Category Archives: Television

Columbo; Short Fuse

.

Conceived and produced in the late 60s Columbo is the platonic ideal of the ‘inverted’ mystery where the killer is revealed early to the audience and the intrigue of the story is how the detective find the tiny flaw in an otherwise ‘perfect murder.’ It is unlikely that the movies and series had someone other than Peter Falk been cast as the disheveled but brilliant police detective. Falk often improvised lines on camera to throw off his costars in the same manner that his characters threw off balance the quarry he hunted.

In a bust of nostalgia, I decided to watch an episode from the early 1970s. Originally, I had planned on an episode where the guest star was the incomparable Ricardo Montalban but browsing through the available shows on Tubi I stumbled upon a season one episode with a stacked cast of Roddy McDowall, Ida Lupino, Anne Francis, James Gregory, and William Windom. Well, this one I had to watch.

McDowall, a brilliant chemist and photographer, plants a small explosive device in his Uncle’s cars which explodes killing the man on a dangerous mountain road where it might easily be mistaken as an accident.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the cast of Short Fuse this was actually a very substandard Columbo. There is actually very little for Columbo to detect and the character seemingly leaps to the correct solution without any evidentiary trail. The best part of any Columbo story, where the little detective reveals the flaw in the plan and the crucial elements that the brilliant upper-class murder missed is actually not present in this episode. Columbo plays a trick on McDowall’s character, causing him to panic and reveal knowledge he could have only if he had planted a bomb, but there is no ‘see, this is where you screwed up and I saw it,’ moment. In fact, it is highly unlikely that any grand jury would have returned with an indictment.

What a shame to see such a wonderful cast in such an inferior story.

Share

Reboots, Remakes, and Reimaginings

.

Later this month Apple TV+ will begin streaming the television series Time Bandits from series creators Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. The series is a reimagining of the 1981 fantasy film by Terry Gilliam and against centers on a young boy’s adventures through time with a rag tag collection of misfits that have stolen a map indicating fractures in history/

There are voices raised in alarm and protest over the remake of what some hold as a dearly beloved classic. I watched the original film during its theatrical run and to this day quotes from the script still spring from these lips. (Most often, “Stay, Guard the Map,” whenever I leave anything on a table or such.)

That said I am no distraught over a remake. While it is often a cheap ploy to grab an already existing audience for more cash remakes are not always an evil thing. The admired classic film The Maltese Falcon which propelled Humphrey Bogart to stardom is not only a remake but the secondremake of that story. The earlier two adaptations failed to catch fire with audiences.

But remakes can also be horrid affairs that fail to understand the source material of the original. In 1965’s Flight of the Phoenix when the pilot is pointing out flaws in the plan to make a new airplane from the remains of the crashed one with the survivors strapped to the wings, he insists that the injured man cannot be expected to do that. The aircraft designer says that the man will die before the work is completed and therefore is not a factor. He is cold, it is calculating but he is not cruel or evil but simply dictated by reality. In the 2004 remake he shoots and kills the man, a dramatic and terrible interpretation of the text.

King Kong 1933 is an impressive achievement of technical filmmaking and transcends the simple adventure story envisioned by its creators. The 1976 film has none of the charm or heart of the original and the 2005 version while indulgent clearly has heart and a deep adoration for the source material.

Remakes like any artistic attempt are inherently neither good nor bad and only time will answer of the Time Bandits series meets expectations.

Share

Time and Familiarity Distorts Art

.

By chance I am reexperiencing a couple of television series. To follow along with the podcast The Detective and The Log Lady my sweetie-wife and I are rewatching the surrealist mystery horror series Twin Peaks with an episode each Sunday evening. On YouTube I am enjoying watching millennial reactors experience the original series of Star Trek for the very first time.

Season one of Twin Peaks speeds along much faster than my faulty memory recalled. I had forgotten that the entire first series, as the Brit would say, totaled just 8 episodes. Not even half of a tradition American television season. My emotional memory of a slow, languid story that unfolded at a leisurely pace is entirely a construction that the mood of the series and the decay determine by the decades since its debut.

Star Trek has had a different course in my recent re-exposure to the program. I grew up watching reruns of the series in the 70s. (With very hazy memories as a child of the original broadcast.) I have seen every episode countless time, own the program on Blu-ray dice and have player the Roulette Episode game with myself where dice determine which story to watch.

