Dark Matter - 'We Were Family'

"So, you made me the man I was last week?"

During a simple repair stopover, things get complicated for many members of the Raza's crew.

Five seems like she might be developing a little crush on nice-guy prison doc, Devon, but although he successfully operates on Six we also learn that he is concealing a drug addiction, and maybe more. Meanwhile Four learns that Nyx has an almost unnatural facility in combat, able to predict her opponents' moves enough to match him despite a lack of formal training. Like Two, her skill is almost more than human, and I'm wondering if she might be psychic, especially given that she then joins Two to try to trace a building from the memory she and Five experienced, where Nyx displays a similar knack for improvisation and emotional manipulation, seeming to know just what to say to grease the wheels. A travel agent identifies the building as one on Terra Prime; Eath. Arax, however, is only human. Tasked by enigmatic posh bird to retrieve a thing, he steals the Macguffin that caused all of Five's troubles, but she has not only set up cameras to catch him, she then pickpockets it back from the former king of the prison.

But then Five is all sorts of awesome, even charging Three compound interest on a loan since she was the only one to successfully hide any loot before the GA stripped the ship. A chance to pay her back appears when he is contacted by Marcus Boone's old crew, whose leader, Larcan Tanner, claims to have rescued Boone after his parents were murdered. When the job turns out to include murder and child kidnapping, however, Three opts out, taking out the rest of the crew, including Tanner. It's then Five who, recognising that the happy memories she almost got lost in once were his, assures him that he was loved as a child.

"I just wish you could remember."
"Me too, kid. Me too."

I really hope she doesn't end up too naturalistic.

In the main B-plot, the Android asks to accompany Five and Devon, and winds up in the company of Victor, the smooth-talking leader of a group of free androids, who takes her shopping, asks to kiss her, and gives her an 'upgrade' which will let her blend in with humans by smoothing out her mannerisms and concealing her bar code. He tells her that the 'flaw' which makes her emotional was in fact a deliberate design feature.

Dark Matter continues to run strong, and it's the character work that does it. The space opera and action trimmings are decent, but what's important about them is that they don't glaringly detract from a set of superb performances, Anthony Lemke giving Zoie Palmer a run for her money this week, as Three's grumpy loner personality was deconstructed. In terms of ongoing plot, the hints at Two's origins were joined by news reports mentioning a 'person of interest' in One's murder, something that the crew might take personally.

The Magicians - 'Remedial Battle Magic' and 'Thirty-Nine Graves'

If magic is basically about throwing shapes, are
rappers a kind of hedge witch?

Faced with the knowledge that the Beast wants the Button, and is flooding the Neitherlands with mercenary battle mages to get it (okay, I kind of missed that last episode; my bad,) Team Filory decide that the smart move is to cut a deal.

In a shocking twist, a few weeks later, they are all horribly murdered in class. I know, right! Who knew they still had classes!

Unhappy with the way this piece of prediction magic (psych!) shaped up, they review: Every option ends in them dead, except for 'go to Filory', which whites out the spell. Thus they opt to go to Filory, but first to tool up by learning some battle magic. To this end, they contact the only person they have seen use battle magic, Kady, whom they find in Julia's apartment. She tells them it needs absolute emotional control, but there is a workaround: enchanted bottles to contain their emotions. Naturally, there is a payoff. All the emotions come back when you open the bottle, so there's a hard cap of three hours on the bottle.

After their first training session, Penny and Alice decide that they would rather learn to do battle magic without the bottles - since they turn them into dead-eyed, robot-talking zombies - but the others are all for anything that makes their lives easier, because they have learned nothing from this or any other series about magic. Penny has his own problems, however, as the Beast starts talking to him again, driving him towards madness. His mentor and that guy Joe the pandimensional pansexual top themselves to escape the voice, but Professor Hottington gives him a psychic inhibitor which blocks them out, although she warns that it will eventually destroy his ability to defend his own psyche.

Rule 7) Never trust a creature that looks like your ideal mate or a dead
relative.

As the team begin to master the forms of battle magic - mostly magical darts, force pushes and the occasional fireball - Kady and Julia are on a mission to find a god, by working their way up from sleazy vampires to find a magical being with enough oomph to still hang with the divine. This leads them to an entity that takes the form of Kady's dead mother and tries to inveigle itself into her grief, but Julia holds Kady's hand - no doubt setting the internet ablaze - and they reject her, prompting her to tell them that the gods are all dead. Despite this, the earth goddess contacts Julia in a dream and tells her that she is waiting for her to find her.

Battle magic training goes well, but then Quentin, Eliot and Margo leave the bottles on too long, and afterwards get drunk and have what must have been the world's most embarrassing threesome even before Alice walks in on them in the morning.

'Thirty-Nine Graves' opens with bitterness and recrimination, and ultimately Penny and Alice having a moment, plunging the entire Filory mission into chaos. Even Alice opts to use the bottle when they go into the Neitherlands, since otherwise her seething resentment of Quentin would doom them all. In a nice moment, emotionally balanced Quentin tells Alice and Penny they'd make a cute couple.

Summoning earth deities must be done in pajamas.

In Manhattan, Julia and Kady finally contact someone who can point them to the goddess, when propitiated with gifts. He lifts Kady's grief and gives them the incantation to call on the goddess. Julia and Richard have a moment, and then they summon the goddess, Our Lady Underground, who heals those of them who are sick before sending all but Julia off on various missions of goodness and light, no doubt or question of that. Goodness and light. For sure.

Arriving in the Neitherlands, Quentin is immediately knocked back to Earth by hoodie girl. The others flee and take shelter in the library, where their emotion bottles - and Eliot's booze - are promptly confiscated.

Librarian lady is pure awesome.

Quentin seeks answers by dosing the Dean with a truth serum. The Dean explains that Eliza was Jane Chatwin, who was given then power to control time on a cosmic level, with only major powers - like the Dean, the Librarian and the Beast - remembering the previous loops. She has set Quentin and his friends on the path to destroying the Beast thirty-nine times, and thirty-eight times they have all died. In twenty-seven alternatives, the Dean has failed not to be dosed. Now Jane is dead, so this is the last time. This time around, Jane arranged for Julia to be kept out of Brakebills in an attempt to make her stronger faster.

