Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

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 ...

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...

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...

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), ...

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...

If I thought season one of Shadow and Bone was ambitious, shoving two books into one, season two mixes in parts of three and plays with the plot from the original material too. We can all think of shows that have tried that and struggled, if not fallen flat on their faces. Equally, there are shows that have made a success of that - adapting a story requires changes for the medium, yes, but in the case of TV for the episode and season length too. Fortunately Shadow and Bone fits into the second group. There are some changes that we'll have to see how they play out but, by and large, they within this season. The characters remain recognisably the characters we had in the books (sometimes that’s not great, Bardugo was learning her craft when she wrote Shadow and Bone the series, particularly the first book, and it shows if you look at the books she wrote later and the characters in them) but, at the same time, in some ways it is good - we’ve got a lot going on here, fairly simpl...

Part of any film or tv show set in the real world is about verisimilitude. If you set the show in London and mention real places, then you need to make sure you connect them sensibly. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves has Robin and co walk from the White Cliffs to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall in a day. If that doesn’t make you shudder or laugh, try looking up their relative positions on you maps app. You pulls a few of these about London, he walks home from work, it’s about a six hour journey. He stays in a nice flat in S. Kensington that he’s renting. I can’t find anywhere to rent there for less than £12k per month, and he’s meant to be doing that on a lecturer's salary? Really? Likewise, as a visiting lecturer in a British university he’s unlikely to be a professor, our lecturing positions are different, professors are heads of departments and similar. Students mostly call staff by their first name at university level. Hilary was my head of faculty, I know she was professor so...

Season two of Slow Horses doesn’t quite maintain the split between the two styles of British spy drama as evenly as season one, it’s heavier into the Slough House side of the balance than the Regent’s Park side. However, just as we had a plausible story of modern Britain in season one, we have a somewhat plausible story here. It’s centred around long-term KGB sleeper agents and we know the KGB did do this sort of thing, I’m not sure enough of them are still fit and active, and ideologically engaged, to do what we’ve got here, but it’s not impossible. That said, most of the people who are doing the heavy lifting, the deeply involved things reveal that they have motives that I felt worked. We’ve got a couple of new cast members (we lost Sid and Struan in season one, so we get replacements) who manage to have plenty to do, and one of whom shows why they were sent to Slough House early on. The other not so much, which raises alarm bells after season one of course. We have, as we had las...

Wednesday is, of course, an adaptation of The Charles Addams cartoons and their other adaptations, particularly the two films with Christina Ricci et al (you can find little and not so little easter eggs scattered throughout the episodes). This is also identifiably a Tim Burton series (you can find easter eggs for his previous work too) but this is more an adaptation like Sweeney Todd than Alice in Wonderland - I think the source is macabre enough he sprinkles his touches throughout rather than twisting it too far. However, it would be fair to say that this show owes as much to the success of Harry Potter, and it’s far less TERF-associated spin-offs, as it does to the original material. In the vast majority of the earlier material we have the family together, by and large. This series sends Wednesday away to boarding school, which is distinctly not Hogwarts in many ways but, equally, could have come from the mind of Tim Burton but probably wouldn’t have been funded like this in a...

Warrior Nun doesn’t pick up where season one finished, but it’s relatively close, there’s a two month gap rather than the two years we’ve had to wait. This is just long enough for the plans of various factions to have started to develop. Adriel is using his powers to create new followers, human possessed by wraiths he is calling over of course. The nuns are on the run, hampered by the fact that Father Vincent is thoroughly on Adriel's side. Beatrice and Ava are trying to lie low in a bar in the Italian Alps, but Bea is super-organised and Ava is… well Ava so it doesn’t go too well. There’s a new, anti-Adriel group called The Samaritans, and Ava gets mixed up with one of them in the bar. Because this is television, this is obviously significant, but the ways it’s significant turn out to be complex and interesting. Lilith’s story keeps developing, as does Jillian Salvius' story and the new pope’s. Some of these story developments are in moderately predictable ways, some are fr...

In general British spy dramas, and have no doubt, Slow Horses is a thoroughly British spy drama, fall into two camps. You have the Bond Camp, everything is glitzy, high tech and high adrenaline, high paced. You have, whether in the book or film style of this, peaks and troughs of tension that are really well suited to the film but work well in a book too. The other is the Smiley Camp, quite slow paced, seedy and the most high-tech thing is usually the photocopier. Sifting through papers and bins is often the height of the action but the stress builds and builds inexorably. Interestingly, both of the authors behind the typonyms are former spies, but one was there during WWII and the other during the Cold War, so perhaps it reflects the way things changed from hot to cold espionage. I’m not aware of a spy novelist coming out of the social media iteration of spy craft, although I’m sure there will be one, if there isn’t one already. I wonder what they will look like? While you can argue...

The Power of the Doctor marks the end of Jodie Whitaker’s tenure in the TASRDIS (boo) as well as Chris Chibnall’s (yay). She went out with a 90 minute spectacular timed to mark the centenary of the BBC, and spectacular it was. I have, pretty consistently, disliked what Chibnall did with the cannon of Who. I am not saying it’s a sacred cow, unable to be touched - the Matt Smith to Peter Capaldi regeneration broke one such long-held rule of the Whoniverse and while it’s not my favourite Eleven story it broke the rule in a way that worked and made sense of a dilemma that had to be addressed sometime and was neat within the general bounds of the series. That part, 10/10 in an otherwise maybe 7/10 episode. Then Chibnall rewrote The Doctor’s history so all of that particular history was superfluous and meh. He did that several times and, seemingly, without caring. It landed, as you might guess, like a damp squib. Not just with me, but certainly here. Fortunately in the last few specials he...