Sci-fi Overdose: The Martian, Doctor Who, 12 Monkeys, Fear the Walking Dead, and Rick and Morty, etcetera...

I like sci-fi.

Really, I do.

At least, that's what I tell myself.

But you can have too much of a good thing.

Since starting this blog, I've written more about science fiction than, well, ever. Not only have I watched and read sci-fi, I've thought and written about it. I've stuck with some shows longer than I would have with the intent writing reviews.

Now I've got sci-fi overload. Time for a break.

Why? Things are bugging me that arguably shouldn't.

The Martian, for example. Thought it a super smart snore, even though the ad hoc science was awesome. People can do such wondrous things. Should have liked it. Didn't.

Jurassic World? All the spectacular visuals and none of the smarts of the original.

First several episodes of the new Doctor Who season? Didn't like them, either. Viewership for the show is falling (it may not come back next year for a full run as a result, just a few specials) and what are they doing? Fan service and convoluted plots that alienate casual viewers. The whole franchise is spiralling down into a black hole of self-reference.

The Before the Flood two parter had a much more appealing pace, and even gave the guest actors room to breathe and develop. There were some nice, creepy moments, too, but overall, it felt flat.

The episode depends on a gullible Pull-My-Finger villain, again, one ready to believe anything the doctor says, and so conveniently doom himself.

Someone should make a show: The Universe's Stupidest Space Invaders. 'Monsters' might be more appropriate, but 'Invaders' is catchier. Every week they'd show a bunch of alien morons who try and invade earth, only to be killed by dirty telephones, get eaten by a small dog, defeated by love, or vanquished by their fatal water allergy.

For over 50 years, Doctor Who has eschewed supernatural explanations, preferring (pseudo) scientific ones. 'Demons' would invariably prove to be aliens. Supernatural powers would turn out to be super science. Yet in the last two-parter, the show had ghosts. Not disembodied 'consciousnesses', or rogue information waves, but actual for realsies ghosts. Souls. Weaponized souls, in fact, turned into homicidal puppets by three written symbols.

That has major ramifications for Doc Who: if souls are real, where do they go? Are Heaven and Hell real now as well? Moffat seems keen on this question, and had a faux-Heaven (or was it Purgatory? Whatever...) last season, presided over by Missy. But that was the usual and expected high tech fake out. I don't remember any caveats this time around and it seemed out of character for the program.

Feeling ambivalent about Fear the Walking Dead. It's arguably sci-fi, set in a future affected by a fantastical virus. It's also pretty nihilistic. Standard for zombie fare, I suppose. The government is incompetent, the army malevolent and oppressive and untrustworthy to the point of cliche. Perhaps that is necessary to accelerate The Apocalypse.

Fear gives us a range of characters, from pacifist Travis on one end to ex-torturer war criminal guy on the other. Now, pacifism invites violence and is an extremist position that generally can only survive while protected within the body of The Leviathan, but contrasting it so simplistically against a torturer just feels cheap.

And remember, kids: 'Torture never works!' That's why Hollywood shows it working, over and over and over again. Make up your minds, people.

It's essentially Joseph Mengele vs. Ghandi, and in this universe Mengele is right every time. Because ya gots to do what ya gots ta do, it's a tough world, people are worse than flesh eating zombies, and squishy Liberal qualms will get you killed.

To nail the point home, Travis Gandhi McPacifist frees a young army soldier who was tortured by Salazar McMengele and whom the torturer is going to kill, to keep him quiet. The young man then comes back, and to underline how wrong mercy is, shoots not McMengele, but McMengele's hapless daughter, whereupon Gandhi abandons his ideals entirely and nearly beats the soldier to death.

It's a bit much.

Story beats like these, handled deftly, could be fascinating and thought provoking, illustrating how our moral choices are curtailed by difficult circumstances. But here it was delivered with the subtlety of a two by four to the head.

Too didactic.

When I look at all the anti-hero trend on TV, it's putting me off: serial killers, brutal mobsters, sophisticated cannibals, charming psychopaths, and worse are the new protagonists.

