HEAT 2: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Wading into a movie by Michael Mann. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
   And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. Why? He’s a Michael Mann Man. And he uses a lot of…Michael Mannerisms.
   His name is Frank. The movie is Thief. In another diner his name is Neil. The movie is HEAT. That scene, in a diner, where those two characters have a truly mad conversation? You look at that chat and, on the surface, it’s a regular talk. Underneath it all, though, the conversation is mad. Elsewhere in the movie, there’s criminal activity involving the use of a drill.
   And the main criminal in that film wants out. He’ll do one last big score. This guy contemplates his fate while staring at water. He knows that whatever time he gets…is luck.
   In the Miami Vice movie, Gong Li manages to tell us, twice over, that TIME IS LUCK. This blog post is hidden in the wheel well, to fool you into thinking it’s the only one.
   HEAT 2 is the book prequel/sequel to a movie by Michael Mann. We’ll see if the book is made into a movie sequel. The one thing stopping that would be Mann’s death. He’s 83 as I type this, and I guess he’s looking to make one last big score. Whatever time he gets is luck. So. What does all this have to do with the price of tea in China?
   To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse.
   The book is a sequel to a movie. Think on that for a second. There is no novelisation of the film itself. That throws a few curves into what should otherwise be a straight road of a book. Mann teamed up with a novelist to bring HEAT 2 to life.
   I don’t know which novelist for sure, but a casual glance at the internet hints at two writers being in the frame for the job: both men. When the collaboration finally hit the shelves, crime writer Meg Gardiner had her name on the cover.
   HEAT 2 is the first Meg Gardiner book I’ve read. I’ve watched an unholy amount of Michael Mann movies, television products, and analysis of same. Mann likes to fix things after the cinema release of a movie.
   No. Better to say that he hates to fix things, but he fixes. So Frank, contemplative, looking on a seascape from an alien world, comes from a scene restored to Thief. Filmed, but cut out for the cinema. Sometimes things go the other way...
   Mann removed the word detritus from HEAT. It’s there in HEAT 2. The word stood out in Mann’s movie, was conspicuous by its absence when cut, and is therefore notable for its appearance in the Meg Gardiner collaboration.
   Again. To have any hope of enjoying HEAT 2, you must be steeped in the Michael Mannverse. Okay, maybe Meg Gardiner’s readership came on over to see what the fuss was about. But. This book is for people who have seen and enjoyed the film. That’s a bare minimum requirement.
   It helps if you’ve watched…
   The Jericho Mile.
   Thief.
   Manhunter.
   Miami Vice for television and the Miami Vice movie.
   Crime Story. L.A. Takedown. Robbery Homicide Division. Luck. Tokyo Vice. All for television.
   The car advert with Benicio del Toro. This is for Mercedes-Benz, with the title Lucky Star.
   Go beyond HEAT and watch the deleted scenes from that movie as well.
   Then there’s the cluster of films: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, both cuts of Blackhat, and interviews with Michael Mann.
   Yes, all the other stuff. He had a hand in The Kingdom. It feels like a Michael Mann film. Speaking of which, I’d recommend To Live and Die in L.A. It’s an attempt at a Michael Mann movie without Mann as the director. This features William L. Petersen, who has a bit-part in Thief and is the Michael Mann Man in Manhunter.
   What else? All the other stuff I didn’t mention. The Last of the Mohicans, and so on. If you want to go above and beyond the call of duty in watching a series put together by a bunch of people who went above and beyond the call of duty, there’s the gargantuan ONE HEAT MINUTE, which analyses HEAT cinematically, one minute at a time.
   I’d think about the length of the movie before you even contemplate diving deep on that one. Every minute of a very long movie is given its own episode. If you think you have the patience to handle a 40-minute discussion of one minute of film footage, try it on. And on and on. Half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour…minute by filmic minute.
   An unholy amount of content, right there.
   Where to start? Chuck Adamson. Chicago police. On the hunt for Neil McCauley and his whole fucking crew. Adamson co-created Crime Story for television. You’ll spot him in the movie Thief, on which he advised. He told Mann a whole bunch of anecdotes…
   Neil McCauley was a criminal who called off a heist when he heard a sound in an empty building. McCauley correctly realised the noise was from cop surveillance on the site. This story is worked into the movie HEAT. The cops and the robbers know who they are in this whole situation. Adamson meets the criminal on the street and decides to have coffee with McCauley.
   That scene becomes the biggest scene in HEAT. I know. For some of you, the action is the juice. I’ll settle for it…you know what I mean…I’ll buy that. Moving on. Adamson is in on an ambush of a heist, leaving McCauley and his crew nowhere to go. One guy temporarily escapes. At the movies, he becomes the character of Chris. Adamson shoots McCauley dead.
   Mann writes it up as a script of 180 pages. In the movie business, a page of script generates one minute of film. The time isn’t right, the stars don’t align, so he guts the script and turns it into a television movie called L.A. Takedown.
   Pre-production on a project is a huge thing for Mann. He spent longer filming the bank scene in HEAT than he spent on pre-production for the TV movie version. It took days to film for television and months to make the story fit on the big screen.
   Mann recycles things. Xander Berkeley is on television in Miami Vice. He’s Waingro in L.A. Takedown. And he’s a very nervous Ralph in HEAT. Ralph’s actions lead to the destruction of a television set. You’ll find that scene in Crime Story.
   What’s my point? If you had to write a prequel/sequel to a Michael Mann movie, you’d have to deliver a lot of Michael Mannerisms. You’d need to serve up a montage. Highlights. There’d be no way around that.
   But it’s okay. Mann did that already, across movies and television. Driven men, good at what they do, do bad things. They stare at water. Obsess over time, and luck, and the price of tea in China. They are Michael Mann Men.
   And they must deal with Michael Mann Women. There are two types of Michael Mann Woman. The first: she’s seen some shit. And the second: she’s not seen any shit, but she’s gonna see a shitload of shit soon. None of this ends well.
   In HEAT, Diane Venora plays Justine. She’s married to the driven detective, out on the edge, Vincent Hanna. It’s Diane who has her line about detritus cut from the movie. She gives a great speech after everyone’s gone home.
   The detective returns to the restaurant to pick up his wife after dealing with the fallout of Waingro’s murderous inclinations. Waingro of the television movie is incredibly different from Waingro of the big screen outing.
   Justine lays into Vincent and his inability to be there. (Vital, given Vincent’s command to a snitch to BE THERE elsewhere in this film.) Justine’s speech is riveting. It nails Vincent to the restaurant floor. Sets out his faults. He responds by stating, pretty much, that these faults are assets in the hunt for criminals.
   Faults, in trying to keep a marriage going. His third. HEAT unfolds with criminal inevitability. Cop and robber are tuned in to an exclusively shared frequency. Both understand each other. More than that. They understand that they are the only two players on this field who understand each other. This field is the entire world. A whole planet, and only these two guys relate to their opposites.
   How do we know they are opposites? Vincent Hanna picks up a gun and leaves his home. Neil McCauley arrives home and sits a gun down. Both are driven men on opposite sides of the law. Mann spells it out using everything. Cinematography. Sound. Editing. The guns, clothes, everything. Both men, home, strike a pose on opposite sides of the law. This is all deliberate.

In the case of Neil McCauley, we’re treated to his scene contemplating water in a colour called Michael Mann Blue™^. What is this? It signifies mood, setting, terrain, forthcoming actions, choices, mistakes within choices, and fate. Mann recycles this colour or variations of it across his works.
   The movie leads to a clash. And, leading away from that clash, into possibilities. Clash. The bank robbery goes to hell. Only Neil and Chris make it out, and Chris is barely in any shape to carry on. All Neil has to do is drive to the airport and he’s gone. Possibilities.
   But he’s not the guy to let things go. His way out is for absolutely ever. Never coming back. A multimillionaire. He’s off to Fiji, to stare into the ocean and contemplate life. Except. He has to kill Waingro, who set him up to take the biggest fall. And so he does stop by to kill Waingro.
   Neil has brought a woman to the scene of the impending crime. Eady is the Michael Mann Woman who has not seen any shit. From the moment Neil is exposed as a participant in an ultra-violent robbery, Eady sees a shitload of shit. And none of that ends well for her.
   Adamson killed McCauley. The movie gives us the same story. Cop kills robber. It’s a Warner Brothers movie, by way of Regency. Turns out that crime does pay, but at what cost? Neil’s friend Chris escapes, knowing he can never be with his wife or child again. And? There’s a prequel/sequel book to this? Where the fuck can that even go?
   We’re told on the cover that the book deals with 1988 to 2000. Meg Gardiner had to give the audience the Michael Mannverse. But that’s okay. Michael Mann already handed us that. It is difficult, to move fixed pieces into a story. Playing with someone else’s building blocks, according to certain – very certain – rules and expectations.
   Clearly, Meg Gardiner faced the same problem everyone else ever had with Michael Mann. He’s thorough. Driven. I guess he stares at seas, oceans, lakes. Contemplating his existence. HEAT featured pretty rough shooting locations. Anyone who worked on that movie and The Last of the Mohicans just shrugged it all off.
   What did Meg Gardiner do? She got on with it, and had a blast. Is it a Michael Mann crime story? Yes, it is. What must that feature? The idea that time is luck. We tick that box off. Someone must stare out into water and contemplate the meaning of things.
   Movie: Mann gives us Neil McCauley staring out at water. Michael Mann Blue™^. Book: Meg Gardiner offers us the detective, Vincent Hanna, discovering the same location and staring out at the same body of water.
   We have confirmed lore. It is hinted at, in Al Pacino’s performance as Hanna, that the detective indulges in cocaine from time to time. We had this revelation in discussions of the movie. It’s in the book as part of the official fabric of the story.
