The Good The Bad and the Odd

Starts with an interesting premise, where the Doctor and company seem to have slipped into a sidestream of time, when they land in a Space Museum, but cannot be seen or heard, but can observe.  They find themselves and the Tardis as exhibits. Eventually, the time sidestream joins back and they become part of a more conventional adventure and become in a power struggle between the ruling Moroks and the enslaved Xerons.  The entire series ends with an interesting conclusion – the daleks are hunting them through time.
Rating: Good 5/10

Eh not bad, one of the better ‘historical’ Doctor Whos of the early days. Set in 12th century Palestine, we have intrigues and fights involving King Richard and his knights, Saladin and his moors, with the Doctor and his companions in the middle. There’s some interesting plot strands (Barbara tells Saladin of her time with Nero, teh future invasion by the daleks, and the insect planet, and he thinks she could be the new Scheherazade). I liked this one.

Rating: Good 5/10

Regeneration 1 Series 014 The Crusade

Eh not bad, one of the better ‘historical’ Doctor Whos of the early days.  Set in 12th century Palestine, we have intrigues and fights involving King Richard and his knights, Saladin and his moors, with the Doctor and his companions in the middle.  There’s some interesting plot strands (Barbara tells Saladin of her time with Nero, teh future invasion by the daleks, and the insect planet, and he thinks she could be the new Scheherazade). I liked this one.
Rating: Good 5/10

True Grit by Charles Portis

Written in 1968 but feeling like it comes from us from a writer maybe 80 years earlier, this is a fine first-person account from the perspective of a 14 year old girl, Mattie Ross, about how she avenged the cold-blooded murder of her father by paying for the services of a US Marshall, Rooster Cogburn. 

The language used is vivid and authentic, full of nuance and detail that feels genuine and appropriate for this particular girl (who is intelligent, wise, aloof and the former of strong opinions), with a powerful narrative drive propelling the action and story along.  It has laughs, good characterisation in all the main characters (including the head bad guy, Lucky Ned Pepper),  and is a real page turner.

I’d also add the recent movie of this gets exactly the mood of the novel and gets the character of Mattie pitch-perfect, and has very little divergence from this simple, driving story.

Thoroughly recommended.

Rating: Good 8.5/10

This one was not good.  There were actors dressed up as giant ants, weird woodlouse-type creatures and giant butterflies. The actors were trying to do weird actions and intonations, I guess to appear otherworldly, but it came across as pretty terrible amateur dramatics, and the story went all over the place, but it was basically at first a war between the butterflies and the ants, but then morphed into the ants being controlled by a larger entity called the Animus.  6 episodes was far too many episodes to cover this story.

We get a proper encounter with the Animus by the end (in the last episode), and this really lifted things.  The voice acting and decisions made on how to present this weird, large entity (Vicki describes it as a giant spider, but it’s got legs, tentacles and suchlike, and you feel you’re only seeing part of it) were good choices – this section was rather good.  It’s definitely got something Lovecraftian about it and reminds you of the ‘ancient ones’ in Lovecraft lore – and this point is raised in the Wikipedia pages on this episode.  This end section raised the score a point and a half.

Rating: Bad 2/10

A fun one, with the Doctor and companions up to shenanigans in Ancient Rome, and managing to fit in slave auctions, galley slaves rowing in a storm, gladiatorial fights, and the Emperor Nero deciding to burn down Rome.  The Doctor even has a fight with an assassin, who he easily dispatches, obviously relishing the fight.  Rather fun overall.

Rating: Not Bad 5/10

Rather poor two-parter involving an alien holding some humans in fear, but turns into a routine murder-mystery.  Only really notable for the introduction of a new companion, Vicki,

Rating: Bad 2/10

The Tardis makes it to Earth, but a future earth – the year 2164AD.  They land in a deserted, damaged London, and find evidence of strange happenings (there is a sign prohibiting the dumping of bodies in the Thames).  It turns out that the Daleks have invaded, and have killed or enslaved the survivors to work on a giant mine in Bedfordshire, to remove the Earth’s molten core and make it a giant spaceship that can travel anywhere.

