Wayward Pines Season 2: This is where we came out

The three canonical Wayward Pines books end in a tremendously clear cut way. There’s any amount of peripheral apocrypha, just as there is is with the Wool sequence, but the core work is in and out with brisk efficiency. Then we got the TV adaptation, which choked on the idea of wrapping up the product so definitively, and instead ended on a sequel hook so that they could go on milking the property for a few years.

The upside of this was that Wayward Pines’ second season had the prospect of surprise. The books had ended with everyone taking a two thousand year jump into the future, having answered pretty much all the questions that the books had asked. If you’d read the books, the main interest for the TV show was how faithful the adaptation had been, and how well the TV show handled the withholding and misdirection which Blake Crouch had built into the books. It’s hard to withold some things in TV; the TV adaptation of Iain Banks’ The Crow Road, for example, blows a key twist because it’s pretty much impossible to show a girl throwing herself at an oblivious narrator without the audience seeing it even if the narrator doesn’t. Other withholding is much easier; acting can’t tell you what someone is thinking, no matter what actors might hope to the contrary.

But having killed a big chunk of the headline cast and thrown out a sequel hook of a town where the next generation had set up a police state, the scriptwriters had set up a season where I didn’t know what to expect. Other than my usual expectation of unexpected second seasons, which is that everyone will mark time for fear of running out of plot and having to find honest work somewhere else. Shallow couch-potato that I am, I don’t much care if there’s a plot as long as the characters entertain me from moment to moment. So my uneasy expectation of Waward Pines II was that there would be a Resistance vibe rolling for week after week as baby fascists persecuted cynical older people, aka “How is this different from my actual life?"

Instead things went to hell in a handbasket with impressive speed, as the monsters on the borders horded up something wicked and the humans ran out of food and everything else. There were all kinds of sub plots which looked like they were going to go somewhere, most notably “Oh, look, the monsters might not be the bad guys after all.” complete with mysterious leader spooking everyone out by getting captured just to get a better look at the opposition. And then it all just falls apart, until in the end the survivors pile back into the stasis pods in the hope that if they fast forward for two thousand years perhaps the monsters will have got over their grievances, or evolved, or died out or something.

Which is pretty much the canonical ending, just with ten extra TV hours of faffing about stuck onto it at the front to no very great purpose. We got to see a bit more about how Wayward Pines was designed and planned, and got a different handle on the Abbies, and well, that was about it. Not many new questions, no real answers to any of them, and in the end we’re pretty much exactly where we would have been if the first season had been a completely faithful adaptation of the source text, and the chances of any of the questions from this season still being relevant in a third season are about as high as the chances of there even being a third season.

Wayward Pines: the TV show

My off hand notes on Wayward Pines the book trilogy caused a spike in my page views the like of which I never expect to see again. That was all down to the TV show, which I've only now got round to watching.

Watch the TV show or read the books, but don't do both, I think. I think if you were coming to the TV show completely fresh, not knowing what was going on, it would have been gripping, baffling stuff. If you watch it having read the books, you know what's going on, and you're free to think "That's not what Sheriff Pope ought to look like." or "Melissa Leo doesn't look young or crazy enough to be Nurse Pam." And so on. Matt Dillon, by the way, looks absolutely fine for Ethan Burke. Just the right amount of manly jawline.

There's a lot of detailed changes from the book, including some major swerves in the last episode. The neat three act structure of the books has been dropped, and the world of trouble from the third book has been simplified and telescoped. Probably worked better as narrative on the screen, but it will have bugged anyone who read the books first. I know I said that if you've read the book the suspense goes out the window, but weirdly, you can still get cranky because the story isn't just what you were expecting. What you read first becomes reasonable and logical and what you see later is weird and wrong, even if it's perfectly fine on its own merits.

It's TV, so the Abbies are just wrong, by which I mean they're not wrong enough. They just look like a bunch of summer stock Nosferatus, because that's the limitation of what you can do with people in makeup, where a writer can make much more unsettling changes.

In the end, though, my big thought about the whole thing was the difference between how you read and how you watch. I watched Wayward Pines the TV show in a state of half distraction, an episode or half an episode at a time, watching the time before I had to get to work, and checking my email as it unfolded. I wasn't really present in the show, and it wasnt't just because I knew what was going to happen and so didn't feel I had to concentrate.It was TV, and so it was kind of background. When I was reading the books, I had to concentrate; if I didn't read them, nothing was going to happen. If I didn't concentrate on the TV show, the TV was still going to play it back.

The surprising thing is that there's going to be a second season. It might even work; they've found a good jump-off point for a continuing narrative. And since there aren't any books this time, if I do watch it, I'll have to take it on its own merits. And focus.

The Man in the High Castle

My favourite what if? is “What if no-one ever wrote about the Nazis winning WWII?” If you took out all those books from the genre, it practically wouldn’t be a genre any more. But long before it became a genre, professional lunatic Philip K Dick got out ahead of the curve and wrote The Man in the High Castle, a novel set in an America which has been carved up between Japan and Germany after the Axis somehow managed to prevail on the the Asian continent and then figure out how to invade a country full of heavily armed individualists surrounded by thousands of miles of water. Because Dick had no concept of restraint, he threw in not just an alternate history in which the Germans won, but a spare alternate history in which they lost in a completely different way; Philip K Dick was never happy with a story where the characters could be confident about the ground they stood on.

Dick is famously and magnificently unadaptable, because movies don’t do ambiguity, and SF movies have a hard enough time creating a halfway convincing future without undercutting constantly with that hallucinogenic buzz that crackles through all of Dick’s work. The most successful adaptation is still Blade Runner, though it says everything you need to know about “success” in adapting Dick that the most famous quote from the movie was improvised by Rutger Hauer and has nothing to do with the source text. Blade Runner is a great looking movie which succeeds by dumping most of the actual Philip K Dick out of the action. It came out in a time when home video was practically SF, and if you wanted to relive a movie you had to buy the book; there must have been a lot of bewilderment when people brought home Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and started to grapple with the weird and tangled source text.

So, with Blade Runner having worked out so well, it was probably inevitable that when Amazon decided to make a TV show out of The Man in the High Castle, they got Ridley Scott to produce it. And just like Blade Runner, it looks great. The opening titles are clever, even if no-one in their right mind would launch a parachute assault on Mount Rushmore - after all, the Nazis were being run by people demonstrably not in their right minds. And the US after 14 years of Nazi and/or Japanese occupation has a convincing look; I particularly like the fact that in 1962, VW Beetles are not a counter culture statement but just the cars that everyone is driving. And there are moments which sell the way that monstrousness becomes business as usual; a cuddly highway patrolman offhandedly mentions that the ash settling on the roadway is from the weekly incineration of cripples and terminal cases and then gets on with helping someone fix a flat tire. If it was that commonplace, people probably wouldn’t even mention it, but it’s more effective in its way than all the scenes at Gestapo HQ.

Still, scenery is not story, and it’s hard to know whether this show is going to work as narrative. The source text is like all Dick, dreamlike and all over the place, built on characters barely getting by and ending their stories one step forward and two steps back. That’s not the kind of thing that makes for 13 episodes of TV, still less a multi-season cash cow. So the script throws its weight onto the idea of resistance to the Nazis, and the kind of struggle in the shadows against the Gestapo and the Kempeitai that we’ve seen a million times. Up front as the McGuffin to all of this is a series of movie reels which show an alternate reality in which the Axis lost. In the book, it’s not movies, but a book, making it much harder to decide whether the alternate reality is a an echo of another universe or just a comforting fiction cooked up by a man chafing under the weight of occupation and defeat. It’s harder to maintain that kind of ambiguity with a movie within a movie, simply because in a totalitarian world it would be so much more difficult to make a convincing movie showing the top dogs getting their arses kicked. In all likelihood the long game for this TV adaptation is going to be some version of the movie reels being news from another universe. It may well work, but it won’t be true to the source.

Sons of Anarchy: Endings

About a quarter of the hits on this blog are from one post from about four years ago where I vented about Irish accents on SoA and their location work in Nordor. So I guess, now that SoA is finally over, my page views are just going to tank. 

