Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 45

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “Space Rockers”/”Buck’s Duel to the Death” (spoilers)

“Space Rockers”: Oh, dear. This is everything you’d expect from the title. Chris Bunch & Allen Cole return with yet another “20th-century trend… in spaaaace!!” plot, and one that’s right out of the stock ‘60s/’70s TV playbook of tone-deaf attempts to depict youth culture.

The titular Space Rockers are Andromeda, a trio who perform synth music in light-up bargain-basement TRON costumes, under the management of the sinister Mangros (Jerry Orbach), who’s working with his henchman Yarat (Richard Moll) to do something to their broadcasts that’s causing young people who hear them to riot, steal, and commit other crimes. A Directorate spy posing as their sound engineer is murdered mid-broadcast to Huer, cut off just as he reports that the music is being used to “veck,” a word that nobody in the room, including Huer, seems to recognize.

After a pair of These Kids Today are brainwashed by Their Heathen Music into stealing a Starfighter that, by an astonishing coincidence, happens to be Buck’s, he chases after them until the music stops and they immediately come to their senses and become good, obedient sitcom teens once again. So Buck, Twiki, and Theo head to the orbital satellite Music World, where the band broadcasts from (since apparently in an age when interstellar travel is a matter of hours thanks to Stargates, live concert tours are nonetheless a thing of the past), in order to investigate.

The members of Andromeda (Nancy Frangione, Jesse D. Goins, Leonard Lightfoot) seem nice enough, bewildered at the black-uniformed youth gangs who follow them despite acting in opposition to everything the band believes in. Buck investigates and finds the agent’s hidden data chip, containing another use of the word “veck,” according to Buck (even though the screen just shows wave patterns when he says it). So Buck calls Huer and asks if he’s ever heard the word “veck,” and Huer informs him that it’s slang for “vector,” one thing used as a carrier for another. Why didn’t this conversation happen when the word was first brought up?

Mangros wants to get rid of Buck in a “subtle” way, so he sends his submissive, Marilyn Monroe-voiced girlfriend Joanna (Judy Landers) to “entertain” Buck in his quarters, then pipes in the music with the evil signal that, according to his earlier villain monologue to Yarat, will cause anyone under 30 to become violent. Joanna is immediately affected and attempts to kill Buck, but Buck is immune, which is a pretty precise cutoff, since Buck is exactly 30 at this point going by “Happy Birthday, Buck.” Of course, Buck stops her, and when she recovers, he tells her to leave the station for her own good. He then learns from Theo that Mangros published a paper on using “ionized particles” transmitted through sound waves (????) to control human behavior. Buck goes to warn Andromeda, and once he convinces them, he inexplicably allows them to confront Mangros about it alone while he helps Joanna get to safety. What?? Buck already knows the man is a murderer, and he just lets them walk into danger!

Naturally, the band gets captured and Mangros plans to fake their concert with recorded video. Buck sends Twiki and Theo to Die Hard through the trash ducts and steal the ionizer thingy, which almost gets them sucked out into space (oh, no, poor Theo! Twiki who?). Buck gets captured and thrown in the closet with the band, kept alive on the flimsy pretext that Mangros plans to arrange a convincing fatal accident for them later, and they rig the band’s instruments into a sonic weapon to blow the door. Buck destroys the ionizer just before Mangros goes onstage and rallies the youth of the galaxy to rise in revolt, but since they’re non-ionized, they just laugh him off the stage. Because of course there’s no way the younger generation in a galaxy where war, slavery, and environmental devastation are rampant would have any legitimate reason to rise up in protest.

Wow. It’s like we had to pay for the show’s best episode, “A Dream of Jennifer,” by following it directly with the worst episode. If “Dream” represented everything Buck Rogers had the potential to be, “Space Rockers” represents everything I was afraid it might be when I approached this revisit. It’s dumb, cheesy, thoughtless, cliched, illogical, and thematically confused. It seems to be trying to have it both ways, telling a stock plot that embodies the conservative older generation’s worst paranoid fears about These Kids Today and Their Heathen Music, while also being sympathetic to the youth and the musicians and making them just dupes of an older villain. Yet it still slopes toward conservatism by assuming that young people have no interest in bucking the system (so to speak) unless they’re tricked or brainwashed into doing so, and that there’s no valid reason to protest the status quo even when it’s as troubled as the one we’ve glimpsed over the course of this season. I’ve seen this same set of tropes used in shows from the late ‘60s – Star Trek’s “The Way to Eden,” Get Smart’s “The Groovy Guru,” Mission: Impossible’s “The Martyr” to an extent (which Bruce Lansbury also produced) – but it’s kind of weird to see it still hanging on in 1980.

The episode also suffers from a dearth of Wilma – who’s there as a fixture in Huer’s office early in the episode but completely disappears once Buck gets to Music World – and an excess of Twiki, on whom Buck actually relies to perform the vital task of retrieving the ionizing device, but which he fails at utterly because Twiki is still useless. Also an excess of Judy Landers, who really didn’t contribute much to the episode, and whose inspid, weak, Monroe-esque babe-in-the-woods character is almost nauseating to watch after a season in which the majority of female characters have been portrayed as strong, smart, and capable, even the oversexualized Ardala.

—

“Buck’s Duel to the Death” is story editor Robert W. Gilmer’s first credited script for the show. It involves the people of the planet Katar, who live under the tyranny of the malevolent dictator called the Trebor (which is the writer’s first name spelled backward, although the DVD notes spell it “Traybor”). The Trebor is played by William Smith, with a hamminess level of as much as 0.6 Palances. When he kidnaps the daughter of Prime Minister Darius (Keith Andes) to be the next addition to his harem, Darius is too cowed by the Trebor’s deadly powers to do anything until Deputy Minister Neil (Edward Power) reminds him of the legend of the Roshon, a 500-year-old man prophesied to defeat the Trebor. Neil believes that Buck Rogers can be passed off as the Roshon to rally the spirits of the Katarian people enough to get them to stand up against the Trebor at last, and lures Buck to Katar under false pretenses. As usual of late, poor Wilma gets left behind while Twiki remains Buck’s inseparable sidekick.

Buck is resistant when he learns why he’s been brought to Katar, insisting its people need to fight their own battles. So Darius’s elder daughter Vionne (pronounced “Vee-own,” and played by Robert Stack’s daughter Elizabeth Stack) turns on the waterworks to convince him to help save her sister. He convinces the ministers to let him lead a small squad of “your best men” to infiltrate the Trebor’s palace, rescue the harem girls, and capture the Trebor, and somehow “your best men” includes the elderly Darius himself as well as Neil. Well, I guess I can buy that he wanted to save his daughter personally. Buck gets the harem girls out with ridiculous ease – and with an extended shot of the half-dozen or so scantily clad women climbing down a ladder with the camera pointed right at their buns – and then goes after the Trebor. He’s briefly captured but manages to get away with Darius, who stayed behind to help. Oh, and there was a smarmy minister who was obviously a spy for Trebor, but he’s dealt with easily because the Trebor happened to out him as a spy in Buck’s hearing.

Meanwhile, Buck has learned that the Trebor has the superpower to fling electric bolts from his hand, with a buzzing sound effect straight out of a Buster Crabbe serial. He calls home and asks Huer and Wilma to research electricity, which they insist they haven’t used in over 400 years while they’re speaking to a man on a cathode ray tube TV monitor. Seriously? Why do so many people writing about the future assume they’ll stop using the basic principles we use today? We still use fire and textiles millennia after the Stone Age. And electromagnetism is one of the fundamental forces of the universe. What else are they gonna use to store and transmit energy? Gravity? …But I digress.

For some reason, to research a present-day warlord on an alien planet, Wilma goes to visit the oft-mentioned Archives, source of Buck’s various 20th-century relics. For a moment, I thought we were finally going to meet the mysterious Dr. Junius of the Archives, but instead, Junius is out and Wilma has to settle for his wacky assistant Dr. Albert (Robert Lussier). Which makes no sense, since Junius has been unseen up to now, so why not just have Lussier play him? I guess maybe they wanted to keep him an unseen figure as a running gag, like Vera on Cheers, but it’s not like we ever expected to see him before, so if it’s a joke, it doesn’t really land. (Come to think of it, I don’t think it’s ever made clear whether Junius is human or an AI “quad” like Theopolis.) Albert reads Wilma a note from Junius (which she can’t read herself for some reason) providing an extraordinary amount of exposition on the Trebor, who apparently spent some time stranded on a planet inhabited by beings of pure electricity, a planet called… ohh, I can hardly stand to type it… Volton. And somehow, as a result of living among beings of pure electricity, he has electric microcircuits implanted under his skin to let him shoot energy bolts. Which doesn’t follow logically at all – why would beings naturally made of electricity need technology to channel electricity? The whole thing is gibberish, and ultimately it just boils down to the fact that the dude can shoot electricity from his hand, and Buck already knew that.

So Buck knows the Trebor is coming to Darius’s HQ to confront “the Roshon” and take his harem back, and Buck is now ready to step up and adopt the Roshon role for the confrontation. But he uses his 20th-century smarts about electricity and rigs Twiki with a small transformer so he’ll be more than meets the eye. (He could hardly be less.) So when they fight and the Trebor fires electricity at him, Buck grounds himself by holding onto Twiki, and the bolt feeds back to the Trebor and shorts him out, letting Buck take him down hand-to-hand (or rather, foot-to-hand – have I failed to mention how much Buck’s fighting style relies on jumping and kicking?). Afterward, he makes a speech to the people of Katar (which the show didn’t have the budget to actually depict) about how he’s not the Roshon, they are, and they’ve all got to work it out for themselves and be their own heroes and so forth – which is just about as close as this season of the show ever comes to making any sort of philosophical or social commentary, however generic. Oh, and then there’s the side plot where Vionne has fallen in love with Buck and tearfully says goodbye to him when he must ride off into the sunset. And then there’s the obligatory tag scene where Twiki comes in wearing a cowboy getup and oh gods don’t make me finish that sentence.

Well, it wasn’t “Space Rockers,” I’ll give it that. But it’s still pretty cheesy and silly, and has the same problem with its Twiki-to-Wilma ratio. In general, I feel the treatment of women in the show is deteriorating rapidly. We’re getting less screen time for capable, smart, or heroic women and more women being portrayed as helpless victims, even to the point of having a literal harem in this episode.

Note that “Space Rockers” and this one are the fifth and sixth episodes to air following Alan Brennert’s departure as story editor, and Anne Collins’s story consultant gig ended two weeks before that. But the development and writing of a TV script typically takes as much as a couple of months, so if a head writer leaves a show, their imprint will usually be felt on several later scripts, ones that were in outline or early draft phase at the time they left. So I’m guessing we’re now at about the point where stories that were conceived and plotted under Brennert and Collins have given way to stories originated under Gilmer. Now, granted, these are just the story editors; Bruce Lansbury was the showrunner throughout the season. But given how much of the scriptwriting Brennert and Collins did during their tenure, I have a feeling they were largely responsible for setting the show’s tone, and that suspicion is supported by how quickly the show has begun to get dumber and more sexist at around the time their influence on the script development has died out.

