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Oh man! Thank you!!! Sweet!

(I guess this means I gotta do it now, huh?)

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Dailymotion is also great for classic and new Who as well.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

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Season Two, Episode One

The last time we saw Darren he was sprawled on the ground with a bullet in him. He had gone to Huey’s wake, to make peace with John Boy before heading back to Spain. He wanted to know that his sister and her family would be safe if he went. John Boy assured him “I’m not an animal”, but Stumpy had other ideas, and exacted his revenge with a drive-by shooting as Darren walked away from the pub. Doctors fought to save his life as he hovered close to death, close to being reunited too soon with his dead brother and perhaps the man who killed him over what amounted to a piddling small debt. A year has passed, and things have changed in the criminal underworld. Shaken more than he would like to admit by the loss of his brother, John Boy believes Huey has remained behind, and swears he sees what he often describes as “the ghost” late at night, but nobody else has seen this apparition, and privately his rapidly-growing obsession is making him something of a laughing stock and he is losing the respect of his gang. Not that they would say as such to his face, of course.

The Gardai raid John Boy’s apartment, the CAB (Criminal Assets Bureau, a special unit set up by the Justice Department to target the illegal takings of criminals and seize them) taking his car and all his files. He’s less than happy and tells his lawyer to sort it out, while he orders Nidge to collect all the debts that have been owing. Today. Darren, who has managed to pull through his life-threatening injuries, is talking to Rosie, who is over on a visit, having moved back to London, anxious to put all the Stumpy business behind her. Losing the baby, coming close to death herself has taken all she has, and she is in no mood for Darren’s constant attentions when he won’t commit to her.

Darren, for his part, has cut his ties with John Boy and the gang and is working for a smalltime hustler called Fran, who deals mostly in cheap cannabis and dodgy cigarettes. Fran is almost as mental as Darren’s old boss, but he has to make money somehow, and god forbid he should do anything drastic like get a real job! With his record, I guess, they wouldn’t exactly be lining up to offer him a position, now would they? The job doesn’t last long though, as Darren takes exception to Fran’s method of collecting what’s owed to him, which basically entails him setting his rottweiler dogs on a guy. Darren steps in and batters one of the dogs to death when Fran refuses to call it off, and as a result is fired, with the added pressure of now owing Fran thirty thousand Euro, which reminds him is a debt now due in full.

John Boy fires his lawyer, Pat, accusing him of not doing enough to “keep him out of trouble”, and then accusing him of maybe selling him out, asking if Pat has had his office checked for bugs recently? He’s incensed that the Gardai seem to know every move he makes ahead of time, and is convinced someone is ratting him out. Fran calls to Mary’s house, threatening to get the money Darren owes him from her if he can’t locate her brother. He tells her that her house was done up with part of the money and now he wants it back. She sends him packing, but is trembling visibly. Darren, meanwhile, is having flashbacks to when he was shot, when Mary calls him to chew him out over Fran. He says he’ll sort it and apologises. He goes to see Nidge to ask him if he can loan him the money, but Nidge says he hasn’t got it. He floats the idea of approaching John Boy, pointing out that it was Stumpy who shot Darren, that he did it on his own and there was no order given by his boss. With nowhere left to turn, Darren reluctantly agrees, knowing he has no choice but to climb back in bed with the devil.

When he hears John Boy may be covering the debt, Fran asks Nidge to see if he can get him in with John Boy. What Fran has is small time; he wants to break into the big leagues. Nidge agrees to ask, but John Boy refuses to stump up the money, saying that if Nidge is so worried he can cover the debt himself. Nidge pushes though, pointing out that with Darren off the police’s radar now --- having been shot and no longer part of the gang they don’t have any further current interest in him --- they could use him, and also he declares Fran’s interests to join up with them, telling John Boy Fran is making decent money that they could have a slice of. Eventually John Boy sees the logic and gives in, agreeing to pay Darren’s debt, knowing that the kid will owe him big.

At Pat’s home Stumpy throws a petrol bomb at the door as it’s answered, but it’s the lawyer’s daughter who comes to the door, not him, and she is badly burned. Darren has formed a loose friendship with Luke, the kid he rescued from Fran’s dogs; the two are hanging around a bit now. They go to John Boy’s party (well, it’s a party for someone called Pottsy, but everyone’s going there to meet the gang boss and “do business”) as does Fran and his girlfriend Linda, whom Nidge knows from way back and takes an instant re-shine to. She, more or less ignored by Fran, is delighted and puffed up at the attention, while John Boy’s junkie girlfriend Debbie tries to wheedle some gear out of Tommy. Fran explodes when he notices Luke wearing his jumper: Darren’s mate took it when he burgled Fran’s house, presumably in a weak retaliation for Fran having set his dogs on him. He goes for him, but is restrained by Nidge and the others. John Boy follows Darren outside and reminds him that he is now indebted to the crime boss, and when John Boy says be there, Darren had better be there.

Despite his best efforts, Darren is being pulled back into the frame, back into the world of organised crime, and never before did the phrase “I keep trying to get out, they keep pulling me back in!” seem more appropriate, or tragically true.

QUOTES
John Boy: “There’s this disease, you can only get it from fucking dead bodies. My brother Huey knew this fella, worked in the morgue. Two or three times a week he’d get a knock on the door, middle of the night, offered cash he was, for them to hop up on the dead.”
Debbie: “That’s sick!”
John Boy: “Sure, you’re dead. What do you care who mucks off into ya?”

Rosie: “I don’t want you waiting with me.”
Darren: “Why not?”
Rosie: “You know why not. Cos you can’t keep acting like we’re still together every time I see you.”
Darren: “We’re friends.”
Rosie: “Friends don’t act like this.”
Darren: “Like what?”
Rosie: “Like waiting at bus stops.”
Darren: “Oh! Friends don’t wait at bus stops for other friends, no?”
Rosie: “No. And the other stuff.”
Darren: “What other stuff?”
Rosie: “Talking.”
Darren: “Oh so friends don’t talk to each other, no?”
Rosie: “Not the way you talk to me.”
Darren: “Like what?”
Rosie: “Messing. Making me laugh.You know you’re doing it, I know you do.”
Darren: “What am I doing?”
Rosie: “Making me fall in love with you.”

