Review Welcome to Paradox (1998) - episode 7 "The Winner"

[Mad-Pac]

Aired Aug 31, 1998 on Syfy

A prison that has no bars causes controversy. The prison controls its inmates with pain implants, but one prisoner fights to embrace the system. (Kidding! Fights the system, instead, as usual, of course. But anyway, methinks if this guy is "The Winner," I'm really sorry for the poor saps who are "The Losers.")


CAST

Ice-T ... Revell
Ian Tracey ... Cole
Jennifer Clement ... Inspector Sarah Klein
Stephen E. Miller ... Warden
Blu Mankuma ... Franklin
Shaun Johnston ... Meggs
Michael Philip ... The Host
Deryl Hayes ... Doctor
Colin Banner ... Inmate
Leanne Adachi ... Waitress
Terry Howson ... Big Man
Malik McCall ... Guard
Erick Kaffka ... Beta Cop


WRITTEN BY

A.E. van Vogt...(story)

 

[TheSowIsMine]

Im way behind, with this show. My nw kitten, watching the world cup and working on my basses have taken up my time. But I will watch them eventually. There will be more time after the group stage of the wc.

 

[Brimfin]

Let’s start off by saying this is some of the best casting the series has had so far. Every one of the main characters was well chosen and well executed. Ice-T has the tough guy role, angry, ready to escape, wanting to buck the system. But still he shows patches of decency. Ian Tracey, his friend and later fellow prisoner is someone I’ve just been watching in the show CONTINUUM. His character there is a man who was once normal but became very twitchy. He played both well, but really excelled at the twitchy part. That fits his character here. The inmate who’s been there a long time is played by Blu Mankuma. He had a brief but memorable role in the DEAD LIKE ME pilot and other shows. He has a strong presence, similar to Godfrey Cambridge whom he also resembles. The warden is a complex character, balancing between being a reformer and a controller, though honestly mostly the former. And the prison inspector investigating the system is intelligent and intriguing. With a good script, this cast could go far – and they do.

Revell, a frequent convict who is on the run from prison, gets in trouble trying to defend a waitress being hassled by a customer. Turns out the hassler is a cop and Revell and his friend Cole are busted and incarcerated once again. But this is a prison with a difference, a chip (more like a big bug) implanted into your nervous system making it the equivalent of a shock collar when you’re too close to the fence perimeter. It can never be removed without killing you, though it can be deactivated. Longtime prisoner Franklin has objected to the device saying it robs prisoners of their humanity and can cause long-term psychological damage even when you leave prison. As a result, he’s lobbied Betaville for an inspector to look into the situation and gets one with inspector Sarah Klein.

The warden tells Klein that his methods encourage rehabilitation. “Society thrives when it knows its limits,” he proclaims, in a statement that can be taken many ways. He has old prison paraphernalia in his office like striped uniforms and chains to contrast his more humane methods. I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon here – are the warden’s methods really inhumane? Is having the equivalent of fences and wall that exist only in your mind really robbing you of your humanity?

Revell, tough guy that he is, naturally has to try to walk through the outer fence and finds it’s like being in a hellish environment. He gets sent to the infirmary with no permanent damage but a lesson learned. Later, he lets word get out that he will try again. But it’s just a money ploy for him. He gets the others to think he won’t make it and bet against him. He then fakes an injury to steal pain meds figuring he can make it halfway through and win big. His cellmate Meggs is onto the ruse, even knowing that he stole the pain meds. But as someone who tried and failed before, he warns him there’ll be consequences.

Doped up on the pain meds, he indeed makes it about halfway through the barrier before collapsing. Then he’s sentenced to “the box”. But he is just placed outside on a square slab of concrete. The other prisoners are forbidden to have any contact with him or give him anything. To them, he’s just sprawled out in the open, but to him he’s in a steel box with a wire grate on top for some light. Finally Franklin, who’s just learned that the inspector plans to recommend that the chip system be kept, breaks the rules by giving him water. He tells him they’re all in this together and then walks out into the barrier himself and dies.

