Busy, busy days. Some media consumed in the last weeks were:

The Diplomat, Season 3: I was afraid the same would happen as with The West Wing - which series creator Deborah Cahn had also been involved in - , i.e. the reality I live in would make it impossible for me to watch a show in which the people working for the US administration might be fucked up in varying degrees, but all sincerely dedicated to the common good in terms of their motivation, and by implication the US public would not vote a creature like the Orange Menace into office (twice). (Hence my personal impossibility of a WW rewatch right now.) This turned out not to be the case. By and large, I enjoyed the season, though its global dangers not withstanding, I would still rather live in that reality (where the US President might ( do spoilery things ), but would not want to change the US into a mixture of ultimate corruption and theocratic autocracy, and the British PM is still a Boris Johnson expo with the thinnest of egos, but at least Nigel Farage doesn't exist. (BTW: it's not clear where The Diplomat's timeline departs from ours; resident Rayburn was clearly a Joe Biden avatar when the show started and there is some occasional talk about restoring the US image abroad, but they never say from what, and whether the Orange Menace's first assault on democracy happened or whether something else did.) Seaosn 3 deals with the fallout from season 2's cliffhanger ending, throws in some new twists (and characters), andwhile wrapping up its seasonal storyline again throws in a tag scene with a big new reveal/hook, while playing to its two strengths, i.e. bringing its central character into a series of convoluted political situations in which she has to extricate not just herself but others (including the US and GB), and her screwed up but intense relationship with her husband. ( More spoilery observations to follow. ) In conclusion, I continue to like this entertaining AU. I hope it gets another season, though if it doesn't, this finale despite its last moment reveal would also work as a finale.


The Fantastic Four: First Steps : Which I missed in the cinema but which is now on Disney +. Personal state of knowledge: I saw none of the earlier Fantastic Four movies, to which this one isn't connected anyway; the comicverse characters I encountered a) in an historical AU version via the comics 1602, and b) in the comicverse Civil War storylilne, which means I hardly saw them at their best. (Unforgotten: Reed Richards fanboying Joe McCarthy.) I'm happy to report these latest MCU versions are a delightful bunch, living in a canonical alternate universe (818) in the 1960s, and keeping in trend with both MCU Spiderman and the latest DCU Superman, we're not going through the origin story again but the movie introduces us to the character(s) when they're already superheroiing, albeit not that long. The cast includes Vanessa Kirby as Sue Storm, Pedro Pasqual as Reed Richards, and Joe Quinn, since Stranger Things a Geek celebrity, as Sue's brother Johnny, with the unknown-to-me Ebon Moss-Bachrach playing Ben Grimm. Something that struck me as very sympathetic is that the movie treats the four as a true ensemble, i.e. Johnny and Ben aren't the sidekicks, and that the central dilemna when it's revealed ( and which is spoilery )

German-French channel ARTE also put up the complete Wolf Hall, so I was able to watch the six parter they did based on Hilary Mantel's third Cromwell novel at last. What I thought of the novel itself, its plusses and minuses and how it deals with the history, you can read here, so this review is mostly about how it fares as a book adaptation and tv miniseries.

( Spoilers have heretical opinions on Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell )

Since because of Foundation I'm currently watching Apple plus again, I also marathoned the first season of Silo, which I didn't have the chance to do last time I watched Apple. In the meantime, I had watched the series Paradise over a the Mouse Streaming Service, and in reviews, comparisons to Silo had been made, which enhanced my curiosity. (Now that I've seen the first seson, I know why, though I would say the shows are far more different than similar, even the resoective premises. At best, you have some parallels in some of the conditions and in one of the results. Which is why I still think it was a mistake to not conclude Paradise (which had a good season, don't get me wrong, but I think the quintessential core story is told within it) as opposed to giving it another season, whereas I look forward to Silo's second season (because while the first one has a concluded main story arc, it is very much written as the start of a larger story).