This saturation of the series, with a judgment set by decades of rewatching that fixes the good and bad episodes into their hierarchy is quite shaken when a new viewer comes along.

Let That be Your Last Battlefield has long been on my list of some of Trek’s worst episodes. Aliens with superpowers that exist solely to put the plot of a deterministic course and a ‘message’ presented with all the subtly of a frying pan to the face made this episode painful to watch.

And yet people new to the series, without their opinions set my decades of judgment, can find the story engaging and relevant. My familiarity with the episode exaggerated it faults until I could no longer see its charms.

Oh, it remains a poor episode and the faults I have mentioned are glaring with my experience as a writer, but the bod doesn’t always overpower the good. It is important to try and keep that fresh new viewer experience alive.

Share

What?? A New Time Bandits?? No One Told Me

.

Taika Waititi, the creative and executive behind some of cinema and televisions most entertaining shows, What We do in the Shadows, Reservation Dogs, Our Flag Means Death and movies likes Jojo Rabbit, The Hunt for the Wilder People, Next Goal Wins and more has yet another television series coming in July of this year, 2024.

Time Bandits the series, is an adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy film that I quote to this very day “Stay! Guard the Map.”

I have no idea if this is a continuation or a fresh approach to the material, but I do know that July 24th I will be there for this show’s 10 episode Season One.

Share

Consider the Transporter in Star Trek

CBS Home Video

.

Developed as a means of sidestepping the impossible production challenge of landing a ship every time the characters went ashore in Star Trek the transporter is a marvel of impossible science and utterly fantastic energies.

The show’s lore the transport converts the target’s, usually a person, matter into energy, beams it to a distant location, then reconverts that energy back into matter precisely recreating the person at the new location.

Let’s sidestep the ‘Ship of Theseus’ question if the reconstituted person is actually the same person or not for another essay and focus on the physics of this process.

Einstein revolutionized the world with his understanding that energy and matter were equivalents as set forth in the world’s most famous equation E=MC^2. The energy value of a mass is equal to that mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.

Let’s put a 50-kilogram (110 lbs.) person on the transporter and set them down.

50 kg converted entirely to energy becomes 4,500,000,000,000 megajoules. Such a number is simply beyond human comprehension. It is the equivalent 71 thousand Hiroshima bombs delivered instantaneously as a beam to a distant location. If the transporter chief held a grudge against the person on the planet that had sold him a crummy watch, he could deliver 71 thousand Hiroshimas.

There is a reason why in my Space Opera role playing games when I have introduced a transporter like device it has never ever been of the variety that directly converted matter to energy and back again. Star Trek would have been far better served if someone had decided early on that the transport simply created a gate between places and saved us from both bad technobabble solutions to problems (we’ll just put the doctor in and reconstitute her from an early pattern) and not introduce a weapon of such scale and destruction.

Share

The Doomsday Machine is not Dead

CBS Home Video

.

Season two episode six of Star Trek (The Original Series) gave us The Doomsday Machine, where Kirk and company battle a automated weapon that destroys planets. Hampered by a traumatized Starfleet Commodore they eventually deactivate the mechanism leaving floating derelict in space.

With a hull of neutronium the machine had been impervious to the Enterprise’s weaponry the victory had hardly been assured.

You might be forgiven if you assumed neutronium was a fantastical substance invented by delirious writers much like ‘Vibranium’ or ‘Adamantium’, but you would wrong.  Neutronium is matter that has been so compressed by immense gravitational forces that the protons and electrons have merged with the neutron at the nucleus of the atom forming pure nuclear material with nearly unimaginable densities, Neutron stars have nearly enough mass to become Black Holes, but not quite.

It is unlikely that the ‘Doomsday Machine’, even though it was ‘miles long with a maw that could swallow a dozen starships’ possessed stellar masses of neutronium. (That would make for an interesting battle, fighting a machine with the gravitational effects of a star.) To maintain its shape and function the mechanism would need to counter the immense gravitational forces generated by the neutronium hull.

