Italy on a (very low) Budget

Well, what do you know: no sooner do I suggest that Star Cops is, in one sense, the anti-Gerry Anderson space hardware show (no sign of a launch or landing sequence) than the very next episode, This Case to be Opened in a Million Years, opens with a rocket blasting off from the Moon. Well, almost: there is an accident on the launch-pad and the vehicle is destroyed. Cue red lights and alarms, and everyone getting into not very convincing hazard suits, for the abortive launch is by an Italian company whose business is firing nuclear waste into deep space, never to return.

An investigation of this near-disaster is obviously on the cards, but before Nathan and the team can get onto it, the personnel department get onto the commander and inform him that he’s spent too long in a micro-gravity environment and needs to spend a week on Earth. Nathan is about as delighted as you might expect by this, but regulations are regulations and he heads off, leaving a strangely-subdued David Theroux in charge.

On the flight back to Earth, Nathan finds himself sitting next to a predictably glamorous and outgoing Italian woman, who suggests he spend his leave in Rome – even to the point of making a date with him at the Roman catacombs in a few days time. Unfortunately for Nathan, but fortunately for the episode’s budget, Rome is lashed by continuous torrential rain, and he is forced to spend the next couple of days in his hotel room. He’s all for leaving town but has no way of getting in touch with his date and simple English good manners prevents him from blowing her out. Things get even worse on the tour of the catacombs: not only do the catacombs look rubbish (you can really, really hear the budget creaking in the Italian-set sequences of this episode), but he is attacked by a sinister figure whom he is forced to kill in self-defence.

It turns out the dead man was a Moonbase engineer whom the ISPF recently busted for drug possession, apparently out for revenge: but things inevitably get more complex than that. Large amounts of money have been deposited in Nathan’s account and heroin is planted in his hotel room – he unwisely sticks his tongue in this and enjoys an Apocalypse Now-style freak-out, which the local cops can only interpret in the most negative way. He is being framed – but by whom, and why?

Meanwhile, the rest of the team is working the investigation into the crash on the moon – the assassin in Italy was formerly employed by the waste disposal company, which no-one pays much attention to, strangely enough. The main issue is that they’re not being allowed in to inspect the wreckage, as it is apparently much too radioactive to safely approach – Devis isn’t convinced by this, but finds once again that Theroux seems reluctant to press the issue. Kenzy has also noticed something going on between the head of the company and the Italian-Australian boss of a mining concern – some days everything seems to have an Italian connection…

Nothing wrong with that, of course, but on the other hand the series doesn’t necessarily handle this element with the greatest of subtlety. I’m beginning to wonder if the charge of racial stereotyping which is regularly laid against Star Cops may not in fact have an element of truth to it, because we are not terribly far from Allo Allo! territory here. ‘Ere we-a go for da English-a speakin’ tour-a!’ cries the guide in the catacomb guide, ‘English speaking’ clearly being a relative thing in 2027. The local Italian cops are likewise a fairly dodgy bunch, the inspector always having a fag on the go, and so on.

‘Allo, I am an Italian-a stereotype-a.’

And beyond this, of course, there is the episode’s main revelation, which is that the Sicilian Mafia has infiltrated the high frontier, and apparently every person of Italian descent in orbit or on the Moon is a card-carrying member of the organisation (well, maybe not literally card-carrying). The plot turns out to revolve around a racket where uranium ore dug up by the miners is smuggled back to Earth under the cover of the waste disposal company’s operations, to get around regulations on dealing in plutonium – it hangs together, but it lacks the political angle present in Chris Boucher’s scripts that gave them a little bit of extra edge.

Oh, well – it’s not like this is a flat-out bad episode (though the sequences set in Italy are a near thing), it just trades in stereotypes and the plot is fairly ordinary. What’s curious is that the character spine of the episode, for want of a better way of putting it, is what’s going on with Theroux and his issues with the high levels of radiation involved in the crash and its investigation. It turns out that his father was caught up in another radiation accident years ago and died as a result of his exposure, which has left David with a marked reluctance to take any chances in this area (it’s hardly a phobia, in the circumstances).

Fair enough, and potentially some good stuff there, but it’s mostly presented as a what’s-up-with-Theroux? mystery and only really addressed in one short scene near the end: this is to set up Nathan going alone into the area where the nuclear waste is theoretically stored, getting into trouble, and being rescued by David, whose loyalty to Nathan wins out over his fear. Potentially reasonably effective, but it isn’t really developed enough and Erick Ray Evans, playing Theroux, doesn’t get much benefit from it – Kenzy and Devis get more to do in their investigation of the dodgy mine and its Mafia connections.

I suppose it may be that what’s happening here is that Chris Boucher, creator of the series and writer of the first four episodes, is clearly very SF-literate – you can spot the influences and references throughout his scripts for Blake’s 7 and elsewhere. Philip Martin, on the other hand, while best-known for the well-regarded surreal crime drama Gangsters (I haven’t actually seen this, but I suspect it’s my kind of thing), has less of a track record in the actual SF genre, his work tending to mix well-known tropes with not especially subtle satire. Perhaps that’s true of this episode too. It’s his only contribution to the series, though, so we’ll never know if greater familiarity with the format would have produced better results.