Monday 26 June 2017

Doctor Who - 'World Enough and Time'

Meet the new boss...
"Well, I am that mysterious adventurer in all of time and space known only as Doctor Who. These are my disposables, Exposition and… Comic Relief."

This review will contain spoilers

We open with the Doctor apparently about to regenerate on a plain of ice, and having a bit of a 'Ten moment' about it.

Sometime before, on a spaceship caught on the edge of a black hole's event horizon, the Doctor tasks Missy with leading a rescue mission. Unfortunately, it is a mission that will prove costly indeed for Bill. Torn from her friends by the tides of time, she faces a fate worse than death. The Doctor's attempts to save her may bring him nothing but heartache, and bring Missy literally face to face with her past crimes.

The Good
Two-parter!

Lots of fun business and genuine feels with the time differential.

The Master's disguised role, Razor, was genuinely hilarious, if slightly reminiscent of Babylon 5's family Zathras.

The build-up was, thanks to that two-parter, properly creepy. It's easy to forget how fucking eerie those cloth-faced bastards are with all the tin suit, air grabbing, 'excellent' saying silliness that has followed.

Bill's cyber conversion was easy enough to see coming, but the fact that they went through with it still had some punch to it. Also, I liked the nod to classic Man in the Iron Mask/El Santo teardrop design.

The Bad
Once again, we're echoing audio adventures here, especially the heartbreaking 'Spare Parts', with CyberBill very reminiscent of ... You know what, I'm clipping this bit out. Spoilers.(1) This is especially true of the aesthetic of the sunless city, which is kind of left field for a spaceship.

The Ugly
Oh, I am so torn right now. On the one hand, I don't want to see another Companion death played for effect and then reversed. On the other, if the gay companion is permanently cyberconverted, that would also suck. Especially with the oh-so wondrous Clara allowed to roam time and space regardless of being a potentially apocalyptic paradox.

Theorising
I strongly suspect that Missy is either playing a long game with her past self, or else will have a last minute change of heart leading either to her death and regeneration into a less reformed incarnation, or to some sort of revocation of the past thousand years of her existence. I guess we’ll have some sort of explanation of PastMaster's appearance, since his timeline is pretty locked down. Actually... While Missy's lack of memory of events could be due to the same effect referenced in 'Day of the Doctor', it's also possible that this isn't the real Master at all. Mister Razor is an anagram of Master or iz... R. Okay, that might need some work.

In terms of the Doctor, I wonder if he's not going to do something messianic with his regeneration in order to avert the catastrophe that led to the Mondasian colonists undergoing cyber-conversion in the first place. That would be a shame; he's been agreeably non-messianic so far in this regeneration.

Top Quotes
Razor: Do you want the good tea or the bad tea?
Bill: What’s the difference?
Razor: I call one “good” and the other “bad.”
Bill: ...I’ll take the good one.
Razor: Excellent. A positive attitude will help with the horror to come!
Bill: What horror?!
Razor: Mainly the tea.

Verdict
Right now, this is a red letter episode. Sadly, in the nature of two-parters - and as was show with the 'Heaven Sent'/'Hell Bent' finale - there is every chance that the follow up with so egregiously cock up that this part looks duff by association. Right now, however, we have a very strong set up for Capaldi's last hurrah, so in the words of Ru Paul(2), 'don't fuck it up.' Please.

9/10

(1) The main problem with this comparison being that the harsh emotional punch of 'Spare Parts' is going to be hard to match. You can check it out for about £3 if you doubt me (price accurate as of 26/06/17.)
(2) My partner has been mainlining Drag Race lately.

Wednesday 21 June 2017

American Gods - 'Come to Jesus'

"Let's have a story..."
And so it comes to an end; sort of. Perhaps less an end and more the beginning of the end, or even the end of the beginning.
  
Anansi makes suits for Wednesday and Shadow, and insists on telling them the story of Bilqis, who has adapted to survive throughout history, while envious and fearful men struggle to pull her down. Driven from her homelands (presumably in the Yemen) by kings, and from Iran by Ayatollahs, she comes to America not with her worshippers, but to find worshippers, only to be struck down by a more terrible enemy than any man: AIDS, and the fear of sex which haunted the 90s because of it. At her lowest ebb, the Technical Boy offers her a way out; a new altar where worshippers can swipe left or right. So Bilqis is reborn and so she becomes one of the New Gods(1).

The moral of the story? Get yourself a queen.

"Hit me with your best shot..."
Thus, Wednesday takes Shadow to Kentucky(2) to meet Ostara, aka Easter, a chic and successful Old God riding the sugar high of her holiday thanks to its association with not only the modern, commercial Easter, but also with Jesus Christ. This brings us to what is likely to be one of the more controversial scenes in the series, as Shadow begins to realise that he is in a room full of people, virtually all of whom are, in fact, Jesus Christ(3). Wednesday tries to persuade the sceptical Ostara to join his cause, despite her current success, spinning her the story of Vulcan's murder at the hands of the New Gods and promising that with just a little withholding of her power, she could be truly worshipped again, instead of growing fat on the table scraps of later powers.

While they are talking, Laura arrives with Mad Sweeney. Ostara agrees to 're-life' Laura, but discovers that she cannot, because Laura died at the hand - or at least the design - of a god, leaving Laura to beat the name of the god who sent him out of Mad Sweeney while she attends to more unexpected visitors: Media, and one of the faceless 'children'. Media hints that Ostara has done well by her deal with the New Gods, and could do badly were she to break it, as the one faceless man splits into many, also disgorging the Technical Boy.

