The Truth Is Somewhere (X Files, Delta Green)

'One of those rare horror-genre gems produced for television,' wrote Adam Scott Glancy in a 1994 review for Unspeakable Oath. 'So far the first twelve [X Files] episodes rate nine out of ten phobias for solid horror/science-fiction genre entertainment.''

It's been a while.

Recently I was paid for an acting gig with iTunes cards, and used them to buy X-Files seasons 1 through 5. I tend to do that with stuff I want to see but don't care if I lose, which is always a risk when dealing with the Cloud. I pride myself on having a good memory, but I have to admit I'd forgotten most if not all the episode plots. Something about aliens? Maybe? And there were monsters, sometimes? Lone Gunmen? Someone who smoked a lot?

No, it was a total blank. This, mind you, after spending damn near every week plugged in practically at the electrical socket, waiting like a slavering fanboy for the least tidbit. That was back in 1994, and without wishing to be unkind to anyone here who may be counting their grey hairs, 1994 was over 20 years ago. If I'd had a kid back then, it would be on its way to college.

Hopefully I'd resist the temptation to call it Fox or Dana.

Looking back on it now, that first season was remarkably weak. Not awful - very good, really - but low budget, creaking along, with plots as shaky as an Ed Wood set. Inevitably they fell into a pattern: strange things happen, Mulder proposes something utterly absurd, Scully throws dirt on the whole thing, Mulder is proved right in every detail, madness ensues. Often there are plot holes you could drive a truck through, even if you accept Mulder's version without question.

None of that mattered at the time, and while it kinda matters now, that's only because time has passed. I'm less accepting of wild-eyed bullshit, and I've seen much better television since, so my standards have risen. Yet even with that firmly in mind I find I'm still in love with those early seasons, particularly from season 2 onwards.

That's when things begin to ratchet up, when Mulder's first informant Deep Throat is gunned down, the Cancer Man becomes more of a visible threat, and Mr X becomes Mulder's contact with the murky world of government conspiracies. Steven Williams plays Mr X, and he's such a badass in that role. He really makes it work.

It's also when I begin recognizing supporting cast. I don't know who was hiring back in 1994-5, but they picked some very decent talent. I knew Jack Black was in one of the early episodes, and he of course goes on to fame and fortune. But he's not the only one to hit the radar. Bradley Whitford, before West Wing, Jewel Staite, before Firefly, Titus Welliver, before Deadwood and Lost, Joe Spano, just after Hill Street Blues and before NCIS. Season 2 in particular is an exercise in 'spot the soon-to-be famous.'

If you really don't know what I'm talking about - which is always possible, though perhaps not forgivable - X Files was a supernatural/science-fiction genre show back in the 1990s, starring David Duchovny as FBI Agent Fox Mulder, and Gillian Anderson as his long-suffering partner Agent Dana Scully. The two are tasked with investigating X Files, cases involving paranormal phenomena. This can range from lake monsters to strange parasites from beyond history, irradiated fluke men and little grey men from outer space.

As you can imagine this does not sit well with their superiors, and Agent Scully is initially assigned to the X Files to debunk them, presumably because nobody's thought to fire Agent Mulder. Which is where the first of those peculiar plot holes appears; we're dealing with a massive conspiracy involving corruption at the highest levels, run by men who think nothing of murdering their enemies, their friends, the mailman; men who carry out mass experiments on unwitting human test subjects every other week without losing sleep over the death count. Yet those same men have some psychological block that prevents them from getting Mulder fired, even when he presents them with opportunities to do so with cause. It's papered over with tissue-thin excuses, but it's a problem nonetheless.

Looking back on it, I suspect it survived that initial year not because it was brilliant - good, yes, occasionally genius - but because it was unique. It was 1994. Nobody was doing horror on the small screen in 1994.

Hell, there weren't that many people making horror for the big screen either, come to think.

Tales from the Crypt is the closest thing it had to competition, and Tales was hosted by a scary Muppet. A bunch of carefree optimists tried to make a TV show out of Vampire the Masquerade, but that was in 1996, two years after X Files began, and it withered on the vine. Buffy doesn't start pounding dildos into pale Californians until 1997, and if I'd known what pegging was back then I'd have had a lot more fun watching that hot mess. Ultraviolet's 1998, and British. Touched By An Angel, maybe, but you could hardly call that horror.

