S01.E02: Episode 2

[AnimeMania]

Having survived mayhem in France, Fogg and his party are crossing Italy when their train comes to a screeching halt. Can they continue and save a boy’s life in the process?
Airing 1/9/2022 @ 8:00 PM    US: PBS

[edhopper]

That was intense. Sorry if people just wanted a remake of the Michael  Kidd movie.

[bluestocking]

Nice they gave Fogg something useful to do.  He has some genuine math/engineering abilities, plus he showed empathy to the boy.  Not just a blithering idiot.  

[DoctorAtomic]

So much for the balloon! I thought that was how they would travel.

I did enjoy how stylish the train was. And that you can just pull a train over and get on. I'd get on trains way more if I could eat and drink. 

I liked how they were fancying Fogg this great adventurer, but he's basically terrified. I did like that he got along with the boy quite well. Tennant did really well when Moretti was yelling at him without saying a word. 

I like that we're seeing some scenes in London, and they hung up a map. 

And what wouldn't be so Doctorish as a wild plan! That was suspenseful! I loved tearing up the train for fuel. 

I did like that when they got to the station, Fogg was more terrified than anything. 

46 minutes ago, bluestocking said:

He has some genuine math/engineering abilities, plus he showed empathy to the boy.

Did they say he was an engineer before? I don't recall anything about his background. 

That was a really exciting episode. I hope the rest is like this. Oooh, Bellamy is going to try to sabotage!

Edited January 10, 2022 by DoctorAtomic

[magdalene]

I didn't even know this was on until tonight and I missed the first episode.  But I am hooked already.  Great acting by David Tennant playing a very frightened man who is quite ill suited to be an adventurer finally rising to the occasion.  I also quite like his two companions.  Very intense episode, I was on the edge of my seat.

[j5cochran]

The act of burning the wooden bits of the railcar to fuel the train engine is actually a lovely callback to an event in the original novel.

Spoiler alert (if there can be spoilers for a novel 150 years old!) - in the race across the Atlantic, the steamboat Henrietta is running out of fuel, so Fogg buys the boat and burns all its wooden parts in order to make the run to Queenstown, Ireland.

(Yeah, I reread the book in the last week, just to see how this version compared to the original. It holds up quite well as an adventure novel.)

[Cress]

10 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:

Did they say he was an engineer before? I don't recall anything about his background. 

That was a really exciting episode. I hope the rest is like this. Oooh, Bellamy is going to try to sabotage!

I don't think they said anything of his background. We just got the vague hints from the postcards and the Club members saying he was supposed to go on a trip before. But he must be interested in technological marvels, because he did know about the balloon inventor. The book is mysterious about what Fogg does; other characters say they have no idea where he gets his money from, and that's why everyone thinks he's a bank thief for a while. The Jackie Chan movie has Fogg be a steampunk inventor.

This bridge seems to be a nod to a bridge scene in the 1956 film where they cross a collapsing bridge in the United States. That scene though was a fast paced feat where they raced and "jumped" the gap in the bridge. Tonight's episode instead was slow and intense, with all the drama of the boy. Then they raced to Brindisi by destroying the train! I liked it. Even Passeportout was able to help keep the boy awake with questions about Jules Verne.

Quote

The act of burning the wooden bits of the railcar to fuel the train engine is actually a lovely callback to an event in the original novel.

Yeah, Captain Speedy's boat! Also, there has been a previous movie that did the train dismantling. It's a Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud movie called "The Seven Per-Cent Solution" in which they are trying to catch up to a faster train and rescue someone.

I thought Fogg would allow Passepartout to stay in his spacious cabin with him, but him going to the crowded third class car and interacting with other people was good. Gives you a real feel for train travel for rich and poor.

I'm a little confused because I thought Abigail Fix, reporter, was supposed to substitute for Inspector Fix, the Scotland Yard detective who kept trying to arrest Fogg as the bank thief. But now they're introducing a saboteur funded by Bellamy, so isn't that just Inspector Fix again?

Edited January 10, 2022 by Cress
speculate about sabotage

[Tom Holmberg]

10 hours ago, j5cochran said:

The act of burning the wooden bits of the railcar to fuel the train engine is actually a lovely callback to an event in the original novel.

Makes me wonder what they are going to do with the long rail trip across the US since they already used the burning of the rail cars.

[sempervivum]

12 hours ago, magdalene said:

Great acting by David Tennant playing a very frightened man who is quite ill suited to be an adventurer finally rising to the occasion.

Yes, this was the best part of the episode for me. It was somewhat spoiled by the truly terrible child actor.

Still not feeling Spunky Gal. Is she supposed to be English or American? I realize the actress is German, so maybe her accent is a bit unreliable.

[DoctorAtomic]

Fix is the daughter of the newspaper/editor publisher. She said she remembered when she was a kid that Fogg would come over for lunch sometimes. 

[JustHereForFood]

I liked this even more than the first episode. Though I wonder when will it pick up more speed, they are still on Day 3 by the end of episode 2 of 8. Interesting that they are using more episodic characters, while only slowly introducing more info about the 3 main characters. I wonder what's the deal with Fogg's postcards, since we keep cutting back to them and Fogg is very reluctant to share information about his past.

[DoctorAtomic]

I think it's Day 4. The Day 3 card was flashed when they were waiting for the train, and then the next morning when they got to the bridge.  Passeportout went to find Fogg on the observation platform for his morning shave. 

I would think that the boat to the Suez will eat up a lot of days though. 

