Review: The Others

So was anyone else watching The Others fifteen years ago? Probably not, as it sometimes feels I'm the only person in the world who knows it ever existed in the first place.

Not to be confused with the Nicole Kidman film of the same name or the bad guys of Lost, The Others ran for a single season of only thirteen episodes back in 2000 before getting cancelled without much fanfare. It's never been released on DVD and probably never will be. There was no critical acclaim, no cult following, no fandom campaigns to save it – the show just slipped quietly into that goodnight.

But as it happens, I have a fascination with shows that are prematurely cancelled. There's something so unfulfilled about them: that although their premise was strong enough to get them on the air, they just didn't manage to garner enough of an audience to carry their story through to its natural conclusion.

I couldn't tell you what it was that drew me to The Others in the first place, as it was too long ago that I watched its original broadcast. However, I ended up with all the episodes recorded on videotape which I staunchly refused to erase for years on end, so obviously it had some effect on my teenage-self – and when I happened to chance upon the full episodes on YouTube last month, a walk down memory lane was in order.

SPOILERS for a show that ended fifteen years ago...

The show's protagonist is Marion Kitt, a young woman in her first year of college. She's bright and engaging, but indecisive about what she wants to study and is the very embodiment of the I Just Want To Be Special trope (she practically says this word-for-word).

However, it's clear from a fraught phone conversation with her mother that she's also running from something. Her roommate is irritated at being kept up all night by Marion muttering in her sleep, and by the time a corpse leaps out of her bathtub and grabs her by the arm, it's obvious Marion is the focus of supernatural activity.

Sorry, but the images for this show are going to be really crap.

Marion has endured such experiences her entire life, only now she's been discovered by a group of psychics known as the Others, who offer to help her learn to control her considerable abilities and use them to help people (whether they be alive or passed on).

The pilot episode deals with her introduction to the group dynamic and the investigation into her dorm room. It's being haunted by the spirit of a student who apparently committed suicide there – though in a twist that's indicative of the show as a whole, it turns out she was not murdered (as a viewer might initially suppose) but accidentally drowned after getting drunk and falling asleep in the tub.

Her boyfriend – the would-be murder suspect – is brought in to say goodbye, and in doing so the dead girl is able to move on. (The show also enjoys Moffat-esque word-games: Marion seems to be muttering "my killer's dead" in her sleep, when in fact she's repeating the name "Michael Erstad", the aforementioned boyfriend).

***

From this point on the show is a fairly straightforward occult procedural, in which the characters are confronted with paranormal activity and use their various gifts to solve its meaning. Though there is some repetition in the "twists" the episodes utilize (the writers are very fond of revealing that "ghosts" are actually living people with psychic gifts of their own), the range of the phenomena portrayed is remarkably broad.

From evil wallpaper to psychic serial killers, ghosts trying to communicate with loved ones to attempts at preventing terrible premonitions, time-travelling in dreams to visitations from the devil himself, there was no narrative consistency to what the show would delve into each week. For what it's worth, this is not a bad thing – but apart from the supernatural quality of the stories, each episode often felt like it belonged to a completely different show.  

For example, the episode 1112 deals with a woman who loses her husband and infant son in a tragic accident, leading the Others to help her come to grips with her loss. An earlier episode called Eyes involves a narcissistic man begin to see demons after undergoing laser eye surgery. The two stories are miles apart from each other: one a powerful and poignant portrayal of grief, the other a fairly generic shlock thriller.  

And there was, as it happens, an attempt to construct a Myth Arc – though it's one that gets lost among the Mystery of the Week episodes. Having established that Marion is a uniquely gifted psychic (the leader of the Others says: "touching that girl was like sticking my hand in a fire"), it transpires there's a dark force on the loose taking a vested interest in her.

A serial killer calls it "The Unnamed" on account of its indefinable nature, though another episode (which involves haunted wallpaper, believe it or not) has definite Satanic symbolism. Another episode has a mysterious woman target each member of the Others and ask each of them a simple question: "what do you want?" in the hopes of procuring their deepest desires; a weapon to be used against them in the season finale.  

