The New Legends of Monkey

That was then... (Shiro Kishibe, Masaaki Sakai, Masako Natsume and either Toshiyuki Nishida or Tonpei Hidari(1))

The New Legends of Monkey is a left-field reimagining of Chinese literary classic The Journey to the West-cum-remake of the Japanese series Monkey! (aka Monkey Magic.) Instead of mytho-historic China it's set in a fantastical land, populated by a multi-racial population with mostly Australian or New Zealand accents. Instead of the Buddhist texts, the quest is for a set of sacred scrolls hidden by Monkey right before the gods were overthrown by hordes of demons. Instead of the Buddha punishing him for arrogance, Monkey was buried under a mountain by the gods for a crime he did not commit (which is not to say that he isn't arrogant.) Instead of a young Buddhist monk played by a woman, Tripitaka is an orphan girl disguised as a monk and adopting a sacred name given by her foster father, a wise scholar. Sandy is a rather baffled god, and a woman, and Pigsy is just gluttonous rather than a serial sex pest.

And I'm basically okay with this. Like... all of it.

...this is now. (Josh Thomson, Chai Hansen, Luciane Buchanan and Emilie Cocquerel)

In the pilot episode, our hero witnesses the demon-murder of her mentor and the monk chosen to take on the name Tripitaka and take up the quest to wake Monkey and recover the sacred scrolls. She stumbles across Monkey and wakes him, only to find that he has little interest in helping the world. In a nearby town, she stumbles across down-and-out gods Pigsy and Sandy, and together the four of them defeat the local demon overlord to free the town. After this opening, and with Monkey controlled by a sutra which causes his crown to contract and inflict crippling pain, the group head out to seek the scrolls.

They... don't find them.

They encounter a group of Monkey worshippers who have been guarding one of the scrolls, but discover that their leader sold it to a demon long ago. They are captured by a demonic shaman who is using captive gods to translate the scroll and Monkey almost gets trapped in his own brain, then escape through a forest full of faceless horrors. Tripitaka gets all self-doubty and tries to find her birth mother, but falls into a demon trap. Monkey and Pigsy manage to sneak into the demon stronghold on Jade Mountain, while Sandy follows Tripitaka's captors and they all join up to thwart the demon lord's plot to become immortal and thus ascend to the status of the gods.

Admittedly, the demons are pretty much just dudes in make-up.

Now, I'm not going to claim that this is a good show, and certainly not that it will stand the test of time like Monkey! has done (especially given what a bizarre fluke that success was,) but I enjoyed the hell out of it. Was it whitewashed? Well, the leads are Australian-Thai and New Zealand-Tongan, and only one of the core cast - Emily Cocquerel, playing the gender-flipped Sandy - is (probably(2)) white white. It is stripped of most of the aspects of Chinese culture embedded within the original nodded, leaving only a few names and some okay martial arts. The mysticism is entirely genericised, and the complex interactions of Taoist deities and Buddhism removed in favour of a bunch of fairly generic gods who shot themselves in the foot by imprisoning their best demon-puncher, leaving the rest of them to be murdered by demons.

But, I really enjoyed it. It was fun and undemanding, with quirky, likeable characters and decent performances. It is very slight, and I'm actually sad that there isn't any sign of any further episodes, because I think it had places it could have gone.

(1) I'm not sure what series this is from and they changed over.
(2) I mean, I don't know for sure. 'Australian' is as varied an origin as 'British'.

The Shannara Chronicles - 'Dweller', 'Paranor', 'Crimson', 'Warlock', 'Amberle', 'Wilderun' and 'Blood'

"I am a sexy, shirtless god of war."

Hey! Remember The Shannara Chronicles? I stopped reviewing them because my Sky box done fucked up and missed a bunch of episodes, but now season 2 is on Netflix, so I can catch up ready for oh, it's been cancelled(1).

In 'Dweller', Bandon pops into Leah - where we will see over and over that the security situation is at least as bad as that in Arborlon, which you will remember allowed a random human to come within shivving distance of its princess and last surviving Chosen while on serial killer alert. He reminds Queen Tamlin that she made a deal back in the War of the Races, when the city was surrounded by the Warlock Lord's forces and she offered him access to the kingdom's magical source in exchange for shanking her husband, the King, and leaving the rest of the city unmolested, because apparently the nigh-forgotten War of the Races, the events of which were regarded with some scepticism by the sons of the elf king last season, happened within the adult lifetime of a human in her forties. Not only is the four lands very small, its history is apparently similarly compressed.

Mareth has a strained reunion with his Allanon, not least because he tells her that she isn't his daughter, because the Druid Sleep messes with your junk. So he's all 'nuh-uh, magic radiation!' and she's all 'uh-huh, 'cause magic, yo!' And the whole thing gets very tense and snippy as he starts to suspect shenanigans of a warlock nature. Nonetheless, they and Wil go to some mountainy place that we've never heard of before now to retrieve the Sword of Shannara, which supposedly makes the Elfstones look a bit shit and will let them confront Bandon.

Nope! Nopenopenope!

