The Dragon Prince

For identification purposes, this is not a Bulbasaur.

In a world of magic, humans have long been exiled from the magical realm of dragons and elves for their practice of dark magic, which draws power from other creatures, rather than the ‘primal sources’(1). In fear of an attack, King Harrow of Katolis allows his adviser, the mage Viren, to assassinate the Dragon King and his unborn son. Faced with a retributory attack by Moonshadow elf assassins, Harrow seeks to send his sons Callum and Ezran away, but Ezran stumbles on the egg of the Dragon Prince in Viren’s workshop, and the two princes go on the run, along with the Moonshadow elf Rayla, seeking to return the egg to the dragons and prevent the war that Viren is intent on fomenting.

The Dragon Prince clearly shares some DNA with its co-creator’s former work, Avatar, both in its animation style and in its tone(2). The overarching story is serious, the villain of the piece a horror, but there is much humour in the day to day situations and the relationships between the characters, including Viren’s principal henchlings, his children Claudia – a committed dark mage, but viewing it purely as a tool and showing compassion towards other intelligent beings – and Soren – a jock jerk with a decent heart, but a desperate need to prove himself to his father.

The first season of The Dragon Prince is very short – just nine twenty-five-minute episodes – but has a lot to like in it. The characters are fun – a favourite of all my family is the princes’ Aunt Amaya, a deaf-mute general and all around badass, who takes no shit and refuses to be flannelled by Viren, even before he goes full evil – the story simple, but with a lot of appeal. Also, the elves are lairy Scots whose magic is part of their physicality, rather than floaty and ethereal beings, and I appreciate a show that does something a little different with its magical creatures.

(1) Sun, moon, stars, sky, earth and water, if you’re interested.

(2) Also its elemental motifs and cute animal companions.

Star Trek: Discovery - 'Context is for Kings'

Discovery.

Some time after her court martial, Michael Burnham is being transferred to what is rumoured to be a dilithium mine(1) when the shuttle is caught in a field of electricity eating micro-organisms. The pilot is lost in space, but the shuttle is rescued by the USS Discovery, an advanced science vessel. The Discovery is under the command of Captain Gabriel Lorca and First Officer Saru, who is understandably perturbed to see Burnham again. In addition we meet the former helmswoman of the Shenzhou - now sporting a cranial implant of some kind - Engineering chief and astromicologist Paul Stamets, security chief Landry and super-perky allergen sufferer Sylvia Tilly, whom I will probably end up either adoring or despising.

Burnham is assigned to work in engineering, working numbers for some weird spore-based technology, and then placed on an away mission to investigate the wreck of the Discovery's sister-ship USS Glenn. What they find is the crew, twisted and torn apart by mysterious torsion forces, and a Klingon boarding party ripped apart by parties briefly unknown, and eventually revealed to be some sort of mutated spore-pig. Cornered by the beast, Burnham risks her own life to distract it and allow the others to reach the shuttle, while she crawls though the Jeffries tubes reciting passages from Alice in Wonderland.

"Please don't murder me in my bed. Please don't murder me in my bed..."

The away team escapes and Lorca offers Burnham a job. He admits to engineering her 'rescue' - the fate of the shuttle pilot is never discussed, by anyone, incidentally - but denies that the Discovery and the Glenn were researching bioweapons. The spore-based technology is, rather, a new form of propulsion, intended to permit near-instant travel by following the panspermia network created by drifting interstellar sores. It's shiny AF, with only a slight side-effect of occasionally turning people inside out, and would let them pop out of nowhere on the Klingons and go boo with impunity.

The shuttle leaves without Burnham, Saru has a prey moment, and Tily asks Burnham to be her mentor on the quiet. Landry delivers the spore pig to Lorca in his unsettling autopsy room.

Discovery continues to impress technically, and presents us with a cracking away mission plot this episode. With the relative gore and violence levels now well-established, the big reveal this time is that the USS Discovery herself is effectively terra incognita, in her totality for Burnham, but in part for pretty much everyone on board, since she is running some 80 war-critical secret projects at any one time and everything is compartmentalised and locked up behind easily-defeated breath locks. Only time will tell what she has up all of her sleeves, or what the spore drive can really do.

"You're very tall."

We still only have a passing understanding of who Michael Burnham is, but that question has been pushed aside by 'what the fuck is going on with Lorca?' Gabriel Lorca is a sinister and slightly magnificent bastard, all about the science and the mind-games and the constant testing. He has he skeleton of a Gorn (not supposed to have been encountered yet) and a single tribble (not supposed to be possible) and keeps secrets with the same unthinking ease that most humans apply to breathing. Also, he's Draco Malfoy, so he's got that working against him.

Creepy Title Quote: "Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for Kings." Apparently Captain Lorca considers himself exempt from the rules which bind lesser souls, and it's hinted that he sees Burnham as a potential protege in this regard, after her actions at the Battle of the Binary Stars.

(1) Apparently we're still before the Starfleet Penal Reforms which will see Tom Paris convicted of treason and sentenced to an extended outward bound course in New Zealand.

The Defenders

The Defenders.

Built as it is to binge, I thought it as apt to do a single, whole-series review of The Defenders as to do a blow-by-blow, especially considering my current rate of writing.