Nidge: “What’s he got to be depressed about?” (talking about Darren)
Tommy: “What do you think?”
Nidge: “Didn’t have his bollocks shot off did he, like the soldiers in fucking Iraq! You get a roadside bomb underneath you, you put your hand down to see if your balls are still there and it’s a pound of mincemeat is in your pants! That’d make you depressed!”

Tommy (after they’ve tried and failed to get the full amount owing): “Do you think he doesn’t have it then?”
Nidge: “I know he doesn’t have it.”
Tommy: “What are you going to say to John Boy?”
(Nidge gives him a harassed look, that says that no matter what he says, no matter how well he puts it or how sympathetic he comes across to his boss, John Boy is not going to be happy and will likely send them back to extract, shall we say, alternative payment? John Boy does not like people to owe him money. Well, he does, but he wants them to pay up, and if they can’t, he doesn’t care what happens to them. They’re no use to him. Besides, it always serves as a good example that you don’t welch or drag out a debt you owe him.)

Nidge: “I can’t believe it! A child of mine being picked on!”
(Nidge is more worried about his image here than his son. How can other kids be bullying his son? His son should be the one doing the bullying! This is bad, as it reflects poorly on Nidge’s hard man image, never mind what it’s doing to Warren.)

John Boy: “I don’t give a fuck about Stumpy. To be honest the prick bugs the shit out of me. But you end up on a job with him I don’t want any bollocks.”
(The task of a boss: to make sure that, whether they like each other or not, his staff work together and all personal baggage is left at home. As true in the criminal underworld as, if not more than, anywhere else.)

FAMILY
It’s a real feature of Love/Hate that, no matter what nefarious deeds the guys are up to, rather like “The Sopranos”, they still have to do the little things we all deal with in our lives, the boring, mundane, everyday chores that make up family life. Nidge, on the way to extract money from people with menaces, has to pick up Warren from school and drop him home to Trish. John Boy would, I’m sure, not be impressed! Also, when Nidge drops Warren home Trish is sitting on the sofa watching TV. Why could she not collect their son?

On the way to perform a heinous deed for his boss, Stumpy gets a call from his mother. She has apparently seen a strange man looking in her window, and he rushes to the house. It’s weird to realise that these people, vile and evil and unprincipled and psychopathic as they are, have mothers who love them. It’s almost surreal.

HONOUR AMONG THIEVES
As I’ve been at pains to point out all through season one, this is a fallacy and a fantasy, and it shows here more than in any other crime show. These people are not friends, they’re merely people who band together for a common cause: literally, partners in crime. When one of them gets hurt, hassled, imprisoned or even killed it doesn’t seem to affect the others, unless that can damage them in some way. I mentioned about how when Elmo had the colostomy bag in season one and all Huey could do was laugh at him, leading to his death that might have been prevented if Elmo had rushed him to hospital instead of allowing him to bleed to death in the street. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Here, as Darren recovers from his shooting, nobody seems to care. Nidge plays down what happened, reasoning that it’s not as bad as getting blown up by an IED in Iraq, and when Darren goes to plead with him to help him out by loaning him the money he owes Fran, Nidge smiles lopsidedly and says he hasn’t got it. Of course he has, or could get it, but he’s not interested in helping someone he now probably sees as something of a liability.

FRAN THE MAN
In season one we had Huey as the head-the-ball, but as this season and future ones develop we will come to see that he has one hell of a successor for a psycho among psychos in Fran, who will become a major player, sometimes allied to, sometimes ranged against the gang. Fran is a dog man, that is, he breeds dogs for fights, and he thinks more of his dogs than he does of most people. He is enraged when Darren kills one of them, moreso than when the troubled gangster turns the club on him, hitting him in the face. To Fran, his dogs are his babies and god help anyone who hurts them. After the incident, Fran knows he has Darren, who owes him a huge amount of money, but unlike John Boy (“I’m not some sort of animal!”) he has no compunction about going to see Darren’s sister to demand money from her in the absence of her brother. Like Huey in season one, it seems there is little Fran will shy from, and few if any people he is afraid of. He doesn’t even fear John Boy, who everyone else lives in terror of upsetting. As psychos, they’re almost matched.

THE LETTER OF THE LAW
As was noted briefly in season one, the rules surrounding what can be done about the earnings of criminals and the profits from enterprises proven to be illegal have been tightened up in recent years here in Ireland, with the establishment of CAB, the Criminal Assets Bureau. This organisation tracks the financial assets of known or suspected criminals, pursues writs through the court system and eventually seizes any “ill-gotten gains” in terms of property, land, material wealth or anything else that can be proven to have been bought by the proceeds of crime. As we will see later, this seizure can extend beyond the criminal, to anyone he or she has bought something for that was purchased with money obtained illegally.

This is how the major criminal gangs and godfathers in the recent past have often been taken down here: with their clubs, houses, cars and businesses seized by CAB they have no earning potential and they eventually face the full wrath of the law with no financial backing to help them fight their case. Strip away the assets and leave the man legally naked beneath, and then move in for the kill. It’s a process that has worked for over a decade now, and has required the cleverer criminals to get even more creative, putting property in the names of their wives, family members and so on, in an effort to hide it from the CAB.

Pat, the lawyer for John Boy, also recognises that he is under observation. Under the new money laundering rules, someone who suspects they may be involved in such activity, or knows someone who may be, is bound by law to report it. He has no intention of losing his licence, or worse, serving prison time, but is perhaps rather silly to intimate to the gangster boss that he may be in a position where he is forced to turn him in. John Boy does not treat betrayal of any kind lightly!

