Death in Paradise: "Phone-In Murder" (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 2) at 10 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies expecting to see a 1975 Blaxploitation film from American International called Cornbread, Earl and Me, but I’d made a mistake reading their schedule – that’s actually going to be aired tonight instead. So I switched back to KPBS for the latest episode in sequence of Death in Paradise – I watched this series for the first time the Friday before last and quite liked that episode, “The Painkiller Thrller.” Unfortunately, this one, “Phone-In Murder,” was nowhere nearly as good. It begins with a woman named Eve Wilding (Aislín McGuckin) calling from a lavish home on the island of Guadeloupe, where the series takes place, telling the police she wants to report a murder. When the police, headed by detective inspector Neville Parker (Ralf Little, the series lead) and detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), who was supposed to have got her promotion from uniformed officer to plainclothes detective at the end of “Painkiller Thriller,” as well as a third officer named Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder), arrive at the scene, they find Eve Wilding face down in a decorative pool on the house’s first-floor porch. She’s still alive – the cops are able to call in an ambulance and get her to a hospital in time to save her life – but she’s shown signs of having been strangled and left face down in the pool to die. The police deduce that there’s no way an outside assailant could have got into the house and therefore whoever attacked Eve is still in there. They’re also faced with trying to figure out whether Eve suspected she was about to be murdered herself or she was reporting a previous victim who was already dead.

We get a lot of shots of Naomi and Darlene, both young Black women with a lot of feminine curves the show’s costume designers (uncredited on imdb.com) go out of their way to show off, encasing both actresses in skin-tight pants of very bright colors. We also get to meet the other people inside the house, including Orla Mills (Eileen Walsh) and her daughter Astrid (Isabelle Connolly), as well as Eve’s husband Callum (Owen McDonald). Orla’s husband has recently died – he’s been cremated and they’re planning a ceremony during which they will sprinkle his ashes on the local beach – but we learn that two weeks or so before his death he ordered DNA tests on himself and Astrid and learned from them that he was not Astrid’s biological father. They had had a number of miscarriages and failures with IV fertilization before Orla got pregnant, but the real father was Callum Wilding, a co-worker with whom she drifted into an affair because “I was in a dark place.” Apparently Callum murdered Orla’s husband and tried to kill Eve out of jealousy – writer Emma Goodwin wasn’t all that clear about whodunit and even less so about whydunit. I was left with a reasonably entertaining show whose subplots, including the one about Nathan’s sister Izzy (Kate O’Flynn), who after not having contacted him for two years came out to Guadeloupe and imposed herself on him as a house guest from hell while she tried to make up her mind whether to accept her latest boyfriend de jour’s marriage proposal, were more fun than the main intrigue.

The Cook (Comicque Film Corporation, Paramount, 1918)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When my husband Charles came home, we ended up watching a short documentary on the career of largely forgotten silent film comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who made more money than any silent comedy star except Charlie Chaplin and, like Chaplin, won the right to write and direct his own films. Arbuckle’s career came to a crashing end on Labor Day weekend in 1921, when he took a vacation to San Francisco, rented a suite at the St. Francis Hotel and hosted a party. The party ended with the death of an otherwise forgettable starlet named Virginia Rappé, who took sick at the party and was rushed to a local hospital, where she croaked without ever regaining consciousness. Arbuckle was accused of having raped and killed her – one story was that he had fatally injured her by penetrating her with a Coke bottle (a tale that might have had its roots in the account of Arbuckle’s first wife, Minta Durfee, who said he couldn’t maintain an erection to have sex normally) – and he went through three trials. The jury at the first trial deadlocked 10 to 2 for acquittal; at the second trial they deadlocked again, but in favor of conviction. After the third trial Arbuckle was not only acquitted, the foreperson sent a note to the effect that “Acquittal is not good enough for Roscoe Arbuckle.” But even before there was a jury verdict in either direction, Paramount, which had Arbuckle under contract via his independent company, had dropped him and physically destroyed his unreleased features. No other studio would hire him, and at a time when women’s organizations and the Roman Catholic Church already had it in for the film industry, Arbuckle became one of the poster children (along with his former Keystone Studios co-star Mabel Normand and the mysterious British-born director William Desmond Taylor) for Hollywood’s alleged immorality. Fearful of government censorship of movies – the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in 1912 that movies were strictly “a business” and therefore weren’t protected by the First Amendment, an opinion that stood until 1953 – the major studios got together and hired former Postmaster General Will Hays to head an office that would ensure that both the movies and the people who made them would stay “clean.”

