The Starlost

Harlan Ellison's first and only attempt to create a science fiction television series, The Starlost was doomed to failure almost from the start. Ellison had his name removed from the series when the producers decided to make a number of knuckleheaded decisions about the show and its direction.

It's too bad as the series premise itself would make a fascinating weekly series or movie. Science fiction author Ben Bova wrote a parody of the situation that occurred to Ellison with a novel (I believe it's now out of print)entitled Starcrossed.

Forget about "The Twilight Zone" or "Outer Limits" or the classic "Doctor Who" years with Tom Baker: CTV's THE STARLOST is the creepiest, most subtly disturbing television show ever made for general audiences. The background story about how the show came to be reads like a Nazi War Criminal Tribunal transcript: Harlan Ellison -- not exactly the most laid back person in first place -- is suckered into helping to create an epic television show set in the future, with space ships, laser beams, intergalactic voyage, combining the best talents of the era (Douglas Trumbull, Ben Bova, "Star Trek"'s alumni of superlative writers) with state-of-the-art technology, to be filmed in London for a worldwide audience hungry for creativity that had never been seen before. The scope would have dwarfed "Star Trek" with an emphasis on real science, astronomy, physics, engineering and a fearless sense of speculation about what could be out there in the universe.

Then it all fell apart: The budget was drawn & quartered, the production syndicated, to be made on the cheap in Canada with a production staff of unknowns who were not trained or equipped to handle such a project. The story premise reduced to the lowest common denominator and the talent marginalized by the stupidity of those who only saw it as another way to sell toilet paper, frozen dinners and underarm deodorant. Blatant misrepresentation of intent finally drove Trumbull and Bova from the sets, and finally Ellison announced he'd had enough. Before the first pilot episode was ever taped he'd demanded that his name be removed from the credits lest the producers reap an undeserved bounty off his well-respected propz. Hyped beyond any possible ability to deliver what it boasted, the show premiered in 1973 to abject indifference from thunderstruck audiences who could not fathom what the point of it all was, mixing 3rd rate television production techniques, bizarre illiteracy of both form and content, and bare-bones production values that were put to shame by that which it attempted to mimic.

Without Ellison's guidance the show became a sort of working example of how NOT to approach the science fiction genre, at the same time dumbed down beyond belief and yet defying any sort of accepted formula. Punctuated by bizarre, ultra-cheap quasi-minimal production design, brain dead writing and lunkheaded conceptual inconsistencies, it is a unique, remarkable failure of humanity attempting to do something great and yet stubbing their toe on the wainscoting with each step. It was canned almost immediately with the basic conflict of the last remnants of humanity in search of a new world on a giant, derelict space ark unresolved. They are still out there, somewhere, lost and unable to find their way home due to indifference, greed and incompetence.

And yet what a show it IS in the form of the precious 16 episodes that were made, 10 of which are available now on a DVD box set from Britain. It's the creepiest television show ever made for family audiences, nightmares of it's basic concept of three lost humans moving from compartment to compartment on an unbelievably huge, lumbering, abandoned "Earthship Ark" haunted me for thirty years. Most of it isn't very good in the traditional way of looking at television, but as a kind of kitschy, ambiguous and hopelessly retarded entertainment it's truly one of a kind, for which we should probably be thankful. Harlan may not wish it so but THE STARLOST remains a remarkable example of humanity at their most clueless, with the potential of what could have been eclipsing that which was.

I will let others describe the details of the premise, what interests me about the show is how utterly rudderless, forlorn and misdirected it all feels looking at the remnants 30 years later. If you want a more accurate look at what the show COULD have been, make sure you read the book adaptation of Mr. Ellison's "pilot episode" story, PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES, which opens with a really eye-opening 20 page account of the hell he went through just to get this much accomplished. By all accounts he is to this day bitter, caustic, and openly hostile about the experience, and I agree that an authorized present day attempt to re-visualize his concept is entirely appropriate. Not a "re-make", since THE STARLOST as it is known today doesn't really officially exist. It was taken away from him and made stupid by those who pulled the strings; The idea is still worthy.

None of which, by the way, is meant to denigrate the efforts of those who stuck around & gave it the good old college try. It's not their fault. They did their best and just happened to come up empty, though some of what survives to this day is remarkable: The principal leads (Kier Dullea, Gay Rowan, the perpetually gruff Robin Ward, and William Oster as the endlessly helpful computer "host") were very well cast and gave their all, and the guest appearances by some of the best & brightest of the day (the late Lloyd Bochner, a misplaced Walter Koenig, "Space: 1999"'s Barry Morse, priceless Ed Ames, and John Colicos who even makes the word vegetable sound like a Shakespeare sonnet) are wonderful. Trumbull's special effects don't come across well on the small screen but are entirely practical given Bova's scientific guidance. Superficially the show resembles "Doctor Who" though far, far less profound as realized.

