Incorporated is a science fiction thriller that offers a
chilling glimpse of a post-climate change dystopia. Created by David and Alex
Pastor and produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Ted Humphrey and Jennifer Todd,
the show (filmed in Toronto, Canada) opens in 82 °F Milwaukee in November 2074
after environmental degradation, widespread famine and mismanagement have
bankrupted governments. We learn later that Milwaukee Airport served as a FEMA
climate relocation centre that resembles an impoverished shantytown. In the
wake of the governments demise, a tide of multinational corporations has swept
in to control 90% of the globe and ratified the 29th amendment,
granting them total sovereignty.
Corporations fight a brutal covert war for market share and dwindling
natural resources. Like turkey vultures circling overhead, they position
themselves for what’s left after short-sighted government regulations, lack of
corporate check and FEMA mismanagement have 'had their way' with the planet.
The world is now a very different place. There is no Spain or France. Everything south of the Loire is toxic
desert; New York City reduced to a punch line in a joke.Reykjavik and Anchorage
are sandy beach destinations and Norway is the new France—at least where
champagne vineyards are concerned. Asia and Canada are coveted for their less
harsh climates.
Those who work for the corporations live in privilege behind the
sentried walls of the Green Zones. The rest fend for themselves with scarcity
in the contaminated slums of the Red Zones. The numbers aren’t provided in the
show’s intro but we can guess that they are similar to
Pedro Aguilera’s TV thriller 3% and Blomkamp’s motion picture Elysium—both about living with scarcity, where the few elite enjoy the many
privileges—so long as they follow the elite rules.
“Kleptocracy reigns, paranoia rules, and the marketplace determines
human worth,” writes Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly about Incorporated.
“Only the most obedient, cunning, and technologically adept can flourish. Question
authority? You’re fired! And maybe worse.”
The ‘Elysium’ of Incorporated is an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mixture of realizable technological advances, gadgetry and
thrilling--if not chilling--consequence: like self-driving cars, intelligent
wristbands, surrogate pregnancies and remote deliveries, genetic testing of ‘inferiors’, DNA theft and malware sabotage.
The first episode (Vertical Mobility) opens to a corporate ‘traitor’ being dragged into “the quiet room”, rumoured to be a torture
chamber run by taciturn head of security Julian Morse (Dennis Haysbert). The
scene shifts to the Green zone suburban house of corporate climber Ben Larson
(Sean Teale). As he prepares to go to work, the news streams of hurricanes
breaching levies; Canada building a wall to stem the tide of illegal American climate refugees--12 million already there; offshore oil rigs in
the waters of the former Arctic ice cap; and finally to the “terrorist” bombing
of the R&D lab of biochemical giant Spiga, where Ben works. Spiga, we later
learn, plays the same games as Monsanto and Nestle to ensure profits at the
expense of well-being.
“Over the past forty years,” says a giant image of CEO Elizabeth
Krauss (Julia Ormond) to the suits passing security in the giant corporate
lobby below, “Spiga Biotech has been at the forefront of the genetic
engineering revolution. We design seeds capable of thriving in the increasing
harsh environments of our planet. Our pest and drought resistant crops are now
sold in over a hundred countries. And our advancements in in-vitro testing have
transformed the synth food industry.” She ends with the mantra, “Spiga:
committed to feeding our ever-growing world.”
Ben is, of course, not what he pretends he is. The upwardly mobile
executive has wed Laura Larson (Allison Miller), a doctor with a courageous
heart who also happens to be the daughter of the unscrupulous Kraus. Ben is
really Aaron, a former Red Zone techno-hustler who covertly searches for his
Red Zone sweetheart, now a sex slave to corporate executives at Arcadia, the
‘men’s club’ of Spiga. If he’s going to spring her, Ben will have to get
promoted to the 40th floor.
“If our [current] political climate has you feeling apocalyptic, Incorporated
may or may not be the show for you,” writes Jensen. “It’s a triggering
dystopian thriller and wannabe allegory-for-now about… well, apocalyptic
climate change.” This show, perhaps more than any other, stirs disquieting
thoughts of now—and with it, guilt about what we’re doing or not doing. At the
heart of Incorporated is climate change, which is also its main
character.
“The most impressive performance and character in Incorporated
is its deeply imagined world,” writes Jensen. “Throwaway ideas, like a
grieving widow who hires Laura to remake a poor immigrant in the image of her
dead husband, could seed whole episodes of Black Mirror. James Bond
would kill for the arsenal of gadgets Aaron deploys in his soul-staining
subversions.” Nuanced minutiae and brilliant minor characters weave a mad
tapestry that enrich and intrigue. And like a Seurat painting, their subtle
details change with perspective and build into a subliminal realism you can’t
shake: from the food porn in the opening scene to eating rats in climate
relocation camps or drinking dirty Red Zone water that costs $5. In Cost
Containment we learn that Spiga competitor Izanagi is developing
salt-tolerant crops that, like the mangroves, will thrive on irrigated seawater
in the deserts left by an exploitive short-sighted America: Iowa, Missouri,
Kansas—all the dust storm states. In a later episode, a murdered corporate
executive is found by two dowsers on the dried lakebed of Missouri's Lake
Lotawana. We hear about the “oil wars” in Capetown.
