Twelve Moffat Era Episodes Worth Keeping

After almost eight years in the driving seat, Moffat's time with Doctor Who is at an end. I have made no secret over the past couple of years how much I grew to dislike his time on the show, sometimes to the point of recommending that new fans skip entire seasons just so they don't get led down the same garden paths I did. But, now we've reached the end, I decided it would be charitable to pick some episodes from Moffat's six seasons of the show that I actually like; two for each series. They're not the only ones I like, but they are the standout few that I would recommend to people, and they are my personal highlights of what I consider to be a terrible part of the show. In order of broadcast...

The Eleventh Hour - Series 5, Episode 1 (2010)

It's easy to forget after all that followed just what a strong start the Eleventh Doctor had. After a lot of initial misgivings following the bizarre ending to The End of Time, Matt Smith's first outing was full of fun action and witty writing that reassured a lot of us about the show's future. Smith's Doctor is yet to degenerate into his later self-obsessed creep and is instead energetic and warm, giving us memorable post-regeneration moments like fish fingers and custard. The time-bending nature of the new companion's introduction strikes an innovative note across the new series, and more than makes up for the run-of-the-mill nature of the rather dull bad guy in the Atraxi.

As I said in my review of the episode, there was definitely a "moment" where the Eleventh Doctor clicked with me as the same character as the previous ten. What interests me now is that despite his actually fairly competent beginning, the bad writing for this Doctor as the show went on led to him becoming my least favourite version. That knowledge makes it difficult to watch the scene here with the same excitement, but I think it just about works. All told, I would say that The Eleventh Hour is the best first episode for any of the NuWho Doctors, and the irony is delicious.

Vincent and the Doctor - Series 5, Episode 10 (2010)

A show like Doctor Who often goes into the past for cameos from historical celebrities, but this episode stands out. Instead of simply placing said celebrity into a story and having events happen around him, this episode is directly aimed at establish Vincent's character and backstory. British comedy writer Richard Curtis uses Doctor Who's conventions in unconventional ways, taking a monster-of-the-week pseudohistorical format and using it to explore the depression of one of Europe's great unappreciated artists.

While the 42-minute format of a Doctor Who story requires that a lot of the real-world subtleties are smoothed over, the story's decision to look into mental health and the legacy of art makes something beautiful out of what would otherwise be an end-of-season filler episode.

The Doctor's Wife - Series 6, Episode 4 (2011)

This series is my least favourite of the revival show by a country mile - long arcs which constrain real story-telling, bizarre decisions like Amy's forced pregnancy and the Doctor's fake-out death, and the mid-season split that exacerbated all of the other issues. The only episode of the season that isn't affected by the all-absorbing tendrils of mediocrity is this one, written by acclaimed fantasy writer Neil Gaiman for the previous series and moved over to this one.

While at times the episode veers into fan-fiction territory, the discussion of the idea of the TARDIS as a sentient entity was a long time coming, and could not have been brought into reality more perfectly than by Suranne Jones. Add to that lots of nostalgic nods to both RTD and the Classic Series, a fab villain in Michael Sheen's House and a general sense of fantastic whimsy, and you have one of NuWho's best episodes.

The God Complex - Series 6, Episode 11 (2011)

So what if Toby Whithouse took the ending straight from The Curse of Fenric? I *love* The Curse of Fenric! And I love Toby Whithouse. Despite me saying that The Doctor's Wife was the only episode that had escaped Series 6's terribleness, this one is actually my favourite from the season, and the only one I consider worth rewatching. The unnerving hotel which exploits people's fears is such a fantastically Doctor Who kind of plot, and with the episode's well-realised cast of characters the episode hits every beat it needs to in terms of action and plot. I remember especially liking the fake-out companion Rita, even if the exchange "You're a Muslim/Don't be frightened" is even more tone deaf now than it was in 2011. And, although it wasn't permanent (it never is with Moffat), I loved the fact that Amy and Rory left! Needless to say that they had outstayed their welcome considerably by this point, and I was glad for the small hope that this was the back of them.

A Town Called Mercy - Series 7, Episode 3 (2012)

The only decent episode of the five episode "September Series" from 2012, A Town Called Mercy is another decent Whithouse episode, this time putting the Doctor, Amy and Rory into a Western town that has been infiltrated by an alien war criminal and the cyborg sent to bring him to justice. Aside from just loving Westerns, I liked this episode because of the fact it actually asked some moral questions. You know, like this is actually science fiction or something. While it has its goofy moments, and the main moral conflict isn't satisfied in a particularly interesting way, the fact that it actually inspires thought makes it an oasis of civilisation in a period of the show that was veering wildly out of control.

Cold War - Series 7, Episode 8 (2013)

Guys, I was so excited for Clara. After watching Amy and Rory's terrible writing for three years, I was looking forward to some Northern charm from Jenna Coleman's new companion. Clara is difficult to parse for me, because her three-ish seasons varied so wildly. In Series 7, she had little to no actual character that we could see, with a great deal more that was simply told to us by other characters without much evidence. Cold War, the third episode of the 2013 half of Series 7, is the best because it manages to take this and, for one episode, subvert it.

Finding themselves on a Russian submarine in 1983, the Doctor and Clara find themselves trying to pacify an Ice Warrior, making their first appearance since 1974. Clara is seen to be compassionate and empathetic, and is ultimately the solution to the episode's dilemma. I love the 80s soundtrack, the base-under-siege plot and the new-look Ice Warriors, who manage the difficult task of respecting the Classic Series and still feeling modern.

Flatline - Series 8, Episode 9 (2014)

True story: this list was almost a ten episode list, because I forgot Series 8 existed. Capaldi's first season suffers from writing that is usually more bland than painful, as the writers tried to make Twelve into an ambiguous moral figure. This has been attempted before, but the issue with this was more that instead of spending time showing Twelve making questionable moral choices, the end result felt a lot more like Capaldi being constantly grumpy and rude, and going "Am I a good man?" every other episode. The only upshot of this was that Clara seemed to gain a personality overnight and the relationship between her and Twelve became more complex and real as a result.

By comparison to the season around it, Flatline felt a lot more like an early Tennant episode - set on a council estate with some unique aliens and TARDIS hijinks. The standout performances of Jovian Wade and Christopher Fairbank as graffiti artist Rigsy and council worker Fenton respectively help to flesh out the premise of 2D aliens trying to enter our dimension by providing stakes we can work with. Add to that the element of The Doctor being trapped in the TARDIS and relying on Clara throughout the episode, and what could have been bland comes alive.

Dark Water - Series 8, Episode 11 (2014)

You will notice later that every one of Capaldi's eleventh episodes is on this list. Capaldi's finales have a flare for the ridiculous that usually start off on the right foot with a strong premise and go downhill in the second half. In this case, the episode actually culminates a lot of the season's slightly nebulous themes and brings it together in a way which threatens to change the status quo of the Doctor Who universe, as well as providing a double whammy cliffhanger that left me excited to be watching the show again after so many boring episodes.

Danny Pink is not my favourite NuWho character, especially as his relationship with Clara gave off some abusive vibes in the mid-season with Clara scared to let him know that she was with The Doctor for fear of his reaction. The finale worked with his character and gave us a side to his soldier past that felt three dimensional and worth the build-up. It also let us have the moment at the start of the episode with Clara and the Doctor where they finally have a stand-off, and it's great stuff.

This in turn leads us into the grander plot of the episode - the Nethersphere, and Missy's plot with the Cybermen. While I questioned whether some of the comments in the episode were wise ("The dead can feel it when you cremate them, lol!"), I really did like the concept and how it was executed. Missy is a bloody masterstroke - Michelle Gomez brings a brand new personality to The Master that is playful and unpredictable in a way that is more endearing than Simm's Joker-like performance.

