Lost in Space - 'Impact', 'Diamonds in the Sky' and 'Infestation'

Where it all began (except that it began in black and white.)

There are so many reboots these days, and Irwin Allen's classic 1965 scifi family soap Lost in Space - recounting the oddly domestic adventures of the space-stranded Robinson family, their hunky pilot Don West, comedy villain Dr Zachary Smith and an unhelpfully excitable robot - has already had one; or two if you count a failed 2004 pilot as well as the 1998 feature film, with Matt LeBlanc reinterpreting upright 60s chauvinist Don as 'Joey-from-Friends' in Space. Repeats of the original were a part of my childhood landscape, so I have a certain fondness for the property, and for my money the film at least shouldn't count against the possibility of a new version, since it was both bad and highly forgettable(1), so I'm excited to see what Netflix makes of the property.

What they make of it is a gritty, SF survival drama, eschewing the somewhat cosy affects of the original, while keeping the optimistic family togetherness vibe and occasionally inappropriately upbeat theme tune. In a near future in which the world is going to shit, the Robinson family are part of an interstellar colony mission which hits rough skating and a possible wormhole. The family consists of engineer Dr Maureen Robinson and her three children - Judy, an eighteen-year-old medical prodigy; Penny, a more conventionally troubled teen; and Will, who against the tendency of prior versions is a modestly intelligent boy who questions his place alongside his more gifted siblings - as well as her somewhat estranged husband, military man John.

The new hotness.

When something goes badly wrong with the colony transport, Resolute, they evacuate on their lifeboat, Jupiter-2(2), and crash on an unknown planet. Across the opening episodes they learn that not only are they off course; they seem to be in the wrong galaxy. The Robinsons struggle to survive freezing conditions with the Jupiter submerged. Will is separated from the family while searching for magnesium to melt Judy out of a glacier and runs into a damaged alien robot. At first hostile, after he helps it self repair, it assumes a more human form and seems to imprint on Will as its master. A flashback shows us that the robot attacked the colony ship, the Resolute, during which attack a sociopathic identity thief adopted the identity of one Dr Z. Smith (the original played by original Will Robinson Bill Mumy.) She came down with engineer Don West, later ditching him to improve her own chances and hooking up with the Robinsons during a rain of deadly, falling diamonds.

And then there are fuel-eating space eels! Because of course there are.

With a strong, diverse cast - Judy is half-sister to the younger Robinsons and step-daughter to John, played by Taylor Russell(3), and Don is Hispanic, as well as Parker Posey's Dr Smith making the main cast 50/50 male and female, if you count the robot as male based on the voice actor for its three words of dialogue(4) - and a much stronger range of characters than the original, in which Maureen and Judy Robinson basically made meals and gushed over John and Don respectively. In this version, each of the character has earned a place on the colony mission, so they all have skills; apart from Smith, who is a phoney, and Will, whose place was wangled by his mum bending some rules. Not sure what's going to come of that, but it must be something.

'Danger, Will Robinson.' It's the new 'I am Groot.'

Three episodes in, and Lost in Space is definitely justifying my investment.

(1) Apart from the Apollo-440 remix of the theme music; that was baller.

(2) In this series, the lifeboats are all Jupiters.

(3) And don't think that there hasn't been the usual furore about having a mixed-race family. Blah, blah, diversity for the sake of it, blah, blah.

(4) Yes, those three.

Emerald City - 'Everybody Lies'

Guess who's coming to dinner.

This week on Emerald City, people being shitty to one another. Surprise!

Eamonn is actually surprisingly pleasant to the captive Lucas, whom he knows as Roan, a good friend who disappeared. Lucas lacks Eamonn's conviction that he must have been loyal, and manages to run down a guard who witnessed him apparently bugging out and turning on his own. Convinced that he is scum, Lucas hands himself in.

