Review: Stealing Cthulhu

 

WALMSLEY, Graham, with Kenneth Hite, Gareth Hanrahan & Jason Morningstar (Jennifer Rodgers & Olli Hihnala, illus.; Harriet Evans, ed.), Stealing Cthulhu, the author, Chippenham Wilts. UK, 2011

Octavo; hardcover, with illustrated boards; 178pp. with monochrome illustrations. Minor wear; spine extremities softened; marginal notations in ink throughout. No dustwrapper as issued. Very good.

I don’t do a lot of roleplaying anymore. In other lives it was all I did, weekends, after hours, holidays. I had a regular gaming crowd and other groups available for one-offs and scratch games. Then there was the convention circuit. I wrote a bunch of adventures for all kinds of systems and genres and I learnt a lot about narrative and refereeing techniques and styles along the way. Nowadays, I don’t have a roleplaying crowd, because life has intruded far too much: what free time I have is used up by other demands and – co-ordinating with other like-minded people and finding say, three hours spare to do stuff in? – forget it. It ain’t happening. I was talking with a friend about this situation the other day and we spoke of ways in which ‘fast and dirty’ games could be generated, allowing time – if time could be allocated – to be used efficiently and with less waste. To this end he loaned me this book.

Graham Walmsley has written a textbook that attempts to tell Keepers of all levels of competency how to prepare and conduct horror games based on Lovecraft’s oeuvre. He wades through some of HPL’s best-known works and drags out the essential qualities that makes these narratives work, demonstrating how they can be re-engineered for a roleplaying format. He breaks down the construction of narrative through-put logically and systematically, covering topics such as Beginnings and Endings, Creating Narrative “Distance” (essential for building dread), and The Investigator. As he proceeds, marginal comments by Kenneth Hite et.al. are inserted into the page edges, commenting on – and sometimes forcefully disagreeing with – Walmsley’s material (where these are legible – handwriting styles vary). With this particular copy, there’s an extra bonus: Walmsley has hand-written further marginal material on the pages, addressed to my friend, a long-time correspondent and contributor to the Kickstarter campaign behind this book.

The word “stealing” in the title is a bit annoying. The author’s stated aim is that all sorts of things in Lovecraft’s works can be “stolen” for the purpose of adapting them into a roleplaying context. That’s fine, but the word gets hammered like a brand name throughout the book and it gets old very quickly. Especially when you consider that Lovecraft himself was more than open to other writers taking his concepts and having a play with them: can you steal from someone who’s giving away their stuff for free? What he’s talking about here is borrowing and adaptation, appropriation at some level. Is the loaded word “stealing” meant to imply some kind of cowboy mentality? Some sort of devil-may-care attitude, perhaps? I mean, come on, it’s roleplaying for God’s sake – we’re not getting down with the cool kids here. It was off-putting for me frankly, and I had to consciously steel myself against it before continuing.

Regardless, there’s lots to like in this book, especially if you’re interested in the narrative techniques of HPL. Walmsley breaks down many of the major works in terms of their narrative structures, highlighting what works best and what occasionally operates against the author’s intent, and giving plenty of advice about how to use these techniques in a roleplaying scenario. He discusses plot structure, word use - how to construct descriptions so that they fall into the rhythm of Lovecraft’s material - and, most of all how to turn a story from one of straight horror to one of Cosmic Horror. There are plenty of useful insights to be found here.

Conversely, there’s a somewhat formulaic approach to Lovecraft’s work taking place. Walmsley insists that Keepers not be “afraid” of HPL’s narratives and urges us to simply replay those stories where possible, recycling them for our gaming crowds much as a movie reproduces a print story, putting a personal “spin” on things. He urges us to not treat the canon as something holy, but to take those sacred cows and make hamburgers out of them. I’m afraid this is where Mr. Walmsley and I part company.

I spend a lot – a lot! – of time trying to preserve the canon and to work with it, such that nothing is lost and that all of it makes sense, even when it’s inherently contradictory. It’s a high wire act. Accordingly, when someone pairs Shoggoths with the MiGo, for example, for me they had better make a compelling case for something not supported by the published material. Walmsley doesn’t do this, by the way, but his approach to writing Mythos material certainly has the potential to let it happen. Again, this is a personal gripe which others won’t be bothered by.

In essence, Walmsley turns the bulk of the stories by Lovecraft (and Colin Wilson and Ramsey Campbell) into pared-back frames, into which a bunch of ‘plug-and-play’ tropes and other concepts can be inserted, supporting a number of thematic styles. Thus, if you want to play with concepts of ‘Time’ you run the “Shadow Out of Time” framework inserting the Great Race of Yith as antagonists; if ‘Possession’ is your theme, then your framework is the “Insects from Shaggai” and you stick in the Shan (obviously) or Yithians once more. And the MiGo apparently are our ‘go to’ guys for doing pretty much anything else. Each antagonist has its own array of features: the Lloigor have Minions; the MiGo have Technology; Flying Polyps have Elemental Control. All of these addenda are thrashed out in individual chapters but there are glaring omissions – no Ghouls, for example – although, to be fair, Walmsley clearly states that creatures not covered in the text can be built using similar critters as templates. (There are some that I found odd – my reading of the Colour out of Space is that it’s an effect, a contagion; Walmsley ascribes sentience and will to it – as a species of alien - which doesn’t seem at all appropriate to me, or supported by the text.)

The processes discussed in this book reminded me a lot of an article I read in “Dragon Magazine” way back in the 80s. In that text, the writer stated that he had no advance warning about a gaming session which he was expected to referee. The game was “Gamma World” and in desperation he turned to things that he had in his workspace: a book of old castles provided a working map and a quirky miniature of a carrot-headed creature (possibly a Flaming Carrot gaming piece?) suggested the mutants du jour. In short order – explained step-by-step - he had a game involving the penetration of the secret underground base – an ex-nuclear missile silo – of the Karit tribe (or something like that – it was a while ago!). Walmsley’s treatment of Mythos gaming here is very like this – pick one from column A, take two from Column B. It’s quite formulaic.

Walmsley also encourages Keepers to flip environments and settings, with no regard for the rationales for these things in the original stories. Thus, since “At the Mountains of Madness” is set in Antarctica, he suggests re-locating the story elsewhere – the Amazon, for example – and, accordingly, “Shadow Over Innsmouth” can be dropped easily into the heart of some desert. Now, this may be true, and as a means of brainstorming ideas for a roleplaying game it’s well-travelled ground. But it all seems a bit haphazard here: any story can be pared back to its essentials until it loses all connexion to the original version so there comes a point when you’re not really running a Lovecraft narrative, and swapping in-and-out antagonistic monsters willy-nilly smacks of computer gaming and random “Boss” generation, rather than any kind of considered roleplaying gaming structure. At its most fundamental, this system advocates stuff that is the roleplaying equivalent of the “Howard Lovecraft” animations.

(Pinning down the monsters in this way kind of robs them of their mystery too. Running an “If Deep One (or whatever) then X” protocol for each beastie in question, seems a bit overly simple. Too much like August Derleth trying to ‘explain’ everything with a single (elemental) theory. On top of this, the author states that if your various combinations don’t make sense, then just run with it – the Mythos defies rational explanation. Can you say, “cop out”? Nice try.)

Now, I get it: taking on the role of referee in any roleplaying game is daunting, especially for those who’ve never done it before, so any guide that shows you how the techniques work and makes it seem less forbidding is a good thing. This book is a valuable resource in that regard. However, in terms of narrative construction, it oversimplifies the process unnecessarily, taking a structural and mathematical approach to something that is essentially not able to be – completely – reduced to these terms. Roleplaying cannot be reduced to a bunch of computer game algorithms. I mean, it can, but who wants that? Further, the material reveals the personal peccadilloes of the author which might not have been so obvious except that the commentators have been allowed to scribble in the margins highlighting these biases. Walmsley clearly likes the MiGo, Lloigors and the Colour out of Space and there is an inordinate amount of text provided for them; comments asking where overlooked creatures – and the stories which highlighted them – have gone, only serve to underscore the shortcomings of the text. And, in a post-Trump era, I’ll bet he regrets that snide jab about Obama being a mask of Nyarlathotep too.

This is horses for courses. If you find yourself needing to come up with a “Call of Cthulhu” scenario in no time at all, then this is your first port of call. It’s incredibly useful in that regard. But wouldn’t you rather present a carefully constructed, considered story to your group, rather than just “The Whisperer in Darkness” on ice? Or “Call of Cthulhu” with Azathoth standing-in for the Big C? I know what I’d prefer.

