Alasdair Stuart's Blog

Tron Legacy makes for a fascinating companion piece to Predators. Both films are delayed sequels to acknowledged cult classics, both films use the bones of their predecessors as a foundation and both films revel in advances in special effects technology. Crucially though, both films are not only very much a product of their time but also comment on and examine the times and ideals that produced their predecessors. Predators focuses on the evolution of the special forces operator from a shadowy hero to a more complex, morally damaged figure whilst Tron Legacy focusses on the Cyberpunk movement, something which came and went in the space between the first and second films. The film’s approach to this evolution not only in computing but in our attitudes towards computers is both surprisingly complex and surprisingly brave, using what amounts to three versions of the same character to examine the changes in society’s attitude to the digitial world that Kevin Flynn is so fascinated by.

Flynn himself is established, both in the original film and flashbacks, as an intellectual maverick, a proto-hacker who never met a problem he didn’t like to out think. In fact, Flynn, along with Matthew Broderick’s David Lightman in WarGames, is one of the first ever ‘geek’ heroes. He’s one step away from the phone phreakers and hackers who in turn were the first stage in the evolutionary proces that would lead to everything from Willow Rosenberg in Buffy the Vampire Slayer to wikipedia, wikileaks, Julian Assange and Anonymous. He’s a brain instead of a pair of fists, a unique hero who is uniquely of his time and who, at the end of the first film, finds himself in the last place he expected and the only place he could genuinely do some good; in charge of EnCom, one of the largest software firms in the world. In the space of two hours, Flynn evolves from being just a program, or programmer, into the top of the food chain, the chairman of the board. He’s Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined, a visionary with a classic anti-establishment streak, a brain whose body is a multi-national corporation and who is capable of anything.

So instead he does nothing, turning inwards and creating a digital archipelago where, like every great science fiction scientist, he sets out to solve every problem and, like every science fiction scientist, does it far too slowly. Flynn becomes so entranced with the world he, Clu and Tron are building that he doesn’t realise that it’s evolution is out of his hands. He tells Clu he wants a perfect world and never realises that will ultimately lead to him being deposed from his position in the Grid and likewise doesn’t see that he needs a back door out of the Grid to return to his family until it’s far, far too late. Flynn remains entranced by the idea, by the concept rather than the execution and that leads to him becoming everything Sam, and Clu, aren’t; passive, introspective, distanced. By the time he and Sam are reunited, he’s become the old man in the ivory tower, staring out at the world he created and is all but banished from and somehow is content about that. Flynn exists, literally in an intellectual rather than a physical space, so entranced by the power he both had and lost that he’s in a near fugue state for much of the film. When Sam arrives, it forces him to step outside his experience and re engage with the world he helped build and, through the creation of Clu, helped enslave. The proto-cyberpunk is faced with the real consequences of his actions and sacrifices himself to correct his mistakes. The cult of personality that surrounded Flynn is swept aside by Flynn himself in a final, definitive, physical act that mirrors the subsumation of cyberpunk culture into the mainstream. Flynn removes himself from the Grid and from the world, changing the rules and blanking the canvas in a final act of altruistic anarchy.

If Flynn is an intellectual forced to come to terms with the physical consequences of his actions, then Clu is a physical force with little or no concept of intellectual change or evolution. Clu is the film’s, and Flynn’s, greatest technical achievement, taking the program that Flynn created in the original movie and giving it Flynn’s face and voice and ideals. He’s not so much Banquo’s ghost as William Gibson’s, a leftover cyberpunk artifact from a time where no problem in science fiction couldn’t be solved by writing a computer program. There’s a neat subversive element to Clu as well, taking the heroic identity of Flynn from the original movie and curdling it, changing it into something which is eloquent, driven and not remotely human. Clu was told to build the perfect system and has stuck to that programming for years, methodically removing everything that interferes with his plan and installing himself as exactly the sort of Emperor he accuses Flynn of being. The genuinely fascinating thing about Clu is, despite all this, he still clearly views himself as a hero. The system is closer to perfect without a User in charge and closer still with Clu in place as it’s ruler. After all, who else was told they had to create the perfect system? It’s a fascinating, broken world view that neatly marks out Clu as something both more and less than human, a figure who is a towering threat on the Grid but, as Sam points out, can be deleted with a key stroke outside it. He’s also, fundamentally, the physical and direct aspects of Flynn, something the film elegantly demonstrates in one of its final scenes. Clu addresses his army of lobotomised programs on their way to the gateway back to the real world and uses exactly the same language to describe it as Flynn uses to describe the Grid earlier in the film. Clu is Flynn’s youth with none of his willingness to learn, a relentless attack dog gnawing at the world to try and make it into a shape he can never quite reach. If Flynn is trapped by his over intellectualisation, Clu is trapped by the thoughts and thought processes Flynn gave him. He’s a dictator, a monster but in the end, he’s one with limits. When he’s faced with those limits in the closing scenes of the film, it becomes clear he can’t learn, can’t change, can’t do anything but attack just as Flynn himself can do nothing but think. As a result, when the two are forcibly combined, and destroyed, they’re also unified, each giving the other the elements they were missing. Flynn and Clu both die but they’re healed at the same time and, crucially, heal the Grid by being removed from it. The digital Galapagos Flynn created finally gains freedom, at the expense of its creator, and it’s dictator’s, lives.

Kevin Flynn and Clu are both architects and artifacts of early Cyberpunk, figures who are fixated on the computer as nirvana, a digital heaven that we can come and go from as we please. Both have a missionary zeal, both are utterly fixated on the Grid and both are completely out of touch with the real world. In contrast, Sam Flynn is the quintessential post-cyberpunk hero, a trust fund baby who works through his anger at being abandoned by his father by living in a customised set of cargo containers, dropping out of Cal Tech and running an annual prank on EnCom, where he remains a majority shareholder. Sam isn’t remotely interested in big business, and focusses instead on the same thing his father and, ironically, Clu do; that the information wants to be free. When we first meet him he’s breaking into EnCom to release the latest version of their Operating System onto the internet for free on the night of its commercial release. It’s a very interesting moment that gets all but lost in Joseph Kosinski’s night-soaked visuals and it bears closer examination. This is the moment that marks Sam out as something different, the moment where the same ideals that his father lived by evolve and become something very different and far more contemporary. Kevin Flynn wants the information to be free and is prepared to commit a little light fraud and hacking to achieve that. Sam, in contrast, breaks into his own company and uses the internet, a tool Flynn was almost too early for, to wage the sort of war that the entire internet sometimes appears to be spoiling for. He wants the information to be free but, unlike his father, is prepared to do whatever is necessary to achieve those aims. Kevin Flynn likes the puzzle but Sam Flynn likes the solution, and is far more prepared to get his hands dirty than his father ever was.

These two men, and one simulation, fight and die over a fascinating evolutionary annex. Flynn creates a closed system and sets it running, the world gradually evolving under the watchful eye of Flynn, Clu and Tron, the one survivor Flynn brought over from the original Grid. The religious overtones of this trinity are self-evident, as are those of the Kevin/Sam/Clu triangle but the film sensibly never belabours this point. Instead, it explores a world which has taken on a life of its own, literally in the case of the Isomorphic Algorithms or ISOs. These are the film’s most fascinating concept, spontaneously generating artificial life, and whilst we get frustratingly little information on them, what the film presents us with is both fascinating and indicative of the evolution of the action movie. The one surviving ISO, Quorra, played by Olivia Wilde, is both a far cry from the passive Lora Baines of the original movie and a very modern action heroine. Quorra is light hearted, cheerful and far more competent than either of the Flynn men, rescuing them far more than they rescue her. It’s a neat reversal that not only marks the film out as a modern piece of fiction but also plays up the fact that Quorra is at home on the Grid in a way the Flynns can never be. Even more impressive, the film doesn’t use this to limit or restrict her, but rather to explore a very different view of the Grid to any of the male leads. For Clu and Kevin, the Grid is everything, for Sam the Grid is the answer he’s looking for but for Quorra the Grid is merely a starting point. She wants more, she wants the real world and wants it on her terms. There’s none of the fascist tendencies of Clu, none of the obsession of the Flynn men, just a young woman who happens to be artificial wanting more from her life. It’s a fascinating, nuanced role which is orders of magnitude above the normal female lead and Wilde brings intelligence and focus to the role.

A father, a son, a ghost and a miracle. These four characters are the beating heart of Tron Legacy and each one represents not just an approach to the Grid but an approach to science fiction itself. None of them are perfect, none of them are right but the conflict between them, ideological and physical, is a far smarter, sleeker narrative engine than the film initially appears to have. This is a story about information and how we interact with it, what we do with it and how that’s changed. The Grid has changed, the approach to it has changed but, in the end the information stays the same, as does the single, huge question that lies at the heart of both films and much modern science fiction:

What do you do once you have the information?

For Sam and Quorra, the answer is simple; nothing, until you need to. After all, there are no sunrises on the Grid and life is much, much more than zeroes and ones.

The history of manned spaceflight is defined by inconceivable scale and fragility. Hundreds of thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of pounds of thrust, millions of hours spent designing, testing, flying, all for a small group of desperately human, utterly fragile people who would travel higher and further than anyone ever had before. A unique combination of desire and courage, design and persistence. The knight class of society put in flight suits and fired out of the atmosphere on top of the largest rockets ever developed and nowhere is this combination more evident, more compelling, than in the Apollo program.

Ron Howard and Tom Hanks’ mini-series, From The Earth to the Moon attempts to place this unscalable, inconceivably huge project in historical and personal context. The thirteen episodes explore the project in its entirety, from the initial announcement through the frantic scrabble to be ready, the loss of the Apollo 1 mission and, crucially, past Apollo 11 and the first man on the moon. This is not just a series about Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, it’s a series about what happened to place them at the tip of history and what it was like to be the people who followed them.

