The Watch

I originally wrote a review of each week's episode as they came out and posted them on my Facebook. If you already read them there, there'll be nothing new here. I have very slightly rewritten them to reformat them into a single review of the entire series, but have made no significant changes.

I'd heard that people were disappointed with this. Of course, they were always going to be. You can't make an adaptation without making people angry and disappointed. I'd heard that they changed just about everything. I generally don't think of that as a problem, really. Slapping a well-known name on what is basically an original creation to get a publicity boost is no worse than any other marketing tactic. It could have been good on its own merits.

They changed things, all right. Decisions were made. And I don't understand any of them. This is a truly bizarre TV show. There are things lifted from all over the books but without any apparent rhyme or reason. The plot seems to be every City Watch book scrambled together, but set in an ambiguous time where all the steampunk elements already exist but the social elements are taken from the very earliest stories. They're not adapting one of the City Watch books, they're adapting them all simultaneously. But darker. Oh, and it isn't funny. Not intentionally, anyway. At least, I don't think it's intentional? I mean, I laughed when the slim, brown-haired Adam Hugill's character said that he was called "Carrot" not for his hair but for his body shape, a line that was clearly supposed to be read by a red-haired body-builder but just wasn't. But was I supposed to laugh at that? No one watching this show without having read the books first would have a clue what he was talking about.

And that's not an isolated case. Things from the books are included but altered in ways that make no sense and must be completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated. In one scene, Vimes opens up a security camera, which contains an imp, painting. But when Vimes takes the imp's tablet, it turns out to be (for all intents and purposes) an electronic tablet. It plays video! The imp is clearly there because that's how cameras work in the books, but that's clearly not how they work in the show. And the whole show is like this. It's like two TV shows were involved in a horrible teleporter accident and became fused, the elements of one merged with those of the other. There's no seam, no place where they're joined, but you can tell that this thing that came out the other end is neither one thing nor the other.

It's like a glimpse into the workings of an alien mind and I want to understand it.

Episode three introduces Sybil's tragic backstory. Turns out she hates legalised crime because her parents were (legally) assassinated. Seems like she could just hate those things on principle, but this way the writers could have her run into the assassin who killed her parents. Of course, that's also completely unnecessary. But how else could she have had the mask she uses to sneak into the assassins guild? Bought or made one because each assassin wears a unique, customised mask and so there was no reason to have an official assassins guild mask? Or just walked in without one because some assassins don't wear them anyway? Well, sure. You could also point out the fact that the mask didn't even stop her from being instantly recognised as an intruder, but then you might as well also mention that her role in the plan ended up being completely unnecessary.

I said earlier that I didn't think it was supposed to be funny, and that's certainly true of some of it, but it's such a mess of a show that some parts actually are trying for a comedic tone. But the jokes are just as badly-written and out of place as everything else. It's almost like there were multiple writers playing some version of Exquisite Corpse and then someone had to come along at the end and fit the pieces together. It reminds me of the 1967 version of Casino Royale.

And none of it is as hamfisted and out of place as the romantic subplots, which we seem to be expected to accept merely because those pairings exist in the books. Except for Cheery and... the librarian? But despite having only met within the last few days, our two canonical couples are apparently already in love - even if they don't know it or won't acknowledge it yet.

Oh, and the bad guys seem to be the Auditors, who hate the City Watch specifically, because they'll give people something to believe in? I think? And they (the Auditors) love science, which is opposite to magic, but the Watch is trying to stop the magic sword from being used to summon a dragon? I'd like to say that their motives make more sense as the season progresses, but they definitely don't.

There is no possible way that this is the show that anyone wanted to make. A Discworld show about the City Watch, sure. But not this show. No one set out to create this. It's gone beyond "it makes no sense that this show exists" all the way to "this show makes no sense on any level". It's not just the utter incoherence of the world-building; it's not just that the scripts were obviously massively edited for time; it's not just the book references scattered in at random; this show is completely off the rails. Things just happen. Not because the characters are acting in accordance with their motivations, obviously. Not even because the writers have a particular goal in mind and certain things are necessary in order to get there. No. There's no rhyme or reason to it at all.

Cheery's backstory is even weirder and dumber than it seems to begin with. And it starts out seeming really weird and dumb. For a start, she's human-sized. Second, she has no beard. Both those facts are glossed over to begin with, but one of them is secretly very important. It's the beard. Apparently there's a monster in the "dwarf" mines (which are under Ankh-Morpork and under the jurisdiction of the patrician) that won't get you as long as you conform. Specifically, conform by having a beard. You don't have to conform in any other way, just have a beard and you're fine. And because of this, these "dwarfs'' (who are all human-sized, not "all sizes" as claimed in episode one) don't acknowledge the existence of women or children. Everyone is a man (with a beard). It's not like the books where dwarf women grow beards the same as dwarf men, these "dwarf" women (and children) have to wear fake beards.

And Cheery's mother (who apparently disappeared) got got by the monster because she stopped wearing her beard. Except it turns out that the monster isn't a monster and when Cheery gets got by it she comes right back and now she has magic powers. So I guess that means her mother just chose to abandon her?

Once again, this whole thing seems like at least two entirely different concepts awkwardly mashed together with some bits from the books bolted on top and consequently none of it makes any sense. I don't think it even manages to be offensive because it's actually impossible to work out what it even means. You can't map it onto any real-world issue because it's completely incoherent. It's like Time Cube.

Episode seven mostly makes sense. It's still not good. The bit with Death is a complete waste of time (and a bad joke that goes on way too long) and the bit with Detritus was completely unnecessary (why kill him off and then bring him back later to do nothing? What's the point?), but aside from that the plot actually made sense and the characters had actual goals and motivations that they acted on. I think a large part of this episode might actually be a surviving fragment of someone's original version of this show, before it got rewritten and edited and shuffled into an unrecognisable mess. I'm not saying it would have been good, but it could have been competent. There's sufficient evidence here, I think, to say that there was a script for this show that was written by a professional writer who knew what they were doing. And then some very bad things happened to it.

But, true to form, the ending made no sense. Although the final episode was more coherent than most, it was not at all consistent with the previous episode. And it ends with a sequel hook, which is some extremely wishful thinking. Having seen the whole series, I'm convinced that there were at least three basically complete scripts and what we got was somehow a mixture of all of them. Episode seven may have been about 90% true to one version, and the finale probably about 75% true to another. The first was largely played straight, with most of the humour in the dialogue. The second was pure farce. The two clash horrendously because you never know what you're supposed to take seriously or when to expect a joke solution to a real problem. I think there was probably a third version that had the weirdness of the second but as sci-fi/fantasy rather than comedy, à la Farscape. I don't think much of that third version survived intact, but there's bits of it spread throughout. I base this one the fact that there are two distinct types of weirdness going on; type one is stuff that seems like jokes, like the comic relief goblins or the talking sword. Type two is stuff that seems like fantasy worldbuilding, like the "magepunk" technology, which was strangely prominent considering that it was never relevant. Hopefully at some point we'll get to hear from behind the scenes about how this bizarrely terrible show got made and see if I'm right.