by William RuhlmannThe Triangle is a three-part television mini-series first broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel on December 5, 6, and 7, 2005, taking up a total of six hours (although it runs only four-hours-and-eleven minutes without commercials). Directed by Craig R. Baxley, it traces the adventures of a group of experts (if you can include a tabloid journalist and a psychic under that heading) called in by an industrialist to solve the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. Composer Joseph LoDuca, an old hand at TV series work and at the mystery/thriller genre (he got his start scoring the horror film trilogy The Evil Dead, The Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness, 1983-1993) is in his element with the broad canvas that is the lengthy film, with 53 minutes of music presented here. Predictably, given the title, he saw the project as having three parts and developed three themes to accompany them. In his liner notes, he defines these as, first, the major mystery plot; second, the relationships between the characters; and, third, for want of a better phrase, the action elements, the music for which he accurately describes as featuring "a repetitive, staccato ostinato in the celli." LoDuca is a master in the modern scoring style of mixing a traditional orchestra (probably the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, which gets thanks, but not a specific credit) with banks of synthesizers. He achieves suitably eerie effects with such combinations and also shows an eclectic side by throwing in jazz and Indian flavors here and there, but effective as he is in the spooky stuff, he is also strong enough in the romantic sections (the second part of his trilogy of thematic units) to make one wish he might get to work on a straight-forward love story sometime.