Ancient Pop Culture is Dead to Me

The Guardian - home of the spoiler and the holier-than-thou BTL smart arses who think they're more intelligent than people who comment on the Daily Mail on-line - caused something of a minor cult controversy last weekend when it suggested that Babylon 5 had 'jumped the shark' (this was in a column about good TV gone bad and one that now seems to have to mine the deepest darkest past to be able to fill a page) at some point either during series four or with five (the final, often unknown whether it would happen, season).

Almost 95% of the comments posted lambasted the Guardian for suggesting B5 should even be considered a contender for the Jump the Shark column's ire; most everyone who is familiar with this now 25 year old series agreed that it should never have been granted a fifth season, especially as its complex stories had to be, hurriedly, tied up by the end of season four, but most praised it like it was a precursor to The Sopranos or The Handmaid's Tale.

Babylon 5 is remembered by a many people for differing reasons. Many compare it to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (a source of controversy and argument among both sets of fans for reasons I really can't be arsed to go into); others like to point out the wooden acting, the PS1-styled special effects or the fact that sometimes it was excruciatingly poor TV. The thing is, for all of its criticisms, B5 was a groundbreaking and prophetic SF series and in many ways is perfect for a re-imagining (the way Battlestar Galactica was brought into the 21st century).

But is it?

Most B5 fans you talk to will extol the virtues and brilliance of the Shadow War and tell you that if you thought Game of Thrones was a twisty and turny political drama with a fantasy backdrop then you missed the original. If you think Lord Varys was the arch-schemer then you need to meet Mr Morden. If you thought Jaime Lannister was the epitome of redemption, then you're not aware of G'Kar; or if you felt there were far too many tortured souls floating around Westeros then you need to introduce yourself to Londo Mollari - Babylon 5 was, at the time, the most sophisticatedly-plotted television series ever made but it was then enveloped in Pound Shop wrapping paper.

The truth is B5 was more than just a massive story arc about a space war between ancient races and the new kids on the block. For five series there was an underlying subplot about how Earth was actually not a very nice place; riven with corruption, hate and discrimination and despite being set in the same century as Star Trek, it was anything but a glorious utopia. B5 was not just about the United Nations in space, it focused on inequality while showing that equality was achievable.

The future isn't idyllic, the future is full of homeless disenfranchised people with no future, no hope, nowhere to live or call their own. B5 was about themes that current SF fan favourite series The Expanse focuses on such as xenophobia, the hate generated between Earthlings and those people born on colonies such as Mars or the Asteroid belts. B5 was rife with hatred, racism and other distinctly human traits. Whether the other alien races depicted in it picked up humans bad habits through osmosis or whether it was simply a universal thing wasn't really discussed; but the Narn, the Centauri, and the Minbari - the principal alien races other than humans, all had traits similar to their mammalian brethren. It sounds like it should be great...

The Shadow War, considered by many as one of the most original story arcs ever to appear in a TV series, is the thing many remember about B5, but as I said, all the way through the series it was really all about Earth and its inhabitants. It was about how Earth was not like Star Trek and the universe wasn't a nice homely Federation of Planets; how it was always extremely close to being a fascistic organisation and how it found going down that path extremely easy. It was about Psi Corps or the Ministry of Peace or the Night Watch. It was about assassinating the President of Earth so malevolent forces could dictate the agenda; it was about the hatred between Earth and Mars, especially after the latter ceded from Earth's control. It was about how massive inequality still existed below the surface and it was about corruption, massive fraud and genocide. The stories of 2258 to 2263 are the 21st century in microcosm and series creator J.M Straczynski either had a crystal ball or he knew that the drift towards right wing politics is something other generations of human beings are going to have to suffer...

I've recently re-watched chunks of the series and it amplifies the fact it was woefully made. The actors were poor; the sets were wobbly, the special effects were garish and infantile, but there was something about it; something under the surface that was allowed out every so often to remind us just how BIG 'the big picture' was.

The problem B5 had was those moments were few and far between and had it been produced in 2019 it would have dispensed with a lot of the superfluous filler; those dreadful Star Trek-lite episodes; or the ones made when all the budgets had been exhausted. It wouldn't be 22 episodes a series, it would be 13 and it would meld character building and the actual plot in a far more sophisticated way than was done in 1994. It would have state of the art special effects and actors who didn't seem like they were reading off of prompt cards behind the cameras. It would be wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am from episode one. But...

I'm not sure it would work in 2020. At first I put this down to logistics; in the 25 years since B5 first appeared thinking has changed. A space station is a stupid idea; it is essentially a sitting target. To believe humans would be the facilitators of a universal peace is also stretching it a bit. In fact, if you strip away some of the interesting things that make the series tick, you'd be hard-pressed to find any redeeming qualities.

