Gridlock
Two weeks late, but anyway:
Doctor Who Series Three, Episode Three: Gridlock is, as anyone who follows this kind of thing will know, is this year's entry in the 'Year Five Billion' sequence started in the second episode of New Who in 2005. Taking Martha to New New New .... New York, rather than the gleaming spires we might have expected from last year's glimpse, they instead end up in the bowels of the city, where an endless traffic jam circles and something very old and very agressive is lurking down below the fast lane.
I knew from quite a while ago that the Macra (from way back in a Patrick Troughton story) were going to be returning in Gridlock, but hadn't expected them to be quite such a sideline to the 'real' story. They worked though - it could have just been some nameless new menace down in the smog, but this was a nice way of making it clear that this is still the same universe as Old Who, while they carried on telling their new and updated narrative. The story worked well too, with one of those narratives that are driven by The Doctor and companion being dragged into events created by the scenario, rather than the "Something strange is going on, we'd better investigate" school (cf Daleks in Manhattan a week later).
Separating The Doctor and Martha gave an opportunity for Martha to show some independence and resourcefulness, and the story did a good job in showing The Doctor's determination to retreive her while showing off the effects team's capabilities. I've seen people complain that the 'twist' that everyone was trapped in the motorway was too obvious, but as far as I can tell it wasn't meant to be a twist at all, just the basic situation. The actual (and actually very effective) twists all took place in the city's Senate, where we discovered that the whole upper city is dead, that The Face of Boe is still hanging around, and that his final message to The Doctor is "You are not alone", which it's now pretty much common knowledge sets up some startling revelations coming up towards the end of the series. The closing scene, of The Doctor coming clean to Marth about his past and his singular status, was well done, even if it did feel a bit like it was mostly an opportunity for Marth to have heard the word Dalek ahead of the following story.
I really enjoyed Gridlock - a few people I know have described it as the best Sylvester McCoy story ever, and likened it to Paradise Towers in particular, which I can sort of see, but it's also its own story, and one which featured an elderly lesbian couple and an inter-species relationship in the 'family viewing' 7pm Saturday slot, which not every series can claim...
The Human Footprint
Channel 4, 9pm tomorrow night - an attempt to visualise all those statistics about how much stuff we go through in a lifetime, with a Flash Personal Footprint For Your Life So Far calculator on the Channel 4 website. With the most Mystery Meat navigation I've seen in a long while.
Don’t Panic!
I hope we're not the only ones enjoying the feast of televisual entertainment offered by The Panic Room on BBC Three.
The premise is that two phychologists help a pair of people each week to get over their phobias using intensive techniques and ... The Panic Room (the dramatic pause is part of the presentation), which is a special room in which the object of their fears can be presented and confronted in a controlled manner. Last night was the one we'd been looking forward to - alongside the woman with the fear of cockroaches (fairly reasonable given the fact that a large one had become caught in her hair when she was a child), was the woman with the fear of buttons. It's a legitimate phobia, it transpires, properly called koumpounophobia, and she was clearly severely traumatised by the buttons that she felt were 'wild' - those which are completely loose, or not firmly attached, those which are purely decorative rather than practical, and those which clearly don't match the fabric with which they're paired. It sounds ridiculous, and I hope I'm not alone in finding the premise faintly amusing, but it's clear that there was a real problem and seemingly some real progress in addressing it. It's also surprisingly common, by the way.
It's an odd programme, and in my heart of hearts, I know that it's there for its entertainment value rather than because it's helping people, which makes watching it a very guilty experience.
One Of Those Weeks
Where I keep spotting/hearing about things that I should blog, but not being near a machine at the time, then forgetting. I'm also aware that I haven't commented on the last two episodes of Doctor Who, which I need to get done at some point.
At this point I'll just content myself with mentioning the discovery of the likeliest extra-solar planet yet to have the right conditions for surface water. Several years ago I interviewed the people involved in a TV programme called Planet Hunters (does exactly what it says on the tin) about the methods they use and the amount of detail they can deduce about planets they discover. In those few years, the capability has increased so rapidly that I suspect those people wouldn't believe it.
