Month: March 2015

Previously…

A lackadaisical blogger decided to write a series of reviews about the failed 1980s post-apocalyptic children’s series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. With an emphasis on sight-gags and the ill-conceived idea of having Sherlock Holmes as a sidekick, he covered four episodes of the series before going on a two-and-a-half-year hiatus after the birth of his son. Cribbing some stylistic elements from Phil Sandifer’s Tardis Eruditorium, he resumed the blog in 2014, eventually ramping up to a weekly posting schedule, albeit one with frequent side-trips. In the mean time, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future turned 25, an occasion marked by the release of all 22 episodes on DVD, and followed shortly by the announcement of a planned reboot under the title Phoenix Rising.

And now, the conclusion…

It is March 27, 1988. Macho Man Randy Savage pins Ted Dibiase at Wrestlemania IV. Brian Boytano wins the men’s figure skating championship at Budapest. The Grateful Dead play Hampton Coliseum in Virginia. Jesse Jackson becomes the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential primaries, defeating Michael Dukakis in the Michigan caucuses. Dick Gephardt drops out of the race to see who’s going to lose to George Bush. Next week, Beetlejuice will open in theaters. In the past week, McDonalds opened a restaurant in Yugoslavia, its first in a communist country. Rick Astley immediately caves on his promise and Gives (the top spot on the Billboard Charts) Up to the man in Michael Jackson’s mirror.

Supercarrier and Murder, She Wrote are new. NBC shows a new Lincoln biopic with Sam Waterston, ABC shows Tootsie. CBS shows a biopic starring Rick Schroeder as Calvin Graham, a husky 12-year-old who lied about his age to join the Navy in World War 2. Star Trek the Next Generation takes the week off, leaving Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future unopposed for what turned out to be its denouement.

Let’s get this out of the way right up-front, because it’s easier to talk about the first half of the episode without it hanging silently over out heads.  At the climax of this episode, Jennifer “Pilot” Chase dies, sacrificing herself to destroy the Power Base before Lord Dread can capture it. There. With the pretense of suspense out of the way, we can talk openly about how this episode unfolds and walks itself to its inevitable conclusion.

There is almost a kind of Greek Tragedy element to the final episode of Captain Power. When we left off last week, remember, Lord Dread had discovered the wormhole network our heroes use to reach the Power Base and Soaron has scanned the frequency key they use to access it. Which is to say, from the first minute of this episode, the end is already inevitable. Even if Captain Power and his friends knew how precarious their position was right now, it’s not clear they’d be able to do anything about it.

On the one hand, this can make for a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion: we already know going in that nothing Captain Power does in this episode is going to affect the outcome. And that’s been one of the biggest problems all season, that our heroes seem almost completely lacking in agency. We’re not going to end with the good guys storming the castle and a fateful one-on-one battle between Jonathan Power and Lord Dread.

But, of course, we did all that two weeks ago, and frankly, I was underwhelmed. There’s a shift in emphasis here, then. We’ve already had the big fateful confrontation. Captain Power invaded the very belly of the beast, took on Lord Dread in single combat, foiled his plans and left Volcania crippled. But that’s not going to be what the finale’s about: the finale is going to be about Lord Dread’s terrible vengeance.

And this is ultimately a good thing. The big problem I had with “New Order”, dramatically speaking, is that it was too much of a curbstomp. Enough, in fact, that it starts to become unconscionable that Captain Power has let the war drag on this long: if his gang of five freedom fighters can waltz right into Dread’s throne-room and seize control of Volcania’s systems — even if it’s only for a few minutes — why didn’t they round up Cypher and Sands and Gundar and the rest five years ago and level the place?

This episode has an answer of sorts: namely, Dread’s been playing softball. While Lord Dread’s shown a repeated willingness to kill, it seems like — admittedly, they haven’t been entirely consistent about this — he overwhelmingly prefers to convert or digitize. And therefore he’s been holding back. He essentially said as much last week: he’d opted to focus on creating the “new order” rather than on wiping out the old one. The justification, then, that it’s only with the “ticking time bomb” of Icarus and Prometheus that Captain Power would finally go on the offensive is because even with Volcania in ruins, Dread is capable of launching a counterattack more devastating than anything we’ve seen.

Heroes, particularly superheroes, are of their nature supposed to be primarily reactive: Batman can’t just show up at the Joker’s hideout and beat him to death for “being a villain”, he has to wait until the Clown Prince has actually embarked on some kind of crime. Even in your classic Joseph Campbell Monomyth (Which Captain Power tacitly accepts at least insofar as it is rather shamelessly knocking off Star Wars), where the hero is on a quest to unseat the tyrannical power that rules over the land, the story arc itself is still largely reactive: the hero starts out by refusing the call to adventure until the Saruman scourges the Shire, The Kurgan kills Ramirez, Storm Troopers toast Uncle Owen or Lyman Taggart kills Captain Power’s daddy.

Villains act, heroes react, says the law of dramatic necessity. Thus, Captain Power can react to the Prometheus countdown by attacking Volcania, but he can’t just waltz in there on a Thursday and shoot Overmind with a bazooka.

All the same, these last four episodes seem like something of a reversal, don’t they? The lack of any sort of meaningful tension in “New Order” makes the whole “Ticking time bomb” ring false. That story essentially opens with Captain Power learning the vital piece of intelligence he needs to mount a major successful offensive against Dread, then mounting a major successful offensive against Dread. Meanwhile, the very title of this two-parter tells us that now it is Dread who is going to be doing the “reacting”: all season, we’ve been watching him try (and fail) to enact his masterplan. But now, he’s given up on that and is just going to get his revenge.

This is especially important because one of the biggest problems I’ve had with this series is how little seems to be at stake. We’re told that the whole world cowers under Dread’s oppressive rule and all, and Cap told us at the end of “The Land Shall Burn” that this was their first substantial victory against Dread. But does that ring true at all? In “Wardogs”, they destroyed Dread’s base and evaded his trap. In “Final Stand”, they rescued the townspeople before they could be digitized. In “Pariah”, they rescued the kid and cured the Pariah Virus. In “A Fire in the Dark”, they persuaded Jessica Morgan not to help Dread. In “The Mirror in Darkness” they unmasked Jason. In “The Ferryman”, they almost completely foil Charon. In “And Study War No More” they shut down the Styx toxin manufacturing in Haven. In “The Intruder”, they rescue Jim. In “Flame Street”, they escape with critical intelligence. In “Gemini and Counting” they steal a supply of flu vaccine. In “And Madness Shall Reign”, they completely foil Styx. In “Judgment”, they get key intelligence back to the Power Base and in “Freedom One” they capture Christine and foil the plot to capture the resistance leaders. Practically every episode ends with the heroes scoring at least a minor victory against Dread, and the only time Dread manages even a qualified victory is creating Blastarr in “The Ferryman” (Even then, it’s less a “victory” and more “One step shy of an utter rout”). I know, I know, kids’ show and all that baggage, but by this point in the series, Lord Dread seems to be ranking up there with Cobra Commander and Skeletor. I know we’re still half a decade away from David Xanatos, but look at, say, Megatron. He managed to pull off the whole, “Sure, Optimus Prime managed to foil my plan, but we still made forward progress before he did by stealing all this Energon,” thing. Lord Dread is far more in the vein of Dr. Claw, uselessly shouting, “I’ll get you, Captain Power, NEXT TIME!!!” at the end of every episode. We’ve never really seen the good guys lose anything — even the people who get digitized tend to be villainous. We really should have had Eyepatch-Cypher back in “Freedom One”.

That streak’s going to end here, though. After Dread gives a motivational speech to the Hitler Youth, we hop over the the Power Base. Captain Power visits Pilot in her room, where the music does its level best to fool us into thinking there is any chemistry at all between the two of them, as Cap gives an utterly emotionless speech about how much he appreciates and values her while they stand over her little shelf of unlicensed Captain Power collectibles, such as the Isaiah plaque from Haven and her Dread Youth hat from “Gemini and Counting”. Jessica Steen does her usual admirable job of using her eyes to do the acting since Straczynski can’t be bothered to give her any lines, but Dunigan feels especially low-key immediately after Lord Dread’s big emotional speech to the troops. Jessica Steen and Tim Dunigan do a commentary track for this episode on the DVD, and he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with his performance here (He thinks the scene really works), so I’m going to assume that his flatness here is deliberate and pretend it’s confirmation of what I’ve been saying for months now, that Captain Power is meant to be profoundly emotionally crippled. Pilot starts to confess the Big Secret She’s Been Wanting To Tell Him For Some Time when Scout calls them to interrupt with a mission.

