Westworld - 'The Stray'

Apparently you can get a man with a gun(1).

There is something in the recursive nature of Westworld's storytelling that lends itself to intensely character-driven plot progression. After all, the essential action of each episode is made up of broadly similar stock scenes, just playing out slightly differently each time.

In addition to each day in the titular park playing out on the same basic script, but with different guests and the slowly evolving psyches of the hosts, but life behind the scenes is also cyclical. Run the park, shut down, maintenance, reboot. Chief engineer Bernard even has the same basic conversation with the Dolores host each night, analysing her responses to his questions while making her a form of surrogate for the son that he lost. This last is new information, and leads us to a fairly routine grieving, estranged parents call which is notable for being the first scene featuring someone outside the park, even on a screen.

It's all clean, but in many ways Ford's office is a room full of heads.

Ford warns Bernard against getting too attached to the hosts by telling a story about his former partner, Arnold, who wanted to make the hosts genuinely sentient. He tried to kickstart sentience by introducing a voice of god into their minds, but they kind of ended up crazy. Now, some of the glitching hosts appear to be talking to Arnold, as well as seeking revenge on those who wronged them in past iterations or roles. Arnold himself is dead, although perhaps not in an accident.

Meanwhile, engineer Elsie and security spod Stubbs head into the park in search of a 'stray', a host going for an off programme walkabout. They find his group, stuck in a loop because no-one else is cleared to use the axe and make a fire, and a shrine that the stray created featuring a pattern of dots which Stubbs identifies as the constellation Orion. When they find the stray, she realises that it is forming ideas and refusing the sleep command - as Maeve did - and finally bashes its own brains out.

In the park, Teddy has a new partner (see above). It turns out he's a bounty hunter when he's not wooing Dolores and getting murdered, although the latter two are by far his primary function. 'The Rancher's Daughter' is apparently a stock introductory scenario for the park; kill the gunslinger and rape his woman, because in case we hadn't noticed, just about every actual human involved in this park is party to an atrocity. Ford actually talks to him about this between 'lives', explaining that his role is not to protect Dolores, but to ensure she doesn't run away. Is it in response to this that he tries to teach her to use a gun, or because she hid one in her drawer and is having flashbacks of the Man in Black? Hard to say, but it turns out she can't shoot anyway. "Some hands aren't made to pull a trigger," he says, with more accuracy than he knows.

Ah; cultists. Just what every good western needs.

Ford's new storyline features Teddy, focusing his formerly vague guilt over a bad past on Wyatt, his former CO who went mad and decided that he was the sole rightful inheritor of the West. He has a cult and roams the hills, and Teddy and his partner join a posse going after them, only for the hosts involved to get slaughtered by the cult, with their masks and their knives and their weird roaring in the night. Clearly the new direction has some hardcore Heart of Darkness going on in it.

The Man in Black only appeared in flashbacks this week(2), but that motivated Delores to push Teddy to leave with her instead of delaying for his 'reckoning', and to try to learn to shoot. Finally, it moves her to actually shoot a guest who tries to rape her. For such a pivotal moment, this is somewhat lacking in tension. She can't shoot, then she can, but there's no substantive switch beyond a flashback to the Man in Black intending nothing visibly worse than the man she shoots. Still, it's preferable to our protagonist getting raped again. Oh, and William gets into a gunfight and is shot, the hit knocking him down with no lasting damage(3). He then insists he and Logan do a bounty sidequest, during which Dolores stumbles into their camp.

Perhaps the most haunting aspect of this episode is Ford's musing on the hosts as mere objects. Arnold wanted them to be conscious, he recalls, but would it really be kind to use conscious beings in the roles they demand of the hosts? But is it kind anyway to create and motivate beings to fulfill desires than can never be, to fight foes that they can never defeat for those foes' entertainment? The hosts are on some level living beings - Maeve was found to be glitching because she was infected with MRSA - so what do their many deaths actually represent? And what does the nature of the park say about its guests?

(1) Although in fact Westworld primarily seems to treat female guests the same way as male largely by offering them all men to shoot and women to screw.
(2) The obvious assumption is that he's Arnold, but if so he's clearly gone mad in his quest for real consciousness.
(3) The Man in Black, who has been hit a lot, is clearly pretty fucking hardcore.

Arrow - 'Legacy'

God damnit!

With Legends of Tomorrow not restarting until next week, we wrap up the DCTVU run with Arrow's season 5 premiere, 'Legacy'.

It's been a few months, and the Green Arrow is doing the rounds of Star City more or less solo. There are other vigilantes out there, but he refuses to work with them because a) they're amateurs(1), and b) there's no need because Thea is putting the suit back on and Diggle is coming home and Laurel is going to rise from the grave Real Soon Now.

I'm hoping that season 6 will open with Oliver actually on a river cruise in Egypt.

I also find it hard to forgive his failure to burst into song at this moment.

Oliver is of course also Mayor of Star City, although in classic Batman fashion he considers his day job to be a distraction enabling his real work. He is umming and ahhing over an Anti-Crime Initiative which would rely on the spectacularly corrupt remnant of the SCPD, although it turns out that ex-Captain Lance is back in town (and back on the bottle) after his daughter died, his ex-wife remarried, his other daughter vanished into time and kidnapped him five years earlier, and his volatile relationship with Felicity's mum went bung. Felicity, Lance and Curtis are all backing the 'new team' plan, but after the revelations of previous years, Oliver is clearly still putting 'control freak' in the strengths column of his performance review, and his only major step as mayor is the unveiling of a monumentally ugly-ass monument to Laurel Lance(2).

During the unveiling of the statue, Oliver gives an inspiring speech - still good at those then - and is kidnapped by Tobias 'Charon' Church, a ruthless gang boss intent on bringing Star City under his hand and reaping the rewards of running organised crime in what must by now be the most colossally broke city in America. Church intends to hold his collection of kidnapped worthies until the Green Arrow shows up to be murdered.

"A brilliant plant, with only two drawbacks..."

Wah-wah-waaaahh!

Oliver breaks out even as Speedy makes one last ride to rescue him, but they have to ditch and come back for the other hostages. Lance provides a handful of good men and women from the SCPD to run the op, but Church blows up the building and escapes in the commotion to take control of the entire underworld. Oliver finally accepts that it might be time for a new band.

And one of the good cops gets jacked by a mysterious archer(3).

Oh, and in flashback land, Oliver follows his promise to whatsherface to take out some Russian oligarch. He gets captured by the Bratva and is rescued by Anatoly (and if nothing else, more David Nykl is always good) who tells him that a) he's crazy and b) only the Bratva can take on that guy (I will learn names) so Oliver had better start getting initiated.

