Cleopatra 2525: a retrospective

It's been described as 'Terminator meets the Belles of St Trinian's'... I'd call it Buck Rogers with tits.

For the past month, I've been watching one episode a day of Cleopatra 2525 - a series from 2000-2001 about a Los Angeles stripper who goes in to get a boob job, it goes wrong, she’s cryogenically frozen, and wakes up in the 26th century where mutants are about to harvest her organs.

Cleo is promptly rescued by two scantily-clad warrior women called Hel (short for Helen) and Sarge (which canonically stands for “Sensual, Arousing, Raw, Gorgeous, Erotic”) and, together with a hunky android called Mauser, the voluptuous ass-kicking trio try to retake the surface of the Earth from giant flying robots… while also battling a mad telepath in a push-up bra, a morbidly obese android gangster called Sluggo, and an evil clown.

Through Hel’s subcutaneous earpiece, they receive instructions from a resistance leader known only as Voice: an unseen middle-aged woman who has mysterious connections to Hel’s late father and the clown. Our heroines also have a submarine, a flying car and a robot dog, and in one episode they try to reprogram Mauser for sex and it doesn't work. The show’s theme tune is a cover of 1969 psychedelic rock classic In The Year 2525 by Zager and Evans, here given a dance reworking and sung by star Gina Torres.

Watching Cleopatra 2525 is like being in someone else’s dream. It’s woozy, strangely poignant, and exactly of its time. Calling things “pre-9/11” has become a cliché, but sometimes the label really fits: Cleo is the most pre-9/11 show that ever pre-9/11ed, full of self-aware, goofy 90s joy but with a darker edge that becomes ever more apparent. Cyborgs called Betrayers, which precisely mimic humans and have infiltrated the population in order to commit acts of terror, appear in most episodes. The finale, aired in March 2001, ends with a genocidal zealot revealing his true nature and a giant superweapon being fired at the remnants of humanity. The screen goes white. There is no more show. I watched it this morning, and I am bereft.

Trash that knows it’s trash and revels in its own trashiness can sometimes be fun but rarely has lasting value. The magic of Cleopatra 2525 is that it knows how ridiculous it is, but then takes its characters, their relationships and their world absolutely seriously, while still placing an emphasis on fun. Best of all, it has detailed continuity and lore that builds up piecemeal over the course of the series. Some episodes expect you to remember and understand events, technologies and characters from half a dozen disparate previous episodes. This reaches its apotheosis in the final half of season 2, when the show’s runtime doubles in length from half an hour to an hour. By this point, the writers knew cancellation was on the horizon, so - with nothing to lose - they treat the remaining hours as a playground, tying different plot strands together into an unwieldy but arresting whole and ambitiously pushing the series as far as it can go given its budgetary and casting constraints. If you’re gonna go out, you may as well go out with a bang.

Yes, there are a lot of drawbacks. While the principal cast (the three girls plus Mauser, Voice and the clown) are solid and clearly enjoying themselves, most of the guest stars can’t act. The start of season 2 is rough, apart from the episode with the exploding baby, which is hilarious. Cleo herself goes from being a normal kooky girl in season 1 to a more of a ditzy airhead in season 2, in probably the show’s worst writing decision. Too many characters are revealed as “thaws” - by the finale, we’ve learned that 3 other familiar figures besides Cleo are originally from the 20th century and were frozen and reanimated just like her. And there’s a clip show. Nobody likes a clip show.

But this televisual theme park is a delight. One entire episode (Run Cleo Run) is a pastiche of the German film Run Lola Run. Another (Noir Or Never) is a stylized low-budget neo-noir that ends with Cleo getting and keeping a boyfriend. The two-parter Home and Rescue sees our heroines rescue Sarge’s brainwashed sister from a religious cult that sacrifices its members to the robots, believing they’re ascending to a better place. Hel finds out the truth about her father, Voice reveals herself, the surviving humans manage to establish a functioning government and police force, and the evil clown finally gets fried. There’s a body swap episode, some family-friendly stripping and pole-dancing, and a Christmas episode that aired in March. My favourite instalment - the antepenultimate episode of season 2, in which Sarge is framed for murder by some of her former associates - is the series at its most straightforward and compelling.

I don’t think TV will ever be this unselfconsciously strange again. Budgets are too high, CGI is used as a crutch, and writers know their every line faces endless dissection on social media. Sometimes you need constraints to thrive, even if you don’t take things as far as Dogme 95. Today’s commercial anxieties around sex, equality and causing offence would prevent a show like this - which blatantly targeted a straight male audience but probably ended up with more female and gay fans - from ever coming into fruition. And the furry who appears in the first and penultimate episodes? He’d definitely have to go.

No-one else I know has seen Cleopatra 2525. So I have no-one to talk to about chronometric scans, distortion grenades, shaft cannons, the psionic plane, Bailey pods, Dworks and Betrayer factories. We never did find out what happened to Dev and Carla… or if Cleo and her friends survive. I think the actual ending, if the series hadn’t been prematurely cancelled, would have been that Cleo was in a coma the whole time and everything we saw was her dream, just like in The Wizard Of Oz (an obvious point of inspiration). She wakes up in a hospital bed in 2001 - “Mauser” was the doctor, Hel and Sarge her friends, Voice her mother, and the evil clown perhaps the embodiment of a brain tumour she’d been battling. But if I’m wrong, and it was all real… well, I’d love to wake up 500 years from now and hang out with them. See you in 2525, where three women keep hope alive. Fighting for a brand new day, nothing's gonna get in their way… apart from possibly carbs.