James Bond: From Russia With Love

First appearance of half-naked women dancing through the credits. Desmond Llewellyn (Q, although he's still credited as "Boothroyd") makes his debut here, and brings with him the attache case (see Goldfinger) and the sniper rifle (see OHMSS). First time the film has a unique theme tune, and first time said unique theme tune has lyrics (although only over the closing credits). First time the film's title song appears as diegetic sound (meaning the characters can hear it). First appearance of the alternate "007" theme (see Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds are Forever, and Moonraker), and the suggestion that a character (Major Klebb) is homosexual. For the only time in the series, a female character that Bond definitely had sex with makes a return appearance; this is the second and last appearance of Sylvia Trench. Despite the title, while this is the first film to venture beyond the Iron Curtain, it doesn't actually ever get to Russia. First appearance of a Nemesis - a character as smart and as strong as James Bond, played by an actor who could have been Bond himself (in this case it's Robert Shaw as "Red" Grant, setting a bar for this character type so high that only Sean Bean in GoldenEye has ever come close). First time the Bond Girl is Russian, and, if you squint hard enough while she's getting into Bond's bed, first time you can see a naked breast in a Bond film. In less perverted fields, it's the first time the Bond Girl saves Bond's life. First appearance of Blofeld, and of Blofeld's cat. Here, Blofeld has hair and sounds suspiciously like an older Sean Connery trying to hide his accent (no, it's not him, but once you've heard it you can't un-hear it). We never see his face. First time the villains explicitly try to lure James Bond into a trap, and also the first time they use him as a pawn in their scheme. First time the Bond Girl is used as little more than a pawn in a scheme (it's worth noting that The Living Daylights basically copies this film's "Get out of the USSR" plot, but with the added twist that Bond is manipulating the girl every bit as much as the villain is). First time the film persists in continuing on after it appears to be over.

James Bond: Dr. No

Well, it's the first one, obviously. So it's the first time we see the gun barrel sequence (that's a stuntman, not Sean Connery), the first time someone introduces themselves using the "Last name, first name last name" formula (it's Sylvia Trench), the first time someone uses the words "shaken, not stirred" (it's the film's villain). First gimmicky henchmen, the "Three Blind Mice." We have the first appearance of, obviously, Bernard Lee's M, Lois Maxwell's Moneypenny, and Sean Connery's Bond. First appearance of Felix Leiter, and the only time he's played by Jack Lord. First Bond One-Liner: after an informant commits suicide, Bond leaves him in the backseat of a car, and tells the valet to "make sure he doesn't go anywhere." (Later, and with a shorter time lapse, after the Three Blind Mice drive a hearse over a cliff and explode: "I think they were on their way to a funeral.") Surprisingly early in the series, we have an evil female character - in fact we have two, but Bond only sleeps with one, and even James Bond's magic lovemaking abilities are not enough to make her defect to the forces of good (cf. Goldfinger). Neither die; the photographer just disappears after failing to take Bond's picture twice, and the evil secretary Miss Taro is arrested. Miss Taro is, incidentally, Bond's first non-European conquest. First silly name for a Bond Girl: Honey Ryder. First staple of the 60s and 70s Bond flicks, the Villain With a Disability: Dr. No has mechanical hands. First truly bad special effect (not counting the shoddy rear-screen that the series will suffer from up through at least The Spy Who Loved Me): it's impossible to watch the tarantula sequence without noticing that there's a pane of glass separating Connery from the spider. First time a black person has a significant role: Quarrel is (mostly) brave and resourceful (though both he and Honey are presented as being superstitious enough to believe there's a dragon on Dr. No's island), but this being 1962, Bond tells him to "fetch my shoes" at one point. For the first and last time, James Bond sings. Only appearance of Peter Burton as "Major Boothroyd," the armorer.

Right, one of the worst mistakes of 2013 was Doctor Who's 50th anniversary

Or so say the folks at io9, in between implying someone should be blacklisted just because they share the same political views the President of the United States professed to hold back when he was running for office.

Truthfully, the "futurists" (Marxist-progressives) at io9 are just upset that the Doctor hasn't turned into a woman yet.

Time of the Doctor: Tasha Lem? Why?

Or to be more accurate, why was this "mature woman" with a perverse interest in seeing the Doctor naked not River Song? The answer is because Moffat needed to pad the plot out for another two minutes.

Expanding on "Time of the Doctor", part 1 of X

In this post I explicitly want to limit myself to just the regeneration, and discuss both the 13-life limit and the "farewell tour."

"The Time of the Doctor" impressions

• Large chunks of the middle were an exercise in marking time. The Doctor sends Clara away, lets her back, sends her away, and lets her back again
• The aging makeup is no better than it was in "The Girl Who Waited"
• Having Smith regenerate twice was stupid, anticlimactic, and annoying
• Bringing back Karen Gillan for the regeneration was a tremendous insult to Jenna Coleman
• Where the hell is the Valeyard?
• "I'm not talking to you," shouted the girl in the middle of the truth-field

Two out of ten.

Well, this hasn't happened to me in a while...

So having slogged my way through Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I went and picked up The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. And I basically finished that novel on a flight from Hartford to Chicago, and didn't need a bloody flowchart to keep track of everything...

...but part of that was because about halfway through, I realized that an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had pretty much cribbed the entire plot.

Buffy: Graduation Day, Part 1

There are three episodes between "Enemies" and this one:

• Earshot: Is supposed to go immediately after "Enemies," but a kid brings a gun to school in it and Columbine happened four days before it was supposed to air. Buffy gets telepathy but can't read Angel's mind (heh) so she has to trust him when he says he wasn't attracted to Faith while he was pretending to be evil.
• Choices: the Scoobies steal something the Mayor needs for his Ascension, but he kidnaps Willow. Faith's in it; she gets a new knife (which would later turn up in Star Trek Nemesis of all things), but loses it in the fight to Buffy. (The episode's subtext is Billow, not Fuffy.)
• The Prom: Angel dumps Buffy and then shows up to be her Prom date anyway. Thanks, buddy.

 And that gets us up to date.

The Class of 1999 is collecting their graduation robes. Xander is convinced he's going to die. Willow and Harmony sign each others' yearbooks and Willow nonchalantly insults her after she walks away. Buffy says she doesn't even get the whole Graduation thing: "you get a piece of paper and nothing changes."  Well, these next two episodes will have to change that.

A Game of Thrones: Catelyn V (Chapter 28): Inn Cognito

Last time on Adventures in Awful Parenting, one father sent his oldest son to the die in some frozen hell, and it looked like Jon Arryn was murdered for finding King Robert's bastard son. We now turn to Catelyn Stark, who tops everyone else by kicking off a chain of events that gets all your favorite characters killed.

A Game of Thrones: Jon IV, Eddard VI (Chapters 26 & 27): Who's A Royal Bastard?

Previously on the Useless Cripple Show, we were inconclusive about at what age a boy becomes a man.  Let's turn to a 14-year-old motherless bastard at the frozen edge of the world and see if he has anything to say on the subject.

A Game of Thrones: Bran IV, Eddard V (Chapters 24 & 25): Bran Flakes

Previously on My Great Summer Vacation by Khaleesi, Viserys was a tool and Frodo, son of Drogo was conceived. We now return to my least favorite POV character in the entire series and his nincompoop father.

A Game of Thrones: Daenerys III (Chapter 23): And Not A Drop To Drink

Previously on Westerosi Weather Is F*cked Up: Tyrion finished up at the Wall and Arya made a new friend. This time...

On a sea that's not a sea

Dany becomes Khaleesi 

and has a teenage pregnancy.

Yeah rhyming is not my strong suite. 

Admin: Buffy review list

Note that episodes marked with a * are not full reviews, but mere recaps of plot- and character- essential happenings. I'll update the list regularly and bump it once a month, same with the Who Review list.

Admin: Who Review List

Update on the episodes of Doctor Who I've reviewed.  I'll put the serials in chronological order.

A Game of Thrones: Tyrion III (Chapter 21), Arya II (Chapter 22): Of Calendars And Kings

Last time on Test Your Political IQ, we were reminded that Varys is a eunuch, often and loudly. Now we're back to Tyrion, whom in case you've forgotten, is a dwarf. This won't be brought up every other page or so...

Weekend song for those who need to get pumped

Happy Hunger Games Finals Week everyone

This is probably my favorite AC/DC song in terms of the way it's composed. Almost the entire song is in B except for the solo that starts at about 2:47. But the transition from B to A for the solo is so subtle you're likely to miss it. You don't miss the transition from A to B at the end of the solo (3:18), though, so it feels like suddenly the singer is singing in a higher key than he was before.

Also, the chords in the outro are blatantly ripped off from Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."

A Game of Thrones: Eddard IV: Small Council, Big Plans

There's actually a creepy little dance going on with the chapter numbers between chapters 16 and 27. It goes (taking out the character's name), 3, 4, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4.

Course evaluations are a f*cking joke

Let me tell you a story. This literally happened in my Business Associations class.

"The statutory supplement is the only thing you're allowed to use on the exam because the statutory supplement is the only thing you'll need."

Asks accounting question worth 1/6th of the entire exam.

Did the statutory supplement include anything on accounting? Am I going to law school because I'm good at math? Hell f*cking no.

You cannot properly evaluate a class until you see what complete and utter bullshit the professor puts on an exam.

And that is why course evaluations are a joke. Because they're due before the exam.

"Oh," you say, "the little brats who think they did poorly on the exam will give the professor a bad mark." Hey guess what, genius, that's the f*cking point. Most of us are taking out crippling loans on top of our crippling loans to pay for bullshit like a bad mark because the professor outright lied about what was going to be on the exam. We're not frat boy slackers here. None of us have football scholarships. We're here so that three years hence we can be stormtroopers for The Man and drive around in expensive convertibles.

So, what's my opinion of course evaluations due before exams?