The format of the book leaves a little to be desired also. I get it that someone thought it would be cute to have other notable roleplaying scribes doodle in the margins and make their own comments, but it’s also distracting and some of the comments don’t make a lot of sense – they’re minute and constrained by being marginal, and so some relevance gets lost. But Walmsley also works like this in the main text: there are a lot of throwaway one liners and footnotes that confuse otherwise salient points. An instance of note is how often he whacks out a footnote, or a tangential sentence, stating “this is a General rule…”; I would have preferred a list of these rules and their explication at some point in the main text, rather than having to scrabble through various afterthought insertions looking for them.

I am, frankly, in two minds about this book. It’s a solid resource for anyone who wants to write their own Call of Cthulhu roleplaying material, but it feels a bit reductionist to me and a slave to its cute design concept. If you’re interested in HPL’s writing technique, there’s a lot here to inform about his process. If you’re trying to write a computer game featuring the Mythos, then this is a solidly number-crunchy architectural overview for that project. And if you’re running or writing a roleplaying scenario, it’s a good foundation to work from, although – in terms of writing one - it’s incredibly simplified and you’ll need to finesse your stories in order to make them convincing. That being said, there’s a lot of good material here about improvisational technique, narrative engineering, refereeing tips, and the addition of colour which can be applied to any campaign, new or ongoing.

Roleplaying is many things to many people. For some it’s about mathematical probability and modelling; for others it’s about improvisational theatre; for most, it’s somewhere between these extremes. The main issue that this book has is that it assumes gaming, and the process of writing scenarios, follows a single format when it absolutely does not. Read this book: it has lots of good advice and some great insights. At some point though, your ideas of what a Mythos-based roleplaying game is, and those of the author, will diverge dramatically. Be prepared for that and you’ll still get some value from it.

Three Tentacled Horrors. And "catacomb".

Who Goes There?

CAMPBELL Jr., John W., The Thing From Another World – Cherry Tree Book no.408, Fantasy Books/Cherry Tree Novels/Kemsley Newspapers Ltd., London, nd. (c.1950s).

Octavo; paperback; 192pp. Mild wear; covers rubbed and edgeworn with some light creasing text block edges lightly toned with some spotting; light foxing to the preliminaries; original printed price on the front cover scribbled out and a new price added in ink. Very good.

In 1938, writing under a pseudonym, John W. Campbell Jr. wrote a short story which was destined to become a touchstone of 1950s Cold War drama. “Who Goes There?” (later re-published as “The Thing from Another World” or just “The Thing”) was a tale about research scientists trapped in Antarctica who discover a frozen alien creature, one that can shift its form to replicate virtually any living organism. Once it escapes confinement, the story becomes less about the discovery of an unmentionable horror, and transforms into one of infiltration, hidden danger and paranoia. It’s a very effective format and informed much of horror cinema in the years after its publication, including such films as “Invaders from Mars”, “The Bodysnatchers” and “The Blob”, all the while feeding off the real-world paranoia that tensions between Russia and the US were brewing. Inevitably it was turned into a movie itself which we will investigate below.

The print version is an interesting read. It eschews any attempt at grand guignol, in your face horror, relying instead on inference and suggestion to unfold its drama. In this way it heightens the notion that, even in a close-knit community, it’s impossible to keep track of everyone all of the time. The action tends to glide over the attacks by the monster and jump to a narrative moment afterwards when some attempt at re-grouping and evaluation takes place. Most descriptions of the creature are quite oblique. In this way it’s quite a confusing read too, and you have to work to keep track of who’s who (which is quite likely the point!).

The locale and all of the characters are established in this version: McReady our hero, biologist Blair and Copper the medic, and Commander Garry the team leader, among others. Later film iterations dispense with some of this detail, even the location at times. McReady – like many science fiction heroes of the day – is described as mythical in proportion, and there’s a clear debt to the Doc Savage novels going on with him:

“Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood… And he was bronze – his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing, gripping, relaxing, on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.”

It’s evident that they had this description firmly in mind when casting Kurt Russell as McReady in the John Carpenter film.

The decision to base the story in Antarctica is likely a derivation from Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”, although the story is in no way a copycat version of that other narrative – it is clearly its own beast. The sense of isolation, claustrophobia and the threat of the unknown are definite hallmarks of both tales, however. The decision to use the name ‘Copper’ for one of the characters is also interesting – perhaps an homage to Basil Copper, the author of the Lovecraftian novel “The Great White Space”? All of these works begin with the idea of entering the unknown and discovering strange realities; it is only in Campbell’s story where we see the strangeness exploring as well and entering our – from its perspective - unknown reality.

The other clear debt to “Mountains” is the level of scientific exactitude that is on display here. Everything about the scientific base and the roles and duties of its occupants is laid out for the reader in almost excruciating detail. To be fair, these kinds of stories – where the location is the important ‘character X’ that finishes the cast list – do require this amount of exposition, otherwise the closed-in sense of being trapped, the limited amounts of resources and the high level of the stakes involved cannot be adequately conveyed. Lovecraft knew this; Campbell Jr. does too.

There is a lot of conversation that happens here as well. Once the nature of the Thing starts to be discerned, there’s quite a bit of theorizing and cogitation about its origins that takes place. Much of it – especially to people who generally know the deal as far as this story is concerned – is wildly off piste and fantastical but nevertheless is probably just the sort of discussion that would take place in the face of this nightmare. A thing I particularly like, and which I had overlooked on my first reading way back when, was that the creature has an active and telepathic sentience which expresses itself in the dreams of those sleeping nearby, even while it is frozen solid: this resonates highly with the sort of things Lovecraft discusses in his tales about the unbidden malevolence of the Mythos.

The reason that this tale had so great an impact is that it spoke directly to fears of Communist infiltration which were being wildly disseminated in the US at the time of its release. Communists were a real threat, it was assumed; they looked like us and they acted like us: there was no way to tell who was who. Replacing them with the symbol of the creature from an alien planet, these fears were crystallised and made manifest. The enemy was a “Red under the Bed”, as much as it was a Thing from Another World.

NYBY, Christian & Howard Hawks (Dirs.), “The Thing from Another World”, Winchester Pictures, 1951.

It was inevitable that someone would turn the story into a movie, such was its popularity. The bonus in this regard, is that it was possible to script the narrative such that it could dispense with any over-the-top special effects and boil the particulars down to an intense psychological study. Much of film noir had been taking this approach up until this time so the techniques were well-known and easily implemented. That being said however, the writer and directors decided to jettison all notions of a shapeshifting infiltrator from their script and reduced the story to a simple alien invasion premise.

In this version, the scene is set in Alaska, and the scientists are combined with some US Air Force flyboys. Tracking a magnetic anomaly in the district that’s throwing off compass readings, the group discovers what they initially think is a large meteor – it is in fact a UFO or flying saucer. They try to excavate it using thermite bombs but accidentally blow the whole thing to pieces: the only thing that they are able to recover is the body of a strange creature trapped nearby in the ice. This is entirely in line with what happens in the short story – the scientists, unable to identify the metal that the craft is made of, use too much thermite and set fire to the device, blowing it up and almost killing themselves at the same time.

Taking the ice-bound creature back to their base, they place a watch upon it whilst awaiting further instructions from military headquarters. Immediately the group fractures between the idealism of the science boffins led by Dr Carrington and the harsh practicalities of the military types. Inevitably the Thing defrosts and escapes, and it becomes a scenario of Communicate or Kill, with both sides of the equation seeking to outmanoeuvre each other in attaining their goals.

Given its 1950s roots, the ‘good guys’ in the tale inevitably turn out to be the military faction. They are all rough and ready, down-to-earth types while the scientists all come off as a bit fey and unconnected to reality. Dialogue, as is typical of this era, is quick-fire, dense and often muttered so it’s tricky to follow in places if you’re not used to the style. All the men are tough and bloke-y while the women – there are some in this version – are suitably compliant, according to the mores of the time.

The Thing’s motivation is a vampiric one – it wants blood in order to reproduce, which it does by budding like a plant. The scientists sneakily take some cuttings and propagate some seedlings but are quickly shut down by the flyboys. The group barricades itself inside, away from the horror, and devise a plan to kill it if it should enter. It does; they do; everyone cracks wry jokes and lights up their cigarettes: problem solved. For all the talk about aliens and their supposed “great wisdom” it’s all wrapped up with very little difficulty. There’s even time to foster a little romance along the way.

