The City & The City Episode 1

In some ways, China Mieville’s book The City and The City seems like it has a weird-fiction premise designed specifically to be adaptation friendly. The book is basically a police procedural that uses a pretty simple sci-fi concept. I don’t want to sound like one of those guys who say things like ‘this is proper sci-fi, not silly aliens and spaceships’, but of Mieville’s books it does seem to be the one that requires the least in terms of having to visualise things that don’t exist.

At the same time though, the sci-fi premise of the book (as I understood it when I read it in 2013) is that two cities, Beszel and Ul-Qoma, exist in the same physical space and those who live within these two cities can sometimes see each other, but are bound by law to ignore each other because the two cities can’t cross over or else this would be a ‘breach’ and the inter-city police force ‘Breach’ will take them away from their lives without thinking twice.

It’s a premise that’s easy to rattle off a brief description of, but how on earth do you get that across in a TV show, in a way that makes it possible for those without knowledge of the book to understand but without just flat out turning to the camera and telling the audience what’s going on. That’s the challenge that this BBC Adaptation of the 2009 book faced and I think it just about managed to do it successfully.

What I mean to say is that I loved it! But also that I’ve read the book and, though it was a while ago and some of the details are fuzzy in my mind, I’m not coming in completely unaware of what the premise was.

Having prior knowledge of the show's premise as I did, the way the show fed little bits of information at the same time as focusing David Morrissey’s Inspector Borlu and Mandeep Dhillon’s Constable Corwi on investigating the case of a murdered student, seemed really impressive. It gave us something to care about and get invested in early on, while it took a little bit more time to let us know exactly what was going on with the world.

There’s also a really strong visual element in getting the premise across. It paints Beszel as a total noir film which both fits the tone of the story, but also allows contrast to the seemingly more colourful city on Ul-Quoma. I particularly liked Corwi’s early mention of a car that nearly crashed into them being ‘Ul-Qoma Red’, followed by Borlu telling her she didn’t see it. This later pays off, as Borlu sees a red children’s toy (some kind of Sci-Fi fidget Spinner) and desperately tries to ignore the girl dressed in red standing behind him (we also see him drinking a red drink in his apartment that I hope is just called ‘Red Drink’ and that must spell some kind of future danger).

But as much as I loved it, I’m also really conscious that I know what the show’s deal is. I’m not totally sure that someone without prior knowledge will get what’s actually going on. The show never spells it out, which is a good thing, but it’s such a weirdly complex concept that I’m not sure I’d get it if I hadn’t read the book. I remember being pretty confused early on when I read the book about how exactly the world worked but a few chapters in, it explained what was happening. That never completely comes in the show because it’s something you can do in prose that would feel awkward and out of place on screen (though it comes close when Borlu and Corwi are speaking to Malia, the murdered student’s parents).

What I hope I’m getting across is that I loved this first episode and thought it balanced story and premise really well. But I’ve seen serious hour long BBC Sci-Fi Dramas in the past and not had prior knowledge (admittedly because this hasn’t always been something that exists) and found them really boring, The City and The City really looks like it’s not this, I just really really hope that you don’t have to have read the book to share that opinion.

(But with all this said, the BBC website does have this really cool Beszel Tourist Orientation video that spells out a lot of the necessary info.

Also because I couldn’t find anywhere else to bring this up, I really hope nobody watched this show because they saw the promo image and thought ‘Oh, that looks like Life on Mars’: