Years and Years (Russell T Davies)

[gilbertharding]

interestingly while people said Brexit was terrible I thought the main takeaway was that people will just keep on getting on with it until things are concentration camp-level unignorable. good thing RTD isn't writing in an American context.

It was basically the fable of the frog being slowly boiled alive, wasn't it? I still haven't seen the last episode BTW.

[Alberon]

America has already reached concentration camp level anyway. Not systematic extermination but neglectful deaths are happening.

A woman has just been charged with manslaughter of her unborn child because she was shot in an argument she started.

How far would they have to go to reach their equivalent of episode 5 in the U.K.?

[sevendaughters]

that's what I was hinting at: they're at that level and it hasn't inspired the revolution.

[Icehaven]

Why did the other (non-cyborg) daughter character even exist? She had one 10 second moment where she did an impression of her gran that made the others laugh, and another where she was caught buying a £56 bottle of wine, and that was literally it. She wasn't even a sounding board or sidekick for anyone, she just was there in the background for no reason whatsoever. Even the almost as pointless eldest son of Rosie had an (albeit virtually invisible) storyline about his juvenile delinquency. She could have been intended as a sort of contrast with the other younger characters as being relatively stereotypically "normal" but that wasn't employed at all. I wonder if she had more storyline but it got cut or something, but it just seems odd to go to the hassle and expense of creating and casting a whole character in an ensemble drama then doing absolutely zero with them and giving them no storylines whatsoever.

[gilbertharding]

I didn't really like the way Stephen was demonised so thoroughly for having an affair. Wasn't his wife actually pretty horrible? She seemed to spend the first three episodes rolling her eyes, despising him and resenting his family.

[Jerzy Bondov]

I didn't really like the way Stephen was demonised so thoroughly for having an affair. Wasn't his wife actually pretty horrible? She seemed to spend the first three episodes rolling her eyes, despising him and resenting his family.

My wife said this. She's a bad feminist

[daf]

Why did the other (non-cyborg) daughter character even exist? (. . .) She wasn't even a sounding board or sidekick for anyone, she just was there in the background for no reason whatsoever.

Maybe he was going for realism - some people in families float around in real life without causing drama.

[Twed]

Why did the other (non-cyborg) daughter character even exist? She had one 10 second moment where she did an impression of her gran that made the others laugh, and another where she was caught buying a £56 bottle of wine, and that was literally it.

I thought the same thing and decided that she was there to be the grounded one. The one that doesn't cause any drama, I guess to reflect that this is just how things work for some people.

[VelourSpirit]

I didn't really like the way Stephen was demonised so thoroughly for having an affair. Wasn't his wife actually pretty horrible? She seemed to spend the first three episodes rolling her eyes, despising him and resenting his family.

It was only really Celeste and Muriel, wasn't it? The other siblings seemed to find it quite amusing.

[H-O-W-L]

I keep trying to watch this and every single time, I get partway into it and then the dread overcomes me and I have to go "Ahh, I don't want to watch this." and back away.


Ahh fuck. I made it like halfway into Episode 2 and had to full-on tap out. The bloke getting decapitated by the drone broke me. I can deal with some right dark shite but this is just fucking much. Fuck, this must've been what watching Threads was like in '84.

[H-O-W-L]

.

There were hints at some interesting developments, though the tactic of painting a worst case scenario as something likely to happen is pretty cunty. I spent most of my youth terrified of Nuclear War because my teachers convinced me it was about to happen. Having eventually learned to see through the scaremongering, I find dystopian fiction with 'this is one step away from happening if XXX gets into power!!1' overtones massively irritating.

I hate to double post, but you know this show has haunted me all bloody night and all bloody day. I had to go outside and sit on the step out front with a coffee just to unwind and get it out of me fucking head, and I think I agree with your point ultimately.

I respect the show's willingness and sheer brass balls to show such abject worst-case horror in such a politically fragile era where even saying "cunt" might get you considered part of THEM, but I also sort of fucking hate the show for the fact it straight up degenerates into nothing more than Worst Case Mean World Horror Bullshit Vitriolicism. The show exists purely to put its protagonists, and the world they live in, through the ringer. Nothing good can or will ever happen because it's a world of pure misery, a tumble-drier laden on the inside with spikes. It's like that idea Charlie Brooker came up with for a TV show where "lads" get executed by dumping them into a rotating, studded drum.

I can sort of get behind that sort of thing when it's clearly meant to reflect a fictional reality but I think this show is poised and positioned in a time period where this kind of thing can't be seen of as predictive terror-material or 'what if' and as a result it comes of a lot more grim than it should and becomes almost unpalettable when you see the more normal people of the show suffering in this anarchic hellscape.

It's like why I refuse to watch 24: It targets innocents. It targets non-bastards, and it has characters that aren't meant for this horrid brutalistic world, and it gleefully tears them apart just to make a point about MEAN WORLD NOW. Fuck it. Fuck that bollocks.

After I came back inside and had calmed down a bit I watched Dredd, a movie that viscerally disturbed me when I first watched it, and really contrasted how I felt watching Dredd with how I felt with the first episode and a half of YoY. I came to the conclusion that Dredd disturbed me because it depicts some really narky violence and some really horrid things, but ultimately I don't hate Dredd, infact I love it because it depicts that while also depicting a world that has normal people who're just wondering what they're 'aving for tea tonight, rather than this fucking vitriolic shit-dome designed to mince up Middle England and the middle-upper class cunts that YoY presents.

