On SyFy and the Canadian Bacon of an Always White-Led Future World, Part I
My hunger for a sci-fi worldsense outside of the West and Western-centered futurism
This is the second of three Substacks on the iron-grip of white saviorism in a white/Western-dominated world as those in Hollywood and other -woods portray it in their future and sci-fi-imagined worlds. It turns out that Hollywood North — or US North to those of us with any social justice leanings — has taken up these themes in metric tonnes over the past two decades. Despite the penchant of Canadians (read “white folks from Canada,” really) to see themselves as “more liberal” and “less racist” than the USians to their south, their imagined worlds are no less Western-dominated and white-folks-saving-the-world-even-though-they-broke-it as their counterparts in Hollywood. Maple syrup, poutine, and Canadian bacon apparently cannot break or rust away this grip of an addiction.
I.
For many in the US, their full introduction to Canadian-based sci-fi and supernatural thriller work has come through CW (formerly The WB) and SyFy since roughly the turn of the century. Some of these first series were American ones but merely filmed in Vancouver and British Columbia or Toronto and Ontario, like Smallville (2001-2011), Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), Supernatural (2005-2020), and Eureka (2006-2012) and its spinoff, Warehouse 13 (2009-2014).
But like their filmed-in-the-US American counterparts. all are stories about cleaning up messes that the main characters made for themselves. Smallville was the idyllic world where the white übermensch known as Superman rained his Kretschner’s Wheat Germ goodness on humanity for a decade (as Tom Welling played him), fixing messes he frequently helped create. Battlestar Galactica, though a very well redone and rebooted 2000s series, was merely the story of a technologically-advanced, Greco-Roman humanity barely surviving annihilation at the hands of its own creation. Its humanity’s mess became this Earth’s mess, as they brought their PTSDed selves to this planet to seed it with their ideals and their self-destructive natures. Supernatural’s Sam and Dean Winchester took 15 seasons to accept the supernatural order as is, including monsters, and that it was never their job to save the world. Eureka and Warehouse 13 were all about the goofy sci-fi-ness of creating technologies and using supernatural forces the world’s smartest humans — all mostly white, by the way — barely understood and barely could contain or control. It’s amazing how this tired theme gets the film and tv industry’s money and human resources, over and over again.
II.
The next big leap in portraying a future that may look different but ultimately represents the whiteness and Western dominance of the present comes in the 2010s. In the wake of the initial success of the Canadian-US series Continuum, a story of time-travel and a late-21st-century Earth under the autocratic rule of mega-corporations and trillionaires, SyFy channel launched (or partnered with CTV in Canada on) three new futuristic sci-fi series: Dark Matter, Killjoys, and The Expanse in 2015. (I will discuss The Expanse in detail in Part II of this Substack.)
These series all carry with them similar themes. For the most part, there are no sentient alien species flying advanced spaceships or walking and talking in bad makeup wearing all manner of prosthetics with cobbled-together languages (the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises have cornered this particular market). Humanity has expanded its reach beyond Earth and a small handful of Lunar landings to include outposts throughout the solar system or into other habitable solar systems in the Milky Way. The systemic racism of the 21st century no longer exists, as it just faded away, somehow, as if the solar winds blew it into interstellar space. Not that it matters, but Black folk and Blackness as African diasporic people understand it today does not exist in these still-Western civilization and American western-styled futures. But capitalism, massive socioeconomic inequalities, serfdom, and in some cases, even chattel-style slavery, remained either alive and well or re-emerged in these future worlds. There’s always a crisis of epic proportions usually involving some extraterrestrial tech from a long-dead alien civilization. The main characters, always some ragtag crew of multicultural folk, must solve the crisis for the sake of saving humanity.
Whatever the composition of the crew, someone white or white adjacent (usually someone white+ or biracial) must be the one to solve it, all without also upending the social order that made the crisis occur in the first place. All three series started with the promise of providing new imagined worlds for fans to explore. But they all failed to deliver, each in their own way. The authors, showrunners, and other creatives responsible for what millions watch, whether in the US or US North cannot stretch their imaginings of futures and future worlds without the guiding hand of whiteness and Western civilization. As such, these series all collapsed under their own weight.
III.
