Today's Episode
We watched it. Every episode covers the latest installment(s) of a different TV show.
Today's Episode
Down Cemetery Road (S01E01-02)
Apple’s latest thriller starts with relatively small stakes: a house explosion with one survivor, a young girl named Dinah, catches the notice of an Oxford art conservator played by Ruth Wilson (The Affair, His Dark Materials). On her search for the child’s whereabouts and the suspicious circumstances around the blast, she enlists the help of a two-headed detective agency. That’s where the conspiracy takes hold, the bodies start adding up, and the other main character, Zoë, played by Emma Thompson, joins the fray. On this podcast, we review the first two episodes and discuss our thoughts, observations, and hopes for the rest of the series.
Tune in and enjoy. Welcome to Today’s Episode!
Welcome to today's episode, the podcast, where we discuss the most recent installments of a different series every show. It is November 3rd, the day that the Russians sent a dog into space. Do you know how they chose the dog? No. They had like three contestants, and this dog was not like some purebred dog that they worked from birth. It was actually a ranging, uh, a grungy mutt that they picked up off the street and then they trained. And part of the reason they did that was because they thought it would be used to the elements. Think about it. In Russia, it's got to be super cold, and then sometimes, I guess, muggy and hot. And they were just like, if there's anything, any species that can survive in space for a few days, it's gonna be a dog. And so that's why they shot up Leica. She was never meant to survive, and she did pass, I think, in the third day. They have a monument in uh Russia, but also in the US, in Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in New York. That's America's oldest pet cemetery. I I I wonder if there are like a lot of famous animals there. Well, what other ones? Bambi Airbud. Bambian Airbud. Every babe, you know, the pig, they just ship them out there every time.
SPEAKER_01:I remember when Leica was, I or remember learning that when Leica was shot up into space, that was the thing that put the Russians on top of the space race at the time.
SPEAKER_00:It kicked America into gear and they were like, we gotta send a human next. Um, yeah, and so we're talking about cemeteries today. Down Cemetery Road, which is based on a book by Mick Heron. It was his first novel in 2003. Correct me if I'm wrong about any of these facts because I only looked at them really quickly. Then this TV show was adapted by Morwina Banks. Should I know that name?
SPEAKER_01:Uh, not Morina Banks, but Mick Heron, do you know what his big series is? What is his big series? Uh Slow Horses. He is the author. It's spelled differently, though, right? Well, so that's the interesting thing because the series is Sloth House. Yeah, but the first few novels of which were adapted for the Slow Horses television series, hence the Slow Horses ad that played before this on our.
SPEAKER_00:Well, hence Apple being so big on this. Because for some reason, Slow Horses has just been incubating and getting bigger and bigger and bigger underneath everybody's eye. And at this point, it's like reached an all-level high of like people watching. I think it's on the top of its charts.
SPEAKER_01:It just finished season five. It's already been renewed for season six and season seven. And you watched the first season of Slow Horses, right? I did a long time ago. I wanted to see it just based off the first uh two episodes. If you agree with how Ruth Wilson talked about it, she plays Sarah Tucker in this series, described the show in relation to that. She said, McCarron creates these acerbic witty thrillers down Cemetery Road is funnier, more eccentric, more British in a way, and darker and more twisty.