My one major regret about this season is that these faceless men failed to do
any finger snaps while circling Ostara.
Shadow talks to a particularly relaxed Jesus about belief, and how he has none, before joining Wednesday and Ostara on the lawn for the big showdown. As the New Gods dismiss him as unimportant, Wednesday draws down lightning to smite the faceless men, dedicating their deaths to Ostara and declaring his names to Shadow: Grimnir, Glad-o-War; Odin. Ostara flexes her own muscles to take back Spring and so blight the land with famine, and, what with one thing and another, Shadow Moon has become a believer.

And then Laura asks to speak to her husband, while in Wisconsin, Bilqis approaches the House on the Rock on some mysterious commission from the Technical Boy.

"Who's queen?"
Episode 8, 'Come to Jesus', brings the first season of American Gods to a close, and it's been quite a ride, full of sex and violence and as many aggressively, deliberately jarring jazz chords as Birdman. Opening pretty much just like the book, it then diverged to include more of Mad Sweeney, more of Bilqis, and much, much more of Laura Moon(4), as well as bringing in Vulcan out of nowhere. It's been more... full-on god than the opening of the book, using hyper-stylised cinematography and effects to portray the divine in contrast to the more commonplace look of the mundane. It's also expanded greatly on a lot of the background action, which is a common enough feature of visual media adaptations of books with a limited narrative viewpoint, and importantly has done this well, which is a lot less common.

It hasn't been perfect, but it's always been interesting, and I'm delighted that the second season is already confirmed. Here's hoping for a third, since that should just about round the story off.

(1) A part of the radical departure from the book, in which she scraped out her worship as a sex worker and was ultimately the victim of male aggression.
(2) Because of course Kentucky.
(3) Explained as the effect of a faith growing so large that it encompasses widely disparate worldviews which look on the same figure in very different ways.
(4) The sheer fact that so much of the heart of this series comes down to the foul-mouthed chemistry between two really quite unpleasant characters is kind of dizzying.

Tuesday 20 June 2017

12 Monkeys - Season 3

Like the Sam Fisher of time.
Thankfully, I was able to get all of Season 3 of 12 Monkeys on catchup for this weekend, Sky having decided not to record it because obviously I wasn't interest in something on SyFy.

Season 3 picks up with Cole trying to track down Cassie, before a future version of himself tells him to look for Jennifer instead, as Jennifer has the answers. Jennifer is also in Paris, between the World Wars, attempting to become a famous actress in order to sell her play about the Army of the 12 Monkeys and thus send a message to the future. Here she is stalked by 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, without horses', a group of four acolytes of the Army dedicated to guardianship of the infant Witness. They are equipped with the season's new hotness, wearable splinter technology, which allows them to do a Kitty Pride every time they are about to be caught and turn out never to have been there.

Cassie tries to escape from Titan, but is prevented by the same technology and her child taken from her. Then Deacon, who turns out not to be dead, is set to rescue her by one of the acolytes for unknown reasons. They find the Splinter facility destroyed, two years on, but with a pair of tether injections left to bring them back to 2046. Then Ramse shows up with Olivia and everything gets dark. Ramse tries to trick Cole into a mission to kill the Witness which is actually an assassination attempt against Cassie, leading to Cole killing Ramse and falling into an existential crisis as he comes to believe that the Witness is beyond salvation because he carries his father's evil in him. Cassie, meanwhile, is determined that he can be saved, leading to a clash in which Cole and Cassie go AWOL using one of the time vests and begin to work against the rest of the Splinter team, even as one of the Guardians takes the Witness - Athan - away to be raised apart from his destiny.

This season also has at least two actual heists!
Tragedy strikes when Athan loses the one person he has truly loved and in despair - and prompted by meeting his mother, long before she met James Cole and just after losing her first patient - decides to go back and become the witness. Cole and Cassie capture him, but Olivia helps the Splinter team send a hit squad and he is seemingly killed when his vest is hit. Then Olivia reveals her long-game: She has been manipulating the team all along to kill the Witness, allowing her to take over Titan and the Army from the Pallid Man in revenge for the Witness taking everything from her after Jennifer stabbed her. As in Season 2, the Army seem triumphant, before Athan - his life saved by Jennifer, following a vision she has long been seeing - reappears to bust out the team. He is killed, Olivia declares herself the Witness (which Athan revealed to her she was all along,) and the season ends with Titan Splintering in above the facility bent on its destruction, but it's not quite the end of the world. Nor, thankfully, is it the end of the series, with a fourth and final season announced.

It's all gone a bit Kubrick.
I continue to really enjoy 12 Monkeys, although I was sad to see Ramse go. I presume that season 4 will see the surviving members of the team - which may or may not include Deacon(1) - forced to go mobile, presumably using a version of the Army's wearable Splinter tech. If they don't hook up with Jennifer again, I will be pouty, because she remains one of the greatest things ever, including a hallucinatory episode in the trenches to the tune of 99 Red Balloons, but with semi-improvised lyrics as well as her theatrical career.

I'm actually heartened  by the announcement that it's going to be the last season, because as much as I am saddened to lose it, I am glad that it is likely to get to tell its whole story to the end and not be cancelled midflow.


(1) I'm assuming it will, because I have a theory that Deacon is important. He was a little upset this season to learn that he doesn't appear anywhere in the Witness's visions, and I wonder if he isn't some sort of freak, temporal wildcard. Olivia calls him an interchangeable component, but what if that's not true?

iZombie - Season 3

So... was Blaine's hair always that colour?
Season 2 of iZombie wrapped up an ongoing conspiracy plot involving an energy drink that makes people into zombies, and introduced another, as PMC Filmore Graves was revealed to be a front for the coming zombie state, devoted to staving off 'D-Day' (discovery day) until they are ready to establish a zombie homeland.

Man this review requires a lot of use of the z-word.

