The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [26]
4. Nightmare Stage: The world's ice caps begin to melt, the sea-level rises catastrophically all over the globe, a large part of the world's population dies in various disasters and almost all social order breaks down.
5. Miraculous Escape: Humanity finds unspecified `magic weapons' to kill off the monsters; the sea stops rising; humanity is saved; hero and heroine are happily united; life begins to return to normal.
The same year, 1953, just after the Queen's Coronation had prompted millions of Britons to install their first primitive television sets, the first serial on the new medium to catch the nation's imagination was Nigel Kneale's The Quatermass Experiment, with its hero a shrewd and robust scientist, Professor Bernard Quatermass. As head of the world's first manned space-flight project, Quatermass is horrified when the spaceship returns with only one of the three astronauts alive. Gradually it becomes clear that the survivor, Victor Caroon, has not only absorbed the personalities of his two dead colleagues but has been taken over by some diabolically ingenious extra-terrestrial power which is using his body as a vehicle to take over the earth. The `frustration stage' sets in when Caroon appears to be turning into a cross between a cactus and a fungus, then disappears. When next sighted he has become a huge and fast-proliferating fungoid monster spreading over the interior of Westminster Abbey, about to throw out millions of spores which will wipe out humanity, allowing the aliens to take over. In this `final ordeal', Quatermass confronts the monster and somewhat implausibly persuades the three human beings who are still mysteriously part of it to resist its influence, even though this will involve their own suicide. This leads to the `miraculous escape' by which humanity is saved.
In the sequel Quatermass 11(1955) our hero again saves mankind from extraterrestrial invasion when he discovers that mysterious small meteorites dropping out of the sky contain an alien life-force which possesses any human being who comes near them. The only outward sign of what has happened is a mark on their skin. He then discovers that, with the aid of their new zombified human allies, the aliens have established a mysterious `defence plant' in a remote part of northern England, The `frustration stage' begins when Quatermass comes to London to alert people at the top of government that something astonishingly sinister seems to be going on. He is surprised to receive bland assurances that there is nothing to worry about. But then, in each case, observes that the senior figure to whom he is talking has the telltale mark on his arm. Frustration turns to nightmare when Quatermass manages to visit the plant with a delegation. One member separates from the group to look into a vast pressure dome. He comes out dying of ammonia-poisoning, uttering the one word `slime'. Quatermass guesses the aliens are using the oxygen-free dome to reproduce, before emerging to take over the world The `final ordeal' comes when the plant is stormed by an army of angry locals. As they engage in a shoot-out with zombified armed guards, Quatermass opens up the dome to oxygen, thus destroying the monsters within and saving mankind.
Kneale's third and most successful working of the theme, Quatermass and the Pit (1958), begins with the discovery on a London building site of a mysterious cylinder, at first taken to be an unexploded wartime bomb. Quatermass realises from surrounding fossil remains that in fact it must have been there for five million years. Through the now familiar sequence whereby