An interesting episode.  It has some great stuff in the first few episodes concerning this post-apocalypse London, humans converted into mental slaves called ‘Robomen’ by the daleks, and a generally dark tone.  The setup is a little wasted as the to-ing and fro-ing gets a little soap-opera, but overall this has a great premise and scenes, and it’s clear why the Daleks continued to be such a part of popular culture generally, as well as such significant baddies in Dr Who lore.

Rating: Good 6.5/10

The Tardis has a malfunction whilst trying to get the travellers back to their own time and country, and the travellers find themselves in contemporary times, but shrunken to the size of an inch.  They do not realize their location, and think they are on an alien planet with giant ants and earthworms.  Eventually, the plot turns into a dull drama about a plot around murder to cover up the strength of persistence of a newly-developed pesticide.  An interesting premise that isn’t a very engaging story.

Rating: not good, 4/10

The Tardis appears to land in the English countryside, as the Doctor is mad at Ian and Barbara, and wants to return them to their own time.  It turns out they are in the France of Robespierre, and indeed we meet both Robespierre and Napoleon during this adventure, and the drama focuses on intrigue and escape (usually from prison cells, but also from the guillotine).  Not bad, with some diverse acting and characters.

Rating: not bad, 5.5/10

Here the crew land on a spaceship and think everyone is dead.  It turns out they’re not, they’ve been incapacitated, and keep getting incapacitated whenever they try to leave orbit of the planet they’re close to, called The Sense-Sphere.  It turns out the inhabitants of this planet, the Sensorites, are afraid because previous humans discovered their planet had huge deposits of molybdenum, and were planning to mine out the planet.  However, the Sensorites have psychic abilities and could read their minds.  What then follows is a convoluted, unfocussed tale of tribal politics, hidden humans trying to poison the water supply as they imagine themselves at war with the Sensorites, and assorted shennanegins on the spaceship and the planet. It’s a little plodding, and the plot is all over the place, but there’s a really good performance by an actor called Stephen Dartnell (playing ‘John’) who has to convey both terror and confusion as his mind has been turned by the Sensorites.  Probably one for the completists.

Rating: odd, 4/10

Some nice touches in this one, with the Doctor and companions landing right in the middle of the Aztec civilization. Barbara gets taken for a reincarnation of a revered high preistess, and starts to declare human sacrifice is unpleasing for the gods. There are power struggles, and the Doctor insisting you cannot and should not interfere with history, and reasonably good set design for such a stagebound, low-budget production, and the lead characters are mostly fine, though some are quite wooden.  I also like the part where the Doctor inadvertently gets engaged when he shares drinking cocoa with a woman taken with him, and he indeed feels affection and admiration for her.  The final shots in the Aztec kingdom have him put a gift from her down just outside the Tardis, but then pocketing it at the last second before going  into the Tardis and leaving.

Rating: Good, 6/10

Rather good story where the Doctor and his companions land on the world Marinus, where a supercomputer once ran everything, but went wrong and was shut down.  A  scientist has fixed it, but needs the assistance of the visitors to secure 5 keys to start the machine.  What follows is a set of contained separate stories as the visitors traverse the world to collect the disks.  These range from very good to good, each story holds up quite well – though there’s some weak scenes and the final two episodes are a little overextended, centring on a murder mystery.  My favourite is the first substory – where brains in glass jars have mental control over the humanoids in their city, making the visitors think they are in paradise when they are in fact in rundown shabby rooms, until Barbara suddenly sees through it.

I rather liked it overall.

Rating: Good, 6/10

Book Review: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Borroughs

Written by the man who would later go on to create Tarzan, this is the first book in the ‘Barsoom’ set of books (Barsoom being a name for the planet Mars) which chronicle the story of John Carter, an earth man from Virginia, USA who mysteriously finds himself on Mars.

