When I saw the chance to write a Second Look article, I jumped on it.  I loved the concept, I loved the structure of it.  I even happened to be doing a rewatch of a show I had not seen since I was in my early teens!  Things were aliginging! I promptly signed up for a slot and moved on with my life and my watching.  Only later I realized that everyone else had chosen much better subjects.  Subjects that were shorter, more recent, and ones that people had actually heard of.  Instead I committed myself to writing up a one season show from the mid 90’s, Space: Above and Beyond.

To give a little insight into why on Earth I would choose a show like this I have to set the scene.  A young bureamancer in their early teens lived in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.  For my entire life up to that point, my family had two television channels, PBS and CBS, which was great if you liked British comedies and lame (to me) sitcoms, but not so great for a burgeoning nerd in search of some science fiction to watch.  Enter satellite TV and suddenly there were options.  One of those options was this show being shown in reruns, and I latched on hard.  Before I found out about Babylon 5 at least.

Space: Above and Beyond (SAB), got one full 90’s season of 23 episodes.  This gave them a chance to really try and set up the universe, which was good, and gave them some episodes to experiment, which for the most part was bad.  The gist of the show is that Earth in the 2060’s is branching out and establishing their first colonies on other worlds by taking advantage of naturally occurring wormholes.  A different race, referred to as the Chigs, takes offense to this and destroys the colonies and then turns their eye towards Earth, setting off a massive conflict that the show details.   

A pretty simple premise to hang a show on, but if anything SAB tried to do too much at once and could never really settle on what kind of show it wanted to be.  Did it want to be a pseudo X-Files about conspiracies? Did it want to be a gritty show about the lives of the marines on the ground? Did it want to be a show about ace pilots flying daring missions? The answer is apparently yes to all of that, which led to a muddled final product.

The Good 

As much as I think overall the show was a swing and a miss, there are some elements that even coming back as a much older viewer I found intriguing.  In the backstory of the show humanity is just coming out of what were known as the AI wars, a global conflict against “Silicates” or androids.  This is pretty boilerplate scifi but the piece I like is the cause of the wars.  A programmer that was mad at his bosses for turning him down for a raise snuck new code into a software update that basically introduced the concept of gambling to the Silicates.  This caused them to rebel, even knowing that their chances of success were minimal.  I like that it addresses how logical creations, with access to a ton of information, can still engage in rebellion, a question that had not even occurred to me every other time I have seen this plot.

Another strength for this show are the grown up actors so to speak.  James Morrison as Lieutenant Colonel T.C. McQueen (which is a great character name for this kind of thing), and Tucker Smallwood as Commodore Glen van Ross, are standouts.  McQueen has a tough but gentle leadership style which I found pretty effective, with his initial piece of advice to the young pilots being “Its ok to be scared”.   It’s no wonder that most of what I felt were strong episodes had strong work from both Smallwood and Morrison.  Those episodes include the two parter of “Never No More” and “The Angriest Angel” about a deadly enemy ace, as well as the episode “Sugar Dirt” about having to make hard choices at a strategic level. 

Also something that I enjoyed from the series as an adult, was that the show went out of it’s way to make the Chigs seem alien.  We don’t even get to see one until the final two episodes, as they are always in their armor or their fighters.  The barriers between the species to communication are handled in a very hard scifi style which I appreciated.  The first hint we even get as an audience that the aliens are attempting to understand humans is in the episode “Never No More”, where the clunkily named enemy ace, Chiggy Von Richthofen shows up with “Abandon All Hope” written in English on the side of his fighter. 

Something else I enjoyed when I was younger was just having a show about cool pilots flying dangerous missions.  The show delivered in that respect and it was something that I have always loved in my scifi since I first plunked my ass down and watched the Rebels attack the Death Star, and it is still one of the show’s strengths even on a second viewing.

The Middling

Some of the elements of the show come across as half-baked but nearly there.  These are things that probably would have improved over say a four season run. To me the visuals are in that category.  This show was an early adopter of CGI for their space scenes, and it has aged very poorly. It looks like it was done cheaply even for the era. However this allowed them to stage some ok looking battle scenes, so it is a mixed bag overall.

