Review: House of Cards (Netflix)

Disappointingly unsatisfying for something that’s also quite gripping.

Despite the enthusiastic promotions of Netflix (which is a company I generally approve of) and the presence of Kevin Spacey in the starring role (a man I find both oddly-attractive and an excellent actor) I was reluctant to click on the huge WATCH THIS NOW banner that suddenly appeared at the top of my Netflix homepage the day this launched.

It’s not really hard to fathom why, though. I mean, you couldn’t get a much more patriarchal image than the above: a middle-aged white man sitting on a marble throne that looks an awful lot like Abraham Lincoln’s colossal monument of Massive Marble Manhood and Political Domination. I mean, I’m assuming it’s meant to be ironic: a political schemer dripping blood from his fingers to stain the great man’s chair, but I wasn’t feeling it. No, what this image said to me was POWER. I knew exactly what the program was going to be about and I hadn’t watched it, yet. Clearly Kevin Spacey was playing a Magnificent Bastard in the US political arena. And that was the story. Right there. Wow, look at the middle-aged white man go. And, I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect it to be badly acted or badly written – I respected the team and the actors – I just expected to find it dull and utterly unsurprising. I am bored to tears with ‘dramas’ about middle-aged white men running circles around everyone else. They aren’t dramatic, anymore, they’re expected, tiresome, depressing.

But I ran out of Hemlock Grove and my interest was piqued by the large number of women in the supporting cast: Robin Wright, Kate Mara,  Sakrina Jaffrey, Kristen Connolly, and Constance Zimmer, and more!

Plot

Francis Underwood (Spacey) is a US congressman who at the start of our show expects to be made Secretary of State, but his ambitions are unexpectedly thwarted. Plastering a smile on his face, he begins to plot both his revenge and advancement to an even higher position.

Claire Underwood (Wright) is Francis’s wife. Ambitious and steely in her own resolve, she works in the not-for-profit sector, spearheading the Clearwater Initiative. She seems to genuinely care about her charitable work, but this doesn’t stop her from being uncompromisingly ruthless when she believes it to be in her or Francis’s interest.

Zoe Barnes (Mara) is an ambitious young reporter who thrusts herself into the fore by snapping a fortuitous picture of Underwood admiring her rear. Underwood enjoys her audacity and sees the value of using her to strategically leak stories.

Peter Russo (played by Corey Stoll) is a US Representative addicted to drugs, alcohol and prostitutes. He’s divorced and engaged in an office romance with Christina Gallagher (Connolly), but seems like his heart is in the right place.

Russo is caught drunk driving with a prostitute in the passenger seat and Underwood sends his Chief of Staff, Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), to sweep the matter under the carpet, giving him a hold over Russo, upon whose unstable shoulders many of Underwood’s plots will turn.

How was it?

Eh… I don’t know, really. I suppose it was much as I expected: well-written, well-paced, well-acted, and… disappointingly predictable. Not in the individual twists and turns, but in that it was about a white, wealthy, middle-aged man tying everyone else in knots. And watching privilege seek revenge for a comparatively minor slight is… not that satisfying?

Spacey was exactly what he needed to be. Robin Wright was completely spot on as the ice cool hard-ass who still  believes in making the world a better place and believably struggles with her love for the ruthless Underwood and her attraction for the more free spirited Adam Galloway (Ben Daniels). Corey Stoll is sympathetically a complete mess for whom you root to get his act together. Kate Mara is appropriately annoying in her ambitious forwardness, and carefully balances the line between being unlikability and hidden depths.

Robin Wright as The Princess Bride

The ingredients are right, but the recipe creates a dissatisfying result for the modern mouth. I kept thinking: this could have been awesome if they’d given the Francis Underwood role to Robin Wright. If you’re finding the name familiar, by the way, let me help you out. You may be recalling Robin Wright from all time classic satirical romantic adventure story, The Princess Bride.

Quite apart from it being a pleasure to see her again (took me about half way through the series to work out where I knew her from), this couldn’t be a more different role. Buttercup from The Princess Bride was all softness and sweetness and innocent belief in true love, barely concealed under a veneer of haughtiness which is really just another facet of her naivety. Claire Underwood, by contrast, is quiet spoken and beautiful and works for a good cause, but is self-possessed and a real force to be reckoned with. In the first episode she gets her manager to fire half her staff so that she doesn’t have to accept a donation that would compromise Francis, and then lets the same manager go herself. We instantly know this is a woman to be reckoned with, and Robin Wright’s performance is perfect. I would have been much more interested in her performance of a truly uncompromising role, like that of Francis.

Instead, her steely resolve is ultimately undermined. Despite what she claims, she isn’t quite as independent from her husband as he is from her. Not that either of them is fully so. One of the more interesting things about the show is their relationship, which is both open and governed by strict rules. Both Claire and Francis have lovers, and neither keeps this from their spouse; it is always understood that the affair is to be fleeting and useful. Despite the fact that jealousy does cause occasional tension, this seems to work for them. Nevertheless, whilst both partners show weakness, it is Claire who seems to truly reach out for love and for comfort in her lover, it is Claire who secretly longs for children and comes to regret accepting Francis’s decision not to have them, it is Claire who always returns to Francis – drawn by his power and security.

None of this is inappropriate for a character or wrong for a woman. But it’s part of that sense that this is always how women are presented. You can have a woman show strength on-screen, just as long as you undercut that strength in some way. Show that she does really want love, and to have children, and that, despite her protestations, she will endure subservience… maybe even likes it a little.

You could have believably gender-flipped this show, and seeing as they transplanted the original British concept to an entirely different political system, it’s not unreasonable to think that they might have experimented with the form some more as well.

But they didn’t. And whilst there are plenty of strong women, Francis Underwood gets the better of them all. Even when they do start to mount an attack on him, it is something they must band together to perform. And although the issues surrounding women using their sexuality to get ahead are touched on, I found the analysis one-sided and a little shallow. Yes, Francis uses sex to get what he wants, too, but it’s by assuming a stereotypical older-man-using-younger-woman role, which is questioned, but never really unseated. I kept hoping that the title was a hint that Underwood’s delicate plan was doomed to come tumbling down, but it never quite happens.

And… and it’s not enough to show the flaws of the patriarchy anymore. I’m bored with it. I know what those flaws are. Show me something new. At the end of the day a show about a patriarchal figure who abuses his power is still a show about a patriarchal figure. It’s not just that it’s sexist it’s that it’s… uninteresting. We’ve seen The West Wing, and Yes, Minister, and even House of Cards itself, before. If you wanted to remake a show, why not use that venue to propose something new. That would have been actually provocative and interesting.

So, yeah, if you’re looking for time to kill, there are worse ways to do it, but I’m not going to say this is Must See Television (or webivision, or whatever) because it’s not. It’s a very well-made version of something you’ve seen hundreds of times before.

Review – Star Trek: Into Darkness

I wish I’d seen THIS movie.

