The 6th Day|Toronto Eaton Centre — the glass galleria where you buy your pet back

RePet is the joke that carries the whole premise of The 6th Day: a bright retail chain where you hand over a tissue sample and walk out with your dead dog again, cheerful signage, no questions. The mall that houses it is not in Vancouver at all. The production crossed the country for it and shot in the Toronto Eaton Centre, where the escalators, the tiers of railings and the long vaulted glass ceiling give you a consumer cathedral in a single wide shot.

Eberhard Zeidler designed the galleria and it opened in 1977, a deliberate descendant of Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II — a barrel-vaulted glass roof running most of a city block between Queen and Dundas, with the shop floors stacked along both flanks and open air down the middle. Michael Snow's *Flight Stop*, sixty fibreglass Canada geese frozen mid-descent, has hung under that roof since the beginning. The building is one of the most visited places in the country, with tens of millions of people through it a year.

The choice is smarter than it first looks. A cloning storefront only works on screen if it sits somewhere completely ordinary, surrounded by the same signage as a phone shop. The galleria supplies that and also supplies scale: enough vertical space that the camera can look down four levels and find the future looking exactly like a Tuesday.

Go in from the Dundas end and take the escalators to the top. Stand at the railing under the vault, find the geese overhead, and look down at the floor traffic. The light through that glass is the same light in the film. The only difference is the signs, which have changed brand by brand for fifty years and will change again, which is more or less what the movie was worried about.

Location photo: Toronto Eaton Centre (Wikimedia Commons).