Start to Finish: 7.06 - The Child

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Once more, the simplest of companions brings us the weirdest of chronicles, as Louise Jameson and Anna Hawkes perform The Child.

Leela was dead, to begin with, having expired in the dungeons of the extinct Z'nai and been absorbed by the Time Vampire, she has now been reborn in the body of a young girl named Emily, to whom the warrior spirit acts as a guide and 'imaginary friend'. The Child is a story that she tells Emily, of the travels of the Wizard and the Warrior Girl, and a strange land of terror and imagination in the shadow of the greatest work of art in all creation. It is a tale that will stretch credulity, and an adventure which will test Leela to her limits.

The Child is an odd beast. The main narrative is a whimsical adventure that begins with the massacre of a peaceful religious gathering, while the framing device is a child talking to her reincarnated imaginary friend and interjecting elements of fairytale into the story. Emily appears to be a child of the Victorian or Edwardian eras, but we'll probably never know for sure as the end of the first run of The Companion Chronicles seems to have scotched the idea of this being the start of another trilogy of Leela stories, each set at a different point in Emily's life. As a result, it is a bit of an outlier; an interesting idea that was never realised in full.

Next, we'll move on to the second half of season seven, and it's back to the First Doctor for Inquisitors and heretics in The Flames of Cadiz.

Start to Finish: 7.05 - Return of the Rocket Men

Image (c) Big Finish Productions.

The Rocket Men was a bit of a wild card in The Companion Chronicles, introducing a new villain in the shape of a band of ruthless pirates who dress like radio serial hero Commando Cody and fly around on jet packs like absolute bosses. Well, apparently that's just what the public want, and they're back, from outer space, in Return of the Rocket Men.

As Dodo insists on celebrating Steven's birthday, the TARDIS sets down on a colony world. It seems quiet enough, but before long the peace is shattered by a crew of the most feared pirates in space. Their leader is a ruthless man named Van Cleef, intent on squeezing the colony for all that it is worth. The Doctor is wary of getting involved, only too aware how dangerous the Rocket Men are. So is Steven, who once had a run in with them himself, on his 21st birthday. On, he is starting to realise, this birthday.

Another twisty bit of timey-wimey this time out, as Steven Taylor - bruised from all the losses the TARDIS crew has suffered in his time - revisits his own past and accepts the possibility of death to save his own life. Of course we know he lives, but attaching this adventure near the end of Steven's run gives this the appropriate emotional weight as it contributes to his realisation that he needs to strike out on his own. The Rocket Men remain appropriately horrible, and Van Cleef is a worthy successor to the original play's Ashman. The colony world setting puts this generically alongside the western, rather than the more Die Hard style siege adventure of The Rocket Men, but then shifting genres is part of what makes Doctor Who what it is.

Next up, we get weird, as Leela returns from the dead and Louise Jameson performs The Child.

Stranger Things - 'Chapter 4: The Body'

"I got a real positive feeling about this."

After the shock ending of Chapter 3, Mike lashes out at El for giving him false hope, but she responds by causing his walkie talkie to receive a cry for help from Will. He's still out there, he concludes, and assembles the kidvengers to share in the revelation. Lucas is of course skeptical still. Joyce (why was I calling her Nora last review?) believes the same thing as Mike. She calls the body fished from the water a 'thing' and refuses to believe that this is Will. Jonathan and Sheriff Hop both think that she's in serious denial, but they will both come to question their own certainty later on, as will Lucas.

In short, this is the episode where shit gets undeniably real.

Girls, apparently, are blonde in these boys' world.

Mike, Lucas and Dustin disguise El as a girl (once more, they essentially see her as alien just because she has short hair and is wearing Mike's clothes. Put a dress and a wig on her and they're like, dude!) to sneak into school and try to use the ham radio to boost her signal. Unfortunately they get caught and pushed to attend Will's memorial service. Here, Mike sees the standard issue bullies laughing and calls them out. They homophobe for a bit and Mike shoves one of them. When the bully comes back at him, El paralyses him and makes him wet himself, and maybe it's just me, but nose bleed notwithstanding she seems a little too into it. Kids are vicious, yo.

Nancy tries to report the faceless figure she saw at Steve's house, causing a bust-up with Steve, who is much more worried that he'll be found out for having a party with beer and sex than that Barb is missing. The police seem convinced that Barb just ran away, hinting that it was out of jealousy after Nancy slept with Steve, which in turn leads to a bust up between Nancy and her mother. Feeling isolated, Nancy notices a distortion on the photo of Barb and approaches Jonathan to enlarge it. He's a bit distracted, until she mentions the lack of a face, a detail Joyce also described. He enlarges the shot and sure enough, a faceless figure is watching Barb. Could his mother be right about Will? And what does that mean for Barb?

"All work and no play makes Joyce something something."

Joyce meanwhile cranks up the Clash and tries to make contact with Will. This time he is able to speak to her directly, Nora peeling back the wallpaper to reveal a weird membrane, through which Will calls to her while the boys hear the conversation over the ham radio, which pretty much puts the mockers on Lucas's doubts. Something approaches and Joyce tells Will to hide; she will find him. Then she gets all Shining on the wall, but merely bursts through to the outside while the ham radio ignites.

Back at Hawkins Lab, a volunteer is sent through a similar membrane and killed by a monster. Science is a harsh mistress.

Hop hits the bar, but it turns out he's quizzing a state trooper about why Will was found by state troopers on non-State run land, brought in under heavy guard and investigated by a state coroner. The trooper admits he was tipped off, but warns Hop he'll get them both killed. Hop heads back to the morgue and knocks out another trooper. He cuts open the body and finds... flock. The body is a fake, so Hop heads for the Lab and a possibly ill-advised break-in.