Eliot gets the team evicted from the library when he sets fire to Mike's book. They meet up with a member of Brakebills' missing class, a boy named Josh, whose girlfriend Victoria is the traveler Penny saw held captive by the Beast. After a pep talk from Penny, Alice comes up with a way to shield them all against detection as they get to the Filory fountain, but Eliot drops an LSD carrot, forcing Margo to shoot one of the mercenary mages, and Penny to slice open hoodie girl with his magic.

"I never thought I'd say it, but thank God for Hitler."

Buttonless but reconciled, Julia and Quentin come up with an alternate plan. Using a time tunnel established in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, they travel to 1944 and stalk Jane until she enters Filory, then tailgate a pre-teen girl through a magical door in an old-fashioned red telephone box. Which is only a little bit very creepy.

These two episodes really flow together, and I wonder if the show isn't written somewhat with a binge in mind. Put together, 'Remedial Battle Magic' and 'Thirty-Nine Graves' propel the story and characters forward. Quentin and Julia's reconciliation is quick, but linked to her discovery of purpose and the reigniting of their childhood Filory connection, has a true feeling of wonder. Penny and Alice's relationship also moves on in leaps and bounds, such that their one night stand - which felt cruel and self-destructive in the book - came off as natural and even healthy. Speaking of self-destructive, Margo and especially Eliot continue their spiral of darkening rage as Eliot is still coming to terms with killing his boyfriend, and now the realisation that Mike had a happy life (and was a Repuiblican) before the Beast hijacked him. Consequences hang heavy in the Magicians, which is perhaps why I am so suspicious of the white-robed Our Lady Underground.

As a point of minor interest, the Librarian misnames Margo as 'Janet', hinting that the series is somehow a later repeat of the story told in the novel, 'The Magicians'.

Preacher - 'El Valero' and 'Finish the Song'

I really don't know if anointing oil is that combustible...

Jesse Custer comes to the end of his long, dark night of the soul as Quincannon's men lay siege to his church.

'El Valero' gives us a little background on Quincannon, whose family were killed in an accident which left him determined that God and the soul were nothing but a lie. This was what caused him to reject God and created the rift with Custer Snr. Now he has come to lay siege to the church, but Jesse is a challenging obstacle. Even three sheets to the wind and confronting a returned Eugene, he takes out the initial team sent to extract him, then holds off a frontal assault from the bell tower before demanding to see 'the agents'.

He soon realises that 'Eugene' is an hallucination, Hell being harder to escape than to enter, hence his desire to see the two angels and have Genesis removed from him. Despite some last minute doubts that maybe God did have a plan, he allows them to replace the entity in the coffee can, but when Deblanc and Fiore prove less than eager to restore Eugene, his anger seems to call to Genesis, which bursts the can apart and returns to him.

"Who's insecure?"

As the town turns out to enjoy the siege, including Mayor Miles, who has convinced himself that given the existence of a 'verbal contract', Quincannon is in the legal right, Donnie goes to his car and seems to put a bullet in his head, but it turns out that he is wilier than we might have thought. Deafened by the gunshot, he is able to approach Jesse without fear of the voice and capture him.

Jesse signs over the church, as Quincannon affirms that he 'resisted' the Voice because his God is not Jesse's, but 'the god of meat', a pseudodeity of matter and manifest destiny. Jesse however makes one last bargain: One more Sunday, and he will call on God to appear, and if He doesn't, then Jesse will denounce Him as false in front of the entire congregation.

This episode has little of Tulip or Cassidy, save the former adopting an adorable bloodhound from the pound's death row, which she regretfully feeds to the latter after one last good day.

He's back!

In 'Finish the Song', we see the end of the Cowboy's story, as he returns to Ratwater and savagely executes about 93% of the adult population as a storm begins to sweep over the town.

Jesse jumps out of a moving police car and flees into the night. The sheriff is keen to catch him, but Quincannon is unconcerned, sure that he will be there on Sunday to lose his bet and denounce the Lord. Deblanc and Fiore try to decide between two courses of action: Call Heaven and face their inevitable separation, or use a dodgy travel agent to go to Hell in search of another means of resolving their problems. The matter is forced, however, when it turns out that their phone is missing, stolen by Jesse.

Ouch.

Tulip heads to Albuquerque - where we briefly see her sitting before her bound enemy with a table full of tools - leaving Emily to look after Cassidy, with money enough to keep him in donors. "Don't go to Pet Centre though; they're onto me." The recognition of the truth of Cassidy's nature is a major rug pull for Emily, and nudged by the discussion of traps in Psycho, she decides to be free of part of hers, luring Miles to the O'Hare house and locking him in with the vampire before releasing the remaining animals and heading off to pick up her kids, which is straight up not a development I saw coming for that character.

Jesse is reunited with Cassidy and apologises for being a dick. To make it up to him, he agrees to help dispose of Miles' body. When Jesse mentions that he needs an angel hand to make the phone work, Cassidy has a brain wave, and as they are burying the mayor beneath the tree, takes the opportunity to grab a paw from one of the 'clones' he killed earlier.

Angels are not nice people in this series. Neither are people, if we're being
honest.

Deblanc and Fiore, whose mutual affection is increasingly to the fore, leave their motel room and take a bus. The Sheriff is called after the mess is discovered, including a limbless woman in a bathtub full of ice, who begs him to kill her. Of course, when he does she reappears behind him, then leaves him to struggle with his conscience.

We get a series of increasingly swift repeats of the Cowboy's story, seeing his failure to save his daughter and his bloody revenge over and over again, until finally Fiore and Deblanc join him and the place caption flashes up: HELL. They offer to get him out of this recurring nightmare, if he kills the Preacher for them.

