[Read the whole thing]]]> Steven Moffat’s second season running Doctor Who shared one major characteristic with Russell T. Davies’ second season: Both were not as good as their first seasons. Moffat is overall a much stronger writer than Davies and his story arcs have been more interesting (far fewer Daleks, for one thing), but this season felt like he bit off more than he could chew, setting up a complicated set of plot threads, but the payoff has so far been rather disappointing.

Here’s my ranking of this season’s episodes from favorite to least:

• The Doctor’s Wife (written by Neil Gaiman)
• The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon (Steven Moffat)
• The Girl Who Waited (Tom MacRae)
• The Wedding of River Song (Moffat)
• A Good Man Goes to War (Moffat)
• The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People (Matthew Graham)
• Closing Time (Gareth Roberts)
• Let’s Kill Hitler (Moffat)
• The Curse of the Black Spot (Stephen Thompson)
• The God Complex (Toby Whithouse)
• Night Terrors (Mark Gatiss)

Spoilers ahoy!

Individual Episodes:

The season’s best episode was actually outside of the main arc as well as not being written by Moffat, that being Neil Gaiman’s “The Doctor’s Wife”. Given all the River Song shenanigans during Moffat’s reign, I – like I’m sure almost everyone else – expected this would be a key story in the arc, but in fact Gaiman takes the story in a different direction, anthropomorphizing the Doctor’s relationship with the TARDIS. It was a very Gaiman-esque story, with atmosphere and horror and some sweet moments, as well as a lot of tantalizing bits for long-time Time Lord fans. Actually the story’s setting is the sort of thing that a whole season of episodes could spring from, but I doubt it will ever come up again. But that’s okay. The only drawback to the episode was the rather cheap and obvious manipulation of time used to terrorize Amy and Rory.

I previously reviewed “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon”, which were pretty good, but are a good example of the problem with the season’s arc: It’s terribly elliptical, and is full of an assortment of weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Why an astronaut suit? Why isn’t the Silence just cleaning up if they have these elaborate electrical powers and are nearly-invisible? Since when can the TARDIS turn invisible? Still, the set-up for the season’s big question – is the Doctor going to die, and if not (since he clearly isn’t), how’s he going to get out of it? – is pretty well done, there are plenty of suspenseful moments, and the Doctor’s solution to the Silence in the second part is rather clever.

Speaking of “cheap and obvious manipulation of time” as I did above, “The Girl Who Waited” was about as un-subtle an episode as one can imagine, taking the original meeting of the Doctor and Amy to its logical extreme via the perils of time travel, and in a ridiculously contrived environment. Yet it still works pretty well, mainly because of Karen Gillan’s portrayal of the two Amys, and the Doctor’s decision at the climax of the episode.

As you can see, I’m already not hugely enamored of the season already. The season’s finale, “The Wedding of River Song”, concerns, well, its title, and also how the Doctor gets out of it. I felt pretty foolish for not seeing it sooner, considering the solution to the problem was telegraphed several episodes earlier, not to mention early in this episode itself. It’s reasonably satisfying, and the Doctor using the trick of hiding in “a Doctor suit” (a good line) to fall “off the grid” so the Silence doesn’t keep hunting him is pretty clever. But the climax felt, well, anticlimactic, very different from the explosive Season Five climax.

The mid-season arc stories, “A Good Man Goes to War” and “Let’s Kill Hitler” were rather unsatisfying. “Good Man” continues the rather silly trend of the Doctor being this universally-known figure, loved by many and hated by many more, which just completely clashes with my concept of the character as this lone, stealth figure doing good deeds under everyone’s radar across the universe. “Wedding” suggests that exactly this has become a problem for the Doctor, but Moffat never really establishes how the Doctor’s status quo changed in this way, so it just feels awkward and uncharacteristic for the series. “Let’s Kill Hitler” focuses on the mystery of River, basically explaining what we’d all guessed earlier when we learned that Amy was pregnant. I found this fairly unsatisfying, especially since it plays way too fast-and-loose with the regeneration rules for my taste. (Heck, Moffat undercuts any reasonable explanation for why River would have been able to regenerated by having her gestate outside of the TARDIS – while Amy is a captive of the Silence – though really no explanation would have satisfied me. It’s another “weirdness for weirdness’ sake” plot device.)

The other stories were one-off tales. “Closing Time” is the best of these, highlighting the Doctor’s fatalistic last years prior to the season ender; Craig from “The Lodger” shows up and the pair basically have a buddy episode, which is quite a bit of fun other than the cliched deployment of the Cybermen as the big threat. “The Curse of the Black Spot”, “The God Complex” and “Night Terrors” are all fairly generic horror yarns, all fairly forgettable; “Spot” gets the nod as the best of the three for its less ridiculous explanation for its mysterious goings-on.

The Season Story Arc:

As I said earlier, I think Moffat bit off more than he could chew in the complicated story arc of this season.

The Silence are a fairly creepy adversary, but they’re also basically a cipher. Considering that we’ve never heard of them, nor has the Doctor, one wonder how long they’ve been around and, more importantly, what it is they’re trying to accomplish. Are they trying to conquer the universe? If so, then their attack on the TARDIS in Season Five was a disastrously bad choice, as it nearly destroyed the universe. Are they trying to destroy the universe, then? If so, why? Are they just trying to kill the Doctor? If so, why? They seem to fanatic to simply be hired guns. Or do they have some other goal, and if so, what, and why do they fear the Doctor so much? This season really didn’t make any progress in exploring any of this. Presumably these elements are what Season Seven will be all about – they’ll end up a pretty weak and forgettable foe if not.

I’ve been conflicted about River Song as a character (though not about Alex Kingston as an actress, who pretty much steals any scene she’s in; ah, if only she’d been able to appear opposite Christopher Eccleston!). For a while she was being deployed in a strict “every time the Doctor meets her occurs for her before the last time we saw them meet” manner, which was a nifty plot device, but one I never really embraced because if both of them can time travel, then why do they have to stick to that pattern? But as a storytelling conceit I was willing to accept it. But the pattern goes completely off the rails here, as the Doctor meets her as an infant (at the end of “Good Man”), and then as (effectively) a teenager (in “Hitler”), and then at two different points in “Astronaut”, and then I gave up trying to untangle their timelines, since it’s clearly no longer important. If Moffat has been planning to build up to a grand “this is the first time River meets the Doctor, and the last time he meets her” scene, he’s already short-circuited the impact of that episode this season. Too bad, since such a scene could be quite cool.

(On the other hand, it would be equally impressive – and maybe have greater impact – if the Doctor manages to reincarnate her from her computer representation back in Season Four’s “Forest of the Dead”. But I digress.)

I thought the notion of the Silence appropriating River’s life to make her a weapon against the Doctor was a pretty nifty idea, although I didn’t understand how she was able to escape their control and short-circuit their plans. It also leaves one big questions about what we know about River: If the Doctor wasn’t killed, why was she imprisoned? How is she able to keep walking out of her prison? What authority imprisoned her? If the Doctor was killed in 2010, but shows up at some earlier time later in his own timeline, wouldn’t that conclusively exonerate her before she’s even imprisoned? For that matter, River seems able to time travel on her own, but we don’t know how. Her timeline is a mess, and I don’t see how Moffat can reconcile it all other than wiping everything away through some deus ex machina. I suspect he has no intention of trying. Maybe he has some notes which make everything fit together, but from the material on film, I can’t see how.

But okay, I admit I’m intrigued and amused by the metatextual mystery set up at the end of “River”, where the first question (of the TV series) will finally be asked: “Doctor who?” Does Moffat have the guts to actually dive into the Doctor’s earliest life and give us some insight into his character that we haven’t been given? It’s never been the purpose of the series to explain everything about the character, and some of that mystery has always been an underpinning of the show, but explaining some of it, especially in a manner that could be built on at some unspecified point in the future, would be very cool, and something that’s rarely been done. (Honestly, what must it have been like for the – far fewer – fans back in 1969 when the Time Lords were introduced? Could Moffat pull off a revelation anywhere near that level? I sure hope he tries.)

So in sum, the season was often interesting, but ultimately disappointing. In a way, it sums up Moffat’s style of writing: Many bits of it don’t make sense, but it’s emotionally satisfying. “The Girl in the Fireplace” from Season Two fits this description to a T, but at his best (“The Doctor Dances”, or “Forest of the Dead”) Moffat manages to overcome his plotting difficulties. But the whole-season arcs of his first two seasons don’t, and given that they rely on intricate plotting, they end up not being more than the sum of their parts. I think Moffat needs to simplify things a bit, and hopefully now that some of the mysteries behind River and the Silence have been revealed, the third act of the Matt Smith Doctor will hang together better than does the second.

This one is a little offensive, but for completeness’ sake:

Sadly no one’s put up my favorite ad from this series, “Fishing Tackle”. But I’m sure you

[Read the whole thing]]]> The NYNEX Yellow Pages series of commercials from the late 80s/early 90s, roughly in order from best to worst:

This one is a little offensive, but for completeness’ sake:

Sadly no one’s put up my favorite ad from this series, “Fishing Tackle”. But I’m sure you can use your imagination.

The season-opening two parter was

[Read the whole thing]]]> We discovered that Comcast On Demand features Doctor Who, so we’ve been able to watch the first couple of episodes of season six despite not getting the BBC America station. Nice! (Sadly we haven’t been able to see the Christmas episode, but it doesn’t seem like we missed much.)

The season-opening two parter was a little disappointing, though. Spoilers for these episodes if you haven’t seen them.

