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Sensor Scan: Species

, 11

1995 was a major turning point in my association with pop culture. It was the year my family first got satellite TV, and while this meant I finally had access to television besides three channels of varying degrees of snow for the first time ever, it also meant the end of my association with Star Trek for five years.

I’ve of course told this story a lot, but it bears repeating one more time. In the 80s and early 90s, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had an unusual direct-to-syndication deal, whereby they would be included as first-run series as part of a syndication package local affiliates of the major national networks could bid on to fill gaps in their programming schedule, which would otherwise include stuff like game shows or reruns of popular series from past decades. For those outside of the US, in this country our national networks have local regional partners for every municipal area, and while they all get the network’s primetime shows, stuff like local news and weather will be different station to station. Back in those days the syndicated shows were different too, which could lead to weird things, like, say Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine competing with each other (and sometimes even reruns of each other) because two different local affiliates for two different networks decided to air them both in the same timeslot. It…wasn’t always the best system, let’s say.

But even though I only had three channels, it never bothered me. I’ve never been a huge TV person (partly because of this), so I didn’t care. I had PBS, cartoon shows and Star Trek. What more could I possibly want? But all that changed in 1995 with our shiny new satellite dish. And while it was certainly exciting to have so many new channels to explore, it came with a serious price. In the mid-90s, the satellite provider my family used didn’t offer local channels, instead providing a generic national version of PBS and the networks with no regional content whatsoever. This included syndication, so that was the abrupt end of my association with Star Trek on television, I thought forever (while Star Trek Voyager was sold as an exclusive to UPN, Paramount’s ill-advised attempt to make a network to compete with ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX, UPN wasn’t included in our satellite package either until Voyager had ended. In fact, we didn’t get UPN until midway through Enterprise‘s first season).

This also means that 1995 is where I drop out of Vaka Rangi’s narrative, effectively for good. I’ll pop by to check in on Star Trek every so often over the next half-decade (usually with a somewhat baffled and concerned expression on my face) and it will always be something I default to saying I broadly like, but my fever for adventure At the Edge of the Final Frontier will be nowhere near this intense again. My passion will briefly return to flashpoint levels once TNN picks up Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns in 2000 and the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine DVD box sets are announced three years later, but I’ve already talked a lot about that in the Next Generation section.…

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Sensor Scan: Babylon 5

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This is the fandom war I remember The first in the world.

OK, I’m not going there. Not tonight. Babylon 5 doesn’t deserve that. Not least of which because this is a show that when I look at it I don’t so much see something actively offensive as much as I do a case of heroic ambition tragically misplaced and misguided. Let’s not beat around the bush and deal with the obvious straight upfront, shall we? Babylon 5 isn’t very good. Phil has actually already articulated the reasons why very well in a piece for TARDIS Eruditorum some years ago, so I’m not going to make much of an effort to restate the arguments. Just go read that essay instead. There’s way more interesting stuff to talk about in regards to Babylon 5 from a Star Trek: The Next Generation/Star Trek: Deep Space Nine context than tritely comparing their respective quality.

During the mid-90s, you couldn’t go anywhere in sci-fi circles without publicly stating your position on the biggest, most controversial sore point since they announced a new Star Trek with a balding English thespian instead of Captain Kirk: Which was better, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (and Star Trek more generally), or Babylon 5? Forget the Star Wars vs. Star Trek divide-Although I had my annoyances with the franchise, they were mostly personal. This was the real schism that caused people to grab for the torches and pitchforks back in the day. Although the fandoms didn’t really get along, I was not trained to hate Star Wars the way Star Trek loyalists resented Babylon 5 opening up the genre TV market, or the way Babylon 5 fans seemingly resented everybody. It was a civil war the likes of which were unprecedented in the world. After all, it’s not like anything else important was going on in 1994: Not like there was an international espionage scandal or an AIDS pandemic or genocide in Rwanda or anything like that.

