#15 Bonne Nuit
02/06/20 20:04
Just after lockdown started, various notable figures like Stephen Fry and Floella Benjamin urged us to turn on the subtitles during children’s TV shows to encourage literacy. As a result, when our boys watch Teen Titans Go on the Alexa while they have their dinner, they can read along as Beast Boy says ‘I'm diggin', I'm diggin'. Diggin' like a pro, yo.’ I’m fairly sure that’s doing them some good on a deeper level, and it allows me to feel better about myself as I ignore them, pour myself some wine and doom-surf on my phone until my retinas melt.
Subtitles are great for grownups too, because you have to keep your eyes on the screen, which makes it difficult to scrabble about on the sofa for the last piece of Cadbury’s salted caramel. I swear my calorie count has halved this week, as we’ve binged on Into the Night, which is almost entirely en Français. Foreign-language stuff makes me feel terribly high-brow, even though the series in question is sci-fi schlock that goes in hard on the ‘fi’ and doesn’t worry too much about the ‘sci’. Naturellement, I fucking love it.
The premise is this: A crazy NATO officer hijacks a plane because he’s learned that daylight is killing people, and the only way to avoid it is to take off and fly west – ‘into ze night’. (NB - one of the cast actually says this phrase, in English, with a sexy ‘Allo ‘Allo accent, at the end of the first episode, and I nearly stood, applauded, and walked out of my own living room.)
Anyway, back to the plot. Obviously, the other people on board think NATO guy is nutso, and he has to shoot the pilot in the hand to make his point. Luckily, they have a social influencer amongst them who is able to look at Instagram and see footage of people back on the ground keeling over as the gamma rays hit them. How could anyone film that? Ça ne fait rien. Everyone realises some weird merde is going down, and the only way they can avoid being fried is to outrun that naughty sun. From then on, they’re stuck on the plane, arguing with each other about democracy (this is French, after all – well, Belgian, but you get my radioactive drift), working out which of them are secret terrorists or rapists, and occasionally stopping off at a handy airport to stock up on snacks in the dark.
Still with me? Bien. Every episode starts with flashback as one character remembers life before plane-lockdown. If it was me, it would be images of watching my youngest bob about in a trampoline park, or going to Anthropologie to stare at nice coats. But this bunch of miscreants have much bigger, nastier fish to eviscerate. We see them having enthusiastic extra-marital sex, beating someone up in a brothel, getting sucked into online dating scams. I mean, that’s why they’re in a fast-paced apocalyptic drama and I’m stuck at home teaching my boys the difference between cacao pods and Mars Bars. Everyone has a secret, and a skill, and that’s the beauty of having a group of diverse and dodgy passengers trapped in an aircraft. As the series goes on, Sylvie the suicidal ex-helicopter pilot manages to land the plane, the sour-faced mother with a sick kid translates the last words of a Russian cosmonaut stranded in space, while Ayaz the Turkish mercenary is good at cobbling together nasal cannulas, and cutting gemstones from corpses.
Oui, Into Ze Night is completely bananas, and yes, it’s brilliant because, circumscribed as we are, at least we’re not stuck in a falling-apart aeroplane in a demented race with a star. It makes me feel positively free – free to venture into my back garden and feel the beams hot on my face; free to walk our hallowed earth without having to raid a vending machine and hop back on the tarmac before dawn; free to eat an apple without it tasting like paper because cosmic rays have stripped its nutrients.
As ever, sci-fi provides the most comforting out-of-mind experience, reminding you that however bad things are, at least you’re not a feverish adulterous co-pilot with a septic hand having a simultaneous mid-life crisis and stress-induced breakdown, or a homicidal soldier left on a runway to face a grisly gamma fate. Wah-hey! Watch this, and go into your own night safe in that knowledge. À bientôt, mes amis.
Subtitles are great for grownups too, because you have to keep your eyes on the screen, which makes it difficult to scrabble about on the sofa for the last piece of Cadbury’s salted caramel. I swear my calorie count has halved this week, as we’ve binged on Into the Night, which is almost entirely en Français. Foreign-language stuff makes me feel terribly high-brow, even though the series in question is sci-fi schlock that goes in hard on the ‘fi’ and doesn’t worry too much about the ‘sci’. Naturellement, I fucking love it.
The premise is this: A crazy NATO officer hijacks a plane because he’s learned that daylight is killing people, and the only way to avoid it is to take off and fly west – ‘into ze night’. (NB - one of the cast actually says this phrase, in English, with a sexy ‘Allo ‘Allo accent, at the end of the first episode, and I nearly stood, applauded, and walked out of my own living room.)
Anyway, back to the plot. Obviously, the other people on board think NATO guy is nutso, and he has to shoot the pilot in the hand to make his point. Luckily, they have a social influencer amongst them who is able to look at Instagram and see footage of people back on the ground keeling over as the gamma rays hit them. How could anyone film that? Ça ne fait rien. Everyone realises some weird merde is going down, and the only way they can avoid being fried is to outrun that naughty sun. From then on, they’re stuck on the plane, arguing with each other about democracy (this is French, after all – well, Belgian, but you get my radioactive drift), working out which of them are secret terrorists or rapists, and occasionally stopping off at a handy airport to stock up on snacks in the dark.
Still with me? Bien. Every episode starts with flashback as one character remembers life before plane-lockdown. If it was me, it would be images of watching my youngest bob about in a trampoline park, or going to Anthropologie to stare at nice coats. But this bunch of miscreants have much bigger, nastier fish to eviscerate. We see them having enthusiastic extra-marital sex, beating someone up in a brothel, getting sucked into online dating scams. I mean, that’s why they’re in a fast-paced apocalyptic drama and I’m stuck at home teaching my boys the difference between cacao pods and Mars Bars. Everyone has a secret, and a skill, and that’s the beauty of having a group of diverse and dodgy passengers trapped in an aircraft. As the series goes on, Sylvie the suicidal ex-helicopter pilot manages to land the plane, the sour-faced mother with a sick kid translates the last words of a Russian cosmonaut stranded in space, while Ayaz the Turkish mercenary is good at cobbling together nasal cannulas, and cutting gemstones from corpses.
Oui, Into Ze Night is completely bananas, and yes, it’s brilliant because, circumscribed as we are, at least we’re not stuck in a falling-apart aeroplane in a demented race with a star. It makes me feel positively free – free to venture into my back garden and feel the beams hot on my face; free to walk our hallowed earth without having to raid a vending machine and hop back on the tarmac before dawn; free to eat an apple without it tasting like paper because cosmic rays have stripped its nutrients.
As ever, sci-fi provides the most comforting out-of-mind experience, reminding you that however bad things are, at least you’re not a feverish adulterous co-pilot with a septic hand having a simultaneous mid-life crisis and stress-induced breakdown, or a homicidal soldier left on a runway to face a grisly gamma fate. Wah-hey! Watch this, and go into your own night safe in that knowledge. À bientôt, mes amis.
- Into the Night, 6 episodes, Netflix
