Les Mini Series: Thoughts on Part 6 + final conclusion

OK…there’s a lot to unpack here from the last episode, and from the series as a whole, so bear with me people because this is gonna be a long post.

So the finale finally rolled around, which is good, now I can move on with my life and try to forget about this horrible adaptation. Maybe you liked it, fine, your opinion is your own, but I bet the people who liked it haven’t read the novel, because if they had then they would know that this is not a good adaptation of Les Miserables, it is mediocre at best.

In tonights episode the revolution ends with the death of all the Les Amis boys, Javert finally got face to face with Valjean again only to have his world fall apart by realising he’s not an evil man after all, Valjean saves Marius, Marius and Cosette get married, Thenardier fucks off to America and Valjean dies.
And there’s no mention of what happened to Mdm Thenardier, Azelma or Toussaint. Sure maybe they weren’t the most important characters but I would have liked to have known their fates.

Like I said last week, we’ve barely been given an opportunity to get to know the Les Amis boys so when their deaths came around I really wasn’t that affected by it, not like I’ve ever been when watching the musical anyway. They were such boring characters, Enjolras in particular was very dull, and I’m not criticising the actor playing him, an actor is only ever as good as the script, but this guy is supposed to be an enigmatic leader who you would follow to your death. There was no point where I really bought his performance at all. I will say, his death scene with Grantaire was nicely done, you won’t get much better last words than “I piss on your blindfold” so I will say that Enjolras had a good death scene at the very least, but as for the rest of it, I think his character needed more life to it.

I think David Oyelowo as Javert was actually good in this episode, he started out as the same one note officer but by the end of the episode I actually found myself sympathising with him. I know that I’ve compared him to Batman a few times but actually I think Javert is more like General Zod from Superman. See, on Krypton (Where Superman and Zod come from, in case you don’t know) babies aren’t made like they are here, all babies are made through genetic engineering and your career is predetermined before you’re born. General Zod was designed even before birth to be a General, his whole life was dedicated to the military on Krypton so when Superman is born through natural means and Krypton gets destroyed he is obviously angry about it because by being born Superman is making a mockery of Zods entire life, and that’s why he’s like Javert. Javert was brought up with a very black and white view of the world. That there are people who break the law and those who uphold it and nothing in between; if you’re a criminal then you’re always a criminal. Javert chose to uphold the law, so when someone like Valjean comes along and shows him that a former criminal can actually lead a good life and be a good man well it sends his entire world view into turmoil, and yeah I totally get that, and I totally get why it would drive him mad. I’ve actually come to sympathise with Javerts point of view more in the past few years, I still don’t think he needed to kill himself, I’m sure there was another way out of his situation. But, I do get it, I get his turmoil.
I just really wish they hadn’t made Javert such a one note dumbass in this series, there is so much more to Javert than just his obsession with Valjean.

The ending of this series….Oh Christ the ending made no sense. Basically Marius and Cosette get back from their honeymoon… (oh and at least we were spared a wedding night scene, I was shocked they didn’t show that actually, they’ve sexualised Cosette enough in this series but they actually stopped at the last episode? Wow, wonders will never cease. At least we can be thankful for small mercies)…and Thenardier inadvertently tells them that it was Valjean that saved Marius’s life and that he is after all a good man. So two of them go to find Valjean but he’s in Digne, where the Bishop was from, where he dies with Cosette by his bedside…

OK…but how did Cosette know about Digne??? Valjean never told her about that, how would she know that he would be there? That makes absolutely no sense! Yeah, maybe Marius told her, because Valjean did tell him about the Bishop of Digne, BUT...he didn’t tell Marius how much the kindness of the Bishop meant to him, so for him to be there and for Marius and Cosette to find him there is a huge leap in logic

For everything they did wrong in this series I held out hope that they would at least have the good sense to actually do the ending right, but they didn’t, they even fucked up the ending! Good job guys, fucking well done (slow clap…)

You know what though, by the end of this series I found myself so not caring about any of the characters anymore that the ending didn’t even matter to me. How did this happen? I was so optimistic about this series before it started, we haven’t had a new adaptation of Les Miserables in ages, but by episode three Andrew Davies somehow made me not care about the characters from the only novel that I've ever loved. I think this series may have actually killed my heart.

