Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 71

Asking a favor of my readers

I’ve noticed that Only Superhuman has very few reviews posted on its pages at Amazon (11 as of this writing) and Barnes & Noble (7 as of this writing). I’ve gotten a fair amount of feedback for the book in various places, so I know people are reading it and talking about it, but surprisingly little of it is showing up on those two pages. Yet I gather that the reviews on those sites help generate attention for a book, at least among their customers. So I wonder if I could ask folks who’ve read the novel to post reviews on either or both of those pages. It doesn’t matter whether you bought the book there; this is about increasing attention and discussion. And of course I’m not just soliciting positive reviews. Please be honest, but make your thoughts heard. And feel free to use the like/share buttons on those pages too. And if you’ve listened to the audiobook versions of Only Superhuman or Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder, feel free to post reviews on their GraphicAudio pages.

If nothing else, getting more reviews might produce a more statistically useful sample size. As it stands, OS is averaging 2.8 stars out of 5 on Amazon and 4.5 out of 5 on B&N, so clearly the samples are too small to give representative results. Of course, what I’m asking for isn’t going to produce statistically unbiased results either, but it couldn’t hurt.

Feel free to do the same for any of my other novels as well, of course, although my Star Trek novels generally get more reaction already, and my Marvel novels are out of print. Only Superhuman is the one that I think could benefit the most. Plus it would just be nice to get more feedback from my readers.

RISE OF THE FEDERATION: TOWER OF BABEL cover and blurb released!

StarTrek.com has just released the cover for Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel .

This is a distinct improvement over the rather, err, understated cover to Book 1. That cover wasn’t what I’d been hoping for, so I asked my editor, Ed Schlesinger, if there was a chance we could get Doug Drexler to do a portrait of Endeavour for Book 2, maybe with Pioneer too. Ed said they could do that and the wheels were already in motion. I guess we were thinking along the same lines. And now Book 2 has a Doug Drexler cover of Endeavour and Pioneer together.

Here’s the cover blurb:

The United Federation of Planets has weathered its first major crisis, but its growing pains are just beginning. Admiral Jonathan Archer hopes to bring the diverse inhabitants of the powerful and prosperous Rigel system into the Federation, jumpstarting the young nation’s growth and stabilizing a key sector of space. Archer and the Federation’s top diplomats journey to the planetoid Babel to debate Rigel’s admission… but a looming presidential race heats up the ideological divide within the young nation, jeopardizing the talks and threatening to undo the fragile unity Archer has worked so hard to preserve.

Meanwhile, the sinister Orion Syndicate recruits new allies of its own, seeking to beat the Federation at its own game. Determined to keep Rigel out of the union, they help a hostile Rigelian faction capture sensitive state secrets along with Starfleet hostages, including a young officer with a vital destiny. Captain Malcolm Reed, Captain T’Pol, and their courageous crews must now brave the wonders and dangers of Rigel’s many worlds to track down the captives before the system is plunged into all-out war.

Tower of Babel goes on sale in late March, and can be preordered from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or wherever you buy books.

Aloha, Professor: RIP Russell Johnson

I just read the news that veteran character actor Russell Johnson, known best as the Professor (Roy Hinkley) from Gilligan’s Island, passed away. The news was broken on Twitter by his co-star Dawn Wells, now one of the last two survivors of the original cast along with Tina Louise.

http://www.thewrap.com/russell-johnson-professor-gilligans-island-dead-89/

This is very sad news. Johnson was something special as the Professor, bringing an air of great intelligence and dignity to the role. He was the straight man, but with the charm of a leading man. And he was, much like his contemporary TV star Mr. Spock, a science nerd who made science nerds look cool and sexy. In a lot of ways, I think he and Spock were two of my most influential role models as a child. I was kind of nerdy and socially inept myself, but I was good at science and knowing stuff, and it was heartening to see that the Professor and Spock were people whose strengths were mainly intellectual but who were valued and appreciated for it. Although my attempts to emulate them didn’t work out too well, since real schoolchildren don’t respect the nerdy science guy as much as island castaways or starship crewpeople do. Still, I don’t blame the Professor and Spock for that. Judging from the other men in my family, I was probably going to turn out much the same way anyway, which is probably why I had such affinity for characters like the Professor.

But Johnson deserves enormous credit for making the Professor as heroic and engaging as he was. He actually made this silly sitcom seem educational at times. I once heard of a study where one group of students was shown an episode clip of the Professor explaining how to make a battery with lemon juice and metal strips, and another was shown a more conventional educational film explaining the same thing — and the group that saw the Gilligan’s Island clip learned it better! I think public television passed up a great opportunity — they should’ve hired Johnson to be the star of an educational show teaching about science. He could’ve anticipated Beakman and Bill Nye by a decade or two.

It’s also a shame that the special-effects technology of the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t up to a live-action Fantastic Four, since Johnson would’ve been absolutely perfect for Reed Richards. Anyone who’s seen Alex Ross’s renderings of Reed in Marvels knows that he feels the same way.

One can fairly say that Johnson deserved a better career than he had, that typecasting as a result of his Gilligan role may have kept him from the leading-man roles he was easily qualified for. But the Professor was a great, iconic role in its own right, and a great legacy for Johnson to leave. He will be remembered.

SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN thoughts: Season 2, Eps.5-8 (spoilers)

“The Seven Million Dollar Man”: Author Martin Caidin, who created Steve Austin in the novel Cyborg, wanted Monte Markham to play the role on TV. The part went to Lee Majors, of course, but here Caidin got a consolation prize of sorts, for Markham guest stars as the title character, the second bionic man.

We open with Steve undergoing his regular psych review with Rudy and his nurse, Carla Peterson (Maggie Sullivan). We learn that Carla helped Steve through his post-bionic depression and had a romance with him at the time, but has now moved on. This means that Carla is taking the place in series continuity that was filled by Barbara Anderson’s Jean Manners in the pilot movie, much as Oscar Goldman (from the original novel) replaced the pilot’s Oliver Spencer as the head of the project. Plus, of course, Steve was a civilian astronaut in the pilot and an Air Force colonel in the series. Still, it’s too bad they didn’t bring back Anderson, who was far more appealing than Sullivan’s Carla.

Anyway, Steve spots Carla handing his evaluation tape to a man who’s cleared to leave by the gate guard, but the guard, Rudy, Carla, and Oscar all deny that any such man was ever in the facility. Resenting being “gaslighted” by his closest friends (of whom Carla is suddenly one even though we’ve never seen her before and never will again — ahh, ’70 TV), Steve presses and finds that the man is former racing champion Barney Miller (Markham), who somehow survived a horrific crash about 18 months earlier. It’s not hard for Steve to put the pieces together. Barney is bionic too, and is having trouble adjusting, as Steve learns when he confronts a drunk, depressed Barney in a bar and loses to him in a tense arm-wrestling match. Oscar comes clean; he resisted making a second bionic man, not liking the idea of his superiors considering Steve expendable, and kept the secret to spare Steve’s feelings. But now that the truth is out, Steve volunteers to chaperone Barney on his first assignment, retrieving some plutonium stolen by agents of an unspecified foreign power. (Richard Anderson pronounces “plutonium” with a short o, like “plutahnium,” oddly enough.) The depressed Barney has a mood swing when he gets to use his strength, getting carried away by the rush and beating the bad guys pretty seriously, within the limits of ’70s censorship, until Steve (who took forever to carry the plutahhnium to their van) stops him. Barney is now addicted to the power and it becomes clear he can’t handle it. It makes sense, in a way: Steve’s an astronaut, a team player, while Barney’s a racer, a highly competitive adrenaline junkie. He feels as driven to compete with Steve as he does to beat up the bad guys, and it’s making him dangerous. So Steve convinces Oscar to dial his bionics down to normal strength. But Barney fights back and tries to destroy all of Rudy’s files on bionics so that he’ll remain indispensable — or maybe he’s just trying to give them an excuse to kill him. Steve is determined to take him down before that happens.

This is a potent, dramatic episode by Peter Allan Fields, whose work on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. didn’t impress me much but who went on to do terrific work on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It’s good to revisit the issues Steve had to face as a result of his transformation, something that hasn’t been touched on much in the series — although it’s disappointing that Steve is a bit too idealized, his problems all totally conquered, leaving all the character flaws to the guest star. But that’s ’70s TV for you, and within those strictures, it’s a strong dramatic piece. Markham does a very effective job as Barney, his expressive acting a drastic contrast to Lee Majors’s deadpan. One wonders what the series would’ve been like with him as Austin, but it’s hard to tell from this, since he’s playing a troubled and dangerous man rather than a clean-cut hero.

Still, the final fight between Barney and Steve is underwhelming. Since they’re evenly matched, there aren’t many strength gags, aside from a shaking of the image (created in post-production) when one slams the other into a wall. Aside from the slow motion and one smashed door, it could’ve been a fight between two normally powered men. (And watching the fights on this show drives home how much the influence of Hong Kong cinema and mixed martial arts has changed American film and TV. These days the fights in a show like this would be so much more sophisticated in technique, as opposed to the cruder brawling style used in this show.)

Barney will return in season 3, but with a name change to Barney Hiller, since the police sitcom Barney Miller premiered in the interim.

Sound effects watch: The ta-ta-tang sound is used repeatedly for people or fists flying laterally, consistently with its earlier usage, but in this case every instance is the result of bionic strength (Steve’s or Barney’s), so we’re getting a bit closer to the familiar standard. The bionic-throw whistling sound — let’s call it the ballistic whistle — is still in use, so I guess we can call that one standardized now. And there was another bionic-jump sound here, when Barney and Steve(‘s stunt doubles) jumped down from a telephone pole to attack the plutahhhnium thieves.

