Pilot Season – Sleepwalkers

    I cheated on this one a bit more than usual in that I watched the first two episodes. This is only a single-episode pilot and the first two episodes not only aired in consecutive weeks but they were aired out of production order, so there was absolutely no need for me to watch them both. I did so for two reasons: the show was canceled after the second episode aired (five more were burned off months later in the West Coast markets only and two more never aired at all) and I wanted to watch both episodes to make sure the absolute drivel of the pilot wasn’t just lightning in a bottle. Never fear, this show is as dreadfully stupid as I thought.

    It wasn’t simple to watch these specific episodes either. This was only ever partially issued on DVD in Australia as three quasi movies where they spliced the first six episodes together into three separate 90 minute chunks and released them individually in 2005, fully eight years later. They did it in production order, not broadcast order, so I had to deliberately watch the wrong second episode because that’s how it was aired. I deliberately watched the confusing sequencing just to get the full experience.

    I mentioned in my review of ‘Prey’ that it had a season 3 problem. I will charitably say this show had a second commercial break problem. The fact that they somehow squeezed nine produced episodes out of this tiny, tiny pebble of a concept is honestly a little impressive.

    I will get the positives out of the way first. The cast is fine. Bruce Greenwood is solid, a baby Naomi Watts is allowed to use her actual accent and shows glimmers of why she’d later become a star, and Abraham Benrubi is just as delightful as he always is. Some of the production design is decent. The opening credits does that late-90’s thing of ripping off ‘Seven’ but not quite as annoyingly as a lot of other shows of the time period. I think that’s it.

I'm sure Mr. Fincher is very flattered.

   

    Earlier this month I completely dismissed the first episode of ‘Perversions of Science,’ “Dreams of Doom.” It was written by David S. Goyer (shakes fist) and was all about dreams and dreams within dreams and I hated it because nothing meant anything and nothing made sense. Well, here we have an entire show produced that very same year by that very same David S. Goyer (shakes fist) that bends that very same premise into basically a roughly procedural format. It’s like if someone after reading that review gathered up everything I hated and traveled back in time to use my concentrated disdain to create the perfect show with which to annoy me.

    So let’s dig into why the premise of this show is so very stupid, not even the execution (which we’ll get to) just the premise. Without going into anything so pointless as the plot it’s as such: members of The Morpheus Institute have developed technology that allows their staff to enter peoples’ dreams. They have their own backstories and traumas that occasionally bleed over into the dreams but otherwise it’s about entering the subconscious of people to ... do stuff, generally getting them to remember things. Oftentimes it’s uncovering a childhood trauma, one episode has a serial killer that’s been shot in the head so they go into his brain to find out where his last victim is being kept alive (hey there, ‘The Cell’), they apparently start wandering down the path of psychics and supernatural beasties in later episodes because firstly why not and secondly it’s just about the only place you can take a premise like this. Otherwise the show is just heavily dramatized therapy sessions.

    Dreams are, generally speaking, a problem in a visual medium, or possibly a symptom of a deeper storytelling problem. Visual narratives are, like any kind of narrative, constructed reality. Through framing, blocking, editing, foley, the addition of music and special effects, they take part in a collective language of visual storytelling, a shared frame of reference between the filmmakers and the audience. For example the standard shot / reverse-shot of a two person conversation is not jarring or confusing to us even though it’s taking at least two distinct camera angles and flipping between them during what is supposedly a single conversation because it’s what we’re used to and we’ve been taught how to interpret it. We know intellectually that just off the side of the frame there’s an entire crew with lights and craft services and masking tape on the floor for blocking purposes but in the moment we’re fully buying into the illusion being built for us.

    Filmed dream sequences break that illusion by using the same basic language of constructed visual narrative but violating the agreed-upon rules in order to confuse and upset us. What were the utilitarian building blocks of the storytelling become part of the storytelling themselves. You’ve bought into the fantasy, you have sufficiently suspended your disbelief to engage with the story, but if dream sequences get introduced that disbelief gets harder and harder to suspend when you can’t guarantee, for sure, that any given scene won’t suddenly end in an unmotivated edit and have a character jerk up in bed, more than likely covered in sweat and breathing heavily. Much the same problems are involved in hallucinations. In the season 2 finale of ‘House M.D.’ the main character has been hallucinating for much of the episode. Then there is a normal edit to the doctor and his staff on a staircase when he suddenly wonders how he got there, having no memory of anything between the last scene and this one, and decides he’s hallucinating again. While a clever moment it does taint the rest of the episode as it establishes that any edit, be it a simple scene transition or commercial break, for the rest of the episode might be part of the narrative instead of just the underlying structure of the show.

    One of the first things taught in writing 101 is to avoid the ‘it was just a dream’ ending. This is usually couched in terms of it being cliched and played out but it’s actually worse than that, it makes everything established up to that point effectively meaningless. In written mediums you can do a bit more with dreams, you can use them to explore the psychology of characters or establish motifs or themes, but that direct authorial voice isn’t there with a tv show or movie where the emphasis is on show not tell.

She's got her eyes closed because she's in a coma because clever.

    

    Let’s get into some specifics. The plot of the pilot is very simple: a man is getting sick somehow because of recurring nightmares he’s having of a faceless attacker. He is told at his current rate of decline he has mere weeks to live. So he turns to The Morpheus Institute for help. Through dreams they determine he had an unborn twin brother that seems to have been absorbed by him in the womb and he feels survivor’s guilt. Once he learns the truth he confronts his attacker in the dream and instantly gets better.