Sitting at the end of the first decade of the 21^st century, it’s tempting to buy into the conspiracy theories that the moon landings never took place. As I write, the space shuttle program is about to be shut down, its replacement is several years away and whilst NASA have, again, announced a plan to return to the moon, there’s little chance of it happening in the immediate future. There are interesting developments, to be sure, and I’ll be looking at the Hundred Year SpaceShip program soon, but the moon is so far away, so distant, the Apollo project such a distant memory that it’s passing into modern myth. Tikur Bekmambetov, director of the Nightwatch movies, is currently producing Apollo 18, a found-footage horror movie about the ‘real’ last manned mission to the moon with the tagline:

THERE’S A REASON WE NEVER WENT BACK.

But why did we go in the first place? That’s what this first episode sets out to explore and does so in a clever, even elegant way. The project is inconcevably vast, inconceivably ambitious and instead of trying to look at it from a particular viewpoint, this first episode embraces that scale, embraces that moment of abject shock as the project is announced and asks the titular question;

Can we do this?

That question falls squarely on the shoulders of James Webb, played by Dan Lauria. As Russia gets the first man into space, and then the first space walk, it’s Webb who is put under continual pressure to try and get the Americans ahead of the game and that pressure, that need, is written all over Lauria’s perpetually hangdog face. The Americans were systematically out manouvered for much of the history of early spaceflight and the episode neatly contrasts the flight of Yuri Gagarin and the first space walk, conducted by Alexi Leonov, with scenes of worried men in suits trying to work out where they went wrong. The Russians are in flight, the Americans, it seems, are still trying to work out how to get off the ground.

That process begins with the Mercury and Gemini projects and culminates in Kennedy’s famous announcement, which is also part of the series’ opening credits. It’s a beautifully played moment as we see Webb and his colleagues react to the speech. There’s a long pause and then Webb asks who wants his job. His colleagues laugh and after a moment’s conversation, Webb again asks who wants his job and this time, no one laughs. Ten years to get an American on the moon. Ten years to get from pressurised cannisters lobbed over the horizon and back again to a world wide net work of communications and sensors and technology, designed from scratch, that could transport three people to the moon and back again. Needless to say, no one volunteers to take his job, and slowly, the impossible is rendered down to the merely all but impossible. Goals are defined, engineering contracts are developed, design work begins and the next step is defined; Gemini. Two men where Mercury was one, a chance to get more astronauts in orbit, more experience and begin achieving the seemingly endless list of objectives needed for a moon shot.

All of which begins in a hotel in Houston, where a man called Max Peck checks in over and over and over again. It’s a moment of quiet, slightly desperate comedy, as the new astronauts all check in under the same code name but the scene also carries a resonance that echoes through the rest of the project and the series. These men are all unique and all the same, each part of the mission but none more important than the others. Max Peck will walk on the moon and each of them is Max Peck.

But not all Max Pecks are created equal, something which becomes clear as the new astronauts make their way out into the country to help raise the profile and funds of the project. At one particular fund raiser, astronaut Elliot See is greeted with polite enthusiasm by some and barely contained derision by others, because unlike several of his colleagues, he hasn’t flown yet. An astronaut isn’t an astronaut unless he’s been above the atmosphere, unless he’s pitted his fragile humanity against inconceivable scale, inconceivable distance. This idea, that the astronaut corps are defined by their work rather than their personality, is something that continues to haunt the American space program and is explored throughout the series, most notably in episode two, Apollo 1, and episode 3 We Have Cleared The Tower.

Matched with this need to build a reputation is the brutally simple fact that everything about the project is dangerous. The very real human costs of the project form the focus of Apollo 1 but they’re foreshadowed here, through See and Ed White, the first American to walk in space. See never flew, killed in a plane crash, whilst Ed White’s space walk was one of the defining moments of American space travel and is presented here as the moment the program really gained momentum. One of the final scenes of the episode is White, sitting astride his Gemini capsule as it orbits the Earth, pointing, just for a moment, at the moon. It’s a beautiful, complex image, evoking Doctor Strangelove as much as the heroic ideal of the Astronaut, the pressure-suited knight riding a steed built by hundreds of people towards glory. Arrogance and persistence, hard work and vision, cinema and history combine in a moment which is iconic, complicated and tragic.

It’s revealing that the episode doesn’t finish with this but rather with a group of astronauts being informed that they will be the staff for the Apollo project, that one of them will walk on the moon. Once again, there’s the idea of scale vs individuality, of one historical moment that any of them could carry. This scene answers the question at the top of the episode, definitively and with absolute confidence; we can do this, we will do this and one of these men will be the one to do it. Max Peck is going to the moon, but as episode two shows, the price of getting there is far higher than anyone in the project realises.

This is the piece I submitted to the first 48 Hour Magazine, a fascinating project put together by a group of editors who decided to see if they could take a magazine from concept to proof in 48 hours, the concept for the zero issue being the word ‘hustle’.  I put this together, on magic, JJ Abrams and narrative structure and, whilst it didn’t get in, I’m pretty pleased with it.

Pledge, Turn, Prestige, Monster

Magic tricks are the slightly more reputable sibling of con tricks and are designed along the same, basic structure. ‘That structure was articulated by Christopher Priest in his novel The Prestige and is defined as the pledge, the turn and the prestige. The pledge is the promise of something extraordinary, the turn is the apparent revelation and the prestige is the actual reveal, the moment you realise that the magician was never standing there, that the silk scarf has become a bird. It’s a simple, elegant framework that can be applied to everything from making a coin disappear to walking through the great wall of China and it’s also one of the secrets of JJ Abrams’ success.

Abrams’ entire career is based on not just a fascination with misdirection and magic but an instinctive understanding of this framework. Lost, Alias and Fringe, the three TV shows he’s best known for all embrace it and interestingly, each one also uses the three stage framework within their pilot episodes. In Lost, the Oceanic 815 survivors not only realise something is wrong with the island but that they’re not alone, in Alias Sydney Bristow not only realises she’s working for the opposite side but becomes a double agent whilst in Fringe, Olivia Dunham not only discovers what the Pattern is but that her colleague Agent John Scott is deeply involved in it. Pledge becomes premise, turn becomes plot, prestige becomes cliffhanger. The three stage magic trick melds with the three act narrative structure to create something intricate, detailed and, in the long run, immensely rewarding.

This is the connective tissue that holds Abrams’ work together as shown by the teaser trailer for his new film, Super 8. It opens with text informing the viewer that in 1979 a section of Area 51 was closed before cutting to a train speeding through the night. We learn that the materials stored at Area 51 were being moved overland to a secure location as, on screen, a pickup truck smashes through the barrier and runs headlong into the train. The train is derailed, cars ripped apart before, finally, silence falls. The text returns, informing us that next summer ‘It Arrives’ as the camera tracks through the wreckage to a large, sealed container with US Air Force stencilled on the side. The side of the trailer deforms and is then thrown outwards as the camera cuts to a close up of a Super 8 film lens with film flickering past it before fading to black.

Now, as pledges go that’s pretty spectacular. In less than two minutes we learn that something awful was moved from Area 51, something unthinkable happened that freed it, that the creature is large, strong and angry and that the film will have something to do with a Super 8 camera. Straight away we get science fiction and horror mixed with conspiracy thriller and a human element, all without meeting any of the principle characters. The message is clear; next summer, innocent people will witness something awful, try and survive it and you’ll be first in line for a ticket.

It’s a classic set up and one Abrams has used before, most notably with the original Cloverfield trailer. With no name and almost no credit text, it was a cut down version of the party scene from the start of the film, culminating in the Statue of Liberty’s head being hurled into the street. Once again, it’s a pledge, a hint of something remarkable designed to intrigue, get the audience’s full attention and bring them closer before the turn.

The teaser trailer for Abrams’ Star Trek uses the turn beautifully, opening with close ups of men constructing something immense as sound bites from the history of space exploration play. It’s only in the final shots, where the camera pans up over the saucer section of the USS Enterprise, Leonard Nimoy says ‘Space, the final frontier’ and the familiar refrain plays that it becomes clear what’s being trailed and the true nature of what you’ve been watching becomes clear. It even throws in a self-deprecating, cheeky prestige as the Starfleet crest appears to the sound of the transporter and the first bars of the original series theme tune before fading out to be replaced by two words:

Under Construction

This wry, self-deprecating sense of humour is just another means of disarming the audience and putting them at ease. It’s also an immensely clever move with Star Trek in particular because it feeds into the affection for the series and the status quo it represents.

Abrams then takes great pleasure in both honouring and subverting that status quo throughout the film, most notably in the opening sequence where the Kirk we meet is revealed not only to be James T. Kirk’s father but has to sacrifice himself in order for his wife, son and friends to survive. It’s a brutal sequence, difficult to sit through even after multiple viewings and there’s a case for it being the film’s turn. After all, everything changes as a result of it and the rest of the film is spent exploring those changes.

However, the real turn arrives at roughly the halfway mark, by which point the sense of familiarity has returned. There are changes certainly; James T. Kirk is a darker, brasher version of his old self, Spock is more emotional but still a genius but they’re fundamentally the same people. The Enterprise looks more futuristic, the special effects are more impressive but, fundamentally, it’s still Star Trek, still familiar, still safe.

Then Vulcan is destroyed.

In a single moment, Abrams, along with scriptwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman change the rules, alter one of the most intricate fictional universes in decades forever and force the audience to pay full attention as they realise that everything is different now. The building blocks, the accepted wisdom of decades of fiction are changed into something new and dangerous and exciting which still, somehow, manages to honour what’s gone before it. This isn’t just a textbook example of how to successfully reinvigorate a franchise, this is magic at it’s purest, taking something that the audience think they know and turning it on its head. It’s the assistant disappearing, the needle going through the balloon, the card appearing inside the sealed box. This is the turn, positioning the audience for the final revelation, the prestige.

