DVD Review: SPACE 1999 BLU-RAY Episode#1 BREAKAWAY! Plus Viewing Order List!!

So I just received today the SPACE 1999 Blu-Ray Season One Set!

Does it live up to expectations? Few episodes in and I have to say… HOLY HECK does it ever! I’m older than most of you reading this, having been frozen in a block of ice during World War II (Okay , okay I’m joking! It was actually World War I) 🙂 , so it tends to give me a different perspective on culture and entertainment.

And I guess a different appreciation for the wonders of yesteryear.

Whereas kids raised today on the latest Battlestar Galactica or Big Screen Blockbuster, may see in this outdated show just groan inducing cheese, I see something that does not dim or fade… I see quality. And it is not for nostalgic reasons that I praise some old shows; old shows can be awful just like new shows. I’m always distrusting of people who put things on a pedestal for nostalgia’s sake, just because they grew up with something. Seems like a lazy person’s way of rating things.

Crap is crap. I grew up with ‘Different Strokes’ and ‘Dukes of Hazard’ for heaven’s sake, and you would have to pay me (quite a lot) to sit through those shows again.

So yeah anyone who hypes a show based on no more than nostalgia, is suspect at best, and moronic at worst.

Either a show is good or it isn’t.

No, if I gravitate to something from yesteryear or from today I do so because there’s evident in it a craft, a passion, that transcends the budgetary or technological constraints of the time.

I once watched a ragtag theater group on the edge of the world put on a production of MAN OF LA MANCHA, that lacking even the most modest sets, was performed with such verve, and passion that decades later… it rallies me still.

And watching SPACE 1999, a show that even its title proclaims as a short-sighted anachronism, I’m drawn in and impressed by it for similar reasons as that play of long ago. Not judging it because of what I remember of it as a kid (I hated it as a kid) but judging it based on my appreciation of it today.

Here is this multi-national cast and crew, and this British studio, developing in that shadow land between the demise of the Star Trek television series and the rise of the Star Wars film, this very odd space show.

As a kid I wasn’t a fan of the show. I caught it sporadically, and I found it (though it’s not a word I would have used then) plodding. It was stilted, overly stoic, and filled with not particularly happy or young people… endlessly scowling at the camera and talking, talking talking.

As a kid I would watch maybe ten, fifteen minutes, then start looking through the five (and on a good day six) channels we had back then for a good show. Maybe a rerun of Star Trek. Now that was a show to capture a kid’s imagination! It was colorful, action-packed, filled with attractive people (did I mention the mini-skirts) who seemed to be having fun in between saving worlds, By comparison SPACE 1999, was a drab, monochromatic environment, filled with endlessly scowling old people. I could get that from my teachers, so I didn’t need that in my tv show.

So as a kid I might have seen 3 or 4 episodes in bits and pieces, none of them leaving a positive impression on me. But as an adult the price was right, and my curiosity was piqued so I now have the Blu-ray in my SEIKI Multi-region player, and as stated… it looks better than it ever did when watching it as a kid. The Blue-ray remastering is fantastic, imbuing color everywhere in a show that I recall being almost achingly drab and gray and lifeless.

Putting in the first disk, and watching the first episode, BREAKAWAY and I’m stunned… it’s gorgeous, simply sumptuous. It’s visually very reminiscent of Kubrick’s 2001. The masterful use of models, the 1960s used to imagine and dress the coming millennium. Even though this is a show that ran from 1975 to 1977, it’s the suave, controlled ‘James Bond’ 60s, rather than the psychedelic 70s that influence the films costumes and sets.

There’s a sleek open modernity and aesthetic that is style rather than fad, and this extends particularly to the sets and ships with this wonderful analog, tactile sense to the walls and architecture and buttons and displays. And boy, I love seeing those oscilloscopes/frequency generators. As a guy who has had to use more than a few of those, now rarely seen, tech tools… it’s both charming and effective.

