The Last Of Us

Fungi To Be With

The Last Of Us
Canada/USA 2023
9 episodes Jan - March 2023

A quick, shout out of a review for The Last Of Us, a TV show based on a successful Playstation game of the same title. It’s not one I’ve played as I kinda stopped playing video games around the same time I started writing this blog (too much of a time suck). So I don’t know how faithful it is to the original storyline but I do know this new one includes a fungal infection that is the exact same one, as observed in ants, as was used in the original novel and movie of The Girl With All The Gifts (reviewed here and here). And it takes place in a similarly bleak, post-apocalytpic wasteland where small clumps of humans divided into various factions struggle to survive in the world which all went to hell 20 years prior.

Interestingly, the post apocalyptic work is set contemporary to when we’re watching as an audience so, yeah, the fungal-zombie apocalypse started twenty years prior to this. We see the first night where civilisation collapses in the very first episode and, I’d have to say the series starts off strongly at the very least. We meet main man Joel, played by Pedro Pascal, as he loses his daughter to violence that first night and this starts him off on the path to becoming an embittered smuggler in the post-apocalyptic world. Then, as part of a trade, he agrees to escort a tough, 14 year old girl across the country to find a resistance group hospital (like I said, despite everyone trying to survive, there are warring factions in the dregs of humanity left after the events in the first episode) to use her blood as a cure for mankind. Ellie, played absolutely brilliantly by Bella Ramsey, is immune to the fungal infection. That is to say, she is infected but shows no signs at all of infection... as she isn’t a lethal zombie-like creature trying to infect you within 12 hours of being infected herself. You’ll find out just why she’s immune in the pre-credits sequence of the last episode in season one.

Pascal is also very good with this and he plays a really cold and ruthless character who, suprise surprise, softens to Ellie and bonds with her before the end of season one. Bonding exercises include surviving the infected, surviving the ruthless leader of a rebel faction who is after them (played by the great Melanie Lynskey from Yellowjackets, reviewed here and here), various raider groups, ill health (when Ellie has to stitch up a bad knife wound on the barely conscious Joel and trade for penicillin, barely escaping from the ‘Christian Cannibals’ she makes the trade with) and various other gnarly events.

And, it’s okay I guess. It’s not hugely brilliant and I’m not too sure why it’s caught the popular imagination so much but, although it’s fairly clichéd and very predictable. it’s well made, well acted and is nice to look at. Some of my favourite moments are ‘nature against the wreckage of humanity’ shots... such as a frog jumping on the keys of a piano in a half destroyed hotel or a bunch of giraffes between wrecked tower blocks. So there are some poetic moments and it’s things like this that kept me watching.

Another positive is that there are few episodes which aren’t self contained. I think there were two where things were left on cliff hangers to resolve in the next one but it’s more like a 1970s TV show in terms of just having a central mission with a new adventure each week. Most of the episodes crosscut between a character in the early days of the fungi-zombie pandemic and the present day which, is an okay way to do it but it gets a bit overworked by the end of the show... although there’s a lovely episode which tells Ellie’s back story and shows just what... or rather who... she lost to the virus herself.

And that’s me done on this one. The Last Of Us is a well put together show and has a lot of entertainment value and some good acting from the leads. The mushroom people (as I like to call them) are not particularly credible, it seemed to me, so I did find it hard to get too worried about them, once I’d finally seen one. All in all, it’s a better show than most of the ones that, say, Disney are putting out these days (yeah, I’m talking about their Star Wars and Marvel shows) and I’d certainly watch a second series... which I’m assuming will be based on the sequel game. Not the best of modern TV shows but certainly not the worst either.

Loki

Low Key Ending

Loki - Season 1
June 9th to July 14th 2021
6 episodes

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Wow, you know, this one was almost a great TV show, it has to be said. It has one huge problem which, at least temporarily, kinda puts a damper on things but, yeah, for the most part this was highly entertaining and a much more interesting, if paranoid, take on the Marvel Cinematic Universe... or, you know, the Marvel Dodgy Internet Streaming Universe as it’s now become, as Disney try and milk and dilute all their newish acquisitions to squeeze the maximum profit out of them (although I did appreciate the oblique reference to Captain Hook in one of the episodes in this show).

Loki follows the further antics of the ‘split away’ variant version of Loki, played once again by Tom Hiddleston, after he diverges from the established timeline during the addition to the epilogue scene, so to speak, of The Avengers (aka Avengers Assemble, reviewed here), as shown in the time heist sequence in Avengers Endgame (reviewed here). It reruns some of that scene and then continues after Loki escapes, thus branching off into a new variant timeline, before his future adventures leading to his ultimate demise at the hands of Thanos ever happened. But then, straight away, he is captured by agents of the seemingly all powerful TVA (the Time Variance Authority) and it gets all ‘Brazil at it’s most Kafkaesque’ for a while as he is processed and, unlike many of his allies, instead of being disposed of in ways I won’t mention due to spoilers and things we find out later in the story, he instead gets recruited to help Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson.

