"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Monday, April 26, 2021

The Nevers 1.3: Mary's Melody



A really powerful, touching, terribly beautiful and instructive episode 1.3 of The Nevers on HBO tonight.

I was thinking, as Mary was singing in the park tonight, her voice amplified by some kind of Edison-like loudspeaker with possibly some dollop of superpower worked in, that if only the Touched can hear Mary sing, and we in the audience, on the other side of the screen, can hear her, than maybe The Nevers is telling us that all of us are touched in some way, too.

It was a lovely thought, until bullets tore it apart.  And there's a trenchant lesson in there for us, too.  In tonight's episode, the monster with the eaten-away and maybe also electronic head is easily disposed of.  And Amalia, after a pretty fierce battle in the water with the big bald chain-wielding guy manages to put him of out his homicidal misery, too.  But not so the horrible bullets that end Mary and her song.

Isn't that a lot like our own 21st-century real time, when bullets are daily doing so much horrendous damage, fired both by police and civilians with hate in their hearts, and we seem to be unable to stop it?  Mundi is able to stop this assassin, but there will be more, just like there are in our own world.

Dr. Cousens has incredible healing powers, which we saw again tonight, but he can't bring back the dead, at least as far as know.  That's a line which no one who has crossed can come back from, not here or in the special, wondrous Victorian world in the which The Nevers takes place.

But we still have Mary's song, and I like to believe that, where there's song, there's hope, and maybe in our world as well as theirs.

See also The Nevers 1.1: Never Say Never ... The Nevers 1.2: Song and Gun

          "challenging fun" -- Entertainment Weekly




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