GOOD CHARACTERS MAKE GOOD FICTION. PERIOD.

I THOUGHT I WOULD DO A SHORT post on three TV shows I’ve been watching, all fantasy/sci-fi dramas as it turns out, two of which are misses and one is a satisfying hit. Like a lot of people, I was looking forward to the new series: House of the Dragon—the “prequel” to Game of Thrones. Also there was another widely-anticipated   prequel show, the Rings of Power, which is Amazon Prime’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, which details the ages before the LOR took place, including the period when the “rings of power” were forged. I’ll do the second series  first: 

 

THERE ARE STORIES aplenty in Tolkien’s depiction of the years before Middle Earth’s beginning, and Amazon Prime spent a reported one billion (that’s with a “b”!) dollars on the first season, so I was looking forward to seeing how they would envision such a sprawling epic and bring to life Tolkien’s imagined world with all its majestic realms, and varied peoples.  WHILE IT IS DIFFICULT ENOUGH to bring a work of literary fiction to life on the big (or small) screen, it is generally a good idea to stay reasonably faithful to the source material in terms of plot and characterization. ALAS, AMAZON’S dog’s breakfast of a fantasy series does neither. Other commentators here and here provide more detailed (and humorous) reviews than I’ll bother with now. 

I’LL JUST ADD that having watched the first three episodes of “Rings”, I was unimpressed by the overall storytelling (it seemed typical TV fodder) and character development (what development?) The elf “Galadriel”, around which much of the show’s action sinks revolves, is a one-dimensional character whose portrayal is wooden at best. When compared with the hobbit and human characters brought to life on the big screen in Peter Jackson’s LOR and Hobbit trilogies a few years ago, the elves, humans and ‘proto-hobbits’ in Amazon’s “Rings” seem lifeless and stereotyped or just plain annoying, and as a viewer, I can’t invest my time with them. The show’s script writers would do well to provide interesting dialogue, back-story and character development and spend less time worrying about woke inclusivity, virtue-signalling and marketing their “product” to trending, demographic audiences. I give the show   👎👎👎.

 

HBO's HOUSE OF THE DRAGON is a prequel  to its hugely successful (except for the horrid last season!) Game of Thrones series, and it also would do well to invest more time in character development and less on CGI special effects. Yes, there are dragons, but stick to good story telling. Admittedly, the plot and characters are better shaped here than in “Rings”, but I find myself less interested in them than I was in the original GOT series.

“House” characters suffer, in part, from the story’s time frame. Characters age, actors portraying them change. Two actors portray the main character, for example, playing younger and older versions of Princess Rhaenyra, along with a confusing array of siblings and offspring. And, frankly, once you’ve seen one dragon, you’ve seen 'em all. I’ll watch the show, but you’ll probably find my eyeballs stitched to my doodling pad more  often than on the TV screen. So it goes.

 

THE THIRD IS A SCI-FI I’d like to briefly mention, starring the popular Hollywood actor, Jason Momoa.* It's called See and it depicts the world several centuries from now inhabited by remnant human populations who are congenitally blind. Everyone, except in very rare circumstances, is born blind!  We never learn why or what happened. Was it a virus? A  bio-weapon? Radiation? Triffids? Whatever the cause, people in the future live with this affliction in small urban centres (in the ruins of today's towns and cities), or else in villages, nomadic tribal groups and even quasi-feudal kingdoms. The populations are small, the lives of the people are hard scrabble but realistic, and the strategies they use to find food and defend themselves, as well as how they negotiate their way across the land, are ingenious, but also believable. The story centres around Momoa and his family over a period of about twenty years. And the important thing that makes this show work is that the writers take the time to portray characters’ individuality. We see them grow and mature as they deal with life’s hardship and with each other. We sympathize with them and, as a viewer, you invest emotionally in such characters. 

 

THE SHOW has a good deal of violence and bloodshed, with Momoa having to fight someone in most episodes. His Zen-like battle style and swordsmanship are impressive, and the only thing more intimidating than "Baba Voss" (Momoa) wielding a machete in a dance of death with his opponent is his "little" brother "Edo" (Dave Bautista). The plot is fairly complex, the characters work and, importantly, they make you want to see what happens to them.

I enjoyed #3 but the first two are ho-hum and reserved for those times when you have to stay indoors  to avoid fallout from Russian nukes. 

 

Cheers, Jake.

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*He has been in recent Marvel superhero movies playing the character “Aquaman”. He also was the first season of Game of Thrones and in 2021’s Dune.  

