X marks the spot for uninspired TV
Ordinary scripts, underdeveloped characters plague CBC’s war story
I’m not sure if it says good or bad things about Canadian cultural productions that we still have Second World War stories left untapped.
Perhaps it’s admirable restraint in the face of what might be the most storied event in even semirecent history, although given the unrestrained glee with which we chase even tenuous Canadian angles on everything, I could be convinced it’s more likely a matter of limited means.
It’s probably a little of both that left the story of Camp X, the ultimate Second World War- era subterfuge academy, off our screens until now: violent skulduggery doesn’t lend itself to our national ethos or our production budgets. If it’s new territory for us, though, it’s still well worn for fiction, a place of nooks and crannies that demands some careful combing to dig up anything interesting in the setting.
CBC’s X Company, which has just wrapped up its first season, elided this problem, mostly, by ignoring it entirely. Camp X and its missions supporting the resistance in occupied France are little more than notably aged set dressing for a sabotage- of- the- week procedural. The Second World War is its setting, but so far at least, that’s all it is.
In some ways this is clever, or helps the show sidestep the more obvious problems that plague this kind of series — which is still the mushy, reliable middle of most television schedules ( particularly for people who aren’t going to start watching television on the Internet anytime soon). The moral high ground that’s so crucial to easily digesting the heroes’ fitful dark tendencies is guaranteed by virtue of the fact they’re fighting Nazis. They’re not subtle bad guys — and, to some credit, X Company is good about separating Nazism as a malevolent force from the conflicted humans who operate under it. But it allays any temptation to revel in depraved actions while getting off about deploring them. That’s not something most crime shows can claim.
We do know the characters will always do the right thing, though, or at least feel the right way about doing something you could construe as wrong. The closest the show has come to a grey area involved the thuggish Neil ( Warren Brown) stabbing a captured enemy who may have betrayed them to his superiors. It’s a justifiable tactical choice, but he bonded with the man, so he feels rough about it. That’s good, because up until then, he seemed like a man who enjoyed violence. And who knows how an audience might respond to such faint traces of moral ambiguity?
The forthright do- rightness would be less annoying if it didn’t fit so perfectly with X Company’s tendency to find its familiar groove and camp there. As with a lot of serials, it even has a vaguely mystic type at its ostensible centre: Alfred is an introverted synesthete — he experiences multiple sensations at once, so he can taste sounds and hear colours — with a photographic memory who could change the course of the war. This is just a lot of window dressing: it gives him some poetic lines, and it makes him a handy guy to have to look at enemy files, but otherwise it’s just his one- line descriptor for the team. Even his nerves, which were supposed to make him a huge liability in the field, were overcome and then ignored by the end of the show’s second hour.
Whatever other metafictional concerns exist, that’s ultimately where the first season of X Company has fallen down, even for a procedural: none of these characters has advanced past the punchy introductions they got in the first episode. ( The lone exception might be radio operator Harry, played well by boy- faced Connor Price, who is inching toward a sort of steely nebbish with little regret.)
It might have nothing to say about its setting, but the show has the capacity for manufactured drama you would expect from the creators of Flashpoint. What it doesn’t have, so far, is the ability to give its characters more colours than one. However predictable the genre is, the good ones find people who stick out.
X Company already has a second, even longer, season coming, so there’s time to inject character into these people. But until that happens, Camp X remains fertile ground for a storyteller who wants to grapple with it.