t the outset of this new series, Derek Barnes(Embry), the Webmaster of a paranormal site, says "The story I'm going to tell you now is true." Derek's twin brother, Adam, killed himself two years earlier, and Derek still carries a heavy burden of guilt for failing to respond to Adam in his moment of need.
Adam ran an academic Web site called Occultresearch.com, which looked into reports of the paranormal. Derek was his legman, a self-described "surfer just trying to keep cornflakes on the table." When Adam died, Derek took over the site, juiced it up with a little rock-and-roll attitude and, for reasons unknown, renamed it Freakylinks. Derek now runs the site with his partner, Jason Tatum (Prince) and brainy behind-the-scenes tech Lan Williams (Carrion).
In the pilot episode, Derek receives an anonymous email that contains a video of his dead brother, implying that Adam was alive only two days earlier. The email links to a mysterious Web site with a single word: Croatoan.
Appropriately freaked, Derek consults Adam's former fiancee, Chloe (Sheridan), to see if she can shed light on the mystery. She tells him that at the time of his death, Adam was investigating the Blair Witch-like disappearance of 115 people from the 16th-century Roanoke Colony; Croatoan refers to an island nearby. Adam was closing in on a theory that one of the colonists--a little girl--may not have been entirely human.
Later, while revisiting Adam's home, Chloe and Derek have a close encounter with a presence that may or may not be Adam. They also encounter a raving lunatic with knowledge of what Adam may have been seeking. The deeper Derek and Chloe probe, the closer they come to uncovering secrets about an unseen world that they may not be ready to handle.
"This is making no sense."
Freakylinks is the mutant stepchild of a diverse creative team that once included Blade screenwriter David S. Goyer, The Blair Witch Project's producer Gregg Hale and executive producer Tommy Thompson. Goyer and Hale, who wrote the pilot, have since downgraded their involvement in the show, and Thompson has been replaced by David Simkins (The Adventures of Brisco County Junior). The reason: Fox's apparent desire to downplay the creators' original dark, edgy conception and emphasize the show's lighter elements.
Judging from the pilot, the amalgam of light and dark works less successfully than in The WB's Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel. And for all of Freakylinks' cutting-edge production--lots of hand-held video, smart-aleck narration and grainy flashbacks--the show relies on surprisingly conventional B-movie scares and spookiness. Only in a historical sequence about the Roanoke Colony does the show come close to approximating The Blair Witch Project's sense of foreboding and creepiness. Otherwise, Freakylinks is the kind of show where the hero enters a scary old house in the middle of a dark and stormy night, where specters appear in high windows and where mirrors are gateways to the supernatural.
The show's pilot is not aided by a truly murky plot and flat-footed dialogue. For example, Chloe asks, "Why didn't you ever clear out Adam's things?" Derek replies, "I guess I never wanted to accept the truth about what happened." The writers chose to chop the narrative up into flashbacks, flash-forwards, video inserts and dreamlike sequences, which made the story more confusing by the minute.
The Web gimmick quickly becomes irritating, and it remains to be seen how effectively future writers marry the series to the elaborate Web site that has been created to complement the show. What's clear is that Fox is trying to capitalize on Blair Witch's effective use of Web culture as a way to build backstory and mythology--ironic given Fox's well-known hostility to fan Web sites.
