ALL SCI-FI

[Pow]

Terror Television, American Series 1970 ~ 1999.

Format: Dr. Paul Turner (Tim Guinee), is a M.D. exposed to a deadly toxin during the Gulf War.

In 1991, he returned home to the United States to die, only to discover that he was being kept alive by a mysterious antidote, administered by a secret conspiracy.

A mysterious Japanese woman (Vivian Wu) and a large pharmaceutical company had invested a great deal of money in him and his "cure," and were now bent on using him as a secret agent for their own, enigmatic agenda.

At the same time, Turner's commanding officer from the army, Major Lynne Reese, recruits Turner to work for U.S. ARMID (United States Army Medical Institute for Infectious Diseases) to investigate the criminal abuses of science in the United States, permitted by Charter 44.

Turner is helped in his quest to learn more about his disease and his benefactors by his lover and former physician, a Yale educated M.D., Sydney MacMillan.

Sidebar: This was an intriguing but short-lived SF TV series that ran back in 1999. Only 3 of its 13 episodes were ever aired at the time.

The show had a dark & paranoid kind of X-Files vibe to it. You had the shadowy organization supplying Dr. Turner his medicine that kept him alive. He wanted to find out who they were. Who was the woman who met with him to give him his antidote? Why were they so interested in him in the first place? How did they manage to create a serum to help him that he, a qualified medical doctor & his physician girlfriend, have never heard of before? What did they want from him in return?

In addition, Dr. Turner could not always be sure that US ARMID outfit he was performing investigative work for were being forthright with him.

Then you had Turner's investigation of the week, revealing astonishing scientific projects he was unaware of and that put him in constant jeopardy.

The series had a lot of interesting mysteries going on and a darkness to it all. I recall enjoying the 3 episodes I saw and disappointed that ABC did not give it a chance. The network publicized the series as an "exclusive limited series." This well could have meant that the show did not have the full confidence of the network and never ever had much of chance to survive.

[Bud Brewster]

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Wow, another fascinating discovery by Captain Mike Powers, the ASF Member of the Future!

The link below is the pilot, and it leads to all 13 of the episodes. The old Sci-Fi channel's "Saturn" logo is in the lower right corner, so somebody made good DVD-R copies of these and uploaded them to YouTube, seven years ago (according to the comment below the video).

These are not crappy VHS recordings, thank goodness!

Enjoy!_



____________________ Strange World (1999)


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)