She/her. Cis, queer, American, curmudgeonly. I was born the year of the moon landing. I have many fandoms: Sherlock Holmes (Granada Holmes, ACD Canon Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock until it jumped the shark), Good Omens, X-Files, Doctor Who, Star Trek (Original Series) Broadchurch,The Great British Baking Show, The Good Place, Brooklyn 99, Hamilton, and many more. Since 2016 I have kept up an intermittent commentary on American politics, tagged as #the current catastrophe.
So, I bought myself a copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition of the Bronte siblings' juvenilia. For those less obsessed with this family than I am, a little bit about what that is:
In 1826, barely a year after their sisters Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis after a year at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge (the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre), the surviving Bronte siblings--Charlotte (age 10), Emily (age 8), Anne (age 6) and Branwell (age 9)--started engaging in collaborative imaginary play using the figurines from a box of toy soldiers that Branwell got from their father as a present. Eventually they started writing stories and poems based on this play, and formed their own literary society, complete with imaginary publishers and literary critics. The original setting for most of these stories was Glass Town, eventually renamed Verdopolis. In 1834 Charlotte and Branwell expanded the universe to include the kingdom of Angria; Emily and Anne created Gondal.
Angria was located in an extremely hazily imagined Africa. The Duke of Wellington was a significant character in the Angrian saga, and Charlotte's main author surrogate was one of his sons, Charles Wellesley. All of these stories and poems were written in minute handwriting in teeny tiny little books which they evidently made themselves. This book makes these sagas available to the interested reader, with footnotes and a critical apparatus and everything. To give you some idea of how committed they were to this project: this edition of the Bronte kids' selected writings (meaning this isn't even all of it) runs to 484 pages before we hit the appendices and explanatory notes.
I'm about 150 pages in, which means I've just finished reading The Spell, Charlotte Bronte's first sustained attempt at a novel. She was 18 when she wrote it. It's set in Angria and largely narrated by Charles Wellesley (though there is an epistolary section to cover the stuff he doesn't witness). The story focuses on the mysteriously compelling Duke of Zamorna. I'm going to talk about this below the cut tag because I found it fascinating. This will involve major spoilers for both The Spell and Charlotte Bronte's first published novel, Jane Eyre.
Along with Byron, the Bronte kids read Blackwood's Magazine, which was famous for its Gothic tales of the supernatural and was also a major influence on Edgar Allan Poe. You can tell, in the very early stuff included in this volume, that Charlotte was a big fan of magic and the marvelous; she was more into trying to imagine what it would be like if everyone was 30 feet tall than she was into realism. It's also interesting that Charlotte developed an early taste for metafiction. She and the other authors appear in some of these stories as "Genii" who enable their heroes to accomplish miraculous feats. The Spell, as its name implies, does dabble in magic; but though you wouldn't call it exactly realistic--it is very, very Romantic--its plotting is a lot more rational and coherent than it is in any of the earlier stuff. This despite the fact that "Charles Wellesley" announces in a preface that his purpose in writing this story is to prove to everyone around him that his brother, the Duke of Zamorna, is mad.
The Duke of Zamorna is sometimes identified as an early protoype for Rochester. I wouldn't go that far; but it is interesting to me that Charlotte Bronte is already trying out some things that will be very important in Jane Eyre, including and especially the idea of the double. Jane is constantly forced to confront other women who become her double: first Helen Burns, whose Christianity Jane incorporates after Helen's death, and then the two women who fill the Mrs. Rochester role before Jane has a chance to: Blanche Ingram (who goes through a charade marriage to Rochester as part of her mercenary and insincere courtship of him) and Bertha Mason (who actually is married to Rochester). This reading of Bertha as Jane's double--as, essentially, the embodiment of the rebellious rage that the 18 year old Jane no longer allows herself to express--is of course indebted to Gilbert & Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. But doubling is something that is inevitably produced by a bigamy plot, where all the shock and thrills ultimately derive from the scandal of there being two of something there should only be one of.
For a long time, The Spell looks like a bigamy plot. The epistolary section focuses on the Duke of Zamorna's wife, who is jealous of his poorly concealed affairs with other women. And we eventually see the Duke of Zamorna getting everyone together to declare to them that a different woman, Emily, is his true wife and the mother of his two children. All of these noblemen are amazed and some of them--especially those related to the current Duchess of Zamorna--are very angry. Before that happens, though, we get a lot of hints that Zamorna has some kind of demonic doppelganger out there. He's reported being seen in public while he's also sick and dying at home, he doesn't seem to remember having done and said things that other characters saw him do and say, etc. It's eventually revealed that there are actually two Zamornas. Yes, all along the Duke of Zamorna (named Arthur Augustus Adrian Wellesley) has had an identical twin brother--hilariously and prophetically named Ernest--and they have concealed this fact from nearly everyone due to a spell that was placed on them the night they were born . Ernest is married to Emily; Arthur is married to the Duchess. So it's not a bigamy plot after all. Instead of a plot that doubles women, it's a plot that reveals its hero as split/doubled.
It's part of the terms of the curse that both twins have to "in reality be but as one." Despite being two separate people, they have to share a single life: according to the curse, if they are ever seen together by anyone, they will die. One is doomed to be famous and the other to be obscure. So for most of the story, Zamorna appears to be a wildly incoherent character with a volatile and cruel disposition. He's inconsistent in his affections (sometimes he loves his wife and sometimes he doesn't; sometimes he has a very weird dom/sub thing going on with a peasant girl named Mina Laury, sometimes he's completely indifferent to her), he's cruel to his friends and lovers (when they're not actually his friends and lovers), etc. The doubling is a way of having a hero who's both loving and cruel, both good and bad, both dignified and irreverent. Even after the curse is lifted and everything's explained, we're told that the two brothers have infiltrated each other's lives to such an extent that nobody will ever really know what words or deeds to attribute to which brother.
So this is interesting to me, because it does show you sort of how Rochester was built. The main difference between Rochester from Jane Eyre and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is that with Rochester, underneath the Byronic exterior there is the capacity for love, compassion, remorse, and repentance. Heathcliff is a sadistic bastard all the way down. 18 year old Charlotte wanted to have it both ways with her ideal man--the fascinating despotic egotism AND the capacity for faithful love and companionate marriage--and decided the way to do it was to literally make two of him.
Another thing that's interesting to me is the fact that Charlotte invested so much in this Charles Wellesley character as her alter ego. We're always told that the Bronte sisters adopted pseudonyms because women's writing didn't sell. But Currer Bell was not her first alias; and she seems to have been very captivated by the opportunity to play her family's games as Charles instead of Charlotte.