The Woman Who Lived - Series 9, Episode 6 (2015) 

Season 9 had a number of gimmicks that felt a little off. The main one, apart from it being split up into two-parters, was a RTD-style keyword, The Hybrid, which fed into each episode in more subtle way than the previous series' inclusion of Missy in almost every episode's epilogue. Like most of Moffat's running stories, it ended in a copout, but it also gave us the character of Me, a character I genuinely thought was really cool. The only episode where that character gets the right amount of focus is this one, The Woman Who Lived.

Introduced in the first part of this loose two-parter as a Viking child who the Doctor hubristically resurrects by bonding with alien technology, we see her here as an immortal being, slowly losing her morality and memories, and desperate to be The Doctor's companion. I initially dismissed the casting of Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) as stunt casting, but she really can act. I guess it was hard to see that at the time, with her storyline in the 2015 series of Thrones mostly consisting of her wiping corpses and selling cockles.

The only bad thing I have to say about the episode is that it has one too many talking lions. And that is almost entirely negated by there being almost no Clara in it.

Heaven Sent - Series 9, Episode 11 (2015)

Because of this season's odd nature, the finale two-parter is a lot more loose than usual, and this is immeasurably for the better. Simply put, Heaven Sent is one of the program's finest episodes, way beyond the likes of Blink. And I mean it; unlike the previous season finale, where I have to overlook glaring faults, this is a really well-crafted story, with everything just coming together. It's essentially a Capaldi one-hander, seeing him trapped inside a bigger-on-the-inside Time Lord device which makes him relive the same sequence of events over and over again. The theme of persistence and certainty in the face of death is a strong one, especially with Capaldi at the helm, giving it his all, portraying a man so determined to escape that he repeatedly resigns himself to death just to make a millimetre's progress.

Oxygen - Series 10, Episode 5 (2017)

Due to personal goings-on in my own life, I have not reviewed Series 10 and I don't know if I will, but on the whole I enjoyed it. I liked the semi-reboot of the series and Bill Potts is a light shining down on the show. Oxygen was a great base-under-siege episode that had some good ideas, my favourite of which was the Adams-esque dilemma of the parent company making them pay for their oxygen. It's kind of a like a traditional Doctor Who Base-Under-Siege story where the enemy is the life-support system.

Unlike a lot of Base-Under-Siege stories in NuWho, it avoided the pitfall of not feeling like there were any stakes by seriously threatening the lives of both Bill and The Doctor. They both experience the vacuum of space and are choked and chased and electrocuted. Just when you think the status quo will be reasserted, we discover that The Doctor is now blind! This was a great way to end the episode, as well as a lead-in to the following three-part story where The Doctor's need to protect Bill is a major theme.

World Enough And Time - Series 10, Episode 11 (2017)

In the year-long hiatus between Series 9 and 10, I started listening to Big Finish audios - I've listened to about a dozen now, and when they are good, they are good. My favourite, predictably, is the Fifth Doctor audio Spare Parts, which takes place on Mondas and gives a very thorough look at the kind of world that would create the Cybermen. It's spooky and full gruesome moments. I bring it up because World Enough and Time borrows extensively from Spare Parts and it's legacy, even more than the supposed "adaptation" that was Rise of the Cybermen back in 2006.

The marketing was full of spoilers for the return of John Simm as The Master. I will admit that Simm's disguise fooled me for a good while; his reveal at the end to Missy is fantastic. I had always wanted a multi-Master story, and it was a real coup to get Simm back to the show after his ambiguous exit seven year prior. Not only was it fun from a fan perspective, but it was also the perfect way to highlight the character development that Gomez' Master had been undergoing throughout this weird and wonderful season.

For the first time in a while there was a palpable sense of horror in this story, as Bill Potts spent time in the creepy hospital at the base of a ship falling into a black hole, with The Doctor and Missy at the top watching her life pass on fast-forward. The most memorable parts of the episode are the parts that surround the Cybermen, with pre-formed cloth-faced bodies crying out for death, and the crushing blow at the end of the episode when Bill is transformed. I was annoyed that this amazing character had been given so tragic a fate, but the following episodes made up for that slightly. Scenes like the ones in the hospital are what I have been asking for for so long - actually exploring the body horror of the Cyberman premise and using it to bring nightmares to whole new generation.

Epilogue

I can't honestly say, now that it's over, that this part of the show was entirely bad. The Capaldi era feels like a much-needed improvement over the Smith era, which went downhill fast. I think the key difference is that during those first three or so years, the writing of the Doctor and his companions entirely focused on archetypes and "mysteries" which never amounted to anything resembling human behaviour. The Twelfth Doctor is much more of a complex personality, even outside the narrative constantly informing us without evidence that he's morally shady. Now that I've lended the era some charity and genuinely discussed episodes I liked, I think it's time to do a top ten worst list. This is going to be fun.

Thanks.

TV Shows I Watched In 2015

It's that time again, folks. Here is a list of the shows that I watched this year, some of which I watched live as they came this year, and some of which I just happened to binge and thought I'd mention here. Spoilers everywhere.

This image is, in itself, a spoiler. Unless you don't
watch the show. Image from sidekickreviews

Game of Thrones - Season 5, HBO/Sky1
Written 15th August.

Another season of Game of Thrones went by, and along with it another series of controversies, odd character decisions and an unhealthy obsession with victimising women. The show managed to cover pretty much all of the most recent two novels in G.R.R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire book series while also going more heavily off-book than ever before. This led to, as in last season, a lot being left out, as well as characters being moved around, killed off and generally manipulated in such a way as to confound anyone who knew the plot of the books.
    The best and most amazing storyline was also the one that went most off-book - fresh off the heels of killing his father, Tyrion Lannister is smuggled to the continent of Essos and is encouraged by his saviour Varys to seek out Dragon Queen Daenerys Targaryen. Along the way he is kidnapped by exiled servant of the Queen, Jorah Mormont, who happens to be heading in the same direction. Unlike in the books, however, Tyrion actually makes it, leading to several scenes of Daenerys and Tyrion together. A lot of the frustration with Dany's storylines in the first four seasons was their loose connection to the plots going on in Westeros, and getting to see Tyrion in that part of the world made the mythology tie together more physically - as well as putting my two favourite characters onscreen at once.

"Bring it." From Wikimedia

     Over in controversy corner, and the show continued its trend from last season of exploiting violence towards women and girls. Sansa, who at this point in the books has stopped doing anything, is shipped over to her home in Winterfell, where she becomes the wife and plaything of the disgusting Ramsay Snow. After spending four seasons building her up and delivering her the agency she always wanted, her character was derailed in a plotline designed to act as a redemptive arc for the tortured Theon Greyjoy. This culminated in a horrific rape scene, thankfully not showing the act but regardless framing the scene by making us watch Theon's face as we hear Sansa's terrified screams. This carries forwards to the storyline in the North, where, again off-book, Stannis Baratheon decided to use his daughter for a blood magic ritual, and again we get to watch his face as we hear his daughter's genuinely blood-curdling and upsetting screaming. The list of reasons why this doesn't make sense is long, but notably: killing his daughter makes half of his mercenary army rout the field; his wife kills herself because of her guilt; and now the guy who believes himself the "rightful king" has no heirs whatsoever. Which is why it didn't happen in the books.
     Now with the death of Jon Snow (or not, it's an uncertainty carried over from the book), and a great deal of material not covered by the series (leaving a few notable holes), the future of Game of Thrones is uncertain. HBO has guaranteed that the show will get another two seasons in order to conclude its story, and they've apparently been given notes from Martin himself. Despite all of the horrible ways that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss like to hurt female characters and mess up the story, I still enjoy Game of Thrones, and I want to see it get better.

