The Time of the Doctor and the Fall of the Eleventh

And so we come to the end of Matt Smith's run as the Doctor, with the frankly divisive trilogy of Name, Day and Time.

The Name of the Doctor wrapped up a season of speculation about Clara, the impossible girl, and had both good and bad aspects. I liked that Clara's specialness was based on something she did, rather than on being just super special, but the involvement of the Great Intelligence felt rushed. After their appearance in The Snowmen, it felt as though they were somehow supposed to have been a recurring menace like the Silence or Bad Wolf, but in fact they never showed a snowflake until popping up to be the Doctor's great nemesis. That was a failing.

Now, unlike many people, I didn't think Name ended on a cliffhanger; Clara chased the Great Intelligence through the Doctor's timestream, undoing the damage it caused by becoming a succession of short-lived Claras throughout his lives, and the Doctor fished her out into a conceptual space where she caught a glimpse of the War Doctor.

The Day of the Doctor I have discussed elsewhere in great detail. Again, I was less troubled by it than many people.

And that brings us to The Time of the Doctor, which wraps up the entire Eleventh run from the crack in Amelia Pond's bedroom wall onwards. There is a story in there that I really liked, about the Doctor giving up his final life to defend something that, in many ways, doesn't need defending, except for the handful of lives in danger. He's not guarding the Time Lords, or the door to Gallifrey, but the people of Christmas/Trenzilore, and that I liked. I also liked the resolution of the name plot: "His name is the Doctor." Well, of course it is.

But... And what a characterisation of this trilogy that word is. But, in this case, and as with the others in many ways, what it doesn't do well is tie up the loose ends. It's as if the last Season (and two specials) has been struggling with two or even three Seasons worth of plot ideas, and doing none of them well because they won't do without any of them.

The Papal Mainframe is yet another not-entirely-matching view of the Church marines, and why it's led by a flirty chick in heavy eyeliner is unclear, except that apparently everything in the nuWho future is run by flirty chicks in heavy eyeliner who fancy the Doctor.

The Doctor tricking the wooden Cybermen was something I liked a lot. If felt very Doctorish, and we don't get a great deal of that some days.

I liked Handles, but again, I really wanted to have seen his genesis; even if it was just as a piece he'd picked up at the end of Nightmare in Silver. That would have made a connection and made the eventual 'death' of Handles more affecting (although it kind of would have done already).

Finally, I'm not sure about the ending. It was a bit token for the end of the Doctor's final lifetime (and I'm leaving aside here that I would have liked to have seen at least a nod to the Valeyard somewhere) and I've never been a fan of the regeneration of mass destruction.

All in all, I think it was probably time, but in the end the series didn't tie together enough to earn this ending. It's a shame, because Eleven opened with such promise.

And now Twelve, or perhaps Doctor 2.1. I guess we'll see what they manage with him.

The Eagle

Hannah and I decided to watch a DVD on Friday, and after considerable searching, we settled on The Matrix, simply because I don't own many DVDs that she was interested in. It's not that our tastes don't overlap, they do, I just don't own those DVDs. Thus, on Saturday we opted to pick up a cheap DVD in Asda for a future evening's entertainment (in the end, Sunday's).

After much careful consideration, we opted to spend £3 on a copy of The Eagle, with Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, rather than Black Death, with Sean Bean.

Based on Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth and referenced by James Holloway of the Gonzo History Project in his discussion of Picts who look like Native Americans, The Eagle is an odd-couple buddy movie, in which Marcus - son of the last Centurion of the lost 9th Hispania - seeks to restore the honour of his family by recovering the eagle standard of the legion, aided by his British slave, Esca.

This is one of those films where they distinguish nationality by accent, having the Romans chiefly played by Americans - or in one case, Mark Strong doing an accent, which is a bit odd - and the British by British actors. Marcus and Esca argue and talk about whether Rome is awesome or awful; they get captured by the Picts and Esca claims Marcus is his slave, then at the end of the film they basically swan into town hall, give a Tribune the finger and swan out again like they're in a cop movie and they just took down the mob.

It's kind of interesting to watch from that angle.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The background was so metal that
Gandalf was surprised no-one had photoshopped
a guitar into the image yet

After a year's wait and the game-changing experience of Sylvester McCoy, Peter Jackson and Ian McKellan's turns in The Fivish Doctors, here it is; part 2 of the epic adaptation of the not-really-very-epic novel The Hobbit.

So, first up, you should probably know by now that I am a sucker for Jackson's big mad epic schtick, although not to the point that nothing he does bothers me. The ride to Osgiliath in Return of the King, for example, was a thing of beauty, but basically dumb as rocks, and he has a habit of knocking down the supporting cast and playing keep away with their dignity in order to make the heroes seem more heroic which I don't care for.

Of course, with the Hobbit the real issue is the inclusion of all the extra material relating to Dol Goldur, most of which just appears in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, and the general Lording up of the Hobbit, which is a much lighter and simpler tome. Honestly, I don't have a big problem with either of these; the problems I do have will be discussed in the spoilery section lower down.

In general, I had a good time with this one. There was some nice action and some good drama. Also, Smaug is fucking badass. As has happened before, however, I find that the devil is in the details, which is to say that while the broad strokes pleased me, the close brushwork gave me more trouble.

So; spoilers.

Reviewer Lindsey Ellis identified two key problems with the Lord of the Rings film trilogy: Too many battles, and the 'forced Peej conflict'. The latter refers to Peter Jackson's tendency to add extra character conflicts, in the hope that more misery will make the characters more interesting and likable.

In terms of too many battles, here we have an extended spider fight, an orc raid on the wood elfs and a running battle on the river following that, a fight in the mountain between the dwarfs and Smaug, as well as a flashback to Smaug's first attack on Esgaroth, and another orc fight in Laketown. Then we have the forced Peej conflicts, which come thick and fast. Thranduil - in the books just a stubborn king - follows (or rather, precedes) Elrond into the willfully blind to the need to interact with the world club, while at the same time being pissy about his kid's romantic aspirations, just like Elrond. Clearly, someone has a case of hero worship. The film also throws us Legolas - not in this book - and Tauriel - not in any book, partly for some bad ass elfing, but also apparently for him to moon over her while she has a doomed romance with Kili the dwarf.

I don't think the film really needed any of these.

A couple of weird changes: the 'black arrow' being a harpoon fired from a double-armed mounted crossbow, rather than Bard's lucky arrow; and the weakness in Smaug's armour being a result of a past fight rather than chance.

Also, Kili being wounded with a 'Morgul shaft' and healed by Tauriel using kingsfoil was... bizarre. Is there a whole line of fine Morgul products? And is Tauriel really the Queen of Numenor?

Free Birds and Frozen

So, the last couple of weeks we've been to see some of the seasonal animated fare, partly because it's less likely to spook Arya than the screaming monkeys.

First up was Thanksgiving adventure Free Birds, with Owen Wilson's neurotic slacker turkey Reggie and Woody Harrelson's manly battery escapee Jake teaming up to travel back in time and disrupt the first Thanksgiving, in order to escalate the treatment of the Native American tribes from merely shabby to viciously cannibalistic.

Okay, to 'get turkey off the menu', but who is counting?

The film is pretty up front about its historical inaccuracy, opening with an announcement that nothing is real except the talking turkeys. With that out of the way, it's a jolly enough romp, and even has some depth to it, as Jake learns that the wild turkeys aren't a simple people in need of rescuing, but over all it is unashamedly fluff. I do worry about the notion that no-one would be hunting turkeys if not for the European settlers, which furthers the myth of the Native American 'harmony with nature', especially given the somewhat stereotypical depiction of the Native Americans themselves. I was also a little baffled by the notion that the first thanksgiving was essentially the settlers throwing a dinner party to impress the new neighbours, but I don't have good enough American history to know how off that is.

I was also upset that the straight couple got their happy ending, but the macho gay beta couple just got a moment, although the film still has the most overt and positive homoerotic subtext of pretty much any animated children's film ever.

