in the 1980s makes a lick of sense except in light of the understanding that everyone was fairly sure we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust any day now. And this understanding had sort of grown up through the ’60s and ’70s after we’d spent the fifties in denial of it, so that by the ’80s, we’d reached the Kubler-Ross stage of acceptance. So on the one hand, yes, there was that nagging belief that any day now, President Reagan would make good on his offhand jokes and start the end of the world. But as we’d all accepted that and come to terms with it, there was a tremendous sense of liberation that came with it. Okay, sure, we were all going to die, but, for good or for ill, that meant we didn’t need to hold back. Go ahead, eat an extra desert. Build a car out of stainless steel. Sell junk bonds. Snort a line of coke. Have anonymous, unprotected, premarital sex. Get a mullet. The world’s going to end well before you’re ever called to account for it.

And then the ’90s came, and the Evil Soviet Empire crumbled, and everyone shouted, “Yay! We’re all going to live,” and then, “Shit. That means I’m going to have to pay the bill, aren’t I?” And we spent the next decade basically trying to prove to anyone who would listen how mature we were now, with our flannel and our angsty music, and recycling, and our only ever liking things “ironically”, and our always having to be subversive and postmodern, and our “not running the economy into the ground much”, which made us feel good about ourselves and how we weren’t all shallow and self-destructive like those ’80s guys.

It all fell apart, of course. We repealed Glass-Stegall, elected George Bush, watched two planes crash into the New York Skyline, and basically got ourselves everything that sucked about the ’80s with none of the hairstyles. (We got iPods too, though, so it wasn’t a total wash).

But the angsty ’90s weren’t the only ’90s, and the ’90s weren’t a wasteland: there was another ’90s where, emboldened by the fact that mankind had collectively sorted out how to avoid nuking itself out of existence, we actually thought maybe we could sort out major problems like pollution and poverty and inequality (This too didn’t last). And you could be all postmodern and subversive, even angsty if you wanted. So too, there was more than one ’80s. Alongside the devil-may-care ’80s of glam and big hair and primary colors, there was another ’80s. An ’80s that saw itself being forced to pay for the sins of the old men who carved up the world back at Yalta. That ’80s was pissed.

It’s kind of strange to be talking about Punk here in 1987. Punk’s real heyday had come and gone by 1987 — its influence lived on in Post-Punk and Pop Punk and Neo-Punk and Emo and.. Well pretty much everything worthwhile about modern music. But as a specific identifiable movement with certain tropes and trappings, Punk is really more of a ’70s phenomenon. But you wouldn’t know that if your memories of the ’80s came primarily from post-apocalyptic children’s shows. There is a pervasive idea through ’80s eschatology that the apocalyptic future will be full of Punk Rockers. Blank RegIf it’s an anarchic dystopia, they’re the bad guys, rapacious street gangs looking to assault and rob more photogenic survivors. If it’s a totalitarian dystopia, they’re more likely to be sympathetic — characters who look scary but turn out to be allies in the cause of bringing down The Man. Punk was, even on its most superficial levels, kind of apocalyptic to begin with, and I imagine that using some of the iconography of Punk in the Mad Max series did quite a lot to make it one of the major indicators of dystopianism in film.

But even as Punk Rock evolved, moved on, and waned in its original form in the real world, it remained a dominant signifier in mass media dystopianism. I think by the late ’80s, Punk had simply been around long enough that the people who made mass market media had finally heard of it and finally thought Middle America would find it “edgy” but not too scary. And Punk was especially dominant in Cyberpunk. Which you’d think was obvious, but it’s not really; the “punk” in Cyberpunk wasn’t originally specifically related to the Punk Rock movement — it was analogous to it, but cyberpunk’s literary trappings are much closer to noir and more heavily influenced by the culture of the far east. More mirrorshades than mohawks. I don’t know if the entanglement between Punk and Cyberpunk was a simple matter of film and TV producers not caring to learn the distinction, or if there was other cross-polination, but by the time Max Headroom got his own series (A series which is surprisingly disjoint from Captain Power; though both had their entire runs in 1987 and 1988, only three episodes of Max Headroom overlap the span of time between the broadcast of Power‘s first and last episodes.), it was pretty standard for the “urban misfit” class in anything cyberpunk to be depicted as very specifically 1970s punk rockers.

Which more or less brings us to “Flame Street”, an episode that, much like “The Ferryman”, is simple and well-structured, and hangs together mostly on important character moments rather than plot. Tech CityCap and company have come to “Tech City”, which is kind of a cross between Tokyo’s Akihabara district and the Kowloon Walled City. Only this is Captain Power, so it’s populated entirely by white people dressed like punk rockers (Seriously, about a quarter of Toronto’s population is of Asian descent. Would it have killed them to cast an Asian actor for this one? Pretty much the one unbreakable trope about 80s cyberpunk is the assumption that folks from the pacific rim were going to be running things, especially anything to do with technology, in the grimdark cyber-future.). It’s enough to make you wonder if they’ve accidentally wandered onto a Max Headroom set. The Captain’s Log entry at the beginning tries to make sense of this place by explaining that Dread allows it to exist because of the technology they provide. It seems like a pretty thin excuse, especially as it’s clear that Overmind’s capabilities are superior to anything in Tech City. Also, Tech City is kind of a dumb name (“Flame Street” is better, but I don’t think the name is actually used for anything in the episode).

[raw]Cap and company have come here undercover in order to, ahem, surf the web for information about the Styx phase of Project New Order. One of the big things about the web, of course, is that you have to physically go to it in person. And stick your head in it. They dress as monks and wander through the streets of Tech City, chanting as they try to be discrete in this techno-dystopia. By pretending to be ascetics. Their cunning disguise fails to hide them from the attention of “Zone Boy”, who is basically Luther from The Warriors with a mohawk.

Brock JohnsonIt would not be strictly accurate to call Brock Johnson (fabulous name, by the way. I can just imagine Tom Servo going off on a long riff about an actor named Brock Johnson) “convincing” or “compelling” in this role; he’s not a realistic depiction of punk, a realistic depiction of addiction, a realistic depiction of sociopathy, or a realistic depiction of humanity, really. But at the same time, his performance is spot-on: the nihilistic punk sociopath is very much a stock character in dystopian fiction, and so is the cyberpunk nonsensical-technobabble-addict, and he’s right on-target for those archetypes, modulo the fact that he only uses language you can get away with in a seven-thirty time slot. Unlike a lot of the guest cast in Captain Power, Johnson’s long resume is full of things I’ve actually seen or at least heard of, such as Viper, MANTIS, MacGyver, Seven Days, First Wave, Supernatural, The Listener, and most recently, Pompeii. It appears that he’s got something of a natural talent for this kind of stock character, since his filmography reveals that he’s most often credited in his TV work as Unnamed Punk, Unnamed Thug or Unnamed Junkie. Except in the one role I actually distinctly remember him from, a guest spot on So Weird where he played a bee that had turned into a gas station attendant (He helps the heroes solve the Traveling Salesman problem. God, I loved that show).

He’s a violent sociopath and a junkie, addicted to “Neuro-charge,” a suitably cyberpunk pseudo-drug which seems to consist of getting minor brain damage via uploading something unsavory via one’s obligatory cyberpunk direct-wired-network-connection-to-the-brain. Which we are meant to believe is an expensive hobby, and not something you can do by, say, jamming a nine volt battery into the hole in your head. I mock because I care — while this is all very silly and unrealistic, it’s still perfectly in keeping with the tradition of cyberpunk, at least on screen (In print too, though to a lesser extent).
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Eager for work, Zone Boy agrees to lead them to “Mindsinger”, who they’re seeking in order to access the “cyberweb”, and also because, this being a cyberpunk episode, they have a certain quota of characters with eXtreme!!! 31337 hack3r names which would sound really cool as your AOL screen name, except that it was already taken so you have to be Minds1nger586 instead. Mindsinger is apparently the most 31337 of the 31337, able to hook customers up with, “any sensation you want”. Our heroes are also shocked, shocked when Zone Boy casually drops the fact that Mindsinger is female. Because who could possibly imagine that in the 22nd century a girl would be an expert at computers? Everyone knows that ovaries physically preclude the ability to interact with electronics. Except maybe for piloting a wormhole-traversing shuttle or operating super-powered bio-armor.

[raw]Don’t get me wrong, kudos where they’re due: it’s clear that Mindsinger’s gender is supposed to be a feminist nod, showing the audience that yes, girls can too enter STEM fields. As long as there’s an apocalypse to destroy all existing social constructs.

