Pandora's Box, subtitled A Fable From the Age of Science, is a BBC television documentary series by Adam Curtis looking at the consequences of political and technocratic rationalism. It won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 1993. Curtis deals with, in order: Communism in the Soviet Union, systems analysis and game theory during the Cold War, economy of the United Kingdom during the 1970s, the insecticide DDT, Kwame Nkrumah's leadership in Ghana in the 1950s, and the history of nuclear power. The documentary makes extensive use of clips from the short film Design for Dreaming, especially in the title sequence. Curtis's later series The Century of the Self and The Trap have similar themes to Pandora's Box. Background Adam Curtis explained the background to the series: "I grew up in the late Fifties and Sixties. To me, the scientist was a heroic figure in a white coat, who stood proudly in a gleaming laboratory. Everyone was captivated by the idea that science could be used to build a better world ... since then, the image has been severely tainted, and for me, Pandora's Box will aim to find out why". Pandora's Box was the first work by Adam Curtis to showcase his subsequently distinctive visual style. He explained: "in Pandora’s Box I wanted to make a sort of funny film about economics. I was just starting out in TV and was almost in tears when editing because I could find nothing to illustrate it and I thought I was going to be sacked. Out of that desperation I started raiding the BBC archive, I remember I even had talking squirrels in it at one point. Stylistically, a lot was born out of that necessity to get things done to a deadline." Episodes Part 1. 'The Engineers' Plot' This episode, originally broadcast on 11 June 1992, details how the Bolshevik revolutionaries who came into power in 1917 attempted to industrialise and control the Soviet Union with rational scientific methods. The Bolsheviks wanted to turn the Soviet people into scientific beings. Aleksei Gastev used social engineering, including a social engineering machine, to make people more rational. But Bolshevik politicians and bourgeois engineers came into conflict. Lenin said, "The communists are not directing anything, they are being directed." Stalin arrested 2000 engineers in 1930, eight of whom were convicted in the Industrial Party show trial. Engineering schools gave those loyal to the