🚀The Dark Age: Nervous breakdowns in space

Hello, friends!

I've just completed the day's work on The Dark Age, finishing another part of Philip's story.

Spending time writing this character has me looking to similar characters in other books or movies or TV shows, characters who share Philip's state of grief. Over the weekend, for example, I finished watching Fleishman is in Trouble, in which each of the main characters is in a state of persistent melancholy at best, deep personal trauma at worst.

The character I think of most when writing Philip, though, is Tom Jericho, from the 2001 movie Enigma. In that story—which takes place at Bletchley Park during World War 2—Jericho, a codebreaker, has just returned to work following a nervous breakdown. He'd fallen in love with a woman who also worked at Bletchley, but it had gone disastrously wrong. But upon returning to work, Jericho can't help but see glimpses of the woman everywhere; he spends much of the movie in a sort of limbo, reliving every memory and then holding it up against his present, which he finds lacking. In his memories he keeps chasing the woman; when he finally catches up to her she just regards him sadly and says, "Poor you. I really got under your skin, didn't I?" And she leaves him there.