It’s a wonderful clash of concepts, a 1999 wherein analog did not lose the war to digital, and Pan-Am never went out of business, and JFK’s head never went back and to the left.

And the story… I had never seen the first episode, the story (which I’ll leave you to discover) is some crazy audacious manna! In short, I found it a lot of fun. Though it plays, fast and loose with physics, I have no prob with that. I go into my sci-fi not expecting it to be sci-fact.

And the stilted, stoic, even dire performances that bored me to tears as a kid, here in this episode work brilliantly. It’s so stylized, their acting, ranging from subtle to understated to unnatural(Barbara Bain offers an unblinking, very controlled, almost mechanized delivery, yet is still very feminine. It’s very unusual what she does, but unusual in this case works). An addictive episode.

If you’re a fan of films such as Kubrick’s 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY or Mario Bava’s DIABOLIQUE, those primary color drenched odes to style, then you’ll love this first episode of SPACE 1999. I was there in 1999, and this is the future we didn’t get, but should have.

Perhaps it’s not too late! Someone go blow-up the moon!!!

🙂

Oh and one more thing. The order these episodes are on the Blu-ray set (and DVD) is production order, which is completely how they came out. However, it doesn’t work.

I’ll say again… it doesn’t work.

I hit episode two, and I was like…. “what the eff, did I miss something?!”. Because even though these shows are supposed to be more or less standalone, some scripts/stories juxtapose badly with other episodes, in the order they are on the disk.

I did a bit of searching, and thankfully found someone who noticed the same type of inconsistency in the production order of the shows. Namely Andrew Kearley who has created a great web site devoted to SPACE 1999.

One of the best things on the site is that he has created a viewing order for the SPACE 1999 shows.

His website gives a breakdown of why he places the shows where he does, and you can read it here. After viewing the entire season one, I see both the strengths and weaknesses of his list. In my opinion, after watching the whole season, it’s best to stick to production viewing order except where necessary. In a lot of cases Kearley’s list moves episodes out of production order, when in my opinion it doesn’t improve or substantially affect the viewing experience.

So I’ve created a list that looks to stay true to the production order of the series (the order it was shot in and how it is laid out in DVD), except where such alterations in my opinion substantially strengthen the viewing experience.

So here is Production order of the episodes and how you will find them laid out on the DVD or Blu-ray:

Breakaway

Matter Of Life And Death

Black Sun

Ring Around The Moon

Earthbound

Another Time, Another Place

Missing Link

Guardian Of Piri

Force Of Life

Alpha Child

The Last Sunset

Voyager’s Return

Collision Course

Death’s Other Dominion

The Full Circle

End Of Eternity

War Games

The Last Enemy

The Troubled Spirit

Space Brain

The Infernal Machine

Mission Of The Darians

Dragon’s Domain

The Testament Of Arkadia

Utilizing Kearley’s and then my own viewing experience, I’m come up with what I believe is the optimum viewing order for this series. Maintaining Production Order whenever feasible. So without further ado, here is the final set in concrete order, that I recommend the shows should be watched in. I call this the HT Space 1999 recommended Episode Viewing Order List (or HT Space 1999 REVOL for short :)):

1. Breakaway
2. Earthbound
3. Black Sun
4. Missing Link
5. Voyager’s Return
The first five follow the Kearley list. Without doubt that gives a great opening to the series.
6. Ring around the Moon
7. Matter of Life and Death
Six and Seven is where I break with the Kearley List. This forms a loose 2 parter. With the possession of the Doctor in RING perhaps following her subconsciously into MATTER and perhaps helps address some of the inexplicable events that happen there.

8. Guardian of Piri
9. Force of Life
10. Alpha Child
11. The Last Sunset
12. Collision Course
13. Death’s other Dominion
14. The Full Circle
15. End of Eternity

These eight episodes GUARDIAN to THE END OF ETERNITY (with the exception of moving one episode earlier in the season for story development reasons) follow production order, as I saw no substantial reason to move them around. And having watched them both ways they work best this way, adhering closer to production order.

