Quaran-TV, part 12
Aug. 9th, 2021 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This TV watching log covers shows watched in July, and the first bit of August.
Wynonna Earp's final season finally found a home on a UK streaming service, which meant that we were able to watch it after waiting a year! I believe this season came as a bit of a shock to the showrunners, and they decided to reward their small — but vocal and devoted — fanbase with pure fanservice. The show was always deeply silly, but this time they dialled things up to eleven. I loved it.
Lucifer is another deeply silly show resurrected on a new platform after an apparant cancellation. This latest season dropped a lot of the case of the week stuff in favour of a longer arc involving a war to inherit the role of God, and lots of celestial family drama, and I'm not sure this was the best approach. Lucifer is one of the few shows where I want monster-of-the-week plots rather than serialised television, and although I still enjoyed the character interactions it wasn't my favourite season of the show.
Lupin's second half was a delight from start to finish. Omar Sy is brilliant in the role (although I have to laugh at the fact that all his heists succeed on the basis that he's someone no one notices — he has such presence that in real life he'd be impossible to miss!), I adore all the supporting characters, and I only wish that we were getting more of the show!
The third of the shows about trickster gods with names beginning with 'L' is Loki. I know a lot of people in my Dreamwidth circle liked this, and I don't like to devote lots of space disparaging things that friends enjoyed, so I shall simply say that I really, really disliked this. My favourite Marvel film is Ragnarok, with the first Thor film a very close second, so to say I was disappointed in the show is an understatement.
For something completely different, the Icelandic Netflix show Katla is a complete shift in tone. It's set in a small village near the eponymous volcano, which has been erupting constantly for over a year, covering the area with ash and rendering it virtually uninhabitable. The only remaining residents are those too stubborn to leave, too traumatised and haunted by events in their past to sever their connection with the area, or those stuck there in order to carry out scientific research. The plot reminds me somewhat of the French show Les Revenants, in which dead family members and neighbours of the inhabitants of a small mountain community suddenly reappear, causing all kinds of tensions. In Katla, however, not every 'returning' character is the doppelgänger of a dead person — in some cases they replicate living people. Their presence is unsettling and destabilising in an already unsettled and destabilised community, and the show digs into questions of grief, memory, trauma and family. It's not a gentle show, but it's really well done.
The next show, Vagrant Queen, is far more brainless — a ridiculous cheesy space opera, airing on SyFy and I believe based on a comic. The 'vagrant queen' of the title is deposed and in exile after a violent revolution on her home planet, and she now wanders the galaxy in a rickety space ship with various misfits, eking out a living doing salvage operations, and fleeing from the show's scenery-chewing villain. Every twist is telegraphed from a mile off, and the whole thing is a catalogue of clichés, but if you like lurid neon space opera with a found family of drifters, it's a lot of fun.
The final show I watched was Ms Represented, a documentary about women in Australian politics. I wrote about it earlier in this post.
Wynonna Earp's final season finally found a home on a UK streaming service, which meant that we were able to watch it after waiting a year! I believe this season came as a bit of a shock to the showrunners, and they decided to reward their small — but vocal and devoted — fanbase with pure fanservice. The show was always deeply silly, but this time they dialled things up to eleven. I loved it.
Lucifer is another deeply silly show resurrected on a new platform after an apparant cancellation. This latest season dropped a lot of the case of the week stuff in favour of a longer arc involving a war to inherit the role of God, and lots of celestial family drama, and I'm not sure this was the best approach. Lucifer is one of the few shows where I want monster-of-the-week plots rather than serialised television, and although I still enjoyed the character interactions it wasn't my favourite season of the show.
Lupin's second half was a delight from start to finish. Omar Sy is brilliant in the role (although I have to laugh at the fact that all his heists succeed on the basis that he's someone no one notices — he has such presence that in real life he'd be impossible to miss!), I adore all the supporting characters, and I only wish that we were getting more of the show!
The third of the shows about trickster gods with names beginning with 'L' is Loki. I know a lot of people in my Dreamwidth circle liked this, and I don't like to devote lots of space disparaging things that friends enjoyed, so I shall simply say that I really, really disliked this. My favourite Marvel film is Ragnarok, with the first Thor film a very close second, so to say I was disappointed in the show is an understatement.
For something completely different, the Icelandic Netflix show Katla is a complete shift in tone. It's set in a small village near the eponymous volcano, which has been erupting constantly for over a year, covering the area with ash and rendering it virtually uninhabitable. The only remaining residents are those too stubborn to leave, too traumatised and haunted by events in their past to sever their connection with the area, or those stuck there in order to carry out scientific research. The plot reminds me somewhat of the French show Les Revenants, in which dead family members and neighbours of the inhabitants of a small mountain community suddenly reappear, causing all kinds of tensions. In Katla, however, not every 'returning' character is the doppelgänger of a dead person — in some cases they replicate living people. Their presence is unsettling and destabilising in an already unsettled and destabilised community, and the show digs into questions of grief, memory, trauma and family. It's not a gentle show, but it's really well done.
