HERON
Outline for a television drama series, including an opening telemovie and thirteen episodes
© David Lowe, 20 April 1996
When nobody believes you, when you have nowhere to run, when you're isolated but not alone - one man will listen to your story. His name is Heron.
BACKGROUND
Everyone knows we're not told everything that's going on in the world. For some people, that's not good enough. Heron is the story of a man who dares to look deeper. It's about outer and inner space. It's about someone who not only listens, but acts. It's a show for people with open minds, and people looking for answers. It's for everybody who likes being scared. It's Halifax FP meets The Equaliser in The Twilight Zone. It's Cracker meets The X Files. It's a psychological thriller/suspense series for the late 1990s.
JACK HERON
Sam Neill, John Waters or Bob Peck could play him. The audience will love him. He's a Sydney-based psychiatrist who uses psychotherapy and hypnosis to help people who have had terrifying encounters with aliens. In his youth he was an archery champion, and he's still got an unerring talent for getting to the heart of things.
When we first meet Heron he's married and has two children. He's a partner in a leading mainstream psychiatric practice and also lectures at a university. Heron is a leading authority on using hypnosis in pain management. He's written a couple of books on the subject. An attractive young student named Katherine Alexandriou is bonded to him as part of her PhD study into clinical hypnosis.
Heron's work commitments leave him very little time for his family. He's practically a stranger to them, spending all his time at the practice or doing his university work. Initially Heron is not the sort of man who believes in UFOs. He's a scientific, skeptical man. Women find him very appealing. Men respect him.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
Apart from Katherine Alexandriou, who could be played by someone like Zoe Carides, the main initial supporting characters are Heron's wife Karla, teenaged son Chris, young daughter Lucy, and his middle-aged partner in the practice, Frances Korsch.
Karla seems to be a typical housewife. True, she was a psychiatric patient herself at one time (that's where she met Heron), but she's over all that now. Or is she? Heron considers his son Chris to be a hopeless pothead, and possibly a drug dealer as well. He's certainly got a surprising amount of money for an unemployed person who spends most of his time surfing. Lucy is seven or eight years old, a very mature little girl with certain psychic abilities which will become obvious as the show continues.
Frances Korsch is an older woman who has worked hard all her life to get where she is now; a partner in a psychiatric practice with one of the leading names in the business. She's got a big heart, but she's essentially a hardheaded, skeptical woman with a medical background. When Heron goes off the rails, she's got a lot to lose if he pulls her down with him.
Katherine Alexandriou comes from a migrant background and has also worked hard to get where she is, rejecting a strong family push towards the marriage/children route to follow an academic career instead. She's bonded to Heron for a year, and has to follow him and his study wherever it leads. Katherine's a stickler for the scientific method, and can usually find a rational alternate explanation for every crazy alien story Heron comes up with. She needs him to finish her course. He can't offend her too badly or he risks severing his sole connection with the university and a regular pay packet (after the psychiatric practice folds).
Heron can't drive. Katherine drives a sports car. Heron's a bit of a techno-peasant. Katherine's right up on everything from global positioning systems to the Internet. Heron drinks and smokes. Katherine's a health nut. Despite their differences, there's also plenty of unresolved sexual tension between these two, as well as mutual respect.
TELEMOVIE
The opening telemovie sets up Heron's character and follows his violent transformation from a closed-minded man, unavailable to his own family, to someone looking for answers; a wounded, wiser person with an ability to listen and to help others.
The story begins with business as usual for Jack Heron. On paper he's got the perfect life. Nice family, a successful career. But he barely talks to his wife and kids, he spends all his time at work, and he drinks too much for his own good. Then something strange happens. Heron's son Chris disappears while he's out surfing, alone. A big search fails to find any trace of him. It's assumed by the authorities that Chris has been taken by a shark or drowned. Then, after a couple of days, Chris reappears, wetsuit and all, way out west in the desert. He stumbles into town, utterly terrified, and eventually gets home.
