Perversions of Science – Dreams of Doom

    We will not be addressing the tiddy robot.

Always classy, HBO.

    As a general rule I have no interest in anthology shows. There are exceptions, of course, most of them involving Rod Serling, but the lack of central characters or long-form storytelling generally cause my eyes to glaze over. Even when they’re a full hour there’s generally not enough time to establish the premise, characters, and tell a full story. And when you cut those down to half an hour all the problems are even worse.

    The only thing that people really remember from ‘Tales from the Crypt’ is The Cryptkeeper, and rightly so. A pun-slinging puppet corpse hamming it up is always good times, even if Geoff Peterson is his superior in every way. It was a hit for HBO back when ‘Dream On’ was its definition of a breakout smash and it managed to generate a couple of spin offs: ‘Two Fisted Tales,’ a war anthology, and ‘Perversions of Science,’ a sci-fi take on the ‘Tales from the Crypt’ formula. Both shows attracted some of the best talent in the business, with directors such as Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis, and Tobe Hooper and stars such as David Morse, Kirk Douglas, and a young Brad Pitt. ‘Two Fisted Tales’ lasted for three whole episodes, ‘Perversions of Science’ for a whopping ten.

    To me the clearest problem with anthology shows is the writing. Unless you have a Rod Serling or a Charlie Brooker overseeing things quality is going to be all over the place and often quite weak. Even ‘Amazing Stories,’ which managed to last for two whole seasons and have some cultural relevancy, and was overseen by Steven Spielberg, an amazing talent but very conspicuously not a writer, ultimately didn’t amount to much. When you’ve got half an hour, less with commercials, you need to set up the beats quickly, tell your story, and end with a punch.

    That right there might be the achille’s heel of the entire endeavor: for every single episode you need to have a full ending. Not a ‘to be continued,’ not a fade into credits as the crisis of the week is wrapped up but the saga continues, you need to have told a full story with a definite ending. That’s why Rod Serling was such a genius, it often felt like he started with the ending nailed and then figured out how to get there. Referring to shows as ‘O. Henry stories’ may sound dismissive but there’s a reason that name has stuck around, dude knew endings.

    Which finally brings us around to the very first episode of ‘Perversions of Science.’ ‘Dreams of Doom’ is pointless and terrible and should have killed writer David S. Goyer’s career in its infancy (he’s going to come up again when I finally do the pilot for ‘Sleepwalkers.’ His name is likely to come up a lot. I think he sucks and he does terrible things to my favorite comic book characters). This episode has a few other names involved: Keith Carradine, Lolita Davidovich, and Adam Arkin star and Walter Hill directs. On paper this is all gold.

    It’s a disjointed and worse boring episode of television. You know that cliché where a character wakes up and ‘it was all a dream?’ This is just under thirty minutes of that happening over and over and over again to no apparent point.

    Keith Carradine is an associate professor of Literature who spends a few minutes of the episode talking about Keats. There is no point to this, he doesn’t even recite any poetry. I only mention it because I really like Keats. He apparently took part in a clinical trial of nebulous government origin involving lucid dreaming that may or may not have involved an experimental drug. He is apparently now unable to ever fully wake from dreaming. Every time he thinks he does it turns out he’s in another dream, from which he’ll eventually wake. Rather than turtles it’s dreams all the way down.

    What this mechanically translates to on screen is that roughly every minute or so there’s a white flash on the screen or a scene cut and the five or six basic elements of the script get randomly shuffled. At any given moment Lolita Davidovich will be either his therapist, his wife, his daughter, Marilyn Monroe, or a hooker. A girl introduced as a student in his class will also be a stripper, his wife, a receptionist, or a newscaster. Adam Arkin will either be his friend, a bartender, another newsreader, or a doctor. Keith Carradine will occasionally complain about things but generally just looks confused or put upon.

    And that’s pretty much it. That’s the episode. There’s a very clumsy attempt at an ending where about three minutes before the episode doesn’t so much end as stop one of the remixed characters claims you can’t die in your own dream, this gets repeated a couple of times, he walks into Lolita Davidovich’s therapist office, shoots himself in the head, and then she wakes up with him in bed as her husband, turns to the camera, and screams.

    This, I must remind you, was the first episode, the one that was supposed to get you hooked. There was no through-line, no theme, no apparent deeper meaning to any of this. For what it is there are an absurd number of sets and costume changes, this thing had a budget. Walter Hill, I will remind you, had previously directed ‘The Warriors’ and ‘48 Hours,’ but he was on his way down at the time and it shows, this doesn’t even rise to the usual level of a Hollywood director slumming it. The producers behind his show much have either been doing mountains of blow and signing everything or ending each day with massive fistfights.

    I will circle back around to the beginning to briefly talk about the show’s theme written by Danny Elfman. It sounds like someone doing a style-parody song of Danny Elfman. Weird Al would dismiss it as being too on the nose. In 1996 he scored ‘Mission Impossible,’ ‘The Frighteners,’ and ‘Mars Attacks!’ In 1997, the year of this episode, he scored ‘Men in Black’ as well as ‘Flubber’ and ‘Good Will Hunting.’ It wasn’t that he was incapable of still doing good work, it was that he had more important things to do and probably scrounged around for an old ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ demo he had lying around.

    I was upfront about my uninterest in anthology shows. Did I cheat a little by picking this episode to dismiss the entire form? Yes and no. Just a quick bit of research clued me in to the dismal reputation his show had but even so I had no idea it would be this actually dreadful.