SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND Episodes

Space: Above and Beyond. Fox-TV. Australia/USA: Hard Eight Pictures, Inc. / 20th-Century Fox Television. Series Premiere 24 September 1995. David Nutter, dir. premiere episode. Michael Lake, prod. Glen Morgan & James Wong, exec. prod. and premiere script. Morgan Weisser, Kristen Cloke, Rodney Roland, Lanei Chapman, Joel De La Fuente, James Morrison, featured players. The premiere episode is "recombinant," highly allusive (or larcenous) TV, putting together «near-in», space-opera SF—set in 2063—and the US Marine Corps training film (complete with the actor who played Gunnery Sgt. Hartman in FULL METAL JACKET); advertised as by the producers of The X-Files and seems to share that series' ambivalence toward authority and other Establishment values. Shows an interesting willingness to experiment with—very limited, very temporary—military democracy and show a grunt's-eye-view of military life (risks not taken in any of the Star Trek/Star Wars outings and their relatives). Brief scenes of both wealthy and funky civilian Earth; brief references to "AI Wars," and "in vitros": people grown "in glass" and derogatorily called "tanks." The premiere features VR simulators, body armor for Mars, and lots of military space craft. Enemy aliens imaged on Mars enclosed in armor (they also have families and can either be killed with water or moved by human kindness to commit suicide). Cf. and contrast Battlestar Galactica, ALIENS (film), and, pre-eminently, the STAR WARS series; cf. and contrast also the sort of space-war stories typified by R. A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers (q.v. under Drama and Fiction). Opens with an unprovoked attack on Earth's Vesta Colony, Epsilon Eridani Star System, in what until then was thought to be a galaxy devoid of intelligent life outside of human; seems to assume a 21st c. dominated by US culture in its Anglo forms (within that culture, non-"tanks" seem to enjoy equality). Briefly handled in Paula Vitaris, "Space: Above and Beyond," Cincefantastique 27.2 (Nov. 1995): 54-55.

(RDE, 25/IX/95)