John Heron dismisses his son's fantastic story of alien abduction and puts it down to drugs. Heron's wife Karla is more sympathetic. She shares her son's fear. The police and rescue authorities treat the whole affair as a hoax, and threaten to bill Heron for the cost of the search.
But Chris has changed. He spends all his time inside now, and never goes surfing. He tries to substantiate his claims by telling his father about previous alien contacts - the famous and not so famous cases - but Heron ridicules him. The young man is isolated from his friends and girlfriend. His mother seems to be the only one who really understands.
Then Chris disappears again. This time he doesn't come back. Heron dismisses what has happened as attention seeking behaviour. He believes Chris will show up eventually. But Karla is a nervous wreck. Heron's skepticism about UFOs means that his professional counselling skills aren't available to his wife. When she tries to talk about her own paranormal experiences she strikes a wall of hostility. Voices inside her head make her fear she's going mad.
Heron and Karla stop speaking. She withdraws into a shell. Then she's found dead by the side of a shopping mall car park, having apparently jumped off the top storey. Heron is brought out of his daze and utterly floored by this. His wife and son are gone. Now his family is just him and Lucy, his little girl.
Heron discovers his wife's handwriting in the margins of his son's UFO books, also detailed notes about abductions in her diary, references to something called Project Fastwalker, and the 13th Floor. More surprises are in store. The doctors tell Heron that his wife was pregnant when she died. Not only that, but there was 'something strange' about the foetus. Going against the advice of Katherine, Heron breaks into the hospital and discovers an alien-looking foetus preserved in a bottle with his wife's name on it. Heron is caught by security and handed over to the police, who lock him up. Korsch and Katherine get him released, but don't believe his babblings about foetuses in bottles. To shut him up, Korsch uses her medical connections to get back into the hospital, taking Heron with her. The bottle is gone.
Heron goes to the media with an appeal to find his son. Now his unpredictable behaviour is threatening the practice. His academic colleagues look askance at Heron's talk of aliens and secret organisations. Katherine also begins to wonder about Heron's sanity. Heron begins to fear that he might be going mad himself. Before he does any more harm to both their professional careers, Frances Korsch urges Heron to take a break for a while. Heron agrees, but since Chris's disappearance he won't let Lucy out of his sight. She goes with him to a remote coastal guesthouse.
Katherine is forced to twiddle her thumbs while she waits for Heron to recover from his recent traumas and get back to work. Meanwhile Lucy has also started talking about spaceships and greys. Heron builds a complicated movement and light triggered alarm system around her bed to protect his daughter. Lucy's stories increase in detail. She isn't afraid of the aliens, but says they just 'play with her'. As far as Lucy is concerned, Heron doesn't know what's real and what's imagination any more. She tells her father that her big brother Chris came to her in a dream and told her to tell Dadda he was all right. Then, one night, the alarms around Lucy's bed are triggered. Two figures, cloaked in black, slip from Heron's grasp and get away.
Heron and Lucy return to the city. A note is waiting for Heron from a man called Parrish, who saw his TV appeal. Heron goes with Katherine to meet Parrish, an enigmatic old man in a wheelchair who says he's there to listen, a person to talk to 'in cases like these'. Heron does some research and discovers that Parrish threw away a respectable career as a physicist to become a defacto UFO counsellor; someone who listens to people who've been traumatised by alien beings and tries to help them. Initially Heron dismisses Parrish as a quack, but soon the old man is the only one left holding out a helping hand. Heron goes to visit him again, this time alone.
Parrish shows him an archive of tapes he has recorded over the years with traumatised UFO victims: shelf upon shelf of terrifying testimonies to the existence of alien beings. Heron spends an afternoon listening to snippets of different tapes as the events described are re-enacted in his mind's eye: sightings, abductions, sexual attacks. The mysterious Project Fastwalker is mentioned again, as well as something called the Black Table. Parrish says he doesn't know what the words mean. The victims come from all walks of life. They are young and old, male and female, educated and illiterate. Heron is shocked and amazed to discover he's not alone. His experience with his family is far from unique.