   There are loads of tiny details here, from across the Mannverse. I mentioned deleted scenes from HEAT. One is a short but memorable sequence with a visit to a fence/informant in a place packed with cheap television sets. Cut. Gone. Lost.
   Recycled as a scene for use in the book.
   How does the story unfold? It opens with the consequences of the bank job. Eady has seen some shit. She puts in an appearance to tie off a loose end or two. Then she’s out. Justine and her daughter Lauren are given a few moments in the narrative.
   We learn that Vincent Hanna did not divorce all of his wives. One died. Does this contradict the movie? When Nate is discussing Hanna’s career with Neil McCauley, there’s a mention of two divorces. Current wife is Justine. Maybe Nate got the details wrong. Nate makes a few errors of judgement in the movie.
   He misjudges a businessman, leading to the betrayal at the bank. And he misjudges Neil, in giving away Waingro’s location…believing that Neil won’t give a shit. Neil gives a shit and blows Waingro away – creating the inevitable cops-and-robbers collision that ends the film. So here and there, Nate slips up.
   Looking back, I liked the use of current wife in the movie. It’s a small set-up for Justine’s ejection from Vincent’s life. Maybe he’s into women on Prozac. This is where he goes wrong. There’s a scene near the start of the film with Hanna in a stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building. Hanna being asked about…well, being there…and he has to duck that responsibility to go and fight crime. So he dashes downstairs.
   And we have that near the end of the film. Hanna in a very stressful family situation. Wife and stepdaughter in the building: now a hospital rather than a home. And another conversation about, y’know, being there. He dashes downstairs to fight crime.
   Maybe his earlier wife had just barely divorced him and he still thought of her as his wife when he raced to be with her as she died. That would square away the story.
   Where are these characters in the book? Justine, Lauren, and Eady are mentioned. But there’s a shift in focus to the flashback. It’s 1988, and Neil is still alive. Still taking down scores. He has another Michael Mann Woman to encounter. She’s seen some shit.
   Chris meets his future wife Charlene for the first time, and becomes obsessed with her. She’s seen some shit. The other members of the crew, Michael and Trejo, are given almost no time in the story.
   It’s Chicago, Chicago, Chicago. Hanna blew a guy away there, and we’re talking about a fucking maniac. Expect violence. Loose ends? In the immediate aftermath of the bank robbery in the nineties, we have Hanna not doing something.
   Waingro’s corpse is on a slab. There’ll be a DNA sample to try to tie him to unsolved crimes. He’ll be revealed as the serial killer Hanna was tracking in a movie subplot. We never reach that scene.
   Back to the eighties, in Chicago. Here are scenes we’ll never get, for reasons of story integrity. Hanna can only have a vague brush up against Neil and his crew. That must be maintained and it is maintained. Playing with other people’s building blocks.
   The narrative needs a Waingro villain. And it gets one. Neil is in town, planning to take down scores. The home invader, Wardell, is Waingro – but packing double the worst trouble anyone ever had. Neil is interested in scores. Wardell becomes interested in Neil. Hanna is there to take down Wardell. All sorts of cats running around after mice.
   Hanna is with the Chicago force. The only familiar person on his crew is Casals, who leaves Chicago with Vincent Hanna and goes to Los Angeles for the movie portion of the story. We get virtually nothing on Casals as a character.
   This is the Neil show, the Hanna show, and the Chris show, with Wardell flitting between sideshow and main show. There’s a theme here, concerning Wardell. In the movie HEAT, Hanna has a cop on his crew: Bosko.
   Bosko is played by Ted Levine. A Michael Mann regular. In Crime Story, Ted Levine plays a villain who just keeps getting away. And I was reminded of that character thread in this book. Crime Story is Chicago, through and through. In HEAT 2, Wardell, as scummy as he is, just keeps getting away.
   This is foreshadowing. Introduce your villain in the flashback. Give Neil and Chris more character background. Show that Vincent Hanna is the edgiest cop on the edge. Build Wardell as a stone killer.
   In the past, the action is the juice. We’re concerned with a high-risk score that has to go just right or everyone is dead. It’s taking the cartel’s money and vanishing into nowheresville, fast.
   This more or less plays out okay. What’s not okay is Wardell, who has cut into this crew. His plan is to throw his men at Neil’s men, post-heist, and reap the rewards.
   Everything is fucked up. We see why Neil avoids attachment after this. His crew has to fade away. Wardell, being the villain we’ll definitely return to in the future, escapes with loot. Building blocks. Plot set-ups. It’s very Chicago.
   Belongs to the Thief and Crime Story segments of Mann’s career. HEAT, before there was HEAT. This part of the job, Meg Gardiner does well. She does the other part well, too, but…before we even get into that…
   Time passes. Many characters are dead and gone. Vincent Hanna is still in Los Angeles, with his crew. Drucker. Casals. Who is left? Nate. Chris. His wife Charlene. We go through what happened to Chris and where he is now. Building a criminal empire. Staying away from his wife. Longing for her. In the movie…
   This part is super important. On the run, Chris can’t resist trying to see Charlene. It’s a trap. The cops are waiting. Charlene gives a signal. Warns him off. He drives out. Cops brace him on the street anyway.
   His identity holds up. And then we see him lost in despair in his car, as he is about to head off into a new life – leaving Charlene behind for eternity. That’s what we take away from the movie. The Michael Mann Woman sends the Michael Mann Man away. Cut and dried. That is it.
   So where can this book go? Wisely, it sticks to that level of finality. Chris does distantly see Charlene again through a window. They talk on the phone, but that is all.
   He knows he still has to let her go as the book unfolds. This could have been easy to fuck up. But finality is finality. We don’t want them to get back together, and we don’t need that. The characters don’t need that.
   Instead, we have this new criminal empire. It carries Chris back to Los Angeles. He wants to take down Vincent Hanna. Wardell resurfaces as the villain. What’s the tone of this later part of the book?
   It is generated from a cluster of movies: The Insider, Ali, Collateral, the other cut of Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and both cuts of Blackhat. For the cops-and-robbers stuff, you have Public Enemies. Mann occasionally dipped into biographical pictures. John Dillinger died in Chicago, so this is very Chicago.
   As for the other stuff. The Insider and Ali both feature dense layers of paranoia. Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat are certainly involved in crime…but they give us something different. Collateral does what HEAT did before. It made Los Angeles seem new, fresh, showing us a hidden visual side to Hollywoodland that’s normally so generic in cinema.
   Pause for thought. HEAT did that. And then Collateral did that, all over again. Fresh, twice. Which brings me to Meg Gardiner. She has to give us these characters again. Fresh, twice over. So she leans heavily into areas that interested Mann to a greater degree in his later films. Oh, he was always interested in this stuff.
   However, there’s a shift from the earlier work. This exists in Collateral to an extent, but comes to the forefront in Miami Vice and leaps from the screen in Blackhat. Massive criminal organisations. Heavy on the tech-stuff. No borders. International activity.
   Electronics to the left of you, computers to the right, and people in the shadows. Driven. Dedicated. With high-end skill-sets.
   It’s hard to write about Miami Vice without stating underrated, or deserves a second look. Maybe check out the alternative cut of the movie. Barry Shabaka Henley, and we’ll call him a Michael Mann regular, is one of America’s best-kept acting secrets. He’s part of a cast dedicated to bringing the story to life.
   There are Michael Mann fans who walked away from fare like Miami Vice, Blackhat, and the television show Luck. “Mann had lost his touch.” They want HEAT. Okay. HEAT 2 isn’t for those people. HEAT 2 is for people who were into HEAT, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Blackhat.
   I know Blackhat is a hard sell. Cyber crime. Was it a movie out of time? Right on the edge of what was happening, and yet somehow a decade ahead of itself?
   A movie that was going to inform the mainstream audience of internet criminality’s all-pervasive threat – all the way up to government level. No one wanted to know. Shit like that’s all over the news on the daily, these days. In the fabric of existence, at breakfast and on through to sunset and after.
   If you don’t like Miami Vice or Blackhat, I have news for you. Put the HEAT movie on. Enjoy what you have. No one has ruined your movie experience. Coming up into the year 2000, HEAT 2 gives you a party like it’s 1999 vibe.
   Songs are referenced. But beyond those, you can feel the soundtrack. Mann sometimes employs multiple composers for his movie work. Across different eras, I could see Mann dividing the musical tasks accordingly. A little bit of Elliot Goldenthal here, James Newton Howard there, Lisa Gerrard with Pieter Bourke. Maybe the unused finale track Goldenthal created for HEAT. Mann likes to recycle, after all.
   Would HEAT 2 work as a movie? To get the job done, it’s pretty much a full recast of HEAT. Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, and Tom Noonan are gone. Noonan would have been a great return actor: the character of Kelso has a cyber security role to play in the book.
   The book works as a book. Once you are through the immediate aftermath of the bank heist in 1995, and the building of a villain back in 1988, the conflict escalates into 2000. Mann wasn’t happy, having to change the finale of Miami Vice. You can see the locations being used in the book. Unfinished business for Mann, perhaps.
   Things go phenomenally bad in Neil’s past. We are treated to the origin of Neil’s desire to visit Fiji. He never gets there. Chris is the one who is home-free at the end of the movie.
   In the book, the three-way firefight involving Vincent, Chris, and the beyond evil Wardell…that’s the payoff to Chris setting up a new life for himself. He’s closing in on a big score so that he can get out. But he turns from that to take a chance on extinguishing the detective who killed his buddy.
   If you can’t stand Miami Vice, this is no-go for you. Same for Blackhat. That’s on the basis that Chris involves himself in the life of a Michael Mann Woman. It’s a lengthy sequence. He has to be doing SOMETHING that’s going on far from Los Angeles. And if that global cyber criminal enterprise doesn’t float your boat, you’ll wonder why you are reading all of that stuff.
