The Gathering Storm A page about Dark Skies - downloaded from the Internet Overview | People Involved ------------------------------------------------------------------ Overview: the show's concept In 1947, an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell, New Mexico. With proof of extraterrestrial life in hand, the U.S. government began secret investigations. Majestic, a group whose very existence was extremely classified, was formed to perform these investigations. You guessed it, Constant Reader - the agents of Majestic are the infamous Men In Black. Majestic's investigation of, and ultimate entrance into conflict with, the aliens who have begun to poke their noses into our affairs, has real-world, headline-making consequences. These consequences, of course, have different, official explanations that can be found in any history book - but, as Navy Captain Frank Bach, one of Majestic's longest-serving members, says in an episode of Dark Skies, "History is written by those who clean up the mess." Consider Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 went down over the Soviet Union in 1960. The explanation you know is that Powers was on a reconnaissance mission, and the Soviets shot him down. The real explanation, in the world of Dark Skies, is that Powers, on orders from Majestic, was chasing an alien ship. Bach ordered Powers to pursue the flying disc into Soviet airspace. Powers obeyed, but had an extremely close encounter and crashed. That's a sample from the teaser of "The Awakening," Dark Skies's pilot. Many alternate explanations of historical events take place in the course of the series, because the struggle between human factions and aliens is set against a historical backdrop. The pilot opens in 1960 and closes in 1963, and the whole of the series - planned, like Babylon 5, for five years - will cover a period through the year 2001. The heroes of the show are John Loengard, played by Eric Close, and his girlfriend/fiancee Kimberly Sayers, played by Megan Ward. The aliens are the villains of the piece, or so it appears. In between are Frank Bach (played by J.T. Walsh) and the Majestic organization - sometimes the heroes and Majestic will have similar intentions, and sometimes they will be at cross purposes. "The first season is about discovery [of the alien threat]," Bryce explains, "and it's sort of an unholy alliance with Majestic, because sometimes their interests coincide and sometimes they don't coincide." The show will change in later seasons: "We will not be the same kind of show in Season Five that we are in Season One." But regarding this season: "We have an order of thirteen hours, which includes the pilot, so we have eleven more episodes that are paid for already. Those'll take us only through 1964, and the first season may only take us through the [1965] New York City power blackout." People involved Dark Skies was created by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman. They're capable, but neither is an SF writer. Their experience in speculative fiction is more along the skiffy and fantasy line. Bryce has written for Lois & Clark, and wrote the Sci-Fi Channel's first original movie, Official Denial. (Coincidentally, "Official Denial" is the title of the first season of Dark Skies, which, like B5, has titles for each of its seasons.) Like Dark Skies, Official Denial features aliens and Majestic; considering that its budget was approximately thirty bucks, the telefilm is relatively good for the first half. It does, however, have a pretty lousy ending. Bryce was also involved with _MANTIS_; the FOX network suits brought him on board after the pilot to "re-conceptualize" the show. Judging from his response when I asked him about _MANTIS_, it was not a good experience. However, at least one good thing came out of his time there - he was introduced to Brent V. Friedman. Brent comes out of the horror genre. He's new to television; his best-known screen credit is probably The Resurrected, an adaption of H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Brent's a huge Lovecraft fan who owns some issues of Weird Tales that contain the first printing of Lovecraft's stories. While Brent doesn't feel that The Resurrected was as good as it could have been, it's still a good film, and the best screen adaption of Lovecraft I've seen. He's a bit embarrassed to admit that he also wrote the horror flick Ticks, aka Infested. It's a giant tick movie. 'Nuff said. "Our analysis of the UFO phenomenon, such as it is, is that at best it could be . . . indifferent to humanity and at worst it could be considerably darker," says Bryce. In case the sentence doesn't make it obvious, Bryce (although he himself has never seen a UFO) is a "believer." So is Brent Friedman. That's what drew Brent's wife to introduce the two in the first place. They turned out to be kindred spirits. Bryce had been working on the show before he met Brent, but the two really caught fire together. They really wanted to make the show real, and that desire led them to do the world-building that's at the heart of _Dark Skies_. Here's the way Bryce describes it: "Brent and I set out to know where we were going, and because we were out to make something that would have some sales resistance, we felt it was incumbent upon us to have it nailed really well, so that people couldn't say, 'Well, you know, we think it's an interesting idea, but you can't keep it up.' We wanted to prove to them that you could keep it up. . . . before we got started, we created a briefing book that was given to the network and studio people that included an 85-page timeline that literally took you from 75 million years ago to the year 2008." Bryce elaborates, "It was a timeline that tracked historical events, UFO events, and _Dark Skies_ interpretations . . . and half of it was blacked out, because it was on a need-to-know basis, and the network guys didn't at that point. We've worked really hard to have a plan." The idea behind the timeline is to build a world that "doesn't contradict itself, real world events, or UFO events." (Of course, biology and chemistry are still fair game; the science in the pilot had some goofs, but the show's world is intended to be internally consistent.) The timeline was not created to order; the two did it themselves. "We had no deal, no nothing. We did everything on spec. We just said, 'We're gonna prove to everybody that this vision works. So we came up with the whole briefing book - we just worked night and day on it. It was just a labor of love for both of us." Dark Skies has several writer-producers - eight, to be precise. According to Bryce, not all of them are involved in production work; why those non-producers carry the title of "producer" is beyond me, but they do. Here's a complete list, broken down by titles. Executive Producers: Bryce Zabel Jim Parriott Supervising Producers: Brent Friedman Steve Aspis Steve Beers Co-Producers: Mark Schilz Bernie Laramie Producer: Brad Markowitz The pilot's score is by Mark Snow. (No, they're not stealing him from _The X-Files_; he and Bryce are buddies, and he scored the first thing Bryce ever did for TV. Bryce asked Snow to score the pilot as a good-luck charm. Snow did. It worked.) The series score is by Michael Hoenig, formerly of Tangerine Dream. - o -