This and that and history
Dec. 16th, 2025 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakWatched completely on Apple +: Down Cemetery Road, a new series (I would have written miniseries, except I hear there'll be a second season), based on an earlier novel by Slow Horses author Mick Heron. Starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, both cast somewhat against type and having fun with it. Emma Thompson plays Zoe, a cynical private detective right out of the hard boiled age, if that one had female cynical hard drinking PI's, Ruth Wilson plays Sarah, starting out as somewhat naive, idealistic and disorganized. (I have seen Ruth Wilson in roles where she isn't a brilliant sociopath before! I swear I did! But Alice and Marisa Coulter are just so memorable!) Zoe starts out the story married, to another P.I. who is more the benevolent goodshoe type and whom she has feelings for but cheats on and generally argues a lot with, while Sarah is with a guy hiding total jerkness between a placid facade, but before the pilot is over, neither of these relationships are existent anymore. Both women - who live in Oxford, not London, which is a change, but the action doesn't stay there - through different ways find themselves uncovering the central dastardly plot which unsurprising given the author the show is based on involves fuck-ups by awful government agencies and the attempt to cover this up which leads to an ever higher body count. The Zoe and the Sarah storylines after a brief meeting in the pilot stay apart for half the season, and I was about to complain, but then the second half reunites them and gives me these actresses playing superbly against each other. If I have one complaint, it's that there wasn't really a pay-off for the existence of Talia the new defense secretary. But presumably in the second season?
Started to watch and stopped watching: Gunpowder on Amazon Prime. Look, show, two podcasts managed to turn me around on James VI and I and got me interested in Stuarts beyond the Restoration era, I'm in the market for this ! I'm also with you pointing out Catholics got a truly rough deal in the late Elizabethan and in the James era. But Kit Harrington brooding as Robert Catesby isn't going to cut it, and who does Mark Gatiss as Robert Cecil think he's playing, Shakespeare's Richard III?
Started watching, may or may not continue: The Name of the Rose, new tv version on Disney +. I mean, if there is an early 1980s novel begging for the miniseries treatment, it's absolutely that one, the OG Murders at a Monastery story. I would have thought a mniseries could offer the chance to include a lot more from the novel than the movie was able to, but foolish me, the show creators instead thought they needed some adiditional subplots. Adson now starts out as not really a novice, though he wants to be, because his father wants him with the imperial army instead. That's right, he now has Daddy Issues. (This is where you can tell there must be some American money involved.) William of Baskerville, aka the cleverest Holmes avatar in another setting before House, is played by John Turturro, who doesn't look anymore like the (reddish blonde) William of the book than Sean Connery did but does a decent job playing him. Somewhat unsurprisingly, like the movie, the series beefs up the part of Bernard(o) Gui. Who in the book shows up only in the second half and leaves again long before the big showdown, but Jean-Jacques Annoud already decided he didn't want an evil inquistor going to waste, but apparantly so did the creators of this one, so while Gui still doesn't arrive in the monastery before half point, we see him being evil and fanatical en route in every freaking episode. Did I mention there are new subplots? About which Adson, who is our narrator (voiced as an old man by Peter Davison, omg, that was a nice surprise), can't know?
I mean, I get wanting to flesh out the girl and her relationship with Adson - actually wanting to give her a relationship with Adson, as opposed to a one night stand when he's on drugs. On a show, not tell note, I can even understand giving Remigius and Salvatore flashbacks to their time with Fra Dolcino instead of letting Adson be told what Fra Dolcino was all about by other characters, and I'm somewhat curious where the new character Anna, the escaped and avenging daughter of Fra Dolcino, will fit in (especially since she's a different character than the girl). But! Four episodes in, and we haven't had a single debate yet about whether or not Jesus has laughed, or one in which Aristoteles is mentioned, let alone his lost book about comedy. As this events really really REALLY important to the resolution and the killer's motive, I have the unholy suspicion that this series will replace the book's 'Aristoteles with some Dan Brown type of stupid conspiracy theory document, or for all I know a freedom manifest penned by Fra Dolcino. For God's sake. I hope I'm wrong.
...but...Daddy issues. And Gui menacing attractive ladies a la Frollo and Esmeralda en route. Argh.
