According to a scientific theory (that you must know if you saw a cancelled TV show produced by J.J. Abrams with the same name), six degrees, everyone is connected everyone through a chain of five intermediaries, even your favorite K-Pop singer is six steps ahead of you. Although this concept has usually been applied (and even improved) to the real world as in, for example, the case of Facebook users, we are going to see how this works in the field of TV shows.
Well, let’s play. We could start off with американцы The Americans. Do you remember the plot about the development of Arpanet and Beeman’s attempts to get the computer program, Echo? Why don’t they call Cameron Howe or Donna Clark, from Halt and Catch Fire? Both seem approachable and they know their share about computers and, moreover, they live in the 80s! Look how cute they look holding a floppy disk! They are meant for each other (sorry Nina).
And what about Andrew Larrick? The gay marine officer from The Americans could perfectly appear in Ryan Murphy’s The Normal Heart, a TV movie about the LGTB’s struggles between 1981 and 1984. Reagan’s government didn’t support them in their fight against AIDS and so, he could join forces together with Nadezhda and Mischa in order to overthrow the establishment.
We can also connect Halt and Catch Fire with… The Leftovers! In the pilot episode of Halt (who uses its full name?) Joe ran over a poor armadillo with his car. This metaphor of power and pride appears again in The Leftovers. Here the animal, a deer, suddenly shows up in front of Kevin Garvey’s vehicle as something incomprehensible, again a metaphor, but this time about the global disappearances the world population have suffered.
The Leftovers leads us to other two TV shows. The 2% of the population who vanished… could they have been kidnapped… by aliens? And if we accept that, are those aliens the same that abduct Mulder’s sister in The X-Files or Kit’s girlfriend in American Horror Story: Asylum? The truth is out there, and the dogs are frakking suspicious.
And our final connection is again related with supernatural forces, in this case the Devil (or demons). Sister Mary Unice, that sweet nun of AHS: Aslyum that is possessed by a demon reminds us to Penny Dreadful and Miss Vanessa Ives, the most mysterious women of nineteenth-century London. They both have a demon inside, now the cuestion is, could it be the same demon?
We still need one connection to successfully link The Americans with Penny Dreadful using the theory of the six degrees, but you can see that missing part in every fade in: your reflection. You, your imagination and its ability to mix different elements are the ultimate connection, the stones that made this bridge possible.
So now that we have the excuse to fantasize about the worlds of this two shows coming together let’s dream a little: What could happen? A werewolf fighting against Reagan, Nadezhda recruiting doctor Frankenstein in order to resurrect fallen comrades, Brona Croft (the sick prostitute of Penny Dreadful) spreading communism and gender equality to all the London’s prostitutes… The world needs that crossover, and me as its scriptwriter, right now.
The Homecoming Queen.
Telethinking 