TekWar

I would have given it more stars but for the simple fact that some scrimping had to be done in order to create the world of 2045. The continuity wasn't always consistent. However the series taken from the four Universal Action Pack movies that aired in syndication months before the series debut was one of the most futuristic and visionary cyberpunk stories to air on television in the early/mid-nineties when VR and Cyberspace was beginning to become common buzzwords in the lexicon of the 90's. Granted the future was very stylish, not the beat-up grungy used and recycled vision of cyberpunk that visionaries like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling gave us in their novels. Here the tech was high tech looking with colorful polished surfaces, metallic sheen and a slightly computer generated look to it's design. I like to call it Ikea-Tech as it has a subtle euro-Nordic influence to it's design sensibilities. This doesn't detract from the viewing experience, just makes this cyberpunk future a bit more heavy on the futuristic comfort rather than the "beat it to fit and paint it to match" aesthetic of wrote cyberpunk. But again, that is a minor aside, what counts is the stories and the acting and Evigan and cast deliver good solid dialog with only a few winces (Rez-off) and cool cyber-noir story lines that would make effective reading if not filmed. In this stylish future the world is plagued by the drug TEK. The drug is a futuristic VR hallucinogen that when active allows the user to experience whatever illusion he or she desires along with enhancing the users neurochemical processes. That is why it is deadly, as these TEK experiences can not just be addictive but eventually cause neurological deficits, nerve damage, brain damage and eventually death. Jake Cardigan a former police officer starts the series being revived from a 15 year cryoprison sentence early to find his world turned upside down. His wife has divorced him and taken another lover, his son is ensconced away in a private school in Europe and he has no job and a bad reputation as a TEK junkie and a cop killer the last of which is what got him thrown in CryoPrison. Walter Bascom, head of Cosmos security got Jake out for the express purpose of giving a wrongly accused man a second chance to redeem himself as a crusader against TEK. The series follows his adventures with his trusty sidekick Sid Gomez as they take down TEKLords that have murderous VR duplicates, TEK family syndicates, Hackers in search of TEK secrets, Android part thieves and even saving the life of a scientist who has figured how to stop TEK from affecting the brain, thus making it non addictive and harmless and making him a target for some very powerful TEK distributors. Along the way, Jake and his equip(Nika, Sid, Sam) make serious in-roads into stopping TEK and freeing the world from the nightmare of addiction and murder that follow in it's wake. Sadly the series never completed a first season, and was not renewed for following seasons like many a scifi series. The series was rerun on SciFi Channel which is probably where it belonged in the first place. Universal who I think had just bought USA Networks (owner of SciFi Channel)decided to showcase the series on a cable channel in prime-time instead of prime-time syndication like most of their Action Pack series. Had it been run that way, there could have been a wider viewing base with better ratings as a result and the series might have had the numbers that showed it was a worthwhile investment to keep filming. Granted USA was gaining in popularity as a Prime-Time network to rival the syndies and non-cable nets but this was still early and uncharted territory. Still, we got something and with remakes becoming popular these days, a chance that this could be remade with even more lavish FX is possible. I am sure the writers of this series could find a bit more to write about Jake Cardigan and his fight against TEK.

A pity we lost this after only one season. Great cop show with a twist. The matrix sequences were the closest I've seen to a realisation of William Gibson except for the film Johnny Mnemonic. Good cast especially Maria del Mar and Natalie Radford. I hope William Shatner gets round to writing some more novels some time.

I heard some mediocre and even negative reviews about this show. Well, I don't agree at all. It was made during 1994-1996 (1 season only). There were 4 Made-for-TV movies before this series. Unfortunately, I didn't see those movies (maybe yet) but I really love the series - brilliant achievement for that-time television. They made a very decent cyberpunk series with great visual effects and really good acting. Too bad, the show was closed. It deserved better promotion and much wider publicity. Greg Evigan, Maria del Mar, William Shatner, Natalie Radford, Eugene Clark and others did a great job. I hope, this show (or its remake) will come back in the nearest future!

We were introduced to an array of some very interesting characters during "season one", which consisted of four feature-length "films" made for TV by Alex Beatons "action pack".

And this weekly one-hour television series followed pretty much the same format. In fact, the production value was a little bit higher than the first four entries. I am watching the first episode right now, many of the special effects are much better then in the action pack releases. To me it is about the same as watching the live action RoboCop series which was being played in syndication around the same time, some of the same people who worked on that show worked on this show. And some of them actually worked on Star Trek the next generation including Morgan Grendel who wrote the episode "the inner light" which has been considered possibly the best Star Trek episode ever.

But when they started showing this, there was only one minor change: The character of "Centra" (Catherine Blythe) who portrayed Bascom's computer hacker was replaced by a different girl, Natalie Radford as "Nika". I always liked Centra more.

For the first at least six episodes, The list of characters did not change much except for maybe swapping out the actor who portrayed Jake Cardigan's son, and I don't know if Cardigans wife, Kate, played by Sonia Smits ever appeared again. But Sid Gomez eventually was replaced by Maria Del Mar as "Sam Houston".

It was around that time in the show, people started losing interest. We had gotten used to the team of Cardigan and Gomez, and suddenly there was a brand new character that we had to get used to and the show wasn't allowed the proper amount of episodes for us to accept Sam Houston as a replacement.

I always thought she was OK in the part, and I liked the ripped up pants that she always wore.

But I never understood why the show which was being shown on Syfy channel at the time suddenly stopped being shown. They didn't even play the last four episodes at the time.

There were some other problems with this show that I just learned about, during the first "season", the actor who played the character of Bennett Sands (Ray Jewers) suddenly passed away. Which had serious repercussions to the stories from then on. I never knew this until I watched "Tek Lords" and they do an homage to Ray Jewers. The final episode of the first season dealt with his murder but never shows the actor.

And Bascom himself (William Shatner) only appears in a few episodes. Of course he was working on Star Trek Generations that year.

But this show was just one of those shows that could have done well had it been given a chance to develop, it really wasn't that bad. Especially for a show made in the 90s they started getting more interesting with their speculative fiction, and sometimes we will see a device that they had on this show... Computer gloves used for navigation, even three dimensional representations. Of course the concept of holography hasn't hit the main stream computer market yet even though there are some devices that display a 3-D screen that appears to float in the air. But the idea of interactive characters that feel as if they are there when you touch them is probably years from being something that we will see in consumer computing. But this show even introduced the concept of MP3 music players that could be worn on a wrist like a watch, MP3 was a technology opposed by the RIAA. But now it is a common streaming format. Also, touch screens which are very common today especially on hand devices. And hand devices like the iPhone were introduced in shows like this.

I believe I installed windows 95 about halfway through the first season, that was a major change for computing that year.

I have no intention of reading Shatner's books, so I will never know how well these concepts are executed in that medium. This show is oddly prescient, though. Something about the video phone interfaces feels very current and the theme of technological addiction was so far ahead of its time that it probably helped get the show axed. The cyberprep (this is not cyberpunk in the strictest sense of the term, the genre having developed beyond its punk roots by the time TekWar aired) world is an interesting place with interesting people. I wish this had been Cyberpunk 2077's DLC instead of Phantom Liberty.