Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The I in Team

This is another episode that is close to perfection, and another that left me wondering why I ended up with such a negative impression of the fourth season of Buffy. So far it has barely put a foot wrong. I think the problem is with what’s still to come, considering that the Big Bad is revealed in this episode, and he’s basically a fairly uninteresting version of Frankenstein’s Monster. As a threat to carry us through to the end of the season, Adam is not looking too promising. Continue reading

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The Twilight Zone: Once Upon a Time

The Twilight Zone Original Logo 1959Once upon a time there was a black and white television show that was shown every weeknight of my youth at 1am.   I miss those nights watching with my dad.   It ran for 156 episodes.  That show was of course The Twilight Zone.  It’s a show that is typically well regarded and it’s been rebooted a handful of times to varying degrees of success.  Having finally decided to tackle the original series in order, I’ve encountered a number of episodes I had never seen before which blows my mind since I’ve been watching this for somewhere in the vicinity of 50 years.  The episode Once Upon a Time is one such episode that has escaped my viewing and I’m disgusted that it doesn’t make its rounds on those marathon days.  The catch is, I fully understand why it doesn’t get airtime.  It’s outdated… but that’s the very point of it! Continue reading

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Love, Death and Robots: The Tall Grass

As the camera pans down to an old train as it passes by a field of grass, I thought, “This is going to be good.”  I was being random and hopeful.  See, I love old trains.  I have my dad’s Lionel trains setup in the basement and recently built a Lego train; even ran wires throughout it to get it lit up.  It looks great. But I had no idea the episode would take place right off the train.  On top of that, the main protagonist looks like H. P. Lovecraft which also excited me; I’m not a fan of the man himself, but I love his creations and this gave me high hopes about this one. Continue reading

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The Avengers: Silent Dust

The Avengers DVD releaseSteed and Emma head to the countryside, in an episode that includes everything we would expect from a rural British setting at the time: a rich landowner who enjoys “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, sittin’… on every committee”; lots of horse riding; a gamekeeper who sneaks around with a gun, looking for poachers; and fox hunting. Just about everyone they meet also happens to be involved in a plot to hold the country to ransom. Continue reading

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Buck Rogers: The Guardians

buck rogersWe open our latest adventure with Buck and Hawk exploring a lifeless world when a sudden wind kicks up and our heroes encounter a dying Harry Townes near a grave.  Genre fans know him from The Twilight Zone and Star Trek: Return of the Archons.  He’s one of those recurring faces of 1960’s TV, but he’s so heavily covered in a beard, that I failed to recognize him right away.  Townes is one of the Guardians, a race that exists for a millennium before they die and their power is handed over to a new Guardian. But to get that power, it has to be handed over.  Buck and Hawk leave “Janovus XXVI” in search of the new Guardian. Continue reading

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Angel: Expecting

angelI feel like this was the first episode of Angel that was actually trying to address a real life situation in the same way that the parent series did.  I think the idea it was going for is a good one and one that has a lot of depth, but the execution isn’t quite there.  Cordy is dating and after a wonderful night, she wakes up pregnant.  Ok, on its own, that’s a powerful topic.  A woman bears the consequences of a one night stand more than a man does, because ending up pregnant is a long term commitment and for at least 9 months, the woman can’t walk away from it.  So what happens to Cordy is rough, especially since she wakes up with a belly clearly indicating the baby is almost due.  She might as well be 9 months pregnant.  So we know she’s likely to give birth at any moment, and yet this is where the point of the story petered out.  
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Columbo: Murder: A Self Portrait

Columbo Murder a Self Portrait PaintingColumbo still has a dog called Dog. Either he’s getting new dogs and keeping up the Dog naming tradition, or Dog is breaking all records for the longevity of a basset hound. We begin this week with Columbo taking Dog to a basset hound dog show, which looks like a lovely thing to watch, but it’s an odd way to start a Columbo episode. Perhaps they thought the half hour it takes for the Lieutenant to join the actual story was too long to wait, and it was probably a good call, because this one takes ages to get to the point, and we have to suffer half an hour of a man treating three women like objects. Continue reading

