Late Night Blogging: The Worlds of Gerry Anderson

Cult-TV Blogging: Brimstone: "Heat" (October 30, 1998)

Brimstone hits its stride in the third episode produced (though second aired): “Heat” written by Janis Diamond and directed by Jesus Trevino. It hits that groove because the episode remembers a critical aspect of Detective Stone’s experience.

Like the 113 escaped convicts he pursues so relentlessly, Stone went to hell for his immorality. He is, in some significant sense, a lot like the men and women he hunts.  They are all sinners, and have all faced punishment for their sins.

The aspect of Brimstone that thus makes it a great television show is Stone’s reckoning that there are indeed shades of gray in terms of humanity’s understanding of his actions, but the hierarchy in the universe --represented by God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell -- is not gray.  Contrarily, it is black-and-white. 

How is Stone to account for this fact?  For the idea that humanity can see a whole range of moral solutions to problems, but the universe itself views matters of morality only in rigid absolutes?

Hence this week’s story, called “Heat.”  It involves a girl who lived in the Middle Ages, named Gwendolyn, who has escaped from Hell, but is still experiencing the post-traumatic stress associated with her victim hood in life.  

When Gwen was a young woman, a group of squires burned her house and then repeatedly raped her.  She reported the crime but was told by the local clergy that, essentially, boys will boys, and that all those squires were from noble families. Hence nothing could be done, or should be done.

Gwen responded to this crime and injustice by visiting terror upon the squires. She burned them alive.  And for that act, she went to Hell when she died.  

Now, back on Earth, each time Gwendolyn attempts to make love to a man, memories of the rape cause her to, literally, burst into flame.  Any modern lover she takes to bed dies from the unearthly heat her body generates. 

When Detective Stone learns the specifics of Gwendolyn’s crime, he associates her behavior with his own transgression.  He killed his wife’s rapist, Gilbert Jax, in cold blood.  And like Gwendolyn, he went to Hell for taking the law into his own hands. 

It’s even worse than that, for Stone, here.  In “Heat,” he learns from a psychiatrist, played by Lindsay Crouse, that many rape victims never fully recover from this crime.  Stone wonders if this is what has happened to Rosalyn.

Accordingly, Stone confronts the Devil (John Glover) and refuses to send Gwendolyn back to Hell, feeling that she has suffered enough.  “I won’t do it,” he tells him.  The Devil, however, has Stone over a barrel.  Sympathy is fine, but if Stone won’t do the Devil’s work, then the Devil will find another inmate who will. 

And doesn’t Stone want that second chance to live? That chance to reunite with his wife, with Rosalyn?

Stone’s dilemma makes for a great character conflict and Brimstone triumphs when it examines the morality of crimes, and juxtaposes those crimes with Stone’s history. 

“Heat” also cements Stone’s persona here, in terms of how he treats suspects that he questions.  It’s a kind of Kolchak: The Night Stalker vibe, actually.  Stone is  a little suspicious, a little bemused, and a little pushy when sussing out information.  

Also, those suspects here are depicted in the same way they are on Night Stalker: as quirky, individual, and a little bit funny.  In “Heat” we see this dynamic in terms of the haughty college resident monitor, and in terms of the Goth chick Stone interviewees.  She tells him “There’s no law against worshiping the devil,” for instance, and Stone bites his tongue.

She might want to rethink that life choice…

“Heat” also represents a turning point for Brimstone because it involves a hell convict that doesn’t really deserve to go back to Hell; one the audience can sympathize with.  In “Poem” and the “Pilot,” that was most definitely not the case.  

In both of those cases, the convict was evil and committing further evil acts.  Gwendolyn, by contrast, is just trying to figure out who she is, where she fits in, and how, finally, to find the love that eluded her in her life, before it ended.

The episode also works -- as so many entries do -- because John Glover is entirely amazing in the role of the Devil.  He’s a real scene-stealer. Early in the episode, he asks Stone: “What are you going to do?  Kill me like you killed your wife’s rapist?”  He makes the line almost playful.  And finally, he delivers one-liners such as the delightfully wicked: “Stop and smell the burning flesh of sinners.”  It takes an actor with real aplomb, a nd a certain heightened sense of self, too vet such dialogue with so much charm and such authority.

