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R.I.P. Ruth Evershed...

1:59 PM / Television / 2 Comments

...and R.I.P. SPOOKS. Thank you for ten hair-raising years of quality TV.

Some thoughts on the extended versions of the Millennium trilogy

9:35 PM / Television / 3 Comments

With the second trailer for David Fincher's upcoming English language and yet-to-convince-me-it's-in-any-way-worthwhile remake of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO having recently hit the web, it somehow seems appropriate that the extended television version of the original Swedish adaptation and its two follow-ups have finally been made available to English speakers. For those not aware of the somewhat unusual history of these adaptations of Stieg Larsson's literary phenomenon, a brief overview: originally, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was filmed with the intention of releasing it both theatrically and in an extended form as Parts 1 and 2 of a six-episode miniseries for Swedish television, the final four instalments derived from the second and third novels in what became, with Larsson's untimely death, a trilogy. With the books' explosion in worldwide popularity, however, a decision was made to release all three films theatrically, resulting in a return to the editing room for some judicious cutting to rein in their somewhat unwieldy combined running time of over nine hours.

Although not billed anywhere on the UK packaging as TV versions, this is precisely what these extended cuts are, and this should be clear from their structure: barring the first instalment, each episode begins with a recap of the events of its predecessor, before seguing into an illustrated title sequence depicting various key moments from the trilogy. While the artwork and particularly the motion graphics effects are a little on the naff side, they set the tone well and are accompanied by a nice piece of music by composer Jacob Groth. Each episode also ends with a greatly abridged set of closing credits, consisting of still frames rather than the scrolling text of the theatrical versions.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, shot with two different versions planned from the beginning, is arguably the instalment least affected by the changes. While the television cut features almost half an hour of additional material, most of it serves to flesh out the characters and their world a little more rather than making any radical alterations to the overall narrative and its flow. Certainly, the TV version has a slightly more relaxed pace and delves a little more into the relationships between various characters - particularly with regard to Blomkvist's relationship with Erika Berger, a major element in the novel and one that crops up in both sequels but was excised completely from the theatrical cut - but it doesn't ultimately feel as if you're watching a different film. Most of the added material is of the "for the fans" variety, with those that are familiar with the books being able to identify all sorts of little subplots that didn't make it into the theatrical version, perhaps most notably the story of Wennerstrom's mole inside Millennium. An additional point worth noting with regard to THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is the change in aspect ratio: it was the only one of the three films to be shot in 2.39:1, and given that this version was intended for broadcast it's unsurprising that it has been reformatted to 1.78:1 (a combination of cropping and opening up the mattes slightly). While regrettable (I personally think the film loses some of its sense of scale with the narrower ratio), you can't really complain as this is how this particular version was intended to be seen.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

Fast forward to the second instalment, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, and the changes between the theatrical and television editions are striking. Since the decision to cut down and release films two and three theatrically was apparently made relatively late in the game, chopping so much material out of an already completed film was always going to have a damaging effect, and you really get a sense here that you're seeing THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE as it was intended to be viewed for the first time. The film not only gains nearly an hour's worth of footage but has also been radically restructured. Entire sequences are shifted about in the timeline, thereby gaining new significance and in places having their meaning completely altered. A case in point is Salander's return to Sweden. In the theatrical version, she makes the decision to head back when she discovers that her crooked guardian, Bjurman, has been checking out a tattoo removal clinic (presumably with the intention of ridding himself of the words "I am a sadistic pig and a rapist" which she branded on his stomach in the previous film). In the television cut, her motivation for returning to Sweden isn't spelled out (although we are invited to infer, as in the theatrical version, that the sum of money left to her by her mother may have played a part), and her discovery about Bjurman comes once she has settled in her new apartment in Stockholm. This is a perfect example of the often clever compression found in the theatrical version, whereby events are greatly compressed or simplified without the inclusion of any significantly different footage (there are minor instances of different takes being used, but that's about it)... and yet in spite of the smart decisions made as to what to cut and what to keep, I always felt that the theatrical version felt rather muddled and disjointed, to the extent that I suspect many viewers not already familiar with the novel would have been completely lost. With the TV version, not only does it have more "room to breathe", it also seems to make a great deal more sense, with previously unexplained leaps in logic now being properly followed through. Much more time is given over to Salander's vilification by the press, intensifying her plight, and significantly more time is also devoted to the police investigation, focusing on infighting and the unscrupulous behaviour of one dodgy officer. There's no doubt in my mind that the TV cut of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE is a much better version than its theatrical counterpart. It makes more sense and, despite the longer running time and less abrupt pace, seems better paced. It's still a long way from the complexity of the novel with its biting social commentary, but the fact that even a portion of that aspect has found its way into the TV cut is a cause for celebration. Of the three films, this is the one that comes closest to being completely transformed.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST

Finally we come to THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST, this time with around 40 minutes' worth of new material. This time round, the new scenes are largely to be found in the first half of the film (i.e. episode 5 of the miniseries), but while there are once again plenty of them, they somehow make less of an impact than was the case with THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE. Perhaps it's because THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST tells a more linear story, with the material removed from the theatrical cut generally simply taking the viewer from point A to point C while glossing over point B: the new material, much of it focusing on the infighting and surveillance efforts of the rogue security faction, once again helps flesh out the characters and gives a sense of the broader social significance of the storyline, but doesn't really alter the outcome in any significant way. More attention is also paid to the police investigation, and this at least is appreciated, if only because it explains the sudden sidelining of Inspector Bublanski, a major figure in the second film who all but disappeared in the theatrical cut of the third film. THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST was always the weakest of the three novels, and the one most in need of some judicious editing, and despite the adaptation containing far more in the way of narrative changes than the other two films put together, neither the theatrical nor the TV version can get around the fact that not a great deal actually happens until the point of Salander's trial, with all the main pieces having already been placed on the board in the second film.

I enjoyed rewatching this series of films a great deal. The first film continues to stand above its two sequels in a class of its own - it's slicker, better written and clearly benefitted from a much higher budget, while its two successors look every inch the TV movies that they are. Good TV movies, but TV movies nonetheless, and ones clearly made on a budget. Viewing them in their originally intended form, however, does them a great many favours and even makes the obvious budgetary shortcomings - the grubbier visuals, the prevalence of "characters sitting in a room/walking down a path talking" scenes - seem more forgivable. One thing is clear: watching all six episodes in rapid succession allows you to really appreciate the impressiveness of Noomi Rapace's portrayal of Salander, and if nothing else the films should be celebrated for this career-defining performance, whatever their individual shortcomings.

I'll be discussing the image quality of all three films in a future post.

A few thoughts on The Field of Blood

11:08 PM / Television / 3 Comments

(THE FIELD OF BLOOD aired on BBC1 Scotland on Sunday May 8th and Monday May 9th.)

I'm a little surprised that FIELD OF BLOOD is the first of Denise Mina's novels to be adapted to the screen. The GARNETHILL trilogy is more widely known; the DS Alex Morrow series that started with 2009's STILL MIDNIGHT (review here) and continues with THE END OF THE WASP SEASON, released this week, seems like a more natural fit for the standard TV cop show format. FIELD OF BLOOD, which introduces overweight teenage aspiring journalist Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, also centres around a particularly unpleasant child murder inspired by the real life killing of James Bulger - contentious material to say the least.

The latter is one of a number of elements from the novel that are either significantly softened or jettisoned completely in David Kane's two-part TV adaptation. The details of the murder are particularly nasty in the book; in the TV version, the body of toddler Brian Wilcox is simply found (off screen, naturally) strangled and dumped in a canal. (And in so doing, the title "The Field of Blood" becomes meaningless.) Gone too is most of the rampant sectarianism that runs through the book and provides much of the flavour of the early 80s Glasgow in which both versions take place. Much of Mina's colourful language remains (the dialogue is littered with "fucks" and "shites"), but all in all this seems like a softer, more palatable version of child murder - if the subject can indeed ever be made palatable. Meanwhile, the parallel story of the "real" Paddy Meehan, which made up a good third of the novel's page count, has been whittled down to a brief dialogue scene in which Paddy explains how the story of her namesake inspired her to want to be a journalist.

