We Have No Mouths And We Must Scream: Give Me Away (Season 1)

A little while back, I read a Bluesky post from Mac Rogers - creator and main writer of Gideon Media's Give Me Away - in which he noted the general lack of critical engagement with podcast fiction. This is a state of affairs which leaves a lot of creators firing audio drama into the void, their comments sections all but empty, save the occasional review bomb casually tossed by some right winger dedicated to harming whatever art he’s been told he shouldn’t like. 

The post reminded me of an exchange I had with Jonny Sims back in 2020, about the mammoth series of tweet threads I’d written on the Magnus Archives, which – before I nuked my Twitter account - had covered every episode of his show. While he didn't always agree with my takes (a remarkably charitable framing of the situation, I'm sure), he thanked me for critically engaging with his work as a piece of art, something which, at least at the time, he felt hadn't been happening as much as he'd like.

So I thought, hey. I love Give Me Away, I have a lot of respect for Mac as a writer and a general human being; maybe putting together an essay or three on his (thus far) only multi-season podcast might constitute a solid. It'd also give me a break from focussing on Star Trek, which is probably an extremely good thing in itself.

First, a disclaimer. I am mutuals with both the creator/writer and director of Give Me Away on Bluesky. It would be presumptuous of me to call either Mac or Jordana even casual acquaintances, never mind friends, but I don't want to suggest, even implicitly, that I am coming to the show from a position of pure neutrality. Caveat lector, innit.

First, a summary of the show’s setup. This will necessitate some spoilers, of course, but I'll keep them low-level, since one aim of this post is to persuade newcomers that the show is worth their time. Give Me Away centres, at least initially, on a four-person family; Graham and Morgan Shapiro, and their two now-grown kids, Talia, and Jamie. Graham and Morgan's marriage is on the rocks, at least in part because Graham always seems to be distracted by something Morgan can't understand, and Graham himself doesn't seem able to articulate. Early in the first episode, two things happen at approximately the same time: Morgan finally gets sick of Graham's endless refusal to do anything about their growing estrangement, and an alien spacecraft lands in the Nevada desert.

A spaceship that won't stop screaming.

As the series progresses, we learn the screams are coming from roughly fifty thousand alien beings, all of whom have had their minds uploaded into some kind of VR torture chamber. The scale of the pain being inflicted – both in numbers and in intensity - makes it clear to many that the alien minds need to be rescued ASAP. The only problem is that there doesn't seem to be any feasible way to do this. There aren’t any empty alien bodies lying conveniently around, and an early experiment in which a captive is uploaded into a computer ends in disaster.

The only way to release each prisoner appears to be by placing them inside the brainpan of a willing volunteer. This makes them permanent passengers inside a human's mind, helpless to do anything but talk to their hosts, but it at least ends the agony.

A lot of people find the idea horrifying. A lot more get why its necessary, but can't bring themselves to volunteer. Graham feels differently, and a major strand of the show is how his decision to apply to become a host in what becomes known as the Nevada Project affects him, his relationships with Morgan, Talia and Jamie, and their relationships with each other.

Also, it turns out, the entire country. Another major story strand relates to the political situation in the US after first contact. The show's fictional Republicans respond to the alien ship (nicknamed "the Ghost House" for its unending cannonade of bloodcurdling howls) precisely the way you would expect them to, by demonising them as useless metaphorical mouths at best, and hostile infiltrators at worst. Doubtless they'd take this tack just to revel in some performative cruelty, but there's the additional bonus that the Democratic President is sympathetic to the Nevada Project, so full-throated opposition to it is politically useful ahead of the upcoming midterms.

That's the show in a nutshell, then; a family drama intersecting with a political thriller, all marinaded in a mixture of solid, albeit familiar, sci-fi tropes. The individual parts of all this are well written and directed, and we get another of Gideon Media's characteristically strong casts - I started thinking about the actors I wanted to particularly highlight, but it got so long I realised I'd basically be offering an implicit list of the performers who I'm comparatively cool on, which feels mean-spirited (I do have to note just how brilliantly Sean Williams does at playing two distinct characters with not just the same voice, but the same body, and how effortlessly he makes it clear who is speaking when).

So let's do what we almost always do around here, and splash around in the semiotics.
Give Me Away is a story about how we define our boundaries and borders; where we draw them, what we call them, and how porous we allow them to be.

It’s also a story about how the personal is political.