–

“Straight on ’til Morning”: Star Trek‘s D.C. Fontana is back with another script, and fittingly, it brings aliens into the bionic-verse for the first time. Steve is consulting (or something) on the impending launch of a lunar probe, one of Oscar’s projects, when he spots a UFO (read: a small blue dot) similar to one he saw three years ago during a spaceflight. He’s one of many to report the sighting, so the next morning he goes to the nearby town of Denbow to investigate and discovers a local man has suffered radiation burns when confronted by a prowler who stole clothes from his line. The prowler is actually one of four aliens — whose alienness consists of shiny reddish pancake makeup — whose ship crashed in the sea nearby and are trying to survive. Apparently they burn humans just by touching them, and are harmed by the touch in turn, though the reverse mechanism is unclear. They’re telepathic, with specialized skills so that only one of them, Minonee (Meg Foster), can communicate verbally. She tries to reason with the local hick cops who find the aliens, but TV hick cops are immune to reason and it doesn’t go well. The aliens flee, leading the search party astray with a psionic illusion, but Steve’s infrared vision sees through it and he finally catches up to them, after some futile attempts by the group’s guardian Eymon (Christopher Mears) to fend him off by telekinetically hurling rocks and trees at him. Finally Minonee has found someone who’ll listen to reason, and she explains they’re a family of marooned explorers, and Eymon and their parents are dying from being touched. Minonee expects she’ll die here too, but Steve gets an idea when he learns they have a mothership standing by near Pluto’s orbit. The others soon die, and Steve sneaks Minonee onto the base, planning to send her up in the lunar probe where she can get picked up when it passes behind the Moon (aggravatingly, they refer to the “dark side of the Moon” instead of the far side). But sending the signal alerts Oscar, who confronts Steve because he wants to take Minonee prisoner and study her for the good of Science (and the millions of dollars that would be wasted if Steve sabotages the probe to get her home). Will Steve be able to convince Oscar to choose compassion over duty? Well, duh. We all know by now that Oscar’s a complete teddy bear.

The addition of aliens to the series was a big step, but it’s a weaker episode than I would’ve expected from Fontana. The aliens are too cliched in their mental and physical powers, piled on with whatever attributes the story needs. Maybe it would’ve felt less hackneyed and corny in 1974, but if so, it hasn’t aged well. It isn’t helped by the cheesy sound effects when the aliens use their powers — and though Oliver Nelson’s score is pretty good, he falls back on the cliche of using a Theremin-like sound for the aliens. Too much time was wasted on the manhunt in the woods, and there’s not much thematic weight to the story. Sure, it shows ordinary humans fearing what they don’t understand and hounding the peaceful aliens because of it, but that idea just sort of lays there, and it’s already familiar from films like The Day the Earth Stood Still and It Came From Outer Space. It’s not a bad story, but it’s weaker than it deserved to be.

(Oh, and Steve and Minonee don’t actually learn each other’s names until her final scene, where she actually says “I don’t know your name” shortly before they part. Huh? She’s a telepath who’s been reading his mind for half the episode, and she hasn’t come across his name? Not impossible, I suppose — we probably tend to think of ourselves as “I” most of the time — but it’s the sort of thing that seems to warrant an explanation, at least.)

—

“The Midas Touch”: Back down to Earth now, in more ways than one. Oscar arrives at a closed government gold mine in Nevada, now reopened and run by a bunch of hired thugs led by MacGregor (Noam Pitlik, who coincidentally would later become the main director for the aforementioned Barney Miller). Oscar seems oddly pleased by how much gold they’ve mined. Has Oscar gone bad? Are we already at the one where he got replaced by an android? (Oops, spoilers!)

When Steve investigates Oscar’s disappearance, he finds that Oscar was researching some handwavium byproduct of a new gold-smelting technique, with potential applications for energy generation. So naturally Oscar’s interest in the mine is above board. But the project director, Oscar’s oldest friend Carrington (Farley Granger), tells Steve that he’s been getting strange orders from Oscar, issued from a private office Steve doesn’t know about. It looks like he’s been planning a gold heist for which Carrington would be framed. Not believing it, Steve goes out to the mine himself and gets captured by MacGregor’s men. The main thug is Connors (Rick Hurst, who would later be Cletus Hogg on The Dukes of Hazzard), whose manner toward Steve is probably meant to be amiably threatening, but comes off as almost flirtatious, particularly given how he calls Steve “pretty boy.” (At least, I assume it was accidental. Although Connors did have a line about not knowing Oscar’s whereabouts because “I don’t date him.” Hmm.) MacG has Connors put Steve to work in the mine, where there’s a convenient accident that lets Steve save Connors from a runaway ore tram. (And for the duration of the scene, Steve’s left arm seems as powerful as his right.)

Steve breaks out and finds Oscar, who’s been drugged, but they get caught — just in time to discover that the real bad guy is Carrington, a totally unsurprising development since otherwise Farley Granger would’ve only had one scene. Carrington intends to make Oscar use his security clearance to help get the gold out of the country, threatening Steve’s life if he doesn’t. But he offers Oscar a quarter of the worth of the gold if he goes into a willing partnership with Carrington. Which means, given that the worth of the gold is $25 million, that he’s just offered Oscar the opportunity to become The 6.25 Million Dollar Man. But the show can only have one title character, so Oscar refuses the deal, but still has to help Carrington to save Steve’s life. Carrington puts on a show of having Connors and another thug take Steve out two days’ walk into the desert and give him a canteen of water, but instructs Thug #2 to kill him. Once Connors figures out what’s really going on, he helps Steve escape.

Steve catches up with MacGregor’s gold-laden truck in a Jeep, and is somehow able to climb out of the driver’s seat and onto the truck without the Jeep swerving out of control the moment he lets go of the wheel. Is that some hitherto-unmentioned bionic power? He gets into the passenger seat and is somehow able to intimidate MacG into playing along even though he’s unarmed — though I guess he’s made it clear enough that he’s very strong. Steve is waylaid by one of MacG’s men, but once he gets into the plane, he’s able to save Oscar. Oscar’s bummed about his oldest friend turning out to be a murderous criminal scumbag, but given the track record of hitherto-unknown best friends in ’70s TV, it was either that or dying.

A decent run-of-the-mill episode. I suppose it illustrates the versatility of this show that it could go from a personal drama in “Seven Million” to high-concept sci-fi in “Straight on” to a more conventional heist story here, but this does feel kind of ordinary by comparison. It has a good score, but that’s kind of a given, at least if you like Oliver Nelson’s style.

—

“The Deadly Replay”: Once again, we get an episode that revisits — and retcons — Steve’s origin story. Last time it was his bionic recuperation, this time it’s the test-flight crash that precipitated it. Steve’s old engineer colleague Rogers (Robert Symonds) has rebuilt the test vehicle that crashed — herein depicted as the Northrop HL-10, although the footage used in the pilot and main titles is a blend of that and the similar M2-F2 (specifically a crash involving the latter), while Martin Caidin’s novel and the ’87 revival movie designate it as the fictional M3-F5. Upon seeing the rebuilt HL-10, Steve gets a flashback to audio and footage from the main titles — and it would’ve been such a clever segue if they’d had his flashback actually be the main titles, but TV shows hadn’t yet started getting creative that way with their title sequences, so instead we get the same audio and some of the same images replayed a few moments later when the actual titles start.

Anyway, Steve decides he has to get back up on the horse, but Oscar warns him that there was evidence — which Oscar had flimsy reasons for not revealing until now — that the vehicle was sabotaged. That makes it basically a mystery story, and the five members of the flight crew are all suspects — the most obvious suspect being surly Ted Collins (Jack Ging), who resents Steve for a former relationship with the flight doctor who’s now his wife, Andrea (Lara Parker). They make him so obvious a suspect that he’s never a remotely plausible one.

The plan is to run Steve through a simulation that will recreate the malfunction that almost killed him before,  to see if he cracks under the pressure. At first, he seems to, getting disoriented in the cockpit, simu-crashing, and then collapsing. Oscar comes running, and Steve insists to him that he was drugged by some conveniently undetectable substance. He convinces Oscar to let him run the simulation again, and he passes with simulated flying colors. So the actual flight goes ahead, and the HL-10 is sabotaged, conveniently in a way that can be overcome with a superstrong bionic arm. The saboteur turns out to be the least noticeable, least developed member of the group of suspects, which feels like a cheat. Turns out he was working for an aerospace mogul who wanted to poach the lucrative NASA contract for his own firm.

For a revisit of Steve’s origin, this feels a little underwhelming. The formulaic mystery structure and weak payoff thereof don’t do it any favors, and the motive for the sabotage seems anticlimactic. These days, there’d turn out to be some massive evil conspiracy underlying the hero’s origins, and while I don’t suppose I’d want it to go that far, it would’ve been nice if the secret behind the series’ formative event had been a bit more interesting than it was. It’s also a bit annoying that every time Steve flashes back to the crash, it’s the exact same audio sequence used in the main titles. The original pilot used a much more extensive sequence and it would’ve been nice if they’d drawn on that material for some variety.

But the strength of the episode lies where it did in the pilot: in the cooperation of NASA and Edwards Air Force Base in providing the vehicles, filming locations, footage, and presumably technical advice to make the test flight seem authentic. And given that the pilot is not strictly part of series canon, I suppose this is as close as we’ll get to a new canonical version of those events. (Although as I mentioned, later productions would disagree with this episode’s details. Continuity was a flexible thing in ’70s TV.)

Guess who made the “Top 5 Authors of Star Trek Tie-In Novels” list!

