About that ending

Because the fannish mind sometimes does quirky things and makes you ponder something years later: back when Being Human finished, I had problems with the ending which the additional scene on the dvds largely resolved. To spare you the trouble of looking up the original review, ( my spoilery problem and why the additional scene mostly fixed it )

Now, ever since watching the scene, I assumed it meant ( spoilery stuff )

. Having rewatched the last episode for the first time since it was originally broadcast, I changed my mind as to the timing and some other stuff. ( Spoilery musings ensue )

Which is why I'm now revising my theory about the implications of the additional scene. New headcanon: ( is spoilery as well. )

...and wild to hold, though I seem tame...

This is the most extensive article on the upcoming tv adaption of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell novels I've read, and the first one which mentions a significant change between source material and tv version. To wit: Straughan the scriptwriter and Kominsky the director ship Thomas Cromwell/Anne Boleyn, which Hilary Mantel did not. To quote from the article:

Nevertheless, in condensing a thousand pages into a six-part drama, Straughan had to give weight to certain strands over others. He chose a revenge plot as the spine of it – Cromwell avenging the death of Wolsey – and complicated that by making the relationship between Cromwell and Anne central. Where the books – which will become a trilogy with the eventual publication of Mantel’s third volume, The Mirror and the Light – trace the relationship between Cromwell and Henry, Straughan’s adaptation has a slant of suppressed sex and power.

This shift is so marked that when I ask Kosminsky if he wishes he had waited until all three books had been written, he barely hesitates before saying no. By way of illustration, he shows me an early cut of a pivotal scene in episode three (the episode that ends with Anne’s coronation). Anne and Cromwell observe Henry from a window in Whitehall as Thomas More hands over the chain of office. Cromwell is watching her. He looks at her chest rise and fall as she breathes. He imagines kissing her neck. The moment is brief but the electricity and complicity in it are extraordinary. ‘Although Henry hangs over the whole thing as the superpower,’ Kosminsky explains, ‘for me, the drama is about the evolution of the relationship between Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, which ends with her death.’

You know, reading this, I'm on board with the change. (Though it cracks me up when everyone in this article mentions The Tudors as an example of a "bad" historical tv series - not that I disagree, but The Tudors may be the first version to introduce some UST between Anne and Cromwell as they go from allies to enemies, and guys, give inspirational credit where due. You didn't get this idea from Hilary.) Anyway, the reason why I'm on board with it is that it makes Cromwell a bit more fallible and less chess master supreme if he has an unspoken attraction to Anne even while condemming her. (And I certainly prefer it to getting constant snide asides about how Anne is losing her looks in the second novel.) The actress playing Anne Boleyn also in the article is quoted with a spirited defense of her:


When Claire Foy read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, she loved the books. Yet she soon found that her position as a reader was no use to her as an actress. ‘I understood it from Thomas Cromwell’s point of view,’ she explains. ‘So if they’d asked me to play Thomas Cromwell I’d have said, “Yes!” But because you only ever see Anne observed by him, you only have his impressions of her – that she was pinched and mean, gnarled and nasty. But she’s not like that, it’s just how she seems to him. So I had to do the research for myself.’

Eventually, Foy says, she felt angry on Anne’s behalf. ‘She could have been remembered as one of the greatest women in history. Where she came from to become Queen of England was extraordinary. She was clever, she was bright, she was vivacious, she was witty, she was political. But she was also slightly manic, irrational, emotional. And those characteristics were perfect for a political figure at the time. As a woman I felt she was blighted by her reproductive system.