Perry Mason Series 2 (2023)

This Never Happened 
To The Other Della

Perry Mason
Season 2 - 8 episodes
March - April 2023
HBO 
Chinese Blu Ray 

Warning: Some spoilers

So the second and, regrettably, final series of the latest incarnation of the Perry Mason TV show, very loosely based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, sees the return of Matthew Rhys as Perry, his now partner Della Street, played once more by Juliet Rylance and the excellent Chris Chalk as his investigator (and ex-cop from the first series), Paul Drake. 

And it’s all pretty great... perhaps even better than the first season. 

This one involves the murder of the son of the boss of a corrupt, crooked oil man and two young men who are accused of his shooting. Sworn off criminal cases since the outcome of the first season, Perry and the gang go right back into it, defending the two gentlemen but, as we soon find out, through the course of the investigation, the two may not be as innocent as they at first seem. 

And like the first one, the show does some great work looking like a somewhat authentic 1930s milieu. I spotted a drawing of a certain big ape in the background of one of the shots (one of the two accused is a good artist and is accepted into art school... although he only hears about this after he is being held with his brother in a jail cell) dated it for me as being set in 1933 and, yeah, it’s confirmed later when Perry takes his young son to see King Kong (reviewed here) at the cinema. 

It all feels right to the period and, I’d have to say the art direction on this show is absolutely awesome. And, of course, the language and colour of the streets is perhaps more reflective of the times than, say, a movie of the time made contemporary to that period would be allowed to be (much like the use of language, slang and attitudes found in a James Ellroy novel set in, say, the 1940s or 1950s). 

The cast are all terrific and, although Perry’s former ‘friend with benefits’ Lupe, played by Veronica Falcón, returns for the first episode, she’s moved out of the narrative fairly quickly in order to build a new romantic interest for Perry in the shape of his son’s teacher, played by the always watchable Katherine Waterston. Another new actor to this, but only for the first couple of episodes and, used something as a plot device, is Sean Astin as a greedy and expanding store owner. 

Shea Wigham returns as Perry’s former investigator Pete Strickland but, now working for Hamlton Berger (a returning Justin Kirk), he has to balance his friendship with Perry with the fact that he is working against him in the case that Perry is working on and, yeah, the two do come into some pretty heavy conflict which has big repercussions for Perry as he finishes this second season. 

Also on board this time is the great Hope Davis but, her character is used in an interesting way and, though she doesn’t exactly have a huge spotlight in the series, she does have a lasting presence on the proceedings. Della Street also has a new flame in this, with Jen Tullock playing a character who, while not named as such, is based on real life Hollywood screenwriter Anita Loos. And the two of them are pretty good together in the show, it has to be said.

Okay, it looks like this is one of my shorter reviews but, this show really had some bite to it and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Gritty in all the right places and with some really great cliffhangers. The conclusion of the trial is not about the sudden piece of shock evidence which gets everyone off and, though there is some big evidence given, it’s mostly resolved behind closed doors and, well, there are repercussions for Perry due to something which is found hidden in his office when the opposing legal team have broken into it... lets just put it that way. I would love to see where a third season of Perry Mason would go but, alas, this one doesn’t seem to have been renewed, for whatever reason. A pity. Despite rumours to the contrary, we are not yet living in a time of television of great quality so, when a show does come along which does absolutely everything right, you’d like it to keep going.

The Rig Season 2

Oil Be Back

The Rig
Series 2
6 episodes Jan 2 2025
UK Wild Mercury Productions

I had a lot of good things to say about the first series of The Rig, not least of which came down to the excellent acting skills of the ensemble cast including stand out performances from the likes of Iain Glen, Emily Hampshire, Owen Teale and Martin Compston. I also said I was unsure why the series was left open ended on a cliff hanger of sorts and, considering the title of the show, after the giant tsunami is released, surely the only place the helicopters carrying the survivors could possibly go is to another rig. Which is, it turns out, exactly what happens.

This one is a bigger, luxury rig which can also move itself around if needed but the majority of the surviving ‘extras’ from the first show are taken back to civilisation after signing problematic gagging orders by the company that is trying to end ‘the ancestor’, as the Cthulhu-like presence beneath the sea has been dubbed in the first series.

