Category: TV

Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

Goddard Film Group is working on a revival of Captain Power.
The new series is currently being developed under the name Phoenix RisingPretty much everyone agrees that Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was a kind of a hokey name and trying to get people take a show with that name seriously is a sucker’s game. It’s a shame, of course, that they’ll lose the name-recognition, but Phoenix Rising is a good solid name (Assuming they don’t come up with something even better), and my sense of nostalgia is hardly justification for using a name that sounds like a superhero comic. Not even a real superhero comic; a fake superhero comic whose name someone rattles off in a long comic list in some story where one character establishes his credentials as a comic book nerd by rattling off a long comic list of superheroes. Also, Phoenix Rising is totally the name of my own post-apocalyptic Power Rangers fanfic. But I digress., and it’s reported to be a more serious, modern hour-long drama, something in the vein of the modern incarnation of Battlestar Galactica. All the classic characters are included (No word yet on Stingray, Tritor, or the female Liquid Metal Bio-Dredd whose name escapes me at the moment). And, blowing my mind even more, Tim Dunnigan is apparantly going to be playing the role of Mentor (The guy I describe in my reviews as “Hologram Kenny Loggins”).
I’ll post details as I learn them, but follow @PhoenixRisingTV on Twitter for news as it happens.
You know, when I started reviewing Captain Power about a year ago, I had no idea anything like this was even possible. I wasn’t even really actively aware that a big anniversary was coming up (It only occurred to me when someone mentioned that Star Trek The Next Generation had an anniversary coming). I was still thinking of Captain Power largely as a show that I remembered and no one else did. I’m really just floored to see that there are still so many people with so much love for a show that burned brightly, but too fast. Today, I can finally let go of that 24 years-long sting of disappointment from when I finally realized that Captain Power wasn’t coming back.
The best thing about this, for this thirty-three year old man who was a little boy back in 1987, is that some time soon now, I’m going to be able to share Phoenix Rising with my own little boy.
Link Roundup:

• Phoenix Rising on Twitter
• Captain Power Lives! on Tumblr, who is a lot faster about getting news than I am
• Henshin Justice reports on the news
• Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future on Facebook
• The Realm Cast reports as well

For what it’s worth, I swear, not having known anything about this announcement until 3:30 this afternoon, I was planning to do anyother Captain Power review next weekend. I’ll see if I can get it done any faster than that.

Hm. If that simple-minded fellow can manage it, surely I can deduce the trick of it. Let’s see. Ahem. Power on

Oh hey Sherlock Holmes, whatcha — ZOMG!

What? Oh. Yes. The effect wasn’t quite what I was expecting.

Well what possessed you to try transforming on your own?

Research, my good fellow. I was undertaking an experiment.

How’s that?

In our last adventure, you intimated that you had information about a sixth member of Captain Power’s Future Force.

And… So… You thought you’d turn yourself into a robot?

I was performing an experiment to determine the parameters for this sort of transformation. But I observed a certain discrepancy. You spoke of an “Original pitch” for this series?

Oh?

In reference to the sixth member of Captain Power’s batallion, you described an “original trailer.”

Oh. That. Yeah. I first heard of this, as it were, from a page at captainpower.com. That page didn’t really have any description, just a strange and contextless collection of screencaps. Now, I had guessed that this was some kind of unaired pilot episode, as shows often do to sell themselves, like the 30 minute episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a different Willow, or the weird episode of Star Trek where Spock laughs and shouts a lot and the captain is played by Jesus. Or the several weird american episodes of Red Dwarf with Jadzia Dax as the Cat and one of My Two Dads as Lister.

Or my own illustrious creator’s early script treatment of my own adventures, in which my chronicler and good friend Dr. John Watson was not a medical doctor recently retired from Her Majesty’s Army, but instead a time-traveling cat with supernatural powers.

Right… You’re weird.

Anyway, having seen the DVD extras, I now know that this wasn’t a full pilot, but just a short demo reel. Back when Gary Goddard was pimping the show, Mattel funded them to shoot a short featurette they could take around to trade shows in order to drum up pre-orders for the toys. The show was in a fairly early stage of development at the time, so we get to see some idea that never really panned out or that went in a different direction for the final product.

The trailer is readily available on YouTube, but there’s a nicely cleaned-up version on the DVD, so let’s take a new look at an old future, as you’ve never seen it before. Again…

Well. That’s different.

And it doesn’t stop there. A narrator is proud to tell us all about “The most exciting television event of 1987.”

Boundless optimism on his part.

Well, he could hardly be expected to say “The second most exciting television event of 1987, seriously, we were hoping to do better, but I just heard that they’re planning to bring Star Trek back.” The narrator goes on to compound his sin by promising to use interactive technology and a mix of live-action and “The latest in computer technology” to “usher in a new age of television entertainment.”

He invites us to “Journey into the Future” as we pan up across the gleaming golden codpiece to get our first look at our hero, Captain Jonathan Power, and — Hey, wait; who’s this yo-yo? Yes, the original cast is not in this promo, not having been cast yet. This Power gets across the general sense of “Boyishly Handsome” that Tim Dunnigan would present in the series, though this Power has a bit more of a Flash Gordon thing going on, looking kinda like a high school football player. Who took one two many to the head.

As the narrator waxes about Good and Evil, we transition using a strange, low-quality visual effects shot of approaching Earth from Space, which looks suspiciously like the opening sequence of the 1990 season of War of the Worlds. We return from space to see our representative of evil: Lord Dread, who rules with– Oh god he looks like the crypt keeper!

This version of Lord Dread is older, more skeletal, and somewhat more reminiscent of Captain Picard as Locutus of Borg. His entire right arm is cybernetic, and unsubtly so, looking a bit like it’s made out of black Robotix parts. Also, somehow he manages to look kind of chunky. His chest armor sits high on his shoulders, concealing his nek and, combined with is fully cybernetic arm’s fully cybernetic shoulder, t manages to make him look rather less like simply a man in armor, and more like a man who’s had a sizeable part of his torso replaced.

A brief montage punctuates the narrator as he warns us that this is a world of “Power, wonder, and mystery,” full of “Powerful heroes” and “The Most Powerful Fighting Force in the World,” a world where narrators really like to use the word “Power”.

Our narrator helpfully informs us that this is the year 2099, and —

Aha!

Aha?

Clearly, you see, but you do not observe; surely this bit of narration sheds some light on a point of mystery for you?

I’ll point out, and Gary Goddard mentions this in one of the DVD extras, that among the fairly small contingent of people who remember Captain Power but who were not fans (I dare say, even among some who were), there’s a widespread belief that Lord Dread’s appearance was liberally cribbed from Star Trek’s Borg. While the visual similarities are substantial — in the case of Locutus, even bordering on uncanny — there is a bit of a deal-breaker for any accusation of theft in that direction. Namely, while Captain Power and Star Trek: The Next Generation were contemporaries, Power ended its run in March, 1988, while the Borg were teased in episodes of Trek airing in May, 1988, but neither appeared in person nor were named until the episode “Q Who”, which aired fully a year later in May 1989. Moreover, during those teasers in the first season, the TNG writers were imagining the Borg as a computer-rendered insectoid race. Ironically, it may well have been watching a few episodes of Captain Power that convinced them that computer animation was not going to cut it for their New Star Villains — and provided an alternative solution.

You mean that it’s 2099 instead of 2147? Well, obviously, at the draft stage here, they had the show set in a different year. I guess that at some stage of development, they decided that a hundred and ten years in the future was a bit less plausible than a hundred and fifty, given the extent of the technological development compared to the audience’s native time period. It does serve to highlight a very common trope in television science fiction, one I identified years ago when I was active on TVTropes: Sci-Fi Writers have absolutely no sense of scale, and rarely think of specific years as having an actual meaning — that “One hundred years from now” and “One thousand years from now” actually describe radically different places in time. By 1987, we were just getting to the tail end of when a sci-fi writer could just toss out “In The <stentorian_tone>Twenty-First Century</stentorian_tone>” and have the audience happily come with him in the understanding that he meant “The amazing neat-o whiz-bang future where we have moon colonies and personal jetpacks and food cubes, but are still socio-politically the same more-or-less as the audience and don’t have anything weird and uncomfortable for middle-america like gay marriage or really properly equal rights for women, though maybe there’s a black president just to drive home that it’s the future.”

So presumably, they started out with an executive summary that said “In The <stentorian_tone>Twenty-First Century</stentorian_tone>,” but at some point, J. Michael or Larry whispered, “Hey Gary, you know that the twenty-first century happens in like thirteen years, right?” and there was some fumbling and nodding and they quickly added 50 to all… their… dates…

I take it that your circumloqution has finally brought you around to the conclusion I reached before your admittedly fascinating digression?

You were talking about how that one episode randomly put a “99” in the stardate instead of “47”?

Quite

Yeah. That actually does clear that up. Someone got sloppy with the search-and-replace. Man, the world was weird before Perl.

The narrator tells us about the Metal Wars, and their end with Dread, ruler of the world, operating out of his stronghold, Volcania. They really went all-out on the model shots of the Volcania approach, which I can only imagine is why this is the exact footage they use in the series whenever they want to show Volcania, the giant cybernetic volcano of Detroit.

Dread, we are told, spends his days “monitoring a wide array of radio frequencies” as part of his search for the last bastion of resistence, the “legendaryYou keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” Power Base…

We cut to The Power Base, and wow, that’s some impressive matte painting. The final version feels cramped by comparison. This Power Base is somewhere closer to the Batcave end of the spectrum rather than the Stargate Command end. That said, this doesn’t seem like a very good television set. It’s very workstation-y, lots of desks all clustered together, not really a lot of space for the actors to actually act in. It’s shot either in tight close-ups or from above, and it gives me the sense that the cast is meant to be seated for scenes set here. It seems somehow reminiscent of, say, Space 1999. It’s described as the place where they keep their “Powerful” vehicles for “ground, sea and air!”

This is, I think, where we start to close in on one of the key elements that was abandoned between this stage of development and what finally came to the screen. We’ve got a heavy emphasis here on a recurring motif of “ground, sea and air”. We will see it again.

Here’s a real treat. We get to see Not-Cap go through the Power On sequence. And does that charging station look familiar? No reason it should, really, since I’ve never shown you a picture, but…

Okay, so it’s still not a tremendous match, but look, they’ve got the same weird-ass irregular hexadecagon shape.

Yeah. Remember how I said back in my first review how a lot of the merchandise for this show looks like it was adapted from something other than the actual aired program? Well, here’s the something. Some of the other things are more nebulous, but this version of the charging booth is quite clearly what inspired the design of the “Power On” toy.

It’s here that we’re introduced to our heroes, the mighty Future Force, and — Oh god, it’s these guys…

Yeah. This video was made pretty early in production, before the roles had been cast. I don’t know if any of these people were under consideration for the parts — heck, I don’t even know who any of them are. It seems just as likely that there are actors who specialize in this kind of work. I don’t know.

The Narrator makes introductions: Major Matthew “Hawk” Masterson, our narrator becomes a shade uncomfortably orgasmic as he announces, “Fighter… In the sky!” He’s a good deal younger than the “real” Hawk, closer to the age of the other teammates. I suspect that this version of the character doesn’t include the rich backstory that fleshed out the final version of Hawk, and my impression is that his role was a lot smaller at this stage of development. It’s hard to be sure, because of the video quality and the way the scene is lit, but I think his armor may be gold in this, not the blue-silver he wears in the series.

Lieutenant Michael “Tank” Ellis — hey, that guy looks familiar. Yes, it’s Sven-Ole Thorsen, the only actor to appear in this promotional video who would go on to reprise the role in the series. Did his performance here really sell him in a way the others didn’t? Did he test well with audiences? Had they already cast Thorsen, but had to get ringers for the others? My suspicion is that he was just the beefiest guy they could find, so they cast him. Also, why is he smoking? Could you do that on a kids’ show in 1987? I know that back in the Max Headroom days, it was practically required to smoke in dystopian Sci-Fi, but in a kids’ show?

Corporal Jennifer “Pilot” Chase. Danger! Eighties Hair! Danger! Seriously, do not stare directly into the hair. At least at this point in develoment, she’d become Jennifer. Some of the design notes (Included as an image gallery on the DVD) refer to the character as Tiffany “Pilot” Chase. Her costume is generally the same, though it seems like it might be a bit more, ahem, generous in the breastplate.

Sergeant Robert “Scout” Baker gets approximately the same screen-time here that he gets in the show. We’re told that his specialty is espionage, but this is depcited in the form of him backing into a cliffside niche while evading enemy fire.

And Colonel Nathan “Stingray” Johnson— Wait, who?

Yes, Colonel Nathan “Stingray” Johnson was the original Green Ranger sixth teammate. Now, as I mentioned in earlier posts, the plan for season 2 was to have a sixth member join the team, but not Stingray; the capsule summaries call for the new member to use the handle “TNT”, and to be an explosives specialist. Stingray’s motif was to be water.

Ground, Sea and Air, remember? We’ve got the “Powerful” Power Vehicles for Ground, Sea and Air, and now the original team includes Hawk, with the power of flight, and Stingray, with the power of water. To fill in the gap, let me tangent a little about the forces of Evil…

Though only Soaron appears in this promo video, Lord Dread’s army was originally to consist of at least four named Bio-Dreads. One, a shape-shifting, liquid-metal style female Bio-Dread was dropped early as being too impractical to film. The remaining three are described using various terms, the one I have used so far is “Warlord”. Soaron is identified in some of those design notes as the “Sky Sentry” or “Air Warlord”. A second Bio-Dread Warlord named Blastarr is added around the midpoint of the series. This is a ground-based warrior, a giant brute with laser fingers. The design notes describe a third Bio-Dread, Tritor, who described as the “Water Warlord“.

If I tell you that Blastarr has tank-treads for feet, would it make it more obvious what’s going on here?

Soaron, Blastarr, Tritor. Hawk, Tank, Stingray. Three “elemental” Bio-Dreads, three corresponding “elemental” Future Force fighters.

Tritor and Stingray were dropped, of course. The interviews on the DVD claim that after shooting the promo, they realized that the difficulties of filming underwater scenes made it impractical to make aquatic battles part of a weekly series. Personally, I prefer to imagine that they suddenly realized that they’d reinvented Aquaman from Superfriends and wisely decided that it would not add to the richness of storytelling to keep arbitrarily adding fjords to all the plots.

I think that this Ground-Sea-Air thing does a lot to explain some of the unevenness and weirdness in the series as it came to fruition. Hawk’s disproportionately large role, for example. If the original intention was to have the three Warlords paired off against their three counterpart specialists, then Hawk is really doing the work of three characters for the first half of the season: they may have imagined rotating through the elements, doing an “air” episode, then a “ground” episode, then a “water” episode. Hawk inherited Stingray’s screentime, and the long lead-time to have the Blastarr model ready for the screen meant that he also got a chunk of Tank’s as well.

