Review of Peaky Blinders season 5 and Ghost In The Shell: SAC_2045

I can’t call this review a catch up because I actually did watch something new. But first things first.

Peaky Blinders Season 5

Peaky Blinders continues the freight-train-esque inertia of the previous seasons. All of the good stuff we’ve gotten used to is there. The writing is taught, tight and sharp. The production value is BBC industry benchmark quality, the acting is industry benchmark quality and so is everything else.

What amazes me is that the show stays fresh. I typically burn out on a show after two or three seasons no matter how good it is. I’ve simply had my fill. This tends to be even more true when I discover a show several seasons in and I get to binge my way up to the current episodes. But that just didn’t happen here. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The BBC short series format of only six episodes per season may very well be what prevents burnout from happening. It certainly has a lot to do with keeping the quality high and the pacing perfect. It’s a lot easier to plot out six episodes than it is to plot out twenty and the creative juices aren’t spread nearly as thinly.

The new villain for season five is a historical one. Oswald Mosely was a real British politician who formed the British Union of Fascists in the years before World War II. Built on right wing nationalism and anti-Semitism (sound familiar?) Mosely unapologetically argued for a ‘Brittan first’ policy that managed to gain some significant traction, at least until a much better-known fascist named Hitler rose to power in Germany and Mosely’s political party was banned in England. In Season 5, Tommy Shelby’s personal mission is to infiltrate Mosely’s emerging fascist organization and undermine it from within, while trying to fend off a violent takeover from a group of Scottish gangsters and a potential coup from within his own family.

So he’s busy this year. But once again the plot never, ever drags. Every scene is multilayered even as it focuses on a specific issue or character and drives the story forward. This is how dramatic television should be done, folks. This. Is. Correct.

Peaky Blinders has earned its rightful place alongside the all time greats such as Deadwood, Rome, The Boys, Carnival Row, The Wire, True Detective, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, The Americans, OZ, Mad Men and The Sopranos.

Every so often someone just cranks one out of the park, and this is one of them.

I was pleasantly shocked to experience this twice in the same month when I watched

Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045

Anime fans are impossible to please. Give them something amazing and no matter how well you follow it up they’re going to scream in your face about how you ‘betrayed the spirit of the show’ or ‘undermined the point of the series’ or…took away whatever fan entitlement they most treasured.

Ghost in the Shell is a franchise that goes back a long way. The original film was from 1995 and it was groundbreaking. It is on the short list of Anime that you can shove in the face of an anime hater to definitively shut them up and prove unambiguously that yes, this is a real and valid form of art. It won awards. It made tons of money. It generated an immensely loyal following.

It also generated a spinoff TV series called, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

In Japanese media it is common for a comic book to be the source material, but for the show to take those same characters and follow a different plot. This is what happened here. The exact same characters in the (almost) exact same world with (most) of the same voice actors, but a different plot.

And unlike most anime, Ghost in the Shell: SAC got a second season, and then a stand-alone movie to cap things off. Then it went dormant for a long time until Netflix happened. There was a live action movie that (somehow) featured a white woman playing the role of a Japanese special force’s commando…but the less said about that film the better. It wasn’t awful, but it was a tad embarrassing. Let’s just move on. Let it be understood that everything good that I have to say about Ghost In the Shell excludes the bad live action movie.

There were a series of stand alone (I’m not punning here, honestly, that’s just what they were) animated short films that I haven’t seen, before a new series was announced. And when the new season trailer came out there was an immediate and hellish backlash against the animation style.

I should know because I was one of the leading members of the angry mob. It just looked…bad. Like really cheap CGI rather than the high-quality hand drawn anime the series fans had been watching for years. I had no problem with a CGI series, but could it please look nice? And did they have to significantly alter the physical appearance of the main character?

I freely admit at this point that I was exhibiting fan entitlement. I also freely admit that I sat down to watch the first episode (which somehow dropped on Netflix without me even realizing that it was due to be released soon), expecting to hate it. I wanted to hate it.

Twenty-five minutes later I still didn’t like the animation style but…damn it…I was back home. For the first time in 16 years I was back in that world that immersed me so much and set such a high bar that it basically ruined all other animated TV and movies for me.

The story was so good right from the beginning that the animation style, which I still don’t love, quickly stopped being a problem for me. As the episodes went on I got more used to it. And I still didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it anymore either. It’s…very different. But the characters are still recognizably themselves. And, very importantly, they got all the same voice actors. I binged the entire thing in just two sittings.

The Matrix sequels were awful pseudo-philosophical action shoot-em-ups; a great example of how to not blend philosophy and action. Ghost in the Shell is how to do it right. It takes a complex idea and explores it in depth while making that exploration a journey of discovery for the main characters. They grow and change while confronting the challenges presented to them by the story arc.

Like every season of Ghost in the Shell, this season (and presumably the next one) exists to examine a philosophical concept.

The first season introduced and examined the concept of the series namesake: the so called, Stand Alone Complex. The idea is somewhat complicated, but it boils down to this: multiple unconnected, leaderless individuals, inspired by a single external event, begin to act in a way that outwardly appears to be coordinated. The first season also dealt with government corruption, racism, anti-technology bias and a host of other issues. But it was all built around the core concept of the Stand Alone Complex.

The second season continued with the idea of a Stand Alone Complex and explored the notion of what might happen if someone attempted to weaponize it. This season dove deeply into ideas about machine life, xenophobia, the meaning of death, post-traumatic stress disorder, nationalism and grief.

The theme of the third season (I checked, this is a continuation and not a reboot) seems to be resistance to change and our reaction to becoming obsolete or outmoded. Which works on several levels because if you read the online reviews, fans of the old series are dumping all over this new one for being ‘unfaithful to the original’ and ‘not looking very good’ (subjective judgement, but I agree) and being an ‘action-heavy sequel to a once thoughtful anime’. I draw the line at this last objection because there is an entire episode devoted to expositional backstory on the series antagonist. Make no mistake; there is a lot of action. But it’s used to highlight the antagonist’s overwhelming power, so it has good motivation.

A newcomer to the series would be fine starting here but would be better served tracking down a place where you can stream the first two seasons. It’ll take a while to watch them, but you’ll be extremely glad that you did. And by that point we might at least know when the next season is due to drop on Netflix. At which point I will sit down and devour it in one sitting.

But even then, I still won’t like the animation style.