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Missions (Empreinte Digitale, 2017) Season 1

Two multi-billionaires (one French, the other American) compete with each other to put the first humans on Mars...sound familiar?

But what if, when they get there, they find something of cosmic importance, with the help of an 'historic' Cosmonaut and a re-location of the famed Atlantis?

If you can accept the plot holes and some boulevard acting, this French production will entertain you with its splendid visuals, but other than the core plot twist, never really asks why anyone today would want to set foot on a planet where they cannot breathe without a suit, where the storms will kill you if the food and the boredom does not.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episod...3964c/missions

Missions (Empreinte Digitale, 2019) Season 2

They went to Mars and lost their way....and it doesn't look like they will return for Season 3, even if the producers do find them....

Close to Me (Channel 4, 2021)

A menopausal woman comes to term with memory loss after falling down stairs. Like the cold case review, the person -usually a woman- who wakes up not knowing what just happened is a useful plot device for contemporary films and tv dramas, eg Flight Attendant (which I haven't seen).

Here, it covers the usual suspects -did her husband try to kill her? Was it her money he needed for a failing business, was it to support an affair, was it her own fault as a form of self-harm? By Episode 5 of 6 I really didn't care and watched it to the end to discover the big reveal was no more interesting than the first scene with its internal monologue/voice over. As is also the case in these series, the house is fabulous, at the end of wooded road, in well-kept gardens, but the dog it was that died. I am not sure if this works as a study of the menopause as I doubt most women who go through it experience life with the same level as trauma as this Danish Blue who has had a traumatic childhood that hants here -has it shaped her?

Another theme is that of the woman who marries a man who is less successful than she is, but the menopausal issue only, as it were, comes to the fore when the married couple need lubricant to have sex, which I suppose is meant to be frank and shocking for the blue stocking brigades, most of whom seem to have decamped to Texas these days (who remembers Mary Whitehouse now?).

Half-baked, hence the plot holes a irritating errors -patients in hospital have disposable cups not glasses for their water, why would Hastings which I assume must have high-end housing but is otherwise a depressed area of Sussex support four branches of the same estate agency? And so on. Six hours is a lot to ask of the audience, and it looks like it was too much for the actors. WHen the house is the star (as was also the case with the Scots drama, The Nest) you know there is something wrong

The Tourist (BBC 1, 2022)

This drama/comedy is currently on BBC 1. I watched all six episodes yesterday, though by Episode 3 out of curiosity rather than enjoyment. A man survives a car accident in the Outback but loses his memory. Over the course of the drama he recovers some of his memories but only with the assistance of a woman. The general themes of this drama are that that past will catch up with you in time, and that we may all be tourists in time. The attempt to play with time and reality is not clever so much as tedious, as are the references to Spielberg's The Duel, the Dollars films, and the choice of music.

This is not an advertisement for Australia but a warning. The men are blokes with a dry sense of humour, the Sheilas on the plump side. In both cases, intelligence is in short supply, so we are thinking more Xavier Herbert than Patrick White. The Greek-origin actors, presumably of Melbourne are gainfully employed, but one is left with the feeling the money spent on this excursion into the wilderness might better be spent renovating asylum seeker hotels, one could even take a cue from The Tourist, and call them Big Fuck, or Little Fuck.

It is still running so I won't spoil the plot, it spoils itself.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Missions ….never really asks why anyone today would want to set foot on a planet where they cannot breathe without a suit, where the storms will kill you if the food and the boredom does not.

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Presumably “because it was there” and scientific curiosity.

I enjoyed it, a bit different and strangely the fact it was in French gave it a more abstracted quality than some of the factory sci-if that dominates the television screen.

sex education

they have 2 non binary boys

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Originally Posted by Nikka

sex education

they have 2 non binary boys

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This is a contradiction in terms. There is no such category as 'non-binary boy'...

Trigger Point (ITV, Sundays at 9pm)

Well, the first episode went like a bomb...sorry. Though watchable, plot holes and obscure motives suggest this series has a lot to do in order to match Line of Duty.

Hidden Assets (Peter McKenna, broadcast on the BBC, 2021)

A drugs and diamonds caper that links Ireland to Belgium, or more precisely, Shannon to Antwerp, and not much of an advert for either. A well-dressed Irish detective teams up with a scruffy Belge -Flemish not Walloon, indeed French is noticeable by its absence here- and together they uncover a network of crime that unravels after a raid on the house of a criminal in Ireland. The script is not hiding any assets, nor do the actors involved appear to have any that are going to win awards. Shannon comes across as possibly the busiest airport in Ireland, and if you have been reading about the 'Parties'/'Gatherings' in Downing Street in violation of the Law of England, and wonder what a wine fridge might be, look no further. And is it just me, or do the homes of rich people look more like hotels than homes? And why, when the characters return home, do they open the wine fridge rather than make a cuppa? Ireland has come a long way since Father Ted. And to think I watched all six episodes!

I, Sniper: The Washington Killers (Arrow Pictures, 2020, broadcast on Channel 4 2022)

I watched all six episodes on the Uk's Channel 4, and was gripped throughout. The documentary pieces together the various murders which took place in 2002 that 'terrorised' the Washington DC area, but we now know began in Washington State, perpetrated by a man and a boy, the latter being the one who pulled the trigger that killed ten people and injured three. The documetary is based on recorded confessions of Lee Malvo, now 33, the law enforcement/FBI/medical staff involved, and the victims and their families, including two ex-wives of John Williams Muhammad.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, this was mass murder on ice, with both Malvo and Muhammad justifying their actions on the basis 'If they take it from me, I will take it from them' -meaning love, children, indeed, as the film suggests, childhood itself. The only real problem is that Malvo's testimony rationalizes his actions years after the event and presumably after some therapy, though he is in Solitary confinement in prison. Sort of apologetic, Malvo insists he was manipulated by the man he looked up to not just as a father figure, but as a lover too, but at the time neither man or boy had anything of consequence to tell the prosecuting offiicials in interviews before or during their trials. The point being they had nothing to say, they had made their point with the killings. The grief, one has to say of the victims and their survivors, is real, and is the heart of this grim record of history.

One moment stands out, in Episode One, where the gun merchant shows the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle of the kind Malvo stole, saying citizens have a Constitutional and a God-Given right to own such weapons -the first being wrong, the second preposterous rubbish. The Constitution of the USA does not give individuals the right to own firearms. And even if the man knows what God wants, and that is absurd, one wonders why God would put humans on the earth to live and then give them weapons to kill.

Lastly, the justification Malvo offers one could just as easily use to justfy Trump's domestic terrorists using violence to 'take back' what they think their enemies have 'taken away', and as someoene points out, to the extent that the US allows citizens to own a variety of weapons of human destruction, such violence is endemic in US culture, further backed up by several hundred years of it.

But as I think Chief of Police Moose also says, plenty of people have traumatic childhoods and don't take their revenge on society by killing innocent men, women and children. I watched all six back to back, but it was worth it.