Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Harsh Light of Day

The writers on this show have a great way of juxtaposing similar events but with different people. Often that’s the world of Buffy and her friends in contrast with their enemies, and we do get that here, but there’s a third element as well, presenting a richer and more complex picture. We also don’t get a clear good/evil divide. The three relationships presented in this episode are all twisted in different ways.              Continue reading

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The Twilight Zone: The Shelter

The Twilight Zone Original Logo 1959It sounds a bit like a riddle: how do you destroy a society without laying a finger on it?  I don’t know; you probably get the idea.  But Rod Serling answers that with The Shelter.  The problem is that, like so many of these stories, we’ve got to fill 25 minutes with a concept that really only has about 10-15 minutes of life.  This is a good story, but I don’t think we needed the elongated style for what Serling is telling us. It’s a thought experiment in true horror.  It makes for a great question for The Book of Questions, but isn’t a 25 minute episode of a 60’s TV show, despite the fact that, at the time, this fear was very real.  That’s the one thing you have to remember: this was a very clear and present threat at the time it was first aired.  But was there enough content?  Maybe but for me, it was held together by one line and I’ll talk about that in a moment… Continue reading

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Love, Death and Robots: Lucky 13

lucky13Superstition raises its illogical head when junior officer Colby is given a new ship: Lucky 13.  With a serial number that has 13 in it twice, and whose digits add up to 13, it’s easy to see why this may be a ship of ill-omen.  Coupled that with the fact that 2 crews were utterly lost during missions with the ship, it’s no wonder no one wants to fly her.  But superstition can’t hold a candle to the bonds of friendship, loyalty and love.

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The Avengers: Death at Bargain Prices

The Avengers DVD releaseSomething has clicked into gear for the fourth season of The Avengers and there is a confidence and polish to these episodes that was rarely present before. We’ve gone from a series that was solid, watchable entertainment, to a show that is top-notch every week. In particular, the opening sequences to each episode have been remarkably efficient hooks to draw us into the stories. This week we start with a man looking very nervous in a department store, all by himself. There is something disturbing about that, which I discussed for the Twilight Zone episode The After Hours: Continue reading

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Buck Rogers: A Blast for Buck

buck rogersSynchronicity is a weird thing.  My sister happened to get my post about the end of the year, which opened with me asking where time goes, only to immediately get another email opening with the exact same question.  The day I watched this episode, I had been playing a video game, Gotham Knights, and had found an audio clip of Bruce Wayne’s where he says, “it’s New Year’s Eve… no, I guess it’s actually New Year’s Day….”  Oddly, I played that and found it on… New Years Day.  Then I went to my living room to watch Buck Rogers and the next episode was this one, A Blast for Buck.  Well… as I said, synchronicity is a strange thing indeed. Continue reading

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Angel: Lonely Heart

I have to say I really enjoyed the first episode of Angel, so I was deeply let down by the second story, Lonely Heart.  It does get better about half way in, but it spends the first 15 minutes milling around a bar watching the entire cast being awkward.  It probably has a lot to do with the way they get their cases.  Cordelia has printed out business cards, but no one has them yet, so we can’t have people come to the detective agency in any normal way.  Instead, Doyle again has to have visions which really are such a cheesy way of saying “hey, the writer needs a semi-convenient way of being in this bar… the only one in LA!”   You’ve probably heard the expression, “have horse, will travel” (or for our purposes, “have spaceship, will travel”) but this series offers no logical means of getting from story to story so Doyle’s visions are what we have to work with.  So off to a bar they go and a several hundred year old vampire wouldn’t have much experience with humans, so he’d have no idea how to talk to them!  (Oh, wait, am I being sarcastic?)  When he meets Kate, she asks what he does for a living: why does he go with “veterinarian” instead of “private investigator”?  He doesn’t have a case at that point so there’s no jeopardy of putting a case at risk and he’s trying to find out who is in trouble anyway.  Sounds like a perfect way to make headway.  But no, Mr “I’ve never spoken to a girl before” opts to go with “vet”!  I was bewildered.  Was it supposed to be funny? Continue reading

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Mrs Columbo: Off the Record

If we were unsure of Kate’s marital status, she makes it clear in this episode. She is Kate Columbo no more: “I went to court and got my maiden name back.” Oddly, Mike expresses surprise at hearing Kate introduce herself as Kate Callahan, although she has done so twice before, albeit overdubbed on the most recent occasion, which supports my theory that these episodes were broadcast out of order, with the decision to change Kate’s surname taken after at least one of the episodes had already been filmed. I also still stand by my opinion that a strong motivation for this decision had to be the way the writers can now tease a romance between Kate and Mike, an added element to the show that was absent from the first season. They are obviously very fond of each other, and that perhaps leads to Kate being granted access to murder cases in a way that must surely go beyond the usual interactions between police officer and journalist. Continue reading