This is the very first episode of Brimstone I ever saw, during its run on Fox television, and “Heat” was good enough to get me hooked.  The idea of “dangerous sex” is certainly a cult-tv cliché, one featured on many programs, from Torchwood to the 1990s Outer Limits.  But despite that familiar convention, “Heat” doesn’t feel lurid or sleazy.  On the contrary, Gwendolyn is a truly tragic character, and it’s appropriate that Stone treats her with sympathy…at least as far as he can.

It's great that a series about a universe of absolutes finds the space to contemplate the in-between.  And it won't be the last time it happens on Brimstone, either.

Next episode: "Encore."

The Films of 1983: WarGames (1983)

The genre films of 1983 focused largely on two subjects.  The first was computers and computer video games.  And the second was nuclear war with the Soviet Union. 

And in some rare instances -- such as WarGames (1983) -- the two topics aligned perfectly.

The year 1983 saw Richard Pryor’s super-computer menace the Man of Steel in Superman III, and Sean Connery’s James Bond back in action in Never Say Never Again to battle Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer) over a video game of (nuclear) “Global Domination.”

Meanwhile, in the horror anthology Nightmares, Emilio Estevez got zapped into an arcade game to combat the artificial intelligence called “The Bishop of Battle.” 

In terms of nuclear war, 1983 was the year of the terrifying Nicholas Meyer TV-movie The Day After.   That unforgettable film showcased the gruesome effects of a nuclear war on Americans in Kansas.  Another affecting film of 1983 concerning nuclear war was Testament, starring Jane Alexander.

Why the Hollywood obsession with both computerized games and nuclear war in 1983? 

On the former front, Atari, Intellivision, the Commodore Vic20 and other technological platforms had altered the American landscape permanently in terms of home media gaming and computing.  Suddenly, computers were making the move into every middle-class home in the nation.  The “future” was here.

On the latter front, President Ronald Reagan had been swept into office in 1980 on a platform of economic recovery, but he was also, at least initially, a hawk regarding nuclear war.  In fact, his administration was a strong proponent for a concept called winnable nuclear war, as the historical record clearly demonstrates.

President Reagan’s adviser, Richard Pipes, in 1982, for instance, noted the “probability of nuclear war is forty percent….and our strategy is winnable nuclear war.” 

Meanwhile, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, T.K. Jones remarked in 1981 that “The United States could recover from an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union in just two to four years…Nuclear war is not nearly as devastating as we have been led to believe.  If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it.  Dig a hole in the ground, cover it up with a couple of doors, and then cover the doors with three feet of dirt…”

In 1981 President Reagan himself noted that there could (safely) be a “limited nuclear war in Europe.” His vice-president, George H.W. Bush, in 1980 even described how to prove victorious in the nuclear war scenario:  “You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have the capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict upon you.  That’s the way you have a winner.”

Meanwhile, on February 5, 1981, future Secretary of the Interior James Watt noted to Congress that there might not be "many future generations...before the Lord returns."  

When one couples the pervasive rah-rah attitude about waging winnable nuclear war with the apocalyptic Christianist visions of many Administration officials, including Reagan himself -- as was reported in People Magazine in December 1983 (where he explained that the eighties represented the first time in history that so many Biblical prophecies were coming true...) -- one can understand why many Americans, especially young ones, felt very afraid about the future

Some have credited his viewing of The Day After (1983) as the very thing that turned Ronald Reagan from an ardent warrior in the winnable-nuclear war sweepstakes to a staunch proponent for peace with the Soviet Union. He had to face down the more right-wing elements of his own party -- including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who wrote a letter to the Washington Post urging the president not to give up the nuclear store) -- to wage that fight

Today, we can be grateful for President Reagan’s change of heart, and for his persistence at Geneva and Reykjavik in the mid-to-late 1980s, but WarGames -- released in 1983 -- very clearly obsesses on the inherent madness of the “winnable” nuclear war scenario; the very attitude still prevalent in our national defense establishment in 1982.

