september media roundup
midnight mass (netflix)
Watch the teaser for Mike Flannigan's Midnight Mass and you'd see a heartwarming story about a priest connecting with a disabled girl in a quaint small town. Watch the complete series and what you'll actually find is a strange, violent thriller with an ecclesiastical backdrop. It certainly kept me guessing; is this a story about faith? A horror flick? A parable about death? Midnight Mass falls somewhere between all three themes without fully embracing any of them, though it veers towards horror in the last two episodes.
Father Paul, the passionate but enigmatic priest.
There are a few particularly strong roles in the series. Hamish Linklater plays a convincing young priest brimming with the holy spirit, and Samantha Sloyan plays the chilling acolyte steeped too long in her own grandeur. These two kept the series aloft where it otherwise faltered. Alex Essoe was cast to play the geriatric mother of Annabeth Gish at only 29, and the effects team did not consistently pull off her supposed age. Wearing glasses and a head scarf does not a convincing disguise make.
This is clearly not an old woman.
Despite these casting weaknesses and a few wildly self-indulgent monologues between Riley Flynn and Erin Greene (seriously, I clocked one of them in at over five minutes), the series is a decently executed, original screenplay worth a watch.
rifters
My last read was Primary Healthcare in Cuba; The Other Revolution which contained some excellent research but left me wanting for something a little lighter. I settled on a series of novels titled Rifters by Peter Watts.
Don't be deterred by the tacky dust jackets.
The first, Starfish, brings us down to 1,000 meters and 100 atmospheres under the sea. A team of bio-engineered, incompressible divers act as saturation divers and operate without gear or decompression. Their chests are hollowed out and replaced with machines. Their eyes are obscured by photon sensors, and they spend their days nestled on the Juan de Fuca rift, adrift on a volcanic ridge they maintain to keep the generators running required to power 30th century North America.
Adding to the physical pressure, extensive psychological testing reveals to their handlers that those best suited to this isolated work are those "pre-distressed" souls who have experienced past trauma. The rifters grapple with both physical danger and fight l'appel du vide as they sink deeper into isolation and lose their sense of self.
She remembers the first time she dropped into the ocean this way, remembers the person who held her hand through that drowning ordeal. That person is gone now. The deep sea broke her and spat her out. Clarke wonders if it will do the same to Acton [as] she floods the airlock.
By now the feeling is almost sensual; her insides folding flat, the ocean rushing into her, cold and unstoppable [...] the Pacific slides through the plumbing in her chest, anesthetizing the parts of her that can still feel. The water rises over her head; her eyecaps show her the submerged walls of the lock with crystal precision.
It's not like that with Acton. He's trying to fall in on himself; he only falls into Clarke. She senses his panic, watches him convulse, sees his knees buckle in a space far too narrow to permit collapse.
He needs more room, she thinks, smiling to herself, and opens the outer hatch.
They drop.
This haunted setting makes for an incredible first book, but it isn't meant to last. The second novel sees our characters leave the Juan de Fuca rift and head for the surface -- which degrades the series from something unique to something closer to mundane. A novel plot line centered around biological computers and a pathogen make for a rather jarring transition in setting and purpose. Regardless, these first two novels are high quality hard science fiction. ▣