Abnormal Fixation 2.6: "Firewall Farewell"

 

30 Years Ago Star Trek: Voyager: "Deadlock" (March 18, 1996)

If Star Trek: Voyager (1995 – 2001) had played its cards right, it would have added an alien nemesis to the enduring outer space franchise as terrifying and fearsome as the Borg once were.  

In particular, the first seasons of the 1990s program featured an alien race of the Delta Quadrant known as the Vidiians. These aliens were hideously deformed, technological advanced beings who suffered the effects of an incurable plague. 

What made the Vidiians truly so terrifying, however, is the fact they weren’t out to explore other worlds peacefully, or make new friends.  

Instead, they wanted to harvest the organs of any compatible life form they could find. Certainly, the Borg wanted to “assimilate” new technologies and drones to their vast collective, but the Vidiians would kill you in a heart-beat for a healthy liver. They had no choice because a plague was destroying their civilization.

The Vidiians were at their dreadful, menacing, and merciless best in the second season Voyager episode “Deadlock” by Brannon Braga. 

The story, not unlike “The Best of Both Worlds” on The Next Generation (1987 – 1994) features a scarifying sense of momentum and inevitability. It's one of those episodes that moves fast, with great purpose, and events seem to overwhelm both the characters and the audience.

In “Deadlock,” Voyager discovers that it is entering a region of space controlled by the Vidiians.

Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) decides that it may be prudent for the ship to cloak itself inside a nearby “plasma drift,” and hopefully remain out of sight. But the ship encounters some sort of subspace turbulence in the drift.  The warp engines stall, as if they have “sprung a leak.”

This turn of event couldn’t happen at a worse time, because not only are the Vidiians nearby, but Ensign Wildman is very pregnant, and going into labor. When the ship's systems start to fail, the baby's life is imperiled, even after a "fetal transport."

The plasma drift also causes all of Voyager’s matter to double, creating a duplicate ship, but one joined at the heart -- the warp-drive -- with “our” Voyager. This means every person, from Janeway down to the newborn child is also duplicated.

The two Janeways confer about the crisis and the possibilities of separation, but before long, the Vidiians find Voyager in its hiding spot, and 347 of their shock-troopers board one of the ships to begin organ harvesting…

The opening acts of “Deadlock” are laden with terrible techno-babble that means nothing, a common problem of both Star Trek: Voyager and the episodes written by Brannon Braga. Yet despite this pitfall, “Deadlock” works, in part because it possesses the (brutal) courage to play out its nightmare scenario: a Starfleet vessel overrun by Vidiians. 

In short order, we see Tuvok (Tim Russ) and Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) shot down by the soldiers, their organs cataloged and harvested for return to the Vidiian population. The episode also shows us Harry Kim (Garrett Wang) dying during a hull-breach, but it is the deaths associated with the Vidiian march that, for me, remain the most terrifying. One of the most upsetting images of the episodes sees the Vidiian away team practically salivating at the thought of taking the Wildman baby, a new-born.

"Deadlock" is also abundantly clever in the way that it plays with audience perceptions of “our” Voyager. At first, the version of the starship we have followed all along seems hopelessly crippled, and Janeway must contemplate destroying her own ship.  

Then, a second Voyager is found -- with a whole crew and a functioning ship -- and we breathe a sigh of relief because, essentially, we know our beloved characters won’t die. Then the kicker is that it is the other Voyager -- the whole Voyager -- that is boarded by the Vidiians, leaving the other Janeway to destroy her ship….which she promptly does.

"Welcome to the bridge..."

“Deadlock” is a particularly strong episode for Kate Mulgrew -- and for Captain Janeway -- as she plays the same individual attempting to “cheat” death in two, essentially, hopeless situations. 

And making matters worse, Janeway must consider not only the safety and well-being of her own crew, but the safety and well-being of the other crew, which is also, paradoxically, her own crew.  It’s enough to make the head spin, but one quality I admire about Janeway (especially here) is how she takes the weird situation at face value and -- based on the available science and the facts -- works her way through the danger. I’ve always liked Janeway quite a bit as a character, and she’s actually my second favorite Star Trek captain, after James Kirk.  

In part, this is because Janeway is actually an expert in a field other than diplomacy. She’s a scientist and engineer first, not just an ambassador with a portfolio like Picard, and many episodes (including “Parallax”) reveal how her training in those fields help bring about good outcomes in crises. Given our anti-science culture today, I find Janeway especially refreshing. She's smart as a whip, and never uses the excuse that she's "not a scientist" to avoid grappling with a problem. Instead, science is one of her key allies.

Voyager was always at its best when it verged on being a horror show, which is another reason that "Deadlock" works so effectively.

I also absolutely love “The Thaw,” another second season story, wherein Janeway must outwit a devilish, holographic clown (Michael McKean), and I am similarly fond of the third season episode “Macrovirus,” in which giant, airborne germs decimate the crew, leaving Janeway to single-handedly combat them and save the ship.  

These episodes come closest to fulfilling Voyager's potential. It  is a series about a starship alone in the great unknown, without the resources of a command structure to fall back on. Episodes like the one I mention focus on the danger inherent in such a scenario. They are more Space:1999 than your typical episode of Star Trek.

Later seasons of the series brought the Borg back again and again and again, watering down their threat substantially, but those return visits, while demanded by Star Trek fans, I suppose, are not that effective.  

Imagine, instead if Voyager had continued to use the Vidiians as a primary villain.  

We could have had five or six years of some really scary stories about contending with a race that sees humans only as organ donors… 

50 Years Ago: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)

In 2011, film critic Marc Mohan termed the late Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth a "dreamlike, disjointed and frustrating piece of work." It's a good description of a film that speakings in the language of sunning visuals and symbolic imagery, but features a confusing plot. Like the late David Bowie himself, The Man Who Fell to Earth is beautiful to gaze upon.

