Watchmen

Right, you can stop the pandemic now.  I’m not playing anymore.  Granted, I’ve only got prosecco problems when it comes to coping with covvers (the mask makes my beard itch, I want to go to the theatre, I could lose my job etc), but as a lifestyle trend it would be really great if we could move on to something new.  Such is the extent of my fatigue that I actively avoid almost all news, as it’s mostly just white male Etonians blustering about the perils of young people and other such evils.  But, my clicks were recently baited by reports of the Emmy Awards.  Sure, there was no ceremony, but this was a normal annual thing that was almost happening.  I’ve harped on here about incredible pieces of TV that have kept me glued to my sofa and, of course, there were those top shows among the nominees – you know, your Euphorias and your Successions.  However, among the winning boxsets I was proud of completing, there was one that had passed me by: Watchmen.

I got the first episode cued up, but it wasn’t until a Friday evening when I was taken by the mood to delve into the story.  We all know I’ve no time for superheroes.  I’ve even been underwhelmed by attempts to subvert the genre (The Boys).  Nevertheless, I had thoroughly enjoyed the film version of Watchmen when it came out in 2009.  Oddly plausible, artfully stylised and with a story I can no longer really recall (which wasn’t helped by a second viewing that I mostly slept through), the film gave me an underlying confidence that I wouldn’t be subjecting myself to mindless Marvel’s punching by numbers.  This would be something better.  And how right was I?  And the Emmys?  And also all the people that watched it when it came out last year and told me then that it was worth a watch?  My whole subsequent weekend was consumed by a need to finish the nine episodes, desperate as I was to solve the mounting mysteries and witness the conclusion of the very complicated plot (unlike the last episode of Dark that I am too scared to watch).

We’ll run through now how watching Watchmen checks off a lot of my boxes when it comes to a good, er, boxset.  First up, we’ve got the alternative reality, last seen blowing my mind in the third series of The Handmaid’s Tale.  In Watchmen, the Vietnam War has gone a bit differently, cars no longer use petrol, interdimensional squids are an ongoing hazard and, in Tulsa, the police are required to wear masks.  If you’re finding this disorientating, then I’ve come some way to approximating the experience of watching the first episode.  Initially, Watchmen doesn’t care if you’re clued up on what’s happening or not.  Somehow, I was thrilled by my own stupidity and electrified by the need to keep up.  Filling the gaps became a desperate urge, mostly because these important elements of context were only ever alluded to in passing, thus making the later expositions all the more plausible.  I was completely sold.

One alternate the Watchmen reality keeps the same is racial tension.  A prominent catalyst to the show’s events is the Tulsa race massacre, something which, to my shame, I had never heard of.  If Watchmen’s only achievement in this world is to make more people aware of the 1921 destruction of a prosperous Black neighbourhood by white supremacists, then for that alone I would doff my hat to it.  Throughout the present-day narrative, the threat of racists remains and looms large.  It’s given an all-the-more-terrifying edge by the way these thugs mask their beliefs with respectability, making us blind to their blind hatred, while they are deaf to reason.  I won’t reduce racial tension to a plot device – Watchmen unapologetically puts America’s issues with race front and centre – but it brings to life a good-versus-evil jeopardy that means so much more than generic white man hero battling generic supervillain.  And on that note, Watchmen revels in its championing of actors that are normally side-lined.  Reams and reams of glorious dialogue proceed without a white man in sight.

My final point to stress is Watchmen’s deft stretching of narrative tension so that each episode thwarts as much as it solves, carefully creating the coming crescendo which forms the mini-series’ climax.  Once enough intrigue is set up, the revelations come thick and fast.  Regina King is our (badass) anchor as we navigate each blow to the psyche, and don’t worry if you at first think that Yahya Abdul-Mateen II doesn’t have enough to do (see The Get Down and Black Mirror for evidence of his range), but around this central couple assembles an array of characters you can’t help but feel desperate to know more about.  I craved more of Jean Smart’s Agent Blake while Hong Chau’s Lady Trieu maintained the perfect level of moral ambiguity until just the right moment.  I won’t spoil things by saying one or two minutes of the finale got just a touch too Marvel-y for me as everything else was a sublime televisual experience.

If we end up confined to our homes again, then Watchmen is the closest you can get to the visceral real-life experiences we have been lacking in 2020.  Maybe we do need heroes after all, but Watchmen’s heroes aren’t preening about in Spandex demanding attention for selective philanthropy.  Instead, they’re driven by their own hatred of systems and belief structures that hold humankind back.  They’re compelled to act against what is wrong, no matter the cost, and this is quite rightly what Watchmen presents as heroism.  Anyway, we seem to have strayed into some very uncharacteristically earnest territory for Just One More Episode, especially when we’re all here for passive aggression and sarcasm.  But what can I say?  Here is a boxset that transcends all the blue willy comments it’s left itself open to.  If only all storytelling could be this good, and this important.

