Golden sunbeams cut through the window upon an adolescent girl napping on what looks like a Roman couch, something regal about her attire—NAUSICAA. She is awoken by her handmaidens as ornate chests open and gilded dresses are heaped upon naked shoulders. They treat her with deference, but there is laughter and banter. They bid her join them to the river.

A mule-drawn carriage through the woods loaded with laundry and provisions, the girls chattering about, bits of cheese and bread in their fingers. Every young man of gentle birth on the island of Phaeacia seems to want to woo the princess as she’s coming of age. The maids tease her and she accepts it with grace, and looks on ahead.

At the river, checkerboard of drying clothes, glistening oil on naked skin, some sort of ball game. The princess walks through the woods and encounters a decayed shrine to the Pallas. Then a scream.

Beyond the last treeline where the beach starts, among shattered bits of boat lies a Stranger decked-out with his face in the surf.

Nausica puts her maids to order, bids them run and alert the guards. They put their clothes on in haste. The Princess still looking into the distance.

The stranger jumps awake, coughing sea and earth. His bearded face rises rugged like time, sand still clinging. 

They see each other—close-ups, reaction shots. Her lips half-parted. He battered by the waves.

Voice-over (the one and only): “Every sailor, upon arriving at a foreign port, prays the people he finds know what is good, and what is lawful by the gods, and honoring our people’s rite of hospitality, will take him, and treat him like one of their own. And when it’s time to give him back to the sea, that they will show him the way home.”

Cue title:

NOSTOS

the return

FADE IN: a grand, walled city burning across the night. Cue text: ΤΕΝ YEARS AGO. Another: THE OUTSKIRTS OF TROY.

The Greeks plunder their way through a village. The Stranger in a fancy helmet or something that denotes rank, blood-shot but restrained, looking on as his men have their way. A mighty bow across his back, short sword cuts down a hopeless attacker, blood on bronze. He spots his comrade across the din: “MENELAUS!” (his voice was in the voice-over) The general approaches as if he were to greet a friend at a tavern, clay wine-jug in his buckler-hand, addresses him as ‘wily son of Ithaca’ or some other diversion. Echoes of the Iliad: They say they contemplated throwing the horse off the cliffs, we were almost goners for a minute there, but what a mind you have. The wife is in the ship with my brother, he stood guard as I reunited with her. Poor Agamemnon, burns with longing to reunite with his, haw haw. Seven years the rotten city took from us, all for a woman. But I’ll be cast down if she doesn’t rival Venus herself in the bedchamber! The tone is uproarious with maybe a barked order thrown in, or a savage blow to some opportunist, and a side of sadness when Achilles is mentioned, spite in case of AJAX. But the Stranger is on edge, and with good reason: enter EURYLOCHUS, his horse halting with a neigh: the men must to the ships; the Kikones are roused down their hills, a whole army of them.

A scream of warning fills the air and beyond the village the view is filled with men of horseback descending upon them with howls in their mouths and arms in the air. The Stranger roars for his men to run away. He climbs atop a low rooftop, grits his teeth and fires arrow after arrow.

BACK TO PHAEACIA: The noble youths exercising naked in all the classical sports. The Stranger watches them and Nausicaa watches him, as she pours her father the king wine at the aftermath of a banquet. After a shower and a change of clothes, the burly man is presentable but looks grim. Two of the athletes approach him and offer taunts and a bow and arrow. Do you still have it in you, old man? He glares back, then picks up discus after discus until he has the heaviest one, and with a roar sends it way off.

The Phaeacians applaud, the taunters smile dumbly, the Princess looks like she’s feeling something new.

A DREAMLIKE FOREST. Sword drawn, he steps over discarded shields and pieces of armor. There is a faint chewing sound in the background: the soldiers, dirty and ragged in their underclothes, sat and reclined into the embrace of a strange people, decidedly un-Greek and effeminate. Something like bamboo shoots connects the native hands to his comrades’ mouths, and they munch and slobber looking sheepish. The natives eye him back and smile with evil. 

THE DECK OF A SHIP, THE SEA AT NIGHT. He reprimands the company, his small fleet of trieres in view. Like those lotus-eaters I had to drag you out of there, who had forsaken kin and country. What came into you? We sacked a city, wasn’t that enough?

Wine is passed around, the atmosphere a touch funereal. EURYLOCHUS: Have you no wives to come home to?

Only my father’s sows, comes back a soldier still with peach fuzz on his cheeks–ELPENOR. Laughter cuts through the crew. Tell us again of the defectors, Captain, what did you do with them.

The Stranger/Captain is a gifted raconteur, talking with his hands and a low voice navigating terror and astonishment. Ribald jokes pepper his narrative and the crew hang from his lips, following the wise old Captain’s eerily childlike eyes as they search about and drift out of focus. The Captain speaks of how he threatened the natives and spent the night dragging his men back into the ship, one by one, to tie them up as their haze gave way to protest and mania. 

Elpenor beams with excitement, Eurylochus seems pleased if skeptical. POLITES cuts in: the Pallas is with you, son of Laertes. She guided you through the war, lent you wits and cunning.

And may she guide us further, he replies. Halfway a man my TELEMACHUS will be by now. 

And of your wife, Captain?

A voice booming from the mastheads: Strong winds! We shall not be rounding Malleus tonight!

The Captain looks concerned.

