Tag: Johnny Harris

The Fades, Episode 6

“It’s today. It’s the end of everything.”

FadesEp6

It’s apocalypse now, as The Fades reaches its much-anticipated climax this week. Paul’s dreams of the end of everything are becoming more frequent, as Reborn Fades wander the deserted streets in search of fresh meat. But we know from last week that Paul’s visions of the future can be changed. Or is it just that he doesn’t have the full picture yet?

This final episode paid off in spades all the concepts and plotlines that have been so carefully set up through the series’ run. I had been slightly worried that writer Jack Thorne wouldn’t be able tie the myriad of imaginative concepts and likeable characters up satisfactorily, but actually this really did. Almost – because then there was that coda…

But to begin at the beginning: it was a nice touch, in keeping with the story’s continuity, that Mac’s “previously on” recap was delivered from inside the boot of Neil’s Vauxhall Vectra, into which he’d been unceremoniously shoved at the end of the previous episode. You could tell this was going to be a dark episode when even Mac was so downbeat: “In the beginning was the word. And the word was shit.” It set a grim tone that was reinforced by some atmospheric montage shots of the deserted town, with bodies lying strewn on pavements and in rivers. (Incidentally, thanks to Alex from the Love and Liberty blog for enlightening me that this “everytown” is mostly South Oxhey and surrounding areas of Watford.)

Clearly then, the Fades had won; a fact hammered home by John as he led his little troupe of Reborn acolytes into the office of the Mayor, pausing briefly to chomp on an unfortunate council employee who hadn’t had the sense to get out of town. Joe Dempsie continued to impress as John, who, like all the best villains, had believable motivations; as he put it, angrily, “70 years of suffering!” Dempsie managed to convey a real sense of threat and menace without descending into Blofeld-style melodramatics, even when likening his story to that of Lot and the Sodomites.

John was so scary precisely because he didn’t want the problems solved. Possibly mad after his decades long post-mortem ordeal, he’s happier as a flesh eating revenant than he would be to Ascend. And with the last Ascension point closed by Paul, his followers seem to feel the same. But Dr Tremlett made some sense when he pointed out that there were no people left here to eat any more, and they should move on. John, however, was fixated on killing Paul, his motives murky. Was it out of a genuine sense of strategy, knowing that if his Reborns were to thrive, he had to remove the only one who could stop them? That’s what he told them, but the way he clasped the now-gone Natalie’s necklace suggested that there was more than a hint of revenge there, and those out for revenge rarely think clearly.

That such an outlandish villain could have such an understandable, even sympathetic set of motivations is a mark of how well Thorne writes characters. But John wasn’t the only villain this week. Building on the hints of single-minded fanaticism that had been present throughout the series, Neil emerged as just as dangerous a threat, leaving Paul caught between two polar opposites of psychosis. Johnny Harris has been excellent as Neil from the beginning, never a sympathetic mentor figure in the Obi-Wan Kenobi mould; so when he dragged Jay out at gunpoint to coerce Paul into going along with his plan, it was a very convincing threat.

And I have to say, given how well the character had been built up, it was perfectly believable that he did, ultimately, shoot her. The only problem, if it can be said to be that, was that Neil’s fanaticism had been built up so well that it almost seemed a foregone conclusion, but that in no way lessened the shock. Clearly, this was a story that was taking no prisoners, and any of the characters who’d been so lovingly and likeably drawn was fair game.

I was a little surprised that Paul, having failed to heal her (this limit on his power felt necessary to inject the sort of jeopardy often missing from superhero stories), would so quiescently follow Neil, capitulating to his plan to kill John. But really, what choice did Paul have? Jay was gone, but Neil still had his mum, his sister and his best friend salted away in undisclosed locations. With the threat that real, obviously Paul would have no choice.

The scene of all three confronting each other amid gunfire in the Mayor’s office was directed with a masterful tension, as they taunted, cajoled and exposed each other’s weaknesses. John’s contemptuous assessment of Neil as an orphan who nobody liked echoed Neil’s earlier, revealing, exchange with Mac when he confessed that, as an orphan with no friends who saw dead people, he’d once thought he was Jesus Christ – probably the ultimate sign of monomania. But John came off no better, rejecting Paul’s attempts to help him. So I couldn’t help letting out the first of several “Yay!”s this episode as Paul, tiring of both of them, stood up and threatened to blast them both with his hand rays before dashing off to fix the real Ascension point – the disused shopping centre where he’d first found Neil, John and Sarah.

