The Anorak Zone Forums

[Professor_Thascales]

Good story.

[Apparatchik]

I agree that Duel was well done and is the best example of the "Aliens make the hero and villain fight" stories. It certainly has more going for it than the versions in Star Trek, the Outer Limits or Space 1999.

[jcompton]

Everyone hates Harvest of Kairos. I remember it as having been very creepy, but I don't think I've ever read a single positive review anywhere.

This seems like as good a place as any to publicly confess that I kinda like Harvest. It has plenty of bad bits, but there's just something about Jarvik's performance that I can't dislike, even at its "Woman. You're beautiful." weirdest.

Actually, I think the scene where Zen rattles off the devastating capabilities of the lunar lander is genuinely great. Although much of the Servalan/Jarvik interaction was implausible at best, that scene came off well. Jarvik's contemptuous laugh over Zen's monotone delivery of its tremendous power gets me every time. Servalan's dilemma and her capitulation is very believable--she knows it is next to impossible for the Kairos lunar lander to be more powerful than the Liberator, but she is ultimately a creature of technology. She believes what computers tell her, even if instinct and her own judgment know what the computer says cannot be true.

And in a season full of uneven characterization and even more unclear motivations, Harvest's portrayal of Avon is one of the more interesting. He's depicted as the space terrorist equivalent of an absentee business owner having hired on a new manager (Tarrant) and ceding day-to-day operations to him. Avon as the eccentric uncle up in the attic, tinkering away with Orac on some crazy scheme week after week until he was really needed on the flight deck or whatever, would have been an interesting non-psychopathic direction to take the character on a longer-term basis.