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So what did I ultimately think of the whole thing? Honestly, I think the whole thing was perverted. I don’t just mean with it being overly sexualised and the erotic dream sequence that was totally uncalled for, I mean the whole novel has been perverted by Andrew Davies and his polluted mind.
You know, a fun fact is that Victor Hugo was the biggest man-whore that Paris ever knew at the time, every brothel in Paris was closed on the day of his funeral because all the prostitutes were too busy mourning his death to provide their services. So if the horniest man in France didn’t feel the need to add sexual overtones to his greatest work than maybe he knew what he was doing! Maybe he should have been listened to!

And Andrew Davies has the balls to claim that this was a more accurate adaptation of the novel?! Don’t make me fucking laugh, look at everything he did wrong…

He made the Paris police look like the fucking Keystone Kops, he turned Javert into a one dimensional idiot, he got rid of Fauchelevant who was totally an important character in the novel, he sexualised children by turning Eponine and Cosette into Marius’s wet dream, He made Enjolras dull as fuck and he got rid of half the Les Amis boys! Seriously, where was Combeferre, where was Joly, where was Bossuet, where was Jehan!

But the absolute worst thing about this series was what he did to Valjean. He missed the mark with him so much. Valjean is supposed to be a gentle soul who was changed by love, first by the Bishop of Digne and then by Cosette. But they made him into an angry, shouty, borderline abusive father who had semi-incestuous intentions towards his daughter. Cosette was the one who really made Valjean love, the Bishop was the one who set him on the right path but it was Cosette who really changed him, but the writers took that and perverted it. They changed him from a father who would rather die than hurt Cosette, so much so that in the novel it literally kills him to see her get married, to a man who was at one point dragging Cosette by the wrist through the streets and then physically restraining her from leaving the house. That is not the Valjean I know. This was so far removed from the Valjean I know that I don’t even recognise him anymore.

I don’t think I will ever get over what they did to Valjean in this series, ever! They have literally killed my image of him, I feel so emotionally scarred by this it’s been like losing a family member.

Maybe you think I’m taking this too personally but please remember that Les Miserables is the only novel I’ve ever read that made me feel anything. I’m not good with literature, I don’t always get the meaning of things and I’m not an intellectual by any means. I didn’t go to school as a kid and my education was stunted for years, so when I took on the novel Les Miserables and I found that I understood it and that I really connected with it, well, that meant a lot to me. So yes, I do take it personally when people fuck it up.

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But in the interest of fairness there were some things I liked about this series; I mean the first three episodes were quite good actually, in fact I was mainly favourable to them on this blog, but by episode four it went downhill so fast that my opinion of the whole series changed overnight.
I think the whole thing was visually pleasing, I mean it looked good; the sets looked pretty cool actually so I can’t fault it in its production values. Although if I’m honest it did look a lot similar to the 2013 movie, you could basically cut and paste certain parts of it and you would barely notice any difference. The costumes were good too, I particularly liked many of Cosettes dresses, they were pretty.

Also I actually liked the diverse cast, not like some people online who said it was inaccurate and forced diversity. Honestly, if the performance is there then ethnicity doesn’t matter, who cares what colour you are as long as you can play the part well, just cast whoever is good for the role. Hey, I mean I don’t recall Victor Hugo ever saying Javert couldn’t be a black man, or Thenardier, so why not? I don’t know how diverse Paris was in 1832, I wasn’t there! People should learn to judge by performance and not by skin colour, and by the last episode David Oyelowo absolutely crushed it as Javert. I actually felt a bit moved by his performance in the finale, it’s just a shame he wasn’t as good in the rest of the episodes.