Specifically, WarGames sees advanced computers as bringing man one step closer to all-out nuclear Armageddon, primarily because machines don’t boast any sense of morality. 

If men can't act according to human decency and conscience, what are the chances their machines will? 

For a movie about the end of the world, however, WarGames is surprisingly sweet and gentle in its prognosis. The “villainous” computer that nearly initiates World War III is treated with humanity by the film's protagonist, and eventually taught the error of its ways. It is “schooled” by the best of the human race -- kids -- so that it understands that the only way to win a nuclear war is simply not to play. 

Interestingly, the case the humans make in the film is not one explicitly about morality (which a machine can’t fathom, I suppose), but about futility, as empirically demonstrated by numbers..  The computer runs through a nearly-infinite series of test war simulations in a matter of seconds and determines that, in every conceivable permutation of thermonuclear war, there is no winner.  

Why engage in a game in which there is no victor?

Nearly thirty years after it premiered, WarGames remains a lot of fun, even if it is not as powerful as it once was.  In particular, the John Badham film features some deft visuals and certainly has a lot of heart.  Of course, the threat of nuclear apocalypse no longer hangs over the world and so it is easier, in some sense, to dismiss the film and its eighties era fears as fantasies, or relics of a time long gone.  

Robbed of its timely currency, WarGames loses some impact in 2012 and even seems dull at spots.  It’s a good film, to be certain, but I remember seeing it in 1983 and thinking how terribly plausible it all seemed.  Watching it this weekend, I was struck by pleasant feelings of nostalgia, but not consumed with excitement or fear.

 “Let’s play Global Thermonuclear War.”

Hoping to preview a new exciting game from a company called Protovision, high-school student and computer whiz David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) accidentally hacks into a computer at NORAD, the W.O.P.R. (War Operations Plan Response).  

David engages the machine in a game of Global Thermonuclear War, unaware that the game could have catastrophic real life ramifications.

After David is arrested by officials at NORAD, he learns that the machine is still playing the war game, and that only some know-how insight from its creator, Dr. Falken (John Wood) can stop W.O.P.R., or “Joshua.”  David escapes from custody and with his girlfriend, Jennifer (Ally Sheedy), sets out to find Falken, now a recluse following the death of his family.

At first, Falken is unwilling to help, believing that “extinction is part of the natural order,” but David and Jennifer soon persuade him to help them stop the countdown to nuclear Armageddon. 

“People sometimes make mistakes.”

WarGames opens with a frightening scenario. Two military men in a bunker are given the order to launch nuclear missiles and, in essence, destroy 20 million lives.  

One man can’t do it.  One man can. But without both men on the same page, the missiles don’t fire. 

Upon audit of this event, the Army and Administration officials are very upset.

If the President wants to launch a nuclear attack, he can’t have a 22% failure rate because his soldiers have an outbreak of morality over causing mass murder, can he?

Instead of honoring human morality, the Armed Forces and Administration decide that the way to remedy this situation is to remove mankind from the loop entirely; to take men out of those launch stations and replace them with computer relays that operate automatically, and are connected to a machine called W.O.P.R.

In other words, it is better to double down on the concept of winnable nuclear war than to question if global self-destruction and mass murder are actually rational courses of action.

This opening sequence remains one of WarGames' finest.  It is tense, well-acted, and it immediately sets the stakes.  We quickly sympathize with the soldiers tasked with destroying the world, and gasp at how stupid the bureaucrats are.  They want to have their nuclear war no matter what, and are not going to let a little thing like individual conscience stop them.  By stumbling down this particularly repugnant path (and never looking back…), they nearly doom the entire human race to extinction.

On a much more human and intimate level, WarGames also proves intriguing today because it understands that the future of human race involves, largely, people gazing at screens.  

In this movie, there are big screens, little screens, arcade game screens, home computer screens, and wall-sized screens displaying Missile Command-like graphics, not to mention Tic-Tac-Toe playing boards.  

