#in another universe this story was televised instead of warriors of the deep

[yeonchi]

Kisekae Insights #26: The Superhero Project Prelude (a preview of things to come)

(Art by blakehunter)

My journey into tokusatsu began in 2013 when I watched Power Rangers Samurai on television and was enthralled at the use of kanji in the series. This led me to learn about Super Sentai through watching its counterpart, Samurai Sentai Shinkenger. Later, I began to learn about Kamen Rider through watching Decade thanks to its crossover arc with Shinkenger, which would lead me to watch other Super Sentai and Kamen Rider series. Eventually, I also learnt about Metal Heroes through watching crossover movies and Ultramen after watching some episodes of Orb online out of curiosity (Ultraman was on TVB through satellite back in the day, though I never really cared for it).

While the adaptations of Super Sentai and Kamen Rider in Gokaiger and Decade were among the initial elements teased and hyped for the Moushouden Series, it should be noted that they had their roots in previous series. In the final instalment of the second run of Kisekae Insights, allow me to walk you through how I implemented Super Sentai before 2018 and give you all a little bit of a preview of what is to come.

Samurai Mode: The prototype powers

The second half of Series 9 in 2014 featured the Doctor and his companions becoming beta testers for the Superhero Project in the form of Samurai Mode. The arsenal of Shinkenger was adapted, but the names were kept close to their adaptation counterparts, with the exception of the core rangers’ morphers, which are named the ShodoPhones. The Samurai Morpher and the Gold Ranger’s powers were the first to be developed for alpha testing; their tester, Hiroki’s assistant who was also one of his “triad” comrades, would go on to become ShinkenGold when the Superhero Project was launched. Akari had also managed to get her hands on a ShodoPhone as well, presumably having been stolen from UNIT.

Red Samurai Ranger: Hiroki Ichigo

Blue Samurai Ranger: Momoka Mizutani

Pink Samurai Ranger: Angelina Mouseling

Green Samurai Ranger: The Doctor

Yellow Samurai Ranger: Satoyuki Saitō

Gold Samurai Ranger: Hiroki’s assistant

Female Red Samurai Ranger: Akari Ichigo

Samurai Mode was first used by the Doctor and his companions on Destination One, but unlike in Shinkenger, they weren’t fighting demons or monsters; they were fighting Girl Power and their allies. Following that adventure, the Doctor passed his ShodoPhone on to Storm Dasher, who used it when he fought Lord Tirek alongside Twilight Sparkle on Equestria. Dasher did not transform into the Green Samurai Ranger, but he did temporarily transform into an alicorn – an unintentional foreshadowing of things to come in the Moushouden Series. Dasher gave his ShodoPhone back to the Doctor at the end of the episode.

As for the other five, they went on to fight at Sekigahara, Osaka and Kyoto (Honnōji and Nijō Castle), though they never used their Samurai Mode powers at Sekigahara. The Doctor would rejoin them when they fought the final battle in Yokohama as he had been on Trenzalore during the events of the Series 9 finale.

The year after, I wrote a “director’s cut” version of the arc which is basically just a remake but with the Samurai Mode powers given more prominence than they did during the series while also toning down on influences from Dynasty Warriors, Samurai Warriors and Final Fantasy. I also used Mega Mode outside of a Megazord setting (instead of it being a combination of power-ups) and featured Megazord finishers on human-sized opponents with the Mega Blade. Because the events of the director’s cut version are different to the original episodes, I consider them to be non-canon.

The road of the Xtreme Legend

Before Gokaiger and Decade premiered, a set of prelude stories were made for Series 10 and 11 in 2017; to complement the BBC Series 8 and 9 having 12 episodes each, I write a total of four episodes – one to replace Deep Breath (titled The Advent of the Doctor), two extra original episodes (one for each series) and an original Christmas Special (titled Dawn of the Space Pirates).

After Girl Power’s defeat, everyone began focusing on their high school studies. By 2016, the first wave of UNIT’s Superhero Project teams were launched; alongside the new Shinkengers led by Akari that replaced the beta testing team, the Gekirangers, Go-Ongers, Goseigers and Zyuohgers were formed as well. The five teams got into a conflict with the Doctor, Hiroki and his assistant while they were investigating a conspiracy involving the Clockwork Droids harvesting organs from students who had committed suicide over their studies and a company giving students unfair advantages in their studies (through cheating).

The year after everyone graduated high school (2017), Hiroki, Akari and Narutaki discover the return of Kawakara, the lost city of Akari’s grandfather, Antoni. Later that year, Narutaki went missing after she and Hiroki were freed from the possession of Evil Death (the Grim Reaper, not to be mistaken for Good Death based on the character played by Simon Farnaby in Horrible Histories) and her role as ShinkenBlue was replaced by another member of Girl Power. Around the same time, Takumi Kamijō and his team at Torchwood Pleiades became the Magirangers after testing a prototype system during the Superhero Project’s beta testing phase.

That Christmas, Hiroki encountered a demon named Suira, also named Sui after the demon in Chinese folklore that explained the origin of money in red pockets. Suira transformed Hiroki into Gyūki after having done so 17 years earlier in an effort to help him get revenge on his parents after being sent to time out. Meanwhile, the Doctor began gathering up the Gokaigers in response to the Zangyack Armada’s vanguard fleet attacking cities. They fought Shikabanen before they help the other Rangers fight Suira, who had transformed into a demonic orge named Dokkaebi (based in Korean folklore) and later combined with Gyūki and Nian (the Chinese New Year Monster) to become the Krlunk Smasher. Although the Rangers defeat the Krlunk Smasher, he grows giant and the Gokaigers form the Legendary Megazord to defeat it.

From the Doctor’s point of view, the 2017 Christmas Special and the events of Gokaiger take place between Series 11 and 12 – after Hell Bent but before The Husbands of River Song and the episodes featuring Nardole, which are collectively known as the Nardole Saga.

A look at the first wave teams

So in summary, the first wave of Superhero Project teams shown in the preludes to Gokaiger and Decade are the Magirangers, Gekirangers, Go-Ongers, Shinkengers, Goseigers, Gokaigers and Zyuohgers. For the most part, the names of their arsenal are derived from their original Super Sentai series, but there are a couple of exceptions; the Shinkengers’ arsenal uses the names from Power Rangers Samurai (as stated earlier) while the Gokaigers’ Zords and Megazord combinations uses names derived from Power Rangers Super Megaforce.

Very few teams had Megazords in Gokaiger due to time constraints; in fact, the only teams that have Megazords featured (aside from the Gokaigers) are those that have a button on their morphers to summon or combine their Zords. Out of the teams in the first wave, the Zyuohgers are in this category, though Cyber Knight and the Gosei Ground Megazord would appear mid-way into Gokaiger.

Speaking of the Shinkengers, what happened to the beta testers for the Superhero Project? Hiroki would go on to become Kamen Rider Decade; Hiroki’s assistant would retain his equipment and become ShinkenGold; the Doctor and Angelina would become part of the Gokaigers; and Momoka and Satoyuki would resign. The ShodoPhones were handed back to UNIT and four of the new Shinkengers received the Samuraizers (from Samurai) as their morphers; Akari retained her ShodoPhone when she became the official ShinkenRed.

Power-ups for the Shinkengers and Goseigers were also introduced; the Black Box and Shark Disc were introduced in Series 9, while the Super Goseigers were introduced in the 2017 Christmas Special.

And that’s all I’m going to tease for the third run of Kisekae Insights. As I stated in the last instalment, this is going to be final instalment of the second run as I want to focus on other things, including the Doctor Who Series 13 reviews and finishing off my personal project. I don’t know when I’ll begin work on the third run, but right now, I’m currently dreading the time until then because of various things, particularly in regards to current affairs.

Kisekae Insights will return, but be warned that things might not be the same. I leave you with my take on an English version of the Shinkenger opening song that I wrote in 2018 after being inspired by Psychic Lover’s take on it. For the most part it’s the same, but I modified the lyrics to fit with the tone of the Shinkenger arc in Series 9.

That’s it again from me. Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook and Tumblr to see more of my posts.

Samurai Sentai Shinkenger English Lyrics (modified by me)

Original lyrics here

Dance! Dance! Get up! Fight together! Chop! Chop! Take down Girl Power! Samurai Sentai Shinkenger Forever! Year upon year it goes This Time War never ends Humans, Time Lords and Daleks are fighting again So we are serious And we are dangerous When we see your weaknesses Your future is over! Let the words light up the sky The elements make us strong! These heroes are makin’ noise They’re fighting for us all! Swords clash, gunshots blazing loud Go Go Samurai Power Rangers! Just do it! Fight for time and for our universe! Don’t! Don’t give up! Don't be afraid We say ‘Banzai’ in the end When Rangers get together, it’s Samurai forever! That’s ‘Bushido’ Hey bring it on! Samurai Sentai Shinkenger Forever! What are we fighting for? Harmony or discord? We indeed fight for peace To understand your drive When we get serious Regrets are part of us We practice so we can fight with no more regrets! Let the words light up the sky The elements make us strong! These heroes are makin�� noise They’re fighting for us all! Flowers blossom, moon sun storm Go Go Samurai Power Rangers! Just do it! Fight for those who really believe in you! Fighting, dancing, shining, dreaming For our future, don’t be afraid! When we combine our powers We will not be beaten! That's 'Bushido' Cut with the sword! Samurai Sentai Shinkenger We are dreaming of the day when the world will be at peace If you don’t wanna understand, then we will take you down! Dance! Dance! Get up! Fight together! Chop! Chop! Take down Girl Power! Our love and courage is what powers our swords! Dance! Dance! Go Go Samurai! Chop! Chop! Go Go Power Rangers! Altogether we will break the darkness of the world That's 'Bushido' Hey bring it on! Samurai Sentai Shinkenger Forever!

[loopy777]

Nickelodeon gives you the task of writing a series based on Korra's earthbending successor with no limits on what you can do. How would you write his story?

Interesting that you say “his.” There’s no rule that the Avatars have to alternate gender, but at this point the fandom assumes it so much that I’d just go with it to avoid controversy.

Anyway, I’d probably turn Nickelodeon down if they wanted me to write Korra’s successor. I have no interest in the future that seems to be getting established in LoK. I want the franchise to stay in the past forever; there’s more than enough room, and I’d even be open to throwing away the concept of “canon” to tell stories that might merely be in-universe legends.

