you got your galactica all over my trek
I'm long past my obsessive phase with it, but I occasionally catch CSI: Original Recipe from time to time. Tonight was one of those times, and boy, am I glad I did. For a show in the home stretch of its ninth season, they can still bring the high heat.
We open with a scene from a low-budget, yet culturally significant type of sci-fi TV show, possibly from the late 60s or early-mid 70s, with a leading man who may well go on to reinvent himself a few times, from space commander, to beat cop, to eccentric lawyer. Or maybe not. Pull back to reveal the scene -- from the second season finale of, ahem, Astro Quest -- is playing on a TV in a vendor's booth at a sci-fi convention, where said vendor is attempting to convince Vegas Crime Lab tech Hodges to fork over three-quarters of a grand in exchange for what the vendor swears is a one-of-a-kind, authentic prop, used in that very episode.
Hodges: Do I look like an idiot to you?
Cut to Hodges happily geeking his way across the convention floor -- the fourth annual "WhatIfItCon," by the way -- prop in hand, when a fellow conventioneer wanders by, brandishing the exact same prop. Then Hodges' eye is caught by a vision in a short skirt... actually, a uniform of the type worn by female crew members on low budget, yet culturally significant-type sci-fi TV shows of the late 60s or early-mid 70s. He saunters over, complimenting the uniform, and we find that within the uniform is none other than Hodges' fellow lab-rat, Wendy. After a few moments of slightly flirtatious bonding over their newly-discovered shared love of classic low-budget, yet culturally significant-type sci-fi TV shows, screams are heard. Hodges and Wendy make their way to the scene of the commotion: a battle-damaged replica of the bridge from the low-budget, yet-- y'know what? I'm just gonna say Astro Quest from here on, okay?
So, anyway, it's a battle-damaged replica of the bridge from Astro Quest, and plopped at the base of the command chair is this week's victim, about whom we'll learn more shortly. He's really most sincerely dead, and there's a woman bent over the body, crying desperately for him to wake up. While Wendy leads the woman away, Hodges leans over to check the body, then whips out his cellphone and jauntily flips it open, all you-know-who style. Homicide Captain Brass answers, and when Hodges identifies himself and says he's got a situation, Brass demands to know how Hodges got his number (he cloned Grissom's cell on "a work-related matter" at some point in the past). Hodges reiterates that they've got a situation with one of the exhibitors, Brass asks him to be more specific, and if you couldn't see this one coming a mile off, you clearly need to make some room in your life for classic, low-budget, yet culturally significant sci-fi TV...
Hodges: He's dead, Jim.
Cue The Who and roll the title sequence!
After the break (which included a fabulous, action-packed promo for How I Met Your Mother), CSI Nick Stokes and Coroner Dave have arrived, and examine the body, while Hodges and Wendy hover nearby, offering helpful observations.
Hodges: You're gonna need a lot of tape lifts.
Wendy: And swabs.
Nick threatens to just vacuum up the whole crime scene, get exemplars from everyone attending the con and dump enough work on the lab rats to keep them busy for the next few months if they don't "beam [them]selves back to the lab" and let him work. As for the vic, one Jonathan Danson, aged 36, from Chowchilla, California, it turns out he's the writer-producer working on a revival -- or, as they're called these days, a re-imagining -- of Astro Quest called, fittingly enough, Astro Quest: Redux. Danson and his co-producer/financier, Melinda Carver, were in discussions with Paramount about launching the series on The CW. Brass asks Melinda, with Danson dead, what happens to the rights. She guesses they'd revert to her, and wonders what Brass is getting at... which is, he tells her, exactly what she thinks he's getting at.
In the morgue, the new guy, Ray Langston (Laurence Fishburne, taking over the top billing from the departed William Petersen), is peeling the blood-stained clothing from Danson's body when Hodges makes an observation from the doorway.
Hodges: A guy in a red shirt dies at the beginning of most Astro Quest episodes.