When I joked about not wanting to draw parallels between Jon Nathan-Turner and Steven Moffat, some part of my brain went ping

• They both cast the youngest actor to play the Doctor to date the first chance they got to re-cast the role (Peter Davison and Matt Smith)
• They both oversaw an anniversary special that was somewhat marred by the fact that a recent Doctor (Tom Baker/Christopher Eccleston) couldn't be convinced to come back
• They both revisited old and forgotten enemies during the run-up to that anniversary special
• They both wouldn't leave the title sequence and theme tune alone
• They both tried to do really complicated seasonal arcs with limited success
• They both cast someone who had appeared on the show before (Colin Baker/Peter Capaldi) as a "darker" Doctor the second chance they got to re-cast the role
• If you consider John Hurt a "re-cast" rather than a special guest star, you can change "the second chance..." to "after killing off two Doctors" (because Tom Baker did one season under JNT)

Doctor Who fake titles

generated here
and here

(Incidentally, they both eventually generated "The Massacre," which is the official title of a Season 3 serial.)

Here are some of the ones that could be Doctor Who episode titles

• The Mercy of a Doctor
• The Brain of the Cybermen
• Just don't be "Spock's Brain"
• Massacre of the Lazarus Planet
• Attack of the Lazarus Planet
• The Ultimate Infinity
• Hey, they did a serial called The Deadly Assassin
• The Mind Dominators of Empty Daleks
• The Android of Death
• So close
• The Future Robbers
•  Children of Time
• Deep Space 9 beat you to it
• The Time Mists
• Time of Horror
• A Day in the Ice
• In which four Ice Warriors form a band that one of their girlfriends breaks up
• The False God
• Spoiler: it's the Doctor
• The Fear of the Angel
• Vengeance of the Keeper
• If not Doctor Who then Mass Effect
• An Abominable Light
• Hey, we already did shadows...

Catching Fire impressions

in lieu of an actual review (which I really can't do until it comes out on DVD, because that's not my style)

• Catching Fire is, in my opinion, the weakest book in the trilogy (although the third quarter of Mockingjay is basically nonstop running-and-gunning with no end in sight and really starts to drag), so the film starts off at a disadvantage
• Jennifer Lawrence's cheekbones were incredibly distracting
• the scene were President Snow announces the third Quarter Quell was very obviously (and therefore poorly) edited down from a larger scene, probably where he explained what the previous two Quells entailed
• The scene where Katniss and Gale are talking about leaving... did they accidentally burn all the good takes? Because I know Lawrence can act a lot better than that
• When Snow visits Katniss at the beginning he shows her a hologram of, um, something. Apparently it was her and Gale kissing, but I could not for the life of me tell what it was
• The end was horribly rushed and confusing
• I'm getting really sick of the Crucified Hero Shot, as well as Clean Pretty Reliable CPR
• It's seriously too long. The source material doesn't help - you have the victory tour taking up something like half an hour before the Quarter Quell is even introduced

 To end on a positive note (and don't let the rest of this post fool you; I did like it)...

• Johanna went from being my least favorite character in the book to possibly my favorite character in the film

I don't like the Series 7b credit sequence

First of all, recoloring the "Doctor Who" title every time is the sort of stupid cheap (I'm inclined to say "naff" but that might result in me failing British 101) gimmick that reminds me far too much of the JNT era.

The starfield itself actually reminds me more of Star Trek than 80s Who.

This could be because Tom Baker is My Doctor(c) and thus any opening sequence that's not the time tunnel is a hideous sacrilege.

The point is, if I were Moffat, I'd be doing everything in my power to avoid drawing similarities between my era and JNT's. (Hey, maybe that's why Doctors Five through Seven had nothing to do with the 50th anniversary.)

Who Review: Cold War

In November of 1984, shortly before Gorbachev came to power, a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand Banks.
It then sank in deep water, apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
But according to repeated statements by both Soviet and American governments, nothing of what you are about to see...

ever happened.

 

Wait, sorry, where was I? Oh, right, Davos Seaworth is a Soviet submarine captain, Edmure Tully is his political officer, and Chancellor Gorkon is some random scientist who likes listening to degenerate imperialist music. Oh, and he's dug up an Ice Warrior.

Gee, first the Great Intelligence and now the Ice Warriors. Hey, 2013 wouldn't happen to be, say, an anniversary year, would it? What's next? The Black Guardian? Yartek, leader of the alien Voord? Sutekh? Magnus Greel? (Downside to nuking Gallifrey: traditional anniversary villain Omega has to be a no-show, although he did get a shoutout in The Day of the Doctor.)

So it turns into Alien on a submarine, and the weirdest thing about the cast isn't the fact that the three main guest stars are extremely recognizable, but that they don't do frickin' Russian accents. But then, neither did Sean Connery, but then, Sean Connery was James Bond.

I'm going to review The Aztecs soon, and I was going to hold off on mentioning it until then, but it comes up in this episode: in very early Classic Who, before the Doctor was really a hero (remember, in the very first serial of the show, he was all set to bash a caveman's head in with a rock in order to get back to his ship*), every serial had to come up with some sort of contrivance to keep the Doctor and company from leaving before the plot was resolved. They'd be captured by cavemen, captured by Daleks, captured by Marco Polo, locked out of the TARDIS by a telepathic forcefield, lose the TARDIS in some Indiana Jones-style tomb, etc. So here as soon as the Doctor and Clara hop aboard the Red Onion, the TARDIS activates its emergency displacement system and jumps away to the south pole. (In 1983. Not sure how time works, but if I were the TARDIS, I wouldn't go to the place where my owner was destined to die for the first time three years hence. Wouldn't that leave a wound in time or something?)

*Yes, One called it "the Ship" far more often than he called it "the TARDIS."

The Ice Warrior gets loose and everything goes to hell. Edmure Tully turns out to be just as much a screwup in this universe as in Game of Thrones and gets himself offed, but eventually the Doctor and Clara are able to make the Ice Warrior understand this thing called mercy, so when his ship comes to get him he refrains from using the sub's nukes to start Operation Planetary Eradication. (OPE - yup, that's a Doctor Strangelove reference thrown in among my Hunt for Red October references.) In the process, the Doctor once again rehashes the whole Time War Thing And How It Relates To This Episode, just in case we'd all forgotten in the long gap since "A Town Called Mercy."

Let's get the obvious comparison out of the way. It takes place in XX83, during a cold war, underwater, with a returning foe, and has some sketchy effects. It is, basically, Warriors of the Deep done "right." (I confess, while the rest of Warriors was a mess, I liked the way it ended: with everyone dead. The Doctor's moral high ground can't save everyone if one side has no interest in salvation.) I disagree with the idea of doing the Ice Warrior's head in shockingly obvious CGI, especially when his hands were animatronics. We're twenty years on from Jurassic Park, which flipped between the two flawlessly, and yet you can still tell the difference on a TV budget. 

It is Doctor Who's most blatant attempt to do Alien ever, which is a) a good thing, because I was really afraid it was going to be "Dalek on a submarine" and b) quite amusing when you consider the following things:

• Ridley Scott was this close to being the production designer for Doctor Who's second serial ever. You know, The Daleks.
• Doctor Who did a serial in 1974, five years before Alien, with basically the exact same premise (minus Alien's most famous scene)
• Speaking of Alien's most famous scene, John Hurt shows up at the end of this season.

This is a tough episode for me to grade because I like The Hunt for Red October and I like Game of Thrones and there's plenty of appeal for me in it. But as I hinted above, the Doctor basically gets to do the exact same thing he did in "A Town Called Mercy." There's more for the companion to do this time (and Jenna Coleman looks damn fine in a military jacket), but... something just doesn't quite click.

5 out of 10.

Yes, Matt Smith is the 11th Doctor. Yes, he's also on his 13th and final life. It is not complicated

and if Steven Moffat is making it complicated then that's sad.

Look. A Time Lord can regenerate 12 times for a total of 13 lives. The first time the Doctor regenerated was when he changed from the First Doctor to the Second...

Regeneration - Actor - Doctor - Life

     0.  William Hartnell - 1st Doctor - 1st life

1. Patrick Troughton - 2nd Doctor - 2nd life
2. Jon Pertwee - 3rd Doctor - 3rd life
3. Tom Baker - 4th Doctor - 4th life
4. Peter Davison - 5th Doctor - 5th life
5. Colin Baker - 6th Doctor - 6th life
6. Sylvester McCoy - 7th Doctor - 7th life
7. Paul McGann - 8th Doctor - 8th life
8. John Hurt - War Doctor - 9th life
9. Christopher Eccleston - 9th Doctor - 10th life
10. David Tennant - 10th Doctor - 11th life
11. Meta-crisis ("Journey's End")/David Tennant - 12th life
12. Matt Smith - 11th Doctor - 13th life

No, the events of "The Impossible Astronaut" aren't a problem because it was a shapeshifting robot duplicate. And the Doctor using regeneration energy to heal River's wrist in "The Angels Take Manhattan" just has to be residual energy from the time she burned up all her regenerations saving his life in "Let's Kill Hitler." (Because the alternative is that Moffat invented the War Doctor after Season 7a.)

When Showrunners Write for Shows

I was reading About Time Volume 7, and it was explaining that part of the reason why the characterization (of everyone, but especially Rose and Mickey) went to hell in Season Two is because RTD was too busy working on his own scripts to actually do the script-supervising job.

And it occurred to me that Steven Moffat has the same problem. After all, the guy was a beast under RTD, but the only thing he's written since taking over the show that comes close to being as good as "Blink" was "A Christmas Carol." And this makes a certain amount of sense; prior to Doctor Who getting shoved around the calendar year, it's safe to assume that Moffat had more time to work on the Christmas specials than he did on regular episodes.  (I'd also like to note that the absolutely Santa-awful "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" was dumped on us immediately after the schedule hijinks began, and that only five episodes aired between that and the following Christmas special, "The Snowmen," which was something of a return to form.)

