Childhood's End - 'The Children'

Karellen's final announcement interrupts Harvey, just to prove that he's a dick.

Beset by crowds of children and with Milo constantly calling them, the Greggsons move to the enclave of New Athens, where the last flowering of human cultural achievement exists in a state of willful imperfection, separate from the Overlords' golden age. Milo conducts tests on the children of the world, all of whom are rapidly manifesting psychic powers. And in Missouri, Ricky is dying, and rejects Karellen's offer of a comforting hallucination of his honeymoon with his dead first wife.

Milo sees disaster in Jennifer Greggson's eyes and has his girlfriend vacuum-pack him for shipment to the Overlord's planet. For him the trip takes 48 days; for the Earth, 40 years. Karellen announces that humanity's time is over; their children have become something else and will soon depart to another state of being, and that no more children will be born. We are then treated to a montage of children floating away from their crying parents and one woman discovering she is no longer pregnant, because fuck you that's why.

And then New Athens explodes.

"Well, there goes the neighbourhood."

Milo learns that the children are joining with the Overmind, a universal consciousness formed of the last generation of almost every sentient race in the cosmos. the Overlords are an evolutionary dead end, a race who will never ascend, and who act as the Overmind's emissaries. Returning to Earth, Milo finds that everyone is dead, with just Jennifer Greggson, the catalyst and focus of change, standing on a mesa somewhere, channeling all the energy of the world into the act of ascension, destroying the world in the process.

As the end comes, Milo begs the Overlords not to forget humanity, and to keep something of their culture. When the Earth is gone, Karellen leaves one song to hang in space as a memorial.

The final installment of this adaptation wallows in its desire to make the story of humanity into a human story. Ricky Stormgren spends most of the episode dying, or in the hallucination of his first wife, leading to an emotional payoff when he declares his second wife the true love of his life that has next to no impact, because this really isn't his story and it's hard to invest in him. Since the end of 'The Overlords', he's basically just been a hanger on, tangentially involved at best through Peretta's bullshit Christian assassin subplot.

For identification purposes, we are not the Midwich Cuckoos.

The focus on Jennifer Greggson also hampers the broader story, and the necessary contraction of the time scale and bigging up of the seance and the Overlords' intensity makes the natural evolution of the last children of humanity to join the Overmind look like a deliberate act of cosmic child-snatching (and the less said about the sudden and arbitrary termination of every ongoing pregnancy on the planet the better.) What took decades in the novel occurs in a single generation, and the resulting emotional whiplash is clear in the characters, who transform a sedate and thoughtful work of philosophical speculative fiction into a histrionic angst-fest. The children too are so instantly and utterly alien that it's hardly surprising that they are seen as being 'taken', and their survival as representing nothing of humanity. From all we can see, they might as well be a battery for the Overmind, as the eroding of identity is replaced by the nigh-deification of the catalyst, Jennifer.

I don't know if Childhood's End is unfilmable, but certainly in this instance the drive to connect the story to a continuous human cast has dramatic and deleterious effects on the story and its fundamental purpose. The endgame of the story is the loss of individuality, and by focusing on individuals instead of the broader human story, that step becomes more antagonistic, the overtones more sinister. I guess the thinking was that without clear and consistent protagonists the story is less accessible, but I suspect that this is a story that would benefit from a bit of detachment. It's a shame, because there's a lot in there to like and there was real potential for more.

It was also frankly awesome to see the SyFy Channel investing in something weightier than another Sharknado movie.