It’s hard to write a serious review for what was not even remotely a serious movie, so I’m not even gonna try. Benedict Cumberbund* was excellent, and whilst it’s hard to talk about the deeply problematic elements of white-washing represented in his taking the role without giving spoilers… I can see why he was chosen even if I also feel considerable disquiet about it **(spoilers in the footnote). Nevertheless, this film was beyond sloppy, and if you want to enjoy it in any sense, just find a YouTube clip of all the Cumberbatch bits and sit and watch that. It’ll be cheaper and less disappointing.

So, this is my half-arsed, bullet-point list of everything that was wrong with Star Trek: Into Darkness:

1. Tribbles. It’s WAY too early for Bones to even know what a tribble is, let alone for it to be a standard lab animal – and WHY WOULD YOU HAVE A TRIBBLE AS A LAB ANIMAL, ARE YOU INSANE? DO YOU EVEN WANT TO HAVE A SPACESHIP LATER? Although both Vulcans and Klingons have a history with tribbles, in ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ it’s made reasonably clear that humans haven’t encountered them before, as evidenced by the fact that they have no idea how dangerous they are.
2. Androids on the bridge. I like androids about ten times more than the next person, but whilst I was uneasy about their role in the previous movie, I am NOT HAPPY about seeing an android officer on the bridge of the Enterprise in Kirk’s time. You don’t mess with Data. You just don’t. Stop it.
3. Intertextuality without text. This movie was all over the place riffing off things both explicitly and implicitly. It’s not just other Star Trek movies and the way that every character is constantly saying favourite quotes with no sense of timing or style, its visual references to Star Wars and spaceships that look like Terminator hunter-killers and the inside of a Klingon death… planet… thing… that just really strongly reminded me of the spaceship interior at the end of Independence Day. But it was all just… thrown in there. There was no meaning to it, and, out of context, it doesn’t even really work as a hit for geeks. Geeks like consistency, and this film had none of that.
4. Spock is Kirk is Bones is Scotty and Uhura is Deanna. Everyone (except Khan) is in slip-stream between a caricature of who they’re meant to be, spouting catch-phrases, and completely the opposite of both their character in canon and as set up in the 2009 movie. The Kirk-Spock-Bones Freudian triad is gone. Spock has emotions up the wazoo and Bones… Bones is an empty puppet, whose lack-luster lines are wasted on Judge Dredd Karl Urban. I mean, I get why you want to make Spock the main character: Zachary Quinto is much more charismatic and modern a front-man than Chris Pine, and the 2009 movie added real nuance and interest, but the nuance is gone. Spock is interesting as a man drawn in two directions, and the Vulcan no-emotions side to Spock has become a thin gauze, stripping any sense of emotions roiling under the surface of their power and tension. As for Uhura…
5. That’s not Uhura. The kickass, take-no-shit, in-love-with-a-vulcan-because-she-can-respect-his-reserve-and-keep-that-shit-PRIVATE woman is GONE. This is a needy stereotype of a woman who gets pissed at her man at the drop of a hat. And whilst, yeah, she might be upset that he put his life in danger, the Uhura of the last movie would have understood his motivation, and if she had any problems with it she would have worked them out in PRIVATE, and not in front of the captain, a man she knows to be a womaniser who has always been needling at the edges of their relationship, waiting for it to fray.
6. And whilst I wanted to be generous when I read quotes of Abrams saying that Star Trek was always sexy and that’s what they fans want, I had to admit that the shots of the saucy-shiny-suits at the beginning which offered a bit of equal-op sexiness were pretty brief. And all Uhura does in those scenes is emote whilst the men around her – who all like Spock, too, take action. She gets a tiny bit of come-back towards the end, but it’s like the way Brenda finally stops screaming to step up to the plate in Highlander as… a distraction so that her man can properly dispatch the bad guy. Between those two points we see an AWFUL lot of men, both extras and main cast, and two VERY sexualised women in the main cast and a negligible scattering of female extras. All of whom are in the ‘retro’ mini-dresses. Alas, the TNG move to have that be a uniform that men wear too seems to have been swept under the rug.
7. LIGHTS. OH GOD. THE LIGHTS. I thought Texts from Superheroes were exaggerating.

I mean, I’ll be honest, I thought I knew and understood that J J Abrams has a lens flare problem, but someone close to him needs to stage an intervention. This is NOT healthy.

He even had the gall to put his flashy little lights in the beam-up effect, which my Geek-Film-Buddy Lee actually liked, but I… was rather less impressed by.

Going into this movie I thought J J Abrams’ had been his own worst enemy leading up to the release. He overhyped the ‘WHO IS BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH PLAYING?!1!’ card and he said really dumb things in interviews, like that he never actually liked Star Trek and thought it was too ‘philosophical’. I thought he couldn’t really mean it, because the 2009 movie had been so good. But this movie felt like the lazy work of someone who’s a bit too full of their success and whose careful attention to detail when he was trying to win over the fans went out the window when he felt he had them bought and paid for.

I don’t like to write negative reviews in general, but this was one of the Big Damn Films of the year, and I’d been really looking forward to it, and I thought if you’re the sort of person who’s interested in my reviews in the first place you’d probably want to know what I thought. So, here it is: it was a white-washed movie with a pinch of sexism, a couple of nice cameos from Hollywood sci-fi old guard and one up-and-coming charismatic actor making a role his own who you can’t fault for stepping up to the plate even if it really ought to have gone to a person of colour. It was poorly paced, poorly plotted, and contradictory, but the production values were very high. If you don’t mind these issues then you may enjoy it as sci-fi fluff.

*Yeah, yeah, I’m not really into making fun of people’s names, but he’s a rich, successful, white man who doesn’t seem to mind and generally seems to be having the time of his life. He’s also about the only thing I’m going to speak positively about in this review. He can take it.

**SPOILERS IN THIS FOOTNOTE: if you’re luckier than me and avoided more than hints about WHO BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH IS PLAYING, I didn’t want to give the game away, but yeah, it’s Khan. Although the big reveal is somewhat marred by Cumberbatch pronouncing ‘Khan’ differently to every person ever, including everyone else in the film. If you don’t know why this is problematic: Khan was a NON-WHITE superhuman. He was from INDIA. And whilst his portrayal by Mexican Ricardo Montalbán in The Wrath of Khan has some clumsy race implications, he was at least played by someone other than a white guy. Yeah, Khan is a character with tremendous charisma, and you need a really phenomenal actor to pull off the role, in part because Ricardo Montalbán’s performance was so iconic, but if you don’t see how having a white guy play a genetically-engineered-to-be-perfect human being FULL STOP is a problem, you got some alone time you need to spend thinking about that, anyway. Add to this that the role was specifically conceived of as for a person of colour in a ground-breakingly progressive series… yeah, it’s really problematic. THEN, they take a really, really pale white guy – a BRITISH white guy (because everyone knows charismatic villains are only PROPERLY charismatic and villainous if they’re British) and PALE HIM UP SOME MORE with make-up that makes him look ill (why? this guy is a superhuman! He’s not ill. It’s almost impossible for him to BE ill) and dye his red hair black BECAUSE HE’S AN EVIL BRITISH GUY, GUYS, THAT’S WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE! LIKE DRACULA, RIGHT? I’M PRETTY SURE HE WAS BRITISH. And yeah… my cans ain’t happening because I’ve lost my evens.