Despite the promising build-up, the storyline ultimately ends on a hugely unsatisfying cliff-hanger, with each of the characters facing certain death with no conceivable way of escape. Dark stuff, but it makes for a strange contrast to episodes involving a telephone psychic grappling with the onset of making very-real premonitions, or (in an episode I mentioned in this post) a story in which one of the key characters starts having vivid dreams about a beautiful woman.

The third-act twist is that she's the final victim of Jack the Ripper, but since the Others remain helpless to change her fate, it closes on one of the characters questioning why the encounter happened in the first place. In light of the show's finale, you can't help but feel it's a comment that encompasses the show in its entirety.

***

This odd sense of disconnected variance is also present in the way psychic abilities manifest in the characters themselves. Some can channel the dead, one is an empath, another has precognitive dreams, and one is practically a superhero, complete with the ability to pull off the Jedi Mind Trick.

And yet their collective powers remain strangely ill-defined, particularly in the case of Marion. The first episode has her unconsciously partake in free writing, only for a fellow student to pick up her pen and find it's too hot to touch – something that's never brought up again in any of the episodes that follow.

So with this in mind, I think it was likely the cast of characters which prevented the show from becoming more popular. Though there are a couple of exceptions, they're not hugely defined or likeable, and none of the dynamics really ping. Most successful are Julianne Nicholson as Marion (who captures both the curiosity and overwhelming terror of what she's capable of) and Bill Cobbs as Elmer Greentree, the founder and paterfamilias of the Others.

Elmer is the "practically a superhero" character that I mentioned above, though the writers compensate for this quite a clever way – though his judgment and abilities render him largely infallible, it's the vulnerability of his students that prove to be his Achilles Heel. Having taken responsibility for their wellbeing (and with a failure in his past that was sadly never given the chance to get explored properly) he's often compromised by the confusion, fear and stubbornness of the other Others.

He and Marion form a warm mentor/protégé bond with one another, and Bill Cobbs has a presence that makes you believe Elmer can pull the Jedi Mind Trick on an interfering air hostess, or snap a young boy out of a psychic daze by yelling: "wake up boy!" from a considerable distance. Not only that, but there's a weary worldliness to him that's played as much for poignancy as it is for laughs. This is a man who is more than ready for death, and yet hangs on for the sake of a young woman who needs his help.

Mark Gabriel (Gabriel Macht) and Ellen "Satori" Polaski (Missy Crider) are also fairly compelling. He's a medical student who struggles to reconcile his empathic and healing abilities with the science that surrounds him, and is the only member of the group to vocally admit he'd willingly give up his gifts if he could.

(Though for an empath, we're left to wonder what on earth he was thinking in taking Marion down to an abandoned tunnel where two children were murdered, without her knowledge or permission in order to see if she'll pick up on their violent deaths. She does, and it's traumatizing. Nice one, Doctor Gabriel).

In comparison, Satori is the only Others member to make a living from her psychic talent, hiring herself out as a medium and occasionally working with the police department in their unsolved murder cases. Despite her somewhat flaky appearance (her outfits, spiritual paraphernalia and insistence on an "exotic" pseudonym) she's perhaps the most powerful Other after Elmer himself, and there's an interesting – though subtle – exploration of how she strives to be taken seriously in an increasingly cynical world.

Mark and Satori have a history together, and yet every time they get intimate strange things happen: lightbulbs explode, glasses break, objects start levitating – you get the idea. I suppose it won't surprise you too much to learn that a Love Triangle forms between Marion/Mark/Satori – but it's pleasantly low-key and despite a prickly first meeting, Marion and Satori end up becoming trusted friends.

It's hard to tell but they're holding hands during a near-death experience.

(Now is as good a time as any to point out that despite Marion being the show's protagonist, it's an odd choice to have the female characters so incredibly outnumbered by male ones (it's a 2:5 ratio in favour of the men), especially when you consider that the realm of the supernatural, the intuitive and the irrational is usually portrayed as one belonging to womankind).