There’s also this: I mentioned before that, especially looking back after twenty yearsHoly crap, it’s been twenty years of ethnically diverse Power Rangers, the Future Force — and the show as a whole — feels pretty overwhelmingly white and male. The aired Future Force was three white guys, an African-American and one woman. While this version has a slightly worse overall ratio — four white guys — there’s something else to consider. See, in one sense, this isn’t really a Five Man Band any more. It’s almost more like a Power Trio. You’ve got Cap, the leader, Scout, the intellectual, and Pilot, the one with ovaries who represents the deliberate rejection of cold machine logic. Then as a sort of secondary layer of characters, you’ve got the three “specialists”. My impression is that had the show stayed close to the vision in this promo, the characters of Cap, Pilot and Scout would have been the big parts, while the other three would have, in essence, have been treated as a single character: it’s the Big Three plus Specialist, who is in Air-Mode this week. The specialists would trade-off being major characters from week to week, leaving the other two to make only a token appearance for the Big Fight Scene, while the other three would provide consistency. Viewed this way, the racial and gender imbalance is somewhat less problematic. The “main” characters are one white guy, one African-American, and one woman. It’s still a little off-putting that all three specialists are white and male, but it’s less forthright when only one of them is active at any given time.

We return to Volcania, where a computer voice alerts Dread to a possible Captain Power sighting. This presumably is Overmind, though it lacks Overmind’s Creepy Stalkery Voice, and Overmind is never mentioned in the promo. Dread responds by ordering an attack. His voice has been run through a ring modulator and he speaks only out of one side of his mouth. As he ponders his evil plans to capture Cap and the Gang, he does the Robot Head Tilt ThingYou know the thing. In TV and film when a robot is looking at something it doesn’t understand, like a timed explosive it’s just picked up, or a teddy bear, or love, it sort of tilts its head to one side in contemplation. Best guess is that the motion is based on observations of people who have some vision problem that affects object recognition, where they have to turn a thing around and look at it from several angles and reason out what it is because the complex post-processing that our brains normally do to identify objects isn’t working. Or it’s because robots don’t have eyebrows to furrow..

This Dread comes off far less human than the Dread we ultimately got. He’s scarier, and on the basis of what we’ve seen so far in the series, I think this interpretation would have been more effective. He’s less physical and less relatable. Now, as the series goes on, we’re going to see an evolution in the character of Dread that will make it more clear why the character’s affectations were modified. I realize that I may be going out on a limb, given his limited screen time in this promo, but it’s hard to imagine this version of Dread conveying that slight hint of regret — even remorse — that we see in the aired version. That hint was going to become the key to the character had a second season happened. As things turned out, without a second season to rely on it, they probably could have made a go of it with this interpretation of the character. It would have made a few things a slightly harder sell, mostly elements in A Summoning of Thunder and A Fire in the Dark, but it could have worked.

Here’s the main event: Soaron. And I’m kinda surprised; Soaron looks good. I mean, he still looks like a Playstation 1 character, but a really good one. From late in the console’s lifetime. His colors are considerably darker, and he lacks the strobing breastplate he would later gain — I assume at this stage, the details of how the interactive element would work hadn’t been determined (One of the interviews mentions that they’d initially had much smaller targets, but had needed to rework them several times to get them to work). His alternate breastplate does look a bit sparse, but this Soaron really conveys menace in a way that he just did not in the final show. Soaron’s voice is also different. In the show, I do not think I’ve mentioned this, he’s got a little bit of a Don Adams thing going on, or maybe even a bit of a WC Fields. Like an evil robot Inspector Gadget. That nasal aspect is absent here. In fact, his voice kinda reminds me of those Racist Trade Federation Fake Chinese Accent aliens from Star Wars Episode 1.

Unlike what we see in the show, the Soaron “fight” is handled almost entirely by Cap and Jennifer, mostly shooting over their shoulders as they run from laser blasts. The fight also includes some disconnected clips of Scout, Tank and Stingray (But curiously, not Hawk) popping put of their respective elements (Scout pops out of that niche in a rock wall; Tank steps through a shattered wall, and Stingray emerges from a body of water which isn’t even in the same time zone as the desolate quarry where the other scenes were filmed.

We end on Dread, one side of his mouth telling us that “There is no place to hide!”

Thus do we leave the future that almost was. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but it provides a curious insight into what was in the minds of the showmakers while they were putting this together. We see hints here of things that they wanted to include in the series but ultimately never had the chance. There’s a certain sense of epicness to this promotional video that only rarely comes across in the final product. But at the same time, this trailer lacks the humanity of the series I still remember fondly a quarter-century on.

So what do you think, Sherlock?

Fascinating. I think in future, I shall leave the tokusatsu-style transformation sequences to you. If I feel the need to radically alter my perceptions in a blur of lights and visual effects, from now on, I shall keep to my cocaine.

Probably for the best.

Mine the DVD.

Special thanks to my mother-in-law, who despite the normal tensions that exist in a mother-in-law/son-in-law relationship, has a pretty solid knack for getting me a Christmas present I really enjoy every year.
This DVD set is pretty top-notch for the price range. The transfer is good but not perfect — in particular, the title sequence is a little fuzzy, and there is a bit of choppiness in the high-action sequences. The visual quality isn’t quite as good as, say, the remastered Doctor Who classic series DVDs, but those run about as much for one six-part serial as this entire season box set. It’s still quite good in the less action-heavy sequences, and Soaron cleaned up so nice that I’m half-convinced they just went back in and re-rendered all his models using someone’s laptop in their spare time. There are no subtitles or captions, which is unfortunate. Again, easy to forgive under the circumstances, but it’s a shame that the hearing-impaired are going to miss out. And, of course, for my own selfish reasons, it would have been helpful to have a transcript I could look at to verify some of the dialog.
The commentary and interviews are great. It’s a shame they couldn’t get in a few more commentaries, but I can’t imagine it’s easy to come up with 22 minutes worth of things to say about a show you were involved in a quarter century ago for each of twenty episodes.
Conspicuous by their absence are the direct-to-video animated “Training Videos”. I can only guess that the distribution rights for those were different, having been made by Armtic, a now-defunct anime studio. They don’t add much to the experience, but it means I’ll be toting those three ancient VHS tapes along with me until the day I die. A real collector’s edition might have also benefited from something like a commercials gallery, though the quality of the clips they show in the documentary suggests that those may no longer exist in decent quality recordings.
The documentary is a real treat, providing some framing and exposition that goes a long way to help us modern viewers understand the reasons for some of the really bizarre design and storytelling choices, and they talk at length about the direction they would have taken the show in the second season — a lot of which surprised me, and I’ll go over it in length as my review series progresses (Sorry about the hiatus. Sadly, my son doesn’t really have the attention span for a half-hour action-adventure yet.). They also debunk and confirm various bits of theoryJMS goes so far as to mention that “people on the internet” had identified rape symbolism in the depiction of digitization. Given what a quick googling of “captain power” and “rape symbolism”, I gotta ask: did I just get a shout-out? I’ve thrown out here.
One of the really weird coincidences I noticed though, was the episode ordering on the DVD: they’re in the same order as the order I’d previously announced for my reviews. So that’s convenient. The upshot for you folks at home is that I imagine my screen shots will be a lot less grainy and color-corrected.
I will point out this: I wasn’t able to get my Power Jet XT-7 to interact with the DVD. They mention the difficulties they had during development getting the toys to work, so my suspicion is that the process of deinterlacing and upconverting that 25-year-old NTSC signal to play on my 1080p screen probably destroyed the carrier signal. I’ll see if I can dig out a dumber DVD player and a CRT screen and try again when I get the chance. I also can’t rule out that my 25-year-old Power Jet XT-7 just isn’t up to it. If you can make it out in the picture, the thing is suffering from a few decades of grime and a couple of missing parts. It does make all the expected shooty-sounds, though it power cycles if you shake it too hard.
In all, this is a great DVD set, well worth the price. I’d probably have paid double for a set with more special features and more work done on the remastering, but at this price, and given the obscurity of the series, it’s clearly a labor of love. It’s priced like a budget shovelware release, but it makes a really serious effort that you don’t usually see with comparable season boxsets for shows of this vintage. Captain Power aficionados have undoubtedly already bought a copy, but if you’re just curious: this is worth it. For that matter, if you’re a fan of Babylon 5, this is probably worth it just to see an example of JMS developing some of the stylistic elements he would later use.
Next time, I’m going to go into a bit more detail on one of the coolest extras on the DVD. Until then, Power On!
Oh, and one last thing: I’d like to give a small shout-out to CPL of Captain Power Lives!, who has a fantastic collection of images of hard-to-find or unreleased Captain Power toys and links to various other reviews of the DVD set.

Hello and welcome once again to A Mind Occasionally Voyaging. My cohost is Sherlock Holmes, our topic is Post Apocalyptic Children’s Television, and tonight’s victim is “Final Stand”, episode three (or four) of…

Before we get started tonight, a couple of kudos to the post-apocalyptic world. I spent a good chunk of last week rummaging through blip.tv for web original series that might make for good watching. In the post-apocalypse department, here’s what I found:

• After Judgment: Sort of a spin on Christian End-Times fiction, this is a show set after a “Judgment” based loosely on the 19th century idea of a premillennial “rapture” in which God removes the virtuous before destroying the Earth. In this world, though, God has elected not to visit plague and disaster on the unsaved, but rather has just sort of let the universe wind down. The Earth has stopped spinning, no one is born, no one dies, everything is just sort of more of the same forever and ever. Well, except for some creepy guys in motorcycle leathers who occasionally show up, grab someone, and take them away, never to be seen again. The story is about your average ragtag group who band together to try to find a prophecied back-door into heaven.
• Day Zero: This one only has one episode so far, but it’s basically a Zombie Apocalypse (These are Honorary Zombies — radiation-afflicted mutants altered by the fallout of a nuclear war, rather than the walking dead). The eight survivors are a ragtag mismatched group who, y’know, have to do that whole surviving thing. Did make me scream “SCIENCE DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY!” a few times at such ideas as radiation having “killed off their natural immunity to crystal meth,” allowing street drugs to be used as one-hit-kill weapons against the mutants, but fun enough so far.
• Exile: Another zombie apocalypse, this time a legit one. The first (and so far only) episode introduced some interesting characters, and then killed them all. So.
• Necroland: Another zombie apocalypse. This one was too disjointed to for me to really have much of an opinion yet, but does feature a foul-mouthed ten year old girl killing zombies, so there’s that.
• The Black Dawn: This one is a plague apocalypse of some sort. Though there’s a whole season of episodes, I’ve only seen one so far, so no opinion yet.
• Zomblogalypse: This one’s a lot of fun. The Zombie Eschaton as told by bloggers.

I’ve got a few more of these in my queue, so look forward to more words about them in the future.

One thread that runs through a lot of these web serials is that the influence of Lost really informs the storytelling. Now, I’m sure Lost is a good show, but I really don’t look forward to a generation in which every “castawayAs I mentioned back in my review of Captain Power Episode 1, I view post-apocalyptic drama as being a one of several particularly science-fictiony flavors of the literary tradition of Robinson Crusoe: stories which are largely about the challenge of survival in a hostile world, cut off from the protagonist’s home culture.“-type science fiction drama has to ape it any more than I particularly like the way that The Road Warrior prompted every post-apocalyptic earth for the next 20 years to look like the Australian Outback.

I don’t see what you’re complaining about. I didn’t find the plot of Lost to be impenetrable in the slightest. Now, could you pass the cocaine? I am dangerously close to coming down.

So let’s rewind for a bit to the days before you were contractually obligated to frame your castaway story as a series-long mind-fuck ontological mystery, and see how things were in the world of the future-as-viewed-from-the-Eighties.

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Episode 4 (or 3): Final Stand
By J. Michael Straczynski

This one is going to be Tank’s character focus episode, which is nice because we’re four reviews in yet, and I can count the number of lines from regulars who aren’t Cap or Hawk on my fingers. We open with some Bio-Mechs emerging through the inexplicable fog into… What looks like basically the same abandoned factory as every other indoor fight scene so far.

The Putties Mechs wander around, looking for the Future Force, who have cleverly hidden behind and under things, until one of them scans what looks like the air cleaner off a Chevy Vega with his DYMO label maker Deluxe, revealing inside the source of the “Vwoop vwoop” noise that has been driving me crazy for this scene so far. Inside the air cleaner is what looks to be… GLaDOS?

I guess GLaDOS is supposed to be some kind of fake bait transmitter thing, because the commander Bio-Mech immediately announces (say it with me everyone), “It’s a trap!“

Excellent piece of deduction on the part of the robotic gentleman.

Hawk (For we can not have a scene without Hawk) and Scout decide to press their advantage by… Immediately revealing their position. Scout jumps out in front of the mechs and, in what seems to be a radically misguided Jayne Mansfield impression, says “Looking for me, boys?”

After few exchanges of laser-fire, Tank decides that he needs to get on the Bizarrely Inappropriate Impressions bandwagon by performing what is going to be his major character shtick for the rest of the series: channelling the Kool-Aid Man.

Tank is such a badass that he manages to decapitate a mech with a single backhand, and his weapon is so powerful that its video toaster laser effects make a sort of “Skoom!” sound effect instead of the usual “Pwoosh!”. He even wears an ammo belt even though none of the weapons we will ever see take any kind of ammunition (Except Hawk’s nerf launcher). It’s Hawk’s time to shine, and he does, sending dozens of mechs to meet their maker, including one who he only clips across the hip, which staggers to the ground, then struggles back to its feet, and sort of stands there quaking with terror until Tank fires off the coup de grace. Our hero, everyone!

Now, I know that the Bio-Mechs are meant to be soulless automata, without even the capacity for independent thought and self-awareness of a Warlord Bio-Dread like Soaron, and that is why it is okay that they get slaughtered by the dozens without our heroes ever showing them even a hint of compassion.

But here’s the thing. Soaron is a (poorly-rendered) CGI robot. He looks funny. he moves funny. He speaks in clipped sentences and his delivery is over-the-top. Overmind does the detached-psychotic-bedroom-voice thing that HAL 9000 taught us to fear in computers. Lord Dread has a human face, but he’s barely mobile — so far, we haven’t seen him so much as rise from his chair — and he looks like what you’d get if the Borg assimilated Darth Vader. And he’s a genocidal lunatic.

The bio-mechs, on the other hand, are actors in suits. Stunt men, no doubt, who are doing a lot of very physical acting. And they don’t move like robots. They move like people. They bump into things. They interact with their environment in a physical sort of way. They duck behind things. They stagger. They get clipped across the hip by a bazooka-laser, fall down, and try to get back up. When they die, their bodies twitch and they let out little rasping, rattling death sounds. When the last two mechs try to escape, they don’t look like robots attempting an orderly strategic withdraw: they look like routed soldiers who are running for their lives.

That mech Tank shoots is staggering, shaking. I don’t imagine that was intentional; just something the stuntman did naturally because he is a human being acting out a very physical scene, and his own humanity shines through. And this is kind of awkward in your Ultra Disposable mecha-mook. Because when Tank head-shots an injured mech that is literally quaking with terror, my sympathies ends up on the wrong side. And when Scout guns down two retreating mechs, then calls out “You’re out!” in what seems to be a weak Rex Barney impression, it just seems callous.

Undoubtedly, this would be a lot easier today — in a big-budget exercise, the Mechs would likely be CG themselves. Ironically, it’s possible that if they did a modern re-imagining, Soaron, being a major character who has to interact with other characters, might be the only one of Dread’s forces not to be computer generated.