Plainly, the idea here is that man has crossed a threshold into a new world, one where computers are at the center of every facet of life, whether it is playing games, booking airline tickets, or waging war.  And yes, this observation is prophetic in terms of 1983's understanding of the future.  Today, we do all those things by computer on a regular basis, and many of us spend eight-hours a day, five days a week gazing at monitor screens.

Screens, screens everywhere...

Would you like to play a game?

Accordingly, several times throughout WarGames, director Badham cuts to images of these myriad screens, and we detect a human face reflected upon them.  This image could be considered a visual way of “boxing in” the characters’ usable space in the composition, positioning them in a frame-within-a-frame, and thus revealing their entrapment or enslavement by the machine.   

Or it could be, perhaps more trenchantly, a way of suggesting a shared world.  People like David are seen, literally, inside the confines of the computer screens, via their reflections.  Have we built "children" that will one day be our equals?

The question this brand of composition raises is simple: Are we a reflection of our computers?  Or are they a reflection of us?  If we fail to teach our machines our morality, how can they accurately reflect us, their masters and "parents"?  

Contrarily, we could ask: do the computers we stare at all day succeed, instead, in “de-humanizing” us, turning matters of life and death into exercises in statistics, percentages and other equations?

What happens to mankind when life-and-death decisions are reduced to math?  In examining that question, WarGames is a cautionary tale about handing over too much authority, and ceding too much humanity, to computers.

The frequent compositions in WarGames that reveal computer screens, and human reflections “locked” inside them, suggest in uncomfortable ways, a fear of computers and technology, but also a fear of deeper symbiosis with our tools and instrumentation.   If the world were destroyed in the scenario presented by this film, it would be because we failed to make our machines a real reflection of our hopes and dreams, it seems.  It will be because we have failed as parents.

Are we reflections of our creations?

Or are they reflections of us?

In some oblique way, WarGames also implies that self-annihilation is in our very nature.  Falken suggests that “nature knows when to give up,” and seems to believe that man has reached that threshold because he has constructed machines -- computerized sons and daughters, essentially -- who lack our conscience and capacity to care.   Only when W.O.P.R. creates a “computer enhanced hallucination” of the end of the world do people readily detect how they are gambling with the world’s future, and humanity’s future by handing over control of our weaponry to the machines.

One quality I have always admired about the film involves the solution to this problem.  There isn’t some all-out effort to destroy or unplug W.O.P.R. in WarGames.  Instead, David runs the seemingly-curious machine through the rounds of Tic-Tac-Toe so it can understand futility; how two sides of equal strength can fight to a draw…but  no better. 

This solution suggests that machines are not really such bad sorts after all, if they can -- like us -- gain practical experience.  Fortunately, W.O.P.R. can play a few thousand simulations of Tic-Tac-Toe and Global Thermonuclear War in a few minutes and arrive at the conclusion that there is no winning strategy.   He just needs to be taught, and humanity needs to teach him.

In the character of Falken, we very much see this idea of a “father” figure.  He has even named W.O.P.R. “Joshua” after his dead son.  But because W.O.P.R. is a machine, Falken has been able to walk away from his creation both physically and emotionally, and become a kind of absentee parent.  When David communicates with W.O.P.R. as Dr. Falken by using his password, there even seems to be a longing on the machine’s part for his father’s presence.  He seems to have missed him, after a fashion.  

In many ways, that idea of being “responsible parents” to our technology is more timely today than the nuclear countdown or thriller aspects of WarGames.  The technology is different in 2012, but the problem, perhaps, hasn't really changed.

I remember first seeing WarGames in 1983 and being absolutely terrified by it.  Today, that emotional response seems a little silly, given the film’s abundant sense of humor and the jokey scenes involving Broderick and Sheedy as they hack into NORAD and evade capture. 

But what’s impossible to convey if you didn’t live through the eighties is just how pervasive the fear of nuclear war was, circa 1980 – 1983.  I remember going to sleep almost every night and worrying about nuclear war.  

Where would we go to survive?  How would we live?  What if it happened when I was away at college, and I couldn't re-connect with my family?  

These were not remote, intellectual issues for cerebral or dispassionate debate.  

