Monthly Archives: February 2023

The Peripheral (2022)

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The Peripheral (2022) on Amazon Prime Video is an adaptation of William Gibson’s 2014 novel.

I’ve watched all of season 1 and it’s smart science fiction.  Some of the plot threads weren’t obvious to me immediately but became clear on reflection or as the show developed, which was nice.

The resolutions to a series of impossible dilemmas are satisfying.

The show is set in North Carolina in 2032 and in London, UK in 2099.  The filming takes place in both actual locations.  I can’t judge the Appalachian Mountains accent they’re doing for the North Carolinians, other than to say it sounds fine to me.

I haven’t read the book, so I can’t say how closely the show hews to the source material.

I do think it’s interesting to think about the stacks of concepts the show depends upon, time travel, virtual reality, video games, robots, nanotechnology, the very rich conceptual palette that science fiction writers can now draw upon.

Willow+ 1×08 Out of the Murk

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I think Willow+ is just ok.  There are two quick fixes: first, replace the cinematographer with someone who isn’t so enamored of darkness and murk, and if you’re going to keep the modern music, make it acoustic.  The Bruce Springsteen “I’m on Fire” cover was a good choice.  “Money for Nothing” was possibly the worst epic fantasy concluding music they could have chosen.

Summary

The core issue with Willow+ is that it fails to commit.  It’s as if the writers are Elora Danan, uncertain and unconvinced of their own power and magic.  It feels like the show is always apologising, as if it wants to be some different genre, trying somehow be cooler.  But you can’t be cool by trying to be cool.

This would have been understandable 20 years ago, when America was afraid of dragons, but it makes no sense now that Harry Potter is so absolutely mainstream that the movies, audiobooks and books still remain in top sales positions years after their release.

If you take a show like The Peripheral, it knows it is smart science fiction, it doesn’t spend a second apologising to the fans for being science fiction or trying to be a different show.

I feel like the best show happened before the show, in the very early pre-trailers where Warwick was just hanging out with the rest of the cast making silly conversation.  You felt like they were all having a bit of fun.  The actual show doesn’t feel like they’re a team and enjoying working together.

For the show to work, it needs to trust the fans and commit to the genre.  It needs to be an epic fantasy with action and comedy, based on the original movie.

Too Many Directions, Too Little Time

I do feel for the show, TV used to have over 30 episodes a season, then 22, then 10, now 8.  With twenty or more episodes you can afford to make mistakes.  The entire first season of DS9 is pretty much a loss, and half of SG-1’s first season is weak too.  But with just eight episodes they all have to land really well.

And for Willow+ they don’t.  For an adaptation you need to take the original movie, which is a too-long fantasy adventure/quest journey with lots of action and some comedy.  And then you decide on maybe one, and only one, alteration.  A reasonable alteration is to have more modern language and mores, Merlin (2008) did this reasonably well.  Merlin is solidly Arthurian fantasy, with a more modern feel for the characters and their interactions.  It works fine.

Willow+ tries to change too many things.  And it suffers from weak writing, and weak comedy, which combine together in boorish man Boorman.

1×08 and Fan Respect

Shows that try a comedic style need to be very careful to ensure the joke is always on them, not on the fans.  And remember that fans want to be in the show, they’re watching with attention, they’re not running the show in the background while they’re on two other devices.  You can’t do anything that jars people out of the show’s world.  The whole point of a good show is you escape somewhere else for a while.

To keep people in a show, you have to set the rules and follow the rules.  I have a feeling that instead Willow+ as a show is basically embodied by the Crone, who hates rules.  Sorry, but rules make for good art.  Otherwise you get an incoherent jumble where you’re perpetually pulled out of the show by esthetic, tone, and cultural dissonance.  Which is what happens in Willow.

This is where the modern music in particular becomes a huge problem.  I’m ok if you don’t want ye olde music, but it has to be something that keeps you in the genre of the show.  For fantasy that means acoustic, no electronics, no pounding beats.