Stranger Things continues to be a powerful blend of smart sci-fi thriller and eyes-open love letter to a past age. I'm really starting to worry that Mike and El are going to end up as an underage, telekinetic Bonny and Clyde given their shared rage and delight in anti-bully vigilantism. I'm also concerned that Hop's good traits - intelligence, observation and deduction - will be overwhelmed by his reckless need to atone and we'll be bidding him a farewell sooner rather than later. On the upside, Joyce and Nancy both take a step for the proactive this week. I'm particularly intrigued by Nancy's attitude to Jonathan. He's clearly embarrassed about the photo of her - and he should be - but she seems genuinely to accept it as a mistake and to consider him awkward more than he is creepy. It's not something you would have seen a lot of in the actual eighties, where girls tended to be judgmental and guys needed to prove themselves in one way or another.

Start to Finish: 7.04 - 'Last Post'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

So, this one's a bit of a downer. Not the play itself; just the fact that this is one more last for Big Finish; the last play recorded by Caroline John, published shortly after her death in 2012. It is called, aptly enough, The Last Post.

A series of deaths of important military and government personnel are found to be unconnected and not suspicious, except by UNIT scientific adviser Elizabeth Shaw. Liz discovers letters in the effects of many of the victims which foretell their deaths to the minute. With the Doctor and the Brigadier skeptical, Liz ropes her mother, influential academic Dame Emily Shaw, into the investigation, which all seems to lead back to one of Dame Emily's government committees, to margarine marketing, and to the Apocalypse Clock.

Although the loss of yet another classic Who actor lends an air of melancholy, the story itself in The Last Post is fairly upbeat, escaping from the usual pattern of Liz complaining about being a glorified lab assistant and contemplating leaving UNIT. While a perfectly valid approach, Big Finish have mined that vein pretty hard, so it's good to have something different, with Liz as the dynamic investigator, thwarting the villain with only tangential help with the Doctor, and the formidable Dame Emily along to carry the burden of menace, since we know Liz makes it. While it is sad that Caroline John is gone, I'm glad that she got this for her swansong.

Next, the Rocket Men return in Return of the Rocket Men.

Hooten and the Lady - 'The Amazon' and 'Rome'

I really hope these two don't sleep together.

The archaically titled Hooten & the Lady is an adventure show of the kind that aims to be known as rollicking, following the exploits of titular characters Ulysses Hooten (Michael Landes) and Lady Alex Spencer-Park (Ophelia Lovibond).

In 'The Amazon', usually library-bound curator Alex - an expert in the field of archaeology; like, all of it - somehow persuades the British Museum to fund a one-woman expedition into the heart of the Amazon to locate the lost final camp of a Victorian adventurer who disappeared while searching for the lost city of Zed, source of the El Dorado myth. Unfortunately, while negotiating for directions she is interrupted by the brash American treasure hunter Hooten, who inadvertently steals the local tribe's golden skull thingy, and because as we all know, primitive tribes love them some golden skulls and frontier justice, it's pyre o'clock before you can say knife. They escape, argue, find the camp and a map to the city, but kind of lose it again after Alex's embassy guide tries to off them and nick the treasure for himself.

This opening episode is dogged by the unpleasant feeling that white explorers might have had their day, and that having a tribe of Amazon natives with no English language or even subtitled dialogue threaten to kill and possibly eat our white leads over a misunderstanding is probably a lot not okay. It's a shame, because the basic pairing are quite likable, and reasonably evenly balanced, with Hooten's local smarts and tough guy swagger matched against Alex's booksmarts and confidence. It's also refreshing to see the bookish, unworldly female lead turn up in the jungle in trousers and boots; not a high heel in sight.

Alex's mum, played by Dr Jane Seymour, Medicine Quinn.

'Rome' is a much better experience, if only because the Italian Mob are a villain we can all get behind despising and white stereotypes are less uncomfortable than their non-white kin. Hooten ropes Alex into the quest for the last surviving Sibylline Book (which for a text from the 6th century BC looks hella modern and actually bookish) to help out a nun. The nuns are being coerced by the mob, who want to ransom the book back to the Vatican as a vital foundation of Rome's history, and I have to say it's nice to see the Vatican portrayed as concerned about cultural history rather than too busy hiding the secret bloodline of Christ.

We get a bit more range in the characters as well. Hooten has the diplomatic chops when it comes to the Mob, while Alex responds to the Mob boss's attempt to burn a page he doesn't like by setting his face on fire.

At this stage, I'm willing to stick with the series, although I suspect that the further it strays into 'exotica', the more uncomfortable it will get, and I'm likely to lose my patience with it if they overcook the will-they, won't-they of it all. Presumably her fiance is intended to turn out to be too dull for her, and since I can't for the life of me remember his face or indeed if we've seen his face, that's working, but I don't want to see her with Hooten either, any more than I want Robin to end up with Strike in the Cormoran Strike novels, however much of a toolbag her fiance was/husband is. Be your own windkeeper, Alex! You don't need no man to complete you!

Start to Finish: 7.03 - Project Nirvana

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Our next installment of The Companion Chronicles is Project: Nirvana, and in the land of Big Finish, 'Project:' means only one thing: The Forge.

First established back in the main range's Project: Twilight, the Forge is the audio equivalent of Torchwood, but vaguely competent, determinedly scientific/military, and without all the gratuitous sexy-sexy. The story of the Forge ran from Twilight's WWI-set prologue through several spin offs of questionable canonicity (including the comic Project: Longinus, novel Project: Valhalla and the short stories Twilight's End and Project: Wildthyme) and the audio plays Project: Lazarus and Project: Destiny. They made passing appearances in other Big Finish plays, such as Zagreus and Cryptobiosis, identified either by name or the use of their motto/code phrase, 'For King and Country.' The influence of the Forge and its nigh-immortal Director, Nimrod, extended into A Death in the Family and the Black and White trilogy, which is where we find ourselves here.

