Series / Star Cops

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Star Cops was a British science fiction television series created by Chris Boucher that was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1987. Set in the year 2027, the world of Star Cops includes five permanently manned space stations orbiting the Earth, as well as bases on the Moon and Mars, and approximately three thousand people live and work in space. The setting was influenced by the potential for greater access to space promised by the then new Space Shuttle programme, and by concerns about the militarisation of space through the US government's Strategic Defense Initiative (known as "Star Wars"), both of which were underway in the early 1980s. Space travel and life in space are portrayed in a hard science-fiction style, with fairly realistic depictions of weightlessness and low-gravity environments, lengthy space journeys of months or years, and hazards such as spacesuit failures and radiation exposure.

Law enforcement in the developing stations and colonies is provided by the International Space Police Force (ISPF), initially made up of twenty ineffective part-time volunteers derisively nicknamed the "Star Cops". A decision is made to put the ISPF on a permanent, full-time footing, and veteran detective Nathan Spring is appointed -very much against his will- to lead the force. Many episodes deal with the efforts of Spring and his team to establish the Star Cops as a credible organisation as he sets up headquarters on the Moon, recruits new staff, dismisses corrupt officers, and works to extend the ISPF's jurisdiction to the American space stations and Mars colonies. At the same time the team investigates the cases that come their way, many of which are new crimes arising from the technologically advanced future society the series depicts, and the hostile frontier nature of the environment.

In total nine episodes of Star Cops were made. A tenth episode, titled "Death on the Moon", was planned but industrial relations difficulties during production led to it being abandoned shortly before recording was to commence. A combination of factors, including conflicts in the production team and poor scheduling, meant that the series never found a satisfactory audience and was cancelled after one season. In recent years, Star Cops has undergone something of a critical reappraisal and is generally hailed for being a good attempt at a realistic "High Frontier" SF series.

A new audio series featuring some of the original cast was released by Big Finish in 2018.

Star Cops offers examples of a number of tropes, including:

• Ancient Astronauts: Invoked in-universe. In "Little Green Men and Other Martians", an astronaut at the Mars colony hides a smuggled Mayan statue on Mars and pretends to discover it. This is part of a plot to make people think there were ancient martians who contacted the Classical Maya and thereby run up the value of the smuggled artifact when the plotters sell it.
• Anyone Can Die: Nathan Spring's girlfriend Lee Jones was seemingly set up as a recurring character in the first episode "An Instinct for Murder" but killed off suddenly in the second, "Conversations with the Dead".
• Artistic License – Medicine: A few examples.
  • Before being made commander of the moon base, Krivenko earned a Nobel Prize for contributions to space medicine. These are implied to have included some variety of Anti-Radiation Drug as well as treatments that prevent deconditioning and bone loss from low gravity, enabling the Star Cops to stay in space indefinitely except when the plot demands they take a Busman's Holiday.
  • "In Warm Blood" involves a drug that causes subjects' blood to clot solid at 41 C exactly. Everyone in an overheated spacecraft dies instantly, as opposed to the clotting starting with the warmest parts of their bodies.
  • "A Double Life" handwaves the moon base hosting what is intended to be a new IVF ward by stating that the procedure somehow works better in low gravity. The thief stealing embryos to hold for ransom also uses Instant Sedation to escape the scene.
• Blunt "Yes": A rather good one in "Intelligent Listening for Beginners" from Nathan after Kenzy demands to know if she's going to be a glorified secretary for the rest of her Star Cop career. It's not that he's noticeably sexist by the standards of the day, mind you; Kenzy was on the take but too politically well-connected to be fired outright or overtly Reassigned to Antarctica.
• Bollywood Nerd: In "Intelligent Listening for Beginners", Dr. David Chandri, who turns out to have written a computer virus responsible for hundreds of deaths.
• Bomb Throwing Anarchist: Dr Chandri in "Intelligent Listening for Beginners". How exactly blowing a chemical plant and causing a train wreck are supposed to help create the "society without leaders, not a society without laws" he claims to want is difficult to fathom, although he was demonstrably insane.
• British Brevity: Only nine episodes.