The best example of a prestige in Abrams’ work is arguably the end of the pilot episode of Fringe, which deals with both the mystery deaths of everyone aboard an international flight from Berlin and the serious injury of FBI Agent John Scott, caught in an explosion at a storage facility linked to the incident on the plane. Scott’s friend, and lover, Olivia Dunham’s refusal to let him die leads her to defy protocol, track down reclusive genius Walter Bishop and his son, Peter, get Bishop released from a mental asylum and, finally, to both the person responsible for the incident and a cure for Scott. The episode is, by all weights and measures, over, the series’ premise established as Olivia is offered a job investigating Fringe Science cases full time, Walter is reinstalled in his old lab and Peter slowly begins to accept his father.

Then John Scott gets out of bed, goes to the perpetrator’s room and suffocates him. At almost the same time, Olivia discovers evidence that Scott was complicit in the attack, tracks him down and a car chase ensues. Scott is fatally injured and his last moments are spent apologising to Olivia and telling her to ask why.

This by itself would be enough, but the episode’s final scene really drives home the unknown territory the series is running headlong towards. Nina Sharp, the head of Massive Dynamic, a pseudo-Microsoft company helping the government investigate Fringe Science is shown Scott’s body. She asks how long he’s been dead, is told and, after pausing for a moment, says ‘Interrogate him.’

This single moment brings together the mystery surrounding John Scott, the allegiance of Massive Dynamic and the research into communicating with the comatose and dead that Walter successfully uses earlier in the episode to not only set the rest of the series up but neatly place the viewer and Olivia on the same page. Neither know what’s going on and both find themselves wanting answers as the episode finishes. Or to put it another way, the circle is closed, the trick is finished and everyone leaves the theatre asking how it was done.

Pledge, turn and prestige, each not only mapping onto the three act dramatic structure but changing it into something rich and strange. Abrams and his collaborators take this still further, incorporating the elements of magic and misdirection not only into their films and TV series but how these stories are marketed and presented. This is magic not only as a storytelling framework but a tool, a means of not only writing and constructing stories but selling them to an audience. It’s not always successful but it’s always interesting and, with Abrams linked to several major new projects, it’s an approach that’s clearly working. Just remember, the rabbit isn’t always in the hat, and the hat may not be a hat at all.

Adolescence is skin deep invincibility. You find yourself clamped to the handlebars of a motorcycle with the throttle jammed open, hurtling towards adulthood, sex, money, furniture and everything in between. You can’t turn, you can’t stop and if you slow down the only thing that will happen is every other driver will laugh at you.
Because make no mistake you’re not alone. You’re trapped in a flock of people in exactly the same situation with exactly as little control as you. Some of them will be friends for life, others will be people you would happily see dead or maimed or worse. Some will be both. All of them are as frightened as you, as out of control as you and all of them, without exception are looking for something to make them feel better. The fastest way to do that is, of course, to laugh at the other people in the race, the ones who are slower, the ones who are frightened, the ones who are different.

You can’t stop, you can’t turn around and you can’t get off. So you change your focus, you change your definition of what control is, you change yourself. Survival becomes all about totems, about objects and styles and culture that have tremendous, vital significance for you. For one friend of mine, that came through classic horror and Goth make up, for another it was a saxophone and an East German army jacket. For me, at first, it was books, then a leather jacket, then film. You survive however you can, whether that’s through playing the sax, learning how to draw Egyptian eye makeup or knowing about a film three months before your friends do. The icons and totems change and fall away but the need for them, to make something about your life your own never does and often they define you as much by their absence as their presence.

It’s absence and what happens when you become aware of it that lies at the heart of Nowhere Boy. The story of John Lennon’s teenage years, adapted from the book by his sister, it follows the future Beatle from the loss of his uncle through to his departure for Hamburg with the band that would become the Beatles. From an absence to a departure, it follows Lennon with unrelenting, unblinking intensity through the worst, and arguably most important, years of his life.

Adolescence sits in the no man’s land between confidence and terror and the film shows us both those extremes in the first ten minutes. Lennon begins the film happy, relaxed and innocent as his Uncle gives him his first harmonica lesson. This is Lennon unfettered but also Lennon undefined, a happy, cheerful, charming young man whose life comes to a crashing halt when his Uncle dies. In one of the film’s most affecting moments, he breaks down in front of his aunt the day after his Uncle dies. She firmly, but not unkindly, tells him off, says it’s just the two of them now and hands him a tea towel. Lennon stares at her for a moment, then begins to dry the dishes. A widow and a child, united by the one thing they won’t talk about, by a smiling Banquo with a harmonica in his top pocket.

The death of his Uncle, the absence in his life, wakes Lennon up, sacrifices his innocence for his awareness. He becomes aware of the odd nature of his life, of the fact that he lives with his aunt even though his mother is still alive. His need to find answers, to discover the truth behind that arrangement in turn leads to him becoming aware of his priorities; family before school, his future before everything else. Trapped, it seems, in a house with an aunt that doesn’t love him near a mother that doesn’t want him, Lennon can rely on one person; himself. Therefore, it only makes sense he make himself a success because clearly no one else will.

This combination of selfishness and confidence, of absolute determination and complete lack of focus is what drives Lennon. He wants something desperately and at first he’s convinced it’s a relationship with his mother. The scenes between Lennon and his mother Julia are arguably where the film is at its strongest, the two playing off one another in a way that’s both sweet and unsettling. Ann-Marie Duff plays Julia as a desperately cheerful, unfettered woman who runs headlong at her teenage son with a combination of joy and crippling guilt. There’s an air of courtship, of romance to the scenes, of two people trying desperately to fit eighteen years of relationship into a few weeks. The scenes, and the characters, feel fragile, hysteria always present just beneath Julia’s laughter, rage beneath John’s wry smile. These are two damaged people trying desperately to fix themselves through the other’s company and they never quite manage it.
A lesser film would have concluded with the inevitable apocalyptic argument but here that arrives not longer after the mid point. Lennon discovers the truth about his past, about the horrific choice he was asked to make between his mother and his father and he does exactly what anyone would in that situation; he explodes, raging at the people around him, at the world he’s trapped in, at the fact that God chose James Dean to be James Dean instead of him. This is Lennon unfettered, Johnson nailing the Beatles’ savage combination of fury, humour and blistering intellect.
For all his bluster though, Lennon finds a measure of peace. The film tilts around this confrontation, the view of each character changing as we learn about the complex relationship between his mother and aunt, and the love they both have for him. Kristin Scott-Thomas’ Aunt Mimi is still strict but there’s a compassion to it, a tempering of both her emotions and John’s as she takes gradual steps towards reconciling with her sister. There’s something uniquely English about the way the two women make up, neither saying anything yet both working to find common ground and where Johnson and Duff are emotive and expressive, Scott-Thomas is the quiet, reticent emotional core of the scene and the film.
Lennon’s perspective, and the audience’s view of him, also change at this point. A young man who has been defined by absence, of a father, a mother, school, affection, is suddenly defined by the thing he most wants; attention and through that, love. He realises that his mother wasn’t what he was looking for, that what he really needs is to define himself on his own terms. The rock star attitude becomes tempered with real ability, real dedication. By the time we see the Quarrymen play their first gig, it’s clear that Lennon has changed his totems, swapping the absence of a conventional family for the swagger and theatricality, the attention and crucially, adulation, of a performer.
Even this, though, isn’t enough and one of the film’s best scenes comes after the gig as Lennon is introduced to a young Paul McCartney. The casting of Thomas Sangster, who Johnson worked with before on the under rated Feather Boy for the BBC, is something close to genius. The two have an an instant bond, part adversarial, part affectionate, one all rock and roll bluster, the other all quiet, sad focus. McCartney is broken in a unique and complementary way to Lennon, losing his mother to cancer where Lennon lost his father to the Merchant Navy and together the two form begin to form something like a whole. Lennon has the swagger and the raw talent, McCartney has the focus and the patience to teach him and the tempering effect he has on Lennon is revelatory, especially on Lennon himself. For the first time he sees himself from another persepective, the slight, quiet McCartney slipping past his size and bluster to reveal not only what he wants but how to get there. For the first time, Lennon realises that a good look, an attitude and his own talent aren’t enough, that he not only needs a band, but needs to be challenged. He’s still brash and over-confidence but for the first time Lennon’s able to see not only where he’s going but also that he can’t get there alone.

Then Julia dies. In the cruellest possible way, at the cruellest possible location and time. Lennon is defined by absence once again, and, once again, is unfettered. The confident, Elvis-quiffed almost rock star is revealed to be just another totem, just another icon clutched in the hands of a terrified, angry boy who can’t believe he’s here, again. The rage that’s never far from the surface bubbles over into violence and Johnson shows us it all, shows us that everything up to now has been a front, that Lennon’s still broken, still alone.

But no longer alone. The hair, the attitude, the anger all fall away as we see Lennon realise that he’s part of something larger than himself now, that he’s defined by the presence of his band more than the absence of his family. It’s still not right, it still causes him almost incalculable pain but for the first time he’s bigger than it, stronger than it. For the first time it’s something he can define and understand instead of something that defines him.

Nowhere Boy is a film about how we define ourselves and how we’re defined, about what we choose and what’s forced upon us. It’s a film about the events that defined a man who helped define generations of music and musicians. Most of all though , it’s a film about the crucible of adolescence, the glory and the terror of realising that you’re clamped to the motorcycle but you’re not the only one. It’s rarely fair, it’s never easy but none of us go through it alone and sometimes that’s enough.

