Fazzinchi

Being Human

fazzinchi — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:31:05 +0000

Suddenly I See

Hello strangers. Last night I sat down and watched the final installment of series 2 of the marvellous Being Human. I assume you watch it – although if for some uncomprehensible reason, you do not, I can only recommend the DVD boxset when it is released. In fact, get that anyway. It is a masterly production, with some great SFX when called for, engaging multi-dimensional characters and a cracking script. I do love the way the dialogue just throws out a few curve balls from time to time. For example, in yesterday’s episode, in the middle of a heated argument that was quite literally a matter of life of death, Mitchell points to Nina and refers to her as “Inch High Private Eye”… I nearly fell of my chair such was the level of the guffaw. And earlier in the series when Mitchell and George reflected their rage and despair respectively by their reaction to BBC3 re-scheduling The Real Hustle. The script just makes the entire series a joy to watch.

Looking splendid in glorious HD, these 8 episodes of BH have continued to explore some interesting areas, most notably this time around we saw the religeous aspect of the church’s reaction (or, at least, some peculiar little evangelical offshoot of Christianity) to the existence of such “monsters”. Led by the sinister Kemp, played deliciously by Donald Sumpter, and his technical assistant, this cult superficially sought to help the world by ridding it of the Type 1’s “Vampires”, Type 2’s “Ghosts” and Type 3’s “Werewolves” and this element of the storyline was a constant throughout. Many of the episodes began with a flashback sequence where some incident in the past either influences or mirrors the present day. Having known that a third series was commissioned and that production was being relocated to Wales, the series also built (as did series one) to a conclusion that opened up some interesting possibilities for new stories.

From a character point of view, I quite enjoyed seeing Annie struggling to come to terms with her death and her wildly varying reactions to it: this season we saw her get a job, learn how to resist being drawn through the doors that appear to take people to the other side, meet her mother, before finally succumbing to “death”. Although quite what that means remains to be seen as there appear to be a good supply of TV cameras on the other side to enable communication back to the land of the living. George’s year was a little less interesting, although this was more than made up for by Russell Tovey’s sympathetic portrayal. I am glad that he and Nina seem to be back together. Mitchell has possibly been the most interesting this series following the death of Herrick last year. He was forced in to a leadership position among the vampires that he didn’t seem to want and was, if truth is told, pretty hopeless at it anyway. His endeavours to integrate the vampires quietly in to society while they were all going cold turkey was never going to work, although the hell that kicked off after the mass murder of these undead at the hands of Mitchell’s new girlfriend, Lucy, was a genuine series highlight.

Davros Returns

fazzinchi — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 07:54:16 +0000

“Welcome to my new empire, Doctor!”

Catching up with the Day 8 of 24 over recent days and I was very amused to find that the guy who played Eugene Tooms in the X-Files (and also Horace of the Dharma Initiative in Lost) was now portraying none other than Davros! Actually it was someone other than that Davros because Doug Hutchison, for that is he, was pretty good in his role as a hired assassin for the first four episodes until, as is usual in 24, he met an untimely demise. When I was a kid I always thought that one of Kojak’s co-workers was also called Davros but I got that one wrong too. So, are there any other circumstances where a Davros has turned up in unlikely places? Comments in the usual place please. [While I have your attention, don't forget to vote in the February poll (over on the right) of your most anticipated US import for the coming months]

I Was Lost

fazzinchi — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:22:16 +0000

Putting Your Foot In It

Hello. Did you miss me? I’ve been extraordinarily slack in maintaining this blog over the last month or so, bar the Twitter feed on the right that really just looks after itself. Genuine apologies. Grand plans to write up a series of previews and reviews of the Chistmas TV schedules came to naught (other than the obligatory “End Of Time” review in my most recent post on 1st January). May be I should just stop with the ambitious promises and grandiose plans and simply get my head down with the writing. For those that are interested, my blogging muse has been focussed on my Other Site of late, which is a more personal and somewhat esoteric affair about me as I blog my way through my final 365 days as a thirtysomething, during which I endeavour to give my life some focus and stick to some resolutions (that are proving as tricky as I thought they would). Anyway, I couldn’t let Friday night’s SkyOne HD debut of the final season of Lost go without mention and I hope that this little entry here will trigger a mini-re-launch in content here on “fazzinchi.co.uk”.

