A Matter of Perspective

15/03/2008 by AJ.

There’s a third season episode of Star Trek - The Next Generation called ‘A Matter of Perspective’. In it, Riker is accused of murder when a scientist is killed in an explosion. So, old Jean-Luc recreates the events in the holodeck, using the technology to prove Will’s innocence.

Except … it’s not that easy, as everyone involved has seen the incident from a different angle. Filtered out particular events, given more prominence to others. All are remembering the reality as they saw it. They report their memories accurately, but overall, their version of the truth is not all it could be.

I note this as, at the moment, I am bemused by the current reaction amongst both friends and the media to Ashes to Ashes, the continuation of Life on Mars, featuring Cult TV’s Hall of Fame Hero for 2007, Gene Hunt.

For me, the 1970s realm that was the setting for prequel series Life on Mars happened for me at a time when I had an age in single digits. I can recall the music featured, even knew the lyrics of songs by the likes of The Sweet, even seeing the band performing in my mind’s eye on Top of the Pops.

But for me my heyday was the early 1980s. The era of Ashes to Ashes. The choice of music - Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, The Clash and so forth, just makes me all nostalgic. In 1981 I was 16-17, just starting out as a DJ (playing for 6th Form parties at school), and going to gigs like The Human League at Bingley Hall and The Police at the NEC Birmingham. The best days of my life.

I admit the bias as I am prepared to be more forgiving, it would seem, than people who weren’t in the same position as me at the time. For those younger, most not even born at the time when either LoM or AtA were set, both are worlds-away from our present day. For those older, most see the early 1970s as more of a “golden age”, musically and culturally, that the 1980s.

However, the problem seems to mainly be rested at the feet of new leading character Alex Drake. The profiler from the 21st Century whisked back to her own single-digit age era of 1981. To move the format onwards, Drake has knowledge of Sam Tyler and his mental apparitions that were revealed in LoM. So, rather than the fuzzy bemusement suffered by her predecessor Sam, Ms Drake is well aware of the nature of her experience. She (reckons) she’s near death, holding on to her life in 2008 by the thinnest of threads, and seeing her adventures in 1981 as some sort of test that she is being put through. Solve all the riddles and she will survive. Fail in her set tasks, and she’s off this mortal coil for good.

This premise immediately means that we are less symathetic to her than we were for Sam. She’s a know-it-all, she thinks she has a jump-off point for all the answers, so she treats the characters around her with more detachment and scorn that old Sam did. They are figments or her own imagination, she thinks, so why should she respect them?

The problem with this is that the viewing audience have grown to like Gene, Ray and Chris. So, the detached treatment Ms Drake has given the dynamic trio doesn’t go down well with the viewers. All three of them are lovable in one way or another, and here we have this interloper stomping in and, as Shakespeare would say, biting her thumb at them.

Drake is being too clever for her own good, in effect. The perspective of the viewer is such that, yes, we know you’re in a dreamworld, but for heaven’s sake enjoy it, rather than being uptight with yourself by referencing such things as “Back to the Future” with a DeLorean, or the soon-to-be The A Team!

How different would our perspective be if DCI Hunt and the team weren’t already known to us? Difficult to say, as we aren’t in that position, and I very much doubt that AtA has any viewers that aren’t actually already familiar with LoM.

So, we see a new character playing in an established universe, admittedly advanced onward by eight years. And she’s not playing nice with people we have grown to like over the course of 16 previous televisual hours. To be honest, given the set-up and premise of AtA, it’s difficult to work out how logically Drake could handle the situation any differently.

Personally, I don’t see this as the show’s major flaw, but one of its major strengths. If you know you’re in a fictional world, then Drake’s way of coping is absolutely logical. You can laugh at what’s happening around you, no matter how serious everyone else in that universe thinks things are.

It’s a pity we all can’t take this sort of attitude on in our own ‘real world’ as it is portrayed to us. Things happen all the time which, if you step back from them, make absolutely no sense, given the take on reality we are expected to follow from what our chums in the mass media tell us.

This week’s case in point: it is widely acknowledged that air travel is the single biggest cause of increases in the levels of CO2 in our atmosphere.

Indeed, there is also no widely distributed argument to the fact that CO2 is one of the major causes of global warming, which is leading to climate change.

So, this week, we have HRH Queen Elizabeth II opening Terminal 5 at London Heathrow airport, with a new runway or two in the offing.

All these things being true, what are we to conclude? Take your pick from the following answers. Is it:

a) CO2 causes global warming, and the continued support of mechanisms for air travel means our own Government is not committed to doing anything about rising temperatures; or

b) CO2 is NOT the cause of global warming - the climate change which is happening is due to something else - in which case, all this carbon offsetting and proposed extra taxes are just a means to make money; there’s actually not a thing we can do about the planet heating up.

It’s got to be one or the other. This is an either/or situation. It can’t be both.

Without all the facts, without all the evidence, the answer remains a matter of perspective…

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