Darkness subtracts. Darkness doesn’t just take away where you’re going it takes away where you’ve been, stranding you in an eternal present you can neither see nor touch. That removal of outside stimuli not only forces us to look inward it also brings our inner selves to the surface, reveals things we may not want ourselves, or anyone else, to know. In the dark, the wild things come out to play.

The fourth episode of Stargate Universe, explores the concept of darkness as both an external and internal problem. Externally, that darkness is caused by a sudden collapse in the ship’s power systems, one that Rush blames entirely on Col Young’s deployment of research teams around the ship. In an instant, the Destiny loses everything from lighting to propulsion and coasts, apparently out of control, further out into space. The crew are, literally, powerless and that realisation throws the internal darkness of several major characters into stark relief even as the Destiny slips further into the night.

For Col Young, the darkness gives him a moment to draw breath. A leader who has been almost incapable of leading for the last three episodes, Everett Young takers centre stage for much of this episode and Louis Ferreira’s dialled back, pensive performance gives the commanding officer as much fragility as it does authority. Young’s still badly injured, still trying to function and still doing what he thinks is best, but he’s operating in the dark in every major way and what he finds there surprises both him and the viewer. Young chose his career over his marriage and when the lights go out on Destiny he’s forced to re-examine that decision. There are no histrionics, no over wrought emotions here, just a cautious, reticent, dialled back man trying to re connect with a wife that he abandoned. He’s a good officer and a good leader but when the lights go out he has no idea if either of those things really matter.

For Nicholas Rush, the darkness is a brick wall, too high, too wide and too close. He’s clearly brilliant but he’s not quite brilliant enough, his inability to work with people combining with Young’s drive to get home to drain Destiny’s power. The only thing worse than that fact is that Rush knows it, his relentlessly analytical mind throwing up his mistake again and again until it’s all he can see. The moment where he breaks down is particularly interesting, his anger at Young clearly masking his own guilt and putting his shame and terror at his own failing to the fore. Whether Rush admits it to anyone else, he’s in the wrong and he knows it and that knowledge almost breaks him.

For Tamara Johannsen, the darkness is a chance to take comfort in what she knows. Alaina Huffman is rapidly becoming one of the show’s strongest cast members and TJ’s quiet, pragmatic compassion leads to one of the best scenes to date. Her conversation with Rush, after he wakes up, is the most open either character has been to date, Rush admitting his weaknesses to the one person that he doesn’t think will judge him and TJ taking clear and immense comfort in the doctor/patient relationship. It’s a moment for both of them to catch their breath, to be given support and validation without having to ask for either and it’s remarkable to watch.

For Eli Wallace, the darkness is an opportunity. David Blue’s slightly nervous comic timing is put to tremendous use here as Eli finds himself in three difficult situations, each of which tells us more about him. The first sees Lt. Vanessa James drag him away from a conversation with Chloe to talk to him ‘alone’. The sexual connotation is openly acknowledged in the next scene where James instead takes Eli to an impromptu council of war of the lower ranked soldiers aboard. Eli, to the surprise of everyone there, not only faces them down but acknowledges that their concerns are valid, becoming a bridge between the different crew factions as he does so. It’s a nicely played moment for everyone, where no one is quite right and no one is quite wrong. James may manipulate Eli but she does it for the good of everyone she works with and Eli’s acknowledgement of that is a clear step forward for both characters.
The second moment reinforces this as Volker and Brody, two of the engineers aboard report to Col. Young that there’s no way to solve the power outage. When Eli puts forward a solution, he’s not only thanked by Col Young but also used as a stick to beat the other two men with. Eli is an undisciplined college dropout who, on the first day on the job, was put in the worst situation possible. He’s still working, still doing everything he can and simply by doing that he not only becomes something more than the young man he was when he arrived but also becomes the first member of Destiny’s crew to accept and begin to adapt to their situation.
The third situation neatly undercuts that as Eli and Sgt. Hunter Riley are found using one of the ship’s Kinos to spy on Lt. Vanessa James. Operating in the dark, the two men have reverted to basic adolescent behaviour, a recent memory for both and the end result is a well written but deeply uncomfortable scene. Col. Young’s overt, deadpan disappointment with the two of them is a welcome break in the tension but the fact remains that one of the ship’s best scientific minds and one of the ship’s only Gate technicians are caught using alien technology to spy on a colleague in her underwear. No one’s perfect in the dark and whilst the sexism is in context, it’s still difficult to watch.

Darkness focusses. When you can’t see anything, you find yourself turning to what’s important to you, a fact neatly reflected in the testimonials Eli spends the episode recording from other characters. From Vanessa James’ simple plea to not die out in space to Matthew Scott’s prayer, each one of them turns inwards and only some of them like what they find. Not all of these people are likeable, or even like each other, but all of them are fragile, all of them are human and all of them, in the end, are alone in the dark.
Even then, darkness doesn’t last forever. As the episode finishes, the crew realise they’ve dropped out of Faster Than Light travel on the edge of a solar system, itself an incredible coincidence. When that system is found to have habitable planets, the situation changes and suddenly, the crew find themselves with a tiny sliver of light, a reason to hope. They relax and watch as the Destiny, huge but dwarfed by the gas giant it’s flying through, aerobrakes into the system. Under deep blue, almost marine light, the Destiny’s crew take a moment to revel in the incredible place they’ve found themselves in. Until they realise that the ship is heading directly for the system’s star, the light at the end of the tunnel becomes all too clear and, suddenly, darkness looks like a luxury they will soon miss.

Light overwhelms. Light doesn’t just show you how far you’ve come it shows you how far you still have to go, stripping you of complacency, of the comfort of not being able to see all the way ahead. That flood of external stimuli forces you to fall back on instinct, on what we know best even if we’d prefer not to. In the light, all the lies we tell ourselves are stripped away until our true selves are exposed, whether we want it to be or not. ‘Light’, the season’s fifth episode, uses the backdrop of a lottery to decide who will leave the ship on the only shuttle to explore what happens when every weakness, every fault and every strength are illuminated.

In the light, Matthew Scott and Chloe find comfort in nothing but each other. The relationship, already forged in adversity through the death of Chloe’s father, is consummated in the light of the star that will kill them, a moment of desperate human intimacy that is all they can hope for and all they really want, It’s not quite love, not yet, but it’s the closest either of them will get. It’s also a moment that shows not only far they’ve already come but how far they still have to go. Chloe is painfully aware that she’s a fifth wheel, lacking even the scientific skills of most of the rest of the civilians whilst Matt is blissfully unaware of anything else, using his time with Chloe to delay the inevitable. He holds onto the belief that she’ll be one of the people picked as long as he can and when that’s stripped away, he falls back on the two pillars of his life; duty and faith.

In the light, Vanessa James remembers who she is. Despite her anger over the relationship between Matthew Scott and Chloe, she does her job, stands her post and looks after her people because in the end, that’s what she knows best. The relationship dies the moment she finds Matt and Chloe together, but something new, something deeper, is born the moment she meets his eyes when she arrives at the shuttle. Everything is said in a single glance and then she turns and guards the airlock, prepared to shoot any of her friends and colleagues who weren’t picked. It’s a moment of silent heroism that not only shows exactly how bad things have got but how strong James is. She’s rapidly becoming one of the most interesting second tier characters and it’s going to be fascinating to see how she’s developed.

In the light, Ron Greer and Nicholas Rush are given the last thing they expected; a moment of peace. Serving with unfailing loyalty, Greer accompanies Colonel Young on what he believes will be his last walk. The moment where Ron apologises for letting Colonel Young down and Young responds with a simple ‘At ease, Ronald’ is heartbreaking, an acknowledgement of a friendship and respect that never feels forced or tawdry.
Rush, for his part, is transformed by their apparent death. He becomes open, calm, even friendly, apologising to Eli and making his peace with Colonel Young. He welcomes their apparent doom for the same reason Ron does; as a chance to lay down his burdens and end his life in exactly the place he wanted to be.

In the light, Eli Wallace remembers who he is. The arrested adolescent who spies on women in their underwear is replaced by a young man who has, he thinks, come to the end of his life and likes where he and who he is. Like Lt. James he’s hurt by the relationship between Matt and Chloe and, like James, he deals with it. It’s Eli who comes up with the idea of recording final messages, Eli who gives Rush the gift of seeing the ship from the outside and Eli, along with Chloe, who faces their fate head on. He’s a good man, not a perfect one, but at long last he realises that he’s good enough.

In the light, Camille Wray gets her priorities right. Ming Na has been the least used of the cast so far but there’s clearly a slow build with Camille that will pay off later in the season. Her Kino message, a simple, honest expression of love for her girlfriend, is one of the episode’s most affecting moments and gives her, and the situation the crew are in, welcome depth.

In the light, the Destiny’s crew learn they have no idea what’s happening to them. The episode’s closing scenes are where it really flies, as the ship plunges into the star to refuel instead of to die and the crew’s celebrations are cut short as they realise the shuttle and it’s crew can’t catch up to them. As Rush, Eli and Scott frantically cobble together a solution it becomes clear that the final lesson the crew learn is devastatingly simple; they must rely on each other to survive. For the first time, the Destiny’s crew are truly united in dealing with a problem and, whilst Rush recoils from his perceived weakness, that bond looks set to stay in place. They’re the wrong people, in the wrong place but,whether in darkness or light, they have no one else to rely on.

John Constantine has been around. A former punk rocker turned street magician, Constantine has faced down every ruler of hell, defeated the thing that lives behind the world, survived time in an insane asylum and a Maximum Security prison and become involved time and again with the London underworld.

