My Apology to Starhunter Redux

Michael Paré as Dante Montana.

I owe low-budget sci-fi series Starhunter Redux, which I've been watching on Amazon Prime, an apology.

I'm sorry for calling you "total ass", that your sets look like total amateur shit, and for saying you're worse than Star Trek: Voyager on a bad day. You are none of those things.

Well, maybe a few of those things. The obscure, 44-episode series was definitely shot on a shoestring. Not a "Doctor Who in the 70s" tin-foil and cellophane budget, but pretty close. This "Redux" version released in 2017 updates the CGI shots and visuals...I can only imagine what VideoToaster monstrosity came before it.

As for the show itself, it's fairly simple as sci-fi premises go. It's the future, 2275. A rag tag motley crew of bounty hunters traipse frontier star systems hunting escaped criminals. They fly about in their retrofitted cruise liner, the "Tulip." It's crewed by a stoic, cowboy looking, anti-heroic captain (Michael Paré as Dante Montana); an impulsive yet tortured ex-soldier first mate (Claudette Roche as Lucretia Scott); and Dante's adopted niece (Tanya Allen as Percy Montana) serving as chief engineer, comic relief, and a child-like naive foil to the hard-boiled command crew. Oh, and there's a floating AI called Caravaggio (Murray Melvin), who's a cross between Batman's Alfred and the Mother on the Nostromo (Alien). I wish I was kidding.

Spoilers ahead.

Having a look through Amazon Prime, I thought I'd give it a go. I fucking loved Space Precinct 2040, another streaming hidden gem.

Oh boy. It did not start well.

The CGI was something out of a student project; sets held together with bubblegum and balsa wood. Red Dwarf could have pulled this off...but it was supposed to be funny. Then the story began.

I was laughing my ass off in the first episode; a leader of the shadowy organisation "The Orchard" kept referring to "genes" over and over. Eventually my mind shut down and I started thinking of denim jeans... it was all downhill from there.

However it revealed a crucial piece of lore: The Orchard is tasked with sequencing the last unknown parts of the human genome, unlocking humanity's elevation to a higher plane of existence; "The Divinity Cluster." There's a bit of shakiness to the stories, but its rather well executed science fiction nonetheless.

An entire back story to Lucretia as a soldier details her liberating a cruel medical experimentation facility on Callisto. The experiments, conducted by a Dr. Mengele style character, sparked a genocide of "pure" humans against cybernetic or genetic "augments"; the story was particularly heartbreaking, especially when she confronts the Mengele character head on.

All this sounds like they're ripping off Cowboy Bebop, Firefly, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, except these predate both by a number of years (Starhunter debuted in 2000: so two in the case of Firefly.) Even so, similarities to these and other shows definitely don't end there.

The series thus far has a Doctor Who vibe; adventurers unbound by a "hero's code" or Prime Directive. They're thrust into solving other people's problems while trying to make a quick buck. They're usually navigating some gnarly moral grey areas and duking it out in some bargain-basement action sequences.

Oh yeah, it's done on the very cheap. Which is fine - science fiction can be as cheap as it wants and still be good science fiction.

Cheap Science Fiction is Still Science Fiction

Science fiction as a visual medium requires so much of the viewer's intellectual attention and imagination to fill in the gaps. Yes friends, the Doctor's TARDIS - a blue police box - is bigger on the inside. It also goes anywhere in time and space. If it looks shoddy and made out of plastic, who cares? The fact that it exists at all requires an extreme suspension of disbelief in the first place.

The better the visuals, the more the imagination suffers. The shitty cave in Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet, in which Tom Baker's Doctor paces back and forth because they've only got about three feet of green screen to work with, would look like complete shit if it were a crime series or adventure film (Just go to a regular cave??). The fact they're walking on a destroyed surface of a planet sandwiched between a planet crushing spaceship makes it look feel like it was plucked whole from Douglas Adams' mind and committed to film. It's real enough to tell the story; that's what matters. Those ofay with sci-fi know the score.

My beloved Babylon 5 looks like shit. Really, really bad. It'll only look worse as time goes on and production values go up. If Babylon 5 was a book reliant on imagination alone, it's would be one of the most compelling and and wonderous science fiction books ever written. It's outstanding, especially considering creator and writer J. Michael Straczynski went through an ordeal to realise his vision at all.

In modern storytelling, we can conjure near-real computer-generated, well, anything you can think of. We don't really have to imagine an "eldritch terror" like a Cthulhu or a Godzilla, it's there. We made one. See? The less imagination goes in, the less imagination we invite from the viewer. It's no wonder so many people are turned off by special effects-driven science fiction like the latest Star Wars or Marvel films.

What really killed the sci-fi imagination-factor for me was Star Trek: Discovery (in more ways than one). In one episode, hundreds of repair droids started fixing the Enterprise's phaser-scarred hull mid-battle. Commander Captain Pike ordered "damage control" - and we saw damage being controlled. In minute detail.

I would have been satisfied if he just said the line and moved on. (Hopefully as rocks fell around him and sparks flew.) Every other Star Trek incarnation had a captain or flag officer barking orders for "damage control." In our minds, the damage is being controlled. It's the 23rd/24th Century, of course it's being controlled. They have a device or a computer program called "damage control" and its function is to control damage. The end.

Please accept my apology, Starhunter Redux. I lost sight of science fiction being an intellectual, imaginitive exercise more so than a visual feast handed to me on a platter. It's the writer's job to strike the right balance between what's believable and how much we can "imagine" the story up ourselves. In this case, I think they'd nailed it. For the most part.

Some of your story elements were a bit hokey, but your ideas feel rich and engrossing. I'm only part way through, so it could fall over like the second season of Andromeda or something. I hope not.