But, I’m going to try to answer the question in good faith. If I was a professional television writer/producer, and my career depended on saying yes to this and trying to do a good job, here’s what I’d do:

Working Title: The Last Avatar

Our star is a poor Earthlands boy. The Earth Kingdom collapsed years ago, Balkanizing into a bunching of struggling nations divided up haphazardly among various tribes, local cultures, and convenient geographical groupings. Our Boy is an Earthbender, but he hasn’t pursued any official training because it’s largely a waste of time and money. Instead, he’s been working his way through an education, learning about robotics and spirit-energy, because demand is high for that knowledge. He repairs old robots for spare money, and even has his own glitchy assistant -- who can transform into a van -- who he likes to trash-talk to show his love. He’s a huge nerd.

Actually, the only reason he can defend himself with Earthbending at all is because of a classmate and friend who’s passed on her own lessons. This girl is one of seventeen young adults who currently use the Beifong name. She’s a Metalbender using her ability to innovate with circuitry, very interested in technology and business, but she also values some of the old ways and thinks Bending is an important part of Earth culture that should not be ignored.

Our Boy knows he’s not the Avatar because the Avatar is a super-famous influencer, activist, pop-singer, and advertising icon. She lives in the Fire Nation and has green hair. You should picture Hatsune Miku for her. There are bigger celebrities, and none of her movies have been huge hits, but the Avatar still has enough culture significance that she was born famous and has managed to stay in the news.

By the way, Fire Nation culture is dominant. All the best stuff comes from the Fire Nation. Their movies, television, music, and video games are popular all over the world. Their technology is better. Their quality is life is better. They have the best doctors, the fastest internet, bigger apartments, the most prestigious schools, and the best jobs. Immigration is limited by law, in order to maintain their high quality of life.

The United Republic and the Water Tribes have seized some former Earth Kingdom territory, so their influence has expanded. The United Republic invested heavily in technology, and they’re now a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare with a government that just does whatever its corporations say. The president of the United Republic is a position that rich men use to become richer. The Water Tribes are a lot better, having managed to transition to a constitutional monarchy and maintain something like a balance between life and technology.

Note that I didn’t say “spirituality and technology,” because the two are one. All technology is spirit-powered. Spirits can meld with the internet. Spirits can inhabit robot bodies. Spirits and humans meet in abstract Virtual Realities where the difference between the two disappears.

And all of this orderly chaos is set to collapse when Our Boy accidentally Firebends during a dangerous action moment. He and Beifong Girl realize he might be the Avatar. But Hatsune Miku has demonstrated command of all four elements. On separate occasions she’s been seen and filmed Earthbending, Firebending, Waterbending, and Airbending, sometimes two at once. So how can Our Boy also do that?

Beifong Girl urges him to contact the Air Nation and the descendants of Avatar Aang to find out. Except, when he does with her family’s help, Dual-Benders -- warriors using two different elements -- try to kill him. He’s been betrayed by the Air Nation- and possibly the Beifong clan. His friend helps him get away, but she isn’t sure she can trust her family. They both go on the run, not sure what to do.

The mystery of what’s going on will drive the whole series. Here’s our cast:

Our Boy: The true Earthbending Avatar, completely untrained. He’s a poor nerd thrown into the deep end of a global conspiracy, but fortunately he has a robot who transforms into a van, so at least he has transporation.

Beifong Friend: Our Boy’s best friend. Not a love interest. She’s the youngest Beifong cousin, an Earthlands patriot who wants to raise the former Earth Kingdom out of its divided state using technology. She’s also far too gentle for her family of power-hungry vipers, but she’s still a great Earthbender and will become a Metalbender warrior before the end.

Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku: An artificial biological/spiritual construct of the Red Lotus, able to Bend two elements at any one time by swapping out a set of four spirits (all of whom are intelligent, devoted solely to her, and have different personalities), and the center of a conspiracy that she’s the Avatar. The Red Lotus built her and are using her to advance their plans. She joins the hunt for Our Boy, officially decrying him as a Disciple of a Vaatu cult trying to destroy humanity. However, she eventually begins to have thoughts of her own and resent how she’s used and abused as a tool rather than a person. She becomes our Deuteragonist, going rogue and having her own journey and arcs that intersect with Our Boy. Depending on fandom reaction, she might becomes Our Boy’s love interest, but might also become just another friend. She eventually frees her spirit friends, giving up all Bending powers.

Water Sage-Candidate: A young man who is training to be a Water Sage/Shaman. He’s a new-age hippie type who distrusts technology but likes people and spirits, wanting everyone to be nicer and more supportive to each other. He’s suspicious of what’s going on with this supposed Vatuu cult, despite his master (a Red Lotus infiltrator) telling him to trust in the true Avatar. When Our Boy and his friends come to Water Tribe territory, he joins up with them to help expose the truth.

Air Detective: An Airbender, a master detective and manhunter, who has been tasked with helping to track down Our Boy. It turns out she’s honest and completely ignorant of what’s really going on, so as she hunts Our Boy, she realizes the greater conspiracy at work- one that seems to have set its sights on the Air Nation back during the height of Avatar Korra’s influence. She’s older than the main cast and largely separate from them, but she does spend a lot of time with Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku and becomes something of a mentor to her. She struggles balancing Airbender ideals and her own cynicism about humanity, and is probably the best fighter in the story.

The Red Lotus: Our villains. They have infiltrated every level of every government in the world, and have figured how to replicate what Raava did with Wan- use a melding between spirits and humans to swap out Bending powers. They have managed to get up to a human/spirit combo being able to actively use two at a time, but they’re hot on replicating the full Avatar experience. The idea is that they eventually want to give everyone full Avatar powers, ruining the office of the Avatar and empowering everyone with the strength to topple governments and businesses. Any single person can knock over a building and kill thousands. And for those who are incompatible with the melding process and explode- well, those are necessary losses. Red Lotus foot soldiers will often have, as one of their two elements, Firebending.

Red Lotus Traitor: A NonBender history nerd from a Red Lotus family. The more he sees as he’s initiated into the family business, the more horrified he becomes, but he successfully manages to hide it- which is good, because recruits who balk tend to wind up dead in ‘accidents.’ When Our Boy comes to the Fire Nation, he and his friends encounter the Traitor, which brings them to the Red Lotus’s attention, but the Traitor finally breaks free and gets the group out, joining them.

Boss Red Lotus: The leader of the Red Lotus. A NonBender. She and her family -- siblings, a father or mother we can maybe tie to a character in LoK, and maybe a kid or spouse -- are running the whole show and have inherited the plan that the Red Lotus are executing. What separates Boss Red Lotus is her personal investment in Fake Avatar Hasune Miku. She thinks of herself as Miku’s mother, and has become more interested in creating a higher form of life than merely giving humanity Avatar powers. She grows more obsessed when Miku goes rogue and commissions a more advanced clone.

Fake Love Interest: A love interest for Our Boy who is a little bit weird and a little bit cool, very pretty in a vaguely gothy way, and fond of bugs. This is actually Koh in disguise as a human, and the romance doesn’t work out. It will be awesome, trust me.

The bulk of the series is Our Boy and his growing group of friends tooling around the world in their robot-van, chased by Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku and the Airbender Detective, slowly uncovering the Red Lotus conspiracy and eventually rising up to save the world with the help of everyone who isn’t evil. The setting is dark and inspired by science-fiction, and there’s a theme of rediscovering the past, but the past doesn’t always hold the solution. Sometimes, the past merely contains the mistakes that led to today’s problems. The redemption of the world usually comes from getting in touch with the culture of the past, and mixing that with the wondrous new technology available today.

The ending I’m envisioning is a kind of embracing of the Red Lotus’s plan, but a non-destructive form. Everyone gets all four elements, but no one is killed by it, and the power level is completely normal. The Avatar, though, is the sole person to be able to Energybend, and it’s this role -- being able to explore the limitless potential of humanity -- that makes the Avatar important going forward. The significant Red Lotus are all sucked into hell or the Fog of Lost Souls or something, except for those who die outright, with the rest being rehabilitated.

Romance will be downplayed, aside from the fakeout with Koh, but if any of the recurring characters show some chemistry, there’s room to develop it. The Fake Avatar Hatsune Miku should be designed to be the audience’s tortured, angsty, badass waifu.

The next level of development for these ideas should come from the Concept Artist team, especially focusing on the weapons used in this setting. This will be followed by a more detailed revision by me with major plot points, and then going to the writers’ room for development of the first season. Entire characters or concepts may disappear or be added during that time.

Merchandising should emphasize the Tron Lines on everyone’s clothing that glow when Bending. Also, the Robot Van can be expanded to a whole line of transforming robots toys, although the word “transform” should not appear in any official material. We see video games as a major licensing opportunity, with a possibility for “canon” stories set in the same time period, intersecting with the cartoon’s main plot. To this end, final character designs should perhaps be modeled on voice actors, so that face scans or motion capture can be employed for AAA video game appearances.

And that’s my pitch.

[arcticdementor]

My take on modern Star Trek compared to the old:

Star Trek very much embodied what liberal American white males of the 1980s and 1990s thought the future would (or should) look like: secular, sexually liberated, humanistic, meritocratic, equitable, and technological – a man’s world, basically. In this world, religion plays practically no role in public life. Problems are solved with diplomacy instead of violence. Money doesn’t exist, so there is no capitalism, greed, or want. People spend their lives bettering humanity and doing other such noble things like negotiating peace with aliens or exploring the universe in one of Starfleet’s advanced starships, each equipped with a plethora of miraculous technologies. In their leisure time, the crews of these starships visit a holographic room, the holodeck, which can conjure any fantasy into a photorealistic facsimile of the real thing.

Probably the only place in the Western world where this mentality can still be found is California’s Silicon Valley. As in the fictional world of Star Trek, men do most of the work; they advance through meritocracy; and there is something akin to a fraternal culture, irrespective of the prevailing progressive ideology. Silicon Valley is also still largely free of the odious diversity requirements imposed on the rest of society.

…

The high point of the franchise, The Next Generation, featured a mostly white liberal cast and various things white liberals liked at the time – sex appeal, food, pseudointellectualism (although handled capably by talented male writers), cutting edge tech, meritocracy, optimism, exploration, and the white man’s moralism.

Starfleet, the Federation’s military and scientific branch, was a rigorous meritocracy, just as Silicon Valley is today. Members were admitted only through a combination of senior officer recommendations, high scholastic achievement, and phenomenally high standardized test scores. Character was also paramount. Crew evaluations feature prominently in several episodes of TNG, and it was made clear to underperforming members that the starship Enterprise cuts a standard above the rest; perform or hit the road.

In the diverse world of Star Trek, the white writers imagined meritocracy would ensure whites like themselves would still have a position at the top of society (just as in Hollywood then and Silicon Valley now) despite soon becoming a minority in real life America. You’ll notice progressive humans are at the center of the Federation in Star Trek despite being a small minority in that fictional universe as well. That’s by design, conscious or not.