Bandon tries to convince Flick that people are all shit, and to prove it he takes the human to visit his former home, the farm where his parents locked him in the basement for being a seer. He asks about the previous owners, and when the new owners start talking about how the son of the family was a magic-using abomination who had to be locked in the cellar after telling his parents that they would be murdered by demons, brutally murders their own son, just in case he was starting to feel sympathetic again(2).

Eretria returns to Leah, reconciles with Lyria and gives her blessing to the political marriage. Since she is able to tell Ander that Catania was coming to look for him, they realise that this whole 'she ran away in a jealous strop' thing was bullshit. Thus tipped off, they catch Ander's guard captain Edain smuggling weapons from Leah to the Crimson. Edain fesses up and Ander executes him, Ned Stark style.

Wil, Mareth and Allanon fight a giant spider-thing called a Dweller - so there's your title - in order to get the Sword. It's shiny AF.

"Allanon! I choose you!"

In 'Paranor', Allanon takes Wil and Mareth to the druid fortress of the episode title, where Mareth and Allanon use a dummy skull to trap Bandon in a magical cage (without telling Wil, because he's too easy to mind read, even though I'm pretty sure all you'd get is 'bloobloobloo Amberlebloo.') To sell the trap, Allanon is trapped with him, but Mareth can selectively release people, only wouldn't you know it, Bandon has poisoned Flick with his sword and in a dolorous blow kind fo deal, only the Warlock Blade can remove that poison. He demands the skull in exchange for Flick's life, and despite Allanon and Flick telling Wil that Bandon can fuck right off, Wil agrees and Mareth goes along with it, because being a strong independent woman, of course Mareth has a case of the Blandy-cravings which seem to afflict all sassy brunettes in the Four Lands.

"Check out my post-apocalypse specs!"

Speaking of sassy brunettes, Eretria falls back in with mentor/protector/weird pseudo-kidnapper and not-really-okay visit screener Cogline, who turns out to be a good guy after all; an ex-druid and a past adviser to Queen Tamlin, who is pretty shaken by the idea of the Warlock Lord getting to Heaven's Well, the big magical source place. He tells Eretria that her magic tattoos mark her as a descendant of Armageddon's Children, a group of humans susceptible to demonic corruption, but in theory also of wielding great power over the darkness. Alternatively, I guess, a black metal band misunderstood by history. He takes her to a faraday cage where he has imprisoned a Mord Wraith, to start her training to resist the call of darkness which has always been inside her, but never mentioned nor had any notable effect until now. She does this by commanding the wraith to kneel before her, because that isn't going to lead anywhere bad.

Garet Jax captures Valcaa, a Crimson officer who tries to capture him, and takes him to Ander and Lyria for some extreme questioning, which provides enough information for Lyria to turn the tables on her mother and insist that the political marriage will be on her terms.

Shea Ohmsford really only has intensity going for him, but it's one more
character trait than Wil.

Against all good advice, Wil and Mareth use a magical portal to find the hiding place of the Warlock Lord's skull, which turns out to be somewhere in Shady Vale... In the past! As we move into 'Crimson', they search for the skull in the past, and naturally run into Wil's father, currently a troubled boy and not a mean drunk. As a demon attacks, they have to protect him, and also ensure that he doesn't give up his relationship with Wil's mother to save her the problems of marriage to a half-elf. They find the skull hidden in the Ohmsford scarecrow and take it back, where Flick runs himself through on the Warlock Blade, but Bandon still gets away with the skull after the oh-so-shiny Sword of Shannara shatters against the Warlock Blade and Allanon gets cut with the Blade's poison.

Once more, go Wil!

I've been scathing about Lyria before, but props to her, because she's about to
sword fight in that dress.

Our other heroes set about cracking the Crimson's influence, and Jax kills Valcaa after he escapes. Riga is pissed. Ander and Lyria prepare to wed and the priest approaches, all hooded and WHAT UP? RIGA! Who could have seen this coming, besides anyone who watched the priest pace up all sinister, and anyone who had ever surveyed Leah's security arrangements, because honestly it has more holes in its defences than Star Labs. Witness here, where not only is Riga able to just pace the fuck up to the royal wedding with a broadsword up his cassock, but the palace is suddenly heaving with Crimson, who set about the guards and guests. The heroes seem to be doing okay, but then Riga kills Ander while the rest of the group apparently stand around like pills thanks to either a) pure apathy and long-hidden loathing for Ander, or b) shonky editing.

"What's my motivation?"
"Leave no scenery unchewed, Manu."

This brings us to 'Warlock', and Eretria and Lyria flee to Cogline's Wraith lab, while everyone else is captured. Eretria receives a vision from Amberle/the Ellcrys, warning that some shit is about to go down and that Wil needs to reach the Ellcrys, because he is their last hope. Mareth and Wil bring Allanon to the healer-commune of Storlock, where Mareth uses a ritual to project herself into her father's mind to heal him, after having a bit of awkward and unconvincing tension with Wil. Within the dream, the two meet Allanon's mentor, Bremen, who confirms that she is his daughter, and the next druid. Allanon wakes and agrees to teach Mareth to be his successor.