There’s a long tradition in fiction, mass-media fiction in particular, of the desire to portray progressive, enlightened ideals being harshly undermined by a nasty streak of essentialism. Science Fiction and Sitcoms tend to be the worst offenders, and I think it’s for a common reason. Sitcom humor trades very heavily — sometimes exclusively — on reductive stereotypes: the source of most laughs is either “Watch these people behave in a manner stereotypical of their gender/race/class. Isn’t that silly!” or “Watch these people behave in a manner opposed to the stereotype of their gender/race/class. Isn’t that unexpected!” These jokes are very often critical of the existing stereotypes (Probably the most popular style of sitcom joke over the last few decades is a variation on “Man behaves in a way stereotypical of Middle America’s notions of manliness, and this causes bad things to happen because that view of manliness is toxic”), but they still can’t help but reinforce them. The joke is only funny if, at some level, the audience will get on-board with you that there’s something inherently wrong with a technolgically-adept woman, or a stay-at-home dad, or an interracial marriage.

Science Fiction too has a long history of trading heavily on reductive stereotypes: with the heavy emphasis on allegory, on high concept, and on worldbuilding, traditional Science Fiction isn’t big on characters — the purpose of a character in science fiction is often to act as an avatar in an exploration of the question “How would the introduction of this high concept into the world affect mankind?” — so a man in such a story is not simply “a man”, but is “Man” in the abstract, and contrariwise, any given woman is liable to be intended as “the avatar of the abstract concept of womanhood”: their traits and foibles are not personal quirks, but indicative of the essential character of their respective genders. But although it happens to characters across the gamut of sex and race, it has a greater impact when it’s done to a less privileged group: a white man becomes “Abstract avatar of the common human condition among all homosapiens;” a woman becomes “Abstract avatar of humans with ovaries, as distinguished from the normal sort of human,” and besides, the tendency to turn “a woman” into “Abstract womanhood” is already common outside of genre fiction to a far greater extent than the same kind of abstraction for men.

If you believe that gender essentialism and feminism are fundamentally incompatible, you’re going to have problem with the fact that in shows like this one, they may well show you women who are fully equal matches for the men, but they always always frame it as something exceptional: the remarkable case of an individual who has risen above the constraints of her genitals, or else they frame it as a reconstruction of essentialist stereotypes (that is, a declaration that yes, the stereotypes are true, but the female stereotypes should be the good ones and the male stereotypes the bad ones): the “mama bears” who gain superpowers from protective maternal instincts or valkyries who can dominate men because boobies and because men are barely-sentient troglodytes(You may have a gut reaction of “But that’s not misogynistic! If anything, it’s misandrist!” That reaction is understandable, but wrong. Historically, “Men are barely-sentient troglodytes who can’t be expected to control themselves,” is invariably the preamble to “Whereas women are pure and good and must remain unsullied. Therefore the liberty of women must be heavily restricted for their own protection, since it’s obviously unreasonable to expect men to control themselves.” It’s the second most popular historical justification for the oppression of women, coming in just behind “Women are basically an advanced form of livestock,” and has been growing in popularity now that you can only rarely get away with referring to women as “Penis houses”.)  — that’s basically the problem with Joss Whedon when he’s at his worst, and Stephen Moffat when he’s at his best. And if you don’t believe that gender essentialism and feminism are fundamentally incompatible, you’re just wrong. So shut up.
(PS: You may well think that this long aside, independent of its merits, is a disproportionate reaction to one throwaway line of dialogue. You are right, but women are so absent in this show that if I want to talk about the problems with this show’s gender politics, I have to take what I can get.)

But the reactions from our main characters undermine this more than once as they struggle to believe that a mere woman could possibly have the technological might to deliver what they need.

MindsingerMindsinger (Which would be kind of a femmy name for a dude in such a superficially punk rock dystopia, now that I think of it) has wildly asymmetric hair, wears a sort of pvc cage, and provides access to the ribald pleasures the Cyber Web offers. Cap leases some time in the web from her, along with access to data that leaked out of the minds of Dread soldiers she’s sold her services to for “two hundred stads a minute.” The basic gist here seems to be that Mindsinger is running a combination cyber-brothel and internet cafe, and Cap is going to go in there to look up Project New Order on Wikipedia. As you would expect, this being cyberpunk, once he starts his “run”, any attempt to forcibly disconnect him from the outside would leave him “zero EEG”, because that totally makes sense and isn’t just ludicrous bullshit to keep the plot running which not only would no one ever design a system to do, but which no one could possibly ever design a system to do (he said, fully expecting to be mocked in 2034 when the RIAA gains the right to DMCA bits of your brain if they catch you thinking about music).

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Unfortunately, Zone Boy has “pross”ed the identities of our heroes, and promptly calls Lord Dread from a payphonePayphone, which exists in the post-apocalyptic 22nd century, to rat them out in exchange for some Neuro-Charge. Dread promises an additional unlimited amount of neurocharge if he can prevent Cap from leaving until Blastarr gets there.

Virtual RealityThe Cyber Web is basically a Laser Tag Arena your mind gets sent to via Video Toaster effects, where you can summon Video Toaster-rendered icons to you in order to learn things. Overmind finds it trivial to hack into the web, and just as Cap has found the icon for Styx, Dread shows up to shoot at him. Dread explains that Overmind has increased the sensory feedback such that if Cap dies here, the psychosomatic shock would kill him for real — which is the closest I think I’ve ever heard to a reasonable explanation of how that whole “If you die in the game, you die for real” thing that always accompanies cyberspace plots could possibly work, a full decade before the vaguer “Your mind makes it real” crap from The Matrix. Cap attempts to fight back, but finds himself outclassed because, as Dread explains, Cap’s fundamental unwillingness to take a human life prevents him from using the force of his will to construct an effective weapon against Dread in cyberspace. Which I think is a clever enough explanation, except for the way it overlooks how three episodes ago, Cap reflexively tried to shoot Lord Dread in the face at point-blank range.

Out in reality, the bad guys show up. Hawk and the gang power on and fight them, attempting to hold them off until Cap can be safely removed from cyberspace. Zone Boy holds Mindsinger at gunpoint to prevent her from freeing Cap once she realizes the danger he’s in from Dread. I have no idea why this would be necessary though, since we’ve already established that Cap can’t be freed from the outside without killing him. He justifies his actions on the basis that Lord Dread has promised, so close as I can tell, to lobotomize him: he says he’s being given a “Permanent checkout. One-way ticket to nirvana; no brain, no pain.” Which is beautifully nihilistic. I love the idea that in a world like this, there are “drug” addicts who are looking for a kind of total self-annihilation to escape their lives. I just wish it wasn’t all so vague. Based on how he’s described it, the thing he’s seeking could be delivered much more easily with a power drill and a nine-volt, and he could skip all this nonsense with Bio-Dreads and 31337 hackers and all that noise. The implication seems to be that “neuro-charge” is some kind of digital signal that has to be purchased at great cost, which Dread can manufacture in unlimited amounts, and which can’t be stored and replayed. It’s not out of line with the sort of weirdness you see in cyberpunk, but in context, bits of it undermine bits of the Captain Power story around it, and bits of the Captain Power story undermine the cyberpunk. If Lord Dread can easily hack the cyber web and produce “neuro-charge” at will, it’s hard to imagine what resources Tech City has to offer him (This would be better if we saw more of what goes on in Tech City; as it is, the only things we know about it fall squarely into the domain of what Dread can already do “in house”).

Inside, Dread forces Cap to conjure up an image of the Power Base and demands to know its location. Then, we start to get really dark and complex, especially for a kids’ show, as Dread tries gaslighting Cap, suggesting that he might have already found and destroyed the Power Base, but messed with Cap’s mind so much that he’s forgotten. Dread claims that, using the power of cyberspace, he can make Cap doubt his own sanity, which is a nice and heavy concept, and I just wish they’d been a bit less vague about that, since we’re not left with any sense of what it entails. We know Dread can’t read Cap’s mind, so presumably what he’s talking about is forcing the Captain to live through simulated experiences that torture him into submission, but all we see of it is the scene at the Power Base, where it’s implied that Cap is already close to breaking. Zombie DadDread shows Cap the image of the rest of the gang, their battered bodies dropped limply to the ground by mechs, declaring, “You can not save your friends any more than you could save your father,” and summons up an image of a ghoulish Bruce Grey, looking like he’s been drowned.

This, however, turns out to be a bad move for Dread, as Power rallies. Overmind asserts that Cap’s will is too strong, and suggests Dread get on with the murderin’. A restored Bruce Grey gives a little speech about the indomitably of the human spirit and dictator-shames Dread for his actions. Cap and Dread fight in earnest, using what looks like those retractable sci-fi lances from Andromeda, as Cap asserts his willpower and forces them to be composited over stock footage of the Volcania fly-by and condemns Dread’s vision of a Brave New World. In a callback to “A Fire in the Dark”, Dread pleads that this wasteland is only a transitional phase, and will be justified by the techno-utopia he means to build. Cap counters that no utopia could justify this, and he’s backed up by surprising visitor.

Dread vs DreadThe unmutilated and unmodified image of Lyman Taggart appears unto them to agree with Cap and accuse his counterpart of having given up too much of his humanity. It’s deliberately vague whether this manifestation is generated by Cap, or is a figment of Dread’s conscience. Lord Dread has a go at shooting his former self, but when that doesn’t work, he just does one of those big “No!” shouts and fades away. Cap gets an opening to return to the real world and deck Zone Boy when the rest of the gang creates an EMP pulse that temporarily disables all technology in the immediate area (I think. We actually see that he’s still in cyberspace afterward and kinda wills himself out).