Rick's group approaches the Alexandria Safe Zone.
From Wikia

The Walking Dead - Seasons 5B and 6A, AMC/Fox
Written between 15th August and 27th December.

The fifth season of The Walking Dead, now finished, can only be described as... sedate. Which is an achievement, for a show which is pretty sedate anyway. 5A had a few interesting moments, but its story progression was fairly slapdash and lacked focus. That lack of focus continued into the second half of the season, with Beth's death glossed over with the death of brilliant supporting character Tyreese. Thankfully, the season picked up again, following our characters into the Alexandria Safe Zone. Seeing our characters back into a suburban environment was really interesting, and would have been even better if they hadn't bogged it down with an off-book romantic subplot. I did however love Rick's descent back into savagery - it felt like a logical progression that after he killed two entire groups (the Claimers at the end of 4B and the Hunters in the middle of 5A) he would flip out upon being asked to trust a group of people who had stayed out of the whole thing. The final scene of the half-season, with Morgan finally meeting Rick again after two seasons, was the icing on the cake.
     I think one of my problems with The Walking Dead, starting this year, was the fact that there appears to be no end in sight. That's not a specific problem with TWD - this occurs in all fiction in this genre, with a number of different possible endings, none of which are going to be very satisfying. It doesn't really help that the show, like Game of Thrones, is adapting its source material somewhat faster than it can be produced. Five years into the show, we're seven years into the comics, and that's not even taking into account the extra plots grafted onto the show's canon. The thing that saved Lost's last few seasons was a definite ending point, and that gave the series a sense of purpose going forward, and a guarantee of sorts that everything would come to a head. Season Five proved that this is exactly what The Walking Dead needs, and what it currently sorely lacks.
     That was, of course, until the beginning of the Sixth Season in the Autumn, at which point the show suddenly shot up a gear. Having spent 5B establishing the people of Alexandria, their politics and the threat of a chaotic group known as The Wolves, 6A set about providing key character development, juicy plots and a refreshing pace. By far the saving grace of this season was the arrival of Morgan, whose philosophical differences with the rest of the cast allowed for some realistic conflict that didn't just descend into painful, "it's inevitable that we're all going to die" nonsense. It also provided quite possibly my favourite episode of the entire show, the phenomenal parable that is, "Here's Not Here" which has Morgan in the spotlight. With these things in mind, I'm a lot more confident about the show's future, and I hope that this movement out of mediocrity lasts for a long time.

Insert joke about the West Coast here.
From Forbes

Fear The Walking Dead - Season 1, AMC
Written 3rd September.

For some critics, this six-part miniseries preceding Season 6A of the parent show travelled far too slowly. I am not one of those critics. There is a certain lackadaisical pace to Fear which it has inherited from The Walking Dead, but there are several things it holds in its favour - characters we haven't been slugging it with for five years, the new concept of watching the apocalypse happening from the start, and the sense of tension as society slowly collapses. So much of The Walking Dead consists of wandering around empty countryside, with tension only mounting when the characters decide to explore an abandoned structure or something like that - here, the tension is constantly building as the world basically crumbles around our knowing protagonists. And that, for me at least, is more worth tuning in for than seeing what weird thing Rick is gonna do this week.

Hey Nicky, you so fine, you so fine you blow my mind
Hey Nicky! From zimbio

Orange Is The New Black - Season 3, Netflix
Written 15th August.

Where do I begin? I tried my best to avoid the hype train on this Netflix series set in a women's prison, mainly because I expected I'd have a great deal of Hype Backlash. Now that I have seen it... what was I thinking? This show is just as awesome as everyone said it was! Originally focusing around rich white girl Piper Chapman and her year in prison on drug-possession charges, the series opens up into a lots-and-lots-of-characters ensemble drama which takes the format of Lost (main plot in the present with an character-specific flashback each episode) and puts it into a format which is deliberately designed around binge-watching. It also manages to portray important issues like LGBT rights, trans discrimination, police and government corruption, sexual abuse and many more in a responsible and innovative manner. (With the exception of the show's solid refusal to say the word "bisexual".)
    I love this show for so many different reasons. The characters are all well developed, with everyone (except Dee, fuck Dee) getting several shades of grey to their characterisations. My favourite character is probably Red, played by the amazing Kate Mulgrew (better known as Captain Janeway). While I actually did enjoy Piper's story in the first season, I agree with the common idea that her storyline is less interesting as time goes on, and I think it's a sign of great writers that the show evolved to focus on a wider set of characters. I'm really looking forward to Season Four and I'm glad that I finally joined the bandwagon.

Sarah and her clones face off against Project Castor.
From screenrant

Orphan Black - Season 3, BBC America
Written between 16th August and 3rd September.

Despite some shaky moments, the third season of Orphan Black continued to demonstrate Tatiana Maslany's immense talent. The appearance of male clones played by Ari Millen threw several new factions into the mix, and proved to take the series in directions that were both positive and negative; positive in that the male clones allowed our sisters to finally discover their genetic origin and advance the mytharc, and negative because these new male characters just weren't as interesting as the pre-developed relationships. This made the beginning of the season feel a little messy, and the varying subplots didn't really mesh together until the very end.
     This season's main theme, tied into all of its storylines, was the importance of family - both actual family relationships and those forged in friendship. Alison ran for head of the local Schools board, funding it by running drugs through her mother's soap shop. Pregnant Helena was captured by the male clones (Project Castor to contrast the female Project Leda) and eventually rescued by Sarah. Sarah and her adopted mother Siobhan then followed several clues in order to find both Castor and Leda's genetic origin - Kendall Malone (Alison Steadman), Siobhan's birth mother, a genetic chimera with strands of male and female DNA.

     Season 3 was messy in places, and it didn't really find its footing until a few episodes in. But it's still not a series that can really be faulted. Tatiana Maslany is still the best actress working on television today, no question, and that didn't change. I can't really complain about the uselessness of the Castor storyline from the beginning of the season, or the random new love interest given to Cosima, when everything with T-Mas was so brilliant. From the discovery of the genetic original, to the introduction of new clone Krystal, the treatment of Rachel as she recovered from a pencil to the eye, and the amazing silliness of Alison's drug business, I kept finding something to love. I can't wait for Season Four.

Gemma Chan as Mia. From Channel Four

Humans - Series 1, AMC/Channel 4
Written 6th September.

By far this year's biggest surprise was the C4/AMC coproduction Humans, adapted from a Swedish series about an alternate Present Day in which human-like robots known as Synths have taken a valuable place in human society. Originally a focused character drama looking as the Hawkins family, the show spiralled out into a rich mythology and backstory while never losing that skill with its characters. In rifling through all of the ways in which robots have been treated in science fiction, the show managed to develop its cast of humans and sentient synths as a large set of distinct, well-developed and sympathetic by Episode Two. Add in phenomenal acting turns by Katherine Parkinson, Colin Morgan, Gemma Chan and newcomer Lucy Carless, and you've got one of the best newcomer shows of the year. (See here for my longer article on the show.)

These are two attractive people. From ibtimes

Outlander - Season 1, Amazon Prime/Starz
Written 6th September.