After near-destruction in the Crimean War forces it to grow a new outer plasmic shell, the TARDIS appears for a time not as a blue police box, but white, except in some stories when it shows up black. It is eventually revealed that the Black TARDIS is a 'cutting' from the regenerating plasmic shell which the Doctor grows into a new vessel. Recruiting a young soldier named Private Sally Morgan and former Deputy Director of the Forge, Captain Lysandra Aristedes, the Doctor uses the Black TARDIS to conduct a direct campaign against the malevolent entities known as the Elder Gods, although in time he would discover that this was all part of a larger game played out by his old enemy Fenric and his great opponent, Weyland.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In Project: Nirvana, Maggie O'Neill and Amy Pemberton take turns narrating the action as Aristedes and Morgan, with the added voice of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor (and if you got through my description of the Black and White stuff unsure which Doctor was going to war with gods, shame on you.) In order to take out one of the Doctor's targets, the two soldiers attempt to infiltrate a speeding train and steal its cargo, but the cargo itself has other ideas, and the train's security team is led by one of the Forge's finest; the intelligent and unflinching Sergeant Lysandra Aristedes.

Messing with time and memory, Project: Nirvana is a pretty effective heist story (and regulars may have realised that I'm a sucker for a heist,) although the final adversary is slightly underwhelming in fact, if terrifying in concept. Aristedes and Morgan are good characters, and this was a good opportunity to see the Doctor's strike team in action, away from the dominating presences of Hex and especially Ace. I'm especially glad that they went with using the Doctor as the extra voice, to complete the team.

Next up, Liz Shaw gets a little help from her old Mum to wrestle with The Last Post.

Start to Finish: 7.02 - The Uncertainty Principle

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Locked in a room with a mad woman who thinks she traveled in time with the man known as the Doctor, Zoe Heriot is once more forced to concoct a story of a past time, based on snatches of evidence and imagined recollection in Simon Guerrier's The Uncertainty Principle.

Following on from previous Zoe Companion Chronicles, we open with our heroine held prisoner, accused of... stuff. The monolithic Company wants her knowledge of other times, and hse had been drugged to access it as public defender Jen, supposedly her only ally, grills her. What was she doing on early 21st century Earth? What was the secret of the Feynman computer? What are the mysterious, shambling grey figures that seem to appear out of nowhere? And could it be that an ultralogical prodigy of the (probably insanely corrupt) elite programme is falling in love with a romantic fool?

The last of these questions is obviously the most problematic, as Doctor Who has a very rocky track record vis a vis Companion romances. In this case it's a bit of a non-starter, with the boy in question mourning his dead sweetheart and said sweetheart turning up alive at the end, but it actually helps that our narrator is Zoe. Due to her almost cloistered upbringing, Zoe is just about the worst person in the world to tell you about her feelings, and the in-character awkwardness alleviates the actual awkwardness of shoehorning of an incidental romance into a 65 minute play about alternate realities and quantum computing. she also makes no attempt to explain her crush by talking about dreamy eyes, so we (don't) have that.

The oddity here is that the framing narrative is actually more compelling than the main story. As often happens, the modern setting militates against an apocalyptic threat carrying much weight, and the love interest - the only character there to be in personal peril - is never really up to carrying that weight. It's Zoe we worry for, with her headaches and impending execution for... crimes.

Okay; let's forge ahead, to the 7th Doctor story Project: Nirvana.

Dark Matter - 'Wish I'd Spaced You When I Had the Chance' and 'Sometimes in Life You Don't Get to Choose'

Bonding.

Okay, so a couple of episodes to catch up before the season finale.

'Wish I'd Spaced You When I Had the Chance' focuses largely on Five and Three, who are separated from the others during a comms shutdown. Five is kidnapped by people traffikers and Three follows, himself pursued by Inspector Kierken. It's a chance for Three to be a sentimental badass, and for Five to be quietly badass herself, hacking a missile to blow up the GA instead of the Marauder. It's also interesting that Kierken again appears in an episode with a title referencing spacing.

Yea-eah we wept,
When we remembered Zairon.

At the end of the episode, Four asks the Android to reintegrate his memories, and in 'Sometimes in Life You Don't Get to Choose' he launches his campaign to reclaim his throne in earnest. Suborning generals and using the blink drive to get the drop on his half-brother, he presents his case and wins Hiro's support. Unfortunately someone rats him out. The Emperor is taken into 'protective custody' before he can abdicate and the Empress takes over. Four gets put through a show trial and sentenced to death, but the crew launch a rescue attempt. Their frontal assault is thwarted thanks to the Empress's informants, the Seers, but Five makes an end run to release Hiro and the tables are turned. Four becomes Emperor and has the Seers, the Empress and his half-brother executed.

What. What?

"I am not Four. My name is Ishida Ryo."

Clearly. This marks a bad development for the crew, who are now all standing in the court of a decapitation-happy emperor who wants to retroengineer the blink drive and galactic power balance bedamned.

Next week is the season finale, and I'm sorry to say that, with a few exceptions - this weeks final scene, 'kill them all' - Dark Matter has not been gripping me so much this season. It's good, right enough, but not great. I guess I'm getting demanding in my old age. On the up side, I've watched it all through, unlike say Bitten or Agents of SHIELD.

Killjoys - 'Full Metal Monk'

Eww!

D'av and Turin track down a Six in Oldtown, and D'av discovers a new string to his Green-power bow when he makes the Six's eyeballs explode. Umm... yay?

In pursuit of the Sixes and of Aneela, Dutch, D'av and Alvis travel to Arkyn - now bereft of its protective shell - n search of Aneela and discover another of Khlyen's safehouses, this one opening at Dutch's touch to an elevator. Below the surface they find an antiquated Six lab, where the Scarbacks who came to fight the Devil were injected with the plasma, one surviving in a cell made of the same sort of wall as surrounds Oldtown.

