Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509220132
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Fox obviously hopes this fast and splashy sci-fi adventure series will appeal to the largely male audience that tunes in Sunday afternoons for NFL football. ``Space'' will air right after most of the games (at 7 p.m.). The two-hour premiere tonight is definitely an eye-popper, if not quite a mind-blower.
The series opens with the image of two hands joined against a starry sky, reminiscent of Michelangelo's fresco of God reaching out to Adam. You don't get artsy references like that on commercial television every day.
It's the year 2063 and earthlings are attempting to colonize a distant, distant star, ``the farthest any human has ever ventured.'' But somebody up there doesn't like us. Suddenly, from out of the black, an alien air force Pearl Harbors the colony with a torrent of fiery bombs. Talk about bad manners.
Meanwhile, in Corpus Christi, Texas, training continues for young recruits in the Tellus space project. Two lovers who have been in training together and expect to be on the same mission are arbitrarily separated by a bureaucrat. This makes them mad and they vow to reunite, even if it takes all season.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a mob of toughs chases an ``in vitro'' through back streets and dark alleys. Test-tube orphans like Hawkes are the world's newest persecuted minority. Also, he has what appears to be a navel in the back of his neck. An outie.
Meanwhile, in San Diego (this is a show full of meanwhiles), a young woman browsing through an empty deserted house comes down with a very bad case of flashbacks. It seems her parents met some ghastly fate when she and her siblings were but toddlers hiding in the attic.
By this time, viewers may wonder if writer-producers Glen Morgan and James Wong (who also created Fox's popular ``X-Files'') are ever going to tie all these strands together. And yet when they do, it's kind of disappointing. Everybody ends up in the Marine Corps Air and Space Cavalry, ready to be dispatched into the heavens to smack those aliens silly.
It's at this point that the premiere episode deteriorates into just another pseudo-macho war movie, replete with seemingly interminable training sequences. And who should be the drill instructor but R. Lee Ermey, the gravel-voiced grouch who played exactly the same sort of role in Stanley Kubrick's ``Full Metal Jacket.'' Here he is again barking and braying at recruits and ordering them to flop down and do push-ups. Just once somebody should tell one of these blowhards to shut the heck up.
Many viewers may want to give up on ``Space'' at this infernally hackneyed point. But if you stick around, you'll get above and beyond it soon enough, and off on a side trip to Mars, which looks very red and turns out to be the place where earthlings first meet an alien face to face. If you can call that mess a face.
Even though the alien has killed one of the Marine team, they sympathetically give it a drink of water. Promptly it begins to spew green goo from its gills and topples over. Although they now have an alien carcass to study, our heroes seem to do little with it. But the finale of the episode is truly spectacular, a bombastic dogfight with alien ships, all of them dodging their way through a perilous asteroid field.
The special effects are of unusually high quality for television. And though the acting and writing are not, they're not disgraceful, either. Here and there, the script tries to make a socially relevant observation or two. The producers have said they set the series in 2063 because that is one century after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which they think marked America's loss of innocence.
We've had so many losses of innocence, it's hard to keep up. But to their credit, the producers stopped short of making ``Space'' preachily pretentious. The danger, though, is that the show will grow tired quickly if week after week aliens and earthlings are going to keep having big booming blowouts in the unfriendly skies.
Thus it's quite possible to enjoy the premiere of ``Space'' thoroughly and yet feel no compulsion to see another episode ever again. In space, no one can hear you change the channel.
by CNB