The Lost Memories

A Series Nobody Explained

~ Sunday, October 7, 2018 ~

In September 2012, Czech Television broadcast a three-part crime series called Ztracená brána — Lost Gate. Written by Arnošt Vašíček and directed by Jiří Strach, it told a story about a serial killer investigation in Prague that turned out to involve the Voynich manuscript, a secret order of guardians, and a prophecy about a gate that would open on a specific day. It received reasonable reviews, an IMDB rating of 7.8, and then largely disappeared from public discussion. Not many crime series disappear this completely when their reviews were this good.

I have been trying to explain that for six years.

The series is still watchable. Czech Television has made it available on their streaming archive, and it holds up reasonably well as procedural crime television. The two-detective structure, the Prague settings, the tension between what the investigation officially becomes and what the investigators come to understand is actually happening — these are handled with skill. Jiří Strach has directed more ambitious projects; Arnošt Vašíček has written for more prominent series. Ztracená brána reads as capable mid-range work, the sort of thing that should have accumulated a modest audience over six years of availability. It did not.

What the series is actually about

The surface story is a serial killer case. The real subject is a tradition: a specific set of beliefs about a thirteenth apostle, a brotherhood charged with keeping a piece of knowledge secure until a prophesied date, and a gate that opens only if the right person arrives at the right time holding the right key. The investigation forces the detectives to take this tradition seriously before they can make sense of the crimes.

The Voynich manuscript appears as a central prop. The Prague Masonic lodge and the medieval tunnel system beneath Znojmo serve as locations. Both are real. The Znojmo underground is genuinely one of the more extensive medieval tunnel systems in Central Europe, and the series treats it as such — the production clearly did its research on the physical spaces.

The mythology is not Vašíček’s

This is the part I cannot get past.

The mythology of the thirteenth apostle, the guardian brotherhood, and the gate opening at a prophesied time is too specific and too internally consistent to have been assembled from scratch for a three-part crime series. A writer constructing a mythology from general cultural memory tends to leave visible seams — borrowed pieces that don’t quite fit, borrowed pieces that are recognizable. The mythology in Ztracená brána has no seams. The theological structure is coherent in a way that either required very careful construction or was borrowed from something that was already coherent.

Bishop Kapalini’s recent work on the apostolic lists makes the screenwriter’s source feel less invented than it should. The documented instability of the apostolic count is real. The heterodox tradition of a figure who stood outside or beyond the twelve — preserved in sources that didn’t survive the canonical consolidation — is also real, and more specific than most people who haven’t read the patristics would guess. Vašíček found this mythology somewhere. The production history of the series does not say where.

What I have not been able to find out

I contacted the production company in 2014 to ask about the mythology research behind the series. I received a polite non-response. I contacted Vašíček’s representatives in 2015 with the same question. I have not received a reply.

This is not, by itself, suspicious. Writers protect their sources. Productions protect their materials. People who receive research queries from unknown journalists do not always reply. The silence proves nothing.

What I cannot account for is the specificity. A mythology drawn from the general cultural memory of the apostolic tradition would look different from this. What is in Ztracená brána looks less like something assembled from general knowledge and more like something someone gave the writer, or showed him, or described to him from a source he was not at liberty to name.

Where he found it is not a question the series itself answers. It may not have been a question he thought needed answering. But it is a question that has not left me alone, and I do not think it should.

Sources

• Ztracená brána. Dir. Jiří Strach. Written by Arnošt Vašíček. Czech Television, September 2012. Three episodes. Available: Czech Television online archive (iVysílání).
• Ztracená brána (2012) — IMDB listing
• Bishop Kapalini Alaloha, “The Lists That Don’t Agree” (January 2018)

• Published by Jan Hartmann on 12:45:00 | in
• 1 comment (1918 views)