strange and random happenstance

Growing up in a house where Masterpiece Theatre was always on in the background it's interesting what impressions remain of shows I only glimpsed in passing or watched a few minutes of. Over the years I had caught bits and pieces of Bramwell but my memory of the show boiled down to a room with bare brick walls with metal beds against them that looked like a warehouse. That would be Eleanor's hospital, The Thrift. Eleanor Bramwell is a doctor who, due to sexual discrimination, can't get a decent job, let alone actually enter an operating room. And who, because she tells female patients the truths their husbands are trying to hide and eschews unnecessary operations, is viewed as problematic. So in walks an angel investor and The Thrift is born. I can't help but feel that this was England's answer to ER. When ER debuted in 1994 it took the world by storm. A year later Bramwell premiered and since that time everyone has been wondering, what the hell was going on with this show. There literally isn't a likable character on it. They are all bombastic and problematic and have raging god complexes. This applies most to Eleanor. You want to root for her because she's breaking new ground, but she's annoyingly dogmatic until something goes wrong and then she's even more dogmatic about finding a solution. Which sometimes never happens. Her patients die. A lot. Though this just plays into the melodrama and Gothic nature of the show. Because if you thought that England's answer to ER would be mildly normal, well you don't know those crazy Brits. Amputations, ovariectomies, asylums, child prostitution, abortion, self-harm, transphobia, murder, wrongful imprisonment, faith healers, rape, you get it all with Eleanor Bramwell! And everything is handled in a barely contained hysteria, because the melodrama is what this is all about. And the melodrama is the only thing consistent in the show. Each season they felt they wanted to go in a new direction. Season one was setting the story, season two, well, it was extra asshole Eleanor, which, given she is a doctor makes sense, but given you're supposed to like her, not the smartest move, season three the show becomes more "realistic" due to the purchase of a handheld camera and character driven episodes, and season four, the less said about the fever dream that is season four where half the cast is gone without explanation and the show decides it wants to be really gritty with a vibe that can only be described as The Crimson Petal and the White meets From Hell well, the better. This show had it's moments, mainly between Eleanor and her father that were sweet and hopeful and showed a functional if fractious family that was of a class not often depicted on screen. Too bad its legacy is for the more wild moments. Even Google's AI overview agrees. And that's a bad sign.  

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bramwell, Doctors, Eleanor Bramwell, ER, Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece, From Hell, Gothic, Hospital, Jemma Redgrave, Masterpiece Theatre, Melodramatic, The Crimson Petal and the White, The Thrift, Victorian

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson
Published by: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: January 22nd, 2019
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Stevie feels like the world has turned upside down. If there was one person in the world whom she thought she would never be grateful for it's Edward King. The conservative politician with White House dreams whom her parents worship and work for has been a divisive subject for years. And yet here he is in her living room giving her what she most desires in the world, a return ticket to Ellingham Academy. After the tragic death of Hayes Major and the disappearance of Ellie Walker, Stevie's parents pulled her out of Ellingham faster than she thought possible. They never thought she belonged there, hell she was never sure she belonged there, but it's where she needs to be. She needs to solve the Truly Devious case, and if that means making a deal with the devil then so be it. Even if it means spying on David. To be fair, David is the one who dropped the bombshell that he's Edward King's son on her only when his hand was forced. But that can be unpacked another day, what needs to be unpacked now is the tin she found in Ellie's room with new evidence relating to the Truly Devious case. Who exactly are Frankie and Edward and how do they tie into the mystery? Well if anyone alive knows that it's Dr. Irene Fenton. Dr. Fenton wrote THE BOOK on the crime; Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders. Charles Scott, the head of Ellingham Academy and Stevie's advisor, has arranged for her to be Dr. Fenton's research assistant. Stevie has access to the attics at Ellingham Academy and has been cataloging the items within and therefore can verify china patterns used and other seemingly useless details for an updated edition of Dr. Fenton's book. Because if there's one thing she's quickly learned about Dr. Fenton it's that she is even more obsessed with the Truly Devious case than Stevie herself. Dr. Fenton's house looks like a cliched conspiracy theorist's hideout. But somewhere among all those secreted papers maybe Dr. Fenton has found a new clue, one thing Stevie does learn from her is that there's a secret tunnel in her school lodging. On Halloween Stevie and David and Nate look for the tunnel in Minerva House and find more than they bargained for, Ellie's body. Stevie feels in over her head. Everyone seems to have a secret and none moreso than Ellingham Academy itself. One thing is clear, with all these bodies piling up she might solve the case but she might also end up dead.