PHILOSOPHY OF THE STREET
John Boy waxes lyrical on the life of a gangster: “Load of bullshit you read in the papers, you know? You get into this, whatever, and you do something because it has to be done, and then somebody wants to do something to you, you don’t let them, and then you’re watching your back all the time. I’m not stupid, like some of them. And the papers are full of shit. But you know what? The only bit of it that’s true: you don’t get out of it you’re dead.”

GANGSTER PARADISE?
One thing that really impresses me about Carolan’s writing in this series is that he manages to maintain a great balance between making the life of a criminal exciting and powerful, and showing the reality of it what it does to other people, to the gangsters’ families, their loved ones. Collateral damage piles up, and they don’t care. They snipe at each other, as John Boy says above, watching their backs, each knowing the day is coming when they will be the target, when they must kill or be killed by the people they currently count as, if not their friends, then at least their allies. The world they inhabit is dark and scary, and bleak and unforgiving. Behind the parties, the money, the whores and the trips abroad, the car chases, the codewords and the camaraderie of the pub, they’re all just waiting for that knock on the door, or the boot through it, the day when they stare down the barrel of a Glock and see the impassive face of a man they thought was their friend, getting them before they’re got themselves.

Carolan never lets us forget this, never lets us get lost in the fantasy and the glamour, never lets us close the door on the darkness; it’s always open, sometimes only a crack, and the stench of evil and fear and paranoia and revenge and betrayal and madness all filter through it like it’s a gateway to Hell itself, and it’s a door we fear to walk through but wonder what’s behind it? It’s also a door we’re very glad we don’t have to pass through, because what lies on the far side, as O'Brien says in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the very worst thing imaginable. It may all seem like fun now, but we are never allowed to forget that it will, and can, only end one way: in death, despair, hatred and betrayal. The only certainty in the world of the gangland criminal is the dark, dread stone of the grave, a deep dark hole yawning wide, waiting its chance to swallow everyone who gets mixed up in this evil enterprise.

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2.1 “Fatal extraction”

Alan is appearing as a guest on a late-night political chat show, and spouting his usual ultra-right-wing views (see first quote below), which does not endear him to the Labour leader of Hackney Council, Georgina Pitt. When he manages to convince her to take a lift with him, against her better judgement, he inadvertently discovers oil in Hackney Marshes when his car breaks down. Delighted, he sets about trying to buy the land but is aghast to find that it is owned by the selfsame council of which Pitt is the leader, and so he endeavours to ingratiate himself with her, and them. He spins Georgina a line about building a community centre on the marshes, promising her jobs and votes, but when her flatmates --- who are all members of the council too --- come back he has to disguise himself as a left-wing poet. His cover is of course blown though, and he realises that in order for his plan to work, now that Georgina is going to be disgraced and thrown off the council for fraternising with the enemy, the Torys must win the Borough of Hackney. This, it would appear, involves taking away the vote from the working class.

A trifle for Alan Beresford B’Stard, MP!

He uses the advent of the soon-to-be-introduced Poll Tax as his vehicle, tacking on an amendment to the Bill which will excuse anyone who earns below £20,000 per annum from paying the tax, but which will also exclude them from being able to vote. The Chief Whip warns him that he has instigated a constitutional crisis: if the Queen refuses to endorse the amendment to the bill on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and undemocratic, she will be seen to be challenging government policy, and Thatcher will be forced to declare a republic. Civil war in England, once again! Alan is not impressed: he knows the real power lies with Parliament, as it did in the time of Cromwell.

Georgina visits him, with the rather unsettling news that she has bought the marshes herself. Having been kicked out of the council, she made sure her last act was to lease the marshes to herself and sell the rights to Texaco. Alan is mystified as to how she found out about the oil, but she tells him it was all down to Piers, who provided the information most helpfully. This changes everything: since B’Stard can’t now make money off the deal he retracts his amendment to the bill. He does however have the last laugh, when he susses out that the Chief Whip is gay, and can now blackmail him to his heart’s content!

QUOTES
Alan: “No no no! I did not say I was opposed to abortion! What I am opposed to is the so-called “woman’s right to choose”! It should be the State’s right to choose! Ugly, stupid, poor people should not be allowed to have children!”

Georgina: “First poll tax, the most unjust tax this country has had to suffer since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381!”
Alan: “How would she know? Her family only arrived on the banana boat in 1951!”
Georgina: “I don’t have to take this racist abuse from this “Home Counties Himmler!”
Alan: “Wait, wait just a second! Are you denying that your family arrived in this county in 1951 on a boat whose main cargo was yellow, crescent-shaped fruit? If that’s not a banana boat, then I wasn’t voted the sexiest member of Parliament 1988!”

Georgina: “Take your hands off me, you dirty bastard!”
Alan: “Ha ha! B’Stard!”

Piers: “I was just using your new photocopier, I hope you don’t mind. I like to keep a record of my correspondence to help any future biographer.”
Alan: “Well I don’t want to disappoint you Piers but A) Enid Blyton is dead and B) this is not a photocopier, it’s a fax machine!”

Piers: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Hackney Marshes belonged to the London Borough of Hackney.”
Alan: “And I wouldn’t be surprised if there was room inside your head for a three-piece suite, Piers!”

Alan (on phone): “Police! Now! Tory MP in distress! Yes, an armoured car will do nicely!”

Georgina: “Be a bitch to get past my comrades though: they all think profit is a dirty word.”
Alan: “I think they’re right: whenever I hear it I get all horny!”

Alan: “He is right to say that the poll tax will reduce the living standards of thousands of ordinary people. Although I prefer to use the word mediocre.”

Alan: “The rallying cry of the American War of Independence was No taxation without representation! I offer a new clarion call: No representation without taxation!”

Chief Whip: “The PM will be forced to declare a republic and replace the queen.”
Alan: “Maggie must be thrilled! It’s the one job she’s always wanted!”

