Starhunter

[JunkMonkey]

13: The Most Wanted Man

A bunch of heavies and a Suit clear the regular patrons out of a bar - a bar that looks suspiciously like the same as the bar in last week's shoot-out even though it clearly isn't. This one is on a Mars orbital station and the other one was.... erm... somewhere else. (Not the fact that it looks like last week's set is a problem. Maybe cheap bars come as standard, off-the-shelf fitted units in this universe. There's probably an Ikea catalogue of them.) The person the bad guys are to meet arrives - and you just KNOW they are the bad guys from the off. He arrives in blurry motion effect which is supposed to make him look like he moving super-fast. (It's what the characters in the Myst games would look like in Zip Mode if you could see them.)
"I want to talk to Darius. You are not Darius!" he says.
"We need to know you have the Maguffin!" says the Suit.
"I am the Maguffin!" (Maguffins are obviously NOT standard and off the shelf - and I spelled 'Maguffin' differently last episode so that proves it!)
The suit has heard all he needs to know and signals his heavies. The Maguffin makes the show's editors do a jump cut and they are all suddenly lying on the floor, unconscious. He leaves. "Hi Ho! Zip Mode, away!"

Meanwhile, in orbit around Mars, the Tulip is beset by problems. Most of them being that their boss on Earth has jumped the gun and claimed the bounty reward for Zip Mode guy (the Solar System's most wanted man) and told everyone that the crew of the Tulip have him held captive. Various factions want him / money / to blow s**t up for the fun of it - take your pick. Michael Paré get to do a lot of acting to a mid-air greenscreen where lots of separately recorded dialogue will be added later. The Tulip is surrounded in the way spaceships in the flat two-dimensional way that Star Trek ships meet. Hemmed in by three ships at 120 degrees from each other on the same plane the Tulip is going nowhere. 'Up' and 'Down' are obviously not in the Ikea catalogue. Taking advantage of a bit of jostling for position between these guys Percy jumps starts the main engines and they escape following the Ion trail of another ship that blasted off from Mars during the stand off and which, for some reason the scriptwriters didn't bother telling us, they know is piloted by The Most Wanted Zip Mode Man.

Off they zoom to the asteroid belt pursued, in turn, by all the 'We want our money' / 'Most Wanted Man' / 'Blow s**t up' guys. Dante blows up the asteroid the Maguffin is hiding behind and they take his ship on board. MaGuffin is not as knocked out by the concussion as they thought he would be and does the hiding-in-the-roof-just-out-of-camera-shot thing and gets past Luc and Dante when they go onboard - which is pretty sloppy of them because Luc and Dante used the hiding-in-the-roof-just-out-of-camera-shot thing a few episodes to sneak in somewhere. Anyway, once onboard the Tulip, Ex Special Ops Most Wanted Maguffin Guy uses his Zip Flash Edit powers to (all together now!) take over the ship.

The bad guys from scene one are in one of the following ships. Luc has been talking to them because they are working for The Orchard. Darius who MaGuffin guy wanted to talk to in scene one is apparently Luc's dad. Luc takes him to the Orchard ship not because Darius is on it but because he takes her word that going is the only way he will get to see Darius. (WHY he needs to see Darius so much is more than a little vague.) On the way Maguffin info-dumps a whole screed of backstory about being involved in a secret project (Everyone take a drink!) an archaeological dig on Earth which has discovered proof of alien intervention millions of years ago. One of the things they found (which we don't get to see - even in flashback) is a dingus which, one night, activated his divinity cluster and gave him the Zip Flash abilities.

Luc returns to the Tulip alone. Dante is Pissed off with Luc. On the Orchard ship Maguffin decides he wants to explode before the end credits. So he does. (WHY? - who knows?) Even though Luc has wangled double the bounty for the exploding Maguffin (I hope she got cash up front). Dante is REALLY pissed off with her - final line of the show: " I want you off my ship" The nearest thing to a cliffhanger we've had in 13 episodes.

Other stuff. No Norks. One Scottish guy but not the one from episode one. No 'gay' jokes which was nice. The actress playing teen-genius Percy is steadily ramping up the "look at me I'm quirky" ticks.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Epsod 14 - Half Dense Players

Darius is back! In an all-white space station interior that is probably still wet from being repainted from being an all-grey space station interior in a previous episode, he is greeted by two scientist types who are impressed that he came so fast. "Only five weeks from the Moon to Jupiter space." He want to see 'The Body - NOW!' Cut To: to the Red Spot on Jupiter. Cut To: a woman doing mad action artist painting like they only do in the movies - mad swirly gestures. I've met a lot of painters in my time. Some of them genuinely certifiable. Not one of them has has painted like that. Cut To: Darius again - he's coming back from having seen 'The Body' and is babbling "This incident suggests a catastrophic intersection of multidimensional space and time - the subject matter forced the intersection by accident the multi mumble hyperdimentionumble hyper-field wimmble woop." Or something. The actor is either improvising or lost his lines. Apparently there was other DNA involved belonging to someone who is apparently very significant in this universe. NONE of which we pay the slightest bit of attention to because we're all trying to work out why Darius is wearing sunglasses in a spaceship.

