Judge Dee

Judge Dee's Mystery (2024)

It's hard to imagine any TV show being much more enjoyable than the latest Chinese adaptation of Robert van Gulik's "Judge Dee" mysteries. I strayed on it accidentally on Netflix, but was initially put off by my memories of reading a couple of rather dull detective novels starring the (semi-) historical sleuth some years ago.

Yiwei Zhou as Di Renjie (2024)

Judge Dee's Mystery certainly starts off with a bang. The new incarnation of Di is apparently a master of Kung Fu as well as possessing a photographic memory: no details ever escape his notice, and - despite his reputation as a ne'er-do-well - his travels in the wastelands around China have clearly taught him a good deal about the world and its ways.

Di and his love-interests

The effortlessly cool cast is led by forty-year-old Yiwei Zhou, with Wang Likun as his love-interest Cao An, and Zhong Cuxi as the all-powerful (yet beleaguered) Empress.

Di's side-kicks

But of course every detective needs his Watson. In this case, as an official magistrate, Di travels with quite an entourage. There's his father's old friend Hong Liang (played by You Yongzhi), Ta Ji as his muscle, Qiao Tai, and Lingzi Qu as the irrepressible Ma Rong.

Ma Rong

This latter is by far my favourite character. She plays a kind of Sancho Panza to Judge Dee's Don Quixote, and is always ready to scull a drink or start a sword-fight. She's also (clearly) deeply in love with Di Renjie, but is forced to accept the fact that he sees her as a comrade rather than one of the delicate, lute-playing ladies he prefers to keep company with.

The delectable Cao An

The plots are (for the most part) absurdly convoluted, and sometimes contain hints of the supernatural. They tend to start in the middle of the hour, presumably to encourage us to continue watching, and last for three or four episodes each. They often begin when Di Renjie is posted to a new district, and is thus forced to try and make sense of the particular intrigues and corruption in his new home base.

Cao An & Di Renjie share a moment

•

Sharon Lathan: Robert van Gulik & Family

Robert Van Gulik, the originator of the series, was born in Holland but brought up in Indonesia, where he first acquired his taste for Eastern cultures and languages. He met his wife Shui Shifang, daughter of a Qing dynasty Imperial, in China during the Second World War. In 1940 he "stumbled across an obscure and anonymous 18th-century Chinese novel," as Sharon Lathan puts it in her brief online biography of the author:

The novel, titled Wu-tsé-t’ien-szû-ta-ch’i-an (Four great strange cases of Empress Wu’s reign), was a fictional account of the deeds of Judge Dee, one of the heroes of traditional Chinese detective fiction, and was set during the 7th-century Tang Dynasty. ... Robert not only translated the novel into English, he delved into the history of Chinese Penal Code and other legal literature of the period. Between WWII and his diplomatic duties, it was not until 1949 that Robert was able to publish his translation — Dee Goong An: Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee ...

My English text was meant only as a basis for a printed Chinese and/or Japanese version, my aim being to show modern Chinese and Japanese writers that their own ancient crime-literature has plenty of source material for detective and mystery stories.

- Robert van Gulik

His fascination with old Chinese detective stories, and with Judge Dee, prompted Robert van Gulik to write original stories for modern readers. His first original story was The Chinese Maze Murders published in 1951, but only in Japanese and Chinese as he believed the stories would have more interest to readers from those cultures. He was correct ... so he soon followed with two more novels about Judge Dee.

"Not until 1956 did he translate and publish his first three novels into English and Dutch. All of his subsequent novels were published in English first, with the translations coming afterwards."

Di Renjie examines a corpse

If you compare the picture above with the one below, you may get some idea of the superior attractions of the detailed period recreation of Dee's world in the TV series to the original crude drawings van Gulik insisted on inflicting on his text.

To put it bluntly, he was no artist. He was, however, a craftsman in the classical tradition of the Western detective novel. And this mixture between chinoiserie and golden age detection has proved a potent and (saleable) mixture ever since.

