In Which We Effort With All The Subtlety Of The Period

Clap Your Hands Over Your Eyes

by ETHAN PETERSON

Happy!
creators Grant Morrison and Brian Taylor
SyFy

Happy! begins with Nick (Christopher Meloni) alone in a bathroom of a bar. The unavoidable irony (the first in the completely expected series of many such switcheroos) is that he is miserable. Nick - a former cop turned killer for hire - throws up and imagines blowing his head off. In his fantasy, his cranium spurts with blood as go-go dancers accompany his distress.

Distress was also the name of a 1995 science fiction novel by Greg Egan. It is the kind of actually meaningful project that SyFy could approach if it wasn’t constantly trying to copy the dismal success of The Walking Dead. Distress concerns an African scientist who develops a theory that makes her the target of a disturbed cult, and an intersection that changes humanity completely. Egan, unlike Grant Morrison, was the sort of writer to take seriously, because his development of characters doesn’t solely turn on making a cop a hitman, a prostitute a sensitive soul, and an Italian mobster the victim of molestation.

Such ugliness makes Happy! an adult comedy, except in typical SyFy fashion, it shies away from any true unpleasantness. Death as conveyed by Nick is painless, efficient and actually somewhat boring. Meloni, who is the classic case of an actor of limitless talent who never found the right role (he came close in Oz), is tries his best to save this tonal mess of a series.

Worst is Happy himself, an imaginary friend voiced by newly remarried comedian Patton Oswalt. As usual, Oswalt does a fantastic job trying to make the awful material Grant Morrison writes for him sound the least bit humorous. Unlike say, the stuffed bear Seth MacFarlane created in Ted, the joke is not that Happy says things that are amusing coming from a cartoon unicorn. Actually his dialogue is quite dull, and before he emerges to haunt Nick so he can save the little girl whose daemon he is, the show is considerably more exciting.

While the art direction in Happy! is up and down, Brian Taylor (Crank) clearly brings a joy to the production design. Happy! looks just as good as feature films which cost a great deal more, and Taylor's energetic gambits with angle, lens and mood all pay off. If you didn't actually have to have a story, and could focus merely on acting performances and visual composition, this show would be in a class of its own.

Unfortunately, the source material is lacking. In the tradition of his brother-in-spirit Mark Millar, Morrison’s only instinct is to splatter more blood, and have Nick say things that could be construed, optimistically, as parting shots even Bruce Willis would leave on the cutting room floor. Like Millar, Morrison seems to think there is a puritanical aspect of America that is shocked by such gruesomeness. But who can even be shocked by their own way of life? With or without an invisible friend, Happy! is a dreary ride through the mind of a self-involved person. Ultimately, this is a trip that each of can take at any time, simply by closing our eyes.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which This Could Be A Normal Family

The following review does not contain major spoilers for the second season of Stranger Things.

Life on Mute

by ETHAN PETERSON

Stranger Things 2
creators The Duffer Brothers
Netflix

It would be nice of everyone involved with Stranger Things 2 to offer a cut of this limited series without the non-original music. The aural shitposting in this dull sequel to the brilliant original becomes overwhelming somewhere during the eighth rendition of a Duran Duran track that, I'm sorry, was not very good to begin with. The incessant period soundtrack is all the more disappointing and generic-sounding because the original music, composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon of Survive, is so much better than the trash that horrendous decade emitted from its orifices. But whatever. Maybe that is the least of the problems in this meandering return to Hawkins, Indiana.

New this season is Max (Sadie Sink), a fetching redhead at the school where Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Will (Noah Schnapp) spend most of their time moping. Once these boys used to play Dungeons & Dragons and go on adventures. With the onset of early puberty, everything has turned to shit. Fuck Jim Croce, Duran Duran, Ted Nugent, Al Casey, Dan Quayle, Roy Orbison, Pat Benatar and Olivia Newton-John. Fuck The Police.

Time is also out of joint for Mike's sister Nancy (Natalia Dyer). Nancy is already beginning to look like her mother; her fresh-faced joie de vivre has pretty much entirely vanished. She spends most of her time complaining to her sometimes boyfriend Steve (Joe Keery), who has given up his college ambitions in order to enter his father's business. Hawkins is the saddest town in the world, and unlike the sonorous mystery of the original, here the main question is whether Will, who returned from the upside-down at the end of last season, will be able to sleep through the night.

Winona Ryder has, for some reason, entered into a passionate relationship with Bob (Sean Astin). Astin is meant to bring us conjoined memories of The Goonies (Fuck The Goonies); instead he and Ryder have all the natural chemistry of a frog inside a shoplifted handbag. Ryder in particular is given almost nothing to work with this season. At least last time out she was believably concerned, driven to find her missing son. Now she is completely aimless, and financially provided for by a man who looks like a lugwrench.