John Constantine has been around. Created by Alan Moore during his acclaimed run on Saga of the Swamp Thing, Constantine was originally modelled on Sting; a cocky, slightly alien occult wide boy with an eye for the main chance and a ruthless streak a mile long. As the lead character in Hellblazer, he’s become one of the great anti-heroes of the last twenty years and very nearly every major comic writer working today has worked on the title at one time or another. Constantine is, literally, a constant, a Chandler-esque figure with none of the romance and a lot more cynicism, a man who endures in both senses of the word.

John Constantine has been around. Over the years he’s travelled the length and breadth of England, has spent time in the US, done time in the US and lived in Australia. One of the very places he’s never been is out in the spotlight, in the glare of publicity that only reality TV can provide.

Until now. Ian Rankin, one of the greatest crime writers of his generation has produced the first in a new series of Vertigo Crime graphic novels. Dark Entries is the story of what happens when John Constantine and reality TV collide. It’s also a fascinating examination of the difference between compressed and decompressed storytelling.

Rankin is the master of the quiet character touch and his Rebus novels are full of the sort of unconscious character tics that make people unique. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see not only how he moves across to comic work but what he leaves behind to get there. Rankin’s eye for description is still there but he’s been able to move that aspect of the work across to the art, giving both elements equal weight. Produced with quiet authority by Weather Delle’dera the black and white art manages to be tense without being scratchy and Delle’dera manages to give each character unique mannerisms. Jude the football hooligan slouches his way around the house just as Ishmael, the cautious, quiet, oldest housemate is always looking around the room, always making sure everyone else is there. Alice, her arms covered with scars almost never makes eye contact whilst Tom the amiable American geek makes far too much despite his eyes being concealed behind the blank white discs of his glasses. Akiko, the Japanese girl is quiet, reserved and desperate whilst Steph is aware, upright, awake. Each one is unique, each one is well rounded and each one is doomed.

Rankin shares a certain wilful contrariness with his most famous creation and for the first one hundred and seventeen pages, Dark Entries is a slow burn, a murder mystery without a murder. We follow Constantine as he’s approached by Mr Keene, the producer of a reality TV show called Haunted Mansion whose mansion is a little too haunted, we see Keene feed him information, see Constantine enter the house and see what’s begun to terrify the contestants. We also see a lot of the traditional elements of reality TV, from circular conversations to complaints about the lack of alcohol, diary room confessions and the constant struggle for dominance in the pecking order that has been the cornerstone of Big Brother in particular for years. Its typically impressive work from Rankin, putting six people together in an odd environment, and putting the perennial outsider, the detective, in the middle of them. It’s a murder mystery without a murder, And Then There Were None where everyone’s still upright and the result is a low key but constant rise in tension.

Then, on page one hundred and eighteen, Rankin shows us the truth and everything changes. The true nature of the house and the contestants is revealed as it’s placed in a much larger, much more unsettling concept. The story is no longer John Constantine in the world of reality TV but reality TV in the world of John Constantine, a change so dramatic the page colour even shifts from black to white.

This is where Rankin may lose some readers. What began as a relatively straight haunted house story becomes outright supernatural horror with the turn of a page and Delle’edera’s rendition of hell and its denizens must surely rank with John Ridgway and Steve Dillon’s versions as definitive. Like his predecessors, Delle’dera’s hell is spacious, open and one step to the left of normal and, just like his predecessors, Delle’dera uses that to lull us into a false sense of security. Hell really is other people here, as Haunted Mansion is revealed to be a long term ratings hit amongst the damned. Every aspect of reality TV culture is transposed across, from the endless discussion of the housemate’s actions to Eviction Night and the constant scrabble to keep the viewers happy. At first it’s a jarring change, but as the novel goes on it becomes clear that this really is the only way the story could go, running the supernatural world of John Constantine together with the barely natural world of reality television.

Even here, Rankin cheerfully refuses to increase the pace. The tension continues to build, the crowds continue to get raucous but they also keep watching.
Because that’s what you do. Reality TV is, like any entertainment, an investment of time for the viewer, albeit with an added social element. You keep watching through the bad bits so you’ll see the good bits when they happen but you also keep watching because that’s what everyone else does. The contestants are alienated so you don’t have to be.
This is the true genius of the book as Rankin, the novelist who excels at long form storytelling, uses reality TV as a bridge into comics, a medium traditionally associated with short form stories. Rankin keeps every element of his style and marries them to the standard tropes of a Hellblazer story: a very English inferno, suburban horror and personal sacrifice. He even willingly sacrifices his favoured location, with the only reference to Edinburgh seeing Constantine confront Brian McArthur, a former friend who became obsessed with Sawney Bean. Brian’s descent into insanity, cannibalism, murder and death plays like what it is, the big finish of a smaller story. In that story, Brian and the question of whether he was possessed by or obsessed with Bean would be the centre of attention but here, it and Brian, are pushed to the sidelines. He becomes a rejected housemate, a demented fan, someone who knows they’re important and takes desperate measures to get near the star of the show. Which is, as ever, Constantine.

The end result is a novel that feels expansive but not padded, something that wears the clothes of a reality TV show but takes it to some unimaginably dark places. It marries the human touch and deliberate pace of Rankin’s novels with the immediacy of comics, creating a graphic novel in the most literal sense of the phrase. The final quarter, where everything comes to head, has that sickening tension that comes after the fall but before the impact, a sense that no one, not the housemates, not Constantine, not even Mr Keene is safe. It’s the moment after the crowd turns but before the crowd riots, and it’s a credit to Rankin that this is the most unsettling aspect of the story. It’s also a pitch-perfect examination of why John Constantine remains such a successful character; he’s a dark, metaphysical lens that we can view the world through and be horrified and fascinated before we turn away. He has no such luxury but at least, with Rankin, he’s in very safe hands.

Two figures stand on a grassy plain. In the distance is a fort, to either side of them are cascades of water or steam. One, a woman, is dressed in a simple white outfit, holding a staff. She is looking directly out of the image. The other is a man, tall, fit, holding a futuristic looking sword and wearing armour that’s as battered as it is functional. He is staring off into the distance. Above them, Wold War 2 era planes fly towards the castle. It’s an arresting image and one that serves not only as a cover but a surprisingly detailed summary of the novel’s themes.

The woman is Miyo, Queen and Oracle of Yamatai. She’s a quietly rebellious character, a woman of tremendous intellect and strength who manages to side step the stereotypes those character traits so often lead to. Miyo is fully aware not only of her responsibilities but of exactly how far she can push her luck. She’s also very aware that her life will never change, that she has been handed what some would view as a fairy tale ending and that as a result, it means very little.

In the hands of a lesser author, Miyo would be conflicted by the arrival of Orville, the other figure on the cover, worried about how her life would change or delighted to see that change made manifest. In Ogawa’s hands though, she becomes one of the most nuanced, grounded female protagonists of recent years, a woman who is tested to the limits by the horrific new world she’s plunged into but is up to the task and more. Miyo is a leader and her journey to that realisation is presented as subtly as it is realistically.

It’s also the reason why Miyo is looking out of the image towards the viewer. She is the only character in the novel who is still able to think past the war, to be aware not even of the future but of the possibility of one. The final scenes demonstrate both this and how far she’s come perfectly, as Miyo rallies what’s left of the Yamatai forces in the surf and in one speech begins to lay the groundwork not only for the future of her country but her species. It’s a crucial moment for both her and the story as she finally embraces her position and sees the battlefield in a different way, the Queen finally realising she can move and act differently to every other piece on the field.

If Miyo is a Queen, then Orville and his fellow Messengers are pawns. An AI from 2598, Orville is part of the Upstreamer Force, humanity’s last line of defence against the ET, a race of aliens who have swept the inner solar system clear of humanity. With the tide finally turning, the ET initiate a jump ‘upstream’ into humanity’s past to continue the war there. Orville and his thousands of compatriots are sent after them but with a subtly different mission; instead of fighting the ET, they will announce themselves to Earth and unite their ancestors against the common threat. In doing so, they will erase forever the future that gave birth to them.

Orville is as fascinating a character as Miyo as much because of his limitations as his abilities. Able to access vast tracts of knowledge instantly, terrifyingly effective in combat and in constant communication with the other Messengers and Cutty Sark, the AI organising the campaign, Orville starts the novel as a pawn but soon realises that pawns don’t win wars. As he and his colleagues discover, time and again, that humanity cannot unite against a common threat he begins to doubt Cutty’s battle plan and in doing so, learns how to move across the board differently. Orville begins to think like a Knight, looking more than one move ahead and, in doing so, he sows the seeds that will lead to humanity’s salvation. Ironically, he also indirectly creates the society that snatches Miyo from her parents and drops her into her role at the pinnacle of Yamatai society.

The seeds of Orville’s independence in turn come from his final months prior to deployment. Like the rest of the Upstreamer force, he’s encouraged to spend time with humanity and like many of his colleagues becomes romantically involved. Orville’s girlfriend, Sayaka, is a cheerfully cynical and quietly altruistic supply officer who uses her job as a crucible to examine the true nature of humanity. She’s painfully aware of every failing we have but also sees how many of those failings come from good intentions and it’s this crumpled optimism and cheerful mistrust of authority that she passes on to Orville. We aren’t a perfect species, but that’s what makes us fascinating. Much like Miyo’s growing strength as a leader it’s a fairly traditional narrative technique but, as with Miyo, Ogawa presents it in such a grounded, honest manner that you can’t help but be carried along.

Orville isn’t the only Messenger to be changed by his time with humanity, as his friend Alexandr demonstrates. Alexandr becomes friends with Shumina, a librarian and one of the novel’s most affecting strands deals with the story Alexandr is writing for Shumina, or whatever version of Shumina the timestream will eventually create. An allegorical children’s story dealing with the war, it’s the one thing that keeps Alexandr sane across thousands of years of combat and defeat and becomes something more than the Messengers, a story with a life of it’s own sewn across countless cultures and countries, a message in a bottle from the future, buried in the past.

