SF Diplomat

REVIEW - Battlestar Galactica season 3 (2007)

THE ZONE now has my review of the third series of BSG. 

It also has links to my reviews of the first and second series.

Go forth and read...

Fixing Torchwood

From reading my original posts on Torchwood you might have guessed that I was Not a Fan.  Nor did I greet the news of Torchwood's second series with very much in the way of warmth or anticipation.  In fact, I might well have suggested that Torchwood was evidence that the BBC had become "a purveyor of the most degrading, toxic and low-brow shit conceivable to man".  However, seeing as we're stuck with the bloody thing, I thought I'd devote some time to thinking about how the series could be improved.

REVIEW - Doctor Who -The Last of the Time Lords

In the three seasons since Doctor Who was resurrected and returned to our screens, the series has run the gamut both in terms of subject matter and in terms of quality; from the puerile and simple minded to the elegant and clever it has shown some real range in the types of stories it has brought to our screens.  However, one this that has not changed is the fact that every season ends on an epic and emotional note.  The end of the first series saw the Death of the ninth Doctor and the defeat of a Dalek armada at the hands of a glowing Rose Tyler, the second series saw the defeat of an other Dalek armada along with a legion of cybermen as well as Rose Tyler getting trapped in a parallel universe.  Season three finishes in equally bombastic fashion as "The Last of the Timelords" finishes the story started in "Utopia" and "The Sound of Drums", but as frequently happens when Russell T. Davies is doing the actual writing, the episode itself is something of a curate's egg.

REVIEW : Doctor Who - The Sound of Drums

The last couple of episodes of Doctor Who have caused some considerable excitement amongst longer-memoried Whovians.  the reason for this excitement is the return of The Master, one of the Doctor's more memorable opponents thanks, in no small part, to the performances of Roger Delgado who gleefully chewed scenery opposite the Earth-bound third Doctor played by future Worzel Gummidge Jon Pertwee.  In many ways a pedestrian rather than a barn-storming episode, "The Sound of Drums" nonetheless includes a number of interesting SF ideas lurking just beneath the surface.

REVIEW : Doctor Who - Blink

In the past I've been rather quiet about the BBC's rebooted Doctor Who.  This is because my feelings about the series vary drastically based upon the recent quality of the episodes.  As a result, when I saw "The Christmas Invasion" I was so enraged about what passed for decent SF on British television that I may have said some rather unkind things about series executive producer Russell T. Davies before suggesting a course of action that would only be possible for him if he were to have extensive genital surgery.  I was also not a huge fan of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood.

However, my relationship with Nu Hu, as it is referred to in some places, has not been entirely negative as after catching the Hugo nominated episode "The Girl in the Fireplace" I happily watched the rest of the season and thought it was great.  In fact, I think that the Steven Moffat-penned episode stands up quite happily to any single piece of genre TV in the last decade.  Buffy and Firefly included.  When the new series of Doctor Who started I had high hopes but after more Daleks and more silly running around and tiresome will-they-won't-they romantic sub-plots, I began to lose interest around the time of the Eurovision Song Contest break.  However, unfortunately for my download ratio, that man has done it again, Steven Moffat has again delivered one of the strongest episodes in Doctor Who's entire run... and the Doctor's hardly in it!

BBC re-commission Torchwood... shit.

That's it... I've had enough.

First, they give a second series to the gibbering comedy-vacuum that was TittyBangBang, then they order a second series of unfunny SF sitcom Hyperdrive and misguided prole-amuser Robin Hood and now they do THIS.

I'm utterly speechless.

Actually I'm not... I'm just fucking angry.

There was a time when the BBC had a reputation for producing television that was, in the words of someone who wrote in to complain about Nigel Kneale's 1984, sadistically high-brow.  To say that the days of quality broadcasting are long gone from the BBC is an understatement.

In recent years the BBC has become little more than a purveyor of the most degrading, toxic and low-brow shit conceivable to man.  A culture of excellence and innovation has been replaced with an incompetent desire to pander to the lowest possible denominator, preferably whilst covering one's own arse.  The result is that not only do shit TV programmes get made, they then get re-commissioned because to drop a series after one season would be an admission of failure even when the only failure was putting the fucking thing on air in the first place!

The idea that a series as conceptually and artistically flawed as Torchwood should be deemed worthy of a second series is the most blatant example of Groupthink since the US and British governments convinced themselves that Iraq was harboring WMDs. 

Actually, I say groupthink but I actually suspect that this is more a case of conflict of interest, abuse of power and outright fraud as Julie Gardner, the woman in charge of commissioning drama for the BBC, is also one of Torchwood's executive producers.

If this is not bad enough we are FORCED to pay for this shit.  Even if we don't watch it, because in the UK if you own a TV you have to have a TV license.  This is... unacceptable.

