Now & Again
"There Are No Words"

Airdate: April 14, 2000

Dr. Morris (Dennis Haysbert) is embroiled in events that earn him the title of Patient Zero for a virus that attacks ink on paper. Books, newspapers, notebook paper and even cold, hard cash in the form of printed bills are not immune to the plague and the world panics.

"There Are No Words" struck at the heart of one of my first loves, that of reading. As the characters stumbled through a world that was quickly and seemingly irrevocably losing the printed word, I felt lost right along with them. The destruction of printed money felt inconsequential to the potential loss of ideas from ancient and important tomes, creating a sense of imbalance and triggering a feeling of grief.

That grief was compounded when it was discovered that the plague had begun to eat the ink off the letters Michael had sent to Lisa during their courtship. It seemed as if she were once again losing the man she loved. Just as painful was Heather's correlation between this new loss and the death of her father. Just as when Michael died, he altered his daughter's world by leaving it, so too has the disappearance of the printed world irrevocably changed her existence.

That the episode uses the painfully clichéd "it was only a dream" trick didn't even phase me as much as the idea it presented of a world without books. That world was a new, dark age where hysteria and greed ruled while the exchange of knowledge, information, and dreams was quickly becoming a thing of the past. The image of a bonfire whose flames were fed by books which were once previously rich with ideas, but now held nothing but blank pages, will never fail to disturb me on a deep, visceral level. The sight of a father forcing his young daughter to surrender her cherished copy of A Christmas Carol will always stand as one of the most heinous acts of cruelty that I've ever witness portrayed on television for he not only took from her something she loved, but also seemed to be forever sentencing her to a darker, grimmer, much less magical world.

Although by that point I had deduced that something was off with this episode, the conclusion, however, was still powerful. Dr. Morris' continued vigilance in preventing Michael from reading had always been a sore point with me and to see this man with an iron will surrendering to his nagging conscience was moving. The look in Michael's eyes when he realized that the world was once again available to him through the magic of books made me all misty.

References abounded with nods to A Christmas Carol, Fahrenheit 451, and even It's A Wonderful Life, but at the heart of the episode lies the idea of the importance of reading. In this quicksilver, increasingly visual world, we often forget the simple joy, the powerful feeling of reading the printed word. "There Are No Words" is a very good attempt to remind us.

-- Linda M. Najera

Now and Again airs at 9pm EST, Fridays on CBS.

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