John Carter first finds himself among a tribe of green 6-limbed Martians (two arms, two legs, and two in the middle that are multifunctional, but are usually used as an extra set of arms).  These martians are at least double the size of humans and are fierce warroirs, but Carter finds himself having greater strength and speed than these people, owing to the lower gravity, and proves himself more than a match for any of them.  Eventually Carter also encounters a member of the red Martian race, who are more like humans, who happens to be a Princess of a city/state called Helium… and through various shennanegins, fights, adventures, escapes and battles, he eventually wins her affections and helps unite various martian factions in peace.  But the adventure doesn’t end there…

This is grand old pulp fiction, the sort of story that would find itself in comic books these days, and much in common with the more familiar Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers stories we saw in the 1930s film serials.  It’s straightforward and unilayered, but the language is both charming and archaic, as John Carter is a civil war veteran, and is written to talk like a grand Southern gentleman.

How this wasn’t converted into a movie until very recently (coming out next year) I don’t know, as it reads much more like the novelisation of a movie than a novel – which I guess is the intention of this type of pulp fiction – to be easy reading, and stimulate the imagination with action and visually-oriented descriptions.

I quite liked it, but not sure how likely it is I’d go back and read more adventures.

Rating: Odd 6/10

Red Dwarf Series 4

An Idiot Abroad – Series 1 and 2

This show is about the travels of Karl Pilkington, a long-time colleague of the comedy writers/performers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.  Karl is rather close-minded, glum and always seems to find the cloud wherever there’s a silver lining.  However, his outlook on life, and his many comments on various aspects of life, are frequently very funny, and sometimes truly hilarious.  This show involves Gervais and Merchant sending Karl around the world accompanied by a camera crew, catching his reactions and thoughts on what’s going on.

Series 1 involves Karl visiting various world Wonders such as the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids.  Series 2 involves Karl doing things he picks from a concensus of the world’s most frequent Bucket List ‘to do’s, such as swimming with Dolpins or staying on a desert island.

OVerall, the entertainment value and number of laughs in this show is very high, it’s funny to see Karl comment on things that would also perplex most Englishmen abroad (such as no doors on the toilets in China, or use ice to wipe your bottom in Alaska), and often we laugh at this as much as laughing at him for being close-minded.   I can no longer think of the Great Wall of China after seeing this, only the Alright Wall of China…

The only fault I can find is that sometimes it does feel like you’re watching someone being bullied into things they really don’t want to do, and also you sometimes feel Karl is playing up to his persona rather than being completely natural, but overall the entertainment value of this show is very high.
Rating: Good, 8.5/10

Game of Thrones

Rating: Good, 9/10

I am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

This is a memoir by Nimoy which zooms through his involvement with the TV series (but gives enough to be interesting) and then more exhaustively covers his involvement with the 6 star trek movies involving the original cast (he also talks about the 7^th and his reasons for not being involved with it). It also mentions his involvement with the Star Trek: Next Generation double-episode ‘Unification’ (this is a great pair of episodes, by the way). He also discusses ideas about a prequel Star Fleet Academy movie that was bandied around – which sounds an awful lot like the most recent reboot movie…

Nimoy writes in a straightforward, non-flowery style, and starts each chapter with some dialogue between Nimoy and Spock, discussing the issues covered in the coming chapter.  He also sometimes intersperses these chats within the text.  It’s interesting to start, but gets a little odd/pointless.   His stories about Star Trek are interesting, but rather dry.  Shatner’s books ‘Star Trek Memories’ and ‘Star Trek Movie Memories’ are much more entertaining, and detailed – and a pair of books I thoroughly recommend.  If I had to pick one word for Nimoy, it’s ‘earnest’.