The Munja'kin chief hands Dorothy over to West, in exchange for the promised – but never delivered – release of his wife from the Prison of the Abject. West wants to know why Dorothy killed East and for whom she acted, and using her mother's image to get close steals some of Dorothy's memories. She becomes convinced that East was going to warn her against Glinda's machinations and becomes even more paranoid than usual. At the same time she embraces Tip as her new favourite and sick burns her former top maid. When Tip helps Dorothy to escape, the former favourite tries to stop them, but Tip is able to pin the blame for the escape on her rival.

Jack accompanies his new mistress and her father, the King of Ev, to the Emerald City, where the Wizard is seeking to secure a supply of weapons to use against the Beast Forever. Anna and Elizabeth publicly dispute the nature of the Beast, however, damaging his credibility as the leading authority on the subject. The Wizard tries to deal privately with Ev, but realises that the King is quite senile and that Langwidere blames the Emerald City for abandoning Ev to the Beast last time. Riding high, she tells Jack that she bought him to be her friend. Touched by her confession that she actually has no better idea how to make friends, he agrees to pal around the Festival of the Beast with her. Langwidere gets harassed by lunks and Jack flattens them – on account of how he's literally metal AF – which turns out, in one of the series' most predictable moves, to really rev Langwidere's engine.

 

"Why would I make my own friends; I have people for that."

There is one interesting note in this sequence, which is that when Langwidere kisses Jack, he tells her 'friends don't do that.' This statement is incorrect in an insidiously toxic fashion, but is a not unreasonable takeaway from his recent smooch-related fall.

Finally, Dorothy reaches the Wizard and finds him listening to Pink Floyd on a gramophone. She asks if he knows her mother, and he responds: "Dorothy? You've come home."

I kind of don't know what I make of Emerald City. It's… interesting, without being involving, if that even makes sense. The ideas are good, the aesthetic is kind of unique, but like the original Tin Woodman it lacks a heart. Large chunks of the action are predictable, and consequently lacking in emotional punch, and there's a lot of expository dialogue. The whole thing is actually kind of stagey. Unless next week's episode inspires me greatly, I shall probably keep watching, but stop reviewing, at least episode by episode.

Emerald City - 'The Beast Forever'

Left to right: Elizabeth (Roxy Sternberg), Toto(1), West (Ana Ularu), Jack (Gerren Howell)(2), Glinda (Joely Richardson), Anna (Isabel Lucas)(3), Small Child Monster Who Has Seen Lard and is Friend of Somebody, the Wizard of Oz (Vincent D'Onofrio), Dorothy (Adria Arjona), East (Florence Kasumba), Eamonn (Mido Hamada), Lucas (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and... some other nun in a fantastic habit. Damn that's a lot of cast (and a surprising amount of diversity.)

This is not your grandfather's Oz. Honestly, it's not your father's Oz, either, nor your older brothers, nor that of any member of your maternal line. This is Emerald City.

"While I queue this up, can we discuss the hat policy?"

Twenty years after being handed over to a pair of Kansas farmers to be raised, Nurse Dorothy Gale is contemplating whether to make contact with her recently returned mother (a brief appearance by Leverage's Gina Bellman,) when a storm whips up out of nowhere, a corpse appears and her injured mother tells her not to involve the cops or ambulance (presumably because she's shivved a fool, or because something something magic princess(4), I guess.) When a police car does turn up, Dorothy is threatened with a gun (because a girl out in a storm is clearly about to start some shit?) and leaps into the car for cover, which is whipped up in the storm and lands in another place, bringing a hapless police dog with her. She the car crashes down, it hits a woman who seems to step in front of it. It soon emerges that the woman she hit and killed is the Witch of the East, which is not good.

"Ding dong the witch is dead?"