SoA should have ended about two years ago. If it had a point, the point was the conflict between Jax and Clay and Gemma, and the best they were ever going to get out of that was five seasons. SoA should have hit its crisis in Season Five and destroyed its world, just like Hamlet does in Act 5. I’m not saying that the result would have been perfect; I don’t even know if it would have been any good, but it would have been better than the long drawn out falling apart of Seasons Six and Seven. There comes a point when you’re learned all you can from a crapsack world, and everything after that is “This? Again?"

Art always collides with money. Even low art. Even TV shows. Especially TV shows. They outrun their welcome, because no matter what you wanted to do at the beginning, in the end you’ve got kids at college, cocaine habits, mortgage payments or just the aching knowledge that you’ve got nothing else in the tank and you need the money for coffee and cigarettes. It happened to Lost, it happened to the X-Files,and man, did it ever happen to Sons of Anarchy. And it sometimes seems like the only other possibility is getting yanked before you’ve even told the story, like Twin Peaks or Firefly. Or Rome. Or Deadwood. Man, don’t make me talk about Deadwood.

So let’s talk about endings. The Sopranos ended so abruptly half of America thought their TV sets had broken. Six Feet Under got all kinds of lost along the way, but pulled an ending out of the mess which is, in its own way, truly unbeatable. Dexter, having turned into possibly the stupidest show on TV, found an ending to carry it right over the line into unredeemable, a trick which would be truly impressive if I thought for a moment that it was the plan. Breaking Bad stayed for exactly the right length and pulled off an ending which was both perfectly judged and almost hypnotic in the way in which every loose piece of karma was tucked away where it belonged.

However, there is one show which stands head and shoulders above them all for the sheer punch of its ending. The Shield  was frequently a violent mess that made no sense at all from week to week, but it found the perfect ending as Vic Mackey was stuck in his own personal hell; a meaningless desk job where he could do nothing and be made accountable for every pointless moment of it. By the end of The Shield, the writers could have had Vic torn apart by wolves and the viewers would have said “Well, Vic DID kind of have it coming, and wasn’t it awesome?” Instead they found a punishment which left Vic with nothing. And considering that most of us watching probably had equally meaningless desk jobs, there was a certain karmic backlash for the audience. There we’d been, enjoying the exploits of a truly horrible person, paying our own tawdry dues to the myth of the ubermensch, the bully with the heart of gold, the man who only hurts us because he loves us. And then Shawn Ryan turned it right back on us; there you go. Mackey is one of you now.

Anyone who’s read this far will know where I’m going. Kurt Sutter worked on The Shield, and at one point it looked like he was running a shelter for former cast members down at Teller-Morrow. So when it came to the ending, that was the yardstick he was going to be measured by. Was Jax Teller going to have an ending that would claw the show back to the promise it had at the beginning?

Nope. Jax spends his last day trying to right the wrongs he’s done, mostly by doing a bunch of NEW wrongs, and then splats himself on the front of a truck, just like his old man did twenty years before. And at the wheel of that truck, that delivery system for Jax’s ending; the man who owns the best ending trashy American TV has ever managed. Vic Mackey his own bad self turned up to turn Jax off, and even he couldn’t save it.

The Strain; yes, that's pretty much what it's been

There’s a great moment, about half way through the TV version of The Strain when the cool vampires turn up, all tactical and covered in firearms and just rule the screen for a couple of minutes. It’s an end of episode cliffie, and I switched off the TV and went off to work thinking “Finally, this thing is rolling out the good stuff”. Then del Toro and crew played Lucy with the football on me for the next six or seven episodes and we didn’t see the cool vampires until the last two episodes, where they wander back in briefly to make Gus the most ridiculous job offer ever, and honestly by that stage I was just glad they’re all going to get butchered off screen next season, because if you’re going to make that little use of the concept, why even bother?

I’ve made no secret of my contempt for the books, although early on I had nursed the hope that del Toro would take some of the ideas buried in them and make three half way good looking movies out of them. There was about one movie’s worth of stuff in each book, I reckoned. That works out to a hell of a lot less than 13 TV episodes of anything worth looking at, even if you’d done the honest thing and made all three books into one 13 episode event. Trying to stretch the first book into 13 TV hours; that’s a strain, is what it is.

I was watching the thing side by side with Penny Dreadful, which is pretty much of an overstuffed baggy mess with too many characters and not enough plot, but which survives on the strength of characters you want to see more of. Eva Green holds the whole thing up even when it’s threatening to collapse all around her, but the other actors rise to their material. The weakest link is probably Josh Hartnett, who’s just flat and mopey when everyone around him is intense, but if you put even Josh Hartnett into The Strain, everyone else would just fade out by comparison. There’s no-one to root for in The Strain; the villains are either awful or interchangeable mooks, and the heroes? Oy gevalt. Abraham Setrakian is Armenian Van Helsing being played by Canadian Morgan Freeman. Vassily Fet, a role reportedly written specifically for the great Ron Perlman, is played by a ringer who gives the good guys pretty much the only person the viewers can root for. After that, it all goes off a cliff. If you’ve got the entire end of the world, you don’t need a family drama as well, but even if you did, no-one needs the Goodweather family. I was watching the new Homeland last night, and Corey Stoll got stomped to bits by a mob; I couldn’t help wishing the mob had found its way to New York.

The books had a couple of neat ideas, and a lot of terrible writing. The TV show’s got all the ideas, and way more of the writing. How did I not see that coming?

The Strain finds its true form

Four years ago, when I was unenthusiastically toeing the first mysterious manifestation of The Strain, I thought it had the potential to be the beginning of an impressive movie. I didn’t realise just how much morecrap was going to fall from the ceiling overhead, and I was dazzled by the sheer quality of Pan’s Labyrinth, so I was inclined to cut Guillermo a lot of slack, in the way that I wouldn’t now that I’ve seen Pacific Rim. 

Well, someone loved the whole idea enough to throw a load of money at it, and here we are with a TV series. Which I was honestly not going to bother with, but there was a sudden spike in my page-views for the swipe at The Night Eternal….

In good news, Corey Stoll is all back to life from getting asphyxiated in House of Cards, and he’s even grown some hair, or stolen Christian Slater’s, whichever is cheaper. In bad news, he’s playing another work-fixated dick-head whose family life is falling apart. I put this down to the unending Hollywood theory that go-getters always have to have miserable home lives to balance things up. Some people think that this is down to simple-minded screenplay writing, but I think it’s dumber than that. The whole idea just appeals to neurotic artistic people who want to think that they’re messing up their own personal lives because they’re tortured geniuses paying a price for success when the reality is that they’d be messing up their personal lives if they were working a shift at Walmart.

Of course it also gives the writers a pretext to tell us how great our protagonist is at his job; five minutes in and we’re getting his wife monologuing straight to camera about how he’s the world’s greatest epidemiologist. When del Toro was on top form, he did not need anyone to monologue the camera to tell us that the Captain was the Spanish Army’s greatest living bastard; he gave us scenes that let us figure out for ourselves that everyone had a good reason to be terrified of him. And honestly, if Corey Stoll’s character is commanding the respect of his colleagues despite being called Eph Goodweather, he pretty much has to be awesome at his job. No need for his wife to put in the time on that one.

It’s pretty much the opening of the book, acting-friendly character count and cast of expendable meat puppets all present and correct, but I was surprised by how del Toro still found a way to make the cold open more boring than it needed to be. You’ve got a Marie Celeste plane on the tarmac at New York; start there, don’t burn up minutes letting us see some of what happened before the plane landed. You’re wasting time and money on people we’re not going to get to know any better later on.

Which leads me to my other surprise; what I had thought of as a movie friendly character count actually isn’t, because there are too many stories and no place that they can believably connect, even though my shaky memories of the book tell me that just about everyone we see in this pilot episode is still going to be in some kind of play for the endgame, assuming that they keep throwing money at the problem for as long it might take to get there. At the speed that they’re not burning through the book, it looks like they might think they’ve got three mini-seasons here, which is going to be asking a hell of a lot from the actors; it’s not like the underlying text is going to save this thing.

Sherlock: There's something about Mary

It seems like I keep on having to write about three things really being just one. Sherlock's short run of three episodes just turned out to be one very long episode. Which itself turned out to be just an interlude before we resume the story we got at the end of the second season. Moriarty isn't dead after all. Neither was Sherlock. I'm beginning to wonder whether anything we saw in the second season finale will still be real by the time they get round to making a fourth season. "Well, John, the reality is that we made London up completely as part of a complicated plot. Also, there is no BBC. And gravity's just a ruse."