   This is meant to be 1,500 words, and I’ve gone over that for obvious reasons. The movie. And the Michael Mann world-view across many movies and television shows. I had to mention those things as a backdrop to a few references in the book.
   The book works for me. It is not about doing thrill-seeker liquor-store hold-ups with a born to lose tattoo on anyone’s forehead. Meg Gardiner gave us a mini-series that would barely be contained as a movie. You might not be into the technological criminal empire that Chris goes for.
   It’s there to beef Chris up as a character who has changed somewhat over time. The build-up to the finale, the shootout, is terrific. I feel there’s a finality to the ending…that isn’t about opening the possibilities of a sequel: HEAT 3. More…setting a mood saying we’re done here, and the protagonists never see each other again. A door is left open, but not much.
   In the end, Meg Gardiner shows that in giving us driven people doing intense things, she is herself a Michael Mann Woman. She’s seen some shit. I’d write more, but this blog’s transponder has been put on a bus to San Clemente. Or possibly Des Moines. So long, reader. You take it easy…you’re home-free.

 

REVISITING TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

There are two names connected to MOCKINGBIRD. For me, the author is always going to be Nelle. Perhaps mistakenly, whenever I heard mention of her, I had the impression people called her that. It rhymes with bell, and not belly. Her creation is always going to be Scout Finch. Not Jean Louise.
   I write here of Harper Lee out of politeness to Clarity, who is always listening in. Nelle is buried in Monroeville, Alabama. You can take an internet tour of the gravesite, where you’ll see other members of the Lee family there…with Finch in the name.
   Before I revisited Harper Lee’s book, I thought about how I visited it in the first place. Going back, there was the movie. Then I went in search of the book. For those of you who try that sort of thing, do your best to remember the book is the book and the movie is the movie.
   Maybe you encounter those items the other way around. Someone makes a movie, and then it is turned into a book. In that case, do your best to remember the movie is the movie and the book is the book. Or the movie of the book of the T-shirt of the radio show of the hamburger, and so on.
   (That should be the book of the movie of the breakfast cereal. Pardon me.)
   I went looking for the book after seeing the movie adaptation. It’s possible that a documentary prompted me into action. A documentary in which she was referred to as Nelle. As for the film, Harper Lee kept an eye on the movie production long enough to know they weren’t going to mess it up. She did her best not to mess the book up herself. For, first, there was another version of her story. A messed-up execution of one we never needed to see.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a book from the start of the 1960s, which is to say there’s a bit of a hangover from the 1950s to deal with in reading it. But the setting is very strictly glued to that of Harper Lee’s childhood in the 1930s. By the time the book ends, historically we’re hovering on the edge of the Dustbowl Years and vivid imagery of the Migrant Mother photographed by Dorothea Lange. W. H. Auden puts a bullet to the 1930s in September 1939, in giving his label to a low dishonest decade…
   But that’s all later. We start around 1933. The outside world, fixed in the grand arena of history, seems so very far away from small-town America and its quota of daily small-town Americanisms depicted in the book. (Although, eventually, Hitler does get a mention.) At its core, MOCKINGBIRD concerns racial injustice sieved through the strained community built around it. This is the only way Lee can approach the story.
   It isn’t.
   There was another version. GO SET A WATCHMAN shows how TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD started life. In that earlier manuscript, the character of Scout is grown to adulthood and, as Jean Louise, returns from the big city to view the old home town under a different light. The author is not particularly kind to her people, there. Lee was asked to work on the tale. She transformed a raw idea into a cooked meal by making the story all about Scout’s childhood days.
   Scout is young in both stories. In the rough prototype novel, she’s 26. And in the finished work, she starts the tale at the age of six. The homecoming story of a twenty-something character doesn’t sound as engaging as the tale of the child in the town surrounded by haunting figures.
   TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a ghost story, with plenty of fake ghosts in it. Nothing in the vaguely supernatural background of the book is scary. The scary stuff is left to all those violent adult themes the child struggles to deal with in the foreground. For this is the Deep South in the 1930s; if a black man kisses a white woman, the town’ll hang him as soon as look at him.
   I’ve read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, but I refuse to read GO SET A WATCHMAN. Sometimes, publication history is a bitch and stands in the way. I refer to the exploitation of a dead author’s unpublished works as necrophilia.
   “By necrophilia, or what the Americans quaintly call necro-feel-ya, I mean the unfortunate exploitation of an artist’s work beyond that artist’s lifetime.”
   In this case, the author remained alive when the deal was struck. So this didn’t come across as necrophilia. No bonus points for that. Sharks tasted blood and circled in the water, under a sky packed with vultures biding their time while the hangman sharpened his axe…which he loaded up with buckshot. Or something like that. Unfortunate exploitation of the artist’s work during the artist’s dying days is no less a crime against art.
   Nelle…
   …your honour, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was absolutely of sound body and mind when she gave permission for her prototype manuscript to be published. On the other hand, the author, Nelle Harper Lee, was subjected to what can only be described as elder abuse, not even comprehending the rights she granted shortly after her sister’s death and not too long before her own.
   Why mention her sister?
   If you do take an electronic tour of Harper Lee’s grave then you’ll see the name Finch there, just as I said. One of those grave markers notes that Alice Finch Lee was born in 1911 and died in 2014. She’s Nelle’s sister. And, into extreme old age, Alice looked out for Nelle’s interests.
   The chronology runs as follows: Alice dies in 2014, the book comes out in 2015, and Nelle dies in 2016. Alice hadn’t been the guardian of the legacy for the last three years of her life, retiring at the tender age of 100. Nelle’s manuscript existed the whole time, and she never published it. Conspiracy? The weight of time, reputation, and lack of literary output?
   Suppose you do rob a grave. Have the politeness to let the body climb down in there, first.
   You and I were not in the room with the writer and the lawyer, so whether cinder-crusted devilry or tedious publishing talk went on…we’ll never know. It’s much easier to look askance at the publisher for conduct unbecoming. That, we’ll return to.
   I tried as hard as I could. But it is impossible to write of one author without writing of the other. I’ll take a detour into the life and times of Truman Capote, the scamp. Nelle and Truman knew each other as children. He created a tomboyish character based on her in his book, and she created a social oddity of a friend based on him way over in her book.
   Did Truman Capote secretly write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or is that hogwash? I tell ye plain, ’tis hogwash. For the last fucking time, no, Branwell Brontë did not write WUTHERING HEIGHTS. Nelle, with MOCKINGBIRD nesting at the publisher’s, travelled with Truman Capote to Holcomb, Kansas.
   Multiple murder in Kansas interested Truman, and he wanted to write about that. He decided to visit the scene of the crime: to descend upon it. Despite the jaundiced babbling of Gore Vidal, delivering a scabrous view in the opposite direction, Truman Capote had talent. He didn’t use it wisely or well, but he had something before the booze rented him out and threw him to the bayleaf mob of critics. Baying is hardly the word for poseurs.
   The thought of Truman using Harper Lee as a condom to communicate with the local yokels…yes, that would’ve amused Truman. Capote is Italian slang for condom. I sense he knew. Nelle took Monroeville Alabama and turned it into Maycomb. The book was behind her, but only just. Truman lingered there, as the odd little boy. Now she was in Truman’s company, and he was still at heart an odd little boy. Nelle stood on the ground in another place with comb at the end of the name.
   Holcomb. There she assisted Truman in the early construction of IN COLD BLOOD. Breakfast at Tiffany’s lay far behind Truman. He’d dedicated it to his close friend Jack Dunphy. Years in the making, IN COLD BLOOD would be dedicated to Jack Dunphy and Harper Lee in that order.
   Capote once acknowledged her contribution and then scratched it out. He had trouble acknowledging her help. “Friend.” Yes. What else? “Assistant.” Capote, in hindsight, diminishing Lee’s contribution, knew how to publicise Capote. Nelle was there for the first two months. Did Branwell Brontë write WUTHERING HEIGHTS? No. Did Truman Capote write TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD? No. Did Nelle Lee write IN COLD BLOOD?
   There, things get tricky. No, she did not write the book. But did she make the writing of the book possible? Did she pave the way? Nelle broke the ice, right? Let’s be fucking clear, here. Nelle Lee dynamited the ice so that Truman Capote could have his book and eat it like cake he’d said he made all by himself. From recipe to reception.
   A new type of book. (It wasn’t.)
   Every word of it true. (A lie.)
   George Washington slept here. (He didn’t. But we might as well throw that one in, too.)
   Truman didn’t care about the multiple murders in Holcomb, Kansas. Since time out of mind, murder most foul has fascinated us. So he knew he could write about a morbidly evergreen subject. That had staying power. Truman didn’t care whether or not the murders would be solved.
   He and Nelle arrived in town in time for the funerals of the murdered family. Truman made a lot of friends there, in Kansas. That’s according to Truman. Nelle made those connections on his behalf. She became the long spoon the community relied upon to sup with Truman Capote.
   You can read his fiction in depth. But you’d never want to be in a room with him for anything beyond the span of a breakfast, Tiffany’s included or otherwise. He’d entertain you, and then you’d be a chapter in a book.
   Gore Vidal? Someone should gore Vidal. Fuck you, Gore Vidal. And for that, you’d have to buy me dinner first. I was childhood friends with Harper Lee. You couldn’t be featured in her book, not even as Boo Radley. But I’m in there. Not as Boo Radley, though. Eat your heart out, Gore Vidal. Go back to assaulting Norman Mailer’s fists with your plastic chin, you… (F-slur redacted.)
