Ruminations on Winterfest On Line 2021
UPDATING THE BatB UNIVERSE TO NOW
By cb mcwhorter
After the amazing hour we spent Thursday night discussing what would be different if our show was produced in 2019 instead of the late 80’s, I did a lot of extra thinking. BatB fans are unequaled in imagination, and ideas flew fast and furiously (oops, wrong fandom) and kept going at our family dinner table and on into my dreams.
I decided it was worth recording, perhaps. Just for fun.
It was immediately mentioned that there’d be less of a platonic relationship between our lovers (ahem). They would have more ways to contact each other, especially if Vincent had a computer. And would he have a computer?
Which led to: the first difference in the world around them that we thought of was how the rise of technology would affect everybody. Would the hyperspace jump of communications technology leave the Tunnels further behind, or would Tunnel residents figure how to participate? If the community was established 30-something years before the start of the story, when the Information age was just getting its momentum, the chances would be pretty good that as people joined the group, they would find ways to get computers and video players Below. The usefulness of video tapes (or DVD’s) for education was discussed, and whether Father would allow them.
Wi-Fi wouldn’t work so well with all the stone (heck, in my house, it doesn’t like cinderblock walls!). So computers would have to be hard-wired. Suggestions were made for making connections through Helpers. That’s a lot of wire, but possible anyway. My son pointed out that Wi-Fi was possible within a chamber or two, so the hard-wiring may not have had to go past the walls.
Electricity would be even more important than for the earlier community, and perhaps tapping into existing lines wouldn’t be as successful. Or safe, since piracy detection is getting better by power companies. That would be a security risk beyond losing power. Ideas for the Tunnels building their own power source - hydraulic power from the falls or wind power from the Chamber of the Winds - were explored. I favor wind power, myself (that wouldn’t surprise you if you know me). The turbines would be easier and safer to install and service. The power harvested from either method would provide more than they needed. If there was easily available electricity, there would be less use for candles and braziers, which as a safety issue would be huge. More areas could be opened in which the combustion of candles would rob the air of essential oxygen. OTOH, fewer candles, wah!
Cell phones would NOT work underground. Heck, sometimes they don’t work in the basements of buildings. They’d have to hardwire land lines like for the computers. Or use the computers. Would they use that for easier communication with Helpers? Would they eschew that communication in order to keep separate?
Someone mentioned growing food, if there’s electricity for lights.
With a power source, internet access and their own food, the Tunnel community would be able to separate themselves from above even more. How would that change the story? Would they be able to generate some income with goods made from their crops or internet-based jobs? They would have easy access to news from Above - how would that change their world view?
Surveillance - cameras everywhere!! How much would that change Tunnel entrances? Surely there wouldn’t be cameras covering the entire Central Park, but very likely at the Park entrances, near the entertainment centers and by service sites like the culvert (wah! some more). Could Catherine go through the Park entrance? Could the children go to play in the Park in the daytime? Could Vincent roam the city as freely as he did in the 80’s? Or would this keep him below ground for sure?
Attitudes being as they are now, could Vincent roam up Top more freely anyway? Who’d look at him twice?
More surveillance: cameras could be everywhere Below. Sentry duty could be centralized to watch screens. “The ways change” could be as easy as pushing a button to slide a door into place that looks like the wall around it. Or to turn on and off lights.
We’d HAVE to keep the pipes, though. It’s too genius and too immediate to give up.
If the danger of Vincent’s discovery is reduced, what factor on his side of the equation would contribute to the lovers staying apart? In the 80’s, he had to stay hidden. That was one factor that kept them apart. He could come to her rarely and work kept her from him just as often. On her side, her social standing was projected as an impediment, and prejudices being what they are, it would probably serve just as well 30 years later. But there has to be a dramatic balance for the story. What, from his side, keeps them apart?
The back stories for some of the characters might have to change:
Catherine: Her history could be pretty much the same. Thugs are the same now as then. She could be attacked and dumped now as she was then. Vincent would take her Below because a hospital was too far away. Sure, he could have a cell phone and called 911, but traffic in NYC is no less legendary now than it was then. The doctor Below might have access to better technology to heal her. And better sutures. Plastic surgery techniques have changed a lot. It may not have taken ten days to get her home. Let’s have some poetic license, then.
Once she left corporate law and went to be an investigator for the DA’s office, computerization would really change the job. More information gathered from the internet, less gumshoe. And what she found would be sent to the detectives who would do whatever in-person detecting would be needed. She’d be in a lot less danger. Yeah, I don’t see the studio holding still for that, either.
But! She’d be on the path to participate more in court proceedings, and not just writing briefs. We could have more of a courtroom drama that explored social issues of the day. Those are popular, still.
Also: security cameras being so prevalent might stimulate her to move from an apartment high above Central Park into something with basement access to the Tunnels. We’d lose our balcony, eventually, but we’d get our brownstone!
Edie: as the lawyers and investigators moved towards handling their own searches, Edie would move into IT Management. I see some comic relief and provision of ingenuity for search techniques.