So far, we've seen no sign of changes in the post-Flashpoint Star City, which is not to say that there aren't any. Church is... not the most notable of supervillains, largely on account of him basically functioning like an actual mob boss (scary nickname notwithstanding.) And the masked archer is... You know, I kind of get the Flash thing. 'Fastest Man Alive' is a title you can expect to attract speedster competition, but 'Arrowiest Man Alive?' I don't see it.

(1) Rather than having been through a rigorous process of professional certification at Flashback-U.
(2) Some sort of Canary symbol would have been a serious step up.
(3) So, yeah... For every archer there is an equal and opposite re-archer.

The Flash - 'Flashpoint'

It wouldn't be the Flash without a little illegal detention.

The second installment of our DC week comes from popular second son of the DCTVU, The Flash, as Barry Allen's frankly bizarre and character-reversing actions at the end of Season 2 lead us into 'Flashpoint'.

Nora Allen wasn't dead, to begin with, and with this one change in the timeline a lot of things are different. Barry and Iris were nodding acquaintances at school and Joe is just a somewhat unreliable work colleague, having become at some stage a drunk. Barry still has his speed, but there's a new Flash in town, dressed in yellow and battling a speedster called the Rival(1), and Barry is just a humble CSI trying to work up the courage to ask a girl out in the coffee shop while he keeps an evil speedster locked up in a warehouse. The fact that he ultimately speed-nicks Iris's purse to create an excuse to talk to her is only marginally less creepy than keeping Thawne in a cage.

Fortunately, Iris superspecialdestinedOTPremembers Barry and it's all going swimmingly, except that even with the help of his sister, alternate 'Kid' Flash Wally West - who got his powers from lightning and nitro in his street racing days - is getting whupped by the Rival and Joe is about to get fired for turning up to work late and hungover. Still, parents are alive and date with Iris! Oh, and Barry's memories keep flushing away down the toilet of time. To keep things on track, he tries to get the band back together for the first time, roping in Cisco Ramone, the richest man in America, and Dr Caitlin Snow, paediatric opthalmologist to help stop the rival.

Caitlin: "'Scuse me."
Wally: "Hm?"
Caitlin: "Have I been kidnapped?"
Wally: "... Unclear."(2)

"I'm the real Flash, and not just because they kind of half-arsed on your suit."

The two Flashes confront the rival, and although Wally is able to subdue the enemy speedster, Wally is killed. As a note, Flash walks away from the beaten Rival, who goes for the sucker punch and is shot by Joe, making DC two for two on sucker punch shoot downs, Lena Luthor having pulled the same save when her assassin tried to gack Alex. Realising that saving his mother was just ridiculously selfish - and thus catching up with the audience - Barry releases Thawne from his dampening cell and allows him to travel back in time to just after his capture and murder Nora Allen after all. Seriously, the space-time continuum around the Allen household must just be Swiss cheesed with speedster holes. One of that day the whole thing is just going to collapse in on itself.

So, the reset is reset and everything is back to normal except that Iris and Joe are no longer talking, the prime timeline version of the Rival is getting creepy messages about alchemy(3) scratched into his home, and maybe some other things as well; we'll have to wait and see. Lessons for the future, Barry Allen; never trust a supervillain to fix things, even one who is already dead.

It feels weird that basically this episode undid the big change of 'The Race of His Life', even if that change was frankly... insane. (Seriously; no more planning for Barry Allen. Just... run around like a good little superhero.) Okay, in fairness I suppose you could see the two episodes working together to establish the new status quo which we'll be exploring in the episodes to come, and to introduce a new evil speedster. I guess we can allow that, just as long as Arrow isn't still harping on the rival archer business.

(1) Speed Force physics 101: For every Flash there is an equal and opposite Reverse Flash.
(2) This also more than a little creepy, Barry.
(3) In fact, the message is just 'ALCHEMY'.

Supergirl - 'The Adventures of Supergirl'

A face! It has a face! AND IT'S SMILING!

Okay, true believers(1), it's that time again when the DC series start up again and we all get to wonder how Oliver Queen can function in society with so little sense of humour, what exactly goes on in Barry Allen's head when he comes up with his 'plans', and whether Kara can move beyond being defined by her relationships(2).

Well, wonder no more, at least on the last one, as 'The Adventures of Supergirl' brings us Supergirl and Superman teaming up as equals, and Kara deciding that actually she kind of prefers her cupcakes at a platonic distance(3). We also get to meet a new potential industrialist villain, in the form of Lex Luthor's sister Lena. Ostensibly in the business of cleaning up after her bro's anti-Superman rampage, she comes under suspicion when she cancels her flight on a pioneering space-plane which proceeds to asplode. The cousins leap into superaction (with Clark in particular demonstrating that, tensile strengths notwithstanding, you shouldn't try to pull a crashing plane to a halt because it looks plain goofy) and then later come at Lena in their civilian roles as Clark Kent, ace reporter and Kara Danvers... his buddy.

Honestly, his hair isn't quite different enough, but I did at first mistake Tyler
Hoetchlin for Patrick Fischler, so props for that.

The show quickly establishes Teen Wolf's Tyler Hoetchner as Clark Kent, which is a role about as far from Alpha Derek as it's possible to get. As Superman we get to see that he takes the same genuine joy in saving people as his cousin - after their first super team-up to save the doomed space-plane, Kara explains: "That was awesome! I mean, that was terrible, but it was awesome." - if not in Kara letting people know that she used to change his diapers. We get little snippets of other interactions - Alex has a bit of a supercrush, while Clark is clearly, if you will, Catnip; Clark and James are bros, while Kal and J'onn are at odds over the DEO's possession of weaponised Kryptonite(4). Wynn wants to ask questions about how being a Kryptonian works, that clearly felt too personal with Kara.

I mean, I don't think we can be entirely sure of anyone who opts for this colour
scheme. That lipstick on that skin in that office; it's all a little bit noir.

Lena protests her innocence, and indeed it turns out that the saboteur of the space plane is an assassin gunning for Lena, possibly on orders from Lex, bringing in armed drones and bombs while the Supers work to protect her. Is Lena completely innocent? Well, if I'm honest I can never entirely trust Katy McGrath post-Merlin (okay, not evil in Jurassic World, just incompetent and horribly, horribly eaten(5),) but for now she seems cool, and we have sinister Cadmus science lady to worry about, who swoops the assassin out of hospital (after Lena shoots him in an act of public defence) and turns him into Metallo.

