Sensor Scan: Quantum Leap

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. He's honestly, genuinely, sincerely a nice guy, and it helps Scott Bakula is the perfect actor for the job: He consistently, doggedly conveys this and drives it home each and every time for 97 episodes and five seasons. Sam is so likable and sympathetic he naturally, and entirely appropriately, becomes the narrative singularity around which the whole of Quantum Leap's universe revolves-Not only do a lot of stories end up dealing with his own life, but he's understandably the primary reason we want to tune in and keep watching. This helps the show in other ways too, as Quantum Leap's sci-fi convictions are in truth little more than a framing device to tell a series of anthology tales, the creators fearing they wouldn't be able to sell such a series without such a conceit. It's Sam Beckett's good nature and Scott Bakula's affable and incredibly attractive charisma that link together all these wildly disparate personal vignettes about otherwise unrelated people.

In some ways, Quantum Leap serves as a much more elegant and streamlined version of Doctor Who, another series that, at its best, is basically just an anthology show with a science fiction framing device. Quantum Leap's advantage here is its staunch rejection of serialization, thus meaning there's no way it's going to inherit a huge surplus of continuity baggage to make it intimidating for new viewers: You could tune in entirely at random, as I did, and still get a great deal of enjoyment out of Quantum Leap's done-in-one morality plays and character dramas. It's an entirely functional and effective approach to sci-fi television that dates all the way back to The Twilight Zone. But I think what appeals to me the most about Quantum Leap at the stage of life I'm at right now is what I read its values and beliefs to be in the most general: This is a show about a person wandering through time and space, guided by the universe to do good deeds and leave the collective unconsciousness of humanity a little better off then when he got there. Sometimes Sam must do things that seem counterinutitive or live through events that are traumatic or hurtful in the short term, but history is always the better off for it in the end. It's a lesson Kei and Yuri would not at all find foreign, and the moment I realised this, Quantum Leap's stature in the pantheon of my half-remembered pop culture memories shot up quite a bit.

I don't have a ton of specific episodes of this show I remember especially vividly. Quantum Leap was always something I enjoyed in the aggregate and I don't have any real lasting or formative memories of it. I do recall not really liking whenever they did so-called “Kisses with History” episodes where Sam is injected into real, actual documented historical events-My distaste for this kind of story comes from the same place as my baseline rejection of historical fiction as a genre that I talked about *way* back in the first volume in the context of “Balance of Terror”. There was at least one episode where Sam lept into the body of a pregnant woman I remember finding...interesting. But the one episode I want to highlight in particular I just found out about now when I was doing research for this piece to refresh my memory: The fourth season finale is an episode called “A Leap For Lisa”, in which Sam leaps into the body of a young Al, at risk of being court martialed for a murder he didn't commit. Al can't prove his innocence without revealing he'd been having an affair with an army nurse named Lisa Sherman while they were both married (...to other people).

What makes this story noteworthy, apart from the strong character moments for Sam and Al, is the character of Lisa. In the original, “bad” course of events she dies in a car accident, but Sam's intervention keeps her alive. At first it seems like this has actually made things worse, as this new set of events leads to Al getting convicted and executed. But Sam manages to change history a second time by finding a key piece of evidence that creates a timeline where both Lisa *and* Al live.

By the way, Lisa is played by Terry Farrell.

Lisa is no Cat to be sure, but Farrell is every bit as coquettishly and provocatively sexual and every bit as magnetically energetic as she is in every other part she plays. And of course, I can't get over how giddy it makes me to find out that one of my favourite men and one of my favourite women were in an production together, and they even play lovers!

(There's an additional level of poignancy here for me in having a character played by Scott Bakula saving the life of a character played by Terry Farrell in order to bring about a better future. That hits at a number of levels and will prove somewhat heartrendingly prophetic.)

Utopianism need not be an ideal state. It need not even be a roadmap to such things. “Utopianism is a framework for utopias”, in the words of Robert Nozick, and maybe utopianism also means doing small things for each other to make everyone's lives a little happier, a little more hopeful and a little more wonderful. Maybe we can't leap through time like Sam Beckett or journey to the stars like Jonathan Archer, but we all travel through time and space together every day and the effect is the same. The future is always now, and it's always been on us to make it a good one.

Sensor Scan: Red Dwarf

 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. This first becomes most evident, in fact, in the second episode of the fourth season, “Family”, which, as we discussed last time, generally fails at its attempts to make Captain Picard relatable by making him even *more* privileged and aloof-seeming. Irritatingly, this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise: It is, after all, the series' Original Sin that it curses itself with after its spectacularly toxic inability to make Tasha Yar work. But it's always dangerously easy in hindsight to assume everything is teleological; inexorably leading towards the present day and the connotations the artistic works of our past retain in our memories, and that's what we should be careful to remember here.

There was nothing conceptually wrong with Star Trek: The Next Generation from the outset that would have rendered it unable to be more egalitarian in this regard: There's no reason a Vasquez-type character couldn't have worked on the show, or that Captain Picard *had* to be an academic from wine country. Those were all conscious decisions made during the course of the show's material production that left it lesser off as a result. Indeed, just last time we saw a fascinating alternate history take on the same concept that seemed at once tantalizingly fresh and retroactively obviously fitting. There's no reason the fundamental idea, the original spark, was doomed from the start. So when people slag off Star Trek: The Next Generation for being too clinical, too imperialistic and too privileged, it does set my teeth on edge a bit, because not only is it judging the entire show by its worst moments, but it's dismissing the entire concept because certain creative figures at certain points in its history may not have been able to fully realise its potential for any number of reasons.

You know, it almost sounds like the same sorts of people who would dismiss, say Red Dwarf or Doctor Who for their camp and bad special effects. 

Red Dwarf is also interesting as a near-textbook example of the sorts of things that happen to long-running franchises, in particular science fiction franchises, with a strong connection to cult fandom cultures (well, the ones that aren't called Dirty Pair anyway). At its heart, this is pretty much nothing more than a bog standard British comedy that just happens to take place in a science fiction setting. As it goes on, however, the show starts to play more and more with traditional sci-fi narrative tropes and archetypes and becomes increasingly concerned with issues of continuity, with frequent fanwanky call-backs, retcons and retroactive grafting of heavy significance onto what were once mere throwaway gags (albeit ones that were good enough to be memorable). From what little I've seen, I tend to think Red Dwarf works best as a straightforward comedy and when it tries to go beyond that to do “proper” science fiction, even just to take the piss out of it, it's punching above its weight class a bit. But either way, you'd never see this stuff happening to any *other* sitcom: Just *try* to picture Red Dwarf: Back to Earth, Red Dwarf X or anything having to do with Kristine Kochanski happening on, say Keeping Up Appearances.

Another way Red Dwarf plays into this archetype though is through the concept of the reboot or reimagining, an altogether more positive and complimentary outgrowth of its science fiction heritage that reminds us that, no matter how incestuously fannish this type of show can become, it can also serve handily as modern myth. There are a number of soft “in universe” reboots in the show itself, but the one everyone wants to talk about is, of course, the failed US remake from 1992. There were actually two pilots commissioned (wow, deja vu): One that was a more-or-less straightforward retelling of the first episode (the cheekily named “The End”), and another that featured direct involvement from the show's original creators.

I only care about the second, because it's a brilliantly mad little thing: Cobbled together at the last second after half the cast had been replaced on a budget of apparently negative dollars, it's basically an outsized trailer comprised of footage from the first pilot, effects shots from the original show and vignettes recorded with the new cast with enthusiastic and ambitious assurances that they come from “future episodes”. This Frankensteinian aberration is stitched together by linking narration by Craig Beirko, replacing Craig Charles as Lister. Beirko actually does a good job with what he has and is pretty likable straight away, though the character he's playing isn't really Dave Lister as originally conceived (for one thing it's a bit unfortunate that Beirko is white and Charles is Afro-British, though the original show's handle of race and gender did strike me as a bit...odd).