It's become anti-hero-palooza!

Even The Doctor is more of a dick these days ('She cares so I don't have to'). And it's a kids show.

Refreshing at first, an antidote to preternatural Brady Bunch optimism, but the pendulum just keeps swinging out.

Non-fiction teaches us about the world. Fiction shows us how to live in it. Moral lessons are invariably imparted by the best stories. Consequences are revealed for evaluation, but it's better done with subtlety than a bludgeon, or stacking the deck so heavily it makes the audience groan. Studies have shown that reading stories can expand people's ability to empathize. Stephen Pinker credits storytelling with changing attitudes in Angels of Our Better Nature. But you need a deft touch. The Martian, for example, delivers a message about perseverance and hope and ingenuity and self-reliance, but it's not punching you in the face with it.


On the positive side, Fear has a tremendously creepy ambiance, and great action sequences.  like the actors and their acting choices. I especially like the actress playing Madison. She has a quiet intensity.

But there are character inconsistencies, too.

For example, a doctor in the finale calls for extraction of herself, her staff, and her patients to an airbase. The med station starts to be overrun by zombies before the choppers can set down, so they abandon the rescue operation. Shortly thereafter the doctor says there is nowhere to go, and commits suicide (off-screen, but heavily implied). Hello? Where was she going to be extracted to, just minutes earlier, if there was nowhere to go? The med station was overrun, but there was no word of the helicopter destination being compromised. That didn't change, so why doesn't her character try and go via ground vehicle? More dramatic to kill herself. Yet it doesn't make the slightest sense and should have been caught by a story editor. It's a minor thing that didn't have to stick out.

Too piddly a concern? Too minor a nitpick? Yeah, maybe.

I am looking forward to next season though. Because they're going to sea, which means pirates!

Fear the Walking Dead is Shakespeare compared to The Strain. Fun idea making vampires a sort of sentient virus / hookworm infection, but ugh. Stay away. It's gotten so bad it may one day be good for drinking games, but right now… not so much.

It's on the same level as Helix. I cut out of that after one season, despite the peppy soundtrack.

12 Monkeys surprised me. Thought they'd just drag out the original movie into an interminable multi-season slog that gets cancelled before the finale is ever reached. But it was an entertaining ride. Except, of course, for a weird character change midway through the season that didn't work. They say they set it up. I don't think they did.

I liked Orphan Black but lost interest when crazy psycho-killer Helena changed into quirky Auntie Helena.

That was just weird.

Not every show can be Mr. Robot: the characters here are so strong I'm on board no matter how bat shit insane the twists are. And they are cray-zee. This program has some seriously powerful writing, bro, and the acting is beyond top notch. Don't even recognize the actors, other than Christian Slater, but I expect to see plenty of them in future. The cinematography and wild, off centre framing, the score, the twisted characters… all superlative. The pacing is perfect, not needlessly frenetic. I'm learning a lot just watching the show. It's not for everyone, but give it a whirl. You may just like it. But it isn't SF.

The real and for true sci-fi program I'm enjoying at the moment is Rick and Morty. It's acerbic and cutting and endlessly cynical, but has the saving grace of being devastatingly funny.

Naturally the characters aren't terribly likeable.

Penny Dreadful, The 100, and Game of Thrones are all darkly brilliant, but they're on hiatus, and only one is really SF.

There's a big divide between being a consumer of fiction and a creator of it. As a consumer, I feel free to criticize and analyze, but as a creator, much less so. I know how hard it can be to create something, never mind something great.

On the one hand, TV shows have editors and writer rooms of talented people and resources to boot, so you expect a lot. On the other, they are working within tight timelines with restricted budgets, limited control, and under intense pressure from multiple directions.

As a wannabe writer, who the heck am I to judge?

So I'm taking a break from my amateur movie and TV reviews before I become more dyspeptic.

Books are another matter...

