TV Review Electric Dreams Episode Three The Commuter

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2017 - Spoiler alerts The third of ten short stories based on the work of Philip K Dick, and the best of the series so far, thanks especially to the lovely performance by Timothy Spall. He is a railway station porter, station announcer, toilet cleaner and general dogsbody who discovers passenger (and one young lady in particular) are heading for a particular railway station on the line, except that station doesn’t seem to exist. There is a whole Hogwarts Express situation going on here. Travelling the line himself he sees passengers leap off between stations which he copies and finds that this puts him near a mysterious village where everyone is happy, friendly, and café-coffee is the best ever tasted. Troubles just melt away. The catch is that the visits to the village change reality. Spall returns home to a life where his troubled son no longer exists. The boy was becoming dangerously psychotic. Spall will find later that some of the people in the village are there to forget the terror, pain and violent even sexual assaults the boy brought to their own lives. Spall nevertheless wants his son back, seeing the life he had as his own. In leaving the Heaven village he is effectively taking back a Hell element in his life too, but he feels greater freedom for that. There are flaws; why does the train stop or slow down to let passengers back on while they are expected to get off when it is still going fast? Why does no one seem to just stay in the village forever? Why do they go home on the last train out? Why are one couple trapped in an endless Groundhog Day re-living of their moment of getting engaged? Why does Spall have any memories or leads on his son left to return to when his mind is wiped? Why does he have a computer switched on in the attic clearly wasting electricity for some time? Why is there no actual station near or at the village? We learn the village was planned (as a non-supernatural place) but then never built, so why is the fictional version so far from the field the passengers travel to it from? Arthur Chappell