Holly is played by Fraiser's Jane Leeves instead of either Normal Lovett or Hattie Hayridge, and I have to say I adore Leeves in the part: She strikes a perfect balance between dry, sardonic snarker and scatterbrained, ditzy cloudcuckoolander and seems like a ideally distilled version of the character: She's fully aware she's spent three million years slowly growing senile, but she ran out of fucks to give somewhere around the first two million. So sure, the second pilot has issues (for one thing it's pretty obvious Rob Grant and Doug Naylor's style of comedy writing doesn't translate too well to a United States context and cast, but that's not necessarily the cast's fault) and then there's the minor issue the pilot is only ten minutes, which does somewhat drastically cut down the amount of time you have to set up and sell your premise. And yet it's also easy to see that, with more appropriate writing and a more competent production, this was a setup that did have some potential for success.

But of course the main attraction for me, and the entire reason I'm doing Red Dwarf at all, is Terry Farrell as Cat. Once again, Farrell is not at all playing Danny John-Jules' character: The original Cat was a very self-absorbed and vain person programatically fixated on his appearance and fashion sense. Terry Farrell's take, by contrast, draws influence from other stereotypes of cats, being a keen and relentless (and borderline sadistic) hunter instinctively built for the kill. On the other hand, she's a fierce and loyal protector of her turf and her family and is always the first to take charge and leap into action. She also really, really gets around, openly and casually chatting about her sexual interests and exploits (she can't understand how human women are satisfied with just one partner a night). Farrell is an absolute knockout in the part (in more ways than one: Her *fantastic* 1980s glamour model hairstyle, Cats eyeliner and street punk tiger skin bodysuit do her quite a number of favours) and decisively steals the whole show (which is admittedly not too hard when your show is ten minutes long and comprised of disconnected skits). I daresay this might even be her definitive, or at least defining, role: Star Trek would have seemed a *lot* less tame had she been allowed to show her feline side as Jadzia Dax more often.

On the whole, Red Dwarf's saga reminds me of how an argument could be made that science fiction and professional wrestling both are viewed as soap operas for men (except in Japan, of course). Just like soap operas, they cultivate and reward long-term viewers with continuity fanservice that, after a time, becomes the only reason anyone bothers to watch these things. And yet perhaps counterintuitively, this is also the very thing that prevents so much science fiction from actually being successful and accessible: Whenever it frees itself from these constraints, it gives itself breathing room to cut loose, play and be imaginative. And as for the gender component...Well, that would explain a lot about science fiction.

If you're a Red Dwarf fan and haven't seen the second US pilot, or even if you're not, you can watch it here. I definitely recommend it from an academic perspective, and it's worth watching for Terry Farrell alone if for nothing else.

Sensor Scan: Batman

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. Last summer as of this writing I was even pleasantly surprised to see the actual bat suit used in the movie on display at a weapons and armour exhibit at an art museum in Massachusetts I visited: I won't pretend it wasn't a little fulfilling to see it in person.

So it's not like this movie was somehow “proving” how big populist entertainment based on superheroes could be successful and comparatively intelligent: Not in a world where the Christopher Reeve Superman movies were over a decade old and there were fond memories of the Wonder Woman and (yes) 1960s Batman TV shows. And say what you will about Hanna Barbera's Super Friends, bear in mind a lot of the people going to see this movie probably grew up on it. It's not so much, I don't think, that audiences weren't prepared for a “dark, mature” version of Batman such that the unparalleled genius of Tim Burton blew their minds: Burton is a creator who, among other things, probably gets a bit too much credit as an auteur for his work here and who is furthermore nowhere near as “dark”, “surreal” and “mysterious” a visionary as he is frequently lauded as being. Burton was far from the first person to remember that German Expressionism was a thing that existed and that you could blend it with big populist things to convey some interesting stuff it'd be hard to do at that scale and within those structural constraints otherwise: The old Universal Horror movies of the 1930s and 1940s basically did the same thing, after all. Hell, even *actual German Expressionist* works were capable of it-Remember Metropolis?

(Actually, Metropolis is interesting to bring up here, considering Giorgio Moroder released his own special cut of the film with a modern soundtrack in 1984 that remains probably the definitive version of the movie for a lot of people these days. Moroder's Metropolis is likely an archetypical 1980s movie because it essentially, and brilliantly, turns the movie into a feature-length music video. Moroder's Metropolis is not quite as stunningly abstract as something like Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture and relies far more on the celebrity of its musical collaborators, but it most certainly fits its era. I know film buffs hate it, but so long as the original version of the movie is still around, which it thankfully now is, I see no reason why we can't accept transformative works based on it. There's even, funnily enough, an anime movie reimagining of Metropolis that also draws influence from an old Osamu Tezuka manga of the same name.)

Tim Burton's major innovation is that he remembered you could take that approach and apply it to things that hold appeal for multiple demographics, including children, not that anyone wants to admit Tim Burton is predominantly a purveyor of children's literature, of course (although he's not the first person to do even that, as Joe Ruby and Ken Spears did the same thing with Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! way back in 1969). And if you actually sit down to piece out what Batman actually is, it reveals its heritage pretty clearly: It's got a fairly straightforward pulp structure with enough twists and turns to keep it compelling and enough dark, antiheroic brooding to appeal to both modern sensibilities and to resonate with comic fans who grew up during the Bronze Age. And, just like Moroder's Metropolis, Miami Vice and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture, it tries to convey itself as much through striking visuals and music, in particular pop music, as it does anything else, though it does make the perhaps regrettable choice to go with Prince as its primary troubadour when the film's regular score was more than enough to keep us hooked. In essence, this is precisely the sort of Batman movie you would expect to see in 1989.

But it's not the structure itself that's the most noteworthy thing about Batman so much as it is the fact it applies this structure to a pre-existing massively popular pop culture franchise. And here the point of comparison isn't something like Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture, the existence of which is nothing if not a fluke given I highly doubt Dirty Pair is as ubiquitous in Japan as Batman is in the West (or Japan, for that matter). And anyway, no matter how good he may be at aesthetic design, Tim Burton cannot hope to compete with an animator the likes of Kōji Morimoto. No, the real comparison really is with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: Simply by virtue of the fact Star Trek: The Next Generation exists, even though it may not quite yet be the massive runaway smash hit it will become (though it's getting there) means that Star Trek is unquestionably one of the hottest properties of 1989, and the legacy of the Original Series has long since cemented the franchise's pop culture legacy. William Shatner or no, Star Trek V *should* have been playing on Batman's level simply by coming out the same summer: We've reached the point where the visual aesthetic of the Long 1980s has become so commonplace and accepted that you can make Batman movies with it, and there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't make Star Trek movies with it as well.

Except there is one, of course: The Star Trek creative team circa 1989 is incestuously insular and hopelessly behind the times. The world has lept into the Long 1980s with rapturous wonderment and Star Trek is pulling against itself trying to make the transition. The Star Trek that bears the future is being hamstrung and neglected while the zombified shadow of its predecessor claws desperately for relevance. There's no better testament to Batman's success as a work of transcendental aesthetic power and Star Trek V's failure at the first gate then the fact the NES game based on Batman is considered a classic while Star Trek V: The Final Frontier...is Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

As is the way of all things, for Star Trek to adapt and survive in this new world, it must evolve.

Sensor Scan: Doctor Who

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. It was more the production stills I saw in the articles where Starlog Magazine would go behind the scenes of the Classic Series and, in particular, it was interviews they did with Jon Pertwee and his thoughts on what the show meant to him. Because Starlog also covered stuff like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Z-list Sean Connery movies and Pertwee's tenure on the show was deliberately modeled after spy-fi action movies, it all kinda got mixed together in my mind. So, my earliest understanding of Doctor Who was not a madman with a box who could go anywhere in time and space and change his appearance at will, it was of Jon Pertwee wearing a flamboyant cape and smoking jacket driving around in an ancient hot rod squaring off against mad scientists in the English countryside. It didn't strike me as anything particularly different then any of the other contemporary spy-fi stuff starring charismatic secret agent action heroes, apart from being proudly and idiosyncratically British.

