American Gods - 'Git Gone' and 'Lemon Scented You'

The hell of mundanity.

So, we left Shadow walking into a motel room to be confronted with his dead wife. We'll have to wait to see what happens next, because first we're going back to see what happened before.

A bored croupier named Laura meets a thief named Shadow in the casino where she works. He proposes that they rob the place together after she keeps him from getting caught trying to rip the house off. Instead they fall in love and get married. He gets into normal life, but she craves something more exciting and persuades him to carry out her 'perfect' plan. He gets caught and goes to prison, but covers for her. While he's inside, she has an affair with her best friend's husband and they both die in a car crash (while ravens circle overhead, which is a touch suspect.)

"And what do we say to the God of death?"
"Fuck you!"

Laura goes to a desert, where Anubis threatens to seal her into the hot tub where she used to huff bug spray (the titular 'Git Gone') for a release from the monotony of her life. Having believed in nothing, she will go into darkness, he explains. "And then peace?" she asks. "There will be darkness," he replies. Then she is dragged back to the world, where she slaughters shadow's attackers, but loses an arm. Going to Audrey's house to scavenge thread to sew the arm back on, she meets her erstwhile best friend in a surreal and awkward scene which reiterates what seems to be the thesis of the episode: Laura shouldn't be with Shadow because he loves her, and she doesn't love him. She admits that maybe she didn't in life, but in death she does.

After a run in with Anubis/Mr Jaquel and his partner Mr Ibis, who get her all preserved and vital looking before promising to seal her in a hot tub for eternity when she's done, Laura waits for an indeterminate amount of time in a motel room until Shadow arrives.

So... mammoth.

'Lemon Scented You' opens with a gorgeously stylised 'Coming to America' about a stone age tribe crossing the land bridge from Siberia, then follows up on this less-than-cordial reunion (Shadow is angry that she had an affair, but takes her resurrection as par for the course,) which is interrupted when he and Wednesday are ratted out for bank robbery. Laura has a fight with Mad Sweeney, who is a poor match for zombie strength, but manages to force her into a bathtub just as the police arrive, again, to break up the fight.

At the precinct, three of the new gods show up: The Technical Boy, Media (appearing as Seven-Year Itch Marilyn Monroe, having earlier manifested as David Bowie) and their apparent boss, Mr World, seemingly a god of surveillance and/or information. The Boy is forced to apologise to Wednesday and Shadow for interfering with Wednesday's business and lynching Shadow (lynching a black man, his colleagues remind the Boy, is poor public image,) and World offers Wednesday an alliance. An upgrade to become god of military death satellites. Odin refuses, insisting that the new gods just take people's time; they don't give back. They don't give people purpose.

Bowie.

The new gods take this with equanimity, then leave our protagonists to flee from a precinct full of horribly murdered cops, because they lack class and subtlety more or less as a defining characteristic.

'Git Gone' is a strange episode, but by showing us the backstory of Laura's life sheds a light on the character that the novel never managed. There she remained in the conflict between Shadow's idealised memories and the fact of her betrayal, but here she is fully realised as a frankly rather unlikeable character – Mad Sweeney is a jerk, but you can't help feeling for him as he's dragged away from the smirking corpse who is sending him down with her immobility – which is a bold and even brilliant subversion of the dead love archetype.

The story doesn't really pick up again until 'Lemon Scented You', which gives the new gods a chance to flex their muscles and show their hand, which is powerful, if flashy. This too, however, is a curiously immobile episode, and in two hours of television we've only really progressed about that long in real time from the end of 'A Head Full of Snow', and now we're halfway through the season. It's a brave step in the history of pacing to go for such a leisurely gait, and I don't think we'll know until the end of the season whether it will prove to have paid off.

Emerald City - 'Mistress - New - Mistress'

"We've been thinking about putting in solar panels."

Destiny looms, in the next episode of the latest Oz adaptation.

Dorothy continues towards Oz, but a near-miss with Eamonn the Unspeakably Rowdy reveals that the Wizard wants her found and killed, although she still has no idea why. In search of answers,she and Lucas travel to East's palace, where Dorothy's possession of East's jewelled gauntlets - known as the Elements - convinces her major domo Suleiman that Dorothy was secretly trained as East's successor.

Elsewhere, there are witches committing magical suicide and the weather is going cray cray, as weather was what East controlled. Anna, the new girl on the Wizard's Council of Nuns, is the only one to realise that this is messing with the omens of the Beast Forever's return, and that all of the Council's calculations are therefore off. This wins her favour with the Wizard, although she kind of blows it by realising that one of his supposed powers - command of an army of giant automata - may have been a teensy bit exaggerated. She is banged up, but not before - correctly - predicting snow in midsummer.

Witch stylin'.

Also exaggerated is Dorothy's degree of being a trainee witch, but she agrees to try to tame the weather, intending to leap into the Witch of the East's control tornado and whisk herself back to Kansas. First, however, she has to be purified, which involves having a bath and putting on a floaty red dress. Then she has to walk on water and tame a giant snake - essentially the magical equivalent of username and password - to enter the tornado and end up in... midwinter beside a river full of shopping trolleys. It's not what she was expecting, but even less so is she expecting to find evidence that her mother was here. Returning, she sparks a brouhaha with Suleiman when it becomes apparent that she isn't the trainee and that the Witch did not die peacefully, but by her own hand. He does reveal, before they cheese it, that her mother was an interloper brought to the tornado to be got rid of, and should have stayed in the land of trolleys.

In our final thread, Jack and Tip travel to the city of Ev in search of more of the medicine which apparently stopped Tip becoming a girl. They find an apothecary, but he won't make more of the potion. He tells them that what Mombi was dosing Tip with is a black elixir; illegal magic that keeps the drinker from being what they truly are. Tip may only remember being a boy, but his 'real' self is the girl.