Leaving Allanon and Mareth at Storlock to bond, Eretria and Wil travel to Arborlon. Meanwhile, Bandon arrives at Graymark and slaughters the Crimson garrison there with magic. Then, he uses an eclipse-related ritual(3) to resurrect the Warlock Lord, who for no adequately explored reason looks a lot like Allanon(4), around his blade, skull and... whatever the third thing was. His heart? His elfstones? I forget, but I'm sure they did say.

When a Warhammer 40K aquila and Wonder Woman's logo love each other very much...

Back in Leah, not knowing what has happened to his garrison, Riga is in hog heaven, and like all successful extremists decides to celebrate what turns out to have been a completely successful coup with a little summary justice. He accuses Tamlin of treason for sheltering magic users, but as a final fuck you, she reclaims some dignity and a measure of redemption, and steps off the execution waterfall just as the smug douchebag is building up a head of steam.

"So, until I'm over my girlfriend becoming a tree, my sword will be forever
short and useless. Well, sure glad it isn't anything symbolic."

In 'Amberle', Wil and Eretria reach Arbolon, only to find that it has been sacked by the Crimson, thus saving the show the cost of more than a handful of extras and proving that Leah still has competition in the woeful domestic security stakes. Eretria rescues the surviving Chosen from the Crimson and leads them back to the hidden catacombs below the Ellcrys, but then she gets possessed by a Mord-Wraith and horribly murders at least one of them. While this is happening, Wil goes into the tree, where the Ellcrys advises him to get the fuck over himself and stop moping over Amberle, like he was doing for all of one episode that one time. When he accepts that there is no bringing her back and that she is in his past, the sword regrows, because... I have no real idea. Because his body and mind were going north and south before? Because the sword of Shannara is as much of a euphemism as the elfstones? Anyway, it's a good thing, because the spirit of Shea Ohmsford tells his son that only the Sword can kill the Warlock Lord.

Well, this is gratuitous.

Bandon asks his master to resurrect Catania, whose corpse he stole from Leah after she was murdered. He does, and she is immediately creeped out by him, on account of having seen him do a murder on a guard, or just because he's looking all grunge and coming on like a freight train when she's just woken up in what could charitably described as 'a crypt' with a clear memory of being stabbed in the gut by a trusted ally. Because he's apparently bored easily, the Warlock Lord puts the 'fluence on her to turn her into a trashy goth with low morals, then macks on her in front of Bandon - again, because apparently the bad teeth, jet black eyes and homicidal tendencies aren't quite enough to be really sure that he's the bad guy - and then forces Bandon to kill her. Amazingly, given these top notch people skills, Bandon is starting to have doubts about his life choices.

"Magic is evil. It makes people do bad things. Now let's burn down this
hospital and get back to doing good!"

Allanon and Mareth are sold out by one of the other patients at Storlock, and captured by Riga and the Crimson. They threaten Mareth to force Allanon to give up the Druid Codex, then sentence them both to burn at the stake, while being all sanctimonious at them. Riga then returns to Graymark, where the Warlock Lord dispatches his guards with contemptuous ease. Riga boasts about his magical immunity, but unlike Allanon, the Warlock Lord doesn't forget that his magic is at least 50% telekinesis, and kills a rather surprised looking Riga with barbed wire and rebar, neither of which he is remotely immune to. He takes the Codex and monologues about independence and seizing power until Bandon tries to magic-kill him, only to turn around and run Bandon through with his Blade.

Alas, poor Bandon; you barely had a consistent characterisation. And alas, poor Sassy Elf. You deserved so much better than reduction to girlfriend, murder and resurrection as a bad-taste sex-toy, as indeed does basically everyone.

Oo. That's not a good sign.

Moving on to 'Wilderun', and Loyalists within Leah spring Jax and the gnomes, who jack the Crimson at Storlock and head to Greymark with Allanon and Mareth. They find the aftermath of the Warlock Lord's rise, including Riga's head, but no the Warlock Lord himself. Using the head, they persuade the Crimson to join forces with the loyalists against the Warlock Lord, for all the good that might do. Eretria admits to Wil that she is a Child of Armageddon - largely I suspect to try to fake out the audience that maybe she'll resist the influence of the Warlock Lord - and they join Allanon, Mareth, Lyria and Cogline at the latter's enclave. Cogline explains that they must guard Lyria and her golden elfstone necklace, which together form the key to Heaven's Well and which they naturally opt to keep together for maximum ease of theft.

"That could have gone better."

The Mord-Wraith possessing Eretria betrays them, drawing in the enemy and overpowering Lyria. Meanwhile, the Warlock Lord whoops Allanon, Cogline and Mareth in a fight, killing Allanon at the start of 'Blood', totally for reals this time.

Jax leads the defence of Leah against the Warlock Lord's armies of... I'm not sure. They seem to have too much truck with walls to all be Mord Wraiths. Eretria is sent to disable the dam on which Leah is built, allowing the Warlock Lord to take Lyria up to a shrine behind the reservoir. He pollutes Heaven's Well with his blood, and with the floodgates open, this will spread his power and influence throughout the Four Lands. Cogline and Jax retake the control room and exorcise the Mord-Wraith from Eretria, while Wil and Mareth defeat the Warlock Lord, and Wil sacrifices himself to cleanse Heaven's Well.