…

In the TNG episode The Drumhead, Picard faces down a witch hunting admiral — a woman, no less. The plot revolves around an incident that occurred on the starship Enterprise. Sabotage is suspected, and the situation is tense. The initial evidence points to a low ranking crewman who is later discovered to be of mixed race, one-quarter of the Federation’s most feared enemy. This all but convicts him in the eyes of the admiral’s tribunal. The admiral mercilessly presses her case, threatening to destroy anyone who gets in her way. She’s meant to be a caricature of conservative jingoists of the era – always scared of the Russians, racist against minorities, emotional. In Hollywood’s view of history, those were the people behind the McCarthy hearings, which this episode obviously pulls from.

…

Toward the end of the episode, Captain Picard confronts his antagonist and gives a fine speech about principle, temperament, and morality in the process. The admiral is defeated when a fellow admiral, a black male character, stands up and walks out in disgust at her actions.

This is one of the reasons why fans liked the character of Jean-Luc Picard: he was a decent, honorable man despite not being perfect himself. He had a code he lived by, and he led by example. Men like that sort of thing. Star Trek Picard, in contrast, portrays him as a bumbling moron who is always wrong and continually berated by female underlings. His view of the world is portrayed as naive or just wrong, requiring strong SJW women to take it to the enemy themselves, often employing violence – including rank murder and sadistic violence.

In another episode of TNG, white male commander Riker stands up to his white male superior — an admiral — who wishes to break the terms of a peace treaty to gain a military edge over a mortal enemy. Riker prevents him from doing so and exposes the dastardly plot. Moral of the story: principle trumps Machiavellianism.

Star Trek was very much a pre-Millennial liberal morality play whereby inspired characters (mostly white) would often stand up to authority figures (mostly white) in order to promote a general moral code — a greater authority — among fellow whites.

Consider some of the following things about Star Trek: The Next Generation and ask yourself if any of this would be allowed on television today without controversy.

…

The diverse new cast of Discovery and Picard mostly excludes white males. The only principle white men who did not appear in make-up during Discovery’s first season were either villains or openly gay. The show’s lead is a black woman who’s the best at everything, acts bizarrely hostile towards the crew and later berates the male commanding officer, captain Pike – introduced in season 2. There’s also an assortment of other female archetypes more typically seen in network television crime dramas – the dorky female comic relief, the bestest ever leader, the tech guru.

Star Trek: Picard’s white male actors, aside from TNG cameos, are mostly villains when they appear at all. Picard himself is a senile old man who contributes essentially nothing to the show. He is used as the butt of criticism from the cast. It’s clear the writers are using him as a canvas to paint their grievances with the real world. Picard — white male America — stands in the new boss’s empowered way. He lives in luxury as minority characters live in poverty. The (white) institutions he represents are all corrupt and racist. To rectify this injustice, the diverse cast must defy Star Trek convention – up to and including committing acts of cold-blooded murder (even villains don’t deserve that).

The new shows also – bizarrely — feature a dearth of straight black male actors. TNG had two; Voyager had one; DS9 had several, including a masculine male captain. The feminists who write this newer junk must feel threatened by their masculinity, a common phenomenon in modern Hollywood movies, comic books, and in network television: black men are usually removed (Star Trek), made gay (Marvel’s New Warriors), or turned into female servants (Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel – a pet to Brie Larson). So, they’ve almost entirely been excised as primary leads in the new shows. The mostly unaccomplished female writers of Discovery even reported the more accomplished (read: threatening) black male writer, Walter Mosley, to Human Resources for uttering a racial epithet (in context with writing about racism), causing him to quit the show in disgust.

Author Walter Mosley Quits ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ After Using N-Word in Writers Room

Discovery and Picard are both written by a crowd that obviously hates the demographic they are writing for, so they pepper many of the episodes with things they know that demographic will take as insults – female characters insulting male characters, underhanded jokes about masculinity or mansplaining, obnoxious female leads, incompetent white male characters who need female instruction, excessive melodrama, denigration of lore. It’s patently obvious. They aren’t even being subtle about it.

…

Fundamentally, these new shows struggle because they are written by people wholly unlike the target audience, so they are not able to appeal to them (the same is true of other ruined male franchises like Star Wars – but I’ll save that for another time). These new shows aren’t for the old audience. The new — diverse — show runners have made that clear. Star Trek now serves as a vehicle for airing out racial and gender grievances against the perceived white male audience. It’s akin to planting your tribe’s flag on another tribe’s territory. The aggrieved gets a rush from being able to rub their enemy’s face in their loss. It’s intentional.

…

Regardless, the primary audience for a show like this is heterosexual men, disproportionately white … And when minority male characters appear, they’re not supposed to be losers upstaged by their sassy, disrespectful and arrogant female subordinates. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the black male captain put his hothead female executive officer in her place more than once. In the new Treks, men are continually insulted, often for no good reason, by female crew members.

What do men like in Star Trek?

Men like technology. So, the writers of Picard introduced a magic wand to the newest iteration.

…

Men like adventure, not melodrama. So, obviously the female writers feature an inordinate number of episodes of characters crying.

…

Most of the adventure element prominent in previous shows is absent or poorly constructed in the newer ones … or ripped off from other properties, including video games. Paramount was being sued a while back for copyright infringement.

…

Men also like ship design, which was a major component of the old shows. They provided countless hours of free fan promotion across message boards and websites, they were cool locations for new episodes, and they inspired fan movies. So, obviously that had to be sidelined in the new shows. The ships, once iconic and profitable selling toy items, are now generic CGI models – totally uninspired trash hastily put together as an afterthought. The new shows can’t sell the merchandise, so the retailers have refused to license much of it.

Another thing men like? Group service – following rules, meritocracy, sacrifice for the tribe, defending territory (even the non-violent philosophical variety), that kind of thing. Well, that’s almost totally absent in Discovery and Picard. The once-honorable and meritocratic military-like Federation is portrayed as corrupt and unequal; the black female lead of Picard berates Jean-Luc in one episode for living “in his fine chateau” while she lived in poverty – again, a totally antithetical concept to the old shows.

…

The whole Federation is a dystopia with criminals and drugs and injustice all about.

Various Federation admirals in the new movies and television shows are belligerent, short-sighted, and rude; one is an outright war criminal. TNG featured at least two episodes with corrupt Federation admirals, but our show’s male heroes put them in their place by the end of the episode. Even the female captain Kathryn Janeway did this once in Voyager. Not true of these newer shows, though. Admirals berate the male characters, then go away – never to be redeemed or brought to justice.

Many of the characters in the new shows act entirely unprofessional towards each other. They are sometimes even cruel or sadistic. The female captain of one Discoveryshort Trek allowed a bumbling white male crewman (whom the female writers mocked the entire episode) to die horribly and then simply shrugged it off when asked about it, “he was an idiot” (implication: he deserved to die because he was annoying her).

…

The biggest supporters of these new incarnations, not surprisingly, are the show’s American writers – along with a few “critics”. These people lack any loyalty to a higher cause (other than themselves), are nihilistic, are sadistic, enjoy berating “the other” (men, whites, themselves even), and have practically no respect for anything they aren’t personally invested with. In other words, they are thoroughly Americanized losers.

There would be a college thesis in that observation if we lived in a better timeline. In this one, the world where the bad guys won, you are stuck reading it in a random internet comment.

I think that observation explains much of what is wrong with modern culture: the past, in many ways, was better than the present and probably will end up being better than the near future. That’s intolerable to a lot of political extremists, the very people who put us in this position in the first place. So, the past has to be destroyed; it serves as a foil to the current reigning madness. “Let the past die, kill it if you have to.” That’s why pop culture had to be denigrated. That’s why Star Trek is trash nowadays.

When conquering armies of the ancient world subdued an enemy, they often defaced the conquered tribe’s symbols – destroyed the statues, burned the temples, desecrated anything sacred; both Muslim and Christian conquerors were famous for this. Same thing here. The new regime is burning the cultural bridges so you can’t go back to the better world left behind, the one not ruled by them.

…

Although, in fairness to the ladies, it’s mostly men like Alex Kurtzman who have ruined the new shows. The guy once stated in an interview that he has a problem writing male characters. Hollywood: let’s hire that guy for Star Trek!

[jeanjauthor]

It’s a ladder, not a competition, writers.  Honor those who came before you, yes, and remember you are there to uplift those who come after you, too.

Amity gets to have a painfully obvious crush on Luz

because Catradora was so essential to the story of She-ra and actually became cannon

because Steven Universe got to show so many wlw relationships - even a lesbian wedding -

because the seeds of Bubbline planted by Rebecca blossomed into a kiss in the finale

because Korra and Asami got an implied happily ever after.

And I’ll add more:  because we had seven seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess building up the bisexual relationships (plural, both men and women!) of Xena and Gabriel, with ever-increasing subtexts about their own relationship together...until we got that final kiss between the two in the final episode in 2001... 

because we had Jadzia Dax kissing Lenara on Deep Space: 9‘s episode Rejoined in 1995. 

^^^This was the first primetime romantic kiss between two women on television in America.  It was a big deal back then when it happened, even if nobody today remembers it being so.  (There were even write-ups on it in local newspapers and magazines, too; we didn’t have the internet that you know of today back in 1995 to look up things casually.)

There was even talk in Star Trek fandom about how ST was again leading the way for the rights of those mature adults who wanted to love “outside the bounds of normal decency” as their detractors tried to cry.  We were cheering to each other about how Trekkies got that first primetime interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura (ST:TOS) into the world’s eyes and ears and minds.  And we were cheering how we again were leading the way with the first women-loving-women kiss on DS:9.

...Just a reminder, this kiss was bisexual, not lesbian; both of the characters’ Trill-symbiotes having been multiple genders in various relationships throughout their lives. The currently involved genders do not strictly define these characters’ sexuality--if you want that, you have to go to Beverly Crusher in Next Gen’s episode The Host, where the doctor was okay with the Trill symbiote going from an alien guy to Riker, another guy, but then upset when the next proper host was female.

Yes, they tried to write the swap as discomfort with the swapping, but it showed discomfort with wlw relationships--this was a case where showing the actions of the story was actually worse than telling the story.  And no, I do not blame Gates McFadden.  It was 1991, not 1995, the boundaries hadn’t been pushed far enough yet...and because of that seeming rejection of bisexuality, there was enough backlash among fandom to the perceived rejection of wlw that the writers & producers of DS:9 went for the story with Jadzia Dax and Lenara Kahn despite it being very risky for its time.

So if you want to talk about who did the most, who risked the most, who started the bonfire...it wasn’t a bonfire.  it was a single little wooden match that almost went out.  And we got nothing but ashes and embers for a long time, barely living coals that slowly grew throughout the Xena series, and in other locations, and eventually became hope of more than embers and ashes in the Korra series...