Robert Van Gulik: Dee Goong An (1949)

•

Di Renjie investigates

Nor would it be impertinent to add that the seventh century CE, the highwater mark of the Tang dynasty in China, is a conveniently distant period to set stories in. The costumes and architecture of the era, lovingly recreated in the TV series, represent the golden age of Chinese civilisation, and are thus familiar to history buffs everywhere. As Ezra Pound once put it, with his customary concision:

a snotty barbarian ignorant of T'ang history need not deceive one

- Pisan Cantos, LXXIV: 32.

Empress Wu

I guess that what interests me most about this act of cultural cross-pollination is the complete ease with which it's been carried out. The credits of the TV show are quick to assure us that the stories that follows are fictional, and thus not historically accurate, but the producers seem to anticipate that the fact they were created by "the Dutch author Robert van Gulik" will be of far less significance to their target audience.

Qiao Tai

Van Gulik was, admittedly, no mere fan of all things Oriental. He had a PhD in Chinese language and culture from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and his publications include a number of Academic works on Ancient Chinese art, music and sexuality: all subjects which recur in his fiction. The Judge Dee stories themselves can be dated fairly precisely between 663 and 681 CE, the apogee of the Tang dynasty, before the interregnum of 690-705. His wife's intimate insider's knowledge of Chinese culture and mores must also have been invaluable to him.

Hong Liang

One of the online critics of the TV series complains that:

Despite the short stints of multiple cases, the second half of the drama became rather muddied and less intriguing compared to the first half. Ultimately, this drama didn’t live up to its potential given the high production value and strong cast.

Given that she also casts aspersions on my favourite character, however, I find it hard to take this critique very seriously:

Ma Rong was bringing about problems left and right to the main cast ... She may be used as a vehicle for Judge Dee to impart certain lessons but the character and the actress were more irritating than entertaining.

However, as one of the more succinct comments on her post so eloquently puts it: "Don’t matter to me just give me more."

The series may not be flawless in all aspects, but the Ma Rong / Judge Dee / Cao An triptych seems to me a clear enactment of the classic id / ego / superego paradigm familiar from so much popular fiction: Think Bones / Kirk / Spock in the original Star Trek, or Deanna / Picard / Data in Star Trek: the Next Generation.

You need an emotionally driven character to represent the primacy of bodily appetites: Pigsy in Monkey (for instance) - or Ma Rong. Then you need a more lofty character who embodies wisdom and logical thinking: Tripitaka in Monkey - or, here, the ethereal Cao An.

Finally, you need a fusion of the two - an Everyman character steered from impulse to impulse by these conflicting influences upon them: Monkey himself - or Captain Kirk - or (as in this case) Di Renjie. They represent the ethical person, controlled neither by heart nor head but by both at once ... Where would adventure stories be without them?

Di Renjie

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Sharon Lathan: Robert van Gulik with pet gibbon

Robert Hans van Gulik
(1910-1967)

1. Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee. Translated from Dee Goong An (1949)
   1. The Case of the Double Murder at Dawn
   2. The Case of the Strange Corpse
   3. The Case of the Poisoned Bride
   • Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An): An Authentic Eighteenth-Century Detective Novel. Trans. Robert van Gulik. 1949. New York: Dover, 1976.
2. The Chinese Maze Murders (1950 / 1957)
   • Included in: The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels. 1961 & 1957. New York: Dover, 1977.
3. The Chinese Bell Murders (1958)
4. The Chinese Gold Murders (1959)
5. The Chinese Lake Murders (1960)
6. The Chinese Nail Murders (1961)
7. The Haunted Monastery (1961)
   • Included in: The Haunted Monastery & The Chinese Maze Murders: Two Chinese Detective Novels. 1961 & 1957. New York: Dover, 1977.
8. The Red Pavilion (1961)
9. The Lacquer Screen (1962)
10. The Emperor's Pearl (1963)
11. The Monkey and the Tiger (1965)
    1. Morning of the Monkey
    2. The Night of the Tiger
12. The Willow Pattern (1965)
13. Murder in Canton (1966)
14. The Phantom of the Temple (1966)
15. Judge Dee at Work (1967)
    1. Five Auspicious Clouds
    2. The Red Tape Murders
    3. He Came With the Rain
    4. The Murder on the Lotus Pond
    5. The Two Beggars
    6. The Wrong Sword
    7. The Coffins of the Emperor
    8. Murder on New Year's Eve
16. Necklace and Calabash (1967)
17. Poets and Murder (1968)

