Well she seemed quite good to be honest but she was mostly flying the Phaeton in a straight line or a circle. Terrible joke I know but I couldn’t resist. Its not like I force you to read this site you know. Anyway, I really enjoyed Moore’s doomed post Battlestar Galactica venture. If you don’t believe it is doomed have a look at the viewing figures. There is no chance Virtuality is going to get a follow up mini-series never mind a full season. Hard Science Fiction like this will not get the same general appeal as Science Fiction like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek. Which is a shame because Virtuality had some nice ideas.

Set about 50 years in our future it is about the 12 man crew of Earth’s first inter-stellar space craft, Phaeton. Lets name the ship after the one of the great fuck-ups of Greek mythology. yes he ended up in the river Eridanus but only after he screwed up big time and got fragged by Zeus. Not exactly filling me with hope for the mission guys. Which brings us to the mission. It is, amusingly enough, to seek out new life and new civilisations and to boldly go where no one has gone before. Unfortunately for the crew after spending 6 months moving the huge clumsy vessel into position to scientist on Earth discover that life on Earth is doomed to extinction sometime in the next 100 years. The Earth’s ecosystems are breaking down and it has all gone at bit pear-shaped. The Phaeton’s mission becomes one of finding a new place for humanity to survive rather than search the Epsilon Eridani system for intelligent life. I’m sure Eridani’s native population are looking forward to that. To help fund the $600 billion project the mission is filmed and beamed back to Earth as a Reality TV show. Edited on board by the ship’s Psychiatrist and presented by the ships IT expert who looks and behaves like a 15 year old girl but is presumably meant to be older. Keeping in with the theme the crew seems to have been picked like a Reality TV show rather than for their expertise. They are all clearly massively dysfunctional and there is clearly a high degree of tokenism in the picks. Put it like this I would let this crew attempt to sale across the English Channel let alone cross the vastness of inter-stellar space. Naturally this is one  of the points of the show.

To keep the crew sane (ish) they all have access to advanced virtual reality systems. These systems allow the crew to spend their leisure time doing cool things like climbing mountains despite being paralysed from the waist down, participate in the American Civil War or being a Japanese Popstar come secret agent. Sadly for the crew the virtual reality  system develops a ‘glitch’ and we end up with a Professor Moriarty in the works. Now you think Windows can be bad but at least doesn’t try to kill or rape you when it crashes. Despite being killed (virtually) by the misfiring virtual reality system the Captain (who is having an affair with the ships Psychiatrists wife in secret) decides to go ahead with the mission and the crew pass the point of no-return. The Phaeton hits 88mph and returns Marty back to 1985. No wait! My bad. Despite realising the Captain has clearly gone do-freakin-laly and the ships doctor diagnosed with Parkinsons (You know this is starting to sound like one of those Vault experiments in Fallout 3) the crew follow his orders and fire up the Orion drive and head off into space. The Phaeton’s Orion drive is based on the real-life theorised system for sending manned craft into space. Basically Project Orion was to function by firing nuclear warheads out the back of the vessel, detonating them and riding the wave. Space surfing! Kinda.

Once speeding through space things get worse when the Captain dies shortly after experiencing a premonition of his death leaving the bitter, disabled ship’s engineer in charge. By the end of the show the pilot and IT expert have found friendship bought together by their distaste towards computer sprites that rape people and the Psychiatrist begins to suspect bad things and looks like he might be up to some himself.  The show ends with Captain’s bit on the side venturing into his virtual reality module to find a computer generated version of the Captain who suggests none of this is real, cryptically quotes Alice in Wonderland and rides off into the sunset. Leaving everyone open mouthed thinking “huh”.

A very nice touch is how they made the virtual reality segments look not quite real. Kinda like when a film uses just that little bit too much slightly off CGI. That way you are always aware that what you are watching is not ‘real’. Or are you?

In the best ‘Life on Mars’ (the UK version not the terrible US one) tradition the show leaves you wondering how much of what is happening is real, who are the bad/good guys and frankly wondering what is actually going on? It also raises other questions like if the crew has been picked for entertainment value rather being the best of the best and whether virtual rape is as bad as ‘real’ rape. And even if the mission is real are they being told the truth or even expected to survive? It has some nice ideas and lays ground work for a quality TV series. Sadly this means that as a standalone TV movie it just doesn’t work. It just feels like someone forgot to finish a screenplay. Moore was clearly angling this for a TV series but I don’t think it has picked up enough viewers to get one. Plus it was on Fox.