Monday Media Musings - 1/6/20

[owlmoose]

Orphan Black: I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was rewatching this; I caught up to where I'd left off (the first episode of the final season) and then finished it this week. Like so many shows that begin with amazing early seasons, the rest of the show doesn't quite hold up; in particular the introduction of the male clones, and their attendant whole other layer of secrets, added a bunch of complexity without making the story enough more interesting to bear the extra weight. My understanding is that this twist was not planned from the beginning, and it shows. Virginia Clay is a cardboard cut-out villain, and while Ari Millen does a credible job as the Castor brothers, he doesn't pull it off quite as well as Tatiana Maslany. To be fair, I've never seen an acting master class quite like the one Maslany gave us as the Leda sisters. But on the other hand, Millen has the easier task -- the Castor brothers were raised together to be soldiers, so they don't exhibit the same breadth of personality types as their sisters. So maybe that balances out. Still, I'm glad to know how it ends and it was definitely worth going back and watching from the beginning, to see how things build.

Killing Eve, Seasons 1 and 2: I feel like I've been hearing about this show forever, and when word came down that it had been renewed for a fourth season before the third even aired, I decided it was time to check it out. I binged the whole thing in like two days (the seasons are only eight episodes long, so this is easier than it sounds). Enemy shipping is not typically my thing -- it's not the relationship dynamic I find the most interesting, and I usually don't find it plausible -- but I will allow that this show pulls it off really, really well. I buy Eve and Villanelle's mutual obsession; it carries through in both the writing and the acting, and I can understand why they're drawn to each other. Still, the character I'm most interested in is Carolyn Martens, and her dynamic with Eve, and I hope we see more of both those things in future seasons.