The film looks good and does what it sets out to do with little fanfare; it follows the plot of the story fairly didactically, although it dispenses entirely with what makes the original tale so thrilling – the paranoia and claustrophobia. There are many lingering shots of aeroplanes, and I can only assume that they were the contribution of producer/director Howard Hawks and are the main reason he gets a director credit. The movie was shot partly in Montana’s Glacier National Park and partly in a meat-packing plant in Los Angeles, so all of the scenes of ice and snow ring convincingly true.

CARPENTER, John (Dir.), “The Thing”, Universal Studios, 1982.

In this version, Carpenter puts back all of the essential elements of Campbell Jr.’s original work. The Thing is no longer just a rampaging monster to be casually electrocuted the moment it kicks down a door; here, it resumes its original conception as a shapeshifter and infiltrator. That being said though, Carpenter remains essentially faithful to the material created by Nyby and Hawks: there are constant callbacks to the first film – the title and its appearance melting into view on the screen; the explorers standing in a circle on the ice to plot the dimensions of the sunken alien craft; even the tough-guy attitude of the protagonists remains. For the most part however, he returns to the original story: we are in Antarctica once more and the familiar names – McReady, Blair, Copper, Garry - pepper the script.

The film begins with a long sequence of a helicopter chasing a dog across a wide expanse of snow. The dog runs into the Americans’ camp and the Norwegians aboard the chopper follow it, guns blazing, at which point the Yanks respond in kind, rescuing the animal and killing the Scandinavians. The dog of course is the Thing, on the loose having decimated the Norwegian settlement and its personnel. Once the dog has been welcomed inside, it’s all over bar the shouting (and screaming).

In this version, McReady is a pilot with a stupid hat, physically modelled on Campbell Jr.’s depiction, but free of the world-weariness and introspection of that prototype. He drinks heavily and takes risks and can’t tell the difference between Norwegians and Swedes. We are introduced to the other team members and their peccadilloes, and we see the tensions already in the group that will inevitably blossom forth once the Thing has had its way. Given its ‘80s roots, there’s some political incorrectness at play in the casting – the expedition cook here is black, in line with the fact that the cook was Chinese in the Nyby/Hawks film – but it’s not too egregious overall. There’s also the casual attitude to marijuana, which seems to be a hallmark of horror movies at this time (cf. Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” in the same year). I was left wondering – in an environment where the largest wild creature you’d be likely to meet is either a penguin or a seal – why there were so many guns and so much alcohol lying around; but I figure, Yanks gotta Yank.

Of course, what this film is really known for is its special effects which were cutting edge at the time. There is no use of CGI here – everything is done practically and, even today, it stands up incredibly well. Much better than 2019’s “The Colour out of Space”, for instance. The scenes between the grotesque body-horror moments where everyone is trying to work out who has been affected by the creature and who hasn’t, are suitably tense and are a nice callback to the same moments in the original book. The ending is nicely equivocal too, which is quite classy.

VAN HEIJNINGEN, Matthijs (Dir.), “The Thing”, Morgan Creek Productions/Universal Pictures/Strike Entertainment, 2011.

This film, released in 2011, is posited as a prequel to the events depicted in Carpenter’s 1982 movie. It takes place almost entirely within the Norwegian camp that Kurt Russell and his cronies investigate in the earlier film and reveals where the creature came from – something that the 1951 movie shows but which Carpenter relegated to some found footage in his version. To this end, the makers of this movie spent a whole bunch of time making sure that what we see during this flick tracks more-or-less directly with what is seen in the Carpenter film. Thus, where McReady finds an axe stuck in a wall in the Norse camp, we get to see just how it came to be there. This is all fine, however it means that the film doesn’t really say anything new about the matter at hand.

Blokey-ness reigns supreme once more as we meet a bunch of slovenly Norwegian guys who drink and fart and tell filthy jokes to pass the time. Into this arrangement comes Mary Elisabeth Winstead’s character as a scientist, dropped off there by two American helicopter pilots, who are immediately forced to hang around due to the bad weather. The creature is found in the ice and taken indoors to be thawed out; it revives and goes on a rampage; yada, yada, yada. In an homage to the 1951 film, they also take the time to destroy the creature’s spacecraft with thermite charges, but deliberately this time: not by accident. With newer technologies – this time a blending of practical and CGI effects – the horror manifestations are less clunky and more seamless, but, as I said, there’s nothing really new to add to the mix. By the time the dog heads for the hills being pursued by two Norwegian guys in a helicopter, we know exactly what comes next.

This is a very well-made film and doesn’t really deserve the hate that seems to bubble up online every time it gets mentioned. It channels a bit of “Alien” and “The Predator” into its narrative mix but its only real weakness is that it doesn’t break any new ground. Fortunately, it doesn’t fall prey to the many tropes that Hollywood is prone to when it comes to sequels – ‘More is More’, or ‘The Maximising Card’, immediately spring to mind – and, in that it takes time to honour what has gone before, it stands up pretty well as far as I’m concerned. And it’s good to see some non-American actors strut their stuff for once.

(It’s interesting to note the difference in pronunciation between cultures here as well. Americans all tend to say “Ant-arctica” or “Ant-artica”, while others pronounce it “An-tarctica”. Wandering through these films really highlights the disparity!)

NUTTER, David (Dir.), “The X-Files Season One: Ice”, Ten Thirteen Productions/Twentieth Century Fox, 1993.

This episode kind of demands an inclusion in this list simply because it riffs off all the notions of the films and stories that went before it. It’s clear that the writers were deliberately channeling the source material – one of the characters who dies in the pre-credit sequence is even called “Campbell”, a clear invocation of the original author.

The story revolves around the discovery, in the Alaskan ice, of a species of alien worm that parasitizes its host, making them behave erratically in order to achieves the worm’s ultimate survival aims. Pinned down in claustrophobic proximity, the science geeks split from the government goons in a critical face-off, while a time-intensive cure is developed, and no-one knows who is infected and who isn’t. There’s even a pilot character who looks like Kurt Russell. Ultimately, the fate of the planet is resolved, and humanity is saved.

Personally, I don’t like this episode because it’s too deliberately arch and contrived. The actors have all obviously been told to dial up the drama, becoming shrill and unbearable, and in doing so, break character quite badly. Still, it pays direct homage to the source fiction as well as both previous film versions, incorporating some of the better elements from both of those iterations.

*****

This story and the themes it riffs off – paranoia, mistrust, isolation – are all good things to hang a “Call of Cthulhu” story from. In fact, there is a write up of the monster in the rule book. It’s possible to just replay one of these cinematic versions with your own team, or to set up the scenario in some other way. There are some things to keep in mind however.

The first is that these creatures are deadly – not that any “CoC” beasties aren’t – but just one of them will take a hideous toll on your group of regular players. You might wish to treat such a scenario as a one-off, with everyone rolling up some new characters. You should probably only try this with a set of experienced players as well, or a group who are quite comfortable gaming together. Issues of trust can extend further than just the imaginary world in which the action takes place.

It’s possible, as well, to play a scenario of this nature in “Live Action Roleplaying” mode, if you have a team that’s willing to dress up and go for it. There are extant gaming styles – such as “Werewolf”, where one player is a secret monster that needs to co-opt as many of the other players as possible without the non-monsters finding out – that can be adapted to this kind of story.

The other thing that needs consideration is setting. In the canon tales, the events take place in isolated and cold environments. Isolation is key for generating the kind of paranoia that makes this type of narrative work: having limited supplies and resources definitely ramps up the stakes. The other thing is that it gives the party a goal. If the monster gets free of the locale and makes its way to inhabited territory, then the fate of the world hangs in the balance – this should be the primary driving motivation for your heroes. I said “should be” but this isn’t always necessarily the case. In the canon, the inaccessibility of the Antarctic (or Alaskan) wastes forms an ideal environment; however, there’s no reason why you can’t set the story in a remote jungle, or a deep mine, or even underwater.

Temperature comes to mind too. All of these stories are set in the cold, but we’re told that the Things come from a hot planet: perhaps if they were in a climate more like their home world, they might be even nastier than they appear in these stories?

Technology is something to consider also. At the end of Campbell Jr.’s story, the Thing manages to build a nuclear fusion reactor, an alien hand weapon, and an anti-gravity jet pack out of some old soup tins and other odds-and-ends in just under a week. Taking the weapons capabilities of the Mi-Go or the Great Race of Yith as a guide, you can outfit your baddies with all kinds of nasty surprises!

