The Fractal Hall Journal

Anyway you cut it, that’s a big chunk o’ text squeezed out over the past couple of days. Well, it is for me. You’ll forgive me if today’s entry is a little more succinct.

Who’da thought that 90s cult programming would have provoked the largest post so far on the Journal? Well, we are all about the Nerd round here. The original plan was to write an entry on every single episode, like the excellent Star Trek annotations over on Siskoid’s blog, but dear God I don’t have the patience.

Speaking of 90s television, there was so much good genre stuff on the box around that time. That’s not to say there wasn’t some shite (VR5, anyone?), but there was an awful lot of good stuff too.

There were two in particular that were obviously commissioned due to the success of the X-Files. I remember American Gothic being superb, with a great performance from Gary Cole as the demonic sheriff Lucas Buck. I’ve got the DVD of that around here somewhere, and like the former show it’s probably about due a reconsideration. Dark Skies was another one, a show that weaved a secret alien invasion into the history of the 20th Century, and like American Gothic was cancelled after only a single series.

I’m not around next week as I’m off to the wilderness of North Wales. Expect some more Celt-centric posting after I get back. Actually, I’ve been meaning to write for a while about the divide between the two parts of the country, and how as a people we tend to perpetuate it when we really shouldn’t, and this trip is as good an excuse as any. I mean, it’s not like we’re going to dissolve into a Civil War or anything (I’m With Aneurin Bevan), but there’s certainly a kind of cultural separation that the Welsh need to address if we’re really going to take devolution forward.

That’s not to say that there won’t be Content here next week, oh no. There’s something a bit different lined up thanks to the magic of Wordpress Post Timestamping, although if it all goes arse over tit I’m not going to know about it till I get back. It’s that kind of adrenaline-fueled risk taking that makes a man feel alive.

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That Was Then: Of all the series of the show, this one has the most to live up to nostagia-wise. Usually the first series of almost anything, SF shows in particular, are pretty crap but get better as the series progresses. As I remember it, this series was the exception. The stand-alone episodes were all pretty good with a few real standouts, and the mythology was still creepy and intriguing, the writers not yet getting the chance to bog everything down with an increasingly nonsensical conspiracy plotline. Oh, and they hadn’t started doing those bloody comedy episodes, either.

Highlights from memory include ‘Ice’ (the arctic one that always comes up) and ‘EBE’, the latter being an episode that starts to flesh out the Government’s connection with downed alien craft and probably suffers the most from being undermined by future series. And although the glow of nostalgia is powerful, I also recall a living computer, a crappy ghost and a Martian stinking up an otherwise excellent run.

This Is Now: The conspiracy elements don’t disappoint, and it’s an absolute travesty that instead of sticking closer to what was hinted at here (unknowable aliens, their genetics and technology harvested by meddling intelligence agencies) the producers ran off with an incomprehensible colony/bounty hunter/Syndicate load of crap.

The series probably doesn’t live up to the high expectations in a couple of ways. A fair few of the episodes are let down by pretty poor concepts (the ‘Jersey Devil’ wild-woman is just silly, for example, and a waste of what could have been a really terrifying demonic monster), and some of the supporting actors ham it up a bit. On the other hand, the characters of Mulder and Scully are consistent throughout, and the arc of their relationship from people who happened to be assigned together to actual partners is very well handled. It’s a credit to the writers that the characters voices were found pretty much in the pilot episode and stays recognisable right through to the final year. And it’s worth pointing out that the dialogue if far better than may recent shows, even if Mulder’s nutcase ramblings go clunk a bit. Then again, maybe that’s part of his character, too.

Because Mulder does become more complicated in retrospect, in that at the time I first watched the show he was obviously the ‘hero’, and as such I found myself always on his side. Scully (and everyone else’s) disbelief was pretty laughable, considering everything that happened every week. But one thing that does come from watching the show again with a little perspective is the distinct impression that he’s a bit crackers. He’s his own worst enemy, undermining whatever ‘truth’ he may uncover by his own unorthodox methods and his inability to modulate his own raving about things beyond everyday experience. His refusal to compromise destroys his own authority and eventually his partner’s, making him a surprisingly tragic figure.

