nineveh_uk

I am completely failing to write up a short fic that is a lot of fun in concept, but like pulling teeth to write. Character voices are not cooperating. Possibly if I ignore it for a bit, I can wrench a mini version out of it. In the meantime, I've been meaning for absolutely ages to mention some TV series, so I'll do that instead.

Mr Queen
In which a modern chef and a bit of a playboy finds himself bodyswapped with a depressed nineteenth-century Joseon era queen. At its heart is a terrific performance by lead actress Shin Hye-sun as our deeply confused protagonist, but the whole thing is just great fun. Can Jang Bong-hwan/Queen Cheorin navigate the pit-of-vipers court, avoid having sex with the king, and get back to his own time, hopefully having sex with his hot maid first? He may not know too much history, but he does have one useful skill: he can cook.

On a cultural ignorance note, this would have been a lot less confusing as my first Korean drama had I been aware that nineteenth-century Joseon attitudes to cousin marriage were not not those of nineteenth-century British literature. It turns out my "Ah, so the king can divorce his wife and she can marry her hot cousin and they can all end up happily" has a degree of wrongness as an interpretation up there with "Aslan is really Satan."



Crash Landing on You
Wealthy South Korean businesswoman Yoon Se-ri gets blown off-course while paragliding and lands in North Korea in a Netflix success. Technically, the North Korean section of the MMZ, but she doesn't realise this until too late, and now she is stuck. Rescued by handsome, highly educated, sensitive pianist North Korean* army captain Ri Jeong-hyeok, can he and his battalion hide her until they can return her to South Korea, or will they be betrayed? Whether they will fall in love is, obviously, not in question. It's not all romance or North Korean army scandals, there's an extensive plot around her family's business, which she was going to take over before she went missing, and a family drama with various terrible relations.

There's so much to like about this drama. It has engaging characters, good acting, and a great plot concept. The visual design of the North Korean settings is fantastic, and it does not, in any way, make one think that it would be good to live in North Korea, despite the warmth with which some of the characters are portrayed. Unfortunately, it has sixteen episodes each about 70 minutes long, and once we got into the second half they felt longer. It felt as if approximately 50 minutes of plot has to be wrapped in an additional 40 minutes of romantic glurge, sometimes with graphics of pastel hearts and rainbows literally decorating the screen. Obviously a lot of people felt differently, but I don't think South Korean romantic TV drama pacing and I don't quite gel.

Also, I feel very aggrieved on behalf of the secondary romance couple. They deserved better, damn it!

*No, I wasn't entirely convinced by this, either.

The other evening, as we sat tired, bored and grumpy, out of athletics and cycling viewing and in need of cheering entertainment, my father looked at the options available and said, " Shall we watch the final episode of Pride and Prejudice?" And we did. I have seen it many, many times since 1995, but not recently, and my spirits lifted at the theme music and remained delighted throughout. It is so very well done on every front, perfectly cast, strongly acted, and I am going to rewatch the whole thing when I get home.

I have finished He Who Drowned the World. The fact it took me ten days says everything about the past week or so. But I really enjoyed it, review in due course when I have a brain. Next up, the authorial AU fanfic.

On the Covid front, my parents are both testing negative and feeling much better, though tired and frustrated. I am out of bed, but spending the mornings coughing like a plague victim. Just to make life worse, the government's total lack of interest in a functioning national infrastructure means there is railway industrial action today and tomorrow, Sunday will thus be awful, and I may need to travel Monday. Plus I need to find something to read!

But not all is a tale of woe - here are two badgers on a trampoline.

I watched the first episode of Wild Isles, David Attenborough's latest, this week and very good it was too. In brief:

(1) Excellent as Attenborough's voiceovers always are, a programme entitled Wild Isles really ought to be narrated by someone with a West Midlands accent.

(2) Youngest Sister and I have long thought that the herring gull deserves a proper wildlife documentary. Despite its sometimes-seeming ubiquity, particularly at 5am in a seaside bedroom with single glazing, they're on the conservation Red list, and they are, when not attempting to steal chips, impressive birds. They deserve their moment in the spotlight. Alas, that came as the baddies vs the cuter puffin.

(3) Every wildlife documentary I have seen or similar story I have read that features orcas/killer whales in recent years seems to include a story about how the particular pod the camera team is following has learned to hunt its prey in a unique manner. Since orcas are highly intelligent predators, that is perhaps not surprising once they are closely studied. Still, I think this was about the forth pod in a row. One day the "something uniquely them" about a particular family is going to be that they've developed tool use, creating blow darts out of carefully-splintered seal ribs that they coat with Portuguese man o' war venom and have used in combination with their more common practice of drowning the prey once captured to take control of a nuclear submarine, the sort equipped with ballistic missiles, and the captain is urgently conveying their demands.