Despite ongoing complaints about the pacing of the series who feel that it should have long-since left Annville behind, I continue to find Preacher a compelling, dark and quirky show, with a slow-burning tension as its lead character crashes from nadir to nadir in a rambling tumult of absurdity that marks it out as something entirely unique. It's long, slow scenes never drag, and it mixes close-up camerawork and wider shots to great effect, as when Jesse calls to apologise to Tulip. We see her listening as he records a message, face bloodied and expression bleak, as though she is unable to answer due to a gun to her head, but then pull back to reveal that it is Carlos who is bound, while she is just waiting to start work.

These two episodes pretty much get us caught up on the backgrounds and motivations of all our characters, so the finale is presumably going to be all go, and Season 2... Well, it should be different, is my thinking. I look forward to seeing how that goes.

Trailer Trash: San Diego Comic-Con

San Diego Comic-Con brought a slew of first-look trailers to the drooling fans, and thanks to the internet, not just to the lucky few who could afford to attend in person. They rest of us can slaver in the privacy of our homes or workplaces over the treats to come next year.

The Justice League trailer immediately scotches Man of Steel/Batman vs. Superman's perfect record by demonstrating a sense of fun. Barry Allen, and even Bruce and Diana come across as likable characters. Cyborg is not much in evidence - my guess would be this is because he needs a lot of effects work just to say hi - but Aquaman is suitably grumpy. I'll always have a soft spot for Brave and the Bold's Aquaman, but his avuncular optimism was an outlier. No sign of the Martian Manhunter or GL, but maybe for the future, when the shared universe has established enough impetus to get past the last Green Lantern's lacklustre box office.

And speaking of DC, there was also the Wonder Woman stand-alone origin movie's trailer, complete with colours and the inevitable Steve Trevor. It's mostly teaser so far, but looking good, with Gadot showing a more zippy side to Diana's personality than the all business portrayal in BvS. This feels important to me after the five hour sombre grind that has so far established the tone of the DCCU. On the strength of these two trailers, I am somewhat hyped for the post- or at least inter-Snyder segment of the shared universe, although of course disappointed by the lack of Martian Manhunter. Still, there's always Supergirl.

There was also a run of Marvel MCU noir trailers: A Season 3 teaser for Daredevil, a first look teaser for Iron Fist, a first soundbite teaser for Defenders and our first full trailer for Luke Cage, in which the eponymous Hero for Hire drops a reference to his late wife and then takes out a stash house with a car door and a lot of attitude. It will be interesting to see how this particular subset of the universe develops the kind of threat that can challenge a quartet where Daredevil is the pretty-boy dead weight without attracting the attention of SHIELD or Thunderbolt Ross (or indeed if it does.)

There was also a Season 4 teaser trailer for Agents of SHIELD, so I guess I ought to watch the rest of Season 3. Not that I'm that hyped about Ooo! Ghost Rider.

Also from Marvel was the second Doctor Strange trailer, with a little more detail and some magic. Still struggling with Benedict Cumberbatch's accent on this one, I'll be honest, although it certainly looks epic.

Back to TV, and Starz were fielding their first trailer for American Gods, which certainly has the gritty, downbeat thing going for it. The cast looks pretty promising as well. Ian McShane was a bad call to play Merriman Lyon in The Dark is Rising, but pretty textbook Wednesday. There's a lot in the book that could be tough to film, but the first glimpse doesn't suck, and that beats a lot of efforts.

Back with DC, we got a look at the darker side of the line with another Suicide Squad trailer, which reveals the scale of the fight that 'Task Force X' is being set up against. Amanda Waller seems to have taken Lex Luthor's warnings to heart, even if she is rather more willing to set a thief to violently murder a thief on pain of cranial detonation. The opening shot here has an interesting 'last pub on Earth' vibe, and I'm particularly curious to see how this aligns with Justice League.

The first trailer for Kong: Skull Island shows us a modern expedition to find a Kong upscaled to share a future screen with 2014's Godzilla, here facing off against the helicopter, gun and camera of John Goodman, Tom Hiddleston and soon-to-be Captain Marvel, Brie Larson. Oh, and Samuel L Jackson, because he's going through another of his swings of ubiquity.

Just... thank god we have Guy Ritchie to realise that what the legend of King Arthur was missing is lovable Cockneys and elephants.

Conversely, thank god we have David Yates to realise that what Harry Potter was missing was guns. Lots of guns. Actually, I say that but I am looking forward to 1920s wizarding New York, even if all the armed police do make me regret that it's not a wizarding Untouchables with potion prohibition and magical g-men.

The early-phase test footage from Star Trek Discovery answers the age old question 'what if a Federation starship and a Klingon cruiser had a baby that looked kind of like the Star Fleet emblem?' That's about all we can say. Even the in-production teaser for Game of Thrones confirms that there will be costumes and shit.

And then there's Legion. There is a definite push to do something different with the story of David Haller, dissociative supermutant and the result is, at least in this teaser, a little unsettling. It's a bold move, to set a series around a character with a severe mental illness - especially one which involves the possibility of bollocks mental health writing favourite dissociative identity disorder - and a lot of eyes are going to be on this one to see if they mess it up.

Uh-huh.

So that was... most of the Comic-Con trailers. I'm pretty psyched for a lot of this stuff, to be honest, so that's a lot of room for disappointment.

12 Monkeys - 'Blood Washed Away' and 'Memory of Tomorrow'

"Are you crazy? Is that your problem?"

A double bill, as I wrap up season 2 of time travel headscrew 12 Monkeys.

In 'Blood Washed Away', Cole and Railly work to prevent the final paradox in 1957. They know where and they know very roughly when, but as their window closes all they have managed to do is rule out every possible suspect and wear each other's nerves to the bone. A nervous man on a temp crew brought in to fix the roof of the factory in question looks solid for the perp, but faced with prophylactic execution he confesses that he was paid to draw monkeys and act crazy.

"I'm beginning to reconsider my calling as a revolutionary leader."