• Casual Interplanetary Travel: While Mars missions are major projects, with travel times measured in months to years, travel between Earth, the Moon, and the space stations in Earth orbit is treated quite casually - despite one of the interviewers who recommends Spring's appointment complaining about the costs. For example: in "Intelligent Listening for Beginners", Spring thinks nothing of sending Devis on a spur of the moment trip from the Moon base to Australia to purchase an order of laser weapons and Devis is able to promptly reschedule his return to the Moon. Sometimes veers into Artistic License – Space compared to the otherwise hard scifi setting; with travel times between Earth, the Moon, and the stations seeming to be hours rather than days.
• Centrifugal Gravity: Most spacecraft and space-stations don't have artificial gravity, apart from the American stations which have rotating sections. The weightless environment is cleverly simulated with wires, camera angles and careful movement by the actors.
  • The pool table in the spinning section of the Ronald Reagan station is described as having magnetic computer controls to emulate play on Earth, excusing the balls not curving from the station's spin. Spring exploits this by hacking the controls to outplay the station's commander.
• Clone Angst: Albi in "A Double Life" was cloned by his father as a replacement for his then-infant brother when their parents split up. His father treated him badly. He blames his brother for it.
• Colonized Solar System: There are bases on both The Moon and Mars, with regular human missions out to the asteroid belt and large space stations in various locations.
• Eagleland: In "Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits", the series indulges in the "Americans are jingoistic war-mongers" stereotype. Commander Griffin is a cigar-chomping, Soviet-hating, misogynistic hothead.
• Energy Weapon : Handled realistically. The laser weapons only produce a green "muzzle flash" but no visible beam.
• Enhance Button: Shows up on a couple of occasions with blurry film or video tube camera recordings.
• Evil Twin: In "A Double Life", Albi is an evil clone of the famous pianist James Bannerman.
• Failed Future Forecast:
  • "An Instinct for Murder" reveals that both the Soviet Union and the Cold War are still going strong in 2027. In "Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits", Griffin, the commander of the American space station Ronald Reagan, claims that the British have always been soft on the Soviets.
  • The actor who portrayed James Bannerman and his clone Albi in "A Double Life" was in his late 30s, implying that human cloning was developed around 1990 and rapidly became relatively routine.
• Fiction 500: One episode features a widow who is wealthy enough to finance an entire new wing of the moon base by herself in contrast to the other modules, stations, and spaceships that are owned and operated either by large corporations or governments. Her deceased husband had been an extremely successful Arms Dealer, which initially gives the Star Cops a very long list of suspects who might want to steal from her.
• Future Society, Present Values: Several characters on the space stations are seen openly smoking, despite smoking already in the process of becoming much less common in many countries when the show was made and despite all real space programs to date having banned all smoking because of the danger of fire.
• Global Warming: "This Case to be Opened in a Million Years" mentions that Venice has flooded due to global warming and sea level rise, so Spring cannot go there on leave and goes to Rome instead.
• Hazmat Suit: These show up in "This Case to be Opened in a Million Years" when there is a radiation alarm from the potential breach of nuclear waste caskets and when the Star Cops are examining the caskets. Why the caskets are not handled with space suits in vacuum is not explained.
• Heel–Face Turn: Pal Kenzy. She's fired for taking bribes, and virtually blackmails herself back onto the team, but redeems herself by the end of the series.
• Human Popsicle: In "Conversations With The Dead", the crew of an Earth-Mars freighter need to use experimental cryonics capsules to freeze themselves in the hope of being revived after an engine malfunction leaves them on an orbit that will take 8 years to return to Earth. Spring deduces that the scientist who built the capsules engineered the engine failure after he was refused permission for human trials. If there is a Cryonics Failure, he will be charged with murder. If the crew survives, he will be given lesser charges.
• Impersonating an Officer: The hijackers in "Intelligent Listening for Beginners" get onto the space plane that they then hijack by pretending to be newly recruited Star Cops. Unfortunately for them, Devis and Kenzy both just happen to be on the same flight.
• Intrepid Reporter: A couple of examples, including a reporter in "Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits" who goes so far as to legally change her family name to that of a researcher whose disappearance she is investigating and list him as her next-of-kin to give an excuse for pestering the American space program and the Star Cops about him.
• Jurisdiction Friction:
  • The Star Cops are supposed to have jurisdiction across all space installations. The American government objects and tries to exclude them from their stations. So do commercial interests who operate their own spacecraft and want to exclude everyone but their own security.
  • The Star Cops do not have jurisdiction on Earth. This does not stop Spring from involving himself in investigations in the UK, Italy, and Japan; or from sending other Star Cops on operations in Australia or the United States. When he is still a British cop, Devis calls out Spring on his interference.
