The Sarah Jane Adventures: Revenge of the Slitheen

Set in a school, this could do better!

I found I had high hopes for this kids' spin-off series from Doctor Who, free as it hopefully would be from the pretentious adult agendas that have so bogged-down both the main show and its studenty spin-off Torchwood.

And indeed, although SJA appears to be capable of winning the battle for quality, I'm afraid this opening two-parter falls down on just about every count.

First up, it's written by Gareth Roberts, whose work I've come across three times before, and been impressed by every time. (The Shakespeare Code, Attack Of The Graske, and The Tomorrow People: The New Gods, three-and-a-half if you count the co-written Invasion Of The Bane, which had a nice script but a weak plot)

Again, Roberts' dialogue does all the things it needs to do. All the characters remember what happened in the pilot, like we do. They also generally notice when plot-points don't seem to add up, like we do.

Unfortunately the plot itself has been thought-through much less. The Slitheen are constructing machines to sap the planet's energy. They're hiding them inside new school–buildings that they're constructing around the world. They're doing this only in cities that contain underground rail-systems so that they can vent the machines' heat down there.

Individually, those three ideas are fine, but they really don't fit together into one plan. If you wanted to erect buildings on railway lines, you'd build stations, or offices, or anything really. Any amount of heat that could be vented into underground rail tunnels could be better vented into the sky. And a machine designed to absorb and store heat really shouldn't be regularly venting so much of it.

At one point these machines absorb the power of the sun. There's no eight-minute delay however, so the effect on Earth is instantaneous. I'd like to think that the Slitheen were only absorbing the energy that was reaching the Earth, but that's not really what was said.

The Slitheen lumber slowly after their equally slow-running prey. None of them thinks to do the poison-dart fingernail thing from Boom Town. I don't like their flatulence, and neither does my mum.

And I'm sorry, but even much of the acting was dreadful, the kids' underacting accentuated by the aliens' overacting. (the director's fault)

Clyde's external monologue at the end is about as clunky as characterisation can get: "You were right – this is great. Weird, but great. And you lot need me. I can't believe you were gonna save those Slitheen. They tried to destroy the entire planet – billions of people. What was the big dilemma?"

I'd like to balance all that with some equally good observations, but the good things are really only average. Y'know, I could type something like "the sound was okay."

What this show does have in spades though is potential. I really hope it goes the way of last decade's Tomorrow People revival, rather than the more recent Who one.

Looking forward to the next story.

Mochaccino Moments – Bruce Murray Singers

I bought this after attending one of the group's live concerts in Howick last year, and it doesn't disappoint. Many of the tracks that I heard that evening are on here, and it was with some sadness that, having just had my NZ residency appeal turned down, I lay on my bed in London and remembered the kiwi people who I had honestly come to consider myself one of. The opening track - Fields of Gold - was quite beautiful, and in the context of all the kiwi friends who I feel I've suddenly lost, elicited a few tears.

Doctor Who - Season 29 Review

I think this was the season when I finally made peace with the show's revival.

One thing it certainly had going for it was the absence of airhead Rose.

Sure, they did their best to replace her with an exact copy, but only mostly succeeded. In Martha we had a character who seemed identical to Rose Tyler, right down to her domineering single mum, but for the absence of her massive pride.

Martha's annoying, and entirely ill-conceived, crush on the Doctor, also lent her a humility that saved her from that.

The season had a quiet story-arc which actually remained true to itself this year. In retrospect, the references to "Mr Saxon" all actually held true for a change (unlike the "bad wolf" and Torchwood refs in earlier seasons), and were more up-front and unashamed, more like a storyline in a TV drama series.

The final story's resolution however hardly delivered on its build-up. Once Mr Saxon was revealed as Prime-Minister, little he subsequently did had anything to do with the job. Why the Master bothered shmoozing the electorate for 18 months when he and the 'Toclafane' could have just invaded as usual is anyone's guess.

The biggest problem with the Master though was his name. "The Master." This was not the Master - this was a completely new villain, and should accordingly have been given his own name. Alternatively, it need only have taken one line to explain that his personality – for the first time - had changed with his regeneration (like the Doctor's does), but not even that parachute was opened.

Story-wise, this season was by no means a classic, but it did feature scripts that were bad, (The Lazarus Experiment) average, (42) and actually brilliant. (Blink)

And that's a scorecard that I think I can live with.

