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The
richness and complexity of the world of Jules Verne will continue to
develop as the series unfolds and segues into subsequent series. We will
get to know our characters better, they will earn from their
experiences, and the ramifications of their adventures will continue to
unfold. The number of their enemies will increase, and we - and they -
will learn more and more about them. The number of their friends and
allies will also increase, and as time goes on they will have a network
of people all over the world who they have helped who may either be able
to help them or who may point them to new adventures.
The over-riding arc of series one is Jules'
journey towards discovering his destiny as the father of science
fiction: every adventure is giving him the raw material to which he will
later apply his imaginative genius. Parallel with this is the maturity
fostered by his relationship with Phileas Fogg, and as a result of
Fogg's teaching his growing ability to function in the world as a mature
person instead of a callow youth.
Yet
another major strand in the first series is Jules' emotional
development, stimulated by his falling in love with Rebecca Fogg and
gradual realisation that though they can be the best of friends they
will not be lovers, and his discovery of the chief love of his life,
Laura Nemo, from whom circumstances keep him apart. And augmented by his
emotional attachments to women who prove to be his enemies, and through
whose false affections he must learn to see.
Another
major strand of the first series is the establishment of the team of
Phileas, Jules, Passepartout and Rebecca and their learning to trust
each other and work together.
But
perhaps the main thrust of the first group of episodes is sheer
explosive enthusiasm for exploring the world in which they live - a
world of immensely cunning, hideously tangled villainies, rampant
megalomania, and incredible scientific developments with equally
incredible risks.
During the first series we will explore the
bottom of the sea, the heights of the Himalayas, the forests of Germany,
the deserts of America, the caverns beneath the earth. It is a headlong
celebration of all the wonders the earth has to offer. By the time we
reach the series finale we will have created a universe in which people
we care about and who care about each other are fully equipped to go out
and take it on - and, in the case of Jules Verne - turn its ingredients
into the dreams which will shape the century to come.
All this means that by the time we reach
series two we will have an extraordinarily rich canvas on which to draw.
We will have established in series one, for example, the tragedy and
mystery of Erasmus Fogg: in series two Phileas will discover his
brother's hitherto unknown son and engage in a desperate campaign to
save him, and Rebecca will find herself confronted with apparently
unanswerable evidence that her beloved father was a crook.
Jules
will have to find a means of protecting his own family once the League
of Darkness tracks them down to their apparently safe haven in Nantes -
and will find that the only way to keep them safe is to journey into the
heart of the League to find its weak spot.
Uncovering
the tangled web of the League's past will be a continuing strand in
subsequent series: sometimes the revelations will be in the present, but
sometimes the time machine will take them back into eras when the League
was changing the course of history - and would have done so even more
drastically had it not been for the intervention of Jules and his friend
There
will be an episode set during the French Revolution, for example, with
Jules playing a Scarlet Pimpernel role; a "Name of the Rose"
style adventure in which Jules and Fogg play detective in one of the
great medieval monasteries; an episode set during the fall of the Roman
Empire as the prototype for King Arthur tries to save civilisation from
the oncoming tide of barbarism.
In
subsequent series Jules and Fogg's pursuit of the League will take them
to the god-haunted world of ancient Greece and allow them to save the
men who invented democracy from the machinations of the Supreme Maste-r;
and back further still to the mud-baked streets of Sumer and the very
origins of civilisation. In an episode reminiscent of the opening
sequence of "2001" they will find themselves at a pivotal
moment in human evolution, when our species made its first fateful steps
on the road we are following today.
But
time travel will be restricted to no more than ten per cent of the
episodes in any given series: the main emphasis will be on adventure in
the "contemporary" world of Jules and his friends. A major
location for these adventures will be the United States of America, and
the stories planned for Jules’ Wild West Experience include the
following:
CALIFORNIA
DREAMING: An adventure in which the Russians attempt to use a robot
army to take over California before the United States can firmly
establish itself there.
GOLDRUSH: An
episode in which Jules and Fogg find the world's richest seam of
gold in the Rocky Mountains - and conceal its existence to save a
pioneering community from destruction.
THE
IRON HORSE: How Jules Verne and Phileas Fogg made the rail link
between East and West possible - and lose the Dirigible and
everything they own.
THE
WILD BUNCH: Jules and his companions are falsely branded as outlaws
by the League of Darkness, and are pursued across the West by the
Pinkertons.
SPEED
THE PLOUGH: Phileas, Passepartout and Jules become homesteaders,
apply their scientific genius to farming and have to use even more
ingenuity to fight off a cattle baron and his henchmen. Steeley Joe,
the steam-powered gunfighter, makes his second appearance.
FLYING
BULL AND THE GENERAL: Jules and his friends recover the Dirigible
and use it to help an Indian tribe escape extinction at the hands of
George Armstrong Custer.
THE
SIEGE OF FORT PHILEAS: Jules and his friends hold off the US Army
when they are besieged by the vengeful Custer in a Western fort.
Just
as the opening of the West in America provides a fertile field for
Vernean adventures, so too does the opening up of Africa, the scramble
by the European powers to take control of the continent, and the search
for the source of the Nile.
In
Europe stories will emerge from the extraordinary career of Prussian
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and his campaign to create a united
Germany; from Garibaldi's heroic quest to unify Italy, and from the
tensions between Imperial Britain and her European neighbours.
And
whenever possible the geographical and spiritual allure of the East will
draw our heroes into ever more exotic locales from Constantinople to the
Forbidden City itself.
The
voyages of all the series from the first onwards will be both outwards
into the wonders of the world, inwards into the developing personalities
of our heroes, backwards into the pasts from which they and their foes
emerge, and forwards into the future into which their imaginations take
them - and the audiences who find their company and the lives they lead
the most stimulating and entertaining hours television has to offer. |
