Jessica Jones - 'AKA 99 Friends' and 'AKA The Sandwich Saved Me'

A key part of the noir tone of Jessica Jones is the way that she doesn't stand
out from the crowd.

Jessica Jones continues her search for Kilgrave by trying to track down the photographer who has been keeping tabs on her. She gets Trish to offer an apology to Kilgrave on air to get the hit taken off. At the same time, a new client finds her through a referral, which immediately triggers alarms after all that happened with Hope's parents. Thankfully, it turns out that the mystery client is actually just a crazed vigilante looking to bump off superhumans, leading Jessica to assure her that she knows 99 other 'gifted' (the titular '99 Friends') in Hell's Kitchen alone.

The hunt for the photographer gets a break when people start calling in their experiences with Kilgrave to Jeri Hogarth. 'Kilgrave made me do it' may be the new excuse du jour, but Jessica is able to pick out a few genuine cases and puts together a support group, from whom she is able to get a key description of the photographer - her junkie friend Malcolm.

It's hilarious how much this guy wants to be Captain America.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Simpson - ex-special forces cop and Trish's erstwhile assassin - comes by to apologise by way of giving Trish a clean and highly illegal gun for self defence. This is apparently the way to her heart, or at least her bed, which comes as something of a shock to Jessica, especially when Simpson then wants in on the Kilgrave hunt.

With some help from Simpson, who is a bit of a manly jerk, but actually seems to be as good as he thinks he is, Jessica manages to ambush Kilgrave, darting him with Sufentanol and whisking him away, only to discover that he's hired a security detail just in case his powers were compromised. They turn up in numbers too great for Jessica to handle, even with Simpson, and Kilgrave is rescued.

A series of flashbacks reveal that Trish once tried to persuade Jessica to become a superhero, but that her first serious efforts at nocturnal vigilantism - in which she rescued Malcolm from a mugging - were interrupted by Kilgrave. The scene in which they meet actually sheds a lot of light on Kilgrave's personality, and you can see in Tennant's performance that a lot of what makes him tick is that fact that, as no-one will ever refuse him, disagree with him, or fail to laugh at his jokes, Kilgrave genuinely believes himself to be a pretty rad guy. He says that he never makes anyone do anything they don't want to, but this more than anything reveals his distorted view of the world. To Kilgrave, people must want to neglect or abandon their children, take him in and pander to him, or they wouldn't do it. It's creepy as hell.

On the other side of the coin, Jessica's true colours shine through when, in the aftermath of the attempted snatch, she picks up the abandoned Malcolm and tries to help him beat the habit that Kilgrave forced him into in order to control him long term (his powers max out at 10 hours of persistence.) Yes, she offers him the drugs if he wants to self destruct, but is clearly pleased that he rejects them. Despite the continuing noir sentiment, Jessica gets a lot more likable at that moment.

Arrow - 'Legends of Yesterday' and 'Dark Waters'

Teamwork!
Actually, this really shows up that the Flash has the only costume in Team
Flash, while Team Arrow has masks for all.

'Legends of Yesterday' is the follow up to the Flash episode, 'Legends of Today', and brings Teams Flash and Arrow to Central City - or a farmhouse just outside it, in a nakedly owned tribute to Age of Ultron - so that Oliver can learn to fight in the sunlight. Savage uses Merlin to send a message asking for a meeting, where he demands Chay-Ara and Khufu be handed over to him, or he will burn Central City to the ground with everyone in it.

As Kendra's memories of Chay-ara return, the teams prepare to fight. Cisco creates a pair of insulating gloves to allow Barry to seize the staff, while Oliver goes behind Felicity's back to try to get to know the son he never knew he had. Unfortunately for Oliver, this is The Flash, so Felicity finds out and is pissed, dumping him. Elsewhere, Carter pushes Kendra to recall her abilities as a fighter by tapping into her anger. Oliver insists on taking a minimal team to confront Savage. Kendra fails to tap her powers, Oliver is off his game, and the gloves don't work. Vandal kills Hawkgirl and Hawkman, the staff goes off boom and everyone dies except Barry.

No, really. Everyone dies, except for Barry, who runs back in time (phew.)

In the revised timeline, Oliver is prewarned that Felicity will dump him for keeping secrets, so he keeps the secret more secretly (yay for not learning anything!) Barry also pushes Cisco not to let Khufu's cock-blocking get him down, and so Cisco is able to help Kendra access Chay-Ara's memories through her goodness, not rage. This not only properly unlocks her powers, but shows them that the meteors that made Vandal Savage immortal are the key to defeating him. Barry nicks a chunk of meteor and Cisco extracts the 'Nth metal' it contains to use in the gloves. This time they take the whole gang to the fight and use the staff of horus to turn Vandal into dust (which Merlin nicks, telling ash-Savage that he owes him.)

I find it hard to express my disappointment that Vandal Savage is only 4,000 years old instead of 50,000, with his backstory swapped out for the character Hath-Set ('house of set' is a weird-ass name for a priest of Horus) to link it to Hawkgirl and Hawkman, and that he ends the episode uncharacteristically dead. I suppose it was the only way to resolve his hunt other than having him kill his prey and probably half the cast, but... I just like the immortal cave man.

And now the cheerful Christmas episode.

In 'Dark Waters', Oliver proceeds with his mayoral bid, and when his harbour clearing initiative is attacked, opts to out Damien Darhk as the leader of the Ghosts. In retaliation, Darhk kidnaps Thea, Felicity and Diggle, threatening to kill them with an algae-based gas he's been growing in the bay so that Oliver will have nothing left to fight for. Laurel and Malcolm (dressed as Green Arrow) intervene and Merlin almost kills Darhk, but apparently some spell protects him (it's actually a bit obscure, but he's up and showing off a perfect underground cornfield a couple of scenes after almost being exploded.) We also get to meet some more of HIVE's leadership, and get a glimpse at their plan, which seems to be leaning towards global algae-gas apocalypse, with a chosen few surviving in their subterranean version of Kansas.

Oliver makes another speech and proposes to Felicity, who - not knowing that he's lying about his son - accepts and is then killed in an ambush, while Darhk enjoys Christmas with his oddly retro family.

The season has been working hard to make us feel that death is going to have a sting this year, but as my girlfriend predicted, this has actually had the effect of softening the blow, partly because we knew it had to be Felicity and partly because with all that protest I actually have more expectation of a reversal, despite the destruction of the Lazarus Pit and Felicity's text book mouth-bleeding 'for realsies dead' head-loll. I'm not saying I won't be cut up if she's gone, she's always been a favourite with us, but that the shock value wasn't there.

Anyway, now the winter break, while we get caught up on Downton and Sleepy Hollow.

Cinematic Review of the Year

It's been an active year for cinema. This is what I've seen, in arbitrarily judged descending order of quality. Most of them have reviews either here or at the Bad Movie Marathon.

