Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

To start, some caveats. First, the amount I know about making a TV show could comfortably be written on a postcard, possibly a stamp. If I paraphrased that advice to writers and “made what I know” it might turn into a TV show shaped thing, but what works for me is not necessarily mainstream enough to be a success. Second, I’m a self-confessed rugby tragic. I’ll routinely watch five, and sometimes up to eight games of rugby over a weekend. There are people who watch more, absolutely, but this show could be terrible and I’m still going to keep watching rugby. Bearing those things in mind, I have to wonder who the target audience for this show is. It’s hard for me to judge the show as a casual fan or someone who doesn’t know anything about rugby but I struggle to see how what we see here translates into enough of an understanding of the game to let you watch the forthcoming Men’s Six Nations (that starts on Friday as I post this) and appreciate the game. As a tragic, while I appreciate so...

In case you’ve missed The Traitors (and I didn’t watch season 1, there are other versions around the world, this is about the UK version) the essential format is a game of Werewolf, Blink Murder, or Among Us - there’s a bunch of traitors who try to murder the others, the faithful, while the faithful try to work out who the traitors are. There is a big cash prize, all the players have to work together to win build the prize pot up. If any traitors are left standing, they take it all home, otherwise it’s shared among the faithful. Apparently in Season 1 of the UK show the faithful won, in all the previously aired shows across the UK, Australia and the US, this is the only time this has happened. What makes this a bit different, apart from the chance to win a chunk of up to £120,000 (they actually played for £95,150 in the end), is that the players go to a nice remote bit of Scotland and live and play together for a up to a fortnight. It’s not playing with your friends, several rounds in...

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 ...

Normally I do separate posts for these, but this year, I only saw four films, so it’s pretty hard to justify a post just for the films. My TV shows count is a bit down too. Some of those are related things - 2023 wasn’t a great year, and I spent a chunk of time rewatching comfort shows. With 50 episodes of The Untamed and 23 plus a film of Sense8 that’s a lot of my “TV space” chewed up. I also changed my viewing habits and watched far more YouTube than in previous years, which affected my TV viewership. Details in my personal life also changed, which meant I got fewer opportunities to go to the cinema but, in fairness, I also had far fewer films that appealed to me. I’m capable of getting myself to the cinema, or watching the film elsewhere if it appeals enough - I did for Barbie for example. Hollywood runs on a paradigm of “blockbusters must appeal to the 18-35 year olds” and I’m massively outside that age range. The array of mid-budget films that used to be there for older people m...

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...