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shallownessHappy new year!
I meant to post this last night.
Strike – The Ink Black Heart
Episode 2
This episode had enough ‘how did that character know that?’ moments that I almost questioned whether I’d skipped an episode, except it followed on timewise from the previous one. But there were a few details being raised, like in the interview with Josh, that had not been introduced in the previous ep.
Robin found out that Strike had got made and damaged his leg via Midge, not him. She unconsciously (?) got her revenge by telling him she’d got a flat and a mortgage, a surprise to him, as he hadn’t known she’d been looking to move. But then Charlotte (turning up to the office like poison) informed her about Strike’s girlfriend who looked like her. Robin was pretty blunt, rightly so, that Jago dragging him into his divorce with Charlotte would be bad for the agency and they needed to make the decision about what they were going to do together. Or basically listen to Robin who was thinking more clearly than Strike who wanted it all to go away – even though it had been shown fairly clearly that the agency didn’t have enough staff with Strike’s movement being further restricted. Midge and Pat had seen plenty to realise things were not right between the partners. And then Strike accidentally heard Pez making a move when he went too far back in the recording of Robin’s conversation with him (but hey, girlfriend!)
Robin really needed Murphy to spell out that he was asking her out on a date, no? Also, Cormoran staying so very, very still when she hugged him (IIRC trying to show him she was okay with physical contact after the almost-kiss in the book, but that bit didn’t emerge in the adaptation.) And, of course, before that, Robin coming to join him on the bed, but not like that.
Robin witnessed Cormoran be very blunt with Josh who was feeling suicidal after surviving the attack, but paralysed, and not taking Edie’s concerns about Anomie seriously enough in the past. She was pretty clearly realising that Cormoran was talking to him based on his own experience.
As for the case, the interview with Josh suggested very strongly that Anomie was the killer. We met the Upcotts, who were clearly a very unhappy family, with the suggestion that both Katya and Inigo were overly involved with the much younger Josh and Kea (and not exactly there for their kids.) Robin-as-Jessica had to listen to Nils blether on about Art and the Vikings (which was a link to the far-right terrorism angle) but ruled him and Pez out as being Anomie thanks to the game. (Nice deflection of how rubbish Drek’s Game looks with the line that a movie deal would lead to a better one.) There was far less online stuff on this episode, just occasionally checking the game for Anomie activity and Strike summarising his investigations into Wally’s pal.
And then Strike interviewed Phillip, who seemed like a piece of work, having choked Edie that time, and with no good reason for why he’d been seen interacting with Yasmin. Strike learned that he’d been a former copper, but it wasn’t shown whether he’d passed this detail on to Barclay, who followed Ormond on his motorbike. This led to a bit of made for TV drama cat and mousing and Ormond causing a crash after Barclay picked up a phone Ormond had tried to dispose of in Norfolk.
It has finally clicked with me that Pat is played by Ruth Sheen.
I watched the next two episodes on the same night.
Episode 3
Cannot see how you’d follow this without having read the book, with most aspects of the investigation boiled down to their very essence, but with so many suspects and, in this episode, online personas.
Barclay was able to deal with Ormond, who was subsequently interviewed by Murphy (who looks better dressed casually than in a suit), with Robin and Strike observing. While the interview confirmed that Ormond was a toerag, there was nothing much to pin on him (except for attacking Barclay with his car) and they confirmed Anomie was active in the game while Ormond was in the police station. Strike floated a theory to Murphy, who was still fixated on the terrorists, at the risk of ignoring Anomie, Edie’s killer. Robin gave Barclay the rest of the day off, saying they’d sort out covering Jago themselves. (Again, with who?)
Madeleine, or the girlfriend who looks like Robin, was confined to being a voice on the phone. All Robin’s online sleuthing about Jago was reduced to one conversation, though Robin was allowed to be right on about getting Ross’s kids away from an abusive father.
