Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling (BBC adaptation) Part Three

Time for the final episode. I am still not sure why this was three episodes long. Around half the first episode and almost all the second one could have been removed completely without changing the plot in any way.

Apparently, ‘long-buried secrets are revealed, putting Strike and Robin in danger as they close in the killer‘ [sic]. I don’t recall any actual peril in the book, but the typo amuses me.

Well, let’s see how badly they manage to mess this up.

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Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling (BBC adaptation) Part Two

All right, part two. Starting to lose patience, this took multiple sessions to get through. If it had been a two-parter, part one could have introduced us to everyone and picked out the most likely people, and part two would be actual detective work figuring out the answer, but as it is we’re an hour into a three-hour program and have no idea how most of the characters are remotely connected to the case. We know Ciara was with Lula earlier on the night she died, and we know Tansy and Freddie were at home when it happened and that Tansy initially claimed to have seen the fall.

Strike hasn’t managed to speak to any of them beyond Tansy refusing to talk to him, and we’ve also been given a list of other people Lula knew who don’t seem relevant to anything. We know no more about the plot at the beginning of part two than we did at the beginning of part one. Rochelle’s death has no impact since all we know is that she was friends with Lula; it’s not until later this episode that Strike tells us she was also with Lula that day.

Despite this, the episode synopsis assures me that Strike makes a breakthrough. We shall see.

Feel free to skim-read, by the way. This was boring to go through and will probably be boring to read; I just wanted to make sure the things I’m complaining about are clear.

 

Strike: The Cuckoo’s Calling (BBC adaptation) Part One

The BBC have decided to immediately follow Cuckoo with Silkworm, so I now have to rush to get through both of them before they vanish from iPlayer.

If they throw out Career of Evil immediately after that, I may never get around to watching it, since I’ll do the book first if I cover it at all (which is a very big if given what Silkworm did to me) and I’m certainly in no hurry. The first two adaptations should give us an idea of how faithful the third will be to the source material, at least, so we can probably guess how good it was if I do miss it.

Cuckoo is split into three hour-long parts, while the others are only two (I think). This seems odd since I remember Silkworm having marginally more actual plot to it.

I’ve only seen a couple of trailers, so this is a ‘blind’ watch even though I know the story; I think they’ve included a lot more of Matthew purely to vilify him beyond reason (he features on exactly half a page in the original book) and it looks like they’ve made Robin slightly less annoyingly man-obsessed fluff, but other than that I haven’t a clue what they’ve done.

Let’s start this train hurtling towards wreckage, shall we?

[Mitchell here: my comments in bracketed italics per usual. I’m going off Loten’s summaries, I’ve not personally seen this and she recommended I keep it that way.]

 

Epilogue Day has come and gone

Last Friday came and went and I nearly didn’t notice. I had a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I was missing something – I’d noticed that it was September 1 and something seemed significant about that, but didn’t quite put my finger on what it was until afterward. September 1, 2017 was, in fact, the date on which the awful ‘Nineteen Years Later’ epilogue would have taken place and I almost let it pass by without noticing (and without comment). I may well be less attuned to Potterverse things than I used to be, but then on top of that it’s also the bloody awful epilogue we’re talking about so it may not be as surprising it didn’t immediately come to mind, but even so, you’d think I’d have thought about this and prepared a post in advance. I feel rather guilty about not having done so.

Here’s a link to a relevant Twitter thread, the sentiments expressed amused me greatly.

Also, Tor.com had an article.

Apparently this was a big deal to some people. Loten tells me it was all over the news and people actually gathered at King’s Cross, among other things. I’ll admit a part of me likes that idea, and almost wishes I’d been able to go and/or had the inclination to do cosplay of some kind (in the back of my mind there are fantasies of mocking the epilogue via live-action subversive fanfic – I could probably pass for Harry, unfortunately – but I know I would never actually do something like that). Or, I don’t know, call in a satirical tip to the British police about Ron Weasley’s fraudulently obtained driver’s licence.

Then, too, on some level I wonder if it will change how people think about the series to realise that even the distant-future epilogue is now in the past (or if they will even notice that; thinking about it, I’m not actually sure any explicit dates are actually mentioned in the text). There’s always that hint of surreality when reading a text like Nineteen Eighty-Four or 2001: A Space Odyssey or the like which is clearly written as if set in the future, but given a date that we have now passed. And maybe it will aid the books’ fade into eventual cultural irrelevance, though that does not necessarily excite me as someone who is invested in criticising them.

