Review STAR COPS: TRIVIAL GAMES & PARANOID PURSUITS - Episode 04

[Doctor Omega]

Your thoughts on this episode....


As Spring attempts to persuade the sceptical Americans to allow him to open a Star Cops office on their space station, the Ronald Reagan, he is asked to investigate the disappearance of a scientist Dr Harvey Goodman from the Ronald Reagan station. The station personnel deny that Goodman or the section of the station he worked in - OMZ13 - ever existed. Out near the Sun, a salvage ship finds an abandoned capsule, designated OMZ13, floating in space.

On to the next episode....

THIS CASE TO BE OPENED IN A MILLION YEARS

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/this-case-to-be-opened-in-a-million-years-episode-5.3523/


Back to the previous episode....

INTELLIGENT LISTENING FOR BEGINNERS

https://www.imdforums.com/threads/intelligent-listening-for-beginners-episode-3.3519/

 

[michaellevenson]

Some of the show 's criticism has been about stereotypes, even Chris Boucher admitted he loves a good stereotype.
Cmmdr. Griffin here is a John Wayne stereotype if there was one! But I find it all fun, seeing him squirm as the dumping of Harvey Goodman's body is uncovered is great. Theroux actually was rather childish towards Kenzy, and I like Nathan's attitude at the fait accompli presented to him regarding her, as the series goes on he will find her invaluable. This episode introduced a character described later on as everyone's favourite Russian, Krevenko, played by Johnathan Adams, an infrequent recurring actor from Bergerac, and he was excellent. In my youthful stupidity ( I saw Star Cops before ever seeing Bergerac) I really thought Adams was really an Eastern European actor, he was that good in this.
The salvage duo was a bit twee and forced, they just didn't come across as salvagers.
The concept of World Press Association is an interesting one, our press agencies are pretty worldwide now, Reuters for instance, still I'm intrigued that the press at the end seemed to agree to support Griffin if he allows Star Cops onto the Ronald Reagan, thereby he gets away with the cover up. A good episode.

 

[Doctor Omega]

Not one of the more memorable episodes for me as the pool/snooker game seemed to go on a bit.

I agree that Krevenko was a great character and I wish he had had more screen time throughout. To be honest, having never really watched Bergerac much, until I read your review above, I thought he was really Russian! So don't feel too bad about your youthful mistake!

The first episode directed by Graeme Harper. I think there is a definite upswing visually over the course of his episodes.

So, not one of my favourites, but I appreciate it more now, watching it as part of these reviews and seeing it in the context of the whole show. (The episodes are all clearly distinct to me now, in a way that they didn't used to be.)

 

[Cloister56]

It isn't easy, to get that damn theme tune out of my mind.

Interesting start, it appears that a "mom and pop" operation can run what appears to be a space shuttle type ship chasing down salvage. That's a little further ahead that I expected it to be.
I imagined at this point that space would no longer be dominated by governments but would have big corporations involved, much later I would expect it to become routine enough for individuals to be able to afford ships. Perhaps they are freelancers but still it doesn't quite fit to me.

So then we see the crew of Apollo 11 (I think) turning gold and flipping over to reveal Ronald Reagan???

I thought at first they were predicting a relative of his (a bit like Bush Jnr) would run for president but t's the space station Ronald Regan. I think it's fair enough to assume that space stations might be named after former presidents. Unless things get a bit less partisan I can't imagine that they would use any modern presidents but it's a good way of firming up the future world building.

The receptionists for the Ronald Regan is awful, the visual effect and the performance is just terrible, raising her eyebrows with every response. It reminds me of Max Headroom and the bit in Back to the Future Part 2 in the diner, it's very dated now and I seem to remember disliking the style back then too.

The distraught sister works well to keep the plot moving along linking events together. I did not see coming her true role even though Kenzy describes her as an Agent Provocateur and in the end she turns out to be completely right.
I wonder how the plan came together, it seems Ms Goodman heard rumours of the virus and approach Nathan and Nathan saw it as a chance to get StarCops on the Ronald Reagan and expose the cover up.
I'm glad the Kenzy situation is continuing into this episode, it wouldn't have felt right if it had just been resolved by this week.
Nathan's responses to her over the vidlink did make me laugh but he was cold at the end with "what career?".
She does some good work in this episode but isn't perfect, overlooking certain avenues of investigation. The erasure of all Goodman's seems like a bit careless but I didn't spot it until Nathan pointed it out. It did make think of all these other Goodmans out there who now have had their qualifications erased.
Kenzy really does seem to be trying hard to secure her job, I think she will eventually earn the grudging respect of Nathan but I can't see him ever being friendly with her.