Meanwhile, in 2045, Ramse and Jennifer's team slogs across country to Titan, falling foul of scavenger ambushes and internal strife as the Daughters lose faith in the 'reborn' Jennifer and Jennifer loses faith in herself and the mission as she watches her followers die again. The breaking point comes when Jennifer reveals that her 'wisdom' is a bag of fortune cookie inserts, and Zeit/Hannah returns from scouting the Titan site with the news that there is no facility there, not of any kind. Ramse, Deacon, Whitley and Zeit press on regardless, recognising that anything else would be to passively accept the coming doom.

"There's a house, cedar and pine."

At the last minute, Cole and Railly discover that the real primary is the wife of one of Cole's workmates. That workmate is the Messenger who was sent to kill her and instead fell in love, but with her primary nature tearing at her mind, he kills her in order to be with her forever in the Red Forest. The resulting blast takes out the factory and leaves Railly in a coma for six months. Cole leaves, and when she wakes Railly works another six months as a nurse/double secret future doctor. Then, in 1959, detective finds Cole living under his favourite alias, Morris Morrison in, as it turns out, a house made of cedar and pine. Here he cuts his hand on a saw and she helps tend it, noting as she cleans it that 'most of the blood has washed away.'

"Witness me!"

In the future, Ramse's team reach the Titan facility, which is there; large as life and twice as sinister. They enter the facility and hear sinister music, at which point dead-eyed, crazy Deacon is basically the one sane man in the party.

'Why would you walk towards the weird music? Ramse, nothing about this place says "good idea."'

Ramse is insistent, and they press on, finding a hooded figure in some sort of ritual circle. Suddenly, they are surrounded by other robed figures, all carrying punch daggers, and as Cole and Railly finally get it on in 1959, the scene is intercut with Ramse and his team being slaughtered by the Army, which is some hardcore fan disservice, I can tell you.

And that brings us to 'Memory of Tomorrow', which opens with a voice over which mostly, but not entirely, mirrors that from 'Year of the Monkey', since that's how 12 Monkeys rolls.

'I want to tell you a story... About how the world ends. And the man who came back through time to stop it... And failed. For, you see, there is another traveler, one who's both the architect and witness to our destruction. And the man cannot see the other's design...

It's her! From the movie!

'The end of the beginning... And the beginning of the end.'

James and Cassie are living in 1959 and she is finally using his first name. They are telling themselves that it's all okay, Ramse killed the Witness and time is safe, but then time freezes around Cole and a woman he doesn't know tells him it's not over. If the audience weren't worried enough knowing what happened at the end of last episode, the visitation is given more meaning because the woman - and our mystery narrator - is Madeleine Stowe, who played  Katharine Railly in the Terry Gilliam interpretation. Here it turns out she is a woman named Lillian, a primary who killed her family to save them from the end of time.

This is the sort of happiness that characters in 12 Monkeys really ought to
avoid for survival's sake.

Cole doesn't want to believe, especially when he learns that Cassie is pregnant, but he is persuaded to take a trip to the Pine Barrens, where he sees the emergence of the anomaly and the first tree of many turn red. Lillian tasks him to change the outcome of their confrontation with Charlie in 1957. Of course, he has no machine, but she insists that 'James Cole does not need a machine.' She also tells him that, if it works, he should not go after Ramse, not go to Titan, and I think we all know how that's going to work out.

And so, reluctantly, knowing what it will mean for him and for Cassie, and for their child, Cole drinks the red tea and projects his mind back, visiting a few key moments before settling on 1957 and killing Charlie before he can paradox his wife. At this point I became convinced that the Witness would turn out to be Cassie, after she learned Cole had effectively voided their child's life.

She also has a big dog now, and probably a suit of power armour out the back.

With the paradox prevented, the Red Forest retreats, and after a year alone in the facility taking a few levels in badass, Jones brings them back to 2045. With Lillian's clear warning that going to Titan is a shit idea, they use the machine to splinter to where the convoy is to warn Ramse to pull out. Naturally they are too late, and with Cole's brother and Jones' daughter in there, no warning on Earth is going to keep them out.

Jennifer fails to rally the Daughters at first; after a strong start with material borrowed from The Lord of the Rings and Braveheart, a big shout out to Independence Day proves a quote too far. At the last minute, however, she pulls it out of the bag with her willingness to give her own life, and her final lesson: 'Be excellent to each other.'

Whoa.

So fortified, the big damn heroes turn up in time to save Team Ramse, but captured members of the Army will only tell them that the Witness is Safe. It's about here that Cassie remembers, impossibly, the time she and Cole spent, but didn't spend, together in 1959. Before they can find the Witness, klaxons blare, and Jones realises why Hannah couldn't find Titan. The entire facility is capable of travelling through time, and it's about to do it again. 

Separated by Army reinforcements, the team end up scattered. Jones, Cole, Whitley and Hannah escape with most of the Daughters, Deacon is killed buying Jennifer time to escape, Jennifer is caught in a temporal leak and thrown to the trenches of World War I, Ramse is rescued by a seeming member of the Army and Cassie is captured.

I love the mirroring of this image with Ramse getting gut-stabbed over the top
of the sex scene last episode.

As the season comes to a close, Ramse meets Olivia, who promises she is not with the Army any more, and she will take him to his son. Cole and Jones splinter back to the facility, but Cassie's tether is gone. Jones is however able to track Titan and sends Cole after it, to 2162, where the Pallid Man welcomes Cassie and tells her that the Witness is safe, the child of two time travellers born outside of time. Her child. So a) shows what I know and b) OMFG!

I told you, this is a story about how the world ends. One that begins at the end and ends... at the beginning.

As in the first season, 12 Monkeys delivers a finale which changes the game, not merely going forward, but looking back. All the references to Cole and Cassie's part in the plan, their importance, take on a new light.  We also saw the Army become a major, physical threat for the first time, with their vast time ship and conclave of hooded figures, although the great success of season 2 lies in revealing so much about the Army and its plans without removing their sense of overall menace.

And did I mention that Jennifer is in 1917, trying to convince the French that she isn't a German spy. That's earlier than any other splinter to date, and also means that Emily Hampshire is almost certainly going to have lots of totally bonkers and wonderful stuff to do throughout Season 3, and I can not express how happy her presence as a regular this season has made me.