The Defenders, for the sake of internet historians of the far future, was Netflix’s answer to the Avengers, bringing together their corner of the MCU and uniting the four superpowered Defenders of New York who aren’t Spider-Man(1). Mind you, it takes its sweet time doing it, being a couple of episodes in before anyone actually meets up.

Danny Rand and Coleen Wing are chasing the Hand around the world when they get a tip off from a dying man that the real fight is in New York. They track down a weapons shop in New York and find a whole mess of dead martial artists. They confront the team sent to clean the crime scene, but they turn out to be a group of black youths offered the work by a man in a white suit. One of them is the brother of Candace, the hostess who was murdered at the end of Luke Cage, leading to the much anticipated ‘Luke Cage vs. Iron Fist’ event, in which Danny Rand bloodies his knuckles on Luke’s indestructible skin, before finally knocking him down with the Iron Fist. Then they both run from the law.

Now I have a lawyer. Ho-ho-ho.

Elsewhere, Foggy gives Matt some overflow, pro bon cases to help him kick the Daredevil habit. One of these is the case of Jessica Jones, who sort-of takes the case of a missing architect because someone calls to tell her not to. This leads her to an apartment full of explosives, and later brings the architect himself to her office with a gun(2). This particular Mexican standoff is interrupted when Elektra shows up, all Black Sky, to knock Jessica about and kill the architect. Matt shows up as her attorney, but she gives him the slip and is able to see him doing some ninja parkour shit(3).

Then there’s an earthquake.

Luke gives Danny an earful about privilege, and the four each make their way towards Midland Circle, an upscale newly built corporate headquarters full of evil and built on top of the big hole from Daredevil Season 2. Danny goes in all corporate to declare war on the Hand, only for their leader, the mysterious Alexandra, to order him captured. There follows a massive fight, with first Luke, then Matt and Jessica showing up to help, and the four of them finally being driven off by Elektra.

This restaurant scene has been a focus of the hype, and it was pretty cute.

Our totally not a superteam repair to a Chinese restaurant to regroup, with Matt and Danny explaining to Jessica and Luke who the Hand are(4) and that they will go after their loved ones. Stick then pops up to let us know that the Chaste – who were formed by the Elders of K’un-Lun, incidentally – have, other than him, been wiped out, give some deep background and name the five fingers of the Hand – Alexandra, Madame Gao, Sowande – the man in the white suit – Bakuto and angry Japanese challenge-seeker(5) Murakami. These five were booted out of K’un-Lun for trying to live forever and have been at it ever since. From scenes of the Hand, however, we learn that Alexandra blew the last of their stores of ‘the substance’ to resurrect Elektra. Jessica leaves, Alexandra catches up with them, but Jessica returns and hits the Black Sky with a car before another big brawl, in which Matt stuffs it by going after Elektra alone and trying to get through to her.

Our heroes get police protection for their friends, but play it coy with Misty for the sake of tension. Luke is able to capture Sowande, and from Alexandra’s actions and his taunting they realise that the Hand wants Danny. Stick kills Sowande after he tries to escape with Danny, and the rest of the team decide that Danny needs to be kept off the front line until they know what the Hand want with him. Danny isn’t having it, because he’s the Immortal Iron Fist, damnit, so they have to tie him to a chair. He and Luke bond a little, but then Stick uses drugged incense to incapacitate Luke and tries to kill Danny. Unfortunately, he drags it out too long, Matt and Jessica get back from finding the architect’s plans to blow up Midland Circle and bury whatever the hole leads to, and in the end Elektra clashes the party, kills her father figure and kidnaps Danny, before murdering Alexandra and declaring herself the new boss of the Hand.

Punchy punchy kick kick.

 Jessica, Luke and Matt are picked up by the cops in suspicious proximity to one stabbed guy and one decapitated corpse. They eventually break out of the precinct and go to Midland Circle, where they fight the remaining fingers of the Hand to an inconclusive result. Colleen meets them with a stack of explosives, which she and Clare go to set up while the others go down to rescue Danny, who has let himself be gulled into fighting Elektra, allowing her to redirect the Iron Fist and open the dome structure buried deep beneath the city, which turns out to be a vault covering a dragon’s skeleton. Because why the fuck not.

Gao explains that the Subtance is basically ground up dragon, and that removing the bones from beneath New York will basically fuck the city’s foundations, because never mind rock and roll, they built this city(6) on dragon’s bones. The others arrive and a battle royale ensues, while Coleen and Clare set charges and battle Bakuto and some goons. Misty shows up with the assist, and gets her arm sliced off before Coleen decapitates Bakuto, who inconsiderately falls on the detonator controls, starting an unstoppable countdown.

Matt gets the others to evacuate, while he tries once more to get through to Elektra, despite the fact that she was a dangerous, thrill-seeking egoist at her best. Murakami gets thrown off the lift, Gao gets fatalistic, Jessica catches the falling lift by its cables and Luke persuades the police to evacuate before the building comes down on top of Matt, Elektra, Murakami and Gao.

Nuns!

The police drop the matter. Jessica reopens Alias Investigations. Luke goes home to Harlem. Danny offers to pay for Misty’s treatment at a state of the art hospital (presumably doing great work with robot arms,) then crouches on a roof like he’s Daredevil. And Matt wakes up in what appears to be the Budapest convent hospital from Dracula.

