Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams
Episode 10 The Father Thing
Written by Michael Dinner, based upon the short story ‘The Father-Thing’
Directed by Michael Dinner
Starring Brian Bolland, Shannon Brown, Dominic Capone, Mireille Enos, Greg Kinnear
Plot: Charles Walton’s family is under attack… His father has been replaced by an alien duplicate as part of a vanguard for an alien invasion.
The Short Story: As with Foster, You’re Dead (adapted for Electric Dreams under the title Safe and Sound), The Father-Thing deals with a child’s point-of-view. It tackles a theme popular in the 1950s—the replacement of people close to you with duplicates. This, often expressed as a reaction to the Communist witch-hunt of the time (a frequent topic for Dick’s short stories), features as a central theme in movie like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (four film adaptations based on Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers) and the 1938 John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There? (adapted as The Thing From Another World, 1951, and John Carpenter’s The Thing, 1981, and the source for the 2011 prequel version of The Thing). What Dick does in this short story is to ignore the world-shattering event of an alien invasion through stealth in which humans are gradually replaced, instead focusing on the personal story as it impacts upon one family, and (even closer) one child.
Charles Walton is part of a typical 1950s family, of two parents—June, a housewife and mother, and Ted, an office drone. Sent to fetch his father for dinner, Charles hesitates as he is unsure which of the two identical men he has seen in the garage he should bring back. The problem is averted when Ted comes to the dinner table himself, just the one of him… Charles is deeply affected by this, however, as it was ‘the other one’ that has come in and made itself part of the family.
Of course, it is the eight year old who can tell something isn’t right, and naturally he’s not believed. Charles flees from the figure he has begun to think of as ‘the father-thing’, attempting to hide in his room. When the thing that looks like Ted pursues him, Charles escapes to the garage, where—hidden inside a burn barrel— he finds ‘the remains of his father, his real father. Bits the father-thing had no use for. Bits it had discarded.’
This is chilling stuff, as close to horror or Ray Bradbury as Dick probably ever came in his writing. Of course, the question arises in the readers mind as to whether young Charles Walton is a reliable narrator—should we take his impression that his father has been replaced by an invading alien at face value? Or is it an expression of some form of mental illness? Often in Dick not everything is as it seems on the surface, but most modern readers who know the author’s work are probably safe in assuming that this 1954 story (published in the December issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction) will take a straight-forward approach to its themes.
Dick had a very personal inspiration for this story. Writing in 1976, he noted: ‘I always had the impression, when I was very small, that my father was two people, one good, one bad. The good father goes away and the bad father replaces him. I guess many kids have this feeling. What if it were so? This story is another instance of a normal feeling, which is in fact incorrect, somehow becoming correct … with the added misery that one cannot communicate it to others. Fortunately, there are other kids to tell it to. Kids understand: they are wiser than adults… hmmm, I almost said, “Wiser than humans”.’
Charles turns to an older kid, 14-year-old bully Tony Peretti. They return to the garage, and the snakeskin-like remains convince Peretti that Waltons’ tale of seeing two Teds, and that one had replaced the other, must be true. Observing his parents through the window, both boys see Mrs. Walton leave to call neighbours in search of Charles, while the father-thing seemingly wilts, no longer having to keep up appearances as ‘Ted’ as if somebody had turned off its power.
Together, Charles and Peretti recruit a third boy, Bobby Daniels, to help them locate the external power source that seems to motivate the father-thing. They eventually located a small metallic insect-like creature burrowing under a concrete slab. As the boys struggle against the creature’s apparent psychic force field, they are stopped from destroying it with their BB gun by the intervention of the father-thing, who drags Charles inside the garage.
When Peretti turns his BB gun on the father-thing, Charles manages to escape, hiding in the bamboo field nearby where he discovers a cocoon-like fungoid creature, almost human-shaped: a mother-thing! As in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pods containing the alien replacements for other individuals are hidden awaiting their maturation. This one is beginning to resemble June Walton, Charles’ mother. Of course, the next thing he discovers is his own nascent replacement, the Charles-thing.
