Show: DEADLINE (cont.)
Our main characters (some still to be finalised/cast - looking at the ones I've got so far, they seem to be awfully, well, male and at the older end of the age range. No wonder they cancelled it with this sort of demographic mix! :D)
Characters
Thomas Craven (Kevin McKidd) www.imdb.com/name/nm0571727/
Former US Army Ranger Craven’s life seems to have gone from bad to worse in recent years. His best friend died saving his life in an Iraqi ambush, and Craven himself ended up invalided out of the service suffering from PTSD, only to find out that his wife had left him for his own brother and that his young daughter Judy did not want to know him. He has found it difficult to hold down a job in civilian life, and remains plagued by flashbacks and hallucinations relating to his military service. And then, to cap it all off, he decided to take Judy on a trip to the New York Museum of Natural History for a school project about dinosaurs, mainly as some misguided father-daughter bonding exercise. He’ll not make that mistake again…
Craven adapts to the situation in which the passengers find themselves better than anybody, falling back on his training and military experience in an almost psychotic way, as an alternative to thinking about the horror of his predicament. Almost in spite of himself, he becomes the closest thing the group has to a leader (and the closest thing the series has to a main protagonist). Nevertheless, he remains plagued by strange dreams and frighteningly real visions, in which he is strapped to a trolley in some sort of underground military laboratory, the subject of obscure but apparently horrific experiments. He is also the first passenger to meet The Man wandering the desert.
Scottish actor McKidd was widely praised even by critics who disliked the show for the emotional intensity of his performance and his convincing American accent. There is also a sizeable online Tom Craven Oestrogen Brigade, and the bulk of Deadline fanfiction seems to consist of Craven engaging in sexual activity with one or more of the other characters.
Judy Craven (TBC)
Thomas Craven’s ten-year-old daughter has spent most of her life never really knowing, or liking her Dad. In fact, she didn’t even want to come on this stupid trip with him; all he does is get mad and yell at people. And she wants to go home and see her Mom, and her cat Fluffy, and Uncle Brian, who isn’t all miserable and mean like her Dad is…
Judy is a smart kid, and brave, but at the end of the day she is just a little girl a long way from home. The catastrophe and its aftermath have a major effect on her, leaving her almost as brooding and traumatised as her father sometimes appears to be; she seems to spend a lot of time in a near daze, gradually hardening under the pressure of her new environment. Craven loves her deeply, but is just bad at showing it, and as the series progresses one of the more interesting elements of Craven’s character development is the way in which he tries to get closer to Judy and be the father to her he has never really managed to be. The growing bond between Judy and Delilah was also remarked upon by fans; she is the only other character Delilah shows any real warmth or affection for.
In later episodes, it became increasingly apparent that Judy had some special connection to the developing situation. She often is seen to say things or know things that she should not know; she is the one who digs up the buried silver dollar that is the only evidence that there was ever a civilisation in the changed world. Fan speculation about psychic powers aside, these strange incidents are never explained on screen.
Fan reaction to Judy is mixed; some people think her surrogate daughter-mother relationship with Delilah is just adorable. Others see her as an annoying character who is nothing more than a distraction from the characters they do like. Nobody likes smart, slightly creepy kids, after all.
Hamid Samadzai (Navin Chowdhry) www.imdb.com/name/nm0159527/
Hamid fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a small child, growing up in a Pakistani refugee camp, like most of his generation. He returned to his home when the Russians left, hoping for a new beginning, but then the former freedom fighters turned on each other, and then the Taliban came to power… Tired of warfare and fanaticism, he came to the United States for a new beginning, but instead found a succession of dead-end jobs for slave wages and, after the 9/11 attacks, increasing hostility and alienation from the other inhabitants of his adopted homeland. And then, the FBI began to investigate him for possible links to terrorist organisations… Hamid and his wife Sharbat were on their way to see a liberal-leaning uptown lawyer who deals with cases like his pro bono when whatever happened…happened…
Like Craven, Hamid is a fighter, a survivor. The only difference is he doesn’t thrive on it. At first, he also has the problem of being under suspicion from many of the other passengers, especially Feldman and Joe, and especially once Sharbat lets slip about the FBI case. He quickly demonstrates, however, that he is one of the few people in the group who has any idea of how to survive in an environment like this, and when the “Mole-People” make their appearance, he and Craven lead the effort to repel their attacks, quickly developing a grudging respect despite their mutual and understandable distrust considering their very different backgrounds. In the ninth episode, “Angels”, it is revealed that Hamid is having the same nightmares as Craven, about the laboratory and the experiments, although neither of them says so to the other.
Online Deadline fanfiction has a habit of pairing Hamid with Craven in a romantic relationship, in spite of the fact that it would appear to be wildly out of character for both of them. Nevertheless, the “ship”, dubbed “TomHam” by fans, is by now an entrenched feature of Deadline fandom.
