The Watch: Better to Light a Candle
February 17, 2021 10:17 PM - Season 1, Episode 8 - Subscribe
Carcer has everything he needs to destroy the city. Can the Watch save it?
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I had actually bounced off of a couple of the early ones without knowing they were Discworld novels. It wasn't until 'Thief of Time' (#26, 2001) - which I bought during a habitual visit to The Book Warehouse because of it's brightly coloured dust jacket and I heard about "Pratchett."
Bounced off of it. Was living at my parent's. Kid sister borrowed it to dress up her decorative bookshelf.
I was in grad school for a masters and was broke, so got around to reading it - and got hooked.
Started from the beginning book and was appalled at the racism and generally shitty writing.
But... so my thinking went... it reached the heights of 'Thief of Time' (and it does even sometimes obliterated it), so I went through them chronologically.
Pratchett as a writer matured and evolved through the series. His kindness makes me really sympathetic to him and felt like I was growing up with him, through his stories. I'll never re-read his earlier works, though.
I think that the fatal mistake of this series was to take The Watch stories as a whole and conclusion and mash the timelines up.
It completely missed the point that these characters and institutions are seriously flawed, and evolved gradually over time - given a kind (but authoritarian...[!]) hand up - to be better.
The Caracer story required too much back story and character- and societal- growth background than could be told in this format. What I saw was a mashup from a committee who all got bits of their pet idea in, and they were all equally cut down by an editorial committee who have no investment in the inspirational material.
Standing outside of cannon, this was a really confusing show. I really dug the aesthetics (Brit crustpunk), but it felt like yet another bad Alice in Wonderland adaptation or something.
Those animated adaptations - very 70's vibe for me, decades-behind-the-times animation, but animation was on an astronomical boom at the time.
The live action Sky adaptations had modest budgets but did individual stories reasonably well.
I am very impressed with Troll Bridge.
posted by porpoise at 1:02 AM on February 18, 2021 [3 favorites]