The big revisions of the season are that the DEO has shifted to its airy, downtown office instead of the DEO-cave, as mentioned that Kara has done a complete 180 on the whole James Olsen smooching thing, and that Kara has opted to write her own job description - as invited by Cat in the finale - as 'reporter'. I like that this decision follows her working with Clark, rather than just being inspired by him, as it emphasises her finding her direction rather than following someone else's.

'The Adventures of Supergirl' does much to buld on the strengths of season one, as well as introducing a full-body Superman who does not disappoint. Of particular note is that at no point is Superman given any kind of priority over our hero; they are natural equals, and Kara's move into journalism is a step to equalise their civilian identities as well, an area in which Kara has traditionally lacked the confidence she brings to superheroing.

A good start to Supergirl's sophomore year and to this year's run of CW DC series. And speaking of running, on to 'Flashpoint'.

(1) Yes, I know.
(2) And whether the Legends can continue to triumph over their own incompetence, but that doesn't pick up until next week.
(3) To revisit an old analogy.
(4) My immediate thought on this is that, not only are there Kryptonian baddies out there, but... Well, the government knows about Kryptonite, which means someone is always going to be holding. Might as well be a more-or-less friendly agency.
(5) I mean just... unnecessarily so, to the point of torture porn.

Dark Knight

Man, some sap buying this on the basis of the box art
was in for a shock.

Thanks to LoveFilm, I have been revisiting a part of my past lately, with sub-Herculean Anglo-Antipodean fantasy 'spectacular' Dark Knight, which aimed to do for Ivanhoe what Robin of Sherwood did for Robin Hood, but ends up doing what The Legend of William Tell* did for William Tell**.

The story follows Sir Ivanhoe of Rotherwood - because apparently the year 2000 wasn't going to go for a hero named Wilfred of Ivanhoe, even if he never used the Wilfred and despite the success of 1997's awesome BBC adaptation - who escapes from captivity in the Holy Land and returns to England to battle the forces of wicked King John and raise the ransom to have King Richard released. So far, so this is the story of Ivanhoe, except that John has a court necromancer, Ivanhoe is the 'chosen one' touched by some higher power (possibly God, possibly Diana, it's never really explored; just... assumed,) and radical Jewish female lead Rebecca of York is a flame-haired martial artist with nary a Semitic bone in her body.

Episode by episode, Ivanhoe confronts some bizarre mystical threat - in episodes where the enemy is purely mortal, this element is usually provided by comedy magician sidekick Odo screwing up a spell, or comedy early-science sidekick Friar Bacon meddling with forces that he ought not to wot of - while Mordour the necromancer tries to persuade John to get involved in some shenanigans which will ultimately benefit Mordour. The CGI is terrible - John's castle is not the worst example, but does show up in every episode - the fight choreography is basic, the plots are ludicrous and Ivanhoe often seeks advice from a druid named Fingal. Who lives in a cave.

Ben Pullen, Charlotte Comer and Peter Farrell as Ivanhoe,
Rebecca and Odo

How ludicrous are the plots? Well, in one episode Ivanhoe's identical semi-demonic half-brother, born of a liaison between Ivanhoe's father Cedric and a water-snake-witch in the guise of his mother, commits a double murder for which Ivanhoe is blamed. The brother of one of the victims comes after Ivanhoe for revenge. Now, Ivanhoe does have an alibi in this: At the time of the murder, he was sparring. Several miles away. With the vengeful brother. Yes, the person seeking revenge is the accused's alibi (and one of several, a fact which the 'tense' trial scene overlooks,) but apparently has decided that he is himself just lying to protect Ivanhoe.

The series is not without its saving graces, mind you. Veteran character player Jeffrey Thomas is a hoot as Mordour, and his counterpart John Bach as Queen Eleanor's scary, scar-faced bodyguard Du Bois is solid. Also, full disclosure: I'm pretty sure I only saw as much of this as I did when it was on TV because I had a massive crush on Charlotte Comer. On repeat viewing, while I'm a bit old for TV crushes now, I regret nothing. What can I say: I go for red-haired Jewish witches in a big way***.

Oh, and a special note for the score. It's... Basically, it's a really good orchestral score, but played on a mid-priced synthesiser. It's almost painful to listen to.

Dark Knight. Never look back.

* If you don't remember this one, then you probably weren't watching way too much crappy fantasy TV in the late 90s. Go you.
** Seriously, his crossbow was backwards. BACKWARDS.
*** Really; that very specific thing turns out to be my type.

Start to Finish: 8.07 - Luna Romana

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

And so I step into the unknown, with the final six installments in the original run of The Companion Chronicles (I say original because they've since restarted,) which I have not previously listened to. We begin with the climax of the Quadrigger Stoyn trilogy: Luna Romana. Sadly, a bit of a pall hangs over this one. The story features both versions of Romana, but was recorded just a few months after Mary Tamm's death, thus her only appearances are in archive recordings. Her sections are instead narrated by the third Romana, played by Juliet Landau.

During their search for the final segment of the Key to Time, the Doctor and Romana arrive in ancient Rome. The Doctor is keen to stop and smell the flowers, or at least take in a to-be-lost play by Plautus, but Romana is as goal-oriented as always, tracking the segment to a hidden machine room in a temple of Luna. In the relative and absolute future, the second Romana arrives with the Doctor in a theme park version of Rome constructed on the Moon. In both eras she encounters a man who has been waiting; waiting for the Doctor, for the TARDIS. Quadrigger Stoyn has been waiting for a very, very long time, and now he is determined that justice will be done.

The Time Lady we deserve.

Luna Romana completes Stoyn's arc. In The Beginning he just wanted to go home. In The Dying Light he wanted the Time Lords to punish the Doctor. Here, he seems intent on wiping out the universe to eradicate all traces of the Doctor's meddling. Molloy provides a decent foil, a self-appointed agent of Order more erratic and destructive by far than the Doctor whose chaos he decries. He also gets to voice all the parts in Plautus' 'Luna Romana', and Plautus himself. Ward is of course utterly assured in the role she has pwned for decades, and Landau is a surprisingly good third Romana. Turns out that she does posh much, much better than Cockney. True, her in-story turn as Romana I is a bit stilted, but that's actually a very true rendition of the character as played; one imagines that Tamm got a lot of direction telling her to be 'more proper'. The first Romana's heels also come in for a bit of a ribbing.

Luna Romana is a good finale to the Stoyn trilogy, and despite his omnicidal monomania, it's hard not to feel a little sympathy for the engineer who waited, only to discover after millennia lost in a chaotic, hostile galaxy that his job had long ago been replaced; with a self-test button. It maintains its pace for the entire extended run time (four episodes instead of two) and the three-person cast manage many more voices.

