I finished watching the series "To the Ends of the Earth" a couple of hours ago. I think I've given half a dozen things a five star rating in my Netflix career, and this was one of them.
Why, yes. It does have Benedict Cumberbatch in it. Why do you ask?
I was astonished to learn that it had been based on a trilogy by William Golding. Astonished and disbelieving because I loathed William Golding for years upon years, since my first reading of Lord of the Flies.
I loved "To the Ends of the Earth" because it was as real as fiction can be. It was about humans being human, flaws and frailties, about life unwinding and people as unwitting players. It was about those moments when you think you're doing the right thing with all the knowledge and morality and ethics that your experience has afforded you - and you still end up doing something horribly, horribly bad.
Ahem. Yes. Story. Set in the Regency period (around 1810) but far different from any Regency romance you might have read.
Young Edmond Tolbot, Sir something or other, with a country estate, house in London, has been sponsored by his influential godfather for a position in the government in Australia. This is about his voyage to Australia and how he survives it. It has licentiousness, buggery, love, bad poetry, drunks, lots and lots and lots of barfing, head injuries and hallucinations, pride, prejudice, sense, sensibility, humanity, inhumanity, love, hate, but no pirates. Everything but pirates and aliens, so far as I can make out.
Romance novels these days always feature very democratic, free-thinking dukes, earls, lords, baronets who think seriously of the well-being of their servants and tenants, offspring and wives. Ha. Edmond is a snob of the first water. He chastises one of the ship's junior officers for addressing him by his first name after they have had a long heart-to-heart. He jumps one of the female passengers, who is quite willing, and after the moment is done, she asks what happens if she ends up getting pregnant. "That is your bridge to burn, madame," says he. Nice.
But Edmond does earn his manhood.
Drat. Now I suppose I'll have to read the books.
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