Another good week of work. I’m glad, as next week we have the cleaners in (that means sitting and comforting the pets in the spare bedroom) and an eye appointment (which probably means dilation and an inability to stare at the computer screen). Still, there are worse eye problems.
I got two stories done for The Local Reporter. One was about the Carrboro/Chapel Hill school district launching the fiscal year without a budget, because the state hasn’t approved one for itself. The other is about a Buc-ee’s convenience store opening in nearby Mebane — this is a big deal but even after writing the story, I don’t get it. Of course one of the selling points is brisket, and as a vegetarian that’s about as appealing as “Hello, would you like a cup of warm vomit?”
Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about Supergirl’s brief appearance and what she might have known about Jor-El and Lara’s plans for Earth. I also posted about a couple of time-travel movies I think of as an anti-double feature, in that their worldviews are polar opposites.
I think I mentioned that my cover designer, Samantha Collins, had come up with what looked like a promising design for Southern Discomfort. Looking at it early this week and getting some feedback from friends with good artistic eye, I realized she’s got it right — it still needs fine-tuning but the image is the right one. So much closer to publication now … I like the image enough I’ve rewritten the cover copy to fit.
Then there’s Jekyll and Hyde. I got several more photos for the book, started work on the bibliography, did some research reading and watched a French movie, Madame Hyde that I’d never heard of in any of my research (it turns out to be a name-only adaptation — details next week). I also watched the excellent British TV series Jekyll, from 2007. I finished the Nutty Professor chapter, and rough drafts of the Monster Mash and Children Of Jekyll chapters (e.g., Daughter of Dr. Jekyll). Good work.
On top of which I found time for lunch with my friend Heather, and to run a couple of errands. For whatever arcane reason, I seem full of energy lately. I hope it keeps up at least through the end of Jekyll and Hyde.
I also think I’ve found a solution to Trixie’s slight but persistent weight gain (not much, but she’s a small dog). Every morning I set aside her soft food for the day in a small Pyrex container. That way I don’t give in to impulse and give her a lot of extra. Fingers crossed this will get good results.
Covers by Bob Brown (top) and Bilquis Evely. All rights remain with current holders.
Much as Jekyll and Hyde will discuss the protagonists’ involvement with sex workers, I’m thinking I should also devote a small section to discussing Jekyll’s household staff.
In the Stevenson novel, Poole the butler is loyal to Dr. Jekyll but it’s a professional relationship, not a personal. At the climax, he’s terribly worried because his employer is apparently locked in his laboratory with the murderous Edward Hyde — indeed, Poole fears Jekyll has already been killed. Eventually he and Utterson the solicitor break into the lab, find Jekyll gone and Hyde dead. We then shift to Utterson reading Jekyll’s confession. What Poole thought or felt about all this does not come up. That fits with the Victorian perception of servants.
As Lucy Lethbridge recounts in SERVANTS: A Downstairs History of Britain From the Nineteenth Century to Modern Times, the master-servant relationship in Victorian times was complicated. The employer and their family lived in intimate closeness to the servants — a valet or a lady’s maid would routinely help men and women to get dressed, for instance — yet there was as little emotional intimacy as possible. Ideally the servants were omnipresent but invisible, speaking only when necessary; some of the McMansions of the day were designed with a warren of corridors that let the staff carry out their backbreaking workday with as little contact with the upper classes as possible. That’s not to say they didn’t sometimes develop bonds of affection or closeness, but it wasn’t the norm, and many servants had to endure crappy food and crappy living spaces (though in many cases better than their lives as urban or rural poor would have allowed). When the 20th century offered better jobs — or even crappy jobs that allowed more freedom — domestic service staff dwindled and became increasingly hard to find (if this topic interests you at all, this is an excellent book).
One of the things I mentioned writing about Attack of the 50-Foot Woman in The Aliens Are Here was that the lead character’s butler isn’t an employee but a lifelong family retainer who’s watched over her since childhood. This is a common refrain in 20th century fiction: Alfred was Bruce Wayne and Batman’s right hand, then eventually rebooted to be a family retainer who cared for him after his parents’ death. Jarvis, Tony Stark’s butler, eventually took on a similar role in Tony’s life.
