This episode is TV at its most experimental and avant-garde. There's no linear narrative to cling to; none of the familiar setup. No killer and not much violence.
The story' resembles a dream in that it doesn't make sense to the waking mind: a strange sequence of seemingly unrelated images and events that cohere in terms of mood and emotion, not of rational logic.
The episode is preoccupied with primordial themes: planetary alignments; impending cataclysm; procreation and family; the future of humanity. There's a lot of weird, unforgettable imagery: the ice-storm and self-immolation that open the episode, the strange girls all simultaneously looking from side to side, and the iron lung.
At the end, the old man in the iron lung, the patriarch of a very unusual family, explains himself to Frank Black and sums up the whole tale by recounting the Biblical story of Noah-another patriarch who saw an apocalypse coming and sought to build a better world in the aftermath.
The character Dennis Hoffman, played brilliantly by Brad Dourif (a highly underrated character actor, like Lance Henriksen himself), initially appears to be a lone crackpot obsessed with apocalyptic "earth changes" but turns out to instinctively know what the case is about. An outcast at the beginning, by the end he finds a family and a place where he belongs.
We also gain more insight into Black's character. For once, our hero's mostly in the dark. He's forced to follow Hoffman's lead instead of trusting his own intuition. But he shows he has the humility to realize when others have insights he doesn't, and listen to them.
Initially he resists hearing the old man's story, declaring he doesn't want to understand in a rare moment of anger. But he relents, and eventually the two come to an understanding.
This episode also has some welcome flashes of levity in this usually grim show, when Hoffman gets on the nerves of the usually stoic Peter Watts, and when CCH Pounder's character dryly describes proceedings with the quote that begins this review.
This episode either speaks to you or it doesn't; there's no middle ground. So it's not meaningful to rate it on a numerical scale. I gave it a 10, but it's obviously not everyone's cup of tea.
The sheer inventiveness and daring of this show floors me. This episode's something you'd expect to see in arthouse cinema, not late-'90s prime-time network TV. Wonderful stuff.
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