Liv and her crew ally themselves with Filmore Graves, while Ravi keeps working on his cure. Major joins FG's zombie strike team, since no-one else will give the Chaos Killer a job, even if he is only the Chaos Kidnapper, and then has to be cured (the first cure having terminal side-effects.) Relief when he turns out not to have lost his memory is tempered by the realisation that ex-pusher turned zombie underworld leader Blaine has been lying about his own amnesia, including to his sometime lover Peyton, who becomes a full-time cast member this season. Also unfortunate is the fact that the remaining stocks of the cure go missing before Liv can be cured, the last having been given away by Major in a fit of do-right altruism. In addition, word of the zombie massacre at the Max Rager party gets out and anti-zombie activism becomes a thing, leading to the murder of a zombie family who turn out to have been old friends of Clive.

iZombie has a lot of good points, although most of them are mirrored in other series. It is, however, one of the very few series where a man (Ravi, in this case) acts like a dick over love and no-one cuts him an ounce of slack. Rose McIver's chameleonic ability to shift persona with Liv's brain-diet remains impressive, as is the fact that when she calls to warn the FG team that they are heading into a trap, their uptight, military leader accepts the word of a proven source, instead of dismissing her as female or a civilian. I've lost track of the number of lives lost to warnings being dismissed that way. I still don't trust FG, and suspect them of stealing the cure. Fortunately, there is a Season 4 on the way to answer lingering questions.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Season 3

Lemonading.
This past weekend was a festival of threes, as I watched three season 3s: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, iZombie and 12 Monkeys.

The first and lightest of these saw Kimmy refuse to divorce her dubious husband in order to protect yet another easily-led woman (played by Laura Dern) falling into his clutches, and thus have to find her own funding to attend college. She briefly attends Columbia on a rowing scholarship, but fails a vital test on the grounds that all sorts of weird shit just keeps happening in her life, like being dragged off by the Feds to help talk down her former bunker-mate Cindy who has turned cult leader herself, apparently on Kimmy's advice. Meanwhile, Jaqueline is struggling to have the Washington Redskins renamed, ultimately persuading them that 'Washington Gun-Takers' will result in a massive uptick in merchandise sales as a much larger demographic flock to buy and burn team shirts.

But it's not really about the ongoing plot, such as it is, so much as the moment to moment interplay of characters and dialogue. On this front, Kimmy and Titus's unhealthy co-dependence goes from horror to horror, while the interlude at Columbia brings back one of my favourite dynamics - Kimmy vs. Xanthippe - although their rivalry has eased somewhat at this point, not least because Kimmy is back to calling herself Schmidt and it turns out that everyone knows that she was a mole woman now. Through all this, and all the terrible things that people thoughtlessly do to one another in the show, it is ultimately about the uplifting power of hope and friendship, and the fact that Sea Lions control the media.


Once more, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a hit and miss show that scores largely through unrelenting weight of fire. Did a joke fall flat? Who cares? Here's the next one! And in fairness, far more land than don't.

Doctor Who - 'Eaters of Light'

The Doctor gets off on the wrong foot again.
"Listen, you are all very, very angry. And really, you’re just scared. But for now, would you mind awfully just jumping out of your skins and allowing Nardole and I to escape in the confusion?"

This review will contain spoilers

Bill has, it seems, a bit of a thing for Rosemary Sutcliffe, so the Doctor has brought her to ancient Scotland to establish that the Ninth Legion really was wiped out. What they find is, of course, much more alien-related than anticipated, and the TARDIS crew find themselves defending the underage survivors of the Roman invasion, and the last surviving legionaries, against a creature not of this world.

The Good
Honestly, it's amazing that Doctor Who has never done the Ninth Legion before now; it's prime time travel stuff.

The monsters were neat. A little reminiscent of the moorwen from Outlander (the scifi Beowulf movie, rather than the softcore Scottish time travel melodrama, although to be fair, that would be a hell of a shakeup and we are north of the border,) but not particularly of anything in Doctor Who's past.

The Romans' response to Bill's sexuality (amusement that she restricts herself to either gender) was another good bit of historical assumption challenging, especially coupled with treating the Romans - usually the good guys, as the 'civilised' ones - as the invading force that they were.

I was amused by the talking crows.

I find I like it when humans gazump the Doctor's attempts at martyrdom.

The Bad
Black legionary died first (although in fairness, there was another, who survived to make the final sacrifice with his brothers.)

I know Nardole is just repeating what he's heard, but surely everyone knows that the Mary Celeste was abandoned due to the appearance of a Dalek temporal assassination squad.

The Ugly
Apparently Stuart Manning isn't doing posters anymore, and I don't know if I should be mad at the BBC or worried about him or what.

Theorising
Okay, so we're moving on to the (possible) redemption of Missy, and we have John Simm popping back up. Degeneration? The Two Masters? Is Missy going to cop a bullet for the Doctor fighting against her old self, or just do something to defeat him that the Doctor won't be able to stomach. I'm mostly hoping for the latter.

Top Quotes
"Oh my God, it even does lip-sync." - Bill gets to the heart of TARDIS translation

NARDOLE: We're looking for Bill, right?
DOCTOR: No, we're looking for the maximum danger in the immediate area and walking right into it.
NARDOLE: Yeah, but what about Bill?
DOCTOR: Well, if she's there, we're saving her. If she's not, she's safe already. Trust me, this is not my first rodeo.

"Is this what happens when you understand what everyone in the universe is saying? Everybody just sounds like children?" - Bill

"Sir, I must to protest in the strongest, most upset terms possible. Don't make me go squeaky voiced!" - Nardole

"See, that’s what I’m trying to teach you, Missy. You understand the universe, you see it, you grasp it, but you never learned to hear the music." - The Doctor gets his Thrawn on

Verdict
A really solid pseudo-historical, tackling one of the great historical mysteries with Doctor Who's usual flippancy. This is an episode I would have liked to see get more time, rather than feeling it needed it, which sets it somewhat apart.


