Starhunter

[Lonewolf89]

Did anyone ever watch this show? I keep seeing on TV late at night. At first I thought it was some lame Outer Limits episode but after an internet search I found out it was an actual show! How long was it on?

 

[HeyLynny]

I don't know, but I keep bumping into this show late at night too. I keep meaning to set my tape but keep forgetting. It doesn't look that bad. I'll try to remember to tape it and find out.

 

[L. Arkwright]

Was it connected to the film by the same name?

 

[Lonewolf89]

I don't think so. There is some information on it in the latest SciFi magazine. It seems as though they're still making episodes, so it's fairly new.

 

[JunkMonkey]

To revive an old thread...

It lasted two seasons. I have watched the first two episodes on Amazon (a 'redux' re-edited version with 'improved SFX' ). I'm surprised it made it to the end of the first season. It's AWFUL! I can't work out if it's awful enough to continue with - like Lexx was for a couple of seasons.

I knew the show was in trouble at the two minute mark. Over an on-screen caption, '3 million years ago', a ponderously slow Arrival / 2001: A Space Odyssey alien monolithy mashup arrives through a glowy spacewarp does something sparkly to what we presume is the planet Earth before disolving into nothingness. Fade (two minutes in) to what is definitely Earth and another caption, 'Present day ... 2285 AD'

- erm... so which is it? The present day or the year 2285?

To distract you from this puzzle the next shot is of a rather attractive semi-naked young woman lying on a bed and, while the audience waits to see if the camera pulls out far enough to see her tits (it does), there is some dialogue. After that it's all very 'WTF is going on?' for 40 minutes. As people explode in toilets, the villain has a threesome (evil lesbian trope box ticked), a Scottish bounty hunter (kilt and hipflask and the best SF comedy eyebrows since Freddy Jones's in Dune) has a brain tumour... and then he doesn't, a mysterious organisation has one of those standing around in a circle taking it in turns to have a light shone on them meeting (Babylon 5's Grey Council but EVIL! but in business suits and with the sort futuristic hairstyles last seen in Duran Duran videos), the mysterious appearance of a shuttle (the dialogue clearly stated the ship only has one - then the plot suddenly requires two so... erm... oh hell, they just land in a shuttle ok? No one will notice. Before there is a shoot out in a warehouse full of empty cardboard boxes(dead lesbian trope box ticked) at the end of which the villain of the piece yells something like, "Behold the awesome power of the Divinity Cluster!" while standing barefoot and Christlike on a computer before dissolving in a rather underwhelming display sfx pyrotechnics.

The next episode was slightly more coherent - though the Scottish member of the crew seems to have vanished without mention and there's another case of the inflatable spaceshuttle when our heroes, marooned on Mercury, suddenly just take off in one because the plot required them to be somewhere else.

Our hero is played by Michael Pare - and he wears a cardigan.

That chair he's sitting in is where he steers the ship - with those control panel things down the side. It's very hard to take seriously any sequence where the ship is being piloted by someone lounging in a comfy armchair.

I may just have to watch some more.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Episode 3 and the crew of the Tulip (I kid you not - this ship is called 'The Tulip') rescue the leader of a suicide cult which has just plunged its ship into the heart of the sun (their ship was pyramidal in shape - I think there was an attempt a Pink Floyd reference here but I may be straining) The cult leader nearly takes over the ship using glowy hand staring eye things and makes reference to 'The Divinity Cluster' that played such a baffingly prominent part of episode one. (Hints at a story arc?)

Three episodes in and we've had two charismatic religious leaders (charismatic, that is, to the characters - in both cases the actors played them in full-on nutcase mode without an ounce of magnetism) who take over the ship and a pair of convicts in transport - one of whom was so charismatic he talked the most gullible of our three person crew into giving him (in his cell) a programmable 3D holographic projector - with utterly predictable results... who attempt to take over the ship..

I'm beginning to detect a pattern here.