Strike in a Darth Vader costume was funny (still no Harry Potter fans at the comic con.) He changed into a Drek mask halfway through – there were a lot of other Dreks there, and one of them seemed to be asking more questions than Strike. Via Yasmin, Robin gained more background about a lot of people involved in Drek’s Game. (One conversation for chapters and chapters in the book!)
And then they were at the train station, where a guy (probably) in a skeleton costume pushed the questioning Drek on to the tracks. Of course Robin jumped down to the tracks, shaming a guy in a Superman costume to follow her and get the unconscious to safety as there was a train coming. The rescuers were only just pulled up in time. Cormoran’s reaction to the danger she’d put herself in was well played, and the scene ended cleverly with the contrast of so many people in costumes and a police man there because there’d been a very real near tragedy.
In a conference with Midge and Barclay, Midge revealed that Inigo had been in clandestine touch with Kea. He was the last of the Upcott family to be ruled out, but, as Strike and Robin noted, she had a major grudge against Edie.
Strike used his prosthetic as excellent cover for snooping on Kea’s laptop. Kea was a bit of a mess, mostly portrayed unsympathetically (I enjoy Strike being cynically unimpressed.)
Robin was then moving house, confiding in Ilsa (no sign of her being pregnant yet.) Her father had a bad back, not a too on the nose heart attack, so he couldn’t make it. Of course, it took Pat to point out to Cormoran that what Robin had described as ‘stuff with the flat’ was her moving house BECAUSE THEY AREN’T TALKING. He turned up, but we didn’t see him help – not sure how much he could as he was relying on a stick or some support, but he fell asleep on Robin’s sofa before she suggested he stay the night.
Robin was superorganised for someone moving into a new home, able to supply a blanket AND breakfast. Pez called, Robin put it on speaker and he made it seem as if Robin had seduced him (she didn’t know that Cormoran had already heard what he shouldn’t), and informed her the Jessica cover was busted thanks to an online post of her being interviewed at the train station as herself. Cormoran started advising her to get a new door and be prepared for terrorists.
Cormoran and Robin roadtrip to interview fendi_1/Rachel Ledwell (isn’t the opposite of Ledwell Followedbadly?), Edie’s cousin. She seemed young for her age, and was the one who made Rowling’s point about online misogyny most vitally. Cormoran was very complimentary (as he should be!) about what Robin had found out. Robin and Strike’s roadtrip continued to Cambridge to interview Morehouse, now that they knew who he was IRL, because they thought that he’d be their link to Anomie.
Except someone, who we all knew was Anomie, as they’d revealed themself to be willing to kill again, had got there first, and made sure Morehouse couldn’t give them away in a very bloody way. Good point at which to end the episode.
Episode 4
Given the amount of attention the investigation into Jago got in the ‘previously’, it barely figured in the episode.
A local police officer was giving Strike grief for having a skeleton key and using it until the secret service turned up, with news that they were about to arrest the terrorist group. Strike had to point out that Anomie had left this murder scene in a wheelchair (which was suggestive of who the killer might be.)
Robin and Strike’s attention turned to PaperWhite, Morehouse’s girlfriend on the game, who she tried to warn via chat, but then got booted off the game.
They did the bombing scene, which is probably the most dramatic scene that I remember from the book with aplomb. Murphy was apologetic, they’d arrested most of the terrorists, but not in time to stop the parcel bomb. Big hug from Robin to Strike, who was soon back out investigating. He learned from Yasmin that she’d been pretending to be Anomie in the game, so all the people they’d been ruling out were now ruled back in as suspects. Robin got a picture of PaperWhite from fendi_1, and they were soon talking to the girl in the picture, who assured them that she hadn’t ever played Drek’s Game, that the (ex)boyfriend she sent it to wouldn’t have shared it, explained catfishing to her father (and some of the viewing audience), and sobered up when she heard there’d been a murder. So, they had a new line of investigation in how Anomie could have got the picture.