The BBC take on Sherlock Holmes has always been an odd duck. Of course you've got the Cumberbatch, lord of all awesome and in Sherlock the titular crown prince of all media's high functioning sociopaths. That does rather tend to white out everything else around it (As Sherlock himself said in the third episode just now "Oh, someone was talking and it wasn't me, so I probably just filtered it out."). But the odd thing about it is that it's a ratings monster produced at eye-watering cost and they only produce it in chunks of three episodes at a time, the equivalent of six US TV hours allowing for ads. Just as you've got the chance to get used to looking forward to it, it's gone again for a year or more. 

Which makes it almost idiotically daring that the writers burned up the first two episodes specifically to maximise the punch of the third. The first was dominated by a heroic refusal to answer the question of how Sherlock got off the roof at the end of the second season(three different explanations offered, and I refuse to believe that I'm supposed to buy any of them). There was a mystery to solve about a terrorist plot, but that was practically a shaggy dog story; oh look, it's a terrorist underground plotting to blow up the Houses of Parliament with a tube train; a terrorist UNDERGROUND, geddit? Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what were you saying there about Watson having a fiancée? Is he going to sulk at Sherlock indefinitely? 

The second episode was the world's looniest best man's speech, ostensibly to showcase all the elements of the murder of the week, but really about the unstoppable bromance of Sherlock and Watson and how to fit a real live woman into the middle of it. 

And having danced around and joked for the fans and generally had a hell of a time, the third episode started paying all that stuff off, showing us that all the throwaway moments of the past three hours had been parts of a jigsaw puzzle we'd didn't even know was there. And it worked. By the time we got to the punchline, I was about two feet closer to the tv than I'd been at the beginning.

Yes, it's silly and the characters are practically cartoons, but the writing's so good and the actors throw themselves into it so hard that you get carried along with a big smile on your face right up to the moment that you've got a lump in your throat. 

Only six TV hours every year or so? When I think about it, we should just be grateful they can do that much. 

Agents of Shield; Whedon gets it wrong

Somehow, I've made the time to watch all of the episodes that have aired of Agents of Shield. That's about eight hours I could presumably have done something else with, though I'll admit that I did do something else with most of it, even if it was only eating my breakfast and surfing the internet, because Agents of Shield struggles to hold my full attention even when I'm only half awake.

The whole thing seems to have come about because Joss Whedon made absurd amounts of money for Marvel with Avengers Assemble and so they told him he could make a TV show about the world if he really wanted to. Since most of Joss' working life has consisted of being given not enough money and time to try to make a follow up to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he doesn't seem to have known quite what to do when Marvel gave him all the money in the world and a full season to waste it on, and here we are with ten lacklustre episodes of whatever the hell it is that he's trying to do in Agents of Shield.

I'm not here to talk about that, because that would be boring - more boring even than the show is turning out to be. I'm here to talk about the show which they should have made instead. 

The whole Marvel superhero thing has given us an uneven torrent of movies in which teenage wish fulfilment made manifest somehow saves the world from certain destruction. Over, and over again. Because Hollywood, I think. Everything's turned up to 11 these days, as though the only way to make us interested is to overload our systems to the point where they shut down in self defence. Presumably at that point our critical faculties cut out as well, and we start thinking that we're seeing something good. 

Well, you can't do that on TV. There isn't the money, and there isn't the time, and it would be absurd to almost destroy the world every week in 40 minutes or less. It's absurd enough that any given franchise seems to do it once a year or so in a couple of hours of frenetic jump cutting. TV is - these days - for slower-burning, more meditative fare. There was a moment in the trailer for the TV show which had me hoping that Whedon was going to be clever; Agent Huge Block of Wood was asked if he knew what S.H.I.E.L.D stood for, and correctly spelled it out. Then he got asked if he knew what that meant, and said "That somebody really wanted the initials to spell "shield"". For that brief moment, I thought "found my next guilty pleasure."

Instead it's been "monster of the week, meet the wood muppets", when it should have been the greatest workplace comedy ever. The movies are the big deal; all huge stars and superheroes running around "saving the world" by demolishing half of it in CGI extravaganzas. The TV show should have been about the grumbling janitors who get to run along after the circus parade with brooms and dustpans, cleaning up the trail of destruction and wondering why they never get any respect. It would have been the perfect place for endless Whedon-esque pop culture jokes and self aware sarcasm. And instead of showing us almost heroes and almost adventures, we'd cut in each week as the team get the phone call to tidy up after the latest big budget movie. They'd be sitting there round the break table, arguing over whose turn it was to fill the percolator, and a battered phone would ring under a dartboard with a picture of Nick Fury's face in the middle. "Ah, not this again." "You know how it is; S.H.I.E.L.D Someone Hasta Inspect Every Little Disaster". And of they'd go, picking up after all the important people we go to the cinema to see properly. 

Probably get cancelled after a month, but that would just be Whedon, being true to himself.

Sons of Anarchy: Season 6; For god's sake, Jax, buy some burners

Let's talk about something other than the Irish accents for a second. 

It's a commonplace that the USA has more guns than cell phones, but Sons of Anarchy seems to be unfolding in some parallel universe where they have guns instead of cellphones. Time after time, the wrong thing happens because SAMCRO seems to be using the same command and control system as Lord Raglan in the Crimea; no-one ever finds out anything unless someone happens to think of telling it to them when they're standing right front of them. You could loop together about ten character deaths in Sons of Anarchy and make a punchy ad for any mobile phone company on earth, so long as the company felt that they were missing out on the murderous idiot demographic. This kind of thing made sense back when they were making Jacobean tragedies, but this is the 21st century, dammit. You can at least text people. After the first couple of dozen people got their heads mistakenly beaten in because some lunkhead wasn't all caught up, you'd have thought that self-styled moderniser Jax Teller would have been all over an improved communications strategy.

Instead he fires up everyone, including his loopy mother, to believe that Tara is ratting him out, and then doesn't bother telling them that the hit's off when things change. And poor old Tara then gets ganked in her own kitchen in one of the messiest murders SoA has ever shown us. 

Well, it had to happen. I'm just tired of everything being down to misunderstandings which effectively became impossible two decades ago. Yep, cellphones aren't secure. Criminal conspiracies would shun them somewhat. But when the hot news is that you've made your own deal with the cops, you're not really risking much to ring your own mother and let her know, now are you? And for everything else, there's burners. It's a cop-out, really. The writers are bought into the idea that true tragedy only exists when someone sets out to do something good, and it has horrible unintended consequences. Nope, that's irony [1]. Shakespearean tragedy, which is what this thing always seems to have been aiming for, shows us someone ruining everything around him, imagining that he's acting for the best, and lets us see clearly how he dug a grave, all the time thinking it was an escape tunnel. Different thing.

Anyhow, Tara had to go. She was getting in the way, just like Otto and Clay. Clay was getting in the way because Ron Perlman was too awesome and only Katey Sagal could hold the camera against him. And also, his character should have been murdered about three seasons back, so it was getting harder and harder to come up with excuses for him to be alive. Otto had to go because, well, jeeze, just look at him. And Tara had to go because she was a smart college educated woman with options, so it never made anything close to rational sense that she'd have stuck around in Charming for more than a fortnight. Now that she's gone, the show is no longer anchored to reality and can do whatever the hell it wants to.

Other than clearing out the sanity and the past-its-sell-by-date awesomeness, the main mission statement for Season 6 seems to have been Jax making yet another effort to get out of the gun business. I've commented before on how little sense SoA's gun business makes. Real wars have been fought with less guns than they've trafficked in the past six seasons. Jax's policy somehow makes even less sense than that. Determined to get out of the gun business because it leads to murder and violence, Jax has, by the end of this season, orchestrated more murders than John Wayne Gacy and had a lot less fun doing it. "I don't like all this killing." a good mission statement; "I'm going to kill my way out of it."; maybe you haven't thought through the problem properly. The Sons of Anarchy seem like the leading cause of death in almost every major demographic in northern California. If they'd just got on quietly with selling guns, could it really have been any worse?