The next show, Vagrant Queen, is far more brainless — a ridiculous cheesy space opera, airing on SyFy and I believe based on a comic. The 'vagrant queen' of the title is deposed and in exile after a violent revolution on her home planet, and she now wanders the galaxy in a rickety space ship with various misfits, eking out a living doing salvage operations, and fleeing from the show's scenery-chewing villain. Every twist is telegraphed from a mile off, and the whole thing is a catalogue of clichés, but if you like lurid neon space opera with a found family of drifters, it's a lot of fun.
The final show I watched was Ms Represented, a documentary about women in Australian politics. I wrote about it earlier in this post.
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Date: 2021-08-09 03:42 pm (UTC)The trailer for Katla makes it look amazing and also just a little too creepy for me to enjoy in visual form. (I am a wuss.) Your summary makes it sound like it lives up to its potential.
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Date: 2021-08-14 08:50 am (UTC)Katla was great, but if you don't enjoy dark and creepy (and at times violent) stuff in visual form, I would definitely recommend against it.
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Date: 2021-08-09 07:07 pm (UTC)Lupin was AMAZING, I love it so much. I can't wait for part three! I thought it was going to be a two-parter so when I saw the words 'will return in part 3' I nearly screamed.
(Hm, Loki. I had an all right time watching it. I didn't have great expectations and I wasn't a fan of many things about it, but I did enjoy some specific parts of it. It didn't feel like a show that actually fit into the MCU, which on a meta level is kind of funny - like it's a variant itself.)
I really enjoyed Katla as well - it was a treat to watch an Icelandic tv series with such good production values (thank you Netflix, for bringing the money?) for once, and also for it to have people in it I hadn't already seen in every single other piece of Icelandic media. I don't even have any 'so and so is unrealistic/fake/not accurate/whatever' quibbles of the kind that are like...very blatantly obvious foreign influence (still mad about parts of Sense8, much as I love that series). I was very pleasantly surprised! I particularly enjoyed how the Swedish lady spoke Swedish to some of the Icelanders but English to others - that was one of the most realistic Icelandic bits to me, actually, because it's very common for some Icelanders to be able to speak Swedish, or Norwegian, or Danish (often through having lived/worked in one of those countries for a while) but also for others to have only a smattering of Danish from school and instead choosing English when speaking to Scandis. the only thing about this show that had me go a bit 'wtf' was Gríma's name - that's a highly unusual name to have and as a noun it means 'mask' (some people might recognise it from LOTR as the name of Theoden's snake-tongued two-faced advisor), but then I realised she's named after her grandfather and then it made complete sense. (on her mother's tombstone you can see she's Grímsdóttir, so her father's name was Grímur, a completely normal name to have. Gríma would be a feminine version of that.)
anyway! I really liked this series and I want Netflix to throw more money at Icelandic content. we have great film/tv makers - our problem has always been funding.
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Date: 2021-08-09 07:37 pm (UTC)(Ha, true!....that might also have felt why the finale which was a deeep dive into heavy MCU exposition made no sense to me)
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Date: 2021-08-14 08:58 am (UTC)Regarding Loki, just about the only thing I enjoyed was the aesthetics. In general I don't enjoy multiverse stories because they tend to have a theme that nothing anyone does really matters, because multiverse, and I find that really nihilistic and bleak. I don't care if people's actions have no higher purpose, but I want them to matter to the people around them.
Wasn't Katla just wonderful? I'm glad to hear it felt authentic to you — I know exactly how irritating it is to see your own country and experiences represented poorly by Hollywood (see: every film/show about Australia not made by Australians or New Zealanders; the 'Australian' characters in Pacific Rim are basically unwatchable to me). The choice to have a British actress play an Icelandic character in Sense8 was always baffling to me, and same with the choice to name the character 'Riley'!
The only actors in the show familiar to me were the guy who played Gríma's father, who I'd seen in a secondary role in an Icelandic crime series, and the guy who played the geologist with the dead son, who I'd seen in the lead role in a different Icelandic crime series...
I really liked this series and I want Netflix to throw more money at Icelandic content. we have great film/tv makers - our problem has always been funding.
I agree 100 per cent, and it was particularly pleasing to me to see an Icelandic show that wasn't a typical 'Scandi-noir' crime drama.
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Date: 2021-08-14 12:18 pm (UTC)funnily enough I'm not that fussed about her name being Riley Blue, because it just sounds like an artist name she picked herself and given her character (and the fact she went abroad) that's very believable. I think the actress was very good at what she did, I just also think the character she was portraying wasn't Icelandic, lol. it's really the little details that bug me the most - the fact she was sitting ON the grave when she went to visit (it's a big no-no to stand/walk on graves for us - you stand to the side or in front of it but never ON TOP OF it), the absurd way she ate her pancakes (you know that scene in inglourious basterds or w/e when Michael fassbender's character is clocked as a foreigner because he held up the wrong 3 fingers when asking for 3 more drinks? it's that kind of thing.)
And then there's the geography. sorry I am PEDANTIC and while I can suspend disbelief for a lot when it comes to filming locations...