This is THE BOOK that made me fall in love with this series. Perhaps I related too strongly to a quirky writer with a few too many cats... and I also have a borderline obsession with moose. But really it was Frankie and Edward that captured my imagination. What I loved is that this book took the ingeniously repurposed Dorothy Parker poem that was viewed as the ominous warning of the crime to come and in fact gave the case it's moniker and turned it on it's head. Which in turn made me think of something else tangentially related and kind of blew my mind as to why I never thought of it before. It's also extra ironic that it has to deal with Jack the Ripper, a case that Stevie views as a little too sensationalized and therefore not for her. So in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed Patricia Cornwell makes a big deal of the fact that the "From Hell" letter which is believed to written by Jack the Ripper was written on the same kind of paper the artist Walter Sickert used, meaning that he must be Jack the Ripper. She has spent millions buying up his artwork and trying to find DNA evidence to prove her point but here Stevie got me wondering, what if Cornwell is right about the letter but wrong about Sickert? Yes, it's commonly believed that the "From Hell" letter is genuine, but what if it's not? What if it was written by a deluded artist and actually had nothing to do with the crime? In other words, the person who writes the letter might not be the killer. This revelation that Stevie stumbles upon with regard to the "Truly Devious" letter and Frankie and Edward just ignited my brain. Coincidences can happen, especially when someone wants to be thought of as evil. If you're two teenagers wanting to be Bonnie and Clyde or an artist wanting to be the most notorious serial killer of all time, wouldn't you do something to try to get that notoriety? In Frankie and Edward's case they didn't know things would play out as they did, but they sure got what they wanted. And this gave me what I wanted. A case I thought was pretty straightforward, a case I figured I had solved, but then Maureen Johnson throws this little wrench in and makes me think, I mean really think. That's why this series is so good, nothing is as it appears and death is a very real possibility. The question is is moose also a possibility?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bonnie and Clyde, Dorothy Parker, Ellingham Academy, From Hell, Jack the Ripper, Maureen Johnson, Moose, Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer, Stevie Bell, Summer School, The Vanishing Stair, Truly Devious

Netflix isn't afraid to do high concept science fiction adaptations, just look to their recent success with 3 Body Problem. Bodies also fits strongly into this category, relying on a strange admixture of the grandfather paradox and the song made famous, in my mind, by The Muppets, "I'm My Own Grandpa." And it's a really clever conceit, the same body shows up in four different time periods, 1890, 1941, 2023, and 2053, and detectives in each time period have to find a way to work across the eras without being sure that their work will pay off and stop an extinction level event that Stephen Graham's character Elias Mannix triggers in 2023. Bodies obviously wants to be Blade Runner meets From Hell with a hefty dose of The Prestige and Line of Duty, and if you replaced Blade Runner with The Fifth Element but with bad prosthetics, you're spot on. Because no matter how good the acting is the failure of the prosthetics give it a slight cheese factor. Amaka Okafor aged up has this weird neck that looks like it's almost all peeling glue. As for Stephen Graham's various looks? I mean, the least said the soonest forgotten. And I think at this point they actually realized it was working against them and tried to keep him out of frame on his deathbed as much as possible. Though, even with these dodgy looks having such a strong cast leads you to care for all the detectives in all the different eras. Kyle Soller, can I give you a special shout out and say you are killing it recently? You TOTALLY deserved that Peabody for Andor. Occasionally one era's storyline will pull you in a little more, hello again Kyle, and you're dying for them to go back to it but then something will happen in another time and then that's all you care about. It's a balancing act that, while occasionally frustrating, pays off in the end because everything comes together in a perfect bow. It's self-contained. It's a miniseries that draws you in, answers the questions, and leaves you satisfied but still hoping for a little more. But where it really got me is how easy it is to have the world just slide into Fascism. The Executive that controls Britain in the aftermath of the attack with the haunting motto "know you are loved" is too plausible. And what's sad is that at the heart of this horrible movement is just a lost boy who thought he was never loved. Maybe that's what's happening in America right now... All these people who've never felt loved just screaming into the void. But not realizing that violence, that Fascism, that control, isn't the answer. That isn't love. That will never be love. Repeating to yourself that you are loved while in some instances is self-affirming, here is delusional. A lonely boy wants love and fabricates it but with just the hint that it's an illusion everything falls apart. If only more things could be saved with a seed of doubt and a hug.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: 3 Body Problem, Amaka Okafor, And the Emmy Goes To, Blade Runner, Bodies, Fascists, From Hell, Know You Are Loved, Kyle Soller, Line of Duty, Stephen Graham, The Fifth Element, The Grandfather Paradox, Time Travel

