Cleopatra 2525 I. Production Produced by Renaissance Pictures and Studios USA, "Cleopatra 2525" and "Jack of All Trades" are half-hour live-action series that together comprise "Back 2 Back Action," which replaces "Hercules." Each has its own title sequence and theme song, but the hour's first bumper features the original 1994 "Action Pack" musical sting. ("Action Pack" introduced Kevin Sorbo's Hercules as a series of telemovies, along with William Shatner's "TekWar" and the forgettable and unrelated-to-its-namesake "Knight Rider 2010.") See www.back2backaction.com for the usual puff publicity. Whereas "Cleo" looks to be halfway-serious SF, "JOAT" is pure farce. Like "Hercules" and "Xena" (and the currently-filming "Lord of the Rings" movie) both series are filmed in New Zealand. As a fun game, try to identify all the props and sets "JOAT" reuses from the Greek series. Rated TV-PG-V. Music Joseph Lo Duca Assoc Producer Sam Clark Co-producer Michael McDonald Exec producer R.J. Stewart Creator Rob Tapert Creator R.J. Stewart Teleplay R.J. Stewart Director Greg Yaitanes Ib. Opening Monologue 500 years into the future, she will enter a world where machines rule the Earth. Mankind has been driven underground and Cleopatra is about to discover there's no place like home. In the year twenty-five twenty-five there are women with the will to survive, fighting for a brand new today, nothing's gonna get in their way. In the year twenty-five twenty-five three women keep hope alive, joining forces to reclaim the Earth, looking ahead, to humankind's rebirth. II. Characters >HELEN "Hel" CARTER (Gina Torres) >SARGE (Victoria Pratt) >"Cleopatra" (Jennifer Sky) >MAUSER the android (Patrick Kane) >VOICE (Elizabeth Hawthorne) >CREEGAN >HORST (David Press) >THE CAT MAN (Mark Williams) III. Airing Order 101 22-jan-2000 Quest for Firepower 102 29-jan-2000 Creegan 103 1205 05-feb-2000 Flying Lessons 104 1207 12-feb-2000 Mind Games 105 1203 19-feb-2000 Home, pt.1 106 26-feb-2000 Rescue, pt.2 --- 1209 15-apr-2000 Perceptions --- 1212 22-apr-2000 Trial and Error --- 1210 29-apr-2000 Double --- 1211 06-may-2000 The Last Stand --- 1214 13-may-2000 Hel and Highwater, pt.1 --- ---- 20-may-2000 Hel and Highwater, pt.2 --- 1221 06-jan-2001 Reality Check --- 1270 13-jan-2001 Pod Whisperer --- 1219 20-jan-2001 Out of Body --- 1272 27-jan-2001 Juggernaut Down --- 1501 03-feb-2001 Truth Be Told --- 1505 10-feb-2001 In Your Boots --- 1507 17-feb-2001 The Soldier Who Fell From Grace --- 1509 24-feb-2001 No Thanks for the memories --- 1510 03-mar-2001 Noir or Never IV. Episodes Season One >>>101 Quest for Firepower A trio of futuristically-garbed figures -- two female, one male -- clamber from a skewed hatchway into the ruins of the Sistine Chapel. With their gauntlets they blast a hole in the "Creation of Adam" fresco, the fire a Spider-man-like length of translucent adhesive climbing rope. Despite their orders, HEL (Gina Torres) is suddenly apprehensive about the ascent, a mission to test new personal shields; she protests to an unseen listener. The second woman, SARGE (Victoria Pratt) whispers to HORST (David Press) that she's addressing THE VOICE (Elizabeth Hawthorne), their reclusive leader. Sarge attributes Hel's "bad feeling" to simple jitters; it's her first foray onto the surface. They emerge from the chapel into a tree-rimmed meadow, and remove their tinted goggles. Sarge survives a wave of vertigo, then they deactivate their gauntlet-mounted jammers. With a loud thrum, a BAILEY appears over the treetrops. It's like a stalk of chrome broccoli, or a cyclopean brain wearing a boot. It evaluates them for a few moments, then extrudes a bevy of weapons limbs and opens fire. The trio's shields hold against the onslaught, and Hel executes the mission's second objective; she blasts loose one of the guns. During the Bailey's brief discomfiture they dive back through the hole. Downstairs, they notice Horst has sustained a leg wound -- and it's sparking. "You're a robot?" asks Sarge, disappointed. "A *betrayer* robot," Hel corrects, as