Last week, we saw Frozen. Now, I only caught Tangled more recently, which is by the same team and has many similarities (in particular Sven the Reindeer clearly owes a lot to Maximus from Tangled), but the story is based on a different fairy tale and is its own beast. It is also beautifully animated, with the same attention to detail lavished on the snow and ice as on Rapunzel's hair in Tangled.

Lifting loosely from The Snow Queen, our story is essentially of two sisters. The elder, Elsa, has magical powers over snow; the younger, Ana, is lively. While playing, Else injures Ana, and while she is saved by the trolls, she has to forget magic and Elsa to retreat from the world until her powers can be controlled.

A painful flash-forward - it's no Up, but watching Ana try desperately to reach her distant sister as they grow older and their parents are lost at sea does tug on the heart strings - leads to the coronation of Queen Elsa, and brings in the supporting cast: A handsome prince, an ambitious trading partner, and Kristoff, a young ice-cutter who witnessed the healing of Ana in the prologue.

When Ana declares her intent to marry a prince she barely knows, Elsa's powers kick off and she flees, leading to the extended third act in which Ana - aided by Kristoff, his reindeer Sven and a magical snowman named Olaf who dreams of summer - search for Elsa, Prince Hans searches for Ana, and plots and schemes are revealled, leading to Ana's second injury by Elsa - as in the fairy tale, the first is to her head, the second and more deadly to her heart - which can only be healed by an act of true love.

Now, getting into spoilers, the payoff on this was what I really loved. Naturally, the fourth act is all about trying to get Ana to her true love's kiss, but in the end what saves her is a display of her own love for her sister, simultaneously lauding familial love alongside romantic and making the princess her own rescuer. Props.

Robot and Frank

Frank (Frank Langella) is a bad-tempered, increasingly sentile retired former cat burglar with a stubborn attachment to his own independence; robot is a mechanical health-care aid with advanced motor and cognitive abilities. They commit crime.

That's pretty much the plot of this independent film. OIn the near future, our elderly ex-fellon is bought a robot helper by his son (James Marsden) and, when it suggests a 'project' to give him structure and help maintain his memory, he teaches it to pick locks so that they can commit burglaries together. Complications occur in the form of the librarian (Susan Sarandon) he has a crush on and a radical anti-robot daughter (Liv Tyler), as the unlikely partnership provides him with a new lease of life.

I'm not a great fan of either James Marsden or Liv Tyler, but they were both pretty decent in this, and Langella and Sarandon are serious class acts. It's an odd little film, but rather sweet and not a little sad in parts, being not just a sci-fi buddy comedy about a man an his robot stealing jewels, but also a touching exploration of the nature and importance of memory, and of its loss.

Catching Fire

It's been a long wait for the second part of the Hunger Games trilogy and a slightly fraught one, as we weren't sure we would be able to take Arya to see it (babe-in-arms tickets are only allowed up to the 12A certificate), but in the end we went as a family. I think we're going to have to start making alternative arrangements, however, as Arya is now alert enough that the moving images keep her awake long enough to then be upset by the loud noises, and especially the baboons.

More than half of this movie does not take place in the arena of the Games themselves. The Hunger Games was a movie about the Hunger Games, while Catching Fire deals more deeply with the issues surrounding them. We open with a good hour showing the growing dissent and oppression within the Districts following Katniss's act of defiance. We see Katniss try to calm things down under the threat of her family's death, and the tension between fear and rage which alternately drive the characters to toe the line and rage against the machine.

This section is grim, but excellently done, and as before the contrast between the Districts and the Capitol are superbly played, not just in the acting and the dialogue, but in the superb set and costume design.

The second section is the announcement of the Quarter Quell and the Reaping of the former Victors. The absolute star here is Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket, transforming her vacuous Hunger Games persona through a few vocal inflections and key character moments. The choking pain as she goes through the same Reaping routine as in the first movie; her seemingly trivial suggestion that the 'boys' should have tokens to match the 'girls', which evolves into a genuine show of solidarity. Also of note are Jena Malone's Johanna Mason and Lenny Kravitz returning for Cinna's final act, which he telegraphs perfectly and understatedly.

Malone gets about ten minutes of screen time to establish Mason as cunning, bold and angry as hell, set her up as an antagonist, an unlikely ally, and then manage an apparent heel-turn and a reversal; that it works is a tribute to the actress and the filmmakers.

Watch me gush!

And this is not to say that the core players are slacking. Jennifer Lawrence continues to get Katniss just right; courageous and principled, but also devoted to protecting her family above some high ideal and, in many ways, a spiky, suspicious, unlikable individual. Her flaws are played as well as her strengths, meaning that she remains the complex, sympathetic character from the books instead of a stock 'strong' heroine. Josh Hutcherson continue to provide what would conventionally be the feminine touch as Peeta; wise, intuitive and empathic, and driven by love and not a sense of duty. Veteran players Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland and Philip Seymour Hoffman provide stalwart support, with Sutherland and Hoffman carrying a lot of the exposition scenes with aplomb and Harrelson a joy as the surly, erratic Haymitch.

The final section of the film is the Quarter Quell itself, and this is almost an afterthought. With the arena driving against the tributes, most of the deaths are offscreen, with just enough shown to remember that, even if most of the fighters in this Games aren't children anymore, the Hunger Games are still obscene.

So, yeah, I loved the hell out of this movie, even the bits I had to watch walking up and down the ramp trying to get the baby to sleep because it scared her with its shrieking monkeys.

The Last Great Time War - Executive decisions and omnipotent incompetents

When Doctor Who was revived, Russel T. Davies made the decision to scrap the bulk of the Classic Series' shambolic continuity through the device of the Last Great Time War, a conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords which tore through the universe, and ultimately left the Doctor the last of his race, and their destroyer. It was a bold step, and one which was largely successful, at least until the pressure to continually reuse the Daleks meant that the Doctor's sacrifice of his own people seemed increasingly pointless, but it did mean that our hero was a war criminal of unimaginable proportions, especially when The Day of the Doctor made it clear that the death of Gallifrey was not just a knowable consequence of the Doctor's last action against the Dalek, but that action's explicit purpose.

So, why make your hero the perpetrator of an act of unrestrained genocide?

In 1963, no-one knew what a Time Lord was. The Doctor was a nameless alien who traveled in his Ship, which looked like a police box, with his granddaughter (who was essentially the only one to call it a TARDIS); it was as simple as that.

The Time Lords only appeared at the end of Patrick Troughton's run in 1969, when he summoned their assistance to deal with the War Lord and was forced to face the consequences of his own transgressions as a result. They appeared as beings of tremendous power and vast technological supremacy, thwarting the attempted escape of the War Lord with dismissive ease before condemning the Doctor to a reduced budget, albeit in full colour.

As time wore on, the Time Lords appeared several times as mysterious figures; non-interventionists, but willing to use the 'renegade' Doctor as a catspaw to nudge events that needed nudging, and even instructing him to smother the Daleks in the proverbial cradle. This was all well and good, but then... but then came The Deadly Assassin, the first serial predominantly set on Gallifrey itself, and the show began to shine a light on the msyterious and powerful Time Lords, revealing them to be a pack of ineffectual incompetents in desperate need of the Doctor to solve any problem not encompassed by past experience.

While many media have since sought to restore the race to their former role, the need to conform to the levels of bureaucracy shown in Assassin and in the almost painful The Invasion of Time, in which Gallifrey is seen to be largely and randomly furnished with inflatable plastic things, meant that they could never be so mysterious again.

In an attempt to restore some of the mystery, showrunner Andrew Cartmel introduced the so-called 'Cartmel Master Plan', but with the cancellation of the series, this was never completed, leaving only hints at Gallifrey's darker past and the Doctor's role in it to be explored by licensed spin-offs. The web production Death Comes to Time made another stab at it, suggesting that the reason for the Time Lords' principle of non-intervention is the ability to destroy planets with their own personal power, if left unlimited, but it never took.

