Dead at 21.

• Author: Rapping, Elayne

Lately, and much to my own surprise, I have found myself making mental notes to set my VCR each week to tape two TV series which are not my usual sort of thing. I had written off The X-Files (Friday nights on Fox) and Dead at 21 (on MTV at various times during the week) as predictable, corny-to-trashy, generic airwave-filler when they began last season, and I'd forgotten about them.

But suddenly, I started hearing about them more and more, not from media critics but more interesting sources. First, some of my brighter students, and then, more intriguingly and insistently, growing numbers of the disembodied presences encountered in the cyberspace "meeting rooms" of the Internet, seemed increasingly obsessed with these shows. The "alt.tv.x-files" newsgroup, especially, which currently averages more than 100 "postings" a day about the Fox series, fairly teems with fascinating, even esoteric discourse on matters scientific, cultural, and political.

What did these people know that I was missing, I wondered? I determined to overcome my ingrained resistance to B-movie-type science fiction (for that is what both shows, in generic essence, are) and find out.

It wasn't easy. The plots are shades of the black-and-white 1950s, like The Twilight Zone or The Fugitive: government suppression of UFO sightings; experiments to implant extraterrestrial DNA in human subjects for military purposes; police files documenting unsolved cases in which suspects seem to have shape-shifting abilities or to have lived in other dimensions; swarms of killer insects embedded, centuries ago, in the trunks of redwoods; high-level plots to plant mysterious microchips in the brains of selected newborns for intelligence purposes. Not my cup of tea.

And then I thought again. Why not retrieve the pop culture of the 1950s, after all? It was a time, like ours, when social realism--especially on political and social issues--was very much out of fashion and subversive and otherwise unorthodox thoughts and theories were not likely to surface except in the metaphoric guise of sci-fi schlock fiction. Everywhere you looked in those days, "things" were coming at you "from outer space," mutant "creatures" were "eating" or otherwise destroying urban centers, "blobs" of unnatural substances were abducting or absorbing your loved ones. Of course, most cultural commentators of the day dismissed such stuff as brain-melting nonsense. Parents--mine certainly--tried to lure offspring away from it, and toward the more respectable, then ubiquitous, boxed sets of "Great Books" and encyclopedias, containing the eternal truths of established authority, which lined the walls of most suburban dens.

But looking back, it is clear that their efforts were futile. The grisly images did indeed find their way into our impressionable psyches, often permanently, and perhaps even fortuitously, for in retrospect, many of these schlocky tales of mystery and conspiracy held subtextual messages, or at least feelings, about the current political scene that were a lot healthier than what was being fed to us through the prescribed canonical texts. To be sure, some of the subtextual messages of many of these el cheapo oeuvres were predictably reactionary: The "invaders from outer space" or darker netherworlds were transparent...