Brain Dump: Killing Eve, Gentleman Jack, and Call the Midwife

Just a few bits and pieces about Killing Eve, both the Gentleman Jack TV series and tie in book, and Call the Midwife.

Killing Eve

With only one episode left in Killing Eve, a big question remains about Eve’s (Sandra Oh) sexual attraction to Villanelle (Jodie Comer). Is she going to act on it or will it be a cliffhanger at the end of season 2?

Twice now Eve’s boinked the nearest man – once her husband Niko (Owen McDonnell) and once her young MI6 co-worker Hugo (Edward Bluemel) – when she was actually sexually excited by Villanelle.

How long can she keep pretending she is “doing this for work” where her obsession with Villanelle is concerned? Especially when Villanelle left her gift-wrapped package in the storage locker with poor Niko?

Gentleman Jack

I read the companion book for the TV series Gentleman Jack: Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister (Movie Tie-In). (Full disclosure, that’s an affiliate link.)

We aren’t completely through with season 1 of Gentleman Jack so I read about a few things we haven’t seen yet in the series. The book reveals all sorts of things about Anne Lister we don’t see in the TV series.

Reading the book also made me appreciate Sally Wainwright even more (as if that was actually possible). She took the essence of what was in the diaries, swapped things around a little, played with the timeline a bit, and created a whole world of people and things to enable Suranne Jones to live the life of Anne Lister.

The series is remarkably true yet compelling drama for episodic television. It’s the genius of Sally Wainwright that she can make that happen. The dialog, the fleshed out characters, the minor plots, the unrolling of events – it makes irresistible drama out of a woman’s meticulously, boringly, recorded life. As the saying goes, drama is real life with all the boring parts left out. That’s Sally Wainwright’s gift in Gentleman Jack.

Call the Midwife

In its 8th season, Call the Midwife remains relevant and interesting. Episode 8 of the series which aired in the US on PBS on May 19, 2019 concludes a multi-episode storyline about abortion.

The events in the episode take place in the 1960s, when abortion was illegal in England (and the US). Nurse Valerie (Jennifer Kirby) learned in the previous episode that her Grandmother (Ann Mitchell) performed illegal abortions under unsanitary conditions.

In conditions like this, the women sometimes died or became infected and lost the ability to have children in the future. With the abortion debate flames currently fanned by the far right in the US, being reminded of what it means for abortion to be illegal was important. Women have always needed abortions. Making them illegal doesn’t eradicate them, it merely makes them dangerous. It sends women to jail for something that should be safe and legal.