I’ve just been informed (by Keith R.A. DeCandido on Facebook) that Ian Coomber of the site What Culture has posted a list of the top 5 Star Trek tie-in novelists:

http://whatculture.com/tv/top-5-authors-star-trek-tie-novels.php

Number 1 is Una McCormack, #2 is David Mack, #3 is Keith, and #4 is yours truly! (#5 is a tie for the actors who’ve written or co-written tie-in novels: Armin Shimerman, Andrew Robinson, and J.G. Hertzler.) I made the list specifically for DTI: Watching the Clock, which he describes as “a novel whose ambition is only surpassed in its accomplishments” and “borderline epic.” Not bad for a novel that I only pitched as an afterthought.

Thanks to Ian for the recognition!

SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN thoughts: Season 2, Eps.1-4 (spoilers)

It’s been over a year since I reviewed the pilots and season 1 of The Six Million Dollar Man (Part 1, Part 2), but I finally got season 2 from Netflix, so now I can offer my thoughts on it as well. This time I’ll be going into a bit more depth, since these posts aren’t as much of an afterthought as they were before.

This season opens with the more familiar version of the main title sequence, with animated “computer graphics” showing schematics of Steve’s bionic bits against a wireframe human body, and with a statement of the main musical theme toward the end.

“Nuclear Alert”: When Arab sheik Sid Haig is outbid in an auction for a stolen nuclear bomb, he narcs to Oscar Goldman about the theft. Except it turns out the bomb hasn’t been entirely stolen yet; the auctioner still has to steal a “reflector fuse,” basically a large metal cheese log festooned with mirror discs and blinky lights. Half the episode is just Steve Austin following the McGuffin as it’s delivered in a truck, which is kind of underwhelming compared to what the title promised. The thief turns out to be a member of the OSI’s inner circle, and he abducts scientist Carol Lawrence in order to force her to assemble it. She’d told Steve how to sabotage the fuse so it wouldn’t work if it did fall into the villains’ hands, but he foolishly just puts the removed part in his pocket so that he still has it on him when he’s caught by the bad guys. So we get a relatively more intense climax aboard the villain’s private passenger jet which has the bomb aboard, with Steve having to beat the bad guys and defuse the bomb before the military shoots them down. Given that his plan turns out to be largely brute force, I had to wonder why he waited so long to enact it, except to build dramatic tension.

To my surprise, the show still hasn’t begun using the familiar “ta-ta-ta-ta-tang” sound effect for Steve’s bionic limbs. But we get a rare shot of sped-up film to represent Steve’s superspeed as glimpsed by a farmer whose field he runs past. It’s rather unconvincing, with things in the background clearly moving faster too, which helps explain why they adopted the paradoxical use of slow motion to represent superspeed.

—

“The Pioneers”: This is an old favorite of mine, largely due to a memorable guest appearance by Mike Farrell and an unforgettable score by Oliver Nelson. (Literally — I’ve forgotten so much of this series, but Nelson’s score for the climactic action has always stuck with me.) Farrell plays David Tate, one of a pair of scientists secretly testing a cryogenics process in space when their capsule crashes in the Minnesota woods. Oscar sends in Steve and Rudy Wells (still played by Alan Oppenheimer), who was also part of the project, but won’t fill in a frustrated Steve on the details until he needs to know. They find one of the astronaut-scientists, Nicole Simmons (Joan Darling), in an intact cryogenic pod and start working to revive her, but the other pod is empty. David got too much of the regenerative serum they were testing, and his body and mind are supercharged, running far too hot and turning him into a superstrong wild man driven by overwhelming pain. Steve must try to stop him from hurting anyone or being hurt himself, for the local lawmen led by Sheriff Robert F. Simon are combing the woods for the “wildman.”

This episode has more flaws than I remember. There are some continuity glitches. When Rudy is using Steve’s bionic power source to revive Nicole, he tells Steve repeatedly that he can’t move his bionic arm, but Steve jumps back and forth between two different positions in different camera angles, a continuity error between takes. There’s a part where Steve and Nicole are tracking David and pass through the same area where he tossed aside his spacesuit gloves, but all they find is a tiny scrap of cloth on a branch. There are a couple of “it’s in the script” moments where characters have knowledge they shouldn’t have; for instance, the sheriff says the campers attacked by the “wildman” described him as “strong as anything,” even though he didn’t actually demonstrate superstrength in the attack. And the episode evokes the hoary old “we only use 10% of the brain” myth, although it extends it to “10% of our full potential, mental and physical” (in Rudy’s words).

But it still holds up very well despite the glitches. In addition to the terrific music, the choice to cast Farrell as David is inspired, letting us see him as a decent, intelligent, sympathetic man during his moments of lucidity and thus highlighting the tragedy of what’s happening to him. There’s some nice characterization with Nicole as she and Steve bond as fellow experiments of Oscar’s, making them family of sorts (“country cousins,” as Steve puts it); and there’s a real poignancy to David’s lucid scenes, and to the superb closing scene where Steve helps Oscar cope with the guilt of his decisions in the name of science. Lee Majors isn’t quite up to the demands of the material, but Richard Anderson knocks it clear out of the park and I’ve got tears in my eyes just writing this sentence. (Although really, Oscar shouldn’t have been forgiven for his actions here. Secretly undertaking such a premature experiment with two people’s lives, going behind the government’s back? He should’ve lost his job and probably gone to prison for this. But it wouldn’t be the first or last time by a long shot that a TV series regular was forgiven for actions that would’ve been career-enders in real life.)

Oh, and sound-effects tracking: As in “Dr. Wells is Missing” from season 1, the “ta-ta-tang” sound effect is used, but only to accompany fists or objects being swung laterally through the air. (There’s one point where I initially thought it was being used for Steve lifting a railroad tie, but on rewatching — yes, I like this one so much I watched it twice — I realized that David was swinging another tie at Steve at that moment, so the sound must’ve been meant to represent that instead.) But the standard “bionically thrown item hurtling through the air” whistle is used when Steve kicks away the sheriff’s rifle, making it the second bionic sound effect to be standardized, following the bionic eye beep.

—

“Pilot Error”: This one’s back to the first-season title sequence for some reason, maybe because it’s shorter — though this episode is slow-paced enough that I don’t see why it would’ve needed a shorter main title. Pat Hingle plays Senator Hill, also a general in the Reserves, whose plane suffered a fatal crash when he was piloting it for recertification. Steve has been called in as an expert witness on the plane, and is unconvinced by Hill’s story that it was his deceased copilot’s oversight that caused the crash. Oscar wants Steve to support Hill’s story since he appropriated a certain Six Million Dollars for Oscar a while back (reportedly two years, though this aired only 18 months after the pilot — although a later episode will establish that Steve needed months to recuperate), but Steve is too clean-cut to play politics and promises only to tell the truth. Nonetheless, he agrees to accompany Hill in the latter’s private plane when their ride to the hearing is delayed, and they take off along with Hill’s son Greg (Stephen Nathan) and his sketchy aide Lannon, who you can tell is not a nice guy because he’s played by Alfred Ryder. Anyway, Steve and the others take naps while Hill foolishly changes the radio away from the tower frequency to listen to music (Steve is actually awake at that point but doesn’t notice it’s a bad idea), so he doesn’t get a weather warning. Hill then suffers a loss of focus and a partial blackout, and as a result they end up way off course and have to make an emergency landing in the desert. An electrical short in the panel flash-blinds Steve in both eyes, even the bionic one. So he needs to rely on the others’ help to fix the plane and clear the runway, and is in danger when Lannon decides to try to bump him off so he can’t testify against the senator — though this backfires against Lannon. Finally they get in the air, but Hill suffers a worse blackout (his son briefly thinks he’s dead even though his head is still upright, casting serious doubt on Greg’s competence as a pre-med), so Steve must fly blind with help from Greg and a perky female airman (Susanne Zenor) in the control tower, even though they have no transmitter and he’s only able to communicate via Morse code through the transponder.

In short, it’s your pretty basic small-plane-crash episode of the sort that many ’70s and ’80s shows did, where most of the story is about solving the various problems. There’s not really a lot of drama beyond that; the threat Lannon poses is rather half-hearted. It is sort of interesting to see Oscar’s more Macchiavellian side rear its head again, but it isn’t really followed through. There’s nothing really bad about the episode, but it’s pretty ordinary.

—

“The Pal-Mir Escort”: Salka Pal-Mir (Anne Revere) is a Golda Meir-like prime minister of an Israel surrogate called Eretz, and the organizer of a peace conference with the guerrillas her people have fought for decades. But she has only days to live unless Rudy Wells can give her the world’s first bionic heart. Oscar assigns Steve as the bodyguard for her escort, as much to reassure her about bionics as to protect her from the various factions that want to subvert the peace talks — including her own chief of security (Nate Esformes), who can’t tolerate the thought of peace with their longtime enemies and would sooner kill his own leader. (This is sadly prophetic — Meir’s successor Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 for that very reason.) Pal-Mir insists that planes don’t agree with her and they must travel by land, and Steve suggests using a “mobile command unit” that was used in Steve’s bionic testing and has full medical equipment — which sounds impressive until it turns out to be just an ordinary RV, an odd disconnect with the script. (It also supposedly only has room for Steve, Pal-Mir, and her doctor, but in fact it’s easily roomy enough to have held a couple more guards.) It’s supposed to be a nonstop trip to Rudy’s Tennessee facility, but Pal-Mir is stubborn and authoritative and insists on stopping to help a couple of stranded hippies (one of whom is played by future director John Landis, who’s credited for the role but is only glimpsed in the distance meditating — his lines must’ve been cut) and to stop at a vegetable stand to talk with a local farmer. This makes it easy for the bad guys hired by the security chief to overtake them and set up an ambush. (The chief gave Pal-Mir a rose with a tracking device, and she gives the rose to the vegetable-stand operator, yet this never becomes a plot point, since the bad guys have already found them.)

