Real science fiction

Watching “The Event” is as confusing as grappling in the dark for your lost flashlight. However, this is precisely what sets it apart from the television shows that you can watch while indulging in the notoriously irresistible habit of multitasking. The show demands commitment of a higher degree; you do not just watch it, you simultaneously look at many frames of the story and try connect them to form the correct picture in your mind.  It holds a seductive fascination for those who have a weakness for robustly challenging plot sequences like “Lost” and “FlashForward.”

Directed by Nick Wauters, “The Event” is a science fiction story with all the spice of a political thriller. Making a mind-numbingly mysterious start, the series chronicles the story of an ordinary man, Sean Walker, who becomes entangled in huge national conspiracy. Determined to propose to his beautiful girlfriend Leila, Walker boards a Caribbean-bound cruise ship. Soon his girlfriend goes missing along with any evidence of her ever boarding the ship. We are soon introduced to a group of mysterious detainees on board who are later revealed to be aliens and told that an extraterrestrial aircraft crashed in northern Alaska near the end of World War II and the surviving passengers look just like humans — the catch being that they have slightly different DNA and they age at a remarkably slower rate than humans.

As it aims to explore concepts of otherness and difference, the show presents a metaphorical discourse on identity politics. By humanising the aliens, it tries to reconcile science fiction with realism, making it easier for the audience to grasp the marginalisation of the detainees. The show bears some resemblance to James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which both symbolise the same marginalised existence that “The Event” does. The difference is that aliens in this show do not present the gothic side of otherness as Frankenstein does, and they are not an embodiment of the technological aspect of our culture like The Terminator. Devoid of a stable and distinct body, the aliens present the uncanny experience of fragmentation and uncertainty. By giving the aliens apparently organic human bodies, the story subverts the tradition of substituting the technological for the organic and undermines their status as ‘the other’ and highlights the notion of hybridity instead.

Furthermore, it effectively highlights the undesirability of truth in contemporary culture. The new black president Elias Martinez who was supposed to release the secret detainees becomes another brick in the wall when he chooses to keep their existence a secret. This can help us discern the elements of the “constitutive ideology” of the show. It presents a haunting image of a postmodern world that is still clinging to the lie of certainty to keep up with its image of a great civilisation.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2010.