I mean, apparently. So I was told. Set firmly outside fandom circles as I was, I could only observe the proceedings from a distance. And anyway, I was preoccupied with other things in 1994 entertainment-wise: I was hurriedly trying to catch up with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine reruns (really, Starlog episode synopses), trying to figure out what the hell Stargate was supposed to be about, really digging Batman the Animated Series and that Spider-Man show on FOX, mourning the end of Garfield and Friends, Disney’s Marsupilami and The Little Mermaid (and yeah, Star Trek: The Next Generation too) and getting really intrigued by this mysterious thing called Project A-ko I kept seeing ads for in my Malibu DS9 comics. I was starting to finally get deeper into video games too: I rode the crest of the last real Sonic the Hedgehog wave as me and my cousin lived out the remaining days of the SEGA Genesis just as Donkey Kong Country mania swept the nation.

But did I watch Bablyon 5?…

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Sensor Scan: Gargoyles

, 19

During the decade roughly spanning the years 1985-1995, Western animation, previously seen as something of a washed-up embarrassment of an industry that only produced patronizing throwaway entertainment for particularly dumb children, underwent a widespread creative and commercial renaissance. One of the pioneering studios of this period, which animation historians have imaginatively dubbed “The Renaissance Age of Animation”, was Disney, whose new CEO Michael Eisner (whom longtime readers will recognise as the former chief of Paramount who worked with Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek Phase II) sought to reverse the company’s ailing fortunes by doubling down on creative quality control. For inspiration, Disney’s animators looked to (in some cases copied) the style of Japanese anime, which was at its zenith in the mid-80s, and in particular the work of Hayao Miyazaki. The initial result of this was Adventures of the Gummi Bears, a high-profile Saturday Morning Cartoon Show that revitalized the block and genre by emphasizing high production values, tight, quality storytelling and a strong focus on fantasy action and adventure narrative. Adventures of the Gummi Bears was an international smash hit, singlehandedly ushered in a brand new age for animation and forced Disney’s competitors to follow suit to keep up.

 
There was also an animated Broadway musical of sorts a few years later about some fish people that gets credit for turning the industry around, but it’s not quite as historically important as Gummi Bears.
 
Fast-forward to 1994, and we’re in the twilight years of the Renaissance Age. Disney, which deserves so much credit for bringing the era about, arguably had its creative peak of this cycle about two years prior to now. Gargoyles is a good case study for this, because while it’s as acclaimed as the rest of Disney’s other output from the previous decade and remains a cult favourite to this day, it very clearly also demonstrates that the studio is now in the business of following trends rather than setting them. The trend in question here would be Neo-Gothic superhero fiction and urban fantasy, and the series is very obviously and deliberately evoking the Art Deco Noir of Warner Brothers’ legendary Batman the Animated Series, even down to a Manhattan setting.
 
Batman, which follows on thematically from the contemporary Tim Burton movies, had been critically acclaimed for not just its eye-catching and unforgettable art style, but also for its mature and sophisticated storytelling. At its best, Batman‘s episodes were like mini Greek or Shakespearean tragedies: Sympathetic character studies of flawed and vulnerable people whose combination of poor choices and poor lot in life led them down a path that culminated in them becoming supervillains. And that’s sort of the key to Batman the Animated Series: Though praised for its unpatronizing character-based storytelling and in spite of its alleged “darkness”, Batman remained a staunchly idealistic and surprisingly optimistic series. It had a strong conception of good acts and evil acts (nothing amazingly preachy, just stuff like the somewhat defensible “urban terrorism against innocent civilians is probably a bad idea”) and put Batman himself in the position of being a compassionate healing figure, who fights nonviolently to stop people from hurting themselves and others (this had the unfortunate additional side effect of all too frequently making the villains more fleshed out and relatable than Batman, but that’s beside the point).
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Sensor Scan: Quantum Leap

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I remember quite well when the first trailers for Enterprise debuted. I’ll save talking about exactly how much of an event it felt like for me (that’s two books from now, after all), but one thing in particular caught my attention straight away: There were these two guys (in *baseball caps*) sitting in what I assumed to be some form of shuttlecraft talking about how the new Warp Drive engine would allow them to go to “Neptune and back in six minutes”. One of those guys looked awfully familiar-Was that…was that who I thought it was?