The episode from this point on is in large part an inversion of “New Order”, now that I think about it. The story sends our heroes once again to meet chain-smoking, bullet-shooting, mushroom-haired Locke, who sells them up-to-the-minute information on Dread’s troop movements, and throws in the highly time-sensitive tidbit that our old friend Cypher (who will not be appearing in this episode, more’s the pity. Also, Cap identifies him as the head of “The Angel City Resistance”, which I assume is meant to be Los Angeles, even though he was part of the “East Coast Resistance” last time), has been captured and they’ve got exactly one hour to rescue him while he’s being relocated to a secure facility.

Just like “The Sky Shall Swallow Them”, then, we’ve got Locke delivering intelligence to our heroes that leads to a ticking clock with Captain Power and his allies needing to act quickly before Lord Dread’s plan comes to fruition. I find myself really pleasantly surprised by just how cleverly this parallel is set up. It goes a long way to redeeming a lot of my issues with the “New Order” two-parter. Of course, we know from the outset how things are going to turn out this time. Any questioning of Locke’s veracity is short-circuited when a brief fight scene erupts with some mechs, who our heroes easily dispatch before saying their goodbyes to the data thief.

Literally the frame after Captain Power is off-screen, the camera pans over and an Overunit and some troopers appear behind Locke — there is absolutely no way Cap and Company could have missed them, but the fact that the rouse is this transparent almost becomes part of the charm. Or maybe I’m just waxing nostalgic because I’m on the last episode. The Overunit thanks Locke for selling out Cap and Company, and Locke decks him while expressing his own self-loathing. There’s no talk of payment as Locke departs unchallenged. That’s an especially nice touch. Given J. Michael Straczynski’s ham-and-anvil approach to morality at this stage in his career, I’d have expected Locke to be offered thirty pieces of silver. As the scene stands, though it’s not said outright, we can, if we want, assume that Locke was paid with his liberty. We’ve had more than enough examples by now to believe that the threat of digitization would break a better man than Locke.

Lord Dread orders Blastarr and a unit of troopers to sneak back through the wormhole when Captain Power arrives to rescue Cypher — they’ll secure the unguarded Power Base and gain all of Cap’s secrets: Mentor, the spare power suits, files on the resistance, Tank’s enormous collection of bodybuilder porn, the Stargate, everything. What Dread hasn’t anticipated, however, is that Cap has decided that the information from Locke is sufficiently important that they ought to take it straight back to base first, and, since they’ll be taking the jumpship into battle and will need their best pilot at the controls… Has decided to send Pilot back to the base anyway and let Hawk, the guy who’s more accustomed to flying solo, pilot the ship.

I gather that Jessica Steen had come to the decision to leave the show fairly early on. I don’t begrudge her this. Her character is really poorly served by the vast majority of episodes. Every time she’s on-screen, she’s wonderful, but it happens so rarely. And besides, the character of Pilot is a very sort of “tech” character. In her minor appearances, she’s usually fixing equipment or using her proton spanner to unlock something. While she mentions in her commentary that the technobabbling she learned for Captain Power helped her land a role as a space shuttle pilot in Michael Bay’s Armageddon, a look at the rest of her filmography suggests that playing an emotionally stunted young woman who is the one regular character to least often get a fight scene is almost uncannily avoiding her strengths as an actor. I have no idea who they’d have cast as her replacement if the series had been renewed, but given the general outline of the replacement character, “Ranger”, a passionate, cynical, “dark action girl”, you know who I’d strongly consider? Jessica Steen.

But if they did indeed have full warning of the need to write Pilot out, it’s strange how awkwardly set up this is. Namely, we have Pilot going off alone on a hoverbike, and this is going to lead to a one-on-one fight with a BioDread. Meanwhile, Hawk’s going to be flying the jumpship, and when it’s inevitably damaged, he’s going to be the one fixing it while everyone else goes off for a fight scene. This is exactly backwards from how these characters have been used so far this season. And after Hawk’s close call and its surprising lack of payoff in “The Land Shall Burn”, I wonder if there was some stage in development here where the roles were reversed, and the intention was to send Hawk back to the Power Base for a final, deadly confrontation.

Whatever the case, Cap promises to continue that talk they were having later, again, utterly failing to convey any emotion. Pilot sets off for home on her bike while the others head for “Sector 9”. As they emerge, Hawk, having missed the memo that Star Wars references were three weeks ago, shouts, “It’s a trap!” as they’re attacked by this ugly quad-copter looking airship thing. When Cap realizes that the enemy ship has entered the gate, he finally shows a little emotion as he shouts for Hawk to get them back into the gate. Just like in “The Ferryman”, it’s messing with Cap’s stuff that really gets him riled up.

At the Power Base, Mentor declares the disk they got from Locke to contain nothing of note, giving Pilot a two-second warning of the trap they’re in, because Blastarr and his troops are inside the Power Base by now. She’s able to contact Captain Power, who tells her to “Hang procedure!” because you can’t say “Fuck” on broadcast TV, and blow the place up immediately. She sets the self-destruct, but first makes a backup of Mentor and grabs the spare Power Suits. Later, they will say this is because she was a rebellious sort who didn’t like to follow orders. I think it would have been better if they’d acknowledged that it was because she was a by-the-book, non-rebellious sort who always followed standard evacuation procedures, since, y’know, it would have actually reflected the character she’s been playing for 22 episodes.

Tim Dunigan does his best at ACTING!, first with his desperate pleas for Pilot to get out of the Power Base, then shouting at Hawk to get the Jumpship back in the air while he goes off to shoot some more troopers because we’re running out of time to get in any more fight scenes. Cap does mention the possibility of running back to base in the Power Jet, but it can’t be launched due to the damage the Jumpship has taken. It’s a bit annoying not to see the centerpiece of the toy line in the finale, but honestly, there’s just no room in the story for it anyway.

Just in case you missed the memo that they’re evil, scenes of Pilot packing up Mentor and turning on the self-destruct mechanism are intercut with the Troopers shooting up the other rooms in the Power Base. Careful checking of the past season worth of episodes should remind you, though, that the only other rooms we’ve ever seen are bedrooms. So we’re treated to clips of Biomechs shooting at beds. And, of course, symbolically blowing up Pilot’s swag table. Because Evil!

Lord Dread orders Blastarr to find the control room and stop the self-destruct, then channels a Batman Villain from the old Adam West series, because he reckons that Power’s final defeat is completely assured at this point even though Blastarr hasn’t actually found the control room yet, the only strategic information they’ve acquired is what color bedsheets Captain Power likes, and right now his Ground Guardian looks very strongly to be reenacting the role of Commander Torg from Star Trek III. And this means that he thinks that he doesn’t actually need to watch the rest of the episode, and it’s a perfectly good time to take a nap — the suspended animation they’d mentioned last time that he’d be going into as part of his “upgrade” to a fully robotic form. And that is how David Hemblen leaves the series, a few minutes ahead of the climax, in the middle of a fight scene, escorted out of the room by some troopers for his nap.

Cap and Tank finish off their own set of troopers just as Hawk finishes his makeshift repairs. Meanwhile, Blastarr shoots his way into the control room. If the Star Trek III parallels so far weren’t obvious enough, his incidental music even kind of sounds like the Klingon theme. He shoots the place up. As Mentor’s tube is destroyed, I swear to God, it kinda looks like he flips Blastarr off. He blows up the Christmas Tree, because symbolism. He even blows up the spiral staircase. It collapses onto a chair, which apparently is how you disable the self-destruct mechanism, because we cut to Pilot in the hangar bay hearing the cancellation announcement. I think if I were constructing a secret base from which to run a resistance against a world-conquering psychopath, I would not design my self-destruct mechanism such that it would automatically shut off if someone shot at the controls. Just saying.

