Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdowns: Decentering the Female Detective in Collateral

by: Ina Rae Hark , June 14, 2021

Collateral, David Hare’s first multi-episode television drama, begins with the execution-style murder of an undocumented Iraqi migrant pizza delivery man named Abdullah Asif (Sam Otto), an event that ripples out to touch seemingly unconnected people of every permutation of gender, race, class, citizenship status, and sexuality. Likewise it implicates multiple British institutions from the military and the security services to the Church and Parliament in the mistreatment of migrants. Hare declares that his intent was to emphasise that ‘the 21st century looks as if it will be a time of mass movements and corresponding mass resentment of mobility. It looks to me as if privileged societies are urgently looking for ways of protecting their wealth, and of keeping the poor outside their boundaries’ (2018). The police investigation into the crime serves as the show’s narrative spine, but narrows its migrant focus primarily to the question of asylum seekers who enter the UK illegally, from potential terrorists to those seeking economic opportunities, to those fleeing war-torn countries like Syria. Reinhard Schweitzer points out that ‘the (forced) removal of “bogus asylum-seekers” accused of exploiting the UK asylum system at the expense of “genuine refugees” was an ‘easy sell’ for both government officials and the media’. (2014: 20-21) A racialised discourse resulted: ‘“Asylum seeker” has become shorthand for any ethnic minority, meaning that hostility can easily spill over from one group to the next. Expressing prejudice towards asylum seekers is reasonably socially acceptable, and some attitudes to asylum seekers are influenced by racism’. (Lewis 2006: 30)

The Intersectional Narrative that Isn’t

The female DI in charge of this investigation, Kip Glaspie (Carey Mulligan), who is working her first big case since her promotion, declares that her task is to pull things together. The program’s set-up promises an intersectional tour de force—some sort of grid map which plots characters against institutional imperatives regarding migration—albeit a rather schematic one (the number of coincidental connections would give Dickens pause). It does not play out that way. 

The series instead disaggregates its apparent intersections. Glaspie is the protagonist of the narrative thread that deals with the illegal migrant’s murder and the people-smuggling ring that had him killed, the story arc that critiques Britain’s policies concerning immigration (and implicitly race). The second narrative thread has the shooter, Captain Sandrine Shaw (Jeany Spark), as its lead, and uses her experiences to illustrate the toxic operations of the white patriarchy in the military. The third features Labour MP David Mars (John Simm) in a dissection of parliamentary politics, but crucially lacks any meaningful confrontation with racial or gender inequities, despite Mars being a vocal opponent of the current treatment of migrants. Some characters do straddle more than one of the narrative threads, but tend to play only minor roles in all but one of them. Thus, although Glaspie exposes the man at the head of a criminal organisation that traffics migrants as the person who commissioned the murder, while also serving as a white saviour for the victim’s two sisters, who face deportation, Collateral decenters her whenever its interest drifts to the other two plot lines. This essay will read this decentering and disaggregation through the lens of Hare’s fifty-year portrayal of gender politics.

In giving so much time to the Mars plot line, Collateral risks disavowing intersectionality altogether. As Michael Mangan notes, Hare has a career-long interest in examining British society’s ‘insistently male-dominated and “masculine” … structures of power and its structures of feeling’. (2007: 221) Collateral turns to this issue through Mars, who foregrounds Hare’s decades-long preoccupation with the failures of the predominantly white male British left to challenge Thatcherism, and then the compromised policies of New Labour. Moreover, in the end the series takes a detour around its many intersections and advocates for a retreat from challenges to institutional power into heteronormative romantic couplings that somehow evade the inequalities patriarchy prescribes.

A theme that does link the various narrative threads comes from the series’ consistent preoccupation with the many women who become collateral damage of the crime and its aftermath. Steve Greene observes, ‘[t]he more graceful critique within “Collateral” comes in how it shows the many ways in which its female characters become commodified’. (2018) Because Collateral gives major roles to a number of women caught up in the murder and its investigation, many reviewers of the series commented on this abundance of female characters, but ignored their commodification, seeing mere inclusion as a triumph for the women portrayed—strength in numbers. ‘The series does do something no crime thrillers have done before. It features a raft of female characters’, says Anitra Chawla. ‘The women are in charge’, writes Eleanor Halls of GQ. ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if male viewers felt a little bit left out’. (2018) ‘Women anchor the show and, it seems, the world itself’, notes Josephine Livingstone of The New Republic, who does go on, however, to provide a nuanced analysis of how women function within the series. In fact, although some of the women triumph, most struggle within the institutional power structures, and the narrative emphasises these struggles, especially for white Englishwomen. As Sophie Gilbert observes, ‘[f]or a show ostensibly about migration, it spends 95 percent of its time with westerners’. (2018)