Cap leaves VR
This is what I imagine the Body Debit scene with Zaphod on the Frogstar would have looked like if they’d done a second season of the BBC Hitch-Hiker’s Guide series

As per usual, the team decides to be sporting about it and not cut up Blastarr into a billion pieces and spread them to the four corners of the earth while he’s out cold from a “Total power failure”, instead going to comfort Cap, who’s visibly shaken from his experience. I have no idea why. In principle, I guess it was that whole, “I can make you doubt your very sanity” thing, but in practice, Dread only has the advantage for about a minute; the rest of the time, Cap’s dominating the hell out of him — undermining his very raison d’etre. Hawk Comforts John But Cap shakily tells Hawk that Dread was in the cyberweb, and Hawk instantly jumps to Shipping-levels of comfort, stroking Cap’s shoulder and telling him that it wasn’t real. I suppose he’s referring to the bit where Cap saw the others dead, but Hawk wouldn’t know about that part, so it’s like he’s saying that Dread wasn’t real, which is dumb, because Dread obviously is real, and his influence in the web was real too, even if he wasn’t physically present.

We end on Volcania, where Overmind is berating Dread for letting Cap get away with the Styx information instead of just killing him when he had the chance. A shell-shocked Dread just sort of absently mutters about how Project New Order must succeed. Surprisingly, there’s no ultimate closure on Zone Boy. We can thank our lucky stars for that, since this setup has historically always led to them doing a scene where the traitorous human gets his just deserts by being digitized, and by now you all know how I feel about Retributive Digitization. The way the were setting it up in this episode, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest if at the end Zone Boy had demanded Dread pay the promised neuro-charge, having held up his end of the deal, only for Dread to dispatch him in some suitably unsavory way, like a lethal download or something. Or perhaps they’d have Mindsinger set up some ironic punishment for him, locking him in the cyber-web experiencing some kind of permanent torture. Y’know, for kids. But instead, Zone Boy ends this episode half-conscious on the floor in Mindsinger’s basement. I hope this was on purpose, and they didn’t just cut the scene of his horiffic karmic punishment for time.

It doesn’t feel like a whole lot happens in this episode. If you take out my long digressions on punk, cyberpunk, and gender essentialism, this article isn’t any longer than the one on “Pariah”. And yet, it feels like a really well-paced episode. It comes and goes quickly, leaning on a small number of pretty dense scenes. We do have the obligatory fight scenes, but the one between Cap and Dread actually feels like character catharsis rather than contractual obligation, and the one with the rest of the team is at least split up by the cuts back into cyberspace.

It’s simultaneously trivial and impossible to complain about the cyberpunk elements. Trivial in that pretty much everything technological that happens in this episode is bullshit, but impossible in that it is pretty much the exact same bullshit that any 1980s TV or film interpretation of Cyberpunk was going to fall into: If you die in cyberspace you die for real; the internet is only accessible by going to a secret elite hacker den; there are electronic drugs that can’t be replicated; accessing the internet involves going into a virtual reality world that looks like a laser tag arena; people will have computers that plug into their brains; I’ve seen it all before. In fact, this may be the closest that Captain Power has ever come to actually doing the genre they were shooting for: they aimed for cyberpunk and they hit cyberpunk.

It’s not a perfect fit, though; there are some parts of the plot that seem to be working against each other. Mindsinger kinda forgets which show she’s in and cautions Cap against getting too close to mainframes because of the brain-destroying countermeasures they deploy, which is total “the world is run by supergiant evil corporations” cyberpunk, in a world without supergiant evil corporations, where the “cyberweb” can not possibly extend beyond this one city (and its unlikely direct T3 line to Volcania. I mean, it’s not like it actually makes any sense at all for the “cyber web” to be any kind of inter-system network. It would make more sense for it to be a single isolated system owned and operated by Mindsinger, that holds the information Cap wants because she recorded it off of her other customers. But what would be the point of warning about mainframes, and how did Overmind hack it?) And Dread’s three-stage plan has three stages that actively work against each other: Zone Boy is sent to keep Mindsinger from pulling Cap out when we’ve already established that she can’t, but he at no point tries to actually kill Cap himself; he’s just keeping him from escaping until Blastarr gets there to kill Cap in person — Blastarr is actively trying in the fight scene to draw the rest of the team away so he can go in there and off Power. But meanwhile, Dread can apparently kill Cap any time he likes using Cyber, and just chooses not to because he wants to taunt him instead, which would of course be interrupted if Cap were so impolite as to get murdered.

Bruce GrayBut it more than makes up for these sins with its character moments. Team Power doesn’t get a huge amount of dialogue, but it’s all pointful: their battlefield banter isn’t one-liners this time, but actual strategizing and working together. Under torture, Cap expresses more emotions in this episode than in the entire rest of the series. And much like in “A Fire in the Dark”, we get an intense look at Dread’s inner turmoil: Cap pretty much exposition-bombs us that under all that metal, there’s a part of Dread still capable of seeing that what he’s done and what he’s doing is wrong — yes, he’s a true believer in the glory of The Machine, but he’s not quite sure that the world he’s making is really the utopia of his vision, or whether it’s worth the cost.

Heck, even Bruce Grey is on the stick here. There’s not really anything to Zombie Dad, but when he gives his little speech to Dread about how he can’t kill a dream, he speaks with passion and fury and hope and disdain and pity, and it’s nothing like his performance as Mentor. And he finally gets to use his damned hands. You can tell he’s been dying to do this, and he makes big broad sweeps with his arms for the whole speech and it would be lovely, except that it’s framed so that you can’t actually see his arms, just his excited fingertips bobbing in and out of the corner of the frame.

Captain Power is done for 1987, but this was a good one to go out on. Next time we travel twenty minutes into the future, it’ll be… Less far in the past. See you in 1988.

The Voice of the Resistance: Time Keeps On Slippin’ (Second Chance)

It’s November 22 or 23, 1987. Billy Idol’s cover of “Mony Mony” has unseated Tiffany on the Billboard chart. A pirate television signal in Chicago, IL interrupts the local public television station’s broadcast of reruns of a British Science Fiction show I used to like, to show a few minutes of obscenity from a man in a Max Headroom costume. On the other side of the pond, said show turns 24 with the first part of “Dragonfire”, introducing Sophie Aldred as Ace, the last of the classic-series companions. “Hell Week”, my all-time favorite episode of MacGyver, airs. Star Trek the Next Generation airs “Hide and Q”, the first step in the evolution of John DeLancie’s character from “Otherworldly existential threat” to “Picard’s wacky omnipotent uncle”, as he’d describe himself at a con I attended years later. Captain Power airs one of its better episodes, “Wardogs”.

Oh dear. We’ve done that one already. This is one of the dangers of talking about a show that was filmed in one order, written in another, aired in a third and put on DVD in a fourth, especially when you don’t plan the whole thing out ahead of time. Well okay then. You know what we’re going to do? Since it’s Doctor Who‘s birthday, let’s celebrate by hopping back in time a bit, to talk about something kinda weird that’s going on in the next universe over. It could not possibly be more disappointing than Day of the Doctor.

It’s some time near the end of 1979. M, the Eagles, the Commodores, Styx and Rupert Holmes are duking it out in the charts. Ronald Reagan has announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. Ayatollah Khomeini takes over Iran and declares the US the “Great Satan”. Robert Guillaume’s character from Soap, Benson DuBois, gets his own show, Benson, following his exploits as the only sane man in the staff of the scatterbrained governor of an unspecified midwestern state that looks like suburban California. Seven seasons will see him rise through the ranks from head of household affairs to state budget director, to lieutenant governor, ending with his bid at the governorship. It’s widely understood that if the series had continued, Benson would lose to his friend and incumbant Gene Gatling, but be appointed to fill an open seat in the Senate, I’m guessing because they wanted to title an episode “Mr. DuBois Goes to Washington.”

We seem to have gone back too far. This isn’t right; I’m only a baby at this point; this just doesn’t work as part of my television history. What are we doing here?

Ah. There it is. Benson is known for his trademark snark, and here in one of the early episodes, he drives home a point by comparing someone unfavorably to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. A handful of years later, between three and five, a little boy in Maryland is going to catch a rerun of this one, and it’s going to be the first time he’s ever heard that name. Let’s see if we can get back on track and hop forward again…

It’s July 29, 2011. LMFAO is in control of the charts with “Party Rock Anthem”. US courts uphold the patentability of DNA. We’re in the thick of a series of uprisings in Africa and the middle east collectively referred to as the “Arab Spring”, and Colonel Muammar Gaddafi dies.

Wait, that’s not right either. It’s too soon for that. What’s going on here? Something is very wrong. History has come off the rails. We seem to be in several places at once. Start again.

