As you'd expect, some are better than others. What annoys me with some of these episodes is they deviate too far from the story Dick wrote. I get that these stories were mostly written in the 1950s so to make them relevant to 2017 you had to change things. But some of them don't just update things; they completely alter the story itself. Now if you're going to call your series Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams and say it's based on stories by Philip K Dick, maybe you should actually adapt the story Philip K Dick wrote. Right?
Something else that annoyed me is the book and the TV show are not in the same order, so as I read, I kind of had to jump around to find episodes that matched (which don't always have the same title) and a couple didn't seem to match at all.
Impossible Planet:
The story is about a tour ship in space that's boarded by an old woman and an ancient robot. The woman wants to go to this mythical planet called Earth. She offers the captain and first mate a bunch of money so the greedy captain finds a planet that sorta matches the criteria and takes her there. The old woman demands to go down, where she's promptly killed. The first mate is appalled and decides to quit the business while the captain studies a strange coin found on the surface--an American coin meaning it really was Earth--before tossing it away.
The episode has pretty much the same premise. There's a tour ship captained by Benedict Wong (Wong of the MCU) and a young guy who has a girlfriend who wants him to get some fancy administrative job with the tour company but he keeps being rejected.
The old lady comes on board with her robot and offers them a bunch of money to go to Earth. Like before, the greedy captain finds a planet that's vaguely similar and then takes them there. What's different is along the way the young guy and old lady start bonding and he has flashbacks to Earth and the old lady shows him a picture where he looks exactly like her grandpa.
They get to the planet and go down and while dying from a lack of oxygen, they imagine they're really in the old lady's grandparents' home of Carolina. There's really no indication if they were really on Earth or not like in the story.
The romantic plot is a little weird but it doesn't distract too much from the story. So overall it was not bad.
The Commuter
The story is about an officious little prick of a British railroad employee who has a man come up to his window to ask for a ticket to Macon Heights. Except there is no Macon Heights! The guy disappears but then keeps coming back. The railroad guy finally gets on a train and finds the elusive Macon Heights, which was supposed to be a town but didn't get built. Except the railroad guy sees it! Then he starts questioning reality until he gets home to find his wife and house are the same--or at least same enough.
The episode layers on some extra stuff to the basic premise. There's a railroad employee named Ed with a wife and a son who has psychotic freak outs. Then one day a woman comes up asking for a ticket to Macon Heights. She soon disappears but eventually he gets on a train and sees people jumping off in a field that leads to Macon Heights.
In the episode, Macon Heights is some kind of Field of Dreams-like paradise for people who have suffered some kind of problems like rape or molestation or stuff like that. It's a quaint little town where everyone is happy and content--until Ed shows up and starts poking holes in it. When he goes back home, his son has vanished; it's as if he never existed. Then he has to go back to Macon Heights to make the woman give back his son even though the boy is going to keep having problems and probably end up in jail and dead.
The addition of the son plot not only helps add time but it helps to make the railroad employee sympathetic. In the book he is as I said an officious little prick, a petty bureaucrat. Giving him a son with mental problems and showing Ed helping women with baby carriages down the steps makes him appear more sympathetic to the audience. It's kind of like that old thing where if you want a character to be more sympathetic, give him/her a dog or child.
Human Is
In the story, there's a scientist who is really a jerk to his wife and everyone else. Then he goes to the planet Rexar IV to study something. When he gets back, he's a new man! He's fun and kind and considerate--and passionate with his wife. The problem is that he's not really a human but a Rexarnian who has taken over the human's body! But when called into court, his wife says he hasn't changed even though she knows he's an alien. They go home together and live Happily Ever After.
The episode changes the guy (Silas) from a scientist to a colonel. He's leading a mission to Rexar IV to steal some chemical Terra needs to clean up its atmosphere. As before, Silas is a jerk who ranges from ignoring his wife Vera to being openly hostile to her. To update for the 21st Century, instead of being a homemaker who seemed like kind of an airhead, Vera also works for the government as some kind of scientist or bureaucrat.
The mission to Rexar goes bad but Silas returns with another guy. He's less obviously different than in the story where he uses kind of old-timey language like from a Jane Austen novel or something. In this case it's not obvious right away because he's sick for a few days. Eventually he gets up and around and gives himself away by not being a total jerk to his wife.
There's some soft core sex and he even makes breakfast for her. Then some footage from the battle on Rexar IV is found that seems to implicate him. There's a slightly more drawn-out trial during which Silas confesses he isn't really Silas, but Vera successfully pleads for his life. And they live Happily Ever After.
The love story element is a little better in the episode, where in the story it was a bit goofy because the wife was an airhead and the alien-possessed husband talked weirdly.