Right after The Spell there's a poem called "We Wove a Web in Childhood" in which Charlotte talks about this whole collaborative fiction project and how much she missed their shared imaginary world whenever she went to live somewhere else. After the poem ends, there's a prose epilogue in which Charlotte claims to have actually seen the image described in the last stanzas appear in her ordinary surroundings:
"Never shall I, Charlotte Bronte, forget what a voice of wild & wailing music now came thrillingly to my mind's--almost to my body's--ear; nor who distinctly I, sitting in the schoolroom at Roe Head, saw the Duke of Zamorna leaning against that obelisk, with the mute marble Victory above him, the fern waving at his feet, hisblack horse turned loose grazing amont the heather...I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom & cheerlessness of my situation."
And then one of the teachers interrupts her and it's gone.
From now on, when people discuss Jane Eyre and solemnly deplore all the red flags Rochester sends up and how problematic and inappropriate their relationship is, maybe I will show them this paragraph. Charlotte is well aware of the difference between her fictions and her reality; and she finds the fictions more compelling. She is not interested in George Eliot's realism or even in Dickens's; she wants her fictions to be more extreme, more fantastic, more absorbing than her actual life is. Approaching Jane's thing with Rochester as if Jane is your sister and you're trying to warn her against a jackass who doesn't deserve her kind of misses the point. Like the web she and her brother and sisters wove in childhood, Rochester shows up to rescue the lonely Jane--isolated in a strange new place and pining for a home that poor Jane has never had--from a life she's already found stifling, monotonous, and incapable of engaging her full imagination and intention.
I have read farther in this book now, and will be talking about "Roe Head Journal," which Charlotte Bronte kept while teaching at Roe Head in 1836. It's partly a diary and partly a series of fictional sketches based on the family sagas.
One of the main things that comes through "Roe Head Journal" is how miserable teaching made Charlotte Bronte. She seems to have found the work absolutely draining, partly because of the difficulty of actually getting people to learn things and partly because she just can't handle that amount of prolonged contact with people she isn't attached to. The lack of privacy is also a problem. These entries typically begin with a brief description of Charlotte's actual day, which inevitably shifts into a cri de coeur about how depleted she feels at the end of it and how much she wishes the other people at Roe Head would stop interrupting her, and then she will try to write something about Angria. Charlotte writes as if, when she's writing fiction, she can actually see and experience the world she's describing; it becomes at least as real to her as her actual surroundings, and it's much more absorbing (the only thing Charlotte seems to like about her surroundings are the thunderstorms). The sketches are interesting, especially in that she is starting to pay more attention to the kinds of characters who *could* be in a realistic novel--people who aren't kings and queens and Dukes of Zamorna. The last one is a portrait of a character named Jane Moore, who has an exotic origin story and is a celebrated beauty, but also appears in a recognizably realistic context: a house, described in great detail, which belongs to a family; and an eighteen year old sister who died too young, one of the few references in all the juvenilia to the death of Charlotte's older sister Maria.
So in "Roe Head Journal" we can see a lot of Villette taking shape as well as Jane Eyre. What most impressed me, though, is Charlotte's anguish about how her situation limits her ability to write. She is, on the one hand, concerned about the hold that this world that she knows is imaginary has on her; on the other, she recognizes it as something she can't live without. "I'm just going to write because I cannot help it," begins one entry. Apparently people have noticed her writing--with her eyes shut--and commented on it. She does it because she needs to shut out her immediate surroundings: "What in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought, dim now & indefinite as the dream of a dream, the shadow of a shade?"
Yeah, I hear you, Charlotte.
Also, remember how Verdopolis and Angria are set in Africa? Were you wondering whether the Bronte siblings' take on Africans was any less racist than your typical British imperialist's? It was not. In one of these sketches we meet our first "moor," whose name is "Quashia," and he is about what you would expect. He does not have any dialogue; he's just described as part of the scene, and what he's doing is passing out drunk in the middle of the boudoir of a beautiful, ethereal, and miserable female character.
Forging farther ahead with Charlotte's juvenilia, here are my thoughts on "Mina Laury," finished in 1838.
Mina Laury appears in The Spell, mainly in the role of caring for the Duke of Zamorna's children. It's clear that she's in love with the Duke of Zamorna and has been his mistress for a while now. When she returns in "Mina Laury," she's been promoted out of the caregiver/governess role--she seems to be a kind of secretary/aide/consultant for Zamorna and for his partisans--and it's made much clearer that she is one of Zamorna's many Other Women. The plot of "Mina Laury" is pretty simple: the Duke of Zamorna, tired of being at home, sets off for Angria in the dead of winter, over the strong objections of his wife the Duchess, who did not just fall up the turnip truck and suspects he's leaving her behind because he's planning to be with one of his other lovers. While he's on the journey, the Earl of Hartford, one of Zamorna's most important political allies, proposes marriage to Mina Laury, with whom he is madly in love. She turns him down, which prompts Harford to stop Zamorna's carriage on the street and challenge him. They duel; Hartford loses.
While this is happening, there's an accident with a carriage outside Mina Laury's house. Mina offers hospitality to the lady in the carriage; neither of them gives the other her real name. Zamorna rushes back to Mina Laury, where--to test her loyalty to him--he pretends he's arranged a marriage between her and Hartford. She faints dead away. He's very pleased with this proof of her loyalty; but is somewhat chagrined when he learns that the woman to whom Mina Laury is currently providing shelter is his wife the Duchess. He manages to get himself and the Duchess away without her finding out that she spent the night at his mistress's house.
And that's it. So here are my takeaways:
Mina Laury has taken the deal that Rochester offers Jane after the debacle at the church: since the man she loves can't marry her (being already married), she's agreed to be his mistress. She is, on the one hand, very clear-headed about this--she knows he'll never marry her, she knows that even if he did he wouldn't be faithful to her, fidelity is just not something Zamorna does, though he expects it of all his lovers--and on the other, can't tolerate anyone else alluding to this to her face, as Hartford does after she rebuffs him.
Mina accepts this because, as she tells both Hartford and the reader frequently in so many words, she sees herself as his "slave." She has completely relinquished her own autonomy to his, and believes that she would submit to any command he gave her--except for the command to leave him. Zamorna thinks of, and speaks of, Mina as his property, and in his confrontation with Hartford he lays great stress on the fact that Mina is one of his possessions, which Hartford is trying to steal.
