jblum's Journal

Been having a non-stressful and healing weekend with Kate; we spent some time wandering around the maritime museum and realising just how much of our knowledge of naval protocol comes from Hornblower and Battlestar Galactica, and I had a lovely dinner with our old friend Anna.

Also been continuing to watch UFO, which has reached new heights of competence. There are still a scattering of episodes which serve mainly to showcase overlong model shots (Close Up was disappointing, it had a clever twist but way too much faffing about with hardware in the lead-up to it), but a surprising number of more human stories -- Kill Straker!, a nicely executed brainwashing episode, E.S.P., in which John Stratton goes slowly over the edge as a man developing psi powers and finding out about SHADO, the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin-but-rather-cleverly-at-that Court Martial, and Ordeal which is effectively disturbing up to the cop-out ending and bizarrely long tag-scene. A lot of them suffer from saggy '70s pacing (even compared to contemporary Doctor Who), but episodes like Sub-Smash are still genuinely effective. The show was also really bold for an SF series in 1970, in that they've already done a completely FX-less and alien-less episode entirely about the breakdown of the lead character's marriage (Confetti Check A-OK), and a story with an unredeemedly bleak ending (A Question Of Priorities).

The big draw has to be Ed Bishop as Commander Straker, deeply unusual for an SF hero of the time -- thoroughly Type A, obsessively driven, buried in his work after the loss of his wife and death of his child (and not at the hands of the aliens attacking Earth as you'd assume), capable of cold-blooded decisions with barely a flicker of remorse, endlessly stressed, claustrophobic, so rigid you can see when he's bound to crack... and quite possibly, completely psychotically insane. Yes, he's always got a good reason for playing head-games with a new recruit, making a recalcitrant general sweat at ground zero of an alien attack, or stalking a brainwashed Paul Foster with a gun... but you also get a sense that he's really enjoying the chance to get off the leash. (Especially in the last, where his comments about how Foster has been challenging his command ring just a little too true.) When Foster accuses him of empire-building in Kill Straker!, it's supposed to be a product of Foster being brainwashed by the aliens... but it's actually quite possible that he's right. Given time, I could see this character building up into a cross between Avon from Blake's 7 and Hannibal from The A-Team: both relentlessly cold and calculating, and a cigar-chomping military man whose sense of judgement is off its fucking trolley. I'd love to see this guy put in the "Orbit" situation from Blake's 7... who would he chuck overboard for the sake of the mission?

Most of the rest of the cast are the usual Gerry Anderson robots, though George Sewell puts in a nicely rumpled performance in the second-banana role, and a wonderfully bizarre man named Vladek Sheybal keeps popping up as an unnerving psychologist/interrogator, an Eastern European suspiciously named "Doug Jackson". (Hmm, wonder if they picked him up at the same post-World-War-II fire-sale where they got Wernher von Braun.) But there are flashes of a show which goes above and beyond its surroundings, and those are enough to keep us interested.

Oh, and we've also decided that SHADO is Torchwood One circa 1980. Secret underground base... Morally dubious... questionably competent... trashes your personal life... retcons people with hilarious results (The Square Triangle)... the name of their secret organisation emblazoned on the sides of their (half-track) SUVs... token American in command of a largely British (though officially "international") team... then again, Jack Harkness would only dream of the string-vest uniforms on the submarine crew or the spangly silver Moonbase outfits. Now if I could only edit the Torchwood intro text into the teletype screens in the ultra-funky title sequence... or get Eve Myles into one of those purple anti-static wigs...