Showtime’s The Man Who Fell to Earth remake (almost) promises a future we can believe in
When President Grover Cleveland pushed a button to light the 100,000 incandescent lamps at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the luminous glow, which left attendees awestruck in the face of modernity, finally shined the world from the proverbial dark ages toward the future. In Jenny Lumet and Alex Kurtzman’s Showtime limited seriesThe Man Who Fell to Earth, a slew of tech royalty look out windows at a London skyline dazzlingly lit by quantum fusion power, capturing a similar sense of promise and wonder. This show understands the tricky balance between mystery and intrigue, madness and lucidity, progress and heartbreak. It doesn’t always set its own world ablaze in the same way, but it manages to offer a hearty spark.
Based on Walter Tevis’ 1963 science fiction novel of the same name, the show’s titular character, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), crashes from the heavens, naked, in search of water. Police pick him up, and he requests the presence of Justin Falls (Naomie Harris), a disgraced MIT graduate in quantum physics now shoveling manure in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Faraday can barely speak. He learns by listening, then regurgitating what he hears in a spatter of phrases and obscenities that worries everyone around him. It’s not the first time he’ll face the police. And if there’s one major failing of the series, it’s the color-blind scenarios of Black characters interacting with cops (particularly when Faraday is acting unhinged) but surviving mostly unscathed and ignored, which requires a real suspension of disbelief.
Faraday is on a mission ordered by Thomas Newton (Bill Nighy), a once-great inventor, presently gone and barely remembered except by his heirs. Before Spencer Clay (Jimmi Simpson), a needling CIA agent, can
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