They strike without warning, without mercy, appearing out of nowhere and leaving no one alive…
For Christmas, one of my sisters gave me a DVD of the short-lived SF series “Space Rangers.” I hadn’t seen the show since its brief original run in 1993, and I didn’t remember a lot of details — mostly I remembered Marjorie Monaghan as Jo Jo and Linda Hunt as Chennault, and that the show had a pleasantly scruffy feel. The last couple of nights I’ve been watching it while I do my nightly exercises, and I was struck by one story element I had completely forgotten — the banshees. These are mysterious hostile aliens who are attacking helpless transports.
And what struck me about them was a strong feeling of deja vu. I’ve seen this scenario before. What’s more, I’ve seen it as an important story element used to add excitement and intrigue to the first few episodes of a new spacefaring SF TV series.
Twice.
On “Firefly” they were called Reavers. On “Babylon 5” they were called raiders. All in all, though, they’re pretty similar in methodology — they appear out of nowhere, viciously attack lightly-armed transports, wipe out opposition with blood-curdling thoroughness, then vanish again before the more-heavily-armed good guys can get there to help.
Now I find myself wondering why these three series all used such similar devices.
I suppose it’s a cheap way to suck viewers in by showing Our Heroes fighting bloodthirsty monsters, and on “Firefly” they eventually turned out to have an important role in the series overall story arc. On “Babylon 5,” though, they were little more than a minor nuisance, contributing almost nothing to the five-year whole, and I would have thought the Narn-Centauri conflict would have been enough of a hook to draw people in without the raiders.
On “Space Rangers,” of course, the series didn’t last long enough to see how important they were. “Space Rangers” was also so clumsily written that it’s hard to be sure why anything was there. I mean, the first episode involves a whole bunch of backstory stuff (the hero’s old mentor, the alien’s mysterious culture) that viewers don’t yet know or care about — not good writing.
Anyway, I find it curious that all three series used such a similar device, and I wonder why it happened. Are space pirates that essential an element of space opera?
The Banshees (and such) are Space Indians. They’re out there in the wilderness beyond the frontier, they attack “civilized” people, and they’re generally considered to be too weak to defeat a true fighting force.
If a lot of Outer Space tropes are Westerns, the “Banshees” are the dangerous savages, but with a genocide-/land grab-ectomy.
In the case of Firefly, the concepts, language and styles used reminded me very much of the golden age of ship-based exploration on Earth. Having some flavor of pirates was necessary for the themes involved.
I’m a bad geek in that I’ve only seen a few Babylon 5 episodes, so I can’t speak to the purpose of the raiders. However, it’s probably a similar reason. Perhaps it was just to give the Good Guys some Bad Guys to hunt down.
Many viewers need pirates in any show that involves ships in order to believe that the world/galaxy/universe is fully fleshed out.
Seems to me that the key similarity is that the Reavers, raiders, and banshees can’t be reasoned with — they don’t negotiate, don’t retreat, just kill. Which isn’t all Indians, but maybe matches the way Apaches were treated in old westerns.
But yeah, maybe they are a way of saying, “We’re on the frontier, beyond the reach of civilization.”
I don’t think you need pirates in any ship-based story — “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” didn’t have any equivalent — but maybe you do need savages to show it’s a frontier.
Incidentally, I watched another episode of “Space Rangers” tonight, and I have another observation to make: On any TV series, any time someone says, “They are a warrior people, Captain,” sooner or later Our Hero is going to be in an arena, pitted in a one-on-one duel to the death against one of those warriors.
I may be over-analyzing things, but from a worldbuilding standpoint it seems to me that pirates or savages have to be there to justify the protagonists being martially skilled and heavily armed.
Without the threat there is no need for those things, and indeed possessing them is suspicious. If you are heavily armed without a good reason, you are the one who looks likely to be up to no good.
Digressing, I’m reminded of the bit in your Dragon Weather books where they stop in a wastelands town for a respite from the threat of bandits. The mentor explains that the people of the town and the bandits are the same people, but everyone ignores the fact.
Another part of that might be the economic argument that having extra weapons and guards is expensive. So if you don’t need them the wasted money puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
I think that space pirates / barbarians are both useful devices for storytelling (gives the heroes someone to fight whom the audience won’t feel too bad about the heroes killing) and likely from a world-building point of view. After all, pirates and barbarians are as old as commerce and civilization: why wouldn’t they appear in space as soon as human civilization in space spread out far enough for there to be settlements no longer under central control?