( Spoilers don't know who built the Silo, or why )

Adolescence: British miniseries in four episodes, conceived and written by Stephen Graham (who also plays one of the key roles) and Jack Thorne, directed by Philip Barantini, who, as the review of the Guardian put it, must be a glutton for one take punishment, because one very noteworthy element of this miniseries is that each of these four episodes is filmed in one uncut take. Now despite watching a lot of movies and tv, long takes aren't something I immediately notice, and sometimes only after they were pointed out by someone else, but not here, because the long take that starts with the episode and ends with the episode (meaning each of the four episodes are "in real time" is thematically highly relevant and not a fancy gimmick - it really heightens that sense of claustrophobia and intimacy, feeling locked up with the characters it depicts.

The cast is terrific, both the adults and the young cast, with the three outstanding teens being fifteen years old Owen Cooper playing thirteen years old Jamie Miller (who "only" appears on screen in two episodes but is much talked about in the other two), Amelie Pease who plays his older sister Lisa and Fatima Bojang as Jade, the best friend of Katie, the girl whose murder kicks off the plot. Now this miniseries is explicitly not a whodunit - the only episode in which that is even a question is the first one, when we follow Jamie being arrested in the povs of both the leading detectives and his father (played by Stephen Graham) who is horrified and of course believes his son's "I didn't do anything" denials - but a "whydunit" - i.e. why would a thirteen years old boy kill his female classmate of the same age? ( More somewhat spoilery observations follow. )

Daredevil ?.04: Okay, the "We build this city" school choir was hysterical, and had me giggling for hours afterwards. On the more serious side, the spoilery encounter was superbly played by both actors.

Wheel of Time 3.04.: Awesome aesthetics. ( Vague spoilers to follow. )

A few things which didn't do it for me:

James Wilson: The Dark Clue. A decades old novel which got translated into German only now, hence my coming across is accidentally. I did like the premise; it's the execution that sucks. The idea: Marian Halcombe and Walter Hartright from The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins start investigating the life of late legendary painter J.W.M. Turner (as he's referred to in the English speaking world, I was recently reminded, in Germany we refer to him as William Turner) when Walter (himself a painter, lest we forget that detail from TWIW) gets tasked with writing Turner's biography in competition to the guy who in real life did so. I was intrigued and charmed by the idea and suspected Wilson might have started out wanting to write a regular old biographical novel about Turner, then found it tricky because it's hard to get a traditional story arc out of his life, and decided on this charmingly 19th century framing device of two interlocking stories. Now I am a fan of (several of) Wilkie Collins' books and was both fascinated and disturbed by Mike Leigh's 2014 movie about Turner, so I was definitely in the market as the target audience for this book. Alas. The Turner parts of the book are sort of okay - our heroes get contradictory testimony about him reflecting various sides of his character, and there's even the sense of him as essentially a Georgian (time of his youth, when his character was formed) in the Victorian era. But the Wilkie Collins fanfic part of it is just plain terrible. Researching Turner works as an emotional catalyst of sorts for both Walter and Marian. ( Beware of bad fanfic spoilers. ) In conclusion, a depressing waste of what could have been a clever and intriguing premise.


Domina (TV Series, Season 1): The Julio-Claudian one where Livia is the heroine. I definitely was in the market for this one, and it did provide a lot of things I liked and/or had missed in earlier takes. So we do get very young Livia's life on the run in the post Caesar's death/ pre her (first) husband making his peace with Octavian part of her life, and indeed lots and lots of emphasis on her Claudian background and the fact her father was Team Conspirators. (Speaking of Octavian/Augustus, the show decides to deal with the various changes his name goes through in rl during those years by letting everyone refer to and address him by his first name of Gaius. Fair enough, and makes life easier for tv watchers.) This is also the first tv take that uses Scribonia (aka Octavian's wife before Livia and the mother of his sole surviving cihild, Julia). And while we don't get all of the children Octavia was the mother or in charge of, we do get far more than usual (one of the two Marcellas, both Antonias, Marcellus, and Julus, Antony's surviving (well, surviving into adulthood) son by Fulvia. Still missing in this version: Cleopatra's three kids with Antony.) And just when I was about to complain that Livia's bff/slave/freedwoman is depicted only in relationship to her, even when traumatic stuff happens, the character got her own scenes and responses. I was also amused by the take on Octavian/Augustus rise and consilidation of power as essentially a Mafia story, which, yes, can see that. Though it severely undersells quite how bloody and chaotic things had been with the Republic for the entire century before young O made his moves, which leads into my complaints re: Livia's motivations, more in a second, but what I want to say here is that the appeal of Augustus and the Principate to contemporaries and thereafter wasn't just that he emerged on top after a few bloody years and thus put an end to (civil) war, but that he managed to stabilize a state which simply had not been working anymore and had gone from bloody crisis/war to bloody crisis ever since the Senate decided murdering Tiberius Gracchus was a good way to deal with his call for direly needed reforms.

