Quatermass(1979) - A Summary
Jan. 15th, 2007 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxOriginally posted on the Old World of Darkness forum on the Shadownessence site:
QUATERMASS: "My evaluation, Chuck - here it is. Forget about trying to get through to it.. The ripe crop can't appeal to the reaper. I think this is the gathering time. The human race is being harvested."
These chilling words froze the hearts and minds of a generation, back in 1979, when this Thames TV show first emerged onto the screens of Britain.
In this vision of a "near future" which was closer than we'd have liked, the world is coming to an end. Society has crumbled and fallen. Gangs roam the ruined streets. Graffiti and filth line the streets, and fires burn unchecked as the wealthy cluster desperately in their gated communities, and cult leaders gather the young to their side.
The Planet People are massing at stone circles, bidding the approach of the Lovely Lightning to take them to the Planet, and getting scorched earth as their only reward.
This series was absolutely drokking terrifying for me. At the time, I was but a lad; and I remember those four consecutive Wednesday evenings as if they were yesterday.
To me, they still are.
Well, this past few weeks one of my local TV stations has been showing the old Thames TV series one more time, in honour of the late Nigel Kneale, Quatermass' creator, who sadly passed last November. From the onset, with the funereal electronic theme, it was 1979 once more. So, to bring this theme into the World of Darkness, I include the episode summaries of the four episodes of Quatermass, to give you a taste of what the show was like.
"We all live in a world where technology is advancing faster than our codes of ethics and where people are turning to one another in confusion about where it is all heading. Philosophers, scientists and theologians all attempt to explain the turmoil in the world in their own terms and yet there still exists that vague apprehension that really no-one has the answer."
It's the end of the Twentieth Century. The world is dying. Society is crumbling.
Professor Bernard Quatermass arrives in a collapsing London to participate in a BTV broadcast celebration an international space station's link-up in orbit overhead. Condemning the violence he has seen, he makes dire predictions about the futility of such a hubristic project, fiddling while the world burns.
In desperation, he reveals that he has only come to London to ask if someone has seen his missing granddaughter. Before he can even do much more than show her photo, however, an unknown force apparently destroys the space station while the world watches.
Quatermass, now a scapegoat for the failure of the mission, is chased out of London, where he takes refuge with Joe Kapp, a Jewish astronomer operating a dilapidated radio telescope near a stone circle. Kapp shows Quatermass his family - his wife Clare and two daughters, their friends Alison, Roach and Chen and an Alsatian dog, Puppy.
In the countryside, things aren't much better. Planet People wander the hills and dales of the world, dressed in hippy garb, vacant, staring, lost, gathering around stone circles and praying to be let off the planet. One such gathering arrives around a circle called Ringstone Round; as Quatermass, Kapp and Clare watch, horrified, the Planet People's prayers turn to screams when a lash of white light descends upon them, breaking the stones and scorching the ground to white ash. Nothing but ash and a few half-buried waxy bodies remain, and after the Lovely Lightning, there is a hideous silence.
"He that soweth the good seed is the son of man: the field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels." - Matthew, 13: 37-43
More Planet People descend upon the freshly - obliterated Ringstone Round, as Quatermass, Clare and Kapp spot a single survivor, her body scarred like a Hiroshima victim: Isabel. The Planet People get violent, and Quatermass and the others barely get away with their lives.
Back at the observatory, the District Commissioner Annie Morgan arrives with news for the team. The Americans are trying to get through to Kapp and Quatermass. All is forgiven, it seems, because of what they discovered: at the time of the destruction of the Space Station, some sort of energy beam had landed at a massive circle of stones in Sao Paolo, obliterating between 12,000 and 14,000 young people who'd simply gathered there. It was a byblow of that energy bolt, which had also appeared all over the world over a period of two minutes, which had killed off the space station.