Finally, there’s that telepathy. In order to work properly and to give your players some kind of advantage, you will need to think about how exactly it functions. In the rulebook, it’s listed as a skill which means that the creature must actively use the ability in order to gain information, noting that the skill level is 99% which makes it almost a fait accompli. You might wish to work it as a contested roll based on Intelligence instead, just to stop the Things from becoming virtually omniscient. The creatures’ ambient ability to ‘seed’ dreams is also a good way to feed vital clues about the situation to the party members if they seem to lose track of the scenario.

And that’s it. From the pages of early science fiction writing and the vaults of classic cinema, a solid gaming mainstay that can be brought to almost any type of horror roleplaying. Don’t forget your mittens! 

Review: “Deep Blue Sea 3”

 

POGUE, John (Dir.), “Deep Blue Sea 3”, Roserock Productions/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2020.

This is my 550^th post at this blog and I thought I would commemorate it by doing something a little trademark-y, something representative of what I do here on a regular basis. Looking around though, there was little of a Lovecraftian nature that I had to hand to discuss. I thought of doing a Library Generation Table but my eyes began to glaze over; ditto another Phobia. I thought – “was there a Rip-It-&-Run subject to explore?” - there was not. I was already committed to doing handouts for “Spawn of Azathoth” but that’s an Herculean task that will go on seemingly forever. So, I went out into the world to see if I could find something and – bam! – I found this: a shark flick. That would do nicely.

To be honest, I hadn’t heard that there was a “Deep Blue Sea 2” – obviously, it wasn’t deemed worthy of an antipodean cinema or video release - and – looking up reviews of it online – I can see why. It gets universally panned as the absolute worst kind of horror-show. The first movie still rates as one of my favourite action/horror films, despite some woeful inclusions, but I’ve never thought that it was remotely worthy of a sequel. Obviously, I don’t work in movie production! Exploring further though, it seems that this film is a sequel to the second, not necessarily of the first, given that there’s very little that connects the initial movie with its so-called follow-up.

The basic premise of all these movies is that deluded science-y types find a reason to increase the size of shark’s brains and become shocked to discover that they then get smarter! We’re told in “Deep Blue Sea” that the purpose of this tinkering is to develop a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease, a worthy goal in and of itself. Why they chose to experiment on Mako sharks though, is one of the glaring and unanswered questions which I took away with me: surely a Wobbegong or a Basking Shark, even a sizable Grey Nurse, or Whale Shark would have sufficed? And how about rays? Manta Rays are plenty big and they’re definitely not equipped with teeth. Essentially, they could have picked on a bunch of sharks that are way down on the aggression scale, but no – they had to go hard, or go home.

Of course, one reason that they needed Mako sharks (for the purposes of the movie, not the tenuous reasoning of the plot) was that Mako sharks jump. In the first film they destroy the underwater research base because sinking it drops the height of the sea pen fences and allows them to jump over them to freedom. In “Deep Blue Sea 2” and three, it’s Bull Sharks that get the gong. Why Bull Sharks? Well, interestingly, these are one of very few sharks species who sport a gland near their cloaca which absorbs and releases salt into and out of the shark’s system as needed, allowing them to spend extended periods in fresh water, should they so choose. Bull Sharks notoriously occupy river mouths in Australia and South Africa during fish spawning seasons and many swimming folk who believe that they’re safe outside of salt water often get the (last) surprise of their lives. Bull Sharks have been found in freshwater lakes and dams 80kms inland from the Queensland coast after hurricanes and floods left them stranded there. Look up the word “adaptable” in a dictionary, you’ll see a picture of a Bull Shark.

Not having seen the second film I’m unsure if there was a pseudo-scientific rationale for using Bull Sharks; but, in this movie, we don’t have to worry about that – here, we learn that three male sharks have escaped the science facility along with their mother, and that their spawning corporate agency is keen to re-capture or kill them before they cause any trouble. That’s the kind of trouble that only sharks with mega-brains and the ability to swim in fresh water can devise which, from what happens next, is not that worrisome, compared to what the humans get up to.

Like the first film, this narrative is built upon a bog-standard Cyberpunk premise: big, flashy science is happening, paid for by Corporate cash, and vested Corporate goals are slowly revealed as the plot unfolds, prompting questions along the lines of ‘sure, we can; but should we?’. In this instalment, there’s a lot of talk about climate change (which they get hopelessly wrong, but kudos for bringing it up anyway) and the impact of rising sea levels on coastal communities (human and otherwise). Our science boffins are monitoring Great White Sharks offshore from an abandoned island fishing community named “Little Happy” (for reasons). They have an “AI” and underwater sensors which track every creature moving in the water around the island and our intrepid boffin-leader is best friends with the Alpha-female Great White, named “Sally”. Into this peaceful environment blunders a shipload of muscularly testosteronal corporate thugs who commandeer Little Happy in order to destroy the rogue Bull Sharks who have moved in, treating it as a convenient smorgasbord. Arguments ensue about whether they should capture or kill the sharks, and it quickly becomes obvious that the corporate bad-guys just want to cover their tracks by killing the creatures – and any- or everything else along with them – as quickly as possible. That includes the humans. It rapidly becomes a fight to save Little Happy from the baddies who want to blow it to Kingdom Come.

It takes some time – with some unexpected singing along the way – to get to this stage in the proceedings and there’s a lot of high-minded philosophising en route which only serves to make sure that the audience gets in some useful eye exercises – by rolling them. A lot. And when everyone gets down to it in the end – when we know exactly where everyone stands in this scenario – the final action sequences are peculiarly lacklustre. There are a couple of fist fights, an explosion, a (heavily narratively-weighted) spear is thrown (which misses), and the last shark swims into a… is it a telephone booth? An air-conditioning unit? It’s annoyingly unclear what this thing is and it’s not at all flagged at the start of the movie, but it pops the last shark quite effectively, whatever it was. I was sensing the absence of a scene, cut from an earlier edit of the movie, that should have been left in… I was also left wondering whether the film crew had ever even seen an action movie before, so unhandily was all of this managed.

And that fiendish anal gland of the Bull Sharks, allowing them to breathe fresh water? ‘Doesn’t come up. ‘Doesn’t get used in the story at all. At one point the bad guys claim that the sharks attacked someone in an African river, but it turns out that they were lying to (literally) cover their tracks. So why mention it at all? Maybe there was a point to it in the previous film…

Like many other movies of this type, it was fairly obvious going in who would die and who would live. This franchise (and I’m still amazed that it has become a franchise) has established some ground rules to cover this sort of thing: if you’re black, you live; if you’re in a relationship with another character, you die; if you’re a useful tech-head, you die; if you’re an overly-idealistic researcher, you die. They mix it up a little here, but the Hollywood Morality Playbook fine-tunes the rest of the details. Interestingly, it’s clear by the end of the film that the story creators deliberately wanted only the female characters to survive the ordeal so, if you twig to this early on, you’ll be able to relax for the rest of the run-time. Seriously: even the female shark makes it to the end credits.

Most of the movie is well acted and nicely photographed and all the reasons that they make these types of films are summarily ticked off: good-looking actors in skimpy clothes with gorgeous scenery and pretty fish – checkity-check-check-check. My question is that none of the things that matter in the movie – all of the MacGuffins and the important equipment which will be useful later on – get flagged. Often, it’s unclear where we are, and why that’s important (it’s nowhere near as bad as the second “47 Metres Down” but it’s almost as annoying). The local restauranteur finds a big gnarly spear as the chips start to come down in the final act, but it serves no purpose during the climax – Chekov would’ve been screaming at the screen. Finally, the sharks are a bit naff. In the first “Deep Blue Sea”, the sharks were real: they were made from modified jet engines covered in latex shark suits; they were remote-controlled and they actually swam through the water, physically interacting with the actors. There were the occasional moments where you could see the rubber seams but, for the most part, they were incredibly effective. Here, all the fish are CGI and it’s bad. Fins that break the surface have this cute little flick and wriggle towards the tip that completely reads false and instantly destroys suspension of disbelief. The underwater scenes look cheap and nasty – like the kinds of modelling they used in “Sharknado”. “The Shallows” this ain’t. They should have just taken a leaf from Renny Harlin’s book and used real(ish) sharks.

