Category Archives: Television

Nordic Noir Review: Freezing Embrace (Hautalehto)

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Having finished Arctic Circle and Reindeer Mafia my sweetie-wife and I turned to a series new to us on the streaming service MHz Choice, Freezing Embrace (Hautalehto in Finland).

Solar Films

Adapted from a novel by Christian Ronnbacka, Freezing Embrace follows Chief Inspecter Annti Hautalehto (Mikko Leppilampi) as he deals with a number of issues, the finalized divorce from his wife, his police chief’s potential slide into alcoholism, his best friend’s potentially unstable son joining the police force while a serial killer who targets and murders young men by drowning them in the icy river. As bodies pile up, the evidence more and more begins pointing to his best friend’s son, a skilled diver, as the murderer.

While I found Freezing Embrace less engaging than either of the other two series I mentioned at the start of the post, and despite in many ways it being a by-the-numbers drama of serving on a police force, the disrupted personal life, the troublesome superiors, the seemingly willful blindness of the national forces, the characters and performance kept the show from feeling routine. I was particularly impressed by Leppilampi in the series. He had been a supporting player in Arctic Circlewith a very different character and quickly with this series I wholly accepted Antti as a distinct person with nothing that overlapped with the character from the other show.

I did find it amusing that when the entire mystery has been resolved and everything about the murderer’s motivation laid bare that the plot for this season was, in fact, a serious, dramatic rendition of the plot of the original Friday the 13th.

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A Thematic Problem with The Red Shirt Issue

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Yesterday evening, I came across a post from a friend online that expressed their middling reaction to del Toro’s Frankenstein prompting a return of my own thoughts that del Toro had worked so hard to make his monster sympathetic that no one of consequence died at its hands, a major deviation from the source text.

del Toro’s use of nameless crew to be killed in a thrilling and exciting opening combat scene with an unstoppable monster makes for a great opening to his luscious film but becomes hollow when the rest of the time the monster is presented melodramatically sympathetic and without emotional or ethical flaws. One could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie opened with mass murder. After all, they were literally nobodies.

Now, I have written about this before calling it his ‘Red Shirt’ problem. For those who are unaware, ‘red shirts’ refers to the often unnamed and wholly uncharacterized extras presented as security officers in Star Trek. These day players came onto the scene and in popular (but exaggerated) opinion died in droves.  The essence is still on target, they were essentially nameless characters brought on to dramatize the danger of that episode, a necessary evil of the time as no network program could go about killing its major and central characters. (This was decades before Game of Thrones would make it a drinking game.)

Western literature and oral tradition stretching back into prehistory is corrupted with a nasty little idea, that some people are simply born better than the rest of us. The nobility deserves their castles, their rich food, and the product of our labor, our bodies, and our lives because of the blue blood that courses through their veins. The ‘Chosen One’ narrative so popular in everything from religion to Star Wars is a product of this form of thinking. Luke and Aragon are good people because they were born to it, not from choice, not from making a decision to be good, but by their very blood. The force and the right to rule flows from their heritage and not their choices. We, the non-chosen, need to step aside and let out betters make the choices that will rule our lives. Our duty is to serve and to be thankful.

And here is the poisonous subtext in the ‘red shirt’ problem, it perpetuates this division of people into those worth and deserving of sympathy, consideration, and ultimately power from those lower, nameless people of the great ‘unwashed masses’ whose existence only matters in the moment that it impacts the monied and good-blooded people worthy of names. There are your ‘betters’ to whom you must defer with titles such as my lord, sir, mister — and to whom you must pay your obedience or suffer the lash and then there is everyone else, ‘red shirts’ to be used and discarded either on the battlefield or the factory to advance the lives and lifestyles of their ‘betters.’ The subtext of nameless victims in horror and action movies is that some lives are inherently more valuable than others.

“Red shirts” are not only a lazy and cheap play for a short cut to dramatic stakes, the practice subtly subverts the egalitarian ideals that all lives are valuable regardless of the accident of their birth or their importance to any particular narrative by regulating some characters to nameless and forgettable disposal.

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The Streaming Services for Science Fiction Fans

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I have been a science fiction fan ever since my older sister caught me trying to write a book report on a non-fiction book about Mars and took it away and put Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein in my hands. Now, in the era of streaming, the streaming wars, and the dominance of geek culture with so many SF movies and shows the question can be posed: which is the best service to subscribe to for science fiction?