So, that was The Defenders, a perfectly serviceable series which takes the uniqueness of the four Netflix Marvel series and combines them into something kind of generic. The best stuff stylistically is when they’re operating apart and cutting from the visual style of one series to another between scenes – perpetual darkness for Matt Murdock, seventies sepia-toned for Luke Cage, washed out noir for Jessica Jones, entirely bland television colours for Danny Rand(7) – but that only carries the story so far, and when they unite the series proves to share Iron Fist’s lack of a distinct visual language. Sadly, it also shares the lacklustre martial arts work, although having the other three means that you get their distinctive styles, and say what you will about Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, but there’s a thesp who put the hours in on his fight training.

Name dropping historical events liek s

The story is decent enough, but suffers somewhat from being basically what the League of Shadows/Assassins is all about in Batman/Arrow – take one city, add ninjas, stir until well and truly done – but with less ruthless Utopianism and more dragons. Elodie Yung does her best with what she’s given, but Elektra is just too much of a cypher and the Black Sky prophecy too vague for the show to paint a compelling picture of the Hand’s internal power struggles. It is also unclear how using up the last of the Substance makes them vulnerable when Bakuto has come back from the dead and can still shrug off bullet wounds in the chestal area. They still seem to have little to fear save decapitation and massive organ failure, putting them just one down on Connor MacLeod.

The Fingers of the Hand are a mixed bag, with Sigourney Weaver a menacing presence, but never a physical threat because of the characters frailty. Murakami has quirks, more than character – only speaks in Japanese, seeks a challenge(8) – and while Sowande has some personality, Bakuto is as bland as everything else coming out of Iron Fist, leaving Madame Gao to do most of the heavy lifting. It was also frankly disappointing that, after Stick warns Luke that Sowande can mess with the functions of his body and kill him without physical trauma, Luke turns out to be as impervious to the old pressure point deal as he is to blades, bullets and harsh language. 

And watching Danny try to kung fu Luke is priceless.

Truth to tell, Luke Cage is a bit of a problem here all around, his power set being basically a massive fuck you to all martial artists. One on one he could have a good fight against someone agile enough to make him wear himself out, but it never happens. Occasionally he gets slapped around by Danny or Elektra, but he really just gets up again. Danny, meanwhile, once more demands the question ‘how did you become the Iron Fist?’ I know he plunged his hand into the molten heart of Shao Lao, but how was this yoyo the greatest martial artist in K’un-Lun when he gets his arse kicked so much? He’s really got nothing but the Fist going for him a lot of the time, and not even that when he’s trying to charge off despite knowing that’s what the Hand wants, or getting suckered into shattering the vault created by a former Iron Fist. Never has a character so ably converted a strength into a liability.

Despite this, some of my favourite character moments in the series are between Luke and Danny, and I confess I’m broshipping them more than a little, and that at least is something that they’ve got right. Luke Cage might have another solo series in him, but I’d definitely take a Heroes for Hire show over Iron Fist season 2.

Speaking of characters, let’s talk about journeys.

Welcome to the Jungle.

Jessica Jones begins the long walk back to humanity, and probably has the best arc of any of the leads. Now in part this is because she appears at the start of the series slightly regressed from the end of her first season, still refusing to take on the cases being thrown at her since she became famous, and by the finale is seen opening up the office again. Luke Cage has a lot to do with that, of course, giving her the chance to cauterise one old wound for reals, but working with a team, be it ever so dysfunctional, brings her out of the darkness. It’s a shame not to see Trish and Malcolm play more of a part in that, but so it goes. We’ve got a lot of characters knocking around and some of them are going to miss out. I did like that they acknowledge her turning this particular corner by greeting Malcolm with something other than an angry insistence that he stop trying to get her to act like a human being.

Luke Cage and Danny Rand do their best work playing off each other. Danny is a big picture guy, while Luke looks after his own. They help each other see things from another perspective, with Luke knocking a sliver of sense into Danny, and Danny showing Luke that he can’t always protect his own by being insular. It’s disappointing that Danny doesn’t grow more significantly during the course of the series, but he is at least forced to confront the fact that he has issues, even if he doesn’t really do anything about them.

The big problem with Elektra is that she is less a character and more Matt
Murdock's issues.

And finally, Matt Murdock, who… Well, if he had died in this series, it would have been no more than he deserved, and actually an apt ending to the arc established in Daredevil. Unfortunately, they kind of take a weird direction with him. He is pitched as the team’s natural leader, but besides his reflexive secrecy, he repeatedly prioritises saving Elektra, even after she proves herself to have utterly embraced her dark side, leaving the team to their own devices because of this. One of my friends was pondering to what degree Jessica Jones gets a pass for being a bitch because she’s pretty, but Matt at least is willing overlook frankly a lot of murder, purely because he really fancies Elektra. I get it; she’s his dark reflection, and saving her means he is not damned, but this is an arc which does not sit well with this ‘natural leader’ thing, an informed trait if ever there was one.

So anyway, that’s The Defenders, which if nothing else provides strong evidence that secret ninja magic crime cults may be over as a thing. Compared to their appearances in Daredevil, the Hand just don’t seem all that mysterious. The Five Fingers are near-immortals with thousands of years behind them, but only Madame Gao has the right sort of unearthly feel to her. Sigourney Weaver does fine work with what she has, but lacks the time to get properly established. They just come off as regular – if highly successful – criminals, and even the dragon bones that they are digging for don’t really feel as epic as they ought.

