Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Hot Skull is, obviously, a Turkish TV dystopian drama. Couldn’t you tell from the title? One of the things I love about Netflix is that they bring shows from other cultures to us. Squid Game, Dark, Lupin, Cracow Monsters, Biohackers, Sexify, Dark Desires, the Rain, Queen of the South, 3% and more are all shows I’ve seen and largely enjoyed from around the world courtesy of Netflix. Even when they haven’t necessarily been great TV (I’m not going to name names here), it’s usually great to see how other cultures create their stories. In particular, four of those, along with Hot Skull are dystopian series (I might have a type, and Netflix might make good predictions of that) but once you strip away the “this is our disaster, this is how we’re coping” there is still a chunk of “and this is how (in the case of Hot Skull ) Turks view a dystopia that is different to Germans, Poles, Danes, Koreans and, of course, Brits (and in cases not listed Americans). To me those differences are fascina...

The Sandman (S1) Wednesday (S1) Warrior Nun (S2) Slow Horses (S1) Severance (S1) Dr Who (Specials) Motherland Fort Salem (S4) First Kill (S1) Derry Girls (S3) Cracow Monsters (S1 and only?) All of us are Dead (S1) Killing Eve (S4) The Ipcress File (one season special) A Discovery of Witches (S3) The Witcher (S2) Foundation (S1) Hot Skull Conversations with Friends (one season special) Stranger Things (S4) This is not an exhaustive list of the TV I watched this year, it’s a list of the TV I was moved to review this year which is not the same. I’m aware of at least a couple of shows I watched all the way through that I didn’t review for various reasons. There are all a number of shows that I started and didn’t finish, which I guess is a review of its own to some extent, but they’re not listed here. As is usual, this list is not really ranked. While it might be possible to rank Warrior Nun and Wednesday against each other, how do you rank either of those against The Sandman or S...

Wednesday is, of course, an adaptation of The Charles Addams cartoons and their other adaptations, particularly the two films with Christina Ricci et al (you can find little and not so little easter eggs scattered throughout the episodes). This is also identifiably a Tim Burton series (you can find easter eggs for his previous work too) but this is more an adaptation like Sweeney Todd than Alice in Wonderland - I think the source is macabre enough he sprinkles his touches throughout rather than twisting it too far. However, it would be fair to say that this show owes as much to the success of Harry Potter, and it’s far less TERF-associated spin-offs, as it does to the original material. In the vast majority of the earlier material we have the family together, by and large. This series sends Wednesday away to boarding school, which is distinctly not Hogwarts in many ways but, equally, could have come from the mind of Tim Burton but probably wouldn’t have been funded like this in a...

Warrior Nun doesn’t pick up where season one finished, but it’s relatively close, there’s a two month gap rather than the two years we’ve had to wait. This is just long enough for the plans of various factions to have started to develop. Adriel is using his powers to create new followers, human possessed by wraiths he is calling over of course. The nuns are on the run, hampered by the fact that Father Vincent is thoroughly on Adriel's side. Beatrice and Ava are trying to lie low in a bar in the Italian Alps, but Bea is super-organised and Ava is… well Ava so it doesn’t go too well. There’s a new, anti-Adriel group called The Samaritans, and Ava gets mixed up with one of them in the bar. Because this is television, this is obviously significant, but the ways it’s significant turn out to be complex and interesting. Lilith’s story keeps developing, as does Jillian Salvius' story and the new pope’s. Some of these story developments are in moderately predictable ways, some are fr...

In general British spy dramas, and have no doubt, Slow Horses is a thoroughly British spy drama, fall into two camps. You have the Bond Camp, everything is glitzy, high tech and high adrenaline, high paced. You have, whether in the book or film style of this, peaks and troughs of tension that are really well suited to the film but work well in a book too. The other is the Smiley Camp, quite slow paced, seedy and the most high-tech thing is usually the photocopier. Sifting through papers and bins is often the height of the action but the stress builds and builds inexorably. Interestingly, both of the authors behind the typonyms are former spies, but one was there during WWII and the other during the Cold War, so perhaps it reflects the way things changed from hot to cold espionage. I’m not aware of a spy novelist coming out of the social media iteration of spy craft, although I’m sure there will be one, if there isn’t one already. I wonder what they will look like? While you can argue...