The Martian vs. Interstellar vs. Gravity vs. Prometheus

The Martian, based on Andy Weir's book, is about a paper thin character and his struggle to survive after being abandoned on Mars. He does so by eating potatoes grown in his own shit and using copious amounts of duct tape.

Basically, it's MacGyver in Spaaaaace.

I'm being facetious, of course.

Weir heavily researched his book, and everything in it is plausible. That Andy Weir researched all this in the first place is, and worked it into a novel, is impressive. That scientists figured out everything for Weir to research is even more amazing.

Human beings can do such miraculous feats, like going to other planetary bodies (we've already reached the moon). It just makes me think I must be part of a different species. The characters in the film are fictionalized versions of all the very smart people down at NASA.

The film spends a great deal of time on Matt Damon 'sciencing the shit out of' his predicament. Which, initially, is pretty cool. He grows the aforementioned potatoes, for example. He co-opts an older probe. He uses radiation for heat. And so on.

The only thing they don't spend much time on is the human element, and without interest in him as a person, interest in his situation wanes as the film drags on and piles on disaster on top of another.

He has no love interest, for example. No close friends. His parents are mentioned, once, but he seems in no hurry to speak to them. They are not invited to NASA to view his return, or to write to him, or, well, anything.

They cover his relationships with his coworkers a little, but it never goes more than puddle deep.

It could so easily have been different.

The human element here is mostly, if not entirely, afterthought.

Gravity takes something of the same approach. We start with the disaster, so there's little time to flesh out Sandra Bullock's character. But that's less of a problem here: she has George Clooney to play off of, and the film is really an IMAX roller coaster ride in space. No need for rumination. Because lookout, space debris! Gravity isn't a deep film, and doesn't pretend to be. That's not the genre.

The Martian, on the other hand, had potential to be far more affecting emotionally than it was.

Castaway got to me. The Martian never did.

Interstellar had dodgy science. Three habitable planets around a black hole? Where was the light coming from? One hour on the surface is a year aboard the ship? Say what? What would that mean for satellite TV reception?

My monkey-brained understanding is that, even with a 'perfect' star like ours, Venus is too close, and Mars too far away, to support life. We're in just the right spot. It can vary a bit, but not much. The idea of finding three planets with stable orbits around a black hole seems… unlikely. But hey, I'm no scientist.

It scarcely matters: if you put the science of Interstellar aside (and I only bring it up because I was told so often how accurate and real it was), the film is much more enjoyable. They establish an emotional connection, and background, between the protagonist and his daughter. Love is at the centre of the film. Powerful, primal emotion the viewer can connect with. It has a heart, however overwrought.  

The Martian's heart barely beats. It's more like an episode of Nova or something.

Gravity felt like a realistic portrayal of a disaster in space, as far as Hollywood goes. The rapport between Bullock and Clooney sold it for me emotionally. Especially Clooney's seeming sacrifice, and unexpected return. They managed to make me care enough that the action sequences, and Bullock's fate, mattered.

By contrast, the lack of emotional depth in The Martian made the film a long, slow slog. There's a great bit with the Council of Elrond, and some clever and funny lines, but it needed more than cleverness. There's no looking into the empty void. No real anguish at being abandoned. He doesn't plumb the depths, he's too practical, so when he rises at the end it doesn't carry much emotional heft.

You just don't give a shit.

Some critics are saying The Martian is Ridley Scott 'returning to form' after the disaster that was Prometheus. I saw that film: it was gorgeous, creepy, and well cast, but didn't make a lick of sense. But you know what? I'd sooner watch Prometheus again than The Martian. I was never bored watching the former, while the latter made me shift in my seat and look at my watch.

Yes, I still have a watch.

Prometheus has characters who are interesting basket cases. The engineers are cool and mysterious. The android is ambiguous in intent. There's a lot going on to look at and absorb. It's a mess, honestly, but it's an interesting mess.

The Martian, on the other hand, is a slighter offering, despite the science. Despite the realism, or perhaps because of it, the picture was boring.

That's a cardinal sin for a piece of entertainment.