Langston, being one of the few people in the building who can tolerate Hodges' company for any significant length of time -- and apparently a fellow Questor, as he's well aware of the customary fate of redshirts -- invites him over to have a look. There's some perimortem bruising on the neck, and a right-angled laceration at the base of the nostrils. Hodges notices some metallic trace in the wound, and tweezes it out, with Langston's approval. Langston asks if Hodges and Wendy always go to WhatIfItCon together, to which Hodges blushingly replies it was their first. Heading back to the trace lab, Hodges catches sight of Wendy, working her mojo with DNA swabs, and we begin our first fantasy sequence.
Bright, splashy colors. We're in the world of Astro Quest, and Hodges is in the uniform -- and hairpiece -- of its leading man, Commander Artemis Bishop, complete with a strategically torn shoulder on his tunic. Wendy's back in the uniform we saw her in at the Con, that of Yeoman Malloy, only this time, her hair is done up in a 60s sci-fi beehive that would have done Grace Lee Whitney proud. The Commander and his Yeoman blurt on about their genders, and said genders' resultant needs, when suddenly Langston is there, shoving a jar under Hodges' nose and ending the reverie. It's the metallic trace from the corpse, which he left in the morgue.
Cut to the Con. Handheld camera on a big banner promoting Astro Quest: Redux. Whip-pan over to the damaged bridge set, where the lift door opens, and out steps... Jonathan Danson. He claims he's here to set us free, "from a vision of an antiseptic future, filled with heroes and heroines who are always steadfast, and well-adjusted and altruistic." Oh, man. Does this mean that Danson's some kind of cross between Ron Moore and J.J. Abrams?
That could very well be the question on CSI Greg Sanders' mind, as well as my own, as it turns out that he's watching footage from a preview of AQ:R that occurred on the opening night of the con. From across the room, lab rat Archie pipes up that, if anything interesting happens at a con, it's online somewhere about five seconds later. Thank you, Interwebz. On the video, Danson blathers on about how he grew up with Astro Quest, and loved it... when he was a kid. But as he got older, "the mythology began to eat away at my soul." Okay. So it turns out Danson's really Rick Berman, apparently.
From her lab across the hall, Wendy catches Archie's eye -- good thing all the walls in the place are clear glass, huh? She signals to him that she'd like to see what's going on, and Archie surreptitiously sets up a video share, so that the video Greg's watching is also fed to Wendy's workstation. She turns and motions through yet another of those ubiquitous glass walls to Hodges, inviting him to come see, as Danson continues to Berman on about this one night in a bar, when he had an epiphany about the reality of the human condition, and how in real life, there are no Artemis Bishops, or other such paragons of virtue, because people basically suck. And with that, he intros a clip from AQ:R...
...in which, Danson himself plays Commander Bishop, his uniform no longer the mod, splashy colors of classic, yet culturally significant sci-fi TV, but a black t-shirt and grungy, fingerless leather gloves. Oh, and some sort of pants, but we don't really get a look at those. It's dimly lit, chaotic, with a lot of handheld camera shake and dank, industrial music cues. Danson as Bishop tries to calm down some equally grungy, gun-wielding dude named Garth who's holding Yeoman Malloy, here simply "Sally," hostage. Sally, by the way, wears a maroon tank top, her greasy hair held back by a headband, and like everyone else on the bridge, she seems to be covered in a thin veneer of sweat and grime. Just as Bishop assures Sally that everything will be all right, shots ring out, and blood splatters onto the Commander's face as Garth brutally guns her down. Danson, as Bishop, sinks to his knees, sobbing pathetically, as Garth turns the gun on him, declaring that "nothing's ever gonna be all right again!" And... scene.
The Con. Handheld camera whips around from the movie screen to get the crowd's reaction. They're struck silent, either completely in awe, or dumbfounded by what they've just seen. I know which side I fall on. The shaky camera lands on a particular face in the crowd, and it's Grace Park. And here's where a totally geeky smile spreads across my face, because even though I wasn't really a fan of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, I'd at least seen enough to decide it wasn't for me, and know who these people are.
And then, the most utterly brilliant thing, perhaps in the history of ever, happens.
Ron Moore... yes, Ron friggin' Moore pops into frame, shouting, "you SUCK!"
