Space: Above and Beyond- Ray Butts

Bishbot episode review:

This is the sort of episode that a summary does no justice to. On the face of it the plot is fairly slight, and I’ve covered it above, but some of the best stories are character rather than plot-driven and Ray Butts has some of the best character work that this show has yet attempted.

Naturally the episode revolves around the man himself and Steve Rankin plays him with utter commitment. Butts is a study in post-traumatic stress (or at least, post-traumatic stress filtered through the lense of TV) and Rankin makes you feel his underlying pain even as he goes out of his way to be as unpleasant as possible. He has two obsessions, pancakes and the music of Johnny Cash, and they both play out beautifully by the end of the episode. In a terrific scene where Butts explains how he left his squad because they thought a mission was too dangerous, only to see them massacred when he came back, we learn that he doesn’t much care for Johnny Cash but that one of his men loved the music. This is the sort of detail that makes an episode like this into a classic. The Southern, country-music loving marine is certainly a valid archetype but subverting our expectations in this way turns Butts into so much more.

The episode has a long way to go to make us feel sympathy for Butts. From the moment he appears he is confrontational and infuriating. He works the Wildcards hard and messes with their heads for no clear reason. Rankin gives him just enough manic intensity for us to realise that he cannot necesarily help this and want to see the real man behind the ticks. Even though the mission is wildly irresponsible he earns the respect of the 58th, and the audience, because his anguish comes from love for his men rather than the narciscism he appears to display at the start. The Wildcards realise they could end up the same way and are equally afraid of dying alone and unburied on some alien planet.

Butts’ death, being dragged into a black hole with Johnny Cash’s I Walk The Line playing, is a splendidly tearjerking sequence. Butts transitions perfectly from bravado to acceptance, gives a sad look at a family photo that belonged to one of his men, and goes to his fate. That one look says it all. His black ops lifestyle has prevented him from having a photo like that, but the men in his unit were his family, and he’s going to honour them. This is conveyed without words, without much sentiment and the capper to the episode, where the Wildcards jettison their breakfast pancakes into space to honour a man whose body they couldn’t recover is the sort of haunting image it is only possible to convey in science fiction.