Inspiration for DEEP

It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment when inspiration for the series struck. I don’t think that ever happens with me—being ‘struck’ with inspiration, I mean. It’s kind of like beard growth: it creeps across my face until I look in the mirror and think, ‘Christ, when did I last shave?’

I found the idea of a device or centralised data system that you can just plug into your head, downloading thoughts and ideas intriguing.

Intriguing and terrifying.

Terrifying for reasons I think are pretty self-evident. Intriguing from a creative perspective, as there are so many different routes you can go down with this.

Aside from the obvious dystopian aspects, I liked the idea of memory and reality being bent and moulded completely out of shape.

I mean, what would it do to a person if you just replaced their memories with those of someone else?

How would you react if you woke up one morning and found out that you were, say, Hitler and you were responsible for the worst crimes against humanity? I can’t imagine it would make you feel great about yourself if you found out that, actually, you’d completely gone against every tenet of your own moral code. Or that the moral code you believed had guided you through life up until now was actually the very opposite of the moral code that had guided you through life.

What if someone swapped Hitler’s memories with those of, say, Sandra Oh? How would Sandra Oh react if she woke up remembering she had committed the worst genocide in history?

I guess it’s like waking up from a coma with amnesia, but instead of a blank space where memories used to be, you find out you’re just a completely different person.

We’re familiar with the idea of organ transplants, so what if we could do the same thing with memory? Do memories shape who we are? Or is there something more elemental inside us? Roots, perhaps. It doesn’t matter how many times we cut back the rosebush, it still grows back looking the same.

Are our impulses hardwired into our genetic code? Or is it all in the mind? Do we have any choice in it at all? Does memory even matter to who we really are?

If we forget the watershed moments in our lives, those events that shaped us into the people we became, does that fundamentally alter us? Do we behave differently after those memories are erased? Do we behave differently when we find out those memories have been erased?

Do you go back to being Hitler again? Or does Hitler bounce along the road to Damascus (via Jerusalem) and teach the world to sing?

Or does he have a complete mental breakdown?