Parrish tells Heron that there's probably no point looking for his son any more. In his experience no abduction victim has been known to return after so long away. He urges Heron to make it up to his family's memory by helping others. Parrish tells Heron that his clinical hypnosis and psychotherapy skills are ideal for regressing victims and getting their experiences out into the light of day. He wants a replacement. Parrish has a terminal illness, and knows he will be dead soon. When he's gone, he tells Heron, there'll be no one to guard the records or continue his work.
Parrish gives Heron the name and address of a client who desperately needs help. Heron puts it in his pocket and leaves. Back at the practice, Katherine and Korsch tell Heron it's a crazy idea to talk to alleged abduction victims. They convince him to return to work. But Heron can't concentrate on wealthy neurotic women and businessmen with sexual problems any more. He leaves and walks the streets. He approaches Parrish's house, and pulls the piece of paper with the client's name out of his pocket. He looks at it, but then changes his mind and rips it to shreds. Heron turns his back and walks away. Suddenly he hears a crackling noise behind him. He looks around to see Parrish's house ablaze. Fire breaks the windows and licks upward hungrily. Men in black suddenly run from the side of the house and leap into a van which races off with squealing tires. The flames are soon too intense to approach the house. Heron rings the fire brigade and then stands by helplessly as he waits for them to arrive. The house burns to the ground.
That night, Heron discovers that Parrish died in hospital that morning, before the fire was lit. He remembers Parrish's words about how 'they would destroy the evidence' the moment he wasn't around to protect it. Heron reaches into his pocket for the name and address of the client - and then remembers tearing it to shreds that afternoon.
Heron can't drive. Katherine has to take him down to Parrish's street. Heron scrabbles through the ashes and mud and finds the scraps of the note Parrish gave him - the name and address of a client 'in desperate need'. Katherine thinks he's absolutely crazy. End of telemovie.
WHY HERON?
The show and character are called Heron because of the word's links to other words and concepts; hero, hearing (listening), and fishing... Something with its feet in one world and its head in another (herons stand in water to fish). All of this suits the image of a vigilante therapist specialising in alien trauma. Herons are tall, solitary birds, which suits the kind of man who could play the role.
Heron uses hypnotism and other techniques to regress his clients back. His trademark is a tiny torch with a little red beam. His business card has the image of a heron on it. Later, when he loses his office and is on the run, people can contact him only on his mobile and via the Internet. He comes and goes mysteriously, a bit like Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel.
UNDERSTORY: PROJECT FASTWALKER
There are two major secret organisations at work in the world of Heron. One is called Project Fastwalker. Fastwalker was formed after World War Two in a secret collaboration between the United States Air Force, NATO and the CIA. Its brief was to investigate and if necessary repel hostile alien contact. It was funded via a bottomless 'black budget', and given full military backing. Each hemisphere of the globe was the responsibility of a separate division of Fastwalker. The North Division was based in New Mexico. The South Division was based in Central Australia, on the territory of America's largest southern ally.
Fastwalker used secret radar and stealth technology, as well as a group of 'remote viewers' - people with special psychic abilities, many of whom also claimed contact with aliens - to monitor and investigate incursions into Earth's atmosphere by alien craft. Any Fastwalker employees who looked like going public with their knowledge of UFOs were killed, kidnapped or smeared.
The hypothesis of Heron will be that this organisation still exists, but is now wrought by internal division. The Northern Hemisphere Fastwalker group are destructive, trigger happy people who tend towards violence as the only response to increasing numbers of alien incursions. There are some in the South, however, who are interested in making contact with aliens, despite the contrary orders of their masters in the US.
It's eventually discovered that Heron's wife and son were both employed as remote viewers for Fastwalker. Secrecy oaths prevented them from telling Heron about this involvement. When Chris Heron disappears for the second time, it's not the aliens who kidnap him, but his former employers, in order to prevent him going public about his experiences aboard alien craft. Project Fastwalker also have an interest in Heron's psychic daughter, Lucy, as well as Heron himself, particularly as he gets closer to the big secrets that lie behind the surface.