Omigish it is! It’s Scott Bakula! The guy from Quantum Leap is on Star Trek! And he’s the new captain! 

Quantum Leap is a show I have fond memories of. It was never something I followed religiously; I was only ever a casual viewer. But it was a show that seemed to always be around, it eventually developed a kind of comfort blanket appeal for me and, in retrospect, seems actually sort of lovely and wonderful. I remember Starlog Magazine covering it back in the day when it was on the air, talking to Bakula, Dean Stockwell and the show’s creative team, so it was one of those shows that was one of my early introductions to science fiction. In much later years, I remember it primarily as the lead-in to the Sci-Fi Channel’s reruns of the Original Star Trek in the late-1990s and early-2000s. Sometimes I would tune in early to watch a whole episode, while other times I’d just catch the tail end of one before TOS came on. Either way it was something I always enjoyed and appreciated whenever I managed to see it: It always seemed a rather pleasant and charming little series.

A great deal of Quantum Leap‘s appeal for me comes from Scott Bakula’s character, Doctor Sam Backett. He’s a quantum physicist heading up a research programme looking into the possibility of time travel, and when the government threatens to shut the project down Beckett protests by throwing himself into the quantum accelerator, “leaping” through the time-space continuum. Thus begins the series’ central gimmick: Every episode Beckett “leaps” to a new point in time and *into* the body of a different person. Soon, Beckett and his friend Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell’s character) and their AI friend Ziggy (series executive producer and narrator Deborah Pratt) discover that Sam’s leaps through time are caused by his behaviour in his present time: In particular, his efforts to right a wrong or correct an injustice that subtly alter the course of history. Upon this revelation, Sam is emboldened to keep leaping through the timeline to do what he can to change history for the better.

It’s this simple, unpretentious conviction to do good, to be a good person and to do what you can, no matter how humble the act, to make the universe a better place in your own small way that makes Sam such an endearing character for me.…

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Sensor Scan: Red Dwarf

, , 27

 

This is going to be another of those essays that crop up every now and again where I am 1000% confident my readers know far, far more about the subject matter than I do.

I never watched Red Dwarf. In fact, I’d never even *heard* of it until I started hanging around niche sci-fi analysis blogs four years ago. Apparently, this is something that’s been a huge part of a lot of people’s lives for many years now though, and given there are ten (going on eleven as of this writing) seasons of this show plus a fair amount of tie-in material, there’s no way I could be expected to put together a comprehensive retrospective of this thing, so, sorry in advance. What I’ll try to do instead is briefly take stock of some observations I’ve made about Red Dwarf‘s fandom and how they feel the show fits into the larger narrative of voyaging starship stories.

The curious thing I’ve noticed about Red Dwarf fans, at least the ones I’ve read and from what I’ve been able to discern through my admittedly limited interactions with the fandom, is that they seem to spend more time talking about Star Trek than they do talking about their own show. I have seen Red Dwarf labeled more than a few times as an explicit parody of Star Trek, or as “Britain’s answer to Star Trek: The Next Generation”. The general argument seems to be that while the USian Star Trek: The Next Generation concerned itself with the pretentious, po-faced navel-gazing of a bunch of upperclass neo-colonialists, the British Red Dwarf follows the adventures of two chicken soup machine repairmen (one of whom is actually dead), a malfunctioning AI and the descendant of of race of hyper-evolved cat people stuck together on a ramshackle mining ship three million years from anywhere who are not particularly concerned with terribly much, and certainly not Seeking Out New Life and New Civilizations.

To me, this argument is merely an extension of a pre-existing cultural tension that separates the United States from the British Isles: The unflattering comparison to Star Trek: The Next Generation is typically accompanied by a(n at least implied) statement about the difference in values between the US and the UK, with a tacit premise that UK values are superior due to their self-effacing modesty and lack of jingoistic expansionist fever dreams. It is also, in my opinion, what we would refer to in modern parlance as a “humblebrag” and further evidence of the inane, self-conscious, warlike factionalism of science fiction fans that is but one reason among many that I hate science fiction fans. As much as I’d rather not, I’m going to take some of these accusations seriously, as there is at least one level at which they have something resembling merit.

