Space Strikers E1: "Best of Friends, Worst of Enemies" (continued)

Metalus (actually, I think his name might just be "Metallic" with a hard C now that they've said it a few times. Erm...okay, then) finishes the reconstruction of Vincent Burke, and orders his lab assistant surgeon guy to shock him awake.

Burke's voice has changed completely from how he sounded as a cadet a few in-story days or weeks ago. And not just in the way that you'd expect from having his face replaced/covered by a cybernetic mask thing. He doesn't sound echoey, or muffled, or synthesized. Just more like a typical growly supervillain. I know that there's a good chance the voice actors never actually got to see the character designs until after the fact, given when and where this was made, but such circumstances have never made me especially merciful to a work in the past and that's not changing now. Anyway, Cyburke wakes up and asks in his new angry growly voice where he is and who all these weirdoes are.

Metallic answers the first question with the serial number of the "prison asteroid" they're on. Okay, seriously, what's up with this whole "prison" deal? His answer to the second one is actually pretty interesting, though. In fact, it's probably the most noteworthy thing in this pilot so far. He tells CyBurke that his fellow humans appear to have abandoned him to die on a lifeless, meteorite-blasted rock, and he and his crew rescued him and restored him to not just human life, but something with far greater power and potential. He only hopes that Cyburke will recognize this act of charity and repay grace with loyalty, but he has no way of forcing him.

What's interesting about this is that it doesn't seem like Metallic is lying. As best I can tell, he earnestly means everything he just said, and believes that he's telling the truth about how Burke ended up alone on that rock. Given his faction's low opinion of humans (even if it's mostly just being enforced from on high, I think), it's a pretty natural conclusion for him to jump to. It also might be a little bit of autobiographical projection, honestly? Metallic seems to have undergone a more primitive version of these same modifications himself, so maybe he's reading some of his own life experiences into this human's situation? That would also explain why he decided to take pity on him in the first place, come to think of it.

Maybe I'm giving this story more credit than it deserves. The writing in general certainly doesn't seem to be up to engaging in this level of subtlety and nuance, but you never know. For now I'll just say that Metallic is the most interesting character in this story until proven otherwise. Yeah, I think that's fair.

Before the conversation can get further, the door explodes open and a squad of armored and helmeted soldiers burst through. Weapons leveled, they announce that Metallic and his accomplices are all under arrest for consorting with the human enemy.

Metallic's own crew didn't have uniforms like this. That could just be a matter of these being field-equipped marines rather than bridge crew, but there's also the matter of their seemingly uniform body shapes. Very unlike the eclectic aliens we saw on Metallic's ship.

Yeah, I'm back to square one when it comes to figuring out what this organization is. It now seems like Metallic's gang are one of several groups operating under the auspices of this bigger, more xenologically homogenous faction. I'd suspect that the former are "inmates" and the latter are "wardens" of this prison system they've been alluding to, but you don't generally let inmates fly around freely on armed spaceships, so I doubt it's that. Hmm.

Metallic and his surgeon friend opt not to go peacefully, and a shootout commences. As the lasers fly, Metallic shouts for CyBurke to run away and hide himself as best he can. Okay, wow, yeah, that characterization for Metallic was intentional. He looks and sounds like any bargain bin nineties scifi cartoon baddy. His role in the "present" timeline when Burke has become Master Phantom is that of a generic evil cartoon henchman. But ultimately, this guy is actually no-bullshit heroic.

This show now has a lot more of my attention than it did a few minutes ago.

Cyburke shows some much-needed humanity of his own by refusing to abandon the being who has apparently saved him, but Metallic tells him he can help him much more by escaping to fight another day. Um...how does he figure? It seems like helping him fight off this handful of guards now would be a lot easier than trying to rescue him after...eh, whatever. Cyburke tears a wall open and flees through it, bidding the others to follow him, which to their credit they do try to. Unfortunately, Metallic and the unnamed surgeon's legs just aren't as powerful, and they get cut off and captured while Cyburke alone escapes into the facility's foundations.

Cut to Metallic and Dr. Noname (too bad we already have an actual literal Nemo in this story lol) being brought before a hulking green guy who is revealed to be Warden Mawrik.