THE BLACK TABLE: SECRET ORGANISATION NO. 2
Made up of the world's twelve richest men, the Black Table was formed during the Kennedy administration, during the 1960s, to ensure their interests were not compromised during the liberalisation of the world at that time. Now the Black Table acts as an unelected world government. They only meet physically during times of extreme crisis, but maintain a continuous electronic network. Between them, the members of the Black Table control all of the world's energy, communication and mineral resources.
The Black Table men are aware of the existence of Project Fastwalker, and have funded its activities through secret channels at various times. At the same time they have used their control of the media to ridicule any attempts to publicise the existence of such a project, or indeed the existence of aliens themselves. The Black Table cannot permit the public to know about the aliens for a number of reasons:
1.) Widespread panic would threaten the world economy.
2.) Any curbs on the excesses of capitalism (as desired by the aliens), such as an end to environmental destruction etc, would threaten their own profits.
3.) The power of the Black Table's puppet organisations, such as governments and the media, would disappear with the knowledge of an external, higher power.
4.) The Black Table's profits are maintained through defence spending, religious intolerance and intense capitalisation at the expense of global solidarity. Any outside threat which might unify the human race would eliminate the neatly controlled cycles of war and famine, supply and demand that are the very basis of the Black Table's wealth.
For many years, representatives of the Black Table have been buying reputable scientists and other figures to prop up their campaign to ridicule and disinform the public about the existence of aliens. The closer Heron gets to the truth, the more he risks the wrath of the awesomely powerful Black Table. But there are other forces also involved here, forces beyond the Earth...
HARPER AND THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR
In 1943 a young Australian soldier named Richard D. Harper was lying in hospital recovering from terrible war injuries. While in hospital the young man had a strange experience which he initially dismissed as a dream. He was taken into a metallic room by a hooded figure with large eyes. The figure told him telepathically that he had been selected as a representative, a prophet. He would be extremely wealthy if he did as he was told. In return, when he was a rich and influential man, he would act as a spokesman for the race of beings to which the hooded figure belonged. The young man agreed, and woke up back in his hospital bed. Harper asked for an atlas. Based on the pictures in his head, he marked a number of crosses in areas of wasteland and desert spread around the world. As soon as he got out of hospital, Harper travelled to these locations and bought the apparently useless land. Beneath the crosses were huge reserves of oil and precious minerals
Richard D. Harper soon became a wealthy man. He diversified into other interests; transportation, newspapers, movie studios. Everything he touched turned to gold. As the money started generating itself, Harper spent most of his time researching aliens and UFO phenomena. The entire thirteenth floor of his first building, Harper Tower, was turned into an enormous UFO archive which only Harper was allowed to enter. Meanwhile the Australian ex-soldier became a multi-millionaire, a man of the world.
Then the aliens returned. It was time to fulfil his side of the bargain. Through his media interests, Harper began spreading stories which the aliens communicated to him telepathically. The trickle of information became a flood. Stories of flying saucers and weird phenomena flooded in from around the globe. Movies were made. People began to accept the reality of the UFO phenomenon.
Then Harper was approached by a representative of the newly formed Black Table. Stop the UFO stories, he was told, and you can become one of us. Harper refused, explaining the contract which had led to his wealth. Soon after, the Black Table faked Harper's death in an explosion aboard his personal jet. Harper was imprisoned in a luxury prison, and is still alive, an old man, at the time of the Heron series, in the 1990s.
All of this becomes significant to the story of Heron when R.D. Harper's son, James, now a junior member of the Harper Industries Board in the USA, starts having strange dreams. He dreams that he must travel to Australia, the land of his father's birth, where he has never been. He dreams of an archive of secrets on the thirteenth floor of the building where his father's wealth began.
