Month: November 2014

It is the last day of January, 1988. INXS tops the Billboard charts with “Need You Tonight”, one of those songs people tend to use a second-long clip from as part of an audio montage to indicate “The Eighties”. They unseated Michael Jackson’s “The Way You Make Me Feel”, which last week dethroned George Harrison. Whitesnake, George Michael and Whitney Houston fall out of the top ten in favor of Expose, Roger, and Eric Carmen (with “Hungry Eyes”, the song which usually follows “Need You Tonight” in those eighties audio montages). A Washington football team whose name I will not repeat wins their second Super Bowl, defeating Denver. Their quarterback, Doug Williams, is the first African American Quarterback to play in and win the Superbowl, while tying the then-record for most touchdowns thrown, and breaking Joe Montana’s record for most passing yards. In the past two weeks, Skrillex was born, Canada’s supreme court has struck down an abortion ban, Vice President George Bush appeared on the CBS Evening News and gets in an argument with Dan Rather over the Iran-Contra Affair, The Phantom of the Opera opens on Broadway, Biggles, a movie Leah liked as a kid, premiers, and I turned nine.

Immediately after the Super Bowl, ABC premiers The Wonder Years, starring Fred Savage as a kid growing up in the 1960s, with Daniel Stern narrating as the same character reflecting on his youth from the present. In a minor coincidence, in the late ’90s, Savage would star in Working, a failed over-the-top satirical workplace comedy, while Stern would voice the title character in the failed animated TV adaptation of the over-the-top satirical workplace comedy Dilbert.

Captain Power took last week off, leaving Star Trek The Next Generation unopposed in the war for the hearts and minds of geeks, insofar as there was ever an actual fight going on. Correspondingly, TNG softballed it with “Angel One”, about which the nicest thing I can say is “at least they tried. I think.” It’s pretty much one of Roddenberry’s original example premises from the initial 1960s Star Trek pitch: a planet where the women are dominant and men are the underclass, isn’t that wacky? I guess the basic idea of “See? You wouldn’t like it much if you got treated that way, would you?” isn’t terrible, but there’s the whole undercurrent of “Women in charge? That’s not right!” that ruins it. Also, this was apparently meant to be a direct parallel to South African apartheid, but that really only comes across at the end, when the local leader decides to banish the uppity menfolk rather than executing them, having conceded that the current system is unstable, and resigned to just slow down the inevitable.

They bring their A-Game this week, though, with “11001001”, an episode that’s actually good, provided you can get past a handful of really stupid things that the plot hinges on. Such as the bit where the Binars, members of the Federation, hijack the Enterprise to save their planet, because if they’d just mentioned to the Federation that their planet was doomed and needed to borrow a Galaxy-Class Starship’s main computer for an hour, the Federation “might have said no” (See, because they think like computers, they are unable to — actually, no, I have a fucking master’s in this stuff, so I am not going to belittle my education by pretending there is any logical way to explain their actions that isn’t predicated on complete nonsense masquerading as discrete logic), or that the captain and first officer of a Galaxy-Class starship get distracted by an attractive holographic woman and fail to notice the entire ship getting evacuated. But these are intensely ordinary “People who write for TV don’t have a damned clue about how computers or formal logic work,” and “Starfleet Bridge Officers are notoriously incompetent,”  sort of problems that you expect from Star Trek, not the particular incompetence of the first season. Plus Minuet is a neat character, and the Binars are the most interesting and exciting new race to be introduced, hence us never seeing them again.

Up against what’s pretty much universally considered one of the stronger season 1 TNG episodes, Captain Power responds with “Judgment”, an episode that has enough promise that Stargate SG-1 will go on to do basically the same plot twice. I should be up-front about this. “Judgment” is an important character-development episode for Pilot, an important bit of enriching the world, it has some of the best CGI work in the series, and complex themes, it’s got a really surprising guest cast, and Jessica Steen got a Gemini nomination for her performance (Also nominated that year: Sarah Polley, who is not quite three weeks older than I am, which, as previously mentioned, was nine while all this was happening. Okay, dad, you can commence comment about what a slacker I am). And I just don’t like it very much, and I don’t really know why. It’s just kind of… Meh. I don’t know. The pacing is weak in the first act, and the resolution is too pat, and even as the least-action-packed episode we’ve had, it still feels like it’s bitten off more plot than it can chew. I don’t hate it or anything; I’m just underwhelmed by it.

We open, unusually, on Scout giving the Captain’s Log. I haven’t mentioned the Captain’s log framing device much because it hasn’t really mattered much. Just a short voice over giving the date and establishing the context for the episode, usually something like, “We intercepted a signal from Lord Dread and are going to Sector 3 to investigate”. This time, it’s a bit different, since Scout is informing us that Cap and Pilot have gone missing while bringing back an intercepted “data tape” with critical information about Project New Order. We’re actually seeing these events play out on-screen, so the main contribution of the voice-over is to establish what they’re doing out there. Also, I guess, to justify Maurice Dean Wint’s paycheck, since neither he nor Tank nor Hawk appear at all in this episode.

For no obvious reason, Captain Power is riding bitch on a hoverbike with Pilot, rather than doing what they have otherwise always done and take the Jumpship, or at the least, do the obvious thing and ride separate hoverbikes. But then the plot wouldn’t happen. They’re being chased by Soaron, and while it’s sweet of the effects artists to try, the hoverbike’s “shadow” on the landscape is so wrong that I half expect Peter Pan to show up and try to stick it back on with soap. Cap manages to take off one of Soaron’s wings and his leg with that laser bazooka from last week. But as the CGI menace spins off out of control, he gets in one good shot and blows up one of the hoverbike’s hover-things, causing a not even close to seamless crash scene that ends with Cap and Pilot being very gently thrown to the ground.

For such a gentle tumble, though, Cap really failed to roll with it: though we don’t actually see the injury that’s rendered him unable to walk, Pilot’s able to assess it just by looking once she cuts a hole in his pants, and that suggests a pretty bad break, possibly a compound fracture. He orders her to take the data tape and make for the nearby oasis. She begrudgingly agrees, then kind of awkwardly gives him a kiss on the cheek. This is supposed to be heartwarming, I guess. She’s worried about her friend, and we’ve been very slowly establishing her feelings for Cap all the way back to “Shattered”. But the sudden escalation here makes me kind of uncomfortable. It’s not that it comes out of nowhere per se, but it feels forced that she’d suddenly pick this moment to make a move. The impropriety of it bugs me. I’m not saying it would be wrong for any character to react like that, but this is Pilot. Her whole characterization so far has been based on little subtle reactions and stoicism. The sudden jump here is something that feels out of character for Pilot. You can have a character like her do something like that, but you need a proper build-up and payoff. You know what there isn’t? A sense of urgency. There ought to be; Cap is injured, they’ve got crucial data, and the Bio-Dreads know their proximate location. But it doesn’t come off in the way the scene is shot. Things feel serious, but not urgent. It’s kind of ironic, even; their banter in this scene is good. Great even, very natural and conveying a sense of camaraderie that usually gets glazed over with any pair of characters that doesn’t include Hawk. But in context, it ends up working against the sense that they’re in a tense, time-critical predicament: it feels normal. In fact, it’s the most normal pretty much any pair of characters in this show has ever felt. And there’s the rub: suddenly giving her boss a peck on the cheek is not a normal thing for Pilot to do. It’s not the right context for a character like Pilot to make that leap.

