These EpisodesForce Of Life
These EpisodesFrom the These Episodes documentary originally on the 2005 Network DVD boxset.
In Space, the people who were out there were frightened, disorientated, certainly in the earlier days. They were people like us. Force of Life was in essence the story of something that was familiar to them on Earth, but writ large in cosmic, almost universal terms. The idea of a force wandering the universe, that relies on heat for its sustenance and for its transformation from one state of evolution into another, is a principle that can work at the micro level in the butterfly and the caterpillar, but it can also work, why not, in the cosmic level. Here we have this wandering force; hard to call it a being, because it has no identity that we could possibly remotely understand. It's driven by an imperative we don't understand either.
This force is looking for heat, and it finds the first available source, the character of Ian McShane. Thereafter he nurses it and it grows; and the remarkable David Tomblin, the way he shot this. He gave such an energy and creativity to the use of camera angles. Striking scenes.
Dave Tomlin I think was one of the top directors on the show. It had its own style, its own type of writing, in its own dialogue delivery. I think David took a lot from that, and I think he's thought a great deal about style, cameras, he had some really good camera angles, it really stitched together in a slightly crazy way.
To see him marching down the corridors, low angle. And the lighting drained as he goes, and of course everything the people in Moonbase Alpha are doing to try and counter this thing, their understanding is always one step behind.
If they had understood, they would have simply said halt, you wanted to be charged and to be sent on your way, great, we'll do it willingly; but it it had no way of communicating and so devises a way in which we will give it a charge, the strength to go in and absorb all the energy. It goes off on the next stage of its evolutionary journey which will perhaps take millions of years, who knows.
Contents copyright Martin Willey