Reading/Watching Log #80

If it seems like this month encompasses a rather eclectic assortment of shows, it’s down to the fact I’m rapidly running out of room on my portable hard-drive and needed to watch and delete ASAP. So along with the latest version of Les Misérables, the fourth adaptation of Strike, the second season of Gentleman Jack, the third of Derry Girls, another take on an Agatha Christie mystery, and something called Worzel Gummidge (the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen) I also caught the final two episodes of Stranger Things. True story: I had a dream about it the night I finished it, and of all things, it involved Mrs Wheeler getting her normal hair back.

Throw in two more Babysitters Club books, two more Robin Hood adaptations, and two takes on Kiki’s Delivery Service...

And WHAT ARE THE ODDS that in the space of two months, after his star-breaking role in Stranger Things as Eddie Munson, I would by complete coincidence see Joseph Quinn in no less than three other projects: Catherine the Great, Les Misérables, and Strike: Lethal White, all of which were just sitting there on my external hard-drive.

I don’t know why this game amuses me so much, but it does.

Potted Potter (Court Theatre)

Before I say any more, know that this was widely advertised as an “unauthorized” spoof on the Harry Potter books, so J.K. Rowling didn’t make a cent. My goddaughter is a huge fan of the books/films, and I owed her a decent birthday present, so taking her to this was my gift to her. And judging from the way she was laughing, even from behind her mask, I won this month’s godmother award.

It was really just a simple two-man show with a lot of props, in which one guy played the narrator and Harry Potter, and the other juggled all the other necessary characters. The pitch was “all seven books in seventy minutes”, with the requisite jokes about how no one wanted to be a Hufflepuff, how boring the interminable camping trip was, and (gasp!) that Harry Potter himself is an entirely reactive character.

Naturally there were plenty of poop jokes for the kids, though they always manage to sneak in a few adult gags as well (at one point one guy comes out reading Fifty Shades of Grey with a shocked look on his face, and the other comments: “some of the mums in the audience are getting a bit giggly”). The Quidditch game was a highlight, with all the audience made to get up on their feet and join in with swerving left, right, ducking under bridges and going over speed bumps (with various obstacles waved at them from the stage) but ironically the best gag came from an audience member: they picked out a guy to be the show’s single Hufflepuff, and then asked him to make a noise like a badger. At a loss at what to do, he just said: “badger”.

Oh, and the bar was selling a version of butterbeer, which I naturally had to try: and it was horrible! Basically liquid butterscotch with cream on top. I don’t think I’ve had anything made up of so many raw calories since I was a kid. It was also the first time in a while that I’ve been around that many children in an enclosed space, so fingers crossed on the Covid front.

Claudia and Mean Janine by Anne M. Martin

Despite being my favourite Babysitter, I have to admit that Claudia’s stories aren’t always the most interesting ones. The best “sub-genres” of the series were either the child-care or the mystery-based stories, and Claudia’s stories were almost invariably about family troubles, friend troubles or school troubles.

That’s very much the case here, which focuses on her fraught relationship with older sister Janine, a certified genius who makes Claudia feels utterly inadequate. Naturally she learns across the course of the story that Janine also harbours feelings of resentment towards Claudia, for being popular and artistic and having less expectations placed upon her shoulders.

The girls do reconcile by the end of the book, though it’s one of those frustrating developments that is continually reset across the series in its entirety. Janine continues to be referred to as the nerdy, insufferable one and the two sisters are at loggerheads more often than not. I suppose in a way it’s more realistic, since rarely do such opposites resolve their differences permanently, but I never found Claudia/Janine to be one of the more interesting dynamics of the series.

It’s also the book in which Mimi has a stroke, and Claudia comes up with the method of communicating with her through blinking. C’mon, I must have first read this when I was twelve and I still knew full-well it was complete bullshit that a thirteen-year-old was the first person ever to come up with the idea of communicating with stroke victims through blinking.

Boy Crazy Stacey by Anne M. Martin

The first of the “babysitting while on vacation” stories and the second Stacey book sees her and Mary Anne accompanying the Pike family to Sea City as mother helpers (and the latent sexism of this moniker is acknowledged, with Stacey realizing they’re more accurately parent helpers).

It was a good idea to pair the unlikely duo of Stacey and Mary Anne, as they’re the most dissimilar of all the main characters and the two that have spent the least amount of time together. The odd couple pairing makes for a nice dynamic as they head off to Sea City with the Pikes, though the main conflict of the story (that Mary Anne gets annoyed at Stacey neglecting her duties due to a crush on a hunky lifeguard) makes up only a small part of the book.

Instead, Martin seems more interested in just writing about vacationing with a bunch of kids. There are chapters about them at the beach, on the boardwalk, at novelty themed restaurants – this was one of my favourites as a kid, and I was surprised by how much I remembered. Martin really captures the sights, smells and tastes of a kitschy seaside resort town.

It also characterizes the Pike kids a fair bit, one of the key Stoneybrook families: obviously Mallory will be joining the club in six books, but we also get stuff on Byron’s sensitivity, Nicky’s desire to hang out with the boys, Vanessa’s poetry and Margo’s car-sickness. But dear god did I want to dropkick Claire into the sun with that incessant “silly-billy-goo-goo” shtick. It is the MOST IRRIATING THING EVER, and not even something I can imagine a five-year-old doing for any length of time.

Kiki’s Delivery Service by Eiko Kadono

I had no idea that Kiki’s Delivery Service was originally a children’s novel; I had assumed Hayao Miyazaki came up with the concept himself. But author Eiko Kadono recounts her inspiration for the story in the foreword: one of her daughter’s drawings depicted a witch riding a broom with a radio hanging from it. In a recent movie podcast I listened to, this anecdote was attributed to Miyazaki, so there are clearly several misconceptions surrounding the story.

Even more surprising was to discover that this is actually only the first book concerning the adventures of Kiki, first written in 1985. Turns out there are five sequels and only last year did we get our first English translation (the one I’ve just read).

Another interesting thing: the first half of the film more or less follows the first half of the book to the letter: Kiki is a young witch who leaves home to settle in a different city with her cat Jiji. She chooses a seaside town and happens across a woman in a bakery who accidentally left her baby’s pacifier behind. Wanting to be helpful, she takes it from the baker (a pregnant woman called Osono) and returns it, thereby giving her the inspiration to start a delivery service.

Her first job is to deliver a birthday present – a little stuffed cat in a birdcage – to a boy, only to drop it on the way and ask Jiji to take its place until she can retrieve it, at which point she discovers an artist living in the forest who gives her the cat in exchange for sitting for her portrait.

But it’s at this point that book and film part ways: Miyazaki works with these established characters to create a narrative in which Kiki loses her inspiration and finds it again through bonding with the women in her life. The book contains more chapter-long vignettes containing dozens more characters: Kiki helps an elderly woman dry her laundry, delivers a love letter from a girl to a boy, helps a sea captain find a solution to clanking wine bottles, and so on.

(A similar thing happened with Miyazaki’s adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle – it starts off incredibly faithful to the book and then does its own thing, though far less successfully there. That movie is gorgeous, but utterly incoherent after a while).