The truth is it was made for a buck fifty; it was written by a man whose biggest claim to fame at that point was Murder She Wrote and however much you try and talk up the complexities of the series, if you watch it in the cold light of 2019 there are holes you could steer a star ship through. In fact, it's probably a damned sight worse than people who slagged it off in 1994 realised. A quarter of a century after it first appeared, the thing that actually hasn't aged is the struggle for the soul of Earth; probably because we're seeing a lot of the themes from B5 play out in real life - not quite with the melodrama or action, but some themes explored in seasons two and three of B5 would not seem too out of place in 2019, even if they're just updated versions of things that happened in Germany in the 1930s.

I approached the series the same way I approached it 10 years ago when I last watched it, with an open mind and devoid of criticism and I saw beyond the shitty production values for about 20 episodes. I was focusing on the episodes that focused on the Shadow War and for a while I saw a symmetry I'd not really seen before; that the Earth subplots were all loosely tied into the Shadows story. This was probably the only positive revelation I garnered, because for most of the time I was gobsmacked by how awful it was.

Any sympathy, empathy or association I might once have felt towards lead characters evaporated - the way TV has become more sophisticated over the last 20 years saw to that. Instead of laughing at the jokes or smiling at the interactions between central characters, I started to cringe a little - would people really be like that in 300 years? Obviously, for something made in the 1990s it's going to have certain anachronistic problems; I managed to see past that; what I didn't expect was to find myself tearing plots apart, with consummate ease, no less.

Looking back, I now believe the Shadow War was a brilliant idea that sometimes was executed perfectly, but at other times was contrived and simply makes me think that my once mad devotion to the series blinded me from glaring holes in the plot and story?

The thing is the Shadow War was actually at its best as a preamble - a subplot. It kind of lost all of its cohesion when it became the main story. But even in the episodes before it became the main crux, it seems that common sense was ignored in favour of tension, suspense and action. In 2019, looking at how fascistic some things are now, the naivety of the 1990s appeared to forget about bureaucracy, unless it was a necessary device. The word 'contrived' keeps springing up in my head, as well as the phrase 'a means to an end' and it seems that both of these things were prominent in B5. I appreciate in some ways, fantasy TV depends on these kind of things, especially when you're dealing with so-called prophecy, but the lack of genuine continuity - even when most episodes were written by the same guy - made it feel 'manufactured'; there is little or nothing 'organic' about it.

I got to the stage where I didn't actually want to carry on watching it. How I'd missed such glaringly obvious plotting mistakes three times previously really annoyed me. I used to explain the sometimes uneven feel it had to the production and budgetary constraints but words are rarely affected by budgets. I struggled to understand why - comic book style - it liked to give a precis of the general story whenever it could; having characters tell other characters who were as versed in everything what was going on and for every genuine bit of dialogue, there was a ham hock of wince-inducing bollocks.

The worst thing was the realisation that the Shadow War actually didn't make a lot of sense and its conclusion kind of contradicted itself... The Shadows believed in evolution through chaos; the Vorlons (the other ancient race still hanging around with the little kids) believed in a more peaceful way, through genetic manipulation and covert means and while the Shadows went around getting all the races to have wars with each other, the Vorlons stood around being cryptic and frankly not doing much at all (which you kind of understand at first). The problem was, when push came to shove, the war was all about the Shadows and Vorlons resurrecting an ancient war and getting someone else to take all the losses. The rest of the universe became collateral damage as they fought each other, forgetting their reason for being there. That might have been the plan, but for races billions of years older than us, it all seemed a little like the meeting of two bullies in the same school yard and the sensible teacher having them both expelled for the future safety of everyone else...

That aside, B5 has always been called a series that has equality at its very heart, but it doesn't. Women are still stereotyped in a 1970s fashion; aliens are often used as a substitute for race or culture and religion appears to supersede everything else - suggesting the discovery of aliens reinforces mankind's belief in God, not destroys it. In fact, in many ways, it was simply business as usual - human dramas played out with prosthetics.

Babylon 5 was every criticism levelled at it. It was like the US version of late 1970s Dr Whos. You felt the sets would eventually collapse in on themselves. The overblown dialogue would eventually spur someone into saying 'this is bollocks, no one would ever talk like this'. It pains me to say this, but B5 was a graveyard for has-beens, D-list actors and basket cases and with the aid of time were allowed to con us into believing we were witnessing something great. It might have been once or maybe it could have been, but if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. We don't need to know how it might be re-imagined. What we need is for people who remember it fondly to never watch it again (for fear of realisation) and to defend its corner, the way I once did. I feel it deserves that, if nothing else.

