Damaged Mothers and Damaged Children in Counter-Measures

posted January 31st 2024

this post may contain spoilers for Counter-Measures series 1-3!

Mothers in SF rarely get the complexity or even acknowledgement that they do in other fiction. Indeed, more often than not, motherhood in SF is a death sentence - for the mother or for her child. I desire at this point to go off on a tangent about Benny whose audio adventures I recently completed to for the first time (though I'm still working on the books), and for whom motherhood is an intrinsic part of her character in a way that is rarely ever seen in SF as it neither reduces her nor serves as a tragedy in the typical way. However, for now I am yet again thinking about Rachel and Allison, and the world of Counter-Measures where mothers and their children do suffer the classic SF problem of dying for the narrative.

For a series that does so well for its female character in general, mothers are notable generally by their absence. We learn relatively little about Toby or Ian’s ancestral families, but Rachel and Allison both have something in common - a difficult family background. As daughters, they both had strained relationships with their own mothers, and though neither of them are mothers, the question of their reproductive viability isn't forgotten. For our main two characters, motherhood is predominantly a subtextual issue, but there is another character whose relationship with being a mother is a core part of the story: Lady Catherine Waverly.

Manhunt sets in motion the plot that carries all the way through Series 2 - the genetic experiments performed by Toby and the others of the Wilcock institute. We are introduced to two of the subjects of these experiments, Emma Waverly and Ray Cleaver. Emma provides the most overt example of the suffocating symbiosis of mothers and their children in C-M as the nature of her relationship with Lady Catherine is explicitly terse. Interestingly, despite the fact that Emma accuses her mother of failing her and it's hard to disagree with that assessment, the narrative itself does not paint Catherine as a monstrous figure. Instead, Catherine is the same as Mary Cleaver - a woman with little to no real power forced to be part of human experiments against her knowledge and will. 'She was an idiot', Ray says of his mother, a sentiment which Emma would certainly agree with about her own mother, but Mary managed something that few others do with success at all: say no to Toby Kinsella. We ultimately learn little about Mary, but from what we're given, we can see - as Rachel does - a woman of incredible mental resolve doing the best she can to escape a situation she has no control over.

Unlike Catherine, Mary was not a woman of class and therefore would have been much more unlikely to be able to support herself as a divorced, Catholic single mother in 1960s Britain. I would certainly suggest that Ray is too quick to dismiss his mother as an 'idiot' when it seems she was anything but. Emma is similarly dismissive of her own mother, unhappy at the way Catherine would have her 'beholden to men' rather than being allowed her own career. Of course, Catherine has had a career to whatever extent she has been allowed and is sharply aware of the limitations she and Emma have as women in their society. She knows exactly what kind of life Emma wants to live and how impractical it is, but Emma sees Catherine’s pragmatism as a failure. Emma wants Catherine to fight for her and despite the fact that we aren't made to see Catherine’s actions as malicious or even within het control, we do feel that Catherine has failed Emma by refusing to make a stand against society - even if her stand would have had the same reception as Mary's. Both Ray and Emma ultimately both suffer not only from the impact of their genetic manipulation, but from the feeling of betrayal from mothers who are doing their best but ultimately fail to be the parent their child needs.

Catherine isn't the only mother who is concerned about her daughter's career - or lack thereof. Rachel's mother is never named and is barely referenced, but what little we do get to hear gives us quite the image of her. Passingly, in Unto the Breach, Rachel snidely remarks that 'mother always wanted me to have a career' when undercover as a carpenter's wife. One can also imagine that Rachel's mother would be pleased to see her married to a man, something that is brought up by the hallucination of Mrs Jensen in Troubled Waters. Even though we can very easily extrapolate the kind of woman Mrs Jensen is from the way Rachel comments on her in Unto the Breach, it is made explicit in Troubled Waters that she was manipulative and controlling. Undoubtedly, Rachel’s intellect is something that would have disappointed Mrs Jensen as Rachel chose to pursue academia over anything else. Although Rachel seems far more well-adjusted than Ray or Catherine, and certainly more so than Allison, the way that Mrs Jensen was chosen as Rachel’s weakness in Troubled Waters tells us that the kind of childhood Rachel had has profoundly impacted her life and perhaps is not something she is as at peace with as she would like people to believe.

Indeed, Rachel and Allison mirror each other in many ways when it comes to their parents. Though with Rachel, her unhappy childhood and eventual running away to become a scholar at Cambridge are events that are mostly implied, with Allison we are able to dig into the events that shaped her. Though most focus is placed on her strained relationship with her father, an unhappy relationship with her mother bleeds through too. 'I'm sorry I broke her,' Allison says of her mother in The Forgotten Village as she talks to her comatose father about the impact Allison's birth had on her mother. Though the whereabouts of Allison's mother in the series is not entirely clear^[1], what is clear is that she was not a positive figure in Allison's life. Not only did Allison feel the guilt of damaging her mother - whether that really was her fault or not - Julian's snide remark about her does not present a flattering image of the woman.

From the pieces we get of both Rachel and Allison's mothers, then, I would suggest we can piece together the image of a similar kind of woman: one who is overbearing bordering on controlling and who takes out any of her own issues on her daughter. Though the two women come from entirely different backgrounds, their absence in the present day lives of Allison and Rachel tells us that the damage done in childhood is something that caused the kind of distance that cannot be repaired. Interestingly too, in Troubled Waters, Mrs Jensen is performed by Karen Gledhill. Although this is not recognised within the narrative, the extradiegetic effect of Allison giving voice to Rachel's mother ties together the idea that the two are linked by a troubled childhood. Further, Allion's own delusion is that she is going to be the perfect wife and mother of a new world, tearing her between the mother she had and the kind of mother she wishes she could be. Neither Rachel nor Allison are the picture of the perfect 60s woman whether they make an effort to be or not, and it seems that the effect their mothers had upon them plays no small part in the image of themselves they attempt to put forward: for Rachel, this is the brilliant professor and for Allison, a modern woman who can have everything she wants regardless of her actual success at balancing career and family.

Mothers in Counter-Measures are, by and large, absent and disappointing figures who shape their children into stubborn, angry people. Though there is a world of difference between Ray Cleaver and Rachel Jensen, the animosity between them and their mothers is something that has affected their decisions and served to make them self-reliant. Although C-M doesn't necessarily condemn these women for the effect they have on their children, it does paint a pessimistic image of women who choose to become mothers and the ways they can damage their children. Despite the fact that the daughters are given wonderfully complex internal lives, the fact that each of their mothers end up dead and disliked and none of them get the chance to have children of their own, it leaves one with the feeling that C-M has a dismissive opinion on mothers as the diametric opposite to the career woman. Unlike Bernice Summerfield who does have it all - for better or worse - the women of C-M are allowed either to be scientists or mothers where the scientists are 'real' women and mothers are left nameless and abandoned. This might be an interestingly opposite opinion to much of SF where mothers are the 'real' women, but nevertheless is a little disappointing that it doesn't quite manage to go the whole way and let women be everything they want to be.