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Homeland 8.1: Lost Time

Homeland was back tonight for its eight and final season, with a strong episode, situated mainly in Afghanistan, that fired on all cylinders.

The main, nearly choking vice that Carrie finds herself in this time is the months of missing time - time she can't remember - inside a Russian prison.  This is a theme we've seen on spy shows before - Howard Gordon was a mover of 24 and does much the same for Homeland - so it's not surprising that Jack Bauer and Carrie Mathison have been in similar situations.  But Carrie's is more laden with danger than even Jack's, given her bipolar disorder.

In episode 8.1, Carrie worries that she may have revealed information about her source in Afghanistan that got him killed.  Seeing Yevgeny in Kabul amplifies those fears - she had come to rely upon him in the Russian prison, and who knows what she may have said to him.   But I have to say, maybe it's something about Costa Ronin's manner - he played a sympathetic Russian in The Americans - that makes hope that he's not the bad guy.  In fact, he'd actually make a good partner for Carrie, but that's not likely to happen, either.  We'll just have to see.

Back to our reality, I'm also wondering if this final season of Homeland will deal in any way with Trump in the White House?  Like 24, the Presidents in Homeland have pretty much avoided any parallels to Presidents actually in office (Elizabeth Keane might have been like Hillary, but the Electoral College decreed otherwise).  But here's a thought: Homeland will be over before Americans have a chance to vote Trump out of office.   The producers had to know this when they were making this final season.  They surely must have been tempted to put something of our reality into this narrative.   It will be fun to see how much.

See also Homeland 7.1: The Worse Threat ... Homeland 7.2: Carrie vs. 4chan ... Homeland 7.3: Separating Truth from Hyperthinking ... Homeland 7.4: Fake News! ... Homeland 7.5: "The Russian Angle" ... Homeland 7.6: Meets The Americans, Literally ... Homeland 7.7: Meets The Americans ... Homeland 7.8: Evenly Matched ... Homeland 7.9: Franny vs. the Job or the U.S. Hacks Twitter ... Homeland 7.10: President Trump and President Keane ... Homeland 7.11: Carrie in Action ... Homeland Season 7 Finale: The President
And see also Homeland 6.1: Madam President-Elect ... Homeland 6.2: Parallel Program ... Homeland 6.3: Potentials ... Homeland 6.4: "A Man with Painted Hair" ... Homeland 6.5: The Attack on Carrie's Brownstone ... Homeland 6.7: The Arch Villain ... Homeland 6.8: Peter's Problem ... Homeland 6.9: The Tide Begins to Turn ... Homeland 6.10: Fake News! ... Homeland 6.11: Quinn and Dar ... Homeland Season 6 Finale: Chilling - and True to Life
And see also Homeland 5.1: Moving into the Age of Snowden ... Homeland 5.2: Who Wants to Kill Carrie ... Homeland 5.3: Carrie and Kerry ... Homeland 5.5: All Quinn ... Homeland 5.6: Saul Wises Up ... Homeland 5.7: Tough to Watch ... Homeland 5.9: Finally! ... Homeland 5.10: Homeland and Homeland ... Homeland 5.11: Allison as Primo Villain ... Homeland Season 5 Finale: RIPs
And see also Homeland 4.1-2: Carrie's State of Mind ... Homeland 4.3: Quinn and Carrie ... Homeland 4.4: Carrie's Counterpart ... Homeland 4.5: Righteous Seduction ... Homeland 4.6: The Biggest Reveal ... Homeland 4.7: The Manifestation ... Homeland 4.8: Saving Someone's Life ... Homeland 4.9: Hitchcock Would've Loved It ... Homeland 4.10: The List ... Homeland 4.12: Out of this Together
And see also Homeland 3.1: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 3.2: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 3.3: Two Prisons ... Homeland 3.4: Twist! ...Homeland 3.6: Further Down the Rabbit Hole ... Homeland 3.7: Revealing What We Already Knew ... Homeland 3.8: Signs of Life ...Homeland 3.9: Perfect Timing ... Homeland 3.10: Someone Has to Die ... Homeland 3.11: The Loyalist ... Homeland Season 3 Finale: Redemption and Betrayal
And see Homeland 2.1-2: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 2.3-5: Sneak Preview Review ... Homeland 2.6: What Brody Knows ... Homeland 2.7: Love Me Tinder ... Homeland 2.8: The Personal and the Professional ...Homeland Season 2 Finale: The Shocker and the Reality
And see also  Homeland on Showtime ... Homeland 1.8: Surprises ... Homeland Concludes First Season: Exceptional