Hare has long been known as the rare male British dramatist to consistently write major roles for women, but that representation has usually come with an asterisk attached, so to speak. Many feminists object that mere representation does not suffice, and that his female characters do not function as subjects, have little power within the world of men. Lib Taylor cautions that ‘while invested with moral authority’, they ‘lack agency’. (2007: 59) Hare has reacted defensively to these critiques, often speaking of feminism in pejorative terms. (Mangan 2007: 221) Furthermore, Hare’s women can seem schematic types, deployed over and over. In addition to the moral exemplar deprived of agency, the martyr to patriarchy and the abrasive truth-teller often labeled mad have recurred in his work since the 1970s, and show up in Collateral as well. 

The Victimised Assassin

The investigation proceeds from one woman abused by the system to another: ‘[t]hey are dismissed in group conversation, they are explicitly referred to as cattle in a slaughterhouse, and they are the victims of assault via blackmail. As the murder case opens up and reveals the full extent to which its main players have been manipulated, it underlines how Abdullah is far from the only victim in this story’.(Greene 2018) There is Laurie Stone (Haley Squires), a harried pizza restaurant manager, who gives jobs to some of the trafficked individuals at the pizza parlour while at the same time allowing the restaurant to serve as a distribution hub for Mikey Gowans (Brian Vernel), a local drug dealer, in exchange for money she needs as sole support of her dying mother; Fatima (Ahd Kamel) and Mona Asif (July Namir), undocumented sisters of the murdered man, both of whom face deportation; Jane Oliver (Nicola Walker), an out lesbian Anglican priest, whose Vietnamese lover Linh Xuan Huy (Kae Alexander) witnessed the crime; Karen Mars (Billie Piper), the customer who ordered the pizza, addicted to pot and gambling; Berna Yalaz (Maya Sansa), a Turkish language translator who is undercover in the smuggling organisation as an MI5 informant; and Shaw, a soldier with PTSD from her time in Afghanistan, and additional stress from having a sexual predator as her superior. 

The severity of the collateral damage depends upon another sort of collateral. Do the women have something useful to the police investigation that gives them leverage to escape the perilous situation the murder has put them in? All the possessors of such collateral are migrant women of colour. Fatima Asif has access to telephone video of the smugglers that Abdullah was using to blackmail them; Linh knows that the assassin was a woman; Berna has information that exposes the head of the smuggling operation and allows Glaspie to pressure MI5 to grant the Asif sisters legal status. Because the migrant women of colour the program focuses upon have more options to escape their plight, while white Englishwomen have less salutary outcomes, sympathies can shift from the migrants to the white victims.

Most centrally, the search for the shooter reveals Shaw’s desperation, entwined as she is in several traps laid by the patriarchy. It is rare for a procedural to put its narrative and emotional heft behind the murderer, but this is what happens here. The focus on Shaw also shifts the politics from migration to the military’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As David Walsh of WSWS observes: ‘[a]udience members who are unsympathetic to the military—and perhaps even the writer himself—have a certain reluctance at first to accept the patriotic and murderous soldier, Shaw, as the central, tragic figure. But that is what emerges. Why? Because she is the one suffering from the most advanced stage of the contagion, her disease is terminal. She is damaged beyond repair and spreads her sickness, to a large extent unintentionally and unconsciously, as far as possible’. (2018)

Shaw’s late, career Army officer father, whom she has idolised since childhood as a ‘great hero’, grooms her for identification with the patriarchy in its most hierarchical and destructive iteration, the military. When asked whether she goes by Miss or Ms., she replies ‘Captain’. Photos of her father and her brother, who ‘died for his country’, have pride of place on her bedside table. Missing are any pictures of her mother Eleanor (Deborah Findlay), a cashmere sweater and string of pearls-wearing typical suburban officer’s wife, who views the world through a gendered lens more characteristic of the mid-twentieth century than the twenty-first. She and her daughter find each other incomprehensible and their company mutually insufferable.

