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Post by geneweigel on Feb 27, 2018 9:28:17 GMT -5
I binged watched this last weekend and forgot to mention. It was like another PENNY DREADFUL (2014-2016 Showtime series) but with the focus just on Frankenstein and related Frankenstein info being interconnected.
Sean "Boromir" Bean is the star and his performance makes it pretty interesting. The second season has a bit of a shift in focus but it continued to be interesting and weird. I particularly like the tall lispy weirdo in the second season.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 5, 2018 17:10:24 GMT -5
I'm giving this a chance. I like Sean Bean... I enjoyed the jump scare where the dead girl with the sewed on hand (?) grabs him, with composites or piece-work showing up from a different angle. The opening scene on the river reminded me of "Great Expectations." Episode 1 has that feeling of someone immersed in Dickens' novels deciding to write a story about Frankenstein to make an interesting stitching together of 'dead literary genres.'
I was trying to figure out when this was set. In Episode 3 Mary Shelley says "I've been a widow these last four years" and Percy Shelley died in 1822 so this series is set in or just around 1826, when Charles Dickens would have been 14 years old (born February 7, 1812). In "Great Expectations," Pip (the narrator) meets the escaped convict in the graveyard on Christmas Eve, 1812 (when Pip was around 7). The flats around the river, contrast of lower classes and upper, griminess of the city... they are are prominent in "Great Expectations" that's why I'm watching for so many parallels... Victorian substandard meets Gothic horror.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 8, 2018 10:33:22 GMT -5
I don't usually care for the concept of the author being included in the story, i.e., having Mary Shelley as a character in a FRANKENSTEIN story. But I'll see where they go with it. So far, I'm enjoying it but it is a slow burn and feels a bit removed from the traditional FRANKENSTEIN story, which may turn out to be a good thing. Like I said, this feels more like a Charles Dickens story with a detective angle and slight FRANKENSTEIN influence... but hey, that's original.
William Blake has made a cameo. Who's next? Washington Irving?
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 8, 2018 12:25:22 GMT -5
Okay, I get it now. The reporter is named "Boz," which was an early pen-name of Charles Dickens, who wrote "Sketches by Boz" which were sort of like "scenes from life" articles. That's fairly obscure, but what tipped me off was the short hand. Charles Dickens taught himself short hand and became a free lance reporter. What threw me off was the age, since I thought the character is a few years too old to be Dickens. But the "Boz" name makes it certain -- he's supposed to be Dickens.
Sometimes I have trouble understanding British actors, and I didn't pick up the name right away.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 9, 2018 14:27:47 GMT -5
The Fortune of War public house in London (in Episode 4) was mentioned in Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" where Jerry Cruncher of Tellson's Bank moonlights as a body snatcher. Jerry earns extra money as a resurrection man removing bodies from their graves for sale to medical schools and students as cadavers. Wow, what a tie-in to this TV series! According to Wikipedia this public house was ancient and demolished in 1910. I wonder how ancient?
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 9, 2018 14:40:43 GMT -5
I just looked up that actor who plays the strange German Dibbel in season two (Dibbel is the real life Frankenstein legend that may or may not have inspired Shelley on a trip down the Rhine passing "Castle Frankenstein" where Dibbel operated out of.) and his name is Laurence Fox and he really talks like that. Now I feel like a total ass. Great performance! Wait!  |
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 12, 2018 9:17:09 GMT -5
I finished season one yesterday, and I enjoyed it. As much as I like FRANKENSTEIN, there aren't many film or TV adaptations that I've really liked. What was the last good one? I remember when the one with Robert DeNiro directed by Kenneth Branagh was about to come out and I was thinking how awesome it was going to be, and I'd just read the book for the first time. But it wasn't that good. With the people involved it should have been, but it just wasn't.
I liked that FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES was more of a reimagining than a retelling, with a lot of familiar themes popping up but also enough variation to make it fresh.
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 14, 2018 14:34:33 GMT -5
Dippel, like Dickens, is anachronistic to this show's time period of 1830 in the second season, unless this is supposed to be his descendant. Johann Dippel lived 1673 – 1734, which makes me wonder if this is supposed to be the same guy or not. According to Wikipedia, "a year before his death, he wrote a pamphlet in which he claimed to have discovered an elixir that would keep him alive until the age of 135." On a show like this it is isn't unthinkable for this character to be over a hundred years old, but I am leaning towards the descendant theory. Also, I like the weird, creepy doll vibe in Dippel's house -- reminds me of Sebastian's house in BLADERUNNER!