Apologies

Apologies, all. I forgot how messed up and stressed I am in a heady instant of over-estimating my abilities and sense of self-worth. So, I’m cancelling Project Super Dead Fish. I think only about 7 people viewed the page anyway. There was a lot of enthusiasm out there for the idea, but not the enacting it, and I am not a healthy enough beast to do it by myself. A healthier beast would wait longer and see how it went, but it was just causing me an immense amount of anxiety – more than I anticipated. So… let’s all just pretend it didn’t happen, OK?

Thanks. Womble out.

On Dowager Countesses and Queens of Thorns

Olenna ‘Queen of Thorns’ Redwyne, sassing Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones.

We love them, don’t we? The old biddies carrying AK-47s of wit and scatter-bombs of scathing put-downs, but… lately, I’m getting depressed by it all. I’m depressed because of why we love these women and why we allow them to say the things that would never be given to a younger woman to say.

They’re a stereotype just as much as the whore with a heart of gold (Inara, Ros, Shae). Don’t believe me? I searched on ‘Queen of Thorns’ in Google Image Search (gif format) and got as many images of the Dowager Countess as I did Olenna Redwyne. By the Dowager Countess, I of course mean Violet Crawley from Downton Abbey. That’s her on the lower right.

The Dowager Countess, Violet Crawley

We love her because she says the things no one else will say. We love her because she’s a woman who’s not afraid to use her voice and speak her mind. And even if what’s on her mind is kind of rude, we don’t mind, because she phrases her put-downs with such style. We’re titilated and refreshed and we say to each other: ‘I love her! I love that she can get away with that!’

But let’s take a step back and examine this. Why is it that a Dowager Countess or a Queen of Thorns can get away with things that other people can’t? The clue’s in the name. They’re both extremely wealthy, titled, widowed, very well-educated women. They’re also both white. They’ve basically won the circumstance jackpot in every way except being female. So what have they got that, for instance, Cersei Lannister, Queen Regent, theoretically more powerful and wealthy than either one, hasn’t? The answer? They’re too old to be used for their beauty or their capacity to breed. Cersei thinks the best tool she has is between her legs, but in reality, that’s as ripe for use by others as it is for her own ends. In this week’s episode, Cersei’s beauty is used by Tywin as a selling point in the marriage he wants to arrange with the Tyrells. And it is countered by Olenna because Cersei’s fertility is more limited than that of a younger woman. Cersei is learning the hard way that trying to play the game on patriarchy’s terms is a game she can only lose, as her value is defined in a patriarchy based on her attractiveness and ability to breed. When Tywin insists that she will marry Loras Tyrell, all she can say is ‘No, please, don’t make me do it again’.

So, we’re meant to celebrate Olenna as a contrast. All hail the matriarchy! But is it really? Olenna’s freedom is founded in her being past breeding age and youthful beauty. She jokes with Varys that any flirtation between them is pointless, because she is too old and he is a eunuch, but it’s a truth. They are both privileged by being outsiders to the sexual game, and they both suffer for lack of sexual value as well. Margaery Tyrell is hailed as her protégé, but in the end she must still woo Joffrey. He may not be particularly interested in her beauty, but it makes her an eligible match and a political mover to rival Cersei. And though she may have shown herself more skilled at manipulating Joffrey, in the end it is only that she discovered that he had more unusual buttons that needed to be pressed, and she will only ever have power through him.

I just…

There’s nothing wrong, per se, with characters like Olenna Redwyne and Violet Crawley. I just find it really depressing that they’re being celebrated as matriarchs and game players when they really haven’t broken out of the patriarchy at all. And even on our supposedly enlightened (ha ha) twenty-first century screen, they are only allowed to give such good ‘sass’ because they fit the stereotype for older, wealthy, white, educated, noble women. All that wry wit that’s been flowing from Tyrion, Varys, Littlefinger, even Tywin… that’s the political moving and shaking and educated wit of wealthy white men, who can come from whatever background they like (Littlefinger and Varys are not noble-born), have whatever sexual proclivities they like (Littlefinger and Tyrion can associate with whores without shame – Tywin’s attitude towards Tyrion would be nothing to how Cersei would be treated were all her indiscresions known*, and his whoring around hasn’t seemed to hold him back with anyone else). Cersei tries her hand at biting wit, but it is always edged with bitterness and uncertainty. She folds under Tywin’s gaze because she knows that, ultimately, as a woman in her prime, she has no power that is not rooted in her beauty and her fertility.

As for poor women or women of colour… they haven’t got a hope in hell. You thought Ros was witty, maybe? But never with any real power or assurance. She may have thought that when she moved to taking care of Littlefinger’s books she gained some more power, but it was never enough to set her free of him, never enough to protect her.  As for Shae? She is completely dependent on Tyrion’s protection and patronage, and though he may love her he never lets her forget it. Would you consider any of Daenerys’s Dothraki attendants witty? They barely have personalities beyond mindlessly muttering ‘it is known’. Daenerys herself is almost always required to be too serious to get away with wit, and at every turn she is called ‘whore’ or worse. I’m not saying the show isn’t critical of this, it is, and Daenerys in Game of Thrones makes a far more powerful feminist character than she does in the books. It’s just… I don’t feel like hailing the Queen of Thorns as some great victory. And I’m uncomfortable with this trend towards endearingly cutting biddies. Because they’re allowed to be cutting only because they are viewed as harmless. It doesn’t matter what they say because they are women who have outlived their sexual usefulness.

I don’t want to have to wait until I’m 70 to speak my mind. I don’t want the actors I watch have to wait until they’re 70 to get the roles where they get to portray women who speak their minds.

I don’t like that women who speak their minds in their older years are regarded as ‘treasures’ because they’re so ‘precious’ being allowed to get away with scheming and criticising men only because men sort of enjoy being taken down by an old woman. I don’t like that a woman speaking her mind in this way is seen as ‘getting away with it’, like she snuck it under the rug. They’re still not being taken seriously. And, as we see, although Olenna is allowed to take down Tyrion and to best Varys, when she comes to spar with the great patriarch, Tywin Lannister, she loses. Because an older woman with some spirit in her is a delight, but an older man is serious business.

*I’m being circumspect, here. Others who have read all the books may read between the lines.

I would just like to express my undying love for VlogBrothers

I could call this a review, but it’s more like a sonnet, except that it’s not written in any kind of verse form, so it’s missing one of the most defining features of sonnets and is thus not a sonnet at all.