But at the same time, I was also aware of another show called Doctor Who. I didn't know much about it except it apparently was about this weird guy who wore a hat and a pointlessly long scarf who traveled around in a phone booth time machine and that my mother really, *really* thought I needed to see it. Why it took me so long to connect this show with the *other* science fiction show suspiciously called Doctor Who, I have no idea. Either way, I finally got to see an episode when the Sci-Fi Channel picked up reruns of the show sometime in the mid-1990s. And, well, it didn't do much for me, to be honest.

It was the Scarf Guy, not the Secret Agent Guy, but I didn't see a phone booth time machine and he was still running around the English countryside doing a lot of secret agent things, namely trying to calm down this Giant Robot who was being controlled by some shady dudes. The scene I remember is of Scarf Guy trying to reason with the Robot, who was throwing a temper tantrum in some abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere while menacing some screaming, helpless-looking girl. I think she was supposed to be a reporter or something, but I couldn't care less. The minute a show throws out something like that, I immediately tune out. I have zero tolerance for sexism in media, and that on top of everything else confirmed my suspicions. Doctor Who was mediocre, also-ran spy-fi and not worth my time. I didn't give it a second thought or a second look for over a decade.

Once the New Series premiered and started getting a lot of media attention, enough time had passed that it seemed like a good time to give the show another shot. I found the first few episodes starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper to be entertaining, or at least entertaining enough to justify tuning in every so often (funnily enough, I *still* got a huge spy-fi vibe from the show as all the promo materials looked like they came right from a 1960s James Bond movie). Since I had the Internet by this point, I was able to go back and research the whole impressive history of the franchise, and suddenly everything started to make a *lot* more sense. I took the opportunity to cherry-pick from bits of the Classic Series, and was finally able to give Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker a fair shot, and now many of my favourite stories in the series come from their eras (I especially enjoy Pertwee's first season for campy, nostalgic reasons as it's *exactly* what I imagined the show to be. I particularly like “The Ambassadors of Death” in this regard). But, as much as I came to like Baker and Pertwee, what really caught my eye was the intriguing creative tumult that seemed to surround the final era of the Classic Series.

The Sylvester McCoy-Andrew Cartmel era was immediately fascinating to me for several reasons. Firstly, as it ran from 1987-1989, this means it coexisted with a time that was extremely formative for me in terms of media. Learning about the Doctor Who that existed during one of my favourite times for pop culture felt like filling in a gap I didn't know I had before. But I was also interested in how McCoy's interpretation was described as being a more mysterious and special character than The Doctor had been before, and how the production team during this period seemed to be genuinely trying to do something creative and unprecedentedly sophisticated with the show. When I finally got to see the whole era a few years later as part of another Doctor Who retrospective, I was properly impressed: While I can't say Sylvester McCoy is “My” Doctor in the common parlance as I didn't grow up with him and the show holds no particular emotional resonance for me, this era did become unquestionably my favourite version of Doctor Who.

First of all, the theme song and opening credits used during this part of the show are incredible: They're unmistakeably 1980s in the most wonderfully, heartwarmingly cheap way, and that speaks to me on an important level. For me, its one of those things that taps into nostalgia without actually being nostalgic. But more to the point, the show is actually exceptionally well done: Barring McCoy's first appearance, every single serial is an absolute knockout, or at least thoroughly entertaining (make sure you watch the extended feature-length cuts of “Silver Nemesis”, “Battlefield” and "The Curse of Fenric", though). The show just *works* here, and, sadly, I've found that to be very rarely the case.

My biggest problem with Doctor Who has always been its structure. When it began in 1963 as an educational show, the point of having people travelling with The Doctor (in particular, two schoolteachers) was in some sense to translate the show's adventure trappings into something that could be construed as a science or history lesson. But, as soon as the series became an adventure show and the supporting cast was collapsed down onto one or two (often female) Companions, it became uncomfortably easy for Doctor Who to get sloppy with this and drift into the problematic, which it did (and still does) more frequently than Whovians want to admit. That Doctor Who has a reputation for featuring an abundance of scantily clad, screaming helpless women is an overgeneralization, but the blunt reality is that it has that stereotype for a reason, and its because characters like that showed up a bit more often then was entirely comfortable and you can't handwave that away as being a relic of another time: Honestly, I'd take my chances on an average episode of the original Star Trek when it comes to progressive gender roles over an average Doctor Who serial (or episode) any day.

Tom Baker always argued he should have had the show to himself during his tenure, and though Baker was a known egotist in this case he's right. With the notable exception of Romana (who has interesting symbolism of her own), none of Baker's supporting cast were served especially well by the show's format during that period, and the vast majority of my favourite stories featuring his version of the character are in the spin-off comics where he's traveling alone. And a big reason why they work as well as they do is because, even if you strip away the blatant sexism and misogyny in some of Doctor Who's women and get a “good” Companion, a lingering consequence of the show's genre shift in the late-1960s is that the archetypical Doctor/Companion dynamic is inherently patriarchal. No matter what you do, you still have a charismatic leading man action hero leading around a far more ignorant young woman, and no matter how much the show has tried to play with that it's never been able to move beyond the inherent restrictions that setup forces onto it.

Well, apart from this once. For the first and only time since the late 1960s, the Doctor/Companion dynamic actually works this time. Perhaps subconsciously reaching back to its educational show roots, Sylvester McCoy's Doctor is a teacher and guardian to Sophie Aldred's Ace, and this is in truth *her* show, not his. In keeping with its defiant thesis statement (which I'll elabourate on below), this Doctor Who is about Ace's journey from bombed-out, aimless street thug to mature, confidant self-assured young woman who learns how to channel her anarchic, revolutionary fire into the most constructive outlets possible. And, as is true for all good teacher-student relationships, it's about how The Doctor helps her reach that point in her life and what he learns from living and working with her. If Doctor Who must have Companions, this is the kind of characters they need to be.

A big aspect of what allows this to happen is that for the first time in awhile, The Doctor feels like a marginal presence, which is the way in which I think the character is the most successful. I think Doctor Who works best as an anthology show with The Doctor and the TARDIS as the only real constants, and I'm a big fan of characters who prowl around the margins of narratives. It comes out of my affinity for stories in which characters *do* and *talk about* things instead of having things *happen* to them. The Doctor had been a low-key, mysterious presence from the beginning, but once he became an action hero in the late-1960s and early-1970s, that aspect of his character got forgotten for a time.

Bringing it back also allowed Cartmel and his team to cast some doubt upon the by this point well-established nature and background of The Doctor, leading to the infamous “Cartmel Masterplan” that people like to read onto the show during this period. Supposedly, it was going to be some ridiculous story arc about The Doctor really being the reincarnation of an ancient time god instead of a fugitive alien from a planet of time police, because that makes so much more sense. Well, the “Cartmel Masterplan”, or as much of a thing like that can be said to even exist, was really the work of writer Mark Platt, not Andrew Cartmel himself, and actually only played out in the spin-off novels that were written well after the show's cancellation. It had nothing to do with anything anyone other than Platt was thinking about when the show was on the air, and why would it? Think about it: If Cartmel and his team wanted to restore a sense of mystery to The Doctor, wouldn't retconning an equally silly origin story onto him sort of defeat the purpose?

No, the Cartmel-McCoy era is substantially more interesting than that. For one thing, it's a version of Doctor Who that recognises, for the first time, what it actually is. Every time The Doctor regenerates, a Companion leaves or the production team changes the show functionally reboots itself, and this was the first time the show intimately understood that, or at least conveyed it effectively and competently. This is a Doctor Who that understands its own cultural legacy and what it can get away with. And it can get away with a lot because, thanks to the previous creative team's catastrophic screwups, it was also a show that nobody was watching and nobody cared about.