She launches the hoverbike on auto-pilot, then runs off to have a pitched fight with Blastarr and the troopers in the hallway. She singlehandedly kills the sixteen troopers, but takes a direct hit to the back and two to the chest from Blastarr. Which is actually pretty good given how many times he shoots at her, because Blastarr can’t aim for crap. Her power suit fails, but she manages to drag herself back to the control room, where Cap contacts her from the Jumpship.

This next scene is hard to watch without getting a little choked up. Even more so when you know that J. Michael Straczynski drew on his own real-life experiences in writing it. In a message board post on GEnie back in 1993, he revealed that he’d drawn inspiration from an incident in his own life when he’d tried — and failed — to talk a friend out of committing suicide over the phone.

Remember, this is 1988. This sort of thing does not happen. I mean, maybe if an actor died then when they came back from a break in filming they’d do an episode where everyone was in mourning, like with Mr. Hooper or Coach. Or if an actor got in a big fight with the producers they’d just be absent and never spoken of again. If the producers were really mad, maybe you’d end on the characters getting a telegram announcing that Colonel Blake’s plane had been shot down. But you didn’t actually kill a regular character on-screen. Even in the sort of show that killed people, if your name was in the titles, you were contractually immune from monsters of the week. It is March. We’ve still got a month before a sentient oil-slick effortlessly bitch-slaps Tasha Yar to death on Star Trek the Next Generation (Seriously, fuck that scene). This scene traumatized me a little, as a nine-year-old. It stuck with me for years. Even though he’s continued to be willing to kill off main characters, Straczynski has never really topped it in my opinion.

;There are only five minutes left in this show, including the credits, but they are determined to squeeze some emotion out of Tim Dunigan. There’s desperation and choked-back tears in his voice as begs for Pilot to hold on. Blood is running from the corner of her mouth and her voice falters as she warns them off. With the auto-destruct disabled, she’s left with no choice but to trigger an overload of the power source, which, shockingly, is a thing they alluded to way back in “The Ferryman”. Cap fumbles his words as he tries to protest that there’s another way.

There are things you can’t say in kids’ shows. Sometimes, this can be hilarious, such as one of my favorite lines from Power Rangers: “He who lives by the sword meets his doom by the sword.” As a small child, I’d gotten this idea that “oblivion” was some kind of pocket dimension where Megatron would send captured Autobots. But other times, this can be unintentionally chilling. For example, in The Sarah Jane Adventures “Day of the Clown”, they’re squeamish about having Oddbob outright kill the children he’s abducted over hundreds of years, but don’t want the logistical problem of his defeat leaving London full of temporally-displaced children freed from his pocket dimension, so they assert that the kidnapped children simply cease to exist over time. Sweet dreams!

As a child, this part confused me a little. It wasn’t like a few minutes were going to make any difference at this point, and if Cap had another way to destroy the base, why didn’t Pilot just wait for him? That’s because as a child, I didn’t understand what she says next.

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future has not been one to hold strictly to kids’ show tradition, of course. They’ve identified people as dead before. But having Pilot outright say that she’s mortally wounded with any specificity was apparently a bridge too far. She says, “It’s too late. I’m all broken up inside.”

Cap is now visibly fighting back tears as he begs her not to do it. Pilot confesses her love for Jon as Blastarr shoots his way in. “Goodbye. Think of me sometimes. Goodbye.”

Blastarr advances on her, orders her to surrender. “Go to hell,” she says. Her hand touches a control which glows brightly. A mountain that doesn’t look much like Cheyenne Mountain explodes. We cut in close on Captain Power’s face as he screams a Big No.

I want to point out: there should be no doubt whatever that Pilot died here. It’s hard to explain just how clear this is. Because obviously, we don’t actually see her die: we just see the explosion from a distance. Blastarr is right there, and he has his arm up — it’s technically possible that he’s about to digitize her.

And yet, you can not watch that scene and walk away believing that’s what happened. Pilot was not digitized. She died in that explosion. Whether Blastarr himself survived is uncertain. If, three seasons later, there was a shocking reveal that she’s saved to disk in Blastarr’s blown-off digitizer buried under a mountain, I wouldn’t believe it. I’d probably go post on Compuserve or something about how the show had been RUINED FOREVER by cheaping out like that.

In a sense, Pilot’s death is also where Captain Power exits the narrative — the Captain Power we’ve been watching since way back in September. The cool, commanding stoic really vanishes from the story. A broken, weeping man buries his face in his hands.

Hawk, though shaken, implicitly takes command here, ordering Scout to rendezvous with the skybike before hugging his grieving friend. The final scene of the series places the four grieving survivors in a smoke-filled forest (It seems pointless to bring it up at this late date, but just about every single “outside” scene in this series is filled with smoke). Hawk discovers the rescued power suits and Mentor backup. His voice cracks as he announces it. Peter MacNeill’s delivery reminds me a lot of the scene in Star Trek II where Scotty announces the death of his nephew (I feel like I always understood the kid was his nephew, but sources tell me that the line where they explain this was actually cut from the theatrical release). Captain Power is being stoic again, but this time the character of it is different: it’s transparently forced. He stares vacantly at nothing as he reiterates that he’d told her to drop everything and book it. Tank promises to make the “Metal Monsters” pay. Cap orders the bike and its contents loaded onto the jumpship and walks away in order to fade into a montage of Cap-n-Pilot moments, which is mostly just clips from last week’s episode since, as I’ve been saying, Jessica Steen was criminally underused. I assume if they’d gotten the rights, they’d have played “Dust in the Wind” for this, that being the universal way of signifying that a character is well and truly dead.

Because there was no second season of Captain Power, we’re forced to confront this episode as a series finale, and it’s weaker on that count than it ought to be. We don’t have time for there to be any aftermath to Jennifer’s death or the destruction of the Power Base. Lord Dread drops out before the climax. Soaron is completely absent.

But, of course, if it’s still March, 1988, we don’t know that Captain Power is over yet, and viewed as a season finale, it fares much better. Indeed, let’s not forget that in this time and this place, the idea of the Season Finale Cliffhanger wasn’t the dominant mode of adventure show writing yet. Season Finale Cliffhangers were largely unknown in US TV until Dallas’s “Who Shot JR?” campaign in 1980, and wouldn’t become the default until Star Trek the Next Generation ended its 1989-1990 season with “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1”. The big “event” episodes for adventure series of the ’80s tended to be two-part season openers that would often be initially aired as a single feature-length block. This ending is not exactly a cliffhanger, but we do have a radical change to the status quo left hanging: Captain Power has lost Jennifer and the Power Base. Lord Dread is undergoing a metamorphosis and may have lost Blastarr. We’ve got avenues left to explore with Eden 2, two power suits in need of an owner, and the fate of Locke the Data Thief left up in the air.

There are weaknesses, of course. Scout is barely present and Tank is just there to say whichever words the writers think sound hilarious in a thick Danish accent. They completely forget about Cypher. Was the information about his capture a lie? It seems like they assume it was, but it’s just as likely that he was bait for the trap. Why couldn’t they try to contact him first to check if he was okay? To what extent am I just complaining because I wanted Lorne Cossette to show up again?

It seems even more obvious than usual to compare this episode to Star Trek the Next Generation. At the end of April, the episode “Skin of Evil” will kill off Tasha Yar. The situation behind the scenes isn’t all that different: Denise Crosby had originally been cast as Deanna Troi. For reasons no one has ever been able to adequately explain, Crosby and Sirtis’s roles were switched, leaving Crosby in a part that didn’t really play to her talents and that the writers didn’t really know what to do with. She quickly came to the conclusion that this part wasn’t going to go anywhere and bowed out.

So, in act 2 of the twenty-third episode of the first season, Tasha Yar tries to force her way past a gestalt entity created from the collective evil of an ancient alien culture, and it zaps her dead like it ain’t no thang. She dies like a Redshirt, struck dead effortlessly for no better reason than to demonstrate to the audience how the monster of the week works. It is cheap and sensationalist, its only redeeming value being in how utterly wrong it is — an affront to the laws of narrative logic that work to protect the lives of people with first names.

