Nine Princes in Amber: What did Eric know and when did he know it?

Someone recently posed a question in a comment and I thought I would reply in a post rather than in a comment.

The question:

just finished book 1. is the following a plothole?
In his cell, corwin mentions not knowing how long it would take for the guards to notice his food being uneaten, if he were to escape. 
He escapes through the Lighthouse etching by the card maker, and spends 4+ months with the Lighthouse keeper!
Is Eric so busy to not check out the cell or listen to a report on two strange etchings on the walls of the scene of corwin's disappeance?
Or have they all really not noticed and have been shoving 4 months worth of water bottles and bread under the prison cell door?
Maybe the card maker came in every day, with a light source, and took the extra food? 

 hat's a good point, and that's something that had always bothered me. I read it again because I needed a refresher on the timeline.

Several books later one of his captors mentions that they knew that he was receiving care packages from a visitor, so that might account for some of the delay in their response.

However, that ignores the fact that he lit a fire in his cell. They're hardly concerned for his welfare, but it's just due diligence to check it out, if only to ascertain *how* he set the fire.

From there, it's not much of a leap to investigate the lighthouse. It's unlikely that they would recognize it as a Trump image, but it's enough of an anomaly that they'd want to dispatch some investigators to see how it figures in with Corwin's disappearance.

So, how does this strike you for an explanation? We'll be charitable and say that no one was around when Corwin set his mattress on fire and the cell smells so bad that it covered up the smell of burning.

After a week or so Corwin's jailers notice that he's not eating his food. Nobody wants to be the one to tell Eric that a prince of Amber died in the dungeon, so they kick the can down the road and just sit on the information until it comes time to celebrate Eric's coronation. There is no hiding Corwin's absence at that point, so somebody tries his Trump to determine what's going on.

They have no idea of how long he's been gone by this point, and he may be sufficiently recovered to defeat Eric at this point, which is why Eric doesn't immediately depart for Cabra himself. We'll assume that he dispatched some palace guards to check out the lighthouse, but it takes time to set it up and Corwin is already gone by that time. (Poor Jopin is probably in for an unpleasant conversation, however)

Speaking of Jopin, we'll assume for the sake of this discussion that he knew Corwin was lying about having been in a shipwreck, even if he probably didn't know his identity right off the bat. A sailor is going to have more a suntan than someone who spent the last five years in a dungeon and there is no disguising that. Jopin probably thought, "This guy is lying about the shipwreck, but he needs help and I don't get many visitors."

Does anyone else have any thoughts? 

Watch this space!

Time to end my hibernation and make my triumphant return. Stay tuned, for normal posting shall resume shortly!

Broadchurch

I'm embarrassed to say that I had never seen Jodie Whittaker in anything, so I sat down to watch this in order to see what I could expect from her and Mister Chinball.

First thoughts. It made me think of the Prisoner, in that the story is set in a surreal village apparently inhabited entirely by past and future Doctor Who actors. (Funny story, I mentioned to Jen who Jodie Whittaker was and that she would be playing the next Doctor. I didn't say anything about David Tennant and apparently, all through the first episode, my wife was thinking, "Wow, that guy really looks like David Tennant! But it must be a coincidence. Josh would have certainly mentioned it if he was.")

It's pretty brutal so far. Our daughter is the same age as the victim in the show, so it seems really personal. It's compelling, but there is no way we're going to binge watch this one. We're going to need something with a bit of levity between episodes.

 Wow! What a great show! Olivia Colman...Wow! I understand why people wanted her to be the Doctor. Really like what Chinball did with it. I hope he brings this aesthetic to Doctor Who. I’ll confess that I don’t like him as a writer. The Power of Three was not to my taste, but Cyberwoman was so bad that I told my friends, “Episodes like this are the reason I’m embarrassed to tell people that I watch science fiction.”But being a writer and being the showrunner involve an entirely different set of skills, so I am cautiously optimistic to see what he brings.

I felt smart for figuring out the killer ahead of time.




Spoiler








I noticed that one of the Netflix thumbnails for the series as a whole had all the families clustered together. Tennant and Colman were in the foreground and I got to wondering why her husband wasn't there. If the pattern held, he would have been off to the back and the side, but he wasn't. I figured that this must have been done for a reason, so I watched the rest of the show with the suspicion that he was the killer. I even wrote it down and then dramatically revealed it when they caught him.
On the fence about series two. I enjoyed the first one so much that I don't want to taint it with a second series that won't be as good.