The problem with this second series is that, asides from the acting, it doesn’t really have a lot further it can push forward on the science fiction/horror element of the show, it seems to me. So we have the two characters played by Owen Teale and Rochenda Sandall going back to the broken, post tidal wave UK to look for Sandall’s character’s wife while the main cast from the last one are playing survival games on the new rig. That is to say, the human villain, Coke (played by Mark Addy) is trying to stop the mysterious species beneath the ocean while the crew of the previous rig are trying to stop him.

Now, don’t get me wrong... it’s fast paced, very dramatic and never gets boring at all. A pretty entertaining package all around, I would say... but it’s nothing really new it’s showing us here from last time around. At least not enough, I would say, to justify a second series. Also, the creature itself, while not in the background, certainly takes a seat far from the action for the most of the six episodes. None of the Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers style shenanigans in this series and the element of threat seems almost gone. It’s brought in every now and again but this second go round is more about the politics and butting heads of the various human cast trying to stop each other before it’s too late. This includes famous actress Alice Krige coming in as one of the big bosses of the company running the rigs. And, her character goes through a similar arc to what the underused (in this second series) Iain Glenn had to go through in the first one... coming out on the right side before the end of the last episode while the ambiguity of the allegiances of the character are explored by all and sundry.

The music is somewhat off in this one, I thought... at least in that you can kind of hear the temp track coming through and bleeding into the original score. I would be completely unsurprised if bits of Philip Glass alongside the main theme from The Terminator were used to temporarily score the rough cut of this show with, as the music feels more than just a little reminiscent of these too in certain areas.

Having said all that, big shout out to an actress called Molly Vevers in this. She’s a secondary character and doesn’t get all that many scenes but she’s got huge screen presence in the bits and pieces she’s in and she should be getting more work, I think. For this reason alone, I’m kind of hoping the series gets renewed for a third season at some point soon... while the story can easily be finished here, there’s a weird, last shot coda which I’m not entirely sure about (okay... I admit I didn’t understand what’s going on there and kinda don’t care truth be told) but The Rig has a good cast so I hope it gets picked up again.

And I don’t have much more to say about this one, I’m afraid. It was much ado about nothing but I still enjoyed it for what it was so would certainly be a part of the audience for a third part, if it comes up.

The Devil’s Hour Series 2

Loop Dreams

The Devil’s Hour Series 2
Directed by various
UK October 2024
Five Episodes

Warning: Very light spoilers for series one.

Okay, so when I reviewed the excellent first series of The Devil’s Hour (right here) I rightly praised it but was forced to conclude that it’s a bit of a one trick pony in terms of any future iterations. But, just to prove me wrong (and they really did), here comes Series Two. I wasn’t expecting much from it after the conclusion of the first series but, I certainly got more than enough here to keep me happy. This second season is easily the equal of the first... although it’s one episode shorter than the 2022 season.

One thing which I’m very happy about is that, after hearing a short interview with the main co-star Peter Capaldi (who plays the serial killer but on the side of righteousness, as far as we know) is that the story arc obviously has a very clear beginning, middle and end because the second and third seasons have been shot back to back and the third series will definitely be the final one (although I suspect it won’t actually get a release until October 2025 or 2026).

All the cast return here, including Capaldi as Gideon, the always brilliant Jessica Raine as Lucy (in at least two different iterations of her character and their respective occupations), Nikesh Patel as Ravi (who is a detective in both of his ‘versions’, so to speak), Benjamin Chivers as Isaac and Meera Syal as Isaac’s psychiatrist. They’re all absolutely fantastic in this, as are all their co-stars.

This one starts off with the Detective version of Lucy we were introduced to right at the end of the last series... we see her life post-Gideon and, I think (it gets confusing at first), we find that the future version of her character is the one who is talking to the ‘far future’ version of Gideon in this particular multiversal loop, which we saw towards the end of the last season. It all points to this second version of Lucy we know as living a life taking place before the main Lucy of last season... because when she dies, Gideon has her blessing to ‘wake her up’ in the next life (if I’ve got this correctly), which is what the first series was all about, it turns out.

