By Rebecca Fisher

Introduction:

Back in 2006, a little show comprised of thirteen half-hour episodes aired on New Zealand television. Despite being based on a book by one of our most beloved Kiwi writers and winning several television awards, it never garnered much attention, but now seems as good a time as any to shine a light on Maddigan’s Quest.

The project began when South Pacific Pictures approached author Margaret Mahy with a proposal to collaborate on a children’s drama series for television. Having long harboured an idea for a story involving a travelling circus, Mahy wrote and published Maddigan’s Fantasia, a book that was then adapted for television by Gavin Strawhan and Rachel Lang. Changing its title to Maddigan’s Quest in order to avoid any potential confusion with the Disney film Fantasia, the show was filled with a range of New Zealand’s best actors (including Danielle Cormack, Michael Hurst, Timothy Balme, Rachel House and Hori Ahipene) and filmed on location around the country.

Premise:

Early in the 22nd century, the world undergoes a vast and radical change, in which the tectonic plates of the Earth shift and a series of devastating earthquakes change the face of the planet. As a result of these events – now known as the Great Chaos – the population has severely dropped and most technology has been lost. What remains is a dangerous wilderness crossed by roads that shift year by year, where communities are isolated and bandits roam the unmapped highways.

Yet out of the ashes of the old world comes Solis, the shining city. It is here that the circus troupe known as Maddigan’s Fantasia spends each winter before heading out every year to explore new lands, collect lost knowledge, and spread some colour and joy.

But this year things are different. Because Solis is powered by the sun, it is in desperate need of a new solar converter if the city is to remain the single bright beacon in a dark world. Though emissaries were sent out to retrieve one from the settlement of Newton, they never returned. The city council therefore turns to Maddigan’s Fantasia and sets them the task of retrieving the converter, reasoning that because the circus leaves the city every year, they’ll be beneath the suspicion of any spies or traitors that are plotting the demise of Solis.

Storyline:

At the centre of this quest is fourteen year old Garland, the final member of the Maddigan family line. She knows the potential dangers that lie in wait for the Fantasia: not only a series of grim communities between Solis and Newton where various societies have found disturbing and oppressive ways of dealing with the uncertainties of an ever-changing world, but also marauding gangs, bad weather, difficult roads and contagious disease.

Recently she’s been having strange visions of a silver girl who tries to warn her about something; a warning that comes too late when the circus is attacked and Garland’s father Ferdy – also the circus’s ringleader – is killed. And yet there’s even more upheaval when two young boys and their baby sister appear out of nowhere to join the troupe, desperate to escape a couple of sinister men that follow them everywhere.

Garland soon ferrets out the astonishing truth: that the boys are from a future where the Fantasia failed to return the solar converter to Solis, resulting in the city turning to radioactive power and falling under the control of a terrible being known as the Nennog. To avert this future they’ve been sent back in time by their parents in order to change the course of history and ensure the success of the Fantasia, using their own foreknowledge and Garland’s diary (or at least an old and battered version of her diary that’s been brought back from the future) to avert any disasters.

But while baby Jewel becomes the apple of everyone’s eye, and younger brother Eden proves himself a blessing to the performers thanks to his magical powers, Timon conceals a dark secret that threatens the Fantasia, their mission, and the future of Solis.

Characters:

So who is the Fantasia? A group of clowns, acrobats, magicians, fortune tellers and jugglers who together form a warm, cheerful, bickering, and utterly loyal extended family. The family dynamic of the circus is perhaps the highlight of the show: a group of colourful characters who are all given unique and interesting relationships with each other across gender, generational and family lines.

I’ve already mentioned some of the New Zealand talent that went into bringing the characters to life, but special mention needs to be made of the child actors. Rose McIver is our protagonist and narrator, a resourceful and determined heroine who is next in line to inherit the Fantasia. Despite her maturity, she’s not above getting territorial over the fact that fellow circus-performer Yves has eyes for her beautiful mother, and suspicious that he’s trying to usurp her father’s place as ringleader.

As the boys from the future, Jordan Metcalfe and Zac Fox manage to be both self-sufficient and highly vulnerable. Eden (Fox) is an anxious-to-please introvert, but Timon (Metcalfe) is a young teen given the huge burden of caring for his younger siblings and ensuing that the Fantasia is successful in retrieving the solar converter. An attraction between himself and Garland slowly builds throughout the episodes, given added poignancy by the fact that if their mission is successful, the two of them will be separated by almost one hundred years.

Rawiri Pene plays Garland’s oldest friend Boomer, who becomes rather jealous of the sophisticated Timon, and Olivia Tennant is the flighty, spoilt Lilith, Yves’s daughter and the bane of Garland’s existence.  It is the dynamics of the Fantasia that really lend the story its interest, for it’s just as much the internal conflicts of the circus as it is the threatening world they must traverse and all the complications inherent in time-travelling that drives the story onwards.

Why You Should Watch:

Maddigan’s Quest is one of those shows that has a bit of everything: a post-apocalyptic setting, a quasi-steampunk atmosphere, a blend of fantasy and science-fiction, some time-travel and adventure, and plenty of great characters. Each episode is named after a landmark and takes place in a new location that the Fantasia come across on their way to Newton and back again. A great deal of care is put into making the geography and maps consistent, and things like costuming and set design give each place a distinctive look.

That said, it’s not all perfect. The villainous Ozul and Maska (two of the Nennog’s agents sent back from the future in order to defeat the Fantasia) don’t make for particularly impressive antagonists. They’re so ineffectual that they lose any credibility as a legitimate threat, and spend most of their time being outsmarted by children. You can’t help but feel that the show would have worked fine without them and their cartoonish levels of failure.

Furthermore, the show completely disregards the “rules” of time-travel. There are loops and paradoxes and inconsistencies galore, in which characters change the past yet retain memories of the averted future, or come from the future in order to change aspects of the past that they’ve already experienced. It’s enough to leave you cross-eyed, so if you like your time-travel stories to remain consistent, then you may struggle with the liberties taken here. Best just to handwave it all as fiction and try not to think about it too much.

In Conclusion:

Maddigan’s Quest is a rewarding watch, all the more so for its distinctive New Zealand feel. It’s infused with a sense of Kiwi culture, whether it be snippets of Maori language, close-ups of our native wildlife, agreements made over the barbeque, or an encounter with a taniwha. It contains some surprisingly dark elements (such as mind-altering drugs, child labour, cannibalism and attempted infanticide) but also captures the excitement and wonder of the circus, utilizing the individual talents of the troupe in rather ingenious ways.

And by the time the bittersweet conclusion rolls around, you just might be invested enough to feel a lump in your throat.

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Next Time: 

Two secret service agents are transferred to a mysterious facility in the middle of nowhere, where every strange and supernatural artefact collected by the US government over the years has been stored. Known only as Warehouse 13, it’s their job to safeguard the collection and go in search of more relics to add to it.

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About The Reviewer:

Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com and her own LiveJournal blog.

To read Rebecca’s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, click on Big Worlds On Small Screens.

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