Even through the duff episodes, there’s always a grey, sinister atmosphere, the kind of foreboding that marks all the best gothic horror stories. Another strike against later episodes is the loss of this atmosphere, generated in no small part by the weather and quality of light present in Vancouver, when production moved to Los Angeles.

Highlights: The balance between the conspiracy plot, the monster-of-the-week and the flying saucer stories was just right, and it’s interesting to note that there’s only a handful of alien-related arc episodes, leaving the show not as badly undermined by later developments as I’d assumed. That said, ‘EBE’ does suffer. What made the episode so good first time round was the glimpses it held of the Government’s motives, of how far the conspiracy went, and the intrigue of downed and captured alien craft. Unfortunately the fact that most of its revelations are discounted in future episodes render it a fairly pedestrian episode.

As a result of this, the best alien-related episode is probably the season finale, ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask’, as this retains its relevancy in later years thanks to its status as the foundation of the show’s mythology, including the first appearance of hybrid humans, a (pretty creepy) alien embryo and the ‘purity control’ substance that, if I remember correctly, is related to the infamous ‘black oil’. But it’s also worth mentioning that the pilot episode is also very, very good, in particular in the way it defines the look of the show and trademarks such as the implants, abductions and the storeroom in the Pentagon.

The strongest episode is unsurprisingly a toss-up between ‘Ice’ and ‘Darkness Falls’, both using lost-in-the-wilderness plots that allow for some great character work from the leads and the guest actors, as well as probably being the scariest ones. An honourable mention goes to ‘Squeeze’ and its sequel for creating in Eugene Victor Tooms probably the X-Files’ most memorable villain.

I’ll also mention ‘Shapes’, the werewolf story considered something of a stinker at the time. I’ve always been quite fond of it, and in rewatching it proves to be a fairly competent attempt even if the wolf suit is a little shit. It makes good use of both the werewolf legend and the X-Files themselves, explaining how J Edger Hoover commissioned the very first one and giving the series a solid historical backstory, a connection to centuries-old events and the paranormal history of the 20th Century, and hinting at a wealth of unexplained FBI investigations.

Lowpoints: None of the crap ones I mentioned above redeem themselves on rewatching, and I’m also going to chuck in the gecko-handed killer episode that isn’t even saved by a glimpse into Mulder’s past as a young profiler.

In Conclusion: Overall, far more positives than negatives. The influence of this series on modern shows is obvious, and not just SF stuff like Heroes. The tone and direction of the X-Files is very much a precursor to the CSI series, or any number of FBI/serial killer shows. It’s a pretty unnerving watch much of the time, and the protagonists are written and played very well even through some of the weaker concepts; it’s easy to see how such strong characters become icons.

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The countdown to the new X-Files film has begun, and I’m pretty excited. As a build up to it, I’m going to see if I can get through the complete run of 180-odd episodes of the original series between now and July. Because I’m not utterly secure in my own nerditude and I need something to shore up my geek credentials while I’m waiting to buy a Starfleet uniform for the JJ Abrams premier.

Me and my Dad watched the first two series religiously every week on BBC 2, and I guess I would have been about 13 when it was broadcast. I remember being captivated by the first trailer that the Beeb ran for the pilot, with its UFOs and aliens in coffins. I loved reading about ghosts and aliens when I was a kid, and this was like a program made specifically for me.

The first two series hit just the right balance between aliens, government cover-ups and the stand-alone monster of the week episodes. The producers hadn’t quite lost their way yet, the main cast hadn’t got bored, and they weren’t at the point where they were killing off Mulder and Scully’s family members just for fun. I think that was part of why I ended up going off the program; the families of the two main characters just got involved further and further with the odd goings-on and all got killed off, and much like Spider-Man before long there were no solid supporting cast members left. I mean, that’s how I remember it but I may be wrong, which is part of what the Nostalgia Trip is all about.