It is kinda weird that Stranger Things 2 focuses so much on the romantic aspect of the show, because that is exactly the kind of material the Duffer brothers cannot write, like at all, even if you gave them a million pages. First of all, love between middle schoolers ain't exactly the most fertile territory to begin with, and high school ardor is barely better.

When Nancy drunkenly tells Steve how little she cares for him and that their relationship is bullshit, the show just has her pretend her subconscious was doing the talking. That way she is not actually a functional character, but simply a Mary-Sue-esque projection of what men require from their women. At one point I thought if I saw Nancy in one more turtleneck I was going to scream.

Stranger Things distinguished itself in the way it wrote believable and meaningful storylines for young people, brought to life by a substantial and broad cast of child actors. All that is still present, although the acting of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is clunky and poor overall. Stranger Things 2 could have used a whole lot more imagination regarding what young people actually feel and think. The boys of this story are either bracingly mature and completely naive, sometimes within the same scene. Mostly it is hard to tell, because the Duffer brothers are focused on the more pandering, comedic side of what they created.

Well, that was all a mistake. Instead of a generic shadow monster, they had a chance to actually make something that blended horror with a realism of time and place that added to, rather than subtracted from that intrinsic aesthetic. Instead, Stranger Things 2 is a watered-down retread of the first, chock full of the fan service that should have only come after they ran through their original ideas. Or did they have any in the first place?

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which The British Empire Returns In Full Force

The Crater

by ETHAN PETERSON

The Last Post
creator Peter Moffat
BBC One

Honor Martin (Jessie Buckley) arrives at RAF Khormaksar in Yemen at a most inopportune time. She has been taken into the final belch of the British colonial experiment when no one in her right mind should have ventured into such a place, let alone an Irish woman, let alone as a British subject. It is a good thing that Jessie Buckley, most recently of Steven Knight's disastrously dull series Taboo, is probably the most exciting young actress in the entire business, because the rest of The Last Post is a morbid, gloomy, and somewhat racist affair.

Under more normal circumstances - say a Gosford Park-clone set in turn of the century India? - Buckley would be outshone by her counterpart, the salacious, sexual, adulterous, sexual Alison Laithwaite (the versatile, flexible Jessica Raine). But not even the sun could diminish how appealing any redhead looks in a desert biome. Honor Martin's husband is the dreadful Joe Martin (Jeremy Jones), the most generic British soldier one could ever imagine. This is no matter, because The Last Post is all about fast-forwarding past the nonsensical conversations men have about subject like torture, imperialism and the love of fellow soldiers and country and getting to the really important material: sex in the time of cholera.

For an ostensibly historical series, The Last Post makes a disturbed mess of its past. It treats the Sunni and Shia residents of the region as relatively indistinct, and only barely pauses to consider that they might have slightest justification for their violence. Which is not to say there isn't a lot of "both sides," just that I can't realistically argue one of those sides.

Again, though, the parallels to the current war on terrorism are pretty much exhausting and exhausted. Politics has become a separate field of inquiry; whatever relevance it bears to our actual day-to-day existence can only be described as a painful imposition. This similarity is present in 1960s Yemen, which is actually South Africa disguised as Yemen since it is more practical to shoot The Last Post there. It's a desert, though, and one looks like another.

Let me get back to Jessie Buckley. Sometimes they put her in citrus colors, and you can barely look at the screen, but mostly she is rotating through a very entertaining set of outfits. She pops out such bon mots as, "I should check on George" and "This will be our honeymoon!" as if they were actual things a person would say. She has the innate ability to make anything believable.

In contrast, we first meet Jessica Raine's Alison when she is underneath a soldier who is not her husband. She moves her body less precisely when she is not engaged in sex, but in any capacity she wields it like any actor should. She is really the only innately interesting character here, and her disease is that of Britain as a whole — the completely forgivable sin of inflated self-importance.

Is this an oblique warning to America, or am I just getting paranoid? This disturbing reiteration of the basic lessons of Mad Men has been extremely shocking to British viewers, particularly a scene in which Alison attempts a homemade abortion. If this had been on Mad Men, people would have barely talked about it the next day. She never actually does it, which is the difference between the two.

As in The Last Post's American inspiration, children play a critical role. It is they who are continually thrust into the thick of danger, whether that be in the water or in the darkness. Creator Peter Moffat is intent on replicating the symbolism that inevitably ensues when we thrust children into the danger meant for adults. No responsible society could live with this state of affairs, so the implication is devastatingly clear.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.