Next time, the 2-hour season finale!

Thoughts on GODZILLA: PLANET OF THE MONSTERS (spoilers)

Godzilla is back, and this time, it’s anime! Yup, somebody finally had the idea to put those two iconic threads of Japanese entertainment together. Or rather, they kind of had to. Apparently Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla license means that Toho can’t make another live-action Godzilla movie until after Legendary’s next two films, so a Shin Godzilla follow-up won’t be possible until at least 2021. But the deal doesn’t cover animation, so Toho was able to continue the franchise in that form.

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (Gojira: Kaiju Wakusei) is the first of a new Godzilla trilogy from Toho Animation and Polygon Pictures, the first time the big G has ever been interpreted in animated form in Japan, although there have been two American animated Godzilla series in the ’70s and the ’90s. Thanks to Netflix being a production partner, I was able to watch the film from home on the day of its worldwide release, and thus I can bring you a prompt review. (Some sources translate the title as Monster Planet, but Netflix has it listed as Planet of the Monsters — perhaps to resonate with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the title of both the 1956 Americanization of the original film and the upcoming 2019 Legendary Pictures sequel, give or take an exclamation point. It also lists it as “Episode 1” of “A Netflix Original Series,” since it’s the first of a trilogy.) I watched it in Japanese with subtitles, but Netflix defaults to the English dub.

The film is computer-animated, but apparently cel-shaded 3D animation has advanced to the point where it looks indistinguishable from well-done 2D hand animation, although the characters still move like 3D computer models, which is a combination that’s a bit off-putting to me. But I got used to it as the film went on. One drawback of the CGI approach is that the characters spend the entire movie in their spacesuits, with no change of clothes/digital model until the post-credits scene.

At first, there’s no indication that this is a Godzilla movie. We open on a large starship where Captain Sakaki Haruo is rebelling against a plan to leave the elderly passengers behind to colonize a hostile planet, insisting it’s just a scam to rid the ship of its weakest population and leave more resources for the rest. Haruo’s grandfather (or just an old man he respects, since the Japanese use the “grandfather/grandmother” title for all elders) talks him down and he’s arrested, but he watched in horror through his cell window as the shuttle blows up in the atmosphere.

We then get a title montage with narration explaining the backstory. In “the final summer of the 20th century” (by which they probably meant 1999, unless they’re calendrical purists), kaiju began to emerge and attack humanity, with the largest of them, Godzilla, appearing in 2030. (Apparently there’s a Japanese prequel novel, Monster Apocalypse, that tells this backstory.) Godzilla proved unstoppable, human civilization was devastated, and two different species of humanoid aliens, both refugees from their own cataclysms, came to Earth to offer help: the Exif, pale androgynous humanoids offering comfort through their religious beliefs, and the Bilsards (or Bilusaludo in the Netflix subtitles), a stockier people with gray featherlike hair and eyebrows, who make a failed attempt to fight Godzilla with Mechagodzilla in exchange for colonization privileges on Earth. Eventually, all three must flee Earth together in the starship Aratrum. Over the ensuing 22 years, the refugees must deal with deprivation and starvation as their search for a new planet continues to be fruitless.

Haruo grows up feeling that humanity has lost its pride and dignity because they fled Godzilla rather than staying to fight, and in prison he develops an anonymous plan to fight Godzilla by identifying the source of the deflector shield Godzilla’s body generates to protect it from attack, the key to its invulnerability. (Reminiscent of the “post-Crisis” explanation of Superman’s invulnerability as the result of his solar-charged Kryptonian cells generating a skin-tight force field, which was why he stopped being invulnerable when Kryptonite or red sunlight disrupted the charge.) If this can be identified by the “noise” it generates, EMP generators can be fired into Godzilla to amplify the “noise” and destroy it. (I figure “noise” must be a bad translation, but I double-checked, and it’s in both the subtitled and dubbed versions. Incidentally, it’s an interesting experience to watch a scene with both the English dub and English subtitles on simultaneously, since the former is written to fit the lip sync and thus can differ considerably from the latter.) Haruo is aided in this project by an Exif priest called Metphies (as his name is spelled in shipboard display graphics, though “Metophius” would better match the sound), who believes Haruo has a destiny to fulfill. When the commanding council realizes the refugees’ only hope of survival is to go back to Earth, they have no choice but to release Haruo on probation to advise them on how to destroy Godzilla.

The ship has a near-instantaneous subspace jump drive, yet somehow it jumps unpredictably in time so that it’s effectively much slower than light, with millennia passing on Earth in just two shipboard decades. They get back to Earth 19,200 years after they left, finding it covered in forests and dense fog. Godzilla is still there, and the atmosphere makes their drones useless. Haruo advises that the only option is to send down fully 600 of the ship’s 4000 personnel to wage a ground campaign to gather the sensor data they need to destroy Godzilla, and we get a Gilligan Cut from some shipboard authority guy saying it’s out of the question to the mission actually being launched, with no explanation for how he was convinced, how personnel were selected and trained, or any of it.

Once the team gets down, they soon attacked by dragonlike avians evidently related to Godzilla (called Servums behind the scenes, but not in dialogue), damaging them so badly that their commander, Leland, calls a retreat, saying they’ll settle on the Moon and gather resources from Earth. It’s actually a more reasonable-sounding plan than Haruo’s macho determination to stay and fight for what’s theirs, but Metphies points out to Leland that their only path to regrouping and getting everyone off-planet requires following something very close to Haruo’s plan anyway, just without the active Godzilla-hunting. But Metphies tells Haruo that other worlds have been destroyed by Godzilla-like creatures, and “some” believe they’re a punishment the universe sends against hubristic species, so that Godzilla will surely seek them out rather than let them escape.

Indeed, Godzilla finally shows up 53 minutes into the 88-minute film, and it’s pretty much nonstop action from there. Leland sacrifices himself to get the data Haruo needs, Metphies is next in command, he puts Haruo in charge, and Haruo orders the big attack and does the whole screaming relentless Japanese movie hero bit, and eventually his plan works and they blow up Godzilla — but then their science guy wonders how Godzilla was so unchanged over 20,000 years and if maybe that was the offspring of the original… and then the whole nearby mountain erupts and turns out to be the original Godzilla, now grown to preposterously large size, and that’s the cliffhanger to Part 1. (Apparently the big one is called Godzilla Earth, and the offspring was Godzilla Filius. Which translates from Latin as “Son of Godzilla,” which means they’ve been fighting Minilla this whole time!) And we discover that this is what Metphies was trying to provoke all along, using Haruo’s attack as bait to draw out the “King of Destruction” whom he worships. Oops! (I suspect his name was influenced by Mephistopheles.)

The reason my summary of the last 1/3 of the movie is so sparse is because there’s not really a lot of story. I’ve come to expect anime to be smarter and deeper than Japanese live-action productions, on the whole, but this movie is pretty superficial. The first half is mostly setup and the second half is mostly action, and neither one has much in the way of character development. Haruo is the only character whose point of view we really get to know that well, and he’s just so stubbornly gung-ho and confrontational, fight and win at all costs, that he’s one-note and hard to sympathize with. To anyone who’s familiar with past Godzilla movies, it’s easy to predict that his conviction of humanity’s right to dominate and possess the Earth will turn out to be misguided and he’ll be struck down for his hubris. So he’s really not someone I could root for, since I could guess he’d turn out to be the goat rather than the hero, and there wasn’t really anyone else to sympathize with. A few other characters have agendas that either reinforce Haruo’s arc (e.g. Metphies) or create obstacles for it (e.g. Leland), but they don’t get much development. There’s also Tani Yuko, a soldier who’s basically there just to be the token female, though she mercifully isn’t gratuitously sexualized in any way. She does get one scene with Haruo where she wonders if the old people on the shuttle were deliberately murdered, with Haruo not wanting to believe the leaders are that corrupt — which is pretty interesting, considering that Haruo’s the one who staged a violent revolt to try to stop the shuttle launch. But otherwise, she’s just kind of there. Overall, the movie is much more interested in military porn and hardware and combat action than it is in character exploration, and offhand I can’t think of a single moment of humor in the film.

Visually, the Godzillas and the Servums are kind of weird-looking. They aren’t rendered in a cel-shaded 2D style like the human and humanoid characters, instead having a complex 3D surface texture, but they don’t look photorealistic either, or even like the kind of stylized-realistic 3D characters you see in Pixar or Dreamworks movies, say. It’s a weird sort of uncanny valley between them, like moving charcoal paintings or something, and it’s off-putting and visually unclear. It’s certainly a novel form of animation, but I don’t think it looks good. Maybe it would have helped if they were more colorful instead of being pretty uniformly gray. But I think the problem is that they’re just too detailed and textured. Part of what makes cartooning and conventional animation effective is that it’s simplified, that it distills things down to their essential outlines and features. A design as cluttered as these kaiju is hard for the eye to make sense of when it’s in motion.

Another problem with the film’s depiction of Godzilla is that, aside from the brief flashbacks in the opening montage, all the action takes place in the wilderness. Godzilla isn’t stomping through a city or an industrial area, just moving through woods and mountains. So while you can tell he’s quite tall in comparison to the forest, there’s still not that great a sense of his scale from a human perspective. There are humans fighting him, but mostly from the air, which also doesn’t help to establish a relatable sense of scale. And just in general, it’s a fairly dull backdrop for the action, without a lot of visual interest. Some of the best Godzilla battle scenes in past movies are ones set against distinctive landmarks — prominent downtown districts, historic castles, amusement parks, bridges, things like that. If Godzilla’s smashing through a setting, you want it to be a setting that has a personality, a strong sense of place. The more striking and unusual the environment is, the greater the sense that something unique and valuable is being destroyed, and thus the higher the stakes feel. So having a whole movie where all the action is in a rather dull-looking wilderness is just not taking the best advantage of the potential of animation to create striking vistas. If they were going to make a Godzilla anime set in the future, why not in some vast futuristic cityscape stretching clear to the horizon, or maybe even a megastructure in space, somehow?

And really, why start the story where they did? Why pack all that deep, complex backstory of the fall of Earth and the arrival of aliens and the failure of Mechagodzilla into a 3-minute, 45-second flashback and a tie-in novel rather than making that the story of the first film and saving this story for the sequel? Just one more respect in which this film feels superficial and unsatisfying.

