It’s not your imagination. Anyone with any means (including royalty) used a variety of methods to cover up the stank, including powdered wigs and perfumed hankies. I’ve read accounts of people’s filthy hands protruding from lace cuffs. The less you had, the dirtier you were, unsurprisingly.
Is it just me or does this show have way too many commercial breaks? I watched the seventh episode this morning and skipped the commercials, but it felt like it was just five minutes of dialogue between commercial breaks.
And this was the second episode in which Godfrey (the East India Company clerk) ran to James to warn him about something the company was about to do. I was thinking he was going to get caught sooner or later. And if he does testify as he promised, what’s his fate?
It’s on the BBC - no commercials 
FX … not so much.
I think you meant the Prince (Mark Gattis). The lawyer is played by Nicholas Woodeson, who was Posca on Rome.
But we’re not talking about that. The EIC/Crown almost certainly plan to kill him immediately after he gives up information, and they think he knows that (he only survives if he has some hidden leverage hidden up his sleeve they’re not aware of)
Therefore the long term disabiling effect of the torture isn’t so important if they think Delaney knows he’s a dead man and there’s no long term for him. They need something that will break him quickly. There are a lot of men who can stand up to conventional pain torture but who break to water boarding. It’s a different sort of method. It’s not mild torture - it’s a horrific experience. It leads to less long term personal damage, yes, but in terms of breaking someone, of giving them something they cannot endure in the moment, it’s right up there with all of the most horrific tortures.
And we’re given a montage. They start out by doing something to crush his legs with some sort of device, and then later what looks to be basically slough off his skin with a cheese grater. He withstood that, so at some later point they moved on to waterboarding. He withstood that, and later they moved on to using some sort of drugs in a primitive sensory isolation tank to break him. We’re told he’s withstood 12 hours of torture.
Is the show somehow wrong to show that an attempt at waterboarding was part of that? I would think that if they were running the full gamut of tortures they did back then you would expect waterboarding.
I dunno man, I think I would break immediately once the hot poker in the anus idea started getting floated around.
Maybe you’re not, but I am.
The fastest way to extract information in the Tower of London is to put him on the rack, which permanently ruins your body. Alternative fast methods are equally ruinous to the body.
They didn’t show him being waterboarded because it’s the most effective technique. (In fact, their depiction shows it to be ineffective, and that a tough guy can just power through, but that apparently doesn’t trigger your delicate liberal offense-o-meter.) They show him being waterboarded for exactly one reason: The plot requires his body to not be ruined. There will apparently be a scene upcoming where he stands, or walks. Or uses his hands to do something.
In other words, it was the height of plot armor. Nobody would ever make a plan that involves getting taken to the tower to be interrogated because on the off chance they leave the tower, they would be forever ruined. But James makes that plan because he’s got plot armor, and is apparently aware of it.
That’s my complaint.
Yep. I realized my mistake when I watched the following episode. Then I regretted my inaccurate post about which character he was.
For fucks sake. You understand the context of this debate, right? There are people who work for our government, and many of our citizens, who advocate using torture on people who aren’t even on trial or convicted of a crime. And when confronted about it, they say that it’s mild, not even really torture at all, not a big deal. Early in this thread you seemed to be taking up that position. I’m not displaying “delicate liberal offense-o-meter” to realistically call waterboarding a very horrific torture technique. You are needlessly insulting, and dangerously close to advocating for the side of evil on this issue.
There are people who’ve suffered multiple kinds of torture have described waterboarding as the worst. There are interrogators that say that there are a lot of people who can withstand a lot of pain but break immediately under waterboarding.
Again, they started with conventional physical torture. Not the rack, apparently, but crushing his legs and tearing his skin off. The show did not show waterboarding as the first, primary, or only method of torture. It was in fact the second of three techniques that we saw on a montage, and indication that it had gone on for 12 hours so there were likely many more. The point of the scene narratively was that they were running the gamut of torture techniques of various sorts and he wouldn’t break under any of them.
“This” debate? You mean your reactionary tantruming that has nothing to do with my posts or this thread at all?
You have repeatedly been uncivil and insulting even when I’ve asked you not to, and I haven’t done the same to you.
There’s a reason that out of three scenes of torture, you only picked out one as being unrealistic, and that one is a hot-button political issue on which a significant portion of the country does not consider it to be torture and advocates that the US use it on its captives. And you picked it out because you thought it was unrealistically light, that in that era they would use real torture, not some pansy ass waterboarding shit. How does the scene with the drugs not get your ire, too? You should have the exact same objections. But waterboarding is what raised your objection. Almost certainly because of the current events surrounding it.
In any case, you clearly have no interest in being civil, so I’m not going to engage beyond that.
So apparently this show has been re-upped for a second season, and the creator has said he envisioned it as a show with a “beginning, middle, end” so I bet it’ll end up being three seasons total when all is said and done. Which admittedly has me a bit disappointed since I was really hoping for a tightly-plotted, one-off miniseries of around 10 episodes, not 24. But oh well. I’m enjoying a lot of it, but not all of it (the mystical stuff I could do without, some of the dialogue is very hard to hear/make out, etc). Hopefully the finale wows me.
What finally made Brace crack?
Go back and read the exchange again. The uncivil and insulting part began here:
Well, season 1 is in the books. I’m a bit split on it… it did a good job of wrapping most of the plotlines and pushing the overall journey of James Delaney forward, and I was definitely on the edge of my seat for the final scenes. But I’m still not drawn into really caring for any of the characters, and Delaney seems a bit too good at predicting everything. And I really wasn’t a fan of
How the whole plot with his sister basically just stopped with her killing herself, without any real point except trying to add some sizzle with the incest and telepathy-fucking and whatnot.
So, all in all, might turn in for the next season, might not.
The sister thing is kind of weird. Maybe they are planning for season two as to how they are treating her.
I wonder if the action will move to Nootka Sound… they whole grittiness thing wold work there as well I’d think.