So a ‘dangerous variant’ of Loki, one of many it turns out, is taking out various TVA agents through time and stopping them from fulfilling their ultimate purpose... which is to police the one true timeline and prune any variances which might branch off into alternate timelines. After working through some trust issues, Loki and Mobius team up with the wonderful, troublesome variant they have been pursuing... Sylvie, played brilliantly by Sophia Di Martino. The chemistry between these three actors and their co-stars is absolutely amazing, I must say and the writing on this show is, mostly pretty good too... with a caveat.

Okay, so one of the things I liked about this is that it’s a heavyish look at the concept of time travel and how you would police such a thing. It’s pure science fiction and, unlike a lot of the Marvel films, which to be fair aren’t always all out explosion fests, this one doesn’t have a heck of a lot of action. Which is not a bad thing because this still has some pacing to it and there’s usually one fight or chase per episode, for those who crave such things.

There are also some very nice moments which depict other variants of characters in different guises... so there’s an alligator Loki, for example and, if you look at a small part of the screen in a particular digital tracking shot in one episode, when Thor’s hammer has just left the top of the screen it’s followed by a little ‘jumping frog’ version of Thor. Another great inclusion for, mostly just one episode apart from an epilogue and also a flashback recap, is Richard E. Grant who plays yet another variant of Loki and... this version of the character is costumed very, very closely to the version of him in the original Thor comics from the 1960s. Which was a nice thought. Also, it took her a while to get back to the franchise after her appearance in a couple of early episodes of Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D but Jaimie Alexander returns to the franchise as Lady Sif (apparently she’ll also be in the upcoming Thor - Love And Thunder movie too, which is good that she’s rejoining the series of films where her character debuted). So that was a nice surprise.

And then there’s the big problem with the series... the last episode. Things build up to a revelation and climax and... well... the answer to the whole plot of the thing takes forever and involves a lot of boring expository dialogue which I could really have done without. We already knew at this point that the series was being renewed for a second season and that may or may not be where this one continues but, certainly, it might also continue in the upcoming Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness movie and, quite possible, even the new Spider-Man - No Way Home movie scheduled for the end of the year (I say scheduled because the coronavirus pandemic isn’t going away anytime soon). So, yeah, nothing is really resolved and we’re left with a cliffhanger, of sorts which, given that I suspect it could be a while for even a second series to get sorted, is a bit of a downer... especially since this last one was a really boring episode when the rest of the show had been really cool.

And that’s more or less it. The music is good but, yeah, no CD release so I’m not investing any time thinking about this stuff anymore... quite often these days I’ll pass on a film or a TV show because there’s no CD of the soundtrack coming out and, yeah, whether I’ll bother getting around to the second series myself is anybody’s guess, if Marvel are going to keep just releasing dodgy downloads of the music instead of the real thing (and the same goes for a Blu Ray release... if it’s not physical then it really isn’t there).

Loki was, for the most part, quite a cool TV show which got incredible dull in the last episode but, may or may not continue from where it left off when we eventually get to a second season. I’m getting a little tired of trying to guess what Marvel’s never ending long term plans for the characters in these kinds of things are, though, so I’m feeling less invested in the whole MCU of late. I guess we’ll see what happens at some point.

Tales Of The Gold Monkey

Monkey Shines

Tales Of The Gold Monkey
UK Airdate: From November 1982
Universal DVD Region 2

Tales Of The Gold Monkey was one of my all time favourite TV shows when I was a teenager. A pity, then, that it ran for only one series, broadcast over here in the UK on Monday evenings to pick up a family audience. I believe the reason it only ran for one season, despite winning a load of Emmys for things like set and costume design, is because it was just too darned expensive to produce for the ratings it was earning, being as the whole show was set in 1938. There were also a lot of people saying that it was just trying to ride the Raiders Of The Lost Ark bandwagon, of Spielberg’s big hit from the year before, although the truth was that it was more inspired by certain films from the Golden Age of Hollywood  than it was by the 1981 blockbuster (and also a series of ads about a bar called the Brass Monkey in the East... the original working title for the show was Tales Of The Brass Monkey). Although, having said that, I bet it took the popularity of Indiana Jones to get the show green lit by the studio.

So anyway, I was always on the look out for a second series but none ever came. I had a poster magazine and an annual (still have these, I think) but, alas, the brilliance of the show was in vain and it was lost to time. Until about ten years or so ago when a DVD was finally released in this country of all the episodes, including the original pilot film, which had something of a small but important cast change from the full series.