At times the story feels a little twee, and some things don’t translate particularly elegantly – for example, there’s a scene in which a tower clock stops just before midnight on New Years’ Eve and Kiki flies up to it on her broom as fast as she can, pushing the minute hand to its vertical position in order to set it off at the right time. I just... cannot imagine that at all. It’s so awkward and unwieldy. How did she manage to push such a heavy object? How could she have taken both hands off the broom without losing control of it? Why’d she have to gather momentum in order to pull this off? It sounds like nit-picking, and perhaps it has to do with the translation, but there are lots of moments like this that grate on the imagination. Miyazaki handled the physics of flying much more realistically.

But for all that, it’s still a very sweet and charming book, and it inspired one of my all-time favourite movies. Hopefully the sequels will be translated as well.

Station Zero by Philip Reeve

The third and final book in the Railhead trilogy takes things out on a suitably epic and bittersweet note. Reeve reminds me very much of Philip Pullman in that he’s clearly writing from an atheistic (or at least agnostic) perspective, yet is nevertheless deeply interested in the purpose of life, the nature of identity, the constructs of humanity, and the question of the afterlife. Heavy stuff for a children’s book, but not since Lloyd Alexander have such heavy subjects been handled with such a light touch.

Zen Starling has been granted a pardon and given a new lease on life – only to find that unlimited wealth, luxury and leisure time is incredibly boring. When he gets an encrypted message that automatically deletes and leaves no record of its existence, he can’t help but set out on a secret mission to follow the coordinates to their location, hoping against hope that they’re from Nova.

The Motorik Nova is the android whose appearance in his life began all Zen’s adventures (think of a more human-looking C3-PO from Star Wars, or even better, the Synths from Humans) and her departure at the end of the previous book has left him utterly bereft. Can a human and an android fall in love? Reeve doesn’t waste a lot of time on the question – the answer is yes, and the lovers are desperate to reunite.

Having discovered the secret to the Black Light Express, Nova is now determined to track down the last remnants of her maker Raven and have him return to what she believes is his true self: the Railmaker who designed the galaxy-wide K-gate network in the first place. But where is he? In a cyberspace belonging to one of the Guardians: the artificial intelligences that essentially exist as gods to human beings, those who destroyed the Railmaker in the first place and to whom people upload all their online data in the hopes they’ll be brought back to some form of consciousness after they die.

In other words, our protagonists are attempting to steal a soul from Heaven in order to resurrect God. I mean, damn. This is a book for twelve-year-olds.

Elsewhere, young Threnody Noon (love that name, wish I could steal it) gets a Daenerys Targaryen arc in which her attempts to seize back control of her throne cause her to resort to ever-increasing amounts of violence and brutality. However, it’s much better than the Daenerys Targaryen arc, since a. the story isn’t interested in judging or punishing her for the sake of a didactic “gotcha!” moment and b. she’s allowed to live with what she’s done. As another character says: “It makes a dramatic end to the story. The question is, have you turned out to be the hero or the villain?”

Her response is: “What does that matter? I won.”

Just TELL ME that wouldn’t have been a better end for Dany. Plus, she ends up marrying another woman. Reeve looks at George R.R. Martin and laughs.

As ever, Reeve also has some interesting ideas about the nature of identity, best seen when Nova downloads herself into hundreds of automated bodies, all with the same memories and experiences of the original Nova. On learning this, Zen is vaguely horrified, and only wants to spend time with the Nova that exists within the body that he has a history with, despite Nova’s insistence that it makes no difference. Who is right? There are no clear answers.

Then there’s the Guardians, who download themselves from cyberspace and into various physical interfaces (or avatars) that allow them to be in dozens of different places at once, and the concept of Vohu Mana’s “afterlife.” To quote the book:

“Some people believe that Vohu Mana is building Heaven. A huge virtual environment in the dark Datasea, full of avatars based on everyone who has ever lived. They think that as long as you make sure to put enough information about yourself online while you’re alive, Vohu Mana will be able to resurrect a digital version of you after you die.

“Passers-by wore raincapes from which cameras hung on rods, pointing backwards at the wearer’s face. Whenever two people met, they greeted each other by posing together for selfies. Behind the steamy windows of small restaurants, people solemnly photographed their meals. The more details of their lives they could upload, the more accurately Bohu Mana would be able to recreate them in his virtual afterlife.”

You could chew on this stuff for days. For the third time, I can’t believe it’s in a children’s book.

The Spook’s Apprentice by Joseph Delaney

Again, I can’t believe this is a children’s book, but for very different reasons. It’s terrifying! I read it because one of my regulars at the library is a massive fan and has been churning through the entire series over the past few months, and it’s always nice to have informed conversations with library patrons regarding their favourite books.

But yikes, I was genuinely unnerved by some of the content in this book!

Tom Ward is the seventh son of a seventh son, and when your father and father’s father is a farmer, then problems arise. A farm cannot be divided among seven, or else it will eventually disappear altogether, and so Tom’s parents have looked elsewhere for their youngest to gain an apprenticeship. Tom’s wise and discerning (and rather mysterious mother) has decided on the Spook.

The Spook is the man responsible for dealing with the boggarts, ghouls, ghosts and witches of the County: laying them to rest, putting them to work, or vanquishing them for good. Basically, a Witcher for juvenile readers. Tom is hardly keen on the idea, but beggars can’t be choosers.

The current Spook, a man called Gregory, takes Tom under his wing and starts him off with a small test: to stay the night by himself in a haunted house. This is only chapter three, and Tom is already dealing with the ghast of a woman whose jealous husband bashed her over the head, mistakenly took her for dead, and dug a grave for her in the basement, all the while unaware that she was still conscious and listening to him prepare to bury her alive.

Um, excuse me while I go scream into my pillow.

As it happens, author Joseph Delaney draws upon very real folklore in order to create the rules of this world, which gives everything a grounded, credible quality – I can easily imagine people performing some of the rites and believing in the superstitions that are presented throughout the story (the powers of iron, silver, rowan, salt, running water and so on). Surprisingly, I’m not actually adverse to an old-school witch, by which I mean a woman that has sold her soul to the devil in exchange for magical powers – it’s a narrative that led to the execution of many an innocent woman, but also one that provides some pretty cool stories. And here there be witches.

As Tom settles into his new life as a Spook’s apprentice, he finds himself both repulsed and fascinated by the tasks that now fall to him. He’s regarded with fear and suspicion by the common folk, but he can’t deny that the supernatural world intrigues him, and the idea of saving people from diabolic forces certainly appeals to the ego. And Tom has some preternatural gifts of his own – Delaney doesn’t delve too deeply into them (saving it for another book) but it’s clear that there’s more to Tom than first meets the eye.

Of course, he does fall into some frustratingly stupid narrative pitfalls. He makes promises to dodgy individuals, doesn’t tell his master pertinent information, and agrees to pass victuals on to an actual witch imprisoned on the Spook’s property... Delaney tries to make it work due to Tom’s lack of experience and sense of honour, but he still comes across as an absolute idiot. Of more interest is Alice, a young girl who lives with local women rumoured to be witches, but who strikes up an odd sort of friendship with Tom.

