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1.12 "Miracle on Third or Fourth Street"

It's Christmas and Frasier is looking forward to seeing his son for the first time in years. Unfortunately it doesn't happen as a better opportunity comes up and Freddie's going to Austria instead. Frasier flies into a sulk, then a rage and refuses to go up to the log cabin to which all four of them --- Niles, Maris, Martin and Frasier --- were supposed to be going to spend Christmas. He decides to oblige Bulldog, who had asked him to take his slot on Christmas Day, but of course only the loneliest, saddest people are listening to the radio at such a time, and he just gets more depressed.

After the show he goes for something to eat, but the only place he can find that's open or not booked out is a greasy spoon, where he makes friends with some homeless guys. He finishes his meal and goes to leave, then discovers to his embarrassment that he has left his wallet back at the station, but the homeless guys all club together to help him out, thinking he is one of them. It's the selfless outpouring of human kindness that he's been waiting for, looking for, hoping for all day. His own personal little Christmas miracle. Even if he is humiliated in the process.

QUOTES
Frasier: "Niles! What brings you here?"
Niles: "Oh I just dropped by to ask Daphne's opinion on a little present I got for Maris."
(Daphne emerges from her room, clad in a short, skintight dress and twirls.)
Daphne: "It's a bit tight under the arms. Shall I put back on the little red one so you can make your choice?"
Frasier (witheringly): "I think Niles has all the information he needs."
Daphne: "Fair enough." (Returns to her room, Niles watching her retreating behind longingly.)
Niles (defensively): "You know, Daphne and Maris are about the same size."
Frasier: "Give or take a foot!"

THE DRY WIT OF ROZ
Bulldog: "You can tell Father Mike has had a few: he's trying to get everyone to re-enact the Nativity scene!"
Roz: "Well, we know who we can get to play the ass!"

AND ISN'T THAT...?
Rosemary Clooney plays Gladys and Mel Brooks voices Tom. Who voices Barry, who does little but cry on his call, I don't know. Oh wait: yes I do. It's Ben Stiller. Well, if I had as little acting talent as him I'd cry too. Also features Dominick Dunne as Jeff and Eric Stolz as Don.

1.13 "Guess who's coming to breakfast?"

Frasier is a little embarrassed to find that his father's date stayed over from the previous night, but once he's got past that (and made a show of himself in front of Elaine) he is happy for his dad. Unfortunately he says so on the air, using names which was totally inappropriate. His father is not happy with his personal laundry being aired in public, so Frasier has to try to make it better. He goes on-air and asks Elaine to talk to his father, tells her he misses her and she should not hold Martin responsible for Frasier's mistake. He sets up a special romantic dinner in his apartment, hoping Elaine will come.

It backfires though, as everyone else in the building has heard the broadcast and thinking it the most romantic thing in the world, treat it as some sort of soap opera and further embarrass poor Elaine. It's up to Martin to try to convince her to give it another go.

QUOTES
Maryann: "Kids! You can't live with 'em, you can't shove 'em back in the womb!"

Frasier: "I need you to take dad out on Friday night."
Niles: "Oh! I wish you had said Saturday."
Frasier: "You have plans on Friday?"
Niles: "No, I have plans on Saturday."

Frasier: "Oh Niles! Nobody refers to sex as "getting lucky" any more!"
Niles: "I do."

I'd like now to reconfigure this section. As with my other series "And isn't that...?" will refer to guest stars who should be well known, but for the guest callers I'll be putting them in a separate section which I'm now going to call
THANKS FOR CALLING

Piper Laurie as Marieann, Elijah Wood as Ethan and Henry Mancini as Al

CHILDHOOD REVISITED
One of the endearing things about "Frasier" is that although the main character and his brother are grown men, references are often made to their growing up, and their father can, with a word or a gesture often make them feel like little kids again. It's quite funny to see these two forty-year olds argue like children and be verbally slapped down by Martin, showing us that no matter how old they get in years, Frasier and Niles are at heart still two bickering little boys. It's also heartening to see the effect a well-chosen word from their father can have on these two grown and professional men.

Here, Frasier is made to feel the naughty kid twice. When he returns to the apartment after having spoken about his father's private affairs on air, Martin tells him he wants a word with him and calls him "mister", obviously an epithet that evokes times when he was in trouble in Frasier's mind, as he grins "Sounds like someone's being taken out behind the woodshed!" to which Martin snaps "Don't tempt me!"

But far more effective is the closing scenes when Martin, tired of his son interfering in his life, orders him to face the wall. And he does. It's clear that no matter how old Frasier --- or Niles --- get, they're still as respectful and in some ways fearful of their old man, to the point where they can still get an earbashing or a ticking-off. It's also interesting that Martin can still picture his sons, even dressed in Armani and driving BMWs, as the little kids he helped his wife raise decades ago. At times, Frasier and Niles will always be his little boys.

1.14 "Can't buy me love"
Against his better judgement, Frasier has agreed to participate in a Batchelors' Auction for charity, as a favour to his dad. Bulldog has also agreed. Luckily, Frasier has been bought by a total babe and he is most happy. Bulldog has been bought by ... Daphne! She had started bidding when the action slowed and is now aghast to find that her bid was the only one, so she is stuck with him. Frasier makes an arrangement to meet Christina, his new "owner", but it turns out that she has been called to a shoot --- she's a model, of course! --- at the last moment and asks him if he could babysit her daughter. Left with no choice Frasier agrees.

Things do not go well. Frasier is not good with children and Renata is a typical product of the modern world, spending all her time on the phone to her friends, sulking and throwing cheetos to Eddie. She then starts badmouthing her mother, telling Frasier that she is a bad parent who hates her, which surprisingly, considering he's talking to a child who is annoyed at having been left with a man she does not know, Frasier believes. Bulldog seems to have met his match in Daphne, who is totally squiffy and gets him involved in a fight with a much bigger man.

When Frasier --- again, how can he be so stupid? --- confronts Christina about her qualfications for motherhood it of course transpires that Renata was lying, and nothing she said is true. Frasier though, in choosing to blindly believe the little girl --- why? --- has scuppered any chances of having a romantic night with the woman, who stalks off, highly affronted, and well she might be.

QUOTES
Daphne: "Why does Maris take the train? Why doesn't she fly to Chicago?"
Niles: "She won't fly, ever since that harrowing incident."
Daphne: "Oh dear! Did the plane nearly crash?"
Niles: "No. She was bumped down from First Class. She still wakes up screaming."

Martin: "Relax willya?"
Frasier: "That's easy for you to say! You're not the one jumping into the rottweiler pit with a pork chop around your neck!"

TJ: "It was horrible! They're like sharks out there, a feeding frenzy! The one who bought me had a crazy look in her eye!" (Enter Roz, looking hungry)
Roz: "Where do I pay?"

Frasier: "Child development is not my thing. My area of expertise is adult relations."
Christina: "Well, you won't be having any of those tonight!"

Christina: "Oh, and I only have one kidney: guess who has the other one?"

As there are no scenes in the station this episode we have no guest callers to mention.

EGGHEAD
I've alluded to it above but really, come on! Frasier can't be that gullible. A twelve-year old moody girl who has been, as she sees it, dumped by her mother with an unknown man, tells him pretty horrible things about that mother and Frasier, a perfectly well-balanced and intelligent and experienced individual, not to mention a practicing psychiatrist! --- believes her without a shred of proof? He doesn't even ASK Christina, even in some oblique way (asking to see her alleged tattoo would be a start, or how old the child is) to try to suss out the truth before he blunders right in and accuses her of being a bad mother! Are we really supposed to believe that a man so well used to dealing with the human heart and mind could honestly make such a mistake, which ends up costing him not only his evening, but potentially a real relationship?

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1.5 "Serge and Toni"

Seven years ago, we see an angry Toni shout at his mother "Why did you let him out?" and go looking for his brother, who is in the underpass attacking Catwoman, who we now know to be Julie. He arrives just in time to pull his brother off her, saving her life, and taking her to the hospital where he leaves her outside and rings the emergency bell. Knocking his brother out he begins to bury him, as their mother watches with a broken heart. Serge regains consciousness as the dirt is shovelled down upon him and cries out for his mother, but Toni hits him again with the spade and continues burying him alive.

Again, we cut to present day where this time instead of attacking her, Serge has taken Lena to his cottage and is caring for her. Toni arrives and his brother pretends that the other voice he can hear is their mother, but because Toni killed his brother their mother will not see him, and he drives away, disconsolate. At the Helping Hand, Victor is discovered to have disappeared, as well as a homeless lady who was there, who turns out to be the wife of Mr. Costa, Vivianne. She and Victor have gone to the American Diner, where Simon earlier attacked the bartender. Vivianne tells Victor that he needn't be scared; no-one can hurt him now, but the boy wants to know if he can hurt other people?

Adele asks her class if they know what is beneath the lake, telling them that there is a whole village buried there, and that it was flooded when the old dam burst. In the midst of her pupils' questions she thinks she hears Chloe asks why Simon killed himself, but she can't be sure. She also thinks she sees him outside the class. Beneath the lake, divers are amazed to find many dead animals floating. Deer. Foxes. Cows. There is no explanation for why they are there, or how they came to be in the water. Serge treats Lena's wound with a compound of nettles, which seems to heal it. Despite her promise, Chloe tells Thomas about Simon and he tells her she is to call him if "the angel" shows up again. She agrees to do so.

Laure comes to tell Julie that Victor has gone; in fact, she expects to find him in her apartment but he is not there and Julie is angry that her friend has let him go off with some homeless woman, as she sees it. Simon is brought to Camille's house by Pierre; he is introduced to the girl as being "like her". He is going to stay with them for a while till the heat dies down; with Victor and Vivianne missing the police will be swarming all over the Helping Hand, and it is not safe there for him. Camille hopes to get some answers out of Simon but he seems to know as little about why they were brought back as she does. He asks her to take a message to Adele, which she agrees to, quipping "We zombies must stick together."

In the hospital, doctors are amazed to find that, close to death when she was brought in, Lucy is in fact recovering. Her wounds are healing and she is getting stronger. Vivianne has been spotted by the police, but alone. When Julie goes to see her in the station, she realises that she is in fact, as she has been saying, Mr. Costa's wife, dead now for several decades. She is evasive about how she died though, changing her story for each person who asks. She confirms that Victor is also dead, and Julie tells her that she thinks she may also be dead, though Vivianne cannot confirm that for her. Camille takes Simon's message to Adele, to meet him that night so they can go away together. She says however she will not be coming.

Autopsies of the animals reveal that they all died by drowning, and the only possible explanation is that they ran, willingly, into the lake rather than face whatever was chasing them. They feared it more than drowning. Jerome goes to visit Lucy in hospital and is told about her miraculous recovery. Lena though is still missing and he is looking for her. Julie has decided to test her theory about possibly being dead by climbing onto the windowledge of her apartment, but she is stopped by the arrival of Laure, who then gets a call that Victor has been spotted. As she heads off to check Julie insists on going with her.

Victor has in fact returned to the Helping Hand, telling Pierre that he is dead, and that it was Pierre who killed him. Victor does not believe Pierre's claim that he tried to save him, and causes another vision or re-enactment of the fateful day. When Pierre's partner appears this time though and aims his gun at Victor Pierre fights back, wrestling with him for the weapon. In the midst of all this Julie and Laure arrive and the scene breaks down. When Simon realises Adele is not coming he goes to her house to try to convince her to leave with him, and Chloe calls Thomas, who arrives on the scene and shoots Simon. In the hospital, Lucy suddenly wakes up!

QUESTIONS?
Why did all the animals drown? What could have scared them so much that they would run into the lake rather than face it?

How are Lucy's wounds healing, and is this in some way related to her power to contact the dead? Was she in fact killed by Serge and now coming back to life?

Is Julie dead? We have seen that she was attacked by the same man as Lucy, and barely survived. But did she?

Is Simon now dead? He has been shot, but as he was already dead beforehand, can he be killed a second time? Or will he rise again? Can any of the "Revenants" be killed? If Vivianne Costa is to be taken as an example, she survived the burning of her husband's house and looks none the worse for wear.

And speaking of Mr. Costa's wife, why does she keep changing her story about how she died? And how, and when, did she die?

What is going on with the lake? Why is the water level dropping so rapidly?

With a history of unbalanced and murderous behaviour, why is Serge so keen to save Lena, rather than kill her and eat her liver, as he has done, or tried to do, at least twice already? What is so special about her?

And finally, some ANSWERS (raising more questions)
We have seen from this episode at least that Toni, though blamed for the almost-murder of Julie, actually saved her by rescuing her from his insane psychopathic brother. The fact that he obviously never mentioned Serge to the police, having buried him alive, would have meant that he would have been the last one to have seen her prior to her attack, but then again, if the underpass is covered by CCTV then why did the police not see him coming out with her body? Or did they, and just assume he had killed her, or tried to?

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
It's clear now that the dropping level of water in the reservoir is a cause for concern, and divers are down there trying to discover the cause. But while there they encounter the strangest thing: many animals floating beneath the lake, animals who seem to have voluntarily run into the water. The only explanation the police pathologist can give Thomas about this odd behaviour is that they were running from something, and that it terrified them more than the prospect of drowning. Was it the Revenants they were fleeing from, or something much worse?

We've also learned that some time ago (we're not told when, but it's certainly within living memory) the dam broke and the town flooded, and that the current one stands on the ruins of the previous, which is buried at the bottom of the lake. Now that the water level is falling, the old town is coming back up to the surface. Can this somehow be linked in with the dead coming back to life?

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Season 2 "Like life, only better!"

2.3 "Thanks for the memory"

On an asteroid somewhere, the "boys from the Dwarf" celebrate the anniversary of Rimmer's death, his 'deathday'. Completely blitzed out of their skulls, the four return to Red Dwarf, and Lister and Rimmer indulge in the time-honoured chat-after-you're-pissed-drunk, wherein Rimmer wonders why no-one likes him, when he does, as he sees it, everything right. Lister tells him that he needs to have time for people, and Rimmer reveals his innermost secrets, including the amount of times he has ever made love in his life (once!). Lister warns him not to tell him this most personal of secrets, but Rimmer is way out on the edge of the Drunkzone, and he ignores Lister, telling him anyway. Lister tells him he will regret it in the morning when he wakes up, sobres up and remembers what he has done...

The next morning when he wakes up, sobres up and remembers what he has done Rimmer is aghast and begs Lister not to tell anyone what he revealed to him. Lister, however, has problems of his own: he has awoken with not only a broken leg, but it is set in a cast as well! He can't for the life of him understand how this happened, and the mystery deepens further when the Cat hobbles in with the same complaint! In addition to this, although it is now Sunday, both clocks in the cabin say it is Thursday, and there are four pages missing from Lister's diary, not to mention the fact that the jigsaw Lister was doing the previous night is now completed, a feat he does not remember accomplishing.

Rimmer of course believes that was has happened is down to aliens, his favourite hobby horse. He postulates that the breaking of both Lister and the Cat's legs may have been an attempt by the mysterious aliens to communicate with them. Lister asks Holly to check what has happened by consulting the Black Box flight recorder, but when Holly goes to look for it he can't find it, and so they set off in search of the signal the Black Box emits. They find it on a moon, and on the way to recover it come across a series of what looks like huge flat footprints, and then, as they come across the Black Box they find it is in a shallow grave, marked with a tombstone, on which is the legend To the memory of the memory of Lisa Yates. This really spooks Lister, who says that he once used to go out with a girl called Lisa Yates...

Taking the Black Box back to Red Dwarf, they run the tape and find that after Rimmer had drifted off to sleep on that fateful night, Lister and the Cat had gone down to the hologram simulation suite in order that Lister could download eight months of his memory into Rimmer's unit, and thus give him memories of a romance Lister had had, with a girl called ... Lisa Yates! Wakening the next morning, Rimmer believed that he had had the affair, and was a very happy man. Lister of course played along with the fantasy, and although Rimmer was unable to resolve certain incongruities in the sequence of events (he being an orphan when his parents were alive, his moving to Liverpool for no apparent reason, and so on), the memory was so vivid and so pleasant to a man who had in reality only ever once made love to a woman that he ignored the discrepancies and lost himself in the recollection of the affair.

The whole thing went spectacularly wrong however when Rimmer "found the letters" Lister had written to Lisa, and suspected that he had been seeing 'his' girlfriend behind his back. Lister then had to explain what he had done, and Rimmer, shattered, made him promise to erase the short-term memories of all four so that no trace of the last four days should remain. In addition, Rimmer insisted they get rid of the Black Box, which they buried on a nearby moon. Lister, however, marked it with the tombstone, wanting to be able to find it again if need be. While they were carrying the tombstone to the quickly-dug and shallow grave in which they had placed the flight recorder though, the slab slipped and landed on both the Cat and Lister's feet (thus explaining the broken legs, and the "footprints", where the stone fell onto the moon's surface). Back at Red Dwarf, Lister tore the pages of his diary out, so that no evidence of what had transpired would remain, and then as they went to erase their memories, he placed the last piece of the jigsaw in place.

Best lines/quotes/scenes

The Cat gives his withering appraisal of Rimmer’s attempts to dance:

CAT: “Ha! You call that dancing? I've seen people on fire move better than that!”

The Deathday cake:

HOLLY: “What's that then?”
LISTER: “It's in the shape of a spanner, Holly, cos he was a technician.”
HOLLY: “Well that's very apt that is. If he'd been a postman you'd have baked it in the shape of an envelope I suppose?”
LISTER: “Yeah!”
HOLLY: “Gordon Bennett! It's lucky he's not a gynaecologist!”

What time is it?

LISTER: “What time is it?”
RIMMER crawls unsteadily to the clock and peers at it blearily. He is clearly suffering the awful after-effects of drinking.
RIMMER: “Saturday.”
LISTER: “Is that the best you can do?”
RIMMER: “There are some numbers next to it, but they could be anything.”

Rimmer has not yet met the right girl…

LISTER: “So, I mean, you haven't met the right girl yet.”
RIMMER: (With overdone sarcasm) “No, I haven't, Lister. I haven't met the right girl. And some just might say, (wags finger) given the fact that the human race no longer exists, coupled with the fact that I have passed on, some just might say that I'm leaving it a little bit on the late side!”

Aliens! Again.

RIMMER: “Somehow we've lost the last four days.”
CAT: “Did you look behind the fridge? If you lose something it's nearly always there.”
RIMMER: “Aliens!”
LISTER: “What?”
CAT: “What are you talking about, grease stain?”
RIMMER: “It's a well documented phenomenon. They kidnap you, give you a mind probe, erase your memory, and put you back.”
LISTER: “OK, aliens came aboard”.
RIMMER:”Without question”.
LISTER: “They broke my leg.”
RIMMER: “For some reason.”
CAT: “They broke MY leg.”
RIMMER: “Right.”
HOLLY: “And then they did a jigsaw.”
RIMMER: “Right.”
HOLLY: “Well, that's cleared that up then.”
RIMMER: “Look, you're not thinking alien. That's what aliens are: alien.They do alien things. Things that are... (shrugs) alien. Maybe this is the way they communicate.”
CAT: “By breaking legs?”LISTER: “And doing jigsaws?”
RIMMER: “Why should they speak the way we do? They're aliens.”
LISTER: “OK, professor, what does it mean?”
RIMMER: “Maybe, maybe, OK? Breaking your leg hurts like hell, OK? "Hel." They do it below the knee, "lo." "Hel-lo," gettit? They do it twice -- twice, "two." "Hello two." And the jigsaw must mean "you." "Hello to you."
CAT: “I wouldn't like to be around when one of these suckers is making a speech!”

The Cat is disappointed…
CAT: “What is this place?”
LISTER: “It's the hologram simulation suite. This is the room that creates Rimmer.”
CAT: “Have we come to blow this room up?”

Notes:

It’s an interesting departure for the series as it reaches the midway point of its second season, with a sort of whodunnit in space. It’s very cleverly written: without the backstory there is no way in hell you could ever figure it out, and if you tell me you did, then you’re a liar. A filthy, smegging, lying, smegging filthy liar! It’s not the greatest episode in season two (we’ve probably just covered that) but it is very inventive and shows another reason why Red Dwarf could distance itself from other comedy shows of the time, and why it still stands up today, so long after it was originally written.

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2.5 "Simon said"

Sam has another of his visions, in which he sees a man shoot another in a gun shop and then take his own life. This has in fact already played out in the opening scene, where a doctor enters the shop of a friend he knows, loads a shotgun, shoots him and then turns the gun on himself. We've also seen that, prior to this murder/suicide, the doctor took a call which seemed to instruct him to do this. Sam suggests they head to the Roadhouse and consult Ash, as his visions are usually linked to the appearance of the demon they're hunting, but Dean is more cautious, pointing out that if the hunters there realise that Sam has this power they may start looking at him as less of an ally and more as possible quarry.

Ash is unable to find any trace of the demon, so Sam asks if there were any housefires in the area from which his vision has been tracked to have come, Guthrie, Oklahoma. They hit paydirt, and Sam and Dean head off to Guthrie to see if this is another Max Miller they're dealing with (see season one's episode, "Nightmare"). What they actually come across seems to be a guy who just asks for things and gets them, including Dean's beloved Impala. Andy Gallagher, the guy in question, simply stops Dean, compliments him on his ride, and asks can he have it. Dean smiles, hands him the keys and gets out, and stands watching as Andy drives away, with a bemused smile on his face.

Meanwhile Sam is following Doctor Jennings, the man in his vision who shot up the gun store. Andy had stopped to talk to him, shook his hand and moved on. Sam worries that if Andy has been affected by his encounter with the demon, and become a killer, or some other sort of psycho, that he, Sam, may also turn out to be just as twisted. He remembers the demon said he had "plans" for Sam and all the other children. It was not then, and is not now, a reassuring thing to hear. Sam follows Dr. Jennings as he approaches the gun store, but legs it in before him and pulls the fire alarm, breaking the spell and putting Jennings at a loss. He then receives another call from Andy and promptly walks out under a bus.

When Sam learns, to his amazement, that Andy has the Impala, he begins to put things together. Andy is able to exert some sort of mind control over people, literally tell them what to do, and they will. Including walking to their deaths under the number 44 to Queens. But when he approaches the guys (who have by now got the Impala back) and asks what they're doing, Dean tells him everything, unable to lie. Sam, however, does not seem to be susceptible to his powers, probably because he too is psychic. He tells Andy that the same thing happened to their mother, and that he has abilities too. However when he asks him why he told the doctor to kill himself Andy looks genuinely puzzled. Just then Sam has another vision, in which he sees a girl immolate herself at a gas station.

As a fire tender rushes past they realise this vision has just come true, and when Dean investigates, while Sam keeps Andy with him, the truth is that the girl did set herself on fire, did get a call on her phone, but Andy did not make the call. Sam has been with him all the time and he never reached for a cell phone, if he even has one. After checking with Ash they find that the woman, Holly Beckett, could very well have been Andy's biological mother, as he is adopted and she gave birth to a baby boy on the very same day he was born. Dr. Jennings was the doctor who oversaw the adoption and not only that, Holly had twins!

As they investigate further, it turns out that his twin is in town, under the name of Weber, working for Tracy, who runs the coffee shop and has something of a thing for Andy, or had. As they race towards the shop, Sam has another vision wherein he sees Tracy, clad in her lingerie, jump off a ravine. They catch up to Weber as he is enticing/ordering Tracy out of her dress, and telling her that when they've finished she's going to jump off the ravine. Sam punches him and sticks a gun in his face, and he and Andy get tape over his mouth, but it seems this twin can control people without words: he manages to get Tracy to hit Sam over the head with a stick and he passes out.

He talks excitedly to his brother, telling him the "man with the yellow eyes" told him he had a twin, and that he had big plans for them both. He admits (as if we didn't already know) that he caused their mother and the doctor to kill themselves, because he is upset the two were split up; how much more of a force they could have been had they been allowed to stay together! But when he tries to get Dean, who is in the forest with a sniper rifle trained on him, to shoot himself, Andy kills him.

As the boys leave they give Andy their number, in case he needs it. Sam worries that at the end of the day, Andy turned out to be a killer, even if he did it to save his girlfriend and them. Dean plays it down, but Sam remembers that when his brother was forced by Andy to tell the truth --- the whole truth -- about themselves, he admitted he worried Sam was right about himself. Back at the Roadhouse, Ellen wants the details of their hunt, stating that they're all in the war together, and with very little in the way of weapons. Sam tells her about what he is, or what he thinks he is, and the demon's comment that he had plans for them. Ellen looks worried.

