EERIE SF/PARANORMAL/STEAMPUNK: 1899

A ship steams toward destiny in Netflix's 1899.

Just before we are swamped by television’s annual flood of holiday movies and specials, you might want to take a few nights to binge something completely different. Fans of steampunk and classic mad-scientist SF, in particular, will be fascinated by 1899, an eerie psychological paranormal thriller on Netflix from the German creators of Dark.

  I’ll admit I’m only about halfway through this limited series starring an ensemble of international actors (the dialogue is delivered in German, Polish, Cantonese, Spanish, Danish, French and I’m sure I missed a few languages) led by British actor Emily Beecham, but I’m definitely hooked. It’s a bit of a slow build, I don’t mind waiting for a show to reveal itself, as long as the characters are interesting (which they are in this case—everyone seems to have a secret and/or a painful past).

The basic premise is that a shipful of European immigrants—some richer on the upper decks, some poorer in steerage—are making the trip across the Atlantic on the symbolically named Kerberos (yes, the three-headed dog that guards Hades). The captain of the mostly German crew (played by Andreas Pietschmann) and his officers remark that, 1) they are grateful they weren’t laid off when the company was bought out by a British cruise line and, 2) they are cruising at only about half capacity in passengers and with no cargo.

Aboard the ship are a mix of odd characters, including a female doctor (Beecham) who specializes in the brain and has studied medicine, but not practiced (which was common at the time for women); two gay men posing as brothers, one of them a fake priest; a madam posing as an imperious society matron; a Chinese mother and her daughter, who is destined to join the madam’s brothel as a “geisha;” a devout Danish family in steerage, the oldest brother of whom is a target for one of the rich gay men and the oldest sister of whom is pregnant; and so on.

About a third of the way into the trip, the ship receives a repeating telegraph of coordinates from a ship of the same line (the Prometheus) that has been lost for four months. There are no other details. The captain determines they must change course to check it out. (I was suddenly reminded of STAR TREK, forced to investigate a mysterious emergency distress signal in the black of space.)

Now, what we have come to understand is that both the captain and the doctor have received black-edged letters from the same anonymous source urging them to investigate the cruise line (owned by the doctor’s father) and the disappearance of the (again symbolically named) Prometheus. On the back of the envelopes was this message: What was lost will be found again. And it’s useful to know that a black-edged envelope in Victorian times meant an announcement of death.

So, despite much grumbling from passengers and crew, the Kerberos is diverted to find the Prometheus. When they get there, they discover the abandoned ship, looking very decrepit (like it’s been abandoned much longer than four months), but no bodies and no evidence of what might have happened. They discover only one survivor—a boy of about eight, locked in a cabinet (from the outside). He doesn’t speak, but hands over to the doctor a pyramid-shaped black object with markings on it. No one has a clue what it is, but immediately all the compasses on the Kerberos go haywire. If it were me, I’d toss the thing overboard, but no one ever does, do they?

Also, while the Captain and his crew (and the doctor) are searching the Prometheus, a young man (Daniel Solace, played by Aneurin Bernard) swims aboard the Kerberos from the abandoned ship, fully clothed, boots and all, and finds an empty room to hide out in. He starts releasing scarabs (another symbol of death) in the ship, why we don’t know. But, pretty soon, people start dying; the captain and the doctor start having visions; and things start going south. (The scarabs, by the way, also unlock doors and portals to other worlds.)

When contacted for orders, the cruise line insists they sink the Prometheus, which is strange enough, but the Captain refuses and makes the decision to tow it back to their port of origin. Passengers and crew are all unhappy—several of the passengers have big reasons for not going back—and the crew fear their captain has lost his mind. But the Captain just knows something is wrong about that ghost ship, and he’s determined to find out what. But a mob blames the boy for the spate of deaths on the ship, chaos leads to mutiny, and Daniel Solace turns out to hold the key to some fearsome new tech on the Kerberos.

But that’s not the end to the wild and inexplicable events on the ship. Manipulation of the new tech places the Kerberos elsewhere, miles from where it had been, back on course for America and separated from the ill-fated Prometheus. Another push of a button starts up the ticking of a spectral clock which sends most of the passengers into a zombie-like state and over the side into the ocean. It’s only much later that we discover the cause of all this may be a mad scientist behind what is a massive mind experiment.

The show has a few faults, the biggest being that Beecham’s character, Maura Franklin (the doctor), is what we in the science fiction world call a Mary Sue. She should be just another passenger—well, with a few connections to the plot, certainly—but for some reason she manages to insert herself in all the action. That would never happen onboard a real ship. Still the show is worth a watch for fans of the paranormal, of steampunk (the Victorian setting, the gears and odd tech—Solace even wears a long coat and boots), and of classic mad scientist SF. They, like me, will want to tune in to find out what happens next in this twisty tale.