Scout dispatches the last two mechs as they desperately try to escape, and claims their prize from the mech corpses: a Bio-Dread transmitter (Or receiver, as it will be called in the next scene). We switch to the jumpship, where Cap makes his log entry: Stardate 47-7.1. They are on their way to “Sector 7, grid co-ordinates 9 by 5,” a place which “Had a name once, but doesn’t any more.” You know, if Cap has been waxing poetic about how much has been lost in every journal entry for the past 15 years, Ken Burns will be rather spoiled for choice when he goes to pick out good voice overs for his documentary on the Metal Wars.

As I mentioned before, I have no idea how their sector numbering works, but according to the map Hawk pulls up, this nameless sector is Sherman Oaks, in Los Angeles. Which seems strange given that back in episode 1, San Francisco was in sector 19, and the military installation that we tentatively placed on the east coast in “The Abyss” was either Sector 14 or Sector 42, depending on who you ask, and in “Wardogs”, we supposed that Sector 7 was in Canada. But perhaps I’m reading too much into the map, because I think it’s the same map every time someone pulls up a map screen in this show.

It will take them about an hour to evacuate the civilians from Sector 7, which may not be enough time, as their captured receiver has revealed that a Bio-Dread has already been dispatched to digitize the locals. Now, based on all the clues, can you figure out which Bio-Dread has been sent to Sector 7?

Based on a careful analysis of the facts of the case, I notice that there is a scuff on the left side of your shoe, indicative of some sort of back injury that causes you to favor one side. If I factor this in with the presumed geography of sectors 14, 7, 19 and 7, taking into account the theory we previously established that a date of 47-7.1 corresponds to the first of July, and interpolating from the weather patterns of Los Angeles, assuming current projections of global warming, but also accounting for a drastic reduction in pollution because of the wholesale destruction of humanity and infrastructure, I think I can conclude that the Bio-Dread best suited for this mission would be… Soaron.

You just said that because he’s the only Bio-Dread we’ve ever seen.

Elementary deduction.

Well, this turns out to be a fortunate move for our heroes, since the immutable laws of the universe say that Soaron can not appear in an episode without a dogfight ensuing. This time, as Pilot keeps the Jumpship out of sight, Hawk launches a pair of guided missiles at Soaron. Soaron dogfights one of the missiles, finally destroying it, but is caught off guard when the Jumpship takes a shot at him — the shot misses, but Soaron, having turned to return fire, receives a Actually, and this one just blows my mind, he isn’t hit by the missile. The missile sort of… Shoots him. And then he explodes. The future is WEIRD.guided missile suppository and crashes, hurt bad enough that we may assume it will take him almost exactly one hour to self-repair, plus or minus the amount of complications that will arise before they can start evacuating people.

We cut back to Volcania, where Dread orders Soaron to — you guessed it — do exactly what they had already established he was going to do. Repair himself, then go to sector 7 and digitize all the humans. Then Overmind tells Dread that he’s got some more artifacts from “Tauron”. Oh Holy Crap! I just figured it out! This is actually a prequel to Battlestar Galactica and the Bio-Dreads are really Cylons! This explains EVERYTHING well actually nothing. Oh well. It was a nice thought. We only get a passing glimpse of the artifacts, but they look for all the world like RoboCop and Nimon-from-Doctor-Who action figures. They will not come up again after the next scene, where Dread looks at one for a moment, then sets it on fire. Symbolism!

Cap powers on (We won’t see them use the pedestal back at base in this episode or the next one. For a show that so often reuses little set-pieces to show off particular things over and over, they seem bizarrely averse to showing the big flashy version of the transformation sequence) and they exit the Jumpship to survey the devastated-village set. Cap quickly identifies the devastation as, “Marauders. Hit and run. Take what they can and burn the rest. It’s bad enough we have Bio-Dreads to worry about. But looters… Humans, preying on other humans.”

Someone should thank him for that exposition. It might have been difficult for the audience to sort it out otherwise. Unless, I suppose, they were to actually look around, or pay attention in the preceding scene when we saw one of these marauder fellows peeking out at the heroes from hiding.

Yeah. And for all I respect Tim Dunigan, frankly, Patrick Stewart would have a hard time keeping this exposition-heavy purple prose from going over like a lead nerf missile, and Tim Dunigan is no Patrick Stewart. Tank adds, “Marauders hit ze place hahd, Keptin. Throw everybody out.”

Hawk is more optimistic: “At least it keeps them out of Dread’s hands.” Well, given the extended rape metaphor in episode 1, I suppose he might have a point. Better to be assaulted, robbed, possibly murdered or sold into slavery than to be digitized, right? Ick.

The local Marauder, a burly, sort of vaguely Or maybe Irish. Or maybe he just smokes way too much. His voice is all over the place.Australian-sounding guy named Kasko, shouts a taunting warning before stepping out of a ruined building. He’s played by Charles Seixas, an actor about whom I have been able to discover absolutely nothing at all other than his filmography. He’s hamming it up as a middle-aged-punk type, with the mohawk and the leather, sort of like an evil version of Blank Reg from Max Headroom. But much more like a character lifted directly from The Road Warrior. The major point here is that he’s a Punk Rock Type, which is basically ’80s shorthand for “This man is a dangerous and unsavory element from a dystopian future”. Tank recognizes Kasko by his voice, and identifies him as having “Came out of the same place I did. Genetically engineered. A freak.” “Like you!” Kasko accuses. “Like me,” Tank repeats, impassively.

Kasko has some survivors imprisoned nearby with a time bomb, and offers to trade them for a chance at unarmed single combat. Cap is unwilling, but Tank insists that it’s the only way, what with their limited time and Kasko being a psychopath. So he strips down, takes off his Tron underwear, comes out of the Jumpship to fight according to “Street Rules”, which is a lot like Navy Rules: First one to die, loses.

Kasko takes an early lead by pushing a brick wall over onto Tank. Since they don’t especially trust Kasko to keep up his end of the bargain, Scout is busy trying to rebuild the walkie-talkie Kasko had used earlier to talk to his hostages then smashed and discarded. He explains the procedure of tracking the signal by interfacing with the crystal in a ridiculous fake spy-movie German accent, which Cap finds about as endearing as I do. Is stupid voices going to be Scout’s thing now? I do not like this thing.

We cut around a few times, showing Soaron repair himself, Cap and Company track the hostages, and Tank playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Kasko before getting caught in an incredibly obvious trap when Kasko offers to just give him the detonator for the bomb, and walks out onto an unstable bit of floor, which he promptly falls through.

Or, if you are observing carefully, gets lifted out over and lowered through, presumably by invisible guide wires.

Indubitably. Kasko runs downstairs to kick and taunt Tank some more, preparing to detonate the bomb early just to be an asshole. At the same time, Cap and Company find the prisoners. Tank begs Kasko to let the hostages go, as he’s got what he wants. Kasko accuses Tank of having gone soft and holding back, to which Tank responds by kicking Kasko through a wall.

They fight some more while Cap tries desperately to diffuse the bomb. Then, just as things look tense, with about a minute and a half left…

Cap opens the door and lets the hostages out. Wait. A minute and a half? Who diffuses the bomb with a minute and a half left on the clock?

Kasko hits Tank in the face with a cinderblock, retrieves the detonator, and declares, “You lose!”, but Cap barges in and declares the hostages rescued, entreating Tank to come with them before Soaron gets there. Tank, in a move that will surprise you if you haven’t watched this show at all yet, turns to not be at all hurt from a cinderblock to the face, gets up, decks Kasko, and leaves, shouting “Quick! Let’s hide!” I just want to point out that this sounds absolutely adorable the way he says it. This six-foot-seven bear of a man with a Scandinavian accent, all covered in sweat and brick dust, saying “Quick! Let’s hide!”

Without his armor, Tank wouldn’t stand a chance against Soaron, and Kasko is just enough of a dick to not take his defeat like a man. He breaks cover and shouts “Captain Power is over there!” to Soaron. Soaron, of course, doesn’t care what an organic like Kasko has to say, and instead shouts “Obliterate!” then digitizes him, which I assume is to spare us the moral diciness of having Tank kill a human, even if the human is a dangerous psychopath. That said, let’s not forget that episode 1 has established that digitization is a metaphor for rape. So don’t get too much schadenfreude out of this. Which puts us in the uncomfortable position of cheering for Kasko’s defeat as it comes in the form of what is essentially a metaphor for corrective rape. Yeah. I feel a bit soiled now.

It gets worse. After digitizing Kasko, Soaron throws his head back and lets out a sort of vaguely orgasmic howl. Gross. The heroes take advantage of Soaron’s post-digital distraction to break cover, shoot the Bio-Dread, and make a break for it. Cap has to fight his way back to the jumpship, which should be a really tense scene, but it doesn’t really compare well to the mech fight from the beginning of the episode. Soaron fights rarely do — in this case, we cut back and forth between Cap running around a ruined city set and shots of Soaron, framed by nothing but sky, shooting. It makes the fight seem disconnected, and that takes a lot away from the drama. As the jumpship flies off, apparently having decided that the audience has forgotten that whole “It’ll take three trips and an hour of travel-time to evacuate these people” thing, Soaron caps off an episode full of weird impressions by adding his own: he channels Dr. Claw, and shouts, “Next time!”

In the jumpship, Tank talks about his escape from A street gang? A genetic engineering lab? Undersea colony? Our last, best hope for punk rock? Who can say? This is all we’ll ever hear about it.Babylon 5, and laments that he’d thought he’d put his violent past behind him. In a scene that I think woulda benefitted from the Full House Music, Cap comforts Tank with a speech about how, sure, he used brute force to solve his problems, and sure, maybe he enjoyed beating up Kasko, but it’s all okay because he used his violence to help people rather than to harm people. Which is an unusual moral lesson, but I think it’s kind of cool for that: a sort of dystopian moral for a dystopian world.

That’s “Final Stand”. Next time is “Pariah”, which has a bit of focus on Pilot, but is basically another character focus episode for Hawk. I told you the writers really liked Hawk.

The following paragraphs talk about gender issues in the media. If that sort of thing is not your bag, hop down until you see the image of Boston Red Sox Manager Eddie Kasko.

Continue reading Our Last, Best Hope for Kool-Aid (Captain Power: “Final Stand”)

Before we get started, those of you who are into that whole Facebook thing (It’s a fad. It will pass) and have found this at all interesting, you should, I think the term the kids use these days is “stalk”, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future on Facebook. If you are into “The Twitter”, you should, I think the term is “twat” @Capt_Power_2011. I honestly can’t tell if these are the official feeds of the group responsible for the upcoming DVD release, but if they’re not, no one is. They’ve got some neat stuff there, including an interview with Gary Goddard and Tim Dunigan, who have both aged rather gracefully, about the never-before-seen behind-the-scenes documentary footage that will be on the upcoming DVD.

Also, buy the damned DVD. It’s available for pre-order at Walmart, Amazon, and many other fine retailers. It’s already on my wishlist, though it remains to be seen if I’ll preorder and thus ensure that it arrives on my doorstep the day it’s released, or if my wife will make me wait until Christmas, because it’s kind of a dick move to buy yourself a present at the beginning of December. (Seriously though, I’m getting one before New Year’s. My son is not going to grow up watching off-air VHS copies of this show which are a quarter-century older than he is).

And now, on with the show…

Power on

It has come to my attention, through a careful survey of the facts, that your previous presentation may have been, shall we say, misplaced.

Ah. Yes. That.

You claimed that “Wardogs” was the second episode of the series. However, my research clearly shows that it first aired on the Twenty-Second of November, some two months after “Shattered”.

Right. As I mentioned before, these episodes, particularly in the first half of the season, were only very loosely ordered. I mentioned that “Shattered” doesn’t really feel like a solid choice for a first episode. In fact, the pilot for the series was “Pariah”, which is still two episodes off. “Wardogs” was indeed aired tenth, but we do have a clue to the fact that this was not its original intended position, which you no doubt have already observed.

Of course.

The opening line of “Wardogs” is “Database Journal 47-5 mark 13.” Now, we don’t have any kind of confirmation for how or even if these numbers directly map to dates, but I’m inclined to guess that “47-5 mark 13” is future-speak for “May 13, 2147”. In aired order, episode 3, “Final Stand”, is dated 47-7 mark 1 — July 1, 2147. That would place “Wardogs” two months before “Final Stand”. The episode I’ll be reviewing this week, “The Abyss”, has only one date mentioned, and it’s “99-7 mark 3” So… This one is set fifty years after the rest of the season? Either Cap is using a different dating system for his personal journal, or he misspoke. In either case, best guess, this episode takes place on July 3.

Because I couldn’t find dates in most of the episodes, I’ll defer to captainpower.com to provide the dates which appear in this table:

Episode	Stardate	Aired Order	Stardate Order	My Order
Shattered	47-2.10	1	1	1
Wardogs	47-5.13	10	5	2
The Abyss	99-7.3	2	10	3
Final Stand	47-7.1	3	9	4
Pariah	47-3.7	4	2	5
Fire in the Dark	47-4.17	5	4	6
The Mirror In Darkness	47-7.12	6	11	7
The Ferryman	47-4.12	7	3	8
And Study War No More	47-9.14	8	16	9
The Intruder	47-5.20	9	6	10
Flame Street	47-8.4	11	12	11
Gemini and Counting	47-8.10	12	13	12
And Madness Shall Reign	47-8.16	13	14	13
Judgment	47-11.3	14	18	14
A Summoning of Thunder, Part 1	47-6.14	15	7	15
A Summoning of Thunder, Part 2	47-6.14	16	8	16
The Eden Road	47-10.15	17	17	17
Freedom One	47-8.30	18	15	18
New Order: The Sky Shall Swallow Them	47-11.26	19	19	19
New Order: The Land Shall Burn	47-11.26	20	20	20
Retribution, Part 1	47-12.15	21	21	21
Retribution, Part 2	47-12.15	22	22	22

My ordering is basically the same as the aired ordering, except that I’ve moved “Wardogs” up to episode 2, because Wardogs is the episode most blatantly aired outside of its intended position. This is also basically what Wikipedia does, except that they reverse “The Abyss” and “Wardogs”. I make no attempt to defend this beyond “That’s what order my ancient copies are in.”

So, with that settled, this week we have “The Abyss”. Stardate 99-7.3. Let’s check the capsule summary from TheTVDB.com…

A brief transmission reveals the location of secret military base, still manned and functioning. But when Power and Hawk go to investigate, they’re attacked and captured, ending up scheduled to be executed as spies and traitors as Dread’s forces close in on the location…

So… Cap and Hawk meet up with a surviving regiment from the pre-apocalypse armed forces, and are mistaken for enemies, and– Really? Really?

It would seem so.

Okay, seriously? I have distinct memories of this show being clever and mature and having a rich storyline. And they pull this? It’s the same damned setup as last time!

You did just explain that these three episodes would not have originally aired in this order.

So that makes it better? We’re up to three episodes and one and a half plots! Okay. Fine. Let’s get on with the slow desecration of my childhood memories that is…

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Episode 3 (or 2. Or 10. Whatever): The Abyss
By J. Michael Straczynski

The first thing you’ll notice about this episode is that it is the only episode of the series whose title card is not enclosed by unwarranted scare quotes. Or more likely not, since most people don’t notice that sort of thing. But I noticed. Oh how I noticed.

