French detectives! Spanish time travel! British tars! TV, movies and a play

The second season of the French crime series HPI jacks up the stakes some from S1 while keeping the same basic premise: genius cleaner Morgane (Audrey Fleurot) works as a police consultant, using her brains and super-acute awareness of details to solve crimes that would otherwise be dead ends. In one scene her partner Karadec (Mehdi Nebbou) points out this is exactly the point in the episode where she comes up with a brilliant deduction so well, what has she figured out?

As a result of one unauthorized investigation last season, Morgane is under scrutiny by Internal Affairs cop Roxane (Clotilde Hesme) and thinking before she talks is not Morgane’s strength. Over the course of the season she clears herself but she also realizes she’s hot for Karadec, who is now dating Roxane — plus a great deal more going on Morgane’s messy personal life. Still a fun one. “Look for three-fingered men and you find one on every corner.”

MIRAGE (2019) is a Spanish time travel film probably inspired by Frequency as it has a similar premise of two people communicating across time by using the same device (a radio in the first movie, a video camera here) under freak conditions and, of course, screwing up their lives.

The protagonist, a nurse in the present, contacts a kid in 1989 the very night he’s about to die running from a murderer. Her intervenion saves the kid but creates a new timeline: she’s a famous neurosurgeon (she gave up on that when she married), the killer’s still out there and her husband thinks she’s a deranged stalker. Can she put things back to rights? Can she and the boy bring the killer to justice?

I really enjoyed this one other than one annoying plot contrivance: why is it her alt.friends and colleagues never bring up her husband (“You’re having some sort of breakdown — I’ll call him.”)? The answer is that it preserves a big reveal late in the film but it still makes no sense. However I still recommend the film. “The flight of a butterfly can be very cruel if it’s in a place or time that allows for change.”

This year’s Gilbert and Sullivan production from the Durham Savoyards was the duo’s first big hit, H.M.S. PINAFORE OR THE LASS THAT LOVED A SAILOR. This has never been a favorite of mine — the relatively simple question of whether the Lass will end up with heroic sailor Rick Rackshaw or Sir Joseph Porter, KCB lacks the plot complications and twists of most of the later works. However it does show many of the elements that recur in later plays such as characters switched at birth and pompous, unqualified officials. It also occurs to me that a key part of the plot makes Buttercup (no relation to the Princess Bride character) at least 15 years older than the man she’s going to marry at the end. Still the Durham Savoyards put on a lively, engaging production, as usual (and unlike some of theirs, done in period). “Now this is most alarming — she practiced baby farming!”

PS. My friend Ada Milenkovic Brown took out an ad for Ceaseless Way — we’re both contributors — in the Pinafore program.