Capturing The Golden Girls: My Sample Script

Posted on March 25, 2023 by Jamie Andrew

The Golden Girls is one of the funniest sit-coms ever written. Its dialogue zips, licks, and zings, each performance by the members of its main cast a masterclass in marrying archetype to authenticity to create larger than life characters that never-the-less still ring true in the real world.

The Golden Girls showed older women leading rich, fulfilling and interesting lives: pursuing relationships, nurturing friendships, wise-cracking, problem-solving, and enjoying full and healthy sex lives – not laying down and preparing to die, or fading into thankless quasi-matriarchal obscurity. At a time, and especially in an industry, where executives weren’t overly inclined to put older women front-and-centre, here was a group of older female actresses who were not only carrying a successful prime-time comedy show, but one of the most successful prime-time comedy shows of all time. The legacy of The Golden Girls, and that talented quad of actors, is the laughter that still rings in the air – from generations old and new – many long decades later.

I loved The Golden Girls as a kid, and I love it still. My partner and I recently started a re-watch, and we’re re-hooked. Even my 8-year-old caught an episode and chortled heartily at these women 55 who were years+ his senior.

I got into the rhythm and cadence of the show so much that I started hearing fresh dialogue in my head. I decided to get it all down, and see if I could pull off a successful facsimile of a ‘new’ episode. Not a whole episode, mind. Just a short sequence. You can access it in PDF form by clicking on the link immediately below:

GOLDEN GIRLS

I know it isn’t formatted correctly, especially the dialogue, which shouldn’t run along the lines as far as it does, but the exercise – for me – was to see if I could successfully capture the show’s tone, and the characters’ voices.

If you’re a fan of The Golden Girls, I want to know if you can see and hear Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia in your mind’s eye as you’re reading along.

Let me know. I fancy tackling Red Dwarf next.

Stranger Things S4: Praise and Predictions

Posted on June 29, 2022 by Jamie Andrew

The length of TV episodes used to be dictated by the strictures of schedulers and advertisers. Netflix and its streaming stable-mates have made these curbs unnecessary, though budgets, production costs and the attention span of the average viewer has kept the length of most dramatic series sitting somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes. That’s probably the sweet-spot, the boundary beyond which you start to bore your audience or reveal your short-comings. Or both, as happened when Kurt Sutter was given free reign with Sons of Anarchy. Not that the show was exactly Shakespeare to begin with. Season four of Stranger Things, however, takes this rule and wipes its hive-minded bum with it. Even at an average length of 90 minutes the episodes still don’t feel long enough, simply because every aspect of the production, from the writing to the acting to the design to the creature effects, is par excellence.

Stranger Things is both a tribute to and a subversion of the sorts of slick, high-concept, high-spectacle, Spielbergian melodramas that wowed cinema-goers in the 1980s. It treads the line perfectly between verisimilitude of setting, and nostalgia safariing, choosing to warmly bathe rather than drown its audience in tropes and pop-culture references. The show’s characters are distinct, rich, well-drawn and entertaining, comprising a symbiotic ensemble that contains few dud pairings or groupings. The show is fast when it needs to be, slow when it needs to be. It seamlessly blends action, adventure, heart, horror, and comedy; tears with laughter. Not many series can run the tone gamut from ET to Nightmare on Elm Street and make it work, but Stranger Things doesn’t just make it work: it makes it look easy. And that’s before we even talk about the perfect pacing; the skilful use of tension; or the way an episode’s separate stories dovetail and interlock in the most satisfying of ways.

Upside down, show you send me…

With the concluding four hours of its fourth season just days from dropping on Netflix, Stranger Things is enjoying the sort of blanket coverage, critical acclaim and mass appeal that once propelled Game of Thrones to its unassailed status (give or take an eighth season) at the top of the pop-culture totem pole. Everyone is talking about the show, even if they’re just asking people to stop talking about the show so much. People are probably going to start calling their kids Nancy, Elle and Jane; Dustin, Lucas and Mike; and possibly even Vecna, and Demi-Gordon. ‘Who or what is Vecna?’, Season 4’s central mystery – more visceral and compelling than the unsolved shootings of any number of prominent Texan oil tycoons – has already been solved, and the relieving news is that Stranger Things avoided becoming another Lost with aplomb. The Massacre at Hawkins Lab not only neatly closes the season’s narrative circle – clearing the decks for the finale’s inevitable confrontation between One and Eleven – but answers questions about the origins of Hawkins’ inter-dimensional trouble we never even knew we wanted to ask. It all makes sense, at least in terms of the rules of its own fictional world. Mercifully, nobody in Stranger Things is doing the equivalent of causing plane crashes above hidden tropical islands to help protect a magic plug-hole from a smoke monster.

On the contrary, Stranger Things‘ writers know exactly what they’re doing, even if our current destination was never the original plan. They’re smart on a smaller scale, too. They know the building blocks they’re working with – the tropes and archetypes – and they’re deft at reassembling them on the hoof to keep things fresh and surprising. And they know that we, the audience, know the building blocks they’re working with, too. Consequently, and cleverly, then, they take great joy in subverting that awareness. Case in point is this season’s mile-high battle between Joyce, Murray and Yuri on a plane somewhere above eastern Russia. All signs point to the disappointing yet strangely comforting realisation that Murray’s martial-art prowess will ultimately only prove effective against child opponents. We fully expect Joyce to emerge from off-camera and incapacitate Yuri herself. However, at the last moment, Murray demonstrates his innate bad-assery, even if his bad-ass-ed-ness is more in spirit than in deed, and more through luck and enthusiasm than skill.

The episode Dear Billy, featuring Max’s near-death at the hands of Vecna, was executed particularly skilfully. Those familiar with the language of television would have been instantly pessimistic about Max’s survival chances on the basis alone that Sadie Sink – whose character Max was an important though hitherto peripheral main character – was getting a meaty chunk of the spotlight to herself, along with more challenging and emotional scenes than she’d ever been given before. That’s often a sign that the writers are giving a character a long goodbye; a last victory lap before forced retirement. It’s such an ingrained trope that I found myself genuinely unsure if Max was going to make it out of the episode alive, and almost rose from the couch and on to my feet in step with the climbing tension.

Kudos, also, for making the Demogorgon scary again. The story-line that follows Enzo and Hopper on monster death-row is part Alien 3, part Prison Break, and all thrilling.

Endgame and beyond

Now that Vecna’s identity and modus operandi have been revealed there’s no direction left for the narrative to travel except straight to the final confrontation between good and evil; it won’t follow a straight line, of course, because there are still dangling plot threads by the dozen, not least of which are the US Military’s El-shaped endgame; Nancy’s mental imprisonment by Vecna; Mike’s mission to find El; Hopper and Co’s escape from Russia; and the murderous intentions of Hawkins’ townsfolk, who have been whipped into satanic panic by jock-cum-avenging-angel Jason Carver.

Still, with no surprises of Vecna’s magnitude left to uncover (though I could be sorely wrong about that) the only truly surprising thing left is to kill off a main character. We’ve been teased with this many times before, through the hanging fates of Will, El, Hopper and, most recently, Max. However, the more times a show teases a major death without following through, the less effective that narrative trick becomes. Keep doing it and you risk alienating your audience, and, worse, making them feel cheated (accusations that were thrown at The Walking Dead during its Dumpster-Gate moment). I truly believe that someone big is about to go six-feet upside down. But which characters are Stranger Things most likely to sacrifice?

Let’s take the long way round. It seems almost certain – to this writer, in any case – that the fifth and final season will take place in Hawkins: the place where it all began, featuring all of the characters we’ve come to know and love, each with an axe to grind. There’s a neatness to that; a feeling of having come full circle. For that to be the case then Joyce, El, Will and Jonathan will have to leave California (possibly – nay, hopefully – with Argylle in tow). Now, sure, if Joyce and Hopper were to hook up – supposing they survive Russia – Joyce might consider returning to Hawkins with her clan to be with Hopper, but she might just as easily decide to convince Hopper to leave behind the Hawkins house of horrors and join them all in the sunshine. So something has to give. I doubt they’d kill Hopper at this point, not so soon after his first ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’. I do, however, think that Joyce is a possible candidate for erasure. Her death would not only force the California gang back home, but also transform Hopper into a molten copper with the safeties off; The Punisher with a supernatural twist. And that would be a sight to behold, grief and sadness notwithstanding.

But even as I write that, I talk myself out of it. Joyce has been through a hell of a time. She suffered the trauma of a missing child, had to help that same child rid himself of inter-dimensional possession, watched her romantic partner die, watched Hopper ‘die’. It would seem rather cruel to cap off her arc with a sad and tragic death. Doesn’t mean they won’t. But, as happened with Dear Billy, the show’s got me racked with doubt. The only certainty, to my mind, is that Hopper will live long enough to overcome his past trauma, and prove his love and parenting credentials through saving El – and I don’t foresee that happening this season.

Something terrible was always going to happen to El. She won’t die, but, by god, she’ll suffer. The particularities of this suffering are legion, but here’s a handful of potential scenarios: El defeats Vecna (possibly by drawing on the inside help of the ‘souls’ Vecna has already absorbed, like happened to Freddy Krueger on Elm Street, and Peter Kay on Doctor Who) but gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but takes his place, and gets trapped in the upside down. El defeats Vecna but the force with which they do battle tears a hole in the interdimensional fabric between universes, and the upside down bleeds into and merges with the real world, possibly just affecting Hawkins, but potentially the entire world. I guarantee that whatever happens, Hopper will enter Hell for El in season 5, whether that hell is in another dimension, or here on earth. Which it just might be. Probably the most likely scenario is that the US military, who have been tracking El all season, leaving murder and torture in their wake, will snatch El at the finale, and spend season 5 trying to use her as a weapon. Maybe they’ll combine that with the bleeding of universes. Maybe we’ll see the return of the Mindflayer, but this time it’s the size of Wales.

Dead-pool 2

You can lay easy bets on which part of El’s wounded psyche Vecna is going to try to use to break her (literally and figuratively): her guilt both at releasing Vecna from his powers, and at opening the first portal to the upside down, and all the deaths that flowed from those two events. Maybe to counter this attack El will try to harness her powers from a memory that makes her sad and angry, like the death of Hopper, only to have her burgeoning powers slapped down to nothing once it’s revealed that Hopper is still alive. Maybe the memory that gives El the power to perform a killing strike will be the recent death of Mike? The gangly Ghostbuster is surely in the top tier running for early check-out. The continuation of Mike’s time in the show wouldn’t add a great deal to its overall worth, but his death certainly would. Then it would be El who turned avenging angel. Equally, though, it might make her do a Scarlet Witch and become next season’s big bad.

The smartest money in the great Stranger Things‘ dead-pool, however, is on Steve. He’s a great character, but he’s literally got nowhere left to grow (sic). Yes, there are hints at a rekindling of the romance between Steve and Nancy, and while that story-line certainly has potential, whether Jonathan lived to see it happen or not (because he’s got to be on the chopping block, too), I think the most likely – and possibly powerful and affecting – scenario is that Steve will somehow sacrifice himself to save Nancy. He’ll go out in a way that would have surprised his younger self, and everyone who knew him: a brave and selfless hero.

I hereby announce that Murray, Dustin, Eddie, Argylle and Erica have been awarded indestructible plot armour. They now occupy the same exalted status as Carol and Daryl in season 4 of The Walking Dead. Nobody better muss so much as a hair on their heads. We’re not playing here.

In summary, then, I don’t have a bloody clue what’s going to happen next. But it’s fun gazing into the portal the first volume left in its wake, and wondering just what the hell’s going in there, because the suspense is killing you.

The clock is ticking.

Dexter finally gives us the finale we deserve

Posted on January 17, 2022 by Jamie Andrew

When Dexter (Michael C Hall) returned for New Blood in 2021 he became the last of the great TV anti-heroes of the 2000s still standing. His unstable stable-mates were all gone. Walter White met the business end of a Nazi shoot-out, spending his last moments tenderly caressing a meth lab. Tony Soprano ascended to that great gabagool jewel in the sky after being gunned down in a diner (and, yes, that’s what happened: please ignore the outrageous blasphemies proffered by rival sects). And Vic Mackey, neutered and out-manoeuvred by his own greed and hubris, suffered a fate worse than death: a desk job.

All of these characters were afforded a reckoning that rang true with their trajectories and psyches, and the shows that spawned them got to close off their thematic circles in ways that felt earned, earnest and fitting.

Dexter Morgan, on the other hand, got to become a lumberjack.

Dexter’s original series finale (season eight, episode twelve, ‘Remember the Monsters‘) – the agony of which has now mercifully been dulled by the show’s successful second stab at getting things right – was a masterclass in poisoning the chalice. It retrospectively made the whole series weaker, and effectively removed Dexter from the lips of all those who might have recommended the show as a compulsive and accomplished piece of television. Game of Thrones‘ swan-song looks positively sanguine when set against the relentlessly wrong-footed, legacy-wrecking dreck that is ‘Remember the Monsters’.

The ending seemed ridiculous; incongruous; written with a shrug. What were we to make of lumberjack Dexter’s lot? That removed from his life, his friends and family, he would suffer as Vic Mackey did? Unlikely. He’s a serial killer with shallow affect and a lone-wolf outlook. This wasn’t hell for Dexter. Life would go on. Were we to infer that Dexter deserved his life more than Tony Soprano? More than Walter White (who at least chose to sacrifice himself, and in the process soften the worst excesses of his arrogance and murderous pride)? After all the damage that Dexter had done to those closest to him, after all of the good lives he’d taken or caused to end through obedience to his Dark Passenger… he just got to walk?

Thus, with a course correction that’s been a long time coming, Dexter: New Blood returns to the saga with the renewed convictions that not every expectation has to be subverted, and that just because Dexter’s death seems like the obvious choice… doesn’t mean that it isn’t also the right one.

The more things change…

New Blood tells a self-contained story, with a looping narrative that circles back snugly around on itself by the final episode, but it also serves to close off nine seasons worth of tragedy and legacy – The Bay Harbour Butcher; the Trinity Killer; Rita; Harry; Dexter’s old life at Miami Metro; his sister, Debs; his estranged and now returned teenage son, Harrison; La Guerta; Batista – in a way that’s emotionally and thematically satisfying. That’s not to say that this season isn’t without its fair share of crazy contrivances and cack-handed short-cuts, a trademark of Dexter that’s always remained constant, but when the end result is as powerful as the (new) series finale, Sins of the Father, it’s easy to forgive a few indulgences along the way.

Dexter – now living in the snowy surroundings of the quaint little town of Iron Lake – isn’t even Dexter when we first meet him (again). He’s Jim Lindsay, a charming and unassuming man who works behind the counter of the local gun shop, and plays happy families with Chief of Police Angela Bishop (Julia Jones) and her daughter, Audrey (Johnny Sequoyah). Jeff Lindsay, of course, is the name of the man who wrote the novel series from which the show was adapted, so Dexter’s new moniker is both an easter-egg-y nod to his literary creator, and a hint as to the likely direction of the Dexter/Harrison dynamic – in the novels Dexter begins to mentor Rita’s young kids, the children he helps to raise, in the ways of the Dark Passenger.

Dexter’s dearly departed sister, Deborah, is now his Dark Passenger, a signal that Dexter is carrying a few hefty body bags of guilt following the long-ago events of season eight. Whereas Harry used to echo his role in life as Dexter’s enabler, Debs just wants Dexter to stop, calling bullshit on his web of self-serving justifications.

New Blood, then, is the natural conclusion to Dexter’s saga, but it’s also a different beast. That’s also patently clear from the title sequence: namely the lack of one. Dexter of old possessed one of the greatest title sequences of all time, one that spoke to the truth of Dexter’s duality, and of the brutality that lurked behind even the most banal of routines and gestures; all scored to a jaunty, slightly-sinister, plinky-plonk theme that encouraged us to revel in the more mischievous aspects of Dexter’s darkness. Not so here. This, we quickly learn, is no place for wry asides, coal-black chuckles or twisted hero worship. This is a new game: the endgame.

The idea of finality is baked into New Blood. The shadow of death casts its shape over every frame. Dexter’s new home of Iron Lake is entombed within snowy upstate New York, a far cry from the stuffy, sun-sheened streets of Miami. While the location further serves to separate the ‘classic’ Dexter from the ‘new’ – visually, tonally, and, of course, climatically – it’s also deliberately on-message with the series’ closing themes: it’s cold, isolated, redolent of death. Dexter might as well be living within Robert Frost’s most famous poem. Miles to go before he sleeps? Not as many as he’d imagine. Iron Lake is a town where ancestral ghosts haunt the hills, where the snow might just be human remains, and where hitch-hikers come to die.

The scenery also invites comparison with Walter White’s sojourn into a snowy wilderness late in the final season of Breaking Bad. Walt chose exile – a cold place to die – but a mixture of ego, shame and regret propelled him back to the only life that would have him, if only just long enough to secure his legacy, his family, and maybe even his ‘soul’. Dexter, of course, doesn’t have a ‘soul’. Or, rather, he does, but it’s only in, and through, death that he discovers it.

The end is the beginning

New Blood at first looks set to explore Dexter’s relationship with his estranged son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), perhaps even giving the semi-retired serial killer a redemption arc. But echoes of Dexter’s inevitable downfall are embedded in the narrative from the beginning.

One of New Blood‘s first scenes sees Dexter pulled over at the side of the road and ‘arrested’ by the Chief of Police. We quickly realise the two are a couple, and what we’re seeing is nothing more than good-natured banter and sexy role-play. Of course, in the finale Angela arrests Dexter for real, after discovering that not only is he the man responsible for killing local douchebag Matt Caldwell, but also Miami’s very own Bay Harbour Butcher.

In episode one of New Blood, Dexter falls off the whacking wagon in style, breaking the rules of his own kill-code by murdering Matt Caldwell in the woods for the crime of killing an innocent deer. In the finale, Dexter kills Sergeant Logan, a decent man, in order to escape from prison, and flee town with Harrison. This murder becomes the reason that Harrison shoots and kills his dad. Logan is to Harrison what the deer was to Dexter – innocent and undeserving of his fate. Unlike Dexter, Harrison is completely justified in pulling the trigger, at least according to Dexter’s ‘code’. In a way, the entirety of New Blood is the story of Dexter setting himself up as the perfect first victim for his son to dispatch. In teaching Harrison to kill Kurt Caldwell – both the father of the man Dexter murders, and a particularly prolific and heinous serial killer – Dexter is inadvertently leading Harrison towards fratricide, and himself towards symbolic suicide.

Live by the code: die by the code

In Dexter’s final scene with Harrison, and his final scene overall, the character is laid bare: to himself, and to the audience. We acknowledge that what Harry did to and for Dexter wasn’t good parenting, but warped, misguided and abusive – whatever gossamer-thin strands of good intentions may have been woven into the horror. Harry made Dexter into a serial killer, one who came to believe in his own twisted, sanctimonious notions of superherodom, which in turn caused Dexter to react to his own grown son’s anger and mental health problems not with tough love, understanding or therapeutic intervention, but by trying to mould Harrison into an avenging serial killer just like him. Not even Kurt Caldwell did that. And, in the final analysis, is Dexter really all that different from Kurt? Or Trinity? Or his own brother? Here, Dexter is stripped back to his irreparably damaged core: an addict and a narcissist who fools himself with rituals and others with his charm, but, ultimately, would turn on anyone who threatened his secret life or freedom, no matter how much he claimed to love or admire them. When Angela arrests him in his kitchen, there’s a moment where we see Dexter’s and Angela’s reflection in a metallic surface, a caddy of knives tantalisingly within reach, and it’s obvious that Dexter is calculating how to use them: on the woman he ‘loves’; on the woman whose daughter his son, Harrison, is very much in love with.

In the past we’ve applauded Dexter’s ingenuity in extricating himself from all manner of tricky situations, cheered him on in his dark endeavours. But the man being interrogated by Angela in the police station isn’t some righteous, charming, relatable, friendly neighbourhood serial killer, but a dangerous, ugly, manipulative psychopath who will stop at nothing to deceive and destroy both the innocent and the guilty alike. It’s impossible to root for him this time, if it ever was in the first place.

Dexter does, however, get his redemption – of sorts – in death. Harrison is headstrong. Angry. Zealous. But he’s still a confused teenage boy who just wants his dad to want him, to love him, to do what’s right. Dexter easily could have manipulated this final confrontation to his advantage, told Harrison what he wanted to hear in order to get close enough to disarm or kill him. And in the end, isn’t this the way that Dexter shows affection? By deciding not only not to kill someone close to him, but choosing to die at their hands in order to make things easier for them?

It’s fitting that as Dexter becomes his own final victim, surrounded by the faces and memories of his past victims, he finally realises the extent of his capability and capacity for love and selflessness.