When the Enterprise departed the battle volume the machine still retained it shape. If it was truly and utterly dead, it should have collapsed into a sphere, but it did not. Something inside the doomsday machine still functioned, fighting the terrible crushing force of gravity.

It was not dead. Now, there’s a space for some fan-fiction or a tie-in novel.

Share

Masters of the Air Rekindled my Annoyance with The Eternals

.

(Minor Spoilers follow)

In the final episode of Masters of the Air Major ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal (Nate Mann) after being rescued by the Soviet Army following the crash of his B-17 sees with his own eyes a death camp that the Nazis had operated. This naturally has a massive impact on the pilot, but the scene also reawakened an irritation I had with the superhero film The Eternals.

The conceit of The Eternals is that a small group of immortal being and the source of many myths and legends have live with humanity from before history shaping and guiding our development. One of these beings is Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) whose particular gift to humanity is teaching us technology.

Phastos’ faith in humanity is shattered with our use of technology and this is exemplified in the movie by having him break down crying amid the rubble of Hiroshima.

Yes, the nuclear bombs kill hundreds of thousands. Yes, they were the very cutting edge of science and technology at the time. But millions were murdered by the Nazis in Europe, millions. Their murders did not end the war, their murders were the point of the war. Murder on such a scale is impossible with the technology of industrialization. The vast incomprehensible scale of it is only achievable with the industrial revolution.

One can argue the terrible ‘trolley problem’ of ending the war in the Pacific with nuclear weapons. Would it have been more moral to forego the atomic attacks and launch a ground invasion that would have almost certainly cost far more lives? That’s a debate that cannot be resolved because it is a personal value judgement, but the slaughter of the innocent in camps built only for death? That is undebatable. That is a clear and perverse corruption of technology and that is what should have shattered Phastos belief in humanity.

Share

Partial Series Review: The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin

Apple+

.

With the crushing news that Our Flag Means Death is not renewed for a third season many in fandom had their moods depressed as the loss of the irreverent, gloriously queer, ahistorical pirate series. They may find some so solace in Apple+’s original program The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin.

Like Taika Waititi’s pirate series Dick Turpin is inspired by an actual historical persona, a highwayman whose status and legend are more products of vivid exaggeration that his actual crimes and exploits.

Starring comedian/actor Noel Fielding as Dick Turpin. An imaginative man desperate to be something other than a butcher’s son Dick leaves home and becomes a highwayman and member of the Essex Gang, the nearly worst rated gang of highway thieves in the area. Together with the oddball members of the gang, Turpin engages in hijinks as a highwayman while dodging a local Lord and the godfather of organized crime Lord Wilde (Hugh Bonneville.)

While not as flamboyantly queer as Our Flag Means Death, Dick Turpin manages a modern sensibility and pacing in its humor. Despite its 18th century setting the characters and tone are decidedly 21st century. Produced in the United Kingdom, the series is populated with familiar actors and comedians if you are a bit of an Anglophile. The crime and violence are played for laughs, and it is not the sort of program that will leave you with deep questions about the nature of life and humanity but rather help you spend half an hour not thinking about such deep subjects. It is escapism but there are times when that is your highest duty to yourself and your sanity.

The first two of six episodes are already available to stream with the remaining four being delivered on a weekly basis as is the standard practice for Apple+ programing. If you have access and need to forget the terrible mess that is our current world you could do far worse than engrossing yourself in The Completely Made-up Adventures of Dick Turpin.

Share

Ellison’s Cynicism & The City On The Edge of Forever

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

.

The City on the Edge of Forever the 28th episode of season one from Star Trek (The Original Series) is a celebrated and award-winning episode of classic television collecting both the Hugo for short form Dramatic Presentation and the Writers Guild Of American award for Best Episodic Drama on Television.

After suffering a mishap while the Enterprise investigates disturbances in time from a long dead world, Doctor McCoy to hurled into the past where his presence changes history erasing the United Federation of Planets’ existence, forcing Kirk and Spock to follow McCoy to set right the course of the universe.

The original script was penned by famed and mercurial author Harlan Ellison but for production the screenplay had been rewritten, by uncredited story editor D.C. Fontana, at the producers request. The rewrite dissatisfied Ellison producing a rift between him and the producers that lasted decades. Ellison eventually would publish his own account of the production in book form that included his original script.