Every single rung on the ladder has been important.

Let me repeat that:

EVERY SINGLE RUNG ON THE QUEER LADDER HAS BEEN IMPORTANT IN OUR CLIMB TO ACCEPTANCE AND FREEDOM.

Honor all of that, and then go build more rungs on different branching paths for folks to climb.  Light more fires under the asses of producers and directors and writers and artists.  Because we’re still far too close to the shitpits of discrimination, disdain, imprisonment, and the risk of being murdered for simply existing with an inborn love for people who look like us, instead of strictly & solely some binary opposite.

Honor the steps taken just to get here, and keep building many, many more story-stairs.

I hate that there are people who constantly compare wlw representation in cartoons by putting down the cartoon that did the most before it. Like, this shit's a ladder, not a pyramid.

I keep seeing posts about people calling out people who shit on Catradora's development in favor of how Lumity is going, and it doesn't make sense to me. You can't compare things like this because you don't see all of the fighting and struggling that goes on behind the scenes to get a love confession between two female leads? Noelle herself said that she had to fight to get the story she wanted to tell out there, and found ways to weave Catradora into the story of the show that they couldn't ignore it...but people want to complain because it took the entirety of the show to get what we got compared to Amity losing her shit in front of Luz in the first season of The Owl House.

Getting proper representation in a show - a "children's show" at that - is hard, and is a constant uphill battle. Amity gets to have a painfully obvious crush on Luz because Catradora was so essential to the story of She-ra and actually became cannon because Steven Universe got to show so many wlw relationships - even a lesbian wedding - because the seeds of Bubbline planted by Rebecca blossomed into a kiss in the finale because Korra and Asami got an implied happily ever after. And there are probably so many more examples that have and will happen because of the work that these shows did.

Tl;dr: I understand seeing how little we actually got in terms of representation in retrospect, but we can't put down these pieces of media, because doing so invalidates not only the importance of these milestones, but the hard work and sacrifices of these showrunners who just wanted to create a story for people like us.

[esonetwork]

Timestamp #SJA19: The Gift

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/timestamp-sja19-the-gift/

Timestamp #SJA19: The Gift

Sarah Jane Adventures: The Gift (2 episodes, s03e06, 2009)

Eat your vegetables before they eat you.

The Bannerman Road Gang chases a disguised Slitheen with a stolen matter compressor into a warehouse. The plan is to compress the planet’s carbon into a giant diamond. When the Slitheen gets away, Sarah Jane calls K9 to act as a bloodhound.

The gang ends up in a standoff with the Slitheen agents, but the world is saved when two orange-skinned Slitheen materialize and apprehend the bad guys.

It turns out that they are Blathereen, another family from Raxacoricofallapatorius. The planet holds many families, but only the Slitheen are criminals. These two Bathereen, Tree and Leef, wish to show their appreciation with a dinner party, and Rani offers her home as a host.

The dinner party goes off without a hitch. The Blathereen talk about Raxacoricofallapatorius and how it was once the jewel of the Raxas Alliance until the Slitheen destroyed the reputation. They offer a gift, a pot of rakweed, which is supposedly a staple food on Raxacoricofallapatorius. They want Sarah Jane to act as an ambassador to end starvation on Earth with this single plant.

Sarah Jane and Rani are skeptical, and Clyde is suspicious. After the dinner, Sarah Jane asks Mr. Smith to analyze the plant but he finds nothing harmful. The gang heads to bed to prepare for their upcoming biology test. Clyde hasn’t studied, so he hatches a plan to borrow K9 to cheat on the exam.

The next morning, Luke searches for his tie in the attic and discovers that the rakweed has released harmful spores into the atmosphere. When he inhales the spores, he gets sick. That’s a first since the Bane made him the vision of perfect health. 

Luke stays home from school while Rani heads in and discovers Clyde’s plan. He has K9 transmitting him answers via an earpiece, and the plan makes Rani furious and fearful.

Sarah Jane and Mr. Smith discuss the rakweed’s mutation. The plant hunts its victims and drains their energy. The plant is spreading, and reports indicate that people are collapsing with black and red marks on their skin. At the current rate of propagation, the plant will have seeded the whole of London within hours, and the Earth within a week.

The rakweed issues another burst of spores and Mr. Smith saves Sarah Jane by using his cooling fans to divert the spore cloud. His energy is depleted as a result, but he’s still able to commence work on an antidote. Unfortunately, it won’t be ready in time. Sarah Jane puts the plant in her safe to block any further spores.

The rakweed spores infect Clyde and Rani’s teacher, sending the students into a panic. Clyde, Rani, and K9 are trapped in the school. By chance, while trying to escape the school, they determine that the sound of a bell causes the plant’s destruction.

Sarah Jane traces the Blathereen teleportation trajectory to Antarctica and follows them to their ship where they are gloating about their conquest of Earth. The trip is a one-way event, but Sarah Jane takes a Super-Soaker filled with vinegar and demands their help.

Unfortunately, the Blathereen trick and restrain her. She finds out that the rakweed is addictive and the Blathereen intend to use Earth as a farm to corner the galactic market. Leef and Tree reveal that they are descended from both the noble Blathereen and the criminal Slitheen, products of an interclan marriage. 

Sarah Jane learns that the plants require communication to survive, then escapes and teleports home. While she checks in on Luke, K9 amplifies the school bell and eradicates the plants within the school building. Clyde connects with Mr. Smith via K9 and shares their knowledge. Mr. Smith uses every electronic device in the affected area to transmit a signal at 1421.09 Hertz. The plants are destroyed and the infected are cured.

Saved by the bell, eh?

Furious, the Slitheen-Blathereen teleport to the attic and prepare to murder Sarah Jane. Mr. Smith activates the signal again, causing the rakweed in the alien stomachs to react quite negatively. The aliens explode in a burst of orange goo, covering the entire attic.

Thank goodness that this is the season finale. Cleaning that set is going to be a pain in the ass.

Clyde cleans the attic and the gang settles in for a nice picnic lunch and Sarah Jane muses on the possibility that one day some alien races will want to help humanity. That through friendship, the Earth could become a shining example to the entire universe.

The idea of breaking the Raxacoricofallapatorian monoculture is great. All too often in science fiction and fantasy, the cultures that we meet are one-note. Doctor Who is no exception. The big failing here is that we don’t break that tradition, and while we see an open door for non-villainous Raxacoricofallapatorians to exist, we continue the stereotype that all of them are nefarious.

That’s a lot of lost potential. The story could have been a great analogy for accidental introduction of invasive plant and animal species, cultural miscommunication, or even imperialism and colonial politics. The Blathereen gift could have been a legitimate olive branch given Sarah Jane’s galactic reputation, a miracle for any other planet but Earth, and the door of friendship could have been opened by having these two disparate groups working together.

Alas, no. Instead we have the evil aliens trying to take over Earth and our heroes finding the solution completely by chance.

The story does play with established mythology again, introducing the Raxas Alliance with Raxacoricofallapatorius, Clom, Raxacoricovarlonpatorius, and Clix. We also get mentions of several UK locales including Ealing (first mentioned in Ghost Light and Survival, but returning throughout Series Four), Perivale (from Ghost Light and Survival), and Chiswick (first seen in The Runaway Bride, but featured in Series Four).

The discussion of Sarah Jane Smith’s tendency to improvise was a nice callback to the Third Doctor in The Five Doctors, as was her lament that there should have been another way aside from violence to save the world, ala Warriors of the Deep. A fun (but disgusting) callback was Clyde’s “why does this always happen to me” when splattered with goo, which happened twice in Revenge of the Slitheen and Enemy of the Bane.

Finally, I find the K9-Mr. Smith rivalry to be pretty humorous. Two supercomputers who cannot stand one another… wacky fun.

But really, this story ends up fairly average and a little disappointing given its lack of original thought the pure amount of luck involved. It could have been so much more.

Rating: 3/5 – “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

UP NEXT – Sarah Jane Adventures: Series Three Summary

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

[feynites]

(1/2) omg I have to tell you that I just came across your tumblr post about "Evil Chancellor Traytor" & it made me laugh so hard and reminded me so much of my own childhood in which me & my sister had all kinds of elaborate characters for our society of toys (including one of my mom's old Barbies from the 60's whose hands had been chewed by mice in my grandmother's attic) & my little brother also used to follow our stories-anyway the point is! What you wrote was hilarious & I would totally...

(2/2) ... read more tales from your society of childhood toys! It was hilarious and awesome! Also you seem really cool! Ok that is all! :)

-

Thank you!! X3

Having siblings you get along with seems to be a real boon on this front, it seems - lots of energy to bounce off of, and someone to consistently share and re-tell all the stories with. 

We played a ton of games, although probably none as easily summarized in an entertaining short story as Evil Chancellor Traytor. But. Lemme see... uhm... oh! Okay, we can try the story of the king who was friends with him. King Bazooka.

To begin, we’ll need context. One of the major sources of toys when my siblings and I were a bit younger was the local convenience store (which my dad ran... into the ground). But, while it was around, it had a selection of cheap plastic action figures. Which we could acquire at-cost, and so, we had plenty of them ourselves. This is where we got our cheap Power Rangers knock-off toys (one of which would eventually become the king mentioned in Traytor’s story).

For reference, they looked like this:

There were a few basic models, all of them very ripped, in a variety of colours ranging from the above yellow and red, to blue and pink and white and black and so on and so forth. Their limbs could move and their knees could bend, and their feet and hands could also be rearranged to some extent (I think, maybe not the hands) but they weren’t exactly durable, so their limbs popped off pretty regularly.

Anyway, we had a veritable army of these toys, but also something of a problem with them at first. See, my sister and I were both girls, but none of the models for these toys came with the usual, y’know, curvy boob-and-hips figure that would typically denote them as women. There were pink ones, and of course we were well familiar with the concept that pink = girl, but the pink Ranger Warriors were also savagely ripped. But we didn’t want to have an army of all boys, how would we apply our usual range of soap opera cliches? Who would get unexpectedly pregnant or engaged? In space?

The solution came by way of a library book about female body building, that I had semi-recently discovered and quickly recollected. I, in all my worldly older sister glory, asserted that these toys were totally capable of being women, they were just really muscular women. Skepticism was expressed by my younger brother and sister. The Book was called for. A magazine was acquired instead. Images were found of ripped lady body builders, and scrutinized for accuracy.

