(no subject)
I know I'm way behind everyone else on this, but I just finished the first season of "Life on Mars" (UK), and it is so damn good. I love the characters (Sam and Gene are so awesome together. You can read it slashy or not, they're a fabulous pairing either way), I love the cop show bits and the sci-fi parts, the music is fantastic ... I can't wait to start the next season. I'm also going to download "Ashes to Ashes" ... no Sam, but I do love Gene. I think I'm going to give the US version a miss, though. And now I'm super excited for the Dr Who finale, having taken in so much John Simm awesomeness lately (not sure about the bleached hair/hoodie thing, or the Visible Man skull business in the trailer, but still excited).
I've also started "Cracker", another British cop show, with Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid!) as a very Dr House-ish crime psychologist, and a ridiculously young Christopher Eccleston (who of course punked out after a season, because that's apparently how he rolls).
And I watched the new Prisoner, but I'm not sure what I think of it
It's definitely a lot more coherent than the original show (like that's difficult to accomplish), but because it's more coherent, the points they're trying to make are clearer, and I'm not sure how I feel about some of them.
The last episode reveals that the Village is a construct inside a dream of Number 2's wife, and the people in it are mentally ill patients of 2 and his wife who've been put there without being aware of it. 6 is briefly repulsed by this, but meeting his Village girlfriend's real life psychologically damaged self convinces him to heed the Villagers' insistence that he be the new 6, and his girlfriend 313 the new comatose woman keeping the Village real. I assume the audience is supposed to be like "aw, 6, you done fucked up" at the end, but the show itself doesn't seem to feel that there's a middle ground between imprisoning the mentally ill in a fascist fantasyland and having them roam the streets crazy. The scene with 313's disturbed real self seems to put it on the side of the Village being the lesser of two evils, and that kind of creeps me out. It would be marginally better if the people involved had agreed to it, but it's explicitly stated that they didn't. I dunno, the show didn't seem nearly critical enough of that idea, and if the whole point of The Prisoner is to critique systems of control and power, it really should have been.
I'm also less than impressed with the new Prisoner's treatment of women and minorities. I read a newspaper article in Newsday that was all "yay, women actually have something to do in this version", and I'm kind of curious if that writer actually saw the whole show, because what the women on the show get to do isn't particularly amazing. I don't think there's a single major female character whose arc didn't involve her sacrificing herself for a man - one of 6's love interests seduces him on 2's insistence and then plunges into one of the holes that appear in the Village, and his other love interest and 2's wife are both kept comatose to preserve their respective man's vision of the Village alive. At least in the old show, there were female 2s that actually had some kind of power or plotline not related to being with a guy. There appears to be only one black man in the Village (oh, wait, no, there was a hobo-y looking guy in the last episode), his purpose is to serve 6 or 2's needs, and one of the few times he takes any action beyond ferrying 6 in his cab is to help put 6 into power at 2's request. There's a gay couple, but it's a somewhat sketchy middle aged man/teenage boy pairing, and the boy ends up killing his lover to protect them from being outed. The boy also eventually kills himself when he can't handle not existing in the real world. The show put minorities in the Village I think to modernize it and differentiate it from the all-white original cast, but they didn't seem to think of the weird implications that comes with them all being powerless and in desperate need of 2 or 6's help.
This isn't to say I hated it, though. The design of the show was great, in a way that was very different but at the same time very similar in feel to the original show (the visuals in the old show are generally my favorite element anyway), and it has some interesting directing going on. Ian McKellan is awesome in it, like he is in pretty much anything, and though I think multiple 2's were interesting, the way the new show was rewritten works better with one (though if they had a bunch of Ian McKellan-level awesome British actors playing 2's, that would've been pretty cool). Jim Caviezal is ok- his 6 is a self centered dick, but so was Patrick McGoohan's, so that's fine. In general, the show had an interesting buildup that's kind of let down by the end of the series, and the writing is pretty iffy in some parts. There's a lot of smaller elements that I liked - the episode with 6 teaching and spying has some genuinely creepy (to me, anyway) stuff about the indoctrination of children (also, I liked the quick disposal of the "who is Number One?" question in that episode, because that ended up being one giant mess in the old show), there's some neat shoutouts to the old show (I wish McGoohan hadn't declined playing the old man escaping in the beginning, that would have been really cool), there's some amusing lines (like, 99% of which come out of Ian McKellan - 2 is probably the most interesting role in the series), and it's still not nearly as fucking stupid as the original finale, so it definitely has that going for it. I'm not a huge fan of the original - I like the visuals and the concept but there is absolutely too much bullshit and "look, it's weird, that must be meaningful!" stuff going on, so I'm not disappointed that it didn't live up to the original, but I think it could have been better than it was.