Kingdom (킹덤)

Well, a lot of people filled their boots with the Shipwrecked post, didn’t they?  Learning nothing from that runaway success, this week I’m veering recklessly to the other end of the TV spectrum.  We’ve not chatted about my love for zombies since both The Walking Dead and Fear The Walking Dead (the latter a spin-off of the former) were subjected to my sardonic snarkiness months and months ago.  So, brace yourself for the flesh-eating undead.  But that’s not the only swap we’ve made.  Replace a Pacific Island with the Korean peninsula.  Switch bikini-clab British Millennials for medieval Koreans.  And sub inarticulate youths saying “you know, kind of like” for a violent onslaught from the Korean language, with subtitles straight out of the How To Speak Archaic English textbook and, ladies and gentlemen, you’ve got yourself Kingdom.

But, as always, due to a grave inability to take anything seriously, I jest.  Kingdom is literally the best thing I have seen on Netflix in ages.  I’m not even sorry about writing such a weak sentence as that previous one – it doesn’t need dressing up.  I’m still in a state of excitement, and I finished all six episodes about a week ago.  I’m looking at the clock as if it’s going to tell me when series two will come into my life and provide me with equal measures of horror and entertainment.  Let’s be honest, I get both of these in my office, but very little of this comes from historical Koreans, so it’s nice to have a change, isn’t it?

The bit where I tell you what it’s all about will now follow, but again, we’re going for a certain laziness of language, as the rest is verging on highbrow (historical, foreign language) and we need to average things out to keep the majority happy.  So, there’s this prince, right?  His dad, the king, is on his deathbed, yeah, but the prince is being kept away by the new queen, his stepmother.  She’s expecting a baby by the old king, so she needs her husband to survive until the birth in order to secure succession.  She’s part of a clan who are hungry for power, so let’s just say there’s a rather Westerosi approach to this whole throne ownership business.  Her clan’s devious attempts to keep the king alive are what cause the inevitable zombie outbreak, while dismissing a physician back into the countryside is what spreads the pestilence to the peasants beyond the palace.  Meanwhile, our poor old prince also has to flee for his life on a quest to find out the truth.  He’s about to find out it’s not so easy being a prince in zombie-riddle medieval Korea.

What sets this apart, though, is bloody all of it.  But let’s distil from this two of the main TV-viewing features upon which you can feast your eyes.  The first is that every shot is exquisitely cinematic in its beauty.  From ancient palace buildings to dramatic landscapes, the visuals’ lushness is exceeded only by the ancient costumes.  You’ll wonder who ever thought those big hats were practical for soldiers, or question how warm so many layers of silk can be, but you’ll always end up impressed.  Somehow, this aesthetic doesn’t distract from the drama; instead, it becomes the perfect frame for the zombie fare, which often needs further theming to become plausible.  Having been to modern South Korea, I’m not sure the impact would have been the same among the grey buildings of Seoul, evidence of the whole place getting smashed in during the 1950s’ Korean War.

The second main setter-aparter is the incredible dramatic tension.  A zombie origin story is always fraught, as you, the viewer, sprawled on your cushions and shoving snacks in your face, know full well that doom is due while the characters all too slowly put two and two together and come up with some sort of denial of the epidemic chasing them down country lanes (yes, these zombies run, fast).  Skip this bit if you don’t want any spoiler content whatsoever, but one element of the zombie mythology in Kingdom has to be mentioned: the undead are only active in the dark.  Cue limitless possibilities of the sun setting, corpses starting to twitch, silly Korean magistrates being inefficient in their jobs and all hell being unleashed.  Conversely, you know your beloved main characters just have to survive each night before the daytime brings a bit of a breather.  A whole episode got so tense, the build and build to nightfall so domineering, that I had to press pause and pace about the room a bit to restore all sense of perspective to myself.

Alongside all of this, Kingdom finds time to make comparisons between the haves and have nots in society: a sort of socialist message to accompany the consumption of flesh, if you will.  The nobility are repeatedly shown to cock up their handling of an issue of national importance, while our royal hero, the prince, also learns that the peasant fodder bearing the brunt of the infestation don’t actually deserve to be eaten alive.  It’s funny how Brexit bleeds into everything, isn’t it?  (Or is that a bit of a reach this time?)  It seems that any dishonour towards a royal, however, does come with the alarming punishment of one’s whole family being annihilated.  What a great way to target crime.  The next time someone swipes your iPhone on a moped, you can rest assured that they won’t just be found and jailed, they won’t just be executed, but their whole family tree will be erased from the earth.