SPEAKER_00:Um I would not say more twisty, but I would say it is even funnier. I don't know, man. That's a hard one to say. I like she's trying to sell it. I get that. But let's let's save our impressions until the end, right? Or at least deliver them throughout the plot. So down cemetery road, two episodes came out, two hours long, almost true, and a kind of grief. And I have sort of a like, you know, uh love-hate relationship with Apple TV shows at this point. Severance, Pachinko, Silo, the studio, the after party, they know how to put out bangers. Right. They have good TV. And then they also, and this tends to be the conspiracy thriller part of their like lineup, Prime Target, Surface, uh, the Changeling, Invasion. Um, yeah, to a certain extent, but like those ones are fundamentally flawed, in my opinion. And the formula is the same for each because you've got top-notch production value, you've got big screen talent, limited episodes. So they're definitely like trying to contain the quality over quantity, and yet it just doesn't always deliver. And so going into this, I didn't know whether or not it was or if it wasn't. Um, you do have a lot of familiar faces popping up here. I recognized Ruth Wilson from The Affair, as well as his dark materials. I kept waiting for her monkey to show up because she has a monkey in his dark materials in Oxford, and she's at Oxford here. So that was weird. Also, the one the woman in the wall and Luther. That's where she, yeah. Uh there's succession with Adam Godley. You've got Sweet Tooth uh alum, you've got Preacher Alum, Baby Reindeer guy, Misfits dude, Curtis from Misfits. And it's just all about this agency that's trying to cover up the existence of a little girl named Dinah. Um, let's jump into it. So, Ruth Wilson is Sarah Tucker. She is an art restoration specialist at the Oxford Museum. I wonder how she got that job. She used to be a student at Oxford, we learn, but she's really good. She has a good eye for picking out who did what. Like they try to bring in a painting and say it was done by some famous painter, and she's like, No, he never used cobalt blue. That must be his wife. Was it done in such like a uh Sherlock way or Sherlock and daughter where it's like close subs? They are trying to show you that she's smart. So I'll say that, but it's like she just squints at stuff and she'll figure it out. She's not particularly sociable, doesn't seem like she'd be a great friend to have. She speaks her mind. Um, and her life is so-so, she's got the stable job, a boyfriend who it doesn't seem that she like really likes that much by the end. I'm not really sure why they're together. And then she rides around on a bike. So she doesn't have a car. It's with that bike that on her way home, what would you say? Because you saw the first episode, you didn't see the second episode. I saw both. What would you say the inciting incident of this thriller is? The explosion. A lot of people would say the explosion. To me, I think it actually is when she almost hits this girl with the bike. Because if that never happened, she would not, for the rest of the two episodes, be obsessed with finding Dinah. Okay, so the girl is Dinah. That's what we're led to believe in the first episode. In the second episode, we find out that it's not. So she she nearly runs into this girl. The girl runs up, grabs a butterfly, they lock eyes, and there's this connection there. Not a romantic connection, but one where she's like, I bond with this girl. I know who she is. I used to be so imaginative. And then the mom comes and picks up the girl and they leave. Now that all happens in the course of like 30 seconds, and they're putting a lot on the pressure of the actors to deliver, to believe that there is that love there that is making this bond happen. Unspoken connection. Were they able to do so though? No, absolutely not. And not 30 seconds. That's what makes the rest of this so crazy because she she goes on a wild goose chase, trying to make sure that this girl is okay later on in the episode. And we have to wonder why. So she goes home, she's throwing a dinner party, she throws the lasagna from the freezer into the uh into the uh oven. The funny thing about this is that this is no like small dinner party. Her boyfriend is trying to impress his boss slash person that he's about to go into business with, Gerard Incheon, who's a billionaire, and his wife Paula, they're gonna be stopping by. You'd think that they would have like prepared a little bit more than a frozen lasagna. Also, their neighbors are gonna be there. Their neighbors are bohemians. Uh, so one of them is named Wigwiam, and the other is Rufus, and they have like four kids. And yeah, in the dinner party, while things are very awkward because, like I said, Ruth Wilson's character, Sarah, likes to speak her mind. She's not getting along with uh highly elite uh billionaire douchebag uh Gerard.
SPEAKER_01:Tom Goodman Hill. He was nominated for an outstanding supporting actor at the primetime Emmys for his role in Baby Reindeer. And it's funny because he kind of started out, you know, he was the good character in humans.
SPEAKER_00:He was the dad and he was like kind of a cheesy funny dude. And then by Baby Reindeer, he had Don Heal and he was the bad guy. And now he's he will be, yeah, he will be playing evil for a while. He he turns out by the end of the first episode that he's just a douchebag, that he's not actually evil, evil. But yeah, you have this explosion that happens, it rocks the whole party, the glass breaks, and everybody finds out that because they go running outside, that there was a uh that it was actually the next door neighbor or one of the neighbors down the street. And it was said to be a gas explosion, killed everybody in the house, including this kid's mom. And the kid, though, survived. Uh, she was, I guess, protected by a bookcase or something that fell down on top of her, a cabinet that like trapped her underneath during the heat of the explosion.
SPEAKER_01:It was reminiscent to me of episode five of Daredevil, where an explosion happens in New York, and you see Foggy and Karen, they're sitting at a table and glass flies everywhere at slow-mo and they go toppling to the floor.