Horst tosses away his gun and morphs his arms into blasters. In the ensuing firefight, the two humans manage to blast him aside, then dive down the hatchway -- into an empty shaft. They plummet downward calmly, then flip in mid-air and fire off webbing lines, gradually braking their fall. On a ledge, Hel examines a wound on Sarge's right side -- Horst took out her remaining kidney. "I can't believe he was a machine. Ow. Though that would explain a few things," she giggles. The Voice insists they bring the Bailey arm to The Lab, but Hel is adamant that Sarge be treated first. They stagger into the emporium of a cat-faced organ vendor and his hissing snake-headed partner. They're in luck; he's just acquired a set of 21st-century frozen bodies, and is purring lasciviously over a white-wrapped blonde in the autosurgeon tube. (According to her attached record, she never awoke from anesthesia during an operation in 2001.) He demands payment: "What've you got? Drugs, tobacco, slaves?" He refuses their weapons gauntlets as "outdated" so (over Sarge's protestations) Hel parts with a small wooden cylinder from which she removes a photo (her husband? brother? son?). "You don't see wood much anymore," the cat says, satisfied, and leaves them with instructions while he goes to "the cat box." They pick a body with the appropriate blood type, shove the blonde aside, and the autosurgeon goes to work on Sarge. The procedure completed, the duo consider the blonde. "We can't leave her here for these ghouls. We're better off just killing her now; put her out of her misery." The awkening girl overhears, grabs the Bailey gun, starts quoting Clint Eastwood, and introduces herself as "Double-oh-eight, codename CLEOPATRA." (Jennifer Sky) Then Horst arrives, targeted on Sarge, and Cleo immediately drops all pretense of confidence when she notices the hole drilled through his belly. After one firefight, some Xena-esque wall-running stunts, a lot of screaming and evidence of the Voice's omniscience ("Hel! Sarge is in danger"), they escape. Cleo nearly falls down the shaft before Horst (unable to find them with their jammers activated) morphs into a featureless silver manikin and leaps down it. Cleo (suffering culture shock) loses it and attacks Sarge, falls over the edge and is rescued by her moments-ago target. She tells her story: two years studying acting at Glendale Community College, paying the bills as an exotic dancer under the stage name "Cleopatra." "A what?" asks Hel, ignorant of finer 20cen euphemisms. "A stripper, okay?" says Cleo acerbically, obviously embarrassed. For her part, Sarge doesn't understand the point of breast implant surgery. A little more web-swinging, and they pass through a holographic wall, into THE LAB, where Cleo meets the hunky MAUSER (Patrick Kane). "Down, girl," says Sarge, "He's a robot. Not even programmed for sex." Lecherously she adds: "Yet." Cleo asks after some new clothes to replace her "400-year-old gauze." "You're very concerned about the way you look, aren't you?" Sarge asks, and Cleo mimics the comment, then retorts: "like those exposed midriffs of yours are functional." Mauser announces that the Baily gun is the most powerful weapon he's ever seen, and is ready to adapt it for standalone use when silver-Horst cuts through the formerly-holographic wall. It's still targeted on Sarge, and a fourth firefight ensues. While Mauser works on the gun, Hel has Cleo mimic Sarge's voice to distract it. They blow it to bits. Afterward, Cleo asks if they can just freeze her again, with a note to wake her when things get better. Hel somberly tells her that until the Baileys are defeated, they won't; that they're fighting for a better future. "All for one and one for all, eh?" the 21cen girl says. The others find that very apt and inspiring. Cleo smiles, "I've got a million of 'em." Story Analysis Well, character roles are pretty obvious. Hel is the serious leader-figure with a personal loss in her past. Sarge is a ready-to-rumble nymphomaniac. Cleopatra has a playful attitude and an