So, that’s it – 550 posts and yet another shark flick. I’ve never made a secret of the fact that I think that these films stem from dark and icky parts of the human psyche and are trading off the perceived threat that sharks pose to humans (minimal) and funding from the witchcraft that is Chinese medicine. In this year of Coronavirus lockdowns, I can almost see this film as a kind of public service announcement telling people to stay away from the beach and observe social distancing (or get eaten by a shark? Maybe not). Regardless, this is quite a dull stab at the genre, clunkily composed and about as realistic as its promotional poster (see above). That is to say, not at all.

Two Tentacled Horrors.

Revisiting “The X-Files”: Season 1

CARTER, Chris (Creator), “The X-Files – Season 1”, Ten Thirteen Inc./Twentieth Century Fox Television, 2001-2002.

I spent some time at home alone the other week and I developed a sudden urge to re-live the adventures of one of the X-Files’s best villains – Eugene Tooms. Entering this rabbit hole meant taking a few stabs at the assembled material because, while I always remember that there’s a Tooms episode entitled “Tooms”, I always forget what the first episode in which he appears is called. I always know that it’s a fairly early episode, but there’s another story called “Conduit” – a likely contender for the title of a story about a villain who can slide through pipes - on the first disc which always throws me off. Long story short, I ended up watching the whole first season. Perhaps after this I won’t forget where to look in future!

Running through the material assembled on the DVD set, it’s interesting to note how this series took off and how it learned to walk after its initial crawling phase. As seen in the most recent iterations of this show, Chris Carter and crowd are sentimentalists about TV, especially the type of programming that predominated from the 60s into the 80s, and their tendency to crib from that source in regard to everything from actors to storylines starts to be revealed by walking down this particular memory lane. It’s clear that Carter had a solid vision of what he wanted this show to do, and that vision is a strong framework which propelled this series into the phenomenon that it later became.

There are low points, however, although most of these boil down to personal taste. For me, I can do without the so-called “Mythology Episodes”, recognizing of course that much of the over-arching tension of the series and the inter-character strife depends directly upon this element. There’s a lot of “Monster-of-the-Week” (MOTW) type stuff going on as well that, uniquely in these early stages, falls flat and never gets re-visited, causing some head-scratching in later seasons. A feature of strong television shows is their ability to reintegrate past material and to generate story from such revisiting; many opportunities for such growth get seeded here and are – with the weird exception of Tooms – never followed up.

Many of these first season episodes are peppered with the daily minutiae of Mulder and Scully’s (especially Scully’s) workaday routine – signing vehicles out of the car-pool, collaborating with old associates, inter-office politics, etc. Later seasons dispense with this stuff entirely, short-cutting it for brevity’s sake, which tends to sever the show loose from its moorings, from my perspective at least, and elevate the main characters out of the real world in which they’re supposed to be grounded. Fortunately, at this early stage, Carter’s cringeworthy fascination with Nazism is not so blatantly on display – a definite plus.

I didn’t watch these episodes in any particular order – I watched the Tooms stuff and then cherry-picked my way through the rest, until – once I’d decided for sure that I was going the see them all – I’d ticked them all off. In reviewing them though, I’ll take them disc-by-disc:

Disc One:

We kick things off (“Pilot”) with what will later become a by-the-book abduction scenario for our Filers of X. Scully gets dragged from her cozy position at Quantico to become a watch-dog for Mulder’s activities and they head out to Oregon in an uneasy alliance. The first mission sees aliens and shady government operatives enabling the abductions of teenagers and the ensuing cover-up of that activity, involving the replacing of buried bodies with ring-in simians. Our dynamic duo is harried and harassed, their hotel rooms burned to destroy evidence, and with local officials warning them off. Much is speculated upon and much is learned with Mulder becoming increasing annoying due to his unwillingness to share what he knows with his new partner.

In episode two – “Deep Throat” – Mulder is directed by his eponymous informant to check out the goings-on at an air force base in Idaho. Initially, the duo is called in by a concerned housewife whose air force pilot husband went missing and then re-appears in a state much worse for wear, leading her to suspect military shenanigans. Mulder, of course, jumps to the conclusion that the air force is test-driving new aircraft, modified from captured alien tech, at which notion Scully just rolls her eyes. Siding with local bored teenagers to gain access to the base (Seth Green in an early pre-“Buffy” role), Mulder gets captured by the authorities and Scully dances a delicate two-step to have him relinquished. In the end, nothing definitive is learned and even the housewife backs away from her “I demand answers!” stance. It’s interesting to note that Jerry Hardin who plays Deep Throat is very similar in appearance to Darren McGavin of “Kolchak: Night Stalker” fame, Carter’s self-professed inspiration for much of the “X-Files”.

Next comes “Squeeze”. This is the first Eugene Tooms episode and is the title I always get wrong. Dragged to a crime scene where the murderer’s point of access is a complete conundrum, Scully’s bemusement is undercut by Mulder’s awareness that clusters of five similar deaths have been taking place at 30-year intervals since the start of the century. In another nod to the “Night Stalker”, the duo is directed to a retired police officer who had a personal interest in the case, and they begin to unravel the mystery of an immortal mutant human who can slide through tiny spaces and who hibernates for 30-year intervals emerging to devour the livers of five randomly-chosen individuals. Our heroes track Eugene down but are stymied by the fact that no-one is going to get behind their ‘crackpot’ theory concerning Tooms’s uncanny abilities. Tooms gets locked away before he can chow down on his crucial fifth organ, and we’re left with a cliffhanger indication that a jail is no place that can hold a guy who can slide between bars…

“Conduit” plumbs some more UFO lore (specifically, the events surrounding Falcon Lake in Manitoba, which took place starting around 1967) to retail a story about people being abducted by aliens from campgrounds on Lake Okobogee near Sioux City in Iowa. Scully is advised that Mulder has requested travel expenses for a trip to Sioux City based upon a tabloid article about a missing girl and it is revealed to her that Mulder believes his sister to have been similarly abducted. For my money, this is the absolute worst thing they could have introduced to Mulder’s backstory, because it becomes a useless pain-in-the-backside from this point onwards. Anyway, the girl goes missing, her much younger brother starts channeling UFO chatter through television static (alarming the government flunkies), and the kids’ mother goes from helpful to interfering as the (unseen) Men in Black go about their business in the shadows. We’re left with Mulder quietly sobbing in a church over a picture of his sister Samantha, an image which is about as trite as it is possible to conjure.

In these first four episodes, we see shady government intrusion in a ‘boots on the ground’ fashion that we’ll never see again. The Government-within-the-Government has operatives everywhere, shutting down Scully and Mulder with ham-fisted abandon: rooms are torched; witnesses are coerced; local pillars of the community turn out to be paid enforcers. It’s refreshing and believable, but it all gets junked as the popularity of the series evolves. It’s interesting too to see the nuts-and-bolts of the agents’ daily lives (even if that shot of Scully wandering through the partitioned office space gets used more than once), since it grounds them in a quasi-reality quite distinct from the other-worldly superstar status they assume later on. For my money, they should have brought back Fran from the carpool, or at least given her some lines and screentime.

Disc Two:

The guy who gets killed and eaten in the pre-credit sequence of this next episode (“The Jersey Devil”) is the same guy who dies of an embolism from “straining too forcefully” while on the toilet during the later season story “War of the Coprophages”. He shows up elsewhere in the X-world also, but I’m always reminded of that ignominious death every time I clap eyes on him. Still, he’s doing his bit for public health, I guess. Anyway, blink and you’ll miss him here, he gets partially-devoured by the Jersey Devil in the early 50s and photos of his corpse fire Mulder’s investigation in the present era. Of course, Mulder’s probing of the matter is found to be objectionable to the Sherriff’s Office in Atlantic City and he gets walloped and thrown in jail for his pains. He then bands together with other local experts and almost finds undeniable proof of the creature’s existence before the irascible Sherriff shuts him down. And where is Scully in all of this? Hosting children’s parties and going on blind dates arranged by her sister. As you do.

“Shadows” was a story cobbled together after network heavies insisted that Scully and Mulder be seen to be helping “ordinary people”. This episode involves a company doing shady business deals with Islamic terrorists: one joint-CEO commits apparent suicide, and his devoted secretary starts receiving supernatural assistance against those intending to do her harm. Called in when two muggers are found dead in an alley from strange causes, Scully and Mulder trace the goings-on back to the secretary and unearth the conspiracy with ghostly assistance. As tales go, it’s alright, however the secretary is one of the most unsympathetic characters that the “X-Files” has ever coughed up.