What I’m trying to say is that I love VlogBrothers, and I blame all of you for not telling me about them before. Since my vow to sample vloggers and webisodes created by someone other than Felicia Day or Wil Wheaton, some of you have kindly pointed me the way of a few specimens of what the web has to offer.

You told me to try I Am Tim, about the last reminaing descendent of Van Helsing fighting Evil in York. And I wanted to like it, because it’s made and based in my city and it’s indie and scrappy and genre, but I just couldn’t get into it. And I could have reviewed it to say that, but I didn’t watch enough of it to give a full report, and I don’t like to shit on indie creators just because after five minutes of watching I felt a bit ‘meh’.

You told me to try Garfunkel and Oates and you were right about them. Garfunkel and Oates are an incredibly talented comedy musical duo who peddle quirky, geeky, often risque humour, sometimes with a ukelele. Sometimes I feel like they’re speakin’ out for women who own both their sexuality and their social awkwardness, with songs like ‘I Don’t Understand Job’ (NSFW) and Go Kart Racing (Accidentally Masturbating)’ (obviously NSFW). But othertimes I’m a little uncomfortable with how they buy into certain stereotypes, with songs like ‘Gay Boyfriend‘, ‘Pregnant Women are Smug‘, and ‘29/31‘. Some parts of these songs are funny and they’re still well-made, but… yeah.

And then there was VlogBrothers. VlogBrothers present regular short video blogs by John and Hank Green. Their videos are geek-centric, liberal, and very funny. Hank’s video, Tumblr: The Musical, made in collaboration with AVbyte, is a perfect example of this:

Exuberant to the point of hyperactivity, John and Hank Green have their finger not merely on the pulse of the Internet, they are enthusiastically swimming in its veins. In this video Hank unabashedly praises the time-sink that is Tumblr, a blogging platform which has grown from the fringes to becoming rapidly central to anyone who wants to build an Internet presence, especially amongst geeks. Singing about Tumblrs obsession with gifs, Benedict Cumberbach, cats, and the minutia of Tumblr’s swiftly evolving ideolects, Hank could go pound for pound with Felicia Day’s ‘Do You Wanna Date My Avatar‘ for geek points.

And I’m basically crushing on Hank Green right now so I just want to link you to all his awesome vlogs, like Cat GIF critique and 17 rants in 4 minutes, but John Green is also worth your time. More than worth your time, awesome. Take, for example, this review of Escape from Camp 14, exposing things I… didn’t know about North Korea and probably should have. And, you know, he was in a Google hangout with President Obama, so, umm, awesome.

Anyway, I’m going to watch Iron Man 3, now and if I don’t leave now I won’t have time for a drink first and that’s not how me and Lee Harris watch geek movies. So… enjoy VlogBrothers. Your life will be better.

Review: Doctor Who: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

Well, that was the best episode of Doctor Who we have seen in a very long time. It was near perfect in execution, nodded to a past that charts back before 2005, and had some deep, troubling and interestingly explored themes. I was impressed and captivated. There was a clear impression that this needed to be a landmark episode, and it delivered.

Hard to believe it took eight years to show an interior of the TARDIS that was more than nameless corridors, but when push came to shove we were not let down.

Plot

The Doctor decides to let Clara try and fly the TARDIS as a way of getting the two of them to feel more comfortable with each other. (The TARDIS has made it plain that it doesn’t like Clara one bit and doesn’t trust her to be aboard without the Doctor.) For some reason putting the TARDIS in some kind of safety mode to allow Clara to fly involves turning off some plot significant shields? (I said near perfect execution, didn’t I?) Anyway, the moment is provided for the TARDIS to be exposed and some likely lads in a salvage vessel spy it and try to haul it in.

During the process of this the TARDIS is damaged, and somehow the Doctor is thrown outside the TARDIS whilst Clara is trapped within (fudge fudge fudge). The Doctor convinces the salvageers to help him enter the TARDIS and find Clara on condition that they receive the ‘salvage of a lifetime’.

Meanwhile, Clara becomes lost in a very unhappy TARDIS (fires are periodically a problem, because of… reasons) and she finds herself chased by strange, dark, creepy creatures.

The Doctor and the salvageers (it’s a word, shut up*) enter a race against time to save Clara and stop the TARDIS from exploding, hampered by the fact that some of the salvageers are more intent on salvaging than saving.

To add spice to the mix, one of the salvageers is an android, and he can sense the pain of the TARDIS, causing tension as he urges against his teammates’ impulse to just loot and get out.

My thoughts

This was bright, bubbly, entertaining, nostalgic, and dark. Which is a lot of what I want out of Doctor Who. We had some lovely nods to TARDIS episodes past, including the fan-beloved swimming pool. I would have liked to see the Cloisters (we do hear the Cloister Bell), maybe the rooms of some former companions, and I’m madly curious about the Doctor’s own bedroom, but there you go. They had to go wherever the plot was relevant, so fair enough.

There were a number of notes that made me wince. It wasn’t as bad as a Moffat penned episode, but there were a few completely unnecessary gender-oriented jokes which went unchallenged, and I continue to feel uncomfortable with New Who’s (mainly Moffat Who’s) emphasis on the conception of the TARDIS as female and in some kind of romantic relationship with the Doctor. Yes, there is a tradition of referring to ships using female pronouns, but that’s a sexist time and location-centric Earth tradition, no reason for the Doctor to buy into it. No obvious reason for the Doctor to think of the TARDIS as gendered at all. Being gendered is not a requirement of sentience. I know the Neil Gaiman penned episode is popular and all, but one of the things that made me less keen on it was this emphasis on the TARDIS as female and in love with the Doctor – even thinking of herself as called ‘Sexy‘, which if you wanted to encapsulate everything that’s wrong with Moffat era Who, a lot of it is said right there.

There’s nothing wrong with the TARDIS being feminine per se (she couldn’t possibly be female (sexed), TARDISes don’t mate), she can be gendered however she fancies. The problem is that she’s in a master/slave relationship with a paradigm patriarchal figure in an epically popular television show aimed at children. And don’t get me started on the people who think the themes don’t matter because it’s a family show. Do you even know what a theme is? A theme isn’t something invented by academics, it’s something academics label as a way of identifying messages embedded in a work of literature (yes, TV is literature, just like plays, deal with it) and issues tackled. If your message is one of iconic figures with whom children will identify being engaged in deeply problematic master/slave relationships with the division being created along gendered lines in a show where the male patriarch increasingly belittles women… yeah, it’s a problem.

Let’s talk about the master/slave dialectic; it’s an important tool of societal, psychological, and literary analysis. Marx liked  and popularised it for that reason, although it originates in Hegel. One thing I think really raises the bar of this episode of Doctor Who is that it directly addresses the problematic of master/slave dynamics.