MUSIC
REO Speedwagon: "Can't fight this feeling"

Soundgarden: "Fell on black days"

Spinal Tap: "Stonehenge"


PCRs
Dean tells Sam "He full-on Obi Wanned me!" Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke's mentor from "Star Wars", as if you didn't know.

Andy later enlarges on this by saying, when he has worked his powers on a security guard, "These aren't the droids you're looking for", causing much hilarity among the trio.

Sam reminds Dean that he had OJ convicted "Before he got out of his white Bronco!" OJ Simpson, duh!

The "WTF??!" moment
No, none really. Again some twists but nothing that really makes you sit up. Meh, maybe when we realise that Andy isn't evil, that he has a twin. Yet even then it's not that sort of moment that makes your jaw drop or anything.

The ARC of the matter
Again we're meeting another "gifted child" that the demon apparently has plans for. This one, however, does not seem to be homicidally bent, though his brother is. The guys worry that in the case of Weber, his house did not burn down, there was no fire, and so the pattern they have been establishing and tracing for the last while may be a red herring. The abilities of the kids certainly seem to be manifesting themselves in different ways: Max Miller could move things by telepathy, Andy can control minds via the power of suggestion, as could his brother, though Weber seemed to be able to do so with just the power of his mind whereas Andy needed to make a verbal command. And Sam can see visions. And possibly has telekinesis. Once, so far.

There's certainly a growing sense of something big dark and evil gathering its forces, marshalling its troops and moving the pieces on a chessboard into position. Could be the demon they're hunting, or it could very well be something much more powerful and dangerous.

BROTHERS
Sam is haunted by his visions, but also by the fear that he is going to turn out to be a killer. He knows he has been chosen by the demon, but does not know why. It's unlikely to be to run messages or help the aged though, and he frets over the power that may lie dormant in him, that he may be unable to control once it's unleashed. Dean has always stood by him, told him he is not evil and could not be made so, but in the harsh light of honesty and truth, when Andy forces Dean to talk openly about who they are and why they are following him, Sam's brother reveals a worry that his sibling may be right: there may be forces at play inside him that he can't control, and he might just turn out to be as bad as, or worse than, the things they hunt.

Although this confession was made under duress, and Dean demands a do-over, in vino veritas as they say, and although there was no alcohol involved, Dean's mind was at the time laid bare and there was no way he could say anything but the pure, unvarnished truth, so Sam knows this is truly how his brother feels, even if he hides it, even if he does not admit it to himself. Deep down, Dean Winchester fears that the brother he hunts with may one day hunt him, or put him in the position of having to hunt his own flesh and blood. There's no way Dean can take it back, though he makes a valiant attempt, and the admission, though forced, must really hurt Sam and make him think that maybe he is not worrying over nothing.

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM!
I'm a frustrated writer, as if you didn't know, and if there's one thing that grinds my gears it's holes in plots. Loose ends that aren't tied up. Situations that come about that could not possibly work out that way. Facts that aren't checked. Okay, that's more than one thing, admittedly, but they all boil down to the same thing: read your proofs! Make sure everything you've written holds up to close examination, because believe me, there are people out there --- and I'm one of them --- who are poring over your work, just waiting for you to slip up so they can say "Gotcha!"

This new section will run in every synopsis of every series I look at, wherever I find plot holes or inconsistencies or just plain lazy writing, and I will be naming and shaming. You don't care about that of course but hey, it keeps me off the streets.

Ordinarily the writing in "Supernatural" is pretty top-drawer, but like any series which uses various writers, they occasionally slip up, and here I feel there are two not quite major, but important plot holes. Both center on Weber.

1. How did he get the cell number of a woman who has not been his mother for over twenty years? He called her on her cellphone to give her the instruction to set herself on fire, but how did he get her number? This is important because, without her suicide the guys would possibly not have put two and two together and even realised that Andy had a twin. If he had gone to the station, passed by her and whispered to her, then okay, I guess. But even at that, how did he know she was there and more to the point, why was she there? Twenty years after she gave both her kids up for adoption she just happens to be at the place where both of them are now living? Come on! It's a bit tenuous, is it not?

2. Why, in the vision Sam saw, though he changed it, was Doctor Jennings to kill the gunshop owner? Weber had nothing against him. Why not just get the doctor to go in, load the gun and kill himself? I know he was evil and probably did it for effect, but still. Also, how did he get Jennings's number? I suppose that could have been on a business card. Again though, a little weak I feel...

Ah! I feel all important and smug now! Nothing like bringing someone's work down to make you feel better about yourself! ;)

2.6 "No exit"

Investigating the disappearance of a girl in Philadelphia, the boys find residue of ectoplasm at her apartment. Back at the Roadhouse earlier, Jo had given them a file she had put together, showing that over the last eighty years the same type of girl --- blonde, young --- has disappeared in that city from the same building, one every ten years. The police see no pattern due to the inordinately long gaps between the disappearances, but Sam and Dean agree with Jo that it looks like something they should check out. They realise that for ectoplasm to form, the spirit has to be very angry indeed, but just as they leave the apartment they run into Jo, who pretends Dean is her boyfriend and they are thinking about renting the place.

Earlier, Jo has had a fight with her mother about her wanting to go off hunting, and is obviously now rebelling. Seems she has somewhat pushed the guys into supporting her investigation. While they're there they detect more ectoplasm and find a clump of blonde hair in a vent. Jo also says she feels like something reached for her. The next morning the news breaks that another girl has gone missing in the building, and when they look into it, the three of them find the usual signs -- cracking plaster, ectoplasm --- but they have no leads. Dean at first thought maybe somebody died violently in the building and was seeking revenge, but there are no records of any sort of violent deaths here over the last eighty-two years.

Then they find that the apartments were built next door to what used to be a prison, and the field which the building now stands on was where criminals used to be hanged. Although there is a long list of the people executed in the prison, one name stands out: H.H. Holmes, America's very first serial killer. It fits: he used to torture and mutilate blonde girls, chloroforming them to knock them out first. Dean mentions he has smelled something in the hallway earlier but couldn't pin it down; now he realises it was chloroform. The problem burning Holmes' bones is that his body is encased in concrete, ostensibly because Holmes did not want anyone messing with his body. However when they realise that Holmes' MO was to trap his victims and keep them alive for as long as he could, they reason that the girl who just went missing, Teresa, could still be here, hidden somewhere within the walls of the building, and so finding her has to be their first priority.

Their search does not yield anything, but Jo, crawling through a duct, goes out of sight of Dean and then he hears her scream. When he breaks through the wall she is gone. She ends up in a disused sewer, where she finds Teresa also imprisoned. The hand of the spirit reaches in and grabs her head, tearing out some of her hair as Dean and Sam try to pinpoint her location with a metal detector. Crawling through the sewer they arrive just in time to save Jo, Dean shooting Holmes' spirit who flies backwards. He's not destroyed though, and Dean figures they have to lay a trap for him, using Jo as bait, as she had originally been trying to do when she came to the apartment. They manage to trap Holmes in a salt circle and taking Teresa with them they exit the sewer.

Aware that the trap is far from permanent, they steal a cement truck and seal up the sewer completely, rather ironically mirroring the current state of Holmes' physical remains. On their return to the Roadhouse Ellen tells Jo that her father was betrayed by John Winchester, that the two had been working on a hunt and John let him die. We don't get any more details but she seems really angry about it, and at seeing the possibility of history repeating itself with her daughter and the two Winchester boys. On finding out what has happened, Jo is shocked, but not as much as Dean and Sam, as they leave, confused as to why their father would leave a fellow hunter to die?

MUSIC
Foreigner: "Cold as ice"

Cheap Trick: "Surrender"


PCRs
Dean quips that there's a case in LA. Young girl, captured by an evil cult. He reveals the name is Katie Holmes. Sam laughs. I'm assuming this is a reference to Holmes marrying Tom Cruise, and his well-known association with Scientology. (Also coincidental that the surname is the same as that of the serial killer they end up hunting. Hmm...)

Dean mentions the Stay Puffed Marshmallow man, while they're looking at ectoplasm. Again, it's an educated guess, but I think they're referencing Ghostbusters here.

The "WTF??!" moment
I would guess it would have to be the revelation that John Winchester was responsible for the death of Jo's father, Ellen's husband, and the tension that suddenly creates within the group.

The ARC of the matter
Though it may not turn out to be arc-worthy, it's nevertheless a shock when we learn that John left his partner to die, if that is indeed what happened, and the dynamic between Jo, Ellen and the boys is now completely changed. Whether this will reflect on further episodes/seasons remains to be seen. Certainly, the fledgling relationship between Jo and Dean is now in serious trouble: in the beginning she was flirting with him, she pretending to be his girlfriend, he playfully smacking her bottom, and as the episode runs on it's clear Dean is very fond of her and terrified when she gets taken. But at the end, any hope of a life together, or even a lust-filled night, seems quashed when Jo learns what his father did.

http://www.trollheart.com/plot2.jpg

As I’ve mentioned in recent Supernatural writeups and occasionally other places too, I’m something of an aspiring/frustrated writer, and one of my bugbears is bad plotting, lazy writing and a lack of attention to detail. Okay, so that’s three things, but they all come under the one heading: laziness. I’ve seen a good few decent movies (and some very bad ones) suffer from often a very simple slipup in the plot, a case of the writer forgetting or omitting to mention something, or assuming something happens when the viewer cannot reasonably be expected to make that assumption. It happens too often and I wonder it isn’t more widely marked; people in general seem to adopt an “Emperor’s new clothes” approach: if nobody else saw that then I’m not pointing it out. I must be wrong if no-one else saw it. I must just not get it. And so on.

In this series I’ll be looking at some serious plot flaws in movies, good and bad, famous and niche, and pointing out where the writing got sloppy and how, if at all --- and in most cases it really did --- it affected the overall enjoyment I took from the picture. Also how it impacted on the main storyline, if it did.

The first one I want to look at is one I would not necessarily consider a good film, but in fairness that could be due to the glaring plot holes I’m about to describe. Without these, perhaps the movie would have come across differently to me. But as far as I’m concerned, screen writers are paid enough to check their work, or have it checked, before it hits the cinema, and anyone who lets incongruities of this magnitude through does not really deserve the title or prestige of being a writer.

Some of these holes in the plot I'm pointing out are small, granted, but some are large enough to take the aircraft in the movie down, were they to appear in its fuselage. And all told, there are not two or three, but twelve separate issues I have with this film. Yeah, twelve plot holes, of varying sizes, but they all contribute to a piece of writing that amazingly Roger Ebert described as "an airtight plot"! I respect the guy, but if he thinks this plot is airtight then I wouldn't want him designing any airlocks for my space station, is all I can say...
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Flightplan.jpg
Movie title: Flightplan
Year: 2005
Genre: Thriller/Drama
Stars: Jodie Foster
Directed by: Robert Schwentke
Written by: Billy Ray

Basic storyline: A woman (Foster) who is an aircraft designer is returning with the body of her husband who has died overseas. With her is her daughter. During the flight her daughter goes missing and Foster must try to convince everyone on the plane that she is not going mad; her daughter was with her, must still be on the aircraft.

Plot Hole One: While Foster’s character, Kyle Pratt sleeps her daughter, Julia, is apparently taken from her. Now, I admit that many of the passengers are probably also asleep, watching the movie, reading or just looking out the windows but surely someone on board that plane sees a strange man move in and take the little girl? And why does she go with him? She doesn’t know him and has surely been brought up better than to go with a stranger? I guess she could be asleep but it still should look suspicious. More, when she goes missing someone should remember seeing her being abducted.
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Plot Hole Two: It becomes clear that the terrorists have manipulated Kyle into being the fall guy, but the plan is a little weak. In order for it to work, first of all they have to ensure Julia is onboard, and how can they make sure that happens? One or both of them could have missed the flight, it could have been cancelled, any number of things. But the coffin is on the plane, with the bomb inside. So if all elements of this plan didn’t come together, what were they going to do?

Plot Hole Three: How is it that of all the passengers on the aircraft not ONE of them can remember seeing a woman CARRYING HER CHILD onto the plane? Nobody saw that. And not only that, it’s not that they don’t remember her: they all assert she was not there. How do they know? How did NOBODY see Julia, not even the mouthy children of one of the couples?

Plot Hole Four: We find out that one of the flight attendants is “in on the conspiracy”, fine. But why does the other one, when she hears that Julia was not on the passenger manifest, say she did not see her either, when she must have seen her? Okay, so the facts may be blinding her but what about the evidence of her own eyes? Kyle and her daughter board first, they are the first passengers on the aircraft, which may have been pre-arranged by the "bad" flight attendant in order that nobody sees them getting on, but surely the other flight attendant would remember more clearly the very first passengers on, especially one carrying her daughter?

Plot Hole Five: Not that big but … why does the arab guy who Kyle accuses remark that he always watches his own children, and doesn’t lose them then blame someone else? Everyone up to now has agreed Julia was not on the plane: why is he saying she was but has now gone missing? And what was all this about Kyle saying she saw him looking int o her daughter's room the previous night? Is that just a red herring? Is she close to losing it? It's never returned to so it's just left as a very sloppy loose end, a vehicle for a rather clumsy post-911 blame-the-arabs-for-everything idea.
http://www.trollheart.com/fplan2.png
Plot Hole Six: When the captain checks with the mortuary in Berlin about Kyle's husband why do they assert that Julia died with her father? The director of the morgue is to be arrested so must be in on the plot, but was all his staff too? And are we to assume that when the details were checked it just happened to be him that answered?

Plot Hole Seven: Again, a small one, but where did Kyle get the key she uses to gain access to the aircraft’s emergency systems in order to create a diversion?

Plot Hole Eight: Assuming that they want her to believe that her daughter died with her husband, why is there no coffin with the child in it? Would she have left her daughter back in Berlin?

Plot Hole Nine: Again, a small one but ... Kyle handcuffs Carson, the Air Marshall who turns out to be the bad guy, so how did the "bad" flight attendant free him from his handcuffs so quickly? She didn’t even look for a key. One second she was approaching, next Carson was free.

Plot Hole Ten: Carson said they needed a credible hijacker who knew the plane. Why? What difference did it make? If she ran raving like a lunatic looking for her child without knowing about the layout of the aircraft, Kyle would still be seen as a madwoman. Why was it important she knew about the layout of the plane? And adding to that, she worked on engines. It's not to be assumed she would therefore know the full layout of the aircraft. These things are often assembled in sections, at different work stations. She might only ever have seen engines, not any other part of the fuselage. To imagine she could find her way around the innards of the jet, just because she worked on and designed the engines, is I think pushing it a bit.

Plot Hole Eleven: The attendant runs from the plane which is surrounded by cops and military, and nobody even challenges her, never mind shoots at her or orders her to show her hands? She just runs off into the night? Yes she is eventually captured, but would YOU just run out with all those guns presumably trained on the aircraft?

Plot Hole Twelve: Similarly, after BLOWING UP THE PLANE Kyle emerges from the smoke --- and remember, she’s the prime suspect --- and is not even challenged? Okay, so she has her daughter in her arms but still.
http://www.trollheart.com/fplan3.png
One of the most cloying and aggravating things about this movie are the voices at the end as Kyle walks away with her daughter. People say “I told you there was a little girl” and “She never gave up.” Yeah, well where were they when she was being accused of being insane, and weren’t these the same people who looked at her as if how dare she disrupt their flight, looking for a fictional daughter? Now suddenly they all believe, which is understandable, but now they all believed in the first place? Oh sure.

One final thing, and it is a small niggle but bugs me nevertheless. The movie is called “Flightplan”. A flightplan is the information an aircraft lodges with the control tower and ATC as to where it’s going and how it’s going to get there. The “flightplan” referred to here seems to be the plan the three people have to get money out of the airline and blame it on Kyle. Not quite the same thing. Annoying, to someone who is an aircraft nut.

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/i...kr-fkZDrkcE2Ow

Episode Three

Gail is brought the news about Malcolm’s death which makes him the prime suspect in Hatties’s death, and the family are targeted as people make up their own minds. Steve is pleased to hear that his ex-wife is coming to offer her support to her sister, Hattie’s mother, while Alan goes to face his investigation, and Everett has to change his plans when Linus is sick and wants to stay home. While there, he conducts a search of the house and though he finds the bag Everett had hidden away it is now empty. Or not quite: he finds a card in it, which leads him to, of all things, a new age workshop. Before he goes in he sees the vision of his mother again. He learns that Hattie went there, and that Everett is well known there, and often drove Hattie home.

A TV reconstruction of the crime scene worries Gail, who demands the film crew don’t use footage of her home. Caitlin finds more stones, some in her shoes, some falling, she says, out of the sky. She tells Linus Hattie believed in the spirits of the forest, elementals, and some part of her wonders if her sister isn’t now trying to contact her in some way? She further tells him that the police found Hattie’s bag in her locker, in which was her passport, money and clothes, so it looked as if she was ready to run away. Steve confides to the social worker that his brother may be singled out as Hattie’s abductor; he wants him sectioned but the careworker will not sanction it.

James gets rid of all the evidence of Carroll’s Field and Hattie’s involvement in it, to try to deflect any suspicion that may be growing. That is growing. And it’s more than suspicion. Remember Sandra’s comment last episode? Gail, despite being warned by her son not to say anything to the police, blabs the first chance she gets about all the money her husband has lost on the development. James is furious but can’t show it in front of DS Mills. Outside a pub Fiona takes a picture of Everett with another blonde woman, and is almost seen by him but seems to have got away without being detected. Having failed to secure Seth via sectioning, Steve has him move in with him. He doesn’t exactly make him feel welcome though, and gives him his son’s room, which we see is still decorated as if the boy is coming home. Seth is impressed, and Steve lets slip that he will see his son soon. Seth thought he was in Spain but Steve tells him Angie, his ex-wife, is coming to lend support to the Sutton family, and that he will see his son then.

Seth talks about Hattie. He tells his brother that the girl was a “nice spirit” and the woods “wouldn’t have allowed him” to hurt her. Steve is even less convinced than he was before. Gail goes back into the woods and sees Everett making out with the blonde woman. She now realises that the bird hide is the perfect place to be a peeping tom, and she now knows what her late husband was doing in the woods. Birdwatching. Yeah. Of a sort. When she gets home and talks to James she suddenly remembers that he never brought any of his girlfriends home when he was younger, and a dark and twisted picture begins to emerge of her husband. James tells her that when they were in France Malcolm was picked up for masturbating in a public place. He didn’t tell his mother because, he says, he assumed she knew. She reveals that she was only fourteen when she met her late husband…

Seth leaves Steve’s house and appears to find something that scares him in the woods. Alan returns home, much happier than when he left. He says the girl withdrew the complaint so he’s off the hook. Fiona’s daughter insists she and her mother saw Hattie on the day she disappeared, but Fiona belligerently tells her she is wrong. She says she would have remembered it. The little girl gets upset but Fiona sticks to her guns, as if trying to deny that what her daughter says is the truth. Caitlin lets Linus listen to the last voicemail message her sister ever made, a call she didn’t answer and she now feels a massive sense of guilt, knowing her twin was trying to call her for help but she was too wrapped up in her own world to bother taking the call. An angry mob --- or possibly local troublemakers --- throw fireworks into Gail’s house and paint obscenities outside.

As Caitlin comes out from the bathroom in Linus’s house, Everett mistakes her for Hattie, then mentions something that makes the acronym NDN mean something: Next Door Neighbour. Caitlin shrinks away from Linus. Seth accuses Steve of taking the girl, saying nothing brings a family together like a tragedy, and telling his brother he is so desperate to see his son that he would go to any lengths to make that happen.

QUOTES
Fiona: “Well, Malcolm Spicer’s suicide is as good as a confession, isn’t it?”
Cop: “The DI doesn’t think so. I mean, Carroll’s Field was over a year ago now, and half the town was at those protests.”

Gail: “I drove him to that tree, I tied the knot in the noose. He was more afraid of me than dying alone in the woods. I’m worse than death!”

Steve: “What do you want with your roast?”
Seth:”Nothing: I’m a vegan.”
Steve: “Get you some turf from the garden centre then!”

Linus: “What are you doing out of the woods?”
Seth: “I’ve seen the end of the world.”

Seth: “Bad Seth’s killed Hattie. I’ve seen what he’s done.”

Everett: “Aren’t you lucky to have pick-and-mix next door neighbours?”
Caitlin: “NDN. Next Door Neighbour. It’s you, Linus!”

SUSPECTS
Malcolm

The signs are pointing away from him now. Even though he’s dead, having taken his own life, the mystery continues, and it’s emerging that Malcolm may have liked boys and so would not have taken a girl. This does not keep him from being tried and found guilty by the village, of course, who decide that his suicide is proof positive that it was he who took Hattie. Her father worries that if Malcolm was responsible, how will he now find his daughter with her abductor, perhaps killer, now dead?

Everett

The signs are pointing more towards him. Linus finds out that his father did know Hattie, though he denied it. He used to meet her at an arts class and often drove her home. When he sees Caitlin come out of the bathroom in his house there is a mirror on the wall and in it he sees the blonde twin. Fiona has established his type: young and blonde, and the bag that could have either damned or cleared him is now empty. He makes a cryptic remark to Linus: “You’re hard to kill”, though it may be nothing. But let’s not forget that if Linus is the NDN that was found scrawled in Hattie’s locker, Everett lives next door too…

Seth

Perhaps too easy a target. Seth obviously has some mental problems, and he’s a big man. But he tells Steve that Hattie was a “good spirit”, and he seems to listen to the trees, whom he says would not allow him to hurt her. Of course, as mentioned last episode it was him who found Malcolm, and he seemed to be pleased about it. Maybe though he was just happy that suspicion should have moved from him. The local yobs are still determined to put him in the frame though, even going so far as to try to blackmail his brother to stop them from revealing what they know, which is basically nothing anyway. Still, if the word gets out that there is a “crazy man” living in the village, people may draw their own conclusions…

Steve

On the other side of the coin, Seth accuses Steve of setting the whole thing up, as an excuse to get his ex-wife --- and more importantly, his son --- to come back to the village. This has been remarked upon before, and it certainly doesn’t help to remove Steve from the list of suspects.

Alan

His investigation mysteriously and suddenly dropped, is there anything now to tie the copper to the abduction? That hair in the attic? Was it a bird’s nest? Is he just a red herring? But if so, why is his wife so determined to tell herself that neither she nor her daughter saw Hattie that day?

Linus

With the shock revelation at the end, is Linus back in the frame? He’s certainly her next door neighbour (though that’s no crime) and is interested in Caitlin, but we’ve seen no evidence he had any feelings for her sister. Nevertheless, he must be pushing his way back into the lineup at this point, unlikely though he seems as a suspect.

Small town, small minds
Of course, with Malcolm’s hanging himself he is seen as having confessed to the deed, which is bad news for Gail and James. Their house is attacked, vandalised and they are plagued by nasty phone calls all hours. Gail learns of her husband’s penchant for little boys and is so disgusted that she says if he wasn’t already dead she would kill him. But nobody is interested in her revulsion. With Malcolm dead there are only the living for the vengeful to turn their anger on, and Gail and her son are seen as having known about, perhaps even been complicit in, Malcolm’s crime. Those who went on the search that night will remember his reluctance to join in, and will look on this as further proof of his guilt.

Coming in 2014!
Before I get to my next entry in this journal, just a quick heads-up on the series intended to be featured here in the coming months. Some may not be for a while but I will do my best to ensure they are all at least started by year's end. These are not in order.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...n_Mars_OST.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi..._TV_Titles.jpg
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...at_the_End.jpg
http://images.zap2it.com/tvbanners/h...g-the-rift.jpg
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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...3c/DS9logo.JPG
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV...640_SY720_.jpg

As well as the return of some old favourites. Well, they're old favourites of mine!
http://img2.imagesbn.com/p/883929246...4_s260x420.JPG
http://englishcoursedublin.com/wp-co..._tv_series.jpg


Ran out of image space but also expect the return of Futurama, Spooks, The New Statesman and some other new series like 24, which I forgot to mention up top, and The West Wing. 2014 gonna be a busy year for Trollheart! It's all to come!

http://s5.postimg.org/xv0u0fgwn/cpb5.png

Important note: This episode marks the point where the arc really gets going in earnest, and is so important that not only is it the only episode being posted this time out, but by itself it exceeds the MCL, so I've had to split this one single episode up into two posts. Yeah, it's just that important and pivotal!

