Barstow, California, 1990; a girl blows out the candles on her birthday cake. Seventeen of them? Or 18, maybe, around that kind of age. Happy Birthday. Or is it? Later that night, two menacing-looking dudes pull up at her house, break in and wake her up. “Donna, can you keep a secret?” one says. “It’s a secret that you gave to us, we’re here to give it back to you just as you asked, all those years ago. We’re just here to shepherd you, it’s all right.” He shows her a mysterious sign.
I don’t think it is all right, though, not at all, because she has a fit of some kind and starts speaking a strange language; later, after waking up in the garden, she goes back inside and writes a note in which she says she is not – underlined – Donna, and that “in the beginning there was death”. Then she gets in the bath and slits her wrists, splashing red all over the nice white tiles (they didn’t have bath overflow holes in California in 1990, apparently).
Oh, so Donna’s not going to be a big character in Intruders (BBC2), then. Except, you never know: she was adamant she wasn’t Donna, and, in any case, death is not the end, but the beginning. Confused? Ha, it’s barely started. I’ll give you confused.
To Seattle then, present day– present night, actually – where it’s raining. Someone knocks on a door; who is it, asks the woman who lives there; FBI, says the voice. This becomes a theme: loud knocking; who is it; FBI; wait, it’s not FBI at all, it’s menacing dudes, possibly Intruders. This one, the very menacing Richard Shepherd (James Frain), kills the woman and her son, who are the family of Bill Anderson, an acoustics expert. Jesus, they don’t last long, characters in Intruders.
But here’s a familiar face: John Simm, playing Jack Whelan, now a writer, once a cop. If you’re thinking Life on Mars, forget it. Intruders is more Tin Machine-era Bowie – harsher, grungy, utterly unfathomable. And although Simm is from the north-west, we’re talking Washington, not Greater Manchester. A convincing American? You’d have to ask an American about that. But they – American actors – must be getting pretty cheesed off by all the limeys going over there and pretending to be them on television. It is a US/UK BBC collaboration, but still.
Anyway, Jack’s wife Amy starts acting oddly – very oddly – on her birthday: she likes jazz all of a sudden, and she can speak Russian. Then she disappears. Meanwhile, down by the beach, a young girl, Madison (Millie Bobby Brown, another Brit pretending otherwise), starts acting oddly on her birthday. I’m beginning to suspect birthdays are as dangerous as knocks on the door around here. Young Maddy has an encounter with menacing Shepherd before going back to run a bath – Noooo! Don’t do it! – but she kills the cat, not herself, holding it under the bubbles. Maybe she’s a dog person. Or maybe she’s not herself…
Obviously, we’re dealing with a secret society, Qui Reverti, devoted to chasing immortality by seeking refuge in the bodies of others. Only, it’s not obvious – I got that from the programme notes. Nothing about Intruders is obvious: it’s practically a secret society itself, giving away virtually nothing. Qui Reverti; sand dollars; significant numbers (nine, mainly); mysterious radio broadcasts; in the beginning there was death; what goes around comes around; very low frequencies that may be the key to immortality... I’m going to be honest: I’m struggling around in the dark, literally, a lot of the time. Even when it’s daytime, the skies are dark and angry, as is the oppressive score, with lots of ominous drumming. It’s hauntingly beautiful, yes, grim and gruesome, and intriguing up to a point. But hell is it tangled – it makes The X-Files, with which it shares DNA and creative personnel, look like a stroll in the park.
Here’s two more significant numbers: 0.8 million people watched the first episode when it aired in the US; 0.37 million watched episode two. That’s one big drop, after which it flattened out. Intruders will find followers here, but it will be a cult audience of die-hard (or die-never?) enthusiasts of the paranormal. I did watch episode two, and while I wouldn’t say I was on top of things or had any answers, I began to understand what questions I should be asking. You might easily not have got this far, though. You could decide – especially if you don’t believe in the possibility of immortality – that life’s simply too short.
