Author: Cheryl Morgan

Given that Disney announced they would purge this series from their streaming platform, I figured I should give it a watch while I could. I’m not entirely sure it was time well spent.

Willow, the TV series takes place 20+ years after the events of the movie. Sorsha and Madmartigan have been ruling Tir Asleen all this time. They have two children: a son, named Airk, obviously, and a daughter named Kit. Madmartigan has spent much of his time off adventuring, leaving Sorsha to run the kingdom and raise the kids. While she hasn’t quite turned into her mother, she has become a parent weighed down with responsibility. Meanwhile, Elora Danan, for her own protection, is being raised as a servant girl.

As the story begins, Sorsha has decided that Kit must be married to Graydon, the prince of a neighbouring kingdom. Kit, who takes after her mother, is deeply unhappy about this. Besides, she is in love with an orphan warrior woman called Jade. In the credits, Jade’s last name is given as Claymore, which should tell you who her father was. As the wedding feast begins, the forces of Evil kidnap Airk. Kit, Jade, Graydon and a chap called Boorman who might once have been Madmartigan’s squire, are sent off to rescue him. They are told to find a great sorcerer called Willow who can aid their quest.

So far so good, in that the TV series builds on the film in interesting ways. Warwick Davies and Joanne Whalley reprise their roles, and there’s also a guest appearance by Kevin Pollack as Rool the Brownie. Val Kilmer was unavailable because he’s dealing with throat cancer, but he appears in a few flashbacks from the movie and his son, Jack, provides his ghostly voice in couple of episodes.

If only the series had lived up to the promise. Like the film, it is shot in Wales, so the locations are beautiful. Little else is good. The sound is muddy, as is usual for modern TV drama. Much of the action is shot in low light, presumably as a cost saver. The costume selections are bizarre. The continuity is weird – I’d love to know how Elora managed to dye her hair red and acquire a new denim jacket while trekking through the wilderness. The plot is often cookie-cutter fantasy. And worst of all, it isn’t funny.

By the last couple of episodes (there are 8), the cast have finally settled in to their roles and their story arcs are starting to come to the fore. Also the bad guys have interesting tactics. It is clear from the ending that the writing team have some good ideas for Season 2. And we know that TV series often take a season or so to find their feet.

Unfortunately Disney seems to have decided against continuing it. One of the reasons is probably because of the lesbian relationship between Kit and Jade. In the “making of” documentary, Erin Kellyman, who plays Jade (and who you may remember as Karli Morgenthau in The Falcon and the Winter Solider), makes a big thing about being a lesbian actor playing a lesbian character. There’s also a cameo appearance by a lesbian couple who live in the forest, one of whom is played by Hannah Waddingham.

I won’t shed too many tears. After all, the original film was made in the days when people still thought it was a good idea to let George Lucas make movies. We know better now. But I do worry about what is happening with TV drama these days. It seems like the creative folks are working very hard on limited budgets, and with the ever-present threat of some senior executive ordering them to do something stupid, and then the inevitable sub-par product gets canned. It is no way to run a business, Hollywood.

And that’s a wrap. The BBC has reached the last episode of the final volume of His Dark Materials. Well, they did so a while back, but I have finally watched them all. What are we to make of it?

Echoing previous seasons, they have done a fine job of adapting the story to television. Ruth Wilson continues to be brilliant as Mrs. Coulter. James McAvoy is suitably monomaniacal as Lord Asriel. Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson have grown nicely into their parts as Lyra and Will. And Will Keen is delightfully creepy as Cardinal MacPhail. Some of the animation of the daemons is a bit dodgy at times, but overall it is very impressive television.

If I have a complaint, it is that the sound is even more muddy than usual for TV drama. Even with headphones on, I could not make out what the actors were saying when they were whispering. I understand that Amazon Prime is introducing a feature that helps make speech clearer in dramas. I do hope that other streaming platforms follow suit.

Having come to the end of the series, however, we need to look at the overall message, and whether anything has changed from the books.

One thing that appears to have been skipped is the idea that daemons will become fixed in form when their humans become adults. That’s not hugely important, except for the fact that a transition from childhood innocence to sexual maturity is a key part of the narrative.