Family
That's right; my daughter is now old enough to actually watch films with us (she is very much looking forward to The Jungle Book next year.) The films we went to see together, either just the two of us or with Hanna, are, in descending order:

• Inside Out
• The Good Dinosaur
• Cinderella
• Minions
• Shaun the Sheep

The Good Dinosaur and Cinderella were actually both pretty good, but The Good Dinosaur made me cry, and Arya wanted to see it again despite howling through much of it.

Dates
I don't get to see many movies with my partner, Hanna, since Cambridge and Ipswich have different chains and therefore different cinema cards now. What we did get to see, again in descending order, was:

• Age of Ultron (half of it anyway, second watch for both of us, called due to illness)
• Into the Woods

Damn. We really don't get to the cinema much (although four of the five family movies we were both there.)

Just Me
So, most of my cinema watching is just me. Sometimes I go with friends, but I usually need to hit an earlier showing than most people can make, as I have flexible hours and a long commute. In descending order:

• Fury Road
• The Martian
• Ex-Machina
• Ant-Man
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens
• Mockingjay - Part 2
• Jurassic World
• Chappie
• The Man from UNCLE
• Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
• Jupiter Ascending
• Spectre
• Kingsman
• Terminator: Genisys
• Tomorrowland
• Victor Frankenstein
• American Ultra
• Insurgent (actually, I only caught this on DVD, but it was out this year in the cinema)
• The Last Witch Hunter
• The Scorch Trials
• Fantastic Four
• Seventh Son

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Red and Blue, the standard movie colours for civil war.

This is the spoiler-free review - the big, detailed on will be on the Bad Movie Marathon.

Thirty years after Endor, Luke Skywalker has disappeared. The Republic faces the threat of a post-Imperial power called the First Order and ex-Princess Leia is leading a Resistance against their rise. Enter our new leads: Poe Dameron, ace resistance pilot; Finn, a renegade stormtrooper; and Rey, a scrappy scavenger.

Finn and Rey, our particular heroes, embark on a journey to deliver a droid carrying vital information, and that's not the only similarity to A New Hope, a movie as old as I am. It can not be denied that The Force Awakens leans heavily on its original source, and that makes it hard for me to judge it in isolation, but what it does with that source is way more interesting than what the prequels did, and arguably more interesting than A New Hope itself. It really helps that they got a good writer who knows the franchise (Empire and Jedi co-writer Laurence Kasdan,) so that the dialogue pops nicely without leaning on having 'a bad feeling about this' like it was a crutch. I'm also not going to pretend that it hurt getting 'Big' John Williams on board to do the music.

There are no big surprises, but certainly some twists that I didn't anticipate going in and a story well wroth following. There was one section that flt superfluous and the central macguffin is a bit of a stretch, but overall the story is good and the character beats are really nice, and have the development that was lacking in the prequels. It's going to need a very strong follow up in episode VIII, but this is an excellent setup.

Good job, JJ. Good job everyone.

Blindspot - 'Eight Slim Grins'

The FBI know how to show a girl a good time.

We open with Jane confronted by the bearded mastermind behind this whole thing, who is then shot to death by a mystery sniper, so I guess he's either not the mastermind at all, has a weird plan involving his own death, or is some sort of death cheating wizard. The latter option is supported by the fact that the mastermind appears to have kidnapped Kurt's childhood best friend, framed daddy Weller for murder, raised young Taylor as a ninja then erased her memory and sent her back to Kurt, now an FBI agent, in order to lead him through a complex pattern of crimes of which he has apparently precise, date specific information and/or has assessed the precise pattern in which they can be triggered by the agents themselves.

For the bulk of the episode, the team pursues a bank heist crew, one of whom has a SEAL tattoo matching Jane's. It's pretty by the numbers and yields just one word of a clue: Orion. The team spend much of the episode snarling over the way all their leads peter out, but that actually doesn't make it any less irritating to the viewer. The confirmation of Taylor Shaw's identity is a small thing given how many more questions it raises. There is some business about Jane's place in the team, but that's really just marking time.

The real twist of the week comes when Patterson uncovers a tattoo identifying a heavily redacted FBI case file related to AD Mayfair. Mayfair blanks the connection rather, but later hooks up with an old colleague and warns him that whoever sent Jane knows about 'Daylight', which is something secret enough that his immediate response is pretty much 'and you haven't killed everyone and set fire to the office because...'

Blindspot is definitely a flawed work, but not uninteresting. Jaime Alexander is a bright spot in a slightly underwhelming cast, and the sheer unlikeliness of the premise deserves a full on craziness that the show holds back from.

The Librarians - '...and the Image of Image'

That's some heels right there.

When the Librarians stumble across bad magic that the clipping book hasn't warned them of, it's time to investigate, and in this case investigation means... going clubbing.

Having some fun with Rebecca Romijn's height and past career as a model and the general fish out of waterness of our nerdy dream team trying to get into a swinging night spot, the episode gets a little heavier once the villain emerges: Dorian Gray, not a fictional but a former 'special friend' of Oscar Wilde whose meddling with bad magic inspired the novel, written as a warning against dabbling. Cassandra's increasing inebriation as Gray's drinking transfers its effects to her is at first played for laughs, then as a threat.

The episode gets Gray pretty much spot on, not really malevolent, just monstrously self-absorbed. It also provides some extra motivation by suggesting that insulating himself from the effects of his sins has cut him off from their pleasures, pushing him to greater and greater extremes. It also plays a little with our expectations, giving us a more original denouement than just slashing the painting.

MVL of the Week

Drunk Cassandra trying to keep tiny rhinos out of her mental workspace is good for a laugh, but this has to go to Jake this week: Increasing frustrated that everyone but him can get into the club (including Jenkins, who sneaks in with the band,) he attempts to distract the bouncer by getting into a generic argument about the relative merits of America and England, which quickly escalates into a literary showdown with the unexpectedly literate doorman.

Supergirl - 'Red Faced' and 'Human for a Day'

Sam and Lucy Lane are dicks to Kryptonians

'Red Faced' sees the Woman of Steel confronting her own anger and double standards (again). After she intervenes in a road rage incident and ends up scaring a group of children with her strength, Max Lord steps up his campaign against her and Henshaw warns her that people don't hate and fear her and Superman because they have godlike power, but because they have all too human tempers.

As the episode continues Kara learns that James and Lucy are getting a place together and that James has invited Lucy to game night, at which it becomes obvious that the two of them have the kind of bond that she can never hope to have with a human. Cat's mother comes to town and immediately starts putting her down, leading Cat to round on Kara, and Lucy's dad - General Sam 'Not Thunderbolt, but that's a technicality' Lane - shows up to slag off James as not good enough for his little girl and force the DEO to assign Supergirl to take part in a test of a new military android named Red Tornado (which sounds like the nickname of a Cold War era Russian boxer.)