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Living Conditions

The problem with Living Conditions is that it’s half a story. That story is The Boy Who Cried Wolf. It’s a widely misunderstood fable because the boy isn’t the one who suffers the consequences of his lies, with the exception of a few later retellings of the story, in which writers sought to correct the problem by having the wolf eat the boy as well. The consequences in the original story are suffered by the villagers, whose flock of sheep gets eaten. The moral therefore should be this: take people seriously when they warn that something bad is happening, even if they have an unreliable track record. The one time you ignore them might just be the one time they happen to be telling the truth. It’s basically this: even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Don’t assume the time has to be wrong because the clock isn’t ticking. Continue reading

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The Twilight Zone: The Arrival

The Twilight Zone Original Logo 1959The Arrival opens up with a teaser that we are about to see the tail end of a long mystery around strange airline flight.  Yes, this is another Twilight Zone episode that focuses on an airplane!  However, this opening serves well to grab hold of us and keep us interested.  Yet, that wasn’t my initial reaction.  Near the end of the episode, I was becoming confused thinking that I’d been tricked: that scene that we had at the start was not at the ending!  Had Serling forgotten what he promised?  But the next morning, while I prepared for work, my brain kicked in and I realized what was done to me.  I don’t know if I was just slow – a distinct possibility –  or if the trick eludes most people upon first viewing, but when it hit me, I was far more impressed by this episode than I’d been with many of Serling’s more recent contributions.    Continue reading

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Love, Death and Robots: Fish Night

fishnight1This has to be the strangest of the tales so far this season.  One of the things I really love about this series is that it’s got a vast range.  We’ve seen comedy, drama, plenty of sci-fi and no shortage of horror.  We’ve seen action and silliness… we’ve even had an episode with real live people.  That’s some versatility; it’s not confined to one type of story, or one type of animation.  The episodes of season one haven’t gone past 20 minutes yet and still manage to tell a compelling story.  

So what the heck can I say about this episode?  Fish Night gives us two door-to-door salesmen driving through some old roads, maybe out in Utah or Nevada, when their car breaks down.  The blistering heat means they can’t attempt to go anywhere until the next morning.  But that night is going to be the most unusual night of their lives.  

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The Avengers: The Cybernauts

The Avengers DVD releaseI’m virtually a newcomer to this series, nearly 60 years after it was made, but I do have a vague memory of watching one or two episodes as a child. Just about the only thing that sticks in the mind from those viewing experiences is the Cybernauts. I can’t say for certain if it was this episode, or one of its sequels, but they are a big part of why I wanted to see The Avengers eventually. Much like the Cybermen in Doctor Who, they terrified me as a child. Continue reading

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Buck Rogers: Happy Birthday, Buck

buck rogersIt’s a bit depressing coming off Space Vampire to get such a mundane story.  In reality, none of these episodes have tread new ground, but they are all varying degrees of fun with old plot lines.  However, this episode is just a standard revenge story.  Cornell Traeger was sent on a routine exploration mission when he crashed and was imprisoned underground for 15 years.  Now he wants revenge on Dr. Huer, the man responsible for sending him on the mission.  Yawn.

The problem is that this ends up being a real talky episode with Traeger spending a lot of time talking to Delora, a psychologist who can extract thoughts from the subconscious.  He needs her to extract data from the mind of a courier who knows Huer’s schedule.  Did I mention, yawn?  He clearly hails from the same race as Jack Palance’s character in Planet of the Slave Girls; his hand glows and if he touches someone he can turn them to silicone.  Oh, the sarcasm is just bursting to get out! Continue reading

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Angel: City Of

I can’t believe it!  I was so happy when Doctor Who came back to our screens in 2005.  It seems I wasn’t alone either; the show grew in popularity in ways we classic fans could never have expected.  Then 2006 came and the popularity continued to grow and there was a spin-off series, Torchwood.  Then another came with The Sarah Jane Adventures.  I mean, the man behind all this brilliance, as far as I could tell, was Russell T. Davies.  Sadly, when he left, Stephen Moffat came in and tried a different strategy which gave us some good ideas, but over the course of his tenure, the show seemed to have lost something.  In my world, it was the fans who had loved the RTD era and bailed with Moffat’s.  Bummer for me; I wanted people to talk to about the show.  Then Chris Chibnall came in and I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to drive the remaining fandom to the hills.  We lost so much when Russell left.  At the time of my writing this, there’s been all this talk of a new showrunner taking over Doctor Who which made me realize what we needed while watching the first episode of Angel.   We need a writer like Joss Whedon.  And that’s because he did with Buffy what Russell would do with Doctor Who, but he did it years earlier.  He treated the audience like we were intelligent! Continue reading

