On Apple TV
I’ve signed up for Apple TV for a month to catch the buzz on Widow’s Bay (loved it!) and decided to watch Murderbot while I was at it. All of us on this blog absolutely love Martha Wells’ ongoing series, but I was resisting the tv show because I had a huge problem with the casting. I’m basically writing this post to air some petty grievances, figuring I have the excuse that we’ve all read the books already.
Alexander Skarsgåard is fine and all (although I don’t really understand the folksy accent he’s going with here), but they had the opportunity for a truly outstanding casting in Vico Ortiz (perhaps better known as Jim from Our Flag Means Death). Murderbot is not just unsexed but explicitly non-gendered in the book, and casting a more petite body type could have given a really interesting emphasis on how robotic strength is not connected to muscle mass at all.
The show is a lot of fun, both in action and comedy, but I think it could have been actually groundbreaking in how we think of humans, ‘augmented’ humans, and robots, which would have been especially timely right now. I got annoyed enough at the visual interpretation that I picked up the book again, and there’s just so many scenes that would have been elevated with someone like Ortiz. To give a nonspoiler example, the first time the science team sees Murderbot in civilian clothes rather than armor, they are disconcerted. One scientist doesn’t even recognize Murderbot, which doesn’t make a lot of sense with a giant Nordic body that seems specifically cast to stand out.
The casting of the science team is great, Dr. Mensah in particular. I wish they would have let the science team in general be more science-y, a little more The Martian than Starship Troopers, but they each get individual characterization and nuance, which is more than a lot of shows manage. The one thing I have to admit the show improves on is the visualization of Murderbot’s favorite space soap The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon; what an absolute delight to see star-laden technicolor snippets! Anyway, Apple made a good show, but they could have made a great one and I just can’t quite get over that. (I’m loving doing a general murderbot reread, though.)
We finally bit the bullet and got Amazon Prime in order to watch “
Oh, The Dragon Prince! The first season of this cartoon just hit Netflix a few weeks ago, and it probably would have passed me by entirely except for a thread of kudos on 
If The Dragon Prince is Game of Thrones, then 
So, I’d read The Alienist over twenty years ago in college, and only vaguely remembered it being about applying the very young field of psychology to the profiling of serial killers, and that the serial killer in question preyed on young boy prostitutes. I didn’t remember any details, including any of the central characters or the final solution, so the miniseries was almost a brand-new story for me, and I loved it! The acting was all excellent, overshadowed only by the lush cinematography highlighting the dramatic differences between the very wealthy and the very poor at the end of the nineteenth century. I am very much hoping that TNT decides to tackle the sequel, The Angel of Darkness, next!
Anyway, The Butchered Man reminded me strongly of The Alienist, in a good way. It takes place a good fifty years earlier and in rural England, but the two central protagonists fit right in. Giles Vernon is an ex-military man and current police chief, who is working to transition the local police from a loose watchman structure to a more organized unit based on his military experience. To that end, he hires Felix Carswell as a full-time police surgeon and forensic pathologist.
And going back to TV, can I also recommend “Fallet” on Netflix? The preview seem to show a somewhat generically dark police procedural, but there was a subtle quirkiness to it that attracted me. Let me tell you, in the actual show, the quirkiness is not subtle: “Fallet” is an extremely funny satire of the popular Nordic mystery genre. The characters and dialogue are laugh-out-loud funny, but the actors, director, and cinematographer all play it extremely straight, which makes it even funnier. The whole season is eight half-hour episodes, so it is a quick and easy watch, though it is subtitled, since half the characters speak Swedish.
I really like Western movies, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book in the genre, actually. I love to see the long shots of empty vistas and close-ups of horses, but am not quite so keen to read about them. I have a suspicion that The Sisters Brothers is not your normal Western, but I absolutely loved it!
Pocketful of Bones is straight-up Bates Motel! Within the first chapter or two, a young prostitute accidentally gets pregnant from a john; when he discovers the baby and threatens to take the child from her, she kills him and buries him the backyard She continues to support herself and her son through sex work, which complicates the son’s adolescent sexual awakening (to put it nicely).
I have to admit that I mostly wanted to watch the miniseries because I am a shameful sucker for a pretty face, and Aidan Turner is just so damn attractive. He is so attractive that I’ve watched two very mediocre shows (“Being Human” and “Poldark”) solely in order to look at him. He was very good in this, though his character also turned out to be the most problematic part for me.
That was the one sour note for me; overall, it was all very dramatic and fun to watch. Since there was a fair amount of sex and violence, I wondered what liberties the show had taken to ‘modernize’ the source material, so I checked out the book, and it turns out, not much. That Agatha Christie was quite the salty lady! The show ups the ante just a bit on both, but still sticks remarkably close to the original novel.
I’ve been looking forward to the tv show “Preacher” for a while before it premiered last month on AMC. I’d never read the comic book, but I think Dominic Cooper is extremely handsome and just needs to be in more shows and movies in general.
For people unfamiliar with the basic premise, Jesse Custer is a preacher in a small Texas town with a dwindling faith and congregation. In the middle of a lackluster sermon, he gets struck by a supernatural entity, which bestows on him the Voice of God, allowing him to command absolute obedience. Any person’s use of this power is clearly problematic, and sets Jesse up as a pretty classic anti-hero. Rebecca pointed out that this is the precise power abused by the terrifying villain Kilgrave in “Jessica Jones.”
Biblio-therapy 