The show continues after this following both Detective Lucy and the later (or previous, depending on your point of view) iteration of Lucy after the events of the first six episodes, crosscutting between the two and also the various versions of the other actors’ characters in their respective versions of their reality. Where this one gets interesting is that Gideon seems to be building, possibly by accident, a network of people who seem to be ‘awoken’ (sometimes tragically so) to their plight in the universe. This could possibly be a small group utilised in future loops of themselves, I suspect.

So the focus on this one is the explosion in the toy shop which kills so many children... primarily to find the identity of the bomber in the yellow hoodie. Now, we’ve not been shown his/her face as yet but it kind of seems obvious to me just who this person must be and, maybe it’s a bit obvious from the start (although I’m still hoping series three will be able to surprise me on that score... fingers crossed).
 
A couple of things of note though... they’re still hiding people in the background of shots on occasion. There’s a brilliant moment in the early stages of the second episode here where Lucy and Isaac are with their psychiatrist and, in one long shot only, another version of Isaac peeking out at them from behind the curtains is clearly visible in a ‘blink and you’ll miss him’ appearance. And it’s not just things like this which keep me watching because the show is just so gripping on its own but, heck, this is pretty good icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

Two minor gripes though... and they really are minor.

We still don’t know why the show is called The Devil’s Hour. The waking up at 3.33am is still a feature for at least one of the characters but there’s no significance attached to this at any point, it seems to me.

Secondly, when one of the Lucy characters is going through a lot of pregnancy test kits over a ‘time passing’ montage, we see her throwing each dud into her bathroom bin as each negative result comes to light. Alas, the dud kits are piling up on top of each other in the bin to suggest the passage of time but... yeah, honestly that’s ridiculous. I mean, I know, visual shorthand and all that but are they really expecting us to believe that this woman doesn’t ever empty her bin over a number of months? Or even let other rubbish pile up on top of it?

Other than that though... I was gripped and thrilled and, asides from feeling smug at least about the identity of the yellow jacketed bomber (to an extent), The Devil’s Hour continues to surprise me, certainly with the twists the story takes but, not least of all in that it actually manages to hold its own with the previous series. I’m absolutely, once again, flagging this show up as one to watch and... I just hope there’s a Blu Ray version coming up at some point down the line.*

*Got sick of waiting to show this one to my folks so I just ordered a ‘Korean Blu Ray’ of the first two.

Yellowjackets - Series 2

 

Wilderness Things

Yellowjackets - Series 2
USA March - May 2023
Series 2 Nine episodes

Warning: Some spoilerage.

Yellowjackets Series Two  is... mostly pretty good I’d have to say. Continuing from the point it left off, where one of the major grown up versions of a character was kidnapped on the point of suicide, this one details just what happened to her and the attempts of grown up Misty to find out who has kidnapped her and why. Meanwhile Shauna, her husband (played brilliantly by Warren Kole) and her daughter (Callie Sadecki) are trying to throw the cops off the scent of Shauna’s murder of her ‘fling’ in series one. Also, we have Taissa dealing with the fallout from her somewhat violent sleepwalking stints (as her reflection gazes back at her before doing its own thing, in some nicely chilling moments)... with symptoms of that being hallucinating a visitation from her son and putting her wife in a coma from a car crash in an early episode.

Of course, we also have the teen versions and various other ‘probably mostly expendable teen versions’ trapped in the wilderness with their now one legged coach, dealing with Shauna’s pregnancy and also, quite accidentally, getting into a taste for cannibalism... while they embrace the ideas and teachings of the teenage version of Lotte (Courtney Eaton).

And it’s pretty riveting stuff with all the cast from the first series back for the second, including Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Teen Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), Teen Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), Misty (Christina Ricci) and Teen Misty (Samantha Hanratty). There are also a couple of new members of the team. Firstly, the grown up version of Lotte (who has apparently spent at least ten years in a Swiss psychiatric hospital) is played by Simone Kessell. She’s now running a kind of cult retreat for troubled souls, which is a bit of a bad idea for that character when you think about it.

Also, we finally get to see who Teen Taissa’s red headed girlfriend, Van (performed wonderfully by Liv Hewson) is played by when she’s grown up. As Taissa somehow manages to drive to her VHS video store ‘While You Were Streaming’, we find that she’s played by the brilliant Lauren Ambrose.