Still no sign of Scotty McEyeBrows.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Episode 4

The crew of the Tulip capture a psychopathic criminal and are returning him to space prison when they are commandeered by a Special Ops unit with a prisoner of their own. When some (totally unexplained, out of nowhere) energy burst shockwave something hits them and makes everyone do Start Trek lurching, the prisoners escape. The Special Ops' prisoner is a girl in a body-stocking who uses the now familiar glowing-hand-to-forehead thing this show is so fond of to bump off some puddingy bad actors pretending to be elite fighting troops. She sets the Tulip on course for a quarantined research station orbiting the Uranian moon Miranda. There, after a lot of wandering up and down the same three corridors, it transpires she is the re-incarnated daughter of the head of the research base combined with some unfrozen-from-the-moon's-surface, intelligent, hive-mind virus that feeds on hate and emotion.... and then the moon blows up for no other reason than the show only had a couple of minutes' running-time left and no one could think of a proper ending.

I'm sure the directors of this show knew the how to do the standard walk and talk, 'we've got a shedload of boring dialogue to deliver so we'll have the characters walk down a corridor as they deliver it which is slightly less boring than them standing in a row' shots - but they don't get used in this show. There are various possible reasons for this:
1 They require a set long enough to sustain more than a few seconds of dialogue at a normal walking pace. (Which I'm not sure this show has.)
2 They require equipment which may not be readily available, or costly in time and money - such as steady-cam or dolly tracks
3 They require expensive rehearsal time and then extended shots are more likely to require several takes to get right and are then more difficult to cut away from and into than static close ups of the actors delivering the same dialogue.
4 They requires actors who can deliver more than two lines at a time.

Instead of the walk and talk shots we get lots of dialogue in cheap-looking, medium close-up, one and two shots which are a lot easier to stitch together and reshape in the cutting room. But are soap opera dull. To take the edge off this relentless rigidity just about every shot is dutched. The camera is tilted at every opportunity. No one is ever quite vertical. It's very annoying.

I'm starting to suspect that Eyebrows McScott was a figment of my imagination.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Esipode 5: The Man Who Sold the World - the title of which tells us the writers of this show have heard of some SF books even if they have obviously never read any.

The crew of the Tulip go to Pluto and get to leave the confines of the studio for a couple of days as some of the action takes place in a very 1980's Doctor Who-looking quarry. They are there to arrest a war criminal. He does not want to get arrested. He uploads an annoying referring to themselves in the third person floaty head hologram to destroy the Tulip while our heroes Dante Montana and Luc Scott are left to the tender mercies of his girlfriend. (Who has really nice teeth. Seriously impressive set of gnashers.) Our villain was involved in horrible genetic experiments during the 'Callisto Rebellion' and it turns out was doing research on... the Divinity Cluster! Though what he was working on, or what he discovered isn't really explained. I suspect The Divinity Cluster! isn't really a story arc at all but a thing to be dropped into every other episode to make it look like there is a story arc before being pulled out of a hat for some final episode showdown that will end generating more unresolved loose ends than it tidies up. (Not that there are any at the moment.) To add some impetus to the proceedings all this is happening at exactly the same time as a once in 28,693 years 'electro-magnetic anomaly' is due to hit 'in this part of the Solar System' and makes things explode. The floaty head AI is defeated when the Percy the sulky teenage girl left in charge of the Tulip gets fed up with everything being sh*t and having off-set grips squirting fire extinguishers at her, pushes a couple of buttons and automagically makes everything all right - just in time to collect our heroes. The villain ended up dead because he dumped his girlfriend and in a fit of pique she shot him. The girlfriend was then shot in turn by the secondary hero.

Suddenly finding themselves a few minutes short of their allotted adventure time the three person crew take it in turns to stare into middle distance as their inner monologue voice overs unconvincingly waffle on about destiny and the meaningless of existence.

End

The cameraman, fed up with merely dutching his angles, gets inventive and starts off at least two shots with the camera (or at least the image) upside down.

Canada probably has has two quarries within driving distance of Vancouver as the quarry used here was not the same one that appears in every other episode of Stargate.

Scotty McNot has obviously been written out of the show as has any mention of our hero's main motive (as expressed in the original opening credit voice over) of searching for his son "stolen from him ten years ago", mentioned vaguely in episode one not not referred to at all since.

 

[BAYLOR]

Ive seen a few episodes, Pretty dire stuff.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Eipesod 6: Peer Pressure.