Star Trek does, in fact, have something of a class problem and it’s one the future creative teams on Star Trek: The Next Generation do actually and explicitly make worse.…

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Sensor Scan: Batman

, 7

Yeah, yeah, I know-Another retrospective on the 1989 Batman movie. As if the world needs another of the bloody things. It *is* a major cultural signifier of the summer, though, and is furthermore at least partially responsible for the malaise of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: We can’t exactly ignore it, so just bear with me and I’ll try to make it worth your while.

As I’ve said elsewhere, US superhero comics are not my medium of choice. I have no emotional attachment to them and are blissfully unaware of the comings and goings of DC and Marvel beyond the bare minimum of what is absolutely required so as not to be persecuted by Nerd Culture. So frankly, I couldn’t give a neutrino’s emission about how Batman stacks up as a comic book movie: Comics and comic culture are entirely peripheral to what this movie is and what it did. This was a legitimate pop culture phenomenon with viral marketing and everything and remains a cultural touchstone for generations of filmgoers regardless of the frequency of their patronage of comic shops because, difficult as it seems for some to comprehend, statistically everybody knows who friggin’ Batman is. Indeed, superheroes and Star Trek both are among those bits of pop storytelling that are so ubiquitous and recognised they become universally acknowledged as representatives of the modern Western tradition around the world in spite of Nerds’ incessant attempts to pretend they’re marginal and niche.

I did see this movie, though. Although I certainly knew who Batman was and picked up just through the osmosis of living in society that that he was a major part of our culture, because I didn’t read any superhero comics I wasn’t familiar with any actual Batman stories. I even distinctly remember my grandmother buying me a Kenner Batman figure based on Michael Keaton’s portrayal in this film (Batman was no more or less toyetic a thing than Star Wars, let’s all remember): She gave it to me when she met my mother and I at a McDonalds for lunch one day. It was probably the first bit of superhero merchandise I ever owned, although I think the memory of getting that toy predates even my memory of watching the movie itself. Indeed, many years later the film became a bit of a shared experience for us as we bonded over a rerun of it on one of the HD movie channels she gets as part of her cable package.

Speaking of, this movie might have been my first exposure to Batman as an actual media artefact rather than bit of folkloric pop culture: I can’t distinctly recall whether I saw this movie, the Super Friends or the New Scooby-Doo Movies episodes with Batman and Robin first. I’m leaning towards this though, if for no other reason than Michael Keaton’s all black body armour with the bright yellow bat insignia on his chest remains the definitive Batman look for me to this day.…

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Sensor Scan: Doctor Who

, 12

Hi everyone. Since we’re all friends now and this is a judgment-free zone, I’d like to tell my story here today as part of sharing time. I know we’ve all been talking lately about the things we grew up with and how they shaped us into the people we are today, so in light of that I have a confession to make. I never grew up with Doctor Who.

Let’s be realistic here. Nobody reading this needs me to explain to them what Doctor Who is. It is, as of this writing, arguably the biggest, most talked about, most beloved and most overanalyzed television show on the air today. It has a cultural weight that utterly demolishes everything else remotely comparable, and regularly sweeps the science fiction awards shows year after year partially because it’s the only science fiction show left on TV. As I write this I’m coming off of the franchise’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013, a year where it absolutely dominated entertainment headlines and was an omnipresent sight in every store, at every convention, and in every neighbourhood. Doctor Who currently has a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-level of media presence, so trying to historicize it in any way feels bemusing and inauthentic. You know what this is, I know what this is, let’s not kid ourselves.