Lyria becomes Queen, and Eretria, Cogline and Mareth go to Paranor. There, Mareth suddenly feels that Wil is still alive, and we cut to Wil waking on a battlefield (in the Forbidding?) surrounded by Furies. 'To be continued,' the screen caption lies.

This is the end...
No, actually, this is the end.

So, there we go. Two seasons of sub-Game of Thrones fantasy heroics, in all its compressed scale, minimalist timelined glory, and now we will never know if Wil gets eaten by demons on the wrong side of the tree. I like to think that he does, because he has been been the consistent weak link in the series. It's not even that he's less talented or pretty than anyone else, but that he's got so little substance. I can't blame the actor, given how little he has to work with. The ladies in the piece aren't much better, but at least they get to be a bit sassy (apart from poor sassy elf Catania, who was done wrong in this season.) The best you can say about Wil is that he's... present, and in retrospect I tend to blank out even that. The standouts tend to be the bit parts, which tend to be filled by solid thesps, and the production design is impeccable, even if the budget sometimes impairs the execution.

I will miss The Shannara Chronicles. If it's never been classic TV, it's been good fun to watch, and absolute classic snarking material.

(1) I can't claim to be surprised. I'm more astonished that it made it to season 2.

(2) Partly because he genuinely has had a shit time of it, and partly because of his big-eyed woobie face, it's easy to forget that he's a world-ending zealot.

(3) Which shows excellent timing on his plan.

(4) He is also played by Manu Bennett.

Chronicles of Shannara – ‘Druid’, ‘Wraith’ and ‘Graymark’

"I cut my hair. And I wear leather now."

Grab you Elfstones and warm up your snarking muscles. It’s been a while – we’ve had two seasons of The Magicians since the end of season 1 – but at last it’s time to return to the Four Lands, for the further adventures of Blandy McWhitebread and the sassy brunettes who find him unaccountably irresistible.

A year has passed since Princess Amberlie became the new Elcrys in order to restore the Forbidding and lock away the demons. In that time, Ander has been holding together an elf kingdom on the verge of implosion, while a group of anti-magical fanatics called the Crimson track down and murder anyone using even the most inoffensive of magics. Traumatised by having his girlfriend dump him to turn into a magical, demon-repelling tree and apparently so over that whole 'looking for his missing friend' thing, Wil has become a healer in a gnomish community. He has devoted himself to the medical arts, eschewing the use of magic in all save the most vital of circumstances, such as conjuring up images of his dead girlfriend for a pity party. 

"Let none call me an informed bisexual. Now, where's Blandy?"

Some might judge Wil harshly for making such a king-sized hash of looking for Eretria, but we soon discover that her rescuers – not trolls, but a bunch of scavenging types in disguise – are led by an old friend who has deliberately led Wil to believe that she was dead, because heaven forfend that anyone Eretria meet not turn out to be a bit of a tool(1). On the other hand, she’s doing a much better job of moving on and has hooked up with fellow scavenger Lyria (who is a decent-seeming person that Eritrea likes, and thus not what she appears, because despite being a quick-witted, nails-hard survivor with the best wilderness skincare regime in the multiverse, our girl just can't catch a break.)

Bandon and his Mord-Wraiths will be wintering in Castle Greyskull.

Allanon goes looking for the missing seer, Bandon, and finds him leading a bunch of cultists who worship the long-dead Warlock King. His plan is to cast a spell to turn his followers into Mord Wraiths, flying death-cloud things that shoot magic beams and are all kinds of horrible. His motivation is vengeance against Allanon for throwing him to the sharks while trying to train him to be a druid, and his goal is to return the Warlock King to power by recovering the vessels of his power, including his sword and his skull. Allanon arrives late and is thoroughly outmatched by Bandon and the Wraiths (not a pop group,) which I’m sorry to say is going to be a bit of a theme for this season.

"No, really; I'm a badass. Look at my coat and haircut."

Wil is rescued from the Crimson’s bounty hunters by Mareth, a feisty half-elf who adds further evidence to the case that, whatever the series itself may believe, Wil Ohmsford is literally the furthest it is possible to be from being the actual protagonist of the series. It's not just that she's a more engaging character and way more of a badass, it's the fact that she has stuff going on from the get-go, whereas Wil is dragging his heels and being all 'let someone else save the world and stuff.' Mareth explains that she is the daughter of Allanon and Amberlie’s Aunt Murderedbyademon (Pyria, but that was literally all she did,) and that she is looking for her father because she’s suddenly come over all magical and has some serious questions to put to dear old dad. She also makes out with Wil, because of course she does, although it is only as part of a ruse.

Rescue entrance!

Eretria learns that her new father figure is as shitty as the last and, following a mystical vision of Amberlie while drowning that tells her Wil is in danger, tells him to do one and heads off with Lyria. They are soon captured, however, because Amberlie’s competence still operates on a sliding scale, and rescued by badas bounty hunter Garet Jax(2). However, Jax proceeds to abduct Lyria himself, because she is actually the daughter of Queen Tamlin of the massively powerful and hiterto completely unmentioned human kingdom of Leah. Ander is attempting to secure a treaty with Tamlin – who is hella into bling and knuckles deep in every pie going – and she has forked out to retrieve her daughter because she wants Lyria to marry Ander, so that she can manoeuvre for a takeover of parts of the elven kingdom.

