It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
Previously on TMINE
It’s been a quieter week this week, with nary a Boxset to be seen. However, TMINE did review the first two episodes of Devs (US: Hulu; UK: BBC Two). Meanwhile, Orange Thursday didn’t quite fulfil its usual mandate, only managing to take in the one movie: Dark Waters (2019).
John Turturro in The Plot Against America
Next on TMINE
In terms of new shows, after realising that Temple (US: Spectrum) was actually Temple (UK: Sky One) and removing it from the list, I managed to take in Dave (US: FXX) and Amazing Stories (Apple TV+), both of which I’ll be talking about after the jump.
Coming some time in the week will be a review of The Plot Against America (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic), I hope, but that’s about it for new TV, so I might find a boxset somewhere to review as well. I suspect it’ll be season three of Babylon Berlin (Germany: Sky; UK: Sky Atlantic), given I’ve now watched the first four episodes.
Meanwhile, tomorrow’s Orange Thursday will be back to its usual double-barrelled glorywith a preview of Radioactive (2020) and a review of Joker (2019).
John Hannah in Transplant
The regulars
The regulars list is starting to swell again. After the jump, I’ll be letting you know what I thought of the latest episodes: For Life, Star Trek: Picard, Stateless, Stumptown, Transplant, and War of the Worlds, as well as the series finale of The Outsider.
Most TV dramas are written by people without much knowledge of science and technology. The resulting mistakes annoy people who do have knowledge of science and technology. But as Mr Robot demonstrated, there is a market for TV dramas written by people who do understand science and technology. And as the title suggests, Devs is such a show – Devs is short for developers, as any IT fool knows.
However, Devs also demonstrates that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, both for audiences and for writers. Even the title is a trap for those who know about technology. Does Devs actually stand for developers or is that what the show wants you to think? Because one of the many mysteries that Devs builds up in its first two episodes is the mystery of what devs actually stands for – even the show’s collection of emotionless IT staff aren’t sure.
From the brain of Alex Garland
What Devs definitely is is the first TV show both written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Sunshine, 28 Days Later), meaning it’s very ‘hard SF’. It’s also one of the first “FX on Hulu” shows released so far, meaning it’s a bit more niche and a bit darker than the standard Hulu fare.
It sees Sonoya Mizuno and Karl Glusman playing a happy couple of super-brained developers working for bearded Nick Offerman (Parks and Recreation) and his ultra high-tech San Francisco tech company. They’re the kind of people who argue over breakfast about the right mathematical functions to use for encryption protocols to avoid being vulnerable to cracking by quantum computers – which given that they live and work in a near future when quantum computers are both viable and useful isn’t quite as theoretical a worry as it might at first seem.
When AI researcher Glusman demonstrates to Offerman a neural model of a nematode that accurately predicts its behaviour for 10 seconds, he’s rapidly promoted to Offerman’s Devs division – a division so secret no one actually knows what it does and so advanced that it works in an area inside a Faraday cage that’s vacuum sealed away from the rest of the universe.
But that same day, Glusman disappears and Mizuno is tenacious enough to start investigating what’s happened to him, even after she’s seen CCTV footage of him setting fire to himself and burning to death. Soon she finds a mysterious app on his phone that really isn’t the Sudoku game it claims to be…
What is Devs? What happened to Sergei? What is the app really? What is Offerman planning to do? Why does he have a giant statue of his dead daughter looming over his house?
And does knowing too much about physics turn a rather good show that knows quite a bit about physics into something more annoying?
It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend to fellow TMINE readers anything you’ve been watching this week
Previously on TMINE
When I get busy, TV gets busy – such is the game the Fates play with me. Nevertheless, TMINE still managed to review the entire second season of Netflix’s Altered Carbon and preview Fox UK’s forthcoming War of the Worlds.
But I also watched a whole bunch of other new shows, which I’ll be covering after the jump: Transplant (Canada: CTV), Tribal (Canada: APTN), Stateless (Australia: ABC; UK: Netflix) and Queen Sono (Netflix).
In movies, tomorrow’s Orange Thursday will be down to a single feature, since I’m out tonight so won’t have time to watch a second flick: Dark Waters (2020).
In TV, by next Wednesday, I’m hoping to have watched and maybe even reviewed: Dave (US: FX), Devs (US: Hulu), Amazing Stories (Apple TV+) and Temple (US: Spectrum). There’s probably some other shows I’ve missed, knowing me, so I’ll try to review them too when they show up.
For Life
The regulars
With Stumptown taking another week off, the list of regulars is back down to the usual three again: For Life, The Outsider and Star Trek: Picard. All of which I’ve managed to catch up with and are after the jump.