Why is this important as to why I'm not a fan of the show? Because Domina is yet another case of a sympathetic main character's secret key motivation being the wish to reintroduce the Republic. Because, see, the whole reason why Livia Drusilla (in this version) masterminds the invention of the Principate - makes her second husband from a gangster into a ruler/tyrant, as one character puts it in the show - is that her plan is that one of her sons inherits this complete power from him, and then restores the Republic for real.

Head. Desk. Now, Livia, being the daughter of an actual Republican, is actually at least a more plausible candidate for this than, say, the centuries later Emperor Marcus Aurelius in a way, and she's just a teenager when Caesar dies, so wasn't old enough to have memories of the actual Republic pre-first Triumvirate and could believe it would have been fine if not for Caesar's rise for power. But if this show wants to have its cake and eat it by providing Livia with this noble motivation justifying her increasingly ruthless strategems, while simultanously insisting on her intelligence and refusing to let her to anything to actually set up a transition of power back to the Senate. (Which "restoring the Republic" would have to mean.) On the contrary. Whenever Senators show up, they're scheming to kill Augustus and/or Livia and her kids and mean and temporary obstacles to be defeated, except for Livia's father's old bff who is noble, but doesn't anything mundane like trying to assemble a faction. So how does the show's Livia imagine things would go if all her plans succeed and one of her boys upon being handed complete power nobly hands it back to the Senate? Would the Senate, after decades of being either evil schemers or sycophantic yes-men to Augustus, then suddenly reveal they're really all virtuous statesmen inside? You'd think she'd cultivate at least a few Senators with the potential of being future administrators, especially since if there's no more Princeps inter Pares, that means Rome has to be governed by two different Consuls each other again, and where are they supposed to come from? But no. Meaning: you have a series which on the one hand aims for a "gritty Mafia drama in togas" vibe, a morally ambigous heroine who starts out well intentioned but has to be not just smarter but more ruthless to remain on top once she's there, but on the other you give her this illogical central motivation that only works in a fairy tale world.

There's another structual problem. For Livia to have impressive struggles to achieve, she needs opponents who challenge her. Now, until she marries Gaius, this works well enough, especially since the show presents her first husband (hitherto described as a conservative nice guy in what few fictions he made it into) as an opportunistic, incompetent and increasingly evil louse. But once she's Mrs. Princeps, she's in theory on top of her world. The show gains some tension from the fact that Gaius-as-Augustus has of course no intention of giving up power and that he's smart enough to figure out one day why Livia really married him, but most of the outward menace/scheming Livia has to contend with is brought by either the aforementioned evil senators.... or Scribonia. As in, Livia's predecessor, Julia's mother, carrying an immortal grudge against Livia for being the cause of Gaius divorcing her. (Supporting Scribonia, though not with evil schemes, is Octavia, who in the first two eps actually comes across as the smarter of the two, but after the show goes through a time jump and change of cast so the kids can be nearly grown up teenagers is suddenly naive and gullible as opposed to scheming Scribonia) Scribonia, character wise, is something of a blank slate - I think basically the only things we know about her from the sources is who she was married to (like many a Roman aristocrat, she was so repeatedly, and indeed remarried after being divorced by Octavian), the scandalous way Octavian divorced her, and that when her daughter Julia eventually gets exiled by her father, Scribonia chooses to go with her. (According to Seneca, she outlived her daughter, but it's also possible she died with her at the start of Tiberius' reign.) So sure, you can write her as benevolent or malvolent as you like. But either way - she has zero political power. She is NOT married to the first man of Rome. So the series by shoving her into the female villain position hitherto occupied by Livia in I, Claudius on the one hand wants us to believe in Scribonia as Livia's Enemy No.1, but otoh doesn't justify why Livia doesn't simply get rid of her one way or the other. And then there's the fact the show's Scribonia is none too bright in her scheming. And it's not like Gaius was in love with her and thus would have a reason to keep her around in Rome. (He divorces her as cold-bloodedly on the show as he did in rl, i.e. basically the moment Julia is born and isn't a boy.) So why the show' s Scribonia is in Rome in a position to make trouble instead of being exiled or dead in the last half of the first season makes no sense.

