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Then I take it that that leaves the blank page to me
This is not Dickens, either. I got derailed by Peter Capaldi.
I watched Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009). It was streamable from Netflix; I'd never seen any of the show. Peter Capaldi wasn't the selling point, but I did notice his name in the cast; I've liked him ever since discovering him as the Angel Islington in Neverwhere (1996) and then whenever he's turned up randomly in television roles.1 He has just made the leap to someone I'll watch read the phone book, with or without lots of complicated swearing.
It is not necessary to get into the plot for the purposes of this post, except to note that Capaldi plays John Frobisher, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, who ends up oddly near the heart of the story. He doesn't look like much: a thin, greying, married-with-two-kids man with the faintly harassed look that characterizes certain levels of the civil service, busyworking through breakfast with his family, the same number of briefcase-swinging strides up the steps of Thames House that you imagine he's taken for the last thirty years of his life. What he's told to do, when he gets into his office, is order the assassination of Captain Jack Harkness and the destruction of Torchwood. It gets worse from there. By his actions, he's a study in the banality of bureaucratic evil, the sober-suited, glasses-wearing, nearly faceless functionary whose willingness to cover for his government's forty-four-year-old atrocity kills quite a lot of people and nearly ends the world; by character, he's a worried, dedicated, foolishly brave2 civil servant who loves his wife and his children and his country, none of them as wisely as he might. The result is a character sufficiently complex that it is nearly impossible for the viewer to decide how they feel about him. He's too practiced a middleman to be written off as a dupe; he's not innocent and he doesn't pretend to himself that he is. When he's all but told to his face by the Prime Minister that he's been handpicked to handle the situation with the 456 because he won't be missed if it all goes pear-shaped, he doesn't even seem surprised by the dismissal; he bends and bends endlessly to the self-serving interests of his government even when he knows he'll break before they do, because he truly seems to believe my country, right or wrong. And then he registers a little flinch of shock or despair or self-loathing at the next step falling away before him, and the next minute pulls himself together to negotiate with something out of Lovecraft3 or prepare some truly abhorrent calculations, and it's almost impressive, how thoroughly he's out of his depth, how doggedly he gets himself through each increasingly inconceivable day, at once under no illusions as to what he's doing—what he is, that he'll do any of it—and still clinging to the delusion that maybe it'll all be worth it in the end. You never get to feel simply sorry for him. You never get to write him off. And the show bestows on him a wrenchingly tragic ending, which is as open to argument as anything else he did in his life. Fine, some of this is the script. But it is not all the script that Frobisher should pop off the screen in a way that none of the other characters did for me, even the regulars; he feels so live and three-dimensional, when he's onscreen everyone else is sort of orbiting around his collapsing moral star.4 I'm not sure that was Russell T Davies' intent. It's not as though the other characters have no ethical dilemmas of their own—I think the fanbase may still be fighting over the one the show ended on. But Frobisher's is the most minutely observed and the most palpable, for which I blame Peter Capaldi; and wherever he turns up now, I will watch him.
1. I know he's legendary for Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It (2005—), but at present all it seems we can get in the U.S. is In the Loop (2009). It's near the top of my list.
2. He has his moments, but he really knows how to pick them.
3. The alien species known as the 456 are, actually, genuinely disturbing. This series is not quite more horror than science fiction, but it definitely takes place in the kind of universe where sometimes you are better off not knowing what's beyond the stars, because they are older than you are, and hungry.
4. Though I was not surprised that something awful happened to the character who would have been my favorite in the absence of Frobisher. It just took less time than usual.
Local Hero (1983) seems like a good place to start.
I watched Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009). It was streamable from Netflix; I'd never seen any of the show. Peter Capaldi wasn't the selling point, but I did notice his name in the cast; I've liked him ever since discovering him as the Angel Islington in Neverwhere (1996) and then whenever he's turned up randomly in television roles.1 He has just made the leap to someone I'll watch read the phone book, with or without lots of complicated swearing.
It is not necessary to get into the plot for the purposes of this post, except to note that Capaldi plays John Frobisher, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, who ends up oddly near the heart of the story. He doesn't look like much: a thin, greying, married-with-two-kids man with the faintly harassed look that characterizes certain levels of the civil service, busyworking through breakfast with his family, the same number of briefcase-swinging strides up the steps of Thames House that you imagine he's taken for the last thirty years of his life. What he's told to do, when he gets into his office, is order the assassination of Captain Jack Harkness and the destruction of Torchwood. It gets worse from there. By his actions, he's a study in the banality of bureaucratic evil, the sober-suited, glasses-wearing, nearly faceless functionary whose willingness to cover for his government's forty-four-year-old atrocity kills quite a lot of people and nearly ends the world; by character, he's a worried, dedicated, foolishly brave2 civil servant who loves his wife and his children and his country, none of them as wisely as he might. The result is a character sufficiently complex that it is nearly impossible for the viewer to decide how they feel about him. He's too practiced a middleman to be written off as a dupe; he's not innocent and he doesn't pretend to himself that he is. When he's all but told to his face by the Prime Minister that he's been handpicked to handle the situation with the 456 because he won't be missed if it all goes pear-shaped, he doesn't even seem surprised by the dismissal; he bends and bends endlessly to the self-serving interests of his government even when he knows he'll break before they do, because he truly seems to believe my country, right or wrong. And then he registers a little flinch of shock or despair or self-loathing at the next step falling away before him, and the next minute pulls himself together to negotiate with something out of Lovecraft3 or prepare some truly abhorrent calculations, and it's almost impressive, how thoroughly he's out of his depth, how doggedly he gets himself through each increasingly inconceivable day, at once under no illusions as to what he's doing—what he is, that he'll do any of it—and still clinging to the delusion that maybe it'll all be worth it in the end. You never get to feel simply sorry for him. You never get to write him off. And the show bestows on him a wrenchingly tragic ending, which is as open to argument as anything else he did in his life. Fine, some of this is the script. But it is not all the script that Frobisher should pop off the screen in a way that none of the other characters did for me, even the regulars; he feels so live and three-dimensional, when he's onscreen everyone else is sort of orbiting around his collapsing moral star.4 I'm not sure that was Russell T Davies' intent. It's not as though the other characters have no ethical dilemmas of their own—I think the fanbase may still be fighting over the one the show ended on. But Frobisher's is the most minutely observed and the most palpable, for which I blame Peter Capaldi; and wherever he turns up now, I will watch him.
1. I know he's legendary for Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It (2005—), but at present all it seems we can get in the U.S. is In the Loop (2009). It's near the top of my list.
2. He has his moments, but he really knows how to pick them.
3. The alien species known as the 456 are, actually, genuinely disturbing. This series is not quite more horror than science fiction, but it definitely takes place in the kind of universe where sometimes you are better off not knowing what's beyond the stars, because they are older than you are, and hungry.
4. Though I was not surprised that something awful happened to the character who would have been my favorite in the absence of Frobisher. It just took less time than usual.
Local Hero (1983) seems like a good place to start.
no subject
Local Hero (1983) seems like a good place to start.
LH has an outstanding musical score composed by Mark Knopfler, then of Dire Straits. You can get a taste of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMwcGPjYAIk
no subject
Cool.
no subject
Oh, yeah. Sailing is a great album ...
Baloney again.