It should be mentioned that the climax is pulse pounding and I got caught up in it, but getting there was far more painful than it had to be.

Ultimately, The Martian just raised my opinion of Interstellar, Prometheus, and Gravity (although I already had a high opinion of Gravity).

Is it time to let go of plausibility and embrace the universe altering power of love?

Just remember to bring duct tape.

In Defense of Zombies

Zombies tend to be silent types at the best of times, so when their reputation is maligned by elites, they just aren’t able to defend themselves. This is particularly true of criticism appearing on the internet.

Zombie don't type.

And so it falls upon others to defend their reputation from the wanton calumnies that percolate online.

For you see, lately, smug internet pundits have been bleating on about how the real danger in The Walking Dead franchise is other humans, not zombies. You know, because man is his own worst enemy, blah blah solemn wisdom blah. I take the point, especially on a thematic level, but come on: in the end, this is an overly simplistic cliché that’s been pushed to the point of absurdity.

The time has come to stand up for our humble, bumbling zombie friends. They may be unassuming, slow, uncoordinated, even brain-dead, but they still have it where it counts when it comes to collapsing civilization into a smoking ruin.

The zombie doesn’t brag. They're above that. They're brain-dead. But then, they don’t have to brag: their work speaks for itself.

First, without zombies, there wouldn’t even be an apocalypse in the first place.

Seriously.

How many people tried to eat your face off on your way to work this morning? Are 99% of your friends and family zombie chow? No? Isn’t that odd. After all, in the real world there are a lot more of those dangerous human things than in The Walking Dead. It’s populated mostly by zombies.

I wonder how that happened.

Me? I'd rather sit in a cafe populated by humans, rather than undead flesh eaters, but that's just me.

Typically, a war kills a very tiny proportion of the overall population, and most die due to disease or famine that are side effects of the fighting, rather than in actual combat.

Yet the lowly zombie, in short order, kills off 99% of the entire population of the planet. And they do it by biting. Up close and personal every time. No atomic bombs, no guns, no knives, no carpet bombing. No nerve gas, no gas chambers.

Just teeth.

The death toll of the Second World War is between 50 and 80 million, spread over five years. And that’s using every weapon humanity had at its disposal, from machine guns to a-bombs.

Pathetic.

Zombies? They kill SEVEN FREAKING BILLION in a quarter that time.

With their teeth.

I can't emphasize that enough.

That's like making a suit of power armour in a cave using spare parts and an old blow torch.

Many humans would die from disease and starvation, as transportation and supply networks collapse, but the show never covers this. And the disruption is caused by our modest zombie masses, anyway.

So I ask you: which is more dangerous? Human or zombie?

Yeah. That's right.

Suck it up.

So let’s all show our putrifying undead friends some well deserved respect.

Sure, the living could unleash nuclear Armageddon at any time. Send 70,000 nuclear warhead tipped missiles criss-crossing the globe to blossom and burst. But we haven’t. And it isn’t even looking likely.

Human possibility isn’t the same as zombie certainty. Zombies don't hold back.

Maybe if the characters in The Walking Dead decided the real enemy was, oh, I don’t know, the freaking zombies, they wouldn’t be on the brink of extinction.

Just a humble suggestion.

Quest for an audience: Final nail in the social media coffin?

Interesting article over at Publisher's Weekly by Jennifer McCartney about best-selling author Victorine E. Lieske.

Some take-aways:

Lieske says a key ingredient to success is to simply write a story that people want to buy. “You’d be surprised at how many writers don’t understand why their part science fiction, part women’s fiction, part space opera, part paranormal romance, part dog mystery based loosely on their life story isn’t a bestseller,” she says.

And…

She examined her marketing and publicity efforts but remained confused. Sales were steady and didn’t jump when she posted a blog or bought an ad. So what was influencing people to buy her book? Lieske says she got an email from a woman that helped solved the mystery. “She said, ‘Amazon recommended your book to me, and I really enjoyed it.’” At that point, Lieske realized that it was not her tireless marketing efforts that had resulted in more sales. “I was doing all this work, blogging, and posting on forums, and making book trailers, and all these things that weren’t reaching people,” she says. “But Amazon could reach hundreds of people each day.” She decided that the key to a book’s success must happen before the book is published—a combination of writing, story line, cover design, blurb, and price.