Going back and looking at periods in which the script editor wrote for the show, one notes that the only person who could pull this off without wrecking the rest of the season was Robert Holmes (unsurprisingly) in Season 14 (and probably in Season 12, given what people have said about Terry Nation's script for Genesis of the Daleks). Terrance Dicks wrote "Robot" at the end of the subpar Season 11. Douglas Adams sunk his entire creative talent into "City of Death," the only thing worth watching from Season 17. (Eric Saward got the job because of "Earthshock," so we can't blame him for the rest of Season 19.) (And it's possible that the black & white script editors like Tosh or Spooner pulled it off, but with so many episodes missing from the archive I really can't make that call.)

Curiously, Nu Who's American counterpart and most obvious inspiration, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had the exact opposite problem. When Joss Whedon took a vacation to write Season Six's "Once More With Feeling," he left the show in less capable hands and the rest is history. (And I'd like to point out that Buffy aired almost twice as many minutes per year as Doctor Who does, which makes me incredibly skeptical whenever somebody tries to defend the recent scheduling shenanigans.)

I'm not really going anywhere in particular with this. 

Who Review: "The Angels Take Manhattan"

I've started off a few of my more recent reviews with something along the lines of "Steven Moffat has a problem," and I'm going to start this one off by wondering whether Moffat knows why the Angels were such a creepy, scary threat to begin with. So I wanted to preface this by saying that Moffat's easy prey right now since he's the showrunner, but that's not why I keep criticizing him. See, after "Blink" aired, I wrote a list of Doctor Who episodes I owned and a brief synopsis of each one, and at the end of the "Blink" synopsis I said something along the lines of "Moffat should be the next showrunner." Seriously, the first three years the show was back, Moffat consistently wrote the best episodes each season. He rightfully snatched a Hugo for "The Empty Child," beating out Battlestar Galactica's "Pegasus," and then his "Girl in the Fireplace" stole a Hugo from BSG's "Downloaded."

So I'm not trying to say that Moffat is the biggest hack on Doctor Who since Terry Nation. That's not what I'm getting at here. Nation was a guy who wrote (and snagged the copyright for) the Daleks, and yet the best-remembered Dalek serials (The Evil of the Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks) weren't written by him (Genesis is credited to him, but the whole concept was outgoing Script Editor Terrance Dicks's idea, and it was heavily re-written by incoming Script Editor Robert Holmes). In contrast, Moffat actually came up with several good monsters, it's just that he went and milked his most famous one far too hard.

Case in point: the climax of "The Angels Take Manhattan" involves the Doctor, River and Amy arguing in a graveyard while a statue points at Amy. The Weeping Angels work in dark rooms with flickering lights, which, admittedly the first half of the episode has in spades. The don't work outside in broad daylight. The tag at the end of "Blink" - showing a bunch of statues outside in broad daylight - worked as kind of a stinger because it didn't require us to think about it too much, and it was an effective capstone on the previous 44 minutes of pure terror.

Also... the decision to treat the Statue of Liberty like the T-rex when up until this point the Angels have been Velociraptors... it doesn't work.  The Angels aren't scary when the camera holds on them for a very long time, which is basically what happens with Lady Liberty in the background of all the rooftop scenes. It's hard to fault the director for not "getting" the Angels because there are parts of this episode that do work as well as the scariest parts of "Blink." In particular, the little kid statues that keep terrorizing Rory went a long way towards making the Angels scary again. (Although, how did those statues get Rory out of the basement and over to their farm? They didn't zap him through time...)

By far the most frustrating thing about this episode is the fact that 1938 is somehow a TARDIS-proof year. Daffy Duck was named, the March of Dimes was established, Hitler assumed control of the German military, and the Munich Agreement was signed. Okay, those are fairly important things. But hang on; back in "The Empty Child," the TARDIS managed to land in 1941. Ah well, different production teams, different rules, ri... oh, wait, "The Empty Child" was written by Moffat. Why couldn't the Doctor have popped back to 1941 and picked up Amy and Rory after three years? Because the plot demanded it?

By far the most ludicrous thing about "The Angels Take Manhattan" (and it's a close tie between this, the Godzilla Lady Liberty, and the Graveyard Scene) sees the Doctor running in slow-motion to recover the last page on the novel he was reading as if it's the key to resolving the episode's crisis and not just a little epilogue on the Ponds.

Still, aside from Martha Jones, Amy probably gets the most dignified companion exit of New Who, and I guess that's saying something.

6 out of 10.

No, you don't need every Doctor to show up in an Anniversary Special

(And other assorted defenses/critiques of Steven Moffat)

The most persistent criticism I've seen of The Day of the Doctor is that, aside from David Tennant and a Tom Baker cameo (and a Hartnell soundalike recording one new line of dialogue to play over stock footage), the other Doctors were present for about ten seconds in the form of stand-ins or stock footage.

Fiddlesticks.

Who Review: The Power of Three

Hey you guys, remember that show Star Trek: Voyager? Remember the "Year of Hell" two-parter?

Oh, you don't? Okay, the quick and dirty is that over the space of a year, Voyager gets the snot beaten out of it, there's actual tension, conflict and character development among the crew (and then the reset button is pushed, naturally).

So when I saw the preview for this episode at the end of "A Town Called Mercy," where Amy described the plot as "the year of the slow invasion... when the Doctor came to stay," I figured it could be something like that.

It's not.

The Doctor gets terminally bored with the slow invasion and wanders off on some other adventures, getting Amy married to Henry VIII in the meantime, before he returns, waves his magic wand at the problem, and makes it go away.

It's supposed to be about, I think, Amy and Rory deciding whether to live at home or keep traveling with the Doctor. You know, that decision they've been putting off ever since "Hotel Labyrinth" "The God Complex." Would you care to guess what they do here? Oh, that's right, they put the decision off again.

Meanwhile, Rory's Dad is back for a repeat performance, because hey why not, and he's knocked unconscious by the alien menace that's trying to kill humanity.  Knocked unconscious, rather than killed, by the alien menace who's trying to kill humanity.

The one thing the episode has going for it is that it finally came up with a role appropriate for the sort of child actors they can afford (as opposed to the ones Game of Thrones can afford, which are much better). Namely, a kid who literally does not speak, does not emote, does not have to do anything except act like a robot.

Three out of ten. I would rather Steven Moffat reduce the number of episodes per year (or, given his strengths and weaknesses, make fewer, longer episodes per year a la Sherlock) than dish out crap like this.

Who Review: The Day of the Doctor

This is an anniversary special unlike no other. Let's start with the obvious: in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, and even, God help us, Dimensions in Time, efforts were made to represent all the Doctors.

No, no, please come back, this isn't another Classic Who rant about how Colin Baker should have been in it. When you have twelve Doctors, you will swamp the plot if you try to include them all. Hell, The Five Doctors is padded enough without an actual appearance by Tom Baker. And, well, look, between Baker's stock footage in that and Hartnell's cue-card-reading performance in The Three Doctors, it's fair to say that they've never, really, done a multi-Doctor story that adequately featured every incarnation of the Doctor, and oh well.

Speaking of padding the script, have you noticed that each of the previous anniversary specials just had the one plot? Some super-villain that requires the presence of all the Doctors, or else some super-villain who's deliberately drawn all the Doctors into his trap? Yeah, The Day of the Doctor doesn't even have a proper villain. Or a single plot. The latter is a staple of the show under Steven Moffat (a man who once said that Douglas Adams needed someone to stop him from including every wacky idea he had in the show). The former is... probably the first time this has happened since, oh, The Edge of Destruction.

Now you're going to needle me and say, "Look, the episode has Zygons and Daleks in it! How can you say it doesn't have a villain?" And my answer is that it doesn't have a villain. They're there, but... they're not.  The Zygon plot disappears, and the resolution to the story is basically the Doctors saving Gallifrey from themselves, rather than from the Daleks.

Okay, the plot, briefly. In the present day, Clara and the Doctor are taken to UNIT because there's a problem. The Doctor is shown a Gallifreyan painting - a moment frozen in time - that's either called "No More" or "Gallifrey Falls." It's called "Gallifrey Falls" because that's what's happening - begging the question of who made that painting - and it's called "No More" because that's what the Hurt Doctor carved on a wall with a laser-gun, for some reason. Then he went and stole the Moment, a weapon so sophisticated it grew a conscience.

Okay, remember when I did my review of "Asylum of the Daleks" in the (written) style of Chester A. Bum? Because I'm trying to picture Moffat pitching this script and not using that persona. "So there's this weapon that's so sophisticated that it actually grew a conscience - like Hactor from Life, the Universe and Everything, and it takes the form of Rose Tyler because, well, the fans just can't get enough of her.* And then Ten and Eleven are fighting the Zygons!"

*If Rose hadn't appeared since the end of Season 2, it would be perfectly fine by me. Just in case I never made that clear in any of my other reviews.

Anyway, Head!Rose (she calls herself the Bad Wolf, but, look, from the moment it's revealed that only the Hurt Doctor can see her, I've decided that Doctor Who and BSG take place in the same universe, or at least in universes that have the same God) tells the Hurt Doctor not to make everything go boom and then kind of does a reverse Christmas Carol. "Reverse" in both the sense that we only travel to the Doctor's future, and in the sense that it doesn't change him. After he witnesses Ten and Eleven sort out the whole Zygon thing (by having them negotiate for... what, exactly? Are the Doctors content to let Zygon shapeshifters live among us unsuspecting apes?), he decides that he has to go through with killing Gallifrey and the Daleks because... of... quantum.

10 and 11 go along with him, but then decide to take a third option by slotting Gallifrey into a pocket in time. They get the First Doctor to start the calculations (somehow) so that all the Doctors know what to do (somehow), but everyone except 11 and possibly 10 forget about their efforts because of the unstable timeline or some such. (Look, until "Time Crash," we never had a case of the Doctor remembering experiencing the events of a multi-Doctor episode from his younger self's perspective before. Now suddenly the show has to delve into fanwank to explain his amnesia . Joy.)

I think this is the part where certain fans whine about how saving Gallifrey undoes all the angst that Nine and Ten had. Piffle and Phooey.  1, raise your hand if you expected Gallifrey to stay dead forever. 2, raise your hand if you were sick and tired of hearing about the Time War.