A brief digression here, before we get into the business of tackling Give Me Away properly. The phrase “the personal is political” – or sometimes, “the private is political” – is a phrase that came out of Second Wave Feminism during the latter third of the last century. In its original form, it highlights how the ways in which women were (and often still are) oppressed in the home isn’t just a domestic issue. Whether we’re talking about the unpaid labour inherent in the concept of the “housewife”, the misogynistic psychological and physical abuse so many women suffered (and suffer) from their partners, or the sense of dissatisfaction and limitation that originates from seeing how many doors are closed to you, while the world only cares that you’ve polished the handles of those doors properly, feminism insists there’s a problem here; and not one each home can solve for itself. The patriarchy must be dismantled across the board, not negotiated with across every individual kitchen table.

The truth of this is obvious, and inescapable, to the extent that anyone trying to deny it can be immediately dismissed as having any praxis worth a damn. But the idea has a valence beyond the context of its birth. The personal is political in general, in the sense that our personal lives and experiences are in dialogue with our politics. The political causes we believe in, ultimately, relate to who we want to help, and why. And who we want to help, and why, stems in no small part from who we know, and have known, and their private lives and their politics. It’s all dialectical, unless we try very hard to make sure that it isn’t.

I would argue the truth of this is no less obvious and inescapable than the idea misogyny neither starts nor ends at home, and those denying it no more worthy of our time. And yet people do deny it, especially on the right. I think there are (at least) two main reasons for this. The first is the desire for those on the right to frame every problem they don’t personally suffer from as being an issue at an individual level, which accordingly requires a solution at that same level. This framing both saves them from having to actually do anything to help anyone other than themselves, and lets them believe that not having the problem in question demonstrates their superiority as a person, rather than a structural advantage they have done nothing to earn. The second reason, intimately connected to the first, is the desire to maintain the fiction of “the view from nowhere”; the idea one can divorce oneself fully from the experience of being human and determine what is objectively best for society as a whole without fear or favour. Oddly, it’s always well-off cis-het white men who seem to think that this is possible, though only for well-off cis-het white men, who in their estimation are the only possible neutral observers, in the same way only a lion can fairly decide which prey animal is most deserving of being mauled and eaten next.

This is an attitude which can only possibly be maintained by ensuring no-one around you can point out the obvious flaws in your sophistry. It’s also an attitude which means anyone who might otherwise be minded to do that pointing out is going to take great efforts to avoid spending any time in your company. And while the people in question tend to have egos more fragile than a porcelain pinata, they paradoxically enjoy the fact so many shun them, because the isolation they impose upon themselves by being thunderously ignorant fucking dickheads, prevents them from being “contaminated” by the personal experiences of others which might interfere with their wholly objective pronouncements.

The politics of the right in general is predicated on minimising personal interactions with anyone unlike themselves. There is an immediate corollary to this for the left, which is that we’re best served by there being as many different people talking to and living alongside as many other different people as possible. The corollary to that corollary, though, is that much of right-wing political action is dedicated to limiting the extent to which the left can actually achieve that. Not just by drawing as many boundaries between people as it can, but by trying to persuade us that those boundaries are supposed to be there, and that it would be perilous to try to cross them.

Give Me Away is a show that recognises the importance of the link between our private lives and our political ideals. The final straw for Morgan in her marriage to Graham appears to come when he tries to back out of couple’s counselling. Graham doesn’t want to think of their problems as being something that plays out among married couples, and that might be resolved by engaging with someone with a broader viewpoint. He needs to believe the marriage is something he can fix by himself, that it would represent a failure on his part to have someone else succeed – or just help – where he has failed. He wants an individual solution to what he sees as an individual problem, while failing to notice this attitude – that his marriage and his family belong to him to fix – is no small part of the problem. This isn’t precisely the same thing as refusing to see the personal and political as intertwined. But the two mistakes come from the same source; a refusal to accept that there are some problems we simply cannot fix on our own.

There’s a scene later in the season where Graham explains where he sees things as having gone wrong. As he got older, he found his life getting increasingly empty, and he allowed his own thoughts to expand to fill what he saw as the void. The boundaries inside his head kept getting bigger, and as he puts it, that just meant Morgan was crossing inside those boundaries more and more often, and causing more and more resentment in the process. That was part of the problem, but the other part (again, from his perspective; Morgan has her own thoughts about what happened) was that the same solipsism which was crowding Morgan out also made him incapable of imagining any solution that wasn’t borne in his own head.

