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THE SECOND COMING (Eccleston/Davies; DVD comments)

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Micky DuPree

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Feb 10, 2007, 12:44:41 AM2/10/07
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Huge honking plot spoilers for _The Second Coming_, starring Christopher
Eccleston, written by Russell T. Davies, and directed by Adrian
Shergold, even though its ITV broadcast in the U.K. is now four years
old. I believe its U.S. telecast was confined to the poorly distributed
BBC America channel eight months after. (The DVD is available in
Region 1 from amazon.com and amazon.ca, and in Region 2 from
amazon.co.uk, just to take three examples, w/ audio commentary, deleted
scenes, and gag reel.) I recently saw it on DVD and then went to Google
Groups looking for a place to post about it. u.m.t.a, now quiescent,
had the only familiar names.

In article <10448305...@urchin.earth.li>, Niall Harrison
<s...@tirian.magd.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

: Personally, I loved it. Flat-out, no quibbles, loved it.

I had lots of quibbles, but it was still the most interesting thing I
had seen in a long time. It's hard to get serious ruminations on
religion in American television.

: It was so beautifully *mundane*; like, this *is* what it would be
: like.

The entire decision to keep the spectacle to a minimum was well
considered. If you can't find the miraculous in every blade of grass,
then religion's just for show anyway. If the Second Coming can't happen
in Manchester, then it can't happen anywhere.

: You've got these incredible, unbelievable fantasy elements ("ok, maybe
: one more"), and you've got a real sense of it being grounded in the
: real world.

I agreed with the commentary by the writer, Russell T. Davies, that the
effects were very well done; not cheesy, but supportive of the script.
The daylight in the night stadium was very tasteful, which is hard to do
with something that spectacular. It was poles apart from the Cecil B.
DeMille school of biblical bombast.

: There's no dodging of the consequences of the idea, either - just
: relentless, logical progression.

There I start to disagree. _The Second Coming_ was sweet in a lot of
places, but a bit of a letdown at the end, an atheist or a religious
rebel trying his hand at allegory. (I suspect Davies is an atheist, for
reasons I'll explain later.) It's one thing to believe there's no god,
but it's a bit strange to prefer that there be no god. I can see it if
one prefers that there's no vengeful or vain god, but I didn't see
anything dreadfully wrong with Anointed One Stephen Baxter apart from
fibbing about having sex and nicking a cell phone.

The underlying rationale of the allegory seemed to be that morality
trumps metaphysics. I.e., it's not right to keep a thinking species in
a permanent state of childhood with the ever-watchful parent coming in
to judge, reward, and punish. But if that was apostle Judith's
justification in the end, then the steps that the narrative took were
contradictory.

It's the same contradiction that Ivan Karamazov ran afoul of, though
aimed in a different direction. Judith didn't come to the erroneous
conclusion, as Ivan did, that in the absence of God, "Everything is
permitted," but she did come to the conclusion that it was all right to
found the future happiness of the rest of the human race on the misery,
despair, and death of one man. They both came up with a principle --
morality trumps metaphysics -- powerful enough to indict God Himself,
and then they turned their backs on it. If morality trumps metaphysics,
then the greatest among us would be no less entitled to moral
consideration, to compassion, and to live out his life than the least
among us. Judith should have been Steve's greatest advocate for
retiring from the god business and living a full human life, not urging
him to suicide. There's a difference between living life as if there is
no God, and actually assisting in God's suicide after you've seen the
proof that He exists as a sentient sapient being. I can't get those two
aspects of Davies' story to reconcile.

Every time I see a gospel, whether it's a new one or an old one, I
always end up feeling sorry for Jesus. I don't think that's the
intended reaction, but there you go. If morality trumps metaphysics,
then it didn't really matter if Steve was the son of God or not. You
just don't treat people like that, and that was where _The Second
Coming_ fell down for me. The only reason why Steve had to die was
because the writer's metaphysics preferred it. The Third Testament
could be, "The human race is grown up now. God relinquishes all
parental responsibilities and buys a house in the Bahamas." Parents
don't have to die in the material world when their kids reach 18. Steve
didn't need to die to put the human race in the same position either,
except that the writer preferred it (and possibly had some sentimental
attachment to the idea that the Savior had to die again in order to save
humanity from Himself). Davies said in the commentary that a happy
ending for Steve would have been a copout, and I'd agree completely if
they had been making a tragedy, but the impression I got at the end was
that Judith and the human race did get their happy ending.

