Spoilers below.
Fourth episode out of six - only two left, now. And yet again, TPTB have put in a mytharc episode, this time in the sense that it's the ongoing saga of Scully's family (as opposed to aliens, hybrids and world domination). Mixed in with this, the -spoilers - death of Scully's mother, is a rather jarringly-different-in-tone monster of the week story. The pairing required Mulder to juggle being available to Scully in her grief within minutes of cracking wise about corruption and self-interest in local government. Duchovny's acting is up to it, but I'm not sure he should have *had* to do it.
There was at least one quotable line. As her mother lay dying, Mulder admittd to Scully that he'd tried to develop a technique for wishing people back from the dead when she was in her own coma. Scully replied, "Mulder, you're a dark wizard."
The story itself seemed to have grown out of the fighting phrase 'takin' out the trash'. The homeless of Philadelphia are being harassed alternately by a developer and by a do-gooder who claims she's on their side but is actually fighting to prevent them being relocated only because she doesn't want them living anywhere near her. Mulder quickly deduces they're both in it for themselves, and so does a super-strong monster called the Band Aid Nose Man, who literally takes them both apart. His modus operandi includes arriving in the back of a garbage truck, and often, dragging bits of them out and throwing them into the back and jumping in after them as he leaves.
M&S are called in to investigate, and Mulder notices a piece of Banksy-style graffiti art on a wall nearby. So does a pair of low-lifes, who steal the piece of drywall it's painted on. It's signed by The Trashman, and they reckon they can sell it off for thousands. The monster kills them for also being self-serving and making money off the homeless. The local police analyse the paint on the signature, leading Mulder to the only store that sells that brand of paint. He tails a buyer to some warehouse where the kid runs away, but it's okay because the Trashman is there as well. (If all they had to do was test the paint, why do we even have the art thieves subplot? It just crowded out an already brimful episode.)
Anyway, Mulder finds the artist, who not only makes graffiti art, but also creates a sort of golem, which he describes as a tulpa (until Mulder gives him the dictionary definition of a tulpa, which is apparently different). The animated thing/whatever has picked up the artist's hatred for those who exploit the helpless and is out there killing them; the original artist knows of no way to destroy it. (And for his troubles gets a lecture from Scully about taking responsibility.)
The outsider-art aspect of the show is well done, and the artist's halting explanation of his work is a great set-piece. (He's played by Rancid's Tim Armstrong, who seems to embody the character. Maybe he's a good actor or maybe that was great typecasting.) Scully gets in a short action sequence that marks her out as a badass and, when Mulder whines about having to "do" stairs, she quips she used to "do" stairs in three inch heels. Scully's anguish at her mother's death and continuing remorse over losing her adopted-out son William is also wrenchingly-well done. Mulder gets to be sarky, knowledgeable about mythological creatures and a strong support for Scully, so it's all round a good episode.
Don't know who drove the garbage truck, though. Or how M&S could possibly write up the case report without being called delusional.
And there's one big error - Gillian Anderson fluffs one of the most important lines. After her mother has heard from her estranged younger brother and died in relative peace, she should say, according to the subtitles and to common sense, "She wanted to know before she left that he'd be okay." What she actually says is "She wanted to know before he left that he'd be okay." It's odd that either the director didn't notice (which would be bad) or that he didn't have the money to reshoot or work around it (which is arguably worse).
You can watch the X-Files here.
Showing posts with label x-files. Show all posts
Showing posts with label x-files. Show all posts
Thursday, February 11, 2016
Sunday, February 07, 2016
X-Files: Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster (TV 2016)
The second episode of the re-launched X-Files was a bit iffy. It was a mytharc-style episode, and it seemed kinda odd to start a new mytharc when the old one was never really finished, in a six-episode season that may not be picked up next year for any further elaboration. Called Founder's Mutation (a sort of X-Filian pun on the 'founder' of a charitable foundation that looks after mutant kids and the founder mutation, which is the mutation that precipitates a speciation event), it went everywhere from telekinesis through telepathy, mutant kids with cronenbergian bodies, Mulder and Scully's separate fears over what may have happened to their adopted-out child William, to ice-pick suicides and good old-fashioned male terror at the concept (sorry) of pregnancy.
It was a decent X-Files episode but seven hundred years of Orphan Black (at least) have aired since X-Files went off the air, and in that we've seen so many foundations and founders and children in orphanages and mutations that the original source has been eclipsed by its...clones. (Sorry again.)
Scully mentions a paper on Founder Effects by Batini and Hallast - which says that 64% of the population of Europe can be traced to three male ancestors in the Bronze Age. This is a real paper. You can read it here.
Now, the third episode, Mulder and Scully Meet The Were-Monster was helmed by one of the best of the original writers, Darin Morgan, and is a perfect X-File. A monster-of-the-week episode, it trotted along nicely with all the eye candy of a good episode and all the clever-dickery of the very best episodes. The poor editing and iffy acting of the pilot and second-aired-episode failed to make an appearance.