[raw]Cap, for his part, reacts with pretty much just dull surprise. There’s a fraction of a second where it looks like he might crack a smile, but it’s so quick that I’m half-convinced Tim just flubbed the take. Back at Volcania, Dread makes his contractually-mandated appearance this episode and orders Blastarr to go retrieve the data tape and capture Cap. I guess this is the episode where we really establish the relationship dynamic between Soaron and Blastarr, who haven’t really interacted before. The series bible likens Soaron to the Red Baron — a sort of old-school “noble villain” type, who wouldn’t shoot an unarmed opponent as it’d be unsporting. I guess I can see a little of that having made it through to the screen. As a child, as I’ve mentioned, I was inclined to imagine Soaron as a weaselly, Starscream-type character. I think what I was picking up on was really the sense that he considers himself above the rest of Team Evil. Blastarr, on the other hand, is much more brutal, straightforward, and short-tempered.

Despite the basic jankiness of 1987 computer-generated effects, this is probably the most effective scene we’ve had with the CG characters in Captain Power so far, just because when it’s Blastarr and Soaron, the Bio-Dreads can do something that we’ve never seen them do before: physically interact with something. Neither Soaron nor Blastarr normally touch anything; they don’t even share the screen with another character or moving object that often. That works against both of them, but especially Blastarr. It’s easier to justify with Soaron, not only since his thing is aerial combat, but also because you can very easily imagine Soaron as being the sort who would consider actually physically striking someone to be too proletariat for him. But with Blastarr’s emphasis on brute, physical strength, I think we really all just want to see him pummel someone with his bare hands, and it seems wrong that he never does.

This was especially evident back in “The Intruder”, when Blastarr is interrogating Jim. It’s a standard clicker who forces Jim to the ground, restrains him, and holds him at gunpoint, but it’s Blastarr who hovers over him and demands information. After the actual sequence of Jim being taken down, the clicker vanishes save for its foot and the barrel of its gun. Because it really shouldn’t be a nameless goon in that position: it should be Blastarr. That fact shoulds so hard that the first time I watched it, my mind just kind of implicitly registered Blastarr in that position. The scene is edited to trick you into forgetting that he’s not actually the one physically interacting with Jim: filmmaking convention suggests that when the camera is on Jim, we’re seeing Blastarr’s POV, and when it cuts back to Blastarr, symmetry tells us it should be Jim’s POV. And the angle on Jim is clearly POV of the same person pointing the gun at him — it’s basically shot straight along the gun barrel. The scene is framed like Blastarr is standing directly over Jim with his foot on him, and the scene just works better if you can make yourslf forget that’s not what’s happening.

When Blastarr finds the injured Soaron, this comes to a head: Soaron wants the honor of the kill, and refuses to give Blastarr Cap’s last known coordinates. Blastarr responds by picking Soaron up and throttling him until he gives in. Then, after he’s dropped the other Bio-Dread to the ground (or at least, to be composited in as close as they could to making it look like he’s lying on the ground), for good measure, he picks up Soaron’s severed leg and tosses it some distance away.

[/raw]

While that’s going on, though (Confession: I’ve flipped the order of these scenes since it makes this article flow better), Pilot has hiked the ten miles to the nearby shantytown. She barely gets in a hello, though, before the one teenager in this town literally decides to murder her with an axe.

See, it seems that back in her Dread Youth days, our beloved Pilot was involved in the destruction of the boy’s previous home, Sandtown. We’re treated to a flashback of a young Pilot — well, actually she looks exactly the same age as in the contemporary scenes. How long has she been out of the Dread Youth anyway? I know back in “Gemini and Counting”, I claimed that she’d been out for about ten years, as per the series bible. But that was plainly bullshit even when I said it (The uniform still fits, after all). This flashback suggests that it couldn’t have been more than a few years. Less if we assume Pilot’s no older than 20 (If, say, she’s 24, I could buy that the flashback was five years ago. But if she’s 19, no one ages that imperceptibly in their teens). Equally convincing: the Bling Nazi who’s in charge of the operation is the same not-Erin blonde from last week. None of this fits with the bible’s notion of Pilot having left the Dread Youth young and working her way up through the resistance in her teens. Instead, it seems like Pilot can’t have left Team Evil more than about a year ago. That scans with the comic’s implication that she wasn’t around at the previous anniversary of Daddy Power’s death. But it’s a bit hard to swallow that she’d go all the way from Dread Youth to Power Ranger in such a short time. I mean, when Cap turns down Chip’s application in “The Intruder”, he makes it out to be about how it takes time to earn trust. Pilot has evidently earned Cap’s trust very quickly. The compressed timetable also works against the implication of “Gemini and Counting” that her conversion away from the cult of the machine was a process that took time, a long “journey”. You could salvage it if we interpret Sandtown as an event after she’s already started questioning her allegiance, but this episode is going to unfold in a way that argues against that. Unlike the origin-story-by-proxy we were shown in “Gemini”, here we seem to be implying a much more TV-cliche “Complete character reversal due to a single traumatic incident” origin for Pilot. Which, hey, okay, things become tropes because they work. But now they’re making me really want to see that origin. When Erin’s story seemed to be a direct analogue for Pilot’s that was a clever way of telling us about Pilot’s backstory without resorting to flashback. If the two characters aren’t really all that parallel, it leaves a hole where there should be an origin. There are three characters in this show who joined up with Cap but we don’t know the details (Hawk worked with Cap’s dad, as we’ll be learning next week), and of them, Pilot is the most compelling (“How did Tank end up here?” is a less interesting story, to my mind, than “Where did Tank come from?” and Scout is such a blank character at this point that it’s hard to care one way or the other about him. It seems perfectly in character to imagine that he’s simply a hard-working guy who worked his way up through the resistance by doing his job well until he got promoted to Cap’s team, with no particularly eventful backstory. Not that it wouldn’t be nice for him to have one; we just haven’t established enough about the character to make me feel like there ought to be one).

To make matters more complicated, the locals claim that the sack of Sandtown was “years ago”, long enough that the boy, Randall, was a small child at the time. He basically just keeps shouting “Kill her! Kill her!” and swinging an axe at her until he’s restrained. The town is quickly swayed by the persuasiveness of his argument, which pretty much boils down to, “She’s lying! Kill her!” and it looks like a lynchin’ is about to ensue until Pilot finds a really unlikely ally.

I know, right? That’s William B. Davis, best known as the “Cigarette-Smoking Man” from The X-Files. But here, he’s kind of freaking me out in the role of Arvin, the local authority figure, who strongly opposes vigilante justice and wants the rule of law and the democratic process to prevail. Pilot agrees to stand trial in return for two of the locals going back to find Cap.

Unfortunately for them, they arrive at the crash site at roughly the same time as Blastarr. Cap, who had been biding his time by apologizing to and then murdering a cactus, drags himself behind some rocks to cower while Blastarr easily murders the townsfolk, leaving their armored vehicle to crash harmlessly into a boulder. Blastarr intercepts their radio call for help, and sets a course for the Oasis.

Pilot’s trial mostly consists of Randall demanding people kill her, intercut with flashbacks that kinda belie — deliberately, I hope — his claims that Young Pilot had been particularly gleeful about it. His uncle Gaelan confirms that Pilot was there and involved, but shows a suspicious lack of bloodlust, even going out of his way to defend her: she wasn’t an Overunit; she was just following orders; she was a “child spouting slogans,” who didn’t have any way of knowing what she was getting into.

[raw]
And this leads into Pilot’s big speech, which is almost certainly what got her the Gemini nomination.

It’s true I was in the Dread Youth. And I was in Sandtown. There’s something you have to understand. I never had a family. The Dread Youth was my family. It was my whole world, there was nothing else. From the day that I was born, I never knew about having parents. Or friends. Or feelings and love. I knew nothing about being human. I served the machine, and I was so proud. To be “Youth Leader Chase”. And I knew all my lessons, and I knew my destiny as part of the new order.
But there’s something else you have to understand: that night, everything I knew, it fell apart. Into the lie that it is. I wanted to shout out. I wanted to stop them. If I could’ve told you, that I didn’t know. I didn’t realize what was going to happen. That night, I did. I saw the true meaning of the slogans and the uniform that I was wearing. And I started a journey. And it later led me to Captain Power. And he has taught me what it is to be human. Things that I never knew.

