First off, since the last post mentioned Being Human, which is now completely over forever (allegedly), I may as well start by commenting further on that.
Briefly, I wasn't entirely happy with the way it ended for several reasons.
For a show that started as a comedy drama about three supernatural beings trying to fit in to the human world, it ended up venturing way too far into the supernatural side of things. Its strength was in its smallest, most mundane moments, highlighting the inherent ridiculousness of everyday life by framing it in a deliberately exaggerated light. The further it got into its supernatural lore, the more confused it became, particularly where it cherry-picked what to accept as 'truth' and what to gloss over... And, much as I liked the 'new' trinity by the end of this final series, they introduced a lot of inconsistencies - my particular bugbear being Hal's history: he was described as "one of the Old Ones", yet he was turned (much like Mitchell) by an existing vampire as he lay dying, a casualty of war... So, was he 'an Old One', or merely older than most other vampires around in the here and now?
In the grand finale, I found myself expecting a grand Inception-style cliffhanger on two different occasions. I can't remember one of them, but the other was Hal looking in the mirror after Alex found herself alive and bleeding, and Tom found himself wolfless. How perfect would it have been to just cut to the credits from Hal's face, snorting at whatever he saw in the mirror, but never actually revealing it?
But what really got my goat (so to speak) was the sudden revelation in this final series that vampirism and lycanthropy were "curses from the Devil", and that 'killing' the Devil might actually end that curse for any or all of its victims. Again, the series had been largely atheist in its approach to things, so bringing the Devil into the picture in the final series didn't make much sense. George, Mitchell, McNair, Tom and Hal represented the darker side of humanity, our repressed self-loathing, fears and desires, no religious trappings were ever necessary. Having brought the Devil into it, however, and having followed Kevin Smith's example by 'trapping him in a human body', you're still on quite dodgy theological ground if killing that human body also kills the Devil. The trick worked in Dogma because Smith never said the body's death would kill God, it would only trap Him... But this Devil also followed the example of Azazel in the movie Fallen - he could transfer from one body to the next as long as he escaped before the body died... but, unlike Azazel, he didn't need to make physical contact to do so, and evidently needed to build up sufficient power beforehand, through malicious acts.
In many ways, I think Being Human's effective story ended when George staked Mitchell and told him "I'm doing this because I love you". It was one of the most beautiful, bittersweet moments Television has ever presented (helped immeasurably by Russell Tovey's charming vulnerability, and Aiden Turner doing a Han Solo). The cliffhanger of the remaining friends standing together against the impending vampire threat was a more fitting end to the series, because it was far more ambiguous.
The finale had its moments, though... The Devil's speech to the nation was well-written, if a little obvious and unoriginal, and Hal's line that the desire to be human is the end, not the beginning, of one's journey toward humanity, was excellent... if only his twitching between 'Good Hal' and 'Bad Hal' hadn't been so grating.
Riding in on Being Human's coat tails, BBC3's new supernatural drama is In The Flesh, a slightly clichéd drama about 'rehabilitating' zombies (which could be allegorical of so many things...). I can see several things coming in the next two episodes. I shan't tempt fate by revealing them all here, but the preview of episode 2 reveals that the zombified son of the militaristic anti-zombie group's leader will be returning home, and so Things Will Happen. Some of these Things will no doubt involve the protagonist, Kieren. On the basis of the first episode, it seems OK... but there's a dark, angsty void where there used to be a show about the humour in humanity.
In other news, work is... progressing. I'd be lying if I said it was all rainbows and happiness, particularly over the last few weeks, during which I've been underemployed for rather too long, then been the only person giving a flying fuck about a print product which was woefully undersold (seriously, a sales team of something close to a dozen, yet only two people have made any sales on the next issue of the regular mag, and most of those happened months ago... I can see this thing returning to the grave all too soon), only to be blamed quite vehemently for one of the most minor cock-ups in the whole enterprise.
Yeah, don't worry about an Editorial team who can't spell... That's about par for the bloody course.
Don't get me wrong here - I screwed up, and I know it... but, as is always the way, now I know, I'm even more angry about it than the Sales Director who gave me a roasting... But that same Sales Director had no answers for the questions I sent her way (such as "where was the delegation within the chain of resposibility?", "why were so many people unavailable during the Production cycle?" and let's not forget "why were so few fucking ads sold in the first place?"), preferring to change the subject back to why everything that went (visibly) wrong with the product was directly my fault.
I was asked to log my time for this last month today, so my invoice can be properly broken down and money allocated from the correct budgets, and it was actually quite difficult. Partly because I just don't log my time at all, let alone accurately, so I had to figure it out by backtracking through recent jobs, but partly - to be brutally honest - because I've been twiddling my thumbs so damned much. I seem to have spent positively stupid lengths of time hitting the 'Get Mail' button in MacMail, or refreshing the bookings lists in Filemaker, only to find that - quelle surprise - nothing new has been sold in.
There was a burst of internal laughter today, when one of the Salespeople 'remembered' that a late sale package he offered a client recently included a free add in the next issue (and they wonder why they're not making money?). He phoned, strangely, to tell me he was going to add it to Filemaker... I kinda wish he'd left it to be a surprise.