I’ll finish by saying that I don’t care if you don’t like subtitles.  You should have tried harder at school if you can’t read fast enough.  Stepping outside of the English language into Kingdom allows you to access one of the most compelling additions to the zombie canon in quite a few years.  Sure, it’s based on a comic book, like The Walking Dead etc, but it’s set apart by its uniqueness in the Western TV marketplace.  It’s also endlessly gratifying to watch the various extras really go for it in their performances and energetically give something extra of themselves, become extra extras.  Just remember, don’t come for me when you reach the cliffhanging end of series one, because it was me who opened your tiny mind to the intense tension of Kingdom.

The Walking Dead

I don’t know if I can carry on with The Walking Dead.  It doesn’t give a lot back.  I’m persevering because, when it’s at its best, it’s truly among the most impactful television I have ever seen.  But series eight, which has just returned from its mid-season break, is a gruelling and gruesome onslaught of hopelessness.

I mean, who has a mid-season break anyway?  With the average American series over twenty episodes, compared to Brits calling it a day after about six or seven, I realise I don’t have a leg to stand on.  But where are the other mid-season breaks in adult life?  I’m very much in favour of bringing some sort of half term to working life, otherwise it’s just endless, isn’t it?

But anyway, they’ve had a good innings.  Who’d have thought such an incredibly graphic and violently gory drama would attract such international acclaim?  There was a slight head start from its roots in a series of popular comic books, but I don’t know anything about these really, so I won’t wade in with my views (though a lack of knowledge has never really stopped me before).  In short, the initial premise is that a man wakes up from a coma to find that a zombie apocalypse has taken hold on the USA.  Cue eight seasons of struggles to stay alive.

And what a man.  Rick Grimes is the Southern sheriff whose sweat-soaked shoulders end up bearing the weight of leadership: he finds himself the de facto head of a ragtag band of survivors.  Around him, there develops a cult of Rick.  He seems to be able to keep people safe.  Repeatedly, the characters end up in nice new communities: planting a few crops (they seem to favour beans), sticking spikes through zombies’ heads at their perimeter fence to avoid being overrun, teaching the children how to cope (mixed ability, of course).  This obviously lowers the scope for drama, so it never lasts long.  After a while, you begin secretly to wish it will all go terribly wrong.  After a bit longer, you realise this is inevitable and merely bide your time until the undead stream into whichever compound and thin out the cast a bit.

However, Rick doesn’t go around mansplaining how to kill a zombie to a bunch of terrified mother hens.  He’s epic, but the strong female characters run rings around him.  Michonne, Sasha, Tara, Rosita and Maggie are just some of the bad motherf*ckers keeping his show on the road.  For me, though, the most impressive is Carol.  While every cast member of The Walking Dead grows and develops, Carol’s beginnings as a brow-beaten housewife couldn’t be further from where she ends up.  The first episode of series five, No Sanctuary, is proof of her undeniable badassery.  It’s one of the greatest things I have ever seen.  Take a bow, Melissa McBride.

This is what happens to Rick’s people.  They get tough.  And then they come across other people that are softer, and dominate them, or they come across other tough people, and fight with them.  This seems to be the rut we are stuck in.  With each series, more times passes since the apocalypse.  The undead might be more decayed than before, but it’s the humans who are even more monstrous.

I’ve already covered the spin-off show, Fear The Walking Dead, where I mentioned that the constant threat of death makes the drama more intense.  Your favourite could be killed at any juncture.  Never are they more at risk than at the huge storyline climaxes that have punctuated the start and end of each season (and each mid-season for that matter).

It’s these peaks that have been more like troughs in recent series.  In an effort to avoid being predictable and allowing its main characters to seem immortal, The Walking Dead will desperately cull a few of them, just to keep you on your toes.  But these deaths feel like betrayals, particularly when they don’t take the storylines anywhere.  There’s a balance to be struck here, but the striking has failed to hit the mark like it used to.

I should have seen the end in sight when a tiger appeared in the second episode of the seventh season.  Shiva might also be in the comics, but this wild animal’s introduction in The Well, obeying its human masters, shattered many illusions for me.  The dead coming back to life?  I’ll buy it.  But a tiger that knows which people to maul based on the community they come from?  Come on!

Countless friends have abandoned ship, complaining that the storylines are too drawn out, that there is too much build up before the release of any action.  But then series eight has been constant battle action, and that doesn’t feel right either.  When you’ve invested so much in a show, you feel it owes you something.  I’m sticking with it in case I can work out what I feel it owes me.  Maybe I’ll know when I see it.  I don’t want to be a fan that expects everything to be done just to please them, so I’m bearing in mind that this is still one of the best shows out there (which I seem to say every single week on here…).

