The Lost Room (2006)

Three-part TV miniseries, 360 minutes, Color, USA, 2006

Written By: Laura Harkcom, Christopher Leone & Paul Workman

Directed By: Craig R Baxley & Michael W Watkins

Dramatis Personae:

Peter Krause is Joe Miller, cop and single father, inadvertently dragged into a strange world of magical objects.

Julianna Margulies is Jennifer Bloom, member of a secret society and ally to Joe.

Kevin Pollak is Karl Kreutzfeld, wealthy collector of magical objects.

Dennis Christopher is Martin Ruber, police forensic specialist who also gets sucked into the world of magical objects.

Peter Jacobson is Wally, eccentric mental patient and possessor of a magical bus ticket.

Rogert Bart is The Weasel, small-time crook who crosses paths with Joe.

Chris Bauer is Lou, Joe’s ill-fated partner.

April Grace is Lee, police colleague of Joe.

Elle Fanning is Anna, Joe’s lost daughter.

Margaret Cho is Susie Kang, freelance magical object dealer.

Commentary:

Ah, Sci-Fi Channel Originals. How I adore them. It never ceased to amaze me how, when given more than two hours to tell a story, the quality of a Sci-Fi Channel Original increases exponentially. Most of the original movies that come out of Sci-Fi Channel Pictures or any of its direct-to-video affiliates are cheap disposable crap, the movie equivalent of junk food. Every so often you’ll get a little gem in the rough, or a particularly festering turd, but for the most part, given two hours to kill, Sci-Fi will come up with something in the so-bad-it’s-funny vein. Given MORE than two hours, however, and Sci-Fi will really impress. Sci-Fi Channel miniseries are characterized by fascinating concepts and better-than-average writing – probably because the ideas are too dense to cram into two hours – and hardly ever leave a bad taste in the mouth. Things like Five Days to Midnight or the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels are remarkable opuses, considering they come from the same source as things like Shark Hunter.

To wit, The Lost Room, Sci-Fi’s latest miniseries. It’s a fascinating little tale of magical items, secret histories, and hidden subcultures. It’s an engrossing story, with multiple layers of meaning and a genuine sense of believability, as well as a mind-bending concept as its springboard. It’s definitely worth the six hours it takes to watch; even after six hours it feels unfinished, leaving the viewer wanting to know more about this world and its characters.

The story opens in a pawn shop, as several armed shady types converge to negotiate the sale of a mysterious item: a seemingly innocuous motel room key. The deal goes sour quickly, as “The Weasel,” a petty crime boss wielding a deadly ball-point pen, breaks up the proceeding and kills two of the men in a particularly horrible way. However, he fails to get the key; Iggy, stockboy at the pawn shop, gets his hands on it and flees.

We are then introduced to Joe Miller, a cop going through a bitter battle with his ex-wife over custody of their eight-year-old daughter Anna. Now Joe’s your typical devoted single dad, and a genuinely good guy, so we know he’s going to get put through the ringer real soon. Sure enough, he and his partner Lou investigate the crime scene at the pawn shop – and puzzle over the baffling condition of the corpses, who seem to have been burnt to a crisp from the inside out and fused to the walls – and shortly after Joe has a run in with Iggy. Shot in the back by mysterious people, Iggy dies in Joe’s arms, but gives him the key, telling him that “it opens doors.”

Sure enough, Joe discovers the power of the key: insert it in any door lock, then open the door, and you are transported to some kind of pocket dimension that takes the form of an empty hotel room. From that room, you can then exit out any other door in the world. At first, Joe keeps this a secret, but as he and Lou investigate the crime further, it becomes clear that the key is only the tip of the iceberg. His possession of the key causes him to cross paths with several people, who either seek him out deliberately or are drawn to him unconsciously by the power of the item. First he meets Wally, an eccentric little man with a magic bus ticket and a little too much knowledge about what the key really is. The key is one of several hundred “Objects” scattered throughout the world, seemingly everyday items that have mysterious magical properties – some useful, some ridiculous. Wally’s bus ticket, for example, can instantly transport a person to an empty stretch of highway outside of Gallup, New Mexico. There is, Wally explains, a subculture extant in the world of people who collect, trade, or otherwise make use of the Objects for their own purposes. As to Joe’s motel room key, well, it would seem that these Objects all came from that motel room. In 1961, Wally explains, SOMETHING happened at that motel. An entire room was blinked out of our dimension, and the objects within it imbued with strange powers. There are people who seek to collect all the Objects to try and understand what happened, and there are people who believe that the Objects are “pieces of God,” and to collect them all is to become all-powerful. As Joe continues his investigations, both into the murders and into this mysterious underworld of magic Objects, he crosses paths with Karl Kreutzfeld, a wealthy man who collects Objects for his own mysterious reasons; and Jennifer Bloom, member of “The Legion,” a secret society who have decided that the Objects are too dangerous to exist, and so collect them to be locked away forever. All of these people want Joe’s key, and they use varied methods in the hopes of getting him to part with it. Joe’s still a little new to this world of magic items and secret societies, so he does nothing…until the Weasel kidnaps his daughter and offers to exchange her for the key. The exchange goes sour, and Anna winds up lost inside the Motel Room: the Room “resets” whenever the door is closed, and any foreign object – or person – still in the room at the time is simply “gone.” With no legitimate sources of help to turn to – his messy divorce was common knowledge, and the sudden “disappearance” of his daughter makes even his closest friends doubt him – Joe uses whatever means necessary: he works with Jennifer, Kreutzfeld, and the Weasel all together, playing one against the other, pumping them for knowledge and using their expertise on his quest to unravel the mystery of the Objects and try and get his daughter back.