Sound-effects watch: We get a prototype for a bionic-jump sound when Steve leaps up to a helicopter, but it’s not the sound that would later become standard.

All in all, it’s a pretty effective episode if you can look past the plot and production glitches. Pal-Mir is an effective character and a good foil for Steve, who lets his old-fashioned male chauvinism show, admitting that the idea of a woman in charge isn’t something that he or other Americans have come around to yet. The resonances with Meir (and, unintentionally, Rabin) add some stakes to the story. As it happens, eight years after this, the show’s producer Harve Bennett would produce a Meir biopic, A Woman Called Golda, starring Ingrid Bergman as Meir, the final role of her life.

Finishing up RISE OF THE FEDERATION: TOWER OF BABEL

…And I haven’t yet had my language confounded or been scattered abroad, which is a good sign.

No, that’s something else. What I mean to say is, I’m currently working on the final proofreading pass of Star Trek: Enterprise — Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel, and for efficiency’s sake and to keep it interesting, I’m combining it with writing the first draft of my annotations for the novel, to be posted once the book is released in April. This is actually useful for the revision process, since it encourages me to examine the text critically and double-check references, so I’ve caught a few things I overlooked before.

Meanwhile, I’ve been shown the novel’s cover, which will probably be released pretty soon. It’s a definite improvement over the Book 1 cover, I feel. But I can’t say more about it yet.

I’ve also been making some good progress on my outline for my next Trek novel, which I should be clear to announce very soon, since the contract is signed and executed. Two of the main plotlines are in place and I now have a good idea of what the remaining one will be; I just need to work out the specifics. Indeed, it was just this morning that I had an idea that really helped the plot come into focus. And I’ve got another two and a half weeks to finalize the outline. Last time, I had trouble figuring out the outline and struggled to get it done by my deadline, but this time it’s going much more smoothly.

One thing that may be helping is that I’ve increasingly gotten into the habit of keeping my cell phone on my bedside table and using its voice recorder to dictate story notes. All too often in the past, I’ve had a good idea before I got out of bed or while I was going for a walk, but by the time I got around to writing it down, I’d forgotten much of it. I think dictating notes has helped me work more efficiently. Although I’m getting a little tired of listening to my own recorded voice, especially since I’m often sleepy and mumbling when I record these notes. I’ve been trying to put more animation into my voice, like I do when I give interviews, just so I don’t bore myself so much. Also, today I finally got around to copying my accumulated notes onto my computer, and was pleased to find that the format for the audio files (.amr) is playable with my existing media software. So I don’t have to worry about losing my notes if something happens to my phone. I’ve been thinking of getting a new cell phone anyway — I’ll have to make sure I get one with a similar recording function.

I’ve got some other irons in the fire writing-wise as well, but nothing I’m ready to talk about. Hopefully there will be some progress on those fairly soon. But expect another Trek update very soon.

The Man From UNCLE Season 2 Affair: ONE SPY TOO MANY and overview (spoilers)

One Spy Too Many, as I mentioned in the previous post, is the theatrical version of the 2-part “Alexander the Greater Affair,” released five months after the episodes aired on television, and with more sex and violence added for the big screen. The violence comes first, with a new opening sequence under the movie titles, in which Alexander’s chief henchman Parviz (David Sheiner) breaks into an army base and battles its guards with gas grenades and a machine gun. The film periodically goes into jerky slow motion at several action beats (no high-speed cameras involved, just slowing down the regular film to a few frames per second), I guess to prolong them while credits are shown over them. It’s pretty awkward. Also, Sheiner sports an obvious bald cap (is there any other kind?) that he doesn’t have in the TV material; no doubt this scene was filmed some time later and Sheiner wasn’t willing to shave his head again. The most awkward thing about it, though, is that after this sequence of his breaking into the military installation, we cut to the opening scenes of the TV episode, in which he’s still waiting outside the gates of the installation and breaks in again. I guess the idea was to suggest that he broke through two levels of security, but the guards at the “inner” gate don’t act as though his van is out of place where it is, so it just doesn’t fit.

The added sex appeal comes largely courtesy of Batgirl herself, the delightful Yvonne Craig, who previously had a disappointing guest role in season 1. Here, she’s one of the various UNCLE communications women that Solo always seems to flirt with, and she’s constantly reminding him of impending dates that he can’t remember making with her; indeed, he can’t even remember her name. It’s pretty blatantly tacked onto/interpolated into the story, with Craig having a scene inserted every time the agents call HQ on their pen-radios, or else showing up and saying “Here’s that thing you talked about arranging in the previous scene” before flirting some more with Solo. She finally gets out of the office for a final scene at the closing reception (though the shape of the wine glass props changes from the episode footage to the movie footage). Its only purpose is to provide some semblance of a romance for Solo in a storyline where he’s uncharacteristically lacking in one. And to add a bit of skin: Craig does a repeat of the sunbathing-in-the-communications-room scene that I recall seeing in the pilot, but since this is the big screen, she’s got her bikini top unfastened. We don’t get to see much more than would’ve been allowed on TV, though. There is another added scene, though, of Rip Torn’s Alexander in bed with Donna Michelle as the neighbor’s wife he’s committing adultery with, in which Ms. Michelle shows her bare back and, briefly, a side view of a nipple. Ms. Michelle later has a brief added scene where Solo finds her in a jacuzzi, but only her shoulders are visible there.

A couple of things are deleted as well, notably the scenes with Alexander’s parents enslaved at the quarry (leaving the reasons for the quarry sequence unexplained in the movie) and the part-2 recap with the UNCLE accountant and Waverly. Despite these changes, though, the movie is very blatantly a recut television episode, complete with the act breaks left pretty much intact. And the original was already rather incoherent, cluttered with random digressions and side threads to pad it out to two hours, and the addition of one more subplot just makes things worse — although getting to watch Yvonne Craig makes anything better. It’s a shame they chose this 2-part episode to release as a feature, since the season’s other 2-parter, “The Bridge of Lions Affair,” was far superior. Although I suppose this one has more of the big action that would’ve been considered appropriate for a cinematic release.

Oh, by the way, in my original review of “Alexander the Greater,” I commented on the incomplete depiction of Alexander’s violation of the Ten Commandments. I said, “did he actually worship another god before Yahweh or make for himself a graven image which he thereupon bowed down to or served? This is left unclear.” However, this time around, I realized that one conversation between Alexander and his estranged wife takes place while he’s performing some kind of ritual in front of a statue of some bizarre creature with a placard on its head bearing the number 2. The episode couldn’t overtly call attention to it, no doubt for censorship reasons, but this must represent his violation of the second commandment, and might cover the first as well. Although he doesn’t seem to be sincerely worshipping the graven image, given that he finishes the ritual by using its flame to roast marshmallows.

—

So how to assess The Man from U.N.C.L.E. season 2? My initial understanding was that this season would be more comical than the first, but overall it seems to be about the same — maybe a little more tongue-in-cheek on average, but not yet actively campy. Still, I found its quality to be lower, with a lot of weak episodes, a significant amount of what seemed like careless acting and directing, continuity and production errors, and the like. It often seemed to me like the actors and directors — and, often, the writers — weren’t trying very hard. The addition of color doesn’t help much, since black-and-white gives things a certain class.

This was the first season where Illya Kuryakin was as central a protagonist as Napoleon Solo, although the show didn’t do a very good job of establishing them as a double act. Often they were pursuing separate parts of a mission, and often Solo was very unhelpful toward Illya, making out with women while Illya was getting beaten up and generally mistreated. In fact, it often seemed as though the two of them didn’t like each other very much. I guess the idea was to play up a sort of comic rivalry, but it was hard for me as a viewer to like them (especially Solo) when there were so few reasons shown for them to like each other. There were so many other partnerships in ’60s TV that worked far better: Kirk and Spock, Batman and Robin, Jim West and Artemus Gordon, Alexander Scott and Kelly Robinson, John Steed and Emma Peel, Maxwell Smart and 99. And note that most of those are spy shows. In this season, Solo and Kuryakin didn’t even feel like partners much of the time. They were more like two independent leads pursuing their own storylines that occasionally overlapped. And unlike most of those other pairings, they didn’t come off as people who would enjoy each other’s company or spend any time together between missions. Like so much else about the show this season, the partnership just didn’t mesh.

On the positive side, this season had less of the first season’s contrivances of getting the weekly “innocents” drawn into events by convoluted accidents, but on the downside, we did see a ruthless streak as UNCLE occasionally used innocents as decoys and bait for THRUSH without their knowledge or consent. And very much on the negative side, the season continued the pattern of embracing ugly or condescending stereotypes of practically every non-Western ethnic group, to the point that I was getting very sick of the show’s relentless racism after a while; but it actually more or less managed to avoid doing so once or twice, portraying Japanese culture almost respectfully in “The Cherry Blossom Affair,” and at least attempting to be sympathetic toward the cultures depicted in “Tigers Are Coming” and “Indian Affairs” while still ineptly and condescendingly portraying them and casting in brownface. At least most East Asian characters this season were actually played by Asian actors, but otherwise there was little improvement on the racial front. Worse yet, the season also demonstrated an uncomfortable streak of misogyny and sexual objectification toward women, particularly in scripts by Peter Allan Fields, though he seemed to grow out of it by the end of the season, and definitely had done so by later on in his career. The lowest point of all is at the end of “The Nowhere Affair,” in which erasing a woman’s entire memory and identity except for her attraction to Solo is portrayed as if it’s somehow a romantic and positive outcome rather than something absolutely horrific and exploitative. To be sure, there was plenty of sexism and ugly racial attitudes in ’60s TV, but I’ve rarely seen so much of it concentrated in a single show. And there were so many other shows, including competing spy shows, that did better. I Spy and Mission: Impossible were trendsetters in racial inclusion (and while M:I wasn’t great at depicting non-Western cultures, at least it generally avoided trying), and The Avengers and Get Smart had marvelously strong and engaging female leads.