16. The Last Enemy
17. War Games

I swap the order of THE LAST ENEMY and WAR GAMES, because in WAR GAMES it kinda heals the damage done to them in THE LAST ENEMY, and helps them get out of the habit of… preemptive strike and finding enemies wherever they look.

18. Another Time, Another Place- Agreeing with Kearley’s desire to have this closer to the end of the first season, I thought this was the ideal place for this episode. The largely space based and battle heavy WAR GAMES being a nice lead in for the far more metaphysical ANOTHER TIME, ANOTHER PLACE. And I think after the loss in ANOTHER TIME, the opening of TROUBLED SPIRIT is a great way to cleanse the palette and show a healing moment for the crew of Alpha after several shattering episodes.

19. The Troubled Spirit
20. Space Brain
21. The Infernal Machine
22. Mission of the Darians
23. Dragon’s Domain
24. The Testament of Arkadia

And the final six episodes follow production order exactly and are a strong powerful wrap up for the first, best, and some would say ONLY true season of SPACE 1999.

Well this has been a lot of fun, a little work, putting this HT Space 1999 Recommended Episode Order Viewing List (REVOL) together. Hope it will be of help and use to some of you. Thanks!

Anyhow, Go enjoy this BLU-RAY edition of a show about a space-faring multi-cultural unified 1999, that somehow here in 2012 we managed to miss. We took the wrong road, somewhere in our not too distant past, and found ourselves stuck for decades in Orwell’s 1984, rather than in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s 1999.

Space: 1999: The Complete Season One [Blu-ray] – Buy it here!

Perhaps it’s not too late to turnaround, as a culture, as a nation, as a world, and find that future that we missed… those days of futures past.

Till later in the words of the late Don Cornelius… Peace, Love, and Soul!!!

TV Review: DEXTER Season #1

So after much hype about the showtime series DEXTER, I finally get around to watching the first season, and I have to say… I didn’t like it.

First the very premise of the show CSI meets Hanninbal Lecter, not really a fan. I think one reason the west in general, and America specifically is such a hotbed of mass murderers is because we are a repressed, violence and death obsessed culture that romanticizes and glorifies our monsters.

And I see shows like DEXTER as feeding into this romanticism of heinous, heinous acts. I heard a recent podcast bemoaning this very fact, that American television is all CSI, blood splatter, bodily fluids, and black light.

It’s not just lowest common denominator tv, it’s uninspired tv.

Getting beyond the mashup of Hannibal meets CSI, DEXTER features some extremely annoying and tired actors/stereotypes. The most annoying is the belligerent, loud and stupid Black guy. I can’t even care enough to look up his name, but if all you have to do is look constipated and frown and bark at people, don’t even show up.

Seriously, just don’t even show up for the part.

Cause that’s not acting, that’s just being a dick. I get so tired of this horrendously cliched and stereotyped writing, of the angry cock-blocked Black man. It’s just bad, boring, inept writing.

And it’s inept acting to see this script and say, “yes I want to play this token, one-dimensional asshole stereotype for the entire season.”

Beyond this actor, I found the other actors nearly as annoying, and it’s not helped by writing that makes these detectives look as if they are dumb as a rock, for not ferreting out the killer. All in all I just wasn’t really invested in the show. more episodes than not, I just wanted it to get to the darn point.

I mean half way through you can figure out where the season’s going, and you’re just waiting for the tired writing to play out to its tepid conclusion. I came to the end of season 1 thinking what a bloody shame, that an awful series like this, and other CSI derivatives get renewed and inventive, original shows such as DAYBREAK, where the Black guy isn’t a dickhead, gets canceled after one season.

Absolutely no justice. All in all, I have to say I have no interest in seeing anymore seasons of DEXTER.

Grade: D.