As for Harrison… is his trauma at an end or is it only just beginning? Both Harrison and his dad were ‘born in blood’, as Dexter would say, witnesses at a young age to the horrific murders of their respective mothers (Harrison’s suffering compounded by the eventual realisation that Dexter’s lifestyle put a target on his mother’s back). But is Harrision suffering from PTSD that could be healed with time and effort, or does a dark passenger whisper within him, also? Did he kill his father because it was the right – or maybe the only – thing to do, or did he kill his father because Dexter satisfied ‘the code’ and Harrison wanted to feed his murderous urges? As good as Jack Alcott was as Harrison, I hope we never find out. Harrison’s final run from town was reminiscent of Jesse’s in the closing moments of Breaking Bad. Better to let what happens next to Dexter’s nearest and dearest live and twist in our imaginations, and not cheapen this very effective, very fitting finale by giving Harrison his El Camino moment.

Goodbye Dexter. You’re finally in prestige-show heaven; if not alongside shows like Breaking Bad, The Shield and The Sopranos, then incredibly close to them. And that’s something most of us never thought we’d get the chance to say.

The Most Disappointing TV of 2020

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Jamie Andrew

2020 will be remembered for a great many things, few of them sanguine. The year began with Australia burning, and ended with Donald Trump trying to smash democracy using other people’s money and temper tantrums. Wedged between those two terrifying totems was the coronavirus, an invisible and deadly assailant that first inexplicably robbed us of our toilet paper, then our freedom, then our collective sense of objective reality. That spectre of lost lives and lockdowns is still with us, and the virus itself only seems to be getting stronger, more deadly and more widespread, like some hideous airborne variant of Mrs Brown’s Boys. As a consequence of the endless upheaval, there wasn’t much to do in 2020 except panic, and watch TV. Thankfully, there was plenty of panic to go around, and a veritable smorgasbord of terrific TV to be sampled.

But that’s not why we’re here today.

Today, I want to talk to you about the shows that made me wish for some kind of retroactive coronavirus-related production disruption that would wipe from existence whole seasons of said shows, and, most mercifully of all, expunge them from my memory. I’m talking about the shows that felt fittingly 2020, in that they were a heinous assault on mankind itself.

The Middle

First, let’s look at a handful of shows that for one reason or another teetered on the cusp of entertainment oblivion, but never quite plummeted, or else started to nose-dive but managed to pull the stick back to achieve if not quite a loop-the-loop then at least a level flight.

Early in the year, Armando Ianucci’s hotly anticipated, space-based comedy Avenue 5 certainly elicited more bangs than whimpers; unfortunately, the bangs came as a result of people slamming their heads off of the nearest solid object in pained bewilderment that an Armando Ianucci project could be so insipid. I think much of the problem lay with the uncharted territory being explored, by creator and audience both. Ianucci usually satirises existing institutions and power structures for which we have countless frames of reference, even if we find ourselves ignorant of the minutiae of their functions. Without much foreknowledge we can get what he’s trying to do and trying to say, and who he’s trying to say it about. We understand the archetypes.

In Avenue 5, set aboard a futuristic luxury space-liner, the institution and target was more opaque, and it took some time for the pieces to fall into place, more time than many viewers were willing to extend. Which is a shame, really, because after a somewhat shaky start – initially, the characters felt oddly broad, and the humour fell a little flat – the show unfolded into a delicious, hilarious farce. Its message on the madness of crowds was moulded, I would guess, with the rise of bumbling populist power-mongers and their slavishly devoted minions in mind, but the year’s events transformed the show into a prescient, scathing, very timely satire on how societies behaved, and continue to behave, during the coronavirus pandemic. Hopefully the second season can hit the ground running… if the coronavirus doesn’t stop them from filming it, that is.

Red Dwarf could easily have ended up slap-bang in the middle of 2020’s dreck list, but it managed to dodge that fate largely thanks to low expectations. Few expected it to be good, even – perhaps especially – childhood fans like me. It still pains me to say it, but Red Dwarf hasn’t been truly noteworthy since its sixth season. Every few years it returns with just enough nuggets of what made it beloved in the first place to justify its continued existence. It’s like a slightly shambolic, age-faded uncle whose hoary old jokes you tolerate because he used to tell you funny stories when you were young. And so it proved with Red Dwarf: The Promised Land, a feature-length special that largely squandered the long-anticipated return of the cat people, especially with its damp squib of a generic villain, but squeezed a lot of laughs out of Lister’s reluctant ascension to godhood (and Rimmer’s reaction to it). There were also a few stellar scenes the dialogue from which wouldn’t have felt out of place in the show’s golden era. Red Dwarf needs to re-learn that it’s always at its best when it trucks in pathos, and lets the laughs flow from character rather than trying to force them through innuendo and crudity.

And now, as promised, the year’s biggest failures and most crushing disappointments.

How the West was Lost

Westworld season one was a brilliant piece of story-telling: dense, rich, mysterious, confounding, thought-provoking. Its second season took a few stutter-steps and stumbles – adding fuel to the fire of those who’d derided the show for over-staying its welcome rather than taking a one-and-done approach – but still turned in powerful, and emotionally resonant sequences and episodes. Then came the third season. Gone were the slow-burns and puzzles, here to stay were the whizz-bangs and non-stop robot ass-kicking. The difference in tone and quality was as pronounced as the difference between Alien and Alien vs Predator 2; Terminator 2 and Terminator: Genysis; and a kiss on the cheek and a thunderous kick in the balls. Westworld has become more like a bad, generic Terminator sequel than the inventive and reflective mind-bender it was when it began. In mulling things over before writing this article, I realised I’d completely forgotten Aaron Paul’s prominent role in season 3; I only remembered once I started grabbing screenshots. This highlights the season’s worst, most unforgiveable, crime: it’s forgettable.

Star Drekking

I was accompanied on my voyages through adolescence by the starships Enterprise, Defiant and Voyager, a triumvirate of overlapping Trek shows (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager respectively) that got me hooked on televised science fiction, and opened my mind to the richness and possibilities of its story-telling.

Sci-fi these days, though, can’t be allowed to revel in its cult status. It’s a multi-billion-pound industry thanks to the likes of Star Wars and Marvel and Disney. Sci-fi is now for the masses, and they want blockbusters, all of the time, whether the screen is small or cinema-sized: big explosions, big emotions, big lens flares, and loud and manipulative musical scores.

Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point. It looks great. Some of the visual effects, particularly in its third season, have been breath-taking. But I can’t help but feel that the aesthetics have been dialled up at the expense of the writing, and somewhere along the line the show has lost its grip on what makes Star Trek ‘Star Trek’. I know times change, and with them budgets, attitudes, audience habits and technology. What might have worked in the 60s (even the 80s) wouldn’t necessarily work today; a lot of it definitely wouldn’t. I know Star Trek has evolved, and has to evolve, to stay relevant. I just wonder if the show has changed too much, to the point where Star Trek: Discovery isn’t just a bad Star Trek show, but a bad (or, if I’m being generous, a mediocre) show, full-stop.

I say this not only as a borderline fuddy-duddy who looks back fondly and perhaps with a sense of protectiveness on the halcyon days of Jean Luc Picard and Benjamin Sisko, but also as someone who watches, and often critiques, an unhealthy amount of television. I’m not operating in a vacuum here. I know what a good Star Trek or, more broadly, a good sci-fi series looks like, and I know what a good TV show looks like. And Discovery doesn’t look like any of it.

Season three saw our plucky crew following Michael through a wormhole into the far-future, acting as custodians of data that a malevolent AI had tried to use to end all sentient, organic life in the universe.

The season started well, with an opener that was entertaining and luscious to look at, if a little vacuous and whizz-bang, followed by an effective episode that saw the crew having to extract the ship from a tomb of fast-replicating ice. Things quickly went downhill after that. The season’s premise, that the Federation of the future was a spent and rag-tag force, a shadow of its former self only kept alive by hope and goodwill, was a strong one, though, as usual, Michael Burnham’s habit of instantly saving the universe just because she’s Michael Burnham rather robbed the story, and the new universe, of its chance to grow in depth and complexity.

Myriad complications face the crew in this new far-future universe, chief among them the cataclysmic event that occurred 120 years before the Discovery’s arrival. This was ‘the burn’, an unexplained phenomenon that caused all dilithium in the galaxy to spontaneously combust, killing untold thousands and rendering most spaceships incapable of fast interstellar travel. Again, fantastical and implausible as this notion was (and I clearly say that in my capacity as a qualified astro-physicist…) there was great potential here for complex conflict and drama that was unfortunately side-lined in favour of slick and shiny whizz-bang, and the sacrificing of all ancillary characters and themes on the altar of Michael Burnham.

You could lay some of the blame for Discovery’s problems on its serialised format – the shift away from the standalone episodes that were once Star Trek’s bread-and-butter – but that would be to deny Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s phenomenally successful forays into that type of long-form story-telling. Even when dealing with war and hopelessness and loss DS9 never lost its essence, its hope, its intrinsic sense of the wider canvas – and franchise – in which it existed.

It helped that DS9 had layered, flawed and fully-fleshed-out characters. Discovery has, at its core, Michael Burnham and Saru (I loved Georgiou, but she’s been spun off into her own spin-off series now), maybe, at a push, Book, Stamets, and Culver, and I wouldn’t include any of them, barring Saru and Georgiou, in the top 50 of Trek’s best characters. I’m still not entirely sure of the names of most of the bridge crew. Very few supporting characters enjoy much in the way of development in this show, and if they do it’s either to service the plot, or service the universal constant that is Michael Burnham – usually the latter. This is not an ensemble show: this is the Michael Burnham show, with occasional not-so-special guest stars.

Season three had so many cynically manufactured emotional beats it was almost a percussive symphony, a dirge scored to the background wail of crying. Jesus, they cry a lot on this show, a lot more than any group of people I’ve ever encountered in life or fiction. And they affirm each other a lot, too, whether it’s earned or not. There were so many bullshit inspirational speeches that I started to think I was watching The Walking Dead In Space. Hugging and crying, crying and hugging, feeling and being in touch with feelings. Signalling to the audience, ‘You should feel this NOW and now you should feel THIS’: telling not showing; shouting not whispering.

Whereas Trek spin-offs like The Next Generation had consultants on hand to advise on the plausibility and logistics of the scripts’ speculative science, Discovery is content to cleave closer to mood and magic. The emphasis is always on feeling over thinking. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the revelation that ‘the burn’ was caused by a sad and angry Kelpien child reacting to the death of his mother under extraordinary (and extraordinarily stupid) circumstances. I’m afraid so. This is no longer a science-fiction show. It’s like something written for the CW by someone who used to write fantasy for children, and doesn’t really like Star Trek, or science-fiction, all that much. I never get the sense, like I did with previous incarnations of the show, that the characters live on the ship. The ship doesn’t feel like a home to them; more like a spaceborne feelings’ factory, or a mobile exposition unit. When the characters appear on-screen – usually running, frequently crying – it’s as though they’ve just entered stage left. Not real people but actors, ciphers. Surface. It’s all just surface.

If you want good small-screen sci-fi, watch The Expanse; if you want good Star Trek, watch 80s and 90s Star Trek, or even watch The Orville, a gem of a show that’s managed to capture the ethos and feel of a modern Star Trek show while remaining resolutely its own thing.

Whatever my interpretation of (or ‘feelings about’ if you want a little sliver of irony) Discovery, a crime hasn’t been committed here. It’s just a TV show, and if people enjoy it or take comfort from it, then who am I to judge them? In any case, I’d take Discovery over Star Trek: Picard any (and every) day of the week.

Christ, Picard felt like a kick in the nuts; a kick so hard it sent my nuts thundering up my body like two errant pinballs, which then ping-ponged between my skull and amygdala until my brain died. Sometimes, as Fred Gwynne said in Pet Sematary, dead is better, and that’s certainly the case here, both in relation to the show itself, and to the fate of Jean Luc Picard at the season’s end.

On reflection, all of the things I enjoyed about Picard season one were rooted in nostalgia. I liked the opening dream sequence aboard the NCC-1701; I liked Picard reuniting with Riker and Troi; I liked seeing Hugh and Seven of Nine again; I liked Data’s (now second) final death scene. But I only liked them in the same way that I would like the sudden waft of a smell that reminded me of being a kid and visiting my dearly-departed grandparents. Running with that memory-sparking theme, then, I would have to say that the experience of watching season one of Picard is like someone reanimating your dead grandparents and having those hitherto sweet, wise and gentle figures hurl foul abuse at you, screaming until they’re hoarse that the world is an irredeemably ugly place and we all deserve death, before beating you senseless and attempting to extract one of your eyes with a dessert spoon (unless your grandparents were like that when they were alive, in which case please pick another analogy from the pile). Gone, also, is the Picard we remember from active duty; here instead we have a walking fan-fic who’s presumably been written by an overly sentimental sado-masochist. The Picard of this show is just a broken old man who seems to spend most of his time being told to fuck off.

I know genre shows like The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica have upped the ante, opening the door to dealing with adult themes and content in a commercially successful way, but Star Trek shouldn’t try to compete with them on that battleground. They’re their own thing, and Star Trek is its own thing. By all means re-invigorate Star Trek, but, again, don’t lose sight of the sort of show it is and always has been, and don’t transmogrify it into ‘Quentin Tarantino in Space’.

Star Trek: Picard is gritty, dark, spectacularly and incongruously violent, full of swearing (people say fuck in Star Trek now), sombre and miserable. It falls light-years short of the success and quality of The Expanse, and in so courting that audience-base at the expense of its life-long fans fails at being a Star Trek show. The worst of both worlds, if you like.

Oh, Doctor Who. What’s happened to you? I was never a huge fan of the show as a child. I was aware of its place in the cultural consciousness, knew the contemporary doctors of my era, and enjoyed it whenever I watched it. I was too young to deduce the death throes the show had entered into under the helm of controversial show-runner Johnathan Nathan-Turner, and didn’t particularly mourn its passing when the original run ended in 1989. As an adult, I enjoyed the show’s new iteration, starting with Christopher Eccleston and running all the way up to Peter Capaldi. As I had started writing for Den of Geek I thought it criminal I wasn’t fully au fait with the show’s long history, geek behemoth that it is, so took to bingeing it from the very beginning. My kids came along for the ride, and fell in love with Doctor Who, almost to the point of fanaticism. They now know every era, every doctor and companion, and almost every story from the Classic series to the present day, up to and including the 13^th Doctor, played by Jodie Whittaker.

And this era is the one they’re least enthusiastic about. I feel the same. Again, the special effects are, in most cases, better than they’ve ever been, but everything just feels a bit flat, from the performance of the central character to the villains to the alien worlds and wonders we’re invited to explore. It’s like the showrunner Chris Chibnall, despite being a fan of the show since childhood, has forgotten the essence of what Doctor Who is. The show has become more like a series of facile morality plays with sprinklings of Quantum Leap than a show about a space cowboy rolling into town in his rusty blue wagon, righting wrongs, fighting evil and trying to leave the universe a better place than when he found it.

This latest season was an improvement on last year’s season 11, but that’s like saying Jeffrey Epstein was an improvement on Jimmy Savile. In fairness, the opening two-parter, Spyfall, was actually a lot of fun, and I loved the new, wild-eyed, scenery-chewing Master (Sacha Dahwan). The Haunting of Villa Diodati, too, was a strong outing, with an intriguing premise and a commendably eerie atmosphere. Graham, played by Bradley Walsh, was, as always, a rare chink of light in the darkness, a warm and engaging companion. Jo Martin’s incarnation of the Doctor, pursued to rural England by the Judoon, was a similar joy to watch, proving that the Doctor’s gender isn’t the real, or at least the greatest, problem with the current manifestation of the character. But, despite little flashes of competency here and there, the season got bogged down in boredom, preachiness, and insipid story-telling, very much wearing its politics on its sleeve, shaped like a giant mutated fist. There was also Orphan 55, one of the worst ever episodes of Doctor Who, perhaps one of the worst ever episodes of anything ever. And that’s before we even consider the canon-smashing sledgehammer of the season’s closing two-parter that makes Jodie Whittaker’s version of the character not the 13th, but approximately the 1,000,013th.

This show is dying, despite its occasional grand gestures and increasing attempts at fan service, and I don’t think I care anymore. And my kids don’t either. Which should be a little worrying for the BBC, given that my kids, and thousands like them, are the show’s primary target market.

Spitting Image is the spitting image of a very bad show. I used to love the series when I was younger, and now find myself wondering if the ‘satire’ was always this broad, the jokes always so cheap. Much of the problem lies with many of the show’s targets being beyond parody, especially Donald Trump, who is already a malevolent puppet. Elsewhere in the show, though, the writers seemed content to take lazy, tabloid-style pops at their targets, most notably Harry and Megan, a duo, and a representation of them, sure to please the Daily Mail crowd. Just leave them alone, for Christ’s sake. The characterisation of Joe Biden, too, could have been ripped from tweets written by Trump himself. And as much as I loathe Prince Andrew, having the punchlines to his appearances be literal punches and head-battings rather lowered the satirical tone to sub-Punch-and-Judy levels.

I liked Dominic Cummings’ pulsating-headed alien, and, contrary to my comments on Prince Andrew, it’s always a joy to see James Corden being viciously beaten, but beyond that the show either punched down, or couched its punches in soft velvet gloves. Puerile, unfunny and a wasted opportunity for some political satire with some real heft.

What shows do you think missed the mark in 2020? Or do you disagree with my sh*t-list? Tell me in the comments below this article.

It’s Time TV Went to the Right

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

Erroneous, or at least exaggerated, reports recently circulated claiming that the incoming Director General of the BBC was going to correct the BBC’s supposed long-standing left-wing bias. So let’s just imagine what it would be like if all of British TV shifted to the right. What sort of programmes could we look forward to?

The Radio Times

Pensioners in England reminisce about the better times when the only entertainment in the home was the radio. Bill in Surrey remembers: ‘My mam would listen to seven ‘ahs of Vera Lynn, then anover twelve ‘ahs of ‘er Majesty the Queen, and we never even ‘ad a fakking radio. She was just nuts, san. Still betta than all these bladdy TV shows full of foreigners and bladdy pooftahs these days.’ To be followed by our nostalgic look back at Thatcher’s glorious economic reign in the 1980s, The Only Way is A-Fax.

The Sooty Show

Britain’s most loveable bear makes a snowflake-defying comeback after his cancellation last year on the grounds that the word ‘sooty’ was‘a bit racist’. Sue’s out: there’s no room in our precious children’s minds for backdoor Chinese propaganda, thank you. And Sweep now speaks proper English. Focus groups felt that, you know, he’s been here long enough, he should speak the fucking language. Watch in delight as Sooty uses his magic wand to do things like remove free school meals and ‘get Brexit done’.

Come Whine With Me

A group of Brexit voters take turns to host each other for a fish and chip dinner, while having illuminating conversations about the Britain they remember.

‘Of course, in my day you could call them ***** ***** ******* without any of this PC nonsense.’

‘Yes, I remember that, you’d just shout, ‘***** ****** *******’ at one of them, and do you know what? They’d shoot you back a big happy smile.’

‘Oh, I know, I know. But never mind that, these days you can’t even call them a ******* ******* ****** ******, or a **** ******* ***** ****** ***** ****** ****** ******* ****** ***** without some leftie do-gooder jumping down your throat.’

‘I heard the other day they were going to ban flags. Or was it lettuce?’

‘They banned Wednesday last week. Too white apparently.’

‘Who banned it? Was it the *****, the ******, or the ******? I’ll bet it was the fucking *****s?’

‘I went into work the other week dressed like Geri Halliwell from the Spice Girls movie, you know, with that Union Jack dress? And do you know what they did? Bloody sent me home.’

‘You don’t really have the hips for that though, Clive.’

‘Quick question on that subject: which toilet would you have used?’

‘Don’t get me started on that caper, I’ll choke on me bloody takeaway. Perverts.’

‘Course, you’re not allowed to say ‘takeaway’ anymore…’

It’ll Be All White on the Reich

A studio audience, dressed in ‘All Lives Matter’ T-shirts, erupts with riotus laughter as they watch hilarious outtakes of unarmed black people in America being shot dead by police. Followed by a bit of old school comedy genius, with Matt Hancock’s Half Hour. This week, that classic episode, The Press Conference.

Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway

An hour of Ant and Dec watching repeats of themselves on TV as they enjoy a Chinese takeaway, which they repeatedly and unapologetically refer to as a ‘ch*nky’. Followed by another episode of White Van Man Der Valk in which the famous working-class British detective tracks down rogue immigrants by pointing at every non-white person he passes in his van and going, ‘There’s another one.’.

Undercover Racist

The white owner of a factory secretly joins his ethnic work-force on the shop-floor for a week, sharing their hardships and agonies, before tearfully announcing to them all on day seven how much he’d gladly send them all back home, if only he didn’t rely on their cheap labour so much.

