TV Catch Up 2

Some TV shows I watched this year, loosely collected by the genre of Science Fiction And Fantasy (with a little historical comedy sneaking in)

1. Stargirl Season 2

At the end of Season 1 Courtney Whitmore and the re-formed Justice Society Of America defeated the Injustice Society. She looks about for new threats and doesn’t find them. However the show suddenly remembers that it’s a teen-superhero drama and it turns out she’s failed classes because of all the superheroing she’s done. Despite it now being the summer break, she has to go back to Summer School.

Obviously new threats arrive. Cindy Burman, daughter of the Dragon King, is back and wants revenge. Though this is in part because she has a black diamond with a shadow god who feeds on fear and rage, called Eclipso. Eclipso attacked the old Justice Society, leading them to kill the man possessed by him, a moral failure (also a strategic one). Meanwhile The Shade, a supervillain from the 19^th century who once was associated with the Injustice Society, has come to town. He’s looking for the Eclipso diamond. He claims not to want a fight and to destroy Eclipso, but he inevitably lies, betrays and causes trouble to do so.

Cindy recruits some of the children of the Injustice Society to become the new Injustice Society. In the fight Eclipso escapes the diamond*, sucks Cindy into the shadowlands, and then vanishes, to spread fear and despair across the town. He breaks up the Justice Society, preying on Yolanda (Wildcat)’s guilt, Rick (Hourman)’s rage and Beth (Dr Mid-Nite)’s insecurities.

As in the first season the show is interested in legacy, both good and bad. Here it complicates it; the old Justice Society made mistakes and caused deaths, members of the Injustice Society weren’t all there for mayhem and world domination. There’s a lot of rescuing, and some of it is from people’s own flaws.

Watch This: Some teen drama meets old school super hero-ing
Don’t Watch This: You’ve had enough teen drama and super hero-ing

* Eclipso appears as a purple and black goblin creature, with eclipse paint covering his face, the coolest part of a disappointing costume, but also appears as an angelic child, and a disembodied voice, dark and horrid weather, and occasionally shadow and darkness

2. The Flash

The Flash is over with season 9, and so is the Arrow-verse aka the CW-verse aka the Berlanti-verse, a sprawling set of superhero TV shows. So what do we get in the final season. Is it a victory lap? A wake? Just another set of shows where Barry comes up against an obstacle that he’s not fast enough to defeat, then he runs faster?

We’ve always know how The Flash ends (Flash missing, vanishes in Crisis). But then the Crisis happened and Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, sacrificed himself in Barry’s place. And so we know there’s another future, a future in which Barry and Iris have speedster children. At the start of this season Barry has a book with all their future events and… that causes some problems. Iris isn’t happy being on a path not of her choosing, especially just after being carried back and forwards in time in the last season.

With the other shows gone* it would seem that the capacity for crossovers would be gone. But no! Our first storyline involves Ryan Wilder, the Second Batwoman from Batwoman. Sadly it doesn’t tie up the loose ends from the untimely ending of that show, but it does let us know that the Bat Team are still out there doing their thing. And also stating that the multiverse is back after being wiped out during the Crisis. A third (fourth?) version of Caitlin Snow is revealed, Khoine, to the chagrin of Chillblaine, who was trying to resurrect Frost (the second (third?) version). He joins Team Flash with another a band of rogues who Barry recruits for this mission; unlike them he sticks around.

Nia Nul from Supergirl makes an appearance in a dream-centred episode. Wally West, Kid Flash, and John Diggle from Arrow make a return for Barry’s birthday, only for a villain to strike and Oliver Queen to guest star; he’s still a bow-themed superhero but now he’s the guardian of the multiverse!

There’s also a one-off time-nonsense episode that begins when S.T.A.R. Labs, the Team Flash HQ, is being inspected for health and safety. Not before time if you ask me.

The final set of episodes bring back Eddie Thawne, police detective, fiancé of Iris and ancestor of Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash, who sacrificed himself at the climax of Season One. He regrets this, seeing what he lost, and how he didn’t stop the Reverse Flash. Various evil speedsters in different coloured suits return. The question is asked: can you actually make the world a better place by punching running faster than a differently coloured version of yourself?