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A New Man

Sometimes the old narrative tricks are the best, and the dramatic irony is strong in A New Man. It powers the episode along, keeping us on the edge of our seats throughout. We know that Giles is the demon. Buffy doesn’t. That simple idea is really all you need to lay the foundations of a great episode, with plenty of humour and some important character development added into the mix. Of course, the last two elements are almost always present in episodes of Buffy, which is a major factor in its success. Continue reading

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The Twilight Zone: The Jungle

The Twilight Zone Original Logo 1959Rod Serling often had good ideas that didn’t quite make the point.  I often feel like we’re watching stories with a punchline but not always a message, like the meaning gets lost trying to setup the zinger.  It’s a shame because I really like Serling.  Still, as luck would have it, this episode was written by Charles Beaumont.  Oh, did I say luck?  Ironic, because that’s basically the whole message of the episode. Continue reading

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Love, Death and Robots: Snow in the Desert

sitd4Similar to last episode, I wanted to stay in this world a bit longer.  It’s a fascinating one filled with strange people.  At first glance, we see a man wandering the desert, but as soon as he gets into town, we are greeted with at least 3 different alien species and I wondered about the larger world.  That’s weird because we had 20 episodes that felt very self-contained before Pop Squad, and then we had 2 in a row where the larger world really loomed large in my brain. Continue reading

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The Avengers: Too Many Christmas Trees

The Avengers DVD releaseOne thing that has impressed me hugely with this fourth season of The Avengers is the way the opening sequences to each episode draw you into the story and make you want to keep watching. This is one of the best, with a surreal dream sequence inside the troubled subconscious of John Steed. He has been having a recurring nightmare, because somebody has been messing with his mind. I don’t know about you, but my own dreams are not normally dictated by any budgetary constraints, so I’m not sure that the forest of cardboard trees works all that well, but as soon as creepy Santa turned up and started laughing at a corpse this episode really had my attention. Continue reading

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Buck Rogers: Journey to Oasis

buck rogersSo you remember that episode of the space-show where Mark Lenard played an alien diplomat who helps avert a war? He had a thing for an earth woman too…  Journey to something or other… what was it?  There’s also blue alien with white hair….  Oh yeah, Journey to Babel, the Star Trek episode.  Or wait was that actually Buck Rogers?  It seems this was the sort of role one cast Mark Lenard for, after his far superior casting as a Romulan commander.  Yes, another Journey episode, Journey to Oasis has Lenard playing a diplomat with a secret.  Get ready for it: he can remove his head.  Buck and Wilma have to escort him to some peace talks but they crash on the planet where Kirk fought the Gorn, right near the same rocks ironically and the rest of the episode is dedicated to them getting to the peace talks on time. Continue reading

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Angel: Somnambulist

angelIt’s always fascinating to me when art parallels real life.  I watched this episode the very day I had a conversation with a friend about how people change.  It’s an important aspect of life in fact.  We can hold onto an idea, determined to not let go under some false belief that we’re being scored on how long we can hold onto an idea, or we can learn and change and grow; we can become better than we were.  Angel is a vampire with a violent past and it’s come back to haunt him.  Somnambulist gives Hawkeye himself, Jeremy Renner, a chance to hold up that proverbial mirror (what with vampires not being able to look at real ones) and it gives us a chance to see that even the worst of us can change.
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Columbo: Grand Deceptions

Columbo Peter FalkWe begin with a slow panning shot across model soldiers on a battlefield, and it’s a great way to start an episode of Columbo. Anyone who has seen the 1970s episodes will also have high hopes, because we know the potential of pitting the Lieutenant against a military murderer, the added difficulties of breaking the barrier of their authority, and the enjoyment of seeing power dismantled by a man in a shabby raincoat. The late 80s return of Columbo has resulted in variable quality, to say the least, so can Grand Deceptions deliver a classic episode with a premise that almost guarantees success? Continue reading