Krivenko is a nice new character, I hope he sticks around as it would be nice for more diversification. They do like to play a spy like sting every time there are conversations about him. The first scene makes him very suspicious, suggesting a kidnapping right before a disappearance happens. He does save everyone from the virus breaking out at the end and it is still left ambiguous about how much he knows and how much he doesn't.

The commander of the space station is a complete arse and with Kenzy very creepy (the music in that scene really adds to the creep factor). I'm glad Nathan and Box schooled him on the pool table. Also I was a bit confused, he sounds like he is from the south of the USA which would fit I think with his Dallas Cowboys T-Shirt, but he is wearing what appears to be a Boston Red Sox cap, I guess he can follow whichever team he likes. The fact he only chews on his cigar makes sense, burning it would seem a bad idea in a space station, I'm not sure what is wrapped round the base.

The show continues to make the effort when it comes to weightlessness. Even during the scene of the virus outbreak, Goodman is floating around. It's a nice touch and they seem to be careful when to use it and when it wouldn't be pulled off.

Really interesting episode with lots of intrigue.
9 sealed capsules you really shouldn't open, out of 10.

 

[Brimfin]

I’m conflicted about this episode. On the one hand, it’s a redemption story, with Pal trying to prove herself to Nathan. And I like redemption stories. On the other hand, it features an American villain – a stereotypical, sexist, paranoid, crooked Texan who calls people “boy.” Obviously, that didn’t win me over.

Once again, we have two storylines but they do neatly merge together at the end of the show. A married couple looking for salvage in space come across an abandoned pod and manage to bring it aboard their craft (an old space shuttle). They don’t know what it is, and when they use some technique to try and see inside it they can’t – except for one brief glimpse of an eye the husband misses when he has his head turned. This goes back and forth with the other story until they arrive near the STAR COPS headquarters, renting some space on the Moonbase where they try and open it with a torch because it’s welded shut.

The main story starts with a woman seemingly desperate to find her missing brother, whom she claims went to work on the American’s Ronald Reagan space station. But station personnel tell her there’s no such person there and never was. However, nothing is what it seems in this one – well, except for the stereotypical American commander of the station whom Nathan thinks is a crook and – spoiler alert – of course he is.

Anyway, Pal from last week is still working there since Spring couldn’t fire her after her previous heroics. So he’s making her work as a glorified secretary – filing and answering phones, er…coms hoping she’ll resign out of boredom. When our aforementioned frantic sister calls, Pal has an excuse to head for the space station. Nathan gets along with Commander Griffin like oil and water, making himself a real irritant by using Box to help him cheat and win a pool game. Griffin is still ticked off about Kirk Hubble being fired last week and doesn’t want to allow a Star Cops office aboard his station. When Pal arrives and tells him about the missing biologist brother, they deny he was ever there – as they don’t rent pods to biologists with their dirty experiments and besides they don’t have a pod X13. It is about this point that we see that the pod the couple salvaged is marked “X13.”

The missing brother mystery expands when Pal explains that she could find no record of him at all on Earth. She even checked all the records at the school he went (Princeton, I think, but I don’t remember for sure) and found not even one Goodman. Nathan explains that should have tipped her off to something suspicious – there must have been at least one Goodman in their files – it’s a common name. Obviously, in their haste to wipe out his existence they must have just erased every Goodman and hoped no one would catch it. Only trouble with that whole theory – which is otherwise good – is how someone at a space station can remotely wipe out school records, birth records, and presumably Social Security records of one person who worked there for a short time. They’d have to be super expert hackers to manage something like that. And why? Wasn’t it enough just to disprove that he ever worked at their station? Why try to make it look like he never existed at all?

The truth comes to light when Nathan leaves Box behind in the communications room where he was trying to access the station’s secret data. I think it was an accident caused by Pal turning off the lights by accident to hide them and then bumping into Nathan in the dark. Accidental or deliberate, Griffin finds it after making a secret phone call to one of his men on Earth and thinks Nathan’s figured it all out. Nathan bluffs that he knows everything and Griffin tries to bribe him. Pal records the bribe on her little disk recorder and Griffin has to admit all. She says she learned the technique from Nathan (who had used it on her) and that she learns from her mistakes. It is at this point that Nathan truly seems to start to accept her back into his good graces.