In other words, all the time and effort sunk into blogging, twittering, etc. is exactly that: sunk.

Funny, I was just thinking of making a book trailer.

Maybe not.

What about blogging? It's kinda fun trying to write reviews. It's a very different kind of writing, compared to a novel, say, but it really doesn't help much of anything. You'd have to blog for years and years, on a very specific topic, to get any traction. I've tried to focus on Sci-fi and Post-Apocalyptic, but that's an area saturated with online material.

I may still write a review of Victor Gischler's Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse though. He's into the whole gritty, absurdist post-apocalyptic thang, complete with civilization saving strip clubs.

Damn, I thought I was original with my satire.

Google Communities are pretty touchy, so that's not a very viable way to connect with people. I'm contemplating starting one myself, but then, I imagine that'd just be another time sink, and there's probably good Wild West reasons for Communities to be so quick to delete and ban.

No easy answers, other than starting 5 years ago instead of now.

And I'll bet others be saying that in five years...

Doctor Who: The Witch's Familiar

Wanted to like it. I really did. The episode riffs off of one of the best episodes of the original series, and promised to be a strong chaser.

There’s a lot of sound and fury, and then it just doesn’t bother to deliver.

Sorry.

First, the good stuff:

I liked the explanation of the teleportation fake-out that Missy pulled, and the flashback to an earlier, untold Doctor story. That was fun.

The episode looks great. Really freakin’ amazing (with a few exceptions. See below). The Dalek control room is fabulously realized, and looks like a cross between the 1960s Andy Warholesque pop art Dalek feature film sets and those of Ken Adams.

The CGI exteriors of Dalek City rock, and are embellished with tiny little flying Daleks zipping about willy nilly, making for a nice FX cherry top. The show has come a long way from the closet of styrofoam and cardboard. Well. A lot is still probably made with those materials, they just hide it better.

Speaking of which, the required hallways are appropriately repetitive looking. Really evoke an earlier era, especially the retro Dalek doors. Who knows? They may catch on.

Missy (Michelle Gomez) is crazy wonderful. She dominates every scene she’s in the way Kramer kicks ass in karate class; I can’t take my filthy eyes off her. She makes the Doctor, Clara, and even our dear desultory Davros fade into the scenery. She’s got the best material to work with, the most outrageous lines, the loosest rules, the most idiosyncratic costume, and she pushes it all to the limit of what’s acceptable in a former children’s tea time show.

Gomez’s acting choices here are freakin' flawless.

The way she determined the depth of the pit… brilliant.

Her final effort to get Clara erased was the pinnacle of her performance, and it at least gave Clara something to do, even if ineffectually and while imprisoned in a can.

The concept for the episode, having the Doctor trying to rescue a child only to discover it is his greatest enemy, is a wonderful one, and has a direct link back to Genesis of the Dalek and a quote by the Doctor himself. What a cracker idea to base a story on! So many places it could go. Such potential!

But it isn’t realized. And that’s a shame.

There’s some sharp witty dialogue, mostly had by Missy.

Capaldi’s eyebrows are in fine form.

The final bit where he saves kid Davros was kinda sweet. And the hand mines were cool.

Now the negative:

I still feel Capaldi’s stiff. That’s a minority opinion, if not outright heretical: the man’s won an Oscar, after all. Granted it may not be entirely fair an evaluation: I went back and looked at some clips from Genesis of the Daleks and those episodes are much more like a stage play than I had recalled (with the sort of sets and props you’d expect from live theatre). The actors over enunciate and there’s a formal, Actor Acting aspect to it at times. Still, I find Baker better inhabits the role than Capaldi. He’s more believable, or was in his early years at any rate. Perhaps Capaldi just needs a drink before going on camera, or material better suited to his own temperament. Let the real Capaldi shine through, drop the artifice, go more Gomez.