We open on a soldier emerging from under a giant metal waffle. He narrowly avoids a leftover Blake’s 7 Prop and is just able to switch on a transmitter before he’s caught by a gang of soldiers led by General Briggs, played by Michael J Reynolds, a man who has made his career playing… Pretty much different variations on the Briggs character, with the occasional foray into “Stuff we wanted Ray Walston for but couldn’t get him.” He summarily decides that the soldier, Price, has turned traitor and He points a gun at him in a “I’m going to shoot you now” sort of way, and then we cut away.implied-shoots him.

Back at the Power Base, Cap and Hawk sit around the TARDIS console, monitoring radio frequencies, when they suddenly pick up morse code from “Nope. No idea how geography works in the futureSector 42“. When the signal cuts off suddenly, Cap decides that there’s no time to alert the others, as surely this is a distress call from a surviving military unit who are in trouble. He and Hawk rush over to the Power Booth and, three episodes in, for the first time in the series, we get to see the full proper transformation sequence. Which seems to involve holding hands.

As Cap and Hawk hop on their hoverbikes to greenscreen their way to Sector 42, we cut to Lord Dread in Volcania. Dread is doing his daily reading from the Book of Computers, This is not me being flippant. He actually prefaces it with a cite.Chapter 4, verse 1:

And the Machine was given unto man. The Machine was perfect of mind and elegant of form. And the Machine said, “This is my gift to my people, that they may throw off the bonds of flesh.”

Good to know that Dread’s obsession with perfect, logical machine perfection, taken to its logical end, results in him writing quasi-religious scripture aping a stilted, archaic form of English specifically to sound like a five-hundred-year-old translation of a two-thousand-year compilation of a collection of four-thousand-year-old documentation of the cultural and superstitious practices of a nomadic bronze-age civilization.

Man, this machine logic is weird.

Overmind interrupts Dread because it’s picked up the transmission as well, from sector 14. So Dread uses a different map system than Power. Great. I am never going to sort these out. Anyway, just like in the other two episodes, it appears that Lord Dread receives a personal notification of every single thing that happens anywhere on Earth, and Dread is basically doing nothing of any pressing importance at the time. And, just like before, Dread’s immediate reaction is to order Soaron to go take care of it, and Soaron is just sort of flying around and having a good time when the call comes in.

Actually, I’m not clear what Dread orders Soaron to do. When Dread tells him to go “neutralize” the “disturbance” in sector 14, Soaron asks, “Shall I terminate current operation?” and Dread answers “No, my sentry: finish the task at hand, and then await further orders.” So… Dread orders Soaron to go to sector 14 and neutralize the disturbance, but not to stop what he’s already doing, and to finish what he’s already doing, and then stop and wait for more orders. So.. Did he order Soaron not to go to sector 14? Or to go to sector 14, but finish what he was already doing first? Or… Look, for all that “The Machine was perfect of mind and elegant of form,” jazz, Dread’s management skills leave a lot to be desired.

And by the way… First it’s night, then it’s day (Cap had given the time as 0300 hours), then it’s night, then dawn. Given that we know the Power Base is in Colorado and Volcania is in Detroit, this would seem to imply that Sector 42 is on the east coast, though dialogue later will suggest otherwise. Also, possibly that the earth rotates the wrong way.

Once we eliminate as impossible any scenario where the rotation of the earth has been reversed, we are left with the possibility that latitude is the key discriminator among these locations; during certain parts of the year, a location a few degrees closer or further from the equator could have a significant impact on the time of sunrise and sunset. Furthermore, it is inherently likely that Captain Power, being a military man is giving times in the Greenwich time zone. And indeed, we can not be certain of the location of the strange metal bird-man at all.

Ah, but in that case, the time would be closer to ten at night eastern time, and, if I’m remembering rightly, seven in Colorado. Which would account for the daylight the first time we see the hoverbikes, but it would hardly explain how eight to ten hours would have passed on the east coast.

In that case, I submit that you must consider one additional possibility.

What’s that then?

The director just didn’t care.

Touche. Shortly after Cap and Hawk land, General Briggs’s soldiers descend upon them and in a few minutes, a band of infantrymen who haven’t seen action in years are able to disarm and incapacitate the Future’s Last Hope For Survival. Because the damned Power Suits run on three triple-A batteries.

Cap wakes up strapped to a chair in the General’s underground lair. As a shortcut to let us know that General Briggs has come unglued, he does the cliche Crazy Military Guy act, where he takes everything Cap says as evidence against him: “We came here because we received a distress signal,” Cap says. Briggs responds “Aha! So you admit you were exchanging unauthorized signals with a known traitor!” Briggs also asserts that he has a duty to protect his men and keep them safe until he receives orders from the president. Cap proves that he hates America by revealing that there isn’t any US government any more, and Briggs takes this as further evidence of Cap’s traitorous intent, especially as “You should be using your training, manpower and supplies to help people instead of hiding in this hole in the ground,” is exactly the same sort of commie-socialist-nazi-kenyan propaganda the treasonous soldier had been spouting before the general offed him.

The general storms off, leaving behind a soldier whose name I do not recall, but who I will call “Colonel Will-Eventually-Order-The-Men-To-Safety-While-The-General-Has-A-Breakdown”, or “Col. Weotmtswtghab”. Cap points out that the General is plainly insane, sowing a seed in Col. Weotmtswtghab’s brain.

In the next room, the soldiers are showing their resolve, even under these conditions, to still stand by traditional US military regulations and procedures, and are therefore torturing Hawk with an electric torture machine. Hawk, not being one to take crap from anyone, tells his interrogators to get stuffed. The general enters with a copy of Hawk’s permanent record, and, finding that he’s the sole survivor of his original unit, accuses him of, what else, treason. He further asserts that the fact that Hawk knew Dread before his transformation proves that he’s actually a Dread spy.

There is a certain flaw in the General’s reasoning

Yeah. It rhymes with “He’s sad as a catter.”

To show how evil he is, every time Hawk tries to answer, the torturer zaps him instead, proving that the torture isn’t actually about getting information, but is 100% about the torturer getting his rocks off by making Hawk suffer. Which, for the record, is always what torture is about.

The general decides that he’s satisfied himself that Hawk and Cap are “obviously” spies, and orders them executed. Hawk expresses his displeasure as only he can.

After a commercial break, we return to Briggs’s office. Col. Weotmtswtghab comes in, hoping to dissuade the general from offing Cap and Hawk, but the general launches into rambly story about how the reason we lost both Vietnam and the fictional 2127 South American Vietnam Analogy War was because the anti-war movement had better songs than the pro-war movement, and if only it weren’t for guys like Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, we’d have totally won the Vietnam Analogy. When Col. Weotmtswtghab finally gets a word in, he protests the general’s decision, which prompts a little outbursts of mental instability where the general gets all shouty and threateny about the idea of someone daring to question his orders. The General reiterates that he wants the prisoners executed by 1800. So this is 15 hours after the first scene now.

We cut back to Soaron, who is standing on a pile of debris, apparently having finished whatever he was doing that morning. Dread orders him to proceed to the transmission source and rendezvous with a unit of troopers. So… I guess Dread really did mean “Finish what you were doing, then call me back, and then I will order you to do the thing I just told you I was going to order you to do.”

Hawk is tossed in a cell with Cap, and Hawk makes some threats he can’t back up about what he’ll do if Cap has been hurt. Because, y’know. I seriously don’t want to ship these two, but they just make it so darned easy. Corporal Exposition rattles off “He’s strong never met anyone like him he’ll survive not that it’ll make much difference.” And if you think there should have been punctuation in that sentence, you and I feel differently from the director.

Once alone, Hawk and Cap discuss their chances for survival, and Cap hits on the crazy idea of trying to plug his discharged suit directly into the high-voltage cable running up the wall. There is some awkward technobabble while Cap speculates that the Power Suit’s “modulation system” might “kick in with the charge” and protect him from otherwise certain electrocution. I remembered this scene even decades later, and it’s got a nice MacGyver feel to it. As Soaron and the Bio-Mechs approach, alarms go off in the base and the soldiers are forced into combat. These soldiers who were able to effortlessly disable two members of the Future Force are easily p0wned by Soaron and the Imperial Storm Troopers.

Realizing the imminence of their danger, Cap succeeds in pulling down the power cable, He’s wearing his TRON-suit underneath, so no, fangirls, no exciting shirtless Tim Dunigan for youtakes off his top, peels off the collectable Captain Power Decal from his chest, and plunges the sparking cable into his breastplate, throwing him across the room and leaving him in a crumpled heap on the floor. We cut away as Hawk futilely tries to awaken his friend. Oh no! Captain Power has killed himself! There’s no chance now!

Quite impossible, given the length of episode remaining

Well yeah. Like I said before. In the next scene, Cap just gets up and is perfectly fine. No injuries from the electrocution, nor anything from having been hurled across the room into a cinderblock wall. But before that, we show the general in his office. The realization that all is lost is too much for the old man, and he just sort of frets around shouting that it’s not his fault and that he doesn’t know what to do. Fortunately, Col. Weotmtswtghab picks up a microphone and Orders The Men To Safety While The General Has A Breakdown.

Fully restored, Cap powers on, and then casually offers the electric cable to Hawk. I really regret that we cut to Cap blowing up bio-mechs, because I think Hawk would have had some fantastic facial expressions for being electrocuted and thrown across a room. Instead, we get to watch Cap, who earlier was easily dispatched by the infantry, clean the floor with the bio-mechs. So, infantry beats Captain Power, Mechs beat infantry. Power beats mechs. It’s post-apocalyptic roshambo!

Inside, Col Weotmtswtghab announces that he’s gotten most of the men to the escape tunnels, and begs the general to escape with them. The general has regained enough composure to go down with the ship, formally turning his command over to Col. Weotmtswtghab and making his last order to get the men to safety, then he sits in the corner and sings “It’s a long way to Tipperary” until Soaron walks in, calls him a pathetic fool, and digitizes him.

I guess Soaron decides it’s not worth pursuing the other soldiers, as we cut to a dogfight in the sky between him and Hawk, which goes the way it always does: one shoots, then the other, back and forth until Hawk catches Soaron in the chest with his nerf missile, causing the Bio-Dread to go spinning off.

On the ground, Cap gets himself surrounded with his power running low. Again. The sultry computer voice in the suit informs him that there’s no escape. Cap is showered with weaponsfire, and channels Dirty Harry for a second, rasping out “You want to party? Let’s party,” before revealing a previously unmentioned jetpack, which he uses to jump over the Bio-Mechs, so he can shoot them while they sort of look around, confused. Another tense moment diffused by “Cap suddenly remembering that he knows how to shoot things.”

He calls Hawk in to give him a lift to safety, which he does, by swooping in, grabbing Cap around the waist, and flying away. Our episode ends on the two of them fleeing to safety.

So what becomes of the surviving soldiers? Do they join up with Captain Power and his men?

Nope. Never seen nor heard from again. I like to imagine that due to improper ventilation, they all die in the escape tunnel from radon poisoning.

And General Briggs?

Gone. They never pull him out of storage or anything.

And what of the remaining members of the team?

They were off in “Sector 7” doing a recon mission. Not mentioned again in this episode.

I see. It is tempting to draw certain conclusions from the ending of this story.

Why should we draw conclusions? The writers didn’t.

Ah, I think you see what I am alluding to. From the evidence here, I am inclined to conclude that the writers just didn’t care.

On the face of it, yes. But don’t forget: this episode was written by J. Michael Straczynski, a writer whose qualifications shouldn’t be in any doubt.

Even a fastidious writer might find himself operating at times with less than full enthusiasm. For example, at the moment I personally care so little for the consequences of this analysis that I have been forced to consume quite a considerable amount of cocaine merely to remain awake.

Fair point, but I think that while it might seem that the writers didn’t care, this episode in fact shows clear signs of executive meddling. Consider: this episode is significantly more action-oriented than the others we’ve seen. There are two major set-piece battles which take up more than a third of the episode’s entire run-time. We have a scene early on with Soaron which does nothing to advance the plot, and is essentially reiterated in full later. No, I think that the logical conclusion here is that word came down from on high to increase the amount of action in this story, and that expansion crushes out a lot of the finer details. The episode ends in what’s essentially the middle of a scene, and the most logical reason I can think of for that is that any attempt to tie up the plot neatly at the end was cut to add a few extra seconds to the fight scenes.

There is a certain lack of cohesion between the action sequences and the narrative segment of the story.

Right. This episode feels very much like it’s meant to be a character study of General Briggs, demonstrating how the pressure of his position has made him paranoid and dangerous. But it’s hamstrung by the short running time. We never really get a sense of the forces that have come to bear on the general, so he comes off as just being an obstinate asshole. When Captain Power accuses him of cowardice, we’re supposed to understand that the general isn’t really a coward, but a brave man overwhelmed by his situation — but without seeing more of the general in action, there’s nothing to take us there.

As in “Wardogs”, one of the major flaws of this episode is the near complete failure of the scenes we actually get to see to instill any sort of emotion in the audience with regards to the guest characters. I have by now started to build an investment in Cap and Hawk — more Hawk than Cap, really — but this story wants us to care about the soldiers, and I just don’t. Out of the entire unit, the only two whose names I can even remember are Briggs and Price — and Price is the guy who dies in the first scene. The only other character who makes any impression at all is “Guy who tortures Hawk”. And let’s face it, if you want me sympathizing with someone, you probably shouldn’t show them committing torture. This could have been fixed if they’d depicted the soldiers as reluctant to zap Hawk, only doing it under direct prompting from the general. That would also have served as a good way to show how desperate and unstable the general was. But, just like in “Wardogs”, all of that is cut short in favor of more action sequences.

The action looks great. It’s fun and paced well, though, as always, it feels perfunctory. We do the “Cap seems to be hurt but isn’t” thing again. Hawk and Soaron have a dogfight again. “Cap is cornered by mechs, but escapes by the simple expedient of shooting at them” again. These feel very much like mandates handed down from the studio execs.

If this show were remade today as an adult drama, all these problems could be fixed and the elaborate stories they set up could be brought to fruition. Heck, as an hour-long show, you could tell these stories well, and still have time for fifteen minutes of action scenes.

And this would make a brilliant story in that format. Unlike our last two outings, the plot doesn’t hinge on something chock full of troubling implications — we do have the General’s rant about Vietnam, but that really serves less as a political statement than as a statement about the general’s state of mind.

I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t point out the other big glaring issue in this one: Three of our five regular cast members aren’t here at all. Now, in a half-hour show with a moderate-sized ensemble, you have to expect that not everyone will play a significant role in every story, but so far, we’ve had one episode that was a character-focus episode for John, one that was a character focus episode for Hawk, and one that’s a Bromance episode for the two of them. Scout, Tank and Pilot have had at most a half-dozen lines each so far in the entire series. I guess if you want your unfortunate implications, there they are: three episodes about the white North American men, with hardly anything from the woman, the African-American, or the European.