The Father Thing:
The story is about a boy who realizes his father is not his father. He's been possessed by some kind of weird bug thing. Then he finds out his father is growing replacements for him and his mom. He ends up killing the bug.
The episode sticks pretty close to this only it makes the story a bit bigger. A boy and his father (Greg Kinnear) come back from a camping trip but soon after, the dad starts acting weird. As do other people in the boy's neighborhood--including the cops.
The boy and a couple of friends find where the aliens are creating more replacements, but end up killing the bug. That doesn't necessarily mean all the bugs are gone though.
The episode is in some ways better in that it adds some depth to the characters that wasn't really in Dick's story. The addition of a friend and his brother to help take the bug down also gives it more of a Stranger Things vibe.
This is really the way to adapt these stories by updating them and adding some extra depth but not changing the meaning of the stories. The next ones discussed are far less successful at this.
(Fun Fact: A teacher in the episode is named Mr. Dick.)
Kill All Others (Or The Hanging Man)
In the story The Hanging Man, a guy sees something hanging from a lamppost and realizes it's a dead body. No one seems all that concerned, which starts freaking him out. Then he starts seeing these bugs flying around and into people and realizes it's an invasion that he missed because he was in his basement that day.
The guy tries to get his wife and kids only to realize they're already infected. He winds up going to the next town over, where he goes to the cops. While they seem to believe him, guess what? They're infected too. Soon the guy is hanging from a lamppost in the town. The bodies are a way to find who has not been infected yet, because the infected won't really care.
Basically the story is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing where aliens are taking over people. A lot of it was probably built on the Cold War paranoia of sleeper agents or other commie spies hiding in our midst.
The episode KAO (or Kill All Others) is not bad but it uses an approach far more like 1984 than Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the not-so-distant future, a guy named Philbert sees "the Candidate" for president of Mexmerican (a conglomerate of Mexico-the US-and Canada) say "Kill all others" during an interview. No one else really gives a crap about it.
When Philbert sees a sign saying "Kill All Others," he stops a train to try to get a picture and winds up in trouble with the authorities. Then when he sees some people chasing a woman and intervenes, he gets into trouble with the authorities again. Finally he tries to ask "the Candidate" about it but the disguise he wears is easily seen through and his real identity is exposed. He goes on the run and winds up being killed and hung by a KAO sign.
As I said, this is a lot more like 1984 than Dick's story by including all of the political stuff. I'm not saying it's bad or I didn't like it; it's just like I said at the beginning, if you're going to call it Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams then maybe you should actual adapt the story he wrote and not a story George Orwell wrote.
BTW, the system for Mexmerican where there's only 1 political party and the idea of "democracy" is that you get to vote down from 52 candidates to 1, sounds like what Republicans want with all these anti-voting laws. So again it's not the episode isn't good or relevant so much as it's not really the same story.
Autofac
The story was kind of fun in that it's a different take on the evil AI genre like The Terminator or The Matrix. In this case the AI isn't evil so much as just oblivious. Basically the "Autofac" was designed to pump out consumer goods based on what it thought people in each particular region needed. But then there's a big war and the problem for the survivors is that the Autofac is continuing to pump out shit, using up all the scarce resources for crap they don't need.
One particular village tries to get the Autofac to shut down. They manage to speak with an android-like representative, but when that fails they hatch a scheme where they pile up a bunch of tungsten in a spot and two different Autofacs end up fighting over it. The war between the Autofacs gets bigger and bigger until it pretty much destroys itself--except for one factory that is producing "pellets" that will create more Autofacs. D'Oh!
The episode is markedly different. It's worth noting that Ronald D Moore is one of the executive producers because the episode is basically like the last two seasons of his Battlestar Galactica show, particularly where a bunch of the "humans" turned out to be Cylons and the Cylons were based off of real people.
Juno Temple is a young hacker who keeps dreaming about seeing the missiles flying and destroying the world. Which doesn't make sense if the war ended 20 years ago. I mean, she'd have to be 40-50 then. The Autofac is producing crap the survivors don't need like in the story. But to get the representative there they knock down a drone and hack into it instead of pretending the milk it delivers is bad like in the story--which is probably because hacking didn't exist in the 1950s.
An android representative shows up and they knock her out to try to hack into her to access the Autofac and plant some bombs. Juno Temple and two dudes go there and then we find out that they're all Cylons androids made by the Autofac to replace humans. And the Juno Temple one knew this because of those dreams of seeing herself at the end of the human world and so planted a sort of virus to wipe out the Autofac. And she found an old Wired magazine with an article on the real human her. Thus her village is saved. Yay?