This gets at a bittersweet irony about Soda Pop Art in general and Doctor Who in particular: It tends to work best when its back is up against the wall and is being consciously and deliberately ignored. Cartmel knew he was an inheriting a show that was dead in the water, and used the opportunity to craft the venerable Doctor Who into one of the most brazenly charged anti-authoritarian screeds in television history. When asked what he thought the purpose of Doctor Who was, Cartmel gave the delightfully upfront answer “to bring down the government”. Under Cartmel and his team, we got J.G. Ballard-esque stories set in a futuristic dystopian high-rise complex, critiques of whitewashed historical master narratives set against a war between insect women and cannibalistic flagmen, a condemnation of the horrors of Thatcherite Britain, a requiem for utopian youth cultures of decades past that sold themselves out for a seat at the table of late capitalist hegemony (that doubles as an introspective critique of Doctor Who itself) and twisting, surreal, abstract musings on evolution, Western culture, nonsense literature, individualist anarchy and the human condition.

Strange as it may sound, it can be incredibly liberating to be in the kind of position Cartmel and Doctor Who were in during the late 1980s: The Doctor's increasingly subdued and mysterious role seemed to be an echo of the show's own place on the margins of society at that time, and that galvanized the team with an unparalleled sense of creative freedom to express themselves. I speak from some manner of experience here: When I was serializing my coverage of the first Dirty Pair series on the blog my readership numbers...Well, they didn't so much drop off as they plateaued out, and the comment threads dried up pretty much completely. Let's just say it was not the most popular or well-received thing this project has ever done. But for me, it was like my eyes had been opened to a world I couldn't conceive of before: It came at a time where I really needed to be alone with myself and my thoughts, to be in a kind of intellectual echo chamber. Discovering Dirty Pair and getting the chance to write about it has been of the most inspirational and affirmational experiences of my life, and I maintain the run from The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair to Dirty Pair: Affair of Nolandia contains some of the best and most transformative work I've ever done. 

Doctor Who writes this newfound power back onto itself and pulls what might be its greatest alchemical magick trick: Changing its own mark. And this is the part of the McCoy-Cartmel era that really does tie into that “Masterplan” silliness. Take, for example, the Hand of Omega in “Remembrance of the Daleks”: It's a legendary device that literally constructs star systems, and The Doctor implies that he helped design the prototype in a time before his own people's existence during what sounds suspiciously like the Old Universe. This has been used as evidence that The Doctor is really some version of “The Other”, that mythical time god we talked about earlier. But what if something else is going on? Maybe there is no “Other”. Maybe The Doctor, being a time traveller, went back into his own history, that is, the history of his own show. Not in a diegetic sense (we all know how those crossover stories tend to turn out), but extradiegetically. Metatextually. What if The Doctor is writing revisionist history self-insert fanfiction and the “Other” business is his author insert avatar, a role he crafted (or perhaps reappropriated) for himself? Sylvester McCoy himself is a magician and stage performer, you know. The Doctor knows what modern myths look like, and he has an immense amount of power because he's finally returned to the role of oral storyteller.

That's why this Doctor Who, the Doctor Who of the Long 1980s, is so special. It at once acknowledges its lineage as part of a decades-old unfolding text and is an utterly self-contained work that stands decisively apart from it. When The Doctor and Ace walk off together at the end of “Survival”, the final story of the Classic Series, it may as well be the end of Doctor Who itself as far as I'm concerned. It brings 3-and-23 years of storytelling to a more than satisfying close for me. There's of course a whole other story of Doctor Who that begins here, perhaps many, and there will continue to be as long as people feel it's a story worth retelling. But those will build off of and take inspiration from the story that ends here, not continue it. No amount of serialization and continuity nods will change the fact that it's a new and different universe now.

Speaking of, some of those people are creative figures on Star Trek (curiously, every Doctor Who fan I've ever met either speaks begrudgingly of Star Trek at best or spits fire at it at worst. Every Star Trek fan I've ever met loves Doctor Who unconditionally and considers themselves massive Whovians). This era of Doctor Who in particular has an uncanny relationship with Star Trek: The McCoy-Cartmel era debuted the same night as “Encounter at Farpoint”, and while the Star Trek: The Next Generation team wouldn't have been able to see it on first transmission, that didn't stop them from throwing in quite a number of references to the good Doctor in The Next Generation's first season, and the in-jokes would only increase as the series went on. But more esoterically, there's a genuine conceptual and thematic overlap between the two shows during this period: Both are, in their own ways, digging up a long-abandoned and forgotten utopian science fiction story from decades passed and utterly transforming it through symbolic postmodern magick.

Utopianism still has a place and a role to play and, as we have seen, it can come from crossing any number of timestreams. In Westernism, we take the best of the past and the best of the present to build the future we want together. Indeed, we can only travel through time in Westernism. And it's those rare, beautiful people in Western culture whose good work reassures us that The Next Generation is going to be brilliant.

Sensor Scan: Hellraiser and Hellraiser III

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. Although Giles Deleuze would say sadomasochism isn't even a thing, arguing that the two figures the concept takes its name from (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade) came from two irreconcilable philosophical positions, outside of genre fiction and early post-structuralism, S&M is most closely connected to BDSM kink culture (with the “B” and “D” standing for “Bind” and “Domination”), essentially a sexual hobby or lifestyle built around elabourate consensual role-playing fantasies involving power exchange and role reversal.

So, what makes the Cenobites conceptually interesting then is how they invoke this iconography and psychology in the context of metacommentary on the horror genre. One theory for why BDSM is so popular is how it “exercises the brain's systems”, the same way you might work out if you have a sedentary lifestyle or occasionally eat something really sour or bitter. I suppose a similar argument could be made for the popularity of certain horror movies: We don't get scared out of our minds on a day to day basis, so maybe that's something we enjoy precisely because of that. So this is all very well and good, but what, I can hear you ask, does any of this have to do with Star Trek? Well, one obvious connection to make is to the Borg, and in particular the Borg as depicted in the wake of Star Trek First Contact and Star Trek Voyager. Originally a monolithic hive mind representing the intractable will of capitalist hegemony, they get reinvented in 1996 to become essentially Cenobites, complete with the unfeeling self-mutilation theme (the Borg Queen in Star Trek First Contact even tempts Data with new carnal experiences, much as the Cenobites do to Frank Cotton, the antagonist of the first Hellraiser).

But the problem with both the Cenobites and the second-draft Borg is that neither of their respective works really do anything with the premises they set up. Obviously we'll talk more about the Borg later, but as for the Cenobites, a big criticism that's leveled against the sequels to Hellraiser as opposed to the first movie is that their original intended meaning is lost as they get turned into generic Pop Christian demons. There's a famous line in the first Hellraiser where the Cenobite Pinhead (who becomes the breakout character of the series in subsequent installments), explains that his people have been considered “both angels and demons” but are really merely “explorers”. It's a really tantalizing scene to be sure, and it's swiftly ignored by everything else the first movie does. What bugs me about Hellraiser is how it pays lip service to BDSM philosophy, but in every other respect is a bog-standard 1980s horror movie, with screaming, helpless women, blood and guts and menacing villains.

Frank Cotton, who summons the Cenobites, gets himself torn to pieces for his troubles and then convinces his brother's wife to kill men for him so he can rebuild his body, is the main villain to be sure, but that doesn't mean the Cenobites themselves are portrayed as anything resembling sympathetic or any less horrifying: Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead, infuses all of his lines with a Christopher Lee-style sense of imposing dread and the Cenobites are all *treated* as generic horror movie monsters, with the heroes all screaming and fleeing in terror from them. None of them get any characterization apart from “creepy” and “grotesque”, and this has the side effect of making Hellraiser seem less of an intriguing treatise on horror movies and BDSM philosophy and more of a boring, straightforward shlockfest that appropriates BDSM imagery in an attempt to look current. I mean, Barker can have the Cenobites say they're neither good nor evil, but given the fact he uses phrases like “The Hellbound Heart” and “Hellraiser”...Well, let's just say I'm not especially surprised at the direction the series took.