Speaking of Oldtown, Pawter gets Johnny out of the clink and they head into that grim metropolis in search of the means by which Jelco plans to destroy the people. They realise that contraband is slipping in and that the Company plans to send in poisoned food to winnow out the weak and leave only strong workers, but unfortunately the wall also serves to sedate the mind, inducing a euphoric state. They get another of the Nine to come and see their evidence, but wind up high as kites and powerless to stop Jelco murdering their potential ally and framing them via the power of selfies.

Not good.

The SixMonk identifies Dutch as Aneela, and as the Devil they came to fight, and Khlyen as Aneela's father. Then he asks for death and refuses to forgive Dutch for delivering it. With just a little more information, the team leave Arkyn and look for Johnny, but with the poisoned food on its way and all of Oldtown on a permanent high, is it too late to get the band back together?

Okay, so this episode was kind of a downer, especially watching Pawter and Johnny stumble drunkenly to their downfall. There is nothing more dismaying in Killjoys than watching Jelco win. I really want Dutch to punch his head off. And Delle Sayah, who was revealed as his ally in this diabolical plot (although they prefer sinister scheme.)

Pilgrim - Series 1 and 2

Image from BBC Radio website.

“Of all the stories told in these islands, few are more strange as that of William Palmer.  Cursed, apparently, on the road to Canterbury in the Spring of 1185 for denying the presence of the other world by the King of the Grey Folk, or Faerie, himself, and compelled to walk from that day to this between the worlds of Magic and of Men, and subsequently known in all the strange and wonderful lore of the mysterious William Palmer… as Pilgrim.”

Taking a bit of a break from my regular audiobooks, I've been alternating between the Big Finish Companion Chronicles and the BBC dark fantasy radio series Pilgrim. Broadcast in seven series of linked 45-minute plays between 2009 and 2015, Pilgrim follows the travails of the eponymous Pilgrim, a rare book dealer named William Palmer who has lived for more than eight centuries, having been cursed by the King of the Grey Folk for telling him that Christianity would sweep away all the old superstitions, and assigned to act as intermediary between the human and occult worlds.

Although young in appearance, Pilgrim is an ancient and world-weary being, unable to withstand the years as the Grey Folk do because he is still one of the 'hot-bloods'. The terminology of the setting, Grey Folk and hot-bloods, emphasises the central conflict of the series. The Grey Folk are ancient and immortal, but pale and cold by comparison to humanity. Without their detached nature, Palmer struggles with his endless existence, as well as his thankless duty to police the borderlands between humanity and the colossal power of the other world, armed only with a wide knowledge base and a fundamental, but not specific, indestructibility (he mentions a run in with a fallen angel that left him recuperating for a century.)

Series 1 loosely focuses on his search for fellow-immortal Joseph of Arimethea, who might hold the key to ending his existence. The Grey Folk want him to keep going because - as we are often told - the King loves him. His real anchor, however, is his daughter Doris, half-Grey herself, but still an old lady by the time of the series. In episode 3 he rescues a young werewolf named Freya from a powerful secret society who hunt unique creatures. Freya wants him to involve her in his work, but the one thing we learn about Pilgrim is that he is pretty dedicated to being a martyred loner. As a result, Freya goes off in a huff in early series 2, and with Doris departing in episode 8, we're out of female leads, but the non-Pilgrim cast is highly mobile, so that isn't to say that series 3 won't bring in new ones.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Pilgrim is the degree to which he doesn't actually resolve things. Maybe half of the stories are resolved by his clever use of his understanding of the other world, but the rest come down to a regular human making a sacrifice or quasi-Biblical figure being a badass. Pilgrim is not a badass. He is ultracompetent against human opponents (but just the worst in most social situations,) but little more than an ant against the Grey Folk, unless he can invoke one of their own rules.

Pilgrim was that rare gem, an entirely serious British fantasy series. The BBC has a tendency to be a little ashamed of its SF and fantasy output, and to focus on a particular kind of radio, but Pilgrim ran for just shy of thirty episodes, all or most written by series creator Sebastian Baczkiewicz, despite not being a sitcom or excruciating 'comedy drama'. I've got five more series to get through, although I think I'm going to hit up another audiobook first.

Start to Finish: 7.01 - The Time Museum

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Way back in the summer of 2014, I set out to review the entire series of Big Finish Companion Chronicles, a task at which I singularly failed. In part, this was because my finances hit a point where I could no longer justify the cost of Big Finish CDs, leaving me without the last six plays to review. Thanks to a recent sale, I now have those last six plays, so let's take a punt at the final two seasons of The Companion Chronicles, beginning with the not-actually-a-First Doctor adventure, The Time Museum.

Ian Chesterton, one of the Doctor's very first human companions, wakes in a replica of his bedroom which connects to a replica of his old classroom, and so on through a series of tableaux of scenes from his experiences as a time traveler. He is met by Pendolin, the museum's curator, who explains that this is the Chesterton Exhibit, and that he was 'collected' to be a part of it, but now the exhibit and Ian himself are threatened by the approach of a whispering horde of 'them'; beings that feed on memory itself.

Less a stroll than a headlong flight along Memory Lane, The Time Museum eschews both framing narrative and recollection of a past adventure. Instead, the play is purely the story of Ian and his mysterious companion as they try to escape from the Museum, punctuated by brief recollections from earlier stories, including 'An Unearthly Child', the Companion Chronicle 'The Rocket Men' and that weird one where they got shrunk. It's a chance for Ian to be the hero one more time, and to show what he's learned from the Doctor; as well as what the Doctor learned from him.