What Graham ultimately recognises, I think, is that the mistake he’s made is to try and dull the pain of a growing sense of disconnection, rather than figuring out how to forge connections anew. This revelation is of some concern to the Nevada Project – does he want an alien in his head because it’ll finally give someone he can’t become disconnected from? What’s actually happening, though, is that Graham has realised he had everything backwards. Connection follows engagement, not the other way round. We all want to help the people we love, but we also end up loving the people we want to help.

Focussing so much of this season on the Shapiro’s failed marriage, and how Graham’s state of mind contributed to that failure, works on several levels. One of the most interesting is how the family drama works as a midpoint between the explorations of how live in our own heads, and how we live within broader society. This is a good time to talk about the obvious: Give Me Away is an Alien Nation-esque story about immigrants, and immigration. This plays out in several of the ways you’d expect – the aliens are kept in a camp they’re told is for their own protection, the Republicans on TV keep hinting about the risk of dual loyalties, and how ridiculous and dangerous it is to take the aliens at their word that they’re no threat to decent hardworking real Americans. Members of the immigrant community themselves end up at odds about whether to assimilate, remain separate, or even attempt to reshape the community they have found themselves in. US service members, with self-images wholly predicated on their role in protecting the American people, suddenly prove wholly hostile to American citizens they don’t believe should count as American (in the Trump era of ICE atrocities and constitutional arse-wiping, this aspect of the text hits particularly hard).

But the parallels run deeper. What the aliens are ultimately asking for is for a home in America; to become part of what is already (despite the best efforts of many) a gloriously multicultural society. They’re also effectively refugees, in that they’ve been displaced by violence, and cannot realistically go home even should they want to. And sooner or later, whenever a political debate breaks out about how or if to help house refugees who just want to be able to start a new life, those opposed to the idea start demanding to know why all the bleeding-heart humanitarians aren’t volunteering their own towns/streets/houses as places for the displaced to live.

There’s any number of reasons why this is a BS argument. It’s another attempt to turn a problem that needs a structural solution into a series of individual choices. Granting the idea that treating refugees as fully human is a matter of personal choice would further embed racism in society – someone happy to have a Sudanese refugee living in their spare room is liable to not be happy when ICE kidnap them on the doorstep. And individual billeting atomises communities, which is some distance from desirable.

That said, for all the ways in which “Just have them in your own houses!” is intended not as solution, but as a refusal to accept any solution is needed, it is still unquestionably an act of kindness and charity to do just what is being asked of you. I have been astonished and humbled by the number of people in the UK who responded to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, and the displacement of so many Ukranians as a result, by offering their own homes as refuges. What Give Me Away does, brilliantly, is use its tale of aliens and their technology to take this a step further. The show upgrades the demand to “Just have them in your own minds!”, and posit that there are still people, people who are the best of us, people who are just like everybody else, who will agree to do just that.

There are so many reasons this is a brilliant idea. For all I’ve talked above about the ways in which individual solutions don’t exist, it’s actually undeniable that we’ll only solve anything through individual actions – it’s just that the first action has to be to to choose to become part of something larger than ourselves. It doesn’t really matter what that larger thing is - assuming it isn’t our own shadow cast against a blank wall – so long as it’s something worth doing, eventually it will be all link up in any case. Just as Give Me Away offers an answer to “Why can’t you house them yourselves?”, it does the same with “Why choose to help these people, instead of all the other people who are suffering?”. As Graham himself puts it, with a full and simple moral clarity: “No particular reason”. You find people to help, and you help them. When something near you is on fire, you help try to put the fire out. You don’t demand those already helping to justify why they haven’t checked whether there might be another bigger fire they could be at instead.

The idea also recognises that we lose when we don’t listen to those unlike ourselves, and that we win when we commit to listening always, however personally uncomfortable that makes us feel. There’s an ironclad rule at the Nevada Project that when the alien in your head wants to say something, you say it for them. It doesn’t matter how rude or unhelpful or even risky what they want to say is, you relay their words and tone with your own mouth, because fuck you if you think you get to police how someone unlike you gets to interact with the world.

Lastly, there’s a recognition that even if individuals do choose to engage in an organised effort to house the displaced, the right wing will try to smash it to pieces, because they never simply didn’t want to help. They didn’t want anyone to help, because once different communities start working together on one issue, how long before they’re working together on everything.*

How long before they get to really start making the personal political?