Making this show yet another example of one that learned all the wrong lessons from I, Claudius. I.e. adopt the "but he/she really wants to restore the Republic and is just faking harmlessness" gimmick, but ignore the fact that I, Claudius lets its villains be formidable - Livia herself first and foremost, of course; in that show, she's ruthless and a non-stop schemer, but she's smart and brilliant about it. That's what makes her so chilling. I somehow suspect the original pitch for Domina must have been along the lines of " I, Claudius, but Livia is the heroine, and also, they curse as much as in Rome" and then too late they realized if Livia is the heroine, you need another villain or villains, and landed on Scribonia because someone has to be the evil woman, clearly. Without bothering to think things through.

And then there's the minor irritation of Livia except for the last three episodes wearing her hair open instead of bothering with a Roman hairstyle (though all the other female characters have one). Why? But that's really just one minor detail.

In conclusion: oh producers of historical drama set in the many centuries of Roman Imperial history: you can actually do dramas where the main character does NOT want to restore the Republic.

I watched and enjoyed the second season of The Diplomat (the review for the first season is here, which I wasn't sure I would, given that back in the day when we all thought it couldn't come worse than the Bush administration (insert hollow laughter here), I found myself unable to marathan The West Wing and had to wait for the Obama era to watch it; the divergence from reality being too great. Welll, the divergence in the case of The Diplomat still is enormous - it's not that the poliictians on either side of the Atlantic aren't also capable of dastardly deeds, that's what drama consists of, after all. It's that humanity itself is by and large better in this show. (As it was in The West Wing, for which showrunner Deborah Cahn used to write back in the day.) I don't just mean the fact that most people in public service (again, on either side of the Atlantic), independent of political persuasion, are really dedicated to the public good - of course they're also ambitious, but the show doesn't treat this as an either/or thing, which I like - , and even the villains are 100% convinced to act in the general best interest and are workoholics. It's that I don't think the US electorate in showverse would ever vote for the Orange Menace, twice. He probably would not even have gotten through the primaries, and since so many more people with spines and ethics exist in showverse, there would not have been the transformation of his party into an authoritarian personality cult. You know, showverse might be uncomfortably close to WW3 at times, but I'd still rather live there. (Showverse does have a past questionable US president who was terrible, but not to the same degree.)

Anyway: the second season picks off where the first left off and and contiinues with its mixture of pulpy political thrillerness, walk and talk intrigue and confrontations and personal relationship drama, with the later not getting as much room as in season 1 due to this season being two eps shorter. The cast is the same as last year, minus the people who died in the s1 finale and plus Alison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn in the last few episodes, which was awesome. In terms of personal relationships, I continue to wonder if Keri Russell starring media can now guarantee me messed up, complex marriages designed to prove wrong the old tv assumption that people are only interested in the UST and the getting together part and as soon as a pairing actually is together, they lose interest. I mean, Elizabeth and Philipp in The Americans are very different form Kate and Hal in The Diplomat, but it's true for both relationships that the audience gets introduced to them as already existing, and it's one of the core emotional axis' on which the entire show revolves. (Meanwhile, Kate's UST ridden relationship with the British Foreign Secretary, alas, is much less interesting than in s1, but that fits with what happens, plot wise.)

Having just seen Ali Ahn as Alice in Agatha All Along and Rory Kinnear as Tom Bombadil in Rings of Power made it a bit odd to return to them as the London CIA station chief and the Not Boris Johnson British PM, respectively, but of course they're great in their parts. ( Spoilery remarks to follow. )

In conclusion, perhaps not despite but because of its increasing lack of a resemblance to rl marathoning the second season of this show provided me with good entertainment, and I look forward to the third.