Carrying on the recent rise in online-only shows, this year I also watched the first season of Outlander, a show only available in the UK via Amazon Prime's exclusive premium on-demand service. Adapted from the series of books by Diana Gabaldon, the show follows 1940s army nurse Clare Randall as she is thrown back in time to 18th Century Scotland. There she is taken in by the Clan Mackenzie, a local lordship in opposition to the British throne, and she falls in love with the strapping Jamie Fraser. Forced to fight the evil ancestor of her 1940s husband, she must find a way to get home.
     Outlander often struggles with its balance of historical drama and sci-fi leanings. Like its obvious protegé Life On Mars (which actually succeeds the publishing of the books which inspired the show), it's often difficult to remember the fact that Clare is displaced out of time, at least once the "Fish-out-of-water" humour runs dry. Luckily, the plot is well-placed enough that a lot of the time you don't much care, and those sci-fi elements do raise their heads again. I did find a lot of the show's nudity and sex scenes a tad excessive (this show has more nudity than Game of Thrones, although it's usually a lot less bloody and violent) and I found it questionable that the two main villains of the this first season were both implied to be gay (and the same was not true of any other character.) But despite concerns, there's something strangely compelling and relaxing about the escapades of Clare Randall, especially in the second half of the season, when the series' mytharc begins to bear fruit.

Even on the poster it looks like she doesn't wanna be here.
From the BBC

Doctor Who - Series 9, BBC1
Written 27th December.

After being pleasantly surprised by Series 8, I had a lot of hope for my favourite show. Moffat was still here, of course, but there was something of a development in his writing style that seemed to me to be less about making offensive jokes and more about actual character development. Series 9 was very much one step forwards, two steps back. A lot of Moffat's old tropes returned, including an arc which didn't really go together very well, and the habit of retconning important parts of Doctor Who's history. However, the show did go the extra mile in taking some steps in new directions, especially when it came to the Time Lords.
     The most notable differences in this season came with the show's new format and aesthetic. Most all but two of the episodes in the season were organised as two-parters, which brought to mind the format of the Sarah Jane Adventures. I had hoped that it would allow a lot of the stories to become more developed, as they were approaching the length of Classic serials, but that didn't really come to pass as a lot of the time each individual part had a very different tone, pace and occasionally writers than the other half, meaning there was something of a lack of tonal consistency. This tied into another aesthetic shift for the show, with Moffat falling back into his misguided desire to make the show "cool" and "modern", exchanging the Sonic Screwdriver for a gaudy set of sunglasses and Peter Capaldi's Pertwee-esque costume for a hoodie and trainers. And the less we talk about that electric guitar, the better.
     Clara finally got to leave this series, although they had to ruin it again by giving us a passable if noble departure, followed up by a less believable resurrection and an open-ended departure off into space. Series 8 had her developing from a normal-ish human being into a character somewhat obsessed with taking on the responsibilities and identity of The Doctor, and that development did continue here, albeit a great deal more slowly. Unlike the previous season, which presented this as a noticeable flaw which Clara really shouldn't be working towards, this year it was just an accepted fact about who she was, including during both of her exits. I like that she carried on that development, but I still think that it would have been so much better to just let her leave in Last Christmas like she was supposed to.

I am going to break that guitar. From BBC America

      And, finally, this year was struck with a number of arcs and recurring characters. From the second episode we got not-so-subtle mentions of "The Hybrid", a retconning Time-Lord prophecy which spluttered to an unsatisfactory ending in the finale. Part of that developing arc was the reoccurring face of Maisie Williams as Ashildr/"Me", who didn't really impress in the role, with the exception of a more subtle turn in The Woman Who Lived. These recurring aspects did tie the season together into a cohesive whole, but the result didn't really gel very well because of the vast changes in tone and the fact that most of it is brushed aside for an arc with the Time Lords in the finale.
     For a series that tried very hard to be different, it's a shame so much of it failed in the execution. For the first time we got two female writers and both of their episodes were slated by fandom, even though they were two of the best episodes of the season. The Zygon two-parter, while dangerously stupid in its politics, was at least trying to be relevant and interesting science fiction. There's a sense of stuttering, of a car failing to start repeatedly. The question is, can Doctor Who recover before it burns out the clutch? And, if rumours are to be believed, is next year the last outing for both Capaldi and Moffat?

At least Miko's story turned out not to be as terrible as I thought.

Heroes Reborn - Season 1, NBC
Written between 30th October and 27th November.

I had a lot on the table for Heroes Reborn. Despite a lot of my misgivings about its parent series, I was still of the opinion that it could have really done with one final season to conclude the story and the journeys of these characters, as well as to explore that last cliffhanger in which the existence of Evolved Humans (now "Evos") is now a public matter of fact. When Reborn began I wasn't very impressed with the the way it reused a lot of the same character archetypes and themes to say a lot of the same things, but as the series went on I began to see how tightly the story has been written, avoiding a lot of the pitfalls that Heroes itself often fell into.
       Instead of acting as yet another cycle of Heroes' repeating storyline, the focus of the series around the aftermath of an orchestrated terrorist attack means that this Universe feels a lot more adult, with characters having to face the consequences of their actions as and when they happen. There are enough old faces to make the show still feel like you're watching Heroes, but for the most part the injection of new blood has very much updated the show, developing it past its mid-noughties chic and neatly avoiding a lot of the stink that the show had picked up by its fourth season. Its biggest improvement is in its time-travel story, which manages to be very tight-knit and cohesive, dotting all the is and crossing the ts to make an exciting and yet perfectly logical sequence of events.
     I wish I could have reviewed this week-on-week, but I really didn't have the energy to do so. I'd also have liked to see how it ended - but for some stupid reason NBC have decided to leave the final three episodes of the season in January, ending this year's run with an awkward filler episode and completely demolishing any and all momentum that the show has. People are not going to tune in in January to finish this thing off, and if they do, all of the tension will just be gone. It feels a little like NBC want to sabotage this show and make sure that Heroes doesn't end up coming back full time, and that's a real shame, because once this little mini-series got going, it really deserved a fair chance.

Luther is captivating but running out of ideas. From the BBC

Luther - Series 4, BBC1
Written 27th December.

Erm... Hi? I've loved Luther since it started, I think it's an amazing, unique take on the detective genre which combines gruesome villains with a charismatic lead, playing off of a number of detective show cliches while never actually feeling held down by them. It fell into a nice format of four hour-long episodes in two rhyming couplets, which worked, keeping the character's intensity in short bursts. The third season ended on an open-ended but satisfying moment, keeping it open for star Idris Elba's desire to take the series to cinemas. That's what makes this incredibly short two-parter seem a little... well, weird is the word. It's nice to see you, Luther, but why is this such a flying visit?
     Given the brevity of the series, I was expecting something huge from the two-parter, something which would fundamentally change the format of the series. While we shifted some of the cast around, replacing Warren Brown with Rose Leslie and starring a brand new messed-up killer who eats his victims and then leads the police to each of them with a trail of identity papers. It was a balance of moments both introspective and painfully tense, but it didn't really have the barnstorming, triumphant surge which made Luther work - there needs to be the catharsis that comes with watching Luther beat the shit out of someone. The second half also wandered off into very strange territory, and even with Luther's extraordinary stories it stretched my sense of disbelief. I would have much preferred that this be the first two episodes of a brand new series instead of this strange "event" show which didn't really feel like it made that much of a lasting impression.

This show would be at the top if this was a "Top 11 Shows" list.
From denofgeek

Jessica Jones - Season 1, Netflix
Written 27th December.