‘But we’re all from Dudley,’ says the foreman.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t understand anything you people say,’ he replies.

Followed by Corona Nation Street. Tonight the residents tear down a 5G mast and have an illegal street party to celebrate.

The BreX Factor

Simon Cowell introduces the singing talent show where every contestant has to sing the British national anthem, even though not a single one of them actually knows the words.

Doctor Red-White-and-Blue

This week the Doctor takes the Tardis on holiday to Benidorm, and decries the lack of any decent Bovril.

Jamie on the Box: Muppets Now

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

Disney’s first stab at the muppets post-Henson, the 2011 feature film The Muppets, was almost immaculate. The character of Walter was a master-stroke, both an entry-level proxy for the new generation of kids encountering Jim Henson’s phantasmagoric creatures for the first time, and a reminder to old fogeys like me of how much the muppets meant to them and how excited we were to see them again.

The muppets themselves weren’t quite as anarchic or unpredictable as they’d been in their 70s/80s heyday – alluded to in the movie itself through Animal being constrained from indulging his destructive impulses by way of self-help therapy – but what the movie lacked in chaos it made up for in reverence, well-earned sweetness, a plethora of genuinely catchy musical numbers and laugh-out loud moments. Disney had captured lightning in a bottle, but didn’t appear to know what to do with it once they had it, as evidenced by 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted, a sequel that was watchable, though lacklustre and lacking in heart.

ABC’s The Muppets – the 2015 behind-the-scenes mockumentary that was cancelled after one season – showed staggered promise, but, again, the showrunners fatally misunderstood the property. The result was an ill-judged, frequently insipid, tonal mish-mash that alienated long-time admirers like me, and failed to ignite adoration in those coming to the muppets cold. Instead they were left cold. What I want to know is, who looked at the muppets and thought, ‘I know what’ll reinvigorate this franchise: multiple references to Kermit the Frog’s sex life.’ In the end, The Muppets new TV series wasn’t bold or edgy enough to work as an all-out, adults-only entry in the canon, but it was too adult to appeal to children. So who the hell was it for?

And now we have Disney’s Muppets Now, a show perhaps cynically designed to capitalise on the Zoom-era zeitgeist at a time when most TV shows have been crippled, cancelled or postponed by the creep of the coronavirus.

The show follows Scooter’s attempts to cobble together an online extravaganza from the filmed segments sent across to him by his co-stars, uploaded before our very eyes as we watch the episode, while Kermit frets and frowns.

The first of these segments is Life Sty, wherein Miss Piggy explores beauty, style and showbiz pizzazz, featuring guest appearances by actor/singer Taye Diggs and actress Linda Cardellini. Next comes little Walter’s showcase of his fellow muppet’s lesser-known talents, this week turning the spotlight on Kermit’s almost supernatural talent for photo-bombing. The Swedish chef is next, hurdy-gurdying through a cook-off with celebrity chef Carlina Will, before Kermit tops it off with a one-on-one (well, several-on-one) interview with Ru Paul.

And it was, you know… Okay. A bit flat. I watched it with my two young kids, 5 and 3, and they were bored for most of it. Things weren’t much better over on my side of the age divide; I sat stony-faced for the most part. I enjoyed bits of it, but again I was left wondering, ‘Who is this for? What is this for?’

The Piggy segment was one-note and predictable. The cooking segment – by far the worst – felt like exactly that: a cooking segment; an insipid piece of fluffery you might find on a magazine show like The One Show or Saturday Morning Kitchen, but without even those show’s intermittently successful attempts at good-natured humour. The Swedish chef seemed incidental to his own showcase. He was no longer the agent of chaos I’d enjoyed watching as a child (and an adult, I hasten to add). He Just seemed disgruntled and mean-spirited. More inexcusably still, he just wasn’t funny. My kids agreed.

And what the hell has become of Kermit? I’m a Henson purist, but even still I came to appreciate and enjoy Steve Whitmire’s take on the world’s most famous amphibian. Matt Vogel is the latest actor to puppet and voice Kermit following Whitmire’s acrimonious departure from the franchise in 2017, and he’s just not Kermity enough. Vogel’s evocation/impression – whatever you want to call it – is poor to the point where I think I would be better at it, and his attempt to capture the character leaves Kermit’s green feeling distinctly grey.

Did Kermit turn to valium after his last show was cancelled? Is that the in-show explanation?

It’s telling that the strongest segment is the photo-bomb one; a segment containing two muppets and precisely zero humans. It’s very funny, and uses its characters well. Likewise, the interplay between Uncle Deadly and Miss Piggy is a genuine joy to behold. Again, it’s an interaction that doesn’t need a celebrity guest to make it work. It’s already there in the script.

Disney seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that it is the muppets’ celebrity guests that have always made the brand work; made people watch. Sure, the original Muppet Show had a different celebrity cameo every week – everyone from Elton John to Steve Martin to the cast of Star Wars – but the appearances never felt like celebrity-for-celebrity’s sake. While the show’s guest stars added a direction, a feel and a flavour to their particular episode, people would watch it whether they were there or not: there was never any doubt that the muppets had top billing. There’s something depressing and par-for-the-course about the modern iterations of the muppets trying to shoehorn in as many celebrity appearances as possible. Even when the original series featured a star that few people had heard of, the magic was still there. Not so now.

While I agree that change and re-contextualisation often can re-invigorate a long-running property, not every revived show needs I-Phones, shaky-cams, Zoom calls or numerous nods to contemporaneous social mores. Call me a cranky cultural conservative if you like. I suppose I am when it comes to the muppets, the first show I remember watching as a very small child.

I hope the next five episodes of Muppets Now contain something to make this old man and his own little muppets chuckle, or even smile. But if that turns out not to be the case, then let’s hope that someone at Disney works out that the best way to capture the energy and essence of these furry, fuzzy, fun-lovin’ little critters is to let them come home. Put them back in their theatre, re-cast a credible Kermit, and then, frankly, leave them the fuck alone to do their thing.

Jamie Does… Love Island

Posted on March 5, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

I’ve never watched Love Island.

Mind you, there are a lot of things I haven’t done: stapled my testicles to my left thigh; performed a bungee jump using a bunch of dead snakes tied together; covered cereal boxes with black masking tape, strapped them to my body and ran through an airport shouting ‘bomb’. I guess what I’m driving at is: not having done something isn’t always a strong argument for doing it. Some things are better left un-done.

Still, my shtick is to see or do something new with a view to writing about it in an excoriating and/or self-deprecating manner, and what better opportunity for malice and mirth than having a crack at what I’m sure is one of the dumbest, most shamelessly hedonistic sex-a-thons the world has seen since Charlie Sheen got his knob stuck in the air vent at his local swimming pool.

So I watched Love Island. Three episodes to be precise.

And I think that was enough.

And by ‘enough’ I mean ‘too much’. And by ‘too much’ I mean I think I’m going to take my eyes out and roll them around in broken glass in case I’m ever tempted to watch Love Island ever again.

Though I’d never watched the show before, I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. And lo and behold, shocking precisely no-one, least of all me, the title sequence was a montage of attractive, deeply conceited people casting off their clothes in slow-motion to the kind of music that suggested a sense of grandeur unlikely to be matched by the reality of a bunch of twenty-somethings sitting around a pool trying to fuck each other.

First up, the girls.

There was Siannise, a Beauty Consultant from Bristol with the intonations and mannerisms of Marjorie Dawes from Little Britain. She said she wanted someone family orientated and respectable, which begged the question: what the fuck was she doing on Love Island?

Then there was Paige from West Lothian, an ex of Lewis Capaldi’s, who described herself as loud and a drama queen, as if those were in any way positive attributes. I wish people would realise that honesty isn’t always the best policy: “I’m horrible, me. I wet myself on purpose every time I’m on the bus. I strangle turkeys for a laugh. My favourite show is Mrs Brown’s Boys.”

Leanne from London promoted herself as the life and soul of the party, a rather trite and vacuous thing to say, but I could tell that beneath her shallow and hedonistic veneer lurked the soul of a true romantic. “Might as well go for a handsome guy, because ugly, handsome, they’re all assholes,” she told us, “But it burns more when you get cheated on by an ugly guy.” Wasn’t it Jane Austen who said that first? Although Jane Austen probably wouldn’t have gone on to say that she loved builders.

Next there was Shaugna, a Democratic Services Officer who didn’t seem to understand exactly what she did for a living. She was a little more certain in her opinion of plumbers: she liked them. Sexually, one would assume, rather than just admiring their work ethic.

KNOCK KNOCK

“Who’s there?”

“It’s a me, it’s a Mario!”

SLIDES KNICKERS OFF.

I’ve got a little tip for you, Shaugna and Leanne. If you’re asked to list three of the most interesting things about yourself, and one of those things is that you like to fuck tradesmen, you could probably do with taking up a few more hobbies. Even try shagging a few scientists and people who work in the customer service industry to even things out a bit.

Sophie from Essex blathered on about the colour of eyes she wanted her babies to have. Yeah, Sophie, I’m sure the pulsing meatheads about to swagger into the pool area can’t wait to have a long chat about your maternity plans.

‘OH MY GOD YOU’RE GORGEOUS!’ the women all shouted at each other, as I smirked and thought to myself, ‘These women will fucking HATE each other in 3 days time.’ Turns out I was wrong.

It only took a day.

I think ‘Love Island’ does a great disservice to the word ‘Love’. I wish they’d just be honest and just call it FUCK ISLAND, and invite contestants of more average body types to participate. “Ah’m big Sharon fae Paisley, and ah fuckin’ love chips and gettin’ ma hole claimed.”

Next came the guys. There was Nas from London, a builder (yeah, I know, seemed like a dead cert with the ladies, being a tradesman and all, but none of them liked him). He kissed his ‘guns’ and stood with his hands on his hips looking all pouty, before revealing that he was after ‘a good set of eyebrows’. If he’d been on Take Me Out, they would have buzzed him into oblivion, jammed the buttons so hard it triggered an earthquake that swallowed the studio down into the hungry jaws of the earth itself. Still, he seemed like a nice guy, which again begs the question: what the fuck was he doing on Love Island?

Callum the scaffolder from Manchester was a little more on-message with his cry of ‘Get me in there. I want to see what the talent’s like!’ He never said as much in his intro-tape, but it goes without saying that he’s probably got Chlamydia. And such a vicious strain that his cock is now possessed by the virus, glows green and calls itself ‘Evil Claude’.

Ollie was next, a young, posh heir to a fortune and a Lordship who looked like Martin Clunes and sounded like George Osborne doing a Mr Bean impression. He announced that he was a cheater, and lived next door to Charles and Camilla, possibly labouring under the misapprehension that the wow factor of the latter cancelled out the disgrace of the former, when in reality the cheating bit was probably more palatable than his being neighbours to that pair of horse-faced weirdos. Ultimately, no-one really liked Ollie, mainly because he was a surly, brooding, conceited ball-bag. In any case, he was swiftly axed from the show when news broke in the real world about him molesting antelopes or shooting tortoises through the brain or something. I’d still maintain that murdering an animal isn’t as bad as inviting a girl over to your house only for her to glance outside and see Camilla putting the washing out.

Then there was Connor from Bolton, a chiselled but goofy-looking young man who looked like Pornstache from Orange Is The New Black mixed with David Walliams, a look that he topped off with the hair-cut of a monk. He very quickly revealed a whole deck of ‘RED FLAG’ playing cards, delighting the young woman who showed an interest in him by getting drunk and starey-eyed, before aggressively brushing her hand away and claiming that she hated him already. To paraphrase Paddy McGuinness: “Let the island… see the love!” Where’s the love?

Mike the police officer was last to arrive. His ‘aw shucks’ smile and gift of the gab did a lot of heavy lifting to off-set the predatory energy bursting out from his steely, tiger’s gaze.

The pairing system and the ‘getting to know you’ games seem to eschew the current trend for open and honest dialogue between the sexes in favour of a Weinstein-esque, Lack-of-Consent-a-thon, which is of course why the infernal shite gets so many viewers. I guess it isn’t called ‘Respect Everyone’s Boundaries Island’ for a good reason. Who would watch that?

When the guys first arrived, the women had to stand behind some love hearts, and step forward if they wanted to be coupled with the man on display. Poor wee Naz the builder struck out, with not a single lady even flexing their toe in his direction (if I was a contestant on that show, the five women would have poured petrol on the love hearts, set them alight and then retreated behind the safety of the flames).

Here’s the kicker, though. Even though Naz was regarded with shrugs of ambivalence from the girls, he still got to choose one with whom to couple up. “Well, Naz, none of them has given consent, so which one would you like to compel to share a bed with you?” Christ.

A later game involved the presenter reading out a fact about one of the contestants, and then asking a member of the opposite sex to passionately kiss the person to whom they thought it referred. It was all getting a bit too rapey for my liking.

I won’t deny that there was some small part of me – some sad, primal part of me – that started to get into the show, fooling myself that I was embarking on a psychological dissection of the mating rituals of the under-30s. When the twins bounded in with their blonde locks and big boobs, I correctly predicted almost instantly that they’d end up with Mike and Callum. I felt like a Club 18-30 Freud.

But by episode three I’d had enough. We all like a good gossip, men as much as women in my experience (although men pretend they aren’t gossiping), but after a while my brain started to rebel against the steady diet of intellectual nothingness I was feeding it. And, sure, there were some beautiful girls there, but if carnality’s your thing it’s best to either find a real woman, or thump yourself half-blind to porn.

I tend to resist the current trend towards inter-generational conflict. ‘OK Boomer’, Millennials, all those assorted generalisations and stereotypes. And I try hard not to sound too curmudgeonly or out of touch. Times are different. We’re reasonably free from strife. That’s great. Past generations suffered to make this world better and easier for the generations to come, not so they could make us feel guilty for being free or prosperous. But even still, I found myself sitting there shouting things at the screen like: ‘A good war, that’s what’ll sort out these preening fucking layabouts.’ And ‘Try doing your eyebrows in a trench, you oily, tattooed numb-nut!’ Conveniently forgetting the fact that my adolescence was spent playing computer games, drinking to excess, spending money on drugs and inflatable furniture, and sabotaging my romantic and sexual couplings at every opportunity, with not a war or a rationing book in sight. I was once just as feckless, fatuous and reckless as these young whippersnappers, it’s just that significantly fewer people wanted to have sex with me, and now that number is somewhere in the low single-digits. One. Me. I still quite like to have sex with me, so at least there’s that.

Anyway, I’m off to watch something a bit more worthy and important, to wash the stink of this fleshy tosh off my soul.

[cycles through Netflix for six hours]

[types FUCK ISLAND into Pornhub search box]

Jamie on the Box: The Good Place series finale

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

A lot of shows this past year have ended their runs evoking loss, mortality and death. I don’t know if this surge of sombre feeling has seeped into pop culture because the liberal west has moved away from organised religion and towards secularism and needs to plug the spiritual gap somehow, or because a lot of the most recent crop of show-runners are feeling their ages, but, whatever the reason, shows as various as The Deuce, The Affair, Preacher, The Haunting of Hill House, Mr Robot, and Legion have used their final bows to remind us of ours.

It came as no real surprise when The Good Place – RIP – carried on the trend. After all, it’s pretty hard to set a show in the afterlife and avoid evoking loss, mortality and death.

The genuinely surprising thing about the finale of The Good Place was just how hard it hit me in the tear ducts; harder than all of the other shows I mentioned in the first paragraph combined. Sure, The Good Place has made me leak ocular fluid before – most notably when Chidi’s memories of, and love for, Eleanor returned mid-way through the fourth season – but it’s never made me almost drown in the stuff before.

For many hours after the end credits had rolled I was left with an over-whelming sense of life’s fragility and finality. I was drunk on a potent cocktail of love, loss, joy and sadness, trying to blink back rivers of blinding tears and failing miserably. I couldn’t concentrate on reading a book the rest of that night, not one sentence; I couldn’t watch anything else on TV; I struggled to process and convey the sheer range of emotions I was feeling.

It felt like I’d been to the funeral of a beloved grandparent. This was grief. Real, actual grief: terrible; life-affirming; harrowing; beautiful. What the fork was going on?

This is… A comedy, right?

The Good Place – from the mind and fingers of Michael Schur, who co-created both Brooklyn Nine Nine and Parks and Recreation – has been one of my favourite comedies of recent years. It’s a perfect balance of farce, heart, slapstick, high-brow and low-brow humour, held together with whip-smart writing, hilariously detailed world-building, continually inventive and subversive twists, and, most importantly of all, a feast of rich and colourful, well-drawn characters who, by the end of the show’s run, feel like family: both each other’s and your’s.

Eleanor, Chidi, Jason and Tahani entered what they thought was heaven but was actually hell, teamed up with its architect, the demon Michael, to escape deliverance and chase redemption, uncovered an existential conspiracy borne of incompetence along the way, saved the world, learned how to be their best selves, and finally reached heaven – the titular Good Place – only to realise that it was more hellish than hell itself. It turns out that an eternity of butthole spiders and Richard Marx music isn’t nearly as blood-curdling a proposition as an eternity spent bereft of purpose and in possession of God-like powers.

The show raises as many laughs as it does questions. When you have the time and the power to do everything you want whenever you want, can anything in your life hold meaning? Is a life without struggle worth living? How long can we tolerate existence for existence’s sake?

In its final episode The Good Place eschews the whacky and the supernatural to make a convincing and beautiful case for humanism. Michael’s joy at being made human (his Pinocchio moment, his friends tell him) renews our own appreciation for the brief flash of existence each of us gets to call their own.

As each of the other characters either let go or level up, we’re left feeling a little less afraid of whatever it is that might lie behind that final door in the forest glade – whether we imagine ourselves as the ones walking through it, or the ones left behind to wonder.

The very last scene also suggests that the good we do in life, and beyond, will live on and touch the lives of others. I liked that, even if it seemed that humanity’s fate was to become benevolent space fertiliser.

The Good Place mulled over a great many theories and philosophies over its run, reflecting a shining kaleidoscope of pop culture in the process, but its finale left me most of all with a great and powerful impression of The Wizard of Oz.

Michael was the wizard with the booming voice, who ended up being a lot nicer and more humble than his disguise suggested (and it was such a good disguise that it took Michael a long time to realise he was even wearing one). Thanks to his love and devotion to Janet, Jason found his brain – or at least was able to teach his existing brain the value of patience and focus. Tahani found her heart. Chidi found his courage. And Eleanor found all three.

It was sad. It was beautiful.

It was perfect.

And did I mention it was forking funny?

There’s no place like The Good Place.

Take it sleazy, everyone.

Jamie on the Box: Star Trek Picard

Posted on January 26, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

It’s been an exciting, almost boundless time for TV in general lately, but sci-fi as a genre has fared rather less well, the glittering exceptions being The Orville, The Mandalorian and The Expanse (and perhaps we can extrapolate from that roster of success that it’s simply a good time for sci-fi shows with the word ‘The’ in the title).

Star Trek: Discovery is certainly boldly going, as all good Trek series should, but many of the franchise’s fans have also boldly… just gone. Lost in Space is fun and frothy, but nothing more. Just last week there was yet another flashy but hollow outing for the thirteenth Doctor played by Jodie Whittaker (although last night’s Judoon-flavoured romp appears to have turned a few heads), plus a disappointingly lacklustre debut for Armando Iannucci’s new sci-fi comedy series Avenue 5 (let’s hope tonight’s episode kicks it up a gear).

There’s a lot of hope, then, riding on Picard (CBS All Access, streaming on Amazon Prime), Sir Patrick Stewart’s first foray into the Star Trek universe since 2002’s disappointing big-screen outing ‘Star Trek Nemesis’. That’s right, baby: Picard’s back. Except he’s retired. And he needs a stunt double to run. And he’s re-programmed his replicator to dispense decaffeinated earl gray. But what did you expect? He’s an octogenarian now. (“Computer? Stool softener. Phillips’ Gel. Hot.”)

The show’s opening sequence takes place aboard the ship of our Star Trek dreams – which is also literally the ship of Picard’s dreams – the Enterprise D. The old bird’s looking as good as she ever did, hooking a hand-brake turn across a space-lane. On-board the dream-ship, the dearly departed Data is back where he belongs, playing poker against Picard.

If not for the etches on Patrick Stewart’s face or the chub on Brent Spiner’s very human jowls we could be watching an episode plucked straight from the final seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I guess that’s sort of the point. When Data asks Picard why he’s stalling, and Picard answers sadly: ‘I don’t want the game to end,’ he’s acting as a proxy for fans like me who’d rather remain on-board the old ship than wade into the unknown with a new crew and a new focus. But Picard has to wake up, and so too do we. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

We’re in France, actually, at Picard’s vineyard.

Picard now has a dog called ‘Number One’ who likes to jump up on his lap and lick him right in the mouth, which begs the question: why did he name the beast after his former first officer? I guess space must’ve been lonely sometimes.