By the time the new series rolled around, the Time Lords had been explored by books, audio plays and webisodes. There was so much conflicting information, so many theories, that untangling them would have been an epic task, and one which new viewers would have little time for. The classic series Time Lords were pretty much exploded, reduced to pointless bureaucrats who couldn't achieve anything without the Doctor, and the spin-off versions had so much baggage - genetic looms which 'wove' children for a race rendered sterile by an ancient curse, living houses, the vaguely defined structure of Chapters and the triumvirate of Rassilon, Omage and 'the Other', the CIA - that they were all but unusual.

The Last Great Time War was the way around this, and also made the Doctor a unique figure. Unfortunately, the way it was done left a bad taste for many. The Doctor had been responsible for many deaths in his time, but to slaughter his own people was for many a step too far. In retrospect, it is beyond a bold move for a family scifi show to present us with a hero who killed his entire race, but it was oddly soft-pedaled in many ways, although usually only to be brought up and thrown at us by an episodic villain; Davros in particular dubbing the Doctor 'the Destroyer of Worlds'.

On the other hand, it really had to be the Doctor, in order to explain how he was the sole survivor. The destruction of two races was a terrible thing, but to have run off and let someone else do it perhaps more so.

As I have mentioned before, I always envisaged the death of the Time Lords as an inevitable consequence of the destruction of the Daleks; that rather than deliberately burning Gallifrey, the Doctor had been forced to burn the entire Time War out of history in order to preserve what remained of the universe. The End of Time then suggested that he might have done what he did because all that remained of the Time Lords was a corrupt and power hungry High Council, in their own monomaniacal fashion just as bad as the Daleks.

The Day of the Doctor however presented not only a very mundane sort of war, but also a very domestic Gallifrey, along with a very deliberate act of destruction which made the Doctor's actions seem far less justifiable, much more monstrous. I much preferred the Time War in my mind.

Do I have a conclusion? Not really, save to say that I understand entirely why the Time Lords had to go, and why the Doctor had to have done it, and that overall, I liked it better the less they tried to pin it down.

Agents of SHIELD: The Well

The Well opens in the aftermath of Thor: The Dark World, with our team of roving agents somewhat incongruously detailed to sweeping up the wreck of the University of Greenwich looking for pieces of Dark Elf technology.

This isn't a direct link, however, just a brief tie-in and a reminder of the Asgardians, before we jump into the real plot of the week, which has an extreme right wing group in Norway searching for the pieces of a lost, Asgardian berserker staff which imparts superhuman strength by dredging up the wielder's darkest memories. With Ward affected by the staff, the team work with a renegade Asgardian to recover the weapon he broke and concealed millennia before the self-proclaimed 'new gods' can take over the world.

There's a lot to like in this episode. Ward gets some more development, both from the memories revealed and his reaction to the staff. May also gets a rare chance to be as legitimately badass as she is described, not just by kicking butt but by showing her mental strength as well. I also appreciate the appearance of an 'ordinary' Asgardian, something missing from many alien races.

As I said last week, I was looking for one more decent episode, and now I feel able to say that the series has landed. Here's hoping it keeps it up.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Fire

In the final season of Avatar, Aang and his posse head for the Fire Nation, intent on bringing down the Fire Lord and his plans for world domination. This is a chance for an exploration of the series' long-running enemy up close, and introduces Team Avatar to the human face of the Fire Nation, both in the form of its civilian populace and through Prince Zuko's eventual face turn to become Aang's firebending master.

As with Earth, Fire becomes yet darker. The planned attack on the Fire Nation is crippled by the fall of Ba Sing Se and the near-mortal wounding of Aang at the end of Book 2. The Fire Lord goes from a brooding presence to an active menace, his monomaniacal drive dominating the series as the Fire Nation gears up for a war of annihilation on the remaining Earth Kingdom cities.

This is a pretty all-action conclusion to the series, maintaining a blistering pace, with more than a third of the running time taken up by three multi-part stories - The Day of Black Sun, The Boiling Rock and Sozin's Comet. In addition, the various characters each get their turn in the spotlight: Sokka in Sokka's Master and The Boiling Rock; Katara in The Puppetmaster and The Southern Raiders; Toph in The Runaway; and Zuko in The Beach.

The ending is a bit of a deus ex machina, but pays off the philosophy which has run through the series. It also features the open appearance of the Order of the White Lotus, a league formed of every kick-arse old person encountered in the course of the series, who essentially retake the largest city in the world with an army of five. All in all, it's been a satisfying run. I look forward to The Legend of Korra coming up on LoveFilm.

The Day of the Doctor

So, I'm a massive Doctor Who fanboy; this is a known fact. If it weren't obvious, I probably gave it away by attending the cinema screening of The Day of the Doctor in a hand-knitted 4th Doctor scarf.

The last big 'event' episode of Doctor Who was The End of Time, which contained a number of good ideas surrounded by a pile of crap; I really wasn't wild on it. This time, I came out of the cinema squeeing. Having then rewatched the episode on iplayer, I can see the joins a bit more. So it goes.

The Day of the Doctor does big pretty well; perhaps too well. It's not exactly Hollywood special effects, but it does suffer on the smaller screen. It has a nice balance of humour and action, a few nods to the fans - but not as many as I was afraid they might have - and even the presence of Billie Piper doesn't completely annoy me.

Stuff I liked and, so you know, spoilers.

• The interaction between the three Doctors was, for me at least, the right mix of spikiness and total, mutual understanding.
• John Hurt as the War Doctor was wonderful; so tired, so full of the pain of trying to be the Doctor in a setting that had no use for the Doctor. I mean, it's John Hurt, he's a bit awesome, and the posh gravelly thing really was working for him.
• The use of some proper time hopping. I like to see some time hopping, as long as the show doesn't regularly pull a Bill and Ted.
• The Ride of Thirteen, as I am calling it, because I'm a sucker for that stuff.
• Osgood.
• Kate Stewart being a true successor to her father, in the bad ways as well as the good.
• The handling of the Elizabeth I stuff. It doesn't make the 10th Doctor's douchegabbery in the specials less douchebaggy, but I'm glad that having decided to explain it, they didn't perpetuate the douchebaggery.
• The rabbit.
• "Am I having a mid-life crisis?"
• I want to point up "Again with the pointing; they're screwdrivers," but that is, sadly, undercut by the fact that the three Doctors later use their sonics to blast a Dalek with some sort of concussion wave.
• Tom!
• Clara doing what Companions should do; providing a rock in the Doctor's turbulent world.

Stuff I liked less:

• The Moment turning out to be a big bomb. It's called 'the Moment', not the Explodinator; it's also called the Galaxy Eater. It can open fissures through time and space and has both sentience and a conscience, but apparently it can't selectively target the Daleks. For me, it should have been something far more conceptually terrifying and complex; something to not just destroy Gallifrey and the surrounding Dalek fleet, but to scorch the Time Wars from history. In particular, it didn't sit well with the 9th Doctor's certainty that the Daleks were all gone if he just blew up a planet they had a massive battle fleet around. They actually talk about the Daleks sending reinforcement, so apparently those ones would have been dandy.
• The Time War itself being depicted as a straight up shooting war. I'll write more on this in a separate article, but the one advantage of sticking the war and the destruction of the Time Lords in the limbo between series was that it should have been pretty well unfilmable.
• The horror of the Doctor's actions being about the children, rather than the fact that, children or no children, it was an act of massive genocide. I also found the original plan far more reprehensible when it involved blowing up a planet than when it was implied to be some catastrophic temporal shenanigans. I think it's because the Doctor is destroying all of the Time Lords and the Daleks to prevent future destruction, rather than carving out a piece of history to prevent past destruction.
  There's also the fact that he says he's serving notice on the Time Lords that he won't allow any more fighting, but at this stage that's a moot point; the war is all but over and the Time Lords clearly have nothing left but spit and bile. There's not even a sign of any remaining TT capsules, so what is it the Doctor wants them not to do?
• The fact that the 9th and 10th Doctors, having told Kate Stewart she would never be able to live with herself and sacrificing millions to save billions was never the right thing, went back to do it again. I can get that the War Doctor might still think he had to do it, but they should have been on the other options train by that point, even if they needed a companion to give them a push in the right direction.
• The lack of even a late cameo by Christopher Ecclestone, or from Paul McGann - who had obviously been in to film The Night of the Doctor - or new audio for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, for the Ride of Thirteen.