All in all, then, the first Godzilla anime is underwhelming, especially as a followup to the very impressive Shin Godzilla. It looks fairly good in some respects, less so in others, and it’s well-made and competently acted, and it has a good score (by Takayuki Hattori, composer for Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla and Godzilla 2000: Millennium), although without any reference to Akira Ifukube’s classic Godzilla themes. But it doesn’t have much in the way of substance, or a lot going on beyond a pretty straightforward, one-track story. The more I reflect on it, the more disappointed I am with it. I just hope the remaining two installments in the trilogy do better.

Locus bestseller again!

Blowing my own horn department: Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Patterns of Interference has made the Locus Bestsellers list in the Media & Gaming Related category for the third month in a row! After two months at first place in the category, it’s now fallen to #4, but I’m still on there!

Thanks to David Mack for the heads-up!

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “Olympiad”/”A Dream of Jennifer” (spoilers)

“Olympiad”: This one’s written by the appropriately named Craig Buck, whose other credits include The Incredible Hulk, Magnum P.I., and V: The Final Battle (as Faustus Buck). It’s right in the show’s wheelhouse of a present-day plot dressed up with futuristic trappings, as our Captain Rogers is invited to the 2492 interstellar Olympics (on the flimsy pretext of presenting the 20th-century Olympic flag) and gets involved in the attempted defection of two athletes, space-sled racer Lara (Judith Chapman, Angela from Galactica 1980’s only good episode “The Return of Starbuck”) and vertical high-jumper Jorax (Barney McFadden). They’re in love, and Lara asks Buck for help getting Jorax away from his tyrannical Lozerian masters, Deputy Minister Allerick (Nicolas Coster of Star Trek TNG: “The Offspring”) and his henchman Karl (Paul Mantee of Robinson Crusoe on Mars). Wikipedia says this plot was inspired by a real defection of lovers from behind the Iron Curtain in the 1956 Olympics.

The catch is, Jorax has a bomb implanted in his brain, and Allerick will set it off if he attempts to flee and make the Lozerian Satrap look bad. So Buck has to figure out a way to get them out safely, with help from Twiki, Theopolis, and Wilma, who impersonates a hooker to take advantage of Allerick’s fondness for women in an attempt to steal the detonator (and she uses a knockout-needle ring straight out of Mission: Impossible). It gets a little implausible in the ending, where Buck has to take his Starfighter through the orbital force-field bobsled course to intercept the space sled in which the lovers are attempting to flee before the conveniently slow Zeta waves from Allerick’s detonator can reach the bomb implant. The idea is to tractor-beam the sled and get it to the nearest Stargate before the signal catches up, but the sequence is edited so that it takes barely over one second (albeit an unnaturally elongated TV-style second) to get from the middle of the sled course to the Stargate. I’m not sure Craig Buck understood that Stargates are fixed jump points rather than portals generated by the ships themselves. Buck (Rogers) mentions the sled not having “Stargate capability,” which doesn’t make much sense when we just saw a giant hunk of oxygen ice go through a Stargate last week.

“Olympiad” was no doubt intended as a cross-promotion with NBC’s coverage of the 1980 Winter Olympics, which began the week after this episode aired on NBC. That probably explains why the Olympics are virtually the only facet of 20th-century culture that this show’s 25th-century humans still remember. In addition to its Olympic theme, the episode features awkwardly shoehorned cameos by a number of real-life athletes playing their 25th-century equivalents. A fair amount of time is spent on showing off their athletics, albeit updated for the future. As mentioned, bobsledding is now space-sledding through a force-field course. The vertical jump is 20 meters high from a standing start. Boxers zap each other with energy bolts from their fists. There was also a pair of gloved wrestlers fighting without touching each other; I think the gloves were meant to be generating a tractor beam effect, but given what we’ve seen in past episodes, it’s conceivable they were psychokinetic wrestlers, which is actually a more interesting idea so I think I’ll go with that. I mean, if superpowers like psychokinesis are as common as we’ve seen, it naturally follows that people would eventually invent sports based on them.

Conceptual holes aside, it’s a pretty straightforward, harmless Universal adventure-show episode, decently told. Judith Chapman is lovely and effective as Lara, and Coster and Mantee are effectively smarmy, though McFadden leaves little impression. I am getting a little tired of how often the show puts Wilma in the seductress role, which feels incongruous given that it’s generally quite effective at showing her as a strong and capable military leader. But on the plus side, it’s generally portrayed as her own choice to use seduction, just a tool in her kit as an intelligence operative. And the show is relatively good for its time at not objectifying her or its female guest stars (Dorothy Stratten in “Cruise Ship to the Stars” being the exception), though that may be simply because it was seen as a child-friendly family show. Still, I think Erin Gray does a good job of making Wilma an impressive and competent female lead, and I feel the writing doesn’t do enough to let her fulfill her potential, not compared to the kind of writing for female action leads that we have today. But for its time, it wasn’t bad – less Charlie’s Angels and more The Bionic Woman. (Or Bruce Lansbury’s previous series before this one, Wonder Woman, which Lansbury did his best to turn into a Bionic Woman clone.)

—

“A Dream of Jennifer” is the final Buck Rogers script by former story editor Alan Brennert (as Michael Bryant), and it’s an unusually serious episode. At the “Old Chicago Mall” maintained by the Historical Society (which we barely get a glimpse of), Buck sees a woman (Anne Lockhart, formerly Sheba on Battlestar Galactica) who’s a dead ringer for his old girlfriend Jennifer. She vanishes in the crowd, but that night Buck has, well, a dream of Jennifer, in our first fully dramatized scene set in the 20th century. Apparently he loved her and intended to return to her for good after the Ranger 3 flight that trapped him in time – which is something that you’d think would’ve come up before now, but was only alluded to in passing in the pilot when Buck mentioned “a woman I cared for” among the people he’d lost.

He spots the woman again later on at the central spaceport (where Brennert slips in another public-address Easter egg, a page for Captain Christopher Pike to report to the Veteran’s Affairs Office), but she boards a flight before Buck can reach her, and a very young Dennis Haysbert (unmistakeable from his voice) won’t let him board. But a clerk recognizes him as Captain Rogers and helps him find out that she’s Leila Markeson and went to City-on-the-Sea for a festival – in other words, to New Orleans for future Mardi Gras. Buck gets permission from Dr. Huer to go search for her, and in an atypically dramatic and character-revealing moment, Huer refers to the death of his wife to show his sympathy for Buck.

But it turns out that Leila is working for a group of red-skinned aliens called the Koven, led by Commander Reeve (a stilted and miscast Paul Koslo). She was given “molecular surgery” to look like Jennifer and lure Buck into a trap. She lets him find her and they talk, and of course she’s so moved by his story – and by his general irresistibility to 25th-century women – that she can’t go through with it and tries to warn him. But the Koven catch them anyway, and Reeve tells Buck they need him to blow up an android-crewed freighter being sent to aid rebels against the Koven on Vega 5, claiming that “the Federation” (Brennert really wants to be writing Star Trek) has been given false intelligence and Buck will be doing them a favor. The fact that he’s threatening to murder Leila to force his compliance doesn’t exactly incline Buck to believe his story.

And Buck is right, of course. When he gets to the freighter with Reeve’s second-in-command Nola (Mary Woronov), he discovers none other than Wilma aboard. She and a hand-picked crew have been sent to secretly aid the rebels with a weapons shipment. Nola gets Wilma at gunpoint, but Buck and Wilma make a great team and wordlessly arrange a double play to beat her, then use a “contraterrene” bomb from the weapons shipment to fake the explosion of the freighter for the benefit of the Koven’s long-range sensors. (Earth sent the rebels an antimatter bomb?? That’s deeply disturbing. But I guess writers in 1980 were naive about the downside of supplying foreign resistance fighters with weapons and training that might one day be turned against you.)

Yet Reeve isn’t fooled by Buck’s deception, especially when Buck blows his way in guns blazing to rescue Leila. His men capture Buck and hold him at gunpoint for execution. But Reeve has already told Leila she has no chance of escaping him, due to a tracker permanently implanted during the molecular surgery. So of course, since this is a Very Special Episode, she takes the laser blast meant for Buck and dies poignantly in his arms. Although formula must be maintained, so we fade to three weeks later when Buck has completed the grieving process and is fit for another unfunny comic-relief tag scene.

This is a pretty good one. It was clearly intended to be something special, and relative to the show’s general mediocrity, it succeeds. It’s unusually dramatic and character-driven for this show, and I like it when we get some exploration of Buck’s loneliness as a man who’s lost his entire world. I’m not much of a fan of Anne Lockhart’s acting, but she does okay here, although her scenes are enhanced by a beautiful score by John Cacavas. We get rare insight into Dr. Huer, and Wilma gets to be a solidly competent commanding officer. There’s some pretty good effects work with some new matte paintings and ship miniatures (including a shot where the freighter accelerates with “tachyon drive” with streaks of light very reminiscent of the kind of Star Trek warp drive effect that had been introduced in The Motion Picture months earlier). It would’ve been better with a different actor as Reeve, though. And Buck’s past with Jennifer does feel awkwardly retconned in, but it’s an improvement on the general lack of exploration of Buck’s personal history in the early episodes. There were moments when I felt this episode should have come earlier in the season, when the pain of Buck’s loss would still have been fresh. It was actually written during Brennert’s tenure as story editor, and as Brennert wrote in a July 1981 Starlog commentary, the manner in which his script was rewritten by the producers above him was one of the factors that precipitated his departure from the series. Gil Gerard had told Starlog in November 1980 that he was responsible for the rewrites and for getting Brennert and story consultant Anne Collins fired due to what he considered their bad scripts, although Brennert insists he left voluntarily. They both agree that NBC’s executives at the time were largely to blame for the show’s problems. Still, if the rest of the season represents Gerard’s influence winning out over Brennert’s and Collins’s, I think it proves that Gerard should have stuck to acting.

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “Ardala Returns”, but “Twiki is Missing” (spoilers)

“Ardala Returns”: And story editor Alan Brennert departs, replaced for the rest of the season by Robert W. Gilmer, who had no prior TV experience as far as IMDb records, but who would go on from here to – uh-oh – Galactica 1980, but also to shows like Magnum, P.I, Knight Rider, and Scarecrow and Mrs. King. The script is by the duo of Chris Bunch & Allen Cole, who were also relative TV novices at this point and would also become Galactica 1980 story editors, after which they would write for numerous shows including The Incredible Hulk, Quincy, M.E., Werewolf, and the animated Defenders of the Earth (meaning they went from Buck Rogers to Flash Gordon).

