But hold up. When Dexter returns home to pack some things he listens to a message from Rita saying she had to return to pick up her ID. He rings her back. Her mobile rings from her nearby bag. He hears the sound of their infant son Harrison crying. It’s coming from the bathroom. Whoa. You don’t think...?
Yep, they went there. Arthur got to Rita, cut her throat in a bathtub and left Harrison in a pool of blood in a chilling parallel of Dexter’s childhood trauma. “Born in blood” Dexter voiceovers as he picks up his son “Both of us.” Not so much a downbeat ending as a beatdown ending. It hits you like a framing hammer to the skull. That Arthur: full of surprises.
I’m not gonna lie and say that my heart lept for joy whenever Rita appeared on screen but she meant something to Dexter. She was his final ‘fuck you’ to his father; the definitive rebuke to his maxim that like Cain or a Kooks fan the killer must walk the earth alone. And now we know the truth: the dark passenger will always be his master. It’s a cold, cold ending and kind of brilliant.
It’s been a powerful season throughout and you have to give John Lithgow a lot of credit for that. His Trinity is compellingly repulsive and in a show where everyone leads double lives, watching the walls between family man and killer break down has been one of the highlights of 2009 TV. Dexter is a show with a great premise that handles its themes with great care and has enough balls to hit you where it hurts when you least expect it. Mark this one up as a triumph.
The verdict on Dexter Season 4 finale: Mass murder just got serious.
Marks out of 10: 9
Harper’s Island
In Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Niggers, 10 murderers are invited to an island (Nigger Island if you’re asking - I bet property prices are through the roof there) where they are killed one by one by a mystery assailant. Of course in today’s politically correct times you can’t call murder victims niggers, you have to call them “African-Americans”. Only you can’t call them African-Americans because they changed the title to Ten Little Indians. Only you can’t call them Indians, you have to call them “Native Americans”. Anyway, it’s a classic of the genre, sold over 100 million copies and has been subject to numerous adaptations and remakes. Harper’s Island is something of a tribute to Christie’s genius, numerous slasher films and quite possibly Celebrity Love Island. How can it fail?
Abby Mills (Irish actress Elaine Cassidy channeling Neve Campbell in Scream) is returning home to Harper’s Island for the wedding of her childhood friend Henry (Christopher Gorham) to foxy heiress Trish (Katie Cassidy). Abby hasn’t been so big on Harper’s Island ever since her mother was murdered and strung up on a tree branch along with five other unfortunate bastards seven years previously by crazyman John Wakefield. But it’s her best friend’s wedding - what a fantastic opportunity to leave the past behind, reconcile with her father Charlie (Jim Beaver) and just get on with the rest of her life.
The problem with that admittedly laudable idea is that THERE’S ONLY A FRICKIN’ MURDERER loose on the island murdering. It’s almost as if murdering murderer John Wakefield has returned. But how could that be? Charlie Mills shot and killed him seven years ago. Or did he? Dude, I’m telling you - he’s buried on the island1. Or is he?
While you ponder that, numerous subplots keep the narrative going. Thomas Wellington (Richard Burgi), father of the bride and real estate mogul tries his best to stop his daughter from marrying the pleb; douchebag best man Sully (Matt Barr) tries to steal animatronic Barbie doll Chloe (Cameron Richardson) from her gimpy British borefriend Cal (Adam Campbell); Abby flirts with ex borefriend Jimmy (C.J. Thomason); oddball infant Madison (Cassandra Sawtell) tortures snails and bonds with Henry’s weird goth brother J.D. But which of them is the murderer?
Aerial Telly knows but isn’t telling. What he will say is that this is a very enjoyable, taut, pacy chiller that works its way through standard horror conventions with reverence and a wicked sense of humour. The deaths are memorable. Cousin Ben gets sliced and diced by the ship’s propeller; Wellington get a headspade2 to the skull; Richard gets frickin’ lickin’ harpooned. Tenacious survivors, an impressively sadistic Big Bad and annoying characters getting summary justice in the form of their hideous slapstick deaths all make Agatha Christie proud. The daft racist.
The verdict on Harper’s Island: The most dangerous island life since Lost.
