Falling for ‘Fallen’
I’ll tell you what I’ve been most excited about this past week TV-wise. Tonight at 8pm EST, basic-cable channel ABC Family will debut a new original telefilm entitled Fallen. Based on the The Fallen thrillers, a successful quartet of young-adult supernatural books by Thomas Sniegoski, the movie serves as the lead-in to a new original series slated to premiere next year.
The movie follows the plight of Aaron, a recently adopted teen who discovers on his 18th birthday that he is no normal, everyday human being. In fact, he is actually a Nephilim, otherwise known as a half-human/half-angel hybrid. To add to the expected teenage angst upon the occasion of his first brush with legitimate adulthood, Aaron belongs to an ancient group of fallen angels, the Fallen, who are hotly pursued by a murderous army of killer angels called the Powers. And, yes, the Powers are out to get him, too.
This entire intriguing plot hearkens back in my mind to an especially eerie 1998 episode of one of my all-time favorite television series, The X-Files. In All Souls, FBI Special Agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) finds herself grappling with the contradictory juxtaposition of her deep-seated albeit repressed Catholic religious beliefs, the recent loss of her newly discovered daughter Emily, and some exceedingly strange paranormal events involving a young adopted girl found dead and frozen in a genuflecting pose that suggests she was struck directly by God.
At one point, Scully confers with her childhood family priest, who elaborates on certain aspects of the situation after Scully reveals she has seen things while working this harrowing case that she can neither identify nor reconcile with her spiritual background:
“Is this what you saw? It’s a Seraphim. An angel with four faces. Those of a man, a lion, an eagle, and a bull. In the story, the angel descends from heaven and fathers four children with a mortal woman. Their offspring are the Nephilim—The “Fallen Ones.” They have the souls of angels but they weren’t meant to be. They’re deformed, tormented. So the Lord sends the Seraphim to Earth to bring back the souls of the Nephilim to keep the Devil from claiming them as his own.”
—Father McCue (Arnie Walters) to Agent Scully in All Souls (Episode 5.17, 26 April 1998)
Mixing religion and fantasy in television programming, particularly to depict warring angel factions, can be a difficult pursuit with a high potential to offend or confuse the audience, or even turn off those viewers who are not into either genre. Yet, the genesis of the telefilm Fallen from an already popular book series in the current pop-culture climate of Harry Potter fandom, Joss Whedon/J.J. Abrams worship (incidentally, Sniegoski co-wrote the comic book series based on Whedon’s hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff, Angel, as well as authored several other related Buffy and Angel publications), and numerous inspired fantasy offerings in movie theaters (for example, 2005′s super stylish Constantine flick, starring Keanu Reeves and based on the dark Hellblazer comic books) bodes well for its success. Hopefully, tonight’s movie will prove interesting and well-made enough to establish significant interest in the forthcoming series.
Fallen photo courtesy of ABC Family