I want to be able to say with the confidence I had in the late 1990s that B5 was something special; the problem is the only thing that elevated it above awful was the ideas it played with. It executed those ideas piss poorly, but it doesn't detract from the fact that JMS (and others) had them in the first place. To attempt to do something like B5 is far more worthy of praise than to actually critique the show. The fact they were allowed to tell such a strange story from start to finish, with so much interference, is something to be held in high esteem... 'In the face of adversity' should have been the series' subtitle.

The problem is, it is the memory of it that has grown in our minds. If you love B5 for all the reasons I thought I did then I urge you to never go there again. Lock your DVDs or illegal files away - burn them, if necessary; just don't be tempted to re-view something important from a period in your past that can't be changed, because under (not a lot of) scrutiny it falls apart and becomes something you wish you could unsee; it makes you want to remember it how you did, not how it is.

Pop Culture is Dead To Me 2: The Flying Killer

So here's the irony. You start a blog by pointing out how this kind of blog is the least viewed kind of blog I do and two weeks later it's the 3rd single most viewed blog I've ever written on Farky Nell (this blog). I don't know if the timing was good or if the TV I talked about just happened to be topical enough to be largely patronised, but I decided to do it again, to prove to myself the last one was a fluke.

In this month's thrilling instalment I'll be wittering on about The Walking Dead, Lucifer, The Gifted (and a quick return to the Inhumans), Mr Robot, Star Trek: Discovery among others and having a bit of speculation involving things I haven't seen yet or have yet to be released. This is a spoiler warning. There will be talk about things you might not have seen yet (but in most cases you're probably ahead of me).

[SPOILER WARNING]

Four weeks into the new season of The Walking Dead and I'm quite pleased to see they've revisited a 'style' that worked for me. Back at the start of season five or six (I lose track), the producers spent about six episodes played out in real time about how they funnelled an army of walkers away from their settlement. It was tense, dangerous and illustrated how scary the dead could still be. I have no idea of knowing, but I get the impression that this new season might be played out entirely as one real time 'war' between Rick's gang of altruists and Negan and his Negans. And honestly, how good would that be if the entire 16 episode season was centred around one or two days and the consequences of it?

I expect what we'll get is eight episodes of this, ending in some kind of massive defeat for Rick's team - my guess would be the death of Judith and the majority of the Alexandrians - it seems to be the least defended in case of a retaliation and some of the characters there don't exist in the comics. I also think Enid will off Hilltop's self-appointed ruler and that Gabriel will be the one who does Negan more damage than we could ever imagine. But this is all speculation and the fact there's speculation again suggests to me that TWD might be rediscovering its mojo by keeping it simple.

Possibly the biggest shock on TV in 2017 will be the one 'shit' and two 'fucking's in Star Trek: Discovery. I know I've been about the only person who has been surprised by it and while it felt unnatural and forced, it also felt right... Last time out I was less than complimentary of ST:D and because I was wrong I got two packets of Galaxy Cake Bars as a present!

At the end of the two-part pilot, I felt a little underwhelmed; slightly peeved and the ST fan boy inside me I never knew existed was seething about how everything was far too... advanced. I said to the wife that we'd give it a couple more goes and if it was rubbish it would go the way of every ST series since the Next Generation, it would be ignored. By the end of episode three I was absolutely blown away. It's like some dark and slightly sinister half-sister to ST:NG and half the characters are greyer than a school kid's trousers. There are some moments worthy of the best ST cringeworthy scenes, but there are also Machiavellian plots, psychotic captains, and Klingon tits. It's not Star Trek for your kids, that's for sure. It might turn out to be just style over substance, but it's quickly moved up my list of must view stuff.

The TV series that has vied for top spot for the last couple of years has been Lucifer (always challenging Shameless but never quite beating it) and the last time we did this the new series hadn't started and I was expressing concerns about Tom Welling being added to the cast. For those of you not familiar with Welling, he was the last TV Clark Kent/Superman and Animal from the Muppets is a better, more emotive, actor.

The last series saw the final four episodes dropped and added to this one; whatever the reason it hasn't made this series feel any less Scooby Doo like. There was a point when I seriously considered Lucifer to be the best fun 'fantasy' TV show out there because it was so rubbish. Every week you would tune in for 'lame crime of the week' but you'd really be there to see how the real story progressed; even if the real story only got two out of the 42 minutes. Most people work out the killer before he or she speaks (it's usually the first person Lucifer and Chloe talk to) and that usually takes a back seat while Tom Ellis pontificates around the set like some extremely camp music hall thespian and us clued in viewers wait for whatever new revelation is going to be uncovered. Those four held-back episodes have been distributed among the opening seven (notable by the absence of Tom Wooden, I mean, Welling).