Our crew pick up a mother and son from a research facility on one of the moons of Saturn. The mother is wanted for murder. Who has charged her with murder; who she has (possibly) murdered; who arrested her and handed her over to our crew are mysteries that the budget didn't run to answering. So mother and son are locked up in the now familiar cage set. But not before it is made plain that the lad and the crew's teenage girl member really like the look of each other. The son is let out of his cage. The son is put back into his cage . The son is let out again. The son is locked up again. The Mother - during one of the times the son is wandering free around the ship discovering the joys of snogging a 25 year old woman playing a teenager - gets out of her cage by using a rinky-dinky mind-control device to take over the captain's higher brain functions and turn him into her drooling slave. This means Michael Pare gets to do even less than usual, apart from "Pain! Captain Kirk!" acting when she gets pissed off with him. The third member of the crew whose accent and acting chops keep making me think she's wandered in from an episode of Eastenders * gets her higher brain functions tamper-proofed by automagical handwaveium tech and forces the mom scientist to restore the captain's noggin to its previous state. During the procedure the son decides his mom has to be stopped and the best way to do this is to kill himself by going out an airlock without a spacesuit - WHY???? - who knows? The Mom is so upset she uses the mind-control device to turn herself into a drooling cabbage.
Everyone goes home. Teenage girl gets to have a sad moment with a hologram recording of dead boy before the final end credits.

Best bits:
The moment where the young lovers are sitting in the observation deck looking out at the rings of Saturn. The camera dollies forward and the stars behind the rings shift in relation to them. Okay guys, you're not actually looking at Saturn there. You're looking at a cardboard cut-out about three meters in front of the glass. But since this shot was CGI they didn't even have that excuse.

Watching the Mom's voiceover slipping out of sych with her lips. The actress was either not very good at ADR or another actress was bought in to replace her voice entirely because she looks incredibly dubbed for the whole show.

Having said that there were a couple of almost okay moments in this episode. The editor got to flex his muscles and do some groovy jump cutting. Tanya Allen (the teenage Percy) got to prove she is probably the best actor on the show - certainly the most watchable and the one who looks like she's having most fun. And the final shot of Mom rocking in her cell was not exactly ground-breaking but would have worked well as the final 'haunting' shot but they went and buried it fumbling their way to the lost love teenage sadness ending.

* (I think it's the way she gets to say, "What is going on?" at least once every episode - I keep expecting one of the Mitchells to tell her to "Leave it! - You don't wanna know.")

 

[Rodders]

But are you enjoyong it, JunkMonkey?

Sounds like it could be a "So Bad it's Good" kinda thing.

 

[BAYLOR]

But are you enjoyong it, JunkMonkey?

Sounds like it could be a "So Bad it's Good" kinda thing.

The sad part is this mess of a series actually had the potential to be something good.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I

But are you enjoyong it, JunkMonkey?

Sounds like it could be a "So Bad it's Good" kinda thing.

I am enjoying it's awfulness. (I'm sure there's a long German word for that.) Like Baylor says it " had the potential". Watching them squander what they had is fascinating. I have since discovered that there was more than the two original seasons. In 2017 a three episode 'mini-series' was shot.

Starhunter Transformation (TV Mini Series 2017– ) ⭐ 8.2 | Sci-Fi

50m

www.imdb.com

The producers have, as yet, not found a buyer/airtime/distribution deal. You have to wonder how bad things have to be for that to have happened given the drek that makes it free to air (ish) on Amazon Prime.

 

[BAYLOR]

I

I am enjoying it's awfulness. (I'm sure there's a long German word for that.) Like Baylor says it " had the potential". Watching them squander what they had is fascinating. I have since discovered that there was more than the two original seasons. In 2017 a three episode 'mini-series' was shot.

Starhunter Transformation (TV Mini Series 2017– ) ⭐ 8.2 | Sci-Fi

50m

www.imdb.com

The producers have, as yet, not found a buyer/airtime/distribution deal. You have to wonder how bad things have to be for that to have happened given the drek that makes it free to air (ish) on Amazon Prime.