Dark Matter - 'I've Seen the Other Side of You'

"Android's down."
"Again?"

It's episode three and the crew are all back on the Raza. You know, and one of them is in a coma and there's the dead one, and those three tagalongs.

The Android's inability to neural link with the ship turns out to be a result of the nasty brain spikes they put in her head, so she has to shut down and let her nanites realign her brain. This naturally means that the ship is about to get invaded, but this time it's by the crew of the Raza. Turns out the crew left brain patterns in the computer back before a job which might have knocked out the Android (and which sounds a lot like it was the job that led to Portia Lin (the future Two) becoming a nanite-ridden superhuman. Unable to find the Android, the ship looks for another neural link matching one of those prints, inadvertently kicking Two, Three and Four's brains into regression.

What's important about this episode, beyond the gunfights with the newcomers and Five using the copy of Lin's memories in her own brain to sync up and engage in some Matrix fu, is that it acts as confirmation that the crew really weren't misunderstood outlaws. They were - even if for mostly accessible reasons - utter shitheels, quite happy to bust a cap in a teenager's ass and move on with their day. Also, it allows them to finally make a choice between the old and the new, as the Android is eventually able to offer them a choice of remaining as they are, or integrating the old them into the new.

Also, Arax turns out to be the 'asset', attempting to steer the Raza towards a rendezvous with the posh lady who calls Five 'pumpkin'.

The X-Files - 'My Struggle'*

"Dude; you look rough."

Huh. Apparently I never published this one. I probably would have noticed if I'd watched any of the other episodes.

Ten years after the X-Files closed, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder are reunited when Director Skinner forwards a request to meet them from right-wing internet pundit Tad O'Malley because... Okay, I'm not entirely sure why O'Malley, a man who rants about big government conspiracies online merits this call, but apparently he's onto something. He knows a bunch of guys who are reconstructing a spaceship from alien tech, and a woman, Sveta, who claims to have been repeatedly implanted with part-alien foetuses which were then removed.

Somehow this convinces Mulder that they've been on the wrong track after all, and that the real conspiracy is not driven by aliens, but by humans using alien tech to control other humans. O'Malley sets out to broadcast the truth, but the reconstructors are killed by black ops types and Sveta by a flying saucer after publicly recanting her statements, and O'Malley's website goes down. In response to this, Skinner rehires Scully and Mulder and reopens the X-Files, because... Actually, I'm pretty sure that the one absolute in all this is that Walter Skinner doesn't need reasons to do shit. I think he's the mastermind.

The fact that their paranoid media contact was Jeff Winger didn't phase me
for a moment. All respect to Joel McHale, but it wasn't because of his
performance, rather that the rest of the episode was nonsensical enough that
I just went with it.

After a decade away, The X-Files is back, with basically the same credits and way more CGI (well; maybe. I never saw the later series. Hell, I thought Sveta was way off with her psychic visions claiming Mulder and Scully had a kid, but apparently they did. I had no idea.) The leads are older, and one of them at least has not become one lick better of an actor in the intervening years. The conspiracy - be it of alien overlords or the military-industrial complex - makes no sense, and telling us that Scully has alien DNA doesn't distract from the fact that, once again, the weakness of the conspiracy is its willingness to kill everyone except Mulder and Scully. And of course Skinner; who is totally the mastermind.

* I'm not sure who is Hitler in this scenario

Sleepy Hollow - 'Sins of the Father'

"Did we get hologram tables while I was away?"

More Sleepy Hollow it is, and we're back on the 'who was Sheriff Corbin?' train.

Fugitive artefact dealer Atticus Nevins reappears, apparently pursued by a ghoul. He tells Abbie he can help fight it, describing a ghoul that attacked him and Corbin in Iraq; their first supernatural experience. Team Witness tries to recover the golden scarab which controls the ghoul from one of his rivals, but oh snap! Nevins has the scarab, hidden in a major abdominal wound inflicted by Pandora. Abbie overcomes her post-Limbo nerves enough to shoot the ghoul in the voonerables, but Nevins escapes with Corbin's big index of stealable loot - pausing only to confirm that Corbin was not a bribe-taking son of a bitch - which he trades with Reynolds' FBI superior for an envelope of cash and a bullet in the head.

So the bad guy was the bad guy all along!

Jenny and Abbie each meet with their father, who tells them he left because he was falling into alcoholism and causing more problems than he solved; it wasn't their fault. Abbie wants to know how her mother descended into madness, since she's started seeing giant glowing symbols as well as flashbacks. By the end of the episode, she is apparently worshiping either the symbol or the thing that it represents in thanks for 'saving her'.

The Hidden One decides that he hasn't been enough of a jerk lately and restores a fragment of Pandora's power, basically just to fuck with her and so she can experience the same existential crisis he is going through being only just a little bit all powerful. Pandora has the look of a woman who is seriously rethinking her allegiances.

Sadly, the main impact of this episode is that, by presenting us with flashbacks to an August Corbin who isn't Clancy Brown, it's made me not really care about him anymore. Seriously, he looks less like Clancy Brown than Joe does. Still, with his name cleared and Nevins gone, maybe it won't come up again.

Stranger Things - Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers

My three year old daughter took one look at this promo image on Netflix (en route to PAW Patrol, naturally,) and said: "Someone lost a bike." Clearly the image communicates its message.

In small town America a boy goes missing after a D&D game. Reluctant at first, the Sheriff begins to share the concerns of the boy's mother, launching a major search, which the boy's friends join on the sly. A lost girl with uncanny abilities appears in town, pursued by sinister agents who will kill to retrieve her.

Welcome to Stranger Things, a Netflix original love story to 1980s science fiction.

I'd like to see the casting calls for this series: "Will Byers, a nine year old boy
who looks like he was raised on CRT television and pizza to a soundtrack of
unironic Michael Jackson."