A lot of people are bothered by the fact that it doesn't follow directly from the end of the previous episode. I'm not, especially - the final scene was not an actual place, but an image of the Doctor's memory, after all, so nothing much was going to have happened - but I would have liked some specific mention, rather than just ignoring it.

I thought that the B plot would have made a pretty good episode on its own, although Zygon shapeshifters hiding in stasis paintings felt a bit belt and braces. The integration was okay, but again, the Zygonity was superfluous to the A plot and its primary purpose was just to introduce the idea of the suspended animation.

The resolution wasn't bad, and in particular managed to not mess with the new series continuity, while still being a point of great transition for the current Doctor, although in part by hand-waving the Doctors' amnesia. On the other hand, that's got to be established, as otherwise the current Doctor would always know what had happened in these stories.

As with The Light at the End, Big Finish's almost eight Doctors anniversary special, I might damn this with faint praise and say it was a good multi-Doctor story. I think it is a little more than that, but that its depiction of the Time War was ultimately - and perhaps inevitably - a let down.

Looking over my lists, I note that the good points are all brief, and perhaps superficial, while the disappointments run deeper; I also suspect that I will find more things that niggle at me as time progresses, and indeed the cons list has expanded as I typed. It makes me wonder sometimes if the show was ever as good as I thought it was, or if I was just much younger.

Overall, however, I think this was a broadly successful entry; imperfect, and in some ways deeply flawed, but hitting most of the right notes in the right order.

Best Episodes: Ninth and Tenth Doctors

The Ninth Doctor - Christopher Eccleston
With us all too short a time, the Ninth Doctor had a lot to carry. He had to sell the show to a new audience - as Eight had failed to do, through no fault of the actor - and to the old audience, as well as inaugurating the change of pace that came from the episodic format and 42 minute running time. He was a huge hit, there's no denying it, bringing the Doctor to a new generation and bringing us veterans up to speed on the new order, as it were.

Cheeky, flirtatious, enthusiastic and - when the occasion called for it - incredibly dark and serious, the Ninth Doctor was never less than compelling. His affection for Rose Tyler endeared him to many, and his regeneration after only thirteen episodes came a sight too soon.

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
Future showrunner Stephen Moffat hit the ground running with a tale of aliens and confidence tricks amid the London Blitz. The gas mask zombies are chilling, and while Rose gets to have fun with dashing new boy Captain Jack Harkness, the interaction between the Doctor and Nancy is intense and heartwarming. The story works hard with its set-up, such that the finale manages not to be a deus ex machina, and the double episode - in general, double episodes of nuWho work a little better, benefiting from the extra set-up time - earns its uplifting payoff.

Other highlights include the emotional sucker punch of Father's Day and Dalek, which made the eponymous pepper pots scary again, albeit briefly, and even kind of tragic.

The Tenth Doctor - David Tennant
Bubbly, exuberant and really rather kissy, the Tenth Doctor was all energy and motion, except when he wasn't, and when he wasn't was the time to be afraid. Like the Seventh Doctor he was an incarnation with a lot of darkness inside him, but unfortunately it was expressed more in grandiloquent declamation than in schemes and secrecy, and in the end he became almost Messianic, declaring himself 'the Time Lord victorious' and dubbed 'the Lonely God'.

He also got saddled with the Rose wuvs the Doctor sequence, which did neither Tennant nor Billie Piper any favours, and the succeeding Martha pines at the Doctor but he doesn't really notice sequence, which shamefully underused Freema Agyeman.

Human Nature/The Family of Blood
Based on a Seventh Doctor novel, this two-parter sees the Doctor disguise himself as a human in pre-War Britain. It touches on the racism of the period, but its great strength lies in the way that it plays with the nature of the Doctor's adventures, fantastic and yet terrible. It is slightly let down by an ending in which the villain of the story narrates how the Doctor did some stuff that he has never done anything like before and it makes you wonder what's up with him trapping people in mirrors and shit.

The Tenth Doctor has a hit and miss run otherwise, with Blink as a standout that I overlooked here only because it's a Doctor lite episode, and thus hard to categorise as a Tenth Doctor story, and likewise Catherine Tate's tour de force performance in Turn Left, which is sadly followed by the horrific betrayal of her character in Journey's End, an authorial decision which still leaves me angry.

I liked David Tennant, but ultimately I was glad to see him go because I didn't care for a lot of the stories he was given. Ten bowed out, as ungraciously as any Doctor ever has or hopefully will, in The End of Time, a two-part special which basically contained one pretty good special sandwiched between a lot of padding.

Atlantis - The Song of the Sirens, Rules of Engagement and The Furies

Just a quick update to cover the last three episodes of Merlin in sandals adventure series Atlantis.

In The Song of the Sirens, Hercules is manipulated by the enchantress Circe in order to bind Jason to the future assassination of Queen Pasiphe. It seems a little odd that the death of the current primary antagonist should be a price, but it plays up Jason's sensibilities quite nicely, as well as reinforcing his loyalty to his friends, as he accepts the price to save Medusa, who has been fatally overcome by Hercules' date-rape drug.

And, yeah, that's the problem of the episode, as it hinges on a desperate Hercules buying a date-rape drug - well, bottled siren song - to make Medusa love him. It's a shame, because it makes him highly unlikable just as they're starting to dig beneath his boorish exterior.

Overall, these are three good episodes for the self-styled world's mightiest mortal, and Mark Addy flexes his not inconsiderable acting muscles to make the hard-living heavy a sympathetic character despite his vainglory and hypocrisy. He displays considerable loyalty, courage and compassion throughout; it's just a shame we had to kick it off with a magic ruffie plot.

Rules of Engagement comes back to our 'hero', Jason, who learns that Ariadne is to become engaged to Pasiphae's nephew. He sulks, and even his emo strop is bland, and then enters the celebratory pankration to try to win her hand. Ariadne does better than Jason out of the proceedings, almost achieving the level of actual characterisation as she first compromises, then declares her open resistance to her stepmother, with the upshot that her handmaiden and confidant is assassinated as a lesson in power. It's actually quite a dark and powerful moment; more so than anything Jason gets.

Finally, The Furies is Pythagoras' episode, introducing his brother and some background about a murdered father, and culminating in an attempt to defy the Kindly Ones, here a consuming sandstorm rather than the tormenting Furies of legend. There is also a fairly dull side-romance between a couple of supporting players, and a sacrificial one-off character whose death is barely remarked on by anyone, despite his managing to become slightly more interesting than Jason in just a dozen or so lines.

Agents of SHIELD: The Hub

Another major outing for the SHIELD team's brains trust, this time focusing on the former half of FitzSimmons as the lovable Scots tech-genius gets hauled along on a covert op by Agent Ward. This gives Ward another chance to look human, as well as effortlessly bad-ass, and Fitz a chance to spread his wings somewhat. In particular, the episode impressed me by declining every opportunity to undercut Fitz's competence: when he uses his ingenuity and engineering skills to impress a bar full of Ossetian gangsters and is given a congratulatory glass of vodka, he doesn't choke; when called on to deploy the MacGuffin of the week in support of Ward, he doesn't drop it.

It's not a complete sausage fest, however, for while Ward and Fitz are bickering and buddying and heartbreakingly destroying each other's artisan sandwiches, Skye and Simmons decide to hack SHIELD to check up on an op they don't have clearance for, in a plot which ends up with Simmons shooting a senior agent with the night-night pistol, which by this stage has appeared so often it deserves a credit shot, and Skye choosing to help the team instead of pursuing her own agenda.

The series continues to touch on Agent Coulson's transformation from stone-cold badass to avuncular badass, with his team-over-agency agenda and his pursuit of Skye's case while still protecting her from the whole truth. We also touch on the nature of his resurrection, with Coulson now recognising the automatic nature of his description of Tahiti and seeking the truth, which is classified even above his level.