In 1995, author Philip Kerr released a novel called Gridiron, about a hi-tech building that gains Artificial Intelligence and starts playing with its occupants in the fashion of a video game. This “X-Files” episode  - “Ghost in the Machine” - lifts that concept in its entirety and runs with it here as a Monster-of-the-Week narrative, adding some connective tissue to weave it into the world of Scully and Mulder. If you’ve read the book, you’ve seen this instalment; I’ve done both. Neither is much chop.

In each successive season of the “X-Files”, it became routine to take the X-Filers out of their comfort zone – a range of homogeneously-anonymized Canadian towns masquerading as places in the US – and dump them in extreme and remote locales – also, for the most part, in Canada. This story – “Ice” – is supposed to take place in the northern fastnesses of Alaska, where a team of geologists researching Arctic ice core samples has come to grief. Channeling “The Thing” as hard as it can, our heroes identify, thwart and contain an alien virus released from the permafrost and save the day, despite the director of the episode telling them to act as manic and unhinged as possible. Not a great moment for Scully and Mulder, but okay for their first ‘away game’.

In these four stories we see that the producers of the show were maybe not so confidant that their vision would be embraced by the viewership. These tales crib so madly from all kinds of well-established sources – “Poltergeist”; “The Thing from Another World” (aka. “Who Goes There?”); “2001: A Space Odyssey” (by way of Gridiron) – that there’s an air of desperately trying to soothe TV heavyweights informing the atmosphere. It must have seemed to Carter and Crew at the time that television audiences weren’t as receptive to their sourcing from the urban legend motherlode as they would have liked. They shouldn’t have worried… Things of note: we spent a bunch of time trying to fathom Scully’s social life in these few stories and we also saw the start of some inter-jurisdictional pissing contests which arise conveniently now and then as the needs of the stories demand. The genius programmer from “Ghost” – as obnoxious as he was – was allowed to drift away into oblivion, where he might well have been a useful contact to be unearthed in later seasons. That episode as well, saw right inside the shadowy government conspiracy, giving us a few moments with the ‘bad guys’ as they reviewed their encounter with Mulder – something that happens less and less as time goes on.

Disc Three:

This is one of those moments when something that seems cool - some feature of the zeitgeist – spurs a kooky X-story that pops like a party balloon in the light of subsequent examination. In “Space”, Scully and Mulder are brought in on an investigation of sabotage in the NASA space shuttle program by one of the technical support crew. It transpires that the former astronaut head of the program is being possessed by a ‘space ghost’ which he encountered while he was out space-walking, and which he inadvertently brought back down to Earth with him. There is a preponderance of imagery riffing off the infamous “Face on Mars” which nowadays – with much better, high definition camerawork – has become a case of myopic wishful thinking of the Hubble variety, and it makes this episode completely un-watchable nowadays, quite apart from the confused and rambling unfolding of the tortured storyline.

In “Fallen Angel” Mulder gets a 24-hour window to investigate what seems to be the case of a crash-landed UFO. Dodging military ‘husher-uppers’ loaded for bear, he sneaks past the perimeter sentries and begins poking about. Inevitably, he gets caught and Scully is sent out to drag his sorry arse back to Washington; but he changes tack, encounters an amateur UFO investigator in the inevitable aluminium caravan, and becomes the target for the crash-landed alien, to the military’s further annoyance. It’s clear that this maudlin NICAP fellow, Max (along with the “Ghost in the Machine” programmer), was the prototype of what would later become the introduction of the Lone Gunmen characters, and it must have tested positively enough with the punters to green-light those characters’ facilitation into the X-World. That being said, however, this guy is about as pathetic as they come. There’s also an interesting moment of casual sexism in the story, where the radar operator who spots the incoming UFO is derided for being ‘just a girl’: we seem to have come a long way since then. Maybe.

Another MOTW episode and another lost opportunity for reintegration. In “Eve”, two young girls on opposite coasts of mainland USA overpower and kill their fathers in identical gruesome fashion at the same moment in time: Mulder is almost wetting himself with excitement while Scully tries to deconstruct every theory he comes up with. It transpires that the girls – codenamed “Eves” – are the product of Government experiments in eugenics, illegally unleashed into a private in vitro fertilisation clinic. The girls are super-smart, psychic and psychotic on top, and try to poison Scully and Mulder in order to avoid being locked up with others of their kind from earlier experiments. It’s compelling and intriguing and the entire concept – multiple cloned criminal masterminds and their hi-tech prison compound – is completely forgotten and dropped by the X-World from here on in.

Mark Sheppard, before being Badger on “Firefly” and Crowley in “Supernatural”, began his TV life as Cecil “Bob” l’Ively, a pyrokinetic firebug in the first season of the “X-Files”, in the episode entitled “Fire”. This is an awful episode. It’s nothing to do with the concept, or the performances of the villain, his victims or of our main cast – it’s completely the wrong-headed addition of a British Scotland Yard agent with history concerning Fox Mulder from his days at Oxford University. This contrived romance is truly hideous: it’s badly performed, poorly constructed and cringeworthy in its execution. Scully rolls her eyes a lot in this episode and it’s nothing to do with the possibility of there being a psychic arsonist on the loose. The British agent drops the ball of this investigation time and again (to the detriment of her clients) in her vulpine need to sink her claws into Mulder and his reactions are entirely of the hot-and-cold variety, impelling the viewers to cry, “for Christ’s sake! Make up your mind!”. The writers also throw in a reference to Mulder being afraid of fire – something that never gets raised again. Not recommended.

“Fire” also ends with yet another super-powered villain locked in a high-security prison facility, being experimented upon by shadowy powers-that-be. Don’t worry though: along with almost every other instance of this type of villain, we’ll never have to worry about encountering them again, more’s the pity. Can you imagine the mayhem that might ensue if l’Ively, the Eves and Eugene Tooms had all broken out and banded together? An opportunity lost to my way of thinking…

Throughout this selection there are further efforts at tinkering with the backstory of our leads. With “Fire” the die is cast and from now on, Mulder’s past cases and career path will keep barfing-up rationales for meeting new people and re-visiting past scenarios, while Scully constantly moves forward from the nest of her family with very few ghosts of her past life (with some exceptions) coming back to haunt her. Fox has history and a complex network of connexions; Dana, generally speaking, doesn’t. That’s what has been decided upon at this point.

Disc Four:

Now, here is where everything comes together, and we get an “X-Files” episode that’s pure magic. It’s likely that what makes “Beyond the Sea” work is simply the presence of Brad Dourif playing the villain, Boggs; there’re more than a couple of creaky additions to the plot, but his bravura performance really sells it. We get introduced to Scully’s family, especially her father played by Don S. Davis, on loan from “Stargate”. He dies of a heart-attack (ironically) after Christmas dinner at Scully’s place and she is awakened by his ghost appearing to her in her house and trying to impart a message. Later, after the funeral, Scully and Mulder are trying to trace a young couple abducted by a serial killer once affiliated with another violent offender – Boggs – currently on death row. Boggs claims that his first brush with death – he was given a last-minute reprieve – blessed him with psychic powers and that he can lead the FBI to the kidnapper’s lair through visions. Mulder sets a trap, which Boggs falls into, and dismisses him; Scully, however, sees something which leads her to believe that Boggs is the Real McCoy. Boggs’s terror of death is palpable throughout this story and his desperation to try and win a deal almost makes the viewer sympathise with him. There’s enough equivocation to leave Scully’s head spinning as she tries to work out if he’s genuine or not but it’s her last act of absolute cruelty – denying Boggs’s wish that she be a witness at his execution – which has to be the unkindest cut of all.

Two things bug me about this otherwise excellent instalment. All the way through, despite the fact that he’s always the first to fall for a conman’s fake psychic-show moves, Mulder tells Scully she mustn’t fall for Boggs’s patter, implying that he’s the only one allowed to do that; the second thing is that, in talking to Mulder about her ghost-dad’s appearance to her at the moment of his death, Scully blithely says, “visions of the dead by loved ones at the moment of death are a common psychological phenomenon” to which I say, what the-? How is this “psychological” and why hasn’t it been completely explained and de-mystified? ‘Cause to my knowledge, it hasn’t.

In “Gender Bender”, the X-Filers come across real, gosh-darn’ tootin’ aliens and get completely outfoxed by them. These aliens exist in a small, reclusive, apparently religious enclave, similar to those of the Amish; however, they exude pheromones which bend humans to their will and can switch gender after marathon sex (which kills any human they do it with). One of them goes rogue and rampages down the eastern seaboard of the US, and the Filers of X set out on their case. Everything winds up back at the aliens’ home turf where Mulder splashes through a bunch of mud and Scully gets romanced by one of the police officers from “Silence of the Lambs” in a funny hat (after which she throws up). Before arrests can be made (and the actual existence of aliens cried from the rooftops) the outsiders make some crop circles and vanish. As with other MOTW beings, these aliens are never heard from again and they fail to measure up to the producers’ later view of what aliens are actually like in this series (which, obviously, is why they got sidelined). Oh, and Nicholas Lea, later to be Mulder’s nemesis Alex Krycek, shows up as the only one of the rogue alien’s bonk-buddies to stay alive afterwards.

