The mission of the starship at the center of the latest Cracked.com web series is supposedly “to seek out strange new life and adventure,” but its real mission is to right a half-century’s worth of wrongs. Television shows and movies of yore have told us plenty about space heroes with titles in front of their names — Captain Kirk, Princess Leia — but not nearly enough about the maintenance workers who have kept the space fleets flying.
The four-episode series is “Starship Icarus,” and it’s must viewing for anyone whose head is filled with memory fragments of “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Lost in Space” and so on, which of course is practically everyone. This collective body of intergalactic references has already been mined for humor — the films “Galaxy Quest” and “Spaceballs” did it pretty well, for instance. But “Starship Icarus,” whose episodes began posting last week, with the final one having gone live on Monday, is quicker and more deadpan than most of its predecessors. The four episodes together don’t total an hour, which means there’s no time to linger over a reference or a gag; it’s flyby humor at warp speed.
The five flunkies who are the focus of the series don’t battle hostile extraterrestrials, though there seem to be plenty of them around in whatever universe this ship is flying through. They maintain the computers and more mundane systems that keep the ship going, which is a formidable job because, as Episode 1 explained, the ship has a mind of its own and when it gets nervous it tends to spew raw sewage onto certain decks.
But the series isn’t all or even primarily bathroom humor. It eventually works its way around to the kinds of metaphysical questions that made “Star Trek” so great. For instance, if an entire maintenance crew is killed and replaced by clones, are the clones still responsible for the financial debts their predecessors left back on Earth? Heavy. In space, no one can hear you wink.