Almost all the lines were quotable and it was all I could do not to pause every couple of minutes to write them down and put them here. Scully's "Mulder, the internet isn't good for you," was one of the best delivered, and the scene where the game warden and Mulder stop in mid-screaming-and-running to find "settings" on Mulder's newfangled cellphone was another memorable moment. Oh, and I must mention Mulder saying, "I'm a middle-aged man - no, Scully, I am!" followed by a cut to Scully, who hadn't said a word in protest.
- spoilers everywhere below -
Not for the first time this was an episode where the peaks came from reversing the normal course of things. In the prologue, Mulder is going through old files and throwing them out, as they've been solved since he was last in the office. Student pranks, advertising gimmicks and in the case of mysteriously moving rocks on a 'racetrack', simple ice-formation, have now been shown to be the explanations of the 'mysteries'. He's no longer the believer. He's throwing pencil-darts not at the ceiling tiles, but at the I Want To Believe poster, which Scully, when she comes in, declares is actually hers.
Not for the first time this was an episode where the peaks came from reversing the normal course of things. In the prologue, Mulder is going through old files and throwing them out, as they've been solved since he was last in the office. Student pranks, advertising gimmicks and in the case of mysteriously moving rocks on a 'racetrack', simple ice-formation, have now been shown to be the explanations of the 'mysteries'. He's no longer the believer. He's throwing pencil-darts not at the ceiling tiles, but at the I Want To Believe poster, which Scully, when she comes in, declares is actually hers.
The monster, when today's mystery is finally solved, is a lizard who was bitten by a man and therefore becomes a man each full moon, much to his disgust. This reversal is used to great comedic effect as the were-man gets an opportunity to show how absurd much of human culture actually is. After his transformation he found himself compelled to...get a job. So he could qualify for a mortgage, whatever that is. He was worried it was too late for him to write a novel.
The bad guy (doing the murders and the biting) is the game warden. The babes in the woods who stumble across the murders are huffing paint fumes and the man who runs the motel with the creepy hidden corridor and peeping-tom holes into every room (which are full of animal skins and weird-ass stuffed heads, including a jackalope) drinks rubbing alcohol. Mulder sympathizes with him - that's what he expects in a motel-keeper. The motel keeper tells him to go away, in quite a friendly fashion and adds, without malice, "Or I'll kill ya."
Although it sounds depressing, an entire hour of hearing that humanity is crap and everything anyone cares about is meaningless, completely-arbitrary hooey, the writing is light and funny. The were-man (yes, I'm aware that 'were' means 'man' and so that means 'man-man' but what else would you call him?) is played by Rhys Darby, the New Zealand comedian. You may remember him from such films as What We Do In The Shadows, a vampire mockumentary in which he played a polite were-wolf. "I'm a were-wolf, not a swear-wolf!" He has exactly the right touch for a role in which he's called on to wave his arms and point out the ridiculousness of human existence, much of it expounded while standing around a gravestone named for Kim Manners.
He's also wearing clothes in the style of Kolchak, the Night Stalker (having taken them from the corpse of one of the people murdered by the game warden) and there's a story behind that. The whole script is taken from an unfilmed episode of the latterday Kolchak and repurposed for the X-Files. The full story is here.
One thing I'm always interested in is how a story is put together, how the scenes are written to cover the story adequately. The following is just a set of notes to myself.
I was particularly taken with this sequence: Mulder finds some pills in the were-man's motel room and of course pills have the prescriber's name on them. He goes to see the psychiatrist named and presumably asks about the patient. We don't hear about the patient. The scene opens with the psychiatrist telling the story of a man who was tormented by a lizard dragon and eventually finds a gypsy who tells him to stab it in the appendix with a shard of green glass. He stabs the creature and as it dies he realizes he's looking in a mirror and it is himself. The psychiatrist says the moral is it's easier to believe that there are monsters out there than to look inside yourself.
This 'legend' turns out to be the actual story. Without any connecting 'real story logic' being offered, it seems the only way you can kill this creature is to stab him with a broken bottle. Or did the lizard-man just believe that because the trick cyclist told him the story? Why is the psychiatrist telling this story to people anyway? (Whenever a question about the were-man's life-cycle comes up, both the lizard-man and Mulder agree there's no logic to it, and yet, overall, it works in the story.)
The psychiatrist also tells Mulder he told the lizard-man to go to a cemetery, because if nothing else, it'll bring home the fact that all one's troubles are temporary. Mulder questions this, but the doctor says, "It's what I do." That gives Mulder enough information to find the lizard-man. He's going to be in a cemetery. How-to-write columns always say that each scene should not solve the mystery, but should give sufficient information for the next step to take place but I've never seen two togeher that are so pure. In the motel room the bottle. From the psychiatrist, the location. When Mulder finds the were-man by the gravestone, he explains that until a few days ago he had no idea he could die, so I guess the psychiatrist has his uses.