The biggest problem I have with the story so far is that it has too many elements which seem there merely to seem cool or quirky without serving much purpose. For example:

• The opening sequence taking place in America, and the Doctor wearing a stetson. Yes, bow ties are cool and fezzes are cool, but this is getting tiresome.
• Did I miss something? Since when can the TARDIS turn invisible? Isn’t the whole joke about the broken chameleon circuit that it always sticks out like a sore thumb?
• The Silent that Amy meets in the bathroom killing the woman who’s also in there. This could have been an effective indication of the Silence’s power, but they completely fail to use this ability in any remotely intelligent fashion in the rest of the story, when they should have been able to eliminate most of their opposition trivially. Consequently the woman’s death seems gratuitous.
• The handling of Amy maybe or maybe not being pregnant was extraordinarily clumsy.
• The trick Amy and Rory employed of marks on their skin to indicate how many Silents they saw effectively set up the creepy scene in the orphanage, but in a practical sense it seems pointless; they could have recorded that information in better ways.
• The notion that the girl’s space suit would call the President was rather silly. Why would it bother? What would it expect him to do? Setting up Nixon’s habit of taping everything in the Oval Office was cute, but no more than that.

Oh, and by the way: The Brits get Churchill last season, and we Americans get Richard Nixon? Thanks a lot!

(Bookzombie has his own set of things he liked and disliked.)

To be sure, there are many things for which I give the story a pass, since it seems likely that these are things that will be explained later: Who the girl is, why the Silence needed a space suit, why they put the girl in it, why the girl seems able to regenerate, what the SIlence’s goals are, why they captured Amy, how they survived until 1999 (since we see one in the Utah sequence), who killed the future Doctor and why, why they seem to own the time machine from “The Lodger” (or one similar to it), etc. etc. Steven Moffat has set up a complicated story for the season, and I think he’s a good enough writer to make it all pay off.

However, he must make every one of these elements pay off in order to make the season successful. And even if he does so, I think his predilection for throwing in strange elements for no good reason weakened the season opener. It’s strange that he does so, since it seemed like something that Russell T. Davies would do, while Moffat’s stories for the Davies series were much tighter and contained fewer frivolous elements.

On the brighter side, the most resounding success of the story was how the Doctor managed to deal with the Silence, by essentially programming humanity to kill them on sight. It’s a bit of a stretch when you think about it, but it is fundamentally a cool idea and plausible enough to appreciate.

How the Doctor’s future will play out, now that we’ve seen his future self get killed, is of course the mystery of the season. Will it turn out to be an impostor? A clone? Merely a “possible” future? A future that can be changed? Was he not really dead? After a lifetime of reading comic books and science fiction, this set-up is actually a little less fascinating to me than some of the other mysteries in the story – unless Moffat comes up with some solution I haven’t seen before.

The other big mystery is who the girl is. The prevailing theory seems to be that she’s Amy and Rory’s daughter, who can regenerate because she gestated in the TARDIS, and who might grow up to be River Song. (See, for example, this post at Bleeding Cool.) My personally loony theory is that there’s another Time Lord around, and the last (and first) time we saw her she was, strictly speaking, even younger than the girl we see here. I doubt that’s what’s happening here, but it would be funny if it was.

Whether she’s connected to River, well, it wouldn’t surprise me. After all, we first saw River wearing a space suit, and in an episode titled “Silence in the Library”. Those may both be coincidences, though.

Overall the story was a nice “ride”, but the plotting and storytelling were both rather shaky. It’s very, very hard to tell a serious story with some many superfluous trappings (really, The Avengers is the only TV show I can think of that managed to do it), and I’d much rather have Moffat focus on solid plotting with witty dialogue, and dispense with the stetsons and body markings and assorted silliness. It doesn’t make the story better, and it’s certainly not necessary for a good Doctor Who story.

[Read the whole thing]]]> While no one can take away from Russell T. Davies his accomplishment of getting Doctor Who back on the air, by the end of his 5-year run I found the style of the show under his reign had worn thin; indeed, I liked each season less than the one before. Some of this was because Christopher Eccleston’s performance in the first season was so much better than David Tennant’s (nothing against Tennant, just that Eccleston was a supernova in the role), but mostly I found the stories were getting less sensical and more saccharine, and I was pretty sick of the Daleks and the over-the-top and ever-more-ludicrous season-ending two-parters.

As the new producer, Steven Moffatt, had written many of the very best episodes under Davies, I had high hopes for his first season. But the end result was… not quite what I’d hoped for. While Moffat wrote six episodes in the season, none of them were as good as the best ones he’d written during the Davies run, and while the season overall was more consistent than the last few Davies seasons, there were still several clunkers.

Here’s my ranking of this season’s episodes from favorite to least:

• The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang (written by Steven Moffat)
• The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone (Moffat)
• Amy’s Choice (Simon Nye)
• The Beast Below (Moffat)
• The Lodger (Gareth Roberts)
• The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood (Chris Chibnall)
• The Eleventh Hour (Moffat)
• Vincent and the Doctor (Richard Curtis)
• The Vampires of Venice (Toby Whithouse)
• Victory of the Daleks (Mark Gatiss)

If you haven’t seen the season, be warned that there are spoilers ahead in my review.

The biggest change, of course, is that we have a new Doctor in Matt Smith, and a new companion in Amy Pond (Karen Gillan). The best feature of the new stars is their relationship, as it’s established from the first episode that Amy is fascinated by (and infatuated with) the Doctor, but she also feels betrayed by him because she feels he broke a promise to her when she was a girl to take him with her. (Of course, it was just that darned unreliable TARDIS bringing him back 12 years later, but she doesn’t really change things for her.) Amy’s sorting out of her feelings for the Doctor and for her fiancé, Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill), is a big part of the season’s story arc; it’s basically her coming-of-age story.

Matt Smith is fine as the Doctor, but he didn’t blow me away. Indeed, I was disappointed for the first few episodes that he seemed to just be channeling David Tennant, that his Doctor wasn’t a significant departure from his predecessor (this might be a first for the franchise, which previously has usually made an effort to make the break between Doctors clear and even extreme). At times it seemed like he was Tennant’s Doctor in Peter Davison‘s body wearing Patrick Troughton‘s clothing. Fortunately, he grew on me as time went on, but I’m still hard-pressed to say how his Doctor is materially different from Tennant’s. I think Smith brings a little more empathy to the role: His Doctor is a more sympathetic figure, and that makes those moments when he seems to betray his companions (whether inadvertently or as part of some larger plan) seem all the more emotionally wrenching. But I think Smith makes the Doctor earn the benefit of the doubt more than Tennant did (Tennant’s Doctor often seemed callous to me, putting on his “gosh that’s too bad” face in reaction to other peoples’ troubles; consequently I didn’t have much sympathy for his whining in “The End of Time” when his time was up).

Karen Gillan pulls off the nuances of Amy’s character quite well, excited about traveling with the Doctor, challenging him on some of his stranger behavior, and being stuck between him and Rory (by the way, Arthur Darvill doesn’t get a lot of different stuff to do playing Rory, but absolutely nails it when he does get a chance to show some range, such as in “The Big Bang”). She’s a strong character, though I noticed that she’s another in a line of female companions who seem at dead ends in their lives before they head off with the Doctor: Sure, Martha Jones was an exception, and Sarah Jane Smith is the most prominent professional-woman companion, but Rose was a young woman working in retail and seemingly without direction in her life, Donna was unemployed, and now Amy does “kiss-o-grams”; not really distinguished backgrounds. But to be fair, Amy has the mitigating factor that her life has been turned upside-down by the crack in time and space in her bedroom wall. One could argue that a wandering adventurer like the Doctor is more likely to attract companions at loose ends or without direction, looking for someone like him to give their lives meaning. That certainly seems to be the case for Amy.

The unifying story element of the cracks – as with the running threads in past seasons – is handled a bit awkwardly, with the cracks showing up in various episodes to no real effect other than foreshadowing of the season’s finale. (“Bad Wolf” in season one was basically the same.) The exception is in “Flesh and Stone” when the Doctor uses a crack to deal with the weeping angels, but otherwise they’re more ominous than actually relevant. Then again, the season ends with the “why” behind the cause of the cracks left unresolved, with the promise that it will be central to next season’s story, so if things get better from here, then the fact that the cracks were handled so cavalierly will happily be forgotten.

As far as the individual episodes go, the season contained several pedestrian stories: “Victory of the Daleks” is one of the weakest Dalek stories I can recall, with a ridiculous climax involving World War II airplanes in space. I wonder whether this story played better to a British audience who might feel a more visceral excitement in this sort of recreation of the Battle of Britain, but absent that it’s just a bad episode. “Vincent and the Doctor” is a worse-than-average monster story which is not quite redeemed by the coda where Vincent Van Gogh (nicely played by Tony Curran) glimpses his future. One assumes writer Richard Curtis is a huge Van Gogh fan, since the story has no reason to exist otherwise. “The Vampires of Venice” is a similarly weak monster yarn. And “The Eleventh Hour” is only notable for its nifty set-up of the Doctor/Amy relationship, but the threats (Prisoner Zero and the ridiculous-looking Atraxi) are by-the-numbers.