I love how Hurt doesn't do the Espresso routine that everyone from Eccleston on has done, and that he is apprehensive at best about the prospect of turning into the excitable, overeager lads that are Ten and Eleven. I really hope that Peter Capaldi will be as laid-back as Hurt, but I'm a killjoy that way. (I'm overall torn on the whole concept of the Hurt Doctor. On the one hand, he throws the numbering out of whack, makes Matt Smith the twelfth regeneration, and forces the show to address the 13-life limit now rather than when Capaldi leaves. On the other hand, it's John Freaking Hurt, who, assuming we don't count the 60s Dalek films with Peter Cushing, is probably the most renowned actor ever to play the Doctor. And he frakking nails it.)

I also liked how the "use the same screwdriver to do the 400-year calculation" gimmick (even though 10 lost his on the moon and 11 certainly implied that his screwdriver was new) set up the resolution. Nice touch there. Moffat's getting better at this sort of thing.

As my recap might have hinted, it is not perfect. And it's not because of the lack of other Doctors - look, three are dead, four don't look like themselves anymore, and one probably won't touch this series again for anything short of the Crown Jewels.  I think we'd all rather our Doctors be represented by stock footage rather than by re-casting (though I'd love to know what the Hartnell fans thought of David Bradley in An Adventure in Space and Time), which means that stock footage is really what we're going to get.  ...And I'm not writing off the other Doctors just because I'm a Tom Baker fanboy and the man himself got a cameo at the end of this special. As I said in the AAiSaT review, I thought his cameo went on for a tad too long and wasn't vague enough as to who or what Tom's character was and what message he was giving Eleven. 

Now comes the part where I have to slap a number on this thing. It's hard to do this with the "special" episodes because they, even moreso than the normal episodes, are not aimed at me, a 25-year-old American. So if I had to nitpick, I'd say that this episode, being the fiftieth anniversary episode and all, is geared towards a broader audience, and it tells that broader audience that Doctor Who is silly, stuffed, and at times incoherent. Which is a pretty accurate description of the show right now, honestly. But it also tells them that Doctor Who is good fun, as it always was, and has decent effects nowadays too.

Well, with that in mind, I'd say that this is the second-best special the revival series has done, the best being, obviously, "A Christmas Carol." I gave that one... well, shoot, my review of "A Christmas Carol" was two sentences long. I hereby retroactively give that one a 9 and this one an 8 out of 10.

Who Review: An Adventure in Space and Time

It is fair to say that David Bradley has now emotionally destroyed the fandoms of both current TV shows I watch: first as Walder Frey, executor of the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones and then as William Hartnell, the tragic hero of the docu-drama An Adventure in Space and Time, which catalogs  the first three years of the show and takes a few, ah, licenses with history.

Now, I'll just get this out of the way, the waterworks were flowing pretty consistently from around the time Hartnell's granddaughter told him he said "gloves" instead of "drugs" and then came up with a beautiful kiddie explanation for why the Doctor would really need "anti-radiation gloves."  I thought the whole thing was utterly fantastic, and certainly more of an emotional gut-punch than The Day of the Doctor. (TDotD is gimmicky silly fun that - thanks in part to John Hurt reacting to 10 and 11 exactly the way Classic Who fans did - never takes itself anywhere in the vicinity of seriously.  More on that in a future post.)

So I started playing Diablo III. Here are some observations.

How to win the game: Play as Demon Hunter. Set up a turret. Use caltrops and the combat roll (with the rolling shot upgrade) to dodge all the things while the turret clears the room for you. As soon as the turret ability recharges, drop a second one.

They could really have simplified the "hub" areas by putting the jeweler, the blacksmith and one shop right next to each other. That way as soon as you were overburdened you could salvage all your magic/rares, craft/socket your gems, and sell the rest in about thirty seconds. (The later hubs are better at this, but the one in New Tristram is just awful.)

For that matter, having to return to the hub every five minutes because your inventory's full is irritating and breaks the flow of the game. Having said that, I do vastly prefer an extremely limited inventory space and a teleport ability to, say, a 70-slot inventory with no merchant in sight (ohai Dragon Age: Origins).

Speaking of Dragon Age: Origins, you know how the rogue is the most useless class in that game (to idiot noobs like me)? Yeah, see the "How to win the game" section, above.

If every female "soldier" character in other games was as toned as the female Monk, it'd be considerably more realistic (I'm looking at you, Mass Effect).

This extraordinarily conservative gamer thought the Witch Doctor was racist (as in, a horrible stereotype).  On the other hand, the ability to throw spiders at all the things kinda made up for it.

I really like that on replays you have all your followers right at the start, and that there's dialogue for them at appropriate points before they're "supposed to" join the plot. Slightly unrealistic, yes, but something that I'd like to see in other games. (Obviously, say, Mass Effect 2 could never do this since recruiting followers was the entire plot of that game.)

The pacing is kind of odd. The second act drags on for far too long, the third act felt a lot like the Thessia mission in ME3 (you're on this heroic charge to defeat evil forever, but the plot-aware gamer knows it's going to end in tragedy), and the fourth act felt horribly rushed (the lack of a proper hub contributes tremendously to this). Alternatively I might just hate the second act for those damn flies who shoot admittedly easy-to-dodge projectiles that whack off a huge chunk of you're health when you're too busy fighting everything else to dodge them.

I came this close to naming my female Barbarian Brienne.

It's called a "postgame," not an "endgame," internet. The "endgame" is the final level (or the finale of one of the worst Star Trek iterations). The "postgame" is everything you can do after that aside from watch the credits. Which reminds me...

Frak unskippable 10-minute-long credit sequences.

Waitaminit... is Peter Capaldi the Valeyard?

Fact: We know that the Valeyard is a darker incarnation of the Doctor, a manifestation of all his evil, that's supposed to pop up between his twelfth and final regeneration.

Fact: We know that Capaldi's Doctor is going to be "darker" than the previous ones.

Fact: The addition of the Hurt Doctor, combined with Tennant's bogus regeneration in "Journey's End," means that the Smith Doctor is actually the twelfth regeneration!

Do I need to explain that last one? Okay here we go.

• We know the Morbius Doctors are bogus because Peter Davison explicitly refers to himself as the fourth regeneration (meaning the Fifth Doctor - the First Doctor wasn't a regeneration, but the real deal) in The Five Doctors.
• Oh, you want to subscribe to the hodokery that Hartnell -> Troughton was a "renewal" and Troughton -> Pertwee was a "change of appearance?" Three words: "Blinovich Limitation Effect." Go look it up, ya fanwank menace.
•  That means that the Sixth Doctor is the fifth regeneration, the Seventh Doctor is the sixth regeneration, and the Eighth Doctor is the seventh regeneration. So far so good.
• Then McGann (Eight) turns into Hurt. This is the eighth regeneration. The Doctor is now on his ninth life, regardless of whether he calls himself "The Doctor" in this life.
• And on that note, the notion that the Doctor is called the Doctor because he helps people, and chose that name because he makes people better, go back and watch An Unearthly Child, in which the First Doctor advises leaving a wounded caveman to die because helping them jeopardizes their escape.
• Hurt regenerates into Eccleston. The ninth regeneration therefore creates the character we know as "the Ninth Doctor."
• Eccleston regenerates into Tennant. This is the tenth regeneration.
•  Tennant regenerates into Tennant, and uses the energy to heal himself and create a clone of himself ("Journey's End"). This is the eleventh regeneration.
• Tennant regenerates into Smith. This is the twelfth and final regeneration.

 To continue...

Fact: as anyone who's seen Logopolis knows, "these don't quite count" versions of the Doctor have shown up before to help the Doctor through his regeneration.

Fact: Capaldi showed up ahead of time in The Day of the Doctor.

What if, and bear with me here, Matt Smith's Doctor dies? He doesn't regenerate at the end of the Christmas Special? He just lays there for a minute... and then Capaldi comes in and says something silly like "I think you need a Doctor." And then we learn that he's the Valeyard, and he's going to ensure that the Doctor gets additional regenerations? Moffat can come up with some way to rationalize this vis a vis his behavior in Trial of a Time Lord.

Just saying.

Who Review: A Town Called Mercy

It's the one with the cyborg cowboy. He shoots a guy, the guy asks "Am I the last one," and the cyborg says "there's one more: the Doctor."

The Doctor arrives at a town called Mercy and finds a load of stones and lumps of wood. The cyborg is tracking him. Mercy may look familiar: it's the set of pretty much every Spaghetti Western ever. Mercy has electricity too early, and the Doctor mentions his Christmas list for the second time in two episodes.

Everyone in the saloon looks up when the Doctor enters. When he says he's the Doctor, the undertaker starts measuring him for a suit. Then when he says he's an alien, they pick him up and carry him out of town. And then point a lot of guns at him. And then the cyborg shows up. The townsfolk start praying, which has to be a first on this show. Then the sheriff - That Guy From Farscape - orders the Doctor back across the town boundary.

Inside the sheriff's office, the sheriff explains everything. The cyborg has erected a boundary around the town and kills everyone who crosses it. The Doctor works out that "the alien doctor" isn't him. It's a guy named Kahler-Jex. He crashed here, and he saved the town from an outbreak of cholera.  And he also rigged up the electric lights.

The Doctor decides he's going to take Jex out in the TARDIS, which is problematic because the TARDIS is outside the boundary. While Rory and Sheriff Crichton distract the Gunslinger, the Doctor rides off on a horse and we learn that Murray Gold can't do Ennio Morricone.

Jex tells Amy he'd rather stay in Mercy and help people.

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides he wants to stop and check something out. He finds a cable buried in the sand and follows it to Jex's spaceship, which appears to be singularly undamaged. It looks like a giant egg. Sonicing it sets off an alarm, drawing the Gunslinger away from Rory and Sheriff Crichton. Digging through Jex's files, he finds that Jex was a war criminal, which might explain his coming-and-going German accent. Then the Gunslinger finds the Doctor and reveals that he's out for "justice," which explains why he hasn't gone and shot up the town yet.