SPEAKER_00:They use slow-mo there, they use slow-mo at the end of the episode. Yeah, they're not afraid of it. Um, so uh the police are there, everybody's got their phones out, and in fact, Sarah tells her boyfriend to put it away. Um, you see this like suspicious, shady character in the side, and they take the mom's body and they stick it in like the like wherever the dead bodies go, uh, the morgue, and uh and then everybody kind of disperses. But before then, it occurs to Sarah that she probably knew the kid. The kid was probably the same one who she ran into earlier and she felt really bad about that. The next day, Wigwam, the neighbor, comes up and she's like, I got this letter from my kid who wants to give it to uh Dinah, the in the hospital. And uh at that point, Sarah's like, Let me do it. I really want to go and see this child who I barely met, but I'll I'll take the note. Please let me do that. The funny thing about the note is it it literally just says, sorry your mom did. In other words, sorry your mom died. Yeah. But that seems like a really bleak thing to give a kid, like right after they're especially because they're in the hospital and they're trying to be smoke inhalation that they're dealing with. Yeah. So with absolutely no credentials and no connection to the family, and absolutely no legitimate reason to be able to see this child, she marches into the hospital and she confronts a nurse, and the nurse says, Let me check on this. And she cut gets her, like I don't know if it was a doctor or another nurse, probably a higher-level nurse to come out and say, We cannot confirm whether or not this kid is here. And that's a child safety thing. I completely understand where they're coming from. But at this point, Sarah goes complete Karen. She has a connection with this child and she says, I need to see her. I need to be the one to give her this note. Who knows why? Rather than just dropping it off there. It made no sense. And they almost call security on her. And I completely am in the hospital's camp.
SPEAKER_01:I don't mean to like influence your opinion, but it was just the craziest scene to actually watch because you're supposed to be on Sarah's side. I know we talked about the 30-second, like unspoken connection, but what is fueling this fixation with Dinah do you think it's like guilt, fear, something like that?
SPEAKER_00:She just says it later on, right, when she hires the uh detective agency to find out about this girl. Uh he's like, so what's really motivating you? And she's like, I see her in me. In the second episode, we get a little bit more understanding, but not too much. With how the hospital reacted, what is fueling Sarah's skepticism? Like just she just didn't like that. They wouldn't even confirm. The guy comes out and he's like, We cannot tell you whether or not she's even here. And she says, Who the hell are you? The person doing his job. He has a white lab coat on. He's obviously like a doctor. I don't think he had a white lab. I think it was like a nurse's uniform. It was Scrubs. He had Scrubs and a name tag on. But she's walking out of the hospital and she's upset. And Gerard is there, the guy with the billionaire. And that's weird. And so she immediately goes up, or she tries to avoid him at first. But then when they're confronted, uh, he tells her that he knows the board of the hospital. And she's like, Hey, could you pull some strengths and find out whether or not this girl's okay? And he's like, All right. Um, which is, I mean, lucky for her, I guess. Also, it seems like a complete 180 from what he was like earlier. He didn't do it uh like without like he didn't even know who she was talking about at first, though, even though the explosion was the day beforehand. He had no idea what was going on, he was up in his own head. Um, again, that makes a little bit more sense later. She goes home, and I think that's where she gets the one bit of evidence which actually makes sense why she would follow up on it, which is the fact that she notices the paper's picture is photoshopped, and it's the same one of the police taking out Dinah's uh body to like go to the hospital, and that they'd just taken the kid out of the picture. And it's weird. Like, why would they choose that image out of all of them? So she goes to the police uh and she's she asks uh once again, with all the entitlement in the world, to know about the act of investigation and is surprised when they say, no, this thing has been flagged, it's restricted, you're not allowed to know. Now, I don't know how investigations entirely go in Britain, but I do know, or in the UK, but like I do know that they don't just open it up to the public completely. You cannot just walk in, especially if you are somewhat in the vicinity of the location of what when it what happened, to finding out where the police are thinking about this.
SPEAKER_01:That's usually why they have the barricades up, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Right. I I that's more the location of the actual crime scene. I'm talking about where she went directly to the police station and she's like, let me see the file. No, give me access to the file. And they say, No, we can't do that. And she was surprised, she's shocked. So she goes from there. She does tell them about the Photoshop, they don't seem to care. Uh, she goes to the detective agency, and that's where we get the Odyssey of Joe Silverman, played by Adam Godley. And then we also meet at that time his wife slash ex-wife, because they have a fraudulent relationship or a weird relationship going on. Zoe. Zoe spelled like Zoe Kravitz, that's her name.
