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hestia8Few things in this entry, presuming I can remember what I’ve watched in the last week.
Schedulers are super unhelpful, but we all know that, right?
Side note for any Sarah Jane Adventures fans passing by – Daniel Anthony is in Casualty, which is GREAT. He was brilliant in SJA and I am super super happy that he’s turned up in something I watch so I don’t have to add in a show just for him (I would, seriously, he’s brilliant).
Holby, on the other hand, is fucking annoying at the moment and I still hate Oliver.
Also - knew I'd forgotten something - I have now seen all of Black Mirror but that will need an entry to itself, which I had better work on for tomorrow evening.
Being Human episode 4 somehow managed to reach new fucking heights of emotional turmoil, because of Bobby. Oh my GOD, Bobby. Stop creating such good characters and then killing them off straight away, Whithouse, it’s not fucking fair. At least Crumb went in the same episode.
Oh, also I found out this week the series is only six episodes, not eight. Fucksocks.
I watched the first episode of Lightfields but it wasn’t really great. Although I do need to stop watching ghost stories before I go to bed, so tbf it was clearly doing something right. And I was pleased to see the chauffeur from Upstairs Downstairs turn up, I like him (I need to go look up his name at some point).
Earlier today I watched the first Jack Taylor episode (it was called The Guards but I think the series name is just Jack Taylor). I watched it because it’s a) a crime drama b) starring Iain Glen. Channel 5 have done a shit job promoting it, so don’t worry if it’s passed you by. Here’s the Demand 5 link:
www.channel5.com/shows/jack-taylor-the-guards/episodes/jack-taylor-the-guards
The books are written by Ken Bruen, who wrote the film Blitz that got to me so much a few weeks ago (suddenly my feelings about this show make a LOT more sense). It’s set in Galway and Jack is an alchoholic ex-cop who shambles about the place finding things because that’s the only thing he’s good at (there was an odd bit where he says there are no PIs in Galway because that's too close to being an informant but then he's basically...being a PI, so apparently it's ok if you just don't call it that? Idk).
The show was a weird mix of interesting and cliché, and there was a fair amount of genre-savviness from the characters (the top cop in the show definitely knew what show he was in and what part he had to play). Iain Glen was great, and unlike Statham in Blitz he was definitely the high point of the whole thing.
One thing I did find a bit odd was the occasional voice over with Jack going on about how drunk he is or how miserable he is. It tended to come out of nowhere and there were long periods where we didn’t hear anything, and then it would pop up again. I’m not sure it was terribly essential to proceedings. I’d picked up that he was drunk, miserable and didn’t get on with his mother from what was happening onscreen.
Jack’s relationship with Sutton was interesting – I was shipping them pretty much from the moment he turned up because the voiceover suddenly went ‘omg and then there is my friend Sutton and it is always ace when he turns up woo’ and ‘then sometimes he goes away for ages and I am sadface’ (I am paraphrasing), and it did sort of seem like maybe they had this thing where they just slept with each other when Sutton was in town and then went ages without seeing each other or even talking or whatever. I was aware as I was watching that this was not going to be canon, obviously.
The mysteries in the show were interesting, but both suffered with their reveals. Anne’s claim to be looking for a missing daughter turned out to be a reeeeally roundabout way of trying to get to Jack’s friend Sutton, and it all seemed rather overcomplicated. The girls who’d supposedly committed suicide turned out to have been killed by the standard pillar-of-the-community-with-a-dark-secret. Who’d helpfully filmed himself drowning them. And then had dumped them all in the same place so that they all ended up washing up in the same spot. His position was basically his protection, because he wasn’t really particularly great at hiding his tracks.
As with Blitz (again! Sorry, I’ll stop comparing them), the more interesting story was one of the supporting characters. Sutton – Jack’s friend – originally injected a necessary bit of life into things, but soon turned out to be a rather uncontrollable wrong’un, unhelpfully causing deaths left, right and centre (including running over one of Jack’s friends because he’d told him…something bad he’d done, I forget what). And THEN he turned out to have kidnapped the murderer and strung him up so that Jack could take a turn. Unfortunately (according to Sutton) he’d inconsiderately died before this could happen.
Jack was horrified by this – I loved that, actually, I’ve got a bit fed up of super-jaded cops and I wasn’t expecting him to react that way – and then the conclusion rapidly fell into place.
It turned out – if I’ve got this right – that somewhere in Eastern Europe Anne had been running an orphanage and she made a deal with Sutton to get her children to safety. Instead some of them ended up as part of black market adoptions, and her assistant ended up dead (she’d used her name for her made-up daughter). Sutton, for his part, also knew about the murderer’s thing for young girls, and had been blackmailing him for years. Then the top cop showed up at the end, Sutton got shot by Anne, and the top cop threw Sutton and the gun in the river and told them both that they’d never been there. It was a lot like Blitz (final comparison, I swear!!) in that the resolution was actually really satisfying if not strictly legal.
So, in summary, worth watching, some odd bits but Iain Glen more than makes up for it.
ETA: just found out it’s on ZDF in Germany. Wonder if I can understand an episode if I just watch it in German?
ETA2: They’ve also got a whole Scandinavian crime thing going on. Apparently I should be watching more ZDF.
