So. The Fabulous Boyfriend is currently on the other side of the planet, on business. As usual, I have gone straight into Geeky Bachelor Mode. This includes too much late-night television and/or websurfing.
I have just seen my first episode of Starhunter. Apparently it was finale of season one.
The bounty-hunter ship upon which most of the series takes place has some inspired touches: story goes that it’s a rustbucket decommissioned cruiseliner, so the cabins and bridge and corridors are all full of little backlit stained-glass windows. But the rest of the set looks like something out of Red Dwarf with a coat of gray-green paint: plastic panels full of buttons and switches, Naugahyde, the works. The whole thing is shot on the same sort of video stock that Doctor Who used, which is hard to describe but you’d recognize it if you saw it. The ship’s computer is a hologram. There’s a woman who looks like the black Minnie Driver.* There’s a Severe Villainessthink a bleach-blonde Servilanwho can’t seem to decide if she’s from England or Connecticut. There are cheesy video overlay effects. There are some halfway decent CGI starship sequences. Acting styles are all over the road but generally run the gamut from “pretentious” to “stilted.” Every now and then something happened that was obviously supposed to be dramatic or poignant but lacked any sort of emotional punch. Ooh, and best of all! They’ve even got a Wesley! A Teenage Boy Genius with Dimension-Warping Powers! And the villainess has to call him “The Chosen One” with a straight face! Priceless.
Basically, this show left me with two impressions:[ul][li]Huh. It’s like the entire production team of Blake’s 7 fell through a time warp to 2002 Toronto, spent 20 minutes learning about current technologies and themes in SF television, and immediately got to work on a new show. Only this one kinda sucks.[/li][li]WTF?[/ul]As it turned out, I was wrong on the first count. It’s actually shot in New Brunswick. But I stand by the second one.[/li]
Has anybody else seen this thing? Has it been successful anywhere? Will there be a second season? It was horrible, but I was strangely transfixed. Tell me about what I just saw. If you’d like some more reference material, here’s the promo spot for the episode I saw.
Discuss.
*Seriously. It freaked me out. Not a strike against the show, but noteworthy nonetheless.