I've also started "Cracker", another British cop show, with Robbie Coltrane (Hagrid!) as a very Dr House-ish crime psychologist, and a ridiculously young Christopher Eccleston (who of course punked out after a season, because that's apparently how he rolls).
And I watched the new Prisoner, but I'm not sure what I think of it
It's definitely a lot more coherent than the original show (like that's difficult to accomplish), but because it's more coherent, the points they're trying to make are clearer, and I'm not sure how I feel about some of them.
The last episode reveals that the Village is a construct inside a dream of Number 2's wife, and the people in it are mentally ill patients of 2 and his wife who've been put there without being aware of it. 6 is briefly repulsed by this, but meeting his Village girlfriend's real life psychologically damaged self convinces him to heed the Villagers' insistence that he be the new 6, and his girlfriend 313 the new comatose woman keeping the Village real. I assume the audience is supposed to be like "aw, 6, you done fucked up" at the end, but the show itself doesn't seem to feel that there's a middle ground between imprisoning the mentally ill in a fascist fantasyland and having them roam the streets crazy. The scene with 313's disturbed real self seems to put it on the side of the Village being the lesser of two evils, and that kind of creeps me out. It would be marginally better if the people involved had agreed to it, but it's explicitly stated that they didn't. I dunno, the show didn't seem nearly critical enough of that idea, and if the whole point of The Prisoner is to critique systems of control and power, it really should have been.
I'm also less than impressed with the new Prisoner's treatment of women and minorities. I read a newspaper article in Newsday that was all "yay, women actually have something to do in this version", and I'm kind of curious if that writer actually saw the whole show, because what the women on the show get to do isn't particularly amazing. I don't think there's a single major female character whose arc didn't involve her sacrificing herself for a man - one of 6's love interests seduces him on 2's insistence and then plunges into one of the holes that appear in the Village, and his other love interest and 2's wife are both kept comatose to preserve their respective man's vision of the Village alive. At least in the old show, there were female 2s that actually had some kind of power or plotline not related to being with a guy. There appears to be only one black man in the Village (oh, wait, no, there was a hobo-y looking guy in the last episode), his purpose is to serve 6 or 2's needs, and one of the few times he takes any action beyond ferrying 6 in his cab is to help put 6 into power at 2's request. There's a gay couple, but it's a somewhat sketchy middle aged man/teenage boy pairing, and the boy ends up killing his lover to protect them from being outed. The boy also eventually kills himself when he can't handle not existing in the real world. The show put minorities in the Village I think to modernize it and differentiate it from the all-white original cast, but they didn't seem to think of the weird implications that comes with them all being powerless and in desperate need of 2 or 6's help.
This isn't to say I hated it, though. The design of the show was great, in a way that was very different but at the same time very similar in feel to the original show (the visuals in the old show are generally my favorite element anyway), and it has some interesting directing going on. Ian McKellan is awesome in it, like he is in pretty much anything, and though I think multiple 2's were interesting, the way the new show was rewritten works better with one (though if they had a bunch of Ian McKellan-level awesome British actors playing 2's, that would've been pretty cool). Jim Caviezal is ok- his 6 is a self centered dick, but so was Patrick McGoohan's, so that's fine. In general, the show had an interesting buildup that's kind of let down by the end of the series, and the writing is pretty iffy in some parts. There's a lot of smaller elements that I liked - the episode with 6 teaching and spying has some genuinely creepy (to me, anyway) stuff about the indoctrination of children (also, I liked the quick disposal of the "who is Number One?" question in that episode, because that ended up being one giant mess in the old show), there's some neat shoutouts to the old show (I wish McGoohan hadn't declined playing the old man escaping in the beginning, that would have been really cool), there's some amusing lines (like, 99% of which come out of Ian McKellan - 2 is probably the most interesting role in the series), and it's still not nearly as fucking stupid as the original finale, so it definitely has that going for it. I'm not a huge fan of the original - I like the visuals and the concept but there is absolutely too much bullshit and "look, it's weird, that must be meaningful!" stuff going on, so I'm not disappointed that it didn't live up to the original, but I think it could have been better than it was.