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The Stranger: Tight As A Drum, Surprising Heroes and Villains

My wife and I binged The Stranger on Netflix, mostly last night, and last two of the eight episodes, today.  It's based on Harlan Coben's novel. and it's intricately plotted, with tight as a drum resolutions, just as you'd expect from a Coben work.  Indeed, even more.  Which makes it about the best detective mystery series we've seen on any kind of television in years, maybe ever.

All I'll tell you about the plot is that a husband (Adam Price) is told a secret about this wife, which, when he confronts her about it, leads to her disappearance.  That happens in the first episode.  The rest of the series shows us the husband in search of his wife.  The search leads to all kinds of stunning surprises about his family and neighbors, all of which, though seemingly beyond the most dogged detective work, tie together plausibly in the end.

That's no small feat in a genre in which far fewer twists and turns are left not fully explained.  And The Stranger does this with surprising villains and heroes at almost every turn, and moral ambiguities swirling around just about every scene.  In that sense, The Stranger is but a canvas in which the complexities of life in this world are writ large on the screen.

I haven't read Coben's novel, but I understand it takes place in America.  The Stranger unfolds in England, and feels perfectly situated there. It's peopled by top-notch British actors, including MI-5's Richard Armitage (who plays Adam Price in The Stranger) and Siobhan Finneran (DS Johanna Griffin in The Stranger) from Downton Abbey.  But everyone else in this series puts in some great acting, too, including Jacob Dudman as Adam's eldest son Thomas, and the always excellent Stephen Rea as the pivotal Martin Killane.

But I may have said too much already, and, if I were you, I'd stop reading about The Stranger, and snap it up asap.

 


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Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time - on Spotify

advance order limited pressing of multi-color vinyl from Light In the Attic Recordsget the CDlyrics to all the songs on the albumreview of the album in Swan Fungusinterview about the album in Psychedelic Baby Magazine90-minute radio interview about album and my other musicjoin my music mailing list



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The Sinner 3.1: Second Degree Murder, First Degree Detective

The Sinner was back tonight for its third season, which, at first blush, looks to be more of a straight-up whodunnit than the first two seasons, or at least the second season, which is fine in my book,

Harry Ambroise is in pretty good shape, suffering mainly from an intermittent sciatica.   Bill Pullman, as always, is perfect for this role, with just the right mix and degree of savvy and vulnerability. He's suspicious of the passenger survivor of a car crash which killed the driver.  As ever, Harry is right.

The survivor is some kind of psycho, a high school teacher in upstate New York, Jamie, well played by Matt Bomer.  His wife is very pregnant.  His college buddy Nick shows up, apparently unannounced, and references some kind of unexplained things they did together in college.

Those things were presumably not good, and at least in part involved a woman who now lives in some kind of driving distance from Jamie.  Nick wants to pay her a visit, Jamie does not. Nick refuses to listen, Jamie pulls the emergency break on the car which causes it to crash.   Jamie is relatively unhurt, and refuses to call 911.  That act, according to Harry, would constitute second degree murder.

But how will Harry prove that, and what else will he find in Jamie's past and present?  I don't think we knew so much about the killer in the first two seasons, this soon in the narrative, and that makes this season of The Sinner especially interesting.  See you back here next week.