   I made that last paragraph up. But for someone writing A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences, Truman made things up, too. True account. Not exactly. Multiple Murder. Now that bit he got right. Consequences? From a writer who didn’t care. A writer who came to care about all the wrong things, in the end, concerning that case.
   Nelle: Truman’s cultural guide, secretary, catch-all assistant, note-taker, editor, and friend, making it possible for people to relate to her as the acceptable face of Truman Capote’s investigation.
   Truman continued without Nelle’s assistance for years after, as the case led to suspects, arrests, trial, convictions, and executions. Capote didn’t care about the justice of it. The Clutter family, parents and children, were murdered by two men Capote took more interest in.
   Capote wanted to be the invisible narrator of his big book on big themes in an isolated place. But with Truman it’s all about him, all the time, every single time. That’s why here, I’ve only mentioned the murdered family once by name. I want you to know that the star of the show is Truman Capote…first and foremost, and that’s according to him. Not me. The murdered family is sidelined in favour of contact with the criminals.
   I’ve barely scratched the flawed mirror surface of Truman Capote’s life. It hides an ocean of depth, full of nasty vindictive things. My trident has three points to it. One. Truman knew Nelle in childhood, and served as a model for an oddball character in MOCKINGBIRD. Two. Nelle went with Truman to research the book that would become IN COLD BLOOD. She didn’t have MOCKINGBIRD attached to her name, just then. He was known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Three…
   Wait. Detour. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Capote wrote that and lived off the back of it. (He’d dine out far and wide on all of his books, save at the very end, beyond his death. Stick a pin in that one.) The Breakfast movie appeared a year before the movie adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD. Both writers made it big, and made it big at the movies.
   Truman danced with Marilyn Monroe. But she’d not be his character, Holly Golightly. Marilyn was warned off playing a prostitute, and that was that. They should have married, just to give us a disaster-zone as a cautionary tale. But, with Truman, that would be just one more disaster-zone/Tuesday. Let us not dwell on imagined wedlock.
   Capote hated the idea of Audrey Hepburn in the part of Holly. She was too pure, in his mind. No depths of darkness or suffering or want.
   If you know anything of Audrey’s life in the Second World War, you’d know she had more than her share of trouble to help inform playing a character in a movie, thank you very much.
   Capote, at his bitchiest, in resenting someone for not being tough…and simply not knowing or failing to acknowledge what Audrey went through…is about average for the man. Acknowledging others is, for people like Truman, simply a bend in the road that curves round, inevitably, back to people like Truman casting light on themselves.
   Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Truman was not a fan of the adaptation. He’d bend over backwards to point out that Holly Golightly wasn’t really a call girl. She’s not a prostitute at all. Then he goes and says the thing. Girls like that are American geishas. This comment is deeply offensive to the geisha specifically and to Japan in general. Shocking. That would be like casting Mickey Rooney to play a comedy relief Japanese character in Breakfast at…oh.
   Isn’t Mickey Rooney racist in that movie? TRUMAN: Hold my beer. Let me tell you about Holly Golightly and Japanese culture…
   Truman had issues with his movie adaptation. Nelle had no problems with hers. Truman’s book didn’t win a Pulitzer. Nelle’s did. Book and movie combined to make Nell an unlikely star. She shied from that, quite quickly, leaving her sister Alice to handle the messy business of publicity. Or…lack of publicity.
   There’s no such thing as a reclusive author. But there is such a thing as the author who fucks off into a room with a writing machine to do the work alone. To fill the blank page. That writing machine could be as simple as a pencil or as complicated as a manual typewriter; electronic keyboards are idiot-proof, and, therefore, less fussy.
   Nelle didn’t consider success. I was hoping for a quick and merciful death…at the hands of the reviewers. She was spared that. Truman, for his part, entered into gladiatorial combat with them. Both authors reduced their output. Truman envied Nelle’s success. A pointless envy, as she cared not for it. And so, that friendship ended.
   You’ll find them together as Scout and Dill, in MOCKINGBIRD. Truman Capote, at his most amusing, fictionalised by his childhood friend. And Nelle. If I call her a rebel, that has Southern connotations. Should you hunt for criticism of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, it lies in a view that the author looked a little too kindly on her people of the South and let them off the hook. The counter to that is…just plain folks…come across as far more evil in their racism on account of being depicted as just plain folks. To depict their humanity is to reveal their inhumanity.
   Nelle and Truman tasted success. Truman developed an addiction to the fame. Nelle had an allergic reaction to it. Point three of my trident. After big success, MOCKINGBIRD, IN COLD BLOOD, that was pretty much the end for both of them. They also faced this problem of a book resurfacing with grim finality. Nelle still had the manuscript of the prototype novel somewhere. Truman thought he’d destroyed his early book.
   The story goes that he left it behind in a place that was taken up by someone else. A magpie of a tenant, who discovered a Truman manuscript, and preserved it. Are some things worth preserving? I was once told a tale that I reworked into the opening of a novel…
   This is the book I shredded. And I destroyed the physical hard drive and all back-up media, too. But I kept the opening. The only good part was the part I’d been told by someone else. This was a singular lesson in learning to write. And in learning how to vapourise anything you didn’t want to see the light of day.
   After their deaths, the two were united by this connection – material resurfacing from the folds of the swamp. Nelle left some short stories in a place in New York. Truman had an early work bob to the surface. Writers were dead and gone, and books still hit the shops. SUMMER CROSSING. You know. Necrophilia.
   In Nelle’s case, THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER collects a bunch of short pieces. Why are there so many “lost” manuscripts to this history? If she’d wanted to, Nelle could have gone back in and worked up a few short stories to keep the literary beggars away. The hungry crowd of critics, I mean. Nelle gave us one book. Be happy in that.
   Scout Finch is a fictionalised version of Nelle. There are books out there with memorable characters. Some of those characters are memorable through description, action, or speech. The truly memorable characters from classic tales are memorable through all three of those things and one more item: they stay with you.
   Knowing how the friendship frazzled – an inevitability, with Truman – I prefer Scout and Dill to remain where they are, staying with memory. Not for me the publishing problem connected to the later-earlier work GO SET A WATCHMAN. Haven’t read it. Won’t read it. Did enough research on it to make comments here, and that’s that.
   It is an earlier work: the prototype. And it is the later work, published in the last days of Nelle’s life. Touted as a sequel, on the basis that it is about Scout returning to town those many years later, it fired enthusiasm in a great crowd to hear of its existence. Except…there are text passages word by revealing word that are practically the same scenes as they are in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. Bit of editing, here, there, marking differences in MOCKINGBIRD. Don’t even pretend for a second that this other book is a sequel. It is not.
   Conduct unbecoming of a publisher includes trying to pass this prototype off as the direct sequel. I will grant you we finally discover something the realm of criticism toyed with, as an absent-minded dog toys with a bone. In the prototype book, the heroic Atticus Finch, Scout’s noble lawyer dad, is anything but. He’s a segregationist: the type to build separate drinking fountains based on skin-colour.
   In the prototype, Nelle is not so kind to her people of the South and she doesn’t let them off the hook. The two books could be resolved with expansion and editing of the prototype to turn that work into a true sequel. But this was not to be. Nelle died. She outlived Truman. He’d outlived his friendship with her. Could he have written more, with his heart, brain, and liver shot through like Swiss cheese from the wild excess of too much wild excess? With those wearying disadvantages, writing soon drops off into typing. And sloppy typing, at that.
   Could Nell have written more? She took a stab at true crime, covering a story that sent her into the writing landscape of IN COLD BLOOD. Familiar territory, for she’d walked that road and gathered many notes on the trail once before. But it was not to be, second time around.
   There’s a wanton, libertine, neediness in the literary critic/pundit who cries why couldn’t you give us more than one perfect book, you bastards to all the writers who only have one perfect book in them. Those poseurs are never fucking happy. You can shit gold for literary types like that, and they’d complain the shit wasn’t diamond-encrusted. Be wanting jam on it, next.
   If you enjoy a book, what more is there to say. We could wax lyrical about what might have been. But we can never truly know. Was Nelle thrown from her horse after riding her first book back to the stable of publication? If you write of the complacent daughter returning to the small town only to discover her lawyer father had feet of smashed and tainted clay…
   And the editorial view is…we can’t go with this book…what, then? Be softer in telling your tale. Focus on the childhood character. So you go away for a time and rewrite the damned thing. Now it’s an Instant Timeless Classic™, and you are set for literary life.
   Except. It must rankle that your initial idea, which is not so soft on your people of the South, it must hurt, that the core story was rejected in favour of your classic. What could you do, then? Take the prototype and rework it so that Scout grows up into Jean Louise Finch, and when she heads home from the Big City, obviously, we see she had a young daughter’s infallible view of the noble lawyer…only to realise this idolatry doesn’t match the man’s constant juggling of life in the Deep South…
   You’d need to gut both narratives to make it work. But once the classic is a classic, you can’t go back and change a single word of the sacred text. So the challenge then would be to rework and rework and rework the prototype until it no longer resembles much of anything.
   Some characters never grow up. And they really shouldn’t. Peter Pan. Tom Sawyer. Even Huck Finn. The Secret Garden is set around the year 1907/08, and features a character – the boy Colin – who cannot walk. Spoiler: he regains the ability. And the children in that story never grow up. They mustn’t. For Colin is ten years old and infirm. The moment he walks again, well, that’s the moment he’s fit enough to serve in the trenches of the Great War.
   Holden Caulfield never grows up. People don’t like it when I say…you know he goes back to the school and shoots everyone at the end, right? Anyone forced to read Salinger’s fuck-awful book in school soon reaches that conclusion. So it isn’t in the text, so what?