The war to be “Star Trek for the Eighties”, the war for the soul of science fiction on television was an utter rout. Star Trek the Next Generation defeated Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future so handily I doubt they even realized it was there at all. But on this one, small point, I think Star Trek needs to concede one very palpable touch. When it came time to kill off an under-utilized, miscast character who was wasting a perfectly good actress’s talents because writers had their heads way up their butts when it came to the concept of “Strong female warrior character”, Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future actually knew what the hell they were doing.

Tasha Yar died because there was nowhere for her character to go, and her death shouted that at the audience. When Jennifer Chase died, it wasn’t merely the death of a character who was never going to go anywhere. It’s the collapse of a future that could have been. A romance with the nominal hero that would never happen. A quest for redemption that would never end. Her death doesn’t just leave a hole to be filled by giving Worf a different color uniform: it completely rewrites the dynamic of the team. From the moment Pilot dies, Captain Power is no longer in control of his world. He only gives one more order in the series, and he’s barely paying attention when he does.

This was part of the plan going forward: Cap’s plot arc through season two was to make him increasingly unfit for command as he failed to cope with Jennifer’s death, leaving Hawk as the de facto leader, and you actually see that happening in the few minutes of screen-time left after the Power Base explodes, with Hawk immediately taking charge, while Cap walks around in a glaze.

This is not the strongest of series finales. It’s not the strongest of season finales. But it’s a far stronger and more coherent finale than we’d been led to expect out of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. It turns the show’s former weaknesses into strengths. The oddly subdued stakes of “New Order” — indeed, the overall lack of anything in this show ever costing our heroes anything — creates a sense of invulnerability about our heroes which proves disastrously false here. The unfortunate tendency for our heroes’ actions to have little bearing on the outcomes of individual episodes is here transformed into a very classic style of tragedy. It’s very Caves of Androzani (A Doctor Who serial whose plot is basically “Ten minutes in, the Doctor falls into a hole full of poison, and spends the entire rest of the story trying and failing to not die from it.”). Their favorite trick of “It turns out our hero isn’t hurt all that badly after all,” is turned on its head when Pilot indicates that she’s been mortally wounded.

This series has been strange and uneven. Almost every episode has a strong idea at its core, but it’s hamstrung by poor follow-through. Pacing is all over the place, plot developments are sidelined for action sequences, and the writers are rarely willing to place the characters in real peril, whether moral or mortal. The practical effects are lovely but the digital effects are… overly ambitious. The model work, though rare, is absolutely beautiful, but also very dated, having a visual texture that aims for Star Wars but feels a lot more like Space: 1999. Few of the actors are actually bad, but few of them are great, and only David Hemblen and Peter MacNeill are written to leverage the acting skills they actually possess, with Maurice Dean Wint reduced to one-liners and Sven Ole Thorsen, weighed down by a suit that wouldn’t even accommodate sitting, only gets as many lines as he does because the director really got a kick out of the way he says “Party”.

And there’s digitization. No one in the show, hero or villain, seems to be quite sure how horrific it’s meant to be. Dread himself offers it as the blessing of “immortality” to Stuart, and uses his preference for it over killing as moral justification… Then turns around and uses it as a form of torture, and punishes his own people with it. Meanwhile, for our heroes, it’s a straight-up rape analogy the first time we see it, but then they’re perfectly happy to allow or even manipulate their human enemies into being digitized as punishment.

But there’s something mad and beautiful about this show. There’s a basic bizarreness to the way that there are quite clearly three completely distinct iterations of the design process that all bleed through into the finished product of the franchise. There’s the Marvel Annual, which can’t seem to tell if it’s derived from the toy line or the show. There are strange ghosts of a much more Flash Gordon version of the concept. There’s the training videos, where they bring together the worlds of the merch and the show, and which by all rights ought to be utterly disposable and non-crapgiving. But then you see the World Trade Center in the background, or the absolute epic awesomeness of the “Tower of the Seer”. You’ve got the sheer, unmitigated balls of history’s most shameless rip-off of the Death Star Trench Run. And the creepy sexual undertones of Dread’s relationship with Overmind. Or the growing parallels between the Dread/Overmind dynamic contrasted with the Cap/Mentor one. There are tantalizing hints of a bigger world out there, with Eden 2, the Wardogs, the East Coast Resistance, but then the odd contradiction of Captain Power’s team being seeming ignorant about events outside North America.

There’s no one thing you can point at and call, “The reason Captain Power failed.” Most of the parts of this show are, if not great, at least okay. There are ideas and themes that J. Michael Straczynski would pick up on later in his career to great effect. This level of reliance on computer-generated effects won’t be seen again for years — in fact, the degree to which Captain Power integrates live action with computer animation is probably still unheard of in television (Yes, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica and later incarnations of Star Trek would all do that sort of thing, but not for a substantial chunk of every episode), but it’s hardly bad enough to sink the show. I think the biggest problem for the Soldiers of the Future is just down to it being 1988, and that TV doesn’t work that way yet. In the years to come, Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV would learn how to do things like series-long plot arcs (The X-Files), maintaining a lighthearted tone while tackling adult storylines (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), telling whole stories while maintaining a heavy action component (Hercules), conveying the horror of war on a human level (Battlestar Galactica), and transforming heroes fighting robots after the apocalypse (Power Rangers RPM).

Here in 1988, what we get instead is a strange Frankenstein’s monster of a show. As though Landmark Entertainment dug up some discarded corpse of a ’50s sci-fi serial and reanimated it by summoning the ghost of the more sophisticated television of the late ’90s. Maybe it walks funny, it’s got bolts in its neck and stitches on its forehead, and it’ll freak out if it sees fire. But, y’know, I don’t think it really deserves the torches and the pitchforks.

Next time, I’ll talk a little bit about the legacy of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, and about the plans they had for a second season. But before that, I’ve got one last diversion I want to go on…

To be concluded…

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Tim Dunigan (Captain Power) would go on to star in four Davy Crockett TV-movies for The Wonderful World of Disney during the 1988-1989 TV season. His acting career would slowly peter out afterward, whittling down to one-off guest roles. His most recent acting role was as police chief Crockett in the 2011 direct-to-video Buddy-Cop-Dog movie k-911.

Peter MacNeill (Hawk) remains a regular face in Canadian drama, appearing in Rin Tin Tin: K-9 Cop, Call Me Fitz, PSI Factor, and Queer as Folk. He also appeared in The Good Witch series of Hallmark Channel TV-movies, and is currently appearing in the series, which debuted at the end of February.

Sven-Ole Thorsen (Tank) continues to work as an actor and stunt man. His most notable role to date is as Tigris of Gaul in Gladiator. He is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most frequent collaborator

Maurice Dean-Wint (Scout) was a regular such shows as TekWar, PSI Factor, and Haven, and starred as RoboCable in Robocop: Prime Directives, Quentin in Cube, and Luther in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Jessica Steen (Pilot) went on to appear in Armageddon. She was a regular on Homefront, Earth 2, Murder One, Killer Instinct, Flashpoint, and Bullet in the Face. She had a recurring role on NCIS and originated the role of Dr. Elizabeth Weir on Stargate SG-1. She currently appears in Heartland and Canooks.

David Hemblen (Lord Dread/Lyman Taggart) has continued to work in film and television, particularly the works of Atom Egoyan, but is best known these days as the voice of Magneto in the X-Men animated series. He was offered the role in the live-action movie but had to turn it down. He also voiced Asmodeus in Redwall.

Tedd Dillion (Overmind) voiced Commandant Lassard in the animated Police Academy series, and Hammer in Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.

Deryck Hazel (Soaron) has no film credits after 1990. I found a reference in a book to a Toronto-area actor of that name who died in the early ’90s, but I can’t confirm it’s the same person.

John S. Davies (Blastarr) had a recurring role in Prison Break and was a frequent guest star on Walker Texas Ranger.

Bruce Gray (Mentor/Stuart Power) was an occasional guest on Dallas, Matlock and Murder, She Wrote. He played Admiral Chekote in Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and appeared as Vulcan patriarch Surak in Star Trek Enterprise. He also had recurring roles in Medium, Falling Skies, and How I Met Your Mother.