Which is... a hell of a thing, and I think the series does very well here. Tip wants to become a boy again, while Jack tries to kiss him, because Tip still identifies as male, while Jack is... pretty shallow really, and more to the point has immediately redefined Tip by apparent, biological gender.

Jack: Not an ally.

I'm not saying that Jack deserves to be pushed off a roof, but it was a dick move, and accidents happen.

So, Dorothy seems to be a witch, but nevertheless, Tip is by far the most interesting thing in this series so far. I don't know how contemplative the genderswitching in Oz is, but Emerald City appears to be looking at more than just his biological sex. While a boy is what he was made by Mombi, it is also the only thing he has ever known himself to be, which is why I'm going to continue using he until the character indicates otherwise.

Emerald City - 'Prison of the Abject'

"Were you looking for a veteran British character actor?"

We're off to see the Wizard,

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Because, because, because, because, because,

Because of the dubious beard he has.

We open with Dorothy trying to teach the amnesiac Lucas about knock-knock jokes, only for him to be overcome with blood poisoning. She gets directions to an apothecary named Mombi, who turns out to be a witch who lives in a house with a magically activated thorn-bush door, which I'm pretty sure is illegal in the Wizard's Oz. Depressingly, I'm far less certain of the legal status of Tip, the boy she keeps locked up 'to protect him', but Tip certainly feels that free is what he's meant to be, and intends to be so with the help of his friend Jack.

The fearsome Geometric Guard.

In the Emerald City, the last remaining Cardinal Witches gather for the funeral of East, which will seal away her soul and magic. In a PR move, the Wizard opens the ceremony to the public, knowing that it's some freaky shit and will damage the witches' standing with the people. Glinda of the North also brings a new councillor/nun from her orphanage to make political side-eye at Councillor Knocked-Up, and tells him that since he banned witches from taking apprentices, no-one knows how to maintain the spells on the Prison of the Abject where potential witches are held(1), so nyeah.

Speaking of, the Wizard's goon Eamonn leads a group of guards through the Prison in pursuit of Dorothy, and kills a would-be mutineer who for some reason mistakes Mr Intense for a shiftless eccentric.

Mombi takes Dorothy and Lucas in and treats the latter's wounds, despite identifying him by his sword as one of the Wizard's witch-killing guards, only for Dorothy to get all confrontational about Tip. While Mombi is sleeping, her guests try to help Tip escape and the boy gets away, although he refuses to let Jack steal anything. Mombi goes all Black Canary and Lucas flips out, stabs her and bashes her face into a pulp. As Dorothy leaves, Lucas follows, face all bloodied, and tries to engage her with a knock knock joke, which, fair play, is hella creepy.

Out in the woods, Tip runs out of medicine and, as much to his surprise as Jack's(2), turns into a girl. Back at the house, Mombi starts to recover, because only a witch can kill a witch, if you recall.

"Of course I'm a girl now; look how much hair I have."

Emerald City is a bit of a mixed bag. I'm starting to suspect that it is secretly brilliant, but that a wealth of strong ideas are mired in the unfortunate collision of director Tarsem Singh's unique vision and the constraints of an Anglo-American television budget. The casting is a dead giveaway – all unknown talent and jobbing thespians, with D'Onofrio the only significant 'name' – although the problem is definitely not the actors. Rather, it lies in a production where every element is heavy with unachieved spectacle. I am reminded somewhat of the original production of Neverwhere, a decent effort that had everything necessary to be amazing except a realistic expectation of what was possible on a television budget, although at least Emerald City wasn't stuck with Neverwhere's video filming problem.

I'm still on board with Emerald City for now, but with Person of Interest and The Magicians coming back, and my family due to move in with me in a month's time, we may be approaching another crunch.

(1) I'm pretty sure this is the same spell that she used on Lucas and Dorothy last episode, which makes them roll around on the floor, convinced that they are trapped in a James Bond opening sequence.

(2) Although serious Baumheads were almost certainly all going 'duh!'

A Brief History of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

The shiny brass plaque of
professionalism.

"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."

- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
In his brief half-century of life, the writer Douglas Adams produced both less than one might imagine given the depth of his influence on western SF culture, and more than a lot of people know. A good fifty percent of his actual published writing and at least ninety of his enduring legacy is encompassed by the multi-media, multi-canoned Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, and a good deal of the rest (of the former, if not the latter) by the two novels and incomplete fragments of the third in the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series.

An odd beast, the original novel is a mash-up of two Doctor Who scripts - Shada, which was never completed due to industrial action, and City of Death, which was filmed in Paris as a cheap holiday for the cast or something and is remembered as one of the all-time classics - with all-new characters save only for Professor Chronotis, an eccentric and possibly immortal Cambridge academic whose rooms are in fact a time machine. Central to the narrative is Dirk Gently - originally named Svlad Cjelli - a self-styled holistic detective whose method of solving crimes by seeking the interconnectedness of all things closely resembles a mixture of grotesque emotional manipulation and dumb luck. He returned in a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and a third novel, The Salmon of Doubt was at the work in progress stage when Adams died, although it is telling of the weight of his own legacy that he had expressed doubts as to whether it wasn't actually another HitchHiker novel.

Thus the entirety of the Dirk Gently series was a pair of modestly received novels with way, way more ideas than either story or character. Not to say that they were bad, although in truth I've never got on with Adams' novels as well as I have his screen and radio writing; something about the pace of reading makes the flaws in his characters - and especially his female characters, although fair play, Kate Schechter in Tea-Time is one of his better efforts - that little bit more glaring perhaps.

The Electric Monk is one of many key concepts dropped from
most other adaptations.

It took a long time for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to get adapted, but by heck it's making up for lost time now. First up, namesake Dirk Maggs came off his adaptation of the remaining Hitch-Hiker novels on a high and went straight into producing a radio adaptation of the two novels starring Harry Enfield as Dirk Gently (and the late Andrew Sachs as Professor Chronotis, which is slightly disconcerting as he played the villainous Skagra in the audio revival of Shada, who murders that version of Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord.) Debuting in 2007, twenty years after the publication of the novel, to a mixed reception, I personally felt that they did an excellent job of capturing the feel of the novels, and in fact it was only on listening that I really understood how the end of the first novel worked(1).