Because of the arc beginning, from here, to be more pronounced and obvious from this in, I'm going to be using some new logos, which will depict how arc-centric the episode is, or isn't. Basically, if you see this

http://www.trollheart.com/bab5test.png
the episode has some serious arc material in it and really --- if you're following along or watching for the first time --- you can't afford to miss it. This
http://www.trollheart.com/bab5test2.png
indicates there is some arc material in the episode but it's not as important or vital to the storyline and finally an episode carrying this image http://www.trollheart.com/bab5test3.png
is pretty standalone and, though few episodes from here on can be skipped, you will probably feel less lost (though not entirely) if you give this one a miss. These "arc headings" can also be viewed in conjunction with my new rating system, which I'll be applying retrospectively, using the images of Starfuries to indicate how good or bad the episode is.

http://www.trollheart.com/starfury5sml.png

Basically, five 'Furies is an unmissable, brilliant episode while one 'Fury is a real turd in every way. There will be few if any of these (cough) "Infection" (cough)

Season Two: "The coming of Shadows" (Part Five)

2.9 "The coming of Shadows"
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The ailing Centauri emperor is making plans to visit Babylon 5, above the objections of his Prime Minister, and the much more vocal protests of G'Kar, who believes the fact that the man directly responsible for the enslavement of his people is allowed onboard to be an abomination. Sheridan, however, thinks it will raise the profile of the station, show the naysayers and doubters back on Earth that something positive is being done with their tax credits, and also reminds G'Kar that this could be his personal opportunity to speak to the emperor and perhaps negotiate on behalf of his people. The Narn ambassador is not listening though, and leaves, muttering dark veiled threats.

Lord Refa of course has no intention of letting such an opportunity go to waste, and has arranged for Londo to give a speech during an audience with the emperor, in which he will outline the decline of the empire, the need for change, and make some predictions about the economy which Refa and his associates will ensure come true. The net effect will be to make Londo look forward-thinking and inspirational, a man wtih his finger on the pulse, and show the emperor to be weak and out of touch. Londo remarks that after he has delivered his speech he will hardly be flavour of the month at court, but Refa, with a chilling smile, reminds him that the emperor's health is “fragile at best”, and that when he dies then Londo will be very much in favour with the new order. Londo is uneasy, but he has agreed to support Refa and cannot back out now.

G'Kar, too, has a plan for the emperor, supported by his government: to assassinate him. A strange man arrives at the station and lurks around, watching Garibaldi. But it's hard to get the drop on Michael and he arrests the guy, worried that he might be a security risk, given their high-profile visitor. The emperor intends to make an important speech and Garibaldi is not about to let anything happen, not on his watch. However what does happen is totally outside his control, as on the way to the podium the emperor collapses, and has to be moved to medlab. He tells Franklin that he has a very important message, something he was going to reveal in his speech, and as he does not trust any Centauri to relay the message properly he asks the doctor to do so.

Refa is already moving, trying to jockey for position as his rivals make their move. He asks Londo to help him make his powerplay, and Mollari calls on Morden, to have his associates take out the Narn listening post in Quadrant 14, on the border of Centauri space. Franklin goes to see G'Kar, delivering the message that he was asked to. The message is: he is sorry. The emperor has offered an apology to the Narn Regime for all the evils perpetrated upon them, all the lands taken, all the blood spilled. He is taking the first step, and G'Kar is stunned. Londo has another dream of his future, in which he sees himself on the throne, sees the huge hand reachng out of the stars prophesied by Elric the Technomage, sees himself grappling to the death with G'Kar, as he has seen this vision of his death many times before.

Tragically, G'Kar meets Londo and has a drink with him just before he hears of the attack on Quadrant 14. It will be the last friendly action between the two, as hours later he will discover that the old war has been reignited. Garibaldi gives in to the demands of his prisoner to speak to him. The man tells him that he has a message for him. When Garibaldi puts the disc on, he hears the voice of Jeffrey Sinclair! His ex-commander tells his old friend that he has learned that there is a “great darkness” coming, as again Elric said. He tells him that the man who bears the message is a Ranger, an elite force under Sinclair's command. He should trust him. He's placing them at Babylon 5's disposal; they are intelligence gatherers, and will keep him updated on the coming storm. When G'Kar learns of the attack he is incandescent with rage, and goes to kill Mollari but is stopped by Sheridan, who reasons with him that he will need their help in the coming days, and G'Kar must choose between personal revenge and the safety of his people.

On Centauri Prime the old Prime Minister is murdered by agents of Refa's, removing the final obstacle to his plans. Garibaldi goes to Sheridan with the information he has, though he has been ordered, or asked, by Sinclair not to reveal its source. Sheridan knows enough about his security chief now to trust him and take him at his word. In his final moments of life the emperor, hearing from Refa of the attack on Quadrant 14 and the reignition of the ancient war, his plans and dreams torn cruelly from him at the last, whispers to Mollari that they are all damned, and takes his last breath. Sheridan tells Mollari that he intends to ensures the safety and proper treatment of the Narns on Quadrant 14 by sending observers to monitor their treatment, a “threat” which has the effect of forcing Londo to allow the civilian Narns to return to their homeworld instead of being made slaves and put into forced labour camps.

As a result of the attack, Narn not surprisingly declares war on Centauri, and the hope for peace the late emperor cherished is destroyed. The old enemies are at each others' throats once again, but this time the Centauri have powerful, shadowy allies. Before departing the station, Refa tells Mollari that all opposition back home has been crushed, and that the emperor's nephew is to ascend the throne; their puppet, leaving Refa and Londo pulling the strings. Things are about to get a lot nastier at court.

QUOTES
Sheridan: “G'Kar, don't do something we'll both regret.”
G'Kar: “It is too late for that, Captain. Too late by far.”

Londo: “This conversation makes you uncomfortable?”
Vir: “Yes. Yes it does.”
Londo: “Then for once we have something in common.”

G'Kar: “It is a strange feeling to know suddenly that all the decisions in your life have brought you to this place. There is no longer doubt or uncertainty. The future consists of only three probabilities: In the moment that I strike, the emperor and I will both die, or he will die and I will spend my life in prison. Or I will fail to kill him. For the first time in my life, the path is clear.”

Londo: “Go and find Mr Morden and bring him here.”
Vir; “Londo, don't do this!”
Londo: “I have no choice!”
Vir: “Yes you do! I know you don't listen to me but just this once I'm asking, don't do this. There's no turning back once you go down that road!”
Londo: “Do I have to go look for him myself?”
Vir: “No. No, I'll go, and I'll bring him back here. And one day, I'm going to remind you of this conversation. Maybe then you'll understand.”

G'Kar: “I was ready! I had prepared myself, I had made my peace with the universe, I had put all my affairs in order! I had the dagger in my hand! And he has the indecency to start dying on his own! Never in my life have I seen a worse case of timing!”

G'Kar: “The emperor! How is the poor fellow! I was so looking forward to opening ... a dialogue!”

G'Kar: “Mollari! I'm going to get you --- a drink!”

Sinclair: “Stay close to the Vorlon, and watch the shadows: they move when you're not looking.”

Centauri Emperor: “How will this end?”
Kosh: “In fire!”

Refa: “What did he (the emperor) say?”
Londo: “He said, 'Continue: take my people back to the stars'”.
Later, Refa asks in private, “What did he really say?”
Londo: “He said, we are all damned.”
Refa: “Well, it's a small price to pay for immortality.”

Sheridan: “I should mention that I've just received permission from my government to send observers to the colony. Their job will be to monitor the treatment of the civilian population.”
Londo: “They are not welcome!”
Sheridan: “Well we're sending them anyway! Unless you'd like to try shooting down an Earthforce transport? Personally, I'd advise against it.”

G'Kar: “For a hundred years the Centauri occupied our world, devastated it. We swore we would never let that happen again. This attack on our largest civilian colony has inflicted terrible damage, loss of life. They have crossed a line we cannot allow them to cross. As a result two hours ago my government officially declared war against the Centauri Republic. Our hope for peace is over. We are now at war. “

IMPORTANT PLOT ARC POINTS
War with the Narn
Arc level: Orange turning to Red later
As the Centauri renew their aggression against their old enemy, this will just be the first step on their path back to power, and soon few races or worlds will be able to stand against them. Backed by Mr Morden and his allies, they will go forth across the galaxy and destroy, attack and conquer, as they did in the old days. However Londo must harbour a sneaking suspicion somewhere that he has been played, that he is following the path Morden has laid down for him, and is being led inexorably into a dark and cold abyss, from which there can be no escape.

The significance of the Centauri's war against the Narn will grow as the season develops, and provide a springboard into some of the biggest developments of the next three seasons. You heard the introduction at the beginning of each episode this season: “the year the Great War came upon us all”? It's about to kick off.

Sinclair
Arc Level: Red
We all thought we'd seen the last of the previous commander of Babylon 5 once season one ended, but it would appear we are wrong. What we seen onscreen is not stock footage, used to allow Michael O'Hare a cameo in the show, as many other series might. No. This is a new role for him, and so the story of his being sent to Minbar is not just a clever plot device to explain his disappearance from the show, but will become an integral part of the next two seasons. We will not see Sinclair again for some time, but when we do, it will be momentous.

Coup d'etat
Arc Level: Orange
With the emperor in failing health, he must know that the trip to Babylon 5 could be the last one he may ever make, and indeed so it turns out. But he is anxious – desperate even --- to deliver his message of apology to the Narn, and so he risks the trip, which costs him his life. Not only that, he does not get the chance to make his speech, though he entrusts it to Franklin. Although the doctor passes it along word for word to G'Kar, and the Narn is for a short moment taken aback and full of hope, when the war is restarted Mollari pretends that the emperor has given it his blessing, when in fact he has told him that his people are now damned for what they have done.

The death of the emperor, and the subsequent removal of the Prime Minister, his loyal and dear friend, clears the way for a new man to ascend the throne, the emperor's nephew, who we will meet soon enough. He is to be little more than a figurehead, however you know what they say about leashing mad dogs? Londo's star is certainly on the rise, but growing too is the darkness inside him, the evil that will eventually claim him, and which Vir has tried, and will continue to try, to warn him against. Refa, based on homeworld, believes he is in charge, but must fear Londo's unknown allies who have so easily brought about the victory that resulted in the success of the coup. Londo had better watch his back...

Rangers
Arc Level: Red
We hear the word mentioned only once, but this elite fighting force will become more and more important as the series progresses, and you can certainly be sure we will hear much more of them, as their presence, and then their reputation, spreads out across the galaxy.

Taking sides
Arc Level: Red
This will become a recurring motif as the war goes on, and drags in other worlds and other races, and others have reason to fear the Centauri and their allies. Initially, Sheridan convinces Earth to at least support if not ally with the Narn – this is not Earth's war, but they can help, just as the US helped long before coming into World War II --- but you would have to wonder what the motivation is behind this, from Earthgov's point of view? Clarke has made it clear he has no time for aliens, but perhaps he also fears the power of the resurgent Centauri Republic, and worries that if left unchecked they could become a threat to Earth. So for now he agrees to go along with the captain's idea of observers, even if only used as a stick to beat Londo with and make him accede to their demands with regards to the Narn civilians, but later he may have second thoughts.

Ascendancy at Court
Arc Level: Red
There’s no doubt that the name of the previously-laughed at and ignored ambassador to Babylon 5 is suddenly being taken seriously again, seriously enough for Refa to have entrusted him with the plans of he and his associates to depose or replace the old emperor, although this may be more along the lines of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”; Refa knows a little something about the power and influence Mollari wields with allies of which he personally knows nothing, and has seen firsthand what they can do. It would be unwise to go up against such a man, and to make an enemy of him. Had Londo not sided with Refa, you have to wonder if the coup might have gone ahead, given that Mollari and his powerful associates would then perforce be on the other side?

But now, as he makes plans to demonstrate once again his power and the reach of his hand, there can be no doubt that Londo Mollari is becoming an influential, powerful force at court, and people are not only taking notice of him, some even only now realising who he is, that he exists at all, but many may already begin to fear him, to see him as a potential threat, while others will rush to gain his favour and ally themselves to him as if he were the very emperor already. Londo is swept along in this newfound confidence and arrogance, and this will only get worse when he visits the court itself. Perhaps he’s already intending to try the throne out for size? He tells Vir he has no desire to be emperor --- “I prefer to work behind the scenes. The rewards are almost as great, and the risk much reduced.” --- but he has seen in his dreams that, whatever his desire, the Royal Centauri throne is in his future.

SKETCHES
Londo Mollari
Not surprisingly, this is an almost completely Londo-centric episode, though of course G'Kar features in it too. But even apart from Londo, we learn something more of the Centauri court. We hear that the emperor traditionally keeps four female telepaths with him at all times. These women are linked from birth, and when the emperor leaves the homeworld two stay behind while two accompany him, making this a two-way communication system that is always up to date. We also learn that Centauri women, all bald, are not born that way but shave their heads, while the males seem to wear elaborate wigs, like the gentlemen of the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Britain and Europe.

But most importantly, we see here the deal Londo makes with the devil, the sealing of the pact between he and Morden. Mollari had asked Morden before “What if I need another of these little demonstrations?” and Morden had replied, with that cruel, obsequious smile that is so maddening, “Pick a target.” Here, he decides to exercise that option, and calls Morden in to provide a show of strength and pull off an attack that the Centauri could never have managed on their own without terrible loss of life and ships. He has given his backers a sign, that he is the future and that the old guard are on the way out, many literally. In a society as superstitious and often gullible as the Centauri, this is indeed a sign that there is a new order on the rise.

Londo however does exhibit some doubts about his dealings with Refa, and when he wakes from another troubled dream and realises that the attack has begun, it almost looks as if he wishes he could stop it, turn back time, undo this madness. But of course he can't, and he is committed to the path he has chosen. He knows he has betrayed the wishes of the late emperor, and agrees he is probably indeed damned, along with the rest of his people, but it is too late to turn back now. He must feel like crawling away when an upbeat, joyous G'Kar buys him a drink and tells him there may after all be hope for their two peoples, knowing what is happening as they share a seat at the bar, but by the time the colony has been destroyed and his people have moved in he is arrogant and overbearing, the representative of a conquering people lording it over their victims. And yet, he seems troubled, almost as if he is being forced to play a part he does not wish to.

He has had the dream he often has, but in addition to the throne scenes he now sees the vision Elric spoke of, a great hand reaching out of the stars. Whether or not he hears the billions calling out his name in hatred and agony --- “My followers?” “Your victims.” --- is unclear, but it surely upsets him. Events are moving too fast for him now and there is no time to catch his breath and think of what he has done, which is probably just as well as it might very well drive him mad.

It's clear too that the easy, almost friendly relationship that existed between Londo and the rest of the station command staff, especially Sheridan, is at an end. He is an aggressor, an ambassador of a regime that has killed and destroyed and invaded without provocation, and is without question now seen as the bad guy. There will be few if any who will have sympathy with him, fewer who will spend time with him as they once did, and many who will now begin to look upon him as an object of fear. The little comical man has become a dark threat, just as a certain ex-Corporal in the German Army did in the 1930s.

ONE GOOD CENTAURI
As will be his role throughout the whole of Londo’s association, both with Refa and with Morden, Vir will try to sway Mollari from the twisted path he is embarking upon, with varying degrees of success. When Londo announces his intention to use Morden to help “make a show” for Refa, Vir begs him not to do it, but Londo will not listen. Vir warns him “There’s no coming back once you go down that road!” But Londo is thinking only of his rise to power, and how people will have to take him seriously again. Vir does what he can, in his own small way, to distance himself from his employer’s plans and objectives. Here, when Refa has finished his drink he casually hands the goblet to Vir, who pointedly refuses to take it, staring daggers at the noble. It’s a very, very small victory, but Vir will take any he can.

Sadly, the path Londo is on will drag Vir along with him, and he will be pulled into some very unsavoury actions. One thing you can certainly always say about Vir though: no matter how bad the going gets, no matter the crazy, ill-informed or even, later, evil choices Londo makes, he will never desert his friend, and he will never give up trying to save a soul that has been long promised to the dark side, for a whole lot more than thirty pieces of silver.

ABSENT FRIENDS
No, not a one. For the first time in a long time, all the ambassadors are there, even Kosh! I don’t see Lennier or Na’Toth, although the latter is mentioned in what is meant to be G’Kar’s final testament before he goes to kill the emperor, but even Sinclair gets a look in. A full cast, indeed.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
As if I needed to point it out, this is a serious arc episode. Things come to a head as the two enemies who have been sniping at each other since season one, scoring points off one another and making threats, all of which seemed at the time pretty empty, come together as the situation reaches boiling point and the war between the Narns and the Centauri begins again, more or less where it left off, though with an unfair advantage on the part of the latter, both in the element of surprise and due to thier new allies. Londo moves further into the darkness and the galaxy holds its breath, aware that when the Centauri have conquered --- as they surely must --- the Narns, there is nothing to stop them moving on, expanding their ailing empire and “reclaiming” territory no doubt said to be theirs from centuries ago. In short, when the Centauri go to war they do not just stop with the one enemy, and a resurgent empire needs to enlarge its borders. Who will stand against them?

The reappearance of Sinclair, though brief, is interesting and he introduces us to a new word: Rangers. The Centauri emperor is dead, and Refa and his colleagues, backed by Mollari and therefore Morden, aim to change the way Centauri politics, foreign policy and defence is conducted. In the middle of all this stands Babylon 5, suddenly the potential clearing house for weapons, troops, information: both ambassadors have access to the place, and who is to say they won’t use that privilege to their and their world’s advantage? Babylon 5 has just become a much more dangerous place to be, and will act as a pivotal focus not just for this war, but for the one to come.

http://www.trollheart.com/toplay.jpg
As explained when I began running the series, “House of cards” is a trilogy, based on three separate but linked books, and following the career of Francis Urquhart from lowly Chief Whip of the Conservative Party to the giddy heights of Prime Minister. Each part is titled differently. This is then essentially part two, and follows Urquhart in his role as PM. What follows over the next four episodes shows that when it comes to maintaining his hold on power, Urquhart will not even let the man sitting on the Royal Throne of England stand in his way!

CAST

Francis Urquhart, played by Sir Ian Richardson: The machiavellan politician is the centrepiece and focus of the three books, so of course he is back to scheme his schemes, sacrificing people left and right like pawns on a chessboard. The one thing Urquhart wants above everything is power, and he will do anything, including murder to get it. He will not stop at taking on the King of England, if the man threatens his position.

His Majesty The King, played by Michael Kitchen: Newly crowned as the figurehead leader of state, the King is a man of principles and ethics, who believes that the poor should be taken care of. There should in fact be no poor: he wants an undivided England. He is at heart a dreamer, though he does retain the loyalty of the people, and his plans to help the disenfranchised and dismantle the different levels of society, to do away with the haves and have-nots, puts him on a direct collision course with the ultimate capitalist, who serves at his pleasure in Downing Street.

Sarah Harding, played by Kitty Aldridge: A pollster who becomes Urquhart’s personal advisor and later mistress. She essentially becomes Mattie Storin Mark II.

Elizabeth Urquhart, played by Diane Fletcher: Francis’s scheming wife is back to stand by his side, help him cover up the evil deeds he perpetrates, and reap the rewards of those deeds.

Tim Stamper, played by Colin Jeavons: Although Urquhart’s attack dog played a relatively insignificant role in “House of cards”, his influence grows here as he begins to try to rise through the ranks and is thwarted by his mentor. Remember: attack dogs can attack their owner if provoked!

Chloe Carmichael, played by Rowena King: to some extent the Penny of “House of cards”, Chloe is the king’s assistant publicist, a black woman who uses her position at the palace to push her left-wing minority agenda whenever she can. She has fierce admiration for the king, and detests Urquhart as an example of everything she stands against.

David Mycoft, played by Nicholas Farrell: Private secretary to the king, he is a latent homosexual whose marriage is breaking up as the series begins, and whose personal life is about to take over from his professional one, putting him in an impossible position.

Commander Corder, played by Nick Brimble: If Stamper is Urquhart’s attack dog, Corder is the mad pitbull. He is the finger on the trigger, the knock at the door, the deliverer of brown envelopes that destroy careers. His are the hands that cleanse, his the nod that removes the PM’s enemies at his behest. He is fanatically loyal to Urquhart, cold and methodical, perhaps quietly psychotic as we shall see later and not at all afraid of doing Urquhart's bidding, nor in the least reluctant to carry out his orders, no matter what they might be. In the Middle Ages, he would have been called The King's Hand. And that hand is very bloody.

Episode One

We see the smarmy, self-satisfied face of Urquhart as he speeds along in a limo. He turns to the camera (to us) and remarks “Remember that frightfully nice man who spoke of the classless society? He had to go of course. Everything changes.” This indicates that Urquhart is talking about something that has already happened, and we are about to be taken back in time to witness the events. Indeed, the new king has just been crowned, and Uruqhart, as Prime Minister, is there (as are we now) to witness the coronation. He does not seem taken with him. One imagines a similar reaction to that he had when Henry Collingridge was elected into the office he now holds himself. But Urquhart’s dreams are constantly haunted by the terrible thing he did at the end of “House of cards”, and he sees Mattie’s body falling away from him, over the edge of the rooftop garden and down to smash onto a parked van, as she screams “Daddddyyyyyyy!” It seems he will never be free of the ghost of Mattie. He goes to see the king, summoned there, and meets Chloe Carmichael, the king’s assistant press secretary, and David Mycroft, her boss. He seems a little contemptuous of both, asking Carmichael through his traditional fixed smile that never reaches his calculating eyes, “And just what is your job description?” He seems annoyed that the previous assistant to the monarch, one Sir Edgar, is “taking early retirement”, surely palace code for being let go as the new king brings in his own people?

The king talks of the poor in society, the homeless and the disadvantaged, and how he can help them. Urquhart plays the problem down, saying he too is worried that people are homeless --- though he pointedly adds “however few” --- but that there is really nothing that can be done about it, and he counsels --- warns, really --- the king against “throwing borrowed money at the problem.” Of course, Urquhart couldn’t care less about the poor, the homeless or the unemployed. Like our friend Alan B’Stard, to him these people are a lower form of life, good for one thing only: votes. And not even that any more, as somehow (though it's not explained how --- lack of interest perhaps --- very few of the "underclasses" are said to be even registered to vote. So they're absolutely no use to Urquhart, and if they're no use to him then they can all go to hell. Naturally, he does not voice this position to the monarch.

The king tells Urquhart that the government office buildings to be erected in a prime London real estate area should instead be used for a community centre, something which does not sit well with the PM, though he dare not shoot down the idea outright.Once he gets back to Number Ten though he makes sure that all his cronies are briefed on what to say to the Secretary of State for the Environment when he comes in with his plan, all full of what he is going to do for the inner city, and the whole idea is carefully but firmly shut down, put to one side and Dick Caule, the SoS, can surely feel a hot breath on his neck. Should he turn around he would doubtless see Urquhart bearing down on him, fangs bared! He’s quickly told to accept an alternative position --- “So much better than a straight sacking!” --- and Urquhart and his new Chief Whip, Stamper, celebrate that the contractor they were getting kickbacks from will be able to go ahead with his development as planned.

The king, Urquhart knows all too well, will not be happy that his idea will be blocked now --- with the Secretary of State sacked Caule can not protest, and as it was his baby nobody else will; Francis will obviously appoint someone he can trust to the post now: one of the boys, a sound man who will do what he’s told --- and Urquhart thinks it might be prudent to “take out an insurance policy” against the ruler of the country, asks Stamper to look into it. Meanwhile he interviews, at Elizabeth’s urging, a young opinion pollster called Sarah Harding, whom his wife believes may be the “distraction” her husband craves. He is getting bored, jaded, set in his ways: he needs a new challenge, and Sarah may be the one to provide it. The fact that she’s pretty and sexy certainly helps, but as ever it’s the mind Francis craves, and eventually, the soul.

Given the option, Sarah admits she can’t resist the offer and accepts. Her husband is less than happy, though she has made it clear she is not interested in a sexual relationship with her new employer.

