Steven Harper Piziks

            A resurrection man watched the funeral, and his expression was hungry. He stood behind the huddle of funeral-goers clustered around the grave and didn't speak with anyone, which was how Jesse spotted him. A dead giveaway, so to say. Jesse stared at him from the corner of one dark eye. The resurrection man wasn't yet twenty. Brown as a dead tree. Straight brown hair under a frayed brown cap, long nose, sharp jaw, long brown coat mended twice, worn brown shoes that were nonetheless carefully polished. Someone who was used to hiding who he was.

            The resurrection man met Jesse's eye for a flick. He had good eyes, that one—clear and blue and strong—and Jesse touched his cap in salute. Jesse had a gravedigger's build, wiry and a little short, able to throw an eight-pound shovelful of dirt six feet toward heaven, and he could hold his own in a fight against two men half again his height. The resurrection man was taller, whipcord, and Jesse bet he wore gloves to keep his hands clean when he robbed night-time graves. No one who saw him by day would know what he did at night.

            When their eyes met, blue on brown, it created something interesting and indefinable, like that boundary moment when water touches a burning coal, or warm ocean air brushes a chilly shore. The resurrection man looked away. Jesse clicked his tongue in mischief—and the chance to make some money.

            The coffin rested on a pair of beams set across the grave Jesse had dug only that morning. Jesse always put a scattering of sawdust and a few pine branches in the bottom of his graves so the coffin wouldn't rest on dirt. It made no difference to the deceased, mind you, but it made the family feel better. Two solemn boys pulled the beams away, and the pallbearers lowered the coffin with ropes braced around their necks like pulleys while the preacher said his final bit. While all this was going on, the resurrection man slipped away, confirming Jesse's suspicions that the man was a grave robber who knew the best time to leave was when the family was occupied.

            As the family drifted off, Jesse barely overheard a man and a woman in conversation. The woman murmured, "He won't get up and come after us, do you? He's stubborn enough to try."

            "Jesus, I hope not," the man muttered back. "That copper-plated sumbitch was bad enough when he was alive. I can't think what he'd be like, lurching around, dead."

            Death brought out the truth among the living. Jesse looked in the direction the resurrection man had taken and gave himself a private nod. It was going to be an interesting evening.

            Jesse finished filling the grave of Mr. Elmer Pitt (b. 1803, d. 1889), then went home to the little shack he occupied at the edge of Highland Cemetery, made himself a pot of strong coffee on his bachelor stove, dropped a slug of Irish in it, and waited until sunset. When the early autumn night slid in cozy among the gravestones, Jesse put his shovel back over his shoulder and strolled toward the grave of Elmer Pitt. There was time to enjoy the walk and think about how to spend the money he would shake out of the resurrection man. It had been a while since he'd passed a good night's drinking and fighting at a pool hall. Or maybe he'd buy a new pair of boots.

            The trek was easy. Didn't matter that it was dark. Jesse had dug plenty of graves in Highland Cemetery and knew the place like the end of his shovel. He even had a map of the place tacked to the wall of his shack, with every grave picked out in careful precision. People thought that graveyards laid out the dead in neat, cornfield rows, but Highland's graves made a swirling mosaic that twisted around the hills and trees, creating stars and flowers and teardrops that only God and Jesse's map could see. Jesse had taken over as the main gravedigger in Ypsilanti from Mr. Suggs two years ago. Mr. Suggs himself currently rested in a grave well back from the road that Jesse himself had dug with extra care. Jesse didn't run the cemetery—that job belonged to the great and gloomy Frederick Huff, who issued daily orders from the caretaker's house and only emerged to complain at Billy Cake and the other fellows who worked the cemetery. But it was Jesse who dug the graves.

            Highland Cemetery had opened twenty-some years ago, a bit before Jesse was born, and it had stolen away all the business from Prospect Cemetery. Didn't seem to matter that Prospect was half a mile closer to downtown Ypsilanti, with its growing Normal School and expanding railroad system. Prospect still failed to prosper.

            Problem was, Prospect had both proven too small, so the city had bought a big chunk of loamy hillside outside Ypsilanti and named it Highland Cemetery. The local Catholic community had been scandalized at the idea of sharing eternity with Protestants and even Lutherans, so they had bought a bit of land right across the road for their own dead, keeping Mr. Suggs, and now Jesse, busy digging graves for both. Meanwhile, the townsfolk stopped using Prospect Cemetery entirely, and no one seemed interested in paying Jesse Fair or Billy Cake to even trim its trees, so these days the verge ran wild. The inhabitants didn't complain.

            It was a serpent night, with the chill breeze hissing in the leaves. Jesse wound through the stones until he came to the new grave of Elmer Pitt. The thin glow of a little lantern on the ground illuminated the markers from the bottom up, and the familiar quiet sound of a wooden shovel biting earth came to Jesse's ears. Resurrection men always used wooden shovels. They made less noise. Jesse crept closer.

            The resurrection man had already made good headway and was knee-deep in the ground at the head of the grave. Two canvas drop cloths lay beside him, one to catch the dirt and the other to receive Elmer Pitt. Jesse noted the well-worn leather gloves covering the resurrection man's hands. The man also had a crowbar and a length of rope.

            "So you're from the University Medical School," Jesse said in the dark.

            To his credit, the resurrection man didn't drop his shovel or even shout. Instead, he turned and focused sky eyes on Jesse. Mud stained his trousers.