Given my love of trash (Bromans, Survival Of The Fittest, Geordie Shore), I’ll tolerate a lot of things.  I’ve come to terms with how much the cast perspire in the 100% Georgia humidity.  I don’t mind that so many of them seem to be British, which makes me constantly scrutinise their accents for an accidental syllable of Home Counties pronunciation.  I don’t mind that the rest were in The Wire.  I could handle The Cell (series seven, episode three) when Daryl is held captive and tortured with the same song on loop (ruin your day here).  And finally, I can handle the current storyline doldrum.

The reason for this is series two, episode seven, Pretty Much Dead Already.  It ends with an epiphany.  It makes you question all you thought you knew about zombies, about humans and about humanity.  It turns on its head the unwritten rules of TV.  I felt like the sofa had collapsed away from under me and I was freefalling into a new world.

I’m just waiting for that to happen again.

Fear The Walking Dead

If you’re going to watch a lot of television shows, it’s worth figuring out what sort of themes you like the most.  For some reason, I’ve never been able to interest myself in shows about solving murders.  I’m (probably) never going to murder anyone, so it all seems largely irrelevant.  However, any show with a hint of zombie apocalypse goes straight on my watchlist.  If I follow my own logic, then this should mean that I fully expect to live through humanity being killed off by the undead.  But then, I don’t think I do see this in my future.  Yet, it’s still feels more relevant to my life.  And this is most likely because half my days are spent in a zombie-like routine, catching the same buses, standing in the same spots on Tube platforms, thumbing through the same apps and repeatedly writing the same office emails.  It’s not quite apocalyptic, but its tedium is probably as painful as being eaten alive by cadavers.

Anyway, we’ve got distracted.  The point is, I love anything about zombies.  Ever since I was dragged to see 28 Days Later (actually about an infection), I’ve never found anything as compelling as working out what I would do in the same situation.  That said, I still don’t have a plan.  And so, with the eighth series of The Walking Dead hitting UK screens, it’s time to turn attentions to the spin off, mostly because I’ve just finished the second series.

With the democratisation of TV content, allowing viewers to pick their own schedules, a model that’s done so well for Netflix and Amazon, it was an absolute mugging off that BT did the worst thing ever with Fear The Walking Dead on its UK launch by holding it hostage on its paid-for channels in order to force people to sign up.  Instead, people simply resorted to pirating it, so go fudge yourselves, BT.  I have been a good boy and simply hung on for the episodes to come under Amazon Prime.

The show’s lack of ubiquity is a real shame, as its quality really is up there with The Walking Dead.  Sure, the gore maws your eyes sore, but having the fall of civilisation as a backdrop really makes a good character arc seem all the more compelling.  The action centres on LA in the early days of the outbreak, complementing The Walking Dead’s setting in the well-established future of the same apocalypse.  The tension that dominates the first series as the characters try and work out what’s going on while we’re fully clued up on their fates makes for epic viewing.

But, it’s actually very hard to like any of the characters.  The show still has you rooting for them to survive, but they mostly are a real bunch of bastards.  This continues into the second series and ties in with the theory that, while monsters may walk the earth, humans will always be the biggest bad guys.

Beyond describing the premise as following a band of survivors attempting to live out the end of days, there’s not much else you need to know.  Comparisons to The Walking Dead might be all we have.  While everyone in that show looks sweaty as balls in the Georgia humidity, Fear The Walking Dead plays out in the dry heat of California and beyond.  As someone who is almost always too hot and can barely keep any clothes on, my biggest concern is how someone can bear to wear jeans in a desert, not the fact that they are being chased by brain-devouring zombies.

The languages geek within me loves the fact that a good portion of the show switches between Spanish and English, and you’re definitely in for a treat if you like boats.  The Walking Dead’s zombie lore is well observed, though Fear The Walking Dead does rely a great deal on the fact that smearing yourself with dead people’s bodily mush disguises to zombies that you are still alive.  It’s a bit too easy.

Zombie-based dramas trump a lot of other themes, simply because any and all of the characters can die at any minute.  It might sound macabre to enjoy this, but what else can consistently provide such strong human drama?  In murder mysteries, the victim is already dead, lying there cold and inert in a chilly morgue.  In Fear The Walking Dead, the victims of death stalk the earth having a lot more fun (and doing that sort of breathy growling they enjoy so much).  Just don’t watch it straight before bed as you will be too tense to sleep, unless you have finally numbed all your emotions by watching too much of this sort of thing.