I’m not sure how Riker will react to discovering that his old boss has named in his honour an animal that gets visibly sexually excited many times a day and presumably tries to hump anything it sees, but he won’t be able to deny that it’s an apt homage. Anyway, that’s probably more than enough words on Riker’s wandering glands.

Picard is having dreams and visions; so too is Dahj, a young woman who finds her Chuck-like killing-powers activated when a bunch of assassins beam into her apartment on date night and murder her boyfriend. Her visions are of Picard, a man she’s never met, so when she sees him giving an interview on whatever they call the telly in the far-future, she goes straight to Chateaux Picard to enlist his help.

‘I’m so confused,’ she tells him, weeping and neurotic, ‘I don’t know who you are. I just killed some men. I know your face. I can do kung-fu. I think I love you.’

‘Come here, you,’ says Picard, ‘And give your uncle Jean a big cuddle.’

OK, I’m paraphrasing a tad. Horrifically, though, it’s a close approximation. Too much of the premiere seemed designed to join the dots of plot, at warp speed and with scant regard for pacing or character. Granted, there was a lot to pack in – everything from the destruction of Romulus to a hot-potato refugee crisis to re-purposed Borg cubes – but more time could’ve been taken to set things up and orient us in this new world. Less jumping around and hashy-bashy dialogue.

Can we talk about the whole Data thing? That’s a rhetorical question; we’re already doing it. See, Dahj is Data’s daughter, which is why Picard and Dahj were so drawn to one another. Artificial life-forms were outlawed, but not before Data’s neurons were used to clone a daughter, because, you know, that’s how robots work. But they couldn’t just clone one, silly, he had to have two daughters, BECAUSE THAT’S HOW THESE THINGS WORK. I can almost hear one of the show’s 80,000 producers asking another of the show’s 80,000 producers during pre-production:

‘You know how Star Trek used to stick as closely as possible to actual science, or plausible projections thereof, with very little in the way of ridiculously fantastical shit in service of quasi-mystical character quests?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well how about we get rid of that science shit?’

By the end of the episode Dahj is dead, but long live her sister, Dohj, or whatever the shit she’s called.

Patrick Stewart, of course, was… well, he was Patrick Stewart. When has that man ever turned in a poor performance? You could watch him taking a shit for twenty minutes and it would still be better than 90 per cent of anything you’d ever watched. Picard still possesses charm and wit and authority, but age has softened him around the edges; Stewart takes the veneer of vulnerability and warmth that always existed in Younger Picard and drapes it around Old Man Picard like a cosy tartan blanket.

That old dog can still bark though. When a TV interviewer probes him about Starfleet’s deplorable political stance in the wake of the android-orchestrated shipyard attack that left Starfleet unable – or unwilling – to come through on its promise to rescue refugees from the Romulan supernova (pauses to catch a breath before passing out from terminal exposition), he seethes that Starfleet’s decision to ‘abandon those people we had sworn to save was not just dishonourable, it was downright criminal!’

This is not the Star Trek we remember (see also Discover, Star Trek). Whereas the first clutch of series in the franchise (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT) cleaved closely to Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future – despite occasional forays into the grey and dark areas of both the universe and the human heart – Star Trek: Picard firmly establishes itself as a vision of the future that takes as its root a post-colonial, present-day past (I know, I can hear it, too) in which populist demagogues like Trump and Bolsonaro rule the world (Hell, out here in the real-world, in a case of life imitating art, Donald Trump has sanctioned the use of a logo for his Space Force that’s pretty much identical to the Starfleet logo).

Simply put: Star Trek is now a dystopia, in which almost all institutions are inherently and irreversibly corrupt. Most of the baddies from the other iterations of Trek are now the goodies, and most of the goodies are now the baddies.

It’s similar in a way to what happened with westerns. Once the genre had been around for a few decades, doing its thing of showing the rough and tough and noble American dream in its infancy, we started to get revisionist westerns, showing a dirtier and doubtless more accurate version of the Wild West: a world that was grimy, brutal, morally bankrupt, and occasionally genocidal.

Picard is revisionist Star Trek. A revision of the future before it’s even happened. A reversal of hope before we’ve even had a chance to feel it.

I’m willing to sit back and see where the show takes us. I love the character of Picard, I’m intrigued by the set-up, and if I was exasperated a few times, then I certainly wasn’t bored at any point. I guess I liked it? I feel a lot of good will towards Star Trek, having been a big fan of TOS, TNG, DS9 and VOY as a teenager (much to the dismay of my balls, which would’ve liked to have been emptied into a woman a little more often). I want to love Picard. I just…

Well. Let’s see what’s out there.

Word of warning to you, though, Jean-Luc. This isn’t the 90s anymore, son. No mansplaining. No assuming anyone’s species. And don’t forget to check your human privilege before you go off and do something patronising or unforgivably offensive like save the day all by yourself.

Forget who you were. Remember who you are.

But whatever you do, don’t forget to engage.

The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2019

Posted on January 21, 2020 by Jamie Andrew

2019 was another bumper year for TV. Each and every January I shake my head and think to myself, ‘That year must have been an outlier. The revolution ends here. We’re going to go back to mid-90s dreck again, I can feel it, and I’ll be able to concentrate on movies again, like I did when I was younger.’ But, no. Come every following December I’m totting up my watch-list and thinking to myself, ‘God damn and yee-haw, we’re living in a never-ending, televisual gold rush.’ Here’s my pick for the best show of the year, and the worst show of the year. More lists and effusive (and occasionally furious) analysis to follow over the next week.

The Best TV Show of 2019

Crowning the best show of 2019 was tough. Such a banquet-sized smorgasbord of returning classics and staggering debuts from which to pick, and on which to gorge.

Stranger Things made a stonking return to form in its third season, escalating and amplifying everything that was good about its maiden outing and erasing the missteps of its sophomore year. The Affair and The Deuce both bowed out with strong seasons, capped off with almost immaculate finales. The Expanse had a phenomenal fourth season in its new home at Amazon, a tense, trauma-filled exploration of new worlds and the new political paradigm ushered in by the ring gates. Barry continued to impress with its slick mix of feeling and farce, comedy and tragedy, and death-dealing dilettantes. Fleabag’s triumphantly funny second – and we suppose final – season was rightly showered with acclaim and awards. Game of Thrones, em… happened. And, of course, there were of terrific new shows like Watchmen, The Mandalorian, Undone and Russian Doll.

But it was Mr Robot, a show that rarely gets the attention and acclaim it deserves, that impressed from start to finish, turning in a master-class of twists, pathos, danger, tension, excitement, hope and heartache, showing real heart amid the source code. The show – endlessly inventive, potent, powerful and poignant – concluded its very human story of loss, love, tragedy, trauma, the lies we tell ourselves, the people we think we are and the people we want to be with a haunting final twist that served as both satisfying ending, and brand new beginning.

Every character got a chance to shine – from the world’s unluckiest FBI agent, Dom; to the damaged yet heroic Darlene; to the suddenly humanised yet still sinister and shadowy Whiterose – but it was Elliot who burned the hottest and brightest. That Rami Malek has managed to do so much to engender our sympathies and pluck our heart-strings with a character of such shallow affect is a testament to his skill and presence as a performer, the work of his magnificent co-stars (Christian Slater in particular) and the series’ consistently exquisite writing. All three of these winning elements came together with stunning, jaw-dropping effect in the season’s seventh episode, ‘Proxy Authentication Required’, undoubtedly the best episode of the season, and a strong contender for single best TV episode of the year. More on that later.

A sad, fond farewell to Mr Robot, then: the show I put off watching for so long because I thought it was about actual robots, and thought that sounded pretty lame. I’ll miss you terribly.

The Worst TV Show of 2019

No contest. Fear the Walking Dead’s fifth season is an exercise in sado-masochism, for creators and audience alike, I’m sure. It’s an unrewarding slog, a penance, a drag, an artistic atrocity, an amorphous grey void of suffering and boredom. The show has risen and fallen more times than a rutting beast in Hell’s bordello, but this time it’s down and out, and incontrovertibly dead, it’s ugly, twisted corpse face down on the bed, putrefying in the fetid stink of its own spent juices.

After an inauspicious start, bordering on woeful, Fear the Walking show surprised fans and critics by dropping a bold, bravura, thrilling, lean and mean third season that was able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the best seasons of its parent show. Season four, which was ostensibly a soft re-boot, didn’t reach the same heights, but it was still very watchable. Its bleached and sombre back-drops, and host of new faces – The Walking Dead’s Morgan among them – allowed the story to spin off in some interesting new directions. With season five they didn’t so much drop the ball as drill a giant hole down to the earth’s core and propel the ball into its molten heart.

On paper, the narrative ingredients of the season look like they’d make for a delicious meal. There’s an plane crash; a nuclear power plant going into meltdown; irradiated zombies; hot-air balloon peril; a race to fix a broken plane; a daring escape from the blast zone; the return of Daniel; the arrival of Dwight from The Walking Dead; gunfights; dwindling resources; a zombie-killing Rabbi; a Wild West town; an evil cowgirl. It sounds more like a season of Z Nation than The Walking Dead, and I mean that as a compliment. When Z Nation went balls out, as it frequently did, it was a frenetic, bat-shit crazy delight.

Unfortunately, whatever Fear the Walking Dead gains in neat lists of disparate things, it lacks in believable character motivations, decent dialogue, adequate pacing, a plot that makes sense, tension and excitement. The whole season is unforgivably dull, empty, and infuriating. The show’s hitherto big hitters – most notably Daniel, Stroud and Morgan – are sullied and neutered by poor writing, and the new love story at the show’s core – between long-estranged lovers John and June – is wrecked by cack-handed, tell-don’t-show corniness.

A special dishonour must go to the tribe of armed, Lost Boys-style forest children that the gang encounter and rescue. Here’s a little tip for show-runners everywhere: if your show makes me cheer the potential horrible death of a group of children, then you’re probably doing something wrong. Either that or I’m a psychopath.

But worst – the VERY worst – of all is the season’s handling of Morgan, a character that’s long been in decline, but now, it seems, terminally so. Morgan used to be one of my favourite characters in the franchise, but his zen shtick – and his stick-shtick – has worn so thin that when he lay bleeding on a stoop at the close of the season, on the brink of death from a gunshot wound to the stomach, with baying zombies advancing upon him, I struggled to give even the faintest scintilla of a shit. I didn’t want a cliff-hanger. I was keen to watch my former favourite cast member being torn to shreds. Just to see if I could feel something about this show again.

F*** you, Morgan, I thought. And f*** you, Fear the Walking Dead. How dare you make me care again, just to snatch it all away from me. I never thought I’d say this, but they might as well bring Madison back. And do you know what? They probably will.

What do you think were the best and worst shows on TV this year? Let me know in the comments so we can all fight about it.

The Use of Silence in TV Shows

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Silence isn’t just an absence of noise. It’s a tangible thing: heavy; sentient; alive. It can show us beauty in a smog-shrouded city-scape or death in the red sky of a savannah sunset. Through it we can commune with the majesty of God, or gaze into the eternal nothingness of His great echoing absence. It’s everything and nothing: a swallowing void into which we pour our deepest fears and the inexhaustible darkness of our collective imaginations.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that silence has traditionally found its greatest expression on the big screen. The cinema, with its pews arranged to face a window that looks out upon infinity, has always felt sacred and limitless: a place of wonder and worship; catharsis and contemplation; desire and dread: a holy cathedral to all that makes us ‘us’.

Cinema’s early audiences screamed as trains careened towards them from the other side of the screen; watched in a mixture of horror and wonder as workers toiled silently and hopelessly in the pits and caverns beneath the mighty husk of the metropolis; and giggled with glee as Keaton and Chaplin made an art-form of teetering precariously on the ledges of terrifyingly tall buildings.

Even when sound entered the medium, silence continued to steal all of the best scenes. Think of the absolutely staggering sequences that bookend 2001: A Space Odyssey; or the poignant and funny near-wordlessness that dominates the first twenty minutes of Wall-E, or the long, lingering shot on Jack Nicholson’s face as he sits by the asylum’s open window near the heart-wrenching climax of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

While cinema has always been the perfect conduit and capsule to conduct and contain the horror, majesty and beauty of silence, the TV was – in its early years at least – too small to hold it. TV was merely the noisy little contraption that chirped and chattered away endlessly in the corners of our living rooms. It sat there, yakking, chanting, warding off silence and its concomitant notions of death and infinity like a priest exorcising demons. It didn’t want to push the boundaries of the possible, or open our minds to infinity: it just wanted to distract us from the loneliness that marked our existence – and occasionally sell us cigarettes and washing powder.

It’s only relatively recently that advancements in technology, distribution and access have allowed TV to raise its ambitions and muscle in on the awe-game. While it’s true that TV can never compete with the sheer size and raw, herculean power of cinema, it’s also true that it doesn’t need to: TV incontestably plays the better long game. It can go further and deeper into the characters and worlds it creates, reaching into our souls and the darkest recesses of our minds and imaginations for weeks, months, even years at a time.

Our couches, arranged around the intimate half-dark of our living rooms, are our new sites of worship. The roles have been reversed: cinema is now the medium that seeks to sell us things in as noisy a fashion as possible – circus-style spectacles, franchise events, merchandising – while TV has become the portal through which we’re granted access to the whole beautiful ugliness of our humanity: to truth; to terror.

To silence.

A hush hits the box

Silence has a profound effect upon us precisely because it’s such a rare commodity in the blaring cacophony our modern lives have become. Human hubbub is ubiquitous, unbroken, and as addictive as it is wearying. Our homes thrum, hum and creak; our cities are non-stop symphonies of honks and thumps and clangs, and even the fabled semi-silence of the countryside is a myth belied by the daily background chitter of chirps, hisses, whines and trills: a city of hills and trees.

These days we actively seek out silence by going on retreats, but in our deep, primal past, silence was something to be retreated from; an unwelcome curse; a potentially fatal gap in our knowledge of the world and the moment. We scrutinised it for the faintest sounds of footfall, for the barest rustle or creak, never able to relax, perpetually wondering if it was our fate to have dinner, or become it. That’s why silence, when it comes, hits us like a hypnotist’s finger-click, snapping our senses to attention.

When writers and show-runners tap into this power it can yield striking results. Silence, when used sparingly and with purpose, can make a sequence or a whole episode stand out from the rest of the canon. It can highlight or strengthen a message; lend profundity to the smallest of gestures; or magnify a tone or mood, as the following examples show us:

Better Call Saul (and Breaking Bad before it) routinely lets its rich, luscious, uniquely-styled visuals say what needs to be said against a canvas of silence, in punchy and powerful sequences that are cinematic in both their scope and execution. The Americans, too, knows when to stop talking and let the music tell the story instead, most poignantly in its emotionally resonant series’ finale, ‘START’.

Patrick McGoohan’s wilfully baffling series The Prisoner used silence to amplify the strangeness of the village and highlight the hopelessness of Number Six’s predicament in its weirder-than-usual, highly atmospheric episode ‘Many Happy Returns’.

The Wire once pared down its dialogue to the point of near-silence to give us a memorably funny sequence featuring McNulty and Bunk solving a crime with only heavy, knowing looks and various whispered permutations of the word ‘fuck’.

No matter the reason it’s used, silence always has something to tell us.

The Fifth Dimension

While TV’s early years may have lacked a certain artistry there were still plenty of shows that pushed the medium to its limits, and weren’t afraid to use silence as a creative tool. Many decades before the X-Files was even a government-sanctioned twinkle injected into Chris Carter’s eye against his will, The Twilight Zone used silence both to disturb and distract.

In its second season episode ‘The Invaders’ a lone woman in an old wooden shack-house in the middle of nowhere receives an unearthly visitor of unexpected dimensions: namely, a flying saucer. It’s so tiny it’s able to land undetected on her roof.

The only sounds that can be heard for the bulk of the episode are the woman’s screams and shrieks as she’s hunted, prodded, shot and burned by the proportionately tiny invaders, and the zaps, bangs and crackles of their tiny weapons as they do so. The woman’s very pure fear – and by extension ours – is amplified by the silence, which drifts through the house like a gas, slowly suffocating our senses and cutting off our usual reserves of comprehension and comfort. Our own fear centre takes centre-stage as narrator of the piece, imagining the very worst of fates within that oppressive cloud of quietness.

The silence occupies our adrenal glands just long enough for the rug to be pulled out from under us in the closing moments of the episode, turning the tables on we the human audience and the tiny invaders both, who are revealed – in a sublime twist – to be one and the same.

Last year, The X Files – a show that owes an unimaginable debt to trailblazers like The Twilight Zone – also dedicated an entire episode to (near total) silence. The snappily-titled eleventh-season offering ‘Rm9sbG93ZXJz’ used silence to inject novelty into the show’s decades-old format, and to magnify the horror of one of the foremost terrors of our age: the rise of the machine.

Mulder and Scully spend most of the episode’s run-time fleeing from a succession of remorseless automata through a patchwork landscape of re-appropriated sci-fi tropes, with barely a word spoken between them until the final scene. Throughout their running of the gauntlet we meet a vengeful electronic waiter, an over-zealous computerised taxi-cab, AI drones that swarm like angry wasps, and a HAL-like house with murder on its mind. Most of the words spoken in the episode are issued by machines and appliances, all eerie facsimiles of the human voice.

Their voice – which is really our voice – has been foisted upon them to unambiguously establish their status as the new slave class. But who’s really calling the shots here? It’s a smart, stand-out episode that not only works as a cautionary parable about our relationship with technology, but also as a commentary on the mistreatment of human workers in the service industry. We mistreat them to our detriment and at our peril.

However, the real horror in Rm9sbG93ZXJz doesn’t come from the machines and their ever-evolving sentience, but from our own species’ tacit decision to abnegate our existence to them. The silence is apt because it echoes and reflects our own silence in the face of the gadgets and gizmos that have rendered us mute. For proof of this abnegation look no further than the street outside your home, or around the room at your nearest and dearest. Or even down at your own hands.

If machines one day have a louder voice than their human creators, it will only be because humanity made the choice to surrender its voice to them in the first place.

Muted Mirth

Silence needn’t always have ‘something’ to say, or at least something profound to say. Sometimes it can be used simply to make us laugh. In the Frasier episode ‘Three Valentines’ the show’s ever-clever dialogue takes a back-seat to a one-man, one-act bout of classic slapstick. Niles’ efforts to have the perfect Valentine’s Night are wrecked by mounting misfortunes that rise to a crescendo of chaos and culminate in a messy and mirthsome moment of tragedy. It’s a sequence that stands out and lodges in the memory, and that’s no mean feat considering that the body of work it stands out from comprises eleven seasons of one of the greatest and funniest sitcoms of the last fifty years.

Depending upon who you ask, you might get different answers to the question: ‘Why should silence make things funny, or funnier?’ Niles Crane himself might advance a psycho-philosophical theory, explaining that silence builds tension, and laughter vents it, so if someone’s anguish and misfortune is played out against a back-drop of silence it will always provoke a larger laugh response, provided the audience doesn’t become too accustomed to, and thus too comfortable with, the silence.

Bojack Horseman, on the other hand, might tell you that the only silence he’s interested in is silence from people asking dumb questions, and where’s the nearest bottle of vodka?

Bojack Horseman leaned into its whip-smart visual humour harder than ever in its refreshing, razor-sharp and almost entirely dialogue-free third season episode ‘Fish Out of Water’. It’s visually striking, unique, laugh-out-loud funny and endlessly rewarding, with gags planted everywhere you look (Mr Peanut Butter on an underwater bill-board: “Seahorse Milk: Keeps your seahorse baby from crying. Take it from me, a childless dog”).

While silence is of course used to convey Bojack’s sense of himself as a perennial outsider, it also serves to bolster the episode’s punchline. And what a bloody punchline.

The final stinger of Inside No 9’s first season episode ‘A Quite Night In’ fell somewhere in tone between the Twilight Zone’s and Bojack’s, but with an added barb of cruelty. Shearsmith and Pemberton, no strangers to the macabre and the hellish, confidently demonstrated with this episode that words aren’t necessary in order to craft something bleak, brutal, brilliantly observed, and – most crucially of all – incredibly funny.

You’ll definitely laugh at this episode: if only to break the unbearable tension of the silence.

The Sopranos and The Shield have nothing more to say

In life most of us abhor silence. We equate it with discomfort and awkwardness. We consider it dead air; a form of social suicide. I guess that’s why when some people come to re-imagine the world on television they leave it out.

Soap operas create universes where words pepper the air like automatic gun-fire. Some prestige dramas, especially those penned by Aaron Sorkin, advance the lie that our lives are an ever-spinning conversational whirlwind of whooshing dialogue and precision banter.

But real life is stitched through with – and often dominated by – silence, as anyone who’s ever been married will tell you. It’s normal, natural, perhaps even essential. David Chase knew this, and he let that truth bleed into the body of The Sopranos.