"This is sickeningly familiar."

Eretria gets into the palace, gets captured, and is offered cash to forget Lyria. While there she reunites with Ander and Allanon, and sets out to rescue Wil. Unfortunately, on the way out the door, Allanon is captured by the Crimson. General Riga, leader of the Crimsno, turns out to be magic proof. Eretria therefore takes the Queen’s purse in order to hire Jax to find Wil, while Catania goes to tell Ander that Allanon was captured, and gets stabbed by the king’s bodyguard, who is an undercover member of the Crimson. I feel I should be sadder at the loss of Sassy Elf, but she’d been recharacterised as kind of a drip (and, not coincidentally) Ander’s new love interest,) so we’d kind of lost her already. To his credit, Ander notices she's missing, but is clearly feeling guilty enough about throwing her over for a political marriage that he buys the story that she ran off in a huff about it.

"You'll never be half as shiny."

Wil and Mareth head to Shady Vale when they realise the Crimson are going after his Uncle Flick. They find him safely hidden, but then the Mord Wraiths show up and Bandon takes Flick hostage, threatening to kill him of Wil doesn’t retrieve the skull of the Warlock King from the Druid fastness of Paranor. At around or about the same time, Riga is menacing Allanon to try to get his grubby mitts on the Codex of Paranor, the Druids’ magic 101 textbook. There is also a bunch of argument about the nature of magic - basically it boils down to a largely irreconcilable back and forth of 'magic is a necessary tool', 'magic is inherently evil' - and the fact that Riga was infected by a Mumbletymumble(4) which attacked his pregnant mother, hence leaving him immune to magic.

"We're on a team."

Eritrea and Jax find Wil and Mareth. There is a reunion and a lot of suspicion and ‘you’ve changeds’, and then they set out to rescue Allanon from the Crimson so that he can take them to Paranor to get the skull to trade with Bandon, which all feels like a frightfully bad idea, but there you are. Wil does have a history of really bad ideas, so at least there is consistency. They goad a rightly skeptical Jax into helping them with some grade school level reverse psychology, and in a rare show of gumption Wil is the one to realise that the bounty hunter actually just plans to hand him over for cash. He doesn’t care because he wants to get inside. 

The Crimson wanted flyers just look so much like some sort of trading cards.

Mareth taunts Jax with her illusions, mostly because the show really needs us to understand that Mareth is hella good at illusions. Then they reach the Crimson fortress of Graymark and Jax takes Wil in as a prisoner. So far, so dumb, but luckily for Wil 'God's own idiot' Ohmsford, one of the Crimson’s officers basically gets all up in Jax’s face about how he has backstory(5). In much the same way as Arion got all up in Allanon's face about not really being a druid in Season 1, he's all 'weapons master my arse', and reminds Jax tells the audience how Jax was the only survivor when his unit in the Border Legions was wiped out be demons during the war before dropping the reward purse in the mud for Jax to pick up. Stung, Jax decides to throw in with our heroes.

"The concept of the suction pump is centuries old..."

Wil stuffs up a rescue attempt, despite breaking out of his cell(6), and Riga has him hooked up to a knock-off of Count Rugen’s Machine, which pumps out his blood into a jar in an attempt to force Allanon to reveal the location of the Codex. He's also savvy enough to order the tunnels under the fortress sealed off as soon as it becomes clear that Wil had what I will charitably call a plan. Wil and Allanon bond over the whole torture thing by yelling at each other about how Allanon doesn't care about anyone and Wil is a whiny brat who managed to be the only member of the first season posse who never learned an important lesson about sacrifice, necessity or the number 4. Actually, that one may not have come up; I basically just insert that dialogue into any scene involving Wil.

Fortunately, the others manage to bust in before the tunnels are sealed off. Mareth locates Allanon’s staff and is able to wield it, lobbing burning coals at Riga when he boasts of his magic immunity. A massive fight ensues and, despite Jax briefly succumbing to PTSD and some false tension as Allanon magics the door open, our heroes escape.

Looking back, I am not 100% convinced that they recovered Wil’s Elfstones. I guess we’ll find out.

The Kingdom of Leah. Hydroelectric, apparently.

So, that was the first three episodes of Season 2, and there’s a lot going on. I’ve skipped over most of the politicking in Leah, because it’s a bit plodding, but the Four Lands remain a minute place where it’s hard to believe it took so long to find Wil since everyone either knows everyone else or lives just down the road from them. Allanon has come over a bit useless, but then that’s kind of required of an active Gandalf, lest he leave the rest of the party in the dust. Wil has had a haircut, taken a level in brooding badass, and is marginally less bland, while Eritrea has ditched the informed part of her informed bisexuality, making the fact that she canonically hooks up with Wil even more depressing since it effectively doubles her alternatives to the Milquetoast Marvel (although of those, Lyria is one of the more tedious, being a pretty stock character(7) with little to mark her out so far.)

