ER is a show that went on way too long, well past its expiration date. Sure, we’ve had hospital dramas since the beginning of television, but let’s be real, it’s a show about doctors and sick people, and once you’ve done the usual bits about doctors with drug addictions, romantic liasons, doctors euthanizing patients, doctors unable to cope with the stress or guilt of losing patients, and all that, there’s only so long you can torture these poor characters before you just plumb run out of ideas. Hell, even House M.D. has run out of wacky, impossible-to-diagnose bullshit. When you reach that point you start getting into some seriously loony stunt-writing to fill time.

And believe me, ER started doing that around its seventh season. It went on for fifteen years. Fifteen years. That’s just insane. Can you imagine the stuff they had to pull out of their asses to go that long? Eventually they realized the only way to keep it fresh was to circulate new characters in, and that meant phasing old characters out. Remember Doctor Romano?

I do. It’s probably the most cracktastic, insane soap opera death I’ve ever seen. If you remember that episode of Friends where Joey’s doctor character falls down an elevator shaft, that’s NOTHING in comparison. Doctor Romano got horribly maimed by a helicopter.

Twice.

We’re talking about a long-running storyline where a doctor got his arm amputated by a tail rotor, developed an irrational fear of helicopters… which turned out to not be that irrational when weeks later, another helicopter proceeded to get caught in sudden windshear and dropped directly on his head.

Thing is, though, it really should have saved ER. Come on, now, that’s undoubtedly the most retarded thing you’ve ever heard, but it’s also AWESOMELY retarded. You just don’t see this kind of shit every day. And I’ll be honest, it took balls to kill off a character in an otherwise serious drama in such a hilarious fashion. No brains, but massive cojones. If ER had only embraced that dark side, become some nightmare, bizarre parody of its former greatness, it might have evolved into something even greater! Oh, it would have totally alienated its old audience but found a new one altogether. It has the virtue of being new and original, instead of shambling onward for ten years, unwatched, a shell of its former self.

ER needed to do something insane, something radical, something unlike any hospital drama before it had attempted. It had mined out every other hospital drama storyline long ago, so why not get crazy? How crazy? Sometimes jumping the shark isn’t just inevitable, it’s absolutely called-for. Hell, I wanna jump that fucking shark on an ACME rocket with my hair on fire.

Sixteenth season: the zombie apocalypse hits. We’re there on Day 1: patients come in with severe fevers and dementia, most suffering from bite wounds and claw marks that show advanced stages of infection and skin necrosis despite claims that they were bitten that morning. The doctors aren’t stupid, they know what this looks like, even if they’re not willing to put anything on paper yet. They isolate the victims and start running blood tests, alerting security to keep an eye on them.

Things snowball fast, though. The ER gets swamped with injuries from riots, more attack victims, and people fearing for their safety. People are demanding answers and treatment, and a fearful mob quickly turns to a violent panic. The doctors are even temporarily forced to evacuate until the police (already stretched thin) can restore order.

Things start looking up once the National Guard responds and sets up a military cordon and mass triage in the parking lot, but already there’s talk of evacuation as the infection spreads like wildfire outside the cordon. Nobody knows what’s going on, as the national media seems to be completely ignoring the crisis, perhaps as the result of a government blackout. It leads the doctors into thinking that perhaps the infection is localized to the city, a fear that is confirmed when the National Guard commander is informed that the regular army is setting up a quarantine zone.

(This leads to several interesting subplots where the guard commander starts to fear from his communications with his superiors that the military is preparing to eradicate the infection by nuking the city. Additionally, some of the doctors realize that if the infection is local to the city, then there may be hope of a cure if they can find Patient Zero, if any of them have the balls to venture outside the military cordon.)

Days pass, and the situation grows even more bleak. The hospital is nearly overrun from within when bodies from the hospital morgue– bodies that had no contact with other infected– start to rise and attack. The doctors are now completely baffled, and there’s growing sentiment among some that they should try to take the medivac helicopter to safety, infection be damned. The military quarantine would likely shoot down such an attempt, but try explaining that to a fearful mob of patients.

Salvation finally arrives when the military starts dropping supplies, food, and ammo, as well as relief paratroopers and a new group of doctors. It seems like good news, until it turns out that these new doctors and soldiers have little interest in the hospital’s problems. They immediately commandeer an entire floor and start moving equipment in. Every day, they start asking for specific patients by name and taking them away, by force if necessary. These patients never return, and all day and all night, the helicopters fly in and out, taking sealed crates away and bringing new ones back.

One day, they all leave. They pack up their gear just before dawn and fly off, never to return. The military radios go deathly quiet. The scheduled airdrop never arrives. The next morning, the National Guard commander is found dead, a smoking gun in his hand. The best case scenario is that they’ve been abandoned to their fates. The worst case? Does anyone else hear an airplane?

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I think many of you are missing the point of this particular exercise. I’m trying to point out that these are terrible ideas that should never be applauded. A violent exploitation sequel to Manos? Be serious.

And yes, I know that all of these ideas are, without fail, based on some other existing series. I told you, my creativity is completely sapped. Lacking original ideas, the only thoughts I have are slipshod attempts to resurrect or repair already-perished franchises. I lack the ability to create anything new.

