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Oct. 27th, 2023 01:17 pmI've been watching Follyfoot recently which for something from the 1970s is actually progressive in many ways and it was definitely not just 'pretty girl and cute ponies and het romance' shit. I mean like they had to shoot 2 horses due to mistreatment of them even just within the first episode, they did not fuck around, and they also addressed things like prejudice against travellers and suchlike as well as animal cruelty. (Also the het romance thing... never actually happened. They specifically had them not get together).
I liked the first two series even though it was dark at times. The third series was weird though. Oddly it reminded me in places of some of the late Granada Holmes episodes (though I think there's some crossover between the people who worked on both? So that might not be as strange as it seems), I mean that show did go rather bizarre in the later episodes too where you had Holmes moping about and behaving strangely and being all ~spiritual~ and shit. It was odd. And so was a lot of Follyfoot in the third series. Like Dora having a nightmare where she saw things that were happening elsewhere/were going to happen. So apparently she's suddenly getting prophetic visions now. And her suddenly deciding she wanted to leave Follyfoot. And the whole antagonism between her and Steve, I don't get it, he kept having a go at her about things that he did himself, he kept flying off the handle with her for being different to him yet kept saying basically he liked that she was like that, also he's the one who's been in prison but suddenly he seems to have incredible faith in the police? Also he kept calling her 'girl' throughout series 3, I'm sure far more than he did previously, and I hated that. I didn't really like him at all in series 3.
Also the episode with the guy who treated his family like crap and nobody liked except his horse and then he turned the horse loose and set fire to the stable and then dropped dead and then on top of that it had Dora angsting over his death being her fault somehow (it wasn't) I found particularly unpleasant. The way overall it all worked out with Steve trying to take over and Dora obsessing over hating how everything was changing and then it just ended was just really strange and perhaps they may have intended to resolve things more satisfactorily had they made the film (which never actually got made) but as far as I can tell there wasn't intended to be another series of it. That does kind of seem to have been all they intended to do. Which sucks. Series 2 would have been a much better place to end it if that was all they ever intended to do - it had Dora being given Follyfoot; it had the thing with the tree sprouting, it had hope. Series 3 just felt like a huge downer throughout that didn't resolve anything or have any real hope, just a vague idea that 'everything is changing and that's not all necessarily bad but I still hate that it is changing' (also the oldest horse dying and Dora just missing being with him at the end like she wanted. That was depressing too). If I watch this again I don't think I'd bother with series 3, I didn't like it much.
Side-note: Ron (who despite everything is a far more likeable character in the show than in the books and I did like how much he seemed to care about Dora) reminds me a hell of a lot of a very young Jared Harris so that's odd too.
I liked the first two series even though it was dark at times. The third series was weird though. Oddly it reminded me in places of some of the late Granada Holmes episodes (though I think there's some crossover between the people who worked on both? So that might not be as strange as it seems), I mean that show did go rather bizarre in the later episodes too where you had Holmes moping about and behaving strangely and being all ~spiritual~ and shit. It was odd. And so was a lot of Follyfoot in the third series. Like Dora having a nightmare where she saw things that were happening elsewhere/were going to happen. So apparently she's suddenly getting prophetic visions now. And her suddenly deciding she wanted to leave Follyfoot. And the whole antagonism between her and Steve, I don't get it, he kept having a go at her about things that he did himself, he kept flying off the handle with her for being different to him yet kept saying basically he liked that she was like that, also he's the one who's been in prison but suddenly he seems to have incredible faith in the police? Also he kept calling her 'girl' throughout series 3, I'm sure far more than he did previously, and I hated that. I didn't really like him at all in series 3.
Also the episode with the guy who treated his family like crap and nobody liked except his horse and then he turned the horse loose and set fire to the stable and then dropped dead and then on top of that it had Dora angsting over his death being her fault somehow (it wasn't) I found particularly unpleasant. The way overall it all worked out with Steve trying to take over and Dora obsessing over hating how everything was changing and then it just ended was just really strange and perhaps they may have intended to resolve things more satisfactorily had they made the film (which never actually got made) but as far as I can tell there wasn't intended to be another series of it. That does kind of seem to have been all they intended to do. Which sucks. Series 2 would have been a much better place to end it if that was all they ever intended to do - it had Dora being given Follyfoot; it had the thing with the tree sprouting, it had hope. Series 3 just felt like a huge downer throughout that didn't resolve anything or have any real hope, just a vague idea that 'everything is changing and that's not all necessarily bad but I still hate that it is changing' (also the oldest horse dying and Dora just missing being with him at the end like she wanted. That was depressing too). If I watch this again I don't think I'd bother with series 3, I didn't like it much.
Side-note: Ron (who despite everything is a far more likeable character in the show than in the books and I did like how much he seemed to care about Dora) reminds me a hell of a lot of a very young Jared Harris so that's odd too.