I have watched the original episodes many many times since the 1970s and I have read Ellison’s original script. Both are wonderfully written but Fontana’s is decidedly more in the tone of Star Trek.

Spoilers follow.

The crucial element of history that McCoy upset is saving the life of a pacifist, Edith Keeler, which delayed America’s entry into the Second World War allowing Germany to emerge victorious. Kirk, having fallen in love with Edith, is torn between his duty to preserve history and prevent a NAZI future and his emotional need to save the woman he has come to love.

In Ellison’s version, Spock, the inhuman, coldly logical alien holds both men. Kirk and McCoy, back, preventing them from saving her and reestablishing the proper shape of time.

In Fontana’s script Kirk seizes McCoy, stopping him from saving Edith, but is emotionally devastated by his course of action.

Dramatically speaking I have held and continue to hold that Fontana’s ending is simply better. It costs Spock nothing to do the right thing. Alien and detached from the pull of emotion, Spock’s action has no more dramatic weight that a piece of automated machinery performing a programmed function. Kirk, forced at great emotional pain and trauma, stopping McCoy is the sort of event that forever changes a character and change lives at the heart of drama.

None of this is new thinking on my part. It’s been my conclusion for nearly 30 years since I read the original script. That said thinking further upon the story and Ellison’s ending I do think that there is another aspect to this that is fascinating.

What is the thematic core of Ellison’s ending? Why was he drawn to that particular resolution?

It is possible that the answer is that Ellison held a very dark and cynical view of humanity.

While I have not read all of Ellison’s work, I have read a number of his well-crafted short stories and dark is common element. Rarely if ever did Ellison descend in joy over terror and crushing failure.

It’s possible, either by authorial intent or predilection, that Ellison’s ending reflects a deep sense that humanity, that people, are incapable of overcoming their selfish needs and desires for a greater good. That flawed and weak humanity will always fail to destroy the One Ring and choose themselves over others.

If that’s the reason Ellison went with his ending it makes even more clear that deep and unbridgeable divide between himself and Roddenberry. Roddenberry believed in humanity’s perfectibility. That a future without the irrational failings of racism and selfness was possible and Ellison’s ending reject all of that. It is an ending that asserts people will choose their own happiness even at the cost of uncounted millions.

Share

Series Review: Monsieur Spade

AMC and Studio Canal

.

Set some twenty-odd years after the events of The Maltese Falcon Monsieur Space follows famed private detective Sam Spade (Clive Owen) as a retired man of luxury in the South of France. Originally drawn to the small village of Bozouls fulfilling a task for a former flame Sam has settled into a comfortable life but dogged by loss. When brutal murders at as local orphanage, a missing child, and the teenage daughter of his former love becomes intertwined Sam is forced to once again practice his profession in a town bursting with secrets worth killing over.

Co-created by Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Oz) this series has the writing pedigree to be peak television but sadly stumbles right at the finish line.

Clive Owen does a quite good job in his portrayal of Spade, a man who has suffered too much emotional trauma and wants nothing more than to swim in his pool, alone. The cast, a collection of French and British actors for the most part, are well suited for their roles and inhabit their diverse, complex, and secretive lives quite well. The problem with the series really lives in the final episode.

It is said that every story begins with a promise. A contract between the teller and audience about what sort of story is being shared and violating that contract loses the audience. Genre often cements the nature of that promise. With detective fiction an element of that promise is that the detective will by reason, logic, and pure skill, untangle to the web of lies revealing the truth. Holmes will explain it all to Watson and justice arrives with our satisfaction.

Monsieur Spade breaks this inherent promise of mystery stories. The final episode, seemingly in a mad rush to wrap up all story and plotline before the hour has ended, resolves by nearly a Deus ex machina sidelining the protagonist with Spade no more essential to the resolution that the police detectives lectured by the private detective. Frank and Fontana are talented writers with enormous gifts for character and story, so this collapse of basic writing seems far out of character. Television and film are complex mediums for telling stories and all sorts of events can intrude on a production forcing last minute changes that degrade the final product. Perhaps that is what happened here. Whatever the cause Monsieur Spade after flying true for several episodes untimely missed the target entirely.

Monsieur Spade streams on AMC+.

Share