Start to Finish: 8.06 - 'The Dying Light'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

It's been some time since the Doctor left Gallifrey. Susan has been left on Earth and his old body finally gave out, but the TARDIS is still with him as he, in his second incarnation, accompanied by Jamie and Zoe, reach the mysterious Sanctuary in The Dying Light.

The Sanctuary is a vaguely religious community housed in the carved caverns of a vast mountain, which floats in a sea of sand. Its members were all washed up by the vast storms which rage across the planet, a dying world orbiting a dying star. The leader of this community is the Abbot, a man whom the Doctor knows better as Quadrigger Stoyn. He has been preparing a trap for the Doctor for man, many centuries, determined to find his way home, but the very world that has supported his endeavours may yet harbour a secret that will thwart them.

Narrated by Jamie, with Zoe as a second voice - a requirement which ensures that the inevitable explanation of technical matters is done in voice, Zoe to Jamie, rather than in narration, Zoe to audience - the second part of the Quadrigger Stoyn trilogy combines the trap narrative with a classic mysterious structure tale, with the ancient mountain city of the Sanctuary naturally proving far more than it seems. It's a stronger entry than The Beginning because it is more consistent, and maintains the theme of order (as represented by Stoyn) vs. chaos (as embodied in the Doctor.)

And this momentously brings me to the limit of my previous experience. Next time, we'll cover the double length conclusion of the Stoyn saga, with Lalla Ward and Juliet Landau (yes, that Juliet Landau) as the Second and Third Romanas in Luna Romana.

Start to Finish: 8.05 - 'The Beginning'

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

For the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who, Big Finish had a series of event releases, including the 11-part Destiny of the Doctor, a series of three stories for the main range Doctors all set in 1963, the multi-Doctor extravaganza The Light at the End, and a trilogy of Companion Chronicles which began - aptly enough - with The Beginning.

The seditious, disruptive troublemaker known as the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan are pursued by the Chancellery Guard into the workshops beneath the Capitol, where they steal a derelict time ship and flee the stifling confines of Gallifrey. Unfortunately, they are not alone on their conveyance. They have unwittingly dragged a technician named Quadrigger Stoyn with them, and when they encounter an order-obsessed race seeking to seed and control life on a planet called Earth, the Quadrigger might just decide that blood is less important than order.

Told by Carole Ann Ford as Susan, and with veteran audio man Terry Molloy as Stoyn, The Beginning was a bit of a disappointment for those hoping for a definitive account of the Doctor's previous life on Gallifrey, but it did provide another link between the Big Finish continuity and both the old and new TV series, with the Doctor bringing the Hand of Omega aboard the TARDIS after a brief, offscreen consultation with the time-shifting Clara. It also drops out travelers in to the origins of life on Earth, providing a vague rationale for the ship's fascination with that world.

The Beginning is a decent story, but probably the most underwhelming of the Big Finish anniversary entries. The fact that it leaves Gallifrey so soon and offers a first adventure only thematically linked to the reasons for the Doctor's departure are ballast that the story itself - given barely an episode and a half to itself - fails to overcome.

Star Wars Rebels - 'Hera's Heroes'

"Do you even art, Slavin?"

So, just a little filler this week, as Hera goes back to her family home - now completely occupied by Imperial forces - to retrieve a family artefact. No biggie.

Oh, wait. What I mean to say is that Hera comes face-to-face with Grand Admiral Thrawn and it's pretty much everything we could have hoped for.

On a supply run to her homeworld, Hera learns from her father that the province where she grew up during the conflict of the Clone Wars has been occupied, and that her mother's kalikori, an inherited Twi'lek artwork telling the story of a family and added to by every generation, has been stolen. While the rest of the crew run interference, Hera, Ezra and Chopper sneak into the house to retrieve the kalikori, but are caught when Thrawn appears with the local garrison commander, Captain Slavin. She bluffs that she was stealing the kalikori to sell, but as anyone familiar with his form would know, Thrawn is seriously the fuck into art, seeing it as key to understanding the races he has to fight. He knows what the kalikori is and deduces not only Hera's identity, but that the out-of-place speeder pilot is her backup, stunning Ezra before he can act.

And just... Seriously; I'm going to let the show speak for itself for a moment:

Thrawn: War, it's all you've every know, isn't it? You were so young when you survived the Clone War, no wonder you're equipped in spirit to fight as well as you do. War is in your blood. I studied the art of war, worked to perfect it, but you? You were forged by it.
Slavin: Sir, she's just a peasant!
Hera: It doesn't matter where we come from, Admiral. Our will to be free is what's going to beat you.
Slavin: You... you dare?
Thrawn: Slavin, please. You embarrass me in front of our host.
Slavin: Host? What?
Thrawn: May I introduce Hera Syndulla. Rebel pilot, freedom fighter and military leader. Daughter of your nemesis, Cham Syndulla.

The worst possibility for Season 3 was that they were going to fuck up Thrawn, but damn dude. He's psychological, philosophical and sharp as a tack. Cham Syndulla comments on the razor sharp tactics of the Empire's new commander even before Hera sees Thrawn. He goes right through her disguise and demonstrates a keen understanding of who she is as well as who her people are, and keeps his cool at all times except when his underling, Slavin, persists in being a prat. 

Hera spends a lot of time quite low down compared to Thrawn, but I expect to
see that reversed in future episodes.

Oh, and the icing on this wonderful villain cake is that this first meeting, which establishes the relationship between heroes and their new antagonist, is with Hera. After two seasons of Inquisitors and the publicity blithely calling Kanan the leader of the Rebels, this cements the fact that Hera is the captain, and the guiding force behind our rebel band. Unless you're going to argue with the Grand Admiral's characterisation of her as a military leader, and I'm not going to be the one to gainsay Ol' Red Eyes. It sets the season up as a chess match between two non-Jedi master strategists, one of whom is our female lead, and that's awesome.

This, my friends. This is the Star Wars Rebels we feared we would never get when it started getting Jedi all over it.

Thrawn leaves Slavin in charge while he goes to attend to an 'experiment'. Chopper - who also gets a character note as they come across the downed Y-Wing that Hera salvaged him from during the Clone Wars - rescues Hera and Ezra and they escape, blowing up the house on the way out, basically because fuck you, Empire. As they fly off, Thrawn orders his gunners to stand down. His experiment was to see what Hera would do in the situation he created, and he still isn't looking to chip away at the Rebellion a piece at a time. He wants to know his enemy.