After three years, I'm still waiting for a whole story with the Doctor's spaceship actually on another planet though.

Individual Story Reviews:

The Runaway Bride
Smith And Jones
The Shakespeare Code
Gridlock
Daleks In Manhattan / Evolution Of The Daleks
The Lazarus Experiment
42
The Infinite Quest
Human Nature / The Family Of Blood
Blink
Utopia / The Sound Of Drums / Last Of The Time Lords

It Could Happen To You (or me)

Spent the morning helping out at a homeless breakfast in the city.

It's a fantastic centre – they even offer the clients showers and fresh clothes.

Chatting to people was fascinating as always. Without wishing to trivialise their situation, it's amazing how poverty can afflict anyone. No matter how successful you are, no matter how much money you have today, no matter how many strong friendships you have, the fact still remains: you actually might be sleeping on a pavement soon.

I got talking to one of the other helpers, who unexpectedly turned out to be a client. I'd wrongly assumed that she was a volunteer, I think because she had been smiling so much.

She was from New Zealand. She'd come to London to search for her daughter. Having eventually ascertained that her daughter was in fact in Ireland, she'd finally given up and turned around to go back home again.

Except that the world won't let her go back home. That takes a thousand impossible pounds for a plane ticket.

And what happens when she gets there? She succeeds in giving-up.

What a nightmare, when you're made to work so hard for something you don't even want.

Doctor Who: Utopia / The Sound Of Drums / Last Of The Time Lords

Utopia

The episode begins where the last episode of Torchwood left off – with the Doctor picking Jack up from inside Torchwood's dank HQ. No, wait, in this version, the TARDIS lands outside, and Jack runs towards it screaming "Darrk-torrrrrrrrrrr!!!!" before leaping in slow-motion towards it as it dematerialises.

This is already not working for me.

The TARDIS lands at the end of the universe. This is a great hook, and for the first time since 1989, the episode is set on an ALIEN PLANET!


Unfortunately:

a.
Despite being 500 trillion years in the future, right at the end of the universe, everything looks like the 1960s,
b. It's populated by humans,
c. The fact that it is the end of the universe is never explored. In fact, it's all about the humans hoping to travel to another planet and begin a new life, even though the universe is about to end.


Even the savages are called the "Futurekind," although there is no future.

I can't help but compare this with Lance Parkin's imaginative book Doctor Who: The Infinity Doctors, which featured several chapters at the end of the universe, exploring the idea with backwards-living characters who were burning history books to keep warm, because everything was getting unstoppably colder. In this show however, the actual impending end of the universe is irrelevant.

The Doctor and Jack have a very long conversation in which they try to explain away plot-holes from earlier episodes, mostly ones by this author. Perhaps inevitably, this quickly backfires.

I hate writing these things, but someone has to...

a. The Doctor says that in The Parting Of The Ways, he knew that Rose, with the power of the Time Vortex (= power of God - the only way I can describe such a terribly easy story-ending), had brought Jack back to life and accidentally made him immortal.

Unfortunately, the Doctor didn't know that Rose had brought him back to life. Afterwards, Rose didn't know either. Of course, the Doctor did possess the power of the Time Vortex himself for maybe ten seconds just after that moment, so that would be the only possible occasion when he could have discovered this.

Except that he could also have fixed it at that moment, but didn't.

As for whether either of them subsequently remembered those events, there's been contradictory evidence both ways since then. The easier-to-reconcile explanation is that he just watched the episode on the telly.

b. The Doctor says he left Jack behind because he was immortal, and that was wrong. I'll bite the bullet and just accept that one, though it doesn't sound like a reason to me, and certainly not a Doctorish one. There's no evidence of this whatsoever in the episode.

Finally the aging Professor Yana turns out, entirely by coincidence, to be the Master. I've been waiting for this ever since I read that the Cybermen would return a year after the Daleks. He's only just made it in time.


This is done quite well. Derek Jacobi plays an innocent old man who comes across as so real, that he just doesn't quite fit into a fictional show. That's not a criticism, rather a measure of how good the old luvvie is. As his true identity breaks through in his mind, I caught a snatch of Anthony Ainley in the role on the soundtrack. If it's from after Logopolis, this would be only the third allusion to the post 1981 episodes of the original series, which have so far been quietly glossed-over.

The Doctor has a flashback to the face of Bo's dying words "You are not alone," and as expected, there's still no explanation why he didn't say "The Master is alive" or why he didn't tell the Doctor earlier. It's the bad wolf plot-chasm all over again.