There’s an interesting sideline to this: in discussing pheromones, our duo skate around the idea of humans creating them. To be clear: humans do not exude pheromones. At all. Unlike “Space”, where a higher powered telescope put paid to the idea that there is any kind of face on Mars, thus destroying the main plank of the show’s plot, the dialogue here tiptoes around the central notion of the story and, by a miracle, manages not to fall over into the realm of ludicrousness. Unfortunately, while cheering this win, the rest of the tale crashes and burns into a dumpster fire.

In “Lazarus” there’s a departure: we meet an FBI agent under whom Scully studied and with whom she conducted a brief affair, thus seeming to destroy my theory that Scully’s adventures mostly never spring from her past. There’s that ‘mostly’ in there to get me off the hook, however. Here we have two bank robbers on a spree, being pursued by Scully’s ex-lover who is unaccountably driven to bring them to justice. In apprehending them during a heist, the driven agent is shot and Scully kills the robber; during the ensuing paramedic travails, the consciousnesses of both men switch bodies and the former Agent, now the revived bank robber, tries to return to his partner and restart their dangerous crime career. There’s lots of talk of PTSD and over-empathising with the target of one’s obsessive mission, before diabetes and a vicious betrayal sees everyone put out of everyone else’s misery. The only real supernatural touch – a body-hopping tattoo – is completely overlooked by all parties during the course of the proceedings. Nice touch.

“Young at Heart” sees yet another rogue doctor dodging ethics committees and doing whatever they damned well please in order to pursue a scientific breakthrough. Here it’s experimentation on victims of progeria – a disease which causes accelerated decrepitude in children - in an attempt to reverse the effects of aging (somehow). Our doctor performs illegal surgery on a prison inmate after which he is declared dead, despite evidence to the contrary provided by another inmate. The supposedly dead prisoner springs from Mulder’s ever-fertile back-story and turns out to be the ferocious killer he should have shot when he had the chance, regardless of the regulations, and who is now Hell-bent on vengeance, starting with Mulder’s friends. Our villain is cunning and intrepid – also, much younger in appearance, and therefore harder to spot in a crowd – despite having a salamander’s paw for a hand. Mulder beats himself up relentlessly over the situation while Scully does some useful sleuthing and they finally bring the murderer to justice (again).

At this point we have the second oblique Nazi reference which Carter has chosen to sneak into the ongoing narrative. The rogue doctor in “Young at Heart” mentions that his colleagues used to call him “Dr. Mengele”, after the notoriously sadistic German prison-camp medic. This, along with the eugenics mentioned in “Eve” is the thin edge of the wedge of Carter’s flirting with Nazi tropes throughout this series. Here it’s just a casual name-drop; later, after discussions of Operation Paperclip have entered the narrative, the gloves come off and you get a solid sense that, sooner or later, Carter will be dressing up his entire cast in Hugo Boss designed SS-uniforms. And this he does, before the series concludes.

Disc Five:

“E.B.E.”, the title of the first episode on Disc Five, stands for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity and Mulder promises to deliver evidence of such a thing to his new chums, the Lone Gunmen. He doesn’t deliver, however, just as this episode also doesn’t deliver any kind of consistent narrative. This is a so-called Mythology Episode and exists merely to provide connective tissue to other similar episodes and to round-out various side characters. Among those characters are Director Skinner and the Smoking Man, Deep Throat and, most importantly, the Lone Gunmen, who are established here for the first time. There’s some waffle about a truck carrying a UFO across the US, Gulf War Syndrome being a side-effect of alien visitation and a lacklustre break-in by the X-Filers of a covert military base which reveals nada. Nothing to see here. Moving on:

I dislike “Miracle Man” as an episode because to my way of thinking it trivializes the infiltration of American political life by religious cultism, despite the oft-declared separation of Church and State. After recent months of watching the AmeriKKKan Electoral Farce, I had to steel myself in order to jump into yet another exhibition of religious snake-oil merchandising. This story is fine, on balance, but it gets muddied by the bizarre Mythology-extending notion that the after-effects of alien abduction – specifically, the remorse Mulder feels over the loss of his sister - are things which can be identified and healed by the Divine Grace of Gentle Jesus (Praise the Lord!). I think not. At one point, Mulder says outright to the titular miracle man that he’s not going to get into a fight with him using religious rhetoric and this is exactly my position with this type of crap also. I always feel like I need a bath after this kind of thing…

We’ve skated across half-a-dozen different Fortean tropes by this stage of the proceedings, so it seems hardly surprising that we’d finally grab onto some werewolf action. It’s not that clear-cut however: with “Shapes” we take a dive into Native American mythology and pad around awhile with some skinwalkers. Springboarding rather obviously off the oft-reported Fortean goings-on at Skinwalker Ranch, we learn of a rancher fighting a legal dispute over a boundary line which the tribesfolk claim meanders over into reservation territory. Scully and Mulder get called in after a native man is shot and killed, mistaken for some kind of wild beast, but not before he wounds the rancher’s son. Reservation life is graphically, and rather miserably, portrayed here and the usual ‘is he, or isn’t he?’ tropes of werewolf fiction run their course until the final reveal. It’s a good story, but Scully’s willful blindness as to what’s going on sometimes pushes credulity.

In “Darkness Falls” we have the second of two ‘away games’ in this season. After “Ice”, it was obviously thought that these long diversions into strange and new territory were good for ratings, and so, here we are. Unlike that other episode though, this is more of an “X-Files” story, more its own creature rather than an homage to a science fiction mainstay. This tale tells of a band of loggers working in the far distant back-blocks of wooded terrain in Washington State. After mysteriously vanishing, the FBI (i.e., Scully and Mulder) are asked to investigate, Mulder revealing that it’s not the first time this has happened and that another logging team vanished in the same area at the turn of the century. In due course, we meet a forestry ranger who respects both the wilderness and the logging companies’ desire to make profits; a logging company representative who is concerned only about the bottom line and couldn’t give a rat’s about trees; and an eco-terrorist who freely acknowledges endangering logging crews but claims to have evidence that the loggers are breaking laws in order to cut down protected old growth pines. It turns out that he’s right, and the felling of certain of these trees releases a type of mite which – due to the quantities in which it is able to swarm – can suck a human being dry in no time flat, later using the dried husk as a cocoon for breeding more of its kind. The only thing that keeps them at bay is light so, when darkness falls, it behoves our heroes to have a light burning. There are many twists and turns in this tale and the end is a particularly equivocal one, leaving the viewer with a sense of disquiet.

There’s a sense of working towards quantifying the Mythology in these four episodes, possibly as a knee-jerk response to the unfortunate events of “Gender Bender”. “E.B.E.” simply lays out a bunch of stuff for the fans, without even trying to massage the material into a coherent narrative, while “Miracle Man” gets completely broken by an injection of unwanted and unnecessary Mythos material – specifically the useless meanderings over Mulder and his sister. Even the ending of “Darkness Falls” is designed to flag notions of shady Government intervention, however it doesn’t damage the preceding episode overall. It’s as if the creative team won network approval after the generally white-bread stories of Disc Two and here they’re frantically making their mark as hard as they can.

Disc Six:

In “Tooms” we have the conclusion of the Eugene Tooms saga. Our vicious mutant comes up for parole and, despite Mulder’s best efforts, he is released once more into an unsuspecting community. Having been deprived of his fifth liver by the Filers of X last time, he immediately sets about obtaining this prized morsel so that he can fall back into his usual thirty-year hibernation. Mulder, however, has other plans. He interferes with Tooms’s machinations several times (during the course of which we seem to be offered the notion that Tooms is attracted by a certain shade of blue, an ill-conceived and unnecessary wrinkle to this villain’s modus operandi) and Tooms finally lashes out and murders his psychotherapist. The race is then on to apprehend him before he beds down for his thirty-year nigh-nighs. It transpires that a shopping mall has been built over his usual haunt, so he builds his bile-nest beneath the escalator; Scully and Mulder locate him there and finish him off by the simple expedient of turning the moving stairs on. Problem, as they say, solved.