It wasn't really terrible, but it got too far away from the premise. It took what was mostly a fun story about consumerism run amok and turned it into another boring AI-taking-over-the-world story. Really this story was like The Trouble With Tribbles, where you had the goofy little fuzzballs reproducing and reproducing and eating everything, only this was robots producing milk, sandals, or whatever else. If you hadn't read the story, you'd probably like the episode.
The Hood Maker
The story is about a future society where telepaths or "teeps" are being used by Big Brother to read people's thoughts. Someone is distributing silver bands that go on the head and let people block the teeps. The government is desperate to find out who is responsible and eventually they capture the guy. But when the teep reads his mind, he finds out the teeps are not even mutants, just freaks who originated from a nuclear blast or something and can't reproduce and will die out in a generation. This literally blows his mind and the hood maker goes on his merry way.
The episode takes an approach more like Alien Nation or Almost Human. There's a normal (we think) cop in some city. I guess it's after a war that destroyed all the computers so everything is back to the mid-20th Century at best. A teep girl named Honor is brought in to work with the cop. Then someone wearing a strange hood almost kills them with a Molotov cocktail. They start investigating the hoods and the cop and Honor start falling in love and even fuck.
Where this really deviates from the story is that the real "hood maker" is not the guy making the hoods, but the cop. Somehow the cop has the ability to block teeps from reading his mind. And so he is regular humanity's hope to counter the threat of the teeps. Except he probably dies when the hood factory is on fire and Honor won't let him escape. Meanwhile teeps are rising up all over the city.
I think this is another that's not a bad episode, but it kind of strays too far off-message. The government using teeps to read minds and violate people's privacy kind of gets lost in the shuffle of everything else going on. It seems like something pretty important.
Like Autofac, if you don't read the story it's based on, you'd probably like this better.
(Fun Fact: in the introduction to the story in the book, the writer of the episode admits to changing the hoods from silver bands to actual hoods because that's how he imagined it as a kid. So that was a conscious choice not something done wrong.)
Safe & Sound (Or Foster, You're Dead)
The story Foster, You're Dead is about two things: Cold War paranoia and rampant consumerism, subjects that pop up in some of Dick's other stories like Autofac. In the story, Mike Foster is a little boy who is terrified because his family doesn't have a bomb shelter. In this world of "1971," everything is geared towards preparing for nuclear Armageddon, including schools that teach mostly survival skills. Mike finally guilts his dad into buying a spiffy new shelter he can't really afford only for it to become obsolete a few months later. (In a way Dick foresaw the modern tech industry where as soon as you fork over a bunch of money for something it becomes obsolete in favor of the newest, latest thing.)
Mike is happy for a little while, going down to the shelter every day just to hang out and feel safe. But after a lousy Christmas retail season because everyone is buying "adapters" for their shelters instead of the furniture his dad sells, Mike's dad has to get rid of the shelter. Mike is really bummed. It ends with the ironic joke that he sees a sign reading, "Peace on Earth."
The episode Safe & Sound really only adapts half the premise. Foster Lee is a 16-year-old redheaded girl who is moving from a "Bubble" in the west to some big city in the east. At her new school, all the kids have these smart bracelet things called a Dex--like Dexterity, I guess--and if you don't have one you're basically an outcast who has to go through separate security lines, have to do schoolwork manually with a pencil and paper, and can't go into the school safe room during an attack. Plus just the normal peer pressure of not being cool. After Foster's mom refuses to buy one, she gets a classmate to help her obtain one.
Soon after when she's trying to use it she contacts customer support and a really helpful, friendly guy called Ethan starts contacting her. Foster starts getting worried because her father heard voices and went crazy and even after her mom makes her get rid of the Dex, Ethan keeps talking to her through beams of sunlight or ants--supposedly.
He convinces her there's a terrorist plot afoot and she has to carry a bomb into the school to stop it. She does so but is stopped before it can go off. Afterwards she becomes a hero as the government pins everything on her mom, who was crusading for more representation for the Bubbles and whatever. The end then explains how Ethan manipulated her. Hooray.
This does an OK job with the half of the story about paranoia. In this case paranoia about terrorism instead of nuclear war, which is a more 2010s appropriate subject. Where it fails is the other half of the story about rampant consumerism. Which maybe being made for Amazon, a central hub for rampant consumerism, was something they didn't want to touch on too strongly. But really that second point of the story was how the government had basically monetized fear, by convincing people to buy shelters and constantly upgrade them. Like I said earlier, there was a parallel to modern tech only in this case it wasn't just to be hip and with it so much as without the latest, greatest thing you'll die! That's what had Mike Foster so freaked out in the story but there's really none of that in the episode.
What I also noticed in this, Autofac, and Human Is especially is the creators of the series really don't do much with the dark humor in some of Dick's stories. Some of these stories have a wry, tongue-in-cheek humor that reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut, though I think maybe these came out first. But the TV series doesn't really do that; it plays everything straight and it's kind of a shame because I think some of these episodes would be better if they were a bit more fun instead of grim.