The main thing you notice about the series is just how goddamned 80s everything is, from the clothes to the music (I'm pretty sure one of the producers rang John Carpenter's doorbell while another nipped in the back window and stole a load of demo tapes) to the faces. I mean, seriously; how do you cast 80s looking faces? And yet... I guess those kids have always been there, they just haven't been on TV for twenty-five years. It even somehow affects to treat D&D like some mysterious new thing that no-one knows  much about except that it was in E.T.

As in Spielberg's seminal tear-jerker, at the centre of the series - or at least at the cnetre of episode 1 - are the kids: Eternal outcast nerds Mike, Lucas, Dustin and the soon absent Will, and the enigmatic and powerful Eleven, who seems to be connected to the local super secret science lab where a dark, looming presence that kill scientists and makes lightbulbs flicker may have hatched from a thing. It's the 80s, so the boys act with a freedom undreamed of in this endarkened age, despite the acres of lonely forest surrounding the town of Hawkins and the darkness that descends from about 4.30 and enfolds the town in the kind of night that falls and really means it.

"Joyce Byers, a single mother with hella 80s hair."

There are grown ups and teenagers, but they're less important so far: Will's mother drives the search for her son, but has no existence beyond that yet; Mike's parents, his sister and her horny boyfriend are just around, the latter two most making out in her room and listening to 'Now That's What I Call a 1980s Soundtrack Album*'; Sheriff Hopper is a bit more rounded, a lost soul mired in drink, but under it all a good, solid copper; the government agents are ruthless and sinister; and the guy at the diner is a decent soul until he's shot in the head. So it goes.

Stranger Things is intensely familiar and retro, which somehow manages to be new and interesting. There are shades perhaps of Super 8, but it's a slightly later period and leans a little more towards horror than SF, despite many trappings of the latter genre. 'Chapter 1: The Vanishing of Will Byers' is very much a foundation, but hints at good things to come with its sparse, practical effects and deft recreation of the visual and auditory language of 1980s cinema.

* If I were an 80s nerd or hunting for the Easter Egg in Ready Player One I'd probably be using this scene to date the series exactly.

Preacher - 'He Gone'

Plot lost.

No question, Jesse Custer is starting to lose it.

Interleaved with flashbacks to his past - his troubled childhood friendship with Tulip; his father's rejection of his friend because 'she's an O'Hare'; his bitter prayers for God to kill his father and take him to Hell; and his father's subsequent execution in front of his son's eyes - Jesse struggles to deal with the implications and consequences of his harsh words at the end of the previous episode, and effectively does so by deciding that it's not his problem. God has a plan, he's part of that plan, and so what will be will be. Right?

As Tulip tries to become part of his life, Emily tries to admit her feelings and Cassidy tries to be a confidante, Jesse systematically rejects them all, scorning Tulip's cooking, telling Emily she was foolish to believe in him, and letting Cassidy burn in the sun when the vampire tries to call him on his bullshit. Even Tulip, despite telling Cassidy in no uncertain terms that Jesse would reject him if he really knew what Cassidy was, is disgusted by his rejection of his friend.

The sensitive Celtic complexion.

So far, no-one has raised the issue that Jesse's experiments with Cassidy proved that he can't compel someone to do something beyond their abilities, which strongly suggests that anyone could just go straight to Hell if they felt so inclined.

To cap it all, Odin Quincannon returns to collect on his bet. His god, it turns out, is his business and his family legacy, so Jesse's command has made him more ruthless, not - as the bet stipulated - a Christian. With enemies at his gates - literally, Quincannon bringing all of his men and machinery in the night to knock down the church - and all of his friends telling him that he's an arsehole, Jesse breaks through the floor and starts calling for Eugene to come back.

Or... Actually, he yells: "Come back!" and I can't imagine that his failure to stipulate a name will in any way bite him in the arse.

Between the flashbacks and his reactions in the present day, it emerges that Jesse's devotion to God is based not in faith or love, but in fear and guilt, and his sermons it is clear that this is how he wants to appeal to others. When he tells Odin Quincannon 'With God, all things are possible,' it comes across as a platitude, but his threats of hell fire are entirely sincere. Props to Dominic Cooper, whose restrained performance is the heart of this episode. Ruth Negga and Joseph Gilgun get to do the big performances, but Coopers is all in the face, the eyes, and the maniac grin when the power of Genesis crashes through him.

Dark Matter - 'Kill Them All'

"A riot is a very ugly thing. And I think is is about time that we had one!"

So, first up we address the elephant in the room:

One is pretty definitely dead. I'm not ruling out a bait and switch entirely, but the actor's name is out of the credits and this episode is pretty damned insistent that what we thought we saw at the end of the last was what we actually saw. One is dead; and not 'Jon Snow' dead; 'Ned Stark' dead.

With a special investigator in town to pin the crew of the Raza to the white hole machine they nicked in the heist episode and the colossal death toll that ensued from corporate shenanigans, the warden - who is definitely Up To Something (TM) - panics and tries to have the crew killed, but prison boss Arax saves them in return for getting in on their inevitable escape. Six starts to get antsy about the system he serves, and is visibly hurt when the Android tells him he's not on the crew anymore.

Also sword fights.

With the help of a map provided by Tori Higginson's Mikkei executive and some well-timed sabotage by Six, the crew bust out and aim to steal a shuttle sent by the Ishida to bring Four back for execution. Naturally, this leads Four into a sword duel with his childhood friend Miskai, who has also replaced their mentor as Commander of the Royal Guard since Four, y'know, murdered him. Back on the block, Arax starts a riot, and Two uses her resistance to the sonic security system to escape and disable the guards, forcing a power down so she can let the others out.

This is all well and good, but the real meat comes from Five and the Android.

Wait... What?

The Android is not having a fun time, and once more Zoie Palmer is fucking killing it with her childlike manner and incredibly subtle expressions, including a heartbreaking look of restrained fear and pain when the tech starts trying to break into her memory. As she has refused Six's authority, the investigator brings Five to release the Android's record of events, but instead Six cuts the power and Five gives the Android a single order: "Kill them all."