If it had been made right by honest visionaries who were interested in amounting to more than the sum of their parts it could have gone on for three or four seasons at least, perhaps even fulfilling Ellison's proposed story arc of the three heroes eventually repairing the ark and setting it on it's way again. Yet as an unfinished sketch of that idea it exists like a half remembered dream, haunting because of it's fleeting nature rather than hampered by never having been finished.

8/10. In spite of everything, 8/10.

The Starlost had the potential to be a classic science fiction series as it was created by the superb writer Harlan Ellison. The premise was intriguing: earth is abandoned by the humans that have poisoned it in various ways. A great spaceship arc is constructed and a series of domes house various cultures. At some point in their journey an accident occurs killing the crew, the domes are sealed off, and in time the different societies within them come to believe only in their own world and are unaware they are part of a massive starship.3 individuals from a dome with an agrarian community discover the truth, along with the fact that the ark is on a collision course with a g-class star.The series revolved around their attempts to save the ark. unfortunately Ellison came into conflict with the producers & writes extensively about this in an intro into the book based on the series, Phoenix Without Ashes.The fact that the show had a shoestring budget did not help either.This would be a wonderful premise to revive with Ellison on board, and the state-of-the-art special effects now available.

You know, I was just sleeping and having a dream about a huge generational spaceship, with separate hanging living complexes, which carries most of the population of Earth away to a distant world. Then I realized, I'd seen this concept before on TV, when I was a kid. Reaching through my own memory banks to the distant past, I could only come up with the words: "lost", "ark", and "Walter Koenig" (Chekov from Star Trek). Did the search for Koenig through IMDb, and sure enough found this entry. If I had instead done a search for "lost" and "ark", I'd have probably ended up in "Raiders of The Lost Ark", so it's a good thing I didn't do that search. :-)

Wow, now that I'm looking at the list of stars of this show, I am surprised by how many of them are well-known. Walter Koenig was just a guest star on it. I didn't realize that one of the stars was Keir Dullea, Dave from 2001: A Space Oddessy. Also Robin Ward, I remember he used to be a weatherman or something later on. Ah, ancient Canadian memories.

Koenig seems to have a knack for memorable guest appearances on sci-fi shows. He also had a memorable turn as Bester on Babylon 5.

Of course I was only 8 years old at the time. But in retrospect, the storylines, weird synthesizer music and general atmoshphere were wonderfully creepy. Yes it had super-cheap production values but what could you expect from Canadian TV in the early 70s? The highest budgeted entertainment of the day would have been Hockey Night in Canada or the Irish Rovers Show (remember that one?).

The Starlost is a giant Ark ship hurtling through space on a collision course with a star. The earth has long since been destroyed and the ark ship itself was crippled by a meteor collision several generations into it's long journey. The technical people are dead. What is left are multitudes of biospheres, each with different sub-cultures of human "tribes", all cut-off from one another. These descendents of the original travellers have lost all knowledge of their journey and history. None of them even know they are on a space ship. Their biosphere is simply their home. You have to admit there is something mythic about that premise. I thought it was a nifty idea.

The series follows the adventures of 3 inhabitants, Devin, Rachel and Garth, who escape their biosphere, slowly find out the truth of the Ark, and travel from dome to dome.

I remember catching a few reruns of The Starlost in the early 80s and it was still as good (relatively speaking) as I remembered it. The use of those super-cheesy chroma effects did add a certain other-worldliness to the production that is hard to describe. It was as if it was so bad that it was actually effective (or almost). Certainly if this was redone today with a bunch of flashy, overblown, modern cgi, all the spookiness and creepyness of the original series would be diminished.

I think the reason why this series actually worked for me is because it had that "Space 1999" theme of being disconnected, alienated and lost, while scrambling like mad to get back to "somewhere" more connected. There is something metaphysical and tragic about that set-up which I guess appeals to introspective individuals.

I also liked the way that almost every episode ended on a down note, with the trio jumping to yet another Dome filled with raving madmen of one sort or the other.

Anyway, too bad this series seems to have disappeared. It would have been cool to watch a few episodes again. But I guess the original videotape that it was shot on has since decayed! :)