In the middle of the season’s quality range, there’s the two-parter “The Hungry Earth/In Cold Blood”, which is a bit better than the average monster story (although not nearly as terrifying as the Fifth Doctor story “Frontios”, which also involved people being pulled into the Earth), and brings back the Silurians in (I think) the form of yet another subspecies of this prehistoric reptilian race. The most notable thing here is the absolutely gorgeous depiction of the Silurian city, which might be the single most impressive special effect and set design in the history of the show – really beautiful. “The Lodger” is a more effective horror story, with the Doctor isolated from the TARDIS, renting a room in a flat in which mysterious things are happening, and getting to the bottom of it. Matt Smith gets to play soccer and there’s an entertaining love story among the supporting cast, but the ending was a little disappointing, since the cause of the mysterious happenings felt a little too quickly examined; I’d have appreciated more depth in the history of the thing. “The Beast Below” is a very traditional trapped-in-an-enclosed-space-with-danger-all-around story, except that Moffat turns the premise on its ear by making things be not what they seem, and using it as a means for Amy to demonstrate her worth to the Doctor. It doesn’t quite hit on all cylinders, but it’s pretty good.

Then there’s the best of the season: “Amy’s Choice” and the pair of two-parters written by Moffat. “Amy’s Choice” is a fine suspense piece, cleverly taking place at two different points in our heroes’ timeline, and presenting a difficult puzzle for them to figure out, plus bringing resolution Amy’s conflicting emotions about the two men in her life. “The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone” brings back River Song (Alex Kingston, who has plenty of screen presence to stand as an equal to the Doctor) and the weeping angels. While I think Moffat plays fast and loose with the nature of the angels (it seems much easier to keep them at bay here than in “Blink”), I liked some of the new characteristics that he added to them (“that which holds the image of an angel becomes an angel”, resulting in the tensest scene of the season), and there were quite a few nifty last-minute escapes. Despite this, the story seems overlong, the military crew who show up to deal with the angels don’t seem very competent or prepared, and overall the story has more style than substance. While still quite a good story, it felt disappointing given its heritage in previous great Moffat-penned episodes.

Moffat saved the best for last, in the season’s finale, “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang”, in which River returns to help the Doctor solve the mystery of the Pandorica (which turns out to be a pretty neat idea), and then to help the Doctor and Amy save the universe. “The Big Bang” has one of the best opening sequences of any Doctor Who episode ever, and despite the solution relying on a time paradox, it’s a highly entertaining romp, with the denouement at Amy and Rory’s wedding being great fun. Yes, the Doctor saves the Earth and the universe again, but Moffat brings more gravitas and humanity to the event than Davies did in his season-enders. And yet… I still wish the series would veer away from having to end every season with a big bang (literally, in this case). Honestly when the stakes are this high, you just can’t keep topping yourself every season – it just doesn’t work. It only works here because Moffat is a flat-out better writer than Davies (and Davies certainly didn’t pull it off season after season in his run), and maybe Moffat can pull it off once more, but that’s probably the limit.

I want to make special mention of the season’s incidental music, composed by (I believe) Murray Gold, which is some of the most memorable of the series. I particularly enjoyed the themes he wrote for the Doctor and Amy, which key the final scene of “The Eleventh Hour” as well as the coda of “The Big Bang”. I hope the music gets released on an album, because I’d certainly buy it.

This has been a far longer review than I’d anticipated, which I guess speaks well of the season overall. Certainly I enjoyed it, even if there were a few clunkers along the way. But it did feel like it was struggling to throw off the weight of the immensely popular Tennant era, and having a hard time finding its own voice. It did set up the overall storyline for next season, which I hope will see further evolution and rise in quality.

Benedict Cumberbatch works quite well as Holmes, at times seeming to deliberately emulate the style of Jeremy Brett in the 1980s

[Read the whole thing]]]> Steven Moffat & Mark Gatiss’ series Sherlock is quite good, as a modern-day reimagining of Sherlock Holmes (much in the same way that the new Battlestar Galactica was a reimagining of the original).

Benedict Cumberbatch works quite well as Holmes, at times seeming to deliberately emulate the style of Jeremy Brett in the 1980s series (which was fairly faithful to the original stories), but other times carving out his own style. Much of this is because in this series Holmes is a much less sympathetic character, callous and lacking empathy: As Detective Inspector Lestrade (Rupert Graves) says at one point, he’s a great man and maybe someday a good one. Martin Freeman as Doctor John Watson more fully shares the role of protagonist than did his predecessor, being a humanistic figure where Holmes is not.

The series features only three 90-minute stories, of which the first, “A Study in Pink”, is the best. Holmes and Watson meet and become roommates, and solve the mystery of what appear to be serial suicides. It’s the best because the relationship between the two is at its most nuanced here, with Watson showing that he has skills too, albeit very different skills from Holmes. “The Blind Banker” involves a Chinese smuggling ring and a series of murders, and is certainly atmospheric, but focuses on Holmes’ overly-developed sense of importance and capability, while showing him to not be quite as clever or skilled as he thinks he is – but not really seeming to learn from the experience. “The Great Game” presents Holmes with a series of mini-puzzles as an unknown adversary threatens to kill individuals unless Holmes solves his puzzles. This episode seemed a little too clever by half, getting too involved in the mechanics of the plot, while everyone other than Holmes seemed to be shoved to the sidelines. It also unfortunately ends on a cliffhanger.

So the series has its flaws, largely from the writing side, but it’s at its best when it turns the actors and characters loose to interact with one another. It also has some terrific cinematography and excellent music, and the verbal jousting among the characters is first-rate. Fortunately it sounds like a second season is in the works, and hopefully it will build on the first and further develop the characters.

The theme of the season is both one of the Doctor’s impending regeneration (which we

[Read the whole thing]]]> We recently caught up with the last episodes of Doctor Who starring David Tennant. Taken a whole, they were okay, better than the fourth season, but they still show lead writer Russell T. Davies’ tendency to be overly sentimental.

The theme of the season is both one of the Doctor’s impending regeneration (which we know about thanks to the mass media, but he obviously doesn’t), and the Doctor’s relationship to his companions generally, i.e., why he has and needs them, since he spends these adventures without any companions.

The first episode is a big tease: “The Next Doctor” (written by Davies) has the Doctor land in London in 1951 where he becomes embroiled in a plot by the cybermen, but more importantly he encounters a man (David Morrissey) who claims to be the Doctor, and even has a companion, Rosita (Velile Tshabalala), who resembles the Doctor’s past companion Martha Jones. It quickly becomes apparent that this Doctor isn’t who he claims, and the fun is in figuring out who he really is. The explanation doesn’t aim too high, which is fine, since it provides some insight into the Doctor himself as well as making the other character interesting in his own right. The cybermen story is much less satisfying, culminating in a truly ridiculous monstrosity menacing the city. So this one was a bit of a mixed bag.

The second episode, “Planet of the Dead” (written by Davies and Gareth Roberts) is the least interesting story of the season. The Doctor gets on a London bus on which a jewel thief, Lady Christina (Michelle Ryan) is also travelling, and they end up getting sucked through a hole in space to a desert planet, from which they need to learn how to escape, since going back through the hole kills anyone who tries it. They meet aliens who have recently crashed on the planet, and learn why the world is a wasteland, but none of that is really interesting: It’s just a lackluster monster story. The emotional core of the story is the Doctor’s relationship with Lady Christina, who find the Doctor and his life of travelling alluring, but the Doctor realizes that the amoral Christina would be a poor companion and rejects her. There’s a foreshadowing here of the Doctor’s impending demise, but that’s really the high point of the episode. This one was a misfire.

By contrast, “The Waters of Mars” (Davies and Phil Ford) is the best of the specials. The Doctor lands on Mars in 2059 during the days of the first manned mission, but he knows that every person on the base is doomed to be killed in a huge explosion, although Captain Adelaide Brooke (Lindsay Duncan) inspired her granddaughter to help lead Earth outside the solar system. Things start to go wrong when several crewmembers are infected with some sort of virus, causing their bodies to be controlled by some sort of water-based alien. The Doctor tries desperately to depart, but he’s delayed just long enough to have a change of heart: As a time lord, he can change history, and he resolves to do so, to save whomever he can from the base.

This episode is in the tradition of many of the classic series’ “locked inside with a killer” stories, as the characters get gradually herded to a place where they have to make a stand or die, with the added tinge of melancholy since the Doctor knows their fates. It tie into the overall theme of the specials is to show how the Doctor can act unchecked if he doesn’t have a companion tying him to humanity. It’s a tense story with compelling acting and drama, although any long-time viewer of the series will be a little perplexed (as I was) that companions are so important to the Doctor, since he’s gone for periods without them in the past and his fundamental character hasn’t changed. I guess you can chalk it up to specifically the Tenth Doctor being a man whose hubris led him to making this frightening decision. In any event, this is probably he single best episode Davies has written.

Finally we have the two-part episode “The End of Time” (Davies), in which the Master returns (played again by John Simm, although this time as a sort of young punk rather than an insane aristocrat – quite an impressive turn, really). The Doctor arrives on Earth to prevent this, where he again meets Donna’s grandfather Wilfred (Bernard Cribbins) who has been having nightmares about the Doctor and the end of the world. The Master is captured by a billionaire who wants him to activate a piece of alien technology, which he does, except that he turns the tables by using it to take over the Earth himself. But all of this may end up being incidental, as we learn that the President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton) has been using the Master as a means for Gallifrey to escape the time lock it was plunged into at the end of the Time War. The Doctor has to stop all of them to save humanity and the rest of the universe besides, but at the price of his tenth incarnation.