So, this is why I have less of a problem than most when Pinhead turns into a ridiculous, cackling, monomaniacal Satanic villain in Hellraiser III, which I found eminently more enjoyable in an endearingly low-rent and cornball fashion. At least this movie has no pretenses to being anything other than what it is. Bradley seems to be into his part in a way he wasn't in the first movie, but as fun to watch as he is the real draw for me was Terry Farrell, in one of her first major headlining roles. Farrell plays Joey, a tenacious reporter trying to learn the truth about the puzzle box who uncovers some dark secret about how Pinhead's evil half has been split off from his good half and is throwing a fit on Earth for some reason or another, I don't really know-I got lost and stopped paying attention pretty much as soon as the credits rolled.

I've always liked Farrell, but I've got to say my jaw dropped when I saw how absolutely incredible she is in this movie: She's remarkably commanding in the part, and flatly refuses to play Joey as a stereotypical screaming and helpless horror movie girl. Instead, Farrell aggressively plays Joey as the lead and fearlessly goes toe to toe with the scenery-devouring Bradley. The climactic scene in the church is really worth a watch on its own: The way Farrell has Joey just spit fire and shout down a grandstanding Demon!Pinhead is the stuff cinematic legends are made of. It's the highlight of the whole film for me, though maybe I just can't get passed Jadzia Dax imperiously demanding a priest to tell her, if demons aren't real “...Then what the fuck is that?”. It's absolute gold. From beginning to end she just acts her heart out, and bless her, she unashamedly treats this ridiculous, ridiculous movie as her potential breakout role. I am now firmly convinced that, as much as I adore Jadzia, Terry Farrell was criminally wasted on the part. She's every ounce as commanding and powerful a stage presence as Avery Brooks is.

(Farrell's not the only Star Trek alum to cut teeth on Hellraiser, by the way: Her Star Trek: Deep Space Nine co-star Andy Robinson, who plays Garak, was Frank Cotton in the first movie. Or rather, Frank wearing his dead brother Larry's skin. He's good in the role, but it is a bit of a shame to see him end up typecast again: Robinson's breakout role was the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry, and ever since he's tended to get approached to play mysterious, psychopathic characters, which bothers him. You can see how he'd much rather be playing the down-to-Earth, everyman Larry instead of the twisted and murderous Frank.)

I used to watch a lot of shows about filmmaking growing up that would go behind the scenes of then-current and upcoming movies. I remember the Hellraiser series being spotlighted in particular for its makeup and practical effects, so Pinhead is sort of an iconic figure of this era for me. But, mostly from a production standpoint: I never really watched these movies and was never really a fan of this genre of horror. I could appreciate all the work that went into making them and how passionate people would get about them, even if I didn't really have any strong feelings one way or the other. I can say the same thing about the Hellraiser series on the whole: I can appreciate the baby steps it takes in experimenting with the horror genre, even if I don't think it was very successful, and I can be utterly delighted at one of Terry Farrell's early roles and the raw talent and professionalism one of my favourite actors of the day brought to her job, no matter how small, silly or forgettable it might have been.

Sensor Scan: Aliens

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. Aliens is not Rambo: First Blood Part II, and is every bit as clever and innovative when it comes to exploring film genres as its predecessor was.

As is always my go-to for this sort of thing, I'll turn once again to James Rolfe. I'd say he's forgotten more about horror movies then I'll ever know, except for the fact I don't think he ever actually *has* forgotten anything about horror movies. As James explains in his own review of this film, Aliens, like Alien before it, takes its inspiration from both 1930s haunted house movies and 1950s sci-fi B-movies. While it inherits the former from Alien and retains the conceit of a bunch of unaware travellers finding themselves in a corner of the universe they're not supposed to be, the B-movie this time is not It! The Terror from Beyond Space, but Them!, a 1954 movie about an ant colony becoming exposed to nuclear fallout in the deserts of New Mexico, causing them to, naturally, grow to giant size and terrorize the populace. It's from Them! that Aliens gets the majority of its action pedigree, and also many of its iconic setpieces: Both movies feature charismatic military agents who investigate the scene of a mysterious disaster and then fight off a swarm of monsters, a young girl who survived the previous attack in catatonic shock from what she experienced, and even a climactic showdown against a “queen” monster in a nursery where the heroes torch her eggs.

Here's where the haunted house trappings come into play again, because we can tell right from the get-go that the Colonial Marines are overzealous, ill-prepared and dangerously underestimating their enemy, and the suspense comes from watching them charge blindly into things and, inevitably, getting picked off by the Aliens. So, just like in the first movie, we can say this group of protagonists is once again not supposed to be in this part of the galaxy (the movie poster even says “there are some places in the universe you don't go alone”) and we can extrapolate the anti-capitalist message of the first movie to now include the military industrial complex. So, far from being a straightforward action movie, Aliens continues to wear its influences and its ethics on its sleeve and reveals itself as a provocative deconstruction of militaristic action sci-fi as filtered through an expansion to Alien while still remaining a *ton* of fun to watch. Aliens may not equate its critique of unscrupulous institutionalized authority with a critique of rape culture as clearly or as elegantly as the first movie did (though it does inherit and invoke some of this by default being a sequel to Alien and using the titular monsters), but in its place it has all the trappings of genre bending and Long 1980s postmodern cinematography to play with, the styles having been long established by this point.

Though dialing back on Alien's vitriolic polemic against rape culture is perhaps in a sense necessary to keep it feeling fresh, this does mean Aliens is somewhat less sexually progressive and bold than its predecessor, though it does try, it must be said. The biggest problem is Ripley herself, now a legacy character. Marked from the beginning as the main character, she suffers the same fate as every other female lead, action or otherwise, to come in her wake: Namely, the problem that Hollywood screenwriters tend to have no idea what to do with a female lead unless they rest on comfortably familiar stereotypes about femininity. What made the Ripley of Alien special is that she was a gender-swapped male character with none of her lines changed except pronouns. The Ripley from Aliens is a woman from the start, and that's where writers tend to fall back into their bad habits. So, Ripley has to act as a surrogate mother figure to Newt, and this goes on to define a lot of her motivation in the back half of the movie (and I'm not even touching the stuff that happens in the further sequels) and is given another female character to be contrasted with. And naturally, Ripley is portrayed as the more feminine and “correct” one, and thus the one who survives.

(Frustratingly, Cameron seems to have this problem a lot in his science fiction stuff: The whole point of his Terminator films is that Sarah Conner is only important because she gives birth to John Conner and has to be protected. That she gets a massive badass boost in Terminator 2 does little to draw attention away from this troubling truth about her role in the series' narrative.)

But wait, I'm not going to brush by Private Vasquez just like that. Because she's the real reason we need to talk about this movie. Ignoring for the moment the fact she dies, Vasquez is a bloody amazing character and a rightfully deserved milestone in cinematic history. Even more butch than the original Ripley, ripped and crew-cut Vasquez smack-talks her way through the whole film, is more fun to watch than even Bill Paxton (yeah, I said it), thus immediately shooting down any critique that she's less sympathetic than Ripley and gave audiences a female character the likes of which they had never seen before. As for me, I absolutely adore her: Vasquez is bang on in the territory of female characters I love seeing, especially in a movie like this, and is far and away my favourite part of Aliens. Between them, both Ripley and Vazquez have indisputably defined the way Hollywood (and video games for that matter-Some of you know where this is going) conceptualizes female action heroes since, both for better and for worse. However, though Vazquez has had a profound impact on generations of creators, there are only two we need concern ourselves with for the moment. And those would be Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana.

Energized to discover they'd be working on Paramount's hastily announced new Star Trek series, Fontana and Roddenberry set about acquainting themselves with how science fiction had changed in the decade or so since the Starship Enterprise last took flight. This entailed watching a whole bunch of sci-fi movies, one of which was Aliens. After they watched it together, Roddenberry pointed to Vasquez and told Fontana “I want a character just like her on the new Star Trek”. This young lady was the first properly original character created for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and both Roddenberry and Fontana spent a lot of time hashing out who she would be and what she would be like. The character brief they came up with was, frankly, astounding. She was going to be a hardened, working class survivor of a failed Federation colony torn apart by gang wars and, in keeping with Star Trek's history of diverse casting, she was going to be a Latina.