See also The Sinner 2.1: The Boy ... The Sinner 2.2:  Heather's Story ... The Sinner 2.3: Julian's Mother ... The Sinner 2.5: The Scapegoat ... The Simmer 2.7: Occluded Past Unwound - Mostly ... The Sinner Season 2 Finale: The Ambiguity of Harry

And see also: The Sinner season one: Wild, Unconventional, Irresistible Mystery

 
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Curb Your Enthusiasm 10.3: Garbage Cans and Apples

Among the many hilarities of Curb Your Enthusiasm 10.3 are garbage cans and apples.

Things - natural, produced, customs - not being used the way they're supposed to has long been a staple of Curb.  Or, to be more precise, Larry's frustration sometimes fury about things not being allowed to have the proper function is a persistent theme.  The key is Larry is right, but over-reacts (to some extent), and therein resides the hilarity.

Take garbage cans, for instance.  They're supposed to be for garbage - a place to throw in what you are discarding- but Larry finds that's not the case, at least twice.  The first time is an apple that Larry was eating - "nonchalantly" - in his lawyer's office, until the lawyer objected (the same lawyer, of course, who didn't let Larry use his bathroom last week).  Larry compounds his lawyer's objections by throwing the half-eaten apple into a wastebasket.  But it has "no lining," so the lawyer doesn't like that, either.  Next, Larry tries to throw a scone unliked by cousin Andy into a garbage receptical in the kitchen, and gets told by Andy's wife that they dispose of their garbage in the pantry (which made me think of Paul Simon's "Mrs. Robinson").

But the apple was centerpiece of another example in this episode of things being misused.  Larry also encounters decorative apples in several places.  Some look so real that - of course - Leon and Larry both bite into them, and chip their teeth.  The decorative fruit that looks too real is a longstanding grievance of likely millions of people in this world, but most of them don't chip their teeth on them.

I'm pretty sure almost no one chips their teeth on garbage cans, but now's as a good a time as any to mention the paradox of the garbage can, that I discovered decades ago.  It arises from the problem of how do dispose of a garbage can?  Think about it.  If you leave an empty garbage can in your driveway, the sanitation crew won't take it away, they'll just think someone else already took away the garbage in the can that was never there.  We recently got semi-automated garbage pick-up in our area, and that would make the paradox even worse.  If you left a note on the can saying "please dispose of me," the automated arm wouldn't be able to read it.

Anyway, you can read more about the paradox of the garbage can here, and I'll be back one of these weeks with another review of Curb.

See also:  Curb Your Enthusiasm 10.1: Reunited!

See also: Curb Your Enthusiasm 9.1: Hilarious! ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 9.2: Wife Swapping ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 9.3: Benefits ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 9.4: "Hold You in his Armchair" ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 9.5: Schmata At Large ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 9.8: The Unexpected Advocate ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 1.9: Salmon Discretion ... Curb Your Enthusiasm 1.10: Outfit Tracker


just releasing:  Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time  - digital, CD, vinyl
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The Outsider 1.5: The Tear-Drinker

Ok, here, are best I can tell, is where we are with The Outsider, as of tonight's episode 1.5 on HBO:

At least three murders of children have been committed by doppelgangers.   Molly, who seems to be the most knowledgeable about is going on, thinks that some kind of evil entity is at work - a bogeyman, is the least arcane name for it.   More important, he or whatever it is feeds on people's grief - drinks their tears, as our saner characters are coming to realize.  ("Tear Drinker" is the title of this episode.  I rarely use the given titles in my reviews, but this was too apt to pass up.)

There aren't too many of them on hand, by the way.  Molly, a private investigator with a taste for the evil supernatural, seems to be in her right mind.  Her logic is leading her to supernatural conclusions.  Ralph is also rational, and not quite yet ready to accept what Molly is telling him.  But he's becoming a believer.   The stripclub owner and the other cop - the one who wants back into police work - I'm not too sure about.  I'm not even sure they're two different people.  At least one of them, I think, has that half-eaten neck - that is, his neck looks half eaten.  Presumably that's the work of the bogeyman?

