This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.
The middle stretch of the first season of Millennium is preoccupied with suburban horror.
In The Well-Worn Lock, Wide Open and Weeds, Millennium presents the audience with threats to supposedly “safe” suburban families. In each case, the threat is shown not to come from outside these homes, but is instead nestled snugly inside. In The Well-Worn Lock, Joe Bangs is a respected family patriarch and a monster. In Weeds, Edward Petey is both an active member of his gated community and a predator. Wide Open is perhaps a little more sensationalist, featuring a serial killer who sneaks into houses that are on display, hiding inside until after dark, and then brutally murdering any adults in the home.
Home (in)security…
There is an intriguing thematic continuity here between what might loosely be termed “the suburban trilogy.” Indeed, Weeds was shuffled around in the broadcast order so it would not air directly after Wide Open, perhaps because of this similarity. This thematic continuity is quite striking, like the presence of Scully proxies and surrogates in the stretch of the second season of The X-Files running from One Breath to Irresistible or the subtle fixation on “cancer” from the end of the third season into the fourth season of The X-Files.
Like The Well-Worn Lock before it and Weeds after it, Wide Open is not particularly elegant in its meditations about suburbia under siege. The story is a bit clunky, prone to the same trashy exploitative excess that can be found in some of the weaker moments of the first season. Nevertheless, Wide Open largely works – it manages to tap into a fairly universal fear in a decidedly unsettling manner, inviting the audience to wonder whether there may actually be monster lurking in their own closets or under their own beds.
Standing guard against the world…
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: estates, fear, frank black, home, home invasion, house, living, los angeles, millennium, nineties, riots, Safe, suburban, suburbia, Terror, urban, wide open | 1 Comment »
the m0vie blog 
Star Trek: Enterprise – Canamar (Review)
Next year, Star Trek is fifty years old. We have some special stuff planned for that, but – in the meantime – we’re reviewing all of Star Trek: Enterprise this year as something of a prequel to that anniversary. This April, we’re doing the second season. Check back daily for the latest review.
The story behind Canamar is much more interesting than the story told in Canamar.
On the surface, Canamar is quite simple – “Star Trek does Con Air.” However, it had an interesting journey from original pitch to televised episode. Indeed, Canamar developed from David A. Goodman’s attempts to break out Judgment, trying to figure out what would happen to Archer after he had been found in Klingon court. Originally, the crew would have rescued Archer from a prison transport rather than Rura Penthe. However, producer Brannon Braga took such a liking to the “Archer on a prison transport” concept that he pulled it out of Judgment and assigned it to John Shiban to script.
“Have you seen Con Air?”
“No.”
“Good. Then this’ll all seem new to you.”
However, Braga also divorced Canamar completely from Judgment. Archer would no longer be a prisoner on a Klingon prison transport. Instead, he would find himself mistakenly arrested by an entirely new alien species a couple of episodes before he’d find himself arrested by a more recognised alien species. It feels somewhat redundant, with the first act of Canamar rushing through set-up of plot beats that would feel more organic and fluid if they came from an early episode explicitly designed to build to the idea of Archer on the prison transport.
Canamar is a prime example of just how out of touch Star Trek: Enterprise was with the television landscape, reinforcing the sense that the second season of the show was a holdover from some much earlier period of television production.
“It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. I’ve outrun Imperial starships.”
Continue reading →
Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 100s, 1990s, canamar, drama, enterprise, john shiban, Jonathan Archer, nineties, prison, serialisation, social commentary, storytelling, Television | 6 Comments »