Both the father-thing and its progeny go into convulsions, a result of Peretti and Daniels pouring kerosene into the tunnel inhabited by the metallic insect controller. The firey death of the bug also kills the creatures it controlled. As they prepare to burn the fungoid-like bodies, it seems likely that a wider invasion is yet to be thwarted.
One of Dick’s most anthologised stories, The Father-thing approaches a standard tale with a creepy and atmospheric edge. It plays upon teenage paranoia, the fear that as you don’t relate to your parents (the generation gap, as it was termed in the 1950s and 1960s), then maybe they aren’t actually related to you at all. Perhaps they’re not even human. It’s an old trope put to good use by Dick in a period before it was all but worn out by repetition.
The story puts together a patchwork group of heroes: an eight year old, the six years older Peretti, and the young black kid, Daniels, who’s about nine. They know one another through neighbourhood interactions and school, but they’re not friends. Charles even thinks that the bully Peretti may have beaten him up at one point, as he had most kids in school.
The paranoia of alien invasion is clearly what Dick intended, but there is a real syndrome called ‘prosopagnosia’ in which people can fail to recognise the faces of those they know, even relatives. Kids don’t recognise their own parents, while parents can fail to recognise their own children. The neurological disorder, commonly called ‘face blindness’, was properly diagnosed and named in 1947 (although there are records of earlier examples), but it didn’t really become widely known until the late-1980s into the 1990s, long after Dick’s time.
Of course, Dick’s two most prominent themes are embedded in The Father-thing. The question of what is ‘human’ is apparent in the new life-form that replaces Charles’ father—if a ‘thing’ looks, sounds, and acts like the human ‘Ted’, is it just as human? Secondly, there is the question of what is ‘reality’. Is an alien invasion underway? Was Ted the first to be impersonated, or just the latest in a long line of thousands. There is also, in a sense, a reading in which the children have created their own counterfeit reality—maybe the whole thing is nothing but a childhood game, filtered through the imagination of Charles Walton, while Ted and June are simply long-suffering parents with a wildly imaginative kid to cater for…
The Television Episode: This final episode of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams is a fairly straightforward adaptation of the source story with a heavy dose of Stranger Things injected into it. As the ‘body snatchers’ theme is so old and worn out through repetition, this instalment—for all its much-needed fidelity to the original story—might come across to those not well versed in Dick as derivative and old hat. That’s a problem inherent in the source material that the show all but ignores.
The episode is cast well, building up a good father-son relationship between Greg Kinnear’s ‘Father’ and Charlie, ably played by Jack Gore. They are connected through a love of baseball; they talk about it on a camping trip and Jack is trying out for the school team. Unusually in these kind of family-based dramas, the role of the mother (well played by the often under-rated Mireille Enos) is sidelined. An attempt to add adult drama themes into the story—the parents are on the verge of separating—falls flat, and feels like an addition made to the story simply to bring it up to length. There is little made of the idea that the new father-thing might be a more caring better family man than the original (an idea explored earlier in the series in Human Is). This soapy element is possibly another Spielberg echo, lifted this time from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
What’s lacking, perhaps, is the ambiguity of Dick’s story, the possibility that as we’re seeing things through Charlie’s eyes, perhaps he’s mistaken about what’s going on, or imagining things. Instead, we get a straightforward body-snatchers-alien-invasion tale, albeit fronted by Mr. Nice Greg Kinnear. The invasion is simply represented through a series of meteor shower like events.
It’s derivative, not helped by the fact that much of the show looks like it has taken a leaf straight out of the Stranger Things playbook (itself derivative of 1980s Spielberg). The kids tool around on their bikes with a degree of autonomy modern children generally don’t have. Their investigation into what’s going on verges on the tone of a caper movie, very different from the paranoia that opens and closes the episode. This uncertainty in tone doesn’t help an instalment that has very little to add to the original source story. Oh, and once again there’s a throwaway PKD reference when one of the school teachers (Terry Kinney) is revealed to be one ‘Phil Dick’. #RESIST
Verdict: Oddly, unlike the best of the series (Autofac), The Father Thing is faithful to the source story but fails to build it into something worthwhile.