Kane - an old hand at Scottish TV crime, having penned episodes of TAGGART, REBUS and created SEA OF SOULS - does a decent job of compressing the key events of the novel into two one-hour episodes and, doing double duty as writer and director, shoots Paddy's nocturnal trawls through Glasgow in the back of reporter George McVeigh's car with a great deal of flair. The use of 80s music is also very effective, and the attention to detail in the production and costume design is impressive. THE FIELD OF BLOOD is very much a period piece, and while the book provided far greater justification for locating the story in 1982 rather than the present day, it doesn't feel like a gimmick. It's also rather impressive that, despite how much Glasgow has changed in the last 30 years, there are no obvious anachronistic clangers to be found.

In front of the camera, stalwarts such as Peter Capaldi and David Morrissey are on good form as Paddy's colleagues at the Daily News; Capaldi in particular gets to shine in the second part as the dying Dr. Pete. (He also gets by far the best line: "I've got cancer." "Balls!" "No - liver, actually.") Newcomer Jayd Johnson handles the central role well, although her Paddy is somewhat different from the one described in the book, and certainly not at all what I pictured. More troublingly, at least a dozen references are made to her being overweight despite the fact that Johnson can at most be described as curvy - seriously, virtually every major character calls her "fat" at some point. By the end of the show, it's a touch ridiculous: Johnson may not be stick-thin, but her weight is hardly something that would incur constant passing comment.

I suppose part of the somewhat critical eye I'm bringing to the adaptation stems from already being familiar with the source material. As such, it's very difficult to switch your brain out of "that bit's different" mode and simply enjoy the show based on its own merits. Looked at objectively, THE FIELD OF BLOOD provides a welcome change of pace compared to other TV crime dramas: its teenage protagonist and period setting allow it to stand out, and it's nice to see a show that revolves around an amateur investigator in a market oversaturated with portrayals of professional detectives. It even manages to serve up a decent whodunit, thanks mainly to the fact that Kane wisely doesn't go in for the sort of "stunt casting" the likes of WAKING THE DEAD was famous for (whereby you could usually guess the killer the moment the big name guest star walked on to the set).

Producer Alan J. Wands talks about the possibility of THE FIELD OF BLOOD serving as a pilot for a longer Paddy Meehan series - which, given that there are only two further books featuring the character, would presumably entail the creation of new storylines beyond the scope of the novels. (There's also the slight issue of each novel jumping forward several years in time, with the third instalment, THE LAST BREATH, taking place in 1990.) I'd certainly be up for that, though it would be nice if future episodes managed to capture a little more of the particular brand of bleakness Mina is so adept at writing.

Laying the dead to rest

1:01 PM / Television / 1 Comment

This past weekend, the BBC's Emmy-winning crime series WAKING THE DEAD began its ninth and sadly final season with a two-parter, "Harbinger", penned by Ed Whitmore. Whitmore is someone whose writing I have a lot of time for, particularly with regard to his contributions to WAKING THE DEAD. He wrote my favourite ever episode, Series 2's "Thin Air", as well as Series 3's "Multistorey", the episode that bagged the show its Emmy, and in my opinion the quality of the show suffered noticeably during his two-year absence from it (Series 6 and 7). When he returned during Series 8, he gave us the best episode of WAKING THE DEAD in years, "End of the Night", and as such I was elated by the news that he would be serving as lead writer for Series 9, responsible for three of the five two-parters. (Obviously, it would have been perfect if creator Barbara Machin came back to do the finale, but it doesn't look like this will be happening.)

Having watched WAKING THE DEAD from its 2000 pilot and never missed a single episode, I've come to recognise the recurring traits that would tend to pop up in episodes penned by the same writers. Stephen Davis' scripts, for example, were often laugh-out-loud hilarious, while Declan Croghan (the head writer for Series 6 and 7, and the creator of the upcoming THE BODY FARM spin-off) made heavy use of religious imagery and creepy cults. Whitmore's modus operandi has tended to be revealing the hidden depravities committed by supposedly respectable upper middle class families, and "Harbinger" is no exception. What initially seemed to be a fairly conventional "missing person" story (albeit one with the odd unique touch, such as a creepy old couple clearly inspired by Grant Wood's American Gothic) went off in a completely different direction in the second hour when the team uncovered a particularly disturbing case of Münchausen syndrome by proxy.

This is what I love about Whitmore's episodes. So often, he gives you what you think is one thing, then proceeds to twist it in a completely different direction, while at the same time layering in enough clues that the final reveal makes complete sense. (I'm thinking in particular of "Thin Air" and the revelation that Roger Allam's character had been in love with his own daughter.) I've noticed that whereas some writers tend to pack as much excitement into Part 1 as possible, meaning that Part 2 is sometimes a bit of a letdown, Whitmore takes the time to build things up in the first half, so he can then pay them off satisfyingly in the second. Taken in isolation, Part 1 of "Harbinger" feels a little bland and unremarkable, but view it in the context of Part 2 and it becomes clear just how well constructed the story is as a whole.

I do miss the old team, though, and the insertion of a new character, played by Eva Birthistle, just makes me yearn for the interplay that built up between the original five leads over the course of the four series they spent together. Boyd, Grace and Spence are still present and correct, and the Boyd/Grace scenes invariably tend to result in the best moments in any episode, but Birthistle's character, Sarah, hasn't really gelled with the team yet, and I'm afraid I've never taken to the current pathologist, Eve (who'll be the main character in THE BODY FARM). (And what happened to Kat, the new girl from the previous series? 80s hair aside, I liked her.) Before the start of Series 9, I did a flying recap of the show, watching one episode from each season, and I was struck by the evolving chemistry between the original leads, culminating in the pitch-perfect Series 4. This exchange between Boyd and Frankie, from "Anger Management", just kills me:

(Boyd has started seeing a therapist and is learning to control his anger. The team are used to him blowing up at the slightest provocation, which is why Frankie is so disturbed by his even-temperedness here.)

Sorry to inadvertently turn this into a bit of a grousing session, but this (heavily improv'd, by the looks of it) exchange between two talented actors who clearly know their characters intimately is the sort of thing that made WAKING THE DEAD so unmissable for its first four to five years and is the element I found most sorely lacking in the Series 6-7 period. We got little hints of it in Series 8 (Boyd and Grace's discussion about which of them has the weirder job in "End of the Night" being a particular highlight), and I'm hoping there's more to come before things come to a close in four weeks' time. I'm genuinely sorry WAKING THE DEAD is ending - it is, for my money, by far the best long-running detective series I've watched in recent years, and trounces the flashier, sillier US equivalent, CSI - but on the plus side it stands a reasonable chance of ending on some sort of a high. And if at some point in the future, Boyd and the team decide to don their lab coats once again to once again pick over the bones of a few more rotting corpses, I'll be there.

Incidentally, my picks for the best episode of each series are (bearing in mind that it's hard to pick a "favourite" for the lacklustre Series 6 and 7):

• Series 1: "Every Breath You Take" by Barbara Machin
• Series 2: "Thin Air" by Ed Whitmore
• Series 3: "Breaking Glass" by Stephen Davis
• Series 4: "Anger Management" by John Milne & Andy Hay
• Series 5: "Straw Dog" by Declan Croghan
• Series 6: "Yahrzeit" by Declan Croghan
• Series 7: "Skin" by Clive Bradley & Declan Croghan
• Series 8: "End of the Night" by Ed Whitmore

HDTV fun and games

5:13 PM / Television / 9 Comments

For the last several years, most of my TV recordings have come courtesy of the Freecom DVB-T USB stick I picked up for somewhere in the region of £15. Back then, the only television being broadcast via antenna in the UK was of the standard definition variety, but with BBC, ITV and Channel 4 all launching their own high definition terrestrial solutions in the last year, I decided I wanted to get in on the act instead of having to rely on other sources to acquire HD recordings of the relevant shows.