And By The Way; Re Sci-Fi Now
Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
If the first issue is anything to go by, there won't be many later ones.
This is the kind of up to date, cutting edge magazine that sees fit (in 2007) to use the snippet "Did you know... that Dougray Scott was originally due to play Wolverine in the X-Men films, but filming for Mission Impossible II overran." That was in 2000 by the way. How can they possibly think that anyone who would be remotely interested in the fact hasn't already known it for, oh about six or seven years?
I spotted three or four factual inaccuracies on even a fairly casual browse (the most glaring of which is that apparently the Paul McGann Doctor Who TV movie led to a US-made series - someone should tell McGann, since he doesn't seem to have been in it), and as for the quality and style of the journalism, a lot of it was like reading a rather sub-standard fanzine.
And rather brilliantly, the magazine's website (I say 'site'... splash page with a link to a forum) includes the immortal phrase Sci-Fi Now (Coming Soon).
You Are My Sunshine
Saw Sunshine on Friday night. Liked it a lot, though was left feeling slightly dissatisfied. My initial instinct was to think it needed a few more immediate explanations, which is not something I usually over-worry about, being able to interpret perfectly well for the most part. And I hated the shooting style adopted for certain sequences (I'll be good about not spoiling things, but it's the bits involving the twist that they actually give away themselves in the film's trailer).
But then, reading the review in the first (generally excerable) issue of new sci-fi mag Sci-Fi Now, I realised that my level of dissatisfaction arose from the same problem that their reviewer had with it, which is that it doesn't know what kind of film it wants to be. It starts out in one style, then abruptly jumps to another, then to another, and finally ends up in a totally different genre than the one in which it started.
Annoying, but not in a way that means I didn't mostly enjoy it.
The Feral Terrapins of Hampstead Heath
Look, I'm not making this up. The word 'terrorising' is being used.
The Neighbour We Won’t Miss
When we move, our downstairs back neighbour will be left behind with a song in our hearts and a skip in our step. Apart from minor matters like the 4am shouted phone conversation while standing in the garden under our window, she's just generally a disruptive influence (she can't get the hang of allocated parking either).
My Beloved is working at home this week, and so is on the receiving end of her everyday anti-social behaviour. He's just sent me an email he wants to send to her, which probably tells you everything you need to know. (Her name isn't really Fantasia, by the way.)
"Dear Fantasia,
1. Shut your fucking windows if you're going to watch TV that loudly.
2. The rest of us got over Sex and the City in 2004. Watching episode after episode All Day Long is just not right.
3. Maybe divert some of that single-female angst into over-eating? Oh, I see you already have. "
The Embryo Thing
I meant to write earlier in the week on the final decision around Natalie Evans' attempts to use her frozen embryos. This case feels like it's been coming up in the news at its various stages forever, and given that it's actually been five-plus years, in news terms, it actually has been. I know this is going to make me sound horribly unsympathetic, but she really needed to get over it years ago. Five years looks dangerously obsessive to me, and five years' effort to produce a child who will have to be told categorically that it wasn't wanted by one of its parents also pushes things into the realms of plain old cruelty.
I daresay that people will say that it's important to her that she has a child that's really her own, and maybe that's so overriding an instinct in some people that it warrants this saga. But really, if she'd applied to adopt a child in the first place and been accepted, she could have had five years of happy parenthood by now. If she applies at this stage I'd actually like to think that the obsession and the tendency to cruelty would stop her being accepted.
The Property Ladder
Can't remember (and am too idle to check) whether I mentioned that we'd found a house that we liked the look of, but we did, and we put in an offer on it which has been accepted. Then for all sorts of reasons I ended up having to jump through all manner of hoops in order to get the mortgage sorted out. But finally this afternoon, I've heard that it's all fine. So three-bedroom semi-based suburban lifestyle, here we come (touch wood for surveys and the like).