Stamper visits Princess Charlotte, introducing her to Sir Bruce Bullerby, editor of the Clarion newspaper, who she seems to dislike intensely. The Chief Whip has a proposition for her though: he knows she was paid off after her divorce so that certain embarrassing details would not come out and implicate the Royal Family in a scandal. She is hurting from the treatment she received, and no doubt misses the finer things in life, so the chance to get back at the family of her ex-husband speaks to her, especially when she can make so much money at it. But there is a problem: she was warned by the Palace not to blab or something nasty would happen to her. Stamper tells her Bullerby will pay her for her story --- “for history” --- but not publish it till after her death. She will get the best of both worlds: when she passes on her story can be told and until then she can live in the luxury to which she has become accustomed, and which at present evades her.

There is of course a catch: Bullerby wants to “become her friend” … in every way. The princess is repulsed by the idea --- she hates and loathes the fat balding man --- but there is the money, calling, already in Stamper’s briefcase just waiting to be handed over. She agrees, and Urquhart now has his insurance policy, a weapon to use, should it be needed, against the king. Speaking of the king --- literally --- he tells the PM that he intends to make a speech in ten days time to the charitable commission which will outline his desire to help the poor, close up the divisions in the country and place more emphasis on helping people. Urquhart, needless to say, is unimpressed.

Chloe convinces the king to keep his speech as it is, although he has at last acquiesced to Urquhart’s request for a copy, while David Mycroft reveals to His Majesty that his own marriage is over and goes out, gets attacked and finds his way into a private gentleman’s club, where he gets picked up. He realises for the first time in years that he has been fooling himself into thinking he is straight, and throws himself into an affair with his new friend. Urquhart summons Sarah to his townhouse, where he asks her for her opinion of the speech the king intends to give. She is as deprecating of it as is the Prime Minister, and performs what he gleefully calls a “surgical emasculation” on the speech, taking all of value, ie everything important, everything the king wanted to say, out of it and leaving a bland, pointless missive.The king is of course furious, and determines to read the speech as he had written it. Chloe tells him he should also make public the fact that the government tried to censor it.

It’s Urquhart’s turn to be furious, as the papers get hold of the fact that he tried to rewrite the king’s speech and he demands His Majesty instigate an investigation into how the leak happened at the Palace.

QUOTES
Urquhart: “A new king! A new age of hope and peace and spiritual growth. Etcetera.”

Elizabeth: “Everything you have done in the past was for your country’s good. Everything.”

Urquhart: “I must confess, I do feel a residual frisson. A king is a king after all, and the sherry is usually excellent. I do hope there won’t be any changes there. One hears these rumours about … camomile tea!”

His Majesty: “Well now, you’ve had a lot more practice at this sort of thing than I.”
Urquhart: “Perhaps Sir, but I’m sure you have had the benefit of your mother’s exceptional experience and her valuable counsel. As have I myself.”
His Majesty: “Yes. She said you listened very courteously and deferentially, and then went away and did exactly as you pleased! Is that how it was?”
Urquhart: “Oh that’s very good, Sir. Her Majesty always did enjoy a little joke at my expense. She understood the constraints that bind us very well: we can none of us do exactly as we please. And that’s probably a good thing.”
(This is an interesting first warning shot from Urquhart. He is advising the new king that he had better not have any funny ideas, now that he is in power, about actually doing anything. In Urquhart’s view, a king, or queen, is nothing more or less than a figurehead, someone to bow to and smile at and say “Yes Sir” or “Yes Ma’am”. But the business of running the country had best be left to him and his cabinet. He of course smiles when he says this, but his eyes are as ever hard as diamond and his smile the sort of thing you might expect to see if a cobra could smile.)

His Majesty: “You’re a clever man, Mr. Urquhart.”
Urquhart: “You’re too kind Sir. I’d rather be remembered as a wise man than a clever one, though I think sound man is the highest praise I can expect.”
His Majesty: “I’d like to be remembered as a good man.”
(Here we have the fundamental difference between the two men. Urquhart would rather be a “sound man”: one who gets the job done, no matter what. One who can be relied on. One who will let nothing stand in the way of achieving his goal. Honed in his years as Chief Whip, when he had to “put a bit of stick about”, keep the troops in line, and became both respected and feared, and carried through to the highest office in the land, where if anyone says anything bad about him it’s certainly not to his face. The King, on the other hand, is an idealist, and believes that with great power comes great responsibility. He is distressed at the plight of the poor and believes that it is his job to try to help them.

The thing he does not understand, fails to grasp utterly, is that he is a constitutional monarch; his power comes from Parliament and he can really do little or nothing without their agreement and approval. He is not a feudal lord: his word is not law. Well, not if it does not tie in with what the Prime Minister thinks is “best for the nation”. This idealogical chasm will grow as the two most powerful men in the land face off against one another, leaving room for only one victor.)

Urquhart: “Did you write in the "Observer" that Francis Urquhart is like a shark: he has to keep moving forward to stay alive?”
Sarah: “Not a very flattering simile, I’m sorry.”
Urquhart: “Well, better a shark than a sheep, I suppose.”

Sarah: “I’m interested in looking at power close up. I want to see how it works.”
Urquhart:”You know how it works, Sarah. It corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Sarah: “There’s no such thing as absolute power.”
Urquhart: “If you work for me, you will give me your absolute allegiance.”
(Another interesting point here. Urquhart is playing with Sarah, letting her know that he is inherently evil, that should she make a compact with him she is getting into bed (literally, after a while) with the devil himself. He offers her the contract, but she must sign it of her own free will. The Devil never forces or coerces anyone to make that pact: they must do so willingly and with the full knowledge (so far as they are aware) of what they are getting into.)

His Majesty: “I want to talk about the wastage of human resources as well as natural resources, about the divisions in our country --- north and south, rich and poor, hope and despair --- and what we can do about it. Well, you know what I’m talking about: you must be as desperately concerned about it as I am!” (Yeah…):rolleyes:

Urquhart: “All I’m saying Sir is that in a constitutional monarchy the sovereign cannot be seen to be opposing his own government.”
(And there lies the rub. This is exactly what is happening. When Urquhart hears the king’s speech (hah!) is already written he asks --- demands really --- that his people be allowed to “go over it”, which the king knows means the big red pen of censorship. He refuses, and the Prime Minister knows that he is about to have a battle on his hands, one which he may not find that easy to win. After all, nobody has taken on the ruler of Britain since Oliver Cromwell, and we know how that turned out!. Interestingly, tellingly in fact, this is the first time when in His Majesty’s presence that we see the smile slip from Urquhart’s face. The mask slides and for a brief moment the cold dead eyes of an indomitable will to survive stare out, like the last look an assassin gives his target before pulling the trigger.)

Urquhart (to camera): “Strong words. But I’m afraid we can’t allow it. If he thinks that being king gives him the right to say what he likes then he is a bloody fool!”

Urquhart: “He has to learn. People wouldn’t take kindly to a man with three Bentleys lecturing them on equality!”

Urquhart: “Your Majesty, as a private man you are free to entertain any beliefs you like, but as the monarch you have no beliefs, or shall we say, no personal political convictions. Not in public.”

Elizabeth: “Oh dear. he was difficult, was he?”
Urquhart: “He was yes. I think we have a new leader of the opposition.”
Elizabeth: “Break him, Francis. Bring him down.”
Urquhart: “I’ll bring the lot of them down if I have to.”
(This short speech tells us so much about Francis Urquhart, as if we didn’t already know. He is talking about what could be seen in some quarters or from some viewpoints as treason: going up against his king, forcing him to abdicate, pushing him out of power. He would be happy to bring down the entire monarchy as long as he retains his vicelike grip on power. He’ll tell us it’s for the good of the country, but by now we know better. Sometimes, the interests of the nation coincide with those of Urquhart. When they do, that’s fine. When they don’t, it will always be the Prime Minister’s concerns that win out. FU helps nobody but himself.)

Power behind the throne
Perhaps to be taken literally this time around, as Urquhart takes on the very king himself. But it is as ever Elizabeth who keeps him on his mental toes. In “House of cards” itself it was she who convinced her husband to run for the position of leader of the party, when he had entertained no such notions himself. It was she who assisted in the “removal” of Roger O’Neill, and now here again she is ready to stand behind Francis and support him no matter what.

She starts by acquiring for him “Mattie Storin Version 2.0” in the pollster Sarah Harding. She sees in her a brilliant mind --- and a fabulous body! --- that will surely intrigue Urquhart and help him to face the trials coming. When Francis complains about the king being awkward, she encourages him to destroy the man: “Break him, Francis!” she smiles. “Bring him down.” And she knows, and we know, that he can and will.

The Royal “We”
Urquhart is again at it: “We can’t allow that to happen” he tells us. Again, whether he is talking at this point about the party as a whole, the government or all interested parties, or taking us into his confidence and making us part of his conspiracy (after all, we know about what happened on the rooftop garden, don’t we? And we haven’t gone blabbing to the papers) is at this point unclear, yet it seems certain that Urquhart sees the world in black and white, as a clear case of “us” and “them”. And “them” don't stand a chance against him!

The Urquhart Bodycount
As we’re now into the second chapter of the trilogy, it’s time to take a look behind Francis Urquhart’s back and see the mounting pile of corpses, both literal and figurative, he’s leaving behind him. Like Alan B’Stard in “The New Statesman”, we can’t hold him personally responsible for every single death that may result indirectly from his policies or his decisions. When B’Stard buries nuclear waste under a school those kids may later die of various related ailments, but you can’t really place the blame for that specifically at the tory’s door. B’Stard would not even bother to see these people as collateral damage: to him, they barely exist and if some of them die he would regard it, if at all, as an unfortunate consequence of his getting a little richer, and think nothing more of it.

Similarly, the hardline policies of Urquhart’s government may mean that Mary, a 42-year old nurse who has worked at the one hospital all her life, loses her job when Urquhart has it shut down as unprofitable, the land rezoned for office blocks, or Jack may take his own life when he realises how impossible it is for him to get a job. Bill may go wild with a shotgun at a bank, shooting two staff members and six customers before turning the gun on himself, all because he can’t pay his mortgage. All of these are a result of the policies of the Conservative Party, but not directly attributable to the PM. He has not, so to speak, pulled the trigger himself.

So here we will concentrate only on those people who either die or are ruined, financially, emotionally or politically --- or all three --- by Urquhart’s direct intervention. Those he kills or has killed, those whose careers he destroys, those who stand in his way and are swept aside. Only if there is a clear intent will these people be considered for the bodycount. As with B’Stard, there will be two types of body: lethal and non-lethal. Lethal speaks for itself: anyone who loses his or her life at Urquhart’s behest. Non-lethal will constitute anyone who is ruined but not killed. They could be maimed, or deported, or fired, or scandalised, blackmailed or number of other methods. Anyone driven to direct suicide by Urquhart will be considered a Lethal addition, anyone who dies of natural causes (heart attack, cancer etc) that is brought about or exacerbated by the Prime Minister’s interference or influence will also be so considered.

So, since the original “House of Cards” began, how many bodies has Urquhart buried?

LETHAL

Roger O’Neill: Used by Urquhart as his errand boy, his sometime thug and his mouthpiece, O’Neill proves too much of a liability and Urquhart fears he knows too much about him, and so he must go. He cuts his cocaine with rat poison and Roger takes his last ever hit on this earth.

Mattie Storin: The focus of the story other than Urquhart, Mattie is another who knows too much, and Urquhart shows us that even if he is in love (hah! Does he know the meaning of the word?) with someone he is still prepared to sacrifice them if they get in his way or threaten his rise to, or grip on, power. Mattie is hurled off the roof garden to her death. These are two deaths in which Urquhart has a direct hand, literally. It is his hand that cuts O’Neill’s coke and his hands that throw Mattie to her doom.

Non-Lethal
Henry Collingridge: Annoyed at the mild-mannered man’s rise to the top, and more, his refusal to give Urquhart the position he had been virtually promised, Francis sets about a complex plan of manipulation, disinformation and obfuscation that eventually leads to the Prime Minister having to resign.

Health Minister Mackenzie: Although not ruined, Urquhart does destroy the man’s chances of being elected Prime Minister by arranging a damaging demonstration at a factory which results in the running over of someone in a wheelchair. Mackenzie has no choice but to back out of the race and surely stands to lose his very post? His reputation has certainly been ruined.

Patrick Woolton: Another, very strong candidate for the top job, Woolton is outmanoeuvered by Urquhart and his plans for Number Ten are stamped upon. His marriage may also find itself under some strain.

Dick Caule: The first to go in the second chapter, the hapless Secretary of State for the Environment must wonder what he did wrong, to be forced into taking a backwater post in Strasbourg or face being sacked? Of course, it’s all part of Urquhart’s plan to thwart the king, and Caule is just another neck on the chopping block, a faceless piece of cannon fodder.


Non-Lethal Bodycount: 4
Lethal Bodycount: 2
Total Bodycount: 6


The real Urquhart
As I said at the end of “House of cards” (no I will not call it season one!) Urquhart likes to be known, or seen at least, as a man of the people. A diplomat, a statesman, a benign father guiding his children. Of course, like all fathers he has occasionally to discipline, but that’s all part of parenthood, and anyway, it never did any harm, did it? But early on we see his true face begin to manifest more in this second chapter.

He talks in abstract terms about the homeless, the unemployed, the people his government have willfully and callously let down, but it’s clear he couldn’t give a tinker’s curse about them. He laughs inwardly at the notions of the new king, the idea of helping his people. Helping them! That’s not what a king is supposed to do, in his book!

But during his exchanges with the king, as it becomes increasingly and quickly obvious that the new monarch is not going to be malleable, not going to be persuaded how to think and how to act, as have other kings and queens in Urquhart’s experience, his true self looks out of his eyes and he declares unspoken war against the Palace. He will not have a king challenging his constitutional authority, and if it provokes a civil war, then so be it! Urquhart reveals a little more of his real attitude to Sarah, who shares his views and believes the king is trying to bring the whole country into a state of permanent social welfare, but even she does not know his true mind.

When he snarls at the end of the episode “I’ll bring the whole bloody lot of them down if I have to!” we see the mask torn away, the true face revealed, and the real Francis Urquhart leers out from the placid visage of the Prime Minister, the blood of former victims on his teeth, naked raw ambition and powerlust in his eyes, and a chilling warning to freeze the heart on his lips. You start to worry for the King of England.

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As we all know, this is a reference to the David Bowie hit, and indeed it's in the pilot episode, but other than that once, that's where the similarities end. One of the most successful and intriguing crossover shows that blended elements of police drama and science-fiction, "Life on Mars" began transmission in 2006 and quickly became a cult favourite. Because of the crossover element it appealed to fans of both types of show, and many who were fans of neither but liked a good drama with a bit of mystery. It was produced by Kudos, responsible for, among others, top UK spy drama "Spooks", already in progress here.

Detective Sam Tyler is hit by a car in 2006 and awakes to find himself in a rather odd place. It quickly becomes apparent to him that he seems to have travelled backwards in time, back to 1973. Police work is far different here; things considered unprofessional these days are de rigeur in the seventies, leading to some hilarious scenes and quotes, like when Tyler describes a suspect as an "IC3 male" and all the other coppers look at him blankly. He rephrases, shrugging: "A black guy", he says, and they all nod, understanding. Throughout the series Tyler is plagued by the belief that he may be in a coma and just imagining all of this, but he gets pulled into the fantasy --- if such it is --- so deeply that there are times when he really believes he is in 1973. And maybe he is: it's not made clear till much later what the actual situation is.

Tyler's new boss is straight-talking, straight-shooting (literally) borderline alcoholic and criminal-smasher Gene Hunt, who would become a favourite with the viewers of the show, leading to his starring in a sequel series and his own rise to stardom. Full cast listing to come. Tyler is faced with unlearning everything he has been taught and everything he has based his police work on in the twenty-first century --- DNA, for example, was hardly even heard of much less used as a police tool in the seventies --- and trying to fit in to the harsh, often brutal, un-PC world of his colleagues, where smashing a suspect's head into the table was an accepted method of gaining information, and nobody gave a toss about criminals' rights. Racism and sexism were rampant, and nobody wanted to get in touch with their inner child, unless it was to find out where his bigger brother, who was wanted on charges, might be found.

Against this backdrop Tyler works his cases, gets involved with a woman who may or may be a figment of his imagination and tries to figure out what has happened to him. Has he gone crazy? Is he dead? Asleep? Dreaming? Or has he really somehow travelled back in time? The ambiguity helps to heighten the sense of tension in the series, and as I say it won't be resolved for several years after the whole thing ends.

CAST
The cast list for "Life on Mars" was really quite tight, with most if not all of the stories revolving around the five main characters, and no real recurring roles outside of that. There are other actors of course, but they rarely if ever crop up in more than one episode. So you have the likes of robbers, hostage-takers, gunrunners and the odd officer, but nobody who really matters other than these five.
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SAM TYLER, played by John Simm.
After this role which pretty much defined him for the later half of the 2000's, (I refuse to call them the Noughties!) Simm was cast in the plum role of The Master in the new Dr. Who, but by then just about everyone knew him as Sam Tyler. As related above, Tyler is a detective working for the Greater Manchester Police who is on a case when he is hit by a car and seems to awake in 1973. He spends the series, in addition to carrying out what to him must be very unorthodox police work, trying to figure out how, or if, he can get back to his own time.
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GENE HUNT, played by Philip Glennister
Again, a career-defining role, Glennister, mostly unknown prior to this, would become forever tied with the role of Gene Hunt, and in fact would go on to reprise the role in the spin-off series. Hunt is a tough, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners cop who does things by the book --- his book. He's actually more likely to beat you over the head with it than read from it. He doesn't like rules, he doesn't like nonces and he definitely doesn't like crooks! What a guy! An icon for a generation.

ANNIE CARTWRIGHT, played by Liz White
The love interest for Sam, and to be fair not that much else. A woman in a man's world in 1973, she is the recipient of countless sexual slurs and innuendos, behaviour that by today's standards would have you up before an enquiry on sexual harassment charges. She tries to convince Sam that he is real, that they all are real, although she can't explain why he thinks he comes from the twenty-first century. She thinks he's a bit loopy, but she does fancy him. She's probably also, deep inside, worried to admit she may be nothing more than a part of a fevered dream by a man in a hospital bed.


RAY CARLING, played by Dean Andrews
Womanising, chauvinistic, drunk and arrogant, Carlton is the epitome of the seventies "bad cop". He is Gene Hunt's right-hand man, and looks up to the chief. He sneers at Sam's attempts to apply 21st century policing methods to the seventies, and his favourite method of enquiry is the judicial application of the boot in the groin.

CHRIS SKELTON, played by Marshall Lancaster
The "baby" of the group, Chris is either being taken under the wing of Tyler, who wants to make him a good cop and prevent him being corrupted by Carling and Hunt, or siding with Ray against Tyler. He's quite naive in many ways, almost more a boy than a man, and he gets quite a ribbing from his colleagues, especially when he starts seeing a girl.

All of these characters, bar Tyler, will transfer over to the sequel series, "Ashes to ashes", at the end of "Life on Mars"'s two-season run. The series was so successful, and ended on a cliffhanger that a followup was commissioned, which ran for three seasons and finally wrapped up all the plotlines and explained what had been going on for, at that time, four years.

Oh yeah, another thing about "Life on Mars" was it featured one of the most bitchin' soundtracks since "Supernatural", with all the best seventies rock and pop music.

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Hailed as one of the most authentic and realistic portrayals of the Robin Hood legend, "Robin of Sherwood" -- which was retitled, with stunning originality in America as "Robin Hood"! --- was perhaps the first of the many interpretations down the years to treat the myth without satire or lampoonery, without making the title character a larger than life figure, and with as much attention paid to historical accuracy as possible when you're dealing with a person who may not have existed, or may be an amalgam of other people living at the time. It was also the only show I ever saw about Robin Hood that brought in pagan and mythic elements to the story; Robin himself paid obeisance to the pagan god Herne the Hunter, who treated him as his own son.

In this alone the show was unique. In every other film or series about the famous freedom fighter Robin was always the top authority, the man in charge. He deferred to no man, and perhaps only one woman. But here he willingly acknowledges the leadership and guardianship of the enigmatic man who professes to be the human representation of the spirit of the forest, Herne.

Running for three years from 1984 to 1986 over three seasons, the show was a big hit on UK television and is still seen as the benchmark for programmes about the legend, its popularity helped by the haunting theme and incidental music provided by Irish traditional group Clannad. It was one of the few British programmes to feature two different actors in the title role, with Michael Praed's Robin of Loxley being taken over by Jason Connery's Robin of Huntingdon in season three. In a timeslot clearly aimed at children and adolescents, "Robin of Sherwood" was obviously far more mature than the other Robin Hood shows that had been around, and appealed to adults just as effectively.

All the main cast were English actors, so there was none of the uncomfortable American accents of the likes of "Prince of thieves", and this of course helped the authenticity of the show. It was also shot on location in England, bringing in elements of both Saxon and Celtic myths. The show dealt with some uncomfortable subjects, among them devil worship, human sacrifice and witchcraft trials. The programme also retained many classic elements of the legend, such as the competition for the silver arrow, the rescue of Marion and of course, Robin's implacable enemy the Sheriff of Nottingham. Though the classic lineup of Merry Men were mostly present, there were some changes, with Allan-a-Dale not part of the band, only guesting in one episode, his place possibly taken by Robin's almost-idiot younger stepbrother, Much, the miller's son.

CAST
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Robin of Loxely, played by Micheal Praed
What do you need to know that you didn't already? The son of a nobleman who was then killed in a rebellion against the Normans and had his lands confiscated, Robin is raised by a miller and meets the enigmatic pagan god Herne the Hunter, who recruits him to fight on the side of the poor and the disenfranchised. Robin gathers together a rag-tag mob who make Sherwood their base of operations and strike from there against the rich, being a particular thorn in the side of the Sheriff of Nottingham, who is trying to maintain law and order in the area.
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Will Scarlet, played by Ray Winstone
A firebrand, hothead reactionary, Will wants nothing more than to crack some Norman heads, but he has no idea about planning or strategy. He constantly vies with Robin for leadership of the gang, but Robin is better liked and trusted by the men. He is against Robin's idea of helping the poor, believing that the gang should concentrate on striking against the sheriff and his men.

Friar Tuck, played by Phil Rose
The archetypal fat friar, Tuck is Marion's protector and escapes with her into Sherwood Forest, where they link up with and then become part of Robin's gang.
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Little John (real name John Little), played by Clive Mantle
His name, as you no doubt know, belying his huge size, Little John is under an evil spell when he first meets Robin and fights him, but the younger man defeats him and destroys the influence of the spell. Thereafter he becomes Robin's friend and right hand.
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Lady Marion of Leaford, played by Judi Trott
Ward of the Abbot Hugo, brother to the Sheriff of Nottingham, Marion is the daughter of a nobleman who is believed to have died in battle. She has a large inheritance coming to her, which the abbot is eager to get his greedy hands on. He promises her to the Baron de Belleme as his wife, but with Friar Tuck's help she escapes into Sherwood and meets Robin, with whom she falls in love.

Much, played by Peter Llewellyn Williams
One step removed from a simpleton, Much is the son of Robin's foster-father, and so sees Robin as his big brother, though they are not actually related by blood. He is ... well, I don't really know what he's supposed to do in the show. Most of the time he gets in the way. Could have really done without him to be honest. But Robin feels a sense of kinship and loyalty towards him, and will not have a word said about him.

Nasir, played by Mark Ryan
A Saracen warrior and assassin, Nasir originally works for the Baron de Belleme, but when his master is defeated he joins Robin's band, the two having fought and gained mutual respect for each other. Nasir is a man of few words, allowing his swordplay to speak for him, but he is fiercely loyal to Robin.

The Sheriff of Nottingham, played by Nickolas Grace
One of the most entertaining figures to grace any Robin Hood show, Nickolas Grace steals the show every scene he is in as Robert de Reinault, the long-suffering Sheriff. Whether he is browbeating his second, the unfortunate Sir Guy, or recoiling in disgust and perhaps fear from a rebuke from King John, Grace displays a dark humour that demands that you like him. Even as the "bad guy" he's totally engaging and corrupt to the core. His attempts to kill or capture Robin and his men are nothing short of comical, and he has some of the best lines in the series.