Meanwhile, the bogeyman is upping his game.  He's not only lurking around under a hoodie, but he's warning Ralph's wife Jeannie, telling her that Ralph and she will die unless Ralph drops the case.  Assuming that guy is the bogeyman, and not some other kind of spirit trying to help.  Nah, I think he's the tear-drinking bogeyman.

So there you have it.  This is a noir detective into horror story to the max, all the more intense because the depredation is as much psychological as physical, and the scenery is somehow pastoral and horrific at the same time.  I have no idea how this will end, which is why I'll keep watching.

See also The Outsider 1.1-2:  Two Places at the Same Time

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Vikings 6.9: Othere = ?

Catching up with Vikings, now at episode 6.9 (I've been busy with my music, which you can see/hear a bit more of here, if you're interested).  It's an unusual and excellent season, to say the least.  And 6.9 had what could be a real shocker.

Ubbe and Torvi get to Iceland, in search of Floki, who hasn't appeared at all yet this season.  They meet a very familiar face - familiar because he's played by Ray Stevenson, who's played major roles in Rome and so much more - who is legendary Viking explorer by the name of Othere.  He's legendary, because he claims to have sailed to a "golden" land in the West, which I assume is America not Greenland.  Ubbe's inspired, but Othere has another revelation: he says his original name was Athelstan, a Christian monk!

Now, back in season 3, we saw Athelstan beaten to death, by none other than Floki, later the discoverer of Iceland, and also a keen object of Ubbe's interest.  I should mention that I have a policy when it comes to death in non-science-fiction television and movies.  If a character's head is not blown off, cut off, or shot, I think there's always a chance he's still alive.  And, although Athelstan certainly appeared dead, I'm pretty sure his head was still attached and more or less intact after Floki's beating.

So, this means, at least by my standard, that Othere could indeed be our original Floki, whom Ragnar so loved.  And the episode is entitled "Resurrection".  On the other hand, Othere could have had a conversation with Floki, somewhere further west, in which Floki "confessed" what he did to Athelstan, which prompted Othere to take on Athelstan's identity.   For all we know, Othere/Athelstan killed Floki - indeed, a conversation with Othere out of Ubbe's presence suggests that something untoward happened to Floki, perhaps something more than what we already know.

I'm looking forward to the mid-season finale, which should also tell us more about the impending battle between Norway and Rus, the other great world-changing story this season.

See also Vikings 6.1-2: Russia!

And see also Vikings 5.1-2: Floki in Iceland ... Vikings 5.3: Laughing Ivar ...Vikings 5.4: Four of More Good Stories ... Vikings 5.5: Meet Lawrence of Arabia ... Vikings 5.6: Meanwhile, Back Home ... Vikings 5.7: A Looming Trojan-War Battle, Vikings Style, and Two Beautiful Stories ...Vikings 5.8: Only Heahmund? ... Vikings 5.9: Rollo ... Vikings 5.10: New and Old Worlds ... Vikings 5.11: Rollo's Son ... Vikings 5.12: "The Beast with Two Backs" ... Vikings 5.13: The Sacrifice ... Vikings 5.14: Fake News in Kattegat ... Vikings 5.15: Battle ... Vikings 5.16: Peace and War ... Vikings 5.17: No Harmony in Iceland ... Vikings 5.18: Demented Ivar ... Vikings 5.19-20: Endings and Beginnings

And see also Vikings 4.1: I'll Still Take Paris ... Vikings 4.2: Sacred Texts ...Vikings 4.4: Speaking the Language ... Vikings 4.5: Knives ... Vikings 4.8: Ships Up Cliff ... Vikings 4.10: "God Bless Paris" ... Vikings 4.11: Ragnar's Sons ... Vikings 4.12: Two Expeditions ... Vikings 4.13: Family ... Vikings 4.14: Penultimate Ragnar? ... Vikings 4.15: Close of an Era ... Vikings 1.16: Musselman ... Vikings 1.17: Ivar's Wheels ...Vikings 1.18: The Beginning of Revenge ... Vikings 4.19: On the Verge of History ... Vikings 4.20: Ends and Starts