It was intended that the same crew would then tackle The Salmon of Doubt, but for Reasons(TM) it never happened. Either causally or consequentially, Dirk Maggs left Above the Title Productions to found his own production company, and I guess that Above the Title was left with the rights to the third series, but not the driving force.

The property then languished for all of two years, before BBC4 hit us with Dirk Gently, a pilot for a proposed series starring Stephen Mangan as Gently. This series departed dramatically from the novel in a number of ways, not least by making the bemused everyman character Richard Macduff almost as much of a dick as Gently himself, as well as removing Professor Chronotis, the Electric Monk and about eighty percent of the hardcore weirdness and front and centering Gently's secretary's pathological fixation on her employer in a way that, astonishingly, resulted in a worse-written female character than the one in the novel. There was also a bleakness to it that seemed at odds with a certain sense of wonder, or at least the search for wonder in a life that insists on making marvels commonplace, that feels key to Dirk Gently as a character.

In the series Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently runs a
holistic detective agency.

Once more speaking purely from my own perspective, I was not a fan of the pilot, although I felt that the series was improving before it got canned after three episodes, pulling in ideas from the two novels and removing some of the antagonism from the Macduff/Gently relationship to make the characters a little less abrasive. The overall response was positive, but not enough for BBC4 to overcome the BBC's natural and deep-seated aversion to producing non-Doctor Who SF programming. There's something fundamental in the BBC psyche that seems to insist that SF and fantasy programing is intrinsically silly and shouldn't be taken seriously, with the result that the Corporation produces almost nothing in these fields that is not on some level parody, and if it does will ensure that such programmes are derided as 'trashy fun' at best in their official listings magazine.

But you know who isn't ashamed of making SF? That's right; America. Thus it is that Dirk Gently has been exported, courtesy of IDW Publishing, who began running their Dirk Gently comic strip in 2015 and collaborated with BBC America and Netflix to bring him back to the screen in 2016, this time played by jobbing thesp Samuel Barnett. It is notable that in both media, Gently remains unassailably British (of possibly Transylvanian extraction,) although they are set in the US. Apparently something about the character resists characterisation as anything but a middle-class white Brit. Fair play, Barnett manages to combine wholesome and creepy to great effect. The rest of the cast are right at home in the new territory, however, and the original supporting cast are gone along with the matching plots.

That hair though...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an eight-part serial, in which Dirk teams up with Todd, a downtrodden bellhop played by Elijah Wood, to investigate the murder of a billionaire, the disappearance of his daughter and all manner of associated weirdness. It has time travel, body-swapping, gunfights, a holistic assassin who follows the same pattern of beliefs as Dirk, but is possessed of a deep certainty that the world guides her to kill those who need to be killed in some way, and a shark in the body of a kitten. Once more then, the original story is jettisoned, and the writing style is sufficiently different to that of the original that it is really glaring when they drop in something lifted directly. The series casts Gently as one of a number of individuals with a unique and erratic connection with fate, which is rarely of any great advantage to him, but which he hopes may be of help to others. He's younger in spirit and less cynical than earlier incarnations, with his constant manipulation due more to deeply flawed social skills and possible autistic tendencies(2). Todd is an intensely dislikable character, which provides little contrast with Gently, but is worked for an effective antagonism as both work towards their eventual redemption.

Of course, I'm not sure that redemption really suits Gently; it sort of hinges on a sense of shame that the original character certainly never showed much sign of, given his struggles with guilt in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm also dubious as to whether British absurdist SF benefits from gun battles, and vice versa. I didn't hate the series, but it feels as if - and the same is true of Dirk Gently - it's not actually Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so much as a very different thing using a lot of the same ideas.

In the series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency, Dirk Gently does not run a holistic
detective agency.

I miss the original storylines in the TV versions, and what replaces it never has quite the same timbre of weirdness; that is, they're weird, but it's their own kind of weirdness, in an adaptation of a novel whose native brand of weirdness feels at least as intrinsic to the work as any of the characters. Neither series has been terrible, but neither series has been, deep down, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency because neither of them has, deep down, really had a Dirk Gently to its name.

Dirk Gently was born as a human expee of the Doctor, and perhaps as a result is almost as hard to get a solid handle on as the Time Lord himself. It's hard to say why some Doctors work for us and some don't, but we all(3) have distinct ideas about when a Doctor 'isn't quite right'. I'm not sure that there is yet a definitive interpretation of Gently. They all have something, but none of them have everything. Enfield was excellent, but ultimately lacked a final quality of essential vigor, perhaps a consequence of picking a proven comic talent over an untried youth. Mangan's Gently was as coolly manipulative as any Sherlock, but more obsessive in his pursuit of answers than driven by an often-inappropriate joie de vivre in discovery. Barnett's is more of an enigma, even to himself, and probably the most complex of the bunch, possibly even including the novels, which are as I say notable move for complexity of ideas than of character. The thing of it is... Dirk Gently is not a character who is an enigma to himself, at least not knowingly so. Anyone who can pursue investigations by following random strangers and have the neck to charge for it can't be consciously harbouring any serious doubts as to their calling.

For myself, and for what it's worth, I would rate the various media as follows:

1. The radio series. I like audio, and I like Adams on audio especially.
2. The novels. I know it may be sacrilege, but see above re me and Adams' novels.
3. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
4. Dirk Gently. 

(1) It helps to know that 'Kubla Khan' is a fragment, but Adams himself has admitted to not being able to quite fit the end together when he went back to it.
(2) It's not explicit, and there are few people - even fewer in fiction - who don't fit one or more criteria or definitions of autism.
(3) All encompassing here the particular subset of Doctor Who fans.

Westworld - 'The Original' and 'Chestnut'

Welcome to Westworld.