Torchwood - That's it... I'm out.

The other day I got round to watching episode 5 of Dr. Who spin-off series Torchwood.  While the first few episodes hadn't exactly impressed me, I downloaded it because I heard it was written by P. J. Hammond of Sapphire and Steel fame.

The result was another disappointing mess.  The episode starts off promisingly with a paedophile stalking a little girl.  Initially this interested me as the old medievel folklore about children being kidnapped by children closely mirrors the fears that modern parents have about paedophiles.  Admittedly Joss Whedon did something very similar in Buffy with a demon who could plant a story about the death of a pair of children and then provoke parents until they took to vigilanteism, but here was a very fittingly english piece of folklore that promised to be topical too.

What a disappointment.  The paedophile gets killed by the fairies and then the episode devolves into a very standard monster hunt that ends absurdly with Jack going "well there's nothing we can do about it" (making us wonder why A) they even turned up and B) who the fuck creates a problem that can't be solved and expects it to carry dramatic tension?).

The episode also includes this preposterous sub-plot about the immortal Jack occasionally re-inventing himself as his own son.  Jack essentially denies that he was his father all throughout the episode despite the fact that A) his immortality was established in the first episode and B) people know he was around and young during the 1940's.  So in other words, Jack spends an entire episode denying what everyone at home knows to be the case, for absolutely no reason.  Clearly Hammond had written this before he was told that actually, Jack's colleagues would know that he's immortal but it shows real laziness and contempt for the audience to not try and put a different spin on this so as to salvage the idea (maybe Jack's old girlfriend puts 2 and 2 together).

All this to say that's it... I'm giving up on this.  It's shit.  It's poorly written, poorly conceived, poorly made, poorly acted and just generally poor.  It's also Welsh.

Since I've started reviewing I've realised that films and books aren't just good and bad, they're also more or less interesting.  As a critic this second dimension becomes pretty interesting as from time to time you find yourself having to write about things that were complete crap but are nonetheless crap for interesting reasons.  The remake of House of Wax was a good example of this, as was The Swarm.  These types of pieces compare nicely to pieces such as Brick or My Name is Earl, which were really really good but not in ways that were particularly interesting to write about.

Torchwood, it turns out, is neither good, nor interesting to write about as it's obvious to all and sundry why it doesn't work.

Anyway, short of a sudden massive upsurge in quality towards the end of the series, I'm moving on.  Life's too short.

Torchwood; an impression rather than a review

I've hummed and hawed quite a bit about writing an early review of Russell T. Davies' Dr. Who spin-off.  This has been largely because while I thought his Christmas Invasion was some of the worst TV ever made, I eventually came to appreciate its technicolour campness and Davies' annoyingly cunning decision to outsource the writing to people more capable than him (most notably Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat).  As a result, I'm not yet willing to completely condemn it.  Having said that, after watching three episodes, it doesn't look good.

The Bait and Switch.
Ever since the first series of the new Dr. Who revealed itself to be a success, rumours started to abound about a spin-off series.  BBC Three Controller Stuart Murphy described the series as "sinister and psychological... as well as being very British and modern and real", Davies himself was also quoted as saying Torchwood was a "British Sci-fi paranoid thriller".  All in all, the series has been billed as being an adult drama as opposed to the more "family friendly" nature of Dr. Who necessary for it's Saturday tea-time slot.

However, so far we have had a bit of blood, some gratuitous swearing, a cast of characters who are seemingly all bisexual,  endless talk of shagging and snogging and the trailers for episode four feature what can only be described as a woman in a metal bikini.  Seemingly, what was meant when the series was billed as adult drama was not "mature" drama that was more complex and challenging than the day-glow accessiblity of the parent-series, but the same gurning campness as the original series only with added sex and violence of the most sophomoric and low-brow kind imaginable.

Clearly a bait and switch has been pulled here.  People expected  an heir to Ultraviolet, a British Buffy or Angel, the X-files meets This Life (a comparison initially attributed to Davies but later rejected) and instead have got  Footballer's Wives meets Plan Nine From Outerspace.  Compared to the grown-up sci-fi produced by our American Cousins, Torchwood is idiotic, sophomoric and puerile.  Where American genre writers have been pushing the production and creative values of genre further and further until series such as Battlestar Galactica, Firefly or Buffy can be compared to highbrown mainstream dramas such as Deadwood or the Sopranos, Russell T. Davies thinks that the height of adult genre drama is gay kisses and an unconvincing will-they-won't-they subplot.

When judged as an adult drama, Torchwood is ridiculous.  When seen as a British version of Buffy or Angel, it's insulting.

The Setting.
It is interesting to note that, like Dr. Who, Torchwood is set in Cardiff.  However, unlike in Dr. Who, here Cardiff plays itself instead of pretending to be the infinitely more interesting and beautiful London.

