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.

Childhood's End - 'The Deceivers'

"Are you ready to party?"

As the Golden Age of mankind flourishes, scientific curiosity is dying, with one Dr Boyce its last champion and that almost entirely under the direction of the Overlords.

Karellen visits Ricky to tell him that being in the Overlords' ship has made him terminally ill, and that he can not have children. This visit prompts a resurgence of the pilgrim camps outside the Stormgren farm. Elsewhere, their son's night terrors prompt the Greggsons to call in counselor Peretta Jones. Thomas Greggson describes visits to a hellish landscape and responds to a cry from his unborn baby sister, Jennifer, even as an unseen force twists and warps Peretta's crucifix.

"I know it looks like a conspiracy wall..."

The Greggsons are lured to the Boyce institute for a party where Karellen makes an appearance. He tells Milo, who has been conducting private research into the Overlords (including speculating that a previous visit is responsible for tales of demons which match the description of the Overlords themselves,) that scientific curiosity was leading humanity to its destruction. Then he arranges for Amy Greggson to be brought to a chamber with a ouija board where he coaxes the yet unborn Jennifer to 'awaken' and communicate with something away from Earth in a hugely and public light show. The Greggsons depart and Boyce is visibly shaken, but Milo recognises communication in the light; letters of the Overlord language, each representing constellations, including a previously unknown symbol standing for an uninhabited constellation*.

"For Jesus!"

Back on the farm, Karellen brings Ricky a rare and precious cure for his illness, but first Ellie and then Peretta threaten the Overlord with a shotgun, because bitches be crazy, yo (and apparently they missed that worldwide broadcast showing the Overlords preventing four semi-pro shooters failing to execute Ricky thanks to routine Overlord intervention from last episode.) Okay, in fairness Ellie is pissed when she learns that Karellen deliberately sterilised Ricky, since what is coming 'will be harder on the parents,' and Peretta because... Well, because she is crazy. She talks about faith, but actually she's consumed with religious hatred, her belief shaped not by love of her God but by hatred of what she sees as its enemies: The Overlords. She shoots Karellen**, but Ricky uses the restorative to heal him (at the cost of his own life,) and Peretta later kills herself.

Jennifer Greggson is born and her eyes go all freaky.

With 'The Deceivers' (a misleading title, as the revelation is that humans have deceived themselves) the contraction of the timeline and use of continuous characters begins to bite, and the grand scope of the novel is lost in the soap-opera minutiae of individual lives. Milo's research is interspersed with an awkward romance subplot with a colleague (she's so into him, but he's all about the research and then they go to the party and she's in  acute dress and then there's kissing) and the 'seance' scene is just monumentally over-dramatic, as the slow emergence of the true purpose of the Overlords is lost in spectacle and telekinetic child rage.

Peretta Jones, a character added for the series as the voice of the dying of Earth's religions, is too much of a crazed zealot to be sympathetic. Yael Stone's wild-eyed templar with her suicide mother is actually much less affecting than the earnestness of Lara Robinson as the younger Peretta in 'The Overlords', making her simple pleas not to forget God.

'The Deceivers' then is a less effective episode than 'The Overlords', and I worry that the overemphasis on the individual in a story explicitly about the fate of humanity as a whole will continue to dog the finale.

* And yes, the astrophysicist conflates star clusters and local stellar groups with constellations, because Stargate?
** As a side note, apparently the local Sheriff considers 'she's my friend' as sufficient ID to let someone through a police cordon, and a gunshot insufficient reason to run into a barn and investigate.

Childhood's End - 'The Overlords'

This is certainly a series that makes some bold visual choices.

Into a world on the brink of environmental collapse come the ships of an alien race. They temporarily halt all transport, silence all communication and harmlessly ground all aircraft, then use the images of dead loved ones to send a message. Karellen - the self-styled supervisor for Earth - announces that they are here to help and to prevent humanity destroying the planet and themselves. They choose Ricky Stormgren, a Missouri farmer and natural leader to be their sole contact with the people of Earth.

Media mogul Hugo Wainwright, distrustful of the aliens, dubs them the Overlords and uses social media propaganda to drum up distrust, while Ricky struggles to overcome resistance to the often high-handed methods of the planet's benefactors. The Overlords provide clean power and a massive programme of resource redistribution, but run roughshod over national sovereignty and personal property rights, resulting in a continuing support for Wainwright's Freedom League, while other groups voice fears that the Overlords will eclipse the concept of God. All the while, Karellen refuses to appear in his true form before the people of Earth.

Inner city kid and aspiring physicist Milo (who narrates the opening bookend from a post-apocalyptic future) is shot by a gang banger after his mother gets into a fight with a rival drug dealer, but the Overlords intervene, killing the shooter and restoring Milo to life, at the same time healing his lifelong paralysis. As their good works begin to drown out the Freedom League's message, the League kidnaps Ricky and threatens to kill him if the Overlords do not withdraw and allow humanity to fuck up the planet on their own schedule. Karellen acts to rescue Ricky, but not before allowing Wainwright's fanaticism to subvert his own message and thus removing the last organised resistance to the Overlords' project.

I was if nothing else impressed that they went full demon for
the Overlords.

In their last meeting, Ricky uses a camera to shoot a picture of Karellen through his one-way mirror, but he and his wife agree that Karellen was right to hide himself. Even fifteen years later, when the supervisor deems it time, the world is shocked to see his true appearance. The watching grown ups are horrified when Earth's 'guardian angels' turn out to be towering demons, but the children smile in acceptance.

This new miniseries adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's first successful novel makes a number of changes, for better and for worse. My familiarity with the source is limited to this opening part as I have only read 'Guardian Angel', the short story which Clarke adapted into the opening section of the eventual novel, so I'm not claiming to be an expert.

Like the earlier BBC Radio adaptation, the miniseries opens with a character in the end days of Earth, which is kind of OMG spoilers. It also massively compacts the timeline of the series, so that there can be continual protagonists, whereas in the book each section revolves around a different cast of characters, and the gap between the arrival and revelation of the Overlords is fifty, not fifteen years. I guess it makes sense to have a more consistent cast for television, but it makes a bit of a mockery of the whole concealment thing when they don't leave long enough for the generation who have grown up with the Overlords all their lives aren't in charge yet. Also, so far the series hasn't mentioned the Overlords' first visit to Earth, but that may come later.

Finally in the headscratching side of things, the book's ambassador for Earth is Rikki Stormgren, the Finnish Secretary-General of the United Nations, representing a form of international authority and more importantly hailing from a largely neutral nation. Switching this character for Missouri farm boy Ricky Stormgren puts the voice of the Overlords slap bang in the middle of perhaps the most hated international playground bully since the European empires of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and results in the aliens' directives being effectively issued by the USA, with Stormgren flanked by dodgy Secret Service assholes. This muddies the waters significantly. Stormgren even notes to Karellen that the worst thing for many people would be if the Overlords, the beings sitting in judgement of the world, were just other humans with a bit more tech throwing their weight around. In essence, by working through the US, this is what they become; the parallels are too great, despite their almost Communist agenda.

On the other hand, the series makes an excellent fist of updating the present-day setting. in particular with the Freedom League's use of social media and soundbites to obliquely liken the Overlords to the Nazis or to farmers fattening stock for market. The use of the image of planes being lowered between skyscrapers was also a very potent and bold visual, a gentling of the great American nightmare image of the 21st century.

So far, the adaptation has been pretty good, holding to the basic ideas of the book with just a little compression of time and an increased US focus. The fact that part two is called 'The Deceivers' instead of 'The Golden Age' however gives me pause.