Meanwhile, Misty gets some, at first unwanted, help from a fellow amateur but somehow millionaire crime sleuth... who is also probably a serial killer (I reckon)... played by Elijah Wood. All I can say is... they make a cute couple. And the song and dance stuff they do when Misty is availing herself of Lotte’s sensory deprivation tank is pretty silly (which means it’s cool, in my book).

And, yeah, it hurtles along at a pace with some nice momenta such as, when teen Shauna is talking to the frozen body of her dead best friend, it transitions from living actress to corpse version and back again between the cuts. When the two get in a tussle, Jackie’s frozen ear falls off and Shauna is mortified... except, by the end of the episode, she casually slips it into her mouth and eats it. Nice touch.

And everything hurtles towards the inevitable double cliffhanger ending for the girls in the ‘end of season finale’ episode... this season is an episode shorter than the first, for some reason. So in the back story, the girls barely escape their cabin burning down. While in the modern story, all the characters converge (including those pesky cops) in Lotte’s retreat where, things get fairly dramatic and a regular character dies (yeah... she’ll be back in some form, I reckon). Although, I’d have to say that, after a great lead in, I kinda found the last episode a little anti-climactic, truth be told.

Here’s the thing though... I think I’m getting a sense of where this might be going. Although... I kinda hope I’m wrong and this show manages to surprise me instead. There have been little clues, quite subtly hidden (or else I’m imagining them) that things from the present are kinda, maybe, bleeding back into the past. So I’ve got two theories where this might be going... especially since we now know how easy it is for any of the characters to be hallucinating and we also know, especially due to the episode dealing with Shauna’s first pregnancy, that the camera eye doesn’t always tell the truth. Furthermore, we also know the grown up versions of the characters have hazy memories about certain aspects of their past.

One idea I have is that, maybe the girls didn’t get out of the wilderness and have grown up there without realising they didn’t escape and have been collectively (or even singly) imagining their modern life. Which would be interesting, for sure. Or... the girls never escaped but they are still in that time and just imagining their future (which would be a bit of a cop out, truth be told). So, I kinda hope it’s not one of those things but... well, time will tell I guess.

Ether way, series two of Yellowjackets didn’t overly disappoint and I can’t wait for season three to arrive. Hopefully they’ll finish the story off with that one, maybe?

Killing Eve Series Two

Villian Hell

Killing Eve Series Two
BBC - Eight Episodes

Well this is an impressive follow up to last year’s pretty great TV show Killing Eve. In fact, I’ll even say that I enjoyed it much more than the first series. Although, it does have its problems....

For instance, the story is a little played out and once you have the basic premise explored in Series One, where the two main protagonists - secret service woman Eve (played by the great Sandra Oh) and crack international psychopath assassin Villanelle (played equally brilliantly by wide eyed Jodie Comer) - are clearly obsessed with each other and wanting to make some kind of, presumably intimate, connection - it gets a little flat. So the story takes on a lot of extra distractions to compensate, by way of new characters and ideas, to keep the suspense of that particular ‘relationship’ in play while trying to not draw attention to that padding in some places. However, the writers and performers (yeah... and everyone else) are all pretty successful holding the interest in both the characters and the shady, John Le Carre like shadow world in which they operate.

As the first series, the writers give a nice mix following both Eve’s domestic life grounding and then contrasting it with the almost surreal world inhabited by her nemesis/hero. There are also a few surprises which show up over the eight episodes comprising this second series including at least one character you might not have been expecting to see again in this one (yeah, don’t worry, this is a spoiler free review so I’m not intending to elaborate on that). There are also some, admittedly drama fulfilling, new characters brought into the mix but they are the best kinds of distractions when it comes to bringing in new things to fill the episodes with... that is to say, they are entertaining ones.

My favourite thing about this one is that it takes it’s time (at least two, possibly three episodes) to deal with all the fall out from the last 5 minutes of the final episode of series one before it gets all the main characters back to, at least some kind, of status quo. And the writers are still having fun with the dialogue in this, with some witty exchanges between various characters along the way.