If I could go back and change that night, I would. But I can’t. And I try every day of my life to make up for it.

It’s a nice speech. She talks about what it was like to grow up as a child of the Machine, and how she never had a real family or knew what it was like to be properly human.

[/raw]

But.

Let’s be frank here. This speech boils down to “It wasn’t really my fault and I felt super bad afterward, and besides, that’s totally not me any more.” And on top of it, she gets all weepy and cries at them. Pilot.

I don’t like it. It’s cheap and emotionally immature, and it comes off to me like she’s trying to dodge responsibility for her actions rather than take it.

As I said before, Stargate SG-1 more or less did this plot twice. The more straight-up of these is the first season episode “Cor-Ai”. Teal’c, the former First Prime (read: Chief Henchman) of Apophis (read: The Bad Guy), who’s switched sides and joined SG-1 (read: The Good Guys) is recognized by the locals on a planet they visit as the dude who carried out the ordered execution of some of the locals. He’s put on trial and will be executed unless he can persuade the son of a man he killed not to.

Yeah, like I said, it’s close. Even up to the part where, in the end, the bad guys show up and the condemned prisoner demonstrates having turned face by risking themself fighting to defend the place, which is going to happen to Pilot in a couple of minutes.

The first season of Stargate SG-1 is generally understood to not be all that good. This is true, but “Cor-Ai” is one of its high points. And a big part of the reason that the story works so well is that, unlike Pilot, Teal’c doesn’t break down and protest that he’s changed. He confesses. And more, he refuses to defend himself. Teal’c defense falls to his teammates. Because Teal’c believes that he does deserve to be held accountable for his crimes, and that if his execution will make some kind of recompense to the people he’s hurt, it’s only fair: the fact that he’s reformed doesn’t make him any less guilty of his past crimes.

I think that’s what’s really lacking here. Pilot’s whole thing is that she’s stoic: thanks to her upbringing, expressing emotion doesn’t come naturally to her. In this, her most important character focus episode, though, she basically spends the whole episode out of character. Kissing John, then breaking down in tears at her trial, it’s like the writers are trying to cram her into the “Action Chick” stereotype that she’d thus far mercifully avoided.

Teal’c also gets a better twist to his story. The laws of dramatic necessity tell us that it is a real problem for one of our heroes to have something like this on their record. We can forgive them, but only if they throw us a little bone: we need something to offset their guilt. For Teal’c, the reveal is about why he specifically executed his accuser’s father. Dad was crippled, and Teal’c knew that the local custom was strictly “leave no man behind.” So, given that he couldn’t outright disobey a direct order from his god-king and therefore had to kill someone, he chose the person whose sacrifice would improve the community’s chances to evade recapture in the future.

Notice how Teal’c isn’t entirely let off the hook here: he still shot a dude, and he still did it deliberately and with premeditation. Jennifer gets off lighter. Uncle Gaelan triggers a flashback to Volcania shortly before the raid. Through a stroke of incredible coincidence, Pilot just happened to overhear Gaelan, at the time a prisoner, break under interrogation and pony up the location of Sandtown. Turns out that while, okay, Pilot was there, and she was involved, it’s not like she had any actual say in what was going on.

It’s too damned easy is what it is. And really, it displaces the crowning moment of the story onto Gaelan: the moment we see him locked in a cell with some kind of evil Occulus Rift strapped to his face muttering, “Please, stop, I’ll tell you anything,” it stops being Pilot’s story and starts being the story about an old man in an impossible situation who did the only thing he reasonably could have done, and spent years consumed by guilt over it — it becomes his redemption story, not Pilot’s.

News of the approaching Bio-Dread interrupts the trial just as The Cigarette-Smoking Man is about to ask the jury for their verdict, so, after all his impassioned insistence on observing the rule of law… He gives Gaelan his gun is just like, “Well, I guess you get to decide whether or not to shoot her,” as he runs off with the others to prepare the town defenses. There’s nothing in the way Gaelan’s acted so far to suggest that he’d even consider offing Pilot, which makes it seems a little unnecessary and kind of cruel that Pilot’s immediate response is to not-very-subtly let him know what she knows. It’s played entirely wrong, and comes off like she’s trying to shame him out of killing her. Naturally, he gives her the gun and releases her to go aid in the town’s defense, while he hangs back to confess to his nephew.

The scene is played precisely wrong. I mean, in the first place, no one seems to even suspect that something is Up with the fact that they sent two dudes to the location Pilot gave them and ran into a Bio-Dread — no one jumps up and says, “Well hey, obviously she was lying about Captain Power being there and it was all a trap.” I mean, except Randall, but “She’s lying! Kill her! Kill her!” is basically the extent of his dialogue for the whole episode. And it really feels wrong for her to try to shame Gaelan like that. They should have tried to convey a sense of kinship between them, like with Erin a few episode back. How hard would it be for her to say something like, “I never wanted anyone to get hurt. But I was scared, and I was hurt, and I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. I think you know what that’s like.”  I don’t know, maybe that is what they were going for, but color me unconvinced.

The townsfolk’s puny blue lasers are no match for Blastarr’s superior pink lasers, so Pilot powers on and faces him down, even though her suit’s triple-A batteries are only at ten percent. Her intervention comes just in time to rescue one townsman from a chronic hysteresis:

It’s nice to see Pilot in a one-on-one fight for once. Unfortunately, as is always the case for the first few minutes of a Blastarr fight, she’s utterly ineffectual. Even a random bazooka she just happens to find lying around can’t bail her out — Blastarr may be dumb, but he’s got the capacity to learn from past mistakes. She takes some finger-lasers to the chest and de-morphs in a sequence that rather bizarrely involves her boobs teleporting about a foot upward.

Blastarr hovers threateningly over her, waving his digitizer and threatening her in a way that will totally not seem prescient later. But just as it looks like Pilot’s number is up, Gaelan comes running out shooting a laser-revolver. Blastarr promptly murders him, but the distraction allows Pilot to… Not do anything. Blastarr turns back to her, but apparently he too is surprised that she’s still there waiting for him, because it takes him forever to line up his shot.

And that gives Cap time to unexpectedly arrive unnoticed in that armored vehicle from a few scenes ago. Which he drove by telepathy or something because he’s in the gunner’s position rather than the driver’s seat.  I mean, seriously, we’re meant to believe that Cap pulled up next to them, got out of the driver’s seat, got into the gunner’s position and got off a shot without anyone noticing he was there? With a broken leg?

The truck-mounted gun knocks Blastarr to the ground, and Pilot finally does something about it, retrieving that bazooka and giving the Bio-Dread a few in the chest as he stands up. This whole “Blastarr is completely invincible the first few minutes, then suddenly becomes vulnerable for no reason,” thing is kind of weird. The most sense I can make of it is that Blastarr can basically take any blow that he’s prepared for, but it requires some kind of conscious effort on his part, so he’s incredibly vulnerable to any shot he doesn’t see coming. This is a little backed up at least, since they do make a point of showing Blastarr catch the shots he takes on his shield or arms. Though one of Pilot’s ineffectual throwing-snowflakes did explode directly in his face earlier.

I really like the way the end of the battle plays out in spite of the fridge logic. Pilot’s allowed to remain the center of the action even after Cap arrives. He hangs back, doesn’t even power up (It’s implied that his suit is out of power), just gives her a thumbs-up after getting his shot off. It’s very Action-Movie-Sidekick of him. Pilot’s still allowed to land the “kill”-shot herself rather than Cap becoming the default center of the action.