She is captured by the Munja'kin, who reckon her for bad news. The other Witches and the Wizard of Oz are going to be mad as hell that she ran over East; besides, having killed the Witch means that she must be one too. Apparently these are the rules. Therefore they vote to kick her off their territory and send her to the Emerald City to tell Oz that she is very sorry. Meanwhile, Oz is looking for her. His acolytes inform him that her arrival is the first sign of the return of the Beast Forever - and in their huge radar wimples they look like they ought to be tuned in to the frequency of the universe - a sort of colossal force that appears in many forms to bring badness upon the land; sort of like Gozer the Gozarian, but without the whole 'choose the form of your own destruction' bit. Fearing the implications for his magnificent and totally real hair(5), he sends a guy named Eamonn who practically has 'ruthless enforcer' tattooed on his forehead to look into things.

The straw is presumably meant to suggest the Scarecrow, but
actually just hints that it isn't mud he's covered in.

Dropped off at the border of their snowbound territory by the Munja'kin leader (whose wife, we learn, has been trapped in the mud of a cave for possessing magic, I suspect this will become important,) Dorothy soon finds herself in the desert, where she encounters a man on a crucifix. He's an amnesiac, and despite her protests he browbeats her into naming him Lucas (after her home town in Kansas.)

Elsewhere, the Wizard visits West, a Witch who appears to have retired to be a drunken brothel madame or something; possibly just a drunk. Regardless of her state of dissipation, she realises that his supposedly chaste ADC has been knocked up. Eamonn reaches the Munja'kin village, where not only is Dorothy gone, so is the Witch's body. Perhaps Dorothy was not Witch enough to kill her after all.

"There is no charge for fabulousness."

Sure enough, East is not dead and catches up with Dorothy, trapping her and Lucas in an illusion of a muddy pit, apparently holding a grudge for the whole getting his with a car thing. She goes through Dorothy's stuff and finds a pistol, and as only a witch can kill a witch, Dorothy misleads her into shooting herself in the head, which... is apparently not as much of a kicker for Dorothy as you might expect.

West gets all psychic traumaed and the Wizard sends Eamonn after Dorothy while giving a speech promising to protect the land from the Beast Forever.

Directed by Tarsem 'Style Over Content' Singh(6), Emerald City may be the fix I've been needing since the end of Season 1 of The Shannara Chronicles. It's pretty, flashy and not too complex (yet), and has a lot of excellent visuals to illustrate the review with. The cast are decent (a cut above Shanarra, I would say,) and so far they aren't mining an alternate interpretation that anyone has done before (in, for example, Wicked, Wicked the Musical, Tin Man, Oz the Great and Powerful.) There are also a couple of really interesting bit, including the winged monkey drones and the way East's powers work, making Dorothy and Lucas believe that they are trapped with no ability to get free rather than actually moving them. The power of suggestion, I guess.

(1) I didn't get the actor's name, and even 'toto' is just Munja'kin for dog in this one.
(2) Character not in the first episode, also holy shit it's CBBC's Young Dracula!
(3) Character not in the first episode, also I'm assuming that's not blackface...
(4) Dorothy has a tell-tale a) birthmark, or b) tattoo given to her in infancy, in the shape of either a) a load of dots, or b) a constellation. This sort of thing is always highly indicative of destiny.
(5) It is revealed in-universe to be a piece.
(6) In fairness, a lot of his content is pretty good, but his style is peerless.

MacGyver - 'The Rising'

However cool these guys are, clearly they don't want to get that stuff on their
clothes.

Do you remember MacGyver? If you don't, congratulations; you're young, enjoy it while it lasts. Running from 1985-1992, with a couple of TV movies in 1994, it was an adventure show starring the pre-Stargate Richard Dean Anderson as Angus MacGyver, a gun-averse secret agent and one-man A-Team, who would resolve situations by using available materials to create impromptu tools and weapons with the aid of his trusty Swiss Army knife and roll of duct tape. It was good fun, and it ran for seven years, and the character came back to recover the lost treasure of Atlantis(1) and shut down a British-based nuclear arms industry run by the perfect neighbour from Ever-Decreasing Circles(2).