The Hegelian theory is that a consciousness cannot be self-aware unless it has encountered another consciousness which it recognises as like itself and yet distinct from itself (don’t worry about why, it goes back to Kant’s transcendental idealism, which is a whole other thing, just accept for now that it’s a theory with a good amount of history behind it). As such, any consciousness is reliant upon other minded beings for its own existence, and yet (according to Hegel) it is always trying to destroy, or at least assert dominance over the Other. It doesn’t like that there is a consciousness out there that is not its own, so it seeks to destroy or absorb it. Which it can never do without destroying itself. Thus a symbiotic relationship forms. The ‘winner’ of the struggle becomes the ‘master’, dominating the ‘slave’, and yet the master becomes completely reliant on the ‘slave’ for nearly everything. Masters are not producers.

Now, there’s a feminist history of rejecting the struggle for dominance in the master/slave dialectic as a specifically masculine view. I do not subscribe to this. I think such views rest on an unsubstantiated essentialist view of gender which reads women as fundamentally submissive or non-combative. There’s plenty of evidence that this is false, even if you think that women are, on the whole, more submissive or gentle than men. Personally, I don’t just believe, but know, that many women are neither submissive nor gentle; however, I do not assert that this is an indication of superiority. I know there’s substantial reaction against Anglo-American feminist insistence on active and assertive agency as the only legitimate and respectable way for a woman to demonstrate her worth. Gender aside, one should concede that praising only the assertive and aggressive is problematic. My point is rather that assuming that these are exclusively, or even predominantly, male attributes is both false and problematic. I do think there is a natural human drive towards dominance. ‘Natural’ merely in the sense that the genes of those that strive for the most food, the most mating opportunities, etc., have a tendency to result in continued survival, and that’s common between men, women, gender queer, monkeys, catfish, and elephants. Nevertheless I also agree that struggling for dominance is not the only successful survival trait, and often beings that expend their energies in other directions can be more successful. Megan Lindholm’s masterpiece, Alien Earth, which is also deeply concerned with analysis of the master/slave dialectic, is particularly interesting in its exploration of cooperative ecologies and their relation to combative ones.

What I’m getting at is that the master/slave dialectic as an analysis of sentient interaction is an idea with legs, but not one we should be uncritical of. The Doctor’s relationship with the TARDIS is an exemplar of the master/slave dialectic. (A point the Doctor’s relationship with the Master has flirted with drawing out under the hands of some of Doctor Who‘s more insightful writers in the past.) The Doctor is the ‘master’, yet he is almost completely dependent upon the TARDIS for just about everything. She is his slave, and must do what he tells her, yet he’s not even a Timelord without her, he’s just the last Gallifreyan, not even able to reproduce. You can see why, then, it’s problematic to phrase this particularly iconic master/slave relationship in gendered terms. I am reminded with bile in my throat of the discussions I have had with male geeks about the sexism inherent in David Eddings’s works. All the women are ultra feminine, but, it is always said, the men would be hopeless without them. Polgara may be an immortal sorceress, but she likes cooking and darning socks. And that’s fine. Many women like cooking and sewing. The problem is that the men around Polgara exploit the assumption that she will like these things by completely neglecting to develop any skills in these areas. In this way, she has to perform these services for them. Dividing labour along gendered lines enforces a restriction of women’s options even as it makes men dependent on them. The catch is, the actions that men depend on women to perform are rarely those that allow women to accumulate extra resources with which to commission services from men.

And so the feminist Marxist analysis of the master/slave dialectic goes.

So. The thing I liked about this episode is that it confronts these problematic elements embedded in Doctor Who head on. By having a character who is othered (designated as the slave role) by virtue of him being literally a machine (the theoretically non-sentient analog of the slave role) we are confronted with the deep inappropriateness of such relationships. I don’t want to transgress into the Spoiler Zone, but let us just say that the emotional impact of the inappropriateness of such a relationship is made viscerally evident.

Moreover, despite the depressing tendency towards sexism in recent Doctor Who, and some unsettling elements of characterisation of the TARDIS with respect to her gendering as female, the TARDIS has a long history of defying the Doctor’s expectations. The majority of Peter Davison’s era, for instance, is spent with the Doctor having very little  control over where the TARDIS goes at all. His repeated attempts to return Tegan to Heathrow airport in the correct era represent an utter failure of mastery. Similarly, ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’ is structured by scene after scene of the TARDIS asserting control and rendering the Doctor, his companion, and everyone else aboard her utterly helpless.

This is why I think Stephen Thompson is to be commended as the writer of this episode. This is an acknowledgement and exploration of the Doctor’s problematic relationship with the TARDIS at a level we rarely see. Like the salvageers exploiting their ‘robot’ companion, the Doctor has gained immeasurable benefits – near godlike status – exploiting the TARDIS. And when the Doctor ‘offers’ them the TARDIS in compensation for rescuing Clara (one assumes he always plans to double-cross them on this, but it’s still a startling thing to do with a being you regard as sentient) one is confronted by the narrowness of their vision as they proceed to try and dissect the TARDIS, ignoring the fact that the TARDIS as a whole is worth immeasurably more than any circuit could be. The slave, we are reminded, is usually much brighter than the masters – he or she has to be; she or he does all the work.

It should also be noted that this is probably unique as an episode of Doctor Who in which people of colour outnumbered white people, and I suspect that it no mistake. One of the factors underlying the current instability of our economic situation, after all, is that so-called first-world, predominantly white countries like the UK and the US have had their wealth bolstered by exploitation of people of colour for centuries. It is a mistake to think this ended with the abolition of legal slavery. As a relatively poor person in the UK I can still buy a top for £3 if I want to. How is that possible, but that someone, somewhere, earns far less than I do? Now, following the credit crunch, our economy struggles to stabilise in a world where developing nations we are used to exploiting are gaining greater economic power.

One might still think ‘Well, that’s all very well – elucidating the master-slave relationship, but the status quo remains unchallenged for the Doctor at the end’. I think there’s some legitimacy in that. People talk about having a female Doctor or a black Doctor as a way of balancing the scales, but I still kind of feel like that’s missing the point. Not that I’m against it. I think a black Doctor could now be possible with nothing problematic to it at all. A female one… well, I have no faith that it would be well-executed under the current regime, and the total dominance of Doctor Who by male writers is preventing a woman from gaining sufficient credibility to take the helm and challenge the way of things. But in another time, under different leadership, with different writers… sure, it could be fine. My point is rather that 50 years of the Doctor flying around acting as the Great White Male Saviour to countless cultures that have not his wealth**, his education, his technology, cannot be erased by having one iteration of the Doctor be black, or Asian, or female. The problem with viewing it like this is that we are still maintaining the wealthy white man as the ideal by making it a goal to have people of colour and women play his role. The real goal is to surround this show where a rich, educated, white man saves the day again and again with a normality where any man, women, intersex or gender queer individual can save the day in any way he/she/zie damn well likes. The Doctor should not be the standard we all seek to attain. The Doctor should be just another character. Rich, complex, exciting, amongst other rich, complex, exciting characters, each of whom is rich, complex, and exciting in different ways. The rich, white, educated male ideal is not the only one to which we should aspire.

