Fiction - reflecting or interrogating reality?

Another good night's sleep, walking up to cool and cloudy weather, and an hour's walk before cooking an early lunch. Then I drove Clare over to Chris' salon in Rumney for a haircut, and on return watched two episodes of the French thriller 'Time is a killer'. The Corsican scenery in which the drama is set is very colourful, but the production doesn't make good use of available techniques to display different scenes set twenty five years apart. 

There isn't enough of a visual difference between the two. Colour in older scenes contains slightly over-saturated reds, sepia or even grey-scale tinting would work better in contrast to contemporary scenes more naturally tinted with a  more natural blues and greens. The result is confusing as more effort is required to remember who's who and what age they're meant to be. It's another one of those convoluted inter generational mafia vengeance type stories. Does it reflect reality or an exotic stereotype of traditional cultures? Ah well, it's something to pass the time and avoid getting on with work in hand, I suppose.

Later on, the penultimate episode of season sixteen of NCIS with Gibbs walking out in a crisis, leaving his team to solve a case without him while he tries to come to terms with unfinished business from his own past personal life. He's looking older, and there's talk about retirement and what he wants when his career is over. It marks the start of his diminishing role as leader in the crime solving team, a fading away which continues for more than three dozen episodes broadcast and into season 19 still being made, having been disrupted by the pandemic. 

Amazing that the series has been running for eighteen years. Of the original first series cast only Mark Harmon, David McCallum and Sean Murray remain. Murray played a callow young geek, and is now the middle aged senior agent. The other two started as middle aged senior agents and are now elder statesmen, so to speak. While it falls far short of The Archers, running for seventy five years and still going strong, NCIS and its stories, many of them with concerns relating to emerging new technologies is an interesting portrayal of issues reflecting life in the new millennium.