Destroy All Onions!

I’m catching up on all the stuff I’ve been recording over the past few months. In the past week I’ve seen the series finishers for Lost, Fringe, and Heroes.

All of them were pretty good, with a nice build up that explained a few new things, wrapped up a few loose ends, but then left me wanting more. Which I suppose is exactly what they’re meant to do. The other good news is that because I got so far behind, the long summer of having nother on tv is nearly over, and I haven’t suffered too badly.

I’ve also been enjoying Season 1 and now Season 2 of Smallville on DVD. It’s fairly lightweight, but it is fun.

The past week saw the return of Torchwood, for a special 5 day run on BBC1. Torchwood is one of those things that I quite enjoy, but I have to admit that I didn’t have very high hopes for this. I was wrong. It was good tv.
Since folks may not have caught up with it yet, I’m going to avoid any significant spoilers, but here were the highlights for me:

• It retained its sense of humour. Admittedly, less so as the week went on, but there were still some good funny moments that were in keeping with the show.
• The scenes with the cabinet, where they tried to work out what to do about the alien’s demands. I know that public opinion of our politicions is at an all-time low, but I think it was a fair reflection of what could happen in such an impossible situation.
• It retained it’s Britishness. Right from the start, the look of the camerawork said BBC drama. With Torchwood being so successful in the US, it was possible that they might have watered down some of the local feel, but it was still there, with great lines like “Otherwise, what use are league tables?”
• The big reveal of why the aliens wanted the children was really good. Really chilling. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, it did. That explanation put other things into context too, like why there were no sleek and gleaming alien battleships, for instance.
• And a nice role for Nicholas Briggs, who normally voices the Daleks, and here managed to get an on-screen role, playing an equally nasty piece of work in the cabinet.

The other thing that interests me is that, although I don’t think that it looked cheap in any way, it did not go over the top with the special effects. The children were eery, but did not require any special effects, just acting. Likewise the 456 themselves, who by appearing in clouds of chemical mist never needed to be done with sophisticated prosthetics. I can’t help thinking that this is a return to traditional values in a way, and showing that good stuff can be done with creativity and imagination, rather than lots of money and computers.

Because of how things ended up, I don’t think that Torchwood will be back after this. And yet its huge success in America makes it almost certain that the BBC would want to keep it going for as long as possible. So it will be interesting to see what happens next on that front.

But if it is the end, I think it had a great finish – a drama that raised moral questions about prices that are and are not worth paying for peace. And in a one-liner by the 456, it asked an even better question – why we would fight so hard for one set of children, while another group of children die every day, in the real world.

please could you fix it for there to be something decent on tv when I’m at the gym.
It was Gok’s Fashion Fix again…

That the quirky and fun music from A town called Eureka and the very serious music from Battlestar Galactica are written by the same guy, Bear McCreary?

That’s quite a broad musical spread. He’s a clever chap.

Of course, unless you also watch quite a bit of Sky One, this will mean nothing at all to you.

Just watched the final episode of Being Human, BBC 3’s latest attempt at fantasy drama. And I rather liked it. The setup of a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost living together in a rented house in modern day Britain was enough to get me to watch the original pilot months ago. I thought it showed potential then, so I caught the full series. There were some casting changes, which initially just confused me, but otherwise the show remained very similar to the pilot. It’s the sort of thing that probably fitted very well on BBC 3 – not quite mainstream or expensive looking enough for BBC2 – maybe BBC3 does have a purpose after all.

As the title implies, the overall theme of the show was what is means to be human, viewed through the eyes of these three outsiders, who are no longer quite human, each in their different ways. They didn’t spend a lot on special effects, as the show wasn’t really aiming to look flash (especially the werewolf effects) – it was much more about the characters, and their situations. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it was thought-provoking, but it did explore a few interesting ideas about belonging, and people, and stuff.

I liked it. I hope it gets re-commissioned for a second series. And I would recommend you catch it if and when it gets repeated.

• Following up on an earlier post, this week’s Doctor Who was “The Forest of the Dead”, the second part of a two parter written by Stephen Moffat, who will be the new guvnor at Doctor Who. I thought it was very good. He writes scary stories, but rather beautiful endings.
• And this week’s Heroes (Chapter 7) was the point at which the series got its mojo back – it shifted up a gear, and things started to get a bit more interesting again. Suddenly I can’t wait for the next episode, like I was last year.