Remember the glorious oddity that was Fargo a few years back? And of course 12 Monkeys? Yeah, we're going through a definite phase of TV adaptations of movies, and now HBO have reached further back for their adaptation of 1973's Michael Crichton-penned Westworld.

As in the film, the titular Westworld is an elaborate vacation resort in the not-so-distant future, where guests pay for an authentic old west experience, provided for them by android 'hosts' programmed to provide whatever the guests want, but without actual awareness that they aren't real people. Through the first episode, 'The Original', we meet several hosts - Dolores, a wholesome settler girl; Teddy, her nice would-be boyfriend; Maeve, the madame of the local bar - some of the staff of Westworld - founder, Robert Ford; head programmer, Bernard Lowe; ops manager, Theresa Cullen; paranoid security chief, Stubbs; and narrative director Lee Sizemore, a colossal tool - and a few guests, only one of whom is particularly noteworthy; the Man in Black.

Visually, the Man in Black is very similar to the android Gunslinger in the
movie, and similarly driven.

The twist is that in this version, the malfunctioning androids aren't the antagonists, or at least not solely or universally. Repeatedly subjected to violence and indignity by the guests, they come back from each refit as full of hope, anger or joy as ever, only to be beaten, raped or killed again by people that they can not hurt or even fight in return. They are very much the better angels of this tale, especially by comparison to the staff who enable their treatment and guests like the Man in Black, a super-rich regular - it is implied that he drops so much money that any usual rules are suspended for him - with a long history of abusing Dolores - the oldest host and presumably the 'original' of the title, unless that's the Man in Back as the original guest - but who has tired of the usual games and, after exhausting the potential of increasing levels of one-sided violence is looking for a 'deeper level' to the game.

Meanwhile, the staff are forced to halt the roll-out of a new software update which radically increases the emotional expression of the hosts when it begins to manifest glitches and to express memories of previous narrative cycles and roles. Taking a group of hosts offline, the staff move up a violent shoot-out to cover the lack of subquests. The lasting results of the glitch force some units to be withdrawn altogether and leaves Dolores able to hurt a fly.

'Chestnut' follows Dolores as she begins to remember snatches of her past, including the death of Teddy in the shoot-out, despite her beau being seemingly recast as a black hat. Meanwhile, a pair of new guests - Logan and William - enter the park. Logan is an old hand and committed black hat, while William is a newbie and shocked by the treatment of the hosts.

"Welcome to Westworld. Meaningless robot sex?"

Logan advises William to stay focused on the meaningless sex and violence, and not get sidetracked into the subquests. As an ST, I can't help feeling for the staff of the park, who clearly devote hours to crafting narratives - treasure hunts, posses, gunfights - for visitors who consider a notional rotating exclamation mark to be a target for pointless violence.

Mind you, I don't extend that sympathy to narrative director douche, who presents a Native American sex-and-violence travelogue, only for Ford to shoot it down in favour of something mysterious that he has been working on, probably during his jaunts into the park. I smiled at that, because the narrative director really is a dick. He also trades heavily on the shallow craving for sensation that marks the thrillseeking, disruptive guests.

Just one layer of the surrogate parent business that is all over this series.

The Man in Black continues his quest, rescuing a man from the noose in order to question him about 'the maze' in his home town. He guns down just about everyone in town with his LeMat revolver* and then turns the gun on the man's daughter, but it is the daughter who answers, suddenly calm and robotic, that the maze is not for him. Not that he cares, or that the hosts have any means of stopping him. It's very notable during the shoot outs that the Man in Black gets shot. A lot. It's just that the guns can't hurt guests (although the mechanic of this is not explained, unlike in the movie where the guns have a built in sensor,) which means that the stakes and consequences of any given fight lie entirely on the hapless hosts. It's not explicit, but it seems likely that this lack of risk is the root of his discontent with the existing narratives.

Hooker with a heart of printed circuit boards.

Back in town, Maeve is glitching, putting off the customers. Sizemore has her patched and sent back with her aggression ramped up to a level that is even more off-putting, requiring another recall and tune up from Elsie Hughes, a young programmer and the last major staff character so far. She detects an infection and sends her for treatment, only for Maeve to wake up on the table, flee and find the storage chambers where the unused hosts are kept. This is of course a wee bit distressing for her.

If you're thinking 'damn, that's a lot of characters' then you've not seen the show yet, because I'm skipping, and all of them have at least basic drives, motives and characterisation by the end of episode two. It's another example of a TV series with real, heavyweight writing and production, an excellent cast and a lot of subtext to focus on. It sometimes feels that as big budget movies get dumber, big budget TV gets smarter. Westworld is definitely smart, transferring much of its satirical commentary to MMOs and other multiplayer online games in which disruptive players might detract from the enjoyment of others in search of their own, and I hope that the payoff when we learn what the 'deeper game' is all about will live up to the opening.

* Yeah, I'm a weird gun nerd (like, weird guns especially,) and the LeMat is a classic bit of Old West weirdness, exploited here by seeing the Man in Black break open what initially looks like a six-shooter and load it with nine bullets and a shotgun cartridge.

Preacher - 'Monster Swamp'

Cassidy's daywear is a delight.

Okay, it's been a few days and the rambling, Cohenesque nature of Preacher can make it hard to get my recap straight, but here goes:

We open on women in their underwear fleeing men with guns. One of them is cornered and shot with what turns out to be a paintball pellet, this being a spot of 'harmless fun' between the workers of QM&P and the staff of the Toadvine Whorehouse, the brothel where Tulip hangs out (in a non-professional, mostly poker-playing capacity) between gigs. Unfortunately, a sinkhole then swallows up the unfortunate young woman, leading to a heartfelt eulogy from Quincannon:

"Thank you all for coming out today. There are some lessons to be learnt. First, you boys need to watch the roughhousing. 'Cause this is what can happen. And, uh, you ladies, if you're gonna be out here in the middle of the night, you need to watch where you're walking."