Judge Dee's Mystery (2024)

Children Of Earth

[Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009)]

I suppose like most nerds brought up on hard sci-fi - that trinity of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, shading off into new wave: Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem - I've always regarded film and TV as the poor cousins of "real" science fiction.

Star Wars on the big screen and Star Trek on the small screen set the tone: fatuous space-opera with spectacular (but mindless) special effects in the former, self-serving imperialist hogwash in the latter. There were exceptions, of course: the psychedelic insanity of Kubrick's 2001, the noir ambiguities of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but for the most part the real action in speculative fiction seemed to lie elsewhere: mostly in those anthologies of "Best Sf stories" I devoured all through my youth.

Of late, though, I've had to revise this attitude. Far from being the impecunious relative, filmed SF is beginning to assume a more dominant role. I put up a post a while ago about how surprisingly impressive the remake of Battlestar Galactica was turning out to be, but I guess I still saw that as a bit of flash in the pan. Now I'm starting to wonder. The main reason for that is Torchwood.

[Doctors to Date:
Query: How can there have been 10 Doctors already
when Gallifreyans are only supposed to go through
9 cycles of metamorphosis?]

Now I've been a Doctor Who fan for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest TV memories consist of crouching over a black-and-white set where an old white-haired sage was combatting strange monsters in a set which seemed smaller than the average broom-closet. After that came the fey, Chaplinesque Patrick Troughton, the mod Dandy Jon Pertwee, the sublime Tom Baker, and so on and so forth. There were some pretty fine ideas in some of the stories - some exciting moments - but one has to confess that they were never really good in any objective, demonstrable way. There was always an element of camp about the show, a need to suspend judgment in order to enjoy them. That's been as true of the latest, Welsh-based series as of any of its predecessors. David Tennant was a good Doctor, to be sure - even a very good Doctor - but there's only a limited amount that can actually be done with the role.

So the idea of watching a mere spin-off from Doctor Who never really attracted me much. There've been spin-offs before: the dreadful K-9 and Company comes to mind. Infantile was scarcely the word.

[K-9 and Company]

But then we were in the video shop the other day, and there was Children of Earth on the shelf, and I remembered having been assured by another hardcore Doctor Who fan that Torchwood was the bee's knees, so we succumbed to temptation and took it out.

Many hours later, tousle-haired and sleepless, we looked at each other and concluded that we'd have to persevere to the end - that there was no way we were going to get any sleep until we'd got to the end of this particular story.

It's not that the characters are particularly lovable. On the contrary, Gwen, the female star, is quite irritatingly self-satisfied and bossy (in my humble opinion), and I even find Captain Jack rather less than charismatic. There's a certain frisson in the homosexual subplot: boys kissing boys on prime-time TV! But that's not it. The star of this show is the writing.

It's exciting, action-based stuff, to be sure, but what really grabbed me about it - and reminded me strongly of the new look Galactica - was the disenchanted timeliness of its message. You might call it cynical, but I prefer just to see it as terrifyingly credible ...

[The Kiss]

[WARNING: plot spoiler!]

I don't want to wreck the show for those who haven't seen it, but I do have to specify that an alien power has come to earth and is demanding a tribute of children: 10% of the world's population of children, in fact. "Absurd!", you say. Well, of course. But mark how the writers deal with this somewhat improbable premise.

First of all, it turns out that these particular aliens have been here before. That time - in 1965 - they only demanded a ransom of twelve children, in exchange for a promise not to release a virus which would kill an estimated quarter of the world's population. Twelve lives against over a billion? Pretty good deal. The children (orphans, whose absence wouldn't be noted) were duly handed over by Captain Jack Harkness of the Torchwood institute himself.

