Cult-TV Theme Watch: Skeletons

A skeleton is an organism’s super-structure, and an adult human skeleton showcases 206 bones including the vertebral column, the rib cage, and the skull.

The skeleton features a kind of fearsome or monstrous visage, too, and it is for that reason -- fear -- that skeletons often appear throughout cult-television history. 

Skeletons represent a great mystery, perhaps, when discovered by cult-TV protagonists. 

What happened to the dead?  How did they die? Who were they? Where did they come from and what did they face?

A skeleton -- a human form without, necessarily, individual human identity -- raises all such questions.

Three Quaker-like innocents, Devon (Keir Dullea), Garth (Robin Ward) and Rachel (Gay Rowan), discovered they were living on a spaceship, not on a planet in “Voyage of Discovery,” the first episode of The Starlost (1973 – 1974). But what they found on the bridge of that ship was even more terrifying: the skeletons of the dead crew, victims of some long-forgotten but catastrophic disaster.

Similarly, in Space: 1999’s (1975 – 1977) “Testament of Arkadia,” the Alphans discover a cave of humanoid skeletons on the distant world of Arkadia.   These skeletons seem to pre-date man, and the mystery surrounding their lives -- and deaths --- grows and grows.

An away team from the Enterprise-D discovers the skeleton of a human astronaut inside a strange casino on another world in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s (1987 – 1994) “The Royale,” and wonders what led him to his grim fate.  Worse, when they can’t escape the casino, they wonder if they will share his lonely fate.

A pair of skeletons is discovered in North Carolina in The X-Files (1993 – 2002) episode “Field Trip,” and is positioned strangely…as if resting together on a bed.  Again, the skeletons confirm the what -- death -- but not the how or why.  That’s Mulder and Scully’s job, to get those answers.

Skeletons have also made fearsome and spooky villains in many series.  In Doctor Who’s (2005 - ) two-parter “Silence in the Library”/”Forests of the Dead,” the Doctor grapples with the “piranhas of the air,” the Vashta Nerada.  These microscopic aliens devour flesh, leaving only bone, and then, grotesquely, can animate the skeletons of the dead. An unforgettable vision presented by this installment of the series is that of an ambulatory skeleton in a spacesuit.

Skeleton soldiers and sword-fighters -- deliberate echoes of the work of Ray Harryhausen in Jason in the Argonauts -- have likewise appeared in such series as Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Tabula Rasa”) and Merlin.