Two Cops for the Price of One

It’s been a few months since we last checked in with RoboCop: Prime Directives, the 2001 Canadian-produced TV miniseries. Largely that’s because the first episode, “Dark Justice”, while not as terrible as it could have been, wasn’t good enough for me to immediately say, “hey, I need to watch more of this right now.” It was a little slow, a little cheesy, and it struggled to really do justice (no pun intended) to the RoboCopDetroit's finest protector, this cyborg first debuted in Paul Verhoeven's satirical, over-the-top violent, action film. universe, even if it tried really hard. Making RoboCop on a budget isn’t easy, and while their attempt was admirable, it was certainly not something most people were going to rave about.

Still, there were three more episodes of this miniseries to get through, and I am nothing if not thorough. It takes a lot for me to quit out on a franchise once I’ve started in, and something has to be really terrible for me to say, “yeah, okay, now we’re done.” The last time that happened was the seventh HellraiserBorn from a short story by Clive Barker, this series introduced a new kind of killer to the burgeoning 1980s Slasher scene, a demon from Hell with the promise of pleasures for those who opened a puzle box. Those pleasures, specifically, were: gore, screams, gore, terror, and gore. film, and even now I’m still trying to muster the energy to go back and try again. A moderately okay RoboCop episode wasn’t going to scare me off, I just had to find the time to get back into it. And I found that time recently, in part because my streaming queue said, “hey, remember that RoboCop thing you didn’t finish?” So here we are.

And, yeah, “Meltdown”, the second episode of the miniseries, is about what you’d expect if you wanted the first. It, too, is kind of cheesy, fairly low-budget, and certainly very aged at this point. You can tell that the creators of the miniseries really wanted to try and do right by Detroit’s defender and his world, but they didn’t have the means to really pull it off. Plus, this episode strays further from the dark tone of the first two movies, RoboCop and RoboCop 2, and feels far more family friendly, evoking memories of RoboCop 3, something no project in this franchise should ever do. That makes it less interesting than I’d like, making me wonder just how much worse this miniseries can get.

This second episode finds our cybernetic cop (played again by Paige Fletcher) called in to respond to a disturbance at the OCP headquarters. Three hacker / thieves broke into the building to steal… something, and in the process they set off all the security systems. This causes the building to lash out, attacking the very cops sent to try and catch the thieves, killing many of them. Robo gets into the building, past security, and manages to get to the R&D lab where the thieves are, but they are able to use shock weapons to stun him and make their escape.

In the wake of the attack the head of OCP tasks OCP’s security chief, Sara Cable (Maria Del Mar), with coming up with a solution to the problem. Cable has something in her back pocket for just this moment, an upgraded security unit (functionally a new robotic cop) using the corpse of her own dead husband, Commander John T. Cable (Maurice Dean Wint). She then sends this new “RoboCable” after the head of OCP to scare her. The OCP president then blames Murphy for the actions of RoboCable, and authorizes the shut down of the RoboCop project. But Murphy won’t go without a fight, and he will do everything to clear his name and stop the other cyborg cop before things get worse for Detroit.

There are some interesting ideas in “Meltdown” that work well in the context of the RoboCop franchise, so I don’t want to dismiss this episode out of hand. Introducing a second cyborg cop is a good idea, and the fact that the series doesn’t follow the steps taken by RoboCop 2 (where that film used a criminal for its second cop) is an improvement on the idea. Cable was an interesting character in the first episode, and he makes a capable cop to turn into the second Robo for the purposes of this story.

Turning someone Murphy knows into another cop, like him, is also good for his own character development. It makes him confront his own humanity, to realize there’s more in his own soul than just the robotics and the prime directives he’s been given. He can then take those lessons to try and get through to RoboCable, maybe restoring his own friend’s memories and soul in the process. Are we more than the materials we’re made of? Murphy has to figure that out and it adds solid pathos to his own character.

With that said, though, this episode has about thirty minutes of real story stretched out of an hour-and-a-half, so it does a lot to pad everything out. We get that initial attack by the thieves, which seems like it will be a major point for the plot, but then the thieves basically disappear for much of the episode. One of them shows back up later, with her kid, as Robo is wandering the back alleys of Detroit, and they eventually bond, but I wouldn’t say putting a mom and her kid in as people for Robo to talk to really added much to the story or his character.

In fact, this felt like the most family-friendly, RoboCop 3 part of the story. It wasn’t just because Robo strikes up a friendship with the little girl, or that he then has to defend her while bad guys come to kill him. There’s also the fact that boy the girl and her thief of a mom have silly cybernetic enhancements, and the mom even uses a kind of glow-stick, lightsaber weapon when she’s fighting the cops. She feels like she stepped out of a very different film and someone ended up in this RoboCop production. It doesn’t work.

And unfortunately while we’re getting all this emphasis on characters we don’t care about, and who add almost nothing to the story, we lose sight of one of the major characters we should be focusing on: John Cable. He’s the new Robo model, and while we don’t want to ignore our own hero completely, the episode could have spent time on his development, making him seem like more than just a meat sack in a kit of armor. By the time the episode reaches its end, and Murphy has gotten through to his old partner (because they’re both cops, and they’re both cyborgs), you don’t feel like the episode has really earned it.

I know I can’t criticize too much because the budget for this series was clearly tight and the producers had to make do with whatever they could to get the series working. I can forgive bad production decisions, cheap sets, less than stellar special effects, and many of the other sins the show commits simply because the money wasn’t there. What I can’t forgive, though, is bad writing and stupid dialogue, especially because having characters stand around a talk is the cheapest thing you can do. We could get character developing moments for both Murphy and Cable that wouldn’t cost all that much for the budget but would make them into better, more realized characters. That would certainly be far more interesting than having some cyber thieves become Murphy’s friends for absolutely no reason.

It’s hard for me to understand exactly what the creators were going for with "Meltdown". The introduction of RoboCable is great, but very little else here really clicks. It’s a table-setting episode with a lot of padding that fails to really get audiences interested in what comes next. The final shot, with both Robo partners walking off into the sunset is interesting as it promises more adventures for the two of them (presumably in the last two episodes of the series), but this is one really good moment out of an hour-and-a-half of blandness. Even for this low-budget series I expect better.