Dispassionate drama

Here’s a riddle: When will a streaming video company, known for producing several sexually explicit prestige dramas, elect not to capitalize on the love scenes in its source material? The answer, evidently, is when the characters portrayed are married Christians.

Fans of Michel Faber’s poignant sci-fi tale The Book of Strange New Things (including WORLD staffers who awarded it their 2015 Book of the Year in Fiction) will recall an early, crucial passage that, while not gratuitous, is hardly shy in depicting wedded congress.

Christian missionary Peter is about to take leave of his wife Beatrice for an unknown length of time to minister in an unknown galaxy to an unknown people. On the way to the airport, desperate to seize every last opportunity for physical closeness to a husband she may never see again, Beatrice suggests they find a secluded spot to pull over and, well, get physical.

It’s a tender, sad scene that bears all the marks of awkward, insecure reality. Amazon’s new pilot Oasis, based on Faber’s book, doesn’t include it. It doesn’t even allude to it. Far from being a minor edit, this shift may suggest the kind of seismic changes we can anticipate from the series if Amazon orders a full season.

The first episode of Oasis is a tense, well-acted sci-fi drama full of tantalizing, even theological, questions. Why has the founder of the space colony gone AWOL? Why would a militant atheist send a cryptic message to a preacher begging him to come to them? If the planet contains intelligent life, where do they fall in the redemption story? Are they innocents, or are they fallen creatures in need of a Savior? All gripping questions many viewers will want to stick around to see answered.

The series also, refreshingly, depicts Peter and his apostolic goals in a positive light. Game of Thrones’ Richard Madden exudes earnestness and humility in the role of a pastor uncertain of who his flock members will be, or if they will even be human. He deals with his foulmouthed, F-bomb-dropping crew-mates with wisdom and an open heart, quickly becoming the rock they lean on. But by the end of the first episode, that’s mostly all Peter seems. Earnest and humble. Because, inexplicably, Amazon decided to do away with the primary emotional conflict that makes him something much more accessible. It does away with Beatrice.

Things may change going forward, perhaps through flashbacks or a misunderstanding, but by having Beatrice appear to die at the outset, Amazon robs Peter’s story of its heart. And with it prudishly excises all traces of marital desire.

That’s not to say there’s no love shown between the couple, but it’s the kind of passionless, stock religiosity audiences have seen a million times, like Beatrice promising in long-suffering, portentous tones that God has plans for Peter and he must go on without her. Or instead of a funny, flirtatious man who writes, “My dear, sexy, wonderful wife, I know you are with me in spirit, but I’m feeling sad that your body is so far away,” we get him pensively staring out the window as light-faded images of a beatific Beatrice twirl in the dusk of his memories. Forgive me, but yawn.

These lost moments could have given Amazon the chance to do what the best scripts do—create delightful, yet authentic twists to characters we think we already know. To make the Christian missionary couple real—real in that, yes, they too, they especially, long for each other … and not just so they can pray together.

This may be the first time I’ve ever suggested it to a mainstream studio (and of course I intend it solely for Peter and Beatrice and in the most appropriate, nonlewd manner possible), but Amazon, if you go forward with Oasis, please, bring the sexy back.