It makes sense that, after West and Vensen got episodes that focused on them, Hawkes would get the third. He’s the other member of the cast most fleshed out. And, of course, the episode is going to focus on the fact he’s an In-Vitro. Also, there’s another In-Vitro in the cast, the high ranking Commander (or Corporal or something) McQueen. So the episode looks at the life that “Tanks” live by creating a conflict between the rebellious Hawkes and the by-the-books McQueen.

The plot is relatively simple. The crew are on a space freighter. Most of the “dirty jobs” are done by In-Vitros and there is a big cargo of In-Vitros still in their tanks, waiting to be awakened at the destination world, more cargo than people. This division between Tanks and Humans comes to a head when the freighter is attacked and the most realistic way to survive is to cut the power to the section of the ship keeping the suspended In-Vitros alive. The result is a mutinty, the details of which are unimportant, other than that it gives Hawkes and McQueen (and others) their chance to debate the topic of racism with stakes. We learn more about In-Vitros as we go. They are awakened from their tubes at eighteen years old! So basically someone like Hawkes has probably been sentient for less than a decade. We also know that, given their lack of a true family, they can sometimes bond over being grown with similar DNA configuration, and Hawkes has a “sister” of this kind among the cargo of In-Vitros on the freighter. All in all, this is a decent setup for this kind of story and I’m impressed that this series has done it.

It’s also worth noting that, if last episode was a battleship and groundfighting combat episode and the episode before that was dogfighting combat, this one is submarine combat. If I’d gone off my memory I’d’ve thought the show was all dogfighting all the time, but it’s good that they mix it up. Keeps it from getting stale.

Not much else to report. We get a subplot about romance with the characters unused in the main plot. Wang has started dating someone he met online (over the “SpaceNet”) and Vensen thinks romance is a waste of time. Damphousse has a boyfriend back home who has a daughter from a previous relationship who hasn’t warmed up to her yet. I don’t know if any of this will matter down the line, but we do get West admitting his selfishness in going AWOL that one time, so the show will address things serially on occasion it seems.

This episode’s focal character is Captain Vansen. I don’t think that I’ve even mentioned her yet, but she’s the leader of the unit we’re following on this show (the Wild Cards, apparently) and her deal is that she lost her family during the AI Wars and she’s understandably upset about it. It’s worth noting that a woman in command is another commonality with Earth 2. We’re lucky the Internet in those days wasn’t what it was now or we’d have had a frothing horde of men who claim this was oppression.

Because this is Vansen’s episode and we’re delving into her past, we learn a lot more about the AIs. There’s a whole thing about their creation that I didn’t commit to memory because I doubt it’s important, but what we do know is that they’re called Silicates. If that came up in earlier episodes, I missed it. What is definitely new is that we learn a bit about their culture: they worship risk and chance and gambling as if it was their religion. After the AI Wars, they left Earth and, at least the group we see here, are living as space pirates. When this group tries to hijack some mining operation, the Wild Cards assume they are going to sell it to the Chigs. I don’t know if that’s entirely a guess on their part or if such an economy actually exists. If it does, I have to assume first contact between the Chigs and the Silicates happened before that with the rest of humanity, because humanity didn’t know the Chigs existed until a few months ago. I find their worship of chance to be an interesting choice, though it did lead to one of them saying “Fate’s a bitch!” in a way that was probably meant to sound cool or threatening, but was instead goofy. But they’re gonna be goofy because we’re told they are completely taught on existing material and can’t come up with ideas of their own, which is actually pretty prescient given the current state of things that the news continue to call “AI” in spite of the fact it is closer to predictive text.

Anyway, Vansen wants to know why the Silicates killed her family. Because the AI are able to access the memories of each other or whatever, she learns her family was picked by a coin flip. I’m someone who likes to see the randomness of the universe in the fiction I deal with, so I like that. Vansen then goes on a killing spree of Silicates and saves her allies, who were pinned down. She doesn’t exactly get closure, but in the militaristic genre, getting kills is proof of your worth, so that’s good for her.

By the way, the episode opens with the unit being assigned guard duty of this mine and they are unhappy with it. This unit of idiot children want to be assigned at the front lines, where they get to see action. You’d think that people in the military would understand the idea of strategic value and such, but these guys just want to bang their ships against the Chig ships to prove how tough they are. Idiot children, I say. We don’t actually see their space planes in this one. We get the Saratoga battleship-style turret fighting in space and then the rest of the battle is ground fighting. These kids can do it all.

Also, when on a planet with a third Earth’s gravity, the first thing that Wang does is throw a football into orbit. So good for him.

This one starts with some human army guys finding a human survivor on a planet that was attacked by aliens, I guess. The guy keeps describing himself as “The farthest man from home” in spite of the fact that a bunch of other humans are now there with him. In his defence, he seems to have utterly snapped. Anyway, his existence gives hope to the boringest of the cast, apparently named West, the guy who lost a friend/lover (I genuinely don’t know their relationship) at the start of the pilot. If this guy is alive, she might also be. So West goes AWOL, stealing his space plane to go check the colony world for his missing friend. There, he comes into conflict with the aliens but does find a couple human survivors who confirm that his friend survived the initial attack, but was captured. He tries to follow this lead, but the aliens are onto him and he’d be dead except that the rest of the cast come to his rescue. He gets into trouble, and the whole team gets into trouble for helping him, but ultimately he did find two survivors. Also, they think someone up above may be pulling strings to keep them from being court martialed or whatever.

Anyway, this one was nothing special. West was, to me, the least interesting part of the pilot. I was hoping they’d wrap up his missing lady plot in this one so the show would be done with it. They don’t. As of the end of this episode, she’s still missing.

In spite of the episode being named after him, the “Farthest Man from Home” is all but forgotten once West gets on with his plans. I don’t know if this show is serialized in the kind of way where he’ll come up again or not. I did find it interesting that the show so quickly had them find a mentally-unhinged survivor on a planet. That’s basically what Tim Curry’s character on Earth 2 was and he was also introduced very early. Incidentally, another Earth 2 similarity is the use of VR technology for recreation. It’s less advanced here than the Gear used by the Earth 2 folks.

The guy who got to yell at the team for being such reckless heroes is one Commodore Ross, played by character actor Tucker Smallwood who is one of those I recognize from multiple places. Looking him up spoiled for me that he’ll be back, but I’m fine with that. I like him.

What else? Well, since it isn’t the opening movie anymore, the show has opening credits. They make the cast seems smaller and more manageable, so I like them. Also, the cast all have callsigns based on the deck of cards, like Hawkes is “Jack of Hearts” and I think it was Wang who was “Joker” and such. One nice little continuation of the discrimination against In-Vitro’s plot is that Hawkes has to modify his helmet to accommodate his navel, since they don’t come that way by default.

And then, what I’m mostly here for, the aliens. For the record, the humans call them “Chigs”, not “Chiggers” as my memory had told me. Still, I’m going to give the writers the benefit of the doubt that they knew what they were doing. We learn a few things about the Chigs in this episode (and I kinda hate calling them that). They seem to fear their dead, to the extent that human survivors have been hiding in a cave with some of their corpses to be unnoticed. Also, it seems like they have five-fingered hands, albeit with claws. Still, that’s disappointing. But the characters discuss why they call them “Chigs” and it is apparently a comparison to Chigoe fleas specifically, but another character says he thinks they look like prawns. So at some point it seems humanity in the universe has seen the Chigs unmasked, even though we haven’t.

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.