Dirk Halfspeed Reimagined - Part 1

In the eighties, I used to cowrite an adventure serial called The Tales of Dirk Halfspeed. We wrote it in a slapstick, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy style. I and my writing partner wrote about thirty eight or so episodes.

That's a couple of decades ago and I still periodically have thoughts of writing the next episode, or rebooting the whole serial and start something fresh that is based on those characters. It would be an opportunity to clean up all the inconsistencies we'd written ourselves into, as well as an opportunity for the story itself to mature into something more character oriented and dramatic.

So I've had some ideas and I've jotted down some notes, some thoughts on what a reimagined series could look like.

Dirk comes to consciousness, finding himself floating in space. He is in a space suit with no memory of who he is or how he got into this predicament. He finds a label on his suit and learns that his name is Dirk Halfspeed. Perhaps in a plot twist we learn that this was not really his name but that there is some other significance to this name he finds, but he mistakenly believes it is his name. He adopts it as his identity. This perhaps causes him trouble later, as the name is really a code word or perhaps refers to an organization or something, and is associated with a group of people that are up to no good.

How does Dirk survive? How does he find Sirius? How does he hook up with Seran and Joe, and who are these people in the reimagined series? How does the Negative Time link to this?

Somehow he gets to a space station. This station is like a nexus, because Seran and Joe are both independantly drawn there, and that is where the trio meet each other for the first time (unless I decide that Joe really is Dirk's brother, an idea I tried to work into the original series).

More thoughts and explorations to follow.