This was another strong episode; one more and I will feel confident in saying that the series has hit its stride.

Agents of SHIELD: F.Z.Z.T.

After a week's hiatus for hmrmmnrr, Agents of SHIELD returns with F.Z.Z.T., an episode focusing on the show's resident adorkable British science double act, FitzSimmons.

What I don't get is how Simmons is in any significant way more blonde than Fitz.

A series of mysterious deaths prove to be the result of an alien virus, rather than foul play, triggering a crisis when Simmons contracts the virus and has to work against the clock to find her own cure. As well as providing much needed character development for FitzSimmons - who have been crying out to be more defined as something other than 'cute', 'smart' and 'British' (English and Scots, not necessarily in that order) - Ward gets a moment of almost humanity, and Clark Gregg goes from strength to strength as Coulson, looking out for his team and risking his life to bring solace to a dying man when it becomes clear he can't do anything more.

Agents of SHIELD has been a bit hit and miss up to now, but on top of the action and the humour, this week's offering managed something more; I found it genuinely moving in parts. Perhaps it was because so many backdoor pilots seem to have a cool character played by a British actress who is then killed off before the series, but I actually felt a real sense of threat when Simmons' life was on the line.

Best episodes: The Seventh and Eighth Doctors

The Seventh Doctor - Sylvester McCoy
The cosmic trickster with the cheeky grin and the wise eyes, the Seventh Doctor with his claims to be 'much more than just another Time Lord' contained some of the first traces of NuWho's 'lonely god'. Initially written off as clownish by critics, Sylvester McCoy brought heavyweight acting muscle to the role which proved important as the writing team began to explore the Doctor as arch-manipulator and an adversary of the ancient gods of the Old Times. He started off playing spoons and ended up as 'the Dark Doctor'.

And he had an Ace up his sleeve.

Battlefield
Now, overall this is probably not the best Seventh Doctor episode; that would be Curse of Fenric or Remembrance of the Daleks. Battlefield, however, is the one I find the most fun, not least because... well, because of this:

As the last of the first three audio Doctors, the Seventh also has a good catalogue, including superb runs with Tracey Childes as Elizabeth Klein - both in her original incarnation as a Nazi scientist, and as a UNIT scientific adviser in UNIT Dominion and Persuasion/Starlight Robbery and Daleks Among Us - and the genuinely epic Black and White TARDIS saga. There are very few real clunkers, although Love and War - an adaptation of a Doctor Who novel - sits very uncomfrotably with the characterisation in the other stories. Also worth mentioning is the emotional grind of character development which Ace goes through across the course of the run.

The Eighth Doctor - Paul McGann
Despite a lacklustre outing in the American TV movie, I always loved Paul McGann as the Doctor. He was fun, he was lively, he combined the serious with the light in the way that the Doctor should, and since his audio debut in Storm Warning, he has received some of the best of Big Finish. He has also gone through the wringer, losing pretty much every companion he's had tragically - Charley Pollard, Lucie Miller, Gemma and Samson - with Mary Shelley only escaping because she has to go and write Frankenstein.

Edit: Speaking of which, new favourite 'TV' appearance with the bounce-inducing Night of the Doctor showing his regeneration from the emotionally scarred post-Dark Eyes wanderer into the disowned War Doctor.

Caerdroia
Right towards the end of a series of stories sent in an anti-time universe without the TARDIS, Caerdroia is another one that is my favourite because it is so much fun, from the three versions of the Eighth Doctor to the torturous bureaucrat insisting that an inquiry be 'referred to the real or rhetorical questions department for a ruling before any action can be taken'.

Also of note are To the Death, which is a gut-wrenchingly tragic tale, Doctor Who does the Apprentice in Situation Vacant and Shakespearean barnstormer The Time of the Daleks. The current Dark Eyes miniseries has also opened very strongly.

Best episodes: Fifth and Sixth Doctors

The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
The Fifth Doctor was the first to be cast young, and for a long time was the youngest ever to play the role. He brought a youthful energy to the role, but Tom Baker had energy, so the main thing that Davison's Doctor had going for him was a kind of hopefulness; a belief in a universal goodness which could be appealed to in almost anyone - Daleks and Cybermen notwithstanding. It is perhaps not surprising that the Fifth Doctor's most-used expression was one of pained disappointment. Overall, he had younger companions as well, with mixed results.

I missed Peter Davison for the most part, as I lived in America watching Tom Baker reruns. His time in the show is sometimes looked down on, and yet produced two of the most talked about episodes in Who history with Earthshock and The Caves of Androzani. In the former, Adric becomes the first long-term companion to be killed off (previous deaths were of short-term companions such as Katarina and Sara Kingdom), while the latter...

The Caves of Androzani
When people talk of a 'serious' Doctor Who episode, they talk of The Caves of Androzani, a melodramatic revenge tragedy in which just about everyone dies in the pursuit of money, power, vengeance or the love of a good women with a bad accent. It's the episode that proves for many people that Doctor who can do 'dark' without being Gothic and silly, although I might argue that while it isn't Gothic, it's still a little silly in places. Still, it is good with it.

The Fifth Doctor has done very well in terms of audio plays, partly as a result of being one of the original three Doctors both licensed and available to Big Finish, but also for the character development given to some of his less successful, or at least less well-served, TV companions, such as Turlough in Gothic-future romance Loups-Garoux, and Peri across many entirely listenable plays. The series also build a mighty partnership between Nissa and the Doctor and another classic double act with Peri and Egyptian companion Erimem, whose turn in The Kingmaker helps to make it not just my favourite Fifth Doctor audio play, but also one of my favourite things ever.

For my money, the Fifth Doctor has also had some of the most successful four-story collections, including the excellent Demons of Red Lodge and 1001 Nights, and even the hit and miss Circular Time includes the bittersweet 'Autumn', in which the Doctor faces the insularity of his beloved English and Nissa gets one of the better companion romances.

The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
The Sixth Doctor was a deliberate reversal from the Fifth; a little older, but also grandiose where his predecessor was modest, bombastic where he was soft-spoken, and aggressive where he was conciliatory. The Fifth Doctor might have apologised to a Sontaran for denting his gravity sphere, but the Sixth Doctor would have demanded its insurance details on the spot. He was also, let's be honest, screwed over.

The Sixth Doctor lost an entire series of plays (of varying quality to judge by their audio revival) and what was left to him was a mixed bag, including the much-debated Trial of a Timelord arc and Peri's... death? departure? Given the choice between a stupid death and a crowbarred romance, which is better? In the end, nothing became the Sixth Doctor's TV incarnation like the leaving of it; not with a bang, but with a bop on the noggin of a stand-in with a wig.

And then came the audio incarnation...

City of Spires/The Wreck of the Titan/Legend of the Cybermen
Such is the difference between the quality of the TV and audio Sixth doctor stories that I have trouble picking a favourite. Project Twilight is an effective modern vampire tale; The Wormery is a strange tale of love, obsession and ambition set in a pre-war cabaret; and Doctor Who and the Pirates navigates from frivolous yarn, by way of musical extravaganza, to end up as a tragic tale with a note of hope.

Hell, some of the audios even have Mel as a decent companion, although not Catch-1782, which is... weak.

In the end, however, I have picked Big Finish's love story to the Second Doctor, and more particularly to his companions Jamie and Zoe. City of Spires begins as a pseudo-historical mystery and leads into the surreal adventures of The Wreck of the Titan, before the story wraps up in Legend of the Cybermen, which contains truly moving moments, but more to the point is just plain fun; which is more than I can say for most of the TV serials.

Best episodes: The Third and Fourth Doctors

The Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee
There's a lot to love about the Third Doctor. Notable at the time for being the first Doctor in colour, he was a dashing man of action, a practitioner of Venusian Aikido and a gadgeteer par excellence. Of course, he was also crippled by the actions of the Time Lords (read BBC budgeting) and thus unable to travel in space and time for a couple of years. He also had the Brigadier, which allowed the show to engage in an ongoing pragmatism vs compassion debate.