It’s September 26, 1987. Whitney Houston tops the charts with “Didn’t We Almost Have It All”. Over the next two days, Captain Power will air “The Abyss”, and then any chance of that promo narrator being right about it being “The Science Fiction Event of the Year” will be cut down when “Encounter at Farpoint” airs.

But it’s also 2011. How can this be? Where are we? I see pearly gates. That ain’t good. We are at the threshhold of the afterlife — a place I always knew I must come to if I was going to talk about Captain Power. But I didn’t expect it so soon. We aren’t in heaven yet, though, nor in hell. Not as above, not so below. No, we’re just in the antechamber. And here is St. Peter. A figure perhaps more comforting to middle America in 1987 than Anubis, but reduced to the same role: he will weigh your heart against a feather, and determine your ultimate fate. A vapid but kind and caring beauty queen steps onto the pedestal. It glows gold she is sent up to paradise. Colonel Gaddafi steps up and the pedestal glows again, red this time. His fate is less pleasant: to live out the final experiences of a suicide bomber every two minutes for the rest of time. St. Peter beckons; it is your turn.

The mind is its own place, Milton said, and can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell. Which is a weirdly observant thing for a Calvinist to say, but there you go. St. Peter has a problem. He doesn’t know what to do with you. His pedestal has turned blue. Somewhere else, in the 1987 around us, the video game console wars are ascendant, and their influence has intruded here as well. A thousand years of subtle nuance and theology went into the western conception of how the worth of a human soul is judged, but here, at the 2011 that exists in the eye of this storm, all that is discarded in favor of a point system: this afterlife may have unambiguously Christian trappings, but they’re only skin-deep: Gaddafi was condemned specifically (and explicitly) for his use of bombs against civilians; his choice of religion doesn’t enter into it. Do good things, acquire Blessing Points, do bad things, acquire Damnation Points. If your BP exceeds your DP, the light turns gold and you go to heaven. If your DP exceeds your BP, the light turns red and you burn.

But the light has turned blue. HP=DP. Does not compute. Abort, Retry, Fail. What is St. Peter to do with us? What does one do in a video game if you reach the end of the level without enough points to achieve a victory condition? Try again.

It is April 9, 2011. The US congress narrowly avoids a government shutdown with a temporary agreement to fund the government for a bit longer. This is pretty much how the country limps along until 2013, when they finally fail to keep the god damned country running for several weeks. Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” is unseated in the charts by Katy Perry’s “ET”. This is pretty much how the country limps along until the middle of May. In a bar in Ellicott City, twenty-several teams are in a tight competition for Trivia Bowl XXVIII. Very few points separate the top-ranked teams, and we’re nearing the end of the game. One question could make or break a team here. The category is television. Give either of the two names of the 1987 show which was Matthew Perry’s first leading role as a regular cast member in a sitcom. I remember. No one else does. The team is awfully good at this game, and those eight points are enough to break the logjam among the top four and ensure that no one can catch us. We take home the trophy.

The answer I gave, because I wasn’t sure of the other one, was Boys Will Be Boys, a bog-standard sitcom about a teenage boy, his mildly delinquent friends, and his family. It was okay, nothing noteworthy, except that Matthew Perry played a guy named “Chazz,” which was a thing that could happen in 1987. It died a merciful death within a year. But Boys Will Be Boys wasn’t where the show started, and it’s not what sucked us back and forth from 1979 to 2011, then back to 1987. Because Boys Will Be Boys was what the show became after a heavy retool. When the show first aired, on September 26, 1987, it wasn’t Boys Will Be Boys, but Second Chance. It was still about a teenage boy and his mildly delinquent friends, but it wasn’t just about that.

2011 seems to be the crux here. We have been to it twice now, but the two are strangely different; April and July are separated by more than the two months they usually get. The premature death of Colonel Gaddafi I can understand; in April, the cards were already on the table. But here in July, there are hovercars, and hover-freeways. And people are impressed by furniture made of wood. John Travolta is on the fifty dollar bill. And business attire is a blue Nehru-inspired polyester suit that wouldn’t look out of place in either Star Trek the Next Generation or Captain Power. With blue slippers.

We are back in July, in the first scene of the first episode of Second Chance, and after sending Miss America and Colonel Gaddafi to their respective fates St. Peter’s next guest is a man who looks a lot like Mitt Romney, who has just died by crashing his hovercar on the Santa Monica Hover-Freeway while wearing a blue Nehru-inspired polyester suit. This is Charles Russell, and he sets off the blue light. Not good enough for heaven, not bad enough for hell. The karmic equivalent, St. Peter explains, of the music of Barry Mantilow.

Charles Russell is therefore transported to Venice, California, September 26, 1987, to become a lodger at the home of his struggling mother, where he can act as a father figure to his own past self, then incomprehensibly using the nickname “Chazz”, in order to steer himself onto a slightly more virtuous course. This mostly takes the form of painfully unfunny jokes like Chazz claiming he “Wouldn’t be caught dead” in a blue polyester Nehru-inspired suit, and President Travolta being on the fifty. Chazz, along with his friends Nerdy Eugene and 50s Greaser “The Booch” (Because it’s the 80s and you can apparently be named “The Booch”) has been driven to petty larceny in an attempt to forestall the pending foreclosure on their home.

Fortunately for Chazz, his older self is the attendant at the convenience store they attempt to rob, and talks them out of it, which is, as I said, fortunate for Chazz, but apparently doesn’t cut it with St. Peter, as he “changed the circumstances” rather than teaching his younger self the difference between right and wrong. This comes as a great disappointment to Charles, who, having spent a day in the 1980s, is now understandably very eager to get on with being dead. So Charles is ordered to remain in 1987 for as long as it takes to teach his younger self to make sound moral decisions.

Which is apparently four months. It is November 28, 1987. Almost back where we started. Where everything went off the rails. Edmondton beats Tortonto in the Grey Cup. Jennifer Warnes and Bill Medly knock Billy Idol out of the top spot on the Hot 100 “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life”. Episode 9 of Second Chance airs, and the show goes on hiatus for the Christmas holiday season, which, this being 1987, has the decency not to start until after Thanksgiving. If I’ve got my years right, this is one of my favorite childhood Christmases. But don’t get comfy; we’re not staying.

It is January 16, 1988. We’ve hopped over “Heaven is a Place on Earth”, “Faith”, and “So Emotional” to find George Harrison at the top of the charts with his cover of “Got My Mind Set On You”, a song with a catchy enough tune, but which only had about thirty words in it when James Ray sang it back in 1962, and Harrison leaves one of the verses out. (The missing lines, in case you’re wondering, are “Everywhere I go, you know / Bad luck follows me / Every time I fall in love / I’m left in misery”). All this hopping around in time has broken something. History has changed. Second Chance returns to the air, but things have changed. Now, it’s called Boys Will Be Boys and is about the continuing exploits of Chazz, Eugene and The Booch — with no time traveling dead future-selves.

This is basically the weirdest damned thing I have ever heard of. It’s like if for the second season of The Incredible Hulk, they’d fired Lou Ferrigno and said, “Y’know what? Let’s just make it a drama about David Banner going back to work as a scientist and never mention the period of his life when he occasionally turned green.”

It didn’t save the show. Of course it didn’t. The problem with Second Chance wasn’t its outlandish premise. It was the fact that it wasn’t very good. Matthew Perry is basically just charisma and one-liners, the jokes are predictable and forced, and they decided to include a character called “The Booch”. And for some reason, half the cast have very forced-sounding Brooklyn accents. I can’t tell you with any certainty, because this week I am a time traveler and am dropping anachronism bombs everywhere, whether it was especially bad compared to other sitcoms of the time. It’s clearly trying too hard, but remember, one of the places we are today is 1987, and TV hasn’t adopted the pseudo-naturalistic frame it has in 2014: we expect our sitcoms to be broad caricatures, trading on one-liners and catchphrases: “Did I do that?”; “Of course not, Cousin, don’t be re-dick-a-loose”; “I HEAR you!”; “Don’t have a cow, man”; “Whatchu Talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”

What I can tell you is that over the past few years, I have gone back and re-watched big chunks of Benson, One Day at a Time, The Facts of Life, Punky Brewster, Out of this World, The Torkelsons, and a handful of other sitcoms. And they’re all still funny. The first three of those at least have some serious problems that are really grating today: Benson is clearly trading on the joke “He’s black, but he’s more competent than the white people!”; The Facts of Life is clearly trading on the joke, “They’re girls but they think they’re people!”; One Day at a Time keeps playing, “Their landlord is really REALLY rapey” for laughs. But they’re all still properly funny. Out of this World is a little bit harder to watch. Its humor is all one-liners and funny walks. It’s clever enough that it’s still enjoyable, though, and it doesn’t have the same kind of problematic concept at the core of its premise the way those (otherwise better) shows do; yes, it occasionally has elements of gender essentialism, and it’s got a whole tanker truck full of fat-shaming, but it’s much more “This is the way TV works in this imperfect world we live in” and not “The fundamental idea of our show is based around reinforcing an ugly stereotype.”