   Scout and her brother Jem, even oddball Dill, never grow up. Spoiler: Jem never grows up in the prototype book. There’s plenty of forensic analysis online to show you the word-for-word scenes that are the same or nearly. MOCKINGBIRD has a layer of polish to the work. The other, no.
   I have detoured into talk of a monster: Truman Capote. And I am not the first to express distaste for the promotion of a prototype novel as a sequel to itself. No more of that. What brought me here?
   Revisiting Nelle’s tale.
   I’ll have to revisit the film. For that sort of story, seen through a child’s eyes, you always hope, desperately, when sitting down to watch…please tell me they employed children who could ACT. I’ve revisited the book in another way…and I haven’t written of that at all. How remiss.
   Now remember, if you are going to tackle such things, the book is the book and the movie is the movie and never the twain shall meet. But somewhere between 1960 novel and 1962 movie there’s a place for a visual adaptation that moves at your own pace: the pace at which you turn the comic book pages. In 2018, Fred Fordham adapted TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD into a graphic novel.
   Take a digital tour of Monroeville and stop by the old court house. Fred certainly went there, for the trial scenes. I now have two copies of this story. One a novel, and the other a comic book. Both start off with motifs of a fence. By design, if you know the tale. The novel is a towering work. And the hardback comic book does its damnedest to convey the same story.
   For reasons of compression, the movie gives you a taste of the novel if not the full range of flavours. Otherwise the movie would be a decompressed TV show. The same compression gives you a taste of the novel in the graphic novel. Otherwise the comic book would be a whole volume longer.
   I recommend all three adaptations. The movie may stay with you, as might the art in the graphic novel. But the book is the one that goes into the most detail and lingers, positively, the longest. My copy of the book carries an introduction by Albert French, whose own novels are not kind to the oppressor.

 

COLONEL SUN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

I stared at a story from yesteryear. COLONEL SUN: putting James Bond through his paces after his battle against a man who owned a golden gun. But I also looked at my own short story in that area. I can only call it James Bond Tourism. That’s as kind as I’ll be to my past self. Throw Bond into a familiar setting, drop in references to past misadventures, and wrap it up in a pastry of heat and violence.
   Having had a crack at that sort of nonsense myself, I’m in a position to say that Ian Fleming’s style is easy to observe yet hard to pin down on the page when typing in the manner of that far-off country of the past. The precise detail involving food, drink, places, and vehicles. That ability of Fleming’s to want to write fiction by dressing it in real clothes…is taxing.
   If you desire to invent guns, cars, and meals, why, turn to science fiction and be done with it. Have your hero drive a 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. He should be a detective named Marlowe, in a space zoot suit, with a goldfish bowl for a helmet. Google is his friend. Or digital assistant. Something along those lines.
   Fleming and Chandler wrote about worlds containing real guns. Yes, movies featuring James Bond are full of product placement. This is true of Fleming’s books. He packs the stories with guns, cars, food, and drink. All real. Why invent, when the genuine article adds a layer of reality to an otherwise fanciful tale? Bed the fiction in a garden of real items, and make your outlandish saga somehow more reasonable.
   Writing like Fleming is, indeed, taxing. And that’s for reasons of product placement, alone. James Bond’s taste at breakfast is not Bond’s. Strictly speaking, it isn’t exactly Ian Fleming’s. No. The devil in the detail at breakfast comes from Fleming’s friend William Plomer.
   This set me wondering. Fleming surrounded himself with people who were contacts when it came to story details. Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his book about Commander James Bond? Let’s have a bit of clarity. Novel.
   Who was Kingsley Amis going to draw on for assistance, when writing his James Bond novel? For Amis had already tackled Bond to the ground in an ungentlemanly game of rugby elsewhere. Amis drew on Ian Fleming’s books and also Fleming’s knowledge when it came to compiling a dossier on James Bond.
   Not a novel. A book. And he met Fleming, who was near the end of his life, just to cover details in the dossier. Fleming pointed out a few slips. The Bond author was used to those, having taken both barrels from the acid wit of Noël Coward.
…what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 6 a.m. in dear old England. This, dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is 11 a.m. in Jamaica, it is 4 p.m. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue.
   Fleming had the same brand of acid flowing through his veins, when it came to Noël Coward.
   It’s interesting. When you sweat with embarrassment the sweat runs down your face and drops off your first chin on to your second.
   Amis analysed Bond from the stance of a fannish reader who knew the dossier assignment called for a bit more work than just liking the fiction and regurgitating facts. His own level of criticism may have had Amis shaking in his socks moments before meeting Fleming. But the Bond author didn’t gut the new boy.
   And Amis was the new boy. Soon enough, he, too, would be a Bond author. When Fleming died, leaving The Man with the Golden Gun short of the revision and polish required to bring it up to ramming speed, Amis was offered a crack at it.
   History differs as to what happened next. Amis made recommendations, but they weren’t carried out. Alternatively, Amis made changes uncredited. He rewrote the book. Or he wrote the book. What do we know about any of this wilderness of mirrors?
   Fleming wrote the book. He complained about it to his editor, William Plomer. There were plans to finish the job. But Fleming’s time was marked, and his heart gave out. Amis was asked to look at the manuscript. Money changed hands. He was hired on as a consultant.
   Yes, he made recommendations. Fleming’s fingerprints are all over an actual manuscript. Amis provided a page of notes. You only review twice, Mr Amis. Once when you read the manuscript in private, and once when you publish a bitchy review that questions why some of your own ideas weren’t taken up throughout the story.
   For that is what Amis does in his published review. He asks why Fleming didn’t exploit this point or that part of the plot. Then he offers his own alternative motive for the absurdity of the assassin Scaramanga taking James Bond on as a partner in crime. Scaramanga fancied him something rotten.
   Not according to William Plomer, who’d been closely involved with the book. At the end of his life, Fleming struggled to complete the story. Complete it he did. But not to the level of detail Fleming demanded of himself.
   Amis decried the thinness of the book’s plot. We’ll return to that when I stick a knife in the back of Colonel Sun. And so, to Colonel Sun. It’s easy to mock by calling the book…
   The Further Adventures of Lucky Jim Bond.
   Take a (Bond) Girl Like You.
   The Old (Foreign) Devils.
   Amis has a bit of a fixation with setting Bond up as a hero in the Byronic fashion. Whatever the fuck that is. It’s just Amis being Amis. Or Markham, which was his cover for the Bond assignment. A cover Amis immediately blew.
   Why is Kingsley Amis, of all people, writing a special introduction to this guy Markham’s book? Although Kingsley’s name is shorter on the cover, his name appears in larger type. What’s that about? Some kind of fix was in.
   Ann Fleming, Ian’s widow and keeper of the sacred flame, hated Bond. But she managed to love Ian Fleming, no easy task, and hated Kingsley Amis even more than she detested her husband’s violent creation.
   She didn’t want this slipshod fair-weather commie writing the further adventures of a character she couldn’t stand. Never one to let her snobbishness get in the way of her snobbishness, Ann joined a long list of people who had nothing good to say of Kingsley Amis.
   How did Amis do, in the Bond stakes? Well enough that his work filtered down into the movies. The World is Not Enough borrows the central point of Colonel Sun: M is kidnapped.
   Die Another Day doesn’t have Colonel Sun in it, but there’s a Colonel Tan-Sun Moon. Just far enough from the character Amis gave us to avoid having to pay out cash for the use. However, the movie is a camouflaged version of Moonraker and has little to do with Amis, beyond half-pinching a character name.
   Spectre, though, puts Amis deep in the closing credits for dialogue that appears in Colonel Sun. This is a torture scene. Congratulations. Amis made it into the worst Bond movie. Spectre is, in my view, fucking lamentable. That’s a highly technical term. Film has its moments, but moments don’t lead to a satisfying cinema-going experience.
   They’d done a deal. Spectre was back on the menu, after the legal dust settled – for the last time. Kevin McClory’s long-running dispute over ownership of various story elements died with him. After that, it was much easier to settle on a deal.
   Okay. Resurrect Spectre. And the boss, Blofeld. But make it meaningful. How? Oh, show flashbacks to other Bond characters in the opening credits. That’s where the welding starts. Taking the Daniel Craig movies and fusing them into one long integrated storyline that shows…Spectre was behind everything, all along.
   No. It does not work. Thanks for asking. The movie is the story of two boys who know each other. One grows up to be James Bond. And the other…what, creates Spectre just to get back at Bond? Er…
   Where the fuck was I? Amis successfully wrote and delivered his one Bond novel. The opening is good. There are vivid scenes. His one failing is the plot, which is practically non-existent. Think it over for two seconds, and it falls apart. Why is the villain doing this? For all his talk of trying something new, by going into a Greek setting, Amis rehashes Doctor No as a far less interesting Colonel Sun.
   A fleet of books followed, guided by other hands. Had Amis lived to see his credit in Spectre, well, first, he’d have been a hell of a fucking age. Second, he’d have derided much of the movie. You can see his ears perking up at the dialogue in the torture sequence. Numbers flash over his eyes as he calculates whether any payment for usage felt worthwhile.
   Amis wrote Bond for the money. Fleming wrote Bond to create excitement as he typed page to page, staving off boredom. Ian Fleming, thrilled at the thought of creating a scene in a story. That stays with me, long after Amis typing for cash saw his Colonel disappear at the first sunset.

 

STUPID SEXY SEA DEVILS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

THE WAR BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. Yes, it’s a fucking shit title for a Doctor Who spin-off. No two ways about that. I prefer the title STUPID SEXY SEA DEVILS. At least, then, the audience has an idea what to expect. The problem with the war of the title is…a complete lack of war in the show.
