The last collage of images starring St. Bonaventure featured a much darker backdrop.
While the dispute centers on two slices of land, it has been playing out against a much broader backdrop of historic antagonism among the major powers over separatist movements.
Brooding over its surroundings like Castle Dracula, Douglas's hilltop lair — a "wood butcher's palace" containing a room "that felt like the world's greatest conversation pit" — is not so much a backdrop, more like an architectural character in its own right.
And Baltimore is very much the backdrop, and what has happened in Baltimore recently, obviously, very much sets the tone for this book.
All of that sets the stage perfectly for the more familiar elements of the case, so that when they finally happen, we see them, powerfully, against a much larger backdrop.
Against this backdrop, much of health policy looks perplexing.
Whether the Jets pick the safe, comfortable choice in Sanchez or the dynamic, unproven option in Smith will be viewed as much against the backdrop of Idzik's plan for long-term success as Ryan's win-now credo.
By this stage, McKay has got so many characters in play that only one of them, Mark Baum, is given much of a backdrop; we learn of a private sorrow, wrestled over in conversations with his wife (Marisa Tomei).
To be fair, the device blended in to Poldark's backdrop much better than the aforementioned Downton bottle, which was accidentally left on a mantelpiece before the fifth season began.
The articles generated by the competition are often set as much against a backdrop of inaction as action – the stagnation of mass unemployment, the isolation of people with mental or physical disabilities, or the grinding boredom of a refugee camp.