The premise here is kind of an odd one. Kane (Michael Ansara) has designed a new variety of Draconian Hatchet fighter, which looks just like the old ones but has some unspecified differences that make it impossible for any Draconian pilot to fly without blowing up. (It’s unclear how or if this can be reconciled with “Vegas In Space” establishing that Velosi was the supplier of the Hatchet fighters. With Brennert and story consultant Anne Collins gone, the show’s continuity might no longer remain so tight.) So Ardala (Pamela Hensley) uses a faked 1996 space capsule (complete with a plaque based on the Pioneer 10 plaque, with the nude human figures surprisingly uncensored) as a Trojan Horse to lure Buck (and Twiki) into a trap. Her plan is to use him as the template for Kane’s “Zygots” – synthetic duplicates with “alloy skeletons, vat-grown protoplasm,” and computer brains. Buck is put in a “neural capacitance suit” – modified from what looks like a cheesy ‘50s B-movie spacesuit with a fishbowl helmet, though it might be one of the spacesuits from Battlestar Galactica’s “Fire in Space” – to record his memories and piloting experience. We get stock video footage of fighter planes, representing Buck’s Air Force memories—which I believe is the first time this series has directly depicted any events from Buck’s life on 20th-century Earth, even if it is just stock film.

The prototype Repli-Buck is absurdly cheerful and mangles Buck’s 20th-centuryisms, and he’s sent to Earth with a bomb inside, to detonate when he’s alone with “New Chicago’s three main leaders” – which, oddly, means Huer, Theopolis, and Wilma, even though Huer is only the head of the Earth Defense Directorate and Theo is one member of the Computer Council, with Wilma just a colonel in the defense forces. The security sensors detect the bomb priming, and Wilma rather absurdly disintegrates Repli-Buck one second before the bomb goes off. Not only have EDD sidearms never previously been shown to be capable of Star Trek-style disintegration, but disintegrating a bomb should not make it harmless, since disintegration is basically what an explosion is, and if it’s a nuclear device, then its disintegration should mean a whole bunch of radioactive vapor was just released into the air.

Meanwhile, back on the Draconia, Kane continues picking Buck’s brain (including a fighter simulation in a proto-holodeck – I’m reminded that this is just seven years before Star Trek: TNG) to build three more duplicates of Buck to pilot his fighters. But Ardala, having been rebuffed in her romantic advances to the real thing, has more amorous intentions for her new Real Dolls and has them gather in her quarters (though only one of Gil Gerard’s two doubles looks even slightly like him from the rear). But Buck had Twiki use a low-level shock to scramble his neurons, so one duplicate is highly introverted and another can only talk about flying F-16s. The last is suitably amorous, but Ardala finds herself unwilling to settle for a mechanical substitute and gets all weepy and lonely. She then sends the Bucks to attack Earth, but Real Buck escapes by tricking her into thinking he’s another Zygot (which she falls for way too easily), then helps Wilma shoot down his not-so-better three-fourths. (A similar problem to the above arises when Buck saves New Phoenix from an antimatter bomb by blowing up the fighter carrying it while it’s right over the city. That shouldn’t work!!) Though Wilma has her own fighter-based equivalent of the stock “Which one do I shoot?” evil-twin conundrum, and apparently chooses right by pure luck. And Buck inevitably plays a prank on her and Huer at the end by pretending to be a Zygot again, haw-haw.

It’s ironic that the show’s primary recurring villains, Ardala and Kane, always seem to be saddled with the show’s weakest episodes (even if you include the clip show, since they appeared in archive footage). This is one of the sillier premises they’ve done, it has a fair amount of implausible ideas and plot holes, and it’s an odd fit to the characters; Kane has never been an inventor before. Ardala’s obsessive crush on Buck as the ultimate specimen of manhood, combined with the episode’s assertion that his reaction times are the most superhumanly swift in the galaxy, is kind of embarrassing in how it aggrandizes the lead character. What makes Gerard’s performance work is that he plays Buck as an everyman – certainly not lacking in confidence and courage, but not arrogant or aggressive either. So when the scripts try to play him up as this superhuman Adonis, it feels incongruous.

—

“Twiki is Missing”: He is? Oh, good. Moving on, then…

Oh, wait. They’re gonna look for him, aren’t they? Rats. Anyway, this episode is by Jaron Summers, who had previously co-written a script for the aborted Star Trek: Phase II revival series, “The Child,” which was eventually filmed as the second-season premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation thanks to the 1988 writers’ strike. It opens with, unusually for this show, a pretty smart science-fiction idea. Wilma is escorting a “spaceberg” of frozen oxygen to Earth to help replenish its holocaust-depleted atmosphere, a maneuver that’s been done successfully twice before, but that carries considerable risk of a catastrophic ignition if the berg doesn’t hit its atmospheric window just right. While the idea of a frozen mass of pure molecular oxygen existing in space seems chemically unlikely, the idea of terraforming a planet by using cometary impacts to increase its stock of volatiles and atmospheric gases is pretty solid scientifically, featured in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and in Star Trek: Enterprise’s “Terra Prime.”

The not-so-great part involves a tyrannical mining consortium head named Belzack, hammily acted by John P. Ryan (at a ham level of about 0.4 Palances, I’d say). He mines the universe’s most powerful chemical explosive, blazium, but he’s frustrated by miner inefficiency and revolts cutting into his profits, so his assistant suggests a solution: Twiki. Or as he’s formally known, Ambuquad N22-23-T. (25th-century English in the show is written in a font where some letters are always upper-case and some are always lower-case, so it’s actually written “AMbuQuAd n22-23-t” on the photo.) Supposedly, what makes Twiki such a wiseass is that Buck, with his limited 1980s technological skills, has somehow reprogrammed a 25th-century AI to have unique properties like loyalty and imagination, and Belzack somehow thinks this will make for better mining thralls than ordinary mindless drones. At least two things about that sentence seem backward to me.

So Belzack sends his employee Stella, who’s played by future Sledge Hammer! female lead (and future Mrs. Michael Crichton) Anne-Marie Martin, under her birth name Eddie Benton. Stella tries to buy Twiki from Buck, and when he refuses, she convinces him to let her photograph Twiki’s circuits, which is a ruse to lure him into a trap. Stella is one of a multiethnic trio of women who manifest psychokinetic powers when they join hands and “mind meld” (the term is actually used in the episode). It’s kind of an odd limitation on their powers, given that they clearly aren’t siblings like most superpowered characters who need to use their powers in tandem (see the Wonder Twins on Super Friends – or better yet, don’t, that’s a terrible idea – or the Strucker children on The Gifted). They mind-blast Buck, quadnap Twiki, and load him into a remote-piloted Starfighter, but Buck gives chase and retrieves Twiki, though not before a stock-footage dogfight with the empty fighter once Twiki has ejected.

So Belzack has his Wonder Triplets kidnap Buck this time in order to extort Huer into sending him Twiki. Huer can do nothing, both because of Directorate “no negotiation with blackmailers” policy and because the spaceberg has hit an ion storm and gone dangerously off course. So Twiki goes to Buck’s rescue, somehow managing to board and launch a Starfighter by himself without clearance, even though we see repeatedly in the course of the episode that he can’t even navigate stairs without being carried. (Why design an “ambuquad” who can’t ambulate? Conversely, why design facilities that aren’t accessible to drones in the first place? Aside from Twiki’s limitations, we’ve seen a number of wheeled drones in the show. So shouldn’t there logically be ramps everywhere?) Of course, Belzack captures Twiki, because Twiki is useless. Buck has to convince Stella – who’s confessed her sob story that Belzack is threatening her son’s life to ensure her compliance – to help him escape, not only to save Twiki, but because he’s realized the blazium explosive is just what’s needed to course-correct the spaceberg and save Earth. While he and Twiki are searching for the explosive, Buck is overcome by a sonic security device which Twiki “saves” him from – but Twiki can only “save” Buck by getting the agonized Buck to lift him up high enough to reach the sonic emitter, because Twiki is bloody useless.

(Just to be clear, I don’t actually hate Twiki as much as it sounds. I don’t think he works very well as a character, largely because of his design and the fact that there’s nothing to his personality beyond random wisecracks – which never work that well because the constant “bidi-bidi-bidi”s inserted before his lines ruin their comic timing. I think the show might have a better reputation if not for the cheese factor of Twiki’s constant presence. But I don’t care enough about Twiki to make the emotional investment for hatred. It’s just fun to trash him.)

So Buck is almost caught again, but Stella finally finds the strength to turn on Belzack and helps him and Twiki get away with a chunk of blazium. With help from Huer and Theopolis’s computations, Buck cuts the chunk to size and drops it on the spaceberg, and Wilma fires to detonate it and set the berg back on course, saving the Earth – from its own people for once. Well, I guess it was their turn. Belzack is conveniently overthrown off-camera, and the comic-relief banter ends the episode like clockwork.

I wouldn’t call this an especially strong episode, but it’s better than I expected a Twiki-centric story to be. The spaceberg plot is pretty cool and sciencey, and the stuff with Stella is okay, though the rationale for why Belzack wanted Twiki in the first place is implausible and continuity-challenged. Twiki has never before been implied to be unique; the other ambuquad we’ve met, Tina in “Cruise Ship to the Stars,” seemed just as human and emotional as he did. And the pilot established that the whole civilization is governed by a council of AIs like Dr. Theopolis, who are certainly sentient and capable of imagination and problem-solving. So the premise doesn’t really fit the universe, any more than it fits Buck’s character to suddenly make him a genius programmer who’s responsible for Twiki’s personality. (I could buy the idea that he’d encouraged Twiki to develop more of his own innate potential for individuality than most drone owners prefer, like how Star Wars: The Clone Wars portrayed the Anakin Skywalker/R2-D2 relationship. Belzack could have simply misunderstood Twiki’s nature and Buck’s role in it.) Also, Huer explained that Belzack made his fortune by selling the highly useful explosive blazium to buyers throughout the known universe, which raises the question, why didn’t the Earth Defense Directorate already have its own supply of blazium to use on the spaceberg? And could there be a sillier name for an explosive than “blazium?” And why do sci-fi universes that already have antimatter insist on making up chemical explosives that are supposedly more powerful? Nothing’s more powerful than 100% conversion of mass to energy.

Also, just to get annoyingly literal, Twiki is never really missing for any significant portion of the episode. When he’s kidnapped, Theo almost instantly tracks down the fighter he’s in. When he’s ejected into space, Buck loses track of him for slightly longer than a commercial break before the New Tulsa traffic center locates him (somehow drifting near “Alpha Centura,” which is a hell of a long range for New Tulsa’s space radar). Once Buck’s kidnapped, Twiki goes off on his own, but he couldn’t really be considered missing because anyone could’ve guessed exactly where he was going, if they hadn’t been too busy trying to save the Earth.