Now they've come back - with a vengeance. What's the reaction of the British government? To try and cover up that earlier transaction by ordering the judicial murder of everyone involved in the 1965 operation. Then, to try and persuade the aliens to play along by not mentioning the reason why they've returned to the UK, rather than anywhere else on earth. Lies, prevarication, covering their own arses precede by far any instinct to try and actually combat this invasion.

But what do the aliens need the children for? Well, it turns out that they secrete a chemical which makes them "feel good." In short, this alien embassy is here to ensure that their supply of drugs is secure. The children, we're assured, "feel no pain" - they're simply strapped to a pump so they can give out the alien equivalent of crack cocaine. And, best of all, they can survive for decades like that! Hmmm.

Of course the government's first thought is to keep this secret. What would be the point of causing a panic? And how could you persuade people to hand over ten percent of their children if they know what their fate is going to be? This time the aliens say they'll destroy the entire population of earth if their demands are not met - pour encourager les autres, one supposes: to make sure that no other subservient species get too uppity in the future.

This is dark stuff. But it gets darker. There's a long - and fascinating - conversation around the cabinet table. How to choose the ten percent? Which children should go? A lottery is clearly the only fair way of selecting them ... but of course the children (or, rather, grandchildren) of cabinet ministers must be exempted from taking part!

"But what about nephews and nieces?" shouts one of them.

"Don't try your luck," growls the Prime Minister.

"If you think I'm going to try and explain to my brother what happened to his kids ..." she replies.

The meeting dissolves into bedlam.

But then it turns out that the nephew-and-niece question was meant solely as a debating ploy. Actually her point was that all of them are ready to make exceptions for children they know personally - but that's because these are good, worthwhile children: "the kind who become doctors and teachers and lawyers - who run our schools and our hospitals." What would be the point of wasting children like that? We all know, she goes on, that there's another kind of child: the yobbo, the dole-bludger. Children who'll grow up to be a burden on the state, worthless mouths to feed. Everyone is nodding solemnly by this point. They know the kind of kids she's talking about.

But how could one make sure that it's only this kind of untermensch kids who get handed over to the aliens? Simple. You exempt all the posh schools sight unseen, and just send the army round to the poorer schools, the slum schools - collect all of their kids for an "inoculation" programme.

Does this sound implausible, melodramatic? I really wish it did. I could hear behind them, all the time, the cringing, cowardly voices of those French cabinet ministers at Vichy, explaining how the alternative to rounding up Jews to be handed over to their neighbouring Nazi overlords would be far, far worse: "If we don't do it somebody else will."

And, as the aliens made their pitiless, disgusting demands, I could hear distant echoes of the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when Britain declared war on China to ensure the maintenance of its drug-trade with the celestial Empire. How dare the Chinese government attempt to stem the growth of commerce (meaning, in this case, the creation of vast armies of opium addicts in all their major trading ports)!

Then, at the end of it all, after our heroes had pulled out their somewhat unlikely deus ex machina solution to the alien menace, how implausible that the politicians' first order of business was to decide who to blame it on in order to avoid suffering electorally for having literally rounded up ten percent of the nation's children to be sacrificed to Moloch. How unlike Blair and Bush and their disgusting, lying toadies! I don't where people come up with such strange, unwholesome ideas! By waking up and looking around them, I guess.