There's something fascinating to Charlotte Bronte, at this age, about Mina's complete self-abjection when it comes to Zamorna. She's shown to be very capable, intelligent, and assertive when it comes to other men. But Zamorna's subordination of her will to his is a big part of her attraction to him. Mina Laury's understanding of love reminds me a lot of Haydee's characterization in The Count of Monte Cristo; which makes some sense because Haydee is essentially a character lifted out of Byron's Don Juan.
So it's a major development, in terms of Charlotte's approach to characterization and to romance, to make Jane's independence so important to her that she will defend it even against Rochester. When Jane walks out of Thornfield at the end of Volume 2, she's walking out of Mina Laury's shadow. In refusing to stay with Rochester, she's refusing the "devoted slave" role, which is inseparable in both her mind and Charlotte's mind from the mistress role.
So I've mentioned that Angria and Verdopolis are supposed to be located in Africa. "Mina Laury" is one of the best demonstrations yet of how utterly uninterested the Bronte children were in knowing anything about Africa. All of "Mina Laury" happens during a cold snap where everything is frozen and winter storms are constantly blowing through. Clearly this is Yorkshire weather, somehow happening on the African gold coast. The same goes for all the architecture, etc. To the extent that there's world building in this saga, the world being built is an English one, nominally transported to a different location. Mina is, however, apparently Irish? This is one of the things that being a "western" seems to mean in this story.
I've now finished the rest of Charlotte's portion of this book, which consists of an unfinished (at least in my opinion) novella called "Caroline Vernon" and the one-page "Farewell to Angria."
Both very interesting. Reactions below.
"Farewell to Angria," written in 1839, is not entirely what I expected. It's very short, for instance--two paragraphs--and it's hard to say who this "reader" is that she's addressing. So far, the only people reading the Angria stories are the people who are writing them. So it seems likely that this was really written for Branwell, Emily, and Anne, as a way of explaining why she was withdrawing from their collaborative project.
In the second paragraph she does talk about this as a step she might be taking for her own peace of mind. After lamenting the parting from places and characters that now feel like part of her extended family, she says, "Still, I long to quit for a while that burning clime where we have sojourned too long. Its skies flame--the glow of sunset is always upon it. The mind would cease from excitement & turn now to a cooler region, where the dawn breaks grey and sober & the coming day for a time at least is subdued in clouds."
But the first paragraph suggests that the problem with Angria isn't that it's too stimulating, but that in becoming more fully realized and more familiar, it's starting to bore her. She's proud of all the work she's done fleshing the place and the people out; but all the same "the eye is tired of the picture so oft recurring & now so familiar."
Underneath it all is the sense that Charlotte believes that she's now a skilled enough writer to reach a community of "readers" wider her own family--and that if she's going to find that bigger audience, she can't take Angria with her. She is perhaps now mature enough as a writer to notice that despite their nominally exotic setting, the environs of her last two novels closely resemble her own, and her characters are spending a lot of time in houses that are indistiguishable from the English homes she knows. In both "Mina Laury" and "Caroline Vernon," the wars and intrigues and politics of Angria and Verdopolis--all the things that would be front and center in high fantasy--fade into the background. Like "Mina Laury," "Caroline Vernon" is built around a romance plot involving the Duke of Zamorna. What's in this novella is very interesting; also interesting is what's not in it.
Like "Mina Laury" before it and Jane Eyre after it, "Caroline Vernon" is named after its protagonist. Caroline Vernon is the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Northangerland. Zamorna and Northangerland are allies and frenemies. Zamorna married the Earl's legitimate daughter Mary; he has made her pretty miserable with his epic infidelities. Nevertheless, when Caroline was born, Northangerland set her mother up in a house and appointed Zamorna as Caroline's guardian. Zamorna seems to have taken the job seriously, and to have been a helpful counterweight to Caroline's narcissistic and hysterical mother. At the beginning of the novel, Northangerland decides that since Caroline is fifteen now, and since her mother refuses to accept that she's no longer a child because seh doesn't want to acknowledge how old that makes her, it's time to take Caroline to Paris and bring her out in society. Zamorna tries to talk him out of it, apparently out of a sincere fear that the Parisian society she'd be entering will ruin Caroline's earnest and thoughtful character.
In fact, Paris doesn't spoil Caroline, though while there she does hear from some of her Parisian associates that Zamorna is not the stand-up guy she thought he was. Discovering that he's famous for ruining women is dismaying to her at first. But almost immediately, his Bad Character becomes a source of erotic fascination. Caroline returns to "Angria" with a burning desire to see Zamorna again; but her father sticks her in an isolated country house and leaves her there. Caroline eventually just takes off one day and travels to a town where she knows Zamorna has gone and gets herself invited to the house where Zamorna's staying. Crushed at first by his seeming indifference to her, Caroline is sitting alone in the library when Zamorna comes in...and at the end of that conversation, she has agreed to run away with him. And she does. The story ends with her father showing up--furious--cracking Zamorna across the face with a pistol, and promising to ruin him if he doesn't immediately give Caroline into his custody. Zamorna defiantly declares he's survive the worst Northangerland can do; and that's the end of it.
So here are the things that are most interesting to me about all this, from the point of view of Jane Eyre:
Caroline's feelings for Zamorna are pretty intense even before she goes to Paris, but she doesn't really understand them. Hearing about Zamorna's sexual past clarifies and intensifies these feelings instead of cooling them down. She doesn't fall for him in spite of his bad character, but because of it. Knowing his reputation as a seducer doesn't warn her to stay away from him; it gives her hope. The isolation of "Eden Cottage," which her father thinks will protect her, only gives her more time to brood over her obsession with Zamorna; and when she gets a single letter from him, it excites such passion and desire that she decides immediately to run to him. Charlotte's description of Caroline's mental state at the time stood out to me:
"Here was something more than the devil to pay--a voluntary elopement without a companion, alone, entirely of her own free-will--on the deliberation of a single moment! ...Miss Vernon did not reflect, did not repent, did not fear. Through the whole day & night her journey lasted she had no moment of misgiving. Some would have trembled from the novelty of the situation, some would have quailed under the reproaches of prudence, some would have sickened at the dread of a cold or displeased reception at their journey's end. None of these feelings daunted Caroline a whit. ...She could not see the blind folly of her undertaking. She had no sense of the erroneous nature of the step. Her will urged it. Her will was her predominant quality & must be obeyed."
So if you compare this to, say, Lydia's elopement with Wickham in Pride and Prejudice or Natasha's foiled elopement with Anatole in War and Peace, what stands out is that Charlotte wants us to see this as an expression of Caroline's own "will." It's not that Zamorna is any better for or to Caroline than Wickham and Anatole are to the teenaged girls they ruin--more on this in a moment--but that Caroline is the one who initiates the elopement. Zamorna's letter is definitely stirring the pot--he lets her know that in his eyes she's not a "little girl" any more, he teases her about her questions about his 'character' based on what she's heard in Paris, and he tells her to write to him again if she's "still unhappy at Eden-Cottage." But it definitely doesn't suggest this, and he's very surprised when she turns up in the drawing room of the house where she's staying, under an assumed name.