This story is annoying for two reasons: First, it’s yet another of Davies’ over-the-top season-enders, which honestly gets very boring after a while. You can’t keep ratcheting up the suspense and excitement level all the time, it’s not “Doctor Who Saves the Universe Again and Again”. Second, even after he’s been fatally wounded, there’s a lengthy denouement where he travels around to visit or see the many friends he’s had in his tenth life, a sort of melancholy mirror to the events of “Journey’s End” at the end of the fourth season, but which really feels entirely unnecessary. A little nostalgia here and there is okay, but geez, this was too much. The scene with Captain Jack was amusing for the decor of all the aliens in the bar, and the encounter with Rose was amusing, but I think this sequence should have been scaled back considerably.

Some bits are quite good: Wilfred is an endearing character, and the fate of Donna is still rather tragic. John Simm is excellent as the Master, especially in the first half, Timothy Dalton is always a delight to see, and the final confrontation between all parties is quite good (although it perhaps goes on a bit too long, and the solution the Doctor chooses seems so simple as to undercut the length even further; Davies is not really the strongest plotter). But overall I found “The End of Time” a bit disappointing, especially after “The Waters of Mars” (whose themes were largely dropped in this story, which is also too bad; I’d been intrigued by the possibility of the Doctor heading down a path of hubristic self-destruction, which isn’t how it played out).

I’ve said several times before that I didn’t think David Tennant was as good a Doctor as Christopher Eccleston. This is selling Tennant short to some degree: I think he was let down by the writing as much as anything. Although I do feel he played the character in a way too similar to some past Doctors, whereas Eccleston’s Doctor didn’t really resemble any of his predecessors (which was, uh, fantastic). But Tennant’s earnestness and comic tinges have been entertaining.

For next season, I’m most excited that Steven Moffat will replace Davies as executive producer and head writer, as Moffat has written several of the very best episodes of the series, and I’m looking forward to the quality of the writing going up next season. Here’s hoping that’s how it works out.

(You can read my reviews of other nouveau Doctor Who seasons here.)

[Read the whole thing]]]> It took a while, but we recently finished the first season of Torchwood, the Doctor Who spin-off about a team in Cardiff, England defending the planet against alien incursions, and featuring Captain Jack Harkness, the occasional guest-star of Who. As I’ve done with Who, I’ll list the first season episodes in order of most to least favorite, and as usual my comments below will contain spoilers.

• Captain Jack Harkness (written by Catherine Tregenna)
• Ghost Machine (Helen Raynor)
• Out of Time (Catherine Tregenna)
• They Keep Killing Suzie (Paul Tomalin & Dan McCulloch)
• End of Days (Chris Chibnall)
• Countrycide (Chris Chibnall)
• Random Shoes (Jacquetta May)
• Greeks Bearing Gifts (Toby Whithouse)
• Combat (Noel Clarke)
• Everything Changes (Russell T. Davies)
• Small Worlds (Peter J. Hammond)
• Cyberwoman (Chris Chibnall)
• Day One (Chris Chibnall)

A friend of mine said on Facebook that you have to look at Torchwood as a guilty pleasure. That would be fine – since much of this season is very poorly written – except that I already tend to see Doctor Who as a guilty pleasure, and Torchwood is a big step down from it, so where does that leave it?

The most frustrating thing about the show is that the Torchwood team are mostly incompetent, which is a big change from most shows of this type where the government organization protecting us from the unknown is instead highly competent. But this isn’t really a theme of the show, it’s just a lever used for the stories: The characters are incompetent, so they do stupid things, and that results in problems.

So, for example, in “Cyberwoman”, Ianto has been hiding his half-cyberized girlfriend in the basement of Torchwood since the Battle of Canary Wharf back in Doctor Who season three. He doesn’t really have a plan to reverse her condition, and he certainly doesn’t trust that his co-workers would help him. Naturally it all goes disastrously wrong once she gets loose. Or the first episode, “Everything Changes”, when the characters are making selfish use of the alien artifacts that Torchwood has access to even though Captain Jack’s told them not to. All this would make more sense if the team were more of a research organization, but that’s not really what they do, and it’s certainly not what they’re set up to do. This pattern continues through the season finale, “End of Days”, when the whole team turns against Jack to do something remarkably stupid which puts the whole world at risk. I can’t count the number of times I said, “Maybe next time you’ll listen to Jack!” at the television during the season.

Not that Jack is a whole lot better, since he’s written very erratically. He’s certainly the most competent character in the group (although Tosh is okay; she’s a fair sight better than Gwen, Ianto and Owen), but he also swerves from being empathetic to being very callous and uncompromising. It’s like the writers couldn’t decide if they wanted him to be a tough-as-nails leader, or more of a heroic figure like the Doctor.

The season’s rocky start has one good episode, “Ghost Machine”, and a decent one, “Countrycide”. The former is an atmospheric story about a device that can show echoes of the past, while the latter is a creepy horror story whose punchline is very different from what you’d expect. But neither of these are episodes to build a season on; in a better show, they’d be meat-and-potatoes episodes rather than the standouts. And they’re amidst dumb episodes like “Cyberwoman” or the immeasurably stupid “Day One” with its sex-obsessed alien killer (gah!), or the faerie-inspired but muddily-plotted “Small Worlds”.

The series does get better as it goes on, though. “They Keep Killing Suzie” features the forgotten Torchwood member from the first episode coming back to cause trouble, a well-constructed episode that unfortunately peters out with a pointless chase sequence at the end. “Out of Time” involves some people from 1953 brought forward to the present and having to adjust to a very different era. It’s one of the more thoughtful episodes in dealing with this premise seriously. And the best episode of the season is “Captain Jack Harkness”, in which Jack and Tosh are thrown back to 1941 during the dawn of World War II and have to figure out how to get back even as Tosh is the subject of anti-Japanese sentiment. They also meet, well, Captain Jack Harkness of that era, who’s not at all what they were expecting.

That episode sets up the last episode, “End of Days”, in which the mysterious goings-on turn a promising set-up into the team turning against Jack pointlessly and resolving into another stupid monster story. It’s a bombastic story but it’s frustrating and not very satisfying. And it ends with Jack disappearing to adventure with the Doctor at the end of his third season, which makes the series feel even more like a spin-off which is subordinate to its original series.

Torchwood has all the ingredients to be a solid series, perhaps a little derivative of The X-Files, but with a flaboyant, unusual star character, an inventive visual look to the team’s headerquarters, and an unusual pedigree. But the writing just doesn’t follow through on the series’ premise, and rarely delivers stories that either make much sense on their own terms, or involve characters doing things that seem sensical. Overall, it’s mediocre, and never truly great.

[Read the whole thing]]]> It took us a little while, but this weekend we finished off the fourth season of Doctor Who. As usual, I’ll run down the episodes from best-to-worst (in my opinion, anyway), and then some comments with spoilers:

• Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (written by Steven Moffat)
• Turn Left (Russell T. Davies)
• Planet of the Ood (Keith Temple)
• Midnight (Russell T. Davies)
• The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (Russell T. Davies)
• The Doctor’s Daughter (Stephen Greenhorn)
• The Fires of Pompeii (James Moran)
• The Unicorn and the Wasp (Gareth Roberts)
• The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky (Helen Raynor)
• Partners in Crime (Russell T. Davies)
• Voyage of the Damned (Russell T. Davies)

Season four got off to a very shaky start indeed, with the Christmas special “Voyage of the Damned”, which was silly, dumb, nonsensical and several other adjectives. A bad episode, as the Christmas specials generally have been. But still, forgivable as it was just a special.

Unfortunately, the season proper got off to a start nearly as poor, with a ridiculous (and rather gross) villain and plot. The redeeming quality of “Partners in Crime” was the whimsical relationship between the Doctor and new companion Donna Noble, with the memorable musical theme for their pairing. But the episode itself bent over way too far to keep the two just missing each other for its first half, and the premise of creating little baby aliens from human fat was disgusting for basically no good reason. Between them, these two episodes made me put off watching the rest of the season for quite a few weeks, because they were both really weak.

Unfortunately this is a consistent problem in Russell T. Davies’ writing: His characterizations are pretty good (occasionally great), but his plotting and premises – even by the loose standards of Doctor Who – tend to be very weak.

The next few episodes are decent “bread-and-butter” episodes: “The Fires of Pompeii” is about as middle-of-the-road an episode as you could get. “Planet of the Ood” is a pretty good thriller. “The Sontaran Strategem/The Poison Sky” is a mediocre invasion-of-Earth yarn. “The Doctor’s Daughter” is a straightforward colonization-gone-wrong yarn, made a little better through the exuberant performance of Georgia Moffett as Jenny, and titular character; however, I guessed the episode’s punchline about 15 minutes in. “The Unicorn and the Wasp” is a far-too-pretentious science fictional mystery featuring Agatha Christie as one of the characters; despite a few good moments, the episode is too ludicrous to hold together.

At this point we’re more than halfway through the season and it’s been a pretty mediocre lot so far. And as a companion Donna has been something of a mixed bag. She’s at her best when she’s acting as a mature, capable woman; as with Martha Jones in season three, at times she’s more mature than the Doctor himself. But her characterization is uneven, as she’s often overwhelmed by events she’s thrown into, which although it’s fairly reasonable that she would be, it’s also ground that feels recently trod-over in the current series. Catherine Tate seems swept away by the eddies of the writing, doing well when given good material, but seeming whiny or annoying with weaker material. Ultimately I blame the writing, as I think it would take an actress of historic talent to forge a consistently great performance out of the character of Donna as portrayed here.