Alison vanishes, joining the Planet People. Clare shows signs of wanting to join them, smuggling out a pendulum and wandering off to a stone circle. Chen shows signs of wanting to join, too. Isabel, in the meantime, is taken down to London by Quatermass and Annie - Quatermass begins to glimpse a dreadful pattern to the events, but before he can do much more, they reach London, where they are ambushed by thugs. Quatermass is bundled out of the taxi. Back home, thousands of Planet People gather outside Kapp's home around another stone circle, while Kapp is a couple of miles away trying to fix an external dish.
This gives him a spectacular view of the Lovely Lightning as it descends to earth, taking out his entire family and thousands of Planet People.
This sort of 'social calculation' is characteristic of Kneale's attention to verisimilitude. "QUATERMASS" relies for its effect on establishing a very conceivable near- future: Prince Charles is now King of England, his sphere of influence relegated to a community of old dotards clinging to patriotism long since effaced by civil war, "Kill HM the King" shouts the graffiti; cars have registration plates 'v' and 'x' and all television networks have centralised to British Television (BTV) which broadcasts to an audience more eager for negfarious excitement (the family "Tittupity Bumpity" show) than hard news; the nation's youth have been unified under the banner "Planet People"; the "good old British Bobby" is now a part of the Metropolitan Contract police, and what remains of the army is under the command of a government whose operations and rhetorical gestures are confined to back rooms. None of this is beyond the scope of our present imagination.
Quatermass finds shelter among a community of old people living out of a scrapyard of rusted out old cars. Kapp undergoes a minor nervous breakdown in the wake of his family's slaughter.
Quatermass finally sees the whole pattern at last. An alien God Machine had set up humanity for the sole putpose of its eventual harvest. Planet People are the harvest. It's their time. They gather at the stone circles, and the Machine picks them off.
As Quatermass reaches this conclusion, Planet People begin gathering at Wembley Stadium, in their hundreds of thousands. As tension mounts, Isabel in the hospital levitates, and then explodes into a shower of white crystals. This confirms what Quatermas suspects - the ash is the part of the humans that the Machine doesn't need: their bodies. The Planet People never went anywhere. The ash they were walking in at Ringstone Round was them.
Horrified, Quatermass tries to warn the authorities of what's about to happen at Wembley, but too late. The biggest bolt of Lovely Lightning ever seen hits Wembley square on, and it all goes white ...
"... the only act of imagination Kneale requires is accepting the existence of this "insensible, insentient" alien machine in space that is culling a large proportion of the world's youth in blasts of celestial white light. Even then, Kneale is not asking much. Even the most sceptical of viewers w ould be hard-pressed to find it far-fetched."
In the wake of the latest harvest, Quatermass watches in horror as the sun rises green in a green sky. The ashen fallout from millions of humans has reached the upper atmosphere, and the sky has turned a bilious green, everywhere.
The only hope left for humanity is to try and convince the machine not to harvest any more humans. The only way of doing so is by luring the Lightning to a site the humans choose, and detonating a nuclear warhead just as the lightning strikes.
But how to lure the lovely lightning? As the young gangers relinquish violence and join the Planet People for what might be one final harvest, the older citizens find themselves growing increasingly desperate in their attempts to try and create an electronic signal which mimicks the signature of a million chanting Planet People.
But when the time comes, and Quatermass and the others set up the trap, Quatermass is horrified to find his missing granddaughter among the crowd of Planet People who turn up, attracted by the fake signal. Reunited with his only living relative at long last, as the lightning descends, he and his granddaughter push the button that triggers the n'uke.
There is an aftermath. There are children. The lightning never came again. But all the same those children, at the end of the show, are seen dancing and singing inside an ancient stone circle ...
Anyway, there you have it. 20 years before the Week of Nightmares and when the Old World of Darkness' Time of Judgment all began, Nigel Kneale showed the world how to really write an Apocalypse.
And to this day, if I find myself in a stone circle, I look up, just in case the fucking lightning should come down ...