Really, all I’m talking about here is empathy. Give Me Away is too. The show is about the need to recognise the personhood of those across some boundary – however defined – from you, and act accordingly. It’s a show about refusing to do what the right wing want of you, which is to fixate on the boundary itself. In one of my favourite scenes in the first season, Graham discusses with his non-binary offspring Talia how they feel that, after years of pretending singular “they/them” pronouns were some incomprehensible blasphemy against the English language when applied to enbys, people have immediately started using those terms for the alien visitors whose definition of sex didn’t precisely map on to our own (or, put another way, now “they/them” is usable as a way of distancing the subject from humanity, rather than recognising it). Talia admits that they found that frustrating, and that part of that frustration genuinely was to watch how a race of people no-one had even conceived of just a few months earlier were granted an accommodation they themselves were still frequently being denied on the most spurious of grounds.

But it’s a trap, Talia says. We’re always pushed to resent others, because resentment crowds out empathy, and empathy is a threat to the status quo. It’s easier to inflict damage on people when the pain that damage causes isn’t being noticed. Give Me Away makes use of its sci-fi nature to make this point pretty directly. The Ghost House houses a machine that allows you to feel the agonised, desperate horror of the prisoners trapped inside, which potential recruits to the hybrid project are briefly exposed to, so as to give them some sense of the stakes involved. We learn during the season that one of troops stationed on the base – troops under Lieutenant Riley, a man trained to prioritise the hypothetical hurt to American citizens over the actual lives of those he’s sent to fought – has tried the device. This young man, wholly devoted to the military, and who Riley loved like a son, immediately resigns his commission and applies to join the Nevada Project. Experiencing what the prisoners were going through makes a soldier throw away the career that had become his life, and a relationship that had saved his life, and make that choice within minutes. Because when you feel someone else’s pain that deeply, what else can you do but try to help?

What’s interesting here is that it seemingly never occurs to Riley to try the device himself. Someone who meant more to him than almost anyone else alive just told him there was a more pressing calling than the one they’d once shared, and yet Riley has no interest in investigating for himself. Because he doesn’t want to. Because he doesn’t dare to. He doesn’t want to risk the possibility that learning more about the newcomers might require him to start caring about them as people. Perhaps he tells himself this is to avoid making it harder for himself if – when – he ends up on the opposite side to the newcomers. But that’s just a different way of saying the same thing, isn’t it? He doesn’t want to risk the possibility that he might begin to see those on the other side of the line as people. He doesn’t want to risk a change in how he views the world.

Change, of course, is perhaps the one thing the right-wing fears more than empathy. Or maybe it makes more sense to say the right-wing fears empathy precisely because it demands change. Mac Rogers has written about how Give Me Away explores the ways in which, as we grow older, we might find it increasingly difficult to understand the choices made by the young. Accordingly, a driving concern of the series is the importance of not letting that confusion become dismissal. This is an idea that again finds expression in Graham asking questions of Talia, but it also obviously factors in to so many volunteers for hybridisation being youngsters. What’s important here isn’t that we understand why those youngsters want to share their skulls with an alien being. What’s important is that we don’t let our empathy become tangled in barriers temporal, any more than those geographical or cultural. The same Second Wave Feminism which did so much good in the fight against patriarchy, which gave us the phrase that underpins this entire essay, ultimately shrivelled into gender-essentialist transphobic vileness, because it could see no way but its own to understand or define what it means to be a woman. Either we empathise across the years, or we grow to be what we hate.

Give Me Away is a paean to omnidirectional empathy as a political, even revolutionary act. It’s a meditation on how the individual intersects with the structural, noting the importance of each person’s decisions and actions while holding up broader movements as necessary for progress. It accepts wholly the importance of every human being, while doing about as much as any story can do to reject the idea that it is individuals alone that change the world for the better.

It’s also, for what it’s worth, a show I only used a third of my notes on it to write this essay, because there’s so much else going on that I could have talked about instead. And I haven’t even mentioned seasons two or three yet.

As I said, though, part of the point of this essay is to get people who haven’t tried the show to give it a go, and dissecting the later stuff wouldn’t really be in keeping with that goal. I might come back to those seasons later (I probably will, actually, if only because the politics get chewy in new and interesting ways), but let’s see where the year takes us.

For now, go spend a little time in the Ghost House. Listen to the screams, and everything around those screams, and ask yourself where else there might be some listening to be done.

*Something I realised the day after hitting "post" on this - and it's so obvious an omission I felt compelled to add it now - is that the aliens are the only people on Earth who genuinely can offer a wholly neutral view regarding the way human society works. And the party where all the David Brooks-style arseholes always end up immediately despise them.