at burglar Darien Fawkes (Ventresca) gets caught in a compromising position during his latest jewel heist. It's his third strike, and he draws a life sentence without parole. But his brother, Kevin (David Burke), offers a way out.
Kevin is a government scientist working on a top-secret project. He offers Darien a get-out-of-jail-free card if Darien agrees to "volunteer" for an experiment. "Is this, like, a Viagra thing?" Darien asks.
Unfortunately, no. With the help of the mysterious Swiss scientist Arnaud (Joel Bissonnette), Kevin implants a gland called Quicksilver in Darien's brain. When Darien becomes frightened, Quicksilver coats him with a substance that renders him invisible. The more Darien learns, the more he can control his ability to become transparent. He can even make objects invisible.
But there's a catch, as Darien finds out. Quicksilver acts as a narcotic on his brain. Without doses of a blue chemical called the Counteragent, Darien will go nuts. "It'll blow the lid off your id," Arnaud says.
In the two-hour pilot episode, Darien pleads with his brother to extract the gland when things get ugly. It seems Arnaud is not who he appears. Rather, he's a terrorist with his own agenda: to steal Quicksilver and sell it to the highest bidder. At an appointed hour, Arnaud and his men kill everyone in the lab, including Kevin--the only man who knows Quicksilver's secrets and who could remove Darien's gland.
Darien escapes. Desperate and with madness encroaching, he tries to make contact with his physician girlfriend, Casey (Rebecca Chambers). But before he can make her believe him, Darien is abducted by government operatives.
They are part of The Agency, a third-rate intelligence organization that is part of the U.S. Department of Fish and Game. They make Darien a deal: Capture Arnaud and they'll help him return to normal.
Sly comedy wrapped in silvery goo
SCI FI's original series The Invisible Man bears little resemblance to the classic H.G. Wells novel of the same name, on which it is loosely based. Rather, it combines sly comedy and post-modern cynicism with the conventions of science-gone-awry stories to come up with an appealing hybrid, a Pulp Fiction meets Strange World.
The pilot script, by series creator and executive producer Matt Greenberg (Halloween: H20), is clever and knowing. It focuses on the quirky Darien, a Nietzsche-quoting, Mark Twain-reading antihero with a heart of gold and a serious case of sibling rivalry. Greenberg uses ironic voice-over narration to convey a lot of this cleverness, and for the most part, it works well.
Greenberg and director Breck Eisner apply their wit to the pilot's visuals as well, and undercut audience expectations whenever possible, to good comic effect. It's a nice touch, for example, that The Agency isn't the usual top-secret, high-gloss, high-tech spook show, but rather an underfunded government agency in which employees kvetch about their GS levels. It's also amusing for the villain to be a non-neutral Swiss person who bristles at the suggestion that ABBA originated in Geneva.
Ventresca (Prey) is great as Darien, with the right combination of attitude and vulnerability. He is ably abetted by his supporting players, especially his mismatched Agency sidekick Hobbes (Ben-Victor, last seen as Moe in ABC's The Three Stooges). Their Mutt-and-Jeff bickering is one of the pleasures of the first two episodes.
The SF elements are minimal. The invisibility process, in which a computer-generated Matrix-y silvery goo covers Ventresca, isn't particularly impressive, but does the job. Paul Verhoeven's upcoming movie The Hollow Man is about to raise the ante for invisibility special effects, so The Invisible Man would do well to focus on story and character rather than the gee-whiz stuff anyway.
It remains to be seen whether subsequent episodes will fulfill the promise of the charming pilot; the second episode, "The Catevari"--about Darien's pursuit of a mysterious government assassin--feels like a standard-issue X-Files plot. And it's unclear why Darien's girlfriend from the pilot was dropped in favor of a Scully-like government minder, played by Shannon Kenney, who will be Darien's series partner.
n the depths of vast, sprawling and ancient Gormenghast castle, a baby is born--Titus Groan, heir to the Earl of Gormenghast. Thus begins the four-part BBC television adaptation of British fantasist Mervyn Peake's classic work, Gormenghast. Young Titus's world is entirely bound by the massive stone walls of the castle, from its lofty parapets to the heat and stench of its awful kitchen. The Groans and everyone else in the castle move slowly through an oppressive atmosphere, with the weight of stones and a rigid schedule of rituals to keep them firmly in their places. Even the color of the breakfast eggs is determined by the vast book of Law, read aloud by the perpetually angry Secretary Barquentine. But when Lord Groan's manservant Flay unwittingly liberates an abused kitchenboy by the name of Steerpike, the plodding course of Gormenghast's history is forever changed.
Steerpike manipulates his way up the social ladder, starting with Lady Fuchsia, Titus's sister. His ambition knows no bounds, and he relishes his evil acts, taking delight in playing the identical twins Cora and Clarice against their brother the Earl. His machinations take in the family doctor, Prunesquallor, and his sister. The only people not fooled by Steerpike's wheedling act are Titus's nanny, Slagg, and Mr. Flay, but they are helpless to prevent his maneuverings. Finally, Steerpike blackmails the twins into ultimate betrayal, and the resulting cataclysm drives the Earl to suicide. Titus's cold and distant mother, the Lady Gertrude, becomes suspicious, but would rather pamper her roomful of cats than protect her family. As Steerpike's enemies disappear one by one, it is up to young Titus, with the help of Lady Gertrude and the flighty Dr. Prunesquallor, to stop the traitor before the castle crumbles and the Groans are no more.
In Peake form
The challenge of adapting a huge and complex work like Peake's Gormenghast book to the screen is in providing enough faithful detail to satisfy the literary works' fans while moving the story along briskly to capture the attention of those who haven't read the books. This production succeeds admirably on both counts, achieving an operatic air that gives viewers a sense of Peake's style. The brilliant set and costume designs blend medieval and turn-of-the-century European influences with startling departures from the standard fantasy look and feel.
While Peake's novels are difficult reading, thick with style, the images his words paint are unforgettable--the dusty, crumbling castle with its creaking and groaning inhabitants. Each character is (almost literally) etched in stone. It's a testament to the extraordinary cast that they slip quite comfortably into their roles. Standouts are Celia Imrie, whose Gertrude is appropriately mountainous and chilly, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who forces viewers to sympathize with Steerpike even while taking a terrifying turn, and veteran horror actor Christopher Lee, whose dour, skeletal lankiness is perfect for his role as Flay.
If there is a flaw to Gormenghast, it is that it is too short. Even though the series covers only the first two books of Peake's trilogy (the third is widely agreed to be inferior), four episodes hardly seem enough to cover all the story's important events. In the third episode, the main storyline takes a back seat to the hilariously tragic efforts of Irma Prunesquallor to find a husband from among the castle's hidebound schoolmasters, and viewers might find themselves wishing for these scenes to be over so that Titus's adventures could get more air time. But with Mervyn Peake, asides, tangents and secondary stories are all part of the fun.
