"YEARS AND YEARS and Years" by Jackie Hedeman
My co-writer Molly and I have one rule: our characters are not allowed to take on the fate of the universe.
The alternative is tempting, especially since in our audio drama The Pasithea Powder we have created a war hero space captain and a disgraced science prodigy working together to unravel an interplanetary conspiracy. Between them, there’s more than a soupçon of romantic tension, but they’re kept apart by their relative positions in a postwar galaxy, a shared history with difficult secrets, and by beautifully prosaic geographic distance. Sometimes, as we raise our narrative stakes, it requires almost physical effort not to raise them higher still, to push our heroines into impossible, irreversible situations where the only way out is to take on the entire machine of their political existence.
Molly and I grew up and went into adulthood surrounded by our fair share of Chosen One narratives and, more than that, by television shows that couldn’t seem to resist the call to outdo themselves dramatically, ratcheting up the stakes so artificially high that the hero’s survival became absurd and the hero’s death would be unfair and no outcome could ever feel earned. When we write, we want to avoid that snare. In The Pasithea Powder, we’ve worked hard to create a world where, like our world, it would be impossible for one person to solve the problems created by hundreds, thousands, millions, more.
In January 2020, I sat on a plane and muffled my sobs in a dinner roll. I was watching the final episode of Years and Years, a vision of apocalypse that at the time felt maybe ten years away. Not to be confused with the Olly Alexander-fronted band, Years & Years, Years and Years is a 2019 HBO/BBC co-production helmed by writer and Doctor Who rejuvenator Russell T. Davies. Like most of Davies’ work, I would characterize Years and Years as a bracing blend of dark and upbeat. Maybe the word is tragicomic, but that leaves out some of Davies’ signature flair, which he previously brought to the original British Queer as Folk, A Very English Scandal, It’s a Sin, and many other screen wonders. If all writers have their material, their stuff, as my favorite grad school professor put it, then Davies’ stuff is surely comprised of parents and children, working class triumph, queer revenge, the collision of the epic and the mundane, and the firm knowledge that human beings are remarkable: remarkably kind, remarkably cruel, and remarkably brave.
Davies is the master of the advice a different professor gave me in undergrad—if you’re going to have a character get bad news, have them pick up the phone laughing—and also of its reverse, that it is possible for lightness to prevail in the face of desperation. This approach is evident in Years and Years, which tracks the Lyon family across the fifteen years that follow the firing of a nuclear missile. Geopolitical tensions rise, jobs close and banks crash, migrants make dangerous crossings and politicians make predictable scapegoats, technological advances sprint into overdrive, and life changes.
Or it doesn’t. Watching Years and Years two wines in, in the dark hushed middle of a transatlantic flight, I couldn’t get over how quickly the Lyons adjusted to the apocalypse surrounding them. Partly this is a function of watching fifteen years unfold over six episodes, where, after a time jump, changes in interpersonal relationships and the state of the world may be a shock to the viewer while the characters have had time to adapt. I now realize the Lyons’ adjustment was unsurprising in another way. Though eventually they all brush up against the darker sides of the end of the world, initially they just keep their heads down and try to get used to the new options they have. These have been the actions of the privileged across time, to wait and see.
Once the plane landed, I texted everyone I knew—or at least the former Whovians I knew—in a daze. “You have to watch Years and Years,” I typed with one ungloved hand, waiting for the parking shuttle at a frigid Kansas City airport. “HIGHLY recommend.”
Because, like the Lyons, I can wait and see, my memories of March 2020 are not of trauma, they are of the fear of trauma. Not even two months later, I tweeted, “Dear Everyone I Told to Watch Years and Years, This isn’t the time. Love, Jackie.” I don’t know what I thought I was protecting anyone from, when right outside their windows, or in their homes, they could turn and see exactly the kind of desperation and callousness that plays out on the screen. I couldn’t stop thinking about the show, about how each episode begins with a madcap rush through another year of unimaginable suffering. I even considered re-watching it to write something about it. I watched Schitt’s Creek instead.
I still haven’t rewatched Years and Years, though my reason has shifted. Then, I was afraid I would see it as a disconcerting mirror to the state of a world whose destabilization was only just starting to reach me. Now, I’m afraid I will no longer find it as profound as I once did. Rather than going too far, being too real, I am starting to think it didn’t go far enough.
At the end of Years and Years, the apocalypse is partially averted. It is a fine, bittersweet ending and an extremely Davies-ian ending and it did make me cry real tears at 40,000 feet, but it also feels more handwave-y speculative and less sharp than the rest of the series. Those quiet moments when the Lyons argue amongst themselves about whether demagogue Vivian Rook (Emma Thompson) is an acid-tongued hero or a political monster feel more grounded in the shared humanity of the characters than the end, when the court of public opinion saves the day and the eldest sister, Edith (Jessica Hynes) dying, uploads her consciousness to the cloud.
Davies probably knows this. “I’m not information,” Edith says in her last moments. “All these memories, they’re not just facts, they’re so much more than that.” Davies, in an interview with RadioTimes, explains, “That's what the whole series is asking – ‘how much of everyone else are you?’”
I will say, I think Davies’ project with Years and Years is not my project. Doctor Who is ample proof that he is not afraid of the individual as literal world-changer. I also know that Davies has a refreshingly capacious sense of what it means to change or save the world. In Queer as Folk, when Stuart Allen Jones (played to perfection by Aiden Gillen) test drives a Jeep through a homophobic car dealer’s salesroom window, I think he saves the world. That is the kind of thing I’m also interested in as a writer, gestures that mean absolutely nothing and absolutely everything all at once.
Molly and I posted the first episodes of The Pasithea Powder in December 2019. We plot, write, and record at home, over video chat, in glowing screens that feel more like real human connection with every passing day. More than once, getting up to get more wine, I’ve tried to offer Molly some, forgetting that we’ve never been in the same place for any part of our long writing partnership.
We drew much of our early inspiration from the futility of WWI, but our listeners, who found us during the pandemic, don’t necessarily know that, and I suspect the story of governments sacrificing bodies to fuel the engine of power is eerily resonant no matter when you’re living. Perhaps it is not particularly impressive, after all, that Russell T. Davies managed to make such emotionally accurate predictions about the world when he had so much history to draw on.
How do you write about hard times without trying to fix them? The temptation is there, a woman standing atop a pile of the lightly stunned and repentant bodies of her enemies, a romantic declaration and perfect policy recommendations at the tip of her tongue.
We have tried to combat this temptation by leaning into the humanity of our characters. What is possible for them to do? What would they realistically want to do? Where are their limits? Our early notes read, “Something traumatic and paradigm-shifting is happening and instead of dealing with it we’re partying ‘til dawn.”
Many a Chosen One narrative ends in a comfortable aftermath, with the right people in charge, their suitability for the role unchallenged, and from there we’re hustled out of the story. The book closes, the credits roll before anyone asks any questions about corruption or post-traumatic stress or how nothing is really over, not really, if the fundamental circumstances that allowed this to happen in the first place haven’t changed. We put the book down; we leave the theater. We have escaped with our lives.
What we’re left with is a collection of memories and a challenge: not to set out to save the world, but to figure out how to live in it.
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