Brian J. Robb
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The Foster family, to the amazement of his classmates and teachers, don’t even own a nuclear fall-out shelter. Foster is not registered for Civic Defence, his family do not contribute to the NATS (essentially national defence), and he doesn’t even have a permit for the school’s communal shelter. All this because is father is something described by one fellow pupil as ‘anti-P’. The entire community, apart from the Fosters it seems, are on a wartime footing, even if the ‘war’ is simply an extension of the then ‘cold’ war that Dick himself experienced in the mid-1950s extrapolated 20-odd years into the future.
Mike’s father, Bob, a ‘wooden furniture’ salesman, exhibits all manner of what might be thought of by his contemporaries as eccentricities. He carries a pocket watch, which causes Mike to note ‘he was surely the only man who still carries a watch’. He’s ‘anti-P’, standing against the ‘preparedness’ that everyone else in town has (literally) bought into. The shelter salesman Mike encounters thinks to himself that the Foster family are ‘coasters’, refusing to pay into the local and national defence (the NATS), but ‘sliding along, safe’ without contributing the 30 per cent of their income as everyone else does.
Originally published in Star Science Fiction Stories #3 in 1955 (edited by Frederick Pohl), ‘Foster, You’re Dead’ is a snappy projection of fear-induced consumerism. Planned obsolescence and ever-newer models are obvious points of criticism, but it is the fact that these items (shelters, gas masks, subscriptions to the NATS collective defence) must be bought to ensure continued life. It’s best put in the wonderful slogan: Buy or die. It is a simple fusion of war and fear with economic necessity and end stage capitalism that is even more relevant now in the second decade of the 21st century than it was in the mid-1950s. It is a simple example, even given the 1950s trappings of Dick’s future, of his prescience, his ability to take contemporary trends and imagine how things might go—in this case, he was (unfortunately) spot on.
America is divided into those in the West, who live free from state scrutiny in ‘bubbles’, and those in the East, who live in fear of terrorism but who willingly give up personal privacy for guaranteed safety. Foster and her mother have won the right to spend a year in Chicago, one of the Eastern cities. She is enrolled in Runciter High School (an entirely pointless nod to Dick’s novel Ubik and its central character Glen Runciter), and discovers that she is like an unsophisticated ‘country’ girl coming to the glamorous ‘big city’. Like Mike in the original story, Foster is an outsider, shunned by her contemporaries because the beliefs of her parent mean she opts out of scoiety’s ‘norms’. Instead of bomb shelters, Safe and Sound updates the story to the age of social media and the ‘forever war’ against terrorism, real or implied.
In order to fully participate in school (and in this society in general), Foster needs to have a ‘Dex’, an always-on electronic link that allows access to information and services, but also surveils the population at large 24 hours a day. In acquiring her Dex, Foster discovers that everything is transactional and a refusal of sexual contact with her supplier causes the wider school community to turn on her. As a commentary on current high school social life in the age of social media, this is a decent updating of Dick’s work, but Safe and Sound doesn’t really adapt Foster, You’re Dead.
Instead, it rips off the brilliant 1999 Jeff Bridges movie Arlington Road in which a man is unwittingly manipulated into perpetrating an act of terrorism. In this case, Foster is manipulated by her Dex tech helper (always whispering in her ear) into a position where she fulfils the propaganda purpose of depicting all of those from the ‘bubbles’ as ‘terrorists’ who threaten the Eastern way of life. As a result, her mother is arrested and jailed, while Foster is reprogrammed through brainwashing to become the new face of the Dex system and of the benefits of conformity. (A completely unnecessary series of final flashback simply confirm what any alert viewer should have been able to work out for themselves rather early in the episode.)
This is a decent SF story to tell, full of social commentary on the current world, and it does feature some ‘Dickian’ themes and ideas, but Foster, You’re Dead it is not. It even manages to waste great actors like Maura Tierney and Martin Donovan in nothing roles. That’s been the biggest problem with this entire series—while the episodes might riff on elements or ideas in their source stories, they are not (with the honourable exception of Autofac, by no accident the best instalment) adaptation of the Dick stories—and that’s a shame.