My friend Ross describes this as “confusing status and contract” — if someone takes care of you, cooks you dinner, draws your bath, well obviously they must like you, right (The same thing happens with sex workers — the fantasy that even though they’re doing it for the money, they’re really into you)? I also wonder if it doesn’t reflect that few of us, even if we can afford it, live with domestic servants. It’s easy to romanticize something you don’t experience on a daily basis.
The point I’m getting to is that I can see in a lot of the Jekyll and Hyde films. Poole vanishes from the novel and plays no role at the finish of the 1920 John Barrymore film. In the 1932 Fredric March film he has a much stronger connection with Jekyll. In the opening scene he’s nudging Jekyll out the door to be on time for his lecture; Jekyll is bantering cheerfully back. At the end, when Hyde turns back into Jekyll, deceased, the film closes with Poole sobbing over his master. He cared, he really cared.
This isn’t true of all movies, not even of all the movies set in the Victorian era. But it is true of several of them, Mary Reilly in particular. It’s worth noting.
This was a productive week but it left me feeling off-kilter. When writing goes very well, it’s easy for me to get caught up in it, not take breaks, and then feel wiped at the end of the day. While stopping the work feels counter-intuitive, it’s better in the long run.
Also there are one or two paperwork tasks I needed to do this week and I didn’t get to them. That’s not good either. I did get to several but one of them is big and complicated and it’s hard to carve out time when, like I said, the writing is going smoothly.
Two more things going smoothly. First Sage, a Persian vegetarian restaurant that’s a favorite of ours, reopened after a couple of years closed. Bigger place, co-owned — if I’m understanding it right — by a successful Indian restaurateur so I’m guessing more money. The start-up menu has a smaller selection than of old, but the food is still great.
Second, we’ve been concerned about Trixie’s weight gain. Slight, but she’s a small dog so even a little matters a lot. The big problem is that the added meds both dogs are on get wrapped up in food or pill pockets. I’m now setting her total soft food for the day in a small container in the fridge to give me some idea how to ration it. It’s obvious I was giving her way more than that so this is a win.
As to work, I spent more time on The Local Reporter than I’d planned, as often happens. Though in fairness, it was fun time: I was interviewing a local filmmaker about the Sick Chicks Film Festival (specfic films made by women) so I watched one of her films streaming on Amazon (review tomorrow). That added to the time. I also wrote about Carrboro’s plans to renovate its town hall.
My own writing is going to be Jekyll and Hyde for the rest of the year, I think. This week I rewrote the Nutty Professor chapter, which includes other films where Hyde is a womanizing party animal. I also wrote the first draft of the Monster Mash-Up chapter. I watched a couple of movies and several episodes of Monster High in various incarnations.
I also got some feedback from TYG and a couple of other people I trust on the tentative cover design for Southern Discomfort. More about that soon.
That was a good week’s work. I’ll end the post with a shot of the blue tower opposite the Carolina Theater. Not that we were there this week, but just because.
I’m not sure how I stumbled across JEKYLL AND HYDE ADAPTED: Dramatizations of Cultural Anxiety by Brian A. Rose but my initial thought was AAAAAAH! My searches before I signed the McFarland contract for Jekyll and Hyde led me to conclude nobody had done a survey of Jekyll and Hyde films before me; my editorial contact concluded the same.
Fortunately Rose and I are not playing in the same ballpark. Rather than discussing all the movies, his interest is how the different adaptations express different fears in different times. Thus, Jekyll acquiring a fiancee in the Victorian stage adaptations positions not just Hyde but Jekyll’s scientific research as a threat to the domestic values Victorians prized. The 1932 Fredric March version, showing Hyde as a neanderthal, distances evil — it’s not us, it’s our awful ancestral instincts — whereas the films showing Hyde as more or less human acknowledge evil as part of us.
I find most of Rose’s conclusions unconvincing — I don’t buy Paul Massie looking human in Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll is meant as a statement about the nature of evil, for instance. And he’s completely wrong to argue George Carew in the 1920 Barrymore version is a hypocrite — Carew is not at all hiding that he’s a libertine, he’s quite proud of it.