She’s easily the book’s most interesting character, raised as a witch (or so it’s implied) but clearly desperate to escape her heritage and become a decent person. Going forward through the series, she’ll be the character to watch.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

It’s rare that I would watch something before reading the book first, but it happened with A Discovery of Witches. Based on the show and other reviews, I had a fair idea of what to expect before cracking this one open, which made me kind of enjoy it despite itself. Make no mistake, it’s a terribly self-indulgent manuscript centred on a cliché-ridden forbidden love affair between an overbearing vampire and a classic Mary Sue protagonist, in which approximately five important things happen in a book that’s about the size of a brick.

And yet, there’s plenty of discourse going on these days about what makes a good reading experience, if not a good book. For example, I don’t use the term “Mary Sue” lightly, but protagonist Diana Bishop is one, indubitably. She has magical DNA that allows her to manifest every witch-power on record, even though the rest of her species can only master one or two. An ancient vampire falls in love with her at first sight and choses to devote his entire existence to her wellbeing. Her first-person narrative devotes four solid pages at the beginning of the book to humble-brags, which I’ll quote here:

“[My intellect] had always been precocious, leading me to talk and read before other children my age. Aided by a prodigious, photographic memory, my schoolwork was soon established as a place where my family’s magical legacy was irrelevant. I’d skipped my final years of high school and started college at sixteen.”

“My first few performances were heralded by my professors as extraordinary examples of the way good acting could transform an ordinary college student into someone else.” (Context: her magical abilities imbue her acting with traits possessed by the characters she plays, making her irresistible to men who follow her around campus).

“I returned home, declared a major in history, took all the required courses in record time, and graduated with honours before I turned twenty.”

“Colleagues warned that I had little chance of being granted tenure [at Yale]. I churned out two books, won a handful of prizes, and collected some research grants. Then I received tenure and proved everyone wrong.”

Does anyone else find her unbearable? And you’ll have to take my word for it, but after selling herself as an intellectual prodigy, she demonstrates precious little evidence of it throughout the course of the story.

So yes, she’s a Mary Sue. But does it really matter in a story about vampires and witches and time-travelling? Am I holding her to a standard too high when Matthew is just as super-perfect as she is? (The author can’t resist having every other random female character simper over him: “Valerie gazed at [Matthew] raptly and turned pinked. The vampire had charmed her with no more than a thank-you.”) YA author Sarah Maas writes Mary Sues all the time and is completely unapologetic about it, stating that women also deserve have this kind of mental candy-floss to enjoy.

Then there’s the sheer length of the book, with the page-count largely made up of extraneous detail. We get pages upon pages of what Diana wears each day, what kind of wine she enjoys, and an entire chapter on a vampire yoga session (I’m not kidding). Every room, meal and outfit are lovingly described in attentive, excessive detail. 

And yet I recall that recent Tumblr post which took people to task on criticizing the excess length of Les Misérables, telling readers to slow down, stop complaining, and to just let themselves get immersed in a narrative.

Like Kate Mosse (Labyrinth, Sepulchre, Citadel) and Elizabeth Kostova (The Historian), Deborah Harkness practically luxuriates in the world she’s created: the academia, the history, the sensory pleasures of a light brunch. I’m almost tempted to say she’s annoyed by her own plot; that she’d much rather just potter along, writing about the minutia of things that interest her.

Like I said earlier, only five relevant things happen in this entire book. Firstly, scholar and suppressed witch Diana Bishop is working at the Bodleian library when she unknowingly calls up an ancient tome that’s been placed under a spell, inaccessible to anyone but the right person at the right time. Said to contain ancient secrets about the origins of vampires, witches and daemons, its re-emergence immediately gets the attention of all manner of creatures in the vicinity, who congregate on the library to watch Diana and see what she’ll do next.

Among them is centuries-old vampire Matthew de Clermont, who promptly falls in love with Diana and pronounces himself her protector. Feeling threatened, Diana agrees to plot-point number two: accompany Matthew to his family estate in France where she’ll be safer. Plot-point three is that this turns out to be hogwash: she’s kidnapped from the grounds by a flying witch and tortured for more information about what the book contains. After being rescued, she and Matthew retreat to her lesbian aunts’ home in New England, and come to the decision to time-walk deep into the past, where Diana will not only be safe from present-day threats, but also find a teacher to help with the mastery of her own magical gifts.

Matthew and Diana also fall in love along the way, but it’s a by-the-numbers affair, and Matthew is quickly established as one of those tediously overbearing alpha males that populate these types of romance novels. Which brings me to the next big fandom flashpoint: are these types of male love interests and their love affairs with quiveringly submissive female characters... bad?

There’s a battle currently raging across fandom between shippers and anti-shippers: one side screams these stories are reductive and sexist and harmful, the other that it’s just fiction and we should all mind our own business and let people enjoy whatever the hell they want. As it happens, I lean toward latter option in principle, while remaining openly baffled at what on earth other women find attractive about men like Matthew, even in the realm of fantasy.

Here are some choice quotes that sum up Matthew:

“You wear a seatbelt in my car, you wear a [safety] vest on my horse.”

How angry would Matthew be if we jumped the paddock fence? Angry, I was sure. Followed by Matthew telling her: “if you’d jumped the fence back there, today’s outing would have been over.”

“I will kill you myself before I let anyone hurt you. And I don’t want to kill you. So please do what I tell you.”

“I don’t want you near me when I’m angry.”

After take-off Matthew ordered me to sleep. When I resisted, he threatened to give me more morphine.

Marcus was telling [Aunt] Sarah that if she approached me, [Matthew] would likely rip her head off.

“You’ve known Matthew a few weeks. Yet you follow his orders so easily, and you were willing to die for him. Surely you can see why Sarah is concerned. The Diana we’ve known all these years is gone.” Diana’s rebuttal? “I love him, and he loves me.”

Holy restraining order, Batman! He drugs her without her permission, takes the phone from her hand while she’s talking with her aunts, buys clothes for her and expects her to wear them, carries her to bed and tucks her in, controls her diet, shushes her into silence, breaks into her house and watches her sleep (vampires authors love this one) and follows her around without her knowledge or permission. We get the obligatory protestations from Diana and the lip-service descriptions of her feistiness (“I’ve never met someone as stubborn as you” – really Matthew? Not your mother or your ex-girlfriend or your sister?) but every time she pushes back, he just reasserts his control until she gives up.

I just cannot fathom the appeal of this. I always feel so far removed from the general consensus whenever I’m reminded that this is the sort of thing so many women fantasize about: being controlled and infantilized by a much older man. Is this really the dream? To date a pseudo-dad who waits on you hand-and-foot and makes all the decisions so you don’t have to do anything yourself?

To me, the secret question behind all this is always: how much of your autonomy are you willing to sacrifice for expensive free shit? (Because along with good looks and killer instincts, Matthew is naturally also obscenely wealthy).

And yes, I’m aware that this is the point when everyone starts screaming: “it’s just fiction, it’s not real!” I’m not disputing that fact, but since it is in fact just fiction, no one is going to die if I state my opinion: that I find it all profoundly creepy.

