'Lone Gunmen' bites the bullet

Paranoia isn't funny.\nOh sure, my friends laughed at me when I freaked out after learning how various agencies can stalk you online using tracking devices innocuously named "cookies." But after three months, I was still convinced that diabolical corporations were tracking me online, reading my e-mails and logging everything I had ever said in a chat room or posted on a discussion board to create a damaging psychological profile of me, which they would sell to every employer who ever received a resume from me.\n"So," I expect every manager to ask me during a job interview, "you actually looked for naked pictures of Ashley Judd in the university computer labs?"\nYup, paranoia is a Pandora's box of worry and fear, but paranoia can be interesting because sometimes your fears are real. \nThe old conspiracies on "The X-Files" used to be endearing because they originated from a premise chillingly close to the truth: After World War II, the United States changed from a peaceful democracy to a militant superpower. It breathed new life into fascism in Spain and other countries such as Chile, and it engaged in secret policies that would have made Woodrow Wilson cringe, such as bombing Cambodia, all in the name of combating global communism. \nUnfortunately, "X-Files" producer Chris Carter has taken reality and nailed it to the cross of slapstick for his new show "The Lone Gunmen" (9 p.m. Sunday, Fox). While the three conspiracy theorists -- Byers (Bruce Harwood), Langly (Dean Haglund) and Frohike (Tom Braidwood) -- might have been excellent supporting characters on "The X-Files," their solo adventures are self-parodying and dumb.\nWhy? Because not even Oliver Stone would believe some of the tripe the Lone Gunmen pass off as conspiracy theories.\nThe show is about three modern day muckrakers who drive around in their 1972 Volkswagen minibus, uncover conspiracies and write about them in their newsletter, The Silver Bullet. On "The Lone Gunmen," believability goes right out the window. One of their headlines screamed Teletubbies are a form a of mind control.\nIn the pilot episode, the Lone Gunmen try to learn if the Department of Defense tried to kill Byers' father because he learned the government was planning to crash a plane into the World Trade Center via remote control and blame it on terrorists to get more funding.\nSound far-fetched? The episode climaxes when Langly hacks into the plane's autopilot, using a special chip -- "Sneakers" anyone?\nBefore I go on, I have to quote the movie "Airheads," which is about a group named The Lone Rangers: One character asks them, "How the hell do you pluralize 'lone' ... If there are three of you, you're not lone."\nThat's enough pop culture.\n"The Lone Gunmen" didn't have to be this stupid.\nOn "The X-Files," the Lone Gunmen used accurate historical and technical data. They didn't explain; they revealed.\nIn the episode "Wetwired," the Lone Gunmen showed how TV images can influence viewers. The episode begins with a premise that we can believe: TV is an extremely influential medium. If it weren't, there'd be no TV ads.\nThe Lone Gunmen sound credible when they discussed how TV could be used to force people to act, thanks to writer Daniel Sackheim, who had the Gunmen explain in a few brief sentences of understandable prose how TV works and how a signal can be inserted in the VBI, Vertical Blinking Interval -- where the close captioning usually appears.\nFor more about this, take Telecommunications T 207.\nIf "The Lone Gunmen" weren't a comedy, it might have been able to explore real issues in paranoia today, like data mining. Did you know, for example, that when supermarkets started giving out those discount cards, the kind that you scan at the register, they noticed the beer-diapers connection -- men who got told by their wives late in the week to pick up diapers would also pick up beer for the weekend. Hence, many stores now put beer next to diapers.\nI'd like to know what else they know about us and how safe is this information -- if IU gives us an indication, a lot of bad people can steal our personal info very easily.\nThese are the kinds of anxieties that "The Lone Gunmen" should play on. If they just did a little research, it could be a good show, as long as it stopped being a comedy. As I said before, paranoia isn't funny.