Another problem is that the book is written in heavy academese (“This is a postmodern reinscription of the traditionalist values and perspectives that ordered earlier melodramatic versions, but one that eschews earlier eschatological answers.”) which makes it hard for me to focus on Rose’s points. And some of them are good, such as noting Spencer Tracy’s version probably influenced filmmakers more than March’s superior production (small wonder — to avoid competition with the Tracy, MGM hid the March take away for 30 years). March is the last version for decades to show Jekyll doing charity medical work and up until the 1990 Michael Caine film, the Jekylls looked human rather than March’s ape-man (Tracy is also the first Jekyll to have his test animals acting strange, something repeated in several later films). This book wasn’t worth the $90 I paid for a used copy but it does have its uses.
As I mentioned last week, Tubi’s search function introduced me to a series I’d never heard of before, a 1969 Italian four-episode show called simply Jekyll. It’s another plodding attempt to adapt Stevenson faithfully and another adaptation where I see the seed of what might have been an interesting idea.
Lanyon here is a brilliant surgeon and Jekyll’s mentor before Jekyll went into research. Lanyon grumbles that Jekyll’s been seduced by the grant money available for cool research proposals and the media attention — good surgery doesn’t get your name on TV but if you announce a research breakthrough it might, even if it proves smoke-and-mirrors later. Exploring that aspect of science would have been interesting but nope, they do nothing with it.
JEKYLL: Jekyll gives Utterson his revolver just in case Hyde gets grumpy! In flashback, Hyde pressures a woman to drown her dog but she drowns herself instead! In the aftermath of this tragedy Jekyll’s friends lament his decision to tamper with god’s domain! I wondered how they’d squeeze one more episode out of it and they did it by extending Jekyll’s backstory to excruciatingly slow length. “Man created by man is the holy grail of molecular biology.”
Rewatching SCOOBY-DOO: Mask of the Blue Falcon (2013) right after seeing early episodes of the series was a little jarring: I was conscious some of the voice actors were different from the originals, which didn’t hit me when I first saw the film. That said, this is a fun adventure as the attempt to reboot the Blue Falcon TV show (in this version a live-action show) as a grim-and-gritty vigilante not only pushes the original star to the breaking point, it brings down the wrath of the hero’s arch-nemesis, Mr. Hyde. Whom I’ll note is dressed in the usual Fredric March-style Victorian outfits and top hat. This is the largest role Hyde’s gotten in any Scooby story, though it’ll still end up in the appendix I suspect.“Mr. Hyde is the monster that taught us to be afraid of monsters.”
The HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA trilogy will definitely get a mention in my Jekyll and Hyde appendix even though Hyde’s presence is small even for a monster mash. I’m not sure I’d have registered him at all because the glimpses are brief and he’s just a monstrous figure in a top hat — plus director Genndy Tartakovsky throws in so much visual detail (it’s reminiscent of his work on Samurai Jack) it’s easy for one figure to get lost in the shuffle. I’m still happy my work on the book led to me watching these because dang, they’re fun.
The premise of HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (2012) is that Dracula (Adam Sandler) lost his great love to a torch-wielding mob back in the 1800s. Retreating from the human world he created the eponymous resort, somewhere monsters can stay without having to hide. In the present day, his daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) has turned 18 meaning she’s finally free to leave the hotel and explore the human world. Dracula’s terrified of what might happen to her and desperate to talk her out of it; complicating things, a hiker named Jonathan (Andy Samberg) wanders into the hotel. Dracula has to pass him off as another monster until he can push the guy out the door. Worse, Mavis has “zinged” on him, a form of love at first sight — and Drac can’t stand the thought of his little girl with one of Them.
The film is funny, visually delightful and has a great voice cast, including Kevin James, Fran Drescher, Steve Buscemi, Molly Shannon and David Spade. Hyde appears briefly in a couple of group shots and like I said, I wouldn’t have noticed him if I hadn’t researched where to watch. “Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something very normal here?”
HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 (2015) has Mavis and Johnny marrying, then Mavis giving birth to a kid to the delight of his “Vampa” Dracula. Except — is it possible the kid is just an ordinary human? And what will Drac’s father in law (Mel Brooks) say about that? While Dracula starts testing the kid to prove he’s a monster, Mavis and Johnny visit the human world where Mavis discovers the joy of convenience stores and Slurpees (“We have to try all the 48 flavors!”). If anything, funnier than the first one. “We don’t need to kill any more — we’ve got Pop Tarts!”
HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 3 (2018) has Mavis and Johnny dragging the gang out of the hotel and onto a cruise ship. Mavis figures after her dad’s been running the hotel for a century, he could use a break so why not a lovely vacation cruise to Atlantis? Too bad the captain (Kathryn Hahn) is a descendant of the Van Helsings, out to recover an ancient mystical artifact that will help her cyborg grandfather take his revenge on Dracula. Will Dracula zinging on Captain Erika be enough to avert the apocalypse? Hyde has a slightly larger scene this time, getting mouth to mouth from a gremlin, though I’m still not sure I’d have spotted him watching cold. In any case, good fun. “Now that we have the instrument of destruction, our family legacy will be fulfilled — but first we’ll lure them in with a dance party!”
THE BAD GUYS (2022) are anthropomorphic animal outlaws whose attempt to cap their career (“No thief has ever succeeded in snatching the Golden Dolphin.”) leads to capture, than an attempt at reform under the guidance of the guinea pig Richard Ayouade, the Kindest, Most Wonderful Humanitarian the World Has Ever Faced. Why, just look at how he selflessly housed a mysterious glowing meteorite so he can study its energy, which of course he will only use for humanitarian purposes … Unsurprisingly the Bad Guys end up framed for a crime they (for once) did not commit, while the guinea pig taps the meteor’s power to pull off a billion-dollar heist. Funny and extremely meta (“Will this be the feel-good redemption story all of us need?”), with Sam Rockwell as Wolf and Awkwafina as the hacker Ms. Tarantula. “Out of all the people in the world, I hate you guys the least.”
For one thing, TYG has this week off. She’s so relaxed when she doesn’t have to work, doesn’t have to worry about them calling her in for an emergency, doesn’t have to set her schedule to fit anyone else … While she always has lots of projects for her vacations, she doesn’t usually get many of them done but she accomplished much stuff this week.
And Tuesday she took the pets all day so I could have a day off of my own. I almost never manage a full day without pets demanding attention let alone timing it so I’m not working. We tried it last summer during her vacation but it didn’t work so well: there was a brief, routine dog checkup that morning, it appeared something was horribly wrong with Plushie’s eyes but it turned out it was a misreading by the doctor. Which was wonderful to hear but by the time we figured that out, the day was shot.
So Tuesday I took a long walk in the morning — it was the end of a brief cool spell here — then went and sat in the local cafe, Bean Trader’s, drank multiple cups of tea while doing some planning in my notebook, and reading without any dogs to distract me. Then I ran a couple of errands, hit the comic-book store — I very rarely get around to that — and as it’s current location was close to a Petco and a Target, went to them too. Didn’t buy anything at Ultimate Comics — the things I liked were too pricey for me just now (and I have a half-dozen TPBs I haven’t finished yet) — but I replaced our broken-down kitchen Lazy Susan with a new one and picked up a box of cat litter.
Then I came home and did various other things by myself the rest of the day. Way relaxing.
The rest of the week? Kind of chaotic. Monday Plushie had his recheck exam at the physical rehab place. His weight is down and his condition has improved overall so the exercise we’re doing clearly work, yay! But that did add an extra hour to our usual visit.
Wednesday we had a guy in to clean our dryer vent after TYG noticed the laundry closet steaming up when we used it. I thought I’d been tracking that as I do most of our recurring maintenance gigs but it looks like it’s been a couple of years. Good thing — turns out the hose had completely disconnected from the drier.
Plus I went to my dermatologist for an annual checkup that morning. Turns out I had a couple of potentially precancerous skin things so she froze them off. Stinging pain, but way better than the alternative.
Then Thursday we had the housecleaners in. As I’ve mentioned before, now that we have to keep Snowdrop and Wisp from running out, I wind up sitting in the upstairs bedroom with them (after we’ve chased them up there) for a couple of hours, plus the dogs.
The pets make it hard to write, and my brain’s sluggish when things wrap up so I’ve learned to block off several hours and assume I’m not getting any work done. This time it was even worse. We found a couple of wasps or hornets in the house this week —
— so we had the Orkin man give an inspection. It looks like they built a nest in our chimney; he took care of that and put some insecticide on the flue where it should keep them from coming in. Plus we had a general handyman we’ve used before come in because TYG wanted him to hang some pictures (trust me, it’s much easier to pay someone) and do a couple of other odds and ends. So I wound up in the bedroom longer and got my schedule even further thrown off. On the plus side, getting all that stuff out the way at once means we don’t have to deal with multiple disruptions.
