Everything Is Connected

I've never been much of a Douglas Adams fan. I like his stuff well enough. I just don't buy into the cult that's long surrounded him and his work. 

That said, I do have a pretty long history with the man and his material. I was nineteen when the first series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy aired on BBC Radio 4. At the time I was living alone in my grandparents' house, caretaking it while they were both in hospital, which is a more complicated story than it sounds but I don't have time to go into it here. I remember listening to one of the episodes, sitting in the greenhouse because it was warm there, under glass in the early spring sunshine.

I liked the radio series well enough. I liked the books better. The TV series I recall being somewhat disappointing but I watched it anyway. As a lifelong science fiction fan, I was more interested in the existence of a successful, popular SF comedy series than I was impressed by any of its intrinsic qualities. I thought it was funny but not that funny.

A couple of years after Hitchhikers began, while I was at Cambridge reading English, Douglas Adams came to do a reading at one of the colleges. University was where, among other thing, I learned to avoid public appearances by writers. As entertainment, they tend to be lackluster. It's ironic, then, that readings and signings have been a significant part of my working life for the last quarter of a century. I'd rather work a reading than listen to one, luckily.

Back when I was at college, though, I was still excited at the prospect of seeing famous people up close. Or even not-so-famous people I'd vaguely heard of. I'd seen Ian McEwan reading from his second novel and watched three somewhat superannuated Liverpool poets declaim in a basement. I knew who Douglas Adams was and some people I knew wanted to go, so why not?

I don't remember much about the event other than Adams talked about his time on Dr. Who quite a bit. He might even still have been working on the show. For many years, probably as a result of that experience, I was under the misapprehension that he'd written or script-edited many of the Tom Baker episodes from my favorite era, the time in my adolescence when I used to hurry back home on a Saturday afternoon so as not to miss my one chance to find out what happened next. No catch-up tv then, nor DVD or VHS. As I remember it, the Doctor didn't even get reruns.

 In fact, Adams wrote just three storylines for Dr. Who, only one of which went out under his name. The best-remembered, Shada, didn't even get an airing until forty years later. Adams moved on to environmental activism and gift books about supposedly amusing made-up words and I largely forgot about him and his increasingly idiosyncratic career.

With two exceptions. Adams, like David Bowie, was very alert to the possibilities of new technology and how it drives cultural change. Also like Bowie, he didn't just lend his name and I.P. rights to a video game; he wrote and designed one of his own. The game was called Starship Titanic and I could see the box from where I'm sitting, if there wasn't a filing cabinet in the way.

Starship Titanic came out in 1998 and I bought a used copy not long after. It was easy to come by for cheap. As Wikipedia has it, the game was "released to mixed reviews and was a financial disappointment". I doubt I played it for more than a couple of hours. I remember nothing about it other than I didn't enjoy it. I notice it's now available on Steam, where it enjoys a Very Positive rating, almost entirely courtesy of members of the Cult of Adams, at least judging by the tenor of the reviews I scanned.

A project I much preferred was Adams' final fiction series, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". The eponymous first book and its sequel, "The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul", were published in the late 1980s, which would have been about when I read them. I don't own copies. I believe I would have borrowed them from the library.

I read each of them once and thirty-five years later, unsurprisingly, I remember almost nothing about them, other than that they were even cosier than the rest of Adams oeuvre. The appearance of the expression "Tea-Time" in one title and the protagonist's surname, "Gently", in the other pretty much tell you what to expect.

Or so I remember it. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps they were grittier and darker than I'm giving them credit for. I mean, by the same logic, one of them does also have the word "Dark" in it...

Last week I finally got around to watching the BBC America tv show, also called "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", which has been sitting in my Netflix watchlist pretty much since I got Netflix. I knew absolutely nothing about it. I only put it on watch by dint of name recognition and I only started watching it because, when I got to the end of The Peripheral, I had no new SF/Fantasy drama in the pipeline that looked any better. It was Dirk Gently or Locke and Key.

It also seemed like it would make for some pleasant light relief after the somewhat challenging content of The Peripheral. I was in the mood for some light, humorous whimsy. That wasn't exactly what I got.

I watched the final two episodes of the first season last night. The climax was so compelling I couldn't bring myself to stick to my self-mandated ration of one episode per evening. To front-load my review, I liked just about everything about the show - the writing, the acting, the characters, the plot, the visuals, the pacing... 

I also liked the violence. My god, but it's a violent show. I can't offhand remember when I last watched something with a body count to match. It seems like someone gets shot about once every two minutes, on average, although admittedly that average is stacked by the times thirty or forty people get shot in a matter of seconds.

People also get electrocuted, harpooned, set on fire and bitten in half by sharks. When they don't get killed they get locked in the trunks of cars, handcuffed to bedsteads, bludgeoned with baseball bats and dropped off bridges. If anything in the least little bit like that happened in the Douglas Adams original, I definitely don't remember it but even if it did, I think it's safe to say it didn't happen this often.

I'm not, by and large, much of an aficionado of screen violence but I have read a lot of comic books and the show has all the impact of a really good comic. As well as being relentless, the violence is both gory and clean. There's a lot of blood but absolutely no guts. No-one thrashes or writhes or even screams much. They get shot and then they die.

It's not just the violence that reminds me of reading a top-notch superhero comic book. The characters are all tropes or types, with just enough depth to make them feel like actual people but none of the wearing contradictions of serious literature. Everyone has a signature look or move or style that might as well come with a theme tune. I found myself eagerly waiting for the next appearance by my favorites just for the fun of watching them do their thing.

The plot, which involves time travel, makes as much or as little sense as any time travel plot ever has but there are some great verbal set pieces towards the end where the characters really lean into it for everything it's worth. As with most shows I really enjoy, almost all the characters are likeable. Even the villains, truly despicable though they are, come across as oddly lovable at times.

The main villain, just to make that point, really loves his dog. Inevitably, it's a corgi. I have now seen so many corgis in so many shows I can almost not think of them as "those ugly dogs the Queen used to like". There's a kitten too. Neither the dog nor the cat are just a dog or a cat but I won't say what they are because spoilers.

The season ends with a massive cliffhanger, the exact one I was expecting. Fortunately, since the show first aired in 2016, we can skip all the "will they, won't they" over whether they'll get a second season. They did, although they didn't get a third. 

I'm going to start watching Season Two tonight. Can't wait. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't already done so to give the show a try. It definitely won't be to everyone's taste but it was a very great deal more to mine than anything else that's ever had Douglas Adams' name attached to it.