SPEAKER_01:And that's what the series is, because there's been four books uh written about them, Zoe Bomb series.
SPEAKER_00:And she's like butcher cosplay, you know, from the boys, she always has the trench coat on, she's got the cut uh hair like he does, and she's like rough around the edges. It's a two-headed private detective business. She's the bad cop, he's the good cop. And you could not have made a character more scripted to die than Adam Godfrey is in this episode. And that was infuriating to watch because the second he was introduced, and the second you've seen the cover of Down Cemetery Road, you know this guy does not have a short lifespan. You know that they're going to use him as the motivating factor for Zoe to jump into the investigation. And so every scene that he gets, they make him so sad and so like he has the heart of gold. He's down on his luck. He'll take no every case, big or small. He'll find your cat for you. The guy just wants to do good. And then he follows up on his first lead, and what a surprise by the end of the episode, he's dead.
SPEAKER_01:He's yeah, he's supposed to be kind of like the the nicest character, you know, the the the friendliest character.
SPEAKER_00:It was just upsetting because I enjoyed his scenes. I he was funny. You were talking about comedy, and and that's definitely where he comes from. But then I couldn't enjoy it because, like, unless the show had pulled, subverted my expectations, and at the end he had turned up to be alive and he was going to help them with the case. There was no way I was going to be okay with this because the way that Zoe treated him was so mean that it was clear that she was going to be using that guilt for later on. It was like they were just stacking it up for her.
SPEAKER_01:Well, he's also supposed to be the one that's figuring out the most, right? And it seems like a cop-out whenever someone is figuring out almost like everything about the mystery.
SPEAKER_00:His lead is he goes, he believes her, he goes to meet the nurse, and he finds out that not only is this girl there, but she's also being checked out that night. So a little backstory, though, is that Gerard did contact Sarah and say, Hey, I talked to the board, and the board told me that she's safe and that she's gonna be there a few days, and then social services or whoever is gonna take her and she's gonna be fine. And then so she thinks Gerard lies when she's contacted by uh uh Joe and told that he has milked this information out that says that she's actually leaving tonight. Now, what we know as the audience, because we keep on getting flashes to it, is that there are several agencies involved here. There's the top Tibby Top agencies, agency that we don't see. Then there's this guy named I think C, and then he is in control of this other guy whose name is like Malik, and then that guy is control of two agents named like Amos and um Axel.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so you're saying that C is second in command, it's kind of layered basically, and but the top piece He says, according to Wikipedia, that this is a Ministry of Defense operation.
SPEAKER_00:High and that C is the high-ranking member, but C, who is intimidating, but also just like supposed to be comic relief, he has his higher-ups who breathe down his necks. We just haven't seen them yet. I thought that Hamza was supposed to be the comic relief because RogerEber.com talked about different type of comic relief. Like Hamza is just like he's out of his element, he pretends to know what he's doing, but you can tell he's kind of just flying by the wire of like, okay, go kill this person for me, please. While C is just like, do I need to get rid of you, Hamza? I can find a new Hamza. Um, and so there's someone above C, we don't never meet them. There's Hamza, and then Hamza's in charge of this like pair of brothers named Amos and Axel. And uh so when Sarah's being followed, we think that Curtis uh from Misfit is down angle.
SPEAKER_01:That's his name in the show.
SPEAKER_00:All right, so getting back to the point, she finds out that the kid's being discharged, she runs to the hospital. She gets there as soon as she possibly can, and she notices that she's being followed. And what does she do? She's she needs to find this kid, so she pulls the fire alarm to a hospital, causing all the patients and the doctors to run out of the hospital. And she sees the kid that she thinks is the one that she, the butterfly girl, Dinah, being loaded up into a car and driven away. She's prevented to getting to that kid because the person who's been following her gets in her way. And then she sees Gerard of all people, and she confronts Girard and she's like, You lied to me.
SPEAKER_01:And then Gerard is just always there.
SPEAKER_00:Gerard's like, you know what? I'll just tell you. My wife had a miscarriage, and that's why I've been at the hospital the whole time. Get off my back. And so then she's like, Oh, I'm a dick. And so she goes home. She should spend the second episode in the uh hospital not in the hospital in the police department because she just pulled a fire alarm with there being no fire.