In the real world, I can't see Judith living a normal life afterwards,
much less a happy one. Even though Steve ate the poison willingly,
there'd always be people who would want to kill her for killing God.
Cults would spring up saying the tape was faked with an actor, and the
real Steve was being held prisoner. I understand that one shouldn't
take allegories literally. Nevertheless, I submit that you can't do
away with religious frenzy and persecution just by killing God. That's
an atheistic version of pie in the sky.

There was a certain amount of ahistorical despair in Steve's big speech
to the masses, too. "It's finally happened. Heaven is empty. And Hell
is bursting at the seams." I know it's hard to tell at the microscopic
level, but we're living in what is probably the most moral time in
humanity's history, certainly from the standpoint of reducing
institutional versions of Man's inhumanity to man. Everyone used to be
bossed around by kings and oppressed and slaughtered by local warlords.
Most men were forced to bend knee to someone, and women and children
were essentially chattel. I know there's still literally a world of
room for improvement today, but what golden age was Steve implying in
which Heaven was a lot fuller and Hell a lot more empty than they are
now (never mind that traditionally, membership in either was supposed to
be eternal)?

Though powerfully played and directed, the final dinner scene between
Judith and Steve had both narrative and philosophical flaws. Davies was
somewhat conscious of this in the commentary, but only to the extent
that there was suddenly a lot of exposition for Judith to get through.
He didn't seem to be aware that it was only in this eleventh hour that
any of the main characters bothered to discuss the particulars of this
universe's metaphysics as a rationale for making universe-altering
decisions.

Specifically, how did Judith know without access to supernatural sources
of information that the death of the son of God would mysteriously kill
all the devils too? If indeed, as the story presented itself, despair
was something the devils rejoiced in, you'd think that Judith and Steve
were wrong to conclude that the devils would simply disappear when Steve
died. In a consistent universe, it seemed to me that the devils would
have triumphed in the end, since the son of God Himself, who was
nevertheless a bona fide human being in his own right (that was an
incessant point of both plot and characterization), had despaired and
taken his own life. And yet it seemed to me that the ending showed
Judith was vindicated and was therefore correct in every one of her
pronouncements to Steve. Since Davies used a noncanonical Jesus, I
don't know why he even bothered to include devils in his cosmology. I
would have thought he'd prefer Steve to say that the sinning has been
Man's all along. The devils were just a convenient fiction that Mankind
could no longer shift the blame to post-Steve.

I understand that this was allegory, not meant to be a literal what-if,
but since Davies pinned his horrific climax on the unquestioned
acceptance of a last-minute metaphysical prediction, I think it would
have been only fair that more foundation for these metaphysical
conclusions be laid earlier in the story rather than saved up for one
big authorial exposition at the end. That's why I suspect Davies is an
atheist rather than a religious rebel, since the hows of getting to the
conclusion weren't treated as important. The only thing that mattered
was that the supernatural cease to exist and that Steve grant Judith
(and the audience) the penultimate boon of using the infallible Overmind
to confirm her conclusion.

Another clue was the way Davies tried to depict Steve as "power mad."
If morality trumps metaphysics, then supernatural power is morally
neutral, just as natural power is. It doesn't matter where an ability
comes from. What matters is how it's used and for what purposes. I saw
Steve get tempted to cross the line with his supernatural power, but I
never saw him cross it. The only times he did were with stupid ordinary
stunts, like setting off car alarms. If that's "power mad," then every
15-year-old brat is drunk with power and needs to eat the poisoned
pasta. Even in the deleted scene where Steve got rid of a door
supernaturally, I didn't see where using the most expedient tool in the
toolbox was somehow evil or mad. Davies saw it as "power mad," but the
only way I can see someone coming to that conclusion is if you take it
as axiomatic that there's something inherently wrong with the
supernatural.

And the whole idea that it would have been somehow wrong for Steve to
bring apostle Pete back from the dead -- if Steve had accomplished it
with CPR and pressure bandages, that would have been all right, but if
he had used divine healing, that would have been wrong ... why exactly?
Because humans should deal only with human acts and consequences? What
would it matter to Pete which method saved him? Because if Pete had
lived, it would have changed the charge against Frank from murder to
attempted murder? Why should Pete have been made to suffer in order to
make his attacker pay? That doesn't make any moral sense at all. The
only thing that made it wrong for Steve to save Pete was a
presupposition that anything supernatural is inherently wrong. One can
make a case that humanity has to come to terms with uncontrolled
population growth, but only an idiot makes that case by saying that
first-degree murder is a more moral alternative than the supernatural
saving of the victim. (Davies made a curious remark in the commentary
that Pete was the last person to get into Heaven, but that doesn't seem
congruous with the conclusion at the end that all things supernatural
had ceased to exist: God, the devils, Heaven, Hell, all of it. It
sounded like Davies wanted to have it both ways so as to justify Pete
staying dead.)

