Liaison: Crime and L' Amour

So I just binged Liaison, a six-episode French/British spy thriller that streamed on Apple TV+ two years ago.  It's still up there -- one of the joys of streaming -- and I'm glad it is.  I don't how I missed it when it first aired.  I see that critics gave it mixed reviews, another example of the poor vision and/or hearing of some of the people who somehow continue to share their myopic assessments to hapless readers.

First, I should say that I'm not surprised Liaison was so good.  The French have a knack for putting up excellent police series.  They know when a couple running away from police, or in the police themselves, always find time when they're caught in tight spots, figuratively and literally, to hug, kiss, pull together even more, and do what comes naturally.  This mix of crime and l'amour always hits the spot, if done right. It made Spiral, a French police drama, one of the best ever on screen.  Thus a spy thriller with a French ambience, which after all is a kind of police drama, has big leg up in emotion.

In the case of Liaison, the British, who also have the own appealing ways of presenting a spy story -- epitomized of course by James Bond -- meld with the French to make an once combustible, sarcastic, and devoted production.  Eva Green (Penny Dreadful) and Vincent Cassel (Westworld the series) in the lead roles are in the middle of a high tech, terrorist tale of corruption and those who are struggling to stop it, and it's tough to tell, or supposed to be tough, to tell who is the hero and who is the villain.  Although--

[And here's my warning about spoilers ahead .,.. ]

I said "supposed to be tough," because I never lost my faith for a moment in the these two appealing heroes.  It was fun to see them driving from both sides of the front seat, as well as wielding knives and guns and avoiding their lethal result with a combination of prowess and sheer luck.

Now the short series ended in a way which leaves the tableau wide open for a second season.  I have no idea if that will or won't happen. But if it does, rest assured I won't wait two years to watch it.

Westword 3.2: Dolores' Enemies

A fine second episode of the third season of Westworld on HBO tonight, even though Dolores and what we saw of her life last week was present only in the lives of others, Maeve and Bernard, and the characters, androids and humans, in their worlds.  Of course, all the worlds and lives are connected, so Dolores was actually very present in the story, and the stories of Maeve and Bernard, on the way to approaching each other, were quite good.

Maeve has always been a great character, driven by the need to find her daughter, able to defy programming and orders, but only most of the time.  We encounter one of the times she can't, a very significant time, at the very end of tonight's episode, when Engerraund Serac freezes her, in that excellent white dress, with a remote control (yeah, reminiscent of today's television remotes).  In that instant, Serac instantly becomes one of the most important and provocative characters on the show, maybe even a successor to Ford.  He clearly has enormous knowledge of the hosts and how they work.  And, just for good measure in making him provocative, he wants Maeve to kill Dolores.  (It also doesn't hurt that he's played by one of my favorite actors, Vincent Cassel.)

Does Maeve have loyalty to her kind?  So far in the two seasons plus two new episodes, it's tough to say.  She has loyalty to and love for her daughter, clearly.  She'd kill Dolores in a heartbeat to save her little girl. (It's still not 100% clear, by the way, why Maeve is so devoted to her - the devotion is definitely sprung of something deeper than programming.)  But if her daughter wasn't at stake, would Maeve kill Delores?  Certainly not necessarily if she were commanded to do so - she could defy the command.  But since we don't really know what makes Maeve tick, it's impossible to say at this point what Maeve would do.  Which makes her story this season especially alluring.

Bernard also wants to stop Delores from wiping out humanity, and if killing her is the only way to do that, I'd say at this point that he would.  Bernard remains a supremely interesting character, since he's both a host and a master programmer.   That makes him uniquely different from both Dolores and Maeve, in different ways.   In one obvious sense, he's also a successor to Ford.  And there's no doubt the Bernard and Serac will meet before this season ends.

So we're off and running, with more sharp characters and storylines.  And I'm glad Warworld and its Nazis were apparently just an appetizer for a much bigger story.

See also: Westworld 3.1: The Great Outside

And see also Westworld 2.1: Maeve's Daughter ... Westworld 2.2: "Narcissus Narcosis" ... Westworld 2.3: The Raj and Guns of the South ... Westworld 2.4: Questions Pertaining to Immortality ... Westworld 2.5: Telepathic Control ... Westworld 2.6: The Dangling Conversation ... Westworld 2.7: Maeve vs. Dolores ... Westworld 2.8: The Wrong World ... Westworld 2.9: Fathers ... Westworld 2.10: The Realist World

And see also Westworld 1.1: Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick Served Up by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and J. J. Abrams ... Westworld 1.2: Who Is the Man in Black? ... Westworld 1.3: Julian Jaynes and Arnold ... Westworld 1.4: Vacation, Connie Francis, and Kurt Vonnegut ... Westworld 1.5: The Voice Inside Dolores ... Westworld 1.6: Programmed Unprogramming ... Westworld 1.7: The Story of the Story ... Westworld 1.8: Memories ... Westworld 1.9: Half-Truths and Old Friends ... Westworld Season 1 Finale: Answers and Questions