Hunted - TV review

Hunted came to an end this week after its eight-week run. I stayed with it until the final unlikely twist, and not only because Melissa George made such a good job of the almost impossible role of gorgeous super-woman Sam Hunter. The best acting, though, came from the admirable Patrick Malahide, who made a superb elderly hard man, bent on revenge for reasons that only became clear late on.

Hunted was devised and written by Frank Spotnitz, the man behind The X Files, and this show had some of the merit of its illustrious predecessor, though there were many differences. Sam Hunter was working for a secretive (and very sinister) security company, and there were various multi-national shenanigans involving a billion pound tender for a dam project, an environmental calamity, and all manner of villains, most of whom had it in for poor old Sam.

I'm not usually very keen on stories lasting as long as eight hours. You need an exceptionally strong plot to keep the viewer interested, and although many good judges tell me that the first series of The Killing was a wonderful success, despite its length, I was slightly disappointed with the follow-up, which lasted for ten rather long hours and felt as if the script needed radical pruning. Hunted was better, because the twists and turns kept coming, and there were a couple of rather excellent twists in the final episode.

I did, however, feel that the last few minutes were rather over the top. A plot device that had been used three times already was repeated yet again, and I also became rather confused by the sheer number of conspiracies that were taking place. Hunted was by no means a masterpiece, but all in all, it was pretty well crafted, and I'm glad I stuck with it.

Bad Blood

The overlapping territory between stories with a sci-fi or paranormal element and crime fiction is one that interests me a good deal. I mentioned a while back the vampiric elements that I introduced into the seventh Harry Devlin novel, First Cut is the Deepest – although the murder mystery there had a solution based entirely in the rational world.

But sometimes stories about murder wander away from the established science and into realms of speculative fiction. An example is ‘Bad Blood’, an episode from ‘The X Files’ that I’ve just watched. It’s a story set mainly in a tiny community called Chaney, somewhere in Texas. Half a dozen cattle have been killed and exsanguinated, and when murder is done, Mulder and Scully are called in. But is there a vampire at work, or do the crimes have a different explanation?

Matters are complicated by the fact that we know from the start that Mulder has killed a young man, whom he thought was a vampire, and the events leading up to this are seen first through Scully’s eyes and then through Mulder’s. After the flashbacks, the story moves forward, and it becomes apparent that all in Chaney is not as it seems.

There are several elements in this story that have links with crime fiction – there are some neat clues, and one part of the plot reminded me of a book by Val McDermid. This is not, in the end, so much a crime story as an exercise in fantasy fiction. But it’s a pretty good story, cleverly told.

Squeeze

The ‘impossible crime’ story is capable of infinite variations, and although some people think it’s a played-out sub-genre, confined to traditional Golden Age mysteries by the likes of John Dickson Carr, I disagree. The continuing popularity of ‘Jonathan Creek’ shows the potential for intelligently written impossible crime stories on television, while successful novelists as diverse as Stieg Larsson, Christopher Fowler and Jim Kelly have nodded in the direction of the impossible crime in recent times.

In the 90s, I watched quite a few episodes of ‘The X Files’, and I’ve just seen, for the first time, the third episode in series one, which is a very effective version of the impossible crime story. ‘Squeeze’ concerns a number of murders in Baltimore, where the victims were savagely murdered in rooms without an apparently viable means of entry – and their livers were ripped out. When Fox Mulder and Dana Scully come on to the scene, it emerges that the murders have eerie parallels with similar crimes that have occurred at 30-year intervals. But surely the invisible culprit cannot be over one hundred years old?

The solution to the mystery involves paranormal devices that would not be acceptable in a conventional Golden Age whodunit. But in the context of a sci-fi series, the plot is perfectly acceptable, and I enjoyed ‘Squeeze’. It was evidently a great success when first screened, as the initial ‘Monster of the Week’ episode in the long-running series.

‘Squeeze’ features a memorable character called Eugene Victor Tooms (needless to say, with a monicker like that, he is unlikely to be one of the good guys.) – so memorable that he returned for a future episode in the series. ‘Squeeze’ was entertaining enough to remind me why ‘The X Files’ enjoyed such excellent ratings, especially for the early series. I haven’t seen the film based on the series, and believe it met with a mixed reaction, but I’m tempted to give it a try.