Oooh, thank you. I really hope this doesn't start sucking now Bokenkamp has gone and the show's moving beyond his planned eight seasons. I'm fearful the new showrunner will treat this as a cops and robbers show rather than the witty, subversive, and gloriously woke show that it is. Fingers crossed. |
sure i agree, to a point. without spader's screen presence and his brilliant ability to deliver dialogue, which has also always been great to fairly good even at its lowest point, then this show would have died long ago. i mean he got the part as ultron's voice, which he was also brilliant at. and yes if he was painting i can only imagine the sweeping dialogue :D but to me the only really good parts of the following 4 seasons was spader's performances and glen's moments, which were just exceptional. the two really fed off each other. who red really is was a driving force for at least 3 of those seasons, without that question there is no season 5 and onwards. the writers pushed it. i certainly didn't. watching seasons 1-4 every episode was either a surprise or edge of the seat. what followed felt more like a studio pushing writers to produce rather than writers polishing their work. either way, i see the earlier seasons as the blacklist dictating the situations which then switched from then on. not sure how i would ever consider them as being side plot, but then we are all different and take different things from what we see. would be bloody boring if we didn't huh. imagine us ALL being ravinloons :D |
@RavinL00n Horses for courses an' all that but a) James Spader; I'd watch paint dry as long as he was the one doing the painting and b) the plot - surely? - has always been an afterthought, a mere add-on, a garnish in the Blacklist; the beauty of this show is in its subversive wit, its bold casting, its examination of the difference between ethics and morality and its bawdy (but camouflaged) sex jokes. It seems clear to me that for the first few seasons very few of the main cast were aware of this; they thought they were in a standard network cops and robbers show. Spader always got it. I'm confident the studio execs did not, otherwise the show would never have got made. And while these fine aspects of the show tailed off somewhat they were still strong in Season 8. Case in point for the scurrilous jokes - when Red et al are holed up in wherever-it-was and baddy of the season was outside with his men, Dembe says ‘They’re coming in front and back.’ Red replies ‘That’s never a good thing.’ The joke there is pretty obvious, no? So I’m hoping the people now running it are aware this was the point of the show; Red’s real identity and is-Keen-really-dead and so on are merely extraneous glitter. |
thx for the great torrent :) if i ever had any doubts that this show should have capped the bottle after the demise of mr kaplan then just one scene from this season opener really highlights the point yet again. i give you the scene in a hospital bed. dembe compares liz's death or maybe just grief in general, such was my immediate reaction to this thoughtless dialogue, as 'dead skin' which should just be cut away. i was even mildly entertained up to that point. we had 4 really good seasons, which clearly a lot of thought went into, they had structure. since then i have seen a massive plot hole open and the blacklist itself became a mere passenger rather than the drive for this show. season 5 should have answered all the questions or even left some mystery for fans to speculate over. instead the whole thing has been polluted by dairy maids milking it for all its worth without any real planning. hard to be a fan when what i enjoyed so much has been so over polluted |