Ambitious, the series intends to give a continuation to two classics of science fiction, the novel by Walter Tevis and the film by Nicolas Roeg.
by Thomas Sotinel
In front of thousands of spectators on the verge of ecstasy, Faraday is preparing to announce the good news: the planet is saved. The first sequence of this new avatar of the man who came from elsewhere is also – almost – the conclusion of the series. The elegant man and sure of him that one discovers gives a messianic dimension to the insurance common to the leaders of the multinational tech. He obviously triumphed over the obstacles that men have put on his interstellar path.
By choosing to start at the end, Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman, the creators of these ten episodes, take the risk of possibing the mystery of this character whose origin is known anyway. The title is explicit, the series proceeds from both a classic of science fiction literature and a masterpiece of cinema. Roman by Walter Tevis published in 1963 (available in France under the title L’Homme Fallen du Sky, by Gallmeister editions), feature film by Nicolas Roeg, with David Bowie, released in 1976 (found on the Mubi platform ), The Man Who Fell to Earth has long conquered his place in the imagination of those who have crossed his path.
on the verge of cataclysm
We will have noticed, the alien of the series did not borrow his earthly name from the same physicist as the hero of the novel and the film. The latter was called Newton, that of 2022, Faraday. It is not a question here of telling the same story, but of prolonging it, of acclimatizing it to our time. The visitor no longer has the elegant strangeness of David Bowie, but the human thickness of Chiwetel Ejiofor (Twelve Years A Slave, in 2013). And, above all, the one who came to earth to seek the remedy for the water shortage which threatens Anthea, his original planet, discovers a world which, too, is on the verge of cataclysm.
By altering the postulate of the story, Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman open to him possibilities of which they make intelligent use, spinning the original metaphors of the novel of Tevis, injecting both the anxieties and the fictional figures XXI e century.
As in Roeg’s film, it is in New Mexico that the extraterrestrial capsule crashes. Naked, not controlling the language or the uses of the place, he quickly finds himself surrounded by hostile and armed humans. Faraday came to carry out the mission that his predecessor, Thomas Jerome Newton, left unfinished, diverted from his goal by alcohol, television and the CIA. To achieve this, he needs the help of Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), a physicist banned from the scientific community, who lives in a marginal commune of the State, but also to come into contact with Newton. This will finish, at the end of the first episode, by appearing in the guise of Bill Nighy, which, to embody the worn extraterrestrial by too long exile, made the head of the poet William Burroughs.
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