Doctor Who and the Silurians
Speaking of that debate, it was perhaps most obvious in Doctor Who and the Silurians, an episode which expanded the clash to include the bureaucratic forces of Whitehall, thus creating a three-way tension - the Doctor's desire to do what was right regardless of the cost, the Brigadier's to do what was expedient to protect the world, and the civil servants' to do whatever didn't hurt the bottom line or the public image - which played off against a troubled first encounter between humanity and its predecessors on Earth, the Silurians.

This being said, the Pertwee years had several strong stories, including Inferno and the two Peladon stories.

On audio, the Third Doctor is perhaps best represented through the Companion Chronicles narrated by Captain Mike Yates - The Magician's Oath, The Vengeance of the Stones and The Rings of Ikiria - ultimately one of the more tragic companions, whose idealism led him to become an enemy in The Invasion of the Dinosaurs, which hadn't been done before.

The Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker
And now, the big one. Tom Baker had the longest run of any Doctor, and the longest scarf. He was a vast presence, literally and figurative, with his towering frame and booming voice, and the vast energy with which he filled the screen. In his later years the show was becoming increasingly doubtful of its own seriousness, with many nods to camera and some dodgy serials; like The Invasion of Time, which cemented the Time Lords not as distant cosmic observers, but as bureaucratic idiots who couldn't fight off an invasion without the Doctor and have an unnerving love of inflatable plastic furniture. On the other hand, when it was good...

City of Death
Many to choose from for Tom - Genesis of the Daleks is overlong, but excellent, and Pyramids of Mars and State of Decay represent the Gothic flair which served the Fourth Doctor well - but my pick of the bunch is City of Death, aka Doctor Who writes off a trip to Paris. The plot - later recycled, with bits of the unfinished Shada, by writer and script editor Douglas Adams for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - is a lovely conceit (an alien present in multiple times across Earth's history, from his perspective concurrently, seeks to raise capital for time experiments by persuading artists to create multiple copies of their greatest works and then storing them to be sold as the original in a later time), and the dialogue sparkles.

A shout out is also due to The Key to Time, an ambitious and partially successful attempt at introducing a significant arc plot into the show.

In audio terms, I would go with the quartet of stories The Sands of Life, The War Against the Laan, The Dalek Contract and The Final Phase, in large part for the cracking dynamic between the Fourth Doctor and the disingenuously named 'Cuthbert', played by David Warner (who also played an alternative version of the Third Doctor in the superlative Sympathy for the Devil).

Best Episodes: The First and Second Doctors

Following on from Matt Farr, this is a brief discourse on my favourite episodes for each of the Doctors, together with a few thoughts on the Doctors themselves.

The First Doctor (William Hartnell)
The First Doctor is a fairly unique entity within the ranks of Doctors, in part of course because the concept was unformed when the episodes were being made. That he was intelligent and from a highly-advanced civilisation was there, but the Time Lords wouldn't get a mention until the very end of the Troughton period and of course regeneration only came in with Hartnell's departure. He displays some unusual attributes - a ruthlessness at odds with many later incarnations (although less so the Sixth, Seventh and Tenth), the most pronounced uncertainty in controlling the TARDIS, and a calculating disregard for his companions' safety if it gets in the way of his scientific curiosity (which would be replaced in later versions with a reckless disregard for his own safety and, by extension, his friends).

There are also some very strange episodes, with the likes of The Celestial Toymaker and Land of Giants introducing early some of the cosmic whackery that would always haunt the excessive edges of the series.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth
For me, the best of the First Doctor is The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The use of blasted London is excellent, the plot draws on classic 'la resistance' concepts, and in particular the desperation of the rebels - best exemplified in the way that they cling to their hopes for their new bombs - are done well, and the sacrifices made by various characters feel real and relevant (where some Who serials just seemed to throw minor characters at the bad guys until the screaming stopped). The three companions are well-used, there are a few good twists and only one very ropy monster, and the inclusion of Dalek collaborators and a shady black marketeer prevent the story being one-dimensional.

It also includes Susan's departure scene, which I adore.

On the audio front, I have a particular fondness for the astonishingly brutal The Rocket Men and Return of the Rocket Men, with the titular villains looking like fifties pulp heroes and acting like actual, honest-to-badness pirates.

The Second Doctor - Patrick Troughton

The Second Doctor is, perhaps, the first 'proper' Doctor. Firmly established as an alien and inheriting companions from his predecessor, he also stepped from the rather stuffy and old-fashioned garb and mannerisms of the First Doctor into the high eccentric mode which would dominate for his next six incarnations, with his fur coat, baggy trousers and recorder. He also brought us one of the truly insane serials, with The Time Robber, which introduced the concept of the Land of Fiction (which for the 1960s was pretty goddamned meta).

The War Games

Due to the cull of stored episodes, I don't have much to choose from here in terms of personal experience. I go for The War Games over The Invasion for two reasons: firstly, because of its grandiose ambition, and secondly, because the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to undo a screw.

Of course, it also introduces the Time Lords - for better or for worse, although here they are at their very best; aloof, uninvolved, superior and effortlessly powerful - and by doing so takes the first step towards the establishment of the coherent parachronic universe which would cause such problems for the continuity buffs in later days. As a final note, while Tomb of the Cybermen is sometimes criticised for its depiction of Toberman - a black character who is essentially a mute, idiot slave - The War Games features another character, a black soldier from the American Civil War, who is notably one of the few subjects of the titular games able to resist the conditioning of the War Lord and his agents.

I don't have any particular audios to note, although as has oft been noted, Fraser Hines provides a kick-ass Troughton impression.

Arrow: Season 1, Episodes 1-5

With superhero movies and cartoons at something of an all-time high, it is perhaps surprising that there aren't more superhero TV shows, although doubtless the effects cost is a major consideration. Arrow is a fairly good bet on those grounds, taking as its central character one of the effects-light 'supernormals' of the DC universe; Oliver Queen, aka Green Arrow.

Speaking of supernormals, let's get this out of the way: Arrow is very, very Batman. Oliver Queen is a millionaire playboy who loses his father and becomes a vigilante in response, defending his city as hooded - not masked, although for added security he is heavily mascaraed - vigilante... the Hood. Yeah, we have yet to have Queen's alter-ego referred to as Green Arrow, or even Arrow, instead focusing on the visual and motivational parallels with Robin Hood. That makes a certain amount of sense, although honestly if you're leery of superheroes with silly names, I think you're probably working in the wrong genre.

Now, there are differences. Where Thomas Wayne was a martyred saint, Robert Queen was a fallen angel, and Oliver's mission is to redeem his father's sins more than to honour his memory. In addition, Bruce Wayne's world tour of unbelievably painful training is replaced by a gauntlet of survival on an island called Purgatory, which through a series of flashbacks is revealed to be full of horrible DC villains (and straight up, if you're going to try to have a more gritty, realistic look to your superhero series, Deathstroke the Terminator may not be the way to go).

Seriously, is this the torso of a millionaire playboy?

Good points:

Stephen Amell balances the playboy facade of Queen with the terrifying intensity of the Hood pretty well (and pretty is the operative word). He has the usual problem that he apparently manages to persuade people he's an idle dilettante despite having the body of the world's greatest athlete (see right), but the coincidence of his return is covered well, and I like that even in the first five episodes he is expanding his team and making it more about the mission than himself.

The supporting cast is also pretty strong, with Katie Cassidy as Laurel Lance being a little weak, mostly because she has to vacillate wildly between trusting and not trusting Queen, and thus going from smart to pretty dumb depending on the needs of the plot. Colin Salmon is in it, and that's never bad, but as I have since Resident Evil I worry that he'll end up being cut into teeny tiny cubes.

Bad points:

So far, we're just building up the ongoing antagonists, and most of the baddies have just been corrupt businessmen with goons; the most interesting villain was the Yakuza hit woman and that's because her long, white hair broke the visual monotony of clipped professional cuts and dark grey suits, rather than because she was in any way well-rounded.

Well, and flashback Deathstroke, but he's just been in flashbacks.

