Half-way through The Gilded Age season two: many Chekhovian guns not fired

When it comes to TV, I'm in a funny situation from a blog perspective. It's not that there aren't a lot of shows on that I'm interested in; it's just that we're in the middle of them, and I'd prefer to finish them before giving an opinion. The jury's still out on both The Crown season six and the Doctor Who specials (of which only one has aired so far) for different reasons. I'm still not sure what I think of The Crown, and am hoping the six remaining episodes will help me make up my mind. As for Doctor Who, if I review "The Star Beast" now, I risk overemphasising my complaints and forgetting about the good stuff, which includes the wonder of being able to watch the show on telly, at the same time as the UK. I'm hoping the remaining two specials will blow me away and make me more thankful.

So a mid-season report of The Gilded Age it is. Not that I'm certain of what my final verdict will be here either. I can only say so far, so good; however, it's still not a patch on Downton.

This is starting to be a problem, as it's the second season, and we should be past the awkwardness of the show setting out its stall. I think the second season of Downton was my favourite one, in spite of it being set during World War I (I'm not too fond of the World Wars as period-drama settings). So why is The Gilded Age, in spite of being entertaining and the best costume drama we've had in a while, not able to hit the same heights?

From a plot perspective, the show is suffering somewhat from late-Downtonitis. Remember how, in the later series of Downton, some storylines were spun out way too long because they constituted certain characters' "arc" for that particular series? The Green murder investigation comes to mind, as does Thomas (uncharacteristically, in my view) trying to medicate himself straight. (That last one didn't take the whole series, but it felt like it.) There's quite a lot of that sort of plotting in The Gilded Age. Mrs Russell is getting involved in the New York "opera wars". Mr Russell is facing strikes and disgruntled workers. Marian is being mildly courted by an eligible widower. And this, it seems, is what they will be doing all season.

These storylines are left simmering, with a desultory mention here and there, without ever really coming to the boil. I can better face the romances moving slowly than, say, the opera plot, which isn't very thrilling to begin with. But I'd prefer a faster pace all round, where the same character could be involved in more than one major occurrence per season. Just look at how comparatively action-packed Downton series two, episode two was. Both Edith and Thomas loved and lost during the episode, and that was far from all that was going on. Afterwards, Fellowes found new things for them to do. No need to dwell on love interests that aren't going to lead anywhere.

A reason for the drawn-out plot threads is, I suspect, that the show has too many characters to juggle. We have the Brook/Van Rhijn household, the Russell household, and Peggy and her parents. It's a lot, especially as both the Russells and Agnes Van Rhijn keep an impressive number of servants. The result is that many of the characters are still pretty sketchy, and I have a problem even remembering their names. You can see that it would be quite a challenge to furnish them with more than one seasonal story arc per head.

Another problem is that two of the characters that get the most screen time – Bertha Russell and Agnes Van Rhijn – are so hard to feel anything for. I still don't understand what's behind Bertha's social ambitions, and I would much rather get some real insight into Agnes's psyche than hear any more of her Dowager Countess-isms. Last season she was at least a good employer to Peggy, but this season she's just stuffy and awful, apparently without reason. We need some introspective scenes with these ladies fast, or we'll never know why their sister and husband respectively bother with them.

Having said that, other characters and plot lines are more of a success. George Russell is still a cynical delight. Ada Brook is lovely, and I found her autumnal love affair so engaging I basically spent one episode holding my breath fearing that Agnes would spoil it. I'm intrigued to see what happens with disgraced businessman-turned-valet Watson, and how Peggy will disentangle herself from her budding romance with a married man. I can watch Oscar fortune-hunting unsuspecting (or maybe not) heiresses all day. And while the servants of both households haven't had a lot of juicy drama coming their way so far, I do like them and hope that better things will be waiting just around the corner.

I also sort of admire Fellowes's disregard for the "Chekhov's gun" principle, which – sorry, Chekhov – I find to be an overrated piece of storytelling advice. How predictable wouldn't stories be if a gun introduced in act one were always to be fired in act three? Fellowes doesn't scruple to introduce a lot of false trails, as he did in Downton. Oscar's ex-lover simply gave up wooing Gladys Russell out of spite. Peggy's child died, so she won't be hunting for him the whole season. Her visit to the South might, after the foreshadowing of her worried mother's warnings, end up with her witnessing the lynching of one of the bright young people she has optimistically interviewed. Or it might not. Julian Fellowes keeps us on our toes and makes life difficult for people like me who enjoy making predictions.