PHAEACIA. Nausicaa before the King and Queen. ALCINOUS displeased: What were you thinking, daughter, accosting a stranger like that? Are you not the most wanted on the island?

Isn’t Zeus the patron of travellers seeking refuge, starts the Princess, but her mother ARETE stops her: who are you to anticipate the whims of the immortals? Don’t you know how your father’s brother was slain by Apollo’s bow, out of jealousy and spite?

He spoke kindly to me, mother, and begged to take him in. He was a fright to behold but he was in a bad way. 

The King turns to ECHENYUS, the elder. Alcinous, I hear your daughter offered to escort  the Stranger to the gates and he declined, for fear of starting rumours. Lawful he certainly seems, and your daughter is wise to heed the will of the immortals–it is known how they sometimes walk among us, and test us. 

Very well, says Arete, but he has yet to seek our audience and our blessing. Let him address our gentry tonight, and state his identity and his purpose.

CUE MONTAGE, Echenyus at the agora calling on the local high society to bring gifts to the stranger, shepherds hunched on their crooks taking cue, pig after pig have their throats cut, smoke rises as one of their brethren is charred in tribute, bits getting picked off by the mortals. The maids set the tables for a lavish banquet, carry loaves and amphorae out of cellars.

The squeals of the sacrificed mingle with those of the swine now surrounding the Stranger’s feet, who stands around them comically clad in armor again, baffled at their sight. He seems to be in a MAGICAL FOREST again. Behind him, the harboured ships of the Greeks can still be seen down the wooded path. He proceeds into the forest and another sound rises now, the faint echo of an eerie song. He finds the maids bathing in the river, Nausicaa among them, singing a song we’ll hear again. He is now naked like when the sea spat him out, and rummages for a leaf-cover. When he’s done he notices a female figure spying him from across the clearing, covered in shade. He makes toward her–ahead, a kind of cottage house, and a repetitive, mechanical sound. From the window he sees the back of her as she works the loom, her hair done up over the nape of her neck, another image to recur. He enters and is now in a terrible CAVERN. A giant man hunched before him, his front hidden from us as he gobbles meat disgustingly. Still our view fills with him, until– 

The Stranger gasps into wakefulness, covered in sweat, startling Nausicaa standing over him. Will you join our feast, Stranger? Our people have no fame for skill in war or sport. But in shipbuilding, in song and dance, none may challenge them.

THE FEAST: The youths of Phaeacia in a mighty circle dance. A bard whose eyes are covered in a round of cloth sings of Hephaestus tricking his wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares into bondage on their bed of sin, the rest of the Olympians laughing about. Finally generous Poseidon offers the betrayed husband gifts in exchange for the adulteress’ freedom. 

The muse took his sight and gave him poetry, Nausicaa tells the Stranger of the bard. He bids her send him his plate of meat. She does, and after giving thanks the bard tells a new story: that of the taking of Troy.

Young and old in thrall to the bard’s narrative. Helen of Sparta, equal to Aphrodite in beauty, eloping with Paris of the great city of Troy, her betrothed Menelaus rounding up the Greeks to wage war for her sake, and his brother Agamemnon, and the demigod Achilles, finest warrior the world has ever known killed by a treacherous bolt, and ODYSSEUS of Ithaca, whom Pallas Athena told in a dream to fashion a great wooden horse, and trick the Trojans into inviting their own doom. 

The Stranger is in tears. The Queen takes note and bids the bard pause. Let us not sing of these things any longer, that fill our guest with sadness. Time has come to hear his own story, at any rate.

Nausicaa and her mother discreetly flanking a statuette of Athena. The room’s eyes now on the Stranger. His reddened eyes filled with a mute terror.

AN ISLAND AT DAWN, the ships of the Greeks at bay. The Stranger/Captain staring into the distance. 

Enter Eurylochus. We have gathered enough provisions, Captain. Game and forage. Captain?

In the distance, a flock of sheep is tended to by a giant caveman. Further off, the mouth of his cavernous home agape. 

Gather me half a dozen men, the Captain tells his second, his gaze unmoving and filled with a quiet spark.

Furtively, the company sidles up the hill path and enters the massive space of the CAVERN, branching off into various chambers, hot coals in the great hearth still glowing warm. Some are fenced and hay-strewn, little stables, others have huge baskets neatly grouped and stacked. The comrades cannot help but look–milk and cheese aplenty, and they partake in excitement. But then their Captain bids them quiet. The baying and bell-ringing flock soon fills the corridors before them, and as the sound of the rolling boulder settles through and the light in the cave is eclipsed the sheep congregate obediently on the hay. In their wake, the comrades are gone.

We follow the man’s hulking shape as he shepherds the last of his flock in, and settles down in his kingdom–or does he? Something seems to bother him as he searches around emitting low growls. 

Maybe the plunder is evidenced by traces of milk and cheese on the cave floor. Nevertheless, we now see him from behind the baskets, where the Captain and his men are hiding, and soon he sees us too, turning to face us with a furious roar and a single gigantic eye bulging red and veiny on his bearded face.

BACK TO PHAEACIA. His reddened eyes filled with a mute terror.

“I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, king of Ithaca. My wife, Penelope, is waiting for me to come home from the war Menelaus waged on the city of Priamus. But in my journey I have angered Earthshaker Poseidon, and for ten years I have been cast upon the waves.”

— END EPISODE ONE —