Second Chance is not as good Out of this World; the jokes aren’t as good, the characters aren’t as good, and like shows that are far its superior, it’s got a baked-in problematic premise: the implication that single mothers don’t cut it and a boy needs a Real True Father Figure, even if it’s his own temporally-displaced ghost-self (Act 2 is basically the characters shouting at the camera that Chazz has been driven to amorality specifically and entirely because his estranged father won’t pay child support). And this show isn’t good enough for me to forgive that. The Facts of Life is funny enough for me to bracket (not overlook) the gender essentialism; Second Chance is not.

They probably shouldn’t have played it for laughs. If you wanted to do a show about a guy sent back in time to put right what once went wrong, who is assisted in his journey by someone only he can see and hear, you probably want to make it a drama. And get Scott Bakula.

It is October 20, 2011. Adele, who had unseated Katy Perry back in May, has returned to the top Billboard position by unseating Maroon 5 with “Someone Like You”. The two have been duking it out since September. In Libya, Colonel Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi dies. Again. In Baltimore, a man who recently helped his friends win a trivia bowl gets the first season of Benson from Netflix. Huh. That’s funny. There’s a reference to Gaddafi. Weird how the more things change, the more they stay the same. I thought this was supposed to be the future. I want my hovercar.

Did I do it, Al? Is history back on the right track?

I think so, Sam. Ziggy’s saying that the Arab Spring happened the right way, and Miss America didn’t die in 2011. On the down-side, it looks like you set flying cars back about twenty years. And for some reason, an episode of Captain Power ended up in the wrong place on the DVD.

All that just by retooling a sitcom? How about Matt? Did his career ever recover?

He made out great. Ziggy says he goes on to star in one of the biggest sitcoms of the ’90s. Oh. That show kept the Nice Guy character archetype alive for another century. Can’t have it all I guess.

It is July 12, 2014. Iggy Azalea is on top of the charts with “Fancy”, a song I don’t like, but I can at least respect the craftsmanship. I’m about three quarters of the way through writing this article. I am almost certainly writing it months in advance since I know chronologically, it falls another four or five articles down and I’m not even finished with The Mirror in Darkness yet, but I wanted to get it written down before I forgot. I pull out my tablet and check NewsBlur. I’m following a handful of blogs that have, like my own Captain Power articles since the hiatus, adopted (ie. “stole”) some stylistic conventions from Philip Sandifer’s Tardis Eruditorium, a blog I no longer follow because something happened in my head and now I find its subject matter sends me into a recursive obsessive bad-head-place. A cat named Frezno has posted to The Nintendo Project Resumed (A successor to Sandifer’s now-defunct Nintendo Project) about Metroid. Crap. He’s doing the whole “Bouncing around to different time zones” thing, and he’s obviously beaten me to it. I’m going to have to write a whole extra paragraph at the end to acknowledge that so that no one thinks I’m ripping him off.

Oh Boy…

And you should win prizes for watching (Not quite Captain Power: The Rose of Yesterday)

A brief intermission. Between “The Intruder” and the next episode, there was originally meant to be an episode called “The Rose of Yesterday”. That episode, along with one called “The Room”, were dropped when the episode count was cut during production. What I know about “The Room” is pretty vague; it was to involve Cap passing himself off as a refugee, faking a vague European accent and inappropriately asking his buddy Mark about his sex life before declaring that everyone betray him and that he’s fed up with this world.

“The Rose of Yesterday”, on the other hand, has the following capsule summary: “Lord Dread orders the destruction of all books. The Power team scramble to save all literary artifacts. Tank meets a librarian.” I am SO DISAPPOINTED this one got dropped. I mean, sure, yes, okay, that’s a massive tonal shift from the surrounding episodes. But to have such a straightforward kids’ show plot? I wish we could have one good, solid, traditional kid’s show episode. It would put everything in perspective. Besides, Post-Apocalyptic Library? Holy crap, Captain Power collides with Tomes and Talismans. I can’t even begin to codify how fucking awesome that would be. Mentor doing database searches for the Universal Being? Miss Bookheart explaining to Tank that Melville Dewey invented his decimal system to help people find things in a library? Hawk’s facial expression as he plants his underwear somewhere to attract a horse? Cap asking if biographies are a kind of fiction? Pure unbridled awesome. I would happily trade away “Pariah”, “The Intruder” and “The Mirror in Darkness” for “The Rose of Yesterday”.

And since it doesn’t exist, let’s talk about something else for a while.

So, a while ago, I said that sitcoms with outlandish elements to their premise were a sort of specifically late-80s-early-90s thing. This isn’t so much “true” as “nonsense I came to believe because of confirmation bias”.  As it turns out, late-80s-early-90s is basically just when I was most aware of sitcoms, and thus most likely to notice.

The phenomenon I’m talking about excludes “Situation Comedies in a traditionally Science Fiction setting”, so things like Red Dwarf, Quark, and Homeboys in Outer Space don’t count (Not that I don’t find them fascinating, just a less specifically 80s trope); I’m specifically talking about “Contemporary domestic sitcom whose premise includes one major fantastical element.” As far as I know, the earliest example is 1953’s sitcom adaptation of Topper, which is kinda sorta like a more Eisenhower-era version of Beetlejuice if the Michael Keaton character hadn’t been in it. The seminal early example is probably 1961’s Mr. Ed (Which is the one with the talking horse, which if you aren’t familiar with it, then you are so TV-illiterate that it’s unlikely anything I say in these articles will mean anything to you. I don’t even mean that as an insult; there’s no shame in not having wasted your life learning trivia about the history of TV, but we’re kind of in the deep end of the pool here for someone who isn’t familiar with water), then you’ve got 1963’s My Favorite Martian, where Ray Walston plays the quirky alien houseguest (Think ALF but with Ray Walston with a TV antenna on his head instead of a penis-nosed furry. Also, for the kids out there, a “TV Antenna” is a pair of telescoping wire rods that used to stick up out of the back of televisions.) to Bill Bixby. The 60s also gave us the infamous Jerry Van Dyke vehicle My Mother The Car, about Jerry Van Dyke’s infamous vehicle, and The Smothers Brothers Show, an early vehicle for future-variety-show hosts Tom and Dick Smothers, wherein straight-man Dick struggles to help his deceased brother Tom earn his wings as an angel, The Second Hundred Years, about a 19th century prospector who gets Buck Rogers’d into the 1960s, and My Living Doll, where a psychiatrist struggles to teach a military android to be a “proper” woman, adhering to proper 60s gender roles land being obedient, subservient and submissive to men. So there’s that.

The big seminal ones from the mid-60s, of course, are Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, which are basically the same show only the former is a lot cleverer than the latter, about, respectively, a witch and a djinn who marry ordinary suburban men and have to avoid spooking the squares with their superpowers.

The ’70s gave us The Girl With Something Extra, which was just about ESP and not, as the title would lead you to expect, a shockingly early and misguided attempt to depict transgender people in mass media, Bewitched‘s short-lived spinoff Tabitha, and the ur-example of the 1980s-flavor, Mork and Mindy, which is another show about a Typical American Person who has a permanent houseguest from another planet, the houseguest this time being Robin Williams, [A joke has been deleted here in deference to the recent passing of the troubled but extremely talented comedian]. There was also a short-lived contemporary show about a guardian angel called Out of the Blue.

But the 80s is obviously where my knowledge of TV stops being hearsay and starts being first-hand. So when I was talking about a particular movement in “Sitcoms with Outlandish Elements to their Premise”, I was talking, really, about a particular little cluster of shows:

  • Small Wonder (1985-1989), about a Typical Suburban Family with a robot daughter
  • ALF (1986-1990), about a Typical Suburban Family with an alien houseguest. Who is a cat-eating muppet. Also, the last survivor of a destroyed homeworld. For Laughs! Also, dude’s nose is really phallic. Said family mostly just complains about him, never once expressing any sympathy for his loss, any respect for his dietary requirements, and refusing to even call him by his real name, Kunta Kinte Gordon, instead only ever calling him by his slave name, “Alf”.
  • The Charmings (1987-1988), which I described last time this came up, about Snow White, the prince, their kids, the witch, the magic mirror, and one dwarf moving to suburban 1980s California.
  • They Came From Outer Space (1990-1991): Alien teenagers go on a road trip in California to pick up chicks.
  • Out of this World (1987-1991): About a typical suburban California teenage girl who is half alien and can stop time.
  • Hi Honey, I’m Home (1991-1992): About a typical suburban California family whose next door neighbors are Witness Relocated characters from a 1950s Leave It To Beaver-style sitcom. Who have to use a device called a “Turnerizer” to transform themselves from their natural Black-and-White state.
  • Harry and the Hendersons (1991-1993): Adaptation of the 1987 film about a typical suburban family with a houseguest who is a Sasquatch.
  • Dinosaurs (1991-1994): A traditional sitcom where all the characters are animatronic dinosaurs.
  • Herman’s Head (1991-1994): A work-com told from the point of view of a sort of Greek chorus personifying the title character’s four dominant personality traits.
  • Woops! (1992): About the six survivors of a global thermonuclear accident. For laughs!

