Utopia
Note: Since I plan to discuss the nature of the conspiracy that is central to the story only read to the double line and no further if you don’t want any plot spoilers.
Created by Dennis Kelly
Based on An original idea by Huw Kennair-Jones, Mark Aldridge, & Clare McDonald
Written by Dennis Kelly & John Donnelly
Directed by Marc Munden, Wayne Yip, Alex Garcia Lopez & Sam Donovan
Starring Alexandra Roach, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Paul Higgins, Fiona O’Shaughnessy, Adeel Akhtar, Oliver Woollford, Neil Maskell, Geraldine James
Composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer
This is a review of the British version of Utopia, and there is an American version freshly out on Amazon Prime, and I’ve seen enough of that to know that the details and tone between the two differ significantly. I planned to review the Amazon US version, but I understand it has been canceled after just nine episodes. TV critic Inkoo Kang called that Utopia “Too hackneyed to be timely, too grim to be escapist.” Not enough kittens and butterflies, I guess.
Part of it was timing. In 2013, pandemics were one of those things Trump said nobody could see coming, except of course everybody could. In Utopia, the “Scottish flu” arises, and amasses a high death toll fairly quickly. Cue anonymous people in isolation suits to show up on the telly hauling corpses to tents.
It turns out that the pandemic is being faked by the government, which knows nobody is too stupid or too paranoid to not take a pandemic seriously. Luckily, a vaccine is available. By the tens of millions, Britons are supposed to line up in masks to get their shots. Truly a queue anon.
However, the pandemic is fake, and the vaccine has a different purpose.
Probably not the right message for 2020. America already has enough lunatics.
The original series has several other items that would upset a 2020 American audience, such as a bloody school shooting, and a scene where a woman gets an eleven-year-old boy drunk, and it’s implied that she is willing to try to seduce him for information he has.
Several people are suspicious, having gleaned subtle clues from a graphic novel which spells out the whole conspiracy, albeit very indirectly.
There’s a couple of assassins who remind me quite a bit of the two angels in the first two season of Preacher. There are high-ranking government functionaries, both honourable and otherwise. There’s tons of intrigue, mostly of the dark variety, and the show, popular to begin with, has become a cult classic in the UK.
Originally on Channel 4, it can now be seen on Amazon Prime.
Despite the darker edge brought about by current events, it’s a great action/conspiracy/comedy thriller.
If you could push a button that would instantly and painlessly sterilize 99% of the living human population, including in all likelihood, yourself, would you press it?
On one hand you have nearly eight billion people on Earth, and a wide array of global catastrophes await us in the not-too-distant future, what with climate change, the rise of fascism, major shortages of food and drinking water. To press that button might save billions from a horrible and painful existence. Or any existence at all.
On the other hand, you are sterilizing nearly everyone without their consent. From that perspective, are you committing the greatest crime against humanity in the history of humanity?
So: Would you press the button?
The idea isn’t original. I was first exposed to it nearly 50 years ago, when Philip José Farmer wrote Seventy Years of Decpop (the deliriously lyrical German title was Bevölkerungsimplosion)which explored the course of humanity after a scientist came up with an aerosol that did sterilize almost everyone. Typically of Farmer, it was a dark and rather sad novella, but both brilliant and unforgettable.
There’s no simple, obvious answer to such a moral choice, and the characters in Utopia are faced with exactly that sort of choice: Her Majesty’s government has faked a flu epidemic that supposedly has wiped out a Scottish Isle. They rush a vaccine into production, only the vaccine doesn’t immunize against the imaginary flu; it sterilizes people. Unaddressed in the series is that Westminster has finally come up with a Final Solution to the “Scottish Problem” that is less complex than devolution. I suppose the fact they were going to make the vaccine available worldwide after the Aberdeen testing meant the Scots shouldn’t take it personally.
The moral and ethical complexity of the basic choice means that there are divided feelings on it both amongst antagonists and protagonists, and personal vacillations appropriate to the nature of the dilemma. There is simply no “right” answer.
But then you knew that, right? Right?