Sarah too was getting some closure. Having been unable to resist trying to kill Mark while having sex with him, she’d fled to threaten John – as much as she could – before having a soul-baring tussle with Alice, the last of the Angelics. As Alice told her the unpalatable truth that, as an Angelic, she just didn’t do well enough, it gave her a necessary resolve. Paul had told her that the visions of the future could be changed; and she had to do that before Paul’s watch reached the fateful time of 4.20, at which John would stab him to death.

Mac, meanwhile, had been locked into a shipping container with Anna, as they resolved the love/hate relationship built up over the series. Well, sort of resolved it, anyway. Locked in a container surrounded by hungry Fades trying to smash their way in is an odd situation in which to confess your undying love, but Mac managed it. In an episode full of performances turned up to 11, Daniel Kaluuya still managed to steal every scene he was in, even outdoing the excellent Lily Loveless as Anna. Nevertheless, Anna too continued her journey towards being sympathetic as she started to thaw towards Mac – though perhaps not as much as he believed!

Of course, that scene wouldn’t have worked so well if Paul and Anna’s mum had been locked in there with them. If I have a real criticism of this conclusion, it’s that both she and Sarah’s husband Mark didn’t really get a resolution to their storylines. Neither, really, did Mac’s dad, though there was at least some kind of circular conclusion as he ended up rescuing Paul’s mum from where she was tied up in her house. Mark, meanwhile, just got the hell out of town with Vicky, his recent on-off shag.

As with all the characters, these had been well-drawn enough that I’d hoped for their storylines to end with something more conclusive than just tailing off or leaving. But I can perhaps excuse Jack Thorne in the sense that these characters were necessary for the more important one to play off, and he’s a good enough writer that even if secondary, they came off as fully rounded personalities. Perhaps if there’s a second series we can see more of what happened to them…

And a second series there may well be, if the end of this is anything to judge by – though I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. It all climaxed with a heartstopping confrontation between Paul and John in the disused underground shopping centre where it all began, and we realised that Paul’s visions of an ashy apocalypse were premonitions of this event; as he reopened the howling beam of Ascension from beneath the fountain, ash rained down all over the place.As foreseen, John showed up to stop him, and a really rather brutal fight ensued.

One of the things I’ve always liked about teenage fantasy fiction books – unlike their childrens’ TV equivalents – is that the books don’t shy away from putting the heroes through the physical wringer. We got that here in spades as Paul was shot, and beaten, and had his hand broken by John with a wince-makingly believable ‘crack’ sound. But just as it looked like the premonition was all coming true, Sarah popped up to redeem herself, by interposing herself between John’s fatal shard of broken glass and Paul. At which point, Paul, already rather badly injured, surprisingly threw himself off the high balcony they were now on.

And here I couldn’t resist another “Yay!” as Paul’s wings extended and he flew. A true Angelic, with emphasis on the ‘Angel’, he hovered above the Ascension point, blasting power into it until it reopened fully, at which point all the Reborn Fades disintegrated into a shower of light, then formed into birds and flew off. (A word about the birds, incidentally – I think this is inspired by Stephen King’s The Dark Half, where, as in many cultures, birds are characterised as psychopomps, their duty to escort recently deceased souls to the afterlife.)

So Mac and Anna were saved as Dr Tremlett and the other Reborns melted away, while fittingly, John’s much-delayed Ascension actually seemed really painful. But in the end he went too, and the shot faded out on Paul’s watch, showing that fateful time of 4.20. Was he dead? It seemed not, as Anna and Mac found him bloodied and crying sitting on a shopping trolley. But as Neil cowered in the doorway of the Angelic HQ, muttering that, “you don’t mess with Ascension”, the grey skies turned red. Clearly it’s not all over, and it’s far from clear that the Paul we saw was properly alive, given the injuries he’d suffered.