Sir Guy of Gisburne, played by Robert Addie
The downtrodden and ridiculed commander of Nottingham's garrison, Gisburne does everything he can to catch Robin, but like the schemes of Dick Dastardly or Wiley Coyote, every one fails and he is left to endure the wrath and contempt of the Sheriff. A man of action and war, he has little time for diplomacy, traits that land him in trouble as often as not. He has of course an abiding hatred for Robin, who sees him more as a bumbling oaf than a serious enemy.

Abbot Hugo de Reinault, played by Philip Jackson
Younger brother of the Sheriff, he is the senior clergyman in Nottingham, but is more interested in amassing personal wealth through the acquisition of land than in devotion to God. He is the ward of Lady Marion, since the supposed death of her father.

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Episode Four

Fiona awakes to find her daughter is not in her bedroom, but finds her outside in the garden shed, terrified. She tells her mother that she knows Alan is not her dad, to which Fiona reacts with surprise. She wants to take her to the doctor but Alan is again against it, saying it will bring down the wrath of Social Services upon them. A radio report announces that there is CCTV footage of a girl believed to be Hattie at a train station but it has not yet been confirmed. Linus tries to convince Caitlin that he is not “NDN” but she is not sure. He goes home to find his father missing, and as Caitlin has said that the girl in the footage is supposed to be meeting “NDN”, things are beginning to add up…

Gail decides it’s time to move. She, after all, no longer owns the house: the bank does. Nothing to stop her leaving and trying to start a new life far from here. She goes through Malcolm’s things and in a locked briefcase which she forces she finds an envelope of money addressed to Linus. She doesn’t however know the young man; thinks it must be important though. Their neighbour calls round to tell them that Hattie has been found alive --- she hasn’t of course; it’s all just guesswork and supposition and hope, but it brings a small ray of sunshine into Gail’s day. Alan is upset with his wife as she has intimated their daughter is afraid of him, and wonders why. He, for his part, takes the opportunity to set things straight with the little girl by taking her to school and trying to explain to her.

While he’s gone Fiona explores the attic but finds it’s all been cleaned up. Later she comes across Everett again, and it transpires that he saw her taking the picture of him. It also transpires that they know each other as more than just neighbours: there seems to have been an affair, which ended badly. Everett however claims not to remember the bad part and Fiona storms off. Seth tells Steve he has found Hattie’s body, but his brother is either too scared or does not believe him and refuses to let him take him to her. In the course of chasing the local bully/drug dealer into the woods, Alan comes across the corpse though, stuffed up into the branches of a tree. There can be no doubt now: Hattie Sutton is quite dead, and has been for some time.

Thanks to the insensitivity of the bully, who takes a photo of the body, everyone in school gets an MMS and Caitlin learns in the cruellest way possible that her sister is dead. Fiona goes to the crime scene and is devastated : the discovery has hit her hard. Linus confronts his father and ends up being thrown out of his house. Fiona takes him in. Steve tells Seth he has to leave but his brother is unwilling to go. He seems to want to pay for his crimes. Steve goes to the Sutton house, where he meets his ex-wife and, finally, his son whom he has not seen for years: he and his mother have been living in Spain. Except they haven’t, as Angie tells him; they have in fact only been a five-minute drive away, but she wanted Steve to think they were out of the country.

Steve begins bonding with his son, then swiftly makes plans to abduct the boy, but before he can put his plan into operation the police arrest him. Seth has confessed, and as his brother Steve is now under suspicion. Seth talks about “Bad Seth”, who “takes things to make people unhappy.” He has reasoned that taking Hattie would make people unhappy. He tells DS Mills that Hattie had powers; she was a white witch, knew the old magic. James is delighted when he realises that, due to his bad back, his father could not have hauled Hattie’s body up into the tree, and so he must be innocent. But Gail knows that their problems run deeper than that. DS Mills visits Alan to confirm Seth’s story about burgling their house. Alan is aghast.

Furious with Malcolm, Gail goes to arrange his funeral, a cremation with absolutely every expense spared. She knows he has to be buried --- well, cremated --- but doesn’t want any ceremony, flowers, mourners … nothing. Just get rid of him. At home, Malcolm’s effects are released by the police and sent back to her, and taking his phone she rings Linus’s number, which is in the phone. She hasn’t even considered that the ID on the phone is going to read “Malcolm” and scare the shit out of the kid. He’s in Caitlin’s bedroom --- yeah, he just walked in as if he lives there! --- but she almost seems not to realise he’s there. It’s like she’s lost in her own private world of pain. He believes that his father killed his mother, and is ready to go to the police, as he also thinks Everett killed Hattie. He pours out all he knows to Fiona, who tells him to sleep on it and if he feels the same way in the morning she will take him to the station.

At home, realising he will now never see his son again thanks to his brother’s confession, Steve begins breaking down the little microcosm he has kept in the boy’s honour, the preserved bedroom the boy used to sleep in. It’s time to face facts and move on with his life. Caitlin wakes up to see stones all over her bed, and comes to a fateful decision.

QUOTES
James: “Don’t want those bastards to think they’ve won.”
Gail: “They have.”

Fiona: “You’re not allowed to talk to me like that. Not after what you did to me.”
Everett: “What did I do to you?”
Fiona: “You don’t remember? May bank holiday weekend, 1992?”

Gail: “You honestly think a bunch of lilies and a few hymns is going to buy him a place in Heaven?”
James: “Well what do we do then? Chuck him in the sea? Fling him in a skip? Leave him out for the animals to finish him off?”

Gail: “My chiropractor once told me that your body learns to ignore pain. You’re not getting better but your brain stops telling you how much it hurts, and it just gets worse and worse over the years until it all just falls apart. Well that was my marriage: thirty-two years of pain.”


SUSPECTS

Seth

Well, he’s confessed now, so that’s that, isn’t it? Or is it? He still seems confused, talking about “Bad Seth”, and it seems more like he’s afraid he did it more than he knows he did. His confession though, whether real or imagined, scuppers his brother’s plans to be reunited with his son, and to take him away from his mother.

Malcolm

Pretty much out of the picture now. His bad back would not have allowed him to have carried Hattie up into the tree in whose branches she was found. Unless of course he had an accomplice? Seth? Is it possible both men killed Hattie, or that the one helped the other?

Alan

Seems a little too relieved when he hears Fiona say that Linus is ready to shop Everett. Dodging a bullet? And what is all this about his not being Charlotte’s father?

Steve

Jury’s still out. Any man who would consider snatching his own child from his mother and absconding with him would surely be capable of anything?

Everett

Emerging as a possible suspect now, a strong one if Seth’s confession turns out to be false, or in error. Despite what he said to the cops, he not only knew Hattie, he seems to have had some relationship with her, and is surely the “NDN” chalked on the inside of her locker door. What did happen to his wife? Did he kill her? Is Linus right?

PAGAN IMAGES

The whole forest seems shrouded in pagan imagery. The likes of this “Magic Circle” they talk about, the odd bits of dolls strung up on wire, even the falling apple-blossoms seem to exude a sense of mystery and awe and impart to the woods a feeling of enchantment, and also a certain dark and sinister ambience. The small stones that keep falling on Caitlin are hard to explain, but may have been used in some sort of pagan rituals, and the little gemstone Everett puts by the makeshift monument to Hattie surely contains some sort of mystical power, even though Linus’s father scoffs and says he doesn’t believe in magic.

But Seth does, and he tells the police that Hattie had powers, that she was a witch or wiccan of some sort. Is it possible she upset someone with her beliefs? Did she use her “power” to ensure Carroll’s Fields was never built? Is that why she was killed? Or did someone fear her power would be used against them, someone who believed she had that power, or was afraid not to?

Notes: Steve’s plan to abduct his son is half-baked at best, useless at worst. Where is he going to go? Spain he says, and he’ll have to get out of the country if he wants to avoid the law. But how is the child supposed to travel without a passport? And how exactly are they going to get to Spain? Steve is not rich; he seems to be just barely scraping by. I doubt he owns his house, probably a council rental, so no way he can sell it and even if he could, how would be expect to do that quickly enough to enable him to disappear before the police start looking for him? Once Harry vanishes he’ll be the prime suspect and they’ll have checkpoints at all airport, ports and motorways. He hasn’t a hope. Not a great thinker, our Steve!

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2.1 “Legitimate targets”

As season two opens we pick up exactly where season one ended, with Masie and Ellie trapped in Tom''s house and a bomb in his briefcase about to go off. A bomb does go off, but it's in another part of London --- the one in Tom's house fails to explode. Thames House is evacuated as a coded warning comes through, and it turns out that the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland has been killed by a bomb in his house, for which the separatist group Patrick McCann works with has claimed responsibility. He calls Tom, asking to come over to his side: his life is in danger and he needs to get out. However he's too slow and is killed before MI5 can pick him up.

Before he died though, McCann warned Tom that the killing of the NI Secretary of State was just the beginning: this day is about to get a whole lot worse. Called in to work against his will, Tom insists Ellie and Masie come with him. There's been a mortar attack on an army base which is supposed to be classified, but McCann's group have not claimed responsibility for it, unlike the killing of the Secretary of State. Looking into other possible culprits, they come across a Serb general, Miroslav Gradic, and think he might be involved. In the middle of all this Ellie leaves Thames House with Masie, and goes to her mother's; she will not speak to Tom when he calls later that night. He goes to Danny's apartment and speaks to he and Zoe when they return. He confides to Zoe that he wishes he had never told Ellie his secret; he knows he is going to lose her now. The attack on the army base appears to have been a diversion to cover the theft of munitions from Longcross, and they suspect a mole in the MoD. They track a Serbian intelligence agent who is working out of the Serb embassy, and Zoe latches on to him, intent on finding out what his link with Gradic is. A munitions transport is attacked by Gradic, giving him more weapons.

Danny is attacked by some thugs and left in a heap, and it emerges that the Serb agent, Rado, is Gradic's nephew. He has killed in his service, and Zoe is now in his apartment and in potentially grave danger. Luckily though she manages to pass him the cufflinks which have a keylogger built in, as she has been ordered to do. A man presented with a gift from a pretty woman? Who wouldn't make a point of wearing the things? So now MI5 can pick up everything he types on his keyboard. It seems he's sending classified ads to be posted in newspapers. The guys know this must be code and luckily Danny unearths their mole, a low-level operative who has been fooled into thinking he was helping a Freedom of Information movement. He tells them that the ads corresponded to a coded location which would be the “dead drops” where he would leave the secret papers for his contact --- whom he only knew as “Radovan” --- and collect his money.

MI5 get to work trying to find the relevant ad and Malcolm finds it. The terrible truth is that the ad shows a grid location for the COBRA meeting being chaired by the Prime Minister tonight and with all top heads of government and the armed forces attending, a chance for Gradic to strike off the head of the snake, take out the heads of the intelligence, military and government at one blow. Even now, as Tom races towards the location, the attackers have broken in and are ascending the stairways. But when Gradic enters the meeting room he finds only Tom there --- and the army of course. The meeting has been rescheduled and relocated at the last minute.

Gradic is taken into custody, but Tom sneers that sending him to the Court of Criminal Justice at the Hague is more like a holiday, and Harry agrees. So they concoct a story that he is a paedophile, and send him to Egypt, where he will be treated appropriately. It's rough justice, but it's justice. But if that's a happy ending for Tom it's the only one, as Ellie, tired of competing with his job and national security, leaves him for good, and he can't really blame her. Radovan is also arrested for having aided his uncle.

The “Need to Know”
Highlighting how tight security is and how everyone must abide by it, a lower-ranking agent tells Harry “Urgent incident report Sir, but I don't have clearance to read it out. It's on screen now.” This seems over-the-top: the guy could easily read it and nobody would know, but his clearance level does not authorise him to access the message and so he has to wait until a superior officer comes in. Silly really: the message could be time-dependent, lives could be hanging in the balance, but protocol must be observed at all times.

Baggage
Tom, Ellie and Masie

Tom agonises over the slip of the tongue, the moment when he told Ellie what he really is, where he really works, when the lying and the cover stories and the deceit became too much for him. But now, like Spiderman revealing his secret identity to someone close, he has put the woman he loves, and her daughter, in danger. He has painted a big target on her back and she will carry this forever. She will be a way to get to him, a way to put pressure on him, someone to threaten when an enemy wants him to do or say something. He was nearly responsible for both their deaths, and it's only pure luck that the bomb did not go off. He would have had to watch them both die --- would have died with them, rather than continue on without them --- and he now bitterly regrets having let the mask slip. He can see, as he has known all along, why the work of a spy and his personal life must never mix, and why most of the agents cannot afford to even have a personal life, must keep everyone close to them at a distance, and invent stories and excuses to cover up the incredibly important, but incredibly dangerous work they do in the defence of the realm.

Zoe
Although she knows it's part of the setup to capture the keystrokes from Radovan's computer by giving him the cufflinks, surely some part of Zoe must be flattered at the attention the good-lloking Serb gives her. I mean, she's not ugly or anything --- quite the reverse --- but Radovan is dark-skinned, cultured and kind (at least outwardly) and a perfect gentleman. He does not know this is a ruse and seems to fall fairly hard for the girl, doing his best to help her better her circumstances. Of course, at the end of it all is the hope he will get into Zoe's knickers, but even so, he does help her. And she must wonder, lonely and isolated by her job as she is, what it would be like to fall for a man like this, what it would be like to come home to a man like this? She knows of course that he is involved with one of the worst butchers in Serbia's troubled history, but hey, nobody's perfect!

For his part, Radovan seems genuinely crushed when it slowly starts to dawn upon him that he has been used. He just sits there as the special branch break down his door, unable to believe that the woman he had perhaps been falling for has betrayed him, and in a way, you kind of have to feel sorry for him.

Hard to believe?
It's like those plot holes I featured recently. Sometimes it's hard to understand how certain parts of a story are supposed to be taken seriously. We're meant to believe that a transport moving munitions on behalf of the Ministry of Defence is taken without a single shot fired by the British? Gradic and his men shoot the driver --- who stupidly leaves his vehicle, unarmed --- and then take out the rest of the detail. A jeep AND a truck with soldiers and NOBODY GETS OFF A SHOT?? God save us. Sometimes it's just a little too far off the reservation...

And Danny gets taken out by four little snotnoses? Even if he isn't armed, surely he should be more than able to take care of four little punks with some unarmed combat or something? But he offers no resistance and they kick the shit out of him! Britain's finest? :rolleyes:

The mind of a terrorist
Asked about how he feels about the women and children he had bulldozed alive into mass graves in Serbia, Gradic sneers “They were collaborators, and would have killed me when I turned my back. The woman and the child, they are all the same to me. They are my enemy. They are all guilty. They deserve to die.”

Harry's World
Harry: “There's no justice any more, Tom, not the way the world plays it. Nuremberg, truth and reconciliation? There hasn't been a single unified successful prosecution of international law. Do you know how much that single Libyan Lockerbie suspect cost the country?”
Tom: “An enormous amount of money.”
Harry: “An enormous of money. They're sending Gradic to the Hague. The way the tribunal's going, he could die of old age before his case comes up.”

The Shock Factor
Well, sort of the reverse really. As season two opens we find ourselves in exactly the same spot, as if time has frozen until we can again rejoin Tom, and there he is, standing helplessly outside the door of his house with his girlfriend and her daughter trapped inside, a bomb about to go off. When the bomb does explode, it's pretty masterful writing as we're led to believe it's his house that's going up, but in fact unbeknownst to us the scene has changed and we are now looking at the home, or former home, of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who has just been killed by the Irish group.

This sort of cliffhanger ending would disappear in later seasons. Although there would be a cliffhanger, it would be resolved literally in the last seconds of the episode. Maybe it was too much for audiences to wait to find out what had happened, maybe ratings were dipping, I don't know. But you'll see it in future seasons, where at the point you expect they'll freeze the action at the end of a season they just push it on that little bit more so that things are resolved. Disappointing really.

Also worthy of note: this was the first season of Spooks to run for ten episodes, unlike the first which only had six. From this on in, there would be ten episodes per season.

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Back when I started up this journal, over a year ago now, and I presented a list of series I intended to cover (a large percentage of which have been or are being featured, with more waiting in the wings for imminent release) Unknown Soldier brought up the subject of Doctor Who. Would I be looking at that long-running (longest-ever running) BBC science-fiction drama? I thought about it and I said it was unlikely, given what I had already in the pipeline, but that if I did attempt it it would only be from the “rebirth” of 2005 onwards. In other words, I would only be looking at the “New Who”, when the show was reimagined by Russell T. Davies with Christopher Eccleston in the role of the ninth Doctor. Why? I’ll tell you what I told him at the time.

Although I watched the series when it was on BBC when I was a lad, I did this for reasons that the younger ones among you will find hard to relate to. The first reason was that back then, in the seventies, we had about four TV channels. There was no digital telly and we didn’t even own a video recorder --- in fact, for much of my earlier youth videos were not even invented or at least commercially available. So you had to choose carefully what you wanted to watch, and it could run like this on a Saturday evening: RTE (Irish national TV station) showing the news and the Late Late Show (boring chat show), UTV (Ulster TV, the “Northern Irish” part of our viewing, even though it was an English channel --- think Channel 4 before there was a Channel 4) maybe Coronation Street (soap opera that has been running for 14,509 years now), BBC 1 might have sports results or some gameshow and BBC 2 would be showing Doctor Who. Now, for a 10-15 year old, bored with no internet or XBox, no mobile phone, no computer even, such a choice was obvious and a no-brainer.

The second reason was that I was already becoming a fan of science-fiction, so whether it was a movie about giant ants, a cartoon with rockets in it or even a dry documentary about going to the moon, I was in. Star Trek, Blake's 7, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (yeah I know!), Battlestar Galactica ... I watched them all, devoured them with the almost insatiable hunger of the young and bored and restless. And Doctor Who, terrible though it actually was, fit right in to these preferences. Thirdly, I watched it because if you didn't then they might be discussing it at school and you'd be left out of the conversation if you hadn't seen it. As I said, there were no video recorders so you watched it there and then or you didn't get to see it at all. Finally, like every young boy at the time, then and since, I watched it because it had girls in it. Well, one girl. But many of the other sci-fi shows did not, though some did. It sort of tilted the balance and made up your mind if you were wavering. Then there was the music. Iconic, spooky, scary, always something to look forward to on a Saturday, even if the episode itself left rather a lot to be desired.

So basically we watched Doctor Who because it was the best out of what was showing. I’m quite certain now that if I had the choice, with the hundreds of channels, SKY Plus box, internet, videogames and a hundred other distractions we have now, I would not choose to watch classic Who. In fact, it showed a while back and I wasn’t interested. The thing is, Classic Who, to me, was terrible. I know Urban and Unknown Soldier will want to crucify me or feed me to the Daleks for that comment, but it was. The sets were shaky, the acting often awful, the scripts laughable and the effects largely non-existent. I’m not saying that to get at Doctor Who specifically; back then, the budgets weren’t available and the technology did not exist to allow any sci-fi show to realise its true potential. As the seventies turned to the eighties and into the nineties, and more updated techniques came to the fore, and with the rise of CGI and digital television, on into HD and 3D, television science-fiction strode forward in leaps and bounds. But back then, in the sixties and seventies, the possibilities were very limited.

The result being that shows like Doctor Who, Lost in space and others looked crap. But to be fair, it wasn’t just the sets or the effects. Blake's Seven was a show that came up around the same time as I was watching Doctor Who and though its effects were equally terrible, and some of the acting as bad, the stories were much better overall. US asked me to include that show too, and well the jury’s still out: at the moment I’m finding it hard to even find a source for the show before I can even think of reviewing it, so please stand by but don’t hold your breath. The point I’m making here is that, were there anything better on at the time I doubt I would have watched the original Doctor Who, and now that there is, I would not even think of going back to watch it. Urban is doing a great job on it in his “Doctor Who thing”, but mostly --- and I realise this is because he intentionally started with the worst episodes first --- he’s laughing at it, saying how bad it was and just basically taking the piss out of it. I feel that way when I occasionally catch an episode, and I find it hard to believe that the “New Who” is based on that original show at all. It’s light years ahead of its parent, but of course with the passage of time you would expect, even demand that. Look at “new” Battlestar Galactica compared to the original, or even Star Trek: the Next Generation beside classic Trek. The series has to grow, expand, mature, both in terms of effects, settings, acting and storylines, and in its appeal to the ever-changing audience demographic. Original Trek was for young boys who wanted adventures in space, whereas “new” Trek concerned itself more with political and environmental issues, and gave much more powerful and dominant roles to women, who had been mostly relegated to the equivalent of answering the phones in original Trek: receptionists in space, indeed.

So the new Doctor Who targeted a double demographic: those who had grown up on the original and those who had never seen it, but would nevertheless appreciate a well-written, well-constructed and above all enjoyable show. Which just happened to be a sci-fi one. Original Who was very much up its own arse and there was little, as I remember it, real humour or self-deprecation about it. New Who changes all that, and with its, so far, three incarnations of the Doctor and a new one on the way, has won new fans and probably in all likelihood alienated many purists who grump and fold their arms and complain that it’s become a “kids’ show”, forgetting that originally that was the audience at which Doctor Who was aimed in the sixties.

You surely know the basics of the show one way or another. If you’ve been following Urban’s Doctor Who Thing (and if not, I expect a very good explanation on my desk Monday morning at nine o’clock!) he’ll have filled you in on the basic premise of the series, but very briefly The Doctor (no other name, and no he’s not called Doctor Who) is a Timelord, an alien from a race of time-travellers who live on a planet called Gallifrey and basically police the universe. After many run-ins with humans the Doctor has come to grow fond, and indeed protective of the Earth, and fights many enemies who wish to destroy, enslave, sell or otherwise mess with our home planet. Oddly, he has no special powers per se --- he’s not a superhero --- but he does have the benefit of over nine hundred years’ experience to draw on, and as he goes from adventure to adventure his fame --- and respect for him --- has spread, to the point where often the mere mention of his name has been enough to scatter whole invading battlefleets, who suddenly think well maybe Orisis IX in the Crab Nebula was a much nicer planet: let’s invade there instead! He also has the undoubted advantage of not really dying: he can "regenerate", that is, take on a new form, each time he comes close to death. But the number of regenerations is limited, otherwise he'd be immortal. At the time of the rebirth of the series he is on his ninth incarnation.
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The Doctor travels through time and space in his spaceship, a blue old-style fifties police box called the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space), and almost always has a human companion with him, nearly always female. The Companion keeps him grounded, reminds him who he is and stops him occasionally going off the deep end. One or two have been instrumental in saving his life too. He has many enemies, of whom the best known are of course the Daleks (or, if you live in Ireland, Dar-licks!) and the Cybermen, who all for some unknown reason seem to think Earth is the place to be. You’d think there’d be enough planets across time and space for them to hassle but no, they always have to come knocking on our door.

I used to read my sci-fi/cult TV mags and note with amusement the campaigns for, rumours of and denials about the return of Doctor Who. After all, it was cancelled by the BBC in 1989, and looked a dead duck. But fan campaigns persisted, people speculated on how, when and who, and finally, after more controversy than a reunion of Pink Floyd or the Beatles, the word was officially out: Doctor Who was returning, and it would be better than ever. I suppose someone in an office in BBC Towers must have finally realised this could be a huge moneyspinner, and cash speaks loudest. Therefore on March 26 2005, almost nine years to the day as I write this (well, a few weeks off) Christopher Eccleston, who had made his name in series like Cracker, Our friends in the north and Clocking off, as well as movies like Existenz, 28 days later and The Others, stepped onto our TV screens as the hard-man northerner ninth incarnation of the Doctor, and after sixteen years the BBC’s enfant terrible was back. And it was indeed better.

Unlike Urban, I’ll be doing my usual on the series. I may take an occasional pot-shot at some gaffe or unfortunate error of judgement in storywriting but I will generally be taking this seriously. There were, undoubtedly, bad episodes across the so-far eight season run of “New Who” (which, for the sake of my sanity and the preservation of inverted commas everywhere I will only refer to from here on in as Doctor Who, with the explicit understanding that I am only talking about the new series) but the good mostly outweighed the bad, and when they were good sometimes they were very very good indeed. I’ll be starting my coverage soon, and some of my material may indeed dovetail with what Urban is writing. So if you want a straightforward, serious look at how New Who (last time I’ll use the phrase I promise) beats the crap out of Old Who, check out this journal. If you want comments on how bad Old Who could be, read Urban. Or better yet, read us both. We’re sort of doing the same thing, though in two extremely different ways.