[1] Don't start.

Sons of Anarchy; Season 6; dare we imagine a Sons without terrible Irish accents?

Well, episode 11 of Sons done drop, and with it they done drop Clay, at long, long last. But first someone put a long overdue bullet right through  Galen O'Shea's smirking implausible face. I've been dreaming of THAT day. Galen's not-quite-right northern accent has been bugging me for as long as I've been surrounded by real ones, to the extent that now that he's finally out of our lives, I googled the actor to see what his excuse was. Turns out he's from Kerry, which explains everything. Southerners, as I've daily been reminded, do terrible nordie accents.

Season 6 has been driven by Jax's crusade to get the Sons out of guns, which has had to surf past the rampaging lunacy of them ever being in guns in the first place and the further lunacy that Galen's nutso Real IRA man was so wedded to the Sons as the only possible middlemen for his vast arms marketing empire. Jax's plan is to get out facilitating mass murder by moving into whoremongering, and he really seems to think it's a step up. Ordinarily I'd look at a plan like that and say "Your mother must be so proud" but then Jax's mother is Gemma Morrow….

There's still two episodes to go, in which presumably Tara's bonkers scheme to get out of Charming with her kids is going to go even more malevolently wrong than it already has. Of course, the real suspense is over whether we've got all these plastic paddies out of Charming once and for all, but I know better than to get too optimistic.

In other news, Donal Logue blew up in the hangar. I'd been looking forward to watching him mess the Sons up all the way through this season, and instead he had a complete meltdown and was dead by episode six, by which stage it was a blessed relief to see him getting off the screen before he ruined all my happy memories of everything else he'd done. Mind you, at least he took Otto with him. That was something. 

But the big news is Clay is gone. After guns, Clay has been Sons' biggest problem for a couple of years now. On the one hand, Ron Perlman is awesome, and you could see how the team didn't want to let go of an asset like that. On the other hand, Clay should have been dead years ago. It was getting harder and harder to believe the stories which were somehow keeping him alive, no matter how much Ron Perlman did to make you buy them. Clay had to go, if anything else was going to make any sense. And with him gone; with that epic presence finally eased out; the rest of the cast have got a chance to fill the space with something new. Are we going to see them step up in the last two episodes? 

Under the Dome; This is not going to end well. Or at all.

Stephen King adaptations rarely work out well. If you'd put me in the hot box and worked me over for a while trying to sweat an answer out of me, I'd have said "Bitches, you want to beat the truth out of someone, don't be such lightweights. Drop the phone books; use Stephen King books." Because man, Stephen King is not the kind of guy who's going to use one word if he can get the job done in a chapter. And the iron rule is one page of dialogue is one minute of screen time. Try to cram one of his doorstops into a movie length and you're going to lose most of the words, and with them, you're going to lose the characters, who rise above formula when King has the space to let us hear what they're - kinda long-windedly - thinking.

So, if not movies, surely TV? In TV, you've got all the room you want, all the space you need for King's prose to sprawl out on the sofa just like the viewers. Yeah, not a lot of encouragement over in TV land either, where productions have routinely choked on the need to keep the action family friendly.

CBS found another way to go wrong. Under the Dome is one of King's less grisly books, in that no-one's getting ripped to pieces by eldritch abominations and such as. Bad stuff is happening, but it's all well within the wheelhouse of contemporary drama, even on CBS. And a standard half season run would have been a good fit for Under the Dome's bloated but only a week long plot. The problem - and it's a biggie - is that CBS aren't a cable channel and they like everything to run forever. This is the home of CSI, which is still running even though everyone I know stopped watching it about four years ago. Under the Dome is a bad fit for that model, what with the one week of action and the ending where everything burns down and blows up. Not really something you can spin out.

Undaunted, like fools and geniuses throughout history, CBS went for it anyhow. And they had one brainwave, dialling down the evil lunacy on Big Jim Rennie from "Aliens made the dome just to keep Big Jim Rennie from getting on reality" to "Small town demagogue with a mean streak". Even wilier, they hired Dean Norris, fresh off playing Hank in Breaking Bad, to play him. Norris is a good actor, coming off a role where he'd played a pretty uncomplicated good guy in a landscape of very complicated bad guys. Those two things together brought a lot of ambiguity to the character in the opening straight; sure, you'd hate to have to buy a car off Big Jim, but he wasn't a monster. Might even have some decency to him if he didn't have anything personal riding on a decision. 

Between hiring Norris and cutting a cow in half, the producers must have used up all the money, because there's no-one else in the cast who can even keep up - though in fairness, this was also true of the book characters; when I was reading the book, I kept having to flip back to figure out who the heck was angst-ing now about the current plot red herring. Big Jim might not have been the most plausible character ever to walk the pages of fiction, but he had a couple of dimensions to him...

Now, if CBS had grasped the idea that this was always a short term one time deal, by that one act of tweaking Big Jim to be more subtle, they'd have been well on the way to making an adaptation which might have beaten the source material. Instead, they faffed about, setting up mini-problems each week without ever doing anything to suggest that the townspeople were in any way freaked out by being stuck under an impervious goldfish bowl. They took King's howlingly insane meth plot and made it more howlingly insane, if that were possible. About six episodes in, I was starting to get worried; then I heard they were going for a second season and my heart just sank. There's no long game for the underlying idea. It was always about putting people in a pressure cooker and seeing what happened, and King went out of his way to stack it so that things would go to hell in a hand basket within a week. 

CBS wants something like a dystopian Gilligan's Island, or god help us, another Lost. This is a) dumb b) not the book they're supposedly adapting, but if that was the way they wanted to go, they shouldn't have smuggled in all the dynamite King stuffed his Dome with.

It will be next summer until we see whether getting King in to do the writing gets them back out of the hole they've dug themselves, but in the meantime, watch the Simpsons Movie, which I suspect is going to remain the definitive video version of "small town gets stuck under impervious dome".

It's Eurovision time; the annual hooting and poking fun post

The Eurovision song contest is a never ending source of wonderment to me, mostly for how wrong it can go. The bland songs never draw me in; it's the way they chuck spectacle at the screen in an effort to stand out somehow. One of the singers is five months pregnant and I was honestly surprised that they resisted the temptation to have the baby come out and join in.

Moldova are the first outbreak of traditional goofiness, sending a hairdo the Leningrad Cowboys would have sold their winkle-pickers for; there must have been a song underneath it, but between the quiff and the I-wanna-be-Hell's-Christmas-tree dress, it's not like I had a lot of attention left over for music. Hot on the heels of that, Finland's back in touch with its inner Lordi and sent us Krista, who seems to have picked her costume after all the backing group got first call on the clothes that fit. Belgium's sent a song and some dancers which have me honestly wondering if they just asked the European Commission to temp for them; it's like watching the world's most awkward dad being turned into a young woman and then told to groove it at a wedding.

The whole Maltese team looked so delighted to be there, and also as though they'd only been told at the last minute that they were on telly that might and had run over to the studio in whatever they were wearing when the call came in. Which was somehow adorable but it's probably just as well they weren't going to win, because I don't think there's room for a Eurovision in Malta unless all the actual Maltese take a holiday that week someplace else. I was disappointed that Germany broke a great streak of weird US pastiches and sent a taped-off-the-radio of last year's winner instead. But at least this way I know what Austria will send next year….

The standout of the show - at least at the half way mark it's hard to imagine anything topping it - has to be Romania, who sent Ming the Merciless to sing countertenor while standing on a huge pink binliner. If they win with this, I have no idea how the Galactic Empire will run itself, but clearly a heck of a lot less fabulously. Hungary, in the meantime has had a complete irony bypass and sent a lovely little low-key love song performed by a charming gang of hipsters who had a backdrop of those weird cartoons we used to get from Eastern Europe when I was a kid.

Best choreography idea has to have been Azerbaijan, who put their dancer in a box; sounds dumb, but it was pretty clever when they did it. And it feels safe to say that most fun song of the evening is going to be the Greek one, which is bonkers in the best possible way. The Eurovision has to be one of the few places where you can say "It's not safe out there, bring an accordion" and have it work out perfectly. Ukraine may have nailed the worst choreography medal by getting the tallest man they could find in the Ukraine to show up in plaid just to carry their singer on stage and walk back off again. They didn't even let him say "Hodor."

