Western X: Ep. 1 “X Marks The Beginning”

“X Marks The Beginning” – On the plains of a desert wasteland, a man known only as X is on the verge of death. Among a pile of dead bodies he awakens, with no memories of his past and hunted by an unknown enemy, he struggles to uncover the truth behind his identity; this is the beginning of his journey.

2 Swirlies

“The four evils will unite and the darkness will surrender.”

The only reason this episode got 2 swirlies instead of one is that, despite the general lack of action or story, I’m a sucker for a good mystery.  Good being the key word there.

So far, this first episode is all tease.  It starts off with dead bodies in the desert—always a great hook!  But it also does something else: inflict the longest opening credits ever upon the audience.  I know this is a Western, and pacing tends to be leisurely in the genre, but having titles interrupt the opening scene past the two minute mark is a bit… distracting.

Visually, the filmmakers put a lot of effort into the beer-bottle look of this series, and there’s some interesting “experimental-ish” sound and picture editing here (a necessity since there is no dialogue)—used to convey the main protagonist’s madness or confusion or amnesia or… something.  Guess we’ll find out later!

The episode also ends with more violence, another dead body, and much general story confusion.  In fact, clarity is this episode’s enemy.  The audience has no real idea what’s going on, and if you didn’t read the episode description beforehand, you’d be totally lost.

As one of the first title cards reads: “The Mystery Begins Now.”  The filmmakers seemed to have put a lot of effort into the technical aspects of this series, so let’s hope that the story and mystery live up to these efforts in the episodes to come.