Jex holds Amy at gunpoint, but then Sheriff Crichton reads the script, realizes Jex is a bad guy, and saves her. The Doctor confronts Jex, who says he's a war hero. Jex's people had been at war for nine years, a war that had decimated half his planet. His cyborgs brought peace. Then he decommissioned the cyborgs, and one of them went rogue, because that always happens. Hey guys, don't make cyborgs or AIs, please. If every science-fiction story, ever, is anything to go by, they will go rogue and start killing people.

Jex notes that the Doctor is also a war "hero," although he thinks the Doctor doesn't have the nerve to do what must be done (and, again, having seen Genesis of the Daleks, I'm inclined to agree with him).  The TARDIS crew debates the good, the bad and the ugly of their current situation. Amy wants to forgive Jex, as does Sheriff Crichton, Rory and the Doctor want to chuck him out of town. The Doctor does that and then holds him at gunpoint, waiting for the Gunslinger to show up. Then Amy holds the Doctor at gunpoint. And won't take her frickin finger off the trigger I mean DAMN!

I have to pause the DVD and go into a rant now. I get that Brits are babies when it comes to self-defense and that they're perfectly happy relying on other people to save them when bad guys show up. Fine. Cultural differences. And I guess that explains why Amy doesn't know Gun Safety 101. But it's played for comedy, and that bothers me. Okay, back to the review.

The Doctor admits that he's treating Jax horribly because of his own guilt at not killing the Daleks or the Master or anyone - and I punched the air here - and Amy says he has to be better than him.  The Gunslinger shows up and holds Jex at gunpoint. Jex reveals that he remembers all the cyborgs' names. The Gunslinger shoots, but Sheriff Crichton pushes him out of the way and takes the bullet instead. He dies, telling the Doctor that he and Jex are both good men, they just forget it sometimes. (Okay, his character's name is Marshall Isaac.)

The Doctor sends Jex to his cell, and the Gunslinger says they have until noon tomorrow to hand over Jex or he'll kill everyone. Hey, Doctor, if you'd just gone and gotten the TARDIS like was the plan, Sheriff Crichton would still be alive and the town wouldn't be in jeopardy now.

That night, a gang arrives to take Jex and deliver him to the Gunslinger. There's a standoff that's not at all shot like a standoff. The Doctor gives a speech about how violence doesn't end violence - hey, Doc, tell that to Harry Truman.

The Doctor and Jax have a discussion. Buffy did this sort of thing as an art form - "whose problem are we really talking about here?"  He says "We all carry our prisons with us," and that gives the Doctor an idea.

High noon. The Gunslinger walks into town. There's a kinda-sorta-proper standoff this time, before the Doctor sonics the Gunslinger. Various decoys distract the Gunslinger before he cottons on and goes to the church. The Doctor tells Jex to run for it. The Gunslinger waves his arm cannon around before deciding not to kill anyone. Jex makes it to his ship and uses the tech he's wired up the town with to communicate with the Gunslinger. Jex blows himself up using the ship's auto-destruct, and an appallingly bad effects shot makes it look like his ship was hidden right behind a barn.

The Gunslinger decides to follow him because he's a creature of war with no role to play during peace. The Doctor says he does have a role: to protect it. So the Gunslinger stays as the town's Batman. Or RoboCop.

7 out of 10. Always nice to see the Doctor deal with the whole Time War thing in an episode that doesn't involve the overexposed fascist pepperpots. 

Who Review: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Nefertiti is smoochin on the Doctor when he gets some sort of call. A ship the size of Canada is coming to Earth, sometime in the future. Neffi is with him for... some reason.  They have six hours until the ship gets within missile range.  And the guy from Sherlock is there too. He's a safari guy from 1902. And Mr. Weasley. Who is Rory's Dad. The Doctor abducts them all - by which I mean Amy, Rory, and Mr. Rory, and goes onto the ship with Lestrade (Riddell) and Nef. The Doctor says Hi to Brian (Mr. Rory) as only he can.  Amy's annoyed because she thinks Neffi and Udell have replaces her and Rory. A door opens and dinosaurs come out.

I can't decide to go with a Jurassic Park joke, or an Earthshock joke.

Riddell wants to shoot them, but the Doctor says no. Wait why did he bring this guy?

Anyway the Doctor uses his magic wand to make the computer talk to them, but then he ends up on a beach. The beach is humming. The Doctor has Christmas list. There's a floor under the beach. Some guy is watching them. He tells someone or something to "bring them to me."  Meanwhile, Amy, Riddell and Nef are having a spat about gender issues and Nef doesn't know how to high-five. And then they stumble onto a sleeping teenage T-rex. Then they see a shadow on the wall, just like in Jurassic Park. Lestrade makes his way over some obvious CGI and Amy says she's a queen.

It turns out the beach is the engine room. It's a spaceship powered by waves. Somehow. Then they're attacked by Pterodactyls. They can't teleport out because of technobabble. So they run into some cliffs. Which are a part of the engine-room-beach because plot. Then robots arrive. They're very cross with the Doctor.

Amy turns the lights on. Dino shadows chase them around. And then we see a Silurian on the video-record. The Silurians herded dinosaurs onto a space-ark, but one of the species wasn't adapting. And now there aren't any Silurians on the ship. Another spacecraft has boarded it in the meantime..

The Doctor calls one of the robots "Rusty." Heh. Speaking of Heh, after a Triceratops snifs Brian's balls and licks his face, the Doctor and company are taken to see Walder Frey/Argus Filch/William Hartnell. He's familiar with the Doctor, and his name is Solomon. He was attacked by Velociraptors and rescued by the robots, and he might be dying. And he's actually not familiar with the Doctor, he just thought the Doctor was a... doctor. And he wants the Doctor to fix his legs. When the Doctor gets nosy, Frey has Rory's dad injured by one of the robots.

Amy finally just calls Rory and tells him it's a Silurian ship.

Walder says he's transporting the ship to some colony. And then he scans the Doctor and finds out how much he's worth. Except that value is "nothing" because the Doctor doesn't exist. He's "no one." Hey, Walder, hopefully you'll be meeting another "no one" in the near future.

Anyway, Amy tells the Doctor that it's a Silurian ship. And the Doctor fixes Frey's leg and then asks what happened to the Silurians. He airlocked them. And then the ship autopilot dragged him back to Earth. The Doctor tells him about the missiles but he doesn't believe him. Because bad guys never believe the Doctor.

Anyway the Doctor escapes with Rory and Rory's Dad and they ride a Triceratops. It's a pretty silly scene, and I'm not at all clear that they saved any time doing it. Also the robots are slower than the Borg.

Riddell gets his hands on some firepower.  They're stun guns, so Amy approves. She sees the Doctor snog Rory full on the lips, and I'm not sure she approves of that.

Anyway Frey shows up again and decides he wants something even more valuable than the dinosaurs: Nef! He has one of his robots shoot the Triceratops because he's an evil snot. Then Nef, Amy and Ridell are transported to Frey. It was Nef's idea. And Frey straight-up says he's gonna rape her, and then takes her back to his ship.

The Doctor goes to the control deck. He magnatized the hull so Frey can't escape. Ridell gets a chance to go Robert Muldoon on the Raptors. And they flank him, obviously.

Rory and Rory's Dad have to fly the ship because of plot. Amy and the Doctor have a big "it's the end of the world and we're talking about our personal problems" scene.

Well, Riddell fared better than Muldoon, so he and Amy get to go fight Raptors again. He's a chauvinist but he's clearly enjoying having Amy shooting right alongside him.

The Doctor teleports to Frey's shuttle, and shorts out the robots. They sing "Daisy Bell" as they die. Nef turns the tables on Frey. And the Doctor leaves him him on the shuttle after he reconfigures the shuttle to emit the signal the missiles are chasing. And a million Game of Thrones fans cry out in joy.

Meanwhile Riddell and Amy have stopped all the Raptors. Day saved, Rory's Dad gets to see Earth from way the hell up in space. Space space, gotta see space. I'm in space.

But, hey, remember that time the Brigadier killed a bunch of Silurians? I guess the difference is the Brig was a generally decent person, whereas Walder Frey was... well, Walder Frey.

5 out of 10. Fun guest stars, but a tad overstuffed and more than a little incoherent.

50th

Telepaths. Scientific troubleshooters. A "mature male" costar instead of an ancient amnesiac fugitive lead. Man, Doctor Who could have been just a random, forgotten sci-fi trivia piece.

So first and foremost, props to Sydney Newman, for focusing on the "mature male costar" in the original treatment and telling the production team to do something more interesting with the character.  Yes, originally the character who became Ian Chesterton was envisioned as the lead. The Doctor ain't no sidekick! Additional props to Sydney Newman for rejecting the backstories the original production team came up with, meaning that for the first six years of the show, we had no idea who the Doctor was, where he came from, or why he left. This gave the various production teams a huge sandbox to play in. Additional additional props to Sydney Newman for hiring Verity Lambert as the show's first producer.

Who Review: Asylum of the Daleks

Steven Moffat has this problem. He comes up with all these great ideas, and nobody stops him, tells him to parse it down to sense-making, which is funny because that's exactly what he said was Douglas Adams's problem on the City of Death DVD.

With that in mind, I would like you to read the rest of this post in the voice of Chester A. Bum.

The Doctor meets a woman inside a statue of a Dalek! And then it turns out that she is a Dalek! And then we find that Amy and Rory are getting a divorce, because they already did a pregnancy last season and Moffat wants to keep them "interesting"! And then the Daleks abduct everyone! And then they ask the Doctor to save them!

And then we meet the girl who's going to be a companion half a season from now, half a season early! And she's making souffles! And listening to music so she can't hear the Daleks squawking at her!

And it turns out that the Daleks have an asylum where they lock up the Daleks! And the Doctor points out the obvious problem, namely that the Daleks should just EXTERMINATE any problem they come across! And the Dalek gives a response that amounts to "yup, but this is the plot so roll with it!"