If we weren't clear yet, his enemy is Hera, and he seems impressed.

'Hera's Heroes' begins as a pretty stock character episode and explodes into a real stand out of the series, establishing the threat of Thrawn and, through him, locking in Hera's previously underplayed importance in the series and the rebellion.

Star Wars Rebels - 'Steps into Shadows', 'The Holocrons of Fate' and 'The Antilles Extraction'

Ezra Bridger; one of the few teenage characters to express his rebellion by
actually getting a haircut.

The rebels are back, as Season 3 of Star Wars Rebels kicks off with the double length extravaganza 'Steps into Shadows'.

The Rebels are in a pretty dark place, and I don't just mean because they're on a planet full of monster spiders. Kanan has been blinded and while Ezra is stepping up to the plate with his can-do attitude, severe new do and mighty force powers, he's doing it with the aid of the Sith holocron, which keeps whispering to him about power and destruction like a sexy-voiced bad idea bear. Things come to a head when Captain Sato gives Ezra a promotion to Lieutenant-Commander and the lead on a mission to retrieve a number of decommissioned Y-Wing bombers from a scrapping yard. Unfortunately for Ezra, a new force stands against him, as the Empire brings in the Seventh Fleet and the newly promoted Grand Admiral Thrawn to lead the hunt for the Rebels and put the fans into paroxysms of glee.

Observe the glowy sphere thing...

Our full Imperial team this year consists of Grand Moff Tarkin, Governor Price (the new Governor of Lothal after Vader blew up the last one,) Thrawn, and old hands Agent Kallus and Admiral Konstantine. At their first meeting, Thrawn quickly deduces the Rebels next target based on the cold open and sets out his plan to destroy them.

Ezra's team heads off to recce the scrapping facility, but when they find the Y-Wings being moved up the queue he decides to make a move without backup. The team - Ezra, Sabine, Zeb, Chopper and Rex - drops in to secure the bombers, but face a hard fight against armoured scrapper droids. Some might say 'screw it; they're just Y-Wings', but Ezra is determined to see it through, trashing the control room with his new lightsabre (which is disappointingly much more conventional than the old one) and sending the facility into a crash dive into the flaming heart of a gas giant.

TOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!!

Back on Atollon, Kanan is called into the desert by a mysterious voice, and meets HOLY CRAP IT'S TOM BAKER!

Ahem. That is, he meets the Bendu, a massive, sassy force user with the voice of Tom Baker who explains that he doesn't have any truck with that whole dualism thing.

"Jedi and Sith wield the Ashla and Bogan. The light and the dark. I'm the one in the middle. The Bendu."

The Bendu encourages Kanan to 'see' using the Force, not regaining his vision, but rather the ability to truly see things for what they are. Among other effects, this allows him to realise that the spiders will not attack unless he is afraid of them. It also allows him to clear his mind enough to sense that Ezra is in danger and he and Hera shoot off with the Rebel fleet, just in time to rescue Ezra from the station - although not before the destruction of their shuttle, the Phantom - and the rest of the team, who realise they are flying Y-Wings with no hyperdrives. As the Star Destroyers close in, Thrawn calls them off, realising that this is not the extent of the Rebel fleet and wanting to get them all.

"You think only Imperials can stand around a glowy thing?
We can stand around a glowy thing too!"

In 'The Holocrons of Fate', Ezra and Kanan are contacted by Maul, who has kidnapped the rest of the crew and is holding them hostage for the Sith Holocron and Kanan's Jedi holocron. As Kanan gave the Sith holocron to the Bendu to keep it away from Ezra, they have to go into the desert to get it back, and the Bendu insists they do some trust exercises, like Ezra going into a spider lair unarmed while Kanan guides him. Ezra is much less able to trust in his Zen thing to get him past killer spiders, but ultimately trusts Kanan enough to begin to heal their master-apprentice bond and earn the holocron back from the Bendu. The Bendu explains that combining the two holocrons would provide the answer to any question, but warns that whatever one learned from that could never be unlearned.

"Nice ship you have. Shame if anything were to happen to it."

On the Ghost, Maul is all affably evil at the crew and, realising that it is their home as well as their transport, is able to root out Kanan's holocron. He recaptures the crew after they escape his robot helpers. He also mentions a time when he used to rule Mandalore. He tries to flush Kanan out of an airlock on arrival so as to leave Ezra to be his apprentice, but Kanan gets back aboard and rescues the others. Meanwhile, Maul and Ezra open the holocrons. Ezra wants to know how to destroy the Sith and Maul is looking for Hope. They both see Tatooine, before Kanan interrupts, briefly seeing Ezra in the light of the holocrons and forcing Maul to flee empty handed.

'The Antilles Extraction' is a more familiar sort of Rebels story. In order to replenish the Rebellion's stable of pilots after a series of disastrous run-ins with a squadron of TIE Interceptors, Sabine goes undercover at Skystrike Academy to attempt to extract potential defectors who are hacked off with the Empire's shoot-to-kill policy on transport vessels. Ezra is antsy about this, complaining that he doesn't like risky undercover missions, although Kanan points out that he's fine when he gets to take the risks. Sabine infiltrates and locates the would-be defectors - Wedge Antilles and his friends Hobbie and Sir Not-Appearing-in-the-Films - only for Kallus and Pryce to turn up to investigate possible defectors. While they are able to hide until they return to flight training, the opportunity to escape is a trap. Sabine, Wedge and Hobbie are captured, while Sir Not-Appearing-in-the-Films is killed as an example.

It's like that episode where Ezra was undercover as a Stormtrooper cadet, but
in black.

Sabine busts out by pwning Pryce in the world's classiest torture chamber-set designated chick fight. She rescues her remaining friends and they make a run for it, aided by Kallus, who tells her to tell Zeb they are even now. They get shot up a bit, but Ezra and Kanan pop in and extract them, and now the Rebellion has a Wedge.

After a storming second season, Star Wars Rebels is coming out swinging. 'Steps into Shadow' is not quite as good as 'The Siege of Lothal', if only for the absence of Darth Vader's heavy metal walker lift, but Thrawn is promising and Pryce a welcome heavyweight female presence on the Imperial side. I like the tension between nuEzra's growing confidence and abilities and continuing uncertainty, and more Tom Baker is always welcome, as well as bringing an intriguing new perspective and a set of slightly silly names to discussions of the nature of the force. It's also worth remembering that both previous series built up to a strong finale, so it's not really appropriate to judge these episodes against the likes of 'Twilight of the Apprentice'.

