It now offers a quite evocative rendering of 16th-century England. A Discovery of Witches is quite well staged, quite well written, has quite good special effects and is quite imaginative in how it deploys them. ![]() Season two’s arc looks set to try to inject some danger into proceedings by revealing that the Matthew of 1590 – he works the usual vampire shtick of having sucked blood at any major historical event you care to mention – was a canny political operator amid the betrayals and purges of Elizabethan England and may, therefore, have been a right bastard.Ĭan Diana reconcile herself to this? Will it distract from her quest to become a proper witch, find that damned book again and be the first magical creature to read it from cover to cover? With the show reluctant to rip cloth or spill fluids, the answers are likely to come in the usual form: some mildly terse conversations between characters who, whichever realm or eon they represent, talk like sensible, middle-class people. Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode are competent leads, but they look as if they want to sack off this netherworld palaver, climb into a Range Rover and hit David Lloyd’s for a jolly game of doubles and a nice Aperol spritz. Diana and Matthew committed themselves to each other fully about three episodes in, and have been comfy companions ever since. The big consummation in season one was over in seconds and somehow involved both participants keeping their trousers on, while the central relationship doesn’t work as an elegant, demure will-they-won’t-they romance either. Despite featuring vampires on the loose it rarely lets much blood flow, and the boffing between these two inhuman superbeings, whose ardour is meant to fuse two immortal, elemental forces, is strictly vanilla. In contrast, A Discovery of Witches is, considering the subject matter, painfully genteel. ![]() It would be disrespectful to Outlander fans to say they watch it purely for the cruel violence and desperately hot sex, but they’re certainly not skipping past them. But that comparison shows up what makes A Discovery of Witches drag. Outlander went a bit dour a couple of years back, so we have room in the schedules for a time-travelling love story that shifts to a different place and era when it gets bored with the old one. ![]() Instead we’re in musty Tudor chambers, ducking under gnarly beams and swapping exposition with Walter Raleigh and Christopher Marlowe, the latter played by Tom Hughes with an extreme side parting and a chip on his shoulder large enough to start a fire. In the season two opener at least, there’s almost no Trevor Eve as the leader of the bad vampires, eyes beady and hair swept up dead straight, like a furious silver-plated parasaurolophus no Alex Kingston as Diana’s reliable American aunty no sigh-worthy shots of Venice, the HQ of the shadowy “Congregation”, which in this story is fantastical creatures’ version of the masons. Now – in line with the second book in the bestselling All Souls trilogy by American novelist Deborah Harkness – they’re in London in 1590, and immediately there’s a crisis: Diana and Matthew have isolated themselves from the locations and ensemble cast that were the best things about the show. As we left them, our heroes had changed into loose tunics and were holding hands tightly as they prepared to evade the kerfuffle and decamp to the 16th century using Diana’s recently mastered ability to move through time. Meanwhile, Diana herself accepted that she is not just a witch but a uniquely powerful one, this epiphany coaxed out of her by her lover, a kind geneticist called Matthew who’s also a vampire.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |