Recently I made the interesting discovery of a one shot wonder TV program that died on the vine before I even knew it existed. In my defense I was abroad studying when the show came out in 1999. It is called Total Recall 2070 .
The current trend of large scale networks building their own websites and making old television programs available for viewing is changing how we will watch the medium entirely. For me it made this show available, like finding it buried in a dusty old archive somewhere and the pleasure was all mine.
I was interested in watching the new Terminator series, The Sarah Conner Chronicles and I found the show listed on their indices, which I highly recommend for reviewing the decades of available programming for study. The site is called HULU and basically belongs to NBC from what I can tell.
I enjoyed watching this show over the last few weeks a lot but not because it was the best example of Sci Fi on television but because it is a remarkable example of art being ahead of its time. Technically speaking they anticipated a considerable amount of the futurist dialog to come. More interestingly they got a lot of it right. They dealt with nanotech and cloning of course but more important, though they only mention it once in passing that I can tell, they also bring up the Singularity (specifically using the word) and a core theme of the entire series is emerging AI and *Friendliness* though they don't mention Friendliness directly.
The show is nevertheless relevant because the main theme of the entire series is about the evolutionary ascension of AI into being a Superintelligence and the social subtext of that process and they deal with it in more depth than one would expect from prime time television, which may have contributed to its swift demise. The dystopic theme of memory management and human reprogramming in order to micromanage society at large is more than a bit disturbing to many audiences.
I do not want to give too much of the plot away and the general acting is OK, however the cliched basic future cop shoot em up is a direct result of the merger of two famous PK Dick stories in movie form; Total Recall obviously but also Blade Runner. In fact Scott appears to have had considerable influence in the making of the entire series as even a cursory review of the sets will reveal. Ironically, though the title and protagonist elements of the show refer to Total Recall more of the story revolves around androids, AI, and a modified Blade Runner premise. It is actually a lot of fun to watch and considering that it is now almost 10 years old it was also perhaps an example of TV a little too far ahead for its time.
The list of actors that later appear in Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, and other famous Sci Fi is also a bit of trivia fun to observe. For example the principle android character must have been making a Star Trek movie at the same time because he practical is still in Romulan makeup for this role and was playing a Vulcan or Romulan around the same time period. However the subtext of the dialog introduces issues that the membership of our forum might consider remarkably prescient although they are presented in a classically superficial manner.
