why I love Quatermass and the Pit
Nov. 12th, 2025 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI’ve been rewatching Quatermass and the Pit for the last week, which is apparently something I do every few years and then never write anything about. It’s a black and white BBC serial from 1958, to our eyes science fiction horror though a massive leap beyond genre in its own time, and I love it very much. I honestly think it’s perfect. There isn’t anything I’d change except put more women in it and even so at least it does have one brave 1950s lady scientist academic trying her best. Could be worse if not by much.
So the Quatermass in the title is a person – named by writer Nigel Kneale with what he called the weirdest name in the phonebook; he’s Professor Bernard Quatermass, a restrained, charming British academic in charge of something called the British Experimental Rocket Group. By the time we meet him in the Pit, there aren’t so many rockets; Quatermass the pacifist is in the middle of being told the military are taking over his research; that his planned moonbase is going to be used as a place to build up armament. No one mentions Sputnik or the USSR, but no one has to. This was absolutely on-the-minute current when it was made. Quatermass is furiously angry and kind of heartbroken; then he discovers an old friend of his has a very similar problem, and decides to be a dick to his new employer while he solves it.
There really aren’t a lot of rockets in this story! Matthew Roney, Quatermass’s old friend, is a paleontologist, who has discovered an ancient site of prehistoric hominids in… Knightsbridge. (There’s been construction, ok.) But deep down in the pit there’s also an unexploded bomb (!) left over from 1944, so the military have taken over. Quatermass plays silly buggers with the army folk until they leave Roney alone, and then hangs around to see what happens next. That’s the set-up. And I love it, largely because Quatermass is incredibly charismatic (he was played by five different actors, but this one is my favourite) and also just… you can see here how the series was an influence on every SF, horror or fantasy thing to ever be on television. It’s so fucking interesting and intelligent.
But then. Everything that happens next is creepy in the best way. Bit by bit, Roney and Quatermass get at the truth of what is in the pit. Questions; digging; old newspaper articles. Quatermass standing in the bombed-out house next to it, amid the ghosts. No, someone says; it was always like that. It wasn’t the war. This isn’t a bomb. There is always this bombshell of darkness. There is always the pit.
It’s not a bomb. It’s a spaceship, full of pentacles and devil’s horns and dead Martians. And there are ghosts. There have always been ghosts here. Oh, I love it so much. Quartermass’s insectoid Martians came to Earth five million years ago, hoping to colonise Earth with apes they had remade into their own image. (This, by the way, is where we have the most prescient and famous bit of dialogue from the serial, which I want to say again here was made in 1958. Quatermass asks: "If we found out that our Earth was doomed, a thousand years from now, or a hundred, what would we do about it?"
"Nothing,” Roney says. “Just go on fighting each other as usual."
They’re talking about the Martians. But they’re not, are they. They’re not talking about the Martians.
So they go on not talking about the Martians. We learn that the long-dead Martians brought with them an insectoid mentality –– that theirs was a colony, a hive -–and that those unlike them were to be destroyed. The start of the serial has a bit from the BBC Light Programme – about the race riots, in Birmingham; about the violence. The Martians thought anyone unlike them should be destroyed.
You see? You see. We are the Martians, Quartermass says; we are the devil, we are the ghosts, we are the mob’s voice, the one that says to kill. This is our racial inheritance. (It would be our genetic inheritance, if DNA had been discovered yet. Quatermass is the last generation of educated adult to be unaware of DNA, or of climate change.) And the military interfere, and Quatermass and Roney can’t stop them, or anything, and the Martian tendency wakes up in everyone. I love these scenes, because they do so much with so little – this is a pre-Doctor Who level of special effects, sound effects but no visual effects, so they go ahead and use their actors to scare the fuck out of the audience instead. Quatermass and Roney, usually so competent, are heaped in a deserted bar surrounded by broken glass. There’s one scene where a young man, one of the good guys, hits his girlfriend over the head to stop the Martian in her killing him. And there is one line of dialogue here that is so fucking horrifying that I’m not putting it down here because I can’t figure out a way to cut-tag it.
What’s key to it, of course, is that Roney, Potter with his now-knocked-out girlfriend, Fullalove the journalist who is Quatermass’s low-key nemesis, are, in the end, immune to the Martian tendency. Quatermass himself is not. The last episode has this astonishingly interesting, powerful scene where we see Roney – see that he’s terrified, backing into a wall, before we see it’s Quatermass who’s trying to kill him. It’s 1958 and these are a couple of guys who call each other by their last names, so nobody says I love you; instead, Roney grabs him and shouts at him about a fish. It weighed 29lb and they landed it together and it was late afternoon, sunlit, and please come back. I wonder if this is the very first instance of an I love you and I need you and you are better than this sort of scene on tv, and if so, it’s a really good one to begin. (Also. These scenes are naturally filmed tight and close and claustrophobic. It’s just, they really do look like they should kiss. It mght be nice if they did. I’m just saying.)
