Plot

The episode begins with two seemingly unrelated stories. A charming but roguish and unreliable photo journalist in his reckless attempts to photograph an erupting volcano succeeds in crashing a helicopter injuring the pilot and killing himself. A boy while arguing with his foster parents in the car inadvertantly causes them to crash to their death. He survives and wakes fellow inmates nightly in the dorm in an orphanage with his nightmares about the crash. While asleep a silver metal ball left to him by his real father starts to glow in his hand and next thing we see is an alien space ship hurtling post-haste towards earth. We get some rather sinister point of view shots framed in blue light of both the boy and the dead photo journalist as the alien presumably looks at them. Next we see a (not too gory PG rated) drop of blood from the journalist melt into the snow and a clone emerges from under the snow. That this cloned alien is not an evil invader aiming for world domination is immediately signalled by the fact that he picks up the injured pilot presumably to take him somewhere to be cared for.

In the meantime, George Fox, an obsessed alien hunter employed by the government has come across a news report of a boy escaping a car crash by surrounding himself with an eerie blue light and convinces his boss to fund a trip from Washington to Seattle to investigate the report. Fox helpfully provides some of the back story for the alien's arrival in his plea for funds to his boss.

The alien makes contact with his son, Scott Haydn, but Scott frightened by the glowing sphere that the alien activates in his hand runs away from him.

to be continued

Other film and TV resonances
Again there are a few antecedents. In an obscure 1971 British film Quest for love based on a short story by John Wyndham the protagonist is a scientist who in a laboratory experiment gone wrong (that well-worn science fiction plot device) wakes up to find himself in a parallel universe where he is a playwright with a reputation for women and drink married to a beautiful woman. At one point the wife notices he is scar free, just as a former lover notices the cloned Paul Forrester in Starman is scar free with perfect teeth - hence confirming the non identity of the original and the replacement. In both cases, the replacement is a fine upstanding specimen in contrast to the flawed original. The copy, in contrast to the usual expectation, is morally and physically better than the original. One can find a similar theme in Star Trek: The Next Generation where the android Data is morally better than the original Lore of whom he is a copy or a later model. But in the final analysis, both androids are themselves copies of humans and Data, like the wooden doll Pinocchio, aspires to being human, a state which is perceived as being 'better' and more true.

The Starman, although he finds humans interesting, does not aspire to being human. Indeed, there is a very persistent anthropocentric view of the cosmos in much science fiction as in other areas of thought - namely that humans are at the centre and pinnacle of the universe. Further, as I have mentioned in my article on Sapphire and Steel, 'human' in American science fiction is all too often a shorthand for 'North American' and thus the notion becomes overtly ethnocentric. Starman manages (sometimes) not to fall into this common trope and presents, even if only fleetingly, the possibility of a thought that does not regard being human as the only valid means of existence and truth. British science fiction, such as Dr. Who and Sapphire and Steel, also seems to suffer less from this anthropocentric affliction.

One might also enquire as to whether there are any resonances with the notions of 'born again' and 'conversion', but we are not talking of the internal transformation of one individual, but the replacement of one individual with another. In Starman the body or physical component is a copy - it is not the same body - and we are speaking of two distinct selves not a self which has been transformed into another self. The body is a copy and the individual that inhabits the copy is quite distinct from the individual that inhabited the original body. The idea of the 'simulacrum' or copy is a common theme in science fiction and postmodern theory.

I'm not too sure where all these jumbled ideas are leading at present but will keep thinking.

Jarring plot moments
This is the moment of the Starman's first encounter with a lift and not knowing what to do with it. When a woman gets in and presses the button for her floor, he looks at his key for the number. How does he know how to read? Presumably he also found the hotel by reading the tag on his key. One can - at a big stretch - accept the incredibly fast language acquisition, but reading is another matter.

The female reporter who negotiates with Fox concerning the alien, calls Fox by his first name George. This would seem to imply that they are old acquaintances when in actuality they have just met.

more later...