Jonathan Creek s5 ep1: The Letters of Septimus Noone
This is less a recap than a collection of bullet points, but then again, some of the recaps have also been collections of bullet-points... I plan to do the same thing with the new episode of Hannibal tomorrow, when I've had a chance to watch it again.
- Jonathan in the theatre at the beginning, upset by the person with the glowing smartphone next to him? R. That is completely and totally R. Jonathan afterwards, holding a mini tub of ice-cream to his punched eye? The reason I'm always leery of his remonstrating with other movie/theatregoers. It's not that it's happened but we did get a threat once from an idiot who brought a very young child to Avengers Assemble. People take their film/play-disturbing civil liberties very seriously, apparently.
- I was prepared to hate this, but it has a strong start with typical Renwick humour - the malfunctioning gondola, the tuba incident (disgusting but funny, though emetophobes should beware), the upper middle class family life caricature with bonus Alien references.
- JONATHAN IN THAT RIDING HAT.
- David Tennant arrives, aged 20 and with a Beatles haircut. Does rapid-fire Sherlock-style deduction which is total bollocks (or so we have to assume, since he's wrong about Jonathan's injuries and Jonathan and Polly just keep staring at him in embarrassment). Hopefully there won't be more to him than this - the media played it up as if the episode was generally spoofing the show, which sounded like desperate relevance-grabbing, something Jonathan Creek has never needed.
- The "impossible crime" aspect is played differently than usual, in that this time we know exactly how it happened: Juno Pirelli was stabbed by a disturbed woman, didn't want to press charges, and wore a prosthetic on her abdomen to hide the small mark. I sat there the whole time going, "You should go to A&E! How do you know it hasn't nicked the intestine?", and lo and behold, she bleeds out, cue Jonathan being called in, Polly groaning, and Sherlock Jr. (sigh) being dragged along to spout more preposterous theories. [ETA: his name, inevitably, is Ridley]
- Jonathan has to be told Polly's mother was half-Spanish. After, you know, eight years of marriage or whatever it is. Or: THE AUDIENCE DOES.
- The stuff with Polly's dad is nice, and unlike the way Jonathan was played and written in last year's terrible Easter special, he's actually allowed to show emotion here - he looks on the point of tears a couple of times at the undertaker's and at the rambling old (Jacobean?) mansion Polly's inherited. This is a good thing, because the last episode gave us nothing to convince us that he had any feelings for Polly or explain how they'd wound up together. I do actually like them together in this episode, which was probably my biggest worry.
- Boyfriend: "You've seen the name 'Holmes' too much!" But seriously, it is obviously 'holmes', not 'sawjoy', right?
- Oh, and the real impossible mystery turns up in the form of an old family friend who describes her mother's spilt ashes disappearing by themselves while she left the (locked) house for a couple of hours. Polly actually gets to solve this one, in the sense that she's present when the Roomba pops out, as pre-programmed, to hoover up some crumbs. Then when she gets home and Jonathan pre-empts her solution, she has a small Maddy-style strop. JONATHAN, YOU HAVE A TYPE.
- Okay, so that's solved. So the real real mystery turns out not to be the impossible type, but a discovery in Polly's family home, when they find a box of letters than reveals her late mother's affair with one Septimus Noone...
- I'm still mulling over this decision to leave the show without any real impossible mystery. The Noone letters are a mystery, and a nice one, but not impossible. The Roomba thing is solved within ten minutes, I think. And we know how the stabbing was covered up from the start. Maybe it's just to bridge into Polly actually being enthusiastic and appreciative of Jonathan's mystery-solving, to the point where she solves one herself. Which I liked, by the way. I find that encouraging for the future of the show, though naturally I wish we'd never gone down this weird marriage/normal guy route. I do like, by the way, the fact they now have an eccentric house. That was an important element and it was very sad that they lost the windmill. Also, the theatrical element of this episode helped to make it feel like old times, since Adam Klaus is a distant memory...
- So, guarded hopefulness from here on out.
- Jonathan in the theatre at the beginning, upset by the person with the glowing smartphone next to him? R. That is completely and totally R. Jonathan afterwards, holding a mini tub of ice-cream to his punched eye? The reason I'm always leery of his remonstrating with other movie/theatregoers. It's not that it's happened but we did get a threat once from an idiot who brought a very young child to Avengers Assemble. People take their film/play-disturbing civil liberties very seriously, apparently.
- I was prepared to hate this, but it has a strong start with typical Renwick humour - the malfunctioning gondola, the tuba incident (disgusting but funny, though emetophobes should beware), the upper middle class family life caricature with bonus Alien references.
- JONATHAN IN THAT RIDING HAT.
- David Tennant arrives, aged 20 and with a Beatles haircut. Does rapid-fire Sherlock-style deduction which is total bollocks (or so we have to assume, since he's wrong about Jonathan's injuries and Jonathan and Polly just keep staring at him in embarrassment). Hopefully there won't be more to him than this - the media played it up as if the episode was generally spoofing the show, which sounded like desperate relevance-grabbing, something Jonathan Creek has never needed.
- The "impossible crime" aspect is played differently than usual, in that this time we know exactly how it happened: Juno Pirelli was stabbed by a disturbed woman, didn't want to press charges, and wore a prosthetic on her abdomen to hide the small mark. I sat there the whole time going, "You should go to A&E! How do you know it hasn't nicked the intestine?", and lo and behold, she bleeds out, cue Jonathan being called in, Polly groaning, and Sherlock Jr. (sigh) being dragged along to spout more preposterous theories. [ETA: his name, inevitably, is Ridley]
- Jonathan has to be told Polly's mother was half-Spanish. After, you know, eight years of marriage or whatever it is. Or: THE AUDIENCE DOES.
- The stuff with Polly's dad is nice, and unlike the way Jonathan was played and written in last year's terrible Easter special, he's actually allowed to show emotion here - he looks on the point of tears a couple of times at the undertaker's and at the rambling old (Jacobean?) mansion Polly's inherited. This is a good thing, because the last episode gave us nothing to convince us that he had any feelings for Polly or explain how they'd wound up together. I do actually like them together in this episode, which was probably my biggest worry.
- Boyfriend: "You've seen the name 'Holmes' too much!" But seriously, it is obviously 'holmes', not 'sawjoy', right?
- Oh, and the real impossible mystery turns up in the form of an old family friend who describes her mother's spilt ashes disappearing by themselves while she left the (locked) house for a couple of hours. Polly actually gets to solve this one, in the sense that she's present when the Roomba pops out, as pre-programmed, to hoover up some crumbs. Then when she gets home and Jonathan pre-empts her solution, she has a small Maddy-style strop. JONATHAN, YOU HAVE A TYPE.
- Okay, so that's solved. So the real real mystery turns out not to be the impossible type, but a discovery in Polly's family home, when they find a box of letters than reveals her late mother's affair with one Septimus Noone...
- I'm still mulling over this decision to leave the show without any real impossible mystery. The Noone letters are a mystery, and a nice one, but not impossible. The Roomba thing is solved within ten minutes, I think. And we know how the stabbing was covered up from the start. Maybe it's just to bridge into Polly actually being enthusiastic and appreciative of Jonathan's mystery-solving, to the point where she solves one herself. Which I liked, by the way. I find that encouraging for the future of the show, though naturally I wish we'd never gone down this weird marriage/normal guy route. I do like, by the way, the fact they now have an eccentric house. That was an important element and it was very sad that they lost the windmill. Also, the theatrical element of this episode helped to make it feel like old times, since Adam Klaus is a distant memory...
- So, guarded hopefulness from here on out.