Mutant X

This article originally appeared in The Age on August 24, 2002

It’s not exactly profound, but Mutant X (Channel 7, Thursday, 10.30om) has it right when Adam (John Shea) says in the show’s first episode a few weeks ago, ‘The paranoid will inherit the earth.’ And if not earth, they have certainly inherited television and now beautiful young people ravaged by mutant DNA are roaming Channel 7 at nights with James Cameron’s Dark Angel (Thursdays, 9.30pm) and its downmarket cousin Mutant X. If you prefer you paranoia set in the present there is 24 (Mondays and Thursdays, also Channel 7, 8.30pm) where Special Agent Jack Bauer doesn’t have a clue who he can trust and, before the series goes on much longer, we will be wondering whether we can trust him either. Paranoia isn’t new of course and The X-Files captured brilliantly the cultural zeitgeist that the truth is out there, but not to be found within range of any government officials.

It is ironic that shows that flirt with the paranormal or are set in the future are often better at reflecting cultural anxieties and stresses than shows that attempt realism. Mutant X and Dark Angel capture a very particular paranoia – that of genetic modification run riot. If you can put a bit of fish DNA in a tomato what can you do to a human? Well, in Dark Angel you can whack in a bit of dog, or amphibian, or, in the case of the Dark Angel herself, Max, create a Bionic Woman for a new generation. And I’ve got to say, Max (Jessica Alba) is a very gorgeous, black leather wearing, Super Chick.

This series Max escapes from Manticore, the secret government-funded lab that performs medical experiments on children in an attempt to build a soldier class, destroying the lab and sending the hapless kids scattered through the forests of Seattle. She doesn’t escape, however, before she is infected with a specially constructed virus that threatens to keep her and political activist, Logan, in a state of unrequited love (one touch and he’s dead). Which is not dissimilar from Angel (Angel) being kept from sex and true love by an ancient gypsy curse. Fraught relationships between the sexes often have such supernatural twists and in this week’s season finale of Charmed (Tuesday, Channel 7, 8.30pm) Phoebe finds that even death cannot keep her and Cole apart. Stalking from a dimension beyond time and space gives new meaning to the theme of the guy who can’t let go.

Then there is the ‘freeze’, a device used several times in Charmed but also to good effect in the final episode of Angel. This is when the world freezes around you long enough to allow a demon from another dimension to drop by for a chat. Visually dramatic, these freezes have another purpose and allow the unfrozen ones to be the focus of the universe’s undivided attention – a narcissist’s dream.

Characters are often manipulated by forces beyond their control. The mutants in Mutant X are regularly injected in the neck with a sub-dermal thingy which forces them to act for their evil captors. Another guy suffering such electronic interference is Spike (Buffy) who has been kept from his habit of bloodsucking by an electronic chip in the head. This notion of medically induced mind control seems to reflect fears about anti-depressants and other forms of medication which effect behaviour.

Anxiety – that’s what I love about these shows – there’s heaps of it but unlike the real world all neurosis is justified. What does the research say? Something like paranoids are realists with an under-developed capacity for denial. And in the dark of night-time television they flourish.

Posted by Sophie at 03:38 PM