If I have a complaint, it's that there are signs of Cerebus Syndrome setting in, with the show becoming more po-faced and losing its humour as the stakes rise. I hope that this isn't a one-way street, as not only Rebels but also Star Wars as a whole has always done better when mixing up the serious with a bit of fun.

Start to Finish: 8.04 - Ghost in the Machine

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Jumping ahead after our First Doctor double bill, we go to the Third Doctor, or at least his companion Jo Grant, in Ghost in the Machine, written by Jonathan Morris and directed by Louise 'Leela' Jameson. Damian Lynch provides able support to the inimitable Katy Manning.

The Doctor has wandered off while Jo was checking out the TARDIS wardrobe, only to turn up comatose in a sealed complex full of skeletons and weird sounds. On his body is the TARDIS log recorder with a note saying 'use me', so Jo does. As she begins to learn what happened from a recording made by Dr Ben Chikoto, however, Jo realises that things are not quite right. Recordings are not quite true to their original, and something else is present on the tape; something sinister and powerful in search of a voice.

I missed a trick listening to this on the way into work instead of the way home. In the dark. The conceit of recordings that change beach time you play them back, and which begin to answer when you talk to them is creepy as hell. There's something wonderfully Sapphire & Steel about the whole thing. Manning and Lynch each have to cover a range of voices, with both actors playing both Jo and the Doctor at points, and do so superbly, and the story does something that Big Finish have always done well by toying with the possibilities of the audio format.

Next up, we kick off the Chronicles fiftieth anniversary trilogy with the First Doctor and Susan in the aptly named The Beginning.

Start to Finish: 8.03 - Upstairs

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

Rounding off a double dose of Doctor Number 1 - and he's back after the next story - our trip through the Companion Chronicles brings us to Mat Coward's claustrophobic Upstairs. The play is narrated by Maureen O'Brien's Vicki, and has no other voices except for Peter Purves providing the voice of second companion Steven.

The TARDIS materialises in an attic in London in the late nineteenth century. A little exploration reveals that it is part of a vast network of rooms, with no stairs down and a serious fungal infestation. Then they try to find their way back, and realise that they are moving in time as well as space, through a near-infinite complex of identical rooms in the attic spaces of Downing Street. That would be bad enough, even if they weren't sharing the space with a conspiracy of deferential servants intent on moulding (sorry, not sorry) a pan-temporal fungus into the God-Prime Minister of the Eternal British Empire.

Yeah, so this is a weird one. Not The Time Vampire weird, but definitely off-kilter, with its time fungus and wacky conspiracy of the self-loathing servant classes. O'Brien and Purves bounce off each other nicely, and the Doctor is done well, deep in his most know-it-all phase. The opening half is more effective than the latter, with the claustrophobic reveal of the infinite attic working better than the sinister servants, who are a little too reflexively deferential to be truly menacing. As so often has happened, I found it better on a re-listen than I remembered it being.

Next up, Jo Grant is a Ghost in the Machine. As we close in on the end of the series, I begin to ponder tackling some of the other Big Finish releases, not least to keep getting my money's worth from them. Perhaps the main range, as far as I was able to stay up to date, or maybe the also-finished (rather abruptly) Tomorrow People audio series.

Start to Finish: 8.02 - The Alchemists

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

We're going back to basics for the next Companion Chronicle, as the Doctor and his granddaughter pay a visit to Earth's history in The Alchemists.

The TARDIS puts down in 1930s Berlin as the Doctor searches for somewhere to hide the Hand of Omega, and the Doctor is immediately distracted by his desire to visit one of the struggling city's famous colloquia and speak to the great scientific minds of the day (even if he does know their theories are bunk.) Unfortunately, his appearance carrying a bag of gold from his travels draws the wrong kinds of attention, and soon Susan is on her own, trying to trace her kidnapped grandfather in a city where she had no friends.

Framed as a letter from Susan to Barbara to explain why she wants someone there to look after the Doctor if she ever leaves, The Alchemists is a fairly simple story, which ends with Susan pointing a gun at someone, which is pretty left field. It's also another pure historical, resisting the urge to drop aliens into the setting of Secret Hitler, instead choosing to use spies as the enemy and a real-world scientific cul-de-sac in place of alien tech.

Don't worry; next time we'll have weirdness, in the First Doctor story - and I believe this is the first time we've had the same Doctor twice in a row, although I could be wrong - Upstairs.

Start to Finish: 8.01 - Mastermind

Image (c) Big Finish Productions

The final season of the initial run of Companion Chronicles begins with a return to the UNIT Black Archive and its custodians, Captain Ruth Matheson and Warrant Officer Charlie Sato, joined by the totally surprising antagonist - or perhaps villain-protagonist - of Mastermind.

Deep beneath Gateshead, something is stirring. A grandfather clock chimes midnight, signalling that the Prisoner, the most dangerous artefact in the 'Museum of Terrors' is about to wake up. For Ruth and Charlie this means that they will have the chance to talk to, interrogate, and try to recruit the most dangerous being on the entire planet, the Gallifreyan supercriminal known only as the Master. They want to pick his brains, he wants to control theirs, and before they are finished, we'll learn a little bit more about everyone.

In a clever reversal, Mastermind brings back non-Companions Ruth and Charlie, and as in Tales from the Vault they are both the protagonists of their own little bottle episode and the audience for the main Chronicle, as they seek to learn how the Master came to be discovered in a sealed penthouse apartment in Las Vegas. Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso are once more solid support, but the star of the show is Geoffrey Beevers, if not the most prolific Master (four episodes on TV and a couple of dozen on audio compared to Roger Delgado's 43) is the longest running, on and off from his debut in 1981.

The story plays with the idea of the Master, not as a diabolical pantomime villain, but simply as a highly effective criminal mentalist; and of course as an unreliable narrator. After all, how can you trust anyone who uses a phrase like 'deathworm morphant'?

From the present to the past, and from science fiction to historical, we move on to the First Doctor story The Alchemists.

Westworld - 'The Original' and 'Chestnut'

Welcome to Westworld.

Remember the glorious oddity that was Fargo a few years back? And of course 12 Monkeys? Yeah, we're going through a definite phase of TV adaptations of movies, and now HBO have reached further back for their adaptation of 1973's Michael Crichton-penned Westworld.

As in the film, the titular Westworld is an elaborate vacation resort in the not-so-distant future, where guests pay for an authentic old west experience, provided for them by android 'hosts' programmed to provide whatever the guests want, but without actual awareness that they aren't real people. Through the first episode, 'The Original', we meet several hosts - Dolores, a wholesome settler girl; Teddy, her nice would-be boyfriend; Maeve, the madame of the local bar - some of the staff of Westworld - founder, Robert Ford; head programmer, Bernard Lowe; ops manager, Theresa Cullen; paranoid security chief, Stubbs; and narrative director Lee Sizemore, a colossal tool - and a few guests, only one of whom is particularly noteworthy; the Man in Black.

