Author Archives: Jack Knoll

Wow! I’m not going to beat about the bush here – Two Against The Rock is a huge step up for Space Precinct. Suddenly it actually looks like what I would expect a £20 million television series made in 1994 to look like. And we finally have an episode that successfully carries dramatic tension without veering wildly in different tonal directions. I think we finally have a Space Precinct episode which perfectly fit its audience.

What an interesting episode of Space Precinct we have here. Everything but the kitchen sink has been chucked at Divided We Stand. The story twists and turns through so many events and themes and characters that it felt like it would just keep going. The episode could have been a straightforward political thriller, but tries very hard to offer more than that by layering in a fall from grace for our heroes, a baby-snatching subplot, and some hard sci-fi business about cloning. The shocking pivots this story took were genuinely surprising to me. For better or worse, I couldn’t have predicted where Divided We Stand was going to end up.

On September 22nd 1994, a little show debuted on American television about a group of six friends going about their lives in New York City – its title, imaginatively, was Friends. The producers of this obscure and rarely discussed sitcom came up with the novel idea of quite literally naming every episode based on the happenings of that week’s installment. Sounds like any other television series, doesn’t it? Well, my naive little possum, let me explain further. The creators of Friends, with their quaint vision of absolutely dominating the airwaves and crushing everything in their path, decided that their episode titles should reflect the way a casual viewer might describe a particular plot at the office water cooler the next day. As a result, the likes of The One with All the Thanksgivings, or The One Where Everybody Finds Out, or The One with the Prom Video, have become rewatchable sensations because it’s really ruddy easy for viewers to figure out which episode they want to see again. It would seem that turning episode titles into marketing tools is the way to get ahead in show business. Who’d’ve thought it? Friends did quite a few other things right in 1994, but every time I see one of those episode titles I just can’t get over how neat they are.

Also in 1994… Space Precinct. Need I say more? Okay, I will. For the simple reason that Space Precinct premiered nearly two weeks after Friends, the Space Precinct writers couldn’t use the same ingenious method for titling their episodes. Alright, timing wasn’t the only factor involved. That kooky naming convention probably would not have fit whatever edgy-yet-kid-friendly-yet-adult-oriented-yet-sci-fi-masterpiece-yet-police-procedural-yet-bla-bla-bla tone the Space Precinct producers were aiming for. So, instead, they came up with titles like, Illegal. What happens in Illegal? Well, it’s not really there in the title, is it? Every episode of Space Precinct usually involves some kind of illegal goings-on because it’s a cop show for goodness sake. And it’s a shame that this episode has such a vague, unmarketable title because it has some really memorable moments. We could have had The One With The Snuff Fights, or The One With The First Kiss, or The One With The Scene We Had To Reshoot for BBC2.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the crazy schedule that the Space Precinct production team were up against. The series premiered on US television on October 3rd 1994 – the day that principal photography on today’s episode wrapped. Just over a month later, on November 21st, Seek and Destroy was broadcast in America. That strikes me as an insanely narrow lead time considering the complexity of a big budget science fiction series like Space Precinct, particularly when it comes to post-production. Such were the bizarre circumstances of Space Precinct’s distribution.