Pascal's Wager

"If it were up to me I'd burn this place to the ground!"-- Titus Welliver

Insofar as this haplessly imperiled woman is able to puzzle out the threads, Zone Blanche is a more diffuse provincial version of Bosch with unexplained phenomena. The central plot involves two murdered women, and then we have the backstory surrounding the lead detective’s earlier victimization in the same forest, the suppression of that event, a series of additional crimes with men on the edge of sanity, a suicide attempt, and a wolf spiritual guide, a land scandal scheme, with the external malevolence emanating from or causing the corruption of Villefranche. There are no overt allusions to the Islamic State attacks, and this series falls under the rubric of the “mysterious village,” but the layered fantastical elements is a method to broach difficult issues without causing riots in Riyadh, or asking viewers to reflect on Sunni women drivers. Many of the automotive scenes in Zone Blanche are spooky, suggestive of vulnerability, and the opening shot of the pilot, skillfully done, (how easy it to experience crippling paralysis, in the blink of an eye), might have been a homage to George Romero, and the ever enduring living dead, while grinding the buttock to ground beef, yet another therapist, aged and brusque, stopping by to treat the Muslim pampering my disposable underwear with far more direct marginalization than the dowager engages in, jabbing a finger in the air, you follow me down to the car. Saran is, quite truthfully, too infantile for antagonism of the sort I am used to, but like most paraprofessionals, she is unwittingly brutal, physically aggressive, pragmatic, and severely limited in terms of intelligence. I have about a week and a half to go before I transition if she doesn’t land me back in the hospital. If she transfers me badly, as happened Friday, she’ll step back and watch me flail on Mr. Wheelchair’s golf cart. It took all my willpower not to fire her while I struggled gasping to keep my balance. Unless I can outwit the system, or throw money at it, it will only get worse, so close to giving up, I have to be cautious with the despondency. It took a good Sunday with Dana to realize my biological memory skills haven’t entirely vanished, latching on to Bosch precisely because this is familiar territory. I’d say his life was worse than mine, yet hesitate, supposing it is difficult for you to conceptualize the first 16 years of my life were virtually in a home very close to that of Bosch’s orphanage. I have little idea where the writers will ultimately take Zone Blanche, but the moral guilt is nicely woven in with the inexplicably ominous, like a Medieval Catholic allegory..