[END of plot spoiler]

[Lynley Hood: A City Possessed (2001)]

I don't know. The other thing I've been reading lately is Lynley Hood's terrifying book A City Possessed, about the Christchurch creche debacle in the 1990s, and I couldn't help but see the analogies:

• The immediate instinct, on the part of those in authority, to shut up dissent, to ignore inconvenient truths, to look for a powerless, vulnerable scapegoat.
• The incredible effrontery of the establishment (legal as well as political, in this case), who concluded, at the end of one of the various whitewashing "inquiries" into the whole affair, that if it could be proved that there were a large number of miscarriages of justice in New Zealand, then there might be a need to overhaul a system which virtually never reverses a vedict once arrived at. But since the Arthur Allan Thomas case was such an "aberration", according to this looking-glass logic, there's clearly no necessity for such radical steps to be taken. Justice? schmustice ...
• The instinctive, unquestioning closing of ranks by the ruling class who know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the maintenance of order in society - i.e. the continuation of their own peculiar privileges - requires a few sacrifices to be made from time to time. Because the alternative (we're constantly assured) would be far worse.

I guess Torchwood and Galactica still have to be classified as light entertainment. But I have to say that what the public will tolerate in their TV dramas has certainly changed a lot of late. It's clear that nobody was expected to feel surprised at watching these venal, slimy British politicans paying with their children's lives for their own political futures.

Galactica had a rather more brutally functionalist agenda. "Every woman adores a fascist / The boot in the face" as Sylvia Plath famously asserted. Perhaps one could rephrase that to say that the American system of governance has always had a sneaking sympathy for - and uncomfortable resemblance to - fascism: the insistence on social conformity, the profusion of emotive flag-waving and symbolic reenactments of nationhood ... Galactica was interesting because it examined such attitudes - at length, with pellucid, dispassionate logic - rather than simply embodying them (unlike Star Trek and its innumerable sequels).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we've entered some kind of golden age of TV SF - that everything on that medium is now worthy of serious attention. What I am saying is that a few select TV shows have somehow managed to creep under the radar and say some very hard-hitting things about the nature of our civilization: the way we live now. For every Torchwood, there are still a number of fatuous, pointless miniseries like V and its ilk, but at least now the word is out. Where pulp fiction - in the hands of masters such as J. G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick - once led the charge, now it's the TV writers: mostly, to be sure, the Balzacian creators of such sprawling realist epics as The Wire or Deadwood, but also the humble, ill-funded script-writers of science-fiction TV.

[The Wire (2002-2009):
R.I.P.]

What makes House so darn loveable?

[House, M.D.]

I've been mulling over this one for quite some time now - trying to get the right angle, you understand.

A couple of weeks ago I thought I had it: the resemblance between Dr Gregory House and Mr. Sherlock ["sheer luck"] Holmes - both single-syllabled surnames that begin with "H"; both misanthropic smartarses: one with a sidekick named "Wilson", the other with a sidekick named "Watson"; one inspired (& written by) a Doctor (Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh & Dr Arthur Conan Doyle, his ex-pupil), the other actually working as a Doctor (a diagnostician, no less) ... The list could go on and on.

And in fact it does. Unfortunately, when I keyed this inspired notion into Google, it came up with a number of references to websites spelling out the resemblances in great circumstantial detail. What's more, it turns out that the show's producer has made no secret of the pairing, and has even admitted that Holmes was one of the inspirations for House.

Back to the drawing board, then. Or rather, back to my original thoughts on the subject, back when House was new and the novelty of Hugh Laurie playing someone besides the foppish Bertie Wooster or the even more foppish and imbecilic Prince Regent (in Blackadder III) was the most striking feature about the show.

[Jeeves and Wooster]

I thought then that the sheer rudeness and ruthlessness displayed by House in his day-to-day interactions with patients, subordinates, other staff members, and even the long-suffering Dr Cuddy, the hospital administrator could be explained (or at least motivated) in terms of another British invasion.

In a world where Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity because of his use of the "F" word, and where Simon Cowell can trash one pathetic hopeful after another on American Idol, it's become very apparent that only Brits appear to have the right to act as holy fools or licenced jesters in the USA.

The theory went more or less as follows: although Dr. Greg House is American through and through, everyone knows that he's actually played by a British actor. Therefore a certain licence is extended to him which would not apply to a local playing the same role. As an American-impersonator rather than an echt American, he's subliminally regarded as outspoken rather than downright obnoxious - it's rather like the swishy exaggerated emotionalism of female impersonators (in show-biz, at any rate) as opposed to the complex and nuanced behaviour of actual women ...