As a thirteen year old, these were the thoughts that I ended each day with as I fell into slumber. These thoughts were never far from consciousness, and certainly many films of the era, from the Mad Max trilogy to Dreamscape (1984), from Night of the Comet (1984) to WarGames tapped into this pervasive apocalypse mentality.

But today, divorced from its original context, WarGames almost seems gentle or quaint compared to our modern entertainment.  It hasn't aged terrifically well.  

Still, I can assure you, when I was thirteen years old this John Badham movie had me on the edge of my seat throughout, and I wondered -- and worried -- if today could be doomsday.   I'm very grateful that in 2012 my son has no such thing to worry about, and that his sleep is untroubled by the specter of idiocies like "winnable" nuclear war. 

Movie Trailer: WarGames (1983)

Theme Song of the Week: Ashes to Ashes (2008)

Late Night Blogging: James Bond Trailers (Daniel Craig Era)

The Top Five; James Bond Fight Sequences

The Bond films are known for spectacular stunts, gorgeous women, ingenious gadgets, memorable bad guys and inventive (if mad) plans to take over the world.   But they are also known for their dazzling, brutal fight sequences.

At some point in every Bond film, the story comes down to Bond against one opponent, with only fists, feet -- and whatever targets of opportunity are available -- making the difference between life and death.

By my reckoning a great fight scene is one with inventive targets of opportunity (Bond using what’s on hand to defeat the bad guy), a great setting, a sense of suspense, and a feeling of exhilaration.  That last bit -- the exhilaration – is meted largely by how the fight is filmed and edited.

My top five selections are.

5.  On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), Beach Fight, Pre-Title Sequence.

Here the new Bond (George Lazenby) attempts to rescue a beautiful damsel in distress, Tracy (Diana Rigg) but is intercepted by Draco’s hulking goons.  Bond is held at gunpoint when he seizes a target of opportunity (an oar on a beached row boat), and leaps into action.  Bond and a goon then duke it out in the roaring surf, with crashing waves all around.  The tide serves to accelerate the pace of the fight.

This beach battles boasts the distinction of not only being suspenseful, but beautifully rendered in terms of imagery.  Silver moonlight makes the ocean shine brightly in this scene, while Bond and his nemesis appear as circling black silhouettes.  The editing is fast-paced, but the camera occasionally steps back far enough to establish a sense of geography, and in these infrequent establishing shots, a large, very-sharp hook is visible in the foreground, a visual indicator of the life and death nature of the battle.

This fight is essentially George Lazenby and director Peter Hunt’s audition film, and they both pass it with flying colors.

4. Diamonds are Forever (1971), Elevator Fight.

This Bond entry is at the low-end of the totem pole, in terms of my affection.  It’s a sort of fat, bloated, listless film. 

But early in Diamonds are Forever, Bond goes up against Peter Franks (Joe Robinson), a jewel smuggler.  The two men fight in an extremely tight setting: a cramped elevator.  The setting is so tight, in fact, that almost each time a character pulls back to deliver a punch, an elbow shatters glass on the elevator windows. 

Because this fight arena is so small, in fact, the two men are constantly being thrown into the elevator control switch, making the car stop and start its ascent towards Tiffany Case’s (Jill St. John) apartment, another wild card in the fight. 

The fight features broken light bulbs, shattered panes, and more.  At one point, Franks picks up a shard of jagged glass and attempts to stab Bond with it, one of those all-important “targets of opportunity” I mentioned above.

This fight is very different from the one I describe above in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.  There isn’t a lot of quick cutting, and not a lot of camera position shifts either.  Instead, it’s just Sean Connery and Joe Robinson (and their stuntmen, no doubt), pounding brutally on one another, sometimes for long stretches.  

This is one of the meanest grudge matches in the long-lived series, an absolutely life-or-death struggle.

3. Thunderball (1965). Pre-Title Sequence: Bond vs. Count Bouvar.

Setting and context play a crucial part in making this Thunderball fight scene so memorable.  Bond attends a funeral, but then rather suddenly breaks movie decorum when he meets the grieving widow in a large, royal-seeming sitting room.  What does he do??  He punches her in the face.