For equally illogical, but strong story reasons, the were-man is due to hibernate for 10,000 years soon and hopes to wake up cured. As endings go, it's total bollocks, but it solves all the story problems. No one now alive will be around and so you don't have to think of a happy ending. It's out of our hands. Assume all live happily ever after.
I've seen a couple of comments on the interwebs asking why a lizard-man in America who hibernates for 10,000 years at a time would have a New Zealand accent. What accent should he have had? The mind boggles.
(Edited for clarity.)
(Edited for clarity.)
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
X-Files: My Struggle (TV, web, 2016)
I suppose if anything was going to tempt me back to write in an 'old' form of media like my blog, it would be a reboot of an 'old' form of paranoia like the X-Files.
Watch here.
With My Struggle, the X-Files re-debuted on January 24th, 2016 after an hiatus since May 19th, 2002. That's almost a whole generation. Times have changed, which the new program artfully reflects. Someone mentions Uber; someone gives a tiny cellphone their number from their own tiny cellphone without anyone having to write it on a phone booth hood, or memorize it; someone watches the cable news on their laptop at their workdesk. Times have changed for paranoia as well. Before the X-Files, difficult as this may be for youngsters to believe, most American, broadly speaking, believed their government was committed to telling the truth to citizens. When I came here in 1989 it was difficult to understand how 300 million people could all be so non-cynical.
That all started to change during the X-Files' first run, and pretty much completely overturned on September 11th, 2001. After that, large numbers of people started questioning the government, along with all other forms of authority. Evolution? Pull the other one. Climate Change? Pfff obviously the work of...Big Trees or something. Maybe the X-Files did it, or maybe 9/11, or maybe the interwebs or all of those things. But it was a significant change.
Spoiler alert:
Chris Carter, the X-Files' creator, seems to have weathered the change with little difficulty. A certain amount of the program was given over to Generation Jones Fan Service and I felt I was being patted on the back simply for being the age I am and Knowing Stuff - for example when Tuskegee and Henrietta Lacks were tossed into the script like cranberries into a salad at one point - but the showrunner seems happy to shift the pacing of an episode up to Millennial/Generation Z standards. I think "The Truth" was overturned two or three times in just this one episode. We have two or three of Mulder's fast-gabbled infodumps about The Truth (how does Duchovny learn all these lines?) then we learn the Real Truth, then we learn the Really Real Truth. Then all, and I mean all, of the evidence for one of those layers of truth get blown away. Mulder and Scully are left without any evidence apart from a DNA gel from the lab and their own wits. Oh, except that Skinner is on the case, so the X-Files are being reopened.
Overall, a very satisfying new episode.
End spoiler.
Thoughts:
Don't they look old? I mean, I'm older too, but I don't catch myself in reruns of Teliko in the middle of the night over the years and learn to assume I'm always going to be from the mid-nineties.
Loved the idea of having a (slight) telepath in the show so she could do as-you-know-Bob infodumps from the characters' brains, teaching us what's changed with them and what's the same without them having to express it clumsily in conversation.
Aren't screen bugs small compared with the old days? I suppose that's because you can't really see them on a cellphone screen so they've lost their usefulness and become vestigial.
Loved the character of O'Malley and the internet-ranting school of fame and conspiracy.
"My Struggle"? i.e. Mein Kampf? Why this title?
One quibble: The X-Files preferred method of depicting a conversation is to have an establishing shot of two people talking (like the picture above) and then to shoot one person talking over the other person's shoulder, then change to the other person speaking over the first person's shoulder. This is a creaky old way of doing it and given the length of some of Duchovny's lines, and the lack of care in matching expression to recent speech when we cut to the other person beginning to listen, it really doesn't work. Let's have a new convention.
Verdict: would watch again, except I don't have cable. I watched this one, as you can also, on the web at Fox.
Watch here.
With My Struggle, the X-Files re-debuted on January 24th, 2016 after an hiatus since May 19th, 2002. That's almost a whole generation. Times have changed, which the new program artfully reflects. Someone mentions Uber; someone gives a tiny cellphone their number from their own tiny cellphone without anyone having to write it on a phone booth hood, or memorize it; someone watches the cable news on their laptop at their workdesk. Times have changed for paranoia as well. Before the X-Files, difficult as this may be for youngsters to believe, most American, broadly speaking, believed their government was committed to telling the truth to citizens. When I came here in 1989 it was difficult to understand how 300 million people could all be so non-cynical.
That all started to change during the X-Files' first run, and pretty much completely overturned on September 11th, 2001. After that, large numbers of people started questioning the government, along with all other forms of authority. Evolution? Pull the other one. Climate Change? Pfff obviously the work of...Big Trees or something. Maybe the X-Files did it, or maybe 9/11, or maybe the interwebs or all of those things. But it was a significant change.