Shaw’s world literally blows up when a Taliban terrorist bombs the site where she and other British troops are working on a project with a group of Afghan women, killing her ‘best friend’—and implied lover—Elizabeth, whose ‘bits’ cover Shaw to the extent that she feels she can never wash them all off. This trauma leaves her unable to get psychiatric clearance to return to the war zone in order to take revenge. A mounting desire to kill a terrorist, any terrorist, renders her easily manipulated by the head of the smuggling ring, her father’s long-time friend, Peter Westbourne (Richard McCabe). He is retired from the Army and uses a travel agency as a front for his smuggling operations, insisting to his subordinates that it must be run according to military standards. He has assumed the father-function in the Shaw family, and when he needs to be rid of Abdullah Asif, who is threatening to expose his crimes, he points Sandrine’s anger at him and pulls the trigger.

After she kills Asif, however, Shaw begins to see through the male military ethos. Her superior officer, Major Timothy Dyson (Richard Portal), is an infamous sexual harasser who has driven a former female aide to a nervous breakdown. Another woman in her regiment notes that no one has stopped his predations ‘because this is the army.’ Dyson finds the phone Shaw uses to contact Westbourne and blackmails her into having sex with him. This sends her spiralling as she holds Dyson’s wife Phoebe (Orla Brady) at gunpoint, convinces her of her husband’s sins, and drives off in the Dysons’ car to a hotel she and her father used to frequent when she was a child. There she writes a confession, and shoots herself. She has finally seen that the men she worshiped were, like Dyson, abusers. Dyson insists to Phoebe that ‘The woman’s mad’. It is the habitual reaction to any woman in Hare’s oeuvre who speaks uncomfortable truths. ‘Are all women mad?’ his wife snaps back, accepting Shaw’s version of events. Collateral insists that they are not mad as in crazy, but mad as in angry as hell.

The Olympian Detective

Mulligan’s dominating performance gives the nominal protagonist Glaspie a vivid and consistent personality that obscures the program’s narrative incoherence and decentering tendencies. Glaspie speaks with brutal candour, does not tolerate prevaricating b.s. from others, resists bullying and intimidation, and relentlessly pushes forward with her investigation, despite institutional roadblocks. She ‘rarely smiles, doles out sarcastic asides with a hardline stare, and won’t take no for an answer’. (Halls 2018) Her partner, DS Nathan Bilk (Nathaniel Martello-White), tells her she needs to take a communications course. Yet the facts of her life that do not stem from personality fail to tally with that personality, or to add up convincingly overall. She was an Olympic pole-vaulter, then a teacher, now a detective, married to a fellow educator and is pregnant (as was the actress at the time of filming). Greg Fienberg, who reviewed Collateral very favourably, does demur that ‘the different details from her past … feel less like traits and more like a writer thinking, “And wouldn’t it be interesting if she were also…”’. (2018) During a Q&A after a screening of the first episode at the BFI, Mulligan and Hare themselves laughed and rolled their eyes when describing Glaspie as a ‘pregnant pole vaulter’. (‘Collateral Conversation’ 2018)

Collateral’s genre as a police procedural also destabilises the centrality of Glaspie’s character, because Hare was ambivalent about working within the conventions of that genre. ‘At its start, Collateral may seem to be familiar’, he writes. ‘After all, it does involve a police investigation. But I hope you will notice the absence of any of the usual apparatus of police procedurals. I can promise you there are no shots of computers or pentel boards’. (2018) At the BFI, director S.J. Clarkson describes the struggle with the writer over allowing the police cars to employ sirens and flashing blue lights: he viewed them as a cliché, but she pointed out that an audience would not suspend disbelief at their absence. (‘Collateral Conversation’ 2018) There is nothing more typical of a police procedural than the lead detective as centerpiece. Thus, Hare perhaps strives too hard to render Glaspie as someone who does not fit that mould.

Commenters often point to the pole vaulting as the detail that threatens to render Glaspie absurd. An awkwardly literalised metaphor that stands out because one rarely thinks of women track and field athletes in such competitions, it is nevertheless no different in kind than if Glaspie were a hurdler, sprinter, or marathon runner. Each of those sports would indicate a different but easily legible characteristic of her investigative methods. So the pole vaulting, in context, represents her activities in a male field, using a phallic prop, to propel her over the patriarchal obstacles that seek to stymie her inquiry into the criminal organisation that powerful men wish to preserve.

