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The people of Beta Colony rank among the freest, best-educated, most open-minded, healthiest, and overall highest quality of life in the galaxy. If some of our works of popular culture veer towards the overly celebratory, well, can you blame us? It’s not like we’re exporting this mass media to other planets; they have their own bragging rights.
But I’ll confess that I was made a little uneasy watching The Thin Blue Line, the latest from Rockslide Studios. This docudrama presents a fictionalized version of the Escobar invasion of seventeen years ago. Ethel Wendelstadt stars as Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Expeditionary Forces; Stephen Gallagher plays her captor-turned-love interest, Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar; Roger Evans is dastardly but unconvincing as the villainous Admiral Vorrutyer.
Part of my distaste stems from the premise. Of all the things to boast about, the Betan military, really? It’s kind of like filming a paean to Cetagandan diplomacy or Barrayaran science. But more subtly, the film takes what should be a tragedy and plays it for laughs. Vorkosigan’s backstory as the Butcher of Komarr basically goes unmentioned, aside from a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line about “seeking redemption.”
And the film elides the difficulties with Naismith and Vorkosigan’s “happily ever after.” The fictionalized Naismith chooses to accompany Vorkosigan to Barrayar. In reality, she returned to Beta Colony and was greeted as a hero, but proved unable to cope with civilian life after the trauma of killing Vorrutyer. Unwilling to attempt a scientifically-proven therapeutic regimen, she went fugitive and fled back to Barrayar, where Vorkosigan had recently been named “Regent”—de facto Emperor in all but name, a title he would hold for the next decade. In exile from her own people, Naismith had no recourse but to play second fiddle to a man already married to his job.
There are some praiseworthy aspects to the holovid. Production quality was high; it was shot on location in Escobar, whose government was happy to support a project that would portray them in a sympathetic light, and the landscapes are gorgeous. There’s even a cameo from “Steady Freddy” playing himself! (Only on Beta could our head of state make an appearance seventeen years after his term; the stress anywhere else, and the rest of the galaxy’s shoddy medical technology, would make him unrecognizable.) And Kia Montrell has a great appearance as a hermaphrodite Expeditionary officer who thwarts a bigoted Barrayaran. But overall, Thin Blue Line sugarcoats a real story about the horrors of war. Avoid.
Several of my colleagues have been playing the game of “if you could commission one film of your choice, you have total control over the script/cast/etc, even if it would be wildly impossible in reality, what would you do.” You should definitely check out their columns. (I especially enjoyed Pen Harmouth brainstorming special effects filmmakers could use to depict the subjective experience of wormhole pilots during a jump.)
But what I want to write about is a project that would never see the light of day for plenty of reasons: namely, a sequel to The Thin Blue Line, deconstructing the heroic premise of the original and showing what would really happen to someone like Cordelia Naismith on Barrayar. Despite their notorious isolationism, statistics about Barrayar’s public health are available (and dire); what would it be like to go from Beta to that? There’s nowhere in the built-up galaxy that would have their expanse of plant life, so you’d need a lot of CGI art. Since we’re dreaming, I’d bring Ethel Wendelstadt back as Naismith, but cast someone much older as Regent Vorkosigan—maybe Gerald Lund? (His son, Andrew Lund, could play a younger Vorkosigan in flashbacks to the Komarr atrocities, as we work through Naismith reckoning with being married to the Butcher.)
Of course, with my luck, Naismith will probably import Betan cultural norms with her and turn Vorkosigan into an open-minded bisexual. But hey, a man (or a woman, or a hermaphrodite) can dream.
Reviewers have to eat our words on occasion. I’ll admit, I wrote Rainbow Quartz off as titillating and didn’t realize what a groundbreaking depiction of diversity it would turn out to be. Jump to Hell’s humor and pacing impressed me on a first watch, but some of the technobabble hasn’t aged well; it turns out that even lay audiences can keep up with serious descriptions of space tech.
I recently had cause to revisit my review of The Thin Blue Line from five years ago, and I must admit I was unfairly harsh on it the first time around. Don’t get me wrong: it’s still a bad holovid. Upon a rewatch, I find even more to critique in the leads’ performances. Gallagher as Vorkosigan is emotionless for the first half hour; all well and good for an officer who has more important things on his mind, but we’re supposed to believe he wants to marry her? Wendelstadt, as Naismith, is naive to a fault, blithely waltzing into harm’s way in the hopes that she can talk the Barrayarans down. And Terrence Parson tries to steal the show as Prince Serg, but just comes off as ludicrous. This character is supposed to be the heir to a multiplanetary empire, and his father was well-known to be in ill health. It defies credulity that he could be that incompetent.
But my more fundamental gripe, that an inspirational story about the Expeditionary Forces was essentially impossible, may have been unfair. I recently met a Betan mercenary going by the name “Naismith.” This was obviously a nom de guerre, but it was striking that of all the heroes he could have styled himself after, he chose a woman, a captain who loved exploration and science more than making war, who tried to seek peace even when it looked naive, and who ran away from fame rather than basking in long-lost glory. Maybe he wasn’t aware of all the implications, but for better or for worse, Cordelia Naismith is the closest thing our planet has to a genuine war hero. We might as well tell her story.