So, both in the course of preparing for my weekly blog entries, and just because I enjoy re-visiting the Fantastic Worlds of my childhood, I’ve devoured a lot of SF TV, lit and movies recently which date from the first third of my life. I’m reminded, in comparison to the fantastic fiction of other time periods, that, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, this was a genre badly in need of a daily dose of Prozac! I mean it wasn’t all dark and dreary, but, really, my first fifteen years were overlorded by some depressing s__t!
Herein a few examples. I tried to go chronologically. Feel free to add your own examples or counter-offerings! Oh, and, yeah, SPOILER ALERTS. I reveal lots of endings.
Star Trek – “City on the Edge of Forever” (1967)
The granddaddy of depressing SF TV, in an age that had only known the likes of Tom Corbett, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space, though The Twilight Zone had delivered us some dark stuff, I find the likes of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “Time Enough at Last” to be more delightfully ironic character pieces with twisted, almost Poe-like endings. They didn’t depress me or rob me of hope. Nuclear holocausts are too big to absorb, and the small tragedy of the last man on Earth losing his glasses just as he finally has time to read books is almost humorous in the face of the loss of the human race. And a man being shot because paranoia has whipped his neighbors into Xenophobic fury? Suckage, yes, but suckage that lets the viewer shake his finger at the screen and say “I’m glad I’m more enlightened than those idiots!”