I'll promise not to judge a TV series by the quality of its sets and CGI in future. Maybe.

Angering Ourselves To Death – Postman’s Brave New World Re-Re-Visited - Chapter 1

Chapter I: Postman’s Portent – The Brave New 1984

 Neil Postman.

 “We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

“But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985)

In the 2018 documentary, Behind The Curve, a look at the worldwide community of people who believe the Earth is flat, filmmaker Daniel J. Clark asked prominent YouTuber Patricia Steere what sources of information she trusted. “Myself,” she said, laughing. “I jokingly said if there’s an event like…I’ll just use Boston Bombing again,” referring to the 2013 bombing incident at the Boston Marathon, “I won’t believe any of those events are real unless I myself get my leg blown off.”

It would seem her wilful ignorance when it comes to the curvature of the Earth is an apotheosis of the media as an environment as a culture – the magic of YouTube and the internet has “undone her capacity to think,” as author, media ecologist, and father of modern media as environment scholar Neil Postman said in his 1985 landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.

What’s more telling is that her philosophical solipsism, that being that only the self is all we can really know of reality, is not an isolated phenomenon. To be fair, it's hard not to these days.

In the theory of Julian Jaynes seminal book on the evolution of consciousness, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind, he argues that our pre-antiquity consciousness was not defined by recognising our thoughts as our own, but as one side of the brain “speaking” or “hallucinating” to another part that listens and obeys its commands. These commands were interpreted as Gods. As bi-cameralism broke down, we externalised these voices into Oracles, churches, prayers, and eventually, scepticism that any such voices were derived from on high. A vestige of bi-cameralism, the verb phrase to understand which means to perceive the intended meaning or comprehend it, means to literally stand under a God who is giving instructions to a human receiver – or in this case, an unconscious hemisphere of the brain commanding, and a conscious hemisphere obeying said commands. Though we’ve moved past this bi-cameral state, we have not moved towards a state where we can authenticate information as “true” or “factual” just by looking at it.

As humans, we are limited. We use language and media to transmit our ideas, desires, knowledge, etc. to other people. As the semanticist Hayakawa put it, we use the “nervous systems of others” to help us achieve our goals. His most famous example is a soldier calling out to an observer for information on what is going on, and the observer reporting back to the soldier – he has “borrowed” his eyes and ears and gained a report thanks to a “loan” of his sensory systems. However, if the observer reports back false information, the soldier has not gained any knowledge at all. To use a well-worn analogy from the great General Semanticist Count Alfred Korzybski, the “map” the observer has provided for the “territory” or reality of what is going on is not only inaccurate, but false. The observer may have relayed zero enemy activity, when in fact he has seen multiple targets. The soldier is now imperilled due to his internal “map” consisting of this false image.

And the images we create each day are staggering. We, as humanity, produce 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 10²⁰) bytes of new data each day, and the rate is accelerating. It would be impossible for any one human to observe and analyse the data we create, per day, in a lifetime. We are not oppressed by an external imposition; we are oppressed by how gigantic our media environment has become. If Patricia and her Flat Earth friends only observed one-one-thousandth of this data generated per day, that would still yield 25 terabytes of data – 250 million images, 35,714 hour-long videos, or even 416 hours of Virtual Reality content. With humans being this limited and navigating information systems so vast, can you blame Patricia for this ignorance? Ms. Steere could, if she wanted, live out her entire life without ever encountering an opposing viewpoint. She could call out only to observers who confirm her bias for the rest of her life and never run out of data to comb through.

From this perspective, Postman was right.

A Familiar, Not Brave, New World

However, we now have another layer of oppression to contend with; that the technology we adore is used simultaneously for our surveillance and gratification. One cannot exist without the other. In the 80s and 90s, civil libertarians called for a dismantlement of the “surveillance state;” CCTV cameras on every corner, police providing a watchful eye on the populace. In authoritarian regimes such as China, these cameras and listening devices serve this very function, a generational echo of the German Democratic Republic’s STASI invading the private lives of citizens. China’s internet is censored around the clock by a “Great Firewall of China” which blocks certain foreign websites with pro-democratic or anti-Chinese content, as well as moderation by government agents in social media such as WeChat or Sina Weibo.

In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed with the help of Washington Post and Guardian journalists that our electronic transmissions, such as those used by Facebook, Google, and other social media were being systematically harvested. Our data, which we freely gave to these media, are used as part of the NSA-developed XKeyscore and the Boundless Informant data collection and visualisation tools, used for covert surveillance without due process.

Over one billion people use Instagram, for example. Apart from its uses as a data harvesting tool for advertisers or as a platform for marketers, it arguably has no functional purpose. It does not provide a solution for transmitting photos to other people – it could be perceived as another pleasurable toy, such as those found in the vain and self-absorbed culture of Brave New World. Psychologists and others have linked social media to addiction, as other users’ “likes” and ego-strokes can often release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is known to scientists as the “feel good hormone.” Dopamine is our “reward.” In that regard. Like many addictions, dopamine “rewards” lose intensity with frequency. Bigger and better “rewards” are required to feel the same “high.” In a cynical view, Instagram and other social media are much like a dopamine dispenser, in the same way rats use a mechanical food dispenser in experiments.

Postman said we would come to love our oppression through the adoration of technology. He was, to an extent, saying feelings would become more sought after than facts. Though we live in Brave New World, there is a sinister apparatus that belies it – the world of 1984. Since we are unable to trust our media environments – the nervous systems of others – or even make proper sense of it due to the sheer volume of data we can interact with, the maps we will carry around in our heads will be of lower and lower accuracy and quality. The amount of information we are aware we are not in possession of, or will never be in possession of, is near incalculable.

And for many reasons, as this series will explain, has made us very, very angry.

To be continued in Chapter II: The Media Malware Machine