Plus I wound up spending a lot of time working on Local Reporter articles — some of the stuff I’d anticipated didn’t come in so I had to scrounge around for alternatives. That can eat up time. I was pleased with my work though: one article on replacing a public works building flooded by Chantal, one on an expansion of the city cemetery.
All of that left me with relatively little time to do much else. I did get some work done watching stuff for Jekyll and Hyde but overall my work was a nothingburger. Though I did get some stuff posted at the Atomic Junk Shop (blogging happens outside regular work time) — one on a historical-fiction inaccuracy that annoys me, one on a couple of weird stories from 1970.
I must admit I do love that Gene Colan panel though.
Next week should be smoother. I have most of my interviewing and research done for my newspaper articles, there are no dog appointments as yet, and no appointments of my own. Fingers crossed.
I’ve found Tubi useful for catching multiple films for Jekyll and Hyde. The search function proved unexpectedly useful this week when it turned up a couple of movies I didn’t have on my list (and one TV show I’ll get to reviewing down the road. Not good movies, but I’m not watching stuff for fun. And pretty much nothing in today’s list was good.
Like I, Monster, JEKYLL AND HYDE (2017) shows doing a faithful adaptation of the novel is usually a bad idea — Stevenson’s book is simply not cinematic. As in the book, Lanyon tells Utterson about his nightmarish encounter with Hyde, but not about what he saw (i.e., the transformation); that has to wait until Utterson reads Lanyon’s final letter. That pads the running time but given that we know what he saw, it doesn’t build suspense.
This is a low budget film and looks it: anachronistic costumes, contemporary street shots and interior scenes shot with lots of close-ups, which I assume is to keep down the cost of set-dressing. Of note for having Hollywood veterans Mickey Rooney and Margaret O’Brien appear in a small scene.“I’ve heard that laboratory he keeps in his home is more reminiscent of a Mary Shelley novel than a man of science.”
JEKYLL AND HYDE (2021) isn’t good but I give it points for a different spin on the tale. We come in at the end of the story, shortly before Utterson discovers his trusted friend Jekyll has committed suicide out of guilt over his crimes as Hyde. When he digs deeper, it turns out Hyde is Jekyll’s evil serial-killing twin who drove his brother to suicide and framed him for the murders. Not first-rate but watchable. “I took into my hand that glass beaker of the purest decaying foulness and pressed it to my lips.”
Now the others — DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (2008) also tries a new angle, turning the story into a legal thriller. Jekyll (Dougray Scott) is a present-day doctor whose experiments in tapping our inner self which holds “key to healing and fitness” (reminiscent of similar medical woo in Jekyll and Hyde Together Again) but creates a brutal psycho whose drive is to kill and kill again (I do not buy that he represents Jekyll’s dark side). When Jekyll goes on trial for murder, he wants to plead guilty as the only way to stop Hyde. His attorney insists on fighting the case (which is unethical — the client calls the shots) via an insanity plea, the prosecutor dismisses this split personality nonsense as balderdash, then the attorney suddenly pivots to proving Edward Hyde is a completely different person (nobody asks why she started with an insanity plea). Scott is adequate as Jekyll, good as Hyde, but the ending twist badly needs more explanation. “Changing into another person was not a metaphor.”
Classic Hammer took three shots at Stevenson’s story starting with The Ugly Duckling above. Having recently risen from the ashes, the resurrected Hammer gave it a fourth riff with DOCTOR JEKYLL (2023). Twentysomething ex-con “Robert Stevenson” take a job as caregiver to troubled pharma executive Nina Jekyll (Eddie Izzard), with strict instructions about maintaining 24/7 surveillance within the house and making absolutely sure Nina never goes off her meds — but Nina seems so nice, is it really necessary to be so paranoid? Yep; it turns out he’s been hired in an elaborate 11-dimensional chess game by Rachel Hyde to kill Nina, then jump bodies to Rob.
