No, I won't Remember You, thanks.

I am sorry to say that the final episode of the BBC’s ‘Remember me' was a severe disappointment.

 

Not having written the whole thing, I can’t suggest any other obvious way out, but let me explain what troubles me.

 

First, the reality and motives of the ghost. In M.R.James, the ghost or other horror is generally real and can do real harm, but usually only to the  person who has awoken it .

 

In ‘A School Story’ a murder victim rises from his hidden grave and comes in pursuit of his killer, after sending warnings in a particularly menacing manner.  In ‘Martin’s Close’, a killer is pursued by his rather more recently dead victim, whose approach he identified through snatches of a shared song.  In Count Magnus’, ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’,  ‘A Warning to the Curious’ and ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’, a character summons a horror by excessive curiosity. Also, in ‘Warning’, the avenging spirit has ‘some power over your eyes’, so that he can sometimes be seen, and sometimes not.

 

I’d also allude here to Henry James’s ultimately unsatisfactory ‘Turn of the Screw’, filmed brilliantly as ‘the Innocents’ many years ago. In the book, the reader is left wondering whether a repressed and lovelorn governess has imagined Quint and Miss Jessel.  In the film, we see both these revenants, usually at a distance.  And I still shiver at the recollection of the first sight of Miss Jessel, clad in midnight black, her face appallingly white and her eyes deep in their sockets, staring hungrily  and desperately across the dark lake in the sultry day, quite obviously dead but yet quite obviously still moving among us with the power to do harm. And her power has a logic to it. She and Quint, whom we know to be debauched, seek to possess the two children, one of them already quite possibly corrupt in some unstated way.

 

Now, the ghost in ‘Remember Me’ begins well. We see her, obviously dead and black, soaked on the beach, and then – the mind lurches as she begins to rise from the sand in the half-light, her draperies trailing.

 

We see her, in dreams or perhaps nor dreams, beginning to rise from dark corners of rooms. We are told by one of her victims-to-be that she has seen her, standing in the same place as a murdered woman, an incredible circumstance that can be described but not shown. We see her sitting faceless hunched on top of a bus, then disappearing from her seat.

 

We see her appearing, her face fully revealed, in a picture taken when she was not there.  This is quite frightening, but wait. We see her, invisible but powerful enough to interfere with gravity, holding the little boy’s swing, though he never describes this terrifying experience to his sister or her friend, the reassuring policeman.  Then we see her (as we have done once or twice before) with her face almost entirely covered, but what we can see looking as if the rest might be very unpleasant. Yet when she is eventually unveiled, she looks completely alive and rather nice.

 

Her motives are a bit baffling. If she wants to keep Tom Parfitt, her lifelong charge, what good does it do to go round pushing social workers out of high windows, or drowning care home assistants in their houses? How has she obtained this power to prolong Tom Parfitt’s life, so that he is at least 110- but looks 70ish?The BBC needed her to have this power, so that Tom’s parents could be killed by the Kaiser’s Navy in the (once famous)     bombardment of 1914, but he could still be alive now. If the ghost is so keen on killing people, why didn’t she kill Tom’s wife, who is eventually revealed to have been killed by Tom, thanks to an amazing care-home coincidence.

 

Why would an Indian ghost be in any way incommoded by a Yorkshire song?  

How did she have the power to come alive again after being shipwrecked and drowned? If she knew he was an orphan in Scarborough, why not just stay alive and take the train?  Why would a ship on the way from London to India travel past Scarborough? Why, in any case, did the ghost want to drown the little boy?  The whole thing just dissolves.

 

I think they wanted to have a ghost, but feared making the ghost too real.