Who Review: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

(I'm doing Series Seven Buffy-style, sitting down with the DVD player open in one window and Notepad in another and just writing down a narration and my reactions. What's different is that what you're seeing here is my first impression, whereas with Buffy I've seen all the episodes before.)

Our episode begins with a starship cruising directly over our heads (Star Wars), going on for longer than you'd expect (Spaceballs), and then exploding. The Doctor is caught up in this, and ends up falling to Earth, desperately wrestling with something that will save him from dying the second he hits the ground (Moonraker - and by the way, Moonraker managed to look more real than this. This is not a good sign).

He gets saved by a woman who takes him into town to find a police telphone box.  It's Old Times, judging by the car.  Maybe 1920s-30s.  The Doctor can't see a thing because he put the helmet on backwards. 

So they get to the police box and the woman says her name is Madge.  After an incredibly long amount of time, we learn that the police box is not the TARDIS. This sets the tone for the entire story: things we know are coming take too long to actually happen.

Somewhat tasteless post

Today's the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of JFK.

It's also the fiftieth anniversary of the day the Doctor Who team recorded "The Survivors," also known as Part 2 of The Daleks, the episode in which the Doctor and his companions meet the Daleks for the first time. The very first episode of Doctor Who would be broadcast the following day, so the actors were already a bit nervous, owing to obvious concerns about how well their new show would do. On top of that, they only found out that Kennedy had been shot about a few minutes before they started recording.

So if you watch that episode, note that the fear, nervousness and apprehension on their faces is not entirely fake.

If you're over the age of, say, 53, I apologize for trivializing your version of 9/11.

Stuff I found online: ASOIAF deaths vs Harry Potter deaths

A Song of Ice and Fire deaths

Harry Potter deaths

Some quick notes on io9's Doctor Who list

They really like New Who, don't they? There is only one episode from New Who listed as a "Disappointment" (unsurprisingly, it is "Fear Her"). The Mind Robber, Carnival of Monsters, and Remembrance of the Daleks are ranked criminally low (they're in the top 100, but they deserve to be in the top 30. The fact that they're all ranked below such tripe as "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Doomsday" is the real problem).

I'm not going to argue with the top three (The Caves of Androzani, "Blink," and City of Death), as they really are the best three episodes/serials and basically impossible to rank against each other because they're so very different. That Doctor Who and the Silurians is in the top 25 is immensely gratifying. "A Christmas Carol" is rightly judged as the greatest Christmas special ever, but placing below "The Waters of Mars" is just wrong. I can understand io9 - a decidedly liberal website - putting "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" painfully low on the list for its racial problems.

And, to end on a high note, I wholeheartedly agree with their choice of Pyramids of Mars as Tom Baker's second-best serial.  The whole list is here.

Ha.

Buffy: "Enemies"

Which one is this? It's the one where Faith steals Buffy's boyfriend (although she'll do it again with considerably more aplomb next year).  It's also the one where she kisses her. So there's that.

Okay, previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: We had the episode "Doppelgangland," famous mostly for Willow's line vis a vis Vamp!Willow: "I think I'm kinda gay." (At least one source suggests that this, and not Seth Green leaving, was the main impetus for picking Willow over Xander as The Character Who Turns Gay. But that's later.)

Buffy and Angel went to a movie. Because this episode takes place before the concept of the internet as a place where people can find information about boring humdrum stuff like movies (as opposed to stuff like demonic rituals and sewer blueprints), they didn't realize it was an erotic film until after they started watching it.  Buffy is clearly uncomfortable, and who wouldn't be? I mean, the last time she and Angel got pelvic (the show's words, not mine), it ended with corpses. And angst. And a rocket launcher. Angel proves that he's got his emotions under control by kissing Buffy without vamping out. But really, this scene goes nowhere, just as pretty much every Buffy/Angel scene between "Amends" and "The Prom."

Two quick images for Doctor Who's 50th

That I found online.

http://i.imgur.com/uJSH7cX.gif

http://imgur.com/uCn7BZy

"Enemies" tonight, I swear.

Night of the Doctor

What?

Ender's Game: More thoughts

SPLOILERS!!!!!!!!

(And unlike the original review, I'm just going to flat-out give away the ending here.)

Hey, wanna see a review of Ender's Game by some people who didn't get it whatsoever?

Here you go.

More of my thoughts will follow today.

Buffy musings: A Fall from Grace

So here we are, halfway through the meat of Season 3. Time for a retrospective.

• First of all, let's be honest here: Buffy suddenly being a girl scout rings false. Remember that between "Homecoming" and "Revelations," she has at least shared liability for the deaths of three humans. And, just to turn on my time machine for a minute, the Knights of Byzantium from Season 5 would like a word about Buffy's "never directly kill a human" code. Hell, at the end of this season, father-figure Giles is going to ram a sword into the Mayor's chest, and Buffy's not going to bat an eye at that. (Then again, Giles - and Wesley once he moves to Angel - are the two characters to whom the normal rules just don't apply. Cf. B5.22, "The Gift," and, well, just about every Wes-central moment on Angel from A3.16, "Sleep Tight" onward.)
• On the other hand, Faith allying with the Mayor, who has vampire minions, is also problematic, given Faith's "Vampire, Slayer, dead vampire" line in "Revelations." If she is supposed to be the pure uninhibited warrior, and especially if she wants to dodge responsibility for her crimes with the "I'm a Vampire Slayer" excuse, is it too much to ask  that she, y'know, slays vampires?
• To sneak ahead with the time machine, I'd like to point out that it's Angel who starts to get through to Faith, and it's Wes - prim, British-flag-up-the-butt Council toady Wes - who screws that up. The contrast with Faith's arc on Angel's fourth season is amusing.
• Buffy and the others can't do squat to help Faith right now because Faith doesn't accept Buffy's viewpoint as any sort of valid (man, if only Faith could walk a mile in Buffy's shoes or something...) 
• We can argue about the other circumstances of Faith's fall until the cows come home, but the decision to ally with the Mayor is Faith's and Faith's alone. That's a conscious decision to become evil. Period.

 That's where we're at now. Reviews resume Thursday with "Enemies."
 

Hang on, I've got another rant for you

There are these extremely silly security features on websites that ask for your birthdate before letting you see mature content. They serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever provided you're capable of subtracting, say, 30, from the current year.

So that's stupid enough. But then some of these things aren't content to just let you type in the date, because heaven forbid you crash their servers by not understanding the MM/DD/YYYY format and trying to insist that you were born on the third of Fifteenember instead of the Ides of March. (Come to think of it, heaven forbid you use the roman dating system, where dates were determined by counting backwards from three fixed dates of the month. "Yes, Mr. Pointless Mature Content Filter, I was born Ad XVI Kal Jul, MCMLXXXVIII.")

So instead these things make you select the date from these drop-down tabs. Okay, so month, that's easy, day, you probably won't have to scroll so far, year...

Why in the hell is 2013 in the year tab right now? Or 2012? Or 2011? If your two-year-old can use a web browser, navigate to a specific website, and enter his/her date of birth, just let that kid in because by golly a few gory decapitations are the least weird thing that kid is going to encounter on his way to disproving Fermat's Theorem before he graduates from kindergarten!

Yup, I'm petty. Have we met?

I have been neglecting you

and I apologize.

Buffy reviews will continue in the near future (meaning not until Wednesday, and possibly not until Thursday), but in the meantime I have a rant.

iTunes. Why you must update? 

First of all, a disclaimer. I update iTunes approximately once a year, because every update is crappier than the last one.

Now... do you remember a time in the far-off halcyon days of 2010, when you pushed Ctrl+M to switch to the mini-player? I do. What's this three-key nonsense?  It's awkward and uncomfortable.

Oh, and once upon a time I could hit the "shuffle" button and then the number sorter, and it would show me what order the songs would play. There wasn't any of this "upcoming songs hidden in a separate list" bullcrap.

And then for the epitome of just effing stupid...

Where. The hell. Is my minimize button?

Grr. Argh.

Film Review: Ender's Game

Ender's Game is not a film that I can review without giving away the ending. So above the jump I'm going to say that a) the plot hole at the end is a result of the adaptation massively compressing the final act, and b) the film gets a B-.

What Worked
Asa Butterfield can act. I really can't speak for the rest of the kids because the rest of the kids were never required to do anything, but Butterfield holds his own against Harrison Ford, which is pretty damn impressive. In my opinion, though, this makes the voiceover narration fairly redundant. The film did not feel two hours long, and I would not have minded if the film had obeyed the maxim of "show, don't tell," particularly during the sections where Ender and his team are supposed to be burning out.

The film is f*cking beautiful and the score is great (although I defy you to watch the sequence with Ender and Petra training in the Battle Room and not hear the Game of Thrones theme). The film manages to undercut itself here as well, though: We see the exact same battle sequence three different times. There's a reason for this re-use of stock footage, namely that it's an official recording of Mazer Rackham's big battle and they deliberately censored a huge chunk of it, but we don't really realize that's what's going on until the third time we see it.

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

Mass Effect and Me

The trilogy is over, the curtain is down (and has been down for half a year), and now it's time to offer some final thoughts on the trilogy.

Favorite Mission: Virmire (Mass Effect)
So you've flown across the galaxy and have exhausted every lead hunting down the rogue Spectre Saren. All you can do now is investigate this gargled transmission from an infiltration team out in the middle of nowhere...

And right off the bat it tells you that this mission ain't gonna be like nothin' you've done before. Unless you've done one of two very specific things beforehand, one of your squadmates is going to be a corpse before the mission even gets underway.

Then you get inside Saren's base and the music turns into an ominous remix of his theme, and you find some members of the infiltration team whose minds have been destroyed.  You fight your way past krogan and Geth Destroyers, two of the toughest enemies you have to fight on foot, and then...

Wait what?

(Cheap-ass micro-post just to keep my streak up; I've got a massive Mass Effect post for tomorrow and a broader Buffy-themed post for Friday, but neither is done yet.)

So apparently they're dragging the Queen Elizabeth throwaway joke back for "Day of the Doctor."