The moment is quite shocking, but we soon realize Bond has tagged his opponent (really legendary Bond stuntman Bob Simmons) as Colonel Jacques Bouvar of SPECTRE.

The two men then fight in a contest that -- visually speaking -- is edited to within an inch of its life.  The cuts are sharp, the movements sudden, and targets of opportunity are everywhere.  Before the fight is done, a table, a grandfather clock, a chair, a large bureau, hanging tapestries and other pieces of furniture all thrown into the mix, and in rapid-fire succession. 

The fight’s final punctuation is great too: Bond’s nemesis ends face first in a fireplace, and then Bond chokes him to death with a poker that Bouvar had previously yielded as a weapon. Yikes!

Later Bond films often imitated this particular fighting style (I’m thinking of the glass factory fight in Moonraker [1979], in particular) because it is not just a man-against-man contest, but a two-person demolition derby or wrecking crew.

2. Goldfinger (1964): Fort Knox Fight: 007 vs. Odd Job.

It’s probably fair to term Goldfinger the “gold standard” in terms of Bond films, if you’ll pardon the pun.   It very much sets the tone of the film series in a variety of ways, from the tongue-in-cheek pre-title sequence, to the pop title tune.  The final confrontation between Goldfinger and Bond in Fort Knox is no exception.  

Here we have a fantastical or out-of-this-world type setting (with gold bricks stacked on all sides), the colorful and physically powerful soldier villain, Odd Job, and a bomb ticking down to destruction to generate suspense.

That bomb plays a critical role in the action too. Unlike in the other fight scenes tagged in this list, no music accompanies the grudge match between Bond and Oddjob.  Instead, we hear only the persistent hum of that atomic bomb.  It reminds us constantly of the stakes, which is a good thing.  We know that the game isn’t simply stopping Odd Job, but defusing the bomb before it explodes.

Finally, this fight culminates with a great target of opportunity.  Outmatched and outfought by Oddjob, Bond targets a loose electrical cable, and electrifies a wall where Odd Job’s metal-rim has lodged, thus killing his opponent.  If you can’t out-fight your enemy, out-think him…

1. From Russia with Love (1963): Train Fight: Bond vs. Red Grant.

From the opening moments of From Russia with Love, the film establishes Red Grant (Robert Shaw) as the man who has been trained to kill James Bond.  This is his reason for being. 

When Bond and Grant thus meet for their vicious fight in a train car, it is the battle between two men whose capacities for lethality the audience knows quite well.  We’ve seen Bond in action several times by now, and know he can handle himself in a fight.  But we’ve seen Grant in action too, with his watch-garrot…killing a Bond double and others.   This fight is as much about characters as it is about thrills. 

Who has the edge?  The killer instinct? Grant has prepared for this fight for some time.  Bond, on the other hand, must rely on his wits and instincts.  He doesn’t know his enemy the way Grant knows him.

The actual fight is not only fast-paced, and brilliantly-edited, but buttressed by the fact that there appear to be no stunt doubles.  It really looks like Connery and Shaw are slugging it out, and vying for superiority, and the sense of authenticity is incredibly powerful. 

This fight feels frighteningly and painfully real, and though we are conditioned to expect that the hero always wins, there’s still a sense of uncertainty too; a sense that Bond has met his match.   It’s the greatest Bond fight ever, in one of the best films in the series.

Cult-TV Theme Watch: Tattoos

A tattoo is a form of body art involving indelible ink. Thus, it is a permanent form of body art.  American attitudes about tattoos have moved towards deeper acceptance over the last decade or so, but tattoos have still often played an often sinister role in many well-known cult-tv programs.

For instance, in a first season episode of the syndicated Friday the 13^th: The Series (1987 – 1990) titled “Tattoo,” a gambler uses cursed tattoo needles which can materialize any monstrosity carved into the flesh (including scorpions and spiders) to further his winning streak.