The only problem? Until recently, it was impossible to get hold of a computer-based device capable of receiving DVB-T2, the transmission system used for HD terrestrial broadcasts in this country.

Enter the solution: MyGica's FreeView T200, the first DVB-T2 USB device available in the UK. The fine people at TVStick.co.uk got their initial shipment on Monday, dispatched one for me within about half an hour of my ordering it, and it showed up on Wednesday afternoon. That's what I call great service!

Initial impressions are pretty positive, taking into account the newness of the device and the various technical kinks that will presumably be worked out with subsequent driver iterations. Unlike my Freecom DVB-T, which was basically a USB pen drive with an aerial connection on the back, MyGica's solution is a small hub with its own external power supply, although it still connects to the system via USB. The bundled HiDTV software can only be described as unstable, at least on my system - it crashed continually while searching for channels and took somewhere in the region of five attempts to complete a full scan. After that, it remained unstable and I was unable to get any sound (although the video looked fine).

Fortunately, I've used Windows Media Center for TV viewing and recording ever since I upgraded to Windows Vista and later Windows 7, both of which come with Media Center included, and I've always found it to be vastly superior to any of the various freeware TV options, as well as ArcSoft's TotalMedia (which came bundled with my Freecom stick). Therefore, I promptly ditched HiDTV and switched to Media Center, which detected and played all the relevant channels with no problems.

The image quality seems good - certainly as good or better than the various alternatives I've been relying on for HD shows I watch. The recordings are all in Microsoft's proprietary .wtv format, which only plays in Media Center or Windows Media Player. I personally don't have a huge problem with this as both are perfectly adequate programs, but if anyone knows of a way of converting these files into something more compatible (without re-encoding, naturally), I'd be interested to hear.

A slight problem, though: for some reason no programme guide data is available for any of the four HD channels (BBC One HD, BBC HD, STV HD and Channel 4 HD) in Media Center. Apparently this is a problem between Microsoft and Freeview HD and one that affects at least one other HDTV receiver (the Black Gold BGT3620). For three of the four channels, the most straightforward solution is to sync each channel with the TV guide data from its standard definition counterpart. Obviously this doesn't work for BBC HD, which has no SD equivalent. File it under "problems I can live with but hope they fix before too long."

The only other problem I've encountered in Media Center is that sometimes on startup, or upon changing channels, it will randomly lose the ability to received HD content, giving me a message stating that the signal strength may be weak or the aerial may be disconnected. In these instances, opening up the HiDTV software for a few seconds (which is sometimes as long as it runs for before crashing!) is enough to solve the problem, and I'm sure it's an issue that will be cleared up eventually, but it's frustrating nonetheless.

Still, all in all I consider this £69.99 well spent. There are clearly some compatibility issues to be worked out, but until then I'm more than content to work around them in exchange for (relatively) hassle-free viewing and recording of HD content.

What happens in Bristol

5:04 PM / Television / 6 Comments

On a handful of occasions in the last six months or so, I've furtively mentioned trips to London and Bristol relating to what I rather cryptically described as an "employment opportunity". Having now clarified matters, I'm now in a position to give a little more of an indication of what that means. The terms of my contract prevent me from going into TOO much detail, but I've been told that it's okay for me to tell readers of this site that I was invited on to and am now participating in the 2010 writers' Shadow Scheme programme for the BBC medical drama CASUALTY.

A Shadow Scheme, as per the BBC Writersroom web site, is

basically a dummy run of the commissioning process. Writers are asked to pitch guest story ideas, and given a real serial document from which they are asked to write all or part of a script. Usually they are asked to write two drafts. This script is not for broadcast, but is used by the production to decide whether or not to commission the writer.

Très cool, non?

For me, this is the cumulation of a process which began last Autumn and has, in a rather unconventional way, landed me in a position of having a very real shot at getting to contribute to a programme that I'm very passionate about (as anyone who has read my rants about the show can attest). Last Monday and Tuesday, I was down in Bristol for the initial two-day induction programme, which I attended with several other prospective writers. Obviously I'm not in a position to give a blow by blow account of what the induction consisted of, but let's just say that I experienced what can only be described as a very enjoyable information overload. The Writersroom web site provides an overview of what last year's Shadow Scheme consisted of, and while the specifics of this year's event were somewhat different, the basic gist of it remains largely the same:

Casualty

Also looks for writers with TV experience and a good grasp of structure. Casualty needs writers who can not only handle serial stories and medical procedure, but who can come up with strong and arresting guest stories and who have something exciting and relevant to say about the world now. For the 2008/9 Casualty shadow scheme, writers were given a three-day induction course on how to write for the show, which included a set tour and information about the format and ambitions of the show. The selected writers then pitched guest stories and if these were thought suitable, those writers worked with Script Producer Bianca Rodway and Script Editor Jenny van der Lande to develop shadow treatments and a draft Casualty script. A fee was paid for each part of the shadow scheme.

Sorry for being somewhat cryptic about all of this, but the contract I've signed places some pretty rigid restrictions on what I can and can't say about the process, so in the interests of being safe rather than sorry, I've decided to simply direct you to information that is already in the public domain. I certainly can't tell you about what's coming up in the show, so don't bother to ask!

Anyway, yeah - I thought you'd be interested to hear about this. I'm not a fully fledged writer just yet, and it may very well be that nothing ultimately comes of it (I'm effectively competing with several other writers for a very limited number of commission slots, and this is a VERY competitive business), but these are incredibly exciting times for me and, while I have a lot of work ahead of me, I'm looking forward to every minute of it.

A few thoughts on Murderland

2:59 PM / Television / No Comments

Murderland is a three-part crime drama starring Robbie Coltrane that aired on ITV1 over three weeks, from October 19 to November 2. Crime dramas are, of course, a dime a dozen on ITV's evening schedules, whether they're long-running series like Taggart and Wire in the Blood or standalones like this, but this one caught my attention because of its use of the "parallel perspectives" method of storytelling, of which I'm rather fond... when it's done well. Basically, each part, it seemed, would tell the story from a different character's point of view, with each revealing information to which the protagonists of the other two parts are not privy. In reality, Murderland essentially drops the ball in that regard, but more on that in a moment.

It's standard murder-mystery fare: in the mid-90s, thirteen-year-old Carrie Walsh returned home from a party to find her prostitute mother murdered. There was no sign of sexual assault, but the attack was so brutal and frenzied as to suggest that this was not some spur of the moment thing: whoever did it bore a serious grudge against the poor woman. Bereft and with no immediate family upon whom to rely, Carrie turned to Douglas Hain (Coltrane), a scruffy detective inspector with an unconventional work ethic. Despite his promises to Carrie, however, the murder was never solved, and Hain's conduct resulted in the case being jeopardised and him being forced into early retirement. Fifteen years later, on the eve of her wedding, Carrie - now calling herself Carol - turns up on Hain's doorstep, adamant that she can't move on with her life until she knows the truth.

[Continue reading...]

Dollhouse officially cancelled

11:21 AM / Television / 2 Comments

Source: EW.com

Well, I won't claim that I'm hugely surprised, or indeed hugely disappointed. The writing was on the wall more or less from the get-go, and the fact that it got a second season at all is, depending on your point of view, either a miracle or a sick joke. As far as I can tell, the remaining episodes of Season 2 will indeed be aired, but there is unlikely to be any coming back from this, not even if the viewing figures rise drastically (which, let's face it, isn't going to happen).

Broadly speaking, I'm in agreement with the opinion piece posted over at EW.com, which argued that there is a silver lining in this cloud,

because it'll free [series creator Joss] Whedon from a show that, let's be frank, was never going to climb out of the hole it was in. Dollhouse had too much viewer attrition and too little network support. It'll let him chase down the myriad other things he could be doing - writing more comics, making more Web content, and, perhaps (as more than a few people have suggested) getting in bed with a cable network that'll give him the latitude to do what he likes, how he likes.