I don't think Blake's 7 had better writing than Doctor Who. I think Blake's 7 strength was it had more defined characters and a bigger regular cast that it could write for.
It was the interplay between the characters that made it compelling to watch.

I don't think it's a coincidence that my favourite Blake's 7 episodes were written by Robert Holmes who consistently wrote some of Doctor Who's best stories over a 17 year period and who was script editor during the peak of it's popularity during Tom Baker's first 3 series.

As you know I couldn't disagree with you more on original Doctor Who. The concept is actually amazing and still the best I've seen in a sci-fi series. I would say as far as science fiction world's go it's the richest and most diverse sci-fi world out there and more interesting than the Star trek universe overall. Trek probably has a larger worldwide fanbase for the simple reason it gave better attention to its aesthetics and its brilliant use of colour back in the 1960s and then moved into big budget movies in the 1980s. Also the concept of Trek is far more realistic of course than Doctor Who could ever be, but who necessarily wants realism in a sci-fi series? Sure the acting and sets on Doctor Who were generally bad but the stories and races pretty amazing and of course every series has its dire episodes (which Urban is covering) Doctor Who as a series is really an acquired taste.

Doctor Who was always amazing for me for the simple reason that I grew up with the novels of the series and like with every novel you visualize everything. Despite growing up with the BBC and in the UK old Doctor Who back then was very seldom repeated and you'd get the odd showing and I mean odd showing of the older series. Most Who followers just had to watch the current series as it was and as you said there was no video releases of the older stories for many a year, which made the novels of all the earlier Doctors an amazing thing to have.

Blake's 7 another amazing series and right out of the 70s Who catalogue for style. It was far bleaker than Who and had a greater character development and kind of goes hand in hand with 70s Who.

I've now got more into new Who, but the series is far less interesting than the classic series and like most shows today it's largely aimed at getting ratings.

As fas as B7 goes, I would agree that to some extent the interaction between the characters was one of the things that made the show (remember Avon trying to convince Vila that he needed him to help dump the neutron star fragment, when only moments before he had been quite willing to kick him off the ship in order to lighten the load?) but I think the stories were really good too. The whole idea of Blake being railroaded and becoming a reluctant revolutionary, and Avon's eventual rise to power was pretty unique in sci-fi, even drama of the time.

But it was either a clever twist or a really bad idea to call the authority in the show the Federation, and more, to make them evil. People --- myself definitely included --- had grown up with the idea of Star Trek's Federation, and they were definitely seen as the good guys (until DS9 skewed things), so to get used to the idea of the Federation being the evil oppressors was I think hard. And they could have called them anything; why the Federation I never understood. But yes, between Blake's 7 and Space:1999 (another one under consideration: can I have three extra sets of arms grafted on please? Oh, and make the day 30 hours long while you're at it!) they were two of the darkest sci-fi shows on telly, long before the likes of Galactica or Babylon 5 showed up.

I do admit my memory of classic Who is very hazy but other than I think "The Green Death" I don't recall being excited about any of the stories. I would seriously argue that "New Who" is MORE interesting than "Classic Who", though I guess I can't really as I don't remember that much of the latter. However I think it's definitely come on in leaps and bounds, though in some ways it has become something of a parody of itself to a degree. I'm not sure it's a show you can be into both sides of: seems like you're either a Classic nut or a Current nut (not bun); guess which side I fall on?

Still, I'll be interested in both your comments when my coverage does begin. If either of you know how to get at Blake's 7 without having to shell out for the DVDs please let me know. Netflix ain't got it and I don't see anything on YouTube, and these days it's almost impossible for me to(r)rent anything, if yiz get my drift... ;) I think I'd like to take it on, but I need a source.

Oh yeah: throw Space:1999 in there too. God, when will I ever sleep? :shycouch:

Oh man! Thank you!!! Sweet! :thumb: :bowdown:
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(I guess this means I gotta do it now, huh?) ;)

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

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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”
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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?) ;)

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.

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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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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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!”

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

Yup. It's on the list. But there's a lot to come before it. I'll definitely be doing it though. Watch for an intro soonish.

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2.7 "The usual suspects"

Dean has been arrested on suspicion of murder of a young woman, and Sam is soon taken by the police too. It's fairly obvious the pair have been tracked by the cops across the states, racking up offences such as credit card fraud, identity theft and so on, but now the change is a lot more serious and a SWAT team bring Sam in. The other problem --- as if murder wasn't enough --- is that Dean is supposed to be dead. Remember when they left his doppleganger back in season one? Well that body is now being exhumed, Sheridan, the lead investigator on the case tells Sam, and they're interested to find out what they will uncover back in St. Louis. The female cop, Ballard, tries to get Sam to cut a deal, telling him his brother is already bound for life in jail but he can get on with his life if he helps them.

Sam begins to tell the story in flashback mode. Tony Giles was a good friend of their father's, so when they heard about his death in the local paper they came at once to investigate. Seems Giles, a lawyer, was killed in his office by having his throat slit. No suspects, no CCTV camera footage, no signs of entry and no DNA or fingerprints. When they arrived and spoke to Giles's wife Karen, she mentioned that her husband had had a nightmare the night before he died, of a pale woman with red eyes standing at his bed. This is the part of the story Sam tells the police officer. What he leaves out is...

When Dean and Sam broke into Giles's office, they found a sheet of paper on the desk with one word typed over and over again: danaschulps. The same word has somehow been carved or blasted or burned into the top of the glass table. As the guys try to crack Tony Giles's password on the computer (well, as Sam does) Karen is visited by the ghostly woman, and her printer clacks out the same word: danashulps. Dean arrives at the house to find Karen murdered, her throat slit in the same way as her husband's was. As he kneels beside the body the police suddenly burst in and he is taken into custody.

Now we're back in the present, and Sam is trying to impress his brother's innocence on the cop, but it's hard to give a reason for his presence in the house with a corpse just freshly killed without giving away their secret and possibly being locked up as madmen. Left to think about it by the cops, Sam concentrates on the word danashulps. They both thought it was someone's name, but haven't been able to come up with a single example in the whole Baltimore phonebook, so perhaps it's something else? An anagram? Both brothers, held in custody separately, get the same idea and each work on rearranging the letters to see if they spell anything else, anything significant.

Dean's lawyer, rather nonplussed that his client does not seem to be taking seriously a charge which could see him face the death penalty, mutters when asked that one of the words Dean has made, or part of it --- Ashland --- is a street not far from where they are. He gets a note in to Dean to let him know, and Dean appears to agree to confess to the murder, but instead tells the camera setup to take his “confession” that the two brothers believe that a vengeful spirit was responsible, causing considerable anger and mocking laughter among the cops. Dean is locked up, but when they go back to find Sam he has somehow escaped from a fourth-storey room with no fire escape.

Ballard encounters the pale woman in her bathroom at home; she notices the woman's throat is slit deeply and her eyes are red. The word danashulps is written across her mirror, revealed in the rising steam. When Dean sees her the next morning she starts asking about “all that stuff he was talking about” --- spirits, ghosts, life after death --- and he notices she has bruises on her wrists that are the same as those that were on Karen Giles. Dean tells her she needs to find Sam, who will help her. She is impressed that he is giving up his brother, whom she could arrest, but Dean advises her it would be better if she let him save her life.

When she meets Sam he is going through a stack of photographs, all women who have disappeared from the Ashland Street area. Ballard tells him that the spirit woman looked like she was trying to say something, but with her throat cut no sound would come out. She identifies her from Sam's photo collection as Clair Becker, who vanished about nine months ago. She was a junkie and although Ballard does not remember specifically arresting her, she did work narcotics at the time so it is possible. They go to the last address she is known to have been seen at, hoping to find her body and do the old salt-and-burn trick Dean and Sam are so adept at now, and find the ghost of Claire there, pointing towards where an old shelving unit blocks the window. The name stencilled on the outside, and partially blocked by the unit, is ASHLAND SUPPLIES, with the five last letters obscured. Sam gets a sledgehammer and breaks through the wall, but although he finds something there he is bothered.

Vengeful spirits are, well, vengeful, and they want to stick around to take their revenge. Leading Sam to her remains is going to mean Claire's vengeance will be at an end, so why is she showing them where she is buried? When they recover the body they see bruises on the wrists, as surely they expected since this is a hallmark of the murders the spirit has so far committed, and a necklace around her throat, which Ballard remarks she has one just like: Sheridan gave it to her. Sam makes the connection now: Claire is not a vengeful spirit, she is a death omen, and is trying to bring her killer to justice. Ballard now remembers that a while back some heroin went missing from a bust, but nobody was ever accused. Surely it was a cop, and if so, he would need a heroin dealer to fence it...

Sheridan it seems has already got Dean in the van, under the pretence of being transferred to St. Louis for the murders there, but Sam and Ballard catch him as he stops and there is a gunfight. Sheridan admits that he killed Claire, as she was going to turn him in for stealing the heroin. Tony Giles was laundering the money from the deal, but also ready to turn, so he had to go, and as it was likely he had confided in his wife, Karen needed to be removed from the picture too. There's nothing left now but for Sheridan to die at Ballard's hands as the ghost of Claire looks on, satisfied that she has been avenged.

Having realised that the guys were telling the truth all along, and that they saved her life, Ballard lets them go, pretending they escaped.

MUSIC
Another of those rare episodes where there are no songs played.

PCRs
Rather an obvious one, but Sam says “I'm not Scully, you're Scully.” Dean replies “I'm Mulder.” (Referencing the famous duo from “The X-Files”, of course)

Again Dean references Matlock when he calls the lawyer the name: “Hey, thanks for the law review, Matlock!” Sam also says the same thing when he meets the lawyer, Kraus. Well, he says “Sure thing Matlock!” leading Kraus to sigh “You two really are brothers, aren't you?”

Dean also references the cartoon ghost Casper, though he calls him “bloodthirsty” whereas we would generally know him as “friendly”. Or annoying. Especially since he started working for the CIA. I'm serious!

Dean says “I'm not joking Ponch”, referencing Poncherello, one of the TV heart-throbs from the series “Chips”.

On the note he passes to Dean are written the names “Hilts” and “McQueen”. We all know who Steve McQueen is, but I didn't know that Hilts was his character in the movie “The great escape”. Now I do.

When the guys are separated apparently they check in to motels or hotels under the name Jim Rockford. “The Rockford Files” was a detective series that ran in the seventies, very popular, made a star of James Garner. Frasier's father also watches his show, so if you're reading my writeups of that show you'll hear about him there from time to time.

At the very end, Dean grins “For some reason I could really go for some pea soup”. I'm assuming this is a reference to “The Exorcist..” Actually I see now that it is, as Linda Blair is in this episode.

Dean says “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” and also mentions “redrum”, two references to the novel/movie “The Shining”.

The "WTF??! Moment
Probably at the opening, where Dean is arrested. Though it's kind of not really...

BROTHERS
Of course you wouldn't expect either brother to give up the other to the cops to save their own skin, but Sam is given the choice here when he is told Dean is headed for a life sentence at best, the death penalty at worst, but that Sam does not have to be part of his fall. Naturally, the younger brother knows the truth but can't explain it without sounding insane, but he has no intention whatever of leaving Dean behind.

It is interesting that the two of them have been hunting for so long now that at times they operate almost as a single mind. While separated, and with no way, initially, to contact each other, they each come to the same conclusion about the word danashulps, believing it may be an anagram rather than a name. Of course, they've encountered this sort of thing before, but still it is impressive.

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Let’s just get one thing straight from the start: I do not watch reality shows as a rule. I hate the bloody things. “Survivor”, “American Idol”, “Big Brother”, “Dancing with the stars” …. name any reality show you like and the chances are I’ll hate it. I hate the lazy programming, the formulaic way of presenting these things, and the constant hero-worship that seems to go with both the judges and the contestants, like everyone assumes you must be watching the show, and if you’re not then why not? Reality shows also show a bored, lacklustre attitude to television programming. Why look for, or make, new drama, comedy or (god help us) sci-fi shows when you can just take the current format, tweak it a little and hey presto! You have a new show. X-Factor? American Idol. Dancing with the stars? Dancing on ice. Not to mention the slew of programmes that then split off into national versions: Survivor UK. Survivor USA. Survivor Canada. I don’t know if this particular show spun off, so don’t post comments telling me I’m wrong. I don’t care: I’m just using it as an example, and certain shows have certainly been taken up by countries other than the one in which they began.

Another of my favourites (the only other really), “Dragons Den” did it, although technically I don’t count that as a reality show, as it doesn’t follow the tired and banal format of other shows. But nevertheless you have Dragons Den Canada, Dragons Den Ireland and the US version which they decided to call, for some reason, the Shark Tank. Yeah. Um. These reality shows take away interest, finance and support from other shows which should get an equal chance, but no. If you don’t have four judges (one of which has to be smarmy and/or nasty) and people voting in --- probably texting, though Twitter is no doubt just around the corner --- then we do not want to know. A show about cowboys? Who’s going to watch that? Eighteenth-century period drama? Do me a favour, pal! And as for that show about Pan Am! Doomed to failure, son. Doomed to failure.

Because of course what makes or breaks a show is not how good or bad it is, it’s how many people watch it, and by extension how much advertising space the networks can sell. Ratings, in the world of television, are the great leveller. Many a great and long-running series has fallen foul of the ennui of the jaded audience, who lose interest and so the ratings plummet and the show is axed. Conversely, some shows that have clearly been on the air for far too long rather than being put out of their misery remain there because enough people are watching them to make them commercially viable, even after many years of the same tired and boring storylines. Sure it’s the whole soap opera idea. Families all across the UK and Ireland sit down to watch “Coronation Street” and “Eastenders” two or three times a week, and often will look at each other in bemused indifference as another lacklustre episode ends. But they keep coming back to it --- it’s almost a tradition at this point --- hoping it will pick up, and so the viewing figures remain steady and Britain’s two best-loved soaps are in no danger of cancellation, despite both being clearly well past their prime.

And everyone loves a reality show! You’ll hear them talking about them in work, at the shops, at school, whereever you may happen to be. Who will win “Dancing on ice?” Didja see that fella on “Britain’s Got Talent?” When is “Masterchef” on? It’s like a shared national, or global, consciousness, and people the world over look forward to the return of their favourite reality show as it comes back for season one billion, never fearing the axe because these shows are giving people what they want, and when you give people what they want they will always come back for more. Or, to put it another way and to quote Lisa Simpson: you’ll never go broke appealing to the lowest common denominator.

So yes, I hate reality shows and so by definition I should hate this show. Massive egos walk in the door and tell everyone how great they are, like nobody ever ran a business before they showed up, and suck up to the boss in the slim hopes of beating the other candidates and landing a plum job at his company. It’s all about the nasty, cut-throat world of business and there’s little or no room for sentimentality. A show like “The Apprentice” should have me reaching for the channel changer as I try not to bring my dinner back up.

So, why does it not? Why am I so drawn to this show, which I should hate? Why do I look forward eagerly, like the sheep who count the days to the next American Idol or whatever, to the new season and then lose myself in it? It’s not for research and it’s not to prove that I’ve at least tried it and hate it. And it’s certainly not for irony. The truth is, I don’t know why I enjoy this show but I do. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of things about it that I dislike, and I often catch myself thinking “WTF am I watching this?” but I never turn it off. In fact, the very idea of featuring it here must mean that I really do enjoy it, and that it’s among my favourite shows. And it is.

I realise fully that ninety-nine point nine nine nine recurring to infinity percent of you here could not give a pair of rat’s balls about this show and will pass over the writeups here with rolled eyes or shakes of the head, wondering what the hell am I doing wasting time and energy on this when I could be writing more “Spooks” or “Babylon 5” or “Futurama” or, well, anything. Some of you may be looking at it and saying “HTF did I get here? I meant to click on Janszoon’s journal link!” Happens all the time. But the point is that I know very, very few people, even those of you into reality TV, will be interested in reading what I write here, and that is just fine. But from the first I’ve wanted to find a way to expound on my thoughts about this show, and for a while that desire found its outlet with another website, but things did not work out and anyway it was only the current season they were interested in, and of the UK version too.

So I’m writing this more or less for myself. If anyone wants to comment they are as ever welcome, and I’d love to debate the ins and outs of the show with you. But I don’t expect that to happen. This is a show most of you will skip over, I know that. No problem. But I have a lot to say --- good and bad --- about it, and this is my journal and here is where I intend to say that. If you don’t want to read it nobody is forcing you. If on the other hand you are one of the few who are interested in, or intrigued by the premise of, this show, then you may find something here to entertain or even educate you. My hope is eventually to do all three series I have watched, that is, the US, UK and Irish versions, though finding a source for the middle one is proving very hard. But I have hopes. If I manage it then I intend to try to run them in tandem with each other --- okay, there are three: trandem? Whatever; I mean I’m going to run all three at once. What that would mean would be that I would first post, say, episode one of season one of the US Apprentice, followed by episode one season one of the UK and then the opener for season one of the Irish version. The latter only lasted four seasons so after that --- if I ever get that far --- we’d drop back to the UK and US ones, which are I think about evenly matched in terms of how many seasons they have so far run for.

For anyone who does not know, and wishes to know, what the show is about, here’s a basic rundown. Super-rich corporate magnate Donald Trump (and in the UK version Lord Sugar, formerly Sir Alan) selects fifteen of “the best of the best” to come to his headquarters in New York and take part in what he calls “the interview from Hell”. Basically, over the course of about twelve weeks or so, each candidate has to work with others in a team to do various things, and do them better than the other team. This could be anything from starting their own ice-cream parlour to putting on a lavish gala show for celebrities. After each task the two teams are called to Trump’s boardroom, where he announces who has won the task. Each team has a PM, or Project Manager, and in the losing team one person will be fired each week. It may not be the PM, but often it is.

As the weeks go on and the tasks get harder, the weak are weeded out and those unable to stand the heat are kicked out of the kitchen, till finally only two people are left standing and these are pitted against each other, the winner taking the prize of a senior position in one of Trump’s many companies. They are The Apprentice.

I suppose what I like about the show is that it can really trip the self-righteous, arrogant candidates up, forcing them to commit errors they maybe wouldn’t normally or putting them in an unfamiliar situation that they find hard to cope with --- someone who, for instance, can’t stand dogs might have to work with a team to groom these animals, or someone who knows nothing about fashion might have to help put on a fashion show ---- which sorts the men from the boys and the women from the girls. It’s gratifying, in a schaudenfraude way I suppose to see these self-aggrandising "business prodigies" argue over what how to properly identify something on a list of items they have to locate, or to see them snapping over what colours should be used on a logo. Also, people who are not used to taking orders have to learn to work within a team and do what they’re told. Not always easy.

But I think it’s mostly the way they cope (or don’t!) with the varied tasks they’re set that interests me most. Sometimes these tasks can reveal a real diamond in the rough, as someone discovers they have a talent for something they didn’t realise they had, as well as unearthing turds, where someone discovers they don’t. The interplay between these new leaders of tomorrow’s business world is always good to watch, and it’s funny when they make a simple mistake that you or I wouldn’t make, and you’re shouting at the screen saying “You idiot! There are two Ls in “appalling!” or whatever.

The tension as to who is going to win is another factor, as despite yourself you’ll find yourself allying with certain characters and candidates, and hoping they’ll triumph, or, more often, taking a dislike to others and waiting to see them sent home. The Boardroom (yeah, it requires capitalisation) always crackles with pent-up frustration, anger and recrimination, and Trump pulls no punches as, with his two aides, who shadow the teams as they go about their task and report back to the boss, he picks apart their failings and demands answers. Like sharks scenting blood in the water, the candidates almost always turn on each other, the teams disintegrating like smoke as everyone fights for his or her position, more than happy to throw one, two or more members of their group to the wolves. Sorry about the mixed metaphors, but I was going to say “under the bus” and I don’t like that phrase, not least because they use it a lot in the show.

And Trump, despite what he’d like to think, is not infallible. Over the seasons he has made some very questionable decisions, firing candidates who should have been kept and saving ones who clearly deserved to be let go. Even in the final selection he has, in my opinion, more than once chosen the wrong finalist. Whether this is for ratings or genuine on his part I don’t know, but perhaps it shows that behind the expensive suits and the limos and the apartments crammed to the ceiling with gold fixtures, the man is just as human as any of us, if richer possibly than God. It’s nice to know even he can get it wrong from time to time.

But in the final analysis, the last word is his and though he takes advice from his aides and listens to the results of each task, weighing a candidate’s performance sometimes on one task and sometimes over the course of several, his is the firing finger and his is the unalterable decision as to who goes, and who stays. To paraphrase CJ from “The fall and rise of Reginald Perrin”, he didn’t get where he is today by letting other people make his decisions for him!

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Season Two: "The coming of Shadows" (Part Seven)
2.11 “All alone in the night”
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Ambassador Delenn has been summoned to stand before the Grey Council, who wish to consider her position both within that august body, and as representative to Babylon 5. She fears she may at the very least be removed from the latter. Ivanova tells Sheridan there have been strange reports of disturbances in Sector 92, and he decides to go investigate personally. Ivanova reminds him that General Hague is due at 1800, and is surprised that she was not advised of this important arrival, but Sheridan tells her it is a private matter and he should be back in plenty of time. When they get to the sector co-ordinates though, there is nothing to be seen … until suddenly a strange ship comes through the jumpgate and after a quick firefight with Sheridan’s escort, beams the captain aboard and leaves.

The only survivor of the escort, Lieutenant Ramirez, has no choice but to head back to Babylon 5 and report the abduction, as his ship has been badly damaged. The general arrives on the station, and worries when he is told Sheridan is overdue: this is not like him. Delenn receives the judgement of the Grey Council. Due to her disobedience in refusing to wait until her transformation had been authorised, she is to be removed from the Council, can no longer be known as Satai. When she asks what about her ambassadorial position, she is told this is still being debated. It being her right to make a statement before the Grey Council, and she confirming she wishes to exercise that right, they will convene, and call for her when they are ready.

On the alien ship Sheridan is subjected to experiment and/or torture, then pitted in combat with an alien, and then another, a Narn, who asks Sheridan to kill him. But the captain just knocks him out, reasoning that whoever captured him --- and the Narn, and any other aliens --- are using them for their sport, and refuses to play. Ramirez dies, and the telemetry from his fighter shows the alien ship kidnapping Sheridan. Delenn discovers that she has been replaced by, of all people, Neroon, in the Grey Council. Neroon is Warrior Caste, and now that caste have skewed the balance of power on their side, which is unprecedented. Delenn is cast out, but allowed to remain at Babylon 5.

Sheridan manages to disable the control that was forcing the Narn to fight him --- and the other alien too, we assume --- and teams up with him to try to escape. Meanwhile back at the station the general has called in Sheridan’s old ship, the Agamemnon, to help out. They’re trying to track the alien ship, and are getting some help as it has made extra stops, presumably to collect more specimens. Sheridan has an odd dream in which Kosh speaks to him. On returning from her visit to the Grey Council Delenn is contacted by Babylon 5, and tells them she knows of this race. She gives Ivanova the co-ordinates of their homeworld, and the Starfuries along with the Agamemnon head to intercept the craft, joined by Ambassador Delenn.

Though the aliens space most of their captives --- eject them into space without any protection, basically executing them ---, the strike force destroys the ship. Sheridan and the Narn meanwhile have made it to an escape pod and are picked up. As he leaves medlab having checked up on his fellow captive, Sheridan runs into Kosh who says “You have always been here”, the same phrase he used in the dream the captain had aboard the alien ship. General Hague meets with him and it becomes evident that Sheridan’s original mission on B5 was to scope out the loyalties of his crew. He says he doesn’t enjoy being a spy, but now that they have all proved themselves Hague tells him that not everyone back home is convinced the death of the former president was an accident, and he asks Sheridan to help him gather information to help him prove that there was a military coup on Earth, that Psi Corps were behind it, and to help him redress the balance. Sheridan agrees, and his command staff, when asked, are in too.



