The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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3:28pm on Tuesday, 16th August, 2022:
Anecdote
I finished watching The Sandman yesterday.
I don't usually watch a lot of TV, because time spent watching TV is time spent not playing games, but I'd heard many good things about this series so I persuaded my wife to create a gap in her busy schedule of watching episodes from all ten series of Stargate SG-1.
Hmm. Well I haven't read the comics that The Sandman TV series is based on and don't expect to, so it was all new to me. It started off as if it was going to be a series of stand-alone episodes with a light overall arc, then suddenly it became an actual series that you need to watch the next episode of to find out what happens. I preferred the stand-alone format, but because it can be watched back-to-back it wasn't too annoying when it switched to a serial format in the second half.
The acting was excellent overall, although I could have done with a better-voiced raven. I also found Tom Sturridge's head distractingly block-shaped, which didn't affect his acting but affected my viewing. I think part of the reason the acting was so good was because the characters were so well-rounded; it's easier to get your teeth into a part when there's something of substance into which to sink them. Also, hiring good actors works wonders. Lucifer, Death and Rose were made by the acting. Hob and Johanna were spot on, too.
There seemed to be rather a lot of literary allusions made. This kind of thing seems to be regarded as clever by students of literature, but in games we just call them Easter eggs and don't accord them any kind of pretentious meaning whatsoever (which is lucky for those designers who put them in for reasons of pretension). I'm not a fan of such allusions, in fact it was the presence of so many of them in the SF magazine Interzone that caused me not to renew my subscription to it in the 1990s. They're generally superficialities disguised as depth; some genuinely are deep and do have an important place, but not if over-used and not if you can't tell them from the shallow ones. I was starting to get irritated by the end of the series, but not enough to make me dislike it.
There seemed to be a lot of sex going on. OK, the series is about dreams so this is perhaps to be expected, and it did help flesh out some of the characters, but it was getting a bit repetitive towards the end. There was a heavily disproportionate amount of same-sex activity, but that makes sense if you want to ensure that it covers the full range of characters, good and bad. It was a similar thing with character race: if you only have one or two examples of an ethnic minority then if the characters are evil it will look racist and if the characters are good it's going to look like tokenism. Broadening the base worked well.
I expect there'll be a second series, and I expect to watch it. I shall resist looking up the plots from the comics. I'm a little worried it'll start pulling in more ready-made characters like Lucifer, because that's how over-use of allusion tends to go, but I'm hoping that they'll be bit players and the story will focus more on characters of the author's own invention.
Right, now I can head back from Gaiman to game man.
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Copyright © 2022 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).