Anyway, in this age of remakes and reboots, someone decided that we don't have enough Anguses on TV these days, and so we have ex-X-Man Lucas Till taking up Mac's Swiss Army knife and leather jacket, accompanied by ex-Delta Force buddy Jack and hacker with a heart of gold Riley, as he sets out to avenge the murder of his girlfriend and previous hacker, Nikki by ex-Wimbledon midfielder Vinnie Jones in the cold open. Mac's team is part - or possibly all - of super-secret clandestine division the DXS, which masquerades as a 'think tank' and sounds like a courier service. Jack hits things and Riley hacks, while Mac makes things out of other things. To help us along, the show's twist on the formula is that Mac's process is explicated not just through voice over but through screen captions identifying the useful things that he sees.

Either that or he suffers from a bizarre form of synaesthesia in which he literally sees the names of things as labels. It's not entirely clear. Either way, it's not as cool as Cassandra's math-vision in The Librarians.

Picking a handcuff lock with a paper clip is probably really hard, but on T it's
pretty old hat.

'The Rising' sees Mac and his team trying to recover a biological warfare agent that was stolen from them after they stole it, presumably from bad people, although really all we know is that they appeared to be Italian. The shock twist is that Nikki turns out to be the mastermind (and not dead.) They prevent the release of the virus via IED, but the whole thing brings the agency into disrepute, leading to the rebranding of the DXS as the Phoenix Foundation. Nikki herself is arrested, but escapes thanks to Mac teaching her to pick a handcuff lock with a hair grip. Ah, the hazy flashbacks of romance.

So that's MacGyver 2016. Is it good? Not very. Is it bad? Not really. The cast seem likable enough, but I guess we'll find out if the show as a whole has legs. If it does, no doubt they will be usefully labelled.

(1) Spoilers: The real treasure was knowledge.
(2) Rose's dad in Downton Abbey for those too young and hip (or not-British) to know Ever Decreasing Circle.

Thunderbirds are Go - 'Crosscut'

"Help! My face is stretched across the inside of my visor!"

I joke about the uncanny valley a lot in regard to CGI productions, but it's especially apparent in this week's Thunderbirds are Go, as the visors on the radiation proof masks worn by Scott and guest character Marian van Arkel (voiced by Theresa Gallagher of Alphablocks fame) eerily distort their features across the available surface.

In the absence of the other brothers, Scott and Virgil set out to reseal an old Uranium mine in South Africa, before a storm front blows radioactive dust across Pretoria. The unsealing turns out to be the work of Marian, daughter of the mine's former owners, who were ruined by the death of the nuclear industry in and around the same conflict of 2040 that created last week's stealth satellite. She plans to restore her family's wealth by selling refined Uranium to the Hood, but comes good in the end during a daring escape from the mine in Scott's company.

She also tries to kill him with an aliens-style power loader, which is close enough to a forklift for my money.

Cinderella

Whatever you may think of this film, I can state without fear of controversy
that it contains a fucktonne of dresses.

Following on from Maleficent, the next Disney classic to get an in-house live-action remake (I think the first was The Jungle Book, some years back) is Cinderella, starring Lily James off of Downton and Cate Blanchett, with Helena Bonham Carter as the fairy godmother, and directed by Kenneth Branagh.

The film is sumptuous. The sets and costumes are excellent and the effects for the Godmother's magic are suitably sparkly. James plays Ella just the right side of tooth-grindingly winsome, the Prince (herein named Kit) is decent enough, and the support is of a very high standard. Derek Jacobi as the King is both conservative and sympathetic, and Stellan Skarsgard and Nonso Anozie as the bad and good courtiers are great fun. While essentially played straight - which, as I think I may have said before is the new radical interpretation - the film inserts a scene in which Ella and Kit meet incognito to establish a spark, and reverses some expectations by having the King bless Kit's intention to marry the mystery woman on his deathbed rather than frocing a promise to do what is 'good for the Kingdom'.