Don Francks (Lakki) spent much of the ’90s as a voice actor, with credits on the animated A.L.F., Police Academy, X-Men, The Legend of Zelda, Swamp Thing, and Cadilacs and Dinosaurs, as well as voicing a series of animated adaptations of the works of Richard Scarry. He also has regular live-action roles in La Femme Nikita and Hemlock Grove.

Lorne Cossette (Cypher) would go on to appear in The Twilight Zone, Street Legal, Two if By Sea, The Song Spinner and Darkman 3 before his death in 2001.

Larry DiTillio (Writer) went on to write for such shows as Babylon 5 and Beast Wars: Transformers.

J. Michael Straczynski (Writer) created Babylon 5. I mean, he did other stuff too, for which he is justly famous, but it’s unlikely anything he does with the rest of his life is going to top the epic levels of geek cred he got for creating Babylon 5.

Gary Goddard (Creator) went on to create Skeleton Warriors, but most of his work has been creating dark rides and 3D short films for amusement parks, including T2 3D: Battle Across Time and a segment for The Star Trek Experience. He’s currently working on Broadway 4D, a high-budget multimedia extravaganza that will feature Christina Aguilera as Eva Peron provided it ever actually happens (there is some doubt). And, of course, Phoenix Rising.

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• In case you’ve forgotten, you can get the complete series of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future on DVD from amazon.com
• The Super Saturday Short-Lived Showcase is also talking about Captain Power. You can see their treatment of this episode here.

It is 1989. Blah blah George H. W. Bush. Blah blah Taylor Swift, Anton Yelchin, Daniel Radcliffe and Lucy Hale. Blah blah Graham Chapman and Hirohito. Blah blah World Wide Web. Blah blah Salman Rushdie, blah Manuel Noriega. Blah blah Shining Times Station, blah “Blame it on the Rain” and “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. We’ve been here before and we all know the drill.

So you know how I made a couple of references to The Captain Power Annual, a 1989 publication that is probably the most distant point in the Captain Power Universe. Information on it is sketchy. I didn’t even know about it myself until a few months ago. In terms of obscurity, this is less-well-known than the handful of supermarket coloring books (Which no, I’m not going to suddenly show up with and talk about, because there is nothing at all to them). More than once, I’ve sort of intimated that I’d review it if I ever found a copy, which I implied to be an unlikely task so many decades later.

As it turns out, though, the trick to getting a copy of The Captain Power Annual was, technically speaking, to actually look for it. Seriously, once I decided to make an actual effort, it took me two hours to order a copy off of eBay. It would have taken less but I don’t speak Dutch.

The Captain Power Annual was made by Marvel UK, and falls into the tradition of British Comic Annuals. There’s not, so far as I know, a direct stateside equivalent of this sort of thing — the closest equivalent I can think of, at least in terms of content, would be fanzines. American comic makers sometimes do release special annual publications, but these are usually either reprint albums or just special longer editions, and the practice has been in decline since the ’80s in favor of trade paperbacks.

British Comic Book annuals are typically published around Christmas, and are hardcover books running in the neighborhood of 60-90 pages containing games, comics and short stories. In addition to the annuals associated with the classic staples of sequential art in the UK, annual publications are often associated with TV-tie-ins. Doctor Who, Star Trek, Blake’s 7, Thunderbirds and Space 1999 all had annuals associated with them in the UK — Doctor Who‘s resumed publication with the launch of the new series. Even The Tomorrow People and Sapphire and Steel got one annual each.

They were typically aimed at a younger audience, and because of the vagaries of how the TV shows were licensed, who was writing what, and when things had to be done, they often diverged wildly from the source material.  Furthermore, Great Britain already had its own tradition of comic art when American-style superhero comics became widely available, and so the art style in British sequential art is a lot more varied than what you see in US comics. For me, this gives everything a very retro feel, with the brighter colors and less stylized art that I personally associate more with newspaper comics than with comic books.

All that adds up to the fact that, despite coming out at almost exactly the same time, the Continuity Comics adaptation of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future looks basically nothing at all like the Annual.

I’ll be upfront. This isn’t great. It’s a slim sixty pages consisting of three comic strips, three prose stories, three “games” and back-of-the-toy-box-style radically non-show-consistent character profiles for Dread, Cap, Tank, Hawk, Soaron and Blastarr. It shows a cover price of £3.95, which would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $13, which is roughly half what I paid, and roughly twice what you’d pay for a modern copy of The Doctor Who Annual. It seems like kind of a lot of money to me, but it’s apparently not out of line with similar publications of the era.

The front and back cover show identical pictures of Captain Power and Lord Dread locked in battle, Cap blocking Dread’s force-lance while drawing back a kind of tecnho-billyclub thing. The inside cover, again front and back, have the same illustration expanded to a tableau with the supporting characters surrounding the pair, Cap’s allies to the left, Dread’s to the right. The artwork is just a bit reminiscent of Judge Dredd. Even though the characters themselves bear little resemblance to one another, the physical designs of the two are similar enough that it should really be surprising if Cap didn’t owe a little in his comic book form to He-Who-Am-The-Law. This tableau is the only place where the art style seems anywhere close to the Continuity Comics series, though their preference in this book is for gritted teeth over the open-mouthed “dongs” look. The art inside the book is simpler and brighter. Though they do have in common the fact that Dread looks a bit like a cross between Yen Sid and Yul Brenner. There’s a frame or two in the Continuity Comics book where he looks like that too, but not many.

This book is very strange in its approach to continuity. I would say that it seems like the writers (There are no credits in this book beyond the copyright, so I have no idea who to blame) hadn’t seen the show, and were working entirely from the toy boxes and possibly the series bible. But of the three prose stories, one is a straight-up adaptation of “Flame Street” and another is explicitly a sequel to “The Eden Road“.

But at the same time, the trivia puzzle on page 22 claims, as if the audience had a realistic chance of knowing this, that the Metal Wars started in 2020, while the introduction manages to get confused on the same page, giving the current date as both 2089 and the show-accurate 2147.

The introduction frames the annual as excerpts from the journal of Jennifer “Pilot” Chase, discovered hidden in the barracks by a nameless Dread Youth soldier. That’s a cool conceit, and you see similar things done these days with TV-tie-ins and mixed-media “scrapbook”-style books such as Dugald Steer’s ‘Ologies series. It would have been really cool if they’d done something more with it. The introduction ends with the disgusted soldier turning the book in to Lord Dread for destruction, hoping to get some kind of reward. Instead, he’s scheduled for digitization, as Dread considers the journal so dangerous as propaganda that no one who’s read it can be permitted to live.

The content proper begins with a comic titled “Judge”, in which Captain Power and his friends rescue an Overunit who’s been placed on trial for being a Captain Power supporter. Cap and company break in with the help of an under-cover sympathizer and rescue the prisoner. Cap agonizes for one panel over whether to take the operative with them too, but ultimately decides to leave him under cover. But once they’re gone, it turns out that Dread has found out about the double-agent, and it’s kind of implied that the trial was actually just a rouse to expose him. This story feels incomplete. There’s an interesting angle here, with Captain Power being conflicted about leaving a resistance member under cover in Volcania, and the fact that Cap’s decision turns out to be the wrong one should be a great source of conflict. But we never see Cap again after the agent is exposed, so we’re left with a downer ending for no clear reason. That’s especially jarring when you consider that the Annual, like the rest of the Captain Power merchandizing, is unambiguously targeted at children rather than adults, and the Annual seems to be targeting even younger audiences than the toys and the comic.

Lord Dread’s profile and picture include Falcor, the robotic bird who was originally planned to be Dread’s personal Laserbeak. It gives a greatly simplified version of his backstory: in this version, he simply became “embittered” when he was “ridiculed” for inventing BioDreads. Fair enough. If someone invents intelligent life, “ridicule” is not an appropriate response.