What Queen Elizabeth joke? Way way back in Season 3 (of the new series), in "The Shakespeare Code," the Doctor and company have to bugger off at the end of the episode because Queen Liz I finds out the Doctor's in time and she's angry at him for some reason. The Doctor idly quips that he'd love to know what he did, because he hasn't done it yet. This was an episode that aired in 2007.

For comparison's sake, imagine if Buffy had revisited the mantis eggs from 1.04, "Teacher's Pet," in Season 7. What mantis eggs? Remember the episode about the teacher who turns out to be a preying mantis demon who feeds on virgins? And even though she's dead by the time the episode ends, the final shot is a bunch of eggs in her closet, ready to hatch?

...anyway, you'd think Moffat has enough loose threads of his own to wrap up before getting involved with his predecessors. Hey, while we're on the subject of old unanswered questions, what's the deal with the whole "Captain Jack is missing two years of his memories" thing from the first episode he was in?

Buffy: "Consequences"

"I missed the mark last night and I'm sorry about the guy, I really am. But it happens. But how many guys do you think we've saved by now, thousands? And didn't you stop the world from ending? Because in my book, that puts us in the plus column."
-Faith

The episode begins with Buffy dreaming. She's drowning, being dragged down by the deputy mayor. She makes it to the surface, but is shoved back under by Faith. (They keep doing this drowning-as-baptism allegory; first in 1.12, "Prophecy Girl," then in the last episode, now here.) The news breaks that the deputy mayor has been murdered. Wes wants the Slayers to look into it. Buffy says there's no point because there's no hint of a supernatural element, and Faith, extremely uncharacteristically, agrees with Wes. 

Wesley mistakes Cordelia for a teacher. I'm just gonna leave a link here and move on.

Buffy and Faith go to an empty classroom to discuss their little dilemma. When Buffy says she can't lie for Faith, Faith points out that she lied to protect Angel. Jealous, Faith? Jokes aside,

We next discover that, just as Buffy is moving closer to Faith, Willow is moving closer to her witchcraft buddies.

Crime scene. Angel looks on as detectives find a bloody smear on the dumpster where Faith staked the deputy mayor. Man, she was really sloppy with that whole body-disposal thing. We, along with the Mayor, learn what the coroner's report says: there were wooden splinters in the wound. The Mayor muses that "a Slayer up for murder one" is "interesting." Unbeknownst to him, the Slayers are both sneaking around City Hall, investigating the deputy mayor, and they see Wilkins and Trick leave together, thick as thieves.

Buffy and Faith have another talk about what happened. Buffy keeps pushing the girl-scout angle, while Faith drops the plot-relevant point that there's a freighter leaving the docks twice a day, just in case she needs to bail. Faith does the Slayer-as-Ubermensch thing again, including the quote at the top.  "People need us to survive. In the balance, nobody's going to cry over some random bystander who got caught in the crossfire." Yet Faith is clearly uncomfortable with all this; in addition to the line about skipping town if necessary, her body language says she really doesn't wanna talk about it. Oh, she loves talking Slayer-as-Ubermensch. She doesn't want to talk about the consequences of that.

Detective Useless (2.11, "Ted;" 2.22, "Bargaining, Part 2") shows up to hound Buffy and Faith about the killing, but leaves empty handed. Angel notices.

Buffy finally flips out and confesses to Willow. Friendship repaired! Meanwhile, Faith has also gone and confessed to Giles... that Buffy was the murderer. Friendship ruined!

Sidebar: Faith can't look Buffy in the eye.

And here's where things get interesting.

Giles reveals that he knows Faith's a bad liar (which is why he treats her as one of the good guys until 3.18, "Enemies"), and also that this is not the first time this has happened. "It's tragic, but accidents happen." Normally the Council investigates, but Giles plans to keep them out of this. He handwaves the whole "hey, Your Britishness, why didn't you just tell Faith that?" issue by telling her that Faith is in denial and there's no helping her until she faces what happened. Unfortunately for the whole "keeping the Council out of this" thing, Wesley is eavesdropping.

When the Scoobies discuss what to do, Xander volunteers to talk to Faith because he had sex with her. Naturally Willow figured it out first. (Immediately after this scene she goes to the bathroom for a good cry, so "Amends" notwithstanding, she's obviously not over him.) Buffy points out that Faith is a "use 'em and lose 'em" kinda girl, and she's not going to take Xander seriously.  Despite the fact that he is a) a former lay and b) mortal, Xander doesn't listen and goes off to try to talk to Faith. Faith insists that the important thing isn't that it was an accident, but that it was Buffy who did it. Xander might be starting to get through to her with the whole "accidents happen" line before he goes off trying to play the knight in shining armor. Faith has no time for that. It ends with the first attempted rape in the series, before Angel bashes Faith over the head, drags her back to the mansion, and, because this is a Marti Noxon episode, chains her up. (By the way, Faith can't break out on her own. Nor could she break the handcuffs in the last episode. Compare with the handcuffs she breaks in 3.21, "Graduation Day, Part 1.")

Everyone so far has gone about this all wrong. Buffy keeps pushing the "it's wrong and I'm a saint" thing, which is never going to work with Faith. Giles knows Faith is lying but doesn't bother to say something like "Well, I can understand why Buffy would be upset and want to hide this from us. These things happen. The important thing is she feels remorse for it." Xander has the right idea as far as the approach goes, but he's completely the wrong person for the job.

Angel, on the other hand, knows exactly what it's like to be a murderer.  While Buffy goes back to Faith's place to "get some of her things" to prove she's on her side (um, as far as poor excuses go, this takes the cake), Angel starts lecturing Faith.  Given that she doesn't attack him, he might be getting through to her. Of course, then the Watcher's Council's goons show up. (Giles seems to think the Council will lock her up, but surely that can't be standard operating procedure? Give the vampires free run while you rehabilitate the Slayer, rather than off that Slayer and keep a tighter leash on the next one?) Faith breaks out after heavily implying that she's ready to take another life - so Angel was right about that whole "she's got a taste for it" thing. 

When Buffy finds out Faith's gone, she remembers that line earlier about the freighter and makes a logical conclusion. Buffy insists that it's not too late, but Faith has no interest in being "miss goody-two shoes." Faith continues doing the Corrupter thing. "You need me to toe the line because you're afraid you'll go over it." Clearly she strikes a nerve, but they're ambushed by vampires; the Mayor knows that the Slayers know he's dealing with them, so he sent Mr. Trick to eliminate them. Faith saves Buffy from Trick and stakes him.

Giles thinks Faith has a chance since Buffy won't give up on her, but Faith shows up at the Mayor's office, informs him Trick is dust, and decides that means he has a job opening.


7 out of 10. This is a bit of a letdown from the first part. Faith and Buffy essentially have the same conversation three times, and Faith's decision to ally with the Mayor at the end is confusing. She continues acting like she's part of the Scoobies while she works for the Mayor, so it's not like she's trying to get away from them. How does she know that Angel's not just going to knock her out and chain her up again?  (The original plan was for Faith to commit suicide, and while the end result is much better, it does mean the writers are scrambling right now.)

Buffy and Angel crossover guide

After Angel, Cordelia and Wesley skip town at the end of Buffy Season 3, it can be difficult to follow the plot back and forth between the two shows. This gets worse after Buffy moves over to UPN, home of the legendarily awful Star Trek Voyager for its legendarily awful final two seasons, because suddenly the episodes don't bounce neatly back and forth. And you can't even go by air dates, because a crossover between Buffy s7 and Angel s4 was screwed up by a little thing called the Iraq War.

Now, to save the eject tray on your DVD player some wear and tear (because y'all still use those, right?) I've put together a list of the Buffy and Angel episodes you need some context from the other show to fully enjoy.

(Note: I'll abbreviate the series' titles in the episode numbers. So B4.03 means Buffy Season 4 Episode 3, and A1.03 means Angel Season 1 Episode 3)

B4.03 "The Harsh Light of Day" -> A1.03 "In the Dark"
Buffy sends Oz to deliver a package to Angel for safekeeping. Spike follows in the hopes of stealing it for himself. Oz and Spike both return to Sunnydale afterwards.


A1.07 "Bachelor Party" -> B4.08 "Pangs" -> A1.08 "I Will Remember You"
Angel gets a warning about Buffy and returns to Sunnydale, interacting with the entire cast minus her. When she finds out about it she follows him to L.A. to ask him why he didn't bother saying hi.


B4.16 "Who Are You" -> A1.18 "Five By Five"
Faith flees Sunnydale and takes a contract on Angel's life (undeath?).


A1.19 "Sanctuary" -> B4.20 "The Yoko Factor"
Buffy chases Faith to L.A. and gets into another fight with Angel. Faith ends up in prison for just shy of three years. Angel follows Buffy back to Sunnydale and gets into another fight with her.

A1.22 "To Shanshu in L.A."
Darla is resurrected.   Buffy's gang won't find out for half a season, though.

B5.07 "Fool For Love" -> A2.07 "Darla"
Multiple flashbacks to Angel and Spike's glory days, Rashomon-style. No actual crossover, but each episode's flashbacks helps fill in the other one's gaps.


A2.11 "Redefinition" -> B5.14 "Crush"
Drusilla finishes up a stint on Angel and moves back to Sunnydale. Darla's resurrection is mentioned on Buffy for the first time.

B5.14 "Crush" -> A2.17 "Disharmony"
Harmony leaves Sunnydale for L.A.


B5.15 "Forever"
There's no corresponding scene in Angel, but Angel shows up to comfort Buffy through a family crisis.


B5.22 "The Gift" -> A2.22 "There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb"
Willow visits L.A. and gives Angel the bad news that he and his ex are no longer on the same channel.


A3.04 "Carpe Noctem" -> B6.04 "Flooded" -> B6.05 "Life Serial" / A3.05 "Fredless"
Angel and Buffy leave for an "intense" offscreen rendezvous and then return to their own shows without actually sharing any screen-time.

A4.13 "Salvage"
Faith breaks out of prison after Angel loses his soul again. Angelus calls the Summers home after hearing that the Slayer is in town, in order to determine whether it's Buffy or Faith hunting him. There's no corresponding scene in Buffy. 