Pilot promptly ignores her injured commander to go emote over Gaelan’s dead body as everyone pointedly doesn’t do anything about the unconscious killing machine a few feet away. Arvin shows up and apologizes for that whole trial thing, though I don’t know what he’s got to apologize for. “Sorry we put you on trial for a crime you did commit and frankly responded entirely reasonably under the circumstances.” She declares the whole thing no harm no foul, and the editor stops paying attention for a second, because they let the shot linger on William B. Davis too long after he cracks a smile so that it kinda looks like he’s now looking down at Gaelan’s dead body with a grin that drifts onto the border of “lecherous”.

Everyone evacuates the town in the time it takes to change camera angles, in order that the animators don’t have to account for anything moving when they composite in Soaron for one last appearance where he berates the recovering Blastarr a bit, then it’s an evening funeral scene in a geographically disconnected bit of sand and rocks. The townsfolk bury Gaelan while Pilot and Cap — who’s on crutches, so at least they remembered that much — watch. Afterward, Randall apologizes to Pilot for that whole attempted-axe-murder thing. Pilot’s magnanimous. After all, they, “Both have things to be sorry for.” Yeah Jennifer. He’s sorry for attempting to extract violent revenge for the murder of his family; she’s sorry for her complicity in multiple war crimes; it all balances out I guess.

I guess that really sums up what I don’t like about this episode. They’re so determined to exonerate Pilot that they end up stripping the character of any tension; Pilot’s story can’t be one of redemption if the narrative is going to go out of its way to apologize for her. It’s Gaelan who ends up having the compelling story here, not Pilot: he’s the one who makes the noble act of self-sacrifice at the end. At the end, he’s dead, having died to save Pilot, and the cherry on top is that this convinces Randall to forgive her and view himself as the one who was out of line. When this happened to Teal’c? The Randall-equivalent character doesn’t apologize. In fact, he can’t even bring himself to forgive Teal’c, not fully: instead, he claims that he made a mistake, and Teal’c clearly isn’t the same person that killed his father. He’s willing to grant legitimacy to the new man Teal’c has become through his redemption, but even still he doesn’t forgive his father’s killer. That could have worked here too. Have Randall say something like, “I was wrong. A Dread Youth Leader killed my family. You aren’t Dread Youth.” But the way this episode is written, even that would have laid too much blame on Pilot; they prefer the idea that she was there but can’t permit her to have actually had any agency in those flashback scenes.

You know what would have made this episode better? Scout. I’ve said so many times that his character is pretty blank, and this would have been a great opportunity to fill him out a little. We know from the Captain’s Log segment that Scout had been tracking Cap and Pilot. So have him arrive at Oasis looking for them. Have him defend Pilot at her trial. He seems like a people-person, far moreso than the others. He could tell stories about Pilot from his perspective, which would flesh out both their backstories. And you don’t put Pilot in the position of trying to justify, y’know, having been a Nazi.

I’m loathe to take Pilot’s big speech away from her. I mean, the Gemini folks thought it was pretty good (Though not quite as good as Sonja Smits in Street Legal), even if I think it’s kind of a betrayal of the character. So let’s keep the speech, but have her give it to Scout, privately. Yeah. You can even let her cry Scout feels like the right person for her to cry to, not a bunch of strangers. Of all the members of the team, he’s the closest to her equal. It’s hard to imagine her being willing to show that level of vulnerability to Cap, or even Hawk. And Scout — admittedly, this might just be through neglect — seems the least wrapped up in a “soldier” persona; battlefield-formality suits him less than the others (In fact, if I were writing Scout, I think I’d give him a non-military background. Make him a civilian communications expert who was drafted to Power’s team out of necessity, rather than an officer who worked his way up through the ranks).

The key thing to making this episode work for me would be to make Pilot actually accept responsibility for her past. We can still have the karmic saving throw with Gaelan, but Pilot shouldn’t be making the argument that she was young and didn’t have a family and didn’t know what she was doing. And we need her to have had actual agency in Sandtown. Yeah. Go all-in. We need to see her actually pull the trigger. Maybe we shouldn’t go as dark as having her personally gun down Randall’s family, but we can have her be the one to set fire to their house. Or at least give the order. Heck, Gaelan calls her a “Child spouting slogans,” so how about in one of those flashbacks, she actually spouts a slogan? You can’t have redemption if you can’t own up to having done wrong. We need to see that Pilot herself believes that she deserves punishment for her crimes.

Admittedly, adding Scout to the mix complicates matters for the climactic battle. But that’s not too hard to solve. Let’s do something with that data tape that was the Macguffin for setting up the episode. Make the data on it time-sensitive, so Pilot sends Scout away with it ahead of the attack, and we play this as Pilot firing her defense because she’s resigned herself to losing this trial. Boom. Problem solved.

As it turns out, pretty much every criticism of this episode I have boils down to, “SG-1 did it better,” so it shouldn’t be surprising that my “fix” for the episode is “Pretty much make it the same as the SG-1 episode.” Of course, Stargate SG-1 is literally a decade away at this point. In fact, this is weird. “Cor-Ai” aired almost exactly ten years after Captain Power aired “Judgment”. Like, five hundred and twenty weeks. (It is January 23, 1998. Savage Garden tops the charts with “Truly, Madly, Deeply”. ABC is so desperate that they’re showing Sabrina The Teenage Witch twice tonight. In the past weeks, Ted Kaczynski has plead guilty to being the Unabomber and accepts a life sentence without parole, the UN has banned human cloning, Sarah Polley turned 19, Pope John Paul II visited Cuba, and President Bill Clinton was accused of sexual harassment. By Monday, the Queen Mother will have a new hip, Grease will have closed on Broadway, Posh Spice will be engaged to David Beckham, the Broncos will have won the Super Bowl, and President Clinton will have said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”) So maybe telling that kind of story properly is still in the future. A little specter of it has popped its head up here, fully ten years too early, and Captain Power couldn’t quite nail it.

But, all my complaints aside, it got it really really close.

It is January 17 and 18, 1988. Earnest Byner fumbles at the 3-yard line, losing the AFC championship for the team which would later become the Baltimore Ravens. The top song on the charts is George Harrison’s cover of “Got My Mind Set On You”, which old-me is ashamed of young-me for liking so much. Compared to last week, Elton John, Tiffany, and The Bangles have entered the top ten with “Candle in the Wind”, Not-“I Think We’re Alone Now”, and “Hazy Shade of Winter” respectively.

Disney’s The New Adventures of Winnie The Pooh premieres on The Disney Channel, which is at this stage in its history, a commercial-free premium network. At the moment, my family has a weird cable package which consists of the broadcast DC and Baltimore stations, plus, for some reason, CBN, which is going to start evolving into The Family Channel (now ABC Family) later this year; it’ll be another year or two before we get the rest of basic cable, to say nothing of the pay channels (Most of which we eventually get through the happy accident of the cable company not really having their act together and turning on the premium channels for everyone on the block whenever anyone subscribed). The New Adventures is a far more mundane and traditional Winnie-The-Pooh adaptation than the Disney Channel’s previous attempt, Welcome to Pooh Corner, an early 80s series done in live-action with animatronic-faced costumes, which is sort of magnificently bizarre and creepy and totally worth watching. Sadly, only about a dozen of the possibly more than a hundred episodes were ever released in home video format, and even fewer are still findable today. In broadcast-Disney, The Wonderful World of Disney airs the first half of a failed pilot called Earth*Star Voyager, a not-very-good show about a space ship crewed for no good reason by children with a plot that is actually surprisingly similar to Star Trek Into Darkness (I’m serious; the plot boils down to “Evil Admiral wants to build a super-giant-warship, so he strikes a deal with a renegade to help build it, and sends off the flagship deliberately under an inexperienced commander planning for him to fail”). For absolutely no reason, I keep running into people who remember this show, though I personally do not. Although it was nominated for two Primetime Emmys (Sound editing and mixing), it is almost entirely forgotten, and Disney would prefer everyone forget it ever happened, the usual fate for TV shows with asterisks in their titles. TVTropes helpfully describes it as “The Mickey Mouse Club meets Star Trek.”