Poor melancholy Davros Loman is a real downer. He could do with some pharmaceutical pick me ups, if you know what I mean. Maybe Prozac and some therapy. The evil creator of the Daleks is dying, his fire has gone out of the universe, and he’s gotten deadly dull. No megalomaniacal screeds here, just the pathetic bleatings of a green half-man with a blue eye stuck in his forehead.

When Davros tries to convince the Doctor that he’s offering him the chance to kill all the Daleks on Skaro, he just has to touch the cables, no really, just touch the cables, why won’t you touch them, go ahead, you know you want to… it just comes across like my five year old nephew trying to trick me into doing something. Seriously, just touch the cables. Go on. Then all the Daleks will die. Honest. For real and for true. PULL MY FINGER, DOCTOR!

So when the Doctor turns the tables and it is revealed he didn’t buy into Davros’ little deception (and I use the term ‘little’ here deliberately), it comes as no surprise whatever. The big surprise is that Davros has so little emotional intelligence that he thought his scheme would work in the first place. It’s entirely out of character for Davros, who was once a canny operator. He seems to have gone senile as well as soft.

The scenes of emotional, death bed connection between the Doctor and Davros rang like a cell phone on mute. Seemed false and forced and what was I watching? Who did they replace Davros with, anyway? I knew Davros. Davros was a favorite villain of mine, and you, sir, are no Davros.

Of course he’s faking. It’s preposterous.

Sadly Clara fades so far into the background during the episode she might run into Captain Kirk in that episode where he’s always fading away into another reality. They really short changed her character this time around.

The Dalek zombie sewer slime came across as both odd and jarring (Is it a reference to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? He once referred to the Gulag as a sewer system). It’s such a goofy, nonsensical idea you know immediately it’s there to solve something later in the episode, and lo and behold, it does. How convenient. And to be honest, clever in a what are they smoking at the Beeb these days kind of way. And yet the effects used for the slime attacks are retro and highly evocative of the original series. The foam used for Seeds of Death was more convincing, and that’s saying something, and it’s not good. They must have blown the budget on the city sets.

The Daleks are boring. God, they’re dull. I’m sorry, but they are. Boring and dull and incapable of surprises. At all. They just wobble about shouting ‘exterminate’ and wave their plungers ineffectually. They couldn't be duller if they were Dalek Accountants. In fact, those would be more interesting, as they'd have things to say about numbers and taxes. The Daleks just have no menace anymore. They can't properly kill people without them teleporting away, or deal with their own bloody sewage. I mean, honestly, the sewage gets the better of them.

Sewage.

True, they’ve tried over and over again to deal with the Dullness of the Daleks issue, in stories like Evolution of the Daleks, where they tried to hybridize their way out of the dead-end plunger yank-fest. But it always goes back to the same interminable status quo.

The Daleks are less interesting now than when they first met William Hartnell. There was still a smidgeon of nuance around them in those early days. Now, they’re just one note pepper pots. Dalek dialogue feels so limited you could take bits from other episodes and cobble together all the responses you’d need for a slew of new episodes.

That’s how limited these tin cans are. No range at all.

They're almost background elements, like fire hydrants or trees.

Brilliant idea and concept, of course, but they need room to grow. That or they should be retired until someone can think of something, anything, interesting to do with these perpetually peeved hate machines.

Or does the Terry Nation estate prevent any meaningful alterations to their nature?

Or perhaps they really are setting up a new threat, one that will replace the Daleks: Doctor Who and the Unstoppable Undead Sewage. 

I confess I don't see the toy potential.

The Doctor says he went to see Davros because ‘you asked’. But he runs away and hides in the Thirteenth Century, throws a three week farewell party, hides from Mr. Snake and expects to die and has no hope. So… all you have to do is ask? Does guilt over not saving kid Davros’ rot his soul that much? The Doctor’s done a lot worse over the years to a lot better people. I just found this death wish because 'Davros asked him to’ made no emotional sense. Of course, the Doctor lies. It still doesn’t make sense.