Spoiler alert:
Chris Carter, the X-Files' creator, seems to have weathered the change with little difficulty. A certain amount of the program was given over to Generation Jones Fan Service and I felt I was being patted on the back simply for being the age I am and Knowing Stuff - for example when Tuskegee and Henrietta Lacks were tossed into the script like cranberries into a salad at one point - but the showrunner seems happy to shift the pacing of an episode up to Millennial/Generation Z standards. I think "The Truth" was overturned two or three times in just this one episode. We have two or three of Mulder's fast-gabbled infodumps about The Truth (how does Duchovny learn all these lines?) then we learn the Real Truth, then we learn the Really Real Truth. Then all, and I mean all, of the evidence for one of those layers of truth get blown away. Mulder and Scully are left without any evidence apart from a DNA gel from the lab and their own wits. Oh, except that Skinner is on the case, so the X-Files are being reopened.
Overall, a very satisfying new episode.
End spoiler.
Thoughts:
Don't they look old? I mean, I'm older too, but I don't catch myself in reruns of Teliko in the middle of the night over the years and learn to assume I'm always going to be from the mid-nineties.
Loved the idea of having a (slight) telepath in the show so she could do as-you-know-Bob infodumps from the characters' brains, teaching us what's changed with them and what's the same without them having to express it clumsily in conversation.
Aren't screen bugs small compared with the old days? I suppose that's because you can't really see them on a cellphone screen so they've lost their usefulness and become vestigial.
Loved the character of O'Malley and the internet-ranting school of fame and conspiracy.
"My Struggle"? i.e. Mein Kampf? Why this title?
One quibble: The X-Files preferred method of depicting a conversation is to have an establishing shot of two people talking (like the picture above) and then to shoot one person talking over the other person's shoulder, then change to the other person speaking over the first person's shoulder. This is a creaky old way of doing it and given the length of some of Duchovny's lines, and the lack of care in matching expression to recent speech when we cut to the other person beginning to listen, it really doesn't work. Let's have a new convention.
Verdict: would watch again, except I don't have cable. I watched this one, as you can also, on the web at Fox.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Piper Maru Eyes
Excellent day today. Following a conversation with a friend a few thousand miles away and three hours ahead (I love the internet) in which we discussed the joys of crab for Sunday lunch, we made a trip to Newport Beach and the world famous Crab Cooker.
We had smoked albacore and calamari and soft shell crab and king crab claws with their local-style potatoes, a sort of lump of mashed potatoes baked with cheese until crispy. Mmmm king crab claws. Oh and their lovely bread loaf. STB had coleslaw while I had the relatively difficult task of ordering the tomato slices. (I forgot to say 'tomayto' the first time and got a does-not-compute look.)
We went for a short walk to look at the ocean. There is a storm blowing through So Cal today and the cold wind was whipping onto the shore, depositing a fair amount of the beach sand between my teeth in that annoying way wind does. Really, I haven't faced such a bracing wind at the beach since the last time I was at Blackpool. (But you can't get rock or deep fried black pudding at Newport Beach.) We did see one person on the promenade being treated by the Lifeguards for Copious Bleeding - there's always one, isn't there? - and attempted to walk down the pier but were beaten back by the winds. We went to the more sheltered dead end road by the Crab Cooker that looks into the marina and found a drunk shirtless guy leaning over the wall attempting to coax his equally drunk and shirtless friend, who had fallen into the marina, to fly or levitate or something the ten feet from the waterline back up to the road. Both of them were bleeding from various grazes, so it must be the height of fashion at crazy old Newport Beach.
No one could pull him up so we encouraged him to swim to the wooden-floaty-walkway-thing to which the yachts were moored, but he didn't seem to have the courage. So his friend jumped...agh no!...into the marina and swam to it. Encouraged, the first guy made it to the slip. Being very fit, he soon pulled himself onto the floaty thing. However, his encouraging friend, not being a natural athlete, was unable to pull himself out of the water. His friend dragged him to a mass of piping and other slippery items that would lead to this being even more difficult for him and then left him to his own devices. He eventually made it out of the water. Meanwhile, back on land, their designated driver was walking up and down by the wall, staring in horror and occasionally saying, "Should I jump in too?"
Luckily she resisted this impulse. One thing we hadn't thought of was that the door from the slipway to the outer world was locked, so the last glimpse we had of them was of them attempting to climb a gate in bare feet and wet clothes. Hopefully DD thought of calling the marina management to get them let out. Now that they were out of danger of drowning, we didn't feel too bad about leaving them to it. It's all in a day's fun at the beach, isn't it?
Then off we went to Second Spin to look through the vinyl. I got an old Donovan record - Barabajagal - which seems in very good condition (and is described on the receipt as 'generic vinyl' - gee thanks). Oh, and a MGMT CD. And also some of this Blood Energy Potion.
People are strange, aren't they?