And seriously, the fuck? It comes almost out of nowhere for Five, the innocent of the crew, but following a season of peril, Six's betrayal and the investigator pointing a gun at her head, and given Jodelle Ferland's performance, it's totally believable. And the Android of course does exactly as requested, including a wonderful moment when everyone is dead and she just drops the gun she took and goes back into her regular mannerisms.

The crew get away, along with Nyx, Arax and a doctor named Devon, but Six is shot and has to be put into stasis, and the Android can not neural link to the ship. Elsewhere, a mysterious woman of mystery is told that the crew are back aboard, including her 'asset'; Five.

Dark Matter pulls out all the stops for a cracker of an episode. As in season one, the overall premise is pretty familiar, but the show is enlivened by strong characters, decent writing and direction and some excellent performances.

The Musketeers - 'The Queen's Diamonds'

It's that man again.

The Musketeers go back to their roots this week, in a search for 'The Queen's Diamonds'.

But - aha! - it's not Queen Anne whose sparklers have been nicked, but Queen Henrietta Maria, sister to the King and wife of the beleaguered King Charles - who somehow makes Louis look grounded and sensible - and the jewels were to have been sold to a Dutch financier for money to fund Royalist troops to oppose the forces of the English Parliament, before being nicked by a daring highwayman.

Within minutes of being given the job, the Musketeers spot their old adversary Emil Bonnaire hanging around. They like him for the perp, and given his stalwart soul he immediately fesses up, but claims to have sold the rocks and given the money to his partner for safekeeping. Cue a search across the city to retrieve the various bits of bling before the financier tires of the delights of Feron's bathhouse. It's a fairly simple task, so Aramis gets leave to go off and help out a long lost friend who is about to marry well, but is being blackmailed by her past as a prostitute. Thus we learn that before his father took him in, Aramis was raised in a brothel.

Pauline is marrying a McGann, but damned if I know which one*.

In other news, Athos has a continuing flirtation with Sylvie, who has taken up her father's place at the head of the growing civil liberties movement in Paris, voicing the people's discontent with the aristocracy. Via some prodding from Grimaud, Athos' involvement in the hunt for the Queen's ice, where no-one cares if the common folk are murdered in their beds, leads to a falling out between the two, although during the course of the mission we do see Porthos lobbing a stone into a field to be found by the workers.

In the end, Sylvie gives Athos the elbow, Bonnaire gives up the last of his haul and the money for immunity for him and his partner, the Queen's handmaiden, and the Musketeers piss off Pauline's fiance by showing up to take back his intended wedding ring in a frankly baffling scene in which the phrase 'it was stolen from the Queen of England' is not used, Athos instead throwing down. Aramis also learns that the fiance's groom is the blackmailer, claiming that he is looking out for the bride as well as the groom, because society will rip them to shreds. To remove this obstacle, she murders him, but turning up to the church with blood on your gown turns out not to be a winning move.

'The Queen's Diamonds' is a bit of a dog's breakfast, in which three b-plots struggle for A status to the detriment of all.

Aramis' new backstory is frankly confusing, given that all we know of his later childhood is 'signature booze' and 'girl who then became a Blessed Sister of St FuckYeah.' The twist - the wedding isn't spoiled because he turns out to be a tyrant, but because she is a laser-guided crazy - is decent, but in many ways this feels like a plot that should feature the Comte de la Fer, given the whole 'married a woman who turned out to be a thief and look how that turned out' bit.

The development of Sylvie's subplot is obviously arc-related, but out of kilter with the rest of the episode, and prevents this being a light romp to relieve the tension between episodes of grimdark conspiracy and monarchical tuberculosis.

The actual A-plot is the best, because it's the most fun, but ends up being disappointingly simple. Bonnaire is quite fun in moderation, and I could have stood the episode committing whole cloth to a more complicated scavenger hunt.

* IMDb says Paul, who was of course also the foppish rival in the 1993 movie version of The Three Musketeers.

Sleepy Hollow - 'Kindred Spirits'

"Grave robbing. That's new. Interesting."
"I know you meant gross and disturbing."
"Yes, yes of course. Terrible thing. Must put a stop to it."

What's this? An episode of Sleepy Hollow? Yeah, bitches; that's what I'm talking about.

While Abbie is recovering from her extended absence, Agent Reynolds taps her to consult on the double halberd homicide of a couple in a local lover's lane. She and Ichabod realise that the killer is most likely to Kindred, the Death-powered, Frankensteinian super-zombie created by Benjamin Franklin and given its parody of life by the Witnesses in Season 2. There is, naturally, a certain amount of guilt, which might be mitigated if they realised that it had returned following Pandora's beacon.

To stop the creature, they send Jenny and Joe to retrieve Franklin's glass armonica (well, one of them anyway, and a portable one built like a hurdy-gurdy at that, rather than the more common free-standing model) from the local museum, having identified this as one of a number of controls provided by Franklin. Ultimately, they realise that it is targeting couples because it has never known love, just in time for it to nab Zoe, who is in the middle of breaking up with Ichabod for going all silent on her for months.

"I want to know what love is,
I know you can show me."

In desperation, they activate the ultimate control; a female Kindred stored at the museum, complete with her own morning star. Why, Franklin? Why include weapons on your moderating influence? It's like incorporating a bomb into a nuclear reactor's control rods. Anyway, it works: The Kindred and Kindress hit it off and head out of town, until the Hidden One blows them up in a snit and swears off love. Alas, while they are in time to save Zoe it is way too late to save the relationship, which at least puts her ahead on points against his last love interest, who was drowned by La Llorona, lest we forget. Sadly, they do seem to be using this to push the Ichabbie agenda, which does not make me happy.

Did I mention I like platonic partnerships?

So, I confess I think we lost touch with Sleepy Hollow along the way, and part of that is that I don't know if Season 3 is as good. While Moloch was nothing to write home about, Henry/War was an antagonist worthy of the name of nemesis, and neither Pandora nor the Hidden One really makes up for the loss of our two Horsemen (or the fact that we apparently won't get to see the others any time soon.)