As I said, I’m not sure this is a good idea. This has been a compelling, enjoyable story, but the ‘cliffhanger’ ending felt a little tacked on, as though somebody at BBC3 had had a premonition that the show would be a great success and asked Jack Thorne if a second series was possible. While I appreciate that viewers will always want more of something they enjoyed, I thought that the show had had a proper ending and probably should have been left to stand alone as a great story. The classic children’s fantasy TV that this often reminded me of tended to do just that; I don’t recall TV execs clamouring for a second series of Children of the Stones or The Changes.

Of course, that’s all just theorising, and Thorne may have always had a continuation planned. If and when it happens, I hope it can live up to this story, which has been one of the best bits of fantasy TV in ages. A lot of people said it started slow, with too much of the Skins-influenced bits of Paul’s ordinary life, but I actually thought these were essential in building the characters and the environment they inhabited. It was also an obvious tribute to the comics that must have influenced Thorne; the superhero leading a double life as an average everyman like Clark Kent or Peter Parker. I thought the two strands were deftly interwoven throughout, cleverly combining into one big supernatural thriller by the final two episodes.

The dialogue and the cast were superb throughout, too. Iain de Caestecker as Paul perhaps suffered a little from being in the shadow of the more voluble Daniel Kaluuya as Mac, but he had the sort of intense introversion you see in the better superheroes; notably Michael Keaton’s Batman. Johnny Harris is fast becoming a guarantee of gritty, scary hard men who nonetheless have tragic vulnerabilities. I’m continually impressed with Lily Loveless, who also put in a great turn as a homeless girl in The Sarah Jane Adventures, transmitted while The Fades was halfway through. And how good was it to see Daniela Nardini again?

I’ve loved this show all the way through, and have to congratulate Jack Thorne on creating such a complex and imaginative mythology from scratch. As I say, I do rather wish it had been left to stand alone as one story. But equally, if the second series can live up to this one, I may change that opinion.

The Fades–he sees dead people

“Why do people assume death is fair? It’s totally random – just like life.”

FadesEp1

Dead birds are falling from the skies. In the dark night streets, a woman is attacked by a weird grey skeletal figure with yellow eyes. A teenage boy awakes from nightmares of the end of the world, wetting his bed, and sees grey cadaverous shades of the dead everywhere he looks. The recently dead roam a forest, light blaring from their torsos, seeking one of the few places left to ascend since man invented concrete.

Welcome to the world of The Fades, trailered so cryptically and effectively on BBC3 recently. “That looks cool, “ I remember thinking of the hyperdramatic but undetailed trailers, set my Tivo to record it and promptly forgot it existed. Yesterday I found my recording, watched it, and realised that this has the potential to actually be rather interesting.

Much has been made of this as a new ‘cult’ youth drama, much in the vein of Misfits and actually from the same channel that produced the sleeper hit Being Human. The Fades certainly does have this kind of potential, but it’s aiming at a far younger ‘youth’ audience than either of those shows. While the heroes of Misfits are young, they’re clearly older than school age; and the vampires and werewolves of Being Human must be pushing thirty (or far older if they’re vampires, whatever age they look). By contrast, The Fades has a hero who’s still in the sixth form, presumably between 17 and 18 years of age. The result is that, with its supernatural weirdness and teenage hero, this feels like nothing so much as one of those classic spooky children’s dramas that both BBC and ITV did so well in the 70s and 80s, updated to include swearing, sex references and some genuine horror.

That post-watershed slot might sadly lose it some of the teenage viewers it might otherwise have got; but in these days of Sky Plus and iPlayer, I doubt that. The fact that what seems ostensibly like a teenage show has so much in it that could be deemed ‘adult’ is presumably down to the writer. Jack Thorne is a playwright who cut his TV writing teeth on Skins, another show that tries to show a realistic portrait of British youth, then graduated onto working with Shane Meadows on the excellent This is England 86.

Those influences show; while 80s teenage dramas were all about gritty portrayals of joblessness (hello, Tucker’s Luck), and Skins is all about hedonistic fun laced with social reality, The Fades brings precisely those approaches to a typically freaky, Children’s BBC-like tale. Nominal hero Paul (Iain de Caestecker) is a believable and likeable teenage nerd; witness his hilarious attempts to smoke in a vain attempt to impress the friend of his sister he has such an obvious crush on. Or his convincingly irritating family – his mum smirks at his frustrated assertion that he’s “trying to be a man”, and his sister (Lily Loveless, worlds away from the lesbian earth mother type she played in, yes, Skins) is a constant source of patronising embarrassment.