'I must break you.'

So, the point is that Supergirl is pretty steamed when she faces off against robo-Ivan Drago, and kicks seven bells out of it, despite the fact that it turns out to have been built specifically to murderise Kryptonians. Her beatdown triggers its self-preservation and stealth modes and Lane tells her she's responsible for unleashing an unstoppable killing machine on the public, because he's a colossal dickbag. In fact, you know what, Thunderbolt Ross is like, 'dude, you're a dick.'

Kara blows up at Cat, who takes her out to get drunk and explains to her that, yeah, it sucks, but as a woman she can never get mad. A guy can lash out and be respected for his passion; for a woman, it's career suicide. She advises Kara to work out what the anger is behind her anger, and to find an outlet. She fights Red Tornado again, but he distracts her by endangering civilians and escapes. She saves Lane's life in the incident, leading him to, again, tell her anyone his out of control robot hurts is on her head, because dick, and Henshaw to blow up at him for being an ungrateful, self-righteous ass.

Actually, that scene is very important. Kara and especially Alex are increasingly certain that Henshaw is up to something and may be implicated in the death of Alex's father, but there's a real moment when he suddenly has her back absolutely against Lane. Then she goes off and punches a car until she realises that at the core of it she's angry with her mother because she doesn't have a chance of a normal life.

'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.'

Alex approaches Max Lord, who is able to reveal that the robot's now-sacked inventor is remotely controlling it, leading to a two-pronged battle as Alex fights Dr Morrow and Supergirl fights the increasingly powerful and dangerous Red Tornado. Morrow is killed, but the robot becomes self-controlled (Alex says 'sentient', but that's a leap,) so Supergirl pulls out all the stops and blows it to hell with her heat vision.

Back at the office, Cat rounds on her mother for insulting Kara, but the moment is marred when Kara cuts her hand and actually bleeds.

Like fish, aliens need regular cleaning of their habitat, but you
can't just put the Master of the Faceless Hunters in a bag.

In 'Human for a Day' it emerges that in destroying Red Tornado Kara used a 'solar flare' (a relatively new thing only added to Superman's power set in the last year,) expending all of her stored solar energy and thus losing her powers for a time. Of course, this is when an earthquake strikes National City, at the very moment when the DEO are taking Jemm, Son of Saturn and 'Master of the Faceless Hunters' out of his telepathy-proof containment tank so it can be cleaned.

While Kara experiences a broken arm and helplessness for the first time - without her powers she can only stand by while people die - and Cat makes a broadcast urging people to be calm, Alex is holed up in the vault at the DEO where Kara's mother's hologram lives and Henshaw goes after Jemm. When his backup is taken out and he starts acting oddly, however, she determines to go after both Jemm and Henshaw. In part, she is driven by the knowledge that Henshaw went on a mission with her father from which only Henshaw returned in mysterious circumstances.

So, this scene had some drama.

Max Lord has another go at Supergirl - this time for not showing up - and after watching someone bleed out and a pep talk from James, Kara opts to try and do what she can without powers, confronting and talking down a looter despite knowing that a bullet would do horrible things to her as a human. In the wake of this, she accepts a comforting hug as a chance to get snuggly with James, only for Winn to walk in, having determined that perhaps her superpowers can be kickstarted with an adrenaline rush. There's a gas explosion, James gets heroic and, when he falls down a lift shaft, Kara's powers return.

Winn has a go at her because he's as tired of this love quadrangle as I am, and it's done in an interesting way. Winn is clearly jealous and a lot of his remarks are hurtful because of it, but he has a sound point that it's pretty cheap to sneak a cuddle in her vulnerability while Lucy is out of town, and only likely to get her more hurt. All in all, he comes off as a bit of a dick, but so long as he doesn't get on the nice guy high horse, we can get past that.

I am, it turns out, a huge Martian Manhunter fanboy.

Alex cuffs Henshaw to a pipe and tries to take down Jemm on her own. He turns out to be an unstoppable badass, but she is rescued at the last minute by Henshaw, who displays immense physical strength in the process. Later they talk and he reveals that he is an alien refugee who was tracked down by the real Henshaw and Jeremiah Danvers. When Danvers defended him, Henshaw killed him, but Jeremiah returned the favour. In return, the alien took Henshaw's identity and promised to protect Alex, hence sometimes keeping her out of missions. Then he takes on his natural form as the last son of Mars, J'onn J'onzz.

Eeeeeeee!

Supergirl continues to struggle a little with the balance between strong human drama and action, and a slightly ham-fisted feminism. It's the last of these that is the problem, sometimes being done well and sometimes - see especially Kara's role in the love polygon aspects - not so much. The fact that her search for a normal life is automatically assumed to be stymied by not being able to get a date is not a great start.

On the other hand, I really like that, having discussed the way that women aren't allowed to get angry, in the final fight with Red Tornado the series does allow Supergirl to get mad, Melissa Benoist roaring and snarling like a mad thing as Supergirl channels all of her fury into taking down what, slightly uncomfortably, they have just decided is a unique, sentient being. I'm not saying that Supergirl committed genocide, but... Anyway, my point is, look at that picture above. How often does a female lead get to look that furious?

On the flip side, the scene where she talks down the looter is also really good, highlighting the gentler side of her humanity and her ability to be the figure of hope that vigilantes can't. A female lead with multiple personality modes? Who'd a thunk.

Arrow - 'Beyond Redemption', 'Haunted', 'Lost Souls' and 'Brotherhood'

New digs.

As Arrow marathons go, this week's really sucked, but we're almost there now, with only the second part of the big Legends of Tomorrow crossover event to go to get up to speed (well, plus this week's episode by the time we sit down to watch again.)

In 'Beyond Redemption', Lance and Laurel struggle with the fact that Sara is back, but basically as a blood-crazed feral beast, regardless of Laurel's insistence that she'll be fine in time. Sara refuses to tell Oliver on the grounds that he'd put Sara down like a dog.

This place gets more 'STAR Labs' every day...

Meanwhile, the SCPD anti-vigilante task force have gone rogue to put together a retirement fund for the imminent collapse of the city that pays their salary, forcing Lance to work with Team Arrow to stop them. Oliver suffers a bout of suck and gets taken hostage, but Lance talks the leader of the team down by appealing to her sense of duty and to the idea that nobody is beyond redemption, speaking not only of Sara but of his own deal with Darhk, which Oliver now knows about. He offers to hand himself in, but Oliver asks him to be their inside guy in Hive.

Full disclosure, I don't actually know if this is a pixie bob.