It does get better, though. Next week is a Tank-focused episode, and after that… Well, actually, after that it’s another Hawk episode. I kinda get the impression that at some point during development, the writers decided that Hawk was a more interesting character than Cap, and decided they’d make the show be about him instead, even if Captain Power had to retain top billing for legal reasons.

Indubitably.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to–

I say!

What?

Sir, I realize these are progressive times, but you appear to be naked.

Huh? Oh. Right. Sorry. Here. Power on!

And welcome back to A Mind Occasionally Voyaging as we dive once again into the post-apocalyptic world of…

Now, I’m not saying that I am tapped into the pulse of Hollywood, but on October 19, I posted my review of episode one of Captain Power, and on October 20, CNN Entertainment did a feature on it. Which can only mean one thing.

That the pending DVD release has sparked up public interest, including both the CNN article and your own review?

Um, no. Clearly, it means that the writers at CNN Entertainment have spies in my basement, watching me blog.

Of course.

One thing I learned from the article is that Tim Dunigan, who, as I mentioned last time, is now a mortgage broker, still has the Captain Power suit, and sometimes wears it to work to impress clients.

• A Mortgage broker shows up to closing dressed as Captain Power
• B “I have five piercings. Guess where they are.”
• C 3 AM Text Messages from Ex-Girlfriend You Haven’t Spoken To In Five Years Demanding Personal Details About Your Wife
• D Bumping into Shari Lewis at the Holocaust Museum

I can’t quite imagine how this could have a positive effect on a normal client, but of course had he been my mortgage broker, I think I would have immediately caved on that extra half a point I wanted them to take off. To better explain, please see the chart to the right to explain exactly where this idea falls on the scale of awesome to creepy.

I haven’t mentioned Gary Goddard before. His entertainment company has been responsible for a lot of things, mostly designing theme park entertainment like the Star Trek Experience and Jurassic Park: The Ride. But he also has done work on the stage, in Specifically, Masters of the Universe, but I can’t imagine that’s the thing he wants to be remembered for.film, and television. And the reason I bring him up is that he created Captain Power, and in the CNN article, he mentions wanting to revive Power as a modern not-for-kids Sci-Fi Drama, a la the (now old) new Battlestar Galactica. Which would kind of blow my mind — in much the same way that the new Galactica did — though I’m having a hard time imagining an adult audience taking a title like Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future seriously. Still, fingers crossed.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For a revival to get greenlit, people need to buy the DVDs, and for people to buy the DVDs, you need to read my reviews, see the wonder and majesty that is Captain Power, and mutter to yourself “Oh man, I have to buy this and tell all my friends to do the same!” In this episode of A Mind Occasionally Voyaging, we’re retreating back to the magical land of the eighties to take a look at episode 2 of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Episode 2: Wardogs
By Larry DiTillio

And here I have some eratta from last time. I previously credited the writer of Episode 1 as “Larry Oitillio”. That’s because they insisted on doing all the intertitles for this show in the OCR Font designed to convey “It’s the FUTURE!” to the audience by showing them 1960s banking technology. Google assures me that Larry DiTillio is a fairly famous writer, whose credits include He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Babylon 5. So I should not at all be surprised to see his name attached to this show.

We open on Cap’s Log, explaining that they’ve received word of several well-orchestrated raids against Dread in “It’s the future, so regions don’t have names, but numbers.Sector Seven“, and that he’s sent Hawk out to do a greenscreen “field correspondent” piece for The Daily Show aerial reconnaissance.

A Dread convoy is doing its darnedest to look inconspicuous against the gray and colorless backdrop. Aside from the bright red strobing target lights on the front. We cut to this episode’s guest talent, hiding behind a rock. The man observes the Dread troop movements and reports back to an unseen female voice, name-dropping something called “Eden 2”, which is their ultimate goal, and — hey, where do I know that voice from?

Anyway, the guy with the binoculars orders his gang, who he refers to as “War Doggies”, to attack. I’ll take a moment now to point out, outside of the regular cast, the only characters we saw in episode 1 were the bio-mechs, the sontaran, and Athena, who is fairly well groomed, having just been restored from tape backup. So this is really the first time we see Non-Future-Force-People-of-the-Future living the post-apocalyptic lifestyle. They look pretty much like you’d expect: like extras from a Mad Max film. Long hair, sleeveless shirts, more exposed chest hair than I am really comfortable with, Rambo-style headbands, shoulder pads that would make Rob Liefeld cream himself, and — oh holy crap. The guy calling the shots in the raid is notable First Nations actor and guy-often-confused-with-the-English-author Graham Greene. You may remember him from… Pretty much everything in the last 20 years that called for a Native American of a Certain Age. His big break in the US market was Dances With Wolves, but he also held such widely respected roles as the Alaskan dad in Roget Ebert’s least favorite movie ever, North, as well as episodes of A great show which I really miss now that it’s gone, in spite of doing something silly with their title such that I am forced to refer to the show as “Numb-three-ers”.Numb3rs (as a Native American chief), The Red Green Show (as a nearly deaf and possibly deranged explosive expert), the second Twilight movie (as Charlie’s token Native American-slash-Werewolf friend), and Canadian time-travel-domestic-drama Being Erica (as probably the most senior of the time-traveling therapists. Seriously, if you’re not watching Being Erica, you should be. It also has a former Power Ranger in it), and numerous other things I haven’t watched and therefore will not mention.

He will be playing the role of “Cherokee” this week, a name which reflects all the care and subtlety that goes into choosing a name that reflects and is respectful to the character’s heritage without straying into harmful stereotypes or cliche oversimplifications. Well, that or they just threw a dart at a board with popular Native American-Sounding names on it and it landed just shy of Tecumseh. But what can you expect from a culture where most people still use the term “Indian” for a people who we’ve known for over 600 years are from the opposite side of the planet from India.

The doggies make short work of the Bio-Mechs, by which I mean there’s an overly long fight scene to show off the strobe effects in order to give the kids their money’s worth this episode. Eighties River Tam jumps atop a tank and tosses a grenade inside, in order to establish her as a reckless risk-taker, a trait which will at no point be relevant. We cut back to Hawk, who reports in that he hasn’t seen anything, such as a pitched firefight with a large Dread convoy, and that someone is “playing a game of hide and seek”. On the ground, a mech with a giant truck-mounted canon decides that it would be a good time to reveal his presence and starts shooting. That finally gets Hawk’s attention, unlike the previous firefight, and he dispatches the mech with a single shot from his wrist mounted nerf rocket. Unfortunately, none of the wardogs see him do this, because a few seconds later, they look up, and Eighties River Ram identifies him as a Graham Greene repeats it back to her as “Clicker”, so I assume it’s Futuristic Slang for “robot” and they’ve mistaken him for a mech. But she quite distinctly pronounces it “Quaker”.Quaker, and because they apparently hate the society of Friends, Graham Greene shoots Hawk with his big gun, disabling him in a single hit.

Knocked out of the sky, Hawk falls powerless, perhaps thousands of feet, to land on the sun-baked desert landscape below, and is severely injured. He’ll spend the rest of the episode slowly dying of his massive internal injuries. Naw, I’m just kidding. Hawk isn’t hurt at all, just playing possum. Cap psychically deduces something has happened, and tries in vain to reach Hawk on the radio, but he’s called away by Tank and Scout, who’ve discovered a secret gigantic Dread-made technodrome in the middle of nowhere which they think for no clear reason must be related to Project New Order, so they’d better look into it, what with everyone having read the back of the box, and knowing that Project New Order will be a recurring plot element over the course of the series.

Graham Greene and Eighties River Tam are still bound and determined to mistake Hawk for a Bio-Dread, and make plans to cut his head off to access his delicious bubble memory and nougat center. Hawk overpowers Eighties River Tam, springs to his feet, and, having his would-be decapitators at gunpoint, and defended from their counterfire by his armor suit… Powers his suit down so everyone can see his Spooky Face while he tells them, “Sorry, but I’ve gotten used to this head!” Bless his heart. He’s really trying to toss off a cool one-liner, and it just isn’t working out for him. He proceeds to go through a lengthy series of really creepy facial expressions that I think are aiming for “Dirty Harry”, but come off as “Creepy Stalker” as he explains that his butt hurts and he is not happy about having been shot at. Larry DiTillio is still convinced he can keep up this farce about the Wardogs thinking Hawk is working for Dread, so they just sneer at him while someone offscreen presses a gun to Hawk’s neck. Graham Greene calls him a “Dread Head”, but Hawk can’t even get out his angry retort as he turns around to see this newest attacker, then squeals like a little girl when he sees that it’s his old friend-with-benefits Vi. They go in for a quick cuddle while Graham Greene and Eighties River Tam look on in befuddlement, before a hard cut to the inside of… Somewhere. I mean, I assume it’s a cave or something, but this really just drives home for me how completely ungrounded this episode is, geographically. The Wardoggies had assumed that the convoy they raided was headed for Dread’s base. Did they mean Volcania? Volcania is supposed to be in Detroit, and is post apocalyptic urban sprawl as far as the eye can see. This is… A quarry. Possibly the same quarry as the last episode. Now, admittedly, we never went as far north as Michigan on that road trip I took out to the midwest ten years ago, but I’m like 50% sure that Detroit is not normally surrounded by a desert wasteland riddled with cliffs and caves and desert. Given that Hawk is ostensibly Canadian and Vi served with him in the Metal Wars, and Graham Greene is Canadian, so I might guess that this episode is set in Canada. Sure. Why not. According to myth, had a second season been produced, the Power Base would have relocated to Canada. Now, my Canadian geography is not great, so for all I know, there are huge swaths of Canada which look like generic post-apocalyptic deserts (cliff-bearing type), but I am unconvinced that there exists a place in Canada where one would get “much needed supplies” in convoy-quantities such that the shortest path from there to Detroit takes you though such a landscape.

Logic suggests that such a convoy could only originate in Ottowa, Toronto, or Montreal.

It is fascinating how much I fail to care. Vi introduces Hawk to the Wardoggies. Well, she introduces him to them. There’s no scene where they cut to each of them in turn giving us a name and a personality trait so that we care if they die later. Instead, Vi takes Hawk back to her room to… Apparently talk abut Hawk’s dead wife. I assume she’s dead. And his wife. We really just get “What about Joanna? Is she–” and a sad head-shake from Hawk. She also asks after “Mitch and Katie”, who were “In Dalworth when Dread hit it.” Again, nothing to connect these to, but, um. Did they just tell us that Hawk’s children are dead? Or digitized, a fate which the last episode dedicated itself to explaining was worse. Hawk tries to get Vi and the Wardoggies to join La Resistance, but she’s tired of all this fighting, thinks the war is unwinnable, and is “If this is indeed Canada, “north” seems like an unlikely place to put your mythical promised land heading north” to a place called EarthPrelapsarian BoogalooEden 2, which they’ve got a hot tip about, though Hawk doesn’t believe in it.

While they’re each trying to convince the other to run off with them, Graham Greene rushes in to alert them to a ship on their radar. Hawk identifies it as Cap’s shuttle, and runs outside to call him. And because Hawk apparently does not carry a radio separate from his easily-disabled and power-limited Power Suit, this requires Powering On.

He calls home and, typical man, invites Cap over to Vi’s place and totally expects her to do all the cooking when he didn’t even ask her ahead of time. Cap totally ditches Tank and Scout, revealing which teammates really matter to him. Tank and Scout tempt fate by saying that everything is totes cool and Dread’s forces have no idea whatever that they’re nearby. A little flying nothing-in-particular-shaped thing scans them with its Dalek Vision, and instantly, Dread is personally alerted in Volcania. Dread does not understand the concept of matrixed management models. He So… What exactly is Dread doing before he turns around to face the screen. Does he just sit there in his throne all day looking dour at the empty space in front of him?turns toward the video screens, the only adornment in his lair. He immediately places his base on high alert, and calls Soaron. Man took over the entire world and has reduced 98% of the human race to convenient 3.5″ floppy disc, but he seems to have exactly one guy he can go to when he needs something done.

We cut back to inside the Wardoggies’ cave, where Hawk has, of course, immediately de-morphed. Cap is here now, and Vi is explaining their plan to rendezvous with a contact who is going to get them to Eden 2. Cap explains that the entire “It’s the future. There are sectors now.sector” is closed off, and offers to take them to “The Passages”, but they’re determined. And if Eden 2 turns out to be a myth, they’ll… Find something else. We have yet to hear anything about these Passages other than “they’re a place where Cap takes people he saves, where they are safe,” and we have yet to hear anything about Eden 2 other than “It’s a place where you can go and be safe,” so any real sense of why they’d be so determined to choose the one over the other was certainly not clear to audiences during the original airing, or, for that matter, to internet critics a quarter century later.

Vi indicates that she will not be swayed, so, in spite of Hawk’s protests that Cap somehow magically convince her otherwise, Cap and Pilot decide to just bugger off to see what Tank and Scout have found, leaving Hawk to… Um, do whatever I guess.

Soaron flies around, basically just to show off the state-of-the-art 1980s CGI for a good 30 seconds before landing in front of — hey, isn’t that exactly the same Egyptian Catacomb entryway from last week? Anyway, he orders the biomechs to withdraw and announces VERY LOUDLY that they’re going to abandon this top secret and highly valuable base. Scout calls Cap and asks if they should go in. Cap tells them to hang back, so they can all march blindly into the trap together. We cut back to Scout and Tank, and it sounds for all the world like the boom mike catches one of them farting.

Back in the caves, Hawk is still grousing about Vi’s unwillingness to give up her dream of leaving the horrors of war behind to hide out in a secret underground refuge in favor of leaving the horrors of war behind to hid out in his secret underground refuge. Vi decides to win the argument by seducing Hawk, by stepping out from behind a curtain dressed like Donna Reed. She’s all dolled up for some romance, but for some reason, they decided that, with Hawk and Vi both being Soldiers of a Certain Age, their notion of dressed-for-seduction is straight out of the 1950s. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that the writer momentarily forgot that this is the future, and that the, say, thirty years earlier when Hawk was in his prime is still a hundred and thirty years in the future.

Or maybe he did, which is why Hawk’s reaction to this clumsy act of seduction is a look of confused horror. This reaction, and I realize that you will all be shocked to learn this, is not what Vi was expecting, and she starts to cry and self-deprecate over her foolishness. But it turns out that the sight of a woman crying is exactly what it takes to get Hawk’s motor running, and he rushes over, takes hold of her and announces, “Which he means as a compliment, but it seems to edge kinda close to “Given that my choices are heavily restricted due to the apocalypse, I guess you’ll do.”You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in a long time,” and then they make out.

The show suddenly remembers that this is a kid’s action adventure, and we cut back to Captain Power and company before we get to see Hawk pull out his little war doggie. They gun down the few remaining guards at the Technodrome, and Pilot unlocks the front door using an industrial vibrator a sonic screwdriver. Inside, Scout finds computer files about the mysterious “Project New Order”, which he tries to decrypt, while the others plant a time bomb, and have just found a pile of Ominously Foreshadowy Barrels when they are caught by a band of mechs led by Dread’s chief Nazi, “Overunit Weber”.

