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

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

Part 14: Return of the Aye-eeee

Wherein some people are nuts, and some people talk to nuts, and they’re the less nutty ones

These days, it seems there aren’t any American actors in lead roles on US TV. Even the characters that are supposed to be American are played by British or Australian actors.

Before Idris Elba hit stratospheric levels of fame, he teamed up with Dominic West to fool The Wire-watching world into believing both were natives of the Baltimorean landscapes over which they battled and hustled; Hugh Laurie expertly masked his middle-Englishness to play the embittered, brilliant, ebullient and quintessentially American Gregory House MD; and two Australians, Aden Young and Adelaide Clemens, convinced absolutely as a pair of tragic, star-crossed souls from the deep-south in Showtime’s exquisite crime-and-redemption series Rectify. These actors and actresses are all exemplars of the craft of transatlantic (or transpacific) tongue twisting.

There is, however, an ever-growing roster of Brits and Antipodeans who’ve less than impressed the great American public with their efforts: Rick in The Walking Dead (especially in the first season, where he sounded like Forrest Gump’s even dippier cousin); Ewan McGregor in the third season of Fargo; Charlie Hunnam in Sons of Anarchy; and Gerard Butler in… well, in just about anything in which he isn’t supposed to be Scottish.

Except in the most heinous of cases, my untrained ears can’t seem to discriminate between good and bad attempts at the various dialects of the US. It got me wondering if people outside of the UK accept on the same unconditional terms the attempts of non-British actors to mimic our native accents. Did people in Rhode Island detect anything amiss in Dick van Dyke’s famously shite attempt at Cockney? Did the people of Florida notice that the Northern Irish accents in season 3 of Sons of Anarchy were so bad they almost constituted a war crime? And what do the people of New York, Nevada and Hawaii think of the Scottish accent issuing from the mouth of Outlander’s resident death-defying witch, Geillis Duncan?

I’ve no way of knowing. I can, however, tell you what the people of Thisguy, Scotland think of it. How can I put this? Hmmmm. Well, em… Lotte Verbeek has a good stab at the Scottish accent. The trouble is that she doesn’t stop stabbing. She stabs it again and again and again and again. Until it’s dead.

That may sound uncharitable of me, and that’s because it is, but in my defence it’s impossible not to feel a little combative considering that the character of Geillis contributes to how my kin and culture are conveyed to the world. Outlander is, after all, one of the most widely popular Celto-centric TV series of all time.

Don’t get me wrong, Verbek is a good actress, and she makes a commendable attempt at a Scottish accent considering that she hails from mainland Europe, but Geillis’s dulcet tones are so off-centre that, as a Scot, it takes me out of the performance entirely. It’s like listening to a symphony being played off-key on un-tuned instruments by a drunk orchestra.

Of dogs.

There’s one way you can judge the quality of a Scottish accent, and it’s this: the more syllables an actor adds to the one-syllable word ‘Aye’, and the longer those syllables are drawn out, the worse the attempt. Case in point: if Geillis’ ‘ayes’ were elongated any further they’d basically be the death throes of a Japanese Anime character.

Anyway, we’ll return to Geillis later in the run-down. For now, let’s kick things off with a ship-wrecked Claire, who wakes up shaken and stirred on a strange island; singular in her purpose, alone in her terror. The island Claire finds herself on is a mish-mash of Biblical tropes: it’s Eden after the fall; it’s the wilderness through which Jesus wandered for forty days and forty nights, warding off the temptations of the Devil himself. There are indeed snakes here with Claire, but they aren’t much interested in tempting or talking: just in throttling and biting.

For the first 16 minutes of Uncharted, Claire is on her own. There are no people in this strange environment, only hunger, and a landscape littered with prickly plants and biting ants. Basically, she’s Mowgli, but without the singing animals.