QUATERMASS: "My evaluation, Chuck - here it is. Forget about trying to get through to it.. The ripe crop can't appeal to the reaper. I think this is the gathering time. The human race is being harvested."
These chilling words froze the hearts and minds of a generation, back in 1979, when this Thames TV show first emerged onto the screens of Britain.
In this vision of a "near future" which was closer than we'd have liked, the world is coming to an end. Society has crumbled and fallen. Gangs roam the ruined streets. Graffiti and filth line the streets, and fires burn unchecked as the wealthy cluster desperately in their gated communities, and cult leaders gather the young to their side.
The Planet People are massing at stone circles, bidding the approach of the Lovely Lightning to take them to the Planet, and getting scorched earth as their only reward.
This series was absolutely drokking terrifying for me. At the time, I was but a lad; and I remember those four consecutive Wednesday evenings as if they were yesterday.
To me, they still are.
Well, this past few weeks one of my local TV stations has been showing the old Thames TV series one more time, in honour of the late Nigel Kneale, Quatermass' creator, who sadly passed last November. From the onset, with the funereal electronic theme, it was 1979 once more. So, to bring this theme into the World of Darkness, I include the episode summaries of the four episodes of Quatermass, to give you a taste of what the show was like.
One: Ringstone Round
"We all live in a world where technology is advancing faster than our codes of ethics and where people are turning to one another in confusion about where it is all heading. Philosophers, scientists and theologians all attempt to explain the turmoil in the world in their own terms and yet there still exists that vague apprehension that really no-one has the answer."
It's the end of the Twentieth Century. The world is dying. Society is crumbling.
Professor Bernard Quatermass arrives in a collapsing London to participate in a BTV broadcast celebration an international space station's link-up in orbit overhead. Condemning the violence he has seen, he makes dire predictions about the futility of such a hubristic project, fiddling while the world burns.
In desperation, he reveals that he has only come to London to ask if someone has seen his missing granddaughter. Before he can even do much more than show her photo, however, an unknown force apparently destroys the space station while the world watches.
Quatermass, now a scapegoat for the failure of the mission, is chased out of London, where he takes refuge with Joe Kapp, a Jewish astronomer operating a dilapidated radio telescope near a stone circle. Kapp shows Quatermass his family - his wife Clare and two daughters, their friends Alison, Roach and Chen and an Alsatian dog, Puppy.
In the countryside, things aren't much better. Planet People wander the hills and dales of the world, dressed in hippy garb, vacant, staring, lost, gathering around stone circles and praying to be let off the planet. One such gathering arrives around a circle called Ringstone Round; as Quatermass, Kapp and Clare watch, horrified, the Planet People's prayers turn to screams when a lash of white light descends upon them, breaking the stones and scorching the ground to white ash. Nothing but ash and a few half-buried waxy bodies remain, and after the Lovely Lightning, there is a hideous silence.
Two: Lovely Lightning
"He that soweth the good seed is the son of man: the field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one; The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the world; and the reapers are the angels." - Matthew, 13: 37-43
More Planet People descend upon the freshly - obliterated Ringstone Round, as Quatermass, Clare and Kapp spot a single survivor, her body scarred like a Hiroshima victim: Isabel. The Planet People get violent, and Quatermass and the others barely get away with their lives.
Back at the observatory, the District Commissioner Annie Morgan arrives with news for the team. The Americans are trying to get through to Kapp and Quatermass. All is forgiven, it seems, because of what they discovered: at the time of the destruction of the Space Station, some sort of energy beam had landed at a massive circle of stones in Sao Paolo, obliterating between 12,000 and 14,000 young people who'd simply gathered there. It was a byblow of that energy bolt, which had also appeared all over the world over a period of two minutes, which had killed off the space station.
