Clueless, Confused--and Hooked

So much of television drama is transparent, it’s refreshing to encounter an occasional chunk of it that you can’t see through immediately. Or perhaps ever.

The name of the new series is “Strange World.” As if the one we’re acquainted with isn’t strange enough.

On the other hand, there is something seductively muddy about this midseason hour from ABC that is “X-Files”-like in look, tone and concept while monitoring a former Army scientist being drawn ever deeper into an interior universe of violence and ambiguity that poses many questions but provides few answers.

Make that no answers.

Which is why, as a lifelong devotee of murkiness, I’m hooked.

The first two episodes air tonight and Tuesday, the latter being the regular night for “Strange World” while it temporarily supplants “NYPD Blue.”

It’s true that many of us who do this work rail against dramas that are hopelessly muddled. The difference is that lack of clarity in those instances results from bungled writing or execution. In the case of “Strange World,” obfuscation appears to be the intent, perhaps even the point. If so, the grand design works.

Protagonist Paul Turner (Tim Guinee) asks one of his tormentors tonight: “Who are you people? What do you want from me?”

Neither he nor I have found out after several episodes.

Sound too perplexing? It’s no more so than “The X-Files,” which surely inspired it. And c’mon, aren’t you just a little weary of TV whose every move is overt as it’s spooned to you like pablum, requiring only that you remain awake to accept it?

“Strange World” is not nearly as opaque as ABC’s late, great, exquisitely disorienting “Twin Peaks,” the David Lynch-Mark Frost series that asked you trust that a narrative lay beneath its layers of maze. Instead, like Fox’s “The X-Files,” the language “Strange World” speaks is recognizable, and so is its dramatic construction. But. . . .

Who are those people, and what do they want from Turner?

His exposure to chemical weapons during the Gulf War gave him a mysterious degenerative disease that he is able to suppress only by regularly shooting up with a mysterious drug supplied to him by a mysterious female (Vivian Wu) known mysteriously only as the Asian Woman.

Who is she, anyway?

And why does she threaten to withhold the drug from Turner tonight, treating him like a junkie, if he doesn’t rejoin the United States Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID?

Is the Asian Woman on our side or their side? Is that mysterious FBI man lurking about one of us or one of them? Is he really an FBI man? And who are they and who are we?

Also, who is the Log Lady? And who did kill Laura Palmer? Oh, sorry. That was “Twin Peaks.”

Not nearly as puzzling are Turner’s USAMRIID boss, Maj. Lynn Reese (Saundra Quarterman), and his physician girlfriend, Dr. Sydney MacMillan (Kristin Lehman). But that minor flaw from co-creators Tim Kring and Howard Gordon (a former executive producer of “The X-Files”) can be overlooked tonight when it turns out that a little boy who died may not have died. And the man who killed him may not have killed him. If he did die, that is. On the other hand, what is “is”? And why does Dr. MacMillan belong in the Lips Hall of Fame?

Meanwhile, Turner is on the lam. But from whom? And why? And more important, what is “the lam”?

It’s an impressively obscure start, and even more interesting is Tuesday night’s plot in which the answer to a mystery appears to be inside a pregnant woman’s belly. Whoa! A seminal moment comes when a cell phone rings and someone says: “It’s them.”

Them being? Don’t hold your breath for an answer.

Without giving anything away--as if I understood enough to do that--here are more key questions from tonight:

* “What are you involved with, doctor? What was so important that three people had to die today?”

* “Who do they own now?”

* “Why have you sent me on this path?”

It’s quite a series that can make an immediate fan of someone who doesn’t understand much of it, the appeal of “Strange World” in part coming from its cast, with the boyish Guinee especially persuasive as Turner, the kind of scruffy guy who wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit even at his own funeral. For anyone interested, moreover, “Strange World” is also a real babe watch.

And again like “The X-Files,” the stylized noir look is a co-star. This is a series on which the sun doesn’t dare shine. Those tight shots bring you nose to nose with characters who seem often to be half in shadows, the stark lighting creating an ambience of danger and dark foreboding.

Very dark.

When I opened my door quite early one morning last week, an unmarked package lay on the mat. Obviously, it had arrived in the middle of. . . .

The night.

Inside was a videotape cassette of another hour of “Strange World” with a handwritten note saying only: “This is going to be the fourth episode aired. Enjoy.”

But who had delivered it? And why?

I had already received the first two episodes. If this was the fourth, where was the third? Would there ever be a third? And must 3 always precede 4?

After popping the tape into the VCR, I watched as Turner tried to discover the reason for a mass suicide by members of a cult in a remote village. A voice said: “Something drove them to it.” But what?

Only someone who saw what happened would know. “Find the witness,” the Asian Woman ordered Turner. Meanwhile, the patient whom MacMillan wanted transferred was not in her room, but she left behind a note. “What is it?” someone asked. Who was to say? And anyway, it would depend on the definition of “it.”

I can tell you only that the fourth episode is a romantic Shangri-La of mystique that left me as moved as I was baffled. What does it mean? Don’t ask.

No wonder they call it strange.