Skepticism was retracted. It was agreed that this solution worked, and that, in the tradition set before us by the Power Rangers television show, all pink and yellow versions of the toys (and any others we considered suitably effeminate for some reason or another, but definitely those ones) were The Girl Ones. Dilemma resolved, we immediately set about playing with them, of course, and constructing stories around them and incorporating them into our existing populace of toys. We discovered some neat stuff about these action figures. One was that their hands could hold onto stuff pretty well, and were quite suited to dangling them off of lines and chords and the attachments for blinds and tying them to strings and whipping them around like helicopters. ‘Space exploration’ required a lot of this. Of course, this also meant that our most intrepid heroes tended to be the ones who suffered injuries like ‘lost thumb’, and ‘severed limb’, and ‘complete dismemberment’. 

Most of the time, though, when something broke, it could be popped back into place. Thumbs, torsos, and heads were the general exception to this, I seem to recall. But every so often the ball that locked into the socket for a limb’s joint would also break, rather than just popping loose, and then the only hope was glue (which would reattach the limb, but also result in ‘mobility issues’ where it couldn’t move around at all).

So... in essence, we had an army of space-faring disabled gender non-conforming lady bodybuilders, and their brothers/husbands/boyfriends/etc, protecting the universe. We developed ridiculously deep attachments to some of these toys, with all their wonky limbs and wobbly knees and scratched paint, and we’d do our best to keep them away from the dog (but the dog didn’t go for them too often, because the plastic was too hard), and also any adults who might throw them away.

Eventually, though, the convenience store closed, and we no longer had easy access to new Ranger Warriors, or even the option of replacing ones who got too damaged to keep playing with. So my sister and I determined that it was time for our space adventurers to retire. No more whipping them down staircases or tying them to fan blades. They became Space Veterans, who would walk among the populace of other toys, and recount gruesome war stories and endure PTSD flashbacks and sometimes sit outside the tavern, drinking and looking up at the stars. Wistful, but by and large also resigned to the fact that their space exploration days were done, and they had other things to do. Quieter lives to get on with.

All but one.

Bazooka.

See, each Ranger Warrior was named after some kind of weapon. Names ranged from the creatively-dubbed ‘Gun’, to stuff like ‘Scythe’ or ‘Artillery’. The last Ranger Warrior we got before the store went under was a red and silver one, and by then most of the standard names were taken, so we dubbed him ‘Bazooka’. With a name like that, it was possibly inevitable that he was kind of an over-dramatic hothead.

But Bazooka had no battle scars, no lost or broken limbs. He had barely gotten a chance to fight in the Space Wars before his unit was recalled, and the peace treaties were signed. His older sister had a medal of Highest Honours, and had lost mobility in both of her arms, and could tell tall tales about the days when her unit would wade through alien wilds on daring missions. Bazooka was still pretty fresh. Signing up was supposed to be his chance for glory, his chance to prove himself! But instead, he had been washed out with all the old-timers, too.

Even though our space heroes might have retired, though, not all of their enemies did. One of the treaties signed granted an embassy to the Happy Meal Barbies. Twin sisters, forever rooted in place against plastic stands, with eerily off-model eyes. One of them had a bicycle prop, but neither of them could actually move off of their stands, because they were actually alien shapeshifters who had... misunderstood some images of humans, before they ‘locked in’ their final forms and found themselves stuck with them. So one just had this bike, fused to her, that she never rode, and that was technically part of her body. The other I don’t recollect as vividly.

Anyway, they were evil, like genuinely to the bone evil, but also sometimes sympathetic because one of them was part bike. And so of course when the dog claimed the old king, they hatched a scheme to become the Queens of Action Figure Dystopia.

The details of that particular adventure are lost to the sands of time. What is known, though, is that it involved a lot of hexes, and a giant purple marble called The Esper, and when all was said and done the twins only managed to be queens for a short period of time before they were overthrown. In a scene ripped straight from The Transformers Movie (the old cartoon one, not the Michael Bay stuff that was nowhere to be seen yet), Bazooka touched The Esper and ended up becoming the next king by way of ancient whatsits and magical such-and-such, regardless of his appalling lack of actual qualifications. All hail the new king!

He sucked at it. For a long time. The theme of ‘Bazooka has no goddamn idea what he’s doing’ was a pretty substantial one, in my memory, but it probably only lasted for a few days before he started getting his shit in gear and tried to solve problems with methods that did not require explosives. And he earned the friendship of his Evil Chancellor, who he would come to trust above all others and would not stand to hear besmirched (of course, to most other people’s eyes, this just looked like a resilient strain of his incompetence, and general opinion was that Bazooka was well-meaning-but-dim, and Evil Chancellor Traytor was... well... evil).

By the time Traytor died, Bazooka was among the last of the remaining Ranger Warriors. Many had been thrown out by then, culled in an effort to curtail our childish messes because, of course, nearly all of them were visibly broken in some way. Others had been misplaced or destroyed in any number of ways. Bazooka’s sister was long gone, and so were my two favourites, and pretty much it was just down to the king, who had grown weary even if his parts still moved and his armour was unscratched. The deaths of so many of his friends and loved ones weighed upon him. In his way, he had always been separate from them, always straddled a divide as someone not quite a veteran, not quite a hero, not quite a politician. He never really achieved any of the greatness he sought. Only the wisdom to realize that this greatness had probably never existed in the first place.

When he buried himself in Traytor’s name, it was, in many respects, the final chapter of the space heroes’ saga. In the end, few of them met happy fates. But while they were around, they witnessed the cosmos from the edge of spinning fan blades, and got possessed by alien brain worms who made them try to drown their best friends in the kitchen sink, and found out that they were secretly half snake alien and had mental breakdowns over it, and maintained orbital facilities in obscure parts of space where the only company they had for months at a time was the voice on the other side of a quantum transmission, and even became royalty (a few times).

So, as a toy’s existence might go, none of them did too badly, either.

[hollywriteslightly]

A place to call home

"You can't go home again," wrote Thomas Wolfe. For most of my life I've railed against accepting this unbearable truth, stubbornly searching in vain for a way back to homes that were lost to me; those of wood and nails, those found in other people, and, maybe the most elusive, a sense of home and belonging within myself. For all that time spent searching, what I never paused to consider was that I'd always held a way home very literally in the palm of my hand. I've wanted to be a writer since I was three years old, the age when my mother taught me to read. Our family home was on the northern end of the Gold Coast, a block from a glittering, shallow estuary of the Pacific Ocean called the Broadwater. I was always outdoors, in Mum's subtropical, ever-blooming garden – full of silver-green ironbark, scarlet bottlebrush and pink flowering tea trees – or at the sea; I could smell the salty pungency through my bedroom window. I used my life savings to leave Australia for England to give my writing dreams a wholehearted crack … I’d never been to Europe before, I was alone, and I knew no one. Illustration: Simon Letch My favourite stories were ones that reflected the landscapes I lived in: May Gibbs' Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, and Pixie O'Harris's Marmaduke the Possum. Both were tales embedded in Australian flora and fauna, told from European storytelling perspectives. As soon as I learnt to write and read, I started writing stories about gumtree kingdoms, paperbark queens, soldier crab warriors and wattle witches. When Mum added Indigenous Australian books to my library, such as Dick Roughsey's The Rainbow Serpent and The Quinkins, my fascination with the relationship between stories and landscapes deepened. As I grew older and began to choose my own books, I turned to young-adult novels and fairy tales, most of which were European or American; the culture of Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club also mirrored most of the television and films I watched. When I was nine my family moved from Australia to North America. We rented a home in Vancouver, which we used as our base while we lived and travelled in a campervan from national park to national park throughout Canada and the US. The experience was like jumping into one of Mary Poppins' chalk drawings; suddenly I was in the world I'd read about in the adventures of the Wakefield twins, seen on Sunday night Disney television, and absorbed at the movies. North American landscapes, both wild and suburban, created an exotic sense of wonder and pure escapism that my homeland surroundings couldn't compete with. A couple of years later, on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I noticed in a vague way that the stories I was drawn to writing were always set overseas, even if the setting was only implied. It didn't feel like a conscious decision to separate my storytelling from my homeland, it was a default in my imagination. In my early 20s I moved inland to live and work in Australia's dramatically beautiful Western Desert, learning and sharing culture and stories with Anangu colleagues. For the first time I noticed a sense of Australian people, weather, bodies of water, flowers, and bushland creeping onto my page. But that wasn't to last; the desert was a landscape that became a home I loved and lost. I didn't leave because I wanted to. I left the desert because I was fleeing a violent relationship. This was not a new phenomenon to me. I had lived with male-perpetrated violence before. Ongoing research shows how traumatic experience changes the brain. According to author Michele Rosenthal, for trauma survivors who go on to develop symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder – an unmitigated experience of anxiety related to the past trauma – the shift from reactive to responsive mode never occurs. Instead, the brain holds the survivor in a constant reactive state. In my case, I lived with high-functioning fear and anxiety as a result of trauma. One of the ways this manifested was in my relationship with Australia. "Memory is the fourth dimension to any landscape," wrote Janet Fitch. By my late 20s, everything about home caused me pain and fear. Accumulated memories were embedded everywhere I'd ever been, in every sense and memory: the smell of the sea, the changing hues of red dirt. The feeling of summer heat softening in dusk air, and saltwater tightening my skin as it dried. Gum leaves hushing each other in the strengthening wind and the deep growl of thunderstorms; the smell of rain hitting baked dry earth. The unholy screech of cockatoos and drunken joy of rainbow lorikeet song at sunrise, and the haunting scents of wattle and honey grevillea in bloom. I tried different cities and jobs in Australia, but lived with the unending feeling that I belonged nowhere. I understand now that it wasn't only cultural influences that caused me to crave an escape from the familiarity of home in my writing. It was also my brain's response to trauma. Writing stories set elsewhere was an act of refuge; I wrote myself away from places that weren't safe, into fictional ones that were. The tipping point came during dinner with a trusted friend, who held space for us to talk about the debilitating sickness of shame as a result of trauma, and its consequential stasis. Why don't you go? I remember her asking. Make a new home, somewhere totally different. But choose a place that takes you towards writing. Don't leave yourself completely. I remember how time slowed between us at the dinner table as I took in her words. There was a spark in my belly as I considered following my childhood dream, the one thing that trauma had not extinguished. What would become of my life if I tried to follow and honour that one constant in how I identified and understood myself? An old memory arose: sitting at my childhood desk with the window open, sea breeze blowing in while, oblivious, I hand-wrote stories full of wonder. Everything I hoped for was possible. Six months after that dinner conversation, I used my life savings to leave Australia for England to give my writing dreams a wholehearted crack: I accepted a place at university in Manchester to do my master's of creative writing. I'd never been to Europe before, I was alone, and I knew no one. The contrast of the moody, consistently grey north-west of England to the extreme weather and bright colour of central eastern Australia was a deep shock. No matter though how I struggled with the lack of sunlight, the colourless skies and a dampness I could feel in my bones, it was also – immediately – a place of deep relief. Manchester was a tabula rasa; fear and anxiety were still enormous parts of my learnt behavioural responses, but, for maybe the first time in my independent adult life, I didn't panic about what or who might be around every proverbial corner. In my first week I met the kindest man I've ever known and somehow knew enough to not turn away from the sense of safety and sun-warmth being in his company gave me. I was on different time, under a different sky, with different trees, seasons, light, wildlife, cultures and people. And I'd gotten myself there to write, something I hadn't done in a long time. There was a brief period a few years earlier when I'd tried, but it had caused too much conflict in my relationship at the time. Held liable for the wandering depth and breadth of my imagination, I had hidden away my lifelong calling to write. Every new morning in Manchester, my mind seemed to unfurl a little bit more with another day of freedom and possibility. I took to my northern life with as much zest and gusto as I could muster. I started writing and, again, vaguely noticed most of my new writing was set everywhere and anywhere but Australia. I didn't return until 2012, three years after I'd left; I shook with fear for most of the long-haul flight to Brisbane. Homecoming was painful, poignant, anxious and beautiful. My fear was mainly unfounded, like a child's fear of the dark. When I returned to England six weeks later, a question began to form that I'd not considered before. It niggled and agitated deeply in my mind, a pea under a princess's mattresses. I wouldn't turn to it, I wouldn't ask it. I didn't want to have to answer. What does it mean to exile ourselves from the places that make us? Back in Manchester, a couple of years passed. I was writing regularly and working on storytelling projects that took me to places in the UK and Europe I never expected to go. I was in a healthy, loving relationship with a kind man. I felt safe. I began to trust myself. At the same time, the longer I stayed away from Australia, the louder the country started to call to me. In my dreams, in my memories and most of all, in the gaping spaces between the lines of everything I wrote. In 2014, when I sat down and wrote the first line of my first novel, it was immediately clear that the story was set in Australia. Even more surprising and unfamiliar to me was how utterly right it felt. I wrote the entire first draft of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart in Manchester. Over 12 months my office, home, and wherever possible, wardrobe, became a trove of Australian native flora, scents, photos, art, music, poetry and objects. I was driven to embody my story's world as much as possible, insatiably hungry for the sea I grew up beside; the feeling of salt on my skin; the mystifying green sugar cane fields at the end of my grandmother's street; the peach and violet-blue sunsets I watched from my mum's verandah; the wildflowers and red dirt of my old desert home. Safe to freely remember the landscapes that meant home to me caused a hunger like first love. It was blissful, unstoppable agony to revive them to life on the page. It was blissful, unstoppable agony to realise I was writing my way back home to them and them to me; I was coming home to myself. I'm writing this at my desk in Manchester in mid-November, when the holly bushes and rowan trees have burst into red-berried bloom and night draws in at 4.30pm. People around me are buttoning up for winter. All this time of year signals to me is home: in a couple of weeks I'll pack my suitcase stuffed with togs, thongs and cotton dresses, and make what has become an annual pilgrimage south for a long slurp of summer in Mum's garden. The journey home has grown easier since 2012. With the publication this year of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, returning has become outright magical, and in all my years of travel the international arrivals gate at Brisbane Airport is still the best destination I know. The beauty of clutching my mum and stepdad, grinning with teary faces as we walk out into the sweltering humidity and I catch my first glimpse of gumtrees in their native soil, fills my heart like nothing else. Until I wrote Lost Flowers, I had thought that to escape trauma I needed to separate myself from everything that reminded me of it. But, it turns out home is deeper than pain, deeper than love. Those roots go deeper. The landscapes, flora and fauna that raised me will never be any further from me than the microsecond between my heart's beat or the unseeable dark in the blink of my eye. Those places are always there. Here. Home. Writing has been my homecoming in all senses, to places made of wood and nails, to accepting and reciprocating the love and kindness of others, and to learning that I wholly belong to myself. Maybe this is what Thomas Wolfe meant: we can never go back to what was. We can't go home again, to home as it was when we lost it. But we can find our own ways to return, anew. And in those ways, maybe everything we hope for can be possible.

