aul Turner (Guinee), an Army scientist, is part of an elite team sent into Iraq in 1991 to investigate the release of toxins from a top-secret bombing raid. He and his partner are accidentally infected with the toxin, which gives them a rare, incurable and fatal anemia.
Cut to the present. Turner's been receiving secret treatments for his own version of Gulf War syndrome from a mysterious Asian woman (Wu), who is manipulating him on behalf of unknown, possibly malevolent forces. As long as he does what she says and tells no one, he will continue to receive the treatments that keep him alive. All she'll tell him is that "There's a reason you were chosen."
In the first episode of Strange World, Turner is asked to help solve a murder-kidnapping in which his former partner is the prime suspect. Turner discovers that the boy has a secret twin who is being held by his former partner. He offers to rejoin his colleagues at USAMRIID--the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases--to get to the bottom of it using an obscure clause that allows the appointment of a special investigator to look into criminal "abuses of science."
What Turner finds is a plot involving human cloning and a conspiracy so dark that someone has been killing those who know what's going on. The further he gets into the case, the more he alienates his doctor and girlfriend, Sydney MacMillan (Lehman), and runs afoul of his ally at USAMRIID, Major Lynn Reese (Quarterman).
The second episode, "Lullaby," concerns the abduction of fetuses from young pregnant women. Someone is using surrogate mothers to breed fetuses that spontaneously miscarry at six months. Or do they? As Turner investigates, he uncovers a plot involving a mendacious obstetrician, a couple who are not what they seem and a renegade FBI agent. What Turner discovers is a shocking misuse of the young women's hopes for a baby.
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A limited-run midseason debut, Strange World is based on the proposition that not only is the truth out there, it's pretty scary. As Turner asks Reese in the pilot: "Why are people more afraid of aliens from outer space than they are of the monsters we're creating ourselves?"
The first two episodes offer a smorgasbord of scary pseudo-science drawn from newspapers and books: bio-weapons, mysterious miscarriages, Munchhausen's by proxy syndrome, human cloning, organ harvesting. In all of this, Turner is the key: The tortured central figure in a massive conspiracy to conceal the existence of--well, viewers are not really quite sure what just yet, but it's big.
And if that sounds familiar, it's no accident. Strange World is ABC's latest attempt steal a few folders from The X-Files. It's better than ABC's last X clone--the short-lived Prey, whose main virtue was a somber Debra Messing. This time around, the network apparently decided to go ahead and hire the real deal: former X-Files executive producer Howard Gordon.
In addition to a lot of supporting players, crew and a Vancouver location, Strange World shares The X-Files' moodiness, dark palette, sense of foreboding and paranoia based loosely on very real events and places: the Persian Gulf War, the unidentifiable ailments of Gulf War veterans, the threat of bio-terrorism and the setting of USAMRIID, made famous in the book The Hot Zone.
It also goes out on a severed limb with an uncharacteristic-for-prime-time use of graphic, if fleeting, imagery, apparently an attempt to trump the X-Files' own gross-out factor.
The first two shows are intriguing, if a little slow. For now, the conspiracy is dense and impenetrable, and the use of the mysterious Asian woman seems like an arch device to set the plot in motion. But here and there--as in a scene between Sydney and a frightened mother-to-be, played touchingly by Monet Mazur-- the writing is affecting. And Guinee nicely captures the anguish and panic of his terminally ill character, especially when he's late for his curative fix.
