Cult-TV Blogging: Brimstone: "Pilot" (October 23, 1998)

I’m adding a new series to my Cult-TV blogging line-up here, even as I continue with Ghost Story/Circle of Fear (1972 – 1973) on Sundays, and Land of the Lost (1974 – 1977) on Saturday mornings.  

The new series is one of my absolute favorites from just over a decade ago: Brimstone (1998 – 1999).

Created by Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, Brimstone aired in the late 1990s on Fox (as the lead-in to Millennium [1996 – 1999] on Friday nights), and ran for just thirteen hour-long episodes before an untimely cancellation. 

The series starred Peter Horton as Detective Ezekiel Stone, a former Manhattan-based police officer who died in 1983…and went to Hell.  He did so because he took the law into his own hands and murdered his wife’s rapist, Gilbert Jax.  Two months after that act of vigilantism, Stone was killed in the line of duty, and he’s been trapped in the Underworld ever since.

As the series commences, however, 113 of the “most vile” criminals in Hell manage a jailbreak and return to Earth to wreak havoc.  

The Devil (John Glover) -- trying to cover his ass with the Man Upstairs -- recruits Detective Stone to pursue the fugitives and send them back to Hell and permanent incarceration. 

Ezekiel can do so only by destroying their eyes, the so-called “windows to their souls.”  In exchange for his service, Stone gets a much-valued second shot at human life, happiness, and redemption.  Each time Stone kills an escaped convict, a strange runic tattoo (representing the convict’s “number” or identity) burns off his body. 

Stone must also deal with the fact that some of escaped convicts are extremely powerful, with terrifying supernatural abilities. As the Devil informs the detective: “The longer you’ve been in Hell, the more it becomes a part of you.”

Although Stone and the Devil are Brimstone’s two main characters, there is a large supporting/recurring cast as well.  Father Horne (Albert Hall) is a blind priest who knows the truth about Stone.  Max (Lori Petty) is the landlord at Stone’s flea-bag apartment-building and a trusted friend, and Rosalyn (Stacy Haiduk) is Stone’s still-mourning wife, now re-located to Los Angeles and unaware of her husband’s return.  Detective Ashe (Teri Polo) is a cop whom Stone occasionally works with, and who takes a dark path as the series progresses.

The villains featured on the series are literally twisted creatures from Hell, and the roster includes an unrepentant rapist (“Encore”), a shape-shifter with multiple personalities (“Faces”), a lovelorn poet who kills virgins (“Poem,”) and even a Bonnie and Clyde-styled pair of thugs (“The Lovers.”)

The critical response to Brimstone was originally quite mixed.  Writing for U.S.A. Today on October 23, 1998, Robert Bianco concluded: “Brimstone is as pretentious as it is dreary…the show is beyond salvation.”   Similarly, The New York Times’ Caryn James termed the series “dull” and suggested “any sign of life would have been an improvement.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker noted that the horror series “earns points for flair” and Variety called Brimstone “surprisingly watchable.”

The series pilot opens with an image that would have been right at home in the Adrian Lyne film Jacob’s Ladder (1990): a man -- Stone -- awakens on a kind of hellish subway, a passageway from Hell to Earth, apparently.    

We soon find out his story, as he confesses it to a priest in Manhattan church.  “Even the Devil has to answer to a higher power,” Stone tells the unseen clergyman.  And then a surprise: the Father Confessor is actually Stone’s target, a priest from 1896 named Salinas who believed that by killing four altar boys and sending them to Heaven, he could bring about Judgment Day, a scene from the Book of Revelation.  Over a hundred years have passed since his execution, and now he’s ready to start all over…

Two elements, primarily, distinguish this (excellent) first episode of Brimstone.  The first element is the photography, a kind of washed-out, burned-out palette that closely approximates black-and-white photography. 

This bleached-out look, drained almost entirely of color -- save for an icy blue hue -- makes sense in terms of the specific lead character and his dilemma here.  This world isn’t quite real to Stone yet, and he’s not even fully alive, it seems.  The de-saturated look of the city seems to reflect this situation quite well.  It’s a world he is not fully a part of, and thus not a vibrant, colorful, or happy place.

The visual and thematic film noir elements of Brimstone are indeed very strong.  In keeping with that particular film genre, we have an urban setting here, replete with rain-swept streets, fog, and other atmospherics, and we also get the noir’s trademark brutality, violence and oneiric or dream-like qualities.  

Perhaps more importantly, Stone is a true noir hero in nature: a morally-soiled gumshoe in trench-coat who can’t help but see the world in conflicted, ambiguous terms.  The photography strongly reinforces the protagonist's morally ambivalent nature, and thus a perfect artistic dynamic emerges: form deliberately mirrors content.

Secondly, Stone himself is established well as a character in the pilot episode. He’s got some great jokes to deliver (and under-play), including his witty comeback when someone asks him where he’s been for fifteen years: “Out of country…down under.” 

More importantly, Horton transmits here as laconic and somewhat dissolute.  He’s curt, concise, and down-to-business but not particularly social, and that balance seems just right.  Horton holds back a lot in terms of emotional availability, while nonetheless possessing that all-important glimmer in his eye that makes the audience aware he’s in on the joke, and that he understands the series’ wicked sense of humor. 

We know Ezekiel Stone is a good person who went astray, and almost from the very beginning of the series, we sympathize with him and his predicament.  One affecting scene in the pilot sees Ezekiel visiting his old family home, and experiencing sort of “interactive flashbacks” with his long-gone wife, remembering his life and the love he lost. 

Brimstone could have very easily become “Hell Convict of the Week,” but the series rather commendably takes an unexpected route (as we shall see) and focuses intently on these elements of character and style.  The things to gaze at intently in the weeks ahead as we survey the other episodes are:

How the criminal of the week tells us something important about Stone himself, and his mistakes on Earth.

And secondly, how the visual style -- namely grainy and gritty imagery along with pervasive jump cuts -- reflect Stone’s interaction and conflict with the real world.  It's a world he's not fully a part of, and out-of-step with.

Brimstone has been called “Touched by the Devil” and that’s actually a pretty good joke and apt description of the series’ premise and themes.  This is a series that -- without pretense or candy-coating -- explores evil’s role in the heart of men, even in good men like Ezekiel Stone. 

Next episode: “Poem.”