Which is a shame, because I actually really liked the underlying nuts and bolts of this story. The idea of a book that’s secreted away in the stacks and unobtainable to anyone for centuries before a witch who has repressed her own abilities manages to summon it up without even realizing its significance is a great hook, as is the premise that other witches, vampires and daemons would converge on the library given that each of their species has vested interest in the contents of said book.

The Big Three of supernatural fiction is vampires, witches and werewolves, but that last one has been switched out for daemons in this trilogy. They bear no resemblance whatsoever to fallen angels, instead being born to ordinary human beings and possessed with intense artistic talent, so it’s unclear why they’re called daemons (or why it’s spelt that particular way). But along with vamps and witches, they’re also after the book.

Vampires want it because they believe it holds information about the creation of their species, witches want it because they think it’s an all-powerful spell-book, and daemons are interested because they think it’ll give them meaning and a history (vampires create each other and witches have maternal ancestry, but daemons are all alone in the world). That’s a fascinating conflict at work, but it’s barely explored at all.

Towards the end of the book, Diana and her allies create what they call a “conventicle” to offset the more official Congregation, which is made up of three vampires, three witches and three daemons: those tasked with the responsibility of making sure their individual species don’t break any of the established rules (like say, carrying on an illicit affair). This is also a pretty neat conceit, but by the time it shows up, it’s almost time for the book to end.

That’s pretty much the experience of A Discovery of Witches: finding the gemstones amidst the clutter. There’s so much extraneous material here that the book could easily be halved in length, most of the interesting ideas pertaining to the supernatural world exist on the outskirts of yet another creepy romance, and the show did tons of stuff better, particularly in giving space to other characters and their agendas (or even just introducing many of them – Juliette, Sophie, Nathanial – earlier, instead of having them turn up randomly in the last handful of chapters.

And yet for all of my complaining... I kind of enjoyed it? Knowing what I was getting myself into, even the dodgy stuff, like Matthew’s “courtship” and the absurdity of vampire yoga, made things more entertaining, not less. If nothing else, Harkness creates an appealing aesthetic: the architecture of Oxford, the beauty of Matthew’s French estate, the whimsy of Diana’s aunts’ homestead (where ancestral ghosts inhabit the rooms and the house creates more space for itself when it senses the arrival of more guests).

I suppose at a stretch you could categorize this under “dark academia”, making it the perfect winter read. And yes, I plan to read the sequel before heading into the third and final season of the show.

Rogues of Sherwood Forest (1950)

My attempt to track down any and all Robin Hood adaptations continues, and I’m getting into the obscure shit now! As it happens, I really enjoyed this one – it very much reminded me of Disney’s The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (which would be released two years later) and exists almost as a pseudo-sequel to the Errol Flynn classic.

With each new take on the material, it’s fascinating to see where on the timeline the story will be set: most films opt to end with the return of King Richard from the Crusades in order to secure themselves a “fairy tale” happy ending in which all wrongs are righted by the return of the true king (conveniently ignoring the fact that historically King Richard took off for France almost immediately after his return from the Holy Land and ended up dying in a siege, thereby leaving the throne open for John to claim entirely legally).

Going for a Rightful King Returns ending is understandable enough, but the more ambitious takes on Robin Hood usually forego Richard’s return as the story’s endpoint and instead turns his death into the inciting incident. This film for example, explicitly takes place in 1215, with John on the throne and the opening text stating that “the Bill of Rights and the Liberty and Justice we enjoy today stem from the Magna Carta, the great charter which the oppressed people of England forced from their tyrannical King John.”

That’s an hilarious oversimplification, but it’s not until Ridleys Scott’s Robin Hood in 2010 that a similar angle on the legend was taken (at least as far as I know). And in that case, the film only hinted at what ended up being the most historically significant part of King John’s reign, being otherwise too distracted in setting up sequels and a franchise that never materialized to really get into the nitty-gritty of what the Magna Carta stood for and what it achieved.

Of course, this film has a highly fanciful take on the charter and King Richard’s legacy. Across the course of the film, people speak of Richard’s “principles” and his “democratic ways”. He apparently freed Nottingham from all taxes, and banned any gallows from being built in or around the castle. At one point John is told: “you rule by the consent of your subjects” and when the nobles gather to discuss the nature of the charter, they decide it should “govern high and low with equal justice” in which “every man should be held innocent until proven guilty,” there’s “no imprisonment for debt”, that “every man should have the right to dispose of his own property by will” and “women must not be forced into marriage without their consent.”

It’s okay, you can take a moment to laugh. And yet, I actually found it surprisingly touching that a film made in 1950 could attribute this level of forward-thinking to a bunch of rich white men living in the early thirteenth century. I would love to sit down some of the whiny anti-woke brigade who complain that everything is too politically-correct these days with this movie and see what they have to say about its idealism.

Another unique choice is that the Robin of this film is actually the son of the original Robin, Earl of Huntington, who led the outlaws while Richard was away on the Crusades, accompanied by our protagonist. By the time he returns from the Holy Land, his father is dead and he’s inherited all the lands and titles. (It’s for this reason the film sort-of feels like a sequel to Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood).

But this means that Robin is not only the target of King John’s misplaced revenge (the film opens with a jousting tournament in which the lances are rigged) but that he’s a generation younger than all the Merry Men. That said, it doesn’t really amount to much. Robin isn’t mentored by them, and there’s no teasing about getting older or anything else you’d expect from a narrative tweaking like this. It’s just there.

Much like Robin is mostly just there. He’s not really an active or memorable participant in the drama that unfolds; when the climatic fight against King John comes, it’s based on a plan that’s conceived by the barons and nobles – Robin is simply tasked with enforcing it.

As for Marian, this film actually has quite a good one, though bizarrely she’s referred to as Marianne de Beaudray. Like, they literally pronounce her name “Mary Anne,” which isn’t something I’ve ever come across before. She’s also a blonde, which doesn’t sit right with me. Marians can be raven-haired or redheaded, but never blonde. It makes me wonder if she’s meant to be the Marian, or if Robin’s mother was Marian and this one is just a nod to the original love interest.

In any case, it’s a good depiction of her. I don’t mind Marians portrayed as Action Girls, since there’s precedence for this in some of the earliest ballads, but I also appreciate it when she’s allowed to be intelligent and useful and have agency outside of physical fighting. Here, she sneaks past the castle guards after Robin is captured and provides him with a means to escape by lowering a saw to his window from the room above, and later becomes his spy in the castle, sending him messages via homing pigeons.

In fact, she sends one of the pigeons pretty coldly to his death when she realizes King John plans to shoot them down. She sends one out the window, then while the guards are busy targeting it, releases the second one to successfully deliver its message and never gets caught. She’s never reduced to a Distressed Damsel at all – the Count of Flanders (who is essentially Guy of Gisborne) barters with John for her hand in marriage, and once Robin gets word he tells her to play along, insist on being wed in a church that’s reachable only by a forest path, and to trust him.

She does, and the outlaws free her long before she reaches the church.

