Discussing The Invisible Man A Little More Seriously

Assuming "seriously" is the proper word to use here. I already did the jokey post about it a week and a half ago, but I felt like talking about it a bit more in-depth.

The gist is that Darien Fawkes (Vincent Vintresca) is a thief, he gets caught robbing the elderly fellow as I described, and is sentenced to life in prison. Fortunately, he has a genius brother who needs a human test subject for a government project, and it'll get Darien out of prison. The project being the insertion of a gland into Darien's brain that produces a chemical they call Quicksilver, which bends light, making the person, ta da!, invisible (and there are a few other benefits). Then they find out the gland also secretes a sort of narcotic that reduces Darien's inhibitions, making him kind of nuts, but of of the scientists has developed a counteragent that will temporarily (maybe six days) nullify that effect. Then we learn that scientist, Arnaud (Joel Bissonnette) is actually a weapons' supplier to terrorists, and he wants the plans for the gland, people die, Darien goes on the run, and ends up working for the Agency, who commissioned the project. It's not what Darien wants, but the gland can't be removed without killing him, and the Agency are the only ones he can get counteragent from, and he'd rather not go crazy.

So there are certain allowances that have to be made to continue the series, such as not being able to remove the gland safely. On any occasions when Darien might have a way to get rid of it, that avenue inevitably closes up. Likewise, the temporary effect of the counteragent provides a reason why Darien doesn't just accept that he has the gland and go do what he pleases, instead working for the Official, who he doesn't much care for.

One of the nice set-ups is that even though the Agency has apparently existed for quite some time, it is (currently, at least) a small, underfunded agency. They have two dozen employees at most, only five of which garner any significant face time (Darien, the Official, Eberts, Hobbes, and Claire, also called the Keeper). The underfunding is frequently used for comedic effect, as the Official and Eberts scramble to balance the budget, appropriate more funds, conceal where they spent $17 million (that'd be the Invisible Man project), and generally hamstring Hobbes and Fawkes in their various work by pleading poverty when a little cash needs to be spent, say Hobbes needing a calling card. The other side of it is that because they're always strapped for cash, they will take almost any investigation, including those from outside the government sector. It's a convenient way to provide a variety of conflicts for them to struggle against.

In Season 1, they are two recurring antagonists, Arnaud, and Chrysalis. Chrysalis is your standard shadowy multinational corporate entity that is working towards some purpose, in this case preparing for some major catastrophe (which they will probably help to engineer). Among their activities were trying to scare a superstitious South American president into approving a chemical weapon defense system for his country, kidnapping highly intelligent people from various private sectors and freezing them, and trying to get Fawkes on their side. They have at least one super-soldier of their own, a woman by the name of Allianora, whose lungs were altered so she can hold water and air in them, allowing her to walk up to people, liplock them, and then flood their lungs with the water. Creepy. She and Fawkes are supposed to have this romantic tension, possible because of some connection they feel over both being artificially engineered freaks, stuck under the thumb of their makers, but I didn't feel it as I watched the episodes*. Maybe that was the point, though, since they were constantly in conflict, or pretending to work together, on to backstab each other for their agencies, that whatever they might feel was trapped under all the requirements of the job. Or they just didn't have the critical chemistry. It happens.

I prefer Arnaud as a villain to Chrysalis. With Chrysalis, Allianora is the representative we see most often, and half the time she's helping Darien, so it undercuts her as a villain. Plus, their motives are vague, and I'm uncertain if in Season 1 we actually see the top dogs, or just the equivalent of a sectional manager. Aranud, in contrast, is his own man. He's alternately devious, charming, playful, and vicious. When he was part of the gland design team, he was the brilliant but funny scientist. He's also the guy who, when Darien caught him copying the files on the project onto his own flash drives, hit himself on the head with a fire extinguisher so it would look like Darien went Quicksilver mad and attacked him, thus discrediting the one person who realized what he was up to. And this is the same guy who can woo a neurosurgeon into believing he's a federal agent, so that she'll help implant a new gland into his head (when he pieces together how to make a new one). And when he was trying to retrieve a chip with data files on the gland which Darien forced him to swallow, he actually cut open his own stomach and removed it by himself, no painkillers obviously, since he'd want to keep a clear head.

Yet for all his class and viciousness, he's a bit like a child, growing frustrated that Darien saw through his act (because a con recognizes a con), and he prefers to engage in wildly elaborate schemes to get what he wants. For example, using a former Russian mobster to lead Fawkes and Hobbes to a supposed arms dealer, so Arnaud can chase Fawkes (Aranud is wearing thermal glasses of some sort), shooting at him, run out of bullets, then drop a gas grenade which actually contains some form of flu virus that will make Darien so sick he'll be rushed to a special hospital for government agents who can't afford to go under anaesthetic around people not cleared for what they might say, except, Arnaud has captured a killed a doctor who works there, so he can use said doctor's fingerprints and retinal scan to sneak and abduct Fawkes when the procedure is about to start. Whoo. Gimme a second to let my fingers rest. Ok, I'm good. But I love that. Yeah, it's ridiculously over elaborate, when Arnaud could just trail Fawkes, leap from a van, club him unconscious, then take him somewhere and operate**, but it shows class, style. Arnaud is not some common leg-breaker. This is a man who finances his weapons dealing by running a beautiful casino in Mexico, so he is going to do things a certain way. Really, I guess he figures the more he plans it out, the less likely some random factor will put the kibosh on things.