(In fact, Vasquez had such an impact on Roddenberry he wanted to straight-up offer Jenette Goldstein the part on the spot, before Fontana, probably wisely, pointed out that Goldstein is not actually Latina, but is in fact a small Jewish woman.)

We'll talk more about this character (or rather Tasha Yar, which is who she eventually morphed into) once the rest of Star Trek: The Next Generation crystallizes, but just stop and think about the magnitude of the ramifications somebody like this could have had for the Star Trek franchise. Here's a character, a working-class human woman of colour, mind you, whose entire life has been a testament to the Federation's most systemic and shameful failures and is now among the USS Enterprise's senior staff. Though interpersonal conflict was always going to be a no-no, just imagine the perspective she could have brought to the show and the ultimate exploration of its own ethics it eventually became. Someone who doesn't speak or act like a philosopher or a refined, eloquent Starfleet Academy graduate, yet who is still treated as an absolute equal and a vital, beloved member of the crew. To me, the storytelling possibilities here are endless, and the potential futures she represents are the most achingly, heart-rending examples of missed opportunities and unfulfilled potential in the entire history of Star Trek.

I know Vasquez has also been criticized as an example of half-baked feminism, especially in recent years. It's either bad that she embodies so much of what is seen to be the masculine conception of badass, bad that she's butch and also sexualized or bad that the non-traditionally feminine woman is the one who has to eat it. But here's the thing: There's no wrong way to be a woman, and the sooner we all realise this the better off we'll all be. The fact remains Vasquez was a wake-up call to US filmgoers and an important reminder that different kinds of women exist. Maybe she's not everything we'd want to see today, but she's still a milestone and an important, inspiring character. That she remains one of the benchmarks for women in action movies to this day is a testament to how little progress we've made since Aliens, not how retrograde Aliens itself is.

Really both Vasquez and Ripley are indicative of what's good *and* bad about Aliens from a feminist perspective. The film is frustrating not because it's poor or reactionary, but because it's constantly taking two steps forward and one step back. You can see the legacy of this in the comparative safeness of the works the film has inspired, such as Vasquez's inability to make the jump to Star Trek: The Next Generation and how Samus Aran suffers, beat-for-beat the exact same fall from grace in the Metroid series Ripley does here. And, ultimately, because history has shown this is pretty much as far as the Alien franchise ever got: Whatever individual merits Alien³, Alien Resurrection, Prometheus or the Alien vs. Predator series (the comics, movies and cartoon show, not the video games) might have, I don't think anyone can seriously argue that, as cohesive works, any of them are remotely on the same level as Alien or Aliens. Just like the Contras and the Xenophobes that followed in its wake, these works took the superficial aspects of the first two movies out of context and emphasized them such that their original meaning was all but lost. In fact, the debacle the Alien series became is part of the reason H.R. Giger revisited motion picture science fiction sexual horror eight years later and worked hard to give us his definitive statement on it.

But the fact there even is an Alien series and that its iconography and motifs have permeated pop consciousness to the extent they have is unquestionably due to Aliens. As well-received as Alien might have been at the time, this was the film that made the Aliens and H.R. Giger pop culture staples, and, furthermore, that gave Alien a second life. Many people, especially people of a certain age, saw this movie first and then, high on how much they enjoyed it, eagerly sought out Alien. For that alone Aliens has had a positive impact on society and earned its place in science fiction history. It deserves to be treated accordingly.

Sensor Scan: Spenser: For Hire

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? Yes, in terms of male action heroes you could do considerably worse than someone like Spenser, but he still dominates the spotlight to such an extent it overshadows everything else about the world, an that's never going to not be patriarchal. Hard-broiled detective stories are not realistic or representationalist in the least: Certainly they don't need to be and I'd even argue they probably shouldn't be (at least not in the context Chandler is using), but to decry Agatha Christie for writing women's fluff while declaring that the men's fluff you write is better and more realistic literature is a pretty low blow. Trying to build a comprehensive worldview out of Spenser: For Hire is no less damaging and ill-advised then trying to build one out of Death by Darjeeling.

As for the television series itself, it's here that the gulf between Miami Vice and other shows of the time really becomes apparent. Because even though Spenser: For Hire premiered only a year after Miami Vice, it already feels painfully creaky and outmoded. This would be the case even if it wasn't based on a by this point ten year old book series: The direction, cinematography and music all feel like a relic from a previous era. It's considerably less visually interesting than Miami Vice (and not just because the bits of it I watched were set in Boston in the wintertime) and it's actually rather difficult to believe this was the chronologically newer show. Almost everything feels flat, listless and lifeless, and this is not at all helped by Robert Urich's profoundly uninspiring portrayal of Spenser. Urich genuinely feels miscast, and in no way seems to embody the suave, manly character Parker wrote, which, admittedly, might not have been an altogether bad thing. This show is a picture-perfect demonstration of how passe traditional network television, and honestly detective fiction in general, was by 1985. It's not entirely surprising the series floundered around in the ratings flirting with cancellation for the rest of its run.

But comparisons with Miami Vice in which it comes up consistently lacking are not why we're looking at Spenser: For Hire here. No, the real reason we have to talk about this show is because Avery Brooks is in it. Brooks plays Hawk, the contract killer and bodyguard associate of Spenser's and is absolutely formidable in the role: He takes the original brief of Hawk as a fiercely principled man who can serve as Spenser's mirror twin despite coming from a vastly different background and possessing attitudes that Spenser might otherwise find repugnant and just runs with it, turning Hawk, who was originally a supporting character, into Spenser's unqualified equal and co-lead. One of my favourite scenes comes in an early episode where Hawk is in the employ of a corrupt gambling magnate Spenser has been hired to take down. The script has Spenser try to lecture Hawk about his life decisions and how he's too good to be on the “wrong side of the law”, and Hawk gets a firm rebuke where he calls out Spenser's position of privilege.

Urich, for his part, seems to try and give Spenser the moral high ground here, playing it as if Hawk is a kind of sympathetic antagonist, a sort of well-intentioned extremist. Brooks has absolutely none of this, completely shutting Urich down by emphasizing the presumptuousness of Spenser acting as if he has the right to tell Hawk how he should live his life, having never grown up black and never having to spend his life hunted, feared, demeaned and infantilized for his skin colour and heritage. It's a triumphant scene, one of many Brooks gives to cut against the solipsism the series tends to exhibit elsewhere. Indeed, Brooks is so good and so powerful that Hawk quickly became the series' breakout character, earning his own short-lived spinoff in 1989. In fact, he may have even have had an impact on Parker himself: Early Spenser books focused on the title character almost exclusively, but, after this show, Hawk became more and more of a central figure, to the point Hawk essentially became the main character of Parker's last few novels, relegating Spenser to the support role. As Brooks himself once put it:

"I never thought of myself as the sidekick...I've never been the side of anything. I just assumed that I was equal."

There are two reasons Avery Brooks is so effective here. The first is that he is an incredibly passionate and dedicated activist who genuinely believes in the power of art to effect social change and firmly committed to his cause. The second is that he's a classically trained thespian who actually has the skills and the range to back that up: Not just an actor, Brooks is also an educator and worked for a time as a professor of theatre arts at Oberlin College, and as a result has an incredibly deep-rooted understanding of how drama and narrative works. Brooks brings a gravity and Shakespearean bombast (and here that phrase actually means something) to his roles and is by default a powerful and captivating stage presence. He doesn't go halfway on things, so when given a brief like this he'll absolutely leap at the opportunity to make it as memorable and provocative as he can.

It's little wonder then that Avery Brooks landed the role of Benjamin Sisko so easily. Although, ironically enough, it's Star Trek that reveals how influential Hawk as a character really was: The whole reason Sisko isn't bald and doesn't have a goatee, which is Brooks' preferred look, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's earliest seasons is because the producers felt that style was iconic to Hawk and they wanted to avoid comparisons. In other words, Brooks was so well-loved as Hawk that Rick Berman and Michael Piller were afraid it would overshadow the fourth Star Trek series. And even when he did get to have his look back, that was around the time the production team began to write Sisko far more brooding, mysterious and dangerous...Almost like Hawk. Which is a shame, because Avery Brooks has an incredible, incredible acting range: Just compare Sisko's earliest scenes on Deep Space Nine (especially when he's interacting with Jennifer, Jake and Jadzia) with how Hawk behaves, and you'll see how manifestly different the two characters are.

But Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's production tribulations are still comparatively far removed from where we are now. What's important for the moment is to highlight what an amazing actor and person Avery Brooks is, and how lucky we all are that he contributed his talents to help build a legacy of utopian fiction.

Sensor Scan: Miami Vice

Among the many, many ways Kei and Yuri shifted this blog's course and changed its mark was forcing me to drastically alter the structure of this essay. I was always planning to cover Miami Vice in some fashion here: It was an important enough show at the time, I watched enough of it and it left enough of an impact on me such that it's a not-insignificant part of my television viewing career and there's considerably more creative overlap between it Star Trek then I think a lot of people realise or understand.

But before I made the decision to cover Dirty Pair episode by episode I had planned to go into a great more detail here, anticipating a rather lengthy critique of the show's basic ethical premises and assumptions. But I don't need to do that anymore, because Dirty Pair already did that for me in the frankly stunning “No Way! 463 People Disappeared?!”/”We Did It! 463 People Found!” two-parter. Not only that, it tossed it out as an afterthought; one small fraction of a much grander and more splendid tale of love, healing, intrigue and hope because Kei and Yuri are better than all of us. So really, there's not a whole lot more I can say about Miami Vice's basic conceit and its depiction of life in the Miami/Dade county vice department that wouldn't be repeating what either I or Dirty Pair said in the context of the “463” episodes.

There's always going to be ethical questions about TV shows whose protagonists are police officers, and rightly so. This kind of genre is always one of the easiest with which to slip unto unabashedly brutal hegemony, especially given what's happened to the United States' police departments in recent decades and given the sorts of atrocities we now regularly see them committing in the news. It can be very challenging, especially for someone subscribing to the political persuasion of the average reader of, oh, let's say this blog, to warm up to a show like Miami Vice, and this is understandable and to be expected. One thing that is worth stressing, however, is that Miami Vice was nothing if not a show that committed to itself and its ethical claims and seemed to internalize every critique leveled against it over the course of its five seasons: The much-parodied colourful pastels of the first two seasons eventually gave way to darker Earth tones in later years, which better reflected the show's basic outlook. The whole thing even ultimately ends by having Crockett and Tubbs resign the force in bitter rage and disgust, feeling that everything they've done since becoming vice cops has made life provably and catastrophically worse for themselves and everyone around them.

Because that's the thing about Miami Vice-People think this show was all about bright colours, tropical scenery, glitzy high-rollers and girls in bikinis and it wasn't. In fact, this couldn't be any further from the truth of the matter: This is a deeply, deeply cynical show whose opinion on the human condition could be charitably called “nihilistic” and uncharitably called “hopeless”. I don't think I've ever seen a work of fiction whose populist perception is any more divorced from its actual content than this.

As much as Crockett and Tubbs are charismatic authoritarians by virtue of being leading men who are police officers in a (well, pesudo-) police procedural, they're also characters who, from the very beginning, are quite keenly and openly aware of the destructive nature of power structures and the role they in particular are playing in them. The pilot episode focuses on how Crockett's job as a vice cop has completely estranged him from his family, who have long since moved beyond him, and how Tubbs' got his brother assassinated in a sting gone bad back in New York. The iconic scene, with the two cops driving off into the night to a Phil Collins single, is all about how they're almost certainly heading to their deaths at the hands of a massive shootout. The first story arc (one thing among many Miami Vice does not get anywhere near the level of recognition for pioneering that it deserves) is a five episode serial about Crockett and Tubbs trying to bring down their arch-nemesis Calderone and never once succeeding in doing anything apart from contributing to massive collateral damage, ending with Lieutenant Rodriguez, someone pegged as a regular main character, getting gunned down in vengeance hit job. Although the show would mix up its subsequent serials with a more episodic approach after this, the overall despondence of the first arc set the tone for the rest of the series.

The first thing new viewers hyped up on expectations of pastels, beautiful scenery and delightful 1980s cheesiness learn about Miami Vice is that anyone can die, the good guys never win, the world is a heartless and unforgiving place, innocent bystanders *will* suffer as a direct result of your actions and nothing you do has any hope of ever making a difference.

Of course, part of the reason Miami Vice has the reputation it does is because of its unique look-and-feel. Nothing on United States television had looked like this before, and it's a tough case to make to say anything after it looked like it either. The two most commonly repeated stories about Miami Vice were that it was the first US TV show to deliberately look “cinematic”, thus paving the way for subsequent TV series to be more like movies, and that it was conceived when NBC head of entertainment Brandon Tartikoff scrawled “MTV Cops” on a napkin and sent that in as a show pitch. The latter is by most accounts simply untrue, although it's worth mentioning simply because of Tartikoff, who will crop up later on in the project as the CEO of Paramount who asked Rick Berman and Micheal Piller to come up with a spin-off of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Tartikoff being far from the only link between Miami Vice and Star Trek). The former is worth parsing out, however, because Miami Vice is in truth hardly cinematic, or if it is it's only cinematic in a very narrow and strange set of ways. 

Miami Vice was certainly responsible for changing how TV incorporates music, as it was one of the first shows to regularly shell out for the licenses to use current charting pop hits, which is something that movies often do and is standard practice on television now, but was unheard of when the show debuted in 1984. But what really set the show apart was its utterly jaw-dropping art design and attention to detail: Producer Michael Mann was tenacious about ensuing the world of Miami Vice evoked very specific moods and themes and was very precise about how things like colours and blocking conveyed different things. I watched a making-of documentary about this show once and I was absolutely awestruck at the amount of effort that went into every single shot of every single episode of this show for five whole years: Mann would obsess over things like the outfits the extras were wearing, how they were walking and where they were stood in relation to the action. The show would even buy up and re-develop entire city blocks *solely* for the purposes of getting a shot to look right. If it appeared onscreen in an episode of Miami Vice, you can be absolutely certain it was there for a reason and was meant to symbolize or make you feel something.

Take Sonny Crockett's infamous wardrobe, for example. The reason he wears T-shits under designer suits, leaves his collar constantly unbuttoned, keeps five o’clock shadow and wears shoes with no socks is because the guy's a broken, disheveled mess of a human being. Just look at his hair. He gets practically no sleep, is always bouncing from operation to operation and has to constantly look the part of a high-rolling drug dealer. He probably comes back home to his boat every night and falls asleep in that getup, then rolls out of bed the next day to do it all over again. And, once the show turned even darker (which was apparently somehow possible against all sense and reason) starting with the third season, his preference for whites, pinks and blues fades away to be replaced with oversized, ill-fitting dirt-brown and grey tweed. You can discern pretty much everything you need to know about Crockett just by looking at the guy, this was absolutely intentional and that it spawned a trendy fashion movement that's become the poster child for the glitzy and gauche '80s can only be explained as a case of the audience catastrophically missing the point.

MTV Cops or no, Mann was well aware this series was being made for an audience that was “...more interested in images, emotions and energy than plot and character and words”. And that's this show's real innovation and why it's so special and important: It marks the first time in US television where it became possible to do a show free to experiment on a higher level of narrative resonance, no longer weighed down by obligations to hackneyed Writing 101 bullet points. And this bears consideration in the context of Star Trek too, as we're entering the period where Star Trek is commonly seen as being mini made-for-TV sci-fi movies. When people like Rick Berman talk about how doing Star Trek in the 1980s and 1990s amounted to taking a feature-length science fiction film from pitch to screen in a week on a television budget and timetable and isn't referring just to ILM's special effects, this is the sort of thing he's talking about.