There’s another little cluster in the late 90s, with Third Rock from the Sun, Sabrina, Meego, and the like, but after that, I think the balkanization of television started to become an active force against this sort of thing — all the post-2000 examples I can think of aired on The Disney Channel (Speaking of The Disney Channel, one I left off that list as a marginal case: Kids Incorporated (1984-1992): a show about a tween pop band that dealt with things like bullying, graffiti, after-school jobs, aliens, robots, and time travel.), unless you count the Geico Cavemen, about which the less said, the better. Another factor you got, moving into the late 90s, is that shows like The X-Files and later Buffy the Vampire Slayer laid the groundwork for a renaissance of high-concept hour-long action/adventure/drama, and caused a resurgence of what we’d more comfortably call “proper” speculative fiction. By 1999, if you wanted to do a show about Ordinary Teenagers Who Are Also Aliens, you had options other than doing a sitcom about an Ordinary Family in Suburban California With Permanent Houseguests From Alpha Centauri; you could make Roswell instead.

This sort of show fascinates me enough that they’ve stuck in my head for decades despite the fact that most of them were failures and few of them have been rerun since I hit puberty. A big part of the reason is that it’s so rare to see a TV show incorporate Science Fiction or Fantasy elements without becoming just straight-up Sci-Fi/Fantasy. See, only a few years ago, I finally came to understand that “Science Fiction” is not actually a genre (More accurately, there is a “genre” which is properly called “Science Fiction”, but that genre is a subset of the thing we generally refer to as the genre of “Science Fiction”); look at how other genres work: mystery; romance; action; adventure. Those genres work differently than “Science Fiction.” When a story is a “mystery” it is obliged to be about a mystery; there has to be a thing which is unsolved at the beginning, and the story has to follow the process of solving. Mysteries gotta be mysterious; a mystery that isn’t mysterious fails at being mystery. A comedy that isn’t comical fails at being comedy. You can’t make an action show about two people having a quiet discussion over cucumber sandwiches and tea (Which is why my Knight Rider fanfics always ended up sucking). But Science Fiction doesn’t work that way. There is absolutely no level of lack-of-“Science” that will cause a piece of Science Fiction to stop being Science Fiction. Science Fiction is less of a genre and more of a set of tropes and motifs — it’s something more akin to a desktop theme. It sets how the buttons look and what color the UI is, but it doesn’t actually specify what applications you’re running. (Science Fiction is not the only genre that is like this. See also “Western”).  And yet, most of the time, the inclusion of a science fiction element exerts a kind of irresistible marketing gravity that “marks” the whole thing as going on the shelf with Orson Scott Card and Ray Bradbury.

I mean, think about this: the following shows are generally considered “Science Fiction”:

  • Star Trek
  • Quantum Leap
  • Red Dwarf
  • The Twilight Zone
  • First Wave

And these are not:

  • MacGyver
  • The A-Team
  • Monty Python’s Flying Circus
  • Tales from the Darkside
  • The Fugitive

How is it that we can seriously say that Red Dwarf is more similar to Star Trek than it is to Monty Python? Or that two shows which are about men walking the earth to try to avenge the murder of their wives while on the run from the law which has falsely accused them are fundamentally different because in one of them, the real killers are aliens and in the other, the real killer is just a dude with a prosthetic arm? And what do we do with something like Knight Rider? There’s no sensible categorization of shows that makes Knight Rider more like Doctor Who than Airwolf, except that Knight Rider has a talking car.

So I’m very interested in these things which somehow managed to avoid genre-gravity and remain in orbit around “Normal ordinary mainstream non-genre sitcom about a typical suburban family, probably in California” despite having alien houseguests or supernatural creatures, or robots. How did that happen? How did formula-obsessed Hollywood allow it?  And is there something about the period from 1985 to 1992 that made these things more likely to make it to air, or is it just that the ones from earlier are too obscure for my googling to turn up? Why did audiences give four years (Which is, I believe, the legal definition of “A successful run”) to Evie Garland, VICI, and Gordon Schumway? How did The Charmings get a second season, when Captain Power didn’t?

This was all meant to segue into something, but I see now that I’ve just about hit two thousand words, so hold that thought.

Gluconeogenesis

Scene: int. Family Room, day. DYLAN and DADDY are playing. DYLAN finishes some candy he had asked for on the pretext that his toy alligator wanted some.

DYLAN: Oh no! I forgot to give some candy to my friend alligator!

DADDY: That’s okay. I know. Since he’s a toy alligator, maybe he’d like pretend candy. Maybe you could make him some candy in your kitchen.

DYLAN: (incredulous) You don’t make candy in a kitchen!

DADDY: Sure you do! Where do you think candy comes from?

DYLAN: (condescending) It comes from the Easter Bunny. On Easter, the Easter Bunny bring it to our house.

DADDY: (laughing) Okay. But where do you think the Easter Bunny gets it?

DYLAN: (as though DADDY is very dim) From his easter basket.

 

Broke into the Old Apartment (Captain Power: The Intruder)

It is November 15 and 16, 1987. Tiffany retains ownership of the top spot on the charts. John Mellencamp also charts with Cherry Bomb, though at this stage in his career, he’s John Cougar Mellencamp, because, I am not making this up, people thought that “John Mellencamp” was not a sufficiently manly name for a rock star. Also working their way up the charts are Belinda Cougar Carlisle (Heaven is a Place on Earth), Fleetwood Cougar Mac (Little Lies), and Debbie Cougar Gibson (Shake Your Love). Since last we met, the BBC aired a condom commercial, which everyone thought would be the end of the world but wasn’t. Anthony Kennedy has been nominated to the US Supreme Court, which nobody thought would be the end of the world but was. Someone paid fifty-three million dollars for a Van Gogh painting. The Running Man opens in theaters. And there was a snow storm that got me out of a day of school. When I woke up, my dad pretended that the air outside had frozen solid and we’d need to chip our way to the toolshed with ice picks to get the shovels we’d need to shovel the driveway.

The Ferengi return for this week’s episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, “The Battle”, and I’ll damn it with faint praise by saying it’s better than “The Last Outpost.” I mean, it’s an okay watch, but the whole plot hinges on the fact that the profit-obsessed always-lawful-evil race shows up out of nowhere, says “Hey, we found this weapon you used years ago to kill a bunch of our people. We thought you’d like it back for free with no strings attached,” and no one finds this sufficiently suspicious that they do anything about it until it is way too late even though their captain almost instantly starts acting very very mind-controlled. It’s also another one of the episodes that makes everyone hate Wesley Crusher, because he’s a smug git about it when he takes a sidelong glance at some scan data and is thereby the only person to realize that Picard’s being mind-controlled.  And for that matter, the “Picard Maneuver”, proof of Picard’s tactical brilliance, turns out to be “Warp straight at the ship you want to shoot at, and then shoot them.” The Picard ManeuverI mean, the allegedly clever thing is that because you are breaking the speed of light, the ship you’re attacking sees two of you. Because Picard is the first person clever enough to realize what “faster than light” means. (Earlier in the episode, he switches off a tractor beam, shocking everyone by realizing that, in accordance with Newton’s laws of motion, the ship they were towing is just going to maintain a constant velocity and therefore stays right where it was alongside them. And this is supposed to make us suspicious that he’s being mind controlled. This is the second time that “Has a basic understanding of eighteenth century science” is used to hint that someone is being mind-controlled this season). And the reason the whole thing works, close as I can tell, is that when the other ship sees two of you, one far, at the place you have been the whole time so far, and one near which just appeared, they will shoot at the far one and not bother trying to evade the near one… Because they are stupid or something I guess. Data comes up with a countermeasure that involves scanning for trace gases for some reason, since I guess that travels faster than light? I don’t know. There’s nothing I’ve ever seen or heard that explains why the much simpler countermeasure is “There are only two of them. It’s the one that just appeared out of nowhere.” I don’t know. Star Trek was never known for its science. They wanted Picard’s clever tactical maneuver to involve leveraging the concept of outrunning your own image, which, yes, is a cleverly scienceish thing to do, but in practice, it’s way less clever than “Fighting Game Boss Who Makes False Images of Himself Where You Have To Realize Only The Real One Casts A Shadow,” because there’s only two images, they don’t move, and it’s always the new, closer one.

Sorry about that. I just wanted to vent. Anyway, the corresponding Captain Power episode is “The Intruder”. This is an episode which was clearly supposed to be iconic: it’s the first introduction of Private Chip “TNT” Morrow. Except that at the moment, he’s Private Andy “TNT” Jackson, but nevermind. Chip slash Andy was slated to become a recurring character, joining the team in season 2 as part of a cast expansion that would have presumably paired him against a new fire-themed Bio-Dread, so that we could finally play a proper game of elemental roshambo. And then none of that happened, so we’re left with a story that suffers from being clearly meant to be more interesting when considered from a perspective that no one ever got the chance to see it from.

