The Fall

[hollyisalovelyname]

Watched it last night. Tis good, but disturbing. Gillian Anderson very good. Jamie Dornan scary. Anyone else see it?

did you find it relaxing?

The difference is I'm capable of critiquing the programme without making personal remarks about people with the opposite view.

Clever touches: I liked the lack of response from GA when the pc said she was gay (which is partly direction, but there was no line in the script either). GA had some great one-liners (not going to type them all now as I'm on my phone). I thought the final phone call between them was well-pitched.

It's not Joyce, or Proust. But it's not pretending to be, and it doesn't have to be on their levels to be good, or clever.

i've not made any personal remarks. you've taken my remarks personally, that's totally different. plenty of people, however, on this thread have directed unkind or undermining remarks to me... didn't notice you jumping in at the time.

i don't think Joyce or Proust would necessarily make good television. that's really not the level i'm attacking the show at, i do hope you believe me on that front. i'd just like the characters to behave in a way that makes sense before everyone starts agreeing that it's a good script.

i thought the fuck/verb/man/woman line was weird, personally. i mean, if a man behaved the way she did to a junior officer, just rocking up and giving her his hotel room number, wouldn't that just be sexual harassment?

Yes, I found it relaxing, it's a piece of fiction on tv - I found sitting down for an hour, seeing where I knew etc. Now I'm sure you are going to infer that I find the torture and murder of women relaxing, and no I don't. I find the act of watching tv relaxing and the story held my attention.

Don't know about anyone else but I've been amazed at how many people on here have been writing things about how scared they've been when watching it. How they've then been freaked out or frightened in their own house. Seriously? Never had that effect on me at all. Dh went out for a run last night while it was on leaving our door unlocked for about half an hour, didn't bother me in the slightest. Mind you, that might be because I'm a bit of a horror nut so am not easily scared.

no no, i'm not inferring that, i just thought it was tense, rather than relaxing.

good point, hotair, why shouldn't she? no problem for me, so long as everyone doesn't start talking about her as a fantastic feminist. but again, i think that comes back to Cubitt's pretty elementary understanding of strong women.

I like tension - it relaxes me

I didn't find it scary either, I found bits suspenseful - when Annie was on the toilet before she was attacked, I found suspenseful. But I don't like horror films.

I didn't double check my locks, or find it hard to sleep. I may have rushed through my sneaky before bed smoke outside

it was definitely relaxing then... i thought whoever directed it did a good job winding everyone up, but the cross-cutting with the sex scene etc was surprisingly tasteless. weird, when so much of the rest of it was well-done. was it euros lyn who did them all? or am i getting mixed up with broadchurch?

Is everybody on MN in agreement that they would have never slept with their husbands just after they confessed to an affair with the babysitter?

Producers take note

i don't think of her as much of a character at all, that's the problem. swimming, drinking, wearing a great blouse and acting unprofessionally in sexually harassing an officer... meh. simply being a female in charge of her own genitalia does not make her feminist.

although i did think the slut-shaming speech was good, i must say. excellent to get that idea aired. it just felt like a bit of a cut and paste job, though, in a show that was otherwise so keen on torturing beautiful women. i'm not saying there weren't good ingredients, just that they didn't add up to a coherent piece.

actually, to be clear. she might consider herself a feminist, one who makes mistakes etc etc. but that doesn't make her an icon of feminism. it just makes her jane tennyson or any of the rest of those female cop shows who fuck young men.

Hatty, look up hysterical bonding - plenty of people on here have experienced it and there are some going through it who don't seem to be aware of it.

Good grief I thought I'd stumbled into AIBU rather than Telly Addicts!

Aitch - Euros did Broadchurch, not this one.

This was not perfect telly but what is? I personally felt the mirroring of Stella's sex scene and the crime was quite heavy handed. I could see what they were trying to do, but it just hit the wrong note for me.

And her speech on violence against women at the end was a bit clunky. Yes it was an important message but it felt a bit forced in terms of wording and delivery. But I loved her reminding her team not to make value judgements on victims etc. THAT was getting a message in, in a way that made sense within the plot.

IMHO there was a LOT of plot to get through in the space of 5 hours and as a result the characterisation suffered. That said, I do wonder if series 2 gives more space to develop all of that, leading towards the denouement. However, that would suggest they should just have run one longer series like TK1 (Danish).