Chief among those men is MI5 agent Sam Spence (John Heffernan), a self-described ‘mid-level English racist’ who takes the security services’ view of the police as social workers and PR flacks who are not tough enough on asylum seekers. He assumes a mocking tone when noting that Glaspie’s husband Gerald (Tom Turner) is a head of school, as if teaching were an unmanly profession. Spence has his informant, Yalaz, inside the people-smuggling organisation; her intelligence gives him a heads-up on any terrorists trying to enter the country. So it serves Spence well that the smuggling continues unabated. In race, class, and gender, he is the opposite to the undocumented women of colour who suffer the most direct collateral damage from Asif’s murder. This sets up the sort of intersectional conflict Collateral promises but does not deliver. Glaspie’s team mediates in its composition between the white male world of Spence and the non-white female world of the Asif sisters. She, the white DI, is assisted by a South Asian woman, DC Rakhee Shah (Vineeta Rishi), and Bilk, a Black man. Bilk views Glaspie with suspicion and resentment, and betrays her outright by keeping Spence abreast of the investigation’s progress. When confronted by his colleagues, Bilk insists that class differences make it hard for him to collaborate with the two educated women, whom he views as dilettantes about police work. But this argument doesn’t explain his alliance with the white MI5 officer whose upper-class bona fides outrank all of them. It is clear that his shared gender with Spence trumps any allegiance to his female partners. Collateral also misses the chance to put him in the context of the series’ discourse on race.

Speaking to her husband after the investigation has concluded, Glaspie replies to his inquiry as to whether its resolution has satisfied her with ‘I got close.’ This seems an overly optimistic assessment. Harm comes to many of those whom she pursues: Mikey is beaten, Stone and Shaw are dead. Although she breaks up the people-smuggling ring, Westbourne escapes. No one directly involved in Asif’s murder will be brought before justice. That she does intervene successfully for the Asif sisters and Berna Yalaz has to do only with the evidentiary material they can leverage. When Fatima mentions her detention centre friend Gillian’s (Anna-Maria Nabirye) predicament as someone who came to England at age two, never attained legal residency, and is now facing deportation, Glaspie, despite her sympathies for migrants, shrugs it off as something that happens to people who over-stay if they are unlucky.

Throughout Collateral, many people recognise Glaspie as an Olympic athlete. This is not because Britons are devoted to pole vaulting but because, during one of her vaults, she ‘landed badly’, hitting the ground on her back and bouncing comically. Video of the incident went viral and she keeps a copy of it on her phone to remind her that it will always be part of who she is. The risks she takes do not always pay off, as the mixed results of her investigation of Asif’s murder demonstrate. Although her original target, the shooter, would have brought herself to justice without any police intervention, Glaspie does track her down, and has the opportunity to prevent her suicide. And in this instance her candour fails her. Shaw is desperate to believe that she killed a dangerous terrorist, but instead of telling her a consoling lie until the situation de-escalates, Glaspie says, ‘I know someone told you that and I know why they told you that.’ Shaw’s despairing wail leads to a scene, witnessed only by the viewer, in which Glaspie’s affect alters from the way she presents in every other instance. Her face is consistently impassive, allowing at the most a small, wry smile or widened eyes when her boss DSU Jack Haley (Ben Miles) berates her for violating protocol. But now she is practically mugging as she contorts her features to indicate dismay at her mistake, and then reacts so viscerally at hearing the gunshot that she slams herself against a wall, as if she herself had taken a bullet. This moment will no doubt remain in her memory the way the viral video of her fall stays on her phone. Even if the incident is not a public humiliation, she has once again landed badly. Kip Glaspie may avoid the martyrdom suffered by so many Hare women who share her personality traits, but she leaves a trail of martyred women in her wake.

