Star Cops - Conversations With the Dead (S1E2)

The introductory ep of Star Cops had a cast of characters who treated death in a rather chilly fashion.  In this second  ep, loss of life is more keenly felt, especially by Nathan Spring.  Lee Jones, Nathan's girlfriend, is murdered.  Meanwhile, his officer David Theroux is looking into an accident that has set a spacebound couple on a trajectory which will see them run out of oxygen with no recovery possible.  The crew at the moonbase react in their individual ways, but all are devastated by the inevitable deaths of their colleagues.  The episode is all about grief, a welcome and stark contrast to the insouciance of 'An Instinct for Murder'.  As a newcomer to the show, it's a relief to see that 'Star Cops' does have a heart after all.

I think my initial guess was right, though, that the coldness of the first episode was a deliberate part of this fictional landscape.  Nathan, being a cop, damn well wants to find Lee's murderer himself but is bluntly told to butt out by the cop (Devis) who's actually assigned to the case.  Devis is one of those TV police who is pigheaded, incurious, unimaginative, uncaring, rude, and wouldn't bat an eye if the case  was closed without a solution - less work for him to bother with.  That's all Lee's death is to him, work.  He's not much like Nathan except in that one crucial regard: a life lost is not felt personally, it's just an academic puzzle to solve.  Karmically speaking, Nathan has has met himself and it's a slap in the face.  Butt out?  Someone he loves has just been brutally murdered and he's supposed to just whistle  his  way back to the moon?  It isn't just indifference, either, Devis tips his hand with a snide remark about leaving the job to "real policemen", revealing his contempt for the 'star cops'. Later Devis will show a more sympathetic side but admit that he finds Spring "a bit sentimental for my taste".

Lee's murder is a small masterpiece of budget-conscious staging.  She returns home to find that a message from Nathan awaits her, laden with security  encoding that takes forever to get through.  That it's from Nathan makes us more urgent than it does her, we know it must be important.  We get more anxious the further the scene progresses, the more we want to hear that message.  When it comes, it's a dire warning that Lee's life is in danger...and it just sits there  with Lee in another room not seeing it.  The lights go out. A stranger has broken in.   Hitchcock would be proud of the manipulation of both Lee and us.  The message was a ruse to keep Lee in place so that her killer could be sure of her location.

I felt this death too.  Time was devoted to establishing the bond between Nathan and Lee in the first episode, which served as character development for Nathan.  I thought it might lead somewhere, but not here.  Had Lee been introduced in this episode, we wouldn't have shared that loss with Nathan.  Another innovative scene transpires with a grieving Spring at the restaurant at which we saw them before, reliving their last conversation together.  At first it looks like a flashback until we see that Nathan's lips aren't mouthing the words we hear from him.   It's disorienting.   Anyone  who has lost someone dearly loved will have had similar moments of dislocation.  On a personal note, I've just been through that recently, so I know.  It's a poignant scene expertly intuited by director Christopher Baker.

On the moon, personnel are dealing with the unavoidable but still pending deaths of a couple (Mike and Laura) who were shepherding a supply shuttle to Mars.  The shuttle's engine has fired early, forcing them into a trajectory that has sent them on a death course.  They are as good as dead but still alive to know it.  The base personnel are  crushed and try to deal with their grief in their own ways, including arguing about how to take the news and what to do next.  What will Mike and Laura do?  Blow out the airlocks and die quickly?   Play out their time?  Theroux wants to discover whether the engine failure was intentional but finds that his questions are an intrusion on  the attempt to cope with devastating loss.

We never see Mike and Laura, we only hear their transmissions.  At first this bothered me a little.  But I think it helps us to identify with the moonbase personnel. We know the couple are going to die but are too removed from them to do anything about it.  Think of it as  Voight-Kampff empathy test.  We knew Lee already, but we feel even more for Spring...Mike and Lura we don't know at all but we can feel for them, and for the  ones they left behind. Loss is loss.  I wanted to know who the executed Russian girl was in Instinct for Murder but no one gave a damn.

Productionwise, Star Cops is still finding it's feet, just like Nathan in zero-G.  One effective weightless scene involving a  sleeping harness is followed by another unconvincing one of Nathan trying to seat himself at a  console.  In his acrobatics to appear weightless you can see that he is  actually struggling against gravity.  He gets all the moves just right but the illusion is broken by the effort itself.  Ironically, it made me better appreciate the work that went into it from the actor (David Calder) to whoever choreographed the scene.  Incidental music was more on target this time, two pieces of scoring suited  Lee's murder and a sequence luring Spring to a park  for info on the killer.  That theme song has become a lot more on-message now. I like the look of the moonbase and the moonbuggy that gets people  there.  Looks very proto-UFO.

There's another nice touch in Spring's meeting in the park at night.  He is approached by a shady but possibly innocent character who happens to be on roller skates.  You don't often see physical assaults that involve skates.  It's just unusual enough to provide a bit of off-kilter flavor.

Like the previous ep, there are two cases that are unrelated.  One is transparent, the culprit obvious the moment we are introduced.  The other story is far more clever.  I didn't catch it, because like Nathan I kept tuning out the newscasts as so much unwanted distraction.  Both cases bring us back to that same coldbloodedness, a blind eye to the value of other's lives in the face of our own goals.  The people responsible for Lee's death do indeed understand grief and the human psychology that drives it - they understand but don't care except that it is a tool to their own ends.  In neither case will justice be  served.  It's a cold world after all that warm-blooded nobodies like Laura, Mike, and Spring live and die.  The eps finale took me by surprise for Nathan's solution and his unresolved desire for revenge clashing with his self-loathing at having been personally responsible for three deaths now.

9 pairs of rollerskates in the dark. 

My favorite line came when Spring, trying to wrestle down his anger, barks "DEVIS!!  ...d'ya wanna  drink??"