Italy have - to their eternal credit - made the French mistake. They hired a good singer, got him a good song, and sent him on stage in a beautifully cut suit, for all the world as if he was in some kind of song contest. It's so outside the box, it might even work. 

Ireland, for the first time in ages, actually seems to have decided to act like they cared. It was a perfectly good song and they didn't send a joke double act to sell it. I'd never realised quite how Spartacus celtic drummers could be made to look, but there always has to be one act with oiled up muscle men in every Eurovision. With any luck we won't actually win, but it's nice to look like we actually give a crap.

This may be a surprising year, because some of the circle jerks of past years have been disrupted; the Balkans and Cyprus are out of play, giving no handy bloc to pass all those votes around, and there's less of the Baltic than we usually see as well. And Denmark seems to be running away with it with half the votes in, while Ireland is firmly in bottom place. I'd like to think it can only get better...

But it didn't. Dead last, in a world where Jedward could get a respectable score last year by acting like kids who'd been let loose in a toy box. So much for trying to take it seriously. We should send them Dustin next year.

The Lady Vanishes; if Hitchcock didn't do a straight adaptation of the book, neither should you

Ethel Lina White was the Lee Child of her day, or thereabouts, but not the least irony of her career as a detective story writer in the years between the Wars was that the most famous adaptation of her work didn't even use her title, The Wheel Spins, and chucked a few extra characters into the mix because Hitchcock felt his movie needed more fun in it. Two of them, Charters and Caldicott, were such a big hit that they wound up living on into three other movies; these days they'd probably have got their own franchise and gone around thwarting vast plots armed only with well-thumbed Wisdens, but in the 30s and 40s people had more sense, and they were rolled out as comforting comic relief.

The BBC saw all this, and pondered it hard, and duly decided that the world had been waiting almost eighty years for a faithful adaptation of the original book, though they didn't go to the crazy lengths of keeping the original title. They hired the proverbial metric buttload of English character actors and packed them all off an train journey from somewhere in Yugoslavia to Trieste, all so that one of them could vanish, another one could go nuts looking for her, and the rest of them could, for various complicated reasons, flatly refuse to admit that they knew anything about it. 

The girl going nuts was a character called Iris Carr, but the actress' name was the infinitely more suitable Tuppence Middleton, exactly the sort of name all high-spirited gels could be relied on to have in the 1930s, or at least in Agatha Christie, which represents the high water mark of my general knowledge about the 1930s English society (I always assume that the social milieu has been meticulously represented in Christie books, on the shaky basis that the plots are so outrageously unrealistic that she could never have gotten away with them unless everything else was fairly grounded). In what was either a brave moment or a spectacularly bad piece of acting, she's thoroughly unlikeable all the way through, which would probably be even more jarring if it weren't for the fact that no-one else is particularly likeable. At the heart of the original books was the notion that everyone on the train is either positively beastly (if Yugoslav) or kind of a selfish dick (if English). So poor old Iris is surrounded by platoons of people with their own various reasons for being unhelpful, and in principle, it takes the whole movie to figure out who's really out to get her and who just doesn't give a toss. 

It turns out that watching a bunch of people being dicks to an unlikeable socialite is, on the one hand, an interesting comment on the way people look after themselves without either malice or sympathy for those around them, and on the other hand, kind of hard to get that invested in. There's no-one to like, and we return to the Master, who had the basic wit to make Iris more likeable, her beau less of a drip, and to add some English caricatures who were fun rather than just cold and self-involved. Poor Ethel Lina White is long dead now, God rest her soul, but if she had any lingering doubts about whether Hitchcock did the right thing by tearing up half her novel, the BBC have just shown her what might have happened if he'd done a Coen Brothers on it and shot everything just like it was on the page. 

Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire; never gets funnier than that title

It takes a very particular kind of mind to be disappointed when a TV character has two umlauts in his name and neither of them are sounded properly, but thät's höw I röll. Kröd Mändoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire was something which I wanted to like, partly because it's really about time someone took the everliving piss out of fantasy in general, and partly because I enjoyed the splendid ridiculousness of a man who had - apparently - a flaming sword of fire. Probably made for him by the Ministry for Redundancy Ministry, I speculated, but it turns out that once they beat the title out of him, the writer who liked playing with words must have croaked from the ill-treatment, only to be replaced by the eight or nine guys who couldn't see a banana without thinking "Nyuk, nyuk, fellatio joke alert!"

There was a time when sex jokes had to be double entendres so that you could pretend that you hadn't meant at all to frighten the horses, and that you had no idea that people with filthy minds might put such a terrible interpretation on your innocent ruminations about cats or vegetable marrows or whatever. And then we all got veddy growed up and mature and such as, and it was briefly hilarious to have jokes which were single entendres. Well, I say hilarious, but I mean bearable. There's always an element of shock or surprise or the unexpected in a successful joke. Which means that repetition is generally death to humour. From time to time you get someone so talented that they can take a joke and chase it so hard and so far that the repetition itself becomes a successful joke. This talent is far rarer than comedians think it is, and so it comes to pass that Kröd Mändoon's actors found themselves trying to wring three hours worth of funny out of ten minutes worth of assorted gay panic and nympho jokes. I doubt anyone involved is going to remember it as their finest hour. I'd go so far as to say that I hope no-one involved is going to remember it as their finest hour, because we all deserve better than that, and they were all doing their best, in Hungary of all places, on the kind of budget you get when you're a joint UK-Canadian co-production for TV.

It's genuinely hard to think of a movie or TV show where mocking fantasy clichés has worked. The Princess Bride pulled it off, but then again The Princess Bride exists in a class of its own; there really is nothing else like it out there, either as a book or movie. It works partly because the writing is wonderful and comes from a real affection for the things it's gently mocking, but mostly because at every moment there's someone to root for; all the characters had a grandness to them, even though I'd happily pay extra even now for a print without Billy Crystal's Miracle Max. Well, it's not fair to expect Kröd Mändoon to be in that league, but it's a pity that the writers didn't think a bit more about why The Princess Bride or even Xena Warrior Princess worked as well as they did.

Because boring repetitive sex jokes to one side, the biggest problem in the show is that there's no-one to root for. Obviously you can't root for the villains, but the heroes are idiots. Kröd Mändoon himself is a mopey neurotic warrior leader with the attention span of cheese mould and the leadership skills of the recording secretary of a minor drama society. His sturdy band of heroes comprises a wizard whose cowardice slightly outweighs his utter ineptitude, a slave whose primary skill is shooting his own team by mistake with a minor in breaking things, a pagan warrior who's the only person in the whole thing who knows what she's doing and has any confidence in herself, but is depicted permanently as a slut, and - saving the worst for last - the gay lover of Kröd's former mentor, who's played as a swish stereotype so broad, it's probably offensive to stereotypes in general, let alone actual gay people. Collectively, they could be outwitted by a tree-stump, and someone must have thought that this was hilarious in its own right. 

Rather than pitting them against a tree-stump, the writers set them against Matt Lucas, here playing Eddie Izzard playing Blackadder. I recently watched Eddie Izzard playing a comedy villain in Bullet in the Face, which was kind of terrible, but had the crazy courage to run with every lunatic idea that crossed its writers' minds for just long enough to shock you before finding something even worse and shocking you with that instead. God knows it wasn't good, but it never got samey. Izzard hung around the edges as one of the two primary Big Bads, alternating between chewing the scenery and telling everyone how good it tasted. Matt Lucas was obviously going for the same vibe as corrupt Governor Dongalore, but since the character was written as a rubbishy poltroon with no redeeming features, the script didn't do him any favours. It's rarely a good sign when the most dignified performance in a show is coming from John Rhys-Davies, a lovely actor who specialises in loveably gruff hamminess. When he showed up, things got noticeably better, at least until the script called for him to pose in a leather jockstrap for no particularly good reason. That's a hard image to square with dignity, even when the show's already taken a moment to linger on the sight of Matt Lucas strutting his stuff in a fur codpiece big enough to wallpaper some of the offices I've had to work in.