James travels to Sydney and finds Harper Tower. Unfortunately no one can open the thirteenth floor, not even him. The entire floor was hermetically sealed according to the terms of his father's will, and guarded round the clock. James must get in himself, or find someone else who can, to retrieve the next piece of the puzzle. All of this comes out when James Harper contacts Heron towards the end of the first series.
The young Harper has to find his father. Heron has to find his son. Heron and Harper are both about the same age. The 13th Floor brings young Harper to Australia. Harper takes Heron to America in the second series. Perhaps his son Chris might even be there - in the clutches of Project Fastwalker's Northern Division.
ALIENS
The aliens of Heron have their own set of objectives and obstacles. There is only one species. The different physical forms represent different sexes and life stages. The aliens are invisible to most human beings after they reach adolescence. Children, mad people and psychics can see them, as well as people in states of altered consciousness associated with drugs and religious experiences. But as far as everyone else is concerned, aliens are like ghosts; they can't manipulate the physical environment in our dimension except in extraordinary circumstances.
The aliens make up for this lack of physical presence with their ability to invade human dreams and transport us, while we are sleeping, to their ships, where they can interact with us physically. The aliens cannot speak, but communicate telepathically.
They're interested in Earth, and human beings in particular, because we are the closest beings in the universe to themselves. The aliens' problem is that they've almost evolved themselves out of existence. They're like computer geeks who have spent so long playing with machines that their bodies have wasted away. They've become almost purely intellectual beings, and can no longer reproduce. Although they live much longer than human beings, they're dying out. They've been visiting Earth over the years to breed a new race of hybrid people. They use human beings in much the same way as we use test tubes or animal organ donors, and are also curious about us, in the same way we're curious about animals. The aliens artificially inseminate women with triangular probes and then extract the babies before they reach full term. They are also experimenting with human male sperm, with less success.
The reason for their concern at the way humans are mistreating the planet is essentially a selfish one. If human beings wipe themselves out then the aliens don't have anyone to hybridise with, and die out as well. So the aliens confront everyone they abduct with images of environmental devastation in an effort to instill the human race with some common sense.
The increasing numbers of UFOs in the late twentieth century is due to the exponential rate of destruction of the planet. The situation is becoming more and more urgent for the aliens. This also explains the UFO presence at places and times when the future of humanity is threatened, such as Foo Fighters during WW2, the Roswell incident soon after the first nuclear weapons were detonated, and Russian sightings at the time of Chernobyl.
Perhaps an even bigger underplot is revealed down the track, related to virgin birth stories such as those in Christian/Hindu/Aztec/Jainist/Aboriginal/Amerindian/Buddhist beliefs. It could be suggested that all of these stories stem from alien attempts to artificially inseminate people and create 'prophets' who will then spread the word on their behalf, a la Richard D. Harper. That's what the triangular marks on people's abdomens are about. The supernatural and mystical stories surrounding such prophets, such as rising to heaven after death and performing magical feats, can all be explained by the aliens connection with these 'children of God'.
HERON'S QUEST
Understory and surface plots are all tied together by Heron's central quest; to find his son. For Heron, the regression of abduction victims is his way of trying to find out what's going on, as well as make it up to his wife and son now that they're gone. He's driven by a powerful feeling of having being lied to by the powers that be, and has a deep guilt about his own part in the death of his wife and disappearance of his son. These are some of the forces that fuel his desire to add to the evidence, help others and help himself. Heron has been wounded by life, and isn't perfect, but fundamentally he's a good man, a seeker after truth.
The stakes for his character are high. He risks his career, his reputation, and ultimately his life by closely examining the scientifically taboo subject of alien abduction. At the same time he refuses to profit from his work by selling people's stories, tabloid style. The show has a strong heart. It's about healing, and helping others at risk to yourself.
Heron's services are cheap or free. His clients come from all nationalities and walks of life. They're rich and poor. Some speak through interpreters. Some are crazy. Most are very sane, ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences. These experiences are re-enacted and dramatised for the audience as clients tell Heron their stories. Sometimes the re-enactments are done from different viewpoints, contradicting each other, Rashomon-style.
