We are officially at the halfway point of the series and things are finally picking up for The Watch team.
(Some spoilers lurk beneath as always.)
“Twilight Canyons” wastes no time getting into the action as the investigators quickly get themselves into a shootout with some “Drag Goblins” while searching for Carcer and racing him to find the sword that he plans to use to control the Noble Dragon.
Everyone ends up at the titular Twilight Canyons, which turns out to be a nursing home where no violence is allowed, yet houses some of the most vicious and violent senior citizens in Ankh-Morpork. We meet Jocasta, a sweet elderly woman who seems to have forgotten a lifetime of truly remarkable stories. She is key to finding the sword as drawings in her room tell a story of two women’s journey to the edge of the Disc for some unknown reason.
This episode of The Watch was focused on the age-old themes of love and loss. Wayne, the sword, speaks, but only those in love can hear the dulcet tones of the inimitable Matt Berry. I am very pleased by this voice casting choice as I am sure many other fans of his will be as well.
We are learning that love is even more powerful than the most powerful unseen magics of the Disc, and this will undoubtedly come into play in the final episodes.
Cheery, Angua, and Carrot all get more screen time this week and are crucial to both the main plot and their own subplots. Cheery gets to shine and stand out this week as a compassionate dwarf with some very humorous lines, while Carrot suddenly is worried about being attacked by the Noble Dragon as it prefers virgins. Yeah, that joke lands very flat. As time goes on, I see the casting of Adam Hugill as Carrot Ironfoundersson as perfection. He clearly wears his heart on his sleeve and his earnestness makes him invaluable.
The Librarian shows up briefly when Carrot heads over to Unseen University to find out more of the story behind the sword, and somehow he looks better than when we first met him. Maybe it is the lighting, but either way, it was less disturbing than our first look.
I don’t plan to make this a full recap of the episode, but this week is packed with more plot details than any we have seen so far. More pieces of the puzzle fall into place but we still don’t have the big picture.
The thing that surprised me the most in these new details is that Carcer suddenly has become somewhat sympathetic. He has a meeting with the beings that brought him back to life and now force him to do their bidding about ¾ the way through the episode. The voices make some very cryptic references to “other versions” of The Watch and seemingly other dimensions. Might this be an explanation of why things are so different from the Discworld we know? Do we want to know? Time will tell.
Death returns and we get hints of how death is really not appreciated in his job and is quite lonely. It is played for sentimentality and a bit of a chuckle, but fans of the book series know what happens when Death gets it in his mind that he needs a break or takes up a different job. Essentially, the Disc needs Death to keep things moving. Maybe it is a sign of what could be in future seasons. I could definitely see The Watch dealing with the mysteries of Death’s disappearance.
“Twilight Canyons” is definitely my pick so far out of the 4 currently available episodes, but little things keep poking at me that I am not sure how to interpret. We get a lot of namedrops of deep cuts of the Discworld universe, including a strange Jingo reference, but they are clearly not remotely the same characters or ideas from the books. Maybe their names are meant to be Easter eggs for the hardcore, or maybe they hint at the other universes mentioned by the (assumed to be) Auditors.
The most interesting tidbit is the title of the episode and the nursing home itself. It doesn’t exist as far as I am aware in the novels, but it was mentioned a few years back as a setting in one of Sir Terry’s unfinished stories before he passed. It was to have been about the elderly residents of Twilight Canyons fighting an evil force, though they have lost their memories. There are absolutely parallels to this and it feels too close of a coincidence to be an Easter egg. Sir Terry Pratchett passed away due to complications from early-onset Alzheimer’s disease back in 2015, so this is clearly something of which he was keenly aware.
The episode ends with Vimes being told by Vetinari that she wants to control Noble Dragon themselves, and it puts Vimes and The Watch in a very unpleasant and possibly fatal position.
Overall there are some genuinely hilarious scenes that border on utter silliness but others that will leave you smiling well after the episode ends. I refer primarily to both the result of violence in Twilight Canyon and getting treated to the origin of “The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Economic Injustice” which is so true in the real world and clearly on the Disc as well.
From the novel “Men-At-Arms” :
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. “
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
What did you think of Episode 4? Let me know and come back next week when I review Episode 5 “Not on My Watch.”
