Minor spoilers contained within

Cheery knows what The Dark in the Dark means…

Big changes this week. First up, the gears changed and it’s clear we’re into the closing strait. You could feel the tension at moments as characters were faced with difficult choices and put in actual peril. You could also feel the delightful chaos of multiple different sides all competing to come out on top.

In particular there’s a dance sequence that… well… I was laughing and talking at my screen with happiness when it appeared. This show could have fallen into conventionality and safe tropes as the various sides come to blows. Instead it’s embraced its characters and celebrated absurdity and boy does it pay off this episode.

The second big change is where this story is going. We have finally departed from the novels in a couple of significant ways which I won’t spoil here. These departures are answers to the questions I was asking last week about where the show could head given it had changed up who the apparent antagonists were to Vimes, Carrot, Angua and the others.

What I will say is that they made me stop and reflect on how I thought about the direction the show has taken. Looking back it’s clear from the first episode they knew where they wanted to be – the layering is there even if I was focussed on how closely the story cleaved to the source material.

This episode focuses on Cheery and it’s all the better for it. Cheery has slowly been built up as the moral soul of the Watch where Carrot is their moral compass. What I love about Cheery is she’s someone who knows who she is, who has come through her journey to the Watch but isn’t presented as a troubled soul or as someone who ‘made a lifestyle choice’. When Cheery is on screen we know kind words are coming, not weak words but strength in kindness and in knowing what is good. She’s like the aunt who gave us good judgement-free advice when we were too scared to be who we knew we wanted to be.

The episode follows her home and we learn about how she escaped her old life, why she left it all behind. We also meet those she left behind and that too is presented with a tenderness we have no right to expect from a comedy show.

Yet it’s not mawkish, nor sentimental. The show holds onto its absurdist roots while seamlessly weaving in delicious elements from the wider Discworld.

We have Cheery and we have a proper sense of where our conflict is heading with new players, new elements and while all of it is undeniably ‘Discworld’ it’s ploughing its own furrow and writing its own stories. I can’t say whether Pratchett would have been pleased but enough of his stories were about turning the world into something which works for us that I find it hard to think he would have objected to what’s been done here.

A last word about Carrot. More. We’ve not had enough of Carrot yet. I’m hungry for more of him, not least because of how mellifluous Adam Hugill’s northern accent sounds but also because in this episode we’re given an insight into him we never get in the novels – a lost child wanting to understand who he is. The show is playing about with his background – just like the books, but it’s making it much more human than I ever really felt the books managed to make it and I’m here for it.

Verdict: The show continues to deliver and I’m beginning to strongly feel I want another series – who do I speak to for that to happen?

 

Rating? 8 drag queens out of 10.

Stewart Hotston