The year is 2062. China has grown to stand equal to America in terms of military power and the two nations hold an uneasy peace with one another. America’s military resources and political presence have become diminished by their ongoing entrenchment in a war on terror. The Middle East is scorched from US nuclear weapons and global warming has forced some coastal regions to be evacuated due to storms and flooding and inland shantytowns are commonplace across the globe.
Bill Sadler is a young, handsome man in his mid 20s. He lives in Dyess, Arkansas, and lives what is, in these times, a pretty good life as a young farmer. He meets a girl and they fall in love. As war breaks out between the US and Asia, Bill gets drafted, trained and shipped out. As he leaves, he tells her he loves her.
Twelve bloody years of battle later, snippets of which are revealed via flashback throughout the miniseries, Bill finally returns home, to find his homestead in ruins and his fiancé gone. He finds letters, written and stamped, addressed only to ‘William Sadler, Private 1st Class #482-7943’. The last letter is dated seven-months previously, and is unfinished, un-enveloped and on the ink-stained desk next to a dried-out fountain pen and an upturned chair stained with long-dried blood. Bill is clearly upset and cries for the first time in over a decade.
As he searches the world for his lover, flashbacks to the war reveal an unsanctioned black ops mission two years prior. Two squad members are killed and one captured in a raid on a biological testing centre in Korea. The facility was trying to create enhanced warfighters from genetically modified embryos and DNA from the most successful soldiers, along with mind-control implants for instant satellite communication and, if necessary, remote termination. Bill and another, Marcus Kane were the only two survivors from the raid.
Although Kane is now dead, Bill learns his wife has also disappeared. He tracks down the genetic researchers and rescues his fiancé. They make it as far as his waiting car when her eyes go dead and she falls, limp, to the floor.
Five years later, to the narrated recitation of the poem, Bill is revealed, heavily scarred, sitting in a darkened corner of a dingy bar, with a half-empty whiskey bottle on the table in front of him, a nobody, a ghost of a man haunted by love lost.
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This 3-part HBO Sci-Fi miniseries outline, entitled Damage Control, is the result of an heteroglossic, analogical adaptation of William Blake's poem Never Seek To Tell Thy Love. The poem is concerned with a man's regret at lost love and his insistence that one shouldn't express one's love, as it only leads to pain and loss.
How merry.
The adaptation above is based on the poem, adapting its themes and issues raised, more than a direct visual representation of the images conjured by the poem yet, in a way, it fulfills this also. The emphasis, however, is on the effect of lost love on the main character, and the way in which he regrets admitting his love. The final sequence in the bar is full of regret and serves as a warning to others; 'do not tell of your love, for it will only bring pain'.