Series 6 continued with the theme of “Baffling The Audience” albeit in the most delightful way. The cliffhanger to series 5 was Juliet lying in the bottom of the pit, hitting a nuclear warhead with a rock before the screen went to white-out, and we follow on from that moment back at the begining of everything with Jack sat on Oceanic 815 playing out scenes with all the characters we’ve already scene just before the plane begins to hit turbulence above the island. However, instead of the plane disintegrating as we know it does, or at least should, it corrects itself and goes on the land safely at LAX picking up Desmond as a passenger for good measure. However, in case we weren’t all bemused enough by that, the same characters are continuing to exist on the island AS WELL in a Sliding Doors way it was described by Iain Lee on the mighty Lost Initiative podcast. So, after the flashbacks and flashforwards of previous seasons, it would seem that we are now going to get flashes to an alternative timeline (flashsideways, perhaps?) where we see what would have happened if they had landed. However (and yes, I know that is three “howevers” in a paragraph but it’s just that kind of show okay), we also find out that Juliet’s attempt to correct history by detonating the bomb actually worked, so I’m working on the hypothesis that both sets of realities are somehow real. Certainly, all is not as it should be in the non-crash world with lots of little things being out of synch with established continuity. Listen, if you really wanna find out what happened I can make no higher recommendation other than Lostpedia, who provide an invaluable synopsis. Just don’t ask me to explain.

I Don’t Want To Go

fazzinchi — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:02:40 +0000

The Time Has Come

The king is dead, long live the king! In this case the former is Russell T Davies and the latter Steven Moffat who wrote, by all accounts, the final, post-regeneration minute or so of RTD’s swan-song opus, The End of Time, shown in two parts on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Now that the baton has been well and truly handed over it is (almost) time to put together a complete analysis of the 60-episode era. There will be time enough for that another day and if you’re really, really quiet you can hear fanboys up and down the country tapping on keyboards about gay agendas, deus ex machina and how Paul McGann should be in it any day now. However, today it’s all about bidding David Tennant a fond adieu and greeting the dynamic Matt Smith to the role of “Eleven” as he shall henceforth be known. The End Of Time was a massive tapestry of plot threads that needed to be woven together and developed into a coherent whole, it might just have been the most complicated Doctor Who tale of all in the five years of Mr Davies’ stewardship that we have enjoyed.

It began with Wilf, Bernard Cribbins acting his socks off to widespread if not unanimous praise, being drawn into a church during a choral performance. A mysterious woman, played by Claire Bloom, appeared and talked to Wilf in portentous and somewhat vague terms about the Doctor. This was the first of a number of visions that this woman made to Wilf before finally being revealed as a Time Lady in the service of (but rebelling against) the Lord President of Gallifrey during the climax of the adventure. Quite who Claire Bloom was actually supposed to be, has set fandom’s tongues a-wagging as if RTD wanted to give us all one last, parting tease/gift to argue about for years to come. Yet it doesn’t really matter. I got the impression that it was she who was behind the Ood’s accelerated capabilities as her projections to Wilf were exactly like the Ood’s projections to the Doctor that we saw in The Waters Of Mars, no doubt using some largely irrelevant wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey techniques. Although I was surprised that it wasn’t more explicit. One could argue that this ability of a Time Lord to communicate from inside the Time War to the outside universe, has set up the opportunity to incorporate the Gallifreyans into events at some point in the future although, having seen the ending here, I’m not sure this would necessarily be a good thing.