There is so much to love in this miniseries that I find it hard to keep it all on one page. As I said, there are layers and layers of this story and this fictional universe, making it all the more compelling to watch. This is a startlingly smart piece of television, that tackles complex concepts and lays out a Byzantine plot that pulls no punches and throws more curveballs than your average Major League pitcher. I absolutely love the idea of “secret histories,” of hidden societies that exist on the fringes, and The Lost Room delivers on that idea without becoming unbelievable. Object owners and Object seekers alike are part of this great secret culture that we can only vaguely perceive. Nowhere is this better articulated in the mechanics of how this society works. The Objects are such mundane objects – a pair of scissors, a pencil, a deck of playing cards – that a person could actually have one in the back of a drawer in their house and never know it. And the people who own the objects are equally ordinary, or would be without them. That’s one place where the story is quite believable: we have people who NEED the Objects, because without them they have nothing special in their lives. And we have people whose lives have been ruined by the Objects: Wally himself is borderline crazy, and the owner of a comb that freezes time is easily one of the most disgusting losers ever put on film. Jennifer says as much to Joe when they discuss how the Legion collects Objects; “I’ve had people BEG me” to take them away, she says.

The miniseries also does not shy away from the dangerous nature of the Objects: the Legion is only one of many secret societies dedicated to using and collecting the Objects, and some of them aren’t as pleasant about getting them as the Legion is. Nowhere is this more evident in the side story of Martin Ruber, who starts out as a friend of Joe, but slowly becomes more and more obsessed with the Objects as he learns more about them. He falls in with “The Order,” a group of fanatical collectors who can and will commit cold-blooded murder to attain their aims. Ruber’s search for answers and for power leads him down a very dark road, which ends with him betraying Joe in a very personal, very horrible way. Kreutzfeld is a similar story: he’s not really a bad person, but has been driven to nefarious deeds out of desperation – and when we learn why Kreutzfeld seeks Objects and what he plans to do with them, it’s hard not to understand where he’s coming from, even if we don’t agree with where he’s going.

As great as the series is, however, it’s not perfect. The storyline is so complex that it apparently couldn’t be resolved in six hours. A great many questions go unanswered by the end of the story. We never find out what exactly happened in that motel room in 1961. We never know why or how these objects came to be. And the fates of several characters in the story are never resolved; we simply stop following their lives, and the story ends. It might have been too much to ask, perhaps, to have such a complicated story be neatly wrapped up by the end of the last episode, but it’s still infuriating. There are no real answers given; not even Joe is sure what he’s done by the end of the story, or even if he managed to bring the whole affair to a satisfying end. So much is left hanging that it’s kind of disappointing; it’s almost as if the writers couldn’t think of a convincing way to actually end the story, so they just had everything blow up. Which is a pity, because the story held up so well until that point.

Oh well. There’s at least 300 minutes of good stuff within this 360-minute miniseries, and I highly recommend that you catch it when it replays – and you KNOW the Sci-Fi Channel WILL replay it. Frequently. Not exactly prime rib viewing, but it’s definitely not your typical Sci-Fi Channel junk food movie. Check it out next time it’s on; you won’t be disappointed.

Unless...you know, you were really hoping to see that Dean Cain movie marathon….

Things To Look For:

- One thing I always look for in a miniseries is the acting, and for the most part the actors here do not disappoint. Peter Krause is entirely believable as an average, decent man pushed to his limits by extraordinary circumstances, and Kevin Pollak seems to be channeling Kevin Spacey in a GOOD way. Julianna Margulies has yet to impress me in any movie I’ve seen her in – why does she have an Emmy, exactly? – but at least her role here as the mysterious take-charge woman is an easy one and she doesn’t screw it up. Dennis Christopher is appropriately creepy and pathetic at the same time – he never stopped being Jack Of All Trades, I guess – and Peter Jacobson is just wacky enough to be endearing without being irritating. Elle Fanning…well, in general I don’t like to speak ill of child actors – it just seems cruel and churlish – but I will say that it’s clear Dakota got most of the talent in that family.

- The way the Objects and their powers are handled is quite refreshing. It’s clear a lot of thought went into it, because the power each Object possesses is not immediately apparent. You’d think a clock would affect time somehow, but no. It’s the COMB that stops time, while the clock just does…something vague. It’s great that so many of the objects have completely random and useless abilities, like the radio that will add three inches to your height if you tune it to the right channel. You really get the sense that whatever happened in the Motel Room was a huge cosmic accident, with no rhyme or reason to the proceeding. It’s another small touch that makes the story all the more believable.

- The Order are genuinely creepy people, and their behavior toward the Objects is quite disturbing. They believe that the Ohjects are pieces of God, things to be gathered and worshipped – by any means necessary. And the fact that they look like average people, from any and all walks of life, makes it all the more creepy and believable. The things they require of Ruber before they allow him to join are dark and scary things indeed: a true testament to how power corrupts, I think.

- There’s one great gag in the story, where Joe confronts the Weasel and his minions. One of the minions sees Joe’s gun and asks, “What does the gun do?” Joe replies, “It shoots bullets really fast!” Made me laugh so hard to hear that. It says so much about the series, I think: the melding of the everyday with the magical, to the point where no one involved can even be sure what’s a magical object and what’s just a gun. Great clever stuff, and the series is full of little moments like that.

Date Posted: December 19, 2006

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