Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2010-02-07 12:35 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2010-02-07 12:35 pm
Does This Mean We're Not On Telly Any More?
Which of you lovely people anonymously sent me the badges? Thank you so much! The Pokémon and Baker Street ones are my favourites; the one that looks vaguely like Zombie Derren Brown alarms me quite a lot. ♥!
In spite of all my worries about watching it, Dead Set, it turns out, doesn't freak me out nearly as much as Being Human, which I am genuinely considering giving up. I love Annie and Mitchell and (most of the time) George, and I love the relationships they have with each other, but every time I watch Being Human it just upsets and depresses me. When I start thinking 'there's a new episode coming up' with dread rather than excitement, it's probably time to stop watching.
Not that Dead Set is a festival of delight, but I'm able to watch it in a slightly more detached way, possibly because I know a bit more about what's going on behind the scenes and possibly because the threat it deals with is very specific and (let us hope) fictional.
A few not-really-spoilery thoughts on Dead Set: whilst watching, I found myself thinking on many occasions that Kelly (whom I liked very much) looked really rather similar to Lisbon of The Mentalist.
Therefore, Lisbon and her team need to fight zombies.
I don't think anyone can argue with that logic.
Grayson is a sweetheart. Patrick is an arsehole, but an arsehole who appears to be to at least some extent based on the writer, which is interesting (don't hate yourself, Brooker!). Riq is sort of adorable. Kelly is my favourite character, and I loved the way her fear and despair and determination were portrayed. I liked the fact that the housemates, despite all their failings, were fundamentally decent people who cared about each other and worked together; it would have been easy to go 'oh, look, the only survivors are the absolute dregs of humanity in the Big Brother house', but it was actually much less cynical than it could have been. We know you don't really hate humanity, Brooker; you're not fooling anyone.
Although I generally feel that zombies should be slow-moving, I actually didn't mind the running zombies here. Putting the studio out of action very quickly was necessary for the plot, so they sort of had to be excused, and I'd heard that Brooker had originally planned to set it over a longer period of time and show how the zombies slowed down as they decayed, which makes a sort of sense; as the muscles are presumably still intact, why shouldn't a freshly turned zombie be able to run as fast as a human?
I think Dead Set is one of the few things I've watched and enjoyed and yet have absolutely no desire to cross over with Pokémon. Still wouldn't mind the RPF crossover in which David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker find themselves facing the undead hordes, though. The problem is that I have a complete aversion to real-person deathfic, so I'd have to somehow contrive an unlikely happy ending. THE ZOMBIES DECIDE THAT BROOKER IS TOO BITTER TO EAT. Brooker is mildly offended but, let's be honest, not complaining. Mitchell survives using his hitherto undisclosed magical powers. No, I'm not entirely certain this idea is going to work.
In spite of all my worries about watching it, Dead Set, it turns out, doesn't freak me out nearly as much as Being Human, which I am genuinely considering giving up. I love Annie and Mitchell and (most of the time) George, and I love the relationships they have with each other, but every time I watch Being Human it just upsets and depresses me. When I start thinking 'there's a new episode coming up' with dread rather than excitement, it's probably time to stop watching.
Not that Dead Set is a festival of delight, but I'm able to watch it in a slightly more detached way, possibly because I know a bit more about what's going on behind the scenes and possibly because the threat it deals with is very specific and (let us hope) fictional.
A few not-really-spoilery thoughts on Dead Set: whilst watching, I found myself thinking on many occasions that Kelly (whom I liked very much) looked really rather similar to Lisbon of The Mentalist.
Therefore, Lisbon and her team need to fight zombies.
I don't think anyone can argue with that logic.
Grayson is a sweetheart. Patrick is an arsehole, but an arsehole who appears to be to at least some extent based on the writer, which is interesting (don't hate yourself, Brooker!). Riq is sort of adorable. Kelly is my favourite character, and I loved the way her fear and despair and determination were portrayed. I liked the fact that the housemates, despite all their failings, were fundamentally decent people who cared about each other and worked together; it would have been easy to go 'oh, look, the only survivors are the absolute dregs of humanity in the Big Brother house', but it was actually much less cynical than it could have been. We know you don't really hate humanity, Brooker; you're not fooling anyone.
Although I generally feel that zombies should be slow-moving, I actually didn't mind the running zombies here. Putting the studio out of action very quickly was necessary for the plot, so they sort of had to be excused, and I'd heard that Brooker had originally planned to set it over a longer period of time and show how the zombies slowed down as they decayed, which makes a sort of sense; as the muscles are presumably still intact, why shouldn't a freshly turned zombie be able to run as fast as a human?