In fact, ‘not as epic as they ought’ is pretty much the watchword of the series. Like the Avengers movies, it has a lot to fit in, and in doing so doesn’t reliably do any of it much beyond ‘quite good.’

(1) The fact that Spider-Man is a thing in the MCU does sting The Defenders’ cred a little. I mean, even if Iron Man has moved upstate, the friendly neighbourhood wall-crawler is only in Queens. Does spider sense not work on ninjas? Does MCU Spidey even have spider sense?

(2) The second of many times I thought Malcolm was going to get fridged.

(3) Not sure how she manages this, since she’s a good PI but he’s supposed to be able to track a heartbeat at half a mile.

(4) A spiel which goes down like a cockroach sandwich.

(5) That is literally his character: He’s angry, he’s Japanese, and he seeks for something to challenge him.

(6) And by implication, given how much time they spend talking about this being ‘just a city’ and that Elektra can expect to see many cities fall, many, if not all cities.

(7) Seriously, the sin of Iron Fist – well, one of them – is not really having a style to back up its lack of substance. It’s almost unique in being a series that needed its foreign language scenes to be dubbed instead of subtitled.

(8) And yet is not determined to pit himself one on one against the Iron Fist (which would probably be disappointing) or even the Black Sky.

Castlevania – Season 1

"I don't care."

A young woman begs Dracula to teach her medicine, and to come out of the shadows to teach humanity to be better; to escape the bonds of superstition and ignorance. Some years later, she is burned as a witch by a tyrannical priest, unleashing Dracula's fury upon all of Wallachia.

After giving a year's grace to clear out, in order to properly raise an army from hell, Dracula sets about his dread work, unleashing nocturnal beasts upon the towns and cities of Wallachia. In the city of Gresit, itinerant former vampire hunter Trevor(1) Belmont falls in with a group of Speakers – nomadic oral historians and occasional magicians – who have been accused by the Bishop – the same who burned Lisa Tepes(2) – of bringing down the demonic infestation by being insufficiently god-fearing. Trevor protects the Speakers and fights the Bishop's clerical leg-breakers. Then he and Magician-Speaker Sypha Belnades lead the townsfolk against the attacking demons, before falling into the catacombs of the wandering Castle Dracula and waking Dracula's son Adrian(3) from his slumber to aid them in the destruction of his father.

And that's it. Just four episodes in this opening season of Netflix new animation. Atmospheric, dark, and packed with as many f-bombs and sassy comebacks as they could get Richard 'Thorin' Armitage to set to audio, it's pretty damn good. The cast is excellent, although Armitage is the clear standout just because he has the best writing. Everyone else is pretty sobre and serious, but Belmont gets to snark like a boss. Armitage is a really good straight actor, but for full value you really need to let him sass a bit, and this show lets him roll. The line 'Ask your floating vampire Jesus' is one for the ages.

 

"Fine. We'll do the badass walk, but I still don't care."

While overtly anti-clerical, deep down the series reserves its scorn for false shepherds. The Bishop is dedicated not to God's work, but to his own glory, and reminiscent of Pratchett's Deacon Vorbis. His acolytes are bruisers and assassins in clerical garb, and the one 'proper' priest is genuinely able to bless water so that it burns demons. This is much more interesting than just dismissing religion altogether.

Anyway, that was all there was so far. A longer Season 2 is expected next year. I just hope they keep the cast intact.

(1) A good, solid Wallachian name.

(2) Yes, as a married woman she went by 'Mrs the Impaler'.

(3) Another fine Wallachian name, although he also goes by Dracula's favourite impenetrable alias, Alucard.

Sense8 – ‘Who am I?’, ‘Obligate Mutualisms’, ‘Polyphony’ and ‘Fear Never Fixed Anything’

"Who am I? Do you mean where I'm from? What I one day might become? What I do? What I've done? What I dream? Do you mean ... what you see or what I've seen? What I fear or what I dream? Do you mean who I love? Do you mean who I've lost? Who am I?

"I guess who I am is exactly the same as who you are. Not better than, not less than. Because there is no one who has been or will ever be exactly the same as either you or me."

Okay, so... I'll be honest, I didn’t; review the first three episodes of this series before because I figured we'd binge through the season and I'd do it in a oner. Then the news of the cancellation and unresolved cliffhanger hit and we lost momentum. Now there's the promise of a last hurrah and resolution, so... Here we go.

Season 2 of Sense8 retains much of the feel of Season 1, with our multicultural cluster of Sensates(1) each doing their own thing, but there's a much stronger arc feel, not least because three of our characters are deep into the arc so that their thing is arc thing.

Will and Riley are still hiding from Whispers, with Will playing cat and mouse as each tries to locate the other. Whispers pins them down to Iceland, thanks to an elaborate ruse with yoghurt and seagull soundtracks, while Will ultimately gets the drop on him, allowing the cluster to set up a meeting with one of his superiors. Unfortunately, Whispers reverses the advantage by murdering his boss after he makes a deal with the cluster, forcing them back on the run but leaving Will with actual blockers instead of heroin.

Never alone.