I guess what I’m saying, basically, is that virtually every other ’60s spy show was better than this one.

The one relative high point this season was the music, though that’s a qualified success. Lalo Schifrin’s new arrangement of Jerry Goldsmith’s theme is far less interesting, losing Goldsmith’s Latin syncopation and strong orchestration in favor of a more simplistic rhythm and fewer instruments. While Schifrin scored episode 2, “The Ultimate Computer Affair,” all the other music in this season was done by either Gerald Fried or Robert Drasnin. It’s an unusual degree of musical consistency for a ’6os adventure show, and both composers did good work, though Fried’s work only occasionally rose to the standards of his later work for Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, and others. Notably, though there were a lot of stock scores, there was an unusual resurgence of original music in the final episodes of the season, which was good to hear.

There were a number of notable guest stars this season, including Vincent Price, Maurice Evans, Vera Miles, Ricardo Montalban, Martin Landau, Eve Arden, and Paul Winfield, plus quite a few really lovely guest actresses. Unusually, several actors played two different roles in the course of the season, including David Sheiner (“Alexander the Greater” and “Nowhere”), James Hong (“Alexander” and “Bridge of Lions”), Cal Bolder (ditto), Theo Marcuse (“Re-Collectors” and “Minus-X”), and Woodrow Parfrey (“Cherry Blossom” and “Moonglow”). While it wasn’t uncommon for actors in ’60s and ’70s TV to play multiple roles over the course of a series, it was unusual to do it twice in the same season, let alone for so many actors to do so. I’m not counting this as one of the season’s negatives, but it’s an odd quirk.

On to the bests and worsts:

Best innocent: Depends on how you define it. Maurice Evans in “Bridge of Lions Pt. 1 & 2″ gives the standout performance of the season, but he’s kind of a borderline innocent, straddling the fence of good guy and bad guy. By the more conventional formula of a bystander caught up in events, I’d say my favorite was probably France Nuyen in “Cherry Blossom.” Though Jill Ireland in “Tigers Are Coming,” Susan Silo in “Children’s Day,” and Sharon Farrell in “Minus-X” were pretty impressive.

Worst innocent: Ann Elder, “Bridge of Lions Pt. 1 & 2,” for her atrocious Irish accent — although Nancy Kovack’s all-over-the-map attempt at an English accent in “King of Diamonds” is pretty awful too.

Best villain: When Vincent Price (“Foxes and Hounds”) is one of the villains, is there any contest? Although Vera Miles in “Bridge of Lions” comes close, giving one of the finest dramatic performances of the season.

Worst villain: Jerome Thor, “Arabian.” Strident and annoying.

Best episodes (chronological order): “Cherry Blossom,” “Bridge of Lions Pt. 1 & 2,” “Round Table,” “Minus-X”

Worst episodes: “Alexander the Greater Pt. 1 & 2,” ‘Discotheque,” ‘Re-Collectors,” “Deadly Toys,” “Children’s Day,” “Deadly Goddess,” “Nowhere” (!!!)

So out of 28 distinct stories (including two 2-parters), I count only 4 as good, 7 as bad, and the remaining 17 as mediocre. And even the good ones are a mixed bag, episodes that were flawed but had enough strong moments or overall entertainment value to be worthwhile anyway. Overall, this was just not a good season. The main things that made it bearable to sit through were the music and (for me, at least) the abundance of really lovely female guests.

At this point, I’m unsure if I intend to continue to season 3. I didn’t like season 2 much, and season 3 is reportedly far worse, so I’m not sure it would be worth it to subject myself to it. After all, it’s not like anyone is paying me to do these reviews, so what would I get out of it? Well, beyond getting my morbid curiosity satisfied. I’m almost tempted to continue for that reason alone. But at the very least, I’m going to take a break from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. for a while and take a look at some of the other shows piling up on my Netflix queue. I’ll shortly be getting season 2 of The Six Million Dollar Man, which I’ll be reviewing here. (Actually I’ve already gotten the first two discs — I needed a break from TMFU — but I wanted to get through this series of reviews before I began posting those.) After that… we’ll see.

The Man From UNCLE Season 2 Affair: Eps. 25-30 (Spoilers)

“The King of Diamonds Affair”: Arrghhh, the accents! We open “Somewhere in Soho, London” (the same caption from “Bridge of Lions” — too cheap to make a new one?) as a restaurant patron with a Mockney accent only Dick Van Dyke could love gets her tooth broken by an uncut diamond in her plum pudding. This brings Solo and Illya to investigate Pogue’s Plum Puddings to see if they’re involved in diamond smuggling. A supposed new Brazilian mine is turning up stones identical to the kind sold by the Peacock company, which is buying most of them up, but the head of Peacock insists all his stones are accounted for. (Apparently diamonds were one of the anchors of the world economy at the time, at least in the UNCLEverse, which is why our spyboys are investigating this.) But the head of Pogue’s, Victoria Pogue (Nancy Kovack), seems to know nothing about it. She also knows nothing about English accents; Kovack’s delivery migrates freely between Prim English Governess and Scarlett O’Hara, with various unidentifiable stops along the way. Everyone else faking an accent in this episode is at least managing to fake a consistent one, but Kovack can’t even settle on a continent. It is probably the worst English accent I’ve ever heard, and in the context of this episode, that’s saying something.

But there’s a more authentic accent afoot, for the boys decide they need to take a closer, unauthorized look into the Peacock vault, which means consulting an expert, Rafael Delgado, the world’s greatest (and vainest) diamond thief — and it’s Ricardo Montalban in his second TMFU appearance! They come to him in Dartmoor Prison pretending to be Hollywood producers seeking his input for a movie. He catches on, but not before he gives them enough tips to let them break into the vault and find it’s already been broken into from beneath, a billion dollars in diamonds stolen. Peacock has hidden the theft for it would be catastrophic if word got out.

Delgado is broken out by his partners, implicitly the Mafia (for some reason the show had to tiptoe around that), though they dress like John Steed and put on fake English accents that are more convincing than those of the characters who are supposed be genuinely English. They’re led by Blodgett (Larry D. Mann). Delgado plies Victoria with Montalban’s Latin-lover routine in order to reach the mob’s plant inside the shipping department (and apparently the only other employee in the building), who was responsible for the shipping mixup that tipped UNCLE off to the crime. Solo then shows up, and through convoluted circumstances, he and Victoria get knocked out and stuffed in a box by the shipping guy, then shipped out to Brazil by Blodgett’s men. Oh, and the gangsters spot Illya watching them and apparently shoot him, causing him to fall into a pile of garbage, but when he recovers, his only complaint is a bumped head. Maybe he just pretended to be shot? Or maybe the episode doesn’t make much sense.

So they end up in Brazil and Blodgett finds Solo and Victoria and is going to kill them, but Delgado saves them for nebulous reasons and tries to get away with both them and the diamonds, but they get caught and they need Illya and two Brazilian UNCLE men (TIO men?) to save them, and the good guys manage to shoot the mobsters with cannons which affect them a la Yosemite Sam, but Blodgett gets off one last shot and Montalban gets to play a death scene, and then Solo and Illya are chilling with Victoria in front of a badly painted backdrop of Rio’s coastline, but then Waverly shows up just so he can pull rank and get some alone time with the girl. Oh, and there’s a casually racist allusion to cannibalistic Amazon natives.

So, yeah, kind of a mess, and oh good grief nobody ever let Nancy Kovack do an accent again. But on the plus side, Ricardo Montalban! Plus honorable mention to John Winston (Star Trek‘s transporter chief Kyle, and the one person other than the main Trek cast who co-starred with Montalban in both of his appearances as Khan), who plays a British UNCLE agent and, although Australian, does one of the least fakey English accents in the episode. Though admittedly that’s extremely faint praise.

—

“The Project Deephole Affair”: UNCLE is trying to smuggle a geologist past THRUSH, who want him captured for some evil project (as Waverly explains in an expository walk-and-talk where a huge microphone is on camera for several seconds as they leave his office). The THRUSH team is led by the Bondishly-named Narcissus Darling, who’s played by the lovely Barbara Bouchet and lives up to her mythic namesake in her fondness for self-reflection (and who can blame her?). Due to a mixup in their scouting of hotel windows, they mistake Buzz Conway (Jack Weston), a career failure and nobody, for the geologist when he tries to duck out of paying his hotel bill. Solo takes advantage of the accidental opportunity to use Buzz as a decoy, having Illya slip the real doctor out by another route. Conway later wakes up in a swankier hotel, finding a plane ticket to San Francisco and a sizeable wad of bills by his bedside (although the wad, when he examines it, is visibly just a few singles wrapped in a twenty). He also finds the apparent corpse of the geologist in his closet (never checking to see if he has a pulse), which spooks him into taking the flight to get out of town rather than cashing it in. (Creepily, Illya is monitoring Conway via a camera in the latter’s bathroom.)

So basically they’re risking this guy’s life as a decoy without his consent. UNCLE’s manipulated civilians like this before, but has usually given them a say in the matter. This is just sick. Anyway, he doesn’t remain in the dark for long, because once in San Fran, he’s hijacked via a drone control planted in his car, and there’s a fairly impressive freeway stunt as Solo (in Illya’s convertible) kicks out the car window and climbs inside to regain control (and somehow isn’t lacerated by all the broken glass). Buzz isn’t too happy and tries to get away, but stumbles into the bad guy’s clutches (I’m glossing over a lot of back-and-forth). Said bad guy is Elom (Leon Askin) — spell it backwards. He’s a narrow-eyed man who can’t stand sunlight, wears sunglasses, is insecure about whether Narcissus likes him, and wishes to “penetrate deep into Mother Earth” (oookay) in order to deploy a sonic earthquake weapon. Bottom line, this guy is essentially Marvel Comics’ Mole Man, taking a break from battling the Fantastic Four. Bizarre.

