Red and Blue make Purple

czarrish

I’ve been obsessing over this for about a year now, because I’m always interested in how books get adapted for screen and what can be lost or gained by the change of medium, and so here’s a big post no one asked for about how I think they should handle the Noah Of It All in the first season of the Raven Cycle show.

I know I’ve seen a few people talking about doing a flashback episode to get into how Noah died and have all the necessary exposition about his relationship to Whelk and how/why he died, but I think it would be interesting to take it in a different direction.

In the book, Noah and Czerny are kept separate throughout Whelk’s POV vs the kids’–so that you don’t Know that Noah is Noah Czerny until Blue and Gansey find his body and the whole story is forced out of Noah and out of Whelk’s POV. Whelk isn’t a character who tends to talk to others–especially not about this situation–which is why most of what we have about Czerny is in his internal monologue. Internal monologues don’t really translate on screen.

So here’s my proposition: Instead of splitting Noah into Noah and Czerny, we split Barrington Whelk into Barrington and Whelk. Cast the 17 year old version and 24 year old versions of Whelk and keep them separated in the narrative.

Adam has his suspicions about other people being in on the hunt for Glendower, which the show could lean on before swapping POV over to Noah, who’s meeting up with Barrington to pour over maps of the ley lines. The Noah of these scenes is subtly more clean cut and more solid and less–less off than the Noah of the scenes with the Gangsey. This Noah smiles more brightly, talks more, has bigger ideas, spends a lot of time with his family; we probably meet Adele, who’s 16 when he’s 17, at some point. You see the fight he has with his mom about her birthday schnapps. You see his ravens and his art and his skateboarding and his music. Meanwhile, the Gangsey version of Noah is as we know him–Noah, but less so. Quieter, a little reserved.

This would lead first time viewers who haven’t read the book to think that Noah is working with this guy on the side and possibly being the presence that Adam feels spying on their investigation. Noah’s shiftiness, his disappearances, etc can be chalked up, narratively, to the idea that he’s working against them. That maybe his nervousness with them is because he genuinely likes these people and feels like he’s starting to use them.

Later on, after Blue and Gansey stumble upon a body with Noah’s driver’s license, we cut to the more clean cut, alive Noah standing in the woods, and a title card appears–May 2005. He tugs his headphones (the big, chunky kind that fit for 2005 but make him look just kind of like a hipster in 2012) to the side, muffling the music, and calls for Whelk, using his last name for the first time on screen.

Then the scene cuts back and forth in a series of flashes–the first blow of the skateboard, the red pen in Noah’s hand as he circles a spot on the map, Blue and Gansey with red and blue lights flashing across their distraught faces, the door to Whelk’s apartment slamming shut as the television shows body of missing Aglionby student located in Virginia woods, the teenaged Whelk gripping a skateboard with white knuckles and a heaving chest and blood spattered across his face, the ground buckling beneath Noah’s body, Noah’s parents and the 23-year-old version of Adele walking past Blue and Gansey, who are huddled together in the police station, etc etc etc.

Then, you feel the loss even more than you would have if you’d only met Noah The Ghost. If you see Noah interacting with his family all season, it hurts more when you see Noah’s stoic mother finally break down and cry after seven years of holding it in and waiting for him to come home. If you see how Noah looks at Whelk all season, how he clearly cares for him and respects him, then it’s all the more devastating when Noah looks at Adam and Ronan and says, are you afraid of Gansey? If you see Noah’s loyalty and idolization of Whelk all season long, it makes Whelk that much more despicable when you do the fade out from Noah, clinging to life, to Noah’s skeleton in the woods in the same position because Whelk didn’t care enough to even bury him.

Anyway, I think that’s a way better way to do it than just doing a Very Special Episode Set in 2005 that gives all of that information after the fact and would really maximize the impact of Noah’s story and the tragedy of his death.

dontkickthepj

my skin broke out in goosebumps the second i started reading this and they still haven’t gone away??? holy fuck?????

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.