Capheus is going about his business, but having attracted the interest of a journalist has become quite a celebrity, even beyond his neighbourhood. He is approached to consider running for office, and while he protests that he is not a politician, he is told that people don't want a politician; they want a leader. He goes to the journalist, possibly for advice, but is driven off by her jealous colleagues, who hint that he is a fiction she created and crudely asserting that his interest must be carnal and is thus hopeless, because she is gay(2), leaving him a little adrift.

Wolfgang and Felix hover on the edges of a potential gang war, and are unexpectedly offered a club to run. The owner's secretary makes eye contact with Wolfgang and starts turning up naked and sexy in his brain, revealing herself as part of another cluster, one apparently aligned to some extent with BPO for protection. I practically punched the air when Wolfgang actually told his cluster-mates about this instead of keeping it as a pointless secret.

Kala remains somewhat disconnected, although her pharmaceutical knowledge is key to understanding the blockers, and she begins to discover not only that her father-in-law's religious intolerance is deep-seated and hateful, but that her husband is more interested in making delivery dates than providing good quality drugs.

I'd completely forgotten that Sun fought the same cop on a roof in her
underwear.

Sun is forced to escape from prison after her brother hires guards to murder her. She goes on the run with the old lady who killed her abusive husband, although her partner in crime then hands herself in so that Sun can get away. Sun goes into hiding with her old martial arts teacher, who is then visited by what seems to be an honest cop, who fought Sun in their student days and was roundly thrashed.

Nomi remains in hiding with Bug, doing the cluster's hack work, until Bug suggests a way around her problems. Reaching out to 'the Guy', he arranges a meeting in a cinema showing one of Lito's films (giving us a lovely scene in which Bug remotely fanboys at Lito,) with a contact who shows in a V for Vendetta mask and offers 'e-death' – Sense8's version of The Dark Knight Returns' clean slate – in exchange for an unspecified but non-tawrdy future favour. Nomi's records and warrants promptly vanish.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure everyone else in the bar just saw Lito neck eight
tequillas.

Lito's career founders as he is typecast as doomed, gay characters, causing him to reject an invitation to be president of the Sao Paulo Pride Parade. He also reminisces about one of his first gay lovers, a photojournalist who turns out to have been part of Angelica's cluster and a victim of BPO's purges. Lito returns to the bar from last season to drink shots with the cluster (not sure how that works to an outside eye) in part in memory of Jonas, who is killed having outlived his usefulness. The bartender tells him that Lito's kiss inspired him. He proposed to his boyfriend and they have enjoyed the best year of their life. This not only shows Lito what he can achieve as a gay actor, but propels the cluster into their next big act of rebellion.

Their last run at Whispers revealed how big the organisation is, which they realise means that there must be lots more Sensates out there. Thus, Riley agrees to DJ a gig for one of her old contacts, in order to put the message out. Three conspicuous figures – one in saffron robes, one some sort of biker and Sylvester McCoy in a Barber hat – see the gig, and Riley draws McCoy to 'visit' the stage, prompting him to flee, but getting their message out before she and Will escape along the Thames ahead of Whispers and his goons.

Man this season is a rollercoaster ride, with first the cluster and then Whispers getting the whiphand week by week(3). Next episode is going to be a downer by that pattern, but on the upside, Sylvester McCoy!

(1) Although this term is actually dropped for the most part in favour of 'homo sensorium'.

(2) She may well be, but the immediate read of this is 'won't sleep with us'.

(3) Or however often we manage to catch it.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Return

Gypsy, Crow, Joel Robinson and Tom Servo

It's got to be twenty years since my University pal James 'Gonzo History' Holloway first introduced me to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, a ramshackle series in which a captive held aboard the 'Satellite of Love' – first Joel Robinson, played by series creator Joel Hodgson, then Mike Nelson, played by head writer Mike Nelson – was forced to watch terrible movies by a pair of mad scientists in the bowels of Gizmonic Institute – first Drs Clayton Forrester(1) and Larry Erhardt, then the latter was replaced by hapless goon TV's Frank, who in turn was replaced by Dr Forrester's mother Pearl, who went on to become the lead Mad in the later seasons, assisted by allegedly intelligent gorilla Professor Bobo and the allegedly non-corporeal Observer – for reasons which were nebulous at best. The test subject would watch the movie in the company of two robots, Crow and Tom Servo, and make fun of it while visible in silhouette. The show began its life on local TV before graduating to Comedy Central, a theatrical movie and a final run on the old Sci-Fi Channel(2), oft known as the channel where good series went to die, eventually closing down at around about the same time I first saw it.

 

Crow, Mike Nelson and Tom Servo

 After a couple of decades in the wilderness, with various cast members creating the Rifftrax website – essentially stripping the concept to its bare bones and providing just the riffs to be listened to alongside the movie – and a Flash series centred around the bots, as well as doing non-MST3K stuff like writing a novel about fictitious killer rats(3), Hodgson launched a Kickstarter campaign which eventually funded the creation of fourteen new episodes of the series, featuring a new test subject – Jonah Heston, played by comedian Jonah Ray – and new Mads – Dr Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), daughter of Clayton and self-described 'third generation supervillain', aided by Max, aka TV's Son of TV's Frank (Patton Oswalt), and a crew of skeleton themed mechanicals and musicians – who trap him on the dark side of the moon in order to drive him mad and perfect Kinga's 'liquid media' technology so that she can rule the world of broadcasting in some fashion.

Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day), Crow, Gypsy, Voice of Crow (Hampton Yount), Jonah (Jonah Ray), ... I have no idea who that guy is, possibly a puppeteer, Voice of Tom (Baron Vaughn), Joel (Joel Hodgson), Max (Patton Oswalt), Tom

 The show is basically the same. It's shot on digital and streamed via Netflix, so it looks much nicer than the usual YouTube VHS grab, although not so different from the recent remasters released officially. There's a new big band version of the opening music ('Love Theme from MST3K') performed by the Skeleton Crew, and it kind of throws me every time that Day is singing her own lines instead of lip-synching. It's also a bit of a shock to have the SoL's control bot, Gypsy, speaking with an actual woman's voice instead of a man's falsetto, and Tom and Crow are both more mobile thanks to the involvement of Jim Henson puppeteers and just the general advance of puppet technology. There are cameos from old cast members and others, including Mark freaking Hamill as a space carnival huckster, because why not. We even get some sort of running plot about Kinga planning to marry Jonah in a blatant ratings grab, while Max schemes to usurp her affections.

But at the core of it, it's the same old MST3K. We open with the invention exchange – dropped for most of the Nelson run – and then Kinga and Max explain how bad the movie is going to be. Jonah and the bots sit – mostly; Tom is now able to levitate in the theatre to mime interactions with the screen, and Gypsy drops in to throw out a joke twice an episode – in the theatre and riff at the movie, interspersed with skits and commercial break-style bumpers to maintain the expected pace on a streaming service. It's an incredibly affectionate recreation of the original, with a similar sense of humour evident in the riffing.

And then Jonah gets eaten, but I guess we'll look at the implications of that(4) next season, if there is one.

Meet the new Shadowrama, same as the old Shadowrama.

Season 11 – the show is internally numbered as a continuation of the original, including a nod to the 200^th episode – begins with Reptilicus, a Danish kaiju movie with a more than passing resemblance to British kaiju effort Gorgo (riffed in the original series.) This is high art, however, compared to Cry Wilderness, a shitty bigfoot movie with unexplained native American shenanigans and big game hunters and I don't know what else. Also, the Reptilicus episode features a catchy song about the kaiju of the world.

The Time Travelers is a low budget, downbeat scifi with a tacked on ending and a deeply annoying comic relief character. Avalanche is a disaster movie with actual stars (an aging Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow,) although the film is most notable for how long the Avalanche takes to arrive and how quickly it's over. During the episode, Joel and the Bots' attempt to curtail the trend of monster/disaster mashups by getting copyright on as many titles as possible.

"But the cowboy didn't like him so he shot him in the fa-ace!"
"Wow, that's meta."

Following the trend of taking its sweet time to get to the point, The Beast of Hollow Mountain is two-thirds of a western about the rivalry between a Texan rancher in Mexico and the local big noise over cattle and dames, before the frankly bizarre appearance of a third act allosaurus.

Starcrash is a 1978 Star Wars knockoff which shows that the perils of trying to knock out an effects heavy knock-off in double quick time were not discovered by the Asylum in the age of video. It stars Hammer Horror sexpot Caroline Munroe, master thespian Christopher Plummer and 80s heartthrob-turned-CBeebies bedtime story reader David Hasselhoff, which I confess is a sentence I never expected to write.

Yes, this happened.

The Land that Time Forgot is, by MST3K standards, a classic of the adventure genre, in that it is actually shown on TV with a fair degree of regularity. Starring American matinee idol Doug Mcclure at the height of his British monster movie period, it follows Mcclure and a crew of British character actors who hijack the U-boat and, due to the machinations of the German crew, end up in an isolated land filled with dinosaurs and cave people, as you do. Just in case we thought the show was getting mainstream, this is followed by Italian sword and sandal dickery The Loves of Hercules, in which a woman is cuddled to death by a tree; for realsies.

PT Mindslap.

Yongary: Monster from the Deep is the Korean Reptilicus, and is followed by a two-episode spectacular. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is a slow, dull fantasy movie, and I'll be honest, I'm astonished that this one was never covered in the original series. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II is an almost entirely unrelated dull fantasy movie that is slightly less slow, has more blatant T&A, but doesn't have a score by James Horner(5). Neither is as excruciating to sit through as the soul-crushingly dull Carnival Magic, but Mark Hamill sings in one of the skits, so that's topping the best of lists right there.

We continue with the deeply meta streaming service Christmas episode, featuring The Christmas that Almost Wasn't, in which Santa hires a lawyer to help him launch the department store Santa craze and prevent his landlord foreclosing on the workshop. Then we finish with another Mcclure Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptation, At the Earth's Core, in which Mcclure wears a suit reminiscent of Mark Hamill's space huckster and accidentally ends up in a hollow Earth when he and bumbling academic Peter Cushing try to drill through a hill in Wales, discovering human tribes – including Starcrash's Caroline Munroe – oppressed by psychic pteranodons.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Call it a comeback; I say it never left.

(1) No apparent relation to the lead in the 1950s movie version of War of the Worlds.

(2) Rather than the current SyFy Channel, home of crappy monster movies.

