Women in Sci-Fi

I'd say that the SLIDERS writers and producers suffered from a common flaw among men: they didn't see women as people. They see women strictly in terms of what they have to offer men. The Season 3 writers saw women as sources of masturbatory imagery and sexual overtures and Maggie Beckett, to them, existed to provide exactly that and no more. As a result, the Maggie character is offensively shallow: why would a woman constantly bounding into danger wear such skin-baring, low-cut, exposing outfits? Why would a woman venturing into unknown cultures, whose survival could depend on blending in, wear such attention-drawing clothes?

Also, Maggie is so flirty with Quinn in "The Exodus" and Carlos in "Slither." But the show doesn't explain why Maggie is attracted to either one; it simply wants Kari Wuhrer's body thrust in the direction of a man. Maggie isn't being sexual in any way that reflects on her emotional or physical desires; she's sexual because that's the image a male producer wanted from the women on his show. There isn't any thought as to what Maggie wants, who Maggie is, what her goals and needs and ambitions are, what she'd work towards or what she'd choose to wear while doing it.

In the later seasons, it gets better, but it's still about what men would want from the Maggie character. Marc Scott Zicree and Chris Black write Maggie as a funny, pleasant, caring presence because they would like the women in their lives to be funny, pleasant and caring and they like giving Kari Wuhrer things to do. It doesn't say anything about Maggie.

Modern shows these days give female characters a sexuality that is their own, if that makes any sense. On BLINDSPOT, Jane Doe (Jamie Alexander) is attracted to Kurt Weller because where Jane Doe is a spy whose identity has been a moving target, Weller knows exactly who he is and who he wants to be and commits to that and inspires Jane to do the same. On SUPERGIRL, Kara Danvers is a little boy crazy and a bit of a fantasist, but it's also a way to escape her identity crisis and the stress of her superhero career. Sara Lance on LEGENDS has sex with any man or woman she wants because she's having fun and not tied down. It gets her into trouble sometimes when she lets historical figures seduce her and it's hilarious.

And modern media also succeeds in highlighting women physically by focusing on athleticism and ability rather than staring at the chest and backside; Adrianne Palicki on AGENTS OF SHIELD and THE ORVILLE is shown in action as an astonishingly limber gymnast. Rachel Nichols on CONTINUUM gets through sci-fi laser gun battles with impressive physical aplomb. Ruby Rose in BATWOMAN has the swagger of a boxer matched with the grace of a dancer. 

I think of Maggie in these terms myself. I've written a lot of fanfic using Maggie because, when writing my SLIDERS scripts, I needed a character who was a spy and it made sense to use Maggie rather than create someone new. In my head, Maggie is still played by Kari Wuhrer, but Maggie doesn't strut and thrust out her chest; instead, I see her walking with the weight of someone who carries more muscle than the average woman.

My vision of Maggie is dressed in a blouse that's reflective; she can undo some of the buttons to look casual or keep it buttoned to look formal. She wears a leather jacket that shields against the elements but can be swapped for a formal blazer. She wears pants cut to her figure; a jacket can obscure her legs or show them off. My Maggie dresses like Megan Boone on THE BLACKLIST.

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I imagine Maggie with a very sweet smile and quite the figure, but it's a feint; it makes men dismiss her as a pretty girl and not see that she could be a threat.

My version of Maggie isn't attracted to Quinn; he's 10 years younger than she is and he never even finished college. She sees Quinn as her genius baby brother, someone who can solve any and every problem, but who is painfully incapable of staying out of trouble. She is his bodyguard. She keeps him alive because she needs his brilliance; she saves Quinn so that Quinn can save everyone else.

My image of Maggie is that she doesn't mind casual sex for physicality and exercise, but she's been married for a long time. She loves Dr. Steven Jensen because of his commitment to truth, even painful truth, whereas Maggie, who has pretended to be a dumb cocktail waitress, a Communist secretary, an aspiring singer, a ski instructor and other roles in her spy work, has spent too much of her life pretending.

My view of Maggie is that she is driven to serve. If she weren't a soldier, she would have been a nurse or a city council representative or a public transit mechanic or a plumber; her father the General instilled in her a sense of duty to her fellow human being.

