nixsight

Two minor TV obsessions this week. I promised someone that I’d watch “Stargate: Universe” so that they didn’t have to, and we’ve been sitting on the first season of Canadian drama “Durham County” for months, and finally got round to that this week, too.

Durham County Season 1

We picked up “Durham County” largely because it stars Hugh Dillon, who impressed the hell out of us with a nuanced and oddly sweet portrayal of the head muscle in SWAT show “Flashpoint”. As it stands, we got into “Flashpoint” largely because it had Veronica Mars’ dad in it. So you start to get a sense of how this works.

The show is notionally a murder mystery. Hugh Dillon is homicide detective Mike Sweeney, who moves his family – including eccentric young daughter in a mask Maddie, morbid teen daughter who wants to follow in her father’s footsteps Sadie, and his wife Audrey, who is trying to come to terms with having barely survived breast cancer – away from the city, and back to the place where he grew up, the titular Durham County. The place itself is billed as a small town, but it presents more like a suburb of the oft mentioned “downtown”, albeit an insular one.

The family move into the area amid a search for two schoolgirls, and Sweeney is eager to start working the case, but then the body of locally beloved English teacher Nathalie Lacroix is found, and when Sweeney sees the body he becomes obsessed, because he has a hidden connection to this new victim.

Thrown into this mix are successful, well-liked and disturbed local businessman Ray Prager and his family, who live across the road from the Sweeneys. It transpires that Prager and Sweeney were friends as teens, and there are secrets and lies to be told there, too.

The murder mystery tag on this show is slightly misleading, because no effort is made to hide much of the actual details from the murderer – in fact, the first scene we see quite horrifically and barely flinching lays out the fate of the schoolgirls, and shows us the perpetrator of that crime, and we also know intimately what happened to Nathalie Lacroix. What we don’t know, and what keeps the viewer engaged throughout, is how events will play out, and what happened before Sweeney brought his family to town. The mystery is what happened between Ray and Mike years before, and not so much the details of the present day murders, but how much each individual protagonist knows, and how they will deal with each new thing they discover.

Hugh Dillon handles the tightrope between temper and temperance in Mike Sweeney’s personality subtly, managing to make a character prone to making shitty decisions easy to empathise with. Justin Louis as Ray Prager is just incredible, though – Prager is an almost totally reprehensible character from the moment he appears, but Louis manages to tease some small measure of comprehension of the conflicts that he feels out of the audience, which is truly impressive. He’s equal parts loathsome and dangerously unpredictable, and yet there are moments where I actually felt quite sorry for him.

The two leads are ably supported by everyone on the cast – particularly worth mentioning is Laurence Leboeuf, whose Sadie could easily have been a typical annoying teen, but manages to bring something believable into every excess she’s asked to play.

The show is light on detection and procedurals, but heavy on style and gravitas, and it’s an interesting approach to have the crime all laid out early so that the viewer has to ponder on motive and history instead. Fun isn’t the right word – at times the show is fairly relentless in it’s bleak tone – but we’ve got the second season cued up already, so that tells you something.

Stargate Universe 0101 – 0106

There seems to be a lot being said about “Stargate Universe” across the internet. Most of it seems to be nonsense, n’all. I’ve read lots of negativity from – and this shouldn’t be surprising, really – Stargate fandom itself. Like Star Trek fandom before it, this group loves their chosen franchise so damn much that they seem determined to kill the fuck out of any attempts to keep it alive with a new, fresh iteration.

If that last sentence doesn’t seem to make any sense, that’s because it doesn’t. I’m working on collecting my thoughts about these first few episodes, but there’s a particular sort of fan entitlement that I just find poisonous, and it was hard to dodge it around this show.

It’d be a shame if “Stargate Universe” did get buried by unreasonable expectations, because it’s not a bad show at all. And the areas where it is a little weak are all legacies of the franchise that it belongs to in the first place.

Worth noting now is that the comparisons, made by journalists and fans alike, to both “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” are superficial at best, and lazy at worst. At least BSG comparisons can be forgiven – I can understand the trailers leading people down that path a little.

[At this point in the review, I found myself getting massively diverted onto the subject of how wrong those comparisons are… a meandering blah-fest which I’ve shunted into it’s own post, because it was muddying the issue here.]

Actually, the show brings comparisons between the Stargate and Star Trek universes into sharper focus than anything else. SG1 began with the questing spirit and naivete of the original Star Trek, and developed into the more complex continuity and bigger ideas that The Next Generation evolved into. I didn’t watch much SG: Atlantis, but I got the impression that it was more restricted to a central base of operations than SG1, and also in common with ST: DS9 it concerned itself with the complexities of a war of intergalactic proportions.

There are pretty obvious similarities between the plot to Stargate Universe and Voyager. Both concern a mixed and mismatched crew, trapped on a ship beyond the imaginable limits of their particular universe’s known space. Bizarrely, Stargate Universe both stretches and dilutes the themes, by having its crew stuck on a ship that is also alien to them, but at the same time allowing them a communication lifeline with earth.

