Advisers refused even to reveal which typeface had been chosen to bear the portentous messages.
But it is too fragile a cinematic vehicle for the portentous messages it is supposed to deliver.
Two days before he was killed, he sent her a portentous video message on WhatsApp.
It was almost exactly a decade ago that Derek Quinlan (the Derek of that portentous text message), Dublin tax inspector turned archetypal, insanely-leveraged Celtic Tiger, first got wind that the Connaught, Claridge's, the Berkeley and the Savoy might be up for grabs, and asked McKillen if he was in.
I saw Trinity's "Crucible" at a special weekday-morning performance for high school students, who appeared to be as gripped as I was by both the message and the portentous events unfolding on stage.
Samuel Morse, sending the first telegraph message 125 years previously, chose the portentous phrase: "What hath God wrought?" But Kline's task was to log in remotely from LA to the Stanford machine, and there was no opportunity for portentousness: his instructions were to type the command LOGIN.
Along with the drama of the Discovery programs and the overwrought musical score and the sometimes-portentous narration by Mr. Sinise is, always, the message of the series: Human space exploration is worthwhile, even necessary.
His revelation of an enigmatic message behind a curtain is reminiscent of similarly portentous objects in such Renaissance masterpieces as Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of the merchant Georg Giese surrounded with the stuff of trade, or the emblems of greed and vanity with which Quentin Metsys accuses the couple in his picture The Moneylender and His Wife.
Written in the wake of 7/7 and the Paris riots, Ten New Messages is politicised in the sense that everyday life is now politicised, so there are no portentous proclamations, just vivid tales of anxious glances on the tube, civil unrest and urbanites on a short fuse.
The portentous minutes ticked away.
