A question for my Gen Z readers

So, a "baddie" is an attractive confident woman. If this woman is an assassin, does that make her more or a baddie or less of one?

Space, the whitest frontier (Review: 'Star Trek' Pilot: "The Cage")

Star Trek has turned 60. "The Man Trap" first aired in Canada on 6 September 1966 and in the US two days later. To mark the occasion, albeit a day late as I was watching Strange New Worlds, I watched the first pilot of the show made in 1964, called "The Cage". A good chunk of the material here was later used in the two-parter "The Menagerie", but this is the first time I've seen it in its original form.

My honest opinion? It's like I'm watching something from the 1950s, not the 1960s. The whole look of the show - big TV screens, paper reports, the uniforms etc. looks less refined and futuristic than the series itself would. The characters on-screen are entirely white with one exception, a transporter assistant with no lines. I'm reminded of White Christmas of all things. Even the much-parodied Orion slave girl scene has a rather white-looking Middle East.

Here, Jeffrey Hunter plays Christopher Pike, the role Anson Mount portrays in Strange New Worlds - and I don't like him. He's a male chauvinist with an excessively abrasive personality and a willingness to threaten violence that isn't countered by the charm that William Shatner has as Kirk... or indeed Mount has as Pike.

Majel Barrett as Number One - we don't get a fuller name for her here - is too cold and withdrawn. Would she sing karaoke in Klingon? I think not, even if she does fantasise about Pike. Not my cup of tea.

The best character of the lot - the only one kept to the main series - is Spock... and his eyebrows are pretty extreme here, not helped by the shorter haircut.

The plot is arguably the best thing about it, although I did think of Moopsy, but the resolution is if anything too pessimistic and frankly ableist. We also get an attempt at end of episode comedy that doesn't work at all, because all the characters are too frosty.

Conclusion

There's some interesting ideas here, but I am glad NBC asked for a second pilot and a retooling of the show. Shame we lost Number One, but we got so many better characters as a result.

5/10

'Star Trek' Table Read for Writers Guild Foundation

 

I watched this on Saturday in full - it covers not only "The Man Trap", the first broadcast episode of the show, but we also get "Mudd's Passion" from TAS. The special guests are some pretty big names in the SFF business as well.

Fiona Dourif was definitely the campest performer there - having seen clips of her in the Child's Play franchise, the woman definitely knows how to consume scenery. A great deal of fun all round.

You can buy it here for the next week or so for just $20 - it goes to a good cause too.

Tim Curry 1946-2026

Another actor who was known to multiple generations for different things - and to all of them for just how much scenery he chewed while doing it. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a classic that will live for generations to come and for me, his turn in The Wild Thornberrys was also great. 

(I don't recall if I saw him on stage in Spamalot. I don't think I did.)

He'd rather reduced his presence in recent years due to health problems, it being a pity we didn't have more of his considerable talent.

What we had though is going to be long remembered.

Rest in peace, legend.

Andy Burnham's opener

It's been just over a week since Andy Burnham became our latest Prime Minister.

I must admit that I wasn't exactly keen on Burnham coming back, especially when an MP resigned his seat solely so Burnham could return to Parliament, especially as he was still serving out his term as Greater Manchester's mayor. But he's here now and I wish him the best. We've going to need him to succeed to stop Reform.

Thoughts so far is that he seems to something of a return to the pre-New Labour Prime Ministers. He feels that the UK made a major wrong-turn with the Thatcher era and the neoliberal period that followed it. Of course, he was part of the Brown government, but that's politics.

We have a real problem with social care - it needs to be sorted out properly before it collapses due to insufficient taxpayers to fund the system. Immigration does help in that, but we can't keep increasing our population ad infinitum; we already import a lot of our food as is.

Also, there is a need to get the NEETS to stop being NEETS. Many of them can work with the right incentives and support. I myself hold down a full-time job despite being on the autistic spectrum. If nothing else, people sitting around at home are ripe to be radicalised, especially with social media as it has been for a while.

Halting the prisoner release scheme is the right move. It needs a major review and we're probably going to have to build more prisons. We might even have to go back to the "hulk" principle by chartering some ships and turning them into floating prison for a while. There is a feeling that crime is out of control; this may not be true, but perception is often more important than reality.

Foreign policy seems to be largely the same. A decisive break with Trump is a risky move; a rupture might not be easily fixed even after his departure. Until we can defend Europe from the Russians without American assistance, we're kind of stuck.

Anyway, it's early days - we've got the summer ahead of us, Farage's stunt in Clacton and then the party conference season.

One thing that has to be a priority - going carbon negative. We need to get the excess carbon out of our atmosphere as the impacts are already.

This is probably not entirely coherent. But I'll leave it as is.

Review plans

I've decided not to continue the episode by episode reviews of Fringe, mainly due to lack of time. A pity, because the first episode of Season 2 features no less a figure than the Duchess of Sussex herself, that is Meghan Markle, as an FBI agent.

What I will do instead is take a similar approach that I am taking with Buffy, of reviewing one episode a season and I've already selected the one I'm going for based on the description I found...

Once the current Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season is done, I intend to finish off The Animated Series and move onto The Next Generation. The plan is to watch the three 24th-century Trek shows (The  Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager) in US broadcast order, to fully appreciate any links between them. I am also intending to watch and review "The Cage" for the 60th anniversary itself.

I've forgotten to do a post on Andy Burnham - I'll try to do that this week.

Analogue Leverage (Review: 'Mission: Impossible' 2.13, "The Astrologer")

Good morning, Mr. Smith. The man you are looking at is Bruce Geller. Geller was the creator of the Mission: Impossible TV series that eventually spawned an eight-movie franchise. He doesn't have any plans as, unfortunately, he died in a plane crash in 1978.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to review an episode from the second season of the original television show. As always, should you or any of your blogging force be caught or killed, Hayley Atwell will disavow any knowledge of your actions.

