"Three heroes. Three separate paths leading to one shared destiny. To change the world. To make history." - Jimmy Bond, on his personal heroes and employers, the Lone Gunmen
The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series DVD Review
By Robert Atkinson
Spin-offs must look great to network executives. On paper they make sense: a built-in fan base, a wealth of pre-existing market data to draw upon, actors already set in their roles, the possibility of cross-over episodes for Sweeps Week.what's not to love? The downside, and it's a big one, is the thorny problem of expectations. The audience knows (and presumably loves) the characters in one context, but how will they feel about them as they are transplanted into another world?
In the case of The Lone Gunmen, a chip off of The X-Files juggernaut, the results were mixed and ultimately unacceptable to the Fox Network, which cancelled the series after less than a season. The three Lone Gunmen - John Fitzgerald Byers (Bruce Harwood), Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and Richard "Ringo" Langly (Dean Haglund) - were recurring characters on The X-Files since the first season. Whenever FBI Agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) needed help outside of official channels, he called on the muckraking journalists behind the conspiracy-laden The Lone Gunmen newspaper for information, technical expertise, and comic relief. Where The X-Files tapped into the nation's mistrust of the government and the faceless powers that be with gloom and despair, The Lone Gunmen attacks it with humor and optimism.
Each of the three Lone Gunmen represents a different citizen-hero archetype:
. Byers is a disillusioned bureaucrat born on November 22, 1963 - the day of JFK's murder - who still believes in the positive power of citizenship a la the Camelot era.
. Langly is a computer hacker with an endless supply of Ramones T-shirts and wise to crack.
. Frohike is a journalist and pubisher with a checkered past who looks like a diminutive Carl Bernstein gone to seed.
They are, in short, geeks, freaks and social misfits who are also fiercely patriotic. This word is bandied about often in the post-9/11 world, and the Lone Gunmen practice a version of it rooted in the idea that America and the United States government are two different things and that questioning the status quo is as American as apple pie. Call it activist patriotism. The series' opening title sequence drives this home. In it, a digitized American flag waves as a Hendrix-styled version of the Star-Spangled Banner plays. The focus tightens on the white stripes, which are revealed to be a field of surveillance cameras. The very symbol of the nation has been corrupted and co-opted. It's up to the Lone Gunmen to set things right.
If the Lone Gunmen's original popularity came from their Everyman qualities, the series creators apparently believed that attracting new fans meant including some eye candy. Enter Yves Adele Harlow (Zuleikha Robinson), a stunningly beautiful and mysterious mercenary armed with a British accent and a host of fake names that are all anagrams of the name Lee Harvey Oswald. If the Gunmen are a low-rent Mission: Impossible team, then Harlow, with her black leather and panthery walk, is pure Bond girl. Sometime an ally, sometimes a nemesis, the series had only begun telling her story and explaining her motives when it was cancelled.
For the ladies, we have Jimmy Bond (Stephen Snedden), a good-natured, lunkheaded idealist the Lone Gunmen find coaching a team of blind football players in the episode "Bond, Jimmy Bond." Unbeknownst to Jimmy, the charity organized to run the team is being used as a front for a criminal organization. After the organization's plans are thwarted, Jimmy, recognizing the three Gunmen as kindred spirits and fellow windmill tilters, joins the newspaper's staff as gopher and bankroll for the perpetually cash-strapped publication (why the tech-savvy Gunmen don't forego the expensive printing of the newspaper and publish online is a mystery). Jimmy's presence also serves a valuable narrative function. By having to explain (and often re-explain) their actions to Jimmy, the audience is also told what they are up to in a non-intrusive, natural way.
The series pilot ("Pilot") is not for the squeamish. Broadcast on March 4, 2001, the episode's climax involves a government cabal taking over a passenger jet and attempting to crash it into the World Trade Center in order to drum up business for weapons manufacturers. The scenes of the jet aiming at and narrowly missing the Twin Towers are artfully rendered and both spooky and sad to see. In the audio commentary, the writers are first reluctant to address the fact that one of their nightmare scenarios had come to life. They were understandably horrified by the idea that their work might have provided some inspiration and relieved this wasn't the case. They also note the sad irony that the government complicity in their fictional World Trade Center attack has become a commonly held belief about the 9/11 attacks among real-life Lone Gunmen-types. The deeper irony left unaddressed by the writers is that it can be argued that The X-Files actually helped bring the once-fringe conspiratorial view of U.S. history into the mainstream, thus fertilizing the ground where a thousand 9/11 theories now bloom.
The conspiracies explored on The Lone Gunmen are for the most part benign and localized when compared to their sprawling The X-Files counterparts. The best of these conspiracy-of- the-week episodes are "Madam, I'm Adam," "Tango De Los Pistoleros," and "The Lying Game." "Madam, I'm Adam" features character actor Stephen Tobolowski (Groundhog Day) as a man with a data port in his neck who has apparently lost his wife, house, and identity as part of a government re-education program. From this traditional set-up, the episode takes one unexpected turn after another, weaving together midget wrestlers, obnoxious television pitchmen, and a Matrix-like virtual reality into one of the strangest things seen on network television. In "Tango De Los Pistoleros," a tango dance competition serves as the backdrop for a plot to smuggle a top-secret cloaking technology out of the country. Zuleikha Robinson gets to show off her dancing ability and the softer side of Yves Adele Harlow in some steamy, beautifully shot tango scenes. A bit of Frohike's mysterious past as an infamous tango master is also hilariously explored.
"The Lying Game" features the first direct The X-Files cross-over, with FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) apparently involved in the murder of Byers' college roommate's brother. In the episode, a complicated series of events has Jimmy Bond disguised as Skinner, which means Mitch Pileggi is actually playing Jimmy Bond pretending to be Skinner. The result is one of the series' funniest scenes and a great chance for Pileggi to demonstrate his acting skills go far beyond playing the normally dour Skinner.
The cross-overs continue with "All About Yves" in which The X-Files' flim-flam artist and Man in Black Morris Fletcher (Michael McKean) crosses paths with the Lone Gunmen concerning a secret government hit squad called Romeo 61. The episode, one of the best and most fully realized of the series, explores Yves Adele Harlow's past and current loyalties and includes an uncredited appearance by David Duchovny as Fox Mulder. A depressing "To Be Continued" leaves a host of questions unanswered, for the show was cancelled and the second part of the episode was never made. Gratefully, the collection also includes the The X-Files episode "Jump the Shark" in which the three original Lone Gunmen are given an appropriately heroic demise worthy of the characters and the ideals from which they stood.
The fourteen episodes of The Lone Gunmen: The Complete Series come on three discs housed in a two clear plastic cases that slide into a cardboard outer sleeve.