As for the rest? John Billingsley's Professor Miles Ballard comes across as superfluous. He's meant to serve as Mr Exposition, the guy who runs the group's website and organizes the meetings, but we don't see much of the latter two activities, and Elmer ends up providing most of the information the audience needs. Miles is initially the one to seek out and recruit Marion, suggesting that he's the founder of the group, but it's later revealed The Others are much older than its current generation of members.

There was some material to be plied from the fact he's the only Muggle of the group, but it never gets explored, and his name ("Miles") suggests a clumsy attempt to model him on Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Giles. Instead he comes across as pompous and inferring, with an irritating habit of mumbling out the side of his mouth. Maybe that was just the actor, in which case: sorry, but it just bugged me.

John Aylward is Alfred McGonagle (who oddly isn't featured in the opening credits), a war veteran blinded in Vietnam, but whose injury granted him a Disability Superpower. Though he can no longer see, he has dreams and visions that are depicted in the negative (things that look light are actually dark and visa-versa) and which give him glimpses of the future.

That's the idea anyway. In all thirteen episodes, I don't recall him contributing anything useful to the team dynamic and for the most part he's just a typical Grumpy Old Man. The problem with portraying old curmudgeons is that there's got to be a Heart of Gold lurking somewhere underneath – and in Alfred's case, there isn't. He comes across not only as a rude jerk but a Dirty Old Man as well, with several creepy comments directed at Marion and women in general.

As such, he's not endearing – just an old sleaze, and a pretty useless one at that.

Last of all is Kevin J. O'Connor as Warren, who in many ways was the show's most interesting character – and inevitably the most underutilized. He seems to have an unspecified mental condition of some kind (it could be anything from anxiety to autism) and is able to see patterns in random objects, which lead him on wild goose chases all over the place.

He's a very rare example of a male Mysterious Waif, and yet (like Alfred) his abilities are never employed to any great extent in the cases that get tackled, and he's the only one not to get a character-centric episode to himself. Go figure.

***

But if show had one thing going for it, it was style. The Others is hugely atmospheric, with an air of foreboding filling every frame, and a trait reminiscent of The Ring in how it manages to make even innocuous household objects seem creepy.

There would appear to be a reasonable budget behind many of its special-effects, and of particular note is its visualization of the Other Side. For instance, when Marion confronts the spirit of the girl haunting her dorm room, both actresses are shot in slow-motion, underwater, wearing diaphanous dresses. You don't need me to elaborate further on how strange and evocative the finished result is.

***

The Others is not a show I can wholeheartedly recommend as anything other than a curiosity. Early cancellation meant the story and character arcs weren't brought to a logical conclusion, and though it has a consistent style and some genuinely spooky moments, its tone is incredibly uneven when it comes to what aspect of the supernatural it wants to explore. The afterlife? Demonic activity? Restless spirits with unfinished business? Telepathy and telekinesis? They all fall under the "paranormal" moniker, but they're not necessarily natural bedfellows.

In many ways the show served as a minor stepping stone between The X-Files (which gets namedropped at one point) and the current influx of supernaturally-themed television shows: Supernatural, Sleepy Hollow, Fringe, Grimm – in fact many of its storylines are eerily echoed in these later shows (as with the Winchester brothers, the Others also have to solve the mystery of a haunted airline before the plane they're on goes down).

Some actors went on to bigger things – though not the ones you might expect. Julianne Nicolson and Bill Cobbs have been working steadily, and of course Gabriel Macht is now best known for his work on Suits ... but look! It's Gabrielle Union in a small supporting role:

Don't worry, she survives this.

And none other than pre-Heroes, pre-Star Trek Zachary Quinto, in a Bit Part that encompasses exactly two lines, and which (according to IMDB) was his very first role ever.

This was honestly the best shot I could get of him.

So it's somewhat amusing to ponder that perhaps the greatest impression The Others made on pop-culture history was in providing Zachary Quinto with his first step on the road to fame.

Though the show had a great opening theme:

If I've piqued your interest, then all thirteen episodes are available on YouTube (though make sure you watch Luciferous second and Life is for the Living last – for some reason the channel has them posted out of order). And though I'd advise you not to get too invested, I'd love someone to talk to about this poor forgotten show!