And my sense of Maggie is that she regards people who aren't in the military as a bit stupid -- ordinary people lack survival skills or the ability to set goals and march relentlessly to accomplish them and lack a strong sense of self-preservation that makes it necessary for her to protect them.

My personal vision of Maggie is that she is a spy, a soldier and a public servant -- and the fact that she has Kari Wuhrer's face and body is a factor, but people shouldn't ever only be their bodies. And I think this is a Maggie that Kari Wuhrer could've played well if she'd ever been given the opportunity.

I wonder if this might become a thread about all my favourite action girls.

Sooo, watching Jerry O'Connell's very mediocre CARTER had me moving on to watching CASTLE. CARTER strikes me as a legally dissimilar photocopy of CASTLE, about a man from the entertainment industry blundering into crime solving with a no-nonsense lady police detective. Except CARTER foolishly made its leading man an actor with no applicable skills to fighting crime and whereas CASTLE features a mystery novelist who actually has something to offer a procedural series.

But I have to say, the appeal of CASTLE is Nathan Fillion's interaction with Stana Katic and Stana Katic's Detective Kate Beckett is another interesting model of what Maggie Beckett could have been. Katic is strangely similar to Kari Wuhrer at certain angles with the cheekbone defined triangle of Wuhrer's face and the reddish brown hair that frames her face just like Wuhrer. But CASTLE films and costumes Katic so differently: the angles on Katic are specifically to bring out her furrowed brow and laser-like glare as she glowers at Nathan Fillion's antics.

Katic's costuming is also terrific. In Season 1, she only wears a dress in two scenes. The rest of the time, she's clad in large lapeled coats, leather jackets, smart blazers, sharp blouses -- and there's some impressive subtlety in the tailoring where at certain angles, the camera picks up on the curve of Katic's back or the rounding of her cleavage, but it's always incidental, the result of Katic wearing clothes that have been fitted to her form.

Kate Beckett is very well-written. Admittedly, her character is just running through all the procedural tropes. But what makes the character comes alive is Katic playing off Fillion. While Fillion gets all the good wisecracks, Katic easily punctures his ego and the fact that she retains composure and focus when Fillion is being so funny -- it makes Katic's Kate Beckett seem like a focused, professional, clearheaded public servant with a crisp cool that is perpetually unruffled. Katic ensures that even when Beckett is annoyed, Beckett is still in control. Where Fillion is aggressively reacting, Katic is aggressively thinking.

There are many, many shots of Katic looking curiously around various crime scenes, her eyes narrowed pensively, her bearing thoughtful and and calculating, her face absorbing all information around her -- it reminds me of how Jerry played Quinn. It reminds me of Jerry's performance in "In Dinos Veritas" where Jerry is looking around The Cave, showing Quinn spotting all the entrance and exit points and coming up with a plan. Katic quietly conveys that Kate Beckett is a crimefighting genius whose cleverness is obscured by Castle's showboating.

Maybe Stana Katic should play Quinn Mallory.

I've been watching the first season of V.I.P., a wonderfully ridiculous (in)action comedy from 1998 (when Season 4 of SLIDERS was airing) featuring Pamela Anderson as a hot dog stand worker who blunders ass-backwards into:

(a) a date with a leading man celebrity actor to a Hollywood movie premiere
(b) accidentally rescuing the cowardly actor from a murderous gunman on live TV
(c) playing along with said actor telling TV reporters that she is his bodyguard to explain why he hid behind her and used her as a human shield when threatened
(d) joining an actual team of bodyguards who hire her as a figurehead while they do all the actual work and pretend that she's a martial artist/markswoman/combat strategist when her skills extend to counting cash and grilling hot dogs

V.I.P. is not 'good' by any conventional standard of quality, but it stands out to me because it is clearly being made on the same production model as Season 4 - 5 of SLIDERS: filmed in Los Angeles on a barrel-bottom scraping budget. Enclosed sets with windowless room after windowless room. 'Action' that consists of interchangeable shots of actors firing weapons off camera. A female lead hired for her surgically augmented chest and presented in an action show.