Alexandr’s story ends up embodying everything that the Messengers did right and every one of their failings. Unable to hold the ET off at any time in history, the massively depleted troops use the last weapon at their disposal, myth, to arm humanity against incursion. This is not only the moment where Orville, Alexandr and the rest truly become Knights, figures with one foot in reality and one in story, but also the moment that shows why they can never be anything more. The Messengers come back from a future where there the war dominates every aspect of life and is the reason for their existence. Their tragedy, and Orville’s in particular, is that he can no longer see anything beyond the war, beyond the next holding action, the next small victory, the next retreat. In the end, Orville is looking out across the plain because that’s all he knows how to do.

The Lord of the Sands of Time is one of the first releases from Haikasoru, a new imprint dedicated to bringing Japanese science fiction to the west and it would be difficult to find a stronger first offering. Ogawa has an eye for detail and character and a consistently elegant view of temporal warfare that gives the book a grace many other novels lack. This is an intelligent, compassionate, action packed story about love, duty, history and the different ways we perceive it. It’s one of the finest science fiction novels of the last five years and one that anyone remotely interested in the field shouldn’t be without.

The Apollo program died the moment Neil Armstrong’s flickery cathode ghost touched down on the moon’s safe and uttered one of the most famous phrases in human history. Everything that followed him, from the genial charm of Al Bean’s Apollo 12 crew to the ‘successful failure’ of Apollo 13 and the arrival of Harrison Schmitt, the only scientist in history to walk on the moon on Apollo 17, was an afterthought, an also ran, second place. The moon had been reached and it was summed up perfectly by Armstrong’s pilot, Buzz Aldrin; magnificent desolation.

Moon, written by Duncan Jones and Nathan Parker and directed by Jones takes this vague disappointment and makes it the centre of the film. The story cleverly places our satellite in the last position it can appear new; as somewhere remote, dangerous, but ultimately mundane. A workplace with spacesuits, a mine face populated by robots. This moon is busy, certainly, but still empty, still desolate, but no longer devoid of human presence.
The story follows Sam Bell, played by Sam Rockwell. Sam is the token human presence at Sarang Moonbase, serving a three year term where his biggest responsibility is to periodically empty the Helium 3 tanks of the robotic harvesters he looks after and ship the gas back to Earth. Sarang is the front line of modern science, instrumental in keeping Helium 3 as the number one, ecologically sound, clean fuel used on Earth. Sam’s job is equal parts janitor and astronaut, frontiersman and manual labour and the paycheque more than makes up for the three years of his life spent in alone.
Sam, as we first meet him, is as well adjusted to his job as he can be. He keeps a botanical garden using old food boxes as planters, is constructing a precise scale model of his hometown, works out regularly and lives for the video messages from his wife. With two weeks to go he’s a serene, placid figure whose one concern is his growing health problems. He’s beginning to hallucinate and whilst he can still do his job, he’s becoming very aware that something is wrong. Matters come to a head when he sees a woman walking, suitless, on the lunar surface. The ensuing accident cripples his rover and leaves him badly injured.
Sam wakes up in the infirmary. He’s told by the base AI, GERTY, that he had an accident, was able to get back to Sarang but appears to have suffered minor brain damage. GERTY runs some tests, makes sure he stays in bed and leaves him be.

But Sam Bell, the second time we meet him, is a different man. He’s concerned, agitated, curious. He gets out of bed early and hears what sounds like GERTY talking to Earth, except the live satellite link has been down for weeks. He can’t remember making sections of the town model and when he notices that one of the Harvesters has been immobilised, is hugely frustrated to be told he can’t go out to fix it. Filled with nervous energy and seemingly unharmed from his accident, Sam fakes an atmosphere breach and leaves the station.

In the airlock, there’s an empty hangar where a spacesuit should be.

When he reaches the Harvester, there’s a rover trapped under its treads.

In the rover is a man with Sam Bell’s face.

Sam Bell is a placid, calm man who sees things that aren’t there and has only two weeks left to serve. Sam Bell is a nervous, energetic, angry man who is two weeks into a three year contract. Both think they’re the real Sam. Both want answers. Both are being lied to.

The genius of Jones’ film is that the desolation that Buzz Aldrinr esponded to is not only present but lies at the heart of both versions of Sam. The banality of their existence is not only a comfort but, it’s revealed over the course of the film, a positive influence on both of them. The younger Sam is driven to the point of obsession, angry, bad with people and on the verge of losing his wife. He’s barely able to keep still where the older Sam is barely able to move, lacking the benefit of three years of monastic life at Sarang.
The older Sam has the tranquillity but lacks the drive. He’s a man who has done nothing but look himself in the face for three years and as the film progresses, he’s the one who becomes strong enough to confront the very personal aspects of the situation. Young Sam is concerned with where he’s going, whether he’s real, whether he’ll get back to Earth. Older Sam is concerned with where they’ve been, happy to find out whether they’re real and able to deal with the truth far better than young Sam. One of the film’s finest, most poignant moments comes from this and is, appropriately, an absence. Old Sam makes contact not only with Earth but with the daughter that he has spent three years watching grow up, only to find her a fifteen year old young woman. Rockwell’s face is a master class of silent, complex acting as he struggles to deal with not only this information but his own voice, off shot, asking who’s on the phone.

Neither of them are real. Neither of them are first. Neither of them are important.

This is the information he keeps from young Sam, recognising that the younger version of himself needs the anger, the energy, the absence of knowledge in order to get where he needs to be. It’s a sin of kindness as well as one of omission and it gives the ending a bittersweet tone it desperately needs.

Rockwell’s work as the two versions of Sam Bell is extraordinary, there’s really no other way to describe it. The slightly distant serenity of older Sam is present in every element of the character from his over long hair and the physical damage he takes to the moment he receives a message from his wife. Rockwell is completely focussed on the screen, living for a woman who is a quarter of a million miles away and, unknown to him, fifteen years ago. A lesser actor would have played this Sam as child like or senile but in Rockwell’s hands he’s a gentle, smart man who is coming to the end of his life and coming to an acceptance of that.
The younger Sam, in stark contrast, is a character wrapped in an elaborate joke. Spending much of the film in his Lunar Industries jumpsuit and aviator sunglasses he’s every inch the hero astronaut, complete with close cropped hair and constant, desperate need to find out more. He’s energetic where older Sam is tranquil, tensed where older Sam is relaxed. He has potential but no peace and it’s that which ultimately gives him the tools he needs to get to the end of the story.
In essence, Rockwell is playing one man as both father and son and the honesty with which he does it is affecting without ever seeming mawkish. These men have the same memories, the same experiences but an entirely different outlook and the script is at its best when it demonstrates that. Young Sam’s initial plan, to wake a third clone and kill him so one of them can escape unnoticed to Earth and the other can serve out his term is shot down by his older compatriot not because it won’t work, but because they don’t kill. It’s a simple moment of absolute knowledge, a remarkable piece of scriptwriting where a character is in essence having an externalised moral discussion with themselves and again it’s one of the film’s best scenes. By the end of the film, Sam has been given that rarest of gifts; knowledge not only of where he’s going but what he’ll be like when he gets there and finishes the story as a combination of his two incarnations; a young man with the energy and anger to deal with his new life tempered by experience, self knowledge and compassion.

Were the film just a conversation between two incarnations of Rockwell it would be impressive. However, Kevin Spacey as the voice of GERTY provides a fascinating counterpoint for the character. A blocky, functional computer that can move around Sarang on a ceiling rail, GERTY looks like HAL from 2001 redesigned by the NASA of the 1980s. The only sop to human contact is a small screen where he communicates using a variety of smiley faces.
Once again, the genius of the film lies in this minimalism, as GERTY communicates a complex series of emotions through less than ten still images. Spacey’s warm, expressive voice gives the AI a strength which varies from intimidating to comical and finally remarkably human. When faced with the knowledge that Sam has met himself, GERTY asks whether he might be imagining things and at times appears to view Sam as an asset of the company and nothing more. A lesser film would have used this to make GERTY an adversary but he’s anything but, instead acting as a soldered Ariel, a figure who observes everything and helps Sam not because he wants to, but because he’s programmed to.
Even there though, the film leaves room for doubt. GERTY’s willingness to help could also be read as guilt or dissatisfaction over presiding over the murder of the previous Sams. His final action, offering Sam his reset switches to ensure no record of the events at Sarang will survive is again open to interpretation; on one hand it’s the final act of an AI who is programmed to help its human colleague first and protect their employer second. On the other, it’s a form of voluntary lobotomy, perhaps even the end GERTY has been working towards, a final binary absolution.

The film’s minimalist nature allows Rockwell and Spacey to drill down to the essence of their characters and also allows Jones and Parker to place it in the rarified atmosphere between contemporary science fiction and cyberpunk. Sarang is a resolutely functional base and even Sam’s personal effects seem dated and worn, his small bunk, stainless steel shower and battered chair owing as much to Red Dwarf as they do to Alien. This is the world of tomorrow in its most mundane sense, a future which is almost exactly like the presence in every way.
But this minimalism also means the few hints of the outside world stand out far more than normal. Dominique McElligott and Kaya Scodelario as Sam’s wife and daughter offer hints of an outside world that is as enticing as it is unreachable whilst the excellent Matt Berry and Benedict Wong give Lunar Industries an utterly convincing passive aggressive face as Overmyers and Thompson, the two executives in charge of the operation.
It also means that the film becomes a metatextual piece, the themes of cloning, isolation and corporate espionage applicable both to its own universe and others. It’s almost impossible to not view Sam as an early Replicant, an industrial genetic android with a short lifespan and a single job to do. Like Roy Batty, Sam wants more life but unlike the antagonist and, arguably, hero of Blade Runner, he gets that life without any blood on his hands. Likewise, the three man ‘rescue squad’ dispatched to the moon to help repair Sam’s Harvester could easily be viewed as a Blade Runner division kept on permenant retainer.
Much like Sam, the more the viewer digs, the more questions are raised. Is every base on the moon run by a version of Sam Bell? Was the original Sam complicit? How many times has this happened before? How many other people have been cloned?

