I admit to being confused by the opening as we witness parallel murders happening in different places. Being brand new to this show, I wasn’t sure that the swimmer wasn’t the man in the space suit using some hologram program or something. (Although if he were, he wouldn’t be out in space but in some simulator.) It only took a few minutes to confirm that these were totally different murders despite seeming almost identical in execution. No harm done.
We meet our hero, Nathan Spring, age unknown – except that he’s not old enough to retire but he’s still young enough to think about starting a family. He’s pressured into taking the job as the new commander of the International Space Fleet – his boss put the paperwork in for him and woouln’t let him withdraw his name. He tries to flunk his interview but finds he could do no wrong. Well, he didn’t really try that hard – he just seemed to figure honesty would eliminate him. He ends up doing such a bang-up job out there that he can’t quit. Further, since he had his Earth assistant Brian follow up on his hunch on the Earthbound murder Brian got the credit and moved up into Nathan’s old job. Some jobs just kind of seek you out instead of vice versa.
I’ve only now looked up a little info on the show and found it was made in 1987 and set in 2027. I would have thought it was a little more modern than that. I’m impressed; so far it’s aged well. The production values are good – fancy sets and such. The only problematic scene was when Nathan and Thoreaux and supposedly floating through a corridor and it was obvious they were superimposed on it. That’s not really a problem. I watch ONCE UPON A TIME on Netflix and there are plenty of times I can tell the Evil Queen is not walking through her castle but through something computer generated. Besides, the scene was brief and mixed with side-angled shots which looked normal.
When you’re doing a show set in the future, it’s always fun to see how accurate they are and what kind of stories they do interpreting what the future will bring. There was a show called CENTURY CITY here some years back and I can only tell you it made the future look positively ghastly. So far, this is more positive. Nathan has a box that’s similar to a personal assistant type device of today, just much bigger, and more expensive from the sound of it. The name Star Cops we’re told was a derogatory slang term that just stuck – probably inspired when Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative got derisively labeled Star Wars because of some nitwit’s comment.
The method common to both murders in the story is trying to outwit the computer. Computers have a more active role in the future deciding what cases seem suspicious and which don’t. The murder on Earth is staged to look accidental to fool the computer and keep the police from checking further. Nathan has his suspicions and has his investigator Brian keep looking and he eventually finds out the truth after investigating. One small hitch is that he meets a witness after he falls asleep near the spot of the murder. But we are told the witness said the victim couldn’t have swum in from that spot as he was elsewhere giving him directions. Presumably the witness was there because he frequented the area, but in that case why would he need directions? Minor nitpick.
The Earth murder was the result of a wife paying to have her husband killed to collect his insurance and pay off gambling debts. The spacebound murder is even more cold-blooded. If I understood correctly, normal spacesuits had about a 2% failure rate. The Russians advertised an improved model, and got the spacesuit-making contract as a result. A company wanting to get the lucrative contract was deliberately killing people making it look like suit failure so that the failure rate would go above 2% and his company could get the contract. The usual TV corporate villainy, exaggerated to a ruthless degree, yet not totally unbelievable. The Russians had tried to cover up their supposed failure by blaming one of their own people for negligence. We are later told she was executed before the case was solved and the truth came out. Considering the small length of time that had passed, that seemed rather cold even for the Russians.
I give the writer & director credit for a solid ending. Nathan goes out on his own to draw out the criminals. Thoreaux tries to warn him only to get a gun shoved in his neck by the controller and told that the signal was being jammed anyway. We follow Thoreaux being led by gunpoint only to have Nathan appear posing as a disembodied spacesuit and yank the gun away. I thought at first that Nathan had sent out an empty suit into space, but he explained that he took out the baddies with a medical laser puncturing their suits and killing them.
My main problem with viewing the show was that it did not have closed-captioning or subtitles available. There was a lot of fast-paced banter going on, but I couldn’t pick up a lot of it. I know Thoreaux and the controller were playing a “name the movie from the quote and give me the next line” game, but I missed most of the game's dialogue. Later, Nathan chimed in with a movie line and said, “What, you think you two are only ones who’ve seen movies?” I did like a bit where after being spun around in his space training, a computer asks Nathan to describe his level of nausea. “Some of it is in my lap,” he replies. I’m sure there was a lot of detail and description I missed because I couldn’t hear or make out all the dialogue.
One other minor note was when Spring was trying to find out who would profit from the Russians losing the spacesuit contract, he arbitrarily tosses in, “and look for any right-wing extremists.” That line seemed to be stuck in there just for a political shot (especially since it had zero bearing on the solution); one reason I thought the show was more recent. Why couldn’t he just have said, “Look for members of any extreme fringe groups?” Just a minor annoyance; not enough to wreck the episode.
Overall, an interesting show and more serious than I was led to think by comments made by others in the past. And I do love the Moody Blues theme, but then I love their music too. I’ll give this episode 7.5 antique timepieces, which our Earth victim loved to collect.
