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 ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

In season one it wasn’t obvious that we had a classic sit com, but season two makes it much more obvious. That might be a deliberate change. Season one had three women at college under pressure to deliver a final year project and they came up with an app to help women have better sex, did a load of research and got something that worked. The comedy came from the situation of these women doing research into sexual behaviour at university - a bit like Sex Education they didn’t make fun of anyone for how they expressed desire but if you imagine setting up a safe space for people to have sex and then asking questions about it, there’s lots of room for comedy around that, which they use. In season two, they’ve moved on a bit, the Sexify App is ready to be launched, then all their bills come due and their power gets cut off… an apparent angel rescues them, but demands double the user base - so the drive for Sexiguy, a male version of the app begins. (The angel is not all she appears to be...

Blonde is a deeply uncomfortable, even unpleasant, film built around a mesmerising performance that a little bit of me hopes wins Ana de Armas best actress at the Oscars, although I’ll be happy if she loses to Michelle Yeoh. Although Marilyn died three years before I was born, as I was growing up, certainly when I was a child, she was still the epitome of a sex symbol. Even into my teens that was the case, although by the end of them other women were starting to displace her. So, although I never really studied her life, most of the events loosely depicted here are part of my cultural baggage. I certainly didn’t understand it all the first time I heard some of the stories, but by the time I was 14 or so and I was hearing them for the fifth time I was old enough to understand what they meant, maybe not in the context of the the America of 30 years earlier, but at least to understand what an abortion was, what the drugs stories meant, what being a Playboy centrefold implied and so on. ...

There’s a totally spoiler-free review which is facile, and a mostly spoiler free review that still gives plenty to enjoy but gives some more context. First up, spoiler-free: Hot Brazilian lesbians. Enjoy. We’re left on a cliffhanger so I hope there will be another season (they made a Christmas special, which is officially listed as a second season) but I’m not sure. This is a tiny web show and whether they can make another season or they’ll move on to another project remains to be seen. Also, a friendly warning: you’ll be using subtitles unless your conversational Brazilian Portuguese is really up to speed. I speak just enough classical Portuguese to recognise a tiny amount of what they’re saying and, now, to recognise more words that have deviated from what I learnt. But there’s absolutely no way I can follow what’s going on here, it really is odd words, and I probably wouldn’t have started to catch them without the subtitles. Mild Spoilers from here on We start with a group of f...

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...

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...