The Shadow MP

To the extent that Collateral addresses the migrant issue on a macro level, it does so through the articulation of a more humane policy by David Mars, the transportation minister in Labour’s Shadow Cabinet. Infamous for calling the UK a ‘nasty little island’ during a press conference, Mars rails against his party’s complicity with the Conservatives in wanting to maintain a fortress of the privileged, walled off from the global poor and desperate. Hare said at the BFI that his attitude toward writing about migration was ‘Bugger research’(‘Collateral Conversation’ 2018); he has Mars speak in broadly philosophical terms that echo his own. The history of how such policies were drafted, enacted, and marketed remains unspoken. For a television drama it is difficult to shoehorn in a granular analysis. Gareth Mulvey (2010) and Reinhard Schweitzer (2014) provide useful summations of such analyses. Their details render Mars’ claims as disingenuous, however, when it comes to his implication that Labour has insufficiently countered the anti-migrant policies of the Conservatives after Labour’s loss of power in 2010. Most of them, Mulvey demonstrates, were formulated by New Labour during their tenure as ruling party: ‘[t]he Labour Government elected in 1997 legislated on immigration on an unprecedented scale. The Acts passed have primarily focused on asylum controls, though new channels for economic migration have opened up, and changes have been made to nationality and citizenship. Nevertheless, due to their focus on unwanted migrants, the Acts and the discourse surrounding them convey a dominant message that migration is a bad thing’. (2010) Hare has been a harsh critic of the Blair government, as in Stuff Happens (2004), his chronicle of the Iraq War. Moreover, the victory of the Leave side in the Brexit referendum introduced by the Cameron government owed much to anxiety about white, legal migrants from other EU countries. Despite the opportunity it provides to skewer the Tories, this is an issue Collateral also astoundingly fails to reference. These omissions mystify. Perhaps they are once again in service of streamlining the issue for viewer consumption. The net result, however, is to provide a view of migrant policy unchanged from the media template adopted two decades before the series is set.

Mars not only serves in a Shadow Cabinet, but also serves as a shadow protagonist of the series. He and Glaspie meet in one brief scene. As their colloquy ends, they commiserate on the difficulties for their careers brought on by advocating for migrant rights, but have no other interaction. Yet Mars serves as a hinge, connecting to the women involved in the case but not in its criminal conspiracies. Glaspie naturally becomes the nexus for suspects as they surface. The murder occurs in Mars’ constituency, giving him a flimsy reason to involve himself in it. But to have one person acquainted with so many who are randomly touched by the incident requires some of Collateral’s most convoluted plotting. Mars is an old friend of Jane Oliver, the vicar, whom Laurie Stone sought out for spiritual guidance. He has endorsed the renewal of her lover Linh’s student visa, not knowing it has already lapsed. Linh is the only witness to the shooting. Most incredibly, Karen, the woman whose regular Monday night order of pizza with marijuana on top enables the plan to put Abdullah Asif where Shaw can kill him, is Mars’ ex-wife.

Such narrative contortions create in Mars’ storyline a mirror image Glaspie’s. Its inversions shift white women from victims to power brokers, with Mars as the beleaguered man who must deal with them. For example, in the place of DSU Haley, who reacts so negatively to Glaspie’s rule-bending methods, we have Labour Party leader Deborah Clifford (Saskia Reeves), who calls Mars in before dawn to warn him to follow party dictates instead of his conscience or lose his position in the Shadow Cabinet. The roles of people of colour also shift. Unlike the skeptical Bilk, Monique (Jacqueline Boatswain) the Black woman who is Mars’ chief of staff protects him even while concerned that he is committing career suicide. The starkest contrast, however, resides in Karen Mars. Married for four months to David seven years previously, she is a caricature of the nightmare ex, scheming to keep him involved in her life, using the daughter they had together as leverage. She cannot hold a job, spends her days in bed in a drugged-out haze, and hacks the au pair’s bank account to get money for her gambling addiction. In mitigation of her behavior, Karen points to her childhood in Beirut, during the 1982 Lebanon War, when an Israeli bomb killed her parents. This echo of Sandrine Shaw’s Middle East trauma does not garner Karen even a modicum of the sympathy the script lavishes on Shaw. Karen, for all her sins, never murdered anyone, but in the inverted world of this plot strand, most white women are transformed from excusable criminals to hectoring harpies. 

