Critique or Criticism?
At almost every turn, the Man From Atlantis has been a learning experience for me. Even now, 15 years after we started our watch through of the series, it held surprises for me.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m remastering the older podcast episodes to hopefully make up for some of the audio deficiencies therein.
Perhaps I’ll detail the journey this project has gone through in another post someday, but for now, simply know that for the oldest episodes, I don’t have any remaining source material, just the final podcast as originally dropped. Remastering then involves trying to draw out the best quality audio possible from what’s available.
Machine learning tools are used, and as such, I feel it necessary to carefully inspect the output before making the decision about replacing the original audio online. In short, I have to listen to every episode, in its entirety, and that’s an interesting experience this far removed from them in time. Sometimes, listening to yourself from 15 years ago is like listening to a different person altogether.
I did Sapphire and Steel first, and that’s roughly six hours of podcast. Divorced of embarassing sound quality shortcomings, I was actually quite pleased with those podcasts. It’s a great show, and we enjoyed watching it and analyzing it.
Now, I’m working on the next oldest* series in the archive, The Man from Atlantis. There’s about 12 hours of discussion for that series, and I’ve just finished listening to them. It took us 11 years and three co-hosts to get through that series, and there’s a reason for that.
The temporal distance has given me the ability to look back objectively on what we said, and more specifically, on what I said about the show.
Fusion Patrol, and I in particular, have at times been accused of being relentlessly negative and nitpicky. I certainly can be relentlessly negative, but is that always wrong? Where do we draw the line between critique and criticism?
My impression after listening to our Sapphire and Steel discussions was that we were overwhelmingly positive, with just few negative issues. Sapphire and Steel is a great show.
But after 12 hours of listening to our discussions of Man from Atlantis, I can admit that it is relentlessly negative coverage. Remember that part where I said listening to yourself can sometimes feel like listening to someone else? This was like that. I remembered the broad strokes of our discussions, but not the nitty-gritty.
The thing is, for those of us who had seen Man from Atlantis as kids, we remembered it fondly. For years I maintained a Google Alert on “Man from Atlantis” and I would get two or three hits every month, and half of them would be glowing remembrances from people saying things like, “Remember that show Man from Atlantis with the guy from Dallas? I loved that show!”
I can see how someone might be reminded of a show they loved as a kid, do a search, and find Fusion Patrol’s coverage of the show, and I can see how they might think we’re shitting on a show they remember loving.
This has given me a lot to consider. Was I being unfair? Were we dogpiling on a show that had disappointed us — had betrayed our childhood memories? Did we move beyond honest critique and move into criticism for criticism’s sake?
Listening back over our episodes with the detachment of the years, I now feel like I can definitely answer that question.
No.
We were not in any way unfair to the series. I stand by every single thing I said about it.
Man from Atlantis was genuinely abysmal. The show was bankrupt of ideas before they finished with the four TV movies. The series started with nothing left in the tank and nowhere to go but down. Many of the situations in the stories are downright insulting to an adult audience, and just when you think they must have been making this show for kids, they throw in some totally dark or inappropriate themes about death, infidelity and blackmail, or prostitution. It’s a mess. The science (if you can even call it science) is ludicrous. The acting is often terrible, and the way they treat their characters, like Dr. Merrill, is criminal.
Further, I still maintain, after all these years, after watching thousands more hours of television, that the Man from Atlantis episode The Imp is still the worst piece of television ever made.
It’s terrible. I stand by that, but, listening back to the podcasts, I enjoyed myself and had a good laugh. Finally, Man from Atlantis has brought me some joy.
I anticipate releasing the remastered episodes within the next week or two.
*The actual “oldest” episodes of the podcast are first series Matt Smith episodes of Doctor Who, but I’ve opted to concentrate of entire TV series that we’ve completed, like Sapphire and Steel and the Man from Atlantis.
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