Space: Above and Beyond was set in the next century. It involved an intergalactic war with a bizarre alien race. It was populated by artificially- gestated humans and artificially-intelligent androids. Yet despite these trappings, it often felt less like a science fiction show than, say, a rousing Western, or a patriotic combat film or even an experimental character drama. And as good as the series was, this was perhaps its greatest stumbling block. Make no mistake, Space was a good series, even a great one - among the best new hours of the 1995-96 season, and certainly the best new science fiction series this year. Ironically, though, it creators Glen Morgan and James Wong didn't set out to create a science fiction show.
Since its debut, Space struggled in its seven o'clock Sunday time
slot. Still, demographics for the show were good, and it often outdrew other
science fiction offerings, including both Star Trek series. In many
ways, Space follows the pattern of Morgan and Wong's last outing,
The X-Files, which was also fairly ratings-anemic its first year.
The season's last five episodes of Space were supposed to air sequentially in a stable time slot, possibly Fridays at eight as a lead-in to The X-Files. A renewal decision would then be made after all those episodes had aired.
But after only two showings on Fridays, Fox scuttled the two final episodes, And If They Lay Us Down to Rest... and Tell Our Moms We Done Our Best, and aired a crucial installment on a Saturday night with virtually no promotion. This became the season's de facto final episode.
Had the network lost faith in the show, or were they experimenting, hoping to find a healthier spot in which to schedule it next season? In mid-May, Fox announced that the series would not be on its fall schedule.
At press time, the final episodes, which would have resolved the Kylen storyline and finally revealed the alien Chigs and their evolutionary connection to humanity, had not been given air dates.
"It almost feels like all the work we've put in for the whole season is meaningless," says James Wong, "because it's all coming down to one or two episodes."
"We're up against shows that are in the top ten for the week," echoes Kristen Cloke, who plays Shane Vansen. "It's really, really difficult on us, because the cast and the crew works so hard."
"We've been preempted so many times," says Joel de Ia Fuente, who plays Paul Wang. "It'd be nice if we could get an episode on the air."
Others have found ways to compensate for their disappointment. "It kills him. It hurts me," says Rodney Rowland, who plays Cooper Hawkes. "You've just got to tell yourself, 'I'm doing it for me.' Being a hit, the fame and the money, it doesn't mean anything in the long run. It's how you felt, what you did, how hard it was and how much you were scared and how did you rise to the occasion and conquer that. That's what you want to come away with."
He pauses. "There's nothing to feel bad about here."
From the beginning, Morgan worried that Space would be ignored by science fiction fans since the show would eschew many of the genre's traditional conventions. But if the "mainstream" audience, the one that usually scoffs at science fiction, also ignored Space, who would be left to watch?
Granted, a lot of science fiction fans have discovered Space - the Internet buzz and the rallying letters of support in genre magazines give testament to the existence of a large Space fanbase. But could the show ever expand beyond these loyalists, and gain the mass acceptance of, say, The X-FiIes? Glen Morgan doesn't think so. "A show like that comes along once in a decade," he says. Now, it seems likely that Morgan and Wong will return to The X-Files, perhaps as creative consultants, while preparing a new series or feature film.
During the first season of The X-Files, when Morgan and Wong
were working there as co-executive producers then-network president
Lucie Salhany approached them about doing a series like one she had
supervised at Paramount - Star Trek: The Next Generation. The concept was based on a Starfleet-like military academy. Morgan and Wong demurred, but liked the military angle. So they in turn pitched the idea of a war drama set in space.
"Then Lucie left the network," says James Wong, "but Sandy Grushow was still there, so we did a first draft [of a one-hour pilot], and then Sandy was fired. So now we're getting to the second draft, and we re-wrote it into a two-hour movie-of-the-week, and it went to John Matoian, who became the head of the network at Fox.
"He liked it, and he gave us some notes, and I thought his notes were far and away the best we got throughout this process," adds Wong. "So we got the green light to shoot the pilot, and he was very supportive."
Throughout, Morgan and Wong's "space war" concept had less to do with space than with war. They set out to craft a show that harkened back to the heroic optimism expressed in classic World War II films of the '40s and '50s. Grafting a science fiction framework onto this war simply offered them a fresh selling to tell the kinds of stories they'd read during their college days in a formative Fiction of War class.
