You know Chekhov’s Gun, right? The dramatic principle that everything should have a purpose.
Anton Chekhov explained it with a rifle – ‘If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be there’ – and Utopia loves to follow that rule. Hardly is a pistol pulled in Episode 4 without someone’s blood painting the wall. I counted 10 deaths. Anton would be proud.
Utopia‘s Anton (Ian McDiarmid) wouldn’t be. The creator of JANUS is soaked in death and has been from the moment he witnessed his whole family massacred during the Holocaust.
In a drama where life is almost comically expendable, it’s a stirring reminder, a terrible historical backdrop that puts into perspective just how devastating The Network’s plan is. The man who survived the world’s most horrific eugenics experiment is responsible for the next. No wonder he exists in an almost Fugue state, reverting to the native Roma tongue of his family.
And family is the big theme here. Amid all the guns it’s writ large in red. In fact, with the introduction of Philip Carvel, Series 2 is turning into one big family drama of blood and dysfunction. Arby admits as much, with the blunt talent he has of cutting to the core of the show’s themes. ‘This is all about family,’ he says, watching Tess and her daughter start a new life in Albania. At first it seems he’s talking about them. He’s actually talking about his sister Jessica.
Families being torn apart. Utopia is dystopia, and what’s more dystopian, more unsettling, than a world in which you can’t trust the people closest to you? Or where the lives of those you love are as disposable as a shell casing?
From the truly shocking opening where an activated Network agent shoots dead his family and then himself, to Dugdale holding his captive wife and daughter, to Ian’s brother Roy being shot dead by cowardly Wilson, family ties are severed with brutal efficiency. Sleeper agents are waking around the globe and shooting their loved ones.
Among this, Donaldson’s murder is almost an aside; another body to add to the count, along with the comic-relief Romanian translator. But by now Utopia has trained you to accept meaningless lives and deaths as just that.
The only person to survive facing down the barrel of a gun is Milner, and that’s only because she tells Jess that her father is alive. How ironic in an episode of familial slaughter, that family knowledge actually saves someone’s life.
With Jess heading to find her father, and her brother Arby/Pietre running off with Anton/Philip and his now almost surrogate son Grant at gunpoint, it looks like we’re heading for a family reunion of sorts next week.
Will it be kiss kiss or bang bang? Don’t worry, Chekhov; knowing this show it’ll probably be a bit of both.
Aired at 10pm on Tuesday 29 July 2014 on Channel 4.
> Order Series 2 on DVD on Amazon.
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