Ah, it's absolutely fantastic. So incredibly silly. So gloriously old-fashioned. The music is a smooth blend of misremembered or elaborated themes and overtures from a glut of recent Hollywood blockbusters. The plot works the same way.
(Takes a deep breath)....billionaire shipping magnate Sam Neill hires a group of oddballs (one psychic, one deep-sea diver chick, one meteorology professor with surf-punk hair and an Xtreme deathwish, and one David Carusoesque journalist (Eric Stoltz) with a messy divorce) for $5m dollars apiece. They must use their different skillz to solve The Mystery of The Bermuda Triangle.
Meanwhile, Lou Diamond Philips plays a welder, family man and Greenpeace anti-whaling protester who survives a weird 'event' in the BT (water goes bubbly, whaler blows up, serves them right, etc., but all his greenpeace friends drown, which we care about, and no I don't know what happened to the whale) and then later, once he returns home, finds weird shit happening to him. So do the rest of the cast. LDP thinks, for example, his truck is the wrong colour/that he has a kid he didn't have/that he doesn't have a kid he did have/he thinks he's going mad. And the navy is involved....somehow...
You get the picture? The usual time-travelling, metaverse, wormhole alternate reality stuff, oh, wow, it's just sooooo much like Pringles or really good junk food.
Actually, I've just, to my joy, discovered it has its very own website ha ha! Here it is. Enjoy! Oh, no, wait, it doesn't seem to be working properly....perhaps it's....wooooooooo!
I asked Benjamin from Book Pirate for a summary of last night's show, because it looked like I wouldn't be able to see it. He did us all proud: this, I contend, is the most perfect summary of a science fiction episode I've ever seen. It is brilliant. Here it is:
Triangle.
-Awful, awful credit sequence. So glad I missed that yesterday.
- Bright light predictably turns out to be chopper. They are snatched by special forces types, drugged, debriefed and intimidated. They catch a glimpse of a secret underwater base and are then, bizarrely, let go unharmed and dumped on a beach. The scary government agency are ’50 hours away’ from doing whatever it is they’re going to do.
- Lou is coming to terms with mystery kid, but still hallucinating like a good ‘un. He nearly drowns in his own shower and dead men pop out of the plughole.
- hallucinations increase for the two who dived to the wreck (Prof and Dive Chick).
Prof sees own obit. Dive Chick meets dead mother.
(glimpses of alternate timelines IMHO.)
- Eric Stoltz rescues daughter from sleepover where navy dad shoots himself after muttering about , ‘they’re doing it again’. Scary hallucination/alternate reality lights are seen.
- Scary government types turn up to deal with situation. They prove to be the Navy.
- Sam Neil insists Our Heroes continue, despite being threatened by Navy and seeing scary moustachioed men in the mirror.
- Our heroes have mass trip into alternate reality where America is run by Nazis (talk about a sci-fi trope) and Australians are illegal. Waves of shimmering force change things back to normal.
- Lou brings home presents for both kids. Lou only has one kid again. Lou emotes. (Lou gives good scary-mad face)
- Journo burgles dead Navy dad’s house and finds clues leading to Naval base. (hmmm…)
-Lou sees a shrink. Lou emotes.
- Lou sees more dead people. Lou emotes.
- Oz Prof does tv science and finds weird invisible electric storm in middle of Atlantic. Prof and Dive Chick deduce that the underwater base they saw must be there to generate huge amounts of power. Naturally Prof and Dive Chick decide to fly plane into storm to see what happens.
-Psychic and journo wander onto Naval facility, find spooks and missing old lady/girl behind a curtain and are mysteriously allowed to leave without having their throats cut.
-psychic tracks old lady/girl’s grandfather by getting naked and writing on himself.
-Grandfather when found asks, rather tellingly, ‘Are you with the PROJECT?’
The game being up he then tells Psychic and Eric all about finding a mysterious source of exotic matter (a truly phenomenal power source!) under the sea which he and his partner were writing up for a paper before the Navy annexed it to use it as a weapon. Due to exotic matter’s ability to tv science tv science tv science it could all end badly.
- Lou emotes whilst drinking.
-Prof and Dive Chick have nasty plane experience and are last seen plummeting into unnatural electrical storm of doom.
- Psychic, Eric and Grandfather are driving back to blow the gaff in the papers when a reality altering tidal wave of glowing light hits them and drops them in the drink. Grandfather drowns.
- Lou emotes with gun.
- Lou emotes with gun, whilst staring into electrical storm.
Continued on Sunday.
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