The powerful part. Once Quatermass has come back to himself a little – though still very shaken – he explains what it was like, to hear the Martian tendency inside his head, trying to take him over. “I wanted to kill you,” he says. “Because you’re different.”
Wisely and notably, the show is silent about what that means. Why is Roney, a white middle-class man very like Quatermass, different? The show for sure didn’t do it on purpose, but it could be a queer story. You could read it that way. It could be that Roney is immune to the Martians. It may just be that Roney is, quite literally, a foreigner; a Canadian in London who (we infer) Quatermass knew best back in Canada. And the BBC in 1958 is not going to harp very publically on about such unseemly things as race relations. A Black man, the only one in the serial, is the one who finds the Martian ship. Quatermass is not fucking around.
Roney dies at the end. No one is fucking around. God, I love this show so much. The last couple of scenes, of Quatermass alone in the darkness looking for Roney’s body, and then trying to tell the whole story to a BBC crew, are devastating. Even in fuzzy black and white, they’re about such awful grief, and moral injury; you’ll notice Quatermass has not got the Rocket Group back. His old life is gone and his friend is dead. He’s the hero! The heroic scientist protagonist, perhaps the first of his type, and yet, only not a killer because of his friend who is now dead, and left with ashes. This is one of the first pieces of dramatised SF ever made, and it goes so hard, and it feels so relevant every time I watch it (sample dates of Quatermass serials: 1953, 1958, 1979, 2005) and just. Yes. That moral injury. That's why I love it.
I wanted to finish off this extremely long post about a seventy-year-old piece of television by posting a snippet of it, but I actually couldn’t find anything. Perhaps even better: this was the noise the Martians made inside people’s heads, courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop. And Hob’s Lane, where the Pit was dug, is in my icon.
So the Quatermass in the title is a person – named by writer Nigel Kneale with what he called the weirdest name in the phonebook; he’s Professor Bernard Quatermass, a restrained, charming British academic in charge of something called the British Experimental Rocket Group. By the time we meet him in the Pit, there aren’t so many rockets; Quatermass the pacifist is in the middle of being told the military are taking over his research; that his planned moonbase is going to be used as a place to build up armament. No one mentions Sputnik or the USSR, but no one has to. This was absolutely on-the-minute current when it was made. Quatermass is furiously angry and kind of heartbroken; then he discovers an old friend of his has a very similar problem, and decides to be a dick to his new employer while he solves it.
There really aren’t a lot of rockets in this story! Matthew Roney, Quatermass’s old friend, is a paleontologist, who has discovered an ancient site of prehistoric hominids in… Knightsbridge. (There’s been construction, ok.) But deep down in the pit there’s also an unexploded bomb (!) left over from 1944, so the military have taken over. Quatermass plays silly buggers with the army folk until they leave Roney alone, and then hangs around to see what happens next. That’s the set-up. And I love it, largely because Quatermass is incredibly charismatic (he was played by five different actors, but this one is my favourite) and also just… you can see here how the series was an influence on every SF, horror or fantasy thing to ever be on television. It’s so fucking interesting and intelligent.
But then. Everything that happens next is creepy in the best way. Bit by bit, Roney and Quatermass get at the truth of what is in the pit. Questions; digging; old newspaper articles. Quatermass standing in the bombed-out house next to it, amid the ghosts. No, someone says; it was always like that. It wasn’t the war. This isn’t a bomb. There is always this bombshell of darkness. There is always the pit.
It’s not a bomb. It’s a spaceship, full of pentacles and devil’s horns and dead Martians. And there are ghosts. There have always been ghosts here. Oh, I love it so much. Quartermass’s insectoid Martians came to Earth five million years ago, hoping to colonise Earth with apes they had remade into their own image. (This, by the way, is where we have the most prescient and famous bit of dialogue from the serial, which I want to say again here was made in 1958. Quatermass asks: "If we found out that our Earth was doomed, a thousand years from now, or a hundred, what would we do about it?"
"Nothing,” Roney says. “Just go on fighting each other as usual."
They’re talking about the Martians. But they’re not, are they. They’re not talking about the Martians.