It’s not that I’m bitter or jealous, it’s just that Doctor Who is not a cultural phenomenon that I’m along for the ride with. I occasionally watched the New Series off and on between 2005 and 2012, but I eventually just lost interest in it completely and it’s not something I have any sort of emotional investment in. Doctor Who interests me mostly at an academic level: The current phenomenon is sort of fun for me to watch unfold as it reminds me a bit of what Star Trek: The Next Generation was like in the early 1990s, but now I’m on the other side of the glass, as it were. But also, as many critics, including many of my personal friends, have pointed out, Doctor Who is a show that does some very clever things with things like narrative and metatext and, thanks to a handful of the architects who worked on it in formative years, inherits a relatively unique kind of progressive edge. I’m not going to go into a ton of detail about that here, because there are people who can explain it far better than me and have dedicated a not-insignificant part of their lives to doing just that. You could go ahead and check out, say, Phil Sandifer, Jack Graham, Andrew Hickey, Alex Wilcock or the co-hosts of the Pex Lives! podcast.

What I will talk about is my history with the franchise and what we can glean about Star Trek through looking at it. The Doctor Who I remember is an unusual thing: It’s not the show itself, even though it was on the air at the time.…

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Sensor Scan: Hellraiser and Hellraiser III

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The psychology behind horror movies interests me. I know there have been studies done that show a link between fear and endorphin release, and that a lot of their popularity has been attributed to the rush your brain gets when the pleasure and fear senses get crossed. But do we actually watch horror movies to get scared? There’s a whole massively popular genre of campy, no-budget horror movies that no one could possibly be remotely frightened of, yet is beloved precisely because of how cheap, fake and ridiculous it is. Then there are people who just really like seeing blood and guts splattered all over the screen: They’re not getting anything deep or meaningful out of the experience, they just like the lurid spectacle.

I know for me, while horror is not a particular favourite genre of mine, the bits of it I partake in I enjoy because of the way they build atmosphere. That’s sort of been a defining theme in all of my various media interests: I like things that can build a mood and a feeling. A lot of the reason I’m so partial to the German Expressionist movement and the early Universal Horror movies is because of the way those films use light, colour and design to craft a surreal mindscape the convey certain themes and emotions. I mean, that’s no real surprise at this point and by now I really need to come up with some new words to describe what I like to see in media.

But I also like horror movies that use their horror trappings to explore something that’s horrific or somber in real life, like how Alien made generations of men uncomfortable with themselves by turning rape culture and patriarchy into something repulsive and monstrous. The original Godzilla should really be considered a horror film, and there the horror comes from not just the obvious allegory (atomic weapons, natch), but in that classic Japanese trope of modernity’s shortsighted disconnect from the natural universe. But as much as we’re supposed to be horrified at the destruction of Tokyo, we also sympathize with Godzilla herself, and take pity on the tragic plight she endures. As much as we’re aghast at the destruction left in her wake, we want Godzilla to win.

Which, weirdly, leads into the Hellraiser series. An adaptation of Clive Barker’s novel The Hellbound Heart helmed by the author himself, the first Hellraiser film is an examination of the role pain and violence play in the human psyche as conveyed through a horror movie. It concerns a magical puzzle box that, when solved, opens a portal to the realm of the Cenobites, creatures of a monstrous visage who practice a form of ritualistic sadomasochism and self-mutilation in an effort to explore and understand carnal experience, them seeing no distinction between pleasure and pain. It’s definitely an intriguing concept, especially for a horror film in 1987. With a set-up like that, there’s a lot of potential for metacommentary on the whole genre, filtered through an examination of real-world S&M lifestyle.…

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Sensor Scan: Aliens

, 8

There are, as we have learned, two ways to do morally and ethically defensible action sci-fi in the 1980s. You can either take the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind route and depict the violence as something awe-inspiringly grotesque to be avoided at all costs, or you can go the Dirty Pair route and wear your artifice completely on your sleeve (or really, to be more accurate, strip down to nothing but an artifice bikini) and just go wild in your wholehearted embrace of camp performativity. Both paths share one thing in common, however: The spectacle, irreducible from all forms of action sci-fi, is translated somewhere else, such as the breathtakingly imaginative worlds both works show us or, in the case of Dirty Pair, fully acknowledging we want to see fun and colourful explosions and gleefully giving them to us with wild and knowing abandon.