Chase described each episode of his show as a mini-movie, and that’s something that shines through in every aspect of the series’ production and presentation, from the award-winning writing to the exquisite cinematography to the pitch-perfect acting and directing.

Before its arrival in 1999, few drama series had been as cinematic in their scope or style. The Sopranos wasn’t burdened with antsy advertisers or interfering executives, and Chase was thus left alone to explore the full, gritty gamut of darkness, violence and silence in the hearts of both America and man.

Chase and his team would often linger on Tony’s hangdog expression, or gaze into, and sometimes through, his haunted eyes. Silence made Tony feel more real. One episode ended with Tony and his wife, Carmella, sitting across from each other at their breakfast table, suffering in the silence of the no-man’s land their marriage had become. And, lest we forget, the series itself was capped off with perhaps the most controversial stretch of silence that’s ever been committed to screen.

Shawn Ryan elected to end his great-and-gritty (and criminally under-appreciated) cop show The Shield on an ambiguous – but rather more conventional – note of silence, using it as a way to torture and imprison his anti-anti-hero (sic) Vic Mackey. While The Sopranos’ final scene is a masterclass in tension-building, and its climactic snap of silence a testament to David Chase’s brilliance, cunning and creative daring, it’s hard to shake the feeling that The Shield’s final scene in general, and its use of silence in particular, serves as a more fitting and affecting coda for its main character.

When you think of Vic Mackey, silent is perhaps the last adjective to spring to mind. Garrulous, manipulative, brash, swaggering, vengeful, cunning, bold, maybe. But not silent. Never silent. Much more than a gun, Mackey’s mouth was always his first line of attack – and defence, too; his mouth serving as both his baton and his shield.

Having recounted all of his many sins and criminal transgressions to Laurie Holden’s ICE agent in a bid to secure immunity from prosecution in the series’ penultimate episode, Vic had no justifications left to make, no lies left to spin. He had nothing left to say. More than that, though, he had no-one left to say any of it to. The members of his former strike team were either dead or in jail. His wife and children had escaped into witness protection – to be protected from him, no less – never to be seen again. He had turned in his badge. His former colleagues had turned their backs on him. Vic’s silence – both his own and that which surrounded him – was a manifestation of his isolation from everything he’d ever professed to love. It embodied and reflected his emptiness, his powerlessness.

You can see this in the final confrontation between Vic and Claudette. Vic sits across from Claudette in an interrogation room. She spreads photographs of Shane (former friend, accomplice and strike-team member) and his family on the desk in-front of them both. They’re dead. A murder suicide. Vic played his part in causing it, as Shane’s suicide note makes clear. Instead of using his gift of the gab to deflect blame and guilt, Vic sits, his grief, anger and loss rendering him mute. Finally, he explodes in anger.

As part of the condition of his immunity Vic has to take on a new job helping the government deal with organised drug crime. He doesn’t have a gun or a badge. He has a desk, where he’ll sit for years typing reports. No action, no duty, no badge, no power. Nothing.

For most of The Shield’s long final scene, Vic Mackey is alone in his new office. He’s completely silent. We don’t need to hear him talk. We can see it all in his face. He’s in prison. He’s in hell. He’s been personally and professionally castrated; reduced to human rubble. He’s become the very thing he’s always feared and hated: a faceless bureaucrat.

A siren wails outside his window. He opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a gun and heads for the door. You know he’s smiling.

There you are, Vic Mackey. There you are.

Sometimes silence can say things all the more loudly for not actually saying them at all.

Hear, hear.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 7 – 10

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 17: Let’s do the time warp again

Wherein the whole gang’s back in the past, and things don’t exactly go according to plan

I’m convinced that a harrowing fate awaits the Frasers in the fourth season finale. Perhaps not the immolation fated in the archived newspapers discovered in the 1960s – that would be too obvious, and rather hard for the show to bounce back from – but something equally painful and transformative. Until then, we’ve got a veritable banquet of quests, grudges and reunions to feast upon.

In this clutch of episodes Roger finds Brianna, Brianna finds Claire, and Jamie’s fist finds Roger’s face. Many times. As the Frasers are moved around the chess-board of life by the wicked hand of fate, we discover that it isn’t God, or the devil, or Lady Luck that owns that hand, but Stephen Bonnett.

To describe the amoral, psychopathic Irishman as the Fraser family’s arch nemesis is to undersell his evil and understate his omnipresence in their lives. He’s the demonic force that shapes their feelings, their decisions, their movements, their every waking moments. His ability to wreak destruction upon the Fraser family even when he’s not even trying to or even really thinking about them makes Black Jack Randall in comparison seem about as malevolent as a little kid taking a surreptitious poo in the next door neighbour’s koi carp pond.

Bonnett is much, much worse than Black Jack. There was at least a twisted symmetry to Black Jack, some semblance of a code, a hint that some part of his soul might once have been salvageable. Bonnett very rarely bothers to put a positive spin on his actions. He knows he’s utterly bereft of noble impulses, and throws himself into murderous debauchery all the more enthusiastically for it. Black Jack occasionally fooled himself that he was righteous or justified. I don’t know. Maybe that makes Bonnett ‘better’, relatively speaking. It definitely makes his evil purer, even if it does make his character seem a little less nuanced.

In ‘Down the Rabbit Hole’, Roger and Brianna briefly become the series leads, and we get to imagine what Outlander might look like sans Jamie and Claire. The verdict? Perfectly fine for an episode, but I’m in no rush to see a spin-off series.

During their solo adventures the two young lovers find themselves trapped in a web of fate and misfortune; their respective journeys to Wilmington putting them at the mercies of their parent’s greatest and most dangerous (living) adversaries: Bonnett and Laoghaire.

Roger’s path through the stones leads directly to Bonnett and his ship, the crew of which Roger blusters his way onto to secure passage to the new world. Both men are unaware that the tendrils connecting them to each other will soon reach out and grab Brianna, too.

Poor Roger. We’ve all had bad bosses in our time, but I’d wager that very few of them ever gave us pause to think that they might chuck a baby into the ocean . ‘Don’t worry,’ Bonnett’s fixed smile seemed to say to us, ‘I wouldn’t throw a fecking BABY overboard, and frankly I’m offended at the fecking suggestion.’ He would, however, throw a little girl with smallpox overboard without a moment’s hesitation, an act of brutal pragmatism that revolts us in direct inverse proportion to how very little it surprises us.

When Roger later encounters his direct ancestors, a woman and her tiny little baby, the latter carrying a rash that might very well be mistaken for smallpox by a certain sociopathic sea-captain, Roger knows he has no choice but to play hero and help hide them. By helping them, Roger knows that Bonnett might very well kill him for his insolence and insubordination, but if Bonnett were to find and kill the baby, then Roger would cease to exist. As options go, it’s a lot like the choice between Butlins, and, well, Butlins.

Upon discovering Roger’s treachery Bonnett inexplicably becomes Two-Face from Batman, recalling how he once avoided death by the mercy of a coin-toss, and resolving to decide Roger’s fate in exactly the same way. Roger lives to tell the tale, of course, although one thing becomes instantly and abundantly clear: there’s no human resources department on Bonnett’s ship. Or if there is it’s a particularly bad one.

Things don’t go too well for Brianna, either. Within seconds of arriving in ye olde Scotland, she’s rolled down a hill and sprained her ankle, leaving her half-dead and hobbling before she’s even left Inverness. While Brianna shares her mother’s impulsivity, it isn’t tempered by her mother’s hardiness and resourcefulness. Never mind 18^th century Scotland: Brianna wouldn’t even survive a night-out in Glasgow in 2019. Mind you, who would.

Brianna eventually – and literally – falls into the clutches of Laoghaire, who actually seems like quite a nice person when she isn’t repeatedly trying to kill Claire. It isn’t long before the spurned banshee learns the identity of the wandering invalid in her care, which triggers a reassuringly chilling primal response. Thought you’d gone all human on us there, lassie. Welcome back, Laoghaire, you narcissistic nut-case.

It’s clear that the intervening years haven’t expanded her repertoire of vengeful acts: decrying someone as a witch is still very much her cold dish of choice. Luckily for Brianna, Laoghaire’s daughter, Joan, isn’t an absolute fucking maniac, and helps Bri escape to Lallybroch, where her Old Uncle Ian secures her passage to the new world. Before she leaves, Bri redeems her earlier near-death prat-falling by doing something so utterly Claire-like that she almost out-Claires Claire. She rescues a young lassie called Lizzie from sexual servitude, and takes her with her to America as her paid assistant. Way to go, sister.

Far across the ocean, Claire is enjoying a rather warmer relationship with Laoghaire’s eldest daughter. Mind you, it’s not that hard to go warmer than ‘I’m going to have you burned alive as a witch’. Claire and Marsali’s mama talk is sweet, but demonstrates great delusion on Claire’s part, especially when she says: ‘Ah, your kids. You’d do anything for them. Anything.’

Em, except, you know, resist the urge to jump through a time-portal and abandon them for the rest of their adult lives.

Now that Jamie and Claire are landowners, they get to do things like swank around at big social functions and meet all of the big celebrities of the day, like George Washington, and a young Keith Richards. It isn’t all hob-nobbing and networking, though. While attending a play in Wilmington, Claire’s called upon to use her surgical skills, and Jamie has to play fifth columnist.

The two plot points weave into and around each like vines up a tree. Governor Tryon’s guest, and fellow robber of the people, Mr Edward Fanning, experiences insufferable pain from a particularly vicious hernia (HER-nia? Should be a HIM-nia, am I right, ladies???). When Claire mentions that he might require surgery, Fanning bats away the suggestion like it was a poo-footed blue-bottle, certain that Claire’s vagina disqualifies her from saying anything to him with any deeper resonance than, ‘Oooh, would you like some biscuits?’

When Jamie learns, half-way through watching the play, that his old pal Murtagh and his band of Regulators are about to be rumbled as they rob a carriage filled with tax money, on account of a government spy in their midst, he knows he needs a distraction to get the word out. This he finds in Fanning’s hernia, which he wallops with all of his might. ‘Accidentally’, of course. In steps Claire the surgeon, ready to rifle through Fanning’s guts for as long as necessary to make sure Murtagh doesn’t end up leaving this world swinging on a rope, his skin as blue as a sunbathing Scotsman.

It’s hard not to sympathise with Murtagh’s aims, and Jamie’s sympathy with them, when Governor Tryon is such a cartoonishly wicked elitist bastard, and the kind of man who says things like: ‘Those wretches don’t want their taxes to go towards my palace,’ stopping just short of adding ‘Muhahahahaha!’ after it. Murtagh’s moltenly socialists schemes, however violent in execution, can’t fail to seem noble when weighed against the extravagant and thoroughly corrupt spending plans of a cossetted, wig-wearing, arrogant buffoon like Tryon.

Eric Joyce

I’m reminded of a real-world, close-to-home example of a political figure abusing the public purse, if you’ll indulge the brief diversion. Our town once elected an MP called Eric Joyce. Eric was one of the most prolific expense fiddlers and spender-of-money-that-wasn-t-his that Westminster has ever seen. Seriously, he almost topped the expense scandal league table. He eventually appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to defend his place at the top of the list, hilariously claiming that he spent tens of thousands of pounds on framed paintings for his constituency office, because his constituents ‘wanted to see nice paintings’ when they attended his surgery. Not if they’re at your surgery to complain about their MP spending tens of thousands of pounds on paintings with tax-payers money, Eric, you glutton.

Google Eric Joyce’s name and you’ll find reports of reckless spending, lewd and lascivious behaviour, drunkenness and brawling, a cocktail of behaviours that his opponents claimed made him no longer fit to represent the people of Falkirk. Of course, if you’ve ever been to Falkirk you’ll know that he’s probably the most representative politician the town has ever had. Eric being a Falkirk MP was like making Charlie Sheen the mayor of Sodom and Gomarrah. Namely, absolutely perfect. Anyway, I digress. Eric’s boorish behaviour does, however, lead us quite neatly into talking about throwbacks to another time and place…

Let’s talk about Claire, and the attitudes poured on her by the pompous pricks of the day, whether that day is in the 20^th or the 18^th century. Claire continually has to prove her skills, intelligence and worth in the deeply patriarchal societies she’s cursed to flit between, with the added worry that if she ever fails she’ll probably be thrown in jail or burned as a witch or something. When an old male surgeon arrives at Wilmington and sees Claire operating on Edward Fanning, he splutters: ‘What hath hell wrought? You’ve butchered him. All he needed was tobacco smoke up the rear.’

All he needed was… em, all he needed was what? Was tobacco smoke up the rear a real thing? Is that where the phrase ‘blowing smoke up your arse’ comes from? Being a doctor in the 18^th century sounds like it was quite easy, doesn’t it? Seems all you had to do was sit back in your chair nonchalantly chain-smoking cigarettes, remembering occasionally to puff one up a patient’s arse. And if anyone came in with a mental health problem or a neurological disorder, you’d simply burn them as a witch. Then off to the course for a few rounds of golf, whether it had been invented yet or not!

Imagine going to the doctors with a stiff knee and the doctor smoking a pipe through your bum-hole. What remedies did they offer for people who attended surgery with sore arses? The mind boggles. Along with various other body parts. Did a tender butt-hole call for a different treatment, or just a bigger fire? ‘Nurse, this man is about to prolapse. Fetch the wicker man and a hundred gallons of kerosene. And be quick about it, by God, his star’s already starting to collapse!’

Anyway, this episode handled the tension, sense of mounting dread, rising stakes and intersecting plot lines very well. Mercifully, Fanning’s operation was a success, and Murtagh was able to escape the trap that had been set for him by Tryon, all of which allowed Claire and Jamie to retain their place unscathed at the top of the high-society power-couple league table.

Some time not long after after maw and paw’s close shaves at the theatre, Brianna reaches ye olde America. So does her dutiful, but also rather dastardly, beau, Roger, who surprises her with a make-shift marriage ceremony and the altogether less welcome revelation that he’d known about the prophecy of her parents’ deaths all along and deliberately chosen not to tell her. No sooner are they (sort-of) married with a bit of hand-fasting than the whole thing looks set to collapse quicker than a Mackenzie clansman at an all-you-can-drink whisky festival.

I’m sure I’m not alone in seeing the seeds of serial abuse in Roger. He’s an emotional rapist, a passive-aggressive man-child who uses guilt to get what he wants, reacting to any slight – perceived or real – with the whiny, self-regard of a spoiled toddler. I don’t know if this is because he’s a typical man of the 1960s, or if he’s just an asshole for the ages. In any case, you can’t argue with his love and affection for Brianna. It’s not every man who’ll literally jump through time, risking life and limb, to track down his lover. Mind you, it’s also not every man who’ll conceal the truth of said lover’s parents’ fiery death so he can get his leg over. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

Roger and Brianna’s subsequent fight feels rather stagey and hollow, hitting a note of theatrical melodrama where a more naturalistic tone would’ve better served the mood and the material. It’s perhaps not the fight we wanted, but it’s the fight that we needed, setting the narrative on a collision course with a most unpalatable, status quo-shattering event that will leave ripples in the timeline for seasons to come.

(sigh) Yep. Another rape.

This time it’s poor Brianna’s turn to bear the horror, running fresh from her fight with Roger straight into the lair of that dastardly fiend Steven Bonnett.

At this stage I think the only member of Jamie’s immediate and extended family who hasn’t been seriously sexually assaulted is his brother-in-law, Ian, and with that limp of his he’d best start taking some precautions.

Brianna’s rape is particularly ugly and vicious, and that’s saying a lot in a series that specialises in vicious and ugly rapes. Bonnett’s brutality and callousness is magnified by the insouciance of his equally callous henchmen, who sit around laughing and playing cards as Brianna screams and cries for help in the room next door.

I can’t see Bonnet making it out of this season’s finale alive once Jamie finds out about his attack on his daughter. I imagine Jamie will hang, draw and quarter Bonnett, sending each of his chopped, stretched and lacerated body parts through the stones to a different time zone. One to the age of the dinosaurs, one to the Mongol hordes, one to the battle of Ypres, and one, finally, and most devastatingly of all, to present-day Greenock.

Roger eventually makes it to Fraser’s Ridge – or near it, in any case – but unfortunately for him the first person to spot him is Lizzie, who saw him quarreling with Brianna before the attack, and in the intervening weeks arrived at the conclusion that Roger was the assailant. She reports the sighting and its significance to Jamie, who intercepts Roger on the fringes of his land, denying him the chance to communicate by repeatedly smashing him in the face until Roger’s eye-lids are like two boiled eggs sprouting from his brow, and his face is slick with blood. I genuinely thought Jamie had killed him.

Now THAT’S an awkward first-meeting with your father-in-law. Greg Focker might’ve regretted his evening of smashed urns and milking cats over at Robert de Niro’s house, but it’s certainly better than being beaten to death before you can so much as say ‘I’ve got nipples too, Greg. Could you milk me?’

Jamie and Bri’s first encounter is a little sweeter and more sanguine than the attempted murder that befalls Roger. In-keeping with Outlander’s signature style of marrying the sacred with the profane, Bri meets her father for the first time as he’s standing in an alleyway taking a piss. The scene quickly segues from slap-stick into real, intense emotion, the musical score and the performances combining to make this Jamie – the one who’s writing this rundown – leak almost as much as screen-Jamie did in that alley-way. But, you know, from my eyes. I realise I’ve made it sound like I’m saying the scene made me wet myself.

I didn’t wet myself! [OK, Jamie, don’t protest too much, son]

Outlander is good at the special moments; the big pay-offs: Jamie reuniting with Murtagh, Brianna meeting her father for the first time. It’s not always so good at following through. The longer Brianna spent in her father’s company, the more they seemed to settle into a ping-pong of hoary and expository dialogue. You could feel nothing of the weight of their shared but separate history.

For the reasons of rape and Roger already outlined, the happy family reunion doesn’t stay happy for long, and a very contrite Jamie has to help retrieve the hapless, half-dead Roger from the native Americans who bought him as a slave. Except Roger doesn’t need their help. He found his own way to escape their clutches. He may also have found another, less-traceable route of escape: another set of stones.

Should he stay or should he go now?

You probably already know what decision he makes. I’ve yet to find out.

Three episodes to go and then I’m in-step with transmission. Soon there’ll be no more bingeing for this late convert to the show.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

Wee Ian looked a little crestfallen when Brianna was introduced as his cousin, the wee perv. Don’t worry, Ian, just head south and take her with you.
Claire’s go-to face seems to involve her eyes shifting back and forth in her head like a haunted painting, or a ventriloquist’s bear.

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READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 4 – 6

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie on the Box: Fear the Walking Dead, The Affair

Posted on September 19, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Fear the Walking Dead (S5 E14); The Affair (S5 E4)

The dead still walk, and old habits die hard.

Sunday’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead (AMC), ‘Today and Tomorrow’, began with Morgan watching himself discussing his dead wife and son on Al’s video-tape. I thought we might be about to delve into the sort of episode that The Walking Dead franchise does so well: a powerful, stand-alone, self-contained ode to misery or paean to hope that halts the trajectory of the season’s viscerally depressing arc in favour of fleshing out a character’s motivations or back-story.

Alas, the camera clicked off, returning us to the cold, bleached hues of the show’s sombre cinematography. It says a lot about the show’s present state that I was disappointed not to be spending the entire forty minutes listening to Morgan simply remembering his dead family. Maybe I miss the old Morgan, before the franchise bleached his soul the same lifeless grey as the distant Texan hills.

‘Today and Tomorrow’ is a treading-water sort-of-an-episode in a season that seems to have done nothing but tread water (nonsensical situations and logic-defying set-ups notwithstanding). Morgan and Althea shield a frightened man from The Pioneers – a cowboy cosplay troupe with fascist intent – and then agree to infiltrate their lair in order to rescue the man’s captured sister. Meanwhile, Daniel, Grace and Daniel’s cat share some moments of levity as they bond over LPs, zombie-killing, audio-books and dive-bar guitars. It’s not good, but it’s not strictly bad, which, sadly, is something of a win for season five. A sad state of affairs and a thunderous back-slide indeed for a show that in its third season was starting to outshine its parent.

It’s disheartening how thoroughly Fear the Walking Dead has gutted its big hitters. Daniel, once the show’s greatest asset – the brutal pragmatist; the one-man, hair-dressing Die Hard, – is now barely recognisable as the Daniel of old. Strand, too, once had a dark and mysterious edge – a snake who’d remortgage his grandmother’s soul a thousand times over for as little enticement as a half-bag of Fritos – but who now stands before us a neutered, one-note teddy bear, as bland and hopelessly generic as most of the rest of the characters. John Dorie is starting to suffer the same fate.

