Yeah…so, we may be in for some supreme WTFery, y’all.
The brainchild of X-Files alums (and brothers) Darin and Glen Morgan, Intruders doesn’t tell us much in the pilot except that there are some folks who seemingly reset every nine years, and that has consequences. Shepherd (James Frain) is an enforcer who notifies folks of the reset and then kills them (or tries to).
The other threads in the pilot are Amy Whelan (Mira Sorvino) and her husband, Jack (John Simm from The Village), an ex-cop turned writer. Amy’s been having issues lately and we don’t get a clear bead on the roots of her weirdness although it presents like someone recovering from a nervous breakdown. Amy disappears for a few days and Jack gets a random call that she left her phone in a cab. When he fetches it, he finds a series of cryptic texts but not his wife. He’s also visited by an old FBI acquaintance who was a high school friend of the first person we meet — a teenager named Nadine who in 1990 is alerted to her timeline and responds with a suicide.
Back in the present, young Maddie (Millie Brown from Once Upon a Time) turns nine and then is visited by Shepherd. She has flashes of being a young man, Marcus, who Shepherd is trying to eliminate, and after she drowns her cat while in a fugue state, she snaps wholly over to Marcus’ psyche in Maddie’s body, so this new, young actress is about to have a ball. I could seriously have done without the cat trigger, though, thank you.
There’s also a pirate radio DJ, Oz, who’s aware of whatever it is Shepherd is up to, and Shepherd baits and kills him after hearing him out that yes, he really does have a clue about what they’re doing. There’s one “transitional” person still missing — Bill Anderson. Shepherd kills his wife and son but we never meet him.
And those are our initial players. We don’t know the what of Shepherd except that he tells the Oz they never die.
Intruders is diving into a mega busy night of TV, so the bar is high for it to do well. We’ll see how long people stick with it. It reminds me, in pacing, of the Sundance pickup, The Returned. It’s only set for eight episodes, but I hope it moves a little faster than that. The Morgans are a formidable team, and they gave us some of the best X-Files episodes, Millennium, and the one-season wonder The Others (with a pre-Suits Gabriel Macht), so I’m willing to see where we go. Just leave the pets out of it, OK?
You can watch the pilot now on YouTube. Intruders airs at 10 pm E/9 C on Saturdays on BBC America in the US and 10 pm E/7 P on Space in Canada.
Photo courtesy of Cate Cameron/BBC America.