Tulip is frankly steamed at this, but we'll get to that later.

Cassidy tries to warn Jesse that there are government clones from Heaven coming to try to remove the thing inside him with a chainsaw, but being Cassidy he's not that clear about it, and Jesse is preoccupied. Jesse has PLANS (TM). Inspired by flashbacks of his father beating him for smoking and confronting - unsuccessfully - Quincannon, he asks Emily to announce a raffle with a big screen TV as the prize; he wants to get lots of people into the church for something special.

Miles, the Mayor of Annville, confronts Quincannon and asks him to consider a deal with an environmental group called Greenacres (whom Donnie had previously offered to rough up,) but Quincannon pisses in his briefcase. In a later meeting with Custer, the shamelessly faithless Quincannon agrees to a bet: He will attend church on Sunday, and if he leaves an unbeliever, he gets Jesse's father's land. Miles, meanwhile, babysits for Emily (and it's kind of telling that the Mayor of Annville moonlights as a babysitter.) She blows off his advances, then tells him he has to be out by morning, which HUZZAH is a personality beyond 'Custer's loyal helpmeet'. It's a tiny moment, but adds layers to the character.

"Well, that hit the spot."

Cassidy tells those two guys that he will bring Cassidy, but he needs money to induce the Preacher, whom he claims has a substance abuse habit. The two guys discuss whether they should trust Cassidy, or call in on their old-fashioned field telephone. They decide against the latter, as they aren't keen for their superiors to know that they are on Earth without leave, or why. They're right not to trust Cassidy, however, who takes their money and is immediately seen getting high and laid in the Toadvine Whorehouse.

At around the same time, a wake is being held for Lacey the dead prostitute, including an hour 'on the house'. Tulip is hacked off, and hearing loud music decides to go upstairs and clobber the man who chased Lacey into the swamp. She smacks him around and throws him out the window, only to find that it's actually Cassidy, who now has a piece of glass in his throat. She rushes him to hopsital, wracked with guilt, and even grants him a final kiss, only for him to ditch her at reception and turn up in the blood bank, gorged and healthy. Classy, Cassidy. Classy like Cersei Lannister.

We finish up with Custer's sermon. He tells the congregation that the world is fucked because of their selfish sin, but that he will bring them all to salvation and the service of the Lord, starting with Quincannon. Quincannon rejects his call to serve God, until Jesse hits him with the Voice, provoking him to agree that yep, he'll serve God. Sure. I can't help but feel that once more, Jesse may come to regret his loose phrasing.

"Do you see the light!"

And then the angels' phone rings.

'Monster Swamp' continues the trend of meandering plot threads which dance and intertwine, but rarely actually touch on their way to a singular conclusion. It's pretty clear now that those two guys are angels, and that their attempt to recapture the entity is unsanctioned because they haven't told their superiors that they lost it yet. Jesse has decided that he has the gift in order to save Annville, by hook or by crook. On the other hand, it's still not clear what's going on with Greenacres (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they aren't all sweetness and light, because I don't believe that such a thing exists in this sepia toned purgatory) and Quincannon, or that cowboy from episode 2 (even if you know from passing knowledge of the comics who and what he is.) 

Honestly, I don't see this as a problem; it's not that sort of series. Its pacing is odd, but deliberate. It rambles because it means to ramble, not because the makers don't know what they're doing.

Supergirl - 'For the Girl Who Has Everything'

Points for getting the black mercy a) spot on and b) suitably horrible.

After last week's 'Bizzaro' referenced the classics, it's time to straight up adapt a classic Superman story (and one that was also adapted for the Justice League cartoon, which is where I best know the story from.)

Following from last week's cliffhanger, Kara is absent from work, leading Alex, James and Wynn to her apartment where they find her in the grip of a mysterious plant. Forcibly removing the plant harms Kara, so she is moved to the DEO medical lab. There seems little chance of saving Kara, but Astra learns of Non's attempt to neutralise her niece without disobeying her order that she not be harmed and gives Alex the information needed to save her.
The plant is called the black mercy, and induces a dream state in which its victim lives out their fondest fantasy while it drains their life force. Thus we see Kara's fantasy life on Krypton, among her family, as memories of her earth life slip away. To save her, the DEO have to get Max Lord of all people to rig up a system to allow Alex to enter the dream and prompt Kara to snap out of the fantasy.

While they are doing this, Hank pretends to be Kara in order to preserve her job, which Alex expains is not just a job, but the place where 'Supergirl' gets to lead a normal life. This also gives Benoist a chance to have some fun, strutting around with her arms behind her back and trying to be all gruff and non-nonsense with Cat Grant.

Issa widdle babby Superman! He's so cute!

Alex charges James with making sure that Hank doesn't pull the plug to save her and enters the dreamscape. She gets there to find her sister almost fully integrated, and the dream reacts to her presence by having her arrested as a spy and summarily sentenced to the Phantom Zone. Only a final appeal to Kara's heroic spirit - "Earth needs Supergirl!" - breaks the spell.

Meanwhile, Wynn has detected a plot by Astra's forces which involves manipulating Lord's satellite network. Kara faces Non, in a state of utter outrage at what he put her through by forcing her to lose Krypton all over again, but the other DEO teams are unable to prevent the remaining Kryptonians installing 'Myriad' in the Lord systems. Alex and J'onn face off against Astra, and Alex is forced to kill Astra with a Kryptonite sword in order to save J'onn, although he takes the blame with Kara (oh, hey; a character in the Arrowverse keeping a terrible secret from their loved ones. That's a shocker.)

I think that the great strength of this adaptation lies in the way the dream is changed for Kara. Younger and less sure of her identity than Superman, her fantasy puts her in the bosom of a loving family and it was a wise choice not to shoehorn her into a perfect marriage. That's Superman's ideal life; Kara's is a combination of carers and those she cares for, replacing Kal-el's imagined children with the young Kal-el himself. I also liked J'onn's inability to fill Kara's civilian shoes. In particular his attempt at emotional blackmail by bursting into tears was notable as something that Kara, although far less assertive than J'onn, would never do.