endless supply of bewildering 20cen quotes and strategems. Mauser is the straight man, and The Voice will be exasperated from afar at their lack of discipline. Under Cleo's prompting, the girls will be forever swapping girl-talk over physical attributes and fashion. Tech Analysis After only 22 minutes, it's difficult to say much about a new universe. We know the Baileys "invaded" but we don't know if they're aliens or domestic. We know they drove humanity underground, but we don't know how rapidly, or how large the cities are, or what sort of civilization survives. The presence of the Sistine Chapel and the recently-discovered 21cen corpsicles (as Larry Niven calls them) implies the large-scale submergence of entire buildings. We saw a cat-man and a snake-man, but we don't know their biological origin. Perhaps there was germ-line geneering performed pre-Bailey; maybe these were early anti-Bailey designs; perhaps the technology (still) exists for extreme cosmetic modifications ("body beppling" as Virgin's "Doctor Who New Adventures" novels call it). We saw humaniform robots, but are they centuries old, or still being manufactured? Human-robot sex is apparently possible, but we don't know the social mores regarding it. Cleo attended college in Glendale (California?); what transportation has occurred such that she's revived in the vicinity of the Vatican? Spoken English seems unchanged, but much of the social context has changed in the 524 years Cleo's been napping. The use of the line-shooting gauntlets recalls both the webbing of "Spider-Man" and the "self-guided induction ropes" of "Phantom 2040." Hel and Sarge slowed their descent gradually, rather than stopped instantly; that's a nice bit of physical realism by the writers. The vertigo experienced by Hel upon surfacing could be the expected agoraphobia; but why did the trio remove their goggles immediately after exiting the hole? Organ transplantation is highly advanced if a couple of novices can select a donor with a matching blood type, then let an autosurgeon do the rest. The "gauze" dress and booties worn by Cleo were about as realistic as the "thermal bandages" applied to Leeloo in "The Fifth Element." Horst the "betrayer robot" could morph its arms and discarded its human guise to become a silver manikin; it didn't have the shapeshifting ability of the "T-1000" from "Terminator II" but it did carry energy weapons. With a temporal setting of the 26th century, "Cleopatra 2525" is one of the furthest uptime (or downtime, depending which SF author you ask) series on TV. "Star Trek" is set in 23cen and 24cen, "Buck Rogers" in 25cen, and the "Battletech" cartoon in 30cen. >>>102 Creegan Move to new lab. Holowall. Mauser must not be captured, is blown up "offline". His "nanoplasma" is encoded with 4 security backups. Siphon. Creegan killed Hel(en)'s family. His flying attacker robot. 4 firefights. Hel's "voice receptor". Surgical scanner with holo proj, surgical wand. How does M regen? >>>103 Flying Lessons "Web launcher", trampoline, mutant experimental labs, Gambling, "specimens", "juice" (a resistance inhibitor, aphrodisiac), "upworlders" >>>104 Mind Games Thought inhibitor, Reina reads and controls minds, laser to cauterize nosebleed, Dr.Huggins, holowall to bar, broadcast news, 3 firefights. >>>105 Home Robot waiter New model betrayer, based on a man taken from Sarge's surface village 3 firefights "dwarks" allowed to live on surface, believe Baileys "emissaries" are aliens. They play CE3K chords. Sarge's cyber eye? cornea? with targeting overlay. Fires tracer dart. Holomap from Hel's gauntlet. Sarge nee Rose, sister Lily. Bailey with flamer, emits 6 "probes" Cleo cites ST,SW,BSG,XF >>>106 Rescue Beams Cleo and Lily up. "Tracking fluid" wears off. "This must be Roswell!" Fires probe into orbit. Another into base. Lawnmower stomp. "Pod people" Cloaking generators. Biochemical profile detected by remote drone launcher, pheromone signature. 