Cheers, Donna

THE PERIPHERAL: SF IN MY HOMETOWN!

Chloe Grace Moretz stars in this SF tale.

Almost a year ago, the big news in my hometown of Marshall was that a production company from Amazon Prime Video was here filming a series. This week The Peripheral, a science fiction thriller based on a 2014 novel by William Gibson, debuted on the streaming service, sending our little town into a legitimate tizzy. Much of the population watched the show just to see familiar locations around town—the music venue known as The Depot turned into a dive bar, an old warehouse turned into a 3D print shop where the heroine works, local roads and the main bridge over the French Broad River as backdrop.

William Gibson, of course, is the author of the groundbreaking Neuromancer (1984). He coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and expanded on the concept in award-winning novels in which his protagonists are biologically hard-wired to be connected to (and interacting in) that virtual reality. So, films like THE MATRIX, TRON and so on, all owe their foundational ideas to Gibson.

In The Peripheral, our heroine, Flynne (Chloe Grace Moretz), is working a dead-end job at a 3D print shop in a small town in NC, living with her mother (Melinda Page Hamilton) who is blind and suffering a brain tumor and her military veteran brother, Burton (Irish actor Jack Reynor of MIDSOMER). Her brother supplements their income by competing in virtual reality games, but Flynne is more talented. (In a nod to the recognized misogyny of the gaming world, Flynne never competes under her own name and avatar, but always as Burton’s male avatar.) So, when a Colombian corporation comes calling asking for someone to test their new VR system, it’s Burton they contact, thinking he’s the one who has reached the highest gaming level. They offer big bucks for the trial, so Burton persuades Flynne to step in for him.

When she puts on the headset, she’s transported to the London of 2099. The CGI here is worth watching for, with glittering lights, bright costumes, huge classical statues that at first seem to be projected in holograms across the city (but on closer observation are actually structures suspended in air), and so on. But, of course, neither Flynne nor those of us watching at home can figure out what is going on in this dazzling future, or why it seems so real, or why she’s being asked to do what she’s asked to do without question (kidnap a woman on the orders of one “Aelita” (Charlotte Riley), who then disappears).

Back home in 2032 NC, Burton and Flynne have attracted the malevolent interest of the local bad guy, Corbell Pickett (Louis Herthum) and his gang, for reasons that aren’t yet exactly clear beyond pure meanness. She has to buy her mother’s drugs from them because she can’t afford the local pharmacy, but even their price is too steep until Burton’s disabled military buddy Conner (ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI’s Eli Goree) shows up to threaten a suicidal shoot-out to save her.

After Flynne spends a couple of sessions in future London, most of which is admittedly pretty confusing, a mysterious organization called the Research Institute headed by an exotic Cherise Nuland (T’Nia Miller) puts out a contract on the dark web to eliminate the one person who might know where Aelita is. Don’t ask me how, but this results in a pitched battle at Burton and Flynne’s home in the woods. Fortunately, Burton’s former military buddies are drinking with him around the campfire when it goes down. All are linked via haptic implants a la Neuromancer and manage to protect Flynne and Mom in the house for quite a while but still might lose the battle without the help of Conner who shows up late in the game to save the night.

I will say I was mostly lost during the first episode and distracted by some monumental rookie mistakes on the science fiction tech side. (More on that later.) But by the second episode, the story and characters had started to sort themselves out, and I had begun to be invested in both Flynne and Burton. I’d begun to care about them and what happened to them. Part of this is due to the authenticity of their setting, which is handled with care and respect (which seldom happens with regard to Appalachia), and their accents, which are decent (which almost never happens with regard to our part of the country). The London setting and storyline is less relatable, not because it’s set in the future (I’m a science fiction fan, after all; I can put myself there), but because the worldbuilding and characters are less defined so far. I’ll reserve judgment on that part of the story until I see more.

Now there were a few distractions in the first episode, as I mentioned. As science fiction writers, we can all testify to how hard it is to write near-future SF. Mind you, I don’t think this is a problem William Gibson had; I think it’s a problem his adapters (writer Scott B. Smith, executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan of Westworld, the series) are having. In the near-future, technology is always outrunning the average writer’s imagination. Things are just moving too fast.