Ending an epic fantasy with “Money for Nothing” is a four-part mistake.

  1. It’s the completely wrong music style.
  2. Many people will be immediately pulled into their memory of the animated MTV video.
  3. Anyone who hears “MTV” is immediately pulled out of the show.
  4. “Money for Nothing” is easy understood as an upraised finger to the fans.  Hey look, we just spent a bunch of money and wasted your time on this junk!  Ha ha!

It is the worst possible ending music.

I was not a Willow-ian, so it’s not particularly disappointing to me, but if you are a fan, it is a disappointment on multiple levels.

Other than that, I don’t have any insights that aren’t borrowed directly from Erik Kain, an actual Willow movie superfan, including:

  • There is no purpose for Jade.  There should just be Elora Danan, and Kit, Airk and Graydon should all be in love with Elora.  That would be way more interesting.
  • The Crone should have appeared differently to everyone depending on their desires and personality.

I can tell the extent of Kain’s fandom in that he wrote an entire alternative dialogue scene for the ending as he was too frustrated with the actual dialogue and interaction.  I can appreciate the fan position where you feel the creators understand the show so little that even an outsider can write better material.

I’ve done the same for my fandom shows, writing an entire alternate ending for Battlestar Galactica (2003) and alternative dialogue for the last DS9 scene between Odo and Quark.

That gap between the show you can imagine and the show they actually made can be painful.

Erik Kain’s Criticism

I won’t link to all the articles, you can find them on Google with

site:forbes.com "erik kain" "willow"

With the selections below you can follow the arc of initial hope descending rapidly into scathing criticism:

Previously:
February 3, 2023  Willow+ Into Darkness 1×06 and 1×07

Whydrogen – The dubious appeal of the hydrogen train

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Summary

Trains should be powered by overhead wires.

Hydrogen is some shiny object tech boondoggle.  Hydrogen is not a power source, nothing is “hydrogen powered”.  Hydrogen is a battery that stores energy you have to get from some other source.

Hydrogen mostly makes no sense, so in usual fashion we are chasing after hydrogen.

If you just want to book the train, jump to The Train to Baie-St-Paul.

Details

Hydrogen is not a fossil fuel, it isn’t stored energy from the sun.  If you had a big bucket of hydrogen you could use it in various ways to get energy, but no one has a big bucket of hydrogen because it’s the lightest element and it binds to lots of things, so what doesn’t float away gets turned into mostly-water.

Once hydrogen is bound, you need to put in energy to get it unbound.  So the most common scenario is you use electricity to crack hydrogen out of water so that then you can convert the hydrogen to… electricity later on.  This is basically like a lossy battery process.  The question is, if you already have electricity, why don’t you just use the electricity directly rather than inefficiently turning it into hydrogen?

The only reason is when you’re going somewhere that doesn’t have electrical wires.

The modern way to run trains is with overhead wires, you just send them electricity directly, so they don’t need any heavy onboard storage that they have to haul around.

If you have a primitive rail system like Canada’s, there is I suppose some vague argument that if you want to cheap out (which we always do) and chase pointless tech shininess (which we always do) then you can replace a diesel train with a “hydrogen” train rather than electrifying the line.

This will be touted as magically green, but it’s only green if the entire production and storage chain for the hydrogen, end-to-end, is green.  And you have to invest in all kinds of expensive new hydrogen-handling technology rather than just using the existing well-established electrical grid.

A bunch of extra money for an experimental new thing when you could do it better and cheaper with existing proven technology is basically the definition of typical government transit and tech planning.

SIDEBAR: Ontario almost went down this pointless path too.

TVO – June 16, 2017 – Ontario is thinking about hydrogen-powered trains. Why? – by John Michael McGrath

and then after years of study it didn’t (also a typical pattern for Canadian transit and rail planning)

TVO – February 16, 2021 – Fail, Hydrail: Metrolinx finally ditches plans for hydrogen-powered trains – by John Michael McGrath

After four years of investigation, the company has all but abandoned the idea of hydrogen-fuelled trains zipping through the GTA. Good riddance.