When I read the headline to this Guardian article, my reflexive thought was that that was overly harsh: Now it’s over, let’s come out and say it: The Rings of Power was a stinker. And then I paused. Amazon's Rings of Power's first series is the most expensive television ever made. Its 8-episode series cost an unspecified but enormous amount of money, and looked at in those terms, of how much value did they get out of that money, the Guardian is right. That sum of money could have made, should have made, an awful lot of very good television*, and it simply didn't on any front.

A stinker financially, but my fundamental problem with RoP was that it was simply tepid. If it had been laughably bad I'd have been ranting on Dreamwidth after the first two episodes. I'm a Tolkien fan of nearly 35 years, I have opinions, even if one of those opinions is "it is necessary for a good adaptation to adapt." The root problem is the script.* The script is indeed a stinker. At best, it steals from the LotR films in a heavy-handed way. Occasionally there are good original sections. Most of it is dull. At worst, it vividly illustrates the truth of Ursula K Le Guin's 1973 essay From Elfland to Poughkeepsie. Le Guin and I don't entirely agree on what makes good fantasy style, but we certainly agree on what it isn't: dialogue that with a couple of proper nouns changed sounds like 'a sample of conversation between a senator and a lobbyist for pollution control.' Le Guin's brilliant example actually includes the name Nigel. RoP doesn't go that far, but as a text one would scarcely be surprised at any moment were Nigel the analyst to start delivering his report on biscuit sales.

I'm not as harsh on the acting as Stuart Heritage; though I agree that it is not all of equal quality, I think that the actors could largely have done better with better material. Morfydd Clark is indeed good, albeit occasionally made up rather too heavy on the blusher, but my goodness does she have heavy lifting to do. She's also hampered in that for a fantasy series with a female lead, it manages to be remarkably sexist in a 'complete failure by the creative team to examine underlying prejudices' way. Yes, there are some female characters. But again and again they get presented in ways that fall back on modern media sexism. Amazon's elves are a sexually dimorphic species, women all beautiful, willowy, and Galadriel excepted, at least one of unseen or silent, while the men (Arondir and his fellow Sindarins excepted) are either determinedly middle-aged middle-manager in appearance, or in the case of Elrond, looking like ones mental image of an economics post-grad at Brigham Young University.** I think there was one female elf other than Galadriel who had a speaking part, in episode 1. In one particularly egregrious scene, three male elves plus a dwarven prince sit round a dinner table. There are two women there, veiled and silent, and faces pretty much unseen. Afterwards while the manly business meeting continues, we see equally veiled and silent female elves clear the table. No doubt they then went on to do the washing up. Meanwhile in 'the Southlands', prominent village woman Bronwyn wears the kind of sleeveless hippy sundress that Kate Aldridge would have thought too much in the 1980s while all around her the generic peasants are warmly clad. Once again, Bronwyn is the only woman with lines in the village.

I will admit that it looks absolutely gorgeous, the budget on scenery and special effects being well-spent. The dwarf kingdom in Eregion is magnificent, Numenor a splendid blending of Venice and Byzantium with a dash of Alma-Tadema, the Hobbits earthily bucolic (a bit OTT so, others than I have done the Irish accents rant), the elves' clothes and forest-cities unearthly even if their wigs are not. But setting isn't enough. It isn't anything like enough.

When it comes down to it, the producers, the showrunners, just haven't thought enough. They've got the first 8 episodes of a 5 series and it is boring, and simply because I already know the outline of the story, an issue that applies in the adaptation of any book. There is some good original stuff in there - I ended up really liking Adar (the acting helped), but as a whole they have a bad script both in the detail*** and as a whole. The hook may be 'has Sauron returned?', but if you're not answering in the text that until the end of the series, you need some plot in the intervening episodes that is more than a few business meetings about magical biscuits. The writer of any UK soap, of any bargain-basement 50 episode Cdrama**** knows that you cannot spend your filler episodes just hanging around. And unfortunately, for all its better moments that promised something more, RoP was about 90% filler. I think this is fixable to quite a significant degree for subsequent series, but will need recognition of the problem and some money and talent putting into the script.

And finally PYROCLASTIC FLOWS DON'T WORK LIKE THAT!!!!!!!!!!!

OK, I admit it. This turned into a rant.

*Actually the root problem is giving a project like that to a couple of totally inexperienced showrunners because they were white men with connections.

** Think the lead in The Book of Mormon and dial it up. A lot. Although Elrond's actor actually comes from Hull. Or as they call it in Hull, Kingston upon Hull.

