I never contemplated before just how carnage-heavy Series 2 of The Animals of Farthing Wood is compared to Series 1. Case in point: we're onto our seventh instance of death (Series 1 had six in total), and we're not even halfway through the series. The actual number of individual character deaths remains lower (as Series 1 was far more accustomed to killing off multiple characters at a time), but trust me when I say that Series 2 will get there soon enough.
After being outwitted by the Farthing Fox on their third visit to White Deer Park, the poachers readily shift their nightly activities from gunning down deer to targeting foxes, and a nameless son of Scarface is the one to pay the price. Scarface himself had correctly anticipated that there might be such reprisals for the foxes, so when he finds his son's body he immediately lays the blame at Fox's feet. He then catches Weasel and has her take a message back to Fox that he intends to seek vengeance. Fox raises the obvious question - why would the poachers shoot a blue fox when it was a red fox they were looking for? I believe that the series genuinely hit a roadblock with this particular plot point thanks to their decision to colour-code the two tribes of foxes, so naturally some exposition was required. Here, Vixen offers the explanation that all foxes look the same in the dusk, so it wouldn't make a difference to the poachers (the non-canon audio drama offers a slightly different explanation, in which the winter snow apparently gave everything at night a ghostly blue tint, so the poachers were not under the impression that it was a red fox that had thwarted them at all). Fearing that the poachers will kill every fox they lay eyes upon just to be totally sure of getting him, Fox considers giving himself up to the poachers, but Vixen convinces him that it would be a pointless sacrifice. In the end, it is a combination of the Warden returning and Fox's cunning that leads to the poachers being defeated once and for all.
HORROR FACTOR: 8. The moment of death itself occurs off-screen, but a reaction shot from Weasel does a nice enough job of articulating the horror, and the manner in which the poachers probe the fox's body to ensure that he is dead really hammers home the morbidness of the scene.
NOBILITY FACTOR: 1. Scarface's son was killed purely out of spite, over something that had nothing to do with him in the first place. This is an exemplary case of the victim just happening to be the wrong place and the wrong time.
TEAR-JERKER FACTOR: 2. The sight of the lifeless fox's limb dangling off the poacher's gun is heart-rendering as well as gruesome. Only when Lady Blue subsequently appears and is heard crying, it visibly doesn't match with her onscreen animation, and I find that so distracting.
RATING: 11
No comments:
Post a Comment