The hook is obviously having trans woman Eddie Izzard playing a woman but the film doesn’t give her enough to do. The film spends two thirds of the running time trying to be ominous about what’s coming but instead it just plods along. And while Nina gives the usual origin of Hyde as her dark side, how then can she possibly possess Rob? The flamboyant climax with Rachel quoting Hamlet makes me think that would have been a better route than straight evil (e.g., “I always wanted to be on the stage but my family insisted I go into STEM!”). As is, the movie’s a flop. “Two moves ahead. That’s what you need to be.”
According to my online reading, the musical MONSTER HIGH (2022) was a reboot of the 2010s cartoon series though with the same core protagonists representing the classic Universal trio — Clawdeen (half-Latina, half-werewolf), Draculaura (vampiric but also practicing witchcraft) and Frankie (“My parents made me 15 days ago — but not the way most kids are made.”), all students at the eponymous school where monsters, free of any human contact, can be themselves.
Clawdeen, with dog ears and claws, has never fit in among humans but she’ll be expelled if Monster High learns she has a human side. When she learns a previous hybrid, Edward Hyde, hid a potion away that can make her all monster, she and her friends set out to find it. Alas, it turns out this is a scheme by Hyde’s son Eddie to obtain the potion and thereby gain power enough to take revenge on both monsters and humans.
Online reading indicates this was controversial in Monster High fandom for shifting Clawdeen from an African-American Brooklyn werewolf into someone lighter skinned and mixed race — not that the latter was bad but she’s very much the stereotype of the Tragic Mulatto (just as Eddie Hyde is the angry outcast version of the same cliche). Even without that this didn’t work for me but I’m obviously not the target audience. “Oh my gosh — friendship, sacrifice, this is so touching!”
I’d hoped to have Jekyll and Hyde close to done by this point. Then I could spend the next few months polishing and indexing.
Alas, looking over the chapters Monday, I realized they’re much less polished than they should be. Not OMG I Can’t Get It Done but it will definitely take more work the rest of the year, and less time spent on other projects, than I want. My bad. It’ll still be less of a crunch than on Aliens Are Here.
This week I spent mostly rewriting one of the chapters and watching a 1969 Jekyll series not even listed in any of my sources (I stumbled across it on Tubi), probably because it’s a four-episode Italian show. And unfortunately subtitled rather than dubbed so I had to pay way more attention than the plodding thing deserves.
— and thank you, Neal Adams, for that cool illustration — and on Jack Kirby becoming writer/artist on Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.
I also received a new cover design for Southern Discomfort. It looks good but I got distracted with writing and haven’t really thought about it enough yet. But I think we’re finally on the right track.
Oh, and Trixie has decided she simply must hang out with me, even when TYG tries taking her upstairs. Much as I would love a little more personal space at times, I don’t have the heart to say no. Who could?
While I haven’t finished my reviews yet, I have now watched every Jekyll and Hyde film that I’m a)aware of and b)can access (there’s one or two that simply aren’t available on a US-compatible DVD). Now I’m moving into TV. Unfortunately the initial results have been dismal.
Long before Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf, the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You? series gave us “Nowhere to Hyde” as the first episode of the second season. The Ghost of Mr. Hyde is robbing and looting at will with his uncanny powers; is it possible that Dr. Jekyll’s descendant is up to his ancestor’s own tricks? There’s nothing much to say about this other than there’s no reason anyone should have identified the ghost as Mr. Hyde — he doesn’t name himself (or talk at all), doesn’t look like Hyde (none of the usual Victorian clothes) so why assume it?
“Sandy Duncan’s Jekyll and Hyde” was an equally forgettable episode of The New Scooby Doo Movies, the second series featuring the characters, this time pairing them off with guest stars ranging from Sonny and Cher to Batman and Robin. In this case the guest star is Sandy Duncan, appearing in a Jekyll and Hyde film when a real Mr. Hyde shows up and kidnaps her — except he got Daphne, appearing as her stunt double. From my perspective there’s even less to say, other than noting it exists.
The 2014-16 BBC series PENNY DREADFUL is another example of the monster mash-up, centering around Mina Harker’s father recruiting a werewolf, a psychic and Victor Frankenstein in his efforts to get revenge on vampire kind. As I said when I tried the first season it’s The League of Slightly Above Average Gentlemen and comparably uninteresting. Rewatching didn’t change that but as it did have Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) in the third season …
The plotlines this season are splintered, which doesn’t make them any more interesting (I skipped a lot of scenes). The Jekyll part has Frankenstein recruit Jekyll, a psychologist and neurologist, to find a way to control the Bride of Frankenstein (Billie Piper), who rebelled against her mate and her creator to make her own way; Frankenstein’s in love with her and wants Jekyll to find a drug that will repress her mind to the point she’ll submit docilely.