The Short Film: As Foster, You’re Dead is a story in the public domain, it has been free for others to attempt their own adaptation. Those dissatisfied with the Electric Dreams instalment might do better to seek out the 25 minute short film from 2013, also based on the story (linked below, available on Vimeo). Directed by Kyle Gerkin, this is a more faithful take on the material, although it suffers from being a low budget production. As the story doesn’t require spaceships or aliens, it is more suitable for this kind of limited approach to a more grounded form of psychological science fiction, a Dick speciality.
In a desperate attempt to open communication with the automated systems, Perine, Morrison, and visitor O’Neill waylay an automated delivery truck. When destroying its mixed drop-off of equipment and consumables simply results in a second, identical load being deposited, O’Neill tries a different tack. Pretending the supplied milk is off, he provokes the machine into querying the nature of the defect. The men respond with a nonsense answer: the goods are ‘pizzled’. This gambit garners the promise of a visit from a ‘factory representative’ that will gather ‘data’ on the product deficiency. They have made contact and are one step closer to their ultimate aim of persuading the automated factory to shut down.
Autofac is, of course, a rather crude satire on the growing consumer culture of the 1950s, the period when Dick wrote the story. The machine’s insistence on the endless ‘manufacture of consumable commodities’ was a projection of a future based upon the reality that Dick witnessed around him (but, being an under-paid pulp writer, could only participate in to a limited degree). Written in late-1954, Autofac was published in the November 1955 edition of Galaxy magazine.
When group leader Conrad Morrison (David Lyons) meets with her, it is clear that the humans are not going to be able to persuade the autofac system to change its ways. Instead, it is down to Emily to attempt to reprogramme Monae’s Alice (modelled after the original human head of PR for the autofac system) to use her in an audacious plan to infiltrate and destroy the autofac from the inside.
The trick Beacham successfully pulls off is to extend Dick’s metaphor for rampant consumerism. The war having actually wiped out humankind, the autofac system found itself entirely without customers. Its solution was to simply create more, convincing human androids that don’t know they are artificial. Emily and company are all ‘fake’ people, with Emily modelled after the founder of the autofac system itself. The twist built upon this twist is that Emily has discovered this (via a recovered issue of Wired magazine), and her infiltration of the autofac system is to plan a software bomb deep in its matrix, thus destroying it from the inside.
This is a great extension of the story, taking Dick’s idea of the robots building more autofacs and converting it to the concept of the autofacs creating their own human-like customers. This allows Electric Dreams to once again explore Dick’s perennial question of ‘what is human?’ once again, but from a new angle. The performances are all great, and the environments exactly conjure up Dick’s story (although as with much SF TV there is a slight over-reliance on factory interiors for the depths of the autofac). Direction by one-time actor Peter Horton is serviceable rather than flashy, but the story stands by itself helped by the actors rather than anything else.
Loyce points out the body hanging from the lamppost to his coworkers, who all seem nonplused by it, pushing Loyce towards hysteria. Fearing for his own sanity, Loyce investigates the out-of-place street ornament more closely. The man is wearing a torn, distressed suit and is a stranger to Loyce. The questions pile up in his mind: who is he? How did he end up here? Why isn’t anyone taking any notice of him?
He discovers a ‘cone of darkness’ hanging above City Hall, accompanied by a ‘buzzing … like a great swarm of bees’. He perceives creatures of some sort, exiting the ‘vortex’ cloud and onto the roof of City Hall. Giant winged insects of some kind are arriving en masse in Pikeville from a ‘break in the shell of the universe’. The aliens are making their way to Earth from ‘another realm of being’. Furthermore, these insect creatures disguise themselves as men through some form of mimicry.