Visually, the Man in Black is very similar to the android Gunslinger in the
movie, and similarly driven.

The twist is that in this version, the malfunctioning androids aren't the antagonists, or at least not solely or universally. Repeatedly subjected to violence and indignity by the guests, they come back from each refit as full of hope, anger or joy as ever, only to be beaten, raped or killed again by people that they can not hurt or even fight in return. They are very much the better angels of this tale, especially by comparison to the staff who enable their treatment and guests like the Man in Black, a super-rich regular - it is implied that he drops so much money that any usual rules are suspended for him - with a long history of abusing Dolores - the oldest host and presumably the 'original' of the title, unless that's the Man in Back as the original guest - but who has tired of the usual games and, after exhausting the potential of increasing levels of one-sided violence is looking for a 'deeper level' to the game.

Meanwhile, the staff are forced to halt the roll-out of a new software update which radically increases the emotional expression of the hosts when it begins to manifest glitches and to express memories of previous narrative cycles and roles. Taking a group of hosts offline, the staff move up a violent shoot-out to cover the lack of subquests. The lasting results of the glitch force some units to be withdrawn altogether and leaves Dolores able to hurt a fly.

'Chestnut' follows Dolores as she begins to remember snatches of her past, including the death of Teddy in the shoot-out, despite her beau being seemingly recast as a black hat. Meanwhile, a pair of new guests - Logan and William - enter the park. Logan is an old hand and committed black hat, while William is a newbie and shocked by the treatment of the hosts.

"Welcome to Westworld. Meaningless robot sex?"

Logan advises William to stay focused on the meaningless sex and violence, and not get sidetracked into the subquests. As an ST, I can't help feeling for the staff of the park, who clearly devote hours to crafting narratives - treasure hunts, posses, gunfights - for visitors who consider a notional rotating exclamation mark to be a target for pointless violence.

Mind you, I don't extend that sympathy to narrative director douche, who presents a Native American sex-and-violence travelogue, only for Ford to shoot it down in favour of something mysterious that he has been working on, probably during his jaunts into the park. I smiled at that, because the narrative director really is a dick. He also trades heavily on the shallow craving for sensation that marks the thrillseeking, disruptive guests.

Just one layer of the surrogate parent business that is all over this series.

The Man in Black continues his quest, rescuing a man from the noose in order to question him about 'the maze' in his home town. He guns down just about everyone in town with his LeMat revolver* and then turns the gun on the man's daughter, but it is the daughter who answers, suddenly calm and robotic, that the maze is not for him. Not that he cares, or that the hosts have any means of stopping him. It's very notable during the shoot outs that the Man in Black gets shot. A lot. It's just that the guns can't hurt guests (although the mechanic of this is not explained, unlike in the movie where the guns have a built in sensor,) which means that the stakes and consequences of any given fight lie entirely on the hapless hosts. It's not explicit, but it seems likely that this lack of risk is the root of his discontent with the existing narratives.

Hooker with a heart of printed circuit boards.

Back in town, Maeve is glitching, putting off the customers. Sizemore has her patched and sent back with her aggression ramped up to a level that is even more off-putting, requiring another recall and tune up from Elsie Hughes, a young programmer and the last major staff character so far. She detects an infection and sends her for treatment, only for Maeve to wake up on the table, flee and find the storage chambers where the unused hosts are kept. This is of course a wee bit distressing for her.

If you're thinking 'damn, that's a lot of characters' then you've not seen the show yet, because I'm skipping, and all of them have at least basic drives, motives and characterisation by the end of episode two. It's another example of a TV series with real, heavyweight writing and production, an excellent cast and a lot of subtext to focus on. It sometimes feels that as big budget movies get dumber, big budget TV gets smarter. Westworld is definitely smart, transferring much of its satirical commentary to MMOs and other multiplayer online games in which disruptive players might detract from the enjoyment of others in search of their own, and I hope that the payoff when we learn what the 'deeper game' is all about will live up to the opening.

* Yeah, I'm a weird gun nerd (like, weird guns especially,) and the LeMat is a classic bit of Old West weirdness, exploited here by seeing the Man in Black break open what initially looks like a six-shooter and load it with nine bullets and a shotgun cartridge.

Choices - Hooten and the Lady and Hunters

Meh.

So, I talked a bit before about the fact that the current golden age of TV drama is actually a glut of product which not only allows, but requires that the viewer make choices. Or if I didn't then I meant to and just got distracted. It happens. Anyway, my latest choices not to watch are Hooten & the Lady and Hunters.

Hooten & the Lady is okay, but it's a show of another era. He's a lovable rogue, she's a posh academic; they fight crime, or at least retrieve antiquities. It's not the central dynamic I object to, not that she is comically inept in an actual fight, nor even the forced and unconvincing sexual tension. It just feels kind of weird to be watching a modern set show that is so... colonial. Our leads, a posh white Brit and a rough and tumble, mercenary Yank, travel to exotic locales, meet locals who mysteriously need a British Museum researcher and a raider of tombs to do what we will generously call archaeology for them, and retrieve priceless cultural artefacts in a quippy and irreverent fashion. Egypt in particular has a very established archaeological community and little need to bring in freewheeling, site-dynamiting dilettantes to do for them.

Yick.

On the other hand, at least it isn't Hunters, which tried to win me over to the side of its unlovable 'heroes' by introducing a heavy who puts women in cages, lures prostitutes into gratuitous threesomes in order to drill holes in their spines and makes out with his alien baby-mamma on the corpse, then murders his own child rather than allow it to be held by the humans. It's just plain nasty, and lacks the weighty substance needed to validate the unpleasantness. And, however vile the villain, our heroes are still jerks.

Sometimes you wonder why a series has been cancelled; not with Hunters. I might watch Hooten & the Lady if I found myself at a loose end; I'd have to be at my wits' end to go back to Hunters.

Killjoys - 'How to Kill Friends and Influence People'

"Who's queen?"

Our favourite team of Killjoys are in a bad place at the moment. Westerley is more or less back in Company hands, Jelco is in the wind and Delle Sayah is even more smug than usual having murdered Pawter and stepped into her place as Westerley's favourite posh bird. Johnny is pretty much inconsolable, and Khlyen is on his way for a denouement.