Our first prose story is “The Eden 2 Enigma”, which gives the rather bizarre dateline “47 23 mark 5”. Which, based on the show, would be the twenty-third month of 2147.  Lousy Smarch weather. The first part of the story is a straight-up rehash of “The Eden Road”, with Cap and company making their way into Darktown to gather intelligence on Dread’s latest secret plan, “Project Stormbringer.” There’s no mention of Pilot, which I suppose is technically appropriate as this should be a year after the series finale. It mirrors the Darktown part of “The Eden Road” up to the point where Scout impersonates a trooper, then Soaron shows up and knocks Cap into a hole, where he blacks out. Cap awakens in Eden 2, where he’s greeted by John, who for some reason looks like Barry Gibb now. He’s tempted to stay, but Vi shows up and asks after Hawk, which harshes his buzz by making him remember his responsibilities. Vi gives him a soporific flower and he passes out. We get our one attempt in this thing to render Tank’s accent, as the awakening Cap hears him say “Pawra Keppen Pawra,” which is eventually decoded as “Power on, Captain! Power on!” The others assure Cap that his experiences in Eden 2 were only a dream, as he was unconscious for only a few minutes after his fall. The coda, however, reveals that Cap still has the flower, which he chooses to destroy, lest his team lose sight of the fight against Dread in favor of searching for Eden 2. Much like “Judge”, this story is light and fluffy, but suddenly makes a wild tack at the end to go a bit heavy.

Next up is a profile on Captain Power himself (who’s described as the defender of Eden 2), and a trivia game that can’t make up his mind whether Cap’s Christian name (That is the actual term they use) is spelled “Johnathan” or “Johnathon” (I’m pretty sure I never saw this spelling in the wild until the 21st century, when suddenly it became ubiquitous. Resultingly, I have a hell of a time not wanting it to be pronounced to rhyme with “telethon”) and asserts that while the PowerJet can travel at Mach 19, Hawk’s top speed is the speed of light. The next comic is “Salvation”, which is, this seems kind of inexplicable now, a beat-for-beat retelling of “Gemini and Counting” with, for no reason I can sort out, the character of Pilot written out. “It starts with one,” the narrator tells us. A disease breaks out in the passages — which here, look suspiciously like a generic mid-20th century small town full of people in generic early mid-20th century casual wear — and the only place where they can find vaccine in quantity is Volcania. Cap sneaks in and roughs up some Dread Youth. One of them wakes up, so he ties her up, binds her wounds, and tells her her entire life is a lie. Just like Pilot, he’s able to recite a Dread Youth oath word-for-word, and decries Dread as the “lord of lies”, which has a nicely biblical tone to it. He retrieves the medicine he needs, bandages the nameless Dread Youth some more, and is held at gunpoint by her once the fighting breaks out in earnest. He offers her the same choices Pilot offered Erin: kill him, come with him, or let him go and just pretend this never happened. The one thing this version of the story adds is a brief coda: a single frame at the end of the nameless young woman, still bandaged from her injuries, at a Dread rally, unable to cheer along with the others. The comic ends with the narrator repeating the opening line: “Someone has to be first.”

The juxtaposition is nice, great even, but it’s a poor substitute for the emotional core of “Gemini and Counting”, the implicit congruence between Pilot and Erin. Absent that, what we’ve got here is essentially a very stereotypical story of The Mighty White Man who saves the soul of an impressionable girl by giving her a sermon. I suppose it’s just about possible that the Dread Youth in this story is actually meant to be Pilot (Though she’s a brunette… Except for that last panel. Maybe having your soul saved bleaches your hair?), and this is really Pilot’s origin story. That rubs me very wrong. Firstly, it makes Pilot’s origin story an inferior knock-off of Pilot’s big character focus episode. But far worse, given the romance arc between Cap and Pilot, it’s really nasty to insert an element of “Oh, he beat me up, restrained me, forced me to question my entire way of life, alienated me from the only family I have ever known, and now I love him.”

The frame of this being a journal Pilot left behind when she defected from Dread to join the resistance might account for why Pilot herself barely figures into the narrative. But that explanation only goes so far. After all, at least some of these stories are set during or after the time frame of the series. Besides, Scout is equally absent.

Which means that we’re in a somewhat similar situation in the Annual that we were with the series: the writers only seem to have time for a Power Trio, but they’re technically supposed to be writing a Five Man Band. It makes me think of the old Activision Ghostbusters videogame (“Conglaturation! You have completed a great game! And prooved the justice of our culture! Now go and rest our heroes!”), where Peter, Winston, Ray and Egon were replaced by three identical white guys (The versions for systems oriented toward showing a bunch of text explain that you’re not playing the Ghostbusters, but a random franchisee in a new city facing, surprisingly, exactly the same kind of invasion by a dark hell-god).

Scout gets the worst of it. He only appears in two illustrations in the entire book. And, while I will grant the possibility that this is just a printing error, he seems pretty unambiguously white in both of them. I know, it’s an easy mistake to make, what with Scout being one of the only two people of color in the entire Captain Power universe, but you had one job, TV-tie-in!

Next up is a simple race-style board game and a profile on Tank which doesn’t mention anything about him being genetically engineered. Then there’s an adaptation of “Flame Street”, which is divided into two parts with a break in the middle for Blastarr’s profile. Including one direct adaptation like this is a bit strange to begin with, and stranger still when you consider that “Salvation” is basically a complete rip-off, and even “The Eden 2 Enigma” is really only a slight modification of “The Eden Road”. Keep in mind, though, that this is still 1989. DVD won’t be invented for another six years. TV shows were only rarely released on home video formats, and concepts like a complete season boxset were a decade away. Captain Power was lucky in that it received a home video release at all, but even then, only ten episodes were available on VHS (Plus several “Movie” compilations, edited chimeras stitched together from eighty minutes of the final four episodes). And I haven’t turned up any evidence that such releases were ever made in PAL format for the UK market. So if you were a child in the UK in 1989 and you wanted to re-experience Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, this was pretty much it.The adaptation is completely straight; the only deviation from the televised show is that Cap is looking for information on the afforementioned “Project: Stormbringer” rather than New Order. What does diverge, quite a bit, are the illustrations which accompany the story. Zoneboy and Mindsinger both sport a lot less hair and are a lot more colorful. Far and away the most bizarre and impressive change, though, is to Stuart Power. I have no idea what the Expletive Deleted prompted this. Stuart Power here is depicted looking kind of like an elderly wizard, balding with long white hair and beard wearing Cap’s armor with a full-length cape. Far from looking like the unlikely bearded lovechild of Kenny Loggins and Rachel Maddow, here, he looks like the unlikely lovechild of Marvel’s Odin and Shazam, the wizard mentor of DC’s Captain Marvel. I have absolutely no idea what they were thinking here, but it’s amazing.

I imagine young people of today don’t have the same experience I did growing up. When I was a kid, most things with broad child appeal had a prose adaptation. A lot of them had several. You could often expect a picture-book for youngest readers (Often a read-a-long book with included 45. One of my fond childhood memories is collecting all four parts of the Gremlins read-a-long adaptation that came with the kids’ meal at Hardee’s over the course of four weeks), and a proper novelization, sometimes targeted at multiple reading levels (I have a copy of Spaceballs The Book with an elaborate aside about fruit allergies to make the “Nobody gives me the raspberry!” bit comprehensible to a child who wasn’t familiar with that euphemism. Also, the crosseyed gunner is renamed “Major Idiot”). There’s probably at least two generations of Doctor Who fans for whom their primary experience of about two thirds of the serials is based not on DVDs and animated reconstructions, but on the relentlessly workmanlike prose of Terrance “Wheezing, groaning” Dicks. Novelizations still exist, of course, often as a way for a fan-writer to produce his own “Director’s Cut” of the story, but they’re more polarized, limited to picture books for the very young, and adult novels in heavily merchandized franchises like Star Trek which already have established original fiction lines. The second board game in the Annual is an even simpler kind of race game, close to Parcheesi, Sorry! or Ludo. The profile of Soaron is brief, but refers to his dislike of the “other warlords“, implying that it was drawn from a draft that still included Tritor.