The film answers none of these questions and is stronger for that. In fact, it’s single misstep comes in the closing credits as voice over news reports tell us that the young Sam made it to Earth and that Lunar Industries are being indicted for crimes against humanity. It’s an unnecessary complication to an almost inconceivably elegant, exploration of one man’s life played out against a landscape that is both defined and released by two words; magnificent desolation.

(This essay discusses the entire series in detail. Spoilers for every episode abound.)

In 1966, something terrible makes contact with the British government. Something worse delivers twelve children to it. One escapes to a life of homelessness and mental illness, a life of misery and nightmares of a man in a long coat who promised safety and lied. The others disappear.
In 2009, a voice speaks from the throat of every child in the world and the child who escaped, the man in the long coat and a group of civil servants, politicians and innocent bystanders find themselves at the centre of an event that marks a very intimate apocalypse.

Torchwood:Children of Earth throws everything the previous two series built up around themselves out and replaces it with something which is both infinitely darker and far more contemporary. Five episodes long, each one of them equating to a single day, it’s a story that deals with powerlessnes, societal collapse and what it means to face total, absolute change. These big ideas are all viewed through the lens of small, personal apocalypses, a very human look at how the world ends that hasn’t been seen on British television since The Day of the Triffids. Both are stories about normal people in impossible situations and both follow what happens when those people do the only thing they can; break.

This is clearest in John Frobisher, played by Peter Capaldi. Frobisher is a resolutely average man wth a wife, two daughters and no chance of moving any higher in the government. When the children begin to speak, he is placed in charge by the PM and finds himself giving the order to kill the only people who could uncover the British government’s previous interaction with the alien race known as the 456. When faced with this responsibility he does what almost anyone would do; delegates it to his assistant and murder becomes an item on someone’s to do list. Six people have their death warrants signed before the first coffee run of the day, thanks to something as innocuous as it is disturbing; a blank piece of paper.

Frobisher is at the heart of the story’s strongest element; it’s political dimension. Approaching an event of this magnitude from the perspective of a government allows the writers to take the impossible, fantastic events of the five days and not only ground them but curdle them. This is second contact presented as a policy issue, an action item and as a result this is a moment of singular, abject change that is tainted with the same air of polite sleaze and passive aggressive corruption that has tainted British politics for as long as I’ve been alive. Frobisher is a middle manager put in charge of negotiations with an alien race for no reason other than his diposability, a useful tool in the same way a pen is, or a gun.
He’s a flawed, unfaithful man who signs off on murder but is all too aware of what he’s doing. He knows why he has the job, knows he can never escape it and knows exactly who he’s dealing with. In one of the story’s best moments, he tells Jack that he has his daughter and grandson. Jack threatens to kidnap Frobisher’s wife and Frobisher smiles, apologises and tells Jack that he won’t do that, because he’s the better man. John Frobisher is not a good man, by any stretch of the imagination, but he knows exactly what he is and that makes for queasy, uncomfortable and riveting viewing.
Frobisher, in the end, is not even a monster, he’s the man who stands next to the monsters and in the end, that leaves him with no choice but to become one. His final scene, played out over Bridget explaining that he was a good man is heartbreak in needlepoint, an average life collapsing into horror in one of the series’ many quiet targedies. Frobisher returns home, and Bridget explains how they met. Frobisher sends his children upstairs, and Bridget remarks that he always worked hard and that that isn’t appreciated enough. Frobisher takes a gun from a box, his hand shaking and walks upstairs to the only conclusion he has left, the only way he can still protect his family.
Bridget, his aide, appears to be stronger than Frobisher for most of the story. She’s a career civil servant, a woman who is as calm as she is disillusioned, grinding her way through the same tasks in the same office for yet another decade. It’s only as the series continues that we see who she really is, a fiercely competent woman who has been overlooked and ignored her entire life and has come to accept that. Like Frobisher she’s not exceptional, like Frobisher she’s doomed the moment the job is passed to them but unlike him, she is lucky enough to be given a means of escape. Her final scene, calmly informing the Prime Minister that everything he’s said has been recorded could be played as triumphant, as a final victory but instead it’s played as the closing note of a career that stalled years previously. Bridget was in the room just like everyone else, she said nothing, just like everyone else but in what is surely the last moments of the government, she finds the strength to do the right thing.

If Frobisher and Bridget have greatness thrust upon them and are crushed by it, then Brian Green, the Prime Minister embraces it for all the wrong reasons. Nicholas Farrell has the hardest job of all, playing a man who could and in some ways should be a caricature, a politician who sees nothing but an opportunity in the greatest crime ever committed against humanity. He’s polite, plausible, slippery and utterly convincing, telling Frobisher his children will be taken so the government can appear to be ‘victims’ too with exactly the right amount of sympathy needed to get him out of the door. Green is the embodiment of decades of failure in English politics, a man who exists to do one thing; continue to govern. After all, there are things to be done, policies to be made, elections to be won.

This attitude leads to the series’ most horrific and best scene, the axis around which everything else ultimately revolves. The 456 issue their demands for ten percent of the world’s children and the PM and his cabinet begin discussing the logistics. In the space of ten minutes, they go from the absurdity of attempting to haggle, to excusing their own children from removal to discussing how to ‘spin’ the biggest crime in human history to a single line which embodies the series’ uniquely horrible approach to science fiction:

‘”If we can’t identify the lowest achieving 10% of this country’s children, then what are the school league tables for?”

This is it. This is the moment that Torchwood has talked about for two years, the moment ‘where everything changes’ and it’s only when it arrives that two awful truths become clear; the wrong people are presiding over it and no one ever said things would change for the better. This is the end of the world decided by committee, a very English, polite, sickening apocalypse.
In isolation, this would simply be disturbing. However, we see it through a resolutely normal perspective, Lois Habiba, a new secretary played by Cush Jumbo and that’s what makes it truly horrifying. Lois is a normal young woman who finds herself, along with Frobisher and Bridget, in the middle of history. She’s also the key to the rest of the characters’ survival, the only woman who is prepared to believe not just in Torchwood, but in the idea that something other than appeasement is possible. The series has already been criticised for its jet black ending and the incredibly cynicism with which it views humanity but Lois embodies the best elements of us, the quiet, polite young woman who still believes in doing the right thing, even in the face of incredible pressure to turn the other cheek. She grounds the political scenes, reminding the viewer that millions of lives are being weighed against billions and that each and every one of them is a child, is innocent. They all know they have blood on their hands but Lois is the only one horrified enough by it to do something.

She’s also where the real hope of the story lies, not in the people we are expected to trust but in the people who are just like us. It’s given voice by both Lois and Ianto and Jack’s families, resolutely normal people who are consumed by the bad choices made further up the line. Ianto’s sister Rhiannon (Katie Wix) and brother in law Johnny (Rhodri Davies) provide much of the comic relief with Johnny’s cheerful approach to petty crime a stark contrast to the resolutely proper Ianto. However, for all this they’re compassionate, nice, normal people. They worry about what Ianto does, whether or not he’s gay, cheerfully pump him for information on Jack and are all but destroyed by both his death and the total betrayal of the population by the government. They’re everyone, a normal couple trapped at the end of the world and despite everything, desperately concerned with keeping their kids safe.
In stark contrast, Jack’s daughter Alice knows exactly what her father does and wants no part of it. Where Rhiannon and Johnny are brash and honest and open, Alice is closed off, cautious. Through her, we see what a life lived next to Torchwood does, see a woman who never quite relaxes and who is sharp enough to know her father is prepared to use his own grandson as a test subject. She’s played with total reticence and reserve by Lucy Cohu and like many characters gets a final scene of incredible emotional weight. After Jack has sacrificed Stephen, he’s sitting, alone, in a corridor. She walks through one set of doors, pauses, then turns her back on him. Jack looks at her, then leaves via the other doors. In any other series it would be a moment of redemption and triumph, two people finally breaking away from one another to build their own lives. Here, it’s a moment of acceptance as Jack heads for a future stripped of everyone he loves, or at least, those who’ve survived.

For two years Torchwood has described itself as being beyond the government and above the law. If the idea that the government are to be trusted is the first great lie of Children of Earth, this is the second. Every single weakness of the previous two years is exposed and used as a weapon against the team, from the open secret of their existence to their uneasy relationship with the government and Jack’s immortality. By the end of episode one they are cut off from their support structure, their headquarters and their past. By the end of the story they are decimated, reduced to one member with their status in what is surely a very different world unclear.
This is also their finest hour as every single one of the series regulars turns in career best performances. After two seasons of being told how charming and human Gwen is, Eve Myles is finally allowed to show us that side of the character. For the first time we not only see the quiet, friendly, commanding young woman that Gwen is supposed to be but also the very natural and surprisingly poignant relationship she has with her husband, Rhys. Myles and Kai Owen are an incredibly charming double act, finishing each other’s sentences and bantering with one another like people who’ve spent years of their lives together. The moment where Rhys finds out Gwen is pregnant and insists on carrying her rucksack is another of the series’ best and quietest moments. Gwen has survived a bomb explosion, fought for her life against government assassins and kept the pair of them alive but Rhys is damned if he’s going to let his pregnant wife carry a rucksack. They are the heart of the story and the chilling, bitter monologue Gwen delivers at the start of episode five is made all the more affecting by the sight of Rhys, tears rolling down his face, filming her.
Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto is also given some great material, especially in his interactions with Jack and his family. For the first time, we see something beyond the proper, old fashioned young man with a fondness for good suits and the moment where he arranges to meet Rhiannon where their father broke his leg is another of the series’ best moments. Rhiannon defends their father, Ianto holds his ground and in less than ten seconds we all that we need to see. Ianto decided to be a good man a very long time ago and whilst he’s not always succeeded he’s never stopped trying. His final moments drive that home and for a character who started out at the heart of many of the show’s weakest episodes, his death is the most affecting of them all.