Something like that, anyway. That was in the early days of House, though. The phenomenon has continued and grown since then. After that came my id - ego - superego theory of House (or of television drama in general, I guess). Normally the protagonist of each show is intended to act as a kind of centralising ego-projection figure for the audience: like lowest-common-denominator Raymond in Everyone loves Raymond (a show which, incidentally, I loathe), for instance.

Raymond's wife, there, represents the voice of reason and proportion, the parents the unruly, undisciplined forces of the id or unconscious -- no code, no rules, no taboos: nothing but unrestrained, single-minded appetite.

But House is no ego figure. On the contrary, he attracts us simply because he enacts the unthinkable - constantly, on an everyday basis. He doesn't like cops. So when one comes to his office he gets him to bend over and prods around his prostate with a rubber glove.

The cop pursues a vendetta against him, trying (pretty successfully) to get him busted as a junkie. House refuses to apologise - wisecracking his way to the gallows. And so on. House steals his ex-wife's psychological records to see how she's getting on with her new husband, then turns her down when she offers to move in with him again. This is id behaviour.

House's guides and mentors (shifting aspects of the superego), in this reading, are Wilson (the voice of ethos and balance), Cameron (the voice of human feeling), Cuddy (the voice of society and its structures). He ignores them all, but it would be untrue to say that they don't influence him - a little. Their dumb and reductionist remarks generally provide the clue for each episode's conceptual breakthrough, the deus ex machina, the blessed break, which he's counting on to justify his own self-destructive, amoral existence.

So where's the ego in this scenario? Well, in the first place, of course, it's the hapless patients, at the mercy of House's insane whims and fancies, cut open one minute, drugged up the next, finally patched up like Humpty-Dumpty and rolled out in a wheelchair (generally - not always: some of them actually die) at the end of each episode.

In the second place it's us. House could be said to be one long experience in Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt [alienation effect]. How far can you go before you turn your audience off your central character?

If you want to lose sympathy with House -- if his boorish, sexist, misogynist ways are starting to obsess or even influence you too much - I'd recommend the experience of watching it on DVD. Bronwyn and I have now worked our way through series one and two from the local video shop, and I have to say the amusement factor is dying down.

House, in short, doesn't have the depth of a truly great character, such as Deadwood's Al Swearengen (interestingly, another American-accented Brit). Ian McShane, of course, had the great advantage of starring in a show which only lasted for three seasons (though there were apparently plans for a fourth, or possibly a telemovie designed to round off all the plotlines).

Swearengen's coarse and brutal ways thus had the scope to evolve over the arc of the 36 episodes he strutted and schemed through. He was able to avoid the imprisoning ritual of long-running, 24-episode, seasons: protracted for as long as audience and network can sustain it. His character, in short, had a beginning, middle and end, like the series he illuminated.

It's no accident that Conan Doyle threw his hero off a cliff at the end of the second series of short stories he'd been forced to crank out for The Strand magazine. His real interest lay in cooking up rather fustian historical novels. No accident either that his audience, unwilling to accept anything from him but Holmes, eventually compelled him to bring the vampirish junkie back to life.

The vogue for both Holmes and House, then, might be said to stem from our perennial fascination with the Undead: those beings beyond the reach of common human emotions and restraints, free to act on their appetites without fear of the consequences.

Count Dracula, their avatar, is undoubtedly the King of Cool (in more ways than one) - and it's hard not to prefer him to his equally obsessive nemesis, Dr Abraham van Helsing. Readers will always have a natural tendency to root for the white whale over Captain Ahab.

At a certain point, though, the fascination comes back to bite you. Just try one of those House-ian wisecracks at the office, and you'll soon see that most of us inhabit with more ease the skin of Ricky Gervaise's abject, haunted David Brent (a distant descendant of Jonathan Harker?) than the stubbly, Byzantine Christ-like features of Hugh Laurie's House ...