Goodman was secretly working on a dangerous superbug that could survive even in space. It accidentally got loose in the pod, killing Goodman and so he and the pod were jettisoned into space toward the Sun. Unfortunately, that is the pod that is being opened right then at the Star Cops headquarters. So what happened? The Russian Moonbase coordinator simply asks, “Why was it welded shut?” which allayed their curiosity until Nathan got back and explained all. Now for his intelligent question, it looks like the Russian may be joining the team as well. I know there was more to this Russian guy story, but I couldn’t make out most of the dialogue between him and Colin. Too bad, because it seemed like it was funny banter but it was too fast-paced for me to make out.

Anyway, it turned out the supposedly freaked-out sister was a reporter who changed her name so that she could raise a stink about her missing “brother” to expose the whole scheme. The show closes on her snarky bragging about her triumph. Being as right now our so-called press is wasting their time trying to get our President impeached on Russian collusion nonsense, this was not a time for me to witness an ending like that.

So the nice story of Pal redeeming herself in Nathan’s eyes got lost in this confusing tale of stereotypical villains and snarky reporters posing as concerned relatives. I’ll give it 6 pool tables which apparently can get you into trouble not for what you say, but for what you’re thinking!

 

[Cloister56]

I remember Daniel Benzali from Murder One in the 1990s, and he had great screen presence back then.

Oh Yeah I totally missed that, I loved that show, Teddy was his character I think.

 

[Cloister56]

Yes Theodore Hoffman aww that brings back memories, the intro tune alone was epic

 

[michaellevenson]

First thing to say, is I really thought Daniel Benzali was American, he was that good. His character was a stereotype of course, but very enjoyable and it added to the drama seeing Griffin squirm as Spring uncovered the Goodman cover up. Chris Boucher took a bit of criticism for some stereotypes in this show, and his response was , " I love a good stereotype"
Johnathan Adams as Krivenko was also terrific and will become a nice ally and at times a nuisance for Nathan.
The Dilly Goodman character was a clever bit of subterfuge and worked well with a surprise revelation as to her true identity.
The Lauta and Marty salvage team I thought was not believable. How much would it cost to buy their space craft, or buy launch facilities etc. they were not rich, Lauta kept going on about being rich one day " sweetie". So that didn't work for me , otherwise a good episode. 8/10
Now as for Box, if you know anything about Chris Boucher and his Blakes7 work, then Box is no surprise, as soon as I first saw Box back in '87 I thought " yep, he couldn't resist bringing in an Orac type character into his own show."
Who is Orac? As we're all continuing with Blakes7 ( well, most of us) I'll say nothing, except Boucher was script editor on B7 and he loves his cheeky know it all AI devices, Zen introduced in ep.3 isn't the only one.

 

[ant-mac]

Nathan Spring is asked to investigate the disappearance of a scientist, Doctor Harvey Goodman, from the American space station, Ronald Reagan. The space station personnel deny that Goodman or the section of the station he worked in – OMZ13 – ever existed. To complicate matters, this happens just as he is attempting to persuade the sceptical Americans to allow him to open a Star Cops office on their space station. Meanwhile, out near the sun, a salvage ship, run by a married couple finds an abandoned capsule with the designation OMZ13, floating in space.

I found this to be another enjoyable episode, with some of the highlights being how Nathan Spring uses Box to even up the odds on the game of billiards in space and the introduction of the Russian, Alexander Krivenko. I also enjoyed seeing the switch around in roles. In a TV show that boasted an international setting, it was refreshing to see the villain being an American, especially in an era when Americans could do no wrong, Russians could do no right and many of the villains in Hollywood spoke with a British accent.

4/5.

 

[Gavin]

Another interesting episide. I'm enjoying Pal Krenzy as a character more than I'd thought I would. Seeing her working hard to try to resurrect her career is a good touch. I'd thought that her efforts as hero and media focus might have been it for her sacking and the whole thing forgotten by this week so its good to see that the team don't trust her and it makes perfect sense to condemn her to a desk job and hope she resigns. The scavenging team was an interesting touch although like @Cloister56 I don't think that was reasonable for the assumed period. The near future aspect of the series might have been better served with a couple of low level employees of a salvage corporation. It's interesting seeing the multinational portrayal of space, although the Americans were a little stereotypical. And smoking on a space station? It's hard to imagine there was ever a time that would have been considered a possible future part of space travel? Especially in the 80's when the dangers of smoking were well known and significant efforts were being made to reduce smoking levels.

The mystery was fairly predictable in the end given the clues that were offered up during the episode. The only thing I didn't work out was the identity of the sister - despite Krensy outright suggesting the possibility early on.

Overall a good episode. I'll give it 7 out of 10.