I also liked the Thenardiers a lot in this adaptation, not as people, they’re still horrible human beings, but the performers were good in the parts and it was cool to actually see them portrayed as properly evil for once. Yeah in the musical they’re supposed to be the comic relief and that can be OK, it needs some laughs sometimes, but I’ve never been quite comfortable with making child abusers into comedy, so I liked that here they were actually shown to be cruel people. Olivia Colman as Mdm Thenardier was definitely the standout performance of this series.
But what happened to her by the end of it? We don’t see her again after the beginning of episode five! I hate to say it but I think her character deserved better than to just be forgotten like she was. And what happened to Azelma and Toussaint as well! They deserved better too!

Another thing that I liked was Ellie Bamber as Cosette, I liked how she actually had a personality in this and that she had her own thoughts and opinions, she’s such a non-character in the musical it was cool to see her being treated like an actual person for once. And I liked how they showed her obviously suffering from trauma of her past, that’s something that is sorely lacking from the book and I’ve been saying for years that she would have PTSD. You don’t go through years of horrific abuse and just come out fine on the other side, so I will admit that is one change I appreciated. And I appreciated that by the end of the series it’s clear that Cosette has definitely grown up a lot, she finally faces her past by facing Thenardier and it’s clear that she’s moved on from being just a frightened little child. So yes, OK, I’ll admit it, I did like that Cosette was given the opportunity to grow up, and in fact the changes to her character might have actually been the only good change from the novel.

What I didn’t like about her character is how they kept trying to sexualise her (Yes I’m bringing this up again because it bothered me the most out of everything in this series). Just look at how she was shown in episode four, in one scene she’s running around the park like a child, calling for her papa like a little girl would, and then five minutes later she’s in Marius’s sex dream. So is Cosette supposed to be a child or is she supposed to be a sexual being? Because you can’t have it both ways! There’s a word for that and the word is paedophilia, and somehow I don’t think that’s what Victor Hugo wanted or intended and I don’t ever want to see Cosette portrayed like that again, it’s sick.

I will defend Cosette to the death; she’s way underrated as a character. You know, you can think at Cosette as nothing more than an innocent waif who does nothing in the story, or if you’re Andrew Davies you can think of her as nauseating (which I dispute, I think he’s the nauseating one actually) or you can think of Cosette as the glue that keeps the whole story together. Cosette is the link between most of the major characters; she links Felix to Fantine, Fantine to the Thenardiers, the Thenardiers to Valjean and Valjean to Marius. So I take issue with people treating her like she doesn’t matter as a person, she deserves far more respect as a character than she ultimately gets.

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To me this whole series was just one big epic fail. I’ve seen plenty of adaptations of Les Miserables and some of them are good, some are bad and some are only average, and at the very least the bad ones made me feel nothing, but this series was the first time I’ve seen an adaptation that actually made me feel hurt.

I’m hurt by what some of the characters were turned into, I’m hurt by the changes to the text, I’m just hurt by the whole sordid thing. Andrew Davies took something I loved and he fucking corrupted it, he massacred it. He obviously doesn't understand the novel and why it's so important. Not just to me, but to the world. It's a story about redemption, and knowing that even if you do bad things it doesn't make you a bad person, it's about hoping for change in the world and it's about love. Remember, "To love another person is to see the face of God". That may be from the musical but that's still better than anything from this series.

Andrew Davies doesn’t deserve Les Miserables, he took something beautiful and he perverted it and I fucking hate him for it. My one wish right now is for Victor Hugo to rise from the dead and beat Andrew Davies to death with a candlestick in retribution for fucking up his greatest work.
If I’d been given a choice I would have rather burnt every copy of Les Miserables in the world before I let Davies get his grubby fingers on it, I would have rather let him pry the novel from my cold dead hands before I let him destroy it the way he did.

If you want my advice then I would tell you to avoid this adaptation at all costs. Go see a production of the musical, or see the 2013 movie version, or better yet just read the book, because there really is nothing better than the original novel.

Now it’s over and I’m done with this series, let us never speak of it again…

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Don’t forget if you’re in the UK you can see the last episode and the rest of the series over at the BBC iPlayer.

Les Miserables Part 6