Sunday 24 December 2017

The Shannara Chronicles

I paused in my epic rewatch of the Avengers - there's only so much early 1960s TV I can take in one go - to have a look at the Shannara Chronicles series that my Young Man brought down for me to watch.
I'd heard that it was being made, but I never really got into the books, so was only mildly interested to hear that a TV series was being made.
So far, I'm quite enjoying it. It helps that two of the older characters are played by really good actors - John Rhys-Davies is the Elven King, and Manu Bennett (who was Slade Wilson in Arrow) is the Druid.
The younger characters are quite fun - there's a scene by a river where Wil (last of the Shannara family, so nominally the hero of the series) is about to go swimming, so strips off to reveal his manly chest (in fact, he reveals his manly chest quite a lot as the series goes on). Noticing the Elven princess watching him, he says: "Hey, what happened to 'eyes up here'?"
However, I'm now at about the mid-point of the series, and the Elven princess has almost been raped twice (once by the leader of the Reivers, who we're supposed to be rooting for later on) - rescued both times before it gets too 18-rated (though the box set is rated 15, with "strong violence, injury detail, sex").
Several of the characters seem to have met with Certain Death in the last episode I watched - so it'll be interesting to see which of them survive to complete the quest (which is to do with getting the seed of a magical tree to a certain place before the old tree dies and releases an army of demons onto the world).
The world of Shannara Chronicles is a bit more interesting than I remember from the books, as well - there are relics of a technological past in the background all over the place - an old fridge when Wil dives into the river, an ancient truck, a children's playground in the woods. So I'm assuming that this is a post-apocalypse world, which also explains the poison gas area they run into at one point.

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