A quick addendum to the above: I’m hearing good things about the later seasons of this show, starring Mos Def, but after this rocky beginning I’m really gunshy about investing anymore time in this series. There are so many other great things to discover, to give something less than great, a second chance. But we’ll see.

LUTHER DvD Review II: Praise for actresses Nicola Walker and Indira Varma

[Contains minor spoilers for Season 1 of Luther]

I’m rewatching season 1 of Luther in preparation for watching season 2, which I just got in the mail.

The strength and magic of LUTHER is grounded in it not being the standard cop show about the serial killer or the case, those are ancillary to the real story. which is about Luther trying to make all the dysfunctional pieces of his life, particularly the women in his life… work, to be right.

His greatest challenge not surviving the serial killers, but something far more deadly and relate-able, trying to emotionally survive and make happy the women in his life, from his boss, to his wife, to his… arch-enemy/friend. And it’s only when the writer loses that plot, that heart of the story of Luther, that it suffers… badly, and devolves into its sub-par 1st season conclusion.

See my previous review, for my detailed list of problems with season 1, but in brief, a poorly written and cliched final episode (couple of episodes actually) that marred an otherwise tremendous, and amazing series.

Now that said, perhaps I didn’t give enough love to the first 4 (4.5) episodes. Those episodes are really powerhouse television, the quality of which you seldom see.

And a big reason is the quality of the actors. Idris Elba of course is phenomenal, as is Ruth Wilson who plays the red-headed Alice, as well as the rest of the principal cast. But I wanted to give attention to two actresses that I saw in this series first, and have since come on my radar for other work they’ve done.

One is the gorgeous Indira Varma, who plays Luther’s less than faithful wife. She also played the cheating wife in the first season of ROME. She seems to be making a career of playing cheating women as well as playing women who do not end well, with this series, ROME, and MOSES JONES (ugggh— traumatized me. A good series, but one that is too violent for its own good). She’s a convoluted character here in LUTHER, as his estranged wife she is in many ways more damaging to Luther, by far (in her hot/cold nature), than any of the monsters he has to face. She doesn’t set out to be cruel, though there is a bit of that there, but mostly it’s more a half hearted indifference, which is all the more crushing. It’s another strong performance by Indira Varma.

But the 2nd actress I want to give praise to, and the one I really wrote this post to mention, starred in only one episode of Luther, but left an indelible impression. I’m speaking of Nicola Walker, who stars in episode 4’s tale of a purse fetish serial killer. The salacious and slightly silly description of the killer, doesn’t really do justice to the uneasiness of the episode, or the wrenching, and episode making performance of Nicola Walker.

Following seeing her on LUTHER, I caught her earlier work on SPOOKS, and in that she was equally… brilliant. She brings a very unique presence to the screen, something thoughtful, and considered, and deeply heartfelt, she is so… there. In a world where so many people are shutdown, from themselves and others, there is something so rich and full and impassioned and human about her in the noblest most caring definition of that word. She’s not the ravishing beauty of say Indira Varma, but she has something that can only be called… more. Something within, a stillness, a sense of depth, something both furtive and fathomless, fragility married to something slightly frightening, her intensity, kept subdued… just out of sight, something haunting.

To put not too fine a point on it… I adore this actress’s presence, her performances, her ability to channel humanity– definitive, in a world that is anything but… humane.

So yeah that’s the refresher on LUTHER, and a couple actresses who deserved mention. I’ll post on season 2 soon.

Luther

Luther: Season 2

[Season 2 Review: Contains Spoilers]

Addendum: I just watched season 2 of LUTHER, if you can call 4 episodes a season. It’s utter rubbish!

Well, why don’t I tell you how I really feel? 🙂

The main problem with season 2 is it veers sharply to the irrational, and soulless, and more than just a little bit trite and tired.

Trite uninteresting villains, once smart cops inexplicably made moronic, including the lead Luther. And it makes the mistake, that the original series initially didn’t, of concentrating on the villains, and losing all the intriguing personal ties that made LUTHER interesting and captivating television in the first place.