As is so often the case in shows with idiot villains and heroes, the one sane man in the whole proceeding is Dongalore's endlessly put-upon lackey Barnabas. Alexander McQueen plays him with a long-suffering dignity which is either very good acting or just the actor giving a completely honest reaction to the thought of what he's having to do make a crust this week.

Sons of Anarchy Season 5

Since about a third of the page views for this blog come from people wondering about the verisimilitude of SoA Season Three's trip to beautiful downtown Nordor, I feel like I owe it to my tiny readership to express some thoughts, no matter how cursory, about the short strange trip that was Season 5.

Season 4 was a bit of a mess - I tend to think of all of SoA as a bit of a mess, but apparently everyone thought that about Season 4, which scrambled around frantically trying to find things for everyone to do while Jax deliberated eternally over whether or not to schwack Clay. Having painted everyone into a corner with such gay abandon that he might as well have used a firehose instead of a brush, Sutter whisked aside the curtain and announced cheerily that it was all a CIA plot and that Clay would have to be kept alive so that … well, my suspension of disbelief doesn't get the kind of mileage it would need to get for me to try to explain how it all worked; obviously what's really happening is that Ron Perlman has Sutter's motorcycle locked in a basement somewhere, and to get it back intact Sutter had to think of something, anything, to avoid Ron needing to look for real work in 2012. My opinion; schwacking him and having him come back as ghost would have insulted our intelligence slightly less, but I suspect that Sutter was scared of being told that he was copying the Harry the Ghost schtick from Dexter the TV show.

Anyhow, from that unpromising start, Sutter had to assemble something in the shape of Season 5, and I was not that optimistic about how it was going to go. Clay was still sticking around, gumming up the works. The Sons were still operating in the alternate economic universe where it's possible to make money in the United States of Armed-error by IMPORTING guns from the least armed and least gun-friendly country in Europe, a universe which is co-located with the political fantasy land where the CIA is in any way interested in either Ireland or Mexico to the point where they'd make deals with domestic terrorists to keep a better eye on either of them. I had no idea what you could throw into the scales on the other side to balance that up into something I could watch without poking fun.

Well, fair dos to Mr Sutter, the man has got a couple of gears I hadn't suspected. Season five has finally settled Clay's hash. And the Sons are finally edging their way out of the guns and coke business. And a lot of the bad crazy stupid things they've done are starting to have real world consequences for them and the people around them, which is satisfying. I'm actually kind of looking forward to Season six, where all kinds of bits of plausible retribution are going to have to work their way through the system, schwacking guilty and innocent alike.

Not too dusty for a season which got going by burning Tig's daughter alive, introducing Jimmy Smits as a pimp and finally putting poor Opie out of his misery (though I don't discount the possibility that Sutter is planning to resurrect Opie in Season 6 so that something terrible can happen to his dead body. Opie is like the unluckiest Hell's Angel EVAR). Other fun things; bringing in Donal Logue as a ringer at the end of the season, undoubtedly so that he can terrorise the entire cast the whole way through the next season; bringing in Walton Goggins as a transvestite hooker, because Walton Goggins; and giving Harold Perrineau the best ever explanation of why kingpins need to take revenge - because otherwise they'll just brood on their grievances and lose focus on the big picture. And in a cheering testament to the way that in TV world chemo just works for good and bad alike, Ex-Sherriff Unser has lasted just as long with cancer as Walter White, without ruining anyone's life at all. Yay, Unser. There's a vocal constituency on the internet which want to see him get his own show called Unser PI, but if the money's out there for anyone to get a PI show it needs to be spent on ten more seasons of Terriers.

The Killing [Forbrydelsen] III; Sometimes, less is less

I posted briefly on the first - and I now realise, best - season of The Killing at the beginning of the year. Last night I watched the grande finale, and it crystallised something which nagged at me all the way through watching the second season and the third one; that seasons only ten episodes long weren't even half as good as the sprawling, character driven mess 20 episodes could give us. And re-reading my own post about the first season, I see that I was almost foretelling what might go wrong in the future. The first season is engrossing, even though the red herrings and indeed the whole final plot don't really hang together very well. What made The Killing work was the way it brought characters to life as they grappled with the aftermath of a single murder that - despite endless hints that it was part of some vast sinister conspiracy - came home to very simple and domestic miseries. The second season was a little disappointing after that; while Sarah Lund remained a hypnotic and charismatic presence at the heart of the action, the surrounding characters for the new murder - and the new murders themselves - never really came into focus in the same way.

For the third season, they tried to bring things back to family, with Lund chasing after the abducted daughter of Denmark's most important family of plutocrats, to discover that the abduction itself was driven by revenge for a father who'd lost his daughter. Meanwhile, Lund's own family relationships were falling apart as she simultaneously wrestled with becoming a granny and the problem of breaking up the marriage of an old flame. Over on the inevitable (and honestly never that interesting) political wing of the story, the Danish prime minister was wondering what more he could have done to stop his son from killing himself and how much he was going to need to do to stop his own brother from becoming a complete moral bankrupt. Could there have been more family to fret about? Probably not. But just by having so many family issues to deal with all at once in so short a time, they wound up not being able to work out any of them well enough to give us the same depth of empathy we had the families in the first season. It might be that this kind of thing is like cooking pasta; you've got to use a bigger pan than you think if you don't want everything sticking together in an indigestible clump of starch.

We live in a world where they brought back Dallas after almost 30 years, so I assume nothing from the insistence of the entire production team that the end of the third season of The Killing is the end, full stop. Mind you, given that the season ends with Lund straight up shooting the bad guy in the head rather than live with idea that he might just go on being the bad guy, it's going to be …. challenging …. to get a fourth season on the road. It will take more than one line of dialogue to get them out of that one. Maybe we can come back in 20 years, when they let her out of jail for murder. Although people have been shocked by Lund snapping, I have to say that there was a moment when a cold certainty crept over me that it was the only way things could go. I looked at Lund sitting there in the back of the car, staring at the man she knew had killed at least one young woman and almost certainly dozens, and I thought to myself, she's going to shoot that guy in the back of the head before very long. I was wrong. She shot him in the side of the head. I'm not sure if it was true to the character we've lived through forty episodes with, but I think that it was true to the character we were with in those moments; otherwise I'd never have seen it coming.

The weird thing is how closely the master plot in the first and third seasons coincided. A couple lose their daughter (to murder/to kidnapping). They struggle to get to grips with it, and to find some kind of justice. All the way through, they're supported by a long time family friend who's a core part of the family business and who they've always trusted, and in the end it turns out that he's the real bad guy. And he gets extra-judicially murdered by someone who's at the end of their tether. 

I have to be clear; if I've got a complaint at all, it's that there just wasn't enough of something I really liked. This was great TV. I just wish that there had been more of it. With more time, the third season at least could have been even more awesome than the first one.

The 2012 Barrel; presumably awash with oil

Eurovision has become quite staggeringly vulgar over the years; not the individual acts, but the ever ratcheting visual flash of the staging by the organizers. Azerbaijan rustled up a hall for this year's extravaganza in seven months, and still had money left over to fill the place with pyrotechnics; maybe it's time that they started applying something like US campaign funding rules to Eurovision and telling the hosts that they can't spend any more money than the first one cost.

The UK don't seem to have noticed what happened to France last year and so they sent a singer to sing an actual song, albeit a singer older than my dad and a song which makes him look young. As a nul points contender, it's got everything going for it. Hungary seems to have discovered a stash of 1980s vampire wannabes and has decided to see if the stage lighting will do the same thing as sunlight; sadly not, though I can't remember anything about the song thirty seconds after they stopped. And; this just in; Albania has its own Bjork. Keeping up the 1980s theme, she looks like a rejected costume drawing for the Flash Gordon movie's evil queen, with the comedy bonus of a hairdo that mixes the best of a beehive and ludicrous pony tail.

Lithuania is going even further back in time with a guy who thinks it's a shame the rat pack don't still dominate the world. Because the song is about how love is blind, he started it off in a blindfold; it would have been kinder to offer it to the audience. Neighboring Russia have had an epic irony bypass, and sent a banderilla of babushkas, all of whom look like veterans of the Great Patriotic War, but apparently one of them is only 44. Flesh colored boom mikes are never a great idea, but on a crew this old, they really look like big warts from just about every angle. But the crowd goes wild, so what do I know?