The Mysterious Cities of Gold - Season 2 and the Drinking Game

It recently came up in conversation that the maddest children's animated series ever is about to get a second series. In fact, it has a second series - in French - with an English dub allegedly due out next year!

This being the case, it seems a good moment to record for posterity my Mysterious Cities of Gold drinking game.

• Esteban shouts Zia's name - take a shot 
• Zia shouts Esteban's name - take a shot 
• A temple self-destructs - take a shot 
• One of the children gets captured - take a shot; take two shots if it's Zia 
• Mendoza gets Pedro or Sancho to do something by mentioning gold - take a shot 
• Zia is visibly useless or in need of rescue - take a shot 
• Esteban is referred to as the child of the sun... - take a shot
• ...and vigorously denies it... - take a shot
• ...but the sun comes out for him and the day is saved - take a shot
• Tau harps on about the people of Hiva - take a shot 
• Pedro and Sancho put one of the children down... - take a shot 
• ...and are immediately proven wrong - take another shot
• The cities of gold are referred to as the fabulous cities of gold - take a shot
• The cities of gold are referred to as the mysterious cities of gold - take a shot, and one more for the title shout

I give you two episodes max before you're flat out, not counting the first episode, as it doesn't have Zia in it until the very end (tied up in the hold of a ship; chin chin).

Thor: The Dark World

Euro-posters FTW.

So, here it is; the long-awaited sequel to Thor. This review is, as usual, going to be pretty spoiler-heavy, but I will start off with my spoiler-free impressions, which pretty much boil down to five or six lines of the letter E and more exclamation marks than is dignified.

I liked it; a lot. It managed to balance the absolute menace of the Dark Elves with competence on the part of the Asgardians (so often the new big bad just makes the supporting goodies look like chumps, and that's no fun), the romance with the action, and balls-to-the-wall adrenaline with plots and counter-plots. It's no Inception, but there are enough turns to keep things interesting, and pretty much no-one in the film is extraneous.

Except perhaps Hogun.

Okay; the details.

We open with a very familiar bit of narration, which is pretty much the opening of Thor with 'Jotun' replaced with 'Dark Elves', 'Odin' with 'Borr' and the frost casket replaced with the Aether, which is the worst thing ever, okay.

Flash forward, and with the Bifrost repaired, Thor is busy re-establishing the Pax Odin in preparation for his own rule, while pining over his inability to return to the girl he loves. There are a few hints that his friendship with Sif might have grown into more without his time on Earth and that Odin hopes it still might, but thankfully this never becomes a big drama, and Sif's primary motivations remain friendship and loyalty.

Jane Foster, meanwhile, is tracking holes between the nine worlds, and accidentally releases the Aether, which takes root in her body. Thor whisks her to Asgard, but the Dark Elves wake and follow, unleashing an invasion on Asgard itself, which is the first big action set-piece of the movie.

It is fricking awesome, the more so for managing to make the Dark Elves a serious threat - and, with their blank-faced masks, creepy as hell - without turning the entire battle into a curb stomp.With another attack impending, their mother dead and Odin paralysed by grief and rage at the loss of Frigga, Thor teams up with the imprisoned Loki to draw the Dark Elves away from Asgard and destroy the Aether.

This gets us into one of the dramatic foci of the movie, as the possibility of Loki's betrayal is teased, realised and reversed more than once to arrive at the final payoff. It's twisty enough to be satisfying and convincing, without going too far and just becoming silly. It is also part of an effective false-climax, and plays out Loki's mix of courage and cunning nicely.

The final act moves to Earth, specifically to London, and a world-hopping duel between Thor and the Aether-possessed Dark Elf leader Malekith, in which Foster and Selvig - aided by their interns - manipulate the fateful convergence of worlds to their advantage, which is actually something I haven't really seen very often, so kudos for that.

Overall, this was a very satisfying movie.

Oh, and then we get the epilogue and credit scenes. The epilogue is both heartwarming and has a delightful, if somewhat predictable, twist. The first credit scene sets up Guardians of the Galaxy, and the second is the big aww moment, with a kiss and a Jotun frost hound chasing pigeons in Docklands.

Problems: Well, I feel that Darcy is overdue an awesome moment. Everyone else got one in this film, and she kind of lost out to new British intern Ian in the finale of this one so that she could fall in love with him. It was a very sweet scene, but she was kind of cheated (although she did get my top line of the movie). Maybe she can get to kick Ultron in the fork in Avengers II or something. I am also aware that the Warrior who was sidelined was Hogun, the Asian, which makes sense having established him as a Vanir and giving him some off time with his own family, but it would be nice to see some payoff on that sometime beyond a shot of him looking up at some lost jet fighters.

Agents of SHIELD: The Girl in the Flower Dress and Atlantis: White Lies

Finally, Agents of SHIELD presents us with an episode with some real pace and kick to it, as Centipede's machinations threaten to expose Skye's true loyalties, and put a man with pyrokinetic powers in deadly danger.

Perhaps the biggest problem with this episode is that our second example of the Rising Tide is such a colossal douchebag that it's hard to feel much sympathy with Skye knowing that these were the hypocrites she used to hang with. On the plus side, however, it brings that particular subplot into the open before it has a chance to get old or annoying, and the new direction is honestly more interesting.

Some nice touches this week as well, such as the importance allotted to the giving of a name, and also Coulson's determination to save the super of the week, and his sadness to realise that he can't.


And then, Atlantis, which honestly gets dumber by the week. Conspiracies and secrets this week, as well as a comedy subplot about Hercules' unhealthy obsession with his pet racing beetle. Jason also got to establish himself as not merely dumb and dull, but also less awesomely superhuman than previously shown, which pretty much renders him completely pointless in his own series.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Earth

The second series of Avatar: The Last Airbender picks up Team Avatar - a term used in fandom, but also coined in-universe by Sokka, during a period of envy over the cool names of elite military units - as they emerge triumphant from the North Pole to travel to the Earth Kingdom and study Earthbending.

Earth is in a lot of ways darker than Water. In particular, Prince Zuko is replaced as primary antagonist by his sister Azula, whose lethal confidence stops just short of parody, and finds himself an outcast, mired in an emofunk despite the best effort of Iroh, who remains the boss throughout this series. Aang's struggles with the nature of the Avatar's calling continue, as Earthbending does not come naturally to him and the awesome power of the Avatar state both places him at risk and demands that he give up the people he cares for most.

There are also a couple of especially dark episodes, such as the one which explores Zuko's childhood and Appa's Lost Days, which recounts the arduous and ultimately futile journey of the kidnapped Appa to be reunited with Aang.

This is not to say that the series loses its sense of humour. I would pay good money for a buddy cop series featuring Iroh and Toph, the blind Earthbender who joins the team; a well-bred but still ill-mannered self-made-waif who teaches herself to bend metal just to prove she could.

Earth also develops the philosophy of its universe, mostly through Iroh, although with contributions from Toph and mad Earth King Bumi, and the emotional and spiritual balance of the four elements.

The end of the series is a major downer, but we've moved briskly on to Book 3: Fire.

Star Trek Movie Musings - Generations

So, here we are in the Next Generation era of Star Trek movies and straightaway we're back to the problems of the Motion Picture, in that this is essentially an episode plot made bigger and, alas, more stupid.

We begin with the apparent death of Captain Kirk, and then cut to the crew of the Enterprise D playing dress up on the holodeck, which is a little jarring, especially as we then launch into Next Gen's favourite subplot, Data's emotions, which means we get Brent Spiner overacting for half an hour (which would be less annoying if he weren't actually a good actor, which he is).

Then we get the rest of the film in the company of my least favourite recurring character, Guinan, the effortlessly wise bartender who is awesome at everything. You may have guessed that I'm not loving this so far. In its defence, it does have Malcolm McDowell and Patrick Stewart chewing the scenery at each other, but then it turns out that Kirk's dream life is living in a cabin in the mountains and doing the same thing every day and how does that make sense even before Picard points it out?

Hmm. I seem to have left this one for several months unpublished.

