Tag: space above and beyond

Originally aired October 15, 1995

The 58th are on a civilian transport ship en route to the USS Saratoga. They must traverse a particularly inhospitable stretch of space when their ship is hit by a solar flare, or was it really the first blow from a Chig ship in the area? When things go from bad to worse can the crew of humans and invitros work together to save the ship and its cargo of hibernating colonists, or will their differences tear them apart?

“Mutiny” is another of the good early episodes that I think of when I think back to SAaB in the late 1990s. This one plays out like one of those old submarine movies, with most of the action taking place within the limited confines of the ship with a much stronger mostly hidden enemy outside.

Which, by itself, would have made for a great episode. But “Mutiny” adds an extra element to this mix; part of the crew of the civilian ship MacArthur is human and the other are “artificial human” invitros. The humans of the MacArthur are in command while the invitros are assigned the relatively dangerous work in the engine room of maintaining the nuclear reactor that powers the ship.

When the ship is damaged to the extent that the only way to save the MacArthur from doom is to cut power to one of the compartments of frozen colonists it’s a question of killing 400 human colonists or 168 invitros. It’s a tough numbers game and the invitros, who’ve spent a lifetime as third-class citizens, don’t like the idea of any more of their kin being sacrificed and stage a mutiny and take the ship for themselves.

“Mutiny” brings up some very interesting questions about the nature of identity. Do we find our identity in what we’re born with, or the groups that we choose to associate ourselves with later in life? For McQueen the answer is that he is a Marine first and an invitro second. For Hawkes who’s a lot younger than McQueen and more inexperienced with the realities of life, he’s struggling with this question. He finds some brotherhood with the invitro crew of the MacArthur, but he also has a brotherhood with his Marine squad mates as well.

The only thing I found a bit odd about the whole episode was that it seemed in previous episodes that the invitros had the same rights are regular people. Except here we learn that the invitros frozen on the ship have yet to be born and are assigned to work at a far off plutonium mining facility where the conditions are harsh enough that most would die there before being released from their contracts. They’re almost like slaves here, but I didn’t get the sense in previous episodes this was the case.

I guess I’m confused overall with the nature of the invitros? They’re described as being mix of DNA without a true mother or father and are born at 18 years of age so they lack much of the experience we take for granted. But in “Mutiny” it’s brought up time and time again that there are humans and there are invitros. But aren’t the invitros just humans without parents?

Grade: B+

Stray Observations:
According to McQueen, the official name of the 58th squad is the “58th Air Commando Group.”

The MacArthur takes a shortcut down “Blood Ally” in order to get to the Saratoga as fast as possible.

In the future of SAaB there’s a Detroit Disney Land.

Favorite dialog:
Solomon Monk: “Tell my wife, I don’t mind going–’cept for her…”

Paul Wang: “Is that a question or confession?”

Cooper Hawkes: “Feeling pain’s part of being human.”
T.C. McQueen: “Who said you were human?”

Crewman Ashby: “Did you ever try to do the right thing, only it turns out wrong?”

Hawkes: “I’m sorry.”

Originally aired October 8, 1995

The 58th are assigned to sentry duty at the Icarus mining colony in dark reaches of the Kuiper belt. There mission is to guard a shipment of Helium 3 vital to the war effort. However, at the colony the 58th find a new enemy of robotic humans, the Silicates, who have other plans for the Helium 3.

I haven’t watched all of Space: Above and Beyond since the late 1990s, and it was always my belief since that the early episodes of the series, barring “The Farthest Man from Home” were better than later ones starting with “The Dark Side of the Sun.” And some 15 odd years later I still really dig this episode.

“Dark Side of the Sun” has a more heavy story for a 90s show. Here, Shane Vansen (Kristen Cloke) spends much of the episode trying to come to terms with the execution/murder of her parents that took place in front of her and her sisters when they were children. Vansen suffers from nightmares where she relives the murders over and over again.

We’ve heard of the slightly Terminator-esque Silicates/AI’s before in the Pilot episode, that they were a subservient class of robots who rebelled and waged a terror campaign against humanity. And we learn a little more with “Dark Side of the Sun,” mostly that a virus that implanted “Take a chance” into their coding sparked the rebellion with them vs us and that they’re compulsive gamblers as well.

Visually, the Icarus mining colony is an interesting place. It seems like some real refinery was shot at night to double as the colony that’s supposed to be some three billion +- miles from the Earth. And this mostly works, even if from time to time a few moths fly into the stage lights. 😉

In “The Dark Side of the Sun,” it’s interesting how Vansen comes to terms with battling the Silicates. First by running away, then by warily confronting them and finally by destroying them when the lives of the rest of the 58th are on the line. But sadly enough, even after Vansen confronts the Silicates at the mining colony and almost single handedly wipes them out, in the end she still finds that the Silicates still haunt her dreams.