Marks out of 10: 7.5
1 Yes that makes all kinds of sense - I bet that went down well with the victims’ relatives
2 The heaviest instrument used when cutting up a whale. Don’t get telling me you don’t learn anything watching slasher flicks
Lost Season 3 finale
Holy fucking shit. What an episode. The two hour finale of Lost’s third season was as good a single episode of TV as I’ve seen in years. It thrilled and delighted at every turn with a stunning reveal at the end that got up in your grill and was, like, “motherfucker, what?” Season three has been a huge triumph for Lost after it tried our patience to breaking point in season two. As we’ve got to know The Others we’ve learnt that they are just as much stranded on the island as the Lostaways, they just have the lay of the land better. They’re still taking hostages, busting chops and indulging their obstetrics obsession but you get the distinct impression they’re not really happy in their island paradise. But they still all need to die - never forget that.
While Jack leads the Oceanic 815 crew to the radio tower and possible rescue, Jin, Sayid, and Bernard stay behind on the beach to open up a can of assrape on The Others as they come to abduct the pregnant women. With an armful of dynamite they send seven Others to meet their maker before their inevitable capture by Tom and the boys. Still, about time the Others had some casualties - eat shit you beardie cult bastards.
It’s not looking good for the Craphole Island 3 as Ben orders their execution by walkie-talkie (he’s busy trying to persuade Jack that the rescue idea will end badly). But just as The Others are debating the ethics of the murders Hurley bursts out of the jungle in the Dream Machine van like the A-Team and fucks one of the fuckers the fuck up with bumper on bone action. The diversion gives Juliet and Sawyer the chance to disarm the others and Sayid the chance to snap someone’s neck with his legs. I bet Saddam Hussein wishes The Republican Guard were all as badass as Sayid. Tom, knowing when he’s on to a loser, surrenders. Sawyer, knowing when he’s talking to a cunt, plugs the fucker, much to the shock of Juliet and Hurley. “That’s for taking the kid from the raft” he explains. A fair point.
Speaking of the kid on the raft, Walt turns up grown-up by about three years to get John Locke out of his mass grave. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Walt went off with his daddy on the boat. But this is Craphole Island and while other kids follow the laws of physics, Walt disnae (geddit??) But even more remarkably Charlie’s suicide mission to Push The Button actually works and the ship that has been trying to find the island gets a signal, transmits a message and our heroes celebrate their imminent rescue. But we know that never works, right?
The finale flashback seemed fairly pointless. A boozy, painkiller blitzed Jack turding around making a jack ass of himself, presumably in the thrall of that sort who dumped him. Yet right at the end we go through the looking-glass. Jack meets up with Kate. This is actually a flash forward - after rescue from the island. Jack can’t cope with post island life - he flies constantly in the hope of crashing to get back to Craphole Island. Kate just looks hot and smoulders, but a single solitary tear suggest that she too may be getting island withdrawal. Wow. They actually make it off the island.
There are very few shows that handle the big episodes like Lost. The last thing anyone was expecting was a successful rescue and the revelation was brilliantly handled with the disguised flash forward with a suicidal Jack all ready to throw himself off a bridge because he misses walking around in cut-off jeans, never getting laid and being kidnapped once a fortnight. Takes all sorts, eh? Lost has set up season four in such a way as to make it totally unmiss
able. It premieres in February 2008. Seriously, I cannot wait.
The verdict on Lost Season Three Finale: Free at last.
Marks out of 10: 9.5
Lost series finale
“Dr Shepherd - what’s the worst that could happen?”
OK, you’ve got your series finale. Two things have to work. It must be logically satisfying (loose threads left in the story picked up and woven together) and emotionally satisfying (love, death, happiness, misery and redemption all responsibly portioned out). Lost concentrated solely on the latter and screwed it up spectacularly with a crass, bloated and ultimately meaningless finale that took a two-hour, eye bulging, trousers-round-the-ankles dump on the show’s legacy. They brought together the couples we love (Sun and Jin), the couples we tolerate (Jack and Kate), the couples we don’t buy (Sawyer and Facelift), the couples who don’t exist (Claire and Charlie) and the couples who everyone had forgotten existed proving they were always poorly conceived, badly written and thrown in as an afterthought (Shannon and Sayid) and the couple who walked straight out of a Richard Curtis script Two Timelines and a Coprophiliac (Desmond and Penny Future Knickers). The only people satisfied by all this are Desmund&Penni 4 EVAH!! fan fic writing goons and the kind of emotionally crippled shitsack who only turns on their television set to dissolve into tears.
