When God seemed to appear to the Alphans, I rolled my eyes. Here we go, I thought. But to my surprise, this episode offered me a lot to think about. As I say often enough, that’s what good science fiction should do.
Strangely this episode takes place 55 days before the last one: it’s day 1095. I can’t help but wonder why they bothered constricting themselves like this, because it takes a lot of jeopardy away for the characters. If, for instance, Maya is there on day 1150, chances are she survives through day 1095. Call me strange… Anyway, their sensors pick up some alarming readings before a Jesus-looking dude shows up and claims… “I am your creator!” His powers seem to lend credence to this too. But he makes a comment that was very thought provoking. He refers to those “highly imaginative works of fiction that you call religion.” And at that moment I thought: this is something special.
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As we travel through life we tend to collect emotional baggage. The older we get, the more we will be able to look back on past friendships and other associations and wonder what we could have done differently. There will always be plenty of unfinished business. Sometimes there will be a person in our past we would like to see again, but probably never will. Sometimes we will long for a chance to make amends, explain our actions, or simply say sorry. Sometimes we will desire one or more of those things from the other person. Or maybe there’s somebody we are hoping we will never see again, because it would just be too difficult. The central theme of the first season of Owarimonogatari is very much about these kinds of past regrets, and what happens when an association that didn’t end well crashes back into somebody’s life. 
Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence… oh, sorry. Wrong series. This is far from being a comedy, but it does start off in a prison cell, with two prisoners who have become best friends taking about their future. Vince and John seem like decent chaps, and are looking forward to getting out and seeing their wives again, but when Vince gets out first, things don’t exactly go according to plan for him. 
What an extraordinary episode this is. It’s like the first half was written to make the viewers really, really angry, and boy does it work. Ted is immediately a character we hate. We’re with Buffy every step of the way, there. For a very brief moment we might think she is behaving unreasonably towards him, due to the shock of seeing her mum with a new man:
Oh good… a baseball episode. I get more excited about going to work! But within no time at all, Serling has me seeing this as a comedy and it’s down to the audio effects. One thing The Twilight Zone did very well was that they knew how to embrace limitations. Granted, at the time, these were not limitations, but the expectations of the medium, but life was not in black and white and sometimes fiction could not be caught on camera, so The Twilight Zone used what it could. 
Anyone who enjoys Sherlock Holmes has undoubtedly seen the recent Robert Downey Jr. movies costarring Jude Law as Watson. He’s a good Watson but color me a surprised shade of that famously studied scarlet: I had no idea he was in Sherlock Holmes when he was just a lad. I didn’t realize it either even looking at him throughout this episode. It wasn’t until a (weird) slow motion scene that I thought the actor looked familiar. So, like Marina Sirtis in The Six Napoleons, I opted to watch the credits, and nearly fell out of my seat. There he was, plain as day. Sherlock would have been disappointed at my observations skills alright. 
We come now to what I consider the finest of the Trek movies. But to understand that, I need to rewind to 1991. I’m 19 and at this point in our lives, my friends and I start every weekend with a movie, then dinner, then hanging out until ridiculous o’clock. But for this movie, my best “frenemy” and I had had a falling out and I neither invited him to see the movie with the rest of us, nor did I tell him the time or place of the movie. So it made complete sense in my warped world to find him holding the door open at the theater as we arrived. I said nothing to him and we watched the movie… 
At first this season feels like an odd backwards step for the Monogatari franchise. We begin with a prequel to Bakemonogatari, with Koyomi and Tsubasa investigating a minor mystery concerning a shrine in their school’s gardens. It all seems oddly low key and irrelevant, and by the second episode, which concerns Hitagi and Koyomi investigating flowers, the season was already trying my patience. I shouldn’t have worried. 
The year is 1989; 10 years after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Rumor is, this is the final Star Trek movie. I’m 17 and I have a brainwave. I thought, for the tenth anniversary, I should see if my grandfather wanted to see the last Star Trek movie; a celebration since he had taken me a decade before. Together we journeyed back into the Final Frontier one more time. What’s funny in retrospect is that my grandfather and I would spend time together from 11:30pm until 1am many nights in my youth because he liked The Honeymooners and I liked Star Trek and they aired back to back every night. So off we went for that magical trip. How could I not love Star Trek V? People complain about it, but it’s one of the deepest of the Trek movies. They all had heart, but the bond between Kirk, Spock and McCoy has never been stronger. There are a million great lines, often punctuated by a look from Jim. But this movie is about us. Not a look at humanity as a whole, but each of us individually. Shatner didn’t give us an action packed movie, he gave us a thinking, feeling movie. I don’t love everything about it; the Nimbus III stuff is all dreadful, but the bond between the characters steals the show and I can turn a blind eye to all that other stuff. 
I stumbled across this anime series on Amazon Prime, looking for something that was safe to watch with the children around. There is a lot of anime that’s free to watch if you have Amazon Prime, but their age guidance system is far from perfect. A lot of the anime is simply listed as “NR” for “not rated”, which is not very helpful, because that could mean anything from U to 18, and the majority of anime is far from suitable for young children. Dive!! was listed as “ALL”, so it seemed like a safe bet, and I didn’t see anything that I thought would be potentially offensive. The series actually has its origins in a homoerotic manga, but you wouldn’t really know that from watching the anime. The male divers wear skimpy costumes, which I suppose could be classed as manservice, but on the odd occasions I’ve stumbled across any of the swimming events when the Olympics are on, the contestants weren’t exactly wearing Edwardian bathing suits, so this is probably reasonably true to life, although I’m not sure the real Olympic divers wear swimming trunks that are quite so low cut. I can’t say I was paying much attention whenever the Olympics was on, but I’m pretty sure that I don’t remember a parade of builders’ bums. 
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The View from the Junkyard 