At the same time, Charlotte is also very clear about Zamorna's responsibility for Caroline's social ruin. Once he's confident that Caroline is in fact in love with him, we get an authorial intrusion describing Zamorna's "genuine character":
"Hitherto we have seen him before us rather as a mentor than a misleader--but he is going to lay down the last garment of light & be himself entirely. In Miss Vernon's present mood--burning & trembling with confusion, remorse, apprehension--he might by a single word have persuaded her to go back to Eden-Cottage. She did not yet know that he reciprocated her wild, frantic attachment. He might have buryed that secret--have treated her with an austere gentleness he well knew how to assume--& crushed in time the poison flowers of a passion whose fruit, if it reached maturity, would be crime & anguish."
But he doesn't--because "the selfish Zamorna" is incapable of depriving himself of something he desires just to avoid hurting someone else. "It is his creed that all things bright & fair live for him--by him they are to be gathered & worn as the flowers of his laurel crown." So instead, he tells her he's got a house in the middle of a forest where he secretly keeps his 'treasures,' and will she go there with him? And she says yes.
What "Caroline Vernon" seems to be about, really, is the weirdness of adolescent girlhood--specifically, the crisis of growing into sexual feelings for which your society gives you no legitimate means of expression. And one of the weirdest things about it--based on Charlotte's experience, it would seem--is the way these feelings get attached to men you already know, who by definition are not appropriate objects for them. For a while Caroline has a kind of double-consciousness about what it means to "love" Zamorna. At first, she tells herself, she just wants to be around him and know that he likes her; eventually, she admits that she hopes her half-sister Mary will die so that she can marry him. She's confused by the way her own image of Zamorna shifts after she hears about his sexual past and starts to think of him "no longer as a philosopher & apostle, but as--I need not tell my readers what they know or at least can guess. Thus did Zamorna cease to be an abstract principle in her mind--thus did she discover that he was a man vicious like other men." That's not the only part of this passage in which the narrator seems reluctant to follow Caroline's entire train of thought: "She thought of him no longer as 'the stoic of teh woods, the man without a tear' but as--don't let us bother ourselves with considering as what." At the moment that Caroline agrees to be spirited away to Zamorna's secret mistress house, the distinction between Zamorna as father figure and Zamorna as seducer collapses: "The man beside her was her guardian again, but he was also Mr. Montmorency's Duke of Zamorna."
And maybe this is one of the reasons Charlotte decides to say farewell to Angria. After Caroline says "yes," she exits the narrative, and it ends soon after that. Charlotte either couldn't or didn't want to move Caroline's story past this point. In Angria, based on what we see in "Mina Laury" and "Caroline Vernon," Charlotte let her heroines follow their inapproriate passions to bad outcomes. Mina and Caroline make choices that Charlotte would never allow Jane or Lucy or the Caroline of Shirley to make.
You know that feeling you get when a show you love totally betrays you in the final season and you go back and look at the fic you wrote about before that happened, and you think, oh yeah, this is what it was like to truly care about this show and these characters, i'm really gonna miss that feeling? You know, like after S4 of Sherlock.
Well, now I'm having it for Good Omens. Which I never thought would happen.
So, I bought myself a copy of the Oxford World's Classics edition of the Bronte siblings' juvenilia. For those less obsessed with this family than I am, a little bit about what that is:
In 1826, barely a year after their sisters Maria and Elizabeth died of tuberculosis after a year at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge (the model for Lowood in Jane Eyre), the surviving Bronte siblings--Charlotte (age 10), Emily (age 8), Anne (age 6) and Branwell (age 9)--started engaging in collaborative imaginary play using the figurines from a box of toy soldiers that Branwell got from their father as a present. Eventually they started writing stories and poems based on this play, and formed their own literary society, complete with imaginary publishers and literary critics. The original setting for most of these stories was Glass Town, eventually renamed Verdopolis. In 1834 Charlotte and Branwell expanded the universe to include the kingdom of Angria; Emily and Anne created Gondal.
Angria was located in an extremely hazily imagined Africa. The Duke of Wellington was a significant character in the Angrian saga, and Charlotte's main author surrogate was one of his sons, Charles Wellesley. All of these stories and poems were written in minute handwriting in teeny tiny little books which they evidently made themselves. This book makes these sagas available to the interested reader, with footnotes and a critical apparatus and everything. To give you some idea of how committed they were to this project: this edition of the Bronte kids' selected writings (meaning this isn't even all of it) runs to 484 pages before we hit the appendices and explanatory notes.
I'm about 150 pages in, which means I've just finished reading The Spell, Charlotte Bronte's first sustained attempt at a novel. She was 18 when she wrote it. It's set in Angria and largely narrated by Charles Wellesley (though there is an epistolary section to cover the stuff he doesn't witness). The story focuses on the mysteriously compelling Duke of Zamorna. I'm going to talk about this below the cut tag because I found it fascinating. This will involve major spoilers for both The Spell and Charlotte Bronte's first published novel, Jane Eyre.
Along with Byron, the Bronte kids read Blackwood's Magazine, which was famous for its Gothic tales of the supernatural and was also a major influence on Edgar Allan Poe. You can tell, in the very early stuff included in this volume, that Charlotte was a big fan of magic and the marvelous; she was more into trying to imagine what it would be like if everyone was 30 feet tall than she was into realism. It's also interesting that Charlotte developed an early taste for metafiction. She and the other authors appear in some of these stories as "Genii" who enable their heroes to accomplish miraculous feats. The Spell, as its name implies, does dabble in magic; but though you wouldn't call it exactly realistic--it is very, very Romantic--its plotting is a lot more rational and coherent than it is in any of the earlier stuff. This despite the fact that "Charles Wellesley" announces in a preface that his purpose in writing this story is to prove to everyone around him that his brother, the Duke of Zamorna, is mad.
The Duke of Zamorna is sometimes identified as an early protoype for Rochester. I wouldn't go that far; but it is interesting to me that Charlotte Bronte is already trying out some things that will be very important in Jane Eyre, including and especially the idea of the double. Jane is constantly forced to confront other women who become her double: first Helen Burns, whose Christianity Jane incorporates after Helen's death, and then the two women who fill the Mrs. Rochester role before Jane has a chance to: Blanche Ingram (who goes through a charade marriage to Rochester as part of her mercenary and insincere courtship of him) and Bertha Mason (who actually is married to Rochester). This reading of Bertha as Jane's double--as, essentially, the embodiment of the rebellious rage that the 18 year old Jane no longer allows herself to express--is of course indebted to Gilbert & Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. But doubling is something that is inevitably produced by a bigamy plot, where all the shock and thrills ultimately derive from the scandal of there being two of something there should only be one of.