The latest episode, where Fellowes actually lets a momentous change take place for one of the main characters mid-season, leaves me to hope that the drama will soon pick up the pace. Meanwhile, it is still an enjoyable stroll.

Villain redemption and free will: of course I like Loki season two!

Oh joy, Loki stuck the landing! While I'm not quite as invested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as in, say, Star Wars – I'm fairly new to it after all – it's always a relief nowadays when an MCU project does well and wins the approval of its far from uncritical fanbase. Not to mention that it's great to be able to enjoy the project in question myself without too many quibbles coming in the way.

On balance, I think I liked season two of Loki even more than season one. I had a good time with season one, but I was still adjusting to the fact that Loki wasn't really able to flex his villainous muscles in his own TV series. Also, the over-complicated set-up of the series bothered me, and I wasn't completely won over either by Loki's love interest and alter ego Sylvie or the TVA setting. In season two, we have the set-up out of the way, and though a lot of the storytelling is still labyrinthine, its complications are more enjoyable.

Now we have Loki's whole character arc, it makes more sense to me and increases my appreciation of season one as well. What we saw in season one was Loki's change from a villain to an anti-hero. What we see in season two is his change from an anti-hero to a hero.

Whoa, you might say. Isn't the whole point of Loki that he's a villain? When the shady TVA Hunter X-05 tells him: "Stop trying to be a hero, man! You're a villain. You're good at it. Do that", I for one thought he had a point. However, when push comes to shove, I'm a sucker for a good villain-redemption story, if only it's done right. Loki, ultimately, pulled it off.

I was irritated in season one by the apparent attempt to cram several films' worth of character development into one episode, as Loki was treated to a whistle-stop tour of how the rest of his life would have played out if he hadn't diverged from the "sacred timeline". But I can live with it now as this was only the start of his long and bumpy road to redemption. He made friends with Mobius, but it didn't end there. He fell in love with Sylvie, but it didn't end there. He realised he cared more about her than about ultimate power, but it didn't end there. Season two started with him working apparently selflessly to save the TVA and potentially all of existence, but we still weren't done with the character development stuff.

While the first episodes of season two reminded me of Doctor Who with its time-jumping quirkiness – the lovable engineer and overall fixer Ouroboros (O.B. for short) is in many ways a typical Doctor Who character – the final episode gave me Once Upon A Time vibes, and from me you can't expect higher praise than that. If you'd explain the plot to an old Viking, you'd get the same head-scratching response as if you'd explain the gist of Once to the Brothers Grimm: "Excuse me, who did you say saved the day again?" 

Loki made his final sacrifice in exactly the right way for a redeemed villain: not proudly or self-righteously as a hero might, but resignedly, after having tried everything else. He had a personal stake, rather than acting for an abstract Good of All Mankind. At the same time, he wanted to save not just Sylvie, but a whole group of friends. In the villain-redemption game, sacrificing yourself for a family member or love interest is all fine and good, but sacrificing yourself for someone you don't have to care for yet still do hits harder.

As a Scandinavian, I appreciated the nod towards mythological Loki too. MCU Loki's fate was a great deal less grim – it's not as if he ended tied up in his son's guts with poison dripping on his head, like his wicked inspiration. Nevertheless, he is stuck, and the day he becomes unstuck the world supposedly faces its Ragnarök. Very neat.

Of course, I had some quibbles too. Making Loki so overpowered adds to the ongoing confusion about MCU "gods": I mean, I like the guy, but a Messiah he ain't. Season two dropped the ball badly when it came to the relationship between Loki and Sylvie. Not only is there no discernible romantic chemistry between them any more: she seems angry with him for some reason, though she was the one who betrayed him at the end of season one, a betrayal he never confronts her about. Still Sylvie serves a function as the uncompromising advocate of free will, and I can't but applaud that her outlook won out in the end. The Multiverse may have turned out to be tricky to integrate into good storytelling, but I'm happy that it's still around.

Regicides on the run

"I was wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly and unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did [...] Still, I like Charles – I respect him – I pity him, poor murdered king! Yes, his enemies were the worst: they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they kill him!"