I've been holding off posting my thoughts on Season 2 so far, given that we're only four episodes in (out of thirteen), but if you've read my review of Season 1, you'll know that I'm not exactly the show's biggest fan. That said, I'll be the first to admit that there have been moments of greatness. The last couple of episodes of Season 1 showed a great deal of promise, and out of the four episodes of Season 2 that have aired, the most recent was excellent... albeit primarily because it eschewed the show's focal point (Echo and Ballard) in favour of one of the secondary characters.

And there's the rub: it seems that, whenever Dollhouse is any good, it has precious little do to with series star Eliza Dushku and her character. The most memorable scenes almost always involve secondary characters rather than her, and the two most interesting episodes we've had so far - Season 1's Epitaph One and Season 2's Belonging - have barely featured her at all.

So there you have it. I'll continue to watch the remainder of the Season 2 episodes - assuming they all get aired, that is - and in the end will no doubt feel a twinge of disappointment over what the show could have become had things been different. I strongly doubt, however, that I'll be losing too much sleep over it.

Some thoughts on Spooks episode 8.1

4:46 PM / Television / 4 Comments

* Warning! * This post contains major spoilers for the episode.

So, Ruth is back. And poor old Malcolm crept out the back door after eight years on our screens. Thankfully, he was still breathing when he departed, breaking with a tradition that has, for the last three seasons, seen a regular character killed off in Episode 1.

Season 7 ended with one of the classic cliffhangers that have been Spooks' trademark ever since it first began in 2002, this time with section chief Harry Pearce - of course, that's Sir Harry now - being bundled, bound and gagged, into the back of a helicopter by a turncoat Russian agent. I've always contended that Harry is the cornerstone of Spooks, now the only character to have been there right from the beginning and, as someone else described him, "the still point of the turning world". Lose Harry and, in my opinion, you lose Spooks. Of course, ever since Lisa Faulkner made acquaintances with a deep fat fryer in the second episode of Season 1, it has been made abundantly clear that no-one in this show is safe, and of the regular characters who have departed during the show's eight-year history, more than half have done so in a pine box. By being so cavalier with regard to killing off their characters, the writers have hammered home, right from the start, that regardless of a character's status or popularity, they will, if need be, be dispatched ruthlessly. As a result, after surviving countless previous brushes with death, I genuinely believed that my favourite character's time was up...

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Some thoughts on Criminal Justice Series 2

3:04 PM / Television / No Comments

The television miniseries (or serial) is something of a lost art. British television dramas tend to take one of two forms: (1) one-off or two-part standalones, or (2) longer-running, multi-season productions of varying length. Wikipedia defines a miniseries as "a single finite story told in separately broadcast episodes."

Last year, BBC1 brought the concept of the miniseries back with Criminal Justice, a five-hour piece broadcast in one-hour blocks over the course of a single week. Scripted by a former barrister, Peter Moffat (who also created Kavanagh QC and North Square), it offered a gripping and frankly terrifying look at the British justice system, focusing on a young man (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer's Ben Whishaw) accused of murdering a woman and his desperate battle to clear his name, hampered at every turn by an unjust and corrupt system. The series attracted no small amount of criticism from members of the legal profession for the negative light in which it was depicted but, as the saying goes, the truth hurts sometimes... even if, as per one of the most iconic lines of the serial, "the truth can go to hell."

In spite of the controversy (or perhaps because of it), it was a big success in terms of both critical reaction and viewing figures, so it's not entirely surprising that it was brought back this year for a second series, which finished airing on Friday. Does that mean it's no longer a miniseries? I'm not sure, but there seems little point in getting caught up in semantics, given that the end result was once again excellent. Taking the same basic concept, Moffat weaved a dramatically different story around a completely different cast of characters, the protagonist this time being Juliet (played by Maxine Peake), a shrew-like housewife who stabbed her husband, a well-liked, successful barrister in the public eye but a manipulative, abusive control freak behind closed doors.

Whereas, in the first series, it was unclear until near the very end whether Whishaw's character actually did commit murder (he had no memory of having done it but, as the prosecution pointed out, that doesn't automatically mean he didn't), the questions posed in Series 2 were considerably different. This time, there was no doubt that Juliet stabbed her husband: we saw her pick up the kitchen knife, take it into the bedroom and plunge it into his chest. It wasn't even so much a question of "why": we, the audience, could see that she was a virtual prisoner in her own home and that her husband effectively subjected her two a 24-hour cycle of systematic mental (and occasionally sexual) abuse. The mystery element, if you can call it that, emerged in the form of whether or not Juliet would admit to herself and others what her husband had done to her, and whether she would ultimately be convicted of murder or manslaughter.

Series 2 ultimately proved to be more domestically oriented than its predecessor, spending nearly as much time with family members and acquaintances as with Juliet herself. I was impressed by the almost languid pace at which the events unfolded - a rare treat given modern television's tendency towards action, action action and not "wasting" a second lest the audience lose interest and change channels. Personally, I have nothing against fast-paced storytelling and will happily watch frenetic nail-biters like Spooks, which crams a massive amount of material into each hour-long episode, but Criminal Justice's slower, more deliberate pace ultimately proved to be more rewarding. As much as it was an exposé into the shady goings-on in the legal profession and the police force, it served first and foremost as a character study, with Moffat and Maxine Peake painting a frighteningly convincing portrait of a victim of domestic abuse - someone who, regardless of the outcome, was going down, and in a sense was doomed even before the opening credits began.

Can we have a Series 3, please? And, while we're at it, how about releasing Series 1 and 2 on BD? Both were shot and broadcast in high definition, but only DVDs seem to be available (for Series 1) or announced (for Series 2).

Waking the Dead: Series 8, Episodes 7 and 8: Endgame

9:25 PM / Television / No Comments

Written by Daniel Percival and Andrew Holden; Directed by Daniel Percival

* WARNING * Spoilers ahead! * WARNING *

The overused phrase "rollercoaster ride" is not one I'd normally use for Waking the Dead, but it certainly applies to the two-part finale to the current series, which ended last night. As always, my compulsion to ruin everything for myself led to me reading the officially released spoilers, at which point I promptly became worried for more than one reason. First of all, it all sounded rather silly and, in several respects, a tad clichéd. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it strongly suggested that it was "end of the line" time for a least one of the series regulars, if not the series as a whole.

I shouldn't have worried. Having now seen the episodes, I see no reason to suspect that Waking the Dead will not be back at the same time next year. Furthermore, it was a corker of a finale - the best since Series 4.

Psychopathic serial killer Linda Cummings (Ruth Gemmell), who the team succeeded in locking up in the previous series, begins taunting Boyd from the psychiatric hospital in which she is incarcerated. She succeeds in having a severed finger sent to him, along with a note asking "Who killed Sandra White?" The finger is revealed to belong to the aforementioned Ms. White, who was an inmate at the same hospital as Linda and vanished off the face of the earth shortly after being released. Linda isn't just doing this for the fun of it - she has something to gain from this, but her endgame is a mystery to all and sundry, which worries Grace but fascinates the impetuous Boyd. She warns him not to get involved, but personal commitments mean that she is unable work on the case, leading to her calling in a temporary replacement, Dr. Jackie Cochran (Gina McKee), who has studied Linda extensively and has a secret of her own. As Boyd is drawn deeper into Linda's web, she sets her endgame in motion, which could have lasting consequences for the team...