Derek Jacobi, unfortunately, doesn't seem to have been told who the Master is. Even his thinking out loud – "If the Doctor can be young and strong, then so can I, the Master" – could imply that he's just finding out things like regeneration and his own name for the first time. And, given that he's just getting his memory back, that might be fine, except that the actor he regenerates into – John Simm – displayed no knowledge of the character either.

The Sound Of Drums

Having regenerated, the Master steals the TARDIS, heading back to Earth in Martha's recent past and becoming the "Mr Saxon" character whose name has been repeatedly mentioned without any context this season. Just for a change, most of those references have actually turned out to be valid though, although the regeneration makes the character's personal absence so far a real missed opportunity. How great would it have been for the Master to regenerate into a character who we had already met and trusted? Oh well.

No explanation for why he's been a local election candidate in two different countries though, with his name on posters in both London and Wales.

By the time the Doctor, Martha and Jack have caught up with him, the Master has just become Prime Minister. You'd have thought that would make quite a good story, but this isn't it. Like the end of the universe, the Master's hypnosis of the public into giving him the premiership is quite irrelevant to what follows. What a shame. What a battle of wits that could have been.


Although he thinks that the Doctor, Martha and Jack are trapped at the end of the universe, the Master plants a time-bomb at Martha's flat anyway. When they unexpectedly return, and discover the bomb at the exact moment it's about to go off, well, we can only imagine the Master's astonishment at his astronomical good luck.


That or he knew they were going to be there at that moment because he'd watched the episode on the telly.

Confronted, the Master then claims that the Lazarus experiment was a trap for the Doctor, "Professor Lazarus – remember him? And his genetic manipulation device. What, did you think little Tish got that job merely by coincidence? I've been laying traps for you all this time," which as I pointed out in my review at the time, he couldn't have been. Indeed none of the questions posed by that episode were answered in this story. Even the guy who they inadvertantly implied was Saxon, wasn't, and doesn't even appear in this story.

The new improved Lazarus machine needs the Doctor's biological code to work, unlike the earlier inferior model.

The Master ages the Doctor, which for those of us who are familiar with William Hartnell's three years in the role, should prove no setback at all.

The Master leads the last humans back through time too, and has them mass-invade the Earth, exactly like the Cybermen in the season finale a year ago, and the Daleks in the season finale a year before that, (both by this episode's writer) to subjugate and kill the population, before starting an interplanetary war. There was probably a reason why, but I must have missed it.

Everyone dumbly stands around and watches this. However as soon as the Doctor, Martha and Jack find that the Master has turned the TARDIS into something called a "paradox machine," it's fairly inevitable how this time-travel story, like so many before it, is going to all be resolved, even before the last humans' identity has been revealed.

I guess that the future humans, in their alien-looking casings, unfortunately must qualify as zombies.

Seeing her family held prisoner, Martha apparently abandons the aged Doctor and escapes.

Last Of The Time Lords

With the Earth devastated yet again, an entire year passes. Well, it passes on Earth anyway. In the room where our heroes are, there's little evidence that even a day has gone by, but in fact a year has passed for them too. Who knew.

The immortal Jack is tied up and, very helpfully, fed.

The Master ages the Doctor again, for no apparent reason other than to market toy replicas of his new gun. The Doctor is shrunk to the size of a parrot, and gets lost amongst his unaffected clothes.


In his next scene, he's fortunately found something more his new size.


Martha has spent the entire year following the Doctor's last instruction to get everyone on Earth ready to think the word "Doctor" at the exact moment that the Master's countdown reaches zero. She repeatedly has flashbacks of him telling her to do this.

Unfortunately, the Doctor never said any such thing to her last episode. In fact, no-one knew anything about the countdown until a year later. Either Martha is sadly losing her grip on reality, or someone really should have left that footage in the previous episode where it belonged...


The plan works however, as at the moment that everyone on Earth thinks the word "Doctor", he becomes superheroically younger, returning to his normal size, and floating and controlling things like, like, well, like Rose in the season finale by the same author two years ago.



Fortunately his clothes enlarge into a replica of his earlier ones too. Or maybe he just picked them up again and got dressed in front of everyone. Eat your heart out, Bruce Banner.

The great thing here though, is exactly how the rejuvenated Doctor defeats the Master. After the five of them have spent an entire year held captive virtually in the same room as him, now at last the Doctor...