Again as in classic children’s spook shows, Paul is accompanied by a wisecracking best friend whose primary function is to be the comic relief. Mac (played brilliantly by Daniel Kaluuya out of, guess what, Skins) is a horror fanatic whose pop culture musings on Nightmare on Elm Street and The Sixth Sense, delivered in a marvellously deadpan way, counterpoint a real horror story happening to his best mate that he can’t even see.

As in many classic children’s spook shows, our heroes become involved while messing about. An unwilling Paul has been dragged into an abandoned underground shopping mall by Mac, desperate to find ‘”weird objects” for a horror film he wants to make. Tumbling down an unforeseen escalator, Paul finds himself in the middle of a mysterious confrontation between gun toting nutter Neil (Johnny Harris, previously terrifying as Lol’s rapey stepdad in This is England 86) and the terrifying skeletal figure we saw attacking Natalie Dormer in the pre-credits sequence. Dormer is somehow involved; her character, Sarah, is already dead by this point. But she’s got top billing, she played Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, and anyway this is the sort of show where death isn’t really a handicap to further appearances.

Like any sensible teenage nerd, Paul is terrified and runs away. But he can’t escape, as he begins to suffer the same scary dream visions Sarah used to have – visions of the end of the world, with him as a lone survivor in a corpsescape where ashes rain down thick and fast. From here it just gets madder and madder; Neil turns up unannounced in Paul’s bedroom to act as a sort of Obi Wan Kenobi mentor, as Paul begins to see the shades of the dead on street corners. Some of the dead, Neil explains, can’t ‘ascend’, and linger on Earth; this makes them act “shitty”. They disintegrate into ashes if a living person ‘passes through’ them; we see this happen as Paul stumbles through one in in an underground subway, and she crumbles into precisely the kind of ashes that have been haunting his dreams.

Paul, it seems, has some kind of ‘purpose’; perhaps he’s the Muad’Dib. Later, Neil shows him hordes of the dead trying to ascend, but it looks like Sarah’s just missed the boat. She can still talk, it seems – for now. But only Neil and Paul will be able to see her. But she’s not the one they have to worry about; that scary skeletal grey thing that killed her – and nearly sucked out Neil’s eye with its green tongue – is “something new” that has the potential to end the world. It’s already killed not just Sarah, but Neil’s other sidekick – a welcome return for This Life’s Daniela Nardini, as a pistol-packing, faith healing Scottish vicar, and I hope she’s not dead for good!

All of this is great stuff in itself, though as of part one, who knows what it can all mean? It’s reminiscent of so many classic children’s spook dramas, from King of the Castle through Moondial to Century Falls. But what makes it even better is the Skins-like sense of realism about what it’s like to be a teenager, that presumably gave it its post-watershed slot. Aside from the swearing, and sex references (when Paul starts telling Mac about his dreams, Mac automatically leaps to the conclusion that they’re of the wet variety), there is plenty of wince-making accuracy to Paul’s position as the school’s introverted nerd. “Nobody even notices us,”comments the more excitable Mac, shortly before a slightly comic bit of business ends up with them hiding in a cubicle of the girls’ toilet while a girl does her business next door. “That’s probably the most sexual thing that’s ever happened to me,” notes Mac. Elsewhere, Paul is in therapy because of his bedwetting, but is understandably unkeen to reveal what’s been happening to his therapist, and he has a massive, possibly requited crush on his sister’s best friend, much to his sister’s malicious amusement.

This blend of classy supernatural drama with teenage realism makes The Fades like the sort of drama I would have killed to have seen on Children’s BBC when I was a teenager. It’s all very well having your hero as a teenage boy but if those central teenage boy things like sexual frustration, swearing and wet dreams don’t get mentioned, how much can you truly believe in the character? This has all that in spades, plus some genuinely witty dialogue, taut direction and scary special effects. It’s only part one of the first series, so who knows how good it’ll be, but I thoroughly enjoyed this, and if there’s any justice, BBC3 will have another Being Human-style hit on its hands. Not sure yet if I’ll blog on this episode by episode, but if the next one is as good, I very probably will.