Now homeless, Strike accepted Robin’s invitation to stay with her, which ended his relationship with Madeline. It also led to some domestic intimacy as he mentioned Joan (no time for anything to do with his family in this adaptation), they cooked together and the moment with the toothbrush. And to prove it wasn’t one sided, Robin had a moment of watching him sleeping.
Robin got Midge’s gotcha moment with Jago from the book, where trespassing is justified to protect kids from physically abusive dads. The moment where he tried to get the camera off her and she managed to throw him off and incapacitate him was deeply satisfying. And so, Cormoran could go visit Charlotte, who only knew that Jago was now willing to do a deal, and demand that he and his agency be kept out of the divorce. Charlotte showed her true colours, trying to get back with him and only wanting joint custody of her twins instead of doing what the first Mrs Ross had done, and making sure Jago couldn’t hit her kids again. And so, they were done.
All episode we’d been seeing Strike physically struggle, and this was where it got beyond, when he wanted Robin to leave home for a hotel because there might still be terrorists about (or was it Anomie they were worried about?) She agreed once she realised that despite not being able to stand on the leg he’d come for her anyway. And so he went to hospital, begging for pain killers, and was told he needed to take better care of himself. ‘Been under any stress?’ Strike gave a deprecating answer when he’d just been bombed for the second time in his life and all the rest of it.
Still proud, still thinking about the case, he met up with Robin in the corridor of their hotel, and by now he had his theory. Robin got to tell him off about his health, and got him to agree he’d attend to it after they’d solved this case. We got to see how much younger Edie’s uncle’s pregnant wife was than him as Robin and Cormoran executed a flawless good cop bad cop routine to get the letter that hadn’t been buried with Edie, and clearly wasn’t from Josh. Barclay was on the catfishing photo investigation, where there was some rather obvious with-holding of names, although I don’t know whether people who hadn’t read the book were now suspecting the right person (I admire them for following what was going on.)
As Robin confirmed the handwriting wasn’t Katya’s, and so the hateful letter wasn’t from Josh, but probably from Anomie, it turned out that the Guildhall had called the Upcotts after Barclay had reminded them their student hadn’t been attending (being too busy online and planning and executing murders and attacks.) Thus they’d alerted Anomie!Gus, and so the rescue/confrontation at the Upcotts’ house played out, with Robin responding to cries for help AND using the skeleton key, Strike on his crutches following and getting tasered for it. Robin did her best protecting herself and others from a knife-wielding psychopath in a middle-class home. When some help did turn up, thanks to her attempts to get attention, she learned that neighbours had got in because Strike had opened the door, oh, and Gus had stabbed him.
So, Strike, like Katya, was in danger of bleeding out. Hand holding and near-confessions followed, before he blacked out.
The wrap up had Robin visiting a recovering Katya and finding her still more worried about Josh than her actual daughter, who had lost her father, nearly lost her mother and her own life at the hands of the brother she, at least, had noticed was a wrong’un. Shades of Cormoran’s disgust for Charlotte in Robin’s disgust for Katya, except without the long personal history and ramifictations.
Robin then went to see a mostly cogent Cormoran. She turned down his suggestion she came back that night because she had a date with Murphy. Well, she didn’t know it was over between Cormoran and Madeline, did she? And she hadn’t wanted to parse the whole ‘I will follow you’. But, as Cormoran confided to Ilsa that he’d had something very important to tell Robin, Robin popped back to the office to see that Strike had arranged for her name to be on the door of the agency. It was a nice gesture, and had been set up in the first episode, but I find it hard to believe that they’d have got a new door up in, like, three days. The very last shot was also a nice touch, with someone watching ‘The Ink Black Heart’ in the same hospital as Strike.
Basically, the ‘will they, won’t they’ of it all was the throughline, because I don’t get how you would follow the case if you hadn’t read the book. Robin was almost too perfect – her main flaw being a tendency to throw herself in harm’s way to help/save people (and she wasn’t even as reckless as Strike accused her of being when she did so!)