The last comic of the book is “Captain Power and the Glory”. To keep the sense of time and space thoroughly inexplicable, the caption at the start of the story gives the date as 2029. Cap and company (minus Scout for no clear reason. Pilot is there in a non-speaking role) arrive for a meeting with an up-and-coming resistance cell called “The Glory”. “The Glory” turns out to be Blastarr and some troopers in disguise, as part of a plan that makes no real sense: the Glory was to give the people hope, then crush it when they use this meeting as an ambush. A really terrible ambush, because they decloak their Phantom Striker to taunt our heroes first. The battle is a Stephen Ratliff-level curbstomp, with Cap and company easily defeating Dread’s forces. There’s a real lack of any sense that the writer got these characters at all, giving Blastarr a big complex villain speech (and having him fly a Phantom Striker), and giving Tank lines like “Yo, Johnathan, what’s with the worried expression?” rather than something like “Keptin, vhy so zahd at the pahrty?” In the end, Captain Power resolves to have his team pass themselves off as The Glory in order to keep the myth alive, even though this will mean a reduction in their own relative fame.

Honestly, this story doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, why they’d bother, how Dread’s plan was supposed to work, or anything really. Combined with the shoddy characterization and the bizarre date-line, I’m suspicious that they had no craps to give about this story. The art, at least during the fight scene, is okay. Bright, colorful and fairly clean. The choice of yellow land and pink sky is odd.

Hawk’s profile is followed by a story which focuses on his character, “Enemy Mine“. Which does not even slightly live up to the promise of its title. It’s not a terrible story, though. During a mission in Sector 12 related to Project: Stormbringer (They can’t get the date right to within a century from one story to the next, but they manage a plot arc around Project: Stormbringer?), Hawk takes a serious hit from Soaron and his suit is damaged, forcing him to make his way back to the rest of the team on foot through enemy territory as his suit’s power supply rapidly dwindles. It’s straightforward and action-packed, with a complex dilemma for Hawk, as he struggles with the decision whether to break radio silence, jeopardizing the rest of the mission. The climax comes when Hawk, his power reserves almost depleted, finally uses his radio when he sees Lord Dread sneaking up on the rendezvous site. He’s met with laughter from Cap, who reveals that “Dread” is actually Scout in disguise. The mission had been scrubbed since Cap’s own suit developed a malfunction, and the others (Scout and Tank; Pilot is not mentioned) met too much resistance and nobly ran away, leaving Hawk to the realization that it was only “his own pride and dignity” that had stopped him calling for help sooner (The others didn’t dare contact him since they had no way of knowing if the sound of his radio would give him away).  Like several of the other stories, it ends on a much more complex moral note than you’d really expect.

This book is weird. In fact, this book is so weird that it’s like a tiny little microcosm of the whole series. Much like the show as a whole, there’s this weird tension between the very child-oriented simplicity of the stories, the bright, colorful artwork, and the strangely maudlin endings. The confusion about the date, I’ve already mentioned. It’s rare for there to be any characterization to speak of, but when there is, it’s all over the place.  I didn’t bring it up in context, but there’s also a sense I get that the writers didn’t know how the Power Suits work: they’re handled properly in “Judge”, “The Eden 2 Enigma”, and “Captain Power and the Glory”, but in “Salvation”, Cap is already in his armor when he “Powers on”, and it seems like the implication is that rather than summoning the armor out of hammerspace, the incantation just energizes some kind of super-mode. In “Enemy Mine”, Hawk’s suit fails repeatedly, but rather than dispersing, it becomes rigid, immobilizing him. This seems like a massive design flaw. For the most part, it feels like this was based purely on the bible and the toy line without any reference from the show itself, but then we’ve got the show-accurate dates (and the clearly show-derived but obviously wrong “47-23” date), wholesale adaptations and direct sequels.

The art is strange. No one looks even close to right, though none get so badly handled as the Last Airbendering of Scout. Pilot and Scout appear only rarely — Scout is never a proper character, just making cameos in “The Eden 2 Enigma”, and “Enemy Mine” (He appears in the illustrations to “Flame Street” but isn’t mentioned). Pilot has a line of dialogue in “Flame Street” and “Captain Power and the Glory” is mentioned in “Enemy Mine” and has a wordless cameo in the opening illustration and “Judge”. I don’t know which one got more shafted here. Scout is spared the indignity of having his big story rewritten to omit him, but on the other hand, he gets turned white for his two appearances, and — I just went back to check this because I found it so unbelievable — he’s not even in the opening tableau.

The utter erasure of the black character and the female character are big-time serious problems with this book. But they’re also symbolic of the problem Captain Power had with its race and gender dynamics in all of its incarnations. For that matter, it’s symbolic of the race and gender dynamics of comic books in general from this time period (and two steps forward and/or backward since then), and I’m a more than a little ashamed to realize that had I been reading this back in 1989, I totally would not have even noticed that this was a problem (I’d like to think I’d have noticed Scout being white, but I bet I’d have thought it was a straightforward printing error, like the time Optimus Prime inexplicably turned albino for one panel).

But there is one thread of this paradoxical publication that does manage to properly fascinate me. As I said, the art style feels very retro, very Silver Age. Bright colors, simple artwork. More than that, I’m very specifically reminded of the old 1960s-era Doctor Who comics, back when he was called “Dr. Who” and traveled with John and Gillian, and had a Magic Box and saved Santa. Add to that the odd design choices like how Dread’s human forces all dress like communists at a winery (Except for the high-ranking ones, who have Judge Dread epaulets and samurai helmets. And it seems to be implied that the biomech troopers are actually humans in suits), or the way that the passages and Volcania both look like generic midwestern towns of the fifties, and the early 21st century dates occasionally used, and it adds up to that same feeling I mentioned in reference to the training video cover. This feels like the Annual for the hypothetical 1950s Captain Power that everything Captain Power except the TV show itself screams out for.

Does the Captain Power Annual do it for me? Is it a worthy expansion to the world of this weird little post-apocalyptic ’80s children’s show that I so love from my youth?

The short answer is no. This adds very little to the experience of Captain Power. I sought it out because I’m an obsessive completest who can afford to blow twenty-five bucks every couple of years in pursuit of his lost youth. But I didn’t need this.

But how would Me-Age-Ten have felt about this? I don’t know. I haven’t been that kid in a quarter of a century. I can sort of abstractly say that this is the sort of kid-friendly yet still just slightly dark thing that I think young-me would have thought was a lot of fun. And of course, the me of 1989 would have had his disappointment in a third of the stories being recycled material modulated by the fact that in 1989, I didn’t have the option of watching “Flame Street” or “Gemini and Counting”. That me would very likely just be happy to have, even if it isn’t very good, just a little bit more Captain Power to enjoy.

So ultimately, I guess Me-Age-Ten and Me-Age-36 aren’t so different after all.

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The Captain Power Annual is occasionally available from amazon.co.uk for a fair bit cheaper than what I paid.

Two more to go…

It is March 20, 1988. In Eritrea, the Battle of Afabet is won by the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. Yesterday, two British corporals were abducted and shot dead by the IRA. Mike Tyson beats Tony Tubbs by knockout for the heavyweight boxing title. Tubbs retains both ears. M. Butterfly opens on Broadway, or if you’re a masochist, you can go see Police Academy 5 at the movies. Slow news day. Slow week at the movies. Slow week on TV. The Wonderful World of Disney is in repeats. Last week’s Supercarrier pilot is repeated. Tomorrow’s MacGyver is a repeat. The ABC Sunday movie is Octopussy while NBC airs a new TV adaptation of Inherit the Wind with Jason Robards and Kirk Douglas as Drummond and Brady. It’s the third movie adaptation of a 1955 play based kind of loosely on the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, with everyone’s names really obviously changed (Such as HL Mencken becoming “EK Hornbeck”) to avoid getting sued. The play would be adapted again in 1999 with Jack Lemmon as Drummond and George C. Scott as Brady (Scott had previously played Drummond on Broadway). I remember watching the 1988 movie, but not really understanding it. Mostly I remember being confused as my dad tried to explain that these two people I’d never heard of (Robards and Douglas) were playing two people I’d never heard of (Drummond and Brady) who were really supposed to be two other people I’d never heard of (Darrow and Bryan).