To me, the answer is pretty plain: Apple TV.

While Paramount+ boasts pretty much the entire Star trek Franchise from the original series to the newest iterations, it’s really no deeper than Trek.

Apple TV has an impressive catalog of original and interesting SF. (In addition to even more beyond genre fiction such as Slow Horses and Bad Sisters.)

Here is a partial list of the SF you can find on Apple’s streaming service. I have bolded the ones that I have watched and as you can see the unwatched outnumber the viewed.

  1. For All Mankind
  2. Silo 
  3. Foundation 
  4. Severance 
  5. Dark Matter
  6. Invasion
  7. See
  8. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters 
  9. Hello Tomorrow!
  10. Constellation
  11. Amazing Stories
  12. Brain
  13. Sunny
  14. The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
  15. Circuit Breakers
  16. Murderbot
  17. Pluribus

Of the six shows that I watched, and I watched at least the entire first season for all of them, only one did not work for me and left me cold and uninterested in continuing, Silo. While it had a cast that I enjoyed and an intriguing concept there were world building issues that I simply could not get past to suspend my disbelief. The underground world of the show is simply not run with the absolute need to recycle everything, most of all biological material, that such a system would demand. All the other programs have worked at levels from simply enjoyable to shows that I love. Foundation, while diverging significantly from the source materials, source materials I found too dry to hold my interest, has been forking fantastic. Murderbot hewed much closer to the novels and managed to capture the inner monolog that is so essential to the property’s comedic tone. It took me a little longer to get into Severance. The split nature of the characters, I suspect, created an emotional distance, but once past that and especially once the big reveal of season one was deployed, I was hooked. Monarch was just monstrously fun and I cannot wait to see where Gilligan takes Pluribus.

I initially enrolled with Apple TV because a package deal with Apple music, storage, and TV cost less than the satellite radio services in my car, but now you can have my Apple TV when you pry the remote from my cold frozen fingers.

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Pluribus Questions

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I am only 3 episodes into Pluribus and it is possible that these questions bouncing around my skull have been addressed in some manner later in the series. If that’s the case, then I am looking forward to Vince Gilligan’s take on the matter but if not, I am deeply curious how it all shakes out.

Apple TV

In Pluribus a global event has melded nearly every human into a single consciousness sharing all of their thoughts, skills, experiences, and emotions as one. The protagonist of the show, Carol, along with roughly a dozen others, is for some reason immune and is decidedly not pleased with the new love and harmony of a world at peace with itself. Carol’s reasons are intense and understandable, but are not the subject of my ponderings.

Each individual of the new human collective presents as a serene, happy individual with a unified goal of making Carol happy in whatever way possible, all while espousing the utter contentment of their new states of existence, hoping that they can eventually bring Carol into this magnificent joining.

So, peace on Earth and perfect brotherhood for all of humanity, right?

I hate to break it to people, but humanity can be a right nasty bastard.

Pluribus’ thought experiment creates a unified human mind that would also include all the horrible experiences people around the globe have suffered; everyone is both the victim and victimizer. What exactly is that like? To be both a sexual assault victim and your assailant? To be both war criminal and war crime victim? What does it mean now that all of humanity has the direct emotional and psychological experiences of every serial killer on the planet?

I wonder if the series will get anywhere near these questions. It sort of reminds me of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation and his quest to fully understand humans, but how can you fully understand if you aren’t engaging with the terrible darkness humans are so easily capable of?

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So, I Finally Started Pluribus

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While the series has been the rage on my SF social media feeds, I myself, while quite curious about it, hadn’t started watching until last night. It was a series that my sweetie-wife had a possible interest in, and so not one I would end up watching on my own after she had retired for the evening. We had just finished Down Cemetery Road, Apple’s adaptation of the Mick Herron novel. (That’s the same author that gave us the absolutely wonderful Slow Horses series.)