From Hell: Master Edition by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Published by: Top Shelf Productions
Publication Date: 1999
Format: Kindle, 582 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Queen Victoria's eldest son Eddy has been a bad boy. He's been slumming in the East End with his tutor Walter Sickert. There Eddy met and secretly married a shop girl, Annie Crook. This will not do for the future King of England and his mother decides to set it right. She separates the couple, bringing Eddy home and sending the wife to Bedlam, unaware that there was a child in the care of one Mary Kelly. This is when Sir William Withey Gull enters the picture. He is a respected doctor, an esteemed and high ranking freemason, who saved the Prince's life when he was ill years previously. For his services he was promoted to Physician-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria. The Queen calls on him to deal with her son's wife and he operates on Annie Crook's thyroid gland impairing her sanity. The Queen and her doctor believe the threat is past when Mary Kelly realizes that she and her friends have a meal ticket thanks to her knowledge of the marriage and the baby named Alice. Prostitutes Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, and Mary Kelly would never resort to blackmail if not for the fact their very lives are in danger by the Old Nichol Gang unless they pay up. So Mary sends Walter Sickert a letter. Walter goes to Princess Alix, Eddy's mother. After what happened previously she says this matter must be taken to Victoria immediately and Victoria calls in Sir William. Sir William has recently recovered from a stroke and approaches this undertaking in the name of the Queen as his great work. With the help of his driver Netley they identify the four women and Sir William goes about plotting their deaths. He has informed his fellow Masons at the police that murders are about to commence, but neither realize how significant they will be or how they will terrorize London. Sir William's knowledge of anatomy allows him to be brutal and precise with his work, though at least the first death is as painless as he can make it. The fear that grips London after the death of Polly Nichols means that all the prostitutes are steeped in terror. The newspapers make a sensation of the cases, dubbing the killer "Jack the Ripper." And Jack is here to usher in the future no matter the body count.

Alan Moore is the grand old wizard of graphic novels and it would not be an understatement to say that he created the genre as we know it today. But for all that he is divisive. You either love his work or you hate it, or you're one of those weird people who is really into Watchmen and when they released a totally credible and faithful adaptation you say it's not "your" Watchmen. I sometimes just don't get people. But I'm starting to get the Alan Moore fantascism, despite my hatred of Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, whose adaptation everyone should be complaining about. And I somehow saw that twice in theaters. For me From Hell is his magnum opus, his great work. And being an armchair Ripperologist I was able to enjoy it without believing anything that he wrote about the crimes. Because for all the theories out there on who Jack the Ripper is I have never once found it even slightly plausible that it was a Freemason cover-up at the behest of Queen Victoria. And no matter how fun they made the film Murder by Decree with a camp James Mason and a psychic Donald Sutherland flailing through the streets of London if they couldn't make me believe the theories spouted by Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, I'm sorry, but Alan Moore didn't stand a chance. And while I could blame my dislike of the theory for avoiding the graphic novel for so many years, I didn't know that this was the theory espoused, the only knowledge I really had of the comic was that it was loosely, and I say very loosely, the inspiration for the 2001 Johnny Depp film. Which, well, the less said the better. Except for this, they tried to combine Abberline and Lees into one character to have a psychic cop. Yeah. They did that. So why did I finally decide to pick up the book after all this time? Honestly, I'm not sure. I was just feeling in a gloomy Victorian mood and was rewatching Penny Dreadful and just thought, you know what, now's the time. And here's the thing, if I had known it was more about the world the murders happened in I would have picked it up so much sooner, though I'm glad I didn't because the colorization by Eddie Campbell gave the artwork more depth and definition. The way that Sir William discusses the history of London reminded me of what I love so much about the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch. There's a depth and richness to the history of London with it constantly building and reinventing itself on the remnants of history. Always moving forward into the future. And if this book shows one thing it's that these murders were a force that would move London inexorably forward into a whole new world.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Alan Moore, Eddie Campbell, For the Love of Book Clubs, Freemasons, From Hell, Jack the Ripper, Murder by Decree, Penny Dreadful, Queen Victoria, Ripperologist, Rivers of London, Sir William Withey Gull, Watchmen