Don't get me wrong, I still think it's a great series, but something needs to happen to advance the story a little. It is not popular because of its crap procedural dramas, equally it might not be because of the actual Lucifer/angel/God business, it might be purely down to the way Ellis chews the set up every time he's there; but I can see it losing its way if it doesn't find one.

Speaking of something needing to happen... I'm just about at the end of my patience with the majority of Marvel's TV output. I'm looking forward to the new series of SHIELD because I think Phil Coulson is a great character, but there have been times when I've felt the series needed something more than just an association to the Marvel Universe. Agents of SHIELD is like a John Le Carre novel compared to The Inhumans' small press comic strip. It is not that often when something you want to like gets dropped after just one episode, but the pilot of The Inhumans was so bad you would have struggled to believe it wasn't produced by some cosplayers with a $500 budget.

Agents of SHIELD introduced the Inhumans as a 'new' conceptual menace, because Marvel doesn't own the film rights to the X-Men and nothing has worked quite as well for Marvel than mutants versus humans, so instead of trying to sort something out with the mercenary 20th Century Fox, Marvel tried to create a new 'mutant' menace by bigging up the characters that were first introduced back in the mid 1960s (who were, originally, of Kree origin, which should tie in with the Marvel films but doesn't). The entire story arc involving the Inhumans in SHIELD was pretty awful and what was originally being touted as a major feature film, soon became a major TV series, which eventually became an eight-part mini-series, which eventually got cancelled before it was launched because, as a friend of mine in Hollywood told me, 'It had already become the laughing stock of Hollywood'.

We gave up on the Inhumans after the pilot because, quite frankly, I've seen more interesting things growing on old dog shit.

We didn't give up on The Gifted quite so fast. We gave it seven episodes before finally deciding that despite having an interesting cast and being a Mutant Underground X-Men tie-in it was actually a load of dull, boring and thoroughly uninspiring shite. It's probably me, but how do some of the scriptwriters on these shows get work? The Gifted's problem is nothing happens, everyone in it suffers from melodrama, the two main actors are essentially redundant and it just feels half-arsed. Perhaps this is the way superhero TV is going, if it is then it belongs to another me.

The fact there's 13 episodes in the new Punisher series fills me with dread... I might give it a miss.

We finally caught up on all of Mr Robot season two just as season three was starting. I dunno if it was suffering from second album syndrome but ... WTF? The first series had a madness; a crazy feel to it; season two was very much after the parade; a bit like Moonlighting after Willis & Shepherd finally copped off with each other. I got through the entire season thinking 'something is going to happen' and nothing did and then it ended on a cliffhanger that could easily have taken place ten seconds after the cliffhanger at the end of season one...

I still haven't gotten around to watching the new Twin Peaks.

Stranger Things 2 was considerably better than season 1 or was it? It certainly had more money thrown at it and it moved along at a pace unlike the first series; but ultimately did it achieve anything; did it further the story; was it any good?

On hindsight it kind of reminded me of a lukewarm bland wank, which, to my knowledge, is something I've never knowingly experienced, but imagine being simply perfunctory and could have been so much better with a bit of passion, vinegar strokes and some obligatory 1980s unnecessary nudity. I expect I will enjoy series 3 when it's on and then retrospectively tear it to pieces like I've done with the first two.

I'm saving the current series of Shameless for when the rest of TV has a winter break; looking at William H Macy's naked arse once a year is all I need to confirm it's the best thing on TV.

Yet again I'm struggling to think of a film we've watched since the last one of these that I'd recommend to anyone I like. I'm sure there has been, but for the last few Saturdays we've been doing something a bit retro and watching old classics. A few weeks back we watched The Thing, followed the next week by Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and then Harryhausen's Mysterious Island (which was so much worse than I remembered) and we have Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Old Dark House, Network, Trafic (The Tati classic), a bunch of other Carpenter films from the 80s and 90s and if I can persuade the wife to watch a Mexican film about a tentacled alien sex monster living in someone's house, then The Untamed is on my list. Obviously I'm looking forward to Thor 3 with almost zero expectation, now that I'm losing the will to live with comics films/TV. Oh and we watched The Limehouse Golem the other day and that's two fucking hours I'm never going to get back (even if Bill Nighy was excellent).

Meanwhile in the UK... I thoroughly love Only Connect. From the Barda-esque (Jack Kirby joke there for my comics friends) VC-M to wanting the twats who say 'Hor-Ned' to die from horrible itching diseases. The problem with Only Connect is it's a quiz show...