At the centre of it all though stands Jack Harkness. John Barrowman’s work here is exemplary, balancing the playfulness of Jack’s personality with moments of total emotional collapse. His reluctance to treat his relationship with Ianto as something serious makes for some of the best jokes in the series but has a real edge to it as we see Jack run, time and again, not just from happiness but from responsibility. He knows what he’s done, knows how Ianto will react when he finds out and keeps himself at arm’s length because that’s where he feels he deserves to be. The events of Children of Earth do nothing to change that.
Just as the Gwen we see here is the one we’ve always been promised, this is the Jack Harkness that should always have been at the heart of the show. He’s a matinee idol fifty years out of time, a man who doesn’t age but knows death and who has done terrible things for what he thinks is the greater good. He’s the dark mirror of the Doctor, a man who does bad things for good reasons and who is covered in so much blood, a little more won’t matter. Here, at long last, the writers let Barrowman show the weight of Captain Jack’s thousands of years of life, the damage done to a man who can do nothing but live. Yet again, his best moments are the quiet ones, his distraught reaction to Ianto’s death, the scene with Alice in the corridor, the moment where Gwen asks if he’ll come back and he says simply ‘Why?’. Jack has done it all, the bad far more than the good and he can no longer take it. He’s a broken hero in a broken world and in the end does the one thing he can do; leave.

Ranged against all of them is the 456, an alien we never see as anything but an abstraction of beaks and mucus. This is the true genius of the piece, sidestepping the traditional, slightly poor Doctor Who monster for something which is as implacable as it is invisible. The 456 repeats the same phrases over and over, utterly confident in its superiority and presented, at least at first, as just that; a superior force, an alien that can’t be seen or stopped, only communicated with. When that fades, when the 456 are revealed as nothing more than junkies wanting children for the chemicals they secrete, it’s shattering, the accepted wisdom of modern science fiction in general and Doctor Who in particular collapsing as we realise we’re not even important enough to conquer, just to farm. Again, everything changes and we’re shown not only how small we are, but how cruel the universe around is. We’re cattle, to paraphrase Charles Fort and Clem, the only survivor of the 1966 incident played with tremendous strength and dignity by Paul Copley, is defective cattle. His death is as casual as Ianto’s, as cruel and whilst it holds the key to defeating the 456, he’s still dead and he is far from alone.

Children of Earth is stunning, in the most literal sense of the word. It evokes classic British science fiction but does so with an approach which is modern without once being self conscious or mocking. This is a story about what we do in the face of total disaster, of tiny disasters and tiny victories and the way they weave together to make history, for better and for worse. Packed with incredible performances, it’s a relentlessly grim exploration of the moment everything changes for humanity and what happens to those left behind. It’s a modern classic in every sense, a story that takes old elements and makes them timely and new. 21st century TV drama has rarely been better.

You don’t notice him at first. The stage is open, set in a ramshackle garden behind York Library, surrounded by Roman ruins and picnic blankets. It’s light, early evening in the summer, that moment before the curtain comes up mixed with the moment before the sun goes down. Unobtrusively, a man sits down on one of the mini-stages, engrossed in a book. He’s tall, middle-aged, well-dressed and completely focussed. He looks like us. He’s sitting where we are. The stage is empty.

Then, satisfied, he walks on stage, holds the book up high and slams it shut.

And in the middle of York, in the middle of Summer, reality shifts.

A storm breaks and suddenly we’re on the deck of a ship filled with grim sailors and terrified noblemen. The man with the book is there too, invisible to the other characters, an audience member somehow on stage, an author somehow within his own story. This is The Tempest, a play where audience members and characters, where author and story and reality and fantasy mix to dizzying effect, presented in York Library Gardens by Sprite Productions.

Roger Ringrose’s Prospero is the author idealised, a muscular, vigorous intellect who throws himself around the stage with tremendous intensity and more than a little flamboyance. Prospero is, on paper, a tragic hero of the sort Shakespeare loved; a man left to die by his brother, forced to survive on a desolate island and exiled for over a decade whilst he plotted his revenge. He is, on paper, a Hamlet rather than a Claudius, the victim of a story instead of a protagonist.
However, that very exile empowers him. Prospero is thrown outside the story, runs off the edge of the film like Yosemite Sam but instead of plummeting to the ground, finds out he can influence the story from his place beyond it. His books may be supplied by Gonzalo but the knowledge, the will to build his liberation comes from Prospero alone. He becomes, within minutes of the play opening, a contemporary of Faust, a man who not only knows his place but knows how to make it better and knows the price he will pay for that. He is the first enlightened scientist of English literature, the tree whose roots still run through modern fiction and incorporate everything from Bernard Quatermass to Sherlock Holmes.

He is of course, also Nigel Kneale and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Prospero is outside the book looking in, an author up to his elbows in the organs of his story, present in almost every scene and frantically assembling events to produce the ending he wants.
This makes for some fascinating structural choices in The Tempest. The play is amongst Shakespeare’s most broken backed with the second half little more than an extended series of resolutions as Prospero first gives his blessing to the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand, then foils the half-baked assassination plot of Trinculo, Stefano and Caliban and finally, almost as an after thought, brings his enemies forth, renders them powerless and then forgives them. Were the play not so redolent with some of Shakespeare’s best language it would feel anti-climactic. Instead, it feels new, clean, almost elegant. This is an author at the end of his life no longer content to build the same story with the same tools but, instead, wanting to comment on that story and explore how it has changed and how he in turn changes it. It is, in short, arguably the first post-modern play ever written.
Prospero is not the only character to transcend narrative however. This production features an Ariel who is simultaneously both resolutely physical and completely incorporeal. This Ariel is played by every member of the cast not on stage and occupied with other roles, a hive mind that is simultaneously individual and united, picking up each other’s sentences, finishing each other’s lines and throwing questions at Prospero from every angle. This is Ariel as a breeze, an idea, a concept given temporary voice and it’s an approach so elemental, so incredibly effective that it’s difficult to understand why every production doesn’t use it. Of course, the one character who never forms part of Ariel is Prospero. The author’s role in the story is inviolate, intimate but distant, involved but apart and whilst he can control a chorus of voices, he can never be part of it directly.

Ranged against these two, the rest of the cast seem almost perfunctory. Miranda in particular is one of the least of Shakespeare’s heroines, a woman required to do little more than love her father, fall in love with Ferdinand and deliver the ‘O brave new world!’ joke. Likewise the pairings of Sebastian and Antonio, Trinculo and Stefano are essayed villains at best, men separated by class but united by blank, unthinking avarice. Here, once again, the cast are used in a manner which is both efficient and clever, Sebastian and Trinculo both played by Phillip Benjamin, Alonso the duke of Naples and Stefano both played by Jacob Krichefski. The rich and the poor alike in every, lost on an island writing itself into existence around them.
Which isn’t to say the company don’t do an excellent job, because they do. This is one of the most uniformly strong companies of actors I’ve seen in years with Benjamin in particular showing a neat ability to shift between the embittered Bertie Wooster of Sebastian and the affable and casually violent, cockney Trinculo. Krichefski is also extremely impressive, bringing a wounded, resigned dignity to Alonso and playing Stephano as a jovial, sinister, cowardly stand up comedian, boasting about murdering Prospero one moment and swapping hats with an audience member to avoid being identified the next. Jack Whitam’s Caliban is a gangly figure, uncoordinated and unfocussed and all the more sympathetic for that whilst Tony Taylor’s Gonzalo is arguably the greatest of Shakespeare’s councillors, a man who is quietly compassionate, ruthlessly intelligent and completely honest about his failings. Each one of them and the rest bring something unique to the role or roles they play, from Stephanie Thomas’ intensity as part of Ariel to David Hartley’s compassionate, open Ferdinand.
However, each of them is in the end nothing more than a phrase in Prospero’s book, a component to propel the story to it’s conclusion. This is a play about a man using the tools of narrative to bring his own story back on course, seizing back control of the life that’s been taken from him and he does so with a ruthlessness that often isn’t communicated. Trinculo, Caliban and Stephano are last seen pursued by dog and wolf spirits, Ferdinand is put through arduous physical labour to prove his worthiness to Miranda and the play finishes with Gonzalo, Alonso, Sebastian and Antonio completely at Prospero’s mercy. They are saved not just by Prospero’s mercy but by the fact that any other ending would be untidy. Things must return to normal must, if anything, be better than normal and the only way that can be achieved is if Prospero is reinstated as Duke of Milan and Ferdinand and Miranda marry, cementing his alliance with Alonso. Everything that happens along the way from the way he toys with Alonso’s grief to the enslavement of both Ariel and Caliban drives that purpose, and with it the story, forwards; Prospero must be returned to the book, he must finish his story and that story must have a happy ending.
But can you return to the book after you’ve been outside it? Prospero’s closing speech suggests otherwise, suggests instead that he knows all too well the crimes he has committed and that the price he will pay for them, is knowledge of them. As the play closes, again with Ringrose alone on stage, it seems clear that he will never be fully part of it again. The actor, the character, the author all leave the stage as one, the story they have worked so hard to build finished and receding and, somehow, doing so without them. Prospero’s books, it seems, imprison as much as they empower.