Outer Range 1.3-4: Twin Peaks Out West

So it occurred to me, as I was watching the enthralling third and fourth episodes of Outer Range, that this new series on Amazon Prime has a lot of Twin Peaks in it.   I mean, an investigation of a murder against a backdrop that has a Philip K. Dickian mind-bending vibe is a rare thing, with a pulsing potential to be memorable if it's done up right.  If Deputy Sheriff Joy, one of my favorite characters  (and being played really well by Tamara Podemski) expresses a joy in cherry pie, I may be on to something.

Outer Range is one strange bird, if I may mix metaphors, and getting stranger by the episode.  In the third and fourth episodes, and linguistically evocative also of Twin Peaks, we have a mountain disappearing.  This gives the time shifting or time traveling or whatever exactly is going on a much longer timeline.  If we're talking about mountains coming and going, we're entering the NBC series La Brea territory, and even further back than that.

Autumn probably has the most knowledge of what's going on at this point, and she's not saying too much, despite her seeming willingness to answer every question.  On the other side of the being informative curve, it's not clear how much of what happened to Royal (good portrayal Josh Brolin), when he spent the better (or worse) part of the dead of night in that waterhole, is something he either doesn't really remember or doesn't want to talk about.  I hope his wife Cecilia keeps pushing him for a briefing, and he does more than looked pained when she walks away, frustrated, because he's not talking.

He does have a lot on his mind.  A dead body is bad news in the most normal of times, and Outer Range is most assuredly not normal.  Wayne (well played by Will Patton) knows a little more than what he's saying, too, and the fact that he's more focused on that west pasture than who killed his son, says a lot, too.

But back to that in-and-out mountain:  You can't beat Burl Ives singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain," and with Juice Newton's "Angel of the Morning" also playing in episode 1.4, we've got some timeless music in this time warping narrative.

See you back here with my review of the next two episodes next week.

See also Outer Range 1.1-2: Elusive Hybrid

 

Watchmen 1.4: What We Learned

Here's what we learned in the continuingly gonzo, bordering on insane episode 1.4 of Watchmen tonight - that is, a little more than everything you could want in an alternate reality or alternate history story:

• Henry Louis Gates is Treasury Secretary.  In case you don't recall who he was/is in our reality, he is the African-American Harvard professor arrested by a white racist Boston police sergeant in his (Gates's) own home, because the sergeant thought Gates had broken into it.  As compensation for this wrongful arrest, Gates had to have a beer with the sergeant at the White House at President Obama's invitation.  Gates apparently did better in Watchmen.
• This alternate reality is well ahead of ours in genetics, gene-splicing, DNA manipulation and the like.  And a Vietnamese women owns some kind of huge biological facility in Tulsa.
• Adrian Veidt is in prison - that's what his gorgeous estate really is - and he is permitted to keep ordering up babies who, placed in a bizarre, almost-Frankenstein-like piece of equipment, quickly mature into the man and woman who are his servants.  And who, we also learn, Veidt kills about as quickly as they are created and mature.  Like I said, this is world of advanced biology - and psychos.

At this point, I'd say Watchmen is more comprehensible than Twin Peaks, but a less endearing (nothing, quite yet, like that cherry pie).  But Watchmen does have going for it an intriguing science fiction, nibbling around the edges.

See you next time.

See also Watchmen 1.1: Promising Alternate History ... [Watchmen 1.2: don't look for my review, I didn't feel like reviewing it] ... Watchmen 1.3: The Falling Car

more alternate reality - "flat-out fantastic" - Scifi and Scary

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval

I said somewhere in my ongoing one-by-one reviews of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 10-episode standalone anthology on Amazon Prime that I thought the series was "right up there with The Twilight Zone".  I just checked - that was in my review of the third episode.  I make quick judgments - but I still feel that way.  I even entitled my review of Electric Dreams 1.8 Impossible Planet "Eye of the Beholder," which was the title of one of the best Twilight Zone episodes.   Of course,  there were 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone, in contrast to only 10 so far (of which I've only seen the first 9 at this point) of Electric Dreams, so when I say "right up there" I mean only that the episodes I've seen in Electric Dreams rank with any random fraction of a season of The Twilight Zone.   If and when Electric Dreams gets to exceed 150 episodes - which it actually could, given that Dick wrote 44 novels and 121 short stories -  I'll get back to you with a more definitive comparison.

In the meantime, episode 1.9 The Commuter feels so much like a Twilight Zone episode that I half expected Rod Serling to appear and say "submitted for your approval" (though he actually said that only three times in the entire series).  But The Commuter easily could have been a companion to "A Stop at Willoughby," the 30th episode of The Twilight Zone, from 1960, which has also always been one of my favorites.  Indeed, since Philip K. Dick's original "The Commuter" story was published in 1953 (in Amazing Stories - where, by the way, one of my first stories, "Albert's Cradle," was published in 1993), Rod Serling may well have read Dick's story and had it in mind when he wrote "Willoughby".

