La Catedral del Mar

Primer tráiler oficial de 'La Catedral del Mar'
I am ambivalent about this show. It's a little heavy handed in its depiction of just how awful things were in the 14th Century, but I imagine there are some audiences that enjoy getting their emotions drug around for no discernible purpose. If I can keep myself supplied with adult beverages I can tolerate it. Another problem is that it's dubbed. Unless the dubbing is exceptionally well done it just doesn't convey the same feeling. The dubbing here is adequate so we have two layers of crap icing laid over the story which makes it a little hard to watch, but the story underneath is pretty good.

We watched two episodes last night and so far it it very reminiscent of The Pillars of the Earth, which I almost managed to finish. Maybe I didn't drink enough.

I looked up the cathedral on Google Maps (because that's who I am), and, well, look at this.

La Catedral del Mar, Barcelona Spain

I can't imagine how many electrons gave their lives to bring this image to the screen. I just wonder whether this was done by stitching together a bunch of images, or whether they started with a geometric model. It's not a Mission Impossible level of detail, but it's pretty dang good, especially considering it is halfway around the world, and Google didn't really have any advance warning that I would be looking for this. Well, actually they did, since all those big tech companies are in cahoots, and if they were watching me they could reasonable expect that I would be looking up this cathedral on Google Maps. But that would be nuts. On the other hand, there are all those server farms out there, looking for things to do, so maybe there is a bot* assigned to watch me and whenever it finds an intersection of two data sets it sets about projecting what I might be asking for next. "Oh look! He's watching this show about a cathedral in Spain and we know he likes maps. I'll bet he's going to look up this cathedral on Google Maps, so we better get to work putting together a 3-D model of this thing." Careful Chucky, that sounds an awful lot like the road to paranoia.

Medieval Crossbow

But back to the story. You may notice that our hero is carrying a cross-bow, a cross-bow he picked up on his way out while stealing his son back from his lord's armory. (Why is the kid in the armory? Because that's what villains do, obviously.)

F-16C

The story portrays the lord as a bad, bad man who is persecuting our hero only because he can, but being as a cross-bow was about the 14th Century equivalent of a modern F-16 fighter, you could understand the lord being really pissed about the theft. But that wouldn't make our hero very sympathetic, so it doesn't get mentioned. They do show it, so I imagine it will have an important part to play later on.

P.S. The show is presumably based on the book. Wikipedia has an article about the church itself.

P.P.S. Cathedrals have shown up here on occasion.

* If you mess with the controls, you can turn on English subtitles. It's not really worth it since they don't tell you much. I was going to try and figure out how to do it, but I couldn't even get it to stop at the end without automatically replaying the clip.

**A bot is a little program that gets called up to perform some kind of action whenever a certain triggering event occurs.

Update April 2019 replaced missing video with something similar.
Update May 2020 replaced missing video with something similar.