Where there’s Wilf of course, there is Donna but her return seemed somewhat secondary, if not tertiary, to the main events. It seemed to be a bit of a cop-out that allowed Donna to begin to remember her travels with the Doctor during the cliffhanger to part one, only for some sort of emergency shut down process to have been “installed” by the Doctor to protect her and reset the memory blocks. I was pleased that she was given a happy life in the end but more on that later. Catherine Tate was on good form in the role that so many people doubted her for prior to the start of series four, but if truth is told the acting of Tennant, Cribbins, Simm and Dalton overshadowed all around them.

The next big return for this story was the Master. His resurrection and the plan, apparently put in place while he was still gadding about in the guise of good old Harold Saxon, for what to do in the event of his death was a little on the silly side. A Saxon inspired-cult somehow got its red finger-nailed hands on the Master’s ring, created a set of strange potions in one of Her Majesty’s prisons and, using the genetically transferred Time Lord DNA from the lips of former wife Lucy who clearly never washed her face since Harry’s death, recreated the errant Time Lord in a resurrection ceremony that, later on, Ten seemed to have some kind of knowledge about and took a little for granted. Lucy’s final act was to have persuaded one of her prison guards to supply her with an anti-potion that caused the resurrection process to go somewhat awry. As a result, the Master’s life force began to be dispersed in fairly extraordinary ways that effectively gave him some rather spectacular powers of leaping tall buildings and shooting energy bolts from his hands. His only course of action was to eat a lot of food in a Gollum-esque style, in order to stave off some non-specific, but probably unpleasant demise. Easy, eh? Why didn’t we all see that coming?

It was then that we got to the Naismith / Vinvocci scenes, which were absolutely vital to tying all these strands of plot together. The innocent Vinvocci, on a straightforward mission to reclaim a mysterious alien artifact, were caught in the middle of a whole heap of trouble as the Master was kidnapped from the Wastelands by Naismith and brought in to fix the Immortality Gate. A little bit of sabotage, and suddenly the whole population of Earth bar Donna, Wilf, the Doctor and the two Vinvocci, were turned into versions of the Master. And so the scene was set.

Way back at the end of the Time War, The Time Lords created a plan to escape from the Time Lock that the Doctor was planning to instigate to end the war. They seeded the drumbeat signal in to the Master’s head when he was eight, turning him insane. Then they looked for the signal coming back to them but it’s only when the Master had replicated himself 6 billion times that the signal strengthened itself and could be turned into something more tangible into which a tiny object like a white point star diamond could be sent. Upon receiving this diamond, the Master worked on strengthening the connection even more (“the signal becomes a path”) and the Time Lords got access to come through physically. After breaking free from the Master(s) in the “Worst. Escape. Ever.” the Doctor and Wilf had to head back to Naismith’s mansion in order to stop the Time Lords and the Hell they brought with them from returning. It turned out after much prevarication that all the Doctor had to do was shoot to the Gate thingy to close the pathway and send the Time Lords (Rassilon, no less) back in to the Time War along with the Master who was pretty peeved at the Lord President for seeding the drum beat in his head in the first place.

Just writing the precis in those few paragraphs above, has demonstrated to me that this was an astonishingly complicated story and the text here does absolutely no justice to it whatsoever. I can see why some people, mainly fans, can start to pick apart at the elements that went to make up this tale and look at some of the details to explain why the whole thing didn’t work for them but it was only after the Time Lords and the Master had been sent packing that the core of this story came in to sharp focus. Before discussing that, some huge big dollop of credit has to go to Euros Lynn for directing this epic, cinematic story with such aplomb, and to all of the production staff that turned this in to such a visual treat.

After his success in restoring everything to its proper place, the Doctor regains consciousness on the ruined floor of the Naismith mansion and is astonished and not a little delighted to be alive until he hears four gentle knocks from the corner of the room. All the foreshadowing and premonitions are coalesced in to that moment. Wilf is about to die and the Doctor realises he must sacrifice himself to save the old soldier. Tennant runs the gamut of emotions at this point, knowing what to do but not wanting to die before, inevitably stepping in to the radiation pod and absorbing the fatal dose of. Then we head into a fairly controversial but, in the humble opinion of this novice blogger, a bloody fantastic denouement to the RTD era.

