Saturday, April 23, 2022

Yesterday Came Suddenly

Last night I had the strangest dream
I've ever had before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To put an end to war...



The Tomorrow People's main power is that they are nice. A few years later, George Lucas would posit a universe bound together by the mystical forces of intuition and instinct. But for Roger Price, it was quite literally love which made the world go round. When Carol materializes by Steven's hospital bed and exposits the backstory, she explains the Tomorrow People first and foremost in terms of their outlook.

"We are man's only hope of survival. We're peaceful. We can't wage war. We can't kill. Well, not deliberately anyhow."

Violence and War seem to be the main points on which the Tomorrow People differ from the Saps: there is little talk about environmental issues or sharing the world's resources. The Sixth Commandment shall be the whole of the law. The rule is said at one point to be a mental block: not a moral principle, but an existential limitation. Much later, in Season Four or Five, it is said that if a Tomorrow Person ever did use lethal force, they would either lose their powers or simply go mad.

This taboo has no sooner been introduced than it is being fudged. For one thing, the Tomorrow People carry stun-guns, which seems a little like cheating. Big Bad Jedikiah is a robot: sentient, with a personality and personal agency, but still a robot, making it perfectly okay to teleport him onto the molten surface of the planet Mercury. This may have been part of a not unclever Writerly Plan: an on-going villain who can be played by a different actor each week -- he has Tardis like shape shifting powers -- and who the pacifist heroes are permitted to kill. But Jedikiah didn't appear again until the end of Season Three, when he was permanently but non-fatally written out. A human gets vaporised on Mercury along with the robot, but the guy who pushed the button (Peter the apprentice time guardian) is told that this is all right because he didn't really mean it.

It's a bit like Star Trek: in practice the Prime Directive says that you are not allowed to interfered with affairs of lessor civilisations unless you agonize about it first and feel awful afterwards. The code against killing is even referred to, once, as the Prime Barrier. But I suppose "Not killing anyone unless you really can't help it" is a considerable advance over "We come in peace, shoot to kill". Cuddly terrorist Roj Blake used to kill just as many people as the fascist Federation.

"But what if people make war on us?” asks Steven. Carol doesn't have an answer; and the series doesn't seem particularly interested in the question. The Prime Barrier is mostly there to give our heroes permission to be heroes and to draw a line between them and the grown-ups. But it is rarely a source of moral dilemmas. The series would have been a lot more interesting if the heroes had sometimes been pushed into situations which demanded lethal force, found themselves unable to use it, and had to live with the consequences.



In Marvel Comics, mutant is distinctly a status; a thing which you know about yourself and which other people know about you. People hate and shun Cyclops because he is a mutant; they admire the Human Torch because he is a superhero.

Being a Tomorrow Person is little like that. The fact that Telepaths can telepath is almost incidental. It's the status, the label, the race that counts. The Telepaths of the Galactic Federation could talk to the Saps, but they choose not to. The Guardians of Time choose to share their secret only with Telepathic apprentices. There is a Time Control Doohickey on the space ship which only Peter the time-child can operate: but that's because the guardians have chosen to put a telepathic lock on it; presumably because the Saps can't be trusted to use time travel responsibly.

It's this sense of being a member of an exclusive club or class which Carol emphasises when she first meets Steven. Telepathy is not represented as a Vulcan Mind Meld or a sinister way of knowing your mates’ deep desires and dreams. It's just a form of instant long distance communication: Mind-Speaking.

A Tomorrow Person, she says, is never alone



Did Salman Rushdie ever watch the Tomorrow People, I wonder? He was in his middle twenties in 1973, working as an advertising copywriter, so probably not. He was certainly interested in science fiction and references comic books fairly specifically in his novels. The protagonist of the Satanic Verses catches a few minutes of a Doctor Who story called (of all things) The Mutants and considers it racist -- suggesting that either he or Rushdie hadn't understood it.

But Rushdie's break-out novel, Midnight’s Children, is based on the premise that all the babies born in India at the exact moment of Independence are mentally linked, each with their own culturally appropriate superpower. (It's magical realism as opposed to science fiction, so their powers are heavily metaphorical: I seem to recall that one character can literally incorporate emotions into pickles.) The idea that people who have a common outlook should be literally linked; of telepathy as a metaphor for community, seems present in both the kids’ TV show and the Booker novel. In 2015 Rushdie was said to be working on a popular sci-fi themed TV screenplay but nothing seems to have come of it. It would have been called The Next People.



