My new Star Cops audio drama has been out for a few weeks, and today I’m posting another “author commentary” to annotate some of the concepts that appear in the script, and look at what ended up on the cutting room floor…
Written by me, A Cage of Sky stars David Calder (Commander Nathan Spring), Trevor Cooper (Inspector Colin Devis) and Linda Newton (Chief Superintendent Pal Kenzy), the original cast members from the TV series. Joining them are new audio series regulars Philip Olivier (Inspector Paul Bailey) and Lynsey Murrell (Inspector Alice Okoro), with guest-stars Caroline Loncq (Juno Berg/Susan Jensen) and Alan McKenna (Emerson Fleet). The drama is directed by Helen Goldwyn and produced by Emma Haigh, with story editing by Andrew Smith and music by Howard Carter.
Star Cops was a BBC television series set in a near-future where space travel has become commonplace, where space stations and lunar outposts mark the first steps in colonising the solar system. Alongside aggressive corporate entities, national rivalries and plain old human frailties, there is the International Space Police Force. Saddled with the derogatory nickname of “Star Cops”, they’re an underfunded, under-respected team of volunteer officers attempting to keep the peace on the High Frontier.
In A Cage of Sky, former ISPF officer Colin Devis is on the outs in a desperate quest to find his missing daughter, and forced into partnership with a notorious criminal hacker; meanwhile, his colleagues Nathan Spring and Pal Kenzy have their suspicions aroused when they discover the inmates at a remote lunar prison are dying under mysterious circumstances – and the connection between both threads puts all of them in harm’s way.
Spoiler Warning! These notes give away story points from Star Cops: Blood Moon 2 – A Cage of Sky and other Star Cops stories!
The character of notorious Icelandic computer hacker Juno Berg was inspired by Lisabeth Salander, the main character in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I chose Iceland as a location for the opening scene because I’d visited Reykjavík and I wanted to maintain the international feel seen in the Star Cops TV series. Her ‘simulated personality construct’ (or “gobby computer” as Colin puts it) mirrors similar Artifical Intelligences seen in the show, including Nathan’s pocket computer Box.
Paul Bailey’s report to Nathan includes references to the space station Coral Sea (mentioned in the TV show) and the ISPF presence on Mars (which first appears in the Star Cops: Mars audio dramas). I used this moment to build on the idea that these characters are not the only police officers at work on the high frontier, and that other crimes are happening and being solved all the time; described here is a sabotage incident in Earth orbit, and a cut line would also have mentioned an illegal gambling ring among workers at an L-5 space colony construction site. The L-5 project gets a later mention as the “armpit of the solar system” when Nathan threatens to send Paul there as a punishment posting.
Kenzy’s words to Paul about people she’s previously worked with includes a mention of David Theroux, one of the main TV cast played by the late Erick Ray Evans. Theroux’s fate has not been addressed in the audio dramas, so I wanted to give him a call-back in this story.
The original version of the line also mentioned another TV character – Anna Shoun, played by Sayo Inaba – but this reference had to be cut as Big Finish’s production rights don’t cover scripts not devised by the series’ creator Chris Boucher. For the same reason, a line mentioning the ill-fated Pluto 5 space probe (from the same episode that introduced Anna) had to go.
Colin leaves Earth aboard a Pacific Space Lines spaceplane, another call-back to the TV show (where he was instrumental in stopping a PSL flight from being highjacked).
As they approach the Lethe dome in the Mare Imbrium, Paul tells Colin the nearest outpost is Sarang Station – that’s a reference to the mining facility that appears in the 2009 movie Moon. An earlier version of the script also mentioned the nearby landing site of NASA’s Apollo 15 mission in the Hadley-Apennine region.
The residents and facilitators on Lethe wear forest-green jumpsuits (not that you can see them on audio!) and I chose that colour because it never appeared in the Star Cops TV show.
Scripts evolve as production progresses and story elements change along the way; in early drafts, the character of Juno Berg was more pro-active, dragging Colin and Paul into the conspiracy inside the prison for self-serving reasons rather than being a victim of it. Some elements of the script were cut completely, including an additional scene with Alice Okoro after Paul decides to go off-the-books to help Colin in his search, and another where Emerson Fleet and his assistant Susan Jensen foreshadow things as they react to the unexpected appearance of Nathan and Kenzy. Both scenes were ultimately trimmed as they slowed down the narrative.
Here’s one of my favourite exchanges that had to be cut for time from the scene in the Moonrover:
KENZY: (CALLING) Nathan? Are you awake back there? Get up here!
NATHAN: (FROM BEHIND) Give me a second. These bloody spacesuits, it’s like a military operation every time you need to take a leak… (COMING FORWARD) Remind me to lay off the coffee on future excursions.
Star Cops: Blood Moon 2 – A Cage of Sky is available from Big Finish Productions as a digital download and Collector’s Edition CD; click here to order your copy, and see more about the Star Cops audio series at this link.