Arriving the next morning in the neighbouring town of Oak Grove, Ed Loyce is able to tell his remarkable story to the authorities. He outlines a theory that this incident is only the latest in a long war between men and the invading insects, dating back to ancient times, perhaps even chronicled in the Bible. The only thing he doesn’t understand is the hanging man—what was that all about? ‘Bait,’ explains the Police Commissioner of Oak Grove to Ed Loyce. A trap, to draw out the unconverted, and Ed Loyce has fallen straight into it. Later, as the Oak Grove bank vice-president emerges from a day toiling in the vaults, he notices a strange figure hanging from a telephone pole just outside the police station…
The political background here is one where America has expanded into a mega-nation, taking in Canada and Mexico in the process (whatever happened to that wall?) to form MexUSCan—leading to the naff political slogan Yes-US-Can. It appears to be a prosperous one-party state in which the Candidate (Vera Farmiga) for the highest office is selected from 52 initial entrants. Farmiga’s Candidate and the media people surrounding her appear to be refugees from The Hunger Games in terms of their outlandish styling in hair and dress, supposedly to highlight class difference between the ‘elites’ and the ‘working class’ represented by Phil.
Happy-go-lucky Phil begins to question his world when he (and seemingly he alone) perceives the words ‘Kill All Others’ hidden within both the speech and visuals accompanying a broadcast featuring the Candidate. Most people either didn’t see the subversive message or are happy to ignore it, but Phil’s agitation brings him to the notice of the authorities. As a result he is brought in for testing, but is released with a monitor to keep an eye on his health.
Kill All Others is fine as far as it goes, but it is a radically different story from the Dick original which only manages to pay the merest of lip service to the points made in the original. The gut punch of Ed Loyce becoming the ‘hanging stranger’ in the next town over is completely lost, as is the aliens-from-another-dimension angle. The only effective thing is the sense of paranoia that is gradually ramped up as Phil becomes every more aware that his thinking is different from those around him—is he an ‘other’ or are they? Even this aspect is not as impactful as it might have been. In significant ways, almost each of the episodes of Electric Dreams have been disappointments when taken in conjunction with the stories that supposedly influenced them, although as examples of standard American television science fiction they just about pass muster while falling short of Black Mirror style social and political commentary.
When Gus does arrive, Lester is unimpressed, seeing his childish conduct as somehow counter to ‘a realistic orientation’ to life. When his work takes Lester to a trip of several weeks duration to Rexor IV, Jill is disappointed when he simply laughs at the idea that she might accompany him. Lester leaves Jill and Gus behind, setting out to fulfil a long held professional ambition.
Clearance Agent Frank takes Lester in to the department. Clearance Director Douglas explains that Lester’s ‘original psychic contents’ have been removed and stored, only to be replaced by ‘substitute contents’, essentially a whole new consciousness and personality. This happened on Rexor IV, and the Clearance Department are only too aware of the process. Ten previous impostors have been identified and ‘vibro-rayed’. Lester Herrick is the first to make it to Earth; the others were all caught aboard ship, out in deep space.
Updating the sexual politics of the Dick original, Mecklenburg upgrades the wife figure to someone who has a career and distinct motivations and desires of her own. The Babadook’s Essie Davies is Vera (changed from the story’s Jill), who holds a position within the organisation that sends her husband, Silas (show producer Bryan Cranston, also changed from the story’s Lester), out on dangerous missions to Rexor IV to secure the much-needed oxygen. This welcome change gives the Jill/Vera character much more agency. The Frank equivalent (or the nearest the show has to offer) is Ruth Bradley’s Yaro, which she curiously plays almost exactly like her humanoid robot character in Channel Four’s Humans (adding an extra ‘What is human?’ kink to this PKD text).
Cranston’s Silas begins as the unloving, detached, work-driven figure of Dick’s story, only to return from a mission to Rexor IV changed. Perhaps the change in Cranston’s performance is not as distinct as might be expected, but his actions speak louder, with a fresh attitude to food, his wife, and ‘romance’ in evidence when he returns. The upgrade where we are shown video of the conflict on Rexor is welcome, as is the depiction of the Rexorians as formless, sparkling clouds, perhaps pure consciousness. The revelation that a couple of Rexorians were able to infiltrate Silas’ ship brings suspicion down upon him and the fellow soldier he saved.
One thing missing from both versions is any discussion of the motivation of the Rexorians—why are they stealing human identities and trying to get to Earth? The short story suggests Rexor IV is a dead or dying world, so simple survival might be a motive. In the television version, they are the subjects of a war, so might sabotage of the Terra war effort be a factor, in which case, Vera’s denial of Silas’ changed nature is put in a new light? This is, of course, speculation beyond anything either text gives either reader or viewer.