Please destroy this message in the usual manner. Good luck, Stephen.

The original Mission: Impossible is available on Amazon Video, which is rather like a video store in a way with an eclectic collision of movies and shows from as far back as the 1930s. There's the good, the bad and the just-plain-odd; some free with a Prime membership, some available for a relatively small fee.

The show, produced originally by Desilu until its acquisition by Paramount, ran on CBS from 1966 to 1973 and revolved around the Impossible Missions Force, an American covert operations unit that was tasked each week with a dangerous mission to bring down a hostile force planning to do something against the interests of the free world. Those forces could be a leader trying to rig an election, a secret police chief trying to bring down his leader, or a criminal syndicate that's fixing horse races. Sometimes these missions would take place in the USA, other times in (mostly fictional) foreign countries.

The IMF, not to be confused with the International Monetary Fund, would use gadgetry, disguises and general psychological manipulation to ensure the baddies were dealt with - frequently permanently. Shooting the villains was not the done thing - oh, no. No, the trick was to get the villain shot by another villain, often by framing the former as a traitor or genuinely exposing him as such. The team are highly competent at their jobs and have little personal life seen outside their work.

There's a formula to all this that was fairly rigidly followed:

• The title sequence showing flash frames of the action coming up in the episode - something copied in the film series.
• The tape scene: Jim Phelps (from Season 2 onwards) listens to a tape in an isolated location, the tape then self-destructing or having to be thrown in a fire, acid bath etc.
• The dossier scene: Jim picks his personnel via selecting a series of large photographs of them from a black folder. The cast largely stays the same between episodes, although occasionally an outsider would be brought in.
• The briefing scene: The personnel discuss some of the aspects of the mission and show off a gadget that they're going to use, generally while some of them smoke cigarettes.
• Then onto the mission itself. Gadgets, safecracking under tension, holding your cover when things go sideways... and more smoking of cigarettes. There is a lot of smoking in this show, including while assembling the gadgets.
• The mission concluding and the team driving off just as things go distinctly south for their target.

In "The Astrologer", first broadcast 3 December 1967, the IMF are tasked with rescuing a revolutionary from the Eastern European country of Vesca before he can be returned there by secret police chief Stahl and also retrieving a piece of microfilm containing the names of people who supporting him.

(For the Gen Z readers here, a microfilm is basically like taking a photograph of a document with a camera phone, but with an actual film camera, then using the film itself as the storage medium. You can conceal the film in lots of places, but make sure you don't put the trousers in the wash with the film still in it.)

To do this, they make their way to Orly Airport in Paris, where Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain) pretends to be a famous French astrologer, getting close to the Deputy Chancellor of Vesca, who "predicts" the death of the Chancellor... which then they then save... by having an IMF agent pretend to be the Chancellor.

The agent in question is Rollin Hand (Martin Landau, then married to Bain[1]) a master of disguise. We've not yet gotten to the magical face masks associated with the film franchise.... disguise here involves time-consuming facial prosthetics to make Rollin look like the man he's impersonating. But not here... Landau just operates on the end of a telephone, with effects literally added with a tape player by Barney Collier (Greg Morris). Barney is a black tech millionaire and from this white man's possibly incorrect POV, an even better case of representation than Uhura from Star Trek, literally made on the same studio lot. However, he does end up frequently stuck in the van because in most countries, a black man would stick out; if he has to do an in-field role, it usually involves a questionable accent, of which there are a few.

Fans of Leverage can see him as a 1960s Hardison... and the whole thing can come across as an analogue version of the show. We've got computers with lights indicating status instead of VDUs, a surprisingly lax attitude to airport security, a full-sized telephone literally carried to a table in a VIP lounge, ashtrays on planes with the "no smoking" light being off when in the air[2] and astrology via use of a reference almanac accompanied with a "manual computer" i.e. two bits of card/plastic attached by a pin[3].

You also got a lot of "assembling" sequences, where someone drills holes, solders etc. accompanied by the late Lalo Schriffin's distinctive score, one of the most memorable bits of the whole franchise. This can get rather tedious.

The action then takes us to a Vescian government plane, which looks like a Lockheed DC-4, but feel free to correct me on that. This basically involves Carter distracting the two officials with horoscopes so Rollin and Barney, snuck on via a steamer trunk, can swap the revolutionary for a dummy (who is then removed from the equation in a clever way) and the microfilm for a substitute containing the names of the Deputy Chancellor and some other officials who are actually loyal to the junta. The implication is that Stahl will end up getting himself killed when he tries to arrest all these people, but we don't see it, unlike in other episodes. The whole thing is fairly pedestrian in a way; and we don't even see any bumpiness during take-off or landing, when Rollin and Barney are free to move around.

Then the episode ends with Jim Phelps and team muscle Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus, a genuinely big chap who was also a bodybuilder) picking up Carter in the guise of two military officers[4], with the revolutionary rescued and the real microfilm safely destroyed.

Then the credits roll. Mission completed, although they still need to leave the country, something occurring off-screen. It's actually a fairly easy one too; none of the team is in any serious peril during this.

Conclusion

Like the team itself, this is competent, but unspectacular.

7/10

[1]Juliet Landau was a product of this union; best known for playing Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

[2]We should also mention "Gellerese", the Eastern-European style language designed to be understandable to an audience who can't read Cyrillic or most Slavic languages. One example here being "Belten Atachin", which should be self-explanatory.

[3]I have an astronomical example from the 1990s used for working out what stars are visible in the sky and versions are still used in aviation as a backup.

[4]Soviet-style uniforms feature a lot in this show.