Fortunately, the second half of the season is a marked improvement over the first, unsurprisingly starting with Steven Moffat’s two-part entry, “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead”. It starts off as an effectively eerie horror episode – a global library which is utterly silent and deserted when the Doctor and Donna arrive – and soon become much more with the introduction of archaeologist RIver Song, who knows the Doctor but he doesn’t know her; this is the first time he’s met her, but she’s known his future self for a while. Alex Kingston is terrific as River, and makes me look forward to seeing her (hopefully) in the future, although the way television series work, I’m not holding my breath. The story has the frantic-yet-terrifying feel of some classic episodes, with the characters beating a hasty retreat from their opponents while slowing figuring out (at some cost in body count) what’s going on. If I have a gripe with the episode, it’s the fate of River Song, which although not utterly tragic, is less optimistic than I’d hoped. I like to think that she eventually is reincarnated and is able to live her life and meet the Doctor again. Nonetheless, this two-parter is – as was the case with Moffat’s last two stories – the clear standout of the season.

The season ends with four Davies-written episodes, which isn’t as bad as it might sound. “Midnight” is an effectively creepy locked-room story, more atmosphere than story, about an alien creature that takes over the body of a woman on a broken-down transport in the middle of an unlivable planet’s wilderness. The story’s main flaw is one of motivation – what’s the alien trying to accomplish, and why does it behave as it does once it’s rendered the Doctor powerless? – but as a suspense yarn it’s pretty good.

Donna barely appears in “Midnight”, so conveniently “Turn Left” is all about Donna: An alien fortune teller inflicts her with a creature which causes her to turn right rather than left back when she interviewed with the company where she ended up meeting the Doctor. As a consequence, the Doctor dies because she’s not there for him in “The Runaway Bride”, and terrible things befall the Earth because of his absence. This sets the theme for the season finale: Donna feeling like she’s just an insignificant person, when her presence has changed the world. It’s quite a good episode, although the sense of destiny imparted to Donna feels grafted-on after the way her character’s been handled so far, and again, the fortune teller’s motivations are left unexplained.

The big finish is “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End”, in which the Earth is, well, stolen – by the Daleks, of course. It’s hard to understand why they keep losing when they have the technology to steal planets and keep them out of phase with mainstream time, which is just one of many flaws in the story. But as a Davies story, much of the plot is left unexplained and/or doesn’t make much sense. The theme of the story is that of the Doctor’s large extended family, all of whom (since the series reboot) appear in this episode, usually accompanied by a plot hole or a moment of sheer coincidence. Everyone pulls together to make things turn out okay, and there’s a rather nice sequence of saying farewell to everyone who’s been on the show the last few years, a sort of farewell to Russell Davies’ tenure.

Davies seems to be a sucker for both the Daleks and big, world-changing climaxes, both of which have worn thin their welcome with me over the last few years. He injects Davros, the Daleks’ creator, though other than giving a manic voice to the Daleks’ ambitions he doesn’t contribute much. The episode looks nice – the producers have learned how to apply their special effects budget quite well – and there are many touching moments (and a few clever ones, like when Jackie escapes certain death), but the whole thing feels like it’s trying too hard.

The story ends with a half-human clone of the Doctor, which gives Rose (who’s acquired a lisp since she last appeared) a happy ending with (after a fashion) the man she loves, and with Donna gaining the Doctor’s mind, which overloads her human brain, forcing the Doctor to make her forget all about him and leave her back on Earth. This latter bit seemed not only completely improbable, but largely unnecessary from a story standpoint: Either kill her off cleanly, or find some better way of having her leave the TARDIS. Wiping her memory, too, seems just like cruel writing.

Overall I think the fourth season was a little better than the third season, even though I liked Martha Jones better as a companion than I did Donna. But I’m looking forward to Steven Moffat taking over as head writer. I think he has the right sense of gravitas to give the series some meaning, but hopefully his tighter storytelling will carry over to structure for a whole season, without the kitchier extremes of Russell Davies’ writing.

Oh, and also, we’ll have a new Doctor, as David Tennant is departing along with Davies after this year’s specials. So it’ll be a fresh start. Again.

The spoiler-free version is this: The series finale was quite good. It pulled together more of the ongoing plot threads than I’d expected,

[Read the whole thing]]]> It seems like we just started watching Battlestar Galactica a few months ago – in fact, it was not quite a year ago – but here we are at the end.

The spoiler-free version is this: The series finale was quite good. It pulled together more of the ongoing plot threads than I’d expected, and featured many of the character, action, and philosophical elements which made the series enjoyable. It was annoying that not everything was revealed – or, at least, not to my satisfaction – but on the whole it was a solid conclusion to an ambitious series and a fond farewell to the characters.

The spoiler-filled review is after the cut.

The episode felt like two episodes melded into one, with an action-packed series climax followed by a denouement. Probably not an accident that it was structured this way. The first episode – rescuing Hera from the Cylon colony – was about as exciting as you could hope for: Galactica gets the shit kicked out of her (perhaps a little too much – it was hard to believe it could still move after the pounding it took) and then gets to kick some ass of its own.

I was pleased that Baltar showed some cojones for a change, and the way the dream in the opera house played out was rather clever. I thought Boomer’s reckoning was disappointing, especially since her change of heart didn’t ring true (or her betrayal a few episodes ago didn’t ring true – take your pick). Chief Tyrol’s face-off with Tory over her killing Cally was more satisfying – Tory was portrayed as such as unlikeable character through the series it seemed long overdue. Cavil’s choice to execute himself was less so, although since the series bent over backwards to avoid portraying the characters as good or evil, it would have been out-of-place for him to have been captured and executed.

Leading up to this episode I wondered how they would end the series. I was actually coming to believe that all the major characters would die in Galactica’s assault on the colony, and the surviving colonists would be left to continue their quest for a home without the Battlestar. That wouldn’t have been a very satisfying ending, but it would have fit the often-bleak tone of the series. But what we got was better than that, happily.

Early in the series I suspected that when Galactica got to Earth it would either be Earth in the distant past, or the far future, rather than our own time as we saw in the Galactica 1980 sequel to the original series. So I was pleased to be right when they got to Earth in the middle of the fourth season and found it was far in the future. So then I was pleased to be right again when they got to our Earth in this episode. Clever: There’s no reason there had to be only one Earth. And since much of BSG has been a series of cautionary tales, it made sense to show both ends of Earth’s (or Earths’) existence.

While the second half was well-done as a send-off to the characters, it was disappointing in several ways, too. It seemed implausible that all of the survivors of the colonies would be willing to turn their backs on their technology and go native and revert (as one presumes they knew they would) to a relatively primitive level of living. I guess the leaders would have either been able to sell this, or would have forced it on everyone, but it happened so quietly – especially after all the dissension in the fleet up to this point – that it was just hard to believe.

The big let-down was in the mystical parts of the series. Although useful as atmosphere, I never bought into them as actual supernatural events (this shouldn’t surprise anyone who knew me); I always assumed that there would be a physical explanation for everything, and looked forward to seeing what it would be. Certainly I never bought in to the idea that god was directing everyone towards this goal. (Sure was a brutal route to take: Kill billions of people so that tens of thousands can finally get to Earth and then revert to savagery.) I could deal with some bits – like the opera house – as being pure stylism, but the supernatural was crucial to the series’ overall plot, which was annoying.

Who were the phantom Baltar and Six supposed to be? Angels? Uh-huh. And what about Starbuck? Was she an angel too, since she was killed on old Earth? That’s a damned roundabout way to make things come about, and it basically makes the character feel like it was cheating the viewers. For what were some of the more intriguing mysteries of the series, I think they really dropped the ball on these.

Okay, getting past that: I’m a sucker for sentimental conclusions, which is largely what this was. Adama and Roslin’s conclusion was the saddest of all, of course, although certainly everyone must have known there wasn’t going to be another reprieve for the President. But at least she did ultimately fulfill her prophecy of bringing her people to Earth.

Seeing the crew break up, mostly to live on their own, was also touching, although what lingered for me afterwards was realizing that most of them would never see another living person and their lifetime would be measured in a handful of years and probably a great deal of loneliness. I’m not sure that’s quite what the writers were going for; it seems like Lee Adama, especially, deserved better than that. (It was entirely believable that Chief Tyrol would head off on his own, though.)

In the end, I’d have to say that the episode was more satisfying than not, especially considering the number of ambitious plot threads the series had built up. The big stuff got wrapped up and after a fashion most of the characters got a happy ending, which is certainly an achievement for a series which was always willing to kill off a character. I think could have been a stronger ending without too much effort, but this was pretty good. It was different, that’s for sure.

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’ve never been a fan of Joss Whedon. I don’t particularly dislike him, either, but my exposure to his work has been limited. I never watched Buffy or Angel because by the time it registered that they might be worth watching, I’d finished catching up on several other series and didn’t feel like catching up on yet more series. I watched five episodes of Firefly and hated it (stories boring, setting ridiculous, characters unlikeable). And I’ve never read any of the comic books he’s written.

But on Friday, planning already to watch the new episode of Battlestar Galactica, we decided to watch the first episode of Whedon’s new series, Dollhouse.

The premise is that an agency is able to wipe peoples’ memories, program them with new personas and skills for particular assignments, and then restore them when they come back. The lead character is one such agent, Echo (Eliza Dushku).