The Black Root ambush the team on board Lucy, which is just adding insult to injury, but Khlyen appears with his new anti-Six dart gun, having been waiting for this test opportunity. Fortunately it works and he lays out the plan: Locate the only pure source of Arkyn green not currently surrounded by Black Root gunships and kill it, and through the miracle of the plasma's limitless entanglement, all the other plasma in the Quad, thus averting an all-out invasion by his people, the original Sixes led by his daughter, Aneela.

Okay, so this is a bit fiddly, but as I understand it, Khlyen found the plasma - Holla, I think he calls it - while trying to make miracle grow for his peeps. Instead it turned them crazy; or killed them. Aneela was his daughter, and one of the craziest. When they found more green on Arkyn they made a deal with the Nine to tame and then hand over the Quad in exchange for immortality, and the deal is now due. Delle Sayah is spearheading the process of turning over a core of the strongest workers to be subjugated by overexposure to the plasma. Khlyen is working against them because he met Dutch, who is extraordinarily a double for his daughter, and wants to destroy the Arkyn plasma so that the Quad ceases to be interesting.

This episode is just thick with badassery.

With help from Alvis, Dutch determines that the scarbacks who went to Arkyn took a tree that had grown in Arkyn plasma. The Devil - Aneela - stole it back, and secured it in the Archive, a funky space bank for the super rich. Khlyen is all for ninjaing the place, but Dutch points out that this is a Killjoy mission: "Get in, get dirty, get out."

It's about now that Delle Sayah gets a call from Khlyen asking for a meet to hand over Team Dutch.

D'avin and Fancy Lee have a massive fight with security and John and Lucy dogfight with a couple of Black Root gunships despite being unarmed. Khlyen and Dutch have a punch up with more security before they get into Aneela's vault and find the tree. To kill the pure plasma, however, Khlyen has to sacrifice himself to activate the anti-plasma shot. He dies, but so does the tree, reverting all of the Sixes converted using that source (including Fancy.)

Dutch is conflicted, but Johnny assures her that you can miss someone without forgiving them, and love someone you hate. Later, he excuses himself from Pawter's wake and keeps the appointment he made with Delle Sayah using Khlyen's likeness, whereat he shoots her. Then he leaves, but not before Lucy has said her goodbyes and - having noticed him booking eight different flights out - sets him up with a travel buddy, and be still my beating heart it's Clara (and Alice the gun arm.) They nick Khlyen's super-swanky ship and head off into the black, where Aneela is still around and Dutch is gunning for her.

So, that was Killjoys season 2, and yeah; the strength of this offering is definitely part of why I was underwhelmed by season 2 of Dark Matter. They have a similar space-opera-with-grime feel, but this is markedly superior. The emotional hit of Khlyen's death was complex and powerful, and Johnny's shift towards the renegade side of things a real shakeup. Possibly my favourite scene was the shooting, not least because the actors sell that Johnny and Sayah are both legitimately surprised that he did it. I'm not convinced that Sayah is dead though; I figure that even without plasma the Nine still have a wicked health plan.

And it's been picked up for a third season, so woo!

Stranger Things - 'Chapter 5: The Flea and the Acrobat'

I love these guys.

And we're back to Stranger Things, thanks to a quiet evening in which to focus on some quality TV instead of half-watching trash.

The good news is that Hop isn't dead. Despite penetrating to the heart of Hawkins Power and Light, he is neither eaten by a monster nor disappeared by security, presumably because a police chief is a bugger to disappear. Instead they drug him and dump him back in his trailer, where he goes a bit crazy looking for - and finding - bugs. Then he gets news that a couple of hunters have gone missing, and it's kind of wonderful that when told where he refers to it as 'Mirkwood', just like the kids do. Ultimately he decides to talk to Joyce about it (see above) and props to both actors for a masterclass in confused paranoid jabbering.

Well, I say paranoid, but the conspiracy continues as a Hawkins tech comes to look at the fried ham radio. The principal explains that it's used by the AV club, and is popular among the 'non-athletic' kids.

Jonathan and Nancy set out to look for the monster, Nancy bringing a softball bat and Jonathan his dad's gun - Papa Byers briefly appearing with the intention of exploiting Will's disappearance for financial gain. They bond briefly, then fall out because each looks down on the other for being a snob of one kind or another, but stick it out to find Barb. In all honesty, Nancy is getting pretty badass by this point, and we can only hope she won't spoil it by doing something stupid like plunging headlong and solo into a mysterious and fleshy rift in a tree trunk.

The boys consider where Will could be and El tells them 'upside-down'. By reference to the D&D board, they realise that she means another plane of existence, which Dustin likens to the Vale of Shadows, an evil reflection of the material plane in this world's version of Dungeons & Dragons, which actually sounds a lot like the Upside-Down as we have seen it. At Will's funeral they quiz the science teacher about alternate planes - props to the teacher for knowing exactly what the Vale of Shadows is - and receive the titular explanation: The acrobat can go forward or back along the rope, but the flea can climb onto the sides; or the Upside-Down. For a human to pass through would take a massive amount of power to generate a gate, and Dustin - who is on fire this episode - realises that there is a massive power spike of some kind messing with all of their compasses.

Glub.

As they attempt to track the distortion, however, El recalls her own first encounter with the Upside-Down. Placed in an isolation tank in order to better focus her powers on spying on a Russian, she was pursued by the creature. Frightened for her friends - and in particular Mike - she deflects the compass needles, which precipitates a fight with Lucas. She intervenes, hurling Lucas aside, which of course sparks anger from Mike and ends with Lucas storming off and El running away.

In the woods, Jonathan and Nancy find an injured deer. Neither can quite bear to put it out of its misery, but then it is dragged away. Nancy finds a mysterious and fleshy rift in a tree trunk, and when Jonathan doesn't hear her first call, goes in solo and headlong, finding herself in the Upside-Down and confronting the monster. This time, Jonathan hears her scream, but finds only her pack, missing the closing rift entirely. I can not imagine this is going to work out well for him. It's like Richard Marx' 'Hazard' all over again.

'The Flea and the Acrobat' has some brilliant moments, and moves the plot forward, but I admit I left feeling a little let down by Nancy's last-minute dive into stupidity. I know she wants to save her friend, but seriously... Ah well. The series is still a cut above average and, while boneheaded, it's a very eighties decision to have made. Overall, the eightiesness remains on point, with basically every aspect of the production spot on.

Moreover, despite a somewhat reduced role this episode, Hop and Joyce were a delight, with Hop's appearance at the door and insistence on unscrewing every Christmas light bulb to look for microphones a particular highlight.