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson
Published by: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: January 22nd, 2019
Format: Paperback, 400 Pages
Rating: ★★★★★
To Buy

Stevie feels like the world has turned upside down. If there was one person in the world whom she thought she would never be grateful for it's Edward King. The conservative politician with White House dreams whom her parents worship and work for has been a divisive subject for years. And yet here he is in her living room giving her what she most desires in the world, a return ticket to Ellingham Academy. After the tragic death of Hayes Major and the disappearance of Ellie Walker, Stevie's parents pulled her out of Ellingham faster than she thought possible. They never thought she belonged there, hell she was never sure she belonged there, but it's where she needs to be. She needs to solve the Truly Devious case, and if that means making a deal with the devil then so be it. Even if it means spying on David. To be fair, David is the one who dropped the bombshell that he's Edward King's son on her only when his hand was forced. But that can be unpacked another day, what needs to be unpacked now is the tin she found in Ellie's room with new evidence relating to the Truly Devious case. Who exactly are Frankie and Edward and how do they tie into the mystery? Well if anyone alive knows that it's Dr. Irene Fenton. Dr. Fenton wrote THE BOOK on the crime; Truly Devious: The Ellingham Murders. Charles Scott, the head of Ellingham Academy and Stevie's advisor, has arranged for her to be Dr. Fenton's research assistant. Stevie has access to the attics at Ellingham Academy and has been cataloging the items within and therefore can verify china patterns used and other seemingly useless details for an updated edition of Dr. Fenton's book. Because if there's one thing she's quickly learned about Dr. Fenton it's that she is even more obsessed with the Truly Devious case than Stevie herself. Dr. Fenton's house looks like a cliched conspiracy theorist's hideout. But somewhere among all those secreted papers maybe Dr. Fenton has found a new clue, one thing Stevie does learn from her is that there's a secret tunnel in her school lodging. On Halloween Stevie and David and Nate look for the tunnel in Minerva House and find more than they bargained for, Ellie's body. Stevie feels in over her head. Everyone seems to have a secret and none moreso than Ellingham Academy itself. One thing is clear, with all these bodies piling up she might solve the case but she might also end up dead.

This is THE BOOK that made me fall in love with this series. Perhaps I related too strongly to a quirky writer with a few too many cats... and I also have a borderline obsession with moose. But really it was Frankie and Edward that captured my imagination. What I loved is that this book took the ingeniously repurposed Dorothy Parker poem that was viewed as the ominous warning of the crime to come and in fact gave the case it's moniker and turned it on it's head. Which in turn made me think of something else tangentially related and kind of blew my mind as to why I never thought of it before. It's also extra ironic that it has to deal with Jack the Ripper, a case that Stevie views as a little too sensationalized and therefore not for her. So in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed Patricia Cornwell makes a big deal of the fact that the "From Hell" letter which is believed to written by Jack the Ripper was written on the same kind of paper the artist Walter Sickert used, meaning that he must be Jack the Ripper. She has spent millions buying up his artwork and trying to find DNA evidence to prove her point but here Stevie got me wondering, what if Cornwell is right about the letter but wrong about Sickert? Yes, it's commonly believed that the "From Hell" letter is genuine, but what if it's not? What if it was written by a deluded artist and actually had nothing to do with the crime? In other words, the person who writes the letter might not be the killer. This revelation that Stevie stumbles upon with regard to the "Truly Devious" letter and Frankie and Edward just ignited my brain. Coincidences can happen, especially when someone wants to be thought of as evil. If you're two teenagers wanting to be Bonnie and Clyde or an artist wanting to be the most notorious serial killer of all time, wouldn't you do something to try to get that notoriety? In Frankie and Edward's case they didn't know things would play out as they did, but they sure got what they wanted. And this gave me what I wanted. A case I thought was pretty straightforward, a case I figured I had solved, but then Maureen Johnson throws this little wrench in and makes me think, I mean really think. That's why this series is so good, nothing is as it appears and death is a very real possibility. The question is is moose also a possibility?

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Bonnie and Clyde, Dorothy Parker, Ellingham Academy, From Hell, Jack the Ripper, Maureen Johnson, Moose, Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer, Stevie Bell, Summer School, The Vanishing Stair, Truly Devious