It's also worth noting that not only are both Dr. Who and Torchwood both produced by BBC Wales, but Torchwood is produced not only by Welshman Russell T. Davies but also Julie Gardner who is both a TV producer AND the head of Drama for BBC Wales AND Controller for Drama Commissioning for the whole of the BBC.

In other words, if this series is set in Wales it's because of BBC internal politics and the fact that that the person in charge of commissioning new drama for the BBC has commissioned HERSELF (which is surely a conflict of interest) to make a sci-fi series set in Cardiff.

Straight off the bat, there's a problem casting here.  In choosing to set your drama in a real place, you're effectively granting some of a place's atmosphere to the place where it is set,  to whit; imagine LA Confidential set in Scunthorpe or Chinatown set in Sheffield or even Cracker set in Dorset.  Each of these pieces shows that the right setting can grant your piece atmosphere simply by playing off the things that spring to mind when the audience think of L.A., San Francisco or London.  Even genre TV obeys these rules as Angel was set in LA and Buffy was set in the kind of fictional Californian town that once formed the basis for Scooby Doo.  Torchwood, on the other hand, has Cardiff... a city that's famous for a rather ugly opera house (which spends more time on screen than any of the actors).  Even within the UK, Cardiff has no cultural resonance whatsoever.  Despite this, the series is FULL of shots of Cardiff including a completely ridiculous shot of Captain Jack standing on top of a building for no reason.

As a result, trying to sell Torchwood as a dark and angsty thriller is an uphill battle, and it isn't one that the creative team seem to be winning either.  The bizarre choice of setting and the production credits speak of a series that is creatively compromised by internal politics and sleazy production deals.  The people who have to pay the price, of course, are the viewers.

The Writing.
Thus far, the writing in Torchwood has been sub-par.  Sub-par by the standards of genre TV in general, Sub-par by the standards of genre TV in this country (lest we forget, Nigel Kneale died recently), sub-par by the standards of drama and sub-par even when compared to the simple-mindedness of Torchwood's parent series Dr. Who.

The characters are mono-dimensional.  There's an asian computer geek, a welsh police woman, a creepy english guy, a handsome Welshman and Captain Jack who is smarmy and wears a long coat.  Davies' attempts to grow these characters have been as trite as they are unambitious, seemingly limiting himself to sophomoric comments about their sexuality and will-they-won't-they relationships that not only ape Dr. Who but ape the likes of the X-files.  Simply put, these are poorly written characters that lack depth and they are in the hands of a creative team that seem to lack any desire to add any depth to them.  Even the main character's relationship problems are banal and mundane as they centre around the fact that she works late and rarely gets to see her boyfriend.

For a series that is supposed to be aimed at adults, Torchwood shows an amazing lack of emotional complexity or maturity.  Indeed, watching this series one might well be tempted to think that Davies has never actually had a relationship, or if he has, he clearly has nothing of interest to say about them, leaving us to wonder why he should choose to include them at all.  To speculate for a minute, the reason why they're included is that From Buffy to BSG, you can't make a modern genre series without dealing with relationships.  But Davies has no stomach for the emotional politics of BSG and lacks the eye for subtext and lightness of touch displayed by Whedon's writing on Firefly and Buffy.  Rather than insightful commentaries or bold melodrama, Torchwood gives us adolescent sexuality.

The Ideas.
One of the pleasures of Dr. Who's return to the airwaves is the fact that it is undeniably a series that is all about ideas.  Each week there's a new setting and a new challenge that, if not always original, is undeniably effective.  Consider the creepy ghost story The Unquiet Dead from series 1, the touching relationship between the Doctor and Madame de Pompadour in series 2 or even the idea of an alien pretending to be Satan in series 2.  All of these are nice ideas and are deep enough to sustain an hour or two's drama.

Torchwood has yet to sink its teeth into any interesting ideas at all.  The closest it has come is a machine allowing you to relive old memories and see the future, but despite a large canvas to play with Torchwood disastrously chooses to make the episode about the personalities of the different characters and the relationships between them.  Seeing as no work was done on either of those areas, Torchwood's attempt to pluck at our heartstrings fails utterly, the predictability of the plot and the familiarity of the ideas only serving to drive home how sub-par the writing is for this series.

The lack of emotional depth to Torchwood and the paucity of its ideas combine with its adolescent and inept attempts to be "grown up" to produce a series that is utterly underwhelming.  Unless the quality of the episodes improve drastically as the series progresses, Russell T. Davies is not only dragging the Dr. Who brand through the mud, he is also endangering the future of genre broadcasting in this country, because if a large budget, a successful brand and an award winning writer cannot pull in the punters, then why should the BBC bother commissioning any new series from anyone else?

This series is not only poor, it's intellectual and creative bankruptcy are actually dangerous.