SPEAKER_01:Is she supposed to be a likable character? Because it seems like everything she does, she's just like doing the opposite of, but it seems like the show is making it.
SPEAKER_00:She has nothing to actually feel suspicious for except for the fact that you have the photoshopped picture, which is odd, especially because this agency is the one that chose to roll out that photo. Like, they obviously have their hooks in the police and the reporting and everything about it. So, like, why wouldn't they just choose another photo? Is beyond me. The in the by the second episode, it does become a little bit more obvious why she should be looking into it, primarily because when she goes to talk to the detective about what she just learned, she just saw this kid being sped off in a vehicle. She finds Joe dead. Um, and then she screams. And for some reason, the camera decides to pan straight towards her face in the slow motion. It was kind of funny.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, weirdest slow mo I've seen.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's where they leave you off in the first episode. And in the second episode, which is called The Kind of Grief, they make up a little bit for the show's faults. And this is what I mean by that. Sarah has a come to Jesus moment where she starts thinking rationally because she's confronted with the reality that she wasn't looking for the right kid. She runs into the mom and the daughter that she should that she had this connection with in the first episode and finds out that that's not actually Dinah. So this she's been looking for the wrong girl the whole time. This causes her to spiral a bit, and it should, because she has been acting crazy. And so, because of that, she does the only logical thing and she tries to jump off the Oxford building. What? Yeah, she tries to kill herself. What happened is apparently she's been depressed in the past. Something about like growing older as a genius has made her very like sad. Um, at one point she had a bright future ahead of her, and now she just considers it wasted. And so, who's there to stop her on the top of the tower? She'd done it once before. I'm going to she was she did she actually like succeed in jumping off? I think she had jumped off one time before, and that's why like she is where she is. That's why she's a little bit of a depressed person.
SPEAKER_01:I'm I'm gonna guess it was Gerard that was at the top of the Oxford.
SPEAKER_00:No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is where Zoe starts having her character. And so Zoe will stop at nothing at this point to find out why Joe is dead. Because uh, thank you, by the way, for showing us the affair between Zoe. Just to the extra nail in Joe's coff coffin once he's dead, is a backlash scene to show that she was cheating on him as well as everything else, which he sort of already knew, but like we needed to see the scene.
SPEAKER_01:It's very strange to me because I know that Emma Thompson said that she agreed to the rule because she loves the book. Uh she, yeah, she had already read the book, but it's just the preamble to the book. I didn't actually read it myself, but I listened to the first She also said that oftentimes uh the man who wrote it, Mick Heron, he passes the Beckdill test. So that's that's the reason why she accepted the role. So it's strange that like all this stuff is kind of not.
SPEAKER_00:Well, no, it's her character is the epitome of I don't give a crap of what any man says to me. Like she didn't care that she was cheating on on Joe. She already felt like he was just this weak-willed dude who wouldn't pay his bills, had too much of a good heart. And so like she is Butcher, but just a girl version of Butcher, um, as far as just her attitude. So she approaches Dinah after talking to Dinah's, sorry, not Dinah. She approaches Sarah after talking to Sarah's old teacher, finding out kind of her psychology. And also she learns that uh that gas explosion that uh Sarah is so suspicious about couldn't possibly have been a gas explosion because they turned off the gas to that block like a year or two beforehand. And she spoke to a neighbor about that. This is just going back to how crazy this agency is at not doing a good job. They decide the best way to disappear, these two people or Dinah, is to fake a gas explosion, take her to a hospital that's like local and everybody can find, then speed her off in the most suspicious means, kill the one detective who's looking into it. Like they couldn't be making more missteps if like the breadcrumbs they're leaving behind are mountains.
SPEAKER_01:So that's why I feel like it's like if Moriarty was leaving this like giant thing.
SPEAKER_00:They want to get caught at this point. Like, had they just done something normal, don't kill the detective, just treat the lady, even approach uh a uh Sarah with a logical like explanation. It's not until episode two that one of the goons, Amos, who's in this fancy uh uh dress, uh like he he he likes to perform in a suit. He's one of the two brothers, and he approaches and he says, Stop looking into this, I'm a policeman. And she's like, fine. Uh obviously that doesn't stick around. Like she then jumps back into the plot. But but yeah, Zoe is now part of the investigation. So it's Zoe and Sarah, and they're hanging out, and uh and where are we going from here?