Okay, briefly then, it took the original series cast three films to wreck the Enterprise; it took the Next Gen crew one. Not so impressed.

Agents of SHIELD: Eye Spy and Atlantis: Twist of Fate

On the strength of Eye Spy, I'm glad to say that Agents of SHIELD seems to have found its footing. This week's episode had no new backstory not directly related to the plot, which was also a furthering of the central arc, and allowed the characters to stretch their legs and run for a while. FitzSimmons get a proper tech line, while Ward and May each have their action spot, and the pairing of Ward and Skye is starting to come into more focus (with 'you're gonna have to bromance him' scoring highly on the line of the week stakes).

Meanwhile, Atlantis continues to be as silly as ever, but it's still quite fun. I really hope that some of these mythological tie ins pay off though.

Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer

The Adventures of Captain Alatriste is a lengthy series of novels by Spanish author Arturo Perez Reverte. In Alatriste, director Augustin Diaz Yanes takes the sensible course of adapting only the first of these novels, introducing the character and his page/chronicle Inigo, their friends and enemies at court, and their involvement in the upper echelons of 17th century Spanish politics through Alatriste's unlikely rescue of the visiting Prince of Wales and Duke of Buckingham.

Oh, no; wait. what I should have said is that he shoves the central plots of the first five novels into a single, sumptuous two-hour-plus epic. At the very least, I can say that it never drags.

Make no mistake, this is a film that demands your attention and mocks you mercilessly if you let it slide. It's in Spanish, for starters, so if you're not a Spanish speaker, you'd better be watching the subtitles. The plot is also pretty Machiavellian, so try to keep up, and given that most of the characters are swarthy, mustachioed soldiers in the Spanish tercios, the casual viewer could easily get lost.

That said, it is a magnificently shot movie, with superb action sequences, and it never gets bogged down in all that politics. I suspect that I would have been in absolute throes of ecstasy over the cinematography if I knew more about Velasquez, and I was pretty impressed as it was.

Worth a watch, certainly, although it's two hours in which you won't really be chatting much.

Agents of SHIELD: The Asset and Atlantis: A Boy of No Consequence

Episode 3 of Agents of SHIELD continues, I am sad to say, to be workmanlike. We get some glimpses of character development, in particular from the friction between the consummate pro Ward and the ultimate dilettante Skye, and from another hint as to what actually happened to Coulson, but that leaves fully half the main cast with not a lot to do but stand around a table.

Now, it's a good cast, but they are basically standing around a table, and Agents of SHIELD needs to nail down the pacing needed for a 45-minute ensemble arc show or kill half of them off, because at the moment its just not quite there; for me at least, although I really want it to be. It's got everything in place to be great and it has its moments, but so far, it's only okay, and in today's genre-rich environment, that isn't quite enough.

Ladies and gentlemen: Our hero.

Moving on to something that still isn't as good as Agents, but has the distinction of being better at least than it has on paper the right to be, and that is Atlantis.

In A Boy of No Consequence, Jason leaps to the defence of an old ma and winds up punching the queen's nephew. This means, thankfully, that we get some actual character development for a female character. Not Ariadne, who remains pretty bland, but the wicked queen Pasiphae, who seems to have two strikes against her already, being both a wicked queen and Ariadne's wicked stepmother, whose loutish nephew is both Ariadne's intended and the jerk Jason lamped in the street.

As a consequence, it's the bull-leaping for our band of pals, and Jason must get his team to work together to avoid a life of jumping over angry cattle. Add a little Greek voodoo and a sudden but inevitable betrayal, mix well and serve with some doubtful CGI.

And yet, I find it hard to look away.

Perspectives on Horror - Frailty and Red Riding Hood

 I strongly suspect that this is not going to be anyone's idea of an obvious movie double bill, but bear with me.

Frailty is actor Bill Paxton's directorial debut, a Texas-set paranormal thriller in which a young man (then mega-heartthrob Matthew McConaughey, looking disheveled and ragged) attempts to convince an FBI agent that his brother was a serial killer through a tale of their father's religious visions, while Red Riding Hood is a Twiclone based on the titular fairy tale, complete with a forced love-triangle and a heroine with largely self-inflicted problems.

Not, I confess, a logical pairing.

But...

Here's the thing. Neither film is exactly a horror film, but both draw a vein of horror from the manipulation of perception.

First up, spoiler-free reviews:

Frailty is a compelling drama, well-acted and directed, and by turns chilling and thought provoking. It is well-worth seeing.

Red Riding Hood wants to be Twilight, without being Twilight, and has far less to say than it thinks it does. It is still worth seeing, because it's fun, and being from the director of Twilight it is very, very pretty to look at.

If you absolutely had to choose, I would suggest choosing Frailty.

Beyond this point, I need to discuss particular plot points, so there will be spoilers.

Frailty opens with Fenton Mieks approaching the FBI Agent in charge of investigating the 'God's Hand' killer to announce that the killer is his brother Adam. He proceeds to tell a story of the two brothers and their father, a good man who one night announces that God has sent an angel to tell him that the end times have come and that he and his sons must hunt down and destroy demons in human form. Only they can see the demons and their sins, he explains, and Adam accepts this, even as Fenton sees his father's descent into madness and relentless pursuit of a random list of names.

And then the film turns everything on its head simply by shifting its perspective, with a twist that does the two things that a twist ought to do: It takes you by surprise, and then immediately convinces you that it shouldn't have done.

Red Riding Hood is told almost exclusively from the perspective of Valerie, soon to be given the eponymous cloak, a good girl in a village beset by a werewolf. After the wolf kills her sister, a professional hunter is summoned and the long 'truce' with the beast breaks down, with Valerie caught in the middle of it all.

Except... if viewed from anyone else's perspective, the story is somewhat different. Valerie isn't the innocent people think, or that even she views herself as. She is actually resented by her friends, bears some indirect guilt for her sister's death, and when pressed proves to be selfish, vicious and somewhat amoral. She scorns the village catch, Henry (rich, handsome, honest, sharply intelligent and devoted) for her long-time inappropriate squeeze, Peter (moody, surly, emo hair, although he is at least also loyal to a fault), but won't do so openly and is then willing to stab Peter on a hunch that he might be the wolf, but when he is infected, decides that he's so dreamy he gets a pass. At the end of the film, she is also immensely dismissive of people who, despite their own fears, envies and frailties, when push came to shove were willing to stand up for her against a monster, be that the wolf or the hunter.

It also has a twist, which again I didn't see coming, but I'm not sure that I should have done, which makes it a little less sound.

And there's a rave scene in the middle which is as jarring as the one in the first non-existent Matrix sequel, and even more anachronistic.

Agents of SHIELD - 0-8-4

Say what again! I dare you!

So, last week was the big opener, and now we have the first 'regular' episode of Marvel's Agents of SHIELD (in which I am not going to bother putting the full stops anymore, because it slows my typing right down and because simply capitalising is a perfectly acceptable convention for acronyms), 0-8-4 (apparently SHIELD's code for an object of unknown origin).

I confess, on this one I was a little underwhelmed, in part I think because it was sort of a continuation of the pilot. With the team thrown together from highly disparate parts by Coulson, this is the 'coming together as a unit' episode, and honestly I would have liked to have seen this as part of perhaps a longer pilot episode, or further into the season following a longer establishment of the initial divisions within the team. I also recognise that there are concessions to be made to the conventions of the format, but part of me suspects that they threw in Nick Fury at the end of this one as a nod to the fact that it felt like a necessary episode, rather than a stand out.

There was a lot to like here, don't get me wrong. I felt that they established both the divisions in the team and the individual strengths very well, especially given the time constraints, and in particular they navigated a difficult path in having the team initially get played without making them look like complete chumps. It then proceeded to give pretty much everyone a chance to shine (Skye looked like being stuck with being an informed badass until the save with the safety card, which was a nice touch).

There is a risk still of setting our leads up to look like fools, with Skye being revealed as a Rising Tide mole this early, but I am willing to cut the series some slack.

0-8-4 is not an awesome episode, but for an essentially utilitarian episode we could have got a lot worse.