For a long time, The Spell looks like a bigamy plot. The epistolary section focuses on the Duke of Zamorna's wife, who is jealous of his poorly concealed affairs with other women. And we eventually see the Duke of Zamorna getting everyone together to declare to them that a different woman, Emily, is his true wife and the mother of his two children. All of these noblemen are amazed and some of them--especially those related to the current Duchess of Zamorna--are very angry. Before that happens, though, we get a lot of hints that Zamorna has some kind of demonic doppelganger out there. He's reported being seen in public while he's also sick and dying at home, he doesn't seem to remember having done and said things that other characters saw him do and say, etc. It's eventually revealed that there are actually two Zamornas. Yes, all along the Duke of Zamorna (named Arthur Augustus Adrian Wellesley) has had an identical twin brother--hilariously and prophetically named Ernest--and they have concealed this fact from nearly everyone due to a spell that was placed on them the night they were born . Ernest is married to Emily; Arthur is married to the Duchess. So it's not a bigamy plot after all. Instead of a plot that doubles women, it's a plot that reveals its hero as split/doubled.
It's part of the terms of the curse that both twins have to "in reality be but as one." Despite being two separate people, they have to share a single life: according to the curse, if they are ever seen together by anyone, they will die. One is doomed to be famous and the other to be obscure. So for most of the story, Zamorna appears to be a wildly incoherent character with a volatile and cruel disposition. He's inconsistent in his affections (sometimes he loves his wife and sometimes he doesn't; sometimes he has a very weird dom/sub thing going on with a peasant girl named Mina Laury, sometimes he's completely indifferent to her), he's cruel to his friends and lovers (when they're not actually his friends and lovers), etc. The doubling is a way of having a hero who's both loving and cruel, both good and bad, both dignified and irreverent. Even after the curse is lifted and everything's explained, we're told that the two brothers have infiltrated each other's lives to such an extent that nobody will ever really know what words or deeds to attribute to which brother.
So this is interesting to me, because it does show you sort of how Rochester was built. The main difference between Rochester from Jane Eyre and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights is that with Rochester, underneath the Byronic exterior there is the capacity for love, compassion, remorse, and repentance. Heathcliff is a sadistic bastard all the way down. 18 year old Charlotte wanted to have it both ways with her ideal man--the fascinating despotic egotism AND the capacity for faithful love and companionate marriage--and decided the way to do it was to literally make two of him.
Another thing that's interesting to me is the fact that Charlotte invested so much in this Charles Wellesley character as her alter ego. We're always told that the Bronte sisters adopted pseudonyms because women's writing didn't sell. But Currer Bell was not her first alias; and she seems to have been very captivated by the opportunity to play her family's games as Charles instead of Charlotte.
Right after The Spell there's a poem called "We Wove a Web in Childhood" in which Charlotte talks about this whole collaborative fiction project and how much she missed their shared imaginary world whenever she went to live somewhere else. After the poem ends, there's a prose epilogue in which Charlotte claims to have actually seen the image described in the last stanzas appear in her ordinary surroundings:
"Never shall I, Charlotte Bronte, forget what a voice of wild & wailing music now came thrillingly to my mind's--almost to my body's--ear; nor who distinctly I, sitting in the schoolroom at Roe Head, saw the Duke of Zamorna leaning against that obelisk, with the mute marble Victory above him, the fern waving at his feet, hisblack horse turned loose grazing amont the heather...I was quite gone. I had really utterly forgot where I was and all the gloom & cheerlessness of my situation."
And then one of the teachers interrupts her and it's gone.
From now on, when people discuss Jane Eyre and solemnly deplore all the red flags Rochester sends up and how problematic and inappropriate their relationship is, maybe I will show them this paragraph. Charlotte is well aware of the difference between her fictions and her reality; and she finds the fictions more compelling. She is not interested in George Eliot's realism or even in Dickens's; she wants her fictions to be more extreme, more fantastic, more absorbing than her actual life is. Approaching Jane's thing with Rochester as if Jane is your sister and you're trying to warn her against a jackass who doesn't deserve her kind of misses the point. Like the web she and her brother and sisters wove in childhood, Rochester shows up to rescue the lonely Jane--isolated in a strange new place and pining for a home that poor Jane has never had--from a life she's already found stifling, monotonous, and incapable of engaging her full imagination and intention.
I have read farther in this book now, and will be talking about "Roe Head Journal," which Charlotte Bronte kept while teaching at Roe Head in 1836. It's partly a diary and partly a series of fictional sketches based on the family sagas.
One of the main things that comes through "Roe Head Journal" is how miserable teaching made Charlotte Bronte. She seems to have found the work absolutely draining, partly because of the difficulty of actually getting people to learn things and partly because she just can't handle that amount of prolonged contact with people she isn't attached to. The lack of privacy is also a problem. These entries typically begin with a brief description of Charlotte's actual day, which inevitably shifts into a cri de coeur about how depleted she feels at the end of it and how much she wishes the other people at Roe Head would stop interrupting her, and then she will try to write something about Angria. Charlotte writes as if, when she's writing fiction, she can actually see and experience the world she's describing; it becomes at least as real to her as her actual surroundings, and it's much more absorbing (the only thing Charlotte seems to like about her surroundings are the thunderstorms). The sketches are interesting, especially in that she is starting to pay more attention to the kinds of characters who *could* be in a realistic novel--people who aren't kings and queens and Dukes of Zamorna. The last one is a portrait of a character named Jane Moore, who has an exotic origin story and is a celebrated beauty, but also appears in a recognizably realistic context: a house, described in great detail, which belongs to a family; and an eighteen year old sister who died too young, one of the few references in all the juvenilia to the death of Charlotte's older sister Maria.
So in "Roe Head Journal" we can see a lot of Villette taking shape as well as Jane Eyre. What most impressed me, though, is Charlotte's anguish about how her situation limits her ability to write. She is, on the one hand, concerned about the hold that this world that she knows is imaginary has on her; on the other, she recognizes it as something she can't live without. "I'm just going to write because I cannot help it," begins one entry. Apparently people have noticed her writing--with her eyes shut--and commented on it. She does it because she needs to shut out her immediate surroundings: "What in all this is there to remind me of the divine, silent, unseen land of thought, dim now & indefinite as the dream of a dream, the shadow of a shade?"