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “Happy Birthday, Buck”/”A Blast for Buck” (spoilers)

“Happy Birthday, Buck” is the TV debut of one of story editor Alan Brennert’s fellow comic book scribes – Martin Pasko, who was writing Marvel’s Star Trek tie-in comic at around this same time, and who would go on to write extensively in animation (including a stint as Batman: The Animated Series’ story editor) and occasionally in live action (including the ‘80s Twilight Zone revival and a Max Headroom episode). It opens with Buck feeling especially melancholy and sick of the 25th century as his birthday approaches, so Wilma and Huer conspire to throw him a surprise party. Huer says it’s Buck’s 534th birthday, which doesn’t quite add up; since it’s stated to be January, we’re in 2492 now, which would mean Buck was born in 1958 and was thus only 29 when he was frozen in 1987, making him 7 years younger than Gil Gerard. Wilma makes plans to invite all Buck’s friends, name-dropping virtually every friendly female guest character in the series so far.

But they need a pretense to get Buck out of his apartment while they set up the party, and fortunately, an excuse for their frivolity is provided by, of all things, a plot to murder Dr. Huer. Not that Huer takes such things seriously, since he feels the Security Directorate is overprotective, but he’s informed of a dead Capellan who’s had half his body turned to silicon and who managed to warn of a plot against Huer before he died. Capellans, in this universe, are mildly telepathic humanoids, and the trait that makes them recognizably Capellan to a casual observer is, get this, curly black hair and thick beards. Which serves as a cheesy disguise for the aspiring murderer, Traeger (Peter MacLean), a former Science Directorate officer who’s been imprisoned on a frontier world for a dozen years and blames his ordeal on the man who sent him to explore it, Dr. Elias Huer. But he picked up a matter-transmutation power from the local environment somehow. (Pasko’s script makes the common SFTV mistake of using the term “molecular transmutation” to describe what’s clearly an atomic-level change, e.g. carbon to silicon.) He intends to kill Huer with it, but he needs help from Cleopatra Jones. Yep, Tamara Dobson appears (just a month after her stint as a regular in season 2 of Filmation’s Jason of Star Command) as Dr. Bayliss, a corrupt psychotherapist who steals secrets from her patients’ minds. He needs her to get Huer’s itinerary for him.

Why? Well, apparently the procedure in a case like this is to send a courier to have Huer’s itinerary programmed into her subconscious so that she can deliver the information to the Security Directorate, where they can extract it without her ever knowing what it was. It seems a very convoluted way to deliver encrypted data, but perhaps vidphone or electronic data transmission is too easy to intercept. Anyway, the courier, Raylyn, is played by the quite lovely Morgan Brittany, and Buck’s interest gives Huer the idea to ask him to escort her, as a distraction so Huer and Wilma can set up the birthday party. (See, I finally got back there.) Which, of course, gets Buck in trouble when Bayliss’s goons come to abduct her. While Wilma is baffling Huer with replicas of 20th-century party favors (and he refuses to be murdered in a party hat if the threat is genuine), Buck tracks down the abductors, learns the plot, gets caught, and escapes in time to chase down Traeger – and gets the surprise party spoiled for him in the process.

An okay episode, fairly lightweight but entertaining. I’m still impressed by the continuity in this show, especially where their running gags are concerned. The replacement plant we saw in Huer’s office last week is glimpsed in the background here, clearly dying. Huer has finally figured out what “piece of cake” means after being baffled by it in earlier episodes. But there are a couple of things that don’t quite work. Raylyn is supposedly a highly experienced courier, yet she totally forgets about the preset code phrase exchange until it’s too late to avoid being kidnapped by the impostor agents. And while Bayliss is justifying herself to Buck, she says that Traeger has left a trail of bodies behind him all his life, then in the very next sentence says he used to be a good man when she knew him before his ordeal. Also, I’m not that impressed by Tamara Dobson’s performance here. I don’t remember her being this clumsy in other roles. And it is a bit odd that the director of Earth’s entire defense establishment has so few responsibilities that he can devote so much of his time to planning a friend’s birthday. All in all, this one’s a pretty frivolous exercise, but a reasonable palate-cleanser after last week’s eerie vampire outing. And at least it’s better than what comes next.

—

“A Blast for Buck”: Not much to say here – it’s a clip show. In recent decades, series that have needed to do clip shows to save money have put some effort into doing them creatively and making them meaningful stories rather than just throwaway time-wasters; see, for instance, Stargate SG-1’s “Disclosure” or Andromeda’s “The Unconquerable Man.” But “A Blast for Buck” is from an earlier era, when clip shows’ plots were rarely anything more than flimsy excuses to cue up a series of stock-footage montages. And this episode is one of the flimsiest, even though they brought in experienced TV writer Richard Nelson to script it (from a story by John Gaynor, meaning it took two people to slap this together).

So basically: Alarms are going off because some unknown offworld force has focused an energy beam on Huer’s office. It’s a teleport beam that materializes a large yo-yo-shaped object (as Twiki describes it), whose only purpose is to beam a cryptic limerick onto Huer’s screen, in the visual style of a Jeopardy clue. It alludes to Buck and ends with the word “blast,” leading Huer and Wilma to jump to the conclusion that the entire Earth is in danger (a jump so vast it must have required a Stargate), so they stick Buck in a memory probe that puts his memories of his adventures up on a screen (including scenes he wasn’t actually there to witness), ostensibly to try to figure out which of his enemies could be behind this “attack.” Whole episodes are recapped in montages of several minutes each, including everything from “Planet of the Slave Girls” to “Escape from Wedded Bliss,” but in each case, the prospective enemy is discarded as a candidate in one or two sentences, which they could’ve done without bothering with the memory probe. In the context of the story, there’s no good reason to replay the actual memories rather than just going through the candidates verbally.

Finally it turns out that the whole thing was a New Year’s Eve puzzle courtesy of Buck’s boy-genius friend Hieronymous Fox (“Cosmic Whiz Kid”), a fact that was spoiled right off the bat when the opening credits listed Gary Coleman as the sole guest star (even though he only appears on a screen). There’s less than 20 minutes of new material in a 48-minute episode, all taking place on three standing sets with only the regulars. The whole thing is pretty disposable.

It was also apparently aired out of order, since it took place on New Year’s Eve, yet last week’s “Happy Birthday, Buck” was on January 7th. Also, Patty Maloney, who played the female ambuquad Tina in “Cruise Ship to the Stars,” filled in for Felix Silla as Twiki in “Space Vampire” and this episode, but not in “Happy Birthday, Buck,” further suggesting this one was filmed after “Vampire.” I wonder why they delayed it. I doubt it was a production issue, since it’s a clip show with hardly any visual effects, so it can’t have been that time-consuming to finish. One possibility: the holiday-season hiatus was between “Escape from Wedded Bliss” on November 29, 1979 and “Cruise Ship to the Stars” on December 27, so maybe they wanted to have three relatively strong episodes in a row after returning from the break instead of just two.

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “Cruise Ship to the Stars”/”Space Vampire” (spoilers)

“Cruise Ship to the Stars” is the second episode in a row by staff writers Alan Brennert and Anne Collins under their respective pseudonyms of Michael Bryant and Corey Appelbaum (story by Brennert, teleplay by both). I wonder, was there some union rule forbidding staff writers from doing too many episodes per season or something? If so, that would’ve been quite different from the modern approach where almost all TV writing is staff-generated rather than freelance. Or it could be that Brennert and Collins took their names off in protest for how their scripts were being rewritten by others. I’m only speculating, though.

Anyway, the titular cruise ship is the Lyran Queen, and it’s the same miniature that would later be remodeled into the Searcher, the hero starship of season 2, in which the show was revamped to be more of a Star Trek clone. Huer and Wilma gently encourage Buck to take an assignment to the cruise ship to protect “Miss Cosmos,” a beauty queen – although Huer and Wilma explain that 25th-century beauty pageants value genetic perfection rather than outward beauty, which is a creepily Aryan idea if you ask me. Apparently her genes are so perfect that thieves are trying to abduct her to obtain her genetic material. Sheesh, guys, just steal her hairbrush, why don’tcha? Anyway, the show finally gets around to reminding the viewers (for the first time since the pilot) why Huer keeps giving these missions to Buck, pointing out that he’d attract less suspicion since he’s not a formal Directorate agent. Yet it does establish that Buck Rogers is a celebrity in his own right, which makes his frequent undercover missions a bit hard to credit.

Miss Cosmos, aka Tara, is played by Dorothy Stratten, midway through her tragically brief period of fame between her discovery as a Playboy model at age 18 and her murder by her abusive husband/manager at age 20. Ironically, the 1981 TV movie dramatizing the story of her life and death would star another Buck Rogers guest actress, Jamie Lee Curtis (“Unchained Woman”), as Stratten. Knowing the details of Stratten’s story makes it kind of hard to watch this, but she’s only briefly featured, not being that much of an actress (though she’s adequate in the two main dialogue scenes she has).

Wilma accompanies Buck in the persona of a New Manhattan heiress wearing a huge amount of priceless jewelry, in order to draw out the thieves (although I didn’t even notice her jewels, since I was too distracted by Erin Gray’s endless legs). Twiki and Theopolis are also along for some reason. Isn’t Theo supposed to be one of the councillors who govern the whole of Earth? Anyway, there’s an annoying subplot where Twiki meets with a fellow “ambuquad” called Tina (Patty Maloney), who – I kid you not – says “Boodi-boodi” in a flirty feminine voice instead of Twiki’s more electronic-sounding “Bidi-bidi.” Twiki’s instantly smitten and goes off with her to make a boodi call. Yes, I went there.

Buck soon encounters a shy, fragile girl named Alison (Kimberly Beck) who’s suffering from blackouts and says her boyfriend Jalor brought her on the cruise for relaxation. But Jalor (Leigh McCloskey, who would play villains in Star Trek Voyager: “Warlord” and Deep Space Nine: “Field of Fire”) is a creepy guy who’s gaslighting Alison, and it turns out that he’s provoking her transformation into a Mr. Hyde-like alter ego, his partner in crime Sabrina, who has superstrength and can fire psionic bolts from her hands. Sabrina is played by Trisha Noble, who would later play Padme’s mother in Star Wars Episode III. (Which means that Buck Rogers gets beaten up by Luke Skywalker’s grandmother.) Here, though, she reminds me physically and vocally of a cross between Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt – quite an effective villainess. The casting director did a pretty good job of finding two actresses of similar height and build, so that it’s plausible when one transforms into the other and is still wearing the same outfit. The transformation effect is a fade-to-red overexposure/dissolve that’s similar in principle to the effect Doctor Who used to transform William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.