Sharbat Samadzai (Indira Varma)www.imdb.com/name/nm0890055/
Sharbat’s father was an official in the Soviet-sponsored Afghan communist regime during the 1980s, who managed to make himself useful to Afghanistan’s new, squabbling rulers in the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal. She studied medicine at Kabul University, but by the time she graduated the Taliban had come to power, her father had been executed as an enemy of the new regime and women were no longer permitted to have professions. To cut a long story short, she ended up in New York, cleaning the apartments of people less educated than herself as she waited for the American medical authorities to recognise her qualification. And then she met a handsome cab driver from the old country; now she and Hamid are married and she is four months pregnant with their first child. She has no regrets.
People make the mistake of thinking that because Sharbat is a nice person she is a pushover; she is in fact the last person you want to underestimate, and quickly puts the likes of Feldman who would seek to belittle her firmly in their place. While Craven and Hamid organise the defence of their new community, it is Sharbat who is instrumental in building that community and ensuring that they do not all die of any one of a host of avoidable public health problems while the boys are out fighting. Nobody accuses Hamid of being a terrorist within her hearing.
Despite being one of the more admirable characters on the show, Sharbat seems to come in for a lot of unwarranted dislike from some sections of fandom for somehow “coming between” Hamid and Craven’s manly crush on each other. On the other hand, although her pregnancy was still ongoing when the show was cancelled, Sharbat/Hamid babyfic does have its proponents…
Art Feldman (David Strathairn) www.imdb.com/name/nm0000657/
Ruthless Wall Street lawyer Feldman is definitely not the sort to take cases like Hamid’s pro bono. He has got to the top the only way he knows how, by clambering over those above him on the great ladder, while stamping on the hands of the losers on the rung below. He has it all; a partnership in a major legal practice, a formidable reputation as a litigator; a beautiful second wife twenty years his junior; wealth, power, influence. His only quirk; he still insists on taking the subway to work every morning, just as he has since the days when he was a penniless law school graduate. He is starting to regret that now…
Despite his forceful, indeed overbearing, persona, Feldman takes to the situation less well than some of his fellow passengers. The first few episodes are full of dramatic irony as Feldman, the top dog in his previous existence, is sidelined and rendered powerless, while people he would normally see as nobodies take charge. Used to having all the answers, he finds himself out of his depth, and initially this expresses itself as relentless carping and fault-finding with the efforts of people like Craven and Sharbat to organise their fellow passengers and survive. The blazing confrontation between Feldman and Sharbat over the subject of drinking water, where she utterly demolishes his arguments and establishes her own leadership credentials is often cited by fans as one of the series’ dramatic highlights, even if it is less action-packed than some others. After that, Feldman seems to pull himself together and quickly proves that he has the brains and organisational skills to be a vital member of the community; by the end of the run, he and Sharbat are respectful, if occasionally quarrelsome, allies and very much the “civilian” leaders of the community as opposed to Craven, Hamid and Delilah’s role as warriors.
Veteran character actor Strathairn was generally regarded by critics as the classiest thing about the series, and was nominated for an Emmy award for his portrayal of Feldman. He was probably unprepared however for his unlikely newfound status as something of a “silver fox” sex symbol among some fans, or indeed for the fanfic…
Delilah Sampson (Gina Torres) www.imdb.com/name/nm0868659/
Ever since she was a little girl, all Delilah ever wanted was to be a cop. And she got her wish; she has been with the NYPD for twelve years, has been promoted to sergeant, and is getting ready to take the detective’s exam. Then one morning, she sees a suspicious character apparently picking pockets on a crowded street. One foot chase later, and she has outpaced her partner, followed the perp onto an even more crowded subway train, which is probably technically outside her jurisdiction, and is now trapped in there with them until she gets to the next station… And then things get worse…
The best way to describe Delilah would be tough but fair; she is usually the voice of reason and compromise when things get heated between some of the other would-be leaders of the group. You better hadn’t cross her, however. It isn’t that she has a temper, just that when she is pushed to action it tends to be very decisive and very forceful. She takes her place with Craven and Hamid as one of the community’s defenders, although as far as she is concerned that right is hers alone, and the other two are just testosterone-crazed hotheads who need her supervision. Her bond with Judy Craven grows throughout the series; Delilah herself spends much of her private time grieving for the husband and the young son, about Judy’s age, she left behind in the “old” world. She also is the only person among the passengers with a gun, which instantly makes her the premiere military force in this changed world. Until she runs out of bullets, of course, which is just a matter of time…
Most of those members of the online Deadline fanfic community who don’t “ship” Craven and Hamid seem to ship Craven and Delilah; the rest are convinced supporters of the notion of Delilah/Sharbat.
Joe Antonelli (Kurtwood Smith) www.imdb.com/name/nm0001748/
Joe has been driving trains on the New York subway for nearly thirty years, and he is content with that. He has worked his whole life, never asked anyone for anything. He doesn’t understand these kids today, with their drugs and their gay sex and their weirdo music, but he knows what he believes in; he believes in America. He and his wife Betty live within their means in a little house in Queens that they have lived in since before their neighbourhood got gentrified. Their only son, Joe Jr, a New York City firefighter, was killed in the attacks on the Twin Towers, which only hardened Joe’s firm views on right and wrong; uncharitable people might call him a bigot.
