MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*
Hardly any of the TV serials I've comprehensively examined for high mythicity have received a total score of "good," meaning that there's a strong symbolic discourse running through most or all episodes. Peter Chung's AEON FLUX managed it, but that show consisted of only ten full episodes and some shorts. Chung provided character designs for PHANTOM 2040, but the writers were probably responsible for keeping up the quality of 2040's 35 episodes over the course of two seasons.
GENERATION UNTO GENERATION, Parts 1-2-- In 2040, the venerable costumed jungle-hero of the Lee Falk comic strip gets a futuristic update, possibly with some guidance from the future-city patterns created by the example of METROPOLIS. Eighteen-year-old Kit Walker (Scott Valentine), who has no idea of his heritage, was raised by his aunt in the city of "Metropia," a city divorced from the world of nature. Kit wants to become an ecological engineer in the few parts of the world where natural ecosystems are preserved since the world-devastating "resource wars." But because Kit reaches his majority, his father's old teacher, Guran of Bangalla, comes to Metropia to teach Kit to become the new Phantom. The main source of evil in the "big-city jungle" is Rebecca Madison (Margot Kidder), whose primary plot is to create a closed community, Cyberville, where the wealthy will be served while the rest of the world goes to hell. Kit doesn't want to be a crusader against evil, but he gets a big push toward savior-dom when he discovers that a mutated plant, "ghostwood," may be capable ofto renovating Earth's wrecked ecosystem. Kit consents to become a high-tech "Ghost Who Walks," complete with an invisibility screen. The first two-parter also introduces Rebecca's decadent son Max Jr, who at a young age was traumatized by the death of his father Max Sr, supposedly killed by the father of Kit. Max Jr affects to talk to others through the medium of his grungy cat, named for the French decadent poet Baudelaire. Also present are (1) Rebecca's cyborg enforcer Graft, (2) righteous Metropian police officer Sagan and her cyborg-partner, a mutt named DVL (a knowing spoof of Original Phantom's wolf-pet "Devil"), and (3) Metropian shock-jock Doctor Jak (Mark Hamill) and his "biot" (android) aide Pavlova. In the first two-parter, Phantom destroys Rebecca's plan to brainwash citizens with a video game.
THE SUM OF THE PARTS-- Max Jr concocts a new type of biot to frame the New Phantom as a criminal. This is one of the weaker plots, but the android itself takes on a new and unpredictable identity befitting the name Mad Max bestows on the android: Heisenberg. Another Phantom-foe appears: Sean One, who rules over a series of orbital colonies and who, like Rebecca, has plans to encourage humans to desert Earth to become citizens under his control.
FIRE AND I.C.E.-- Phantom and his team seek to break into Rebecca's security system in order to find out her plans for Cyberville. In the process the hero makes another ally: teenaged hacker Sparks. He also encounters a mysterious figure, Mister Cairo, who seems to be an intelligent hologram.
REFLECTIONS OF GLORY-- Rebecca has another brainwashing plan, and this one is directed solely at the city-council members whose approval she needs to build Cyberville. This time the Madisons plan to use a beautiful singer, Vaingloria (Debbie Harry), who's been outfitted with implants to hypnotize others. (Some slight inspiration from the Evil Maria in METROPOLIS is possible.) In the same episode, Sagan meets Kit a second time when she apprehends Sparks for a minor criminal act, and more or less strongarms Kit into accompanying her on a date. However, when Kit changes into the Phantom to investigate, the vigilante has his first direct run-in with the by-the-book lady cop.
SHADOWS FROM THE PAST-- An African warrior-woman, Nia, bears a grudge against the previous Phantom, and so ends up having a big battle with the new hero. Rebecca makes an alliance with Nia to kill the Phantom, and in so doing shows the woman how she Rebecca has preserved the persona of her dead husband online. Nia poisons Guran, who goes berserk until Phantom is able to find a cure.