Grade: A-

Goofs: This episode exposes a big problem, and of the whole series as I see it, of the notion the the armed forces of Earth would have pilots sometimes be pilots and other times be ground soldiers as part of their regular duties. It just doesn’t make sense. Even today the Marines can “make” a soldier in a matter of months but it literally takes years for them to make fighter pilots. It’s not like they just can trust anyone with multimillion dollar jets.

I can see how the 58th pulling double duty works in terns of SAaB — it means that there just has to be one group we follow no matter if they’re flying or fighting on the ground — but realistically it doesn’t hold true.

Favorite dialog:
Shane Vansen: “Do you ever feel like there’s something out there, waiting?”
T.C. McQueen: “Feeling like maybe you’re not coming back? Everyone gets that.”
Vansen: “How does ‘everyone’ deal with it?”
McQueen: “They go out and they come back…or they don’t.”

Paul Wang: “If any friendliest find my body, I want my ashes spread over Wrigley Field.”

Originally aired October 1, 1995

Army special forces soldiers have rescued a survivor of the doomed Tellus colony giving Lt. Nathan West hope that his girlfriend might still be alive. Disobeying orders, West recklessly flies off to save her. But will his actions threaten his life as well as the lives of the 58th and jeopardize the whole war effort against the Chigs as well?

For the first real episode of Space: Above and Beyond, “The Farthest Man from Home” is not one of the best ones of the series.  It’s an episode with a lot of problems that features the Nathan West character in a poor light. (Though I do wonder if the creators of the show Glen Morgan and James Wong were still trying to figure the characters out and that’s where this odd version of West from?)

Here, West disobeys a direct order not to go search for his girlfriend Kylen when he learns that not everyone was killed when the Telus colony ship was shot down by the Chigs. And when he disobeys, during his rescue mission, West himself is nearly shot down, crash lands and nearly becomes a prisoner himself.

The problem isn’t that West disobeys the order, it’s that he comes off as incredibly annoying when he does it. He essentially takes everything he’s learned in the previous episode, throws it away and goes off on his own. This is something I could have seen the Cooper Hawkes character do, but not Nathan West.

On the Tellus planet, we do get some eerie vistas of the skeletal remains of the crashed colony ship as well as a flag flapping in the breeze that could have only been left by someone that survived the crash. (Up until that point it was assumed there were no survivors.) I also got the feeling with things like the Army special forces soldiers and talk about the Chigs “hitting” Procyon and that the “3rd Wing are getting their asses kicked” that Morgan and Wong were trying to show that the universe of SAaB was much bigger than we’d so far seen.

What I found most interesting about the episode was one of the survivors of the colony, played by a pre-3rd Rock from the Sun French Stewart. He’s a guy who’s survived the crash of a ship from orbit, been alone for months on an alien planet all the while dodging alien patrols out to find him. And he’s gone a more than a little crazy. He’s a lone survivor of a mini-apocalypse, and while he isn’t the last man left alive in the universe, he most certainly is the farthest man from home.

This episode also features the first appearance of the nefarious Aero-Tech corporation that will play a central role in the main conspiracy theory elements of the SAaB story coming later in the series.

Grade: B-

Favorite Quote: Tellus Survivor: “I’m the farthest man from home! Ok!? (Points to the sky) Look there, right there. See? There are twelve billion people, twelve billion lives — and then there me.”

Stray Observations: For the life of me I can’t remember why, but I totally missed this episode when it first aired and didn’t get to see it until years later.

In 2015 the TV series Space: Above and Beyond will celebrate its 20th anniversary. While that date’s still a long way off in the future, I’ve decided to start work on a project celebrating SAaB now so that I can have everything done before the anniversary.

SAaB and me

I was into SAaB in a big way, even before the series debuted. Back in the summer of ’95 I tried to tape TV spots for the show on VHS and even went as far as to buy comic books and magazines because they ads for the series inside. I was a huge fan of the show when it was on and needless to say I was mad when the series wasn’t picked up for a second season and have spent the intervening years upset over the loss of SAaB.

Years before series were available on VHS or DVD I bought the entire run of SAaB on bootleg VHS off of eBay. When SCI-FI Channel reran the series in the late 1990s I sometimes used to drive an hour round trip to watch the show at school since our local cable company didn’t carry the channel at the time. I’m sure I was first in line to buy the series on DVD when it finally became available a few years back.

But rather than lamenting what would have been with SAaB, I’ve decided to spend the next few years celebrating the show.

Currently, I’m working on rewatching and reviewing all of the old episodes of SAaB. There are a few other things I might do too to celebrate the SAaB in the coming years, but since 2015 is still so far in the future I haven’t totally decided on what I’m all going to do.

Previously:

• Never No More
• Mars in Space
• Space Above and Gone