• Lying to the Perp: Spring uses this technique to bust dirty Star Cops by having the newly-recruited Devis pose as a worker desperate to avoid being shipped back to Earth who offers the suspects bribes while secretly recording them. Kenzy is caught by it, although she manages to keep her job. She then uses it on another bribery suspect.
• The Mafia: In "This Case to be Opened in a Million Years", we learn that the Mafia is active in Italy, in Australia, and on the Moon. When Spring starts investigating uranium smuggling that they are involved in; they frame him for drug trafficking.
• MegaCorp: Before she becomes a Star Cop; Anna Shoun works for Hanimed, a Japan-based megacorp with interests from spacecraft construction to pharmaceutical research.
• Multi National Team: The International Space Police in general, and the main cast in particular:
  • Nathan Spring. British, Commander, The Hero, The Captain, Old-Fashioned Copper.
  • David Theroux. American, Chief Superintendent, The Lancer
  • Colin Devis. British, Inspector, The Big Guy, very Old-Fashioned Copper.
  • Pal Kenzy. Australian, Sergeant, The Smart Guy, Dirty Cop (She gets better...).
  • Anna Shoun. Japanese, Physician, The Heart, The Medic, and The Coroner.
• Mundane Dogmatic: The show tried very hard to depict a scientifically-accurate near future with solar system colonisation.
• National Stereotypes: The show was critiqued for stereotypical depictions of many of the American, Arab, Italian, and Japanese characters.
• No New Fashions in the Future: The hair cuts and outfits of most of the characters are quite 1980s. Exceptions are made for some of the Japanese characters. There is apparently a fashion in future Japan's corporate culture for combining traditional Japanese clothing with elements of 1980s business wear.
• Nuclear Torch Rocket: Mentioned in passing. Theroux's father died during a test of one.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Pal Kenzy's Australian and Alexander Krivenko's Russian accents are wobbly. (Which is quite an achievement given that Linda Newton actually is Australian!)
• Our Graphics Will Suck in the Future: The computers and displays look very eighties, including obvious IBM PC/AT keyboards, and there's not a graphic interface in sight. There are however desktop computers that resemble someone's attempt at building a tablet with the hardware of a mid-90s PC. (Insert your own Windows 8 joke here.)
• Perp Sweating: Spring and Devis love to sweat the perps. Sometimes literally.
• Pop-Cultured Badass / Fan of the Past: Theroux and Spring frequently quote movie lines from the 1940s to 1980s at one another. Theroux is better at it, so Spring cheats by having Box look up the references.
• The Professor / Reasonable Authority Figure: Alexander Krivenko, the Russian commander of the moon-base where the ISPF is headquartered. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: How several of the main cast became Star Cops.
  • In "An Instinct for Murder", Nathan ended up in charge of the ISPF because he's not very good at office politics, although you have to give him credit for making the best of a bad situation.
  • In "Conversations with the Dead", Devis knows that he will be needing a new job after Nathan exposes his assistant as having been a mole and an accomplice to murder. He manages to get assigned as a Star Cop rather than being kicked out of the police completely and it turns out that he likes space quite a bit more than Earth.
  • It's also strongly implied that Theroux departed from NASA on bad terms, although we never find out the exact details.
• Reassignment Backfire: In the first episode, Nathan Spring gets assigned to lead the Star Cops because he embarrassed his boss among the British police. In the second episode, he returns to Earth to investigate the murder of his girlfriend Lee Jones and embarrasses both the British police and MI6. He also sets up the man who murdered Lee to be killed by the American military and gets his MI6 handler thrown in prison.
• Revealing Cover-Up: "Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits" involves the disappearance of a microbiologist named Harvey Goodman from the United States station Ronald Reagan. The cover-up of his disappearance included erasing his college attendance records; but the erasure included everyone named "Goodman", which Spring recognizes immediately because other people sharing the last name should have been on the list.
• Shout-Out:
  • Kenzy repeatedly refers to Earth-Moon space as "the high frontier"; referencing the space activist Gerard K. O'Neill's 1976 book "The High Frontier". O'Neill's vision of human space bases inspired parts of the show's design, with plans to include the construction of "Big Ring" spinning space stations had the show continued.
  • One episode involves a nuclear waste dump on the Moon and a spacecraft that suddenly crashes and explodes due to a flight control failure. Compare to the pilot of Space: 1999.
