Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Somehow I didn’t review LOVM seasons 1 or 2 so I’m going to do all three seasons at once. The Legend of Vox Machina is an adaptation of campaign one of Critical Role, an Actual Play streamed D&D game with a bunch of self-proclaimed nerdy-assed voice actors that started as a birthday present for one of them, grew into a regular home game, then a steamed AP, then a creative and gaming giant in its own right. Next March will be their tenth anniversary as a streamed game. By the end of season three we’ve had 36 episodes and a bit under 18 hours of animation. We’re also, depending on how you look at it, either at episode 85 or 100 of the show. That’s over 350-400 hours of content compressed into Blindspot for a lot of campaign 1 and the start of campaign 2 and was frequently away. But she’s available throughout the filming of this, and present a lot more. She does have a bit of season 1 where she goes away and comes back through astral projection at a critical moment - that mirrors ...

The rejects in Slough House are back. The series continues to mix the two styles of British spy stories, Bond and le Carré, flashy and seedy. This time we have a classic trope of both genres: the long buried secret. This is nicely woven into the existing characters in a way that, in retrospect I should have seen coming but, as each twist was revealed, it felt at least surprising, sometimes shocking. It’s hard to really talk about without spoilers. It’s an adaptation of a spy novel where there’s a necessarily intricate plot to satisfy the spooks fans, but I will say that, as mentioned above, there’s some lovely character work here too. Part of that is because we have a larger cast. Even with some of the slow horses being functionally red coats, walking fatalities waiting to happen, albeit slightly more filled out than the classic Trek version - we know something about these characters rather than them being a non-speaking extra hired for the week - we have quite a number of characters ...

Don’t worry, no spoilers! Wynonna Earp: Vengeance is a follow up movie to the TV show. It’s not a replacement for the Season 5 we were supposed to have but never got, rather it’s a sequel, stand-alone, five years later, kind of thing. I will admit, I had my doubts going into this. Wynonna Earp felt like our shit-show, but it also felt like it might be lightning in a bottle, and once it had escaped, you could never recapture it. Just putting the band back together again might not be enough. There were odd moments when I still felt that was true. Which in a 95 minute film is probably a reflection that, at some level, there were odd scenes that I thought needed a bit of work. Given I could say the same of almost any film, that’s not a bad thing to say about this one. There are many I’m far more critical of too. This one just registered a bit differently with me, because I had different expectations, and worries, compared to most films. But the things I expect from Wynonna Earp were ...

French TV and film, I guess like visual media from any country, has its own unique style. They tell stories in different ways, use visual metaphors differently and often have different outcomes to their stories too. If you think of big hit films like La Femme Nikita, The Fifth Element and Leon can you imagine any of them being made by an American director? It’s not just the French that do this of course, British TV is distinctly different to American TV, even when one nation remakes the other’s shows. Think of the two versions of The Office but even shows where there’s hardly any format change can have vastly different fortunes: College Bowl is an American quiz show you’ve possibly never heard of, it has run for six seasons across its initial run and two relaunches. University Challenge , the British version, is currently in its 54th season, although it has had a brief hiatus and a channel swap. Why all this preamble? Furies is similar to a number of shows and films I’ve seen bef...

Thanks to Disney buying part of Dr. Who, and it being rebranded as the Whoniverse, we have the third season one… Classic Who, Nu Who and Whoniverse. Much though I loved Jodie and Mandip as Thirteen and Yaz, I was not the biggest fan of Chris Chibnal's writing. When he got it right (in my opinion), he was great but, for me, too many of the scripts didn’t hit the mark. This season has had one show that was a complete miss for me and given it was trying to serve as a new show pilot for Disney while not being a new show to me (I’m old, I remember watching John Pertwee, live on a Saturday night) I’ll cut it a bit of slack. With a bit of time and reflection, less adrenaline and emotion, the finale has some serious issues too. It doesn’t make sense if you stop to think about it. But in the moment I didn’t care. Otherwise, I liked all the episodes, in the moment and afterwards. Some were stronger than others, but they were all at least good in my opinion. This season has three arc-long ...

Way back when, 2016 or 17 I think, in response to a question about my favourite show, I described Orphan Black as the show of my head, and Wynonna Earp as the show of my heart. I’m happy to be able to say that Orphan Black: Echoes is a worthy, and glorious, follow up in the show of my head category but it also scores well as a show of my heart . It’s clever and thought-provoking in the ways the original was, clearly the daughter of Orphan Black but, just as you can usually see similarities between a mother and daughter white seeing them as distinct, different people, Echoes is similar to, not just a clone (sorry) of the original. We’re still in the world of biological sciences, but this is set 40 years into the future. It’s not clear how the world sees the clones now, at least not for a long time but, in fairness how much do you remember about the big news stories of 1984? So we have a different story, one that I found as engaging, and I’m sure it was much less technically demand...