Speaking of Star Trek, this week’s episode of Star Trek The Next Generation is “Datalore”, a story which is very important for introducing Data’s off-switch. And also his evil twin brother, I guess, but that’s really just an excuse to let Brent Spiner have some fun and ham it up for a change. It’s kind of a weak episode, made all the weaker for the fact that Wesley Crusher once again has to save the day by being the only one who can tell when Data is secretly replaced by his moustache-twirling evil twin. Seriously, it feels like a recurring theme this season is “No one but Wesley Crusher pays a damned bit of attention to how their co-workers are behaving.” But at least it’s a weak episode that lays the groundwork for much better episodes later, including the Augment arc of Enterprise.

Captain Power this week is a big episode for Hawk and Tank. That’s a pleasant change after a sequence of episodes that have leaned more heavily on Cap and Pilot, though I do note with some derision that Maurice Dean Wint still hasn’t gotten a character focus episode yet.

We open in a Toronto Subway, where Cap and company (Minus Pilot, of course; can’t waste Jessica Steen on non-character-focus episodes) are trying to warn “Cypher” that they’ve intercepted some Dread plans involving his resistance group and an evil experiment. While Cap and Scout forge ahead, Tank and Hawk hang back so that Tank can down the contents of a random canteen he just finds lying around. This may seem like an incredibly stupid, or at least somewhat impolite thing to do, but hey, the show’s only 22 minutes long, so we can’t really afford to dawdle on the plot. The camera does us a solid and follows the discarded canteen so that we’ll know it’s important.

[raw]Cap and Scout find the resistance cell mostly incapacitated or dead. Their investigation is spied on by one of Dread’s ubiquitous spy drones, which, of course, he never has any trouble getting into any resistance bases anywhere. Back at Volcania, Dread privately taunts power, and dismisses Lakki when the little playskool toy suggests that maybe letting Cap in on the “Styx” project might be a touch counterproductive.
They find Cypher and some of the still-capacitated resistance after Cap’s forced to stun one of them in self-defense. Cypher explains that a “madness” came down on them all, causing pain, hallucinations and fits of violence. Cypher himself is clearly meant to be affected, speaking in broken sentences and clutching his chest and head from time to time. Though he affects this mostly by talking like a three year old.

This is the first time we’ve met Colonel Cypher, but it won’t be the last. He’ll return in “The Eden Road” and “Freedom One”. He’s played by Lorne Cossette, whose filmography is pretty sparse. He was in a handful of British things in the sixties, then appears to have given up acting until a little flurry in the late ’80s. He passed away back in 2001, five years after his last film roles, minor parts in a Sandra Bullock romcom and Darkman III. But you may know recall him from one particular role: he played Captain Maitland in the early Doctor Who serial “The Sensorites”.

I kind of wonder if there’s anything deliberate about that in this casting: the plot of “The Sensorites” revolved around two major elements which are echoed in this episode: characters driven violently insane by an outside influence, and tainted water supplies.

Dread has summoned some troopers to attack the base, prompting a reasonable if over-long fight scene in the subway. It’s a nice setting for a fight scene, as has been well-established by Michael Jackson and the Wachowski Brothers. When our heroes, along with the resistance survivors make it back to the Jumpship, they’re confronted by Soaron, which of course means that it’s time for Hawk to jump into action. We cut back to Volcania for just long enough for Dread to shout a Big “No!!!!!!” as Power and his gang escape.

[/raw]

Back at base, Cap notices that Tank’s looking a little unwell, so he sends him to bed early, then asks Mentor about this whole “Styx” thing. Mentor helpfully explains what the adults, older children, and more intelligent domestic animals have already worked out: that the resistance cell’s water supply was tainted with a chemical agent that induces temporary insanity. Hawk, in what’s either a rare display of the characters being as clever as they’re supposed to be, or a common display of “we’re 10 minutes in and have to get the plot rolling,” puts two and two together, and sorts out that Tank’s likely infected. Pilot puts on her rarely-seen Power Suit, and the two of them go to visit Tank, who’s kept it together enough to power on himself, but just shouts, “Monsters! You won’t get me! I’ll kill you all!” over and over, and one-shot knocks them out, though, curiously, it doesn’t disperse their suits.

Meanwhile, Mentor, who’s leaking a little more emotion than usual, has sorted out that some random Dread base they’d previously destroyed had produced the Styx bioweapon, and that Dread’s planning to use short-range rockets to deliver it into the aquifer that apparently provides drinking water to the entire west coast. This show has absolutely no idea how geography works. We obligingly cut back to Volcania, where Lord Dread orders the immediate deployment of Styx, since his whole, “Let Captain Power sort out your evil plan with plenty of time to stop it,” strategy has, shockingly, backfired. He’s so fired up that he only pauses briefly to yell at Lakki, who kinda evokes Kiff Kroaker from Futurama with a hint of a sigh before his usual, “I live to serve.” I’ve mentioned before that Lakki is usually described as a spy for Overmind, but “spy” really has the wrong connotation. He’s more of an instrument of passive-aggression by Overmind: transparently saddling Dread with a robot Scrappy Doo just to demonstrate that he can.

Cap rushes off to collect the others, and rouses Hawk and Pilot. Having determined that Tank’s been reduced to a psychotic killing machine, our leader decides that the best strategic move is for him to take Pilot and Scout off in the Jumpship to prevent the launch of the Styx missiles and leave the concussed old man to take care of the drugged-out heavily-armored giant. The camerawork here is very disappointing: we stay on Cap and Pilot rather than cutting to a close-up of Hawk, which is a shame because we’re treated to another one of those famous Peter MacNeill Reaction shots as his lips say, “Sure,” but his face says, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

So we get something approaching a real A/B plot structure here, with our heroes heading out in the Jumpship while Hawk pursues Tank through the base. Cap does a strafing run against Dread’s launch facility (played by the same weird Egyptian-inspired tomb entranceway we’ve seen three or four times by now) in the Power Jet (Which I’m confused by now, since I was fairly sure it was only ever shown once or twice, but it seems to have become a staple now), but then abandons it to approach on-foot with Scout while Pilot… Basically just keeps the Jumpship warm I guess. For some reason, Scout has a bazooka now.

A young, blonde, female Dread Youth who isn’t Erin from last week but probably should have been oversees the launch sequence from within the base. Scout and Cap try a reprise of the strategy from “Wardogs” by having Scout do his Lord Dread impression, but the camera moves to Not-Erin’s left to shockingly reveal Blastarr, whose video-toaster-vision reveals that he isn’t fooled by Scout’s holograms. Scout crumples to his first shot, but luckily for our heroes, Blastarr’s aim is utterly shit, as he only gets within the neighborhood of hitting anyone one more time, and Cap just shrugs that one off. Not-Erin decides to leg it while Cap and Blastarr exchange useless shots for a bit until Scout wakes up. Since apparently, Scout isn’t allowed to upstage Cap, he doesn’t actually do anything effective to Blastarr, but his ineffective firepower does prompt the Bio-Dread to turn, so his shield is pointed the wrong way when Cap retrieves the bazooka and lets him have it. There’s a nice little sequence of Blastarr howling in pain, then we’re treated to the same loop of Blastarr falling to his knees we’ve seen in every other Blastarr fight, though this time, Cap head-shots him while he’s down. As per usual, once Blastarr stops moving, everyone forgets about him rather than continuing to shoot until he’s reduced to rubble.