Pluribus (here on out I’m going to use the standard spelling and not the one utilizing the numeral for an ‘i’) deals with the lingering and global effects of an RNA-carried strand created

Apple TV

by following instructions beamed from an extraterrestrial source. Rhea Seehorn stars as Carol, a highly popular writer of a romantic/fantasy series that has brought her fame, money, and lines of adoring fans. Carol’s life, however, is a lie. She considers her novels to be brainless trash, her warm and welcoming front that she shows fans covers a contempt for people, and it is hinted that Carol is under court-ordered monitoring due to a drinking problem—the breathalyzer affixed to her car’s ignition. And while her novels come from a distinctly heterosexual point of view, Carol hides her own lesbian relationship from public view.

With the release of the RNA-carried strand, everything changes. Global infection leaves a number of people dead, including Carol’s longtime partner Helen, and the survivors merge into a single group mind that spans the earth.

The survivors—except for Carol and a very few others who retain their own identity—for reasons unknown to anyone, never suffered any infection effects and never merged into the new global consciousness.

You might expect that with such a treatment of the plot of Invasion of the Body Snatchers that this is a chase-and-hide story, with Carol ducking and dodging the hive mind at every turn as she searches for answers. But that is not the direction showrunner Vince Gilligan takes it. The “We” that is the rest of the world want Carol to join them; they want to understand why she is immune and to correct that. But at least as far as the first episode goes, they want to do it only with her consent and participation. They are frighteningly helpful.

I am certainly intrigued and look forward to more episodes now that Vince Gilligan has returned to SF/fantasy.

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Hogfather, Outrageous Fortune, and the Unexpected Connection

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This past couple of days my sweetie-wife and I watched the Sky One production of Hogfather, an adaptation of the novel by Terry Pratchett, as part of our holiday traditions. The other holiday movie we often watch at this time of year is Rare Exports from Finland.
After Susan, Death’s granddaughter, has rescued the Hogfather—a Santa Claus analog—from the beings that wanted to destroy him and through that action destroy humanity’s capacity for imagination, she is told by her grandfather Death that humans need to practice believing in the little lies, like the Hogfather, to be ready for the big lies like Justice and Mercy. The theme, stated quite plainly as television is wont to do, is that without imagining such things as justice, how can they be real?
This year this ending and theme struck me quite differently. I had finished my horror novel Outrageous Fortune just a few weeks earlier and its themes were still fresh in my head. Part of the novel’s philosophical grounding is that the universe is utterly indifferent to human existence. It would be wrong to describe the universe as cold, as that implies at least some consideration. It is indifferent, not capable of having any consideration of human behavior and by extension no possibility of punishment or reward. There is existence and only existence as far as the universe is concerned.
Morality, the novel puts forward, is purely a personal perception, but it is also a trap because once it is perceived and recognized, then that knowledge is imprinted permanently on the perceiver’s mind. To recognize that an action is ‘immoral’ within the perceiver’s subjective understanding means it will remain immoral to that person. Whether you do or do not perform that action, the morality of your action is yours to carry as part of your identity regardless of the universe’s indifference. One does not ‘create’ justice; one recognizes it in oneself, or one is ignorant of it.
Pratchett’s work stipulates that belief creates an objective morality, but mine postulates that it never exists objectively but only subjectively, which is the only way we really experience life anyway.

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Dedra & Syril: The Empire Mismatched Power Couple

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Antagonists and Villains are tricky characters to craft. Make them too simple in their motivations and action and they become cartoonish targets, forgettable and easily swept aside by the protagonists. Develop them too well and they become so sympathetic as to displace the actual protagonists as read and audience identification grows. A careful balance between evil goals and representing their full humanity is an ideal that is so rarely achieved.
But achieved it was with Andor’s Syril Karn and Dedra Meero, agents of Star Wars’ dread Galactic Empire, lethal opponents to the protagonists, but fully realized and capable human beings trapped by circumstance and their environments.

Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) begins the series as midgrade police officer working for corporate

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

security, desperate to prove himself and with a fierce passion for law and order. Syril gives no indication that he has ever given any thought to the politics of the empire. Syril has a much more grounded view of life: there are rules and they are the only thing that keeps the chaos at bay. Rules must be enforced and rule breakers must be dragged into the light and subjected to the legal system for correction. His rigid view of the law and justice sets him on a course for tragedy when he cannot accept his superior’s plan to sweep the murder of two fellow corporate cops under the rug. Refusing to participate in a cover-up that would allow a lawbreaker, a murderer, to escape justice, Syril ignites a series of events that lead to riots, the Empire displacing the corporate security, and his collision with Dedra Meero.

