The Dark Herald reviews the BBC’s sadistic assassination of Terry Pratchett’s finest literary legacy,
This show hates me. And it feels quite personal.
I mean, ran over your dog, backed up and did it again, burned down your house, then sent your wife and children to the gas chambers personal. That is the level of individual hatred I felt directed at me while I was viewing The Watch. I am quite serious when I say that this show is the product of extreme mental illness.
Absolute, abject hatred of its source material is evident in every aspect of this production.
The Watch’s art style is a discordant series of nightmare images meant to evoke disgust. It’s walking into Wonderland and finding Alice’s bloody severed head as the center piece of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. It’s a Middle-Earth where Sauron prevailed, and Frodo is now one of Nazgul….
It starts with Nobby Knobs meeting with Death. Or at least that is what any fan of the series who was Blissfully unaware of the horrors he was about to endure would assume. They didn’t really get Death right. in the book’s Death is more traditionally a grim Reaper figure consisting of cloak, skeleton and scythe. Here he was more of a giant robot with clawed hands and glowing eyes in the hood. So, they missed the mark there, but they got Nobby Nobs completely right. Nobby is the only person on Discworld that has to carry a certificate that reads: “I, after hearing evidence from a number of experts, including Mrs. Slipdry the midwife, certify that the balance of probability is that the bearer of this document, C.W. St John Nobbs, is a human being. Signed, Lord Vetinari.” They did brilliantly there.
Except that it turns out Nobby isn’t in this series at all. Neither is Fred Colon come to that.
No, the guy you thought was Nobby is actually Captain Sam Vimes. This wasn’t trying to meet the mark and missed, this wasn’t even an attempt to try something “a little more modern.” They would have just race swapped Vimes if that was what these talentless clods were trying to do. This was the deliberate character assassination of the character of “Sam Vimes, White Patriarchal Male.”
There is a difference between deconstruction and total ablation.
Actually, Frodo as The Tenth Nazgul sounds vastly more interesting than this unmitigated abomination. At this point, I’m beginning to think that Arkhaven isn’t so much one of the little mammals skittering around the feet of the entertainment industry dinosaurs as the proverbial asteroid.