Shannara Chronicles continues to be tosh. Good-looking tosh, but tosh nonetheless.

(1) Yes, Wil; including you.

(2) Whose appearance has provoked some dissatisfaction because he’s a cocky, sexy bounty hunter instead of an enigmatic perfectionist driven to become the greatest of all warriors, and probably rather more because OMG Garet Jax isn’t black(3)!

(3) It’s been quite a while, but I think in the book he spends the whole time wrapped in cloth for some reason, so it’s not as if he’s even in passing described as white.

(4) Mwellret; no wonder I couldn’t make it out.

(5) Something which he explicitly denies earlier in the episode, as part of an apparent move towards metatextual humour which may yet prove to be a mistake.

(6) For this part of the plan, Eritrea gives him a tiny bottle of high explosive, warning him to be careful of his ‘precious Elfstones’ when concealing it, so there you go; the euphemism is official.

(7) The wealthy hedonist slumming it and seeking meaning in a down to Earth relationship.

12 Monkeys - Season 3

Like the Sam Fisher of time.

Thankfully, I was able to get all of Season 3 of 12 Monkeys on catchup for this weekend, Sky having decided not to record it because obviously I wasn't interest in something on SyFy.

Season 3 picks up with Cole trying to track down Cassie, before a future version of himself tells him to look for Jennifer instead, as Jennifer has the answers. Jennifer is also in Paris, between the World Wars, attempting to become a famous actress in order to sell her play about the Army of the 12 Monkeys and thus send a message to the future. Here she is stalked by 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, without horses', a group of four acolytes of the Army dedicated to guardianship of the infant Witness. They are equipped with the season's new hotness, wearable splinter technology, which allows them to do a Kitty Pride every time they are about to be caught and turn out never to have been there.

Cassie tries to escape from Titan, but is prevented by the same technology and her child taken from her. Then Deacon, who turns out not to be dead, is set to rescue her by one of the acolytes for unknown reasons. They find the Splinter facility destroyed, two years on, but with a pair of tether injections left to bring them back to 2046. Then Ramse shows up with Olivia and everything gets dark. Ramse tries to trick Cole into a mission to kill the Witness which is actually an assassination attempt against Cassie, leading to Cole killing Ramse and falling into an existential crisis as he comes to believe that the Witness is beyond salvation because he carries his father's evil in him. Cassie, meanwhile, is determined that he can be saved, leading to a clash in which Cole and Cassie go AWOL using one of the time vests and begin to work against the rest of the Splinter team, even as one of the Guardians takes the Witness - Athan - away to be raised apart from his destiny.

This season also has at least two actual heists!

Tragedy strikes when Athan loses the one person he has truly loved and in despair - and prompted by meeting his mother, long before she met James Cole and just after losing her first patient - decides to go back and become the witness. Cole and Cassie capture him, but Olivia helps the Splinter team send a hit squad and he is seemingly killed when his vest is hit. Then Olivia reveals her long-game: She has been manipulating the team all along to kill the Witness, allowing her to take over Titan and the Army from the Pallid Man in revenge for the Witness taking everything from her after Jennifer stabbed her. As in Season 2, the Army seem triumphant, before Athan - his life saved by Jennifer, following a vision she has long been seeing - reappears to bust out the team. He is killed, Olivia declares herself the Witness (which Athan revealed to her she was all along,) and the season ends with Titan Splintering in above the facility bent on its destruction, but it's not quite the end of the world. Nor, thankfully, is it the end of the series, with a fourth and final season announced.

It's all gone a bit Kubrick.

I continue to really enjoy 12 Monkeys, although I was sad to see Ramse go. I presume that season 4 will see the surviving members of the team - which may or may not include Deacon(1) - forced to go mobile, presumably using a version of the Army's wearable Splinter tech. If they don't hook up with Jennifer again, I will be pouty, because she remains one of the greatest things ever, including a hallucinatory episode in the trenches to the tune of 99 Red Balloons, but with semi-improvised lyrics as well as her theatrical career.

I'm actually heartened  by the announcement that it's going to be the last season, because as much as I am saddened to lose it, I am glad that it is likely to get to tell its whole story to the end and not be cancelled midflow.

(1) I'm assuming it will, because I have a theory that Deacon is important. He was a little upset this season to learn that he doesn't appear anywhere in the Witness's visions, and I wonder if he isn't some sort of freak, temporal wildcard. Olivia calls him an interchangeable component, but what if that's not true?

The 100 - 'Wanheda'

"I'm on a horse."

With the Arrowverse in mid-season hiatus and Sleepy Hollow having spent the last of its goodwill capital with us, it's time to go back to The 100 and see what we missed in the entirety of the last season. You know, since the next one is coming up(1). We begin with the two-parter 'Wanheda'.

