The Core

When Russia invades Ukraine, a mysterious force transports six strangers from all walks of life to a secluded valley holding a secret that can turn the tide of war. To discover this secret and help their country stand up to the enemy, they must get over their dierences and work together, while a hostile presence is breathing down their necks. THE CORE will be a limited one-hour TV supernatural drama inspired by true stories of the ongoing war in Ukraine yet adding a fictional twist. Appropriateness and cultural sensitivity in handling this theme will be ensured by the writer’s Ukrainian background and lived war experience. The show’s main premise is the existence of Cores: fleshless entities dwelling underground, in the deep layers of rock. Worshipped by ancient tribes as deities, they are in truth sophisticated machines left behind by a forgotten civilization. Feeding on Earth’s electromagnetic field, the Cores accumulate tremendous amounts of energy, yet they almost never use it directly. When sensing a threat to itself, a Core would reach out to the people who have the strongest innate ability to connect with it, channel its power into their bodies, and trust them to use it according to the subtle clues it provides. These people are known as the Core’s Guardians. A Core can only connect with people who are asleep and within its range of reach. When summoned by a Core, its six Guardians enter a hyper-realistic shared dream where they must perform certain steps (which are often challenging to figure out) to release the Core’s power into the real world where it produces effects typically attributed to luck: sudden occurrences hindering one side of a conflict and helping another. Some Cores are controlled by governments and operated by dedicated teams of secret service agents, the whole matter being kept under wraps as top secret. This includes the Cores located in the US and Russia. Other Cores, including Ukraine’s Core, are free-running: staying dormant most of the time, they only wake and summon their Guardians when facing a threat of destruction. The story will follow an ensemble cast of six Guardians summoned by Ukraine’s Core: RUDANA is a smart, persistent woman of 35 working hard to make it big with her tech startup despite a curse-like series of unfortunate accidents always getting in her way and her Asperger syndrome crippling her social interactions. Her strong analytical mindset allows her to spot unobvious connections and patterns, which, coupled with her sensitivity to the Core’s signals, proves to be invaluable when interpreting its clues. VALERII is Rudana’s father. Aged 70, he used to own and run a small engineering business before retirement. An avid hiker in the past, he knows a lot about wilderness survival, first aid, and Ukrainian traditional medicine. His rational mindset gets challenged by the shared dream experience. He contributes to the group his extensive knowledge in many fields, unwavering optimism, and real-world team management skills. DAMIR is a truck driver in his 30s, a member of Tatar ethnic minority. Born in Russia but living all his life in Ukraine, he faces a clash of loyalties as his family takes a staunch pro-Russian stance, while he is leaning pro-Ukrainian. An agreeable person who never shuns work, he often acts as the glue keeping the group together, smoothing over the disagreements and bringing to the table his common sense and down-to-earth attitude. GALYA, is a village mayor in her early 50s. Assertive and hot-tempered, she has strong opinions and never hesitates to defend them. Her Christian faith gets challenged as she joins the group and must partake in what feels like Pagan rites. Her superpower is a strong, resonant singing voice and knowledge of Ukrainian folk songs. Not particularly useful in her real life, this skill literally rescues the group at one point. SIMONE, 19, is an international student from Africa who came to Ukraine with a secret intent to complete her male-to-female transition. The rejection and unfair treatment she’s often faced in the past have made her reserved and secretive. However, she eventually opens up to the group and contributes the bits of knowledge about Core-interaction techniques that have survived in her culture, while being obliterated in Ukraine. BRETT HELLER is an American secret service agent assigned to Ukraine to help its Guardian team master their Core’s operation. He has the knowledge that other group members lack but holds it back to make sure they can be trusted before he shares anything. In the dream world, he takes the appearance of Ukraine’s President Grinevsky and impersonates him to win the group’s trust. Eventually, he’s revealed to be a traitor secretly working for Russia. We open on the ensemble members living their lives in August 2021, among the first unsettling news of the planned assault. Then we cut to February 2022, with the main events starting on the day of full-scale invasion and spanning the next two months. When Russia strikes, Rudana, Valerii, Damir, Galya, and Simone get chosen by Ukraine’s Core as its Guardians, with Heller joining them in disguise. Falling in a troubled sleep after the hectic first day of war, they get pulled into a hyper-realistic shared dream, finding themselves in a mysterious valley with ancient artifacts. They don’t immediately realize it is a dream, preparing to survive in the wilderness and somehow find a way back home, until they discover their powers and face the enemy—another Core backing up the invaders. From this point, the five Guardians start living double lives. While awake, they navigate the gritty war reality as civilians struggling to survive and protect their loved ones. In their sleep, they get summoned to another plane of being where they can connect to the Core and channel its power through mysterious rites that turn out to affect real-world battles: whenever chance is at play, it plays out in Ukraine’s favor. The action will switch between two worlds: the cold, gloomy cities and villages of war-torn Ukraine contrasted by the deceptively tranquil, lush-green meadows and woods of the dream plane of being. The story will be serialized and told over 8 episodes, following the group of Guardians through a series of six shared dreams: from struggling to figure out what’s going on to the final face-off with a hostile Guardian team operating Russia’s Core. As the newly minted Guardians realize their power, they start using it to help their nation stand up to the enemy. However, that means groping their way in the dark as they (except for Heller and, to a much smaller extent, Simone) know absolutely nothing about the Core and how to operate it. The Soviet government had purposefully destroyed, or labelled as “top classified”, any information about the Cores, Guardians, and their powers to ensure that Ukrainians would never be able to use their Core to resist it. Coupled with Heller’s self-imposed restrictions on sharing knowledge, that makes it really tough for the group to interpret the Core’s clues to figure out what kind of ritual they need to perform and how to do it. Formed by people from all walks of life, the group lacks cohesion. Besides, in most dreams they face an attack by the hostile Guardian team that they must repel; otherwise, it will kill them in the dream and the real world alike. To stand up to the challenges and survive, the characters must learn to work together despite their differences. Here are two examples of conflicts the group will need to resolve: • Armed with his wilderness survival knowledge and real-world management experience, Valerii initially claims the group leadership. Heller challenges that. As Rudana grows closer with Heller, attracted by his knowledge of dream manipulation techniques, Valerii calls her out on that as he still distrusts Heller. • Galya lashes out at Heller, mistaking him for Grinevsky and blaming him for weak leadership in the real world. When Damir steps in to defend him, Galya attacks him as well. Finding out that they support opposite political forces, Damir and Galya hold that against each other. The two pillars of this show will be: a) exploration of the dream world; b) complex relationships within the group as it evolves from a bunch of strangers to an unstoppable squad that defeats Russian Guardians in the final face-off. Besides, each group member will undergo a personal transformation. The actual events of the Russo-Ukrainian war will form the backdrop. While not being shown excessively on screen, they will be referenced at certain points throughout the series, maintaining a sense of the story’s connection to its broader context.