   One character even tells us there wasn’t really a war. What do we get, instead? We get THE NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN THE LAND AND THE SEA. Not as catchy, true, but you’d certainly grasp the idea from the title. I didn’t hate this spin-off. Just the really stupid bits of this spin-off.
   Yes, we were handed a DOCTOR WHO BINGO opportunity from the start. Don’t knock back a vodka shot every single time a member of U.N.I.T. bites the dust. You’ll lose your liver. Cross off a box at the mention of the main character, from the main show, who won’t be putting in a cameo here.
   Scribble heartily over the NO TARDIS box. And cross off a box every single time the last of the Disney Money™ is splashed up on the small screen for no real reason. This show ran for five episodes. Four episodes, if you skip the padding. It takes a long time to descend to the depths. We really didn’t need to share that journey.
   THE WAR BETWEEN THE DISNEY CORPORATION AND THE BBC was quite a half-show. For every scene I enjoyed, inevitably, there lumbered into view a scene I wanted to axe. And so it went, episode by episode, until the end. Will there be a sea-quel? No, thank fuck.
   Where to begin? With THE SEA DEVILS. This was a story starring Jon Pertwee. Sea Devils live in the sea. Is that true? No. They hibernate. Waiting to be told it is safe to emerge. The catastrophe that forced them to bunker down, well, that never happened. And the wake-up call never happened, either.
   We get some shenanigans with the Doctor’s Time Lord foe, the Master. He’s running a criminal enterprise from inside a prison. Boo, hiss. The short version…we’ll return to the short version shortly…the Master is in league with the Sea Devils, planning to revive loads of them as his aquatic army of doom. He’s only missing a volcano base and a white cat to complete his mission.
   Revived Sea Devils don’t like what the beastly humans are doing. So the devilish creatures start menacing tubs, boats, and ships. Then they lurch ashore and get up to no good. And yet, they have a point. I suspect only the meanest ones relish being called Sea Devils.
   A catastrophe threatened to destroy the Sea Devils, before humans even evolved. The Sea Devils took a nap. When they woke, they found we’d come along and fucked shit up. We wrecked the planet. Yes, DOCTOR WHO told eco-stories back in the day. This is not a new thing.
   That story was, itself, a rehash of an earlier tale. Just with water creatures thrown in, instead of land-based ones. And so, the Sea Devils were established. Defeated, they disappeared from the show. A one-off threat. Until they returned in WARRIORS OF THE DEEP. That’s the one with the underwater base and all those bright lights that make the monsters so mysterious and scary…
   Oh, wait. No. Somehow that bright lighting doesn’t work for the production of this story. The shambling liability is the pantomime seahorse caught in bright lights. An unfinished costume gave the poor operators the sense that they’d been huffing all the glue. And after you watch Ingrid Pitt’s martial arts display against the pantomime seahorse, you’ll wish you’d huffed all the glue yourself.
   That was the last we saw of the Sea Devils. Until relatively recently, when LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS reared its rubbery head. Luckily, no one ever saw this travesty. The Sea Devils of Penzance LEGEND OF THE SEA DEVILS had all the non-viewers non-scratching their non-existent heads in sheer befuddlement. I haven’t seen that story, and neither have you. Got it. Right? Terrific. Just pretend we haven’t seen that one. I certainly don’t know what you are talking about. Piratical Sea Devil nonsense.
   Let’s leave all those Sea Devil stories to the side…except for one. The first one. In anticipation of the release of this Disney spin-off, the BBC went back to the first story with a diver’s knife and gutted the running-time like a fish. Ah, the short version. There was also some editing and fucking around with the audio, so that a Sea Devil could retro its way through a line about the war between the land and the sea.
   Dialogue that never existed in the original. Just to plug the up-and-coming Disney collab, you understand. Even if no one understands. What do I think of that alteration? It was a load of bollocks. Shouldn’t have been tampered with. It was, though. And I can’t do anything about that except gripe. Or reach for my unaltered physical media. I recommend that second option. That way, you get to see the pilot episode, An Unearthly Child – currently unavailable on the BBC.
   By sheer coincidence, I am writing about this fishy tale while listening to Polly Harvey working her way through Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. It’s preferable to watching Stupid Sexy Sea Devils again. And so, to the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils with their stupid sexy non-war…
   Five episodes seems a bit awkward for a spin-off. It feels contractually obliged and, therefore, contractually contrived. We are treated to loads of shots involving the last of the Disney cash. The Sea Devils are back, folks, and they’re about as menacing as nothing in particular. There. I put the damning view in print.
   What’s the plot? A Sea Devil is caught in a fishing net and. Oops. The Sea Devil is killed, and placed on display to make money out of internet clicks. Once upon a time, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce would’ve gotten involved. Then the United Nations objected to being dragged into fiction on the BBC. So it’s been the Unified Intelligence Taskforce ever since.
   U.N.I.T. gets involved. And so does…
   For the next bit we must visit the cinema of 1950-something. There’s a bloke in U.N.I.T. who arranges the taxis. And he is accidentally assigned to a Top Secret mission, investigating Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. Sounds like a job for Sir Norman Wisdom. Deep in the heart of the 1950s, we have this accident-prone bloke, an underdog, who, with a bit of cinematic slapstick and a heart of gold, keeps informing Mr Grimsdale that there’s a spot of bother. Only it is far more complicated than that. And…
   I’m not saying the bloke who hires the taxis is based on Norman, from 1950-something. But it certainly fucking feels like it. A hapless bloke who stumbles into situations. He books the taxis. Sounds about right, for this show. Barclay Pierre-Dupont. Bit of a mouthful. I’ll just shorten that to Norman for the purposes of this text.
   So Norman ends up on Dragon Island. People who are fated to die here…die here. Remember. You don’t knock back any alcohol for those brave sacrifices. Norman shows a bit of respect to the corpse of the Sea Devil, and that gets him on the radar of…surely the sonar of…the Sea Devils. Those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. Turns out, they are very advanced for people who spent a long time slumbering under the sea.
   And these very clever Stupid Sexy Sea Devils want to arrange a peace, of sorts. There wasn’t a war. But we’ve been fucking with the planet’s ecology for ages, and the sanctimonious Sea Devils want to tell us what to do on our own land. Things like…stop chucking your rubbish in our sea, you barely-evolved apes.
   They do have a bit of a point there. Don’t overlook the subtext, though. Those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils went and put the sub in subtext. This spin-off show might feel like a diatribe against Thames Water. I suspect a hint of subtext went in that direction. Subtle. I’d list problems at Thames Water, but I want to keep the page-count down.
   This show about those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils may have it in for Thames Water. Anyway. Saving the planet is urgent. We must act now. Or else. So let’s speed this up a bit, shall we? Right. Except. For some reason, when the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils want to meet the Evil Bastard Humans, it’s important to, er, build a massive fucking concrete pipe coming up out of the Thames.
   Okay. This is a science fiction show, so we have to allow it on that outlandish basis. Otherwise, it would take fifteen years to obtain planning permission and another five years to build the pipe way over budget. With a few leaks at the opening ceremony. It would be a lot quicker for a few Sea Devils to rise eerily from the Thames and hop on a speedboat to take them to a conference room with a shower built in at one end.
   Also, despite the Disney money, this production still can’t do digital helicopters. I guess the Disney money didn’t stretch to hiring a real helicopter to fly along the river. My point is…the show gives you an effective scene. Sea Devils rising from the depths at Dragon Island. And then you have a bit of bollocks to…tide…you over until the next effective scene.
   As soon as you see the big pipe leading inside a building, and it opens on glass walls…you are waiting for the inevitable crack in the glass. It is built into the plot at that point. Spoiler: yes, it really is built into the plot at that point. So, after a construction montage, we are ready to save the world by negotiating with fish.
   The Stupid Sexy Sea Devils don’t like being called devilish. Even if they are from the sea. They might have been Sea Angels, but no. They are Homo Aqua. Queue the homo joke from Norman. I was waiting for conspiracist Alex Jones to do a cameo, warning us that Sea Devils turned the water gay.
   You might have missed the trailer campaign for this show. I’ll grant you that. It’s possible. The trailer campaign shows us…one of those Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. And the tale is framed as a love story between a man and a fish. The main response to the trailer campaign was…
   Sea Devils are sexy? When did that happen?
   I guess it happened on the internet a long time ago, with fans writing fiction. The BBC took a while to catch up. See also Stupid Sexy Cybermen, Stupid Sexy Daleks, and Stupid Sexy TARDIS. Here’s the point. It was virtually impossible to avoid the news that Sea Devils were going to be sexy in this spin-off show.
   Maybe you missed the trailer campaign. If you watched the trailer, though, it made the arrival scene really fucking stupid. The Sea Devils are on the way up the pipe to talk to a bunch of very important people…and Norman. He’s involved now, somehow. The security threat posed by fragile glass walls and a shitload of water…ah, fuck it, that doesn’t matter.
   Everyone should be patched in via primitive video conferencing. Except…high-tech video, using the last of the Disney cash. The arrival scene plays out in a very coy fashion. Koi fashion? I hear they’re wearing fishnets in Paris this season. This blundering sequence hides what the trailers showed us. It’s the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil. She’s here to negotiate with the worst humanity can offer. So she rejects all that malarkey and wants to chat to the guy who books the taxis.
   We must talk about U.N.I.T. In the original show, the outfit was run by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. He would gladly order a Sea Devil shot as soon as look at one. You can just see it, can’t you? Chap with the gills, there. Five rounds rapid. In the revamped show, and in this spin-off, the outfit is run by his daughter Kate.
   Uncharitable viewers hold to the notion that Kate doesn’t get any character development. She’s meant to be a force of nature acting as a barrier against the Doctor’s plans, whatever those are. There’s no Doctor in the spin-off, so her conspiratorial organisation must act as a barrier against other conspiratorial organisations.
