Orphan Black
Aug. 29th, 2015 11:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerI posted a while back about the two conflicting assumptions I see underpinning a lot of televised sf and fantasy from Britain and America, resulting in a tendency (no more than a tendency; I'm aware I'm hugely generalising here) for British stuff to be doomy, downbeat and often depressing, while American stuff is more positive, more proactive and sometimes more than a little...erm...Pollyanna-ish.
Of course, this completely overlooks the fact that a whole lot of the best shows in our genres over the past thirty years or so have in fact been Canadian. I could expatiate at some length about the pleasure I have derived from the creative outpourings of the land of the maple and the Mountie, and perhaps that is in some degree because they combine, in various proportions, these two approaches to story-crafting; so I'm not completely dragged down as I have been by such things as Ultraviolet or The Fades, nor am I left thinking "well, that was nice, but..." as I have been with some purely American shows.
Which brings us to Orphan Black, of which I had only ever caught one episode till recently. I'm now working my way through season two, and it's certainly compulsive viewing. Much has doubtless been said about Tatiana Maslany's tour de force playing fifty-seven different characters, and yes, she's very good, but there's more. This show has, to name but one point in its favour, not only Matt Frewer but also Peter Outerbridge, playing two diametrically opposed bad guys, and of course they're not bad guys to themselves or exclusively, but good people driven by competing obsessions. They're only bad guys from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't happen to share their beliefs, which is most of us, I think.
But what makes the show for me is this: there are good guys, and they are really, genuinely good. They're there for Ms Maslany's crazy mixed-up clones come what may, and they never waver. They're not any of the cliche anti-heroes of whom I have grown so terribly, terribly tired (though there are a couple of those as well). They are the kind of character who, in any other show, would be built up in the audience's eyes just so that when something kills them horribly it would be all the more shocking coughWashcough. So far that hasn't happened to any of them, and I'm hoping it won't. There's Felix, and there's Cal, and there's Kira herself, and all I say is they had better all be alive and well at the end of this. "No good deed goes unpunished" is really old now; it's not clever, or funny, or interesting any more, and it's time it was retired.
But even if they let me down on that, Orphan Black is still, I think, one of the best shows around at the moment. And if the finale of season two is up to the standard of what I've seen so far, it definitely earned its Hugo.
Of course, this completely overlooks the fact that a whole lot of the best shows in our genres over the past thirty years or so have in fact been Canadian. I could expatiate at some length about the pleasure I have derived from the creative outpourings of the land of the maple and the Mountie, and perhaps that is in some degree because they combine, in various proportions, these two approaches to story-crafting; so I'm not completely dragged down as I have been by such things as Ultraviolet or The Fades, nor am I left thinking "well, that was nice, but..." as I have been with some purely American shows.
Which brings us to Orphan Black, of which I had only ever caught one episode till recently. I'm now working my way through season two, and it's certainly compulsive viewing. Much has doubtless been said about Tatiana Maslany's tour de force playing fifty-seven different characters, and yes, she's very good, but there's more. This show has, to name but one point in its favour, not only Matt Frewer but also Peter Outerbridge, playing two diametrically opposed bad guys, and of course they're not bad guys to themselves or exclusively, but good people driven by competing obsessions. They're only bad guys from the viewpoint of someone who doesn't happen to share their beliefs, which is most of us, I think.
But what makes the show for me is this: there are good guys, and they are really, genuinely good. They're there for Ms Maslany's crazy mixed-up clones come what may, and they never waver. They're not any of the cliche anti-heroes of whom I have grown so terribly, terribly tired (though there are a couple of those as well). They are the kind of character who, in any other show, would be built up in the audience's eyes just so that when something kills them horribly it would be all the more shocking coughWashcough. So far that hasn't happened to any of them, and I'm hoping it won't. There's Felix, and there's Cal, and there's Kira herself, and all I say is they had better all be alive and well at the end of this. "No good deed goes unpunished" is really old now; it's not clever, or funny, or interesting any more, and it's time it was retired.
But even if they let me down on that, Orphan Black is still, I think, one of the best shows around at the moment. And if the finale of season two is up to the standard of what I've seen so far, it definitely earned its Hugo.
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no subject
Date: 2015-08-30 05:40 pm (UTC)Haven't seen any of Season 3 yet; shall be very interested to see what you think of the Season 2 finale.
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Date: 2015-08-30 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-08-31 01:46 am (UTC)