The film is also notable for featuring Alan Hale as Little John for the third time in a Robin Hood film (having also played the character in 1922 and 1938, opposite Douglas Fairbanks and then Errol Flynn as Robin). Again, Will Scarlet’s name is taken literally, with the actor dressed in bright red clothing, and though Friar Tuck and Allan-a-Dale are present and accounted for, there’s no sign of any Much.

There’s no psychological depth to any character, but then why would there be? It’s all very jolly, and yet I found myself deeply appreciating the narrative that the film manages to craft. In so many Robin Hood adaptations, the story-arc always seems to hit the same beats, but here – aside from a montage of the outlaws saving poachers, stealing from the rich, hanging out in the greenwood – Rogues of Sherwood manages to find a different angle from which to tell its story.

Setting it after the death of King Richard, working in a subplot which John has several dissenting nobles killed with the “two birds, one stone” intention of stealing their assets and framing Robin for their deaths, and the culmination of the English people coming up with the Magna Carta and forcing John to sign it... that’s a great take on the legend, and in many ways more satisfying and mature than simply going with “Richard came back and they all lived happily ever after”. Throw in an active and intelligent (albeit blonde) Maid Marian Marianne, and this may well end up being one of my favourite Robin Hood movies.

Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960)

Another relatively obscure take on the legends, Sword of Sherwood Forest is best described as an “episode” of Robin Hood. By that I mean the film doesn’t cover Robin’s origins or his happy ending – instead it’s just one of the adventures he has while outlawed and living rough with his men in the forest (which kind of makes it a pity that he meets Marian for the first time here; it would have worked just as well, if not better, had they already been a couple).

This film is of most interest due to the fact that it stars Richard Greene as Robin Hood, an actor who played the titular character in the television show The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955 – 1959). Which on reflection, is possibly part of the reason why this feels like an episode of Robin Hood, as opposed to a Robin Hood movie. I’ve been trying to get my hands on that show for a while now, but no dice as yet.

The Sheriff of Nottingham is also played by Peter Cushing, who is naturally best known these days (at least by pop-culture audiences) as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. He’s the instigator of the plot, with an evil plan to confiscate the estate of a nobleman who has died on his way back from the Crusade. However, the Archbishop of Canterbury opposes this plan, leading to the Sheriff expanding his plan to assassinate him so as to more easily claim the entitlement.

Robin Hood gets involved when he not only discovers the dead body of the nobleman, but is hired by the film’s secondary villain to (unknowingly) assassinate the archbishop. It plays out a little like a police procedural, with Robin sending out his men – particularly Friar Tuck – to investigate certain matters in the hopes of finding out just what the heck is going on. And naturally, once he finds out he’s been hired to murder the Archbishop of Canterbury, he switches sides.

There’s an interesting rapport between Robin and the Sheriff in this one: they are not mortal enemies, but rather see each other as a Worthy Opponent, one that can be safely parleyed with under a white flag. Their take on Marian also portrays her as blonde, but after the cliché of Robin stumbling upon her while she’s bathing in a lake (in broad daylight) she gets some fairly good material. You might even say she’s the only character who gets an actual arc, going from a rather stuck-up noblewoman who looks upon Robin as a lowly outlaw, to one that’s motivated by compassion (her goal in the film is to get one of Robin’s murdered men pardoned by the Archbishop so that his family can give him a proper burial and live without the stigma of his outlawry).

Not a bad offering, just a somewhat forgettable one.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

After a lot of thought, I think I’ve realized what makes this movie so wonderful: Hayao Miyazaki’s mastery of spatiality. People fly in fiction all the time, and the constant portrayal of it runs the risk of making it seem blasé. But here, between the electrifying energy that pulsates through Kiki’s hair and clothing before she takes off, to the awestruck reactions of people when they see her take to the air, to the realistic physics of her actually flying (at one point she gets too close to a tree and uses her foot to kick herself away from it) Miyazaki knows just how to stage flight to make it as wondrous as possible – whether she’s aiming for the hatch of a moving train or diving down elevated streets to reach someone far below.

As I mentioned above, the film covers the first half of the book pretty faithfully, with Kiki coming of age and setting off on her own to become the witch of a new town. She finds a place with the owners of a bakery and comes up with the idea to start a delivery service. And the rest of the movie is mainly just her making deliveries to various people. Delightful.

A lot of people think it’s blasphemy to watch something in a language other than the one it’s originally filmed in, but you have to give Disney credit for a fantastic English dub. The cast is exceptional: Kirsten Dunst as Kiki, Janeane Garofalo as Ursula, Debbie Reynolds as Madame... but it’s Phil Hartman as Jiji who really steals the show. What a gift! I was astonished to discover Jiji was originally conceived as female in the Japanese dub (which puts Jiji’s “friendship” with a white feminine-coded neighbouring cat into a new light, especially as they apparently have kittens by the end of the film) but Hartman’s sardonic tone is pitch-perfect and I’ve always liked the male/female duality of witches and their familiars (it reminds me of Philip Pullman’s daemons).

Another interesting titbit: in the Japanese dub, Kiki losing the ability to communicate with Jiji is permanent, and a sign of her growing up. I don’t really like that, and prefer the English interpretation that it’s just a temporary loss of her abilities.

It’s a wonderfully female-centric story, with women of different ages forming friendships and looking out for each other: the young Kiki, the twenty-something Ursula, the mother-to-be Osono, and the elderly Madame. The only thing missing is a female friend Kiki’s age – instead we only get two girls that are rather snotty to Kiki, though I can respect that the film has no interest in humiliating or punishing either one. To Miyazaki, rudeness and disrespect is just something you have to brush off.

Oh, and there’s Tombo. I dunno, I was never too keen on this guy. I get the feeling that Kiki’s standoffishness is a nod to the fact gifted children are more comfortable with adults than with peers, but he pushes her too hard a number of times, when she clearly just wants to be left alone. Still, at least it leads to a gender-flipped climax in which the girl has to save the boy.  

Two more things: Eiko Kadono’s book introduction has her state that she deliberately only gave Kiki the ability to fly in order to ensure she solved her problems largely without magic, a premise that Miyazaki sticks to. Secondly, I love this the film has no real structure – things just happen, almost episodically. It’s possibly the most low-stakes, luxuriously-paced animated film I’ve ever seen, and yet there’s not a second in which it’s not completely engrossing. And for that, it’s truly one of my favourites.

Les Misérables (2018)

I can’t quote the source, but I do vaguely recall Andrew Davies, who penned this particular adaptation, saying that his intention was to erase the taint of the musical from Victor Hugo’s original novel. Well, he’s free to dislike the musical if he wants, but watching this made me impressed all over again at how said musical manages to hit all the major story beats of the novel – one that’s roughly the size and weight of a brick – without losing narrative coherency.

Which is to say, there’s very little in this most recent adaptation that sets it apart from all the versions we’ve seen before. There’s more of Fantine’s backstory, a few more cat-and-mouse pursuits/escapes between Valjean and Javert and Valjean and Thenardier, and the presence of Marius’s grandfather. Which isn’t to say that it’s a bad adaptation, only that I’m surprised Davies thinks he’s written something that’s entirely removed from the novel’s most famous iteration.