For example, in The Peripheral, the show’s creators have Flynne’s lower class family using a beat-up Roomba to clean their house. Remember, this is only ten years in the future. But theirs is not a ten-year-old Roomba, which any self-respecting poor family might pick up at a yard sale and keep together with duct tape and ingenuity. No, this is a futuristic Roomba that hovers! A hovering Roomba wouldn’t pick up a damn thing—it’s a vacuum cleaner, not a flying saucer for cats! And the disabled Conner uses a unicycle that connects with a motorcycle to make a motorized trike. Why? When four wheels are so much more stable and can even now be engineered to climb stairs. This is what happens when visually oriented filmmakers write SF. The actual science fiction ideas get lost in the desire to look cool and “science fiction-y.”

Still, there is much to like about The Peripheral beyond the fact that it’s set in my hometown. Look past the bloopers and the flawed first episode to give it chance. (New episodes of The Peripheral air Fridays on Amazon Prime Video.)

Cheers, Donna

 

 

ONE SERIES TO RULE THEM ALL

A glimpse of Paradise from Amazon's LOTR: TROP

Well, the biggest screen news this week has to be the debut of Amazon Prime’s lush and outrageously expensive return to the fantasy world of Middle-earth with LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER. I’ve been a Tolkien fan since I read the LOTR trilogy for the first time at the age of 16. (I’ve re-read the books every couple of years or so since then.) I loved the LOTR films by Peter Jackson, and I regularly re-watch those, too.

So, I was anxiously awaiting this debut to see what newbie producers and creators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay would come up with from the limited source material of, basically, Tolkien’s appendices. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, despite extensive negotiation with the Tolkien estate and his own personal participation in the bidding war with Netflix for the rights to this series (which may or may not have helped), was not able to get the rights to the author’s detailed history of the early ages of his fantasy world, The Simarillion. (That book includes the tale of Beren and Luthien, the original human/Elf love affair of which Aragorn sings in FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING and would have made great screen drama.)

On the other hand, obtaining even limited rights allowed the showrunners and writers to set their series in Tolkien’s familiar landscape of characters and places, with an overarching theme and premise around which to tell new stories. As the title suggests, their ultimate goal is to tell the tale of the forging of the rings of power (three for the Elves, seven for the Dwarves, nine for Men, and, of course, the One Ring to Rule Them All), but there is plenty of room for elaboration. (Why, for example, do the High Elves still wear their rings if they know Sauron had a hand in their making?) Think of it as a kind of fan fiction, but with a half-a-billion-dollar budget to work with. (And, yes, that’s billion, with a B. At the end of the planned five seasons, this will be the most expensive television series ever made.)

The new series, which debuted with two episodes on September 2, is set thousands of years before the time of Tolkien’s LOTR trilogy. During this so-called Second Age, the Elves and the Men of the great island kingdom of Numenor joined together to defeat the evil of that time, Morgoth. But in that war, his disciple, Sauron, escaped.

Young Elf warrior Galadriel (Morfydd Clark in the role that Cate Blanchett once owned) vows to take up the search on behalf of her brother Finrod (Will Fletcher), who died in its pursuit. She eventually becomes leader of the Northern Armies for Elf king Gil-Galad (Benjamin Walker), believing strongly that Sauron is still lurking in Middle-earth somewhere. But her quest finds only an abandoned forge at the top of the world, and, after many years, the king commands her to give it up. Even her friend Elrond Half-Elven (Robert Aramayo), a minor advisor in the court, suggests she’s taken her search too far. So when the king declares victory over Morgoth and Sauron and rewards his remaining troops (including Galadriel) with a trip to the Undying Lands in the West, she reluctantly agrees to go. At least until the very last minute, when she jumps ship to go back to the fight in Middle-earth.

Galadriel has always been one of the more interesting characters in Tolkien’s universe, and, in this prequel, we have a hint of the person she later becomes. As a young Elf she is impulsive, passionate, a fighter, someone who is willing to sacrifice herself and others for her cause. After she abandons her trip to Paradise, she encounters and overcomes one challenge after another in her pursuit of evil. It’s easy to understand the temptation the older Galadriel feels when presented with the One Ring, that she might be “more terrible than the dawn,” and that “all will love me and despair.” It will be fascinating to watch her grow during the series, as long as the writers, and the actor, can continue to clear that high bar.

The same is true of the character of Elrond, though I’m not as happy with the casting of Aramayo in the role. We do see hints of Elrond’s later caution and hesitation to do what is necessary to defend Middle-earth by allying with Men. Though I think it would be more helpful, particularly for Tolkien newbies, to address outright why Elrond is treated shabbily in the Elven High Court. (He’s only half-Elven, you see). Though maybe that will come later. His background could be his motivation for being reluctant to ally himself with Men. If so, we need to know it.