B+ isn't actually my type, but I guess it'll have to do. The bag's sitting beside me right now and it's doing really good job of looking like blood. I worked in a blood bank for years and artificial blood in movies really bugs me if it isn't right.
(I said that on this blog once before and Anonymous wrote in to say, "What if they don't want it to look right?" which I thought was a bizarre thing to say. Why aren't movies acted by papier mache heads on lollipop sticks in front of a bedsheet if they aren't meant to look like what they're pretending to be?)
The Dead Weather played a secret show in Chicago last night. 'Secret' must have changed meanings recently as the show was announced on Tuesday or so. The location was not revealed until Saturday, but that's still not a secret show. A secret show is booking yourself into a club under the name the Bell Ends or something (that's probably already taken. But I did think of a great band name today which they can use if they like. The Talkupines! Like a porcupine but chattier! Isn't that a good name? And it wasn't found on a Google search today so it's mine all mine. (This opinion has not been vetted by an attorney.)) and then when the Talkupines come on stage, it's actually them, in all their monochrome glory. That's a secret show.
My other band name from yesterday was Blogger's Banquet. Or perhaps that can be the Talkupines' first album title. Alas I wasn't the first to think of that but I can't at the mo see an actual band with that name. My acting great band name is actually The Soul Dead Brothers, a mis-spelling of the Soledad Brothers I once saw in an interview. I'm currently working on The Soul Dead Brothers' first single which will be called Piper Maru Eyes.
Piper Maru eyes are ones swimming with black oil, as in the X-Files episode of the same name.
A friend used it to describe the blacked-out eyes of the Dead Weather members on the inner of Sea of Cowards.
(Copyright is not mine. Scan by KD)
It needs its own song. Black Oil eyes may be the next vampirism.
We had smoked albacore and calamari and soft shell crab and king crab claws with their local-style potatoes, a sort of lump of mashed potatoes baked with cheese until crispy. Mmmm king crab claws. Oh and their lovely bread loaf. STB had coleslaw while I had the relatively difficult task of ordering the tomato slices. (I forgot to say 'tomayto' the first time and got a does-not-compute look.)
We went for a short walk to look at the ocean. There is a storm blowing through So Cal today and the cold wind was whipping onto the shore, depositing a fair amount of the beach sand between my teeth in that annoying way wind does. Really, I haven't faced such a bracing wind at the beach since the last time I was at Blackpool. (But you can't get rock or deep fried black pudding at Newport Beach.) We did see one person on the promenade being treated by the Lifeguards for Copious Bleeding - there's always one, isn't there? - and attempted to walk down the pier but were beaten back by the winds. We went to the more sheltered dead end road by the Crab Cooker that looks into the marina and found a drunk shirtless guy leaning over the wall attempting to coax his equally drunk and shirtless friend, who had fallen into the marina, to fly or levitate or something the ten feet from the waterline back up to the road. Both of them were bleeding from various grazes, so it must be the height of fashion at crazy old Newport Beach.
No one could pull him up so we encouraged him to swim to the wooden-floaty-walkway-thing to which the yachts were moored, but he didn't seem to have the courage. So his friend jumped...agh no!...into the marina and swam to it. Encouraged, the first guy made it to the slip. Being very fit, he soon pulled himself onto the floaty thing. However, his encouraging friend, not being a natural athlete, was unable to pull himself out of the water. His friend dragged him to a mass of piping and other slippery items that would lead to this being even more difficult for him and then left him to his own devices. He eventually made it out of the water. Meanwhile, back on land, their designated driver was walking up and down by the wall, staring in horror and occasionally saying, "Should I jump in too?"
Luckily she resisted this impulse. One thing we hadn't thought of was that the door from the slipway to the outer world was locked, so the last glimpse we had of them was of them attempting to climb a gate in bare feet and wet clothes. Hopefully DD thought of calling the marina management to get them let out. Now that they were out of danger of drowning, we didn't feel too bad about leaving them to it. It's all in a day's fun at the beach, isn't it?
Then off we went to Second Spin to look through the vinyl. I got an old Donovan record - Barabajagal - which seems in very good condition (and is described on the receipt as 'generic vinyl' - gee thanks). Oh, and a MGMT CD. And also some of this Blood Energy Potion.
People are strange, aren't they?
B+ isn't actually my type, but I guess it'll have to do. The bag's sitting beside me right now and it's doing really good job of looking like blood. I worked in a blood bank for years and artificial blood in movies really bugs me if it isn't right.
(I said that on this blog once before and Anonymous wrote in to say, "What if they don't want it to look right?" which I thought was a bizarre thing to say. Why aren't movies acted by papier mache heads on lollipop sticks in front of a bedsheet if they aren't meant to look like what they're pretending to be?)