He gloats that he's long suspected that Metallic was planning to betray him, and that he and his sidekicks really ought to be inmates instead of guards. Which they now will be.

Holy...

Okay, no. No way. I have trouble believing this.

...is a mid-nineties Saturday morning boys' cartoon actually using a private prison company turned pirate/slaver gang as the villains?

It really, really seems like this mid-nineties Saturday morning boys' cartoon is, in fact, using a private prison company turned pirate/slaver gang as the villains.

I'm kind of blown away. Like, IS this actually what I'm seeing? This isn't just me somehow wildly misinterpreting things, right?

Well, assuming I'm not, hot damn is that a better political take than I'd have ever expected from a show like this.

I still wonder what the history behind this is, though. What was the civilization that these thugs started out working for like? I'm guessing they're the species that Mawrik and his personal forces come from, but I'd really like to know more than that. Including what their history is with humanity, and whether Mawrik's hatred of humans is just a personal grudge or something cultural.

Anyway, CyBurke meanwhile breaks through bulkheads and smashes through blast doors until he stumbles into a guardroom, where he beats them up until they agree to release all the inmates from the cellblocks.

That plating is not only impervious to small arms, but his forearms seem able to reflect shots back at the enemy, sort of Star Wars style.

Why did Metallic tell him to run away from those four or five guards, earlier?

It's not like CyBurke needed time to learn how to use his new body or anything. It's only been minutes or (at most) a couple hours since then.

Yeah, not good plotting.

Also, Cyburke is already doing supervillainisms like threatening those guards with "the pain of eternity(?)" if they don't start doing what he wants. Is this supposed to be down to whatever software Metallics' augs came bundled with? Did the writers just not think about character development being a progression rather than quantum change? Or did Vincent Burke always talk like that, even back at the academy when he was supposedly a model cadet? Option three is canon.

Anyway, he releases all the prisoners, and tells them that he's planning to take this shitshow over and beat it into a proper army to go conquer an empire with. I...where the hell is THAT ambition coming from? I guess Burke was established to be an egotist and gloryhound, but this sort of megalomania seems like it needed either a lot more foreshadowing or a lot more of a corruption arc to preceed it.

He also rambles on about how humanity has rejected him and he wants revenge against Earth. Which few of the inmates probably understand more than four consecutive words of, but they cheer anyway, because being soldiers in this weirdo's army has got to be better than mining asteroid ore for Mawrik all day. So, he arms the prisoners and leads them to the control hub to rescue Metallic and replace the current management with themselves.

Also, CyBurke notably doesn't demand or threaten them into compliance. In fact, he explicitly tells them that any who don't wish to join him are free to run and make their own way as fugitives. Sure, he knows that that's not really much of a choice (would they even be able to get ships to escape on?), but it's still a humanizing touch that honestly feels out of place amidst the sudden descent into moustache-twirling villainy.

Long story short, CyBurke (I wonder when and how he ended up taking the name Master Phantom? The show could have done a bit of extra groundwork here by having Metallic's sub-gang already be named the Phantom Warriors) and his new militia storm the facility and rescue Metallic and his officers. Turned out they were already in the process of staging a desperate escape themselves, but it looks like it would have failed if CyBurke's prison riot hadn't also happened right then. Mawrik and his surviving lackeys surrender, and are forced to start making themselves useful to CyBurke and Metallic.

Then we cut back to the present, with Master Phantom telling all this to Metallic and continuing to recount their escapades since then. Despite him having been there for all of this.

Well, while it is being told like absolute shit, at least that was a good story? Like, conceptually, in the abstract, that was really surprisingly good.

Since taking over Mawrik's gang, Master Phantom and Metallic have seen great piratical success, their fleet growing many times over since then and absorbing many other outlaw fleets of various origins. It isn't made clear if they've actually conquered planets and created a literal empire, or if they just command enough space muscle and are good enough at extortion to be de facto rulers of the region. Also unstated is how Metallic ended up as Master Phantom's sidekick when they started out the other way around; I guess that going by what we saw, Burke was likely just the more charismatic of the two and thus able to command more loyalty from the recruits.