In accordance with the laws of dramatic necessity, our heroes reach the control computer just as the countdown reaches 1, and play a video clip of a rocket exploding in the air. Which is weird since I had assumed the countdown was time to launch. But hey, no time to celebrate yet: we’ve got that pesky B-plot to resolve. (Okay, technically, the B-Plot has already been resolved because they’d been cutting back and forth between them during the last two paragraphs, but it’s awkward to write it that way in prose, so I demuxed them for the purposes of my recap).

The long-awaited Hawk-vs-Tank fight scene is fairly straightforward. Hawk finds Tank. Tank picks Hawk up and pitches him at a computer bank. Hawk demorphs and cowers. We fall back on the old Captain Power standard plot resolution here, since just as it looks like Tank is going to beat the now-defenseless Hawk to death, it turns out that Tank’s not quite completely gone mad, and with some stock, “You’ve got to fight it!”-type encouragement from Hawk, shakes off the effects of the Styx drug long enough to power down and let Hawk take him to bed.

Later, we’re told that Mentor has synthesized a “serum” that will treat Tank… By rendering him unconscious until the poison wears off naturally. I choose to believe that “serum” is a euphemism for “A gallon of scotch.” Everyone has a hearty laugh at the thought of Hawk nearly being murdered by a good friend. Curiously missing is the usual scene where we cut back to Volcania to hear Lord Dread complain about his latest failure.

This episode isn’t great, but I don’t really know why. The structure should be solid, with a traditional Action-Adventure A/B plot structure, and our heroes actually accomplishing stuff — they manage to foil the Styx phase of Project New Order and they save Colonel Cypher — who, let me remind you, is a recurring character. We do get an at least minor variation on the typical Scout scene: rather than what we’ve seen every other time, with Scout using his disguises to cause a single moment of confusion before dropping the charade, his disguise is actually completely unconvincing this time.

But as a whole, this episode just feels weak. The plot with Tank is dealt with too quickly, and having Hawk simply talk him down is both cliche and unsatisfying. This could have been an opportunity to talk about Tank’s genetic enhancements and his own concerns about the violence in his nature as per “Final Stand”, but instead he spends half the episode just muttering, “Monsters! I keel you all!” There’s no rhyme or reason to why he’s able to shake it off at the critical moment — this would have been a great place to get into Tank’s character a little. You know that bit in The Avengers where Mark Ruffalo says, “I’m always angry”? You could play with the idea that Tank is always fighting to control his genetically engineered violent inclinations, and that’s why — even though he loses control temporarily — he’s ultimately able to overcome the Styx drug when the resistance fighters couldn’t.

But, y’know, we needed an extra few minutes of Cap and Blastarr shooting at each other instead. They pull out all the stops for the action in this one. There haven’t been any episodes until now that used this many of their fight scene resources all together: the Power Jet, Soaron, Blastarr, the Jumpship, and all five heroes in powered-on mode. But the price they pay is that the non-action sequences are greatly abbreviated. And honestly, fight scenes with Blastarr just aren’t that interesting for the most part. With Soaron, you at least have something dynamic going on with a dogfight. It may look cheap and the visual effects don’t quite work, and sometimes Soaron doubles in size, and there’s that tendency to have laser beams hit empty space and explode, but still, there’s stuff moving. Blastarr fight scenes are mostly like boss battles in a cover-based shooter. Blastarr just kind of stands there, shooting, and the heroes occasionally pop up from behind something hoping to get a lucky shot in. Then Blastarr drops to his knees and blacks out.

Scout plays an unusually large role in this episode: with Tank and Hawk shunted off to the B-plot, he’s the one who has Cap’s back in the big climactic fight, where it would normally be Hawk. But he still doesn’t do much. His dialogue is sparse, and he mostly just gets knocked down. Scout and Pilot have almost always been under-utilized, and Scout doesn’t even get a character focus episode this season.

This episode also falls short as the culmination of Styx. Pretty much since “The Ferryman”, we’ve been building up Styx as the next major checkpoint on the season-long plot arc. Styx figured into the plots of “And Study War No More” and “Flame Street”, but there’s no sense of this week’s plot being connected to anything that came before. The Styx information cap got from the Cyber Web has never come up since. Cap’s opening monologue explains that they’d intercepted a transmission leading them to go check on Cypher — they could just as easily have said something like, “We found a reference to Colonel Cypher’s resistance cell in the information we retrieved from Tech City,” and tied the ongoing plot together. Likewise, we actually saw barrels with the Styx logo in Haven. Instead of some random Dread Base we’ve never seen before, Mentor should really have just identified Haven as the source of the poison (Of course, to complicate matters worse, “And Study War No More” has a stardate of 47-9, while this one is 47-8, which means that diagetically, they haven’t been to Haven yet, and they discover their involvement in Styx only after Styx has been foiled, yet no one mentions the obvious irony in the pacifistic Haven manufacturing a chemical that induces violence.). Instead, after weeks of hinting at it, Styx proper just appears out of nowhere and is fairly easily foiled.

The nature of Styx is a bit weaksauce too. I mean, the cure is a good long nap. Actually, now that I think of it, “An outside influence causes people to become murderously violent. The cure is to induce a good long nap,” is the plot of an old Tomorrow People serial (“The Blue and the Green”. Cuckoo alien children need to induce strong violent emotions in their host species as part of their maturation cycle. They’re not crazy about the damage this is going to cause, but it’s the only way their species can induce menarche. Our heroes resolve the situation by inducing the entire human race to take a nap, so that the aliens’ balls can drop with the harm to humanity limited to some bad dreams and also car and plane crashes I assume.). It’s passable — the real threat isn’t the poison per se, but the the contamination of the water table, which would leave the west coast resistance without potable water. But that’s a fairly subtle and complex masterplan to lay out in the space of a couple of minutes between fight scenes. Both the flu strain from “Gemini and Counting” and the sleeping sickness from “Pariah” are much more straightforward illness-based threats, and I think it probably would have made the season overall stronger if they’d all been tied together: swap the flu from last week for a new form of the Pariah virus, and make the culmination of Styx be contaminating the water table with a waterborne variant. First we establish what the virus does, we show that it’s still communicable and it taxes the heroes’ resources to combat it even on the limited scale of the outbreak in the passages, then we confront them with the threat of it proliferating too fast for them to distribute a cure. You have a great “Oh crap” moment of escalation when you see that it took a dangerous gambit with Pilot putting herself on the line to stop the first outbreak, then discover that Dread’s plan will lead to an outbreak many times larger.

Instead, Styx as portrayed in this episode basically comes out of nowhere and disappears back into nowhere. It just doesn’t hang together. For those who are keeping score, Project New Order seems to pretty much be Dread’s masterplan of four totally unrelated schemes to wipe out humanity. He’s been working on these for years, and so far, our heroes have discovered and foiled two of the four stages in the span of about half an hour each. We didn’t even get a new Bio-Dread out of this one.