THREADS by contrast represents a single, catastrophic event and the cataclysmic snowballing of bad events that results from that, and more to the point the world THREADS takes place in effectively no longer exists, so it's a lot easier to stomach. Still as horrible as having a monkey wrench twisted in your colon, but still stomachable. YoY, for me, is too raw.

I don't hate RTD for writing it but I think that the uncompromising cynicism of the series makes it borderline impossible to watch for me  and I don't really want to go back to it and push myself through the rest of it, not least because I've had enough spoilers to know that the series turns to bollocks at the very end. That, and it doesn't use Genesis's "Land of Confusion" at any point, therefore it's shit for cunts.

I also struggled to reconcile this feeling because I was worried that voicing my opinion would make it seem like I don't like it purely because it makes me think about uncomfortable truths in the real world. Granted there's some truth to that statement, really, but it's not purely because I don't want to face the truths of the real world, it's because I face the horrid truths of the real world every sodding day and don't want to be uncompromisingly reminded of how shit life is and how I should neck myself for six hours.

I really respect RTD's ability to make me feel and make me react to a series so viscerally but at the same time it's not for me.

Not as good as Love and Monsters, try harder!

[Jerzy Bondov]

I know what you mean. It does cheer up a bit towards the end but frankly I found the optimistic stuff significantly less believable than all the abject misery and degradation. Still loved it though as I'm a masochist.

[Icehaven]

YoY.

You mean YaY, which I admit is the most ridiculously inappropriate acronym ever.

[H-O-W-L]

You mean YaY, which I admit is the most ridiculously inappropriate acronym ever.

Aye, I think my mind gravitated away from it quite hard.

[neveragain]

Ahh fuck. I made it like halfway into Episode 2 and had to full-on tap out. The bloke getting decapitated by the drone broke me. I can deal with some right dark shite but this is just fucking much. Fuck, this must've been what watching Threads was like in '84.

That's a daft bit of slapstick. Hardly the most disturbing piece of the show.

[H-O-W-L]

That's a daft bit of slapstick. Hardly the most disturbing piece of the show.

I wanted to write it off as that but it, to me, represented the point where the show lost any legitimacy in regard to making a commentary or actually warning me about anything and had completely evaporated into the most horrid shit imagineable just for the sakes of shocking the viewer in an increasingly scaling level. If it weren't for the modern day critique I really think moments like that would've been rightfully skewered as cynical Brookerite dross. Just the most miserable shit RTD could think of. That and I have a real fucking nark on for writers who introduce legitimate human characters (such as that chummy-seeming MP, even if he was still a politician and therefore deserving of a shit pie in the nose) just to kill them in horrible ways to either take the piss of them or make a darkly comic point in a show that otherwise treats death and misery as serious business. (Moffat's Who was rather guilty of this and it's why I fucking hated the Capaldi era.)

I had similar issues with Children of Earth and Miracle Day. I'm plenty fine with dark shit (my avatar is from Fire Walk With Me, a beautifully oppressive movie) and I really can hack the brutality of the real world, but when it feels like the writer is having a right old misery-wank, gleefully giggling as he pens in a scene where a mother of six gets disembowelled by the new Amazon Baby Changing Station & Robot of Death just for a bit of what he feels is brevity inbetween scenes where the Einsatzgruppen gun down throngs of screaming toddlers, it feels like the writer is completely unaware of what he's handling and has no real control over himself or his material. I don't RTD really thought that people would take his work emotionally and scenes like that show a lack of consideration and care for the material, like I say, which makes me lose my ability to give it a chance or give a fuck about what he has to say.

If he can't keep his hands on the reins and avoid cheap shots like that then I've got no patience for it. It disturbed me but not because the material was disturbing, but because it felt like HE didn't understand how it could be disturbing. It's hard for me to put this into words, you know?  For what it's worth the nuclear leadup scene had me feeling disturbed but in a much more contextual way and it didn't elicit these feelings in me. In fact the fast, hot chaos of the nuke scene is what made me stick with the series into the second episode, and then RTD lost me in an instant.

I really love his darker episodes of Who and I think some of his episodes are underrated genius, and as a whole I rate any season of his era as better than any single season of Capaldi's by a country mile, I just think this series missed the mark for me. The present-day/predictive-future hook doesn't really grab me enough to make me look past what I feel like he also did wrong with CoE/MD, and that is the endless, biting cynical bollocks thrown at the screen in layers and layers.

Maybe I'll give it another shot, but I probably won't. I feel like the theming is far more at the viewer's expense than people have admitted/said so far, and that makes me uneasy whenever I watch the show.

[sevendaughters]

I thought the death of that MP was "taking the piss" out of the drones and the unthinking consequences of inviting them across the threshold in such a wholesale way. I don't think people were meant to, or did, laugh at that death.

[H-O-W-L]

I thought the death of that MP was "taking the piss" out of the drones and the unthinking consequences of inviting them across the threshold in such a wholesale way. I don't think people were meant to, or did, laugh at that death.

Aye, I took that as the intention, and I ultimately agree with the actual point, I just really didn't like how it came across. It wasn't the only moment that made me stop liking what I was watching, it was just the final straw for me after a significant re-buildup of "I Don't Like This Anymore!" content. But I'll stop blithering about something I don't like now.

[A Hat Like That]

rewatching through iPlayer, to cheer myself up. Our 2020 somehow feels worse than what was portrayed.