QUOTES (Note: as the series moves more closely into the overall arc this season many of these quotes may directly reference or have a bearing on future episodes, events, etc., and so where relevant from now on I will be commenting on those that need commenting, advising how they link into future or previous episodes and how they fit into the overall arc, without of course giving away any secrets or spoilers)

Ramirez: “You’re crazy man! The Dodgers will never make it to the world series. Hell, they’ll be lucky if they make the playoffs without embarrassing themselves!”
Garibaldi: “Your diagnosis, doctor?”
Franklin: “The patient is confused, delusional, unable to separate his natural sense of loyalty to his home team from the fact that they stink, and only got into the playoffs on a technicality!”
Ramirez:” What technicality? The Mars team hit more home runs than any other team on the books!”
Franklin: “Only because Martian gravity is forty percent lower than Earth normal: the ball travels faster and further, skewing the results.. Once they hit Earth gravity, Helen Keller could bat better than any one of them!”

Delenn: “We can no longer allow ourselves to be separated by names and borders. Our two sides must unite or be destroyed. Do not make my sacrifice a vain one. Allow me to finish what I started. In the name of our friendship and the future of our people, let me remain on Babylon 5.”
Neroon: “I am more than happy for you to remain with the humans.”
Delenn: “You are the one who was chosen to replace me. I do not know you.”
Neroon: “Oh I believe you do.” (Removing his cowl)
Delenn: “Neroon! I do not understand. He is Warrior Caste, from the Star-riders Clan! What is happening here? What are you doing? When Valen called the Nine together he chose three from the Worker Caste, three from the Religious Caste and three from the Warrior Caste. My replacement should have been from the Religious Caste. Four of the Warrior Caste gives them unprecedented power!”
Neroon: “And why not? It was the Warrior Caste who died in the war against the Earthers! The Warrior Caste who have defended our world for centuries, while the Council floated among the stars, isolated from its own people.”
Delenn: “This is wrong!”
Neroon: “Is it? You say prophecy tells us a great war is coming. Should it not be the Warrior Caste who lead us against it?”
Delenn: “The Warrior Caste cannot be allowed to set policy!”
Neroon: “Have you done any better? When I was inducted into this circle I was finally told the reason we were ordered to surrender. I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep! If we had been told the real reason at the time we would have never surrendered!”
Delenn: “You do not understand…”
Neroon: “I understand that before me is a creature I do not recognise: one foot in two worlds. You’re an affront to the purity of your own race, and your belief that you are satisfying prophecy is presumption of the highest order! And yet, you are now the perfect liaison between our two peoples. You have no home with either of them. So by all means play your games, act out your little fantasies. Return to Babylon 5. And stay there!”
(Here Delenn tries to explain to the Grey Council how important it is that they unite with the humans to fight the coming darkness. We have already seen how prophecy has warned them that if they do not ally together they will not prevail against the great enemy who is returning, but the Council --- or at least, Neroon --- see her as being arrogant and presumptuous because she took it upon herself to go through the transformation she did without sanction from or approval by the Grey Council. Neroon, as new leader of the Council, banishes her but does allow her to retain her position at Babylon 5, which in the end will be the most important outcome from this meeting, as this is absolutely where she need to be.

Also, the ascension of Neroon to power does indeed tilt the balance of power in favour of the Warrior Caste, and it is now they who shall set Minbari policy. This will have massive repercussions, both for the Minbari and for the galaxy at large, and will divide one of the biggest and most important players in the war that is to come, at a time when they should all be fighting as one.)

Sheridan: “Why are you here?”
Kosh: “We were never away. For the first time, your mind is quiet enough to hear me.”
Sheridan: “Why am I here?”
Kosh: “You have always been here.”
(This will become very important later on, especially mid season three. It’s also important that this dream, as it were, comes partially true: when Sheridan meets Kosh on the way out of medlab, he repeats the final line to him.)

Delenn: “The last expedition of these aliens was into Minbari space. We tracked them back to their homeworld, and made sure they understood the depth of their mistake.”
(A simple but matter-of-fact statement that reminds us that nobody, and I mean nobody, messes with the Minbari and lives to tell the tale! They are a peaceful people at heart, but stir up the hornet’s nest at your peril!)

Hague: “You have an uncommon failing for someone in your position, Captain: you’re a patriot. You believe, as I do, that when we put on that uniform we took a solemn vow to protect Earth against threats from outside and from within.”
(Again, this first real possible confirmation of, if not a conspiracy to kill Santiago then the suspicion of one, will inform much of season three and four, and again, Clark may regret arming Babylon 5 as he does in this episode.)

IMPORTANT PLOT ARC POINTS
“Together we’re stronger”
Arc Level: Red
It has always been one of Sheridan’s strengths that he works with his allies to provide a united front. He is a great man for bringing people together, as we will see very soon, and he believes that allies work best together both when they trust each other and when they have, as G’Kar noted back in season one, “enlightened self-interest”, which is to say, if two races both have something to lose and can avoid that loss by teaming up with each other, it makes sense to do so. This attitude will be one of the defining factors in the coming war, and the coming seasons, and will show why John Sheridan is really the only man for the job.

He shows this here in simple but effective ways. He knows the Narn, knows that although they are now a warlike and somewhat aggressive species, they were originally peaceful and it is only through the invasion and seizure of their planet by the Centauri that they have had to turn to war to protect themselves. Therefore he knows that the Narn who attacks him on the alien ship can be reasoned with, and eventually allied with. It is this sense of shared purpose and the ability to see beyond the obvious --- that someone attacking you is an enemy and should be killed --- that makes Sheridan the man he is, and will define him as the leader he will become.

Armed to the teeth
Arc Level: Orange
As I mentioned, the new armaments installed on Babylon 5 as a result of the visit of General Franklin are there for one purpose and one purpose only: to defend the station against alien incursions in the wake of the Narn/Centauri war, and to protect Earth’s investment and infrastructure. However, the way things pan out it will be to President Clarke’s chagrin that he armed the station, and to Sheridan’s relief and benefit that he did. Franklin grins that once the armaments are in place “Babylon 5 will have enough firepower to take on a warship!” Hold that thought…

The Grey Council, Neroon’s rise and Delenn’s Dismissal
Arc Level: Orange
Delenn has been a member of the ruling body of the Minbari for “twenty cycles”, she tells us. We assume this to be twenty years. Now she is being punished for her temerity and rash actions in proceeding with the transformation without waiting for it to be approved by the Council, but she believes there was not time for the Minbari to debate such a momentous decision back and forth. The war is coming, the old enemy has returned, and she needs to be ready. She did what she believes she had to do, and now she must pay the price. But her real worry is that she will not be allowed to return to Babylon 5, for she is certain that it is here she must be in order to properly fulfil or guide prophecy and ensure the dark enemy is defeated. So on the face of things, while not the best outcome for her personally or socially, the fact that she retains her ambassadorial position and can return to the station is a small victory for her, even if Neroon sees it as a worthless gesture, something he could care less about.

Neroon himself will have a huge impact on the future of Minbar. As a member of the Warrior Caste he now ensures that as leader of the Grey Council he has the power to set policy for his people, both foreign and domestic, and there is no doubt that he will begin arming them for the war that is to come, despite being ignorant as to who or what the enemy is. More importantly, he will surely set about removing, eliminating or neutralising any who stand in his way, and move the Minbari more onto a war footing, causing great unrest among the other castes. You would have to wonder though if his treatment of Delenn is based so much on her disobedience as rooted in his own personal enmity for her. Remember in season one’s “Legacies”, when she basically humiliated and castigated him over the Bremar affair? I’m sure he has lived that one down and doesn’t hold it in the least against her… :rolleyes:

SKETCHES
Delenn
Time to begin exploring the character of the Minbari ambassador, and Babylon 5’s greatest advocate and ally. The story involving Sheridan is almost filler here, and the title, though it may indeed refer to the alien ship and the captain’s imprisonment upon it (and of course back to the opening credits) could just as easily be used to describe Delenn’s plight. Stripped of her rank and position, she is in a very real way now all alone, apart from Lennier, who will never leave her side as he has stated. She must face the coming darkness alone, try to best the old enemy without the help, support or sanction of her people, and it must seem a colossal task, especially now that she must do it more or less alone.

But Delenn’s resolve never falters, not once. When she was offered her place back on the Grey Council earlier --- although she retained the rank and title she had not stood with the Nine, it seemed, since the last days of the war with Earth --- she refused, saying that Babylon 5 was where she needed to be. Now, as she tries to convince Neroon and the remaining members of the Grey Council of the threat she sees as imminent, and of which we have already seen evidence, she is still unconcerned for her standing. Of course, she does not want to lose her title but more important to her is that her people recognise and help her to face the coming danger, and that she remain on Babylon 5, where she has said prophecy placed her. She will give up, has given up, everything in order to retain that position, and though Neroon laughs at her “silly games” and “fantasies”, he is doing her a great service by allowing her to go back. He thinks it will keep her busy, out of the way, unable to interfere in the plans he is making for his people now that he has been elected as their leader. Truth is, had he delivered the final blow and exiled her to some planetary outpost or somewhere far from Babylon 5 he would have hurt her far worse than he achieves by removing her from the Council. In the end, though it is a hard meeting, Delenn, no longer Satai, comes away from the almost interrogation with the one thing she wanted.

We will see this trait in Delenn as the series begins to get going properly. She will always sacrifice herself to her cause, will be willing to die if necessary, and will protect those she believes are important in the coming war. She will be a moving force in the resistance to the enemy, a focus around which to rally and she will prove that two, or more, races can work together for the same goal, even if those two races were recently at war. A salutory lesson the Narns will learn, but that the Centauri will not, to their cost.

It’s almost funny in a way that on the voyage home she’s asked about the aliens and can help Ivanova and General Hague locate their homeworld. Though she is a person of peace, cold anger is clearly brimming up inside her. She deplores the fact that with the election of Neroon as leader of the Grey Council the Warrior Caste have too much power now. She hates the fact the he cannot see past his personal enmity to her and see the bigger picture, putting the needs of his people before his own petty need for revenge. And yes, it surely must sting that she has been ridiculed, rebuked and eventually kicked out of the chambers she was so familiar with and so welcome in not so long ago. So the chance to expunge all that anger in a positive way must seem something of a godsend to her. You can hear it in the coldness and tightness of her voice as she tells Ivanova of the “mistake” the Streib made in attacking their worlds, and how they responded. She also joins in on the attack, no doubt taking the opportunity to let off some steam, though she would of course never admit to such.

ABSENT FRIENDS
This episode is totally human/Minbari centred, with the exception of the Narn Sheridan teams up with on the Streib ship. There is no sign of G’Kar or Londo, not surprisingly as they are no doubt both busy with the war, the former surely formualting defence and reprisals and the latter pressing his advantage and attacking Narn worlds. There’s also no role at all for Garibaldi, interestingly: beyond the opening exchange in the bar about football he’s nowhere to be seen afterwards, perhaps the first time such a thing has happened in an episode, though I couldn’t swear to that. Franklin, after his almost starring role in “Gropos”, is in it only in that scene and again as Ramirez is brought in dying. Lennier comes back and puts in a fine performance as Delenn’s ever-faithful aide and friend, Vir would be wherever Londo is and then there’s a surprise appearance by Kosh. Interesting episode.

NOTES
On the face of it this is almost as bad as the previous, nearly a bad Star Trek rip-off, with a very shaky concept about aliens going around snatching specimens and experimenting on them, pitting them in combat against each other as they have done a dozen times in the various Trek franchises, and it really doesn’t come to much in the overall arc of the story: the Streib fade out after this, are never, to my knowledge, heard from again. And if that was all there was in it the episode would go down as another weak one. But the Minbari side of things, the real story if you will, saves the episode.

We haven’t really, up to now, heard or learned much about Delenn’s people, beyond the fact that they all seem to be bald with a bone in their heads, are divided into three separate castes, and fought against Earth, surrendering when they realised the two races had a shared generic history. Well, we’ve learned a little more, but not much. This is the first episode where we see the inner workings of the Grey Council, where we meet Neroon again and begin to see the repercussions possible in his being chosen as leader. We find out that rather than just being miffed that Delenn did not wait for sanction before entering the chrysalis, it is a very big deal and indeed grounds for dismissing her from her post. We also see that Neroon is not one to let bygones be bygones, and will stand in Delenn’s way whenever he can.

We also see a burgeoning friendship between Delenn and Lennier, which is as touching as it is futile: it’s clear the guy loves her, but she is (at least, until her dismissal) of much higher social status than he, and anyway her destiny lies elsewhere. But it’s good to see that in the wake of all that happens to her, she has one person at least, one of her own people on whom she can rely, who will never desert her, and who will defend her to the death.

I've never quite gotten the fuss about Supernatural. I've watched a bit here and there over the years, but it always just came across as a less good Buffy substitute.

It's not something you can just look at an episode of and then come back later really. Well, after season two anyway. It gets into a very deep and involved story arc and things happen you would just not expect. That said, you're either into this sort of show or not, but bad Buffy substitute? Nah, I ain't having that!

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1.1 “Robin Hood and the sorceror” (Part One)

The village of Loxley, Nottinghamshire, England. The year is 1180 AD. Norman soldiers attack and burn the place to the ground, its people slaughtered by the mounted troopers. A young boy, Robin, is taken to safety by his father and left with a miller and his wife, while Eric of Loxley rides to a rendezvous with Robert de Rainault, who tells him the rebellion is over and Eric has lost. He demands “the arrow”, and says he knows Eric is the guardian. They meet in the shadow of a stone circle, de Rainault’s men all around the structure, and Eric knows he will not leave this place alive. As he dies, he gasps “He is coming! The Hooded Man!” De Rainault picks up his prize, a silver arrow (more like a crossbow quarrel really) and smiles.

Shift to fifteen years later, Castle Belleme, home of the notorious Baron de Belleme, said to consort with demons and traffic in dark magic. A tall man --- a giant of a man really --- cries a warning against this “Hooded Man”, whom he calls Herne’s son, and says a sacrifice is required: a virgin, pure and innocent. The Baron watches with cold, calculating eyes. The scene changes to Sherwood Forest, where we see Robin of Loxley, now grown to manhood, racing through the wood, trying to find his stepbrother Much, before the younger boy does something foolish, but it is too late: Much, pretty much a slow-witted child, has shot one of the deer in the forest, and they are now in big trouble. The deer, indeed all game within Sherwood Forest is seen as the property of the king, and the penalties for killing any of them are stiff indeed. It is of course already too late, and Robin and Much are arrested and taken to Nottingham Castle, thrown in the dungeon where they meet another man, who goes by the name of Will Scarlet. There are others there too, imprisoned for various reasons.

Robert de Rainault, now the Sheriff of Nottingham, meets with his brother Hugo, who is an abbot and is complaining about Robert’s inability --- or the inability of Sir Guy of Gisburne, he who it was who arrested Robin and Much, and who is the Sheriff’s right hand --- to keep poachers off church land. Robert snaps about not having the finances to be able to hire more foresters to help his brother, though it’s clear that even had he the resources he would not assist him. The two obviously do not get along. He soon has other things to concentrate on though, as the Baron de Belleme arrives at Nottingham Castle, to be wed to Lady Marion of Leafort, who is the legal ward of Abbott Hugo and lives in the castle under the “protection” of the Sheriff. However there turns out to be a snag: Abbot Hugo has arranged for her to enter a nunnery. This angers the Baron, who remarks that “marrying her to God” will ensure that the Church gets all her lands. He snarls that the two brothers will give Marion to him, "when the Hooded Man comes to the forest."

Robin and the other prisoners stage a breakout and head off into the castle, taking the guards by surprise. In the courtyard though they are challenged and fight a pitched battle. Some get away but Robin is forced back into the castle, pursued by Gisburne. He ends up outside Lady Marion’s chamber. She lets him in: it’s love at first sight, and she hides him, sending Gisburne away when he tries to enter. He then makes his escape through the window and makes his way towards Sherwood Forest, to meet up with the others. But first he encounters the strange figure of Herne the Hunter, a man who wears animal skins and a large deer head on his shoulders. Mist surrounds Herne, and the sense of something ancient and magical hangs heavy in the air. It’s clear this is a meeting of significance, which will have a major effect and influence on Robin, and shape his destiny from this day. Herne tells him he must be the helper of the weak, the liberator of the enslaved, the hope of a people. He calls him Wolfshead, and Outlaw. He shows Robin a vision, in which he sees ther Baron de Belleme (whom he does not know at this point, never having seen never mind met him), a woman struggling on the ground, an arrow splitting another. He sees battles, a huge giant of a man (the one we have already seen) fighting near a river with a quarterstaff. He sees Belleme making strange gestures in the air, and he sees his father die as Robert de Rainault takes the silver arrow from him. Confused at what he has seen, and probably a little frightened too, Robin turns and runs, as Herne shouts after him and tells him he cannot escape his destiny: he is Robin i’ the Hood.

The Baron consults his runes and tells his giant bodyguard to find the Hooded Man, who has come to the forest, and to kill him. With a glazed look in his eyes the giant nods. The two meet in the forest and fight, by the river as was foretold in the vision Herne showed Robin. Robin manages to take the big man by surprise and knock him out, then he erases the pentagram Belleme had drawn on his chest, the magical symbol that bound him to the dark sorcerer. Grateful to be free of the dread influence and his own man again, the man tells Robin his name is John Little. Laughing at the incongruous name, Robin names him Littlejohn, which pleases the giant. But as Littlejohn joins him and they listen to the others talk about splitting up, getting away from Nottingham, keeping their heads down his spirits sink, and when Herne calls for him he follows the old man, across the river and into deep dark caves, where Herne presents him with a gift, something to aid him on his quest and give it form.

Albion, one of the seven swords of power forged by Wayland the Smith. He tells Robin it is “charged with the powers of light and darkness.” He then tells him to string the bow, and returns him to the forest, where Robin appears as a new man, almost baptised by Herne, and rallies his friends, telling them they should not run but should face the Normans, fight them, take them on and struggle for the sake of the people they are oppressing. They must be heroes, leaders, beacons of hope in an almost eternal darkness of occupation and poverty and near-slavery. They ambush the guard taking Marion to the abbey and rescue her, sending Much to take care of her as they lay a false trail for Gisburne and his men.

(To be continued in part two)

QUOTES
Much: “The King wouldn’t mind. Not one deer. Wouldn’t miss it, would he? The king has plenty of deer. I’d tell him I was hungry.”
Robin: “And then he’d say, better to be hungry and have both hands.”
Much: “Both hands?”
Robin: “And then he’d lop one off, so you’d remember what he’d said.”
(The first line here shows just how, not just dimwitted but how naive Much is. He truly believes that if he tells the ruler of the land that he was hungry, the king will be okay with this. He doesn’t understand that the king, apart from being a nasty, spiteful, greedy and unprincipled person, is the sole authority here in the forest, and he would not allow such a deed to go unpunished. It would be seen as a bad example, and he could not have that. Everyone must see what happens to those who break the law of the land.)

Sheriff: “Gisburne’s brains are in his backside! It’s not more men he needs, it’s more … up here!” (points to his head)

Belleme: “Marry her to God? So that the Church gets all her lands?”
(This was standard practice in the Middle Ages. When an unwed woman, who had property or lands to her name --- usually those of her father --- was married, title for that property would pass to her husband. Women were not permitted to own property of their own: any Marion had would be held “in trust” for her by her guardians until she married, whereafter it would transfer to her new husband. If she became “a bride of Christ”, then the Church --- ie Abbott Hugo --- as God’s representative on Earth, would take the title to all her lands. Dowries such as these were often the reason many women were married, often to men they did not love, for the sake of alliances, or to reward loyalty. The woman rarely had any say in the matter, and was moved around like a bartering chip, just another piece of property).

Hugo: “Belleme’s possessed. He’s insane. They say a demon took his soul while he was in the Holy Land.”
Sheriff: “Do they? Probably sunstroke.”
Hugo: “Gets up to all kinds of nastiness. Devil worship.”
Sheriff: “Ah, but which one? There are so many, aren’t there? And only one god. Hardly seems fair.”

Herne: “They are all waiting for you. The blinded, the maimed, the men locked in the stinking dark all wait here. Children with swollen bellies, hiding in ditches, wait. The poor, the dispossessed they all wait. You are their hope.”

Robin’s Speech: “Not bewitched: awakened! Chosen by Herne the Hunter: his son. You were sleeping. You’ve slept too long. We all have. It’s time we woke, time we stopped running. Nobody ran at Hastings! At least they died like men! And what’s happened to the English since then? I mean, where are they? Stay out of trouble? Do as you’re told and they’ll leave you alone? Is this the spirit of England? Villages destroyed so that princes can hunt unhindered? The people bled white to pay for foreign wars? No voice? No justice? No England? Well it’s time to fight back!”

Robin (to Gisburne): “Tell the Sheriff that Robin Hood holds Sherwood. Tell him that Herne’s son has claimed his kingdom.”

Will Scarlet: “You should have killed him. You’ll have to, one day.”

“Nothing’s forgotten”
One of the central motifs of the show is the desire to strike back at the oppressor, the yearning to be free and the determination to pay the occupier back for the wrongs they have wrought on the English. England at this time is of course ruled by the Normans, French nobles who have taken over in the wake of the victories of William the Conqueror in 1066, and who are hated and despised by the native English, and who in turn hate and despise them. Most of the farmers, merchants, previous lords have been made into vassals or serfs, subservient to the local Norman lord. They are treated cruelly and with contempt, and are seen as little more than slave labour and a revenue stream by their new conquerors.

So there is a lot of enmity and animosity building towards them at the time of Robin Hood, with rebellions such as that at Loxley occasionally breaking out and being brutally put down. The people are waiting for a hero, a leader, and Robin will be that man. He will give hope to the hopeless, alms to the poor and a way to strike back to those who are tired of bowing every time a Norman lord or noble rides by. But there is more. When Robin meets Herne the Hunter, he tells him “Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten.” The old ways, though the pious Normans have tried to destroy or twist them, are still there and the old gods still live in the forest for those who have ears to hear them. Herne is their herald. They do not relish the tramp of the conqueror’s boot in their leafy bowers, and Robin, as Herne’s spiritual son, will be the instrument of their resistance.

Those clever little touches
Whether it’s coincidence or not, as soon as Gisburne kills the miller, in that very instant the millwheel, which had been turning under the impact of the water a moment before, stops dead. It may mean nothing --- perhaps it was going to stop anyway --- but it’s like the idea of a clock which has never lost a second stopping when its owner dies, and never working again. It could also be taken as a metaphor for the idea that the peaceful way, the way of the farmer and the miller and the thatcher, is over, and as Robin is saying even now in the forest, the time has come to fight their enemy.

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Season One, Episode One

With his partner (both sexual and professional) taken by a suspected killer, Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler is on her trail when he is hit by a car at high speed. He wakes to a much changed landscape, with David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”, which had been playing before he got hit, still playing, but now instead of the SUV he was driving he is beside an old Rover 2000, and his ipod has been replaced by an eight-track cassette. A policeman approaches him and tells him that according to the papers he has in his car he is being transferred to another station, but that he is Detective Inspector only. As he stumbles away, disoriented, from the police officer he meets he catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror of a parked car and is horrified to see what he is now wearing. What is this? The seventies?

He makes his way, confused and dazed, back to his office but it has changed completely. Everything is different, and when he meets his new CO, a tough, rough guy called Gene Hunt, he’s told it’s 1973! Mad as this may be, he has to accept it as the evidence is all around him. Televisions are black and white, the cars are all vintage and the whole makeup of Manchester is wrong, not twenty-first century at all. However, as he unsuccessfully tries to call his partner Maya’s mobile --- nobody here is even familiar with the term, as they have not been invented yet --- he suddenly hears what sounds like a defibrillator and voices of doctors, but no-one else seems to hear them. He hears someone calling his name, but before he can answer or hear any more the sound stops.

Chris Skelton, one of the detectives in the office, and the first one to greet him when he stumbled through the door, announces that a woman who had gone missing has been found dead. The road he mentions happens to be the same one from where Maya was snatched, and Sam can’t believe that’s coincidence. Gene Hunt goes to give a statement to the papers and leaves Sam in charge. At the morgue he’s told Suzy was not fed for at least a day before being killed. There’s no evidence of sexual assault and no robbery, the details paralleling the case he was working on when Maya got snatched so closely that Sam can’t believe this isn’t some elaborate joke or trick, and loses it as he shouts “Enough, okay? End of joke! Game over!” and so on.