There is another aspect of the lore that is handled a bit clumsily to me, the Invitros.  During the AI Wars, apparently America decided that the best way to fight the rebellion of their slave race was to create a new slave race. Genetically engineered and grown in tanks, the invitros pop out with superior strength and durability with a biological age of 18.  Episodes like “Mutiny”, and “Who Monitors the Birds” deal with the fact that shockingly a slave race that was designed to die in battle is not treated very well.  However the show is never quite willing to make the leap into being fully sympathetic towards them, despite two main characters, McQueen and Hawkes being of that race.  It feels like the show wanted to talk about prejudice but decided that humanity in the far flung year of 2063 wouldn’t be that bad so they had to make up a fake new race. 

I will throw most of the main cast(Morgan Weisser, Kristen Cloke, Rodney Rowland, Joel de la Fuente, and Lanei Chapman) into this category. None of the young Marines really stand out, as characters or actors.  Most of the actors have gone on to have careers bouncing around other shows but no one really broke out.  The show makes a mistake in my opinion in focusing on Morgan Weisser’s Nathan West in the early episodes. His whining about being kicked off a civilian mission to space by an affirmative action program for invitros has only become more ugly in this day and age. I could identify more with him as a whiny teenager myself, but as an adult viewer I found him grating.  He gets an episode to himself mostly in “The Farthest Man from Home”, and the show wisely moves on from him being the focus pretty quickly, though the character and the actor get to redeem themselves slightly with a better episode called “Toy Soldiers” that features the character’s little brother as a new Marine recruit. 

The Bad

The show gets hung up on some goofy episodes as well.  “R&R” is a bizarre episode that features David Duchonvy as a pool playing non-murderous silicate and it feels like an episode from a completely different show. I did not even remember this one from my first run through, and I can’t imagine I enjoyed it any more back then.  Episode seven “Eyes” introduces some pointless conspiracy theory plots, most likely trying to piggyback on the X-Files’s success. Not surprising since one of the creators wrote for The X-Files. It just does not really gel well with the themes of the show.  One of the primary villains of the show is Aero-Tech, a massive corporation that started the war and is constantly hiding secret knowledge about the Chigs. It is not the worst idea in the world, but it felt like it did not belong with the rest of the show. 

The show decided that in addition to being cool fighter jocks, the characters also for some reason also would do a lot of ground fighting, which did not make much sense.  I think it would have been better to stick to one or the other instead of trying to have both elements with the few characters they had.

The show also suffers from something that is not really the show’s fault but more a problem with my own expectations.  Despite flirting with serialization, there is little of it overall, which really hurts a story about a war, since every single battle or experience would naturally take a toll on the characters. 

The opening credits of this show are also very very nineties. In a sign that the showrunners or the network knew things were not going great, the credits change halfway through the season, to include a voice over narration from Morrison explaining the premise of the show.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day I did not mind watching the show again. The younger me that was obsessed with military history, and fighter pilots had a really good time, since the show is constantly referencing the second world war’s pacific theatre.  The older me is less impressed by the show itself, but found some gems here and there that point to a better show that could have been.  Maybe if they had gotten more seasons they would have had time to reach some better peaks. The entire thing is free to watch on Youtube currently and it was not the world’s worst time filler so if you are at all curious I invite you to try it for yourself.  Strip away some of the goofy nineties stuff, and the jingoism, and you are left with a show that feels like a prototype for the hard edged military scifi that the Battlestar Galactica reboot delivered much more competently.  You get space battles, you get daring pilots, you get implacable enemies bent on destruction, you just get all of those things in a form that needed another decade to simmer before being served.

Favorite Quotes and Other Miscellaneous Stuff

• Sergeant Major Frank Bougus: As part of your training, there is no commanding officer. You are on your own. From this moment until we win this war, the only easy day is yesterday.
• Lt. Col. Tyrus Cassius ‘T.C.’ McQueen With all due respect, I dont think our maker wants to hear from me right now, because he knows im going to go out into that sky in this plane and remove one of his creations from his universe and when I return I’m going to drink a bottle of scotch as if it were Chiggy von Richthofen’s blood and celebrate his death. Chaplain Amen.
• Richard Kind gets to show up as a Colonel that believes in psychics and it is played completely straight, which was kind of a cool way to see him.
• A small aspect of the show, which maybe could have been expanded upon is that other nations are fighting alongside the US, something that is foregrounded in only two episodes “Sugar Dirt” and “Pearly”.
• The show got R.Lee Ermey to be the Drill Instructor for the training scenes in the first episode.  When you need someone to be a Marine DI for your show or movie, accept no substitute.