Far-fetched? Yes. A bit clichéd? Almost certainly, but I'm willing to forgive a lot of any show that can keep me rapt for two hours and leave me thirsting for more. Linda Cummings is basically a Hannibal Lecter figure and I'm a little uncertain as to just how realistic her portrayal is - I don't doubt that brilliant mad(wo)men exist, but I fancy that characters like Lecter and Linda are heavily romanticised and, in Linda's case, not the sort of person you'd expect to find interred in the average London psychiatric facility. Does it matter? Not really, because the episode as a whole is brilliantly constructed and Linda is a compelling character, ably played by a solid actress, Ruth Gemmell. Gemmell actually appeared back in the Series 2 episode Special Relationships (another corker), in a completely different role, and while part of me dislikes the re-use of recognisable actors in different roles on the same show almost as much as blatant retconning (see the Joe/Luke fiasco), I'm ultimately glad they gave the part to her, because she's so bloody good. I'm not going to claim that her performance is on par with that of Anthony Hopkins as Lecter, but there are definite similarities, particularly with regard to the fact that they can both present themselves as seductive and monstrously evil at the same time. She's the definitive manipulator: someone whose true motive remains hidden until the very end and is considerably darker and more disturbing than anything you could guess (well, unless, like me, you read the spoilers). Linda's eventual goal, you see, is to force Boyd to become the same sort of monster that she is - again, it's not exactly original, but it works because we've seen Boyd take himself to the edge so many times before that, by this stage, we really do believe him to be capable of going past the point of no return, if provoked sufficiently. This is, after all, the man who famously almost drowned a suspect in an attempt to wheedle a confession out of him, and just last week left a man to be killed because he knew he couldn't successfully prosecute him. Given the right circumstances, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine Boyd stepping up to the plate and actually committing murder.

What makes this all so delicious is the fact that it is thoroughly grounded in psychology rather than science. Waking the Dead, in its heyday, gave equal attention to both, but I was always more interested in the former than the latter, and I was dismayed to see it being given such short shrift in more recent series. With End of the Night and now this episode, that trend has well and truly been reversed in Series 8. It would be going too far to consider Boyd and Linda two sides of the same coin - he takes himself to the edge because he craves justice, whereas she... well, it's not clear what she has to gain from her behaviour, beyond a sadistic form of personal amusement - but as adversaries, they're truly well-matched. This is, to date, the only time Waking the Dead has ever brought back a previous villain, and they certainly picked a good one. I wasn't overly taken by her in her initial appearance in the Series 7 episode Sins, but she certainly convinced me tonight.

As for whether Boyd did succumb... well, it's actually a bit open-ended. Linda's deal was "a life for a life" - if he killed for her, Grace would survive. (The person he was to kill was the woman who provided his son, Joe/Luke, with the drugs he used to fatally overdose.) Boyd's hands, at present, remain clean, and Grace lives to fight another day (although whether or not she'll beat the cancer with which she was diagnosed in this episode remains to be seen), but the cliffhanger ending poses more questions than it answers. It's almost certain that Linda is dead, having fallen from the roof of a multi-storey building, but the extent of Boyd's culpability remains unclear. Did he accidentally drop her, or did he deliberately let her go? Given that Waking the Dead has never been particularly big on continuity, I'm not confident that we'll ever get a satisfying answer, but we did get some real development in terms of Boyd's character. After all, when push came to shove, he couldn't actually kill another human being - not even the woman responsible for his son's death, not even when she told him she wanted him to do it, and not even when he thought it meant losing Grace. Boyd is, ultimately, not the monster Linda wanted him to be. His victory over her is, fundamentally, a mental one.

Series 8's high point remains the magnificent End of the Night, but Endgame was a far better finale than I ever expected it to be. In spite of the crushingly disappointing Substitute, Series 8 as a whole has been a significant improvement on the last couple of years, and I'm now firmly of the opinion that the show has well and truly turned itself around. Once they start to go downhill, few shows can manage to claw their way back to the top, but Waking the Dead has done it. It's still nor clear what sort of shape the team will be in come Series 9, but I can't wait to find out, and the prospect of it being another year before the show is on our screens again is, at present, almost too much to bear. Take a bow, guys. You really pulled it out of the bag.

PS. That said, I have to dispute producer Colin Wratten's claim that the overarching theme of Series 8 was "strong women facing adversity". I could just about have bought it if he'd added "and being defeated" to the end of that statement, because I saw precious little evidence of it in a season in which (a) a lead female character suffered an off-screen death by DVT, (b) a rape victim murdered her attacker and presumably ended up in jail as a result, (c) another female lead faffed around with a suspect, leading to the case against him being inadmissible, and (d) a female psychopath fell to her death while Grace, the matriarch of the team, spent the bulk of the episode confined to a hospital bed or helplessly waiting for Boyd to come and rescue her. I don't know about you, but none of these scenarios strike me as being particularly big on the "girl power" quotient. (As someone put it in a comment on the article I linked to, "strong woman" appears to mean "victim".) Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against any of those stories per se (well, apart from the cop-out "death by DVT" affair), but if you're going to make statements like that, you ought to be able to deliver on them.

PPS. Just a couple more random observations about the season as a whole:

• While I sincerely hope Sue Johnston isn't going anywhere, if she does end up leaving, as replacements go they could do a hell of a lot worse than Gina McKee.
   
• The new girl, Kat, ultimately gelled nicely with the existing team, and I already like her a lot more than Stella.
   
• Spencer, on the other hand, no longer seems to serve any particular purpose, and I can definitely see the writers ditching him permanently come the next series... in which case, I doubt I'd be sorry to see him go, as the character has never done much for me and has, I feel, been taken as far as he can go.
   
• Finally, I noticed that, as of this series, they've switched composers. I was always a big fan of Joe Campbell and Paul Hart's score, and the new music, of the generic "action cop show" variety, just doesn't have the same effect. I particularly miss the repetitive but strangely hypnotic eight-note signature piece that always seemed to play when Frankie/Felix/Eve was at work in the lab.

Holby connections: Andrew Holden has written extensively for both Casualty and Holby City, and Barbara Marten (Penny) played Sister Eve Montgomery during Casualty's twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth series.

I never thought I'd hear...

11:30 AM / Television / No Comments

...a discussion of the merits of I Spit on Your Grave on last night's Casualty. It was brief, and the episode as a whole didn't do much for me, but for a moment I thought I'd entered some sort of wondrous parallel universe.

Waking the Dead: Series 8, Episodes 5 and 6: Substitute

1:35 PM / Television / 3 Comments

Written by Edward Bennett and Ed Whitmore; Directed by Edward Bennett

This has got to rank as hands down the silliest episode of Waking the Dead ever screened - a crushing disappointment when you consider how good last week's instalment was.

The story: interminably dull pathologist Eve starts a relationship with an eastern European aid worker, Stefan Koscinski (Joseph Mawle), but becomes suspicious of him when she discovers him to be in the possession of multiple passports, each under a different name. She illicitly obtains a sample of his DNA (as you do) and runs it through the usual procedures in her lab, resulting in it being matched to DNA found at the scene of the murder of a fellow aid worker, Briony Havers. Boyd, when he discovers this, immediately calls in another team to take over due to the conflict of interest... Haha, who am I kidding? He decides he and his team will investigate the matter themselves, with Eve continuing her relationship with Stefan so she can spy on him and report back.

What emerges is a gruesome tale of people trafficking and organ harvesting in which Stefan may or may not be implicated, and for the first of the two instalments, it just about works, though it's not really Waking the Dead. Generally speaking, I tend to find that precinct dramas end up on very shaky ground when they involve their regular characters in their own incidents; I tend to prefer it when their level of personal involvement is restricted to their personal feelings influencing the way they approach a case. Go too far in the other direction and you find yourself in "Goodness gracious, who would have thought that I, a criminal investigator, would end up at the centre of my very own criminal investigation!" territory, which quickly becomes silly if done too often. Waking the Dead, to its credit, has largely steered clear of these trappings, and when it has done personal storylines for its regulars has tended to tie them to past cases - for instance Grace in Straw Dog and Spence in Cold Fusion. Substitute breaks what I consider to be the unwritten rule of Waking the Dead: don't mix business with pleasure. Rather than a past case coming back to haunt her, Eve starts a relationship with a man only for him to coincidentally turn out to be linked to both a previous murder and ongoing criminal activity. Suddenly, it's not the Waking the Dead I know and love but rather a conventional detective drama in the vein of latter-day Trial & Retribution.