Yet in the final analysis, this science fiction film is impenetrable, or at the very least, emotionally distancing. 

It's entirely possible that this Roeg film seeks to express how the innocent or weak are often destroyed in a toxic, contemporary culture of luxury, vice, addiction, and sin.  But somehow even that perspective is not enough to render the film entirely successful.

It's one thing for the alien -- an apparent Christ figure -- to suffer for our sins, but need his innocent family suffer too?

I understand some people mourn The Man Who Fell to Earth as sort of the last of its breed before science fiction films such as Star Wars (1977) premiered and changed the nature of the genre.  I get it.  The Man Who Fell to Earth feels very individual, very personal in the way it moves and expresses itself,  and should be commended for that virtue.  It's a film worth watching at least once, even if, when it's over, you're left feeling a little cold.

Steven Rea termed The Man Who Fell to Earth  a "strange creature," and that too is a description I can appreciate, even as I admire the film's unforgettable and occasionally haunting imagery.

An alien from a dying world, Thomas Jerome Newton (David Bowie) lands on Earth and begins developing patents based on his world’s incredibly technological innovation so that he can fund a space program that will take him home to his wife and children, and save the famine-stricken population from extinction.

Once on Earth for some time, however, Thomas meets a young woman, Mary Lou (Candy Clark), who introduces him to vices such as sex and alcohol, and which leads to Thomas losing focus on his task.  

Thomas is eventually captured and interrogated by the CIA, and prevented from carrying out his mission of mercy.

Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth tells the story of an alien world called Anthea that through dozens of nuclear wars, now suffers from a life-threatening, planet-wide drought. 

Only a few Antheans, a mere three hundred, survive. One of their number, named Thomas Jerome Newtown is selected as hardy enough to survive a trip to Earth, where he will construct a larger spaceship to pick up his people so that they can seed the planet. 

Part of the reason for the Anthean plan and choice of destination is that Earth seems to be mirroring Anthea’s path, and within ten years it could destroy itself too.  

Thomas’s mission is therefore not only to save his own people, but our people as well.  

But Earth people, he finds, are emotional and illogical, and he is drawn into their petty squabbles at the expense of larger issues.  He becomes a victim of politics, and man’s self-destructive nature in a story that is about the futility of the Cold War, among other issues.

Nicholas Roeg’s film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth does not coherently convey Walter Tevis’s story, and if a viewer seeks that particular story, he or she will not find it. 

Instead, Roeg’s film is a visually dazzling but often maddening “abstract” approach to the story, one that focuses not on the details of Thomas Jerome Newton’s mission, or the history of his world, but rather on his seduction here on Earth to the human “way of life.” 

At first a kind of perfect or messianic being, Newton eventually becomes a fragile, broken thing instead, and his story is very much a variation or inversion of a Christ parable: A God comes to Earth, and man makes him as weak and mortal as he is. Newton suffers and suffers for our sins, and in return provides man a (technological) paradise.   

The story also seems to play like a coded biography of Howard Hughes in that reclusive, lonely, oddball geniuses get used up and exploited by society, but are never fully understood or loved.  

The emotional core of the two-and-half-hour film is Newton’s haunting memories of his family on the desert world, and the struggle to survive in his protracted absence.  

He imagines their existential miseries, while he lives in a veritable paradise of wealth, sex, movies, and booze.  

Although Thomas realizes that if stays on Earth, he “shall die,” he doesn’t make very meaningful moves to leave the planet before it is too late, and the government swoops in to experiment on him just when he is about to make good his escape and his family’s rescue.  

By movie’s end Newton is a free man, but one who has surrendered to the nihilism he sees all around him.  It’s too late to save his family, and he will never return to his world, he realizes.  The very things that distracted him -- the pleasures of his own flesh -- are the only company he has left.  The movie tags religion, sex, alcoholism and Hollywood movies as the seductive factors that turn him away from a meaningful life and a meaningful purpose.  

By the movie’s last sequence, Newton has contextualized his existence as a film noir, a format in which good, law-abiding men get transformed, through circumstances and life, into a life of crime, or a life of sin, or become victim to his own unsavory desires.  The film noir format is considered erotic and multi-layered, a comment which could be applied to The Man Who Fell to Earth as well. 

Rather than live in ugly reality, Newton’s decision to “go Hollywood’ and dress in the manner of a film noir anti-hero like Humphrey Bogart suggests that he has moved permanently to the realm of fantasy.

Clumsily-written but brilliantly directed, The Man Who Fell to Earth has also been considered a metaphor for the stages of alcoholism, and the way that the addiction can consume an entire life, step-by-step.  

This may interpretation may be accurate, and even profound, and it could explain the film’s lack of narrative clarity as well. 

Newton lives in a hazy world of drunkenness, and can’t pull himself out of the death spiral.  And his death spiral, incidentally, takes down his wife and children before it takes down him, another reflection of alcoholism as a “disease.”

Although it is gorgeously-made, The Man Who Fell to Earth isn’t an easy science fiction film to love because the filmmakers boast no genuine interest in Newton’s alien world, its history, or the specifics of his journey. 

All the concrete details of Tevis’s novel are given short-shrift (a n approach that Under the Skin apes, but more successfully).  

Instead, the movie functions entirely as a chronicle of one man’s deterioration from well-meaning genius to irrelevant, dissolute burn-out.  

But the science fiction veneer is almost entirely unnecessary to the movie’s core themes, even though those moments in the alien desert, with a lonely family in waiting forever, prove absolutely haunting.

In 1984, John Carpenter’s Starman also contextualized the story of a man who fell to Earth, an alien life-form.  And that story too featured elements of the story of Jesus Christ.  Although the imagery may not have been as dazzling and abstract, the story made sense on a concrete level and touched the heart even more deeply.  

