tonnaree wrote:

SusiGo wrote:

have a question about the scene in the hotel room when Patrick tries to kill himself. He cannot open the window, not even when he smashes the urn against the pane. When he wakes up in the morning, the window is wide open. Is this to be understood symbolically (him choosing life although he could end it)? Because we never see him manage to open the window.

 
I thought about that a lot. One idea I had was that he only imagined he couldn't open the window. That there was one little piece of his soul left that didn't want to die and held him back.

That moment when he was standing at the open window actually irritated me a lot, because I'm sorry to say, but all I could think was 'Why the hell is that window open now???'. So if it was meant to be understood symbolically, they didn't really manage to show it this way - to me the way it is filmed absolutely looks as if to be taken for real.
That aside, I think that whole sequence in the hotel room was the strongest one in the whole episode (apart maybe from the scene in that restaurant when he was quoting "We've taken Aqaba!" from "Lawrence of Arabia"... hilarious!). "What's the point of a fucking window if you can't jump out of it?" is probably the best line of the episode.

I have to say though: I don't know the books, so I don't really know where the story is going. There have been tiny hints as to where Patrick is coming from and what might have happened to him in the past, so it'll be interesting to see whether I understood those hints right or not. But apart from those hints I don't think it's a show I would binge-watch even if I could... there wasn't much of a story in this first episode, and although I expect this to change I can't say that I'm really keen to keep on watching.
Patrick (and certainly Benedict's performance) had me laughing out loud one moment and rolling my eyes the next. I'm sure for Benedict this is the role of a lifetime, but seeing Patrick being high and drunk and not much else for one whole episode didn't quite convince me. I'm sure this is meant to show us that he's having severe problems (which probably still is an understatement), but for me as a viewer I would have hoped for a bit more subtlety and just more of a... story.

 

besleybean wrote:

Oh wow...isn't it funny how we see things differently?

I suppose the biggest difference is that some have read the books and others haven't. I am convinced that if you know the source material you automatically see the show in a different light, simply because you already know far more about the character than someone who doesn't know the books. However a tv show has to work as a tv show (as we all know from "Sherlock"), and I have to say that this first episode very much felt like the 'Benedict Cumberbatch Show' to me. Which isn't a bad thing, it's just that in my opinion this didn't carry a whole hour.
But it's all fine. Like I said, I'm sure there's more to come storywise, and I'll certainly watch all of it eventually. It just didn't blow me away.

DVD to be released in July.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07D43DT4J

Yippee!  Thank you for the news.

I just watched the second episode. It is very different from the first one and very good in its own right. Not so loud and shrill (in a good sense) but heartbreaking in its own way. The actors are all excellent, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hugo Weaving. With those parents you can only feck up your life. Hats off to the boy playing young Patrick. 

And having read the books I can ensure you, Vhanja, that this is not a conventional rehab story. Not at all. Every book has a very different tone so we can expect five very different episodes. 
 

Well I hve pre-ordered the DVD, but thanks to a girl on one of my FB groups, I was able to watch E2 illegally this evening.
As I am so hopeless, I have no idea who HW or any of these people are.
But yes, the kid is great.
Very sad episode.
And makes abundantly clear, the clues I picked up from E1: abusive childhood produces a damaged adult.

Yes I have...told you, I'm crap on actors!

Oh yes, is he like Lee Pace's Dad or something?!
I do get all these people mixed up...
Mind you, it's many years since the last LOTR film: pre-Sherlock wasn't it?
And remember, life hadn't begun then!
Or was he in Hobbit, too?

LIke I said, LOTR is ancient history.
I'm a Smaug girl!

My family and I watched the first episode last night. The second episode was also available, but we agreed it was too intense to watch two episodes in one night!
I'm intrigued where it will go, since the first episode is Patrick repeatedly going off the rails, while still making us laugh at some of the things he said and the situations. I can't see clearly where the story will go from here.

As we are talking about the hotel window opening, we thought that moment was odd, too. My dad thought that he was dreaming when the window was open in the morning, since it couldn't open before. For reasons that it's dangerous, I thought hotel windows couldn't open like that if the room was that high up, anyway. Perhaps that is one of the flaws of that particular episode.
Another little moment that I didn't understand was when the gecko (or what ever type of lizard it was) crawled along the wall when Patrick was looking at his father's corpse. I thought it might have been something he was imagining, but I couldn't figure out why he seemed to have such an intense reaction after seeing it.
(My Sherlock brain also was reminded a little bit of The Final Problem when he started hitting the casket, in spite of myself!)

My dad knew who Hugo Weaving was, but my mum didn't and I could only recall seeing his name before but could not remember the context. I recognize some of the things he's been in on his IMDB page, but there's not a lot there that I've seen.