A late addition to this list, but I couldn't talk about 2015 without mentioning Jessica Jones, the latest of the Marvel spin-off TV shows appearing on Netflix. Running alongside the series of blockbuster films and two TV shows on Disney's ABC channel, Marvel moved its vast Cinematic Universe over to Netflix earlier this year, with the 13-episode series Daredevil starring Charlie Cox. I wasn't really interested in that series, but I was interested in Jessica Jones, a series about a superhero-turned-private-eye starring Kristin Ritter and David Tennant. And let's get this out of the way, because it's going to be the most controversial thing I say on this list - Jessica Jones is the best thing that the MCU has produced.
     The main themes behind Jessica Jones , are incredibly important, as they discuss a topic very rarely addressed in mainstream media - female agency. Jones' main villain, Kilgrave, is a super villain whose ability lets him make anyone do whatever he wants them to, and he used this to both physically and psychologically abuse Jessica for a number of years. The series doesn't shy away from the language surrounding the topic - Kilgrave is a rapist, he's a murderer, and he's also the most charming person in the room. The show is a testament to both Ritter and Tennant - Ritter for portraying the anger and strength of a survivor of abuse, Tennant for managing to deliver the most realistic portrayal of an abuser I've ever seen on television.
     But the brilliant thing is that those issues aren't the be-all and end-all - there are a lot of amazing action scenes, some great mysteries and intrigues, a heart-breaking romance subplot that doesn't feel insultingly shoehorned in. There's a charming noir feel that the series maintains with very little effort, but it also feels modern and engaging and almost beyond cliché. Of all the shows on this list, this is the one that I have to recommend the most highly - it's clever, consistent, breathtaking in its topics and just one of the best TV shows to come out in 2015.

Thanks.

Fate of the Cybermen: The Cybermen of NuWho

Written 1/10/15.

This is Cyberman Month, where we've been looking at the original five black and white stories featuring Mankind's cyborg nemesis. I've also covered the five other Cyberman stories from the Classic Series, under Phillip Hinchcliffe in 1975 and later John Nathan Turner through the 80s. But what of the Cybermen now in the revival of the show? I've certainly covered all of the episodes, but it's often harder without hindsight to pinpoint the design and story changes which have brought the Cybermen from the swinging 60s into modern living rooms. So, in this article, I will be examining the history of the Cybermen in NuWho, and wondering where they might go from here.

This was in fact the first publicity image
of the Cybusmen. I love the head tilt.

The Cybusmen - 2006-9
Seen in: Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, Cyberwoman, The Next Doctor

Russell T Davies waited until the second series of the revived show to bring back the Cybermen, spending his first season giving a similar treatment to the Daleks. While they were made shiny gold and layered in a number of different political metaphors, the Cybermen were given an entirely new origin story. Instead of originating on Earth's twin planet Mondas, the Cybermen of an alternate universe originated on Earth itself, created by a disabled human scientist, John Lumic, who wished not only to end human pain and suffering, but also to prolong his own life and unite the world under the brand of his company, Cybus Industries.
     These Cybermen are strong, and sturdy, their design featuring a more angular face and a headplate which from behind recalls a roman helmet. Much was made of the Cybermen's reduction to "stampy metal robots," in the fan consciousness at the time, but this is somewhat unfair - if anything, these Cybermen harken back to the "boiler-suit" design from the middle three Sixties stories, except this time with a budget to fully execute the idea. While their voice was fairly memorable and well done (ta to Nicholas Briggs), they were imbued with a few new catch-phrases indicative of the change in their overall philosophy - "Delete", "Upgrade" and similar phrases likening their thoughts to computer software.
     That change in philosophy is a distinctly modern one. The original Cybermen were a reactionary fear to the use of cybernetics in medicine - artificial hearts, artificial limbs. They were the whole concept of prosthesis medicine taken to a logical extreme, in which a person's entire body is replaced and thus, in the eyes of Kitt Pedler and Gerry Davis, so is the soul. RTD's Cybermen - or the "Cybusmen" as fans call them - are an attempt to apply the same method to capitalism, more specifically to companies like Apple. Rise of the Cybermen sees everyone on the Alternate Earth owning a Cybus Industries "earpod" which downloads information directly into people's brains, and from this we can see the Cybusmen as a particularly heavy-handed message to not let corporations tell you what to think and what to feel.

Of course Chris Chibnall would give a Cyberman a metal bra
and heels. Talk about fetishes.

     But allegory aside, one area where I think that the Cybusmen excel over their previous incarnations is the fear and paranoia that they produce. Conversion between human and Cyberman was only actually seen in a single story of the Classic Series - the often derided Attack of the Cybermen. With the Cybusmen, we see the population of London marching into factories, waiting outside little cubicles, and then wandering in as their brain is surgically extracted from their body and placed into a Cybus Industries shell. It's obviously not as gory as I'm making it sound, but the whole idea of extracting and reprogramming the brain rather than slowly switching body parts means that becoming a Cyberman is an act of complete and utter dehumanisation. Some of my favourite moments from the Rise/Age two-parter came when the Cybermen ended up for one reason or another referring to their former selves, especially the Parallel Jackie Tyler, which just hits you as a gut-punch that this person, while not dead, is irreversible changed. It's fantastic.
     The Cybusmen within Series Two were at their most effective. I was glad that the show used them sparingly, and used them to influence a large part of the show's ongoing mythos. While Cyberwoman was quite, quite ridiculous, it had all of the body horror, all of the adult fears about losing the ones you love, and it also presented the whole idea of a single Cyber-conversion unit as a terrifying thing. While their execution in The Next Doctor was a little more experimental and weird, I think it was still an interesting use of the concept, and I can't really think of anything more awesome to do with your cybernetic guys than to stick them in Victorian England and make them create a slave-driven steampunk mecha. Oh. Yeah.

Hold on... that's a Preacher gun. From the Parallel Universe.
The Cybusmen never even wielded those, this is ridiculous.

The Fake Cybusmen - 2010-11
Seen in: The Pandorica Opens, A Good Man Goes To War, Closing Time, Nightmare In Silver (briefly).

Moffat's first move upon taking the show was to hoist a major redesign onto the Daleks, who had to be included at least once per year in order to fulfil the BBC's contract. However wise that decision was given that as of writing we just had a massive Dalek episode and not a single "New Paradigm" Dalek actually appeared, it led to the apparent explanation that the Cybermen couldn't be redesigned, because the budget had gone towards the new Daleks and the new Silurians. Why bother to bring them back, then, if it's going to be a continuity nightmare? Ha. Moffat doesn't care about keeping continuity within the show as he runs it, only in making references to Classic Who in some bizarre effort to please the fanbase.
     In this period of the Cybermen's history, there was a motion to distance the show from their alternate-universe origin, with the idea being that the Cybermen we were seeing were the originals from our Universe. However, the only concessions made to this were the removal of the "C" plate in the centre of their chests, and the fact that they now apparently have vast fleets of interstellar spacecraft that The Doctor can blow up as and when he pleases. Their catchphrases have changed as well, with at least one Cyberman screaming the Borg cry of "Assimilate" and for some ungodly reason having tentacles in its head. At least one fan theory espouses the idea that some of the Cybusmen remained in our universe at the end of Doomsday and found some of our Universe's guys, who decided to copy the design in the name of style.

Skulls are more funny than scary, particularly when they start
chattering at you. What's it going to do, bite you to death?

     The show attempted to make these Cybermen better in Closing Time, an episode which somehow managed to be the most disappointing thing in Series Six - no mean feat, I'll tell you. They had them skulking under a department store, kidnapping people, converting them and making the use of Cybermats for the first time since 1975. But, of course, they had to spoil it by having the Cybermen's weakness to emotion (admittedly weaponised by both The Invasion and The Age of Steel) become so absurd that the sound of a child crying for his father became enough to melt solid steel.
     It says a lot about the Moffat era that they simply didn't care enough to try and work out what these Cybermen were all about. There's no ideology behind them, no basis in any form of metaphor or idea, they are just cut-and-paste villains who borrow a lot of their catch-phrases from The Borg. Which, when you mention it, goes to describe our next lot...

Some Cybermen face designs look happy, others sad. These
are in a state of constant dumb surprise.