Let that sink in a moment. Because, BWAH! I mean, they had me from the first bit of classic, yet culturally significant sci-fi TV in the teaser, but this was the point, fifteen minutes in, at which I was completely this episode's bitch. Anyway, Moore's outburst spurs the rest of the crowd into open revolt, leaving Danson to wonder, "don't you get it?"
After that, some other stuff happened, including more fantasies with Hodges as old-school Bishop, re-enacting the "what is this... love" scene from The Gamesters of Triskelion with Wendy as the Commander's ridiculously hot training thrall, and watching her totally work it as an Orion slave girl-- er, sorry, a Tijillian concubine, not the least bit green. There's a JibJab-style animated "Danson must die" video put together by a couple of nerdy Questors who totally have their own starship quarters in the home of one of the guys' mom. We get Liza Weil in a mini-skirted uniform, falling prey to the seductive charms of Danson to the point where she willingly puts on a Triskelion-style "punishment collar" and lets the auteur have his way with her in the flippin' command chair... which, as it happens, he did a lot, and had the surreptitiously-taken photos to prove it, courtesy of a camera built into the "targeting scanner" (i.e., the "Sulu Scope") on the bridge set's helm console. Lab rat Mandy makes an oddly compelling argument that Mr. Ed was actually science fiction, as it postulates an alternate universe where horses develop larynxes. Also, the "cool kids" of CSI, mainly Nick and Greg, get a little douchey and jocktastic in reference to sci-fi fans, but in the end, we forgive them because they're willing to sit down and watch a few eps of AQ.
But all of that, while not exactly a letdown, pales in comparison to the most utterly brilliant thing, perhaps in the history of ever.
And the vic? Killed by a Cylon. No, really. Well, actually, by a media studies professor whose thesis he ripped off to form the basis of his re-imagining and then laughed at when she demanded credit. But she's played by Kate Vernon, who was totally a Cylon in that show with the Cylons. Well, I mean the more recent show with the Cylons. The one where, like, half the Cylons looked like hot chicks instead of frakkin' toasters.
Oh... and it turns out that Hodges' crush on Wendy? Maybe not so completely one-sided. But then one of them would have to change shifts, and we don't really want to lose either Wallace Langham or Liz Vassey, now do we? So, for now, we remain unrequited.
We open with a scene from a low-budget, yet culturally significant type of sci-fi TV show, possibly from the late 60s or early-mid 70s, with a leading man who may well go on to reinvent himself a few times, from space commander, to beat cop, to eccentric lawyer. Or maybe not. Pull back to reveal the scene -- from the second season finale of, ahem, Astro Quest -- is playing on a TV in a vendor's booth at a sci-fi convention, where said vendor is attempting to convince Vegas Crime Lab tech Hodges to fork over three-quarters of a grand in exchange for what the vendor swears is a one-of-a-kind, authentic prop, used in that very episode.
Hodges: Do I look like an idiot to you?
Cut to Hodges happily geeking his way across the convention floor -- the fourth annual "WhatIfItCon," by the way -- prop in hand, when a fellow conventioneer wanders by, brandishing the exact same prop. Then Hodges' eye is caught by a vision in a short skirt... actually, a uniform of the type worn by female crew members on low budget, yet culturally significant-type sci-fi TV shows of the late 60s or early-mid 70s. He saunters over, complimenting the uniform, and we find that within the uniform is none other than Hodges' fellow lab-rat, Wendy. After a few moments of slightly flirtatious bonding over their newly-discovered shared love of classic low-budget, yet culturally significant-type sci-fi TV shows, screams are heard. Hodges and Wendy make their way to the scene of the commotion: a battle-damaged replica of the bridge from the low-budget, yet-- y'know what? I'm just gonna say Astro Quest from here on, okay?
So, anyway, it's a battle-damaged replica of the bridge from Astro Quest, and plopped at the base of the command chair is this week's victim, about whom we'll learn more shortly. He's really most sincerely dead, and there's a woman bent over the body, crying desperately for him to wake up. While Wendy leads the woman away, Hodges leans over to check the body, then whips out his cellphone and jauntily flips it open, all you-know-who style. Homicide Captain Brass answers, and when Hodges identifies himself and says he's got a situation, Brass demands to know how Hodges got his number (he cloned Grissom's cell on "a work-related matter" at some point in the past). Hodges reiterates that they've got a situation with one of the exhibitors, Brass asks him to be more specific, and if you couldn't see this one coming a mile off, you clearly need to make some room in your life for classic, low-budget, yet culturally significant sci-fi TV...