The Power of the Doctor marks the end of Jodie Whitaker’s tenure in the TASRDIS (boo) as well as Chris Chibnall’s (yay). She went out with a 90 minute spectacular timed to mark the centenary of the BBC, and spectacular it was. I have, pretty consistently, disliked what Chibnall did with the cannon of Who. I am not saying it’s a sacred cow, unable to be touched - the Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi regeneration broke one such long-held rule of the Whoniverse and while it’s not my favourite Eleven story it broke the rule in a way that worked and made sense of a dilemma that had to be addressed sometime and was neat within the general bounds of the series. That part, 10/10 in an otherwise maybe 7/10 episode. Then Chibnall rewrote The Doctor’s history so all of that particular history was superfluous and meh. He did that several times and, seemingly, without caring. It landed, as you might guess, like a damp squib. Not just with me, but certainly here. Fortunately in the last few specials he...

Severance is a TV show that is based on a fairly simple premise but takes it to a lot of very interesting places that remain uniquely part of the show but resonate strongly with a string of other things. The idea is that someone worked out a neurosurgical procedure called severance that lets you create a completely separate other personality, based off the original and controllably switch between them. More strictly, it separates the memories of the two but memories help define our personalities. In the show this gives you a working “innie” and an away-from-work “outie” that have no real memory of each other, although each is aware of the other's existence. The innies are rewarded with positive affirmations (often false) about what their outies are like. The workplace is weird in more ways than this. The main group of characters look at numbers on a screen and when they feel odd they sort them into bins and “nullify” them. That is almost exactly how the job is described to the n...

Two shows in a row that were deemed unfilmable. Both have spent years, decades even, in various development hells and both have turned out to be very satisfying series. That said, where I described Foundation as sometimes hard to penetrate and requiring of attentive watching, The Sandman was a visual feast and every episode was a storytelling treat so I simply never wanted to take my eyes off the screen. It the difference between not daring to look away (although I was always sufficiently engaged this wasn’t an issue) and not wanting to look away. The differences run deeper than that. Foundation was based on a book while The Sandman is based on mature comics (later graphic novels and then book-length collections). That makes Foundation feel like a 10-hour movie, with a consistent, on-going story, split into sections. There’s absolutely noting wrong with that and while it’s not the only way we see these 10-episode streaming series if you look back at Stranger Things , First Kill ...

Foundation is based to some extent on at least part of a series of books by Issac Asimov. I have read them but several decades ago (maybe more than 40 years for the original trilogy, even the fourth book. That makes my memory between fuzzy and minimal, but there are enough parts that I do remember despite that gap that it clearly captures at least parts of the original but I can’t honestly comment on how faithful it is. The fact it’s taken this long to make a TV series from it says something about how “unfilmable” a series it is. The first four episodes span about as long as it’s been since I’ve read the books, although a lot of this is done in a single jump. That jump is, eventually, made clear but as I remember the book it’s very explicit. As they’ve chosen to shoot it, it’s really not. That’s a choice that feels unnecessary to be honest, and changes the way the flow feels. There are later time shifts, but they’re shot rather differently and flow much more sensibly. There is, as we...

Honestly a lot of my comments about the first part of this season still apply. Perhaps that’s inevitable when you have a 7-2 split in the number of episodes, roughly a 7-3 split in the number of hours. What this split really gave us was a reveal that acted as a mini-climax, then a second true climax to the season. For part two, the story largely abandons good plotting in favour of tugging on our emotions. They do a good job of that, I cared about what happened to the characters individually and, to some extent, in their little groups. But in that last phrase lies the problem I had. In 4.1 we had groups of Hopper, Joyce and Murray, the California kids and the Hawkins kids as four groups, that merged down to three when Hopper, Joyce and Murray merged into a single group. This section really undoes that as all those groups split up again. I understand the idea that the various groups completing their tasks interact through the Upside Down to help each other in ways they can’t really k...

The elevator pitch for First Kill must have been quite a doozy. I imagine it went something like “Buffy x lesbian Romeo and Juliet x iZombie”. The Romeo and Juliet part is easy; our leads are a vampire and a hunter from wealthy families so we have two powerful families, divided. Admittedly not in fair Verona, but it’s pretty easy to see those lines of similar power and structure as we have between the Montagues and Capulets. They each have a scion, Calliope and Juliet, and these two have a complex home life, where they’re expected to uphold the family traditions, which includes hunting and killing the other while being the precious baby of the family. They also happen to meet and fall in love… Of course this doubles down on R&J, but the hunter and vampire as star-crossed lovers obviously brings in Buffy vibes. The iZombie vibes come from the sarcastic internal dialogue we're treated to. It’s not as sarcastic as Liv's inner voice but it is appropriate for the the charact...