Suddenly realisation dawns on him: this is the same killer he was hunting in 2006! He breathes “He’s killed before!” but his men are so worried about his odd behaviour that they take him to see the “Plonk”, a female police officer, who doubles as a sort of staff doctor. And so he meets Annie Cartwright, who will become the focus of his love interest and the one he confides most in. She takes him home to what is apparently his place, a dingy seventies apartment, where he tries to explain that he’s from the future --- yeah, great pickup line! Annie of course thinks he’s suffering from concussion and leaves him to it. Later he watches TV and is amazed to hear the presenter talk about, and to him, but he is unable to respond. Or, to be more accurate, he can respond but his attempts go unanswered and unmarked. He really starts to believe now that he is losing his mind.

At the station, another girl gives them a lead: she says she saw Suzy leave the car park where she was last seen and be pursued by a man with long hair. Gene’s interrogation methods shock Sam; it would not happen in his time! But still, his DCI has got the result. After something of ar argument between the two, Hunt challenges Tyler to take the case, use what he believes he knows about it to solve it. It doesn’t matter if what he’s saying is made up or from the future or if he read it in tea leaves: Gene wants to catch the bastard and will use any resource at his disposal to do so. Sam begins trying to school the seventies cops on the psychology of the criminal mind, but surprises them all when he asks for Annie’s help. She has a BA in psychology, but in this backward era women are not valued for their minds, and the boys are more interested in her tits and her arse than her brain. Nevertheless, Sam persists and realises that the synthetic fibres he found under the nails of the girls, both in the “real world” and here, must be down to soundproofing. The perp wants to keep the victims quiet but he doesn’t gag them, so he must be soundproofing wherever he’s holding them.

Just then they get word that Dora, the girl they were interviewing about Suzy, has been taken. Chris turns up the name Raimes, whom Sam knows to be Colin Raimes, the suspect he was after when he got hit in 2006. Raimes's grandmother, in something of a twist, had lodged a complaint three months ago but when they ask her back down to the nick she’s a little forgetful, so they have to try to jog her memory as to why she made the complaint. They eventually find out that she complained about the noise from next door, from the neighbour’s stereo. Looks like they have their man. They kick the door in, (this is the seventies after all: search warrants? Not around here mate!) rescue Dora and take the killer, a guy named Kramer, into custody. As they leave, Sam sees the young Colin Raimes watching; Kramer waves to him. The two obviously knew each other, and no doubt would renew their acquaintance when Kramer got out of mental hospital thirty years later.

Sam is then faced with a dilemma: he finds a note in Kramer’s house, a note from his doctor stating that Kramer is a borderline psychotic, and he worries that if this is presented as evidence the jury will not send him to prison but to a mental hospital. Once he gets out, Sam knows, he will kill again, and Maya will be on his list. Hunt leaves it as his call, and Sam destroys the note. He has already begun to “do things the Gene Hunt way” and is already starting to think more like a seventies cop.

As he sits alone afterwards, a man appears before him, telling him that he is a hypnotherapist, and that he, Sam, is in a hospital bed in Manchester. He urges Sam to wake up, telling him that he can do it: this world is all fantasy and he needs to return to the real world, where Maya is waiting for him, safe and sound. He goes to the roof of the building, intending to jump, in order to make the transition back to his own time, his own life. Annie however convinces him not to do it, and he begins to wonder how he could have constructed so elaborate, so detailed a fantasy. Is it, could it be real? And if so, if he jumps, will he not just die? Rather than find himself waking in his hospital bed in 2006, will he not just be a spreading stain on the ground below? Can he take that chance? What should he do? Take the hypnotherapist’s advice and “take that definitive step” --- literally --- or listen to Annie’s desperate plea: “Stay”.

QUOTES
Maya: “You used to believe in gut feeling Sam: what happened?”
(A quote that will put everything into perspective. When Sam ends up back in the seventies he’ll have no computers, no psych evaluations, no experts and no DNA. Nothing to go on but his gut, and his years of experience.)

Sam: “I was driving a jeep…”
PC: “You were driving a military vehicle?”
(This is hilarious and puts right into context the difference in attitudes between the 1970s and now. Back then, there were no SUVs. There were landrovers and range rovers, but nobody referred to them as jeeps. A jeep was still seen as something only the army used.)

Sam: “I need my mobile.”
PC: “Your mobile what?”

Sam: “Where’s my desk? Chair! PC terminal!”
Ray: “Who? You want a constable up here?”

Sam: “I need you to connect me to a mobile number.”
Operator: “A what?”
Sam: “A mobile number: 0770 ---”
Operator: “Is that an international number?”
Sam: “No. Look I need you to get me a Virgin number…”
Operator: “Don’t you start that sexy business with me, young man! I can trace this number!”

Sam: “The body should have been dusted for prints.”
Ray: “How the hell are you going to get dabs off of skin?”
Sam: “You’re … you’re right. How could you?”
(This sentence is important. Although disoriented, like any good detective Tyler has investigated his surroundings and come to the inescapable, if unbelievable, conclusion that he is now in 1973. And if he is, then it follows that such things as getting fingerprints off anything but fingers has not been developed yet. He is therefore quick to realise that he had better not argue the case, as his staff will otherwise think him mad. He must go along with this whole thing now as if he really is in the seventies, and operate accordingly. It’s a fairly quick acclimitisation, to be fair, and a good assessment of the situation he is in, even if he does not fully believe it.)

Sam: “I had an accident, and I woke up thirty-three years in the past. Now, that either makes me a time traveller, a lunatic, or I’m lying in a hospital bed in 2006 and none of this is real.”
(The central question that will inform not only the two seasons of this series, but the three of its spinoff, “Ashes to ashes”. Yes, I’ll be doing it too. Is Sam mad? Dead? In a coma? Or has he really somehow managed to travel backwards in time? Is this an elaborate fantasy world, constructed by his mind to allow him to cope with the fact that he is dying?)

Hunt: “We’ve managed to get hold of a bird who was the last to see Suzy. Dora Keating.”
Sam: “So you’ve arrested her? Is she a suspect?”
Hunt: “No. Just a pain in the arse.”
Sam: “All right. Brief me fully. What do I need to know?”
Hunt: “She’s a pain in the arse!”

Sam: “I need a drink.”
Hunt: “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since you got here!”

Hunt: “What’s your poison Tyler?”
Sam: "Diet Coke.” (Pause. Long pause) “I’m just joking. Pint of bitter.”
(Another example of Sam’s realising that he can’t pretend that this is all fantasy, that even if it is, to the people who inhabit this “world of the seventies”, everything here is real, and if he mentions something that hasn’t been invented yet they will not understand. He’s quickly coming to an accommodation with his situation, even if he doesn’t like it. If he’s to do his job --- even here, in what could be a fantasy world or a dream --- he must make sure he’s treated with respect and not as some sort of a lunatic. He will, in effect, have to do everything he can to become “one of the boys”.)

Sam: “Large whiskey please.”
Nelson: “Drink ain’t gonna fix things. What am I saying? I run a pub! Of course drink’ll fix things!”

Hunt: (to a bunch of kids) “Anything happens to this motor and I come over to all your houses and stamp on all your toys, got it?”

Those clever little touches
“Life on Mars” is jammed with these, small nods to pop culture that sometimes only people of a certain age would get. The first I see is when Sam enters the police station he is to serve in, as Bowie’s song fades out and the last sound as ever on “Life on Mars” is a telephone ringing. Sam walks through the door as this happens and the sound of the phone on the song merges perfectly with the sound of phones ringing in the station.

Another good one is when Sam is trying to get information out of Mrs. Raimes, and though he’s being calm he is pushing her, telling her how important it is that she remember. Hunt, on the other hand, talks to her about biscuits, offers her more tea and relaxes her to the point that she does remember what her complaint was about. Reverse psychology, before it was even invented. The fact that Gene Hunt, the big tough no-nonsense kicker of suspects whose mantra is not “are you guilty” but “what are you guilty of?” turns out to be able to handle the old woman in a much more sensitive --- and effective --- way than can his twenty-first century counterpart.

And when Kramer is arrested he waves from the squad car to a little boy, who smiles back. Mrs. Raimes, coming home, snaps “Get inside, Colin!” We can now see that Colin Raimes grew up idolising the murderer, and decided to be just like him. Sam now knows that they were right: Raimes did know the killer: he lived next door to him. If they had only carried their enquiries to one more house.

Music
Another great thing about this series is the way it uses the music of the time to evoke the period. If you grew up in the seventies you’ll be right at home here, with everything from Sweet and the Who to Thin Lizzy and Roxy Music. Not only that, but where and how they use the music is really effective too. So unlike in the Supernatural writeups, where I just note the songs used, here I’ll be pointing out any interesting uses of the music, any scenes a particular song becomes the soundtrack to, or any other way the music is blended with the programme.

“Life on Mars” (David Bowie)

Like I already mentioned several times this is of course the theme music to the series, although interestingly it is NOT the theme per se and is used only the once, here, in the pilot episode. It’s the motif for the series but it has its own theme. I’ve mentioned about how the ending of the song dovetails with Sam’s arrival at the police station and the ringing of the telephones, but it’s also very effective when he “wakes” after being hit by the car in 2006. The song was playing on his ipod then but when he ends up in 1973 the volume swells, the camera does a dolly shot as he takes in his surroundings, and it the whole song just takes on a more powerful meaning.

“Stairway to the stars” (Blue Oyster Cult)


“I’m so free” (Lou Reed)


“Baba O’Reilly” (The Who)

Plays as Sam enters a record shop and gets his moment of inspiration about the soundproofing.

“Rat bat blue” (Deep Purple)

Used as Gene and Sam tear up in the Granada to carry out door-to-door enquiries as to the missing girl.

“Fireball” (Deep Purple)

As Gene and Sam both realise they have their suspect and barrel out of the interview room, on his trail.

“White room” (Cream)

Plays as Sam and Gene return to the station with Kramer, a triumphant arrest.

Tinfoil hat time?
Throughout the series Sam seems to get messages from ordinary objects which should not be able to transmit messages to him. Television is a recurring one: often, programmes will seem to freeze and voices will talk to, or about him, or sometimes the person on the screen will turn to him (or seem to) and begin telling him things. Telephones will often relay information about his physical health with doctors talking about blood pressure and heart rates, and sometimes cryptic messages will also come over his police radio.

The first time we heard this was when the sounds of a hospital seemed to come to him out of nowhere, and a voice called his name. Again this happens when Annie introduces her friend, who asks if Sam can hear him, but the illusion, if such it is, only lasts a few seconds. Later, when Sam is watching TV in his flat, a boring “Open University”-style programme about maths suddenly has the presenter begin to talk about him, as if he is in a coma. The man snaps his fingers into the screen, calling Sam’s name, but despite all Tyler’s attempts to respond, to show he can hear, the man turns away shaking his head and the programme ends.

PCRs
Oh yeah, you knew this was coming, didn’t you? If there’s one show that has more Pop Culture References than Supernatural and Buffy put together, it’s this one.

Hunt says “Bloody Hell! Where are you today? Here or the planet of the Clangers?” (The Clangers was a programme for children, about tiny little animals living on the moon who only communicated through a series of beeps and whistles).

Okay, there’s only one this episode, but more will come, thick and fast.

Welcome to the “Real World”
Throughout this series the question is constantly posed: is this real? And if it is, how can it be? Has Sam really travelled back in time to 1973? How? And why? If he has, how did his clothes change? Where did his ipod and his mobile go, to say nothing of his car? If he has not gone back in time, is he dreaming? Would someone dream with this level of clarity, intensity and detail? Admittedly, it’s the case he was working on before he got hit by the car that more or less takes precedence here in whatever this is, dream world, fantasy construct, or actual 1973: the case they’re working on here seems to parallel, predate in fact and presage the one he was following back in 2006. So is that an indication that Sam is trying to keep himself sane, by clinging to concepts he knows and which are familiar to him?

Or is he dead? Is this Hell? Or Heaven? Is he lying in a hospital bed, in a coma, actually in 2006 but believing he is in 1973? If so, can he escape from this fantasy world by waking up? Or is he fated to remain in the coma until he dies, never waking from it, never knowing which world is real? Has he gone mad? Was his brain scrambled by the accident and even now he’s sitting drooling and blank-eyed in some asylum as doctors and psychiatrists try to reach him, wondering what’s going on in his head? Is it even possible that he lives here in 1973, and that his life in 2006, as he knows it, is a fantasy construct in his head? But then how would he know all the details of “the future” that he tells to Annie, and why would he keep making slipups, like when he advises the guys to dust the corpse for prints, and mentions Diet Coke?

What’s with the “messages from the real world” he keeps getting, as detailed in the “Tinfoil Hat Time?” section? Could that be the doctors trying to get through to him? Or is that even possible? Has some force --- malevolent or benevolent --- seen fit to send him here, to 1973, to do something important? To solve crimes before they’re committed, to catch criminals before they have a chance to turn bad? To twist and change the future?

I’m sorry to tell you that even after two seasons of “Life on Mars” we will not know the answer, not definitively. You’ll have to sit through another three seasons of “Ashes to ashes” to find out what the final truth is. But if you’re too impatient, you could always watch the series box sets. Or catch it on Netflix. But believe me, if you spin to the end of “Ashes to ashes” season three you will be ruining the surprise, and the rest of the series for yourself. If anyone really has to know that badly, and can’t or doesn’t want to watch the whole thing, or wait till I’ve plodded my way through it, you can PM me and I’ll tell you. I’m not even going to attempt to put it in a spoiler here, or anywhere, just in case it gets inadvertently read by those who don’t want to know.

If you have to know, drop me a PM with “Life on Mars” as the subject and I will PM you back, in the full understanding between us both that you will be taking all the good out of the series for yourself. My advice is to do what I did: watch it episode by episode and bear witness to the story unfolding, getting more and more mysterious, clues here and there along with a lot of red herrings until finally the secret is revealed.

It’s much better that way.

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Episode Five (Finale)

For the first time we see Hattie after she was abducted, running through the forest as if being pursued. Then it seems her hunter catches up with her. Gail leaves more messages for Linus, still ignorant as to who he is. Seth is released from prison as witnesses can place him well away from Hattie on the day, and so he has an alibi, whether he wants it or not: the confession was all in his mind. Linus has returned home to confront his father, at knifepoint no less. He accuses him of killing his wife, and Hattie. But Everett alleges that it was Linus who killed his own mother. In a bid to disarm his son, Everett lunges but cuts himself on the knife.

Fiona goes back into the attic, and this time finds the scrap of hair that her husband had said was a bird’s nest. It’s clearly not, and she at first throws it in the bin, then puts it into an evidence bag. Everett tells Linus that his mother died when she tripped over one of his toys he had left on the landing and fell down the stairs after an argument. He has been protecting Linus from the truth, shielding him from the guilt. Freed from jail, Seth goes back to Steve but his brother does not want anything to do with him. He has lost his son forever, and blames it on Seth.

There’s a memorial service held for Hattie. Gail attends, her head held defiantly high now that her husband has been exonerated. While in the church she takes the opportunity to ring Linus again and watches to see whose phone rings. She zeroes in on the young lad, who looks surprised. Seth bursts into the church, to try to tell everyone that Hattie is not dead, she will come back, changed. Outside the church Gail catches Linus, begs him to talk to her. Hattie’s father asks Steve to allow him talk to Seth, and in return he’ll square things with Steve’s ex-wife. After what Seth said in the church, the father needs to know what he meant. At least, that’s what he says. But when he does talk to him in the forest, he kills him, thinking him responsible for his daughter’s murder.

After betraying his brother into the hands of what he must have known was the man who would take his life, Steve goes back to the house but Angie is not interested in letting him see Harry again, despite what was promised. Fiona goes to see Everett, ostensibly to apologise for spying on him earlier. Gail asks Linus if he is a rent boy, which he denies. He tells her that he used to go into the woods with a girl and put on a show for Malcolm, and this was what her husband paid him for. She goes to give him the money she found in her husband’s briefcase but Linus says he can’t take it, as he did not turn up for that last rendezvous: it was Mayday. He goes to see Caitlin, who is babbling about her sister coming back, crying, and saying to Linus that he will not see her as she is again. Fiona has gone to the police station, to confess all she knows.

We now see a replay of what happened that fateful day. Alan met Hattie and told her that her father had been in an accident. He took her in his car, and when she got suspicious and tried to phone her sister he hit her and knocked her out. Interspersed with this replay we hear the sound of police sirens as Alan and Fiona sit in their garden: his time is almost up. She forces the confession out of him. He explains that Hattie used her powers to put a curse on him, so that he would not be able to sexually satisfy his wife. In the flashback we see him take Hattie into the forest to collect herbs which will, he says, lift the curse, but she says it’s all in his head: she has no powers.

He doesn’t believe her and they move deeper into the wood. He goes to cut off a lock of her hair but she breaks free and runs (the scene we saw at the beginning), but he catches her and drags her back. She tries to tell him again that the spell only worked because he believed in it. She tells him that if he kills her she will come back for him, and this pushes him to strangle her as Malcolm Spicer looks on from his concealed bird hide. In the present, a squadron of cop cars fly down the road, sirens blasting, lights flashing. Justice is coming on swift rubber tyres.

The cars pull up --- and the cops arrest Everett! Evidence is found in his house, the lock of hair planted by Fiona when she was there. The bitch has decided to protect her scumbag murderer husband and frame Everett because of what he did to her in 1992. Alan goes to retrieve the hair but can’t find it. Fiona tells him not to worry about it. She tells him there’s nothing more important than her family. As Everett is taken away by the police Linus’s world crashes down, and there’s not even Caitlin there to talk to. Sandra turns out to be more of a friend than Gail had given her credit for, letting her stay in her house in Cornwall as her own is being repossessed by the bank. Gail takes Malcolm’s ashes and mixes them in with the food for the dog…

Caitlin dyes her hair, and puts on Hattie’s clothes, the same dress she was wearing on Mayday. She takes her bike and as Alan and his family are out having a picnic, she rides by, stops her bike and stares at them, pointing at Alan, scaring the crap out of them and maybe making Fiona think that justice has come back to find them, after all. The evidence against Everett goes mysteriously missing and so the cops can’t hold him, but it was flimsy at best and would never have secured a conviction.

QUOTES
Everett: “I have been protecting you all your life you ungrateful little ****!”
Linus: “What are you talking about?”
Everett: “You killed her, Linus. You. You killed your mother.”

Seth: “No! I saw her, cradled in the tree of life! She was not dead! She’s changing! She’ll come back!”

Mr. Sutton: “Do you think he (Seth) did it?”
Steve: “There’s a side of him that’s capable of anything.”

Angie (to Steve): “You destroy everything. You kill what you love.”

Neighbour: “I think a tree is quite a nice place to put his ashes.”
Gail: “I don’t think a tree is very appropriate in the circumstances, is it?”

THE CULPRIT: SUSPECTS FINALE
Now we know who did it, and we can sort out the “suspects”, and see how they fit into the story, and why they were initially considered to have been responsible.

Alan

He is the killer, which is interesting really as of all the suspects bar Linus he had emerged as the least likely, even after Malcolm’s death. Apart from his cock-and-bull story about some internal investigation that was unexpectedly dropped, and the lock of hair in the attic he has not done or said really anything to make us think it could have been him. Clever really: the killer keeps a low profile and lets others fall under suspicion. Also, the fact that he is a cop makes him even less likely. But now we see that he killed Hattie in a rage because he believed she had cast a spell on him that would not allow him to make love to his wife.

Malcolm

Apart from his own financial problems and his predeliction for watching couples make love, Malcolm’s only involvement in the murder of Hattie is now seen to have been that he was a silent witness. He saw everything, but whether he was just scared to come forward, as he would have to explain what he was doing there in the first place and his own dubious record would have come to light, or whether some part of him rejoiced that the woman who had ruined him was getting what she deserved, is unclear. It could even be that the murder turned him on, though he does throw up afterwards.

Everett

Seen now to be innocent, and not so bad a father as we had been led to believe. He has been protecting his son against the awful truth about the death of his mother, and though he did something to Fiona --- we can only assume, though it’s never confirmed, this was to make her pregnant with Charlotte and not stand by her --- this is all he is guilty of. But because of her hatred for him, the ex-police woman violates her principles and ethics and frames him. He is later released, as the evidence goes missing.

Seth

We can probably assume Seth had nothing to do with Hattie’s murder, as he has been provided with an alibi for the time of the killing. But he was a suspect, and that was enough for her father, who exacts his own brutal --- and misinformed --- justice upon the troubled man.

Steve

Had nothing to do with it either, so far as we can see. Just a small man in a small town trying to make his small life a little better by temporarily making himself a bigger man, and hoping to regain the son he had lost.

Linus

Was never really a suspect, just a troubled kid around whom all this madness swirled like an out-of-control fairground ride. In the end though it’s almost as if two people are murdered, as he loses his chance to have a relationship with Caitlin when she takes on the persona of her murdered sister.

A FINAL TWIST
One of the things that totally blew me off the planet with this programme was the last twist. As I said at the beginning, there are so many viable suspects that it’s pretty much impossible to decide who is innocent and who is guilty, and as the series goes on deeper and darker secrets are revealed, some leading to answers, some asking more questions. But even when the killer is revealed and it looks like the law is closing in on him, there’s one final plot twist as Fiona frames Everett, leaving the lock of hair in his house so that he will be accused of the murder. However this reasoning is fatally flawed, as I will discuss in the next section. Even so, it’s a development I had not expected or anticipated. As the cop cars close in, and the scene alternates between their approach and Fiona and Alan in the garden, I expected at any moment the flashing blue lights to pull up outside their house and Alan to be arrested. When it’s Everett’s house they descend on, it really took my breath away. Just when you think everything is wrapped up in a neat little bundle, the killer is unmasked and caught and you’re just waiting for the feeling of the collar and the end credits to roll, this amazing little suspense thriller throws you a complete curve and demonstrates once more what a singularly unique drama this is.

FATAL FLAWS
Before I close this, I’d just like to examine the frankly often glaring plot holes in the last parts of the story. One is the fact that there is no explanation for Hattie’s being found up a tree. Alan is no hunk; he’s not a weed but he’s no stronger-looking than the average man. So how did he manage to get her body way up into the branches of the tree in which it was found? Or, did Seth do that? He called it “the tree of life”. Did he intend to try to engineer Hattie’s return to life by in effect offering her to the forest gods? It’s a rather large flaw in the plot that’s never answered or resolved, or even addressed, and yet it becomes the single reason for Malcolm being cleared of her murder.

As to the evidence found in Everett’s house: well firstly did the cops not wonder why it was in an evidence bag? Not to mention that if they dusted it for fingerprints they would find Fiona’s on the bag but not those of Everett, proving he never touched it. And what sort of evidence is that anyway? If he was proved to have known Hattie, perhaps even have had an affair with her, could she not have given him a lock of her hair? It’s not like it was covered in blood or anything. Flimsy at best, and the fact that it goes missing is probably the best thing for the cops, as by itself it would never hold up in court, and other than that the police have nothing else to link him to the murder.

There’s Linus’s accusations of course, but he retracts these and admits he was wrong. And if the relationship between Everett and Fiona is explored in court, it’s going to become quite clear that they had a fling, and that this is quite obviously the work of a woman who is framing her ex-lover for pure reasons of revenge and anger. No, there’s no case against Everett and I’m surprised the cops arrest him on such paltry evidence.

Final notes:
It amazed me too that someone who was made out to have such high notions of ethics and principles as Fiona would, having discovered her husband to be a murderer, protect him and not only that but frame an innocent man. He may have hurt her, but Everett is no murderer, and she knows this. Not only that, she knows she is being an accessory after the fact and is also seeking to pervert the course of justice. I thought she was an ex-cop? She is so worried and concerned about Hattie, and devastated when her body turns up: how can she now defile her memory like this? Shielding her murderer and framing a man Hattie was apparently once infatuated with? I had hoped that the final scene would be Alan, Fiona or both suffering a heart attack after seeing “Hattie” return, but that’s left up to our imaginations. One thing is for certain though: neither are likely to sleep easily ever again after this.

One final mystery remains though. Caitlin as Hattie singles out Alan and his family to accuse, but as far as she and everyone else knows, Everett was the one charged, and though Linus would have told her he was innocent --- if he managed to see her after the arrest --- even he did not know about Alan. Nobody did, other than Fiona. And Hattie. So was that really Hattie’s spirit come back in the body of her sister, taking her over so as to have her revenge, keep the promise or threat she made to Alan just before he squeezed the life out of her body?