Basing a television show on a successful movie has almost become common place now, but at the time of
Beyond Westworld not only was it uncommon but they were also basing their series after
one
successful movie and one dud. What were they thinking? Only five
episodes were ever produced, and only three of those saw air,
solidifying this show’s position as a notorious “Crash and Burn” series.
With HBO's reimagining airing now I thought it’d be nice to take a look
back and see what caused this show to be cancelled so damn fast.
Beyond Westworld was basically a sequel to
Westworld while completely ignoring the events of the theatrical sequel
Futureworld, though some thematic elements taken from it. Where Delos became the evil corporation in
Futureworld
for this series it’s now the heroic company trying to stop a
disgruntled employee from taking over the world. This is why a company
needs a good HR department to cut these kind of problems in the nub.
Note: In this series there is no reference to
Medieval World,
Roman World or
Futureworld yet according to a poster in the Delos Company office the movie
Westworld apparently exists.
"What do you mean Yul Brynner isn't returning my calls?
Turns out the computer virus that we were told caused the robots to go crazy in
Westworld
was not caused by computer programs designing their own software and
going nuts, but in fact it was all planned and orchestrated by one man,
Simon Quaid (
James Wainwright),
a robotics designer who believed that the robots they were creating
should be used for the benefit of mankind and not as theme park
attractions. (It's never made clear if he put any of this in the
company's suggestion box) This resulted in Quaid turning the robots lose
on the park guests, causing death and destruction, and then he escaped
with a couple hundred more robots for his own nefarious purposes.
And we can assume his headquarters is in a volcano lair.
The head of Delos, and former boss of Quaid, is Joseph Oppenheimer (
William Jordan), who is clearly named after J. Robert Oppenheimer the father of the atomic bomb, a man most known for the famous quote. “
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
So this television show attempted to equate the creation of nuclear
weapons with this dudes theme park robots. In better hands this may
have worked but the results here don’t quite meet that goal. Now Joseph
Oppenheimer is not the star of this show, he’s more the Oscar Goldman
type from
The Six Million Dollar Man, the lead character is Delos security expert and top trouble shooter John Moore (
Jim McMullan). He’s teamed up with Laura Garvey (
Judith Chapman) to track down Quaid and put an end to the robot threat.
John Moore vows to check under every woman’s shirt.
In
the pilot episode they learn that Quaid has managed to get one of his
robot duplicates aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine and so Moore and Garvey
are sent to discover what member of the crew is the robot, and to find
out what Quaid’s plan is. The show’s biggest problem rears its head
right in the very first episode; these duplicates are robots and not the
genetically perfect clones that we saw in
Futureworld, so discovering
who is and
who is not
a robot should be relatively easy. If a fridge magnet sticks to the
forehead of person’s forehead they are most likely a robot. Now in the
last episode “
Takeover” a blood sample was used to confirm
someone wasn’t a robot, but in that case it turned out that Quaid had
stuck a computer control chip into the poor dude’s head. This was the
one and only time in the five episodes that our heroes thought to
medically check out a suspect. For top gun trouble shooters they aren't
all that bright.
Could this man be a robot?
The
show’s basic structure becomes Delos learning about Quaid taking an
interest in something; whether it be an oil company, a football team, a
supply of uranium, or a stock car race, and then sending Moore and
Pamela Williams (
Connie Sellecca),
who replaced Judith Chapman after the pilot, to go undercover and
investigate any robot shenanigans. Now this sounds like a sensible
formula for an adventure/mystery show except for one small thing; Quaid
is on a first name basis with both Moore and Williams, and thus he knows
what they look like. Pamela even worked for Quaid before transferring
to security work. So these two idiots go undercover to find out who
could be a robot, all while the robot they are supposedly hunting for
are completely aware of who's the goodguys are. Or heroes don’t even
bring weapons to combat these killer robots, but instead have to learn
each particular robot’s weakness.
This one’s Achilles heel is a letter opener to the gut.
That
some robots are incapacitated by water while others have weak eyes or
access ports was clearly set up to add some variety to the show, and
give our heroes something to figure out instead of just simply blowing
them away with an EMP pulse or something, but it makes Quaid about the
dumbest mad scientist to ever walk the Earth. One of the robots becomes
incapacitated when Moore takes of its sunglasses; that’s not a weakness
that’s an incredibly bad design flaw. Quaid also succumbs to the
standard super villain shtick where he has the heroes in his clutches
and then leaves him alone so he can escape the apparent deathtrap, but
Quaid goes one step further in the cocky egomaniacal villain mode; in
the pilot he captures Moore, has him placed in a straitjacket that
doubles as a lie detector and torture device, then after interrogating
him he releases a robot rattlesnake to kill Moore. What is beyond the
pale of stupidity is that before leaving Quaid he bloody well removes
Moore’s straitjacket! Is he all about fair play and a man bound
fighting a snake just isn’t cricket? Later he gets the
Professor from
Gilligan’s Island to help come up with even dumber plans.
“You’d be amazed at what I can build with just bamboo and coconuts.”
Simon
Quaid could have made for an interesting villain; his motivation is to
save mankind from itself by placing robots in all positions of power,
with him a silent puppeteer controlling the world’s strings, seems
reasonable in a evil crackpot way, but instead we get a white collar
criminal with delusions of grandeur. None of his plots seem all that
impressive; getting a hold of a fuel efficient car engine doesn’t seem
all the dastardly, but his inability to pull off even the simplest job
left me confident that if up against Inspector Gadget Penny’s help would
not be required to take him out.
“Have you seen my white cat?”
But
the real failure for this show isn’t the moronic plots or incompetent
villains, it’s the fact that John Moore is colossally boring as a hero.
I’m surprised that the robots he’s up against didn’t just self-terminate
to escape his incessant droning. Connie Sellecca seems to be having a
good time, and she is a delight in most of her scenes, but Jim McMullan
looks to be sleepwalking through most of his, and with the apparent
desire to put us to sleep as well. Steve Austin or Michael Knight he is
not.
He’s wearing a sweater vest for Christ sake.
Beyond Westworld
being cancelled was inevitable, that they aired three of them before
pulling the plug is the real puzzler here, but I guess in the early 80s
there wasn’t as much competition out there. The repetitive nature of the
concept “
find robot and pull his plug” would have been tough
to sustain for a full season, let alone a multiple season run, so it’s
best that this show died in the crib. Let’s hope that
HBO has a better idea for making a
Westworld spin-off work.
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