Incidentally, the excellent podcast History of the Germans (currently in its "Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg" season where the family with the famous chin and lower lip first seemingly hits rock bottom in three generations before young Maximilian marries Marie of Burgundy) did a great episode last year about the actual political and theological background of the rl events The Name of the Rose touches on, hilariously summarized as "Der Kurverein zu Rhens - starring William of Ockham and the cast of the Name of the Rose". You can listen to it or read the transcript here.
Started to watch and stopped watching: Gunpowder on Amazon Prime. Look, show, two podcasts managed to turn me around on James VI and I and got me interested in Stuarts beyond the Restoration era, I'm in the market for this ! I'm also with you pointing out Catholics got a truly rough deal in the late Elizabethan and in the James era. But Kit Harrington brooding as Robert Catesby isn't going to cut it, and who does Mark Gatiss as Robert Cecil think he's playing, Shakespeare's Richard III?
Started watching, may or may not continue: The Name of the Rose, new tv version on Disney +. I mean, if there is an early 1980s novel begging for the miniseries treatment, it's absolutely that one, the OG Murders at a Monastery story. I would have thought a mniseries could offer the chance to include a lot more from the novel than the movie was able to, but foolish me, the show creators instead thought they needed some adiditional subplots. Adson now starts out as not really a novice, though he wants to be, because his father wants him with the imperial army instead. That's right, he now has Daddy Issues. (This is where you can tell there must be some American money involved.) William of Baskerville, aka the cleverest Holmes avatar in another setting before House, is played by John Turturro, who doesn't look anymore like the (reddish blonde) William of the book than Sean Connery did but does a decent job playing him. Somewhat unsurprisingly, like the movie, the series beefs up the part of Bernard(o) Gui. Who in the book shows up only in the second half and leaves again long before the big showdown, but Jean-Jacques Annoud already decided he didn't want an evil inquistor going to waste, but apparantly so did the creators of this one, so while Gui still doesn't arrive in the monastery before half point, we see him being evil and fanatical en route in every freaking episode. Did I mention there are new subplots? About which Adson, who is our narrator (voiced as an old man by Peter Davison, omg, that was a nice surprise), can't know?
I mean, I get wanting to flesh out the girl and her relationship with Adson - actually wanting to give her a relationship with Adson, as opposed to a one night stand when he's on drugs. On a show, not tell note, I can even understand giving Remigius and Salvatore flashbacks to their time with Fra Dolcino instead of letting Adson be told what Fra Dolcino was all about by other characters, and I'm somewhat curious where the new character Anna, the escaped and avenging daughter of Fra Dolcino, will fit in (especially since she's a different character than the girl). But! Four episodes in, and we haven't had a single debate yet about whether or not Jesus has laughed, or one in which Aristoteles is mentioned, let alone his lost book about comedy. As this events really really REALLY important to the resolution and the killer's motive, I have the unholy suspicion that this series will replace the book's 'Aristoteles with some Dan Brown type of stupid conspiracy theory document, or for all I know a freedom manifest penned by Fra Dolcino. For God's sake. I hope I'm wrong.
...but...Daddy issues. And Gui menacing attractive ladies a la Frollo and Esmeralda en route. Argh.
Incidentally, the excellent podcast History of the Germans (currently in its "Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg" season where the family with the famous chin and lower lip first seemingly hits rock bottom in three generations before young Maximilian marries Marie of Burgundy) did a great episode last year about the actual political and theological background of the rl events The Name of the Rose touches on, hilariously summarized as "Der Kurverein zu Rhens - starring William of Ockham and the cast of the Name of the Rose". You can listen to it or read the transcript here.
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Date: 2025-12-16 07:34 pm (UTC)Bertha Cool in Erle Stanley Gardner's The Knife Slipped (1939/2016). Not the remainder of the series which was redirected to showcase her male partner instead, but she's fantastically bad-ass in this book and it should have been allowed to set the tone for the rest.
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Date: 2025-12-17 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-17 06:26 am (UTC)The CACKLE I just let out!
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Date: 2025-12-17 01:41 pm (UTC)Seriously, I sighed. Do I think you could flesh Adson out beyond "young, naive, there to ask William the "but why/how/wtf?" questions? Sure. But did it have to be Daddy Issues?