It’s a pretty stacked cast: Lily Collins, Olivia Colman, Derek Jacobi, David Oyelowo, Johnny Flynn, David Bradley, Adeel Akhtar... but special credit has to go to Dominic West as Jean Valjean. I have this odd assumption that he’s been slumming it for years in B-movies, but he rises to the challenge of the story’s towering protagonist and nails it. Valjean contains multitudes; across the course of the story he is terrifying and humble, angry and contrite, violent and gentle, a thief and a father, dehumanized and revered – everything a person can be, Valjean probably is at some point.

West handles all these internal divisions while still retaining a consistent portrayal of a singular man – and also pulls of Valjean’s physicality as well. It’s odd, but I’ve never considered West a particularly large man, but Valjean has to be physically imposing, and he certainly is that here (perhaps they used some camera tricks, or just surrounded him with much shorter co-stars).

This was one of Erin Kellyman’s first roles, and she’s a natural as Eponine, unsurprisingly blowing Ellie Bamber’s Cosette out of the water. It’s so unfair, as being asked to play The Ingenue is the most tedious burden you can place on a young actress, but this Cosette is also quite petulant and dim-witted, which certainly doesn’t help Bamber’s cause. Neither does the fact that Marius is played by Josh O’Connor. Um, really? I don’t want to be mean, and perhaps I’m prejudiced by the fact that he so recently played self-pitying misery-guts Prince Charles in The Crown, but it’s a stretch to believe that he’s the type of guy a young woman would fall instantly in love with, even one that’s spent most of her life cloistered.

Things pick up when it gets to the 1832 June Rebellion, and Joseph Quinn pops up again as Enjolras, successfully portraying a young leader that others would flock to, while simultaneously demonstrating to the audience that he’s in way over his head. Olivia Colman is unsurprisingly fantastic as Madame Thénardier, whereas Adeel Akhtar brings a surprising amount of darkness to Thénardier himself, a character who is usually depicted in purely comedic terms in the musical (okay, so Andrew Davies does differentiate himself there).

And then there’s David Oyelowo as Javert. So you have an iconic character who embodies the rule of law to such a profound extent that he throws himself off a bridge when his deeply-engrained belief system is upended; the police inspector to end all police inspectors, a guy whose life is so utterly defined by law enforcement that his name is literally a trope... and you cast a Black man as this person? Opposite a white Jean Valjean? That’s... a choice. Now look, I know that the novel itself hints as to him being possibly (though extremely vaguely) mixed-race and that this adaptation runs purely on the tenets of colour-blind casting, but you’d think that having made the decision to cast Oyelowo as Javert, the writer/director might lean into the contradictions or at least the irony of a Black man being the personification of a cruel and merciless justice system... but no. It’s a casting choice that’s meant to be taken at face value.  

Which I can do. Like I said, it’s colour-blind casting. The whole point is that actors are hired on the basis of their talent, regardless of the character they’re playing. But... well. There was an opportunity for some deeper subtext here and they chose not to lean into it.

I will say one more thing in the musical’s favour. Whether or not you are a religious person, you cannot deny that the stage-show’s ending, in which Valjean is reunited with Fantine and their souls admitted into Heaven along with all those who died at the barricades, provides a level of catharsis that cannot be matched. After the story’s relentless misery and heartache, the promise that justice and peace can be found on the other side of death is a conclusion that is desperately needed.

That this adaptation simply ends, with the equivalent of a finger-wagging scene involving two little boys begging on the side of the road, is a testament to that – especially since it feels incredibly tacked-on.

Still, this was a solid adaptation. As someone familiar with the story but who has yet to sit down and read the book from cover-to-cover, there was some material here that shed further insight into the characters and their circumstances, and it’s all beautifully filmed and performed. For a story that’s literally called “the miserable”, we keep returning to it, over and over again – such is its power.  

Strike: Lethal White (2020)

Let’s be honest – no one would care about these books if they hadn’t been written by J.K. Rowling, and they certainly wouldn’t be getting the adapted-for-television treatment. I’m not actively going in search of Rowling’s work at this point in time, but I’m also trying to clear up space in my hard-drive, and this has been in my “miscellaneous” folder for years now.

So I watched this for the sake of checking it off the list and deleting it. I have no plans to read Troubled Blood (though by the looks of it, the BBC are going ahead adapting it) so for all intents and purposes, this is my last hurrah with Strike and Robin.

Lethal White was almost twice as long as the first mystery in the series – The Cuckoo’s Calling – and so the adaptation is a chunky four-part miniseries with episodes that run for nearly an hour each. It was probably my favourite of the four books, with lots of turgid family dramas, political back-stabbings, and fun undercover work (Robin gets to disguise herself as both a Tory intern AND a Goth shopgirl). Also, the way in which horse motifs (which includes the “lethal white” of the title) is woven into the narrative is admittedly rather clever.

Cormoran Strike is still an unbearably stupid name (and she’s called Robin – geddit?) but it’s undeniable that Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger are perfectly cast as the duo. Burke gets the burly gruffness of the former, and Grainger the pretty vulnerability-hiding-steel as the latter. Unfortunately, this is also the book in which the will-they-or-won’t-they really kicks off, and there are truly no words to describe how little I care about that. In fact, I’d prefer it if they never did.

But then, that’s really not my concern anymore. Here’s where I get off this particular bus ride.

Worzel Gummidge: Season 1 (2019 – 2020)

This was also just sitting there on my hard-drive, though I honestly have no memory of downloading it, or of even learning about its existence in the first place. There’s a talking scarecrow who befriends two foster kids, and they end up getting up to all sorts of mischief with vaguely pagan undertones.

I think it’s safe to say that this is a passion project for Mackenzie Crook, who writes, produces, directs and stars as the titular character in this remake of an old seventies show, which in turn was based on a range of children’s novels by Barbara Euphan Todd. They’re definitely as bizarre as you’d expect from a children’s fantasy book series written by an Englishwoman in the 1930s, but after you get over the inherent weirdness of the premise, there’s a certain charm to be had.

Susan and John are two foster kids who are sent off to Scatterbrook Farm in order to experience the countryside. The farmer and his wife are nice enough, but too busy with chores to pay them much mind. Instead, the siblings start exploring the countryside, and soon enough notice something extremely odd about the scarecrow in Ten Acre Field – namely, that it comes to life.

Some low-stakes adventures commence, involving Worzel and the children trying to fix the seasons, dealing with a gang of recalcitrant scarecrows, and helping a ship’s figurehead return to her vessel. Scarecrows are pretty creepy at the best of times, and there are certain images throughout these episodes which would probably give the kiddies nightmares (check out the monstrosities in the picture below) but there’s also a lulling, incredibly chilled-out vibe to the proceedings.

This is largely achieved through the show’s frankly incredible soundtrack, made up of music and songs by an English folk group called the Unthanks, which create a warm but also slightly eerie ambiance. Worzel might be a comedic figure, but he inhabits a world made up of ancient traditions, and you can hear this in the folksy songs that contain lyrics such as “the scarecrow sees and the scarecrow knows” and “oats and beans and barley grow”.

