The Tourist: Try It, You'll Really Like It

So I was on HBO Max watching Raised by Wolves and I saw a few ads for The Tourist, and I gave it a shot, and I'm glad I did!  How's that for a non-spoiler review?

But here's a little more, with some spoilers.

A man is run off the road by a truck in the Australian outback and wakes up in a hospital having no idea who he is.  That's a fairly standard beginning, harkening back at least as far as Coronet Blue, one of my all-time favorite summer replacement CBS shows with a short number of episodes because the series was never finished.  The Tourist also has a short number of episodes -- six -- and though the mini-series concludes, there's more than enough room for another season or two.

The main character other than the amnesiac is Probationary Constable Helen Chambers.  That's barely police, but Helen has a keen sense of justice and morality, and is played perfectly by Danielle Macdonald. Helen is a little overweight, and engaged to a psychologically abusive guy who's even more overweight, but is driving Helen crazy to lose weight and has open contempt for her job.  Helen is attractive, inside and outside, and it's no surprise that the amnesiac becomes increasingly attracted to her.

The other police are crooked or barely competent.  The amnesiac (well played by Jamie Dornan) has a prior girlfriend with plenty of spunk, great lines, and names, Luci, Victoria, etc, also well played by Shalom Brune-Franklin.  The action is nonstop, with major surprises in just about every episode.

Some of the characters are almost unbelievably hard to kill, but that's ok.  The amnesiac's status is not clear at the end.  But going by my standard that unless you see the character's head severed or blown to bits there's a always a chance he or she can live to show up in a second season.  Which, as I said, I really hope to see.   Harry Williams and Jack Williams, please write it.

 

Blindspot 1.1: Good to See - Or, Coronet Blue meets The Illustrated Man

Good to see Blindspot begin on NBC last night - in fact, it was excellent.  Coronet Blue, the 1960s CBS summer replacement series fragment starring Frank Converse about a guy who washes up in New York with no memory and saying the words "coronet blue" was always one of my favorites, as is Ray Bradbury's 1951 anthology The Illustrated Man, about a vagrant whose tattoos each tell a magical, science fictional story.

Blindspot has elements of both, as well as Sullivan Stapleton (from Strike Back), an Australian with a great American accent, who plays Kurt, the lead FBI guy, whose name is tattooed on Jane Doe's the amnesiac's back.  She's played by Jaimie Alexander, who does well in her role, too.   The debut was fast-moving, and revealed enough important information to give hope for a compelling series.

Not enough information, being kept too much in the dark, is a pitfall with these kinds of shows, which Blindspot avoided.   We now know that Jane was/is some kind of Navy Seal - even though the Seals don't officially - yet - take women, though as FBI leader Bethany aptly remarks, maybe that's just their public stance.  And there's an evil guy with a beard afoot - who's apparently behind Jane's condition - though who knows for sure if he's entirely evil (and here Blindspot connects a little with NBC's other strange crime hit that begins with a B, Blacklist).

Back to The Illustrated Man, it looks as if given episodes of Blindspot might well be devoted to clues contained in the tattoos, which will be deciphered in series as the series progresses.  That's a good way of keep the stories fresh, as the underlying plot unfolds.

So I'm up for watching Blindspot.  I gotta say, though, that I liked Blacklist much better at the beginning than as the series went on, and I'm hoping Blindspot can avoid this kind of running out of tension and steam.

 
no tattoos, but pretty strange

Stranded in an Unknown City with No Resources...

What would you do if you were stranded in an unknown city with no money or resources? How would you eat? Where would you sleep? What about the weather?

Let's assume, to make this even more challenging, that no resources meant no form of identification, in addition to no credit cards or access to any kind of electronic transfer of funds.

Here's what I would do to eat:

I used to have an acquaintance - this is true, let's call him Alan - who would pride himself on going into diners, waiting until a patron left the table, then quickly sitting down and gobbling up anything that was left on the plate...

I know, it's a little hard to stomach, but it beats starving to death, and I'm pretty sure it's not breaking the law (since the food was already paid for, and the patron left it, uneaten, on the table). I should also point out that Alan seemed pretty healthy, and never got sick from his diner poaching, at least as far as I knew...

Let's move on to sleeping. That's far easier. If the weather is warm, hey, you can find a nice quiet place in some park to sleep. (I once did this when I was a teenager - long story.) Deserted beaches would work well for this, too.

But let's say it's freezing cold outside? In that case, I'd recommend catching some zzzzs on a subway car - if you live in a city with all-night train service. Or maybe cuddling up with a good book deep in the stacks of your biggest public library, that you were able to quietly sneak into...

