I Surrendered: Ghostriders

[john_amend_all]

My first prompt was from lost_spook:

What if there's a literal ghost train network along all the disused/closed railway lines, (of course, incorporating lost Underground stations, too). And the people who know about it and, er, have to guard the secret/use it for stuff/haunt it. Anyway "ghost train network", whatever you can do with that.

Ghostriders

Introduction

I'm imagining Ghostriders as having been broadcast on BBC2 or BBC3, round about 2007.

Episode 1: Now Departing

The story opens at a student party, where we're introduced to our protagonists: Kayla, the centre of attention, having a whale of a time, and Terry, well-meaning but clumsy, whose introduction to Kayla consists of bumping into her and spilling his drink on her dress.

Later that night, Terry and other partygoers are walking home. As they pass a disused station (these scenes were filmed at North Woolwich Old Station Museum) they notice Kayla trying to enter the building, seemingly under the impression that she can catch a train home. They call out to her, but she doesn't seem to notice; instead, she climbs over the station wall and is lost to sight.

The following day, it turns out that since then, no-one's seen Kayla. Police have searched the station, and found no sign that she was ever there.

By night, with no word of Kayla, Terry goes back to the station to see if he can work out what happened to her. As he approaches, he hears distant voices and the sound of a train. Unable to get into the station buildings, he climbs over the wall as Kayla did, and finds a train in the platform, painted green and with a steam engine at its head. There are a number of people boarding and alighting. Their costumes are of designs ranging from Victorian to the present day, but all are in shades of grey, with hardly any colour visible.

(It's sadly apparent that the steam engine is never seen in the same shot as Terry. This is because the train actually at North Woolwich was the diesel-powered 1001, while the locomotive was 30506, shot separately at Alton, on the Mid-Hants Railway.)

After making the inevitable comparison to Harry Potter, Terry tries to speak to the passengers, but to no avail; they barely notice him. When he tries to follow them into the station building, they walk through what, to him, is a locked door. He returns to the train, just in time to see the guard climbing on board. He follows, but before he can catch up with the guard, the train pulls out of the station.

Once he catches up with the guard, he begins to learn where he is and what's happening. The ghost trains, for such they are, run on abandoned railway routes, stopping at stations which no longer exist. The crew and the passengers? Restless spirits who can't pass on to the true afterlife — at least, that applies to most of them. Frequently it's because they have unfinished business in this world — more often than not, business that can't ever be finished.

"But I'm here, and I'm not a ghost!" Terry protests.

The guard shrugs. "You will be, soon enough. Doesn't take long."

Remembering why he came here in the first place, Terry asks the guard if he's seen Kayla. He hasn't, but this train — the Plymouth Flyer — isn't the only ghost train on the network. The Flyer's next stop is at Thornton Junction; Terry might as well ask there as not.

At the Junction, a bleak, empty station, Terry searches all the platforms for Kayla. Just as the Flyer is about to leave, he spots a flash of colour in the distance and runs towards it. Sure enough, it's Kayla; she's sitting on a bench, headphones in her ears, listening to music without a care in the world. At first she refuses to speak to Terry. When he gets through to her, it becomes clear that she has no idea how long she's been there. In this world, with no need for food or sleep, and no day, only endless night, it's only too easy to lose track of time. Still, now Terry's found her, they can get back to the world of the living.

They walk out of the station, only to find themselves on an empty road, with dark moorland stretching as far as the eye can see. A couple of stragglers from the train walk past them, and vanish. Then Terry grabs Kayla's arm, and points — a figure, seemingly made entirely of shadow, is creeping towards them. They retreat into the station, but it seems that the shadow wasn't alone. More of them appear, surrounding Terry and Kayla, who attempt to defend themselves with whatever comes to hand. Just as it seems that all is lost, the shadows fall back, as a young woman dressed as a nurse strolls onto the platform.

"You're alive, aren't you?" she asks casually, as one commuter might address another.

"I hope so," Kayla says shakily.

"Then you don't want to stay here. There are things that cherish life so much, they want it all for themselves. Best get on the train."

"What train...?" Terry begins, and breaks off. He and Kayla turn around slowly, to see that the Plymouth Flyer is once more in the platform. "But it wasn't here just now."

The woman — Valerie — doesn't bother to answer, but simply climbs aboard. Terry and Kayla exchange baffled looks, but all they can do is follow suit.

