I am doing weekly reviews of The Last of Us at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Sunday evening while the show is on, looking at the video game adaptation as the show progresses. This week, the show’s seventh episode.
It’s an interesting proposition, adapting a serialised narrative after it has already been completed. In some ways, any serialised narrative is a first draft, a creative team making it up – to one degree or another – as they go along. As such, there is something very interesting in any subsequent adaptation of the work, as the adaptation has the luxury of a vantage point that can take in the completed work as a holistic entity. Left Behind was an add-on to the original video game version of The Last of Us, but the television series has the luxury of folding it into its ongoing narrative in real-time, as it were.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: adaptation, escapist, left behind, the escapist, the last of us | Leave a comment »
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Doctor Who: Arachnids in the U.K. (Review)
Arachnids in the U.K. is perhaps the best episode of the eleventh season of Doctor Who to date.
Arachnids in the U.K. feels like a nostalgic throwback to the Russell T. Davies era, which makes it feel of a piece with the first three episodes of the season. Executive producer Chris Chibnall has executed his spin on the traditional “present-past-future” triptych that was a hallmark of the early seasons of the revival, and so it is time to return to the contemporary United Kingdom in order to better develop the supporting cast and make some very broad political commentary about the modern world.
Finding its (eight) legs.
It is interesting to reflect on how far Doctor Who has come since its resurrection that this idea seems almost quaint, a nostalgic “back-to-basics” approach that seems lifted from thirteen years earlier. It is a valid and worthy approach to Doctor Who, and reflects Chibnall’s desire to make the show more populist and mainstream than it was during the more esoteric tenure of Steven Moffat. There is a reason that Davies was able to transform Doctor Who from a failed cult curiosity into one of the biggest things on British television using this template, after all.
At the same time, there’s something just a little worrying when the stand-out episode of the eleventh season feels like a perfectly serviceable mid-tier episode from the first four.
“Who is this Harriet Jones? I feel like we could make a deal with her. A tremendous deal.”
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Filed under: Television | Tagged: arachnids, Chris Chibnall, doctor who, donald trump, left behind, political commentary, sheffield, spiders, webs | Leave a comment »