When TIM the computer is briefly switched off, Carol cannot make contact with John, so she jaunts into his bedroom. He sleeps under a duvet with no shirt on; mercifully he wears pyjama pants. But truthfully, girls jaunting into boy’s bedrooms doesn't seem to carry any innuendo. It's more like the Tomorrow People are engaged in an unending long distance sleepover. Carol says that John is nice and kind and clever when she introduces him to Steven, but there is no smidgeon of a hint of a romance between them.

It is the 1970s. Children have their own bedrooms. So far as we can tell, all the Tomorrow People are all  only-children: parents are mentioned, but not siblings. We see Steven's mother; she is notified when he explodes in the street and goes to the hospital. John appraises her of the situation: I think even in '73, keeping big secrets from your parents would have felt a little like grooming. A generation before, kids would have had to contend with bunk beds and younger brothers and sisters. John has a great big print of Neil Armstrong on the moon on his bedroom wall. Kenny has lots of football posters. I think they represent Chelsea players. He is briefly shocked when Ginge (the biker they adopt) mentions that he is Fulham supporter. When Kenny wakes up in his den, the first thing he does is say "good morning John; good morning Carol". When Carol and John don't answer him, he knows that something has gone very wrong.

A Tomorrow Person is never alone. They wake up and greet one another in their minds; they materialise in each other's bedrooms; and the elders of the universe talk exclusively to them.

And there you have it. The Long Chase and Timeslip and the Changes were good TV shows we quite liked. Star Trek and Doctor Who became huge, shared, cultural constructs. But The Tomorrow People was our own fantasy realm, belonging privately to each  of us. It took up residence in our heads and became part of the way we imagined ourselves. It's a cool disco precursor of J.K Rowling's cynical Millennial Enid Blyton throwback. 

I am special. 

Someday soon I will get the magic letter telling me how special I am. 

This will grant me membership of a special club which will allow me to treat anyone who is not special -- my parents, my teachers, my peer-group, anyone without an RP accent -- with a sort of amused disdain.

You could look it as a religious movement: with Breaking Out like being born again.

You could take it as being about consciousness raising; about getting switched on to a higher power. Steen (the grown up space cop) talks that language in the final story of the first season. "Every child is a telepath. All they have to do is find the key within themselves to unlock the special powers we telepaths possess."

You could take Breaking Out as a metaphor for Coming Out. The Tomorrow People has a certain reputation for being A Bit Gay or A Bit Camp. It is certainly true that the guys, at any rate, take their shirts off more than is strictly necessary. Season Two begins with John towelling himself down, presumably after going swimming, for no very good reason.

The X-Men were a club. The Fantastic Four were a family. The Tomorrow People have the best of both worlds. They are a friendship group; a gang, the most inner of all inner rings, four youths against the world. But what they have found at the other end of the psychic Hogwarts Express is clearly a family. John, serious and authoritarian is Dad; Carol, fussy and perpetually panicking, is Mum; Kenny, smiley and spunky is kid-brother and Steven, sensible and confused, on the cusp of adolescence, is big brother.


Peter Vaughan Clark -- Steven -- can't act. To be honest, none of them are very good at it. Steven Salman (Kenny) is the least worst: he is supposed to be the youngest, and he recites his lines by rote as if he doesn't quite understand them. "Saps-thats-you-it's-short-for-homo-sapiens-it-means-man-the-thinker." This gives him an endearingly other-worldly vibe. Sammie Winimill (Carol) had done some TV acting before the Tomorrow People, but her entire performance is two octaves too high, giving an impression of permanent hysteria. She is hamstrung by a script which expects her to say things like "But we've got to do something we've simply got too we can't just do nothing we simply can't." Only Nicholas Young (John) gives any sign of knowing what nuance means: he gets to be the Nice One who is also the Serious Authoritative One, perpetually telling the camera that the world is about to end, everyone is going to die, and that it's a long shot but it just might work. Vaughan Clark accompanies every line with a slightly too careful stage-school gesture, and his voice goes up slightly too much at the end of every question, until you want to throw him onto the molten surface of the planet Mercury. He improved considerably in the second season, and I believe made a decent career for himself on the other side of the camera. We are only five years away from Grange Hill, a school-based soap opera in which the kids looked and sounded like actual kids

But in a sense, Steven is what carries the programme. Reader response is a risky game, and I have claimed slightly too frequently that the limitations of creaky old TV shows are actually part of their strengths. But I do think that there is a blank, gormless absence at the centre of the Tomorrow People, at least to start with; on to which we all project ourselves. We are all Steven. We all have scars on our foreheads. We are all Chosen Ones.