THE BIOT IN RED-- Phantom continues trying to figure out what happened in the events that led to the death of Max Madison Sr and the disappearance of Kit's father. Heisenberg, who has escaped the control of Max Jr, befriends a jazz-playing musician. Max Jr stashes an information cylinder in the musician's case and Doctor Jak sends Pavlova to engage a detective to find the case. Pavlova engages Professor Archer, Kit's college teacher, who's playing at being a detective in imitation of his ancestor (implicitly Miles Archer of THE MALTESE FALCON). Heisenberg conceives a thing for Pavlova and the two of them play out the farewell scene from "Casablanca."
THE GOOD MARK-- Intrigue out the wazoo. Not only is the Phantom trying to learn more about his father's disappearance, Graft and Max Jr conspire to get hold of Rebecca's secret files. Sagan gets framed by her commander, so Phantom helps her bring him down. The script works in a little-used bit of Phantom lore: "the Good Mark," a symbol of righteousness.
DARK ORBIT PTS 1-2-- Sean One desires to have his orbital colonies declared independent of Earth's government, so he gathers supplies for a space laser from an obese Earth-smuggler, the Aussie-accented Gorda. Phantom is forced to league himself with Graft and Max Jr to foil Sean One's plans. Though Graft remains allied to Rebecca by the end of the episode, he and the Phantom part as respectful adversaries, and even Guran hopes that someday the old soldier will recover the better angels of his nature.
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE-- Max Jr has a dream of his childhood, being shown love by his father. But Max's adult psyche intrudes, reciting a (somewhat altered) poem from Baudelaire about angels knowing grief. Simultaneously, Guran reveals that at a very young age Kit received some instruction from his missing father, thus creating a parallel between the adversaries. Rebecca then launches a new scheme: downloading the mental engrams of her husband into a new biot body. However, the biot awakes believing that it's the original Max Sr and goes on a rampage, taking Sparks prisoner. Later he releases Sparks but abducts Max Jr, forcing Phantom to try to stop the android. When the biot drags Max Jr to Sector Zero, the site of Max Sr's death-- an area which should be replete with poison due to the catastrophe there-- all are surprised to see that the mutated ghostwood plant has neutralized the poison elements. The android realizes that it's no more than a machine and destroys itself, though not without claiming that the previous Phantom killed Max Sr.
LASERS IN THE JUNGLE-- The episode opens with Vaingloria musing on the impermanence of human life. That day at one of the singer's concerts, a mad bomber tries to assault Vaingloria, but the Phantom saves her. The hero also plans to lure Graft into the Section Zero jungle to annihilate Rebecca's biot army, on which her Cyberville scheme depends. Max Jr sends Vaingloria along with Graft and the biot army as his "observer," but it's more likely that Max Jr just likes messing with people. There's the hint of a possible romance between the singer and the soldier, though both are too damaged to make a connection. Phantom manages to use Vaingloria's specialty, illusions, to wipe out the biot army. There's an amusing side-plot in which Rebecca loses her hair due to chemical exposure, but by episode's end has regained it all thanks to clone-transplants. In the scene dealing with her recovery, her full head of hair is juxtaposed with the image of the snaky-locked head topping a statue of Medusa.
THREE INTO ONE-- Sagan is forced to work with the Phantom when a trio of citizens-- one of whom is a policewoman known to Sagan-- become a unitary being with enormous telekinetic powers. Cairo appears again, appearing to make a deal with Graft. Both Graft and the Phantom learn of "the Triad Project," which was supposedly abandoned during the era of Kit's predecessor. At the end, though Sagan doesn't learn Kit's secret, she's a bit more sanguine about the vigilante's activities.
THE GAUNTLET-- Sparks, who essentially raised himself on the streets after being apparently abandoned by his parents, gets the chance to find out what really happened. Mister Cairo takes an interest in the teen's welfare, not even charging anyone for eliciting vital memories from Sparks' subconscious. The boy learns that biots from Maximum Inc kidnapped both mother and father, and Phantom resolves to ferret out the truth, though he orders Sparks to stay out of the matter. Naturally the youth deals himself in anyway, but he, Phantom and Guran can only learn the truth by subduing a security system named Gauntlet, whose minds were used to provide a template for the system.