When I read the spoilers for this two-parter, my first thought was "Wow, this sounds a bit daft." As it turns out, I was right to be anxious: things do indeed get very silly indeed, especially in the second part, as plot development after idiotic plot development unfolds, stretching credibility to breaking point and ultimately causing characters to react in completely moronic ways in order to get from Point A to Point B. All this concludes with Boyd willingly leaving a man to be killed and allowing the perpetrators to walk free, despite knowing the depths of the depravity in which they are involved. Oddly enough, that's far from the most idiotic decision the character makes in this episode, but to go into any further detail would be to give too much away.

Suffice it to say, the last couple of series of Waking the Dead each had their own "clunker" episode: Series 6 had Deus Ex Machina and Series 7 had Wounds. I sincerely hope that Substitute was Series 8's low point and that tomorrow's season finale will be of a higher standard. Then again, having read the synopsis printed in the Radio Times, I have a feeling I shall have to grit my teeth as the writers trot out one of my most detested of all clichés...

Waking the Dead: Series 8, Episodes 3 and 4: End of the Night

12:49 PM / Television / No Comments

Written by Ed Whitmore; Directed by Dan Reed

Apologies for skipping over an entire series and a two-parter, but I wanted to write about this one while it was still fresh in my mind. (I'll come back to Series 7 at a later date, I promise.) The reason? Because it was, hands down, the best episode of Waking the Dead I've seen in years. I had high hopes for it when I learned that Ed Whitmore, the show's former head writer and the man responsible for my all-time favourite episode, Thin Air, was returning to the fold to pen it, but I never in my wildest dreams expected it to be this good.

Admittedly, it's a fairly simple story and, at least by Waking the Dead standards, remarkably free of shock twists and complex plot developments. Basically, the story is that, a little over a decade ago, eighteen-year-old Gemma Morrison (Michelle Dockery) and her ten-year-old brother Shaun were abducted by two men, who raped Gemma and then threw both of them off a bridge. Gemma survived, Shaun didn't. Years later, on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, a drunken Gemma seemingly attempts suicide by driving headlong into a tree, leaving a cryptic note bearing the plea "FIND THEM" on her dashboard. The note ends up in the hands of Boyd, whom Gemma had repeatedly pestered to re-open the investigation prior to her suicide attempt. For whatever reason (Guilt? A fear that Gemma may try to take her own life again if he doesn't?) Boyd does so, despite a complete lack of new evidence and the incredulity of the rest of the team, among them new recruit Kat Howard (Stacey Roca).

What follows is one of the grimmest and utterly engrossing two hours of television I've seen in quite some time. Whereas recent episodes of Waking the Dead (since the regime change at the end of Series 5, really) have sidelined the psychological aspect in favour of increased emphasis on forensics and generic plod work, psychology absolutely returns to the forefront here, with Grace finally getting to do more than briefly exit her office to offer some vague psychobabble which ultimately contributes nothing to solving the case. Here, we spend time with her as she profiles the two rapists, constructing their divergent personalities and delving into just what drove each of them to abduct and rape Gemma Morrison. (At one point, she says to Boyd: "You wouldn't question there being different reasons for people to commit murder. It's the same with rape.") It's not really a whodunit - as soon as we meet each of the two suspects, we know beyond any doubt that they're guilty - but the intrigue lies in finding out just why two men from completely different backgrounds and with completely different personalities and motivations would join forces.

The theme of Series 8, apparently, is that of strong women succeeding against seemingly insurmountable odds. Last week's episode, which saw long-running character and strong woman Stella Goodman felled off-screen by deep vein thrombosis, undercut this quite spectacularly, but it was far more in evidence this week. Gemma and her older sister Zoe (Kate Fleetwood) were magnificently characterised and acted, the relationship between them coming across as utterly real. Gemma's refusal to conform to the conventional template of the victim is brilliantly realised in a scene in which, when told by a married man with whom she has been having an affair that they can't do "this" any more, she merely shrugs and says "Okay, let's not do it any more." Clearly anticipating a stronger reaction, he merely stares at her. "Well, what d'you want me to say?" she responds glibly. "'Oh Andrew, please don't end it - not now when I'm weak and vulnerable'?" The construction of Gemma as a survivor - and perhaps more importantly someone willing to manipulate others in order to survive - means that the outcome (which I won't spoil here) is somewhat inevitable, but it's exhilarating every step of the way, and the open-ended climax with its refusal to tie things up in a neat package left me wanting more but at the same time knowing it had ended at precisely the right moment.

As for the regulars... well, as Grace correctly pointed out to Spence, Boyd was back to his old self. He was rude, loud, insensitive and obnoxious, but he was Boyd, and in his quieter moments he came together as a three-dimensional character filled with quirks and foibles. It's still not quite the same without Frankie and Mel, but in terms of the team's interaction this two-parter was much closer to "classic" Waking the Dead than any other episode in the last few years. Boyd's debate with Grace about which of them had the weirder job - "Your job's all abstract, isn't it? Nothing concrete - you deal in sort of airy-fairy stuff. At least I get down to the nitty-gritty..." - almost brought a tear to my eye and made me realise just what the show had been missing since the end of Series 5: the banter. In fact, the old multi-layered interplay had been absent for so long that, when Spence's old DI rebuffed him with the line "Don't flirt with me, Spence - you're married," I initially took it literally. It wasn't until later that I realised she was speaking metaphorically, Spence's "marriage" being his involvement with the Cold Case Squad and his "flirting" being his not entirely subtle hints to her that he is unhappy in his current job and looking to move on.

My one slight criticism as regards this storyline was that I was left with a nagging feeling that more could have been done with Gemma's sister, Zoe. I spent the bulk of Part 1 wondering why she was being so tolerant of Gemma's mood swings and passive-aggressive abuse, and got to thinking that her behaviour seemed awfully like that of someone who felt incredibly guilty and was attempting to compensate or atone for past actions. I came up with a theory that Zoe had in fact known the rapists (or one of them, at any rate), and that they had targeted Gemma either mistaking her for Zoe or in order to get back at Zoe. In reality what was going on was nothing like as complex as this, and I was actually slightly disappointed that, ultimately, Gemma was in fact picked by the rapists at random and that Zoe simply doted on her because "she's my sister... she doesn't have to be grateful for anything." Still, you can't have everything, and on reflection I think I'd have been more disappointed in the long run if I'd managed to successfully work out the outcome before the end of the first hour. Anyway, you can't have a good mystery story without at least one red herring.

End of the Night was terrific. It completely reinvigorated my interest in Waking the Dead and left me eagerly anticipating the remaining two two-parters of the current series. The next one, Substitute, is also written by Whitmore and is therefore in safe hands, while the finale, Endgame, is being handled by a former Casualty and Holby City writer, Andrew Holden. I can't say with any certainty that I know how these will turn out, but I'm optimistic: End of the Night showed that there is without a doubt life in the old dog yet.

What's cooking, doc?

9:27 AM / Television / No Comments

I don't really have much to say about the weekend's opening two-parter for Casualty's twenty-fourth series, which in comparison to the last couple of season premieres really wasn't all that impressive. I will, however, point out that I grudgingly respect any show that has the guts to introduce a new character, billed as a regular and with something approaching three-dimensional characterisation, and then kill them off before the end of their second episode. The unfortunate individual was Georgia Moffett, playing a new junior doctor, Heather, who, called out to attend to an incident at an abandoned shopping centre during her first shift, ended up being engulfed in a fireball and fried to a crisp. It reminded me very much of a certain incident in the first series of Spooks involving a megalomaniac white supremacist, a deep fat fryer and Lisa Faulkner's face. Fun times!

