Pilot Season – The Others

    It’s nice to be pleasantly surprised. I have yet another show to go on the pile of things to watch.

Gone too soon.

    In the fall of 1996 NBC introduced a gimmick into its Saturday prime-time schedule: The Thrillogy, three suspenseful genre shows tied together by a common sensibility. Saturday nights were a notorious broadcast tv wasteland so it made some amount of sense to try to goose some ratings out of the night by tying them together into a loose theme and Saturdays were apparently spooky. The original lineup was ‘Dark Skies,’ ‘The Pretender,’ and ‘Profiler.’ We’ve already covered the first one but the second and third might ring some distant bells. ‘The Pretender’ and ‘Profiler’ were by far the more successful series, both lasting four full seasons with ‘The Pretender’ even getting a couple of TNT made for basic-cable movies. They also crossed over from time to time, existing in the same tv universe, although apparently not in the Tommy Westphall Universe.

    ‘Dark Skies’ never quite made it to the end of its first season and when the block returned in the fall of 1997 it was replaced by ‘Sleepwalkers.’ We all know what happened there. Although ‘The Pretender’ and ‘Profiler’ continued to air together the moniker ‘Thrillogy’ was dropped until the mid-season introduction in 2000 of ‘The Others,’ after which it was pulled out of mothballs. At the end of that season all three shows ended up getting canceled and NBC has never visited the term again.

    It wasn’t my intention to do a Thrillogy trilogy, as it were, of the three less successful shows, it just kind of worked out that way. ‘Dark Skies’ wasn’t too bad for what it was, it certainly had ambition and a lot of potential, just not the greatest execution. I’ll be talking about ‘Sleepwalkers’ for years. Luckily for me it looks like I managed to save the best for last. Of the three shows it’s the least grandly ambitious and I would argue its success is at least partly due to that fact.

    The show was created by the screenwriting duo of John Brancato and Michael Ferris whose output is a decidedly mixed bag. They cut their teeth on such fare as ‘Watchers II’ and ‘Mindwarp’ before a pretty decent run of movies with ‘The Net,’ ‘The Game’ (yes, the Fincher one), and ‘Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,’ which I actually saw in theaters and don’t hate. Then they wrote ‘Catwoman’ and never really picked themselves back up after that. Interestingly five of the 13 episodes were written by Glen Morgan and James Wong of ‘The X-Files’ fame. This was just after their stint as show-runners of ‘Millennium.’

    The only really recognizable actors on the show were John Aylward, Bill Cobbs, and John Billingsly, all fairly prolific character actors. Of the rest they’ve all worked steadily in supporting roles and in smaller movies except for one who apparently starred in ‘Suits.’ They all inhabit their characters quite well and even in just the pilot give very strong ideas of their roles on the show and how they’ll be used going forward.

    The show is set on an unnamed college campus. Our main character is Marian, who dialogue establishes is a relatively small-town girl a little lost and unsure of herself in college. She marvels that her friends seem to know what they want to do with their entire lives while she has trouble picking a major. That night she’s awoken in her dorm room by what sounds like a woman crying but it turns out her roommate is asleep. She gets a glass of water from the sink and sees a dead woman in the bathtub. She drops the glass and wakes her roommate, who finds her sobbing in the bathroom.

    The next day she’s tracked down at the library by one of the professors from the college. He explains his area of interest is the unexplained and supernatural. Her roommate has apparently been spreading the story of what happened the night before and word got around to him. He tells her a girl died of apparently suicide in that dorm room bathtub the year before. He invites her to a meeting of a group he’s put together of like-minded people called ‘The Others.’ She is not interested.

    That night her roommate tapes her muttering a phrase over and over in her sleep and asks how it’s going looking for a room transfer. This is apparently enough to get Marian to head over to the meeting of The Others where we get a quick introduction to our various characters. There’s the professor who isn’t psychic but just wants to help, a rather pretentious girl who actually makes a living as a psychic, an empath who works as a medical resident, a socially awkward guy who it’s implied is schizophrenic and gets chaotic flashes of insight, an older blind man who’s basically a cranky bastard but with psychic powers, and the owner of the house they’re meeting in who’s in his 80’s and has been a medium for decades.