Jack Thorne does a fine job bringing it to the screen in 2018, greatly assisted by Timothy Spall whose Ed has one of those quintessentially British faces.  His "Willoughby" is "Macon Heights," a stop on a train line that doesn't quite exist - literally.   So here the "real or not real" thread is woven around a town, replete with a diner that serves great pie, which, when you add in the attractive, talkative waitress, also resonates with another real-or-not multiple reality classic, Twin Peaks.  David Lynch, Rod Serling, and Philip K. Dick do have a lot of uncommon in common.

Anyway, that's a  pretty good last line, it's nearly five in the morning, and I want to give the 10th and final episode of Electric Dreams my best attention, so I'll watch it tomorrow and be back here shortly after with a review.

See also Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams 1.1 Real Life: Mutually Alternate Realities ...  1.2 Autofac: Human v Machine ... 1.3 Human Is: Compassion or Alien? ... 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries ... 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police ... 1.6 Safe and Sound: This Isn't A Drill ... 1.7 Father Thing: Dick from Space ... 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eye of the Beholder ... 1.10: Kill All Others: Too Close for Comfort

  
more alternate realities ...

Twin Peaks: The Return 1.5: The Mod Squad Meets Big Love in the Diner

Well, I have no idea what tonight's insane episode 1.5 of Twin Peaks is called, or even if it has a name, but I might entitle it, "The Mod Squad Meets Big Love in the Diner".

Because ... my favorite scene featured Mädchen Amick (original Twin Peaks) and Peggy Lipton (also original Twin Peaks, but I'll always think her as Julie Barnes in The Mod Squad) as waitresses in that Twin Peaks diner, into which walks Amanda Seyfried (from Big Love).  There's no Agent Cooper or cherry pie, but Amanda walks out, gets into a car, and the Paris Sisters' "I Love How You Love Me" starts playing as she goes into some kind of rapture.  Call me crazy, but that's always been one of my favorite early Phil Spector productions, and one of the reasons this was my favorite scene.

As for Cooper, he's still not up to cherry pie, but he's drinking more coffee, and begins responding to "agent".   Petit a petit, l'oiseau fait son nit.

There were some other good scenes, but it's almost pointless to describe them, in any known or unknown language,  because Twin Peaks is more than ever about the medium not the content, in true David Lynch implementing Marshall McLuhan fashion.  McLuhan famously tagged the electric light as all medium with no content - or a medium without a message - and this is as good as any a description of Twin Peaks, even though the music breaks through in almost every episode as some mighty good acoustic pie.

But you could easily reverse that, and say that Twin Peaks has so much content that it's too much to watch and comprehend - like trying to understand what you see when you look into an electric light - so you might as well just let the max headroom info flow over you and enjoy the sensory massage.

See you next you all on the other side of the bulb next week.

See also Twin Peaks: The Return 1.1-2: Superluminal Sans Cherry Pie ... 1.3-4: Coffee and Cole

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Twin Peaks: The Return 1.1-2: Superluminal Sans Cherry Pie

Twin Peaks was back - therefore also known as Twin Peaks: The Return - last night with the two first episodes of some new seasons on Showtime.   I enjoyed it. But - well, it's a strange and tough narrative to enjoy.

Here's my story about the story so far - that is, the return, and how it relates, after the first two episodes, to the original two seasons (and, for that matter, to the subsequent movie, which was actually a prequel):

Twin Peaks started out as an idiosyncratic, remarkably good, just slightly absurdist whodunnit, as FBI Agent Dale Cooper, who loves a good cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie, investigates the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer, who turned out to have been leading a double life.  There were lots of suspects and bizarre characters and intricate plots, which are resolved - if you can call it that - by a shift into a supernatural, science fictional, insano world of lodges in other dimensions, time rollbacks, doppelgängers (a literal double life) and all kinds of spirits with no real interest in coffee or cherry pie.

Twin Peaks: The Return starts out in and on this superluminal plane (I take faster than light to be the beginning of impossible dark fantasy), and sprinkles in a murder or two just to keep the story's feet on the whodunnit ground.  But this return has little of the detective mystery that drove so much of the original.   Good Agent Cooper is almost completely within the Black Lodge.  He's kissed and whispered to by Laura Palmer, who realizes she's dead, even though she like Cooper look and are 25 years older.  The doppelgänger bad Cooper is mixed up in some kind of criminal business, but the essential point, as told to good Cooper in the Black Lodge, is that he can't get out until the bad Cooper returns, which he has no intention of doing.