Arrow - 'The Candidate'

"Who wants to be Star City's Mayor?"
"I don't!"

Team whatever they're called if Oliver isn't the boss of them anymore continue to take down Ghost operations, but get no closer to Darhk, and Oliver is increasingly worried about Thea's anger management. They are distracted a little when their mother's old friend Jessica Danforth decides to run for mayor, a career choice traditionally ending in death either before or after the election.

Oliver and Thea protect Jessica from an assassination attempt by a man who has scrambled his own fingerprints and uses a high-powered cattle-prod. Lonnie Machin meets up with Darhk and promises success next time, proceeding to abduct Danforth's daughter Madison after brutally murdering her police escort. After Thea's rage scotches an attempt to trace Machin, Oliver confronts her, leading to a fight in the lair. He explains to her about the Lazarus Pit's side-effects.

The height disparity is much more notable these days.

Darhk disowns Machin, telling him that while he doesn't have many limits, he believes in order, while Machin stands for chaos. He gives Lance the address where Madison is being held and Lance opts to trust Oliver with the rescue, given that he must be running short of cops by now. The team rescues Madison, but in the fight Thea kinda sorta sets Machin on fire, breaking the trust with Lance. Critically injured, Machin still busts out of the ambulance and maims two paramedics.

In the B-plot, Felicity finds that Ray Palmer's death has left Palmer Technologies more or less back where he found it, with the board mandating downsizing based on an algorithm developed by Curtis Holt (a list including Holt himself.) Unwilling to lay off dozens of employees, Felicity makes a hail Mary play, promising the Board a revolutionary new technology to restore the company's fortunes. Because she's awesome like that.

And then Laurel decides to take Thea to Nanda Parbat to look for a cure to her condition andbythewaylet'stakemysister'scorpseandseeifwecangetherbackafterayearinthegroundeventhoughshelookslikeHelenaBonhamCarterinaremakeofDeathBecomesHerorsomething.

Season 4 continues to show a marked improvement in the quality of adversaries, with Lonnie 'Anarky' Machin holding off Team Arrow for a spell and actually overpowering Oliver one-on-one. My one major reservation is Lance's cooperation with Darhk, and I don't know if they'll offer an explanation that works for me, especially if Darhk is willing to resort to threats towards Laurel. I guess we'll see.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - 'Arabella'

"Am I your wife?"

"I think what you are telling, my lady, are fairy tales, but told in some way as if the fairy is telling them."
"Human tales, as it were."
- Honeyfoot and Segundus

The Gentleman's trap is sprung! With Jonathan distracted by his Waterloo PTSD, he sends Stephen to lure Arabella away on the pretense that Lady Pole is upset - which she is, sensing the impending deception and striving to warn the Stranges via her baffled keepers - and then swaps in the moss oak duplicate, who induces the magician to declare her 'your only wife', thus bargaining away the real Arabella into the Gentleman's power. As we first saw with Lady Pole, the right of a person to bargain another's life, let alone their understanding of what they are doing, seems less important than their willingness in dealing with the fey.

One ought not to get into strange coaches, and this is a very strange coach.

Lascelles leaps on this as an opportunity to squash Strange's attempt to publish a magical primer, by fostering accusations that he murdered his wife by magic and manipulating Norrell into refusing to aid his attempts to revive Arabella when the moss oak expires. The result is a rapid degeneration, as Strange abandons his self-imposed exile from practical magic and sets out to become mad enough to see and deal with a fairy, restore Arabella and show Norrell what for.

As in the book, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has little in the way of obvious heroes and villains. While on the most superficial level the dynamic, emotional Strange is the hero and the cold, calculating Norrell the villain, they are both flawed men and ultimately focused on doing what they see as good. The most obvious actual villain is of course the Gentleman, although he is more by way of the scorpion of oft repeated fable; why does he deceive, manipulate and abduct? Because it's what he is. He's less a bad guy and more a natural hazard.

For real villainy and heroism, we have to look elsewhere; at the smaller roles. At the unfaltering Lady Pole, and at Messrs Honeyfoot and Segundus who are working so hard to understand their charge (an action largely unheard of in 19th century psychiatric care;) and at Mr Childermass, who is just... quietly cool. Childermass in particular gets good mileage this week. He politely turns down Strange's offer of a partnership, and explains that as Strange and Norrell seem set on destroying one another now, he will hang back and step in to oppose whomsoever wins, so that there will still be two English magicians. He also clashes with the real villain, the reptilian Lascelles, who with no excuse of alien origin leaps on the apparent death of Arabella Strange as a chance to destroy the already distraught Strange in revenge for his critical assassination of Lascelles' own book. Lascelles also dismisses Childermass as 'the servants', which may yet come back to bite him.

The strength of this tale of magicians and magic is that the real driving forces, be they virtuous or vicious, are human.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - 'The Education of a Magician'

Take or leave us, only please believe us, we ain't never gonna be respectable.

Jonathan Strange is, aptly enough, a stranger in a strange land. From Lisbon into the interior of Portugal he trails the army, seeking a military use for his magic in keeping with the goal of respectability.

Wellington: Could a magician kill a man by magic?
Strange: I suppose a magician might; but a gentleman never could.

War is, however, Hell, and after the death of his manservant and the destruction of the books he brought from Norrell's collection, Strange is forced to dig into his reserves, deploying strange mists and necromancy from the days of the Raven King in the name of the war effort. All of this leaves him somewhat shaken, but greatly respected by the soldiers, the nickname 'Merlin' rapidly going from a joke to a term of true honour.

Meanwhile, in Blighty, the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair once more promises to make Stephen Black a king as he plots to secure Mrs Strange as one of his vassals, but is thwarted by her good sense and caution.