I might as well say a few more things about the characters. The nice thing about Fawkes is that he's not a brainless criminal, but he's not a genius. He did go to college for a time, but as he put it, it lost its luster after his brother earned his third doctorate. He's intelligent, with a love for quotes, and the pastime we most often see him engaging in is reading, one time a philosophy journal, another time he mentions he started subscribing to Scientific American***. Still, he's not all-knowing, so he can serve as the instigator of exposition, since espionage, interdepartmental bullcrap, and medicine (areas Hobbes, Eberts, and Claire are well-versed in) are not things he's familiar with. At the same time, his history as a criminal helps him see through people, which can be valuable, though it leads him to be needlessly secretive with both Hobbes and Claire, because he tends not to trust them when he should.

To be fair, in the early-going he has very little reason to do so. Claire (Shannon Kenny) insists he refer to her as the Keeper, even though she knows his name, and Hobbes (Paul Ben-Victor) resents that Fawkes makes more money, even though he's a rookie, and Bobby Hobbes has worked for practically every agency in the country (and been fired from them for various reasons), and he has to hold this rookie's hand. So in the early episodes, there's a lot of tension between Fawkes and Hobbes, sniping at each other, Fawkes eagerly pulling disappearing acts without warning Hobbes, so that Bobby's left standing there alone and confused, and a general inability to work well together. What's good is that over the course of the season, they do start to form a bond, as each one is willing to stick their neck out for the other, and they develop little patterns. So if Claire makes some comment about them not being able to understand the science behind something, they'll engage in a little back-and-forth about whether that was an insult, and it sure felt insulting to me, and I don't think she really means to be rude, all while she's standing there staring at them. In the last few episodes they start messing around with different high-fives and complimenting each other if one adds a little twist to it. So the series doesn't have them automatically become buddies, rather it's a gradual process, probably aided by the fact that neither one of them has anyone else to turn to.

Bobby's an interesting character. He probably should be a highly paid, highly decorated agent, but he suffers from rampant paranoia, and a tendency to need validation, so he shoots himself in the foot. Also, he has a bit of an ego, so he's his own greatest hero. The paranoia leads to odd proclamations, which leads people to dismiss him when they shouldn't, and the need for some positive reinforcement brings him into conflict with Eberts, the Official's right-hand man. They frequently snipe at each other, especially if the Official has just delivered a cutting remark in Hobbes' direction, which Eberts usually enjoys, and I think Hobbes is irked that he does all the dangerous work, and Eberts just shuffles papers. Still, Paul Ben-Victor gives Hobbes the right feel, where you can see he's dangerous and cool under fire, but he can also be a funny guy when the heat isn't on. And there's one episode where Hobbes gains super-intelligence, and Victor gradually removes the emotion from his voice, so he's speaking in this gravelly, dead sort of tone. Very spooky compared to how he'd been before.

Also, Bobby and Claire seem to develop a bit of a relationship over the course of the season, and it actually works. Maybe because it doesn't progress as far, or as fast as the Fawkes/Allianora thing, and because it lack the air of doom that hangs over that one. Hobbes has a tendency to make jokey come-ons to Claire, and as she grows more accustomed to he and Fawkes, she gets less bothered by them, and more amused, recognizing they're just part of his personality. I think maybe she responds to his loyalty to people, and they may bond over a mutual concern for Darien. All I know for sure is late in the season they're chatting and Hobbes abruptly comments that she looks great in those pants and she makes the sort of shocked face that's more "I can't believe you said that in public, you goof", and less "I can't believe you said that, you perv". So at the least, they've built a sort of camaraderie, which is nice to see, because it means everything isn't strictly about how characters react or get along with Darien, they have their own things going.

Holy crap, that turned out to be a lot more words than I expected. If you made it all the way through, I thank you.

* That has to be really hard though, to convey you and this other person are attracted to each other, when it's just a job, and you may not know anything about each other, or you may not really like the person.

** Fawkes points this out to Arnaud at the tail end of that sequence I described above, claiming when he gets the chance to kill Arnaud, there won't be any playing around. When Aranud leans down a laughs about that, Darien punches him right in the nose, then gets the crap kicked out of him by Arnaud's Brainless Thugs of the Week.

*** That had more to do with him trying to keep his eyes open for ways to remove the gland, though.