Most people I know who have discerning taste in TV have constantly recommended Peaky Blinders and I'm sure it's the best thing since multiple orgasms but I know a lot of people from Birmingham and I struggle to take any of them seriously and a cowing nutritious pot noodle.

Big fan of Simon Reeve. We play the "How many times will he say 'Bloody Hell' in a series?" all the time and I won with 6 for his three-part journey across Russia.

Sue Perkins's trip down the Ganges wasn't a patch on her Dan-Dare-tastic trip to see the Mekon.

Struggling to think of anything else we watch that is good or bad enough to mention; so it's probably time to end this nonsense.

Next Time: It'll soon be Christmas and that means falling asleep during Dr Who, wondering why the BBC even bothers now and probably NOT me taking the time to discuss ITV's new format. you know the one... based on the USA's idea of having FIVE advert breaks in an hour instead of four, the last one being just before the last fucking 30 seconds and credits. Honestly, TV executives are just complete cunts.

A Pointless and Critical Analysis of The Walking Dead’s World and Why It Makes Little Sense

**Twelve months ago today I wrote a blog based partly around the concept of zombies and why they resonate with the living as proper scary monsters. Rereading that blog today I had a strong urge to do something utterly trivial with the same concept...

I give you the closest I have got to being a real geeky nerd for a long time mixed with the miserable git many of you know and love...

The Walking Dead started as a cult comic book and eventually became a massive TV hit, spawning a companion series and propelling Robert Kirkman, the ‘creator’ of the series into Spielbergian realms of fame and opportunity.

As any die-hard fan of the comic or TV show will tell you, it’s never really been about the zombies (a word that is NEVER used in the series), it’s been about the survivors. TWD is a bleak dystopian drama that shows how low humans will go to survive and has become more of an analogy of how some people believe humanity would perceive a post-apocalyptic world.

The problem is, while I have been a fan of the show since it began, it is hard work and during season 6, which started brilliantly and ended like some many other TV series now, as more of an introduction to what will happen in the next series, I started to think about the three or so years that Rick Grimes and his glum posse of survivors have been lurching around the locality of southern USA and while I’m no expert, I began to pick holes in the entire concept – not of a zombie apocalypse, but of what sensible humans would do in the event of one.

The genius of TWD’s set-up is there has never been any explanation about the plague, nor has there been anyone ‘official’ in it – no government, no radio broadcasts, nothing official. Therefore as a viewer we have no idea what the percentage of survivors is and while the world might be readjusting to it in some cities, in and around Atlanta, Georgia and in Virginia it’s the Wild West with flesh eating Indians and psychotic cowboys.

I mean, if you had half a brain you’d sit down and look at your situation and make some plans, which would be reassessed once you realise that it’s you versus everything. The problem is, while TWD has never been clear about the actual amount of time that has passed since Rick woke up in a hospital room (which itself was suggested to be about two weeks after everything went to Romero-land in a hand basket) and the point at the end of season 6 where one of his team faces certain death at the end of a militarised baseball bat, we have to presume that a minimum of three years has elapsed. Filming schedules means we rarely see a Georgia winter, but we have seen autumn leaves a number of times, so let’s presume Rick, Michonne, Carol, Darryl and all the others have been on the road for three years...

1. Food

TWD is set in and around some of the hottest and most humid areas of the USA. Research tells that almost everything that is organic in origin will begin to rot within a relatively small period of time. During the hotter months the humidity is so high that bread can go mouldy inside 36 hours and, more importantly, dry goods, even well packaged, succumb to the moisture in the air considerably quicker than in more temperate or drier regions. That means when we see a cast member munching a cracker or a biscuit they have found in a glove compartment or ignored in a deserted store, it should be soft, mouldy and inedible.
I have a friend who has lived in that area all his life, I asked him about food longevity and he confirmed things go off quickly. “Packets of chocolate chip cookies have gone stale within two days of opening them, hell, even Hostess Twinkies go off.” 

2. Water

It would be very stupid to drink any water, especially if the series is now three years since the Walker Apocalypse. Stream and river water would highly likely be contaminated, either by a number of pollutants or simply dead bodies. Bottled water, especially in areas where it will be heated, cooled, heated and cooled repeatedly runs the risk of whoever drinking it getting Legionnaire’s Disease. Most health bodies do not recommend drinking bottled water that has had the seal broken or is more than three years passed its sell by date. Water can go off just as easily as milk and therefore the safest things to drink would be alcoholic. Unless you have a way of filtering rain water or want to boil everything.