Morgan points to one particular novel that was important to their concept: William Manchester's Goodbye, Darkness. "It was the memoirs of a grunt in the Pacific during World War II," he says. "It's hard to imagine it now but at the time, the Japanese culture might just as well have been an alien culture to the American soldiers that went over there. A lot of their knowledge of the enemy was coming across their camps, seeing the way they attacked the enemy. You didn't get the intelligence information of the big guns. You were just a guy in the woods. You heard saki glasses clinking in the darkness, and it was eerie."
So the series would deal with a squadron of pilots one cog in a massive war machine fighting an enemy of truly unknown, alien origin. Placing the enemy in outer space let Morgan and Wong create a true bogeyman, an endangered species in today's interconnected global village.
"That's really Glen and Jim's brilliance in inventing this show," says staff writer Joe Reinkemeyer. "It was taking a genre that's been around since The Iliad, the war drama, and finding a way to make it fresh and finding a villain that's correct. It's not that we're killing Russians. You get to avoid the political questions, because if aliens are invading the Earth I think everyone would get behind the idea that we have to stop them." To sidestep one of the primary handicaps in science fiction, the series would studiously avoid the technobabble that weighs other shows down like an artificial gravity well. "This show has been really good about not having a kind of futuristic, technical deus ex machina," says Reinkemeyer. "Except for the fact that it's set in the future, all the stories have turned on the character elements." The only reason it should be there is to push the plot forward," agrees writer Matt Kiene.
The technology that is shown would therefore evoke elements of the past, rather than the future. "I don't know if you've ever seen the space capsules at the Smithsonian," says Glen Morgan, "but it's like going to space in a Volkswagen. It's cramped, so we said we want it cramped. We don't want it plush and we don't want carpeting. We want oil stains on the wall. We want rivets. We want a World War II look."
So space battles resemble aerial dogfights. The squadron's base of operations, the Saratoga, looks like an aircraft carrier, and the squad's uniforms are essentially military fatigues.
The pilot was shot in Queensland, Australia by director David Nutter, who had served Morgan and Wong's scripts so ably on The X-Files. A group of relative unknowns were cast as the cadets who form the 58th Squadron. Designs were created, sets were built. Pasadena-based Area 51 began the effects work for the initial installment. But those special effects artists soon discovered that even on a planet wired for instantaneous communication, world-wide webs can get tangled up all too easily. "Modems were just too slow. We needed to send packages back and forth," says Area 51's Ken Stranahan (whose namesake in the series incites the rebellion of the A.l. Silicates).
"Even using the fastest services, we'd be looking at three- to four-day delivery times, and if you had a weekend in between, it could be a week or more," he says. This slowed everything down, because the computer-generated effects had to work in concert with the footage shot in Australia.
On a show so dependent on its special effects, Morgan and Wong soon realized that shooting in Australia, while less expensive, would ultimately cost the production too much lost time to be worthwhile. And they were too thrilled with Area 51's work to do anything that might compromise it in the series episodes. So the production was moved to soundstages in Los Angeles after the pilot was completed.
Even now, Morgan's isn't sure it was the right choice. "I'd have to have done the series there to really know the answer," he says. "It's so much more expensive here, but I believe with the effects and post-production and the music - they had to be here, so it's really easier to be here, however expensive."
"Its a double-edged sword," says Wong. "With The X-FiIes, we'd watch the dailies coming down from Vancouver, and then try to fix things after the fact. Here, you have the opportunity to catch things before they happen, but that increases the workload, because we're right next door to everybody."
Once Fox ordered series episodes, all the Australian sets had to be torn down, shipped to Los Angeles and re-built, including the full-size Hammerhead fighter constructed for the pilot. The cost of doing this had to be amortized over the course of the season, and budgets for the locations and effects-heavy episodes quickly approached two million dollars. (The cost overruns in addition to moving the shooting from his beloved home country, also reportedly aroused the ire of Fox chairman and C.E.O. Rupert Murdoch, souring him on the show.)
