Today in Jingoistic Action: The TV series....
Chris Pratt returns to his Zero Dark Thirty Roots. He sells it. In theory you should be distracted by your memory of his more goofy comedy characters but it's more than just a baseball hat he sells his character to the point where you don't really think about it.
Now Sleep...
It's a dark show. Night night time show. But actually it's not awfully lit for what it is. You don't spend episode after episode turning up the brightness on your TV because you live in a house and not a pure black room. Visually it's comprehensive and that's always appreciated. Now in a metaphorical sense. It's also pretty dark. I never saw Zero Dark Thirty because there are limits to how much jingoism I can take. But there's a lot of violence to "salivate" over that exists only for that purpose. It's not torture porn or anything but if there was a dog in this series it would have been killed violently in a way that hurt.
A Tale as Old as Time...
The story here is compelling enough. It starts out with James Reece (Chris Pratt) losing all of his men in a botched raid. When the higher ups want to blame the dead soldiers for losing control, Reece refuses to go along with the narrative that insults his dead comrades. Eventually he thinks he finds a conspiracy and there's a lovely bit of ambivalence as to whether Reece is imagining it or not. Very like the series Evil on network TV.
In the end we have a good show. A focused show with a story to tell and I can't understate how much that's appreciated. Buuuuut, there are issues. My first issue is our main character Darby Hart the "Gen Z amateur sleuth" and as I expected she's only "amateur" in the sense that she is literally not getting paid. I wasn't sure they were going to do that but they did. Darby isn't interesting as a sleuth. When you think about the great detectives Darby doesn't really do much detecting. She's not obsessed with deduction like Holmes. She's not obsessed with details like Monk. She doesn't create stories like Sean Spencer or Richard Castle. They try to mask it a bit but her thing is that she cares ("The dead speak to me"). To the exclusion of everything else most specifically to the exclusion of the relationships she has with the living. That's not bad per se. It's just not the character of a Gen Z amateur sleuth main character.
Then there's the tech. I mean it started off good. I'll say that. But the longer the show went the more I had to squint to ignore all the tech issues in this show. From awkward conversations ("Vee Eye or emacs") because somehow no one told them you pronounce it "V-eye" or that vim is a thing. The concept isn't just that eight guests are invited by a reclusive billionaire. It's eight hackers. Which makes Darby as a tech savvy hacker less interesting. I mean they do try to frame her as the "computer hacker" and everyone else as just in the sphere of various general hacking but nah everyone here is a level of computer hacker and they do make it a point to say that a few times. So when Darby hacks, it's like why? Why do I care about this? That combined with the flubs in tech representation both big and small kinda damage this tech-happy murder mystery.
What the show does do well is all the none screenplay bits. The acting, the filmwork, even the soundtrack that I recall. I wanted to keep watching. I expected to hate Darby and find her awkward but she's not. She's understandable. She's relatable. I care for her and wanted to see her struggle though even when she was making bad bad impulsive decisions. Emma Corrin just kinda shines even when the writing doesn't. Honestly she's not alone the entire cast was excellent. Especially looking back.
The murder mystery, like the show, started off well. I cared about the characters. I cared about the victim. I didn't lean anyway towards the suspects. Plenty of room and scary situations for Darby to navigate. It was a great recipe. No idea how the cake ended up tasting so bad though. The back end kinda flops. I don't think there were enough breadcrumbs for the killer's reveal. Ironically enough I just finished A Haunting in Venice after this so they actually have something in common. But Haunting is just better. Which is unfair because it's leaning on the tower that is Agatha Christie. Still this could have ended a lot better if they had a more interesting endgame. The pacing was there. the characters were ready it just..... didn't.
Ending Spoilers:
an Christ almighty the less said about "AI that's going to kill someone" the better. It's a stupid plot point. Just when you think everyone's finally realizing that all these AI tools are moronic and useless suddenly these shows come out and make AI out to be this magnanimous force. Here the AI is the killer. In The Creator the AI is the savoir. It's all so stupid and dumb and shows you haven't been paying attention to what AI is and what it can do. It's like all the robotics nerds obsessed with sex dolls that can tell the weather and laugh at your jokes like that's going to replace women in Asia where there are too many men and not enough single women to support them emotionally. The "AI did it" is going to become "the butler did it" very soon and that's unfortunate because it doesn't deserve that level of trope support. AI will help you cheat on an essay but it does so so poorly the idea that it's nearly sentient and almost capable of erasing humanity pains me to hear people say out lout with their mouths. The only way AI could be dangerous is if people give it too much authority. Like making AI the CEO of your company is a bad idea. (Or to take another example from real life: Using AI to decide whose claim gets accepted. The AI had an 80% failure rate) I maintain they're only doing it on paper and that's a GOOD idea because it gives you a perfect scapegoat. Unethical and evil but an effectively "good" idea.