So in ‘honour’ of this ‘significant’ moment, shall we utterly pick apart a bit of the text?

‘He’ll be all right,’ murmured Ginny.
As Harry looked at her, he lowered his hand absent-mindedly and touched the lightning scar on his forehead.
‘I know he will.’
The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.

“All was well” is the part that most people poke fun at here, and rightly so. I remember Rowling saying for years in interviews (before the final book) that she’d had the ending written from the beginning and the last word was going to be ‘scar’, but in the end she did this instead. Looking at it now, I actually think changing that was a mistake: I assume that means the final sentence was originally some reworked variant of the previous one (e.g. ‘It had been nineteen years since Harry last felt any pain in his scar’), which is a functional enough way of implying ‘Voldemort was gone for good and the core conflict on which these books focused has been resolved; rest easy, reader’. It becomes problematic when the next sentence comes along and says ‘all was well’, which even when charitably read falsely implies ‘all of the societal problems in these books have been fixed’ and that’s laughably not in evidence (and, frankly, factually contradicted) even just taking the epilogue in a vacuum. For fuck’s sake, the epilogue includes Ron confessing to having used illegal magic on a Muggle driving instructor, and nobody present notices or cares beyond a vague ‘ha ha isn’t he silly’.

What I also notice is that Harry’s behaviour here is bizarrely superstitious. He’s worried about his child, so he reassures himself that nothing bad could possibly happen to him because there’s no Voldemort? This really does not follow, Harry. There are lots of other things that can go wrong for a child at school; even plenty of Harry’s schoolboy misfortunes had nothing to do with Voldemort! (This is also pretty hilarious in light of Cursed Child being a thing, admittedly. We know quite well that all was not, in fact, well, even in the fictional universe of Harry Potter and ignoring how everything’s been going to shit in the actual 2017.)

In a way, I suppose it could be argued that all of this is ridiculously uncharitable and obviously ‘all was well’ is only being used as shorthand for ‘the story is over now’, much like ‘they lived happily ever after’ and such. But as I said earlier, the previous sentence already accomplished that, so I think we have to conclude it’s doing additional work. ‘All was well’ is not merely saying ‘the conflict has been resolved’, it is also saying ‘and what remains is a good and proper state of affairs’. The deviation from Status Quo has been corrected, Our Side Won, and everything is now the way it should be, there’s no more work to do! Oh wait, I’m not talking about Harry Potter any more, now am I? That sounds a lot like something else that’s awfully relevant in this year of 2017. (And in case you think I’m talking only about Twitler and his zombies, I’m not, though that does describe them: some of the responsibility for their movement’s virulent rise has to go back to leftist complacency after Obama was elected, and our failure to recognise the extent of the racist backlash and take it as seriously as we needed.)

It’s kind of interesting how that dovetails, isn’t it? Especially since I’ve barely begun to address the hilarity of the ‘all was well’ scene occurring in 2017 of all years. And that is because the problem is an underlying attitude and mode of thinking, moreso than any particular sequence of events (never mind that, again, 2016-2017 is especially egregious, that’s not the point). The epilogue’s attempt at a pat ending just lays bare the fact that, in reality, ‘all was well’ is a statement that can probably never be true and there will always be more issues that need addressing. What the person saying it inevitably means is ‘I’ve decided this is good enough’, or, more bluntly, ‘I’ve got mine so fuck you’: it is fundamentally a statement of willful ignorance or complacency.

And to be complacent in the face of systemic oppression and societal inequality is to be complicit in the harm it does.

I’m not always the best about this myself, I have to admit – if nothing else I have a tendency to just observe and try to be well-informed (and to call out bad behaviour when I see it around me), I’m not great at actually taking action on anything, and I’ve been overwhelmed enough that I’ve not managed to do much by way of writing either – but that’s something I’m aware of and something I’m trying to work on.

I’m not sure if I have a greater point here, but this is where my thoughts on that scene took me. Happy belated Epilogue Day.

[Loten here. I have no input. As far as I’m concerned the epilogue doesn’t exist, after all.]