As has been mentioned elsewhere (e.g., in the Boston Globe and by Peter David), the series’ basic flaw is: If you need a professional negotiator, or secret agent, or whatever, why not just hire an actual professional rather than someone “programmed” using some fictional technique? It’s a solution looking for a problem. (I’ve heard that Whedon’s original concept was less adventure-oriented and more intended to explore issues of enslavement and control, which makes more sense as a premise. Rumor is that Fox demanded the series be overhauled with their input, which helps explain what we got.)

The interesting thing about the opening episode is really one of story structure: It’s organized to make it as routine as possible. We have the obligatory introduction to the agency and the obligatory non-adventure to show Echo in a “programmed” role. Then we have the takes-only-2/3ds-of-an-episode adventure with some suspense and action. And then a fade to black amidst a few lingering questions that have been raised. So much set-up and plot mechanics get packed into the episode that there’s no room for characterization or depth, so it ended up being quite bland.

A much more effective approach – which itself isn’t original, but would have made the episode more interesting – would have been to start with Echo in the middle of an assignment, and to have us build up an empathy with her character. Have her really focused on where she is now, and only in the final act peel back the layers to show that she’s acting on behalf of the agency, and finally that she’s not even who we think she is, but is a fake persona. Make her real self very different from the one we’ve gotten to know, and we have some stake in the fact that the woman we knew doesn’t really exist. And not only is there less exposition about the agency, but the nature of the agency gets left as an open question, making us want to come back to find out what it’s all about. To be sure, some of this is known to anyone who read about the series before it aired, but I think this approach would have been far more effective in introducing the set-up while making the opening episode intriguing on its own.

So the overall premise is somewhat interesting, but presents some big challenges to keep us invested in the characters going forward. And the opening episode rates only a “meh”. So they’ve got a ways to climb to make me want to come back every Friday.

(The new BSG wasn’t one of their best, either, but then it was a “calm after the storm” following the excitement of the previous few episodes, so I can understand that.)

Space: 1999 was a childhood favorite of mine, and I still had fond memories of it in young adulthood – but at that point memories are all they were, since I hadn’t seen an episode

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’m frightened to report that I popped an episode of Space: 1999 tonight into the VCR, specifically, “Dragon’s Domain”.

Space: 1999 was a childhood favorite of mine, and I still had fond memories of it in young adulthood – but at that point memories are all they were, since I hadn’t seen an episode in years at that point. In the 90s I found a couple of videotapes of episodes at an SF convention and plonked down some ridiculous price to pick them up.

They’re, you know, not very good.

The acting could be best described as “wooden”. Martin Landau shows less range than William Shatner at his most Shatnerian, Barbara Bain seems vaguely similar to Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, and Barry Morse seems like a slightly drugged Isaac Asimov. Eeg.

The story involves a carniverous, hypnotic, disappearing space alien which lives in a sargasso of spaceships which somehow moved itself from the edge of Earth’s solar system to a location much further away. (Though remember that this is the series in which the mon is blasted out of Earth’s orbit at faster-than-light speeds, and yet which slows down to sublight speeds when it enters another solar system.) The creature is defeated through nonsensical means (with an axe).

And honestly this is pretty typical of an episode of the first season of the series. The second season turned from emphasizing the horror of outer space to becoming an action/adventure series, but it wasn’t really either an improvement or a decline; the whole series was just fatally flawed.

And yet, watching this episode tonight there are brief moments when I think, “This could have been cool.” The laser pistols are neat. The scenes with the Eagles flying above Moonbase Alpha evoke a certain feeling, that humans are surviving even in this barren environment with only a bleak hope. The notion that by this episode they’d been drifting in space for over two years. And of course the Eagles have that cool modular design. There’s also a throwaway moment when Commander Koenig (Landau) mentions that his predecessor on the base had left a bunch of junk in his office which Koenig was going through and salvaging, which made me think that of course any human habitat is going to build up junk as people fail to clean it out, but in these peoples’ circumstances that trash could be treasure indeed. The series is completely oblivious to the more profound implications of these little ideas, it’s just an adventure series. But still.

Sometimes I daydream what it would take to try to resurrect Space: 1999 as a serious science fiction series. It’s a mind game, since the series is so ludicrous by any serious SF standards, far more so than the original Battlestar Galactica was. You could have an experiment with an alien device go awry and drop the moon into the network of wormholes across the galaxy. Really play up the challenge of trying to keep 300-odd people alive on the moon using technology which we might actually achieve in a century or so, and how their mental state changes when living in isolation from the rest of humanity for years. Have some really alien aliens, not just guys with big hair and forehead bumps, or even just pull in the old chestnut of humans on Earth just being an offshoot of an older, starfaring species (which popped up in the original series, too). I’m not saying it would be a great series, but what would it take to try to make it a good one?

All very silly, I know. Space: 1999 will remain a bad TV series which has been mostly forgotten by almost everyone who ever watched it. But somehow there’s just enough there to make me think stuff like this, that maybe there’s something here that could have worked, in other hands, given a different treatment.

After all, something makes me pop that videotape in once in a while to watch an episode. That’s not something I ever feel moved to do with, say, The Six Million Dollar Man.

A few hours later, C. walks past my door and stops to say that his wife loves the series (and he

[Read the whole thing]]]> Yesterday I received my DVD set of Torchwood from Amazon. Just for yuks I put it on display so people could see it through my office window when they walked down the hall.

A few hours later, C. walks past my door and stops to say that his wife loves the series (and he thinks it’s pretty good, too). I say I haven’t watched it, but that I do like the new Doctor Who (although it’s slowly going downhill). And also that I’m just starting to watch Battlestar Galactica. Then I shock him with the fact that I didn’t like either Firefly or Heroes. And we natter on for a while about all of that and he departs.

Some time later, T. comes by my office and notices the DVDs.

“Why’d you get that?” he asks. “It sucks.”

Okay then.

My main problem right now is that I’m not watching as much BSG as I want to.

Well, and I haven’t mailed my taxes yet.

Okay, maybe I don’t have a “main” problem.

[Read the whole thing]]]> Talk about late to the party: Last night we finally watched the DVD of the Battlestar Galactica mini-series that’s been sitting on my shelf since my Dad gave it to me a couple of Christmases ago. It’s one of the few TV series that I’m sorry I missed out on; the reason I did is that Comcast in my city doesn’t include Sci Fi among its stations unless you pay extra for digital cable, which I’ve refused to do just to get one station. So, no BSG on television for me.

I have heard the many good things people have said about the series, but it was hard to get up the motivation to start watching several seasons of television on DVD. And the last two well-regarded SF shows I watched – Heroes and Firefly – were both pretty bad. (Heroes was a decent idea weighed down by boring writing. Firefly was just drek.) So my enthusiasm for BSG was muted. Plus one of the creators of BSG is Ronald D. Moore, who was a writer and producer on the 90s Star Trek series, which were also drek.

Despite all of this, we thoroughly enjoyed the mini-series, finding it well-written, well-acted and well-produced. Which makes me even sorrier that I’ve been missing out on it after all this time!

I was impressed that the creators were able to take the original series’ premise and trappings (character names, planet names, visual appearance of the Cylons) and craft a completely series – even grim – story out of it so that some of the silliness of the names actually seem like artifacts of humanity’s golden age which we’re watching come to an end over just a couple of days.

The construction of the characters is downright scientific: I think all of the major characters either tells a big lie during the story, or is hiding one from before the beginning. All of them are deeply flawed in some critical ways. I think the perfect example of character construction is Gaius Boltar: The “traitor” in the original series, in this series he’s used by a Cylon agent to help bring down humanity. We also know he’s going to be the Cylon’s link to humanity if he manages to escape, yet he does the honest thing when he has a chance to get away by letting someone else go in his place – and then is able to go anyway through the selflessness of another character. The series unflinchingly forces characters to confront their flaws, and different characters have different degrees of success in doing so.

It took me a while to decide whether I liked the acting on the show, and eventually I decided it was actually very good acting. I think I found it difficult to judge because the writing is very subtle and there are few emotional outbursts, and thus few opportunities for actors to really chew the scenery. I think Education Secretary Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) was the litmus test for me: I kept wondering, “Is she doing a good job, or is she just sort of sleepwalking through the role?” Roslin is a very even-tempered character placed in a very difficult position, but I think McDonnell does a fine job of holding the character steady but having her inner turmoil show itself in small ways at key moments. The rest of the cast is equally good, and Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama is excellent in anchoring the series as the man at the center of the firestorm.

The production work was interesting, too. The space battles have a visual look similar to those in Babylon 5 (not really a surprise since B5 blazed the trail for special effects in space opera used today), but the low-key music (often no more than a simple rhythm) and frenetic editing make the battles seem less like a ballet (a style pioneered by Star Wars and rarely deviated from in SF film since) and more like a period of complete chaos in which everyone feels happy to get out alive. The sets and lighting are dark and foreboding. The music is portentious – what there is of it. I would have appreciated some slightly more melodic music, but I can see what they’re going for here; it’s so sparse that many scenes occur without any musical support, which is unusual in adventure television.

So overall, good stuff. Naturally I promptly went out and bought the first season on DVD. This series seems to be further support for the notion that there are no bad ideas, only bad writers. What the world (or at least television) really needs are more good writers.

While out there on vacation, I caught the Nova special Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which as I mentioned previously is about the

[Read the whole thing]]]> After posting about Richard Dawkins on Expelled! I realized I ought to post the following review I wrote way back around the time of our trip back east last November:

While out there on vacation, I caught the Nova special Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, which as I mentioned previously is about the 2005 Dover trial in which parents sued the school board to prevent Intelligent Design (ID) from being taught in schools.