... gets his gun off him.

Jack, having had nothing to do so far, (nothing new there then) at last gets to serve the plot by helping to destroy the paradox machine, so time rewinds and, except for the main cast, it's unexpectedly as if the last year never happened.

The Master's wife, who has also had nothing to do so far, shoots him.

The Master chooses to die, rather than spend the rest of his life in the Doctor's custody. Despite all the times that the Master has cheated death, the Doctor still believes he's dead.

The End.

Whew, and now I can recount what I particularly liked about this story:

The Good Stuff

Although he still has so little to do, Jack's involvement is quite welcome. In his original stint in the show two years ago, he was very bland and had little characterisation, but a season of Torchwood has enabled that to change. Barrowman now knows who he's playing, even if he still finds it a bit of a challenge.

Jack says he escaped from the space station and went back in time to Earth in 1869, after which he lived through both world wars, going through the second one a second time.

This is great because, perhaps by accident, it actually retcons his three contradictory origins into finally making some sense:

i. As a time-cop, Jack comes to earth during WW2 and steals Captain Jack Harkness' identity.

ii. He meets the Doctor and Rose in The Empty Child, and goes travelling with them in the TARDIS.

iii. On Satellite 5, Rose makes Jack invulnerable, so the Doctor abandons him.

iv. Jack then uses his burnt-out vortex-manipulator to travel back to earth in 1869.

v. Jack joins the army under another name. (or both identities would have shown up when Gwen had him checked-out in Everything Changes)

vi. In 1909 he encounters the fairies.

viii. For some unexplained reason, when Jack ultimately joins Torchwood, he re-assumes his identity as Captain Jack Harkness.

That's all fine. Whew.

Alas, in the present, Jack goes onto claim that he then waited for ages for a version of the Doctor to show up that would know who he was. He also claims to have spied on Rose a couple of times while she was growing up. All he really had to do then, once events had caught up, was phone her.

He can't have been a very good time-cop.


These talky scenes between the Doctor and Jack are the highlight of the first episode though. The respectful hostility between the two has real bite. The scene in the radiation-flooded chamber sees the Doctor in a rare moment with many of his usual defences down.

Just like in his original stint in the show though, once the conversation is over, Jack stands through the rest of the story with nothing to do.

While on the run, the Doctor, Martha and Jack turn their TARDIS keys into perception filters to avoid being noticed. The return of a great idea, though not rigidly adhered to, as they keep changing the rules about who can see them. Unfortunately, this will be completely forgotten in the next story when they'd come in handy again.

The Doctor's time as a CGI Time Lord in a cage is a good idea, and well-realised. A shame he couldn't have stayed like that for a few episodes. Farscape would have left him like that for half a season.

Torchwood is actually acknowledged as competing with UNIT, which finally makes the two very similar organisations' simultaneous existence acceptable.

The joke at the end about the face of Boe was funny, and I didn't see it coming. What a shame they didn't either, at any point in the last three years.

What I Really Didn't Like

Finally, I have to put a few words together about the one thing in this story that was an all-round misfire – the Master.

The intention when bringing back a villain from the original series, as with the Daleks and the Cybermen, is surely to appeal to both new viewers and old as well. It's something of a rip-off then, to promise the return of such a well-remembered and well-loved old character, only to ultimately present us with a brand new character instead.

This guy might be called "the Master", and be a Time Lord, but those really are the only similarities.

Everything else about him is different.

The last five actors all played him the same way, with a little variation. Serious, brooding, scheming, full of conviction, and dead straight. His special powers were disguising himself, shrinking people, and possesing his own, fully working, TARDIS.

You can believe that all these guys are playing the same character:








As you can see, even Jacobi and the kid managed to fit-in by just prudently underplaying him.

This rewrite has John Simm joking, larking around, doing silly voices, making fun of people, singing and dancing along to pop music, and overacting like a children's party entertainer.





Neither John Simm nor Derek Jacobi showed any knowledge of the Master at all. Neither had the Master's trademark chuckle. Neither had the Master's smug smirk. They hadn't even been given the Master's whole catchphrase to say. At one point Jacobi gets as far as saying "I am the Master," but stops talking there. (and I think that much was a fluke)

Contrast that with all the old mannerisms that Eric Roberts assumed when he brought back the role in 1996. Consequently, you knew who he was. He was the Master.