SPEAKER_01:Well, let me let me ask, uh, because with like episode one, especially now that we know that the person was not Dinah, I think it's fair to say the inciting incident was the explosion. But episode two No, no, no.
SPEAKER_00:It's still the runaround because had she not had that, she never would have looked into it. Had she not thought it was the other girl, she never would have looked into it.
SPEAKER_01:But episode two is supposed to be kind of more thriller territory where you're getting the conspiracy. And I'm saying, does the show do a good job of balancing this? I know that you've already said that the agency is doing it.
SPEAKER_00:Episode two is where I realized that this is supposed to be more of a comedy than I I thought it was just pure drama in the first episode. By episode two, when you just see the amount of times that Malik is just playing things fast and loose, he's being like, go ahead and kill her. Like, I don't care, just get her out of my hair, like that type of thing. Then I realize, okay, this is played for laughs. Now the thing is, we've seen Curtis from Misfits. Yes, we've seen his character following her around. He does not wear a suit, but he looks almost identical to Amos. So we're like 90% sure that that's the brother until we're not. So what happens is she is freaking out because she sees that uh Curtis's character, I don't know, he doesn't have a name yet.
SPEAKER_01:It's Downey, that's what it is.
SPEAKER_00:Downey, but we haven't learned that yet. But Downey has been following her and broke into her flat. And so she is freaking out. She asked the wigwam uh couple because they were right outside, they were going to bring her some treats, if they could stay with her. The wife has to go pick up the kids, and so her husband Rufus stays in and he's he's being a nice guy. He seems like Joe almost, like he's just there to be agreeable and stuff. And then it takes me too long. But the amount of times that we just see Downey's character following her and doing nothing but kind of looking sad made me a little bit suspicious that he he's probably gonna be a good guy, but I thought he was gonna turn coat, like that he was the bad guy originally, because he looks identical to Amos. It wasn't until I was like, what if he's just straight up not Amos's brother? They they cast them to look almost identical, like the twins from Breaking Bad, yeah. Um, or the cousins from Breaking Bad. And what if not, then who could he be? And I was like, there's only one other black guy in the cast, and it's Rufus here. Oh my god, they're gonna make it Rufus. And lo and behold, then Rufus gets up, he grabs some dental floss, and he's like, I'm gonna finish the job now. So yeah, Rufus, the next door neighbor, decided that the best way of going about disappearing Dinah was to blow up his neighbor's house. We saw that he was at the dinner party when this explosion took place. So that means he must have planted some form of bomb earlier in the day. Also, he must have like he says that he screwed up the way that he killed the detective. He goes on a full villain monologue and he says, Yeah, I left blood on the doorknob, shouldn't have done that. And so he takes the dental fossil and starts to ring it around Sarah's neck. She's screaming. And guess who breaks in Terminator 2 style? Because we thought he was the villain to save the day. But Downey, yeah, and he points a gun and we see the shot. We don't know who he's shooting, but I'm guessing it's not Sarah.
SPEAKER_01:Um you don't see the fallout of it. I know, I I knew about that. I read that, like apparently Downey was supposed to be the watcher, right? Like, are you supposed to think that he was? And then it ended up being, like you said, he kind of uh he wasn't even really bad in that.
SPEAKER_00:It's fair because of how much they cast the two, Amos and Axel. Like you would think that they were it. I think they even talk about them like they're twins. Um I they say the Cray brothers or the Crane brothers, and um and and so yeah, you're led to believe one thing. I think the twist is better than in the first episode where everybody knew that Adam Godley was going to die. Uh, that said, she should have been in jail for what she did at the hospital. Um, the this agency is so terrible, they are going about disappearing someone in the worst fashion possible. And there's no real reason given. Uh, even when Malik goes over to check on Dina, because we see Dinah in this episode and figure out like whether or not she's being taken care of. Uh, there's no real reason why they did this. Like, are they blackmailing someone? Uh, it's it why did they have to get rid of their family? Like, it doesn't make any sense. And then thirdly, why hasn't she dumped her boyfriend? She does not respect her boyfriend, and her boyfriend is such a kiss-up, trying to get in Gerard's or Gerald's good graces. At this point, I don't see like their romantic connection, especially when he finds out that she's been followed or she's trying to like talk about that. They need to break up. That's what I'm ultimately.
