Brendan O’Regan
‘Absorbing’ documentaries and welcome returns makes this week’s viewing ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘fascinating’, writes Brendan O’Regan
With great hype and anticipation The X-Files returned to RTÉ 2 last Tuesday and Wednesday night after a 14-year gap, and as a long-time fan I wasn’t disappointed. The series featured many religious themes and plot lines over its nine-year run and you’ll find my take on it on the articles page of faitharts.ie.
The same creative team is reunited, especially creator Chris Carter and the main actors, and even the opening credit sequence is the same.
The main plot line so far focuses on the alien story arc, with lots of messing about with alien DNA. The conspiracy paranoia is stronger than ever giving Mulder (David Duchovny) great big wads of turgid dialogue.
The style remained so true to the original that they seem to have felt the need to keep reminding us it’s 2016, in case we thought these were leftover episodes from the old days. And so we get references to Edward Snowden, Obama Care, greater cultural acceptance of gay relationships and Scully making a knowing comment about finding information in pre-Google days.
There isn’t much to celebrate on the religious front so far. Scully (Gillian Anderson), who comes from a Catholic background and still wears her cross, is working in what seems to be a Catholic hospital where she discovers what seems to be a nasty experimentation programme run by a dodgy doctor renowned for his work to help the unborn.
There’s a nun who seems a throwback to bygone days – she supposedly looks after single mothers with problematic pregnancies, has a poor opinion of men and their lies and calls desire “the devil’s pitchfork”.
It’s all a bit ropey, and some of the violence is more graphic than I remember from the earlier series, but I’m enjoying the nostalgia.
There’s still a considerable chemistry between Mulder and Scully, and though it was platonic over the years, there seems to have been some biology as well because late in the original series it seems they had a son together, and his fate is a central mystery this time around.
If there was hype around the return of The X-Files, it’s nothing to what I’ve been hearing about Making a Murderer, an original Netflix documentary.
It’s surprising to hear of a documentary creating such a stir so I thought I’d check it out, and after two episodes I’m hooked.
It’s the fascinating story of Steven Avery who served 18 years in prison for rape only to be exonerated (in 2003) by DNA evidence. But the story doesn’t end there. There follows a civil suit against those who did the original investigation, but then another startling development when Avery is arrested in connection with a 2005 murder in his area. Déjà vu with a punch.
Sometimes, you forget that you’re actually watching a documentary as the characters are so absorbing in this real-life drama. Most of the narrative is made up of interviews, news footage from the time and absorbing deposition hearings connected to the civil suit. There’s even extracts from the police interrogation of Avery in the murder case.
All in all it’s a thought-provoking insight into the justice system in general and the American system in particular.
The central character, Avery, garners our sympathy because of the injustice done to him, and his forgiveness of the genuinely sorry rape victim who wrongly identified him is touching, but he has some unlikeable traits as well, such as his involvement in petty crime in his early days. Challenging and gripping stuff.
Back home Last Friday night’s Leap of Faith (RTÉ Radio 1) with Michael Comyn looked at the Brigid of Faughart Festival in anticipation of the saint’s feast day this week, and I’m afraid it was all a bit too New Age for me.
Dolores Whelan spoke of Brigid being saint and goddess, Christian and pre-Christian, even pre-Celtic and a “wise woman of the 21st Century”. According to Whelan, Brigid embodies qualities of the feminine, not as in male or female, man or woman, but aspects of reality that we might say is feminine, in fact the ‘divine feminine’. Digest that!
I did like her contention that science and spirituality are not at odds, and that science is finding what the mystics always knew about interconnectedness.
She admired Brigid for doing the will of God unconditionally and her idea that “life is simple until we complicate it” – worth thinking about.
Pick of the Week
Dúiche
TG 4, Sunday, February 7, 7.30pm
Síle Nic Chonaonaigh visits Glenstal Abbey in Co. Limerick to understand the life and the role of Benedictine monks in 21st-Century Ireland.
THREE WISE WOMEN
EWTN, Monday, February 8, 11am and Wednesday, 8pm
The ‘Three Wise Women’ discuss some of their favourite classic and contemporary movies.
Logainm
TG4, Tuesday, February 9, 8pm
Exploring place names influenced by holy wells.