Lady Pole: Can you think of any instance where you were saved by your husband?
Arabella: I am more in the habit of saving him.

I really like this woman, but alas she makes little headway with the stubborn Lord Pole and Mr Norrell still insists that Lady Pole's madness is incurable by magic and refuses to confess any guilt in the matter, even monitoring her doings and intercepting Arabella's letters to her husband to maintain his position and reputation. As a result, Lady Pole attempts his murder, only for Childermass - who is pretty awesome this week*, acting as Norrell's conscience as well as attempting to warn off Segundus and Honeyfoot before Norrell gets heavy-handed with their school of magic, and generally being the no-nonsense northern one in the Norrell camp - to take the bullet.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is powering through the plot at a rate of knots. This has the benefit of pace, although it loses out some of the crawling dread and in particular the consuming horror of the Gentleman's insinuation into the lives of Lady Pole and Stephen Black. All in all, however, it does what a successful adaptation does, turning the book into a subtly different, but more televisual beast that is still just as good.

* I spend a possibly inordinate amount of time considering which character from a show I want to see get their own quirky PI spin-off. For this one, my current front runner is (Arabella) Strange and Childermass, Detectives of the Weird.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - 'How is Lady Pole?'

Let's be honest; she's not good.

Mr Norrell is the English Magician, and his hangers-on are determined that Britain will accept no substitutes. After all, there's not much credit in being the personal friends of an English magician, rather than the definite article. When Mr Segundus, late of the York Society, introduces the self-taught Mr Strange to the scene, Messrs Drawlight and Lascelles are up in arms, but a display of his prodigal talent and a respectful request for an apprenticeship win over Mr Norrell himself.

Yet these are genteel matters compare to the fate of the titular Lady Pole, who is alive and wed, but now bound to the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair to dance helplessly at his revels every night as she sleeps, growing more and more exhausted and distracted, and quite unable to speak of what troubles her without recounting fanciful anecdotes. Mr Norrell will not help her and no other can do; the only other person who knows is Stephen Black, Lord Pole's butler, himself now caught in the Gentleman's web. Her husband merely locks her in her room, so that the only person who will at least credit that there is a problem is Arabella Strange, who knocks heads with Mr Norrell at an auction and catches the eye of the Gentleman as he spies on Strange.

Episode 2 of the BBC's adaptation of Susanna Clarke's grand epic kicks it up a notch to announce the arrival on the scene of the second magician of prophecy. While Mr Norrell is determined that magic be 'respectable', you can see the extras and supporting characters straining for him to do something exciting. The disappointment when his magical sea defences are entirely invisible is evident, and the catharsis when Strange cuts loose at the Horse Sands is almost palpable.

Meanwhile the enchanted Lady Pole and Stephen Black are shown as tragically powerless figures, and the audience yearns for them to get their chance to kick back against their fey oppressors (and at Lord Pole to boot.) The brief visit to the manor of Lost Hope is a masterpiece, a weird and distorted world of ruins and fragments where the Gentleman and his cohorts cavort with the hapless mortals in their power. Ironically, in her madness and her resistance to the attempts of others to have her confined, Lady Pole finds more backbone than as a whole and unensorcelled woman, but it is Arabella Strange who steps up to represent for the sisterhood, not just in believing in Lady Pole's plight, but in refusing to take any shit from her husband.

The series continues to impress with its combination of special effects and magical storyline with the utter commitment to period detail which lends an intense verisimilitude to the entire tale. 

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - 'The Friends of English Magic'

It's been a while since I read the book, but as I recall, it's pretty accurate to
depict Strange (Bertie Carvel) as slightly baffled as to how he got anywhere,
and Mr Norrell (Eddie Marsan) as simply pissed off to be there.

English Magic is not what once it was. What once it was is not yet clear, but what it is is gentlemen eating fabulous dinners and discussing theories over the port, while poo-pooing the idea of casting spells (because some stereotypes aren't very empowering.) Enter Mr Norrell, practical magician and hoarder of magical texts. Spurred by his ambitious valet Childermass and a challenge from the gentlemen of the local magical dining club, Mr Norrell animates the statues in York Cathedral and finds himself hailed as the saviour of English magic. Sourly determined to rid magic of its trappings of charlatanry, he unwittingly sets in motion a sequence of events that will bring about the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy, that two magicians will restore magic to England: Mr Norrell, and the dilettante sorcerer Jonathan Strange.

This adaptation of Susanna Clarke's spine-cracking opus has far more pace than the novel (after one hour of an absolutely faithful adaptation we'd be halfway through the footnotes in Chapter 1,) although that still makes for a measured affair. Some reviewers seem unable to forgive it for not being Poldark, but if you're not here for heaving bosoms and shirtless ex-vampire/werewolf/dwarf Aidan Turner, there's a lot to like. While actual porn is thin on the ground, the costume and scenery porn is lavish, and part of the success of the production must be that it looks like a BBC Dickens adaptation, just with more moving statues and scrying mirrors.

Thoros of Threadneedle Street!

Perpetual second fiddle Eddie Marsan impresses as Mr Norrell, bringing the requisite absolute nonentity to the great Magician of Hanover Square, while Bertie Carvel belies his stage roots to give a spirited performance as the more dynamic - but so far shiftless - Strange. Norrell's shifts from private rage and animation to public awkwardness, and his horror at finding that London has heard that, far from conjuring statues to life, his great feat was to magically clean all the laundry of York, are deftly underplayed by Marsan. Carvel contrasts with a wide-eyed amazement at everything, which means that his receipt of spells and prophecy from a man under a hedge authentically seems no more startling to him than would be finding a sixpence on the road.