• Skeleton Crew: "In Warm Blood" begins with the Star Cops responding to an unresponsive ship that returned from the asteroid belt to lunar orbit on autopilot. The crew are all dead and vacuum-desiccated at their stations. Initially it appears to have simply been sudden decompression, but then they find that the crew was poisoned by a combination of an experimental drug and overheating.
• Space Is Noisy: Averted. The only sounds heard in space are radio chatter and non-diegetic music.
• Space Pirates: "Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits" features a salvage crew that recovers a missing station module. They go from salvage to piracy when they plan to lie about where they found the module to avoid anyone else claiming it. They did not know it contained a bioweapon.
• Space Plane: Most of the vehicles we see in space are derived from real Soyuz, Apollo, and Space Shuttle designs. But larger passenger flights from Earth apparently use single-stage-to-orbit space planes similar to the HOTOL design concept that was being promoted by British Aerospace at the time the show was produced.
• Space Police: The entire premise of the series.
• Stock Footage: The pilot used stock footage of NASA astronaut training for Spring's orientation and training before he first goes to space. Some Standardized Space Views also appear, although the external views of the spacecraft and stations were mostly done using practical effects with models and printed backgrounds.
• Surgeons Can Do Autopsies If They Want: Anna Shoun is a general practitioner. She is introduced when she is assigned to do forensic examinations of the dead crew of a spacecraft returning from the asteroid belt. Later, Krivenko does an autopsy. His actual specialty is space medicine. Justified by their being two out of the very few physicians who are then on the Moon.
• Surreal Theme Tune: "It Won't Be Easy" by Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues. Not surprisingly, it's actually rather good but has no obvious connection to the programme at all.^note A case could be made that it is about Nathan's sense of loneliness and detachment from the world following Lee's death. Compare and contrast with the theme of Star Trek: Enterprise.
• Synthetic Plague: In "Trivial Games and Paranoid Pursuits", Harvey Goodman was creating a synthetic plague on the American station. When the plague got loose in the lab module, the station crew welded the module shut and tried to Hurl It into the Sun.
• Talking Appliance Sidekick: Box, of course.
• Toxic, Inc.: In "This Case to be Opened in a Million Years". A nuclear waste disposal company turns out to be a front for mafia operations on the Moon, including smuggling drugs and uranium.
• Unwitting Test Subject: the crew of the Pluto 5 in "In Hot Blood" was subjected to an experimental drug hidden in their dietary supplements.
• Used Future: The first couple of episodes were a bit squeaky-clean, then the series switched to a less brightly-lit, used-and-cluttered style for three episodes, before switching back for the remaining four, due to two completely different production teams handling the different production blocks.
• We Will Use Lasers in the Future: Zig-zagged. In the first episode; Theroux is held at gunpoint on a space station by a suspect who is using a regular projectile handgun. He tries to talk his way out of it by telling the suspect that "you can't use that in here", but the suspect had loaded suppressed cartridges that would not go through the pressure hull but would still injure Theroux. In the third episode; Kenzy convinces Spring to buy a supply of laser guns for the Star Cops to use. They are supposedly designed to damage bodies and clothing while not damaging the metal hulls. In the fifth episode; Spring is confronted by the Moon Base mafia boss, who turns out to have kept his own regular handgun concealed.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: A side plot in "Conversations with the Dead" involves an American space station that is claimed to be a civilian operation but is suspected to actually be an Orbital Bombardment platform. The United States government shoots down a stolen shuttle that approaches it too quickly. After that, it is never mentioned in the series again.
• Whodunnit to Me?: "Conversations with the Dead" involves an investigation into an incident leading to the death of two astronauts — who are still alive, and able to take part in the investigation by radio, but who are also stranded in space with no hope of rescue before their oxygen gives out. Experimental cryogenics equipment that just happened to be onboard was used in the hope of saving their lives when the inventor of said cryogenics technology just happened to overhear what was happening. Nathan put two and two together quite quickly, but couldn't actually prove anything, and the show ended before we could find out if the guy really did sabotage the ship.
• Written-In Absence: Erick Ray Evans was ill during production of the final episode, which was explained by Theroux being on planet leave.
• Zeerust: It's 2027 and we have bases on Mars; but no computer networks as pervasive as the internet, no mobile phones, no digital cameras, etc. The showrunners did anticipate the proliferation of flat screen displays and video conferencing. And Spring's smart speaker "Box" could be a Bland-Name Product of an Amazon Alexa if the show had been made 30 years later.