Category Archives: tv

Thinking like a villain

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I think like a continuity checker, but E thinks like a villain!

While watching Robin Hood, Season 2, Episode 9: Lardner’s Ring: (Warning, spoilers below!)

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Me: So how do they know which tree to go to?
(Two scenes later, the group in question are very dramatically stumbling about sherwood forest looking for the aforementioned tree).

(Guy of Gisborne threatens to chop off a woman’s finger if villagers don’t come forward with information. Robin’s gang distract Guy, then turn and run, leading him away.)
E: I’d just turn around and chop her finger off.

(Robin Hood and maid Marian are stuck up a tree with a much sought-after homing pigeon, surrounded)
E: I’d just burn down the tree. It would be quicker.

Me: But wouldn’t that kill the pigeon?

E: They (the bad guys) don’t need the pigeon alive!
(Robin and Marian use delaying tactics, counting on their sturdy tree to be slow to fell, but are caught by surprise when Guy douses the base of the tree in pitch, in preparation for burning them out).

(Later, the pigeon seems to be escaping with its vital message. Guy’s archers are unable to hit it. The sheriff rides up)
E: I bet he’s got a falcon.
(The pigeon soars, triumphant music sounds, then the sheriff’s henchman pulls the hood off a falcon, and the sheriff says ‘fetch!’. The Falcon does so.)

Smooth RiderOf course, neither of us are quite as villainous as Robert Llewellyn. The next show we watched was an episode of Scrapheap Challenge, in which teams must devise vehicles for carrying a full, open topped barrel of yellow goo around a 4WD course without spilling any. The catch? Each team must complete three rounds, and will be scored based on the total amount left in their vehicle’s barrel at the end. In the final round, the teams drive each other’s vehicles.

Evil!

Television makes you Paranoid

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This is a rough-and-ready theory, so I’m going to express it as a series of points a-la “axioms X, Y and Z, therefore deduction Q”.

  • TV conditions us to expect certain things from the world, even if unconsciously.
  • A viable definition of paranoia might be ‘the recurring and unfounded expectation that dramatic things are happening or just about to happen’.
  • Another definition might be ‘the mistaken correlation that normal or commonplace causes will reliably lead to dramatic effects’.
  • On TV, in order to retain viewer interest, dramatic things happen all the time, even when the portrayed causal events are quite normal or commonplace.

Therefore: prolonged exposure to almost any television content predisposes us to expect dramatic things, or to mistakenly predict dramatic consequences when innocuous things happen. In short, exposure to TV induces paranoia.

A couple of things occur to me that don’t fit so cleanly into the argument, but which support it:

  • World Trade Centre Towers, NYC, 11/09/01Even TV news is a concentration of the dramatic. The word ‘newsworthy’ essentially means unusual or dramatic. Inductive reasoning based on the news will lead one to expect warfare, violence, and general mayhem all the time.
  • Good dramatic fiction of any kind, inclusive of TV drama, will typically try to obtain suspension of disbelief and try to make the viewer identify with some character or group. Both of these things focus on the intent of reducing the viewer’s ability to discriminate between fiction and reality. The less clearly a viewer distinguishes fiction from reality, the more potential there is for the fiction to influence the viewer’s expectations about reality.

If all this seems obvious to you, I’m sorry for wasting your time. It stuck me as a point that needed making, with serious, subtle, nasty ramifications all over the place.

Ultraviolet

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It would be terribly easy to write a whine this afternoon. Days like this make it terribly hard to think positive thoughts of any kind, let alone write anything cheerful. That would be a terrible watse of time: everyone has bad days at work, it’s not news, and generally nobody needs to hear about anyone else’s day. I will save it up for the after work mutual rant session with E tonight. 🙂

Instead, I want to write about a nitfy TV series which I mentioned once a long time ago on this blog: Ultraviolet. That’s this TV series, by the way, not this (aparrently mediocre) movie.

uvpeople
I first heard about UV from Polly and Damien. I will attempt to do justice here to the eloquent wind-up that Damien gave it when he described it to me:

There’s this british cop whose friend goes missing just before his wedding. The cop does his best to find his friend, but is hampered by this wierd secret branch of the police who are also lookng fo his friend and won’t say why. They seem to be very odd secret police; they have these weird guns with a mirror on them and they use these odd graphite bullets. The kinds of people they’re interested in are odd too: they only come out at night, and they seem to be very long-lived.

The plot moves quickly, but not clumsily, handled with the deftness and class we’ve come to expect from good BBC dramas. The ‘V’ word is never mentioned, throughout the entire series.

The tone is bleak in the extreme, but the series holds ones hope and interest through depth of characterization and a gritty british-crimefighting motif that somehow resembles The Bill.

It helps that the core cast are mesmerisingly good: The cop is played by the most excellently laconic Jack Davenport who you might know better as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. There’s also the icy Susannah Harker, who I knew best as Mattie Storin from the House of Cards series, and the awesome Philip Quast, disconcertingly memorable either as Javert in Les Miserables or as himself in Play School (1981-1996).

There’s a catch though: Only six episodes of this series were ever made. It sems quite likely that this is all that will ever be made. The plot is not abruptly cut short, but it aches for a second season…

Discussing it after watching the sixth episode, E suggested that they might have failed to convince their producers that there was enough material in the, uh, leach-slaying genre. After all, Buffy the … Slayer took a heroic crack at it, but even with the introduction of inumerable demons, witches, cyborg monsters, mad scientists and even a god, the series was dogged by repetition.

BBC worshipping fanboy that I am, I would like to imagine that Joe Ahearne, the series creator might have overcome this kind of thing, but I can’t really make myself believe. In the end I have to suspect that E is right. Ultraviolet ended with the flame of creativity still brilliantly alight. Better that than tiredly exhausting every last drop, ending when the flame guttered out.