Derry Girls: Season 3 (2022)

I said I would pace myself with the third and final season of Derry Girls, then ended up binging the whole thing in a single afternoon. Hey, it was a sick day.

Thanks to Tumblr, I pretty much knew the major beats of the season: that Erin and James would kiss, that Liam Neeson would cameo, that Sister Michael was on crutches (due to the actress breaking her leg), that Claire’s dad dies, that it ends with the Good Friday Agreement... I also knew that Claire wouldn’t have as much screentime due to the actress’s commitments on Bridgerton, but honestly – they integrated her side-lining so well (being left behind at the train station, moving to a new town and having scenes that are just her talking on the phone) that I didn’t really notice.

It was also the season in which my own childhood finally caught up to that of the girls, with several of the needle-drops being iconic songs from my early adolescence. I found myself thinking; wait – am I part of a period piece now?

This very much had “last season vibes” all over it, and writer/creator Lisa McGee rises to the challenge of giving everyone a decent send-off. I have to admit that I don’t know that much about the Troubles or Bloody Sunday beyond the basics, but you could tell from the way it was framed and performed how important it all was. There’s a fun flashback episode to all the parents as teenagers, and I appreciated that James and Erin get to kiss, but also that the relationship is left up in the air. This way shippers get their moment, and everyone else can continue enjoying the friendship dynamic that the show has always been about. And honestly, they’re teenagers. Let them grow up a bit first.

But as was quoted somewhere or other, the real joy of Derry Girls was that the main characters were allowed to encompass the stupidity of real teenagers, and that they had permission to pull idiotic faces and wear unflattering clothes. Orla in particular was allowed to go to places that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a teen show before – I mean, compare this to stuff like Dawson’s Creek or Euphoria! It’s like you’re dealing with a completely different species of human!

And thankfully, I was unspoiled for at least one particular. I knew there was going to be a Distant Finale, but nothing prepared me for a cameo from Chelsea Clinton herself, finally getting the letter that the girls sent her back in series one. Well played, show. Well played.

Gentleman Jack: Season 2 (2022)

I was about three episodes out from the final episode when the news dropped that this show had been cancelled. Dammit! Sally Wainwright was able to shine light on a fascinating woman and a relatively obscure piece of history in the amount of time she was given, but there was clearly more to come, and I’m a trilogy-minded person at heart. Two seasons just seems so unfinished somehow.

Following on from their “wedding” at the end of last season, Anne Lister invites Ann Walker to move in with her at Shibden Hall, much to the consternation of the neighbourhood. That Anne Lister is not like other women is something of an open secret in the community, and though she commands respect in most places, she’s still aware on some level that there is a line she must toe.

The show’s strength is also its weakness: that it is based on Anne Lister’s extensive diary-keeping. Naturally this source material gives us plenty of personal detail and fascinating insight not only into the protagonist, but the world she lives in. However, it’s obvious that Wainwright struggled a little with the formatting of each episode, as obviously a show based on the historical day-to-day diaries of a woman living in the 1800s comes without any coherent narrative structure.

Plotlines (usually involving the servants) are raised only to be forgotten or resolved off-screen, and much of the technical jargon regarding the mines, economy and political landscape was completely lost on me.

And remember last season’s bafflingly irrelevant subplot about the drunken farmer who was killed by his son and fed to the pigs, only for said farmer’s identical twin brother (played by the same actor) to turn up out of nowhere and start poking holes in the family’s cover story? Wainwright has clearly realized that it’s a dud storyline, and wraps it up by the second episode, never to be visited or even mentioned again. Truly one of the most bizarre Trapped by Mountain Lions subplots I’ve ever sat through.

The show is on more solid ground when it’s simply dealing with the Lister family dynamics: Anne’s relationship with her father, sister, aunt, wife and toxic ex-girlfriend. I haven’t actually read the original diaries, but apparently Lister goes into great detail on a number of subjects, and it’s safe to say that whenever Suranne Jones breaks the fourth wall, she’s quoting her directly.

Wainwright is on record as saying she deliberately ended season one with the two Annes taking sacrament together at Holy Trinity Church – in case she didn’t get a second season, the audience would at least get a happy ending. The same thing happens here, with the women triumphing over Ann’s dastardly brother-in-law, and a hotel earth-breaking ceremony (the couple’s joint venture) allowing for the entire supporting cast to have one last big scene together. So if this is it, at least we get a decent ending – though I do hope that Wainwright manages to find a new distributor.

A couple more things: it’s nice to see Joe Armstrong playing a contented family man (if I squint, I can pretend it’s Allan-a-Dale) and I appreciate the show’s unsentimental depiction of the past. There’s none of Julian Fellowes’s rose-tinted glasses here: society is divided into the haves and have-nots, the latter are perceived by the former as little more than badly-behaved children that have to be kept in line, and Lister herself is an unabashed Tory – at one point even slyly suggesting corruption as a viable method of ensuring that her preferred official gets elected.

Kudos to Wainwright for avoiding what must have been the temptation to turn Anne Lister into a “modern woman” and remain true to the flawed, haughty, arrogant, and at times, unlikeable person she was in life. (And it’s made me reassess my opinion on the undeniable downplaying of Julia Childs’ homophobia and sexism on her own show last month. Real people should be depicted in all their internalized messiness – it’s what makes us human).

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (2022)

This was an unexpected delight, which is always the best kind. I’ve been watching these most recent adaptations of Agatha Christie’s mysteries more out of obligation than enjoyment, as (with the exception of And Then There Were None) Sarah Phelps’ take on the material has left a lot to be desired. I can handle drastic changes to the plots, but the depressing, miserable, bleak context she brought to what are essentially cosy mysteries was rather bewildering. Making things grim and joyless doesn’t automatically make them more sophisticated.

So imagine my surprise when I saw the opening credits to this three-part mystery and realized that it had been written by Hugh Laurie. Yes, that Hugh Laurie (who also plays Doctor Nicolson). And what a difference a change in screenwriter makes! The tone is light-hearted, the dialogue is spritely, there’s comedy to offset the drama, and an unabashedly happy ending. I actually had fun with this. Can we get Laurie back for another one?

Jack-of-all-trades and vicar’s son Bobby Jones is working as a caddy when he realizes that someone has taken a fall over the beachside cliffs. Climbing down to provide assistance, he’s only able to hear the fatally injured man’s enigmatic final words: “why didn’t they ask Evans?” and uncover a photograph of a young woman in the man’s pocket before he dies. Handing the situation over to a passer-by, he hurries off to his next job.

At the inquest he’s introduced to the dead man’s sister, who purports to be the woman in the photograph, and Bobby is struck by the ravages of time on her face. With the death ruled as accidental, he conveys the man’s final words and believes the matter is closed.

But then, with the arrival of his old school chum Lady Francesca “Frankie” Derwent, a number of odd occurrences start to pile up: out of nowhere Bobby is offered a job in Brunos Aires. He’s nearly poisoned by a spiked bottle of beer. And on seeing a reprint of the photograph of the dead man’s sister in the local newspaper, he realizes that it’s not the same picture as the one he found in the man’s pocket.