The Iron-Man-Borg-Lovechild - 2013-Present
Seen in: Nightmare In Silver, Time of the Doctor, Dark Water/Death In Heaven

The excitement when I saw the publicity photos for Nightmare In Silver was just ridiculously high. I love the Cybermen, and I love Cybermen stories, at least in principle. Every time there's a new Cybermen story or redesign I tell myself that this time, it's going to be good. It's going to work, there's going to be a point to them again. The Cybermen are best when they are both A.) working off of your fears about being robbed of your humantiy and B.) working as a metaphor for some aspect of ourselves that is leading us down a bad path. The best Cyberman stories have these elements, be it the original fear of medical technology in The Tenth Planet, of unguarded militarism in The Invasion, or of dehumanising Capitalism in Rise/Age. The most recent incarnation of the Cybermen? They are completely gone. Any hint of being about something is gone, and the Cybermen are now mostly just empty villains.
      Their initial appearance in the romance-novel-sounding Nightmare In Silver brings with it a lot of promise. Their design is given a technical upgrade when a "Cyber-mite" (evidently an evolved version of the Cybermats) absorbs and reverse engineers a newer piece of technology. The Cybermen which result from this have super-speed (an ability seen in a single sequence in their very first appearance and then never again) as well as the ability to both adapt to energy weapons as they're being fired upon and to assimilate people using tiny organisms. In other words, the Borg. I make this comparison a lot on this blog, and that's because it's perfectly warranted, especially after that episode., While the idea of a plague which could rob you of your humanity is still pretty scary in principle, it lacks the body-horror and deeply personal elements which make the Cybermen effective.

Death In Heaven returned some body horror to the Cybermen,
even if it went about it in a weird way.

     Ignoring the ridiculous wooden Cybermen of Time of the Doctor (fuck that episode, seriously), their next appearance was in last series' finale, Dark Water/Death In Heaven, where they have become tools of The Master. This two-parter did good and bad things with the concept. On the one hand, the whole idea of downloading the minds of the human race and resurrecting them in robotic shells is key to what made the Cybusmen work, and so that was really effective. What wasn't effective was this whole business of these new Cybermen apparently having an entire human corpse inside them, which seems to go against the entire idea of having them now so easily transferred via a "Cyber-virus". Why attempt to forcibly combine the two ideas, when the whole "downloading people" thing is scary enough? Having people actually rise from their graves as Cybermen with their original bodies and suggesting that one of them is The Brigadier is effing ridiculous. It made the episode funny rather then terrifying, which as is the case with Capaldi's stuff so far, it was a hair's breadth from being.

The Future

There were accusations flying around during the Wilderness years that any interesting things that could be done with the Cybermen had already been done, and not just in the show, but in the extensive material from the Expanded Universe. Then, Rise/Age appeared, an adaptation of the audio Spare Parts, which was an origin story for the Cybermen of our Universe, similar in style to the way that Genesis of the Daleks had breathed new life into the metal pepper pots by revealing their history and ideological purpose. Whether or not you believe that everything good from Rise/Age came from Marc Platt and Spare Parts, I don't think that there is a Cyberman story which better combines a really good origin for the Cybermen, a set of body-horror moments which scare and unsettle, with what is a fairly decent adventure story.

The one on the right has discovered that her husband Gerald
is having an affair with the pool boy, and the one on the left
was the one trying to cover it up.

     There are so many possible stories that you could develop using the Cybermen from either Universe which would be fulfilling to a purpose of some sort, and genuinely fun at the same time. We don't need a full history lesson a la Attack to explain where they've come from - if necessary, just stick in some minor background dialogue, because the people who notice that stuff will love it and people who don't will love the story for being a good story. The Cybermen have always been for me the dark mirror of humanity, always a vision of what we may become, either literally or in metaphor. It's what makes them so powerful to me, and why after all these years, they're the ones I remember the most. I bought Earthshock, I bought Attack, because the most exciting thing for me about rewatching The Five Doctors over and over again was watching the many different ways the Doctor defeated the Cybermen. One can only hope that there will come a story good enough to inspire that same devotion and love in future generations.

Thanks.

TV Shows I Watched In 2014

Last year I delivered a Top Ten Shows list, which I very much enjoyed. For one reason or another, 2014 didn't see me watching that many shows from this year alone, and saw me more on the catch-up thanks to Netflix. So, in the spirit of fairness, here are the fiction-based TV Shows that I watched in 2014 that came out in that year.

Game of Thrones - Season Four, HBO/Sky 1

Game of Thrones' fourth season saw a sea of controversy and intrigue, as the plot developments moved onto the second half of G.R.R. Martin's third novel in his Song of Ice and Fire series, A Storm of Swords. Much as its fellows over at The Walking Dead, GoT is attempting to follow the plot of the books while keeping things fresh for those who've already read them, as well as imprinting its own stamp on the series. Whether this has been successful or not is up to debate, but the general feeling that I left the series with was that many opportunities had been missed and several plot elements were twisted to gain a much more problematic bent than in the original text.

Oberyn and Ellaria, this season's standout characters.
Shame they were so short-lived. From Wikia

      The biggest controversy (spoiler warning), came in the season's third episode, Breaker of Chains, in which anti-hero/anti-villain Jaime Lannister raped his twin sister Cersei as she mourned over the death of their son, Joffrey, in the previous episode. While disgusting enough in the book, the fact that the series decided to make this a non-consensual act and then proceed to never bring it up again left a bad taste in my mouth, and highlighted a lot of the other moments in the show when the producers had chosen to include more on-screen rape and sexual violence than was in the book to begin with. While this had calmed down by the end of the season, we were still given more of the same in the completely show-original scenes at Craster's Keep where villain Karl Tanner (an admittedly fantastic performance by Burn Gorman, Torchwood) used and abused a village of women already brought up in a life of incestuous torture. It's a strange thing that GoT brings sentences like that up.
     However, there were some fantastic moments this series which helped to balance out the controversy. The appearance of Pedro Pascal's firey bisexual Prince Oberyn Martell became an absolute scene-stealer whenever he was on screen, especially as he tread carefully around the politics surrounding King's Landing. The main plot in the South, with the death of Joffrey and Tyrion's trial for murder, didn't get quite the development it could have, but it came to a fantastic head in the penultimate episode. Some of Tyrion's motivation for his actions in the finale has been removed from the show's text, and that made his motivations less clear, but Peter Dinklage is still the stand-out actor of the show. Add in fantastic developments for Sansa and other characters, and GoT is still worth coming back to every year.

It's telling that the most exciting thing I found in 5A was
a few brief shots of Morgan. From Forbes

The Walking Dead - Seasons 4B and 5A, AMC/Fox

AMC's zombie drama seems to have been daring out into more experimental territory, and simultaneously bringing in higher and higher viewing numbers. After spending the first half of its fourth season in tense action at The Prison, the second half moved into a strange direction, breaking the ensemble cast up and focusing on groups of 2-3 people at a time as the characters escaped The Prison and headed down the tracks to Terminus, a promised land. Mixing in plot developments from Volumes 9-11 of the Comic series, the season had two stand-out episodes. The Grove saw badasses Carol and Tyreese escorting the deranged Lizzie and her younger sister Mia, and the eventual consequences when Lizzie tries to prove her theory that Zombies are just like other people. The season finale, A, felt in its second half like a bit of an anticlimax, but dealt with a certain brutal scene in the comics with a fantastic level of poignancy and horror.
     After Season Five had mopped up the cliffhanger from the previous show, the plot developments seemed to take a weaker turn. A major stepping-stone plot from the Comics was dealt with by the third episode, leaving the rest of the season to deal with long-winded flashbacks and a show-original plot based on Beth which ended (spoiler warning) with Beth's death. While the episodes preceeding the event were enjoyable enough, Beth's death comes at the end of the episode after everything has reasonably been resolved, and thus has started to poke a big hole in the show's suspension of disbelief. I'm still a Walking Dead fan, but the second half of Season Five needs to find a little more tension and make a little more progress toward's the show's eventual move to D.C.