LIFE LESSONS-- Phantom shoots a biot and is grief stricken to find that he wounded (but fortunately did not kill) a human being masquerading as one of Maximum's androids. Phantom learns from the soulful biot Heisenberg that some biots have asserted their status as free, cognitive beings, which Kit finds hard to countenance. The main threat, however, is a defective reactor under the control of Maximum Inc, one that Rebecca's totally willing to let detonate since it will only harm the lower classes.
THE MAGICIAN-- Phantom encounters a professional magician named Steele, a friend of his vanished father. However, because of that contact, Graft and Rebecca may get a pipeline to a horde of secrets Steele maintained from the earlier association-- including a lot of the tech the modern Phantom uses. However, Steele uses his tricks to flummox Graft long enough to destroy the secrets and protect Kit. Though Steele doesn't look anything like the classic Mandrake, whom comics-artist Lee Falk created slightly before he invented The Phantom, it's obvious that this is a Mandrake homage, even if one doesn't know that the Steele character is being voiced by the same actor who did Mandrake in the 1986-7 DEFENDERS OF THE EARTH cartoon.
SWIFTER, HIGHER, FASTER-- Kit's Phantom crusade has led him to neglect the fellow collegians he used to hang with, but when he seeks to re-connect, he learns that one sportswoman, Jenna, has been enhanced thanks to Maximum Inc's promotion of risky nanobot tech. Jenna goes berserk. One of the other females who witnessed the debut of the New Phantom strongly suspects his identity, but nothing more comes of this plot-thread.
DOWN THE LINE-- Phantom and his allies receive a transmission from what appears to be the Phantom of a future era. The supposed descendant claims that for the safety of humankind, Kit must break the Phantom's rule against killing and exterminate Rebecca Madison.
CONTROL GROUP-- Thanks to Rebecca experimenting with memory transfers, Phantom and Sparks get to witness downloads of the memories of Rebecca's enforcer Graft. Both heroes are surprised to learn that the ruthless henchman was once a hero in his own right, defending the helpless people Rebecca wiped out during the conflicts of the resource wars. But because Graft lost almost his entire organic body in the wars-- he speaks the famous Ronald Reagan line from a similarly maimed character in the forties movie KINGS ROW-- he allows himself to succumb to being a madwoman's tool. Yet by the end, it's evident that the heroic Graft is far from being as dead as he thinks he is.
A BOY AND HIS CAT-- Despite Max Jr's facility for plotting evil plots, he enters a VR program and refuses to emerge, so that his body becomes comatose. Rebecca rages at the loss of her son to his own psychosis and brings in a programmer to extricate Max. Said programmer's name is "Cordwainer Bird," a well-known alias of writer Harlan Ellison, and the script not only has Bird comment on his "dangerous visions," the episode title references a famous Ellison story, "A Boy and His Dog." In VR Max encounters a female computer construct who takes the name Athena because she claims that she sprang from Max's head, a la the story of Athena's birth from the skull of Zeus. However, just like Rebecca, Athena is a jealous mistress who doesn't want Max to ever leave, and at one point she morphs into a Medusa-form, referencing the conflation of Rebecca and the snake-haired gorgon in the episode LASERS IN THE JUNGLE. Phantom tries to pull Max out of his delusive state but in the end must leave the confused Maximum Inc heir to his own devices.
In closing my remarks on Season One, I'll reiterate a point I made in my analysis of the book METROPOLIS. The word "Metropolis" means "mother-city," and the arc of the book connotes the madonna-figure of Maria reasserting her primacy over a city controlled by a father alienated from his son. In 2040, Rebecca wields almost total control of the similarly named Metropia, as well as her husband-- reduced to a "ghost in the machine"-- and all of her children, real and symbolic-- and as such, she's closer to the lascivious goddesses of pagan myth, the antitypes to the madonna archetype. Season Two will prove to be no less rich in mythopoeic correlations.
No comments:
Post a Comment