3 firefights. >>>--- Perceptions Hel's father dead, "biosensor readings" "hidden level" Sarge's eye overlay, cutting beam Gauntlets have flashlights Creegan, tracer to find Voice thru Hel Hel, grapplehook (not gum) in left >>>--- Trial and Error 3 firefights. Raina - her powers work on betrayers. Formerly a team leader. Powers a result of Voice's experiments. Inhibitor only blocks projection, not receive - and sometimes not even that. Shield and hypershield. "Nanothermite incendiary" - very volatile when stimulated by a particular frequency Invisible camera drone Mauser >>>--- Double A betrayer duplicate of Cleo (created during Rescue) escapes explosion before receives final programming - believes it is Cleo, been running for "past 3 wks" "nearly a month" "22.3 days" Cleo is 21.623 years old, b. Phoenix AZ, had a dog called Mr.Pants. Gauntlets fire "containment fields" "neutron curtain" No gauntlet for Cleo yuet When a betrayer goes down, it sends a call for backup. "polymorphic betrayer alloy" Mauser was originally a betrayer, an early model, reprogrammed. >>>--- The Last Stand ff 1 (4 parts), 2 "gauntlet" The Watch Jake Lawon "megatronic distributor" - used to generate a forcefield >>>--- Hel and High Water, part 1 New outfits subterranean drilling mole with ULF transceiver Nit: why are both Hel and Sarge piloting? Cleo a little claustrophobic "underwater tractor beam" Underwater 500y since late 20cen, some genetic eng >>>--- Hel and High Water, part 2 Extracts power cell from Bailey for bomb to destroy Underworld Cleo a lifeguard "Healing tube" Nit: why does Bailey call Cleo? Where'd it get img of mom? Induced it? Bailey eye-tentacle, heals Sarge Season Two >>>1509 No Thanks For the Memories (1 hour) Sarge a former member of the Watch. Mnemonic extractor. Cleo was a psychology minor, got a B+ in hypnotherapy. Dylan, Krider, Kavilo. The Watch's secret project is "flash cloning", can copy body, clothes, and memory, then alter memory. Dylan needs Marla to think he's dead, so clones Sarge to murder his clone. >>>--- The Voice (1 hour) Flock of Baileys gather over the water between forest. Holo in lab - Mauer commentate - far more than ever monitored before. Voice patched into lab comm. "I finally get to put a voice to the Voice. She's British!" A team has gone renegade, and V orders them "neutralized". Cleo excitedly asks for weapons. "There you go -- low yield photon taser, defensive use only." Downshaft on abandoned level. V orders ambush set. 3 (2m1f) arrive, wpns ready. Enter old bar. FF. Hel dissuades C from firing. S and QUINT recog each other, puase. Q orders them out. Pinned down. V orders elim at once -- and Quint gets same order. FF cont. Q's f points out sitting ducks. Ready web launchers. He shoots door control, slides open. Roll onto floor, fire web, pull sideways, even as S and H cont shoot. Doors shut. S points out it's Quint's team - which met some weeks ago. C hunk Porter. V says k 3 other teams who tried to talk. Q team. Q goes up vent shaft. V says can't get reading on them. V says can't read Q: have to pursue. Q calls P: reached 2nd floor. C sees him, explains V. S steps out before he expln. P goes after him. S kicks Q gun. S has gun to Q's throat. C calls H, cutting thru door. V is Creegan! S must not hesitate to take him out. S and Q talk: both say turned traitor. C says: not acting. They both cut off comm. V advises Q to mention how saved Lily - which S never told Q. S tells H, advises maybe imposter. SCQ arrive, expln while C gun: voice tapped. P sneaks up, calls Lara. Shoots, S covers C, hits cables, zap Q. P and H exchange. L steps in, gets H. Elsewhere, C laughts. FF H rolls. C webleaps, kicks L, then H steps in. "H, don't question yourself; finish the mission." she holds off, then P fires. "We need to stop this. Talk to him!" C to L. L does. H asks C to mimic Q to stand down. "Uh, no, I really can't do guys." C advises -"I ghouth your sensors were down." "Kill them now, Helen." and she recog it's Creegan. She starts calling aloud for him. Q gets up. P stops. Cleo wave andgrins. "Porter get down!" H shoots wall, Cr steps out. "Hel, i've reqacquuired your signal. There are multiple signals behind you" Cr soldiers. Cr sheild stands firm. FF. "Your Bailey friends?" V wants C alive. "His sheild's too strong!" H and Q together. "What are the Bailey's up to, Creegan?" Tries stun - low range. C gets him with web -- order he disengage, Cr pulsl her over. He's upset at her ruined plan. . She stuns him. Bugs attack. All 6 pull tight. Bugs leave, and they focus on Cre on floor. V insists take to prison level; during his game, B activity increased. Handcuff web. Prison, guards, visitor. Stand back from screen. 