All in all: enjoyable on the same level Spartacus the tv show was, i.e. unabashedly trashy yet wish some surprisingly engaging character development. Given Roland Emmerich is responsible for one of my least favourite historical or "historical" movies, "The Patriot" and also for the Oxfordian eloge Anyonymous which I haven't watched, I liked this far better than I expected. My main reason for watching was that it's set in the Flavian era, which hasn't been cinematically and tv wise milked to death yet, and I had recently reread my definitely favourite work of Lion Feuchtwanger, the Josephus trilogy. BTW, I gather there's a book of the same title - i.e. "Those about to die" - which serves as inspiration but not isn't a historical novel but a non-fiction work covering the entire development from funeral games in ye early republic to elaborate mass productions throughout much of the Empire. As I haven't read said book, I only base this assumption on wikipedia and can't say whether it's any good, and can't compare or contrast, either.

( On to the gloriously trashy saga )

In conclusion: not a must, but if you liked Spartacus (the tv show) back in the day, you'll probably like this one, too. Oh, and if you've read Lindsey Davis' mystery series starring Marcus Didius Falco and want some visuals, you could do worse.

Background: I have not seen the original 1990s animated show this new series is a successor of, though I have seen its praises sung a lot in X-Men fandom, not least by andraste, and since had watched and liked this new series, I decided to use the circumstance that I'm paying the Mouse anyway and watch this, too. I can therefore certify that it's absolutely comprehensible if you, like me, came to the X-Men via the movies and then branched out to reading a few of the comics in trade collections, though not that many. Also? It's much more emotionally satisfying and fun than any movie effort since Days of Future Past.

( To me, my X-Men! )

In conclusion, I'm definitely there for the next season.

As this week presented me with the sad news of novelist C.J. Sansom's death, watching the filmed version of the first of his Shardlake novels was a mixed affair in more ways than one. Overall: I didn't love the four parter (currently available in my part of the world on Disney +) the way I hoped I would, but neither did I dislike it, and what problems I had are largely fixable should the show continue and move on to the later novels.

One of the problems was inevitable from the start: Dissolution, the first Shardlake novel, which the first season of the tv show is based on, is not exactly my personal favourite and in many ways one of the weaker books. (Imo, as always. Pace, Dissolution fans.) (Weak compared with the later novels, which is good news to us readers, right? Would be terrible if Sansom had never matched or surpassed his start! It still means Dissolution is much better than many another Tudor era novel and/or historical mystery.) It's not exactly that it has early installment weirdness - it fits right into with the later continuity - as much as the later character development makes everyone who makes it into the later novels feel like a richer character. Also, by the time I got around to Dissolution, I had read one too many murder-in-a-monastery book, whereas the settings and plots of the later novels (I had in fact started with the third one, Sovereign, and then gone back to catch up with the earlier ones) felt far more original.

Now, the tv series made a key creative decision which I can get behind, even though it necessitated a somewhat different ending, and that is to replace Matthew Shardlake's (unwilling) sidekick from the first novel, Mark, with Jack Barak who is basically the major supporting character from the second novel onwards. I had osmosed this from the advance publicity, and I immediately understood why: Mark never shows up again, he's not a very interesting character in his own right, as opposed to Jack Barak, the developing Shardlake and Barak relationship is one of the strengths of the show. However, precisely because Mark and Jack are different characters, I wondered how that would work out with parts of the plot because I couldn't see Barak making the same decisions. I'm happy to report, to put it in an unspoilery to non-readers fashion, that the tv series accounted for that and didn't just give Barak Mark's lines but did take the trouble of trying to figure out how Jack would have reacted in Mark's place in those situations, and account for the differences.

Another early introduction in the tv series I was less certain about, to wit: the Duke of Norfolk. Again, I think I can see the reasoning, because Norfolk is the big antagonist in the second novel, Dark Fire, and thus presumably of the second season, and if you introduce him here already, you don't have to explain who he is then. However, I think the screen time spent on Norfolk would have been better spent on including instead some of the interactions between Shardlake and the villagers near the monastery, not least because the way he relates to and listens to the non-powerful is one of his most appealing traits.