As the inspector is making her last rounds, she questions Revell but he has little to say. When she offers to shake hands he tells her not to shake hands with the animals. As she is leaving, Revell learns from Meggs that Franklin knew he had a bad heart and would die. “He did that to make your actions mean something,” Meggs tells him. Revell then decides to return the favor by bravely making it all the way through the barrier despite the warden’s attempts to ratchet up the feed. On the other side he reaches up to shake her hand after all, telling her “We’re all human.”

The grandiose play works, and the inspector changes her mind and recommends the system be dismantled. Revell, despite his bravado, hasn’t really changed. The last we hear from him he is bragging about once selling the same house to ten different people. The host tells us there’s nothing more indomitable than the human spirit. A fitting close.

What makes the story even more complex is that there isn’t any clear answer here. Yes, I would not want one of those creepy bugs put in me unless I had cancer and it was the only cure. But was it in and of itself bad? If it employed some psychological trauma to break a criminal down to make him more compliant, was that such a bad thing? Better that he walk through a field that only seemed hellish and did not actually burn him or cause him to break his bones jumping down from a wall or get ripped apart by bullets. If a prisoner is in an invisible box, you can easily see if he suffers heatstroke or a heart attack and if he tried to hurt himself by banging his head against a wall, he’d fail. The warden was a braggart at times, but except for zapping Cole when he was trying to talk to the inspector or ordering “full power” when Revell was making his final walk through the barrier, he wasn’t a sadist. I’d take him over Strother Martin’s warden in COOL HAND LUKE, who just seemed to be cruel for the power rush and the fun of it. Do the prisoners really win by going back to the old system?

Anyway, great casting, a strong storyline, and a lot of things you can debate (like why this was titled "the Winner"??). I’ll give this one 9 fake ID cards that zap the person reaching for it.

This episode referenced the term “feelies” in the opening scene, a nice nod to the previous episode. Unfortunately for the original viewers, this episode aired 3rd and last week’s episode didn’t air until 12th so the reference went unnoticed.

 

[Mad-Pac]

Oh, the 1990s... When if you had a convict as a character, you could cast a Black man for the role and get away with it. Now that kind of choice would be just too controversial, even for an actor who was so identified with the "gangsta" style and made his public image by flirting with both sides of the law. Speaking of which, I got to know Ice T by his role in Law & Order: special Victims Unit, so for me he was always a cop. In fact I've never seen anything he did musically.

By the way, I agree the cast was terrific in this one. It was the actors' performances that made a story that would be otherwise a cliché all alive and convincing. Ice T was perfect and he has great charisma, Blu Mankuma always gave a touch of class to any story, and Ian Tracey has always been that serviceable sidekick, and, because of his sidekick condition, I always mistake Ian Tracey for Callum Keith Rennie and Marc Warren, and I'm not convinced yet that those three are not the same person. The actor who played the warden is someone I didn']t know, but he was fantastic and he had a remarkable tone of voice that added extra layers to the character. And there was the Inspector, who was blonde...

As I said, the story is sort of a cliché, in a way, I mean, in any sci-fi anthology you always have a prison story which tests the bounds between the oppression of the system and the strength of a man's will. In this case it was no different, with the prison system representing the state, the instituted power, and the prisoners were all nice guys with a bad boy pose. I'm particularly glad that, in the end, the climax was convincing the Inspector that the sytem was not to be approved, not that Revell could actually overcome the chip commands by sheer will. It would e disappointing if, at some point, he would just walk away normally because all it took was to defy the system. No, the hindrance was real, even if it was just in his head, but he would resist as long as he had the strength to do so.

The story overlooked some details for the sake of telling a story in the allotted time, but that was not done well. First, Revell was arrested for doing absolutely nothing wrong, and the cop acted more like a gestapo officer than a regular cop. Which makes me wonder, what kind of regime do they have in Betaville? By what they showed, it seems that legal details are overlooked as long as people stay oppressed and don't question things, but in a society so based on technology, we would assume they would stick to procedures and technicalities even if they were unfair. So Revell is arrested and next thing we know he's getting into prison (?) -- No trial? No lawyers? No legal procedure at all? -- and Revell doesn't know anything of how he's going to be punished, when in real life publicity is a key factor as a crime deterrent, and it is in the interest of society that possible criminals know how bad things can get so they will think twice before committing a crime. It's all public record.