I’m a sucker for the Robin Crusoe narrative, especially when it’s riven with religious symbolism. I love to see snapshots of our primal past and renderings of our post-apocalyptic future: the isolation; the struggle. HBO’s The Leftovers delivered this brilliantly, twice: once, when it showed the plight of an early human female navigating a deadly, antediluvian landscape with her newborn child, all the while surrounded by threats and augurs, and again when it showed us Kevin Garvey Snr wandering the Australian outback in the third season episode Crazy Whitefella Thinking. Even the Discovery Channel’s Game-of-Thrones-But-A-Wee-Bit-True series Vikings got in on the game when Floki first discovered the empty, roaring majesty of pre-colonisation Iceland, a rugged landscape he first mistook for Valhalla.

Scott Glenn as Kevin Garvey Snr in season 3 of The Leftovers

Silence, and paucity of speech, if used sparingly, can lift and liberate a piece of television. Silence has a great transformative power; it can sharpen our senses; open our minds; direct our focus to all that’s profound and terrible at the heart of the human condition.

Outlander couldn’t get Claire to stop talking long enough to give that a try.

I know Claire’s narration is a device that creates a bridge between the book and the TV series, but in this case… to whom is she narrating? And what does her narration add in way of shade or nuance to what we can already see and intuit with our own brains and senses? Surely one of the main benefits of Claire having no-one to talk to is that we don’t have to hear her moan or state the obvious for a while. But no. We’re shoved inside her head, like it or not.

“I was hungry. That means I needed food. I needed to find some food. So what else could I do? I decided to find some food. I had to try. But it wasn’t easy. The longer I went without food, the hungrier I got, and the harder it was to find the food. And the more I missed Jamie. Ow, an ant just bit me. That was sore. Still, at least it took my mind off how hungry I was for a moment there. I really need a shit now. I wonder if I can risk wiping my arse with any of these strange leaves? Goodness, I’m hungry. Did I mention that?”

Next we meet Father Fogden, the foppish Englishman of aristocratic stock who has a close, personal relationship with a coconut we pray isn’t sexual. He’s eccentric, he’s adorable, he’s sinister (the man, that is, not the coconut): he’s a Richard Curtis character who’s been inexplicably written into The Shining; he’s the newest owner of the Caribbean Bates Motel, but instead of his mother being dead, she’s an angry fat Cuban lady, who isn’t really his mother, but his almost-mother-in-law. Imagine losing your wife and being trapped forever with your mother-in-law. No wonder he’s on the yupa.

Mamacita – the mother of Father Fogden’s lost love Ermenegilda – wastes no time in cursing Claire to Hell and back, switching it up between English and Spanish so as to inject a bit of variety into her scorn. It becomes clear why Father Fodgen is so fond of fraternising with coconuts (although the hallucinogens might have something to do with that as well). As Claire heals, Mamacita cooks for her, serving up stank with a side-plate of sass for every meal.

Thankfully, Mr Willoughby’s goat-killing proficiency alerts Claire to the presence of Jamie’s ship. Claire’s dash through the jungle to catch Jamie’s ship before it ups anchor and sails away is commendably tense. Thanks to Outlander’s historic cruelty towards its central lovers I really wasn’t expecting a happy re-union. As the action cut between Claire’s panic and Jamie’s preparations, I prepared myself for the old time-delay trick (making it look like Claire was about to catch the boat with seconds to spare, when in reality she’s missed it by a whole day) or the different-place trick (they’re in the same time-frame, but on completely different islands).

Claire is a lot of things – stubborn, haughty, sometimes dangerously myopic – but she’s no damsel in distress. She’s brave, cunning and, above all, resourceful, the latter quality proving the difference between Claire being marooned with Lord Coconut and Mama Sass for all eternity, or sailing off into the sunset with Jamie once more. All it took was a wee waggle of a mirror through a sunbeam, and Jamie was rousing the troops to rescue her.

‘MacDuhb’s wife turns up in the most unlikely of places, does she no?’ says this season’s Angus to this season’s Rupert. Outlander knows fine well that we know that they know that we know how delightfully preposterous the show can be sometimes.