Nevertheless, I do think credit is due to Stephen Thompson and it must be noted that although there is little he can do within the confines of the show to change the cultural context in which it appears, or the necessity that the Doctor is and always will be the title character whose centrality is determined by his possession of the TARDIS - nevertheless, he does show us that if the TARDIS wishes to assert control she is more than capable of doing so. Moreover, although the status quo is re-established amongst the salvageers as well, the way in which the wrongness of their situation has been underscored provides a counterpoint with which to remind the audience that just because things have returned to the status quo, that doesn’t mean that it’s OK.

*I might have just started reading The Three Musketeers, it’s not important, don’t look at me like that.

** Incidentally, ever notice that the Doctor never thinks to carry money and never knows what would be appropriate to give someone when he has some? That’s a classic sign of someone whose wealth has become so vast they can’t even count it anymore or relate to those who lack it with any real understanding. You may not think of him as rich, but the TARDIS offers him so much wealth that money doesn’t mean anything to him. Not caring about money is not a sign of having grown ‘beyond’ such trivial things. It’s a sign that you’re rich enough that you’ve never had to care. One thing I like about Clara is that she consistently challenges the Doctor on his privilege, and expresses concern that the opportunities the TARDIS offers have distanced him from being able to connect with other people on any normal level.

Submissions open for Speculative Fiction 2013

I know I’ve been quiet about it, but you may be aware that Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays, and Commentary, featuring ME, was released this week. Well, now you can submit whole NEW posts to the very exciting Speculative Fiction 2013.

This year’s anthology is being compiled by the beauteous people at The Book Smugglers, which I encourage you to visit. Full details are available here, but the main thing is that they are interested in any review, essay, commentary that you found awesome that dealt with ‘the many fandoms and subcategories that fall under the SFF umbrella, including (but not limited to) reviews of novels/novellas/short stories, television shows, gaming, art (professional and fan), movie talk, as well as essays about the different aspects of SFF overall’.

I highlight this of course because it is a most awesome project, but not without self-interest. Please think of Speculative Fiction 2013 if you see anything in this here blog that you think is a worthy candidate. I know illness has meant that I haven’t done much yet this year, but you might consider my recent Hemlock Grove posts, for instance. And don’t forget my fabulous Slumber Party guests, KV Taylor, N K Kingston, and Jessica Meats.

Party on, dudes.

Everybody wave your hands like excitable children in celebration!

Your excellent taste in reading my posts has been validated! Speculative Fiction 2012: The Best Online Reviews, Essays, and Commentary is out, starring ME. Oh, and I guess 49 other people like Elizabeth Bear, Niall Harrison, Joe Abercrombie, Kate Elliott, Aidan Moher, Christopher Priest, Adam Roberts, Sam Sykes, Kameron Hurley, and Lavie Tidhar, who I guess you might have heard of. But pffft!

Anyway, this is the first time anyone has paid me for my non-fiction and I’m super-excited about it. Probably more excited than all those better known authors and bloggers, and pretty excited just to be in their company, quite frankly.

I encourage you all to go buy it and see all our awesome thoughts: officially the most awesome thoughts about speculative fiction in 2012 on these here internets.

My UK lovelies can get it from Amazon for £8.99.

My fabulous US readers can get it from Amazon US for $11.99.

And I assume non-UK or US-ians can buy it fom the same sites with exciting shipping?

MORE AWESOME STILL is where all the proceeds from sales are going to: http://www.roomtoread.org/ . Room to Read is a brilliant organisation promoting literacy and gender equality in education around the world. They work with communities and governements to promote reading both within school and without. They’re totally rad and it’s a great cause and it’s all about BOOKS.

So, you should buy our book so that kids have books. And because it’s full of really interesting reviews, essays, and commentary. And because one of those essays is by ME. Mainly that last one. But mainly the other ones too. And because my essay is about who wrote the first science fiction story, and it’s not who you might think.

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Review: Hemlock Grove, Season One

I have now watched all of Hemlock Grove. That’s right. All of it. Since Friday. I would therefore like to revise my original tentative assessment and say this: Hemlock Grove is basically the best and most original thing you haven’t watched yet.

Unless you have, in which case: O_O amirite?

Brief iteration of the premise

I couldn’t possibly summarise the plot, and if I tried I would have to spoil far too much. This thing is one hell of a mystery and you have to go on that journey by yourself.

The premise is this: Hemlock Grove is a small town with a lot of secrets. The rich and powerful Godfreys have secrets. The scientist Johann Pryce (Joel de la Fuente) has secrets. The Romani family who have just returned to the town have secrets. Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron) is suspected of being a werewolf. Peter thinks Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgård) is an upir (vampire), but also that Roman doesn’t know it. Shelley Godfrey (Nicole Boivin and Michael Andreae) is very tall for a girl, bandages her hands, glows when her emotions are disturbed, is bald, and has one eye much larger than the other. Olivia Godfrey (Famke Janseen) is mysterious, dangerous, beautiful, and bored. And Johann Pryce bolsters the wealth of the Godfreys with his research in what are rumoured to be unnatural ways.

When young girls start being killed in what looks like animal attacks (but for which no animal tracks are found) accusations fly. Peter and Roman, in particular, are suspects, and despite the enmity of their families they form a strong but awkward friendship, trying to find and stop the real killer.

Why praise it so strongly?

A foray into a new medium is an opportunity for experimentation, and Hemlock Grove uses its unusual freedom from the restrictions of traditional media outlets to its full extent. It defies pigeonholing by genre. Outofmyplanet on Twitter commented to me: ‘It’s interesting. I feel like I’m just not familiar with the storytelling style, but it’s American so I should be?‘ and I think that’s spot on. This is a melding of writing styles. The surface level American teen werewolf/vampire drama is belied by the complex plotting and sophisticated characterisation. The casual blending of the supernatural and surreal with the everyday feints towards European and Latin American magical realism. The bleak, gritty approach, drawing out the relationship between economic and social issues is reminiscent British cinema in general, and recent British science fiction, fantasy, and horror in particular (Misfits, The Fades, the original Being Human). It doesn’t challenge so much as defy expectation, and yet somehow artlessly manages to take the viewer with it.

In my review of the pilot the dominant feeling I came away with was that I was intrigued. I didn’t really know what was going on, what sort of program this was going to be, but I wanted to find out. That feeling didn’t go away. It kept me guessing as to where it was going, both dramatically, stylistically, and thematically right through the end of the very last episode. And yet every episode you feel like you’ve come to understand a lot more of what’s going on. That’s quite a feat.

You may also recall that I had some reservations about the presentation of women. I won’t go so far as to say that the representation is perfect. A number of characters voice sexist opinions and it is somewhat ambiguous as to whether the voiced thoughts are intended to represent truth. What is true is that we have a vibrant range of female characters, each of whom has a rich and complex psychology.