This is unfortunate, because left to its own devices, “The Intruder” is a pretty thin episode propped up by a few strong performances. The bare-bones of the plot are these: an independent resistance fighter wants to join the Power Team, so he stows away on the Jumpship and breaks into the Power Base, giving Cap and Company a quandary about how to ensure the secrecy of their location. Getting from that sentence to twenty-two minutes is mostly a matter of faffing about with character-driven antics. Now, some of these are from our heroes, and that’s good — nine episodes in, these folks are still largely ciphers. But the lion’s share of the screen time goes to the plucky guest star who we’re never going to see again.

So let’s talk about Andy Jackson. Chip Morrow nee Andy JacksonRight away you can see what they’re going for with this guy. He’s a slightly comic character, all confidence and pluck and not-quite-charm. He’s a fairly straight attempt at the “loveable rogue” archetype, the sort of guy who doesn’t believe in rules, or in shaving, who shoots first, and is usually named “Jack (eg. Jack Sparrow, Jack Harkness, Jack-of-all-Trades, Jack Dalton, Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, Jaques Chirac, etc.)“, and gets the heroes into trouble because he’s been manipulated into participating in some unscrupulous scheme involving hidden Inca gold or something. The strongest Science Fiction precedent is Han Solo, but he’s really an old pulp adventure serial archetype, and Andy Jackson is more Lone Star than Han (Though the character he reminds me of most is Jack Dalton from MacGyver). As I said, upon his return in season 2, the character was to be renamed “Chip Morrow”. I have no idea why; there’s no indication that “Andy Jackson” is an alias, and it doesn’t even make a whole lot of sense that it would be — it would make sense for him to be using a code name of some sort, but you’d expect him to drop the pretense with Cap and Company by the end of the episode, and there’s also no good reason that he’d used an ordinary sort of name as his code name rather than something more Top Gunny like “Maverick” or “Goose” or, for that matter, “TNT”. Now that I mention it, the idea that he’s a demolitions expert is also something that isn’t addressed at all in this episode. If anything, his skills seem to be specifically in infiltration. But, of course, that’s Scout’s schtick. Maybe someone looked up President Andrew Jackson’s history vis a vis displaced refugee peoples and decided it was in slightly poor taste to name a resistance fighter after him.

Andy and JimChipandy and his comic relief sidekick Jim (Yes, despite being a deliberately silly character himself, he’s got his own comic relief sidekick) are spying on Cap and Company as they deliver supplies to a refugee camp, once again leaving me unclear on how this apocalypse is supposed to work anyway. Apparently sometimes Cap takes refugees to the passages, and sometimes he leaves them where they are, and sometimes he does their grocery shopping for them. Leaving Jim to lookout duties, Chipandy slips over to the ship and, as close as I can tell, tries to defibrillate itBreaking into the ship. It starts out as a nicely ambiguous scene, with Andy and Jim keeping their conversation vague enough that you don’t know what their deal is. Even better, we’re first introduced to them via a POV shot through Jim’s binoculars’s cheap photoshop filter. All we know at this point is that these two are coding heavily “rogue” and they’re trying to do something naughty to the jumpship.

Unfortunately, they kind of ruin it by cutting back to Volcania, where Lord Dread is watching the whole thing through one of his own drones. Because the world is seriously only about the size of your average football field in this show and at any given time anywhere in the world, every named character in the show is either physically present or watching remotely. I mean seriously, if it takes this little effort for Dread to find the Jumpship, which is parked just outside a refugee colony, how has this war been going on for fifteen years? Dread’s trying to “establish a pattern” to Cap’s movement. I have no idea. They could have made this scene work if Dread’s dialogue had been a little more ambiguous, but instead he kind of lays it plain for us that Chipandy isn’t working for him. He does, however, consider his presence “propitious”, so he sends Blastarr to… Sector 3. Nope. Still no idea where that is, except perhaps that it takes Blastarr approximately the same amount of time to reach it from Volcania as it takes Cap and company to fly back to the Power Base via wormhole.

Chipandy manages to hack his way into the Jumpship just ahead of the returning heroes and hitches a ride back to the Power Base as Dread goes off to Overmind’s boudoir for some negging. Dread apologizes for all the fail they’ve experienced in the past few episodes, and Overmind responds by accusing him of being too emotional. Dread apologizes and promises to do better, then goes outside and gets all bitchy at Lakki, who he’s decided is spying on him for Overmind. Despite the fact that Dread and Overmind are supposedly mind-linked and anyway, Overmind can presumably see and hear Dread at all times anyway because Dread spends like 90% of his time in the room with him. But nevermind. Lakki is all like “I live to serve,” the literally immediately goes off to rat Dread out to Overmind.

At the Power Base, Andy slips out of the Jumpship when no one’s looking. There is a brief comic interlude where he nearly triggers the Jumpship’s self-destruct sequence in the process. Comic relief in eschatological media is always a dicey proposition. You do want to lighten things up from time to time because you risk audience burnout. But if you tack too far in the direction of silly, it very quickly gets tacky and the mood starts to break down. This one just doesn’t work. It’s like we become a different show for a minute. The soundtrack even provides some Mickey-Mousing for Andy during this scene.

I do like the soundtrack, though. I actually bought the soundtrack album Captain Power Soundtrackwhen it was released a couple of years ago. Until this watch-through, I didn’t think too much of the music. It seemed a little too generic, a little too upbeat, and a little… I guess “cheap” is the best word for it. Television soundtrack music was largely unremarkable for most of the history of TV, I think, at least in the US market. You had theme tunes, which usually worked on the same sort of emotive logic as advertising jingles, but that was about it. Once again, I have to refer to where J. Michael Straczynski’s going to go over the next few years, because Babylon 5 changed things for TV Science Fiction Soundtracks when it featured an actual orchestra and real instruments and leitmotifs and character themes and suchlike. And as a cultural antecedent, Star Trek the Next Generation feels much more modern than Captain Power due to their choice to adopt the musical style of the Star Trek feature film franchise (TNG’s theme song is, in fact, a cover of the theme from Star Trek the Motion Picture. I always wished someone would do a Trek series using a modernization of Alexander Courage’s original theme music, but at this point, it’s just as much a stylistic outlier from the canon of Trek music as “Faith of the Heart”).

Retired Mega Man boss Gary Guttman is clearly writing music in an older, more “One guy with a MIDI keyboard” model of soundtrack composition. But having acknowledged that, it kind of works, especially in light of what we were saying last time about Captain Power being a more firmly ’80s vision of where Science Fiction TV should go. The incidental music as Andy is futzing with the self-destruct controls in the Jumpship feel really properly TOS-era Star Trek; you could easily imagine it accompanying Harry Mudd trying some sleight of hand. Only without the intense desire to punch Harry Mudd and the writers responsible for him.  Maybe Cyrano Jones is a better choice. Actually, there’s something kind of vaguely Cyrano Jonesish about Chipandy overall, really.

Power Base HangarThe destruction of the Jumpship averted, Chipandy emerges into the hangar, where Dylan is really pleased when he’s able to make out the shape of the Power Jet XT-7 docked atop the Jumpship. Because this show’s sense of geography extends to interior design, it seems like he walks from there directly to the command center, as he almost walks in on Pilot, who is asking Mentor about this Earth Thing Called Love.

I am actually serious here. Pilot, who’d been “in the rust on a survey mission” during the first scene (presumably to justify the ship being unattended when Andy broke in), summons up Mentor, who appears in his tube delivering a quote from Tennyson, seemingly for no reason other than to ham it up. I mean, he tries to play it off like she’d asked him a question, but that doesn’t really work in context. Then Pilot asks Mentor about love. Pilot asks about love Pilot has really gotten the short shrift from the scripts so far — she’s really only had one noteworthy scene in the entire series, and her upcoming character focus episode is going to be one of the more threadbare ones — but Jessica Steen does a good job of making use of what little the script gives her. She’s adorably awkward in this scene. For his part, Bruce Grey plays it perfectly straight; oblivious to her obvious discomfort, he simply asks for a clarification: Parental, Brotherly, Platonic, Friendship, Camaraderie, or Lovers. Pilot selects “lovers” with all the confidence of a teenager buying drug store condoms, and I’m impressed that they had the option, yet still went with a specifically sexual form of love when they could have chickened out and gone with “Romantic” (Even if the exact wording is a bit awkward, as all the other terms Mentor uses are adjectives).

Chipandy undermines the moment a bit with a goofy grin, but has the discretion to leave her to her lesson. What he does not have the discretion to avoid is calling his sidekick from the hallway, thus breaking radio silence, alerting Pilot to his presence, and, presumably, sparing us a very awkward scene of Mentor explaining where babies come from. She calls Cap on the video phone and they round up the gang to search the place, which only takes about ten seconds because Andy is not very good at hide and seek.

