Awake (NBC Thursdays) plunges Detective Mark Britten (Jason Isaacs) into two dueling realities in the aftermath of a devastating car accident. In one, his wife has survived, while in the other, his son is the survivor—and every time he goes to sleep, he wakes up in oppositeland. To stay on track, he uses coloured rubber bands in each life to let him know where he is, and for viewers, there’s a cold greenish tint to the world with his son, while the world with his wife is reddish, with a warmer feel. I give the pilot credit for quickly introducing the premise and setting out the rules without making viewers feel like they just weathered a content dump, a common problem with new shows that seem to feel the urge to tell, rather than show, in the premiere episode.
People around Mark in both of his parallel universes are wary and uncertain, taking note of his sometimes odd behaviours. Meanwhile, his wife struggles to move on from the death of their son in time-honoured tradition by changing her career plans, painting the house, and charging on full steam ahead. Their son, in the other world, withdraws from Mark and clings to his tennis coach, rejecting the comfort his father offers. Yo-yoing back and forth, Mark aches for one while interacting with the other, and has trouble bridging the gap.
As time passes, the barriers between Mark’s worlds start to blur and break down. Strange flashes leap across the boundaries of reality, and he starts to creep out his coworkers with eerily accurate ‘hunches’ and leaps of logic. Some of these breakdowns are not so beneficial, and leave Mark deeply confused about where he is and what he is doing. There’s a controlled panic that Isaacs portrays brilliantly every time Mark wakes up in a different reality.
The character’s need for order and control becomes critical as he attempts to organise himself to keep his worlds straight as he deals with different partners, different lives, different crimes. In one scene in the pilot, Mark wakes up in a panic, not sure about which world he’s in. He calls for his wife and son but neither respond, until his wife finally appears, with no explanation for her absence. It’s a hint into a possible explanation for the world of the show, that Britten may be dealing with trauma from an accident in which both his wife and son died.
With multiple layers of reality, the show quickly gets dizzying for viewers, but in a good way. Awake starts to break down the boundaries of what is real and what is false, and it challenges viewers to ask themselves what it is about their world that makes them certain it’s real. Britten gets tangled in the layers, questioning his sanity, and the show raises some interesting ethical and cultural questions about mental illness.
Two therapists offer advice and guidance to Mark, who’s obliged to see them by the department to make sure he’s recovered from the accident. One, Judith Evans (Cherry Jones), is friendly, gentle, and nonconfrontational, while the other, Dr. John Lee (B. D. Wong), is more aggressive; sadly, Awake chose to reinforce gender stereotypes by having the woman be the more nurturing and understanding of the pair. As the only people really familiar with both worlds, they become the people he talks to about everything going on in his lives as he tries to make sense of them.
Over the course of the pilot, Mark is challenged to essentially choose one option, to stop dreaming of the other reality and allow it to die. By the end, he tells his therapist, and the viewers, that he’s not so sure he needs to choose; as he articulates, burying a loved one is agonising, and you wouldn’t throw away the chance to see that person at the kitchen table every morning like death never happened. To pick one is essentially to kill the other all over again. He bluntly says that he’ll keep coming as long as the department makes him, but he has no intent of seeking a ‘cure.’
This is a radical statement for television, where any evidence of mental illness is usually grounds for immediate curing. Awake may or may not be about a mentally ill man – it’s hard to tell this early in the game – but it’s making a remarkable commentary on social attitudes about mental illness through Detective Britten. He doesn’t feel that he needs a cure if he can be functional in both worlds. We shall see if the show maintains this position in the long term.
At its root, Awake is a show about death and grieving, or at least it certainly could be. The idea of the dead haunting a dreamscape resonated with me as a viewer, and the premise that dreamscape could become reality, and that it might become impossible to distinguish the two, also had a certain amount of appeal. Adrift in a world where he doesn’t know for certain who is dead and who is not, Mark doesn’t have a strong incentive to deconstruct one of his realities and face life without his wife, or his son.
What Awake pushes at is the fact that some people are happier in their dreams, because when you are dreaming, you can forget what you have lost. In the face of that, you can see how some people might not want to wake up – and, with a small push, how dreams and reality could wrap around each other like a Mobius strip, as one of Mark’s therapists put it. With no clear boundaries between where one ends and the other begins, Mark doesn’t have to draw any hard and cold lines that might break apart his world.
The premise is fascinating, and the pilot was strong. Awake is a show that could go in a lot of different directions, and I’m very curious to see where the creators take it. I’m worried about the unfortunately common tendency in fantasy and science fiction on television to do amazing worldbuilding, but then end with a whimper and a pathetic explanation for what viewers have been seeing.
Hopefully the team behind Awake has an explanation as intriguing as the outset of the story. Clearly, this all ties back into the events that occurred on the night of the car accident, when Mark’s reality fractured and thrust him into dual worlds. I really hope the show, and the revelatory episode that explains everything, live up to the potential of the pilot.