Still, despite all their successes and triumphs, Master Phantom has never forgotten the face of the cadet who betrayed him and left him to die on that asteroid. As the years went by, it became an outright obsession.

...

He says Nemo's name here, and that's where this whole thing clicked for me and I realized what the story behind this story probably was. I'll explain in the conclusion, but for now I'll just say holy shit wow is that funny but also tragic.

...

Cut back to Nemo being cut out of his ruined cockpit by whatsername, Dana. To keep him distracted from his injuries, she tells him to keep talking as she flies him back to her own ship so they can get out of here before the Phantom Warriors close in again. I appreciate that she's at least trying to disguise this clumsy infodump as something that could reasonably be narrated in-universe, but the fact that Master Phantom isn't making any such attempts for his own half of it sort of undermines her efforts. It's okay Dana, I appreciate your effort.

Nemo says that after Burke was written off for lost and he finished grieving and survivor's guilt-ing, he graduated into the Earth Space Force and worked his way up through the ranks to captain. His first command was a ship called the Nautilus, which happened to be named after a submarine built and captained by one of his own distant ancestors. Also, it looks like a bad graphics space opera version of the Richard Fleischer movie's take.

Okay. Show. You do know that "Nemo" was a pseudonym, right? If Captain Nemo had had any children, they wouldn't have been named that.

Honestly, I think it would have been better if they didn't pull this "Captain Nemo's great great great great great great great grandson Captain Nemo who's spaceship is coincidentally named after the Nautilus" shit, and instead just had the man and ship's names be a plain old literary allusion.

...

Also GAAAAAAAAAAH I need to wait for the end talk about this but URGGGGHHH

...

One of the Nautilus' first missions under Nemo's command was responding to a string of attacks against human deep space facilities by the Phantom Warriors. They reach the latest distress signal's source too late; the space station is battered, mostly powerless, and empty. Wonder what they did with the crew? Still, they land the Nautilus on the station's hull and board it to make a thorough search.

I kinda dig the colour palette they chose for the station.

Sort of halfway between the rusty metal of an old ocean platform, and sandstone like an ancient ruin. Pretty unique, and faintly unsettling as I'm sure was the artists' intent. I haven't been thrilled with this show's visuals overall, but this is a rare standout.

They find a recording left by the station's commander, saying that they've been boarded by a motley force of pirates led by an unstoppable cyborg creature that calls itself Master Phantom, and that it's only a matter of time before they break into the control room. Before the recording can finish though, the station's intercoms are taken over from a remote location, and Master Phantom cuts it off to announce that the station is surrounded and that the ESF cruiser currently landed here had better surrender before he gets impatient (actually, he uses an alien unit of time to give the ultimatum, which is another dissonantly good worldbuilding detail amid the otherwise generic space cartoon backdrop). Nemo and Co hurry back to the Nautilus to negotiate with the pirates. On another positive production note, the music as they're hurrying back to the ship is really good.

They reach the ship. Nemo doesn't recognize Burke when he comes onscreen, due to the cyborg Bane mask, but Master Phantom recognizes him.

Master Phantom is delighted, cackling madly at this fortuitous turn of events that delivered the one person he's most wanted to get his hands on to him almost as soon as he started his campaign against the humans. He tells Nemo who he is. Nemo has a pretty paint-by-numbers shocked reaction. Master Phantom accuses him of leaving him to die, and Nemo starts to explain what actually happened back there, but Burke gets him off and refuses to let him speak.

...

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...

Nemo pulls a legitimately clever trick here. He has his men fire on the station's interior and set off a chain reaction of explosives that makes it look like he self destructed the Nautilus to prevent its capture. The pirates are forced to withdraw their ships to a safe distance before the station's reactor goes boom as well, which gives Nemo just enough time to fly clear of the deteriorating station and dash past the Phantom Warriors while their ships are out of position before going to FTL. Oh hey, faking a self destruct, that happened in the Jules Verne books too, that's actually kind of a nice touch if it was intentional.