Collateral’s centre, a female detective bringing together the elements of a murder that arises from a people-smuggling operation, as I have asserted, does not hold. The wobble away from migration as a subject nevertheless expands upon the difficulties of women in patriarchy in a meaningful way. Yet it would seem that the wobble back to migration as a subject shifts the gender politics radically. The paradox of David Hare as the man who populates his works with so many women yet gets no love from feminists has persisted for fifty years, and looks unlikely to resolve itself. Sandra Mayer writes in 2019 that Hare’s ‘celebrity persona’ is wrapped up in the ‘Royal Court realism (mainly that of a white, male variety) [that] has made a claim to be dominant in English theatre’ (40) but that, according to Mary Luckhurst, he has a ‘profound sense of unease that theatrical realism and traditional purveyors of it like himself might indeed be redundant’. (2002: 57)

Whether or not the result of such Hareian paradoxes, the eventual fates of these characters touched by the murder of Abdullah Asif display disparate permutations and combinations of positions on a graph that maps victimisation, moral culpability, sympathies, and severity of consequences. The men show little variance. They are culpable to a serious extent, without mitigating factors, suffer setbacks but no severe consequences, and receive little sympathy. The women on whom the narrative focuses run the gamut, however. Mona Asif is the least culpable, her rape and subsequent pregnancy causing the siblings to flee to save her life. She exercises so little agency, however, that she seems less complicit in the illegal entry into the UK than her brother and sister. Viewed sympathetically throughout, she receives legal residency while her newborn daughter qualifies for British citizenship. Shaw, of course, scores high on every rubric, a victim on many fronts, a murderer, penalised by death, yet shown enormous sympathy in her portrayal. A median case is probably Jane Oliver, who fails to keep Laurie and Linh safe in order to concentrate on preserving her position in the church. Her motives are unselfish but her actions do impinge negatively on others. The depiction of Karen Mars, on the other hand, carries a misogynistic zeal quite out of proportion to her actual culpabilities. But if one cannot deduce a reliable algorithm for where Collateral’s sympathies will go, the narrative’s emphasis on the collateral damage that stems from Abdullah’s murder also reveals that its victims are not entirely blameless in their victimisation.

Har(e)ing Off to the Exit

Steven Fielding discusses the proliferation of UK television dramas depicting ‘the association between New Labour and “sleaze”’ as ‘the result of important changes in the nature of television, which meant dramatists were increasingly encouraged to reinforce the belief that politicians of all parties were uniquely corrupt’. (2012: 2) He cites Hare’s stage works as inspiration for such dramas (2012: 5). He also concludes that these television dramas ultimately ‘suggest that flight not fight is the only option’. (2012: 17) In Collateral a utopian, mutually supportive heterosexual relationship is the recommended refuge, ironic given the toxic gender dynamics the series details. Glaspie has already achieved this at the outset, and this is conveyed through the words of her husband—although only his words, as he remains unseen throughout. When Jane Oliver chooses to retain her position in the Church by sacrificing her relationship with Linh, arguing that she has to choose the life of the parish over her personal happiness, the screenplay implies that this is the wrong choice. Mars’ plot arc assures us that he will not make the same mistake.

Like Glaspie’s, Mars’ first scene finds him in bed with an intimate partner. But this is only his third date with television journalist Suki Vincent (Kim Medcalf), who points out that all of them have been delayed or interrupted by his ministerial or constituent responsibilities. She departs angrily but subsequently writes him a letter urging him not to deny himself sustained human relationships for the sake of a quixotic political quest. In the end, he follows that advice and goes off into the night to have dinner with Vincent, skipping the vote on a surveillance bill his leader has demanded he take part in, content to let the career fallout come as it may.

Glaspie’s first name, Kip (a nickname for Christopher), is an unusual one for a woman. Its choice becomes clear, however, when one realises that ‘kip’ is also British slang for sleep. She works the case for three nights and two days without respite, except for a few brief naps, and others remark repeatedly on her lack of sleep. Thus, when it is resolved, she tells her husband, in her last words of the series, ‘All I want now is sleep’. On the surface, Collateral portrays a smart, relentless woman detective who succeeds in untangling all the criminal elements that led to the murder of Abdullah Asif and rescues his sisters from an unjust asylum system. As I have asserted, David Hare, who has long engaged in the masochistic project of exposing the pernicious operations of British power structures while simultaneously demonstrating the futility of such exposures, deploys many devices to decenter and undercut this view of his police officer protagonist. The final one is to restrict her window for success to how long she can stay continuously awake.