Barry’s a hero damn it, and the show has always been a bit better than it should be. We know the ending is the one that lays the foundations for the future(s) we’ve seen. The futures where maybe they still have to rush to S.T.A.R. Labs every week to confront a new threat. Where Barry can’t ever stop running. But it’s a better, brighter future. Barry runs, he doesn’t punch, he doesn’t kill. He runs into danger and saves people.

He runs towards a new world, a better world.

Watch This: Nine, or maybe eleven years of over-complicated superhero soap opera wraps itself up leaving space for heroics and hope for the future
Don’t Watch This: You’ve forgotten who these people are or you never knew

* Superman and Lois continues for now, but has been officially severed into a different strand of the multiverse.

3. The Expanse (Season One)

On Ceres detective Miller, working for Star Helix security, is given a side job. Find Julie Mao, the estranged daughter of an Earth magnate. This on top of general crimes and discontent; water rations have been cut and the OPA, the belter independence movement, is agitating against the Earth and Mars companies that dominate the belt.

Out in the belt is the water mining ship Canterbury. When the first officer goes crazy Holden, originally from Earth, becomes first officer; they answer a distress call only to be attacked by stealth ships. They discover evidence the ship was Martian. The survivors are then picked up by a Martian ship, the Donniger, only for that to be destroyed by stealth ships and the survivors escape aboard a state of the art Martian gunship, the Tachi, which they rename the Rocinante, which as readers of the books and of the future series adverts know will be a major setting. They attempt to learn what’s going on, teaming up with Fred Johnson, once an Earth marine colonel, now engineer building the Nauvoo, a generation ship for Mormons. He’s also linked into some of the OPA factions.

On Earth, these mysterious stealth ships, Martian involvement, weird things happening to research stations and Belter militancy keep pushing political tensions higher. People keep wanting to send in the fleet. Avasarala, a UN executive, keeps trying to both find out what’s going on and stopping a war. Every time she makes a clever step (leaking that the stealth composites seem to have been stolen from Martian stores has them carry out an inventory which lets signals intelligence locate them etc) something gets in the way, a lead is destroyed, another attack occurs.

All this converges on Eros; both Julie Mao and several gang members Miller is after went there, also the leads that Holden and the Rocinante are following. It’s action, and science fiction and a thriller, and every component is crafted with care. The plots add up to something overly complex but they are still compelling; the characters always have a little bit more to them and the sets and effects all look good.

Watch This: Clever, exciting space thriller
Don’t Watch This: For all the efforts to uncover villainy, the show revels in violence and betrayal

4. Our Flag Means Death

Stede Bonnet, a wealthy aristocrat, decides to become a pirate out of boredom and love of romance. He outfits a ship and sets out to become the Gentleman Pirate, though he turns out to be bad at it.

This is historically true.

After some more or less ridiculous adventures he falls in with the infamous pirate Blackbeard, Edward Teach, and intrigued by each other the two sail together. (This bit is historically true too). Stede and Ed together have some more ridiculous adventures, including Stede introducing Ed into Aristocratic society.

It’s a comedy! It begins as a workplace sitcom, the workplace being piracy, the crew of misfits with the ineffective but charismatic boss. It then revolves around the romance between Stede and Blackbeard, how they are intrigued by each other, and also torn apart with Stede having gentlemanly habits and duties, and Blackbeard being pulled back to his violent rampaging ways.

The setpieces are funny. Every character gets a little bit more than needed, from the camp scribe who writes down what Stede does, to Blackbeard’s second Izzy (historical) who wants to get back to proper pirating, to Jim, who has cross-dressed to join the crew and was trained by nuns to seek revenge for her family but has got sidetracked.

Watch This: Uproarious pirate-themed comedy with real heart and relationships, the ridiculous exaggerations and anachronisms showing up the outrageous reality
Don’t Watch This: It’s gay pirates eating pudding

5. The Swarm

Off Vancouver Island whales are behaving oddly, eventually resulting in an attack on a whale watching ship. Ships in the port have unusual barnacle infestations; a First Nations scientist involved in sea protection investigates. Something very odd is happening to the water temperatures around the Shetlands, where a researcher doing penance for causing problems at the Hamburg Marine Biology Centre is running an outpost. Off the coast of Norway an oil exploration vessel looking into environmental concerns discovers a new species of worm that digs through the sea floor faster than has been seen before. The scientist aboard brings in a professor from Trondheim as a consultant to confirm the results And on the southernmost Atlantic coast of France a lobster causes sickness in a posh restaurant. Before the medical staff have understood what is going on the bacteria gets into the wastewater and starts to infect people.