“This "makes it
hard to not think of the current political and cultural state of things across
the globe,” writes Aaron Pruner of Screener
TV. The fourth episode (Cost Containment) “opened with a familiar
feeling infomercial. Yet, instead of Sally Struthers pleading with the common
American to donate money to help feed a starving child in a
third-world country, [a Chinese narrator presented] the United States as
that third world.” Liz Shannon Miller of IndieWire writes:
“Watching that cold open at this exact moment in our history is science fiction
that might be a little too real. You can forget about The Walking Dead or The
Exorcist: Incorporated may be the scariest show on television.” Says Pruner, “The thing that brought
us here? Climate change.”
"It’s what gives us ... the refugee camps and
ration hacking, the high-class cut-throat world of corporations and the
privileged, yet dangerous, culture that comes with it," adds Pruner. The
corporation's tyrannical demand for allegiance through rumours of loss of
privileges, “contract termination”—or worse—resonates through the ranks
in what the hacker in the Red Zone (Human Resources) calls cattle prod.
“You poor suits, always trying to catch up,” says the hacker to Roger Caplan (Douglas Nyback), ambitious executive looking to steal his way to the
top. “A climber like you gets caught with something like this [a ‘keyhole’,
which “allows you to snoop in any system without leaving any footprints”] he’s gonna get spanked. Or
worse.” Word is out that Spiga
security can be very inventive with cattle prod.
Spiga's main competitor Inazagi starts its propaganda machine on the very
young to keep its corporate family in line. The third episode (Human Resources) opens with an Izanagi propaganda video for children. TV Fanatic calls it “both cute and chilling. Teaching your children to rat out
Mom and Dad is pretty cold, but hey, this is the future, right?” But is it just
the future? I'm confident that TV
Fanatic wasn’t born yet when the Nazis formed the Hitlerjugend. But I would suggest they look up what Santayana said about history…
In one of the best played and most gratifying narrative threads of the
show so far, a Red Zone techno-hacker (played by Canadian actress Sara
Botsford) provides some twisted humour
as she easefully negotiates the Spiga machine to put corporate brat Roger
Caplan in his place, enlighten us on some history and entertain us all at the
same time. After Caplan disdainfully throws money at her to create a skeleton
key to bypass the self-destruct protocol of his stolen keyhole, the hacker ops
for entertainment instead as payment: she takes him outside her secured
warehouse enclave and points to a small rat feeding on the debris in the
adjoining alley.
“You see her?” To Caplan’s quizzing look, she
points. “Beady eyes, pair of whiskers, long tail…” He finally gets it; the rat.
“I want you to catch it,” the hacker bates him. “All ya gotta do is catch a
little animal with the brains the size of a peanut. How hard can that be?”
After Caplan’s first attempt, in which he cuts his head, she croons,
“Now that’s entertainment!” And chortles like a witch; but we find ourselves
cackling with her. After successfully humiliating Caplan, the hacker forces him
to do more. She starts with her own history: “I got here with the first wave of
climate refugees, chased up north by the sandstorms. Government rations were
never enough. You were probably sucking on your gestator’s tit,” she scoffs at
Caplan, “while my brother and I had to scramble for enough protein. Sometimes
there was only one source of it. Although it was everywhere, really…” Her gaze
drifts down to the dead rat on the floor that Caplan had brought in at great
expense to his clothes and pride. She adds, “I’d tell you it tastes like chicken
but I don’t really remember what chicken tastes like. Why don’t you tell me
whether it tastes like chicken…”
What follows is some deep gratification in witnessing Caplan—self-centered and greedy corporate archetype—getting schooled by a
“lowly” but sly plebe. A “little old lady” no less!
Pruner asks, “Could climate change push us into a collapsed society,
informed consistently by the ongoing threat of class warfare? Will we
eventually be separated by electric fences and really big walls? Are fear and
greed going to be the currencies of our reality? These burning questions should
sound far-fetched and silly, but as we watch Incorporated’s
tale unfold, it’s hard not to wonder what our own future will bring.” Far-fetched
and silly? Is it any more far-fetched and silly than voting in a president
who claims that the Chinese invented climate change to make American
manufacturing non-competitive?
The best entertainment
doesn't put you to sleep; it wakes you up. The best entertainment doesn't just
offer visceral escape; it engages you on many levels to connect, think and
feel. And like all good things—friendship, love, family and home—its core value
lies in its subtle yet deep truths. The best entertainment shows you a mirror
of yourself. Incorporated is less thriller than satire. It is
less science fiction than cautionary tale.
"You look to Incorporated for
dystopian fiction that expresses our current anxieties," says Jensen.
"What you get is fitful resonance that makes you realize it might be too
soon for any show to meet that challenge.”
Or is it more that we may be too late…
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. Nina’s recent book is the bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” (Mincione Edizioni, Rome). Her latest “Water Is…” is currently an Amazon Bestseller and NY Times ‘year in reading’ choice of Margaret Atwood.