The sisters really are just Blanchett's
backing group.

Cate Blanchett is of course a fabulous wicked stepmother, although it is a pity that the sisters weren't a bit more nuanced (I overheard a ten year old girl in the audience telling her father that the sisters aren't always portrayed as entirely wicked, so it's not as if the target audience couldn't deal.) Blanchett is also so very venomous that a third act push to give her a sympathetic backstory falls flat.

What the film does very well is take out some of the more cringeworthy aspects of the source, such that Ella isn't set on either attending a ball for its own sake, or because of some misty dream of meeting a prince. Instead, she is hoping to catch up with 'Kit the apprentice', whom she met by chance in the forest. It is only when everyone watches them dance that she realises who she is. It makes the character far more sympathetic, to me at least, that she is interested in a person and not a title (and this is also pitched as the thing that wins the King over.)

My main complaint is that, like Maleficent, they left out the songs, despite making a film that would be perfect for a song or two.

As an aside, if you want to introduce your kids to the subject of death, this is the film for you, knocking off both of Ella's parents and the King during its runtime.

Elsa once more displays her power over ice, snow, and all
kinds of fabric.

Speaking of children, Arya didn't really get on with the film, mostly because it had real people in it, I think. She did, however, love Frozen Fever. Short and sweet, Frozen Fever is a delightful snippet, but encapsulates a lot of my concerns regarding the idea of a Frozen II. It works because it's a short story about the characters, rather than a continuation of the main narrative which had effectively finished. I choose to be cautiously optimistic about the sequel, but the emphasis is on the caution.

Elementary - 'Pilot'

Lucy Liu, Aidan Quinn, Manny Perez and Johnny Lee Miller; apparently
Perez will be token-swapped for a black guy for the main run.

Thanks to Sky boxed sets (for now at least) I'm catching up on another show I missed out of the gate, Elementary, the CBS modern take on Sherlock Holmes.

Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) is hired to act as sober companion to Sherlock Holmes (Johnny Lee Miller), who is established as the kind of addict who breaks out of rehab the night before his formal release. They are a troubled pair, Watson a former surgeon who lost a patient and Holmes a former consultant for Scotland Yard whose trauma is not revealed in the Pilot (although if you know anything about a) Holmes and b) adaptations of Holmes you won't need Watson's astute probing to deduce the involvement of a, nay the, woman.) Holmes has devised his own post-rehab regimen, which involves resuming his consulting work, thanks to a connection with Captain Thomas Gregson, an NYPD detective who studied counter-terrorism methods with Special Branch post-9/11.

The first case tackled by Holmes and his new shadow involves a woman attacked in her home and apparently kidnapped, until Holmes finds her dead in her panic room. He quickly concludes that she is the second victim of a nascent serial killer, but when the murderer - a man with severe mental illness - is found dead, he becomes convinced that something more devious is at work.

The investigation is a solid opener. The writing also allows Liu's Watson to match Holmes step for step. There was a lot of schtick about gender-swapping Watson, but in its opening stages at least there is no sign that the writers are setting up a romantic relationship. Miller's Holmes may not be spot on Conan Doyle's creation, but neither is Cumberbatch's, and what both get right is the mixture of rage and precision, of detachment and involvement. Elementary's Holmes is as abrasive and disdainful of human frailty as he should be, but also utterly incensed by those who abuse that frailty.

The core relationship between Holmes and Watson gets off to a good start. Joan Watson is sharp and acerbic, with a flair for investigation that even Holmes notes with some respect. She is very much a match for Holmes, if not quite in intellect then in her force of personality, avoiding my least favourite thing about Sherlock, which is Watson's near constant bafflement. Martin Freeman does baffled very well, but after an excellent showing in 'A Study in Pink', it was a real shame to see him slip quite so much into Holmes's shadow.