8/10

Saturday 17 June 2017

American Gods - 'A Prayer for Mad Sweeny'

It's that woman again.
Another change of pace this week, as we devote almost an entire – Shadow and Wednesday free – episode to a Coming to America story.

The tale is that of Essie MacGowan(1) a young lass who grows up on stories of the good folk and – almost – never neglects to leave a little something for the leprechauns. She leads a proper Moll Flanders of a life – an affair with a rich man, framed for theft, transported to the Carolinas, returned, a long career as a thief, arrested again after failing to leave bread for her ‘sponsor’, sentenced to death but transported after pleading her belly – before finding a good, quiet retirement with a kind man on a tobacco plantation. As an old, old woman she finally passes, and her life-long guardian comes to collect her.

Mad Sweeney.

Movin' right along.
Now… I’ll be honest, I can’t remember if the one that came for her in the novel was Mad Sweeney, but it’s a brilliant move here, tying this episode-length Coming to America to Mad Sweeney’s current reluctant road trip with Laura Moon and – until he slips and Laura is able to pass on the location of the meeting of gods – Saleem(2). The doubling of Emily Browning of course strengthens the mirroring, and between the now and the flashback, the writers develop the character of Mad Sweeney, like a scruffy, ginger Oliver Queen. He was a king, before he fled the battle he knew would be his death, and now he works for Wednesday because he owes a battle; not to Wednesday, but perhaps to himself.

And – and this is a big and – we learn that Mad Sweeney killed Laura Moon on Wednesday’s orders. Clearly, he feels somewhat badly for this, as when a car crash gives him the chance to take back his coin, he instead returns it to her, to be reclaimed once he brings her to the resurrection man.

In many episodes of Arrow, the flashbacks feel intrusive. While they provided vital development in American Gods’ second (original to the TV series) thread, the present day elements of ‘A Prayer for Mad Sweeney’ kind of interrupt the flow of the amazingly realised Coming to America. They aren’t bad, indeed they’re pretty good and make both Mad Sweeney and Laura Moon more explicable; just… a bit of an oddity. All in all, it’s one hell of an episode, with Browning and Pablo Schreiber acting up a storm in what is almost a two-hander.

I guess we’ll be going back to Shadow next week, but with this and ‘Git Gone’ it’s apparent that the show is building a world that is bigger than its lead.

(1) Tregowan in the novel, but I guess that either Emily Browning, doubling up as Essie, couldn’t do a Cornish accent, or the Irish production lobby was stronger.

(2) Saleem has only a tangential role here, with the most important development for him being that, when given the likely location of the djinn, he abandons his prayer mat.

Doctor Who - 'Empress of Mars'

Apparently royal Ice Queen regalia involves a degree of Predator cosplay.
“Well, I daresay the British Army is more than a match for a bunch of upright crocodiles!”


This review will contain spoilers

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole drop by NASA to watch a new probe scan the ice caps of Mars, only to see ‘God Save the Queen’ spelled out on the surface in rocks. To investigate, they take the TARDIS back to Mars in 1881, only for the ship to rebel and take Nardole back to the Doctor’s office. Bill and the Doctor run into an Ice Warrior and a band of British soldiers; they think that ‘Friday’ wants to trade gems for their help getting him home, but their mining instead cracks open a hibernation hive and wakes Iraxxa, the Queen of Mars. While a hawkish officer tries to kick off his own, Martian Zulu Dawn, Nardole must turn to the only person on Earth who might be able to help him repair a TARDIS.

The Good
I’m a be honest here: I loves me some Ice Warriors, and I especially like it when they get to be a bit more nuanced than ‘Ice Warrior smash!’ This episode delivers on that, with the humans as invaders and the Doctor discussing the complex dichotomy of the Martians with Bill.

I’m glad to see the Doctor managing to oppose war without slagging off all soldiers.

Alpha Centauri! Alpha Centauri played by original voice actress (and former Grace Archer) Ysanne Churchman! So much squee!

You either get this, or I can't explain.
The Bad
A lot of the episode, especially Colonel Godsacre’s plot – weary, war-sick senior officer clashes with hawkish subordinate and ends up forming a connection with an alien race and leaving with them – feels like it borrows from the audio story Storm Warning. I wonder if my brain is just so saturated with Doctor Who that I can’t not see parallels in any story.

The episode never really goes into its theme of humans as the alien invaders, in part because there is no point at which the humans have the power.

No Stuart Manning poster this week. I hope he's all right.

The Ugly
Seriously; the black guy, again? I get that it’s to show that Catchlove is the kind of dick who’d throw a fellow soldier under the bus, but damn.

Theorising
So, the episode is mostly a one off, but presents a significant development in the Missy/Vault storyline. Not only has she now been allowed out of the Vault, her reaction when the Doctor and Bill return to the TARDIS is telling. Maybe she’s faking it, but she shows what seems to be genuine concern for the Doctor’s wellbeing, and frankly managing not to stab Nardole in the back for as long as it takes to fix up the TARDIS is an achievement. I suspect that we’ll be seeing the Last Temptation of Missy sooner rather than later.

Top Quotes
Bill: If there *are* people here, why would they bother writing messages on the surface of the planet?
The Doctor: State visit, patriotic fervor… rogue graffiti artist…

The Doctor: The Ice Warriors. They could build a city under the sand, yet drench the snows of Mars with innocent blood. They could slaughter whole civilisations, yet weep at the crushing of a flower.
Bill: Like The Vikings.
Doctor: Yes. Yes, very much.

