The Rewatch Podcast: RW502 - Dark Skies Rewatch - History is a Lie (introduction)

In this weeks episode of The Rewatch Podcast, Cory and Tom introduce you to the new rewatch plans and discuss the main cast of Dark Skies.

History As We Know It:

The creator of the show is Bryce Zabel, who is a well known UFO researcher and fanatic. He edits Trail of the Saucers, a fast-rising Medium journalism publication on today's UAP and UFO issue, he is the co-author of A.D. After Disclosure, a non-fiction book about the coming post-Disclosure world, and he also co-host on the Need to Know UAP/UFO podcast with award winning journalist Ross Coulthart. His idea for Dark Skies was that they didn’t want to contradict anything that UFO researchers believe, or history buffs. The key was to integrate the two together.

Other series that he has created include MANTIS, The Crow: Stairway To Heaven, and E.N.G (Electronic News Gathering), a long running drama in the late 80’s on CTV. He also worked with Stan Lee on a pilot called The Missing Link. He was a writer and producer on Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, specifically writing the episodes “Strange Visitor (From Another Planet)” and “The Green Green Glow of Home”, and doing the teleplay for “All Shook Up” where also cameoed as a Priest. He wrote several feature film screenplays as well, including Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and Official Denial.

Brent Friedman got his start writing B-grade scripts for films such as Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal, American Cyborg: Steel Warrior, and Prehysteria! 3. He collaborated with Zabel on Dark Skies, The Crow: Stairway To Heaven, and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. He wrote and produced episodes of the early 2000’s Twilight Zone, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Wars: Rebels, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He also wrote for the video games Command & Conquer 3: Triberium Wars, Halo 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Call of Duty: Vanguard, and is also the credited director of BattleKasters. He’s currently developing a game called Unioverse.

The Dark Skies show bible is on lists as one of the best show bibles to read as it is a well done document. It is presented as a top secret government document and details all the specifics, as well as the plans on how to guide future seasons of the show with the gameplay being 5 seasons in all. According to Zabel and Friedman's original plan, the pilot and first season (given the overall title "Official Denial") would cover the period from 1961 to 1969, the second season ("Progenitor") 1970 to 1976, the third season ("Cloak of Fear") 1977 to 1986, the fourth season ("New World Order") would cover 1987 to 1999, and the fifth and final season ("Stroke of Midnight") would break from the decade-spanning format to encompass the apocalyptic final conflict against the invaders, taking place from 2000 to 2001.

Dark Skies was pitched in a single day to ABC, CBS and NBC. Fox was avoided due to the concept's overt similarities to their hit series The X-Files. Each network received a classified "briefing book" written by Zabel and Friedman, wrapped in plain brown paper, which warned that by opening the package they accepted the high level clearance it implied and the full penalties set by the US government for unauthorized disclosure. By the end of the day, two offers had been made and the series went to NBC.

Eric Close plays John Loengard. Besides a few bit parts, his first big role was in the soap opera, Santa Barbara playing Sawyer Walker for 98 episodes. He then played one of the main cast members,Telamon, in the second Hercules movie (which would eventually lead to the TV series starring Kevin Sorbo). He followed this with a lead cast member role in Jennie Garth’s Without Consent (Laura has a car crash while driving drunk and her parents ask a psychologist to refer them to a center specializing in the recovery of troubled youths). He then went on to star in the mini series McKenna (Jack McKenna is the rugged owner of McKenna Wilderness Outfitters, a tour guide agency in Bend, Oregon, who gets help from his failing business by the return of his estranged son Brick who arrives after the death of Jack's eldest son to help his father get back on track). Next up was The Stranger Beside Me starring Tiffani Amber Thiessen (A young newlywed suspects that her new husband may be the praise in the neighborhood).

After Dark Skies he starred in the series Now and Again (Guy gets killed but is given the chance to have his brain implanted in a bio genetically engineered body, to be put to use by the government and forbidden to contact his wife and daughter). He followed that with another series called The Magnificent Seven (Seven men come to the aid of an Indian village under attack from ex-confederate soldiers, later offering their services to those in need in the area). Another short series he led was Chaos (Rogue CIA agents battle the bureaucracy). He was in four episodes of Steven Spielberg’s ten episode series Taken (alien abduction story) and was in several movies as a lead such as Liberty, Maine, Follow The Stars Home, The Sky Is Falling, Alvarez and Cruz, and Unanswered Prayers. He went on to another long running series, Without A Trace, for 160 episodes (Series about the special FBI Missing Persons Squad that finds missing people by applying advanced psychological profiling to reveal the victims lives). He also had a recurring role in to some episodes of Nashville, a supporting cast member role in American Sniper, and besides participating as a lead in various Hallmark Christmas movies, he most recently starred in The Mulligan (Paul McAllister seems to have it all, but his life starts to fall apart and ends up being guided by the wisdom and advice of an old golf pro, and learns about playing a good game both on and off the course).