Admittedly, I'd worked out beforehand that this was going to happen - the fact that the BBC posted spoilers for the upcoming Episode 3 (which they hastily revised a couple of days later) explicitly referring to "Heather's death" was a pretty solid clue, methinks - and I'm slightly miffed that, after two years without the death of a single regular character, we've now had two in the space of just over a month. Still, it's nice to see the show doing something slightly ballsy, even if it does mean we're now deprived of the most promising of the four new recruits who joined for the new series.

PS. The writer of the episodes is clearly a fan of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. Unfortunately, she was at great pains to point this out at every opportunity, beginning with the episode's title, Dawn of the ED (ED = Emergency Department), and extending to dialogue along the lines of "Hey, this is just like that film Dawn of the Dead!" References, in my experience, tend only to be effective when you leave the viewers to discover them for themselves rather than highlighting them in neon.

A few thoughts on Dollhouse Season 1

9:22 PM / Television / 4 Comments

Dollhouse is the latest series from Joss Whedon, whose previous shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly, all attained cult followings and are fondly remembered despite never having made it big with the masses. (In fact, Buffy and Angel continue to this day in the form of comic books written in conjunction with their creator.) Whedon has a reputation for taking superficially simple or even potentially silly concepts (a valley girl fighting vampires, a crew of space cowboys jetting around the galaxy) and use them to explore surprisingly complex themes, told with a sprinkling of sharp wit and zingy dialogue. I don't consider myself to be a fan of everything the man has put out by any means, but whenever I hear that something new is coming out with his name attached to it, I'm always curious, if not outright ecstatic.

Dollhouse is different from Whedon's previous work. While his earlier shows all took place in a world other than our own (Buffy and Angel in a universe inhabited by vampires, demons and girls with superpowers, Firefly five hundred years in the future), the central conceit of Dollhouse is that everything portrayed in it could potentially be happening right under our very noses, albeit assuming that technology was considerably more advanced than we currently believe it to be. The basic idea is that, somewhere in Los Angeles, there exists a secret organisation known as the Dollhouse, which controls a group of "Dolls" or "Actives" - people who, for whatever reason, have voluntarily (or involuntarily, as the case may in fact be) submitted to having their minds wiped for a period of five years. During that time, the Dollhouse can use the Actives' bodies as they see fit, imprinting them with new personalities and sending them on a variety of "engagements", which can range from hostage negotiation to the theft of priceless works of art to glorified prostitution. The Dollhouse's chiefs don't seem to have any moral conniptions about renting their Actives out to individuals whose motives may be less than scrupulous, or indeed the notion of turning a living human being into essentially a zombie - from their point of view, they are merely providing a service.

One of these Actives is Echo (Eliza Dushku), a young woman formerly known as Caroline who, for reasons that are initially unclear, felt she had no choice but to flee her old life and surrender herself to the Dollhouse. As the series opens, she is, unbeknownst to her handlers, beginning to develop a sense of self-awareness and remembering elements of personalities with which she has been implanted and, later on, her previous life as Caroline. Meanwhile, FBI agent Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) is convinced that the Dollhouse exists and has spent most of his career following a series of false leads, to the extent that his marriage is collapsed and he is looked on with scorn by his disbelieving colleagues. His latest lead, however, may not be so bogus: someone has sent him video footage of Caroline, along with a cryptic note urging him to "keep looking".

[Continue reading...]

When the dead stay dead

10:55 AM / Television / No Comments

A few thoughts on the opening two-parter of the eighth series of Waking the Dead. (Warning: spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen it.)

• Overall, a stronger story than the last two season premieres, mainly because this one had a more coherent story than usual by Waking the Dead standards, not to mention an intriguing twist that I for one definitely didn't see coming. I've noticed some degree of criticism of this twist in discussions online, but personally I didn't mind it at all - once it was revealed, all the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together.
   
• The writer, Declan Croghan, continues his emphasis on Catholic imagery, which I'm still not entirely convinced works particularly well in a show like Waking the Dead, where so much of the focus is on forensic science. As with the season premiere he wrote for Series 6, Wren Boys, we get a creepy convent populated by sinister, abusive nuns. Now, I find nuns to be as sinister as the next person, even when they're not being abusive, but some new ideas wouldn't go amiss.
   
• Boyd, as usual, was shockingly rude to all and sundry, including witnesses, suspects and colleagues, but at least he wasn't screaming, stamping his foot or assaulting anyone this week (which leads me to believe the writers are saving it all up for the remaining three two-parters). He did, however, threaten to make one suspect lick up his own puke, which is a new one to me.
   
• Not a single mention was made of the death of Boyd's son at the end of the previous series - although given how spectacularly they bungled that storyline, going as far as to get the character's name and age wrong, I'm not surprised if they decided to simply brush it under the carpet.
   
• They killed Stella! Oh my god, why? Not only that, but they killed her in the most shockingly offhanded way that I'm convinced that either Félicité Du Jeu had done something to offend the producers or else they only had her for a matter of hours. She barely appeared in Part One at all, save to show up and get shot in the leg in the last five minutes, while in Part Two her appearances consisted of a single scene of her in a hospital bed talking to Grace, followed by a single shot of her corpse in the final scene while Grace told Boyd she'd suffered a thrombosis. A really disappointing, throwaway exit, and I wasn't even all that fond of the character. In terms of exits, I actually found this to be worse than Frankie and Felix's inter-season disappearances, because at least in those cases you could fill in the blanks for yourself.

By the way, I'm well aware that I've yet to complete my Waking the Dead Project, with Series 7 remaining unreviewed. I'd get cracking on it, but the series has yet to be released on DVD (apparently there is some situation revolving around an army general suing for defamation regarding the episode Duty and Honour, which might explain the hold-up), and the copies I recorded off air are stored on an external hard drive whose power supply is kaput. Western Digital are, of course, dragging their heels when it comes to replacing it, but hopefully I'll be able to get it up and running again before too long.

What's on the box?

4:03 PM / Television / No Comments

The 2009-2010 television season will shortly be starting on either side of the Atlantic. While British television doesn't really operate around the same seasonal structure as its American counterpart, there's still something of a tradition of new series of popular shows beginning to air around September to October. Here's what I'll be watching

• Dollhouse - Season 2, consisting of 13 episodes (as with the previous season), begins airing on FOX on September 25 with the opening episode to be written and directed by Joss Whedon. It's unclear how many episodes he'll be personally handling this year (in Season 1, he only wrote the pilot, the first broadcast episode and Episode 6), but things have a habit of going better on his shows when he gives them his full focus. (Compare Firefly to the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, both produced at the same time, and it's obvious which one was getting his attention.) In any event, Tim Minear is joining full-time for this season, and he's as good a second-in-command as I can think of.
   
• Waking the Dead - Starting its eighth series this Sunday on BBC1, for a considerably reduced run of four two-parters (Series 4 through 7 always had six). Some of the spoilers I've come across sound a little on the daft side, and the same regime responsible for the previous two series of variable quality - producer Colin Wratten and head writer Declan Croghan - is still in charge, but I'm pleased to note that Ed Whitmore, the head writer during the golden period, has come back to pen the second two-parter.
   
• Spooks - Also due to start its eighth series some time this Autumn. Practically nothing is known about the new run, except that, by the sounds of it, Nicola Walker is back, at least temporarily, while there are strong indications that, after being held hostage, punched, kidnapped and shot at more times than I can count, not to mention raped and seen two potential suitors murdered, Miranda Raison's character, Jo (a.k.a. the one who looks like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle - compare and contrast), will be bowing out. I'm happy about the former, less so about the latter.
   
• Casualty - Series 24 starts on September 12. To quote a line in one of the opening episodes of Series 22, "This place is like quicksand - as soon as you think you've struggled free, it sucks you back in."

So what's everyone else marking their calendars for?