This week’s Star Trek the Next Generation is “A Matter of Honor”, where Riker does a slightly goofy “officer exchange” with a Klingon ship, then has to scheme to honorably seize control of the ship to keep it from blowing up the Enterprise when they suspect it of infecting them with ship-eating bacteria. Vaka Rangi will not give you a tremendous insight into what this episode is about, but it will give you a great little bit of nostalgia about the 3D Viewmaster, so you should totally read that (Though he finds it noteworthy in this context to discover that the Enterprise-D model is blue and not gray. Maybe it’s just because I’m red-green deficient, but that was the very first thing I noticed about the Enterprise-D in the show and never thought anyone would think the ship was supposed to be gray (Minor expanded-universe evidence in my favor: the novel Dark Mirror makes a point of saying that the mirror universe Enterprise is gray, and this makes it look subtly more threatening than the proper Enterprise)).

For a week when nothing happened, I have stretched out the lead-in for this article a bit because I’m reluctant to dive in here. I mean, this is it, right? The end? This one and the next one and then I’m completely tapped out of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Unless I can track down a copy of that 1989 Annual.

After the previous two-parter was such a disappointment, I’m more than a little anxious going into this. When we open, Captain Power and the gang are dancing. That’s not a euphemism or a metaphor either: they’re actually having a little party to celebrate their victory in the previous episode. According to the Captain’s Log, about a month has passed since the previous episode, so this must have been one hell of a party. The others intimidate Cap into dancing with Pilot, and he is polite enough to take his gunbelt off first, which looks oddly suggestive.

Back at Volcania, Dread is still fuming over his recent defeat, and orders Soaron and Blastarr (Who are, of course, perfectly fine despite having been blown to bits last week) to engage in a scorched earth policy against Cap’s allies and resources. It’s a weird little scene. Dread himself oozes menace like never before: “I once thought [Cap] could be saved, but no longer. There is no place in our perfect world for him or for any of his kind. We must find him, and we must hurt him. Badly. Poison his resources, cripple his supply lines, destroy his outposts, strip him of everything he holds dear. Alive or dead, whatever it takes, we must push him from the face of this planet.” But as he pontificates, we keep cutting back and forth to Soaron and Blastarr, who are, like, idling. Blastarr taps his fingers together. Soaron futzes with his digitizer. It’s weirdly casual, and aside from the mood whiplash, it’s also visually pleasing. It’s a rare moment where it would have been perfectly reasonable, given the seriousness of the scene, to have them just stand stock still, but instead, they fidget. I think it really shows a level of comfort with the CGI that’s been growing across the season.

Unfortunately, what happens next is that we get a long montage of Dread Troopers shooting at things that are off-screen which is so obviously recycled footage from earlier episodes that they even include the digitization of General Briggs from “The Abyss“. Great. Cheap stock footage montages. Just what I wanted from my season finale. At the Power Base, Captain Power does another Captain’s Log telling us basically what we’ve just seen, but speculating that Dread is angry and thus liable to make a mistake. Then he nods off in his chair, and Pilot comes in and kind of stalkerishly watches him sleep. Yay!

The next fight scene is new footage, thankfully. At least, for the most part (There’s some old footage of Tank). They make one more stab at witty banter, with Hawk telling Cap not to take the attacks personally, then going on a murder rampage with a bazooka because a clicker scratched his helmet. Scout actually does something useful with his camouflage for once, impersonating a mech so he can sneak up behind the other troopers and stick grenades to their backs, then commandeer a tank, which he uses to disable Blastarr. Remarkably, they don’t recycle the usual “Blastarr drops to his knees” sequence: he’s actually thrown off his feet.

Tank and Scout declare Blastarr suitably dealt with for the moment, so Cap and company bugger off. But at this point, remarkably, the episode actually starts to get good. Dread orders Blastarr back to his feet, actually seeming to will the damaged BioDread to rise. They cut back and forth between Blastarr’s twitching fist and Dread’s own, which shakes as he orders, “By my will and by my blood. You. Will. Move. Do not stop. Keep moving. I command you to keep moving.” Blastarr protests, “There is great pain,” and, “System disruption,” but rises to his feet just in time to justify those weird bits in the last several episodes where they made a big deal out of calling attention to the uncanny ability of Captain Power to travel the country allegedly faster than should be possible. Because when Blastarr manages, unsteadily, to rise, he looks up in time to see the Jumpship vanish into the transit gate. Lord Dread realizes that he can exploit this to locate the Power Base and finish Captain Power once and for all.

At the Power Base, since it’s 47-12.24, the gang surprises Cap by making a Christmas tree out of broken mech parts. Sensing that they are running out of time for this character to make an impression on us, they finally give Scout a major speech. He attempts to tug at the heartstrings by telling the story of his own childhood attempt to make a Christmas tree, of his mother’s reaction, and of her capture by Dread’s forces a few days later. It reminds me of nothing so much as the speech Phoebe Cates gives about her father in Gremlins, but still, major props for at least trying. The camera keeps cutting around to reaction shots from the others, but they all just do the usual stoic thing. Scout concludes that he’d since decided that Christmas Trees were cursed, and that terrible fates awaited anyone who tried to celebrate. Which totally isn’t foreshadowing, right?

Lord Dread more or less flat-out accuses Lakki of spying on him when Lakki interrupts his work to remind him of the importance of getting a good night’s sleep. Then Dread flat-out murders the little weasel, ordering him to go fetch a tool for him which is just on the far side of an unmarked live wire. The show momentarily develops the sense of humor I’ve been wishing it had, because as troopers carry Lakki away, he revives long enough to mutter, “Wait, I’m not quite dead yet.” Dread gives Soaron a scanner, and orders him to go chase Power the next time he goes through a transit gate, then goes to chat with Overmind, who’s been prepping for Dread to enter suspended animation so he can have the rest of his meat body surgically removed.

But before he goes through with that, Dread wants to finish up things with Power, so he asks for “The Mind-Link”. “For the first time since I took control of all the world’s Biomechs and began the Metal Wars, I require direct access to all of our troopers everywhere on this planet.” Though last week, Captain Power was apparently utterly uninvolved in operations outside North America, so this strikes me as overkill. He asks Overmind to, swear to God, “Let me feel the power. Touch me with the might of the machine.” I’ve used up all the jokes I can think of about the weirdly sexual overtones of Dread’s relationship with Overmind, but at this point, it’s so blatant that I think just saying it out loud is funny enough. Once he’s been adequately touched by the might of the machine, he orders all troopers everywhere to drop what they’re doing and keep a lookout for Captain Power. This is accompanied by another stock footage montage of troopers wandering around factories, quarries, and Haven.

This would be a lot more impressive except that in every other episode, it was pretty clear that Dread was already receiving instant notifications every time Cap showed up anywhere, so again, this seems a little excessive. But hey, it’s not this episode’s fault. When Cap finally does turn up, Soaron flies off to intercept, cloaking to avoid detection.

Wait, what? When did Soaron get a cloaking device? Isn’t that the sort of thing you ought to mention before introducing it? Well anyway, cloaked, he’s able to shoot the Jumpship undetected. It escapes serious damage, deliberately I assume, but is forced to retreat through the transit gate. The pursuing Soaron bounces off, but his scanner picks up the access code for the system. Lord Dread declares that Power is already defeated, and just doesn’t know it yet…

This episode is fantastic. Yes, there’s some really bad use of stock footage, and yes, too much screen-time is wasted with montages, and yes, Scout’s big speech doesn’t really work, and yes, the build-up about the transit gates was transparent and forced. But there’s a degree of actually trying here that you just don’t see elsewhere in this series. Dread is actually menacing here, much moreso than he ever has been, and David Hemblen somehow manages to do things like say, “Touch me with the power of the machine,” with a straight face and actually sell it. Not to mention the fact that we’re only halfway through this two-parter, and yet we’ve already had a complete story with a beginning, middle and end, but which is all the same a proper first part of a two-part story.

I wish they’d all been like this.

 

• In case you’ve forgotten, you can get the complete series of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future on DVD from amazon.com
• The Super Saturday Short-Lived Showcase is also talking about Captain Power. You can see their treatment of this episode here.