When last we left our ragtag band of post-apocalyptic survivors, Jaha had led Murphy to an island where they found the AI who scorched the world, and we open with Murphy going insane in a bunker until finally being allowed up to the mansion where Jaha and the AI, ALIE, offer to let him in on their little salvation game. Having spent a couple of months watching the tapes made by ALIE's guilt-wracked creators, Murphy is, to say the least, unconvinced. He not only knows that her sexy lady appearance is an imitation of one of her creators who suggested that she needed an avatar, but that she was built to 'make life better' and swiftly diagnosed that the Earth had a 'too many people error.'

I don't know which makes me more sad; the severe haircut or the loss of the
signature goggle.

Back at the former Fort Jaha, now renamed Arkadia since Jaha went nuts and took off looking for the City of Light, the survivors of the Ark are doing pretty well. A peace with the Grounders continues as the 'Skaikru' search for the populations of the other crashed Ark stations. Chancellor Griffin is wary of drawing too many supplies from Mount Weather given the risks of associating themselves too strongly with the Mountain Men, and the understandably bad memories the place brings up; especially for Jasper, who has gone, how you say, cray cray. During a mapping mission with Bellamy, Monty, Octavia and Kane, he tries to snatch a locator beacon from an Ice Nation raiding party who are searching for 'Wanheda' and laughs as one tries to cut his throat. Meanwhile, Lincoln is going stir crazy staying in to duck a Grounder kill order, and Octavia is giving him evils for putting on a guard jacket. Indra, Octavia's mentor in the Trikru, shows up to explain that 'Wanheda' means 'the Commander of Death' and refers to Clarke. Grounder belief is that you command what you kill, so if the Queen of the Ice Nation can kill Wanheda, she will be able to defy the Commander's peace and make war on anyone they like.

"It's a grunge thing, apparently."

Out in the wilds, Clarke is living rough and killing panthers. Straight up; we are reunited with her as she kills a panther so that she can sell the pelt for butchering services and supplies at a trading station run by a lass who shields her from bounty hunters looking to hand her over to the Ice Nation. She explains that she is grateful for the end of the Reaping, and the two of them get groiny with comparatively little foreshadowing. Compared to her awkwardness with Lexa last season, it's apparent that mass murder and living in the wilderness like a feral animal is a grand way to get over your coming out nerves. I guess you would get perspective.

"This also is a grunge thing."

Bellamy, Kane, Monty and Indra set out to look for Clarke, but run into a group of survivors from the Farm Station, including Monty's mother, Hannah and Captain Pike. Having crashed in Ice Nation territory, they have lost a great many of their number to Grounder attacks, including seventeen children who went out of the station to play in the snow (thanks for that, The 100, although actually thanks for not feeling the need to show it.) Understandably, if incorrectly, the Farm Station survivors are still very much in the 'all Grounders must die' phase, like the 100 in season one, despite Kane's assurance that not all Grounders are alike. I strongly predict that shit is going to kick off when Pike (or possibly Hannah) kills someone who is actually on their side.

After making a walk of shame from the trading station, Clarke is captured by a warrior of the Ice Nation who turns out to be Lincoln levels of unbelievable badass, taking out three members of an Ice Nation patrol who try to swipe his bounty. He coshes Bellamy when the latter tries to rescue Clarke, then takes her on her way despite having already received a nasty stab wound at her hands. This, we will later learn, is Roan, banished Prince of the Ice Nation, and he is taking Clarke not to his mother, but to Lexa, where Clarke responds to the hand of friendship with the fury understandable when meeting up with the woman who punked out on a military victory that would have prevented the need for all that gassing and then had her dragged across the countryside to ask for her help.

"Of course I'm a prince; check out my coat."

Murphy and Jaha are picked up by Emori, the scavenger who robbed them on their way to the City of Light. Emori is a tech-scavenger, and tries to rip off Jaha, forcing she and Murphy to kill ALIE's giant major domo. They discover that the tech they have stolen is ALIE herself, but Emori's brother is converted to the City of Light and they have to exchange the AI core for their freedom. In the City, essentially a VR environment generated by ALIE in the minds of her followers, the major domo assures Jaha that here there is no death.

So, somewhat unexpectedly, Season 3 of The 100 turns out to be less the Tom Hanks section of Cloud Atlas and more like the fourth Matrix movie. It's still the same great-looking, well-acted ensemble piece we know and love, although I am a little worried that the Farm Station survivors will be retreading the same blind hatred subplot that we followed with the Skaikru in Seasons 1 and 2, where we could be doing something new.

(1) And the problem is of course that leaving it so long means that you look for a background detail on some new character and find out that they're due to die in five episodes, or worse to kill a former regular.

Dominion - 'A Bitter Truth'

"Yeah, man; I'm gonna borrow my dad's sun chariot and tear up this town!"

Okay, so it's been a while since I cracked out an episode of Dominion, so just a reminder of where we were: Claire is becoming a moderately inept tyrant with the assistance of Grumpy McTech Bear (real name Gates,) Whele is going mad and locked up on a bogus charge of sleeping with the enemy, Michael has found God, Gabriel is all pissed at the universe, and Alex, Noma and Reisen are negotiation with insaniac secret higher angel Julian.