In 'Haunted', Sara escapes from the basement where Laurel was keeping her chained to a wall until she remembered she wasn't an animal and starts hunting down skinny brunettes with pixie bobs, instinctively seeking to curb her bloodlust by killing her killer. Fortunately, she gets distracted in each attack by maiming her would-be victim's other assailants, so Team Arrow are able to retrieve her before she does more damage than kicking the snot out of Thea one time. There is a worrying moment where it looks like Laurel might actually be trying to let Sara kill Thea in the hopes of restoring her, but I think that was just us taking the least charitable view of Laurel's actions because we don't like her much.

Oliver is pretty mad that Laurel lied to him, especially since he might be the one person who can help. Back in his flashbacks, he'd been recruited to work security on a drug farm on Lian Yu, where he also meets another interloper: A mouthy, British interloper.

It's that guy!

Yes, it turns out that Oliver Queen knows John Constantine, and as Constantine owes him a favour the surly betrenchcoated one comes to Star City to perform a ritual which allows Oliver and Laurel to retrieve Sara's soul and reunite it with her body. He also notes that he has heard of Darhk and recommends that they run.

Ensouled or not, 'Lost Souls' shows that Sara still has that bloodlust swinging, even as Thea's begins to put in a return appearance. The fact that Laurel didn't try to set Thea up is confirmed when she doesn't bring up that whole 'kill your killer' solution when it becomes clear that Sara wants to beat some fools to death. It's also somewhere around this point that Thea starts dating Oliver's political consultant, Alex, whom I presume to be either evil or doomed; possibly both.

This is not good. I have seen good, and this is not what it looks
like.

Having decoded a message from Ray, Felicty finds not his last words, but a call for help, his experiment having miniaturised him and having since been captured and kept in a lab. With help from Palmer Tech employee Curtis Holt - polymath genius, bronze medal Olympic decathlete, base jumper, possible future Mr Terrific and the Arrowverse's second 'just deal with it' married gay guy - she tracks him down, the mission given extra urgency when they learn he is being held by Damien Darhk. Ray is retrieved and resized, but Darhk is able to retroengineer a dwarf star alloy power source for a techno-artefact macguffin.

The unacceptable face of civic leadership.

'Brotherhood' sees Diggle discover that not only was his brother assassinated by Hive because he was a rival drug smuggler, but in order to recruit him into their ranks (although I am baffled that anyone would choose to fake someone's death by hiring a lethal sniper who uses curare-tipped bullets for extra fuck you to take a kill shot.) Recruitment turns out to include a yellow pill that renders one susceptible to suggestion and destroys DNA (which must have long term health risks.) Diggle decides that his brother's neglect of his duty to his family (in particular his wife and son) render him unworthy of aid, but the team insist on getting Andy out and finding out what really happened to him.

Thea goes apeshit on a creeper during a date with Alex (seriously, in what appears to be a pretty swish bar this guy hits on her after Alex has been up from the table for ten seconds,) which he takes surprisingly well, adding weight to the 'evil' column. Later however, she gets in a fight with Darhk, but escapes when he turns out to be unable to suck out her soul, instead draining her bloodlust and having a painful turn himself.

Meanwhile, Darhk offers help with Oliver's campaign for Mayor in return for not trying to clean up the harbour. Oliver considers getting into bed with Darhk so he can be the inside man and not have to risk Lance, but Diggle convinces him instead to fight in the light of day.

In flashback land, Oliver saves one worker from death, but kills another when a suspicious fellow guard manipulates the man into attacking Oliver. This turns out to be the first worker's brother, just so that Oliver has another secret to keep while he tries to work out what drug producer and magic collector Baron Reiter actually wants on Lian Yu.

Arrow - 'Restoration'

"Deal with it!" (is what he doesn't use as a catchphrase.)

With Laurel and Thea on their 'spa trip', Original Team Arrow (so dubbed by Felicity) are struggling to overcome the trust issues between Oliver and Diggle, which become life-threatening when each heads out alone.

Diggle is hunting Mina Fayad, the Hive agent who hired Floyd Lawton to kill his brother, but Fayad is in town bringing a metahuman hitman to kill the Arrow. While Diggle barely escapes from Fayad's security detail, Oliver is lured into a trap and nearly sliced and diced with playing cards that the meta pulls from his tattooed skin. Felicity forces the two boys to cooperate and Diggle explains the Hive connection to Oliver, leading them to go after Fayad together.

They say that cat Smoake's a bad mother...
Shut yo mouth!

Unfortunately, Darhk has killed Fayad in the process of demonstrating his telekinetic powers to the meta (dubbed Double Down by Cisco Ramone) and in punishment for almost getting caught. It also appears to be a political move, with Hive's upper echelons including rivals as well as disciples of Darhk. While they are finding her corpse, Double Down tracks his card to a Palmer Tech lab, where Felicity has asked Curtis Holt to analyse it, basically pulling an 'Oliver in Season 1 asking Felicity to look into something' act.

The assassin chases them to the Lair 2.0, but discovers that metahuman card-throwing skills are at best a score draw against a genius with a submachine-gun, and not really up to snuff against two black ops badasses with an axe to grind. Double Down goes to the metahuman wing at Iron Heights (I guess with a legal metahuman containment facility available, the Pipeline at STAR Labs is just being used for Earth-2 criminals and Lian Yu for people they really don't like?) and in the process, Oliver takes a playing card for Diggle to restore the trust.

"What was I drinking?"

Meanwhile, in Nanda Parbat, Laural asks Malcolm to bring back Sara. He refuses and Nyssa back him up: It's never been done with someone so long dead, and anything even close has always been a disaster. Laurel whines and asks how Nyssa can not want Sara back. Nyssa calls her on her motivation being grief and selfishness, not love of her sister. Laurel, being Laurel, absolutely does not get the message.

Thea asks her father for help in dealing with her problem. He explains that the blood lust comes from fragments of the souls of all those who have ever used the Pit, and will persist until she kills the one who wronged her (not a great solution, since the former Ra's al-Ghul is already dead,) but can be kept at bay by... occasionally killing someone. Being a supportive dad, he then sends a couple of mooks to try to kill her, so that she can off them in self-defence and gain a few weeks respite.

In a random change of heart, Malcolm decides to let them use the Pit to bring Sara back, despite Nyssa's continuing objection and Thea's doubts. Sara returns as a wold-eyed maniac, after which Nyssa destroys the Lazarus Pit so that its existence can't offer hope to counter that flash forward to the graveside from Episode 1. Someone's going yo die this season, and they're not coming back, okay.

An interesting note from this and last episode is that Damien Darhk's approach to staff competence fits a little awkwardly with the standard pattern of Arrow - villain of the week attacks, team hunts villain (or vice versa) for an inconclusive clash, final face-off. Darhk likes results first time out and has a bit of a minion-murder problem, so they're stretching a point each time someone makes it to the next stage.

