It begins, as I assume most sci-fi shows from the era do, with a double-sized episode that is essentially a movie. They set up a lot of worldbuilding and whatnot, but overall it’s a lot of stuff that would make for a pretty boring movie to me. The year is 2063 and humanity has started settling on other planets and is extremely confident that they are alone in the universe. They’re proven very wrong when they get attacked by mysterious alien invaders (wiped out, but with just enough possibility for survivors that the one we’ve been asked to care about may turn up alive for drama later).

And suddenly, humanity is at war with the first non-Earth-based lifeforms they’ve learned of. And it is going poorly, which is why the show is able to focus on a batch of new barely-trained space marine pilots, because with everyone else getting wiped out, they are moved into positions of prominence quickly. Honestly, most of the story is cliche. We’ve got all the standard bickering caused by clashing bad attitudes and cadets with machismo-fueled desires to prove themselves by doing dangerous crap. They’ve even got R. Lee Ermey playing the drill sergeant for heaven’s sake (Though he did give me one line I thought was worth writing down: “In space no one can hear you scream unless it is the battle cry of the United States Marines.”)

So if all that stuff is trite, I’ll have to give them a little credit for the sci-fi world they’re in. There’s nothing mind-bending, but they do more than the bare minimum. There is mention of the AI Wars and AI, who I gather are robots who look just like humans. More relevant to the plot are In-Vitros (derisively called Tanks), who are humans grown not from parents, but apparently created through genetic engineering from tinkering with DNA and all that. The In-Vitros are used as a “minority group that doesn’t have equal rights” for the setting (the first one we meet is almost immediately lynched, and another character is upset because the government cost him his job because they wanted more In-Vitro representation, and so on). The In-Vitros actually have their navels on the back of their necks, which is an image I’ve had in my head forever but if you’d ask me where I’d seen it I would’ve guessed Outer Limits or something. The In-Vitro character on the main cast (Hawkes) is a brooding-jerk-with-a-chip-on-his-shoulder kind of character, again trite, but it’s a setup with story potential down the line. Incidentally, about the characters, right now the members of the main cast I find tolerable at all are Vanessa Damphousse and Paul Wang. Mostly because they are less toxic military-brain types than the rest.

They have kept us in the dark about the aliens so far. We see one. It is generally humanoid in shape and size, but is wearing so much armour that we can’t get the details. This is something that works both for suspense and for budget, so I don’t mind. In fact, I often wish that Star Trek would throw some weird-looking spacesuits in the background of crowd shots. The alien we meet is captured by the main cast and seems better at trying to communicate than the humans are with it. It also manages to pull off a cyanide-tooth suicide sort of thing, rather than be taken alive, by drinking water, which is apparently toxic to it.

I’m gonna do it again! I’m gonna watch a science fiction show I dimly remember from my youth again!

Last time, I did Earth 2, a show I remembered fondly. This time, I’m doing a show I definitely watched, but I don’t remember as well. Space: Above and Beyond. It aired around the same era as Earth 2, and the basic premise was that aliens were coming and space fighter pilots had to fight them off. I feel like it was a more militaristic sci-fi than is usually my scene, but it was still science fiction on television while I was a teenager, so I had to watch it.

Oddly, the one solid thing I remember is that the aliens were somewhat insectoid, so when the humans came up with the derogatory term for them, they went with “Chiggers”. Yes, that’s right, much like how Earth 2 had humans use “Diggers” to refer to some of that show’s aliens, this one also chooses to dance around the N-Word to make a point. Anyway, I’m hoping that the aliens on Space: Above and Beyond at least look cool. Anyway, let’s fine out.

This one is a borderline case, I admit it, but the Venture Bros is one of my all-time favourite television shows and this guy is the closest it’s had to a Beekeeper. Thus, I’ve got to do what I do.

The Killer Drone was a supervillain who was active in the “silver age of comics” kind of era of the Venture universe, fighting fought heroes like the Blue Morpho and Kano. On the show, he’s only ever been mentioned, never seen in action. He’s such an obscure part of the show’s world that even the Fandom sites supposedly devoted explicitly to obsessively detailing about the Venture Bros info, as of this writing, bothered to include the details we’ve been given on their page.

If I squint, it looks like the Killer Drone’s name was William “Buzz” Orpen. Google tells me that there was an Irish painter named William Orpen, but if there’s any kind of connection, I don’t see it. Killer Drone was probably born July 20, 1934 in Essex County, New Jersey. He had brown hair, hazel eyes, and an olive complexion. He was just over six feet tall and lankier than you’d think. He was a thief of the supervillain variety, having been convicted of robbery and general criminal mayhem. He was also a former electrician and an amateur mellitologist. Those last two suggest that maybe he was responsible on his own for the creation of his supervillain equipment, including a bee-themed suit with a poisonous stinger that also allowed him some limited flight! All very impressive stuff for a beekeeping super-criminal, right?

But did he even keep bees? We don’t know. He’s a mellitologist, which could involve keeping bees for research, but it doesn’t necessitate that. And he fashions himself as a “drone” rather than a protector of bees. We’re told he has a tattoo of a queen bee over his heart, but what does that mean? It actually seems possible that he thinks he is a bee (he’s known to have spent time in the asylum for “insane supervillains” after all, so rational thinking may not be his strong suit).

It’s only my own desire to include the Venture Bros in this study of Fictional Beekeepers that makes me bother to review this character. We don’t know that he’s a Beekeeper at all and he’s going to drag down the average, but a show I like is wrapping up soon, so I felt like I had to do it:

One Honeycomb out of Five. That said, there is strong potential here for a Three or a Four here, given his strong on-theme branding and equipment. All it would take would be for us to learn he owned at least one hive. It’s a shame that it is so unlikely that the upcoming Venture Bros movie will reveal much.