The show followed the exploits of pilot Jake Cutter, played by Stephen Collins (who we all knew over here from his role in Star Trek - The Motion Picture, reviewed here), who piloted cargo for cash in his Grumman Goose G-21 seaplane, named Cutter’s Goose and lived in one of the rooms at the Gold Monkey bar on the island of Boragora. There he had weekly adventures with his trusty, forgetful, comedy sidekick Corky (played by the wonderful Jeff MacKay), his romantic interest Sarah Stickney White (played by Caitlin O' Heaney, who posed as a singer in the bar but was really an undercover government spy) and Jack the dog (played by Leo the dog). I’ll get to Jack in a minute because, as far as I’m concerned, he was the most important character in it.

Other regulars included the bar’s owner, Bon Chance Louie (played by Roddy McDowell... a role played by Ron Moody in the pilot episode), Princess Koji (a formidable Japanese princess played Marta DuBois on a neighbouring island who fancied Jake and was always trying to get him into her hot tub), Todo (the Princess’ loyal bodyguard played by John Fujioka), Gushie (Louie’s wheelchair bound waiter played by Les Jankey... being an interesting concession to actors with disability which you rarely saw on TV in those days) and, last but not least, the Reverend Willie Tenboom (played by John Calvin). This last character was very interesting because I’m not sure you’d get away with him on family TV these days. Reverend Willie Tenboom was actually another undercover spy, a German spy as it happens, who would take the native island ladies into his church to regularly ‘bless’ them. Which was the Gold Monkey euphemism for having sex with them. Many a joke in the show came from situations where young ladies of his congregation would come in for their regular daily 'blessings' and with him almost, but never quite, getting caught in the act. I imagine it might be a little problematic these days but, back then, people were a little less uptight than they seem to be these days about stuff like the mix of sex and religion.

And, yeah, it’s a great show. The first pilot episode really set the scene and showed you the close relationship between Jake, Corky and Jack the dog. It opens with Jake accidentally mistaking his codes with Jack and losing Jack’s fake eyeball in a gambling game. The dog is extremely intelligent, in fact. More so than any of the human cast, it turns out. Intelligent enough that he always barks one woof for no and two woofs for yes. Jack always knows what’s going on and, if you listen to his barks throughout the show, you’ll know when the heroes are chasing a dead end or not.

Jack the dog isn’t just a minor character though. He’s a real co-star and, considering he was a stray found in an alley before the show commenced filming, I’m amazed at the level of training the dog seems to have had. The thing is, though, you have to have been watching the show from day one because the key to Jack’s barks is only mentioned a couple of times, early in the series. And it’s interesting in that a lot of the comedy moments throughout the show come from Jack’s bark. So, for example, Jake Cutter will say something like... “Don’t worry, it will be fine. It’s only etc.” and Jack will bark once, completely contradicting him and undermining his companion’s, not to mention the audience’s, faith in Jake. And like I said, Jack’s never wrong and often solves any mysteries coming their way long before his human co-stars have figured things out. If it wasn’t for Jack, this show would have been a lot duller and it’s a shame the series was so short lived because he deserves to take his place alongside such famous screen dogs as Rin Tin Tin, Lassie and Asta (from The Thin Man films). Some of the sequences with Jack would sometimes get quite surreal too, with occasional Japanese subtitles springing up so a native speaker could understand whether he was barking yes or no. Ah, yes, I loved this show.

And yeah, it was a mostly light hearted series with lots of fist fights (that Monkey Bar saw a lot of action) and gun play. A proper 1930s style action adventure series that, while clunky at times (count the engines on a plane or funnels on a ship and then match them up to the found footage long shots... it’s as bad as the changing horse counts on the stage coaches from long shot to close up in the old Maverick series), it was a real antidote to a lot of the other shows airing at the time. There were, of course, other period set adventures around in the wake of Spielberg’s Raiders but... this was easily the best and most entertaining of them, for sure. There was even, on occasion, a more serious, heavily dramatic episode... such as Last Chance Louie, where Jake races to clear Louie’s name in a self confessed murder and rescue him from the fate of the guillotine (with Collins also meeting one of his future wives on the set... Faye Grant, who people might remember from the original incarnation of V). He just manages to do this but the wonderful surprise reveal in that episode and the motivation behind Louie owning up to the murder, is really tragic and was pretty intense for what was, for the most part, a frothy and fun TV show.

So, well, I don’t want to say too much about this series because, it is around on DVD and, seriously, if you like adventure TV shows then Tales Of The Gold Monkey is definitely the one to watch. I suspect it’s not had a modern revival nowadays because of certain allegations made about the lead actor in 2014 which he more or less admitted but, wow, I’d like to see this show get the recognition it deserves now with a young audience. This was high quality escapism of the finest kind.