Spaced: 10 Things To Love About Edgar Wright's Hidden Gem

1. Throwing Presumptions Out The Window

spaced frost pegg
Channel 4

Spaced likes to play with our presumptions, it likes to take familiar tropes and undermine them for the sake of an excellent story.

The best example of this is Tim and Daisy, the two leads who (spoiler) don't get together in the end. Ultimately, though each one makes sacrifices for their friendship, and though there is even some romantic tension between them, they remain just friends.

The point here is to emphasise the importance of their friendship, to lessen the expectation that a pair of characters of the opposite sex have to end up romantically involved. By voicing a criticism of their friendship through one of the less credible characters (Tyres, who's critical thinking skills are shown to be... volatile), they show us how ridiculous this presumption is.

Spaced goes to great lengths to tell us to make the best out of life, to abandon our presumptions and expectations and to instead build our lives around the nature of reality that we observe. It tells us to value what we have, in people and opportunities, and to never throw it away for the sake of something unreal.

After all, what good is a relationship when a friendship works better?

Contributor

My passion for all things Sci Fi goes back to my earliest days, when old VHS copies of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet gripped my tiny mind with their big, noisy vehicles and terrifying puppets. I'd like to say my taste got more refined over the years, but between the Warhammer, Space Dandy and niche Star Wars EU books, perhaps it just got broader. I've enjoyed games of all calibre since I figured out that dice weren't just for eating, and have written prose ever since I was left unsupervised with some crayons next to a white wall. I got away with it by calling it "schoolwork" for as long as I could, and university helped me keep the charade going a while longer. Since my work began to get published, it's made all those long hours repainting the walls seem worth it.