That being said, here’s how I’d utterly ruin Terminator!

At first, I was thinking something along the lines of “John Connor must die” to save the franchise. From the beginning, the series has been somewhat shackled to the belief that John Connor is this mythical “chosen one” who would rally the last remnants of humanity and lead them against the machines. It’s a cool idea, but perhaps something that’s better left to the imagination. I was, to be blunt, unimpressed with the way Terminator Salvation portrayed Connor as humanity’s savior. Why was he so highly-regarded? What made him such a big damn hero as opposed to the others? Because he gave useless advice to people on the radio? Please. We only know he’s the savior of humanity because people from the future told us that he is.

And that’s what killed John Connor. More assuredly than a T-800 shooting his mother between the eyes, knowledge of Judgment Day irrevocably changed the future. It gave Sarah and John forewarning, allowed them to prepare, and set into motion a chain of events radically different than the original timeline. More terminators were sent back, people died, and John was a completely different person than he was in the original timeline when Judgment Day came around. In fact, when John destroyed Cyberdyne, he delayed the original Judgment Day and the timeline really took it in the ass. Now we’re talking about a completely different war, where Connor might not have been important to the war effort at all!

John Connor was a dead man whether Kyle Reese went back in time or not. You could argue that John would never have been born without the time paradox, but that’s the nature of a time paradox; it’s impossible to find the endpoint of a circle, and it had to start somewhere.

Here’s the real truth about John Connor, the first time around, before any robots were sent back to screw the timeline up: he singlehandedly held an assault base perimeter against a sustained, night-long attack when infiltrator terminators killed nearly everyone else on sentry duty. If not for Connor raising the alarm and holding the perimeter for hours against those insane odds, thousands of refugees might have been overrun and killed. Connor became a symbol of heroism, of courage, and of hope. His name became a rallying cry to inspire others to heroic acts, and his voice on the radio inspired fanatical loyalty and suicidal obedience.

He died about six months later.

He died when HKs plasma bombed his command post two years before Skynet even figured out time travel. Skynet didn’t even know Connor had been killed. Neither did most of the Resistance– there’s no way in hell Resistance Command would let that bit of news out.

Look. John Connor was a great warrior, and an inspiring commander. But he was just a man like any other soldier. He was a hero, no doubt, but let’s face it, he got lucky, and Command exploited his name and embellished his story to legendary proportions because the Resistance needed to boost morale. Things were looking hopeless, and Connor was just the kind of story people could latch onto. But really, it could have been anyone.

In fact, that’s the point. He could be anyone. John Connor is a name and a voice, nothing more. He’s the Uncle Sam on recruiting posters. Right now, HQ has about six John Connors running around whipping the troops into shape, leading forlorn hopes into suicide missions. John Connors are dying all the time. Your average Resistance fighter doesn’t know what he looks like; it’s not like he’s on TV. All they might have heard is that he has a scar over his eye, so when Command sends a guy over to lead them and says it’s Connor, who are they to argue?

Skynet doesn’t know what’s hitting it; it doesn’t have the creativity to think that the Resistance might have created a fictional character. It doesn’t know anything about the value of symbolism or the hope Connor inspires in people. To Skynet, this John Connor bastard is everywhere, and he has to die.

Skynet is wasting its time, chasing a phantom and wasting invaluable resources on a target it believes is pivotal to the human war effort. That suits Resistance Command just fine. The longer Skynet devotes resources to killing a dead man, playing whack-a-mole with the half-dozen Connors in the present, the more unfocused it is and unprepared when the Resistance finishes its preparations to strike its final blow.

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Normally I hate series reboots. You only have to look as far as the Knight Rider revamp before you seriously consider turning the television off and finding something to read. Something very, very long to read. I even hated the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and that’s considered to be one of the most successful reimaginings of a shitty sci-fi franchise ever. Star Trek was pretty good, but was there really enough wrong with the original series to warrant its complete invalidation with some “red matter singularity time travel” hand-waving?

Then again, rebooting is just about the only thing that keeps the comics industry (barely) rolling. When a series get too convoluted, dark, confusing, hard to follow, or just too damn embarrassing, they set the existing franchise on fire and rebuild it from Issue #1. Hey, it works, and it’s actually pretty exciting to discover a series and its characters all over again, and most readers appreciate when writers are willing to take a crappy storyline behind the wood shed and beat it to death with a shovel. You just have to hope that once the reboot is done, they don’t fuck it up worse than before (like they did with the Ultimates).

That’s why the X-Files is perfect for a reboot. I don’t think anyone was entirely happy with the way the series conspiracy unfolded. It was entirely too convoluted and yet completely predictable. It took too long to develop and was ineptly executed, and in the end, none of it made much sense, and one wonders why the aliens bothered collaborating with these shady, cigarette-smoking goons when they could have just kill-o-zapped the nation Independence Day-style.