However, we need to parse out this statement a bit, because it can be a bit misleading. The truth of the matter is, from a critical perspective neither Miami Vice nor Star Trek: The Next Generation were actually cinematic in the traditional sense-Yes, they were both visually spectacular to look at, but they were both shot on video in 4:3 (or composited on video in the case of The Next Generation) with a lot of close-ups and as such they both lack a certain sense of scale Hollywood movies tend to have. These shows are only “cinematic” in the sense that art design, imagery and the way things are shot, framed and composited are now important in a way they weren't before. They're not mini-movies or even trying to ape movies: They're still TV shows, they're just a new and different kind of TV show.

Furthermore, and more importantly, neither Star Trek: The Next Generation nor Miami Vice act slavishly beholden to representationalism, a concept which I personally feel lords over all truly cinematic works these days to the point that it's become irreducible from them. The case for The Next Generation is obvious, set as it is in an overt science fiction-fantasy world, and it also has a staunch theatrical heritage we'll look more at once we start talking about the show proper. But this is equally true of Miami Vice which takes *extreme* liberties with law enforcement protocol and, despite taking its name and inspiration from the Floridian port city, has about as much to do with the real Miami as Starfleet Command does with San Francisco. This was a source of much chagrin for many Floridians, who started to become exasperated at delirious people flocking to Miami giddy with excitement to start living it up like Crockett and Tubbs only to discover a run-down slum of a port city.

This is, it must be stressed, not the show's fault: It never once made any pretenses that it was accurately representing life in southern Florida. Because the series was about images, emotions and ideas above all else and even though it adopts the police procedural trick of doing “ripped from the headlines”-type stories later in its run, the Miami of Miami Vice by necessity has absolutely nothing to do with the real Miami-It's obviously and self-consciously a constructed fantasy world modeled after the real thing in order to tell stories about the culture of greed, excess and heartlessness that had come to define the Long 1980s. Which is the other thing about Miami Vice: Although it's a crime drama following a team of cops and is supposedly on the side of law and order, its unrepentant cynicism (another thing it shares with 1990s Star Trek) effectively cancels out a majority of the ethical concerns such a setup might otherwise raise.

Forget cleaning the mean streets of lawbreakers, simply trying to do their job day to day as police officers causes this squad to become an accessory to the most horrific of situations. As police officers (and remember this show hails from a time where police officers at least had the impression of being honest working-class characters rather then the thuggish, hyper-militarized trigger-happy hate groups they act like today thanks to the Department of Homeland Security), the Vice team is caught in the middle of an impenetrable quagmire of corruption on all sides, and no matter which way they turn or what they do everyone's gonna lose in the end. And the show's underlying message is that it's the attitude of modern society, that is, the Reagan-championed Neoconservative revolution, that's allowed all this to happen.

No, drug dealers were not high-class jet set Nouveau-riche in 1980s Miami-That's another aspect of the fantasy world the show creates to emphasize its themes. But, the point of that character archetype is to demonstrate how the world Miami Vice creates is one where those sorts of people, the affluent, the high-rollers, the powerful, are criminals. One where the Yuppie ideal, and everything tangentially connected to it, is shown to be inherently decadent and depraved. The vice team winds up fighting against the military and federal government as often as they do drug smugglers (that is, when they're not one and the same), usually with even more disastrous consequences. This is a world where toxic individualism, cronyism and greed for power permeates every level of every institution and nobody cares about anything or anybody unless it increases their own lot or furthers their own shortsighted goals. And it's a world where those truths are conveyed within and through itself, with little to no need for any other kind of narrative.

(This even ties into the flashy cars, boats and high fashion Miami Vice casually throws around: Crockett, Tubbs, Trudy and Gina are ordinary people living undercover to infiltrate the 1% and bring justice to obscenely wealthy and powerful wrongdoers. The job of a vice cop is to live convincingly in multiple lives. It is, in fact, a kind of performativity and the show acknowledges this on multiple levels.)

What all this means is that really, Miami Vice is a science fiction show, and I don't just mean in that one weird UFO episode from the fourth season where Trudy boards a spaceship that randomly lands in the everglades and James Brown is an alien. Because it's using its world to tell stories, a world that is, I remind you, consciously disconnected from real life, and is explicitly more invested in ideas and emotions than plot, Miami Vice is far closer to what we'd call speculative and genre fiction then the standard contemporary drama to which is its frequently compared. Which also makes it such a gobsmackingly brilliant grand slam that Dirty Pair should give it a nod during one of its high-water marks: In hindsight, the shows really are in a sense compliments of each other, both being postmodern speculative fiction shows focused on concepts that draw some influence from buddy cop dynamics and detective fiction.

(Indeed, Dirty Pair even arguably anticipated and addressed the notorious “Crockett gets amnesia and becomes his drug dealer alter ego” story arc five years early with the “463” two-parter, and it didn't have to fridge anyone. Miami Vice does, unfortunately, have an occasional tendency to fridge people, usually Crockett's one-off love interests. And once, extremely uncomfortably in the aforementioned case, Sheena Easton.)

In fact, I would have actually liked Dirty Pair to engage a bit more with Miami Vice, because Kei and Yuri posses and understand something that Crockett and Tubbs were never quite allowed to: Utopianism and hope. In spite of its breathtakingly gorgeous cinematography and location, Miami Vice, while always thought-provoking, remains unceasingly dour. You're kind of left feeling like there's no way out of the existential hell the show surrounds you with and that your life and ambitions are futile and meaningless. Dirty Pair provides the counter to that: Through love, compassion and enlightenment we can all strive to better ourselves, help each other in the world in our own small way. I would have really enjoyed seeing a proper Dirty Pair riff on this show, set in a futuristic fantasy Miami stand-in that really took all the imagery and vibes of Miami Vice, kicked it into the stratosphere, brought the cleansing fire, ran giddy through it and gave it all a happy ending and sense of hopefulness. I guess that's the utopian in me.

Because I have to say, in spite of its quirks and foibles, I've always had a soft spot and affection for Miami Vice. It was one of the few shows of its kind to genuinely hook me and keep me invested all the way to the end. The world it creates, unrealistic and unrepresentative as it may be, has always fascinated me: It's one of my absolute favourite fantasy worlds in all of visual media, and is probably largely, if not directly, responsible for the visions of neon-tinged urban tropical port city metropolises that have seen better days that still haunt my imagination to this day. The acting is just as good as the production values: Though Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas trend towards the showboating and their characters were the breakouts due to being charismatic leading men, another thing people tend to forget about Miami Vice was that it was a really well-done ensemble series as well. Saundra Santiago's Gina and Olivia Brown's Trudy were always depicted as equal to their male squadmates and each had numerous episodes and story arcs dedicated to them. And then there's of course Edward James Olmos as Lieutenant Castillo, whose performance of a stoic, yet passionate and dedicated man with hidden depths is mesmerizing, and in whom I see shades of William Adama to come.

And it has done some material good: Although the show's Miami bore no resemblance whatsoever to the real Miami, the production team set aside $1 million per episode to help their generous host city's at the time struggling economy and infrastructure, and it did have a calculable impact on Miami's tourism industry. Although that said, the gentrified, resort-choked tourist trap that is Miami today can't really be seen as anything other then a net negative, and now the show looks even *more* inauthentic as the Miami you can visit today really shares nothing in common with its television counterpart. Whatever simulacrum of that world might have existed at one point or another is now gone forever. Whether or not Miami Vice can be fully blamed for that though is up for debate, and it's here that the real problem of basing its fictional setting on a real place becomes clear: Undiluted science fiction doesn't have these kinds of problems because nothing in it could even remotely be mistaken for a real person, place or situation. Though on the other hand, “real” science fiction must also always face the stigma of potentially never truly being taken seriously: I wonder if even something as popular, iconic and influential as Star Trek: The Next Generation will ever be remembered as the kind of television milestone Miami Vice is.

Which it is. It's a show that's as important as it is misunderstood, and one I do recommend spending some time with if you get the chance. Like most TV shows, it has about two-thirds more episodes than it really needs, but that's hardly a slight on Miami Vice in particular and when it does work it's something quite unique and special. It won't necessarily be the most fun evening of television you'll ever have, but I have a feeling it might just be one that gets you thinking and leave you with lasting memories.