© Holly Ringland 

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend Summer 2018 reading issue: 10 short stories by 10 big authors. ​ With much gratitude to Editor, Katrina Strick. 

[eichy815]

Fall Fusion 2019 (CBS)

In another month, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and The CW are slated to unveil their primetime rosters for the 2019-20 network television season.  Adding an unprecedented complication, this year, is the unresolved standoff between the WGA (Writers Guild of America) and ATA (Association of Talent Agents).

NBC and Fox announce their fall schedules on May 13, followed by ABC on May 14 and CBS on May 15.  Bringing up the rear will be The CW on May 16.

The “bubble shows” for this season, which most likely won’t know their fates until May:  Blindspot, The Village, The Enemy Within, Manifest, A.P. Bio, and I Feel Bad on NBC; For The People, Whiskey Cavalier, The Fix, Single Parents, and The Kids Are Alright on ABC; Madam Secretary, Bull, Ransom, Instinct, Life in Pieces, Murphy Brown, FAM, and Happy Together on CBS; The 100, All-American, Roswell New Mexico, and In the Dark on The CW; and Lethal Weapon, The Gifted, The Orville, The Passage, Proven Innocent, and REL on Fox.

So, as I’ve been doing for the past several years, here is the roster I have dreamed up for the broadcast networks when the Big Five trot out their autumn slates in a few weeks.  I also include potential backup plans for the spring months, depending on which TV series fail or succeed.

When a show is picked up for the fall, it usually gets a 13-episode order – which can then be extended (usually via a “Back-Nine” order), if the show performs well enough.  Some freshmen series fall short of receiving a full 22 episodes (usually with an 16- or 18-episode order).  If the show stays far enough above the network’s average in terms of ratings and demos (the estimated number of viewers between the ages of 18-49, who are coveted by advertisers), it will most likely return for the following season.

As for the series that are held over to be midseason replacements:  they usually get 13-episode orders, as well.  Sometimes, a program that looks like more of a gamble might only get picked up for 6, 8, or 10 episodes instead.  If those shows attain a significant audience when they step in to fill gaps anytime between November and May, they may also find themselves on the next fall schedule.  

There are yet other TV series that are intended to be “limited series” or an “event series” – airing for a finite period of time during one predetermined juncture of the year – similar to many original cable television shows intentionally designed with shorter runs.  Fox and The CW have gradually transitioned to more of a year-round format for their programming, and ABC, CBS, and NBC should follow suit over the next two or three years.  For this reason, we may see more of the broadcast networks “time-sharing” different programs within the same time slots as they transition from winter to spring to summer and back to autumn.

After all, there are a limited number of available time slots on the primetime schedule.  With the frequency of limited-run “event programming,” we should expect to see less of the traditional model where one solitary series occupies one specific time slot for nine months of original programming (followed by three months of reruns).

(All times are Eastern/Pacific; subtract one hour for the Central/Mountain time zones)

(New shows highlighted in bold)

Featured network for today’s column…

CBS

Sunday

7:00 – 60 Minutes

8:00 – God Friended Me

9:00 – NCIS:  Los Angeles

10:00 – SEAL Team (fall/winter) / Madam Secretary (spring/summer)

The success of God Friended Me and the stability of NCIS: Los Angeles can lend lead-up support to SEAL Team, which has struggled to reach coveted demographics in its Wednesday night slot.  Midseason (or Summer 2020), Madam Secretary can be waiting in the wings to give viewers an event-style glimpse of Elizabeth McCord’s journey to the presidency (with an abridged seventh and final season possible in 2021, if she wins the election).\

Monday

8:00 – The Neighborhood

8:30 – Carol’s Second Act (with possible Back-Nine) / Broke (spring)

9:00 – Criminal Minds (fall) / Man With A Plan (winter/spring)

9:30 – Criminal Minds (fall) / The Emperor of Malibu (winter/spring)

10:00 – Blue Bloods

Building on the prosperity of The Neighborhood, the high-profile Patricia Heaton sitcom Carol’s Second Act would seem to be sure bet to carry over much of the former’s audience.  Criminal Minds would air its 10-episode swan song in the middle hour up through November sweeps, and Blue Bloods could be relocated from Friday to Monday in order to stabilize that time slot (and make room on Fridays for Magnum P.I. to join MacGyver and Hawaii Five-0 forming a three-hour block of Nostalgia TV).

Broke, a sitcom featuring Pauley Perrette of NCIS, would receive a midseason tryout here.  Meanwhile, reliable utility player Man with a Plan can take over for Criminal Minds in December and January, followed by Ken Jeong’s new sitcom The Emperor of Malibu.  Any leftover new sitcoms with shorter orders could be placed on Mondays in April or May, contingent upon the broadcast timelines of Carol’s Second Act, Broke, and/or The Emperor of Malibu.

Tuesday

8:00 – NCIS

9:00 – FBI / FBI: Most Wanted (spring)

10:00 – NCIS: New Orleans

There’s no reason to believe CBS won’t continue to nurture FBI in-between the NCIS mothership and its New Orleans spinoff.  And, with the offshoot FBI: Most Wanted in the works, Dick Wolf’s first CBS-based spinoff can be tried out here for 8-10 episodes in the spring.

Wednesday

8:00 – Survivor (fall/spring) / The Amazing Race (winter)

9:00 – Courthouse (with possible Back-Nine) / Tommy (spring)

10:00 – Bull

Courthouse (not to be confused with the short-lived 1995 series of the same name) – headlined by CSI alum Marg Helgenberger – can benefit from Survivor as its lead-in, while simultaneously being compatible with Bull.  In the spring, Edie Falco’s new cop drama, Tommy, should receive a limited run in that same slot.

Thursday

8:00 – Young Sheldon

8:30 –  The Unicorn (with possible Back-Nine) / Life in Pieces (spring)

9:00 – Mom

9:30 – Our House (with possible Back-Nine) / Bob Hearts Abishola (spring)

10:00 – S.W.A.T.

Following The Big Bang Theory’s retirement, CBS will likely turn to Young Sheldon to lead off the night.  Pairing it with another single-camera family sitcom would be the smartest strategy; The Unicorn, starring Walton Goggins, is the only contender in the running that fits this bill.  The post-Mom slot at 9:30 should be utilized while Mom is still hot; this is where I would place Katherine Heigl’s multi-cam family sitcom Our House.

S.W.A.T. has remained fairly stable, and will probably return in its established time slot.  If The Unicorn flails, Life in Pieces can be reserved for midseason. Similarly, if Our House doesn’t receive a back-order, Billy Gardell’s return to CBS in Bob Hearts Abishola might also be compatible with Mom (especially since it comes from the same creative team).

Friday

8:00 – MacGyver

9:00 – Hawaii Five-0

10:00 – Magnum P.I.