Oh well. Next week’s another character-driven episode, so maybe things will look up…

Happy New Year! It’s the tenth and/or eleventh of January, 1988. Since we went on hiatus back in November, George Michael has owned the top of the charts with “Faith”, except for the week of December 5, when Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” held the top spot, nudging George Michael down two spots. Michael Jackson, INXS, George Harrison, Whitesnake, Taylor Dane, and Jody Watley also chart. Whitney Houston has finally unseated George Michael as of this past Friday with “So Emotional”. A bunch of notable movies opened in December, including the Robin Williams hit Good Morning Vietnam, the iconic ’80s flick Wall Street, and The Hanoi Hilton, the biggest film role for he who must not be named, but since the first of the year, the only things on the new release list I’ve even heard of are Eighteen Again and Light Years(nee Gandahar, after the novel on which it was based, Les hommes-machines contre Gandahar) , a French animated film with an English translation by Isaac Asimov, which I found utterly incomprehensible as a child, but whose weird tagline (“In thousand years, Gandahar was destroyed; a thousand years ago, Gandahar will be saved.”) stuck with me all the same. Margaret Thatcher is now the longest-serving British Prime Minister since Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and William Gladstone took turns serving about thirteen years apiece of the 34 years from 1868 to 1902 (Yes, I know it doesn’t add up. Benjamin Disraeli and Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery took turns in there too, the history of British Politics being an elaborate trap set up to cost valuable points on the AP European History Test). But not all long-serving leaders are as bad as Thatcher: for example, Robert Mugabe just became president of Zimbabwe. The Soviet Union has announced that they’ll be participating in the upcoming Seoul Olympics — a big deal since the US and the USSR took turns boycotting the last two out of spite. In the upcoming week, SCOTUS will rule that school boards can censor school newspapers, Sportscaster and Bookie Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder will make some racist comments about black athletes, and because it’s 1988 and not 2012, he’ll get fired for this but will not become a poster boy for how the “liberal media” has “gone mad” over “political correctness”. Sony concedes the First Great Home Video Format War and starts making VHS recorders. Employees and employers are stunned when health insurance rates go up 10-70%, but I’m sure that will be the wake-up call we need to get health care costs under control. The Justice Department announces that it’s going to start going after pornographers with racketeering charges, which surely will make it much harder for people to access images of people having sex over the next decade. It is very snowy.

Not much worth commenting on in the rest of the TV universe, though the second half of Flight of the Navigator was the Sunday movie on ABC. Star Trek the Next Generation is back with “The Big Goodbye”, which I think is one of the season’s highlights. It’s a Holodeck Malfunction episode, with Picard, Data, Crusher, and Lieutenant Bucky getting stuck in a pastiche film noir. Guess which one gets shot! The science is rather worse in this one than in the later Holodeck Malfunction episodes, but on the other hand, in 1988, there had never been a Holodeck Malfunction episode before, so this was all very fresh and exciting, rather than being very hackneyed and cliche. It is also, as part of its B-plot, the first instance of the Diplomatic Meeting Where Protocol Requires You To Perfectly Recite Some Long Speech in An Alien Language Your Tongue Isn’t Designed For On Threat of Death if You Mispronounce Anything, which would later turn up in Futurama and Star Trek Enterprise, but here it’s still very fresh and new, and there is really nothing too bad about this episode other than the fact that they shoehorn in another “Wesley Crusher Saves the Day” bit. At the time, it was criticized for being too similar to TOS’s “A Piece of the Action”, on account of it containing people in fedoras and the critics having stopped paying attention after they saw the people in fedoras, because other than that, the two have balls-all to do with each other.

Elsewhere, “Gemini and Counting”. Twelve episodes in, and we’re finally going to get a character focus episode for Pilot. It’s another episode where the plot is kind of secondary to what the episode is really doing, which is one big character scene in the middle. In fact, the plot is almost depressingly simple: there’s a flu bug going around in the passages, they don’t have the ingredients to cook up the vaccine, so Pilot breaks into a Dread Youth-staffed pharmaceutical lab and steals some. If this were MacGyver, the episode would feature a series of problem-solving scenes where Mac uses his ingenuity to get past locked doors and evade guards. If it were Doctor Who, there’d be a series of the Doctor getting captured then escaping at least six times. But this show is half an hour long, so we don’t have time for that: Pilot breaks in, finds what she needs, and leaves. There’s no twist or complication that ever seriously jeopardizes her mission, or any serious danger that she’s going to be caught or killed. Yet.

Which is not to say that this episode is conflict or tension-free: it’s just that all that is, essentially, an aside to the overall plot of the episode. We open in the passages, the heretofore unseen, nebulously defined place where Cap occasionally sends refugees who don’t meet some arbitrary definition of already having a suitable hovel in which to cower. The establishing shot is nice, but sadly, we don’t have time to really get any sense of what life is like down there, or where “there” is, except that I’m pretty sure it’s a redress of the Tech City set from last episode. It’s got that same kind of underground-strip-mall thing going on. Cap and company are warned that there’s a serious chance of an epidemic if they can’t get the supplies they need to manufacture large amounts of flu vaccine, and presumably George Bush and John Kerry start posturing about which of them is manly enough to forgo vaccination (Yes that was a thing. Not even making it up. There was a big thing in aught four where rather than compelling drug companies to take a loss on stepping up vaccine manufacture, the political propaganda machines of the US tried to turn skipping vaccinations into a machismo thing, implying that a healthy man who got vaccinated was just being a pussy. It was like a weird reversal of those WWII-era propaganda ads telling women that smoking was unwomanly and asking them to save our country’s strategic cigarette reserve for “those for whom God intended them: our fighting men overseas”. Yes. Really. God wants soldiers, not women, to smoke.).  Fortunately, Pilot remembers from her Dread Youth days that there’s a pharmaceutical factory, which I assume is in sector 3 (Sector 3: where everything in the fucking world is) staffed entirely by The Littlest Nazis as part of the Dread Youth’s Summer Internship Program, and she’s fairly sure they could shoot their way in and steal what they need because a bunch of kids playing Nazis would be like lambs to the slaughter before Captain Power’s fighting force sneak in unnoticed and steal what they need, and Pilot, with her inside knowledge, volunteers to go under cover.

I’ll point out that, according to the series bible, Pilot was ten when Cap liberated her from the clutches of the Dread Youth, and she’s presumably in her early twenties now, so we’re talking about some decade-old knowledge. Even Cap questions her on this, but Pilot just kind of waves it off. She also insists that she has to go in unarmed, as she couldn’t possibly hide her spandex leotard under a Dread Youth uniform, even though the thing covers so much skin that even a Victorian would probably suggest they’re a bit repressed. Fortunately, her old Dread Youth uniform still fit, and we get some great physical acting from Jessica Steen as she emotes half a dozen flavors of discomfort, shame and anger while she adjusts it.

There’s an obligatory action scene as the rest of the team dispatches a patrol outside to stop them noticing the Jumpship, because we’ve forgotten that it has a chameleon circuit, then sneaks inside. She dispatches the first guard she meets, apparently using the Vulcan neck pinch, but is forced to shoot the second one in the leg. I’m not sure, and can’t find any credits to back it up, but I think this second soldier, Erin, is the same one the camera stops on for an otherwise inexplicable close-up during the Dread Youth Graduation scene back in “The Ferryman”. Of course, since that was graduation, she really shouldn’t be Dread Youth any more but an “Overunit”.

That’s Laurie Holden from The Walking Dead by the way.  Her performance here is nothing special, but she does a really good job of playing the character she’s clearly written to be: a younger version of Pilot. She’s unsure, but masks it with indignance and bravado, accusing Captain Power’s gang of being barbarians. Jennifer restrains and gags her, but promises to return. Inside a hastily redressed set recycled from every other time they’ve needed a “clean-style future” set, Pilot cold-cocks a technician, and swaps her Dread Youth uniform for a technician’s, because this somehow will be more discrete. She politely declines to take his key card as well, instead relying on her sonic dildo to unlock the door to the lab. There’s a few nice touches here, though. Namely, a Lord Dread propaganda poster that looks suspiciously like the Nick Gaetano Ayn Rand covers. Those date from about five years after Power, so it’s probably just coincidence with a splash of “they’re both intentionally trying to conjure up a 1930s deco sort of feel,” I mean, and yes of course I am being deliberate when I make this comparison, it’s also kinda reminiscent of this poster for The Triumph of the Will.