The opening credits are perhaps more interesting than a lot of the actual episodes. The viewer is thrust forward down a kind of tunnel: images of the main character's faces and star-scapes zoom towards us, along with the titles and the credits. It rather resembles the Doctor Who opening sequence; in which the viewer is pulled through a split screen hyperspace time tunnel from which the Doctor and the TARDIS emerge. But that title sequence was only adopted in December '73: at this point the BBC was still using the wibbly-wobbly lines which had served them in various forms since Unearthly Child. 

The central image is of a fist opening up into a hand; and of a bud opening into a flower. And a man clinging to some kind of boxing punch-bag: I've never been quite sure what that means. This imagery is specifically evoked by Carol when she talks to Steven in the hospital: it's a kind of visual analogy to Breaking Out. The fist of violence becomes the open hand of friendship; but more widely and simply, the message is simply "Open Your Mind".

Open your mind.

I can remember, vividly, imagining a future in which a very old man with a long white beard told a large crowd of tomorrow babies that he was the first. And we viewers, who had been there at the beginning, knew that he was John. If Big Finish or someone want to make this story, they should get in touch. I believe that Nicholas Young is still working. That's how the far future looked in those days. The Blue Peter Annual spoke frivolously of a remote futurity when an old lady and two very old gentlemen would return to the BBC garden and dig up the millennium time capsule. Twenty nine years is a long time when you are a kid, but everyone took it for granted that Blue Peter would still be on BBC One in the Far Future, even if there would be different presenters and different pets. The final Planet of the Apes movie ended with a brief glimpse into a future world where the grandchildren of former apes and the grandchildren of former humans sit together at the table of brotherhood. I certainly had intimations of mortality at the age of seven. All Tomorrow People but one grow up. Seven is the beginning of the end.

Open your mind...

Did it come true? John would be pushing seventy now: not quite the grey-beard of my dream, but getting on that way. So far the earth has not joined the Galactic Federation: if we had a referendum the Saps would vote to Leave. War has not come to an end. Steven's generation elected Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. 

It is often said that William Gibson predicted the Internet, coining the word cyberspace in unreadable sci-fi noir novels composed on a manual typewriter. But todays digital natives have far more in common with Douglas Adams’s hitch-hikers than they do with Gibson's cyberjocks. They have an electronic book which contains everything; it has replaced the conventional sources of wisdom and knowledge, even though they know that it is completely unreliable.

But Roger Price saw the future first, in a silly forgotten TV show a few of us fell hopelessly in love with. 

The children who talk to each other from their bedrooms before saying good morning to their parents. The children who instantly know where their friends are and are never out of touch with them. Linked, not through cyberspace but through hyperspace.

A Tomorrow Person is never alone. Ever kid with a mobile is homo superior.



What was the Age of Aquarius?

About seven....

22 comments:

postodave said...

The old get old and the young get stronger. May take a week and it may take longer. They got the guns but we got the numbers. We're going to win yeah we're taking over. Alright.

It was a smart move to make the tomorrow people hippies. In Stapeldon's Odd John Homo Superiors are into murder, genocide and incest. A sort of Manson clan with telepathy. The Tomorrow People are a bit more Woodstock. But children are never going to want to play with toy pacifists so they do have to cheat on that as you say.

I agree Kenny is the best actor. Carol is always so close to hysteria and John is incredibly earnest. When Carol is told by a time traveler from the future she could be the ancestor of many telepaths she avoids saying, 'Oh no, I don't fancy John.' And one can imagine John saying in serious tones, 'I'm sorry Carol, it has to be done for the future of humanity.' 'I suppose you are right John, you usually are.'