Which brings us to Aliens. The first thing that we should square away is that the whole idea of doing a sequel to Alien in the first place is inherently a bizarre one-There’s not a whole lot of room in that movie to build subsequent works out of, it’s pretty self-contained. Furthermore, Alien is a bit of a one-trick pony: There’s simply no way a sequel can be expected to deliver that same level of shock and impact or posses the same sort of novelty. So, given the fact that a sequel to Alien was, in fact, greenlit, this sort of forces whoever the incoming creative team will be to improvise quite heavily to avoid feeling entirely repetitive. And this, I think, touches on the largest complaint against Aliens from fans of the first movie: Aliens is, in fact, quite different from Alien in a number of significant respects, and arguably on a fundamental thematic level. But the thing about that line of reasoning is that not only is James Cameron not Ridley Scott or Dan O’Bannon and thus is sort of by default not going to be approaching this movie with the same positionality, his film furthermore *had* to stand apart from theirs one way or another if it was going to see any manner of success.

And, like it or not, Aliens was very, very successful.

The stock criticism of Aliens I seem to have noticed is something along the lines of that, while the first movie was an intelligent sexual horror film that also proved to be a unique and innovative take on 1950s pulp sci-fi and horror archetypes and cliches, this one takes all of that and swiftly shoves it out an airlock in favour of flashy action sequences, unreconstructed militarism, wisecracks and Bill Paxton. Bluntly, this isn’t even remotely true. Aliens does in fact lack the same level of, for want of a better phrase, sexual maturity, of Alien and has one or two annoying gender issues of its own (and I will address all of them a little later on), but this absolutely does not mean it’s a mindlessly unironic action movie.…

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Sensor Scan: Spenser: For Hire

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Spenser: For Hire

While Miami Vice remained technically a crime drama about policework, it was much more a staunchly deconstructionist work that went out of its way to problematize its genre as much as it did the social structure it was going out into. Spenser: For Hire, uh, isn’t.

Based on a series of “hard-broiled” detective stories by Robert B. Parker, Spenser: For Hire chronicles the exploits of the titular private investigator Spenser and the hired gun Hawk who, while they occasionally operate on opposite sides of the law, both live their lives by a firm code of ethics and principles and respect each other’s decisions. This is pretty much the extent of the premise here, the rest of the series amounting to your basic “hard-broiled” tropes and cliches. In both the books and the TV show, Spenser narrates over everything in a dramatic monologue about tough choices and hard life on the street and absolutely everything you would expect a character in this kind of story to be talking about. Parker is pretty blatantly following in the footsteps of Raymond Chandler here, by which I mean blatantly trying to ape, to the point Spenser has been read as essentially a carbon copy of Chandler’s famous Private Eye Phillip Marlowe. Those parts of Spenser that don’t come from Marlowe come from Parker himself, with whom he shares a suspicious number of biographical details, both having served in the Korean War and hailing from Boston.

As a result, the Spenser series becomes this sort of rambling treatise on Parker’s life philosophy as filtered through a response to Chandler, in particular how it pertains to what constitutes a virtuous and honourable man. It’s a lot of manly speechifying about manly men doing manly things, and I confess I found myself growing pretty exasperated pretty quickly. I mean, it’s not the worst thing ever: Spenser is educated, well-read, enjoys traditionally cultured things like ballet and poetry and traditionally feminine things like cooking (it’s a passion of his, in fact). There’s also a surprising amount of extremely positive and diverse portrayals of gay males in the series, considering this was the 1970s and 1980s, likely owing to the fact Parker’s two sons were openly homosexual. But, Spenser rolls his eyes at feminism in the earliest books and even later on, with the debatable exception of his significant other Susan Silverman, women are background bit players. And oh yeah, Spenser is also a heavyweight boxer, a decorated war hero, can kick anyone’s ass into next week, never, ever takes damage or breaks a sweat and *all* the girls want him, you guys.

Yes, Spenser would absolutely be decried as a Mary Sue if he was a woman, and this touches on the fundamental problem with this so-called “hard-broiled” noir stuff. The whole crux of Chandler’s argument against the Agatha Christie school of dime-store mysteries were that they were unrealistic and inauthentic escapism, and he’s right, but what is the tradition he himself spawned except escapism for a specific sort of romanticized male power fantasy?…

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