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Thursday TV
I think Ashes to Ashes got better this week. Maybe it just got different but the change was at least enough to make me want to keep watching. After all it’s not as if the parent series were perfect. Trying to remember the first few episodes of Life of Mars I do recall thinking it was going to make more of the case Sam Tyler was supposed to be investigatingin 2006, that there would be more of a standard mystery/thriller element to the whole thing, a “who is Sam Tyler and what is his mysterious back story?” Instead it became very much a stranger in a strange land story, the strangeness of history in the collective sense, while Sam’s personal history was reduced to Freudian cliché. Sam had daddy issues, Gene was his faux-father figure. It can’t be the same with Gene and Alex, he’s not who she fears growing up to be or being less than. In the new story Gene is really Annie (but never tell him I said that).
So two things happened this week. Alex began to take the place seriously and a new potential foil/nemesis character turned up in the form of Evan. In 1981 Evan worked for her mother, in 2008 he’s godparent to her child, he takes her away in clip that looks distinctly sinister in flashback. Evan much more than Gene is someone she might take seriously, right class, right profession, superficially a good liberal lawyer like her mother. Which suggests more backstory about her mother to come out, maybe her mother’s murder, maybe her own. There’s also a much more Mills and Boon story about our heroine being led astray by the aristocratic bounder before finally finding true love with the gruff, but underneath it all golden-hearted hero. I hope that’s not where they’re going.
Then I watched the pilot for The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Considered as a pilot this was almost flawless throwing you straight in at the deep end of the story, big dream sequence, hit the ground running, never stop running. Then just when you think you have the measure of things spitting you out naked, nine years later.
As an introduction to a sequel it had two tasks to accomplish, showing how the new story fit with the old but at the same time establishing its own unique identity. The first Terminator movie was straight-up horror, in the second the future we made was scarier than the individual monsters it spawned but both were movies about fear and the fighting of it with little room for the more nuanced emotions a TV series needs to develop. Even on a TV budget I think the pilot succeeded in conveying the urgency of the movies but it also made the characters feel human. Lena Headey was wonderful, you could believe this was a woman who’d spent most of her adult life on the run preparing for an apocalypse, who’d just started to relax her guard but not to drop it. But they also made the FBI’s view of her perfectly credible, she is just a little insane (if aware of that). TV needs more grounding than movies and this Sarah did have more of an everywoman aspect to her, every single working mother living under the threat of economic annihilation, of being consumed by the insanity of obsessive parenthood.
The second Terminator movie also had a rather clunky ‘what makes us human strand’ with Arnie, the robot Silas Marner, learning from the boy John. Summer Glau as Cameron played this far more subtly. I liked how she was curious, the objective way she kept watching John and Sarah, as if they were her equals not her masters to be slavishly imitated. I hope they make more of this, it would fit with the examination of being a mother and the edgy reltionship between Cameron and Sarah has a lot of potential.
So two things happened this week. Alex began to take the place seriously and a new potential foil/nemesis character turned up in the form of Evan. In 1981 Evan worked for her mother, in 2008 he’s godparent to her child, he takes her away in clip that looks distinctly sinister in flashback. Evan much more than Gene is someone she might take seriously, right class, right profession, superficially a good liberal lawyer like her mother. Which suggests more backstory about her mother to come out, maybe her mother’s murder, maybe her own. There’s also a much more Mills and Boon story about our heroine being led astray by the aristocratic bounder before finally finding true love with the gruff, but underneath it all golden-hearted hero. I hope that’s not where they’re going.
Then I watched the pilot for The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Considered as a pilot this was almost flawless throwing you straight in at the deep end of the story, big dream sequence, hit the ground running, never stop running. Then just when you think you have the measure of things spitting you out naked, nine years later.
As an introduction to a sequel it had two tasks to accomplish, showing how the new story fit with the old but at the same time establishing its own unique identity. The first Terminator movie was straight-up horror, in the second the future we made was scarier than the individual monsters it spawned but both were movies about fear and the fighting of it with little room for the more nuanced emotions a TV series needs to develop. Even on a TV budget I think the pilot succeeded in conveying the urgency of the movies but it also made the characters feel human. Lena Headey was wonderful, you could believe this was a woman who’d spent most of her adult life on the run preparing for an apocalypse, who’d just started to relax her guard but not to drop it. But they also made the FBI’s view of her perfectly credible, she is just a little insane (if aware of that). TV needs more grounding than movies and this Sarah did have more of an everywoman aspect to her, every single working mother living under the threat of economic annihilation, of being consumed by the insanity of obsessive parenthood.
The second Terminator movie also had a rather clunky ‘what makes us human strand’ with Arnie, the robot Silas Marner, learning from the boy John. Summer Glau as Cameron played this far more subtly. I liked how she was curious, the objective way she kept watching John and Sarah, as if they were her equals not her masters to be slavishly imitated. I hope they make more of this, it would fit with the examination of being a mother and the edgy reltionship between Cameron and Sarah has a lot of potential.