In the trivia section it says the original ending was meant to depict Craven turning into a tree. Is this really true? One thing I've always liked about Edge of Darkness is its grittiness and had they kept this ending it would have been silly beyond words, given the context of what had gone before. But let's think fr a moment, had it been kept, what do you think would have had to happen to Crven in order for him to undergo this bizarre transformation?
shareI read somewhere that this was in the early scripts, developing the "gaia theory" theme of the earth being a single living organism. Good move to ditch this.
shareI am sure that had it been kept the team responsible for putting this classic together would have handled it in a very professional and as realistic as possible way, but still I can't get the images of Craven gradually turning into a tree ala The Fly out of my head.
Craven: "I am becoming Craven-Tree. Don't you think that's worth a few Nobel Prizes?"
I think this is discussed in one of the DVD featurettes. Basically, Bob Peck just refused to go along with it.
Do you suspect ... "foul play"?
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" An early draft of the script ended with Craven turned into a tree. "
I challenge anyone to find a funnier trivia in IMDB.
This could be seen as a reference to Arthurian legend - Merlin was trapped in a tree by Morgan la Fay.
shareThe basis for the idea had nothing to do with Arthur, and everything to do with Gaia. As an earlier poster commented, Craven was seen as a tree by his daughter, and with his fully realised knowledge of the ecological dangers to the planet it is quite logical that he would want to become part of Mother Earth, or Gaia.
And, to be pedantic, the name is Morgan le Fay, not Morgan la Fay.
"The basis for the idea had nothing to do with Arthur, and everything to do with Gaia. As an earlier poster commented, Craven was seen as a tree by his daughter, and with his fully realised knowledge of the ecological dangers to the planet it is quite logical that he would want to become part of Mother Earth, or Gaia.
And, to be pedantic, the name is Morgan le Fay, not Morgan la Fay."
To be pedantic, of course it was to do with bloody Gaia, but that doesn't stop the writer bringing in symbolism from elsewhere, as he does with the Christus statue at the nuclear bunker.
And if you want to be really authentic, "le Fay" is a Norman name, not the original Brythonic, but there you go...
le Fay from the French La fée=fairy, yes. Never cared for those silly Welsh tarts anyway.
You need to watch that blood pressure...
"You need to watch that blood pressure..."
No, just your attitude - and your clever cut and paste job from Wikipedia. What's the problem with a non-Gaia image being used here? Why not Merlin?
It wasn't supposed to be clever. As to Merlin, I just don't see it. TKM was hardly noted for that kind of subtlety and I believe the series stood up well enough on its own without the introduction of extraneous premises.
As you undoubtedly know, he was talked out of the idea of Bob Peck turning into a tree at the end in the interest of a more straightforward narrative. I think that was the correct decision. He wrote scores of (mainly TV) dramas and never showed any evidence of arty-fartiness or ego.
Obviously you are at liberty to believe whatever you want, but I truly do not see any evidence that a Merlin-type backdrop was intended in this series.
I'm glad they didn't literally turn him into a tree. But still, the end, he does end up looking a bit like one on the hillside, if that makes any sense.
It's a great series - wonderfully quotable (I've typed up reams of lines and put them with the individual episodes) - but there are one or two things, which don't work well, such as the black daisies, which are a complete misunderstanding of a certain idea. Surprisingly, the idea of having a ghost in the series does work - or at least nearly all the time.
I was surprised to discover, after doing some research, that the black flowers didn't exist in reality, because I'd always believed that they did grow or flower for a few days in the Arctic.
Probably I'm getting confused by the huge scam that went on several hundred years ago in the Netherlands over the growing of black flowers - tulips or roses from memory. People misunderstand the idea of a black flower anyway, believing that it symbolises death rather than the beginning of a journey. Which it is of course, if you believe in an afterlife.
I watched the series when it was first aired, and got the DVDs again recently; I was surprised at how well it stands up against far newer stuff. And Bob Peck's early death was such a blow.
I'm fairly sure that black roses - or actually very dark red ones - have been grown.
The black flower thing is a misunderstanding of the Daisyworld model. Daisyworld is a scientific model, a planet covered in nothing but one type of flower. As the climate gets colder, the flowers become darker to absorb sunlight and heat the planet, and as it gets warmer, they go white to reflect it. In "Edge of Darkness", they quote this model as fact, when in fact it is a model. And what's more, it's to do with solar radiation, rather than Gaia reacting to a human threat.
The wikipedia (unreliapedia?) article on "Daisyworld" is one of the better ones (I've capitalised several important sections):
"Daisyworld, a computer simulation, is a HYPOTHETICAL world orbiting a sun whose radiant energy is slowly increasing. It is meant to mimic important elements of the Earth-Sun system, and was introduced by James Lovelock and Andrew Watson in a paper published in 1983 [1] to illustrate the plausibility of the Gaia hypothesis. In the original 1983 version, Daisyworld is seeded with two varieties of daisy AS ITS ONLY LIFEFORMS: black daisies and white daisies. White petaled daisies reflect light, while black petaled daisies absorb light. The simulation tracks the two daisy populations and the surface temperature of Daisyworld as the sun's rays grow more powerful. The surface temperature of daisyworld remains almost constant over a broad range of solar output."
Yes, that's true. The roses sold as black are in fact a very dark red.
I'd never heard of Daisyworld before. Thanks for putting me on to that, I'll do some reading on it later.
.. its gritty realism ...
I dont see much realism, funnily enough.
Just about everything after the cops leave him alone in the house after his daughter's murder could be his wild imagination.
I aint saying that I think that was the intention. Just that it all is pretty weird. The way it ties into his union friend, for example. The underground bunker, and so on. It's almost as if he imagined the whole thing to make out that his daughter's death was not the result of some petty crimninal trying to shoot him.
The tree ending wouldnt seem that strange to me in the context of what went before. The flower ending (albeit it is open as to whether Jedburgh or Craven was right about them) was just as mystical as Craven turning into a tree. His daugher had already turned into a stream, of course.
I've just rewatched this show for the first time in a fair while, and I noticed how many references there are through the early episodes to Craven having a "nature soul", and being "obsessed" with trees. And, of course, there's his daughter's references to his being "a tree" for her. It's all a bit strange, though, because it's all in other people's comments, and Craven himself never says anything (that I could detect) to indicate this supposed obsession -- so it made me wonder if, with Kennedy-Martin's original ending being dropped, most of the earlier moments in the show to set up the concept were also taken out of the script. There were just a few comments left in other characters' dialogue, presumably for character texture.
But they do point to what I imagine was originally a much stronger pro-ecology strain running through the piece than what was finally filmed. A long time back, I read a published script for the show -- it was mostly the final shooting script, but it did have an addendum giving the original ending as Kennedy-Martin wrote it. Sorry to say, I can't accurately remember exactly how it was depicted, but in subjective memory I believe it was similar to what we saw, except instead of having Craven standing on the ridge and letting out that screamed "Emma!" (which I don't like -- it was too big a gesture for Craven at that point, I felt, and rather smacked of "we don't know how else to end this"), we first see Craven looking down from the ridge at the plutonium being recovered, and then as Harcourt and Pendleton are driving away, they look back and see a tree on the ridge where Craven had been standing, and it's left to us to realise the tree is Craven, and then there's the dissolve to winter with the tree standing in the snow and the black flowers. So, not much different from what we got in the version as filmed.
But what else might have happened throughout the original script to strengthen and develop the Craven=tree theme, I have no idea. We only have those few remnants left in the dialogue of the early episodes.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.