Yet, V.I.P. somehow manages to be better than the worst (meaning it's better than Season 5 of SLIDERS) despite many of the same limitations. V.I.P., while often bound to interior sets, battles the beige dullness of SLIDERS in Season 5. Walls are painted purple and blue with lights and bizarre 60s pop art livening up the sets. Clothes are vivid pink or shiny silver and other rich tones. V.I.P. is colourful, at times garishly so, but the creators are aware of the budget shortfall and putting up a mighty fight, insisting that every shot of their show decline succumbing to bland grayness of SLIDERS episodes like "Please Press One."

V.I.P. also attempts to work past its difficulties with action. It is budgetarily restricted to the lead actors and various guest henchmen firing weapons vaguely off camera and no one getting hit until the plot calls for an end to the fight, much like inaction non-masterpieces like "The Dying Fields" and "Heavy Metal. But there is some effort at strategy with the heroes often coming up with feints to draw their enemies into traps or waste all their ammo on decoys or distract with flash grenades and smoke bombs. There's an actual attempt to create an arc in the action instead of just having the actors shoot guns and stall to commercial.

The characters of V.I.P. are broadly scripted and badly defined, much like SLIDERS on the Sci-Fi Channel giving very generic roles to Quinn, Colin, Rembrandt, Maggie, Diana and Mallory. Yet, the show has cast surprisingly well outside of Pamela Anderson, hiring actors who are actually very good to play the 'real' bodyguards around Pamela Anderson's 'fake' bodyguard. The tall and regal Molly Culver gives her Tasha Dexter character a crisp professionalism and a strategic sense of movement and decisiveness and comes off as an ex-spy. The short-haired and muscled Natalie Raitano plays Nikki as a bruiser with a boxer's swagger and a mischievous aggression. And the token male of the group, Shaun Baker, gives his Quick Williams bodyguard character a charmingly unthreatening male glamour and playfulness who loves impersonations and pretending to be a hapless civillian when he's not.

The primary deficiency of V.I.P. is, oddly but unsurprisingly, lead actress Pamela Anderson. She's the co-creator and producer of the show. It wouldn't exist without her. And yet, a few episodes into Season 1, it is painfully clear that Ms. Anderson is simply not an actress and her skills are so weak that she makes Kari Wuhrer look good.

Kari Wuhrer may not be the master thespian, and she had deeply embarassing moments in Season 3 like "Dinoslide" where she couldn't hold a rifle convincingly (which is more on the weapons trainer than on Wuhrer). However, Kari Wuhrer has the basic skills: she can deliver dialogue and hit the points of emotion and exposition. She can perform the character's onscreen actions within frame, she can react and build rapport with other performers and she can carry a scene.

Pamela Anderson can't seem to do these things. I never thought I would see an actor fail to walk down a hallway unconvincingly, but Anderson can't do it; she is visibly struggling to stay within the center of the frame and each step is guardedly hesitant as she's afraid to throw off the shot. She can't decide whether or not to swing her arms and holds them at an awkward middle-height. She has absolutely no thought or technique in how she delivers lines, at one point saying, "Okaabuhhahhhwannarsss" which I had to listen to four times before I realized she was saying, "Okay. But I want a raise." There is no thought to emphasis and her enunciation is shockingly poor.

Anderson is also pitifully incapable of carrying a scene; she can't bounce off her other actors because she doesn't seem to react to them, suggesting she's somehow been composited into the shot in post. She doesn't generate a friendly chemistry or rapport with guest stars with whom she's called to create a bond; she is a vacuum of anti-screen presence. Kari Wuhrer would never be so inept.

Anderson is good on camera when she's in slow motion, walking silently towards the audience, presenting a steely scowl as her supposed bodyguard character only to collapse into laughter as she gets close to the lens. She can do a music video. But once she's given any actual dialogue or any point of narrative or emotion to convey, she becomes a mess.

Kari Wuhrer was, for all her issues, an actress capable of acting. Pamela Anderson, however, is on camera because she has been surgically redesigned for the male gaze. This is another problem that Kari didn't have, or at least not to the same degree. While Kari Wuhrer had C-cup breast implants, Seasons 4 - 5 generally costumed her in blouses and jackets that didn't show off her cleavage except in specific occasions and even the sports bra of "Slidecage" was quite tame. Kari Wuhrer could still be presented as a woman who wasn't a Hollywood actress.