In a way Arbuckle, like Bill Cosby, set himself up; just a few months before that wild weekend in San Francisco he had given an interview proclaiming his determination never to make any movie that wouldn’t be wholesome entertainment for the entire family, including children. Later stars with more raffish screen images, like Marlene Dietrich and Errol Flynn, were able to survive public scandals with their careers relatively unscathed. Arbuckle continued to work as a live performer in nightclubs and the rapidly shrinking number of vaudeville theatres, and he occasionally was allowed to direct films under the pseudonym “William B. Goodrich” (i.e., “Will be good and rich”). His most famous directorial credit as “Goodrich” was a 1927 silent called The Red Mill, starring Marion Davies and produced by her sugar-daddy William Randolph Hearst, who seems to have given Arbuckle the assignment largely to atone for how much money he and his papers had made off their wildly sensational coverage of Arbuckle’s trials and scandal. Among other points the YouTube mini-documentary made about Arbuckle was that he mentored both Charlie Chaplin (at Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio) and Buster Keaton (at Arbuckle’s own Comicque Film Corporation, which he and producer Joseph Schenck set up after Arbuckle left Keystone in 1917). A number of gags identified today with both Chaplin (the dance with the bread-rolls in The Gold Rush) and Keaton (the one in which a false front collapses on top of him and he’s saved only because he happens to fall through an open window) were actually originated in Arbuckle’s films. Arbuckle was also the first film personality to sign a $1 million contract, and he anticipated both Chaplin and Keaton in winning the right to write and direct his own films, Keaton in particular never forgot his debt to Arbuckle; in the late interviews he gave as a sort of grand old man of comedy Keaton said, “Everything I knew about directing I’d learned from watching Arbuckle do it.” Arbuckle’s career ended tragically when he died suddenly of a heart attack in his sleep while on the brink of a major comeback. In 1933 Jack Warner signed him to do six two-reel comedies with the promise of a feature deal if they were successful. They were, but just before Arbuckle was about to sign to make his first feature, he died.

After we watched the mini-documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsrIlnZwzHw) – which was titled My Name Is Roscoe, after Arbuckle’s own frequent criticism of people who addressed him as “Fatty” – we went to another YouTube post and saw The Cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSTq10qm9cE), a 1918 two-reeler from Comicque and Paramount which featured Arbuckle as a cook in a fancy restaurant and Keaton as his waiter. Earlier I’d posted moviemagg reviews of two collections of Arbuckle’s comedies from his Keystone days and I’d said that one reason I don’t think he’s as well-remembered as Chaplin or Keaton was lack of character consistency. Arbuckle would literally do anything for a laugh, whether it made sense for the character he was supposed to be playing or not. Admittedly I’ve never seen any of Arbuckle’s surviving features and I’m basing that only on his one- and two-reelers – they lasted between 10 and 25 minutes and comedy shorts didn’t demand the kind of careful characterizations as did features (something both Chaplin and Keaton learned when they started making features and realized there were some gags they could get away with in two-reelers that they couldn’t in longer movies). (Actually I had seen an Arbuckle feature before, Leap Year, and written about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/leap-year-joseph-am-schenck-productions.html. I just hadn’t remenbered it!) The first reel of The Cook shows Arbuckle and Keaton incredibly agile – Arbuckle is able to make elaborate dishes and throw them across the restaurant floor, and Keaton equally able to catch them, without spilling any food. They also do a bizarre spoof of spaghetti (which is referred to in an intertitle as “tapeworm a la carte”) in which Arbuckle, Keaton and two companions adopt elaborate and highly bizarre ways of eating it, including putting it in a funnel and trying to extract its contents. The gag reaches its payoff when the two other men at the table string a length of spaghetti between their mouths – and Arbuckle and Keaton hang napkins out to dry along it, then snip it with scissors.