The Verdict
‘Empress of Mars’ is an otherwise strong episode, let down by length. I would have loved to see this as a classic serial, with Catchlove pushing his military agenda against the weakened Ice Warriors for an episode or two, before being completely outmatched by the emergent hive. From the start, I have wondered if the show would settle into the new format or even if I would get used to it, but I am more and more certain that Doctor Who has at its core ideas that benefit from a slower pace. In particular, the fact that each story essentially needs to establish a whole new setting.


6/10

Thursday 8 June 2017

American Gods - 'A Murder of Gods'

So... a happy story?
In a very topical Coming to America, we open this week with a group of Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. One falters in the water, but a long-haired man with a kind face walks on the water to rescue him. "You know my name," he assures the man, and light blossoms behind his head, but the light comes from the headlights of a posse of faceless killers, who clutch crucifixes and write holy slogans on the rifles that they use to gun down men, women, children, and even Mexican Jesus.


Elsewhere, Shadow's world is getting weirder by the day. Even as Wednesday uses the threat of the New Gods to hurry him away from any chance of meeting his wife again, a wound inflicted by some sort of walking treeoid becomes infested with a wooden being. People have always had 'a god shaped hole'(1) inside them, Wednesday explains, and trees were the first things that learned to fill it. He is evasive, however, as to what he and his ilk really are; perhaps, in the end, no-one really knows.

Vulcan, Virginia; where we love guns.
Wednesday takes Shadow to Vulcan, Virginia, to meet one of his potential big guns, as it were. Vulcan, god of the forge, has become a god of guns; the power of fire is now fire power. Industrial accidents and a cult of the gun are his meat and drink, and every shooting with his bullets – including those in the opening scene – a prayer to him. Veteran comic actor Corbin Bernsen plays Vulcan deadly straight, as he menaces Shadow with a hanging tree and revels in the power given him by every movie theatre massacre and NRA rally. He is as menacing as Byelobog, but full of force and vigour, and his talk of franchising his worship comes close to the rebranding offered by the New Gods.

Buddies.
Meanwhile, Laura is left behind at the diner, where Mad Sweeney makes her an offer. He'll find someone to properly resurrect her – in Kentucky – after which she will have no more need of the coin and can return it to him. They try to steal a taxi and thus end up travelling with former salesman Saleem, who is looking for his djinn. Mostly to fuck with Mad Sweeney, but also for her own reasons, Laura detours to Indiana where she looks through her mother's window, but does not stay.

Vulcan forges a blade for Wednesday, who realises that he has been betrayed by this one time comrade for the favour of the New Gods who have helped Vulcan to maintain his power. Vulcan calls Wednesday a martyr, but Wendesday insists that that honour goes to the one who joined his fight, forged him a blade and was then cut down. Shadow's reaction of utter horror as Wednesday first decapitates Vulcan and pushes him into a vat of molten steel to steal his power, before pissing into the vat to curse the entire factory and all it produces(2) is flawless.

As Shadow walks further into darkness, Laura finds a moment of light as she watches Saleem pray. "God is great," he tells her. "Life is great," she returns.

Affable evil to the hilt.
'A Murder of Gods' confirms two things: First, that Wednesday has no interest in surviving if it means adapting to the methods of the New Gods. He doesn't want to tap into the zeitgeist and feed on the attention of mortals directed to some icon or other. He wants the real deal; blood and iron and his name as a holy word, giving purpose as well as receiving veneration. And second, that just because they are modern, the New Gods are no kind of nice. I liken him to a more vital Byelobog, but Vulcan is actually much more sinister with his impersonal, uncaring drive to see weapons used, and that's New God to the hilt. As Wednesday notes, his new cult has nothing personal about it, no craftsmanship. The gun and the sword are the martial expressions of this division: One machined and mass produced, efficient and impersonal; the other hand-forged, very personal, but still a device for making people bleed and die.

In the parallel road trip, Saleem is one of the first to show something entirely new. He has hope; he has joy. He's been handed a new life driving a cab which someone took a shit in the back of, and he's loving it. He's looking for his djinn, but not for wishes or for power, and his outlook seems to be affecting Laura somewhat (Mad Sweeney less so.)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this episode is that it is basically all new. Vulcan wasn't in the book at all, and neither was Laura's road trip. While recognising the need to expand the text for a TV series, I was concerned that the new material might be jarring, but this is pretty much spot on. I think my only complaint is that the Vulcan, Virginia gun cult seems to be made up, whereas the book content grew out of what was there. And it's not as if Vulcan doesn't have its story(3).

(1) Which any other week would have been title material.
(2) I strongly suspect that the curse on Vulcan's bullets will turn up later in the series.

(3) When the state of Virginia refused to pay to have the only bridge into and out of town repaired, they approached the Soviet Union for international aid. Virginia cut them a cheque.

Tuesday 6 June 2017

Doctor Who - 'The Lie of the Land'

Poster (c) ... Well, this one was apparently a BBC commission, so probably
(c) BBC, but designed and all by Stuart Manning.
"Your version of good is not absolute. It's vain, arrogant and sentimental. If you're waiting for me to become all that, I'm going to be here for a long time yet.”

This review will contain some spoilers.

The monks have won. The monks have always been here. The monks are a fact of history. The Doctor says so, so it must be true. But Bill knows that this is not true, that the monks have only been on Earth for a few months. She also knows that the Doctor must be working on a plan, if only she could find him.

The Good
Oo! Pun title!

For all his fascination for humanity and apparently a millennium on the planet watching the Vault, it would seem that the Doctor doesn't really have the emotional connection to its history necessary to overwhelm the Monks. This is interesting, even if I don't entirely agree with it.