Over time, Heron gains a reputation, spread by word of mouth among UFO victims, as a man who will listen. He differs from a conventional counsellor in that he demands that each session be videotaped. Some people have a problem with this. Various forces also have an interest in stealing or destroying his tapes.
One ongoing aggressor figure for Heron is a media personality called Derek Chase, who works for television and newspaper interests owned by members of the Black Table. Chase is always trying to either smear Heron's reputation or buy/steal his clients' stories. Via Chase, the Black Table sometimes generate elaborate hoaxes with deliberately engineered holes in them (such as the Greenbank honeycomb incident and the Roswell autopsy film).
As the series goes on, Heron's little girl Lucy becomes increasingly important to him in his research. Via her 'dreams' and psychic abilities, she uncovers new evidence and finds clients whose stories add pieces to the accumulating jigsaw puzzle. Together with Katherine (as a substitute mother/big sister), and Heron's old partner Frances Korsch as a grumpy aunt, they form a meta-family, providing characters for all ages to identify with.
THE EPISODES
Each episode of Heron will look in depth at a particular case. Each case will borrow as much from factual research, or pure fiction, as necessary. Usually an episode will begin with someone approaching Heron, Raymond Chandler style, or he approaches them. The story is told and the crisis is resolved in some way. Each story is fully re-enacted in the best dramatic style.
Sometimes people will only talk to Heron on the phone. Sometimes he has to take people back to a particular place, and walk them through the encounter. Hypnotism is usually involved at some stage. Regressions are often interrupted by B and C stories, as well as the intrusions of obstacle figures, such as family members, friends, police, private investigators and shadowy military and alien forces. As the series continues, Heron comes under increasing physical and psychological pressure. He becomes very like the man in The Fugitive.
There's always the tension between Heron's need to get the information quickly and his professional desire not to hurt people who are already wounded by their experiences. There's also the tension between skepticism and believing, which is often represented by conflicts with his colleagues. Katherine is a particular source of conflict in this area. Although she occasionally sides with Heron, she usually presents an opposite, 'rational' perspective based on the known, checkable evidence and contrary opinions of the clients' psychological state.
To overcome the problem of there being no possibility of a resolution to many of the alien stories (the re-enactment element) each episode will have a strong B plot which contains an arc and resolution of some kind. For instance the A plot might concern an abduction and rape experience which is terrifying and inconclusive - while the B plot could be about the person starting in a near-catatonic state and ending as an accepted and functioning member of society. Wrapped around the central, dramatic core of each weekly episode - the individual re-enactment of a usually terrifying experience - there will be the battles for Heron to save himself, his loved ones and his client, as well as the big quest for his son and the ongoing search for the truth to all the alien and conspiracy stories.
There will be a dramatic arc to each story which parallels the arc of the long length pilot episode in which Heron starts as a skeptical man, unavailable to his own family, and ends without his wife, son or regular job, but with a mission - to help others break the silence and overcome their problems. Via their problems, he works through his own.
SERIES ONE: THIRTEEN EPISODES SET IN AUSTRALIA
1. A child prodigy violinist loses her talent following suppressed alien abduction and rape experiences. Lucy Heron 'knows' the little girl, although they've never met. Heron's role is to get the stories out of the client's subconscious, using hypnosis, and defuse them, so that her career can be saved. Katherine's theory is that the father has been raping the little girl, and the 'aliens' are a fictional construction to hide the truth. Anyway, the little girl's parents pay well for the treatment, so the psychiatric practice isn't threatened - yet. Heron ends up nursing the little girl back to mental health.
2. A dentist begins to have terrifying flashbacks to alien 'operations' when he's anaesthetising people and operating on them. It gets to a stage where he can no longer work. The dentist has visions of golf ball shaped buildings, which Heron later matches with photographs of the secret Pine Gap military base, in Central Australia. The dentist also recognises a photograph of Heron's son Chris, although they've never met. Heron tries to help the dentist, but ultimately feels he has failed. The dentist ends up leaving the job and becomes a dropout.