Similarly, one of the most high-profile episodes of The X-Files (1993 – 2002), “Never Again,” involves a man named Ed Jerse (Rodney Rowland) who gets a tattoo depicting Bettie Page (with the voice of actress Jodie Foster). 

Before long, the tattoo starts urging Ed to commit anti-social acts of violence.  In the course of the episode, a rebellious Scully (Gillian Anderson) -- chafing under Mulder’s tutelage -- meets Ed and gets a tattoo herself, one of an Ouroboros.  The scene of Scully being tattooed proves rather…sensuous, but the danger is that the tattoo (containing ergot) could send her, like Ed, over the precipice into insanity.

The same year, 1997, a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Dark Age” (1997) involved a tattoo. This story finds a group of Rupert Giles’ friends from his rebellious teenage days dying under strange, supernatural circumstances.  

Each one bears the “Mark of Eyghon,” a tattoo representing a body-jumping demon.  In this case, the tattoo represents the adolescent penchant to make anti-authoritarian decisions, only there’s a magical (and demonic) repercussion.

The UPN disease-of-the-week program called The Burning Zone (1997) also featured an episode involving tattoos called “Elegy for a Dream.”  There, Dr. Taft (Bradford Tatum) discovers that a Yugoslavian tattoo parlor is using contaminated tools and ink, and thus responsible for an outbreak in high school of a flesh-eating virus.

In the short-lived Brimstone (1998 – 1999) on Fox, Detective Stone (Peter Horton) sees his (resurrected) flesh covered entirely in strange, unearthly tattoos.  These are actually prisoner identification emblems from Hell, indicators of prisoner identity.  

When Stone sends each escaped convict back to Hell and damnation (by destroying the eyes), that convict’s tattoo burns off his flesh…painfully.

In Smallville (2001 – 2011), Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk) is at one point in the fourth season unexpectedly marked by a tattoo on the small of her back that marks her as the vessel for an ancient witch’s evil spirit.  

For a time, in the episode “Spell,” Lana hosts the witch’s form, and also transforms Lois and Chloe into members of her coven.

Since the 1990s, tattoos have become more and more common, and as mere fashion statements rather than expressions of evil.  

In Star Trek: Voyager’s (1995 – 2001) Chakotay (Robert Beltran) is distinguished by his Native American heritage, and a symbol of that heritage is the tattoo on his temple and forehead.  

You know a trend has gone mainstream when it appears on 1990s Star Trek, and that's the case with tattoos, to be certain.

Characters including Stefan (Paul Wesley) on The Vampire Diaries, Mal (Nathan Fillion) on Firefly and Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) on the re-imagainted Battlestar Galactica all have marked their bodies with tattoos as well.

The Cult-TV Faces of: The Tattoo

Identified by SGB: Friday the 13th: The Series: "Tattoo."

2

Identified by Terri Wilson: The X-Files: "Never Again."

Identified by Terri Wilson:  The X-Files: "Never Again."

Identified by Dave Colohan: Chakotay (Robert Beltran) on Star Trek: Voyager.

6

7

8

Identified by Hugh: Captain Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) in Firefly.

10

Identified by Dave Colohan: Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) on the new BSG.

Identified by Dave Colohan: Vince (C.S. Lee) on Dexter.

Identified by Essence: Supernatural's Djinn.

Identified by Hugh: Stefan Salvatore (Paul Wesley) in The Vampire Diaries.

4

Identified by SGB: Weevil (Francis Capra) on Veronica Mars.

Television and Cinema Verities #39

“It didn’t occur to me on any kind of conscious level, but what this guy [a psychologist] was saying was that Night of the Comet was like a reflection of where teenagers are in their personality development.  At that point, they’re still extremely egocentric.  They believe the world orbits around them, and that their concerns are the only ones that matter.  They have little concern for anybody or anything around them.  He said that Night of the Comet is a visual representation of that stage. There are these two girls and nothing else matters.  I wasn’t doing that on a conscious level, but it makes a lot of sense.  I had no illusions when I did it that this was anything more than a drive-in movie.”

- Writer-director Thom Eberhardt discusses with me the psychological underpinnings of Night of the Comet (1984). From Horror Films of the 1980s, page 402.