Source Code - TV Series
Moving a project from the cinema to the small screen (or vice versa) can be a tricky thing… However, Buffy, Stargate, Terminator (despite it’s short run), and M*A*S*H all made decent transitions, and Mark Gordon, the producer of Duncan Jones’ brilliant movie Source Code, is hoping to he can make it too, after securing a pilot commitment from CBS to turn the film’s premise into a weekly tv series.
Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as pilot Colter Stevens, who wakes to find himself on a train headed for Chicago, with no memory of how he got there, or why he appears to be in someone else’s body… He doesn’t have long to muse on this predicament though, as 8 minutes later the train explodes, and he awakes again, but this time in some sort of military training simulator. Dazed and very confused, Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) appears on a monitor to explain that he is taking part in an experimental ‘source code’ project which allows him to re-live the last 8 minutes of someone’s life, albeit in an alternative reality. The reason he is on that train is to try and identify the bomber before he can set of a much larger explosion in central Chicago.
For the TV series, the plan is to have 3 federal agents using the ‘source code’ technology to jump into people’s bodies to prevent or solve tragic past events. It’ll be interesting to see how they approach moving the mythology to the small screen, as the film leaves it quite open to shoot off in a number of different directions. It’s fair to say this is likely to make some key changes from the film, which very much centered around Stevens, his confusion to the situation, and his mental state. In the same way Stargate saw the TV iron out the process of gating to a planet compared to the movie, i’d rather expect the TV show to focus more on the ‘event’ than the bumps of using the system.
The pilot is being penned by Steven Maeda, writer/executive producer on the superb (and tragically cancelled) ‘Lie to Me’, and ‘Lost’, so he’s no stranger to a good mystery story, and a bit of sci-fi weirdness! Although the basic premise is very ‘Quatumn Leap’, there’s enough other material set up in the movie to make this a much more edgy concept. Will be very interesting one to watch develop.
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