Alison vanishes, joining the Planet People. Clare shows signs of wanting to join them, smuggling out a pendulum and wandering off to a stone circle. Chen shows signs of wanting to join, too. Isabel, in the meantime, is taken down to London by Quatermass and Annie - Quatermass begins to glimpse a dreadful pattern to the events, but before he can do much more, they reach London, where they are ambushed by thugs. Quatermass is bundled out of the taxi. Back home, thousands of Planet People gather outside Kapp's home around another stone circle, while Kapp is a couple of miles away trying to fix an external dish.
This gives him a spectacular view of the Lovely Lightning as it descends to earth, taking out his entire family and thousands of Planet People.
Three: What Lies Beneath
This sort of 'social calculation' is characteristic of Kneale's attention to verisimilitude. "QUATERMASS" relies for its effect on establishing a very conceivable near- future: Prince Charles is now King of England, his sphere of influence relegated to a community of old dotards clinging to patriotism long since effaced by civil war, "Kill HM the King" shouts the graffiti; cars have registration plates 'v' and 'x' and all television networks have centralised to British Television (BTV) which broadcasts to an audience more eager for negfarious excitement (the family "Tittupity Bumpity" show) than hard news; the nation's youth have been unified under the banner "Planet People"; the "good old British Bobby" is now a part of the Metropolitan Contract police, and what remains of the army is under the command of a government whose operations and rhetorical gestures are confined to back rooms. None of this is beyond the scope of our present imagination.
Quatermass finds shelter among a community of old people living out of a scrapyard of rusted out old cars. Kapp undergoes a minor nervous breakdown in the wake of his family's slaughter.
Quatermass finally sees the whole pattern at last. An alien God Machine had set up humanity for the sole putpose of its eventual harvest. Planet People are the harvest. It's their time. They gather at the stone circles, and the Machine picks them off.
As Quatermass reaches this conclusion, Planet People begin gathering at Wembley Stadium, in their hundreds of thousands. As tension mounts, Isabel in the hospital levitates, and then explodes into a shower of white crystals. This confirms what Quatermas suspects - the ash is the part of the humans that the Machine doesn't need: their bodies. The Planet People never went anywhere. The ash they were walking in at Ringstone Round was them.
Horrified, Quatermass tries to warn the authorities of what's about to happen at Wembley, but too late. The biggest bolt of Lovely Lightning ever seen hits Wembley square on, and it all goes white ...
Four: An Endangered Species
"... the only act of imagination Kneale requires is accepting the existence of this "insensible, insentient" alien machine in space that is culling a large proportion of the world's youth in blasts of celestial white light. Even then, Kneale is not asking much. Even the most sceptical of viewers w ould be hard-pressed to find it far-fetched."
In the wake of the latest harvest, Quatermass watches in horror as the sun rises green in a green sky. The ashen fallout from millions of humans has reached the upper atmosphere, and the sky has turned a bilious green, everywhere.
The only hope left for humanity is to try and convince the machine not to harvest any more humans. The only way of doing so is by luring the Lightning to a site the humans choose, and detonating a nuclear warhead just as the lightning strikes.
But how to lure the lovely lightning? As the young gangers relinquish violence and join the Planet People for what might be one final harvest, the older citizens find themselves growing increasingly desperate in their attempts to try and create an electronic signal which mimicks the signature of a million chanting Planet People.
But when the time comes, and Quatermass and the others set up the trap, Quatermass is horrified to find his missing granddaughter among the crowd of Planet People who turn up, attracted by the fake signal. Reunited with his only living relative at long last, as the lightning descends, he and his granddaughter push the button that triggers the n'uke.
There is an aftermath. There are children. The lightning never came again. But all the same those children, at the end of the show, are seen dancing and singing inside an ancient stone circle ...
Anyway, there you have it. 20 years before the Week of Nightmares and when the Old World of Darkness' Time of Judgment all began, Nigel Kneale showed the world how to really write an Apocalypse.
And to this day, if I find myself in a stone circle, I look up, just in case the fucking lightning should come down ...