That’s all I have to say about our good Doctor.

I should love this way-out-there, whacky program, what with its brilliant premise and history and admirable British eccentricity. But I’m not. The show is just not connecting with my inner eleven year old. 

C'est la vie.

I’d rather go watch Sicario again.

Good movie. Go see it.











 

Doctor Who: The Magician's Apprentice Review

 

Doctor Who has always been a bit daffy.

Eccentric like a crazy uncle.

The television equivalent of what you'd get if you merged the local cat lady with a hyper-active five year old and a mad conspiracy theorist, and then irresponsibly pumped fifty cups of coffee into your new, three tongued hydra.

It's wonderfully entertaining at times, but doesn't make a lick of sense.

Which brings me to The Magician's Apprentice.

I'm not the target demographic for this show. Not by a long shot. I probably shouldn't even be watching it. Which may explain why everyone else loved it while I sat gob smacked.

The episode did cause a memory to gurgle out of my grey matter. That's right: my brain gurgles. A memory I acquired from an article some time ago, in which the Doctor Who showrunner said emphatically that one should never indulge in fan service, as it alienates the broader audience.

Presumably this is a different show runner.

The season opener connects back to an episode filmed some forty years ago, and even includes actual footage from it. Hello, Tom. An ethical dilemma is presented to the Doctor: would you kill a boy if you knew he would grow up to be totally evil and kill millions? It's the old time travelers' kill Hitler ice breaker question.

Probably used as a pickup line in time traveler bars.

And the pre-credit opening was very good. Just cracking, really. Superb. I know enough about the program I wasn't lost when they dropped the name 'Davros'. A cool twist, no question about it.

And then the episode goes flying all over the place, throwing scenes at the walls as if someone gave the Attention Deficit Disorder writer a bag of jelly beans and a gallon of coke.

It was zany and over the top over the top, doubly so, even. There's a tank and a guitar and stopped planes (in midair) and snake men and invisible planets and all kinds of batsh*t crazy stuff.

Michelle Gomez eats it up with a little silver spoon and oodles of panache. As Missy, she steals the show, the silver ware, and probably all the towels. She's completely at ease in her psychopathic, mass-mudering character, and has an absolute ball.

Peter Capaldi, on the other hand, is much stiffer. Maybe Gomez excites him. Who knows? She tickled the balls of the Daleks. So cheeky. Anyway, I've enjoyed Capaldi elsewhere, but here, on Who, he's tightened up. It's almost as if he cares too much. I keep feeling like I'm watching Peter Capaldi acting, which is not how I've usually felt previously when he's been in front of a camera performing. It's odd. Perhaps it is the material they're giving him. I don't know.

So much of the episode made no sense. The guitar bit felt like excessive turkey stuffing, although the frozen planes I can forgive Because Coolness. Yet I think Missy could have found Clara without them. The invisible planet? Seems a lot of trouble when they could have just shut the windows on the spacecraft, or put a bag over his head. There are cheaper solutions.

Generally I approve of wildly over the top excess. But here… I'm not so sure. It seemed to detract from the flow of the story.

Moffat is endlessly clever, and quite the wit, but his stories always feel glib and choppy, prone to hop about from here to there and back again, like an itinerant Hobbit on speed. The opening scene alone is worth the price of admission, but after that, the energy started to dissipate.

The trailer for next week, however, teases wonderful moral conundrums for our dear Doctor, enough to make him scarf a bucket of Jelly Babies, although I still have qualms. Why The Doctor bothered to confront Davros the way he did felt to me more like an action foisted upon him by a writer interested in exploring an interesting conundrum than something the Doctor would actually do. It needed more buttressing for me to buy it.

Nevermind.

We are in this to be entertained, so much can be overlooked or forgiven or memory holed, and I am intrigued enough to see how it plays out next episode.

Can Moffat rise above a pat ending and deliver something superlative?

A cherry for a forty-year old cake?