In reel two Arbuckle, Keaton and their comic-villain nemesis, Al St. John, end up at an amusement park called “Goatland.” At first I wondered why it was called that, but then I saw the people there were riding around in rental carts pulled by goats. There are some terrific scenes of Arbuckle, Keaton, St. John and the woman they’re all more or less interested in (Alice Lake) chasing each other around a roller-coaster (though fortunately for them it’s not in operation through most of the film) and some scenes in which Arbuckle has to contend with Luke, his own dog who made appearances in many of his films. Also there’s a spectacular dive off a high platform that’s supposedly the Alice Lake character but whom I suspect was really Buster Keaton in drag; in his later star years, Keaton was famous not only for doing his own stunts but frequently risking on the sets of other movies and stunt-doubling for other actors (of both genders) as well. I wouldn’t call Roscoe Arbuckle a comic genius at Chaplin’s or Keaton’s level – I remember one of Arbuckle’s Keystone films, The Knockout, which cast him as a prizefighter and Chaplin as the referee, and watching them together you could see the difference between talent and genius (though they were much better matched in another Keystone movie, The Rounders, based on a sketch Chaplin had done in the London music halls that could be described as the movie Laurel and Hardy spent their whole careers ripping off) – but it does seem horrendously unfair that he’s been written out of the histories of classic Hollywood over a scandal that (unlike the one that brought down Bill Cosby) wasn’t even his fault; the modern consensus about Virginia Rappé’s death was she died from peritonitis caused by a botched illegal abortion (the sort of thing modern-day Republicans want to return us to as their way of “making America great again”).

Law and Order: "Turn the Page" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 1, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 1) I watched three consecutive episodes in Dick Wolf’s surviving Law and Order franchise, starting with a show on the flagship Law and Order series in which a young woman named Celeste Clark (Mellisa Goodwin) is cornered on a dark, deserted city street well after dark by an assailant in a bright red jacket. He strangles her with some sort of metal something-or-other, with such force he breaks her hyoid bone, and the next time we see her she’s a corpse and the lead detectives, Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and newbie Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), show up to investigate her murder. The police first interrogate the white victim’s Black ex-boyfriend, Mason Smith (Anthony Chatmon III), but let him go after DNA testing clears him. The cops then do a search for other victims killed similarly, and they come up with three Black twenty-something sex workers who were all murdered the same way. Detective Riley has a history with one of these cases since he was the original investigator on it, and the father of the victim whose killing he was assigned is still upset that the New York Police Department is making such a big effort to find the killer of a white woman while it did comparatively little to find the killer of a Black one. Ultimately they trace the crimes to Bruce Elliot (Paul Scanlan), who like Celeste was a devotée of a private sex club as well as someone who made their living in the financial services industry. Elliot is finally arrested in a restaurant after he’s taken a young woman (Nicole Callender) hostage and tried to trade her life for a getaway car.

Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) take the case to trial even though they’re only going to indict Elliot for Celeste’s murder since they don’t have enough evidence against him for the killings of the three Black women, though after Judge Arnold Pappas (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson) rules a key piece of evidence against Elliot inadmissible, the prosecutors ask for and receive permission to introduce evidence of Elliot’s previous crimes as “prior bad acts.” The trial is disrupted big-time when the Black victim’s father makes an outburst in court denouncing Elliot and his attorney, Rachel Horn (Allison Thomas Lee), as liars, but the case gets hairier when Horn calls Detective Riley as her first defense witness and gets him to admit that he considered Elliot a suspect in the earlier murder but decided he was a fine, upstanding citizen with no criminal record and therefore didn’t pursue him any further. Nolan Price decides to go after Riley on cross-examination and gets him to admit that he was once suspended from the police force for punching a superior officer, though the reason was because he made a sexist comment about the woman officer who later became Riley’s direct supervisor, Lt. Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim). Price’s boss, district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the only cast member of the first 20 seasons of Law and Order who’s still on the current show), is worried that going after a cop so aggressively will hurt their long-term relations with the police, but after the trial and the almost inevitable guilty verdict Riley himself offers Price forgiveness and says laconically, “You did what you had to do.” This Law and Order, directed by Michael Smith from a script by old Law and Order hand Rick Eid, wasn’t particularly ground-breaking but it was a good episode that told a tight-knit story and told it well.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "The Punch List" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 1, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 1) my Law and Order marathon continued with a really quirky episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in which a woman comes to the SVU precinct office reporting a rape – with herself as the rapist, not the victim. The victim was Dr. Ray Goldberg (David Krumholtz), who’s in the middle of a major remodeling of his house ordered by Denise (Gabrielle Miller), his wife of 30 years. On the night in question he’s scheduled a date at an exclusive club called Galapagos (which has a wall decoration showing the ape-to-man evolution) with his old friend from medical school, Andy Burke (Jeff Mark). Only Andy bails out at the last minute; though they’re supposed to be about the same age Andy is considerably hotter and sexier, and he’s attracted one of Dr. Goldberg’s female nurses. So Ray goes to the club on his own and meets two younger men, Duvall Mathis (Ian Coletti) and Shirel Fischer (Tara Bopp). The three sit at a table together and, once they’ve all had way too much to drink, they repair to a local bodega where Duvall and Shirel use Dr. Goldberg’s credit cards to buy $1,200 in drugs and other supplies. They also buy him an “escort” for the night and order her to have sex with Dr. Goldberg, whom they’ve plied with erectile dysfunction drugs as well as rohypnol or something similar that leaves him sexually able to perform but unable to resist. They get the woman, Tess Long (Audrey Hare), to cooperate by literally holding a gun to her head – though it turns out that it was just a starter pistol and she was in no actual danger from it, though she thought she was.

The cops determine that the only way they can nail Duvall and Shirel (whom they arrest in the usual flamboyant ways for this show: one of them is taken into custody at the dog-grooming shop where works – thereby establishing that he makes his living in a weirdly similar way to Dr. Goldberg – and the other is pulled off a New York tour bus just as he’s about to lead a tour) is if they can get them back together with Dr. Goldberg in the Galapagos club and wire him to record them. Only Denise Goldberg shows up at the last minute and he has to take her aside and frantically explain to her what he’s doing there, though in the end she forgives him for his inadvertent and decidedly unwanted extra-relational activities. Along the way there’s a subplot consisting of Captain Olivia Benson’s (Mariska Hargitay) continued guilt feelings about the still-missing 14-year-old girl Maddie Flynn kidnapped in the first new episode of 2024, whose father attempts suicide in his apartment over his own grief and guilt about the disappearance of his daughter. He survives, but it’s a close call and he ends up in the hospital for days. I’m presuming that Dick Wolf, his show runners and writers will resolve this continuing story line by the time this truncated season of SVU ends, and I was struck by the irony that among the effects Maddie Flynn left behind when she was taken was a music box with one of those dancing puppet figures. The music box plays, of all things, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 – the same song Peter Lorre as the child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 classic M whistled when he was on the prowl after a child.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "End of Innocence" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 1, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed seemed to me to be the weakest of the three shows run last night, though it had its moments. It was a continuation of the immediately previous episode in which we were told that the imam of a local New York mosque was killed by a Dutch-born hit person identified in the imdb.com cast list only as “The Blond Man” (Myles Delahunty) who wasn’t on the radar of any U.S. police database but was wanted by Interpol for his activities in several European countries. The reason the bad guys in this story wanted the imam killed was because he was about to blow the whistle on a gang that was using people to smuggle stolen jewels into the U.S. by building pouches in their actual bodies. The idea was that the gang’s payroll included a surgeon who would open the wounds, extract the jewels, and give them to the gang – only the cops cotton to this when at least two of the unwilling “mules” get sepsis from the unclean conditions in which the doctor has to perform the operations and subsequently die. One of the victims gets the shit beaten out of him by out-of-control Detective Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez), who’s on the thin edge of a nervous breakdown after his girlfriend, fellow NYPD Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), dumps him, presumably for the Organized Crime Control Bureau’s artificial intelligence consultant, Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington).