*** Seriously, that was the best you could come up with for Sauron's influence on the creation of the rings? Something that the elves would only not have thought of if they had not reached Bronze Age technology levels? FFS! What ought to have been a climatic moment is simply cringingly bad writing. Then there's the insular village, with inhabitants nonetheless called Bronwyn, Theo, Rowan, and Waldreg.

**** God knows, The Untamed had its flaws, but it does set up its big mystery right at the start and then maintain the viewer's interest in that central question through a fairly complicated narrative.

* The very hot weather finally broke and it is cooler, though still not requiring me to wear more than short-sleeves most of the time. Tonight I am in trousers and a light cardi, for the first time in ages. Alas, my hope that when the weather broke I would feel a lot better, while correct yesterday, was disproved today, most of which I spent feeling crushingly fatigued. Damn. The long Covid recovery continues to move forward, but it's very much three steps forward, two steps back, and the last couple of weeks haven't been the best, with some other kind of virus**. This is extremely frustrating, not least because I'm very conscious that this was a period in which I could have hoped to get some more interesting work started off for next academic year alongside the routine stuff, and as it is I am going to be pushed to get the routine stuff done. Grr.

* There is so much I could say about the weather, about the total failure to invest in infrastructure over the past decade, about politics, but I really can't bear thinking about it.

* There has at least been plenty of summer sport to watch when I've felt rough. Though after Olive and Mabel over the pandemic I am now unable to hear Andrew Cotter's commentary without seeing the competitors as labradors.

* What with lots of athletics and having finished Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, of which more anon, I have taken a break from Cdramas and being going through whatever has seemed easy on my DVR or iPlayer at the time. The exception to this has been Australian drama The Newsreader, courtesy of BBC4. A nice 6 episodes, it focuses on the occupants of a commercial TV newsroom in the mid-1980s, with Clark-Kent-like up-and-coming producer who would like to be on the news desk Dale Jennings, and experienced, but inevitably being a woman not as secure as her position should be for her talent, Helen. There are occasional moment when I find myself thinking of the various counterparts on Drop the Dead Donkey, but that's a tribute to the accuracy of the latter rather than a slight to the former. Good mainstream drama, well-written, extremely well acted. I felt I would have caught a few more things culturally had I been my age and Australian, but that didn't matter. I'm very pleased to learn that a second series is currently being filmed.

* I need to buy my brother-in-law a birthday present. I had been thinking of getting in ahead of his look at the Hugo's list for Christmas, and give him She Who Became the Sun as I felt this might be a case of fictional overlap for us, until the ( unexpected ), which felt like it might be a bit much from ones sister-in-law. Though really that is me just being a wimp. I might ask Middle Sister if he owns/enjoys A Memory Called Empire, and if so play safe and go for A Desolation Called Peace. Then I can get SWBtS if it appears on his Christmas list.

**Many negative LFTs, but also it just didn't feel like Covid.

It's hard to believe it is 21 years since the release of the film of The Fellowship of the Ring. I was so excited, reading theonering.net, buying film magazines for photos, and hoping desperately that it wouldn't be a disaster. It wasn't. There are flaws in the trilogy, particularly The Return of the King, but considered as a whole it very much delivered what I wanted, and the experience of seeing that first film in the cinema was absolutely fantastic.

I await Amazon's The Rings of Power with considerably more trepidation. I really want it to be a success, because although I've never been in Tolkien fandom very deeply, I have been a Tolkien fan since I first read the novels in middle school. There is no question but that I'll sign up to Amazon Prime for it, at least for the first series, because I can't possibly see what it is like for myself. But as for what it will be like? I feel like I have no expectations, and that in itself is a bit disappointing. It's being done by two blokes with no track record who have been handed a lot of money (one day women might get to do this, but no time soon, it seems). I think the second age could be interesting, Numenor has a lot of potential, I have mixed feelings about what sounds like massive time compression, I have no problem with actually showing Galadriel crossing the ice (is that going to be a flashback or a prologue? Because if not then they are compressing absolutely everything). It will probably be at least a decent first series. The problem is that I want it to be really good, and I can't help fearing it may lose what makes Tolkien special to me in favour of generic fantasy.

Anyway, here is the trailer.



While I'm on the subject, will anyone, ever, do a Luthien ballet? It is madness there hasn't been one, I can only assume that the estate wants more for the rights than a ballet company could ever manage.

Sometimes, there comes along a programme that seems almost literally made for you as a viewer, and in the run up to the 2022 Winter Olympics, The Olympic Draum (press release) is definitely the one for me. Having covered in recent years the Norwegian women's team, the Norwegian's men's team, and various individual famous Norwegians, NRK clearly felt the need for a fresh perspective in its run-up to the Olympics, and they found it. Seven 22-25 minute episodes following the UK cross-country ski team as they prepare for the Olympics, hampered only by their tiny budget*, wax technician being stuck in Sweden due to the pandemic, and of course the fact of being British. It looks like some lighthearted winter sporting fun.