The main points of the ending are as follows. The island is real. Everyone on it either died there or lived fruitful lives to die later where they went to a nice alternate reality Purgatory (the season-long flash sideways where Oceanic 815 never crashes, Desmond keeps running over Locke and Charlie is miraculously still a twat) where they all meet up in a big stupid church where they move on together into whatever comes after the thing that comes after death. Capiche?
They find each other by those montage memory flashbacks, triggered by physical touch with the one they ruvved in their island life. People need to remember, let go and move on you see. This is all explained to us by Jack’s dead, pissed dad who apparently is some kind of tour guide of the spirit world (Jim Bean presumably his speciality). So far, so Highway to Heaven and so very pointless.
In the meanwhile-back-on-the-island timeline, a series of events now totally redundant and of no dramatic consequence at all take place regarding all that smoke monster destroying the island nonsense. Jack has the fat lad drink some magic water like Big John, Little John so he can now protect the island - a reign we will never see and therefore never care about. Hurley as Oliver Cromwell Lord Protector of Nothing. Cos-mic. There’s a lot of Starship Enterprise hitting an asteroid belt style rocky camera effects as the island quite literally loses its cork (turns out it was a real cork in the hole not a metaphorical one). Give me a break.
Locke and Doc have a meaningless turd joust over the island’s holiest of holes. Locke fatally wounds Jack but ends up dead at the bottom of the cliff after Kate shoots him in the tits. Elsewhere on the Island of Fatuous Redundancies, Lapidus flies a few of them off by the power of duct tape. Yeah, whatever.
The couples killed it from me. Claire never wanted Charlie to put his cock in her and it’s never love if that’s not there. It’s what you feel for a lame elk you’ve just run over as you prepare to curb stomp it out of its misery. Not only is Dominic Monaghan small and ugly with no charisma, he can’t act and Charlie is a horribly written character complete with a back story that demonstrated a stunning ignorance of rock music, Englishness and group dynamics containing every 10 minute MTV feature on Oasis cliché they could be bothered to dredge-up. Every time I saw that needy smackhead shitbird I wanted to kill him. And of course there’s a Driveshaft concert in Purgatory. That first bar of You All Everybody will get you heading towards the light in no time.
Sun and Jin I gave a fuck about. I always did. They always handled that beautifully. But we all know Sawyer should be with Kate and Juliet with Jack. And as for the risible Sayid and brotherfucker reunion - I do not care and neither does anyone else. They even had Boone in the queue for heaven, a man whose death elicited not a flicker of concern and whose reappearance not a flicker of comprehension. Who was his great love - himself?
Sentiment driven fan-fic hook-ups scored with stirring strings are still utterly trite. I can barely count the storytelling cop outs and they just moved the St-Peter-in-the-courtyard thrice-denied Purgatory ending to a different timeline, like Benjamin moved the island - because he all-of-a-sudden, just like magic could and it was the easy option.
Interestingly, the three island black guys Taller Ghost Walt, Michael and Mr Eko were nowhere to be seen in heaven’s waiting-room and no Daniel, Charlotte, Miles, Richard or Frank either (not that I cared about any of those cracka-ass crackers).
The only thing I really enjoyed about this was seeing Vincent the dog who held up his role in this shaggy dog story very well, lying down beside Jack as his life expired. Nice dogging, Vince.
“Not leaving. Moving on.” said Christian Shepherd. Probably best if we do the same.
The verdict on Lost series finale: Plane crash end to a great show.