Dedra Meero (Denise Gough), a sector chief for the feared Imperial Security Bureau, ISB, has an

Lucasfilm/Disney Studios

equally rigid but more political worldview than Syril. Taken from her criminal parent and raised in an Imperial ‘KinderBloc,’ Dedra is a true believer in the Empire. For her, it is not law that brings order to the galaxy but power and the Empire’s power must be unquestioned or there will be chaos. Laws and rules are, for Dedra, permeable, but only insofar as rule breaking advances and protects the Empire’s power to provide stability, peace, and security. Frustrated by a bureaucracy which keeps sector heads and Imperial departments quarreling and warring for resources, Dedra violates rules and protocols pursuing a growing rebellion that others either cannot or will not see. Cold, competent, ruthless, and intelligent, Dedra Meero represents the Empire’s best bet for killing the Rebel Alliance before it even forms beyond the odd terrorist attack or heist.

By the second season this pair have formed both a romantic and professional union. We aren’t shown the courtship, but with the series time jumps we are presented with the couple living together in the imperial capital. When Dedra puts Syril’s overbearing mother in her place, establishing the firm boundaries required to protect her partner, it is clear that Dedra truly cares for Syril. Later Dedra pulls Syril into an intelligence operation that when he learns its true scope and purpose rattles his steadfast resolve, providing their relationship’s tragic conclusion.
Syril isn’t an evil man, he’s a man with solid understandable belief in law and order, but who by temperament doesn’t look at the hand that wields the law for its own self-interested purposes. Dedra, unbothered by both genocide and torture, is evil. She engages in torture and terrorism, putting aside what qualms remain within her withered conscience to advance a system whose true nature is revealed with the annihilation of the Ghor. Her desire for order at any price finds that even genocide is not too high a price to pay. This devotion to power brings the eventual conflict which shatters Dedra’s relationship with Syril and his rigid moral code.
Andor presents the audience with Imperials that are true characters, that are people with complex inner lives and for whom the Empire is not a setting but an environment that shaped them and that they shape. This is writing at its best.

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Frankenstein’s ‘Red Shirt’ Problem

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Guillermo del Toro’s production of Frankenstein is glorious to behold, visually and thematically rich, stuffed with great actors giving generally great performances, it is everything you should expect from del Toro when he’s off the leash, given a budget that fits his vision.

Netflix

It also has a shortcoming in the adaptation department. Now, I have written several times that I harbor no sympathy for the creature in the original text. From its own lips it strikes me as a vain and murderous narcissist who easily self-justifies its acts of wanton violence. Going into this film I knew that the novel’s creature was not going to make an appearance. Del Toro’s long-time sympathy for all monsters made such an interpretation simply beyond the pale. But the more I consider the film the more I am struck by just how much he had to forcibly change to have the sympathetic character that he wanted to present.

In the original text the creation kills, directly or indirectly, several characters: Elizabeth, after her wedding to Victor; Henry Clerval, Victor’s close friend; William, Victor’s brother, a mere child in the text. The thing framed the nanny Justine for William’s murder, and she is lynched for the monster’s crime.

In del Toro’s Frankenstein, the creation kills no one who has a name. William’s death comes as collateral damage in combat with Victor, and even then, in this version, he’s an adult and complicit in the creation, his innocence greatly reduced. Elizabeth dies at Victor’s hand because there can be no subtlety in the theme that he is the real monster.

In its attack on the ice-locked ship, we hear that after the first encounter it killed ‘six men,’ and it may have killed more later, but these men are given no names, they are not characters to be mourned. When the captain tells his crew that the creature is free to leave, there is no word of protest that the murderer of their shipmates is escaping any and all justice. It is as if those men simply never existed because in terms of this film they never did. They were ‘red shirts’ there to die in service of showing that there was danger and to make for an exciting scene.

Taken on its own, this production is fantastic but it is best viewed with total amnesia to the source material.