There is also one big surprise change. In the original book, Mary Malone’s sexual awakening, which prompts her to renounce her religious vows, is with a man. In the TV series it is with a woman. Frankly, I’m a little surprised that Pullman allowed this, but well done to whoever’s idea it was. Yet another literary classic “ruined” for the cishets by “woke queer nonsense”. Huzzah!

When I first read the books, I was carried away with the beauty of the prose, and with the overarching idea of what I described as a version of Paradise Lost in which humanity wins. His Dark Materials is a three-book rant about the evils of the concept of Original Sin, and anyone who has it in for Augustine of Hippo is OK as far as I’m concerned.

However, in the time since the books were published, much has happened. In particular Philip Pullman has demonstrated that, while he might be opposed to the tyranny of the Christian Church, he’s perfectly happy with other forms of tyranny. And if you look, you can see that in the books too.

We discover, at the end of The Amber Spyglass (or season #3 if you prefer), that travel through the multiverse cannot be permitted. Apparently every gate between worlds cut by the Subtle Knife causes Dust to leak out of the worlds and be lost.

Why? Who says so? What is so wrong with contact between cultures, that means that each individual world can have no influence on any other? Is miscegenation bad?

We also learn that, as a corollary of this, no individual can survive for long in a world that is not their own. Their daemons, which are their souls, would not survive for long. Therefore, although they have saved the multiverse by falling in love (and having sex, if you have read the book), Lyra and Will must be punished for their sin by spending the rest of their lives apart. Hey, I thought the whole point was that falling in love (and having sex) wasn’t sinful. Instead it appears that it is only Original Sin that Pullman objects to. Children are therefore innocent, but once they become adults, and sexual beings, they become sinful.

These, apparently, are immutable rules of the multiverse. But who says so? Why does it have to be like that? Well, someone created those laws. Someone in Authority. Someone who is, an Author.

Maybe it is time for someone to organize a rebellion.

There are times when a piece of art can be utterly ridiculous, and yet so beautifully executed that it deserves heaps of praise. That is certainly true of season #3 of Picard. To say that it provides fan service is to massively understate the obvious. It is to fan service what the great pyramid of Khufu is to a balsawood coffin; or what Trantor is to a village of mud huts. It is fan service dialed up so far to the max that mathematicians are arguing over which size of infinity is required to put a number to it.

When I first heard that season #3 would be a “getting the gang back together” thing I was deeply dubious. How could they do that without it being horribly cheesy? And yet, despite this show being about a bunch of people as old as, or older than, me rushing about the galaxy and having adventures like they did when they were several decades younger, it manages to work. It does so sometimes in ridiculous ways, but when it does you simply nod and say, “of course, how could it be any other way?”

The most glaring example of this is that Geordi La Forge, whose day job is now running the Starfleet Museum, has been spending his spare time building a full-size working model of the Enterprise D, which is there ready to be used when it is needed (and without a crew to operate it).

There are, of course, fans who are not happy, because this is not 100% exactly how they remember Star Trek: TNG. Apparently there was never conflict between members of the crew on that series, because such things are un-Trek-like. Well quite right. Can you imagine Dr. McCoy ever disapproving of something that Jim Kirk did? Of course not.

Possibly more cogently, there are those who argue that a Starfleet crew would never put slavish devotion to the book, and their own lives, before saving the galaxy. Personally I prefer to believe that people who serve on a ship called Enterprise are a different breed to your run of the mill Starfleet crew.

That said, Captain Shaw is one of the weak points in the show. At times his character was great, but at others he had to be shoehorned into being someone different because the plot required it. He was the only character whose story arc felt forced to me. Which is a shame, because I really loved him treating Picard and Ryker as a couple of naughty geriatric schoolboys trying to have an Excellent Adventure.

The thing I loved most about the series, though, was the way in which the plot absolutely hinged on having the gang back together. Without Data, without Worf, without Beverly, without Geordi or without Deanna, all of whom contributed specialist skills, Picard would have failed. It is possible he’d have been OK without Riker, but then Riker’s specialist skills have always been loyalty, bravery, and an unfettered willingness to get into trouble to help his captain.