William Russell is not only one of the oldest readers in the Chronicles, but audibly so, capturing the First Doctor better than he ever does his younger self. Despite that, he maintains the sense of pace and physicality needed for this story, and despite the nature of the story being all about memory and memorial, it's one of the less melancholic entries, because the action of the piece is now. It's kind of like a clip show, but a good clip show, rather than 'Shades of Gray'.

Next, we'll pick up the story of Zoe Herriot, in The Uncertainty Principle.

Killjoys - Heart-Shaped Box

"I think I broke him."

Dutch: It's Sabine.
Johnny: Yeah.
Dutch: It's Sabine in a bag.
Johnny: Yes.
Dutch: Johnny, why did you bring me Sabine in a bag?
Johnny: Not a lot of better options. 
Dutch: Oh I think when you're in girl in bag territory you skipped way the hells past better choices. What is going on?
D'avin: She's a Six.

So, yes; to answer that question from last week, Sabine is - present tense - a Six, but D'av's weird anti-Green pushed the Green out of her. Since a big part of the Green's purpose is to nullify the parts of the brain which deal with empathy and morality, this means that she is, temporarily, just a regular girl with lethal skills, as she proves when Turin's in-house torturer tries to shish kebab her head and she decapitates him with her restraints. Turin goes into lockdown and leaves Dutch to take care of Sabine.

While Dutch and D'av clash over Sabine's fate - her Green is regenerating already and Dutch is not convinced by D'av's clear but unspoken plan to maintain a messiah-complex-engendering codependent sex-curing relationship - Johnny goes looking for one of the Wall's engineers, seeking to uncover the Company's plan. She points him in the direction of Jelco's compound, but then betrays him out of fear. Since he's on film breaking and entering without a warrant, Jelco puts Johnny in a box and has his face used as a dance floor. Not pretty.

This is entirely necessary, I'm sure.

D'av and Sabine try to use a sexy hypno-bath and mind link tech to let him see through her Green-memory, leading them through a vision to a mirrored cube on Leith. Then Dutch checks Sabine's room and discovers that she isn't just a Six, she's part of the Black Root; described by Turin as Level Six internal affairs and set to track down Khlyen via Dutch and her crew. She kills another Black Root who tries to kill her, but finds that D'av has already released Sabine, but planted a tracker on her first. This leads Dutch to the self-same mirrored cube where, after killing Sabine before she can become completely Six again, she finds a wealth of items apparently intended for her to find, but probably not until later in her search for the truth, as she doesn't understand a lot of it yet. What she does understand is a red kill box with the name Aneela, whoever that may be.

'Heart-Shaped Box' deepens the rift between Johnny and his crew mates, and in doing so puts him in real danger. Meanwhile it further explores the nature of the Sixes and their internal structure, although the Lady remains mysterious. Perhaps she, Aneela and the duplicate of Dutch (elsewhere dubbed 'Double-Dutch') are one and the same? The episode as a whole is excellent, with some crackling dialogue, especially from Dutch - the Sabine in a bag bit, or Dutch's immediate response to learning of Sabine's release: 'I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the knife in my back.' - and serious feels from Sabine providing depth to Sixes by making the expendable Terminators into unwilling zombies.

Killjoys - 'I Love Lucy'

Talk about sparks flying.

After another successful graq mission, Dutch and the Jaquobis boys are back on the trail of the green goop.

Discovering that mossipede plasma only allows D'av to relive mossipede memories, and that he can apparently manipulate the goo remotely, they set out to find the purified stuff that Khlyen uses. Pree gives them a lead from his old warlord days and they head off to meet with San Romwell, a trader of rare stuff with a gajillion warrants on his head and his own spaceship made of asteroids. They push, he pushes back and has his three gynoid bodyguards - seriously illegal tech - take them all prisoner, but agrees to trade Dutch's sitar for her freedom.

Things are not going as well for San Romwell as might appear.

For most of the rest of the episode, the team are split up. Dutch trades stories with San - she was placed in the harem when her rich family lost everything and trained by Khlyen to marry a prince; he was captured by aliens who conquered his world and flew in spaceships powered by the plasma - while the boys are taken to be rendered down to a molecular pattern, before Johnny manages to hack one of the bots, allowing a roaming 'app' version of Lucy, the ship's AI, to control her. Dutch sings her wedding song while San plays and gets poisoned by the sitar, and she strangles him, but he comes back thanks to nanites which have sustained his life for centuries. The gynoids go berserk and Lucy sacrifices her physical self to stop them (after kissing Johnny,) while Dav uses his goo manipulation powers to throw exploding crystals at shit.

Not good.

San gives them some more goo and Dutch gets him a new ID since they blew up his shit. Then she goes and gets some with Alvis the Scarback, Pawter shows up to get frisky with Johnny and D'av scores with bartender Sabine, who explodes. Opinion seems to be divided as to whether Sabine was a Level 6 until his unique ability shagged the goo out of her, or whether the downside to the cool powers he was crowing over earlier in the episode is that he kills people with his sexy. If the latter I suspect that a lot of fans may be aggrieved by the lack of future D'av sexy.

'I Love Lucy' was a cracking episode, not least for a bravura performance from Tamsen McDonough, the voice and now the face of Lucy, delivering lines like 'stop talking, be naked' with total commitment and soliciting a final kiss from Johnny because 'it could be your only chance to kiss a robot.' I also liked that Lucy was complicit in bringing Pawter to the ship in the end, rather than getting all cyber stalker. I like that even the computer is capable of loving on many levels.

Dark Matter - 'Take the Shot'

"Does this make you an electric sheep?"

It's the Android show this week, as our favourite sweetly awesome mechanoid starts to experience dreams. Sexy dreams about the sexy android demagogue who gave her the humanising chip. Dreams that she disingenuously terms 'okay' when asked.