I meant to post this last night.
Strike – The Ink Black Heart
Episode 2
This episode had enough ‘how did that character know that?’ moments that I almost questioned whether I’d skipped an episode, except it followed on timewise from the previous one. But there were a few details being raised, like in the interview with Josh, that had not been introduced in the previous ep.
Robin found out that Strike had got made and damaged his leg via Midge, not him. She unconsciously (?) got her revenge by telling him she’d got a flat and a mortgage, a surprise to him, as he hadn’t known she’d been looking to move. But then Charlotte (turning up to the office like poison) informed her about Strike’s girlfriend who looked like her. Robin was pretty blunt, rightly so, that Jago dragging him into his divorce with Charlotte would be bad for the agency and they needed to make the decision about what they were going to do together. Or basically listen to Robin who was thinking more clearly than Strike who wanted it all to go away – even though it had been shown fairly clearly that the agency didn’t have enough staff with Strike’s movement being further restricted. Midge and Pat had seen plenty to realise things were not right between the partners. And then Strike accidentally heard Pez making a move when he went too far back in the recording of Robin’s conversation with him (but hey, girlfriend!)
Robin really needed Murphy to spell out that he was asking her out on a date, no? Also, Cormoran staying so very, very still when she hugged him (IIRC trying to show him she was okay with physical contact after the almost-kiss in the book, but that bit didn’t emerge in the adaptation.) And, of course, before that, Robin coming to join him on the bed, but not like that.
Robin witnessed Cormoran be very blunt with Josh who was feeling suicidal after surviving the attack, but paralysed, and not taking Edie’s concerns about Anomie seriously enough in the past. She was pretty clearly realising that Cormoran was talking to him based on his own experience.
As for the case, the interview with Josh suggested very strongly that Anomie was the killer. We met the Upcotts, who were clearly a very unhappy family, with the suggestion that both Katya and Inigo were overly involved with the much younger Josh and Kea (and not exactly there for their kids.) Robin-as-Jessica had to listen to Nils blether on about Art and the Vikings (which was a link to the far-right terrorism angle) but ruled him and Pez out as being Anomie thanks to the game. (Nice deflection of how rubbish Drek’s Game looks with the line that a movie deal would lead to a better one.) There was far less online stuff on this episode, just occasionally checking the game for Anomie activity and Strike summarising his investigations into Wally’s pal.
And then Strike interviewed Phillip, who seemed like a piece of work, having choked Edie that time, and with no good reason for why he’d been seen interacting with Yasmin. Strike learned that he’d been a former copper, but it wasn’t shown whether he’d passed this detail on to Barclay, who followed Ormond on his motorbike. This led to a bit of made for TV drama cat and mousing and Ormond causing a crash after Barclay picked up a phone Ormond had tried to dispose of in Norfolk.
It has finally clicked with me that Pat is played by Ruth Sheen.
I watched the next two episodes on the same night.
Episode 3
Cannot see how you’d follow this without having read the book, with most aspects of the investigation boiled down to their very essence, but with so many suspects and, in this episode, online personas.
Barclay was able to deal with Ormond, who was subsequently interviewed by Murphy (who looks better dressed casually than in a suit), with Robin and Strike observing. While the interview confirmed that Ormond was a toerag, there was nothing much to pin on him (except for attacking Barclay with his car) and they confirmed Anomie was active in the game while Ormond was in the police station. Strike floated a theory to Murphy, who was still fixated on the terrorists, at the risk of ignoring Anomie, Edie’s killer. Robin gave Barclay the rest of the day off, saying they’d sort out covering Jago themselves. (Again, with who?)
Madeleine, or the girlfriend who looks like Robin, was confined to being a voice on the phone. All Robin’s online sleuthing about Jago was reduced to one conversation, though Robin was allowed to be right on about getting Ross’s kids away from an abusive father.