Chief Whip: “I’m talking blood in the streets, B’Stard! Englishmen fighting Englishmen!”
Alan: “So what? It happens every Leeds United game!”

Piers: “I can’t swim Alan!”
Alan: “That’s not really relevant, Piers, as I’ve just attached you to this enormous bust of Gladstone!”
Piers: “But I only told her the truth!”
Alan: “ A fatal mistake for a politician, Piers!”

Alan: “I’m deaf to your entreaties Piers! You cost me 100 million pounds!”
Piers: “But you don’t need it! You’re a millionaire already!”
Alan: “No I don’t need it, but you see I want it Piers, because I’m very very greedy! That is why I became a Conservative!”

B’Stard: “And… and you’re an uphill gardener too?”
Chief Whip: “Yes! Yes!”
B’Stard: “And does Maggie know?”
Chief Whip: “Nobody knows except you Alan!”
B’Stard: “Oh Mr. Whippy! Boy have you made a big mistake! I hate queers almost as much as I hate poor people!”

MACHINATIONS
Alan literally falls on his face into oil, and when he realises how much money he can make he does everything he can to acquire Hackney Marshes, even posing as a left-wing playwright (which he does quite well) until his true nature asserts itself when his beloved Rolls-Royce is attacked. As his schemes go, this is pretty small time and ordinary, but he does top it up by managing to get the second most powerful member of the Conservative Party firmly under his control when the Chief Whip lets it slip that he is a closet homosexual. Not a bad day, all things considered!

SIDEKICK
As ever, Piers is the thorn in Alan’s side. First he accidentally throws away the important fax B’Stard has been waiting for, the report on how much oil is in Hackney Marshes, and then he scuppers Alan’s plans by inadvertently letting Georgina Pitt know about the oil, allowing her to cash in on the fortune he was plannning to make. As a result, Alan tries to kill Piers (won’t be the last time) by pushing him off the ledge outside their shared office while attached to a heavy weight. Alan is deadly serious: Piers is only saved (sort of) by the intervention of the Chief Whip. Alan pushes him off anyway but the bust gets jammed in the windowframe, saving the hapless sidekick, no doubt to Alan’s chagrin.

Season two also begins a series of “punishments” for Piers. Whenever Alan is upset with him there are various ways he will deal with him. Here, he intends to use a drill on his bottom --- though he stops when he realises how much money he can make from the oil deal. These punishments, often for small or stupid infractions, will get more and more inventive as the series progresses.

We also hear in this episode of the second real reference to Piers's at the moment mysterious girfriend, who will make herself known later on. We heard him mention her briefly in season one’s “Sex is wrong”; now we see him sending her what Alan calls “a torrid sex missive” via B’Stard’s fax, which Piers mistakes for a photocopier. He tells Alan (who could not care less) that he wants to preserve any correspondence for future biographers, but B’Stard unkindly reminds him that Enid Blyton is dead!

PCRs
Speaking of same, Enid Blyton was a famous children’s author who created such childhood classics as The Secret Seven and the Famous Five. She also wrote a lot of fairytale/children’s stories.

THE B’STARD BODYCOUNT
Yes, of course it’s only the beginning of the new season and B’Stard has yet to get properly into the business of eliminating his rivals, enemies, anyone who crosses him, but even at that we have more Lethal bodies this week than we’ve had in the whole of season one: not that it will remain like that for long, of course!

Lethal: Three unnamed kids who rather stupidly try to rob Alan’s Roller when he’s playing the role of Alan Berkoff, left-wing playwright at Georgina’s flat. Alan has had the handles of the car electrocuted, and the three would-be car thieves are killed.

Non-Lethal Bodycount: 5
Lethal Bodycount: 4
Total Bodycount: 9

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Season Two: "The coming of Shadows" (Part Six)
2.10 “Gropos”


A contingent of 25,000 Earthforce troops arrives out of nowhere, on their way to a top-secret campaign and therefore Sheridan has no warning before they blow in through the jumpgate, and he has to find billets for them! Leading them is General Richard Franklin, and no, it’s no coincidence: he is the father of the station’s doctor. He tells Sheridan and the command staff that Earthdome has decided to get involved in, or rather, end, the civil war on an alien planet, Aktor. They intend to make a surgical strike on the rebels’ base and wipe them out. As Sheridan spent time on that planet and knows the layout of the base, Franklin details him to help him finalise the battle plans.

In order to maintain the highest level of security right up to the attack, the Gropos --- or GROund POunderS --- infantry --- have not been told what their mission is. Franklin also tells Sheridan and his staff that they come bearing gifts: the very latest in defence armaments, to be fitted to the station. Sheridan is dubious: B5 is meant to be a place of peace but it looks like Earthdome intend arming it to the teeth and he has no choice in the matter. Franklin checks in with his son, but it’s clear that they don’t get on that well. The general never forgave his son for leaving home and going out among the stars, and there’s been bad blood ever since. They try to talk but as is often the case with fathers and sons, words turn into accusations and old enmities surface.

As is often the case too, a brawl breaks out on the concourse when some jarheads decide to hassle Delenn, and one of the other Gropos, a girl called Dodger, breaks it up. There’s a spark then between her and Garibaldi, and they hook up again later. However Garibaldi’s belief that this could be a real relationship is scorned by Dodger, who tells him she just takes her enjoyment when she can because tomorrow she may be dead. She storms out. As he helps Franklin lay his battleplans, Sheridan tells the general that they have been lied to: this will not be a milk run. It will be hard, very hard, to take the fortress and Sheridan advises the general to abandon his plans. But Franklin tells him that the attack is a trade-off: Earth’s help in return for establishing a permanent presence in their sector, which is strategically close to Narn and Centauri territory. He opines that Earth will at some point have to take sides in the war, and they may as well be prepared.