Thus Helen Burns in Jane Eyre. When it comes to Charles I of England, I have been raised in the Helen Burns school of thought, and have had little cause to doubt it. It does seem as if poor Charles's main crime was losing the Civil War, which was no reason for the victors to lop his head off. He can't very well be expected to be in favour of deposing himself. 

At the same time, I have sometimes wondered if I'm being a hypocrite. I don't object to the lopping off of a monarch's head in principle, after all, if he is actually guilty of a crime. I have zero problems with the execution of Louis XVI of France approximately 150 years later (because he committed treason – me fancying one of the regicides has nothing to do with it). Which raises the question: could any case be made for Charles I having committed treason? What did treason (in political terms) even mean in the 17th century? When did the meaning shift from "treason against your ruler" to "treason against your country and your people"?

So it was with some interest I learned that Robert Harris's (him again? I'm afraid so) historical novel Act of Oblivion would be dealing with the escape of two of Charles's killers, and the attempts made during the Restoration to track them down and despatch them in their turn. Maybe this was a chance to learn more about the rationale behind the decision to execute the king?

It turns out the book has little to say about this particular question for a good two thirds of its respectable length. It's still a gripping read, though, for the most part anyway. There is built-in tension in a man hunt, and the based-on-fact circumstances of this one are exciting enough. The two regicides in question, both willing signees of Charles I's death warrant, are Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, aka Ned and Will. They escape all the way to America, and as they start to build a modest life there you'd think they'd be pretty safe. Turns out they're not.

The significance of the North American colonies still being under English rule slowly dawns on the reader. The Governor of Massachusetts may be a Roundhead through and through: in the end, when faced with a direct order from the King, he must obey it or face consequences for the whole colony. And so the fugitives move from one safe-seeming hideout to another, doggedly pursued by Royalists. It's thrilling stuff, as soon as the chase is on, especially if like me you have no idea of how it's going to end.

But there is one slight problem for a Helen Burnsian like myself. It is somehow natural to root for men who are being hunted, and the two regicides are quite likeable, so yes, I was rather hoping they wouldn't get caught. At the same time, they're not a pair of Jean Valjeans. They did kill the king, and though Ned eventually comes to question the decision (I suspect it's Harris who's doing most of the questioning on his behalf; it would surprise me if the real Edward Whalley had many qualms), the doubt is a long time coming. Will never has any doubts at all. So they will just have to face up to the consequences, won't they? They can't be surprised that Charles II isn't prepared to forgive his pa's killers just like that. What did they think would happen?

At  the same time, the fictional leader of the man hunt against them, Richard Nayler, is hard to have much sympathy for. At first I wasn't sure that Nayler being a bit of a pill was intentional. After all, I have found more than one of Harris's heroes to be pills. As the story progresses, though, it becomes pretty clear that Nayler's the bad guy. Harris does give him a strong, albeit contrived, motive for wanting to – well – nail Whalley and Goffe (Cromwell's infamous banning of worship on Christmas Day comes into it), and he's not beyond reason. He's not too thrilled about digging up and executing already dead regicides, for instance (Cromwell and two others). Nevertheless, enough should be enough. I'm not sure the personal motive was such a good idea on Harris's part, either; it would have been more interesting if Nayler had been carried by Royalist convictions alone.

The novel, as one expects from Harris, is well and vividly written, and he writes skilfully about the "down times" in the hunt as well. But the book is a little on the long side for my liking, and some of the hiding-out descriptions could possibly have been cut to tighten it up. I was torn about Whalley writing his memoirs while hiding: it did give me some of the background for the decision to execute Charles I that I was initially looking for, but at the same time it slowed down the narrative. 

Also, while I applaud Harris's attempts to get into the religious mind sets of his protagonists – otherwise, it's a common fault in modern historical novels that the characters lose their faith far too easily, so the author doesn't have to deal with a piety they don't understand – I didn't always find it convincing. Better that, though, than Nayler's increasing atheism, which doesn't make much sense seeing as he is so outraged by the very idea of beheading a King. (Why is that so terrible if the King isn't God's anointed? Nayler doesn't seem to have had any personal relationship to Charles.) All in all, Harris has a better hand with the historical figures than the fictional one, though it's clear he prefers Ned to Will.

This isn't my favourite historical novel by Harris, but it's still good; I've found myself missing the New England atmosphere after having finished the book. It's no mean feat to make me sympathise with two Puritan regicides, while at the same time remaining convinced that I would have hated living in Oliver Cromwell's England.