As I said earlier in this article:  I would transplant Magnum P.I. over from Monday onto Friday.  Together, MacGyver, Hawaii Five-0, and Magnum P.I. would provide Friday night viewers with a synergistic slate of nostalgic remakes – not to mention the potential for many crossover episodes, seeing how all three of these series are likely set in the same universe.  The loyal audience of Blue Bloods should follow it to Monday night (where Bull has been struggling).

MIDSEASON:  Undercover Boss (16 episodes), The Amazing Race (13 episodes), Life in Pieces (16-22 episodes), Madam Secretary (18-22 episodes), FBI: Most Wanted (10 episodes), Tommy (13 episodes), Evil (13 episodes), The Emperor of Malibu (13 episodes), Bob Hearts Abishola (13 episodes), Broke (8 episodes)

LATER THIS MONTH (APRIL 2019)

The Amazing Race (CBS)

Life in Pieces (CBS)

The 100 (The CW)

Bosch (Netflix)

The Son (AMC)

Cuckoo (Netflix)

Tales (BET)

Cobra Kai (YouTube Premium)

Top Gear (BBC America)

The Protector (Netflix)

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Netflix)

Deep State (Epix)

MAY 2019

The Bachelorette (ABC)

Animal Kingdom (TNT)

Elementary (CBS)

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC)

iZombie (The CW)

Lucifer (Netflix)

Sneaky Pete (Amazon Prime)

What Would You Do? (ABC)

Beat Shazam (Fox)

Archer (FX)

Good Witch (Hallmark)

MasterChef (Fox)

American Ninja Warrior (NBC)

America’s Got Talent (NBC)

Bill Nye Saves the World (Neflix)

Chrisley Knows Best (USA)

Our Cartoon President (Showtime)

Southern Charm (Bravo)

Good Bones (HGTV)

Fleabag (Amazon Prime)

The Rain (Netflix)

Secrets of the Zoo (National Geographic WILD)

She’s Gotta Have It (Netflix)

Vida (Starz)

Pure (WGN America)

Property Brothers (HGTV)

JUNE 2019

Instinct (CBS)

Fear the Walking Dead (AMC)

Big Brother (CBS)

The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu)

Celebrity Family Feud (ABC)

Pose (FX)

The $100,000 Pyramid (ABC)

The Wall (NBC)

Claws (TNT)

Masters of Illusion (The CW)

Match Game (ABC)

So You Think You Can Dance? (Fox)

Whose Line is it Anyway? (The CW)

Queen of the South (USA)

Good Trouble (Freeform)

The Affair (Showtime)

Younger (TV Land)

Food Network Star (Food Network)

Orange is the New Black (Netflix)

GLOW (Netflix)

Big Little Lies (HBO)

Queen Sugar (OWN)

Luther (BBC America)

Abstentia (Amazon Prime)

Yellowstone (Paramount)

Riviera (Sundance)

Rosehaven (Sundance)

JULY 2019

Bachelor in Paradise (ABC)

Stranger Things (Netflix)

The Terror (AMC)

Lodge 49 (AMC)

Hollywood Game Night (NBC)

The Wall (NBC)

Dateline NBC (NBC)

Power (Starz)

Suits (USA)

Killjoys (SyFy Channel)

13 Reasons Why (Netflix)

Harlots (Hulu)

AUGUST 2019

Preacher (AMC)

Insecure (HBO)

Ballers (HBO)

The Sinner (USA)

Shahs of Sunset (Bravo)

SEPTEMBER 2019

American Horror Story (FX)

BoJack Horseman (Netflix)

The Deuce (HBO)

OCTOBER 2019

The Walking Dead (AMC)

Below Deck (Bravo)

Ray Donovan (Showtime)

Van Helsing (SyFy)

Mr. Robot (USA)

Andi Mack (Disney Channel)

Shameless (Showtime)

The Man in the High Castle (Amazon)

NOVEMBER 2019

Outlander (Starz)

DECEMBER 2019

Running Wild with Bear Grylls (National Geographic)

Fuller House (Netflix)

Alexa & Katie (Netflix)

Marvel’s Runaways (Hulu)

Homeland (Showtime)

Impractical Jokers (TruTV)

JANUARY 2020

Future Man (Hulu)

Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access)

Baskets (FX)

Grownish (Freeform)

Grace and Frankie (Netflix)

High Maintenance (HBO)

Schitt’s Creek (CBC)

FEBRUARY / MARCH 2020

Good Girls (NBC)

Silicon Valley (HBO)

Scream (MTV)

Barry (HBO)

APRIL 2020

Brockmire (IFC)

Killing Eve (BBC America)

[aion-rsa]

That Time Xena Was Directed by Potsie From Happy Days

https://ift.tt/3fT623B

In a time of ancient gods, warlords, and kings, a land in turmoil cried out for a hero. But they got a Potsie. Hello sunshine, goodbye rain. Xena: The Warrior Princess, in its second season, was already at the forefront of progressive heroics, and its star Lucy Lawless embodied the power of the feminine mystique. Xena was forged in the heat of battle, with the power, passion, and courage to change the world. And she had many gifts. Anson Williams, who originated the role of Warren “Potsie” Weber on the network TV hit Happy Days, helped wrap a pivotal episode, “Remember Nothing.”

Xena: The Warrior Princess is a spin-off of the television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, but Xena and Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor) are no Laverne and Shirley. Xena was a guest character on three episodes of Hercules in an arc which was supposed to leave her dead. But she was too popular to go without a fight. The first season of Xena established it as a rising cult favorite, and by its second season it reached the top slot for weekly syndicated hour long drama. A lot of this had to do with the fact that “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” both the name of a series’ favorite, their vampire episode, and the overall enthusiasm of the cast and creative team.

Xena met her son and spared him the weight of her past in the first episode of the second season, “Orphan of War.” The following installment finds her longing for a more innocent time. “Remember Nothing” pays tribute to Frank Capra’s wishfully thinking 1946 Hollywood classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and to bring back the nostalgia, the producers brought on an alumnus of Happy Days to direct. The classic comedy series rode in on the wave of golden goldies retrofits like Grease and Lords of Flatbush to whitewash the era of early rock and roll for mainstream TV. The switchblades of contemporary 1950s films like Blackboard Jungle were replaced by flip-combs, and the worst trash talk you were allowed was to tell someone to “sit on it.”

“I wish I’d never followed the sword in the first place,” Xena says in “Remember Nothing,” and it was Anson Williams’ job to disarm her. The first-time Xena director also directed two 1996 episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, “Mummy Dearest” and “King for a Day.”

The premise of the episode is interesting. Battle fury causes Xena to kill a young soldier while defending the temple of the Fates. “Name your reward. If it’s ours to bestow, it’s yours,” the Crone promises in gratitude. “Reward,” a guilt-filled Xena asks in shame. “For what? For killing a boy barely out of his childhood? I don’t want a reward; I want that boy’s life back.”

The Three Fates don’t have that power, but instead spin back time. Allowing Xena to choose a warrior path or remain in an alternate reality where her youngest brother is still alive, and she’s engaged to a young man named Maphias (Robert Harte), who is liable to give up on her, “in ten or fifteen years.” Her mother, sadly, she has to forfeit, as she died in the fight which was erased along with the Xena Mythology. She gets to keep the simple village life, unless she takes a life, even for a just cause.

But the original concept was just as tantalizing. “We were kidding around one day, saying, ‘In our fifth season, we’ll have to do the blind amnesia show,’” the episode’s storywriter Steven L. Sears recalled in a January 1998 interview with Starlog Magazine. “But then I thought, ‘How do you do an amnesia show that hasn’t been done? What I came up with was that Xena doesn’t forget who she is, the rest of the world forgets her.” The storyline changed by the time the completed script was written. “Even though I have co-story credit on it, Chris [Manheim] deserves all the credit,” Sears said. “She changed it substantially and did a wonderful job; she found levels there that I didn’t. I was thrilled.”

Like many of the young actors on Happy Days, Williams learned how to angle the cameras. He went on to direct episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Beverly Hills, 90210, Charmed, and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Before Williams made his prime-time directorial debut on a 1987 episode of L.A. Law, he directed afterschool specials and a TV movie about a pre-teen mayor. He expected a lot from his young talent. Maybe a little too much.

“‘Potsie Weber’ directed [this] episode, and I remember him yelling like crazy at the boy who played my brother, Aaron Devitt, trying to wring a good performance out of him,” Lawless recalled in Robert Weisbrot’s 1998 book The Official Guide to The Xenaverse. “Anson was just ragging on him, trying to get some Methody-type performance out of him, which was ridiculous because the boy was untrained. He had all the raw material and no sort of craft.”

Read more

TV

How Xena: Warrior Princess used Greek Myth

By Juliette Harrisson

TV

Why Xena: Warrior Princess Was Groundbreaking

By Juliette Harrisson

Lyceus, the brother, is central to the arc of the story. The episode begins when Xena and Gabrielle visit a temple of the Fates on the anniversary of his death. Defending the temple is the reason Xena is granted a second chance. Her brother is the beginning and the end of that chance. It’s a lot of pressure for a young actor.

“It happens with young men, usually, that you can only yell at them so long and they come to a little crisis point,” Xena recalled in Weisbrot’s book. “They say, ‘This is ridiculous., this cannot be happening to me.’ And he just started to laugh. And so, I went out the back with Aaron and we talked about acting and I tried to get him to loosen up and have some fun with me and just listen and ‘bring me in.’ And I think he did have more fun but it gave him a terrible shock about acting. He said he’d never do another part without going away to drama school. Yes, Aaron was very much like my [real] brother Daniel.”

“Sometimes I think our actors get nervous working with Lucy because she’s the star,” teleplay writer Chris Manheim told Whoosh! in its February 1999 issue. “Remember Nothing” was her first script as part of the full-time staff. She also felt a connection with the Lyceus character. Manheim wrote scenes for the brother and fiancé to build the characters outside of the main stars’ gravity.

“I thought it filled it out nicely and gave you a shot at seeing who that younger brother of hers was,” Manheim told Whoosh!. “I had lost my own younger brother and that was another thing that made the episode so special to me. It made me real tenacious about hanging on to the fact that this is an enormous, momentous decision for her. She can’t blithely say, ‘Well I’ll sacrifice my brother because I love Gabrielle.’ I just could not, no matter what, make it that cavalier a decision. To me, that was the most important, pivotal moment. She had to understand what she was doing for her brother’s good as well as Gabrielle’s and for the Greater Good under all circumstances.”

Williams may have learned a lot about directing while on the set of Happy Days, but he completely missed the power of the Fonz. The biggest change to Xena’s character is that she’s not wearing leather. She spends the episode in village clothes. It’s like those scenes in the early Happy Days when Fonzie (Henry Winkler) is wearing the tan cloth jacket. Suzi Quatro could have pulled off the warrior princess look if “Leather” Tuscadero reunited the Suedes for a 90s tour. Now, I understand Xena isn’t Hercules, she didn’t go through the entire season in one pair of tattered pants, but still. It should be noted.