We know these are related, because this is a TV show and it’s called The Swarm. The researchers don’t. So they all tackle it from their own angle, trying to learn more. The ensemble cast eventually get together in episode six (of eight) as a formal conference tries to figure out what’s going on, but won’t, quite, endorse the outlandish suggestions our protagonists have concluded*. By this time several of them have suffered losses, as a research vessel sank, and then an undersea collapse causes a tsunami. The not-quite mysterious Mifune foundation** backs them however so they can go out and encounter whatever is behind it.

Despite many scenes of action, animal attack, watery disaster and ships in storms, it’s quite a quiet show. Research takes place in large, dimly lit rooms staring again and again at data. And it takes place underwater, where the smallness of people and their machines are drowned by the vast size and silence. By taking its time to introduce us to the characters and the problems, there’s always something to learn, plot or character advancing, if not in this scene then in the next. And the shape of the mystery at the heart keeps changing, becoming less comprehensible with every new piece of information. Perhaps unfortunately the team that comes together is already selected to work together and understand what’s going on. They keep working on their own bits with only a little friction between them, neither in conflict or having any interesting co-operative moments.

Watch This: World-spanning science fiction drama with some good ocean details and effects
Don’t Watch This: The sea is hostile enough already

* The astrophysicist they get on the team to do signals analysis was on holiday on Vancouver Island when mysterious things happened there; obviously time and already being (peripherally) involved when she met the researcher there is why she’s the one they recruit, but it does highlight how the show has been showing us these characters because they’re the ones who end up on the ship. SPOILERS for episodes seven and eight I guess.

** Aito Mifune is a Japanese billionaire with shipping interests, and also he hopes to leverage the results if they get them. Though whether for profit, political power or to be seen as a benefactor is not clear. He’s no more opaque than any of the other characters to be frank, all of whom are out there trying to deal with grief and curiosity.

6. The Wheel Of Time (Season One)

I haven’t read the books! Three thousand years ago The Dragon, the most powerful channeler of the One Power, defeated the Dark One, but also broke the world. Since then only women have been able to channel the one power; men inevitably go mad. The women channelers have formed an organisation called the Aes Sedai, who guard the world from bad magic and things, though they also bicker and scheme against each other.

But there is no escape from the Wheel Of Time. The Dark One is straining against his bonds and The Dragon has been Reborn as The Dragon Reborn to oppose him.

Moraine, a blue Aes Sedai, travels to the Two Rivers region with her warder Lan, where she believes that The Dragon Reborn has been Reborn. There are five candidates. Before she can properly recruit them the village is attacked by Trollocs, huge monstrous beasts, led by Fade, masked followers of The Dark One. They flee, to avoid drawing more enemies down on them.

Taking shelter in an abandoned cursed city, one of them gets a cursed dagger, and they have to flee, splitting the party. They then wander the countryside seeing different bits and pieces. Some of them fall in with an Aes Sedai party who have captured a male channeler, a False Dragon Reborn, and Nynaeve is revealed to be a very powerful channeler, maybe she’s the Dragon Reborn (real). The Children Of The Light, opposed to the Aes Sedai and channeling in general capture two of them; Perrin uses wolf powers and Egwene uses channeling to escape, maybe one of them is The Dragon Reborn. Rand fights a Dark Friend, breaking her power; meanwhile despite the cursed dagger Mat manages to maintain sanity, maybe one of them is (etc.)

There’s an engaging cast and improvements in CGI and the amount of cash they’ve spent has made it look good. If the ending left me a little dissatisfied, well Season two has come out so I guess I can always watch that.

Watch This: A superior fantasy TV show, even if none of the elements quite make it unmissable
Don’t Watch This: If Robert Jordan didn’t stick around for it, why would you?

7. Good Omens Season 2

At the end of Season 1 the angel Aziraphale was cast out of heaven, and the demon Crowley disowned by hell. The two are living quietly in London, Aziraphale in his bookshop, Crowley in his car (giving his replacement tips – the lack of knowledge of earth in heaven and (to a lesser extent) hell is a recurring theme). Then a naked amnesiac Gabriel turns up at Aziraphale’s shop.

