Citadel 1.1-1.2: Memories and Questions

Saw the first two episodes of Citadel on Amazon Prime Video -- all that are available this week.  Very good, recommended, and --

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The key ingredient in this series so far is: memory.  Or, more precisely, memories.  We see in the first episode that the memories of Citadel agents can be remotely erased.  (So, obviously, this takes place in the future.)  This erasure makes lots of sense if you're part of an international organization of good spies (Citadel) at war with an international organization of evil spies (Manticore), because if the bad guys capture you, your top-secret information can't be tortured out of you or otherwise taken.  And then we learn in the second episode that Citadel uploads and stores all the memories of their agents, and keeps them in vials which, when injected into their bodies, brings back the memories of the agent that were previously erased.  This makes lots of sense, too.

It also raises lots of questions, which may or may not be explored in the episodes ahead.  For example, if Agent X's memories are injected into Agent Y, or any other human being, will that recipient suddenly have Agent X's memories?  Or what happens if one person is injected with two or more sets of memories from other people?  Could there be a sage somewhere with a whole collection of memories from agents gone and still present?

But the story is just beginning, so we'll just have to see.  What we do know, by the end of the second episode, is that Mason Kane and Nadia Sinh's memories were at first erased, but only Nadia has recovered hers because, well, it looks like the vial with Mason's memories was damaged and some of the vital fluid leaked out when the bad guys attacked him and Bernard (see below), but who knows, which is to say, I don't really know, because maybe there's still enough of that fluid left in the vial for Mason to at some point recover his memories?  In other words, can just a droplet of memory be cultured to yield someone's full set of lost memories?

Which raises another question: is there any other way that lost memories can be recovered?  Mason and Sinh both seem to have bits in their heads of who they were, which come to them in brief flashes and dreams (which I assume are longer than the flashes, who knows).  And while we're at it, can memories in vials or otherwise be copied of cloned, so that we could actually have two Masons and two Nadias running around?  And/or, can memories be edited, so that only some of the memories can be edited?  And depending on how advanced this memory tech is, could new memories be created in the storage unit, so that when they were injected into the person, they had memories they didn't have in the first place?

Bernard (always good to see Stanley Tucci on the screen), who was in charge of Mason and Nadia before they lost their memories, and apparently still is, would likely know the answers to at least some of these questions.  But he has been wounded and captured by Manticore.  And, also, I'm not clear if he is the ultimate head of Citadel, or just Mason and Nadia's superior.

Anyway, lots to discover in this high octane, fast-moving futuristic spy series, and I'm all in, even if, as you may no doubt already know, I'm grumbling that it's being doled out to us on a less than bingeable basis.

***

If you like science fiction about memory on the screen, check out Remembrance, Rememory, and Mnemophrenia.

Mnemophrenia: Never Saying Goodbye

I just watched Mnemophrenia, put up yesterday on Amazon and made last year.  It's a brilliant, provocative, startlingly original movie, with no actresses and actors I've heard of, and written, directed, and produced by Eirini Konstantinidou, her first time out with a feature-length movie.  I'll predict flatly that Mnemophrenia is destined to become a classic, and the first of movies made by Konstantinidou that will be similarly received.

The story is about a mental state - seen as an affliction by some, a liberating step in our evolution by others - called mnemophrenia, or the inability to tell the differences between virtual reality experiences and the real thing.  But like all good science fiction and and even McLuhanesque thinking about the media, it may be that virtual memories, once embedded in the brain, are more real, or at least as real, as what we take in with our naked senses.

This new virtual/biological experience mix certainly has some profound benefits.  In the far future - there are three futures portrayed in this movie, near, mid, and far futures - and in that third future it also becomes possible to record a human being's experience on a chip that can be implanted in someone else's brain.  (One reason I really liked this movie is in my 2003 novel, The Pixel Eye, I had squirrels implanted with chips that recorded what they saw and heard, for the purpose of spying.)   In Mnemophrenia, this allows a kind of immortality, and picks up on a very powerful theme previously explored in a bunch of novels, my favorite being Charles Platt's The Silicon Man in 1993.  In the far future in the movie, a couple is able to stay together and go beyond via the implant, when the wife is stricken by a rare fatal illness.  There are several worthwhile stories in the movie, but the implant narrative in itself is heart-tugging and makes the movie memorable.

And the cinematography is vivid, surprisingly so for a first time director.  Although conversation is king, hands and feet play almost as much a major role as the expressive faces.  And the little futuristic windows that pop up in some of the scenes actually provide a stream of very useful information, in addition to being fun to look at.

See this movie, and see if you agree.  I should mention that Eirini Konstantinidou was my student at Fordham University, in our MA in Public Communication program, more than a decade ago.  That accounts for the speed with which I put this movie on my screen and reviewed it here, not what I've said about this movie in this review.