Of all the actors in the franchise, though, Lennie James – powerhouse actor, British national treasure – has been let down the hardest. Morgan’s mission to atone for his guilt and murderous sins, and stave off feral madness, was once utterly compelling, but I now find myself anticipating the character about as keenly as a weak cup of lukewarm tea. I’m now actively rooting for Morgan to go absolutely batshit, rip-the-room mental again, just to give Lenny James something to get his teeth into, to give Morgan somewhere to go, even if it’s right back where he started from.

I’ve got a feeling that’s exactly where we’re headed. ‘Today and Tomorrow”s main function appears to be to get Morgan to a place where he’s finally made peace with the tragic deaths of his wife and son, and ready to declare his love for Grace, ostensibly so it can crush those nascent feelings of hope. Indeed, the moment Grace finishes her dive-bar duet with Daniel, she immediately gets to work on her new, one-woman show, ‘Dying of Radiation Poisoning’. Poor Morgan. Lucky us, though, if he flips the fuck out.

And unlucky for Ginny, the franchise’s next (in an insufferably long line of) murky, morally-relativistic bad-guys-who-actually-think-they’re-good-guys. She may waltz about with armed, be-hatted soldiers and throw around that aw-shucks charm like some bat-less, good-for-nothing Shegan of the south, but if Morgan takes his safety off, it’s bye-bye quasi-fascistic brunette.

Whatever happens, I hope something gives soon. I don’t want my happy memories of this show’s very recent hey-day to become long-forgotten relics.

Speaking of memories, ‘remember when’ is The Affair’s (Showtime) stock in trade. Its central conceit – the telling of the same story multiple times, from differing perspectives – has always proven to be as compelling as it is maddening. We know that human memory is fickle and fallible, and that people sieve and filter stories to suit their psychopathologies and agendas, but The Affair offers us wild variation often without the anchor of context.

In the first season the narrative was framed by a police investigation that was unfolding in the future, which explained some of the divergence in the characters’ recollections. Most of the time, though, the audience is forced to become forensic detectives of the soul, hunting for ghosts and searching for shadows over shifting sands of memory. There’s never been a definitive answer to the problems of perception raised by The Affair, only more questions.

Whose story is this? To whom are they telling it? Is what I’m seeing in this person’s account of these events the result of wilful lies being told to a third party, or is it a case of the person lying to themselves? Is a particular emotion or underlying trauma exaggerating this or that aspect of the event? Why is person A wearing a red coat in their own recollection, but nothing at all in the other person’s? Are we knocking against madness here (the third season makes this explicit)? What the fuck is going on?

The only real certainty in the world of The Affair is that Noah Solloway is the fucking worst. Always. Worse than Tony Soprano. Worse than Walter White, Vic Mackey, Hitler and the rotavirus all rolled into one. He’s an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man, who’s never happier than when he’s lighting the torch-paper on yet another narcissistic firework display. But even then the show’s conceit throws doubt in your mind. Often, the very harshest critic of Noah is Noah himself, and you’ll find multiple examples throughout the series of his equally powerful propensity towards self-flagellation. Maybe we, the audience, are simply responding to, and absorbing, the character’s self-hatred, and projecting molten hatred right back at him. Can we really trust the perspectives of the other characters? Maybe they’ve got it in for him, or are threatened by him, or feel guilty about their part in sending him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit? Maybe… maybe he isn’t an angry, whining, arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit-stain of a man after all. Maybe he’s not all that bad?

Don’t be fooled. He’s the worst. Always. He really is. Just when you start to feel sorry for him, he’ll do something irredeemably awful like, oh, I don’t know, sneaking in to Helen’s new boyfriend’s house during a party dressed as a gorilla and trying to plant dildos under his pillow. Although he has a sudden change of heart about taking these actions, when a lonely co-worker and co-reveller later expresses her sexual interest in him, Noah uses the opportunity to cruelly take advantage of her and steal her bra, which he then proceeds to shove under the new boyfriend’s pillow in the dildo’s stead. Oh, Noah, you are utterly fucking awful. His segment in this episode plays like some twisted cross between Mission Impossible and a particularly bad episode of late-era Red Dwarf. When he was caught in the act, I half-expected him to morph into Ricky Gervais.

Noah’s ego is in free-fall. The book he wrote about his affair, that rubbed his ex-wife’s (and his new wife’s) face in shit is now being adapted into a movie, from which process he’s being excluded on account of the famous actor/director playing him in the movie now dating his ex-wife, and re-writing his story to boot. This season is very much Noah’s turn to have his face very publicly rubbed in shit. It’s quite cathartic in a way, but, after a powerful, tour de force fourth season, also shark-jumpingly ridiculous.

Better handled is Whitney’s segment, which serves to flesh out and humanise this archetypal spoiled brat, and also show the ways in which the aftershocks from the original affair are still affecting the lives of everyone in the family.

Whitney is a beautiful young woman from an affluent family who is engaged to and supporting a struggling, down-on-his-luck artist from a far more humble family. In this dynamic, her fiance Colin is pretty much a Noah-surrogate, and Whitney is her own mother. Framed this way, it’s interesting that Noah would try to enlist Helen’s help to sink his daughter’s relationship. He’s basically poo-pooing himself. There’s that self-hatred again.

If Whitney ‘is’ her mother, then she’s got something that Helen never had in her position: the benefit of second-hand hindsight, essentially a psychological time-machine. Whitney can see what her mother has now, post-affair, post-grief. She has a relationship with a renowned and feted Hollywood actor and director. So when Whitney’s abusive – but handsome, influential and renowned – artist ex-boyfriend, Furcat, returns to woo her and beg her forgiveness, she has the chance to hop-skotch the parts of life her mother ultimately suffered through and leap straight to the rich celebrity part. She takes it, albeit temporarily. Whitney has an affair.

I interpret what Whitney does here as an attempt to avoid the trap of her parents’ pain, rather than her answering the call of some shallow or materialist impulse.

“I don’t want to be looked at any more,” the former model tells a supposedly earnest and sophisticated aesthete at Furcat’s party. “I want to be the one doing the looking.”

Later that night she has raw, carnal, drug-induced sex with her ex-boyfriend, as the perverted aesthete is permitted to watch.

Poor Whitney is a confused, helpless, unhappy, selfish, cheating mess. She’s a victim. She’s a perpetrator.

She’s very much her mother’s daughter.

And she’s very much her father’s daughter.

PS: I like to pretend the Joanie bits aren’t happening for now. Please God let them be leading somewhere consequential or meaningful.

Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

Posted on August 4, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

You can’t beat a good cross-over. You can’t beat a bad one, either. There’s something about two or more superheroes or systems or creatures existing together in a space they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) normally occupy that excites our inner movie directors and statisticians. We love it when the Marvel and DC superheroes get together for a jolly good team-up, or when two or more Doctor Whos band together to fend off evil, but we especially love it when there’s cross-pollination between brands.

This is more common occurrence in comics and graphic novels, where the 11th Doctor has boarded the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk has found himself on the planet of the apes, Judge Dredd and Batman have battled Aliens (yes, those ones) and Predators and each other, and Superman has faced down Muhammad Ali.

It’s better, and much more fun, of course, when forces come together to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other, which is why I’ve assembled the fan-made videos below, to share a little of that exquisite, child-like glee with you.

I wonder if soap opera fans fantasise about Pat Butcher beating down Vera Duckworth, or JR Ewing vs Cthulhu…

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

This is one of the earliest examples of the fan-made mash-up genre you’ll find on-line, and it’s arguably much better than the largely execrable big-screen attempts to mesh the worlds of Alien and Predator.

Batman vs Darth Vader

There’s a whole award-winning series of these shorts now, very professionally produced, showing titanic – sometimes surprisingly brutal – battles like Spiderman vs Darth Maul, Iron Man vs Optimus Prime, Wolverine vs Predator, and Homer Simpson vs The Punisher (OK, I made the last one up). This one’s pretty darn good, though.

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

And this one, too. What’s not to like?

Super-Hero Bowl

A very bloody cartoon of every popular genre figure you can think of from the last 60 or 70 years being brought together and violently killing each other.

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

If spaceships, Star Wars, Halo and Star Trek are your thing, get your tissues and a hot bucket of lard at the ready. You’re about to cum.

Icons of Horror – Part 1

What if all of the supernatural villains from the 70s, 80s and 90s got together for a bit of a rammy?

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…

Jamie on the Box – Fear the Walking Dead, Stranger Things

Posted on July 24, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Stranger Things; Fear the Walking Dead

Eleven out of ten for the Mind-Flayer, but Morgan’s crew must try harder

Stranger Things’ first season slammed down into the cultural consciousness like a nostalgia bomb dropped by Steven Spielberg. It was quirky, kooky, spooky, funny, tense, scary, effective and electric, one of the strongest shows of 2017. Netflix had a hit on its hands: a water-cooler show that alternately warmed the heart and made it beat like a haunted timpani drum.

Season two proved to be that ‘difficult second album’ of cliché. This time around, instead of slamming down, the show slithered back into the zeitgeist like a Demogorgon’s dying tentacle, and, a few thrilling set-pieces and emotional moments notwithstanding, barely registered a tickle upon the amygdalas and funny bones of its fans.

It was a pleasure to discover, then, that season three is everything the first season was and more, not only catching lightning in a bottle, but bottling that lightning, transferring it into an industrial-sized cylinder and using it as a weapon to zap anyone who ever doubted its pedigree. Season three re-frames season two as a stutter-step on the road to greatness. Its pair-offs and team-ups make for rich and rewarding story-telling. We get to explore new relationships with new characters, and see fresh spins on existing dynamics. Each set of characters holds a different piece of the narrative puzzle, and their season-long journeys towards the truth and each other are perfectly paced, building to a thrilling climax and a fitting, melancholic coda.

Along the way the show generates dizzying levels of dread, mystery, levity, and tension, in just the right amounts, and at exactly the right times, knowing just when to make you laugh, gasp, wince, quiver, cower or cry. One minute it’s a buddy comedy; the next it’s a sci-fi body horror. One minute it’s a cold-war thriller; the next it’s a 1980s family-friendly fantasy flick. Throughout every second it’s a genuinely affecting, genre-vaulting, trope-tastic summer treat.

The creature effects are terrifying and disgusting in equal measure. Lucas’s mouthy little sister and Hopper’s nutty friend, Murray, generating great, gut-busting laughs in most scenes they’re in – as well as stealing them. The endless 80s pop-culture references are a joy to discover, decode and decipher. Watching the season feels like eating a nutritious three-course meal that just happens to taste like your favourite chocolate.

Everyone gets a chance to shine. Joyce gets to ditch her worried mum act and become a warrior mum; Steve gets to be the hero and get the girl (not in the sense of shallowly seducing and discarding her, which he couldn’t do in this case even if he wanted to, but of ‘getting’ her – really getting her); El gets to explore the powerlessness and heartache of being a regular teenager; the gang gets to prove they can fend for themselves (to a point) without El’s super-powers; Nancy gets to put one in the eye of the patriarchy; and new character Alexi gets to break our bloody hearts.

There’s a part of me that wants Stranger Things to quit while its ahead, but the greater part of me hopes that it becomes a never-ending story.

From the Upside Down to the zombie apocalypse, where stranger things give way to stranger danger, in season five of Fear the Walking Dead.

I’ve been on something of a critical and emotional roller-coaster with this show. Prior to the third season premiere I wrote an excoriating piece itemising everything that was hoary, dreary and dreadful about it (which you can read HERE). I then had to do a full about-turn when the third season defied expectations by being not just good, but occasionally great, producing along the way one of The Walking Dead franchise’s very best episodes, the Daniel-centric outing ‘100‘. My sheepishness and surprise moved me to write a piece for Den of Geek entitled, ‘Is FTWD now better than the main show?’ (which you can read HERE). I genuinely believed that it was.

Season four was a bold and interesting move for the show, bringing Morgan (Lenny James) across from the mother-ship, bleaching the landscape blue and grey, and adding a handful of compelling new characters to the mix. Yes, the villains in the first half of the season were nonsensically lame, and the show still sometimes veered in eyebrow-raising directions, but over-all it was solid, sombre, grounded and well-executed. Nick’s death hurt. Madison’s death made me feel sad – and I fucking hated Madison. Well played, FTWD. Well played.

While Morgan’s quest to be the nicest man in the apocalypse could be a little grating at times, there was no question that Lenny James was leading-man material. Season four also produced another best-of-the-franchise, this time with its fifth episode, Laura, a quiet, touching character study that chronicled the bitter-sweet backstory of noble cowboy John Dorie and his dashing (as in ‘off’) soul-mate, Naomi.

Unfortunately, season five seems like a return to the bad old days. It’s a messy splodge of a story always teetering on the brink of implausibility, crammed with so many potentially interesting scenarios and perils that it’s almost a crime for it to be as boring and maddeningly frustrating as it is. All the plummeting planes, rumbling nuclear power-stations, irradiated zombies, mysteries, comebacks and betrayals in the world can’t balance the scales when it comes to bad dialogue and sloppy story-telling. And those kids… man, those kids are irritating as shit.

The realisation of FTWD’s massive drop in quality hit me in increments. I wasn’t aware of just how much I disliked this season until my brain’s niggling negativity centre reached saturation point about five or six episodes in, and flooded my body with a sense of incredulity and disbelief. I wondered if I was watching some awful, zombified hybrid of Lord of the Flies and Under the Dome commissioned by the CW channel. The threats seemed confusing and inconsequential. I couldn’t really understand why their very survival depended upon a plane – why there was no other way for them to escape the irradiated landscape – beyond the fact that the writers must have thought, ‘This will be neat.’ My wife said the season reminded her of the half-arsed essays she used to write during her short-lived university days, where she would select a handful of random quotes from the source material on the basis that they sounded cool, and then write two-thousand rambling, incoherent, lacklustre words of filler around them.

Back in Fear the Walking Dead’s middling days, its biggest flaw was repeatedly to set up interesting ideas and premises, and then burn through them in an episode or two. Season five manages to go one worse by hinting at interesting ideas and premises, and then never delivering on them at all. While there have been some undeniably fun, surprising and engaging moments here and there, most notably the tongue-in-cheek show-down in the Wild West town, Althea’s episode-long encounter with one of the mysterious helicopter people, and the visual spectacle of the makeshift runway fringed with Christmas lights, disappointment and frustration have been the over-arching constants.

Episode eight showed definite signs of improvement, and there’s more skullduggery and intrigue ahead. I hope the show finds a new lease of life again. I’d hate to see it rot.

PS: Kill those kids.

PPS: Hopper isn’t dead.

Jamie on the Box – Tuca & Bertie

Posted on May 16, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

TV Review: Tuca & Bertie

Two barmy birds land on Netflix and make a virtue out of perseverance

Tuca & Bertie: from the people who brought you Bojack Horseman.

That’s how easy it was for the show to snag me. Cards on the table. If a new show was to come along carrying the tagline: ‘From the people who brought you Bojack Horseman comes back-to-back clips of old ladies receiving painful enemas on rusted gurneys round the back of the supermarket’, I’d be on my couch with a bucket of popcorn ready before you could say, ‘I think we’ve reached something of a cultural nadir.’

Tuca & Bertie is helmed by Bojack Horseman alumni Lisa Hanawalt, who helped develop that show’s trademark look. While T&B shares an aesthetic flair and a penchant for anthropomorphised creatures with its cartoon cousin, the two series couldn’t be more seismically different.

Bojack – eclipse black

Bojack Horseman is a deliciously dark study of existential angst, addiction and depression filtered through the id and ego of a washed-up, middle-aged actor on the cusp of his last chance in life, love and Hollywoo (sic). Tuca & Bertie, on the other hand, is a bouncy, breezy, larger-than-life look at the zany exploits of two female friends as they try to ‘level-up’ into their thirties without losing themselves, or each other.

The two friends are mirror opposites: Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) is an extroverted, fleet-footed toucan who’s taking her first tentative steps towards sobriety and self-reliance; Bertie (Ali Wong) is an introverted career chick (a songbird if you want to get literal about it) who’s just started cohabiting with her drippy but dutiful boyfriend, Speckles (Ex-Walking Dead favourite Steven Yeun).

If Bojack is storm-cloud black, then Tuca and Bertie – in style and execution, if nothing else – is a magical rainbow swirling inside a nuclear-powered kaleidoscope.

I disliked Tuca & Bertie’s first clutch of episodes, feeling meaner towards it precisely because I expected to love it so much. Maybe ‘disliked’ is too strong a word. It’s perhaps more accurate to say I was confounded, puzzled and nonplussed. I scouted online for reviews, and could find only frothy-mouthed outpourings of acclaim, which made me dislike the show all the more.

Was I the lone voice of dissent? What was I missing here? Was there something wrong with Tuca & Bertie, or with me?

While I loved the show’s arresting, vivid, and inventive visuals, I felt that the characters were broadly drawn to the point of caricature, and largely unlikeable to boot. The narrative was wispy and meandering, more dawdling behind the action than driving it; and the themes seemed fluffy and inconsequential. The absurd elements and sight gags, which should have been the show’s greatest asset, felt over-laboured. There was nothing of substance to orient the madness. It felt like going on a blind date and discovering that your partner is one of those people who describes themselves as being ‘certifiably mental’ or ‘totally up for the banter’.

But by far Tuca &Bertie’s biggest sin was that after four episodes the show had barely teased a titter out of me. Sure, I sniggered once or twice, especially at the unexpected introduction of some rather unorthodox sex bugs, but for the most part I sat grinning at the TV like an agitated gibbon, trying to trick my brain into making my mouth laugh. Was I over-thinking it? Was I not giving it a chance? Was I condemning it for not being Bojack? Was there an element of subconscious chauvinism afoot? Was it possible that Tuca & Bertie’s funny message was being broadcast at too high a frequency for my despicably male ears to hear?

As quickly as that last thought tapped a toe into my brain, my mind snagged it with the teeth of a hungry coyote and shook it until it was dead. Firstly, one team of women isn’t going to be representative of all women, everywhere, in any case. Secondly, I’m a veteran of The Golden Girls, one of the funniest sitcoms ever made; I’m Team Roseanne (the character, not the increasingly loopy lady who brought her to life); I’d happily watch and re-watch a movie called ‘Carrie Coon Cooks Prunes in Pantaloons’ over the output of most male stars; I have a fierce love for Captain Janeway; I think Happy Valley – created by, written and starring women – is one of the most compelling, uncompromising, and rich crime series ever produced; and I regularly read and rave about the works of great female novelists (or just novelists, as I prefer to call them).

I’m conscious that all this is starting to smack a little of the old ‘all of my best friends are black’ defence, and my list is quite possibly patronising and self-consciously right-on to the point of pukiness, but I’m simply trying to call attention to the fact that while men and women are physiologically and psychologically different, and subject to a host of different stresses, triggers and dangers throughout their lives, we aren’t so different that our inner worlds are closed off to each other.

Men and women aren’t really from Mars and Venus. Just because something’s about women, or by women, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s ‘for’ women (or at least not only for women), and vice versa.

To rule out the patriarchal angle once and for all, I asked my partner to watch episode five with me: the episode where Tuca and Speckles (Bertie’s wishy-washy architect boyfriend) go on a road-trip to visit Tuca’s boozy, caustic and unspeakably rich aunty. I wanted to get some female perspective, see if there were things I might have been missing because I wasn’t aware I was supposed to be looking for them.

We sat stony-faced and silent for most of the episode’s twenty-six minute run-time, swapping and sharing the odd strained smile or apologetic grimace. Afterwards my partner said that although she wasn’t a big fan of Bojack Horseman, if she ever happened to catch a stray episode with me she at least ‘got’ the show. She could see what other people saw in it, and why they liked it. Tuca & Bertie, though, was a different kettle of ornithoids entirely. ‘What is it supposed to be doing or saying?’ she asked. ‘The whole time, I just wanted it to be over.’

I went back to trawling the net. There had to be others out there who shared my feelings. Not rabid incels or trolls who rebelled at the mere suggestion of a possible male hegemony, but normal – well, comparatively normal – people like me. I found a review of the show by critic Alan Sepinwall, the Head Ed for TV over at Rolling Stone magazine. He, too, had struggled with the first few episodes, but felt that the show deepened as it progressed, becoming steadily richer, funnier and more coherent, striking a rich nexus of quality about four or five episodes in. By this stage I was already five episodes in, and whatever Alan Sepinwall had found in Tuca & Bertie still eluded me, but I was now more hopeful than ever of finding it – whatever ‘it’ was.

‘OH YEAH!’, I hear the more ideologically trenchant among you roar. ‘Long live the brotherhood, is that it, Jamie, you SCUM BAG? You were prepared to keep hating it right up until the point another MAN came along and said that it was good, so it MUST be good, right, because a fucking MAN said so?!! PIG! YOU PIG! YOU PENIS-POSSESSING, MANSPLAINING, MUCK-SPREADING, PATRIARCHAL PIG!’