Megan Ward was Kim Sayers. Her first role was as a lead in the movie Crash and Burn (futuristic movie after an economic collapse and robots and computers are banned). Trancers II (and later Tracers III) was her next lead role (6 years after a time cop returns home from battling future alien zombies, his settled life is turned upside down when a mad scientists creates more), followed by the drama Goodbye, Paradise (a sixty year-old Chinatown bar in Honolulu closes its doors in the wake of urban renewal). She would go on to star in Brendan Frasier’s Encino Man (frozen caveman gets thawed out by high school teens), and Amityville 1992:It’s About Time. Besides a large handful of other leading movie roles, she was in Joe’s Apartment as a lead (starring Quinn Mallory himself, Jerry O’Connell in a movie about a man living with singing and dancing cockroaches).

Most of her TV appearances before Dark Skies were one offs except for the series Class of 96 (Seven students make their way through their freshman year at Havenhurst College), and Winnetka Road (Short lived (five weeks) soap opera about life in Oak Bluff, Illinois, a yuppie suburb of Chicago. Sex was the main subject of the series).

After Dark Skies, she continued her huge run of movie roles with Wes Craven’s Don’t Look Down (A woman tries to get over the death of her sister by joining an Acrophobiac group. Then the group starts to get killed one by one), Tick Tock (A wealthy man becomes suspicious of his younger wife and hires a private detective in time to thwart her plans to have him killed), The Incited (with Lou Diamond Phillips (A young married couple who are pregnant with their first child moves into their turn-of-the-century home where they discover that a great evil has resided there for nearly a century, unleashed by a previous occupant), and Murder Without Conviction (Recently released from her vows as a nun, Christine Bennett is discovering "life on the outside” and becomes embroiled in the investigation of the murder mystery surrounding James and Edward Talley, twin savant brothers accused of killing their mother on Good Friday, 1974). Since 2007 up to 2020 she has been in 366 episodes of General Hospital.

Captain Frank Bach was played by veteran character actor JT Walsh, who never resented being called a character actor. He’s best known for his roles in Good Morning Vietnam, A Few Good Men, and Slingblade but has a very long list of credits including appearances in the X-Files, Pleasantville, Backdraft, and Hannah and Her Sisters. He was one of the main cast members in the movie Needful Things (A mysterious new shop opens in a small town which always seems to stock the deepest desires of each shopper, with a price far heavier than expected), Hoffa (starring alongside Jack Nicholson again), True Identity (In order to escape from the mob, an African-American man must disguise himself as a white man), Crazy People (A bitter ad executive who has reached his breaking point, finds himself in a mental institution where his career actually begins to thrive with the help of the hospital's patients), and Alicia Silverstone’s The Babysitter. We’ve seen him before in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman in the episode Operation: Blackout as Colonel Charles Fane (weapons test kills a man who was Lois’s college roommate's boyfriend but he is actually alive. That episode also had Melora Hardin, Jan of The Office fame).

Single-named Lackos played MIB #6. Despite being a main character here, he has just a few other roles, only one of them as a lead, a movie called Palmdale (A drifter with a violent past comes to the city to kill somebody for money but on his way to do it, a young woman crashes into his life, giving him the choice - to continue on this path of self destruction or leave it all behind and start again).

Connor O’Farrell played Commander Phil Albano. He most recently played in the 2019 8 episode series The Red Line (Follows three Chicago families as they journey toward hope and healing after an unarmed African American doctor is shot by a white cop). Most of his career is as a “that guy” showing up for an episode or two in various series and movies, including a Star Trek: Enterprise, 24, Boston Legal, Without A Trace (with Eric Close), Nip Tuck, Surface, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, ER, Ally McBeal, and many many others. He previously played Professor Jeff Carlson in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode Little Green Men, which also involved the Roswell UFO Incident.

Tim Kelleher played Jim Steele. He’s another “that guy” with 72 roles under his belt, some in the last few years even. Some of his standout roles of note are the voice of Raphael in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, episode 13 of season 1 of SeaQuest where he played Bowman (While operating on a skeleton crew the Seaquest is taken over by terrorists who want to use the computer access to steal codes to polluters around the world), and music producer David Sodenberg in the Meatloaf biopic To Hell and Back.

Charley Lang, another that guy with 46 credits to his name, played Dr. Halligan. We've seen Charlie in The Flash 90 series in episode 17, Twin Streaks (flash is cloned as a blue version). He did have a smaller part in the alien abduction movie Fire In The Sky. He would go on to play a MIB agent himself in the series Seven Days (time travel show, fix what went wrong only within the last seven days). He also played Starke (a Kromag) in the season 4 premier episode of Sliders.

The Narrator is Gregory Harrison playing an older John Loengard. He’s got over 100 credits to his name including various soap operas, Rizzoli and Isles, One Tree Hill, and the Logan’s Run TV Series.