Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels captured my imagination from an early age, and one of the reasons for that was the idea of a flat world flying through space on the back of four elephants, on the back of a giant turtle, a concept that just seemed so odd and exciting. But what inspired Pratchett to set his stories on a flat earth? His first use of the idea can be found in Strata, a pre-Discworld book, which draws heavily on ideas from Ringworld by Larry Niven. Another likely source of inspiration can be found Steven Hawking’s opening to A Brief History of Time: Continue reading
One of my favourite television productions is the weird and wonderful adaptation of 
I have to admit the first two acts of this episode had quite a soporific effect on me. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I didn’t doze off for a bit. The story seems like a good one, with Steed trying to figure out who is the traitor in the midst of the organisation he works for, but not a lot happens to change that status quo for about half an hour, and it’s all very talky and slow. It doesn’t help that Steed is basically working alone most of the time. Dr. King’s part in the story is of little relevance until we get to the final act, so we are missing much in the way of the edgy interactions we are used to between Steed and his (often reluctant) colleague, whether than be King, Venus or Cathy. That’s made up for to a certain extent by his uneasy working relationship with One Twelve, who Steed clearly dislikes and distrusts in a way that was certainly not the case with One Ten. In fact, he asks to liaise with One Ten instead, but he’s out of luck. The boredom of the first couple of acts is also ameliorated by the location filming, which has been a rarity so far, and brightens things up a bit. 
A weird thing happened to me today. I worked on my write up for a Twilight Zone episode, then finished prepping a pre-written post for a Doctor Who audio story called The Twilight Kingdom. Finally done with writing for the blog, I sat down to watch an Outer Limits episode. When Keeper of the Purple Twilight came on, I wondered about the likelihood of that word showing up three times in one night. (Thankfully, I had no hankering to watch Twilight next! Twinkly vampires indeed!) Did it count that I sat down to watch this at 7pm… just about the twilight hour? Ok… perhaps it means nothing after all! 
It seems like forever since the last full series of Doctor Who, but we can’t really complain. Once upon a time we had to wait 16 years between seasons. As is often the case after a hiatus of sorts, we return with a tweaked format. The whole season is going to be one story. This has been tried before, and patience has been tried in the process, but the difference with Flux is that we only have a six episode season, so perhaps the precedent is Torchwood: Children of Earth. There is no reason why this shouldn’t work, and work well. 
Season 2 of Star Trek was clearly in a funny state of mind, right? Check! It was also helping me make a point to my kids, and a generation of TV viewers, that the act of watching the TV has value. This is a skill I have noticed declining in recent years. My kids and many of my friends “watch” TV while playing on their phones, doing dishes, the laundry, learning Fizzbin or even swinging from their chandeliers. 
It seems appropriate to take a pause from Big Finish after last week’s adventure, 
If you thought the body the cells inhabit in Cells at Work! had problems, that was nothing compared to the health issues experienced in Code Black, the darker, more adult spin-off series. The basic premise is the same, with anthropomorphised cells in the human body working hard to keep it alive and well, but this body is doing nothing to help himself. It’s a bleak work environment for the cells. 
There is no doubt in my mind that this is an impressive film with some remarkable performances. Willem Dafoe embodies the vampire in just the same way that Max Schreck did (in the reality of the original acting, of course, not the fiction of this account), while John Malkovich gives us an amazing portrayal of a descent into madness, fuelled by an obsession with his art. And “art” is exactly the right word: 
The only two-part story in the entire run of The Outer Limits and it feels like an actual movie. The Inheritors was the one episode I wasn’t really looking forward to because I was a bit put off by sitting through a two-parter so soon after watching Wolf 359, an episode I found nearly unwatchable. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the episode didn’t just have momentum, but a damned good story as well. I was surprised when the first episode ended; how did the better part of an hour go by already? 
As we approach Halloween, I wanted to share a little something I discovered based on a post I read on fellow blogger David Haden’s site, 
Is it wrong of me to be glad to be done with the Divergent universe and have the Doctor and company back in our universe? I think Paul McGann is both a really nice guy and a great Doctor but the Divergent universe was Doctor Who’s foray into what I consider Star Trek: Voyager territory. It promised something different but delivered the same as what was delivered in our universe. (With some exception, to be fair!) To discover I was getting into a Colin Baker story next was a joy. Baker is excellent in these stories but I was stunned to find that Maggie Smith (Evelyn) was not the companion in this, but rather Bonnie Langford as Mel. Well, this might be a breath of fresh air! 
We kick off the second season of Spice and Wolf with an OVA episode, which feels like a holdover from the first season. It’s a lot of fun, with Lawrence tending to an unwell Holo, who ends up exaggerating her illness because she likes the attention. It is the only episode to feature Nora, and that’s a great shame, because she was an effective third main character for the first season, but the second season sees Lawrence and Holo moving on to pastures new. 
Welcome to Halloween in the Junkyard! We are going to start with one of the great classics of silent cinema from 1922, the unauthorised adaptation of Dracula, which only survives to this day thanks to the survival of a handful of prints that were supposed to be destroyed. The fact that Nosferatu came so close to being lost to history doesn’t bear thinking about, because it is a visual masterpiece. 
There was a recent game release called Control that looked like it would have been a game right up my alley, but somehow the trailer didn’t appeal to me. I don’t really have a good explanation for it. 3rd person shooter with supernatural elements, eerie lab setting and strange incursions from another dimension… couldn’t be more me! Yet, I decided not to get it. Then Epic Games, rapidly rising in my book to rival Steam as a provider of games, gave it away. Free as an opinion! So I picked it up and still did not play it, opting instead to play Cyberpunk 2077 and Days Gone. Then I even tried some shorter games. When I finished I checked on Far Cry 6 and found it was less than a week away, so I decided I’d play Control to kill time. And wish I had started sooner.Lead Writers
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Recent Posts
- The Outer Limits: The Brain of Colonel Barham
- Alice’s Adventures Underground
- Doctor Who Flux: Village of the Angels
- Star Trek: Return to Tomorrow
- Catch-1782
- Mysteria Friends (Anime Review)
- The Box of Delights Episode 2
- The Avengers: Traitor in Zebra
- The Outer Limits: Counterweight
- Dreamtime
- Star Trek: A Private Little War
- Doctor Who Flux: Once, Upon Time
- Nekopara (Anime Review)
- The Box of Delights Episode 1
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