My favorite thread was actually a science fiction sub-story right out of the 1950s, which features a young couple about to make love, with the guy taking his eyes off an extra-dimensional device he's supposed to watch (he doesn't know it's extra-dimensional) with dire results for the amorous couple. I especially liked this not only because I was brought up on clunky 1950s science fiction on the screen, but because I'm pretty sure I was actually in a room much like this one myself, when Bill McClane was interviewing me for his 2002 documentary, "The Evolution of Science Fiction" (though it may have been his 2014-2015 "How to Survive the End of the World" series).  I'm not kidding, see the IMDb listings for Evolution and End).

So you get the idea.  If you like Lynch at his Dadaist best - which gave flavor and edge to his Blue Velvet (whose "In Dreams" sequence is one of my all-time favorite scenes in any movie, period), Twin Peaks, and Mulholland Drive - you'll find it in spades, as almost the complete mind-bending story, in Twin Peaks: The Return.  At least, insofar as the first two episodes.

And I'll be back with more next week.


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The Killing on AMC

Caught the first two hours of The Killing on AMC the other night.   The series has a lot going for it, including

• a genuine whodunit, where we don't know who killed Rosie Larsen - in contrast to Criminal Minds, where we usually know the killer fairly early, but like Wire in the Blood from England and Wallander from Sweden - and The Killing is indeed an English-language adaptation of a very successful Danish series
• Mireille Enos in the starring role of Sarah Linden - Enos did a great job on Big Love, and on also played memorable guest roles Numb3rs, Lie to Me, and Medium which I happened to see ... here, Enos is reminiscent of Olivia from Fringe, though at once grittier and more emotional ...
• Michelle Forbes in a supporting role as Rosie's mother ... Forbes always puts in a winning, no-holds-barred performance

Rosie's father is good, too, and the reactions of the family, the various police, and the politician and his staff who (at this point) may or not be involved in some way in the murder are all believable, and more real - less contrived in their reactions - than you often get on television.   This is especially true of the family, and it's already clear that the search for Rosie Larson's killer on The Killing will be no search for Laura Palmer's killer on Twin Peaks, but instead will be an unvarnished, powerful look at a murder, its impact on the family, and on a police investigation comprised of detectives with talent but no ready answers.

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The Plot to Save Socrates


"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

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Preview ... Intriguingly Miasmic Meadowlands on Showtime

From Ancient Greece until late in the 19th century, it was thought that the swamps gave rise to poisonous vapors - miasmas - which tainted the air and caused all manner of illness and disorientation. The main alternate theory blamed human maladies on demons and devils. When you were sad, you were said to have the blue devils ... the origin of what we today call the blues.

Showtime's new 8-episode series Meadowlands premieres Sunday, June 17. I just saw the first four episodes. And while a doctor and music play important roles, this highly original darkling series is much more than that. In fact, it is so original - in pacing and story - that it almost defies categories.

For starters, think The Prisoner meets Twin Peaks meets Dexter meets any story about witness protection programs. The Brogans come to Meadowlands. We don't know why. But we do know that they better not leave. And we do know that not only the Brogans but everyone else in Meadowlands has some kind of story that maybe any well adjusted person is better off not knowing. Although it's not quite "The Monsters Are Due On Maplestreet," that Twilight Zone classic, there is a flavor of something ghostly, possibly supernatural or maybe just dreamlike, that is also just below the surface of Meadowlands.

The series has fine, attractive acting. David Morrissey - seen most memorably in Derailed with Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen - plays Danny Brogan with just the right combination of power and vulnerability. Indeed, that combination of emotions is at play in every member of this family, and simmers in surprising ways in Danny's wife Evelyn (Lucy Cohu) and their two teenage kids - fraternal twins - Zoe (Felicity Jones) and Mark (Harry Treadaway). Felicity Jones, in particular, brings a real freshness to her role. And the background characters, the neighbors, are just what you would expect in a British series of this sort - each an exquisite nutter, some dangerous, some funny, some just strange, and each played to the hilt.

I put Dexter in the list of comparisons, not just because Meadowlands and Dexter are both Showtime series, but because both share a little gore. And maybe a touch of Arrested Development, too. But you'll know that these Meadowlands when zany are never light and breezy ... if you keep watching, you'll see blood and hear screams and get caught up in a compelling puzzle of a story....

Special sneak preview of the first episodes of Meadowlands ... password: secret

Look here for reviews of specific episodes of Meadowlands in June... ... Meadowlands Opens ... with Tongues and Groves ... Episode 2 ... Episode 3 ... Episode 4 ... Episode 5 ... Episode 6 ... Episode 7 ... Episode 8