“Born Again” is a tale about reincarnation. A cadre of police officers have made-off with a bunch of cash stolen from a crime scene and agree to leave it untouched in a bank for ten years while the heat cools down. One of them has a bad case of conscience about it all so the others bump him off: more cash for the survivors – woo-hoo! The dead guy’s widow re-marries to one of the tontine partners and life goes on. That is, until another cop in the precinct brings in a lost little girl hanging around outside the station. One of the bent cops is asked to find out her particulars and he inadvertently takes a dive through the upstairs window of the precinct building while alone with her in the interrogation room. Slowly, all members of the crew get whacked and Mulder leaps to the conclusion that the little girl is the reincarnation of the conscience-stricken dead cop. I mean, it’s possible, right? You can practically hear Scully’s eyes rolling all through this episode.

With “Roland”, we have an instance of something that will never, ever happen again in the world of television production: the portrayal of handicapped people by actors who are not so afflicted. Nowadays, the first port of call for casting characters such as these would be to find actors who were really disabled in this way, in order to demonstrate that values of equal-opportunity existed within the production house. Is this a kind of Black Face? Handicap Face? Well, it’s something like it and we’ll – thankfully – never see its like again.

The titular character here is a profoundly mentally-handicapped surviving twin, the other half of which pair was a mathematics prodigy and whose deceased head is now being maintained cryogenically for future use. The frozen twin is Hell-bent on finishing a set of equations which will allow an aircraft to be built that could surpass Mach 15, and, to do this, he psychically drives his handicapped brother into writing and testing the equations at the laboratory where he works as a janitor. Oh, and he also forces him to murder all the other scientists who are trying to take credit for his life’s work, too. Luckily, Mulder is on hand to spot the less-than-obvious clues and reveal the solution.

The series ends with “The Erlenmeyer Flask”. This is a twisty Mythology Episode full of the sorts of go-nowhere leads and vanishing evidence favoured by these types of stories. Scully and Mulder are directed by Deep Throat to investigate a high speed car chase which ends in a harbour facility – the police are suspicious of Mulder and send him away, but not before he realizes that the cars in the chase were switched at some point. Following this lead takes them to an experimental monkey lab where they find a taciturn scientist and not much else: he later turns up dead, murdered by a mysterious crew-cut man. Mulder decides to break into the scientist’s home and, while there, answers the telephone and speaks with the missing driver of the crashed car. This encounter leads him to a storage facility full of large tanks containing the unconscious bodies of several identical men. When he later returns here with Scully, all of the evidence has been removed and Deep Throat meets them, reprimanding them for being too slow. Mulder gets huffy and tracks down the missing car-driver only to see him die at the hands of the crew-cut man. Poisonous gas emitted from the driver’s body takes Mulder out and he is taken hostage. Later, Deep Throat contacts Scully, giving her the means to access a mysterious base and steal an alien foetus: this gives them the ability to barter for Mulder’s return. During the exchange, the crew-cut man guns down Deep Throat and leaves Scully and Mulder behind. Mulder rings Scully some days later while recuperating to inform her that the X-Files unit has been shut down. *Phew!*

One reason why I dislike these episodes is that they’re too dense and impenetrable and, rather than being laced throughout the other episodes in the series, are mashed together into hard-to-digest blobs in lumps throughout the season. The narrative aspects are woeful and sometimes – like “E.B.E.” for example – aren’t even real stories; they’re just weird tone poems to the conspirasphere. Also, anything that happens during them of any real consequence inevitably vanishes or – as in this instance, as the last episode in the season – has no consequences at the start of the next season. Everything gets wiped clean and we just start all over again. In a word, they’re frustrating. Back when these episodes were first aired however, we were all novices at the “X-Files” game and hadn’t twigged to the ‘rinse and repeat’ nature of the ongoing series lore.

*****

What’s the takeaway from re-visiting this fannish televisual mainstay? For those interested in TV writing it’s an interesting exercise in how essential connectors within the plot become edited out as understood options in later stories. In this season (and in the second season too – I’ve checked), such activities as signing cars out of the FBI carpool (hi Fran!), hiring rental vehicles, checking into hotels and catching aeroplanes and busses to get to crime scenes, are shown alongside the more outré elements of the investigations. Later seasons assume the fans know how this stuff is done and drop it from the narratives. To my way of thinking, this lessens the credibility of the work, making our main characters seem like super-beings for whom such trivial activities are beneath their notice. Our Filers are willing to call upon experts and to rope them into their investigations also, in ways that they eschew in later seasons – the investigating group at the end of “The Jersey Devil” for example could almost be a “Cthulhu Now” gaming team. Our duo become more self-reliant, almost to the exclusion of everyone else, in later stories.

In line with this, there seem to be more FBI-based experts in these episodes also. Along with them there is a bunch of equipment that they try awfully hard to convince the viewer to be real when it patently is not – audio and indentikit software just does not look like, or do, the sort of things that they achieve in these stories. Graphology, on the other hand, is a seemingly tried-and-true investigative mainstay, the only qualification required being a willingness by the handwriting expert to flirt outrageously with Fox Mulder. Sadly, the amorous graphologists fall by the wayside in due course, also.

This show covers a huge chronological space and over the years the changing nature of society and technology makes investigative techniques displayed in this early season seem odd and downright peculiar. People don’t take photos of everything they see, for instance, because no-one has a mobile telephone with a camera (the ‘phones they do have are monolithic!). Scully finds fingerprints and calls FBI headquarters to tell them that she’ll “modem them over to Washington” at the earliest opportunity. What does this gobbledy-gook even mean? At one point she’s standing in line at a grocery store and, after her purchases are rung up, she writes the store a cheque. A cheque! What the Hell is that? This is definitely a walk down Memory Lane for some of us, but for younger viewers they must be left scratching their heads and wondering what on earth’s happening.

The torches are interesting too. Early on in the season, Scully and Mulder have simple, bog-standard torches. A few episodes later, these are noticeably brighter. Then they get larger, but with massive batteries attached – almost the size of car batteries – and, behind the blinding cones of light they emit, the producers are obviously hoping that we won’t notice. Then they start imperceptibly to shrink down to normal dimensions once more. I’m left wondering, was torch technology propelled forwards simply by the needs of this television program? From one perspective it certainly seems that way.

A final fun derivative from re-watching these early seasons is watching how often they re-use certain actors, hoping that we won’t notice them walking back on in a different hat. Of course, back in the day when an episode of “X-Files” was a once-a-week event on free-to-air TV, the likelihood of us ever noticing was slim to remote. The fact that the same footage of Scully sashaying through the open plan FBI office space could be re-used without any thought that someone might protest, shows how slim this possibility was. An “X-Files” actor might be a second-string FBI agent one week and sleazy john knifed by a spooked streetwalker the next; Jersey Devil munchies one season; dead from a burst blood-vessel while on the potty, later on. Even shady truck drivers like Ranheim – transporting wrecked UFOs in a truck across mainland USA – turn out to be funicular railway operators “ascending to the stars” in the very next season.

What’s most interesting to watch though, is the nebulous way that Scully and Mulder start to crystallise into shape as each episode goes by. These sorts of shows are the creations of many contributing individuals and so the characters get passed from person to person and modified according to the desires and demands of everyone involved. There are writers and directors who definitely wanted Scully and Mulder to get together; there are those for whom this was a least-favourite option; and then there are infinite shades of intention in between. Watching these episodes is like a roller-coaster of nuance as the creators all try to find that sweet spot which would satisfy everybody. Most likely they hit that point at about Season Five, I’m guessing.

This show is pretty fundamental to TV fandom. It is a touchstone for supernatural investigation, regardless of whether you like it particularly, or if you loathe it. It arose during the time of ‘serial-killer chic’, buoyed by such things as “The Silence of the Lambs”, “American Psycho” and everything ever written by Patricia Cornwell. It (along with “Twin Peaks”) rang a change in the depiction of government agents in books, television shows and movies – before the 80s, ‘G-men’ were always faceless drones; here, they began to be personalized in the same manner that Private Investigators were during the 30s and 40s. Without this ground-breaking vehicle there would be no “Supernatural”, no “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer”, nor a slew of other supernaturally-based prime-time investigative TV shows. Re-visiting the first season, it’s fun to see the initial tottering steps taken by the show – where they compromised; where they bent under network pressure; where they took a mis-step – but it’s impressive how true, overall, the show is to its basic premise and how they work to refine and promote that vision.