It’s a remarkable show. Inspiring, even. Watching it one really sees what the scientific community can do when it brings both barrels to bear on a pseudo-scientific idea like ID: Not only were the expert witnesses able to demonstrate the extent to which evolution has been repeatedly tested and found to be reliable (and thereby demonstrate the scientific method at work), but they neatly dissected ID and showed how useless it is as a scientific theory. The principle of irreducible complexity – a key tenet of ID – was shown to be reducibly weak through the demolishing of examples of it (supposedly) in action, and without that there just wasn’t a leg for ID to stand on. One commentator observed that ID is essentially a negative argument, summing it up by saying “Evolution doesn’t work, therefore we win by default.” But of course evolution does work – it’s passed test after test – and even if it didn’t, that doesn’t make ID a theory, it just makes it an idea: It doesn’t explain anything, it doesn’t provide a testable hypothesis, it has no practical benefits. It’s really just a pipe dream.

The plaintiffs managed to win an even loftier goal than that, though: Through savvy investigative research, they demonstrated a concrete link between the supposedly neutral Intelligent Design and the religious doctrine of Creationism, by tracing the history of Of Pandas and People, the ID book at the center of the trial. The smoking gun in the investigation is a beautiful moment, so I won’t spoil it for you, but it made my jaw drop. (There are several jaw-dropping moments on the science end of their arguments, too.)

The judge in the trial, John E. Jones III, came across as quite intelligent and perceptive, and his ruling against the ID proponents was sweeping, and his own commentary in the show made the wise point that in an era when we need good science and competitive educational systems as much as ever, teaching bad science to high school students seemed counterproductive.

Apparently only a few ID proponents were willing to be interviewed for the show. Two of the school board members who tried to introduce ID into the schools were an interesting contrast to each other: William Buckingham seemed utterly inflexible in his beliefs, unable to see where science and religion might be able to coincide, and thinking the judge to be a “jackass”. Alan Bonsell was more measured in his statements, saying that he only wanted to make the school district the best one it could be. Which is a fair enough goal, but it leaves open the question of what practical benefits teaching bad science – or, at the most, a simpleminded idea with negligible evidence to support it – would benefit students or society.

The other memorable ID proponent was Philip E. Johnson, an emeritus professor of law at the University of California Berkeley and a member of the Discovery Institute, an ID-favoring think tank. He says that he’d hoped the case would be a breakthrough in restructuring the nation’s educational system in his lifetime, but now he suspects it will be a lot longer. It’s baffling to me that he would have had such high hopes, since their case was based on nearly nothing – certainly nothing demonstrable or testable – so their hopes seemed mainly to lie in the Bush-appointed judge and the support the case received from the Bush administration. This just seems to underscore that the ID crowd are mainly pushing a political and social agenda without any rational basis underlying it. There’s nothing wrong with having irrational beliefs – the world would be a pretty colorless place if logic dominated every field of human endeavor – but such things are antithetical to science, and should not be presented as such.

Another take-home point to this show is how specious the argument that the fact that “many reputable scientists” believe or disbelieve in a theory is not a basis for arguing for or against that theory. “Many reputable scientists” may believe in ID or disbelieve in global warming, but how many of them there are, or what their reputations are, is irrelevant. Science is not a popularity contest, science is a quest to understand how the world works, and to validate or disprove theories through observation and testing. It’s those scientists’ results, not their numbers, which we should pay attention to.

And whether or not ID is long on numbers, it’s certainly short on results.

Naturally, Judgment Day is available on DVD.

Please be warned that there are some spoilers in

[Read the whole thing]]]> It took a while, but we finished watching the third season of Doctor Who last night, which means it’s time for the review of the whole shebang. (If you missed them, you can go back and read my wrap-ups for Season One and Season Two.)

Please be warned that there are some spoilers in the discussion below, so if you haven’t seen the whole season, you might want to come back after you have to read this.

Here’s how I thought the episodes stacked up, from best to worst:

• Blink (written by Steven Moffatt)
• Utopia (Russell T. Davies)
• Human Nature/The Family of Blood (Paul Cornell)
• Smith and Jones (Russell T. Davies)
• The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords (Russell T. Davies)
• The Shakespeare Code (Gareth Roberts)
• Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks (Helen Raynor)
• Gridlock (Russell T. Davies)
• 42 (Chris Chibnall)
• The Lazarus Experiment (Stephen Greenhorn)

(We haven’t seen the two post-Martha Jones episodes listed as part of the season, due to the peculiar way in which we watch the episodes. No, it doesn’t involve BitTorrent downloads, because if it did then we’d certainly have seen them!)

In the large, I thought this season was considerably weaker than the second season, and you’ll recall that I thought the second season was a disappointment compared to the first. As is usual with such things, I think the fault lies in the writing, as even several episodes in the first division were badly flawed, and several episodes during the season were downright cringeworthy. I think many stories strive to be too cute or too clever and end up just being ridiculous. Granted it can take a truly outstanding writer to take a silly idea and make good drama out of it, but I’d hope that any decent writer would at least be shy away from the silly ideas that they can’t make work. On the other hand, obviously I have a different idea of what “works” for Doctor Who than the show’s creators.

On the casting side, I enjoyed Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones quite a bit. I appreciated that she came from a less-nebulous background than Rose Tyler, as Martha was a medical student. It was sometimes frustrating that Martha would have moments of whining about the Doctor not noticing her, mainly because I thought the show didn’t spend enough time on her unrequited feelings until the very end and so it always felt a little out-of-place. (Not to mention that it felt like a reprise of the main running theme throughout Season Two.)

I still haven’t fully warmed to David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, and still pine for Christopher Eccleston’s more nuanced character. I think I’ve decided it’s not really Tennant’s fault, it’s just that the character is written as a one-dimensional figure: A hopeless do-gooder who’s sort of a brilliant oaf. This leads to some very unsatisfying plot developments, often involving the Doctor seeming completely baffled until he pulls a rabbit out of his hat at the very end. This exacerbates some of the silly stories that the episodes are based around. The Ninth Doctor’s air of self-superiority tended to give his stories a firmer ground on which to stand; when he seemed baffled it was usually because he genuinely had no idea how to proceed, while you never know where you stand with the Tenth Doctor: It he really baffled, or is it just bad writing?

Okay, to be fair we may be pushing the limits of the various elements which go into the Doctor’s personality: Haughty, noble, self-aggrandizing, super-competent, bumbling, clownish. These are the elements which largely define each of the Doctor’s incarnations. The really good Doctors tend to expand and deepen their core aspects (think Tom Baker and Chris Eccleston as prime examples) while the lesser ones seem to flog the same horse over and over (with the Colin Baker character being the worst such figure). The ones in the middle all have their various flaws, by Tennant’s Doctor still feels a lot like the Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy characters: The bumbling do-gooders who are largely undercut by inconsistent writing and oft-incompehensible plotting.

As for the episodes themselves, “Blink” was the clear winner here. Yes, the foundation is a bit weak, as thinking about the ecology of the Weeping Angels makes you realize that they don’t really make any sense except as a one-off plot device. But man, what a plot device! Sending characters into the past to kill them through the sheer passage of time, and telling the story through the character of Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan, who arguably out-acts almost everyone else in the season), with nifty little time dependencies and paradoxes, it’s creepy and moving and dramatic and it just hangs together better than anything else in the season.

“Utopia” is the other excellent episode of the season, and is the lead-in to the two-part finale. Derek Jacobi as Professor Yana is terrific, as one expects from Jacobi, and seeing Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) again and bringing closure to his disappearance after the end of Season One is a lot of fun. I still haven’t seen any of Torchwood, so I don’t know how his character has worked out there, but his presence here is entirely explained in the context of this series, and he’s a nice addition to the end of the series. Anyway, “Utopia” takes place near the end of the universe, and it’s built around a relatively modest concept – trying to help the last band of humans escape a hostile planet for a purported promised land – while being used as a vehicle to introduce the season’s climactic villain. And it does this very well, using bits set up in earlier episodes to build the suspense gradually. I think Russell Davies’ writing works better when his story’s venue is constrained like this; given a much larger canvas on which to work, his stories seem to get away from him.

Paul Cornell’s “Human Nature” two-parter is one of the stories which is basically a house of cards (the Doctor’s motivations for becoming human seem spurious in the extreme – he did all this to be merciful? What the–?), but it’s a pretty effective story nonetheless. The Doctor’s turn as a human results in a character with more depth and range than the Doctor himself has, which serves to underscore that the Tenth Doctor is one of the weaker Doctors, but it does give Tennant more to do than usual, and he does a good job with it. (This is one reason why I think the fault in the character lies in the writing and not the acting.) The story is perhaps overlong, but still pretty good. Special mention to Harry Lloyd as Baines, the prefect who’s taken over by the Family, who makes Baines into one of the creepiest human-looking antagonists I can recall in the show.

From here the season declines from “noteworthy” to “merely adequate” or worse. “Smith and Jones” was kind of a mess of an episode, although it gets extra points for the “Judoon on the Moon” line. The Judoon feel too much like unusually-silly Sontarans and the premise of transporting a hospital to the moon is even more ludicrous than the usual Doctor Who plot device. “The Shakespeare Code” was so pedestrian I have basically nothing to say about it.

Of the really bad episodes, “Gridlock” had a completely ridiculous premise which I just couldn’t get past to enjoy the rest of the episode. I haven’t really warmed to all the “New Earth” stuff which pops up in the series from time to time; I’d be happy if they just jettisoned the venue entirely. “42″ felt like a poor redux of Season Two’s “The Impossible Planet”, which itself was not a great episode. And “The Lazarus Experiment” started out as a science fiction cliche, and ended up as an unusually implausible Big Monster Story. Really bad stuff. This made the first half of the season hard going indeed.

