The Blue Screen Of Death
What Happened Next?
Sat down to watch Reichenbach Falls this evening, a recent BBC4 play about a detective and an author. Got to about 2 minutes from the end and we saw the above. The gut-wrenching realisation that the EPG and the broadcast have gone out of synch on the Sky box and you’ve missed the end, is not a nice feeling. I also seem to have missed the repeats. If anyone knows what happened just after the “One Year Later” subtitle, do let me know?Up until that point everything had been going well, if a little slowly at first. Richard Willson and John Sessions in cameos were as excellent as you’d expect and the two leads played by Alec Newman and Nina Sosanya were suitably taciturn and wonderful respectively. The director certainly made the most of the location too. However, it was the intricate weaving of the plot and the surprising twists that kept us enthralled until (almost!) the end. Ingenious, thought provoking and a shame to be tucked away on a smaller channel.
Tags: Alec-Newman, BBC4, Ian-Rankin, John-Sessions, Modern Drama, Nina-Sosanya, Reichenbach-Falls, Richard-Willson, Sherlock-Holmes
March 7th, 2007 at 10:49 am
I’m sure it’ll be repeated soon. Still, if you really want to know, read on…
A year on, and Jack Harvey is sitting at his word processor, creating the next Buchan novel. As a watching Conan Doyle notes, Buchan’s death was a carefully orchestrated plan to bump up interest in the series — Harvey’s Hollywood agent is busy negotiating a multi-million pound contract.
Scenes into Buchan’s fictional world see the detective re-emerge in Edinburgh, with no explanation as to how he (or the Monkey) survived — just as Conan Doyle never really explained how Holmes could possibly have survived the Reichenbach Falls.
That’s a really poor description of the ending — but I’m sure that the whole thing will be repeated on BBC4 at some point, and will make its way onto BBC2 shortly after.
March 7th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
Thanks Scott…. you’ve no idea how appreciated that is!!