Arrow - 'The Candidate'

"Who wants to be Star City's Mayor?"
"I don't!"

Team whatever they're called if Oliver isn't the boss of them anymore continue to take down Ghost operations, but get no closer to Darhk, and Oliver is increasingly worried about Thea's anger management. They are distracted a little when their mother's old friend Jessica Danforth decides to run for mayor, a career choice traditionally ending in death either before or after the election.

Oliver and Thea protect Jessica from an assassination attempt by a man who has scrambled his own fingerprints and uses a high-powered cattle-prod. Lonnie Machin meets up with Darhk and promises success next time, proceeding to abduct Danforth's daughter Madison after brutally murdering her police escort. After Thea's rage scotches an attempt to trace Machin, Oliver confronts her, leading to a fight in the lair. He explains to her about the Lazarus Pit's side-effects.

The height disparity is much more notable these days.

Darhk disowns Machin, telling him that while he doesn't have many limits, he believes in order, while Machin stands for chaos. He gives Lance the address where Madison is being held and Lance opts to trust Oliver with the rescue, given that he must be running short of cops by now. The team rescues Madison, but in the fight Thea kinda sorta sets Machin on fire, breaking the trust with Lance. Critically injured, Machin still busts out of the ambulance and maims two paramedics.

In the B-plot, Felicity finds that Ray Palmer's death has left Palmer Technologies more or less back where he found it, with the board mandating downsizing based on an algorithm developed by Curtis Holt (a list including Holt himself.) Unwilling to lay off dozens of employees, Felicity makes a hail Mary play, promising the Board a revolutionary new technology to restore the company's fortunes. Because she's awesome like that.

And then Laurel decides to take Thea to Nanda Parbat to look for a cure to her condition andbythewaylet'stakemysister'scorpseandseeifwecangetherbackafterayearinthegroundeventhoughshelookslikeHelenaBonhamCarterinaremakeofDeathBecomesHerorsomething.

Season 4 continues to show a marked improvement in the quality of adversaries, with Lonnie 'Anarky' Machin holding off Team Arrow for a spell and actually overpowering Oliver one-on-one. My one major reservation is Lance's cooperation with Darhk, and I don't know if they'll offer an explanation that works for me, especially if Darhk is willing to resort to threats towards Laurel. I guess we'll see.

The Librarians - '...and the Infernal Contract'

"Now there's something not many motel rooms have these days."

Baird is called on by an old Army buddy when one of his mayoral campaign workers vanishes, only for the clipping book to direct the Librarians to the same case. A 17th Century witch mark reveals that this is likely a case of a deal with the Devil, an infernal contract overseen by an 'Executor' which ensures the success of its holder by manipulating luck and fate, and providing a massive crisis for them to exploit every 44 years.

With the next crisis due, the team sets out to steal the contract from the rival mayoral candidate. Their wily, undercover shenanigans are swiftly blown when the contract turns their luck bad in self-defence and the Executor recognises Jenkins as the great white whale of his profession, but they snatch the document, only for Baird's buddy Sam to snatch the contract and try to make good from bad; because he's a pillock.

We need someone to play a snarky, omnipotent... Never mind.

The Librarians risk their lives to prevent the coming disaster and end up trapped, with the Executor offering them a deal to save them. They all refuse, but when he suggests that one of them could make the deal to save the others, they start to wonder if maybe they could do it and then find a loophole. Fortunately, Baird has already recovered the contract and written in her own name. Jenkins goes in to get the team out, shrugging off the attacks of the contract because however unlucky he gets he is literally unkillable, while the Executor urges Baird to 'make a wish'; which she does, wishing him human, thus making him unable to complete his part of the bargain and rendering the contract void. BAM!

MVL of the Week
It's a tough draw this week, as '...and the Infernal Contract' is really Baird and Jenkins' show. Points go to Jake for his excitement at getting a smokehouse set up for Chupacabra jerky:

Jake: Get ready for Chupacabra jerky!
Cassandra: Ew, you're cooking it?!
Jake: [excited] No, he's making it! The Chupacabra, he's *awesome*!
Ezekiel: [dubious] Is that *safe*?
Jenkins: As long as we keep it away from the goats on Level Four.
Cassandra/Ezekiel: [simultaneously] We've got goats?!

"I like boats!"

Also to Ezekiel for his horror when Jake accuses him of becoming honest since he doesn't use the Library's magic for thieving:

"I said; it's easy. Ezekiel Jones doesn't do easy; he does impossible."

But in the end I'm going to give the prize to Cassandra for 'Sugar Bear', her tooth-grating undercover turn as Jenkins' arm candy (see left.)

The Flash - 'Legends of Today'

"Full disclosure; I'm evil as fuck."

When a mysterious man goes on a killing spree with stone knives and targets Cisco's girlfriend Kendra, even the Flash may not be able to protect her. The mystery killer calls her Priestess Shayera and possesses seemingly magical powers, so Barry suggests turning to a friend with some experience in this area: Oliver Queen.

We cut to Star City, where Barry saves Oliver from Damien Darhk (who, possibly in response to the switch of shows, is having way more fun than in his Arrow appearances to date) and gets to see the new lair, which we haven't quite got to in Arrow (still catching up) and which is boss as all get out. Malcolm Merlin pops up out of nowhere like a long-forgotten Kickstarter reward and tells them that this guy is Vandal Savage, former bestie of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan and all-round immortal, unstoppable badass (which explains how he walked away from a fall out of Oliver and Felicity's loft.

And in fairness, Vandal Savage is pretty goddamn badass; aptly enough, considering he lives in a world where six months training leads to world-class fighting skills and he's had, oh, forever. He's here to kill Kendra, but we only find out why when she gets snatched by a man with wings, who is himself pretty epic, holding off Barry and Oliver combined until they hit him with the old one-two-three. Well, actually a new one-two-three, as Barry follows up a classic tornado and arrow combo with a bolt of lightning.

"It's like every time I come to Star City I'm catching knives."

Man with wings of a hawk who has yet to receive a proper hero name explains that he and Kendra are the reincarnations of ancient Egyptian lovers Khufu and Shayera, who like all reincarnated ancient Egyptians have wings. Seriously, that facet never some up when questioning their story. Savage has hunted them throughout history, killing them time after time and growing stronger whenever they die. He then encourages Kendra to jump off a building to force her memories to emerge, which she does, prompting tension between Barry's urge to protect her and Oliver's newfound respect for people doing for themselves. After a couple of tries, she gets wings and Cisco dubs her Hawkgirl.