Roeg has made at least two masterpieces of modern cinema, Walkabout (1972) and Don’t Look Now (1974), but The Man Who Fell to Earth can’t join that select list because how it tells its story -- in stylistic, avant garde fashion -- doesn’t give the audience a better understanding of the character’s inner life, or his choices.  

In this film, we’re always outsiders to Newton’s decision process, and though we can chart his disintegration and mourn it intellectually, we never feel it as deeply as we should.  

Instead, we grow impatient with him.  Part of the problem may rest with David Bowie's performance.  He is great to look at and appropriately strange in appearance and mannerism, but we don't ever see and understand his true nature.   We don't even really understand his crippling inertia.  

His family is on the line. Why doesn’t he act?

Abnormal Fixation 2.5 "Volatile Memory"

 

Guest Post: Scream 7 (2026)

Seventh Time, NOT the Charm

By Jonas Schwartz-Owen

Like many Scream diehards, I rewatched all six previous films with a group of friends before heading to the theater today. With the entire franchise freshly loaded into my brain, it didn’t take long to realize that Scream 7 simply isn’t much fun. Despite bringing back legacy stars and the series’ original writer, the film feels less like a thrilling new chapter and more like a contractual obligation—for both writer-director Kevin Williamson and the audience. The first six outings varied in quality, sure, but they were always a blast. This one isn’t.

Thirty years after the original Woodsboro killings, Ghostface has returned and is as bloodthirsty as ever. Back at the scene of the crime, this “new” Ghostface wastes no time zeroing in on Scream’s eternal final girl, Sydney (Neve Campbell). Now a fiercely protective mother to her teenage daughter, Tatum (Isabel May), and supported by her husband, police chief Mark (Joel McHale), Sydney finds herself dragged into the nightmare once more. But is this Ghostface someone from her past—someone she thought she’d ended decades ago?

Williamson loads his 30th-anniversary installment with callbacks to the original: Sydney now bears the same last name as Jada Pinkett Smith’s character in Scream 2—something that feels far too specific to be accidental, especially given the shared name with Sydney’s murdered mother. And it’s hardly a spoiler, or even a secret, that Stu Macher, Billy Loomis’ original co-killer, factors into the plot, which naturally begs the question: did that TV to the head really finish him off in 1996? As a meta gimmick, it’s clever enough, but Scream 7collapses under the weight of its paper-thin characters. Williamson has always excelled at crafting memorable victims and villains, but here, Tatum’s friends—the designated prey pool—have all the dimensionality of cardboard shooting-range targets. With nothing to play, the actors can only flail. The script, co-written by Williamson and Guy Busick, isn’t much sturdier: red herrings vanish almost as soon as they appear, as if the performers had only half a day on set, and the finale manages to be both baffling and strangely hollow.

The kills are more elaborate than ever, but many feel like visual-effects showboating better suited to a Tom Savini demo reel. A few shots stand out—particularly a haunting wide of a swinging corpse under a spotlight—but for the most part, the camerawork and editing are so pedestrian they barely register, much less build tension.

So, what does make Scream 7 watchable despite all of this? Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox. Both deliver grounded, lived‑in performances that cut through the noise. Campbell remains the soul of the franchise, and the film gets good mileage poking fun at her absence from the New York sequel. Watching her interact with McHale and May, and rekindling her chemistry with Cox, is almost worth the frustration. McHale, often cast as brash and cocky, dials things down to play a surprisingly stabilizing presence. And Williamson’s strongest writing is reserved for the strained, trauma-bound mother-daughter dynamic.

Anyone with an internet connection knows the rocky road that led Scream 7 from conception to release—missing franchise stars, revolving-door directors, and studio uncertainty. All of that may help explain why this entry feels so adrift. But excuses aside, there’s no escaping the truth: this is the weakest film in the series.

Abnormal Fixation 2.4: "Bounce Rate"

 

25 Years Ago: The Lone Gunmen "Pilot" (March 4, 2001)

An old proverb reminds us that truth can be stranger than fiction. Where genre television is concerned, however that line is occasionally blurred. The truth…is sometime -- shall we say? -- Out There.

Case in point: the Chris Carter X-Files spin-off, The Lone Gunmen (2001). This series aired on Fox TV for a dozen or so hour-long episodes at the beginning of 2001. Cancellation came quickly, alas. Interestingly, however, one particular episode of The Lone Gunmen has not only endured...but become the stuff of legend, not to mention notorious conspiracy fodder.

The pilot episode, written by Chris Carter, Vince Gilligan, John Shiban and Frank Spotnitz (and directed by Rob Bowman), aired originally on March 4, 2001.

This was mere months after the Supreme Court called the contested presidential election of 2000 for George W. Bush. The United States of America had a new president, but the country was still very much in the Peace and Prosperity Age of Clinton. We had no idea what lay ahead in the twenty-first century.

The inaugural episode of The Lone Gunmen unfolds pretty much as you might expect and hope, given the series' premise and quirky dramatis personae. Our heroes are Fox Mulder’s old buddies: the (relatively hapless) trio of computer geeks-cum-editors at a Maryland-based conspiracy-theory newspaper called The Lone Gunman (latest headline: Teletubbies = Mind Control!). We first join these unconventional heroes in media res, during a covert op in progress.

Specifically, our triumvirate of protagonists crashes a ritzy party at E-Comm Con (remember the tech bubble of the late 1990s?). Their mission: to steal the new, ultra-fast Octium IV micro-chip, a technological advancement which the Lone Gunmen –- Byers (Bruce Harwood), Frohike (Tom Braidwood) and Langley (Dean Haglund) -- believe is actually designed to invade user privacy and collect personal information. The Lone Gunmen want to examine the chip so they can pen an expose in their newspaper; one featuring cold, hard evidence of their accusations.

But remember, these guys – once the comic relief on the X-Files – are not traditional TV heroes, either in appearance or skill set. They are closer in spirit, actually, to the original Kolchak than to the hyper-competent Mulder, Scully, or Frank Black. Their hearts are in the right place but...

