Pilot Season – Brimstone

    We’re fast-forwarding all the way to 1998 for this one. This is a dangerous precedent to set. Next thing you know I’ll be reviewing the pilot for ‘The Crow: Stairway to Heaven’ (I will not be reviewing the pilot for ‘The Crow: Stairway to Heaven’).

Y'know it makes my job harder when the title of the show is completely reasonable.

    It opens with our main character, Peter Horton as Ezekiel Stone (from ‘thirtysomething’ and, more thematically resonant, ‘Children of the Corn’), waking up on the subway. A post ‘Se7en’ montage sequence is followed by his wandering the streets, fairly bemused, before he walks into a church and takes a knee in the confessional. There he gives a pretty solid expo-dump of the premise to the listening priest: he used to be a cop, he killed the man who raped his wife, was later killed on duty and went to Hell, now 113 souls have escaped and the Devil needs him to track them down. The priest asks why he’s telling him all this when Ezekiel, just as uninterested as the audience in pretending otherwise, just leans forward and says the priest knows why.

    The Father scrambles out of the church and into an alleyway where he’s stopped by a wire fence. Ezekiel is just about to shoot him when cops randomly show up and tell him to put the gun down. As they’re doing so the camera pulls back to reveal the priest has burned his way through the fence and escaped. Cut to temp credits.

    Which cuts directly back to the arrest. One cop goes looking for the priest, the other confirms to Ezekiel that altar boys have been going missing and he doesn’t look too bad for it. One quick scuffle later and Ezekiel is free with his gun back. He escapes then checks into a slightly run down hotel and through some decent dialogue about baseball with the lady at the front desk it’s established that’s he been in Hell for at least a few years.

    He goes upstairs, relaxes a little bit, then John Glover is out on the fire escape as the Devil to do a little more expo-dumping. He goes over the show rules: neither Ezekiel nor the escaped damned can die except by destroying the eyes, they can’t be physically hurt except by other residents of Hell, and the longer they were in Hell the more powerful they are with like Hell powers. Stone’s been there fifteen years, some have been there for centuries, so good luck, champ. Ezekiel snarks back about how no one’s going to take the Devil seriously if he can’t police his own house to which John Glover smiles and simply pushes him off the fire escape. Ezekiel picks himself up and hobbles off.

    There’s a brief interlude with the cop who tried to arrest Stone which a quick glance at IMDB tells me not to pay attention to since this was the only episode he was in. Still, he’s played by Currie Graham, one of my ‘Hey it’s that guy’ guys, so I don’t mind too much.

    Cut to a school outing and the priest being a creepy priest. One of the children needs to go the bathroom, the priest offers to take him, one fewer kid. We’re going to gloss over these bits.

    Another cop scene, moving on.

    Ezekiel goes back to the church and talks to the priest on duty, an older blind man. They go upstairs to the evil priest’s quarters, the older father not wanting to believe that his coworker had anything to do with the disappearances. While searching a wardrobe Ezekiel finds some strange coins that will turn out to be old subway tokens. As he’s leaving the cop investigating him suddenly walks in and pulls a gun on him. After a stand-off the priest acts as a distraction and Ezekiel jumps out of the window. The cop gives chase and they end up on a rooftop, Ezekiel having saved him from falling. Stone tiredly runs down the backstory, very clearly not caring if the cop believes him, then jumps off the roof and jogs away, pretty obviously convincing the cop.

    A few more expository scenes later and Ezekiel is at a transportation museum putting the old subway tunnels together with old churches, trying to track down the evil priest. The attendant starts to hit on him and he politely mentions he’s married, and then mutters “not to mention dead.”

    This apparently causes him to go by his old house and wander inside. Cue flashbacks to happier times.

    Now we’re back to the cop studying up on the first life of the evil priest to tense music. Then the priest doing creepy stuff to the still-alive kids doing some Book of Revelations ritual-type stuff. Then Stone casing old subway tunnels to some intensely late-90’s drum-heavy music.

    Stone hears some noises, investigates, and finds the kids tied to a beam. In a move I intensely approve of he immediately unties the kids, takes them to the exit, tells them to call the cops and ask for the detective he had the rooftop conversation with, then goes back to lay in wait for the Priest. Seriously, way to instantly take the kids out of danger. Well done, show.

    The detective and his partner get a 911 call and rush to help the kids. They make sure they’re safe and the detective’s partner heads down into the sewers while the believing cop confirms the priest’s identity with the kids using some turn of the century photos of his execution. Down in the sewers the other detective struggles with his lighter when the priest rushes up and stabs him to death with a knife-edged cross, which sure.

    Stone is seen crouching in wait for the priest when he’s distracted by another kid suddenly showing up in the subway tunnels. The priest takes this moment to attack and beasts the stuffing out him until the first detective shows, shoots the priest a bunch of times, then scuffles with him until the priest is run over by a subway car. Picking himself back up the priest starts to intone serious-sounding Biblical words when Ezekiel gets his attention, he turns around, and gets both his eyes shot out. Some very dodgy visual effects later the priest has been sent back to Hell.

    Cut to the epilogue where Stone and the detective have a decent heart to heart. Stone admits if he had to do it over again he’s not sure if he’s kill his wife’s rapist and the detective takes some solace in knowing that there is a divine plan. Stone flags down a taxi and they part ways.

    What a difference a decade makes. This is a very solid pilot. The creators of the show and writers of the pilot were Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris who went on to have a hand in the Kung Fu Panda movies, among other things. The premise is pretty basic and wisely the pilot wastes no time in laying both it and the rules out before moving on to the rest of the episode, filling it with solid if unspectacular detective work and some pretty good character moments. The character played by Currie Graham could easily have been a second lead and in fact another character is introduced in the next episode to be Stone’s contact with the cops so I’d be interested to hear what lead to him not being in the rest of the show.

    I’ve watched enough of these pilots that I’m really starting to rethink how important characters are in the whole scheme of things. The premise certainly has to be there, as well as how it’ll function as a show, but I’m starting to enjoy more and more the pilots that basically plunk the expository stuff down early and then spend the rest of their runtime showing how the characters and the world would actually work.

    Even so this show didn’t get its back end picked up and so is only 13 episodes long. It is the first show I’m thinking about watching after this so I guess technically it’s the first pilot to do it’s actual intended job. Apparently it still shows up in marathons on basic cable from time to time so if you happen to be scrolling channels and see it pop up I’d definitely give it a recommend.