Is a good question and it was seriously testing my ability to rationalise Hollywood logic till I remembered the weirdly dis-concerting mad staring eyes thing the actor had going on in the first episode.

I had real trouble listening to what he was saying back then because I was so fascinated by his weird, doing serious acting by staring shtick. I suspect I wasn't the only one, so they made him wear shades even when it doesn't make any sense. Confirmation for my theory, I think, comes when he doesn't take them off at any point.

So the Tulip get the job of transporting Andrea Arquette, the system famous artist doing the ACTION PAINTING! in the cutaways. Andrea is an 'all round Renaissance woman' played by a reasonably attractive French actress called Ambre Boukebza with an accent so thick you could glue things to walls with it. For once the prisoner isn't locked up in the incredibly escapable holding cell set but locked securely (hah!) in the guest quarters.

Last week's cliffhanger is resolved when Tulip's owner just tells Danté he can't fire Luc.

Danté has the hots for artist lady. Luc get message from Daddy Darius telling her to get artist lady into a shuttle and meet an Orchard ship. (Why this in-flight transfer is needed is never explained. Since Darius is at an Orchard facility waiting for her arrival what's the point of having her kidnapped from the people he employed to deliver her to him?) Luc refuses putting her loyalty to the crew above her loyalty to him - meanwhile an invisible something is following the Tulip. We recognise it as the alien ship from the opening credits but Percy has to fire "probes" at it and "run diagnostics". Percy has just worked out that the something is made of unknown alloys and is three million years old when the special effects we have come to recognise as being associated with 'The Divinity Cluster' come out of it and wrap themselves around the artist who walks out of her securely locked guest quarters. (Every one takes an 'escaped prisoner' drink!) She wanders around the Tulip. Danté follows her and some 'weird stuff' happens. She faints. She wakes up. She starts talking in the First person plural as she is now one with the alien special effect. Blah Blah prophetic utterances about "All will become known to you!" and "You will see in all dimensions!", "You will be.... as GODS!" She vanishes!

Realising the crew of the Tulip "Know too much" (lucky them) and are in danger from The Orchard, Luc records a quick tell-all report and uploads it to a deadman's switch to be broadcast, system-wide, "on all frequencies" if the Tulip is fired upon - which must have been hard to do on a Pam III xe glued to an early Nokia but that's the wonders of technology for you.

I miss the 90s​

Darius backs down.

Not sure what to do about Luc, Danté goes to her room. She's sat at a table. He sits opposite her and looking directly into the camera says: "And now I wanna know what's going on..." The camera pans 180 degrees and finds Luc who nods, and the camera pans right 180 back round to Danté "And I wanna know the truth..." and the camera pans right onto Luc. Pause , And then Back round onto Danté Pause and back round onto Luc and it doesn't pause and it keeps on going round and round ... and I think the director thought he was being innovate and creative but it just makes it look like they are sitting on a roundabout. On the upside. It's just about the only shot in the show that isn't dutched. I think they wanted to dutch it but realised audience would have suffered severe motion sickness if they had.

Fade to black.

Son looking for? Yes.
Norks? No.
Scots? None.
Overall interest level in series? Waning.

 

[Rodders]

These summaries are great JunkMonkey and it sounds truly cliché.

I do always wonder on shows like this whether any genre favourites were born out of shows like this. Perhaps a writer or producer that went on to something bigger and far better.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Ipesode 15: Dark and Stormy Night

This is going to be short.

After 11 minutes of montage made up bits from most of the previous episodes, Dante and Luc meet Darius who comes onboard the Tulip alone. They all three stand in the middle of a circular dolly track and Darius tells them there are dark forces at work - please trust him. If the badder guys get their hands on the secret of the Divinity Cluster they will use it for EVIL. But he will use it for GOOD. He will provide Danté with all that he knows about the Raiders so he can find his son because... the Secret Research Danté's wife was doing was sponsored by the Orchard and Divinity Cluster related (the implication is made that she may have experimented on him). Danté and Luc agree. Darius leaves. Darius mutters "they will lead us straight to the boy" - and his ship explodes. Evil, Orchardy, bastards have blown him up. Luc looks a bit sad but she has a Divinity Cluster activating injector dingus previously only seen in the first episode. So now Danté and Luc are friends again and Danté is the father of the Kwisatz Haderach.