In return, Jekyll wants Frankenstein to help him master the duality of man. Running an asylum, Jekyll has become convinced the human mind is balanced on a fulcrum between good and evil, and that to function we repress the evil. His patients have lost that ability; can Frankenstein help Jekyll find a treatment? The subtext is that Jekyll himself is intensely angry at his colleagues rejecting his ideas and that makes it even harder to win them over.
Frankenstein and Jekyll develop a successful treatment that cures at least one lunatic, and that’s the last we hear of it. They capture the Bride but Jekyll in the end sets her free. And at the end, Jekyll learns that his despised father has finally died, meaning Jekyll now inherits the family title — Lord Hyde. It doesn’t work for me but nothing in this series did.
2015’s JEKYLL AND HYDE stars Tom Bateman as Robert Jekyll, raised by foster parents in Ceylon. They’ve assured him they don’t know anything about his father, nor about why Jekyll becomes freakishly strong and violent without the drugs he takes. Then a letter from Maxwell Utterson (son of Jekyll’s solicitor) reaches him and Robert discovers his foster parents lied — they did know his dad (Louis, son of Henry). Hot with anger, he refuses to listen to their warnings and heads off to London to learn more.
What follows fits Jekyll and Hyde into an urban fantasy set-up, a war between MI-O (Military Intelligence Other) and the Tenebrae, demon-gods and their followers. On MI-O’s side we have Bulstrode (Richard Grant); the leader of the Tenebrae is Captain Dance (Enzo Cilenti). Hyde is in some fashion tied to the Tenebrae; he can free their dark god, Lord Trash (and who the hell came up with that name?) or he can perhaps destroy him. Both sides can make use of him.
This doesn’t make much sense: shapeshifting is a Jekyll family supernatural trait so why did he need drugs to make the change to Hyde? We might have learned in S2 but that never happened (the show-runner says we might as well assume the big explosion at the climax of the final episode killed everyone). On the plus side the cast are good and Bateman manages the change with very little physical difference; people can’t always tell by looking which persona they’re facing but it becomes clear fast (though this raises the question of why almost all the other Jekylls have a bigger physical change).
I also like that the two personas’ women are different from the usual. Lily (Stephanie Hyam) turns out to be manipulating Jekyll for MI-O while Bella (Natalie Gumede) is a music-hall owner rather than a streetwalker, both tougher and more independent than most of Hyde’s lovers in earlier incarnations. The show doesn’t grab me — the Tenebrae are standard foes for a series of this type — but it’s more fun to watch than Penny Dreadful.
I’ll add that while the 1930s look is great (the clothes, cars, fashions) there’s no sense of the politics or customs of the times and nobody smokes tobacco (though I’m sure it’s hard finding actors who are willing to light up and I don’t blame them for that).
I’m willing to live with that. This was a good productive week. And working until 5 PM rather than 4PM still gets good results. That may change eventually — most time hacks require a reboot or a reset — but until then it’s a go.
Other than an interview with Carrboro’s town manager, this was an all Jekyll and Hyde week. Watching movies, watching a 2015 TV series, watching the third season of Penny Dreadful for its use of Dr. Jekyll. The Local Reporter took a summer break — most of the editorial staff were on vacation — so I wasn’t writing anything for them.
At the Atomic Junk Shop I posted about Jack Kirby departing Marvel — a seismic event in comics fandom and the industry when it happened — and a story on writer Paul Levitz’ attempt to untangle the Spectre’s continuity, though that was really just an excuse to post this glorious cover by Marshall Rogers.
I also blogged about something my fellow Boomers (and maybe older Gen X) remember, the Columbia Record Club.
And the Con-Tinual panel on using Olympian gods in fiction is live on Facebook. I’ve written several stories that incorporate Greek myths, including a couple in 19-Infinity (links on my Behold the Book page).
19-Infinity cover by Kemp Ward. All rights to images remain with current holders.