Also, because of the enormity of the subject matter and the gravity of
the final dinner scene, I naturally had to grapple with the question of
just how much the personal part of the dinner conversation was supposed
to be symbolic of something else. On the one hand, the personal
dialogue worked extremely well if taken completely literally and on the
surface. Steve was human, after all, and both he and Judith were beset
with last-minute what-ifs and regrets as the foundation of the universe
started to whirl around them. But it wasn't at all convoluted to see a
larger meaning in that dialogue either. So when Steve asked Judith why
she hadn't asked him out earlier, he could have been asking why she
never bothered believing in the existence of God before. When Judith
replied, "I was hoping for better," she could have been saying she
wanted more out of metaphysics than the usual fare (borne out by her
insistence that it's been God who's been holding mankind back from
maturity).

Problem is, while I can get the personal dialogue to work on either
level, I can't make both interpretations work well at the same time,
which is the usual aim of having a double meaning. If the personal why-
couldn't-we-have-been-a-couple interpretation is to work, then it's
about contrasting their purely human regrets and desires with their
larger roles in the universe. (The _Casablanca_ speech about the
problems of two small people not amounting to a hill of beans wouldn't
have been out of place there.) But if the interpretation about why
Judith couldn't have believed in God earlier is to work, then it's not
about a contrast between the temporal and the mystical at all, but about
continuing the same mystical conversation within mundane trappings. If
I try to force both interpretations to work at the same time, then it
comes off as Judith saying that Steve has fallen short both as a man and
as a god, and for that he has to die, which makes Judith in particular
and humanity in general come off as shallowly materialistic (in both
major senses of the word), callous, hypocritical, and just as bitchy as
Johnny the devil pronounced her to be after their date.

So I'm left thinking that Davies probably didn't intend for there to be
any symbolic reading of the personal dinner dialogue, and yet I have to
wonder why he didn't see that possibility coming. He had obviously
constructed Steve as somewhat thick-headed and unambitious, both as a
god and as a man, offering no major utilitarian value to the world in
either role (not that that was deserving of a death sentence).

I even considered that as possible evidence that Davies isn't an atheist
after all, but is a believer who is in rebellion against a God that he
sees as not measuring up. If you're a considered atheist who prefers
that there be no god (and Davies did at least indicate that he was not
trying to take the piss out of religion with this work), then presumably
you stack the deck in the opposite direction. You write your Jesus as a
more impressive man-god, wiser, able to inspire goodness in others, and
healing the sick in his wake. Then you make your case that no matter
how wonderful God is, mankind is still better off without Him because of
the need for Man to take responsibility for his actions without God
standing there with a safety net. That's the case to be made by a true-
believing atheist, and it's not nearly as easy to do as when you've made
God a sweet simpleton who refuses to heal the sick or otherwise improve
Man's material lot. But I finally decided Davies is an atheist after
all, because the hows of the Book of Steve didn't seem to matter to him
as long as he reached the metaphysical conclusion he wanted in the end.

Ultimately, it was Judith who came off as thick-headed and unambitious
to me, always whining and blaming Steve/God for holding her back when in
actuality, there wasn't anything she did after the death of God that she
couldn't have done before. The fact that she wouldn't move on until
Steve was gone was a flaw in her character, not a flaw in Steve's/God's.
I don't think that's the impression we're supposed to get of her,
though. The epilogue didn't treat the story as a tragedy of events gone
horribly and unnecessarily wrong, but as the dawn of a better day for
Mankind.

There was also a smug comfort to Judith's life that I didn't like. It's
one thing for people of middle income in the developed world to say they
don't need God anymore; that humanity will be better off living this
life only, without the reward of Heaven or the punishment of Hell
waiting for them. Fortunately for Judith, the God of her story ended up
agreeing with her, but I wonder if the virtuous people who live in
marginal circumstances or endure a life of torture think that she made a
good bargain by denying them a better afterlife as well. I can get that
part to work only by assuming that there never was a better afterlife
waiting for them after all, despite the explicitly stated metaphysics to
the contrary within the story.