More than France, possibly, who seem to have caught up with what this is all about and have sent a shouty woman in a nightdress and half the French olympic gym team. I suspect this is going to capture the attention of a much smaller subset of the population than they were planning for; specifically all the people who've been hoping Cher would start touring again because she's SO fabulous.

Italy are now short of money that they've sent necromancers to dig up Amy Winehouse; honestly the only difference I can see is that Nina Zilli hasn't felt the urge to illustrate herself. Not often that the Eurovision has me mourning what might have been in the real world. Norway appear to have found themselves wondering what would happen if Justin Bieber tried to channel Eminem; the answer is that you get something disturbingly like a live action version of Flynn Ryder from Entangled; and perhaps it's best to avoid having your lead spastically flailing around the stage yelling "I don't know what I'm doing tonight." when it's so obvious that he doesn't. 

Just when I thought the Eurovision had forgotten its essential madness, Romania have saved the day with a traditional number; an overadrenalised hot chick in a tiny dress babbling gibberish at the top of her voice and a backing band all in white and playing an assortment of instruments that should never be seen together let alone played together; including a set of bagpipes and a French horn with a bundle of vuvuzelas stuck down the barrel. A welcome return to form for the show. And it seems to signal it getting back into stride; the Danes showed why they're dominating murder dramas but not pop music, and now the Greeks have rolled out with a completely mainstream piece of zorba-inflected bubblegum consisting of English catchphrases and a whole bunch of vowel sounds. That's more like it.

There's always at least one number which makes you think that the country's been subjected to a musical theatre coup, but Turkey seems to have decided that what they really need for next year is a gay tourism bonanza, possibly with vampire overtones. I don't think I've seen anything this camp since I first found out what camp meant. Amazingly, the phrase "Hello Sailor" wasn't used, but it would probably have been overkill.

Jedward have now been and gone, another cunning move in our struggle to ensure that we never have to pay to host this thing again. It's impossible to dislike Jedward, but it's equally impossible to believe that they pay attention during the choreography rehearsals, possibly because they think that as twins they have the superpower of moving as one and so don't need to practice. The outfits this year were arresting; If 1980's Flash Gordon had had a subplot where screamingly fabulous aliens invaded the earth, their armour would have looked just like Jedward's; sensibly, they didn't see any need for head protection.

Voting went pretty much the way it always does, including the ritual humiliation of the UK, who only missed placing dead last by virtue of Norway doing as badly as they traditionally do. Seems like people feel even more hacked off about the Vikings than they do about the Empire.

Forbrydelsen; fudging the landing

Forbrydelsen, aka The Killing, was a big deal on the BBC this year, but I never got the chance to see it till I got it as a Christmas present. Whereupon it got watched in big four hour chunks, just like the creators didn't intend at all. Not only did it go out once a week in Denmark back in 2007, but they took a long break in the middle. People actually protested a bit and got the break shortened. They had a point; the show is compulsive. The gimmick is simple in the extreme. Take a single murder, and then spend twenty episodes not so much trying to solve it as trying to show the ways that the effects of a murder ripple out in all directions to ruin lives. The exact opposite of your standard cop show, in other words.

It works brilliantly as a show about people. This is just as well, because the murder mystery winds up not making any sense. There's a huge amount of drama in the way that the victim's family falls apart, and almost as much drama in the way that the lead detective lets the case take over her life and destroy everything in it. There's even a certain amount of traditionally Shakespearean tragedy in the way that the investigation draws in an ambitious politician and ruins him, although it's hard to get anyone in Ireland to care what happens to politicians these days.

Now, to get a murder investigation to last over twenty episodes, you've got to chuck red herrings about like snuff at a wake, and The Killing tosses in so many blind alleys and false leads that one sane response is just to let them wash over you and wait for something to happen to the characters you care about. That was pretty much my reaction. I don't really read or watch crime shows out of any curiosity about the mystery; it's the journey that interests me more than the destination. Still, I'm moved to grumble out the final landing in The Killing, because the ultimate revelation doesn't make sense of all the the blind alleys which have gone before. From quite early on, the killing's been set up as the work of a serial killer, maybe even a serial killer who's being protected by the government. And - sorry if this is a spoiler - in the end, that turns out not to be the case. And I'd be fine with that, if it weren't for the fact that it's really hard to square the final outcome with the stuff in the middle. It doesn't make sense that all those extra complications would have sprung up given the bone simple motive at the heart of the murder. So I was sitting there at the end of the twenty hours thinking, well, that was a great flight, but the pilot's really messed up the landing.

And several days later, I still think that. I'd still recommend The Killing over most of the TV I've watched in 2011, but I'd do it on the basis of the way the whole world is brought to life, and the way the main characters hold your attention no matter what they're doing. Just enjoy the journey, and don't expect the pay off to be the equal of the build up.

2011 Eurovision; new fish, new barrel, same shotgun

Eurovision is one of my guilty pleasures, though it's not what it used to be when I could listen to Terry Wogan's commentary; Graham Norton's too snide for my taste. Still I usually tune in...

Finland gets things off to an anodyne start; one teenage kid with a guitar. Between what he's wearing and the whiny song, he's the guy who shows up at your party with a guitar and if someone doesn't strangle him in the first hour, he's just going to ruin everything. Oh, dear lord; here comes Bosnia and Herzogovina with the Finnish kid's elder brother. He's wearing a jacket he seems to have stolen off a clown that died from embarrassment. And he's got an acoustic guitar, though just like everyone else in the band he seems to be using it to keep his hands full rather than actually playing it. This is going to be just epic. And here's Denmark, with four guys who are at least pretending to play their instruments. They've got a real dirge of a song, just not fast enough for the upbeat tone they seem to have been aiming for.

Just looking at Hungary, with a song from straight out of the glory days of disco, but easily the most arresting feature is that great big blue ring she's wearing; I swear it's bigger than my fist; I don't know how it's not dragging the mike away from her mouth. And here's Ireland. We'll never again be as embarrassing as Dustin, so I can watch this pretty calmly, but I've always been amazed by Jedward. They finish each other's sentences, but their physical coordination is a thing of wonder. You'd expect twins to dance in sync, but most of the time, they're doing well if either of them has his own legs in synch with each other. It's completely counterintuitive, but somehow beguiling. They're terrible but they're having so much fun it's hard to be annoyed with them. Still can't fight the idea that the roots of their hair go as deep as the strands stick up.

And here's Sweden's boy band, who I reckon are going to get 15% of Europe's vote, if that old Kinsey percentage has any accuracy to it. They look like an off duty version of the Village People, but prettier. Whoever put together Estonia's bit hasn't watched anything but Glee boxed sets for at least a year. At first I thought they'd clubbed Lea Michele and dragged her in a box to Tallinn the way Kim Jong Il used to kidnap Japanese movie directors. And you know, that's not an entirely bad idea, so please, feel free to try it. Greece sent the guy who models for German suit commercials, but in case that was too euro-mainstream, they backed him up with a white rapper from London, which is just bananas. Yet, just think, it wasn't until Greece, the ninth act, that we have someone coming out and doing a song even partly in their own language instead of English.

And the Cold War is SO over; Russia's sent a singing Jimmy Dean; no, I'm being too kind. It's the Russian John Travolta from Grease, complete with three idiot greasers to pose behind him. Pity they forgot to steal his song as well. Meanwhile, France has brought a howitzer to the knife fight; apparently the planners thought this was still a song contest, so they sent a professional singer with an actual song. He appears to be a junior officer in the Tenor regiment, and he's going to be on a charge when he gets back to barracks and has to explain to the TenorGeneral why he appeared in public with his jacket all unbuttoned and no dress sword. But my word, he can surely sing the hell out of an actual song. He's got no business here at all.

Wow, Italy are back in the Eurovision. Now I know the world's going to end at any minute. They appear to have sent the guy who plays the piano at Berlusconi's bunga bunga parties, who after all is probably a bit short of work at the moment. Moldova must be filling in the obligatory eastern european lunatic segment; no it just got weirder. It was pretty mad with three guys wearing three foot tall furry dunce hats, but they were just warming us up for the chick who came in on a unicycle and an even taller dunce hat. Why don't they just have a special prize for this stuff?