B7.17 "Lies My Parents Told Me" -> A4.15 "Orpheus" -> B7.18 "Dirty Girls"
Willow gets a call from "some effeminate-sounding guy named Fred" who tells her to come to L.A. She leaves without telling Buffy why, re-ensouls Angel (again) and goes back to Sunnydale with Faith in tow. (B7.17 was preempted by the invasion of Iraq and shown after A4.15. Oops.)

A4.22 "Home" -> B7.21 "End of Days"
Angel is given the All-Solving Amulet, to give to Buffy because the Buffy writers dropped the ball on coming up with their own Deus Ex Machina (which is odd because it was Angel that was more at the mercy of behind-the-scenes shenanigans this year).

Buffy: "Bad Girls"

"We can't save the world in jail."
-Faith

James Bond has a license to kill. Batman will ignore extradition law and hack your phone in the name of the greater good. Commander Shepard has authority to do pretty much whatever (s)he wants if it helps get the job done.

So, at least in fiction, the question "Is Superman above the law?" isn't really the right question to ask. Rather, there are three underlying questions that deserve more of our attention. Specifically:

• Can we force Superman to obey the law?
• Should we force Superman to obey the law?
• Should Superman obey the law in the absence of such force?

There is an important distinction between the examples I cited above and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Neither 007 nor Batman nor Shepard have superpowers. They are not, for the most part, facing supernatural threats. They happen to be particularly well-suited to their tasks, but someone else theoretically could take over if they ever went insane.

The Watcher's Council has no such luck. If a Slayer goes rogue, you have to spend resources hunting her down, because the next Slayer cannot be called until the current one dies. Recall the opening monologue from the first two seasons: "She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness." (Emphasis added.)

The police are not equipped to deal with vampires and demons (and there's enough evidence in Season 3 to suggest that this was deliberate in Sunnydale on the part of the Mayor, but that doesn't explain why the LAPD is no better over on Angel).  So, does it make sense to constrain the only person who can deal with them? The pragmatic answer is "only if that person has gone off the deep end and is more of a threat than the one they're stopping," but... well, watch and see.

Of course, Faith herself is an anomaly. There aren't supposed to be two Slayers at once. From "End of Days" (7.21):

Faith: There's only supposed to be one. Maybe that's why you and I can never get along. We're not supposed to exist together.

Buffy: Also, you went evil and were killing people.

Faith: Good point. Also a factor.

Buffy: But you're right. I mean, like... I guess everyone's alone, but... being a Slayer? There's a burden we can't share.

Only for a while in Season 3, they were sharing that burden. And then Faith went evil and was killing people.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my favorite episode of Season 3.

Abbreviated rant of the day

So you're a rock band. What do you do when the face of the band dies?

Why, you get back together more than twenty years later as, essentially, an official tribute act. That's what Thin Lizzy did. Okay, fair enough, you have to eat, I get that.

What do you do when some members of the band want to record new music? Well, if you have any respect for what the band was originally, you record the new material under a new name. Hence the Black Star Riders. So far so good.

It's just that now the Thin Lizzy Facebook page is full of Black Star Riders news. What was the point of changing your name if you're still going to take advantage of the old fanbase? You're not fooling anyone here.

Buffy: Why was Faith never "Helpless?"

Warning: supreme geeky speculation follows.

The first time I saw Season 3, I ran with the entirely natural assumption that Faith was younger than Buffy. I assumed this for two reasons:

• I thought it would make sense for them to call a younger Slayer
• Eliza Dushku is younger than Sarah Michelle Gellar, and in my opinion visibly so

However, especially in the next episode I have to review, Faith definitely acts like Buffy's cool big sis.  Or if you prefer, that friend who's slightly older than you and can thus buy you beer.

In "Graduation Day, Part 1" (3.21), Faith says Buffy is "all dressed up in big sister's clothes."

There's also no hint that, when the legal system finally gets its hands on her, she was a juvenile when she killed three people in the spring of 1999 (and Angel is certainly enough of an "adult" show to at least bring the issue up), suggesting that she was born no later than the spring of 1981 (though it seems she only gets convicted of one of the murders; N.B. the Buffy wiki seems to have gotten "Murder Two," i.e, second-degree murder, confused for "two counts of murder," so take what it says with a grain of salt). This gives her a very narrow window as far as being younger than Buffy, who was canonically born in January 1981, is concerned. So it's more likely that she's older, if only slightly.

The finicky issue: to the best of our knowledge, Faith never undergoes the trial Buffy is subjected to in "Helpless," the trial that, supposedly, every Slayer goes through on her eighteenth birthday.  If she were younger than Buffy, this would make sense, seeing as how Faith turns evil about two months after Buffy's birthday (although that would mean that her accidental killing of the deputy mayor would occur while she was still a juvenile). Otherwise...

Buffy Recaps: "Helpless" and "The Zeppo"

"Helpless"
Begins with Buffy and Angel sparring.  Y'know, rolling on top of each other, gettin' all sweaty... and the script doesn't shy away from the connotations.  Angel is worried that Buffy's seeing someone else. He's getting territorial again.

Faith is "not interested in proper training" and "on one of her walkabouts" because, just like when Spike joins the cast later on, they really don't want to risk turning it into "the new person show."

Buffy is looking forward to celebrating her birthday with her father, but he bails at the last minute (not the last time we have a terrible father figure for a Slayer this season).

Buffy: The Wish

"Slaying's a rough gig. Too much alone time is unhealthy."
-Buffy, earning herself this season's Medal of Foreshadowing

Season 3 episode 9

I skipped "Lover's Walk." What you need to know is that 1) it's where that image of Spike in his car, rocking out to "My Way," which will be used in the Season 4 and 5 credits, comes from.  2) it's the one where Xander and Willow's thing for each other is revealed to everyone.  Cordy suddenly becomes "Xander Harris's castoff."

Faith is not in the episode. Willow says they should hang out with her more often. That's really good advice, Will. I mean, if she goes through a moral crisis in the near future, she's going to need friends, right?  (Alas, in the next episode, "Amends," Buffy invites Faith over for Christmas dinner... and then bails on her to go hang out with Angel. Jealous, Faith?)

On to the point of giving this one a full review: I don't believe it's an accident that this episode came in this season.  There's a massive bait-and-switch about Cordy maybe learning something, and then turning into an episode about what Buffy would be without friends (oh, hey, see the preceding paragraph).

Now, I don't really know whether the plan was to bring Anya back in the future, or whether this was a one-off.  But it honestly seems like this episode belongs in this season more than "Doppelgangland" does. Because this episode ties in directly to the question Faith asks Wesley in "Five by Five": Was she always destined to be the "fallen" Slayer? Or could Buffy have been her if things have been different?

Happy Halloween!

Here's a picture of the most grisly death I've ever inflicted on an NPC in the Mass Effect series. (I killed him with Incendiary Ammo, but before his corpse finished burning he got caught in a closing door...)

And here's a song.

A Game of Thrones Bran III, Catelyn IV, Jon III: Enter Littleprick

There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. … Clearly, it is this second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.

Just for fun: How age-(in)appropriate was the Buffy cast?

The Humans
Cordelia: Supposed to be the same age as Buffy. So born in 1980-1981. Charisma Carpenter: 1970. Difference 10-11 years.

Xander: not more than one year older than Buffy (he's seventeen in "Innocence," which takes place on the day after Buffy's 17th birthday). So we'll say 1980. Nicholas Brendon: 1971. Difference: 9 years.

Willow: Supposed to be Buffy's age, so we'll say 1980-1981. Alyson Hannigan: 1974. Difference: 6-7 years.

Oz: Approximately one year older than Buffy, so we'll say 1979-1980. Seth Green: 1974. Difference: 5-6 years.

Riley: as a graduate student, he'd be at least four years older than Buffy.  That would make him born in 1977 at the latest. Marc Blucas: 1972. Difference: Technically anywhere between 2 and 5 years, leaning towards the higher end.

Buffy: canonically born in 1981 (5.22, "The Gift;" the Buffy wiki has somehow pinned it down to January 19 - January I'll accept since the birthday episodes always aired that month). Sarah Michelle Gellar: Born in 1977. Difference: 4 years.

Tara: 1980 (7.04, "Help"). Amber Benson: 1977. Difference: 3 years. 


Faith: Supposed to be Buffy's age, given her ability to waltz in and out of Sunnydale High/UC Sunnydale like she's a student. Eliza Dushku was born in December 1980. Difference: Less than half a year. (For what it's worth, the wiki draws on sources outside the show to give Faith a birth date about fifteen days before Dushku's. Also, edit: I've since come up with a plausible theory that puts Faith's birthday sometime in December 1980. It's possibility #2 in this essay.)

The Supernatural Characters
(Important caveat: I suck* at math. Not as bad as the Mutant Enemy writers apparently do - Spike's supposed to be "barely 200" in his first appearance, but it's later revealed that he was sired in 1880 - but still pretty bad.)
*Oh yes pun intended.

Spike: Born in 1850-1853 (wiki) and sired in 1880 (5.07, "Fool for Love"). Eternally 27-30. James Marsters was born in 1962, making him 30 in 1992, five years before his first appearance. Difference: 5-8 years and counting.

Anya: Eternally 20, according to the wiki. Emma Caulfield: born in 1973. Doesn't appear until 1998, age 25. Difference: 5 years and counting. 

Angel: Born in 1727 (wiki) and sired in 1753 (2.21, "Becoming, Part 1"). That would make him eternally 26. David Boreanaz was born in 1969, which would make him 26 in 1995, two years before the show began. Difference: 2 years and counting.

Dawn (apparent): Is apparently 15 or about to turn 15 in Season 7 (she's starting her freshman year of high school), which began in late 2002. That would make her born in 1987-8. (The wiki says 1986 but doesn't bother to source it.) Michelle Trachtenberg was born in 1985. Difference: 1-3 years. (Of course, Dawn is "actually" either at least eight centuries or only two years old at that point.)