Father Fogden – my very favourite Caribbean-crack-smoking, coconut-nattering nincompoop – again gets to a shine when he presides over the union of Fergus and Marsali. I love Fogden, and I sincerely hope two things: a) that he returns next season, and b) that he’s free to officiate my real-life wedding later on this year. What a unique occasion it would be. I don’t know many people who have been joined in holy matrimony by a man who’s off his tits on gin and yupa.

I laughed heartily when Father Fogden tried to marry Marsali to a different guy on account of Fergus’s missing hand, and then laughed again when, his mistake having been corrected, he shrugged and said, ‘Not as though he’s lost his cock… you haven’t, have you?’

While I saw it coming – and it was a long time coming – it was still hellishly sweet when Jamie asserted kinship over Fergus by handing him the Fraser name.

Uncharted, then, was like the Fall of Eden in reverse: beginning with a silent, lonely journey through deadly and inhospitable terrain, haunted by the specter of a serpent, and ending with two characters joined together in hope, innocence and love, but also – you know, haunted by the specter of a serpent… if you know what I mean (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

The state of Eden is a distant memory for the poor Africans caged and enslaved in the sweltering heat of the Jamaican sun. The very best life they can hope for, at least for the next few centuries, is one serving drinks to snooty, cruel or indifferent aristocrats. It goes without saying that slavery is a repulsive practice. That human beings treated other human beings like that is disgusting, that it happened not so long ago in human history is chilling. For once, Claire’s inability to tolerate any act of injustice irrespective of the times and irregardless of the consequences is worth championing – even if it will almost certainly draw unwelcome attention to Jamie’s visibility and presence on the island.

Deliciously, though, history might think differently. In order to free a slave called Temeraire, Claire had to buy him, which means there’s a physical record of the vehemently anti-slavery, time-travelling firebrand buying a slave and therefore, on the surface of it, actually contributing to slavery.

So, Geillis then. She was never a particularly nuanced character to begin with – Lady Macbeth with a touch of murderous New Age Earth Mother – but in her latest (and last) incarnation as a blood-bathing black widow and purveyor of black magic, she’s positively ridiculous. When she isn’t chasing after the shiny MacGuffin fastened to John Grey’s coat, she’s waving her hand in the air in a dismissive manner and storming through a crowd of party-goers in her big flouncy dress to a chorus of giggles and gasps, like some cartoonishly wicked pantomime dame.

Let’s talk John Grey here. Until now we’ve seen him as a noble but dopey, love-sick little puppy, holding a candle (or indeed a sapphire) for Jamie across time and across continents. The moment where Claire works this out is incredibly sweet.

But the man also has a steely side, shown here when he delivers a rousing, stinging, brutal dressing down to the status-hungry Captain Leonard, saving Jamie’s skin into the bargain. I was almost out of my seat cheering.

Once Geillis’s three-stage-plan to immolate Ian, infiltrate the future and bump off Brianna was foiled, I half-expected her to turn to the Frasers and snarl, ‘And I would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you pesky kids!’ But she was far too busy being decapitated for any of that malarkey.

Well, almost decapitated. In the books I gather Claire sees the job through with the business-end of a blunted axe, but in the TV show she only manages a partial chop. That’s not a criticism. I know how hard it is to cut a cantaloupe under ideal conditions, so kudos to TV Claire for trying. There are thin religious parallels here that are probably more explicit in the book on account of Claire’s more successful stab at decapitation.

In the Bible, John the Baptist – who as his name suggested loved a good baptism – prophesies the coming of the Messiah; a great ruler of legend for whom he is the fore-runner. A little later, he’s beheaded. In Outlander, Geillis – who performs baptisms of sorts upon herself, and always in goat’s blood – prophesies the coming of a great ruler. A little later, she’s beheaded. Did I mention the parallels were thin?

I guess it’s easy to see God-shaped shadows everywhere in a season that’s been so awash with Biblical imagery, from Jamie’s hellish print-shop fire to goats to prophecy.