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When Mixing Genres Use Care: Arctic Circle Season 4

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My sweetie-wife and I have now completed all the available seasons of the Finnish police procedural series Arctic Circle (Ivalo in Finland). The protagonist Nina in Season Three became the chief of the Ivalo police force and became entangled with a tech billionaire, his self-driving car company, and murders surrounding the launch of his newest product. That was a decent season and did not come off as a direct critique of any particular real-world billionaire with a self-driving car company.

Sadly, Season 4 proved more disappointing.

A comet is passing close to Earth, and a collection of international astronomers and scientists is gathering in Ivalo to study the object, but an American terrorist has also slipped past the watchful eyes of the FBI and escaped to the Lapland community. When the staff of a nursing home murders nearly all the residents, Nina discovers that a cult of Christian fanatics are in her town and they have a grand scheme based upon their twisted understanding of their splinter church’s teachings.

Now, just that would be a perfectly fine season-long arc. Nina has both professional and personal challenges—her formerly drug-abusing sister now a deeply committed Christian convert—and juggling being a professional and a new mother. But the series went off the rails when it introduced elements of the supernatural and made the religious beliefs reflect reality.

Characters get mysterious voices in their heads that actually are vital clues to solving the crimes. The comet, which we have been told visited the Earth about 2,000 years earlier and was the actual “Star of Bethlehem,” hangs in the sky and actually leads the police to the perps.

No, no, no.

Now, I have no issues with Christianity being real in the right sort of story. You can’t have The Exorcist without it. (As the sequels kind of prove.) The worldbuilding has to match the genre and style of story that is being told. True Detective successfully blends elements but also generally refrains from providing explicit answers.

Arctic Circle spent three seasons presenting grounded drama without any hints or suggestions of preternatural aspects to its worldbuilding. Trying to add them this late in an established setting is doomed to failure. You just can’t hand-wave Christ and Holy Signs into the story with literal, if subtle, divine intervention as a deus ex machina in the final episode. When you do that, you break the reality of the worldbuilding.

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The HBO Series About SpaceX has RUD’d on the Pad.

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For those who haven’t been following—and that includes me—HBO had been in development on a dramatized limited series depicting Elon Musk and the founding and eventual success of his rocket company, SpaceX. Earlier this week, news broke that the series won’t happen and the rights to the biography from which some of the source material was drawn have reverted to the author. The series has suffered an RUD. (The ironic term SpaceX developed for when a rocket explodes instead of flying: Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.)

This news has disappointed many of SpaceX’s devoted fans, but I’m not sure such a series, at this time, would likely have been all that great. Don’t get me wrong—I think what SpaceX has achieved and demonstrated, the flight and recovery of orbital-capable boosters, is probably the most important development in aerospace since the jet engine. It’s the dramatized series itself that I doubt. I have a few reasons why I suspect it would have been difficult to pull off a truly great show.

1) We do not have enough historical distance.

Elon Musk, SpaceX, and the challenging rockets being developed are happening right now. They are not history; they are very current events. To tell such a story well, I think it’s important that enough time passes for the passions, partisanships, and preconceptions of those deeply involved to either fade or mellow.

2) Musk is still a very politically active agent.

Musk may or may not be the richest man in the world—stock fluctuations apparently change that title quite quickly—and he is reportedly thin-skinned. It would be quite difficult to make an honest dramatization of him and his nature at this time. No man is a saint, nor is any man entirely a devil; the best stories deal with people who are visibly a mix of the two. Whether Musk himself turned an unfriendly spotlight on the show if made to “look bad,” or whether those still angry over his DOGE activities thrashed the program for presenting him in too positive a light while entangled in today’s political passions, it’s doubtful any studio would have let the story unfold without heavy interference.

3) Whose Story Is It?

A story is about character and the changes and transformations characters evolve through over the course of their crisis. The most likely character for that treatment in a SpaceX story would have been Elon Musk himself, but that lands us even more solidly in the troubles of point 2. If your plot is compelling enough, you can dial back on character growth, but that requires a very clear, dramatic plot. Apollo 13’s Jim Lovell doesn’t really change over the course of the crisis, but the plot is blindingly clear: get home alive—simple and overwhelmingly dramatic. “Can we get a rocket to fly and land?” is not as dramatic, no matter the technical and engineering challenges. Without a central dramatic challenge, you need a strong character arc, so I ask again: whose story is it?

In the end, I think the “died in development” outcome for this proposed show is probably, at this time, the right outcome.

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