Welcome to the Dollhouse

10:21 PM / Television / 6 Comments

Looks like Tim Minear has joined the staff of Dollhouse full time for its upcoming second season, after holding down a part-time consulting role on Season 1 (for which he wrote two episodes, including the broadcast season finale). This can only be good news: I've long been of the opinion that, of all the writers to be involved with Mutant Enemy's various productions, he was one of the best, perhaps second only to Joss Whedon. (He started on Angel before transferring to the short-lived Firefly as joint showrunner with Whedon, after which he left to lead the ill-fated but oh-so-funny Wonderfalls.) Oh, and actors Summer Glau and Alexis Denisof are coming along for the ride too, joining other former Mutant Enemy alums Eliza Dushku and Amy Acker. It's going to be a great big reunion, and I for one am looking forward to it.

I'm still slowly working my way through Season 1 on BD, by the way, and will hopefully reach the end before Season 2 begins on September 25. (I'm pretty busy at the moment, working on the PhD - next chapter due in about a month's time - and some other things that I'm not currently at liberty to discuss publicly.) I have a few opinions about it, but will refrain from posting them until I've seen it through to the end. Oh, and please keep nagging at me to post my thoughts on Firefly, which I finished a number of weeks ago but haven't had the time to do a write-up for yet.

Oh, okay. One word about Firefly: terrific.

"Where is Charlie Fairhead?" - a Casualty Series 23 appraisal

4:23 PM / Television / 3 Comments

Another year, another 48 episodes, another "Why am I still watching this?" conundrum. The answer to the latter point, I suppose, is that I'm a glutton for punishment. I'm also, however, an optimist, and I continue to cling to the vague hope that, eventually, things will get better and we'll experience a return to the sort of drama I grew up with in the late '80s and '90s. And, to be fair, present day Casualty, for all its problems, is not wholly without merit. Every now and then, the cast and crew do manage to pull the rug out from under my feet and deliver something unexpectedly good. The very fact that a decent episode is so unexpected, however, is a clear indication that the powers that be are getting more wrong than right. The proof in the pudding is the fact that, in a season of 48 episodes, I can count on one hand the ones that I wouldn't relegate to the scrap heap.

What I will say in this season's favour is that, when it ended last night, it did feel as if an actual story had been told - one that, unlike the last couple of series, had a beginning, middle and end. I attribute a lot of this to the more stable cast when compared to last year. While a handful of characters did leave over the course of the series (and another two last night in the season finale), the fact that there weren't arrivals and departures left, right and centre, as was the case with Series 22, meant that the writers were able to work with what they had rather than being forced to scramble to pull together an intro or exit storyline every other episode. In the grand scheme of things, this is significant as it leads to an overall sense of completion rather than feeling that you've simply watched 48 unconnected episodes. Furthermore, re-watching the opening two-parter recently, I was struck by how deliberately it set up or foreshadowed most of the key developments for the rest of the season. Someone clearly took the time to plan these storylines, which is already an improvement on the previous series.

The writing staff was more stable too. While there was still the inevitable influx of student writers each contributing their solitary script and then disappearing again, more of an effort seems to have been made to nurture an established core team, headed up by Mark Catley, who wrote all of the best episodes in the previous series and, by and large, does so again here. Writers like Catley are serious assets to shows like Casualty, which tend largely to draw from a pool of soap opera writers who seem generally to have little interest in telling stories that have anything to do with medicine. Catley is a product of that same school, but unlike many of his contemporaries has a clear voice of his own and an excellent grasp on character. (On the other hand, the presence of a particular writer is no guarantee of an episode's quality: it's worth pointing out that the same writer, Dana Fainaru, was responsible for one of my favourite and one of my least favourite episodes of the season.)

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True Blood - it's bloody good

10:20 PM / Television / 6 Comments

I started watching this today, although given the sweltering heat I kind of wish I'd chosen something that wasn't set in the Deep South. Anyway, despite the fact that it did nothing to cool me down (seriously, if this fucking heatwave doesn't end soon I swear I'm going to break something), it seems like a great show so far (based on the first episode, that is). It has to be said that vampires are such a hard concept to pull off. Some writers go down the po-faced, deadly serious route, much to their detriment - see Twilight. Others admit the inherent silliness of the subject matter and go for a campy, tongue-in-cheek approach - for instance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So far, True Blood appears to occupy the middle ground, playing it straight for the most part but not afraid to poke fun at itself.

The Blu-ray Disc's image quality is terrific too, transcending its television origins and looking infinitely richer and more aesthetically pleasing than the consistently cheap-looking Weeds, the only other TV show I've seen on BD thus far. It looks to me like some grain reduction has been applied, and I do detect a slight hint of artificial sharpening on occasions, but this is very, very impressive stuff overall and looks a good deal better than some BDs I could mention of recent multi million dollar blockbusters.

PS. The shots below are all taken from the first two-thirds of the first episode, so there shouldn't be anything too spoilerific in them.

Death by a thousand cuts

8:21 PM / Television / 6 Comments

Back when the current series of Casualty started airing last September, I put together a write-up about the opening two-part storyline, expressing admiration at how effective it turned out to be. I've remained quiet about the rest of the series so far, however, and while I wish I could that this was because I've been held so rapt by it that I couldn't tear myself away from it long enough to string a sentence or two together, the sad reality is that the bulk of it simply hasn't been worth mentioning. Very little of it has been dreadful per se - if it were truly appalling, I could at least sink my teeth into tearing it to shreds - but most of it has simply been completely an utterly pedestrian and unremarkable. The current series now has less than ten episodes to go, and while I'll probably do a proper write-up when it concludes (provided I can summon the energy), I thought I'd set down a few (well, a few hundred) words about what I perceive to be the current problem.

Casualty was once rather uncharitably described by some critic or other as a no-budget British version of ER. In reality, I'd be more inclined to describe ER as a more superficially flashy American version of Casualty. The UK show beat its American counterpart to the airwaves by almost a decade, and in many ways set the tone, pioneering most of the breakthroughs in the medical drama field that short-sighted critics were all too quick to credit to ER years later. During its golden period of the mid-90s, Casualty was pretty much unmissable stuff. Now... well, now it's little more than a shell of its former self, an over-stretched, over-exposed behemoth that airs every week not so much because it has anything pressing to say but rather because it has become an institution of this country's TV output and a staple of safe Saturday evening viewing. Lack of talent in front of the camera is not the real issue. While sister show Holby City has tended populate its regular cast with established, fairly recognisable stars like Peter Wingfield, Patsy Kensit and even Jesus of Nazareth himself, Casualty has tended to keep things comparatively low-key (guest appearances during the early days from the likes of Kate Winslet, Christopher Eccleston and Alfred Molina excepted), and although I would never claim the cast to be uniformly excellent, the regular characters are played by a solid base of competent actors, with only a couple of true duds among them. (Unfortunately, one of those duds has been getting rather too much screen time of late, and I pray that his storyline plays out the way I think it will and causes him to depart our screens before too long.) I'm even willing to forgive the obviously low-budget nature of the show - and even then, the gore effects are often second to none. The problems instead stem entirely from the writing and current editorial policy.

In terms of its structure, present-day Casualty is a bizarre hybrid of a show. Whereas it was at one point a fairly gritty drama and is nowadays treated by the glossy magazines as an everyday soap, in reality it's neither a drama nor a soap opera. I actually don't think there's anything else quite like it on television; even partner in crime Holby City has lately moved towards something more recognisable as a straightforward soap. (I'm led to believe that The Bill does something similar to Casualty, but I've never watched that show, so I can't comment on it.) In terms of the overarching serial storylines for its main characters, it's soap, pure and simple. The series runs for more or less the entire year (barring a summer break of between four and six weeks), and as a result personal storylines for the regulars are ongoing, with no real sense of a beginning or end, short of a character joining or leaving. For the most part, these storylines have little explicitly to do with the hospital backdrop, and could just as easily be unfolding in Albert Square or Ramsay Street with a little tweaking. (The exception at the moment is the ongoing power struggle between Nick Jordan and Adam Trueman, which, although primarily fuelled by the clashing personalities of the two characters, is largely specific to the medical setting and their roles as doctors.)

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