...they make mistakes, bungles and foul-ups. However, after a funny riff on Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible (1996) involving the diminutive Frohike on a harness, the pilot episode unexpectedly turns serious. The E Comm Con caper fails and another thief – the enigmatic but beautiful Eve Adele Harlow (her name is an anagram for Lee Harvey Oswald) – steals the chip out from under the Gunmen’s noses.

This mission failure is followed by another bombshell. Conservative, buttoned-up Lone Gunman, John Fitzgerald Byers learns that his father, a high-ranking government official, has been assassinated because of his highly-classified work at the Department of Defense.

Much of the pilot episode involves Byers, Frohike and Langly helping another government official, Mr. Helm (code-named Overlord…) prove that Old Man Byers (George Coe) is actually still alive and in hiding…afraid the government will send a second assassin after him.

What’s Mr. Byers secret? The one that a “small faction” inside the federal government would commit murder to protect? 

Well, my friends, that’s where the controversy, notoriety and conspiracy comes in. Mr. Byers is privy to information about a Department of Defense counter-terrorism war game known as...Scenario D 12.

This particular military scenario involves a “Domestic Airline In-Flight Terrorist Act.”

Unfortunately, Scenario D 12 is no longer a game, as Byers learns directly from his father. No, it is horrifyingly real. A small faction inside the U.S. Government plans to utilize a remote control device to hijack an American airliner in-flight and crash it into a heavily populated urban area. The cover for this false flag operation will be a hijacking, a terrorist take-over of the plane.

Why would anyone want to commit such a horrible act?

Here’s what Mr. Byers tells his son. This is a direct quote from the episode:

“The Cold War is over, John, but with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms business is flat.

But bring down a fully-loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you’ll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart bombed.”

Byers and his father board a jet bound for Boston; the very one that will be used as a flying bomb over New York City. The exact target in Manhattan: The World Trade Center.

The final act of this Lone Gunmen pilot involves Byers aboard the imperiled plane -- and Frohike and Langley on the ground -- trying to avert the collision between plane and skyscraper, and in the process rescue the 110 souls aboard the flight. At the last instant, we see the jet-liner veer up and away from the Twin Towers. Disaster -- and tragedy -- averted.

As everybody now knows all too well, a scarce seven months later, on September 11, 2001, two “fully loaded” domestic airliners did strike New York City and the Twin Towers. In the aftermath, at least one “tin-pot” terrorist claimed responsibility (Bin Laden) and another, Saddam Hussein, was – I guess – just “begging to be smart bombed.” We obliged him in 2003.

After that horrific Tuesday in September, arms sales boomed too, just as The Lone Gunmen predicted they would in the event of such a disaster. According to the Center for Defense Information, in 2006 alone, the U.S. was responsible for 16.9 billion dollars in international arms deals, over 41 percent of all arm sales globally. 

After 9/11, our government disavowed any advance knowledge of these horrible terrorist attacks. "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center" said national security advisor Condoleezza Rice at a White House Briefing on the afternoon. May 16, 2002.

Really?

The Lone Gunmen TV series predicted the exact thing. On national television (with viewers ostensibly in the tens of millions...). And it did so six months before the attack occurred.

And here I thought everyone in the Bush Administration had to keep their TV sets tuned to Fox at all times...

But isn't it strange -- not to mention creepy as hell -- that The Lone Gunmen, a series about crazy conspiracy theories, by-and-large "guessed" the precise nature of the biggest terrorist attack in U.S. history? It accurately guessed about the use of planes as weapons; plus it pointed out the target state, city and actual buildings. The episode even got the aftermath right: war against tin-pot dictators, using our expensive smart bombs as "shock and awe."

More than that, however, this Lone Gunmen episode anticipated the "conspiracy response" to 9/11 that has also arisen in the wake of the attacks.  A certain percentage (36%?) of American citizens don't believe the official story (Al Qaeda hijackers) and instead maintain that the government orchestrated the attacks. Indeed, this is Lone Gunmen's pre-event "explanation" of such an attack.

It's eerie and disturbing to contemplate all this. Yet, this isn't the first time that fact and imagination have mingled uncomfortably surrounding a global tragedy. To wit, in 1898, a writer named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel entitled Futility. The plot concerned the maiden voyage of the largest ocean liner ever built. On an April night, this fictitious vessel struck an iceberg. And -- because there were not enough lifeboats aboard -- more than one thousand passengers died in freezing waters. The name of the ship in that novel Futility is...Titan.

So, fourteen years before the Titanic disaster in 1912, author Robertson imagined a disaster at sea that would indeed come to pass. Consider some of the eerie similarities there. Titan was 70,000 tons in Futility; the Titanic 66,000 tons. Titan was 800 feet long; the Titanic 882 feet. The top sailing speed of both fictitious and real ocean liner was 25 knots. And even more bizarrely, both Futility's Titan and the real life Titanic were described with one memorable adjective: unsinkable. Both ships -- real and fictional -- struck icebergs and sank in the month of April.

The paranormal anthology One Step Beyond (1959-1961) dramatized a story based on this Titanic mystery titled "Night of April 14," in 1959, and I researched the story for my book. To my fascination, I found it authentic.

So, are writers such as Morgan Robertson and TV programs such as The Lone Gunmen just lucky (or unlucky) guessers about terrible things, or is what we have here some strange form of synchronicity: some form of intuitive "knowing" divined subconsciously or unconsciously?

Submitted for your approval, from The Twilight Zone, perhaps. 

But seriously, The Lone Gunmen pilot is worth remembering 25 years later. But prepare yourself. It's a sharp, scary, well-crafted piece of TV fiction; and one that *happens* to have a very disturbing relationship with our "real" history.

70 Years Ago: Forbidden Planet (1956)

"At times loud and frenzied, literally encircling the viewer with sight, sound, and fury, and at other times subtle and silently unnerving, Forbidden Planet is, on every conceivable level, a work of commercial art."