SPEAKER_01:Well, though, don't you think that they're trying to show that the boyfriend is bad? Like, she shouldn't be in this relationship if he doesn't care.
SPEAKER_00:But he's not he's not bad in the sense that uh like he's doing anything evil, it's just like they do not seem like they're on the same page with stuff. Um, and so once I realized that you were not supposed to take this as seriously as a drama, I was able to be not as nitpicky, though I do still sound nitpicky on this podcast.
SPEAKER_01:But does the show's I uh before you get into that, does the show's comedy undercut the threat that it's trying to pose?
SPEAKER_00:In fact, I I was I guess I was happier that like because there's so many big plot holes. At least now I understand that there's like a reason. Like, once now that we have dead bodies stacking up and people getting attacked, there's a reason for Sarah to want to continue her investigation efforts, unlike in the first episode where it made no sense. Now that the agency has caused so many problems for themselves, it makes sense why they are going to be continually involved with it. Like it they had to create such a crazy set of events for it to be legit logical for them to continue forward with it. I I could like the characters more, I guess, Zoe and and Sarah, though, but it doesn't feel like they've been written to be particularly fun to watch yet. So I am waiting on that. Overall, I would have to say it falls more into the conspiracy thriller Apple shows that are kind of forgettable to me. I I don't really enjoy it. I would give it a four out of ten. I'm not impressed with it. The second episode is better than the first. So if you're counting on that trajectory, maybe the next few episodes will be even better.
SPEAKER_01:If you had to compare it to anything, because I read an article that said LA Times are woman over 60 redefining action stardom, and they bought it uh Helen Mirn in 1923, Jodie Foster in season four of True Detective. She was close to 60 at the time, but Sarah Lankinshire and Happy Valley, and they were obviously writing this about Emma Thompson as Zoe.
SPEAKER_00:Happy Valley was just rock solid writing. Um the True Detective, the last season didn't get as good reviews as some of the other ones have, right? Um, and then what were the other two?
SPEAKER_01:1923.
SPEAKER_00:1923. I think Halameir was great in Mobland. I think that uh she was insanely like annoying in Mobland, but also like a really good uh character. I I'm not feeling it with Zoe yet. Like she really just kind of rubbed me the wrong way with how much she was just like we're supposed to feel bad for her when she goes to um Shiva uh for her late uh husband. Um she feels like sort of a one-level character. Like it by making her so rough, it's like she doesn't really have layers. She's she may be that Shrek Onion, but it doesn't feel like it so far.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so you gave it a four out of ten. It has a 77% on Raw Tomatoes, a 7.2 on IMDB. Uh the Financial Times awarded it two out of five stars and said, like Luther, the end of the fucking world and utopia. Down Cemetery Road.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, the guy's from Utopia, though. The Malik guy is from Sweet Tooth and Utopia, and he's been in something else too. Fool me once.
SPEAKER_01:I think that also Nathan, the guy who plays Downey, I think he was in the British version of Utopia as well.
SPEAKER_00:That's true. He was, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it was Like Luther, the end of the fucking world, and Utopia. Down Cemetery Road has the feel of a comic book adaptation in that every dial is turned up, every point of tension is exaggerated.
SPEAKER_00:Nah. I mean, it's it is exaggerated. Um, but like I just, yeah, motivations matter and they just don't have them in the show. I wonder how the book reads. I wonder if it's agreeable or not. But it does kind of make me curious.
SPEAKER_01:Uh I know that that um Mick Heron he said that he wasn't in charge really of development in terms of like dialogue and but he was but he was in there in terms of like um the writer's room because it was written in 2003, so they had to like, you know, kind of with the invention of smartphones and everything.
SPEAKER_00:They did use smartphones, uh, for instance, when they're filming outside the explosion and when she's uh yeah, looking at that. Um, I guess I was wondering if she's not allowed to drive a car because of like her accident earlier, and and maybe that's why she's on a bike the whole time, but it it's it's kind of goofy. So, yeah, four out of ten for me. I'm not gonna watch any more of it. Thanks for listening to us. We'll see you in the next episode. Hope you enjoyed this one. Bye.
SPEAKER_01:Bye.