The late 90s were when television programming fully adopted serial storytelling. Well, that’s not entirely true. Soap operas had been on air for the last few decades, but this was the first time it was applied to genre fiction on prime time, and I was ready for it. That said, this episode was a clunker, and I don’t think I would continue watching the series. On the plus side, Mark Rolston makes an appearance as a scumbag merc who is hard of hearing, which was a nice twist.
Last night I watch Bram Stoker’s Dracula on the big screen, sharp as a coffin nail. Hadn’t seen it like that since ’92, back in Boston, when I hit the theater with the crew from Slaughter Shack. The frontman was tangled up with Sadie Frost—engaged, dating, whatever. I’ve seen the damn thing a half dozen times since, maybe more. Crowd was younger than I figured—bright-eyed, full of blood, and barely old enough to know what they were watching. A few phones flickered like rats in the walls, but they stayed quiet. Smart. Dracula don’t like distractions. And neither do I.
Slopping through the slough of a chapter now, ink-thick and babble-tongued in Alan Moore’s mad Jerusalem, I am. yes, dragfoot and fogbrained, sentence winding round itself like a drunken priest’s sermon, and poor old Jimmy J. himself, God rest his lexical gymnastics, would tilt his noble head and mutter what in the bally blue blazes is this babelish blather, aye, scratching at scalp in baffled awe.
The Supercontext podcast mentioned Harsh Realm, another show by The X-Files creator Chris Carter, in one of their episodes, which prompted me to purchase the box set for season one. The series never made it to season two. I don’t think I saw anything after the pilot, but that episode has stayed with me decades later. Like most of Carter’s productions, it was shot in Canada. The score is by Mark Snow, whose work I never cared for—too much synth strings. On the plus side, there’s music by The Prodigy and Rob Zombie. The plot is reminiscent of The Matrix and various Philip K. Dick novels. The lead is Scott Bairstow, whose acting career didn’t last too long after this series. Always a pleasure to see D.B. Sweeney, as is Lance Henriksen and Terry O’Quinn and his pencil-parted mustache. Rachel Hayward and her cheekbones also make an appearance. And a very young Samantha Mathis!
Okay, here’s some weirdness for you. In my last post about Millennium, I mentioned that while watching Hannibal, I was reminded that Lance Henriksen lamented that the show never got the prestige format it deserved. The next episode of Hannibal featured Henriksen’s appearance; then I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and there was Henriksen again. Wild.
Anyway, this episode felt like it was part of another series. Chris Carter stepped back as the show runner, and I could tell. Season 1, I wanted more lore, and season 2 delivers, but now I wish it would stick to the original premise of Millennium. In any case, my ears pricked up when the Unabomber and
The Rodney King riots were mentioned as they are part of a project I’m working on.
I was watching Hannibal and was reminded that Lance Henriksen once lamented that Millennium never got to be a prestige television show, which was all the incentive I needed to finally dive into season two. Strip away the show’s mythology and groaner of an ending, and this episode was hard to watch. It wasn’t an exploration of 90s America’s fears, but the primal fear of someone you love being snatched away.
