Chuck Todd interviews me about alternate histories
Showing posts with label Richard Madden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Madden. Show all posts

Monday, October 29, 2018

Bodyguard: Brilliant and More



We've all seen stories on the screen about the bodyguard whose job is complicated by falling for the woman he's tasked with guarding.   Some, like The Bodyguard (1992) have been brilliant.  Bodyguard, a BBC six-episode production now streaming on Netflix has all of that and is also brilliant.   And it has something more than that, making it something I've never quite seen before on any screen.

Part of it is the adrenalin - not so much nonstop as it is so high in certain scenes that you're totally strapped into the rollercoaster you're on, its sudden dips and crests and twists nearly out of your seat.  David Budd is a British vet doing security for the U. K. government in London.  We meet him as he gets a woman all strapped up with a suicide bomb on a train to disarm, with his kids on the very same train.  That gets him a job as the guard for the Home Minister.  And did I mention he's suffering from PTSD and is splitting up with wife?   Then things take off from there.

I'll say no more, lest I give away the plot, but like in the excellent MI-5, Budd is thrust into a nest competing vipers.   And, much like in superb Borgen, the Home Minister is a powerful woman with possible designs on the Prime Minister, and consequent enemies around every corner.   Suffice to say that the initial suicide bomb disarming is not the last one we'll see in this story, and not every attack is foiled.

And explosions happen not only physically but in the very fabric of the narrative, with unexpected turns and just about everyone and their relative being some kind of suspect.   The tense situations are handled with excruciating detail and aplomb, the acting is memorable with Richard Madden as Budd and Keeley Hawes as the Home Minister, and the result is being on edge of your seat becomes more than a metaphor.

Highly recommended - but not if you're looking for a nice relaxing evening or two.




Sunday, January 14, 2018

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police



Telepathy is another favorite but not-as-well-known-as-some-other themes of Philip K. Dick - appearing in the aforementioned (i..e, mentioned in my review of episode 1.3 of Electric Dreams) "Beyond Lies the Wub" in 1952 - and its combination with police procedural in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams episode 1.5, The Hood Maker, makes for a classic Dick amalgam.

It's also a great story, compellingly rendered.  Honor is a telepath or TEEP teaming with Agent Ross to maintain order, which includes controlling the TEEPs, whose ability to read normal human minds sows unease and disorder (understandable).  The situation is brought to a boil by the "hood maker" who makes hoods which, when donned, block out the TEEP probes. 

The Hood Maker is smartly written for television by Matthew Graham (who also wrote the TV adaption of Childhood's End and the British version of Life on Mars, much better than the American, by the way), and he has Honor saying such memorable things as "I could read people before I could read books" and Ross telling Honor "you can read minds but you can't read my heart".  I just love quintessentially science fictional lines like those.

And there's a nice symmetry between Holliday Grainger (from The Borgias) playing Honor and Richard Madden (from Medici) playing Ross.  Good directing, too, by Julian Jarrold.

I've been a sucker for telepathy in fiction every since I read Alfred Bester's Demolished Man as a kid at the end of the 1950s (which, by the way, was also a police story).   And I put Sense8 as #1 on my list of best 2017 television series for the same reason (it also has a strong telepathy and police element).  I put The Hood Maker in the same company,

See also Philip K Dick's Electric Dreams 1.1 Real Life: Mutually Alternate Realities ...  1.2 Autofac: Human v Machine ... 1.3 Human Is: Compassion or Alien? ... 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries ... 1.6 Safe & Sound: This Isn't A Drill ... 1.7 The Father Thing: Dick from Space ... 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eye of the Beholder ... 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval ... 1.10: Kill All Others: Too Close for Comfort



not quite telepathy, but some strange mental powers at large here



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