Author Archives: Jack Knoll

This episode of Space Precinct aired on BBC2 on Christmas Eve 1995, just before the worldwide premiere of Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave. What a double bill. That screening of A Close Shave gained BBC2 its highest ever audience figure up to that point of 10.62 million viewers. I wonder how many of those viewers caught the end of Friends and therefore received their first exposure to Space Precinct. Would those last few minutes of lukewarm Haldane and Castle romance hook you for the rest of the series? Somehow, I feel like Wallace and Wendolene charmed more hearts that Christmas.

Hate Street is another episode that took me by surprise! It’s a good one! Maybe not perfect, but definitely up towards the top of my list so far. I’m learning that Space Precinct is an absolute roller coaster of quality with spectacular summits and stomach-churning drops from week to week. I had anticipated more of a steady climb in quality, thinking that with each episode the production team would learn from their mistakes and make adjustments by the time the following installment went before the cameras. But the Space Precinct production line was forced to move at such a pace, and swap out directors and writers so haphazardly, that those course corrections seem to come through luck rather than judgement.

Call me a sensitive soul, but I’m just not sure what the appeal is of a television programme depicting a police officer forcing his hand over the mouth of an alien child in readiness to stab her while she sleeps. Now, you’ve heard me complain about Space Precinct’s chaotic approach to tone and audience suitability in the past, but at the very least I’ve understood roughly the reasoning behind that approach. It came out of a desire to make a show that appealed to children and to adults in the same breath. However misguided and whiplash-inducing the results, I always understood why the producers wanted moments where Tarn hookers were propositioning police officers before launching into a cool laser gun battle against a creepy alien vampire guy (see Predator and Prey). In theory, the adults watched for the sleazy drama and the kids liked the action. It’s a clumsy approach, but I understood it. With today’s episode, The Witness, I watched with my head in my hands, totally bewildered by just how dark the show chooses to go in places – so grim that even well-adjusted grown-ups like myself would wince. The question in my mind changed from the usual “Who is Space Precinct made for?” and became “Is Space Precinct made for anyone?”

Once you get past the cringe-worthy dance club stuff, Predator and Prey is an effective enough episode of Space Precinct. The story tries to pull off some intelligent and surprising twists that have the potential to elevate it above the norm. The villain of the piece is a real standout for the series, and if you like Richard James this is certainly the episode for you!

After the extravagance of the previous episode, Two Against The Rock, it’s not too surprising that Takeover is a cheap and cheerful affair. We’re trapped in the station house for the majority of the episode and the guest cast is kept to a minimum. A good bottle episode for any television series relies on an inventive plot… but unfortunately J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carren don’t exactly specialise in dreaming up out of the ordinary Space Precinct stories. Takeover is a pretty standard runaround with a twist you can see coming a mile off. Even the attempts at non-linear storytelling are rather predictable.