The Magicians - 'The Writing Room' and 'Homecoming'

"So... this is what Britain looks like."

Road trip!

As a note, I'm pretty sure that the 'previously on' scene of the Beast/Mike murdering Eliza/Jane Chatwin included an image cut from the actual showing of the episode, in which Eliza went the way of Oberyn Martell.

A locator spell points to Penny as the one who stole the final Fillory book, and he admits that, yes, he took it, read it, spilled beer on it and threw it out rather than admit that he'd been interested. His fuzzy recollection was that it was written by Jane Chatwin rather than Christopher Plover, and described her attempt to find a means for her brother Martin to get back into Fillory when 'Ember and Umber' stopped admitting him. Eventually she tracked down a questing beast - possibly a rabbit or pig - who gave her a magic button, and there the book ends.

"So... this is what the British look like."

To learn more, Quentin, Alice and Penny head to England to visit Plover's house, accompanied by the bored and grieving Eliot, who also allows them use of a magic door he and Margot created to visit their favourite pub. The big old house is run as a museum, so they take the tour, and of course Quentin nitpicks at the tour guide throughout the presentation on Plover, the neighbouring Chatwin children, his hyper-protective sister and that totally unsolved mystery about the disappearance of the housekeeper's kids (who were apparently too poor to go to Fillory, even in fiction.)

Since they can't ransack the place for a button during the tour, they break back in at night and find a number of books of real magic in Plover's collection, including several that Penny calls the 101 of Travelling. The tour guide catches them, but Eliot claims to be a supervillain and he starts to tell them something, but is interrupted when the lights go out and he is instantly murdered with his lips sewn shut and OMFG the following ghost story is creepy as shit, as they gang witness not only the Mrs Danversesque sister flat out murdering the housekeeper's children for disturbing her sainted brother, but said sainted brother drugging Jane and molesting Martin, all while excitedly describing the adventures they can have together once he unlocks the magic to travel to Fillory, even if it would require him growing some extra fingers.

They find the button, but are forced to flee, escaping only thanks to their magic, and unable to do anything to give the ghost-children peace, much to Alice's distress.

"Wait; I'm burying the gays? And just as I was getting likable again."

Back in New York, Richard tasks Julia with contacting the mind of Kira, a magician who has suffered some sort of locked in syndrome since a spell went wrong. Specifically, she used the spell she used to torment Quentin to create a safe space to make notes on Kira's now perfected spell, and is then asked to give her peace. She balks at first - after all, introducing a black lesbian character and then offing her right off the bat is a bit weak - but then assents, Richard explaining that this is part of using magic for good.

"Welcome to Limbo. I'll be your bandit."

At Brakebills, Quentin muses on the fact that his literary hero was a child-raping bastard, and his sister a child-murdering monster. Penny touches the button - largely to spite Quentin - and immediately vanishes, bringing 'The Writing Room' to a close.

Penny finds himself climbing out of a fountain onto planet hedge maze in 'Homecoming' and is almost immediately met by a chirpy lass in a hoody who explains that he is in the Neitherlands and then tries to steal his button (which sadly lacks the innuendo potential of all those attempts to bag Wil's Elfstones.) Penny quickly becomes completely lost in the labyrinth of courtyards and fountains, and decides that it's time to make like ET and phone home.

He does this by homing in on the brain he is most accustomed to invading, and I'm not the only one to notice his mutual antagonism with Quentin evolving into near-bromance. This time he pops into Quentin's Indiana Jones/Princess Leia/Danaerys Targaryen sex dream, and we learn that not only is he a complete nerd, but even his fantasies think he's a bit of a loser. It's here that Penny learns that what has been about six minutes for him has been as many weeks on Earth.

"If you would just shut up for two seconds, this sex dream would pass the
Bechdel test."

Alice takes Quentin to meet her parents, not for the usual reasons, but because their mutual boyfriend is an extraplanar traveler named Joe. Joe explains that they can create a beacon to guide Penny back to the Earth Fountain, but they'll need to do some sex magic to achieve it. Cue awkwardness and also some decent exploration of the relationship. Damnit, The Magicians, you were supposed to be my big, dumb fluff show.

Julia has now become an active member of Richard's online magical circle, the Free Trader Beowulf. Hosting a meet up, she discovers that one of the members, Asmodeus, is actually Kady, and the two of them are assigned to 'level up' by mastering a set of spells (given to them in what Richard genuinely calls a 'spell binder'; he's so adorably nerdy that I can't help but think he's going to die or turn out a major heel) while the rest of the group work on fucking with causality in the spare room. Seriously; mystery cults aside, it's fucking rude to break time in someone's house without telling them. Also, they apparently want to control a god, which just feels... dumb.

In the Physical Cabin, Margo is just starting to notice that Eliot is actually pretty damned shook up over not just killing someone, but basically murdering his not-actually-boyfriend-because possession, in order to temporarily inconvenience the thing that was puppeting his body. They are briefly distracted when uncharacteristic faint spells tip them off that Margo's ex has created a replica of her which has been drawing off her life force. Dubbed the Margolem, she confiscates it, but decides to keep it around because having a version of her permanently in 'party' mode is good for Eliot. The Margolem also provides confirmation that Margo and Eliot's inviolable relationship is, however, not sexual.

"No, wait. This is what Britain is like."

Back in the Neitherlands, Penny falls through a trap door into a library, where a librarian calls him 'William', and suggests that he has been there before, but doesn't remember. The library is full of books of people's lives, although she warns him that 'people who read their own books often find that they don't like the main character,' and never mind the ending. This includes the life of Martin Chatwin, who also disappeared, but without a card Penny can't borrow it. Instead, and to avoid harm to her books, the librarian photocopies the pages he would have torn out while she kicked his arse, then punts him back to the fountain maze, from which he exits via the beacon into the bedroom where Alice and Quentin are having sex.

So, yeah... The Magicians is steadily improving as it goes along. I've read the first book now, and the changes in plot, pacing and whatnot are substantial, but I think I'm liking the series better, if I'm honest. I would not have expected to say that six weeks ago.