On the plus side, the cast was fantastic and absorbing. I thought the
people playing Steve (Christopher Eccleston), Judith (Lesley Sharp), and
Pete (Ahsen Bhatti) were wonderful, particularly Eccleston. I know some
of it was the writing, but Eccleston would have some of the same quality
in _Doctor Who_ of being this genuinely nice person, good company,
someone you'd want to spend time with. In fact, because I enjoyed
watching Steve so much, I didn't feel like I had wasted my time at the
end, even though I disagreed with so much of the story's underpinnings.
The director's commentary also called my attention to a lot of
intelligent and artful technical decisions that I wouldn't have caught
on my own.

Finally, I feel like an idiot for not catching the significance of
apostle Judith's name earlier. I even caught the significance of
apostle Pete's name, but I was too hung up on Judith's gender to draw
the right lines.

-Micky

--

"Tell me yourself, I challenge you -- answer. Imagine that you
are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of
making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at
last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential
and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature --
that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance -- in
order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you
consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me.
Tell the truth."

-- Dostoyevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_

SoHillsGuy

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Feb 10, 2007, 1:24:27 AM2/10/07
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Other than likely using 'penultimate' incorrectly (as many people do),
I think I agree with every word you wrote.

Very nice summary.

Micky DuPree

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Feb 11, 2007, 1:08:07 AM2/11/07
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Spoilers, yadda yadda.

"SoHillsGuy" <jerr...@comcast.net> writes:

: Other than likely using 'penultimate' incorrectly (as many people do),


: I think I agree with every word you wrote.

The penultimate boon was Steve omnisciently confirming that Judith's
testament was correct. The ultimate boon was his self-annihilation.
How do you use the word?

It was a major violation of the message of the story to use God's
infallible knowledge to say that God shouldn't exist. After all, if
humanity is to truly slog it out for themselves, then they shouldn't
have access to that kind of authoritative reassurance from on high that
they're doing the right thing, but I guess Davies couldn't resist the
temptation to quash dissent by fiat.


: Very nice summary.

Thanks.

-Micky

SoHillsGuy

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Feb 11, 2007, 8:59:15 AM2/11/07
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On Feb 11, 1:08 am, MDuP...@theworld.com.snip.to.reply (Micky DuPree)
wrote:
> Spoilers, yadda yadda.

>
> "SoHillsGuy" <jerryg...@comcast.net> writes:
>
> : Other than likely using 'penultimate' incorrectly (as many people do),
> : I think I agree with every word you wrote.
>
> The penultimate boon was Steve omnisciently confirming that Judith's
> testament was correct. The ultimate boon was his self-annihilation.
> How do you use the word?

If you were indeed implying that another boon was coming after the one
you mentioned, then you are right and I stand corrected.

So many people use "penultimate" to mean "an extreme example" (which
is wrong), and I thought that's how you were using the word.

abigail_n

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Feb 11, 2007, 12:46:15 PM2/11/07
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Hi Micky,

I was directed to your post by Niall, who thought it would interest me
as I had written about The Second Coming on my blog this summer
(http://wrongquestions.blogspot.com/2006/07/second-coming.html). You
make some very interesting points, and I hope you don't mind a
complete stranger offering some responses.

> Every time I see a gospel, whether it's a new one or an old one, I
> always end up feeling sorry for Jesus. I don't think that's the
> intended reaction, but there you go. If morality trumps metaphysics,
> then it didn't really matter if Steve was the son of God or not. You
> just don't treat people like that, and that was where _The Second
> Coming_ fell down for me. The only reason why Steve had to die was
> because the writer's metaphysics preferred it.

I suppose it could be argued that the inherent cruelty of Steve's
predicament is yet another argument against God's interference in our
lives. As you say, one of the lessons of the gospels is that Jesus
was throughly screwed over, so it makes a certain amount of sense that
Steve would suffer a similarly unfair fate.

But, of course, it's Russell T. Davies, not God, who's deciding
Steve's fate, and I think his argument would be that Steve's death -
his sacrifice - makes the story stronger. I would even go so far as
to say that it is the sacrifice that makes the story of Christ as
powerful as it is, and for that matter there are myths about human
sacrifice - child sacrifice in particular - that go all the way back
to the dawn of human civilization. I think as viewers we would feel
cheated by an ending that gave us, and Steve, everything we wanted,
and although you may very well be right to say that Steve's death
undercuts the story's moral message, without it, The Second Coming
might not have been a good story.

>I submit that you can't do
> away with religious frenzy and persecution just by killing God. That's
> an atheistic version of pie in the sky.

