Now that Lent is over (Happy Easter Season, btw!) I can watch TV again but most of it is so bad. I did watch two things on Netflix I really liked, however; Reacher and The Last Kingdom.
I was a big fan of Vikings on the History channel. It was as full of intrigue and violence as Braveheart, plus there was a family connection.
Way back in the 70's, while I was in high school, a distant relative of my Dad's finally completed a history of the Hubbell family. We had a copy of the Big book of Hubbells.
Here's what I know: all Hubbells, no matter whether they spell it Hubbell, Hubble or Hubbel, are members of the same family, which originated with Hubba the Dane, who sailed to Wales and built a castle on a hill. It was referred to as "Hubba's Hill" hence the family name. Back in those days, we had a sailboat on Lake Harriet which we christened "Hubba the Dane". My dad loved to spout poetry as we sailed; mostly lines from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
According the the Big Book of Hubbells, Hubba's father was called Ragnar and one of his brothers was called Ivar the Boneless, although no one knows why.
The main character in Vikings was Ragnar Lothbrok and two of his sons were Ubbe and Ivar (the boneless). Ubbe was clearly Hubba.
Vikings is historically accurate fiction but clearly someone, somewhere, had access to the Big Book of Hubbells.
The Last Kingdom is set a generation later, in Britain, and Ubba the Dane is a character in the first few episodes. He's a badass but a jerk and kind of a dope. But there he is! Made me want to yell "It's a FAIR WIND!" and start spouting poetry, like my Dad.
Unlike Vikings, TLK is set amidst actual historical battles and most of the characters are based on people who really existed. It's like Philippa Gregory's historical fiction: Enough history to learn a bit and enough fiction to keep it fun.
It's very violent. Human history is a story of bloodshed and death. People are not very nice and those who called themselves "Christian" are some of the worst. King Alfred the Great (a real guy) wanted to unite all the kingdoms of the Saxons to form "England" under one Christian King...no matter how many people he had to slaughter to make it happen.
The big political problem at the time wasn't that the other kingdoms already had kings (that was a small political problem) it was that the island was teeming with Danes. UnChristian pagans who loved to fight, were very good at it and had no interest at all in forsaking their own gods, being baptized and becoming good little Englishmen.
There are five seasons of The Last Kingdom and there's never a lull in the action. The show spans about 50 years, which include lots of battles, kingships, alliances and betrayals. I kept googling the historical people, castles and battles as I watched, so I knew who would survive each encounter. The show stayed close to the general outline of history. One of my favorite characters was the Lady of Mercia; King Albert's daughter, who was married off to one of the other four kings and when her husband turned out to be a dink, she took up arms and lead the Mercian Army to victory herself! The only thing new about "feminism" is the whining.
As I told my sister, The Last Kingdom is a little like Game of Thrones due to the palace intrigue and political theater. It makes up for it's lack of zombies and dragons with good writing and characters you actually like. It doesn't hurt that the main character (one of the few entirely fictional characters) is this guy:
As for Reacher, it's completely different. It's a modern day cop procedural based on a series of thrillers written by Lee Child. I knew that Tom Cruise had played the character in a movie but my parents and brother, who are big fans of the books said he was all wrong for the part. In the books, Reacher's physical presence is a huge part of his character; he's 6'5", 250lbs of intimidating muscle. TC is a very good actor and I'm sure figured most movie fans don't read books, in which case, it didn't matter how the character is described in the books. But the fans of the books took one look at Cruise and said "NO."
Fans of Bridget Jones' Diary were equally put off when Renee Zellweger, not only an American but a Texan! was hired to play Bridget, a British singleton but Renee knocked the part out of the ball park! She became Bridget Jones!
But while a talented Texan may be able to do a perfect London accent, Tom Cruise can't do 6'5" any more than Peter Dinklage could play Muhammed Ali.
I liked the show. It was fast paced, suspenseful, well written and at times funny. I hadn't read any of the books when I watched the show but I liked it enough to pick up a couple of them the next time I was at Mom's.
Now I'm totally hooked!
In the last two weeks, I've read four and I just started a fifth last night. They're great!
Lee Child is as close to Louis L'Amour as any contemporary writer I've come across, as far as his story telling skills go. Reacher is a very likeable character and Child writes him so well that you don't notice or care that most of the things he does are improbable. I did get a bit thrown in the first book: Most of the action is set in the Northwestern corner of Montana and the climax involves trying to catch a terrorist who is driving a van loaded with explosives before he reaches Minneapolis.
I know for a fact that you can't drive anything (much less a van carrying a ton of dynamite) from the deep woods of Northwestern Montana to Minneapolis in a single day. I've made that drive. You'd have trouble making that distance in that amount of time in a race car with no traffic and professional pit crews.
I had no problem believing Reacher could use the chair to which he was handcuffed to beat the up the four guys tying to hold him hostage but that van was never gonna make it to Minneapolis in time for the fire works. ( It was the fourth of July.)
Nevertheless, I loved the book.
It just occurred to me that one thing Vikings, The Last Kingdom and Reacher have in common are kick ass women.
I have long hated books, movies and TV shows in which women are the stupid, weak victims who hit the bad guy and then run away. I can't tell you how many times I've found myself yelling at the screen "DON'T RUN AWAY, HIT HIM TILL HE'S DEAD!!"
Seriously; if a guy had spent the last hour trying to kill me, my family or my friends, I'm not thinking 'escape', I'm thinking 'nullify the threat'. The maternal instinct is like an iceberg: all nurturing and cuddly above the waterline but a huge cold mass of danger under it. Some people think that if women ran society there would be no war. I think that if women were in charge, there would still be war but 'surrender' and 'survivor' would be unknown concepts.
Sidebar: I love Aaron Sorkin's work. I've been a fan since Sports Night back in the '90s. The West Wing is addictive! His scripts are superb! But I hated the Newsroom. He lost me during a scene in which Jeff Daniels disarms Emily Mortimer, demonstrating that a woman carrying a gun is actually less safe than an armed woman. That scene pissed me off so much I couldn't watch any more. FIRST of all, a woman on a date is not on edge as a woman out in the urban wilderness is and SECOND of all why do writers always assume we're going to take the gun out of our purse/pocket before firing?? Believe me, if I'm threatened enough to want my gun, I'm not worried about blowing a hole in my oofin' purse.
Lee Child writes women who act like I prefer to think I would in those situations.
His female characters are quick, smart, tough, lethal and funny.
I read a paragraph in which the woman said "My brain was saying threat threat threat center mass bang and when I blinked, I'd already done it and he was dead."
And I thought THAT'S HOW REAL WOMEN SHOOT, AARON SORKIN!!!!!
Oh, and the woman who shot the guy wasted no time crying or flinging herself on Reacher's chest. She just wanted him to help move the body.
So that's what I've been doing for the past month.