It helps that Duchovny and Anderson, both talented actors, work well together. Anderson in particular is a lot of fun to watch; she's clearly got more on the ball than Duchovny. Yet Duchovny has one great talent: he's a natural doofus, and the show eventually starts playing to that, giving him more comedic or parody moments. I can't think of many television shows, genre or otherwise, that would be happy making its lead actor look like an idiot, and to be clear it's not like this happens every week, but when it does, it's a delight. Small Potatoes from Season 4 is a personal favorite.

Yet by the fifth season I find its appeal starting to wear on me. Though there are several moments when I can't wait for a show to finish, the episode Post-Modern Prometheus is the first one I couldn't force myself to finish. Yes, I know it won an Emmy. Chris Carter can thank his lucky stars I wasn't on the awards committee, way back when.

It starts to crumble under the weight of its own mythology at that point. There's just no way to make this all make sense, and it doesn't help that so much of it contradicts itself. One of the long-running secrets of the series is what happened to Fox Mulder's sister all those years ago; was she abducted by aliens, murdered by a serial killer, something else? But there are only so many times she can turn up as a clone, as a child worker clone, as an abductee, as a possible ghost, as a murder victim, before I start to lose interest.

You can butcher a turkey once, cook it once, eat it, make stock from its bones and skin, but when all that's done, you can't bring the turkey back again and eat it a second time. Not if you want to enjoy the experience.

Oddly enough I feel the same way about X Files as I do Delta Green, the RPG originally developed by Pagan Publishing many moons ago.

It first showed its warty head back in 1993, as part of the Unspeakable Oath magazine, but it doesn't really get its chance to strut its stuff until 1997. So it technically predates the X Files, though in practical terms it owes much of its format and initial appeal to that show.

Delta Green, as it was then, had a lot of promise, and I love its take on conspiracy theories, modern horror, cryptozoology, government cover-ups, little Grey Men. I played that game to death back in the day. I still have all the books.

Yet I look back on it now, and it's a mess.

A fun mess, but there's no skeleton here holding it together. The basic premise is solid, but the mythology soon crushes the whole thing under its ponderous weight. You could pick up a sourcebook and literally have no idea what you were getting, because the series didn't seem to be planned in any coherent way.

If you liked the Fate, for example, its New York occult menace based loosely on Club 57 and the exploits of Andy Warhol, there wasn't a Fate book you could get. You could get Count Down and Eyes Only, both of which have Fate-related material, but they also have a ton of other stuff you might not want. If you want to know more about tradecraft, intelligence agencies and the art of being a spy, that's in there too, but again it's scattered over most of the books with no real rhyme or reason as to which goes where.

The lethality level varies considerably. Some scenarios might as well have a footnote saying 'allow for 40 minutes downtime as everyone makes new characters right about now.' Others seem positively gentle in comparison. It reminds me of some of the X Files first season episodes, Darkness Falls in particular, where the writers find themselves in a situation where, logically, Mulder and Scully die. So they do, but not really. Delta Green isn't quite so kind.

There's some absolutely brilliant writing here, but looking back on it I have to ask myself how likely it is that the players are ever going to find this information, or find it useful. With the benefit of hindsight it seems to me now that it was written for the Keeper to read and be entertained by, but not necessarily use at the table.

One thing I admire about the Gumshoe clue system, apart from simplicity of design, is that it forces the designer to consider whether or not what's going on the page is useful. If it's a Clue, it has a purpose, and there's a definitive chain of events that lead from this Clue to the next Scene, where there are more Clues. From here, the players piece together the narrative, and decide what to do next.

I didn't back the Delta Green Kickstarter so I don't know what the new stuff's like. I almost regret that, but money's tight. One thing I hope and pray for is that, whatever it is, there's a plan. That someone has their eye on the long term, not a scattershot put-it-all-in-the-pot approach.

Anyway, it's been a day, and I'm exhausted.

Talk soon!

M.R. James' Winter Tales

I'm going to use the first post of 2013 - yay! - to talk about a subject dear to my heart: the ghost stories of M.R. James, as retold in the DVD boxed set The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James. This is the Region 0 version of the tales, recently released by Australians Shock UPC. All of these programs were originally broadcast on UK television, many of them decades ago.

For those who aren't familiar with the contents: there are twelve episodes in all, though only eight stories are drawn on. Each episode tells one of M.R. James' stories, and depending on which you pick, they can be straight-up narratives - as with Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas - period pieces, or modern retellings of the old stories. The oldest is a 1968 edition of Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, and for that matter the most recent is a 2010 version of the same tale.