"I'll be there in 10" SURE YOU WILL. LMAO THE ONLY PLACE YOU WILL BE IN 10 MINUTES AFTER LEAVING THAT AIRPORT IS STILL ON THE ROAD. (usual driving time from the airport to Reykjavík is 40 minutes, I suppose if he breaks all traffic laws he might make it in 20 but then he still has to get to the facility??)
also. that facility, that "isn't on any map", is very easily identifiable as a) a geothermal heating plant b) a specific geothermal heating plant. which then causes more confusion when the car taking Riley from the hospital (which one it is, I don't remember and I can't be arsed to check) to the secret facility drives through.....the Hvalfjörður tunnel. the facility not being on a map implies remote (as else it wouldn't be easy to hide) so if you're going through that tunnel, I'd assume you're going north, not south towards the only metropolitan area in the whole country. plus also? a secret facility emitting steam and having hot water pipes leading from it? that's not conspicuous. if they're hiding the facility inside a geothermal plant, okay. but it wouldn't be very secret anyway as a geothermal plant is not the kind of place you can just put medical facilities into without arousing suspicion from the people who actually work there....
and the location of Riley's home doesn't make much sense either when you consider all the location markers we're given for it, which are all over the place.
also the road she and Magnus drove on when he and the baby died and that Riley and Will drove on again later (sort of implied to be the same road that lead to/from the facility - implied in the sense that the road network is not very extensive, like there is literally only one road leading to that facility...there's a reason why we have Route 1, it's because it's the only road!! connecting!! one town to the next!! (in Icelandic it's called 'the national road'.) so anyway leaving that out, back to the actual road. it's a tarmac'd and well maintained road which means it is either a) route 1 or b) an important and much-used road connecting the destination (like a geothermal heating plant) to the nearest town (which again is connected to route 1). not even route 1 is tarmac'd on all stretches - which leads me to wonder where the fuck where Riley and Magnus when she went into labour that they had to go on a long drive to get to a hospital? smaller towns don't have hospitals of their own but most have a medical clinic where one can go for small stuff (including in most cases giving birth. if those places are unable to deal with the medical situation at hand they fly people out on either small planes or helicopters to the nearest facility that can. My dad who was born in 1960, was born in a helicopter because his mum went into labour 2 months early, so while they could've handled the birth fine where they lived, they wouldn't have been able to handle a premature baby - so she was flown out to the national hospital in a helicopter. these things go in most weather conditions. we have air ambulances, for fuck's sake.). if they were living in the countryside, why was the road tarmac'd ?
Anyway, the secret facility.
Will speeding in, look at him go. problem: the road he's arriving on doesn't lead anywhere.
Granted not many people except the employees would really notice this, but there's another thing: this is a popular site to visit - there's a hotel and an obstacle course/adventure park/whatever you want to call it, and the viewpoint these screenshots are from. the road into the facility branches off a different road that goes around the lake pictured. there are other geothermal plants in the area and several active geological sites to visit. there are people around, a lot, all the time. it's not a remote location in any way.
I WILL SHUT UP NOW I PROMISE. I enjoy this tv series a lot but I just also have to...force myself to ignore all the Icelandic stuff because most of the time it seems to be there only to serve as some kind of exotic inspirational fairytale magic place with little effort made to actually portray any of it realistically and it pisses me off more than anything else. like I'm sorry but the amount of foreigners who come here to 'find themselves' or writers on retreats 'capturing the wild magic' for their writing or or or or. come on. just because there aren't any trees doesn't make it bleak and magical, it just means we have problems with soil erosion. get the fuck out and shut up.
Katla in comparison felt authentic not just because the actors were all Icelandic (or Swedish) but because the setting was plausible, people's attitudes to each other were familiar, and you didn't have that element of foreign special interest because *jazzhands* magic. the only thing in that whole series that wasn't real was the changeling folklore about Katla, which I actually really enjoyed because by *not* using folklore that already existed, I couldn't tell where they were going with the story. If they'd used folklore from Iceland I would've been familiar with both it and uses of it in literature, I'd have come into it with some notions of literary tradition or intertextuality or what have you, but instead they used a folklore more commonly associated with the UK (I think?) and gave it a local twist and as a result I was like ?? what is happening, this is terrifying, what is going ON. which was delightful :D
also, the guy who plays gríma's dad is one of our actors who have been around for ages and has secondary roles a lot, including in international media! he has been in English-language movies/tv shows a fair bit. the one I can think of off the top of my head is Everest where he plays a Russian. :D
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Date: 2021-08-09 07:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-14 08:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-09 07:53 pm (UTC)Funnily enough I've just started watching Katla. Very visually stunning with an interesting plot so far. It definitely reminds me of Les Revenants.
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Date: 2021-08-14 09:01 am (UTC)I hope you've been enjoying Katla, and I definitely agree with you about the visuals. Iceland has such a striking landscape.
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Date: 2021-08-14 03:40 pm (UTC)I've since finished Katla. I'm not sure enjoy is necessarily the word I'd use for how I felt about it, but it was very good.