This new fantasy features Cara Delevingne, Orlando Bloom, penny farthings and lines like `Critch magic is a sin against the Martyr!´What I think we can all agree we´re wanting in these barren post-Game of Thrones times is a shonky fantasy epic set in half-fantasy Victorian London with Cara Delevingne as the lead, who is inexplicably a fairy, and inexplicably also Irish, and Orlando Bloom is there, too, trying very hard. Prayers and thanks, then, to the megacorporation gods at Amazon, who have produced Carnival Row (from Friday 30 August, Amazon Prime Video), a beautiful, expensive mess.The set-up for Carnival Row is this: I don´t know. Every single sentence uttered in this show hints at rich lore and vibrant world-building but very crucially doesn´t reveal any of it, because Cara Delevingne is running Irishly around a grey sub-city with a pair of CGI wings on her back, and they keep forgetting to tell the story. So the dialogue is like: `Did they kill all the women and children at Bleakness Keep?` and Cara Delevingne half weeps beneath her eyebrows and goes `Aye`. Actually a line I transcribed from the second episode: `Critch magic is a sin against the Martyr!` Another one I didn´t quite understand but: `They call themselves the Black Raven. Fae folk, part of the Wing Brigade ... they run ´lixir.` I think ´lixir is this world´s version of illegal hooch, but I do not know for sure. People keep saying `assuredly`. The first thing rich socialite `Ezra Spurnrose` says is `Now, now, dear sister`. Someone wheels a penny farthing through a town square. The entire series is a fever dream hatched in the frenzied mind of someone banned from every steampunk pub-meet in the UK. It absolutely reeks of taking a pint of Hobgoblin back to the bar because it wasn´t tepid enough. Continue reading...
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