3. Vegetation/wildlife

Apparently in Georgia and surrounding states nothing grows or overgrows. Admittedly the constraints of budget and where they have to film dictate certain factual inaccuracies, but botanists, scientists and expert gardeners will tell you that inside one year, left unchecked, most vegetation will begin to encroach and take over anything man-made. After three years everywhere should resemble unkempt fields and meadows, roads would be covered, anywhere where vegetation exists in abundance would be overgrown.
Wildlife is portrayed as being eaten by man and walker. There are no deer anywhere; no domestic cats, in fact except for a couple of horses, some wild boar and some dogs, TWD world is almost devoid of any kind of life – no fish, no amphibians, no birds... Some of these are explainable, but generally animals outnumber people by a ridiculous amount and the USA has bears, coyotes, wolves, wildcats, mountain lions... Do I need to continue this list? Sheep can go feral if left away from humans for long enough... Why don't animals succumb to the same virus as humans? How come we haven't got flocks of zombified buffalo or armadillos?

4. Decay

Georgia isn’t a dry state like California is (where FTWD is based) and the point about humidity made regarding food is also prevalent with the general infrastructure and the Walkers. A book a friend has recently read by an undertaker points out that the human body decomposes almost 50% faster in hot and humid environments; it’s one of the reasons that funerals are fast and done quickly in hot countries.
Now, even if the walkers rate of decomposition was much slower by virtue of the virus, within three years the original first year walkers would have rotted from constantly getting wet from rain (as was witnessed early on in the series when they found a dead guy in a well), being frozen and defrosted constantly every winter, any of the elements from thunderstorms to high winds – dead humans would be as liable to erosion as everything else. Bones would become brittle and shatter; teeth would fall out, fingers drop off, clothes would rot – the smell alone would be horrendous, which leads us nicely to...

5. Climate/Environment – these states down south also have winters (as hinted at a couple of times) and sometimes temperatures can drop well below freezing for long periods and snow and ice storms are frequent throughout the winter months. The average lowest temperature during the winter is a reasonably nippy -4c, which would freeze the walkers – they generate no heat because they are dead and are effectively the same ambient temperature as any non-living object. This means they would snap or break if they attempt to move while frozen; could shatter if they fall and generally would be considerably easier to deal with if they were frozen to the road or a tree. Eventually the environment would become a far more dangerous adversary to the Walkers than any band of psycho humans.You have to ask yourself why the survivors haven’t broken into a library, looked up self-sufficiency; tried to find where the nuclear bunkers are, the survivalists, the people who installed generators, solar panels, independent water supplies – such as a well or an unpolluted mountain stream? Why haven’t they moved into the mountains where not only is the water safer, but the distribution of walking dead will be considerably less and much easier to deal with. Plus they have natural defences – high up, good vantage point against not just the dead but the nutters who still live. Why haven’t they given themselves an advantage? Considering the people ‘in charge’ are in charge, no one has come up with a plan to avoid the walkers; no common sense is being applied when you consider it is very clear that the real enemy in the series is now each other rather than the slow and usually easily dispatched dead. 

Obviously, a TV series about a bunch of self-sufficient mountain dwellers, safe in their beds with good solid defences against the rest of the world would probably make very dull TV. Just look at spin-off series Fear and its lifeless characters, dull plots and a post-apocalyptic world full of wankers – the creators of all of this must think the rational people will be the first to succumb to the bite of a zombie (probably due to our general disbelief) and the only people left will be the idiots who are too stupid to end up being bitten by anything. The underlying theme in both TWD series is the stupidity of people, it’s not really about surviving because it’s a TV series not real life.

So ask yourself this – if there was a zombie apocalypse tomorrow, would you make the same decisions as Rick and his mates or would you look for somewhere safe, well-stocked and presumably a place where, in this world, even Bear Grylls would forget about if a zombie was trying to bite his ear off?

A Wonderful Lack of Sleep

Remembering Insomnia...


Shortly after Christmas 1994, I started reading what would eventually become one of my favourite novels. I have read it four times since and have just started a fifth.

I have recommended this book to a number of people and every single one of them have felt it is the author's best work (although none were that well-versed in his stuff) and a book they were glad they read.

I have seen this book described as 'science fiction' and as 'horror', 'fantasy' could also be attached to it and I'm sure it falls into all of them categories, yet I don't think of it as any of them. The fact it is written by Stephen King also doesn't automatically mean it should be pigeon-holed - some of his best work hasn't got a ghoul, monster or malevolent spirit anywhere near them. In many ways it could be considered one of the strangest of King's oeuvre and yet also the most revelatory in his exploitation of his own shared universe.

