"I am the Institute!"
All communications have been cut off from top secret research facility New Gethsemane. A team of young scientists, headed by Matt Griffin (Danny Seward) is assembled by the Secret Service's science division C-TAC to find out what has happened. Communicating with the outside world only through their radio headsets, Griffin and his team, Rebecca Stamp (Liz May Brice), Lake (Martin Cole) and Loki Brown (Fraser Ayres) discover that the project - a search through the human genome for Creation itself - has gone terribly wrong. The team tries to escape the carnage, with the help of Centre Commander Sean Bendix (David Crow), but they discover that an operative of the mysterious Institute is already there ahead of them....
Comment
It's really hard to know where to start with Membrane. Written by Tom deVille, it's another tale which presents a part of the jigsaw which is slowly building into the show's backstory. The only problem is that if you don't know the backstory, the show makes little sense.
Visually, this episode is superb. Utilising Blair Witch-style point of view camerawork, a group of investigators descend into an apparently abandoned facility, there to find that it's not quite as deserted as they thought. There are lashings of blood and gore, strange pools of slime, humans mutating into something else as a result of genome tampering, a spooky blank-faced apparition, and walls covered with cabbalistic markings which, we are told, represent the human DNA sequence, but with something added: that something being the strange 'X' symbol seen off and on during the show's first season, and in the title sequence.
Unfortunately without context, the result is hard to understand, and the ending takes a leaf from the final episode of the sixties cult series The Prisoner, leaving the audience even more confused. Perhaps (and hopefully) all will be explained later ...
| Credits | |
| Written by | Tom deVille |
| Directed by | Ian Knox |
| Starring | Joe Grossi (Test Patient)
David Crow (Bendix) Liz May Brice (Stamp) Danny Seward (Griffin) Martin Cole (Lake) Fraser Ayres (Loki) |
Click here for full credit list | |