- Jeff Rovin. A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films. Citadel Press, 1975, page 78.

To assess the dynamic in purely Generation X-friendly terms, Forbidden Planet is to the 1950s what Star Wars is to the 1970s. 

Or perhaps what 2001: A Space Odyssey is to the 1960s.

In other words, Forbidden Planet is a visual space odyssey so involving, so expertly presented, so beautifully designed that it endures as a landmark in the history of the cinema.  

Even 70 years after its theatrical debut, Forbidden Planet still impresses, and on some level even terrifies, in significant degree due to the eerie "electronic tonalities" of the score devised by Louis and Bebe Barron.

Today, this 1956 film from director Fred M. Wilcox and writers Cyril Hume and Irving Block remains one of the boomer generation's most important genre touchstones, and has been referenced directly and indirectly in  a wide-range of high-profile sf productions including Serenity (2005) and Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek (1966 - 1969).   

The film's mostly-invisible villain, "The Monster from the Id," is one that is still well-known by name in the pop culture lexicon.

At the movie's core, Forbidden Planet concerns an anxious fear not of technology itself, but of the human application of technology.  Or, more directly, human hubris.  The film reveals that for mankind (much like the ancient Krell), the stars can be our destination.  But our species could also lose everything it holds dear by failing to understand the greatest mystery of the universe: the human psyche.

Buttressed by "superior special effects" (Science Fiction Films. Bison Books Corp., 1984, page 39), Forbidden Planet truly  "thought big" and thus shines yet as one of the most imaginative and compelling movie visions of the future. 

As a kid of the 1970s,  I grew up frequently reading in the protean genre press about how Forbidden Planet was one of the greatest science fiction movies ever made.  Regardless of factors such as generational loyalty or nostalgia, those testimonials are absolutely, positively accurate.  This has been one of my favorite and most beloved films for a long time.

Delightfully, even if divorced from its Atomic Age original context, Forbidden Planet remains provocative.  The film remembers what so many science fiction visions of today fail to acknowledge; the fact that human beings -- and human problems -- must remain at the heart of any forward-thinking work of art.  

After all, when man reaches the stars he will still be man, and his decisions and wisdom (or lack thereof) will always spark the most invigorating of dramas.  Awe-inspiring special effects are one thing (and Forbidden Planet certainly deploys such effects brilliantly), but a story that connects to us, here and now, on an emotional level trumps such technical achievements every time.

"The secret devil of every soul set loose on the planet all at once..."

In the 23rd century, mankind endeavors to to conquer space, thanks in large-part to the invention of the hyper-drive, which makes interstellar travel possible.

As Forbidden Planet commences, space cruiser C-57D under command of stolid J.J. Adams (Leslie Nielson) approaches Altair IV, a world previously visited some two decades earlier by the Bellerophon.  

On approach to Altair IV, Adams and his ship are warned away from the planet by Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), who insists that he won't be responsible for the outcome should Adams ignore his counsel.

Adams sets down anyway on the craggy surface of the planet and soon encounters Robby the Robot, Morbius's highly-advanced mechanical servant.  Robby takes Adams, "Doc" Ostrow (Warren Stevens) and Lt. Farman (Jack Kelly) back to Morbius's home, where they meet the man.

The grave, serious Morbius is the last surviving original member of the Bellerophon expedition and reports that "some dark, terrible, incomprehensible force" killed the other humans on his crew.  However, he has been safe and secure in the intervening nineteen years, living alone on the planet with just Robby (his construct; something he "tinkered together") and his beautiful if naive daughter, Altaira (Anne Francis).

The ship's crew responds enthusiastically (*ahem*) to the lovely Altaira, even as Adams determines he must contact home base to request further instructions regarding Morbius. 

Unfortunately, the cruiser's long range communication apparatus, the "Klystron Transmitter" is sabotaged at night by an unknown, apparently invisible foe.

In the days ahead, Morbius introduces Adams and Doc to the great archaeological find of Altair IV.  Beneath the scientist's house, inside a vast subterranean complex, stands an ancient power generator belonging to an alien race called the Krell.  The colossal machine -- whose exact purpose remains unknown -- is all that remains of the once super-advanced people. 

In fact, the Krell were so advanced that they visited Earth before man even walked the Earth, and brought back samples of the planet's wildlife, including tigers and deer.  

In one impressive alien laboratory, Morbius demonstrates a Krell educational game, a "brain boost" machine that he himself has experimented on, augmenting his own natural intellect in the process.    

Alarmingly, Morbius also reports that the Krell civilization vanished in one night, on the eve of an almost divine achievement: the creation of a device that could render unnecessary all forms of physical instrumentality.

Awed and a little disturbed by Morbius's alien discoveries, Adams believes Earth  and the "United Planets" must be permitted to share in the wealth.  Morbius objects to the captain's interference, however.   

As if in response, the terrifying invisible foe returns again and again, night by night, growing ever stronger...and ever more murderous.

"We're all part monsters in our subconscious.  So we have laws and religion."

As any college level English student can dutifully attest, Forbidden Planet appears loosely based on William Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1610).  

That work by the Bard revolves around Prospero, a man who has lived on a remote island with his daughter Miranda for twelve years.  

Prospero is served by a spirit called "Ariel" and uses the auspices of Ariel's magic to create a  storm (a tempest) at sea.  The storm causes a shipwreck and draws important visitors (Alonso, Ferdinand, etc.) to Prospero's island for his unique purposes of personal and family renewal.  

Importantly, also residing on Prospero's island is Caliban (think cannibal): a monster who utilizes magic for much darker purposes. In the end, Prospero renounces magic and Ariel is set free from servitude, while Miranda and King Alonso's son, Ferdinand, are free to marry.

Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest is frequently assessed a highly-reflexive work of art because it compares Prospero's use of magic with the magic of the theater.  Prospero's renunciation of magic at play's end is thus said to represent Shakespeare's own pull-back from the stage; his professional retirement, essentially.  The Tempest is also widely considered a "post-colonial effort," drawing specific interest because of the way that Prospero treats (and mistreats?) Caliban, Ariel and the other denizens of the faraway island.  

Forbidden Planet certainly shares an abundance of common narrative and thematic points with Shakespeare's final literary endeavor.  If you substitute Altair IV for the remote island, Morbius for Prospero, and Altaira for Miranda, the comparison begins to take shape.  Captain J.J. Adams -- as love interest for Altaira/Miranda -- is at least part Ferdinand, and the extraordinary Robby the Robot fits the bill as Ariel, the servant of Morbius/Prospero.  

What seems rather unique about the transference of The Tempest's scenarios to the futuristic realm of Forbidden Planet is that the makers of this classic sci-fi film have made some very intriguing switches or substitutions.   

Here, technology -- alien technology -- replaces magic or the occult.  Robby is not a "fairy" or "spirit" like Ariel, but rather a thinking machine created from super-advanced technology; Krell technology.  Just consider  Clarke's third law, of 1961. Advanced technology -- machines beyond our understanding -- appear as baffling as magic, right?

Furthermore, the film's "thing of darkness," to turn a Shakespearean phrase (Act II, Scene II), is positioned as a psychological, interior force, rather than as an exterior personality, Caliban.   It is the scientist/wizard's "id" in Forbidden Planet that creates problems, not a fellow and less honorable practitioner of the magical arts.   

Indeed, Forbidden Planet purposefully re-contextualizes Shakespeare's line in The Tempest that "we are such stuff as dreams are made of," so as to readily incorporate the the Id, which is one third of the human psychic apparatus as delineated by Sigmund Freud.  

Id is instinct.  Id is chaos.  It is aggression and destruction, with no overriding sense of morality, and it operates on passion and desire. Often, our nocturnal dreams  and phantasms are seen as the representative outlet of the Id, and in Forbidden Planet, Morbius -- immediately before his heroic demise -- explicitly names dreams as devious originator of his unpardonable sins.  

"What man can remember his own dreams?" Morbius asks desperately, suggesting that consciously he is fully separate from the the instinctive human urges which created the Monster from the Id and committed murder.  The truth is that the Monster here is actually a reflection of his basest, most primitive self.  Something that -- even in the era of space travel -- man cannot fully expunge.

Another substantial difference to consider when comparing The Tempest to Forbidden Planet involves the manner in which Morbius uses Robby.  Though it is clear from Morbius's demonstrations involving the robot that the scientist holds a kind of spell over him --  able to render Robby immobile with a simple voice command --  Morbius does not utilize Robby to bring visitors to his world.  

On the contrary, Morbius explicitly shuns such visitors while the cruiser is still in orbit.  This act separates him rather dramatically from his literary predecessor, Prospero.  In the denouement of both works, however, the non-human servant (Ariel/Robby) is freed from his master and takes part in the navigation away from the island/planet.  In Forbidden Planet's final scene, we see Robby at the controls of C-57D, having adjusted rather nicely to his new environs.

There are major differences in tenor as well.  In no significant or meaningful way does Forbidden Planet attempt to draw parallels between the technology of the Krell, for instance and the technological art form of film.  

On the contrary, Forbidden Planet plays its story completely straight, sometimes even underplaying moments so as to more fully erect a sense of complete, overwhelming reality about the film's universe.  Again, the idea at the root of the film is not a comparison of magic to art, but a comparison, rather, of  future technology to more current events, circa the mid-1950s.

In the Atomic Age, a literal Pandora's Box was opened thanks to the creation of The Bomb, and many people feared what could happen when mankind "tampers in God's domain."    That's the explicit fear of Forbidden Planet and the lesson to draw from the unfortunate, god-like Krell.  The film is about achieving a technological awareness that our species is not yet emotionally ready, not yet wise enough, to countenance.  No one man can possess such great power, and possibly use it wisely.

In terms of the post-colonial aspects of Shakespeare's work, again, Forbidden Planet differs significantly.  It is of interest here that both Morbius and Altaira treat Robby as a servant, but this seems no more than an oblique comment on human views of artificial intelligence, hardly applicable to the idea of post-colonial paternalism or racism.

The comparison to The Tempest appears most illuminating in understanding Forbidden Planet's theme: that of man harnessing a tool (whether magic or technology) responsibly.  The brief reference to the "Bellerophon" (the name of the first ship to visit Altair IV) expertly cements this thematic strand.  In Greek myth, Bellerophon is a demi-God and son of Poseidon who commits the crime of arrogance or hubris.  He attempts to fly Pegasus to Mount Olympus to reach the Gods, until Zeus retaliates (with a gad-fly), and Bellerophon falls back to Earth, forever broken by the experience.

Quite clearly, Morbius (a Bellerophon crew member) is the one who dramatically overreaches in Forbidden Planet, attempting to gain access to divine knowledge which is not his right nor his destiny.  Morbius's tale and Bellerophon's myth are both explicitly cautionary tales about human overreach.  In the film, J.J. Adams seems to recognize this in his impromptu requiem for the good doctor, and notes that the name Morbius will one day "remind us that we are, after all, not God.."  

Even the (unseen) demise of the Bellerophon space ship in Forbidden Planet seems to harken back to the myth.  Morbius describes how, during take off, it was pulled back and "vaporized," in flight.  Were the colonists going to share the secrets of the Krell with the outside world?  Were they reaching for Mount Olympus when they were downed?

"...a new scale of physical scientific values..."

An undeniable and perennial pleasure of Forbidden Planet is the style and epic scope of visual presentation.  This is a film that occurs entirely on a distant planet, and therefore involves both futuristic human technology and alien technology with absolutely no relation to Earth and our history or design aesthetics.