Back in Central City, Wells and Caitlin develop a speed boosting serum, which Jay insists is an abomination, revealing an almost religious perception of the Speed Force. He is forced to use the serum, however, in order to perform phase surgery after Patty shoots Wells (there was supposed to be upgraded security on STAR Labs, but Patty just walks in like a super villain.) Joe is really snappy with Patty about this, which is kind of harsh considering that if you had just told her the truth everything would be grand. I predict that next week is going to be crunch time for Parry (Batty?) as she's going to want some serious answers, and rightly so.

Savage travels to Central City to snag the Staff of Ra, a magic blaster he intends to use on Hawkgirl and that man-hawk dude who still hasn't been named. He kicks Oliver and Barry's arses with the staff, and they call for a circling of the wagons in Central City, and in Arrow, so now I gots to catch up.

In adorable throwaway theatre, Felicity berates Barry for not letting her know he got his spine broken, Cisco urges Thea to let him give her a better name than 'Speedy', and Barry responds to Malcolm Merlin's second ninja appearance by asking 'is that the only way that guy knows how to enter a room?'

Oh, and Oliver sees his son for the first time, because there are no Central City coffee shops but CC Jitters.

Arrow - 'Green Arrow'

Red Arrow, Green Arrow

We open Season 4 with Oliver living in quiet retirement with Felicity, and adapting terrifyingly well to suburbia while Felicity manages Palmer Technologies from afar. Back in the rebranded Star City, however, all is not well. A gang known as the Ghosts are stockpiling weapons despite the best efforts of the now-costumed Diggle, Laurel and Thea. The leader of the Ghosts waltzes into a meeting of city leaders to tell them to let the city burn. When they refuse, all are killed except for Captain (possibly Chief or Commissioner by now) Lance, who is injured.

Thea and Laurel, against Diggle's wishes, go to Oliver and ask him to return. He is reluctant, but Felicity persuades him and he soon realises that she has been helping the team remotely for a while. They move to take down the Ghosts, but discover that their leader possesses mystical powers of some kind, and when they confront him during his attempt to blow up the new high speed rail link to Central City (by chance, my delayed watching and the reordering of the Supergirl schedule put this back to back with another train bomb in 'How Does She Do It?') he tells Oliver that his name is Damien Darhk.

Arrow Season 4 wants us to know that the gloves are off.

Faced with this threat and with unique experiences with the supernatural, Oliver decides to remain, donning a new costume provided by Cisco and calling himself the Green Arrow when he announces he will be the hero the Arrow never could be. Unfortunately, Darhk has an in on his identity, as it turns out that Lance has agreed to work with him, although despising his methods, and a flash forward to six month in the future sees Oliver talking to Barry Allen over a fresh grave and swearing to kill Darhk.

In flashback, we see Oliver being a rather crap vigilante in Coast City (home of Hal Jordan and Ferris Air) before Amanda Waller finds him and ARGUS drop him straight into an exciting new mission... on Lian Yu.

So, Arrow Season 4 offers to introduce magic to the Arrowverse and to kill someone off... probably in the run up to the season finale. Clearly there's going to be tension between Oliver and Diggle. We might see Green Lantern, and I don't know if Hawkman will immediately join Hawkgirl in Central or make an appearance in Star City first. Personally, the reappearance of the Kord brand makes me hope for Blue Beetle, and with Rip Hunter coming to Legends of Tomorrow, Booster Gold is not entirely off the table. I'm definitely expecting the Atom to return, not from the dead but from the microscopic.

Supergirl - 'How Does She Do It?'

Super-Strength is a networking skill; it really opens doors.

Kara's lives collide when Supergirl is called on to answer a bomb threat while James's relationship with Lucy is on the rocks and Kara is babysitting Cat's son Carter while she is in Metropolis to collect an award for being an awesome female role model in media.

To take these plots individually:

The A Plot for the episode is Supergirl being tested, first by an agile drone which pursues her in flight, then a building bombing and finally an attempt to blow up first Max Lord's labs, and then a high-speed train being launched by Lord and at the same time an airport. All of these prove to have been set up by Lord to assess Supergirl's abilities and motivations, with the fact that she chose to save the train and leave the more crowded airport to the cops/DEO tipping him off that someone on the train mattered to her personally. Max Lord is, it turns out, a bit of a douchebag, with a hate-on for the government since they covered up the causes of his parents' death.

Also, Henshaw gets to show off his alienness by going all glowy eyed and putting his hand through solid matter or something.

One of these creepy stalkers gets a pass for being... however
old Carter is supposed to be. The other, not so much.

The B Plot is a slightly tacked on bit of feminist flag waving; not that I'm agin feminism or flag waving per se, but subtlety has its place. It's a little odd seeing crabby uberbitch Cat Grant suddenly campaigning for mother of the year with her son whom no-one has previously mentioned, but they manage it fairly naturally for that. She opts not to go to Metropolis until Kara offers to look after Carter and seems to be a reasonable mum overall. The main point of this one, however, is that Carter has a crush on Supergirl and runs off to the train station in the hopes of seeing her. In a nice scene, she gives him a chance to be a hero by helping to clear the carriages, and he does so without idiotically leaping into greater danger. Bonus points for his mother drilling into him that there is more to Supergirl than perfect hair.

Finally, the inevitable love polygon is furthered as Kara inadvertently helps to manoeuvre Lucy and James back together by being too much of a mensch. Alex tells her she has spent more time in the Friend Zone than in the Phantom Zone, which is a snappy line but does bring up the much reviled friend zone concept. On the other hand, it conforms to my personal theory that the friend zone does exist, but we can only put ourselves in it, so that's a thing.

By opting to directly tackle the issue of work-life balance for the successful woman, 'How Does She Do It?' runs a little close to the knuckle. Honestly, it's a risk any issue-led episode of any show faces, but as the leading networked female-led superhero show, it reflects hard on Supergirl when a feminist issue is handled poorly and risks a backlash of the 'this is why female superheroes don't sell' variety. In this case, the handling is mostly okay, but a little awkward in places.

Generally, the show continues to make good use of the idea of Supergirl as a new hero in a world that already has Superman, trying to find her own path. As usual, I can take or leave the soap plots, but it seems to be what the people want.

Blindspot - 'A Stray Howl'

"I shot a nun once. I was out hunting in upstate New York..."

The FBI continues to investigate the tattoos covering Jane's body, although many of them - and Jane herself - are beginning to wonder if they aren't some sort of elaborate trap. Patterson establishes that each tattoo may act as a key to unlock the next in a sequence. Kurt begins to suspect that he knows who Jane is, while Jane retrieves another memory: Of shooting a nun in a church*.

The second episode of Blindspot sees the series confront the second biggest problem with its own concept, that the FBI are prepared to chase after cryptic clues tattooed onto a hot commando chick by someone who is a) a nutter and b) a wizard. This week, the hint leads them to a would-be whistle-blower and tips him over the edge into kidnapping a little girl in order to use an illegal domestic drone programme to assassinate its own staff. Agent Badinage breaks cover as the entertaining sidekick to become the voice of skepticism in the face of a set of clues which seem so arranged as to not just lead to a particular sequence of crimes but to trigger them, although the fact that this requires a level of precise manipulation and prescience akin to sorcery is so far lost even on him.