Warning: This is not as spoiler-free as my reviews normally are. This is an adaptation of a book that is as old as me. You’ve had a LONG time to read it and get to grips with the story. I largely keep to the elements that we’ve seen in the trailers, but there are some changes made in the adaptation process that changed how the film worked at critical points for me, making it not work. Although I tried, I found I couldn’t write this review without coming back to them, so you have been warned. Dune Part Two starts with a huge challenge but a lot of goodwill, at least here. Just like in the book, the first chunk, the first film, is a huge amount of world building, the second chunk brings that to fruition. Fortunately it faces up to the challenge and largely overcomes it. There are a chunk of big plot arcs, pretty diverse plot arcs too, that have to be kept in air and then nicely resolved. We’re used to seeing that in streaming series, but we’ve fallen out of the habit of seeing it done...

I’m going to start with a criticism that won’t matter to anyone who isn’t British, but if Eloise (Ellie) grew up anywhere near Redruth, or Jocasta near Manchester, then I’m a virgin fresher. (Wikipedia tells me they’re from New Zealand and Glasgow respectively and clearly they need to do more accent work. Although there’s one scene where I almost fell out of my chair because, having just given up on it, Ellie suddenly sounded at least authentically West Country, if not Cornish.) Having bitched about that, I don’t know if the girl playing Cilla Black was lip-syncing or singing live, but she looked and sounded good. Equally, I don’t remember Jack's (Matt Smith) accent slipping. Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) doesn’t say where she’s from, and to me her accent reads like faux-cockney on top of something (I can’t quite place what), but that’s not unreasonable for the time and someone trying to fit in, in London, sound cool, and while her accent meanders a little but stays in that territory wh...

Season three of Slow Horses picks up a not clearly defined ‘few months’ after the events of season two. Most people have largely dealt with the death of Min, but Louisa is still grieving in her own way. As you might imagine for a Slow Horse, that’s not entirely healthily. The main story is satisfyingly many-threaded. Trying to tread the line between a review and no spoilers is tricky, so there may be mild spoilers ahead. As we’ve seen in previous seasons, there is a pissing contest between First Desk and Second Desk (in the world Slow Horses that’s the person in charge of MI5 and her deputy). This season adds a pissing contest between the whole of MI5 and the Home Secretary. This may or may not be reasonable, but we’ve certainly seen high tensions between the various police representative bodies and Home Secretaries over the last decade or so, extending that to MI5 is plausible. The way they do it is certainly broadly plausible. The story starts with a tiger team (that’s a friendly ...

This is an interesting special for Dr. Who. It’s the Christmas special but it’s also the official introduction for both a new Doctor and a new companion. This particular “everything new” combination in a Christmas Special hasn’t been done before - the 2005 Christmas Special had an existing companion but a new Doctor, it’s fairly common to have The Doctor sans companion, and we’ve had an exiting version of The Doctor plus an incarnation of The Impossible Girl, but not a clean slate like this. I would say it attempted too much to fully succeed and, perhaps inevitably, it was the companion intro, that suffered a bit. She hovered somewhere between plot token and rounded character. As long as she doesn’t become another Impossible Girl, that’s not a disaster though. They had to land the Doctor properly, they had to make the story work and, as we saw with Clara, it’s possible to rescue even a season of the companion being a plot token more than a character, and we can hope the Ruby becomes mo...

While I try not to be too prescriptive in what it takes to enjoy a film - how you engage and enjoy something might be very different to me after all - I would suggest you need to be a fan of 300 and/or Sucker Punch and be willing to watch for the spectacle rather than anything else to enjoy Rebel Moon . Having said that, I’m going to split my review into what’s bad that made me say this, then what’s good. So what’s bad? There’s almost no plot, rather there are a string of tropes that come so thick and fast they’re better described as a tapestry, strung together by a gossamer thin plot where they can’t find a trope to squeeze in. If you want to play 'spot the trope' as a drinking game, I’d suggest sips of beer; if you drink anything stronger, you’ll get very drunk, very quickly. Some of the tropes escape being racist af because the guy that honours his debts and is really good with animals is clearly not a First Nations American, because he’s from a planet in space… (the actor...

Silo is the ultimate bottle episode, except it’s the whole season. The setup, not a spoiler it’s pretty clear from the trailer, involves a community (it’s about 10,000 people so small by some standards but huge in these circumstances) living in the titular silo and struggling to survive in a toxic external environment. There is a satisfying web of stories going on in this series. We have a police force and a secret police. If you’re American seeing the police in brown uniforms under the sheriff might not ring any alarms, but when the police are in brown shirts and the secret police in black shirts klaxons should start to sound. There’s a romance which is about as much about linking to a million other plots as anything romantic but still has a few good twists and turns in the romance trope area too. It’s a mark of the attention they give to all the little bits that the things you expect aren’t quite what they seem. It’s a theme that resonates throughout the whole series. There are poli...

Trigger Warning This story deals with a clearly fictional world: there’s no British Air Force, it’s the Royal Air Force, the country the story is partially set in doesn’t exist - but it doesn’t take more than a cursory knowledge of geopolitics to work out who it is meant to be. The story also questions how nation states decide organisations are terrorists and what that means. It didn’t bother me at the time but it did make me think afterwards and it’s quite a live discussion right now, so it might be more of an issue for you. Vigil season two is a clear follow-up to season one, but instead of the closed world of a nuclear submarine, we have an RAF squadron that flies drones, attack drones with an AI element as part of a late stage equipment trial. Amy and Kirsten are still happily together. Kirsten is pregnant, Amy is massively overprotective and exactly how you react to that will vary I’m sure. I have sufficiently complicated feelings about it that I strongly suspect it’s based on s...

