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Notes -
How about some television talk.
I was looking for a show to watch on a second screen while I played the new Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter and came across Slow Horses - BBC spy show about MI5 and a group of remedial agents. My parents have been watching for years and always recommend it. I loathe most modern television but for whatever reason decided to give it a shot.
It’s very much as expected. The first half of season 1 is all about a “loathsome” right wing terrorist cell, the Sons of Albion. Get this - these right wing youths kidnap an innocent British British-Asian boy and plan to behead him live on the internet in an ISIS style video. But wait, it’s actually a rouge opp carried out by the evil girlboss intelligence minister. They then do a double fakeout where the Sons of Albion get wise to the setup and the scary right wing guy goes on a rampage and attempts to carry out the beheading.
This is a completely ludicrous plot line and it appears that Apple’s Slow Horses is going to be every bit as awful as I expected for a show developed after 2016. Does Hollywood imagine there are actually these sort of right wing terror cells just waiting to activate? Despite all evidence to the contrary and dozens if not hundreds of other instances of racial and political violence perpetrated against white people? Or is the goal to get boomers all worked up about dangerous right wing ideologies. Are they stupid or liars?
For anyone here who’s watched it, does Slow Horses get better? Is there anything of value here?
I’m separately on season 4 of Le Bureau des Legendes - a French foreign intelligence tv drama produced by Canal and very highly regarded by anyone in the Anglosphere that’s seen it. It’s the show that Paramount’s The Agency is based on. And I must say the The Bureau is truly excellent. Season 1 aired in 2015 so it’s only mildly annoying with politics. Very mild. It’s really great and worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. I have a lot of thoughts on it that I can share if anyone is interested. But it reminds me a lot of 24, with less action and more drama.
I don't know, I think Slow Horses is pretty good.
I think this is a pretty shallow read. SH is a spy thriller, what is happening on the surface is not really the entire plot. The whole first season is about how the #2 in MI5 essentially created a situation so they can get money/prestige, but that situation goes off the rails. They instigate, fund, and organize a false flag with some local domestic disgruntles. If you are mad about "Right wing terrorists ends up being a false flag op of a bunch of glowies plus an actual nutter organized by girlboss" because it is "unrealistic", I point you to the Whitmer Kidnapping Plot, in which there is good evidence that the entire thing was setup by different alphabet soup agencies. If you are mad because its Hollywood making right-wing terrorists the big-bad, I recommend you chill the f out, and learn how to actually analyze cinema.
The institutional MI5, and the elites are the source of a the majority of the problems/villians throughout the series. They are portrayed as incompetent, Machiavellian, toxic, rife with abuse and mercenary behavior. This is not 24, or james bond where its a classic good-guy spies vs evil villains, its far too modern. The heroes of the entire series are the "Slow Horses", a cast of actual colossal fuck-ups, everyone of them being an actual loser for some reason or another, but who because they don't get with the toxic culture of the institutional MI5 have been exiled to a waste dumping zone. Being a spy thriller deconstruction, River Cartwright is what James Bond acts/looks like, and he a colossal fuck-up. Jackson Lamb is what actual spies operate like. Using actual wits, brains, tradecraft, and covert actions.
In addition this is an actual book series that is being adapted, and to my knowledge a fairly close adaption. So no, this is not Hollywood being Hollywood and taking the "shit on the right wing".
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