We end the episode with the Beard of Fear paying a personal visit to Jane, which seems remarkably careless, and Kurt convinced that Jane is actually his former neighbour and friend Taylor, a girl that he believed his father to have kidnapped and murdered years before.

Blindspot is teetering on the edge of believability, and a lot is going to hang on the encounter with the Beard. given the intricacy of his plot, he'll need to convince as some sort of insane genius and/or soothsayer.

* Fortunately, she later realises it was just a dude dressed as a nun.

Doctor Who - 'Hell Bent'

Poster (c) Stuart Manning

“At the end of everything, one must expect the company of immortals.”

This review will contain some spoilers.

The Doctor has come home, the long way around.

Someone will answer for his ordeal.

Someone will suffer.

It's probably us.

The Good

• The first ten minutes, with the Doctor in the barn and just eyeballing down Rassilon, was kinda awesome. I especially liked all the soldiers disarming; it felt like the Doctor saying 'the war is over; Gallifrey doesn't need an army anymore.'

The Bad

• Is it no longer possible to have a dramatic arc episode that doesn't belittle the Doctor and everyone around him by making them out to be petty-minded tossers? The Doctor kicks off by being amazing, then throws that away by being a selfish, needy tosser prepared to imperil the universe for the sake of a Companion who was ready to die.
• So, we're going to need to talk about the fact that the Doctor shot a Time Lord with a high powered staser blast and consequently no idea, whatever he says, of whether the General would regenerate.
• Apparently you can get away with just about anything if you're a perky brunette. Karma doesn't apply.
• This episode basically does nothing that Big Finish hasn't done better.

The Ugly

• What is this show's problem with the idea of letting go? According to nuWho, the Doctor can't leave a companion without them being dead, broken or irretrievably lost in time. Honestly, Clara's perfect departure was in last year's Christmas special, before they reversed it. 'Face the Raven' was a decent out, but once again they couldn't let go and she's back because... Well, because the Doctor is a clingy douchebag.

Theorising

Was the town motto 'No matter where you go, there you are' a reference to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, or even to the theme song to Waxwork II: Lost in Time? For that matter, was the Doctor swaggering out of the desert with a black suit and guitar a reference to Six String Samurai? Or do I just have an absurdly eclectic reference section?

Top Quotes

• "Tomorrow's promised to no one, but I insist upon my past! I am entitled to that!" Yeah, no shit. At least they didn't actually go Donna on us.
• "Why? Why does everyone think I'm so scared? We all face the raven in the end."
  Honestly, Clara, the fact that pretty much your next words are to declare your intent to punk the fuck out and delay your death for as long as possible while the universe goes foom probably explain a lot of that. I'm not saying it's an unnatural wish, just... shut the fuck up with this 'I'm not scared to die' if you're going to endanger all of time for the sake of a few more adventures.

The Verdict

Argh! What the fuck was that? Gallifrey was supposed to be gone, but I'd rather that than have it just turn up every so often so the Doctor can get on his hypocritical high horse and snap at them. And Clara... It's monstrous to want to preserve the Web of Time now? Man, fuck the Doctor's monstrous eleven and a bit regenerations of looking after the Web of Time then. Or is it being pissed off that the Doctor shot someone? Or that no-one else thought that mind-wiping another companion was a good idea?

After a pretty good season, the finale once more reduces the Doctor and his companion to stroppy teenagers raging against anyone who disagrees with them or feels that just bending all the rules there are to get what they want is a bit much.

I wish the show could just let go. Accept that sometimes people are lost - fatally or otherwise - and that the survivors might actually mourn and move on, instead of raging against the dying of the light again. Even after it stopped being an educational programme, Doctor Who always seemed to strive on some level to present a good example. NuWho revels in telling us that the Doctor is a worthless arsehole and we'd be mental to consider him a good example. He has no sense of responsibility, no courage, no values worth writing home about. He's a child who only cares about his friend, and only because she is his friend, rather than for her own sake. He is, in fact, exactly the irresponsible dick that people accuse him of being so that Clara can defend him. The best chance of getting out alive? Sure; if you're Clara Oswald or Rose Tyler. If you're anyone else, frankly it's still a crap shoot.

A disappointing end to a season that started pretty well.

Score - 3/10

The Librarians - '...and the Hollow Men'

Flynn comes over all Stockholm Syndrome.

As they search for an artefact called the Eye of Zarathustra, Team Library run across none other than Flynn Carson, seeking out the same item. He and Eve realise at the same moment that it is a trap, only for the Pipes of Pan to send them both - and Jake and Ezekiel - to sleep and Flynn to be kidnapped.

After a slightly abortive rescue effort, the story splits into three threads:

1) Flynn and his abductor, an affable man named Ray (played by Drew Powell, Gotham's Butch Gilzean), who is prone to supernaturally powerful rages and keeps finding powerful Library artefacts in his pockets, seek for the Staff of Knowledge to restore Ray's memory.

2) Eve reluctantly teams up with Moriarty and Ariel to track Flynn.

3) Team Librarian stand around in the dark.

"So to sum up, we plugged in some light bulbs."

Flynn's bonding adventure with a man he comes to recognise as the embodiment of the Library's organising consciousness is wonderfully touching, and Eve's snarky flirtfest with Moriarty is good fun. The rest of the team are, alas, a little out in the cold with Mr Star back in the picture. I liked the ideas in their section - fueling the Library with the stored emotion of a thousand theatrical lights; Jenkins' willingness to sustain the Library with his own life while the others escaped - but there just wasn't much happening. Sadly, this is a common theme when Flynn returns to the series, as nice as it is to see him again.

MVL of the Week
Tough one this week, as the three valid candidates take minor roles in what really is Flynn's show. Still, it was only Eve and Jenkins I ruled out, so I guess the MVL of the week is Flynn Carson.

Honourable mention to Cassandra for geeking out and provoking the line: "Cassandra! Don't fangirl over the archvillain."

Jessica Jones - 'AKA It's Called Whisky'

"Secretly photographing someone isn't very... Oh; hang on."

We open this week with Jessica and Luke getting enthusiastically groinal, and suddenly the rather awkward sex scene from 'AKA Ladies' Night' clicks into place, because they are completely different together now that they're sure the other won't snap like a dry reed. Netflix is working to ratings, however, so their Man of Steel, Woman of Steel, World of Cardboard shenanigans are interrupted by Reuben from upstairs asking them to keep the noise down and then we jump cut to after and the two of them discussing powers. She admits that she used to do the hero thing, but the good she did is outweighed by the bad.