Garibaldi looks for Dodger later and they make up, but she suspects the truth about where they’re going and knows he knows the truth, but he can’t tell her. She surely realises he’s under orders not to reveal the truth, but she must wish that he could confirm, or dispel, her fears. Just then they have other things to think about as another brawl breaks out, but at the height of it the orders come through and the Gropos are all ordered back to their ships to head to the assault point. The attack is a success but at a very high price, though at least Franklin sees that his father survived, unlike just about everyone else we were introduced to in the episode.

QUOTES
General Franklin: “I had an Alfredo Garibaldi under my command during the Dilgar invasion. Excellent soldier!”Garibaldi: “That’s my dad.”Franklin: “So much for genetics!”

Sheridan: “Are you sure that’s wise General? Babylon 5 is supposed to be devoted to peace. If we start arming it heavily…”
Franklin: “The galaxy is changing, Captain, and Babylon 5 must change with it.”

Dodger: “I didn’t come here expecting to set up housekeeping! I’m a Ground Pounder! I’m cleaning latrines one day, the next I’m up to my hips in blood, hoping not to hear the round that takes me out, you got it? In between I like to see what I can get, to remind myself that I’m alive. Okay, it’s not romance, but it’s all I got time for. I’m so sorry it’s not enough for you!”

Dr Franklin: “I’m a doctor. My job is to heal.”
General Franklin: “Then heal humans. Stephen, I know you’re fascinated with these aliens but they’re a threat to humanity, and they always will be. Help your own kind.”
Dr Franklin: “Life is life, whether it’s wrapped in skin or scales or feathers. Now if you respected these beings instead of constantly trying to murder them all the time maybe you’d understand!”

IMPORTANT PLOT ARC POINTS
Ah, kind of none really. This is a pretty much self-contained episode. The only real arc stuff is the first overtures from Earth towards supporting alien governments in return for concessions, something that will kind of fade out and never really develop, so it’s mostly unimportant to the story arc. The only other thing is perhaps a hint of irony, when season three rolls around and we see how those shiny new defence systems get put to use. But that’s for another time.

NOTES
Let’s be honest here, while this may not be season two’s “Infection” or (God help us!) “Grey 17 is missing” --- that’s still to come, may the lord have mercy upon your souls! --- it’s a pretty poor episode and one of the weakest, if not the weakest in season two. It’s doubly annoying that it follows what seems to be an unwritten rule in drama, especially sci-fi, that a really cool, groundbreaking or pivotal episode has to be followed by a really pedestrian one, as if the viewer has had all the excitement he or she can take and needs to regain their breath. Or, as is more likely, the previous episode blew the budget and so it’s back to one-act self-contained dramas with little in the way of effects, which is fine. But why can’t the episode be well written? Does it have to be boring and uninspiring? Remember Star Trek:The Next Generation’s “Family”? Ugh!

Now, this is nowhere near that bad, but even so. After a killer punch like “The coming of shadows” it’s a huge comedown. Okay, so you wouldn’t expect another searing storyline like we’ve just seen, but “Gropos” is basically a ham-fisted attempt to remind us all that war is, you know, hell, as if we hadn’t figured that out already. There are little vignettes within the overall stodgy storytelling and blundering morality lessons --- Franklin’s relationship with his father is well handled if nothing terribly new, and Garibaldi gets some, which is always nice to see with a character who tends often to be sidelined in favour of the main stars. Well, he is a security chief, after all! Much of his job must entail, as Holly once remarked in Red Dwarf, shining his light down corridors, turning it off, shining it again … the life of a chief of security, even on Babylon 5, can’t be filled with adventure and romance. So it’s nice to see him allowed some licence in this episode.

There are, too, foreshadowings of how Earth is intending to deal with alien governments, jumping in bed with the Akdors in exchange for a strategic post in their sector, with one eye on the developing Narn/Minbari war and trying to figure out which way to jump, who they should ally with and how profitable it will be for Earth. So there’s rather a lot packed along the edges of what is basically a fairly dull story, even given the heartstring-tugging at the end. Hey, we didn’t care about those guys: no point in showing them lying dead on some alien world! We had about twenty minutes, tops, to get to know them, and we didn’t. So don’t expect us to shed a tear for your two-dimensional jarheads, JMS!

Mind you, he can’t be blamed for this episode, as he didn’t write it, but then, chances are he had a fairly large hand in it, for as we are learning, and will learn further, about Londo Mollari, the hand of Straczynski stretches very far indeed and casts a long shadow over this series, and you can be sure there’s little in there that didn’t get his seal of approval before it appeared on screen.

Other than Warren Keffer.

You simply don’t go up to a guy of JMS’s talent and try to bully him into including a “sassy, hip flyboy” into the story for no reason than to hopefully boost ratings and bring in the chicks. But this is exactly what the network execs did, and in return they got, briefly, Warren Keffer. He is the only Starfury pilot (other than those who fly them, like Garibaldi, Ivanova and of course Sheridan, as part of their job) we get any real time with, and the way he goes on it’s just as well. He’s cocky, self-assured and cringeworthy; the worst aspects of the fighter pilot who thinks he’s a cut above everyone else. But he doesn’t last, and JMS throws down a clear marker when he has him killed off at the end of this season. JMS is always careful not to involve him in the main storyline, so that when he does meet his end it doesn’t upset the plot. But then, this was all conceived years ago anyway and Keffer was not part of the creator’s original vision, so he’s just a stone thrown in the pond that creates a brief ripple and is gone.

Another thing this episode does serve to illustrate --- apart from the fact that 25,000 squaddies in one place is never a good idea! --- is that old enmities die hard. In the case of the Narn and the Centauri, this shared hatred has reignited the war between the two species, and to some degree this is partially mirrored in the encounter between the jarheads and Delenn. When she complains she has done nothing to them, one of them snarls that he had friends who died on The Line, clearly showing that the recent Earth/Minbari war is still raw and fresh in the minds of many, and that the enforced peace does not necessarily extend to everyone. However, whereas the Narn and the Centauri have rekindled old rivalries, it’s unlikely Earth and Minbar will do the same. These are two races now aligned together --- the Minbari helped finance Babylon 5, remember --- and apart from that, Earth is not prepared for another war so soon, much less against an adversary that essentially had it defeated until their at the time inexplicable surrender.