That leaves the other two two-parters. “Evolution of the Daleks” lands as a slightly-below-average story, largely squandering the promise in setting a Doctor Who story in Depression-era New York, overshadowing it with the rather silly idea of evolving the Daleks into human-Dalek hybrids. This story certainly had the feel of the Daleks being well past their sell-by date; unlike the Jon Pertwee-era Dalek stories, which felt all to mechanical and predictable, the Tennant Dalek stories have turned the Daleks into some sort of bogeyman, seeming slightly pathetic and overused, and only frightening because they happen to be armored machines carrying guns. All of the emotional resonance of the excellent Eccleston episode “Dalek” (arguably the best episode of the new series overall) feels very much a thing of the distant past. “Evolution” has too much of the feel of two over-the-top Colin Baker episodes, “Attack of the Cybermen” and “Revelation of the Daleks”, seemingly thrashing around to figure out in what new direction the monsters should be taken, while simultaneously undercutting their essential menace.

Lastly, there’s the climactic two-parter of the season, in which the Master (William Hughes) returns to the 21st century (apparently a few decades in advance of our own era, as they have flying aircraft carriers here) and arranges to take over the world and use humanity to launch a war to conquer the cosmos. The Master here is portrayed as both calculating and flamboyantly insane, which is certainly quite different from his past personas, who were dark, manipulative villains. It’s a weird effect; it certainly makes him a surprising antagonist as he often acts in ways that I found surprising compared to his past behavior, but then, that’s sort of the point of regeneration, isn’t it? Arguably it was just a coincidence that the Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley Masters had basically the same personalities.

The downfall of the story is that it relies far too much on cheap tricks to work. Aging the Doctor to an old man, and then a ridiculously old man, was certainly creepy, but seemed gratuitous. And the story’s climax was nothing more than a deus-ex-machina, essentially allowing the Doctor to save the day by having all of humanity “think good thoughts” about him at the same time. Any time your heroes win because of a figure bathed in a glowing light, your story has gone badly wrong. (I’d been expecting that Martha had been telling humanity about the Doctor’s good works on their behalf in order to have them passed down the years to their descendants to short-circuit the Master’s plan from the other end.) This sort of magic solution was just as unsatisfying in “The Parting of the Ways” – the Davies script which concluded the first season – and I hope it doesn’t become a habit in what should be nail-biting season-enders.

The episode has a moment seemingly drawn directly from the film Flash Gordon when the Master’s ring is picked up from his funeral pyre by an unknown hand. I guess he’ll be back…

The new Doctor Who series is still fun, but it feels like it’s going steadily downhill. I hope they can turn things around in the fourth season, but I’m losing my optimism. Guys, a little madcap hilarity is okay once in a while (after all, how else could you really spin an episode called “The Christmas Invasion” than to have killer Christmas trees in it?), but I’d like more serious stories with believable premises and sensible resolutions, please.

One unexpected bonus is that NBC has been so completely off-base in promoting most episodes: It seems

[Read the whole thing]]]> I’m sitting watching tonight’s episode of Journeyman, which I wrote about a few months ago. I’m impressed with it so far, after 8 episodes: It’s consistent and intriguing, and the story seems to be moving right along.

One unexpected bonus is that NBC has been so completely off-base in promoting most episodes: It seems like they often promote elements of the show which are sensational but pretty minor. For example, a few weeks ago the previews played up the fact that our hero, Dan Vassar, was out with his son Zack at a farmer’s market when he disappears into the past, leaving Zack alone in a crowd of strangers. Sure, it’s good copy (as they say), but it had almost nothing to do with the crux of the episode. This means that I’m usually surprised – and pleasantly so – by what really happens in the episode.

The series’ story arc is pretty nifty, too: Dan’s time-travelling ex-girlfriend Livia is gradually revealing her background and Dan’s disappearances are slowly catching up to him in the present. And there are lots of little hints that one other character might know what’s going on. The acting is also strong, especially Dan and Jack. It’s a nicely-blended mix of character drama (the Dan-Katie-Jack triangle is intense) and plot (each episode is self-contained, but the overall storyline is moving forward).

I’m usually very skeptical that a TV series has a plan and direction – almost every one I’ve ever seen is obviously plotted on-the-fly, and this becomes painfully evident after a couple of years. (I gave up on The X-Files early in the third season when this became clear for that series.) But Journeyman certainly feels like it’s got a plan behind it. And even if the direction is somewhat loose, the theme of self-determination in the face of what seems like an overwhelming cosmic force might be able to carry it for quite a while.

I’ll be pretty bummed if the series gets cancelled, or if the Hollywood writer’s strike blows the series off-course, although in principle I support the writers in their walkout. But hopefully the series will have a decent run with a satisfying conclusion. It’s got me pretty well hooked so far.

Tonight we watched the first episode of the second season of Heroes. It takes place four months after the first season, and we catch up with what the characters are doing. I found

[Read the whole thing]]]> So this new TV season: I’ll probably skip Bionic Woman, and not much else attracted my attention even a little bit.

Tonight we watched the first episode of the second season of Heroes. It takes place four months after the first season, and we catch up with what the characters are doing. I found the first season to be pretty slow, so I don’t know whether I’ll make it through the second season. This episode bored me when it came to the Claire-and-Noah stuff (Hayden Panettiere & Jack Coleman), and more than once I thought that I’d really just like to have a whole episode of Hiro (Masi Oka). The show spends too much time lingering on boring stuff, and the dialogue isn’t especially clever so there’s very little to carry the viewer through those scenes.

The episode kicks it up a notch at the end, though, with several intriguing scenes. If it can build on these bits rather than stepping back and taking its usual time-outs then it could keep me watching. But it has to keep moving.

I stuck around afterwards to watch the first episode of Journeyman. While watching the story of Dan Vassar, it struck me how much Kevin McKidd reminded me of Reed Diamond of Homicide, and who should show up playing Dan’s older brother Jack but – Reed Diamond. I swear, I had no clue!

In Journeyman, Dan is a journalist in San Francisco who starts disappearing from his present life and appearing in the past, apparently following the life of a man whose wife and child died some years ago. Meanwhile his marriage is falling apart since his wife Katie (Gretchen Egolf) and friends thinks he’s having trouble with drug abuse. The set-up is slightly reminiscent of the book The Time Traveler’s Wife, since Dan has no control over what’s happening to him, though at least he does travel with his clothes.

The episode started a little slowly, and I cringed a little at Dan’s encounters with people he knows in his travels to the past, but it grabbed me with two scenes late in the episode: A sudden appearance by a very unexpected character, and then taking the big step of having Dan act smart in explaining his dilemma to his wife. The implication that there’s something larger going on, and that Dan’s not going to be an oaf while forces manipulate him makes me optimistic that this could be a good series. So that leaves the biggest question of all: Is the series going to go somewhere?

Maybe not, but I’m motivated at least to watch the next couple of episodes to see.

(Spoilers for Heroes follow.)

First of all, it’s the sort of episode I wish they’d had, oh, in the fifth or sixth episode. It would have jump-started

[Read the whole thing]]]> People seem really excited about this week’s episode of Heroes, “Five Years Gone”. I enjoyed it too, but I don’t quite get the widespread enthusiasm for it.

(Spoilers for Heroes follow.)

First of all, it’s the sort of episode I wish they’d had, oh, in the fifth or sixth episode. It would have jump-started what was an extremely slow beginning to this series. (At least half of the first six episode seemed superfluous, intended to maintain suspense, while really just making the show boring.) Granted, the Sylar reveal (which was cool) wouldn’t have been possible had the episode occurred that early, but that and other obstacles could have been written around. For instance, Hiro could have made multiple trips to this future, revealing more a little bit each time. (Heck, it would have been better than Hiro and Ando’s tedious adventures in Las Vegas.)

Second – and more importantly – the story in this episode isn’t really new to me. The story is actually a pretty clearly templated on (if not lifted from) “Days of Future Past”, a story from the X-Men comic book series from 1981. This doesn’t really surprise me, since comic book writer Jeph Loeb is a co-executive producer of Heroes, and no doubt creator Tim Kring and many other members of the writers and crew are comic book fans. Both stories feature a dystopian future in which superpowered figures are being oppressed and marginalized due to political reactions in the wake of a superhuman-driven disaster.

The story is substantially similar to the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, too, down to the pyrrhic-victory-in-the-present-but-returning-to-win-a-full-victory-in-the-past conclusion. Someone in Ceej’s entry on “FYG” said he wanted to see the outcome of the fight between Peter and Sylar, but it seemed clear to me that nothing in the future was going to end well for our heroes; probably Peter and Sylar managed to annihilate each other and take out the rest of what was left of New York.

Sheridan’s trip to the future in the Babylon 5 episode “War Without End” also bears some similarities, although the crux of that story is basically different. But my point is that the key elements of “Five Years Gone” are hardly new; the story has its chilling elements, but to me it was basically old-hat.

Heroes is a moderately entertaining series, but I find it frustrating because it’s so slow. Several of the characters frustrate me, too (I wish someone would just smack Mohinder, for instance, and I really hate the Niki/Jessica character). I am glad that the main story will actually conclude this season, and they’ll have a new story next season. A seasonal cliffhanger I think would just make me give up on the show.

(Via Torchwood.)