The use of old-fashioned Walkmans for the not-Eye Drives was a nice touch.

Michelle Gomez played an older, wearier version of Missy, struggling to be good, but coming up short, to the hilt.

The fake news angle was one of the show's better and more painful political allegories.

The Bad
I wasn't thrilled by the Doctor's test, which frankly felt like it was designed to provide a big fake out for the trailer.

The Ugly
Nothing of note.

Theorising
I hope that the Monks aren't a spent force. While I'll buy that Bill was able to destroy their psychic link through the power of love and so thwart their first invasion plan, they were built up as much, much more than that and their dismissive defeat was rather disappointing. I'd like to see them in the finale, perhaps.

Top Quotes
"You know, back in the day, I'd burn an entire city to the ground just to see the pretty shapes the smoke made. I'm sorry your plus one doesn't get a happy ending, but, like it or not, I just saved this world because I want to change." – Missy

"Oh, you clever, brilliant, ridiculous girl." – The Doctor

"I keep remembering all the people I've killed. Every day I think of more. Being bad, being bad drowned that out. I didn't know I even knew their names. You didn't tell me about this bit." - Missy
The Verdict
As noted above, this is a somewhat underwhelming end to a really very well-executed story. The Monks as built up in the last two episodes are barely present in this one, and while this is explained as a result of them attempting to run the Earth with what is really a very small force, it's a shame that the Doctor never got to face off against them again.

Score - 5/10

Monday 5 June 2017

DC Roundup: Supergirl – 'Nevertheless, She Persisted', The Flash – 'Finishing Line', and Arrow – 'Lian Yu'

Not good.
In a continuing finale vein, we wrapped the three 'long' DC series this week, in the usual apocalyptic style.

'Nevertheless She Persisted' – once more, Supergirl wearing its politics on its sleeve – opened with Supergirl forced to fight her cousin, Superman having been dosed with silver kryptonite which makes him see her as his greatest enemy (Zod.) It's an epic smackdown, but she prevails and Superman recovers in the Fortress of Solitude, where they come up with a potential plan. Supergirl, as champion of Earth, challenges Rhea to single combat for the fate of the planet. Meanwhile, Lillian Luthor reveals an unfinished prototype of Lex's which would impregnate the atmosphere with kryptonite. Lena and Winn can adapt it to fill the air with a fine lead mist (apparently) which would be harmless to humans (they say,) but render the planet Daxamite-proof. This is plan B.

Kara fights Rhea and is doing well until it is revealed that, thanks to the destruction of Daxam by pieces of Krypton, Rhea literally bleeds kryptonite. When Kara still kicks her arse, she unleashes the army. The rest of the DEO – including J'onn, who has been woken by a vision of M'gann – battle Daxamites in the street, eventually joined by M'gann and a cadre of other liberal White Martians. Lillian tries to activate the device as soon as it is ready, but Lena reveals that she gave the remote to Supergirl. Sadly, Rhea's determination to destroy Earth outweighs her commitment to Daxamite convention and Supergirl is forced to activate the device. Rhea dies as Mon-el refuses her any more help than she gave his father (as he now knows that she killed him,) and the other Daxamites flee.
 
No. I don't even like this ship. You're crying!
Kara sends Mon-el away in his pod, which is pretty moving even for those of us who were never aboard that ship. Cue sad montages. Lillian claims credit for driving off the invasion. Lena doesn't learn Kara's true identity, but the reveal that Cat Grant has always known makes it less likely that she'll turn out to have been aware. This means that after being pretty much in the thick of the season, Lena still hasn't had her big choice moment. This is a shame.

Also, Mon-el falls into a wormhole and we see a flashback to a group of black robed Kryptonian cultists launching a baby called 'it' towards Earth, where they predict it will reign.

'Nevertheless She Persisted' is a barnstorming conclusion to a sometimes patchy sophomore season, but lags when it's away from the epic. Henshaw vanishes and James is sidelined in which ought to be an ensemble piece, and the arrival of the White Martians really needed to be more significant, rather than just dropping into a random street brawl. When it's good, however, it's excellent, and one of the highlights is Superman's reaction to getting his butt kicked by Kara (albeit in a very close fight.) He makes no excuses, offers no platitudes, and instead insists that the silver kryptonite didn't weaken him, and that Kara is the legit champion of Earth. He even allows that he doesn't think he could have made the tough call if it meant losing Lois. This guy is like the least toxic man on TV, and that's awesome.

So, hey; Speedster punch up. That's new.
Meanwhile, in The Flash, Iris turns out not to be dead, just dying, and also not Iris. To make up for revealing her location, HR swapped places with her using his holographic projector and thus was stabbed not in the heart, but merely heart adjacent. Thus, Barry rushes him to hospital where emergency medical treatment no, wait, they all just sit there as he dies. I wouldn't mind if they'd suggested it and ruled it out because he was too hurt to go that fast.

Anyway, Savitar realises what's up, although at this stage his existence is uncertain enough that memories are taking time to catch up with him(1), and kidnaps Cisco to create a Speed Force godmaker out of the Bazooka. Barry distracts him for a time by inviting him to come back to Team Flash and be healed, since they did kind of make him what he was by kicking him out in the future. He is not reformed, however, and runs back to make his final push – after getting Killer Frost to deep-freeze Black Flash – only for the modified Bazooka to release Jay Garrick to join the other speedsters in giving Savitar a shoeing. It's hardly a curb stomp, but eventually Barry phases through his armour, pushes Savitar out and shakes the armour to pieces, and the time remnant fades as his paradox is resolved.
 