ABSENT FRIENDS
Most of them really. This is very much a human-driven episode, with only Ambassador Delenn making an appearance, and that in a small almost cameo. No Londo, no G’Kar (though the war between the races is certainly mentioned), no Lennier and of course, no Kosh, as there will be none for quite some time now, right up to about the end part of the season.

SKETCHES
Stephen Franklin
Although this is generally an episode that focusses on Garibaldi, there’s a lot of Franklin in it too. We meet his father, who is a career military officer and it would seem quite xenophobic, telling his son that aliens are a threat to humanity. He has a problem with Stephen treating aliens, believing he should concentrate on helping his own people. He seems to be a hard man, uncompromising and with little time for fatherly love, but at heart of course he loves his son and worries about him, and the doctor reciprocates.

We’ve heard before from Franklin’s own lips about his refusal to allow his research to be used in making weapons, and here his father offers him another such post which the doctor turns down, referencing that earlier decision, which General Franklin no doubt saw as tantamount to treason, refusing to help his own people and disobeying the direct orders of, one would have to assume, a superior officer. For General Franklin the world is black and white, divided up into two sorts of people: those he trusts and those he does not. For his son, the world is equally clearly divided but his worldview is that, as he says, life is life no matter how alien it may be, and he as a doctor has taken a sworn oath to protect and preserve it.

We see why Franklin left home, as he mentioned earlier in the series --- hitch-hiking across the galaxy and offering his services to anyone who would give him a berth to somewhere he had not gone before. But now we see there was more to it that just a young man’s desire to explore,and see strange new worlds. Franklin left because waiting for his father to come back from whatever campaign he was on at the time became too painful, and rather than face that he essentially ran away. It’s said this broke his mother’s heart, though as it’s his father who says this we must take it with a grain of salt and wonder if he is talking about himself. But surely Stephen’s mother was not happy to see him go.

Michael Garibaldi
In our first real look at the security chief, we get a glimpse into his personal life. We already know that he has history with a woman on Mars named Lise Hampton, that he lost her when he agreed to accept Jeffrey Sinclair’s offer to come work with him on Babylon 5, and that he regrets how things worked out. In the episode “A voice in the wilderness” he tried to find out what had happened to her and though relieved to find she had survived the riots, was crushed when he learned she was married, and indeed expecting. Now he falls for Dodger, but is worried that he is moving too fast, which proves to be his undoing when he tells her. She is just looking for a fling, a bit of fun, some human contact, knowing she could be dead tomorrow. As indeed it turns out she is. But he can’t quite understand the idea of a one-night-stand and so loses her.

When he apologises and they intend to pick up where they left off, it’s too late as Dodger, along with every other character introduced here, dies in the assault on the rebel stronghold, and perhaps Garibaldi wishes that for once he had just thought with some other part of him rather than his head. But he was trying to do the right thing. Problem is, he was trying to do it with the wrong woman.

Garibaldi also mentions to her that he is interested in a “lady the kind a guy like me hasn’t got a chance with”: this is of course Talia Winters. He’s been pursuing her now for months, although she for her part has shown him little if any affection and has given him no reason to believe she feels the same. In fact, when she needed to talk to someone it was not Michael she turned to but Susan Ivanova. Considering what will happen near the end of the season, it’s probably as well Garibaldi didn’t push the relationship, as we will see.

(Well, for a pretty poor episode I managed to find a lot to write about it, didn't I?)

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The Batlord

I imagine Star Trek got more notice simply for being American. We don't get BBC shows here. I almost never recognize any of the shows Trollheart keeps mentioning.

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Unknown Soldier

I know the names of nearly all the British shows that Trollheart mentions, but have seen very few of them as I'm not really a TV series person. You should check out classic Doctor Who and Blake's 7 as I'm sure you'd like them or at least appreciate what they're all about.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Trollheart

1.6 "Lucy"

In this episode we learn that Lucy Clarsen arrived in the village one year ago, and took a job in the Lake Pub. There she witnessed the tough times Claire and Jerome were going through in the wake of their daughter's death, Jerome drinking heavily and his wife trying to cope with that as well as the awful tragedy of losing her little girl. Lucy obviously introduces herself and her "power" to Jerome, and he agrees to try. It seems like she's contacted Lucy but it's all a bit showy and she could just be telling him what he wants to hear.

Back to the present and she has awoken in hospital, to the amazement of her doctors. The workers at the dam are leaving, saying that the power station has flooded and the power won't come back. Frederic and his friend dig up Camille's coffin, but there is no body there, only water, as if the coffin has been submerged underwater.Of course they are caught and taken to the police. Pierre has arranged for everyone to meet Camille, in the hope they will understand and the girl will not have to hide any more. Naturally this does not go as planned, with some people shunning her as a monster, others unable to believe it, and some raging that she has come back when their own children have not.

Pierre decides that it would be a good idea if she was seen in a good light, and convinces her to pretend she has been to Heaven, spoken to the other children who were in the crash and relay "messages" from them to their parents. It's a blatant scam, even if it achieves the right results. It plays into Pierre's religious zealot agenda, in which he sees Camille as an emissary from God, proof that God exists. Julie wants to give Victor a bath, but he will not let her undress him. She leaves, and we see that the boy has what looks like bite marks or burn marks, some sort of mutiliation on his arm.

