Posted: Sun Jun 26, 2005 1:27 pmThis last point raises the whole question of the actual purpose of the Mysteron threat in the original series. Was it to demonstrate their superiority over us? Was it to give us a chance to counter it? Or was it to minimise the carnage?
It can't have been an opportunity to minimise the carnage. If it was that, then all the threats in the original series would have been delivered in unambiguous plain English - which they weren't. All that stuff about killing time, destroying the city of the angels and all that was designed specifically to tease and confuse, not to inform, so they certainly weren't trying to present themselves as "decent chaps" - at least, not as we would understand the term.
You do get instances of terrorist groups providing warnings of impending explosions in real life, but whereas supporters of the terrorists might interpret them as proof that their agents were trying to minimise loss of life caused by their actions, the security services would see them simply as a mechanism for creating as much chaos as possible by forcing them to try to evacuate the area under almost impossible circumstances. However that discussion doesn't apply here, because the Mysterons don't have any sympathisers to whom they might want to demonstrate their "regard for human life" - at least, none that have ever been identified in any of the TV shows. And anyway, they demonstrably have no regard for human life at all: they take it whenever and wherever it suits them.
Speaking personally, I don't regret the decision to drop the weekly threat. I thought it was just a little bit silly, though I could see the point in it if you viewed it purely as a challenge to a species that is regarded as hopelessly inferior ("See if you can work this one out, pathetic earthlings!"). The trouble is that as Kambei says, these Mysterons are rather more vicious than the last incarnation. They play to win - and that raises questions in my mind about just how realistic that scenario is. Why? Because - and I've also said this elsewhere - they've already demonstrated capabilities that can't realistically be countered. If they wanted to destroy us utterly, they could do it. Cloudbase/Skybase is a phenomenally complex piece of engineering: assimilate just one key component of it, and/or a few key humans on board it, and you could almost certainly destroy it within minutes - and the same argument applies to any of the mountains of WMDs that mankind has accumulated around the globe over the years. The major population centres of Earth could be reduced to toxic piles of radioctive rubble in no time flat.
I have to believe therefore in both the original series and the new one that the Mysterons aren't really serious about this war at all. It's a nasty little game they're playing, for reasons that have never properly been explained - and to me, that one point is the single most unsatisfactory aspect of the concept of the Mysterons as they're portrayed in the new series. In the original series I could accept the situation presented, albeit with a large pinch of salt, but not really in the new one. It seems to me that either it should be made clear that the Mysterons are voluntarily limiting their actions, or it should be established that Spectrum have developed the means to prevent them (if they try hard enough) from initiating any truly apocalyptic scenarios.
It can't have been an opportunity to minimise the carnage. If it was that, then all the threats in the original series would have been delivered in unambiguous plain English - which they weren't. All that stuff about killing time, destroying the city of the angels and all that was designed specifically to tease and confuse, not to inform, so they certainly weren't trying to present themselves as "decent chaps" - at least, not as we would understand the term.
You do get instances of terrorist groups providing warnings of impending explosions in real life, but whereas supporters of the terrorists might interpret them as proof that their agents were trying to minimise loss of life caused by their actions, the security services would see them simply as a mechanism for creating as much chaos as possible by forcing them to try to evacuate the area under almost impossible circumstances. However that discussion doesn't apply here, because the Mysterons don't have any sympathisers to whom they might want to demonstrate their "regard for human life" - at least, none that have ever been identified in any of the TV shows. And anyway, they demonstrably have no regard for human life at all: they take it whenever and wherever it suits them.
Speaking personally, I don't regret the decision to drop the weekly threat. I thought it was just a little bit silly, though I could see the point in it if you viewed it purely as a challenge to a species that is regarded as hopelessly inferior ("See if you can work this one out, pathetic earthlings!"). The trouble is that as Kambei says, these Mysterons are rather more vicious than the last incarnation. They play to win - and that raises questions in my mind about just how realistic that scenario is. Why? Because - and I've also said this elsewhere - they've already demonstrated capabilities that can't realistically be countered. If they wanted to destroy us utterly, they could do it. Cloudbase/Skybase is a phenomenally complex piece of engineering: assimilate just one key component of it, and/or a few key humans on board it, and you could almost certainly destroy it within minutes - and the same argument applies to any of the mountains of WMDs that mankind has accumulated around the globe over the years. The major population centres of Earth could be reduced to toxic piles of radioctive rubble in no time flat.
I have to believe therefore in both the original series and the new one that the Mysterons aren't really serious about this war at all. It's a nasty little game they're playing, for reasons that have never properly been explained - and to me, that one point is the single most unsatisfactory aspect of the concept of the Mysterons as they're portrayed in the new series. In the original series I could accept the situation presented, albeit with a large pinch of salt, but not really in the new one. It seems to me that either it should be made clear that the Mysterons are voluntarily limiting their actions, or it should be established that Spectrum have developed the means to prevent them (if they try hard enough) from initiating any truly apocalyptic scenarios.
Still, I guess you don't really want to send the youthful target audience off to bed with the screaming abdabs by having too scary monsters - especially invisible ones, coming to get them! An invisible 'something' is a lot scarier than something you can see the strings on 