Marks out of 10: 3
Mad Men
In Mad Men, AMC’s 60’s advertising drama Christina Hendricks plays Joan Holloway, femme fatale and office manager at Sterling Cooper advertising agency. Where does one start with Christina Hendricks? From the moment you see her you’re thinking of ways to impregnate her. Her body is a walking diorama of feminine beauty, a pieorama if you will. Imagine if Marilyn Monroe really had curves. Imagine if Jayne Mansfield really had a rack. Imagine if Katharine Hepburn’s hair was really red. Imagine if Jennifer Lopez really had ass. Imagine if the young Julie Christie really was pretty. Imagine if Mae West really had ‘tude. Imagine if these qualities came together in one piece of pie: a glorious treacly, sticks-to-your-fingers, treacle-coloured piece of treacle tart warmed in the oven and served with melting ice cream. Well that pie exists and its name is Christina Hendricks. She walks among us like a colossus, cracking flags and breaking hearts with every step.
Christina Hendricks is the woman they were talking about in The Song of Solomon. I never really understood that line about breasts like twin gazelle until now. When she swings her hips her ass pulls planets out of orbit. In Rome, men impaled themselves on railings just to attract her fleeting attention before they died. During her visit to the Orient, Chinamen gouged out their eyes on the off-chance she would want to piss in their ocular cavities. Her skin is so white you can’t look directly at it without going blind. Wild yak graze on the foothills of her mountainous breasts. Her belly has its own postcode.
She’s got something between her legs that would make a dead man come. Her pussy drips pure honey - a golden river down her magnificent ivory thighs. She is an anatomical marvel. Her body is a feat of civil engineering as impressive in its own way as The Golden Gate Bridge, The Millau Viaduct and The Birmingham Rotunda. You look at it and wonder “how can that stay upright?” Sniffing her panties has the same effect that Jean-Baptiste releasing the miraculous scent did in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Her cunt juice is the elixir that will bring mankind together. She is a MAGNIFICENT BEAST of a woman.
Anyway, back to Mad Men. It’s a show about advertising men in the early 60’s working in Madison Avenue, created by former Sopranos scriptwriter Matthew Weiner. It’s not quite as good as it should be but it’s still pretty good. Jon Hamm plays Don Draper, the brilliant creative director of the operation who hides a dark past. Peggy Olsen (Elisabeth Moss) is Draper’s secretary, a girl with a heart of gold who becomes the first female copywriter at Sterling Cooper since the war. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is the horrible spoilt young upstart who fucks Peggy then fucks himself by being a slimy untrustworthy shitheel.
The period detail is remarkable. And by that I mean “every fucker smokes”. Everyone. Everywhere. All the time. I’m amazed any of them made it out of the 60’s if they smoked like that. Beyond that it’s good to look at, feels authentic and is an enjoyable reflection on America’s recent past.
/> The verdict on Mad Men: It ain’t The Sopranos but it’ll do.
Marks out of 10: 7.5
Mad Men Season 2
Everything’s gone horribly wrong in the second season of Mad Men. Not that it was ever a rose garden but our principal’s lives are getting darker, twisted and just plain wrong. Scratch the surface of every dream and you find a nightmare. Peggy has a son now, though no one at Sterling Cooper must ever know and she never sees him. Don’s infidelity has been found out and now he lives out of a hotel room and only sees his kids at weekends. Salvatore is still the gayest gay that ever gayed yet is still buried in the deepest of marital closets. Can’t anyone be happy?
Also having a hard time of it is Pete Campbell whose father dies in a plane crash. He seems curiously unaffected though I suppose that’s to be expected of the devious blackmailing little shit. He tries unsuccessfully for a child with his beautiful but dumb wife. These are unforgiving times for childless couples, particularly with the fecundity of Harry Crane thrust in your face. What Pete doesn’t know, of course, is that he is already father to Peggy’s secret child. Pete remains a gigantic gaping asshole but it’s credit to Vincent Kartheiser that there remains a sliver of sympathy for the old money cad.
Though that no money cad Paul Kinsey’s worries are less pressing, revolving as they do around finding opportunities to show off his black girlfriend to his chums. In an age when you’re defined by your accessories a black girl on your arm says you’re a little bit unconventional, a little bit edgy and, in Paul’s case, a little bit of twat because, as Joan guesses in a heartbeat, he’s only dating her for the cool value.
Television Can Blow Me Page 12