Olivia Godfrey presents as a femme fatale, and yet she is not as cold and heartless as she seems. Her love for her children, although often cloaked by an air of indifference, even cruelty, emerges as a core element of her character in moments of crisis.

Shelley Godfrey’s hulking form is belied by her sweet disposition. Despite crippling shyness and an inability to talk in more than grunts, she proves herself articulate and even confident in her views when conversing via email with her uncle, Norman Godfrey (Dougray Scott). She also avoids saccharine sweetness, displaying forgivable moments of frustration and selfishness when she fears her few vital emotional supports are threatened.

Lethe Godfrey (Penelope Mitchell) also verges on the saccharine, yet she is never meek. She’s fully capable of standing up to Roman’s suffocating affection and jealousy, and does not calmly submit to the men in her life treating her as a precious thing to be protected.

Christina Wendall (Freya Tingley), a teenage girl who thinks of herself as a novelist and a bit of an outsider, has a complex and interesting relationship with her friends and surrogate sisters, Alyssa (Emilia McCarthy) and Alexa Sworn (Eliana Jones). These twin girls present on the surface as stereotypically bitchy, ultra-feminine girls. Yet, despite their often cutting remarks, their affection – their love and concern – for Christina slowly becomes more evident. They’re just young girls doing what society tells young girls to do, the show seems to say, they aren’t to blame for it, they’ll probably grow out of their ‘mean girl’ aspects in time. They’re also interesting as fraternal twins whose behaviour seems at first so similar that you might take them for identical, yet they are allowed, in quiet moments, to show subtly different personalities.

Clementine Chasseur (Kandyse McClure) provides an important contrast to an otherwise very femme cast. People react against ‘strong female character’ stereotypes, but I still feel like the majority of television is dominated by a feminine presentation that women like me feel alienated by. I would not call Chasseur a stereotype in any case. Chasseur is an agent of the mysterious Order of the Dragon, who are devoted to finding and destroying werewolves, vampires, and other abominations. Despite Kandyse McClure’s slender build, it’s clear that Chasseur has the muscles to back up her presentation of strength, and her character is a fascinating mix of determination and doubt. Chasseur is mentally and physically formidable, yet plagued by alcoholism, and haunted by the memory of the first werewolf she killed: a pregnant woman whose medallion of St Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, she wears around her neck.

Destiny Rumancek (Tiio Horn) is more problematic, as the town sex-worker and fortune-teller. She’s comfortable in her sexuality, and that’s good, but a theme of magical curing sex makes me uneasy. I’m also concerned for her representation of Romani women as promiscuous and as fortune tellers, as well as in her penchant for conning her customers. The only other Romani woman we really have to compare her with is Peter’s mother, Lynda Rumancek. Lynda’s sympathetic enough, but her only source of income seems to be in selling the drugs the late Nicolae Rumancek left in his trailer to Olivia Godfrey at an inflated price. Beyond that there’s not much to say about Lynda except that she’s a good mother. In a cast as large as Hemlock Grove’s it’s a lot to ask for every character to be complex and involved, and as someone who knows relatively little of Romani people and culture it’s difficult to judge, the Rumancek’s are certainly more sympathetic than the Godfreys, overall. There is some attempt to deal with prejudice against Romani people, and the persecution of Peter by the townsfolk is presented as unjust. Nevertheless I feel it important to highlight that some aspects of their presentation might be viewed as problematic.

It should also be noted that there is some good representation of race. Clementine and Michael Chasseur (Demore Barnes) are both played by people of colour and are great characters that I felt were well presented. Johann Pryce in some respects does reflect a stereotype of intelligent asian people with poor social skills; however, his strikingly Germanic name suggests that the role was cast without any particular race in mind, and Pryce as a character is revealed to be much more complex and interesting than he first appears – as could be said for virtually all the characters. Ashley Valentine (Emily Piggford) is also Asian, and she didn’t seem to me to match any racial stereotype.

In general, the acting is excellent. I can’t think of a single character, no matter how minor, who turns in a duff performance. Particular praise should be reserved for Bill Skarsgård whose portrayal of Roman Godfrey is strikingly nuanced. Roman is probably the most complex and interesting of any of the characters – a daunting presentation for any actor, especially one so young (gah – 23 is young to me now! Of course, he’s playing an even younger man). To detail the range required for this role would be to spoil too much of the plot, but if this man doesn’t get an Emmy he’ll have been robbed.

I can’t close this review without mentioning one of the more controversial aspects of the show, although it is difficult to tackle without touching on spoilers. I shall try to be circumspect, but if you really don’t want to be spoiled you might need to skip to the next paragraph. The matter I refer to concerns an incidence (two actually) of a character presented as largely sympathetic who commits rape. I should say that the rape that occurs onscreen is in no way presented as sympathetic. What makes the incident challenging is that the character who commits the rape goes on to, in other ways, present as broadly sympathetic. This, perhaps, was the only thing I had reservations about until the very last episode. My feeling is that this is intended to be uncomfortable. The writer intends for us to be confronted by the fact that our sympathies can still be engaged by a character who, as a rounded human being, has committed terrible things in a moment of emotional disturbance. I did not feel that the show in any way excused his action. Rather, it sought to confront us with the way our own moral compasses might be forced into muddy confusion. I do not think this is a bad handling of the subject matter; however, people who find this subject triggering may wish to avoid the show for that reason.

Challenging, original, provocative, well-written, well-acted, and intriguing. This show is giving Game of Thrones a run for its money, and then some. That’s how much I think you should watch it. I don’t star my reviews, but if I did, this one would get five.

Review: Hemlock Grove, Pilot Episode

Hemlock Grove is the second of Netflix’s original TV shows. Netflix, for those not in the know, is a site for streaming films and TV shows. You pay a monthly fee of £5.99 (UK) and have opened to you a bewildering array of things to watch. As a media addict I’ve been in on it since it came to the UK and they’ve built up an impressive catalogue. What’s more, Netflix has been a massive success in the US for quite some time, so much so that they have achieved the unique position of being able to move from streaming content produced by others to commissioning their own series. The first to be released was House of Cards, an American remake of the British 1990 political drama of the same name. And they will soon be releasing a season of the critically acclaimed Arrested Development, which has gained cult following since being cancelled in 2006.

It’s an incredibly interesting time, and with Hemlock Grove being the first truly original* Netflix programme, and the first with sf/f/h content, I was intrigued. One of the things that Netflix have consciously done differently is to release the whole season at once. The way that streaming allows viewers to watch just as much or as little of a show at once as they like must have revealed to Netflix the shifts in viewing patterns amongst viewers who have come to value the ability to mainline a show, watching episode after episode back to back. Netflix is not a TV channel, necessarily catering to the tastes of a loosely grouped demographic, carefully schedule content. Their audience selects what they are interested in, and whilst I have to wait until Monday for the next Game of Thrones, I can stream the next episode of Hemlock whenever I want.