The chances of this making it to UK media seem zero, so if you feel the urge to take a look, it is here, dialogue a mix of English and Norwegian.

*Here is the Norwegian team's world cup wax truck. The British have a multipurpose van.

For television to collapse in front of, my current primary criteria, I can definitely recommend the BBC's Winter Walks series. I missed these last year, but have just watched series 2 and am catching up on 1. 'Familiar faces' take a walk somewhere in Yorkshire or Cumbria and talk about it as they go to a selfie-stick and drone. It's thirty minutes of ambling through the countryside and though there's too much walking for slow TV, it's pleasantly reflective. My favourite so far has been Alastair Campbell, who allowed me to go "I was there in July!", as well as being a good companion, though I also enjoyed Amanda Owen*, and I'm looking forward to Selina Scott tomorrow simply on the grounds that she is in Wharfedale and some of my most-walked bit at that. Least successful for me has been Kate Bottley, whose tendency to deliver herself of A Moral I found rather shallow, though the programme is still worth it for a gorgeous route**.

*I hadn't heard of her, but apparently she has many children, a sheep farm, and a TV programme.

**The moral I would have delivered on that episode was "You had to get permission from the estate to install running water in the 1950s????" and an observation on class warfare.

Finally, a car that turns into an aeroplaneIt may not fly absolutely silently, but you can't have everything.

And in more 'formative influences of children's television', a plan to release beavers in London.

TL:DR It's brilliant, watch it!

One of the highlights of the past couple of months has been Chinese 'historical' costume drama Nirvana in Fire. I saw this mentioned online a year or so ago and thought that one day I should get round to it, and occasionally saw it again, and when I reached the end of season 3 of Black Sails and had re-watched the 2015 and 2017 cross-country skiing world championships from the sofa and still there was no end in sight to lockdown or coronavirus, I thought it was time to give probably cheesy, certainly gorgeously-costumed Chinese drama a try.

I am so, so glad I did. One, occasionally two, episodes a day has been my mainstay over the past month. I'm 30 eps in now, with a glorious 24 to go, and I love it. Who would have thought that people sitting opposite one another having conversations, which is a good 80% of the scenes, could be so riveting. And yet it is. Every single episode I sit there going "no, you're not going to are you? You are! Oh you cunning bastard!" about a whole range of characters.

NB I've kept this basically spoiler-free other than the basic premise as revealed in the first episode. No spoilers, please! This is one I need to watch to the end unspoiled (except for the rather silly thing I am aware of.)


( Plot/set-up summary (it’s all about revenge) )

It is fair to say that NiF, with zero nudity*, zero swearing, far fewer scenes set on ships or in brothels, and very limited blood, is in many ways the polar opposite of Black Sails. Except that for all the differences, both lead characters and the plot are driven by an obsessive quest for revenge/justice against a great power, while themselves suffering secret pain. And if that means that they, or the innocent, get hurt, well that’s just what happens. Admittedly the protagonist of NiF tries quite a lot harder than Captain Flint not to hurt other people, but he doesn't hesitate to do it if he has to, and when he does, he is brutal.

Tune in now for cunning plotting, amazing costumes with truly ridiculous hair ornaments, fighting, and people exchanging a wide variety of Significant Glances** indicating various cunning plotting***, nefarious plans, suspicion, stoicism, ruthlessness, guilt, and of course doomed love.

Here is the trailer. Click on the closed captions box for English subtitles.



I've been watching it largely on YouTube (there are a couple of different English subbed versions, this one has the Viki subtitles), but there are a few episodes missing, so those I watched on Viki, which is official but has really annoying adverts, presumably unless you subscribe. I should probably look up which is the version with the best subtitles, but this one is perfectly adequate and I like the footnotes as to what various honorifics mean.

Delayed: Complete YT series here.

ETA Oh God, I am halfway through ep 33 and it is encapsulating the agony of viewing! The Emperor is unsure, Consort Jing is so clever, and her son really, really needs to acquire a political brain fast. So much is said so calmly, but it is devastating underneath. This is why I love it.

ETA 2 Finished ep. "Xiao-Jingyan, why do you not have a brain?" I could have died. It is so good.

* There is a shocking rolled-up sleeve moment.

**There is a lot of what Joey Tribbiani would call "smell the fart" acting, except that the acting in this is top notch and the Significant Glances representing what cannot be said matter desperately. A huge amount is done with a the slightest movement of the expression.

***Actually cunning plotting, revelations unfold one after another in beautiful order.