And on a similar note...Gracepoint. What is it about my country that drives us to create subpar localized remakes of great British television? It looks like they kept so much of the original and the changes they made seem entirely arbitrary. David Tennant reprises his role, but with a different name? How bizarre.

Stranger Things 2

One year ago I went into Stranger Things with what I thought were appropriated calibrated expectations. I’d been burned before by critically lauded productions that failed to live up to the hype and there was no way, I thought, that it could possibly be as good as everyone said.

Well.

I was pleased to be wrong.

And here we are at the end of series two.

Again, I thought my expectations were adjusted appropriately. The sophomore slump is real. I knew that going in. The Duffer Brothers had a lifetime to create season one and ten months to craft the second.

The first one had been an experience. An event. A phenomenon.

The second season was merely competently-produced TV hobbled by three big problems.

1.) It’s become too cutesy and self-referential. Eleven in particular is merely a catch-phrase spouting caricature of her earlier self. I'm fond of observing that Star Wars (A New Hope) is the only Star Wars movie that doesn't take place in the Star Wars universe. A lot of the tropes that would come to define it were still being codified. It drew on Kurosawa and Flash Gordon serials and managed to combine them into something entirely new. Same with season one of Stranger Things. It's imitating itself for season two and like the ripoffs that followed Star Wars, it is missing a lot of what worked the first time around.

2.) They're trying too hard to please their most vocal critics. #JusticeforBarb does not need a series long arc, we didn't need an entire sitcom family for Lucas because his parents were not conspicuous in the first series. These are both addressed in excruciating detail. It couldn’t have been less subtle if his dad had mugged for the camera at breakfast.

The Star Wars prequels were awful, but there was one thing I respected. After George Lucas got some flak for the note-for-note Tarzan yell in Return of the Jedi, he doubled down with TWO Tarzan yelling Wookiees in the prequels. Likewise, when Classic Doctor Who painted themselves in a corner they simply smashed through a load-bearing wall to get themselves out. Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Not everything has to be wrapped up in a bow.

3.) The storylines are siloed. Much like later seasons of A Game of Thrones, it's essentially a bunch of stories that are happening at the same time rather than a single coherent storyline. They don’t even converge as much as they happen to drop the characters in the same location. I’ve run a lot of role-playing games since I began playing in the Stranger Things era of 1980s small town America. There were often times when I saw that attention at the table was flagging so I would hustle things along with a handwave. Rather than worry about the logistics of travel, I’d just say, “Okay, you all wind up at the castle at the same time.” It was lazy, but we accepted it because it got us closer to the interesting part. I was thinking of that when everyone happens to arrive at the lab at the same time. Ugh. I can get away with it because it’s something I’m doing it on the fly with a small group of friends. I’d like a little bit more effort from my entertainment, especially when I know they’re capable of it.

Picayune complaints/stuff that I didn’t like (as distinct from stuff that I thought was objectively bad) Billy is poorly integrated into the story and it drives me crazy when writers fall back on the “I have a hunch that happens to be correct!” solution to their problems. I don’t know if Kali and her group of weirdos was a back door pilot or a hook for series three, but either way it was boring and awful and should have been cut entirely. Mike is kind of a tool and if he was a real person, he’d be on track to grow up as an Internet Nice Guy.

This probably makes it sound like I hated it, but it had elements that really worked too. Any reference to Aliens is welcome. Sadie Sink was astounding as Max and gives a breakout performance. Only Will is better. He carries the show with his vulnerability. Sean Astin was a wonderful addition to the cast. Hopper and Eleven were great together. Steve is great, as always. Nancy and Jonathan do have great chemistry together (too bad they have so many scenes with Murray, who is just this side of an offensive stereotype).

Bottom line, it wasn’t bad but it wasn't nearly as good as it could have been. Series one set a high bar and series two fails to deliver. The more I think about the first series the more I like it, but the more I think about the second series the clearer its problems become.

Illinois Nazis

One time, say about fifteen years ago, a mod on a message board I frequented remarked that he hated Nazis. After I determined that he wasn't making a reference to the Blues Brothers,

I said something like, "Dude, it's not like you're taking a courageous stand here. Nazis are like pedophiles. EVERYBODY hates them."

And yet, here we are in 2017, with some of the most powerful Republicans in the country defending Sebastian Gorka, Nazi, and Roy Moore, pedophile.

I never want to hear "Both sides do it!" again.