Interviewed by Thomas, Frederic and his friend tell the police their suspicions about Camille, that she has come back from the dead. Nobody else would at this point give such a story credence, but Thomas has begun to see for himself that things are not as black and white as he had thought, and that somehow, the dead do seem to be able to come back, at least some of them. Victor tells Julie that he believes she is the "fairy" that his mother told him would look after him if anything happened to her; a child's tale presumably meant to comfort, but he has taken it literally. Laure returns but she is not after Victor this time; she wants Julie and the boy to move in with her, as the power failures will make day-to-day living hard and she has supplies and a generator. Julie turns down the offer though, probably not fully trusting her ex-lover and wanting to protect Victor. Laure tells her before she leaves that they have killed her attacker, and that it was Simon Delaitre.

Thomas turns up at Camille's house looking for her --- Alice, ostensibly, but he wants to be sure that Camille has in fact come back from the dead --- but is told she is not home. He orders her parents to ensure she goes to the police station when she comes home. Lucy helps the police photo-fit an image of her attacker, and Serge is revealed. When Toni finds out that his brother is in the police's sights as a suspect he goes back home and, seeing Lena wearing one of his mother's old dresses he thinks his dead mother has come back, and pleads with her to let him in. In the process, he inadvertently lets slip two pieces of information that scare the hell out of Lena: firstly, that Serge is a killer or would-be killer and second that he is, well, dead. Perhaps paradoxically, this leads to her and Serge ending up in bed together.

Pierre visits Julie and tells her that she must come to the Helping Hand. He warns her that people like Victor will soon become hunted, hated and attacked. She turns down his offer though, and takes up Laure's instead, moving in with her for now. Simon, meanwhile, is not dead --- well, he is, but not dead a second time --- you know what I mean --- and breaks out of the mortuary, where he meets Lucy, who tells him to follow her and brings him to the Lake Pub. When she and he make love she thinks she sees his death throes as he hangs, but she is wrong. What she is actually seeing is not a vision of the past but one of the present, where the parents of one of the children, told by Camille that their child hopes to see them again soon, take the ultimate step and commit suicide.

When the bartender Simon attacked identifies Serge, the police close in on the cottage. Toni meets them, shotgun in hand, and shoots one of them while Lena and Serge look on. Serge helps Lena escape and she runs home. As she runs through the forest, she happens across a band of sinister looking people gathered around a fire. Thomas visits the morgue and finds, as he had feared to, that Simon has gone. He rings to tell Adele, who locks the doors, but unbeknownst to her Chloe opens a window.

QUESTIONS?
Has Lucy actually got psychic powers? Is this why she is now coming back to life as it were?

Why is Camille's coffin full of water? Even given the fact that the bus may have plunged into the lake (which I don't think it did: nothing has been mentioned about that) her coffin would not have been interred with water in it.

Already on the list of original suspects for both the attacks on Julie and Lucy, Toni has now made his position untenable with the police by shooting one of them. Surely he will now be hunted down? What will happen to Serge?

Why did Lucy come to the village in the first place? It seems as if she had a plan. Had she some sort of psychic vision of what would happen?

What are the marks on Victor's arms? Where have they come from?

Who are the strange gathering Lena comes across in the woods?

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
Finally giving up on the dam, the workers are leaving. They know that the power station, which has become flooded, will not restart and the town will be without power for some time. Are they now sneaking off to avoid blame? They don't seem to be informing anyone.

WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
Pierre's attempts to have Camille accepted backfire seriously. When he convinces her to pretend that she has seen all the other children and spoken to them, and conveys "messages of comfort" to their parents, her words are in one case misunderstood and lead to the death of two of the parents at their own hands. Eager to be reunited with their son, and thinking his "message" that he hopes they can soon be together again is a sign for them to take their own lives, they hang themselves. Camille is not yet aware of this, and indeed only Lucy, who has seen it in a vision, knows, but does not understand.

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Trollheart

Adventure, excitement and really wild things: just three of the complications mild-mannered Arthur Dent does not want in his life. He’s perfectly happy --- well, perfectly miserable if he’s honest --- living out his dull, boring existence on a small, drab, blue-green planet orbiting an equally drab type G star way out in the unfashionable end of the Milky Way Galaxy, and the very last thing he needs to discover is that his best friend is an alien, and is in fact from somewhere around the region of Betelgeuse, and not from Guildford after all. He also categorically does not need to find out that his home planet is about to be destroyed in order to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. He has just about come to grips with the unsettling fact that his own house is about to be knocked down, but asking him to accept that the Earth is shortly to become just another statistic of poor intergalactic council planning is just pushing it perhaps the tiniest bit.

Sadly, everything described above happens with almost gleeful cruelty and poor Arthur is suddenly and without any warning on a journey through a galaxy he was not even aware existed, or if he did, it was best observed through a powerful telescope, preferably with a nice strong mug of tea in one hand and a hot water bottle at one’s feet. He is most annoyed! He absolutely did not give permission for his person to be shot at, laughed at, menaced, mangled, transported, teleported or deported and he very clearly remembers never signing anything that said “I would like to be a space traveller, please can you arrange this for me Jim?” But the universe does not care, as he is rapidly finding out.

Conceived as a series of radio plays and then a trilogy of novels that now numbers about six, “The Hitch-hiker’s guide to the galaxy” found perhaps its greatest expression in the six-episode TV series commissioned by BBC in 1981, and is of course the most famous series of books written by the late Douglas Adams. As I mentioned in the intro to “Red Dwarf” and also my writeup on the movie “Dark Star”, science-fiction has been almost ninety-nine percent serious down through the decades. Even the Flash Gordon shows, broadcast on early-morning television and with effects so woeful they were destined to be lampooned forever after, were played with a straight face. For a long time, it was not considered right to mock or even satirise sci-fi. It was seen as the perview of the geek, the nerd and more importantly the scientist. And you did not mock science!