(3) Mike Nelson's Death Rat, by Mike Nelson

(4) I'm pretty sure that the implications will be 'none'.

(5) The score in Wizards of the Lost Kingdom is actually the one composed for Battle Beyond the Stars, but Roger Corman was never a man to waste material, be it ever so inappropriate.

A Series of Unfortunate Events - 'The Bad Beginning, Part 1'

It is uncommonly difficult to accurately and comfortably assign to the
television adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events a definite genre. The
closest I can get is probably the Gothic; a word used here to mean a style of
fiction characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent
events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay

From the first, Netflix's adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events announces its intention to hew closely to the conceits of the original. Patrick Warburton is a constant, dour presence as Lemony Snicket, self-appointed and duty-bound chronicler of the story of the Baudelaire orphans, informing us that this is a story bereft not only of a happy ending, but of a happy beginning or any happy events. By this point we have already been advised to go and watch something more cheerful by the morbidly upbeat theme tune.

Snicket introduces the three orphans - brilliant inventor Violet, absurdly well-read Klaus, and Sunny, an infant with a high level of expression and razor teeth - on the day that they learn of their parents' death in an unexplained fire which also destroys their home and, thanks to the geographically literal mind of their executor Mr Poe, sees them sent to the crumbling home of their mysterious Uncle Olaf. Discovering that they don't come with a wodge of cash, but rather with an untouchable trust fund, Olaf sets the children to work in his house, while he rehearses with his grotesque 'acting troupe'. The children befriend a judge who lives across the road, but all in all are in a very bad place, just as Snicket warned us.

Dodgy beard, child cruelty and singing.

I can't claim to be a great fan of the books A Series of Unfortunate Events, but I think part of that was that I first started reading them while I was teaching, and it's actually kind of hard to read this tale of benighted children surrounded by adults who range from actively malevolent to uselessly well-meaning, all of whom end up as either an active or a passive agent in the long process of making the Baudelaires' lives rubbish, if you're also attending safeguarding training. As much as I didn't care for the content, I did appreciate the arch humour of the first two books, and it's good to see that translated to the screen via a narrative device who feels like something out of a Wes Anderson movie. In addition, the non-naturalistic dialogue is wonderfully performed - most notably by the two older children - so as to convey that the stilted wording and repeated phrasings is an artefact of Snicket's recreation of the events.

Now, it's possible that the style will get old, and I'm not sure this will ever be a series that I at any rate would want to binge watch. This first 42 minute dose, however, helped down with a spoonful of foreshadowing not present in the books, is a gloomy little gem.

A Brief History of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

The shiny brass plaque of
professionalism.

"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."

- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
In his brief half-century of life, the writer Douglas Adams produced both less than one might imagine given the depth of his influence on western SF culture, and more than a lot of people know. A good fifty percent of his actual published writing and at least ninety of his enduring legacy is encompassed by the multi-media, multi-canoned Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, and a good deal of the rest (of the former, if not the latter) by the two novels and incomplete fragments of the third in the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series.

An odd beast, the original novel is a mash-up of two Doctor Who scripts - Shada, which was never completed due to industrial action, and City of Death, which was filmed in Paris as a cheap holiday for the cast or something and is remembered as one of the all-time classics - with all-new characters save only for Professor Chronotis, an eccentric and possibly immortal Cambridge academic whose rooms are in fact a time machine. Central to the narrative is Dirk Gently - originally named Svlad Cjelli - a self-styled holistic detective whose method of solving crimes by seeking the interconnectedness of all things closely resembles a mixture of grotesque emotional manipulation and dumb luck. He returned in a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and a third novel, The Salmon of Doubt was at the work in progress stage when Adams died, although it is telling of the weight of his own legacy that he had expressed doubts as to whether it wasn't actually another HitchHiker novel.

Thus the entirety of the Dirk Gently series was a pair of modestly received novels with way, way more ideas than either story or character. Not to say that they were bad, although in truth I've never got on with Adams' novels as well as I have his screen and radio writing; something about the pace of reading makes the flaws in his characters - and especially his female characters, although fair play, Kate Schechter in Tea-Time is one of his better efforts - that little bit more glaring perhaps.

The Electric Monk is one of many key concepts dropped from
most other adaptations.

It took a long time for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to get adapted, but by heck it's making up for lost time now. First up, namesake Dirk Maggs came off his adaptation of the remaining Hitch-Hiker novels on a high and went straight into producing a radio adaptation of the two novels starring Harry Enfield as Dirk Gently (and the late Andrew Sachs as Professor Chronotis, which is slightly disconcerting as he played the villainous Skagra in the audio revival of Shada, who murders that version of Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord.) Debuting in 2007, twenty years after the publication of the novel, to a mixed reception, I personally felt that they did an excellent job of capturing the feel of the novels, and in fact it was only on listening that I really understood how the end of the first novel worked(1).

It was intended that the same crew would then tackle The Salmon of Doubt, but for Reasons(TM) it never happened. Either causally or consequentially, Dirk Maggs left Above the Title Productions to found his own production company, and I guess that Above the Title was left with the rights to the third series, but not the driving force.