Vincent: What would Vincent do with internet access? Someone mentioned online degrees, perhaps even a doctorate. He might have to show up in person for some of a doctorate’s process, but much as he’d like to, I don’t see him teaching up top. But he could go crazy, someone said, multiple doctorates. He could fund those degrees with online work, as well. Editing manuscripts. Narrating documentaries! I’d watch that. Wouldn’t actually SEE much, but hey…
Father: The HUAC would have happened before he was born. So, what would happen in his life that made him fall from grace so badly that he needed to go underground, and so painfully that he’d choose to stay there? Furthermore, his mid-century attitude as a Physician would not have been taught to him. Our Father practices paternalistic medicine, something my generation and later have been taught is totally unacceptable. We talked about what in medicine would happen to utterly dismantle his life, and there were some ideas (see below). However, I’m striking out from the conversation here after having continued it at our dinner table. My son came up with an interesting suggestion. Father needs to be from a profession that carries either total respect or total expulsion from its numbers. He has to be educated, idealistic and a trained leader. Son suggested the military. Father went to the Naval Academy and started a promising career in the Marines. Captain Wells was assigned to the staff of the deputy director for political-military affairs of the National Security Council, Lt Col Oliver North. And when all that went south, Col North wasn’t the only one whose career disappeared. Capt Wells lost his commission, barely escaped imprisonment, was utterly unemployable and his wealthy fiancée left him. No one noticed when he disappeared. No idea how he wound up in NYC, but lots of ways are possible.
William: He came Below with Father. He was a Marine corporal who fell from grace when Capt Wells did, maybe court-martialed along with him or got disgusted and left the Marines and hit the skids.
Mary: So who’s our doctor? Mary. She went to medical school at Columbia and then did post-graduate training in Internal Medicine and finally a fellowship at NIH in Infectious Disease. All this made her quite the shining star in her profession, someone with a huge future. She was thrilled to be part of the team studying the new viral epidemic that was decimating the American homosexual population, IV drug abusers and a large part of the Third World population: HIV. The pressure was enormous to publish airtight research and to publish it fast, before the other research centers around the world did so. The honors to the group who broke the code for prevention or treatment of this disease would be enormous. It wasn’t all that different from the research frenzy around COVID-19. The big difference between that epidemic and this one was that security was very tight for all the labs studying the disease. They were all worried that someone else could steal their data and publish before they could. It wasn’t long before some of these researchers were goaded by conscience. People were dying, and these labs were wasting time and lives by their competitive stances. They should share resources and information and come to answers for the world that much faster. There really were people who blew the whistle on these guys, and even secretly exchanged data between NIH and a university in Paris, and they paid for that in various ways. They were all fired, some were sued, and I think one even got hit with criminal charges. It was a nasty scandal, and TPTB at NIH couldn’t understand why they were being portrayed as the bad guys. Mary could have been one of these people punished for her conscience. Broken, she went home to New York, where her family didn’t understand her principles and were bitterly disappointed. At that time in the U.S., AIDS was a disease that belonged to social degenerates and as such wasn’t a bad thing. Seriously. And who cared about Africa? It wasn’t until the mid-late 90’s that the public realized “innocent women and babies were being victimized by the degenerates” and there was support for doing something about it. There was a stretch in there that almost every person who chastised me with bombast for caring for “those people who deserved what they got” was an overweight smoker who couldn’t understand why they had heart disease. Drove me nuts.
We’ll need a new mother figure for the children. I’m dreaming of actresses for that already.
Paracelsus: We didn’t talk about him. But we need a bad guy, and I think he should stay a mad scientist. Maybe instead of being Father’s friend and classmate, he was a friend of Mary’s? Otherwise, he could be an Academy classmate of Jacob’s, perhaps a physics major who got expelled for some reason and wormed his way into the Tunnels to germinate his explosive dreams of world domination.
Peter: A classmate of Mary’s, now, and perhaps an old boyfriend who was one of the few friends she still had after NIH blew up.
The children: There was a lot of discussion about how the children could be A) provided with documents so they could move into the world Above if they chose, and B) protected from being snatched up by Child Protective services. Lots of fodder for story lines there. But they should come to te Tunnels the same way as the originals: born there or rescued.
If Vincent could get an online degree, so could any one of the kids.
Mouse: Someone mentioned an autistic Bill-Gates-like genius, going to the limits with coding development and who-knows-what. I suggested that he could come up with a hidden empire like what Wakanda had. It would be easier to hide such a thing underground than it would be to hide a whole country, right? And we aren’t really talking about the Marvel Universe, here - this is reality. (You should know I didn’t type that with a straight face.)
Mouse’s sweet nature and Father’s steady influence kept him from getting over-ambitious, and maybe even kept him out of Paracelsus’ clutches, once his talents became apparent. He isn’t the eccentric kid who could only make half his ideas work. He’s the genius who organizes their security system, keeps their internet conduit to the world Above secure and made a fortune with Bitcoin so that the Tunnel world will never go hungry again. In this setting, Mouse is the one who provides the Council the ability to help the helpless safely.
The imagination kept going as we explored so many of the nooks and crannies of Catherine and Vincent’s world. A lot would be very different. The magic of the love story and the spirit of the Tunnel community would be the same.