Miller is committed to the period he is studying, the Middle Twentieth Century and enjoys adopting not only the dress, but speech patterns and affectations of the period. This, he believes, gives him genuine empathy with the people of that time, beyond a mere intellectual curiosity. His role is to research, maintain, and update museum exhibits relating to life in the long-past 20th century. Unfortunately, he lives in a carefully regulated, hierarchical society that is a stark contrast to what he sees as the individual freedom of the past.
Miller’s entire perception of reality shifts, as he recalls working for old man Davidson at United Electronic Supply in San Francisco. He’s not only observing these strange people from another time hidden within his historical exhibit, he is becoming part of it. What was previously a 3D projected backdrop has now become an ever more convincing reality for George Miller. That begs the question, which is the ‘true’ reality; the 20th century world that Miller now seems such a natural part of, or the future world he inhabited mere moments ago?
He discovers the ‘weak spot’ that allows access back to his ‘world of tomorrow’, so concludes both worlds are real. An encounter with Fleming, however, sees Miller makeup his mind to remain in the past, something his boss denounces as ‘psychotic delusions’. For Miller the past is a freer place, where the state has no control over marriage and children, as in the future. Rationalising he has found a ‘time gate’, a bridge to the past, Miller resolves to stay there.
All that has been retained here is the character name and the central conceit of Exhibit Piece of the two worlds, and the open question as to which one is real. On top of that, Moore has layered two stories about Sarah (Anna Paquin), a traumatised cop in the future, and George Miller (Terence Howard), a wealthy company executive dealing with the loss of his wife and his high-tech software. The opening sets up yet another variation on the Blade Runner future (clearly indicating that the only acceptable visualisation of any Philip K. Dick tale relies on the work of Ridley Scott), first indicated by an opening close-up shot of an eye, followed by the usual neon advertising and flying cars.
Both worlds share certain elements—they both have the same wife in Kate (or had, in the case of Miller); they live in what appears to be the same or very similar apartments; they frequent the same retro-diner; their lives are affected by the same villain… In the way these worlds are depicted, they are equally ‘fake’, equally televisual in that they might actually be pilot episodes of two separate on-going TV shows. There are even echoes of earlier instalment The Commuter (and at one point in dialogue someone even invokes the title of the story that inspired last week’s episode: Sales Pitch).
The third paragraph gets to the subject of the story: ‘The ads. That was what really did it. … The ads, the whole way from Ganymede to Earth. And on Earth, the swarms of sales robots. It was too much. And they were everywhere.’ Here’s the modern relevance, the all-pervasive nature of advertising. Back when he was writing this story in 1953 (it appeared in the June 1954 issue of Future Magazine), the advertising Dick was concerned with was limited to newspapers and billboards, with television just starting to makes its inroads into the home. Now, we have targeted internet-driven personalized adverts, tailored to each of us individually. Sales Pitch, in that respect, is even more relevant today than when it was first written as the situation had got significantly worse.
The ads have a physical effect on Morris, exerting ‘pressure on the audio-visual regions of his brain’, so much so that he has to shake his head to clear the after-image. Their all-pervasive nature is driving him to ‘despair’, causing ‘misery and fatigue’. Even when he gets home to Chicago, he encounters a sales robot as he approaches his own front door. This one is pitching a ‘metabolism adjuster’ for the ‘perfect endocrine balance’. He has no option but to simply push past the unwanted obstruction. He’s been so distracted by all the ads, he’s even forgotten the fact that today is his 37th birthday.
Amid the on-going destruction, Morris realises that the robot itself is the ‘fasrad’, a ‘fully automated self-regulating android (domestic)’, just one of a range of such ‘fully automatic’ androids now on the market. The ‘fasrad’ proceeds to fix all the destruction it caused and then waits patiently in the living room for Ed Morris to purchase it. Although Morris refuses to do so, the android insists it will stay around until he realises just how indispensible it is and he makes the purchase. Unbidden, the machine makes various improvements around the house and even completes Ed’s tax return.
