shallowness (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shallowness) wrote2018-09-18 07:56 am
shallowness) wrote2018-09-18 07:56 am
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Another BBC drama
Black Earth Rising episode 2
Last week, I said this show needed to be more compelling for me. Er, yeah. Mission accomplished. And how.
The first scene was so far so typical, and I was mainly focused on who the random man with the microphone was. The next scene: gunmen training to assassinate key people in the trial and any guards in the courtroom we’d just seen. The vomiting as a distraction technique to get guns into the Hague is a new one, and it was well chancy. But the tension only escalated, and then we thought the children and the man’s change of mind had let Eve survive long enough for us to get a little more on this piece of previous history she was going to present. Then, BAM. People serious about killing have redundancy plans, apparently.
Suddenly it’s all about Kate, grieving, the investigator for us. (I can’t believe that Blick wasn’t a little influenced by Kalinda Sharma, even if Kate has a specific, different backstory, and the drama is of a different flavour to The Good Wife.) Her shedload of trauma (the animated section, the vision, which might have been of Eve – and the composition is generally non-realistic enough for that not to feel like too great a shift) and mental health issues do, as she’s said, make for different responses than you’d expect. They add interest, while she’s extremely sympathetic. The speech, where the ‘she was more than my mother’ went unsaid! I could hear it, though, and nodded when she later said as much. But there was totally a reflexive cringe during the speech, because paying tribute to someone so close at a funeral seems unimaginably hard for me.
The way that she’s using physical exercise and fitness, perhaps to maintain mental equilibrium, but also to transform a child’s ravaged body into that of a strong woman, leads to extremely cool visuals and dynamic scenes. Not least the final sequence, where, like her, perhaps, we’d thought she didn’t care about the threat, but then it became real. She does want to live.
I did not expect them to kill off Harriet Walter’s character like that, but it changed everything. Mikey is being a bit disingenuous about ‘maybe it’s a journey, let’s find the destination’ as if he doesn’t have more than an inkling of where the destination is. He was conspiring with the American diplomat and the Rwandan politician/ex general. She had such a presence that she made me want to be her when I grew up, a bit. Except for having a warrant over her head.
So, the French have been brought into the mix. I thought that the episode fell on just the right side of needing the binaries of drama while acknowledging the complexities of the situation. See the odious older white Frenchman who made some valid points (somewhere, deep in his self-satisfied justification for what led to GENOCIDE) appallingly. The case against the general seems iffy as is and worth airing, although the three conspirators and Eve were trying to get something else into the light.
We also heard about and saw Eve’s dead fiancé, who had saved Kate. We learned even more about how, under the affability, Mikey’s life is a sad one, and I’m mostly in favour of Kate and his relationship, although it looks like she might lose him to the drinking and what it’s led to.
I thought this episode upped everything, the personal drama adding interest to the mysteries and thus making the backdrop more palatable, because I have to admit I was wary sitting down to watch this episode. But right now, it feels viable to call it a thriller.
Last week, I said this show needed to be more compelling for me. Er, yeah. Mission accomplished. And how.
The first scene was so far so typical, and I was mainly focused on who the random man with the microphone was. The next scene: gunmen training to assassinate key people in the trial and any guards in the courtroom we’d just seen. The vomiting as a distraction technique to get guns into the Hague is a new one, and it was well chancy. But the tension only escalated, and then we thought the children and the man’s change of mind had let Eve survive long enough for us to get a little more on this piece of previous history she was going to present. Then, BAM. People serious about killing have redundancy plans, apparently.
Suddenly it’s all about Kate, grieving, the investigator for us. (I can’t believe that Blick wasn’t a little influenced by Kalinda Sharma, even if Kate has a specific, different backstory, and the drama is of a different flavour to The Good Wife.) Her shedload of trauma (the animated section, the vision, which might have been of Eve – and the composition is generally non-realistic enough for that not to feel like too great a shift) and mental health issues do, as she’s said, make for different responses than you’d expect. They add interest, while she’s extremely sympathetic. The speech, where the ‘she was more than my mother’ went unsaid! I could hear it, though, and nodded when she later said as much. But there was totally a reflexive cringe during the speech, because paying tribute to someone so close at a funeral seems unimaginably hard for me.
The way that she’s using physical exercise and fitness, perhaps to maintain mental equilibrium, but also to transform a child’s ravaged body into that of a strong woman, leads to extremely cool visuals and dynamic scenes. Not least the final sequence, where, like her, perhaps, we’d thought she didn’t care about the threat, but then it became real. She does want to live.
I did not expect them to kill off Harriet Walter’s character like that, but it changed everything. Mikey is being a bit disingenuous about ‘maybe it’s a journey, let’s find the destination’ as if he doesn’t have more than an inkling of where the destination is. He was conspiring with the American diplomat and the Rwandan politician/ex general. She had such a presence that she made me want to be her when I grew up, a bit. Except for having a warrant over her head.
So, the French have been brought into the mix. I thought that the episode fell on just the right side of needing the binaries of drama while acknowledging the complexities of the situation. See the odious older white Frenchman who made some valid points (somewhere, deep in his self-satisfied justification for what led to GENOCIDE) appallingly. The case against the general seems iffy as is and worth airing, although the three conspirators and Eve were trying to get something else into the light.
We also heard about and saw Eve’s dead fiancé, who had saved Kate. We learned even more about how, under the affability, Mikey’s life is a sad one, and I’m mostly in favour of Kate and his relationship, although it looks like she might lose him to the drinking and what it’s led to.
I thought this episode upped everything, the personal drama adding interest to the mysteries and thus making the backdrop more palatable, because I have to admit I was wary sitting down to watch this episode. But right now, it feels viable to call it a thriller.