This Guy Is Full of Green Light: A Review of "Golden Years" EPISODE 1

This is from my friend, Bryant Burnette's blog, "The Truth Inside The Lie."  I liked it a LOT.  Bryant takes the time to build an episode review for each of the Golden Years, something I have not seen. . . well, anywhere.  And I read a lot of Stephen King.

Thanks, Bryant, for letting me repost this.  Be sure to check out his blog -- I always enjoy the "Bryant has issues" posts!

This is the first post, covering episode 1.

Alright, Bryant, take it away. . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

You may or may not be familiar with Golden Years, the four-hour movie written by Stephen King that is available on DVD. I get the sense that it is not terribly widely-seen. I might not be right about that, though; my senses have been known to fail me.

Either way, even if you are familiar with the movie, the odds are pretty good that you have no idea it is an abridged version of the original version: a seven-part series that aired on CBS in the summer of 1991. The first episode was a two-hour broadcast, so all in all, eight hours of the series were aired.

The version available home video is shorter by about 135 minutes; in other words, the equivalent of three hours' worth of the broadcast episodes were cut out, including the original cliffhanger ending (which was replaced with an alternate ending intended to provide at least scant closure).

I had not intended to post this article yet. However, I'm working -- slowly; too slowly -- on another post that covers all of the Stephen King-based episodes of television that have been produced (ranging from The Twilight Zone to The Dead Zone to Haven), and as a part of that I wanted to include some brief plot summaries of what happened in each episode of Golden Years. Problem was, I couldn't remember, nor could I find episode summaries anywhere else. Granted, I didn't look all that hard; but still.

This led to me rewatching the episodes so that I could type up brief plot summaries. 

 

I apologize in advance for not covering the differences between the home-video cut of the "movie" and these episodes; that'll happen at some later date, down the line. But since that version is easily obtainable, any King fan ought to readily be able to watch that version. Therefore, detailing the changes seems less crucial than detailing a bit about what happens in the original episodes themselves.

Here goes!

Episode 1 (airdate 07/16/1991)

You might be wondering: how, dear douche sir, are you so privileged as to have access to the original episodes, whereas the rest of us do not?

Glad you asked. I've got a VHS tape that has all of the episodes on it from when I taped 'em way back in the summer of 1991, as I was getting ready to enter my senior year of high school. It's one of my prize possessions, and I had somebody burn the episodes onto a DVD a few years back. So, yeah, that's my less-than-humble story for the day. Hey, look, I'm single and overweight and likely to remain both as I approach forty; I gots ta take my little victories where I can get 'em at this point, y'all.

The first episode was scripted by King and directed by Kenneth Fink, and begins with Harlan Williams riding his bicycle to work. He is a janitor at Falco Plains, a military-run scientific research facility in New York State. Williams is approaching his 71st birthday, and his job is in jeopardy because he recently failed the eye exam portion of his annual base-administered physical. Major Moreland, an unctuous bureaucrat, wants to fire him, but Williams insists on his right to retake the exam, so he narrowly avoids the canning that has obviously been headed right for him.

He is less successful in avoiding the explosion that is heading right for him: he is injured in the blast emanating from the laboratory of Dr. Richard Toddhunter, who is attempting to find a way to regenerate human tissue for use in helping wounded soldiers return to the battlefield quickly. Toddhunter is responsible for the explosion, having ordered his two assistants to proceed with his experiment despite having a warning red light on one of the lab's sensors.

Harlan's husband, Gina, is visited by Terry Spann, Falco Plains' head of security. Spann brings Gina to the base's hospital, where Gina finds her husband laid up in a bed, but apparently none the worse for wear. Later, however, she will notice that his eyes are glowing green; this is apparently a side effect, but nothing to be concerned about. Gina seems less than convinced by this assertion; she's probably right, what with the series having been written by Stephen King and all.

Meanwhile, Spann and the base's leader, General Crewes, question Toddhunter about his involvement in the blast. They suspect he's not being terribly truthful with them, but they don't have much in the way of proof.

Before long, a new contingent of bureaucrats arrives on the scene with questions of their own. They are led by Jude Andrews, a high-level operative of The Shop (the same dangerous black-ops scientific research agency that served as the villains on Firestarter). Seems Spann used to work for The Shop, too, and was Andrews' partner. When asked how close they were, Terry says they were as close as it got: "We used to kill people together," she says grimly.

Doesn't take long for Andrews to up his body count once on the case. A Lieutenant who overheard the dying words of one of Toddhunter's assistants could implicate the mad doctor, and that, apparently, would run contrary to the agenda of The Shop. So Andrews kills the man and reports back that he has done so. Reports to whom? We do not know.

Harlan, meanwhile, retakes his eye exam, and passes with flying colors. And that's not the only weird thing: Gina notices that his hair is turning from white to brown again...

Nobody circa 2012 is likely to mistake Golden Years for top-flight television, and if they do, you should probably not trust them very much. The production is a bit on the low-rent side, no doubt about it, although the television landscape was a very different animal in 1991 than it is today.

The apt comparison is to judge Golden Years against other tv dramas from 1991, and on that score, I think it holds up reasonably well. The acting is mostly fine; Keith Szarabajka is good as Harlan (and is aided by old-age makeup that still looks great in 2012), as is Frances Sternhagen as Gina. Felicity Huffman is a good, solid, sexy, severe Terry Spann, and I've seen a few other people note that she seems almost to be a template for Dana Scully, who was still two years in the future on The X-Files. It's a skin-deep comparison, but I can see how the comparison gets made.

I also like Ed Lauter as General Crewes. R.D. Call makes for a menacing Jude Andrews, although his American accent seems to be a bit too slippery for him to keep hold of consistently ... which is really odd, considering that's he's American. Not sure why he sounds like a Brit trying to keep a rein on his American "r"s, but that's exactly what he sounds like. Despite that, he's really good.

Less good: Stephen Root, who plays the annoying Major Moreland, and Bill Raymond, who plays Dr. Toddhunter. Both are kinda campy and over the top, but since that seems to be on purpose on account of the roles having been written that way, let's cut them both some slack, shall we?

Bryant's Review of episode 2 will appear tomorrow.