Please lower your pitchforks, folks. I know how this looks, but I can assure you that my reverence for Alan Sepinwall has nothing at all to do with his penis, an item which I can only assume he possesses. I’ve followed his career ever since his humble beginnings recapping (among other shows) The Sopranos for the Newark Star Ledger, the very same newspaper that Tony Soprano liked to read in the show. I followed him from HitFix to Uproxx to Rolling Stone, picking up most of his books along the way (I even reviewed his latest, The Sopranos Sessions, for Den of Geek, which you can read HERE). I utterly respect Alan Sepinwall, and usually agree wholeheartedly with his reviews and recommendations.

As I finished episode six, though, I started to suspect that our tastes might have reached their first point of opposition and impasse. Tuca & Bertie still hadn’t clicked for me, and it had a scant four episodes to leave its mark. I’d never give up on a show mid-way through a season, but season finales are handy check-points at which to decide whether to push on or switch off. I figured I’d be switching off. Surely it was too late in the game for a last minute save from the plucky, flocky ladies, and their world of sentient trees and building with great big pairs of tits bouncing from them?

Turns out it wasn’t.

My revelation came later than Alan Sepinwall’s, hitting me somewhere around episode seven or eight. It was around then I started to feel that the show was going somewhere, and saying something.

Tuca started to seem less like an obnoxious, sassy, single-friend composite and more like a rounded, damaged person whose denial-scented psychopathology sprayed out of her whenever she was confronted with pain or truth – the sort of person who, say, goes to a mindfulness retreat and accidentally turns it into a murderous cult. True story.

Bertie began to feel less like a 2D, Diet Monica-from-Friends and more like a living, breathing, relatable mix of conflicting wants, duties and desires. As the season drew to a close, everything started falling into place. The stakes became real, and finally there was something solid to counterbalance the crazy and the zany, which only served to make the crazier and zanier elements seem crazier and zanier, and funnier – much, much funnier – too.

I watched Tuca and Bertie mesh and unmesh, attract and repel, laugh and cry, rant and rage, love and hate, playing out the complex and familiar dance of female friendship in a winsome, winning and truthful way. There were fears. Secrets. Some key #metoo moments were handled sensitively, powerfully and, most importantly, with humour. Was this a different show I was watching?

The laughs were coming thick and fast, too. Not just titters or gently expelled puffs of nasal air, but real, booming, take-you-by-surprise, do-I-really-laugh-like-that laughs. A scene in the hospital between Tuca and a rather frantic medical appliance had me losing my shit quite considerably.

I fell in love with the way the show adds fresh dimensions of humour and tension to the humdrum and the ordinary through its hyper-inventive visual style: text-messages walking to their recipients; characters tussling with themselves inside their own brains, or suddenly becoming live-action puppets; and frenzied NOOOOOOOs growing animate and hurtling their way across town, with characters sometimes hitching a ride on them.

Tuca & Bertie will be back for a second season next year. I didn’t expect to say this way back at the mid-point, but, do you know what? I’m really looking forward to it.

The birds have nested. Now it’s time to watch them hatch.

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 4 – 6

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 16: Tryons, and fighters, and bears, oh my!

Wherein old friendships are rekindled and new enemies are made

Race, culture and tribal identity have been major talking – as well as flash – points thus far in season four. Hardly surprising, given that Outlander began its first season with indigenous peoples being subjugated by an aggressive neighbouring nation, and now finds itself relocated to a country where the indigenous peoples are in the process of being displaced and decimated by white European settlers (not to mention the infrastructure of this brave new world being erected upon the backs of countless thousands of African slaves).

Literature from the early days of white colonisation, and of course books and movies from our own recent past, could avoid tackling the more uncomfortable and unpalatable aspects of America’s birth and ascendance, but Outlander and its contemporaries cannot, and should not (and Outlander certainly doesn’t). We can no longer ignore history’s competing perspectives, and the winners, losers, villains and victims left in its wake.

In the opening moments of episode four, then, we revisit the racial tensions of Outlander’s first three seasons. It seems churlish to describe an incidence of racial tension as ‘classic’, but I suppose it is within the context of the series so far. Real venom simmers between Jamie and governor Tryon; a partial re-kindling of the conflict that reached its apex with the battle of Culloden.

Ostensibly, Jamie and the governor are discussing a land deal, one that will see Jamie becoming a laird-of-sorts once more, and the closest thing this new world has to a nobleman. The conversation between them is cordial on the surface, but unfolds in a very mafia-like way, everything they say to each other carefully guarded behind a fortress of plausible deniability (lest ye olde wire-taps be listening). They bury their threats and insults behind smiles, which flex across their faces like muscles. The governor keeps making disapproving remarks about the Highlanders, even going so far as to call them savages. Jamie won’t take the bait, but he won’t back down either.

Jamie’s new status as a landowner, for all its excitement and opportunity, is at times an uncomfortable burden for him to bear. He’s used to being the rebel, the fighter, the righteous man. Now he’s one of ‘them’. Not just a nobleman but, in the eyes of the Cherokee, an invader; a stealer of ancestral land to which he has no legitimate claim.

The Cherokee don’t waste time in showing up for a couple of grizzly stand-offs on the Frasers’ new turf. They behave menacingly, shout indecipherable threats, and hurl chibs and knives around. If nothing else, I’m sure it cures Jamie’s homesickness somewhat. Throw in some whiskey and bagpipes, and the Laird of Lallybroch could’ve made a proper night of it.

I don’t know if it’s culturally insensitive to say this – which, if I have to ask, probably means that it is – but the Cherokee look more like Chinese drag queens than bona fide Native Americans. I guess that’s what happens to your world-view and perspective on other peoples when you get all your lessons on aboriginal North American cultures from the Hollywood westerns you used to watch with your grandpa as a child.

I’d like to balance out any offence I may have caused to readers with Cherokee ancestry by pointing out that my own ancestral people did, and still do: a) wear itchy skirts, b) eat deep-fried chocolate for breakfast, washed down with a cup of hot lard, c) drink so much alcohol that our livers have the consistency of vinegarised paper, d) exalt a musical instrument that when played properly sounds like a dying cat trapped inside of a Whoopee cushion, and e) have to take language courses in order to understand even other Scottish people the next town over.

Oh, and f) we all have vast ginger beards. Even the women.

There. An eye for an eye… makes the whole world laugh. Or else it should.

So how did Jamie manage to avoid hostilities with the Cherokee? Well, in the usual, boring, predictable way, of course: by hunting down and killing a mentally-ill old warrior who, in response to being banished from the Cherokee settlement, had taken to masquerading as a bear, stalking the forests and killing anything that crossed his path. Oh come on, Outlander. I think we’re all getting a bit tired of that old chestnut.

How satisfying it is to see an incidence of sexual assault being suitably and swiftly punished for a change. How laudably sage and just of the 18^th century Cherokee to have banished Bear-man-to-be for the crime of raping his wife, when sexual assault in our own time seldom attracts the punishment it deserves. That being said, though, they really should invent social workers and probation officers, in case their next sex-criminal turns into a leopard or something.

Claire and Jamie quickly forge a friendship and an alliance with the Cherokee, but their community outreach program isn’t limited to the natives. Claire also befriends the Muellers, a nearby family of German emigrants, and finds herself assisting in the delivery of the family’s first grandchild. So far, so beatific. Unfortunately, the first meeting between the Muellers and the Cherokee doesn’t exactly hint at a friendly future. When Mueller sees a group of Cherokee drinking some water from the river that runs past his property, he demonstrates an early Teutonic talent for neighbourly love by threatening to shoot them all.

Jamie’s out of town trying to round up prospective tenants, so it’s down to Claire to mediate peace between the opposing groups. Maybe she would’ve managed it, too, were it not for the heady mixture of illness, misfortune, superstition and mistrust swirling around the Mueller home.

When Herr Mueller’s daughter and new grand-child are killed by an outbreak of measles, his racism, grief, and ignorance of all things epidemiological combine to make him a crazed savage. He attacks the Cherokee in the dead of night, believing them to have cursed the river-water. He scalps their healer – a gentle woman, who had become Claire’s mentor and friend – proclaiming her a witch, and the architect of the curse.

Instead of turfing Mueller out into the wilderness dressed as a buffalo, or something equally absurd, the Cherokee decide to burn down the Mueller house with flaming arrows, and kill both husband and wife. As the flames lick at the bones of the house, and the flesh of its inhabitants, a little girl’s doll sits in the foreground, silently watching as the family to which she almost belonged is purged from the earth. I remember thinking to myself at that point, with a mixture of sympathy and sadness: at least that’s one less trip on the Christmas-card run for the Frasers this year.

There’s a moment just before the fire where we’re tricked into thinking that Claire might be the Cherokee’s target. We’re ready to embrace that possibility because of an earlier scene in which Roger learns that Claire and Jamie died in a fire at Fraser’s Ridge at some point during the 1770s.

The discovery of the newspaper article that announces the Frasers’ fiery demise (which Roger and Brianna come across independently of each other) propels Roger and Brianna back to the stones: Brianna first; Roger hot on her heels. It’s going to be interesting once Brianna finds out that Roger tried to keep her parents’ immolation a secret from her. It’s not really something you could credibly claim to have slipped your mind, is it?

“There was something I had to tell you… em… nope, it’s gone.”

“Was it about dinner tonight?”

“Nope.”

“Em, did you make plans to go out somewhere, with your friends or something?”

“No. No, I don’t think so.”

[silence]

“That’s really going to bug me.”

“Don’t worry about it. It can’t have been that important.”

“That’s it! [smiles and snaps fingers] That’s it, I’ve got it… Your mother burned to death!… I knew it would come back to me.”

[stony silence]

“What do you fancy for dessert?”

Roger and Brianna’s reunion is one for the future (or the past, I suppose), but there are quite enough reunions in this trio of episodes to be getting on with.

Jamie is in the nearby town trying to drum up support for his big land giveaway among a clutch of ex-pat Scottish farmers and emigres. It seems like a generous deal indeed, but the fish ‘aint biting. Maybe Jamie needs his own advert on public access TV, and one of those big wibbly things that dances outside used-car lots.

“I’m Crazy Jamie Fraser, and I’m so crazy I’m about to give away 100 acres of land, THAT’S RIGHT, you heard me, 100 acres of land, to YOU, with no rent to pay! That’s right, NO rent to pay! Didn’t I tell you I was crazy? They don’t call me Only Mildly Mentally-Compromised Jamie Fraser, by God! You’ll pay NO rent, that’s zero pounds, until God himself serves up the first good harvest. Boy, if I was any crazier, I’d be disembowelling people in the forest whilst dressed as a fucking bear.”

No-one will take any land, though, because they see governor Tryon, to whom they will ultimately be in thrall, as yet another in a long line of English oppressors, taxing the farmers and their land to oblivion while growing fat and decadent on the ill-apportioned proceeds. Another rebellion is brewing, and this time Jamie won’t find himself on the side of people like Bryan from Banfshire, or Murtagh… Wait a minute, IT’S MURTAGH!!!

HOORAY!

Old grumpy-pants is alive and well, and living in Carolina as a blacksmith. He looks a lot older, like a Medicine Man-era Sean Connery, but he hasn’t lost any of his grit and fire. Murtagh’s the leader of the regulators, now: a tax-rebel; a righteous Robin Hood, still socking it to the man. Jamie won’t join Murtagh’s uprising against the unscrupulous tax collectors – he’s establishment now, after all. But neither will he stand in the way of the regulators’ efforts, because he’s still James bloody Fraser, ye ken.

I found Jamie and Murtagh’s reunion to be a lot more affecting than Jamie and Claire’s the previous season. Even Murtagh and Claire’s reunion was at least on a par. It’s all very lovely, which makes me worried, because if something’s lovely on Outlander that usually means that death, or rape – or someone being raped to death – is just around the corner.

Anyway, we’ll see. Back to happy. Before long, the whole gang’s kicking back in Fraser’s Ridge: Claire, Jamie, young Ian, Murtagh, John Grey, and Willie – Jamie’s little bastard (in more ways than one). John Grey has been raising Willie as his own, as he promised Jamie he would, the noble son-of-a-bitch.

I don’t understand the weight of suspicion and hostility that Claire directs at John Grey. Or why the show paints John, first and foremost, as some sort of love-sick stalker, ready to risk his adopted son’s happiness and sense of self for another shot at capturing Jamie’s affections. It devalues the character, and generates conflict where none exists. Sure, John obviously loves and admires Jamie, but can’t the writers simply let that be a facet of John Grey’s feelings and character, rather than the thing that dictates and defines them both? His motivations are surely a lot more complex than: ‘I wonder if this’ll be the thing to get my cock in Jamie’s gob.’

There’s hostility, too, between Murtagh and John as they tussle over the subject of the regulators, although John has no idea that the man he’s dining and debating with is the leader of the agitators. Jamie, as a new member of the landing gentry, finds his loyalties divided along lines of class, status and friendship. Murtagh wants him to use his influence with John Grey to get useful information from about Governor Tryon, but Jamie doesn’t want to betray his friend, especially in light of John’s role as father to his young son. Between John and Claire, and Jamie and Claire, and John, Jamie and Murtagh, it’s all a big chess game, and HEY, THEY’RE PLAYING ACTUAL CHESS, WHAT A GREAT METAPHOR!

Jamie gets a chance to bond with his son when John’s struck down with the measles. He takes Willie out into the forest to participate in stereotypically male pursuits like suffocating fish and shooting defenceless animals through the heart. Jamie systematically strips away William’s rank and privilege by forcing him to get his hands dirty by doing things like gutting and dressing the deer. It’s a very paternal urge, to reach out, to teach, to instill a little of himself in the boy’s character.

Jamie needn’t have concerned himself too much. There’s already plenty of him in there. When William sneaks off by himself to snag a fish he incurs the wrath of the Cherokee, who demand his blood as penance for the theft (that river’s a dangerous bloody thing – stay away from it in future!) William is only saved by a combination of Jamie blurting out the truth of the boy’s paternity, and his own honour and fortitude. Instead of walking away from the incident with his throat slit from ear to ear, he leaves with nothing more than a cut hand, a symbolic warning.

This traumatic event jogs William’s memories of his childhood, and Helwater. When William asks why Jamie didn’t look back at him when he was shouting and running after him on the day he left Helwater, Jamie says it was because he didn’t want to give false hope that they’d ever see each other again. It’s nice, then, that the episode ends with William leaving with John Grey, and turning to look straight into his father’s eyes.

That represents hope.

Which means you’re dead, William. Dead, dead, dead.

Sorry, mate. You’re in Outlander, not Downton Abbey.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

I was a little disappointed in Myers, the forest’s resident wilderness expert, during the bear saga. His knowledge of the natives, local wildlife and survival techniques didn’t count for much when he was dripping with blood and trying to squeeze his innards back into his ample belly. You failed, Fake News Bear Grylls, so move aside and make way for the real survivalist hero, Jamie Fraser: the mighty Bear-Batterer of Lallybroch.
Ah, you Americans and your famous ‘delicacies’. ‘Jerked meat’ means something a lot different in modern-day Scotland. As does ‘meat shed’. I think it’s a gay bar on Byres Road.
They made rifles bigger in the olden days, didn’t they? Mighty me, they were like bloody javelins.
I laughed when the subtitles popped up on screen when Murtagh was talking. He said, ‘Haud yer wheesht!’, and the subtitles said, (speaking in Gaelic). That’s not Gaelic, you silly sausage of a subtitler. That’s just slang. Póg mo thóin… now THAT’S Gaelic.
When Graham McNeil’s wife answered the door to Jamie in town, she gave him a look that suggested she was hankering after his little Greyfriar’s Boaby. I’m sure we haven’t seen the last of her.
Young William, with his long hair and half-confused pout, looks like Boaby, the man who works behind the bar of The Clansman in the Scottish comedy series ‘Still Game’. As a Scotsman, it gives me immeasurable pleasure to say that Willy looks like Boaby.

Jamie and Claire’s bawdy banter in the bath at the close of episode six was excruciating. Is it my imagination, or is there no longer any chemistry or passion between the two leads? It all seems so rote, so forced. Maybe that’s just a realistic portrayal of a marriage, I don’t know. What I do know is that young William looking back should’ve been the image to end that episode.
I’m looking forward to Brianna and Roger’s escapades in the past, which I’m sure must be coming in the next episode.

If you’ve got kids, grandkids or little people in your lives, read them this funny little story I wrote, Roy, Boy of Earth, and consider making a small donation to charity.

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Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 7 – 10

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Jamie on the Box – Game of Thrones

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

My pictorial review of Game of Thrones, Season 8 Episode 3

‘The Battle of Winterfell’

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 4, Eps 1 – 3

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Part 15: The Unicorn Meets the Eagle (or ‘America… f*** yeah!’)

Wherein Claire and Jamie are slaves to fortune, and others are just slaves

The shape and boundaries of Outlander’s story changed in steady increments throughout its third season, building to a wave (a literal one) that swept the show off its axis and into the raw, thumping heart of America’s pioneering past.

Drawing purely on internet chatter from the many Outlander fan groups I follow, season four’s new direction seems to be the site of the greatest schism yet between fans. Some consider the season to be an evolution, others a metamorphosis (from a butterfly back into a caterpillar). Some see it as a revelation, others an abomination. The fans have split into factions as surely as the two warring sides at Prestonpans or Culloden, a fierce, head-on battle for Outlander’s heart and soul. The question keeps coming up: is season four a blossoming, or a blooming disgrace?

So far, I can’t see what all the fussing and fighting is about. Sure, the show looks and feels very different in many ways, but it’s still solidly and undeniably Outlander. As a litmus test I spent the duration of ‘America the Beautiful’ playing a game of Outlander bingo: pointless Claire monologue? CHECK! Soft-core pornography? CHECK! Occasional bouts of yukky, stilted, over-literary dialogue? CHECK! An irredeemably psychopathic bad guy? CHECK! Hanging; misery; betrayal; death; wonky accents… BINGO!

Characters may live, characters may die; characters may come, characters may go; here, there, back, forth, but there’s one absolute constant in the world of Outlander.

Rape.

We’ve already established that the old world was a minefield of sexual assault (plus ça change) with defilements and debasements round every corner, so kudos to Diana Gabaldon and the writing team for always finding new and inventive ways of putting a fresh spin on the horror. I swear that Diana’s rolodex must be a veritable encyclopedia of assault-based flights of fancy. I wonder what ideas lurk in there yet to be employed? Hot-air balloon rape? Man serially abused by evil trees? Elks held in sexual captivity?”

This time around the horror belongs to young Ian, who admits to Jamie he’s still traumatised by the Bakra’s blood-soaked predations. The knife to his neck was but the final straw in a campaign of bodily terror that saw his spirit broken, his pride punctured and his memories hijacked, all of it garnished with a liberal sprinkling of shame.

Is it really any wonder that the Outlander fandom idolises Jamie? He’s a thoroughly good egg, isn’t he? Jamie is more progressive, patient and understanding than many social-justice-seeking millenials I’ve met. “Some ghosts can only be banished by naming them and their misdeeds aloud,” he tells Ian, shooting for spiritual guidance and in the process stumbling across modern psychology and the healing science of talk therapy. Jamie’s own experience with sexual violence has given him greater empathy for people in general, and victims of sexual assault in particular, but more than that: he’s a man who’s always been several hundred years ahead of his time (give or take a few ill-judged slaps).

Black Jack Randall may be dead, but his spiritual successor is alive and well in pre-revolutionary North Carolina. Step forward Stephen Bonnet, Outlander’s latest dastardly villain. Bonnet’s a mad, bad Irishman with the nervous, twitchy energy of a thousand Rik Mayalls, but none of his zany, humanising humour. There’s something more shark than man about this greedy, thankless scoundrel, who repays vulnerability with attack, and kindness with death.

After Hayes hangs for a crime of passion, Bonnet – next in line to swing – takes advantage of a diversion caused by Hayes’ angry, grief-stricken pal to flee his own pendulum-based destiny. Claire and Jamie later discover that Bonnet has hitched a ride in the back of their wagon, and against their better judgement agree to hide and harbour him, smuggling him past squads of redcoats.

When they next encounter Bonnett, he’s a robber, rascal and all-round rotter. He boards Jamie and Claire’s riverboat with his crew of criminals and proceeds to beat, terrify and humiliate his saviours, taking Jamie’s gems and Claire’s wedding rings, and even slitting the throat of the aforementioned grief-stricken pal to whom Bonnett indirectly owes his life. He’s… well. How shall we put this?

He’s a bit of a c***, isn’t he?

I wasn’t entirely sold on the use of Ray Charles’ ‘America the Beautiful’ over the scene of the boat rampage. While I understand that the juxtaposition of the song’s cheery melody with the visceral horror unfolding to its accompaniment serves to amplify the senseless horror of the attack, I really needed and wanted to hear the angst, the screams, the threats, the slits, thuds and cracks. Not because I’m an irredeemable sicko, you understand (although in many ways I am). I just felt that the music both dulled the magnitude of Bonnet’s betrayal and softened the impact of the violence. I wanted to see, hear and feel it the way Jamie and Claire did, no holds barred. I wanted to share the totality of their pain, anger and thirst for retribution.