I think my main problem with it was that the conspiracy was exactly what everyone predicted it would be: saucer men from Mars plotting a major invasion of the planet, with a shady cabal of shadow cabinets collaborating to conceal the truth from the public and position themselves so that they’re spared from the wrath of their new alien overlords. Yeah, there was a little more too it than that– something to do with a deadly virus, a sentient oil, and Big Brother secretly working against the aliens– but still, to me, it was paint-by-numbers. There weren’t any surprises. If you thought it was aliens in flying saucers and evil Men in Black suppressing the truth, you pretty much had it pegged from episode #1.

I’ve always believed that the true secrets behind the X-Files should be far more terrifying than some naked gray bug-eyed bastards who want to abduct cattle and implant shit in the nasal cavities of deranged morons nobody would ever believe. Any kind of alien life that’s been able to make the concept of interstellar space travel a routine, trivial thing has concerns far beyond anything a planet full of spastic monkeys might offer. They would no more negotiate with us than you would negotiate with an anthill in your driveway. They could wipe us out without even noticing they’d done it. If they noticed humanity at all, it would be only as irritants or playthings, and if they did decide to exterminate us, there would be no hope of some Macintosh-borne computer virus or sass-talking Fresh Princes saving us, no deadly allergy to water or susceptibility to the common cold. Aliens like that squeeze more interesting things into the bathroom mirror than humanity.

“Here we go,” you say, “you’re just going Lovecraftian on us, like that’s not predictable.” Well, maybe, but you say that like it’s a bad thing, when really, the concept of the X-Files is just about perfect for a modern-day Mythos investigation show. And in many ways, the central concepts of the Cthulhu Mythos do wonders for expanding the possibilities of the show’s breadth and depth. All of a sudden, you have an alien conspiracy stretching back beyond the dawn of man, with ancient civilizations who worshipped these entities as gods, wretched and glorious hallucinatory dreamscapes, lost continents, and tons of mad cultists and Illuminati, each with agendas eons in the making.

I’m not saying it’s Cthulhu, and I’m not asking to see Mulder and Scully in a running gunfight on the streets of Innsmouth with a pack of shoggoths hot on their heels.

Actually, that sounds pretty cool.

But anyway, I’m just suggesting a fundamental change in tone. Here’s the setup: Fox Mulder witnessed what he believed to be the alien abduction of his sister, and that trauma has put him on a crusade to uncover the truth that he believes is being concealed by the government. But that’s not what he saw. It’s what he wants to believe.

What he doesn’t know is that his parents are fanatical high sorcerers of a cult of some alien god (like Azathoth) who would routinely offer animal sacrifices and hold orgies and festivals of body mutilation in His honor. Both Fox and Samantha were brainwashed at a very young age to be blindly faithful worshipers and participants in these sick, depraved rites. On one night of special celestial significance, the parents chose Samantha as a virgin offering to be the unholy receptacle of one of their god’s insane, protean gibbering spawn.

None had actually seen an aspect of their god before that night, and they were not prepared for what they saw. The ultradimensional, tentacled horror that emerged from the summoning portal ravaged and devoured Samantha and half the cult in its slathering hunger before Fox’s parents broke the circle and expelled the thing, leaving them naked and terrified in a smoking charnel, ankle-deep in steaming blood and bones. Fox’s brain, unable to process the sickness he’d just witnessed, simply shut down and repressed the horrific events, rationalizing it into the most logical thing he could: a standard alien abduction scenario like you see all the time on TV. All he remembers is a shrieking, piercing nose (and yet, almost like music), his sister screaming, and a bright light. It’s left a hole in his memory that he’s trying desperately to fill, but doing so might very well either drive him to insanity, or worse, unearth the brainwashed fanatic that he used to be, the deranged personality that madness had shocked beneath the surface.

Mulder joined the FBI to investigate the paranormal, unaware of what his parents have been hiding from him. He thinks that the government is suppressing the truth to conceal some kind of hidden agenda, or some kind of shadow government working to achieve secret global domination. But really, the government is trying to maintain the status quo. They know the truth. They know that the Old Ones (or whatever they are) are here, are sleeping, and when they awaken, everything humanity knows will end. The date is preordained, and their fate is inevitable. The government is hiding the truth because knowing the truth would drive the world to anarchy and millennial madness. Society, knowing its days were truly numbered, would tear itself apart.

Mulder and Scully are doing a lot of good in the world, stopping cults and their summonings, rooting out supernatural horrors lurking in the shadows and gutters, but they’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. People like Mulder and the Lone Gunmen have spent their whole lives hounding the government, blaming some elaborate conspiracy for hiding alien and occult influence in everything from the design of the great pyramids in Giza, to El Chupacabra, to MK-ULTRA, to the assassination of JFK. Hell, the government encourages that kind of fanaticism. A mundane, human conspiracy is something people can understand, something people can universally hate or dismiss as paranoia. Better to believe in that than to know the actual truth.

So, yes, the government is lying, creating a fantasy and killing to protect it. But it’s the kind of fantasy the world needs. When Mulder finally realizes what’s going on, that he’s been chasing red herrings, is he really going to feel any better? If by some miracle his sister is still alive, once he gets the faintest clue as to what’s taken her, will he really want to find her? Will the truth really set him free? I doubt it. There’s a wing in Arkham full of people who eventually all reach the same point that Mulder will.

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