(Sidenote: watching, I remembered joking with sonetka of how Norfolk is the one Henrician character whom every novelist/dramatist/tv and movie scribe seems to loathe, no matter whom else they champion or despise, and it's not hard to see why, between the bigotry, the book loathing, the certified wife abuse and the nieces using and dumping, and so forth. She agreed that it would be near impossible to woobify Norfolk, which promptly had me imagining how a novelist would do it regardless, and I concluded it would have to be done via a mixture of the tried and true hard childhood approach, plus emphasizing his loyalty and life long commitment to his lower born mistress and elevate it to True Love Across The Classes status, and vilfy his wife as the true abuser of the marriage by emphasizing she didn't get along with their children, either.)

Something I definitely disliked about the tv show was the soundtrack. Look, one thing that's consistent about the novels (including the first one) is that they are by and large subtle in their characterisations, the very occasional explicit boo-hiss figure from the get go excepted. And even those can have humanizing moments. Meanwhile, the tv show has one of those very obtrustive soundtracks which do not trust their audience the least bit: This is spooky! This is a creep! Here's a good person! And good lord, just because the main setting is a monastery, did you have to use generic chants at every second moment? Also, speaking about not trusting your audience: look, I empathize about the difficulty of translating a novel that's written in first person to a tv show where the protagonist does not yet have the relationships he will later have where he could share some key thoughts via dialogue instead, but I'm not sure Shardlake muttering to himself when alone in his room was the ideal way to resolve the dilemma. All the more because the actor playing him, Arthur Hughes, is really good and could have conveyed said thoughts and emotions by silent acting instead. (A case in point where he does this because for a change the script trusted him to do so is ( slightly spoilery ). Hughes conveyes all Matthew Shardlake is thinking at that moment in the novel by facial expression, and I was really glad the script trusted him to do that, and thought, more of that, please, show.)

Talking about the actors brings me to the plusses of the series: in terms of acting ability, I'm good with all the main characters casting, but especially Hughes, and he also has a good sparring chemistry with Anthony Boyle as Jack Barak. (Speaking of Boyle, he captures both the cheekiness and chip-on-the-shoulder swagger and the underlying vulnerability of early Barak.= I also think that the part of Alice is one case where getting out of Shardlake's head and being in a visual medium benefited the character. Sean Bean is good as Thomas Cromwell, though that's another case where I think the writing for the show loses some of the novel's richer and more subtle characterisation. ( Spoilery observation to follow. )

The one element of casting where I'm torn as hell is a) Guy, and b) the colourblind casting some other characters. Now, with another non-Shardlake Tudor story, I'd be fine with colourblind casting. But (Brother) Guy - introduced in Dissolution but continuing to become a regular character in all the novels, and probably my personal favourite - in the novels is very explicitly a black character. He's originally from Al Andalus, i.e. Granada, but while his family had to convert, Guy himself is a sincere Christian (Catholic).) Yes, the term "Moor" in Tudor English could be used for both Arab and black people, but the way Guy's skin colour is described in the narration makes it clear he's not seen as Caucasian. Both Guy being originally Spanish and Guy being black colours, no pun intended, how people who encounter him react to him through the novels, the later far more than the former. (And then there's him being Catholic, which becomes dangerous in different degrees depending on how Henry defines his own religion in the subsequent years.) In the tv show, by contrast, Guy is played by Irfan Shamiji who is not black. On the other hand, the Abbot and Brother Gabriel (both characters who, unlike Guy, won't show up again) are played by black actors, and so are some nameless flunkies in Cromwell's and Norfolk's staff. (And no one, of course, is startled by Guy's looks, though it's remarked by his accent that he's from Spain.) Basically, the way it looks to me, the show traded an important long term character being black in Tudor England and this being part of his overall existence for the colourblind casting of a couple of one-off characters, and no matter how well intended, I don't think that's good representation.

(For what it's worth: no notes on Irfan Shamiji's acting as Guy. He's fine.)

In conclusion: as I said, most of what bothered me about this first season is fixable if they get a second season. A less sledgehammery soundtrack, more confidence in actors' ability to convey thoughts - that should be doable. And like I said - the first of the novels wasn't my favourite, either, so there is ample room of improvement, and I would like to see Hughes playing Shardalke through the decades of his life that the novels chronicle.

This week, the 2024 miniseries version of Shogun ended. All in all, I stand by my original assessment after the first three episodes: it‘s very good, both as its own thing and as an adaptation, and while I might quibble with some choices, I can‘t argue with the overall result.

( Detailed and spoilery observations )