The property then languished for all of two years, before BBC4 hit us with Dirk Gently, a pilot for a proposed series starring Stephen Mangan as Gently. This series departed dramatically from the novel in a number of ways, not least by making the bemused everyman character Richard Macduff almost as much of a dick as Gently himself, as well as removing Professor Chronotis, the Electric Monk and about eighty percent of the hardcore weirdness and front and centering Gently's secretary's pathological fixation on her employer in a way that, astonishingly, resulted in a worse-written female character than the one in the novel. There was also a bleakness to it that seemed at odds with a certain sense of wonder, or at least the search for wonder in a life that insists on making marvels commonplace, that feels key to Dirk Gently as a character.

In the series Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently runs a
holistic detective agency.

Once more speaking purely from my own perspective, I was not a fan of the pilot, although I felt that the series was improving before it got canned after three episodes, pulling in ideas from the two novels and removing some of the antagonism from the Macduff/Gently relationship to make the characters a little less abrasive. The overall response was positive, but not enough for BBC4 to overcome the BBC's natural and deep-seated aversion to producing non-Doctor Who SF programming. There's something fundamental in the BBC psyche that seems to insist that SF and fantasy programing is intrinsically silly and shouldn't be taken seriously, with the result that the Corporation produces almost nothing in these fields that is not on some level parody, and if it does will ensure that such programmes are derided as 'trashy fun' at best in their official listings magazine.

But you know who isn't ashamed of making SF? That's right; America. Thus it is that Dirk Gently has been exported, courtesy of IDW Publishing, who began running their Dirk Gently comic strip in 2015 and collaborated with BBC America and Netflix to bring him back to the screen in 2016, this time played by jobbing thesp Samuel Barnett. It is notable that in both media, Gently remains unassailably British (of possibly Transylvanian extraction,) although they are set in the US. Apparently something about the character resists characterisation as anything but a middle-class white Brit. Fair play, Barnett manages to combine wholesome and creepy to great effect. The rest of the cast are right at home in the new territory, however, and the original supporting cast are gone along with the matching plots.

That hair though...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an eight-part serial, in which Dirk teams up with Todd, a downtrodden bellhop played by Elijah Wood, to investigate the murder of a billionaire, the disappearance of his daughter and all manner of associated weirdness. It has time travel, body-swapping, gunfights, a holistic assassin who follows the same pattern of beliefs as Dirk, but is possessed of a deep certainty that the world guides her to kill those who need to be killed in some way, and a shark in the body of a kitten. Once more then, the original story is jettisoned, and the writing style is sufficiently different to that of the original that it is really glaring when they drop in something lifted directly. The series casts Gently as one of a number of individuals with a unique and erratic connection with fate, which is rarely of any great advantage to him, but which he hopes may be of help to others. He's younger in spirit and less cynical than earlier incarnations, with his constant manipulation due more to deeply flawed social skills and possible autistic tendencies(2). Todd is an intensely dislikable character, which provides little contrast with Gently, but is worked for an effective antagonism as both work towards their eventual redemption.

Of course, I'm not sure that redemption really suits Gently; it sort of hinges on a sense of shame that the original character certainly never showed much sign of, given his struggles with guilt in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm also dubious as to whether British absurdist SF benefits from gun battles, and vice versa. I didn't hate the series, but it feels as if - and the same is true of Dirk Gently - it's not actually Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so much as a very different thing using a lot of the same ideas.

In the series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency, Dirk Gently does not run a holistic
detective agency.

I miss the original storylines in the TV versions, and what replaces it never has quite the same timbre of weirdness; that is, they're weird, but it's their own kind of weirdness, in an adaptation of a novel whose native brand of weirdness feels at least as intrinsic to the work as any of the characters. Neither series has been terrible, but neither series has been, deep down, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency because neither of them has, deep down, really had a Dirk Gently to its name.

Dirk Gently was born as a human expee of the Doctor, and perhaps as a result is almost as hard to get a solid handle on as the Time Lord himself. It's hard to say why some Doctors work for us and some don't, but we all(3) have distinct ideas about when a Doctor 'isn't quite right'. I'm not sure that there is yet a definitive interpretation of Gently. They all have something, but none of them have everything. Enfield was excellent, but ultimately lacked a final quality of essential vigor, perhaps a consequence of picking a proven comic talent over an untried youth. Mangan's Gently was as coolly manipulative as any Sherlock, but more obsessive in his pursuit of answers than driven by an often-inappropriate joie de vivre in discovery. Barnett's is more of an enigma, even to himself, and probably the most complex of the bunch, possibly even including the novels, which are as I say notable move for complexity of ideas than of character. The thing of it is... Dirk Gently is not a character who is an enigma to himself, at least not knowingly so. Anyone who can pursue investigations by following random strangers and have the neck to charge for it can't be consciously harbouring any serious doubts as to their calling.

For myself, and for what it's worth, I would rate the various media as follows:

1. The radio series. I like audio, and I like Adams on audio especially.
2. The novels. I know it may be sacrilege, but see above re me and Adams' novels.
3. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
4. Dirk Gently. 

(1) It helps to know that 'Kubla Khan' is a fragment, but Adams himself has admitted to not being able to quite fit the end together when he went back to it.
(2) It's not explicit, and there are few people - even fewer in fiction - who don't fit one or more criteria or definitions of autism.
(3) All encompassing here the particular subset of Doctor Who fans.

Stranger Things - Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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