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 14, 2018 16:02:07 GMT -5
Fishing for spoilers? Alright, he's Satan.
Just kidding!
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 15, 2018 7:24:10 GMT -5
I knew it!
No, seriously, this show is far too cagey about whether God and Satan really exist to have either one make a direct appearance. There is a lot of talk about "Heaven is closed to us" and "why has God forsaken us" and "God hasn't abandoned us, the church has" and visions that could easily just be hallucinations and nightmares. There is nothing overtly supernatural, just weird science in a highly religious culture. But I like it that way, because I've always viewed FRANKENSTEIN as one of the original science fiction stories, with the main themes being about hubris and bad parenting.
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 15, 2018 9:44:33 GMT -5
In the 80's, I was hooked on Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes takes for PBS. My uncle had them all on store bought VHS and it was almost an addiction I had watched them so many times. But it was fresh and now I don't know how it would hold up because there has been so many good period pieces that are really detailed down to the grime. Its almost as if Jeremy Brett's take is now nostalgey like Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce was in the 80's. I think in years to come the next wave is going to be VR so everything is going to be timelined in ultra-detail making every period romp now seem quaint. Wasn't there a Frankenstein computer game where YOU were the monster? Here it is(with Tim Curry as Dr Frankenstein): www.youtube.com/watch?v=hubW1iY2Z-gI remember playing this in 1996. It was like that boring puzzle game MYST (1993).... www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iM64lBQqWY .... which while "graffyx" were much better it was no SHADOWGATE (1987) www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAjSePd_MYQ. |
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Post by GRWelsh on Mar 19, 2018 7:55:31 GMT -5
I also loved the Jeremy Brett Holmes series -- he was intense and captured the quirky eccentricism. I went through a Sherlock Holmes obsession starting around 1984, and flew through the entire canon of Arthur Conan Doyle stories. I still have that big hardback with the Sydney Paget illustrations.
I remember MYST, and played SHADOWGATE (Nintendo version) but I never saw that Frankenstein game with Tim Curry. That's hilarious! That's actually a pretty good idea to have you play the monster, against someone like Curry.
I finished FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES Season Two yesterday and enjoyed it. They brought it to a satisfying if abrupt conclusion which made it feel like they either didn't know where to go next or they weren't sure it would be picked up for a third season. Maybe it was both. <SPOILERS> The show kind of lost its focus in the second season. Dippel was a highlight but it was a slow burn with the automaton and not that big of a reveal... But they couldn't have gone much further, as they couldn't plausibly have full-on robots walking around in 1830! Marlott didn't feel as much like a protagonist in the second season, but more like an observer from the shadows. The land stealing plot was mundane. I missed Vanessa Kirby as Lady Harvey and didn't like that she died 'off stage' since she was a major character (though that may have been out of the show producers' control if they couldn't sign her on). Esther's resurrection was completely inconsistent with what came before... They simply killed and resurrected her in the same body, and other than a brief fit of screaming, she came back the same. By contrast, Marlott came back with scars implying he may have been stitched together from other body parts, and also he was completely deranged for several years. Even when he began coming to his senses he didn't believe he was John Marlott anymore. It took him years to come around! And before that, the resurrected were total composites made up from 6 or more different bodies. But they seemed to have dropped all of that by the time they got to Esther's resurrection, and when they're escaping at the end Marlott, Esther and Dippel all seem like themselves and fairly normal people except perhaps more resistant to harm, long lived, and able to see dead people (other than their own)... But overall, a good show and worth watching, especially for the period detail and performances.
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Post by geneweigel on Mar 19, 2018 8:33:18 GMT -5
These ongoing shows are good in that they manage the comings and goings of big stars but the hiccups suck when its the last season like PENNY DREADFUL (2014-2016) when they just lost everything when they balled it up to complete the prophesy that said I liked how PENNY DREADFUL's Dracula being some lame nice guy in disguise but it was too quick.
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