Oh, spoiler. Of course they find a way to resurrect Data. How could they not?

If I have complaints about the series, they mostly revolve around the fact that it seemed to completely jettison much of what had gone before. At the end of season #2, Jean-Luc was just starting to settle into a romantic relationship with his Romulan housekeeper, Laris. That all gets forgotten as soon as Beverly Crusher is back in his life. Also at the end of season #2, Agnes Jurati, now queen of a friendly, neighbourhood Borg collective that just wants to be nice, petitions to join the Federation. That goes completely out of the window. Season #3 acts as if Jurati had never existed. I don’t know, maybe Q has erased her from the timeline or something.

Talking of Q, Picard #2 promised us that he was dying. That too appears to have been forgotten. < endless screaming >.

I’m not even going to ask what has happened to Wesley Crusher. Surely with all of his new time-travelling superpowers he would have seen that his mum and half-brother were in big trouble? No?

Anyway, there will be no further seasons of Picard. Nothing about the TNG characters could possibly follow that. What there will be is a brand new Enterprise, the Enterprise G. It will be captained by Annika Hansen, or Cap’n Seven as I hope her crew refer to her. Sidney La Forge and Jack Crusher look likely to be part of the crew. And Raffi Musiker is the First Officer, so maybe the relationship between her and Seven, which began so promisingly in Picard #2, and was jettisoned like so much else in #3, will be back on again. I’m looking forward to it.

Spoilers ahead, but this show is at least 30 years old so I have no qualms.

Streaming services seem to be the in thing these days. The BBC has been muttering about becoming streaming-only in the not too distant future. Of course their iPlayer service has been around for a while now (the interface is still terrible), and is now much more than a catch-up service. The independent TV channels here in the UK have been offering catch-up for a while, but now ITV has launched a full-scale streaming service, ITVX. There is loads of material there, much of which I have no interest in. I suspect that if you want to binge-watch Coronation Street from the very early days then you can do so. But what about SF&F content?

Much to my astonishment and delight, I see that they are offering some Gerry Anderson shows. You can get Season 1 of Captain Scarlet, and even a selection of Fireball XL5 shows. There is also some anime, and the reason I know about ITVX at all is that someone on Twitter mentioned that they have Gunbuster.

I know very little about anime, but Kevin occasionally tries to educate me. Also I have Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy whom I can call upon if I need an expert opinion. Years ago Jonathan told me that I needed to watch Gunbuster because it was something of an ur-series as far as mecha stories are concerned. I’ve been looking for it ever since, and now, thanks to ITVX, I’ve been able to watch it.

Wikipedia, which is probably correct on this as there are too many anime fans out there eager to pounce on errors, tells me that the series was the directorial debut of Hideaki Anno, who went on to produce Neon Genesis Evangelion. The Japanese title of the show was Aim for the Top!, which was in part a nod to a tennis-based anime called Aim for the Ace!, and partly by the Tom Cruise movie, Top Gun, both of which were inspirations. The tennis thing explains a lot of the weirdness.

The basic plot is that Earth has encountered a race of space monsters (Uchuu Kaijuu) that is bent on wiping out all other forms of life. Earth’s defenses rely in part on space-ships in the form of giant robots piloted by teenagers. It doesn’t have to make sense.

The story begins with Noriko Takaya at high school learning to become a robot pilot. She’s useless at it, but because her father was an admiral in the space navy who died in the first contact with the aliens she gets to be one of the two girls from Japan selected to go into space. The other successful pupil is the beautiful, competent and talented Kazumi Amano. The decision as to which girls to send is made by their trainer, Koichiro Ohta, a survivor from the first contact battle, whom the girls all call “Coach” because this is a tennis-based TV show.

Much of the rest of the series is centered around Noriko learning to let go of her fear and embrace self-confidence. Once she does she will become a champion tennis player, er, robot pilot. Kazumi is mostly an ally, but she fears that Noriko’s lack of confidence will get people killed. There’s also a hot-shot Russian girl pilot with the somewhat ridiculous name of Jung Freud who is sometimes a friend and sometimes desperate to out-do the two Japanese girls. And there’s a boy pilot called Smith who gets fridged to give Noriko some motivation.