The Dead Weather played a secret show in Chicago last night. 'Secret' must have changed meanings recently as the show was announced on Tuesday or so. The location was not revealed until Saturday, but that's still not a secret show. A secret show is booking yourself into a club under the name the Bell Ends or something (that's probably already taken. But I did think of a great band name today which they can use if they like. The Talkupines! Like a porcupine but chattier! Isn't that a good name? And it wasn't found on a Google search today so it's mine all mine. (This opinion has not been vetted by an attorney.)) and then when the Talkupines come on stage, it's actually them, in all their monochrome glory. That's a secret show.
My other band name from yesterday was Blogger's Banquet. Or perhaps that can be the Talkupines' first album title. Alas I wasn't the first to think of that but I can't at the mo see an actual band with that name. My acting great band name is actually The Soul Dead Brothers, a mis-spelling of the Soledad Brothers I once saw in an interview. I'm currently working on The Soul Dead Brothers' first single which will be called Piper Maru Eyes.
Piper Maru eyes are ones swimming with black oil, as in the X-Files episode of the same name.
 |
| (From Piper Maru, the X-Files) |
A friend used it to describe the blacked-out eyes of the Dead Weather members on the inner of Sea of Cowards.
(Copyright is not mine. Scan by KD)
It needs its own song. Black Oil eyes may be the next vampirism.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Purity Control - Quatermass and the Pit
Purity Control - Quatermass and the Pit
When mentioning space colonization, as I have done recently, it's worth noting that not everyone wants to commit their own descendants as colonists. If you can't go yourself, then your biological children are a poor substitute. If they're not you, there's no point sending them. It's faster, cheaper and easier to colonize cyberspace and forget the irritatingly intractable galaxy. Upload yourself.
Or, in the case of an early but very powerful science fiction scenario, why not find some creatures who already live on the new world – and make them into you?
I've seen Quatermass and the Pit several times in the dim and distant past. I have a persistent vague feeling that I saw the original British TV series, but that's unlikely as it was only shown the year I was born (1958) and seems not to have been disinterred from the BBC's legendary crypts until the Eighties. I most likely remember my dad talking about it so often that I have a false memory of it. Why was dad talking about it so much? Well, he was a big science fiction fan and talked about the good ones spontaneously - but he also stepped up the volume when the Hammer film came out in 1967 -- that's the version I remember seeing several times, and the one I saw again recently. Americans will remember it, if at all, under its original release name of "Five Million Years to Earth". It is, according to Wikipedia, a relatively faithful retelling of the original story.
It's one of the rare serious, well-thought out and straight science fiction movies to be produced in those dim and distant days. The movie industry was transitioning from the pie-plates-on-fishing-lines-plan-nine-style "sci-fi" to the more modern Zardoz and 2001 type of movies, which the medium achieved somewhere around 1969 (and then, as we know, coasted a bit until George Lucas decided to spend his American Graffiti money on a movie called Star Wars). The writer of the Quatermass films, Nigel Kneale, was considerably before his time in trying to address familiar human themes with a muscular science-fictiony, thriller flair, and Quatermass and the Pit is perhaps his most accessible.
The film opens in Knightsbridge, London, where Hobbs Lane Underground Station is being expanded and major excavations are underway. In the clay, the workmen find several man-ape skulls, which with gratifying rapidity and lack of spurious sub-plots, are sent to scientists who proclaim them man's ancestors and yet too old - five million years - to be in the normally accepted line of evolution.
Almost immediately, the Hobbs Lane workmen strike a piece of metal lodged in the clay and send for the bomb squad, believing it to be an unexploded bomb from World War II. Julian Glover enters as Colonel Breen, commander of the UXB squad. Breen immediately notes that the craft is not made of steel, or any kind of iron, but continues to believe it is a V2 of German origin. Quatermass and the anthropologist discover that the missile is actually a craft, and that the anthropoid bones are of creatures which were in the hold of the craft when it crashed. Cue the major sub-plot of the film, the scientists struggling with the military over access to the craft and its secrets.
Eventually, the craft is breached and the remains of giant horned locusts are found inside. As more power lines are fed into the pit for lighting and cameras, poltergeist-like activity begins to pick up. People in the area begin seeing things; things begin to move on their own; strange sounds are heard in the streets above. Plucky Research Scientist and Exposition Fairy Barbara digs up reports that evil horned goblins have been seen periodically in this area for hundreds of years, each time accompanied by major panic amongst the locals. In fact, the original name of the area, "Hob's Lane" refers to the old name for the devil. Our heroes scan the visual centers of people while they are hallucinating, which reveals that there was once a hive of horned locusts - under a different colored sky. The creatures had apparently been genetically engineering pre-human life five million years ago on a dying Mars, and were bringing some new humans back to Earth when this particular shipment crashed. Breen's meddling has re-activated a hive-cleaning circuit that makes their proxy descendents – us – kill and remove anyone not carrying the Martian genes. Breen continues to feed the Ministry of Defence a line about the excavation being safe and the missile being harmless old Nazi propaganda while Quatermass digs in for the major riot and mass killings he knows is coming. Will London survive this programmed psychic swarming?
