Vlad Jelly

Watching the new Dirk Gently show. It’s odd. Odd in ways besides the kinds you’d expect from a Douglas Adams property. The titular character feels right. His voice is what you’d expect from old Doug’s original creation. He’s noticeably slimmer than the dude from the book, but that was also the case with the BBC version I vaguely remember from a previous year. That curly guy from “Episodes”. I always want to call him Stephen Moffat, but that’s a different Stephen.

But it feels as though this Dirk has been transported to a different world. And I don’t mean that in a diegetic sense. Dimensional transportation would not be surprising in an Adams derivative. It really just feels as though Dirk has wandered on to the set of some other show. When I first saw Elijah Wood on this, I thought, “Oh. I don’t think that I’ve seen him in anything since that dog show.” And it actually feels like that. It feels like “Wilfred”, but the dog’s been switched out for a holistic detective and a heightened degree of weird happenings.

But then there's the comic that Arvind Ethan David created. He also helped on the show and made a stage version that Adams apparently enjoyed. Though the comic began before the show, thus bearing no inherent relation beyond shared provenance, its newest storyline posits that the show is another universe, and the comic's characters are starting to interact with it. It doesn't actually make the television series feel more like its source in itself, but it does draw some disparate aspects of the entire franchise closer together and fulls it out thereby. One might even say that it gives another dimension to the show. I probably won't, though. But I will say that this touch of unexpected concordance is not inappropriate for a story with titular ties to holism.

Bonus Question? 

What is that hair actually supposed to be?

Not quite sure.