Here's what the producers should do but won't likely do . Keep the cast and over all premise but hire a a big name executive producer and let that person in their own writers and directors and editors and, increase the special effects budget.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Iepsode 7 : Frozen

While transporting a gay art thief the crew pick up a mayday signal from a shuttle. On the shuttle are a scientist and his son fleeing a secret research base.... (big deja vu from last episode - just how many family-friendly, secret research bases are there in this solar system?). The son has the unconscious ability to make people see dead relatives. While the rescuing is going on the art thief lets himself out of his cell using a getting out of jail free gizmo he smuggled onboard knowing, after last week's episode, that the crew of the Tulip have no idea that searching their prisoners for concealed weapons or devices with teeny flashing lights might save them an awful lot of time relocking up people they thought were safely behind bars.

'Raiders' turn up wanting the son because... that's what Raider do - steal sons. Our captain remembers his primary goal in life and tries to find out from them what happened to the son they stole from him ten years ago in "2265". (Which was 'ten years ago' if you believe the original opening credits but twenty if you believe the Redux's.) As well as the captain remembering his raison d'être, his sidekick Luc discovers she's working for the secret organisation behind the secret research base and that the secret gay art thief secretly works for them too. Seven episodes in and people are starting to get the story arc into gear. The son projects an image of himself into the Raiders' minds and they go away thinking the image is him. Gay art thief is released because.... they're trying to set him up as a recurring character? Father and son are dropped off on Titan where they will be safe because Titan has been "Raider-free for years". There's probably a sign on the door with a counter in it.

"Titan. Proudly Raider Free for [1],[5][8][5] days."​

Other news:
The film crew seen to have fixed the dodgy camera head - there were hardly any dutched angles this episode. They probably fixed it on the day they shot all the holding cell shots; they were all very very hand held. "Jesus this thing's heavy! What time did they say they'd have it fixed?"

I think I'm going to start counting the number of times people say "What's going on?" at crucial moments. I suspect it's this show's equivalent of the "Captain's log supplemental..." quick recap after an ad break.

"What's going on!"
"The Raiders are still there - waiting for the dog food commercial to finish!"
"Look out! They're firing again!"

 

[JunkMonkey]

Epidose 8: Past Lives

One of those 'Just how small is this Solar System?' episodes The crew of the Tulip are JUST in the right place to intercept a shuttle fleeing from a secret research base orbiting Saturn (I am Getting Very Deja Vu here) The only person on board is - da da daaaah! - second in command, ex Black Ops, hard woman of the crew, Luc's ex husband! (What are the chances eh?) He has been injected with some experimental drug that will kill him in 48 hours. Doing a bit of research of her own Luc discovers the research base is probably owned by the powerful cabal which may or may not be headed by her dad - he may not be the boss but we saw him taking part in the Grey Council meeting in the first episode being very adamant and dominant.

This cabal by the way glories in the name of 'The Orchard' which makes me think that at some point they got the advertising / image consultants in.

"Well we've looked at all the metrics and held extensive focus groups in our secret advertising research base orbiting Saturn and we've identified your core problem. Basically your plans for Universal Domination will continue failing to reach their full potential unless you rebrand. 'Mega-Z-Death Corp.' has to go. For some reason people just don't warm to having their loved ones slaughtered and their civil liberties infringed by any organisation with a Z in its name. We suggest you rename yourself something a little more organic, classical, and friendly like 'Apple', or 'Meta', or 'The Orchard'...."

The captain, not wanting to be left out, has a ex wife too. He keeps her in a chipset and has to wear groovy 3D glasses to accesses her. Apparently she was a research scientist in a blah blah blah and just developed a method of storing people's entire personalities onto hardware when the bad guys arrived and blew everything up apart from the dying-wife digitizer (every home should have one!).

There was a moment of possible tension in the episode when the sudden need for a specific circuit/memory board component to get the ship's reactor back online (so they could make it to some medical facility in time to blah blah blah...) And the audience thinks "Oh no - the captain's's gonna have to sacrifice the interactive wife chip to save his friend's husband! What convoluted and ironic agony!" The audience may have thought that - well I did - but if the writers did they managed to forget to include it in the final script. (That or it was Reduxed out of existence since the first broadcast.)

The head's gone on the camera rig again and it was back to flopping Dutch angles about all over the place.
But only one shot started upside down.

