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Alien Nation heads into remake land.
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The original series, soon to be called AN:OS by fans...
Alien Nation, created by Rockne S O'Bannon, who also brought us SeaQuest DSV and the sci fi perfection of Farscape, is heading back to the small screen in a new series on the soon-to-be SyFy Channel. It's one of those rare sci fi shows that feels like a non-genre show; sure, half or more of the cast are aliens, but the point of the show is that these aliens are people like anyone else, just that they have a different culture that they're making constant decisions about-- it's the immigrant story: how much of the Old Country / Old Planet do you keep when you're now stranded in a new and different place? How much of the new place's culture do you take on? How does it affect the children who have never known the old place, and how much does it affect the older generation who known almost nothing else? Added to that, and it's natural ideas of racism, tolerance, exploration and exploitation, there's the fact that, basically, it's a buddy-cop show. They solve crimes, and they do it within the system. There's authority and respect for it and the comfort of something traditional like that in a show that could easily be very weird-- another weirded-up police procedural, but to an extreme that few others ever manage to reach, and before the general weirding of television.
This new version is going to the set twenty years after the Newcomers landed and started to integrate, and it'll be set in the Pacific Northwest instead of in LA, both of which will change the dynamics a little. It's uncertain whether this will be a reset or a continuation, but as the articles keep referencing the recently-ended Battlestar Galactica update, it's likely that it'll be a little of both (BSG picked up two decades after the original in the main plot points, but they changed many minor points, like the gender of Starbuck, without ever mentioning it, effectively retconning the old story to suit the new). This is excellent news. The original Alien Nation, though only a season long, managed to tackle a lot of the lives of it's characters and their world, introducing many elements that can be used wonderfully in a newer, updated and drama-injected version: the fact that there are three genders of Newcomers, all of which are required for conception, the fact that the males carry the offspring for part of the development, the fact that they pupate at age two, the fact that they were slaves, the fact that even among a subjugated slave race, there were those considered inferior and under-developed, the fact that they were ruled over in extremely abusive ways by their own people and now everyone seems to be equal on Earth, the fact that they have a well-developed spiritual system, the fact that they react to sour milk the way we react to liquor, that they're allergic to sea water as if it were acid, that there are nationalist and radical movements within the population, that they breed quickly, that they're often more intelligent than humans... All this and more in only one season and a few movies. A goldmine of information that can be built on and expanded.
Most notable of the small new details we have, though, is that there are millions of them now, instead of just a few thousand, and they've been here a while. It makes them one of the biggest minorities in the country (and it would be interesting if they have spread to other parts of the world, and we could see them being accepted or rejected in more extreme ways than the Americans have done), and they've been here long enough to have ironed out a lot of the growing pains associated with a sudden influx of refugees. Every town will have Newcomers now. They'll be much more known and understood-- and much more permanent and able to frighten the bigoted. And the world is much different now, with the added layers of terrorism and extremism and ongoing war and economic weakness that weren't there when the original show debuted in the early nineties, or the original movie first brought these interesting new people to our screens in the late eighties. How will that change the story? How will the mass of basically pacifist Newcomers and their radical minorities deal with these new stresses? How will this newly stressed world deal with them? How much of the old show can we hope to see extrapolated into a new one?
This is an excellent show for reinterpretation. Like V and the BSG update that made it possible, it has a solid foundation, but was given very little time to wrap up story lines, or to develop it's larger world view. It's just waiting to be opened up and brought back to us, tougher, stranger, and much more real than ever.
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