Of course, you could also easily solve both your food and sleeping problems by making friends with some nice person - but that assumes, for your safety's sake, that you are an excellent judge of human nature.

So ... what would you do if you were in such a predicament?

Starting June 28, Michael Weston, a CIA Operative on USA Network's new TV series, Burn Notice, will show us how he deals with a similar situation.

I haven't seen any of it, yet, but I certainly intend to.

Hey, you should, too ... USA Network's Burn Notice ... you never know ...

Think about what happened to Frank Converse in Coronet Blue...

The Sopranos End and the Closure-Junkies

As the debate about The Sopranos ending continues to rage - with a great piece in the New York Times just this morning, quoting David Chase from an interview he gave Alan Sepinwall in the Newark Star Ledger - I'm beginning to see the main issue that everyone is really talking or arguing about ...

On the one side, we have the closure-junkies. This is a group that at one time or another includes everyone, all of us. Real life often does not have definitive endings. So we crave them in our re-creations, our recreations, our fiction. We may desperately prefer a happy or a sad ending, a villain to get his just desert, a broken heart to find true love, but what we really want even more than that is some kind of ending that we can hang our hat on, wrap our minds around. That's what fiction is supposed to be about, isn't it?

Maybe, but if it is, who says so? Maybe fiction can sometimes satisfy, and satisfy even more deeply, but not resolving much of anything. There are precedents for this - in Frank Stockton's The Lady, or the Tiger, as I mentioned here yesterday. Stockton's ending of course was not just more of the same, life goes on - but it provided no closure, par excellence.

There have been precedents for this in television, too. One of my all-time favorite series was the radically unfinished Coronet Blue in the 1960s. Frank Converse plays a guy who washes up on a New York City shore with amnesia, and mumbling the phrase "coronet blue". The series was a fragment, an unfinished summer replacement, and we never did find out the meaning of that phrase. (A biography of the producer was published a few years ago, if you want to know - I won't provide a link to it here, because I think the series worked better unfinished...)

Now David Chase of course could have done whatever he wanted with The Sopranos, and that's just what he did. He chose to put in a deliberately radically unfinished ending-

And, in so doing, he's in effect issued a challenge to all of us, the closure-junkies: are we ready to kick the habit, and at least consider going to the other side, an overlapping group of who knows how many, who may love closure in some or most of their fiction, but can also enjoy an extraordinarily open ending?

I'm not at all saying that making this challenge was Chase's intention - I never presume to talk about creators' intentions. What I am saying is that this is the net result of The Sopranos' ending.

As I've already mentioned in several posts here and there, I readily admit to being an anti-closure sympathizer. Indeed, at least two of my novels - The Silk Code and The Plot to Save Socrates - have been criticized by the occasional critic (benighted, of course, in my view) for not providing enough closure, for leaving things at the end too close to the way they were at the beginning. In science fiction and mystery, I do admit to always enjoying a story which lets us in on all sorts of crazy goings-on, and leaves us with a view that, to most of the rest of the world, life is just going on as usual. There's a great mise-en-scene sequence in Hitchcock's Frenzy, when the strangler kills a woman with his tie in her London flat, and the camera pulls back and out the door and down the stairs and out the front the door and across the street and just stops there ... and we see cars and people and life going on as usual on this London street in the afternoon, knowing all the time that a vicious murder just took place upstairs in the flat across the street...

So I was already there for Chase's ending, even though I certainly didn't expect it (though I did consistently predict Tony would live).

And I expect that there are many more out there who are kicking the closure-habit, each time they think again about The Sopranos' ending, and realize how much they really like it...

Useful links:

The Sopranos and Hamlet

The Sopranos, or the Tiger?

The Sopranos Ninth of Nine: The Anti-Ending Ending

The Sopranos as a Nuts-and-Bolts Triumph of Non-Network TV my 2002 article

reviews of the first eight episodes this final season: The Sopranos: First of Nine, Second of Nine, Third of Nine, Fourth of Nine, Fifth of Nine, Sixth of Nine, Seventh of Nine, Eighth of Nine

The Sopranos, Lost, and Heroes: A Comparison of Real and Future Endings

Talking about The Sopranos ending on KNX1070 Radio Sunday June 17


Sopranos Symposium at Fordham University, May 22-25, 2008: Final Program

The Sopranos Podcasts - listen to reviews and analyses to your heart's content

A Conversation with Dominic Chianese

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An expanded version of this blog post appears in The Essential Sopranos Reader  (University of Kentucky Press, 2011)