He and Frankie join forces (along with his old navy buddy and a put-upon medical student) to investigate further, which naturally leads to all sorts of subterfuge, secret identities, and undercover work. Will Poulter is still probably best known as playing Eustace Scrubb in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but he’s had quite a healthy career since then, and he’s excellently matched with Lucy Boynton as Frankie, who is a complete joy. She turns drollness and upper-class insouciance into an artform, breezing through the investigation as though she’s on her way to luncheon.

There are some rather needless cameos (Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent turn up for exactly one scene) and the plot is just as convoluted on the screen as it was on the page (for the life of me, I cannot figure out what the heck is going on) but as far as the recent batch of Christie adaptations go, this is far and away the best of the bunch.

Stranger Things: Season 4: Part 2 (2022)

I didn’t waste a single weekend, but I still went in spoiled that someone would die in the finale. So I spent most of these final two episodes wondering if – despite his popularity – it would be Steve, especially when he started sharing his secret dream of a future with Nancy (that’s second only to showing a photo of one’s loved ones in the “you’re gonna die” sweepstakes). Alas, doom fell upon another character entirely, but I’ll get to that...

One of the most satisfying moments of the season’s first half (or rather, first three-quarters) was the coming together of the Hawkins plot with the Californian one: just as Eleven unlocks the secret to the massacre that took place in her early childhood – that in fact the helpful orderly was another of Doctor Brenner’s patients who was manipulating her in order to get his revenge – so too does Nancy discover that the terrifying Vecna, who has been gruesomely murdering people across Hawkins, began his life as Henry Creel, of the infamous Creel Murder House.

Having established that Henry Creel, Number One, Vecna and the orderly are all the same person, these two episodes contain yet another revelation: that he’s also been controlling the Mind-Flayer, which he created in the Upside Down. Basically, he’s the Big Bad they’ve been fighting this whole time. It’s definitely Arc Welding by way of a Retcon that the Duffer Brothers have just come up with rather than a reveal they’ve been sitting on this whole time, but hey, it doesn’t break continuity so I’m happy to roll with it.

(Though there’s no understanding as yet as to why the Upside Down “stopped” on the day that Will went missing).

These final two episodes are all about bringing the core cast together to fight Vecna, and the Duffers find a fairly ingenious way of doing so given that two of the three groups are in separate states, and the third is in another country entirely. While the Hawkins team (Steve, Robin, Nancy, Lucas, Dustin, Erica, Max and Eddie) lay a trap for Vecna, Eleven realizes she can help from afar by psychically projecting herself into Max’s mind, while the Russia crew (Hopper, Joyce, Murray) come to the conclusion that in order to help their kids, they have to return to the prison and create as much havoc there as possible so to disrupt the Upside Down’s hivemind.

It’s a good idea, though it’s not made clear enough that the Russia crew’s actions actually did have a meaningful effect on the hivemind, and unfortunately the likes of Mike, Will and Jonathan are left with nothing to do but encourage Eleven from the sides of a freezer. Still, it’s impressive that the Duffers managed to keep so many balls in the air, even if (in hindsight) it’s easy to see where they got a bit self-indulgent, or where some cuts could have been made.

Eleven getting bullied at school went on for far too long, as did the interminable Russa subplot. The Jason/Satanic Panic plot turned out to be a bust. Will is still a sad closeted gay, the shady government agents that were chasing Eleven just disappear into thin air, and I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of Argyle was (sure, he provided some comic relief to leaven the tension, but Jonathan could have provided the transport and come up with the freezer sensory tank idea if they’d just made him the one working at the pizza place).

Also, is Paul Reiser still handcuffed to a radiator? And what’s going to happen to Dmitri, the Russian prison guard? Something tells me he’s going to have to leave the motherland. And I do wish they would find a more kinetic way of staging fight scenes: it’s either Millie Bobby Brown throwing out her arm and making a guttural scream, or other characters shooting guns in slow-motion.

But now I’m mostly just quibbling. This was a great season of television: suspenseful, frightening, funny, heart-warming, tear-jerking, and one that wasn’t afraid to push its actors to their limits. But with such a big cast, and all of them vying for the spotlight, there are some clear winners and losers. I’d say this season belonged to the girls: Sadie Sink was phenomenal, Millie Bobbie Brown as solid as ever, Natalia Dyer finally given her due, and Maya Hawke in charmingly quirky support (even if she’s gone from sardonic and cynical to dipsy and somewhat autistic-coded between seasons).

Joseph Quinn also stole the show as Eddie Munson, and though some of the backlash over his death has been rather absurd, it does demonstrate what a strong impression he made in such a limited amount of time. Joe Keery remains the show’s most popular character for good reason, and Noah Schnapp sunk his teeth into his tortured half-outing, half-declaration of love to Mike. Kudos also to Caleb McLaughlin, who blew his climactic scene out of the water and almost single-handedly elevated Max/Lucas from the Beta Couple to the show’s OTP.

Unfortunately, everyone in the Russia subplot suffered with their rather superfluous material, and Finn Wolfhard... let’s just say that watching this, you’d find it hard to believe he was the show’s bona fide protagonist in season one. I’m not as down on him as most viewers seem to be, but if the Duffers want us to believe he’s “the heart” of the gang (or the show) then they’re going to have to give him more than this going forward.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Now that every important cast member has reconverged on a partly-destroyed Hawkins, that’s it for the “splitting up into smaller teams for the duration of the season” formula, right? Season five might have a few mini-missions, in which certain characters work together across a couple of episodes to accomplish a specific goal, but I’d really like to think that everyone will more-or-less be sticking together from here on out.

So Doctor Brenner is gone for good, right? Because I really, really hope he’s gone for good.

The Duffer Brothers have killed off characters before, but they took Max to an extremely dark place this season and I’m not entirely sure she can come back from that without life-long trauma. Between Eleven finding only a dark space where her mind should be, and the level of physical injuries she sustained at Vecna’s hands, it’s going to be (or at least should be) a long, slow path to recovery.

Let the record show that I have absolutely no investment in any of the show’s romantic ships at this point – sailing, crack, sunk or otherwise – and since fandom is being absolutely insufferable about all them, I hope every last character ends up happily single.

Season’s best moment is a tossup between Eddie heavy-metalling on top of his caravan to distract the bat-creatures, and Eleven earnestly telling a baffled Max that: “I piggy-backed from a pizza dough freezer.” (Seriously loved seeing the girls interact in that space, and kudos to the Duffers for giving Nancy and Robin a chance to get to know each other as well).

There’s a lot to wrap up in season five, which has long-since been announced as the final one. I’m not holding out too much hope that Eight/Kali will return, but perhaps that minor mention of her earlier this season was meant to remind us of her existence. And what about Eleven’s catatonic mother? Will she ever wake up and be reunited with her daughter? Could Eleven (or Jane) stumble upon her consciousness while she’s trying to help Max? And there’s still the mystery of why the Upside Down is stuck in the past to resolve.

Hopefully we won’t have as long to wait till the final season, and here’s to sticking the landing!