            "You knew I'd be here," he said simply.

            "Haven't seen your kind in a while," Jesse said. "They passed that law a few years back that says paupers and prisoners go to the anatomy lab, which means the dead poor and the poor dead get a free train ride to your dissecting table. Last I knew, there was no end of dead paupers, so what brings you down here to my cemetery?"

            "We still run short of bodies now and again." The resurrection man went back to work. He was digging at the head, which was why he'd attended the service—he needed to know which way Mr. Pitt was pointed. "I saw the funeral notice in the paper and came on down."

            "What's your name, friend?"

            The resurrection man stopped his shovel again and sighed. "Are you going to call the constable, sir, or just empty my pockets?"

            Jesse had been about to name a figure, one that would give him a delightful evening's entertainment and leave him with a fine morning's hangover, but something stopped his tongue. Something in the other man's posture, his face, his eyes. Jesse cocked his head, and a coyote grin crept across his face.

            "Depends." Jesse stuck out a hand for the resurrection man to shake. "I'm Jesse Fair."

            "Uh ... Arthur. Arthur Tor."

            The coyote grin widened. "Does it bother you to dig up bodies for that fancy medical school over in Ann Arbor, Mr. Tor?"

            "It does." Arthur's shovel bit the ground again. "I had to kill a dog to dissect during my first term, and I don't mind telling you, my hands were shaking for an hour afterward. Still, I did it. Now I'm doing this."

            Jesse cocked his head. "Why?"

            "We have to learn anatomy somehow." Arthur's voice was weary, the sound of someone who had explained this a hundred times. "We cut up the body of one person who died, and hundred other people get to live. And I have rent to pay. Why do you care, if you intend to turn me in?"

            "Just wanted to see what you would say." Jesse stepped into the head of the grave with Arthur, close enough to smell cemetery sweat. "Move over, Mr. Tor, and I'll show you how a gravedigger digs."

The show was awful. It really was. I could see what they were trying to do, but it was all done ... badly. Tom himself simply wasn't very engaging. I didn't really much care about his personal struggles. The networked hyped that he was gay, and they did make it very clear that Tom was gay, but his relationship with his sort-of boyfriend ... failed. There was no chemistry between them. Meanwhile, Tom does show serious chemistry with his bodyguard Isaac, but Isaac also has a thing for one of the women on the show. It looks like the studio wanted both a love triangle AND a "will they/won't they?" couple. What they got was a half-hearted, uninteresting tangle.

I also looks like the studio thought Tom's thing for cars and shoes would make him a cool-guy icon, but that didn't work, either. Yeah, there are the sneaker-heads, but most male viewers don't care what kind of shoe the character wears, even if it has some kind of tech embedded in it, and most female viewers don't care about men's shoes. And the cars such obvious product placement, it was painful. Also, the guy who gets to choose which multi-million dollar car he drives from an entire garage of them automatically becomes less relatable. I didn't envy Tom for his cars, nor did I wish to be him. I only felt he was spoiled.

The overall stakes are too low, or perhaps too abstract. In the first episode, Tom's father boards a Saturn-bound ship that Tom himself built, but the ship explodes after it reaches Saturn. At first, Tom--and everyone else--thinks Dad is dead, but Tom learns his dad is still alive and that a global conspiracy (sigh) sabotaged the ship. Tom now has to rush around the country trying to gather what he needs to rescue his stranded father. The trouble here is that, once the ship explodes, we don't see Dad. We don't feel that he's in danger. And he isn't. The show makes it clear that Dad has plenty of oxygen and whatever else he needs to survive until rescue comes, and in the series, Tom goes off on long, non-Dad tangents, and doesn't seem to be all that concerned that his dad is stranded in space. We have a "we'll get around to it" feeling here. Additionally, Tom doesn't like Dad very much, and for good reason. Dad is cold, homphobic, and plain ol' bitchy to Tom, who would frankly be better off without him. The viewer is left wondering why Tom is so bent on rescuing him at all.

The world-building was also lacking. The show is set in modern-day America, but Tom somehow has access to Star Trek technology--a faster-than-light drive, nanobots, easy retroviruses, and of course, an omniscient AI that malfunctions whenever the plot requires it. Tom's inventions show up lightning-quick, too. In one episode, Tom is able to whip up a miracle drug from some tree sap in just a few minutes. Star Trek can get away with it because of the far-future setting. Tony Stark in the Marvel movies can get away with it because of the super-hero setting. But for this show, the viewer is forced to wonder why all this fantastic tech hasn't made its way into the mainstream.

We also have no decent antagonists. The antagonist is a nebulous conspiracy called The Road Back. The heavy hitters in the organization are, frankly, bland. The group's aims are vague, but they seem to want to roll technology back to prevent ecological disaster. How is this a bad thing? Their members also act with astounding stupidity, which Tom himself fails to take advantage of. In one late-season episode, Tom is talking one-on-one with a tiny, Hollywood-thin woman who is a heavy-hitter in Road Back. She possesses a bit of tech Tom needs to rescue Dad, and she snottily refuses to tell him where it is. I watched this, thinking, "When is he going to grab her and force her to talk? When is he going to conk her over the head and tie her up in the basement until she talks? She's a third his size, has no bodyguards, no weapons, nothing, and she's making threats. Come on, Tom! Get her!" But she simply walks out of the room, leaving Tom shrugging helplessly.

Bad world-building, unsympathetic characters, no romance. It all equals a bad show.