He may indeed...

Fear the Walking Dead: The Dog

I really dug the first two episodes, but the third went (a bit) off the rails.

First, the characters flubbed my idiosyncratic Viewer Turing Test.

Oh, not all at once, and not instantly, to be sure.

I liked the drug addicted kid in the first two episodes, for example. And the dad, Travis. He always seems believably concerned. And the mom… she's awesome. Always something going on behind her eyes. The daughter not so much, but she hasn't been given a lot to do yet, other than wear short-shorts.

Not that I'm complaining. 

The show's atmospheric and creepy and has some fabulously charged scenes. The drive by the hospital was great. Incredibly well staged and expensive looking. The earlier scenes in the church were freaky. The video of the undead attacking emergency response workers, chilling.

And the scene with Travis entering the house invaded by the undead positively crackled with tension.

It was, dare I say, scary.

There's a lot of good stuff here. A lot of potential.

But something underneath all the cool superficialities doesn't sit right with me.

The characters felt more like Writer Puppets rather than Independent Actors. Yes, I know. All characters are puppets.

I mean, duh.

But you don't want the readers (or viewers) to see the strings That's the trick and admittedly it's much more difficult to do than one might think.

This time, I was noticing those darn strings, making the episode an odd mixture of 'okay, I dig it' and 'WTF?'

Travis' resolute pacifism, even in the face of the zombie apocalypse, in particular feels more and more… forced. More of a writer's point, even, or a personality trait written in bold on a character sheet, than a real attitude.

They need to ground his anti-gun position solidly, and soon, or abandon it.

I mean, he's seen infected people peppered with bullets, yet keep on coming. He's seen a guy get his face blown off and not go down. The very same guy who just tried to eat his face, I might add, moments before. Even after his near face-off, Travis lectures Daniel to NOT teach his son Chris how to defend himself with a gun.

The simmering hostility bit between Travis and Daniel felt forced, just there to ramp up the tension a little more.

Ah well. As Daniel says, "The good people die first."

Let's hope so.

Second, the ending of the episode felt… off.

It wasn't the arrival of the cavalry. I have nothing against cavalry charging to save the day, every now and then. They can be fun and uplifting and all that, but here, it seemed like the army dropped in literally from out of nowhere.

This may be me being too picky, but think about it.

One minute, the street is empty. All our heroine sees is Patrick arriving home in his car. The street's otherwise deserted.

The next moment, troops are all over the block.

I know she's all tunnel vision on Patrick, but come on: a convoy of huge army trucks isn't going to catch your eye? Especially when flanked by soldiers running around with automatic weapons out, shooting walking dead people?

Perhaps I didn't understand the staging, but then, it's the responsibility of the filmmaker orient the viewer.

Shouldn't the army trucks have been right behind Patrick?

They were coming from the same direction, after all, down a long street they did a crane shot of later, which means Patrick would have had to PASS the army to get to his house. He would have seen soldiers running house to house, guns out, like they were in active combat. Yet he asks no questions? In fact, he seems completely oblivious to what's going on, other than acknowledging that the airport is closed. He has no idea why. How did he drive all that way without seeing anything?

And considering it was an infected area being cleared by the military block by block, surely the US Army would set up road blocks and not let people back in until the job was finished.

Wouldn't they?

I don't mind the army showing up. I just wish they'd staged it in a more believable way that didn't leave me going wait, what, huh, how, where, why…?

This could all be put down to the short hand necessary to write and produce a TV show on a tight schedule and limited budget. Still, it was in such sharp contrast to some of the well staged scenes (like the hospital drive by), it brought the whole unnecessarily down.

But I'm still watching. I'm looking forward to seeing how the army loses control of the situation.

I did notice that soldiers put a big 'X' on a house. This signaled to realist Daniel (who's in simultaneous love-goggle denial about Griselda's impending demise) that things are already too late. I'm guessing because the army is only containing zombies in homes, rather than going in and clearing them out: the difference between spray paint baby blue and big black infected X.

A fascinating touch.