Hodges: He's dead, Jim.
Cue The Who and roll the title sequence!
After the break (which included a fabulous, action-packed promo for How I Met Your Mother), CSI Nick Stokes and Coroner Dave have arrived, and examine the body, while Hodges and Wendy hover nearby, offering helpful observations.
Hodges: You're gonna need a lot of tape lifts.
Wendy: And swabs.
Nick threatens to just vacuum up the whole crime scene, get exemplars from everyone attending the con and dump enough work on the lab rats to keep them busy for the next few months if they don't "beam [them]selves back to the lab" and let him work. As for the vic, one Jonathan Danson, aged 36, from Chowchilla, California, it turns out he's the writer-producer working on a revival -- or, as they're called these days, a re-imagining -- of Astro Quest called, fittingly enough, Astro Quest: Redux. Danson and his co-producer/financier, Melinda Carver, were in discussions with Paramount about launching the series on The CW. Brass asks Melinda, with Danson dead, what happens to the rights. She guesses they'd revert to her, and wonders what Brass is getting at... which is, he tells her, exactly what she thinks he's getting at.
In the morgue, the new guy, Ray Langston (Laurence Fishburne, taking over the top billing from the departed William Petersen), is peeling the blood-stained clothing from Danson's body when Hodges makes an observation from the doorway.
Hodges: A guy in a red shirt dies at the beginning of most Astro Quest episodes.
Langston, being one of the few people in the building who can tolerate Hodges' company for any significant length of time -- and apparently a fellow Questor, as he's well aware of the customary fate of redshirts -- invites him over to have a look. There's some perimortem bruising on the neck, and a right-angled laceration at the base of the nostrils. Hodges notices some metallic trace in the wound, and tweezes it out, with Langston's approval. Langston asks if Hodges and Wendy always go to WhatIfItCon together, to which Hodges blushingly replies it was their first. Heading back to the trace lab, Hodges catches sight of Wendy, working her mojo with DNA swabs, and we begin our first fantasy sequence.
Bright, splashy colors. We're in the world of Astro Quest, and Hodges is in the uniform -- and hairpiece -- of its leading man, Commander Artemis Bishop, complete with a strategically torn shoulder on his tunic. Wendy's back in the uniform we saw her in at the Con, that of Yeoman Malloy, only this time, her hair is done up in a 60s sci-fi beehive that would have done Grace Lee Whitney proud. The Commander and his Yeoman blurt on about their genders, and said genders' resultant needs, when suddenly Langston is there, shoving a jar under Hodges' nose and ending the reverie. It's the metallic trace from the corpse, which he left in the morgue.
Cut to the Con. Handheld camera on a big banner promoting Astro Quest: Redux. Whip-pan over to the damaged bridge set, where the lift door opens, and out steps... Jonathan Danson. He claims he's here to set us free, "from a vision of an antiseptic future, filled with heroes and heroines who are always steadfast, and well-adjusted and altruistic." Oh, man. Does this mean that Danson's some kind of cross between Ron Moore and J.J. Abrams?
That could very well be the question on CSI Greg Sanders' mind, as well as my own, as it turns out that he's watching footage from a preview of AQ:R that occurred on the opening night of the con. From across the room, lab rat Archie pipes up that, if anything interesting happens at a con, it's online somewhere about five seconds later. Thank you, Interwebz. On the video, Danson blathers on about how he grew up with Astro Quest, and loved it... when he was a kid. But as he got older, "the mythology began to eat away at my soul." Okay. So it turns out Danson's really Rick Berman, apparently.
