Saturday, April 8th thru Wednesday, April 12

Space: Above and Beyond – TV Series 1995

     Well, I’ve gotten ahead of my Netflix delivery, thanx to throttling. So, it’s time to start watching some of the stuff I’ve set aside for a rainy day. And the winner this time is a TV series from about 10 years ago I remembered very fondly. I liked it because it had a pretty accurate (as accurate as you could for Fox TV) portrayal of marines. And it was set in the future, when we are at war with an alien race we know nothing about. I’m not going to talk about the individual episodes, so this single blog entry will represent almost a week of evenings, watching 40 minute episodes. I usually got thru three or four a night. Sorry.

We know nothing about the aliens because, as is shown in the pilot, we thought we were alone in the universe. So we were pretty shocked when a colony that had just arrived on a new planet is wiped out by someone or something we’ve never seen before. And to make matters worse, we’re still not over the LAST war we had, with the artificial beings (called Silicates) we invented to be our soldiers and laborers. Unfortunately, they rebelled, and we’re still involved trying to clean up THAT mess.

One of the things that SF has always done well, and this series is no exception, is the presenting of modern issues in an alternate setting. This allows people to think about the social mores of our time, without all that messing emotionalism that comes if you try to talk about something controversial, like racism. Here, there are artificially gestated humans, called Tanks (cause they’re born from a tank, see) who were created to fight the Silicates. (Do you notice that all our previous problems were self-inflicted? We created Silicates, they rebel. We create Tanks, everybody hates them because they’re Not Quite Human.) The military (at least in my experience with 6 years in the Navy on subs in the 80’s) has a very no nonsense attitude towards racism. It is flatly not tolerated. I always liked that about military life, as I never understood racism anyway. So too here, the Tanks are allowed to be fully integrated into military life. And some don’t like it. So there’s an episode or two right there.

The creators of this series (Glen Morgan and James Wong) were involved in the X-Files and Millennium for Fox. They have since gone on to make some pretty good movies, including Jet Li’s The One, Final Destination 1 & 3, and the Willard remake. They are presently remaking Black Christmas. So the production values and plotting are excellent. Also, the dialogue is great. Aside from the absence of the F bomb, this sounds like how military folks talk.

I have two complaints about this release. First, the discs are flippies (Two episodes a side), which I didn’t notice right away. So I saw a few episode out of order. And the second complaint is the almost total lack of extras. The shows are subtitled, but there’s not a single commentary amid the 23 episodes. There are also TV spots (commercials for some of the episodes, but that seemed pretty lame). Certainly with the flippies, there’s plenty of room. Pity Fox didn’t step up to the plate here.

Three beers out of five. (Could have been a four with just a commentary or two)