Author Archives: Jack Knoll

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.

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.