![]() No way – as she does in this episode – could a woman (who wasn’t, say, an unfeasibly brilliant MMA fighter) slug it out with a man and come out on top. But she’s as annoying and dated a cliché as was, say, the ‘you go, girl!’ Galadriel character in The Rings of Power. Co-writer/creator Eric Garcia has tried to make her more sympathetic by showing her in NA meetings battling her drug addiction. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022Īnd my least favourite episode, almost to the point where I wonder whether I can be bothered to go on watching, is the one focusing on feisty, driven FBI agent Nazan Abbasi (Niousha Noor). Giancarlo Esposito as Leo and Peter Mark Kendall as Stan in episode ‘Green’ of Kaleidoscope. Esposito (aka Gus from Breaking Bad) and Peter Mark Kendall, as his fresh-faced, white, middle-class cellmate Stan, are a likeable duo and you are rooting for them all the way. ![]() You can forgive its absurdities and implausibilities (sorry, but I don’t believe that magic mushrooms, in however strong a dose, work that instantaneously on everyone) because the characters and relationships are well drawn. My favourite of the episodes I’ve seen so far is ‘Green’ because instead of being in the heist genre (which I’ve always found somewhat tedious because it so often feels contrived and mechanical, unless, of course, it’s The Italian Job) it belongs to the much more satisfying ( Papillon, The Shawshank Redemption, Midnight Express, etc.) prison-escape genre. If you watch ‘Violet’ first, perhaps you have an advantage over those who see it third or fourth, but that’s about it. One episode (‘Violet’) is set 24 years before the heist, another ‘the morning after’, another ‘three weeks before the heist’, and so on. ![]() Each episode (colour-coded for amusement value: ‘Which do I feel like watching next? Blue or violet or red…?’) is necessarily discrete, so that it is like a mini-film in its own right, with the characters being subtly reintroduced as if we have never met them before. When everyone is exposed to the same beginning and ending, what happens in the middle doesn’t change muchīrighton rock bottom: How the Greens nearly destroyed the city I loveĪlso the artificiality of the format imposes certain awkward constraints on the rhythm of the plot. Sure, you might learn earlier or later than other viewers precisely what tragic event it is that motivates our hero/anti-hero Leo Pap (Giancarlo Esposito) to want to break into the impregnable security system overseen by his friend-turned-bitter enemy Roger Salas (Rufus Sewell), but it makes no difference to the outcome and little to the viewer’s perspective. The problem with The Unfortunates, as with Kaleidoscope, is that when everyone is exposed to the same beginning and ending (these are non-negotiable) what happens in the middle doesn’t actually change much. But I’m still not sure his experiment amounts to much more than a cute gimmick. ![]() He deserves to be far better known and it would be lovely if his final words to his agent the day before, aged 40, he slit his wrists – ‘I shall be much more famous after I’m dead’ – were to come true. Johnson and highly recommend his book, not just for the meandering charm of his writing but for the tactile pleasure and amusement value of his literary jeu d’esprit. A few years ago, I bought a rare first edition from Simon Finch which I thought would become very valuable but hasn’t because price is subject to demand and frankly there isn’t much demand for experimental 1960s novelists of whom hardly anyone has heard. Johnson got there 54 years earlier with his 1969 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates, an account of a football match in which the chapters were loose bound so that they could be shuffled and read in whatever order you wished. If I sound mildly sceptical, it’s because the novelty isn’t actually that novel. Kaleidoscope is a fairly routine eight-part heist drama with a supposed novelty spin: apart from the beginning and the end, you can view the episodes in any order, meaning that each viewer has a slightly different experience. ![]()
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