Anderson in V.I.P., however, has DD-cup breasts. Even in normal clothes, she looks like a surgical experiment. Her implants don't sit naturally on her body as any sort of plausible formation of fatty chest tissue; they don't rest against her form. They protrude and burst as a separate addition to her figure. It seems unlikely that her minimum wage hot dog stand worker character could afford the $15,000 for cosmetic surgery in addition to the lifetime of medical maintenance and upkeep. Kari Wuhrer, with C-cups that could be de-emphasized, played a lot of centerfold pinup girls, but she could also play a soldier, a hairdresser, a journalist, a police officer or a doctor or a hot dog vendor.

The unfortunate truth is that Kari Wuhrer and Pamela Anderson have bodies that were designed by men, for men and for the male gaze and for the camera to show them in full with their chests to be the most prominent part of their figure in a full body shot. Despite the popularity of these images, I'm not sure that most women would want to look like either one of them, to be the center of unwanted male attention and harassment, to be unbalanced on top, to have back issues and difficulties with posture. And despite Wuhrer and Anderson having made a lot of money, I'm not sure that many actresses would want to limit themselves to only playing characters meant to appeal to the male gaze. And outside of that, their bodies aren't really all that impressive; neither had much musculature. Neither were actually that fit. Outside of the augmentations, they simply acquired a lean skinniness through what looks to me like deprivation and liquid diets at the time. Women and girls should not look to them as role models of health or athleticism.

But amusingly, V.I.P. seems to understand this problem entirely and addresses it by having a worthy female role model onscreen. V.I.P. repeatedly compares Molly Culver's actual bodyguard character with Pamela Anderson's fake-figurehead bodyguard role -- and contrasts them accordingly. Molly Culver's Tasha Dexter wears suits -- fitted by 90s standards, a bit loose and big by modern standards, but she dresses like a professional, moves like an Olympic athlete, and fights like Bruce Lee. In contrast, Pamela Anderson's Val dresses like a teenaged cheerleader, is all hands in the air and uncoordinated in her gait, and can't actually fight at all. Tasha speaks with a measured, cool, dry delivery; Val babbles in an at times unintelligible mess. Val's onscreen beauty is presented through dresses and tops that wrap around her chest and emphasize strained straps and the full roundedness of her breasts. Tasha wears clothes that drape and flow in smooth, clean lines with Tasha being a picture of active and calculated athleticism.

Molly Culver is a really good actress in all the ways Anderson isn't and the highlight of her scenes is her exasperated frustration where the public at large lauds Val as the world's greatest bodyguard when Tasha is the one who is everything Val only pretends to be. Pamela Anderson may be the lead, but Molly Culver is the star.

(For all I know, Culver has as much silicon or saline in her as Anderson, but the show puts her in power suits, so I can't tell.)

What's also interesting to me is that on some level, Pamela Anderson herself must know this and encourage the show -- her show -- to do this. As the executive producer, Anderson would have had full control over who to cast. And she deliberately surrounded herself with extremely talented actors who are skillful in all the areas where Anderson is not. V.I.P. presents Anderson's character as a fake, an impostor, a phony supported by the real talent of her supporting cast, another choice that would have been Anderson's to make. In terms of the V.I.P. television series, Pamela Anderson backed other women and supported their talents.

In contrast, Kari Wuhrer during her time on SLIDERS did not support other women, actively harassing and bullying her female co-star into quitting and making catty remarks about her in the press.

Anyway. Season 5 of SLIDERS could have used V.I.P.'s set dresser and action choreographer. And I assume that Pamela Anderson as Maggie Beckett would have been even more bizarre than Kari Wuhrer, but given that Anderson was content to play an inept goofball to let real actresses take the lead on her own show, it's safe to think that Anderson wouldn't have driven Sabrina Lloyd off the show.

Don't watch V.I.P. It's only interesting in terms of 90s TV and subverting the genre and production conventions of the era. An era that has passed (thank God), because today, if men want to see surgically altered women, they have the internet; they wouldn't go to V.I.P. or SLIDERS for that kind of content and it'd be a waste of time, effort and resources to court that kind of audience. Television now presents action heroines in terms of physical proficiency and athletic ability from Megan Boone on THE BLACKLIST to Jaimie Alexander on BLINDSPOT and it's a shame Maggie Beckett wasn't rendered this way.