It's such a shame because, far from seeing an old character again, this story made it clear that the Master will never now return.

What a cheat.

Thanks to www.shillpages.com for the pictures of Eric Roberts.

Donnie Darko

It's taken me three years, but at last I have watched Donnie Darko.

Leisurely, engrossing film about an open-minded loner coming to terms with seeing things that no-one will ever believe.

Quite how unhinged, if at all, Donnie is is never made entirely clear. The visions he sees appear to all be true, but the acts of terrorism that he commits seem to be some form of mind-control.

It's fascinating to watch such an uncompromisingly dark film about a man who is, frankly, a good guy. I could describe him as abnormal, but somehow that implies that the people around him are in some way better.

Darko thinks about things a lot more than they do, and in several ways sees the world more clearly. The scene in which he tells his teacher off for over-simplifying people's motivations is just the sort of lesson that we all need drummed into us.

The end of the film confused me though, and I don't think it was meant to.

But hey – maybe it was. Maybe Darko's making me think about it too much.

Spider-Man (UK): A Hero's Welcome / Darkness Encroaching / On The Town! / Death Line

Immediately before The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #18: The Scorpion Takes A Bride, the amazing Spider-Man spent a week in England.

Friday 28th October to Wednesday 2nd November 1984, if Peter Parker's diary is to be believed.

Really – for four weeks we in Britain got a brand new original Spidey tale, courtesy of Mike Collins, Barry Kitson, Mark Farmer, Jerry Paris, Mike Scott, Ian Rimmer, John Higgins and Bob Wakelin of Marvel UK. It appeared in Marvel UK's Spider-Man Weekly issues #607 thru #610.


In part one, Spider-Man (or Spiderman as he's occasionally mis-spelt) gets headhunted in New York to appear on a British kids' TV show, by employees utilising a Spider-signal, no less...


Then, according to the editorial in #608, on Saturday 29th October he actually did appear on the TV show in real life! That must have been a cool thing to watch if you were buying the mag. All this, and one of Doctor Who's future companions presenting the show too! (Bonnie Langford)

In the remaining three issues, Spidey has the requisite battles at public landmarks with a puppet cyborg called Assassin-8, whilst doing temp work as Peter Parker at the Bugle's sister paper the Daily Herald...


And there are in-jokes aplenty. Apart from beaming-in Mr Spock, (above, bottom-left) that "Frankie says plow wright" t-shirt he's wearing above is a reference to Frank Plowright - the organiser of the UKCAC comic convention (sorry if that's a tautology) at the time.

He even fits in some sightseeing!


It's a lovely meshing of Spidey's usual fare with Marvel UK's slightly darker, more psychological tone, and it all feels very positive for the mag's future. It's obvious that the creators were hoping that this pilot tale would springboard a whole series of British adventures for the webslinger, set in a country where Spider-Man is, unusually, seen as a hero, rather than as a menace.


And making sure it all sank in, the whole tale was enhanced each week on the editorial page with recaps courtesy of Peter Parker's diary...


The last episode in issue #610 was even accompanied by a questionnaire asking readers what they had thought of the story, and whether they wanted to see more of the same.


As mentioned above though, the following week would see a return to the regular US reprints, so the final UK-produced panels, set back in New York, were scripted to carefully segue into that:







But that's not all. The US artwork was also touched-up, with Assassin-8 being snuck fairly prominently (if that's not a contradiction) into the following reflective panel:


(a comparison with the original US panel is here)

For whatever reason however, barring a further Britain-based Marvel UK Spidey short a year later in Secret Wars #25, it just didn't take. Six months on Spider-Man Weekly had entered its dumbed-down death-throes, and the mag would just never be the same again.

Which is a shame, as the city of London felt like a real friendly neighbourhood for Spider-Man.



(Comic images in this post are copyright Marvel, and were used according to 'fair use' laws)

Bible Summary

I think the best way to review this is actually going to be to simply recount the story, as I currently perceive it:

Accused of a murder he actually did commit, Moses goes on the run, exchanging his royal upbringing for a life of tending sheep.

40 years later, mild-mannered Moses is visited by a being of light who claims to be God. The duo form an unlikely partnership, dedicated to freeing Moses' people from the harsh regime of the tyrannical King of Egypt. With the being of light performing miracles and Moses humbly asking people to stop being so horrid, they break-out over a million people and lead them through the desert towards a new home.