In New Delphi, Reisen distracts Julian while the others snoop. They find an army of near-catatonic 8-balls in the basement, and when they get caught Julian uses the amphora to coax a weak lower angel into the recently-evicted Pete. He tries to do the same to the others, but Noma boots her would-be possessor and pops her wings, allowing them to overwhelm the guards. She identifies the amphora as an ancient, Angelic WMD and Julian as a dyad, a hybrid of human and angel (as opposed to a lower angel possessing a human, or a higher angel in its own physical form.)

Gabriel and Michael hook up on the ridge above New Delphi and get maudlin over the news that Uriel was killed in the bombing of the Eyrie. They argue their philosophical differences and who exactly God's last message was meant for, but agree that they want Alex out of New Delphi and figure on using Gabriel's remaining armies to get him.

"This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

In Vega, Claire consults with Grumpy and they get sealed in when a Higher Angel attacks. They escape, but Claire uses the attack to persuade Grumpy to come out of hiding and be a more active supporter of her cause. Meanwhile rebel leader Zoe kidnaps Whele, planning to broadcast his murder as a rallying call, but he persuades her first that he can get her a broadcast centre, and then that his access codes will still get them into secure areas. All of this is really just an opportunity for him to talk and thus persuade Zoe to buy into his doublethink, and by the time he shoots the taunting halluicination of his son in the heart, she's pretty much ready to sign up to the rebranded Team Whele.

For all that I've neglected it, Dominion continues to be better than it has any right to be, mostly on the strength of its acting. Even Alex isn't completely annoying this season.

12 Monkeys - 'Primary'

Look again: The comedy crazy girl is now a tragic heroine.

"I was sent back in time to kill a man. It was supposed to fix everything; it didn't. So I killed more people; nothing changed. And then I save someone, someone who should have died, and that is what changed things. It's the only thing that's ever made any difference."

We open with a quick montage of Cassie's eight months in the future, living with the West VII and learning to be like them, before cutting back to the roof where Ramse joins the pistol party. Cassie explains that there are eleven more vials of the virus waiting in a plane to complete Jennifer's voyage of death, but still Cole refuses to let Cassie kill Jennifer, instead persuading her to hand over the vial.

Hey kids, it's Michael Hogan from BSG!

Together they go to the airport and destroy the virus, and as it burns time shifts around them. In 2044 the Project Splinter facility suddenly has a sizable staff of scientists and Jones' research material is back, and altered. Yet Cole and Ramse remain. Things have changed, but Jennifer assures them it is not in the way that they think. Cassie angrily returns to the future, and takes Ramse with her to be grilled on the Army's plans. While Jones explains the changes to her staff - better quarantine, more survivors - one of them, Dr Eckland, suggests that if she doesn't remember him things might be awkward when they go to bed together. Being a gent, he moves his stuff out.

In 2016, Jennifer's special awareness of time/voices in her head lead her and Cole to a hotel which she insists he has been to before. She tries to persuade him to kill her and then tries to cut herself with a broken mirror, explaining that she had a purpose, but it is gone now. He stops her, and they get moved to a new room, 607 - a prime number, to Jennifer's delight, and one she has been calling out for a while; also, apparently by chance, the first three digits of Jones' 2016 phone number - a suite which a James Cole bought in perpetuity in 1944. Jennifer confesses her feelings for Cole and tells him that, although he feels he ought to be with Cassie, that is the way that the world ends. He does however convince her that she can find her own purpose.

Deacon tries to get information from Ramse, until Ramse throws him off his game by revealing knowledge of his past. This is a key moment, reminding us that Ramse may look the same, but he's lived a lifetime since he last met Deacon. Cassie then proves how far gone she really is by threatening Ramse's son for the information he doesn't have, but is interrupted when the daughters show up and tell Jones that she must bring Cole back. This is a message passed on to repay his act of mercy towards Jennifer. Despite Cassie's doubts that Cole is committed to 'the mission' anymore, he and Jones reach an accord and he shows her a picture of him and Cassie in 1944, speculating that this is where the Messengers were sent. He also rejects Cassie's insistence that he must be prepared to 'do what is necessary.'

To go beyond a single series, a show has to be able to adapt, and 12 Monkeys is certainly making a go of it, not just with the expanded cast of scientists and the 1944 setting to be introduced next week (yay!) but with the reversal of Cassie and Cole's moral roles. Having spent a season softening Cole and hardening Cassie, jumping her straight to point-a-gun-at-a-kid level of commitment is both a reassertion and a reversal of the status quo, maintaining the central dynamic of 'kill vs cure' while changing the relationship which couches it. Part of me is starting to suspect that an ultimately disillusioned Cassie could be the Witness.

Also of note this week is the continuing apotheosis of Jennifer. Whether her ability to perceive temporal manipulation is causal of, consequent on or even parallel to her madness, it adds a deeper dimension to a character who previously appeared very much as a tool, or the dark shadow of a manic pixie dream girl, while the fact of her mental illness importantly serves to curb her power and make her a less than reliable prophet. Even her attraction to Cole has gone from a manic infatuation to a deep and almost tragic affection.

As it deviates further and further from its source material, 12 Monkeys becomes an ever more intriguing work, holding and revealing its secrets at just the right pace to keep interesting. I hope that it can maintain that pace, at least for this season.