I liked the Tomorrow People but I was a bit too old when it started and I grew out of it. And that is a key difference between this and Doctor Who. Some kids do grow out of the Doctor but a lot, including me, don't. Oddly enough I can enjoy it now. It's around twenty years since I tried it on a child and it would be interesting to see what the new wave of Who fans, the ones who wach the old series as well as the new, would make of it.

Richard Worth said...

I am wondering if SF from c1914 to 1989 accepted that war was the greatest threat to humankind, and whether in 2022 this has become current again?

Michael Cule said...

I was at Oxford studying English by the time THE TOMORROW PEOPLE came on but I still watched it, desperate for some bit of wish fulfillment skiffy as I was.

Right from the start it was clear that the ban on violence was both a major feature and a major bug. These are nice, good and peaceful people. And those aren't the sort of people who have adventures that change the world. (Sorry Andrew and other Christians who may be reading but that's what just about all literature tells us.) If you have totally peaceful characters then what you have is the romance novel at best and tedious soap opera at worst.

It strikes me that a lot more SF&F for children and teens is saying that one day they might become the great heroes they read about. SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD even had the Oath you got to swear if you were Destined. At the age of 67 and still waiting for super powers it strikes me that this might not have been a healthy option to offer my young mind.

postodave said...

Right from the start it was clear that the ban on violence was both a major feature and a major bug. These are nice, good and peaceful people. And those aren't the sort of people who have adventures that change the world. (Sorry Andrew and other Christians who may be reading but that's what just about all literature tells us.) If you have totally peaceful characters then what you have is the romance novel at best and tedious soap opera at worst.
I don't know about that. There is an awful lot of lives of the saints stuff that is about that. I mean whatever else it is The Martydom of Polycarp isn't boring and nor are the tales about Socrates. Both of those can be said to have changed the world. It's the action adventures side that is harder. but the usual way round that is to make the adventures symbolic of something else as in The Grail Quest. The specific proble is these are the literal adventures of literal pacifists working an idiom where life is cheap. Russell T Davies once said 'I'm writing for Children, I'll kill someone.'

Michael Cule said...

I think the difference between the heroism of martyrs and that of superheroes is one of the cases where two of Aristotle's (1) Dramatic Unities still apply: Unity of Action and Unity of Time.

You can't effectively show that the death of the martyr has effects echoing down the centuries, inspiring faith or resistance to tyrrany or whatever. You can TELL people about it, you can imply it but with any sort of coherent storytelling you can't show what the effect is.

Compare and contrast with what you can do with Superman or Captain America. Modern superhero movies will do their best to show the side effects and disadvantages of violent action.

I'm not decrying the effects of the martyr's courage (though I will point out that people can be heroic and sacrifice their lives in bad causes too) but I am saying it doesn't work well with storytelling, especially of the iconic/heroic/mythic type.

Gavin Burrows said...

Me (mental noting): “Having just written about the Tomorrow People myself, every time Andrew says something I should have but didn’t I will kick myself.”

Andrew (first sentence): “The Tomorrow People's main power is that they are nice”

Me: “Uh-oh.”

“Violence and War seem to be the main points on which the Tomorrow People differ from the Saps: there is little talk about environmental issues or sharing the world's resources.”

I wonder if this is as much to do with intended audience as era. As adults, we all casually use playground metaphors such as “Putin is acting like a school bully”. Whereas at that age you’re as likely to think of your local school bully as being like Putin. Ginge and Lefty, while too old to be school bullies, are delinquent ‘bad kids’. While my nearest direct experience, in those days, of the world’s resources being hoarded was my Mum keeping the lid on the biscuit tin.

On the other hand… The standard moral for child audiences tends to be “fighting is bad, leave your brother alone. You’ll be more ready for nuance later.” Whereas I could well believe Price, the post-Sixties utopian, genuinely thought we’d evolve past such primitive thinking and wear more white.

To the devout believer in the power of nice, the ultimate solution to problems is often simply to wait. People will just gravitate to the niceness, given enough time. We don’t tend to think that so much these days. But let’s focus on the dramatic effects. Because they’ll keep us busy enough.

“The series would have been a lot more interesting if the heroes had sometimes been pushed into situations which demanded lethal force, found themselves unable to use it, and had to live with the consequences.”

