and Star Cop Anna Shoun betrays the multinational company which employs her (and with whom she has a paternal relationship) when she discovers their unethical behaviour. Principal characters Nathan Spring (David Calder) Nathan Spring is a 41-year-old Chief Superintendent in the British police force who reluctantly accepts promotion to Commander of the International Space Police Force with the brief of turning them into a full-time professional police force. Spring is a career policeman who has become disenchanted with the prevailing methods of policing which, he feels, are too dependent on computer logic and not on human instinct. His first job as a young detective was to arrest his own father, a computer salesman, for industrial espionage. Spring is a man who is driven but lonely, a man who doesn't make friends easily and whose ability to do so is not easy on account of his choice of career and work environment. His constant companion is Box, a prototype handheld computer (also voiced by Calder), bequeathed to him by his father. The conversations between Box and Spring provide insight into Spring's emotional state and thought processes as Spring engages in "almost Jacobean-style soliloquies" with the device. David Theroux (Erick Ray Evans) Spring's second in command is Chief Superintendent David Theroux, an African-American. Theroux, an engineer, started out in the US space program but quit and joined the European space effort instead. When he is introduced in the opening episode, "An Instinct for Murder", he is working as a traffic controller and part-time Star Cop on the European space station Charles de Gaulle. Movie buff Theroux generally tries to maintain an air of wise-cracking, cool detachment which breaks down only when he is forced in "This Case to be Opened in a Million Years" to face his morbid fear of radioactivity. Colin Devis (Trevor Cooper) When Spring's girlfriend, Lee Jones, is killed in "Conversations with the Dead", the task of investigating the murder is handed to Chief Inspector Colin Devis of the London Metropolitan Police, "one of the Department's all-time cretins". Devis' pursuit of the killer, an agent of the British Secret Service, costs him his job but Spring compensates him by hiring him, at the rank of Inspector, for the ISPF. Although Devis is not the sharpest investigator, his heart is in the right place and he is fiercely loyal to Spring. Overweight, sexist and bigoted, five times married Devis is