The other thing that I really remember getting pissed off about (and isn’t fanguish an enticing reaction?) was how the X-Files themselves went from being a great high concept to hardly being mentioned in the very series named after them. It was like the writers got embarrassed by the concept and decided never to use the FBI’s unexplained cases as, you know, an obvious starting point for stories. I don’t exactly when it happened, but the case files all getting burned was where I stopped watching.

What I found to be the central premise of the series, why I liked it so much, was the atmosphere of history and mythology. The X-Files were part of a long history of unexplained phenomena, and when the series got rid of that it instead started to focus on modern-day weirdness, crap conspiracies and those fucking comedy episodes. Part of it was the way Mulder’s family became entwined with the secret history of the Syndicate, the bad guys complicit in the end of the world. It put too much emphasis on his father’s personal involvement, obscuring the simple elegance of his original motive: his need to find his lost sister no matter the cost, his early career as a promising young criminal profiler eagerly thrown away, as if it were always incidental to his hopeless search for what he’d lost. This eventually became irrelevent to the main arc of the series, to my mind the point where the show lost its heart.

But now we’re several years distant from the original run, and I’m quite looking forward to giving the series a second go. After losing track of the show for a couple of years, I remember watching a chunk of Series 6 on video and quite enjoying it, so I’m hoping that a bit of perspective will get me past the third series dip. As the man himself once said, I want to believe.

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I think it’s the Spider-Man 2 DVD that has an extra called ‘The Mythology of the 20th Century’. I’d check, but the movie shelf seems oh-so far away from my desk right now. The title’s always struck me as being a little off.

That’s not to say it isn’t broadly accurate, at least from the largely accepted (within what is humourously known as the comics community) viewpoint of super-heroes as a modern American myth. But as I understand it the phrase applies more to DC’s stable of properties than Marvel’s. I’ve read several pieces on line that deal with the concept of DC’s iconography opposed to Marvel’s street-level perspective, which is very rarely (if at all) contradicted.

Superman’s ‘mythological’ (messianic, perhaps) elements are obvious, and Wonder Woman’s origin is literally legend-based. Even so, I’m not completely sold on the idea that it’s the mysterious power of Myth alone is the reason for their longevity.

Take other long lived, well-loved characters. I’ve written (well, ranted) about King Arthur recently, and he’s a super-hero with over a thousand years on the clock. There’s Robin Hood, Don Quixote, the Three Musketeers, Captain Nemo. Is it really a burning need for Heroes and Villains that’s responsible? Does that account for Sherlock Holmes? How about Elizabeth Bennett? Or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (as opposed to Pontypridd’s Tom Jones)?

There’s no doubt that Batman will reach his century, with 70 years already under his utility belt. But that kind of character always does. Not necessarily because of a need for myths and heroes, but for characters we recognise and that resonate with us. Ones we want to spend time with, want to emulate, want to be, or ones we dislike in just the right way. Characters that reflect aspects of ourselves that we are compelled to revisit.

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The first item from January’s list of ‘08 previews staggers onto the Journal’s radar, and the very first scene with the hero of the piece, one Mike Traceur, has him in bed with not one but two chicks. I guess this is meant to be televisual shorthand to convince us of how super-awesome Michael Knight’s son (oh, er, spoiler alert) is, but instead kind of makes him look like a bit sleazy. In fact, the program makers seem to go out of their way to show him as being an absolute dick, what with abandoning his best mate to face the men who want to kill him after Traceur fails abysmally in his genius masterplan of paying them off by winning lots of money in a casino card game.

So, the protagonist is an unlikable idiot- does the actor’s natural charisma allow us to identify with him regardless? Hells no. But to be fair, he is staring down the ball-freezing possibility that he’s going to spend the rest of his career being upstaged by a car.

I think you can tell where I’m going with this. Oh, yes, I’m afraid to say that this dumb load of tosh is perhaps the finest two hours of television ever created.