I always felt a little ambivalent about the Stargate shows. Something about the universe’s attempts at mixing the hard, formal realism of the military aspect and contemporary politics, and the total thematic jargon science-fantasy of the planet-hopping mythos never quite sat right with me… largely because – especially at the beginning in SG1 – the realism felt weakly, illogically written, and the fantastical elements never really pushed the imagination as far as such shows should. Add to that forced emotional conflicts and the biggest display of recurrent last-minute Deus Ex Machina of any show at the time, and it all made for white-noise television.

Stargate billed itself as science-fiction, but it didn’t seem to want to be science-fiction enough. It was one of those genre shows that was apparently made by normal TV guys who weren’t that aware of the genre – a little like “The Dead Zone” – so half-remembered, barely comprehended ideas from old Roddenberry shows or Twilight Zone episodes were regularly passed off enthusiastically as new.

Admittedly, after a while and prolonged exposure that enthusiasm does get a little infectious, and it doesn’t hurt to have Richard Dean Anderson’s irreverent approach and 80s Saturday TV wink at the core of that first series. After a while his performance served as an acknowledgement of how silly it all was, and told you it was okay to enjoy the show despite that.

Because “Stargate Universe” is an altogether grimmer affair, with greater, more realistic human needs at stake – the first several episodes concern themselves primarily with the stranded crew trying desperately to ensure that their basic needs, such as air, food and water, are available, because the alien ship that they find themselves on, “Destiny”, is in an extremely poor state of repair – a lot of the levity that rescued SG1 from its otherwise weak approach to science-fiction has been jettisoned. As the tagline says, “The Only Mission Is Survival”.

This creates a balancing act that the show only barely pulls off. Thus far the “far-flung aliens” element of the franchise has been played down intensely, limited to enigmatic clouds of dust that can be benevolent or vicious, and have only been seen in two of the episodes. We know that aliens will show, because we know that this particular fictional universe is populated by them, but at the moment it’s all about the humans. And because the high-concept stuff is where the Stargate universe normally exposes itself as a little uninspired, “Stargate Universe” gets to stand or fall on human interactions, rather than sci-fi props.

Yes, it’s low on laughs, but it’s also low on really embarrassing moments of over-stretching itself, conceptually. One thing fans seem to be clamouring for are a few alien-culture-of-the-week episodes, and that’s kind of understandable – you can’t suddenly start feeding people who are used to eating Big Macs every day steak, and expect them all to swallow it down easy. But if we’re going to use dumb metaphors, we might as well torture them, so it’s worth saying that if the quality of the steak was better, it might be easier to get people to eat… out… there. Uh… you’ll get better reviews from the food critics, or…

Hm. I guess what I’m saying is, the show still suffers from some of the weaknesses that the others have. This production team are pretty good at making a viewer give a damn about what’s happening to their characters over the course of a forty minute episode by now, but the last-minute un-seeded threat-resolution still persists here, and if anything that’s a little more annoying when the problem is something as untenable as empirically not having enough of a resource, or the time to harvest it, rather than an alien race suddenly being talked round in an unlikely manner.

Even so, I’m quite enjoying the way that this show is building up to the crew slowly coming to terms with their accidental exile, and achieving a sustainable way of life on the ship. This is probably because we haven’t really seen anything like this on TV, at least for a while – the nearest thing is probably “Defying Gravity”, but as I haven’t seen that show yet, I’m not sure. The problem is that there might not be an audience for a show paced like this, in this particular universe. In fact, I’m half with those fans who want the show to start properly exploring new worlds, but my reasons are probably a little different from theirs. I just want them to get it over with so that I can see how they handle it, and decide whether or not the show will be worth sticking with.

Until then, I’m quite enjoying the character interactions, as they circle each other warily, and get to see who will become allies, who will harbour resentments, and who will end up shagging whom. Some of the actors are stock TV drama fodder, and do an adequate job, but others, like Robert Carlyle as the difficult and egocentric Dr Rush with his secret agendas, and the brilliant Justin Louis, who plays Everett Young, the military leader of the mission, who is both duty-bound and emotionally conflicted, with the same depth that made his performance in “Durham County” so interesting.

The thing that muddies the water the most with this show is that connection with Earth that I was talking about – there’s a shaky concept at play, here, with odd stones that allow members of the crew to swap bodies with people back at home – the premise is represented in roughly the same way that they showed Sam Beckett taking over bodies in “Quantum Leap”. Quite aside from the fact that this is an example of that conflict I mentioned earlier, between science-fiction and middle-of-the-road TV drama writing that often presents itself in the Stargate franchise – it’s passed off as a technology from a species so advanced that we can’t understand exactly how it works, but for all intents and purposes it’s actually just magic, and so out of place on this show that it ends up looking ridiculous – this mechanism makes the isolation that the crew suffer that little bit less potent.

I suspect it was included because of the story possibilities it presents – in the most recent episode a couple of plot threads grow out of this concept that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, though time will tell if they are worthwhile, or simply soap-opera fodder – and while I think it weakens the purity of the show’s concept, I’m wondering now whether the show I’m expecting is entirely different from the one the showrunners want to make.

This probably isn’t going to be the show you’ll want to make special time for, and it’s probably not going to be episodic enough in structure to make for casual viewing, either, but it’s good enough that it’ll be worth letting one of your more invested or obsessive compulsive friends watch for a few more weeks, and report back on whether the pacing and approach is paying off.