How little I care. (Yet still watch, albeit with a
month delay.) From Wikia

Doctor Who - Series 8, BBC1

Moffat is still here. That should say enough; while his writing is not as intensely unpleasant as it was the end of Matt Smith's tenure, there are still bumps here and there, and even that aside, the show is fast becoming stale under his leadership - and that's not just from my Tumblr-driven social justice background, that seems to be an increasing sentiment amongst fans too. By this point Moffat has had the job for about as long as RTD did, except that he isn't cutting his losses and will continue to be showrunner at least until the end of this year (and, he threatens, for even longer.)
     While I haven't finished my individual reviews of this season, I do have a good grasp of my basic problems. Clara, despite how much the series tries to build her up, has an arc which is either incredibly subtle or just tellingly hollow, which follows her seperation from The Doctor and her personality taking on a more destructive form of The Doctor's role. The problem with this was that it came bundled up in the relationship with Danny Pink, not only tying up her development into a man for no reason, but also forcing a relationship which, upon deeper inspection, is unhealthy and unbelievable. Peter Capaldi is doing his absolute best with what he's got, and despite The Doctor's new asshole persona I still think that Capaldi's Doctor knows what he's doing more than Smith's did. But in using his character differently in each episode, the series treads all over its attempts to present continuous themes, and the result is a season of uneven episodes.
     By the end of the season I'd found ways of looking past my problems with the show and at least enjoying it on a surface level - the finale two-parter was especially good in that regard, as for all it did to confuse and stretch Doctor Who canon, it managed to stay true to the (admittedly thin) characterisations and do so in an entertaining way. I used to hope that Doctor Who could become better - but now it seems to want to settle for middle-of-the-road. Tonally, Series 8 makes me think more "Adian Hodge's Survivors" than "Saturday night blockbuster", and you know my feelings on that.

Rachel Duncan... smiling...
From orphanblack.tumblr

Orphan Black - Series 2, BBC America

My darling, my precious. There are shows I might enjoy more on television, but from my position as a critic I can't think of a show which is just as good as Orphan Black is on every level - acting, themes, plot structure - it's just an amazing, juggernaught of a show. The second season didn't just carry on the plot from the first season, it ramped it up by including a number of new characters and plotlines which only deepened and en-richened the shows universe and characters. Most of this is thanks to the tireless efforts of star Tatiana Maslany, this season playing five clones regularly, and two more in guest spots. The distinct characterisation that Maslany gives to each of her characters and the seamless way she has them interact with and imitate each other is a masterpiece of acting ability, and I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it.
     Season Two's main theme, alongside its intrigue and conspiracy, seemed to be on the positions of women in society, with each of the clones playing a different role and the show really focussing on the clones' attempts to regain their agency after it was robbed from them by a number of organisations. It also followed religious extremism, the rights of the individual, and gave a sensitive if out-of-the-blue look at transgender issues by examining how the clones' dilemma has affected a transman clone, Tony Sawicki.

Tony Sawicki. Tatiana gives him all the respect the
role demands. From BBC America

     I could go into a lot of detail with how each of the main characters developed, but the most impressive to me was Rachel Duncan, a clone introduced at the eleventh hour in the first season who very quickly developed a very emotionally complex backstory and motivation - a tragic villain who has faced as much if not more suffering than the main characters, but who has been driven to believe that the company who created her and the other clones has to maintain its power. There's an amazing scene near the end of the season where, out of the blue, we see Rachel smile for the first time, and it's so both forced and jubilant that the result is scary and sad. Tatiana Maslany has smiled so many times on this show, but she managed to turn this one into the season's most powerful scene.
     Orphan Black's third season may just be its last, whether because the ratings haven't been that good or simply as a matter of narrative necessity - with this much happening in each episode, it seems sensible to know that you have an end in sight. But if that is the case, I can say that I will severely miss this show - and I hope that Maslany goes on to even more success.

Kieren and Amy both had tragic moments in the finale.
From The Mirror

In The Flesh - Series 2, BBC3

A couple of days prior to writing, In The Flesh was cancelled. This is a crime against television. Like Orphan Black, In The Flesh is a fantastically written show with not only amazingly strong character development, but also brilliant representation for female and minority characters, and themes surrounding prejudice, war, society and love. While the second season of the show wasn't as condensed as the original three-part miniseries, the show used its extra three hours to tell a story in a larger universe, with a stronger plot arc, more time to invest in its characters and an ending which felt absolutely shattering but at the same time thematically perfect.
     BBC3 has made a number of questionable decisions over the past few years, and that is probably a contributing factor to the channel's eventual disappearance later this year. It is frustrating, however, to note that shows like Jack Whitehall's asinine chatshow Backchat was safely renewed and moved into BBC2, while provocative, relevant dramas like In The Flesh (and to some extent The Fades) were thrown by the wayside. And to think I was annoyed about White Van Man. Luckily, In The Flesh has a massive fandom and the current twitter hashtag has provoked claims that Netflix may take the series up. Watch this space.

Sherlock - Series 3, BBC1

This whole show is just so dodgy.
From Flavorwire

One of the benefits of this not being a Top Ten is that I can include Sherlock at all. While it wasn't here for long, broadcasting as it did on three consecutive weekends at the very start of the year, Sherlock's third season made its odious presence known. Sherlock series are always quite brief, so I can sum up this series' three episodes as follows: Okay, Fairly good, Horrendous. Moffat's sexism and lack of narrative tact is always more refined in Sherlock, tempered only by the good natures of Mark Gattis and Steven Thompson, but not even they could fix the waste of film that is His Last Vow. On one hand assassinating the character development of Mary Morstan and dehumanising her in the most digusting ways possible and on the other hand giving suspension of disbelief a kick in the shins and throwing it in a ditch, this season's development from okayish into pure arse made me lose any faith that Sherlock will develop beyond Moffat's personal mouthpiece.

Elementary - Series 1&2a, CBS

Holmes and Joan have an amazing relationship that
is refreshingly platonic, instead focusing on trust and
friendship. From craveonline

I completely forgot about this one, but I did actually watch it, and I did end up having strong feelings about it. I suppose that was my issue with CBS' Elementary - it's a great show with some clever ideas, well-thought-out mysteries and decent character development that takes its more flashy British counterpart and wipes the floor with it. The problem for me as a viewer, aside from the lengthy seasons, was that in this form Elementary was a bit too much like the standard police procedural. Each episode ends up so focused on the mystery itself that, while there is very strong character development, it happens over a longer period of time.
     I binged the first series and the first half of the second all the way back in January, so I am a bit hazy, but if I had to mention my favourite bits it would probably be any moment of the show with Natalie Dormer. That woman is an artist. Both in-show and out.

And that was this year. Some TV was fantastic, some of it was tragic, and some of it mixed the two in a way which was confusing for everyone. See you guys next year.

Thanks.

P.S. Waiting until 20:14 to post this...

Camaraderie in Space: My Adventures in Mass Effect

Thanks for the inspiration Andy, you too Connor.