Overunit Weber is a sort of over-the-top “pretty-boy” fascist type, in a a uniform listed straight from the SS, with jodhpurs and an abundance of braid and decoration, and a tall hat, and, for reasons best known to himself, enormous Mr. T-style bling. He gloats over how Power is now his prisoner, and prepares to dispatch the remaining Rangers of the Future, unaware that Scout is still in the next room. Scout morphs his suit into the likeness of Lord Dread and walks in on them just as Overunit Weber calls the real Dread to report his victory. Scout makes no attempt at subterfuge: he just walks in, stands there for a second, and Overunit Weber is surprised enough by this that Cap can give the order for the others to start shooting. Which means that there’s absolutely no reason Scout had to turn into the likeness of Dread. Which has me thinking…

Cap and company brutally slaughter all the mechs, allowing Overunit Weber to run away like a small child. They give chase, but like all secret Dread facilities, there’s a “Lock the heroes in a small trap-lined hallway” button, locking our heroes in a narrow room with bunch of giant novelty phalluses hanging from the ceiling.

Knowing that the visual style of this series was heavily influenced by Japanese media, the Future Force fears that this show is about to take a tragically Hentai turn, and Tank creates an exit for them the way only he can.

Back in the caves, Vi is back in her uniform with an easygoing, postcoital manner as she tries to persuade Hawk to come away with her to Eden (yeah, brother) 2, as “We’ve done our share of the fighting. Let’s spend whatever time we have left loving.” As she considers helping herself to another heaping helping of Hawk, Graham Greene busts in and announces that Dread’s pulled all his forces east, giving them an opening to slip off to meet their contact. Hawk, though, knows that “east” is the general direction where the rest of his team has gone. After a few seconds of hesitation, Graham Green sheepishly reveals that Cap and the others are trapped. Way to bury the Yes, that’s how it’s spelled. It’s newspaper jargon.lede there, Cherokee.

Hawk asks Vi for help, and she holds fast that, if it were just her, she’d do it, but she’s unwilling to risk her men. Hawk goes hardcore Bros Before Hos with her and says, “Yeah. I feel the same way about the Captain,” which you can read as extremely homoerotic if you want, but I choose not to ship Hawk and Cap because the age difference makes it kind of creepy for me. He storms off, telling the rest of the Wardoggies, “I hope you find your paradise,” in a tone that very clearly indicates that by “I hope you find your paradise,” he means “Go fuck yourselves.” Yeah. How dare they not want to give up their only chance at survival and a peaceful escape from decades of horrific war and the constant threat of a fate worse than death to go on a probably suicidal mission to save a group of five strangers who are much better equipped than they are and wouldn’t even need saving if they hadn’t waltzed into possibly the most obvious trap to ever be shown in a television series before the premiere of Stargate SG-1? Anyway, Hawk powers up again and salutes Vi, which I’m going to take as one last parting jab, since he’s making a point to make his final goodbye to her as a soldier rather than as a lover.

Outside the Technodrome, Soaron is… Just sort of hanging around. Dread calls him and alerts him to Hawk’s approach. And we get another exciting air battle, where we intercut back and forth between a badly CSO’d Hawk and a badly CGI’d Soaron trading shots at each other, most of their laser blasts exploding harmlessly in the empty air behind or off to the side of their targets.

The fight goes on for, well, too long really, then Hawk seems to just kind of get distracted and plays with his glove for a while, giving Soaron the opportunity to get in a good shot which knocks Hawk out of the air and unmorphs him. Soaron declares “Victory is mine!” So naturally, God smites him for his pride by having the Wardoggies show up and in about three shots from the ground, dispatch Soaron, who could hold his own against Hawk, who was flying. Vi helps Hawk up and announces that she’d decided to “Give Dread something to remember us by,” which prompts a warm expression from the previously kind of dickish Hawk. Fickle!

The exposition fairy inspires Tank to remind Cap that there’s a bomb about to explode on the computer in the next room, and that their power suits are almost drained, because these things get slightly worse gas mileage than ’57 Chevy with six passengers and a trunk full of gold bullion. For his trouble, he takes one to the chest in the next volley of gunfire and powers down. A cutaway to the bomb shows 87 seconds left on the clock. Overunit Weber orders Power to surrender, but Cap responds by telling Weber to “This show is really terrible about pithy one-liners. That bit from Hawk about his ass being sore is pretty much the best we’re going to get.Come try it.” But just as Overunit Weber orders their destruction, the Wardoggies blast their way in through the wall. They don’t actually do anything; the distraction just gives Cap an opening to gun down all the Bio-Mechs while Overunit Weber curls up in the fetal position. Can’t have our heroes killing a human. Hawk offers them a lift, and the rest of the team races back to the curiously doorway-shaped hole. Tank looks back to tell the empty room “Less get out! Zeese plays gonna blow!” For emphasis, we cut back to the bomb timer, which now shows 15 seconds, even though it’s only been 30 seconds since the last time we saw it. Exactly twenty seconds later, just as the Future Force and Wardoggies are driving away in their little tiny tank-jeep-of-the-future thing, the bomb explodes. Or maybe not. Something explodes, but it’s clearly an entirely different design of building than the technodrome we’ve seen in every other exterior shot. And a good thing too, because Overunit Weber who they’d gone out of their way not to kill was still inside the technodrome.

With only a few seconds left in the episode, Vi and Hawk say their goodbyes and exchange a last kiss as the rest of the cast sort of stands around awkwardly, trying to figure out why the director didn’t tell them all to wander out of frame for this bit so that it didn’t look like everyone else had huddled around to watch Hawk make out. As the Wardogs drive away, Vi and Hawk exchange a last salute to each other, but since Hawk isn’t being a passive-aggressive dick at the moment, it’s a very relaxed and casual salute. In fact, Vi looks more like she’s just waving at him, and Hawk looks more like he’s tipping an invisible top hat at her.

And that, friends, is episode 2 of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. I think it’s a pretty solid one — it’s a character-focus episode for Hawk, which is a little weird this early on, but as I said before, I get the distinct impression that the aired ordering of these episodes didn’t have a lot of thought put into it. The big thing you’ll probably notice is that the plot of this story, at its most basic, is “One of our heroes meets up with an old love interest, gets shot at, then smooches. They raid a Dread base and blow it up after hearing a cryptic clue about ‘Project New Order’. Dread sets up an obvious trap and the heroes fall for it.” So on that level, it’s basically the same story as last week. But this one lacks all the heaviness that comes from making a protracted rape metaphor. Further, by separating the episode out into the A-plot with Hawk and the B-plot with the others, this episode is a lot more balanced, giving everyone something to do, even if Pilot is limited to unlocking doors with sex toys. This episode has a lot more action, and just a lot more general-stuff-going-on, and it doesn’t stray too far into dangerous territory by getting hung up on a protracted metaphor.

Which isn’t to say that this episode is shallow: the whole thing with the Wardogs in general and Vi in particular is a prevailing sense of how just plain exhausting war is. We have all the proof we need that Vi and the Wardogs aren’t cowards, and they aren’t weak, but they’ve been fighting for years, and they’re just plain tired of it. And the way Hawk and Vi act toward each other feels pretty natural — I give Hawk grief for being a dick to Vi, but it’s a very natural sort of dickishness: his friends are in danger so he lashes out — and they’re both quick to forgive when the crisis passes. I don’t especially like Hawk in those scenes, but I can understand where he’s coming from.

Now, this series is really a showcase for why “Half-Hour Drama” is not a common modern TV format. I really would have liked to have some insight into the Wardogs themselves. After their first scene, their screen presence basically shrinks down to “Graham Greene walks into the scene, delivers a message, then leaves.” There just isn’t time to develop more that the one of them — we don’t even learn most of their names.

Warning: the next paragraphs contain a discussion of gender essentialism and the portrayal of women in the media. If you’re not cool with that, skip ahead to the paragraph accompanied by a Mad Libs cover.

Continue reading Yippie-ti-yi-yo, Get Along War Doggies (Captain Power, Episode 2)

Hm. Need to find something. Something charming. Something fun. Something post-apocalyptic. I’ve still got a lot of Hitler Meets ChristI keep wanting that title to be Hitler versus Christ. I would watch the hell out of that movie. to wash out of my soul. But what? Apocalypses are all so heavy, and I don’t think I can dive straight back into the deep end.

I should think the answer was elementary.

Sherlock Holmes? You’re still here? I thought you left with Michael Bolton and the Pope.

I was able to deduce that you would shortly be in need of a special guest star, and being that I am in the public domain…

That’s a fine point. But I’m not sure I’m going to be able to come up with something to review. It’s not easy.

As I said, I think it should be elementary.

That’s easy for you to– Wait. Elementary. Elementary school. Of course! You know what will blow your mind?

Are you offering me cocaine?

No. It’s a metaphor.

Oh. Because I wouldn’t necessarily be offended if you were.

No, really. It’s a metaphor.

You’re sure then?

Sigh. No, look. I keep my collection of film and television organized by genre.

I think cocaine would have been more efficacious. For blowing my mind.

Enough with the cocaine, Sherlock Holmes. I’m talking about my film and television collection. It’s organized by genre. And guess what one of those genres is.

Hm. Well, based on my observation of the small clues around this room, I think I can safely deduce that one of the genres in your collection is “Movies you thought were just ordinary low-budget 1970s action movies, but which turned out to be softcore pornography.”

I. Um. Well. Actually, I was thinking of “Post-apocalyptic children’s television.”

So you are positing that there are enough examples of Post-Apocalyptic Children’s Television to constitute an entire genre?

I am.

Well, it’s not cocaine, but I suppose it will do.

I’ve already talked here about some of the various post-apocalyptic children’s television series in my collection. There’s New Zealand’s teen soap opera and Future Power Ranger incubator The Tribe (which Leah and I still haven’t finished watching). And there’s the post-apocalyptic single-topic made-for-public-TV educational series Tomes and Talismans. I think a big part of the draw is that post-apocalypsism is in many ways similar to the popular traditional genre of castaway stories — which have always been popular with kids — but they have a science fiction flavor to them. It’s half Peter Pan and half Star Trek.

Of course, back when I was actually in the target age group for children’s television, it was the 1980s, and I’ve spoken before about the general sense of periapocalyptic nihilism that really drove a lot of our pop culture in the ’80s. This was a time when, even as a small child, the way you thought of the future included nuclear apocalypse — not as a possibility or a hypothetical, but rather as concrete reality. The east and west had been locked in a cold war for decades at this point, and through the early part of the eighties, President Reagan realized — correctly — that communist economies are designed to marshal resources that aren’t rapidly growing, unlike capitalist economies which require constant rapid growth to avoid a complete collapse. He bet that escalating the cold war arms race would force the Soviet Union to invest so much of their collective resources into their military that they’d eventually overbalance their economy and collapse. Looking back now, of course, it seems obvious how things would work out, but at the time, it seemed like “Both sides sink so much money into their respective doomsday programs that it becomes financially infeasible to not have an apocalyptic war,” was far and away the most likely outcomeThis is, after all, why World War I happened..

But I’m meandering off topic. By 1987, the height of 80s doomsdayism had passed, but it still held a good bit of sway. Now, we all still thought that the world was going to end shortly, but it was becoming clear that some time before it did, we were going to see massive upheavals in the television industry.If this paragraph sounds like it was liberally cribbed from the TV-tropes article, that’s because I wrote that article My parents had gotten cable TV… Um… Probably right around this time, and it opened a whole new world: instead of the four channels we’d gotten in my youth, we now got as many as sixAnd one of them was the Christian Broadcast Network, known today as ABC Family. Really. The first cable package you could get in our area was the Baltimore and DC broadcast channels plus CBN. But CBN was surprisingly awesome because at like 1 AM, they showed Laurel & Hardy movies.. Remember, this was so long ago that there was, at the time, only one Law & Order, and zero Reality-Based Game Shows. And MTV had to somehow fill its broadcast day using nothing but music videos! I realize that it’s basically impossible to comprehend this now, but try to imagine what it was like to be a TV executive back then: for as long as you could remember, “Television” was ABC, NBC, and CBS. And in most places, that was only if the winds were favorableI am writing this from a house where we never bothered to sign up for cable, finding Netflix and the Internet adequate to our needs. In favorable winds, we get one channel. Fuck you, digital switch-over.. Now, you were faced with the reality that within a few years, your average viewer was going to receive fifty, a hundred, perhaps as many as four hundred channels. How could they possibly produce that much content? I like to imagine that it went a bit like this:

INT. TV EXECUTIVE'S OFFICE. DAY. AN EXECUTIVE SITS AT A DESK, SMARTLY DRESSED. HIS NOSE IS BLEEDING

ENTER LACKEY

LACKEY

Hey, boss! You know how you were saying at the last meeting that we were all in big trouble if we didn’t find a way to produce four hundred times as much content for the same cost?

EXECUTIVE

(manic)Who are you? And why am I covered in spiders?

LACKEY

Well I had this great idea. (Does that thing where you wave your arm in the air like you’re fondling a flying dachshund that is supposed to indicate that you’re reading the headline off of an imaginary newspaper. A flying newspaper.) Interactive Television. We do five takes of one show, change things around a little, and we air them all at the same time on a whole bunch of different channels. Every time we break for commercial, you throw up a title card saying, like, “If you want the hero to bang the cute blonde, switch to channel 62, and if you want him to screw the redhead instead, go to channel 50.” We only got to shoot a couple of minutes extra, and we can mix the pieces up and take up as many channels as we want. It’ll be the next big thing! It’s as sound a bet as Apple Computers, Defense Contracting and white rappers!

EXECUTIVE

Lackey, I like it! Of course, I just snorted about five hundred dollars worth of coke, and that’s in 80s money. Call my secretary and have her bring my DeLorean around.

LACKEY

Only five hundred? It’s already lunchtime. You usually blow through twice that much by eleven!

EXECUTIVE

Good point. Cancel the DeLorean, have them send up a chafing dish full of Charlie. But wait. Maybe it’s just because I’m not quite fully stoned, but don’t you think that the viewing public is going to have a hard time accepting interactive television?

LACKEY

I got it all figured out, boss. We’ll get way out in front of it and get them all adjusted to the idea. You know how the kids these days love their video games on their Nintendo Atari Systems?

EXECUTIVE

Oh yeah. I got me that sweet R.O.B. game. Man, those are going to last forever. They’re gonna put out a third game for it any day now… Hey, if I had my robot butler play against R.O.B., which one do you think would win?

LACKEY

I don’t know boss. If you had your robot butler play the video game, who’d go fetch you your cocaine while you watched?

EXECUTIVE

Good point. But what’s this got to do with interactive TV?

LACKEY

Well, you know how the kids these days love their video games? Well, what if we introduced interactive TV by pitching it as a video game you played with your television. We do it like a kid’s show, right? And we get the kids to buy toys.

EXECUTIVE

Kids shows were made for selling toys! We slap on a thirty second PSA at the end and we can call our half-hour-long toy commercial an “educational program”.

LACKEY

I know, right? But here’s the clever part: the boys down in R&D say that you can flash a light in a TV show, and pick it up with cheap receiver, like a remote control in reverse. So we put one of these receivers in the toys, and then, get this: we flash the light in the show, and if the kid has the toy, the toy lights up, plays music, whatever. Bam! It’s like a magic trick. So we get the kids thinking that they’re actually interacting with the TV show.

