Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Stegall
The Mercury Men
Syfy, On Demand
Written and Directed by Chris Prekstra
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
“The men of Mercury are the first men, made of light.” —Jack Yeager
I love subversive works of art. The Mercury Men, a series of ten webisodes that appeared this summer online and on the Syfy Channel, caught my eye last night while TV surfing. I was hooked from the opening five minutes. This tale of alien invasion harks back to the same serials of the 1950s and ’60s that inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark, as well as the revivals of Buck Rogers and The Twilight Zone series. Shot in high-resolution, sharply etched black-and-white, these mini-episodes (no more than ten minutes apiece) reminded me of old Outer Limits re-runs (especially the very first Outer Limits episode, “The Galaxy Being”, which scared the heck out of me as a child). There is the same claustrophobic atmosphere, the inherent menace of sharp-edged shadows that are blacker in black-and-white than in color. The entire series was shot in Pittsburgh for less than $10,000, which is probably the Starbucks bill for a show like Glee. Originally debuting at the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con with an initial concept, The Mercury Men was so wildly popular that Syfy footed the (miniscule) bill for the rest of the series. This is subversion at its best—the birth of indie television.
“I’m sorry, but this is my first time being attacked by lightning men.” —Grace
We start with a Walter Matthau look-alike, Edward Borman (Mark Tierno, The Road), who is finishing out the day in his cubicle farm in 1975. In his white shirt, black tie, and black-rimmed glasses, he is the complete nebbish, a worker bee who watches the clock and longs for quitting time. But as he prepares to depart, mysterious things begin to happen: distant screams are cut off, mysterious thumps are heard. When he sees a man made of glowing light shoot lightning at a janitor, he is overcome with whimpering terror. Cornered by the light-man, he is rescued at the last moment by the pinpoint shooting of a man wearing a leather helmet that was an anachronism in 1975: Jack Yeager (Curt Wootton, Captain Blasto), member of “The League”. (Everyone in this story is named after an astronaut or proto-astronaut: Yeager, Borman, Glenn.) He reveals that the light-men are from Mercury, where the light from the Sun is so intense it has become solid. Over the next nine short episodes, we get an intense, funny, thrilling story of alien invasion and individual heroism that exceeds just about anything I’ve seen in commercial sci-fi in a long time.
“You have to do it, Edward. For all of us.” —Jack Yeager
Like all good science fiction, it’s not really about the fiction. The costumes (retro Fifties serials) are fun, the ray gun (a modified .45) is a hoot, and the dialogue can sometimes be downright hilarious. Confronting a menacing mastermind, Yeager snaps, “Those are pretty bold words for a brain in a jar.” You do not get better dialogue than that in a Saturday morning serial. Edward is the real focus, moving from scared rabbit to bold defender of the planet, without losing his sad face, his slack jaw, or his geeky attitude. But at the last moment, when all other efforts to defeat the aliens’ Gravity Machine have failed, Jack is knocked out, and the light-men are in hot pursuit, Edward uses the greatest weapon Homo sapiens has: his brain. The stalwart hero with fists of iron and the steely eyed glare, while lovable and fun, winds up as second banana in this heroic tale to the ordinary worker drone who rises to the occasion.
“Everything the Chief Designer builds is a miracle.” —Jack Yeager
Did I mention I love this story? Because that’s what stands out here: the story. This is good storytelling. Yes, there were moments where a shot of a hand-held radio went on too long, or the occasional flat dialogue or the overacted, extended scene. But none of that mattered, because the story was so good. It’s not a new tale, but it is well told, and that’s really all one can expect of any story. This is what is so subversive about this miniseries: it’s all about the story. It’s not about advertising, or ratings, or getting renewed (although it may have been about getting exposure, which is what any artist wants anyway). It’s certainly not about the special effects (which were occasionally awesome anyway) or the music (largely borrowed from Dvorak and Holst). It’s about getting the story out there where its audience can find it, love it, interact with it, and support it.
“Just once, I’d like to ask a question that doesn’t have an insane answer.” —Edward Borman
Getting a screenplay made into a television episode may be a little harder than performing brain surgery on yourself with a warm spoon. Getting an entire series greenlighted? Brain surgery without the warm spoon, done in a hurricane and blindfolded. It’s just so damned impossible, with studios and gatekeepers and committees and suits mixing in, that what we end up with, all too often, is watered-down pabulum too innocuous to make much of an artistic statement. It’s hardly worth a writer’s time, because in the end all he or she will get out of Hollywood and the traditional system is a check—probably a small one—and a ban on attending the premiere.
“They’re afraid of us.” —Jack Yeager
The domination of big-money studios in television is an anachronism, tied to the expensive history of an infant medium back in the Fifties. Like the domination of big record companies, or big publishing houses, it was all about distribution. Cable television broke the death grip of the big networks, but the costs were still too high for small independents to gain access to the new distribution channels. But with the Internet, distribution opens up to anyone with a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone. The first art/industry to feel the change was Big Music, the giant record companies who distributed records and CDs. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a sea-change there, with millions of songs now available for pennies, anywhere, anytime, sometimes from an indie band’s tiny website in Univille. Big Publishing is starting to feel the same sea-change as writers abandon the gatekeepers in New York to self-publish on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Even filmmakers once despised as amateurs are now hailed as innovators and entrepreneurs at venues like Sundance, where the studios go to see what independent artists are doing. Now the same tidal wave of change is coming to television: Syfy, instead of commissioning an expensive pilot, underwrote the work of an indie producer to test the waters of this new world, and found themselves with a fine and entertaining story, for a fraction of the cost of a “real” pilot.
“We have to reverse it, which means we have to get close.” —Jack Yeager
Democracy has come to television. All hail the revolution.