rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (NOOOOOOOOO)
Riona ([personal profile] 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.

[identity profile] tamsin-m.livejournal.com 2010-02-07 01:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Could you have Mitchell and Brooker in a small, localised zombie outbreak - like on an isolated island or something. So it starts without them knowing the extent of the zombification, but then they can escape it at the end. Might defeat the apocalyptic tone of a proper zombie fic, I don't know (I'm way too much of a wimp to watch zombie films and thus am n doubt exceedingly ignorant).
ext_235416: (Default)

[identity profile] littlemoose.livejournal.com 2010-02-07 02:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, Britain is an island, so I suppose the attack could be localised there

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!
Edited 2010-02-07 14:58 (UTC)

[identity profile] tamsin-m.livejournal.com 2010-02-07 04:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, Britain is an island, so I suppose the attack could be localised there, making it a large-scale disaster but still potentially escapable.
... 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 dream Derren-Brown-induced shared hallucination.

I enjoy your icon.
Thank you! I made it myself.

[identity profile] amy-wolf.livejournal.com 2010-02-08 07:14 am (UTC)(link)
Hi. Two things you need to know before I run out of internet.

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.)
Edited 2010-02-08 07:21 (UTC)