Kill All Others

The final episode of the first series of the Electric Dreams strand has great world building of a modern hi tech but Dystopian society. Philbert Noyce (Mel Rodriguez) is one of the few manual workers left in a factory that has become fully automated. He is till old enough to remember when the factory employed thousands of workers and old fashioned enough to travel to work by public transport.

With the election taking place, he watches a political debate where the only candidate (Vera Farmiga) makes a shocking statement encouraging violence. She says Kill All Others. The screen flashes Kill All Others but does not state who the others are.

Philbert is disturbed by the statement and concerned why others are not similarly outraged. He wants to make a stand but this leads him to become a focus of the attention of the authorities.

As a conspiracy drama it fails. Poor Philbert, as Michael Caine from Get Carter would tell him. 'You're a big man, but you're in bad shape.' He is never going to be a match for the government.

So we are presented with another government that uses every method it can to sustain itself. In this case we have a Soviet like voting system where it's more important that people vote than whether they have more than one candidate. So now we are introduced to "the others." In her speech she dumps the words "Kill the others." People are so lacking in participation that they don't even hear this. Except for a guy named Phibert, who rants about the evils of this government. He becomes the focus because his actions draw attention to him. We don't need to be rocket scientists to know where this is going. This is the last series piece that I've viewed. I've seen them all now. Once again, the protagonist has no chance. The government has all the weaponry and all the power. People removed themselves from politics long ago and are becoming sheep. Poor Philbert (is he a nut?) can't help bringing horrors to bear.

This was the greatest episode of the series and depicts a mega country that is run by a Uniparty government. It is frightening but well done. The people of the society absorb an offhand comment made by the leader that calls for the death of all others. It was the stuff of nightmares but also very much like the culture of purging the old ideas and history for the demands of the ruling party establishment we experience in today's world. We are there. Papers please.

Overall, this episode has lofty goals and features very good performances by the actors. But the script is written in a juvenile, detached and unconvincing way. It follows a man who is disturbed by what he sees in society around him.

I'm not sure how others were drawn in but the dialogue and performances by the "candidate" - the leader of a single party system - were so over the top and repetitive that it was not convincing. Does the party leader have nothing to do all day but make speeches? Other parts of this episode feature people not acting in the regular manner we expect, like explaining to someone else why a group of people may be chasing someone or how our protagonist has never noticed the catch phrase of this episode "kill all others" before and this is the first time either (a) he's ever seen it; or (b) he's somehow never noticed it before; or (c) it IS the first time it is used. Neither explanation lays groundwork for this to work.

It's a shame. Wastes good performances by talented people. This comes off as one of the cheaper productions of scifi, like an outer limits type of made for TV story line which doesn't usually happen with its competitor, Black Mirror. Some good concepts and fun in this episode with lampooning what society could be, but this episode isn't sure of itself.

Saving just about the best till last, this, the tenth and last episode of the Philip K Dick Anthology was probably the most chilling and disturbing of them all. It started lightly enough as Philbert Noyce, a typical blue-collar assembly-line operative and his wife play tit-for-tat with interactive holographic advertisements but quickly gets darker as they settle down to watch a fawning campaign interview by their megastate Mexuscan's single Candidate, reminiscent of a recent Xi Jinping interview. Rather like the Chinese reporter who rolled her eyes Philbert is sceptical of this brand of one-party democracy but did she really intersperse the usual sub-Obama parodic platitudes with the phrase "Kill All Others"?

Philbert discusses his incredulity at this casual exhortation to ethnic cleanse with his two fellow workers on the production line but it's clear that they either missed the reference or can't get worked up about it, so long as they know they're not one of the "others" but when he later sees a neighbour set upon by a crowd of pedestrians for no apparent reason, repeat references by the Candidate on TV and especially the erection of a huge advertising billboard proclaiming the order with what looks a dead man's body draped over it for effect, Philbert snaps and rebels.

The viewer for a time is left in some suspense as to whether Phil is suffering some sort of persecutional delusion complex as he's made to submit to medical procedures at work including the wearing of a Fitbit type watch to monitor his behaviour but it's clear the worm has turned as he attempts to expose and lift the Candidate's hold over the sheep-like population. The bleak conclusion posits a chilling final image as "order" is restored.

Like so many of the episodes in this series I was impressed by the way the adaptations inserted topical references to the material further reinforcing Dick's presence and prescience of mind when he first wrote his short stories some 50 years or so ago. For the record Mel Rodriguez was great in this one as the little-big man who takes on the system while I also appreciated an edgy synthesiser soundtrack which accurately echoed Noyce's increasing paranoia.

I'm now working my way through a book of Dick's stories (none of which appear to have been dramatised in this series) and I'm not a great sci-fi lover but I can say there's plenty more good source material if a further series gets commissioned which I hope occurs.