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: 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.