Last night Patty and I watched the opening episode of The Fall, a new BBC Two police drama starring Gillian Anderson, the enviro-fascist who was so good as Agent Scully in The X-Files. This turkey can be viewed on youtube or via Netflix–not that you should view it.
Okay, a serial killer is loose in Belfast and superstar detective Anderson is brought in to deal with it. We didn’t see her smile once during the whole broadcast hour–I guess because she’s supposed to be a two-fisted feminist. In one scene she spots a tall, handsome cop working a crime scene; so she has her car stopped and orders her driver to introduce her to the hunk, to whom she immediately gives her hotel room number. If she were a man, this would be sexual harassment. But the whole scene is just a lot of bilge.
The action whizzes by like a snail, a tree sloth, or a glacier. We have that legendary Belfast scenery to entertain us, a landscape on a par with that of Newark, NJ. We get to watch the murderer actually torturing and killing one of his victims–at which point we turned it off. Believe me, you don’t need this show in your life. Avoid The Fall.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I like stories that point us toward a better place than the one we’re stuck in now. In Agatha Christie’s stories, for instance, murder is always a great wrong that must be punished, even if the victim is a loathsome toad who encumbers the earth. And meanwhile her lead character, Hercule Poirot, is kind to humble people and impeccably polite to all. So we wind up getting a glimpse of something better. The world does not have to be Obamaland.
The Fall leaves us stranded in a graffiti-covered killing ground.
They’re welcome to it, whoever they are. Self-congratulating liberals, probably. If that’s the world they want, that’s the world they’ll get.