The Five Spot: I Have A New Favorite TV Character

Also this week: Colin Farrell goes full Karl Havoc and a reminder about how good James Earl Jones was in The Sandlot

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Please do not do curses on me

Bad Monkey, as we discussed a few weeks ago, has the juice. The Apple TV series remains a blast of a late-summer watch as it hums through its season, with severed arm mysteries and wisecracking detectives and Vince Vaughn in a series of tropical button-up shirts. We don’t have to go through all of it again. It’s just a good time and I think you will enjoy it if you give it a run.

And if you do give it a run, you will meet my favorite character on television right now: a Bahamian dark arts practitioner named the Dragon Queen, played by Jodie Turner-Smith, who fascinates and frightens me in ways only a truly special character can. She’s only ever on the screen for a few minutes at a time, at least so far. And whenever she is, she’s usually staring straight through some poor overmatched sap with piercing eyes that cut like daggers. I get visibly excited when she shows up, even while knowing that I would surely crumble into a small pile of dust if she ever looked at me like that. She’s the best.

A lot of the credit here goes to Turner-Smith. It’s the kind of character that could easily become a caricature if not drawn well and shaded in properly. The character is kind of a caricature in the original book, actually, a scary voodoo goddess who mystifies and intimidates everyone she crosses. The character in the show is that, too, to some degree, but there’s also more of a person there. Some of that is the writing but I think most of it is Turner-Smith sometimes showing a softness in the eyes between the daggers I mentioned earlier. It’s a really great performance.

And things are getting interesting for the Dragon Queen, too, especially after the ending of this week’s episode. The whole show is getting interesting, actually. And it’s given me these screencaps, which I suspect I’ll get a lot of use out of going forward.

Long live the Dragon Queen.

FOUR: Colin Farrell really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really did not like dressing up as The Penguin