Schedulers are super unhelpful, but we all know that, right?
Side note for any Sarah Jane Adventures fans passing by – Daniel Anthony is in Casualty, which is GREAT. He was brilliant in SJA and I am super super happy that he’s turned up in something I watch so I don’t have to add in a show just for him (I would, seriously, he’s brilliant).
Holby, on the other hand, is fucking annoying at the moment and I still hate Oliver.
Also - knew I'd forgotten something - I have now seen all of Black Mirror but that will need an entry to itself, which I had better work on for tomorrow evening.
Being Human episode 4 somehow managed to reach new fucking heights of emotional turmoil, because of Bobby. Oh my GOD, Bobby. Stop creating such good characters and then killing them off straight away, Whithouse, it’s not fucking fair. At least Crumb went in the same episode.
Oh, also I found out this week the series is only six episodes, not eight. Fucksocks.
I watched the first episode of Lightfields but it wasn’t really great. Although I do need to stop watching ghost stories before I go to bed, so tbf it was clearly doing something right. And I was pleased to see the chauffeur from Upstairs Downstairs turn up, I like him (I need to go look up his name at some point).
Earlier today I watched the first Jack Taylor episode (it was called The Guards but I think the series name is just Jack Taylor). I watched it because it’s a) a crime drama b) starring Iain Glen. Channel 5 have done a shit job promoting it, so don’t worry if it’s passed you by. Here’s the Demand 5 link:
www.channel5.com/shows/jack-taylor-the-guards/episodes/jack-taylor-the-guards
The books are written by Ken Bruen, who wrote the film Blitz that got to me so much a few weeks ago (suddenly my feelings about this show make a LOT more sense). It’s set in Galway and Jack is an alchoholic ex-cop who shambles about the place finding things because that’s the only thing he’s good at (there was an odd bit where he says there are no PIs in Galway because that's too close to being an informant but then he's basically...being a PI, so apparently it's ok if you just don't call it that? Idk).
The show was a weird mix of interesting and cliché, and there was a fair amount of genre-savviness from the characters (the top cop in the show definitely knew what show he was in and what part he had to play). Iain Glen was great, and unlike Statham in Blitz he was definitely the high point of the whole thing.
One thing I did find a bit odd was the occasional voice over with Jack going on about how drunk he is or how miserable he is. It tended to come out of nowhere and there were long periods where we didn’t hear anything, and then it would pop up again. I’m not sure it was terribly essential to proceedings. I’d picked up that he was drunk, miserable and didn’t get on with his mother from what was happening onscreen.
Jack’s relationship with Sutton was interesting – I was shipping them pretty much from the moment he turned up because the voiceover suddenly went ‘omg and then there is my friend Sutton and it is always ace when he turns up woo’ and ‘then sometimes he goes away for ages and I am sadface’ (I am paraphrasing), and it did sort of seem like maybe they had this thing where they just slept with each other when Sutton was in town and then went ages without seeing each other or even talking or whatever. I was aware as I was watching that this was not going to be canon, obviously.
The mysteries in the show were interesting, but both suffered with their reveals. Anne’s claim to be looking for a missing daughter turned out to be a reeeeally roundabout way of trying to get to Jack’s friend Sutton, and it all seemed rather overcomplicated. The girls who’d supposedly committed suicide turned out to have been killed by the standard pillar-of-the-community-with-a-dark-secret. Who’d helpfully filmed himself drowning them. And then had dumped them all in the same place so that they all ended up washing up in the same spot. His position was basically his protection, because he wasn’t really particularly great at hiding his tracks.
As with Blitz (again! Sorry, I’ll stop comparing them), the more interesting story was one of the supporting characters. Sutton – Jack’s friend – originally injected a necessary bit of life into things, but soon turned out to be a rather uncontrollable wrong’un, unhelpfully causing deaths left, right and centre (including running over one of Jack’s friends because he’d told him…something bad he’d done, I forget what). And THEN he turned out to have kidnapped the murderer and strung him up so that Jack could take a turn. Unfortunately (according to Sutton) he’d inconsiderately died before this could happen.
Jack was horrified by this – I loved that, actually, I’ve got a bit fed up of super-jaded cops and I wasn’t expecting him to react that way – and then the conclusion rapidly fell into place.
It turned out – if I’ve got this right – that somewhere in Eastern Europe Anne had been running an orphanage and she made a deal with Sutton to get her children to safety. Instead some of them ended up as part of black market adoptions, and her assistant ended up dead (she’d used her name for her made-up daughter). Sutton, for his part, also knew about the murderer’s thing for young girls, and had been blackmailing him for years. Then the top cop showed up at the end, Sutton got shot by Anne, and the top cop threw Sutton and the gun in the river and told them both that they’d never been there. It was a lot like Blitz (final comparison, I swear!!) in that the resolution was actually really satisfying if not strictly legal.
So, in summary, worth watching, some odd bits but Iain Glen more than makes up for it.
ETA: just found out it’s on ZDF in Germany. Wonder if I can understand an episode if I just watch it in German?
ETA2: They’ve also got a whole Scandinavian crime thing going on. Apparently I should be watching more ZDF.