Percy wasn't invited to this episode.

The director realised that the sunglasses look for Darius was really dumb so they gave him regular glasses to wear which is what they should have done from the off.
The new on-screen dialogue in this episode took up about five minutes of screen time and, with only three actors, standing still in one set, was probably shot in a couple of hours. The rest of the 40+ minute running time was made up of scenes from previous episodes. Yawn.

Other stuff:
Tits? Yes but flashbacks from episode one.
Scotsmen. Yes One shot from ditto but he didn't get any dialogue so that probably cut his repeat fees to next to nothing.
No gay bashing.

 

[JunkMonkey]

16 : Supermax

Someone finally succeeds in taking control of the Tulip!

They buy it.

Stopping off to buy spares at a spiffingly huge space station (which may well get blown up in a later episode if the title sequence is to be trusted) the crew return to the ship to find its new owners in possession and busy converting it into a prison ship.

The smooth talking, wide-boy owner Max and his slinky wife hire the crew back on as warders. Slinky wife tries to get Danté into bed. Percy runs around sabotaging things. Luc gets a couple of funny lines and reactions shots and calls the Orchard to pull strings. Caught in a compromising position with Danté, the wife yells rape. Luc and Danté get banged up in the holding cells again till Percy makes everyone take a drink by busting them out. There is a bit of running around and gunplay before the delays Percy has managed to cause with all her sabotage has made the whole buying the Tulip project so unprofitable that the bank (with a nudge from the Orchard) calls in the loan.

Who actually owns the ship at the end of the show is left unexplained.

This was almost a fun episode very much played for comedy. It wasn't exactly a Feydeau farce but the actors were obviously having fun hamming it up.

One bit of weirdness. Towards the end of the show our heroes step out of a lift, the see Max's heavies, and Danté starts firing, dropping two of them Bang! Bang. Just like that. The third surrenders. As Danté fires the words 'STUN ACTIVATED' float for a second in front of his muzzle like some bit of SIM Game info. In the original those words aren't there and there is at least one muzzle flash. The Redux addition of the STUN thing (and the removal of the flash) was done, I suspect, to make it look less like Danté had just shot the buggers dead in cold blood- and also to explain why they were then alive enough to be locked up in the ubiquitous holding cells without a scratch on them at the end of the show.

Tits? Yes. Man tits. Michael Paré gets his shirt off for the 'rape' sequence.
Son Hunting - on hold.

 

[JunkMonkey]

17: A Twist in Time

You don't need to read this. The title tells you everything you need to know. Well it does if you have seen any of the countless iterations of Groundhog Day / Run Lola Run / Back and Back and Back to the Future - “There is the theory of the moebius. A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop, from which there is no escape. When we reach that point, whatever happened will happen again.” episodes of any SF show. The Caught in a Time Loop episode is, like the equally obligatory Body Swap Episode, a rite of passage that every SF show has to go through.

Never have I seen it done so badly and boringly as this.

Delivering this week's loonytune psycho killer to somewhere (last week's "who actually owns the ship now?" having been resolved off-screen before the episode starts) the Tulip diverts to offer help at a "secret lab" (Chug! chug! chug!) doing "graviton research funded by the Mars federation". (How the crew of the Tulip are aware of all these secret bases is a mystery. Maybe they subscribe to Secret Research Weekly, New Secret Scientist, Unlicensed Experimental Station Monthly, Jane's Hidden Base Review, or whatever.)

Scanners fail to find any signs of life at the station and, just as they are about to decelerating to enter orbit, something blows up on the ship and all the engines go offline. They have 15 minutes before they hit the surface.... oops! Percy rushes off to fix the engines. Luc rushes off to get the prisoner into the shuttle in case they have to bail, and Danté manspreads in his comfy chair getting frustrated that no one is listening to him.

Needless to say things from go bad to worse. A strange glowing balls of something unexplained drfift past the ship coming from somewhere unexplained (I think we are supposed to assume it's coming from the secret research base but it could be from anywhere) one of them touches the ship and there is another explosion. Percy is trapped in a bit of the ship with a hole in it and the only way she can get out before she runs out of air is through a section of the ship with the kind of 'kills you in seconds' radiation that only happens in SF shows. (And she's got a big hole in her leg.) Luc and Danté rush to her rescue but are too late.... she dies?(it's a bit vague but I think that's what happens). Danté rushes off to get a radiation suit just as another plot energy bubble hits the ship and he's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion.
Realising with remarkable swiftness that he has been thrown back in time he sets out to get it right this time.... And fails.