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Doomed

The memory cheats. I remembered Season Four of Buffy as being far weaker than the seasons that surround it. So far, that’s not the case. It might be that the closing few episodes created that impression; we will see. But so far I’ve been very happy with the new direction the show has taken. Interestingly, when Doomed takes us right back to what Buffy used to be, I didn’t like it at all. Maybe that was the point, but I doubt it. This episode delivers a clear message: if you thought it was better last year, you were wrong. I think that’s accidental, because I can’t imagine a showrunner deliberately weakening an episode just to make a point like that, but either way this all feels oddly old-fashioned, with the return to the school and a very familiar plot about demons opening the hellmouth. It’s so last year. And that’s a reminder of how the new direction, like it or not, is vastly better than getting stuck in a rut. Continue reading

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The Twilight Zone: Still Valley

The Twilight Zone Original Logo 1959I remember hating history class as a kid in grade school.  “Mom, why do we have to learn history?  It’s already happened!”  I was a futurist.  There was an announcement when I was a young man, maybe around 18, that said the next big thing was here.  It was going to change the world.  My first, albeit incredibly optimistic-if-immature thought was transporter tech.  We would basically be able to beam around the planet.  I don’t recall what it was and I’m sure it was a big deal (probably that little thing called The Internet) but to me, nothing was going to be as good as transporter technology right out of Star Trek.  So I was always looking to the future, always wanting Science Fiction to become real.  “But Mike, you have to understand (trademark mom statement, by the way), people who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it!”  Oh, that makes sense mom.  Now I understand.  No politician has ever opened a history book.  Got it.   Continue reading

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Love, Death and Robots: Pop Squad

pop4Having now seen 20 episodes of this series, I feel like I know more or less what to expect.  And then this episode happens and it surprises me.  It surprises me because every other story felt self-contained.  Yes, they are all part of a bigger world but even Three Robots, which takes a snip of their experience, doesn’t feel like it needs more, no matter how much we might want it.  Pop Squad comes along and is barely enough to give us an idea of what goes on in this world.  Continue reading

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The Avengers: Two’s a Crowd

The Avengers DVD releaseLast week, writer Philip Levene gave us killer plants. This week he mines another old favourite trope by introducing a double for Steed. It’s a tricky story to get right, and many attempts over the years at a doppelgänger story have hinged on outrageous coincidences. Levene manages not to fall into those kinds of traps, but instead ends up with something that is unusually prosaic for the fourth season of The Avengers, a straight-up spy story. Continue reading

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Buck Rogers: Time of the Hawk

buck rogersSeason two starts with new opening credits – thankfully same intro and song, but different cast – and another real feather in the cap, so to speak: no preview sequence showing what’s coming.  Unfortunately, the episode is a little laughable because of the main “villain”, Hawk.  Know why Hawk is called Hawk?  Because he’s part hawk.  Now, in fairness, they do make up for that by tackling the whole Ancient Aliens thing, explaining that Hawk’s people visited Earth in the distant past and there are still indications of them that can be found on Easter Island.   Cool idea, and it actually ties in with the resolution, but it didn’t change that Hawk and his girlfriend, Koori, are a little silly looking.  And does it pay to talk about the joystick in Hawk’s ship that actually has a pigeon head?? Continue reading

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Angel: Parting Gifts

angelI’ve been trying to figure out what bugs me with this show.  I like it a lot actually and find myself looking forward to it immensely, but there is something that bugs me and it finally hit me.  It’s like the little brother of the Buffy-verse.  It often feels like Cordy is a little kid in the way she speaks; she’s cute and dippy rather than showing signs of having started to grow up.  Without Doyle to take some of the energy from the 3 character series, it stood out more with Cordy’s behavior and Angel is just a bit too broody to carry that load.
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