[magdalene]

I saw this has been renewed for a second season already.

[seacliffsal]

Much better than the first episode.  However, the journalist saying Fogg wasn't the man she thought he was really bothered me as she is "breaking" stereotypes so why shouldn't he?  Was she disappointed that he didn't stand up to the boy's father?  Why was his walking away to stop the escalation of the situation not "manly"?  I also didn't like that she, as a first class passenger, felt entitled to go the the third class car and dominate the conversation and down time that the workers had. 

I really liked that they showed Fogg's intelligence with the train incidence.

[DoctorAtomic]

To be fair, she knew Fogg since she was a kid, and now they're dealing with one another as adults. She's looking at him through a different lens. She also thought he was some kind of adventurer because she kept asking what motivated him to take on the challenge, when, in fact, he basically did it on a whim to spite Bellamy and because of an anonymous postcard calling him a coward. Not quite the heady subject for a series of newspaper articles. 

[buckboard]

I've been looking to find out how the train crossing the bridge incident was filmed.  Obviously, they didn't have them cross a damaged bridge for real.  I assume it's CGI , but I can't find more information than that the bridge scene was filmed in Romania. 

(Most scenes were filmed in Romania or South Africa, due to COVID.)  

[Tom Holmberg]

On 1/10/2022 at 5:01 PM, magdalene said:

I saw this has been renewed for a second season already.

So its going to take them 160 days to go around the world?

Edited January 13, 2022 by Tom Holmberg

[DoctorAtomic]

I think they're doing another Verne book. 

[Cress]

On 1/11/2022 at 12:41 PM, buckboard said:

I've been looking to find out how the train crossing the bridge incident was filmed.  Obviously, they didn't have them cross a damaged bridge for real.  I assume it's CGI , but I can't find more information than that the bridge scene was filmed in Romania. 

(Most scenes were filmed in Romania or South Africa, due to COVID.)  

Masterpiece shows short "behind the scenes" videos after each episode. This time they showed a video of them filming on the real bridge. It was not damaged at all, so yeah, I assume that they used CGI to make it look like there was a gap in the bridge. Nothing in-depth, though.

[Tom Holmberg]

On 1/12/2022 at 3:20 PM, DoctorAtomic said:

I think they're doing another Verne book. 

I think I saw something about a "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" series.

[JPPT1974]

Either "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth!"

[Cress]

I like how Fix is developing a friendship with Passepartout. She could totally sense that he was still grieving for his brother, and she suspected that he planned to leave them and runaway from his problems, just like he ran from France, and London. She knows why he's getting drunk and starting fights. I don't know if they'll stay just friends or become something more. I hope the show doesn't try to do a love triangle including Fogg, but I don't know what the show will do with the book's plot about Princess Aouda in India.

[DoctorAtomic]

I don't think they will because Fogg is friends with her father, and she talked about when he visited for lunch when she was a kid. Even when she went out to the front of the train to pour the ash on the tracks he was saying, 'I promised your father.'

 

[Tom Holmberg]

19 hours ago, JPPT1974 said:

Either "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" or "Journey to the Center of the Earth!"

Or, considering their fealty to Verne's stories, "20,000 Leagues to the Center of the Earth"

[MissLucas]

5 hours ago, Tom Holmberg said:

Or, considering their fealty to Verne's stories, "20,000 Leagues to the Center of the Earth"

That sounds like an amazing mash-up. I've read both book when I was a kid and all I remember from 20'000 Leagues is endless lists of marine life. Voyage to the Center of the Earth had more action. 

[magdalene]

On 1/13/2022 at 8:56 PM, Cress said:

I like how Fix is developing a friendship with Passepartout. She could totally sense that he was still grieving for his brother, and she suspected that he planned to leave them and runaway from his problems, just like he ran from France, and London. She knows why he's getting drunk and starting fights. I don't know if they'll stay just friends or become something more. I hope the show doesn't try to do a love triangle including Fogg, but I don't know what the show will do with the book's plot about Princess Aouda in India.

Fogg seems to have a tragic love in his past.  I don't get a Fogg/Fix romantic vibe at all.

[DanaK]

I’m a little skeptical that the boy would have been saved by a doctor in the late 1800s in Italy with that much of a leg injury. Would that be realistic?

Enjoyable episode overall

[DoctorAtomic]

It only looked like he needed stitches. The problem was the loss of blood, and they had transfusions back then, no? 

[MissLucas]

6 hours ago, DoctorAtomic said:

It only looked like he needed stitches. The problem was the loss of blood, and they had transfusions back then, no? 

Yes and no, the method was known since the 17th century and there were experiments (animals to animals/animals to humans/humans to humans) and lots of debate. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. The main reason it was so risky was that blood types were not known. Blood groups were detected 1901 but transfusions were still made directly from individual to individual. WWI was a catalyst for developing techniques to store blood and the first blood banks were created.

We can do some handwaving and imagine they met an adventurous Doctor and Papa was a match or a universal donor.

[Tom Holmberg]

On 1/29/2022 at 3:27 PM, MissLucas said:

Yes and no, the method was known since the 17th century and there were experiments (animals to animals/animals to humans/humans to humans) and lots of debate. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. The main reason it was so risky was that blood types were not known. Blood groups were detected 1901 but transfusions were still made directly from individual to individual.

Blood transfusions featured in the original novel of "Dracula" by Bram Stoker. which came out in 1897. So fictionally its possible (if not in reality).