Let me break it down for you: it doesn’t matter if Mike Traceur is a cardboard character devoid of all potential. That is not why we are here. Oh no, the star here is the goddamn Knight Industries Three Thousand.

This is probably the longest, most expensive advert for Ford ever made. I am talking major car porn here. My God does the new Mustang looks amazing. And Val Kilmer is perfect as KITT’s voice. The bland, world-weary delivery of a once-popular actor reduced to taking whatever cheque the Orange mobile phone company wave in his face is exactly the right fit for a soulless automaton.

I’m sensing some skepticism.

Ok, what the monolithic entertainment industry has recently grasped is that as long as a film or program is moderately competent and based on a fondly remembered property from my generation’s childhood, people like me lose all sense of proportion (c.f. Transformers). A talking robotic sports car fits the requirements perfectly, helped in no small measure by the fact that the original was pretty shit anyway.

On a related note, I am completely underwhelmed by the new GI Joe and Speed Racer films in the offing. Action Force (as the former was known over here) was never really my thing, and I don’t recall ever seeing a single episode of the latter. So I guess nostalgia marketing isn’t necessarily a sure thing.

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Before we carry on with today’s post, I just want to direct you good folks to the new blog of a dear friend, Paul C’s More Fun Comics. Please head on over and share your comments, and also the love. As for the Journal, fingers crossed but regular updating should resume on Monday.

Tim Burton’s Batman was marketed as a return to Batman’s darker roots as a sinister, pulpy vigilante. The last Bond film was a heck of a lot closer to the literature than any of the others, and I’ve written before about how much I like the original Golden Age Superman. But it’s actually a different kind of superhero that I really get fandementalist about, and a uniquely Welsh one: King Arthur.

Health and safety warning: This post has come out a little angrier than intended, so feel free to step around the thoroughly misdirected anguish.

I have bored my nearest and dearest rigid over the years while ranting about the common perception of the character versus his earliest roots. The bits that authors and screenwriters have picked up and run with over the years all seem to be later additions (Camelot, chivalry, stoned swords, knights in armour, fucking Lancelot), with the really interesting Celtic backstory largely buried. Good grief, you should have heard me whine when the last Hollywood outing decided Arthur was a Russian. First Knight? Scottish. Or John Boorman’s Excalibur: why of course Arthur was from the West Country! Anything at all, as long as he’s not a Welshman.

I used to get het up about it. Not so much, anymore, because five minutes on any given superhero message board is enough to pull me back from the edge. It’s all about interpretation, after all, and some stories become too big just for one world view.

That said, it would be great if the original legends were recognised once in a while. After all, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Arthur as a Brythonic war leader, propaganda that was almost a plea to preserve Celtic history in the face of cultural colonisation by Saxons, Norsemen, and whoever else took a fancy to Geoffrey’s island. The tragedy is that so much of this early culture, the language, myths and tradition of this group of people, were lost, through deliberate suppression and a lack of a coherent written language. What fragments we have, of poetry in Old Welsh, the four branches of the Mabinogi, Arthurian tales that predate Geoffrey, all seem to point to a richer vein of stories we will never be able to retrieve.

There is so much great stuff in the early stories. Arthur’s army was jam packed full of people with super-powers, for a start. Seriously, they were like the fucking Justice League. One guy ran faster than anyone else in the kingdom, another guy could see further than anyone else, one of them was a superb marksman. And instead, what we get is an endless retread of fucking Lancelot banging the king’s wife. Want to know how that part of the story came about? The bit about Lancelot, a French knight, stealing away the wife of the man perceived at the time as the greatest English king of them all, was cut-and-pasted into the legend by a Frenchman. Well, I know which film I’d rather see, and it doesn’t have Richard bloody Gere in it.

But the two characters who get the biggest shaft are the two original ‘knights’, Cai and Bedwyr. Through the various mutations of the story, they go from being Arthur’s closest companions and greatest warriors to the treacherous, obnoxious and ineffectual Sir Kay and Bedevere, the weak-willed buffoon who can’t bring himself to fulfil Arthur’s dying wish. Who do we get instead? Fucking Lancelot.