Consequently, no earthbound locations are featured -- redressed or not -- in Forbidden Planet, and nor were the film's makers able to rely on our modern digital technology (CGI).  Instead, a vast sound stage is converted into the expansive landing area of the C-57D, and some of the most impressive matte paintings you've ever seen are deployed, along with exceptional miniatures and some opticals, to diagram the world and scope of the Krell technology.

Morbius's house represents a splendid vision of what homes of the future might look like, from the inclusion of a "household disintegrator beam" disposal unit, to metal shutters, to an architectural scheme that incorporates both natural rock and plant-life right into the home's hearth.  

Although the C-57D's familiar "flying saucer" design may seem antiquated to some viewers, the interior of the ship is constructed in full, and in laborious detail: a multi-level affair with a central control station, hide-away bunk beds, and a "deceleration" post for braking (after light-speed).  And the impressive scene in which this craft lands on Altair -- and ladders descend and crew disembark -- plays as absolutely real, in part because so much of the craft's exterior has also been constructed to scale.  

Late in the film, Morbius takes Adams and Doc Ostrow on that extended tour of "the Krell Wonders" and this portion of the film is nothing less-than-awe-inspiring because of the visualizations, successfully living up to Morbius's high-minded description of a "new scale of physical values."   Morbius's matter-of-fact lecture during this tour only serves once more to effectively ground the film in a very substantial form of reality.  This is literally a tour, with a sort of teacher relating to us information about energy usage, power systems and more.  It might seem dry and lifeless to some, but the technical dialogue and professorial delivery actually serve a terrific purpose.  This approach enhances the believability of the enterprise.

This tour -- which plays as educational and real -- is a powerful contrast to the film's most visceral, memorable scene: the Monster from the Id's sustained attack upon the landed cruiser by night.  This particularly riveting sequence, with blazing laser weapons, crackling force-fields, and some unique wire-work (utilized to express the visual of spacemen caught in the grasp of the invisible monster) is still awe-inspiring and terrifying.  The famous monster is visible only sporadically -- an animated energy beast -- and thus terror is rigorously maintained.  The electronic tonalities I mentioned at the outset of the review also help out in maintaining the horror.  This planet and its monstrous denizen not only appear alien, but sound alien as well.  The monster's unearthly howl is not easily forgotten.

Some of the film's vistas also nicely eschew technology human ana alien for more natural settings.  There's an almost poetic shot and matte painting of the grave yard where the Bellerophon dead are buried.  Another shot evocative of the best pulp space art involves Altair at night, with two luminous moons hanging low in the black sky.  

In terms of design creativity then, Forbidden Planet is right off the charts.  Even today, science fiction films visualize holograms, force-fields, lasers and robots in much the same fashion as those concepts are crafted here.  Certainly, robots today are a little more streamlined than the wonderful Robby, but he remains quite impressive (and oddly lovable).  The New York Times' reviewer's words about him still hold up too.

He called Robby "a phenomenal mechanical man who can do more things in his small body than a roomful of business machines. He can make dresses, brew bourbon whisky, perform feats of Herculean strength and speak 187 languages, which emerged through a neon-lighted grille. What's more, he has the cultivated manner of a gentleman's gentleman. He is the prettiest piece of mechanism on Planet Altaire."  Easy, then, to detect why this robot has been beloved for several generations now.

In fact, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the makers of Forbidden Planet should feel remarkably flattered.  Star Trek adopted the film's "United Planets" template lock, stock and barrel, the captain/doctor relationship, and the Chief Quinn character (a Scotty-like miracle-worker) as part of its core, while Star Wars' C-3PO -- another robot of many languages --  and Lost in Space's B9 certainly owe much to Robby in concept and design.  We call this homage, of course.  

In the annals of cult television history, even The Tempest-like tale of a father and daughter living alone on a distant planet together has been oft-repeated, in Star Trek's "Requiem for Methuselah" and Space:1999's "The Metamorph" to name but two.  It is also said that Dr. Who's serial "Planet of Evil" derives from Forbidden Planet in name and concept.  It's a story of a scientist's good-intentioned overreach and devolution into a monster on a faraway world.

Forbidden Planet is a product of its time, and that means, among other things, that no racial minorities are featured in the film at all, which today may likely trouble some folks. Also, Alta is defined in the film largely by her reactions and relationships with the men in her life.   She goes from being an obedient daughter, to being an obedient romantic partner. She's not the independent spirit we might expect in today's cinema.  

But of course, the film was created in 1956, not 2026 and so was a projection of the future that included the America of that era as the foundation of everything.  Despite such concerns, Forbidden Planet remains a terrific and sometimes startling example of what traditional Hollywood can achieve in the genre when equipped with a good budget, a strong and literate script, and the most imaginative effects and production design possible for the day.

Forbidden Planet isn't a movie that was just "tinkered together" and nor is it "an obsolete" thing.  Contrarily, it's a sci-fi masterpiece that both inspires and warns us about our trajectory heading out there, into the Great Unknown.   

From Prospero in the 1600s to Dr. Morbius in the 23rd century, the human condition, it seems, remains a fragile, mysterious, and magical thing.

25 Years Ago: Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "The Body" (February 27, 2001)

If any episode of any TV series could be described as “too real,” Joss Whedon’s fifth season entry of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997 - 2003) called “The Body” would certainly fit the bill. This episode is heartbreaking and sad, and all too real. 

The episode came about because of Whedon’s own experience with sudden death in his family, as a young adult. The author used the truths he learned during that tragedy to craft an unforgettable episode that, in some ways, completes Buffy’s journey to adulthood.