The other half of this would be the series’ penchant for not so much dealing with threats as wishing them away. Villains were always turning out to be not so bad really, once you got to know them. The meek will inherit episode four. Which often felt like an ill-prepared-for volte face. The utopian sensibility and the dramatic structure of action-adventure were always clashing, without anyone seeming to know what to do to solve this.

They did make efforts to fix other problems. While you are of course right about Carol, she was replaced with Elizabeth who was much more another John. But that seems the show’s cardinal flaw. Scuppered by niceness.
 

postodave said...

I think the difference between the heroism of martyrs and that of superheroes is one of the cases where two of Aristotle's (1) Dramatic Unities still apply: Unity of Action and Unity of Time.

You can't effectively show that the death of the martyr has effects echoing down the centuries, inspiring faith or resistance to tyrrany or whatever. You can TELL people about it, you can imply it but with any sort of coherent storytelling you can't show what the effect is.

Compare and contrast with what you can do with Superman or Captain America. Modern superhero movies will do their best to show the side effects and disadvantages of violent action.

I'm not decrying the effects of the martyr's courage (though I will point out that people can be heroic and sacrifice their lives in bad causes too) but I am saying it doesn't work well with storytelling, especially of the iconic/heroic/mythic type.

According to the legends the saints, and Jesus as well, did have superpowers. In some of the apocryphal tales Jesus even has to learn not to use his Superpowers because 'with great power comes great responsibility'. I'm thinking of the Bitter Withy, but there a a few similar tales.

The saints are able to remain pacificists, at least in the stories and at least for a few centuries, because they take the phrase, 'vengeance is mine saith the Lord' very literally.

Existentially speaking the martyr's courage is the heroic victory. The later reward in heaven may be hinted at. Of course no one can prove these acts change history, but proving anything causes anything is tricky. If people say they were inspired by these tales, I think we have to believe them.

Once Christianity begins to reshape the kinds of hero tales told in Northern paganism then we get both the moral hero 'Beowulf' and the morally flawed hero 'Lancelot'. None of this is unsubtle, but by this time Christians have moved away from pacifism and even monks move away from the non-combatant role both in real life and in the tales.

The Tomorrow People lacks the sophistication of much of the Christian writing in dealing with the complex issues surrounding violence and non-violence.

Michael Cule said...

Beowulf is more than half pagan and he actually does things, kills monsters, slays dragons, though ultimately at the cost of his own life.

You can see right there in the story, the difference he made. But THE TOMORROW PEOPLE is trying to depict what I believe is called wu wei, fighting by not fighting, the striking power of inaction, of self control, of acting in accordance with the way of the universe.

And I think that is just rubbish as popular entertainment. I also think that most people who claim to know what the universe wants are not to be entirely trusted.

(Yes, Lancelot is morally flawed and a lot better as a character for it but it's a hard row to hoe depicting such a character and much harder in a program for children. THE TOMORROW PEOPLE were more like Galahad, so practically perfect as to be intolerable as company.)

SK said...

Sorry Andrew and other Christians who may be reading but that's what just about all literature tells us.

You can’t write good action stories about Christians? You should try telling that to Frank Hampson.

Of course it might well be the case that you can’t write good stories about hippies. Certainly I’ve never seen one. But hippies and Christians are very very different things.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Stories about Christians: I think that Middlemarch and Mansfield Park are kinds of stories. Not to mention Little Women. And Little House On The Prairie. I do grant that they are, er, girls stories. Cognisant of the Amazon reviewer who felt that Pride and Prejudice was "just a bunch of people going to each other's houses" but I think they are better than soap opera. There is also one I'm quite fond of involving large allegorical felines and bedroom furniture, which is itself, of course, a variation on The Greatest Story Ever Told.

“Having just written about the Tomorrow People myself, every time Andrew says something I should have but didn’t I will kick myself.” That's okay: I've had to give myself a mental slap every time Postodave says something in the comments I wish I'd said in the essay. (Although, respect should be mutual and you shouldn't just respect people because you are scared of them...)

postodave said...

Beowulf is more than half pagan and he actually does things, kills monsters, slays dragons, though ultimately at the cost of his own life.

