Another B-grade episode. The Dresden Files hasn't exactly hit the ground running on TV, with part of the problem being that Harry's literary world is one of noir detective work; multiple plot threads interweaving to a clever resolution. An hour of TV isn't enough to do this kind of story justice in a self-contained manner.
So instead, we get episodes like The Boone Identity, a pretty standard and predictable X-Files-ish body-hopping story. There was some subtle uses of magic, sarcastic asides from ghostly Bob and great character stuff between Harry and Murphy the cop, but outside of that, nothing overly original.
Obviously for budgetry and story reasons, the TV writers can't slavishly mimic the world Jim Butcher has created on paper and he has addressed most of these in the Butcher Block podcast and seems happy with the alterations.
One change though that, I don't think, has been brought up is Harry's interaction with technology. In the books, a key side effect of magic is that it causes modern technology to go on the blink, which I always felt was a nice touch. However, in the TV show he uses telephones all the time without any problem and even stood next to a person using a computer this week without causing it to go haywire. It's a little thing, and certainly not worthy of Internet nerdfury, but kinda niggly.
I'm still waiting for this series to really fly...
So instead, we get episodes like The Boone Identity, a pretty standard and predictable X-Files-ish body-hopping story. There was some subtle uses of magic, sarcastic asides from ghostly Bob and great character stuff between Harry and Murphy the cop, but outside of that, nothing overly original.
Obviously for budgetry and story reasons, the TV writers can't slavishly mimic the world Jim Butcher has created on paper and he has addressed most of these in the Butcher Block podcast and seems happy with the alterations.
One change though that, I don't think, has been brought up is Harry's interaction with technology. In the books, a key side effect of magic is that it causes modern technology to go on the blink, which I always felt was a nice touch. However, in the TV show he uses telephones all the time without any problem and even stood next to a person using a computer this week without causing it to go haywire. It's a little thing, and certainly not worthy of Internet nerdfury, but kinda niggly.
I'm still waiting for this series to really fly...
The first two episodes were definitely B-grade. Jury's out on the third episode (I loved it, some others didn't). But the fourth episode ("Rules of Engagement") was very solid.
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