Recently, I found out that this book is considered the 3rd worst Stephen King book, in a poll, involving fans. The fact that Pet Semetary was in the top 10, perfectly explains to me the pointlessness of these kinds of polls and the opinions of supposed die-hard fans. That said, the same die-hard fans are getting excited about a Dark Tower series of films, despite the fact the series ended up being an enormous waste of useful words and the films of Stephen King are not likely to feature that heavily in an award-winning retrospective, with only one, maybe three, notable quality exceptions.

Insomnia has never been made into a film. Is called 'boring' by King fans and it doesn't have much of a happy ending. It hasn't been made into a film because it's possibly the most complicated single story of any King novel. Boring is a subjective concept, but I can understand how there's far more discussion and less action than your average blockbuster, but perhaps these people lose sight of the fact that the main character Ralph Roberts starts the book in his 70s or his beau Lois Chasse is also a septuagenarian. Or perhaps these people, who find it boring, have never known what it's like to actually get to know someone; because that is the first thing about this book that makes it endearingly wonderful; it takes its time getting to know the main characters and because of that you become emotionally interested in their adventure long before their adventure starts getting weird.

As for the not having a happy ending, it reminds me of the huge box office failure of the adaptation of a King written short story The Mist, which probably would have been one of the US's top sales hits had it not been for the utterly bleak ending. US audiences hated it, yet it received amazing reviews all over the world. In the short story of The Mist it concludes with the protagonist contemplating the worst; in the film he does the worst, it has no redeeming qualities. The difference between it and Insomnia is the latter does have a happy ending; it just doesn't have the happy ending that the reader wants.

Essentially, it is the tale of two lonely old people, both have lost their long-term partners and are both winding down their last days on earth. The focus of the story initially falls on Ralph who, after the death of his wife, begins to suffer insomnia and then exhausts everything in trying to cure it. It becomes as much of an obsession as his wife's terminal illness had become and before long what appears to be his sleep deprivation begins manifesting in peculiar ways - Ralph starts to see 'auras' or an arrays of strange 'lights' emanating from tops of peoples heads. Some are healthy, some are anything but, and some are unlike anything else. Not only is Ralph hallucinating strange things, he also appears to be getting younger and fitter again - although he initially dismisses it as part of the sleep psychosis he must be suffering from.

If waking up every night at 3am, regardless of what time he goes to bed, is bad enough, he begins to see three oddly rotund figures - without auras - that Ralph nicknames the 'Three Bald Doctors' and eventually there is an encounter between them all, but not before Ralph discovers that Lois is also having trouble sleeping and also sees strange things. Lois is also looking 'well fit'.

Eventually they discover that there is something wrong with the order of things and it might be to do with Ralph's young neighbour Ed, who has a wife and young daughter that the old man and his late wife had taken a shine to, as they had no kids of their own. Wrapped up in his own troubles, Ralph has paid little attention to Ed's young wife; not noticed the bruises or the unhappy child.

Now, there is no real way to convey the general weirdness of the book without having to go into minutiae. To King fans much of the weirdness is easily explained - the book is set in the fictitious Derry, home to It and setting for a number of King's most popular books. There are odd characters on the periphery of the book who are strange anomalies, one or two pop up in other books - something that often happens in King's wild and wacky shared universe. There are also two cracking elements that prove to me how clever Stephen King is as a writer - although whatever place Insomnia was going to inhabit in the author's magnum opus The Dark Tower, may well have been changed due to the hit and run accident the writer was involved in during the late 1990s.

The book's initial antagonist is one of the doctors' who has gone rogue and represents the chaos in the grand scheme of things - he is the 'random', the reason for the unexplained, the unprovoked or the unexpected death. But this is normal - the two orderly bald doctors are quick to explain this to Ralph and Lois when they become embroiled in the madness, the problem is it has become clear that the bald doctor of the random is indiscriminately cutting peoples life forces under the direction of some other antagonist.

The true villain - and the first element of genius - is The Crimson King: the named-but-not-seen major villain in the (then) unfinished Dark Tower saga. Many of his Constant Readers, myself included, believed that Insomnia was a dry run; an attempt to tell the Dark Tower's story in a contemporary setting. This was either because King had grown bored with it at that point, or because he didn't know if he would finish it so he wanted to do an allegorical version - one that scholars could paw over in the future trying to find clues. Whatever the reason behind King's use of the Dark Tower antagonist, the references to and brief appearance of Roland of Gilead and prophesying the future, they appeared in a book that apparently had nothing to do with The Dark Tower's own labyrinthine continuity.

The second and most brilliant, yet most tragic is Patrick Danville - a boy whose appearance in the book is ridiculously marginal, but it actually the entire reason the book takes place...