What connects the Electric Dreams instalment Crazy Diamond to the Dick short story Sales Pitch? Well, in the abstract both concern a dissatisfied middle aged man who longs to flee his life to pastures new, where he can live the life he wants free of current restrictions. That’s about it. Instead, the core of the story is thrown away in a couple of lines when Ed Morris’s wife Sally (Julia Davis) refers to a dream she had that is basically the plot of Sales Pitch… because the rest of the episode simply refuses to have much to do with the central story it is supposedly adapted from.
There are echoes here of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo (1996) that go beyond even the casting of Steve Buscemi. Everything Ed tries to do, whether aligning himself with Jill or trying to turn her over to his boss, seems to backfire. His schemes and alliances all come to nothing. In the end, Sally and Jill outsmart him, escaping them selves together on his boat, while he is left in the surf with his precious Syd Barret LP. Both this and Fargo play with film noir narrative structures and characters, from the man whose life is disrupted by a femme fatale (Knudsen’s Jill is characterised by the colour red throughout, from her hair and lips to her clothes and jacket), and the cross and double-cross nature of the criminal enterprise (which even reveals Ed’s boss as another tempted by the rewards of crime against the company he’s employed by). Jill’s role as an insurance salesperson and mention of a ‘double indemnity’ policy also points to noir as a touchstone.
All this, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Philip K. Dick’s story Sales Pitch. Whether the writers or producers thought the incessant intrusive advertising storyline had already been done (maybe Minority Report or Black Mirror had already stolen their thunder), it’d be interesting to hear exactly how Sales Pitch was so changed to become Crazy Diamond (and just what does that new title mean, exactly?).
In terms of writing, The Commuter predates both The Impossible Planet and the opening story of the television series, The Hood Maker. It was written in late-1952 and published in Amazing in the August-September issue of 1953. It is one of Dick’s essential tales of shifting realities.
A bigger change has been made to the gender and nature of the initial ticket buyer. The exhausted ‘little fellow’ of the story has been transformed in to Tuppence Middleton’s (Sense8) Linda, and she has been given a much larger, more pivotal role to play in the expanded narrative. The Paine stand-in Jacobson has been given a slightly different background in that he is already married with a disturbed teenage son named Sam (Anthony Boyle) who he is finding too much to handle.
The basics of the short story are followed in as much as a ticket buyer asking for a non-existent place vanishes, once outside the ticket window and once in the office, right in front of Jacobson and Paine. With Jacobson’s curiosity aroused, he takes a trip on the line in question and witnesses others leaving the train where there is no stop. Instead of waiting for a second trip (as in the story), Jacobson there and then impulsively joins these seemingly reckless passengers, only to find himself trudging across a field to the slowly revealed destination of Macon Heights.
As in the story, Jacobson’s return to his own workaday world brings with it a change. He is still married, but he and his wife have no children. At this point, Jacobson doesn’t seem to remember the now-missing Sam, or the trauma his mental conditions caused both his parents. In fact, Jacobson himself seems healthier and happier in this altered world.
In rediscovering Sam, and all that he meant, Jacobson come to realise that his life is not ‘right’ without him, whatever troubles he may have brought (and, indeed, will bring in the future, as revealed by Linda). At this point, The Commuter turns into something of a meditation on grief, and a discussion of how hardship and suffering are as much a part of life as good times and happiness. Linda’s world (heaven or a simulation?) does away with one, perhaps meaning that the other cannot be experienced or enjoyed to the full.
On TV The Commuter is nicely put together by director Tom Harper (Misfits, Peaky Blinders). He makes Woking look awful, especially in contrast to the town of Macon Heights (filmed in Dungeness and in the modern development of Buttermarket Square, in Poundbury, Dorset). There is something suitably counterfeit about the world of Macon Heights (and, indeed, of the real world location) that is inherent in the design of the place as much as in the way Harper shoots it. At times the building facades are revealed to be like old Hollywood studio fake frontages, while Linda is able to traverse the space in the oddest of ways (disappearing down into a staircase, for example, instead of going up it). It is a liminal space, neither real nor entirely false. There’s something of the computer game world (Grand Theft Auto style) about the place, too, reinforced by the repeated actions of some of the inhabitants, who seem to be trapped in some kind of ‘happiness loop’ (the engaged couple).