Much to my surprise, the show only has 6 episodes. The story is mostly wrapped up in the first five as Noriko evolves from frightened kid to savior of the solar system. Eventually she and Kazumi get to pilot the new, experimental mecha called Gunbuster which is two separate spaceships that can combine to form a giant robot. Billions of alien spaceships stand no chance against them.

Although the tennis anime and Top Gun are cited as influences, it is clear that the scriptwriters were SF fans. The Earth spaceships are armed with photon torpedoes, so someone had been watching Star Trek. They had probably also read The Forever War, because issues of relativistic time feature large towards the end of the series.

I’m assuming that the show influenced a lot of later anime shows, but you can see themes from it cropping up in modern SF too. The ending of the Valerie Valdes space opera trilogy I’ve been reviewing happily has a big nod to mecha stories. There may also be a plot point from Gunbuster in Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable! space opera series.

If this is all there was to Gunbuster then I’d be telling you that it is kind of fun, probably important historically, and has a few unnecessary soft porn scenes, and ridiculous costumes for the female pilots. But there is also episode 6.

By this time the issues of relative passage of time have come to the fore. Noriko’s best friend from school, Kimiko, does not go into space. When our heroes return from saving the solar system, 10 years have passed on Earth and Kimiko has a young daughter. This sets the scene for the final episode.

After episode 5, Kazumi goes back to Earth to marry Coach Ohta, who is dying of radiation sickness. Jung takes her place in the Gunbuster. Episode 6 is set 15 years later, after Ohta has died. Earth has turned Jupiter into a giant black hole bomb, with which they plan to destroy the aliens once and for all. Kazumi volunteers to pilot it. Inevitably Noriko and Kazumi end up risking their lives to ensure that the bomb goes off as planned. They are caught in the shock wave, and when they get back to Earth 2000 years have passed.

The entire episode is in black and white, as if to indicate that this is the serious, adult episode, and it thoroughly warrants that treatment (save for an entirely unnecessary flash of naked boob). The contrast with earlier episodes is stark, which makes the ending all the more effective. I was impressed.

While I am very impressed with the way that Strange New Worlds replicates the feel of classic Trek, I think that Lower Decks may well be the best Trek because it does two things brilliantly.

Firstly it mercilessly takes the piss out of Trek. The best example of that from Season 3 is “Crisis Point II: Paradoxus” which is set in a holodeck scenario scripted by Boimler. The rest of our heroes have their own opinions about Boimler’s scripting ability (especially Mariner), and this leads to discussion of the merits of various well-known Trek episode tropes.

On the other hand, the show is still very much in love with the concept of Starfleet, and its young heroes are just as much committed to boldly going and doing good as they were at the start of season one. That’s despite the fact that some of them are sorely tested.

Those of you who were expecting more of a story arc in this season, after the cliffhanger at the end of Season 2, will be disappointed. The affair of Captain Freeman and the bombing of the Pakled capital is wrapped up very quickly in one episode. Thankfully there are many fun episodes to come.

One of my favourites is “Hear All, Trust Nothing”, in which the Cerritos is sent to Deep Space 9 on a diplomatic mission. The episode guest-stars the inimitable Kira Nerys (Bajorans are clearly Welsh if they have names like that) and, of course, Quark. The episode shows us a side of Tendi we’ve never seen before.

Rutherford also gets a chance to shine in the episode, “Reflections”. Here we learn that he was once a young tearaway who spent his early years in Starfleet building and racing single-seater starships. Meanwhile Mariner makes the acquaintance of Petra Aberdeen, a former Starfleet officer turned “independent archaeologist”. Both of these storylines will come back later in the season.

Oh, and we get to hear more about the villainous little droid, Peanut Hamper.

All in all, this is a fine season, especially if you happen to be a Californian and not a Texan. Warmly recommended. I understand that Season 4 is in the can and I’m very much looking forward to it.