Anyway, this post should be enough to convince you that not even the passage of a thousand-odd years can quell the flame of fanboy outrage. But my final point is that some things really are better when taken back to their roots, when the accumulated bullcrap of successive iterations are scraped away, and that maybe the original Welsh superhero should get the second chance that reinvigorated so many of his 20th Century descendents.

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Sorry folks, but it’s been one thing after the other this week at the Journal. I’m afraid we’re going to have to skip today’s update.

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101st post, that is.

Still fighting the malevolent goblins of technical malfunction here (although this time it’s related to my car of all things, and I don’t mean in a Knight-Rider-KITT’s-onboard-processor’s-being-hacked kind of way. Speaking of which, more on KITT later.) Your scheduled words will be along a little later.

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And here we arrive at a milestone: Post #100, almost half a year of continuous, erm, content. Since the 15th of October 2007 there’s been something up every day, Monday and Friday, excluding Christmas.

Interestingly (and I mean that in the broadest possible context) I still feel a nagging guilt that 25th of December got left out. Partly because I did have something planned, but didn’t get around to finishing it. Maybe Winter ‘08, we’ll see.

But I also feel vaguely uneasy about it because it’s broken the pattern a little. And that’s the real lesson with something like this; when something becomes a habit, it’s actually more difficult to stop than to carry on. Which is a good thing. If a little obsessive/compulsive.

(Let me drop in a quote from the Christmas-related post that cracked me up the most last year over at Mick Trimble’s Secret Identity: “My Dad would not let me and my brothers believe in Father Christmas. He said, and I’m paraphrasing; ‘I work fucking hard all year to pay for your presents, and I’m not letting some imaginary fat cunt from Lapland get all the glory!’ He’s got a point, but I reckon it took a little of the magic away from the festivities.”)

Let’s see if we can navigate the choppy seas of suddenly patchy internet connection through the next hundred.

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Do you know how close the Journal is to becoming a site devoted to cat pictures? This close. You can’t see me right now but I’m holding my right thumb and forefinger really close together. And I’ll be doing so all day for the benefit of those in different time zones.

Fractal Films

Cloverfield (2008)

I couldn’t possibly do better than this here Cloverfield summary.

A thoroughly good giant monster flick with a nice little hand-held camera gimmick, it hit every mark it needed to by doing exactly what it says on the tin. I don’t know why so many people seem to find it disappointing, as I’m not quite sure what else you could demand from a film about a big creature eating people and buildings. It hardly uneventful, and the dialogue was as witty as you’d expect from a guy who used to write for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (cf. AVPR, a movie written so badly the abbreviated title sounds like a tax form). Possibly the viral marketing left too much room for speculation; I remember getting a little overexcited myself when I thought it might have been a Cthulhu Mythos thing.

Interesting to see that a number of reviews mention how much the reviewer loathes people talking loudly in the cinema. Now, this seems to come up a lot, in particular when people talk about why they don’t want to go to the cinema anymore, or why ticket sales are in decline. My question is, is this specifically an American behaviour, or does it happen on this side of the Pond too and I’m oblivious? I honestly don’t remember the last time I got annoyed by someone talking during a film. So either I’m just not noticing it, it isn’t really a problem in South Wales, or (entirely possible) I’m the annoying one doing all the talking.

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)

Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing is just about the greatest thing that’s ever been on television. I even really like the series after his departure, on the grounds that sub-par West Wing is still way smarter than most things that get turded through the airwaves. But as much as I enjoyed Studio 60, this is the first work he’s done for a number of years that’s come close to the former show. It manages to be tragic, moving, hilarious, with a particularly scathing irony aimed at US political maneuvering in light of the eventual result of arming the Afghan resistance. And you shouldn’t need me to tell you how good Philip Seymour Hoffman is in just about anything he does. Perhaps the only significant fault it’s that it sidesteps any mention of oil or petroleum interests, which is, you know, not an inconsequential factor in the history of the region.

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