But gradually this has changed, mostly thanks to this series, which challenged our notions of science-fiction, and even comedy in general. Like all the best comedy, of course, there is social commentary looking out of every porthole, satirical stabs at the establishment, at civilisation, at Man himself hiding behind the jokes. It’s not slapstick and it’s not farce, though in some cases these elements are used in the plotlines. But mostly it’s comedy that makes you think. The whole story begins with the destruction of the Earth and the escape of its only remaining inhabitant, Arthur Dent, who’s about as far from an action hero or space adventurer as you can get. Dragged very unwillingly and somewhat bemusedly into space by his best friend, Ford Prefect, Arthur very quickly has to accept that his worldview --- that Man is the dominant, perhaps only lifeform in the universe --- is completely wrong, and that aliens do exist. His friend is one, and he meets many others. Sadly for him, most are very humanlike in their attitude and aspirations, which is a nice way of saying they all want to rip him off. Careening from adventure to adventure with all the control and grace of a pinball, Arthur is rather amazed to find that a lot more people than he could possibly have imagined are interested in the contents of his brain, and many of them will do whatever it takes to get to those contents, including, if necessary, removing that brain from the “semi-evolved ape”’s head.

A cult classic in every way, HHG2G has been recently updated for the big screen, but the series was my first real introduction to it after the books, and remains my second-favourite medium through which to enjoy this masterpiece. The casting is perfect, each actor bringing each character alive exactly how you might have imagined them on the page, and the addition of the narrative of the Book together with what were for the time state of the art graphics makes this a brilliant realisation for the small screen of the story told within the pages of the novels. Of course, with three main books to get through the series does compact down the story somewhat, but the main points are all there and it ends pretty much as you would expect.

The metaphor, of course, for a man blundering through his life constantly groping for meaning while knowing with a fatalistic certainty that there is no such meaning, can’t be overemphasised. Arthur Dent is the eternal everyman, the guy in the street, the bloke in the pub whom you wouldn’t look twice at --- if he weren’t in his dressing gown, that is --- and the whole idea that these sort of things happen to other people, not to him, only serves to heighten the irony of the madcap capers he gets dragged into, along with a manically depressed robot, one more survivor of his home planet and a man with two heads who has stolen the most expensive starship in the galaxy. As he says himself with glum matter-of-factness when Ford tells him that the Earth is about to be destroyed in a few moments, “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.”

CAST
The cast of HHG2G is of course a cast of billions, but the main characters comprise five very different people. One isn’t even human. Well, two aren’t even human. Actually, now you come to mention it, that would be three who aren’t …. okay then. Two are human. The rest, well, aren’t. Did I mention one is a robot? One is a robot.

Arthur Phillip Dent, played by Simon Jones: The unhappy hero of the tale, the gloomy protagonist, Arthur is the type of man who would be less likely to even pick up a book about space and aliens and adventures than actually end up going into space and meeting aliens and having adventures. All he wants in the world now is a nice cup of tea. But unfortunately the last teabag, tealeaf and teapot all perished, along with all tea plants, when the Earth was blown up in order to make way for the new hyperspace bypass. Arthur can never go home, but he doesn’t want to be out among the stars either. He has no time for adventures and japes and mysteries: he thinks they’re a waste of time. And like the new guy in town (literally, if town measures about a billion parsecs across in every direction and somehow this guy has never managed to stumble across its borders) he greets every new discovery, every piece of eye-opening technology and every stunning new vista with the sort of wide-eyed (but annoyed) wonder that makes these experienced space travellers laugh at him. Well, all except Marvin. He doesn’t laugh at anything. Life? Don’t talk to him about life…

Ford Prefect, played by David Dixon: Due to a rather unfortunate misunderstanding about human names, Arthur’s best friend managed to choose for himself, rather than a nice inconspicuous name, one that was completely unique. He also failed to blend in as a normal human, dressing rather flamboyantly and talking rather fast and with something of a degree of impatience. Ford is a field researcher for the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and became stranded on Earth while researching an article for the Guide. When he learns that the Earth is to be destroyed he seeks out Arthur and masterminds their escape (okay: he thumbs a lift on one of the ships carrying out the destruction: that’s what hitch-hikers do!), whereafter he attempts to introduce his friend to the wonders the galaxy has to offer. Sadly for him, Arthur is not interested, having had to come to terms both with the fact that his home planet has just been exterminated and, perhaps worse, that there is literally nowhere in the galaxy now where he can find a cup of tea.

Trillian, played by Sandra Dickinson: A sexy girl with the body and voice of a blonde bimbo but with the intelligence of several particle physicists, Trillian escaped the destruction of Earth by the simple expedient of not being there when it blew. She had already left with an alien she had met, and with whom she remains. She vaguely remembers Arthur, and for a while it’s comforting for him not to be the last human alive, but Trillian has spent long enough out in the galaxy that she really can’t be considered an Earth girl anymore. She has adjusted, adapted, embraced the alien lifestyle in a way Arthur can’t, won’t and does not want to.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, played by Mark Wing-Davey: Space hippie, playboy and occasional president of the galaxy, Zaphod has two heads and an ego that is bigger than both. In fact he is not a two-headed alien (though he is an alien; he’s the same race as Ford) but had the extra head grafted on because “it looked cool”. He it was who took Trillian off-world, but though he fell for her (inasmuch as he could love anyone other than himself) she is not really interested and is just using him. He is utterly contemptuous of Arthur when he meets him, and keeps calling him a monkey. Which, at some level, you can’t really argue with.

Marvin, the paranoid android, played by Stephen Moore: Well, voiced by Stephen Moore. David Learner occupied the robot body, but as all that really did was trudge despondently from place to place I’m not seeing a huge amount of acting talent required, sorry guy. And the true personality of Marvin is in his voice. He is permanently depressed, a robot with a massive brain who is cursed to serve humans and carry out menial tasks that hardly befit his hyper intelligence. As he says, or moans, himself: “Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Open the door, Marvin, they say. Take the prisoners up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? Cos I don’t!”

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Unknown Soldier

So are you going to do Blake's 7 or not?

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History