Unfortunately, I didn’t stumble upon Dirk Gently until after the series was canceled. Fortunately, I didn’t know the series had already been canceled when I stumbled up on it. Which is good because I may not have bothered with it after the disappointment with Limitless. And that would have been my loss because both seasons of this series are wicked good.
There is so much going on that the fact that I was introduced to it through Netflix is a definite advantage. The series is less based on than inspired by a novel by Douglas Adams which, if you are familiar at all with Adams, should tell you a lot. The full name of the show, and book, is Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Brian Moylan at the Guardian condescendingly describes the kind of person who would like this show as being the person who in high school who was “a bit of an outcast, kept to himself, was a little bit too into Star Wars, and always knew where to get the best weed”. Well, aside from knowing where to get the best weed- or any weed, that was me in high school so this show was made with folks like me in mind.
It is a twisting tale that starts with a particularly gruesome and inexplicable murder in the first episode. The cast of characters includes: Todd, Todd’s sister Amanda, Dirk Gently, and my personal fav, Farah Black. Not to mention a holistic assassin in the form of Bartine “Bart” Curlish who appreciates good conversation as a relief from the normal litany of screaming and begging she endures from her victims. There are cops, the FBI, the CIA, eccentric millionaires, steampunk, time travel, a corgi, and it just gets weirder from there. For example, in one of the shows less outrageous plot points, Amanda suffers from a fictional nerve disease which causes her to have visceral, often painful, hallucinations. The disease, pararibulitis, is the catalyst for several whole other plot arcs. And those are just the first episodes of the first season. I’m not even going to go into the second season. You have to see it to believe it. Basically, it’s the kind of thing that is meant to be binge watched because at the end of the first few episodes your first and last reaction will be WTF? But in the best possible way.
Back when I was teaching I had a student who gave a presentation that, years later, still sticks with me. Because this young man suffered from social anxiety his actual presentation skills got worse as the semester went on. He was simply too overwhelmed to focus well. The presentations he gave, however, only became more ambitious. For his final he did one about the letter C. I’m sitting there, admittedly a little zoned, having already watched an hour or so of university freshmen exclaim about things like the positives of hard contacts over soft and thinking I should have made the maximum length of these things shorter. So he starts talking about the letter C and I sigh internally but keep a happy face on it. Then I find myself being drawn in. He starts with how, as a beginning learner of English he hated the letter C. To him it was just this extra letter that didn’t need to be there. They already had S and K, what did they need C for? But as he continued to explore the language he saw all the sounds that wouldn’t exist without the letter C. He began to understand how the letter C contributed to the English language. Now, when he encounters something, or someone, that frustrates him the way the letter C did he tries to figure out that person or thing, to understand, instead of rushing to judgement and condemnation.
It was a spiral presentation, brilliantly done. He starts out with this random subject and brings it inwards connecting it tightly to his ultimate point. In the original 1987 Adams novel the main character says, “The term `holistic’ refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things…I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose.” In the show this gets shortened to the interconnectedness of all things. And that interconnectedness is something we the viewers have to trust the writers will lead us to as the comedy/drama/mystery/fantasy show seems to spiral out into a thousand subplots linked by seeming coincidence. It’s bizarre, illogical, comical, outrageously violent, just as outrageously confusing, and entirely entertaining.