As a Star Wars fan, I had my eye on Julian Glover (General Veers) in this movie. He has a lot of screen time and gets to act rather than recite. His role as Breen is not likeable. He's similar to Jason Isaacs in "Soldier", a handsome actor in a spiffy uniform with a terrible mustache who is there for the viewers to hate and wish someone would strangle him or otherwise have him die in an amusing accident. Kneale is too good a writer to make him one-dimensional, however, so he has a few sympathetic touches - he invites the scientist to "join me at my club" at one point, which made me wish we could just cut to another movie where we could watch all these tweedy, masculine, intelligent Brits sit around in nice leather wing-back chairs at their gentlemen's club and chew the fat for a while. But as I said above, Kneale set a fairly brisk pacing for the movie and so we never actually digress to the club.
One odd thing about re-watching it was that I realized I'd misunderstood it completely the first time. I remembered the "periodic outbreaks of racial cleansing" thing and assumed it was making a point about Nazis, as so many British productions of the fifties were prone to do. There isn't the tiniest hint of that in the film, and I'm not sure where I came up with it. Breen does mention V2s, Von Braun, Nazi propaganda and so on and so forth but his take on things is that the Germans sent the rocket filled with fakes in order to make England believe it was being invaded by aliens, and that's all he says.
Once I realized that, I was left grasping for *why* we have a racial cleansing theme. Rather late in the movie, in my opinion, Kneale has a couple of lines that suggest that the locusts were dying out on Mars and wanted "descendents by proxy" - us – and so our ancestors were shipped off for re-engineering. To stop the early humans reverting, the Martians, thinking like insects, installed their default way of keeping the hive clean. They implanted a psychic trigger in the genetically engineered apes that cause them to kill off animals that do not contain the Martian genes[1] - including other humans that are insufficiently pure.
When it comes down to storytelling basics, the purity aspect is just a plot device so that we can have scenes of masses of Londoners rioting and smashing up British institutions like pubs and bus stops in a way that's still frightening and evocative forty years after the movie came out. However, the implications of the act of engineering – my fingers keep wanting to type "making man in their own image" – are remarkably interesting. Does your culture really have continuity and any sort of "purity" when it is being carried on in bodies of an entirely different type? In what way is this survival? Then again, we all will die. Is survival of a meme a partial survival of the bearer of the meme?
With the emphasis on the alien origin of humans and purity control, and the World War II aspect backgrounded, I can see more clearly why so many critics of the X-Files said that it was ripped off wholesale from Nigel Kneale's Quatermass. I don't think that's entirely true, but it does look much more likely. It's particularly similar to the X-Files movie Fight the Future. Chris Carter, the X-Files founder, took some much more interesting detours in his version of the story, but then he had 8 years to tell it all. Quatermass and the Pit whips you through some very interesting territory and then leaves you to put it all together in your mind at your leisure.
.
[1] The humans in the film are both genetically *and* memetically engineered, but neither term existed in 1958, or to any real-life extent by 1967.
When mentioning space colonization, as I have done recently, it's worth noting that not everyone wants to commit their own descendants as colonists. If you can't go yourself, then your biological children are a poor substitute. If they're not you, there's no point sending them. It's faster, cheaper and easier to colonize cyberspace and forget the irritatingly intractable galaxy. Upload yourself.
Or, in the case of an early but very powerful science fiction scenario, why not find some creatures who already live on the new world – and make them into you?
I've seen Quatermass and the Pit several times in the dim and distant past. I have a persistent vague feeling that I saw the original British TV series, but that's unlikely as it was only shown the year I was born (1958) and seems not to have been disinterred from the BBC's legendary crypts until the Eighties. I most likely remember my dad talking about it so often that I have a false memory of it. Why was dad talking about it so much? Well, he was a big science fiction fan and talked about the good ones spontaneously - but he also stepped up the volume when the Hammer film came out in 1967 -- that's the version I remember seeing several times, and the one I saw again recently. Americans will remember it, if at all, under its original release name of "Five Million Years to Earth". It is, according to Wikipedia, a relatively faithful retelling of the original story.
It's one of the rare serious, well-thought out and straight science fiction movies to be produced in those dim and distant days. The movie industry was transitioning from the pie-plates-on-fishing-lines-plan-nine-style "sci-fi" to the more modern Zardoz and 2001 type of movies, which the medium achieved somewhere around 1969 (and then, as we know, coasted a bit until George Lucas decided to spend his American Graffiti money on a movie called Star Wars). The writer of the Quatermass films, Nigel Kneale, was considerably before his time in trying to address familiar human themes with a muscular science-fictiony, thriller flair, and Quatermass and the Pit is perhaps his most accessible.
