Space: 2011

For the past few weeks I have found the everyday progression of my life disturbed, as – with striking regularity – a burning question pierces to the very centre of my brain, one I have so far been wholly unable to come up with a satisfactory answer to. I can keep quiet about it no longer. The question is this: ‘Why the hell am I still bothering to watch Outcasts?!?’

Like me, many people seem to have found watching this show an unedifying experience. Unlike me, they appear to have chosen to act on this in a different fashion: not by going on about it in a blog, but by abandoning Outcasts and watching Glee or something else on one of the other channels. Outcasts launched in a prime-time slot with a blaze of publicity but by its closing stages had been banished to the late-on-Sunday-night graveyard : a clear sign of plummeting ratings.

I can’t say I’m really surprised by this. I suppose I stuck with this show partly because I’m stubborn and partly because I want prime-time SF to get rid of the toxic reputation it’s sort-of acquired in the UK. With hindsight, though, I’m not sure this justifies wasting my time watching a programme which was neither involving nor entertaining nor nearly as profound as it clearly aspired to be.

Nothing but drab shades and nothing interesting happening: the perfect photo to illustrate a review of Outcasts!

Listing all the flaws in Outcasts would take quite a long time, so let’s restrict ourselves to the key ones. When I reviewed the first episode, one of the things I was positive about was the fact it was fairly ‘hard’ SF: ‘no aliens, no psychic powers, no cloned humans’, I said. Well, the cloned humans turned up in episode two, while aliens with near-as-damn-it psychic powers were on the scene by the second half. What started off looking moderately gritty and political seemed to start to want to be Solaris, which was a bit of a wrench, tonally.

What did stay constant was the general mood of cerebral misery that seemed to permeate the planet Carpathia and all of its various inhabitants. For a series presenting itself as an exploration of ‘what it means to be human’, there was very little about the joy of living or the need to smile. I know that general contentment doesn’t make for great drama, but without even a few grace notes of genuine humour the series was a real drudge to get through. (I generally just stuck it on in the background while I was doing something else, as it simply didn’t seem to warrant my full attention.)

Apparently, Outcasts may well have been an attempt by the BBC to recapture some of the apparent magic of the supposedly brilliant reimagining of the world’s pre-eminent transplantation of Mormon theology into a space opera context, Battlestar Galactica (apparently). (My friend Crazy Cat-lady Janey (name changed to protect her identity, but probably not enough) assures me that the new BSG is the best SF TV show ever made, but, you know, she must come from a parallel continuum where Sydney Newman stayed in Canada, or something.) Whatever the merits of new BSG, I can’t believe Outcasts closely resembles it. However, with its combination of metaphysical obscurity and general po-faced gloom it does have a definite vibe of the first season of Space: 1999 about it. Given that the latter is a show referred to in some circles as ‘the dreaded you-know-what’, the entry for which in The Encyclopaedia of SF concludes ‘See also: Scientific inaccuracies’, this may not be music to the BBC’s ears.

But even during Space: 1999’s most wearisome interludes, you were still always perfectly aware of who the main characters were and what they were up to. Outcasts resembled more of an ensemble piece, or a soap, but one where most of the characters were slightly enigmatic and all of them were quite dull. Not the actors’ fault: you could almost see the effort Liam Cunningham was putting into giving some life to the thing. It was all in the scripts – or, rather, not.

I went to a series of lectures on creative writing recently and while I didn’t necessarily agree with everything I heard, the woman in charge made some astute points about the nature of writing this kind of story. Basically, you have to write to character – make up some interesting people, give them interesting problems, and watch them struggle along as they try to get what they want. If, as a result, you have a story which says something about the nature of being human or the problems people encounter when different political ideologies clash, that’s great. But if you start off writing about the nature of being human or the nature of political conflict, and back-engineer your characters to fit that, then you’re writing to idea, or theme, and the story just won’t have any traction or vitality to it.

This is what seems to have happened to Outcasts. The production was consistently lavish and the actors competent, and when the A-story of an episode was formulaic enough (troubled cop finds himself framed for a crime he didn’t commit, evil twin infiltrates community) the programme achieved a sort of grisly half-life, even though it was running solely on reflex impulses. But the rest of the time it just felt hollow and barren and soulless, toying with ideas but never really using them, and frequently very derivative indeed (the bad guy’s main characteristic was that he was religious – there’s a brave new idea).

Outcasts concluded with a big cliffhanger, as a giant starship from Earth arrived on the planet, carrying with it the bad guy’s masters, who had a mysterious agenda of their own. Meanwhile, the senior main characters had opened up a kind of communication with the alien intelligence native to the planet (referred to, for no reason I could figure out, as the host force), and the young female lead had discovered she was actually a synthetic human being and had left her old life behind to join others of her kind living in the wilderness of the planet. I will be very surprised if any of these storylines are ever resolved.

And yet that doesn’t bother me at all. Something went very wrong somewhere with this series. I have a horrible fear the BBC will say ‘this proves that SF can’t draw a mainstream audience’ and not even attempt anything similar for another ten or twenty years. All the failure of Outcasts proves is that bad drama can’t draw an audience. You don’t respond to that by not making any more drama. You just make better drama. So come on, Beeb. Don’t stop making SF. Just start making good SF.