"It's astounding, beyond expectations, what it costs to put a show like this on the air," says Wong. "It's the most expensive show we've ever worked on, and it's a pressure that just keeps growing. The more money you spend, the more people look over your shoulder. That's a huge challenge, to put together the kind of show we want to do and to be somewhat responsible about it at the same time."
"You've gotta go make everything," says Morgan. "It costs $2,500 to make each of the [pilot's] helmets."
"Certainly the more episodes we had, the cheaper it becomes," says Wong, "because we could amortize the costs."
As the cast, sets and production personnel were making their way back from Australia, Morgan and Wong started work on the scripts for the first episodes. They began by establishing more about the three "lead" characters - Cloke's Shane Vansen, Rowland's Cooper Hawkes, and Morgan Weisser's Nathan West. However, the show quickly became an ensemble piece that included seven regular characters.
"We always thought we'd have an ensemble show," says Wang. "We told the other actors, you have to be patient, because our 'lead' characters will get the focus first, and then we'll let the audience know you."
"It was like with Joel, we knew that Joel was funny, even in the second episode," says Morgan. "He was doing stuff off-screen, walking around doing impressions of James Morrison [who plays Colonel McQueen], so we wrote that stuff in. You watch dailies and you see what these guys are doing."
"They've always been really receptive to creating an ensemble," says de la Fuente. "I do feel that the show works its best when we have strong ensemble episodes."
This ensemble quickly came to include de la Fuente's Paul Wang, Lanei Chapman's Vanessa Damphousse and James Morrison's T.C. McQueen. The recurring role of Commodore Ross, played by Tucker Smallwood, also became crucial as the season progressed.
"A lot of what's happened is the writers have had strong story ideas, and I ended up with something because there was no one else to do it," says de la Fuente. "The other characters had very specific roles, certain places to go and specific story points, and Lanei or I would take that story and it would become a part of our characters, like building blocks of random things that come together."
"Glen was very open and direct about his intentions for developing the show and our characters," says Chapman.
"I think it's been a lot of experimenting. Show Six (The Enemy) was the first hard-core ensemble piece," she says, "and we did that for a couple of episodes, and then they focused on one character per episode to see how that did, and then they went back to an ensemble. I love the way they play with what works and are free enough to explore until they find it."
James Morrison's Colonel McQueen quickly became a fan favorite. "We knew he would be prominent, just because of James Morrison's sheer presence," says Wong.
"I think they saw something when I walked into the room to audition," says Morrison. "I think they saw damaged goods under repair, which is what I think McQueen is. He's the mysterious figure who appears when things get really hairy, and he straightens things out and then he splits. That's a classic archetype. It's very much a Western archetype."
But even as the episodes and the ensemble were evolving in maturity and complexity, the show's time slot was severely constraining. Traditionally an hour for family shows, the time period was a little early the evening to tell the gritty, realistic war stories Morgan and Wong had in mind. Moreover, since Fox was broadcasting Sunday afternoon football, the starting time for Space was often delayed by as much 45 minutes in the Eastern time zone.
"This show is more adult that a seven o'clock time slot," says Wong. "I think ultimately that's the problem, even more than having it on Sunday night. We have so many letters that say 'We like that show, it's just hard for us to get ready to see it at seven o'clock.' In some parts of the country, it's even on at six o'clock."
Glen Morgan uses another barometer. "The X-Files was on at nine o'clock, so that means you could turn on the Internet at seven o'clock in LA, and see what the people back East had thought about the episode," he says. On our show, the messages filter in over the following couple of days, so I think a lot of people are taping it and watching it later."
With Space, Glen Morgan and James Wong wanted to tell stories about loyalty and lost faith, to capture the tone of John Ford Westerns, The Sands of Iwo Jima and Twelve O'Clock High, to evoke the themes of literature like The Red Badge of Courage and All Quiet on the Western Front, and to examine a generation shaped by World War II, JFK's assassination and Vietnam. Along with a spirited group of writers, actors, artists and craftspeople, they did it, albeit at times more successfully than others.
But if those stories sometimes seemed less like science fiction because of these themes, it shouldn't matter.
Story editor Marilyn Osborn perhaps says it best when she points out, "We can do poetry on Space: Above and Beyond."
Why shouldn't there be science fiction poetry?
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