A man goes camping or birding then
goes missing. Schoolchildren find
a woman's shoe on a field trip, laces
tightly tied. On the same day, a body
is found face down in the culvert,
apparently drowned in five inches
of water. Are these random occurrences,
or are there victims of foul play here?
How many evenings of intense contemplation
will it take the young detective constable
who studied Classics to tease out connections,
as record after record of his favorite opera
arias plays on the turntable? A good
reader of literature, he'll follow
the clues and collect complex leitmotifs,
revealing how the unseen hand of the author
has braided them into some other variation
of that narrative of thwarted desire. And
all the characters in this series have
such allegorical names: Trewlove, Bright,
Strange; Pilgrim, Thursday. And the main
character, with a first name no one ever
seems able to say. Evil seems so genteel,
and death so earnest and refined—the final
chokehold delivered by expensive silk
pantyhose, the fatal wound by a tiger
slinking straight out of the imperial past
into the labyrinth of gin parties and summer
schools. I kind of wish it were more like this
in real life, not the rising daily tide of
particular murders ordered by a tyrant in
his so-called drug war, executed by his bag
men and hired assassins. There is no coherence
or epiphany in EJKs: only the same MO carried out
mostly in the slums, among the poor and helpless.
Episode after episode, it goes like this: two
masked men ride up on a motorcycle. One shoots,
then they ride away. The child was sitting on her
grandfather's lap. The schoolboy, playing basketball.
The four-year-old who'd just learned to write
his name, asleep in bed. The woman on the sidewalk,
eating a late meal of sardines and rice. In pools
of blood, our children, sisters, mothers, grandfathers:
Kian, Danica, Kristine Joy. Jayross, San Niño, Bladen
Skyler. Cristina, Rowena, Roman... They
number more than twenty-three
thousand now. How many episodes and
seasons do you think that would make?