Finally, I think this prison system had a fatal flaw. A prison that is only the the prisoner's head may stop the prisoner from leaving by his own will, but he could still easily be rescued by friends who wouldn't have any trouble in getting into prison grounds and just taking the guy outside.

And finally, (really this time), I have to mention the couple other episodes this one reminded me of. First, check Blu Mankuma's performance in the Outer Limits episode Stream of Consciousness, as the actor seems specialized int his kind of story. Second, also check the Twilight Zone episode The Pool Guy with Lou Diamond Phillips. I won't tell you why not to spoil the fun.

The Winner is not a total winner to me, but it was surely an entertainer. It gets 8 prison experiments that are the future of the penal system and since they're already in the future, that's the future of the future for you!

 

[TheSowIsMine]

As said above, this is a very cliche story. How much rights do you keep when you are incarcerated.
The acting is what made this one the best so far.
Also, I find the episodes with a little more low sci-fi a bit better. I feel those episodes rely more on the characters.
But yeah, great cast in this one.

I grew up listening to Ice-T(mostly his metal band though) and always watched him in his movies, so it was cool seeing him in this.
And a bit of useless trivia: Ice-T starred with William McNamara, who played Q.M. in the last episode, in the movie Surviving the Game(1994).

 

[Cloister56]

Innovative and advanced prisons frequently pop up in movies and TV. From the recent Escape Plan to Fortress or the Running Man.
The Running Man had a similar idea to this episode, no walls but cross a certain point and bad things happened.
There are some nice futuristic touches like the black basketball and the strange target like basketball hoops.
Prison life is otherwise very cliche with everyone working out in the yard including one guy who looks like he has never even seen a dumbell.

I think the acting was good throughout the episode. Ice-T is alway solid in most things I've seen him in, I don't know how much of that is he is just always playing himself, does that make him a good actor? Well he is always entertaining.
His walk through the barriers could have been comedic with are the spinning and grimacing but works very well.

The story overlooked some details for the sake of telling a story in the allotted time, but that was not done well. First, Revell was arrested for doing absolutely nothing wrong, and the cop acted more like a gestapo officer than a regular cop. Which makes me wonder, what kind of regime do they have in Betaville? By what they showed, it seems that legal details are overlooked as long as people stay oppressed and don't question things, but in a society so based on technology, we would assume they would stick to procedures and technicalities even if they were unfair. So Revell is arrested and next thing we know he's getting into prison (?) -- No trial? No lawyers? No legal procedure at all?

Revell, a frequent convict who is on the run from prison,

I assumed this was because he broke parole but it he could have been on the run. Either way he would get an express ticket back to the inside especially as the cop probably would tag on some extra charges like resisting arrest and assaulting an officer.

As for the barrier itself. It seems quite effective to me. It would at least give the guards time to catch the would be escapee without causing him any physical harm. I guess the concern would be the psychological damage and the possibility of it triggering existing health conditions but we only see one of those demonstrated.
More concerning is that the implants cannot be removed. Prisoners would have them after they finished their term. That seems like a system that could be exploited. Also as is implied this is just the first step and you do wonder if the next steps after prisons may be extending this to other areas where control would be needed.
"Get back to your desk Jeff it's not your water break. The hellish landscape of the 5th floor is still in effect"

There is one thing that always bothers me about these prison with a device concepts. If the point is that we are meant to conclude that the device is too terrible to use then why do the writers always seem to have a protagonist who is wrongly imprisoned.
Unless I'm missing something all the examples I can think of have this. I guess they are concerned that the audience won't root for a "true" criminal but isn't that a bit worrying. The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.

Then we come to Revell's final walk. So Klein see's this and he says "We are all human".
Why does this convince her the system needs to go? We don't see what the alternatives are, surely she would also have to look at people who had served their time in the system.
Does it have lower reoffending rates, lower mortality and morbidity rates, what are the relative costs. To base your assessment on one man being able to slowly stagger across it and shake your hand is a weak procedure.

Also for the second week in a row we see the VW Beetle is the car of choice for Betaville. Two of them this time parked outside the prison.

Overall a decent episode, didn't intrigue me as much as last weeks but I think that's because I've seen this concept so often.
7 steps to assessing the system not followed out of 10