Along the way, the being of light recounts the history of the world so far to Moses, who writes it down.

The being of light claims to have created the universe and everything in it, including humans.

The first man and woman were made perfect, but used their free will to choose to stop obeying God. Without their maker's instructions, they gradually corrupted and died. The first human died at the age of 930. Since then the human race has consistently counter-claimed everything God has said and done, even to the point of insisting that he doesn't exist, and making-up imaginary beings in his place. (and following their imagined instructions)

As life-spans have plummeted, God has been using the reward/punishment teaching system on humanity for centuries to prompt people to start following his instructions again, and reverse their corruption.

At one stage, he wiped-out the entire human race, preserving only the least-corrupted family. Later, to one good man, he promised countless descendants.

Ultimately an entire nation of good people – the good man's descendants – became enslaved in Egypt, from where God has just used Moses to save them, and prove God's existence and power in the process.

Hopefully, the miracles he's performed and the suffering he has saved them from will evoke a lasting choice to put God and his instructions ahead of everything else that might be more important to them, and keep them on the path to becoming fully restored again.

Sadly, this nation of good people also choose to reject God. Over the next forty years, God lets them slowly die in the desert, planning to ultimately bring their children into the new land instead. This he does, but without Moses. Moses, too, has rejected aspects of God, and dies quite old at 120, literally within sight of their long-awaited destination.

Through the subsequent generations, people turn towards and away from God, each according to their own will. Everyone dies though, some, apparently, terminated by God as a means of protecting those still living from their corrupting influence.

As humanity's original perfect spirit becomes progressively more corrupted down the generations, God has entire families taken out of the world. But it's not that simple. Every so often people repent, and turn back towards God, who with ever greater caution then attempts to teach them in order to restore them.

God's reward/punishment incentives work to a point, but real commitment to the healing instructions he offers becomes something of a rarity.

Finally, God creates a new human being from scratch. This one bears none of the corruption of the original human race – he's as good as new, and therefore perfect, like the original first human was.

However unlike the original first human, he uses his free will to choose to remain faithful to God, and never turns from any aspect of him, despite the tremendous pressure of everyone around him. He never starts to corrupt.

Bearing the perfection of God, and teaching everyone to do the exact same things that God has been teaching, he's rejected by them, just as they have been rejecting God.

But with one difference – unlike God, he is a human being, and can be bodily hurt.

As a result, the corrupted humans vent their rejection of God upon him physically. He quite literally bears it all in God's place, being punched, slashed, and having nails hammered into his skin to pin-up his body in public while he hangs there and slowly dies in agony.

And so he dies, too.

God's reward/punishment plan has well and truly failed. To continue with it now would require God to inflict at least an equal punishment upon the perfect human's murderers. Anything less couldn't be a strong enough deterrent.

Of course, the perfect human recovers from death, as he neither deserves it, nor is a bad influence on anyone. Humans only die because they choose to stop following the instructions of the being who made them. The perfect human continues to do this, and continues to live.

Some of the corrupted humans see this, and decide to follow his lifelong example. God places his instructions in their minds, and most of them choose to follow them. A ripple effect begins to take place, as some others follow their example, while some others follow their example, and so on.

People start to get better.

One man tries to stop all this – Paul.

A being of light visits him, and claims to be Jesus - the perfect human. Paul turns back towards God, believing Jesus to be God, and spends the rest of his life inciting others to follow God's instructions too.

Slowly, gradually, through the generations, the corrupted humans turn back towards following more and more of the being of light's instructions, many without even being aware of it.

In an epilogue, the end of the world is predicted, in which the being of light will restore all the dead humans to life. Finally, those who choose to follow God's restorative instructions will therefore become healed and live forever, just as they were originally made to. Those who refuse will deteriorate again, until they die a second, final, death.

God will place those who have chosen to be restored by his instructions on a new Earth, to live forever, just as planned.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

This action movie's a lot like watching a computer-game.

Just as with the first one, I turned my brain off and just enjoyed the non-stop action sequences, broken up by bits of exaggerated comedy. John Cleese does a good job with a bad script, but it's a pleasure to see such an old hand working with someone like Matt LeBlanc, who is quite unashamedly still just playing Joey.

March Of The Penguins

Easy-Reader narrates this full-length doco about the greater part of the year for the emperor penguin. (Aptenodytes forsteri)

And it's stunning. I found myself wishing that I had seen this at the cinema, where the incredible photography must have really frozen its audiences.