   She gets plenty of character development here. You may not like any of that character development. That’s a separate issue. We end episode one with the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil elevating the taxi guy to the position of ambassador in the peace negotiations. He goes all Norman Wisdom at that point. And, indeed, every point.
   In episode two we discover the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil has an untranslatable title. But we can call her Salt. Idly, I wondered if the next Sea Devils in the line-up were Vinegar, Fish, and Chips. But no. Salt has every reason to be salty. At the end of the first episode she delivered her dead children to the humans, blaming the humans for pollution, death, destruction, and the inability to create a cohesive TV show. For every scene that worked, there was an equal and opposite scene that failed.
   There’s local resistance to the idea of Norman Wisdom as humanity’s representative. That played out a little too long. Could have been cut back so we could get on with whatever the story was meant to be getting on with. Clearly, Salt is the only game in town, and she luuurves Norman. The internet casually wondered how he was going to fuck a fish. Not if.
   How, where, and when.
   Meanwhile, we have the world’s bastards putting together a biological weapon derived from samples taken from Salt’s dead babies. There’ll be a lot of obvious plotting kicking in, with the subtlety of a whale landing on your breakfast table. Plot must hove into view, sailing from the horizon to the point of not-so-sudden revelation.
   Norman is the spokesman. But he reads from a government script. Except…we know he’s going to deviate from that government script at every chance. Meanwhile, Kate escapes from conspiracies for a little rest. She goes home to her age-gap romance with doomed Hot U.N.I.T. Dude. Spoiler: that was no spoiler. In STAR TREK he’d be the new guy in the landing party on a hostile world. Here, he’s brave toast. Brave, certainly. But definitely also toast.
   Colonel Christofer Ibrahim is part of Kate’s character development. Luckily, Hot U.N.I.T. Dude gets a bit more character development himself. Unluckily, that develops into being doomed. I liked this part of the show, letting Kate and Christofer be human against a chaotic background, as it deflected from some of the large lumbering blundering scenes we were subjected to at regular intervals.
   Industry talks to government, and various military factions crawl out of the woodwork. There’s a plan to take down the amphibians before the amphibians have even gotten around to spelling out their unreasonable demands. U.N.I.T. could be a part of this conspiracy if Kate sides with the Prime Minister.
   Kate isn’t going to be evil at all at any point in this narrative. Right?
   Now to the unreasonable demands. Salt wants a glass of water. From the Thames. So…Salt wants Thames water. Not Thames Water, the true villain of this story. Or maybe Salt wants Thames Water. Salt doesn’t want water from the tap. Hell, Salt doesn’t want to drink the water. She wants to inflict Thames water on the humans. It’s subtle, this diatribe.
   Then we cut to one of these pointless fucking scenes. It takes a bunch of soldiers, with guns, to fetch the water from the river. Now…the pipe that leads to the conference room…that pipe emerges from the river Thames. So why not just dip into that? Too easy.
   All it takes is a mad scientist in a white coat to dip a glass in. No. We must do this whole thing with soldiers and guns and shit. It pads the show out. The scene serves as an example of the padding in this spin-off. Anyway, Norman Wisdom can’t drink water from the Thames. Humanity rejects Thames water, and Thames Water. Going by the subtext.
   Humanity has to clean up. Obligingly, humanity sets targets for this. But those aren’t good enough for the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. So it’s time for the war to begin. We get a lot of negotiating. I think if you pay a bunch of actors to be in a big room, you want to dwell on the location…even if the audience isn’t as keen.
   Time to end the negotiations. It’s war…against…litter. The Stupid Sexy Sea Devils have the technology to filter all the plastic waste out of the oceans and return it to land. I have many questions. For a start: if you are this powerful, why would you negotiate with the enemy? Just drop the litter on the land with no explanation. That would have been a great opening to the first episode.
   It’s not just plastic, though. Sunken ships. Many questions. We run through a barrage of TV news images. There’s not a Nigel Farage clone in the sequence, but…spoiler. Here he is, and that is no spoiler. After the global case of fly-tipping, it’s back to the negotiating chamber.
   We find out that littering is war. But the real war started long ago. It’s okay. There’ll be a peace plan. Pollution. Just say NO. Borders. The Sea Devils will control the sea. All of the sea. And they throw in a wild card here. The sky, too. Now they are Stupid Sexy Sky Devils. And they demand the hardest demand of all.
   But first, the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil does that thing the Incredible Hulk does. HULK ANGRY. NO ONE BEAT HULK WHEN HULK ANGRY. HULK SMASH PUNY SEA DEVIL. PUNY OCEAN NOT FIGHT BACK. HULK WAVE GOODBYE. When Salt grows angry, Salt grows saltier and turns into an angry guy. Now the Stupid Sexy Sea Devil is still a Stupid Sexy Sea Devil, but…the writing team threw away a chance to state that this change is caused by human pollution of the world’s oceans. Humans made the fish angry. Thames Water humans, specifically, I guess.
   Where’s Alex Jones when you need him? Spoiler: you will never need him. Could the frogs turn Alex Jones gay? No more than they could make him less irritating.
   Back to that final bleak demand. The demandiest of demands. Salt uses a pearl in the neck to alter TV screens. How the fuck is that done? This is waved away by a character who asks that question without swearing. On the screens of the world we see the location of the next meeting. The big demand is that the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils meet the human delegation…under the sea.
   There is Disney money tied up in this. Are we watching The Little Mermaid but in the DOCTOR WHO universe? And so to episode three. Padding. Now there’s an expedition to the bottom of the sea. These episodes are around 45 minutes. The first fifteen minutes? Devoted to putting a team together and getting ready for a very long slow underwater taxi sequence.
   We’re told the journey will take two hours and seventeen minutes. Spoiler. It feels longer. And that’s not counting the training montage. Spoiler. Norman Wisdom is on the team. Spoiler. When you ask someone on the team what is in the box, the answer is always A BOMB.
   Spoiler. That is not a spoiler. Obvious bomb is obvious. We need to know what the evil humans are doing in the meantime, so we cut to Downing Street where the Prime Minister is taking advice on all the different methods of solving the fish problem.
   Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is at the table as the voice of reason. Her Brigadier dad would have been taking advice from some rum chap in the Royal Navy on the guidance systems of the latest torpedoes. Evil Foreign Woman in Uniform voices an opinion. Slap her…she’s French. Evil Foreign Man in Uniform also has an opinion. He’s American, and we expect him to become more evil as we go along. His default setting is evil, and he’s working his way up to a higher level of purity. Then he’ll upgrade to Pure Evil+, with added menthol.
   This is about opposition. Kate could infiltrate the meeting and learn more. All she learns to do here is put a huge target on herself. That’s not a spoiler. Obvious conspiracy is obvious. We go back to the sphere that’s descending to the meeting, just as a reminder of how long it takes.
   Then we’re with the Prime Minister, at a private gathering minus Kate. The warmongering American tells us that this is definitely a war. And we should be getting our war on. Never mind that the bomb is already on its way. This part of the war is about removing obstacles and firing up the bioweapon that took half a minute to perfect from stolen samples.
   I haven’t talked about the music. When first shown, the spin-off was roundly condemned for throwing loud music over every snippet of speech. Is it that bad? No. However, there is value in promoting scenes with no music at all. Even for long stretches. Do we get that in this spin-off? We can dream.
   Even the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils realise the descent is soaking up too much of this padded episode. They take matters into their own fishy hands and…slightly speed things up. This causes needless panic. And more music. Wait a bit. The music does die away. But not for long.
   Finally, we are under the sea. And the area is made breathable for the humans. Everyone can take off those diving helmets. Except the guy with the bomb. He keeps his on, for some curious reason. Salt invites the delegation to talk, but first she manipulates the walls of this grotto so she can be alone with Norman Wisdom.
   They could unite, to end the litter war. Because she luuurves him. And he doesn’t know what to think. Luckily, the plot intrudes and the other doomed members of the team arrive. There’s a spooky gathering of Deep Ones Sea Devils out beyond Sea Devil Reef, and it’s all gone a bit H.P. Lovecraft H.P. Lovecraft.
   But that’s not important right now. We need to go back to London to see Kate avoid assassination. Sadly, her Doomed U.N.I.T. Boyfriend doesn’t make it. He bravely sacrifices himself to the magickiest magic bullet to kill a TV character since the last magic bullet that killed a TV character.
   I’m looking at you, Buffy show. Spoiler: that magic bullet was a load of fucking bullshit as well.
   Maybe he’ll make it. He doesn’t. Now we can return to the depths of this plot and the obvious bomb. Obvious bomb obviously explodes. Norman Wisdom is there to reduce the damage with a last-second save. Luckily for him, there’s no magic bullet to take him out.
   Although, the deliberate editing across two different scenes makes it look as though Norman Wisdom is going to push Kate Lethbridge-Stewart out of a second bullet’s path. I’d have turned up for that science fiction twist. The dreaded and padded episode three spent a long time building up to an obvious bomb and a hashtag sadface sacrifice.
   Oh well. On we go.
   Five episodes. Seems a bit short. On the other hand. Could have been done in four, without padding episode three. Kate survives the next bullet in episode four. A lot of Deep Ones Sea Devils die. Norman Wisdom and Salt make it out and up and away. She uses some sort of magic wizard shield ability to keep Norman Wisdom alive.
   I have questions. If she can move at mega-speed through the waves, why would Salt wait around for the humans to show up in the first place? A bunch of Stupid Sexy Sea Devils could ferry the humans down to the meeting super-fast. But no. She gives him the kiss of life all the way to the surface. Don’t know how long that takes. It is a scene that passes quickly. On the other hand, maybe it takes twenty minutes of kissing to reach safety. Who knows. Has she passed him the disease of being a fish-person? Is he cured of the disease of being human? That’s what we really want to understand.