The performances are all fine, with Spall carrying much of the load and some of the key moments simply an interaction between him and Tuppence Middleton as the mysterious Linda. There is something of Jonathan Carroll’s early novel The Land of Laughs (1980) in this, where the daughter of a writer seems connected to a town where her father’s fictional creations apparently live.
The opening paragraphs economically paint a picture of both setting and the characters that will populate this story. A ‘tiny old woman’, aided by her personal ‘robant’ (apparently some kind of caretaker robot, a contraction of ‘robot servant’) has arrived at the office of Andrews and Norton. She is Irma Vincent Gordon, a 350-year-old original ‘sustained’ colonist of Riga II who ‘probably arrived in one of the old sub-C ships’. She has a simple request, conveyed through her ‘robant’: she wishes to buy a travel ticket. The only concern Andrews and Norton have is whether she will be physically able to cope with the stresses of space travel. When the ‘robant’ points out she has already come to Fomalhaut IX from Riga, they are satisfied.
Even by this early stage, however, there have been some major changes. Norton is already a more sympathetic character than Andrews. Where Norton is easy-going, considerate and has a girlfriend, Andrews is gruff, selfish, and watches porn in the office. It’s a short hand way of outlining their essential characters. Norton is already wanting to move on and up in the corporate structure, not so much for his own sake but to fulfill his girlfriend’s (soon to be wife’s) wishes for a ‘better life’. It is Barbara (Georgina Campbell) who drives his desire for a transfer to ‘Primo Central’.
The biggest addition made to stretch the story out to the 50-minute length of the television episode is a weird timey-wimey love story between Norton and Mrs Gordon, completely absent in the original. Indeed, the music at times recalls some of the romance themes of the Vangelis score for Blade Runner. Norton, it turns out, is the spitting image of Irma’s grandfather—whether he’s a relative or some kind of reincarnation is left vague. He begins to get flashes of a red bicycle and an idyllic day in the country.
Written in 1953 (originally titled ‘Immunity’ and published in the June 1955 edition of Imagination magazine, left), Dick’s short story was originally reacting to the political and social suppression brought about by McCarthyism and the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC) of Congress. He simply projected what he was seeing on the news sometime in the future when hiding your thoughts, maintaining some privacy, was deemed not yet simply illegal, but just socially unacceptable.
Richard Madden stars as Clearance Agent Ross (using his natural Scottish accent, for a welcome change), while Holliday Grainger is the teep, Honor, assigned to him as a partner with special skills. This is a world, visually and conceptually, that is reminiscent of Blade Runner. Madden is dressed and acts like a cut-rate Rick Deckard, while the shanty towns, marketplaces, and urban environments (some shot in the Thamesmead estate made famous by Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange—instantly recognizable, despite an attempt to hide it through all the murky cinematography and constant rain) all recall scenes from the first ever Philip K. Dick big screen adaptation. It seems, as ever, that any take on Dick’s work has to somehow pay homage to the foundation text of Blade Runner.
While both Madden and Grainger give great performances, there seems to be more of an emphasis on world-building than character (perhaps apt for a PKD short story adaptation). There’s no advanced technology here (sight of a typewriter and a record player, as well as a car straight out of Graham’s Life on Mars, suggest the 1970s, but references to computers and the internet reveals this is in fact a post-technology, perhaps post EMP burst, world). It is inconsistent, though, and seems to detract from the main theme of the short story, that of enforced mental surveillance.
Naturally, the television versions of these stories will be different from their source materials, but in the case of ‘The Hood Maker’ it almost feels like it has not been expanded enough to do justice to all the concepts and possible story threads. The drama could have been more front-loaded to better cover the purpose of Clearance, the slow emergence of the hoods, and the quest to find the maker. A 90-minute feature length version of Graham’s take on the material might also have provided the possibility of a conclusion (perhaps including the political conspiracy plot and the teeps’ mental link, hinted at as the ‘grapevine’ here but not capitalized on), rather than the unsatisfying open-ended position where the drama simply stops.
Counterfeit Worlds 