I don't think TSC suggests this at all. On the contrary, there's a
scene right after Steve's first miracle that illustrates your point
precisely. Everyone on the planet accepts that Steve is the son of
God, one religion has been proven right an all the others wrong, and
there are still religiously motivated riots, and a Rabbi being
interviewed on TV says that Steve's existence is offensive to his
beliefs. Religious hatred, and the weight of history, aren't
conquered by Steve's presence, and although the coda doesn't
specifically reference them, it also doesn't suggest that in the wake
of Steve's death, Earth is a paradise.

> There was a certain amount of ahistorical despair in Steve's big speech
> to the masses, too. "It's finally happened. Heaven is empty. And Hell

> is bursting at the seams." ... I know there's still literally a world of


> room for improvement today, but what golden age was Steve implying in
> which Heaven was a lot fuller and Hell a lot more empty than they are
> now (never mind that traditionally, membership in either was supposed to
> be eternal)?

Although he never identifies himself with a particular Christian
denomination, Steve is still the embodiment of the Christian faith,
and to the best of my understanding one of the basic tenets of that
faith is that belief in Christ is a prerequisite to entering heaven,
and that unbelievers, no matter how righteous, are damned. As I
understand it, Steve's point isn't that we live in an immoral age but
in a faithless one, that God has receded from our hearts even as the
system he established 2000 years ago to reward good and punish evil
continues to churn on ineffectually, sending good people where they
don't belong. As you point out later in your post, this is an
extremely narrow point of view, which probably only describes a tiny
fraction of the world's population - Western, middle-class folks like
Davies. Still, one of the things I like about TSC is that it wears
its biases on its sleeve. It's rather uncommon to encounter political
fiction with enough courage to argue its point honestly - to commit to
a point of view without manipulating or bullying the audience, or
trying to conceal its underlying assumptions. I think the respect
Davies shows his audience by acknowledging the foundations of his
viewpoint is part of the reason that TSC can be engaged with and
enjoyed even by people who disagree with its message.

> Specifically, how did Judith know without access to supernatural sources
> of information that the death of the son of God would mysteriously kill
> all the devils too? If indeed, as the story presented itself, despair
> was something the devils rejoiced in, you'd think that Judith and Steve
> were wrong to conclude that the devils would simply disappear when Steve
> died. In a consistent universe, it seemed to me that the devils would
> have triumphed in the end, since the son of God Himself, who was
> nevertheless a bona fide human being in his own right (that was an
> incessant point of both plot and characterization), had despaired and
> taken his own life.

Well, for starters, I don't think Steve despairs. He's not happy
about taking his own life, but it's a decisive act, not a desperate
one.

More importantly, I see TSC as an entry in a subset of fantasy which
describes the departure of wonder, of which The Lord of the Rings is
the most famous example. By taking his own life, Steve severs the
connection between the mundane and the metaphysical. His purpose is
to effect a fundamental alteration in the nature of the universe (just
as, presumably, Christ's birth and sacrifice did two millennia ago),
and it makes sense to me that that alteration will do away with all
manifestations of what, for lack of a better word, I'm going to call
magic. The demons are no more of the physical realm than Steve is,
and the departure of divinity from our world carries them away as
well.

> And the whole idea that it would have been somehow wrong for Steve to
> bring apostle Pete back from the dead -- if Steve had accomplished it
> with CPR and pressure bandages, that would have been all right, but if
> he had used divine healing, that would have been wrong ... why exactly?
> Because humans should deal only with human acts and consequences? What
> would it matter to Pete which method saved him? Because if Pete had
> lived, it would have changed the charge against Frank from murder to
> attempted murder? Why should Pete have been made to suffer in order to
> make his attacker pay? That doesn't make any moral sense at all.

This is a fair point, and again I think Davies's choice has more to do
with writing a satisfying story than with creating a satisfying moral
philosophy. It's necessary for Steve's journey that he suffer a
catastrophic loss (not only Pete but also his father and Judith) at
this point, and the reason writers don't let their characters raise
the dead without terrible consequences is that otherwise fiction is
bled of its immediacy and tragedy is rendered inert.

As for Steve being power-mad, there is a scene toward the middle of
the film in which he comes close to using his powers on Judith when
she enrages him - I don't know what he was about to do, but it clearly
wasn't good. I agree that it's not much, but it is there.

> Finally, I feel like an idiot for not catching the significance of
> apostle Judith's name earlier.

So it's not just me, then? I feel much better.

All the best,
Abigail Nussbaum

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