MovieChat Forums > The Living and the Dead (2016) Discussion > Started off good then went off the rails

Started off good then went off the rails

posted 8 years ago by ronindave
6 replies | jump to latest

The series seemed to start off good - very atmospheric: eery and ghostly with the past and present blending together. However the fourth episode is where it started to get wonky IMHO with the cliche jump scares and ghosts flying across hallways. Then Episode 5 with the Roundhead ghosts who just showed up yet had never done so before. And if they hung everybody in the village how did they still have a village? Then the last one when they dug up a futuristic car that somehow warped back into their time without a body. They would have been somewhat familiar with "horseless carriages" as they already had trains and the first automobiles by that time. They should have been extremely curious as to what the hell it was and how it got there.

And the problem is the mystery of the woman with the shining book is never really resolved from Nathan's perspective. All he sees is her walking away with his son. And even with her strolling off, she had nothing to do with the other supernatural hauntings going on there that started and ended inexplicably - did the Roundheads come back again on Halloween 1895?

The series didn't seemed to know what it wanted to be. Is supposed to be supernatural or sci-fi or both and were characters supposed to ignore the supernatural or not. Nathan became too readily convinced in the supernatural for his educational background while his skeptical wife had no reason to be skeptical by the time she saw the roundhead ghosts. And why was no one in the village saying "hey, why did all this weird stuff start happening all of a sudden when we never had roundhead ghosts and the like running around before?"

I think the show was trying to be too clever for its own good with all its mysteries. The wrap around story of the great great granddaughter haunting/time slips was interesting and would have worked as its own self-inclusive story but some of the other stories like the Roundheads, the workhouse boys, the murdered girl just seem to come out of left field with no connection to anything.

I think BBC sniffed another Lost in the making with gimmicky mysteries or another shambling Doctor Who Moffat arc that gets so twisted into itself that the mysteries cannot be properly answered in a sensible satisfactorily way because the writer never thought it out completely.

I would have liked to have seen a second series to see if they could have have fleshed it out a bit more or if they were just going to do more of the same spooky spooky without explaining why the past and the present were colliding.

[–] loobylou-73768 8 years ago

Agreed. I got a strong sense of a writer who got a few good ideas and got carried away trying to get them all out there, regardless of whether they fitted together into a coherent story. Ultimately it was a stylish but confusing mess with annoying, unsympathetic characters.

There was potential there. They blurring of timelines and the sci-fi angle on the traditional ghost story could have been brilliantly done...but it wasn't.

[–] lexyladyjax 7 years ago

Considering you're judging a television series which is incomplete and will never get a chance to finish telling its story, your critique seems a bit harsh, ronindave. Honour would seem to require the realisation that this story was meant to be told in more than six installments, or is your handle meaningless? Perhaps you're unaware of the background of the truncated nature of this series? It was cancelled too soon. How is that the fault of the writers?

Edit: according to my research, there were no automobiles in Somerset, England, in 1894. The railroad hadn't gotten there yet so there were no roads suitable for car travel. Autos were a luxury when they first appeared and farmers didn't have tractors. Those tractors ran on coal and were steam powered (traction-engines), remember? The Industrial Revolution was just getting started. Those people had likely never seen a car in their lives.

You're online, there's no excuse for ignorance. Look up the Industrial Revolution and learn about it. Its aftereffects are destroying the planet right now.

Bored now.

[–] ronindave 7 years ago

Take your asperger medicine, literalist.

Edit: according to my research, there were no automobiles in Somerset, England, in 1894. The railroad hadn't gotten there yet so there were no roads suitable for car travel. Autos were a luxury when they first appeared and farmers didn't have tractors. Those tractors ran on coal and were steam powered (traction-engines), remember? The Industrial Revolution was just getting started. Those people had likely never seen a car in their lives.

Well, your research failed to understand the concept of newspapers and word-of-mouth and the fact that the Industrial Revolution was already in full swing by the 1890s that even country villagers would have been aware of the changes. More importantly that they wouldn't have been curious as to what the machine was. They weren't cavemen FFS.

Honour would seem to require the realisation that this story was meant to be told in more than six installments, or is your handle meaningless?

yeah that's not weird or creepy in any way...

[–] SandVis 7 years ago

Just wanted to say I totally agree with you! The first few episodes were good but like you said it went off the rails at episode four. It seems the writers threw in every spooky cliché they could think of without considering how it all hangs together. The ending with the car was one of those writers like to toss in because it seems like a clever twist but it actually makes no sense. After episode four I felt like giving up but since there were only two left I decided to push through. Should have followed my instincts!

[–] ronindave 7 years ago

I liked the overall atmosphere and the first 3 episodes were quite good but it seemed to fall apart by the end in terms of the characters and the story. And the car bit seemed like an interesting wrap-around but it begs the question of what the impact of a 21st century car in the 1890s would have had. The writers acted like the people were just "oh, this machine must have been the cause of all the weird stuff" and didn't bother to look any further despite the doctor, his wife, and the reverend being more scientifically-minded and not superstitious medieval peasants. They at least would have been familiar with the concept of the automobile.

I would have been interested how they would have resolved the time travel issue such as the contrails the doctor sees in the sky and when he saw the car. There was some kind of weird time loop going on that simply being ghosts didn't explain especially as the car wasn't a ghost.

[–] hydedom 7 years ago

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