Trying to figure out what’s going on and how to prevent Gabriel being found by heaven (or hell) leads them into various unlikely subplots. This includes trying to make the record shop owner and the coffee shop owner fall in love, leading to the local shopkeeper meeting becoming a romantic ball, that is then besieged by a legion of the damned. Some of the highlights are historical interludes, where Aziraphale and Crowley have various adventures trying to mitigate the trials of Job, run into Graverobbers in 19^th Century Edinburgh and work through the morality, and in WW2 London, the Nazi spies from a flashback in Season One are returned as zombies to provide proof Crowley is working with Aziraphale.

Perhaps because this season isn’t based on a book I’ve read and re-read several times over the last thirty years, the actual storyline felt slight, and the subplots ancillary*. And all of that is very minor. It’s a story about love, and more than that, it’s about how ridiculous life is and how meaning creates difficulty. And how being good is not about following the rules. Sometimes you need to be a bit bad too.

Watch This: Fun supernatural comedy with both heart and something to say
Don’t Watch This: The plot’s slight, gets distracted and obscures the iterations on various love stories

* The Adam bits, the Horsemen bits, the prophecy bits and the witchfinder etc bits in Good Omens season 1 all seemed to converge on the main plot, where Aziraphale and Crowley are trying to cope with and maybe stop the apocalypse. The side bits here, enjoyable as they are, seem to diverge from it and have to be closed down to get back to the plot, even as they cast light on the themes and story. But maybe I’m nitpicking.

8. Fireball XL5

It’s 2062 – a hundred years in the future – and the World Space Patrol maintains watch over space, protecting the earth. One of their ships is Fireball XL5. The crew consist of:

Commander and pilot Colonel Steve Zodiac;
Robot co-pilot Robert, a transparent robot whose insides can be seen, and who smokes when under stress, or it’s funny;
Doctor Venus who, despite being a woman, is a doctor of space medicine*, also French for some reason;
Professor Matthew Matic, engineer, navigator, scientist; and (sometimes)
Zoonie, Venus’s pet and ship’s mascot, a semi-telepathic creature that is always getting into scrapes and whose design reveals the true horror of this setting.

These are all puppets; this being a Gerry and Sylvia Anderson production there are lots of models and sets. Space City has a giant rotating tower where they control the World Space Patrol and other space craft from. There’s a big railed launching ramp from which Fireball XL5 takes off, though it lands vertically (in each case the ship is horizontal). And the front section “Fireball Junior” detaches to take them down to strange planets when they have an adventure. Steve Zodiac also moves into an apartment in the tower during the series (Venus has her own house out of town).

An early “Supermarionation” series, it’s in black and white and often the strings can be seen. The use of jetcycles to move characters about without having to move their legs is notable. In space they have “oxygen pills” so they can breathe without helmets, and fly with jetpacks. Running out of oxygen pills, or having them stolen is a plot point that comes up several times. The characters are a bit thin, though for a kids’ show of the period that’s hardly a surprise. And one of them always has something going on – old music, moving house, dealing with a hideous pet (Zoonie).

The main plots usually involve Fireball XL5 being sent to solve a mystery or deal with a threat. Behind them are either weird aliens (sometimes a bit racist) or human criminals. We get some gangsters who are very American gangster-ish, some spies who are definitely Eastern European, and pirates who are pirates, but that might be a dream sequence.

Is it any good? The models are pretty good, the puppetry hasn’t quite got there (the improvements between this and the next Supermarionation series Stingray are notable). As might be expected for a kid’s show there’s quite some swings; Steve Zodiac and Fireball XL5 are the only ones who can intercept a planetbuster missile** aimed at earth; then we’re back to discover the alarm system Mathic installed in Steve’s apartment has gone wrong or Zoonie has eaten all the food. The half hour format keeps things tight but also doesn’t allow for a lot of plot complication or characterisation***.

Watch This: Fun, light-hearted 1960s puppet space adventures
Don’t Watch This: There are better 1960s puppet adventures from the same creators
A Note: That I only watched the first 13 episodes before writing this review

* The show is very keen to let us know that Venus is a woman but also a doctor of space medicine, and we even have a sexist character, Jock Campbell Space City’s engineer, to be proved wrong when she’s capable when in charge of a mission.

** A manned or possible aliened one, so when they destroy it they kill the kamikaze crew.

*** Though Stingray, made the year after they finished this, does better at this too. It’s the same format but underwater (World Aquanaut Security Patrol) rather than out in space. Unsurprisingly when they had a second go at it, it works better.