Real Life (Or Exhibit Piece)
This was the first episode but the description is so far different than the story in the book that I didn't recognize it, so I watched other episodes first and eventually came back to it.
The story is about a guy who works in a museum. He runs a display of 20th Century America. Then he finds himself inside the display with a wife, kids, and office job like Leave It to Beaver or something. He goes back-and-forth a couple of times before deciding he'd rather stay in the fake world. Ironically, the original Twilight Zone did a very similar episode where an actor thinks the family guy role he's playing is his real life.
The episode written by Ronald D Moore really bears little similarity except for the overall concept. It starts with Anna Paquin as a cop in future Chicago who is traumatized after some kind of massacre. Her wife gives her a device that lets her go on "vacation" where she's in the past as Terrence Howard, whose wife recently died and he's been trying to find the real killers. He developed the technology used to make the device Anna Paquin is using.
It becomes sort of a double Total Recall as Anna Paquin and Terrence Howard go back-and-forth a few times. Is he dreaming her or is she dreaming him? In the end it doesn't matter as their brains are both fried. Yay?
I guess I can't say this one really got the premise of the story wrong. It's just as I said the events are so changed that it's not recognizable until you actually watch it. Maybe it's because that Twilight Zone episode already did this almost 60 years earlier. But hey, it'd make a good premise for a gender swap story. (Actually maybe I've already done something like that?)
Crazy Diamond (Or Sales Pitch)
This was the last one I watched because again it was so different and with a different title so I didn't know it was even one of the stories. And it really isn't. The author claimed to use "Dickean themes"...in the same way that the Super Mario Bros movie in the 90s kept the "themes" of the video game while being almost completely different from the game.
The story Dick wrote in 1954 is another about consumerism run amok. It's a pretty silly story. Ed has to go through tons of advertising on his commute from Earth to Ganymede and back. One day he gets home to find his wife has invited in a robot called a "fasrad." It promises to solve every problem in the house--except its presence. Ed refuses to buy it but the fasrad goes with him on a doomed voyage into deep space. Even when the ship blows up, Ed survives--as does the fasrad. They're doomed to be together forever! It's one of those Twilight Zone-type things like the famous episode with Burgess Meredith as the guy who has time enough to read and then his glasses break. It's a comeuppance for a guy who didn't really deserve a comeuppance.
The episode uses pretty much none of that. It's almost incomprehensible. Ed (Steve Buscemi, cue the memes of him dressed as a young person) works for some company that makes "quantum consciousnesses" that are somehow bred from humans and pigs. And there are pig people! And for some reason the coasts keep crumbling and food expires in a day or two and there's metal about three inches under the soil so no one can grow anything. Ed is restoring a boat so he and his wife can come sail away, come sail away, come sail away and go saaaaailing...because it's time for a cool change.
Anyway, he meets a "Jill" who has a quantum thingy that's going bad. She uses her feminine wiles to get him to give her access to his business so she can steal some QCs to sell, but the deal goes bad and so she has to go back to Ed and his wife, pretending to sell insurance. She starts getting chummy with the wife and in the end they push Ed off the boat but he doesn't die. So...they don't get the insurance money or anything. What was the point then? I mean why bring up a double indemnity insurance policy if you're not actually going to kill the guy and not even be around to collect the money?
But then what was the point of any of it? Seriously, it was awful. Not just because it didn't follow the original story, but because it wasn't really a good story in its own right. Like a couple of these other ones they just throw this near-future world at you with little explanation, but this one makes a lot less sense. Pig people? Why? WTF?!
Like some of the movies I mentioned above, this was a fairly humorous story that was completely drained of humor. And like some I mentioned, it was anti-consumerism but the episode also pretty much drained that out too. Which, again, you have to wonder if they'd have done that if it was being made for Netflix and not Amazon.
A Fun Fact is a lot of the writers, producers, and a few actors in this like Bryan Cranston also worked on other Amazon shows that premiered around this time like Sneaky Pete, Carnival Row, and a couple other ones I forget right now.
Another Fun Fact is I watched this movie on Rifftrax called Invaders From Mars which seemed like if Ed Wood had tried to adapt The Hanging Man or Father Thing into a movie. It was about invaders from Mars (I guess) who sucked people under sand and possessed them. A little kid realizes his father is different (like when his dad slaps him) and tries to get help, though unlike The Hanging Man he does eventually get help. The sets and effects are so cheap and shoddy that it definitely never rises to the level of Dick's stories.
1 comment:
I didn't know Amazon had a Philip K Dick series. My dad is a big fan of the writer, too bad that they made so many changes like you said. I don't think I've heard about the others , though
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