Flaubert once said he preferred tinsel to silver, because tinsel has all the same qualities as silver–plus pathos. I think this is why, when it comes to cult sci-fi TV shows, I’ve grown so fond of VR.5 and Babylon 5. They have everything that great cult shows need: a freaky look, an enigmatic premise, a sinister mood–even that arbitrary number in the title to make them seem like some kind of cool sci-fi upgrade of regular TV product. But they’ve also got one thing more, something that the sleek and shiny sci-fi hits will never have: an endearing, distinctly human tackiness.
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These crank calls of Sydney’s have somehow brought her to the attention of a sinister bunch who call themselves the Committee. They’re yet another of those supragovernmental omnipotent conspiracies, like the village in The Prisoner but without the real estate. Everybody in every episode always turns out to be a member of the Committee (except for Sydney, who only works for the Committee), but none of them seem to know what any of the others are up to, and they’re all unable to explain to Sydney what’s going on because they can only talk about the Committee in ominous Zen koans like “Everything about the Committee is true and false” and “Inside the Committee there’s always another Committee.” You’ve got to admit, this is paranoia of a rarefied order: a conspiracy so mysterious even the conspirators don’t get it. The board meetings must be a laugh riot.
Sydney, though, is surprisingly lackadaisical about her curious employers, even when they periodically try to kill her and dissect her to find out how she performs her tricks. A paycheck’s a paycheck, after all–and anyway she’s suffering from a childhood trauma that prevents her from caring about anything (just the attitude an audience is looking for in the heroine of a TV series). She’s never recovered from the death of her father, the world’s greatest expert on virtual reality, and also, it so happens, a founding member of the Committee. This is why Singer acts in every scene like a panicky gazelle, using an inappropriately urgent whisper to deliver all her dialogue, which is entirely made up of variations on the basic sentiment “I’m not strong enough to handle this.”
But look at the result. Your basic cult show may flirt with weirdness, but inevitably proves to possess a boring, cowardly soul, because beneath it all, it can’t shake its commitment to TV’s standards of bourgeois normality. (The classic The Prisoner is still the model here–for all its hip paranoia it was irrevocably committed to the fundamental sanity of its hero). VR.5 offers no assurance that anything or anyone is even momentarily lucid. I’ve never seen any show so disturbingly persuasive about what it feels like to go over the edge. I find myself rooting for it to make it to the commercial break, and glad for Sydney every time she says something remotely on point. I certainly haven’t gotten this involved in the season’s regulation sci-fi offerings.
But it’s already a big hit–unlike VR.5, which has no chance at all of being renewed for the fall. Voyager doesn’t need imagination. It doesn’t even need admirers. It relies on manifest destiny. The show sweeps the Nielsens as invincibly as the starship imposes its wisdom and charity (and a sweetness so cloying it makes The Brady Bunch look like Strindberg) on every planetary stop during its sold-out ten-year run. You know that all the aliens they meet are bound to be enlightened by the Federation’s humanist ideology of noninterference and tolerance–that is, if they don’t get in the captain’s way. Those liberal imperialists are always the quickest on the phaser button.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Konstantin Valov.