Strike in a Darth Vader costume was funny (still no Harry Potter fans at the comic con.) He changed into a Drek mask halfway through – there were a lot of other Dreks there, and one of them seemed to be asking more questions than Strike. Via Yasmin, Robin gained more background about a lot of people involved in Drek’s Game. (One conversation for chapters and chapters in the book!)
And then they were at the train station, where a guy (probably) in a skeleton costume pushed the questioning Drek on to the tracks. Of course Robin jumped down to the tracks, shaming a guy in a Superman costume to follow her and get the unconscious to safety as there was a train coming. The rescuers were only just pulled up in time. Cormoran’s reaction to the danger she’d put herself in was well played, and the scene ended cleverly with the contrast of so many people in costumes and a police man there because there’d been a very real near tragedy.
In a conference with Midge and Barclay, Midge revealed that Inigo had been in clandestine touch with Kea. He was the last of the Upcott family to be ruled out, but, as Strike and Robin noted, she had a major grudge against Edie.
Strike used his prosthetic as excellent cover for snooping on Kea’s laptop. Kea was a bit of a mess, mostly portrayed unsympathetically (I enjoy Strike being cynically unimpressed.)
Robin was then moving house, confiding in Ilsa (no sign of her being pregnant yet.) Her father had a bad back, not a too on the nose heart attack, so he couldn’t make it. Of course, it took Pat to point out to Cormoran that what Robin had described as ‘stuff with the flat’ was her moving house BECAUSE THEY AREN’T TALKING. He turned up, but we didn’t see him help – not sure how much he could as he was relying on a stick or some support, but he fell asleep on Robin’s sofa before she suggested he stay the night.
Robin was superorganised for someone moving into a new home, able to supply a blanket AND breakfast. Pez called, Robin put it on speaker and he made it seem as if Robin had seduced him (she didn’t know that Cormoran had already heard what he shouldn’t), and informed her the Jessica cover was busted thanks to an online post of her being interviewed at the train station as herself. Cormoran started advising her to get a new door and be prepared for terrorists.
Cormoran and Robin roadtrip to interview fendi_1/Rachel Ledwell (isn’t the opposite of Ledwell Followedbadly?), Edie’s cousin. She seemed young for her age, and was the one who made Rowling’s point about online misogyny most vitally. Cormoran was very complimentary (as he should be!) about what Robin had found out. Robin and Strike’s roadtrip continued to Cambridge to interview Morehouse, now that they knew who he was IRL, because they thought that he’d be their link to Anomie.
Except someone, who we all knew was Anomie, as they’d revealed themself to be willing to kill again, had got there first, and made sure Morehouse couldn’t give them away in a very bloody way. Good point at which to end the episode.
Episode 4
Given the amount of attention the investigation into Jago got in the ‘previously’, it barely figured in the episode.
A local police officer was giving Strike grief for having a skeleton key and using it until the secret service turned up, with news that they were about to arrest the terrorist group. Strike had to point out that Anomie had left this murder scene in a wheelchair (which was suggestive of who the killer might be.)
Robin and Strike’s attention turned to PaperWhite, Morehouse’s girlfriend on the game, who she tried to warn via chat, but then got booted off the game.
They did the bombing scene, which is probably the most dramatic scene that I remember from the book with aplomb. Murphy was apologetic, they’d arrested most of the terrorists, but not in time to stop the parcel bomb. Big hug from Robin to Strike, who was soon back out investigating. He learned from Yasmin that she’d been pretending to be Anomie in the game, so all the people they’d been ruling out were now ruled back in as suspects. Robin got a picture of PaperWhite from fendi_1, and they were soon talking to the girl in the picture, who assured them that she hadn’t ever played Drek’s Game, that the (ex)boyfriend she sent it to wouldn’t have shared it, explained catfishing to her father (and some of the viewing audience), and sobered up when she heard there’d been a murder. So, they had a new line of investigation in how Anomie could have got the picture.