Yeah, I hear you, Charlotte.
Also, remember how Verdopolis and Angria are set in Africa? Were you wondering whether the Bronte siblings' take on Africans was any less racist than your typical British imperialist's? It was not. In one of these sketches we meet our first "moor," whose name is "Quashia," and he is about what you would expect. He does not have any dialogue; he's just described as part of the scene, and what he's doing is passing out drunk in the middle of the boudoir of a beautiful, ethereal, and miserable female character.
Forging farther ahead with Charlotte's juvenilia, here are my thoughts on "Mina Laury," finished in 1838.
Mina Laury appears in The Spell, mainly in the role of caring for the Duke of Zamorna's children. It's clear that she's in love with the Duke of Zamorna and has been his mistress for a while now. When she returns in "Mina Laury," she's been promoted out of the caregiver/governess role--she seems to be a kind of secretary/aide/consultant for Zamorna and for his partisans--and it's made much clearer that she is one of Zamorna's many Other Women. The plot of "Mina Laury" is pretty simple: the Duke of Zamorna, tired of being at home, sets off for Angria in the dead of winter, over the strong objections of his wife the Duchess, who did not just fall up the turnip truck and suspects he's leaving her behind because he's planning to be with one of his other lovers. While he's on the journey, the Earl of Hartford, one of Zamorna's most important political allies, proposes marriage to Mina Laury, with whom he is madly in love. She turns him down, which prompts Harford to stop Zamorna's carriage on the street and challenge him. They duel; Hartford loses.
While this is happening, there's an accident with a carriage outside Mina Laury's house. Mina offers hospitality to the lady in the carriage; neither of them gives the other her real name. Zamorna rushes back to Mina Laury, where--to test her loyalty to him--he pretends he's arranged a marriage between her and Hartford. She faints dead away. He's very pleased with this proof of her loyalty; but is somewhat chagrined when he learns that the woman to whom Mina Laury is currently providing shelter is his wife the Duchess. He manages to get himself and the Duchess away without her finding out that she spent the night at his mistress's house.
And that's it. So here are my takeaways:
Mina Laury has taken the deal that Rochester offers Jane after the debacle at the church: since the man she loves can't marry her (being already married), she's agreed to be his mistress. She is, on the one hand, very clear-headed about this--she knows he'll never marry her, she knows that even if he did he wouldn't be faithful to her, fidelity is just not something Zamorna does, though he expects it of all his lovers--and on the other, can't tolerate anyone else alluding to this to her face, as Hartford does after she rebuffs him.
Mina accepts this because, as she tells both Hartford and the reader frequently in so many words, she sees herself as his "slave." She has completely relinquished her own autonomy to his, and believes that she would submit to any command he gave her--except for the command to leave him. Zamorna thinks of, and speaks of, Mina as his property, and in his confrontation with Hartford he lays great stress on the fact that Mina is one of his possessions, which Hartford is trying to steal.
There's something fascinating to Charlotte Bronte, at this age, about Mina's complete self-abjection when it comes to Zamorna. She's shown to be very capable, intelligent, and assertive when it comes to other men. But Zamorna's subordination of her will to his is a big part of her attraction to him. Mina Laury's understanding of love reminds me a lot of Haydee's characterization in The Count of Monte Cristo; which makes some sense because Haydee is essentially a character lifted out of Byron's Don Juan.
So it's a major development, in terms of Charlotte's approach to characterization and to romance, to make Jane's independence so important to her that she will defend it even against Rochester. When Jane walks out of Thornfield at the end of Volume 2, she's walking out of Mina Laury's shadow. In refusing to stay with Rochester, she's refusing the "devoted slave" role, which is inseparable in both her mind and Charlotte's mind from the mistress role.
So I've mentioned that Angria and Verdopolis are supposed to be located in Africa. "Mina Laury" is one of the best demonstrations yet of how utterly uninterested the Bronte children were in knowing anything about Africa. All of "Mina Laury" happens during a cold snap where everything is frozen and winter storms are constantly blowing through. Clearly this is Yorkshire weather, somehow happening on the African gold coast. The same goes for all the architecture, etc. To the extent that there's world building in this saga, the world being built is an English one, nominally transported to a different location. Mina is, however, apparently Irish? This is one of the things that being a "western" seems to mean in this story.
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Good Omens (TV), Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Characters: Aziraphale (Good Omens), Crowley (Good Omens), Metatron (Good Omens), Muriel (Good Omens), Tenth Doctor (Doctor Who), Harry Watson, Donna Noble
Additional Tags: Time Travel Fix-It, Fix-It, Post-Episode: s02e06 Every Day (Good Omens), Episode Fix-it: s02e06 Every Day (Good Omens), POV Muriel (Good Omens), POV Aziraphale (Good Omens), Snake Crowley (Good Omens), Holy Water (Good Omens), Time Loop, POV Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Part 4 of A Nightingale Sang, Part 10 of Wild About Harry
Summary:
Both Aziraphale and Crowley wish they could have handled their last conversation differently; but there's no going back now. In real life, you can't just reset the props and do another take.
Not unless you have a time machine. Or know someone who does.
Ten, Donna Noble, and Harry Watson* try to repair Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship without causing the world to end. It turns out to be more complicated than they expected. But if at first you don't succeed...you can always create a time loop.
***
*Harry Watson is technically a canon character in Sherlock; but in this story she is essentially an original character from my Wild About Harry series, and no knowledge of Sherlock is necessary. For the full experience, you may want to read "Recovery" first, which explains how Harry and Donna met and why they are now both part timelord.
This story assumes that most readers will be pretty familiar with the canon events depicted in S2 E6, "Every Day." Especially the last fifteen minutes.
The 5 real themes of good omens that the finale completely botched
I know we only had 1 episode and whole plotlines were scrapped but I was just left feeling so empty after the finale given how powerful and moving and profound the themes of season 1/the book were. So buckle up for a long ride let's talk about it
Theme 1: Human Incarnate
The book and the show established that humanity is unique because it is neither purely good or purely bad. From the book: "Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people." This Aziraphale describes as "much better" than either Heaven or Hell
This is one of my favorite sequences in the whole show. And the music is soaring and gorgeous. Adam recalls the things in his life he has come to know and love; his parents, his friends, his dog, his home. He makes it have nice weather all year. Aziraphale could feel that love at the Tadfield Manor. Heaven and Hell tried to create an instrument of destruction. But by putting that inside a human boy, they didn't realize the strength of one boy's love would be strong enough to literally burn the hell out of him. He told Satan himself to shove it and rewrote reality to have the dad he truly loved. The power of humanity's love is stronger than any immortal power could ever be.
