| Posted: 09 March 2018 at 8:57am | IP Logged | 8
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J. K. Simmons is fantastic in this.
I've seen 'full body' acting before but Simmons just nails everything different about the two Howards in his performance -- posture, face, vocal inflections, even the way his clothes hang off him -- to the point where "our" Howard reads as older than his spymaster counterpart without any additional makeup (though I wouldn't be surprised if they did do some subtle makeup to enhance this aspect).
Also some nice name symmetry going on. The surname "Silk" applied to 'our' Howard makes you think 'soft'. The same surname applied to other Howard makes you think 'smooth'.
There's a lot of profanity, but it seems natural... especially coming from spymaster Howard. The nudity seems gratuitous, like the directors and producers have a fetish for Baldwin constantly ripping her shirt off at inopportune moments. It's distracting in a "we can get away with this so we are going to do it to death" sort of way -- much like how the STARGATE SG-1 pilot film kind of looks funny with it's gratuitous "Showtime" nudity compared to the rest of the series.
I think the series would do well to not delve too much into the whys and hows the two universes became duplicated. I've seen far too many series start to creep up it's own arse when they start to embrace their own internal logic and lore. It's best to think of it as a spy show with a sci-fi twist rather than a sci-fi show with spies, IMO.
One thing they seem to emphasize is that there's the potential for the counterparts to be very similar people, even though their life circumstances might be different. In "our" Howard's case his career seems to have been neutered behind the scenes by his wife and higher ups, so that he didn't turn out like spymaster Howard. It almost seems like an experiment designed to see if someone would turn out completely different. Food for thought.
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