Dark Matter was a three-season arc of six characters living 600 years in the future, one as uncertain and as dark as the one humanity faces in the 21st century. The six wake up after some mysterious mishap on Raza (their pirated spaceship) had left them unconscious, only to gradually discover they are all mercenaries with secret pasts. It turned out that the seventh main character, Android, fully AI-independent and space pilot as played by Zoie Palmer, had mindwiped and knocked out the six of them during an emergency. They fly through the galaxy making and breaking alliances and discovering the damage they had wrought on downtrodden people on various planets before Palmer’s character had reset their memories. Alex Mallari Jr. (Filipino-Canadian) Melissa O’Neil (Chinese-Canadian), and Roger Cross (Jamaican-Canadian, also of Continuum note) added a multiracial touch to this otherwise very white Canadian bacon show (which also included Anthony Lemke, Jodelle Ferland, and Marc Bendavid, along with Palmer).
As they slowly regain some sense of who they were before their reset, the youngest character Five (Ferland) learns she is in possession of technology and information that could upset the balance between the galaxy’s corporate monopolies. Stereotypically, the character Four (Mallari) learns he is the deposed head of a Japanese Empire-styled monopoly, while the biracial Two (O’Neil) is also an enhanced human — a lethal weapon of kicking ass — and Six (Cross) is an undercover cop who was supposed to bring the other numbered character to justice. Tried as they did, the actors’ dedication to the series could not save Dark Matter from the perpetual portrayal of the future as one full of Western civilization-styled crises and clichéd stereotypical typecasting.
The show combined the dystopian nature of Continuum’s autocratic corporate theme with the space cowboy futurism of early-2000s geekdom’s favorite Firefly, a superficial multiculturalism grafted onto a white and Western tree. Despite Dark Matter being a show based on a comic book series, the series loses focus after season one, and all momentum after season two. Even an opportunity for a reset in “Isn’t This A Paradox” (S3:E9), when the Dark Matter crew finds itself back on 21st-century Earth is incredibly convoluted. The series fittingly ends in Season 3 with an episode titled, “Nowhere To Go.” Alternative universes with alternative versions of the same characters and weird time paradoxes will almost always, always, always ruin a series.
IV.
Killjoys was equal parts stereotypical Western and space-western, with many of the same general themes of Dark Matter. Set in the middle of the third millennium, Killjoys was the story of three bounty hunters/mercs bound by the laws of humans in the post-Earth planetary system known as the Quad. The biracial British actress Hannah John-Kamen played the lead as Dutch/Yalena Yardeen, who worked throughout the series with Canadian actors Aaron Ashmore of Smallville fame (John) and Luke Macfarlane (D’avin), who are the brothers Jaqobis, all find themselves as part of a galaxy-shattering secret and conspiracy. A sentient alien green goo that a dead civilization from millions of years ago left behind would ultimately threaten human life in The Quad and beyond, and Dutch was at the center of this civilization-leveling crisis.
Over the five-season arc of Killjoys, Dutch discovered she was merely a clone, an echo of her father Khlyen’s (portrayed by Rob Stewart, previously of the CW series Nikita) original daughter from generations earlier, created out of the same sentient goo that would threaten to annihilate The Quad. Dutch’s father had infused himself with the same goo, and set in motion a series of events in which the sentient monstrous goo freed itself, created an army, and tried to kill off all human resistance in The Quad.
Apparently, whenever a biracial actor or actress is cast as a lead in a series, they must be divas as well. Neither can the other actors of color be anything less than scene-stopping prima donnas, at least in Killjoys. One was the Queer cross-dressing singing bard and bar owner Prima “Pree” Dezz (Thom Allison), who had once been a planetary warlord before remaking himself into an ordinary diva. The other was eventually goo-infused Delle Seyah Kendry (Mayko Nguyen), part of the Nine Families plutocracy that ruled The Quad. Within this advanced society, chattel slavery and serfdom resurface and thrive under the weight of the gentry class, their capitalist monopolies, and their police state, with the Killjoys in the middle as a buffer before the sentient goo crisis takes over the series.
Killjoys was objectively a better written and better acted show than Dark Matter. For all the acting and the diva-esque prancing and poses, though, the series was so white Canadian that it was a wonder poutine wasn’t more frequently featured as a staple meal in The Quad. Even John-Kamen’s distinctively high-powered Black British voice proclaiming “We’re Killjoys!” and yelling “Khlyen!” as if her father’s name was a biohazardous chemical didn’t make the series any more watchable, any more than her walking like a runway supermodel in scene after scene. (I do enjoy John-Kamen’s voiceovers in commercials, though.)
The future in these shows is a tangled mess, one where a Filipino can play a Japanese person of royal birth, where biracial women can be genetically-modified kickass leads, but where Arab-looking actors can still play terrorists, and Black actors are always security or military fill-ins. And all in futures where the old racism apparently no longer exists. There’s something funny about the smell of these cheese curds and the look of this green Canadian bacon, as it isn’t separated by more than one or two degrees from its artificially syrupy US-based narratives in this genre.