After the rather unimpressive first episode of last week, I sat down to watch this episode with several different feelings. Apprehension, hope and a certain level of naive optimism was there, and as I picked up my pen to make notes (because that’s how I roll) I was almost looking forward to it. My hopes were soon dashed.Don’t get me wrong; this episode wasn’t worse than last weeks. It just sputtered along at a mediocre pace, with several seemingly needless, and very short, scenes. There were lots of long, lingering looks as characters just…gazed. Gazed at each other, into the distance, into the corner of the room while they thought, obviously hoping that all the thoughts and feelings they were trying to convey could be expressed in a look. For a brief second, I did wonder if I’d accidentally switched to a historical version of Made in Chelsea.
One issue I have with this episode is the timing. The episode opens with Beth returning with Will, so I assume it followed on straight from the last episode. Then suddenly Will’s been staying there for two months. Ned makes an appearance in England, which is again confusing as he was from the American side of the story. It wasn’t clear that time had moved on so quickly, or that Ned had crossed the sea to England, leading to a bemused me squinting in confusion at the screen. The character progression seems shallow, and at points I found myself feeling like I couldn’t care less what happened to several of these characters; Beth seemed like a spoilt teenager rebelling against her mother and her outlaw boyfriend seemed to believe himself to be a cut above everyone else. The rest simply elicted a level of indifference from me, barring Angelica and her husband John Francis (who die anyway) and Ned.
New Worlds also seems to make heavy use of constantly moving camera techniques. While not a bad thing – the only thing worse would be constant static, clumpy shots – sometimes too much of a good thing makes it irritating. There’s a lot of “focus on the spiderweb then move up to the characters, then follow them as they walk five paces then end the scene by swooping off to focus on a leaf” stuff going on. I found myself yearning for a nice simple cut. There’s lots of focusing on irrelevant things before switching to the main character – again, not a bad thing, but too much. A lot of filters are also used, making it feel like Instagram had a hand in making this.
There were points where I was mildly interested, and for the sake of stubborness, I will continue to watch it, but so far, it hasn’t seemed to improve, instead just jog along at the same mediocre pace. This week’s episode focused more on the English characters, so hopefully next week we get to see more of Hope in America, who seems to provide a much more interesting female character than her English counterpart Beth. 2/5
Ramblings of Rachools 