Yes, Lancelot is morally flawed and a lot better as a character for it but it's a hard row to hoe depicting such a character and much harder in a program for children. THE TOMORROW PEOPLE were more like Galahad, so practically perfect as to be intolerable as company

Yes with Beowulf Christian moral characteristics are being grafted onto a pagan hero. There are two main ways you can embody and ethic in a story. You can make the hero or group of heroes the full embodiment of that ethic, or you can have them imperfect, partial embodiments or non-embodiments and depict the consequences of that. The partial embodiment is more sophisticated. the Tomorrow people like Galahad are meant as a perfect embodiment and that is a weaker way of story telling. Even with Galahad there is this ambivalence because he is meant to be a type of Christ and also a perfect knight. As an attempt to combine warrior ideals and monastic ideals it is flawed. Though not nearly as flawed as the attempts to do that in real life.

But THE TOMORROW PEOPLE is trying to depict what I believe is called wu wei, fighting by not fighting, the striking power of inaction, of self control, of acting in accordance with the way of the universe.

And I think that is just rubbish as popular entertainment.

Almost contemporary with The Tomorrow People was a series called Kung Fu that was about Wu Wei fighting and was very popular. It is not surprising because it takes the Western genre and subverts it by having a pacifist who is a better fighter than the thugs and bullies as the hero. A very easy identification figure. Doctor Who is also very Wu Wei. when with Jon Pertwee the Doctor becomes an action hero he uses Venusian Aikido - which Terrence Dicks tells us was chosen as his form of combat because aikido is purely defensive.

I think that can work, but the reason it does not work in the Tomorrow People is because the philosophy behind it is not properly worked out.

I also think that most people who claim to know what the universe wants are not to be entirely trusted.
Things like natural law theory or Taoism say we can discern what is fitting in the universe; it is reasonable to say a person can be punished for theft or murder because they have gone against the natural order. The versions of this that are historicist are more problematic. Punishing someone for not accepting the behaviour of a state that is at the vanguard of history is not the same. Karl Popper wrote two major books about this. The Tomorrow People are drawing on an evolutionary version of the second idea. They will rule because they are superior, and the next stage in evolution.

As Michael Moorcock once put it 'May the force never come knocking on your door at 3 0'clock in the morning'

postodave said...

Of course it might well be the case that you can’t write good stories about hippies. Certainly I’ve never seen one. But hippies and Christians are very very different things.
Vince Cosmos, Glam Rock Detective
The Final Programme - although Jerry is very violent.
The Time of the Hawklords

postodave said...

The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle
The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Dharma Bums

There are also novels that anticipate Hippies
Like Stranger in a Strange Land

I would say The Dancers at the End of Time are hippies
and a case can be made for the X-Men being a hippy commune

postodave said...

Of course they are not all action stories. Vince Cosmos is a bit post hippy. But surely Jerry Cornelius is a hippy. In the time of the Hawklords both ippies and straights have guns firing music at each other. Simon and Garfunkel have a devastating effect on the hippies. The Electric Kool Aid Acid test is a non fiction novel but it has superhero names and it is written as an adventure. The Dharma Bums was set in the late fifties but Gary Snyder who the central character is based on is one of the earliest to adopt hippy ideals.

Gavin Burrows said...

To add insult to self-inflicted injury, I am finding now iI'm saying things in these comments I wish I'd said when it was me saying stuff. "The meek will inherit episode four" wasn't bad, was it?

The general direction the comments have gone into, it seems to me a classic case of internet debates raging because they lack parameters. You need to specify it's the action-adventure genre needs fisticuffs for resolution, not storytelling in general. Postodave has made this point, yes, but not strongly enough in my view. Though I'm not sure I agree with him about the philosophy being a problem, even if I'm not personally a pacifist. It's true to pull off such a thing you have to rig it, so your peaceful heroes are always running into problems which can be solved by peaceful means. But action-adventure always rigs things, sets up overwhelming odds then has the hero win anyway. It wasn't an impossible task, but it was a stiff one, ultimately one Price and his pals couldn't pull off.

postodave said...

There are a whole lot of different rules you can have governing action stories. Heroes who can't kill are entirely viable. They can just use less than lethal force.

The problem with the Tomorrow people is it is not clear why they can't kill, so it is not clear why they can kill a robot. It is not clear how close to killing they can go, and how much it will harm them if they are accidentally responsible for a death, though it seems not much.

