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Mission: Impossible had a very, very tiny bit of serialisation, where somebody that Phelps had screwed over in one episode recognised him off-duty in a later one and went after him for revenge, but that was all. Seconding Wheat Loaf's suggestion of the ITC shows like Department S and The Saint - and I'll add one. Space: 1999 could have been Galactica 2004 in 1975, a small group of humans thrown into an extremely hostile and uncaring cosmos and being forced to survive on their wits and ingenuity as they look for a new home... except, y'know, it was a Lew Grade production in 1975. Literally the only continuity element in the whole thing was that the rear end in a top hat commissioner who ended up stranded on the moon with everyone else at the end of the first episode reappeared after an inexplicable absence weeks later, only to die a horrible ironic death. The writers didn't even remember that one of the crew had had a baby! The first season did have the whole business with the "mysterious force" that was supposedly guiding Alpha into the situations they encountered, but it was so woolly and vaguely-applied that it doesn't really count as an arc. (And it was tossed out of the airlock along with Bergman and Morrow for the second season anyway.) If I were showrunner of a hypothetical Space: 2099, I'd have the moon leave orbit not as a result of a nuclear accident, but because of some kind of huge and deeply-buried alien technology that's been found and kept a secret by the military contingent (setting up a military/civilian conflict from the start) on the base. They set it off, the moon is thrown through a space warp to some seemingly random point in the universe... and from then on it warps again every 48/57/76.3 or whatever hours. If you're off the moon when it goes, you're stuck where you are forever, so there's a built-in timeclock to every episode. Need to see if this planet's habitable? Don't get captured by the locals. Investigating a derelict alien ship? Be quick about it. And of course, maybe the moon's course through the universe isn't as random as it seems... And keep track of how many people die and how many Eagles explode, for Christ's sake. It's not hard!
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Sep 18, 2017 15:23
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Mechanical Ape posted:The Prisoner episodes were basically self-contained, weren't they? If it were remade it would be interesting to give it arcs. It wasn't very good.
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Sep 18, 2017 17:19
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Another old ITC/Gerry Anderson show that would benefit from modern storytelling is UFO. For those who don't know, it's literally the inspiration for the XCOM series (as in, the original game's creators freely admitted to plundering it for ideas), about a secret military organisation that fights alien invaders. The show did have traces of arc-based storylines, about main character Straker's marriage being destroyed and his young son dying because he was forced to put duty and secrecy before his personal life, but mostly the stories were standalones where not even the aliens' motivations were consistent. They're coming to Earth to harvest our organs because their planet and race are dying... except when they sometimes try to wipe out all life on the planet. Those wacky aliens, huh? It also suffered from production problems where the closure of its original studio meant a long hiatus while everything was moved to another, during which time several of the main cast went on to other work and had to be replaced. So in the series as shown, major characters appear and disappear between episodes at random! It could kind of be justified by saying that "it's a military organisation, and they were on other assignments at the time", but it's still jarring.
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Sep 19, 2017 11:29
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