Mentions of Divinty Cluster - Zero.
Big-hearted, hard-drinking Scottish Stereotypes - Zero
Topless Women - Zero (unless you count one of those flashback sex scenes where people make love with the sheets taped to their chest whenever the camera is anywhere but DIRECTLY BEHIND YOU). The boobies used to distract us from the plot in episode one obviously got the money in to make the show - but not enough to pay anyone to do it naked.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Epicsod 9: Family Values

Our hero plugs his wife in and has a wee chat with her in her Lawnmowermanny cyberspace. Apparently she's dying again, her digitized form is breaking down 'on a sub-molecular level', thus adding extra imperative to the whole "find our son" thing. Personally I would have thought a "run CHKDSK for errors and make a backup" thing would have been first on my list but then I'm not a successful TV scriptwriter*.

The Tulip goes to Mars to arrest a small time con artist (doesn't anywhere in this universe have any local law enforcement?). The conman is played by a small, moustached, round faced, French-accented actor. His character is gay, has a boyfriend, and for the first few minutes of his screen time I'm convinced my suspicion that they let the gay French-accented, round faced, moustached art thief go in episode seven so that he could become an established character was justified. But I was wrong. This was a completely different character.

Just as our heroes are about to make the pinch out in the Martian desert where the couple have fled so the show's designers don't have to come up with a set, they are attacked by a Raider! Pew! Pew! Pew! Hopelessly out-gunned our heroes and their captives cower behind some rocks until a teenage girl, sitting in a comfy chair on their mother ship, drops a spy drone onto the bad guy's ship and knocks it out of the sky.

In the wreckage they find the raider is still alive and so is a 12 year old boy. "This could be my SON!" The French con man's boyfriend died - somehow, we're not sure how. Other Raiders are on the way. Facing unsurmountable odds our heroes decide to run away taking the boy with them. The French conman says he will stay behind and hold of a hoard of evil bad guys. Our heroes, forgetting he is the only person they have an arrest warrant for and with a past history of letting Frenchmen with moustaches go free immediately say 'yes' and leg it back to their shuttle-craft. The bad guys arrive. French guy says, 'Hi bad guys, look at meeeee!'. His eyes glow and in a really weird piece of SFX seems to embody the whole of the universe for a few seconds (like the Eternity character from the early Steve Ditko Dr Strange comics). All the bad guys die... for some reason. (Because it says so in the script?) They just drop dead. And the audience are totally baffled - because this really did come out of absolutely nowhere. Right up till this moment the character has been your typical three-time loser, snivelling failure - then he pops up from behind a barrel and suddenly he's GOD!

Back on the good ship Tulip a DNA test proves the boy isn't our hero's son but they do now know who he is and will take him home.

Everyone is a bit sad.



No Scots. No tits. No Divinity Doo-Dah! (unless the French drop dead guys thing was a manifestation of it, and if it was it didn't look anything like its previous, "Behold the Awesome Power!" manifestation and no mention was made in the dialogue.

I am becoming increasingly bewildered by this show.

Other matters:

So far this show has had five Gay/bi characters in eight episodes - which is pretty good going considering it took Talia Winters and Susan Ivanova nearly two whole seasons (of Babylon 5) to even get the suggestion of a kiss. Trouble here though is that every one of them has been on the 'wrong' side of the law, three of them ended up dead, the other two French.

Mars we are told is a wasteland "A hundred years of Terraforming and Trillions spent." I dunno but a breathable atmosphere, fluffy clouds in the sky and puddles of standing water after only a hundred years sounds pretty good going to me. (None of these clouds BTW are visible from space. The establishing shots of the Tulip in orbit look like current NASA maps.)

Our Special Ops, tough lady hero doesn't know how to wear a surgical mask. The white water-absorbent side goes next to the face, the coloured water-repellent side outside. I only know this because of the current pandemic - and the fact that my wife works in a medical facility and is fed up with telling people how to wear them... BUT during the course of this episode there is mention of a killer 'Black flu' epidemic which rendered lots of men sterile (that's why the Raiders steal baby boys), so how to wear a surgical mask properly would be part of the basic world building.

Like a lot of episodic TV the running order of this show in open to debate. Family Values in the Redux version (as presented on Amazon Prime) is episode eight. IMDb lists this as originally being episode three. So whatever attempt at a story arc there may have been in the original has been well and truly mangled even before each individual episode was re-edited.