I think Dead Set is one of the few things I've watched and enjoyed and yet have absolutely no desire to cross over with Pokémon. Still wouldn't mind the RPF crossover in which David Mitchell and Charlie Brooker find themselves facing the undead hordes, though. The problem is that I have a complete aversion to real-person deathfic, so I'd have to somehow contrive an unlikely happy ending. THE ZOMBIES DECIDE THAT BROOKER IS TOO BITTER TO EAT. Brooker is mildly offended but, let's be honest, not complaining. Mitchell survives using his hitherto undisclosed magical powers. No, I'm not entirely certain this idea is going to work.
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Will Brooker be their non-Zombified King? By accident? And he can decree that they don't eat David Mitchell, because he needs someone for intelligent company.
Of course, you could also go with 'some people are randomly immune to the zombification and they just get really ill after being bitten and then better again'. Er, since zombies also eat humans that might be a bit of a problem, but random immunity to a zombie bite could work.
And well, Shaun of the Dead was a zombie film with a happyish ending, so it's not impossible.
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Immunity (perhaps for only one of them?) could work! It doesn't strip out suspense by removing the threat entirely, as, as you say, it won't prevent the zombies from tearing them apart if they have the chance, and it allows for the drama of 'OH NO YOU HAVE BEEN BITTEN but I cannot bring myself to kill you!' without too unpleasant an ending.
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And it can give way to a possible cure, even!
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Blrghgh also these zombie posts are reminding me of the Disney Kids zombie apocalypse fic which needs to exist. DAMNIT. (80% of the Disney Kids get killed off in that fic. WORST.)
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(How can you know the percentage of doomed Disney kids if the fic doesn't exist? Do you have this concept all plotted out?)
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P.S. It's amazing.)
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I enjoy your icon.
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Essentially the plot of 28 Days Later... which, if you have a problem with zombies generally, I don't recommend (although the hardest part for me was Christopher Eccleston playing crazy-in-an-unfun-way).
Edit: I did not see the person below me had mentioned it!
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... and then there's presumably some sort of quarantine set up around Britain to stop the zombification spreading. So as well as escaping the zombies, they have to avoid the non-zombie-military-types who are trying to shoot anyone escaping. Fun times had by all.
Alternatively, at the end they wake up and discover it was all a
dreamDerren-Brown-induced shared hallucination.I enjoy your icon.
Thank you! I made it myself.
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1) I actually spotted Charlie Brooker while watching Al-Jazeera in Vanuatu (a segment about irresponsible behavior in news media), which proves that you have the power to make me constantly run across whatever you're into at the moment, or coincidences can be mighty strange.
2) Zombieland is the zombie movie for people with wimpish tastes.
ETA: Also, if you want happy, fluffy zombie fun, read The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror. Although it does spoil you for plotlines of several other books by Christopher Moore (he tends to write in one giant, weird, vaguely-connected universe, which means you either have to not mind spoilers or be less bored by Practical Demonkeeping than I was. Although you can read Island of the Sequined Love-Nun without being spoiled for anything.)
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Mitchell survives using his hitherto undisclosed magical powers.
You are so excellent, Riona. You genuinely brighten my day.
Re: the zombie RPF crossover, you could always do a 28 Days Later? I swear one of the endings for that is a happy one, in which one minute Jim is bleeding to death in the back of a taxi and the next he's wearing a hand-knitted jumper and frolicking with his fellow survivors in a field. Following that example, you could have a dramatic scene where it genuinely looks like Brooker and Mitchell are about to get eaten by zombies and one of them faints from blood loss and then-- BOOM, SCENE CHANGE. They're actually in hospital somewhere, and Charlie is complaining about the food and the nurses and the hygiene and everything.
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(I have never seen 28 Days Later, but that ending sounds decidedly odd.)
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The only show I've ever found that's more the epitome of :DDDDDDD: than Being Human was Farscape.
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I have never seen Farscape, and from this comment I conclude that that's probably for the best.
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Farscape's one of those shows where you (or, at least, I) remember it as this hilarious, amazing, wonderful, amazing show that's so fucking good it's almost painful sometimes. And then when you rewatch it you're like T________T WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME CRY NEARLY EVERY EPISODE FARSCAPE WHYYYYYYYYY?
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*raises hand*
Heh, zombie-Derren. I didn't think zombie when I saw it, I just LOLed, although now you mention it, Derren Brown as some sort of evil necromancer king-of-the-zombies is a very interesting idea.
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Derren is probably entirely responsible for the zombie apocalypse poor Brooker and Mitchell are stuck in, isn't he? Possibly he has just induced a group hallucination.
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Now I wish I knew something about Brooker and Mitchell because I think this needs to be written.
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THE ZOMBIES DECIDE THAT BROOKER IS TOO BITTER TO EAT
i love it.
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Oh, my goodness, he is actually beautiful.
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YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.
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