2 guards leave. Cr. "It's my job to listen, Mr.Creegan. I'm your confessor." "It is the right of every condemned man to unburden his soul, Mr.Creegan." Open his mind, take his sins. "My sins are my own. I treasure them. I cherish them. Why would I want to share them with you?!" "They're about to execute me for sins of the past... it's the crime I'm about to commit that you'll all pay most dearly... when I die, the world dies with me." Scenes of B atk surf world of past. Conf asks. "I will be soley responsible for the exterminatio of the entire human race." "Tell me, how do you plan to go about this, holocaust." Accept only the thoughts he chooses. Despite her best efforts to stop me - V, and her precious teams of resistance fighters. "Now I know you're joking. The Voice? It's a myth. She's a children's story." Befoer my expulsion, before she became a recluse. FB, bugs atk lab through door, Cr. Tides turned when first learned locn of Mauser, reprogrammed Betrayer - to trace V thru link. His surprise that the d of a colleage/one of my closest friends as leader of flagship team. Lever to overturn V. FB H meets father - really a holo by Cr. So he could tap H's V-link. Trace. H ready to self-des. Lured with obsessed part. She drags him in too. "It's only zest when you're dying *with* me." When Cr says V habit lately "the more she says, the less you know." Dad. Conf. Why? If V exists, noble cause? What could this woman have possibly done to you to justify this lust for vengeance? "500 years! five centureis, my legions of armies have readied themselves to fulfill their destiny, my destiny! I will not be denied by some cut-rate scientist, and her army of insolent thugs!" "Sometimes you eat the bear -- sometimes the bear eats you. Extinct animal. --skin dmg, cryofluid, a Thaw, 5 centuries. old. "You're here to learn my secrets. Aren'tyou? Voice!" "What'd you call me?" "You almost had me, Voice, but a Confessor listens, he doesn't challgne, doesn't provoke." FB to Hel springs Cle from prison. "It's meaningless without trust, and I dont' trust you anymore -- not wehere my father is concerned." He bargains: V. Psionic transplane generator. "I thought your father had died, keeping this out of my hands." Bailey dome, Carter monitor. "I just hate long hellos," Cr dephases Carter, H de Cr, then self. "Some family reunion, huh? Fireworks and everything!" "So. You are Creegan. We have received your communicatoin. You have served us well. You weill be rewarded." Cr takes H's receptor. B above. Conf chg to V. Elegant lady. "How did you forge and alliance with the Baileys, Cr? Cr, I give you one last chance to make amentds. Who leads the Baileys?" "I do. Or more precisely, I did." Boom. "Well, looks like they've developed a will of their own." Above, merging. Zap shaft hatch. "Tell me how to stop them, Creegan." "Name's Bailey. George BAiley." "The day when my children will finally inherit the earth." "Why did you do it? Create those monsters?" "500 years ago this planet was dying, ifnected by a swarming plague of humanity" Orig env ctrl units, cleaning mess. In due time they decided that (humahs mess) for themselves - agreed. Accomplished design, world new again "What makes you think you deserve it!" Clean - give it back to us. Loses composure. Her ancestors left legacy too -- shaft defense cannons. We've moved them to surf. She activates chair. "Hel? Creegan told me nothing before he died." Orders countertk. Walks out. CHS on surf. Guns rolls off platforms. Soldiers. __END__