Holding back from regenerating there and then through sheer force of will, Doctor Ten, heads off to get his “reward”. Appreciation of this coda to the story is clearly quite subjective. The Doctor describes it as a reward to himself, which can easily be interpreted as coming direct from RTD’s mouth himself. And you know what? Good luck to him. After 60 episodes of Doctor Who since it came back, I am more than happy with a quarter of an hour of self-congratulation. It was thoroughly deserved. More than that, each scene (the Mickey Smith & Martha Jones freedom fighters, the Cantina scene, the book signing, Donna’s more successful wedding, and finally the pre-”Rose” Powell Estate encounter with Billie Piper’s Rose) was actually rather sweet and touching and gave David Tennant’s final words, “I don’t want to go” all the more power.

I have been known to describe Doctor Who as the greatest piece of artwork that humanity has ever produced. It usually involves alcohol and my unhealthy desire to create unnecessary debate but whenever I get in to that discussion I always call upon the concept of regeneration being one of the smartest storytelling devices in television. When Matt Smith appears in the burning TARDIS he blazes in to our collective awareness with an energy that probably puts Mr Tennant to shame. All the emotion and angst and heartbreak of the final episodes of the Tenth Doctor are washed away within the blink of an eye as the Age of Moffat begins, but there will be time enough to discuss all that when the new series starts in the spring. The final comments here are reserved for David Tennant. His four years in the role have been nothing less than incredible. He has shown us an acting talent that could lead him to become one of Britain’s finest of all time, not just of his contemporaries. I wish him every success in the future and really just want to say, “Thank You”.

Christmas Day TV Preview

fazzinchi — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:03:43 +0000

Christmas Ain’t Coming Any More

You really don’t need me to tell you what to be watching on Christmas Day, do you? Doctor Who, Gavin and Stacey and find yourself a good DVD or two. Job done.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’d just like to take the opportunity to wish each and every one of you, all the very best for the season. Your support is much appreciated.

Thu 24th Dec – TV Preview

fazzinchi — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:19:46 +0000

It’s Christmas Time, There’s No Need To Be Afraid.

You can tell Christmas has finally arrived when Carols from King’s College gets rolled out (BBC2 at 6:15pm if you fancy). No matter what your family’s traditions are on the 24th Decmeber, I am pretty sure that television will play a part in it somewhere if only to take the weight off your feet for half an hour. BBC1 will entertain you with a non-stop selection of light(weight?) entertainment throughout the evening. From 8pm there’s an hour-long installment of My Family, which I gave up watching after Kris Marshall left to join BT and I continue to work on the assumption that it’s not worth going back to. After that it’s the RT Pick of the Day, the wonderful Victoria Wood and her Midlife Christmas, which is a brand new hour of sketches and then David Tennant continues to take over the airwaves with an appearance on QI, anyone would think he was trying to plug something. If that 30-minutes isn’t enough, you can get more of a Tennant-fix on CBeebies at 6:50pm where he’s reading bedtime stories all week. If this is all a bit fluffy for your tastes, ITV comes along with the 1one-hundredth episode of Taggart for your delectation. Over on the digital channels, there’s not a lot of new stuff with most of the larger stations offering endless repeats or old movies, which I guess is pretty much all some people will be after. On E4HD though, new epsodes of my favourite sitcoms can be found back-to-back from 9pm, The Big Bang Theory, followed by How I Met Your Mother. The latter has been a revelation to me in the months since E4 acquired the hugely successfull US show and broadcast it to hugely unaware UK public. I recall that the first series was shown in some godawful time-slot a few years ago and it crashed and burned so kudos to E4 for resurrecting it. Not only that, they gave it the tea-time slot and showed 5 new eps a week for about four months, which was thoroughly wonderful. It is hard to review it without comparisson to Friends, but take my word it is so worthwhile taking some time with it. So, that is my, quite surprising, recommendation for the day. Legen-”wait-for-it”-dary!