After years of Andrew's irrelevant reviews about Star Trek, Lost and Whovian Lore, I shall write the magnum opus of this website and my own writing (which isn't saying much as this is limited to 3 crap reviews and GCSE English coursework). I, however, should probably introduce myself first. I'm Tanju, 17 years old and autistic. Despite what a lot of people think, autistic people feel emotion and have a sense of humour, even if they appear neutral and monotonous. What makes me so different from so-called "neurotypicals" is my difficultly understanding social norms and having deep and very specific special interests like science, maths, politics and video games. This means I often straddle and frequently cross the line between loud and obnoxious and quiet and reserved. I've always managed to fit in with groups of people, but I rarely ever find myself as anything other than an outsider with more than two or three people. All my life I've felt I was shunned and misunderstood and I've never had a long-term romantic relationship with anyone (or short-term really). My behaviour has made people I care about any connection I made with people has been undermined by my autism, even if it doesn't affect their opinion of me and vice versa.

Then came Mass Effect. I've been using the trilogy as a coping mechanism for my autism since ME2 came out in 2010. I then played through the original and finally the third the day it came out. I didn't realise this at the time though. I just thought I was playing a set of really good sci-fi RPGs. It only dawned on me today, on the final day of sixth form, after probably saying a final goodbye to a lot of people I know and a long talk with close friends. But anyway, enough about me, you want to know about Mass Effect don't you?

The greatest innovation in RPGs this generation.

The games in the Mass Effect trilogy are science-fiction action-RPGs with a focus on having strong story and narrative, which meant a complex and interesting backstory for the universe, tough choices that affect the game and personal relationships with characters in the game. Those personal relationships are what made me fall in love with the game. You are Commander Shepard, celebrated war hero and captain of the spaceship Normandy. Inbetween missions, you could explore the Normandy and talk to your crew, which was diverse and consisted of people from different species and within the humans, different ethnicities, nationalities, etc.  They all have their own story to tell, they're all interesting. Even one of the more disliked crewmembers, Ashley, wasn't just some dumb bimbo. She was religious in a society that near-universally secular, she had a sister she cared about and she loved poetry. Then there was fan favourites like Tali, a skilled young Quarian engineer who was eager to prove herself and deeply patriotic, prioritising her fleet over anything else, and Wrex, a disillusioned Krogan warrior who hates how his people have lost their sense of tradition after a weaponised fertility plague dooms them to extinction. These characters were deeply written and if you immersed yourself into the game, you cared about them. The way you talked to them was the dialogue wheel, shown above. Through this wheel, you could advance or end a conversion seamlessly, ask questions, make moral choices or persuade someone to do something or side with you. It towed the line between choice and cinematic immersion and it worked. I felt like I was Shepard by using this to controlling the flow and general direction of his (or her) actions and dialogue. This helped me develop as a person by allowing me to have something I didn't have in real life, people I felt comfortable sharing experiences with. I was respected by the people who followed me to hell and back. I definitely didn't have autism in-game. I was confident and a good leader, without having an extreme amount of choice that would cause my autism to get in the way.

At this point I'd just like to point out that Mass Effect was not about having a power trip, but an experience where I connected with the characters on a personal level. They weren't pixels on a screen. They were friends, as much and maybe more so than my non-fictional ones. And I know that this wasn't a unique experience for me. The games are clearly designed with this in mind. You completed "loyalty missions" in Mass Effect 2, in order to gain the trust of your new crew. You saw their personal struggles and saw them on a deeper level. Then you have the Citadel DLC, basically a touching, hilariously fun 7-hour final goodbye to the crew of Normandy. Seriously, you have a fucking party at the end. Name one franchise where you would pay £15 for a story about having a party with the main characters.

My care for these characters allowed me to have an emotional stake in the outcome of the game. My rationale for my choices in the game wasn't based on the common good or some other bullshit, but on how they would affect my crew. Without Wrex in my crew, the Krogan would be generic alien enemies. I wouldn't give a shit about them and they wouldn't mean anything to me. We base our choices in real life on how they affect people and if you can't visualise these people, you ignore their troubles. The "starving children in Africa" are an abstract concept until you see their faces on charity adverts. My worldview in-game was based on talking to the dozen or so comrades who helped me save the galaxy. They were people who were immersed in a culture I would never understand. If we have wildly different and contradictory traditions on our own planet, how can we ever comprehend as the Volus' finance-based or the Turian's militaristic culture? Well, a good start would be to talk a Volus or Turian.

Mass Effect isn't some happy Skyrim-esque space adventure, where you can just explore wherever you want to and absorb the beauty and complexity of the open world. It has a linear-ish story and it has to progress to mean anything. You're trying to achieve a single goal along the way. Destroy the Reapers, giant robotic space cuttlefish hell-bent on fucking up the galaxy. This enemy doesn't any nuance to it. They're evil and incomprehensible (at least until that ending...). They exist merely as an obstacle for the protagonist, i.e. me and the awesome crew of the Normandy, to overcome. An equivalent in real life would be A-Level exams, like the ones I should be revising for right now instead of writing essays on video games (by the way I study Further Maths and Physics, not English Literature). We experience stress, sadness, turmoil. The stakes are high and there is little room for error. You can't talk to an exam paper, or persuade it to go easy on you. You finish the paper on the day the best you can. But exams aren't the only thing you do, you have banter with friends, parties, drama, relationships. These are the interesting things in student life, not exams and the same goes for Mass Effect, the Reapers exist as a plot device, but it allows us to overcome hardship to show us our true character. Without situations that require us to do so, we will never need to adapt. That's allowed Mass Effect to have contrast and variety. Dark moments were offset by the humour and joy and camaraderie.  For every comrade dead, for every memorial in Mass Effect 3, there was the good times on the Normandy, there was the sheer and utter fun that the Citadel DLC. It was real and even with autism I could feel that. A goal to overcome and an ideal to reach, the future free from the Reapers or the 4 years in university, made me love every moment, good or bad.

You may ask me, "why a video game?" Hundreds of films, books and TV shows have dealt with struggles of people and their personal relationships, some are even about the struggles of the autistic. If sci-fi escapism is part of the equation, shows like Firefly include the tight-knit crew you mentioned. What makes a video game like Mass Effect so special? The answer to that is long-winded and difficult to put into words, but there is one aspect I can confirm. I'm in control. When I watch Firefly, I empathise with the crew, but I'm not Nathan Fillion, however awesome that would be. No matter how much I become part of that community, the story of Firefly isn't mine. Its the story of Captain Reynolds and his crew trying to make it in a world that is indifferent to him, no matter how many fan-fics I write to rectify that. Mass Effect is my story, through and through. Every aspect of Shepard is customisable. My own Shepard I identify with the most is basically a carbon copy of me, friendly whenever possible, with choices which favoured liberal ideology and multiculturalism (that meant mostly Paragon choices) and a straight male who romanced Tali. Another Shepard I'm fond of is a bi female who romanced Liara in ME1 and Garrus in ME2 & 3 and was mostly Paragon, but sarcastic and a no-bullshit kind of girl. This makes Mass Effect good for replaying, but also gave me a way to express myself. The choice I had in the game was mostly an illusion, but it was a good one. With good writing and a little movie video game magic, playthroughs felt completely different from one another. I was writing a new 100+ hour story for the universe every time I replayed the trilogy. Was Shepard someone who tried to be fair and bring peace to everyone he could or did he sometimes make the questionable choice because the ends justify the means? Was he into girls or guys? Was he even a "he"? We will never know and frankly Bioware, I don't want to know.

I didn't write this for any reason other than needing to express myself. These are my thoughts unfiltered by rational argument, or even proof-reading. I am not a creative writer and if you are, you can probably tell I had no plan for this other than chucking all my ideas onto one post. I just hope that you can relate to my story and maybe appreciate autism a little bit. All it takes is some open-mindedness. But if I had to ask for something, an early copy of Mass Effect 4 wouldn't go amiss. Think about it Bioware.

Once last thing, I'd recommend the film Ben X as the themes in that film reflect the ones shown in this essay. Its also an awesome film, check it out.