Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

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 ...