I can believe the solicitor wanting to stay in her own home and believing that she was invincible, that someone who stole some undies probably would not come again. Because, really, if we all thought we were going to be strangled in our beds after a break-in, many of us would never bloody sleep. So I don't have an issue with that. Likewise, I don't have an issue with the DV victim living near the accountant. Belfast/NI really can be that small, especially when you think of all the young professionals who have snapped up houses in or near previously very working class neighbourhoods.

So The Fall worked for me on some levels, some things jarred. I will tune in for series 2, but I hope they smooth some of the rough edges and I would quite like what is on screen to relate to the plot, rather than how much lipgloss the character is wearing.

invincible lawyer, yes, if it was just a break in, actually. but don't you think the bra and knickers being laid out, and the vibrator underneath made it so much more than that?

have googled, Jakob Verbruggen directed. nevereardofim. sounds furrin.

Clearly I misinterpreted 'all designed to make you park any problems with the script'. To my mind, the use of the word 'designed' indicates thought...premedication on the part of the production team / writers etc.

Being a female in charge of your own genitalia is Actually Caitlin Morans (lighthearted) definition of feminism.

GA obviously thinks of herself as a feminist, acts in ways that go against the conformist expectations of women and says some spot on feminist stuff.

But no she's not an icon of feminism, nor a perfect feminist or perfect character. But FGS, surely we want strong female roles in drama, showing women in positions and relationships that challenge the normally perceived roles of women in drama, or life, as the girlfriend/wife/helper/supporter//victim/mother/self scarificer/emotion expresser etc that are the ways women are most often portrayed? But to then moan that she's not a perfect or a feminist icon just seems a bit lame, like there's no pleasing some people.

Likewise the complaint earlier that the documatery interviewing areal victims of rape portrayed it more realistically than an entertainment drama about a serial killer (but not rapist), seems rather to be missing the point. The point being: you'd expect that really wouldn't you
Due to thier totally differing functions and intentions as pieces of TV.

I like the GA character, I like the edge they've given to her. I think, weve got a good feel for how she functions within a work context and within her personalnrelationshipsnto some point. We know nothing about her background, but I'm keen to know more, I want to see more of her and find out more about her. That's a success in character portrayal in my book.

Dornan killer character though I've found less convincing and less interesting. Not enough contrast between his killer persona and his family man life. He acts like a weirdo at home too.

I haven't found the coincidences too worrying, as ,I accept it's a drama therefore following a course to a predetermined conclusion unlike RL, but also I think much police work does rely on the lucky chance of information coming to light rather than great detective work. Hence so many unsolved crimes. The pathologist knowing am earlier rape victim was maybe one step too far though??

I didn't like the last episode where he phones her, and suggest they era so alike. I found the detective/killer 'special link' just too previously overdone. And it shoould have been shot in 12 parts so minimal wait for next series as by then I probably just won't care.

I've found The Fall to be a real mixed bag, and it might not hang together well but at least it's meant to be thought-provoking: sadly it has dabs of interesting stuff which seem to signal "Here! Think!" but don't follow through at all.

So while I completely get that the character of Stella is meant to have all the attributes that someone listed earlier, I feel that she's been 'put together' and had an iconic blouse thrown at her and we're somehow meant to bow at her feet. It's like a few men had a meeting and said 'Right, let's do a feminist: apparently they do this, this and this, and don't do this'...'OH AND SHE'S GOT TO BE A RIGHT GOER AS WELL'. But that is all there is to her, and so she lurches from these rote right-on lines to being a somewhat predatory/frank openly sexual person, with actually very very little character in there.

I feel that I'm watching something that women have had very little to do with, and this makes me cross.

Also:
-Where are the normal, unattractive people?
-What sort of eedjit hides his psycho accoutrements above his daughter's bed and thinks she won't notice? Kids are nosey (and so they should be).
-He sussed out that farmhouse in a matter of hours, and nobody clocked him at all? Come off it. The countryside is not like that.
-How did the peeing woman not notice his reflection in the mirror? Or feel him creeping about her house? Old houses make a feck of a lot of noise.
-Could go on for ages, the plot holes were quite vast really.

But above all, and this shows the male input quite disastrously: he shagged a 15 yr old and his wife has a wee strop, shags him, then goes back to him because she's pregnant. Er, NO. Where is she seen shaking and crying and maybe throwing up, kicking him out, screaming at him, sitting for hours staring into space, unable to eat etc etc?? Her reaction was so completely wrong, not that there was much of a character to hinge it on, but she wasn't a total nothing. Very very bad writing there.