Austria seem to have learned nothing from history; they still think that doing whatever Germany just did will be a winning strategy. So last year Germany sent a girl with an actual song and a little black dress, and guess what Austria's doing. Not always the same hands, please. Nearby Slovenia; it's possible their Eurovision invite crossed with the invite to Slutwalk 2011, but whatever happened they get the prize for the most slapperiffic girl combo so far; they look like they've snuck out to celebrate their junior certs without their mothers seeing what they were wearing.

Georgia have sent the band who play over the credits in some terrible 1980s attempt to make Tron in a garden shed. The costumes aren't quite mad enough to distract from the song, but my god, they try.

And now we get to the moment when the host country gets to show case the best of their talent. I know that the Germans didn't choose this act by having a random lottery, because a random pick would have been better. They had to pick this one out on purpose. The singer's got a whole suit inspired by the Bosnian jacket, and a schtick which was looking a bit dated when Sinatra still seemed cool to young people.

The wacky world of eurovision voting hasn't changed much; it's still the same old whirl of regional circle jerks despite an attempt to dilute phone voting with expert juries. It's fun to watch the non-regional stuff; now we know who's working on building sites in Italy, and it's fun that Poland gave Ireland a point - some of those returning construction workers must have been feeling sentimental. And someone up in Scandinavia must have picked up on my tentative offer to let our former colonial overlords in Viking land back in.

And my word, Azerbaijan won. Not a great song, but a perfectly solid one, and the one group who had a decent visual. So fair enough. And thank goodness we didn't embarrass ourselves, but we didn't win, so we don't have to worry about paying for that next year.

Sons of Anarchy go Ireland. Hilariously

Last night I was at a loose end and I sat down and watched the four episode chunk of the third season of Sons of Anarchy where the gang goes to Belfast and does things.

I'm an unabashed fan of SOA, which has a lot to recommend it, but the Irish end of things has always left me wondering if anyone involved with the production has done so much as watch the Quiet Man all the way through, let alone meet anyone Irish or ask anyone from east of South Boston whether they were getting things roughly right.

From the outset, I've been fascinated by the notion that the Sons of Anarchy's principal source of finance is running guns from Ireland to the West Coast of the US. I've assumed all along that this was just a matter of trying to find something criminal for the SOA to do without being you know, SO criminal that audiences would just revolt. I'm not sure I agree with the thinking here. It's as though the team behind the Sopranos had decided that they'd make a movie about Italian American criminals but would skip over prostitution, drug running and protection rackets in case it stopped the audience from watching the characters. In real life, bike gangs finance their operations with crystal meth, and AMC have had a good run with Breaking Bad, which is all about making crystal meth. But the team chose to go with gunrunning and now they're stuck with it.

What it's meant in practice is a succession of dodgy Irish accents from American actors who aren't very good at accents even when they're good at everything else. Titus Welliver is GOOD at playing villains. But he gets 100% less frightening every time his accent slips. Now all of this should have been pretty apparent to the team before very long, but it hasn't stopped them from upping the Irish presence as the show has unfolded, and the whole of the third season has been dominated by a confrontation between the SOA and the IRA. And for four episodes, most of the cast were in Belfast and it was just hilarious.

Of course they couldn't afford to send all the cast to Belfast, so all the principal photography was still done in Calfiornia. But they could afford to send a second unit over to Belfast to do pickup and establishing shots. One advantage of making a show about a biker gang is that you can put the cast into helmets a lot, and one helmet looks much like another. So they got all kinds of shots of mobs of bikers prowling Belfast and its environs, and then they'd cut from those shots to close ups of the actual cast doing things in US locations chosen to look not catastophically unlike the locations in Ireland.

If you don't live in Ireland, it probably works, but if you're from these parts it jars. A lot. The light is wrong. The foliage is wrong. I never appreciated until I lived away from Ireland just how much greener it is than anywhere is. It's all a rich deep green that you don't see in warmer climates. Like California. And in Northern Ireland, it's all been very carefully worked over. There are two separate scenes where the SOA get stopped by the Northern Ireland police on tree shaded roads. There are tree shaded roads in Ireland, but they're not that common around Belfast, where there's much more farmland and pasture than people realise. More importantly, the police in Northern Ireland don't stop people in that kind of terrain; it's far too hard to control.

While I'm quibbling about the depiction of the Northern Ireland Police, they don't carry full sized assault rifles any more, even on rural patrol. They don't use ordinary landrovers, and they especially don't use 1 ton landrovers with canvas tilts. Trouble cars in Northern Ireland are uparmoured long wheelbase landrovers. And if you bribed the PSNI to take down an entire biker gang, they'd bring enough men and machinery to do it properly rather than showing up half assed with the wrong vehicles. And of course, if the said biker gang then turned the tables on them, there'd be a manhunt on an epic scale until the bikers were banged up or gunned down.

Outside of the rural scenes, most of the Northern Ireland action takes places around the compound of the Belfast Sons of Anarchy chapter, which is subtly wrong at a lot of different levels. It's too spread out and open; the kind of place in Belfast that they're trying to suggest just doesn't have that much open space. And there's set dressing like wall murals that are just wrong; it's like they were trying to come up with generic bits of nationalism which wouldn't annoy anyone. Trying not to annoy people is - in my experience - the most foolproof way of getting on everyone's nerves. But that draws me into the weird idea of the linkage between the Sons of Anarchy and the IRA. it just doesn't ring true to the reality of life in that part of Northern Ireland. You're in or you're out. There's no halfway points in Northern militancy - collusion between people who hate each other, sure, but there's no half measures when it comes to which side you're notionally on.

The front of the compound is a corner grocery store called Ashby's. Which is completely not a nationalist name, but even if you skated over that (Sands isn't really a Catholic name either, but it's pretty famous now) standalone old-fashioned grocery stores like that have been pretty much obliterated even in the most entrenched traditional communities - a point neatly underlined in the establishing shot of the Europa Hotel with the gaudy Spar across the street from it. On the topic of the Europa, since the second unit crew almost HAD to have stayed in the Europa while they were there (it's so famous as a bomb magnet that every foreign crew is practically obliged by natural law to stay there at least once) it's genuinely weird that they did so little to make sure that the interior shots in California weren't done in some place that at least looked vaguely like it. But if Ashby's had ever existed and hadn't long since been burned out and rubbled, it would be a Spar by now. Everything else is.

And whee, those accents. I know they couldn't fly everyone to Ireland, but how much would it have cost to fly in actual Irish actors to play the Irish roles? It would still have sounded wrong because Irish people can tell the difference between accents, down to neighborhood, and so the Irish cast would still all have sounded like they didn't belong together, but it would still have been a lot less horrible than the Americans doing their best, and with enough Irish people in the local cast, they'd have known not to call a sixty year old Catholic Belfastman Keith.

And back to the gun running because it was so front and centre in all of this. The logistical backbone of this whole show is that Russians smuggle weapons into Ireland and the IRA then smuggles them out to California. It just doesn't make any sense. Private ownership of guns in Ireland - either half - is so tightly regulated that if you gathered up all the legally held weapons on both sides of the border, you'd be able to fit them into a single room. Keeping guns out of the hands of subversives has been a core government preoccupation for so many years that there probably isn't another country on earth which it's more difficult to smuggle guns into. It can still be done, but it's crazy hard. And smuggling guns back out would be only slightly less hard. If you wanted to get guns from A to B, running them though Ireland would be the worst way imaginable. And even the idea that the IRA would have some vast surplus of guns they no longer needed and could sell to the US is kind of dumb. The IRA's full arsenal on its best day was only about a thousand weapons. By the end of season one, the SOA had already moved at least that many guns around California. But that's just niggling at the idea of Ireland as a point of origin for gun smuggling, as opposed to a point of delivery. The really idiotic idea is the notion that the US needs to import illegal guns at all. The US is awash with guns. They're as plentiful as cell phones and the US is one of the world's leading manufacturers of firearms. It's one of the few manufacturing areas where the US still has a significant domestic industry to meet domestic demand, though it still imports a lot of weapons from Brazil and China to meet the demand for cheap knockoffs of the domestic product. There's absolutely no need for the SOA to go to the trouble of bringing in guns from Ireland. So I've suffered through all these terrible accents for no good reason.