END SIDEBAR

The Train to Baie-St-Paul

Quebec City has a train that goes to Baie-St-Paul and then on to La Malbaie.

https://traindecharlevoix.com/en/

It’s fine, it’s a regular Canadian train, which is to say it’s for tourists only, it mostly only runs for a few months in the summer, it leaves from an inconvenient station (Montmorency Falls) and it’s about three times slower and ten times more expensive than just driving from Quebec City to Baie-St-Paul.  Another Canadian rail success!

I have ridden it multiple times but you have to be a serious rail fan to do so.  The view is nice.

In Canada’s spirit of chasing pointless innovation, in 2023 the Quebec City to Baie-St-Paul part of the route will now be served by an Alstom Coradis iLint “hydrogen” train (sometimes?).  The booking site really expects you are doing a single day round-trip, not staying over night.

The regular diesel train is a Deutsche Bahn DB Class 628 (DB-Baureihe 628.1).

The train leaves Quebec City at 9am, arrives in Baie-St-Paul 2.5 hours later at 11:30am (you could drive to BSP in an hour), and continues on to La Malbaie 4.5 hours later at 1:30pm (you could drive to Malbaie in an hour and 40 minutes).

The magic hydrogen train is an Alstom Coradia iLint (Ottawa’s old Line 2 trains, which will now serve the Line 4 airport shuttle segment, are regular Alstom Coradia Lints).

It has the same schedule, departing at 9am and arriving at BSP at 11:30am.

Maybe you can figure out their schedule, I can’t.  As best I can tell, the hydrogen train runs Wednesdays through Saturdays only, and the diesel train every day.  Maybe on hydrogen train days you have to change to a diesel train at BSP if you’re continuing on to La Malbaie.  I can’t figure it out.

You can book the magic hydrogen train (possibly day round-trip only) at

https://traindecharlevoix.com/en/hydrogen-train/

and the regular diesel train, or some unknown combination of trains, at

https://traindecharlevoix.com/en/schedules/

As there is zero benefit to riding the hydrogen train, other than to be able to say “I was on a hydrogen train!”, you should just book the actual trip you want and ignore the hydrogen part.  Make sure you don’t get stuck with a round-trip ticket for the same day if you actually want to spend a night or two in BSP.

There is a very nice Le Germain hotel connected to (and in part on top of) the BSP station.  The best restaurant in BSP is Le Mouton Noir.

Willow+ Into Darkness 1×06 and 1×07

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Willow (2002) 1×06 Prisoners of Skellin was ok I guess.  I liked the comedic troll guy (a very Joss Whedon style, a bad guy who is also just a regular person).  But however realistic it may be for it to be super dark in a mine, it made the entire show muddy and hard to follow.  The same problem as in the dark battle in 1×03.

I went back later and tried switching the Apple TV from HDR to SDR based on reports online about Disney+ HDR issues, but I couldn’t see any difference.  Still just dark on dark.

1×07 Beyond the Shattered Sea was ok too.  It’s that part of the quest we don’t often see, where the adventurers have to slog through the landscape for weeks or months.  It reminded me of the long voyage to the edge of the sea in the super-didactic Narnia book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Beyond the Shattered Sea was not visually dark, but more murky mist in parts.  I do again feel for the actors as it must have been hours of slogging around in cold shallow water.

The sky reflected in the water scene is impressive (if visually incredibly improbable).  I think it gives a sense of what the cinematographers were looking for, testing the limits of what modern visuals can deliver.

I very much hope in season 2 the cinematographers will realise the audience actually wants to see the characters clearly most of the time, rather than in murk and darkness.

Next:
February 9, 2023  Willow+ 1×08 Out of the Murk