The Starlost - The Show!

I've heard about The Starlost for most of my life, but I'd never seen an episode of this notorious science fiction series. My knowledge was most likely a result of reading and reading about Harlan Ellison, the sci-fi writer who concocted the story this series is based on and who wrote the script for the debut episdoe. The Starlost is considered by some to be the worst science fiction series ever and I can vouch that it's not that.

But the guy who first thought it all up was not happy and was so unhappy in fact that he had his named removed and this standby identity of "Cordwainer Bird" punched in to fill the void. Ellison tells the tale of how he was much abused (Ellison is always much abused in his stories) by the folks who wanted to produce this show and how they made promises they either couldn't or had no intention of keeping. I'll take a look at the novel he made with Ed Bryant some time later which presumably puts forth his rendition of this story. But first here's the show.

We meet Devon, an iconoclastic member of an Amish sect which finds its world oddly circumspect. With a limited territory and a limited sky and a limited population the village uses authoritarian techniques to keep the balance. Devon does not fit in, he wants to marry Rachel the girl he loves despite the fact she is promised to another, his friend in fact, a blacksmith named Garth. Devon's confrontations withe powers result in his isolation but he never relents and eventually discovers that all is not what it seems. This Amish clan is floating in space and they don't even know it.

The first episode shows how Devon begins to find the truth and how when he tries to share that truth with his people he is yet again condemned. The three friends end up outside the society and together begin to learn the real truth of their existence. Some of that truth is that they live on a great Ark, a spaceship which was borrowed from the Bruce Dern film Silent Running.

I didn't find The Starlost to be all that bad, a tendency to be dull but certainly possessing special effects typical of the era. Most of the dullness is in the oddball flat way the acting is done. All the actors seem to do it, to demonstrate general lethargy punctuated by moments of furious activity, so I think it must have been intended.  Perhaps they confused ponderous silence with presumed wisdom, but whatever the case it hurts the viewing. As the series tumbles along it does tweak with its look and premise a bit, and toward the end seems to treat our trio of stalwarts as folks more comfortable with technology. That's natural of course, but it felt more like a reboot than an evolution. I've seen worse.

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