1983 is available now and I've watched the first episode, has anyone else?
It seems as though the POD is a series of unexplained terrorist bombings in 1983 that generated an outpouring of patriotism and enabled the government (and the whole Eastern Bloc, apparently?) to regain popular support. It's now 2003 and a series of entangled mystery-thriller plotlines are pointing towards who was responsible for the bombings. Good stuff.
One thing that's really caught my attention so far is the visual design of twenty-first-century Communism, which is very contemporary in its austere minimalism; I don't know if it's intentional convergence but it makes a lot of sense that a revitalized Warsaw Pact would be all plate glass, brushed concrete and polygonal computer monitors.
I just finished Episode 4. The show’s made by actual Polish people, many of whom probably remember life under Communism, so some of the general conditions and states of mind are portrayed pretty well. Alt-hist elements reported so far:
- The Eastern Bloc still exists, obviously. The 1983 bombings caused the failure of the Polish pro-democracy movement by galvanizing the country behind the government, apparently leading to the failure of democratic reform across the whole of the Eastern Bloc.
- Vietnamese-Polish relations are extremely good, apparently because at some point, Vietnam was undergoing troubles and Poland swept to the rescue, welcoming Vietnamese people into the country. An intercontinental railway is being built to connect the two countries, there’s a “Little Saigon” in Warsaw, and Polish schoolchildren are being taught Vietnamese.
- There’s a rebellion in Chechnya that the Soviets are having difficulty suppressing, to the point that the Polish government is being called upon for advice. There is also some sort of rebellion going on in Yugoslavia, though no details are given.
- The President of the United States is Al Gore. He is building up arms in Kuwait (despite “objections from the international community”), threatening war with Iraq.
I actually think that this series’s take on AH is uniquely Polish because of the subtle, but present self-aggrandizement of the Polish nation as a whole. There’s a scene in which a Vietnamese-born character states his admiration for the fundamental Christian kindness present in every Pole’s heart, and one in which the Poles are implied to be both more competent than the Soviets and diplomatically independent of them. It reminds me of the description given on
this TV Tropes page for “Atomic Roulette” by Andrzej Pilipiuk, or that infamously terrible Pole-wank on The Other Place which I refuse to link to: Whenever a Pole writes alternate history with anything less than academic level rigor, it seems, national pride dictates that Poland must always be given an elevated status as some sort of world power in the alternate world, and the Polish nation must be praised as having some sort of fundamental, uniquely virtuous characteristic.
That aside, the show seems pretty cool so far. I agree with your assessment of the style—it’s doing a good job of mixing
1984-esque imagery (which it’s clearly trying to allude to directly, because of the title of the show and the fact that the book itself is shown prominently in one scene),
Matrix-like imagery and the typical architectural trappings of Communist Europe. The cars still look like slightly modernized Ladas and Volgas, which I think is funny. The exposition is handled kind of clumsily, but I’m willing to forgive it because this is a such a new genre for TV that these people are practically trailblazers.
WARNING: this show is NSFW. Strong language, plus quite a bit of graphic nudity in every episode so far.