Unlike many shows LUTHER originally understood something seemingly lost on most crime shows, the fact that criminals are a boring lot, and it’s the procedural and the dynamics of Luther’s life and the extended family around him that was the draw.

Season 2 undoes all that originality, and just makes Luther and all the cops incompetent, feckless caricatures rather than fleshed out characters. Add to this the fact that the new cast I just don’t care for, and you have a show working at a significant disadvantage; a show that plays, while you are watching it, as just so tired, and so disappointing and irresponsible, and so worthy of fast-forwarding.

The best way to describe it is that it performs as if writer Neil Cross had 4 episodes worth of story for season 1, and after that completely ran out of ideas and anything close to originality, for the ending of season 1 and the entirety of season 2 (With the exception of the very ending of Season 2, the coda if you will, I thought that was a nice scene to go out on, but everything leading up to that 5 minutes was largely rubbish, from the overlong plot of killer twins, that was nicked from a far better episode of Tom Fontana’s HOMICIDE, to the completely annoying and useless characters from Erin Gray, as the new detective, to the mother, to the killers. It’s just a lot of hackneyed and overwrought, and unforgiveably tedious characters, that just don’t remotely interest).

I have seldom seen such a sharp fall from grace from the same writer in such a short period of time. Bottom line: Season 2 of LUTHER is just plain awful, which is unfortunate for a series which in terms of performances and look and sound is laudable and had such potential.

Final Grade: D-/F.

ROME SEASON 1 DVD Set

ROME SEASON 1 DVD Set
Rome: The Complete First Season

Rome: The Complete Second Season

Rome: The Complete Series

ROME is a good show, but never really rises beyond that. Consumable enough, the main cast is phenomenal at times, it’s nicely filmed, and offers good music, and moves at a fair clip, but it is not a show that I feel any strong desire to finish. If it’s there I’ll watch it, but I don’t really find it that commanding. And when you hit the Egyptian episode, and the depiction of the ancient Egyptians and Cleopatra, that’s where I pull over the bus.

My pet peeve is the Anglicization of history, the whitening of history if you will. The ancient Egyptians bear no more resemblance to the current inhabitants of Egypt, than the ancient inhabitants of America bear any resemblance to current inhabitants of America, and for the same reason. Invasion,war,migration,genocide, interbreeding, forced relocation. It’s the same reason the black aboriginal peoples of the Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, and the Cook Islands, went from a predominantly Black, Nubian people to a more Asiatic appearance. As the islands were subject first to interbreeding from their ‘discovery’ to a particularly active and pointed form of ethnic cleansing performed during world War II. In fact not so much ethnic cleansing, as ethnic appropriation. Make of your enemies… yourselves. Breeding with your enemy, outbreeding your enemy, as the final battle ground of war.

And if the history of recent times is replete with such sweeping ethnic changes, in less than a couple of centuries. How much more is the ethnic landscape of Egypt changed in 4000 years. Which is why I’m particularly cognizant of the Hollywood style white-washing of that history, and it is the surest way to earn my ire, and take me out of the story. And don’t even get me started on the comic and foolish depiction of the Egyptian royal family, and Cleopatra.

However when you get past that unfortunately clownish and inept episode by writer William J. MacDonald and Director Steve Shill, the remaining episodes leading up to the season finale are very strong and very moving. Particularly the last two episodes, by writer Bruno Heller and Directors Mikael Salomon and Alan Taylor, are a master class… on cinematic storytelling.

So all in all ROME is historical fiction, at times brilliant, that unfortunately suffers from the schizophrenia too common with television series… that the quality can vary widely depending on who writes and who directs.

So I do object to the liberties it takes with the facts; particularly as it relates to Egypt. But that acknowledged, and fast forwarded through, it is definitely a series that is worth a look, if not quite a buy. I don’t see it as a show that I have any interest in re-watching or lends itself to re-watchability, though your mileage may vary. Final Grade: B-.