Joe isn’t too sure what just happened, but he knows it was likely something to do with those al-Qaeda types. Just how they managed to wipe out the whole of NYC and everyone in it in a matter of seconds isn’t clear to him just yet - it was probably one of those WMDs he’s seen about on TV - but what he does know is that it was almost certainly that goddamn Ay-rab Hamid who did it, and he’s going to put a stop to it, right now, because he’s fighting mad and he isn’t going to take it any more…
Joe proves to be pivotal to the show’s ongoing plot, being the first character to fall victim to the “Mole-People”. Even before that, however, Hamid saw him in one of his “dreams” about the laboratory, apparently strapped to the trolley next to him; Craven, meanwhile, was shocked to see that the man in the photo Joe says is of his dead son looks identical to his own best friend who died in Fallujah…
Although Joe is not a character calculated to appeal to internet fandom, and seems like a de facto antagonist in some episodes, critics praised the way Smith’s performance and the writing together managed to make him much more than a strawman blue-collar reactionary, but rather a real, breathing human being shaped by his upbringing and the tragedy in his life.
The Man (Clarke Peters)www.imdb.com/name/nm0676370/
The human - or is he? - face of Deadline’s central enigma, The Man’s first notable appearance in the show is when Craven encounters him strolling casually through the desert towards the end of the pilot episode. He looks, speaks and dresses like just another one of the passengers, although nobody remembers seeing him on the train or in the tunnel immediately after the catastrophe. He seems to appear and disappear at will, both in the “real world” and in characters’ dreams, usually spouting some cryptic phrase or offering oblique advice that will only become clear when it is already too late for it to be of any help. His general manner is of amused joviality, of knowing more than he reveals, with the occasional downright sinister moment. The “Mole-People” fear him; Delilah once shot him, although it seemed to have no effect.
As the series goes on, his connection to the various passengers becomes more apparent but also more mysterious; a flashback by Hamid indicates that The Man might have been the lawyer he and Sharbat were on their way to meet on that fateful day. Feldman recognises him, and he apparently knows Feldman, although from where is never explained. He tells Delilah that she knows him too, but just doesn’t remember, leading to fan speculation that he might be the absent father she mentioned in one of the early episodes, although this is dismissed by other fans as a far too banal explanation. And of course, he is occasionally glimpsed standing almost unnoticed in the background of Craven’s and Hamid’s nightmarish visions of the military laboratory…
The most unsettling moment came after the DVD release however, when sharp-eyed fans spotted The Man boarding the train at the start of the pilot episode, just another face among the extras, even though he was definitely no longer among the passengers after the catastrophe occurred. The messageboards practically exploded.
Speculation as to The Man’s true nature and identity remains heated and vociferous to this day. Is he an alien? A magician? A government agent? The Grim Reaper? The Devil? God Himself? The only people who know - if they know - are Blenkinsopp and Chinn, and they still aren’t saying.
The Passengers (Various Extras)
Apart from the main characters, there are at least a couple of dozen other train passengers wandering in and out of the story. Men, women and children of all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds, they mainly stand around and cheer or jeer the confrontations between the leads, or get attacked by “Mole-People”, but some of them have lines and minor roles in the stories. The fact that the same group of extras are used throughout the series means that some of these minor characters have received followings of their own among fandom, even though most of them are never given onscreen names. Firm fan favourites are “Big Blonde Woman”, noted for her overly dramatic reactions to things said by some of the main characters, and “Red T-shirt Dude” (dubbed “RTD” on the forums), who never actually says or does anything significant, but seems to be in-shot enough times for fans to speculate whether he would have taken on greater importance had the show lasted longer.
The “Mole-People” (Various Extras)
The empty world, as it turns out, is not that empty. The desert island that might once have been Manhattan soon turns out to be riddled with underground tunnels, similar to the one in which the passengers found themselves after the catastrophe. There are also hints from the beginning that they are not alone; apparent campfires glimpsed in the distance at night, what look like human footprints in the dust, a strange sense of being watched, all indicate that the seemingly dead world is in fact occupied. The occupiers do not make themselves known until the fifth episode, “Bones”, and even then their presence is fleeting and mysterious. All that is known is that they live in the tunnels, emerging only at night; they cover themselves with tribal masks and bodypaint so that it is impossible to determine their natural appearance or even if they are human, and they are hostile. Armed with spears and blow-pipes, they try to overpower passengers and carry them off alive; characters speculate that they want them for food, but the truth turns out to be far stranger than that…
The natives are never named onscreen; the term “Mole-People” was coined by fans. The creators have indicated that had the series continued, some of the natives would have become characters in their own right and that they would have ended up building a tense, but cooperative relationship with the passengers in the face of an unspecified greater threat.
Okay, that’s it so far - there are a couple of other characters that I still need to cast (and I need to find a suitable child star to portray Judy!), and I realise we desperately need more female characters, but this remains a work in progress…