- Writer:
- Leslie Bohem.
- Director:
- Tobe Hooper.
- Cast:
- Dakota Fanning, Steve Burton, Joel Gretsch, Catherine Dent, Eric Close.
My mother always talked to me a lot about the sky. She liked to watch the clouds in the day, and the stars at night. Especially the stars. We would play a game sometimes, a game called “What’s beyond the sky?” We would imagine darkness, or a blinding light, or something else that we didn’t know how to name.
John (Eric Close) shows that magic is all about misdirection. Misdirection and telekinesis.
In 1947, a military balloon, part of the top secret “Project Mogul”, crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. Out of this single incident grew an entire mythos of alien crash landings and abductions. And it’s around this incident that writer Leslie Bohem builds his generation spanning alien contact saga, Taken.
This first episode, “Beyond the Sky”, opens with Dakota Fanning’s narration, and if there was ever an actor tailor made for an alien saga, it’s Fanning. Eight years old at the time, she’s almost preternaturally precocious, and imbues her narration with a gravitas that elevates what could otherwise come off as hackneyed or clichéd to something almost profound. It hardly seems fair that someone so young should be so very talented.
Next, the show begins delving into the fortunes of the three families we’ll be following throughout the series:
The Keys. Captain Russell Keys (Steve Burton) and his entire crew are abducted by aliens in the middle of an air battle over the Ruhr in 1943. They find themselves in a field in France several days later, and Keys can’t remember what happened. He returns home haunted by nightmares of what look like German doctors conducting experiments on him. When he learns that all his crew save one have died mysteriously, he seeks out the last survivor who reveals that the German doctors weren’t Germans at all, but something much more alien. Afraid the aliens are still following him, he flees to protect his family.
The Crawfords. In Roswell, Captain Owen Crawford (Joel Gretsch) works for military intelligence when something crashes. Crawford buys the military cover story about Project Mogul until he finds the crashed space craft. Inside the craft are four apparently dead aliens, but five seats. The discovery leads to the start of a secret project to analyse the Visitors and their craft, lead by Colonel Campbell (Michael Moriarty). Initially, Crawford is frozen out of the project, but he soon remedies that by marrying the colonel’s daughter, Anne (Tina Holmes). When Crawford learns that one of the recovered aliens is alive and that it can take human form, he sets out to find the fifth survivor.
The Clarkes. Sally Clarke (Catherine Dent) is a waitress and mother of two, unhappily married to a travelling salesman (Alf Humphreys). Her world takes a turn to the romance fictiony when she finds a mysterious stranger, John (Eric Close), in her garden shed. John is, of course, the fifth alien, and he leaves Sally with not only memories but also morning sickness.
Leslie Bohem is a competent writer, and as such realises that what’s interesting in his story isn’t so much the aliens themselves, but rather the effect they have on the humans in the story. This show isn’t about plasticky CGI ships and explosions, though it has that, too, but about people and how those people handle their worlds being turned inside out. Some of these reactions are more believable than others — Owen Crawford is practically a Star Wars villain transplanted into a series with otherwise fairly complex characters — and Bohem has a tendency to go off into melodrama — Sally Clarkes arc in this episode is pretty much a romance novel, only with aliens — but at its heart, it’s a show about three dimensional, complex characters and how they react to contact with the Alien Visitors. And about how those reactions ripple through time and affect future generations. A lot of good science fiction is about taking the real world, injecting one fantastic element, and seeing what happens. For the most part, that’s exactly what Taken does, and in those moments, it is indeed good science fiction.
But of course, that was just a game; there’s nothing beyond the sky. The sky just is, and it goes on and on, and we’ll play all of our games beneath it.
