hen a terrorist group called Solomon appears out of nowhere on the
planet Cyress, invades a military base and steals seven massive
planet-destroying missiles, the high-ranking representatives of the
interplanetary Allied Forces are naturally appalled. But even as they begin
the inevitable infighting and blame-laying, the other shoe drops. Mad
genius Peat Culten, the only man capable of operating the Planet Link Plan
laser defense system, leaves his post for a bathroom break and never comes
back. In his absence, the PLP satellites abruptly begin destroying Allied Forces fleets. Solomon issues no demands and
refuses to discuss terms; its representative merely contacts the Allied
Forces intermittently to explain which planet he's about to annihilate.
Meanwhile, the PLP wipes out all organized resistance, plus any targets the
renegade Culten feels like obliterating.
The Forces throw wave after wave of anti-terrorist troops at Solomon to
no effect and finally commission instructor Jim Hyatt to form his own
squad and "restrain" Culten. Hyatt, a humorless, square-jawed soldier with
all the personality of a tank, ignores the military's list of
recommended commandos and puts together his own elite group. Some of his
choices are unorthodox: two of them are criminals, one of whom is a
sociopath, and two of the others are arrogant hotshots who won't take
orders.
But as the series proceeds, Hyatt's team bulls its way ungracefully
through crisis after crisis and works its way across the solar system to
Solomon's base. The giggling Culten, who sees life as a giant video game,
targets them the entire time and is delighted by their repeated successes
against him. But Culten's new master, broody veteran Duran Gash, has some
sort of dark agenda in mind, and isn't amused. His motives--beyond the
usual uber-villain "all will kneel before me" jargon--still aren't clear
by the penultimate installment. But he obviously doesn't mind murdering
billions of people to have his way.
Battle of the boring
AWOL amounts to only about six hours, all told; it's obviously a
bad sign that it takes two hours to introduce its main characters. The first
four episodes explain how Solomon grabbed the missiles and how Hyatt got his
insubordinate subordinates, but other than that they're largely wasted on
endless scenes of stiff conflict with no context. The Allied Forces
commanders snipe incessantly at each other without providing any useful
information; whenever anyone poses an authentically interesting question,
the scene promptly shifts. Even five-sixths of the way through this series,
basic facts of scale and identity have never been established. (Does the
action take place in a single solar system or across a galaxy-wide space?
Do the random planets destroyed by Solomon--each mentioned only briefly,
blown up, then never mentioned again--represent a significant
proportion of the Forces, or are they a drop in the bucket?) Without some
sense of proportion, the faceless destruction seems as meaningless and
abstract as Culten, watching video-game icons on a distant screen, seems to
think it is.
Granted, Hyatt, his commanders, his enemies and the people he's
protecting are all iconic and archetypal. But AWOL never reaches far
beyond the archetype stage: its characters are minimally animated,
expressionless talking heads just going through the motions. It's no wonder
Culten's Allied Forces guardians seem astonished when he runs off to use
the bathroom--it's hard to imagine most of AWOL's characters doing
anything as human as eating, sleeping or excreting. Hyatt resembles a
crudely carved robot programmed to grunt at intervals, but he's not alone.
No one in this series seems to feel emotions on more than a rudimentary
level. Even their interpersonal squabbling is impersonal and rote.
To some degree, AWOL could be taken as an artistic experiment in
realism--its characters don't engage in needless exposition or make any
concessions to dramatic effect. The pounding music is the only source
of tension; Culten is the only source of spontaneous motion. But there is
such a thing as too much realism. So far, AWOL is about as gripping
as C-SPAN on a slow day.