   Then we endure the announcement. Why, those Sea Devils were devils all along. How do we know? Salt confesses on TV. But wait. It’s a…
   Deep.
   Fake.
   Fuck off. Just. No. Stop it. Really? Get lost. Leave TV land now and never show your face around here again. Fucking hell. Moving on from that. Salt becomes a Prisoner of War. The war that isn’t actually happening. In the first round of the war, one fishy dude died. Salt lost her children. And in the second round of the war, people were killed by plastic from the sea. Kate’s guy. Then the conspiracy killed five members of the Away Team. Is this a war? Are we simply not adding up off-screen deaths on both sides and pretending that’s a war?
   What’s really important? Does anything tie back to the Prime Minister. That’s what’s important. No. Nothing ties to him. Except all the tendrils of the conspiracy. So a rich businessman has to die next. Loose end. Let’s kill water company executives by making them drink their own contaminated water. Or you could send a killer on a bike to handle a doorstep assassination. That works.
   Norman Wisdom stages a jailbreak with Salt and they swim off along the Thames. Things pick up, as a new representative emerges from the stupid concrete pipe leading to the conference room. This Stupid Sexy Sea Devil is called Tide. I expected his henchman to be named Pods. Together they could pull a quick getaway in a CGI froth of soap bubbles. But no. It was not to be.
   Kate now represents humanity. She reads from a government script. Then she ditches the script. There are several sections of this spin-off show’s script that could have done with a dunking in the Thames. Tide brings up the name Aquakind. Could be a brand of washing-up liquid that’s soft on your skin.
   Salt committed a crime. She saved a human. So she must report in, for punishment. That punishment is incredibly important. Stick a harpoon in that. We’ll return to the point. What is going on in this scene? These are protracted negotiations about Salt. Wait. Are they referencing Strategic Arms Limitation Talks? I don’t think the script is sharp enough to throw that in there.
   Doesn’t matter. Tide reveals a new weapon. The ability to create instant rust. I have many questions. If you hate human debris on the ocean floor, and that debris is metal, you could have insta-rusted it down at any time. Why start with litter as a weapon when you could just go to the use of rust? Hell, why use rust, when you could…ah, but I am jumping ahead of the plot. Stick a double harpoon in this reference. We’ll come back here for the end.
   What kind of war is this? We’ve given you back all your rubbish. So we can’t threaten you with that again. We’ll threaten your metal. Including all the metal we dumped on your land. So many questions. We’re anti-pollution, but we’re going to generate a fuck-tonne of rust. Rusty metal flakes, blown out to sea. Or in the sea, if we raise the level of the sea. Taking all the litter back from London when London submerges. Er…
   Never mind all that. The conspiracy rattles on. That instant bioweapon has a target: Salt. Norman Wisdom and Salt hide out in an abandoned building. First thing you do? Smash windows, as glass is fucking strange to a fish. Did she just…smash the glass in the fish tank? Is that what this is?
   Stupid Sexy Sea Devil starts talking sexy and has to be told by Norman Wisdom to calm down the sexy talk. This is just in case he develops feelings for fish. We all have feelings for fish – mostly concerning cod in batter with plenty of salt and vinegar on the accompanying chips. Yum yum. Tasty. I guess, with a fish invasion, we shouldn’t go broadcasting that info.
   Taste itself comes up from the deep in this scene. Norman Wisdom has a pain in the neck. Is he now slowly growing gills, and transforming into a Stupid Sexy Sea Devil? That is not a spoiler. It lands with all the subtlety of a blue whale hitting your breakfast table.
   Time for a campfire romance. Wouldn’t she shrivel up next to a fire? Salt explains her punishment for helping a human. She’d have to swim alone. This is important to the plot. In ways I cannot fathom, the script dwells on this Little Mermaid theme. Salt was always going to find her way to Norman Wisdom.
   And then they kiss.
   After which, Salt admires his erection. No, really. I’m not making that bit up. We leave them to it while Kate wanders the night, contemplating loss. Back to the lovers. She realises he tastes of salt, and he can’t bring himself to say she tastes of fish. The conversation turns to Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. Stupid Sexy Sea Devil opinion is that Kate is a good soul.
   That isn’t going to fly. Kate’s character development, after the trauma, is to be a bad soul. Our runaways need a plan. And that plan is to escape to North Wales. We don’t get into the detail of that, as it is bollocks. There’s a vast conspiracy going on. But Norman Wisdom reasons, with a complete lack of wisdom, that if he can just contact his family then he could arrange transport.
   U.N.I.T. is listening in. And the Evil American Soldier is listening in to U.N.I.T. Meet you all on the bridge for tea and biscuits. It doesn’t go that well. Salt already explained that her people could find her if she went into the water. To be found is to be punished. Punished to swim the ocean alone.
   At the inevitable stand-off, good soul Kate decides there’ll be a whole lotta shootin’ going on if the American starts his shit. Salt dives off the bridge into a cliffhanger ending. This means her people must find her and exile her. But we have an episode to go. And somehow, we need to squeeze biological warfare into the mix.
   Let’s finish this. Time for really funny horror. Stupid Sexy Sea Devils emerge from the deep. They play seashell horns and summon dogs to the nets. And then they eat those dogs. More negotiating back in the conference room. Sea Devils can’t eat dogs. Don’t eat pets. Well, humans can’t eat fish. Don’t eat our relatives. But fish also eat fish, and that whole thing falls apart.
   And now we turn to that good soul, Kate. She’s under assessment, to see if she can continue in her job after the trauma of loss. No. She’s done. Here’s her character development. She kept tabs on her assessor. And if her assessor doesn’t play ball, Kate plays rough with other people’s lives. Keep her on the job and double the strength of the pills, or else.
   She keeps her job.
   Norman Wisdom is turning into a fish-man. Salt is gone. Kate’s lost the plot. But the biological conspiracy glides into port around now. So it’s time for the Sea Devils to…melt the ice. That should have been the opening gambit. Okay. That, or eating the dogs.
   If the Sea Devils raise the sea levels, what then? It’s the end. And that would be a bad thing for humans. Luckily, some evil bastards concocted a biological weapon of fish destruction. Yay! Humans for the win. Tide puts in an appearance to give the humans five years of melting ice before the end. Oh, and it was never a war. Then why put that in the title of this show?
   Back to the conspiracy. Norman Wisdom is kept secure, for scientific analysis. He cuts a deal with a guard to let him free for the night so he can race to the coast, shove his head in the sea, and yell…
   “Mr Grimsdale! The Sea Devils. Mr Grimsdaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaale!”
   Nothing. Salt does not answer the call. First. What the fuck is her hearing like if she can hear a shout under water from, potentially, half a world away? Second. There’s a reason for a lack of answer. The beastly French Baddie is blocking sonic signals or some bullshit. Frankly, at that point, I would only have cared if she’d offered viewers an éclair. Not other characters in the show. Viewers.
   The fix is in. Switch off the Sonic Sea Baffles for one night and let Norman Wisdom put a call through to his aquatic girlfriend. But before we even get into that, Norman passes out on the bed and he has the bioweapon planted in him. The next time he races off in the night, he’s a walking bomb. There’s a handy limit on the weapon. It isn’t 100% perfect. Norman is turning into a fish-man, so he could be killed by the weapon. Never mind all that nonsense.
   On the beach he reunites with his lost love. She can save the day. There’s a last-gasp fragment of knowledge. She pretty much tells Norman Wisdom to ask for parley, in the piratical sense, and the Sea Devils will be forced to listen. It’s a chance. A glint of hope. But he’s love-bombing her. One passionate kiss and it’s Ebola: for Sea Devils. Seabola.
   Remember sticking a harpoon in that idea of punishment. Salt is forced to swim alone. In exile. Well how the fuck does she contaminate her entire species, then? Do they all share the same bathwater at a very crowded inlet? How virulent is this bio-explosion? The job is done. Both sides meet on the beach. And both sides pass something across the divide.
   The magic word, accord, will never reach the Stupid Sexy Sea Devils. For they be deaded. Or…90% of them, anyway. Hooray. The monsters are no threat. And the bad guys won. We are, sadly, treated to a fantasy sequence which involves the Prime Minister in a shower. Could have done without that. Though the fantasy moment with the conniving French and American villains trapped inside a flooded car…that’s more effective.
   Finally, inevitably, the glass walls crack. The negotiating chamber floods. What a shock. All that’s left is for humanity to pick up the pieces. Salt and Norman Wisdom swim off together when he realises he’s turning into a fish-man. Two harpoons to end on, remember? Why use rust, when you can…
   If Salt has the ability to transform Norman Wisdom into a fish-man, then why start a very public war at all? Why litter? Stupid Sexy Sea Devils rise from the waves at night, and call out with their siren shells. They lure fishermen into the depths, and make Sea Devils out of them. That would have been far more atmospheric, and conspiratorial.
   Why hunt our dogs? Are cats too hard to hunt? Fish hunting cats would have been funnier. So why would you dump litter, or make things rust, when you can convert all the humans into fish-people? Why litter? Hmmm…
   Litter. The point we end on is a scene featuring Kate on the beach. A man drops litter. She tells him to pick it up. He refuses. She pulls a gun on him and tells him to pick it up. The only way we, as a species, will be truly ecological, is if someone holds a gun to our heads, it seems.
   That’s not the point to end on. The real point is, after she put pressure on her assessor, Kate would definitely pull the trigger and shoot a litterbug dead when we fade to black. And that’s the show we turned up for. Not the half-show we got.