3. A teacher in a conservative school becomes a rabid greenie after an alleged close encounter in which aliens showed her a terrifying film of the future of the world if things kept going the way they were. She loses her job and becomes an 'end of the world is nigh' type person. Her brother hears about Heron and brings the teacher to him in desperation. Through the teacher's visions, Heron gets some clues about the aliens' secret agenda. He ends up finding the teacher a job through one of Katherine's friends at Greenpeace. Then the night visions stop.
4. About a nun who fears she's being possessed by sexual demons every time she falls asleep. A sensible friend who has seen Heron in the media recognises the symptoms of alien rape, and convinces the nun that she should talk to him. The nun is so terrified of the night visions that she can no longer bear to go to sleep. She's rigged up a series of contraptions to wake her the instant her head droops. When Heron meets her, she hasn't slept for two weeks, and is a physical wreck. The nun is terrified of going under hypnosis, but Heron tricks her and gets her under his spell. Katherine explains everything with a theory of sexual repression, but Heron isn't so sure. While under hypnosis, the nun is fascinated with the supposedly dead millionaire Richard Harper. Eventually all Heron can do for her is prescribe drugs.
5. An inventor who has created a number of wonderful eco-friendly inventions, such as a free energy windmill and a new type of solar car, realises one day that he can't explain how any of his inventions work. This creates a crisis in his life. He drinks to avoid facing the situation, and his wife hears him muttering about greys and spaceships while he's drunk. Heron regresses him and discovers that the aliens have given him the ideas for all of his inventions. All he did was build them. Katherine's theory is morphic resonance. Heron convinces the inventor that what he does has clear benefits for mankind. It doesn't matter where the inventions come from. The inventor returns to work.
6. About a professional psychic and tarot reader who has had a number of encounters with 'un-men' on highways late at night while travelling, as well as lengthy episodes of missing time. She has since lost all her psychic abilities, which means she's also lost her livelihood (she can no longer tell fortunes). Her friends think it's all a publicity hoax, but the woman's life is a disaster. By now Frances Korsch is sick and tired of Heron's procession of lunatics. The reputation of the practice is being destroyed. Most of Heron's new clients don't have much money either. The pressure is on for him to get out of the practice or stop seeing alien abduction victims. Heron is having doubts himself now. He wonders if he's been crazy with grief all this time. He tells Frances he'll stop seeing abductees and return to his normal practice.
7. But then a witch doctor arrives from overseas. He's the shaman from a tiny African village, who has lost his special powers, just like the tarot woman. The villagers have saved up all their money to send him to Heron to sort him out. (They've seen Heron on TV). The witch doctor claims to have been through a number of painful and embarrassing encounters with aliens in which they sexually aroused him involuntarily, and then 'milked' him. The most interesting thing is that the witch doctor brings Heron a gift from the people in the sky. It's a handmade silver earring in the shape of a heron. The earring is exactly the same as a handmade one Heron's son Chris used to wear. It was made by Chris's girlfriend, an amateur silversmith. The men in black call on Heron, and the shaman is killed in the crossfire. Now Heron is out of the practice and on the run. Frances swears to look after Lucy while he goes to ground.
8. A successful businessman suffering a personal crisis contacts Heron. A strange story emerges under hypnosis. The man had polio as a child. Aliens cured the polio in exchange for a promise from the man that he would do more good than harm to the world when he grew up. Now the businessman's shareholders are demanding that his company build a dam in a sensitive ecological area. This is a major ethical problem for him. He cannot satisfy both masters. Heron can't help him. The man throws himself from a bridge and is killed. This story leads Heron closer to the Harpers.
