Very much enjoyed the way the BBC drama “The Hour” began with a rich and assured history of the characters, and admiring the way the show trusts the audience to keep up. Then I realized I’d actually watched season 2 first. Oh, well. Decent show though, once you get past the fact that London in 1956 seems to have been populated with about 8 people all of whom are involved in the same international conspiracy. Though I do appreciate the attempt to dramatize the dirty reality of democratic governance: journalists, media moguls, heads of government, all cultured in the same Petri dish, swimming in the same cocktail glass every evening after work. As true now in my country, as it was then in the UK. Here it’s Yale, Harvard, the occasional Princeton grad. See you at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

photo credit: Nadia Meslem

For ambitious, passionate Kiter Io, a posting to the daring diplomatic mission organized and hosted by a mysterious race known only as The Understanders represents more than a chance to help his people become part of the new enlightenment era, it also represents a chance to make his personal mark on history. A chance to prove to himself that he possesses the skills his people value most: negotiation, determination and empathy.

But when a disaster kills the rests of his delegation—a disaster that seems no accident—Kiter faces an unknown world—host to many cultures and shrouded in mystery—on his own, finding himself forced to work alongside a new delegation, one made up of members of many different worlds, with strange and alien values. Here he must fight to preserve the goal of his original mission—to bring his people—and all the broken vestiges of a once-great civilization spanning thousands of worlds—out of the twin darknesses of ignorance and xenophobia, at last.

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