    The way they tell this very simple (and don’t forget troublingly stupid) story can be charitably described as needlessly circuitous. The episode opens on the man being attacked on a subway train. Why a subway train? They never explain. The first time the members of the Institute enter his dream they miss the train, wander a post-apocalyptic wasteland until they find an intact museum-type building, go inside and then ride an old-timey elevator down to a nondescript industrial holding area where there’s a mirror, get attacked, dream over. Why any of this imagery? Never explained. The next dream is set in the woods by the man’s childhood home. He sees a younger version of himself turn into a raven, they go to his parent’s house and dig in the basement before the house starts collapsing. This one they follow up on in the real world, suddenly flying to that childhood home and digging in the basement to reveal a carved wooden soldier with the name ‘Nevur’ carved in the based, which they only used because sometimes the characters in dreams talk backwards and it sounds like ‘never’ when you do that. This of course means there was a secret, unborn twin named Ruven (see what they did there?) and that his father, who carved the soldier, named it the backwards name of his unborn brother because that’s what people do. So despite the fact that neither his mother nor father ever so much as hinted of this brother nor was there any documentation of it ever existing the man ‘subconsciously’ knew about it and has felt guilty since presumably birth. The subconscious does quite a lot of heavy lifting in this show. The man and his attacker fight in a dream of the Institute, he wins, the end. That was all a long, long walk to get to nowhere in particular.

    The not-really second episode has at least a somewhat more believable buried trauma in that it could have actually happened. A one-year old boy witnesses his aunt fake his baby’s sisters death by drowning before stealing away with the infant to raise as her own. The mom goes to a mental institute, having broken down after thinking her negligence caused the death of her child, and he grows up to have night terrors about the incident. Fair enough as the premise for a character study. How this translates in the show is as recurring dreams of a church (never explained) and a ‘smiling man’ who is apparently a manifestation of the Trickster archetype who either is or is not trying to protect the boy from his own memories depending on the needs of the scene. What an adult Trickster archetype is doing in the dreams of an eight-year old boy is, say it along with me, never explained. They confront the Trickster, the boy remembers, his night terrors are suddenly gone.

    The characters of the Institute fare little better. Naomi Watts’ character is Australian seemingly for the sole purpose of having her drone on about the supposed Australian aboriginal belief in ‘The Dreaming’ or ‘The Dreamtime.’ As I am not familiar with actual aboriginal culture I’ll just say it’s a bit more complicated than presented on this show and leave it at that. Bruce Greenwood has a wife in a coma whose dreams he visits occasionally as well as an unexplained Ray Wise lurking around in the back of his head, so he’s got that going for him. Abraham Benrubi is just enjoying his time away from ‘E.R.’ Another character is an adrenaline junkie and the patient from the pilot episode joins the Institute as the rookie of the team for expository purposes but in-universe it’s because a background as a fighter pilot translates seamlessly into dream warrior.

    Presumably you don’t get all the way to produced and aired television episodes without having some idea of how everything is going to play out. To dig out my original three necessities of a pilot episode: establish the premise, demonstrate how it would function as an ongoing series, and establish the characters. The first was at least accomplished if not well, the third was still a work in progress, the second failed as hard as it was possible to fail. They didn’t pull a David E. Kelley and have all of the show being written by one person, they presumably had a staff and a writer’s room where they’d get together and map out at least some sort of plan going forward. As they compared notes on character arcs and filled out the show bible didn’t at least one of them, at any point along the way, stop and wonder aloud how in the world they were expecting to make enough episodes to make it into syndication? I mean seriously, the episodes go childhood trauma, serial killer, childhood trauma, psychic succubus lady, married couple dreaming about killing each other, coma wife, psychic link to murder, Stephen King rip off, psychic predicting murders in dreams. When you’re breaking the glass on ‘succubus attacks mining town’ by episode four you’re already pulling desperation moves.

    Before I wrap up I want to circle back around to the pointless nature of all of the ‘symbolism’ portrayed in the dreams, and I lack enough quotation marks to put around that word. The point of Naomi Watt’s character is supposed to be that she’s the symbologist on the team, the expert in interpreting dreams, when in reality she’s supposed to stand next to the male character during tense moments and look concerned. One moment from the pilot really stands out for me as emblematic of just how sloppy the writing was. As they come upon the building in the post-apocalypse she notes that there’s a frieze on the door of a two-faced man, facing both left and right. She correctly notes it as the symbol of Janus, the Roman god, but then identifies him as “the Roman god of past and future.” Which, no, no he is not. He’s the Roman god of “beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and ending,” so I can see where you’re getting that, but no. More than that what’s the significance of this symbol in the dream of a fighter pilot facing childhood trauma? I get that the story eventually resolves itself into twins and that’s the justification but symbolism is more than that. Why is it on the doorway to the building? What significance does it hold for the dreamer? It’s just something that’s there because a writer thought it was clever and never got past that.

    This is not the premise for a television show, it’s the premise for a movie or at most a mini-series. It’s one plot point among many in your fantasy novel. It’s the splash page of your comic book after Batman gets dosed by the Scarecrow’s fear gas. It’s the cold open for your sitcom episode where the husband is worried about his wife cheating on him. The fact that this formed the basis of a for reals attempted television show still blows my mind. If I ever meet David S. Goyer (shakes fist) I will grab him by the shirt collar and keep demanding an answer until he either gives me one or security drags me away.