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Mrs Columbo: It Goes with the Territory

What goes with the territory? For Kate, it’s danger, and that’s an element that differs very much from the parent show. Once again Jenny is imperilled as well, so having a daughter also adds to that element of risk. You start to wonder at this point how Kate can bring herself to do the job she’s doing, and the dangers are highlighted even more than usual this week, with one of Kate’s journalist colleagues murdered, while she was on the trail of a huge story. Continue reading

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Freshman

There are moments in our lives where everything seems to change at once. At the end of the third season of Buffy we saw one of those: the end of school. At the beginning of the fourth season we get another, albeit one that doesn’t apply to everyone: going to university. This is a show that never stands still, and is always great at showing the challenges that life changes bring. So we have basically a whole episode of Buffy feeling like she doesn’t fit in, and worse still she doesn’t have the comfort blanket of her old life to go back to either. Continue reading

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The Twilight Zone: Two

The Twilight Zone Original Logo 1959Season 3 of the Twilight Zone opens with an episode that is hard to put my finger on.   Watching it reminded me of many similar movies I’d seen in my youth.  I remember The World, The Flesh and The Devil as my first barren planet movies.  It’s a 1959 movie starring Harry Belafonte, Inger Stevens (Nan, from The Twilight Zone’s The Hitchhiker), and Mel Ferrer.  It’s about 3 people who survive a war that leaves them the last people on Earth.  I also recall The Quiet Earth in 1985; another fascinating look at the end of the world with very few survivors.  And then there’s Enemy Mine, also a 1985 movie, starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett Jr.  That might be the most closely related story as it features two people on either side of a war who meet and become friends.  But more than anything, this episode really made me want to replay the PC game Fallout!  It’s incredible how much the threat of nuclear war must have lingered over the minds of people living in the late 50s and early 60s.  Then again, Fallout is a game that does a great job creating a nuclear war-torn Earth and that’s a very modern game indeed. Continue reading

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Love, Death and Robots: Helping Hand

helpinghand4I’ve got to hand it to them: this has got to be, hands-down, the most agonizing 8 minutes of television I’ve ever seen.  Ok that had to be said, but seriously, if humans need a reminder of just how dangerous space could be, this tiny episode is the training video everyone should watch.  And the entire thing is carried by one character: Alex, a Scot who is effectively a space mechanic.  She goes out to work on a satellite and a rogue screw hits her from behind.   Its hits her in the oxygen tank and she drifts off unable to get back to her one-person shuttle.  With a rescue crew an hour away but only with 15 minutes of oxygen, Alex doesn’t have much hope… but she’s not quite ready to give up yet!

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The Avengers: The Gravediggers

The Avengers DVD releaseWe have seen creepy undertakers before. We have also seen people emerging from coffins and turning out to be alive when they were supposed to be dead, so at first it seems like the second episode of the third season is some kind of a remake of the second episode of the second season: The Undertakers. It proves to be just one element of a bigger story this time, with The Avengers now apparently a show that throws lots of weird and wonderful ideas together, so we have an episode that features an aerial poking up out of a freshly dug grave, and a fake train ride, with a carriage that moves nowhere but gets shaken around while a screen beside the windows shows a projection of scrolling countryside. All of this is just window dressing for a plot to undermine a radar early detection system, so entertainment value is clearly taking precedence over credibility now. That’s not such a bad thing, because once again this is a lot of fun to watch. Continue reading

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Buck Rogers: Space Vampire

buck rogersI didn’t know when to expect this in the season (I’ve been going through these without looking ahead), but I knew it was coming at some point and was so happy to revisit this one.  I never forgot it, although many of the details had faded.  My memory of it was that it was a strong episode and very scary.  Or perhaps chilling is the right word for it.  Space Vampire aired in 1980 just a little late to be a Halloween episode however it was heavily influenced by a number of other horror movies that had come out the previous year.  However, its most noteworthy inspiration comes from Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Dracula.  The ship that is transporting our space vampire is the Demeter; that was the same name of the ship Dracula traveled on in the novel.  There’s also a victim who gets name checked as Helson, a pretty close sound to Helsing, as in Doctor van Helsing from the classic. Continue reading

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Unusual Doctor Who Photo #16: War Games in Colour

I could perhaps have titled this one “The War Games in Garish Colour”, because here are some photos to illustrate what some of the sets from that story really looked like:

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