[Cameron as Mina Harker / House as the Count]

Battlestar Galactica = Iraq War

Well, yes, I guess you don't have to be a genius to figure it out. The feature-length miniseries which spawned the remake first screened in 2003, less than two years after a certain sneak attack on the World Trade Centre got the Americans so crazy for vengeance.

It's true that the Cylons pretty much succeeded in wiping out human life on the 12 colonies with their own weapons of mass destruction, but the analogy is not -- as I understand it -- meant to be an exact one: simply a good way of setting up a dramatic situation where one can examine at leisure the psychology of a particularly paranoid and inward-looking society at war.

The "remake" idea is an excellent one when it comes to protective camouflage. What harm could possibly come from revisiting kindly old Lorne Greene as Adama, and those two good old boys Apollo and Starbuck hotdogging around the sky in their Star Wars-knock-off fighters? That version was made back in the late seventies, when Vietnam had sickened the USA on real wars, and escapist fantasy westerns and space operas were the order of the day.

Is mine a reductionist reading? Possibly. I'm a big fan of the new series -- not (even at the time) the old one -- but what struck me about it from the first was the profoundly insightful line it took on military expediency and power-hunger.

It isn't just the black uniforms with silver highlights that make Lee Adama and the others look like a squad of young Fascists. Edward James Olmos's croaky, world-weary Adama is certainly no Hitler, but he might be a Rommel or an Admiral Raeder. Is there anything he and his friends won't do in the interests of survival? Adama's led a military coup against civilian government, ordered the assassination of a superior officer, connived at torture, the black market, the murder of civilians -- the list goes on and on. Some hero.

But it's all okay, because the Cylons are even worse.



Or are they? The biggest revelation of the new-look series is the Cylons themselves. they look human. They look better than human, actually. The women -- Tricia Helfer (above), Grace Park (below) and our own ex-Xena Lucy Lawless -- are all babes and supermodels. The men, on the other hand, tend to take a bit of a back seat when it comes to decision-making.



Gorgeous female robots are no new thing in Sci Fi, of course -- think of Metropolis or (for that matter) Blade Runner or Solaris. The interesting thing about these "skin-jobs" (or "toasters"- or any of the other loving terms applied to them by the freedom-loving colonials) is their obsession with theology.

Yes, you heard me right. The quickest way to spot a Cylon infiltrator is to lure them into a discussion about the existence of God and His/Her intentions for the universe. That's the true genius of this TV series. Who the hell came up with that idea?

The Cylons are strict Monotheists -- they're very impatient with the pagan superstitions of the 12 colonies (the planets were named after thinly-disguised signs of the Zodiac: Tauron for Taurus, Geminon for Gemini etc.). The "gods" whom Starbuck and the others repeatedly invoke are an early version of the twelve Olympians: Zeus, Diana, Apollo, Athena and so on.

Liberal Humanism versus Islam? The Colonials are a pluralist society, very like contemporary America. The Cylons, on the other hand, are made of sterner stuff. Philosophy, for them, is to be taken seriously. The basic issue for them, as Sharon-the-Cylon explains to Adama at one point, is whether humanity deserves to survive. The jury's still out on that one, I'm afraid.

As for Iraq, the evidence is all there if you want to look for it: torture in Abu Ghraib prison, the lynch-mob mentality of the fleet's civilians, the primitive glee that Apollo and the others take in killing (they do have qualms when it comes to destroying their own ships -- but they fade pretty fast when the bullets start flying).

It's not a programme which propounds easy solutions, but there at times when the cowardly, compromised, half-schizophrenic Dr Gaius Baltar looks like the only sane one aboard. At least he enjoys basic human pleasures: booze, sex, cards. He's smart, too, if a little eccentric. Compare him to the drunken buffoon executive officer Colonel Tigh, and it's hard not to see the dichotomy between the red and blue states of the USA condensed into one simple proposition.

Start watching it. I think you'll find it's worth it. Who would have thought the American mainstream media could be so intelligently self-analytical?