REVIEW - Battlestar Galactica (Season 2) - 7/20

The very first post I put up on this weblog was a glowing review of the first series of the new Battlestar Galactica.  At the time I argued that not only did this series consolidate the strides in genre TV made by Joss Whedon in Buffy and Firefly, but it actively grew the genre by daring to take on the relevant political discussions of the day.

However, since then my attitude towards Ronald D. Moore's series has cooled considerably.  When I reviewed the first half of the second series I was far from upbeat.  However, having seen the second half of the second series I have now decided to lay out my problems with the second series in full on THE ZONE website.

To be blunt, I think that the writing in BSG is haphazard and directionless, which results in poorly constructed plots, bad characterisation and the continuous use of the old Star Trek "reset button" that magically clears up all the outstanding plot points.

Whether or not this change of method is permanent I cannot say as I'm now starting to wonder whether these problems were not also present in the first series, but were hidden by the fact that the plots had all been worked out in great detail beforehand.  Either way, I think BSG has now come to prove that while you can take the girl out of the ghetto, you can't take the ghetto out of the girl (as Jay-Lo has reminded us a number of times) as for all the gritty set design and the angst, BSG still shows the same poor approach to writing that made Star Trek so dreadful to watch.

I've yet to see any of the third series but I hope that the writers pull their act together.  With the death of Star Trek and Stargate, BSG is now THE US genre TV show.  If Moore fucks this one up, the consequences for genre TV in the short to medium term could be devastating.

REVIEW - Cowboy Bebop - 14/20

Despite being almost ten years old and having spawned a feature-length film (which, parenthetically, was a disappointment, feeling like a lack-lustre padded episode), it is only recently that I got my hands on a copy of this seminal anime series.

Cowboy Bebop is set in a future in which the solar system has been colonised and linked up using hyperspeed gates.  However, an accident involving a gate set up near Earth  made the planet  virtually uninhabitable resulting in human society splintering and settling down on various moons and planets around the solar system but with no centralised authority, this is what is known as the Jazz Age.  In lieu of an inter-planetary police-force, human space is filled with bounty hunters who track down the more deadly or mobile criminals.  They are known as cowboys.

Cowboy Bebop infuses what is ultimately quite traditional manga design with an American cultural resonance, most notably the laid back hipness and cool of the jazz era.  This aesthetic is nicely underlined by a smooth jazz and bebop soundtrack and a tendency beautifully drawn but languid shots of backgrounds wherein life just seems to casually drift by.  Spike is the apotheosis of this design aesthetic, his long thin legs, boots and stylishly ruffled hair and tendency to smoke seem to suggest that he's just walked out of a Charlie Parker concert.  Strangely though, the other characters remain fairly standard anime types with Fay as a buxom and beautiful anime femme-fatale and Jet as the wizened but tough and lovable father figure with the wonderfully weird Edward as a whimsical comic side-kick.

Intriguingly, the english voice cast is arguably stronger than the original Japanese cast whose frequently stiff and stylised delivery didn't mesh well with the subject matter.  Particularly noteworthy is Melissa Fahn's performance of Ed, which is reminiscent of her other performance as the voice of the Tachikomas in Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex.  Though perhaps the success of the english-language cast is just as easily attributable to the fact that Comboy Bebop's american style suits american accents and the cadence of the english tongue better than it does japanese.

Cowboy Bebop's plotting is fairly light and the writers eschew the use of elaborate philosiophical musings and complex character arcs for a more accessible and simple formula that sees the crew continuously chasing down a bounty using a mix of detective work and wonderfully choreographed action sequences using fire arms, kung fu and space ship combat.

These three elements have contributed to Cowboy Bebop becoming one of the most succesful anime series ever released in America with a huge and vocal fan following.  However, I would argue that it is the characteristics that made this series such a hit outside Japan that ultimately let it down.

The show's simple and almost formulaic plotting means that when viewed as a single work (as you're bound to do when viewing it on DVD) the characters and plots never go anywhere.  Indeed, with the exception of the episodes introducing each of the characters and the last three episodes that deal with the back stories of Fay, Ed and Spike, the characters never evolve or change.  They are stuck in the perpetual now of a series without plot or character arcs.  This seems strange not only when compared to other pieces of TV anime, which tend to be over-flowing with frequently insanely complicated sub-plots, but when compared to US genre TV, which, since the X-files has systematically used series-long plot arcs and dramatic character arcs.

When considered as a collection of 25-minute long episodes, it is easy to see why Cowboy Bebop is such a success.  The slight plotting and incredible style of the series makes it instantly accessible and instantly engaging.  However, when you try and watch more than three episodes in a row, the lack of dramatic or intellectual depth becomes immediately apparent and you find your attention beginning to wander.  Cowboy Bebop is great fun and a beautifully made series, but it is definitely not best enjoyed on DVD.