From her lab across the hall, Wendy catches Archie's eye -- good thing all the walls in the place are clear glass, huh? She signals to him that she'd like to see what's going on, and Archie surreptitiously sets up a video share, so that the video Greg's watching is also fed to Wendy's workstation. She turns and motions through yet another of those ubiquitous glass walls to Hodges, inviting him to come see, as Danson continues to Berman on about this one night in a bar, when he had an epiphany about the reality of the human condition, and how in real life, there are no Artemis Bishops, or other such paragons of virtue, because people basically suck. And with that, he intros a clip from AQ:R...
...in which, Danson himself plays Commander Bishop, his uniform no longer the mod, splashy colors of classic, yet culturally significant sci-fi TV, but a black t-shirt and grungy, fingerless leather gloves. Oh, and some sort of pants, but we don't really get a look at those. It's dimly lit, chaotic, with a lot of handheld camera shake and dank, industrial music cues. Danson as Bishop tries to calm down some equally grungy, gun-wielding dude named Garth who's holding Yeoman Malloy, here simply "Sally," hostage. Sally, by the way, wears a maroon tank top, her greasy hair held back by a headband, and like everyone else on the bridge, she seems to be covered in a thin veneer of sweat and grime. Just as Bishop assures Sally that everything will be all right, shots ring out, and blood splatters onto the Commander's face as Garth brutally guns her down. Danson, as Bishop, sinks to his knees, sobbing pathetically, as Garth turns the gun on him, declaring that "nothing's ever gonna be all right again!" And... scene.
The Con. Handheld camera whips around from the movie screen to get the crowd's reaction. They're struck silent, either completely in awe, or dumbfounded by what they've just seen. I know which side I fall on. The shaky camera lands on a particular face in the crowd, and it's Grace Park. And here's where a totally geeky smile spreads across my face, because even though I wasn't really a fan of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, I'd at least seen enough to decide it wasn't for me, and know who these people are.
And then, the most utterly brilliant thing, perhaps in the history of ever, happens.
Ron Moore... yes, Ron friggin' Moore pops into frame, shouting, "you SUCK!"
Let that sink in a moment. Because, BWAH! I mean, they had me from the first bit of classic, yet culturally significant sci-fi TV in the teaser, but this was the point, fifteen minutes in, at which I was completely this episode's bitch. Anyway, Moore's outburst spurs the rest of the crowd into open revolt, leaving Danson to wonder, "don't you get it?"
After that, some other stuff happened, including more fantasies with Hodges as old-school Bishop, re-enacting the "what is this... love" scene from The Gamesters of Triskelion with Wendy as the Commander's ridiculously hot training thrall, and watching her totally work it as an Orion slave girl-- er, sorry, a Tijillian concubine, not the least bit green. There's a JibJab-style animated "Danson must die" video put together by a couple of nerdy Questors who totally have their own starship quarters in the home of one of the guys' mom. We get Liza Weil in a mini-skirted uniform, falling prey to the seductive charms of Danson to the point where she willingly puts on a Triskelion-style "punishment collar" and lets the auteur have his way with her in the flippin' command chair... which, as it happens, he did a lot, and had the surreptitiously-taken photos to prove it, courtesy of a camera built into the "targeting scanner" (i.e., the "Sulu Scope") on the bridge set's helm console. Lab rat Mandy makes an oddly compelling argument that Mr. Ed was actually science fiction, as it postulates an alternate universe where horses develop larynxes. Also, the "cool kids" of CSI, mainly Nick and Greg, get a little douchey and jocktastic in reference to sci-fi fans, but in the end, we forgive them because they're willing to sit down and watch a few eps of AQ.
But all of that, while not exactly a letdown, pales in comparison to the most utterly brilliant thing, perhaps in the history of ever.
And the vic? Killed by a Cylon. No, really. Well, actually, by a media studies professor whose thesis he ripped off to form the basis of his re-imagining and then laughed at when she demanded credit. But she's played by Kate Vernon, who was totally a Cylon in that show with the Cylons. Well, I mean the more recent show with the Cylons. The one where, like, half the Cylons looked like hot chicks instead of frakkin' toasters.
Oh... and it turns out that Hodges' crush on Wendy? Maybe not so completely one-sided. But then one of them would have to change shifts, and we don't really want to lose either Wallace Langham or Liz Vassey, now do we? So, for now, we remain unrequited.