Concerned that this indicates a further degradation in her core programming, the Android introduces the rest of the crew to her holographic duplicate before retiring for more sexy dreams... I mean, self-examination. Actually, her dreams aren't all sexy; they're dreams of a 'normal', human life without android duties and space pirates, but with a sexy husband, gorgeous home and dinner parties.

"Basically, she's rubbish."

While she's doing this, the ship starts to go wonky, and Two, Three and Four all get hallucinations caused by their neural links to the computer. The crew activate the judgey duplicate, who tells them that the Android has infected the entire ship with a virus and they should totes shoot her in the head. The crew are reluctant, especially Five, who proves that Judgey McHologram is the source of the virus. Performance of the week, apart from Zoie Palmer playing three different versions of the Android, goes to Anthony Lemke for Three's agonised expression when asked to execute the Android. Fortunately, the Android emerges from her dream to save the day and the crew unanimously agree that she should resume control.

'Take the Shot' does what Dark Matter does best; a largely self-contained episode with lots of Android and Three failing to be a tough guy. There's also some sword fighting and a few links to the arc plot, but it's not trying to be flash or epic and it's essentially all about the small group of characters we know and love.

Zoo - 'First Blood', 'Fight or Flight', 'The Silence of the Cicadas' and 'Pack Mentality'

"Are we going to end up sleeping together?"

Across the globe, animals begin attacking humans. Coincidence, or the rise of a worldwide animal revolution, driven by outrage at man's destruction of the environment and marked by the 'defiant pupil', a distinctive discolouration of the eye, as if the black paint was running.

In Botswana, zoologist and safari guide Jackson Oz and his hetero life mate Abraham Kenyatta investigate the disappearance of the staff and residents of another camp. Abe is seemingly killed by a pride of male lions, but Oz rescues French tourist Chloe Tousignant and sees a connection with the work of his late father, genius turned obsessive nutjob Robert Oz, who believed that one day the animal kingdom would rise up and kick mankind out of the top spot for being a bunch of planet-wrecking jerks.

Back in the good old USA, a pair of zoo lions kill their keeper and go on a rampage before being shot. Annoying journalist Jamie Campbell harasses antisocial veterinary pathologist Mitch Morgan to press the investigation into their deaths, hoping to link them to biotech giant Reiden Global. They also discover that all the cats in a particular neighbourhood have apparently decided to hang out near a day camp like a feline remake of The Birds, until Campbell calls animal control and they all bog off home.

Oz gets a call from Abe, and tracks him to a tree where the lions have been keeping him, apparently intending that he be rescued and tell the world that they're mad as hell and not going to take it any more. The doctor examining the victims is Oz's mother, and they talk about how his father was crazy, right? Except that the lions killed without predating, and with a refined and consistent methodology across six different males who shouldn't even have been hanging together.

"Are we going to end up sleeping together?"

In Slovenia, we meet our first victims of the week; a British couple adopting an orphan. They agree to take him to the circus to see tigers, which don't eat him. Instead a small dog steals the boy's stuffed tiger to lure the father into an ambush, then thoughtfully returns the toy. Meanwhile Mitch and Jamie find altered brain chemistry and evidence of a leonine hive mind, which oddly enough does not convince a senator to reopen investigations into Reiden.

'Psychic lions, you say? Clearly a case of pesticide induced telepathy.' I can't imagine what self-respecting politician wouldn't pin their re-election campaign on that one. Different story if the lions were Muslim, I'll bet.

Chloe, who is an intelligence analyst, is recruited by a vaguely sinister yet awesome French official to lead a task force investigating these animal killings. She also has a bitch off with her sister, who slept with her fiance. Flow to Slovenia, she assesses the dog attack and others like it as similar to human serial killers honing their skills.

Don't even think it, mate."

Abe accompanies Oz to Japan in search of his father's research. They meet Robert's second wife/widow, but their helicopter is brought down by a swarm of bats. The pilot and the widow are killed, but Oz and Abe find their way to Robert's old lab, where he was experimenting on preventing the defiant pupil thing by gouging out animals' eyes. When the rads shoot up they are rescued by sinister Frenchman who recruits them, along with Mitch and Jamie, to join Team Chloe.

Our next victims of the week are the staff of a penitentiary in Mississippi, who are slaughtered by wolves who break in to rescue a death row inmate. This inmate, who was arrested for murdering a group of hunters, completely out of nowhere, also has the defiant pupil and is apparently the pack's new alpha. He confronts Mitch and Abe in the woods while they track the pack, then kills a hunter and steals his clothes. The team pick up a dying wolf and discover a bacterium in its brain that makes coconuts explode (there's some biology about electrolytes) while Chloe fends off a pushy FBI agent, and Jamie swipes evidence - including a picture of Robert Oz - and alienates local law enforcement.

And in Antarctica a pair of lesbian research scientists are killed by bats swarming on their solar panels. Four episodes and we're already burying the gays.

Zoo is basically a whole heap of nonsense about four pretty white folks and their badass black friend (played by blog fave Nonso Anozie) battling the evil of nature; or something. There may be more to the plot later, and who knows; maybe Jamie's assertion that Reiden Global are behind everything bad ever will turn out to have some validity. It will still be very annoying.

Mr Robot - 'View Source', 'White Rose', 'Mirroring' and 'Zero Day'

"Find someone to be your honest self with. Bullshit."

Okay; a final wrap up on Season 1 of Mr Robot. Once more, I'm eschewing the evocative titling of the episodes for ease of typing.

'View Source' brings Elliot to the brink as he reflects on his meeting with Shayla, and the fact that she hooked up with Vera in order to supply him. Was this a business move or the first step in a friendship between broken soulmates? We'll never know now, but it provides that extra spice to Elliot's feeling of responsibility for her death. He finds himself wishing people were easier to read, and wondering if actually anyone would want that, and ultimately admits to his psychologist, although released from his sessions, that he hacks into people's lives in order to understand them.