The A plot of the episode, more or less, is the continuing quest to prove Hope's innocence. Public opinion is against her, so Jessica persuades Trish to do a talk piece, but when Jeri converts this into an interview with Hope and then pushes an insanity plea, Trish goes off on an attack of Kilgrave which ends with him calling the studio to ask isn't it a bad idea to publicly insult a mind-controlling murderer? Sure enough, a cop swings by and tries to murder Trish while Jessica is seeking the surgical anesthaesia she believes will disable Kilgrave's powers.

She does this first by trying to coerce Jeri's wife, then by taking her addict friend to hospital after he mistakenly walks into Robyn and Reuben's flat and gets hit with a bowling trophy. She throws the almost unconscious Malcolm at a nurse in a palpable betrayal of trust to create a distraction, getting the drugs, but almost certainly losing a friend.

Thankfully, Trish is tougher than she looks - we establish this in a scene in which she is able to throw Jessica, and it is notable that Jessica doesn't push back and use her superior strength to try to frighten her into being more careful - and she is able to hold out until Jessica arrives. Jessica uses one of her anesthaetic shots to fake Trish's death and trigger the cop's programmed need to return to Kilgrave. Through this, she is able to track and almost confront her nemesis, but with a nice family set to kill her and the cop ordered to jump off a roof, he gets away.

In the B plot, Jessica's increasingly intense relationship with Luke - a later scene does for his bed what invoicing disputes did for her door - is cut off when she finds the photograph of his dead wife in his bathroom cupboard, not because she's his dead wife, but because Jessica killed her under Kilgrave's control, perhaps explaining her initial fascination with him.

'AKA It's Called Whisky' firmly establishes that if we're looking for a villain of the week show, we can fuck off. Even more than Daredevil, Jessica Jones is going story a season. And why not given the Netflix instant delivery model? It continues to be hardcore noir, with betrayal going hand in hand with loyalty; Jessica willing to sacrifice a friendship to catch Kilgrave, but not a mind-controlled cop's life. As with a lot of noir, it doesn't overflow with attractive characters, but makes it easier to take sides with its truly horrible villain.

The Librarians - '...and the Cost of Education'

"Like all colleges, 1 in 5 students vanish or transfer out without trace."

When a college mascot disappears, it doesn't seem like a job for the Librarians, but this is no ordinary college. Founded by a mad genius, riddled with occult architecture and the inspiration for HP Lovecraft's Miskatonic University, Wexler College is a nexus of weirdness so intense that most of its residents have stopped noticing, just assuming that all colleges have a 20% attrition rate among faculty and students alike and mottos about infernal fire.

During the investigation, Jake meets one of his academic heroes and finds he has feet of clay, while Ezekiel ignores Jenkins' advice and meets the gaze of a gargoyle, which then follows him around like a harmless and affectionate Weeping Angel. Cassandra, meanwhile, bonds with Lucy, a young physicist with an interest in magic, who is also tracking the disappearances and may have revolutionised particle physics; that or punched a hole into the Dungeon Dimensions.

MVL of the Week
It's another good week for Jake Stone, who after his sparring match with Professor Skeptic is interrupted by a tentacle monster gets to stand up and teach a class his own theories of architecture and solve part of the puzzle at the same time. Once more, Ezekiel gets most of the good comedy moments, bonding with Stumpy the Gargoyle and boasting for all he is worth to decoy the pride-eating gribbly.

Despite this, '...and the Cost of Education' is Cassandra's show, not just because she gets to be the solver this week, but for her delight in the university atmosphere she never got to be a part of because of her illness and her willingness to stand up to her mentor figures, giving both Eve and Jenkins a piece of her mind. When Eve suggests that rescuing Lucy can't be a priority in the balance, Cassandra retorts that she has learned as a Librarian that 'what's best isn't always what's right', and when Jenkins tries to caution her against getting too comfortable with magic after an invitation to join a technomagical cybercoven, she pointedly reminds him that she has already chosen the Library, even if she is questioning its purely containment-oriented methods in the magically reinvigorated world.

Doctor Who - 'Heaven Sent'

Poster (c) Stuart Manning

“Finally run out of corridor - that's a life summed up up!”

This review will contain some spoilers. There is just no way around it.

The Doctor is trapped. Only his companion, Clara Oswald, can help him to escape.

Clara Oswald is dead.

The Doctor is trapped. Only the truth can set him free.

Rule 1: The Doctor lies.

The Good

• I like a twist that can be worked out, although the prison being the confession dial was perhaps a tad obvious.
• The veiled stalker was pretty creepy, especially the viewpoint cam.
• The whole set up put me in mind of the Crystal Maze. Fuck you, I consider that a plus.
• So, the principle of the Doctor's escape is flawed (see below,) but the Shepherd Boy montage was still pretty badass.

The Bad

• I think I'd rather he used the goddamn sonic specs on wood than just thinking doors open. Or lockpicks. The Fourth Doctor carried lockpicks.
• No! You are the Doctor. You are not Sherlock fucking Holmes running scenarios in your goddamn memory palace as your life flashes before your eyes. It was clever once, Moffat; now it's self indulgent. Fuck off. The only thing keeping this out of the ugly section is that I did like the idea that even traveling solo the Doctor needs a companion asking questions and pushing him forward.
• Why doesn't the ultradiamond room reset? I mean, it feels like a huge flaw in his plans. Was that covered in a brief line about the properties of the material?

The Ugly

• So, I increasingly feel that the Doctor can take things personally and get all snitty about stuff, or he can, if he feels he must, bestride the galaxy like a colossus, but if he's going to go cosmic he should grow the fuck up. This comes back to last year's 'if he's not a good man, why isn't he the villain?'

Theorising

So, the first time out, did the Doctor do most of this largely naked?

Is the Doctor saying that he's kind of Dalek-y in his thinking by now? Are we back to that half-human bullshit from the movie? Does he run on petrol and electric? Oh! Or is he saying, as many of us contemplated a ways back, that the Hybrid is Me? Is what the Time Lords did actually just to send a means for the Doctor to enter Gallifrey's past?

And am I really excited about this prospect, or completely apathetic? I honestly can't tell.

Top Quotes

• "Go to the city. Find somebody important. Tell them, I'm back. Tell them, I know what they did and I'm on my way. And if they ask you who I am, tell them I came the long way round."
• "Personally, I think that's a hell of a bird."

The Verdict

There are moments of flawed brilliance in this episode, but overall 'Heaven Sent' feels rather self-indulgent. In particular, the use of the mind TARDIS to explain the Doctor's problem solving would have been a more appealing trick if not for its use in Sherlock. Just because the bit works for either character doesn't mean it can stand being used for both. Oh well, I guess younger viewers would come to it fresh.

Score - 6/10