David Farr, who adapted both The Night Manager and the Midwich Cuckoos for TV, is the pen behind this piece of near sci-fi which explores how artificial intelligence is shaping our lives and deaths. Sam hasn’t spoken to her mum, Kath, for three years when she hears that her mother has walked into the New Mexico desert where she has been found dead. If mother and daughter couldn’t resolve their differences in life, how can that be possible when one of them is dead? Rachel Bagshaw directs a story, produced by Fuel and telling a tale about second chances and asking whether technology gives us the chance to rewrite our lives and our endings.
The body of a 70-year-old woman is found in the New Mexico desert near the town of Taos, a place of pilgrimage for those seeking to embrace alternative forms of living. She is Kath Horvath. On her body the police find a message for her daughter, to whom she has not spoken for many years. The message reads, ‘Sam. Do not grieve. I am not here’. A Dead Body in Taos tells Sam’s story as she travels to New Mexico to bury her estranged mother. Gradually Sam uncovers her mother’s traumatic past. her attempts to break away from her stifling American small-town upbringing, her protest days in the 60s, her experiments with alternative lifestyles and her lifelong, fruitless quest for freedom which eventually left her with nothing (and, as it turns out, everything) to live for. And this leads Sam to discover a shocking secret behind the mysterious message her mother left. For in Taos, Kath Horvath has secretly exercised the ultimate right as a consumer - the right to defy death. In the most remarkable way possible. And it leaves her daughter with a terrible decision to make. Set against the backdrop of modern America, A Dead Body in Taos is part mystery, part sci-fi epic and part love story, that leaves the audience wondering whether, in the 21st Century, freedom is something we should run to or escape from.