"I should like a bacon sandwich."
Sigh. I've been procrastinating about watching this final episode and yes, like the series as a whole, it just isn't very good. Is there any way I can avoid this blog post just consisting of me metaphorically putting this 55 minutes of telly over my knee for a sound spanking?
Well, no one sets out to make bad telly. It's well shot, particularly the action sequences with the CGI Martian. The acting is not so much bad- everyone is competent- but, Robert Carlyle aside, lacking in charisma. And you can see glimpses at times of the fact that Peter Harness is the same writer who has done so much good stuff in the past- the coda of Amy describing to little George is rather lovely. So is the ambiguous note of hope as the clouds seem to clear at the end. Will George live? Will Amy's and Ogilvy's typhoid cure be rolled out? Will they manage to grow crops and survive the winter? Will Ogilvy ever get that bacon sandwich? We can just about imagine that they might. Or not.
But such glimpses do not good telly make. Fundamentally, I think, the structure doesn't work. The first episode was ok, with its linear narrative and the fun of Edwardian Surrey facing an invasion from Mars, in spite of the charisma-free leads. But, for this episode and the last, the split narrative- the flashback to the invasion and the "present" day of the red weed and civilisation breaking down- not only makes the narrative actively less dramatic but adds nothing to the subtext or characters.
Yes, I can see that it would have been worse narratively to have an episode culminating in the Martians dying and another one on the later years of red weed and starvation. But why have the latter at all? If it's a crude metaphor for the climate crisis then it doesn't work; the red weed isn't man made, however much the subtext- in the original novel here and too didactically articulated by George here- may be that this is the British Empire getting its just desserts. Nor do I like how George's idealism is shown as naive and unrealistic. I'm no socialist- my heroes are John Lilburne, John Maynard Keynes and Henry George, not Keir Hardie or the Webbs- but I don't like how socialism is caricatured here.
I suppose, then, that this is quite well made. But the whole thing is woefully misconceived and, in spite of some good work in paces, sadly a bad piece of television.
To say I was dissapointed with this series was an understatement; I was angry, I was upset. In regards to writing, I have always had a problem with the characters in this series. The series has three female characters, Amy, the servant who is quickly killed off during the invasion, and George's actual wife (who only appears in one scene to demonstrate the failure of her and George’s marriage). George's wife warns that Amy is selfish, and honestly, this really feels like a warning for the audience, who are able to follow what makes compelling writing. Amy is on the surface a strong women, clearly realising what is happening before everyone else and intelligent. But she’s like a day-old sink full of dirty dishes and brackish water; the moment you poke the surface, you’re assaulted by the nasty stench underneath. It’s hard to see her actions as anything other than self serving opportunity. She’s figures out what the aliens are doing and even smiles at the photographs in a way that feels patronizing. And she even berates George's brother as though the invasion is due to her relationship with George. It is her failure to adore her husband properly that forces George and his brother to see the hollowness of their action, because neither man understands the long-term consequences until they are killed. So basically, if Amy wasn’t such a jealous shrew, these men would have been more understanding and could have survived. She is the cause of most of their pain. When you combine Amy as an image of femininity, we’re left with a view that women are simply destructive to men. Amy's power is profound, corrosive, irresistible, and ultimately enduring. The woman survives the story.
ReplyDeleteI get it. I understand why Writer Peter Harness expanded the role of the narrator's wife from the novel, stating "I think the clearest choice that I made from the start of this project was to give the male character a wife who had strength of character in her own right [...] It was very important to me to make the female character three-dimensional" But I’m baffled by why Harness, didn’t recognize what a moral sludge the story becomes as a result of these choices and how deeply misandry the series’s treatment of its male characters are.