 “The Body” involves the unexpected and not-supernatural death of a beloved character: Buffy’s mother Joyce, who had been played for four-and-a-half seasons by Kristine Sutherland.  As the episode begins, Buffy returns to her home, thinking all is well. She enters her house and shouts out “Hey Mom!” For her, everything is normal and happy But behind her, in the background of the shot, Joyce s dead on the sofa, having passed away because of a brain aneurysm. From here, the episode adheres closely to the stages of grief as diagrammed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 

Denial is Buffy’s immediate impulse. Buffy calls 911 for help, and as they work on her bother, we slip into Buffy’s thoughts, and a dream world. Joyce wakes up, and it’s a “beautiful miracle.” Then, she and Dawn are with an awake and happy Joyce in the hospital, noting she is “good as new,” and that Buffy saved her life by coming home when she did. It’s a dream fantasy that ends back in the real world, with Joyce still unresponsive, and cold, on the living room floor as the EMTs fail to bring her back.

The opening scene in “The Body” is extraordinary not only for capturing Buffy’s immediate reaction, denial of death, but the feeling that life is somehow now unreal, as she faces her mother’s death. For instance, there is a brief close-up of Buffy’s telephone, as if the keys which she should dial (to call Giles) are indecipherable. At one point, Buffy stands outside and there is no music on the soundtrack, only the distant sounders of wind-chimes and children playing. 

It feels like an extended moment of unreal time. Even the EMT, when he first approaches Buffy to tell her that there is nothing he can do to save Buffy, is blurry, out-of-focus. These strange moments capture how strange and unreal life feels when something terrible has occurred. Buffy’s off-kilter responses (like her almost mindless comment to the EMTs, “good luck”) visually and aurally capture the notion that Buffy has slipped into another dimension, one that is catastrophically real and irreversible.

 

The stage of anger comes into the episode with Xander’s presence. Xander comes from a very unhappy family life, and Joyce is, in some ways, the mother he wished he had. When Joyce dies, Xander goes off the rails, blaming the doctors who took care of Joyce for not preventing her death. He is so angry that he punches through a wall in Willow’s dorm room. His fist literally goes through the wall, and he can’t pull it out. When he does retract his hand, it is bloodied, and he has hurt nobody but himself.  As in life, the reaction to tragedy here is to look for someone responsible, someone to blame. Anger is easy, acceptance is hard.

Bargaining is not a stage of the Kubler Ross model focused on in detail here. Buffy doesn’t attempt to seek a supernatural remedy, for instance, for her mother’s death. She does not promise to be a “better daughter” before the eyes of God, either, if only her mother can be returned to her. 

However, it might fairly be stated that Willow and Anya go through aspects of the bargaining process. Anya will be a better human being, she hopes, if only someone can explain to her what “death” is. As a vengeance demon, she did not know mortality, or death. It is something new to her, and therefore something terrifying. She keeps awkwardly seeking answers about Joyce’s death, apologizing for her lack of text and knowledge, as if to “know” will make it easier.  

And Willow considers that she can’t “even be a grown-up” because she can’t choose the right wardrobe for the family visit to the morgue. It’s as if dressing correctly will somehow make Willow grown-up, and appropriate, and able to help Buffy. And, of course, that isn’t the case.

            

The fourth stage in the model is depression, and this might best be expressed in the latter half of the episode, in moments that involve both Dawn and Buffy.  At school, Dawn is seen crying over a slight from a class-mate, and then attending an art class in which the subject of the day is “negative space,” and the use of negative space in painting. Buffy takes Dawn out of class to tell her what has happened, and director Whedon makes an interesting visual choice. Instead of following the grieving sisters out into the hallway, where Buffy reveals the truth to Dawn, the camera stays planted in the classroom. The Buffy-Dawn scene is observed only from a distance, through a window, and the audience cannot hear what is said. It can only witness the impact of the news, as Dawn collapses into tears. Perhaps this is Whedon’s way of acknowledging that no one can truly “feel” the death of another’s loved one until it happens to their own loved ones. 

           

At the hospital, Buffy is quiet and withdrawn, both qualities of depression. It is hear that Tara attempts to explain to Buffy about her own experience with the death of her mother. She tells Buffy not to feel bad about “thoughts and responses” that she might not understand. In other words, there is no wrong way to grieve, no guidebook for dealing with such a tragedy.  The sad thing here is that Buffy may not be able to hear Tara’s words, because of her own depression and grief.

           

 The final stage of grief, acceptance, comes in the episode’s final composition. Buffy has just had to slay a vampire in the morgue to save Dawn. Dawn has fallen backwards, near Joyce’s body. She pulls the white sheet off Joyce’s face, and we see, without question, that her mother is dead and gone, just as Buffy said moments earlier ago. The episode cuts to black on that recognition. There is no arguing with death. Acceptance of it isn’t a matter of degrees. On seeing the corpse, Buffy and Dawn have no choice but to accept Joyce’s death.

            

“The Body” is a harrowing episode of the classic series, in part for how it deals with the swirl of emotions (and stages of grieving) brought on by a sudden, and senseless death of a loved one. The episode features almost no background music whatsoever, and this absence of a soundtrack makes the story feel all the more real. In real life, our loved ones don’t have loved ones, and music doesn’t reveal or illuminate our emotional states.  Instead, silence is real, awkward, and ever-present in grief. The silence represents, perhaps, the absence of the deceased’s voice. No other sound will possibly do, and yet it will never be heard again.

           

Another brilliant aspect of “The Body” involves the return to a frequent series theme: Buffy’s duty and obligation to be the slayer.  Here, she cannot even grieve her mother in peace. She can’t stop being the Slayer long enough to feel what she must to continue. Instead, she still must kill a vampire; must still be “on the job.” 

And this predicament is oddly truthful too. 

Loved ones die, and yet the world does not stop spinning to account for grieving. Bills still must be paid. One must still go to work, or raise children (or siblings), and or even go to school.  Although a death in the family feels like the end of the world, the world just keeps spinning.

            

For how it handles the grieving process, for how it treads into real pain, and does not use supernatural tropes to alleviate it, “The Body” remains a one-of-a-kind episode of this series, and one of the finest episodes in the canon to boot.