The Plymouth Flyer steams away into the endless night.

Later Episodes

Episode 2: Missed Connections

Jim and Elsie board the Plymouth Flyer. By comparison with the other ghosts, they seem friendly and personable: a happily married couple, travelling to visit their family in Scorton. Their family aren't ghosts; they're visiting their living great-nieces and great-nephews. In the course of the conversation, Kayla agrees to accompany them, in the hope that this might be a way back to the world of the living. But when she agrees to perform a simple favour for her new friends, her unfamiliarity with the spirit world leads to near-disaster.

Episode 3: First Class

It seems that even ghost trains aren't immune from mysterious delays. As the episode opens, the Plymouth Flyer has been stranded for some indeterminate length of time in Aylsham. Mr Selwyn the guard has a suggestion: the Black Pullman is due in a few minutes, and someone could ride it to Melton Constable to send for assistance. Kayla and Terry, being alive, would be able to pay for their trip with life force; but on the Black Pullman it's all too easy to spend more than you bargained for.

Episode 4: Worse Than Death

Terry and Kayla encounter an old schoolfriend of Terry's. She's on the run, but who or what is she running from? And what's so terrifying that it can frighten someone who's already died?

Episode 5: The Smoke

When the Plymouth Flyer arrives at Broad Street, Kayla and Terry try to follow Valerie, and become lost in the darker corners of the Underground network. Their only hope to return to the surface is a conspiracy theorist whose sanity is, to put it mildly, in some doubt.

Episode 6: All Change

In despair of finding any other way out, Kayla turns to Valerie. But even if Valerie can be trusted, what will be her price?

Characters

Living

	Kayla [Aruna Shields] is a student, though she takes her studies lightly. Impatient, impulsive and none too fond of rules, she finds herself frequently infuriated by the events on the railway, over which she has no control.
	Terry [Daniel Cook] is a fellow-student of Kayla's — a historian who pays a little more attention to his subject. This isn't always an advantage in a world where he's surrounded by fragments of otherwise vanished history.

Undead?

	Mr Selwyn [Ben Crompton] is the guard of the Plymouth Flyer, and our heroes' primary source of information on the world they find themselves trapped in. Though he talks freely enough, what he says isn't always as useful as one might hope. His respect for rules and regulations tends to irritate Kayla.
	Valerie [Jessica Fox] is a 'regular' on the Plymouth Flyer. She's not at all forthcoming on why she has to travel by it so frequently, where she goes and what she does there, or... anything else, for that matter.
	Sekhmet is the chief stewardess of the Black Pullman. She is never seen other than in silhouette and her voice is electronically distorted, but leaked pictures from filming showed that she, too, is played by Jessica Fox. Fandom remains divided on whether Sekhmet is supposed to be the same person as Valerie, an identical twin, or whether the whole thing's just an attempt to save money on actors' wages.
	Jim [Matthew Goode] and Elsie [Sarah Smart] are a married couple who, for the past sixty years, have been ghosts. They appear to have become accustomed to this way of existence; they frequently travel from one closed station to another, to visit their living relatives.
	Antigone [Billie Piper] appears in episode 4: a cynical, pessimistic Goth whom Terry knew at school. 'Antigone' is a name she chose for herself; the name by which Terry knew her is Jill. She was killed on a level crossing — listening to music through headphones, she never heard the approaching train. She's long since become resigned to her fate. At one point Kayla suggests that, if she gets back to the real world, she can take a message to Antigone's loved ones. Antigone's only reply is "What's the point? They'd never believe you."
	Wilfred [Scott Handy], formerly a clerk at the Foreign Office, died in the 1930s. He is also a conspiracy theorist who has spent the last seventy years constructing an elaborate theory of who is secretly running the Universe. In the course of his travels, he's amassed a lot of arcane knowledge — the problem is working out which of his 'facts' are true (if any).

Trains

The Plymouth Flyer

The train that's the nearest thing to a home for our heroes; it's one of the safer trains on the network (for certain values of 'safe'). Its external appearance varies depending where and how it was filmed, but 'black engine pulling green coaches' remains pretty constant.

The train is almost invariably less than half-full, and there's never any difficulty finding a seat. Most of the passengers we see are extras, dressed in the styles of the 1900s. Occasionally the distant sounds of children running about or laughing are heard, though the children themselves are never seen.