Elsewhere, Angela cuts a deal to invalidate the evidence against Terry Colby in exchange for the ammunition to successfully sue EvilCorp over the Washington Township spill. Although still shot small and vulnerable, Angela finds her force here, rebuffing Colby's indecent propositions and calling his bluff; she knows that he needs this as much as she does. Meanwhile, Tyrell invites his successful rival's wife to the roof for revenge sex and murders her, seemingly on impulse. Tyrell has always been an odd balance of rigorous self-control and something dark and subterranean at his core. The morlock is out of the box here, both in the killing itself and his less-than collected flight afterwards.

Wait. What?

In 'Whiterose', Darlene arranges a meet with the eponymous head of the Dark Army. To Elliot's surprise, it's him going to the meeting, not Mr Robot. Whiterose turns out to be a time-obsessed... I'm not sure what to say here. Is White Rose transgender? A crossdresser? Something more complicated? Actually, that's probably a more complex question than this appearance has time to answer.

Anyway, that's White Rose, and most importantly Elliot learns why the Dark Army backed out. Elliot fatally underestimated his boss, Gideon, who as well as being a genuinely good human being is a bit of a sly old fox, setting the server they need for their hack as a honey pot to trap future hack attempts. Get rid of the honey pot and the hack is on, forcing Elliot to directly betray his boss.

Angela goes to her ballet session - yeah, that's apparently how she keeps that figure - where she hooks up with her old buddy Darlene and... WHAT! Yeah; Angela and Darlene are like besties or something, and we soon learn why. Before that, Tyrell continues to unravel. The cops show up at his house and his wife Joanna buys time by breaking her own waters with a fork. Brutal, but for the first time in two episodes no supporting female characters are fridged, so there's that.

Darlene, excited that they're going to pull off the hack of all time, admits her love for Elliot, but is horrified when he tries to kiss her. "Did you forget again?" she asks. "Did you forget who I am?" And he did, but remembers that she is his sister. With raging paranoia he berates and assault us, his imaginary friend, before trying to find out who he really is and realising that he is a ghost (in informational terms, rather than like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense.) All he finds are childhood photographs of his family, including his father. Mr Robot.

I really like these two. As much as I'm enjoying Mr Robot itself, I'd watch
the hell out of their PI spin off.

In 'Mirroring', Mr Robot - aka Elliot's dad - takes him on a journey of discovery to explain who he is. While Tyrell is getting fired from his job and put on final probation with his family (the baby survives, thankfully,) Elliot and his father return to their family home, where dad once pushed Elliot out of a window; or maybe Elliot jumped. Anyway, now Elliot pushes dad out of a window. Darlene goes to Angela - who has quick ESafe and been offered a potential job at EvilCorp, who admire gumption and have already made enough on the interest from their panic fund to cover whatever the class action suit makes them pay out - for help finding Elliot and they follow his trail to the house, and then to the local cemetery. Here, Dad promises Elliot that he will never leave him again, only for Angela and Darlene to ask who Elliot is talking to.

Oh-ho! we the audience crow, for we knew it, didn't we. And at once Elliot rounds on us again. "Did you know?" he demands of his imaginary so-called friend.  "You're going to make me say it, aren't you?" he accuses, and then does. "I am Mr Robot."

Darlene takes him home and goes to fill his prescription, but then Tyrell shows up and demands to know what's what, demanding in on the revolution.

Oooh.

Which leads to 'Zero Day', where Elliot wakes from a heartwarming flashback of his dad teaching him that crime is wrong, but less wrong than being a dick, to find him self in Tyrell's SUV two days after the end of 'Mirroring', with the world's financial sectors going to hell around him. Where is Tyrell? What actually happened? Elliot doesn't know and for once, neither do we, although we learn that the hack was launched without the rest of fsociety, that Tyrell has vanished and that Angela works for EvilCorp's PR department now, beginning with watching a senior VP blow his brains out on television. The CEO is unfazed, assuring her that the might of EvilCorp will prevail.

Whiel fsociety burn the drives then throw a party to celebrate (and nadger the forensics of their HQ) and the world gets high on the end of debt, Gideon struggles vainly to plan for tomorrow and Elliot is browbeaten by Mr Robot and hallucinations of his mother and younger self into accepting his part i all of this. Go home, watch the beautiful chaos you've created.

And there's a knock at the door.

After the credits, White Rose - as a man - goes to a party at the CEO's house. The CEO claims to know who did this.

So, that was Season 1 of Mr Robot, a series that is like nothing on Earth. It's a little fridge-happy and so far the female characters have been pretty peripheral, but there's a lot of promise for Angela, Darlene and Joanna Wellick to take a strong role in Season 2. It's a series short on out and out villains, with the Wellicks and the other EvilCorp executives flawed and human, selfish but not actually evil in an absolute sense; no worse than Krista the psychologist's boyfriend who cheated on his wife and abused his dog, then turned around in the last episode and made Elliot out to be some agent of darkness who ruined his life from nothing. The grittily realistic hacking and depiction of a cyber-obsessed world where every thought is tweeted or consigned to a blog and every transaction is in some sense virtual make for compelling viewing. The awkward framing and uncomfortable silences of the series were as eloquent as the dialogue, and the performances are universally excellent, with each character's expressions and body-language spot on.

Roll on Season 2.

Hunters - 'The Beginning and the End'

Earth's only line of defence is so gloriously low-tech.

Ironically, given its title, the pilot episode of new and already cancelled alien hunting series Hunters begins at neither the beginning nor the end, but in the middle, with a man manipulating music files on a computer while a naked woman lies hogtied in a cage next to hutches full of rabbits.