The incredible feats of endurance that the penguins go through each year for their offspring makes you slightly wonder what on Earth the point of the other three months of their year is. We see great crowds of them huddling together in raging storms, practically standing still for months without anything to eat. (no wonder they waddle) And all so that a cute little critter can one day hatch-out and spend its entire life enduring the same thing.

You have to wonder if melting the ice caps might actually make life easier for them...

Doctor Who: Blink

*** contains spoilers ***
I think this is the best Doctor Who story I've ever seen.

One night, Sally breaks into a deserted old house. The wallpaper is peeling-away. She peels it off further and finds that, years ago, someone wrote on the wall before the wallpaper was put up. They’ve written her name. With an instruction to duck.

Well, it goes without saying that at that moment, something flies through the window and almost hits her, but for the fact that she was ready to duck.

As her day unfolds, she continues to receive these messages from the past (from the Doctor, fairly obviously), but each time the level of predestination required for the message to work gets upped.

We've all seen time-travel movies in which people in the future go back to the past and predict things that they remember having taken place in the present, but there's just no way that anyone could know, or remember, the amount required to predict Sally's day down to this level of detail.

It surely can't be coincidence. Or can it?

When it reaches the stage where she's arguing with someone whose half of the conversation is on a 40-year-old video-recording, then there'd better be an astoudingly good explanation by the end of the programme.

And there is...


Much of modern Doctor Who is dumbed-down. Bucking that trend, Blink treats you with respect. I didn't understand the whole story, but afterwards I had to think about it for ages and had to work it all out. And it still all worked. Wonderful.

The aliens are truly original, and absolutely petrifying. I was on the edge of my seat.

The acting was flawless. David Tennant very slightly underacts at one point, because his character had to.

The characters were so alive. It's just tragic that an intelligent, clever, compassionate character like Sally Sparrow isn't the regular companion in the whole series, together with Larry too. Sally proves she's clever, unlike actual companions Martha and Rose, who rely on the Doctor to constantly say things like "Oooh, you're so clever Martha Jones" whenever she states something a bit obvious.

However I guess that if Sally were the regular companion, no doubt the regular scripts would just confer the same shallowness upon her instead.

The gorgeous dialogue. Gems like:

Sally: "I love old things. They make me feel sad."

Kathy: "What's good about sad?"

Sally: "It's happy for deep people."

And many more.

The mellow music.

Despite being set on Earth in the present day, there were no zombies. (I've decided to generously assume that this was set before all the recent high-profile alien invasions)

After the episode, I kept keeping my eyes open. That's gotta be a good sign!

Lest the fanboy in me gushes too much, the show's not perfect, and features CGI tears, a cop who hits on someone filing a missing persons claim, and completely unneccesary nudity. (Larry in undies would have been filmable and perhaps funny, Larry naked was embarrassing)

Other issues like Martha's absent phone, why the Angels don't steal the TARDIS earlier and why Billy doesn't just burn one DVD and give it to Sally at the hospital are different, because there are probable explanations for those holes, but maybe not enough time to explain everything in just 40 minutes.

The cliffhanger ending, which rendered all the earlier events ultimately fruitless, I really could have done without too, but hey, it was a logical progression. (something this series isn't very good at, usually)

My last negative point would have to be what happened to the closing credits:


I honestly thought that Doctor Who was somehow immune from this.

In light of the complexity of this story, written by Steven Moffat, I can't help but think back to his script last season called The Girl In The Fireplace. That had a great time-travel plot-device too, but executed abysmally, making it hard to believe that very much of the final plot came from the same mind as this.

Finally, this is this season's Doctorless story, and IMHO it was, as I said above, the best Doctor Who story ever.

Last season's Doctorless story was Love & Monsters, which was also about nerds looking for the Doctor, and in my review I called it the worst Doctor Who story ever.

It really does go to show just how much difference a good story, deep characters and respect for one's audience can make.

I just want to watch a whole series of this.

Charlie's Angels (2000)

Mindless action film following on from the TV series. The visuals and action sequences are good, but I didn't even attempt to follow the story. Using CGI to mask edits was perhaps not the best way to go. Bill Murray is quite fun as usual, as is Matt LeBlanc.

The best thing about this film though, is simply that it doesn't seek to replace the original TV show – it just comes after it, as all good movie revivals should do.

(sequel here)