InterrogationAfter a commercial break, the Power Team tries very unconvincingly to act bad-ass as they casually talk about murdering Andy because he knows too much. Andy finds this no more convincing than we do and just smugs at them for a while, though he does eventually give up that he’s a former “Earthforce Marine” who’s been fighting Dread “in his own way” since the apocalypse, and his invasion of the Power Base was intended as a sort of “audition” to join the Power Team. Meanwhile, Blastarr locates and roughs up Chipandy’s buddy Jim. We are treated to a few seconds of Blastarr parroting back Jim’s protest of “Get stuffed!” while he learns to impersonate Jim’s voice so he can call the Power Base and beg Andy to return quickly. Fortunately for Jim, Blastarr, ahem, “Needs his bodyI wish I could quit you,” so Jim is spared from immediate death or digitization.

“Jim”‘s incredibly unconvincing message is received by the Power Gang, who of course immediately believe it and power up, leaving Chipandy to just kinda sit there and watch, restrained by no more than a stern glower from Tank and his own reaction shot of childish delight at getting to see the whole-team-power-up-sequenceAndy's Delight. They apparently plan to fly off to the rendevous coordinates and just kinda leave Andy unattended in their base, because they’re all very resistant to the idea of taking him along for the ride. But Chipandy is adamant: he’s noticed that Jim’s vague, soulless message is an obvious decoy, and persuades them to let him call back in order to demonstrate that “Jim” isn’t willing to give their Seekrit Password. He also makes some vague threats about how unwilling he will be to let it stand if his partner gets killed on his account.Andy looking skyward The scene is framed a little oddly, cutting back and forth between a medium two shot of Tank and Cap and a close up on Andy’s face. It’s hard to place where the two of them are relative to each other, except that Andy is looking up in all of these shots, as though Cap is at least two feet taller than he is. Now, Tim Dunigan is quite tall, but it’s not like Barry Flatman (who plays Andy) is diminutive. (Hm. Barry Flatman. Gary Guttman. Gary Goddard. Now I’m wondering if I’ve ever seen all three of them at the same time, because boy do those sound like aliases.)

Also, at one point, he shouts, “Blast it!”, and much like a few episodes ago when they forced Tim Dunigan to threaten to “Shove it down his throat,” it rings really false. You can see in Flatman’s eyes that it took them about sixteen takes for him to make it come out “Blast” instead of “Damn.” It’s a treasonous look. He knows that word doesn’t go there. Whatever acting chops he has are telling him that Andy Jackson, or Chip Morrow, or whoever the hell he is, just is not the sort of loveable rogue who uses the phrase “Blast it!” when his partner’s life is on the line. This show wants to be better than it is. It’s fighting for it.

Before flying into the obvious trap, Tank, now inexplicably powered down (I mean, it’s explicable in that during the previous scene, Cap had ordered them to power down once the Jumpship was ready to launch. But, like, why did they power up in the first place? They seem to do this a lot, which is weird given how short the battery life on those suits was in the first few episodes.), straps a remote-operated grenade to Andy’s wrist so that Cap can execute him if he feels the need, which is a totes legitimate threat and not just padding. We’re meant to believe that their plan is to send Andy out unarmed and alone to confront Blastarr. For his part, Blastarr has had Jim drugged and left out in a field. And he’s standing in front of him, hiding or something? I don’t know. Honestly, the logic of this scene is hard to follow. Andy smugs at Blastarr, Blastarr demands he give the location of the Power Base, Andy basically just shouts “Okay, shoot now,” and Cap’s team starts shooting. It’s a fairly well-balanced fight scene, with everyone getting screen-time, but of course, since it’s a Blastarr fight scene, it suffers a lot from composition, mostly just cutting back and forth between mid shots of someone shooting off-screen. Tank and BlastarrThe one nice exception is a western two-shot right at the climax of the fight where we see Tank standing behind Blastarr just before he incapacitates himBlastarr with his laser-bazooka.

After foolishly deciding to just leave Blastarr where he fell and, say, tearing his unconscious body to pieces and scattering them to the four corners of the earth, Cap removes Andy’s explode-o-wrist and tells him that, having given his application all due consideration, he does not believe he’s a fit for the position they have open at this time, but he’s welcome to apply again in the fall. This is the first time Cap’s mentioned the possibility of adding a sixth ranger, though. Later, they’ll say that there are seven power suits, but at this stage, either Cap’s miscounted, or he’s read ahead in the script and knows why you only get six Soldiers of the Future out of seven Power Suits. Chipandy and a patched-up Jim are sent on their way with a hearty handshake and, I assume, the full understanding that Blastarr is just going to track them down and torture them for information as soon as he wakes up.

This episode is pretty weak, and that’s a disappointment after the last few. I can certainly understand them wanting a bit of a lighter one after the last few, but we seem to be back in the domain of “Things happen for no reason like clockwork in order to drive this empty caravan of a story to its authorially-mandated end,” that plagued the first half-dozen episodes. The major redeeming factor here is the character study of Andy. Barry Flatman hasn’t been in much else that I’m familiar with — most recently, he’s had a recurring role on Fargo — but he’s had pretty steady work, so I assume he’s a generally competent actor. And unlike some of the other guest stars we’ve had, his performance here isn’t a black mark on his resume (Even if he leaves this Goddard-production off of his professional resume on the Goddard Agency website). His performance is solid, aiming for and pretty much hitting a sort of “Han Solo in his funnier scenes” character, albeit with the rougher edges filed off.

Unfortunately, it’s kinda like he burns off all the acting for the entire cast. Tank’s reduced to a few unconvincing threats, Hawk and Scout have barely any presence at all. Only Pilot is spared; I think these are her best scenes so far — she gets a little reprise at the end so she can fidget really wonderfully when Andy suggests she ask Cap to help her with those studies he’d eavesdropped on. Cap is particularly wooden this episode. He shows a grand total of one emotion in the entire thing, and it’s just to get a bit angry during one of the “Threaten Andy” scenes. In fact, he’s so flat and emotionless, I’m halfway convinced that it’s one of those deliberate clever-juxtapositions the showmakers have been doing: mirroring Dread’s spat with Overmind about his lack of emotional control with Cap’s creepy robotic emotionlessness.

So in all, it’s mostly harmless. Andy’s fun to watch and all. As a little break from the recent tension, it would have worked better a little bit later in the season — placed here, it feels a bit like a regression rather than a respite. In terms of foreshadowing a future character, it’s just weird; aside from authorial fiat, there’s nothing we know about Chip “TNT” Morrow to suggest that he’s the same character as Andy Jackson. And frankly, that’s a good thing, since TNT’s character arc was meant to be “He wants to bone Ranger, she does not want to bone him, so he keeps trying Urkel-style to win her over through manipulative nagging and subterfuge.” Do. Not. Want. It seems more likely that Chip “TNT” Morrow was originally conceived as a totally separate character, not related to the guest star of this episode, and hastily tweaked to align with a one-off season 1 character. Perhaps they only decided to make Chip the same character as Andy after deciding to cast Barry Flatman again. But what’s this episode for then, if the character as introduced here wasn’t actually the one we were meant to see join the team next season? My best guess is that, in reverse to what I said before, they did plan to have “Andy Jackson” return when this was made, but something prompted them to heavily revise the character. But I can’t imagine what that was. Maybe they’d originally planned to have both Andy and Chip as separate recurring characters, but merged the two to keep the cast smaller.

This is definitely another episode for the “What in the world kind of show does this want to be when it grows up?” pile. Structurally weak, cinematographically weak, everyone but Barry Flatman and Jessica Steen way off their respective games, with a bare-bones plot and no advancement of the overall storyline. Fluff and filler that I’d be faster to forgive if there hadn’t been so much fluff and filler already. Really, just watch the scenes with Pilot in them and fast-forward the rest.

This kid gets it

One thing Dylan’s latched onto recently is the idea that other things are like him in some ways and different in some ways. One of the most heartwarming moments I’ve shared with my son was a few weeks ago, when one of his friends was visiting: my little boy looked up from his playing and said, of his friend, “I’m just like her, but I’m a little different.”

A few weeks later, this scene ensued:

DYLAN and DADDY are on the sofa, talking about the movie Frozen

DYLAN: Is Elsa a bad guy?

DADDY: Well, not really. She just wanted everybody to go away and leave her alone.

DYLAN: Why?

DADDY: Because she was scared she might hurt somebody.

DYLAN: Why?

DADDY: You remember at the beginning? She was playing with her sister and she hurt her sister by accident.

DYLAN: Why?

DADDY: It was an accident. (sensing a teachable moment in the wake of several Dylan-throws-himself-on-Daddy’s-bad-shoulder incidents)Because she wasn’t careful.

DYLAN: Why she not be careful?

DADDY: I guess she didn’t know how. She was too scared so she didn’t learn how to use her snow power safely.

DYLAN: (thoughtful) I’m just like Elsa, but I’m not her.

DADDY: How are you like Elsa?

DYLAN: I’m like Elsa because I try to be good, but sometimes I’m not.