  

 

You can watch See on the Putlocker video streaming service. Free, I might add. (You'll probably have to refresh the page a number of times before the video plays.)

 

 

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RANT: BELATED THANKSGIVINGS

IF I WERE TO TRY and think about where it all went wrong, would I start with that time, one time long ago, when those first men boarded that first ship bound for the new lands of this continent? If they had taken a U-turn at Guanahani, things might have been a lot different. After nearly five centuries, our settler-colonialist project here in Canada, along with others in what is euphemistically called the “International community” (but is really just the United States and its familiars) seems to be drawing to a grinding, slow-motion train wreck of an end. It will be a while yet; vampires don’t die that easily, despite all the wooden stake and holy water disinformation that’s out there. [Sorry. Halloween looms, and my mind drifts into ghoulishness and things that go bump in the night. Jake.] 

 

But that ‘rock’ at the bottom of our garden, the one I mentioned in last week’s post? It's  being overturned slowly, and what’s underneath—all the slimy bits we’d rather not know about—is bit by gritty bit seeing the light of day. 

 

JUST ONE EXAMPLE of this slow-booting revelations revolution is the ill-fated Nord Stream2 pipeline drama that’s being played out in the Baltic Sea off Danish waters.  The undersea conduit was built to deliver gas to Germany and Europe from Russia (but never activated). It was recently damaged in an explosion and investigators suspect sabotage. It’s unclear whether the pipeline can or will  be repaired and, in addition, whether the nearby Nord Stream1 line remains intact. Both remain moot points, given the geopolitical crossfire raging between Europe and Russia these days. Gas flows from the Slavic giant ceased since the outbreak of hostilities with Ukraine, and the sabotage of the Nord Stream2 last month makes  resuming operations unlikely anytime soon. Oddly, there’s been mostly ‘radio silence’ among the digital commentariat and Western governments about who might be the culprit. Denmark, Sweden, and Germany have begun examining the wreckage using underwater cameras and drones to try and determine the cause of the explosion and hopefully identify who is responsible. But as of October 18, Sweden refuses to make its findings public, and Denmark and Germany seem ready to fall in line, citing “national security concerns” as their excuse to stay mum.

TO ME, that’s a scandal! Whose security concerns are they talking about? Theirs? It was their infrastructure that was destroyed, after all, and you'd think they might want to hang the scoundrels who wrecked it out to dry. it seems nobody, but nobody wants to turn that rock over! Let’s see if they change their minds this winter when things get a bit nippy, and their various populations start to rumble and roar, demanding answers.

AS I SAID last week, cui bono, “who benefits”? Not Russia. Certainly not anyone in increasingly chilly  Europe. Who then? Well, the obvious answer is the United States. The US doesn’t want to see Europe leaning towards Russia, making trade deals with its great rival. It wants to remove Russia from the geopolitical arena and as a bonus be able to sell to its European client-states expensive Yankee LNG. It’s win-win as far as they’re concerned. And while the default narrative initially adopted by Western media was that Russia did it, the fact that fingers are not pointing in Moscow's direction much anymore, and that no state actor yet stands accused, speak volumes. Indeed, if they had any smoking gun proving Russia did it, you know the collective West would be screeching “RussiaRussiaRussia!” at the top of their lungs. But, so far, they don't have proof. Nobody knows anything. Or they're not telling. Perhaps more to the point, no one has the cajones to publicly accuse the Americans of such malfeasance. Yet.

Again, the fact that Russia isn't being automatically scapegoated by every talking head and politico suggests there is a weakening of the consensus narrative, and this might lead to interesting developments down the road, not to mention speaking bold-faced truths for a change.

HERE'S A THOUGHT: One of the most affected countries in all of this will be Germany, with the hit it will take in terms of lost production and economic slowdown. Germany knows who’s screwing it over. The Americans browbeat them into not opening the newly completed Nord Stream2 pipeline just a few months ago. And now, it seems, the Americans (or one of their client-states) have blown it up, pre-empting any possibility for German industry and citizens to access Russian gas.  DO WE REALLY NEED a Germany that sees itself (and with good reason) humiliated and stabbed in the back by a so-called friend? In the middle of all this, in the middle of an increasingly fractious Europe, do we really need that, again?

ON THE OTHER HAND, I wonder if anyone will remember this farrago in a month or two? We have such short attention spans these days. Well, we'll see if other rocks get overturned in the meantime and their slimy landscapes put on public display. When things of this nature get "memory-holed", there's always a chance they will get dug up. And that may be uncomfortable, but it's certainly necessary.

 

Cheers, Jake.

 

 

 

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