EXECUTIVE

So how does that get us to showing the same show on twelve channels at once?

LACKEY

That’s the clever part: the show’s for kids, right? But we put it on in Prime Time. Not one of the big-money slots. Like, Saturday at seven or something. And we throw in some stuff to make mom and dad happy too. Nothing to edgy, no smut or anything. But something a little heavy. Goes right over the kids’ heads, because they’re just there for the fighting robots and shooting things with their toy guns and stuff. But the parents, they get into it because it’s got some heavy stuff. In between the fighting robots. Like, we set it in the future, and there’s been a big war and most of humanity has been wiped out. Yeah, that’s it. A post-apocalyptic kids’ show.

EXECUTIVE

(jaw drops) So the kids are watching it for the robots and the toys, but mom and dad are watching it for the drama… (beat) And mom and dad see the kid playing with the toys, and they see the toys all lighting up and going crazy…

LACKEY

And after a couple of seasons, it starts to seem kind of normal that you’d be interacting with a TV show. So when we roll out the twelve-channels-at-once thing, it’s not something weird and scary, it’s just–

EXECUTIVE

The same thing we did before turned up to eleven. It’s brilliant. It can’t possibly fail. I mean, unless this idea is totally ridiculous and the only reason I think otherwise is that I’ve snorted enough coke today to kill two and a half men! What do you call it?

LACKEY

I got this title, it’s brilliant. It really conveys that it’s a lighthearted and fun kid’s show, and also a dark and edgy drama for adults. I call it…

So that’s the set-up. I think it sounds reasonable.

I liked the bit with the cocaine.

Quiet, you. So, that happened, and in September of 1987, this show came to the air-waves. A few weeks later, another show would premiere. In my area, the two ran back-to-back in order to provide a little synergy. That second show’s first episode, coincidentally enough, included a scene set in a post-apocalyptic near-future that bore a bit of similarity to the dystopia of our amazing interactive wonder. The second show was Star Trek: The Next Generation. As you might imagine, it is rather better remembered than the subject of tonight’s recap.

But what is this mysterious show, this bold experiment in interactive post-apocalyptic children’s television? The show was written by a man whose name you are far more likely to recognize than the show’s: J Michael Stracyzinski. Like his later and infinitely more famous Babylon 5, this show was a pioneer in computer-generated graphics. And like Babylon 5, if you look at the graphics now, they scream less “Cutting-edge supercomputer technology!” and more “Why do the bad guys look like they were rendered on a PlayStation 1?”

Next year will be the show’s 25th anniversary, and its corporate masters have finally deigned to release a DVD set in honor of it. I highly urge everyone to buy it when it comes out, even if you don’t have fond nostalgic memories of the show, because you should encourage studios to do things like this, instead of pretending that their embarrassing failed past series didn’t exist. In the mean time, though, I hope that some screen-caps from my ancient and grainy but lovingly-restored off-air copies will give you the nudge you need to partake. So, what would be a fitting name for a show set in a dystopian future, following the small band of heroes who use super-science to transform themselves into super-powered armored forms to defend the few remaining survivors from an evil tyrant whose grand plan is to annihilate the human race and replace them with a machine race?

No. Wait. That’s not quite right. My bad. Can’t even fathom how I made that mistake. This show, with its entirely serious and not at all ludicrous name, is…

Frakking. Yeah.

Bah. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future? Why, that’s so ludicrous they may as well have titled it Captain Power in the 22nd Century

Earth, 2147. The legacy of the Metal Wars, where man fought machines–and machines won. Bio-Dreads–monstrous creations that hunt down human survivors…and digitize them. Volcania, center of the Bio-Dread Empire; stronghold and fortress of Lord Dread, feared ruler of this new order. But from the fires of the Metal Wars arose a new breed of warrior, born and trained to bring down Lord Dread and his Bio-Dread Empire. They were “Soldiers Of The Future”–mankind’s last hope.

Together they form the most powerful fighting force in Earth’s history. Their creed: to protect all life. Their promise: to end Lord Dread’s rule. Their name: Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future!

Now, with 22 episodes at about 22 minutes each, and packed with action, we never get a really explicit drop of the complete backstory, and there’s a lot of it. Fortunately, this show was so heavily merchandise-driven that you can basically string together a minor Russian novel from the copy on the back of the toy boxes.

We’d best get it out of the way now. Comparisons between Captain Power and Power Rangers are pretty much impossible to avoid. They’re both series about five-man teams, they’re both targeted at children, and, of course, they both have the word “Power” in their titles. Also, something about people magically summoning spandex-based armor.
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers would premiere about five years later, a production of Haim Saban. It was the first and far and away the most successful of a group of series he launched which were American adaptations of Japanese Tokusatsu“Special effects”. Specifically practical effects done in real-time. Especially “Man in a rubber suit”-style effects, as distinguished to CGI or Stop-Motion effects series, which coupled special effects footage of costumed heroes from Japanese television with original US-produced linking footage.
The similarities are there, but they’re mostly superficial: five transforming heroes; evil force with designs on world conquest. It would surprise me if the original makers of Power Rangers didn’t have at least a passing familiarity with Captain Power, (If nothing else, it would have come up when they tried to sell what sounded a lot like a reboot of a failed series to network executives) but there’s no sign that it had any overt influence. At first.
As alluded to by the title gag up there, season 17 of Power Rangers, Power Rangers RPM went into production with the Sword of Damocles hanging over it’s head (Sha-na-na-na ain’t no lie!): the show was all but cancelled. So, deciding that they literally had nothing left to lose, the showmakers threw the saving throw of all saving throws, and decided to set the “final” season after the apocalypse. Taking monster and robot footage from a fairly silly and lighthearted season of the corresponding Japanese series, RPM wove a story in which a genocidal computer virus, Venjix, had wiped out most of humanity, and had plotted out an endgame involving turning the remaining humans into robots. The Power Rangers were empowered by technology developed by one of the scientists involved in Venjix’s creation, and we have some of the darkest storylines and imagery in the history of the franchise. Enough interest was sparked that Saban bought the franchise back from its owners (a subsidiary of Disney) and continued the franchise. Again, I haven’t been able to find any evidence of this, but I find it hard to imagine that twenty-year-old memories of Captain Power didn’t have at least a little influence on the development of Power Rangers RPM.
Now, on the other hand, the Japanese franchise that Power Rangers was based on, Super Sentai, dates back to the late ’70s. Again, I’d be very surprised if Super Sentai didn’t influence the conception of Captain Power. Like I mentioned, Power Rangers was only the first of several adaptations Saban did in the 1990s. Another, called VR Troopers used footage from a different Tokusatsu franchise, known collectively as Metal Heroes. That franchise bore a familial resemblance to Super Sentai, but focused on in one case, a married couplelone heroes rather than a team, had more traditional vehicles (and used them more sparingly) rather than giant robots, and had a generally more cybernetic and chrome-armor look to its heroes. Visually, there’s a much more marked resemblance in style between Captain Power and, say, Dimensional Warrior Spielban, than to anything in Power Rangers.
Come to think of it, one of the strangest things about Captain Power is that it’s not an adaptation of an earlier work. In places, it feels very much like an ill-conceived live-action adaptation of a Sentai anime series not unlike the piles of violent, adult-targeted anime imported into the US in the ’80s and marketed to children by clueless importers who couldn’t get their minds around the idea that “animated” doesn’t mean “for kids” (See also: Macross; Golion). The visual effects often overreach, as if they were contractually required to have a robot bird monster and a flying suit, even though it was the 1980s and would have taxed a feature film budget to do well. And then there’s the artwork. There’s a very consistent visual style to the artwork used on the toys and related media — which looks nothing at all like the show. Look at this picture of the Captain’s action figure. We’re still a decade before “adult collector” toys became a thing, so I don’t expect great parity to the show, but what we actually have here is a toy that is very reflective of the art on the box, but not at all of the show (Look at Cap’s goggles). The “Power On” charging station, rather than being a rather simple six-sided structure, is an extremely elaborate single-user affair. The Power Jet and Phantom Striker barely appear in the series. These all look like toys based on an animated or comic series — pretty good toys in fact — but there’s just no parity with the show. When you watch Captain Power, one of the feelings you get is the strange and incongruous feeling you get watching something like the Bill Bixby The Incredible Hulk, or the 1990 The Flash TV series. Like what you’re seeing is a very affectionate and well-meaning remake of something that was never meant for the medium of television.

Despite what the announcer says, the Metal Wars actually refer to a period when machine fought Machine, and nobody won. We’re still in “this is the backstory to the backstory at this point: Captain Power begins in medias res, fifteen years into a war that itself starts after the apocalypse. The particular apocalypse in question here came about because mankind had perfected robotic soldiers called Battle Droids Neo-Vipers Cogs Cylons Quantrons Robot Santas Foot Clan T-750s “Bio-Mechs”. With a ready supply of soldiers who you can throw into combat without body armor and still avoid a constant parade of body bags showing up on the six o’clock news, with the deleterious effect that tends to have on a nation’s willingness to squander half of its GDP in two pointless never-ending wars that we only got into because our leadership lied to us about them having Weapons of Mass Destruction-Related-Program-Activities — Okay. That sentence kind of got away from me there. Anyway, the point is that once the nation-states of the world had Bio-Mechs, there was no serious incentive to not just be at war all the time. No one ever ended up actually dying, so you never had any trouble finding an ample supply of people willing to die for their country. The wars brought about devastation to infrastructure and bankrupted the nations of the world, and, this show being informed by 80s sensibilities, we could take for granted that international politics got quickly stuck in a cycle of “Build up massive robot armies because otherwise your enemies will attack you,” followed by “Attack with your massive robot army in order to recoup some of your investment in robot armies.”

So by 2132, things were looking pretty dire, which is why scientist and likely porn star Dr. Stuart Gordon Power and his weasely creep sidekick Dr. Lyman TaggartFormer owner of Garfield’s pal Odie came up with the idea of building a supercomputer that could remotely seize control of all the world’s Bio-Mechs and order them to stop fighting. Which could not possibly go horrifically wrong. I mean, sure, every nation on Earth might kinda resent having some independent cabal of freedom-hating terrorists scientists remotely switch all their armies off, but they’d get over it, right? And if they didn’t, well, the scientists would have control over every robot soldier in the world, so tough cookies.

This does seem like a plan with certain logical shortcomings.

No shit, S– You know what, I’m not going to go there. To top it all off, they decided to give their supercomputer a name that could in no way serve as tragic irony by being far more apropos in the unlikely event that the computer turned evil and took over the world: OverMind.

I say. That seems roughly equivalent to naming your child Wolfgang Lupin von Turnsintoawolfduringfullmoons in a fictional universe including lycanthropy.

Yes. But don’t forget, it was made by a guy named “Power” in a superhero universe.

Touche.

The weasely Doctor Taggart becomes impatient with the difficulties inherent in creating an AI supercomputer capable of seizing control of all the world’s robot soldiers, and decides to take a dangerous shortcut by including protomatter in the genesis matrix having sex with OverMind.

I say! I thought you intimated that this was a programme appropriate for children!

Okay, he does not literally have sex with OverMind. But he physically “enters” it, if you know what I meanWhat I means is that Overmind has a door in the back and he opens it up and walks inside., and intermingles his own delicious, meaty human brain with OverMind’s glowing orby computer brain, causing OverMind to become fully operational, if you know what I meanWhat I mean is that it starts working properly and performing the task for which it’s designed.

The only problem, and I admit this is kind of a nitpick, is that OverMind and Taggart both go stark-raving mad, and decide that the best thing for humanity would be for OverMind and Taggart to take over the Bio-Mechs and use them as an army to round up all the humans, convert them into easy-to-swallow digital form, and commit global genocide in order to start a new world order based around cold and calculating machine logic and peopled by a new race of sentient machines called by the entirely logical and not-at-all cartoonishly evil name “Bio-Dreads”. This is clearly a shocking twist that you could only have seen coming if you had been awake during the opening credits.

So, Taggart and OverMind make short work of the world and quickly rip and mp3-encode most of humanity. The remaining world governments decide that, rather than lynching Dr. Power for his role in bringing about the downfall of humanity, they should let him set up shop in one of the middle levels of NORAD, somewhere below the Temporal Sciences Commission and above Stargate Command, to work on a strategy for defeating Taggart. Having sort of blown his creative wad on OverMind, Dr. Power’s solution, faced with literally millions of Bio-Mech soldiers, commanded by some indeterminate number of sentient Bio-Dread troops, supplemented by Taggart’s army of loyal humansWhy are humans following him when his plan involves “kill every last human being” as step 3? Well, some of them are True Believers, looking for a place of honor among the new robotic order. Others are self-serving pragmatists who consider a Dread victory inevitable and prefer to live out their last years in comparative comfort as Quislings. And the rest are just sadists who consider it more important to take joy in watching the world burn than to lift a finger saving it. Yes. Dread recruited the Tea Party., along with his terrible CGI warlord Soaron is this:

He’s going to get a five year head-start on Zordon and make a whopping FIVETechnically seven. They refer to two additional suits which they have not yet given to anyone. These were to be used in the second season had the show not been cancelled. Mighty Morphing PowerNamed for Dr. Power, not because they were full of power or anything. That’d be dumb. Suits. Putting on a sort of TRON-inspired body stocking and allowing yourself to be energized by the Power Platform would summon super-powered armor, and confer protection from digitization. This part we actually get to see in a flashback episode of the series. Sure, it’s a bit unlikely that any amount of Power you encrust five people with would make up for the comical difference in numbers, but that’s just because you’re allowing logic and reason to cloud your judgment. Instead, watch these frames from the transformation sequence.

There. Can you honestly tell me that wasn’t worth the fall of humanity?

Unfortunately, Dr. Power’s son, John, is a brash dumbass who gets himself captured trying to singlehandedly assassinate Taggart, and Stuart has to nobly sacrifice himself to save the dumbass. Someone, no idea who, promotes young John to the rank of Captain. In… Some… Armed… Service… for… Some… Country… I don’t know. John becomes the leader of a team which is called the “Future Force”, I guess because “Present Force” didn’t have the right sort of ring to it. I have no idea what kind of Captain John is supposed to be. He apparently out-ranks a Major, a Lieutenant, a Sergeant and a Corporal, but which would probably imply he’s a naval captain. But that would make him the only one with a naval rank, except maybe Tank, but Tank who ever heard of the navy having a tank? In fact, I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t actually hold any sort of rank at all, and just insists on people calling him “Captain” because it makes him feel all virile when people call him “Captain Power”.

The show’s set about fifteen years after these events. Stuart’s dead, John’s grown into a well-groomed adult with a healthy complexion and none of the sort of physical flaws you’d expect from living a rough and often-undernourished post-apocalyptic lifestyle. He’s played by the excellently-haired actor Tim Dunigan, who you do not remember as the original The one who was played by Tim Dunigan, not the one who was played by Dirk BenedictFace in the pilot for The A-Team. By 2002, Dunigan had decided that the volatile world of acting was no longer for him, and decided to go into a profession where you would always make money no matter what: mortgage brokering. Taggart fell into a volcano or something and had to be rebuilt as a cyborg, and now calls himself “Lord Dread”, and I suspect that his character design drew a lot from Darth Vader and the character of Travis from Blake’s Seven. He lives in a high-tech base inside a volcano. In Detroit. Which sounds unrealistic unless you’ve actually been to Detroit.