The book is also an interesting insight to his inner conflict with Spock and how it dominates his acting career (in this book, he strongly asserts he’s very happy with Spock now compared to earlier in his career – his book previous to this was called ‘I am not Spock’!).  And whilst he says he’s happy, reading between the lines indicated Spock still haunted him somewhat back in 1995.

I really think anyone could read and enjoy this book, but really, only Star Trek fans (myself included) will be the ones to read it.  And it has a great last line.

Rating: Good 6/10

Ronin

An interesting work by Miller predating his more famous works (such as The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City and 300), and hailed by some as his first masterpiece, I was definitely engaged for the first half of book one (one of six) concerning a struggle between a masterless unnamed Samurai (a ronin) and a demon-king, but then the story took a drastic swing into a future dystopia where the story we’d just had appeared to be the dream of a limbless boy that controls a giant computer that runs a city….

Whilst imaginative and having some striking visuals, this was nowhere near as engaging as the Miller stories I mention above, and I did struggle to follow exactly what was going on for sections – which made it hard for me to keep interested.

Overall, I recommend the other Miller works mentioned above far ahead of this, but it was visually striking in places and overall worth reading once.

Rating: Odd 6/10

Rather over-extended story (spanning 7 episodes) about Marco Polo encountering the Tardis crew and taking their ‘flying caravan’ as a gift for the Kublai Khan.  This was a really-drawn-out, wordy story, that meandered about for much of its running time, with repeating sections where Marco Polo is writing his journal, as we hear voice-over that sounds like it was lifted from a basic school history primer on Marco Polo. This also wasn’t helped by the fact that the video for these episodes has been lost, and only the audio remains – but was helped by the fact the version I saw had colour photos of the action (or photos that near enough gave an idea of which character was talking etc), and it was fun to see these characters in colour for a change.  Not much fun, as it tries to be worthy and historic, but comes off as stuffy and boring for long stretches.  It is interesting to hear some 1960s phrases/expressions/ways of talking though.

Rating: Bad, 3.5/10

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Okay, this starts with 5 minutes from the end of the first movie, after which we see Charlton Heston as Taylor disappear into a landscape, leaving his non-talking companion Nova alone on a horse in a barren wasteland.  It then quickly moves to a ‘rescue mission’ after Taylor (the other astronauts with him seem to be forgotten about by the rescue team) which quickly whittles down to one man, Brent, who encounters Nova on a horse. then goes through discovering Ape city and then escaping into the Forbidden Zone after various shennanegins – to encounter a group of human mutant telepaths that worship an atomic bomb as a god. These find themselves about to be attacked by an oncoming ape army (who don’t know they’re there…), and prepare to launch the bomb at Ape City – not knowing the bomb is designed to blow up the whole world (yep, like someone would build that).

There’s some real whackiness here, and whilst the ideas are interesting and fun, and some parts of the execution of the ideas are quite good (the time of worshipping, like a religious service – the use of notes on the soundtrack to denote telepathic messages being sent), it’s not really that much fun to watch.  There’s also some really silly scenes – like the apes in a steamroom – looking like guys in excellent ape masks wearing shaggy carpets…

Not as much fun as the ideas suggest, but not bad.

Rating: Odd, 6/10

Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

This is the third book by Pratchett about Discworld, and involves no characters from the previous books – and as such the reader can read this one as a standalone without being disadvantaged.

It involves a small girl who happens to inherit and otherwise possess magic of a wizardly kind, and starts on a path of learning witchery before her mentor, Granny Weatherwax decides she really needs to be trained as a wizard.  The story then becomes about the girl, Esk, getting to the Unseen University and by a convoluted path, eventually becoming the first female wizard trainee.

It’s a fun, light read, with enough invention and twists to not be entirely predictable, and some nicely drawn characters – most centrally Granny and Esk. There’s also some fun and surprisingly through-provoking content about the nature of feminine and masculine magic, and how they differ.

Recommended

7/10