The show hasn’t come right out and said that Jet and Dr. Vargas are lovers, or on their way to becoming same, but it’s broadly hinted that she’s attracted to him because, even though he’s older and considerably less sexy than Reyes, he’s a fabulously rich tech entrepreneur and he’s also got a high-tech background in state-of-the-art computing while Reyes is just a hot-tempered officer who also happens to be a hot stud. (Reyes is also supposed to be married, so his affair with Jet was extra-relational.) In the end the head of the Organized Crime Control Bureau, Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), a Black Lesbian cop (though she broke up with her girlfriend about a year and a half ago and we haven’t seen her romantically or sexually involved with anyone since), sends Reyes to her own psychiatrist so he can get help without it going on his official police record that he’s in therapy. And Our Hero, Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), shoots and kills the blond Dutch hit man in a gun battle atop a tall building, taking him out surprisingly easily given that half the police forces in the European Union have been after him for years. There’s also a Chinese woman, Ji-Ann Youn (Cindy Chang), who has a curio shop that’s a front for renting guns to various people who want to commit crimes with untraceable firearms, whom Jet busts in the final scenes. Maybe it was because my husband Charles came home from work relatively early during this show and caught me filling in the character names on my copy of the imdb.com page on my computer, but this Organized Crime episode wasn’t holding my attention all that well even though Christopher Meloni is still one of the men of my dreams and Rick Gonzalez has become another one!

NOVA: "When Whales Could Walk" (WGBH, PBS, aired January 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 31) at 9 I put on PBS for a couple of science shows, a 2024 episode of NOVA called “When Whales Could Walk” and a 2015 Secrets of the Dead show called “Jamestown’s Dark Winter.” “When Whales Could Walk” actually turned out to be the more interesting of the two – I’d expected it would be the other way around – and it began in a desert valley in Egypt where paleontologist Hesham Sallam from Mansour and American Universities in Cairo had unearthed a giant fossil containing a complete skeleton of a 60-foot-long animal called Basilosaurus. The name indicates a dinosaur, which was what the original discoverers of Basilosaurus thought it was, but eventually they realized it was a prehistoric forerunner of modern-day whales. One difference between Basilosaurus and modern whales is it had legs and feet so it could walk and hunt down prey on land as well as in the water. Modern whales have the remnants of their original legs which, much like the vestigial front limbs of Tyrannosaurus rex, are too small to support its weight if they had tried to walk on land, but they’re there and in at least some whale species they’ve evolved into flippers. Another researcher, Arnold Gingerich, had gone to Pakistan in search of prehistoric horses; he didn’t find any, but he found fossil remains of an animal now called Pakicetus that, though only one-third the size of Basilosaurus, not only could walk on land but hunted for prey there as well as in the water. Smithsonian Institution scientists Ellen Coombs and Mithriel MacKay got a rare chance to dissect a beached whale and discovered, among other things, that whales have nine stomachs – suggesting that, like cattle, their ancestors subsisted on grasses and other land-based plant life and needed the multiple stomachs to digest it.