HG Wells is one of the founding authors of literary sci-fi. That in itself wouldn’t explain why there have been so many repeated adaptations of his work – other authors such as Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain get the occasional adaptation, but adaptations of Wells work are vastly more common. It might be because there being so many adaptations ensures a cultural familiarity with Wells’ work or it could be because he came up with so many fundamental science-fiction ideas, such as time machines, invisibility, alien invasions and eugenics.
Even so, that wouldn’t explain why in the past six months alone, as well as a movie adaptation of The Invisible Man, we’ve seen not one but two adaptations of The War of the Worlds. The first by the BBC, The War of the Worlds, was a relatively faithful, period affair set in England.
And now we have a far looser adaptation, War of the Worlds, set in modern day France and the UK.
Elizabeth McGovern and Gabriel Byrne in Fox’s War of the Worlds
Alienated
It introduces us to a whole gaggle of Brits and French people, but predominantly British/Irish neuroscientist Gabriel Byrne and his estranged wife (Elizabeth McGovern), as well as French scientist Léa Drucker (Le Bureau Des Légendes) who has sister issues.
Drucker is tasked by the European Space Agency to monitor signals from outer space for signs of alien intelligence. On top of that, she actually sends signals out, too – music encoded as binary. Then one day, she starts to receive signals from a far away star that has a known exoplanet. The world is shocked – more shocked as the signal starts to get stronger and things start coming towards us.
Do they mean us harm? Well, the clue is in the title.
The first season of Altered Carbon was almost a classic example of both how to adapt a novel and how not to adapt a novel. Altered Carbon is a noted piece of militaristic cyberpunk that foresees a future in which people’s minds can be downloaded and uploaded onto little disks called ‘stacks’ that can be inserted into organic or synthetic bodies called ‘sleeves’. Coupled with the ability to ‘needlecast’ information faster than light, you can travel the universe simply by being uploaded from one body and downloaded into another. Or you can live forever. Improvements in genetic engineering et al also mean that bodies can be enhanced for various applications.
Cyberpunk being cyberpunk and Brits being Brits, needless to say, the future that author Richard Morgan envisioned would stem from this improved technology is profoundly pessimistic. The government oppress, the poor are abused, the rich murder and rape for fun in exchange for putting their victims in new bodies when they’re finished, and more.
The first season of Altered Carbon was a correspondingly and refreshingly adults-only affair, chock full of sex and full frontal nudity, sadistic violence and Grade A swearing. An obviously vast amount of money was spent on envisioning this quasi-Blade Runner world and it looked fantastic. The show practically shimmered with ideas.
And it was largely a faithful adaptation, too, following the book’s narrative of former super-soldier ‘Envoy’ Takeshi Kovacs – played by various actors, including Will Yun Lee (Witchblade) and Joel Kinnaman (Robocop), depending on which sleeve in which time period on which planet we were following him – being revived after 300 years to investigate the murder of one of the richest quasi-immortal ‘Meths’. It was an interesting, futuristic gumshoe tale with a mystery to be solved and an engaging enough anti-hero to follow.
So far, so very good.
Sad puppies and love
What really scuppered it, though, was the taking of this hard-core ‘sad puppies‘ ‘masculine’ cyberpunk and smashing it straight into an almost completely incompatible ‘feminine’ affair. Various changes were made to the plot, characters and background to ground it in family, romance and somewhat liberal-left ideas.
The least spoilery example is that the supersoldier Envoys became heroic resistance fighters led by the same person who not only invented the stacks but simultaneously turned out to be the best, most empathetic fighter in the galaxy, as well as Kovacs’ lover.
One or other genres could have worked, but not both together in the same series. The scars from the surgery necessary to combine them were clearly visible, even if you hadn’t read the book.
It was still enjoyable, even on a rewatch, for most of its run, bar the episode that filled in all the back story, but it was still a cautionary tale for future adaptations.
Altered Carbon: Unleash the furies
Now we have the second season, which has a new showrunner, at least one new leading man-sleeve (Anthony Mackie), a new sensibility and a new, clearly lower budget. However, against expectations, the show is continuing with Morgan’s work, albeit skipping his second Kovacs novel and heading straight into the final episode of the trilogy: Woken Furies.
Set 30 years after season one, it sees Kovacs continuing his quest to find his former lover – assumed to have died 300 years earlier – but lured back to his birthplace on Harlan’s World by Meth Michael Shanks (Stargate SG-1). The founders of Harlan’s World are being (permanently) killed by someone or something, and Shanks wants Kovacs’ protection. He’ll even give him a shiny new, weapons-grade sleeve (Mackie) if he’ll help.
But it’s not long before all manner of people from Kovacs’ past turn up – and Kovacs discovers that Shanks might not have been telling the whole truth.
And while it’s learned from season one, season two of Altered Carbon is a salutary lesson that unless you’re Doctor Who and can just ignore continuity at your whim, you need to be careful with the foundations of your adaptation, since it’s going to be hard to change them later on.