The supporting cast is also excellent, including Sam West as Sir Walter Pole and erstwhile Richlieu Marc Warren popping up to raise the dead as the Gentleman with the Thistle-Down Hair. There's not much in the way of female characters, but that was an issue with the book and a simple side-effect of Clarke's adherence to the traditions of the period style in which she was writing. The minor characters are even more Dickensian than the central dramatis personae, with particular mention going to Norrell's hangers-on Mr Lascelles and the almost grotesque Mr Drawlight, to the entire port-swilling Yorkshire society of magicians, and to ubiquitous scruffy religious crazy person Paul Kaye's turn as street magician and agent provocateur Vinculus.

'The Friends of English Magic' is a strong opening episode, although compared to the book it is oddly silent on the legend of the Raven King, who is referred to, but not at any point explained in even the most basic of terms. I don't think it's ever going to win over anyone who came here for the bosoms, but it was never meant to, and despite the costume porn connection, it really is comparing apples and curtain fabric.

12 Monkeys - Four episodes in

Aaron Marker (Noah Bean), Jennifer Goines (Emily Hampshire), Pallid Man (Tom Noonan), Ramse (Kirk Acevedo), Jones (Barbara Sukowa), Cassandra Railly (Amanda Schull) and James Cole (Aaron Stanford)

I confess to a certain skepticism where TV versions of self-contained films are concerned, but when I saw the trailers for 12 Monkeys I figured what the hey? Fargo rocked the small screen last year, so let's give it a go. As a note, the series refers to its influence as La Jette, the original French short film/slide show with narration, not the movie 12 Monkeys.

We open with 'Splinter', and virologist Cassandra Railly's apparently chance encounter with a man who claims to know her and that they will meet in several years time, before vanishing into thin air. This really sets the scene for the series ahead, in particular the intertwining quests of the two main characters. The time traveller is James Cole, sent back in time to prevent a viral outbreak that will almost annihilate humanity. Warned by Cole and given proof of his bona fides when he scratches the face of her watch and a matching scratch appears on its future version, Railly sets out to do the same, but where her story is linear, Cole's is not.

Each episode, Cole drops into Railly's life and they attempt to further their cause through radically different approaches. In particular, Railly is looking for a cure or containment, whereas Cole is a simpler soul who believes with a desperate fervor that it will all be sorted out if he just kills the right person. That was his mission, and his reward is for this version of him never to have existed and suffered through a viral apocalypse.

It quickly proves less simple than he had hoped, as his goals switch from Leland Goines (Zeljko Ivanek) to his daughter Jennifer in 'Mentally Divergent'. A maths prodigy driven insane by a massacre of which she was accused, Jennifer is the only clue to the location of the plague's source, the enigmatic Night Room. She is also hunted, however, by the Pallid Man, the nigh-preternatural point monster for the Army of the 12 Monkeys.

Losing Jennifer, Cole is next sent to find the only other link to the Night Room, an aid worker known to be in Haiti in 2014. This episode 'Cassandra Complex' is however mostly about Railly, and how her determination to find a global pandemic pathogen that doesn't exist yet has destroyed her career and alienated her from friends and even her former fiance (whose presence in the cast shot suggests he will be more important further down the line.)

We then leave Railly for the bulk of the episode 'Atari', in which a scavenging army finds the base from which the scientist Jones is 'splintering' Cole back into history. This one is a straight up action episode with a time travel twist, as Cole and his hetero life partner Ramse (and eeee! it's Charlie from Fringe!) try to fight off their erstwhile comrades in the West VII (named for their quarantine zone.) The episode digs into the relationship between Cole and Ramse, establishing the latter as the conscience of the pair and one of the ruthlessly pragmatic Cole's only links to the rest of humanity. Jones early explains to Ramse that he is expendable, only present because Cole - whose importance to the programme is not yet explained in the series - insists on it, but it's hard not to suspect that Ramse is key to keeping Cole on mission.

12 Monkeys is not a straight adaptation, nor expansion of the movie, but a much more complicated beast telling its own story in its own way. As is de rigueur these days, the story expands through a series of flash backs and flash forwards, from the two 'presents' of 2015 and 2043 as far back as 2006 and 2035. In a lot of ways, Cole and Railly are the least interesting characters in the piece, acting more as pivots for the rest - particularly Goines, Jones and Ramse - to work around. This is not to say there is nothing to them; Cole's evolving story is a brutal tragedy, and Railly is locked into a self-destructive quest for world salvation.

Four episodes in, I am definitely liking 12 Monkeys, although not loving it as much as Fargo.

Elementary - The Rest of Season 1

Thanks to my flu, I powered through the remains of Elementary Season 1, and may even make it through Season 2 before it runs out on Sky boxed sets.

Natalie Dormer, femme fatale for hire.

The plots are many and varied, but the arc and the grist of the series basically covers its handling of two of the more controversial figures in the Sherlockian canon: Irene Adler and James Moriarty (note; spoilers will apply.)

Basically, no-one ever really knows what to do with Adler. She tends to be shoehorned into a romantic role, and usually that of a master criminal, if not on Moriarty's scale. It's an odd departure from the original, in which she is just a smart, tough, independent woman who is being victimised by her ex - Holmes's client, whose case he actually takes lest instead he employ a blunter instrument - whose goal is to be allowed to marry and live her life in peace.

Adaptations find this difficult to deal with, perhaps because for a figure that looms so large, she doesn't actually do very much. Mind you, neither does Moriarty, who only has one appearance, in which Holmes concludes his pursuit of the Napoleon of Crime with what is revealed later to have been a dismissive curb stomp duel. Adapters tend to reverse the balance of power, making Moriarty the stalker.

Elementary goes one step beyond, making the American Irene Adler (Natalie Dormer) the assumed identity of British criminal mastermind Jamie Moriarty. Dormer plays both roles to the hilt, although she's clearly having way more fun as the slinky, lethal Moriarty. Adler is once more the love of Holmes's life, rather than merely a woman whose intelligence impresses him, but by making her a fiction I find I mind this less. That 'the paragon of her sex' is a mere figment of Moriarty's imagination speaks volumes of this Holmes with his awkward mannerisms, operational approach to sexuality and tendency to stand way too close to people.