Now homeless, Strike accepted Robin’s invitation to stay with her, which ended his relationship with Madeline. It also led to some domestic intimacy as he mentioned Joan (no time for anything to do with his family in this adaptation), they cooked together and the moment with the toothbrush. And to prove it wasn’t one sided, Robin had a moment of watching him sleeping.
Robin got Midge’s gotcha moment with Jago from the book, where trespassing is justified to protect kids from physically abusive dads. The moment where he tried to get the camera off her and she managed to throw him off and incapacitate him was deeply satisfying. And so, Cormoran could go visit Charlotte, who only knew that Jago was now willing to do a deal, and demand that he and his agency be kept out of the divorce. Charlotte showed her true colours, trying to get back with him and only wanting joint custody of her twins instead of doing what the first Mrs Ross had done, and making sure Jago couldn’t hit her kids again. And so, they were done.
All episode we’d been seeing Strike physically struggle, and this was where it got beyond, when he wanted Robin to leave home for a hotel because there might still be terrorists about (or was it Anomie they were worried about?) She agreed once she realised that despite not being able to stand on the leg he’d come for her anyway. And so he went to hospital, begging for pain killers, and was told he needed to take better care of himself. ‘Been under any stress?’ Strike gave a deprecating answer when he’d just been bombed for the second time in his life and all the rest of it.
Still proud, still thinking about the case, he met up with Robin in the corridor of their hotel, and by now he had his theory. Robin got to tell him off about his health, and got him to agree he’d attend to it after they’d solved this case. We got to see how much younger Edie’s uncle’s pregnant wife was than him as Robin and Cormoran executed a flawless good cop bad cop routine to get the letter that hadn’t been buried with Edie, and clearly wasn’t from Josh. Barclay was on the catfishing photo investigation, where there was some rather obvious with-holding of names, although I don’t know whether people who hadn’t read the book were now suspecting the right person (I admire them for following what was going on.)
As Robin confirmed the handwriting wasn’t Katya’s, and so the hateful letter wasn’t from Josh, but probably from Anomie, it turned out that the Guildhall had called the Upcotts after Barclay had reminded them their student hadn’t been attending (being too busy online and planning and executing murders and attacks.) Thus they’d alerted Anomie!Gus, and so the rescue/confrontation at the Upcotts’ house played out, with Robin responding to cries for help AND using the skeleton key, Strike on his crutches following and getting tasered for it. Robin did her best protecting herself and others from a knife-wielding psychopath in a middle-class home. When some help did turn up, thanks to her attempts to get attention, she learned that neighbours had got in because Strike had opened the door, oh, and Gus had stabbed him.
So, Strike, like Katya, was in danger of bleeding out. Hand holding and near-confessions followed, before he blacked out.
The wrap up had Robin visiting a recovering Katya and finding her still more worried about Josh than her actual daughter, who had lost her father, nearly lost her mother and her own life at the hands of the brother she, at least, had noticed was a wrong’un. Shades of Cormoran’s disgust for Charlotte in Robin’s disgust for Katya, except without the long personal history and ramifictations.
Robin then went to see a mostly cogent Cormoran. She turned down his suggestion she came back that night because she had a date with Murphy. Well, she didn’t know it was over between Cormoran and Madeline, did she? And she hadn’t wanted to parse the whole ‘I will follow you’. But, as Cormoran confided to Ilsa that he’d had something very important to tell Robin, Robin popped back to the office to see that Strike had arranged for her name to be on the door of the agency. It was a nice gesture, and had been set up in the first episode, but I find it hard to believe that they’d have got a new door up in, like, three days. The very last shot was also a nice touch, with someone watching ‘The Ink Black Heart’ in the same hospital as Strike.
Basically, the ‘will they, won’t they’ of it all was the throughline, because I don’t get how you would follow the case if you hadn’t read the book. Robin was almost too perfect – her main flaw being a tendency to throw herself in harm’s way to help/save people (and she wasn’t even as reckless as Strike accused her of being when she did so!)
