Episode Title: Catacombs
You know... I try my best not to use words like "fun" and "boring" too much when I write these logs. While it's true that when I personally engage with people (and by people I mean the 4 scientists that so happen to periodically visit me in my basement...) my vocabulary is very casual and very imprecise. Things like "fun", "boring". When I actually buckle down and write my thoughts online, I try my best to be a little more critical as, I'm sure, most of you out there don't need me to tell you how to feel about something. Casual sentiments like that is something you can all decide for yourself. So what I usually try to do here is break down things that I've found to be important to the core of the fiction. What I mean by that is, I'm essentially using my education in screen fiction to try to highlight certain aspects of serial fiction that might be lost through casual viewing.
In essence, I would like to be more critical in my logs because I feel that people will find more value in me articulating detailed abstractions of a story rather than talk about it in very broad strokes. But for this particular episode of Low Winter Sun, I'm going to have to make a hypocrite of myself.
This episode was boring.
There's really not a lot of ways to describe this episode. Most of it is surprisingly dull and this is coming from someone who likes Mad Men. I'm not sure a screen fiction could be more of a navel gaze than Mad Men and still maintain some kind of dramatic arc. Point is, I actually like slower stuff. I've never enjoyed the idea that over crowding your senses throughout the whole experience just some how makes that inherently more "epic". That is a logical fallacy. But this episode of Low Winter Sun is a good example of what people who are unfamiliar with drama TV think drama TV is like. This episode was very by the numbers. It handled it's subject material competently but also in a very unimaginative way. This is also randomly punctuated by some very weirdly sloppy writing moments. A great example comes early in the episode when a random cop brought Geddes' daughter who was caught shoplifting.
When Geddes questions the officer's knowledge of the incident. The officer described that she was shoplifting a pair of magnum condoms. Geddes then responds very weirdly with a "You're lucky I don't shove a magnum sized billy club up your ass." First off, it must be stressed that this was a normal conversation at first. The officer didn't say "magnum sized condoms" with a smirk or attitude. He just literally filled in Geddes what was going on. So why did Geddes react so inappropriately? The cop was literally just telling Geddes what his daughter tried to steal. He wasn't making a joke about screwing his daughter or something. I feels like there was a line cut somewhere or something and it just made the entire scene seem disjointed and not thought out. That's not really acceptable especially considering how tightly managed the writing in Breaking Bad has been. And this is the show AMC is trying to replace Breaking Bad with?
Why did you yell at him? He literally didn't say anything in a bad way...
The visual grit of Low Winter Sun lost a bit of it's edge with this episode as certain scenes were just absolutely too dark for me to really see what's going on. I understand that the director maybe wanted to exaggerate the environment of Detroit but it shouldn't come at the expense of seeing the actors act. I would like to see a bit of some visual variety later in the show. Right now it just feels like a listless version of The Killing. Wait, did I just reference The Killing as a positive example? Jesus Low Winter Sun. Talk about under performing...
I know this is night time but come on...
Frank's face is in this shot... somewhere...
cake points to the person who can you find it?
Everything else about the episode is fairly decent without much to comment on. Frank spent the entire episode trying to find information on Katja, which was played very straight and resulted in a bit of a boring process. This was a similar problem with the UK version where (again) Frank's search for Sinada wasn't very compelling either. Geddes' problems with his daughter could have been interesting but, unfortunately, their exchange throughout the show didn't reveal anything about him that we didn't already know. The side plot with the gangbangers actually got interesting in Episode 3 but didn't really go anywhere in this episode. These are the factors that contributed to a boring experience. Really, stories are boring at their core when the characters don't progress and it's starting to feel like Low Winter Sun's characters aren't developing. That doesn't mean this episode is bad (beyond the random sloppy moments). Again, everything was very competently executed but just being competent isn't enough to make your material compelling. Low Winter Sun has all the ingredients but something is just going wrong in the cook at the moment.
There seems to be another problem with Low Winter Sun that I'm just noticing now however. It's my assessment that the show is too much of a pastiche of too many things when it should be the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy/The Wire of Noir. It's ok to draw queues from its fellow crime shows but you will start to lose your own identity if you rely on external factors (like genre tropes) a little too much. Low Winter Sun needs more episodes like 3 and less episodes like 1 and 4.
I will still watch it and I still, believe it or not, look forward to future episodes. I personally really want to like this show and I still feel that this show has the potential to be amazing. But I have to put my own biases aside as best as I can and try to see the show for what it is. It's still lackluster. The story needs to start moving quicker or else it'll not out do it's UK source material and that's a bad thing.