So, if Caitlin's powers don't make her Killer Frost, is she actually a homicidal
maniac?
All seems happy and well - apart from Caitlin, who shakes off the Killer Frost persona, but opts to keep her powers and seek to discover who she really is, leaving Julian looking as if she's frozen his puppy - but then the Speed Force starts to destroy bits of the city now that the prison is empty. Barry accepts that it is time for him to take his place in the Speed Force, which in the form of his mother assures him that he won't be in hell. He has reached his 'Finish Line', and it is time to rest.

Damn.

Finally, Arrow brings us full circle. Digger Harkness betrays team Barry, but the mirakuru-free Wilson seems solid. They rescue most of the hostages, but Dinah, Rene and William are still missing. Malcolm Merlyn takes Thea's place on a landmine and is apparently blown up, which is a touching but unlikely way for the Magician to go. Wilson turns Oliver over, but this turns out to be a ruse to get Curtis' new sonic device to Dinah, who is then able to bust herself and Rene free. She then clashes with Black Siren, with Quentin popping in to deck his not-daughter, and giving his blessing for her to be the new Black Canary. Nissa defeats Talia and all seems to be going well, until Chase makes a run for it and Felicity realises that a) his plane doesn't work and b) he's wired the entire island with explosives with his own heartbeat as a deadman's switch.

...
Chase's revenge is thwarted when Oliver refuses to kill him, even rescuing William with a leg shot, but then he cuts his own throat and the island explodes with everyone but Oliver and William still on it.

D. Amn.

So, yeah… That was a round of downers. My predictions for the future include something Doomsdayish for Kara (because we've already had a Braniac), a return for Barry under circumstances I haven't yet put together in my head, but probably involving some negative manipulation of the Speed Force which needs Barry to sort it out, and an early Season 6 in which Olly is called on to rescue his team from probably Talia and her fringe Leaguers. Or possibly Hell. Not ruling that one out, given the shit we know to have been on or under that island.

(1) I'm assuming, as previously he was always ahead of the curve.

TV Roundup: Iron Fist - 'Black Tiger Steals Heart', 'Lead Horse Back to Stable', 'Bar the Big Boss' and 'Dragon Plays with Fire'; Person of Interest - 'The Day the World Went Away', 'Synecdoche', '.exe' and 'return 0'

"Wax on..."
Okay, so I have now finished off season 1 of the underwhelming Iron Fist and the fifth and final season of the excellent Person of Interest.

Danny is brought to Bakuto's frankly cult-flavoured compound to learn to better cultivate and harness his chi, only to learn from Madame Gao that Bakuto's happy clappy martial arts cult and scholarship programme is a sort of progressive wing of the Hand. Not so progressive that they don't deal heroin or try to, dare I say it, rule the world in some way, but big on affirmative action and recruiting outside the usual fold. I mean, Colleen tries to convince Danny that they are the good version of the Hand, but it turns out that Bakuto has been lying to her all along. It's unclear if he's been lying to anyone else, or why the Hand hasn't put more energy into recruiting people who can be converted to its rather nebulous cause without constant deception.

Danny is rescued by throwing star guy, who turns out to be a Kun Lungian named Davos, Danny's BFF from immortal weapon training, runner up in 'Who Wants to be an Iron Fist 2014,' and the person most abandoned by Danny's departure, since it leaves him guarding the pass on his own without an Iron Fist to be found. Colleen helps them to escape the Hand compound and is later driven out by the Hand for betraying them. Bakuto stabs Danny with a chi blocking spike and Davos reluctantly agrees to stay in New York, but only until the Hand there can be destroyed, and gets a huge chip on his shoulder when he finds the Immortal Iron Fist making out with one of the Hand.

The eternal union of shared sartorial embarrassment.
Joy reclaims Rand after Harold murders a dude (did I review that episode already?) and the Meacham family disintegrates as Bakuto makes a deal for Ward to deliver Harold to him in exchange for the cure to Gao's synthetic heroin. Then Bakuto turns on the family and threatens Joy if Danny doesn't turn himself in. He does, then breaks loose in the lobby as Colleen and Davos arrive. They fight the Hand, and Colleen defeats her sensei in single combat, felling him by kicking a broken shard of sword blade at him. She and Danny agree to hand him over to the authorities, but Davos kills him and tells them that the Hand must be destroyed. He and Danny have a fight and Danny kicks his arse, but lets him go, because he and Colleen only talk a good murder (a fact which kind of thins the tension in the next episode.)

Finally, Harold frames Danny as a drug dealer, alienating Joy and leading to a rooftop confrontation in which Ward shoots his father off a roof (I have no idea how they covered that up, never mind Danny blowing out all the windows with a chi burst) and arranges for him to be cremated before he can resurrect again. Danny may or may not come to some sort of conclusion as to whom he needs to be as the Iron Fist, has a few flashbacks to the cave where he faced a dragon (or, just maybe, a dude with a couple of eye-shaped flashlights) and decides to go back to Kun Lung with Colleen, only to find the pass closed and full of dead Hand. Ward settles back in at Rand, while Joy and Davos plot to kill Danny and Madame Gao listens to them.

So, what has been wrong with this series?

Rain.
1. Danny Rand. It's not just that he's a white kung fu saviour, it's that the character is inconsistent in the extreme. He's a decent, naïve kid, he's a raging cauldron of rage, he's an immortal weapon, and these disparate parts are never bounced off each other, instead he goes from one to the other in such a way that Iron Fist Danny is unrecognisable as nice Buddhist Danny is unrecognisable as angry-at-the-world vengeance Danny. It would also have helped if he'd been at least a little Asian American.

2. Dull kung fu. Seriously, the show needed either razor sharp fights, or way more talking about styles and philosophy, be it ever so cod. The chatty drunken master was an absolute highlight of the series.

