Finished watching the Sci-Fi Channel’s miniseries The Lost Room last night, and I was very impressed.
The whole thing was very cool — very much in the vein of Tim Powers novels or the RPG Unknown Armies. Cabals and individuals comprising an occult underground which searches for, covets and hoards “Objects” — mundane items which came from a motel room which was, for unknown reasons, ripped out of reality on May 4th, 1961. Each of the objects possesses some sort of reality-bending power, ranging from the powerful (The Key, which can be used on any door, and gains you entry into the Lost Room — the motel room in question, which exists outside of time and space, but from which you can re-enter the world through any door, anywhere) to the bizarrely mundane (A watch — if you put an egg within the watchband, it hard-boils the egg). Objects in combination open up other powers….and so needless to say, a wide assortment of characters all want these objects. Again, very nifty.
If you missed it, Sci-Fi will be showing all 6 hours in a marathon on Sunday (4 central time, I think) — so set your Tivos, or your VCRs, or just fire up Bittorrent. It’s worth it.
Sounds like it would make an awesome puzzle-oriented X-Box game, too.
Yeah; my wife and I watched it end-to-end last night and were very entertained. They rushed the ending, and it had a bit of a “and now… the series!” feel to it, but MAN, the way they engaged their premise, and how the characters made *intelligent decisions* when making use of the rules of the premise — not to mention a clever bit of foreshadowing involving a movie projector …
All in all, it’s a good sign that Sci Fi is making much SMARTER programming decisions in the coming year. I mean, yeah: they’ll still be the Mansquito channel to some extent, but given that the Dresden Files series is coming up (and is an item of much excitement on my part), this is all a thrilling indicator of the network’s trajectory.
and it had a bit of a “and now… the series!” feel to it,
That was my reaction, as well, which puzzled me because I’d seen it billed everywhere as a one-shot deal, a closed mini-series. And yet, they leave you with a bunch of unanswered questions. Arooo?
The only thing I can figure is they did it just to be conservative: if reactions were bland or hostile, then they hadn’t lost (much). But if the general viewing audience loved it and howled for more, they could look gracious and say that they were giving us what we wanted.
Aside from that: loved it, and wish they put out more programming like this and less creature-features and wrestling. (And the sad thing is, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the Troma-runner-ups and WWF/WF-whatever: they’re both rife with bad acting, and spotlight huge, scary and sweaty hostile things.)