Anyway, after a couple of encounters with Sabrina and her accomplice, and after failing to prevent Miss Cosmos’s abduction, Buck somehow manages to make the intuitive leap that Sabrina is a mutant who can camouflage herself with an alternate form – a “transmute,” as Theo calls it. Maybe he made the connection with Alison’s blackouts, or maybe he recognized that they were wearing the same outfit. He and Wilma arrange to provoke Sabrina’s emergence, with some unexpected help from Alison, who’s gotten tired of being handled by Jalor and lets her anger at him bleed over into Sabrina when she changes. Team Buck then herds Sabrina into a trap with sonic cannons, and once defeated, she turns back into Alison, who manages to remember where Miss Cosmos is being held prisoner – strapped to a very Goldfingery laser that was meant to carve her up for easy smuggling, but that’s conveniently been taking its time to build up power so as not to register on ship’s sensors, allowing Buck to save her in the nick of time. Alison is sent back to Earth so her condition can be cured, and Team Buck enjoys the rest of the cruise, with the implication that Buck’s going to be one with the Cosmos before much longer.

All in all, a pretty typical episode – a somewhat cheesy concept that’s largely a present-day plot dressed up with some futuristic tropes, but executed better (and with less blatant sexism) than it could’ve been given the premise, with some decent scripting and sci-fi ideas, but with annoying comic relief from Twiki. I’m coming to realize that Twiki is probably the main reason for this show’s poor reputation in retrospect. Mel Blanc does what he can with the material, but he really has nothing to do but crack wise and use anachronistic expressions he presumably picked up from Buck, and there’s kind of a discord between the deep, wise-ass baritone voice Blanc uses for Twiki (not far off from his natural voice at that age) and the boyish, wide-eyed character design.

—

“Space Vampire”: Finally, we get an episode by other writers – the team of Kathleen Barnes & David Wise, who had previously written for Filmation’s Isis, Space Sentinels, and Tarzan, Hanna-Barbera’s Godzilla, and an episode of Wonder Woman. (Wise would later develop the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series.) If the title sounds familiar, it’s because Wise was inspired by the novel Space Vampires, later the basis for Tobe Hooper’s 1985 horror film Lifeforce. However, it doesn’t feature a gorgeous female vampire walking around stark naked for half the episode. What we get instead is… well… not so much to look at.

Even with freelance writers, it’s loaded with continuity nods. Buck and Wilma drop Twiki off at Theta Station for repairs while on their way to a vacation on Genesia, Hieronymous Fox’s planet from “Cosmic Whiz Kid.” Wilma is wearing the same halter-and-pants ensemble that Fox’s bodyguard wore, suggesting that it’s a standard Genesian fashion. They’re traveling in a new ship that Buck has bought (same miniature as Ardala’s shuttle from the pilot), and he’s showing Wilma how to operate it, including a reference to the separable rear compartment with its own identical controls. Surely this won’t come up later, will it? (It struck me as odd that Buck would need to teach an experienced fighter pilot like Wilma to operate a civilian ship. This is an artifact of the rewrite process – though Wise and Barnes developed it for Erin Gray, the script was written to Gil Gerard’s insistence that it be a guest actress instead, until Gray put her foot down.)

Before they can ditch Twiki (which they’re clearly eager to do, and who can blame them), a derelict freighter comes through the adjoining Stargate and crashes with the station, embedding itself and exposing the station’s atmosphere to its own. The crew are found dead, and the captain’s log reports that her “paramed” believed it to be a case of EL-7, a highly deadly virus that causes hallucinations. But when she’s the last one left, the captain screams in terror as some unseen force comes for her. The station’s Commander Royko (Christopher Stone) is convinced she was hallucinating with the virus, and orders the station’s Doctor Ecbar (Lincoln Kilpatrick) to begin vaccinations, though the supply on hand is inadequate. But Ecbar tells Buck the bodies aren’t quite dead, but rather in some sort of cellular stasis, as if something has drained their life essence. Buck’s reference to vampires is one more bit of Earth heritage forgotten by the 2490s.

Meanwhile, there’s a swirly red energy creature wandering around, looking a lot like the evil pinwheel thingy in Star Trek: “Day of the Dove,” and Wilma is struck with an uncharacteristic sense of anxiety and dread. Buck investigates further and finds evidence that the freighter crew was killed, or rather, soul-sucked, by a mythical alien creature called a Vorvon (Nicholas Hormann). The rest of the episode is a creepy horror movie pastiche as the Vorvon stalks Wilma, Buck plays Van Helsing, and Royko plays the skeptical authority figure who’s convinced the disease is making Buck hallucinate. Wilma ultimately gives herself over to the Vorvon in exchange for sparing the others, but once she’s vamped (in more ways than one), the first thing she does is to go all Brides of Dracula on Buck, who barely gets away. Eventually the Vorvon flees with Wilma, but Buck has arranged things so that his new ship is the one it steals, and he’s booby-trapped it to emerge from the Stargate near a sun. (Which raises all sorts of questions about how Stargates work, since I thought they were point-to-point, with a gate needed at both ends.) Luckily, the sunlight weakens the Vorvon and frees Wilma, who (under Buck’s urging over the radio) remembers all that convenient exposition about how to separate the rear half of the ship and fly away in the nick of time.

This could have been a hell of a good episode. It’s quite effective at creating a moody, eerie horror-movie feel and giving Gil Gerard a chance to play a much more solemn Buck than usual, which he does well. Sure, it’s a vampire movie pastiche in space, but it’s a fairly good one. With one major exception: The Vorvon’s makeup is ridiculous! He looks like a Ferengi Nosferatu with a giant honking unibrow. Seriously – when he smiles maliciously, he looks like Rom from Deep Space Nine grinning goofily. And the bald cap is very poorly blended with the actor’s face. The resemblance to Max Schreck’s Count Orlok from the 1922 Nosferatu was no doubt intentional, but the execution was very poor and it just looks absurd. It’s an awful makeup design that really spoils the scary mood, and the actor underneath doesn’t leave much of an impression either. Also, helpless dread and panic is a really bad look for the normally unflappable Wilma, although at least the episode acknowledges how strange and out of character it is for her. I was hoping she’d turn around and save herself and Buck in the end, but I guess that was too much to expect for 1980.

Back on Earth, Dr. Huer and Theo have a comic-relief subplot, in which Huer despairs at his inability to care for the rubber tree that Buck gave him in an earlier episode’s tag (more continuity!) and ends up replacing it with a totally different plant, which completely fails to fool Buck. It’s a fun bit, and I’m loving the tight continuity, but it kind of clashes with the dark tone of the rest.

Note: This is Anne Collins’s last episode as story consultant.

Announcing AMONG THE WILD CYBERS — and the return of the Green Blaze!

At last, I’m able to make my first new project announcement in over a year. Among the Wild Cybers: Tales Beyond the Superhuman, a story collection reprinting nearly all of my previously uncollected short fiction, will soon be published by eSpec Books. And I have even better news: the collection will also feature a new, never-before-published novelette starring Emerald Blair, the Green Blaze, in her first print appearance since Only Superhuman!

Among the Wild Cybers will be available in both print and e-book form, and will be crowdfunded by a Kickstarter campaign that eSpec will soon be launching, probably later this month. The collection, edited by Danielle Ackley-McPhail, will include all my short fiction from my default/Only Superhuman universe, plus the bonus story “No Dominion” (“bonus” meaning it was the only one left over and I didn’t want to leave it uncollected). The title comes from the first story appearing in the collection, “Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele,” but as it happens, the majority of the stories do feature cybers (AIs) in some capacity, though only three focus on them heavily.

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Copyright Christopher L. Bennett

The new Green Blaze story, “Aspiring to Be Angels,” is an 8000-word novelette depicting a key moment in Emerald Blair’s Troubleshooter apprenticeship. I know, I know – prequels. Not as exciting as a sequel would be. But Emry’s superhero training was a part of her backstory that I didn’t manage to include in OS’s flashback chapters; I tried to include it, but I ended up skipping over it for the sake of the novel’s flow. “Aspiring” allows me to fill that gap, and to explore the process by which Emerald Blair became the Green Blaze. Doing a prequel also allows me to bring back Emerald’s mentor Arkady Nazarbayev and delve further into his hero-sidekick relationship with Emry.

In some ways, though, “Aspiring to Be Angels” is more a horror story than a superhero story. It’s not gory or anything, but it’s more dark, bizarre, and creepy than my usual work. It’s something of an homage to the anime Serial Experiments Lain. But don’t worry, it’s also an integral part of Emerald Blair’s journey, true to her character and her world. And I’m hoping it’s just the beginning of her continued adventures, in one form or another.

Another story in the collection, “The Weight of Silence,” might as well be new for most readers, since the online magazine where it appeared, Alternative Coordinates, ceased to exist less than a year after the story’s publication. AC did have a printable PDF edition, as I recall, so there may be a few print copies of “The Weight of Silence” out there somewhere, but I doubt there are very many. So it’s been effectively a “lost” story for nearly seven years, and I’m glad it will finally be available again.

This will also be the print debut for two of my stories that have previously appeared only online, “No Dominion” and “The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing.” Both stories are still available online as of this writing (see links on my Homepage and Original Fiction pages), but between them, “Aspiring to Be Angels,” and “The Weight of Silence,” half of the stories in Among the Wild Cybers are appearing in print for the first or nearly the first time. Which means, hopefully, that “Dominion,” “Caress,” and “Weight” will finally get added to my Internet Speculative Fiction Database author page. Apparently their editors don’t pay much attention to online publications, although they do list my Star Trek e-novellas.

I’d originally expected that the stories in Among the Wild Cybers would appear in chronological order, but Danielle and I decided instead to arrange them for the best reading experience, so no two adjacent stories would be too much alike. Here’s the tentative order, with original publication dates:

“Among the Wild Cybers of Cybele” (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dec 2000)
“Aspiring to Be Angels”                     (new)
“Twilight’s Captives”                         (Analog, Jan/Feb 2017)
“No Dominion”                                   (DayBreak Magazine, June 2010)
“Aggravated Vehicular Genocide”     (Analog, Nov 1998)
“The Weight of Silence”                     (Alternative Coordinates, Spring 2010)
“Murder on the Cislunar Railroad”    (Analog, June 2016)
“The Caress of a Butterfly’s Wing”   (Buzzy Mag, Nov 2014)

There will, however, be an appendix providing a chronological ordering of the stories and an overview of the future history they occupy – including a few new bits of history and worldbuilding that haven’t appeared in print before. In writing that material, I even thought of a way to tweak a part of that history so that a couple of stories have a stronger connection than they did originally.

Between them, Only Superhuman and Among the Wild Cybers will contain the entire published OS continuity to date. If you also buy Hub Space, you’ll have all my published original fiction so far except for “Abductive Reasoning,” which came out too recently to be included in ATWC (which didn’t have room for it anyway). But that’s all right – having a story still uncollected gives me an incentive to keep writing more so I can build a second collection. Hopefully this time it won’t take 20 years to do it.

I’ll provide the link to the Kickstarter page once it’s available. Keep an eye out for updates on publication date, cover art, etc. I’m so glad I can finally post news about this book!