Pilot grabs what she needs and sneaks out. This feels like maybe a bit of a cheat, since she grabs a little satchel of bottles which is roughly the same size as the little satchel of bottles that hadn’t been enough back in the first scene. But maybe this is concentrated or something. It’s a minor complaint. She also snags a first aid kit so she can clean up Erin’s leg. They have a little heart-to-heart where they take turns reciting the Dread Youth oath:

The world is imperfect
We will make it perfect.
Mechanized, immortal, human minds
In undying metaloid bodies
We are the body electric,
Dread’s eyes
We are his fist.
With our blood and our trust,
He shall mold the new tomorrow

She explains a bit about being human and having feelings and all that jazz, though there’s not much meat to it; her argument basically boils down to, “Hey, did you know that the side you are on is actually evil? Why not try good for a change?” It’s not clear to me whether this argument is working for her, and anyway, someone finally notices that missing patrol from earlier. Dread is, as always, personally notified, and dispatches Soaron, because, again, Lord Dread does not believe in middle management.

As Pilot makes her escape, Cap has to fire up the Power Jet, which surprises the heck out of me because I coulda sworn that the Power Jet only appears in “The Ferryman” and “A Summoning of Thunder”. After how Hawk-heavy the first quarter of the season was, it seems like he’s really vanished into the background for this part. I think he only has one line in the whole episode, and it’s to tell Pilot, “You took a big risk.”

Pilot shoots her way past some mechs, but Erin briefly channels the powers of a slasher movie villain and manages to be just behind her despite having a severe limp and possibly still having been tied up. She insists unconvincingly that she’s still loyal to Dread, but since she’s reluctant to actually shoot, they basically just stare at each other until Tank shows up on a hoverbike. Tank’s apparently read the script, because even though Pilot cautions him not to shoot, it’s not like he raises his weapon, or really even acknowledges Erin’s presence at all. Pilot invites her to come with, but politely offers the alternate suggestions of shooting her to become a hero among the Dread Youth, or just going home and pretending none of this ever happened. Erin chooses option C and allows Pilot and Tank to withdraw unmolested. Later, Pilot speculates that she’s “cracked her armor” and hints that she may have planted a seed that might lead to Erin someday making a heel-face turn. Presumably these seeds of disloyalty lead to her being caught and digitized by her comrades, because we never see Erin again.

The stardate on this episode places it just about a week after “Flame Street” — based on the best guess I can make about how stardates work, “Final Stand” and “The Mirror in Darkness” both took place in July, while “Flame Street”, “Gemini and Counting”, and next week’s “And Madness Shall Reign” are in August, as is “Freedom One”, though that one, like “A Summoning of Thunder”, which should have fallen immediately after “The Intruder”, were aired out of order.

Which makes this one kind of an oddball. It feels very much like the episodes from earlier in the season. The plot of course is very similar to “Final Stand”, down to the contrivance of the hero not being able to wear their power suit, and it’s got the same kind of structural problems that plagued all the episodes up through “The Ferryman”: everything feels forced and obligatory. Obligatory mech battle at the five-minute mark, obligatory Soaron aerial battle at the fifteen. No real obstacles for the heroes to overcome, and in fact, the actual plot is entirely secondary and superfluous to what this episode is about. Dread himself is barely in the episode either, and frankly I think it would have been better to leave him out altogether. His appearance seems quite literally down to, “His contract says he has to be in every episode,” and really adds nothing. The best thing I can say about it is that our heroes actually accomplish something in the main plot of the episode, unlike so many of the early-season episodes where the presence of the Power team is more or less irrelevant. Also, Blastarr and Lakki are conspicuous by their absence — this is the first time we’ve had a Blastarr-free episode since he was introduced. There’s also absolutely nothing to do with Project New Order in this one, after it’s dominated the narrative for weeks. And we’re only a couple of weeks away from Pilot’s other character focus episode, “Judgment”. It seems strange to put two so close together — of course, that one’s another “out of order” one, with a stardate in November.

Regardless of what order you put them in, though, this is our third “evil counterpart” episode, after pairing Tank with Kasko in “Final Stand” and Cap with Jason in “The Mirror in Darkness”. Now that I think of it, I really wish “The Abyss” had done something to parallel Hawk as the “good” soldier against General McCrazy as the “bad” soldier, because we’d have some really nice symmetry going then. And it does work a lot better here than it did in the other two: Kasko’s too much of a cartoon and Tank’s too much of a cypher; Cap seems to go bizarrely mental and Jason’s too thin of a character. But with Erin set up so straightforwardly as being “Basically just like Pilot was in the past,” we’re basically getting a backstory-flashback for Pilot without actually having to sideline Jessica Steen in favor of a child actor for a whole episode (Which is, of course, what they’re going to do with Cap in a couple of weeks). The best part of this is that by translating what was a backstory about Cap and Young-Jennifer into story between Pilot and Erin, we completely bracket the (very slowly) building arc about Pilot carrying a torch for Cap: whatever Pilot is meant to be doing to “crack” Erin’s “armor,” it’s not based around happy pantsfeels. All the same, this episode doesn’t really have the solid footing around its emotional center that the better episodes have had. It’s hard to swallow that Dread Youth indoctrination is so flimsy that “One of those rebel scum I’ve been taught to hate and view as mindless barbarians bandaged my leg after she shot me,” is enough to give Erin an existential crisis. It’s good, great even, that Erin ends this episode still asserting her loyalty to Dread — that Pilot only accomplished as much as to plant the first seeds of doubt rather than prompting her to full-on reject her Dread Youth upbringing — but I still feel that their interaction never gets around to actually conveying this alleged armor-breaking. And for that matter, Pilot’s sense of Erin as being like a younger version of herself is kind of weaksauce too. It seems to amount to no more than, “She’s a blonde girl who is loyal to Dread because that’s all she knows,” which, yeah, is entirely valid, but how is Erin any different from anyone else in the Dread Youth? She wordlessly dispatches another soldier just seconds before meeting Erin and never gives him a second though. Why does Erin merit this chance at redemption and not Nameless Dread Soldier #456? There’s no answer other than “Because the plot says so,” and it seems kind of venial and capricious for it. Pilot puts her life on the line to help Erin rather than cold-cocking her and being done with it her basically because she’s a pretty blonde girl. Pilot’s calling her, “my young twin,” but all I keep thinking is, “You let one of them go, but that’s nothing new. Every now and then, a little victim’s spared because she smiled, because he’s got freckles, because they begged. And that’s how you live with yourself. That’s how you slaughter millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind’s in the right direction, you happen to be kind.” I don’t mean to accuse Pilot of being like Blon Fel Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen, but Pilot doesn’t have so much as a second thought about knocking out anyone else she happens upon and just leaving them tied up in closets, so the fact that the one she stops to have a heart-to-heart with just happens to look a bit like her is… suspect.

Nothing I’ve read about season 2 suggests that there were any plans to bring Erin back in the future, which is a shame. Much like “The Intruder”, “Gemini and Counting” feels like a story that would have been better as the first chapter in an ongoing narrative than as a stand-alone piece never to be revisited. Grooming Erin to be Pilot’s replacement would be too obvious, but I think she’d be a great foil to have the characters encounter repeatedly over time — we could see her react differently to each member of the team, building up to a fateful meeting with the Captain himself. And having a sympathetic enemy character would do a lot to make the conflict of the show more interesting, and give us some more variety to how the villain side of the story is told. What might have been.

Next week’s episode will bring us back to the “Project New Order” story arc, but I’m thinking that before we do that, there’s one more little diversion I want to go on. See you then.