This is the idea that would have been so cool for the finale but unfortunately never paid off. As the second coming prepares to destroy Earth again, Aziraphale and Crowley could have teamed up with the power of humanity to reshape heaven and hell for good. Adam and Jesus as the antichrist and christ born to end the world and instead used their humanity to save it. Instead we got the book-of-life arc and humans were literally left to dust
Theme 2: Free Will
Next good omens establishes that angels and demons are just puppets but humans are the ones with real free will because they have the ability to be good or bad. Even with heaven and hell, the humans on Earth always have a choice. In season 2, they agree on this, but Crowley's main grievance is the inequity of it all. Humans have free will but it still isn't fair.
God made angels and demons and humans but the humans never had to follow her 'plan.' Free will and the ability to recognize what is truly right outside the propaganda of good vs evil is what saves the world.
Humans always had free will, even if God was around to kill a bunch of them with floods or take their stuff to win bets or something. Creating a new universe without God wouldn't change that. They would still have free will, just less threats from above/below, I guess. What Crowley's established character really should have wanted here was to fix the inequity inherent in human society. That's what is truly holding them back, not a lack of will. Removing God from the universe doesn't actually solve the root problem here
Theme 3: Our Own Side
This is something Crowley learned very early and spends the whole show trying to teach Aziraphale. That good must be separated from heaven and bad must be separated from hell.
Heaven can do some truly appalling horrors and demons, at least Crowley (and somewhat Beelzebub I guess) have the potential to be kind. 'Their own side' is one where they have the freedom of humanity, to do what is truly right. Aziraphale and Crowley sort of found their way there in the finale, but it was all rushed and Aziraphale never really turned his back on heaven, it sort of just became irrelevant when everything started disappearing. What a beautifully flawed and nice world they could have created together
Theme 4: Love Conquers all
What was it all for? Love. God made Aziraphale and Crowley for each other because she liked to smile at the silliness of their love. The literal only constant in the entire universe. Their love for the world and each other saved it. I think the decision to turn Aziraphale and Crowley's queer love story into a tragedy was the biggest mistake of seasons 2/3. Forcing the soft and romantic comedy of good omens into a queer tragedy was the instant it all crashed and burned. Now everything is tainted leading up to the pain and destruction of it all and the whimsy and lightness is gone. There were moments of it, but it was all leading toward the end. And queer love deserves to not be a tragedy. We have far too much tragic queer love in our society. Yes we got the south downs, but Aziraphale and Crowley never got to experience that freedom. They finally came together just to instantly be destroyed. We deserve happy and fulfilling queer love that is sweet without the bitter parts. Good omens was intended to be a comedy, not a tragedy
And then this was SUCH A COOL IDEA they introduced. Perhaps the first time ever an angel and a demon performed a miracle together. The power of their love could create magic stronger than anything heaven or hell had ever seen. I was so excited to see the wonders they were going to create, they ways in which they could have rebuilt the world better using that love. If they had this kind of power doing a tiny miracle, what could they have accomplished if they really put their minds to it? God herself couldn't have stopped them. And instead, the finale literally revoked Crowley's magic for the entire episode. They sacrifice themselves for a new earth and people that didn’t even exist yet instead of using any of their power to change it. The god awful execution of this theme is probably the biggest letdown of the entire finale imo
Theme 5: Fix It, Don't Replace It
This is so obviously established in seasons 1/2 I cannot believe how badly they missed the mark with this one
Literally shows us the horror of replacing the Earth with all new people. Even children can recognize that just because something is broken, it doesn't mean you throw it away and start all over. They loved the world enough to want to save it. The world is inherently worth saving, flaws and all. If you love something, you don't abandon it. The ENTIRE PLOT of season 1 explores the horrors of humanity and yet humans, Aziraphale and Crowley do everything in their power to save it.
It absolutely blows my mind how directly this scene contradicts the entire message of the finale. Job didn't want new children, he quite liked the old ones. Aziraphale and Crowley didn't want the antichrist's new Earth, they quite liked the old one. We didn't want new human versions of Aziraphale and Crowley, we QUITE LIKED THE OLD ONES. Where the hell did that mentality go when they told God to create an entirely new universe????????????? Season 1 said the world is flawed but it deserves saving exactly as it is. Season 1 said an angel and a demon go off to the ritz together, exactly as they are. The finale said the world is too broken, we have to make it disappear and start over. The finale said Aziraphale and Crowley have too many issues/traumas to be happy, we have to destroy them and start over. That's why as cute as Asa and Anthony's love is, we quite liked them exactly as they were, angel/demon trauma + history and all. They deserved saving too.
Good omens has always been so special to me for how much it pokes fun at but also celebrates the messiness and wonder of humanity and love. The 6-to-1 episodes was a major setback but somehow the finale still managed to drop basically every one of its most endearing and powerful messages. What is the "real world" the finale is trying to make us value? One without a god to screw things up sometimes?? The best parts of humanity always shined through not even despite, but BECAUSE of the heavenly challenges they overcame. It's very clear good omens as a whole was always meant to be a one-season/one-book story. There was so much potential and missed opportunities and I wish we could have had the finale we were all dreaming of. I will always love the world of good omens season 1/the book, so that is the world I'll keep in my heart. And all the nightingales therein
Company and Moral Support: Granada Holmes, “The Norwood Builder”
It’s not as warm and cuddly as “The Blue Carbuncle;” it’s not as creepy as “The Speckled Band.” But “Norwood Builder” has always been one of my favorites, and it’s because it marks, to me, a significant change in Holmes and Watson’s relationship. In ACD canon, the catalyst for this change is really the Return; “Norwood Builder” is the first story set and published after “The Empty House.” As I’ve said many times before, the stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes show us a Holmes/Watson relationship which is much more intimate, and much more central to both of their lives, than in earlier volumes. Hawkesworth seems to have wanted the whole first series to have that Return vibe. Accordingly, in the Granada narrative, “Norwood Builder” takes place three episodes before “The Final Problem” (we have “Resident Patient” and “The Red-Headed League” coming up first). And thanks to some great work from the screenwriter and from Brett and Burke, this becomes, not just an interesting case, but a beautiful moment in the development of Holmes and Watson’s relationship.
BTW, in the discussion below I’m going to assume that Holmes and Watson are partners (in life as in the detective business) and that the show only left that coded because it was 1984-5. If that bothers you, bail now. (I imagine that anyone bothered by this has in fact already bailed; but you’ve been warned.)