9. Heron is contacted by a young man who used to work as a computer operator at a secret Woomera-type base out in the desert. He's an American who was born on the base and has never seen the outside world before. He's broken out and is now wanted for treason. He tells Heron more about Project Fastwalker. Heron discovers that his son Chris was on the employee records of Fastwalker. Until now, not even American presidents or Australian Prime Ministers have ever known what went on inside the base. Like almost everyone else, they've been kept out of Fastwalker's information loop. Heron is shocked that his son Chris was involved somehow. But the man is captured and jailed in a top security American prison before Heron can get the whole story.
10. Heron commits himself to a lunatic asylum to escape from a close encounter with the men in black. Inside, one man recognises him from the television. He's a former air traffic controller and radar operator. This man has all sorts of information about the large numbers of UFOs that he observed entering the atmosphere while he was working. Under regression, it emerges that the aliens caused him to crash a B-52 bomber armed with nuclear weapons that was heading out on a bombing run, following a false alarm. (The bombs were prevented from being delivered to their target). Heron escapes from the asylum and finds Katherine. They investigate some of the radar man's claims and find that they fit in with the known facts. Heron returns to the asylum in his normal guise as a doctor and psychiatrist, but the radar man has been subjected to shock treatment and can no longer speak.
11. An ordinary housewife fears she may be a sleeper, moved about by the aliens like a chess piece for reasons unknown to her. When Heron meets this woman she's in jail for bigamy. She discovered she was a bigamist when she was getting married for what she thought was the first time. Due to amnesia, she didn't know that she'd already married three other men under various names in the past. Heron regresses the woman and discovers a long history of alien contact. Each of the men she's married has been an influential figure of some kind. Once again the aliens appear to have some secret agenda at work. Meanwhile Heron's daughter Lucy disappears. Frances Korsch, who was supposed to be looking after her, blames herself, although the little girl seems to have left of her own free will.
12. Heron is frantic at the loss of his daughter, but Katherine convinces him that there's nothing he can do but wait. During the search for Lucy, Heron comes across another abductee, Lucy's art teacher at school, once a renowned painter. After what she initially thought was an electric shock, this woman has completely lost her artistic ability. Under hypnosis, Heron encourages the woman to draw with her left hand. The electric shock is a cover for an alien abduction. At first the drawings are unintelligible, but then the lines resolve into alien faces and instruments. Eventually, there is a clear image of Heron's daughter smiling out of the page. After the regression, the art teacher's ability returns. She invites Heron to a major exhibition of her alien paintings. Lucy appears from behind one of the paintings during the opening. She acts as though nothing unusual has happened.
13. Heron holds a Christmas party. All the surviving abductees and their families are invited. It's a joyous occasion, until one of them disappears. At last there seems to be hard evidence for the abduction phenomena being real, until Heron discovers that this person, one of his best-loved clients, has been kidnapped by representatives of the Black Table. He's told she'll die unless he stops his research. Young Harper is in Australia now and gets in touch. He uses his clout to save the hostage's life, and sets up the next series with the revelation of the secret archive of the Thirteenth Floor.
THE FUTURE
The second series could begin with a hoax set up by the media to discredit Heron; there seems to be a real hope of him finding his son. When it all turns out to be a cruel joke Heron almost kills the hoaxers. Later, Heron is regressed himself, possibly by Katherine. We discover that he was once a psychiatric patient, and has deeply hidden close encounter memories of his own. He's kept his history of mental illness as a boy a secret from everyone all these years, and now Katherine is at once closer to Heron and more skeptical of his findings.
At Harper's urging, Heron travels to America and investigates bigger and bigger cases, getting closer to the heart of the Black Table and Project Fastwalker. The series could be resolved at the end of episode 26 with Heron being reunited with Chris, or written so as to continue indefinitely, possibly switching to Katherine or even Lucy as the main characters down the track.
After the series is a hit there could be spin off shows and products, such as a CD ROM in which fans get to investigate the contents of the Thirteenth Floor or Project Fastwalker's database for themselves. Certainly the massive amount of untapped research suggests endless story possibilities. A third series could go to Europe or even off-world...
© David Lowe, 20 April 1996
Please contact David's agent, Belinda Maxwell, at ICS and Associates, Sydney Australia, for more information.