Following on from the adaptation of Normal People we have the same director bringing us an adaptation of Conversations With Friends . In terms of Sally Rooney’s career this is backwards but this is how the TV has brought it to us, and how I’ve accessed them too. Much like Normal People we have young Irish people, final year students I think, but with jobs as well (it’s really not super clear - this may be an age thing, when I was a student it was rare to have to take a job, and no one I can remember did that, these might just be kiddies who were working to make ends meet) in Conversations with Friends rather than at school, at the start of the story, learning about the world and their place in it. But they’re also negotiating the world of work and sex/intimate relationships in the adult world. Students might be adults but blowing off lectures is different to blowing off work and your pool of possible partners and friends are basically your age. Once you’re in work, age gaps are sud...

I was an unashamed fan of the first three seasons of Stranger Things . Season four part one carries many of the same elements that made seasons one to three so delightful but where someone, presumably at Netflix, forced them to edit their scripts down to around an hour, this season that hasn’t happened. The episodes are about 20 minutes longer, but not necessarily 20 minutes better. The good scenes are absolutely great, as before, but there’s padding between them that just wasn’t there in previous seasons and it makes too many of the episodes drag for me. Add some problems I had with how they write Robin that I’ll address later and a huge issue with the finale and I struggled with this season for the first time. If you have come across any media about Stranger Things season four, it has probably mentioned the use of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. A lot of the time I’m ambivalent about the music they use in film and TV. I notice when it’s jarringly wrong but very rarely do I thi...

I don’t think most of this season it’s as funny as the first two seasons but that might be me. And that’s not to say it’s not funny. I laughed, out loud despite being alone, at every episode usually several times. I took to watching from a recording because I frequently laughed so hard I couldn’t hear what was going on and I wanted to be able to pause/rewind easily. It’s not like it’s unfunny all of a sudden, I think it just slides off to a different place that doesn’t work for me. As usual the music is really on point and it was great to relive some of those tunes. They play with the format of the show too: we have a flashback episode, a road trip episode and more. I don’t mind that but maybe that contributed a bit to my feeling of it not quite hitting the mark. Setting up the mechanics of the different episodes chewed into the time available for the cast to do their thing. Then came the finale. An hour long special, set a year later building up to the referendum on the peace agreem...

Cracow Monsters is, as you might guess from the title, a Polish show that’s on Netflix. Wikipedia bills it as horror but it’s much more in a dark modern mythology area than a traditional horror. It’s definitely about the conflict between good and evil but on a cosmic, rather than a human or human-adjacent monster scale. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some horror-style moments but they’re not the main thrust of the story, the focus. This show comes with a spate of trigger warnings for sexual scenes, suicide, drug misuse and some others. Broadly speaking all of those are accurate but, honestly, it’s pretty mild stuff. One of the warnings is for sexual violence and I’m left wondering what it was for to be honest. It should be far too easy to dismiss this series. It’s relatively simple to watch and, without even really analysing, spot a bucket load of tropes. We literally have a club for misfit kids with superpowers run by a professor for example. Sound familiar? A character that wea...

Really there were two parts to this special. The bulk of the show, in terms of minutes at least, was a story about the Sea Devils returning and Chinese pirates across three centuries. It was a perfectly solid story although I’ll have to admit I needed to watch it twice to really take it in. The time travel aspect was nicely handled and wasn’t a silly timely-wimey loop with a reset button (Moffat, I’m looking at you) but someone smart using a time machine to try and work out what happened to a ship that mysteriously disappeared three centuries earlier. There are some rather dubious costume choices in places, but since Yaz is raiding the TARDIS’ wardrobes I’ll let most of them go. The Chinese swords - look, I played taijiquan for years, I learnt and taught dao and jian styles. I don’t know where they got those swords, but once they left the guards, the blades are not Chinese. Also, given the position of the characters we see wielding them, probably the wrong sort of blades. But, oh well...

This show deserves multiple trigger warnings for bullying, bullying of a sexual nature, sexual blackmail and extreme body horror. I expected the last one of those, it’s a zombie TV series, the others I will discuss relatively shortly but I need to say they almost made me stop watching and they’re not super-strong triggers for me, so if they are for you, I’d seriously steer clear. Relatively hot on the heels of Squid Game Korea and Netflix gives us All Of Us Are Dead a zombie drama set, in part, in a high school but spreading into the wider city as well. We have fast, smart zombies, always a lethal combination and the transformation is combined with spectacular body horror level contortions after someone is infected. The transformations en masse tick all the horror tropes, and impact, you’d want. But because the transformation takes a while from infection to turning into zombie it has moments of massive pathos as characters we’ve grown to like slowly change before our eyes. The hig...