And see also Vikings 3.1. Fighting and Farming ... Vikings 3.2: Leonard Nimoy ...Vikings 3.3: We'll Always Have Paris ... Vikings 3.4: They Call Me the Wanderer ... Vikings 3.5: Massacre ... Vikings 3.6: Athelstan and Floki ...Vikings 3.7: At the Gates ... Vikings 3.8: Battle for Paris ... Vikings 3.9: The Conquered ... Vikings Season 3 Finale: Normandy
And see also Vikings 2.1-2: Upping the Ante of Conquest ... Vikings 2.4: Wise King ... Vikings 2.5: Caught in the Middle ... Vikings 2.6: The Guardians ...Vikings 2.7: Volatile Mix ... Vikings 2.8: Great Post-Apocalyptic Narrative ... Vikings Season 2 Finale: Satisfying, Surprising, Superb

And see also Vikings ... Vikings 1.2: Lindisfarne ... Vikings 1.3: The Priest ... Vikings 1.4:  Twist and Testudo ... Vikings 1.5: Freud and Family ... Vikings 1.7: Religion and Battle ... Vikings 1.8: Sacrifice
... Vikings Season 1 Finale: Below the Ash

 
historical science fiction - a little further back in time

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Vienna Blood 1-2: Demons in the Architecture

Took a few minutes (actually closer to 90) out of everything else to watch the first two episodes (actually, one episode, broken into two parts) of Vienna Blood on PBS (my wife aptly flagged it).
It's an excellent historical detective drama, set in 1906 Vienna, with the likes of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler making cameo appearances, and astute historical details (we see a disk not a cylinder on the phonograph - the disk, invented by Berliner, would indeed have been playing there and then, not Edison's cylinder, invented, earlier, in the US).

Max Liebermann is a young psychologist in the even younger field of Freudian psychology. Oskar Reinhardt is a detective with a difficult even harrowing personal story (his daughter died and his wife left him).  Their superiors in one way or another are all calcified idiots.  The two make an outstanding team.

Other important aspects of the milieu include anti-semitism - Max and his family are Jewish - and a city which, at this time, was one of the most impressive cultural capitals in the world.  Art, music, and angels in the architexture (to quote Paul Simon) are very much at hand.  But this world also contains demons in the form of human murderers, and that's what this little series is all about:  how an early profiler and a more seasoned lawman can solve crimes and bring the bad guy to justice.

Give that this is a mystery, I won't say anything more about the plot.  I will say that it was well developed and resolved.   I did wonder about a few missing historical details - I didn't spot any automobiles or telephones.   There had to be a least a few of them in 1906 Vienna.  But there was a mention of Jung's "shadow self," which tracks perfectly with history, since Jung sent his Studies in Word Association to Freud in Vienna in 1906.

I'll try to be back here in two weeks with a single review of the next two-part episode.




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Captain Phil interviews Paul Levinson about his New Album 'Welcome Up', and Trump

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 123, in which the inimitable Captain Phil (on WUSB Radio) again interviews me about my new music, latest science fiction, and Donald Trump. But this time, there's my brand new album of science fiction related songs, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time (now releasing by Old Bear Records), to talk about.  And we're right in the middle of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump (author Bill McNulty joins us for the first part of this discussion).  Phil also plays, at the start and end of the episode, two songs from Welcome Up.
Helpful links:
a taste of Welcome Up on YouTube lyrics to all the songs on Welcome Up free digital complete album on Bandcampadvance order multi-color limited pressing vinyl (100 copies) from Light In the Attic Records CDs
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