Pilot Season – Dark Skies

    ‘Dark Skies’ is a little bit amazing. Not in its storytelling or character development but in the obvious effort put in to get the details right, for a give value of ‘right.’ As I was watching I first perked up a little bit at the inclusion of a scene at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, smiled a bit at the mention of Operation Blue Book, but didn’t start paying full attention until they introduced Betty and Barney Hill. Up until then my notes were basically about how forced the period touches were and how every establishing shot showed a location card with the full date, including the year. The date part makes sense, it’s matching an actual timeline of somewhat documented events, but we’re not going to forget it’s 1961, show, honest. Then actual conspiracy theory related things started coming up.

    For my sins I know more than I really care to about aliens and UFO’s and related conspiracy theories. Most of it’s through cultural osmosis but there are a couple of podcasts I listen to as well as some college-era digging into Discordianism and The Church of the Subgenius so I know some key phrases and references. I at least know enough that once I started noticing the bits and pieces of real-world conspiracy lore being woven into the show I kept seeing them and had to give the show-runners at least a little credit for putting in the legwork. Not everything was a keyword search away in 1996.

Even for the 1960's that's not good Photoshopping.

  

    ‘Dark Skies’ starred Eric Close as John Loengard, a young congressional aide trying to get ahead by volunteering to look into some budgetary items overseen by his Congressman employer. He gets pulled into investigating Operation Blue Book, the Air Force’s UFO investigatory program. I’m not going to jump down every rabbit hole the show brings up but I will point out that Betty and Barney Hill and their abduction story hews pretty close to the official account and Operation Blue Book was a real thing that existed. I’ll let you look up the details on your own.

    The central problem with the show is that even before our main character is introduced, before we get acclimated to the 1960’s climate, the show cold-opens with a fighter jet straight up encountering a flying saucer, so whatever potential for mystery is gone. This is not a show that entertains the notion of ‘will they/won’t they’ with the aliens, you know from the jump that aliens are real and now we’re just filling in the details. I suppose the idea is to have a hook for the audience: aliens during the Kennedy administration! The downside is that while we’re listening to the Hills tell their rather gripping story we’re suddenly following a cable wire out to a listening post disguised as a bread truck and I’m right out of the scene and wondering when the aliens are showing up for realsies.

    After getting the Hills on tape our main character starts to drive home, presumably, and is run off of the road by a helicopter. Men in masks jump out and start beating him up in a field. A man in a suit then threatens him and tells him to forget all about the Hills. Which is just stupid, really, they’re assaulting a Congressional aide, however junior. There are about seventeen easier ways to make all of this either go away or just get buried in a line item in a subcommittee hearing. I suppose we need a recognizable character actor to be one of the bad guys. They threaten him some more, this time with a gun, and then leave.

    One investigatory montage later and Loengard has identified his attacker ... somehow, as a Captain Bach. I want to criticize the show for kind of glossing over this part but they only have so much time to tell their story and this is clearly not important and this kind of hand-waving of details quickly becomes endemic so moving on. A coworker he’s been going over facts with gets wind that this Captain Bach is tied fairly directly to the president and bows out of the matter.

    Loengard tracks down Bach to a press conference given by Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the downed U-2 spy plane (the makers of the show sure did love their flashy history). They chat almost amicably and name drop some more conspiracy breadcrumbs. Captain Bach then just ... decides to take Loengard to a top secret facility, which he explains as containing the secret organization The Majestic 12.

    Bach leads Loengard to a morgue. They go over Roswell 101 and the show again stresses that aliens are real and then Bach pulls out the body of a Gray alien. He offers Loengard membership in The Majestic, apparently because he was impressed by all the research done during the parts of the montage we didn’t see. Loengard asks what happens if he says no, Bach says he can’t, so ... thanks? Again, moving on.

    Two weeks later he’s on a plane to Boise to look at some crop circles on that same helicopter with the same crew that assaulted him after meeting with the Hills. This show is an interesting contrast with ‘The X-Files’ in how it treats those in authority. So far this first episode is basically giving us the backstory of one of The Men in Black, someone who would be the bad guy on a different show. Like a ‘Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man’ except way more overt. Which would be interesting if that was at all the intent.

    He talks to the farmer that owns the field containing the crop circles, they drive out to take a look and Loengard starts to look at the circles up close. As soon as he finds a clearly alien artifact the farmer is suddenly trying to run him down in his truck. The other agents, who have been listening in, swoop in and shoot at the farmer until he crashes and dies. See, clearly the bad guys.

    Back at Majestic-12 (I can see that playing fast and loose with distances and travel times is also going to be a thing for this show) they take the body to the morgue. As they start to do an autopsy the body twitches. They start to shut down the section when the body starts strangling the doctor and suddenly little alien tendrils are wriggling out of the cadaver’s mouth. A little alien face-hugger thing leaps out of the cadaver’s mouth and onto one of the agents, they wrestle it into a glass jar, and then throw that into a freezer. Another agent comes in with another specimen in a jar and it’s revealed it was pulled out of one of the aliens from Roswell. With a close up of what looks like an oversize crawdad we end part one.

    This is another two-part premiere, one that actually aired in a single two-hour block, but I’m going to leave it there. Wikipedia informs me that next episode they identify the alien as part of an invading hive mind and rush to inform the president. Considering episode three centers on the Kennedy assassination I doubt it goes well.

    Apparently there was a five-year plan for the show, one season for every decade. This season made it 20 episodes deep before being canceled and they made it all the way up until 1967. Along the way they met The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Charles Manson, Carl Sagan, and other easily-identifiable pop culture figures. The summaries make it sound like a very strange version of ‘The New Scooby-Doo Movies.’

    It’s not a bad show for what it was but I can’t help but wish it hadn’t been quite so overt in what it was doing with its alien plot. A slowly unfolding conspiracy theory taking place entirely in the 60’s and setting the pieces for the modern military-industrial would have been much more my style. Instead we’re apparently whipsawing around the country every six months or so and checking historical and cultural references off of a list. Have you heard of a thing or person from the 60’s? Chances are there was an episode based around it. For fucks sake there’s one episode set during the Watts Riots. This kind of history-by proxy as told by the white men in charge was a very Bill Clinton era thing, the problematic elements run deep. I can’t help but think of something like ‘Lovecraft Country’ as a very pointed corrective to this way of thinking.

    A region one box-set was actually issued by Shout! Factory in 2011. It’s long out of print but you can still get a box set for reasonably cheap, making it maybe the second show I’ve looked at to secure a commercial release (‘The X-Files’ doesn’t count). If you’re really into conspiracy theories, the 1960’s, and thuddeningly obvious pop culture references I cannot recommend it highly enough.