One group of interviewees suggested that the closest living relatives to the prehistoric amphibian whales are hippopotami, who live along riverbeds and spend much of their lives in the water, even though they come up on land to eat and have sex. The reason whales eventually retreated to the ocean and became totally aquatic is explained by the global cooling that happened about 34 ½ million years ago, which caused the Mediterranean Sea to shrink from its prehistoric dimensions to its current ones. They figured this out mainly from the fossilized trees that started to appear in the Egyptian strata from that time, and they assumed that the way whales survived the disappearance of their habitats was to evolve into a totally water-based animal, though as a marine mammal they were still obliged to surface regularly to breathe air before returning to the ocean. The show also discussed the two separate types of whales, one group that retained the teeth they had as land animals and the other that rely on baleen, long fibers of keratin (the same material as in hair) that filter out edible food like fish and krill from great volumes of ocean water and use that as their nourishment. The whales that have teeth sometimes feed on the whales that don’t; there’s interesting footage here of a baleen-whale mother trying to protect her calf from the predatory teeth-bearing whales who are looking at her calf as a potential food source. It also suggested that the reason whales evolved into the largest animals in earth’s history is that they needed to be that big to be able to swallow enough ocean water and filter out the edible materials from it. This NOVA program was a quite fascinating one that told me things about whales and their ancestors I’d never heard of before, and that’s what a science show on TV should do.

Secrets of the Dead: "Jamestown's Dark Winter" (Mentorn Barraclough Carey, Discovery Channel, PBS, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Secrets of the Dead episode which followed, “Jamestown’s Dark Winter,” was a considerably grimmer story that for once was in line with this show’s original mission of literally telling the secrets of the dead before it branched out into more general scientific and technological aspects. It was based on incidents that took place in 1609, six years after the initial founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia that was the earliest settlement of British people in America that survived. (An earlier expedition in 1594 led by Sir Walter Raleigh ended with the death and disappearance of all the colonists.) At the time Britain was in an existential struggle for survival against the threat of the Spanish Empire, and though the Spanish Armada had been decisively defeated in 1588 Britain was still anxious about the Spanish and Portuguese presence in South America and the British government under King James I, Elizabeth I’s successor and the king for whom Jamestown was named, sent out expeditions to create colonies in North America to counter the Spanish presence in the South. The original Jamestown settlers had the misfortune of landing on a marshy island that proved nearly impossible for them to farm effectively, with the result that in the early years the colony teetered on the edge of continual starvation. Apparently there weren’t Native Americans around willing to bail them out the way the Pilgrims and Puritans who settled in Massachusetts had, a kindness they repaid by launching a genocidal campaign against them that continued throughout the U.S. for centuries. (I’m still fond of quoting Adolf Hitler’s comment in an interview with Edward R. Murrow in 1940: “I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”)

In 1609 Britain sent out nine ships to bail out the original Jamestown colonists and bolster the colony with more people and supplies, but though six of the original nine ships actually made it across the Atlantic, storms along the sea route ruined all the food and other materials the colonists were depending on to survive. The show featured a lot of interviewees from an organization called “Historic Jamestowne” (https://historicjamestowne.org) as well as three researchers, Dr. Stephen Rouse, Douglas Owsley and Scott Whittaker, from the Smithsonian Institution. While excavating the original fort at Jamestown the Historic Jamestowne crew, led by Dr. William Kelso and including James Horn, Jamie May and Bly Straube (the latter two being women), discovered the skeleton of a 14-year-old girl. They named her “Jane” even though there’s no historical record of what her actual name was, and based on the surviving fragments of her skull they concluded that her fellow settlers had literally eaten her, including slicing open her head to extract her brain. (Apparently brain meat was considered especially nutritious then, and a number of recipes back in England included animal brains.) The crew from the Smithsonian hired a forensic artist named Ivan Schwartz to do a facial reconstruction of “Jane” from the surviving skull bones. They only had one side of her skull to work from, so they did a mirror image of it to create a digital model of her whole head. “Jane” has found her final resting place in the Jamestown historical museum, thanks to Ivan Schwartz’s sculpture and the surviving bones, and as narrator Ken Chowder (an unfortunate name given that the show is about cannibalism) pointed out, this paints a different and considerably darker picture of Anglo-America’s origins than the usual one we get of individuals struggling against adverse conditions and surviving with grit, determination and an unstoppable instinct. The truth is our forebears literally had to eat each other to hold on and keep their communities together!