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Howard Thomas - Eric Stoltz Emily Patterson - Catherine Bell Stan Latham - Bruce Davison Bruce Gellar - Michael Rodgers Eric Benirell - Sam Niell Meeno Paloma - Lou Diamond Phillips 
OTHER TRIPS INTO THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE The Fantastic Journey OTHER MINI SERIES Jules Verne's Mysterious Island Jason and the Argonauts Tin Man Sword of Xanten 
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Episode 1Christopher columbus wrote in his log about encountering a giant metal ship 1492. One of Eric Benerall's cargo ships passed by three wooden sailing ships in the modern day and got back to dock with only 7 of its crew alive, the rest vanished, blood all over the place and what appears to be a spanish mariner with scurvy on board. Benerall has lost a number of ships in the past year, all of them in the area known as The Bermuda Triangle, so he gathers together a group of 'experts' to find an answer to what has been going on in THE TRIANGLE This team comprises a journalist who used to be on a big paper and now writes for a tabloid, a mad australian daredevil, a discredited psychic and a female deep rescue engineer. Before you know it, strange things start to happen. A passenger plane crashes in the triangle and the rescue vessels find the plane on the sea bed, covered with 50 years worth of corrosion on barnacles. At the same time and place, they find torpedo planes from the 50s in almost perfect condition. There is also a little girl survivor in the toilet, a 6 year-old in the body of a 60 year old. A Greenpeace activist who lost his entire crew to a strange force emerges from hospital to find that he can't remember certain things, like the fact that he has two children instead of just one. The investigators start to suffer hallucinations. Hiring an ex-russian surplus submarine commanded by a mad captain, the team go to investigate a deep water phenomenon and encounter something that they can't explain. The first half of this opening episode is uncannily like that of recent alien invasion show THRESHOLD and the characters aren't that far off either, both of those having apparently taken their premise from Michael Crichton's SPHERE. The gathering of the mis-matched investigation team seems to be the de-rigeur introduction to a sci-fi show these days. The characters are stock, if not actually cliche, and the actors can barely take them above that level. Even Sam Niell as the multi-billionaire shipping magnate can do this sort of stuff in his sleep and actually appears to be doing so. Even so, it's all glossily handled and the opening with Columbus's ships is intriguingly different. The plot moves at a fast enough clip that you don't mind that it isn't making a lot of sense and Charles Martin Smith pops up as the delightfully over-the-top submarine captain. It's entertaining and diverting if not overly memorable. TRIANGLE is a three part miniseries, so it's unlikely that it will be around long enough to try out patience, but it will have to a lot more, and better, if it is not to fade quickly from the memory. TopEpisode 2The team is captured by a dark military force and interrogated in what appears to be an underwater base doing something on the sea bed. When they are dumped back on land, they all suffer strange hallucinations, but hallucinations so real that they can only be real. Emily and Bruce start to investigate the science of the problem, locating the electromagnetic equivalent of a hurricane where there are only clear skies. They decide to fly out and see what's there. The storm suddenly appears out of nowhere. Stan and Howard investigate the human side of the equation. On the local military base, they find the now 60 year old little girl and Stan learns that there is a grandfather in the family. Howard tracks him down and together they learn of the mysterious 'Project'. The old man and his partner discovered alien material on the sea bed whilst laying cables and the military quickly took over. Whatever they are doing, they are providing wormholes into alternate realities, realities where America is a fascist state (and I'll not make jokes about that) or a man has an extra son. The situation is, however, rapidly worsening. The breaches in the fabric of reality are bringing other worlds into ours, making changes such as removing a bridge at the exact moment that Stan and Howard are travelling over it. Could this be deliberate? Have the military found a way to turn a reality breach into a weapon? The plot has gone off in some interesting directions, concentrating more the on human side of the story rather than the special effects. Unfortunately, this has had the effect of highlighting some of the limitations of the actors. Nobody is acting badly, but there appears to be a certain amount of cruising going on. One honourable exception to this is Lou Diamond Puhillips whose performance as a man trying to deal with the fact that his mind is unravelling and he can no longer count on anything being real is genuinely affecting. He seems to be inhabiting a whole different story, though. This is the central episode and it shows. Some of the story is explained, some is left to be discovered, but there is no real momentum until towards the end. It does enough to keep us on board for the last episode, but only just. TopEpisode 3Having survived the various cliffhangers at the end of episode two, the team get together and work out that the phenomenon causing the time and reality shifts is not natural. This leads, through Benirall, to the Secretary of the Navy who admits that it was the Navy that caused everything. An experiment they carried out, codenamed the Philadelphia Experiment, caused a tear in time and space, which has been gradually getting worse and will cause the world to end. Fortunately they have a plan to stop it. Unfortunately, the plan will not only not work, but is likely to end everything everywhere for everyone. Aided by Meeno, who has finally caught up with the main story, they set out to confront the Navy and stop the experiment. They are too late, but since time and space are all over the place there is always the possibility of a second chance. And second chances is what the final episode of THE TRIANGLE is all about. Characters are given the chance to save their marriage, locate their real mother, live again and reclaim a brother. The outcome of all of these is not always as happy as you might expect, though that is about the most real thing going on. This is the climactic chapter and so the sci-fi hardware of the story takes centre stage rather than the more human element of the second. Although there is a passage in which each of the team face their final moments differently with some affecting moments, it is all about the race to get the military to stop before everything goes boom, a race that will include choosing to let a friend die in order to save a stranger. It's Boy's Own stuff with fast speedboats, exploding helicopters, last second reprieves and the future of all mankind in the balance. It doesn't all hang together either. When normality is restored, some of the team's lives are different in ways that can't have been affected by the presence of lack of events in the Bermuda Triangle. That, though, is how THE TRIANGLE needs to be taken, as a good old yarn weaving together many of the myths around the Bermuda Triangle into a slick, fast and ultimately disposable entertainment. Top |
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