Anyway, Elom disbelieves Buzz’s insistence that he’s not the geologist, and threatens a captive Illya to get his cooperation. By random luck, Buzz actually proves to have useful knowledge and redirects the drill to strike oil instead of, err, nonconsensually penetrating the planet’s crust. And then Solo shows up and shoots everybody anyway. And then Elom falls down an elevator shaft, just at a point where there’s major damage to the film, streaks of blue dots going by. Presumably the DVDs are taken from the original masters, so are you telling me the episode actually went out with that much damage? They couldn’t afford to reshoot even for something so drastic? It makes the visible mike seem trivial. Although the technical problems make me feel a little sorry for the episode, which really doesn’t have much going for it anyway aside from Bouchet being really, really nice to look at.

—

“The Round Table Affair” opens with Illya in a lengthy car chase, the kind where, whenever they drive off the road into the dirt, you can see leftover tire tracks from earlier takes of the stunt. Why do they never get it on the first take? Anyway, the chase ends up in the flyspeck Duchy of Ingolstein, which has no extradition treaties with anyone. A crook named Artie King (Don Francks) has thus used his influence with the regent Fredrick (Reginald Gardner), a dissolute gambler deeply in debt to Artie, to turn Ingolstein into a haven for criminals. Solo and Illya inform the rightful Duchess, the tomboyish Vicky (Valora Noland), who immediately agrees to leave her Paris boarding school, take the throne, and kick out the crooks. But Artie and his gangster pal Lucho (Bruce Gordon) remind Fredrick that Artie basically owns him and the duchy (and Artie makes a nasty insinuation about droit de seigneur giving him ownership of Vicky as well, although I doubt it would grant a commoner any rights over a duchess), so the gangsters aren’t going anywhere. Solo and Illya make the mistake of gloating to Lucho and the crooks about their impending expulsion without actually having a plan for when the crooks inevitably bag them, although their imprisonment is oddly temporary.

Fredrick convinces Vicky that she needs to marry Artie if she wants to get the crooks out, insisting that a woman can mold a man into anything she wants — a perspective he’s gained from a lifetime of being wrapped around fingers. But when he makes the same proposition to Artie, Lucho sees it as something that benefits the crooks, for some reason. Also for some reason, confirmed bachelor Artie is apparently trapped into it, even though he was just boasting minutes before about how he had all the power. Lucho keeps Artie prisoner in the castle to keep him from ducking out on the wedding. While attempting to do just that, Artie finds Vicky in the chapel (which somehow contains the sword of St. George driven Excalibur-like into the stone, with an attached legend that the duchess must marry whoever removes it). They bond over mutually being trapped into marriage, which, of course, leads to them instantly falling in love and wanting to marry. The guy who was implicitly threatening her with rape in the first act is now suddenly being written as a sweetheart.

But Solo & Illya kidnap Artie so he misses the wedding. Lucho, though, gets a safecracking associate to (somehow, somehow, somehow) rig the sword so Lucho can pull it and force Vicky into marriage. When the boys from UNCLE hear of this, they realize the lovestruck Artie is the lesser of evils. They collaborate on a plan which entails Artie challenging Lucho to a clumsy duel in full plate armor, with Solo & Illya holding the gangsters at gunpoint so Artie can win fair and square, whereupon he instantly consents to the extradition treaty so the crooks can be taken in. That’s one heck of a job of molding there, Vicky.

Despite the flimsy and inconsistent plot, this ends up being a rather fun episode, kind of sweet and romantic too if you ignore the unfortunate droit de seigneur remark (which, to be fair, the episode did too). Robert Drasnin provides a partial new score in the vein of classic movies about knights and castles and European royalty and whatnot.

—

“The Bat Cave Affair”: Yes, this episode aired nearly three months after Batman premiered and took the nation by storm. But the episode doesn’t really bear any resemblance to Batman beyond the title, which could have been changed sometime during production.

While Illya is in Europe tracking down a THRUSH plot to throw air travel into chaos, a Dr. Transom (Peter Baron) is showing Solo the supposed psychic abilities of Clemency McGill (Joan Freeman), a very beautiful down-home girl from the Ozarks. He and Waverly are skeptical, but her abilities seem uncanny, and she even has detailed knowledge of Illya’s activities a continent away and where to go to find what he’s looking for. This turns out to be a trap, suggesting she’s working for THRUSH after all.

Illya is captured by Count Zark — in other words, Martin Landau doing a Dracula impression, though it’s nowhere near as good as his Oscar-winning performance as Bela Lugosi in 1994′s Ed Wood. Zark has engineered his bats’ “radar” sense to interfere with airport radar, even though it’s actually sonic echolocation and couldn’t do that. He also explains that THRUSH has been using microwave neural induction to implant thoughts in Clemency’s head and lead Illya into their trap in Transylvania, which is an absurdly convoluted way to go about it and a total waste of a technology that could have far more profound applications for evil. She’s a dupe rather than a traitor, and Solo finds the transmitter in her hair comb during his inevitable seduction, so they fly to Illya’s rescue. Zark releases the bats, but information that Zark conveniently handed Illya earlier enables him to recall/disrupt them. And Clemency provides useful information without the hair comb, suggesting she’s really psychic after all, ugh.

This is a pretty bad episode. The plot is a mess, and a lot of the Zark material seems to be played for humor but just falls flat. Landau makes a good try, but it’s simply too broad and awkwardly written a role; the villain doesn’t even get any comeuppance at the end. (Oh, and Whit Bissell is in it too, but is wasted in a fairly redundant role.) The main thing worth watching for is the lovely Joan Freeman, plus a full original Gerald Fried score whose use of ponderous tubas and cackling trumpets anticipates his score for Star Trek‘s “Catspaw.”

Although there is a fun metatextual moment; on the plane, Solo and Clemency are shown watching the final shot of the movie One Spy Too Many, a theatrical version of the 2-part “Alexander the Greater Affair” that opened this season, and Solo remarks that spy movies are light entertainment that’s too far-fetched for his taste. (It’s not the actual end-title card of the movie, though, since that was over a shot of Waverly and Illya. The movie is on the special-features disc and will be covered in the next post.)

—

“The Minus-X Affair”: When UNCLE learns that THRUSH is after the prototype Plus-X formula of Prof. Stemmler (Eve Arden), meant to heighten human senses and abilities, Solo warns the professor that THRUSH is likely to target her estranged daughter Leslie (Sharon Farrell), a wild child who lives “not wisely but too well” off the money Stemmler sends her in lieu of parenting. But he doesn’t check for bugs first, so it’s entirely his fault that THRUSH captures Leslie. Not that their man in Acapulco, Whittaker (King Moody, better known as Get Smart‘s Shtarker and as Ronald McDonald from 1975-84), has to work at it; the sexy, slutty Leslie is happy to run off with him, though not before Illya manages to get a tracer onto her.

But the abduction is just a cover, for Stemmler has been working with the Blofeldesque THRUSH agent Arthur Rollo (Theo Marcuse), who’s not pleased with her for keeping Leslie’s existence secret from him — and confiding about her to Solo. He wonders at her commitment to THRUSH, but clearly she’s more committed to her daughter than it seemed.

Rollo intends to use Plus-X to enhance his men and its secret opposite formula Minus-X to dumb down the guards at a government “synthetic plutonium” plant. Illya goes undercover at the plant while Solo gets captured at Rollo’s HQ. There are guinea pigs galore as Rollo injects Leslie with Plus-X and slates Solo for a Minus-X test. A bitter Leslie initially decides that being bad is in her blood so she might as well join team villain, but later she has second thoughts that could get her killed. Stemmler, it turns out, will do anything to protect her daughter; the only reason she sent her away was to insulate her from THRUSH. So she fakes the Minus-X injection and helps Solo escape. Still, Rollo takes Leslie as a hostage to the plutonium heist, as insurance. Whittaker has delivered the Minus-X to the guards, who have become mental 5-year-olds — and hey, one of them is Paul Winfield! It’s a minor role, but he does it well. Anyway, Solo and Stemmler follow, and it’s not hard to predict what Stemmler will end up doing to save her daughter and atone for her sins.

This is a solid episode, more dramatic than the season’s norm, and it’s the first time in this show that Peter Allan Fields has written female characters in a way that didn’t feel exploitative, misogynistic, or both. It’s a big step in the direction of his much better work in future shows. Both Stemmler women are effectively drawn and well-played, and Farrell is extremely sexy as Leslie. The direction by Barry Shear is also quite strong and stylish, particularly in the Acapulco sequence, which has some strikingly fast-paced and artistic editing that’s unusual for the era. This is definitely one of the few standouts of the season.

—

“The Indian Affairs Affair”: Needless to say, when this show does an episode about Indians, it’s an assemblage of cowboys-and-Indians tropes and cliches, beginning with a cigar-store Indian outside the Bureau of Indian Affairs, then onto a group of Indians using arrows and tomahawks to attack Solo and Illya in the city streets for reasons which are never adequately explained. But apparently it has something to do with THRUSH kidnapping Chief Highcloud (Ted de Corsia) of the Cardiac tribe — seriously — to force his people to let them use their reservation as a site for developing a new type of H-bomb. The tribe won’t talk to outsiders, so Waverly sends Illya to investigate and Solo to contact Highcloud’s New York-resident daughter, whose name is Charisma — seriously. Apparently this is the world’s only Greek-speaking Indian tribe. Speaking of names, Charisma is played by Victoria Vetri under her stage name Angela Dorian, the name she would subsequently use as a Playboy Playmate. Charisma’s a student who does stereotyped Indian dances to pay the bills. Solo tries to solicit her help, but THRUSH attacks and Solo “allows” them to kidnap her, though not before he manages to get a tracer on her (deja vu!).