Lupin is back and getting up to his old tricks. It’s been a year since the end of part two within the show, two years on Netflix, possibly more in France, courtesy of Covid. Assane has spent most of that time in hiding and comes up with a plan to get his wife and son away from the ridiculous pressure they’re under as he remains one of France’s most wanted criminals. In terms of format, we have very much the same structure as in the previous parts: a daring caper and then a Leverage style explanation of the more unlikely components. It felt to me for most of the season that we were missing the social commentary that Lupin had sprinkled throughout the previous parts, but it does rear up with a vengeance in a few episodes. The episodes feel oddly structured, both for Netflix and anglophone TV. Stories spill from one episode into the next, then finish part way through it. Not every time, but often enough it feels jarring and sets an expectation of odd pacing. You get what ought to be ac...

I am reviewing all three episodes of the Dr Who specials in one piece, because they are presented that way. However, they’re quite distinct stories, beyond 14 and Donna running through them. Part one has aliens running around on Earth with a switch on who the bad guy alien is. It’s based on a classic story from Dr Who Magazine, which I’m both old enough and nerdy enough to remember reading. Despite knowing the outline of the story, I enjoyed the episode. At least part of that pleasure was Rose, Donna's daughter, who was trans, played by a trans actor, and stirred up the man babies. Good solid story and a great piece of presenting trans people as part of everyday life. Much better than many of the other ways we’re meant to think about them. (There’s a little niggle about the gender language at one point, but overall it’s good.) The second story is a bottle episode on the edge of space that leans heavily into body horror. Doppelgängers of The Doctor and Donna who can’t quite control ...

The Fall of the House of Usher is a Mike Flanagan horror, in the tradition of Hill House , Bly House and so on. As you might guess from the title it’s inspired by the works of Edgar Allan Poe. If you’re the right sort of nerd you can have fun spotting the references to Poe works, some are huge and smack you in the face, some are smaller or come from his life rather than his writing. I’ve seen reviews that absolutely hate this, or say they make the story incoherent. Personally I found them delightful and well judged. I'm pretty sure I missed some of them but the big, obvious references are held for the right moments - there’s an episode called The Pit and the Pendulum , and the pendulum does its job in a satisfying way. But the smaller moments, the ones that would be spoilers, if I missed them they’re not presented in neon lights and jerking the story out of shape, but if you do catch them, they add an extra little layer of pleasure in the way that all the best easter eggs do. If...

Barbie is a film where the 2001 -spoof trailer made me say “yes, I want to see that” and, as well as being the opening scene, pretty much sets the tone for the film. Margot Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie is a brilliant piece of casting but, to my surprise, Ryan “stone face” Gosling is equally amazing as Stereotypical Ken. There has to be a level of irony in the fact that in this film he’s playing a plastic character, literally, whose face cannot move but he emotes more than I’ve seen in any other film I’ve seen him in. Helen Mirren is the narrator and that British sarcasm adds a whole extra layer to the film. But that’s just part of the whole script, which is amazing. It’s funny, moving and clever. There’s a wide range of humour, from pithy one-liners to longer form observational satirical sketches and pretty much everything in between. I’ll be honest, not all the humour lands as hilarious for me, I don’t have all the experiences (it’s hard to say which ones without major spoilers), ...

I bet you thought I’d forgotten you! I have been reading a lot and half paying attention to random videos on YouTube, or rewatching all of Sense8 which I’m not going to review beyond “it still makes me smile and is a balm to my psyche.” On to the real review. In season one, Stupid Wife pushed my limits with its amnesia trope that certainly up there in my list of story lines I hate that still this side of the nope-line stories. On the other side of the line you have all the yucky things like incest and so on. I can imagine shows around most of the yucky topics I might watch, but they’re not going to be pitched as sexy, fun shows. To be honest, if not for lesbian YouTube raving about it, I’d have probably bounced, which would have been a shame but I liked season one despite the central premise. Season two picks up a bit after the end of season one. Luiza is a bit battered, but ok, and things between her and Valentina are not perfect but are in a much better, and generally improving,...

The problems with Obsession are at least twofold. One is not really the fault of the show. While it lives up to its title, and I believe that at least one of them is dangerously obsessed from very early on (I’m less convinced the other is obsessed, but definitely damaged), it’s not being reviewed that way which is a real problem. The “erotic thriller with BDSM” is absent under a very twisted, obsessive quasi-power exchange with two very broken characters at its core. What I came to watch, based on the reviews I read, is not the show I was given. That’s a problem with the reviewers not understanding what they’re seeing, or not writing what they’re seeing and, as I said, not the show’s fault. But it’s jarring. However, within those two very broken characters and their interactions lies the second problem, and that is the fault of the writing and directing. Unless you’re here to watch this as porn (in which case you’ll get bored quickly, it’s just not porn) these characters are just so...