Categories
Space Rangers

Death Before Dishonor

Space RangersAmbassador Marla Baker is at Fort Hope to wind up delicate trade negotiations with a warlike species called the Vee’Lon, only to watch all of her hard work unravel when Boon punches the Vee’Lon ambassador in a bar after the ambassador insists on fondling Jojo’s hair. The Vee’Lon ambassador’s aide de camp escalates things to a war footing, demanding an official apology but still promising the spilling of human blood. A higher-ranking ambassador is summoned from Earth to smooth things over, but thanks to a bomb placed aboard his ship, he never makes it to Fort Hope. It’s up to Baker to salvage the situation herself, even if it means offering Boon up for a fight to the death with the Vee’Lon ambassador.

written by Ed Speilman & Howard Spielman
directed by David Burton Morris
music by Hans Zimmer & Mark Mancina

Space RangersCast: Jeff Kaake (Captain John Boon), Marjorie Monaghan (Jojo), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Zylyn), Jack McGee (Doc), Clint Howard (Mimmer), Danny Quinn (Daniel), Gottfried John (Weiss), Linda Hunt (Chennault), Claudia Christian (Ambassador Marla Baker), Sherman Howard (Prince Gor’Dah), Dana Gladstone (Lord Muk’Toh), John Mahon (Ambassador Hardcastle), Peter Looney (Max), Duane Whitaker (Roacher), Sheila Johnson (April), Larry Marks (Vee’lon Guard)

Notes: Mere weeks before Babylon 5 premiered, Claudia Christian was hanging out with the Space Rangers. (The Babylon 5 pilot movie did not feature her character, Commander Susan Ivanova, who wasn’t introduced until that series’ first hour-long episode in January 1994.)

LogBook entry by Earl Green

Categories
Season 1 Time Trax

A Stranger In Time

Time TraxIn the year 2193, gifted and fiercely devoted Darien Lambert is one of the best law enforcement officers on Earth…until a string of suspects seem to disappear completely from view with no explanation, many of them on Lambert’s watch. Due to his outstanding service record, it is simply assumed that Lambert needs more of the latest crime fighting tools, and he is issued a portable artificial intelligence called Selma, who can appear visually to Lambert but can also communicate with him via audio only.

The theft of the firearm used by John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Lincoln raises the alarm that something big is on the horizon, and Lambert feels certain that the weapon’s symbolic importance points to a high profile target: the president of the United Nations. Lambert’s hunch is correct, but his timing is off: he can’t prevent the assassination, but he does capture the assassin. However, that same assassin vanishes into thin air from the confines of a state-of-the-art maximum security prison cell. Lambert suspects matter transmission, either into an alternate universe or backward or forward in time.

His suspicions lead him to a lab run by a beautiful scientist, whose work on an experimental time travel device called Trax is slowly being taken over by an obsessive Nobel Prize winning scientist, Dr. Mordecai Sahmbi. The use of Trax involves the injection of a drug that allows the human body to endure the rigors of time travel, but only twice; a way has not been found to make the third trip non-fatal. Lambert methodically gathers his evidence until he’s ready to launch a sting operation on the Trax lab to arrest Sahmbi for sending heinous criminals back in time, unleashing them on the primitive, unsuspecting world of 1990s Earth. Sahmbi himself escapes, and Lambert, with Selma, must subject himself to time travel via Trax in an attempt to stop history from being rewritten by an insane criminal.

written by Harve Bennett
directed by Lewis Teague
music by Garry McDonald and Laurie Stone

Time TraxCast: Dale Midkiff (Darien Lambert), Elizabeth Alexander (Selma), Mia Sara (Elyssa / Annie), Michael Warren (Frank), Henry Darrow (The Chief), Peter Donat (Sahmbi), Henk Johannes (Dietrich), Martin Maddell (Sergeant), Monroe Reimers (Duke), Peter Whittle (Wahlgren), David Franklin (Fredric), Rob Steele (Wilson), Lewis Fitz-Gerald (C.L. Burke), Michael Edward-Stevens (Art), Stephen Bergin (Grille Bar Waiter), Billy Sandy (U.N. President), Jimmy White (Reporter), Pamela Norman (Archive Clerk), Dave Robinson (Businessman), Ben Lawson (12 year old Darien)

Time TraxNotes: Add a dash of Quantum Leap to The Fugitive, and you have Time Trax. Created by Harve Bennett with Jeffrey Hayes (T.J. Hooker) and Grant Rosenberg (Lois & Clark), Time Trax was teased as a sci-fi cop show, though after the pilot strands Lambert in the past, the show happens almost entirely in the present day (of the 1990s, when the show was made). Time Trax was part of the short-lived, ill-fated Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), an attempt by Warner Bros. and Chris-Craft Television to launch a fifth network in the same mold as the then-recent launch of the Fox network; other PTEN shows included Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Babylon 5, the latter being the only PTEN series which actually outlasted PTEN.

LogBook entry by Earl Green