Master Phantom sees them escape and gets mad. More awesome music plays. Then cut back to the present with Nemo talking to Dana, where he finishes his story with an extremely cheesy speech about how he hopes that Vincent Burke can still be redeemed before his heart is completely consumed with evil. End pilot.


Okay. This? This is something special. I don't think I've EVER seen a story work so hard to avoid doing something interesting. However, I'm also pretty sure that it wasn't the creators' fault that things had to turn out like this.

So, first things first. We have one character who lost his previous life, took on an eerie pseudonym, and became the captain of a crew of outlaws and dissidents from near and far, with whom he fights against the powers that be. We have another character who is named Captain Nemo and commands the Nautilus.

It's definitely a headscratcher. But hang on, there are other data points to address.

Nemo gets about one minute's worth of genuine protagonism in this twenty-some minute pilot, when he did the fake self destruct thing at the end. In fact, the story goes to fairly ridiculous lengths to deprotagonize him. All the mistakes that led to Burke being stranded on that rock were his own, with Nemo's reluctance being just sort of talked over. Then there's the ridiculous detail of the commander remotely taking over his ship to prevent him from trying to rescue Burke, with him reduced to once again ineffectually begging. Then, when he meets Master Phantom over the videocall, it happens a third time, with him being prevented from communicating information that would likely be able to change the course of the plot (or at least the course of his relationship with the villain). Aside from the escape plan, the entire story happens to him, and even in that capacity he's barely relevant.

Taken at face value, there are at least two big missed opportunities here. The first is that in having Burke's fate be all his own stupid fault while Nemo was completely blameless makes their history much less interesting. What does Nemo even have to confront, here? What is Burke to him, given those details? It would have been so much more compelling if the mishap was at least partially Nemo's own fault, and Burke's accusation when they met again had actual weight behind it. That could have started, like, a character arc for our alleged protagonist. The second missed opportunity is that, if we DO have to have Burke be totally at fault and Nemo totally blameless in what happened, we could at least let Nemo explain that to Master Phantom and have the latter believe him. Then we could have a plot about these two friends trying to deal with being enemies now even though neither of them really wants to be, but Burke's loyalty to his piratical found family being every bit as strong as Nemo's to Earth and conflict between the two being unavoidable. But again, hold that thought.

There's some really weird shit going on with Master Phantom's and Metallic's characterizations. It's like two characters with some degree of depth and sympathy to them being forced into cookie-cutter cartoon villain moulds in half of their scenes. Also, the really villainous part of Master Phantom's agenda - his desire for revenge on Earth and humanity - has extremely flimsy justifications and is all but completely external to what he's otherwise about.

Now, think about the paradigm of censorship that these cartoons were produced and aired under. What sort of stories were allowed to be told? What sort of heroes were they allowed to follow?

I can't say anything for sure, but I very, very strongly suspect that in the creators' original concept for this show, Burke and Nemo were one character, named Nemo, with the Nautilus being his pirate ship. Unfortunately, you weren't allowed to make cartoons about a morally ambiguous band of renegades fighting against the legitimate authorities back then, and you certainly weren't allowed to have your "hero" do anything really wrong without apologizing and atoning for it by the end of the episode. And, of course, the villains need to be unproblematically wrong and evil. If one seems too sympathetic, you'd better tack "I want to blow up Earth" onto them to avoid issues.

It would definitely be going too far to say that American censorship laws deprived us of an amazing work of art or anything. Even ignoring everything I just laid out, this show isn't well written or well animated, and it would have probably been just as badly written and animated either way. But god, it could have at least been INTERESTING while being poorly written. It could have had something worthwhile under the so-so execution. At the very least, it could have actually paid homage to "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" instead of vapidly appropriating it for a story with nearly the opposite message like it ended up doing.

I can't prove that this is actually what happened behind the scenes, of course, but there's a lot pointing to it.

I guess at least the soundtrack is still pretty great. And the (at least implied) origin of the Phantom Warriors as a prison company turned pirate is a hell of a lot more politically biting than I'd expect from a show like this; I'm surprised the censors let that one slip through.


Also, why the hell is it called "Space Strikers?" The name never even appears in the pilot episode.