The After
A friend of mine linked on Facebook yesterday that they’d watched the new Chris Carter pilot, The After. I liked X-Files, like everyone else, and the first season of Millenium was great, so I thought I’d check it out. As an added bonus, the show is an apocalypse story, which is a genre I really enjoy, so I figured that there was no way I could go wrong. The pilot is currently free on Amazon, so I queued it up and gave it a watch. Now I wish I could go back to The Before so I could avoid watching The After.
The pilot starts innocently enough – a pretty woman has a bad dream, then wakes up and calls her family before an audition. At the audition, we find out that she is apparently too young and beautiful to play the role she wanted. That does not really create any feelings of sympathy for that character with me. I think the effect the writers were going for was to make us believe this character wanted to be a SERIOUS actor, not just a pretty face. I did temporarily give the show the benefit of trying to say something about the way women are treated in Hollywood. I was also pleased when one of the other characters introduced was a female police officer. Too bad all that went out the window as soon as some mean looking Hispanic gangbangers showed up, when the cop literally let one of them walk up and take away her gun, because he was a big scary man. Ugh.
Anyway, the main characters spend a decent chunk of time “trapped” in a parking garage because the power is out and the grating has dropped to cover the entrance. This is supposed to create some dramatic tension, but it’s hard to feel scared that the characters are trapped in a parking garage when they could just hop into any of the cars and smash through the gate.
Whoops! I accidentally invalidated the entire first half of this pilot!
During this time in the garage, we’re supposed to get a feel for who these characters are. What follows is possibly the single most cliched bunch of dialogue from the most tired and kind of racist caricatures I’ve ever seen. The black guy wields a shotgun and actually says “I am an innocent man wrongly accused of murder.” It’s like he’s reading his own TV guide entry. The Irish character is perpetually drunk, foul-mouthed, and attempting to brawl. The lawyer is a greedy selfish jerk, and he has a hot blonde girlfriend with no personality at all that takes off her clothes in the first episode. Then we have the rich old white lady whose dialogue doesn’t actually seem to apply to the show she’s in, and the gay clown. Oh, and the guy that got randomly shot and then just ignored and left to die. None of the characters seem to experience any emotion that follows any kind of logical sense, and spend most of the episode just randomly shouting at each other.
When we finally get out of the parking garage and get the opportunity to see what’s going on, we’re treated to crowds of people clearly just given instructions from offscreen to run around pell-mell with absolutely no goal. A few things are on fire, but mostly we just see big crowds and cars abandoned in the street, and we never given ANY context for this. Everyone is panicking, and we see a complete breakdown of the social order, but not a single person that is spoken to provides any reason for the panic, other than a single line of “We don’t know who’s infected.” As a result, I was left with a feeling not so much of mystery, but of unbelievability. Instead of wondering “Why is this happening? What is happening?”, I was thinking “Why would people ever behave like this?” That is not a question you want someone asking about a piece of writing.
The only good part of the episode came at the very end, after I’d endured nearly an hour of the main character shouting “MAH FAMMWEY!”. Whatever the hell that monster man was actually intrigued me, which pisses me off even more. It was enough of a mystery hook that I kind of want to know what was going on, which means I’m going to have to sit through more hours of this terrible dialogue, with this terrible hackneyed unlikable characters. The monster had a cool design, spooky effects, and seems to imply that there might be something mystical going on, instead of the standard “nuclear war” or “disease” apocalypses that we’re familiar with.
The show is clearly set up as a mystery, and is clearly following the modern trend of not actually fleshing out the answers beforehand. So far we know that the characters all share a birthday, there was some weirdness going on with time, and there are actual reality bending mechanics at work. The entire setup, dialogue, and acting was so hokey though, that I wasn’t convinced that the entire show was a movie within a movie, or some kind of dream state. Or the main characters are all dead, again. Honestly, the big mystery for me with The After was in how it got a green light to get made.