Outlander is usually pretty good at making its sex scenes tell a story, but here – in their last bout of bump n’ grind before their boat is engulfed by waves; the ‘clam before the storm’, if you like – it felt gratuitous. Yes, I know I can’t grudge them some tenderness after all the many hardships they’ve just endured, but it didn’t feel like their passion was informed or fuelled by the cocktail of emotions that undoubtedly would have been swirling around in their hearts and bellies, particularly since Claire had just killed a woman. Oh, and FYI, the use of the word ‘breeks’ is never sexy. Never. In Scotland you’ll most often hear it in this sentence: ‘Whit’s wrang, have ye shat yer breeks?’

That storm was breath-takingly realised, though. It looked and felt dangerous, deadly and horrifying. I got a real sense of the dizzying, frenetic, claustrophobic terror the crew must have felt. Really made me feel on edge: the raging power of the waves, the hopelessness and helplessness, the shrill whistling of the wind, a deadly world drained of colour, and alive with life-smothering danger. Bravo. Spectacularly well done.

Oh, hi, cliched-kiss-of-life-under-the-water, we’ve been expecting you!  And then, later, on the shore, Jamie manages to bring Claire back from the brink again with his very own patented brand of CPR – a very gentle kiss on the cheek.

At least Outlander has kept its two lovers together this time, first at the eye of the storm, and then in bewildered exile, where they always seem to find themselves. Where are Fergus and Ian? What are they going to do? Is Jamie safe from the King’s men?

God Bless America.

See you soon for season four.

A few final, disjointed thoughts

  • I mentioned the TV show Rectify way back at the start of this article. Please, please watch it, I beg you. It’s haunting, raw, poetic, visceral, and agonisingly beautiful; in this scribe’s humble opinion one of the best TV series of all time (if that isn’t too blasphemous a thing to say out here in Outlander-land).
  • I could tell pretty early on that Mark Hadfield wasn’t Scottish (the actor who played Mr Campbell, Margaret the seer’s brother) but never-the-less Mark does a very good job, never letting the accent drift into the realms of parody or exaggerated stereotype. English fans: is Claire’s accent good? It sounds pretty spot on to this set of Scottish lugs, but let me know in the comments below or on Facebook.
  • The bit where Jamie has to deliver penicillin to a poisoned Claire is nicely done. His reluctance to pierce Claire’s skin with the needle coupled with his baffled astonishment at the whole realm of modern medicine I’m sure made the Outlander-watching world erupt in a sonic-boom of ‘Awwwwws’.
  • On the subject of Geillis: if I can just let my carnality shine through for a moment, I found it particularly pleasant when she rose naked from her pool dripping with blood like some sexy mash-up of Hellraiser 2 and Cleopatra. I wasn’t a big fan of her feet, though. Not a foot man in general, I’m afraid. The moment Geillis started stretching and rubbing those veiny numbers in Ian’s face, allegedly in a bid to seduce him, I began hurling pairs of socks at the TV screen.
  • “Your nipples staring me in the eye, the size of cherries…” Em, smooth line there, Jamie. You should somehow try to work the word ‘breeks’ into there. It’s a good job you’re handsome, son, because your patter is awful.
  • I keep forgetting about Jamie’s disfigurement at the hands of the horrible Black Jack. Every time Jamie and Claire bonk it must cost the make-up department a small fortune. “Hey, we’ve got a big sea-battle coming up… maybe Jamie could keep his dressing gown on for this fuck?”
  • “Where did you find him? I must know, is he genuine?” – the look on Mr Willoughby’s face here was charming and funny.
  • I liked the closed circle of discovering that Claire had already investigated the murder she’d just committed.
  • Margaret tells Mr Willoughby: ‘You’re a rare soul’, which makes him smile. Be careful though, Wlloughby. You’re still not adept at decoding the Scottish accent. She might have just called you ‘an airsehole’.I hope Willoughby and Margaret are very happy together. In years to come I’m sure they’ll delight in telling their kids all about that time Daddy murdered their uncle.
  • I’m not sure about WIlloughby’s or Margaret’s arcs. Seems like it was all a bit too convenient. Ultimately, I don’t think either of them, separately or together, were handled particularly well.
  • When Margaret goes into full prophecy mode, I always burst out laughing.

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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

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Scotland