He's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion and sets out to get it right this time.... and fails.

He's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion and sets out to get it right this time.... and succeeds!

But gets Luc killed.

He's thrown back in time to just before the second explosion and sets out to get it right this time.... and does.

And everyone is happy. Happy ending coda. Then another bubble or something intersects with the ship and Luc and Percy suddenly aren't there having the happy ending coda any more and Michael Paré does sad face.

The end...

And it's all so deadly boring! Every time we loop back we get to see the same bits of action from exactly the same angles (but different takes) sometimes lengthened sometimes cut. They used the outakes. But nothing is added plot wise at any point. Nothing is revealed that we didn't know about in the first iteration. We just get to watch our captain getting everything wrong for 40 minutes. Over and over again. Dull. Dull. Dull.

The Redux producers really like the SIM gun status thing because they used it again - REALLY BIG - in a close up.

No boobs. No Scots. No son hunting.
Gay bashing? - a snide 'joke' about someone having had so many sex changes he was "discredited as a man perhaps but his research still stands". Ho ****ing ho.

 

[JunkMonkey]

19 : Eat Sin

Not content with showing us the same sequences of Percy getting trapped and the others trying to rescue her over and over again last episode we get to see it all over again in a "Previously on Starhunter..." teaser which ends up with Michael Paré doing sad face again. The first "Previously on" of the series so far.

Realising he is alone (which takes him considerably longer to figure out than realising he had been thrown backwards through time in the previous episode) Danté checks on the prisoner. He's still in his cell so whatever has happened is probably chromosome linked. As Danté leaves the cells, a glowing ball of pure plotdeviceium floats through a wall and is greeted by the loonytune psycho-killer like a long-lost friend. Danté goes back to the bridge andtalks to the ship's AI (which glories in the name of Caravaggio and is played with a nice line in sneery archness by Murray Melvin a jobbing actor, who despite having regular screen credits spanning 60 years, will probably best be remembered as Rita Tushingham's gay flatmate in A Taste of Honey from 1961). Suddenly there is a shimmery visual effect and Danté has been replaced by Percy who gets to look surprised and say "Oh brother!" before the fade to a commercial break.

The transition from Danté to Percy was done seamlessly. The angle is dutched (yawn!) and it was obviously done with the actors just replacing each other on set while the camera was locked off and the jump disguised in the shimmer. For a moment or two (or possibly longer if you had to suffer dog food commercials) we get to think that we have seamlessly segued from the Obligatory Time Loop Episode into the Obligatory Body Swap Episode. But, sadly, no, we don't get to see Tanya Allen doing a Michael Paré impression (is the world ready?). We have instead stepped into the Not Quite Obligatory (But Soon Will be) Alone in the Ship in Parallel Universes Episode. (The Farscape episode -"Through the Looking Glass" worked the same idea the year before but did it SOOOO much better.)

Needless to say the prisoner has escaped (Chug!) via the glowing plotdeviceium ball. He lures Danté into a trap and ties him up. (Thereby getting control of the ship! Take another three shots because... You've guessed it. The escaped killer is loose in all three universes.) He gets to tie up all three of our leads in the same camera setups in each universe and gets to do "Woooo! I'm a scary killer!" acting at them for a bit and rabbit on about pain being beautiful and feeding agony back to the Universe blah blah. Again, like last week's episode, these three scenarios are played out pretty much shot for shot the same each time. Though the editor has a little more fun cutting back and forth between these parallel, but essentially identical, story lines it's still pretty dull stuff. In the end plucky perky Percy is the one to turn the tables by turning the gravity on the bit of floor that the killer is standing on up to 11 and then jumping through the gravity warp time displacement special effect because (somehow) she can now predict where it will turn up. She meets the SFX and instructs the ship to self-destruct behind her. Then she's in the same universe / time line as Danté. The killer is there too (somehow) so they jump through the "time warp anomaly" conveniently at the end of the corridor and blow up the ship behind them... and then everything is all right again because the killer now isn't in the final (Luc's) universe - because Luc killed him. (Another episode in which the women do all the heavy lifting and our hero wanders around looking lost.) They blow up the base and Percy has a bad. horror movie, jump-scare dream.

The end.

Usual Tits/Scots/Gay bashing/son hunting report card - total blank