Vikings Season 2: The GPS Voyage

It's funny how sometimes a show starts out really simply and then slowly gets bigger and more complex and more produced. You can almost see the behind the scenes conversations as success begins to take root and the producers get bolder or more ratings hungry. Or more likely, network suits come in and tell them to do so. I'm not saying this is necessarily what happened with Vikings season 2, but something changed. It was still good, but there were a few things that kind of took me out of it.

Christian Warrior.

First there was suddenly a more stylized approach to the filming and editing that either wasn't there before or I didn't notice. There is one scene in particular where Ragnar's son and brother, Bjorn and Rollo are sparring on a beach and the camera keeps doing these quick tracking shots from the water. There were also several music video like montages with slow motion for no apparent reason. Rather distracting for a show where the main appeal for me was the simplicity of the lifestyle presented. I think these stylistic turns work well in Peaky Blinders because the setting, industrial revolution era England, is already somewhat jarring in itself. Here, the setting is all natural and outside in these beautiful locations. Just let that be the wow factor instead of showing off.

Another detraction has been some major plot holes and faulty logic. At one point, Ragnar and the others go on a raid to England and they get caught in a major storm, which throws them off course and they wind up landing in the kingdom of Wessex instead of Northumbria, where they were headed. Fine, they decide, and just raid that kingdom instead. No big deal there. Except later on, another ship arrives, headed right for their encampment in Wessex to deliver news of what happened back home since they left. HOW!? Did this ship have GPS and tracking? I honestly couldn't stop thinking about that for the rest of the season. Game of Thrones has so far been very successful in giving us a sense of the vastness of the geography involved when you're traveling by, let's just call it ancient means. When characters in Westeros happen to bump into each other in the wilderness it's usually a big deal that they found each other. But here it's almost like they had called each other and agreed to meet at a certain time sometimes. And while they've more or less addressed the language issue between the Norse and English, there are times it gets a little thin. I mean how quickly did Ragnar learn English? So I guess watching this for this historical consistency might be a mistake. 

The hot viking lady will kill you.

On the other hand, this season had the rise of Lagertha. My only complaint about this excellent storyline is that not enough time is devoted to it. I say scrap the whole Ragnar thing and make the whole show about her. To be honest, by the end of the season, she might be the only reason I'm still into it. Other characters, like Floki, had some iffy motivations throughout the season only to reveal, last minute, that they were only playing along with a deception. Yeah, ok. But Game of Thrones does that WAAAAY better. I get that they have to inject some drama into this but it came off a bit overly drawn out, without any added impact.

Still, I think the show is doing some interesting things here playing with ancient history and extrapolating some details from it. Inconsistencies aside, the show excels when it focuses on the pagan morality. It's not as simple as what we have come to know as an honorable warrior code that we see paralleled in Star Trek's Klingons or even in Game of Throne's Dothraki. It's also not a hippie, witchy nature fest. It's somewhere in the middle and yet neither and yet all of those. It really is its own thing and like I mentioned about season 1, it's weird to find yourself rooting for people when they commit heinous acts, but you do. And you also find yourself respecting the villains when they face death unafraid and true to their code.

By the end of the season it appears this show has gotten much bigger in many ways. Ambition is the driving force for Ragnar, but it's an ambition for knowledge, not power. The power he attains just happens to be what he has figured out is necessary in order to gain the knowledge he seeks of the world beyond. That's all well and good, but if they open next season with more Lagertha, just being a badass and we never get back to Ragnar's quest for knowledge, I'd probably love the show forever.

Told you not to fuck with her.

BBC on Netflix: The Fall and Peaky Blinders

There's a lot to like about The Fall, labeled as a Netflix Original even though it's actually a BBC show (a trick I'm not sure how Netflix gets away with). It stars Gillian Anderson as an English detective investigating a series of murders in Belfast, Ireland. I could see people initially comparing this to The Killing, but aside from the very basic things all shows of this nature have in common, this is different. For starters, the two seasons currently on Netflix are clearly working at saying something about misogyny. And you know what, it's about damn time a crime procedural drama did that. Too often these shows are about titillation at the expense of mostly female victims. And if there is a female cop, they are more motherly than anything else. Shows like Law and Oder: SVU pay lip service to how the culture feeds sex crimes, but the show itself, like most crime shows is really just voyeuristic.

Here, Anderson comes across as cold at first, but you eventually start to see her complexity and awareness of the fact that she's dealing with a male dominated world and how that world predictably results in the crimes she works. But yet, she doesn't judge, really. In the end, she doesn't even judge the criminals themselves as much as she may hate them, because she realizes they are all too human. Of course, in order to get to this point, you have to get past her accent, or more precisely her choice of vocal tone. She has a throaty whisper throughout the series that really drove me nuts most of the time. I get that the character is meant to be somewhat laid back and distant. She's supposed to make you listen to her closely. Her whisper is a sign of confidence. I get all that, I really do. But maybe it's too much. I don't know. She's no Scully, that's for sure. Either way, give this show a shot. It's worth the effort.

She says things like this often and she's right every time.

There are only two seasons on Netflix and it appears to have wrapped up the case, so I'm not sure what season 3 will bring. Will she finally yell at someone? Who knows. It's a standard rule that by being limited, BBC series are usually more contained. But then Luther's last season sort of spun out of control, so you never know.

Another BBC original that Netflix claims is Peaky Blinders, which is one of the most beautifully shot shows I've ever seen. This one stars Cillian Murphy as an Irish gypsy gangster in Birmingham, England just after World War I. The show is great, but I can't say enough how beautiful it is to look at. The sets are so rich and detailed and the photography captures every bit of industrial grime and dirt. There are moments where they walk past local, industrial revolution era workshops of some kind and the fire will just roar in very real detail in the background, inches away from our protagonists, just dominating the scene while lighting it. It's like the opposite of the overblown explosions we see in big budget action movies that frame the heroes in all their glory. This is just part of the scenery and matter of fact in a very scary way. But then the whole city is really like a workshop, with open furnaces and fumes and soot and ash just in the air at all times. This toxic atmosphere is looming and real and dangerous and just a very visible part of the scenery and part of the lives of the working class. And if there's any image in the show that stands out for me it's that fire, sparking violently at times, which appears in various locations throughout the show.

The show is also big on musical, slow motion scenes, set to modern rock. The main theme is Nick Cave and The Bad Seed's "Red Right Hand" and they've featured everything form PJ Harvey to Arctic Monkeys and The Black Keys. Basically, like they've been listening to my favorites on Spotify. Typically, these just come off as stylized transitions and sure, they stick out somewhat at first. But you quickly get over the anachronism for two reasons: the excellent choice of songs and the absolute coolness of the shots themselves. It really is an accomplishment to be able to pull that off, but they do. There are episodes that are a bit slow, but at the risk of getting repetitive, it really is a beautiful show to look at, so it's always interesting.  Plus, there's family drama and Irish drinking and fighting and gang violence and communists. There's gypsy shit and Winston Churchill himself is a recurring character. Seriously, check it out. Here's the opening to the very first episode, which hooked me immediately.