The film opens in Knightsbridge, London, where Hobbs Lane Underground Station is being expanded and major excavations are underway. In the clay, the workmen find several man-ape skulls, which with gratifying rapidity and lack of spurious sub-plots, are sent to scientists who proclaim them man's ancestors and yet too old - five million years - to be in the normally accepted line of evolution.
Almost immediately, the Hobbs Lane workmen strike a piece of metal lodged in the clay and send for the bomb squad, believing it to be an unexploded bomb from World War II. Julian Glover enters as Colonel Breen, commander of the UXB squad. Breen immediately notes that the craft is not made of steel, or any kind of iron, but continues to believe it is a V2 of German origin. Quatermass and the anthropologist discover that the missile is actually a craft, and that the anthropoid bones are of creatures which were in the hold of the craft when it crashed. Cue the major sub-plot of the film, the scientists struggling with the military over access to the craft and its secrets.
Eventually, the craft is breached and the remains of giant horned locusts are found inside. As more power lines are fed into the pit for lighting and cameras, poltergeist-like activity begins to pick up. People in the area begin seeing things; things begin to move on their own; strange sounds are heard in the streets above. Plucky Research Scientist and Exposition Fairy Barbara digs up reports that evil horned goblins have been seen periodically in this area for hundreds of years, each time accompanied by major panic amongst the locals. In fact, the original name of the area, "Hob's Lane" refers to the old name for the devil. Our heroes scan the visual centers of people while they are hallucinating, which reveals that there was once a hive of horned locusts - under a different colored sky. The creatures had apparently been genetically engineering pre-human life five million years ago on a dying Mars, and were bringing some new humans back to Earth when this particular shipment crashed. Breen's meddling has re-activated a hive-cleaning circuit that makes their proxy descendents – us – kill and remove anyone not carrying the Martian genes. Breen continues to feed the Ministry of Defence a line about the excavation being safe and the missile being harmless old Nazi propaganda while Quatermass digs in for the major riot and mass killings he knows is coming. Will London survive this programmed psychic swarming?
As a Star Wars fan, I had my eye on Julian Glover (General Veers) in this movie. He has a lot of screen time and gets to act rather than recite. His role as Breen is not likeable. He's similar to Jason Isaacs in "Soldier", a handsome actor in a spiffy uniform with a terrible mustache who is there for the viewers to hate and wish someone would strangle him or otherwise have him die in an amusing accident. Kneale is too good a writer to make him one-dimensional, however, so he has a few sympathetic touches - he invites the scientist to "join me at my club" at one point, which made me wish we could just cut to another movie where we could watch all these tweedy, masculine, intelligent Brits sit around in nice leather wing-back chairs at their gentlemen's club and chew the fat for a while. But as I said above, Kneale set a fairly brisk pacing for the movie and so we never actually digress to the club.
One odd thing about re-watching it was that I realized I'd misunderstood it completely the first time. I remembered the "periodic outbreaks of racial cleansing" thing and assumed it was making a point about Nazis, as so many British productions of the fifties were prone to do. There isn't the tiniest hint of that in the film, and I'm not sure where I came up with it. Breen does mention V2s, Von Braun, Nazi propaganda and so on and so forth but his take on things is that the Germans sent the rocket filled with fakes in order to make England believe it was being invaded by aliens, and that's all he says.
Once I realized that, I was left grasping for *why* we have a racial cleansing theme. Rather late in the movie, in my opinion, Kneale has a couple of lines that suggest that the locusts were dying out on Mars and wanted "descendents by proxy" - us – and so our ancestors were shipped off for re-engineering. To stop the early humans reverting, the Martians, thinking like insects, installed their default way of keeping the hive clean. They implanted a psychic trigger in the genetically engineered apes that cause them to kill off animals that do not contain the Martian genes[1] - including other humans that are insufficiently pure.
When it comes down to storytelling basics, the purity aspect is just a plot device so that we can have scenes of masses of Londoners rioting and smashing up British institutions like pubs and bus stops in a way that's still frightening and evocative forty years after the movie came out. However, the implications of the act of engineering – my fingers keep wanting to type "making man in their own image" – are remarkably interesting. Does your culture really have continuity and any sort of "purity" when it is being carried on in bodies of an entirely different type? In what way is this survival? Then again, we all will die. Is survival of a meme a partial survival of the bearer of the meme?
With the emphasis on the alien origin of humans and purity control, and the World War II aspect backgrounded, I can see more clearly why so many critics of the X-Files said that it was ripped off wholesale from Nigel Kneale's Quatermass. I don't think that's entirely true, but it does look much more likely. It's particularly similar to the X-Files movie Fight the Future. Chris Carter, the X-Files founder, took some much more interesting detours in his version of the story, but then he had 8 years to tell it all. Quatermass and the Pit whips you through some very interesting territory and then leaves you to put it all together in your mind at your leisure.
.
[1] The humans in the film are both genetically *and* memetically engineered, but neither term existed in 1958, or to any real-life extent by 1967.
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