*'success' here defined as 'getting something you wrote filmed'.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Espiode 10: Cell Game

While picking up a prisoner for transfer the crew of the Tulip are ambushed and teen engineer wizz kid Percy is thrown into Women in Prison hell. The rest of crew are blackmailed by the prison warder into busting out a dangerous killer from their next stop in order to get her out. To get into the maximum security prison, our hero pretends to be a prisoner in transit and gets locked up with the prisoner he is delivering. Back on Prison One, fed up with her bad girl cell mates (ie the type of aggressive unconvincing butch cliché lesbians that only appear in WIP movies), Percy busts out of her cell and gets one of them killed. In prison Two Dante (our hero) convinces the bad guy he's supposed to be springing to go along with him - but not before saying nasty things about HIS sexuality about which the guy neither takes offence or denies. The plan is to pretend they have some virulent mutant form of hepatitis and get carted off to a medical facility by the Tulip. The plan works. Back on Prison one the swap is made and just as Th Warder is about renege on the deal Dante whips out some hitherto unused (and unmentioned) bit of backstory to turn the tables and all the bad guys are arrested.

Actually this was a watchable episode. For one thing it didn't stop. A lot of previous episodes there have been longueurs with lots of aimless corridor wandering and skulking round corners which served very little purpose other than to pad out the lack of script to a decent running time. This episode substituted a sh*tload of fist fights, rape, and the usual gratuitous prison sadism for the wandering around stuff. There was also a bit more in the way of world-building too. As a throwaway added threat, the warder makes noises about selling Percy into the sex trade.

Hard to describe an episode with so much casual gay bashing and by-the-numbers prison violence crap as the 'best' episode so far but certainly the least boring. There were two parallel story-lines which doesn't happen often and the intercutting between to two was well done. And there was tension between our crew with differences of opinion and divided loyalty which stretched the actors a little more than delivering the usual agreeing with each other, or asking what was going on stuff.

Other Stuff:
Searching for son? No
Scotty Person? No
Tits? Yes.
Divinity Clustering. No.
Orchard? No.

 

[JunkMonkey]

11: Blacklight

The crew are on their way to somewhere undefined delivering a captured female Raider. Deep in the bowels of their ship a short circuit defrosts a military officer who, along with a couple of his colleagues, has been in cryogenic deep sleep for fifty years. He wakes up. They don't. Somewhat disorientated he is determined to do Good Old British stage acting in an American TV milieu and continue with his 'Mission' - fighting a war with the Raiders for possession of Mars that has been over for half a century. His side won but he went down in the history books as missing, presumed dead after leading his troops to a heroic defeat. As amazing TV timing would have it the Raiders are having a super secret conclave which the crew of the Tulip just happen to be in the right place to stumble upon. "Aha!" Thinks our hero. "A chance to infiltrate the Raiders and find my son!". Aided by the captured Raider girl who, for some reason, idolises the resurrected military officer he is about to put that plan into action when the military officer sneaks away, boards a one-man suicide fighter that he hid on the Tulip fifty years ago and that NO ONE HAD NOTICED in all that time, and kamikazes into the Raider base. End of that plan. End of show. (The question of how the Tulip escapes the entire Raider navy after launching an unprovoked attack on their mother ship is not only left unanswered - it's not even asked. The show just stops at the point where you would expect the all-out, 'Zap! Pow! Getus outta here! Pew! Pew! Pew!' heck to start.)



Okay, THE big problem with this episode is.... that it makes no sense whatsoever.

Ignore the fact that the Raiders can fly around the Solar System at will and have a huge space base that no one is able to track. (Blah blah! I know 'cloaking devices'. Well, there's no mention in the script of any such devices and, even if there were, you could still SEE the thing. They didn't even paint it black. If we can track thousands of asteroids from ground-based, and near-earth orbit observatories in the first half of the 21st century then something the size of an American City Block (cubed) and made of shiny metal should be pretty easy to spot when people are spread out from Mercury to Pluto.)