And, getting back to those characters, some of them do have their interesting quirks which, as the first series, make this a pleasurable and pretty fast paced watch. The real problem with them, though, is that you can figure out just what purpose they are serving within the drama and so, yeah, a lot of what you are watching becomes fairly predictable for a lot of the time. It’s not totally the writers’ fault though because, clearly, when you’re weaving a story where treachery, deceit and the business of keeping your secrets close to your chest are the common currency in which this shadow world operates, you are bound to be expecting things to not be quite as they seem in the first place. So, yeah, alarm bells may begin to ring on this one from very early on but, frankly, this is still quite skillfully done with the audience at least still having to play guessing games about the intentions of some of the characters when everyone seemed to be fully revealed by the end of the last series.

So, for instance, Eve’s boss Carolyn, played by Fiona Shaw, is still one of those people where you are never really sure whose side she is on and whether the manipulations which are, to be fair, part and parcel of her job, are being played out for the right reasons or whether she may, indeed, be a member of the mysterious, ‘The Twelve’ which we keep hearing about (I expect we’ll get to that by the end of Series Three... they can’t keep circling these things forever). There’s also a nice cameo by Zoe Wannamaker as her boss in one episode.

Now, while I remind you that I loved this series and thought it was even better than the first one, I would have to say my biggest disappointment in Series Two was the last few minutes of the last episode. I don’t want to say here what happens but it’s both very predictable and also seems like it’s insulting the intelligence of the viewers, bearing in mind some of the things we’ve seen in the previous episodes. The ending feels kind of fake and only like it’s there to have a resting point. In fact, in some ways it felt like the end of Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed by me here) where you knew that things would not be left as they were and that’s very much the case here. Without giving too much away, we’ve seen miraculous recoveries and resurrections throughout the story so this one feels like it’s definitely not what it seems and there may even have been some collusion deliberately held back from the audience here to try and give some dramatic tension and to also allow a ‘stunning reveal’ next series. And I’m pretty sure there will be a ‘next series’ if you’ve already seen this one and know what I’m talking about here. I just hope they don’t deal with the fall out as clumsily and nonsensically as Marvel did with Avengers - Endgame (reviewed by me here) and that they treat certain characters more like they did at the start of this series.

Other than that though, Killing Eve Series Two is a pure delight to watch and, if some character deaths within Eve and her husbands non-work life and the introduction of a new female assassin, not to mention another psychopath character (which the new assassin definitely isn’t), seem somewhat obvious and lazy, well... at least they add to a lively and interesting series of entertainments and this thing certainly had me gripped right from the start, for sure. There are some nice dramatic set pieces and at least one wonderful, breakneck paced method of execution involving a lorry which is nicely staged and is as much about Eve’s reaction to what she just saw across the street from her as it is about anything else. People who loved the first show should eat this one up and I can only hope the third series will be with us sometime soon. This is one of the more high quality shows the BBC has been involved with.

Penny Dreadful Series 2

Judged Dread

Penny Dreadful Series 2
2015 USA Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Yeah, okay. So this review of
Season 2 will go the ‘spoiler route’.

The second series of Penny Dreadful is something I was especially interested in seeing because, although the little sub-plots involving the Frankenstein monster (played by Rory Kinnear), Dorian Gray (played by Reeve Carny) and Ethan Chandler (as played by Josh Hartnett) all obviously have a much longer course to run, the main story which brings together Chandler, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), Sembene (Danny Sapani) and Dr. Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) was pretty much finished with in the first series.

Now I was told that this second season is much stronger than the first but, although there is much to recommend in this one, I found it to be a little less compelling in places. Certainly the pacing, especially in the last few episodes, seems more than a little sluggish when compared to the previous series and although there is the sex, gore and action which helped make the first run so watchable, there seems to be less of this happening in this one and much more plotting and talking. Not that I mind this at all but I did find it a little duller than the first year, if truth be told.