I don’t think we talk about this shot enough. whoever was holding the camera, what were you thinking? I know nothing about cinematography, but this sure looks like these-two-in-a-relationship subtext going on
The End of Stupid Watson: Granada Holmes, “The Dancing Men”
Continuing the Granada Holmes rewatch, we move to one of my favorites: “The Dancing Men.” This is one of the classic Holmes stories, and the best one about Holmes as code-breaker. It presents some challenges to the would-be adapter, because so much of the story is about Holmes solving the code, and it’s very difficult to dramatize that. But Anthony Skene, who wrote the teleplay, was an experienced hand at the mystery adaptation, and he does two really smart things here, one of which would have a major impact on adaptations to come. One, he spends a lot of time fleshing out the tragic story of Hilton Cubitt and his wife Elsie, showing her panic and deterioration and his (always almost-repressed, of course) emotional turmoil as the screw turns and the situation goes from bad to worse. Two, he turns this into a story about Holmes and Watson teaching each other. This hammers some nails in the coffins of the two biggest adaptation cliches that the Granada people were trying to kill: Unemotional Holmes and Stupid Watson.
I can’t with the Fourth of July this year, so I’m just gonna celebrate Watson Wednesday by posting about my very favorite screen Watson, David Burke.
I have affection and admiration for Hardwicke; I didn’t totally mind Jude Law; I’m sure there are other Watsons out there that I might love and just haven’t encountered. But today I feel like talking about why, when I started watching Granada Holmes as a youth back in the late 1980s, David Burke became The Watson for me.
We Granada fans talk about Jeremy Brett more, of course; but for me, the Brett-Burke pairing was so important to my love of the show that I stopped watching after he left. I've since gone back and done a complete rewatch, and I came to appreciate Hardwicke's Watson for its own distinctive qualities. But there was just a kind of spark in Burke's Watson that made everything lit (as the kids say). I'm glad we still have the work; I'm sad the man who made it is gone.
One of the finest and most beloved Watsons ever to grace the screen has passed away. David Burke was 91 years old, just shy of his 92nd birthday, and he is survived by his wife Anna Calder-Marshall and his son Tom Burke.
By all accounts, he was a gentleman and a wonderful human being. He could have stayed on to play Watson much longer, which would have made many of us very happy, but he chose to leave the show to be nearer to his family, especially since Tom was very young at the time.
His was not the first intelligent and competent Watson, but this version marked a turning point in mainstream depictions, from comedic sidekick to a hero in his own right.
RIP, dear sir. You will be missed. Thank you for everything.
~*~
To read a longer and moving tribute, please check out the I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere website: https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2026/05/david-burke-first-watson-of-granada-era.html. The tribute includes a link to the interview that the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast conducted with David and his wife a few years ago.
Well this is a heartbreaker. His Watson has always been and will ever be my favorite Watson. I will also always remember the excitement of seeing him on stage in The Crucible.
The summary is: I'm glad it didn't end with Season 2. Still enjoying Tennant and Sheen, whose chemistry can sublimate anything into gold.
As for the rest...
I have to say I didn't much care for it.
And one of the things that I didn't care for about it is that most of it doesn't really follow from Season 2. I mean there are threads that are picked up--Michael being a double agent, etc.--but the plot felt very generic, and the conclusion...well, it's the ending of The Good Place, it's the ending of The Umbrella Academy, and honestly I think I'm partly mad about the fact that it just seems like a way of avoiding the work of writing an actual resolution. There's something...kind of...Moffaty about it. Moffaty as in: Big stakes! Massive conflict! The universe ends! Our beloved characters, tragically destroyed forever! But PSYCH! The universe is BACK! MIRACLE HAPPY ENDING!!!
Because the thing is, the end of Season 2 set us up for so many stories that could have been so cool. And this really isn't any of them. The Metatron, who clearly came out of Season 2 as the main villain, is just poofed out of existence in the cheesiest...I mean, the victim looking into the camera and saying, "YOU!" right before being murdered is one of the dumber cliches to emerge from decades of Agatha Christie TV adaptations. Hell has basically nothing to do at all in this episode--though I did enjoy Aziraphale's trip down there--and in most of the Heaven scenes very little happens. Even the callbacks they obviously worked on, like the whole 3-card monte thing, seem oddly disconnected from what they're referring to. The whole gangster plot with the Bentley was more compelling than the main plot, again partly because it wasn't really about what it said it was about. It turned out not to matter at all where Jesus was, really.
I had assumed, given that they had to shove the whole 3rd season into one 90 minute episode, that it would be jam-packed with action, intrigue, adventure...and instead it felt slow and empty. Like, I feel like we got YEARS of Muriel Being Dim. Which would be OK if it was going somewhere...but it wasn't really. Poor Muriel works out that Michael has the book, and it doesn't matter. If Crowley's always known that Michael has the book, why hasn't he done anything about it?
I mean...many of you all know, I'm not totally adverse to The Characters Meet The Creator And Ask Her Questions. But...I don't know. The S3 portrayal of God didn't seem to me to be connected to S1 and S2. And...
OK, I guess this is a philosophical peeve, I suppose, but...
The new godless universe. I do not buy it. There is no such thing as a world with humans but no angels or demons. Once humans come into the picture, they invent angels and demons and gods in all shapes and sizes. If this is a universe that doesn't have those concepts it's only because the humans have been artificially prevented from arriving at them, which means that God is still out there somewhere fucking with them. And if it doesn't have those concepts...then what's in Asa's shop, apart from those astrophysics books? In this universe, is there Paradise Lost? Was there ever an Iliad? I suppose not? Was there ever Romanticism? What do poets write about in this universe? What is love like in a world where there's no divine love to which it can be analogized?
I mean all of these questions COULD be answered, that would be kind of an interesting thought experiment...but they AREN'T, and this is my problem. The writers are really not committed to this idea, except as a way of wrapping up the arc and giving New Crowley and New Aziraphale their fluff ending.
Again. Not opposed to fluff. The whole thing with the bookshop and Crowley having written that book that no one ever buys...all that's very sweet, I enjoyed watching them do it, I enjoyed all the scenes with them together. I just wish they could have built a better structure around them, and I wish that they hadn't given us a reset instead of a resolution.
Ah well. I will be grateful for it later, I suppose, once I'm over the disappointment. But right now I feel like the curse of Neil Gaiman blighted this whole project sort of beyond repair. Which is sad. I mean, yes, nice homage to Terry Pratchett with the portrait sequence and all, but...this season doesn't feel like something people really genuinely loved. At least, I don't think I'm ever gonna love it.
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
titsay
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
stormborns