The problem is that the Tomorrow People have to be both ordinary kids and highly evolved superhumans. They do advanced Maths and can solve problems saps can't but it is not quite clear how. They fall for simple tricks by their enemies. The homo superiors in Odd John are morally and intellectually different to homo sapiens. The galaxy is a lovely place full of advanced civilisations and also full of threatening aliens. I think it does not quite add up.

Gavin Burrows said...

“The problem with the Tomorrow people is it is not clear why they can't kill”

Andrew already touched on the diegetic explanation. It’s said at one point to be Nature compensating for their powers. This makes… you may be ahead of me here… no sense. But then diegetic explanations are normally ostensible. And Andrew has also hit on the real reason – it is because they are Nice. Though I suppose you could add that this is all happening at teatime. I honestly think this completely closes the question.

Andrew also writes about another TV SF show sometimes. And from your list of problems, how many would apply there? Even ‘kids’ comes in with the companions. And ‘Doctor Who’ ranges from essentially pacifist stories to full-on anti-pacifist. And I think the people bothered by this wouldn’t have liked the show to start with. It’s stuff your brain goes to when the foreground drama isn’t engaging you.

Michael Cule said...

As I recall it (and I have made this up at the time to explain the bald faced assertion) it was due to their telepathic sensitivity which would be enough to make them feel the death of the people they killed. Which just made me wonder about hiring mercenaries or leaving bombs and jaunting away, unpleasant fellow that I am.

It's true that good storytelling is enough to numb the brain while the story is going on. But then you get the dread 'fridge moment' when you open it to get a beer (or whatever) afterwards and suddenly thinK: "Hang on, that makes no sense!"

postodave said...

Nature is very interesting in the Tomorrow People. It has purpose. It can make mistakes. It's one of those things you can't think about or as you say it makes no sense. The teatime thing does not work as an explanation. Kid's sci fi can involve death and if you want your heroes not to kill, you just don't have them kill. No explanation needed.

The companions in Doctor Who can be unusually capable and brave and it was not until the new series that any writer felt the need to explain this. Doctor Who's attitude to violence evolved over time. In the Making of Doctor Who Terrence Dicks wrote of the Doctor, 'He never carries a gun.' He was comparing the Doctor to James Bond and say he does not go into situations expecting to have to kill. That was taken up and it became for some writers the idea that the Doctor would never use a gun, others don't know of this or don't see it that way. But most of these rules in Doctor Who are not explicit. In the Tomorrow People the thing about their not being able to kill is stated from the outset, but what this means, is never fully made plain.

I am not sure at what stage this kind of thing started to bother me. I don't think it did when I first watched it. And the biggest paradox for me is not the one about killing though it is a part of it. It is the way they both are and are not normal kids. Are they more intelligent than saps, do they have a different psychology? I don't think I asked that at the time. Once you do ask that then the series looks incoherent. The needs of a popular children's TV show exclude the terrifying sci fi theme of the mutant human and his relationship with the race he is out evolving.

SK said...

Andrew already touched on the diegetic explanation. It’s said at one point to be Nature compensating for their powers. This makes… you may be ahead of me here… no sense.

Well, I mean, that’s actually the non-diegetic explanation, isn’t it? Plotwise they have to have some weakness to compensate for their super-powers or there would be no challenges.


And ‘Doctor Who’ ranges from essentially pacifist stories to full-on anti-pacifist.

Doctor Who pacifist?! You must have been watching a different Doctor Who to the one I was. It’s true that Doctor Who doesn’t like to use guns (except for all the times when he does) but that doesn’t mean he isn’t violent or doesn’t kill — it just means he does it more indirectly (or as he would say, more cleverly). Pacifists, after all, don’t tend to programme stellar manipulators to blow up the suns of people they don’t like.

SK said...

Sorry, just realised I misread that line and you weren’t claiming Doctor Who was consistently pacifist at all. Shouldn’t reply after skim-reading.

Mike Taylor said...

I was five in 1973 and eleven in 1979, so I suppose I was pretty squarely in the target demographic. Yet all I really remember about it was finding it boring -- something you had to get through before you got to Hong Kong Phooey. (Now there was a TV programme!) Now I'm starting to think I was missing something. Almost though persuadest me to pirate at least the first episode, if only to see just how bad the acting it.