John is still living in NORAD, has claimed one of the Amazing Power Suits (In fact, close as I can tell, his suit is actually called “The Power Suit”. It seems that each of the suits has a name, which, by an amazing coincidence is also the callsign/nickname of its operator.), and asserted his dominance over his dad’s old enforcer, Major Matthew Masterson, played by Peter MacNeill, who goes by “Hawk” because no one could say “Major Matthew Masterson” in a combat situation without getting tongue tied. Hawk is the master of the amazing “Hawk” suit, which lets him fly, thereby being responsible for most of the show’s chroma-key visual effects stuff. The other three suits have been handed out to some other folks John met along the way:

There’s Lieutenant Michael “Tank” Ellis, played by professional Guy-You-Get-When-You-Need-a-Viking-Type-Guy-in-a-Schwarzenegger-Movie Sven-Ole Thorsen, who grew up in a placeDon’t know what sort of place. He just throws it out there without context because JMS really wanted to get the name out there. A voice in my head tells me that it was an undersea colony, but in context, it could be a city, a refugee camp, a space station, a building, a boat, a school. For that matter all he actually says is “While I was growing up in…”, so technically it might not be a place, but, say, a street gang. called “Babylon 5”. I’ve heard that name before somewhere, but I can’t place it. He operates the “Tank” suit, which is all decked out with a camouflage print instead of the chrome everyone else gets, because Tank is like 7 feet tall, so naturally you’d want him to be the stealthy one. His suit also has a ginormous gun.

Corporal Robert “Scout” Baker is the team’s token minority, whose suit has special chameleon abilities allowing him to impersonate Bio-Mechs. As I recall, though, he’s got far and away the fewest scenes, because even after the eschaton, a brother can’t catch a break. He’s a smallish unassuming kind of guy, played by Maurice Dean Wint, who would apparently hit puberty some time in the 90s, because he would grow up to become The Guy Who They Should Hire For Any Movie They Want To Remake Where Richard Roundtree Was In The Original, best known for playing Quentin the psycho cop in Cube, RoboCable in Robocop: Prime Directives and Luther in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The last member of the team is former-Hitler-Youth member Girly McObviousLoveInterest Corporal Jennifer “Pilot” Chase, who, being a girl, gets the lightest armor, and, unlike everyone else, doesn’t even get a helmet, just a pair of sunglasses. I don’t even remember her using her power suit all that much; she’s supposed to be their tactician, but the biggest part of her job is flying their shuttle around. In terms of their practical day-to-day roles, Hawk is the one doing most of the work, but for story arc, Pilot is pretty much second only to the Captain in terms of importance. And she’s the character I remember best after all of these years, because of how the series ends. Which I will get t when I get to it. If I were a few years older back in 1987, I’m sure I’d have had a massive crush on her. But those of you follow this blog will recall that those hormones were not to kick in until the 1990 film Moontrap. Jessica Steen, who played Pilot, would go on to be the original Doctor WeirThe one who was played by Jessica Steen, not the one who was played by Torri Higgson in Stargate SG-1, and, because I do enjoy my irony, also played The Other Becky on the Canadian series Flashpoint, subbing for the original Pink Power Ranger Amy Jo Johnson during her maternity leave. She is also the only Power Ranger Soldier of the Future other than Dunigan whose Wikipedia page mentioned Captain Power in the main body of the article.

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Episode 1: Shattered
By Larry Oitillio

We open on Cap, overlooking the quarry where every episode of Blake’s Seven was filmed. He immediately decides to give me the finger for my causal dismissal of Scout’s importance on the team, by immediately announcing that it’s “Up to you now, Scout,” and buggering off. Our hero!

Right away, we’re treated to some Bio-Mechs, Cyberman-stomping out of what I think is the Necropolis at the Valley of the Kings or something. That garish strobing on their chests is part of the show’s interactive element: when something flashes red like that, you can point your Power Jet XT-7 at it, and shoot to accumulate points.

We cut to Scout, who immediately backstabs a Bio-Mech, and then uses his suit’s array of compression artifacts to transform into the mech’s doppleganger so that he can slip undetected into the… Um… Generic Steam-and-Clanking Factory. We cut back to Cap, Hawk, and Tank, who boldly… Watch from a safe distance. Our heroes!

Tank and Scout are the only Soldiers of the Future who wear full helmets. Tank’s is a bit like a knight’s helmet, solid with eyeslits, while Scout wears something between a full-face racecar driver’s helmet and a 50s-Sci-Fi-Style astronaut helmet. Hawk’s helmet is basically a fighter jet pilot’s helmet, which at least makes sense. Cap, on the other hand, wears something between a helicopter pilot’s helmet and Erik Estrada’s helmet from CHiPS.

Scout promptly attaches one of those generic stick-to-anything timed explosive dealies to a wall, and then decides that now that the bomb is planted, he will probably not require stealth or anything to escape, and reverts back to his suit’s default Cyborg F1-Driver appearance (see sidebar). Unfortunately, Lord Dread had the foresight to lock the factory doors overnight, so Scout won’t be able to get out until the shift change in the morning.

The shift change? For the robot workers?

They have a fantastic union. Cap promises to extract Scout once he’s planted the last bomb, so he sneaks off through what looks for all the world like a spare set from Red Dwarf. Unfortunately, he sets off one of Lord Dread’s Spy Gear Motion Detectors and the jig is up. If only he had some kind of ability to somehow disguise his appearance so that he’d be mistaken for a Bio-Mech…

An army of mechs descend on him, firing purple strobe effects, which would cause your Power Jet XT-7 to lose a hit point if it saw them. Outside, Cap and his buddies, without much enthusiasm, announce that they’ve got to blow up the doors to the factory so that Scout can escape before the bomb went off. Given just how easy it is for Scout to escape, and for them to blow the doors, it’s not really clear to me why they chose this “Use stealth and cunning for the first minute, and then just do whatever” strategy instead of the simpler strategy of “Just shoot it with guns.” The plan comes off, however, and Cap calls Pilot in to pick them up with their shuttle.

The shuttle, by the way, should not be confused with the Power Jet XT-7: the shuttle appears in just about every episode, and does not have a corresponding toy. The Power Jet, on the other hand, only appears once, briefly, and is the centerpiece of the toy line.

Meanwhile, in Volcania, we meet our antagonist, Lord Dread, who, just to show off, spins around 270 degrees in his Big Scary Chair in his dimly lit command room. Because he’s insane with love for the cold efficiency of machine minds. The velvety dulcet tones of OverMind tell him that “Energy Substation Zeta has been violated.” Eew. Cap’s latest act of terrorism has set back Dread’s master plan, dubbed “The Final Solution Project New OrderSeriously. They lay on the Nazi analogues pretty thick in this show” by about three months. Dread vows to look to Cap’s past for a way to defeat him.

The Power Base is a weird set, combining elements of Stargate Command, Power Rangers HQ, The Blackwood Project Base from season 2 of War of the Worlds, and the TARDIS. Cap receives a message from his old friend Athena Samuels which could not possibly be a trap. He summons a hologram of Kenny Loggins, who appears Zordon-style in the glass tube at the center of their TARDIS console. This is Mentor, a hologram from his own time, that only Sam can see and hear of Cap’s dead father, because that would in no way be a creepy way to interface with their computer database, nor would it stunt Cap’s emotional development. Mentor triangulates the origin of the signal, and so Cap and Pilot fly off into their time tunnel. Oh, yeah. They have this network of wormholes they can use to travel around the planet instantaneously.

One might deduce that such a technology would be an unlikely development in a post-apocalyptic scenario, as the resources required in its invention would be of more direct use in, say, fighting the genocidal madman currently eliminating the world’s population. However, I think we can deduce that were such technology available before these aforementioned wars, the impact to human life would be so great that the resulting civilization would be entirely unrecognizable to us, and highly unlikely to stumble into the trap of the Metal Wars.

Yeah. And besides, a secret organization based out of Cheyenne Mountain who travel around using wormholes? What kind of stupid premise is that for a show? Cap banters on at length about how Athena had been his father’s assistant before the war, and hints at how badly his younger self had wanted to bone her, while Pilot looks on in that “I find your story tedious, but mostly because I really want you to aim your Power Jet XT-7 at my Red Strobe Effect, but will not work up the nerve to tell you this until the finale.” He does not point out that this would imply a massive age disparity between the two of them. So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.

When they land, Cap goes off to find Athena, and orders Pilot to stay behind and guard the shuttle. Which she does a bang-up job at, because the instant he’s out of sight, she gets intrigued by a still-working traffic light, and wanders off to be promptly gassed by what appears to be a Sontaran.

Cap goes to a bookstore, and for no clear reason decides this would be a good time to They can Power On either by standing on the empowerment pedestal (which presumably also recharges the suit), or in the field by touching either the insignia on their uniform, or the crest on the Tron-Suits they wear under their clothes. We won’t actually see them do the Full Transformation Sequence from the empowerment pedestal until the third episode. Personally, I suspect that these episodes weren’t aired in anything more than a very general sort of order. Remember, this is the ’80s, and season-long plot arcs were still in their infancy at this point, so the exact order in which episodes aired was pretty much subject to the whims of the broadcaster.Power On, having said before that they should save their Power. Approximately three seconds later, his suit helpfully chimes in that it’s at 33% power. So there are only five power suits in existence, and they can only hold a charge for about a minute at a time. And this is the best Cap’s dad could come up with to prevent the wholesale annihilation of humanity?

A chessboard gives Cap a flashback, revealing that Athena was apparently Jean Louisa Kelly circa 1986. As it fades, present-day Athena Not like that, pervsreveals herself. She’s aged gracefully if this is really at least 15 years later. Aside from evolving into Pat Benetar, she seems not to have changed at all. Because it’s a trap.

Athena shoots Cap in the gut. Fortunately, with the power of his armored power suit, he… is thrown across the room and knocked out cold. The suit dutifully reports that it’s down to 15% power. Athena apologizes, says “It’s the best way,” and runs away.

Back at Volcania, OverMind and Dread exposition for us that Athena has been implanted with a subcutaneous transponder, and was ordered to capture Captain Power alive, so shooting him is viewed as an act of defiance.

Those of you who have remained fully conscious so far can probably work out what’s going on here. Dread had captured Athena at some point in the past, sent her out to lure the good Captain into a trap.

And I’d assume she complied because “captured” in this show usually means “Zapped by a video toaster effect that turns you into an MP3 for OverMind to stuff in his RAID array,” and it’s allegedly unpleasant, so she was probably not keen to go through it again.

Quite. So unkeen, in fact, that she thought he’d be better off dead than captured. I shouldn’t wish to spoil the big reveal, but the rest is, of course, elementary.

Especially as the scene of Athena getting digitized is in the opening credits.

Dread dispatches his Bio-Dread Warlord Soaron to finish the job. Soaron is one of the show’s Big Visual Effects Extravaganzas, bleeding-edge computer generated graphics so sophisticated that each frame in which he appears took literally centuries to render on the most powerful room-sized computers of the seven richest princes of Europe.

So try not to laugh too hard.

Soaron is self-aware, nigh-invulnerable (he can regenerate from even very severe damage), highly individualized (he is the only Bio-Dread of his kind. Except in the training videos where there are dozens of him), and by the end of the series, he’ll be looking like he’s on his way to being Starscream to Dread’s Megatron.

I do not think there is enough cocaine in the world to convince me that stack of polygons is a real physical entity inhabiting the same world as the characters.

Captain Power awakens from his fatal shooting. One of the major storytelling weaknesses of this show is that the main mode they have for resolving a tense situation is “It turns out he wasn’t hurt nearly so badly as it seemed in the last shot.” It’ll happen a lot in this series. He confronts Athena, who has another go at shooting him, but Cap makes his saving throw this time, and disarms her with a blue strobing ninja throwing star. Athena has another trick up her sleeve, though, and lobs a grenade at him, which knocks Cap out again, and this time manages to power down his suit.

Remember how I said back in the very last paragraph that they like to resolve tension by just having it turn out the characters weren’t hurt as badly as it seemed? Well, we cut back to Pilot, who just… Wakes up. Yeah. The Sontaran just left her unconscious where she fell. She takes off in the shuttle, reports the double-cross. Cap, now at Athena’s mercy, has to sit through her monologging as she prepares to kill him. She did, indeed, not care for being digitized. “And then you’re inside. Inside the machine. You can feel it touching you, Johnny. It’s wires and metal, but it touches you.” Eew. So that’s why she wants to kill Cap: to spare him from being digitized. Soaron chooses this moment to show up, though, and shoots Athena. She continues to assert that it’s better to die than to go through the thinly veiled rape analogy of digitization. So Cap snogs her, insists that it’s Words which could not possibly come back to haunt him laterbetter to be alive than dead no matter what Dread makes you think, and they cuddle, waiting for digitization. Just as Soaron prepares to fire, though, Pilot and Hawk show up and chase him off. They get in a few good hits on Soaron, but once he’s in the air, a lot of their shots fall short and explode harmlessly when they hit the matte painting of the sky behind him. The remaining teammates show up on hover bikes and join in the assault, driving Soaron off.

They take Athena back to base, and then remove her tracking implant. Because they have a jamming device, but you’d think they’d mention that up front. Pilot storms off because she can smell a tender moment brewing, and Cap tells Athena that he’ll send her to “The Passages”, which we never get much explanation of, but it seems to be an underground refugee camp.

And that’s the first episode of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. The end credits play over a rather shameless rip-off of the trench run scene from Star Wars, which makes up a good 2/3 of the interactivity segments in this episode. For an introduction to the show, it’s kind of short on exposition — I’m not complaining. I’ve said before that an overabundance of exposition is what often makes science fiction weak from a storytelling perspective. But as an introduction to the show, there’s really not a lot going on. It’s a very personal story, mostly about the Captain himself. The other characters get little screen time and no character development of note. Even the opening scene, where we get to see Scout do a lot of the work, we don’t really learn anything about him. We’re given a name drop on “Project New Order” without explanation, and a few tantalizing details: there had been a west coast resistance but now there isn’t, but there’s no real sense of what this world is like on the whole. There is a bit of really great subtle stuff going on with Pilot. She only has a handful of lines, but her reactions to the thought of Cap kindling a romance with Athena speak volumes. Decades later, I’d have a very similar experience watching the interplay between Kat and Doggie in Power Rangers SPD There’s two reaction shots at in “Shadow Part 2”, one where Kat looks up at Shadow Ranger as he carries her in his arms from the alien ship where she’d been imprisoned, and another at the end where Doggie refers to Kat as his “friend”, and you can see her smile collapse, which together seem to shout unequivocally that she wants the doggie to slip her a bone., but there, nothing ever came of it, not even a verbal acknowledgement.

Warning: The following paragraphs of this review contain a discussion of rape symbolism in Captain Power. Those who do not wish to read these paragraphs can continue reading from the paragraph accompanying the poster for The Graduate

Continue reading The Future! The Shiny Neon Future! (Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Episode 1)