The THRUSH team is led by L.C. Carson (Joe Mantell), who runs a historical museum and has a generations-long grudge against the Cardiacs for their massacre of a cavalry force including his ancestor — which he calls an atrocity by savages with no sense of guilt, conveniently ignoring the far larger massacre inflicted in the other direction over the preceding centuries. His men are the second band of THRUSH goons this season to dress as cowboys. Carson’s kind of a lunatic, at one point donning war paint and trying to rape Charisma because the “savages” have retained a virility the modern white man has lost. She fights him off fairly well and Solo ultimately saves her, though they’re recaptured.

Meanwhile, Illya is attacked by the tribe’s motorcycle-riding warriors, who make an inept attempt to torture him before he wins them over with his usual “You tribal people whom I respect must follow my leadership because I’m smarter than you and also blond” routine. He dresses up as a Cardiac (though with his very pale complexion unaltered) and gets Carson’s man Ralph (Nick Colasanto) to take him to the chief, where his escape attempt dovetails with Solo’s before the aforementioned recapture.

Anyway, the bomb project has involved scientists from multiple countries working on separate components without knowing their purpose, until they’re brought together at the reservation and turn out to be pieces of the world’s first suitcase nuke. In the words of project leader Dr. Yahama (Richard Loo), “We have transistorized a nuclear bomb.” (That was a ’60s term for miniaturization, since transistors allowed smaller electronic devices than vacuum tubes.) The plan somehow involves hiding the bomb in one of four cases and sending them all back to their separate countries without anyone knowing which one has the bomb. I’m not sure what the point of this was supposed to be, but ultimately it’s just an excuse to have a convoy of cars that can “circle the wagons” when an escaped Solo and Illya rally the Cardiacs on motorbikes to attack them Western-style.

In a number of ways, this episode by Dean Hargrove is an attempt to subvert cowboy-and-Indian tropes and align its sympathies with the Indians. The cowboys are cast as the villains and the Indians as the heroes, and Carson’s virulent racism is portrayed as evil and grotesque. Chief Highcloud is portrayed, to a point, as a dignified leader who dislikes seeing his people’s proud traditions mocked, and Charisma is embarrassed by her stereotyped dancing. So it was a decent try. But the episode is nonetheless laden with TV/movie Indian caricatures and cliches that are anything but respectful or authentic, like act titles written in stereotyped broken English. So while it tries to counter the cliches, it’s still a prisoner of them.

On the plus side, we get a mostly original score by Gerald Fried, largely doing his usual ethnic-sounds thing, though there’s an amusing cowboy-guitar motif for the THRUSH men as well. (And Jerry Goldsmith’s episode-wrapup motif is briefly heard at the end as well, arranged “Indian-style” by Fried.)

And that’s the end of season two. Up next, a review of the theatrical One Spy Too Many and a season overview.

ONLY SUPERHUMAN reader question: Measuring the Green Blaze’s powers

I recently received a few questions about Only Superhuman from Brandt Anderson via a Facebook message, and I thought I’d address them here. Brandt wrote:

I enjoy most super hero novels such as Ex-Heroes, Paranormals, Devil’s Cape, etc., and one of the things that is always forefront on my mind is stats. I like knowing exactly how strong or how fast the super-powered character is. So, I was hoping you wouldn’t mind giving an approximation on how enhanced Emerald Blair is. Her strength, speed, reflexes, senses, healing factor and durability if you don’t mind. Also, I apologize for this amount of nitpicking, would you able to tell me what her superhuman attributes be at without any of the enhancements she has? And lastly, in your world, how strong is the average super-being and what is the normal human level at?

Those are interesting questions, though to be honest, I haven’t really worked out that many of the details. It’s worth thinking about if I get to do further novels, though, so I’ll try to offer some answers.

I did address Emerald Blair’s strength level in the novel when I had Eliot Thorne mention that she could “bench-press a tonne in one gee,” i.e. standard Earth surface gravity. That led me to the following analysis from my novel annotations:

From what I can find, the current world record for an unassisted or “raw” bench press (without the use of a bench shirt, a rigid garment that supports the muscles and augments the amount they can lift) for a woman in Emry’s weight class seems to be held by Vicky Steenrod at 275 lb/125 kg. Assuming Thorne was referring to what Emry could lift raw, that would make her 8 times stronger than Ms. Steenrod, at least where those particular muscles are concerned. And Emry’s training isn’t specialized for powerlifting but is more general, so that would probably make her even stronger overall. Not to mention that Thorne seemed to be talking about her typical performance, not a personal record. So as an adult Troubleshooter, with bionic upgrades on top of her Vanguardian mods, Emry might be at least 10 times the strength of an unenhanced female athlete of her size and build. That may be conservative, given some of what I’ve read about the possibilities of artificial muscle fibers. On the other hand, there are limits to how much stress the organs of even an enhanced body could endure.

By the way, the all-time raw bench-press world record is 323.4 kg by Scot Mendelson, who’s 6’1″ and over twice Emry’s weight. The assisted world record (with a bench shirt) is 487.6 kg by Ryan Kennelly, who’s about the same size and whose unassisted record is much lower. So going by what I figured before, that would make Emry nearly 4 times as strong as the strongest human beings alive today, and that’s without the added assistance her light armor would provide her (though she’d need to add sleeves to her armor to get the full effect). And that’s the lower limit. In any case, given all the bionic enhancements she’s added to her native strength, she might well be the strongest person in Solsys in proportion to her weight class, or at least right up there with the record-holders of her day.

Art by Raymond Swanland

According to my character profiles, by the way, Emerald’s height is 168 cm (5’6″) — at least in one gee or thereabouts, since people gain a bit of height in low or microgravity due to their skeletons being less compressed — and her mass is 69 kg (153 lb), which is a bit heavy for her size, but that’s because of the added weight of her bionics and reinforcements, as well as her dense musculature.

So that’s strength. What about speed? Well, I established in Chapter 6 that Javon Moremba, who’s specialized for running, could run at 60 km/h, which is just one and a third times the world record set by Usain Bolt in 2009. I’m not really sure how much it’s possible to increase human running speed without substantially restructuring human anatomy, since we’re already kind of specialized for running by evolution — although we’re specialized more for endurance running than speed, which was how our ancestors were able to be successful hunters and trackers. Javon’s anatomy is altered from the human norm, with atypically long legs and powerful joints and enlarged lungs. Emerald’s proportions are more normal, and her legs aren’t especially long; plus she’s not exactly lean. She’s built more for strength than speed. On the other hand, the athlete I modeled her physique after, tennis star Serena Williams, can be an astonishingly fast mover on the tennis court due to her sheer strength — though not as fast as her leggier sister Venus.

Okay, so we can safely assume that the teenage Emry couldn’t run as fast as Javon. She’s only 84% his height and less of it is legs, so let’s say she has 75% of his stride. I actually have her down as only 72% of his mass, though; I think I based Javon’s statistics on the aforementioned Mr. Bolt. I guess the question is, what’s the comparative ratio of total muscle mass to push with and total body mass to be pushed? I think I’ll avoid any complicated math and just go with visual intuition, which tells me that Emry has proportionally more excess bulk to deal with; but once she’s bionically enhanced, that might compensate.

So let’s say that with just her raw muscle, no cyborg upgrades, she’s got a minimum of 75% of his running speed, which would be equal to Bolt’s world record. But how much do her upgrades boost her strength? Well, we know that she was always strong enough in her adolescent years to match or overpower any man, and judging by those weightlifting figures above, a man’s maximum strength might be something around 2.5 times a woman’s, all else being equal. But many of those men would be mods themselves, so we’d need to up that. Still, I don’t want too much of her strength to be innate, since the bionics should contribute a lot. So let’s say that she started out roughly 3.3 times the normal strength of a woman of her build and had it tripled by her Troubleshooter bionics.

How does that apply to her running speed? This is probably oversimplifying like hell, but it seems to me that if you exert three times the force on the same mass, then by Newton’s second law you get three times the acceleration. Now, for a given distance, the time needed to cover it goes as one over the square root of the acceleration; and the rate is the distance over the time. So that would suggest, unless I’m doing something very wrong, that if she has three times the acceleration for each thrust of her leg muscles pushing her forward, then her speed would be increased by roughly the square root of three, or 1.73. So if her running speed without bionics was 45 km/h, then with bionics it’d be nearly 80 km/h (50 mph). Though she’s probably capable of bursts of even faster speed when she supercharges her nanofiber implants, as we saw when she made her skyscraper jump in Chapter 11. This would make her about 5/6 the typical speed of Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, and half the top recorded speed of Jaime Sommers, the Bionic Woman. But let’s call that her sprinting speed. For endurance running, she’d probably average out a bit slower — let’s say 64 km/h (40 mph), which translates to a 1.5-minute mile — which would put her at better than two and a half times the female world record for the mile. It would also put her slightly above Javon’s indicated speed, but that was for a Javon who was out of training.