[Granted, though, there was something irresistible in hearing a song about America, performed by a black man in segregation-era America, playing over a scene that typifies the violence upon which modern American was built.]

It’s clear that Bonnet has much in common with the fabled scorpion who hitches a ride on the back of a too-trusting frog, but team Fraser’s not exactly lacking for stings. I’m sure there’ll be a reckoning, and soon. But I fear that before that day comes, Bonnett will do much worse to the Frasers and those close to them. Much, much worse.

So far, barring the obvious robbery-homicide, the very worst thing that Stephen Bonnet has done is… speak. What is it with this show and accents? If they aren’t always going to hire Scottish or Irish actors to play Scottish or Irish parts, they should at least seek to hire actors who can turn their tongues to multiple dialects with ease. Ed Speleers is a good actor, but his Irish accent is a little… off. It isn’t in the same league of aural atrocities as Geillis Duncan’s ear-murdering lilts, but it’s just out of alignment enough to hamper the suspension of my disbelief. I’m sure the people of Minnesota, Rhode Island, Durban and Tokyo aren’t all that bothered about a few stray Oirish (sic) intonations, but I know one picky, prickly Celt that sure as shit is.

Ditto Aunt Jocasta. Now, Maria Doyle Kennedy is a talented actress, still in the midst of a long, varied and successful career – and I adored her in Orphan Black as the world-weary, murky, but deeply maternalistic Mrs S – but her Scottish accent is too clipped and staccato to scan as wholly authentic. Again, it’s just… just… a little off. Ever so slightly. But enough for each syllable to boom in my ears like a bomb.

Anyway, enough nit-picking. It’s time to… well, whatever the opposite of nit-picking is. Putting nits back? Making nits great again? Establishing a comprehensive nit-breeding program? WELL, RELEASE THE NITS, because I think that the fourth season’s second episode ‘Do No Harm’ is among the best the show has ever done.

It’s exquisite: a harrowing tale of conflict, prejudice, hatred, hope, despair, tragedy, ignorance and helplessness, for which there are no easy answers and from which there is no method of escape for Jamie or Claire that won’t leave them drenched in the blood of innocents.

Jamie’s experiences suffering under the jackboots of the English forces in Scotland has given him an affinity with subjugated and dispossessed peoples the world over, which predisposes him to stand up for the slaves’ humanity and freedom. Claire cannot abide injustice, and seeks to overthrow it wherever she encounters it, by any means necessary, and no matter the cost or the futility of the act. But here their noble impulses are prostrate in the face of a system that won’t budge, no matter how firmly they press their pasty-white shoulders against it. Jamie knows that even if he could rally the slaves to overthrow their masters, he’d most likely get them all killed in the process – maybe even his beloved aunty, too. Claire, from her vantage point in the future, knows in which direction this particular path of history is winding, and if Culloden couldn’t be stopped… then neither can this.

With each fresh attempt to do the right thing, Claire and Jamie only succeed in making themselves more complicit in the unfolding horror. Their impotence in the face of systemic racism and cruelty is grueling and horrible, though as a narrative choice it’s delicious: a rich seam of conflict and tension.

What does justice mean, who does it really serve, if its points are calibrated so crookedly? When blind white hatred outweighs black lives and freedom? Slavery is a system and a way of thinking that’s a danger and a detriment to the bodies and souls of all men, women and children, irrespective of colour; although the heavier burden rests, of course, upon the shoulders of those with darker skin tones. Sometimes that burden rests upon them literally, forcing them to exist as human cart-horses.

Jamie can’t abide the sight of Rufus hanging from a hook, awaiting excruciating torture and death at the hands of his hate-filled ‘masters’. It sickens and angers him. Hayes being hanged was one thing, this is quite another. He saves him… or so he hopes.

Claire takes an equally bold stance – placing the Hippocratic oath before the hypocritical oath of hatred – by using her surgical skills to heal the wounded man. I thought Ulysses – Aunt Jocasta’s slave of slaves – was going to thank Claire for her efforts, but he instead rebukes her for having intervened. He tells her with some anguish that when the angry crowd gets its hands on Rufus now, which it will, the boy’s fate will be much worse… that they’ll make an example of him to put all of the slaves in their place

It reminded me of the time I stood up for a homeless person who was being verbally abused and threatened on a cold, Aberdeen street. ‘Thanks,’ the homeless man said to me, once I’d warned his would-be attackers off, ‘They’ll probably come back later and kick the living shit out of me now.’

The only choice open to Claire if she wants to safeguard the rest of the slaves, preserve the time-line and ensure a less harrowing death for Rufus is to kill her himself. Jesus, that’s dark, Outlander. Commendably dark. A different show might have seen Claire and Jamie fake Rufus’ death and smuggle him out of town to safety, but this show likes to revel in its impossible choices.

On that note: Claire’s turning into quite the little serial killer, isn’t she? A real Harriet Shipman. They’ll soon have to rename the show ‘Take Me Out-lander’. Who’s she going to poison next?

‘Claire, young Ian’s got a bit of a sore leg. I think he’s grazed it.’

[Claire nods] ‘You get the kettle on, Jamie, I’ll go fetch the [wink, wink] special ingredient.’

‘NO, CLAIRE!!! JESUS CHRIST!’

Claire’s send-off for Rufus was agonising but tender. In death, she handed him freedom, and returned him to his family – even if it was only in his mind’s eye in the brief moments before it winked shut forever.

Then the lynch mob are handed Rufus’s body. Nothing sums up the insanity of racism more than a bunch of angry, mad bastards hanging a corpse. What awful, terrible bastards we’re capable of becoming given the right (or wrong) circumstances. It’s no great surprise that Jamie and Claire decline Aunt Jocasta’s offer to join them on her estate.

I always start these diaries worrying that I won’t be able to write enough and then, once I hit my stride, I always worry that I’ve written too much. Outlander lends itself well to analysis, and because of my closeness to the country that started it all, and my love of TV and pop culture, there are always multiple routes to journey down off the main avenues laid down by the episodes. And, as you’re by now well aware, I do so love a good segue.

However, whenever Roger and Brianna dominate an episode my anxiety about writing too much vanishes. I’ve never found their arc especially compelling, a lack of enthusiasm that’s only been compounded by my indifference to Brianna – both the character and the actress who portrays her. I feel like I could get away with writing, ‘Roger and Brianna did stuff, and then they did some more stuff, and then all the stuff was done, the end.’

Well, blow me down. What a difference a year makes. Brianna and Roger seem really good together here. And I like Brianna now, both the character and the actress. Sophie Alexandra Skelton has really settled into the role, and the character seems at once more relaxed, and significantly wilder. Brianna definitely has Claire’s tunnel-visioned, devil-may-care-ness, but it’s untempered by the anguish of wars and death. I’m sure her impulsivity will spell trouble for Roger in the long-run.

He’s a real love-sick little puppy, isn’t he? That’s when he isn’t being all whiny, passive-aggressive and entitled. I thought their burgeoning romance, with all its confusion, angst and heartache, was handled very well. And Brianna’s blouse landing on the deer’s antlers like some sexy parachute made ma laugh. Still, say what you like about Roger, there aren’t many men who would travel all the way to North Carolina to attend what appears to be a Scottish-themed church bazaar.

The song that Roger sang on stage for Brianna made me cringe. The lyrics were horrible, the tune was crud, an assessment obviously not shared by Roger’s audience, who sat enraptured; smiling, nodding, and staring ahead with unblinking zeal. I’ve been at concerts, recitals and karaoke nights. At least fifty per cent of the people in any given audience are chatting among themselves; twenty per cent or more are off at the bar; fifteen per cent are asleep; and the other fifteen per cent are staring down at their shoes like they’re trying to figure out how to use them to kill themselves.

Anyway, Roger and Brianna did stuff, and then they did some more stuff, and then all the stuff was done. The end.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

As Claire and Jamie’s first big bonk of the season got underway, my partner shook her head and said, ‘Why is Claire always just wet? No preamble, no foreplay: plop – in he goes.’ ‘Maybe because they’re constantly surrounded by the aphrodisiac of death and danger, and he’s got big muscles?’ She was still incredulous. ‘That’s not how vaginas work.’ It was my turn to shake my head. ‘Maybe this says more about me, than it does about Claire and Jamie.’
When the Scots were all gathered together drinking booze and singing Gaelic songs in a phlegmy warble, it reminded me again of how many similarities there are between Scots and that other long-haired, often-indecipherable warrior race, the Klingons.
So, the historical genesis of the drum-roll is as an accompaniment to hangings, is it? Thank you in advance, Outlander, for helping me to win a pub-quiz at some point in the future. What a wonderful, though slightly disconcerting, sprinkling of detail. I’m more used to hearing drum-rolls during a magician’s act. It’s a bit jarring to hear it accompanying a horrid, neck-snapping death, although what is hanging if not a magic trick without the ‘ta-da’ bit?
I hope we see more of John Quincy Myers – Hagrid’s little brother meets the bearded music teacher from the Walking Dead.
Ditto Phaedre. Good actress, good character. Wise and spirited beyond her years. I hope we see a lot more of her.
I wish Lt Wolff had been this season’s baddy. You can just tell he’s going to be a complete, unbridled arsehole.
What a big man-child I am. I found myself snickering away at the subtitles when they were describing animal noises. My partner shook her head in despair. Come on, though, ‘horse nickers’? A horse wearing a big pair of ladies pants? Who can blame a man for chuckling like a child? And the less said about the ‘gobbling softly’ the better.
Claire see the ghost of an Indian, and it leads her to Jamie. I’m sure that presages the appearance of some real-life native Americans in the show.
Frasers’ Ridge! Now I understand why that Facebook fan group calls itself that!

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READ THE REST – Click below

Why I want to binge-watch Outlander

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 5 – 8

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 9 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 1, Eps 13 – 16

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 1 – 4

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 5 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Eps 11 – 12

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 2, Ep 13

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 1 – 3

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 4 – 5

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 6 – 7

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 8 – 10

Jamie’s Outlander Binge – Season 3, Eps 11 – 13

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland

Entering ‘Leaving Neverland’ with an Open Mind

Posted on March 16, 2019 by Jamie Andrew

Depending upon the preconceptions about Michael Jackson’s guilt or innocence you bring with you to HBO’s Leaving Neverland, you’ll find it either a harrowing how-to guide on the grooming of children, or a show-case of the acting skills of two very cynical and greedy con-men.

Wade Robson and James Safechuck claim to have suffered years of abuse at the hands – and various other body parts – of Michael Jackson, a campaign that went hand-in-glove with a relentless charm blitzkrieg that saw the boys and their families showered with gifts, money, love and attention.

Because the documentary offers no physical evidence or conclusive ‘proof’ of Jackson’s alleged crimes, it was natural for viewers to slip into the roles of arm-chair detectives and amateur psychologists: scrutinising Robson and Safechuck’s every motivation, facial twitch, hand gesture and intonation, hoping to discover the truth somewhere in that web of cues.

Do Safechuck and Robson seem upset enough? Do they seem too upset? Is their tone too lively? Too flat? What are they doing with their eyes? Are they being too emotional, or too clinical?

It’s a very human impulse: to seek; to search; to pull apart; to judge. We like nothing better than to impose and transpose our ideas and ideals about the world and human interactions on friends and strangers alike. We know people, right? We’re great judges of character. Aren’t we?

Most of the time, though, our moment-to-moment ‘instincts’ or knee-jerk reactions are wrong, or only ‘right’ within the narrow parameters we set for ourselves based upon the limited information to which we have access; all filtered, of course, through our biases. It’s too easy to imagine certainty in the shadows when you’re busy being blinded by the light of your own self-righteousness.

Wade Robson

Cautionary examples of micro-scrutiny and projection abound, in fiction as in real life, the most striking example of which can be found in Albert Camus’ exemplary work ‘The Stranger’. The story’s narrator is condemned to death for a crime of self-defence; judged guilty almost entirely on the basis of his muted reaction to his mother’s unrelated death a few weeks previously. He didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral. This perceived lack of feeling was witnessed by the townsfolk, twelve of whom went on to serve on his jury. A man who doesn’t weep for his dear, departed mother, they reasoned, must be a man capable of limitless evil. He’s guilty, they proclaimed. He’s a liar.

Case in point: I found myself occasionally sceptical of Robson’s testimony, particularly the uncomfortable level of detail he delivered unflinchingly to the camera, but then found myself softening towards him when a) I discovered he was married and, b) he cried in the second part of the documentary. That’s when it hit me. I don’t know what a typical abuse victim sounds like, or how they typically feel or behave. Who am I to pick apart every micro-gesture, or judge this man based upon his tears or lack thereof?

[And so fucking what if any of them are after ‘Jackson’s’ money? If I’d been offered fame and fortune, and found out too late that the price for achieving this was serial sexual abuse and the disintegration of my self-esteem and trust, damn right I’d try to take every single fucking penny of that bastard’s money. And don’t forget this – it’s all about money for those feeding from the Jackson estate, too. It’s not only the victims who have a ‘vested interested’ in safeguarding that ‘fortune’]

In the end I found it best simply to listen to the two men and their families; let their stories wash over me in their entirety, and then try to place them in their proper context: that context being Jackson’s supreme power and status; and the myriad public allegations that have been made against him since the early 1990s.

Looking back at Whacko Jacko

It seems as though the wider public’s greatest sympathies have always lain with Michael Jackson. His fans and supporters have always held him up as the proto-typical abuse victim, an almost Christ-like figure. Having been brutalised and beaten by his mean drunk of a Dad, and forced to perform in the public spotlight like a cross between a circus monkey and a cash cow, Jackson then arose – free from bondage, free from suffering – to usher the world into a new era of love and peace. Jackson was meek and mild. He’d known pain, he’d known terror, he’d known subjugation, he’d known powerlessness, and he was here to tell the world, ‘From now on, I will demonstrate my ethos of kindness and happiness, and I will do it by surrounding myself with hordes of pre-pubescent children, and sleeping with them in my bed.’

Erm… sorry, what? This has always been the snagging point, and the point around which Jackson’s legal and PR teams have spun the hardest. There can be few parents whose alarm bells fail to ring upon learning of this aspect of Jackson’s behaviour, and the fact that many of the parents of the boys who went on to claim abuse at Jackson’s hands found themselves fooled or dismissed around this point is a testament to the toxic power of money, success, and worship. Jackson seems to be above and beyond the scope of the #metoo movement. He’s like a pope; a prophet; a holy man. Jackson isn’t a mere Kevin Spacey: he’s the Catholic Church itself.

The abused often become abusers. Often, but not always, those who have been hit, hit; those who have been subjected to anger and intolerance go on to subject their nearest and dearest to anger and intolerance; those who have been touched, touch; those who have been brutalised, sexually or otherwise, go on to brutalise others in turn, or else allow themselves to be brutalised again and again and again, in a horrible escalation of the original pattern. Or both.

There’s a reason Dexter’s titular serial-killer-in-disguise brings in a tray of donuts for his cop-station co-workers every morning; there’s a reason real-life monster Jimmy Savile ran so many marathons and donated so much money to charity. It’s over-compensation, misdirection. Smoke, mirrors. Schmoozing.

Grooming.

We Brits tend to be a bit more cynical about these things given our recent experiences not just with Jimmy Savile, but with seemingly every male celebrity who ever graced a stage or set between the 1960s and the 1990s. We know that abusers can hide in plain sight, skipping over fields of whispers to shake hands with pop stars and princes alike.

I know men and women are capable of lying about rape; I know kids can lie about abuse, for all sorts of reasons. But more and more these days (excluding the TV and film industry) it seems as though our sympathies lie more with the abusers – the rich, the powerful, the savage – than they do with the victims. The poor and disenfranchised of America cheer for Donald Trump – ‘He’s just like us!’ – as all the while his unfeeling foot moves to crush them. The working-classes of the UK pour platitudes upon the Queen, a woman who likely wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.

And when a weak and spindly Michael Jackson celebrates a Not Guilty verdict by clambering on top of a parked car like a vampiric Willy Wonka, or a mutated Mister Burns, his fans erupt in a chorus of cheers, whistles and applause. That VT footage is in the documentary. It’s sickening. Jackson raises his arms aloft and makes himself into a lightning rod with which to absorb the explosive adulation of the crowd, a happy smile plastered across his plastic face.

You were accused of child molestation, Michael. And it’s not the first time. You’re not on stage. It reminded me of when Rolf Harris started singing excerpts from his greatest hits while testifying in court. Not just wildly inappropriate, but callously inconsiderate and narcissistic.

Won’t somebody please think of the children…

I’ve heard a lot of people ask, in response to this documentary, ‘Why didn’t the accusers say something sooner? Why did one of them actively lie in support of Jackson and then change his story? Kids blabber and talk, about everything and anything – why didn’t they?

This ignores the role that shame and fear play in our lives. It ignores the work that an abuser does to normalise abuse and/or to isolate their victim from their friends, family, and even reality itself. It ignores the conflicting feelings of love and loyalty a child may have towards their abuser. It ignores the fear a child may have of not being believed, or of hurting their family, even of hurting their abuser. It ignores the fear a child may have of losing that connection to their abuser that on some level they’ve been conditioned to need – a feeling of being loved, of being special – not to mention the material gains it affords them: the bribes, the promises, the luxuries. It’s a horrible, sickening process that makes children feel complicit in their own debasement.

The answer to those three questions posed at the turn of this sub-section lie in our own lives and relationships. We all come through power structures when we’re children: family, foster homes, care institutions. Even without the spectre of abuse, it can be hard to assert yourself within those dynamics. Maybe there’s an old uncle whose views you find repellent, whom you nevertheless tolerate as an adult because those hierarchical cues keep working to constrain your responses.

Maybe a single look or stray tone from either or both of your parents can seal your lips in silence or get your heart pumping like a drug-addled disco-dancer. I know grown adults in their forties and fifties who still won’t spark up a cigarette in front of their elderly parents for fear of reproach.

Look at Tony Soprano, pop fiction’s most iconic and well-rounded mob boss, a man of ferocious and absolute power who still nevertheless finds himself at the mercy of his mother’s narcissistic machinations and infanticidal fury.

Wade Robson, James Safechuck and director Dan Reed

Think about the working world. School and higher education, despite their lofty claims to unlock the unique power of the individual, serve largely as tools to mould kids into the workforce of tomorrow. What little vestiges of non-conformity still exist in a person by the time they join the job market are usually chipped away quickly by the iron hand of the corporatocracy (the only place where creativity is encouraged is in the banking system, and even then its greatest artists usually end up either in jail or in the government). We have no loyalty to our workplaces beyond our wallets. There are no childhood entanglements to complicate our relationship. But, still, most of us toe the line, and work hard not to rock the boat.

In our workplaces we’re forced to accept things and people that under different circumstances we wouldn’t have the inner-reserves of self-control to bear. Workers imagine that Human resources departments function like unions, looking out for the little guy, helping to keep bosses in check, but in reality they exist to preserve the status quo and minimise a company’s risk of haemorrhaging money to lawyers. Ditto appraisals, which are promoted as a boon for the worker, the equivalent of a wish-list to Santa sent up the chimney-spout. To your employer, though, your appraisal is simply a stored record of either your compliance or your mistakes, ultimately a form of insurance against any future legal action. ‘But what grounds do you have for this tribunal? We have three years’ worth of testimony here as to your happiness? You never spoke up before.’

Now imagine that instead of being at home or at work you’re in the orbit of one of the most iconic, powerful and adored human beings who ever lived.

Systems trap us. Our homes and possessions and families make us slaves. Most of the time, most of us take the path of least resistance. Battles are draining, and the reality is: most of them we won’t win. Even if we’re right. Even if we’ve been wronged.

That’s why we admire rebels: James Dean, John Wayne, Larry David. They blaze the trails we can’t. We’re weak. Abusers and psychopaths know this. Especially the rich and influential ones.

That’s why they invariably win, time after time. And will doubtless continue to do so. In a sense, we’re all victims; and few of us even realise we’re being abused.

We’ve now left Neverland

By the end of those four harrowing hours of interviews, interspersed with archival news and home footage, it becomes finally, painfully clear that Neverland wasn’t a waking dream for these kids, but a living nightmare; a factory disguised as a gang hut; where hungry serfs found themselves ferried along rainbow-coloured conveyor belts, on which their childhoods were plucked from them like rhino horns.

Michael Jackson’s power, fortune and legacy are all waning now, which is another reason why the bubble he tried to seal himself inside is ready to be popped once and for all.

He’s still the King of Pop with a capital P. But the ‘aedophillia’ isn’t silent anymore.

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