    There are two main threads to the episode from there and they both do a good job of showing both how the show would function going forward and who the characters are. In what would be considered the b-plot the professional psychic, the cranky bastard, and the socially awkward guy are hired by an old woman whose husband died in a freak accident and left her finances in a mess. She has to sell the house but it seems like he’s haunting it. The haunting is quickly confirmed and although it’s presented as scary, with objects moving and fires spontaneously starting, it turns out that the dead husband is haunting the house in order to guide his wife to the hidden safe where he stored all of the money he saved over the years. He was desperate to keep her from selling the house until she found it and when she does he ‘passes over’ and there’s a very nice scene where the pretentious psychic gently explains it’s ok for the wife to move on now as well.

    The a-plot is Marian dealing with the ghost in her bathtub. It’s made clear by the impressions the other in the group get that Marian is one of the strongest psychics they’ve ever encountered but she refuses to acknowledge or embrace her gift, which is causing her problems. After that initial meeting she keeps trying to disentangle herself from the group, insisting it has nothing to do with her, but things with the ghost keep escalating. She starts auto-writing the same two letters over and over in class, has an episode at a party where she’s suddenly dancing with the ghost and spacing out pretty hard, and then after getting drunk trying to ignore the ghost she gets full-on possessed and tries to recreate the girl’s death by taking sleeping pills and crawling into the full bathtub.

    The medical resident gets a flash of what’s going on and rushes over in time to save her life but now she’s unconscious in the hospital. The group goes over the recording, the auto-writing, and news reports of the girl’s death and figure out they’re all referring to the girl’s ex-boyfriend. There have been hints throughout the episode that the death wasn’t suicide and the implication is that the ex-boyfriend killed her. The professor tracks him down where he’s living rough, basically hiding out in his apartment and drinking. He convinces him to come with him to the hospital in an attempt to contact the girl’s ghost.

    Meanwhile the older medium psychically talks an unconscious Marian through the process of fully contacting the ghost. In a decently stylized sequence where they filmed the actors underwater but lit it so it looks like they’re just floating they talk, the ghost apologizing for almost killing her, saying she didn’t mean to. When the ex-boyfriend arrives the ghost inhabits Marian and informs him that while she didn’t commit suicide he also didn’t kill her. They had a stupid fight and she accidentally fell asleep in the bathtub after taking too many sleeping pills. She knows he’s let his life fall apart after her death, blaming himself, and she tells him to forgive himself and move on since it’s his guilt keeping her from passing on. He cries and apologizes and says he will and the ghost moves on as well. Marian goes into cardiac arrest, apparently having gone too deep to contact the ghost, but the older medium helps pull her back out.

    So we end with the group back at the house over dinner, laughing and talking and comparing notes, a deliberate contrast to where the episode started. Marian has made some real friends and is starting to understand what she wants to do with her life. It’s a strong note to end such an ostensibly spooky pilot episode on.

    I liked this episode quite a bit, I would’ve been quite sad if I’d watched it back in the day only for the show to get canceled after 13 episodes. I especially like how both the a and b plots ended up having happy endings, which is not how you expect a pilot to lay these things out. Reading quick synopses of later episodes this is clearly not always the case and they do start building a story-line on the show of an opposing, threatening force but obviously never got to follow through with it.

    The characters are fairly interesting and rarely just one thing. Everyone rather makes fun of the professional psychic for using tarot cards and burning incense when none of the rest of them feel it’s necessary but she clearly does have a gift and isn’t really bothered by their criticisms. The professor is at the same time a psychic fan-boy, helping out because he doesn’t have the gift he so clearly wishes he does, and also, although he can be awkward, he steps up and leads when necessary. The cranky bastard makes a point of being unpleasant to people but when things turn serious he drops the act and lets his genuine concern show. The quasi-schizophrenic character could easily have been a problematic portrayal of mental illness but the group is consistently understanding and supportive of his needs and never speak down to him, just give him quiet support which he clearly appreciates. And the older medium clearly has a deep backstory with a need to help others and looks fondly on these younger proteges.

    None of this is groundbreaking stuff but to so clearly delineate characters while establishing a premise and having two storylines in one pilot episode is no small feat. It’s not rocket science but it is solid work. No scene or character interaction is ever doing just one thing, it’s usually both moving the plot forward and giving us insight into characters. There was a lot of potential for growth with this show and it’s the first one in quite a while I’m regretful didn’t get the opportunity. It was never reissued on home media nor is it streaming anywhere but the entire series in on youtube, I’d really suggest checking it out.