There are other ways of measuring speed, though. How fast can she dodge a blow or throw a punch? That gets us into the next question, reflexes. Well, at one point in chapter 16 (p. 284 in the paperback), I say “Her enhanced reflexes made her dodge the shockdart before she was consciously aware of it, but her mind quickly caught up.” So her reaction time is certainly accelerated considerably beyond the norm, so much that it outpaces her conscious thought at times. And while her foot speed is not too much above normal, her dodging speed can be literally faster than a speeding bullet. Well, a speeding dart. If we assume the dart had a speed of around 300 m/s, comparable to an air rifle pellet and close to a 9mm bullet, and if she was maybe 15 meters away from the shooter, that would give her a twentieth of a second to react, or 50 milliseconds. That’s maybe twice the fastest recorded human reaction time for movement, and nearly four times the typical reaction time for a visual stimulus. And that’s just the reaction time she’d need to begin moving to dodge that particular dart. Add in the time it would take to move far enough to miss and she’d have to be even faster. Now, I found a factoid somewhere saying that Usain Bolt moves a foot every 29-odd milliseconds, which is about one centimeter per millisecond, so if we draw on the above comparisons to Bolt’s running speed (which is a horribly rough comparison, but it’s all I’ve got), the Green Blaze might be able to move 1.5-2 cm per millsecond, and her torso is maybe c. 32 cm at its widest point, so to dodge a dart fired at center mass she’d need maybe 8-11 ms. So she’d need to start moving within 40 ms or less, which would be 5 times average human reaction time. Just for a margin of safety and round numbers, let’s say her reaction time is 6 times average and 3 times maximum.

So let’s move on to senses. We know from Ch. 3 that 13-year-old Emry’s “enhanced vision” let her make out the movements of the townspeople of Greenwood from some distance away, far enough that the curve of the habitat gave her an overhead view. Now, Greenwood is a Bernal sphere meant to simulate a rural environment with farmland and presumably forest. It should have a fairly low population density, and my notes give it a population around 3000 people. If we set the population density at maybe 30 people per square kilometer, that gives a surface area of 100 square km, for a radius of about 5 km and a circumference of 31.4 km. Now, just eyeballing it with a compass-drawn circle and a ruler, I’d say she’d need to be 1.5 to 2 km away to get the kind of raised angle described in the text. Now, being an assiduous researcher, I went out and braved the cold to visit my local overlook park to see if I could spot human figures at anything resembling that range. The farthest I was able to spot a human being was at a place that I estimate was about a mile/1.6 km away, with the park’s elevation, despite being a respectable 300 feet or so higher, too small to add significantly to the distance. But I just saw the faintest speck of movement. The scene indicates that Emry could see enough detail to make out body language and attitude. I’d say her resolution would have to be at least 3-4 times greater than mine (with glasses). Although we’re not talking about bionic eyes with zoom lenses, so it’s probably more a matter of perception of detail. Assuming my prescription is still good enough to give me 20/20 vision in at least one eye (which I probably shouldn’t assume), that would make Emry’s visual acuity something like 20/7 or 20/5 if not better; the acuity limit in the unaided eye is 20/10 to 20/8 according to Wikipedia. (20/n means the ability to see at 20 feet what an average person needs to be n feet away to see.) Hawks are estimated to have 20/2 vision. Emry isn’t specialized for eyesight, so let’s not go to that extreme. Let’s give her a baseline visual acuity of 20/5, say, about twice the human maximum.

So what do her bionics add? For one thing, they broaden her visual spectrum to the infrared. This is apparently something she can turn on and off. Now, it should be remembered that TV and movies tend to misrepresent infrared vision as being able to see through walls. Actually that usually wouldn’t work, since walls are generally designed to insulate, so heat — and thus IR light — doesn’t pass through them easily. And as I said in the book, glass is generally opaque to IR. So this wouldn’t be the equivalent of “x-ray vision,” except when dealing with less well-insulated things like human bodies. It could enable her to read people’s emotional states through their blood flow, though, or to track recent footprints and the like. She also has an inbuilt data buffer that’s shown recording images from her eyes and letting her replay, analyze, and enhance them later, projected on the heads-up display built into her retina. So that might give her sort of a “digital zoom” ability, to enlarge part of a recorded image, but not to increase its resolution beyond what her eyes could detect. And her implants might up her acuity to maybe 20/4.

As for her hearing, I haven’t established anything beyond the fact that it’s better than normal. She can probably hear a somewhat larger dynamic range than most people and has somewhat more sensitivity, but I’m not sure it could be enhanced too much without a substantial alteration to the anatomy of the ears. But she could have bionic auditory sensors that could allow her to amplify sounds further as needed. As for scent, I establish in Ch. 20 that Emry can track by it, though not as well as someone more specialized for the task like Bast or Psyche. So her sense of smell is, again, somewhat above normal but not massively so. Which would enhance her sense of taste accordingly as well. It’s possible she’s a supertaster, like a lot of real-life people. (In fact, looking over the list of foods that supertasters dislike, I think I might be one!) As for her sense of touch, it’s no doubt unusually sensitive, which is why she’s so hedonistic and easily stimulated. Although her pain sense is no doubt diminished in comparison to her other tactile perceptions. I gather that redheads are normally more sensitive to pain than most, but it stands to reason that her nociception would have been somewhat suppressed.

“Healing factor” is a tricky one; I’m not sure how to codify it. But she does have a fast metabolism and thus probably heals a bit faster than normal, and her bionics include a “nanotech immune-boosting and injury repair system,” as stated in her character bio. She can’t heal nearly instantly like Wolverine in the movies, since there would be physical and metabolic limits on how fast repairs could realistically be done, but she could probably heal, at a guess, 2-4 times faster than normal depending on the type of injury and whether she’s able to rest and replenish or has to heal on the run. (That’s complete guesswork, since I’m not sure where to find information on human healing rates, what the recorded maximums are, or what mechanisms could enhance them.) She’s also got an augmented immune system, both inborn and nanotech-enhanced; she’s probably got little or no experience with being sick, though she might be susceptible to a sufficiently potent bioweapon. She has toxin filters to protect her from poisoning and drugs. Alcohol would probably have little effect on her, but if she is a supertaster, she wouldn’t like the taste of it anyway. And it’s not like she needs help relaxing her inhibitions, since she hardly has any to begin with.

Durability, though, is something the Green Blaze has in abundance, thanks to her “dense Vanguardian bone” and the nanofiber reinforcements to her skeleton and skin. She’s not easy to hurt. She takes a good deal of pounding in Only Superhuman, but the only skeletal injury she suffers is a hairline wrist fracture which is compensated for by her nanofiber bracing. She rarely sustains more than cuts, bruises, and strains. She’s not exactly bulletproof — she needs her light armor for that — but there are enough reinforcements around her skull and vital organs that it would take a pretty high-powered rifle to inflict a life-threatening injury. Her skull reinforcements are probably comparable to a military ballistic helmet, so shooting her in the head would probably cause surface bleeding and a moderate concussion at worst, and more likely just make her mad. And of course her light-armor uniform gives even more protection, strength enhancement, and the like. (Note that this is as much a matter of micrometeorite protection as bullet protection.)

One power Brandt didn’t ask about is intelligence. Emerald Blair embraces her physical side more than her intellectual side, but her intelligence is easily at genius level. She’s definitely smarter than I am, since I have plenty of time to figure out the solutions that she comes up with on the fly. She’s far more brilliant than she realizes yet, and when and if she catches on and begins developing that potential, she could be a superbly gifted detective and problem-solver.

Brandt’s final question is, “And lastly, in your world, how strong is the average super-being and what is the normal human level at?” Well, the normal, unmodified human level is the same as it would be in real life, although people living in lower-gravity conditions would be less strong than Earth-dwelling humans. As for mods, I’m not sure there’s such a thing as an average one, since they’ve specialized in diverse directions. Only some are augmented for physical strength, like Vanguardians, many Neogaians, and Mars Martialis… ans… whatever. Honestly, I’m not sure to what extent physical strength would be needed as a human enhancement in Strider civilization. Combat in the future will be mostly the purview of drones and robots, or soldiers in strength-enhancing exoskeletons. So enhancing individual strength would be more a choice than a necessity, probably more likely to be done for athletics than anything else. Still, in a setting like Strider civilization, where mods have embraced superhero lore as a sort of foundational mythology, there would be an element of sports and celebrity to crimefighting or civil defense. More fundamentally, in a culture where human modification is embraced, physical strength could be seen as a desirable “biohack” just for the sense of power it provides. It’s like how some people like high-performance muscle cars even though they don’t need that much power to commute to work. I think in the Vanguardians’ case it was about exploring the limits of the human animal, finding how far we could be augmented in every possible way, both as a matter of scientific curiosity and as a symbolic statement to inspire others to mod themselves — and thumb their noses at Earth’s resistance to such things. The average Vanguardian might be somewhere around Emry’s pre-bionic strength level, maybe 3-3.5 times normal muscle strength for a given build, though they vary widely in their builds. Still, I think that Beltwide, only a certain percentage of mods would be tailored for strength, with others emphasizing endurance, senses, reaction time, intelligence, adaptation to particular environments, etc. (on top of the radiation resistance that everyone living in space would need).

So, to sum up the Green Blaze’s powers:

Strength: c. 10x normal for a woman of her build or 4x baseline-human maximum
Speed: up to 80 km/h (50 mph)
Reaction time: c. 6x average or 3x human maximum
Vision: c. 20/4 visual acuity, infrared vision, visual recording and enhancement
Other senses: Moderately above human maximum range and sensitivity
Healing: Somewhat accelerated healing and cellular repair; very strong immune system and toxin resistance
Durability: Considerable resistance to abrasion, contusion, laceration, and broken bones; bullet resistance comparable to a human in moderate body armor
Intelligence: Genius-level but underdeveloped

Note, however, that these are her innate power levels, not counting the further enhancements her light armor would provide to her strength, durability, and speed. But figuring those out would be a whole other essay.

Wow, I got a pretty long essay out of this. It was fun, and it could be useful for future adventures, hopefully.

So I’ll open the door. If anyone has further questions about Only Superhuman that haven’t been addressed already on my website, or more generally about my work, feel free to post them in the comments or on Facebook. Easy questions asked in the comments will probably be answered there, while more involved questions may spawn more essays. We’ll see how it goes.