This was a trend that started with DVD box sets. Buying a season to watch at home was the preserve of nerds and fanatics alone in the 1990s. I owned a handful of episodes of Doctor Who, Star Trek, a chunk of The X Files – I didn’t even start buying Buffy box sets until the naughties – and anyone who has seen my video collection would concede that I was something of a film and TV fanatic. A box set was an expensive item and could set you back £80. Few were inclined to buy more than the odd episode here or there.

In the naughties, though, we turned a curve. First videos became massively devalued by DVDs, then DVDs came down in price. Then sites like eBay and Amazon Marketplace made it possible to buy DVDs second-hand much more easily than had ever been possible before. Suddenly a season that would have set you back £80 in the 90s could be had for £30, £15, £10. And the sort of shows we watched changed with it. An audience watching week on week has less tolerance for convoluted plots and rich character development that could mean missing an episode entails completely losing the thread. The X Files and Buffy (which became steadily less episodic) also had something to do with the shift, but even die-hard fans like me lost patience for The X Files’ conspiracy theory eventually. Lost probably represents the real turning point, as a show where you could easily fail to follow what was going on if you missed a week. I did not enjoy it when it first came out for that very reason. But later a friend leant me the DVDs and I was hooked – marvelling at the immersive and complex development that would not have been possible outside of a miniseries in the 20th century. I have friends who don’t want to watch Game of Thrones or Dexter as the episodes come out – they want to wait for the box set.

The world has changed. Storytelling has changed. And Netflix knows it.

The ‘release a whole series at once’ thing is an experiment. It’s bad enough waiting for the next series when the series you’re watching now comes out over two or three months. We may be able to watch Hemlock Grove in a weekend, but a full TV series still takes the same time to produce. Nevertheless, I suspect Netflix are on the right track. Illegal downloaders seem perfectly happy to snag a whole season at once and then move on to the next thing. Give people what they want when they want it and they’re actually happy to pay for the service most of the time. I like a little bit of anticipation, week to week, but if we’ve learned one thing over the last decade it’s that whilst anticipation is titillating, most of us want what we want right now it if we’re given the option.

But on to reviewing the show itself.

Plot

In small town USA people are weird. The rich people in the big house are weird. The Gypsies who’ve just moved into the trailer in the woods are weird. Everybody’s weird. So when a teenage girl is gruesomely killed whilst her girlfriend listens over her mobile, by something that might be an animal, but left no animal tracks, everybody throws accusing glances around.

Actually, these people are more than just weird. At first it seems like it might be a bait-n-switch where everyone’s sort of ‘Yeah, they might be a vampire… but actually they’re just a bit odd’, but around half-way through the episode it becomes clear that there is something very definitely out of the ordinary going on. A girl who walks around with bandages all day unwraps them at home and reveals that one half of her face very definitely looks non-human. A flash-back suggests her father suspects her mother of being other-worldly, and possibly that the girl is some kind of experiment. A teenage girl who declares herself a novelist superstitiously suspects the Gypsy boy, Peter Rumancek (Landon Lioiro), of being a werewolf because his index and middle fingers are the same length, but there are indications that he may really be one. In turn, Peter comments to his mother that Roman, heir to the Godfrey estate, is… some word I’m unfamiliar with, but one assumes to be a Romani word for something supernatural. I hate to be so non-specific in a review, but there’s actually so little information about this show online at the time of writing that I haven’t actually been able to look this up! Even the wikipedia page is kinda sparse. an ‘upir‘.

Meanwhile, Lynda Rumancek (Lili Taylor), Peter’s mother, appears to be dealing (?) some strange liquid in oddly shaped clear vials. And Olivia Godfrey (Framke Janssen), Roman’s mother, is seen with some of the vials, although we presume she did not get them from Lynda, as hints are dropped that there is some kind of bad blood between the two families.

How was it?

Better than I thought it would be.

The show opened badly. It’s an uncomfortable and hackneyed premise to have your inciting incident be a young girl being horribly murdered. Feels very women in refrigerators and is an uncomfortable reminder of the horror genre’s history with sexism. Add to this that we see a pair of breasts (but not the head to which they belong) before we hear a line of dialogue, and as far as I can tell this objectifying shot added nothing at all to the plot… let’s just say I was not feeling well-disposed towards the programme, and was still feeling mad and annoyed at the ‘let’s all assume girls aren’t watching’ feel that left in my mouth when I should have been being afraid for the girl who was running for her life. I have no problem with nudity, I have a problem with needless objectification and the incredibly slanted treatment of nudity (lots of breasts, not a lot of manflesh). The show had to do a lot to win back my trust.

And yet almost against my will I did become intrigued. The baseline premise – grisly murder of a girl in a town where everyone has a secret – has little to interest, but as the show continued I became more and more perplexed and curious as to what was going on. There were hallucinogenic dream sequences that were clearly meant to be significant of… something. Whatever Shelley Godfrey is it is not out of the familiar stock of werewolves and vampires. Is Peter a werewolf? Is Roman a vampire? Is Olivia? Or is Olivia fae of some description – something about her felt very Sidhe, and I can’t help but note that her daughter’s name, ‘Shelley’, bares some similarity to the name of the court of the fair folk. But I’m clutching at straws – I have no clue!

There are also a wide variety of female characters. With the exception of Shelley they are all extremely slender and of the familiar Hollywood style beauty, but they do have personalities and opinions. In fact, there are probably more female main characters than male, which is very unusual. And it’s good to see a lesbian couple presented on-screen with no overt criticism of their sexuality (although, one of them almost immediately dying a grisly death is not 100% awesome).

I have some concerns about the representation of the Romani. I’d say it’s notably more favourable than in most popular media. Less stereotyped than in Buffy or My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, for instance. However, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the high levels of racism against Romani people around the world, and about their anger at widespread cultural appropriation. And I must confess I know little enough myself about Romani – I try to educate myself but I’m probably not the best judge. There’s very little information about writer and producer Brian McGreevy online – for all I know he is Romani, or has done a great deal of research. But I honestly can’t tell. I can say that Peter and Lynda seem to be possessed of a rich culture which does not prevent Peter from interacting sociably with other people his own age. And prejudice against Romani people is acknowledged and challenged. On the other hand one of the first things Peter does is steal a jacket, which plays somewhat into the Gypsy stereotype. I don’t know. I am ignorant myself. But of the two families who feature most prominently, the Rumanceks are given the more favourable presentation.

Overall I am intrigued and willing to see where this goes. More than that, I would encourage others to see where this goes. It has potential, and despite the poor directorial decision early on, I think it has won me over.

*The term ‘original’ is variably open to interpretation. Hemlock Grove is based on a book by Brian McGreevy, but it has never been presented as a television show before (although, I keep thinking we’re going to need a new word for this kind of thing – ‘webisode’ doesn’t seem to cut it for something whose format is otherwise identical to shows like Dexter, Weeds, Firefly and countless others that are also hosted by Netflix).