First, a quick note on format. This may not be something the British realize, but UK DVDs, when viewed in formats outside the UK, tend to come out slightly pixelated. I'm not going to go too deeply into the technical what-not behind this; just take it from me that they do. As this is a Region 0 set, that isn't a problem here. The picture is as clear as a bell.

As DVDs, the discs lack a certain something. Each contains the original programming, and no more. No extra features, interviews, or any content other than the show itself. Since many of these have been unavailable for some time, that isn't a huge problem; most will be happy with just the episodes. However as these old shows are also published by the BFI, which does include extra content, people who find themselves having to choose between one or the other may prefer the BFI discs. Take the 1968 Whistle; the BFI version has two Ramsey Campbell extras and an audio version of the story, as well as the 1968 piece, whereas the 1968 story in the boxed set only has the show itself. Bear in mind, my BFI version of Whistle is the older one; I understand there is a more recent BFI edition, which probably has different extras.

For that reason alone, I'm not sure I would recommend the Region 0 to anyone who has the chance to get hold of the BFI editions, particularly since the BFI has re-released all of these shows in 2012. However the Region 0 has them all together, where the BFI has broken them up into several separate discs. I don't think there's a separate BFI version of the Christopher Lee stories either, so if you went the BFI route you might have to pass on those. Also, the BFI has a nasty habit of letting material like this go out of print very quickly, and not bother to reissue them.  The same may not be true of Shock.

From a price perspective, there's some difference between the two. The individual BFI discs are cheaper, but even once you add all of them together, there's about 20 quid between the Region 0 and the BFI versions. There's also a BFI boxed set, but that doesn't seem to contain the same shows as the Region 0; as it's labelled 'Ghost Stories for Christmas', I rather suspect it won't be out there for very long. Of course, all this assumes that you're able to buy in the United Kingdom; if you're importing this, the price difference may well be eaten up in shipping or forex costs.

Now that I've had that rather long digression, what about the shows as shows?

For my money the Christopher Lee versions, which originally aired in 2000, are the most faithful, and the most atmospheric. That probably has a lot to do with the format of the original stories. They were structured in such a way as to be read aloud to an audience, which is exactly what Lee does. There are very few effects, and most of the shots are of Lee sitting in an armchair, talking, with occasional glances at his audience. While that certainly works as a story, I'm not convinced it works well as television, though I still prefer these to some of the more modern retellings.

The 1970s titles - A Warning to the Curious, The Ash Tree, The Stalls of Barchester, The Treasure of Abbot Thomas, Lost Hearts - are all very well done, and many of them really work wonders. The Ash Tree and The Treasure of Abbot Thomas are probably the best of these, though I admit I'm giving the Ash Tree credit largely because of a very effective end sequence. Good special effects are always going to be a problem with something like this, and there are one or two moments when Ye Plasticke Hande of Satan - or something very similar - almost spoils the mood. That said, options in the 1970s were limited; they can't be seriously faulted for the occasional duff moment.

The modern versions are probably the least satisfying, particularly the 2010 Whistle, which throws almost all of the original plot out the window, up to and including the reason for the title. My quarrels with the 2010 Whistle are specific, but were I to pitch a general complaint at all the modern versions, it would be that the protagonists seem to have been re-cast to be as unlikeable as possible. That's a huge problem in a setting where, as MR James points out, the objective is to get the audience to think "if I'm not careful, something like that might happen to me!" For that to work, the audience needs to be in sympathy with the protagonist, which is damn near impossible when the main character is a miserable prick.

The 2010 Whistle is just odd, to the point where you begin to wonder whether the director would really rather have been working on something else, but got stuck with this instead. I don't say the central plot device wouldn't have worked as an original piece, but it isn't an original; it's a rework of an existing plot, and as the two stories are so different in character and tone - really only retaining the setting and the title - it's impossible to come away happy with the 2010 edition if you've read the original story.

So, to sum: I would recommend the Region 0 set to people interested in M.R. James' stories, since it's a complete set, and contains some material that you won't easily find elsewhere. That said, if it's a choice between the Region 0 and the BFI, I'd recommend the BFI, as those discs contain more material and are probably cheaper to obtain. You'd probably have to sacrifice at least some of the Christopher Lee versions, but if that doesn't trouble you, purchase away!