2B51

A diesel railcar so ordinary that no-one's ever bothered to name it — "2B51" is the reporting number it always carries. It's the train that took Kayla to Thornton Junction, and crops up in other situations now and again. Inside it appears normal at first glance; an inattentive passenger, listening to music, might not notice that the other passengers appear to have all the liveliness of wax dummies.

The Black Pullman

Ghosts lack bodily needs and appetites, so wouldn't have any use for a conventional luxury dining train. That doesn't mean that there aren't alternative means to stimulate their senses, and the Black Pullman offers many of them, from the merely mind-expanding to the outright perilous. While on the outside it looks fairly normal (though black), the interior is positively sybaritic: hung with purple silk, decorated with Ancient Egyptian motifs and lit, though dimly, by braziers.

Behind the scenes, the Black Pullman had a fairly catastrophic effect on the show's budget. The producers had to pay a sizeable sum to have 'Blackmore Vale' and three Pullman cars painted black — and then a similar amount when their cheery promise of "it'll wash off" turned out, as it always does, to be utterly false.

Common Tropes

This series provides examples of:

• Adventure Towns: The Plymouth Flyer visits a different part of the rail network each episode.
• Always Night: In the spirit world, it's (nearly) always dark.
• Bottle Episode: Episode 4 uses only standing sets and stock footage.
• California Doubling: The show takes place on railways that, in the real world, no longer exist, but obviously had to be filmed at railways that do exist — mostly the Mid-Hants Railway.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: Kayla and David both have telephones, but it seems mobile phone signals can't reach them. Moreover, Kayla used up most of the battery power of hers listening to music in episode 1.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Kayla's attitude to Terry. Her first instinct is to think of him as the idiot who spilled his drink on her, and it takes them some time to build up a better working relationship.
• Drinking Game: Take a drink every time the Station Of The Week is Ropley shot from a different angle.
• Dug Too Deep: Wilfred's reason for why the Piccadilly Line extension from Aldwych to Waterloo was repeatedly cancelled — there's something buried just to the south of Aldwych that really shouldn't be disturbed.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: A vocal element of fandom ships Terry / Valerie.
• Foiler Footage: Multiple endings were filmed for Episode 6, since at the time the producers didn't know if there would be a second series and (if there would) whether the actors could be persuaded to return. When it became clear that there wouldn't be a second series, ending 2 was broadcast. Terry / Valerie shippers tend to prefer ending 3.
• Goth: Antigone is one of the gloomy sort.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The latter half of Episode 6 takes place at the ruins of Devil's Dyke station.
• Nobody Poops: Or eats or drinks, either, because they're ghosts (or as good as). Becomes a minor plot point in episode 4, when Kayla realises that anything or anyone could be hiding in the lavatory — it's the one room that ghosts never need to visit. It's implied (though not stated) that sexual desires don't occur either, but that didn't do anything to stop the fandom developing an active kinkmeme.
• The Klutz: Terry.
• Limited Wardrobe: Throughout, Kayla and Terry wear the same clothes as when they entered the spirit world. They slowly lose their colour through the series, until by the last episode they're almost grey — indicating the characters' progression towards full ghosthood.
• Mind Screw: One of the alternate endings to the series has Kayla transformed into a weighing machine, while a troupe of llama-headed dancers cavort around her. It makes just as much sense in context.
• Playing Against Type: Billie Piper's performance as the embittered Antigone came as something of a shock to Doctor Who fans who tuned in hoping to have their Rose withdrawal symptoms alleviated.
• Shadow Archetype: Antigone represents what Kayla might become, if she gives up hope of escape.
• Shown Their Work: Many of the characters and places appear to be references to real-life railway history. For example, what we learn of the backstory of the Plymouth Flyer matches the Plymouth express derailed at Salisbury in 1906, and Jim and Elsie are clearly based on Ronald and Winifred Knapp.
• Sinister Subway: Throughout Episode 5. Most of the sequences were filmed at Aldwych.
• Trapped In Another World: The spirit world.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Valerie wears a different costume every time she shows up, ranging in style from the 1830s to the present day.
• Will They or Won't They?: Kayla and Terry.

This entry was originally posted at http://john-amend-all.dreamwidth.org/84469.html. Feel free to comment there or here.

Comments

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised at what people will watch, actually (every year I am astonished anew at what programs take off :)

[john_amend_all]

Heh. There is that, of course...