One of the problems I had was the way in which the writers forged a new plot/danger to ensure our heroes stay together, for the most part, to defeat the latest menace together. After a strong opening which sees Miss Ives and Mr. Chandler attacked in a coach by naked witch creatures, we are eventually treated to a whole load of extra back story about Miss Ives which establishes that she is a practitioner of ‘witchery’ and which gives her a new enemy acting as a representative of ‘the devil’ who is already trying to claim her soul. It seems somehow clumsy to me that this is all brought into play only now, when so little of this has been mentioned after the lengthy examination of her back story in the first series. However, it does at least make use of Helen McCrory as Evelyn Poole, reprising her role from the first series and being given a more personal history with Miss Ives.

A couple of things which were pretty predictable in the first season do come to pass in this...

First and foremost of those being Billie Piper reincarnated from her previous dead character to become Lily... the latest iteration for the Bride Of Frankenstein (or at least the Bride Of Frankenstein’s monster... although not quite). With this performance, her character appears to be one thing but, as we learn later in the season, looks can be deceptive and Lily has a far less passive role in the impact of her life on others than you might at first suspect. The real problem with this character though is that although Billie Piper does an amazing job with her (I wouldn’t expect anything less from the lady in question), she does seem to be suffering from Clark Kent/Superman syndrome throughout the whole production. That is to say, in the DC comics involving Superman we are asked, for some strange reason, to assume that when he is wearing glasses, he is somehow disguised from being mistaken for Superman. This makes no sense, of course...

Similarly, in this incarnation as Lily, the previous version of the character, Brona Croft, is not in any way recognised by anyone other than, perhaps, that there is a strong probability that Dorian Gray does and can see something has happened to her. But only Dorian. Why? Because she’s had her hair dyed blonde... um. What? So, for instance, after having picked out dresses for her, when Miss Ives is asked by Frankenstein to meet his ‘cousin’, she doesn’t immediately say... “Oh, I remember you. You were my current love interest’s girlfriend I met outside the theatre in the first season... how come you’re not still dead?” Instead, she has no idea and goes about her business, Lilly’s golden tresses fooling even this cunning character. Um... yeah, okay.... moving on.

I said in the last interview that Ethan Chandler looked like he was well on the way to becoming another staple of Universal Horror after his werewolvery was finally revealed (or rather confirmed) at the end of the last series. I was, in fact, referring to the character that Lon Chaney Jr made famous as The Wolfman... Lawrence Talbot. Well, in this one the connection is tracked down by an interesting, one armed detective character, who himself seems to be a quick, half hearted nod to Lionel Atwill’s character in the 1939 film Son Of Frankenstein. Turns out Ethan’s Chandler’s real name is 'Ethan Lawrence Talbot'... so, yeah, as far as I know, Hartnett’s only the third person to play this role which, for most of film history, was played almost exclusively by Chaney Jr. Josh Hartnett’s role is more developed as a character in this one, where he’s shifted over from being the ‘hired hand’ to being a friend and protector to Miss Ives. He also makes friends with Sembene... a friendship which has tragic results in a much more traditional kind of problematic manifestation for the Lawrence Talbot character.

So yeah, we have intrigue and mayhem and we finally get to see ‘the portrait’ of Dorian Gray. Only a fleeting glimpse but it’s not done too badly although the character is almost something you feel the writers don’t quite know what to do with yet. He’s been pretty much at the periphery of the other character’s lives for two series now but you at least, at the end of this one, get the impression that he’s going to be thrown into the mix more when the next series hits, due to his unholy alliance with Billie Piper’s Bride of Frankenstein character.

All in all, there was enough to keep me interested in continuing to watch this second series and, once again, I really don’t know where they are going to go from here, being that each set of characters seems to have split up and gone to different parts of the world. The first trailer to the third season looks like none of them are together and I just hope that the series manages to find a credible way to reunite them all again at some point and, hopefully, fairly early on in the season... it’s the chemistry of having all these strong actors and actresses integrating with each other and also having to deal with their own subplots, in my opinion, that is one of the main strengths of the show.

Since I don’t have the fancy channels where programmes like this are broadcast, and I certainly don’t want to be left a the mercy of commercial breaks anyway, it looks like I’ll have to wait until near the end of the year before I’ll be able to catch up with Series 3 of Penny Dreadful but, certainly, this previous season was, at the very least, good enough so that I still want to. Although I think they could have done a little more with the creepy little dolls than they managed here.


My review of Series One can be found here.