Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Fox's "Harsh Realm" sends a soldier into virtual hell, while CBS's "Now and Again" builds the new bionic man.
Oct 8, 1999 | The opening credits feature spooky electronic music and flashes of vaguely unsettling images (clouds, tunnels, eyes), and they end with the superimposed cryptic phrase "It's just a game." Quick, name that producer!
With "Harsh Realm," his third series for Fox since 1993, Chris Carter joins a handful of TV creative legends (Quinn Martin, Norman Lear, Steven Bochco, to name a few) whose work is instantly recognizable to viewers -- often more recognizable than the cast members' names and faces. The "Harsh Realm" pilot is a Carter family affair; it co-stars Terry O'Quinn from Carter's "Millennium" and features unbilled cameos from Lance Henricksen (the star of "Millennium") and Gillian Anderson (in voice only) from "The X-Files." As a sci-fi drama, "Harsh Realm" falls somewhere between Carter's two previous series -- it's not as exhilaratingly addictive as "The X-Files," but, unlike the coldly uninviting "Millennium," it has characters and a mythology you could potentially care about.
"Harsh Realm" takes its title and the bare bones of its premise from a comic book series about virtual reality universes. In the show's pilot episode, a young Army corporal named Thomas Hobbes (Scott Bairstow), who was decorated for heroism while serving with a peacekeeping force in Sarajevo, is getting ready for his discharge; he plans to marry Sophie (Samantha Mathis) and move to California. One morning, he's summoned to see his colonel (Henricksen) and told that he's been chosen to participate in one last mission, a classified program called Harsh Realm. Harsh Realm is a computer war game developed by the Pentagon to simulate possible nuclear war and terrorism scenarios; it's a virtual reality "where landscapes and people are identical to our world, down to every man, woman and child." Hobbes is told that the game's "high scorer," a soldier named Santiago (O'Quinn), has hijacked the program and warped it. Hobbes' orders are to play Harsh Realm and "remove" Santiago's virtual character. After all, "it's just a game."
Hobbes begins watching what he thinks is an introductory video about Harsh Realm, but he has unwittingly already entered the game. What the Army hasn't told him is that no player ever sent to capture Santiago has been able to return from the virtual world. And if you die in Harsh Realm, you die, period.
Inside the Realm, Hobbes encounters a virtual ringer for Sophie, as well as his dead doggie and the old war buddy, Waters (Max Martini), whose life Hobbes saved in Sarajevo. But things are screwier inside the game than they are inside Alice's looking glass. Sophie doesn't know him and Waters is working for Santiago, who has made Harsh Realm his own personal dictatorship. Santiago lords over a coldly modern skyscraper city, his Che-like bereted image painted on the sides of city buses along with the slogan "One people, one nation, one Santiago." But the city is fenced off from a combat zone populated by desperate players who have become trapped inside the Realm and are forced to scavenge for food to stay alive.
At a church converted into a scuzzy bar, Hobbes meets a fellow soldier named Pinocchio (D.B. Sweeney) -- dig that symbolism -- who has become a Han Solo-like mercenary who's only out to save his own ass (if Pinocchio "can't eat it, bang it or burn it," he's not interested). Pinocchio grudgingly shows Hobbes a "glitch in the software" that enables them to pass undetected across the borderline into Santiago's city. Hobbes doesn't realize it, but Pinocchio, the other lost players and the virtual reality characters have been waiting for a long-rumored savior to free them -- and they believe Hobbes is the man. Indeed, by the end of the pilot, Hobbes' narration (he's supposedly writing letters to Sophie) starts sounding like the thoughts of a doubting Christ figure: "Whose destiny is this? It can't be mine. What is this trial I am being put through? Is it a test of my love for you?"
Part "Heart of Darkness," part "The Matrix," "Harsh Realm" is a dark ride into an intense parallel universe. The pilot's final overhead pull-back shot is Carter and his old "X-Files" collaborators, director Daniel Sackheim and director of photography Joel Ransom, at their bone-chilling, conspiratorial best. But "Harsh Realm" is the purest sci-fi show Carter's done; it's closer in tone to "Star Trek" than to either "The X-Files" or "Millennium." And that might put off viewers who prefer their chills to be grounded in the eerily plausible.
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