Insomnia isn't about the metaphysical battle on different planes of existence between two OAPs and their helpers from a much higher level of existence in battle against a mythical villain and a psychotic former colleague. It's really about obsession and how to turn people into things they aren't. The back story in Insomnia, one that beats heavily throughout the book, is the forthcoming arrival of women's rights activist and pro-abortion campaigner Susan Day. While it never is the focus, it's always there in the background like a tooth beginning to decay. Yet even this thinly-veiled Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate isn't the story. The Crimson King has recruited Ralph's neighbour Ed Deepneau to sabotage the big rally being organised in the Day's honour, but why? What could a prominent Pro-Choice campaigner possibly have to do with a powerful villain of an alternate King universe?

Ed is taking flying lessons because he is going to fly a plane loaded with explosives into the football stadium that Susan Day is going to speak at and Ralph and Lois have to stoop him from doing it - the rest of what I've talked about is just a red herring... except for Patrick Danville.

Ed might think he's just killing a woman who believes that babies should be illegally harvested, but his real target is Patrick, because Patrick will save the life of someone in the future who will go on to change the world and if the Crimson King can prevent that from happening...

I'd say 'ironically' but frankly there was nothing ironic about the way King (Stephen, not the Crimson one) almost shoehorned Danville into his Dark Tower finale to try and close an opened circle (that he seemed to have conveniently ignored).

It was like this brilliant idea from the future was saved for us to read about it further one day but it ended up being a plot device on a bad Chuckle Brothers sitcom instead... This book had been set up as a cornerstone - a key element - in the battle between The Crimson King and Roland and his Ka-tet only to be forgotten about, then, as said, shoehorned (no other way of describing it) almost like an afterthought.

Anyhow, to save the day Ralph makes a deal with the evil bald doctor and it's from this point on where you know, even without the knowledge of having read it before, that there's going to be tragedy on the horizon and the kind you have no control over.

Insomnia is bonkers. It has oddly benign characters, who seem to exist outside of the normal world; different levels of existence, where time moves much faster; it teases us with the elixir of youth and then explains that all you have to do is not sleep; and it has lovely and wonderful characters that should easily remind you of your own grandparents or of someone's, at least. The story is considerably more complex and entwined than you think and, it has this jaw dropper of a moment when, as stated, it was all to save the life of someone who would save the life of someone else - so the great wheel of Ka needs to revolve.

And then there's the tears. The first time I read the book I howled at the end. The second time, armed with the knowledge of how it ends, I howled even earlier. The same with the third time and the fourth, but by this time you feel the hitching at the point where Ralph makes the deal with Atropos and yet you also know that Ralph is being everything he has already proved; he is being the best damned hero ever created by Stephen King and the best damned hero has to die being a hero otherwise it would all have been for nowt. [When Ralph makes a cameo appearance in Bag of Bones a few years later I think I blubbed again]

Insomnia is a dense, at times overly complicated, story about obsession, possession and desire. It has wonderfully rounded characters with believable lives and wholly individual voices. There are elements in this book that King has, sadly, never re-examined - such as Dorrance, one of Ralph's more 'knowledgeable' acquaintances and as I said, there are elements of the story that we do revisit in the future, but I can't help feeling not in the way most of us expected (a criticism levelled at the bastard offspring of The Dark Tower far too often), especially the reduction of Patrick Danville to tortured patsy to allow King to interpret an ending for his bloated folly (you can tell it pissed me off).

For me, this book isn't a tale about lack of sleep, it isn't even the encapsulation of the entire Dark Tower series before the author had his epiphany and screwed it all up, it's about the last of the selfless society; it's about friendship, love, honour, relationships and how they ebb and flow and it's about sacrifices. It is heartbreaking: especially when Lois pleads with Ralph in the final chapter - every time you read it you want her to convince him, because you want Ralph to die of the old age he's had reversed, not at the hands of the crazy bald doctor who had it all planned out. But, you see, he wouldn't have become the greatest character King has ever written if he'd just lived happily-ever after.

Ordinarily I'd just put it down to my own personal desire to not conform to the norm for liking this novel so much, but every person who has read it has felt the same way about Mr Roberts and about the story. I know someone who didn't really understand what it was all about but was hooked on the adventures of these two septuagenarian X Filers and the real-ness of them.

If you ever see it in a second hand book store, or you fancy paying full price, you won't be disappointed and it might also make you wonder just how 'off key' some of King's stuff is. One reiterated word of warning; don't allow the blatant cross-over tempt you into the world of The Dark Tower, because that way leads to anger, disappointment and serious levels of disbelief.