I can just about let the scriptwriters off with the idea that the cryogenic chamber had been undiscovered for 50 years. I would have been more convinced if a couple of lines of dialogue explaining it away had been included. Something about 'all knowledge of that area of the ship being erased from the ship's AI' maybe. What I can't find any explanation for is why those guys were in the cryochamber in the first place. The Tulip is an old vessel (at least 50 years we learned from this episode) requisitioned for use as a troop ship during the long ago war. Our gallant crew have no trouble dealing with the journey times they enure. They have been from Mercury to Pluto in the course of the series so far with no noticeable signs of ageing. So why freeze high ranking military officers for the hop from Earth to Mars? And then lose them? The only thing I can come up with - and this is a stretch - is that the higher-ups in the military saw these guys as fuckups and for some bizarre reason decided this elaborate set-up was a best way shunting them to one side. I would have thought assigning them some dead-end desk job, counting paper-clips on the most obscure establishment they had on the books would have been easier to arrange, but apparently not.

Other stuff.

Scotty McScotScot is still AWOL.
No Boobies.
No Orchard.
No Gay Bashing.
Disintegration of Digital Wife? - Proceeding apace.

We also learned that MIchael Paré can cry on cue - which is a difficult thing to do. My respect for him as an actor went up a notch during this episode.

 

[JunkMonkey]

12: Goodbye, So Long

It's Danté's turn to bump into someone from his past and dig up old memories as he finds himself meeting his (dead) wife's first husband. The old friend was always a bit of a hustler and is ostensibly making his living selling spares and recycled junk at a market but... he has a bigger deal going down and the bad guys aren't happy because he hasn't come up with the goods.

Leaving Danté alone for a minute he goes to to get something from his ship. There is a godallmighty explosion and his ship is blown to atoms (or, at least, a lot of sizeable CGI polygons) . Everyone runs away, taking with them the old friend's business partner. The business partner waits till the air filtration system is fixed - which is why they were looking for spare parts in the first place - before finally achieving what everyone else who has boarded this ship has attempted and failed to do. By simply sneaking up behind people and hitting them with heavy objects, he takes over the ship. He lets Raiders on board and together they torture Danté, trying to get him to tell them where "THE SEEDS" are. What seeds? He doesn't know what they are talking about. (Nor do we, but that's OK). Meanwhile, back in the cells, the women of the crew hot-wire the lock and escape. Realising Danté really doesn't know about the show's McGuffin, the old friend shoots all the Raiders dead. And then it's his turn to get in the cell when the women turn up and point guns at him. They fix the ship but find it has been programmed to fly to another space station and are unable to change course. There are Raiders on their tail. Danté pulls up the arrest records from the destination space base, sees a name he recognises, and decides (for no discernable reason) that's who the bad guys are supposed to meet. The records have no info as to his current whereabouts Luc sneaks off to her room and, with her secret Talking to The Orchard Device, does a CSI and gets his location in seconds flat. This really is pulling plot rabbits out of the hat stuff. "We need to get to the next set and have to have some explanation as to why we are there so if we just keep talking for a bit it will make it look like we know what we're doing .... and here we are."

After a bit of fist to belly interrogation the old friend tells us that THE SEEDS are the seeds of an ultra-secret experimental genetically-engineered super-terraforming plant which will make anywhere they are planted have a breathable atmosphere in no time at all. Gosh! That sounds useful!

They find the bar where the plot rabbit is working. They've just about worked out he hasn't got the McGuffin when the Old Friend walks in. He wasn't dead after all! He doesn't know where the seeds are either. Everyone shouts things like, "You just couldn't stay dead ,could you?!", and "Damn you Montana! Why did you have to come back into my life?!" until one of them realises he can't think of a cliché to say and starts shooting instead. (It's like a game from Whose Line is it Anyway? but with artillery.)

Everyone who might possibly have a clue as to what is going on gets killed.

Dante is sad. His best chance (this week) of finding his son - the Raiders wanted the seeds so he was going to do a swap - has vanished forever. No one knows where the seeds are. Where are the seeds? Does anyone know where the seeds are? Percy, put down that silly kaleidoscope the business partner was always so careful with and look for the seeds... Percy! Well, at least let the camera have a POV of what you are looking at... (Hmmm I wonder what those floaty blobby blue things are?)

Ironic fade to black.

Other stuffing:

No Scottish orchard tits. Two minor outbreaks of 'Gay' humour - neither of them particularly offensive but both pretty needless. Lots of Dutching. No Upsideowning.