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “The Plot to Kill a City”/”Return of the Fighting 69th” (spoilers)

“The Plot to Kill a City, Parts 1 & 2”: This 2-parter by the show’s story editor, comics/TV/prose SF writer Alan Brennert (author of the classic Batman story “To Kill a Legend” in Detective Comics #500, and also a future story editor for the revivals of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits), opens with Buck undercover to capture a thug named Raphael Argus, who’s known for frequently changing his appearance, allowing Buck to adopt his identity to infiltrate the Legion of Death, a notorious band of interstellar mercenaries seeking revenge for the Earth Defense Directorate’s recent killing of one of their members.

Brennert’s comics background shows in the composition of the Legion, most of whose members have various superpowers. Quince (John Quade) is a telekinetic. Sherese (Nancy DeCarl) is an empath who’s very suspicious and paranoid. Varek (Anthony James) is from a human colony that destroyed itself in nuclear war, leaving its survivors as deformed mutants with the ability to turn intangible and phase through walls. And the leader, Kellogg… well, he’s the Riddler (Frank Gorshin). He’s also the master strategist of the group.

Since the sensitivity of the mission means that Buck can’t tell the authorities who he really is, he gets pulled over in Argus’s ship by the space cops before he even reaches the Stargate for Aldebaran II, the wretched hive of scum and villainy where the Legion is meeting. Weirdly, when caught in the cops’ tractor beam, Argus’s amorous computer says their stardrive is shutting down and they’re dropping to sublight. Hold on, weren’t Stargates the method of FTL travel here? Anyway, Buck escapes with help from a fellow prisoner called Barney – played by a young and welcome James Sloyan, and based on a character named Black Barney from the Buck Rogers comic strip – who seems jazzed to meet the infamous Raphael Argus and helps him escape. Meanwhile, since Buck is delayed, Wilma dons a slutty disguise and lures the womanizing Quince to her room, using the same euphoric truth drug from last week to interrogate him.

Once Buck arrives, the Legion tests him out, first by attacking him, second by introducing him to Joella (Markie Post), an old flame of Argus, who instantly recognizes him as not Argus (Aren’tgus?) but plays along with his deception for her own reasons. Buck also bonds with Varek over the fact that both their worlds blew up in holocausts. Varek is a sympathetic character, but he feels he deserves to be bossed around by Kellogg because of his people’s crimes.

At the meeting the next day, Kellogg reveals that his plan is to destroy New Chicago. But Sherese senses Wilma listening before he can go into details, and Buck goes off to “chase” her, along with another Legion member. She does fine in escaping until she’s unfortunately saddled with the ‘70s TV female requirement of tripping over the first convenient obstacle, and Buck has to stun the other guy, then have Wilma take him captive and go back and report that Wilma killed the other guy before “Argus” killed her. Kellogg spells out his plan to detonate New Chicago’s matter-antimatter reactor, which is called a contraterrene reactor – an old term for antimatter coined by physicist Vladimir Rojansky in 1935 and popularized by SF author Jack Williamson in the 1940s. Knowing the plan now, Buck gathers up Joella and tries to escape to the ship – but the Legion has been tipped off that “Argus” is a fraud by Barney, who met Argus before and knows this isn’t him. And that’s the end of Part 1.

In Part 2, Buck gets out of trouble by using a fallback identity Huer arranged for him, an assassin named Whist. Kellogg contacts his agent in New Chicago to confirm the Whist identity, which checks out. But the agent then bugs Huer’s office to confirm he’s clueless about the Legion’s plot, and thus he finds out that “Whist” is actually Buck Rogers, a fact he transmits to Kellogg. Huer and Wilma subsequently arrest the agent, aware that he accessed the Whist identity. Now, logically, if they were monitoring the computer to tell them when the Whist file was accessed, wouldn’t it also have told them who’d done it, so they could’ve stopped him before he blew Buck’s cover? Worse, Huer says the only reason they knew the man had done it was because Theopolis had already pegged him as the Legion spy! So how was he allowed to get away with warning Kellogg? It’s either sloppy security or sloppy writing.

Anyway, Joelle helps Buck get away from the Legion at the spaceport. (Writer Brennert inserts some DC Comics nods into the PA announcements – “Dr. Adam Strange of Alpha Centauri” and a flight leaving for Thanagar.) He’s soon cornered by Varek – who fakes killing him and lets him get away because he doesn’t want Earth to suffer the same fate as his bombed-out planet (well, not again, anyway). Buck and Joelle intimidate Barney into giving him the Starfighter he bought with his thirty pieces of silver earned for selling out Buck, a fair enough exchange. Back on Earth, the Legion blackmails Selvan (James McEachin), an engineer who works at the CT reactor, into giving them access by threatening his family (though Varek bonds with his children while the others are talking to Selvan). Luckily for them, Selvan assumes they’re technology thieves and doesn’t consider that there might be a more apocalyptic reason to break into an antimatter power station. A mix of Selvan’s knowledge, Kellogg’s gadgetry, Quince’s telekinesis, Varek’s phasing, and Sherese’s empathic lie detection lets them get through the “nineteen or twenty” security barriers, actually more like five.

Once Selvan figures out that Kellogg is rigging the plant to blow, he fights back, and when ordered to kill Selvan, Varek refuses and finally turns on his master. Both men are felled for their troubles, though the “Legion of Death” members inexplicably use the stun setting, so that they’re able to recover when Huer arrives and work to shut down the reactor while Buck and Wilma chase after the escaping Legionnaires, dogfight with them, and blow up Quince and Kellogg while Sherese escapes off-camera. Since some antiparticles have already escaped containment and the main console is destroyed, Varek is the only one who can get inside the reactor chamber and restore the decaying magnetic bottles while remaining phased to avoid annihilation. (We saw before that he can selectively solidify different parts of his body – he put his arm through a wall to grab Buck around the throat.) Buck and Wilma get back from outer space just in time to see him succeed. And somehow, all of this takes place in just five minutes! A longer countdown, 20 or 30 minutes, would’ve made more sense, just to accommodate the moving around between the plant and outer space. (Although the elapsed screen time is about 5:45.) Varek is almost killed by stray antiparticles but manages to phase to safety, and Wilma promises to help heal his injuries. Cue unfunny comedy tag scene with Huer and Wilma forced to endure Buck’s attempt at reinventing wine and Twiki flirting with Joella (successfully, somehow), and we’re out.

While this one does have some pretty sizeable plot holes, it’s not bad. It’s still a plot that could’ve been done in a present-day show – stopping terrorists from blowing up a power plant – dressed up with sci-fi trappings like Buck’s gadgets and the Legion’s superpowers. But Brennert depicts antimatter fairly credibly, and even works a nice vintage science fiction homage with the use of the word “contraterrene.” And the strongest conjectural element, I suppose, is how Varek’s personality and actions are shaped by the holocaust his people endured. It’s also the strongest character element in the story, and the closest this season ever comes under Bruce Lansbury’s “keep it basic” guidance to making any sort of social commentary through science-fiction allegory. All in all, I’m not sure this needed to be a 2-parter – there’s a lot of padding and peripheral action that’s largely just taking up time – but there are some decent ideas at the core.

—

“Return of the Fighting 69th”: We go from a 2-parter about a “Plot to Kill a City” one week to a 1-parter about a plot to kill everyone on Earth the next. That escalated quickly. And it’s a bit of  a pacing problem for the series. It might’ve been wiser to put some space between these two episodes.

This one is written by David Bennett Carren, the debut SFTV credit of a writer who would work extensively in SF and animated TV, including a story editor gig on season 4 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The villains in this one are fairly petty for a scheme of planetary genocide – gunrunners Corliss and Trent (Robert Quarry and Elizabeth Allen), who seek revenge on Wilma Deering for the extensive burns and injuries they suffered when she shot them down three years earlier – injuries they declined to have treated on Earth because their freedom and revenge meant more to them. They pursue this revenge by raiding a recently unearthed stockpile of 20th-century weapons near Washington, DC, including enough nerve gas bombs to poison the planet’s entire atmosphere (which seems quite unlikely, but whatever).

When two rookies under Buck and Wilma’s command (seriously, how did a relic from the distant past get to be Earth’s top pilot so quickly?) get destroyed trying to get through the standard, absurdly dense sci-fi asteroid field that Corliss and Trent are hiding in, Huer orders Wilma to reactivate Noah Cooper (Peter Graves), the only person who can get through the asteroids. Cooper is Wilma’s old flight instructor and beloved family friend, whom she forced to retire the previous year along with his entire squadron, the 69th Squadron of the Earth Space Marines (gee, throw in Air and you’d have everything covered). This leads to some tensions when she and Buck go to recruit them. (Buck passes up the opportunity to mention that he’s far older than any of them.) Their grounding was on the, err, grounds that they were too old to meet the physical requirements, but Buck gets Wilma to realize she was biased by her love for Cooper and his squadron and her unwillingness to risk seeing them get hurt.

Cooper insists on reactivating his whole team and modifying some vintage bombers for the mission. He gets the squadron through the asteroids okay, but Buck and Wilma are shot down and taken captive, making Cooper hesitant to bomb the enemy base with them inside. This gives Corliss and Trent time to gloat and threaten, while Buck bonds with Trent’s deaf slave girl Alicia (Katherine Wiberg) by pulling out yet another 20th-century skill that’s been rendered nigh-obsolete by 25th-century science, namely sign language. She helps them escape from their cell, albeit in a way that requires Wilma to seduce the guards first, because of course. They’re almost recaptured, but Buck’s familiarity with obsolete weapons nobody else recognizes as weapons gives him the edge, and they escape just before Cooper blows the joint. There are some tense moments when Cooper’s ship appears to be lost in the explosion, but he turns up intact, and Buck finds Alicia’s parents, and it’s a happy ending all around as usual.

Once more, we get a standard, “basic” 20th-century plot dressed up with sci-fi trappings – in this case, a spaced-up riff on a war story. Indeed, all three of the male actors playing members of the 69th were actual WWII-era veterans – Peter Graves and Woody Strode were in the Army Air Corps and Eddie Firestone was in the Marine Reserves. (Which may have been part of the inspiration for the story, or at least the casting.) It makes for a perfectly serviceable, decent ‘70s TV episode, but it’s not particularly imaginative or innovative either. It’s just okay. Lansbury wanted the show to be “basic” and unthreatening to the average viewer, which means it’s watchable but nothing special. But at least that makes for a better show than I feared it would be, both from my memories and from rewatching the pilot.

One part of this one I liked was Johnny Harris’s score. Appropriately, the leitmotif used for the 69th’s bombers in this Buck Rogers episode reminded me of one of Ray Ellis & Norm Prescott’s music cues for Filmation’s Flash Gordon animated film and series from the same year.

BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY Reviews: “Planet of the Slave Girls”/”Vegas in Space” (spoilers)

The Buck Rogers series proper has less direct involvement from executive producer Glen Larson than Battlestar Galactica did, which is probably to its advantage. Neither he nor his pilot co-writer Leslie Stevens did any writing for it post-pilot. Bruce Lansbury, formerly of The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, and Wonder Woman, took over as supervising producer and showrunner for the series. His approach, according to an interview in the June 1980 Starlog, was to avoid telling “concept stories” like Star Trek did, on the theory that those alienated the average viewer. Instead, he wanted to “ignore the sci-fi nature of the show” and “look for a way to tell stories that are currently being told on other kinds of shows – basic melodrama, action-adventure, and humor.” This was a highly unambitious approach on Lansbury’s part, and as we go, we’ll see how that desire to keep it “basic” played out. Lansbury also largely dropped the pilot’s dystopian portrayal of Earth as a sparsely inhabited wasteland sheltering within a planetary shield, instead showing a more prosperous humanity that was a prominent interstellar power.

The second, also movie-length episode, written by the show’s story consultant Anne Collins, is pulpily and misleadingly titled “Planet of the Slave Girls.” (The working title was “Flight to Sorceror’s Mountain.” According to story editor Alan Brennert, Bruce Lansbury wanted all the episode titles to be “Flight of/to/from” something, in the same way that all Wild Wild West titles had been “Night of…”, but NBC’s executives handed down the more simplistic and/or garish titles the show used instead.) It starts with Wilma Deering introducing Buck (and the viewers) to the Stargates, the show’s method of FTL interstellar travel devised by Brennert – essentially a jump gate technology like that later used in Babylon 5, or for that matter the space-based gates in Stargate Atlantis, except this kind of Stargate is just an array of four animated starbursts that form a diamond-shaped area of squiggly light between them when a ship passes through. Buck and Wilma gate into a training exercise in which an Earth training flight comes under attack from pirates (using stock footage of the Draconian fighters from the pilot), and the flight leader Duke Danton (David Groh), an old flame of Wilma’s, is resentful of Buck intervening to save the pilot, and subsequently of Wilma’s evident closeness to Buck. They later clash when Buck tries to teach 20th-century combat strategy to the 25th-century pilots, using football metaphors that Buck and Duke end up demonstrating on each other physically, in much the way you’d expect from guys named Buck and Duke.

The rescued pilot, Regis Saroyan (Michael Mullins), is one of many Earth pilots to fall ill recently, weaking Earth’s defenses. (It’s mentioned that this has happened in several of Earth’s cities, promptly retconning the pilot’s assertion that Earth was a wasteland aside from “the Inner City,” which is now simply called New Chicago.) It turns out to be the result of poisoned “food discs” shipped from the planet Vistula, so Buck, Wilma, and Danton go there to investigate on the pretense of returning Regis home to his father, the Earth-born governor of Vistula, played by the incomparable but wasted Roddy McDowall. Governor Saroyan turns out to be enslaving the Vistulan workers, who are sold to him by Kaleel, a Vistulan cult leader who’s outrageously overacted by Jack Palance, and who has plans to overthrow Earth. This is presented as evil, even though the Earth people seem perfectly happy with the idea of slavery, with Buck and Regis being the only objectors. The Vistulans are played by white actors with some extras of color, but they’re coded as Arabs, desert nomads who dress in burnooses and keffiyehs and who follow a fanatical leader. Yeah, that stereotype goes way back.

Later, Buck meets Ryma (Brianne Leary), the one and only slave girl who plays a role in “Planet of the Slave Girls,” and actually a resistance leader who tips him off to the plant where the food supply is being poisoned. While Buck (and his stunt double who looks nothing like him) is off fighting the plant’s guards, Wilma and Ryma get captured and taken to Kaleel’s mountain redoubt. Buck and Duke follow and get shot down, and they bond while fighting off desert nomads, while Wilma escapes her captors and disguises herself in skimpy slave girl rags. The boys discover that Kaleel is readying a fleet to attack Earth, so Duke flies off to warn Earth while Buck infiltrates the mountain and gets captured. He, Wilma, and Ryma are stuck in a lava-pit deathtrap that’s poorly enough designed to allow them to escape, while Duke gets the handful of remaining pilots to join him in a raid on Kaleel’s fleet. Said pilots include Twiki and Theopolis, as well as Colonel Gordon, an old veteran coming out of retirement for one last mission. Gordon is a nice bit of homage, since he’s played by Buster Crabbe, the legendary star of the 1930s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movie serials. Practically every line he has in the episode is a winking in-joke about that fact.

Incidentally, Twiki becoming a fighter pilot raises all sorts of questions. In the pilot, it was implied that “drones” were common enough that some random stranger who might be a spy was still able to get his own personal drone. So why doesn’t Earth already have a whole legion of robot fighter pilots? Or just put AI brains in the fighters themselves? Then again, given that AIs are considered sentient and that “quads” like Theo apparently run the society, maybe they don’t want to risk their own kind in battle. Which makes you wonder about their opinion of humans.

Anyway, Buck and Wilma steal the last two enemy fighters conveniently left lying around, and Buck proves his identity to Duke by referring to a conversation about football they had offscreen (would’ve been a better callback if it had been onscreen), and then they use Buck’s “quarterback” strategy from his earlier lecture to take out the enemy squadron leader and win the day. And Governor Roddy McDowall is mortified that he allowed Kaleel, the guy he bought the slaves from, to lead him astray, and his son and Ryma agree to work with him to make things better. So lemme get this straight – the true villain behind the slavery was the guy who sold the slaves, and the guy who bought and owned the slaves and ruthlessly punished them for the slightest transgression was the real victim? Uh-huh.

Aside from the horrifically clumsy approach to human rights and the horrific scenery-chewing by Jack Palance, and the waste of both Roddy McDowall and Buster Crabbe, this is a definite improvement on the pilot. It’s still silly and cheap (stock footage of the fighter launch tubes from the Draconian ship is repurposed as both the Earth and Vistula launch facilities, and will continue to be reused generically for most of the series), and it suffers from an excess of villains, but it’s at least a somewhat coherent story, and the execution doesn’t feel quite so lazy and uncaring, with better acting and better sets. There’s a nice little subplot about an Earth scientist and his computer partner searching for a cure – they bicker incessantly, but when a Vistulan agent sabotages the computer, the human scientist laments it as cold-blooded murder, and is moved when Twiki and Theo manage to bring him back to life later on. It’s also a lot less sexist than the title implied it might be; both Wilma and Ryma are allowed to be somewhat effective leaders and fighters, up to a point (Wilma needed Buck to teach her the lost art of judo, and both women relied on him to rescue them from the lava pit), and there are capable supporting women on both Duke’s fighter team and Kaleel’s band of villains. I like the music too. Though Galactica’s Stu Phillips scored the pilot, this episode is scored by Johnny Harris (fresh off of season 3 of Wonder Woman) and has a nice funky ‘70s sound – which, admittedly, is a bit incongruous for a show about a pilot from 1987 living in 2491.

—

“Vegas in Space” is the first regular-length episode and the second in a row by Anne Collins, who’d previously written for Hawaii Five-O and Wonder Woman, and would later write several episodes of Robert Urich’s Vega$. It’s actually the most solidly written episode yet, though it feels like Collins took a story pitch for a contemporary crime drama and reworked it for Buck Rogers.

Cesar Romero plays Armat, an infamous but untouchable Earth crime lord who’s willing to confess and turn himself in if the Earth Defense Directorate (the organization Huer runs and Buck and Wilma work for) will help him rescue a kidnapped employee, Felina (Ana Alicia), who inadvertently saw secret data that his rival Velosi (Richard Lynch) wants to extract from her brain and use against Armat. Huer is reluctant until he offers information on how to defeat the Draconians’ Hatchet fighters. Remember how the pilot established that the Starfighters’ computers were useless against the Hatchet fighters so Buck had to target them manually, but this was never explained or followed up on? Well, to my surprise, this episode plugs that plot hole by establishing the Hatchets’ resistance to computer targeting as an ongoing mystery stymieing Earth’s forces, and gives Buck and Wilma a debate about the merits of computer targeting versus human intuition.

Oddly, though, Wilma is missing for most of the episode, replaced by a Directorate major named Marla Landers (Juanin Clay), who recruits Buck to join her in infiltrating Velosi’s orbiting casino city, Sinaloa, because of his proficiency at “Ten and Eleven,” the game we know as Blackjack. Apparently Erin Gray initially hesitated to return as a series regular, due to the coldness of the pilot version of Wilma (according to a December 1979 Starlog interview), and Clay was slated to replace her. I found a later Starlog article stating that “the fifth hour,” which I guess would be this episode, was the first regular series episode to be filmed. My best guess is that Clay shot the bulk of the episode playing Wilma Deering, but when Gray finally signed for the series, they shot new framing scenes with Wilma introducing Clay to Buck as Marla Landers, a close enough name to “Wilma Deering” that it could easily be dubbed into the rest of the episode.

Anyway, Buck and Wilmaaaa… arla infiltrate the casino city, and Buck wows them at the gaming table by card counting, which is a lost art in the 25th century because everyone has become dependent on computers. Marla complains to Velosi about the “cheating” player, in order to attract the attention of a thug (The Rockford Files’s James Luisi) so Buck can overpower him and give him a truth drug to find out where Velina is held. Meanwhile, Marla has to fend off Velosi’s romantic advances, but she’s saved by the arrival of Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman, who had a cameo in the feature cut of the pilot as Emperor Draco but who now plays Morphus, the expert who will extract Felina’s memories in a manner that she won’t survive.

But Buck and Marla manage to steal Velosi’s master key so Buck can save her. They break out as planned – along with Tangie (Pamela Shoop), an indentured and scantily attired casino employee who convinces Buck to buy her freedom with his winnings. Then they have to fight off some Hatchet fighters – apparently Velosi was their supplier all along – and Marla has to carry the payoff of the Buck-Wilma debate from earlier by taking on the fighters manually. Then there’s a closing scene where Armat comes clean about being Felina’s father, which she doesn’t want to believe – something he tells her is probably for the best, for her own safety.

This is actually a decently written episode with some nice character bits. Buck is written more dimensionally, with some all-too-brief exploration of his feelings about being 500 years removed from the people he cared for, but also with a pretty fun interplay between him and Luisi’s casino guard. It isn’t much of a science fiction story, just a crime story that with a few minor changes could’ve been set in 1979 Vegas or Atlantic City, which is in keeping with Lansbury’s desire to avoid science-fiction “concept stories.” Still, it’s frankly better-written and more intelligent than I expected from this show, and it lets Gil Gerard play a more well-rounded, substantial character than he did in the first two movie-length episodes. And it actually makes the effort to fix up a plot hole from the pilot about the fighters, which is an impressive bit of continuity. Maybe there’s some modest hope for this show yet.