| Horrors! New sci-fi on UPN 04/11/2001 By / The Dallas Morning News With so many fears to chew over – global warming, resistant strains of bacteria, human cloning – this should be a ripe time for science fiction. Or is the opposite true? Maybe there's no room for scary speculation when our nightmares are becoming science fact.
Whatever the reason, sci-fi on television – even as it proliferates – seems to be retreating from any connection to the real world.
Two new offerings on UPN cement the trend. Both Special Unit 2, premiering Wednesday night, and All Souls, bowing next Tuesday, are clearly designed with the niche network's young male audience in mind.
If you like professional wrestling, the makers of Special Unit 2 are hoping you'll also take to their mix of cartoon violence and comic sexual banter.
The unit of the title is a semi-secret wing of the Chicago police that fights the all-purpose ghouls of childhood. In this universe, every kind of creature you can imagine and some you've never heard of are for real: gargoyles, gnomes, sea monsters.
As a group, they're called "links," as in missing links. Something called a herkamer is basically a living head in a box. But vampires – hah! The cops of Special Unit 2 scoff at their existence.
The new recruit (Alexondra Lee), who's been seeing weird things out of the corner of her eye since she was a kid, is teamed up with a cynical/sensitive hunk (Michael Landes) in a sort of poor man's X-Files in reverse.
Rather than trying to expose "the truth," the partners are out to keep the creatures under wraps. And they apply a lot of violence to the task.
Their exchanges are also aimed directly at UPN's hormonally charged viewers.
"In case you're wondering," he says to her in close quarters, "that's my pepper spray."
"And this," she responds, "is my knee."
Their sidekick is an equally frisky and wisecracking gnome (Danny Woodburn) with a penchant for convenience-store holdups and wrestling matches with the unidentified long-tailed creature locked up in the unit's office.
"Don't make me break all four of your legs," he says to one of his contacts on the phone.
And he has the best line in the series' second episode. During the questioning of a herkamer, this head in a box is asked how he could possibly be helping a Japanese mummy rain terror on the city.
"Mind over matter," the herkamer says cryptically.
"The secret that hides in plain sight. The real world seen through the shadows."
"In other words," the gnome chimes in, "he's not going to tell you."
All Souls, which David Lynch's Twin Peaks partner Mark Frost is helping produce, takes itself a lot more seriously than Special Unit 2 and makes even less sense.
The show is named after a hospital that specializes in state-of-the-art care for charity cases – there's your science fiction right there.
The only problem is that the dead are also hanging around, waging battles that draw in the living. The rules of this parallel world are so vague, there's no easy way to get hooked into the action. The lack of character development doesn't help either.
Like Special Unit 2's main character, All Souls' Dr. Grace (Grayson McCouch) is a naive visionary and not much else. He turns down residency offers from the Mayo Clinic and Yale – more science fiction – to work at All Souls because he has questions about his father's death.
Former Dallas resident Irma P. Hall plays a psychic nurse who indirectly points the way.
In the first episode, female patients with minor ailments are being experimented on. A later installment features a Faustian story line. And there are visual references to The Shining.
The difference between such a terrifying classic and UPN's formula fare is that All Souls and Special Unit 2 have very little basis in real human fears.
Instead, they're based on other sci-fi, and poorly so.
SPECIAL UNIT 2
C-
7 p.m. Wednesdays, UPN (Channel 21). Starring Alexondra Lee, Michael Landes, Richard E. Gant, Danny Woodburn. Created by Evan Katz. 60 min.
ALL SOULS
D
8 p.m. Tuesdays, UPN (Channel 21). Starring Grayson McCouch, Serena Scott Thomas, Reiko Aylesworth, Irma P. Hall, Adam Rodriguez, Daniel Cosgrove. Created by Stuart Gillard, Stephen Tolkin. 60 min.
|