3. Lack of villain focus. Luke Cage threw audiences for a loop by swapping villains half-way through, but Iron Fist couldn't really decide who its villain was going to be. Madame Gao gets jacked by Bakuto's Hand, only for Bakuto to die (probably) and Harold to finally step up as the nearest thing to a big bad in the series, thanks to his sudden yet inevitable betrayal.

Okay, this moment did not suck
4. Joy. Joy was more inconsistent than Danny, bouncing off other (male) characters storylines with neither a clear redemption arc, nor yet a convincing start of darkness. By the end of the series she has lost all faith in her brother, is disgusted by her father, yet seems to be into this whole 'kill Danny' thing, despite the fact that he has actually done nothing to hurt her, for all his corporation-busting naïve shenanigans.

5. Colleen. Don't get me wrong. Colleen was mostly brilliant, but for the plot to work, she suddenly has to be completely blind to Bakuto's shit, since… well, it's just not very well hidden.

Anyway, it's done now, and on to The Defenders, where we can hope that his Heroes for Hire relationship with Luke Cage will round out some of those rough edges. Let's talk about Person of Interest now.


I am sad that PoI couldn't avoid killing the gay.
As we ramp up to the series finale, shit gets real. Harold's cover is blown, and in keeping him safe from the agents of the Samaritan, both Elias and Root are killed. The Machine opts to replace its mystery number system with Root's voice and simulated personality, after a conversation in which Root tells Harold that everyone they have lost is really still alive in the massive complex of simulated realities. While Root is dying of a shot she took for him, Harold is taken by the police and then by the FBI for his treason record, but delivers an epic badass boast during interrogation as he switches from talking to the agent to the watching Samaritan:

"I have played by the rules for so long. ... No, not your rules. You work at the behest of a system so broken that you didn't even notice when it became corrupted at its core. When I first broke your rules, a sitting President had authorized assassination squads in Laos, and the head of the FBI had ordered his men, you, to conduct illegal surveillance on his political rivals. Your rules have changed every time it was convenient for you. I was talking about my rules. I have lived by those rules for so long, believed in them for so long, believed if you played by the right rules eventually you would win. But then I was wrong, wasn't I? And now all the people I cared about are dead or will be dead soon enough. And we will be gone without a trace. So now I have to decide. Decide whether to let my friends die, to let hope die, to let the world be ground under your heel all because I played by my rules. I'm trying to decide. I'm going to kill you. But I need to decide how far I'm willing to go. How many of my own rules I am willing to break... to get it done."

nuTeam Machine
To get it done, he heads for an NSA black site, while Shaw, Reese and Fusco are called away to Washington to protect a new number: The President of the United States of America. The potential assassins turn out to be anti-surveillance activists, and the team has been activated because Samaritan has decided that an anti-surveillance assassination would suit its agenda as much as saving the President would. When the team is almost captured by the Secret Service, former PoIs Logan Pierce, Joey Durban and Harper Rose show up to save them, having received Reese's number from the Machine, revealing that they have formed a splinter cell of Team Machine.

Meanwhile, Finch secures a virus called Ice-9, which will cause chaos, but destroy Samaritan.

Ghost in the Machine.
Finch assembles the tools he needs to disseminate Ice-9 and infiltrates an NSA server at Fort Meade to plant it. Reese and Shaw receive the number for Greer's alias, and head off to stop Finch assassinate him, but Finch has already been captured. Reasoning that he would not have told the Machine the activation code for the virus, Greer has the air removed from their room to kill both himself and Finch, but the Machine is able to get Finch out thanks to Shaw and Reese's intervention, and Finch activates the virus with the Machine's blessing. Meanwhile, the tunnel bodies have been discovered and Fusco has to defend himself from a Samaritan operative who uncovers his missing persons investigation.

This episode ('.exe') also features a series of simulations of the world without the Machine, in which Nathan is alive, Reese saved the love of his life and got dumped, Fusco is in the doghouse after the fall of HR and Shaw is working for Samaritan's version of Northern Lights.

The adventure continues...
In the series finale, accompanied by a melancholy voiceover from the Machine, the team hunt down and destroy the last of Samaritan as the networked world falls into chaos under the onslaught of Ice-9. Fusco and Shaw evacuate the subway station, but Fusco is injured by the Samaritan assassin Blackwell. Reese and Finch take out backup servers, and Samaritan is forced to make one final bid for survival, uploading a copy of itself to a satellite and then sealing itself off as best it can by destroying the upload antenna with a hacked cruise missile. Finch tries to upload a final copy of the Machine to destroy Samaritan, but is duped by the Machine and Reese so that it is the latter who dies on the roof when the missile hits.

Sometime later, Shaw executes Blackwell for Root's murder and we see Finch reuniting with Grace. The voice over is revealed to be a message left by the Machine for the version of itself which, without armies to back it up, kicked the snot out of Samaritan and returned to Earth. Armed with its predecessor's knowledge and experience, the Machine 2.0 contacts Shaw, and I like to think activates a whole bunch of other cells like the Washington crew, all made up of former PoIs.

No, you're crying.
Alas, that was the last of the series, and somewhat hampered by the conflicts between the network's demands for number of the week procedurals and the looming threat of cancellation. All in all, it's not a bad conclusion, although the potential loss of the Machine right after revealing the existence of the splinter cells was a bit of a downer, as was bumping off Root and Reese in the closing episodes. Season 5 was less what I wanted from Person of Interest, and I don't think it did justice to what it was trying to do, quite possibly because of those network pressures, but it was still a cut above the average and I'm glad to have got to see the whole thing.

Now, if only Netflix could get Season 3 of 12 Monkeys, which the Sky Box decided not to record...