So, this is the bad guy, okay. The heroes may be asshats, but this dude keeps naked ladies in cages.

Flash back 72 hours and we get to see a bit of the captive, Abby Carroll, living her normal life with her FBI husband, Flynn and their foster daughter whose dad was Flynn's late partner. Damn this guy's family life is complicated. I bet he's really deep and interesting, says the imaginary viewer for whom this show is being written. Abby is kidnapped by the bad man, who just to drive the point home gets all close in and rapey before incapacitating the half-deaf woman with a sonic weapon.

To find Abby, Flynn is roped into the Exo-Terrorism Unit, a group of cross-agency, slightly international alien Hunters working out of a 1990s police procedural set, using sonic weapons adapted by those used by the 'Hunters', their human-looking alien quarry. He works with ETU agents Regan and Riggs to try to catch our bad man - I think his human alias is McCarthy or something - but they fuck it up, largely because they are fuck ups and incapable of maintaining any kind of tactical formation.

So, are we clear on who the baddy is?

And therein lies the real problem. The leads are a bunch of fuck ups, lacking not only redeeming features, but also convincing reasons to be on this team. In terms of character, Carroll is a growly misanthrope who loves only his wife (and possibly the foster daughter, while also feeling unable to look after her properly on his own,) Riggs is Australian and Regan is impulsive, and probably an alien. The Hunters are pretty one-note - they really have to be to hold onto the bad guy flag against this bunch of chuckleheads - with their human appearance, animalistic snarling and rapey, big game hunter overtones. Maybe there will be more nuance later.

Dark Matter - 'Going Out Fighting'

It's that man again.

Just a few days after seeing the return of Wil Wheaton's black hat hacker Chaos in season 3 of Leverage, I get to see his return as Rook in 'Going Out Fighting'.

With Two's nanites breaking down, her only hope is to infiltrate the lab on Earth where she was created, in the space station atop Dwarf Star Technology's space elevator. The initial infiltration goes well, but then Rook nabs Three and Six and it's up to the rest of the team - including Two, with her nanites overclocked to let her, if you will, go out fighting at the cost of extended lifespan - have to Blink into the station to rescue them, defeat a newer version of synthetic lifeform and acquire the necessary nanites 2.0.

Fecking black oil, man.

In an odd little coda, Three is infected with mind-controlling alien squid ink (if this is a link to The X-Files I may scream.) Six spots that he's acting strangely and they are able to evict the gribbly pretty sharpish, so I'm assuming that there is more to come from that corner. Three's reaction to learning that Six has saved his life again is priceless, and of course Wheaton is an absolutel prize prick once more.

At this point, everyone seems to have forgotten about Devon. There's not even a mention of the erstwhile medic when Three is in an inexplicable state.

As we go on, Dark Matter continues to be entertaining, but soundly loses out to Killjoys in the space opera field.

Killjoys - 'Meet the Parents'

Oh, but that face!

D'av and Dutch are doin' how they do, bagging bad guys and flirting with bartenders (although in this case that's just D'av, hitting on mixologist and amateur psychologist Selina. Not much action for Dutch this episode.)

Meanwhile, Johnny is working a solo escort warrant to return Pawter to her home on Qresh, where we meet her sister Louella and her husband Hank, whom I think everyone pegged for a nogoodnik from the moment Louella's 'of course you know Hank' hinted that he'd hopped sisters after he failed to get into the Simms household via the Pawter route. Then her dad shows up, and he's a sweetie, if a little overshadowed by his as-yet-absent wife. Johnny finds a pool - or, as it turns out, baptismal font - and goes skinny dipping, luxuriating in that much water to remind us what a crapsack the rest of the Quad can be. Then Pawter finds him and takes him off to drill him in Qreshi table manners, and damn that dinner is awkward. As much as he gets to do later, Johnny's big hero moment is when Pawter's mum, Adaline, sends her fleeing from the table and he follows.

"There is a ritual for leaving."
"Yeah, but I'm not from Qresh, so I don't give a shit."

They say good manners cost nothing, but Qreshi etiquette is such a contrived form of social control that honestly they do have a cost; in dignity if nothing else.

Meanwhile, Khlyen and Fancy visit Papa Jaquobis and find nothing out of the ordinary. Khlyen tries to tap into D'av's brain to find his mother, but accidentally gives himself away and Dutch urges D'av to push back. Brains are swapped and hilarity ensues, as the actors have a ball pretending to be each other. D'av's hilarious failure to convince Fancy that he's Khlyen is especially priceless. Oddly, this leads to a new rapprochement between Dutch and her former mentor as they seek a way to swap the minds back (the non-clinical decription would be 'taser in the face') and the revelation that the woman D'av saw on Arkyn in his green goo memories was not Dutch. I'm calling it now that Dutch is a clone of whomever that was. It also brings a new understanding between D'av and his father, so it turns out Freaky Friday plots are still recommended family therapy in the Quad.

Back on Qresh, the Simms household comes under biological attack from a freezing virus created, it emerges, by Adeline herself, to render Qresh uninhabitable by the enemies of the Nine. Adeline sacrifices herself to provide a detailed prognosis and Johnny heads out to rig an exploding gas main to destroy the viral fog. Hank tries to stop him, having been paid to destroy the Simms, but Papa - who is also revealed to have been the family's carpenter before Adeline rebelled by marrying him - takes his skeazy would-be son-in-law out and then sacrifices himself to manually detonate the damaged bomb.

Pawter becomes Lady of the Land and she and Johnny kiss, which I didn't hate as much as I thought I might, although it does lead to him keeping secrets from Dutch, which makes me sad.

'Meet the Parents' is a cracking episode of Killjoys, balancing the comedy of manners with action, plot progression and just the right amount of sentiment.