The benefits of prequel foreshadowing are much more obvious when we turn to the ancestors of the Hobbits, the migratory and secretive Harfoots. Though it is true the writers come uncomfortably close to stereotype territory in giving the Harfoots bad Irish accents and a tendency to vanish like legendary leprechauns, I confess I found them charming and fun to watch, much like their more playful descendants, Merry and Pippin.

And, just like the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo, there is a Harfoot with an unusually curious and adventurous nature, Nori Brandyfoot (Markella Kavenagh), who isn’t content to gather berries and weave baskets with the rest of her folk. She wants to know what is beyond the range of their “wandering;” Who’s out there? What is there to see? Her elders tell her to mind her place, of course. The larger world is dangerous for their kind. Better to stay hidden.

But then, as will happen many thousands of years later, the larger world comes to them, in the form of what appears to be a meteor crash-landing in a nearby field. Nori and a friend go to explore, and find an unconscious, naked “giant” in the center of the impact crater (the unnamed “Stranger” played by Daniel Weyman). So far, the Stranger is incapable of speech, but his attempts to communicate create energetic chaos. Except when he whispers to fireflies in, um, firefly language. Hmm. Somewhat reminiscent of a certain wizard who murmurs to moths to call up a ride on a giant eagle.

In the first episode, we are also introduced to Arondir (Ismael Cruz Cordova), an Elf warrior posted in a remote village of Humans in the South of Middle-earth. His outpost was established to maintain watch over a cohort of Humans who were once allied with Morgoth and thus are considered unreliable. Arondir has been pining for a local healer, Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi), for years, though it is a forbidden relationship, and he has done little but speak a few words to her at the village well. Elf king Gil-Galad has declared the long war with the forces of evil over now, though, and the outpost is about to be withdrawn when mysterious poisonings occur, and an unknown terror burns a nearby village to the ground. Arondir goes to investigate and, well, things don’t end happily. Then there is the evil artifact that Bronwyn’s son Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin) has stolen from a nearby barn, bearing the sign of Sauron.

Most of the first episode introduces us to the main characters and sets up the premise. We don’t meet some major players until Episode Two, however. That would be the Dwarf prince Durin IV (Owain Arthur), heir to the throne of King Durin III, and his wife Princess Disa (Sophia Nomvete), in Khazad-Dum, an under-mountain stronghold previously seen only as a haunted, Orc-infested ruin in Jackson’s FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. If there was nothing else worthy of watching in these two episodes (and, trust me, there is plenty), the scenes of Khazad-Dum in all its glory would make them worthwhile. In Jackson’s film, Gimli asks us to use our imaginations to think of the dank caverns as they once were in their heyday, but now we don’t have to imagine them; we can see them. And they are fabulous.

The excuse we have for visiting is a diplomatic mission to the Dwarf kingdom by Elrond on behalf of Gil-Galad’s celebrated smith, Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), seeking technical assistance in building a new forge that will generate the “heat of a dragon’s tongue.” Just an aside here—we know that such a forge was used to create weaponry like the sword Narsil (which was shattered taking the Ring from Sauron’s finger and re-forged for Aragorn’s use). The question remains as to whether this forge was used to create any Ring of Power.

Elrond and the prince once were friends, but Elrond (as the long-lived Elves are wont to do) neglected the friendship, and he must first overcome Durin’s hurt feelings. (Those Dwarves are so sensitive!) We have hints of the roots of the falling-out between Dwarves and Elves, here, too, an enmity that Gimli and Legolas eventually healed.

While we’re on the subject of the Dwarves, we might as well talk about trolls, too. That is, the trolls that have stalked this production of the fantasy series practically from the beginning. There is a certain element of the fantasy fan base (and we might as well own it, of the science fiction fan base, too) that is openly racist and sexist when it comes to their beloved content. “Elves” (or Dwarves, or Hobbits, or aliens or captains of starships) can’t be Black! they say. Only Orcs (or bad guys) can be Black! And what’s with all these female lead characters? The heroes of fantasy and science fiction are supposed to be heroes! That is, males (and preferably young, white males). The casting of Black actors as a lead Elf and a lead Dwarf (as well as several Harfoots) drew howls of rage from the usual suspects online. Okay, and I’m only going to say this once, it’s fantasy, people. Elves and Dwarves and Harfoots aren’t real. They can be purple if we imagine them so. And the folk who carry the story can be any sex at all. Or no sex. Or all sexes. Just ask Ursula LeGuin, for one, and she was writing 60 years ago.

Fantasy (and science fiction) is for everyone, no matter your race, color, gender or any other sort of definition. Now, can we all relax and enjoy the show?

Cheers, Donna