So they go on not talking about the Martians. We learn that the long-dead Martians brought with them an insectoid mentality –– that theirs was a colony, a hive -–and that those unlike them were to be destroyed. The start of the serial has a bit from the BBC Light Programme – about the race riots, in Birmingham; about the violence. The Martians thought anyone unlike them should be destroyed.
You see? You see. We are the Martians, Quartermass says; we are the devil, we are the ghosts, we are the mob’s voice, the one that says to kill. This is our racial inheritance. (It would be our genetic inheritance, if DNA had been discovered yet. Quatermass is the last generation of educated adult to be unaware of DNA, or of climate change.) And the military interfere, and Quatermass and Roney can’t stop them, or anything, and the Martian tendency wakes up in everyone. I love these scenes, because they do so much with so little – this is a pre-Doctor Who level of special effects, sound effects but no visual effects, so they go ahead and use their actors to scare the fuck out of the audience instead. Quatermass and Roney, usually so competent, are heaped in a deserted bar surrounded by broken glass. There’s one scene where a young man, one of the good guys, hits his girlfriend over the head to stop the Martian in her killing him. And there is one line of dialogue here that is so fucking horrifying that I’m not putting it down here because I can’t figure out a way to cut-tag it.
What’s key to it, of course, is that Roney, Potter with his now-knocked-out girlfriend, Fullalove the journalist who is Quatermass’s low-key nemesis, are, in the end, immune to the Martian tendency. Quatermass himself is not. The last episode has this astonishingly interesting, powerful scene where we see Roney – see that he’s terrified, backing into a wall, before we see it’s Quatermass who’s trying to kill him. It’s 1958 and these are a couple of guys who call each other by their last names, so nobody says I love you; instead, Roney grabs him and shouts at him about a fish. It weighed 29lb and they landed it together and it was late afternoon, sunlit, and please come back. I wonder if this is the very first instance of an I love you and I need you and you are better than this sort of scene on tv, and if so, it’s a really good one to begin. (Also. These scenes are naturally filmed tight and close and claustrophobic. It’s just, they really do look like they should kiss. It mght be nice if they did. I’m just saying.)
The powerful part. Once Quatermass has come back to himself a little – though still very shaken – he explains what it was like, to hear the Martian tendency inside his head, trying to take him over. “I wanted to kill you,” he says. “Because you’re different.”
Wisely and notably, the show is silent about what that means. Why is Roney, a white middle-class man very like Quatermass, different? The show for sure didn’t do it on purpose, but it could be a queer story. You could read it that way. It could be that Roney is immune to the Martians. It may just be that Roney is, quite literally, a foreigner; a Canadian in London who (we infer) Quatermass knew best back in Canada. And the BBC in 1958 is not going to harp very publically on about such unseemly things as race relations. A Black man, the only one in the serial, is the one who finds the Martian ship. Quatermass is not fucking around.
Roney dies at the end. No one is fucking around. God, I love this show so much. The last couple of scenes, of Quatermass alone in the darkness looking for Roney’s body, and then trying to tell the whole story to a BBC crew, are devastating. Even in fuzzy black and white, they’re about such awful grief, and moral injury; you’ll notice Quatermass has not got the Rocket Group back. His old life is gone and his friend is dead. He’s the hero! The heroic scientist protagonist, perhaps the first of his type, and yet, only not a killer because of his friend who is now dead, and left with ashes. This is one of the first pieces of dramatised SF ever made, and it goes so hard, and it feels so relevant every time I watch it (sample dates of Quatermass serials: 1953, 1958, 1979, 2005) and just. Yes. That moral injury. That's why I love it.
I wanted to finish off this extremely long post about a seventy-year-old piece of television by posting a snippet of it, but I actually couldn’t find anything. Perhaps even better: this was the noise the Martians made inside people’s heads, courtesy of the Radiophonic Workshop. And Hob’s Lane, where the Pit was dug, is in my icon.
no subject
on 2025-11-12 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-11-13 10:15 pm (UTC)Toft
on 2025-11-12 06:47 pm (UTC)Re: Toft
on 2025-11-12 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-11-13 12:23 pm (UTC)Quatermass is the last generation of educated adult to be unaware of DNA, or of climate change.
Also my eyebrows just shor off the top of my head at this - it's so recent but so distant
no subject
on 2025-11-13 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-11-15 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-11-13 03:01 pm (UTC)You can use an HTML details tag, which does work inside or outside DW cuts. But even if you don't want to do that, I am going to have to request that you DM me the horrifying thing because otherwise I'm going to wonder forever!
no subject
on 2025-11-13 10:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-11-15 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2025-11-15 11:31 pm (UTC)