MovieChat Forums > The Bletchley Circle (2012) Discussion > Opinions now it's finished? SPOILERS

Opinions now it's finished? SPOILERS

posted 12 years ago by badgerking10
10 replies | jump to latest

Let's start with the negatives.
- The writing / plotting could have been much better... For an episode and a half, they're merrily doing their detective stuff. Then, Susan meets Cavendish and he tells them exactly who they're looking for.
- There were a couple too many characters going: "I signed the Official Secrets Act, don't you know? But, with relatively little persuasion, I'll happily tell you everything you need to know."
- There wasn't really any "jeopardy" towards the end of the last episode, as the other three knew exactly where Susan was.
- How exactly they were using their Bletchley skills to track down the killer could have been explained a little better... Having read a biography of Alan Turing, I know that detailed explanations of the processes used at Bletchley can very quickly start to go over the head of someone who doesn't have that sort of brain. But, on several occasions, it wasn't really clear how the four had come to a particular conclusion.
- While obviously done on the cheap, the period detail was generally OK. But, I did get a bit fed up of seeing the spotless exterior of St Pancras station - it would presumably have been very grimy in the '50s - and the very un-1950s ironwork that was put up outside during the recent refurbishment.

On the positive side...
- It's very rare for anything on ITV to even tempt me to watch, let alone hold my attention for a whole series - by ITV standards, this was about as good as it gets.
- The basic idea was interesting and intriguing.
- The acting was very good.
- Despite its faults, I really rather enjoyed it.

I would be interested to see another case involving the four. Though, I would want the writing / plotting to be rather better and a little more effort put into the period exteriors - no more St Pancras station and its anachronistically gleaming exterior, please!

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] randommovies2002 12 years ago

Yes, a fascinating topic and great for screen dramatization.

I wish someone from the UK would do a film or program about this, too:

http://articles.cnn.com/2007-12-05/living/mf.waropoly_1_allied-pows-monopoly-maps?_s=PM:LIVING

[–] Jerseyporter 12 years ago

Agree on all points. The St. Pancras part as well. It would cost money but they could have grimed it up a bit in post production with some computer action, ha.

I did notice though they tried for some accuracy by, in the brief shots, trying to make it look like taxis were coming out of the arch that was the old taxi entrance (which is now that incredibly posh BAR!). So I gave the points for that.

In sum though the very idea that somebody would be brave enough to base a crime thriller on extremely complex pattern theory makes me take my hat off to whomever commissions programs at ITV now. They also went way out on a limb recently with "The Last Weekend," which some I know did not like, but at least I give them a *A for trying something outside the box these days.

In some ways it was interesting to see how the first episode just launched off from the get go on the whole code and Bletchley thing, rather presuming the viewers would have some of the back story of Bletchley in their heads, even if not an understanding of pattern theory or the Enigma machine shown operating in the opening credits.

I bet Bletchley is going to have a surge of visitors this weekend! Good thing too.

It was amazing what those folks did....and how they had to live with the secrets all those years and never get credit for anything as "they weren't there."

Can't recall but Bletchly itself was not known publicly to exist for a very long while, as they went from the war to the Cold War and operated for many years thereafter in the same capacity. But cannot remember the year it finally came out that it existed. Others may recall.

I'd love to know because my uncle (my dad's eldest brother) worked at Bletchley Park but we only found out after he died (he kept the secret well) so it's something of an 'enigma' to us too! I live in Jersey, so am unlikely to be in a position to visit Bletchley Park any time soon, but I'd love to. The whole code-breaking thing hurts my brain (obviously haven't inherited my uncle's mathematical brain, lol!) but it's fascinating.

I've enjoyed the series, even with the plot holes!

Jerseyporter

"The end is where we start from." (Captain Jack, "Torchwood")

[–] AlbaITA 12 years ago

According to wikipedia:

"At the end of the war, much of the equipment used and its blueprints were destroyed. Although thousands of people were involved in the deciphering efforts, the participants remained silent for decades about what they had done during the war, and it was only in the 1970s that the work at Bletchley Park was revealed to the general public."

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] alfa-16 12 years ago

68,000 people were involved. Though only a fraction knew the entire picture. Outside Bletchley, the number who weren't actually involved in recording and decoding was minute. Details began to be released after newspaper accounts lifted the corner of the carpet in the 1970's but good and accurate accounts didn't really appear until the 1990's.

Churchill, foreseeing the Nuremberg Trials and wanting to restore something like normality as soon as possible, ordered all decoded material destroyed. Or so we are led to believe. This action removed the requirement to produce any decrypted information in evidence in thousands of trials for war crimes, significantly shortened the overall period of of recrimination and provided a real reason for concealment of the operation under the Official Secrets Act.

[–] Squeeth2 12 years ago

A bonus from not officiously pursuing German war criminals and inviting comparison with British colonialism, was that former colonies were donated Enigma machines... so no-one could read their communications....

I got Winterbotham's book in the 70s and then realised that I'd read two things which were innocent diclosures in previous books. In The Flying Sailor by Andre Jubelin (1951) he recounts convoys being given routes around U-boat wolf packs each night ('from an agent') and in the memoir of a RAF mid-upper gunner he recounts crews being given the Luftwaffe colours of the day during raid briefings ('from an agent').... Apparently agent reports or 'captured documents' were covers invented in the Great War.

Marlon, Claudia and Dimby the cats 1989-2005, 2007 and 2010.

[–] defiant-10 12 years ago

Part of the reason that Bletchley's accomplishments were kept secret, and why the "destruction" of the hardware was revealed, is that the coding machines and their methods were used by cold war opponents up into the seventies. We were still secretly decoding their communications.

What I had in mind was boxing the compass.

[–] TheDuchessofM 12 years ago

I thought it dropped the ball--but was still intriguing--halfway through episode two. If I wrotethe episodes, I would have had Lucy kidnapped by Crowley on the train and episode three would have been about the other women using their skills to find her before she was murdered. Much more dramatic than what actually happened. And was anyone else left underwhelmed by Crowley's so-called psychological torture of Susan? I was scratching my head over why she was so frightened when there was only one scene of him watching her house, and he did nothing else threatening.

The intriguing part was that she vehemently denied his grandstanding over how exciting and thrilling her quest to find him was, and that they were a matched pair of repressed geniuses in the post-war era. Isn't that why she was so anxious to use her Bletchley Park intuition to find the killer? I also found Susan's lie about saving Lucy from her abusive husband uncomfortable to watch: if she's running around tell everyone on the planet she was at Bletchley, why keep it a secret from her husband?

But I did enjoy it and would like to see another series.

[–] SrEditor 11 years ago

I thought she was terrified just knowing who the killer was, meeting him and recognizing his deception. She was so far out of "the box" she'd been living in for 9 years.