The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham Hotspur news and links for Wednesday, September 19

Hi, all!

A Dutchman in orange. How fitting.

Ramble of the Day

I am trying not to make so many of the rambles about film and television, but as my rambles have hopefully proven over the last nine months, the things that come to my mind are completely random. Anything can pop into my head at any time, and sometimes it’s related to thoughts of the recent past, and other times it’s related to nothing at all.

Anyway, I happened to be watching the Emmy Awards on Monday and saw Jesse Plemons, who happened to be nominated for his performance in the “USS Callister” episode of Black Mirror. I could make this ramble about how that wasn’t my favorite episode of Black Mirror, and this ramble might actually end up veering a little bit in that direction. This ramble, though, is about Plemons and how I don’t like him — and why it isn’t his fault.

It does go back to the “USS Callister” episode, which actually was not the first time I had watched something with Plemons in it. I’ve seen Breaking Bad and The Master, though I do not really remember him from that film. In my mind, there was nothing negative associated with Plemons, and had no reason to dislike him when I turned on “USS Callister.” In fact, I didn’t even realize that he was in the episode (or that I hadn’t actually clicked on the first episode of the series). I had no idea what to expect at all.

Plemons’s Robert Daly, though, made me incredibly angry. Of course, that was the point; he’s a man who traps his employees in a video game and controls them in a violent manner. This character is so creepy, from the way he looks at the other people around him to the way he spoke. I was so troubled by this voice that I had to look up if Plemons spoke like that in real life; thankfully he doesn’t. I was so disturbed by this person, and relieved unlike any other time I watched a villain get defeated in a fictionalized program than I was when Robert finally went down.

This is all to Plemons’s credit. I won’t argue one way or another if he deserved to win the Emmy, because I did not see Darren Criss’s winning performance in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, or any of the other nominees’ performances. However, it says quite a lot about Plemons’s ability — or my way of thinking and processing such things, you decide — that I cannot look at Plemons the same way. I have never had such difficulty separating an actor from a character, and I don’t know what it might take for me to see Plemons as Plemons and not as creepy Robert Daly. (Watching him play a weird cop in Game Night did not help.)

tl;dr: I can’t disassociate Jesse Plemons’s performance on Black Mirror from the man himself, and this is not a good thing (depending on who you ask, I guess).

Links of the Day

Bolton defender Stephen Darby has retired at age 29 after being diagnosed with motor neuron disease.

Arsenal will rearrange roles at the top as Ivan Gazidis gets ready to depart the club for the chief executive job at AC Milan.

David Squires sounds off on the beginning of the Champions League group stage in his latest cartoon.

Inspired by Mauricio Pochettino’s cow analogy, ESPN’s Chris Wright has come up with a guessing game based on other football personalities’ animal analogies.

Today’s longer read: Marina Hyde comes up with a few modest proposals for the possible third UEFA club competition for The Guardian