Xena: The Warrior Princess has a strong feminist overtone and two strong female leads, but very few of the series’ six season run of 134 episodes were directed by women. While this may not have altered the show’s midriff fetish, it might have been more cinematically revealing. The production had certain rules for shooting in order to maintain serial consistency. Visually, it appears Williams deviated from some of the standard dynamics. While he maintained cameras at eye-level, which was a norm for the show to keep the audience in the heat of battle, some of his action sequences are more ensemble-based than Xena-centric.

Which brings us to Gabrielle. She is not forgotten in “Remember Nothing.” The episode reinforces the preordained nature of the mythic teaming. Regardless of circumstances, timelines or alternative universes, Xena and Gabrielle are bound by fate. The historical displacement leaves Gabrielle as a bitter slave to the abusive warlord Mezentius (Stephen Tozer). Her cynicism is palpable, and she wears world-weariness under her very skin. “I thought Renee was brilliant,” Lawless said in Weisbrot’s book. “I thought she was really great [playing] such an awful little tramp.”

While Xena doesn’t rack up much of a kill-count in the episode. Gabrielle guts her vicious master, getting her first kill of the series. “But in this timeline is it the same Gabrielle?” Sears asked rhetorically during his July 1998 interview with Whoosh!. “It was not just the killing, it was the look on Gabrielle’s face. No second thought about it, this was justice as far as she was concerned.”  

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The kill ultimately doesn’t count, because this is an alternative reality, and first kills are a big thing on Xena: The Warrior Princess. The jokey disclaimer tagged on at the end of the credits promised “Xena’s memory was not damaged or ….. what was I saying?” But there was no collateral fallout. “Remember Nothing” was filmed from May 8 through May 16, 1996. It aired on Oct. 7, 1996, to an appreciative audience which recalls it quite fondly.

The post That Time Xena Was Directed by Potsie From Happy Days appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2RqlL0P

[theupsidedownunderblog-blog]

STEVE IRWIN - CRIKEY! IT'S THE CROCODILE HUNTER

CRIKEY! is a word made famous by one man - Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter Stephen Robert Irwin (22 February 1962 – 4 September 2006), nicknamed "The Crocodile Hunter", was an Australian zookeeper, conservationist and television personality. Irwin achieved worldwide fame from the television series The Crocodile Hunter (1996–2007), an internationally broadcast wildlife documentary series which he co-hosted with his wife Terri; the couple also hosted the series, Croc Files (1999–2001), The Crocodile Hunter Diaries (2002–2006), and New Breed Vets (2005). Together, the couple also owned and operated Australia Zoo, founded by Irwin's parents in Beerwah, about 80 kilometres (50 mi) north of the Queensland state capital city of Brisbane.

Steve Irwin - The Crocodile Hunter Sadly, Steve Irwin died on 4 September 2006 after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming an underwater documentary film titled Ocean's Deadliest. Steve Irwin was man who lived in his khakis and spent most of his time darting the bite of a venomous snake, wrangling a crocodile, or rescuing an animal in need of help. He had an infectious personality that was saturated with enthusiasm and a love for life and wildlife alike. Little would he know it, but his "out there" persona and "can do" attitude would have him stirring a crowd wherever he went. His wild antics started from a young age, and having parents that cared for wildlife, it's no wonder Steve's drive for life was fueled from wildlife. As the host of the Crocodile Hunter, Steve wowed audiences by the millions. He crouched in scorching heat and sloshed in thick mud for one purpose: because he was committed to the survival of all wildlife and their environment. A cut cheek, grazed knee or sliced hand would not slow him down or prevent him from saving as many animals as possible. Especially crocodiles, because as Steve said: "Crocs rule!"

Steve Irwin with croc Steve's life was a cocktail of love, passion, enthusiasm and respect for wildlife. His excitement over the most deadly snake or tiniest lizard brought him to the forefront of animal conservation. He set the precedent for making sure his fellow humans cared for and respected wildlife and the environment as much as he did. Steve changed the world with his extreme conservation efforts and innovative ideas. He was a true blue Aussie bloke whose energy and passion shone through in all he did. Steve's legacy will live on forever. Through fellow Wildlife Warriors, wife Terri and children Bindi and Robert, his conservation work and larger than life personality will endure. Steve's story Stephen Robert Irwin was born to Lyn and Bob Irwin on 22 February, 1962, in upper Fern Tree Gully, Victoria. He moved with his parents and two sisters to Beerwah, Queensland, where his folks opened the Beerwah Reptile and Fauna Park in 1970. Steve grew up loving all wildlife, especially reptiles. He caught his first venomous snake (a Common Brown) at the tender age of six and would often arrive late to school after convincing his mother to pull over so he could rescue a lizard off the road.

A young Steve Irwin By the time he was nine-years-old, he was helping his dad catch small problem crocodiles hanging around boat ramps by jumping on them in the water and wrestling them back into the dinghy. He always had an uncanny sixth sense when it came to wildlife and he spent his life honing that skill. In the 1980s Steve spent months on end living in the most remote areas of far North Queensland catching problem crocodiles before they ended up shot by a poacher’s bullet. He worked with his little dog, Sui, and developed crocodile capture and management techniques that are now utilised with crocodilians around the world. By 1980, the family wildlife park was called the ‘Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park’ and where Steve called home. Steve and his best mate, Wes Mannion, worked countless hours caring for the wildlife and maintaining the grounds. In 1991 Steve took over managing the wildlife park and met Terri Rains, a visiting tourist, on 6 October. Steve and Terri were married in Eugene, Oregon, on 4 June 1992 at the Methodist church Terri’s grandmother used to attend.

Steve with Terri & Bindi Instead of a honeymoon, the couple embarked on filming a wildlife documentary with John Stainton from the ‘Best Picture Show’ company. The show was so successful it turned into a series and the Crocodile Hunter was born. After Steve’s parents retired in the 1992 Steve worked tirelessly to improve and expand his wildlife park. Re-naming it Australia Zoo in 1998, Steve’s vision for the world’s best Zoo was coming to fruition. In July 2006 Steve set out his ten year business plan for his beloved zoo.

Australia Zoo sign featuring Steve Irwin Steve's Honours In 1997, while on a fishing trip on the coast of Queensland with his father, Irwin discovered a new species of turtle. Later given the honour of naming the newly discovered species, he named it Irwin's turtle (Elseya irwini) after his family. Another newly discovered Australian animal – a species of air-breathing land snail, Crikey steveirwini, was named after Irwin in 2009. In 2001, Irwin was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Australian government for his "service to global conservation and to Australian tourism".  In 2004, he was recognised as Tourism Export of the Year.  He was also nominated in 2004 for Australian of the Year. Shortly before his death, Irwin was to be named an adjunct professor at the University of Queensland's School of Integrative Biology. On 14 November 2007, Irwin was awarded the adjunct professorship posthumously.

The Centenary Medal commemorates 100 years of federation and acknowledges the challenges of the new century by recognising citizens and other people who made a contribution to Australian society or government. In May 2007, the government of Rwanda announced that it would name a baby gorilla after Irwin as a tribute to his work in wildlife conservation. Also in 2007, the state government of Kerala, India named the Crocodile Rehabilitation and Research Centre at Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary in his honour; however, Terri objected that this action had been taken without her permission and asked the Kerala government in 2009 to stop using Irwin's name and images – a request with which the state government complied in mid-2009. In 2015, Irwin was a posthumous recipient of the Queensland Greats Awards. On 22 June 2017, it was announced that Irwin will be posthumously honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2009, Steve Irwin was inducted into the Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, recognised for international entrepreneurship both in business and wildlife conservation, significantly contributing to Queensland and its international reputation. Steve's accidental death On 4 September 2006, Irwin was on location at Batt Reef, near Port Douglas, Queensland, taking part in the production of the documentary series Ocean's Deadliest. During a lull in filming caused by inclement weather, Irwin decided to snorkel in shallow waters while being filmed in an effort to provide footage for his daughter's television programme. While swimming in chest-deep water, Irwin approached a stingray with an approximate span of two metres (6.5 ft) from the rear, in order to film it swimming away.

Stingray barb According to the incident's only witness, “All of a sudden propped on its front and started stabbing wildly with its tail. Hundreds of strikes in a few seconds”. Irwin initially believed he only had a punctured lung. However, the stingray's barb pierced his heart, causing him to bleed to death.  The stingray's behaviour appeared to have been a defensive response to being boxed in. Crew members aboard Irwin's boat administered CPR and rushed him to the nearby Low Isles where medical staff pronounced him dead. Footage of the incident was viewed by Queensland state police as part of their mandatory investigations. All copies of the footage were then destroyed at the behest of Irwin's family. Production was completed on Ocean's Deadliest, which was broadcast in the US on the Discovery Channel on 21 January 2007. The documentary was completed with footage shot in the weeks following the accident, but without including any mention of Irwin's accidental death. Reactions to Steve's death News of Irwin's death prompted reactions around the world. Then-Prime Minister John Howard expressed "shock and distress" at the death, saying that "Australia has lost a wonderful and colourful son." Queensland's then-Premier Peter Beattie remarked that Irwin would "be remembered as not just a great Queenslander, but a great Australian".  The Australian federal parliament opened on 5 September 2006 with condolence speeches by both Howard and the Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley. Flags at the Sydney Harbour Bridge were lowered to half mast in honour of Irwin. In the days following Irwin's death, reactions dominated Australian online news sources, talk-back radio programmes, and television networks. In the United States, where Irwin had appeared in over 200 Discovery Network television programmes, special tributes appeared on the Animal Planet channel, as well as on CNN and major TV talk shows. Thousands of Irwin's fans visited Australia Zoo after his death, paying their respects and bringing flowers, candles, stuffed animals and messages of support. Criticism of Irwin's career following his death came from Dan Mathews, vice-president of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Comparing Irwin to a "cheap reality TV star", Mathews accused him of "antagonising frightened wild animals ... a very dangerous message to send to children", contrasted his methods with the behaviour of "a responsible conservationist like Jacques Cousteau", and said it was "no shock at all that Steve Irwin should die provoking a dangerous animal." The son of Jacques Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau—also a producer of wildlife documentaries—took issue with Irwin's "very, very spectacular, dramatic way of presenting things" and suggested instead that "You don't touch nature, you just look at it."  Jacques Cousteau's grandson and Jean-Michel's nephew, Philippe Cousteau Jr., on the other hand, called Irwin "a remarkable individual"; describing the Ocean's Deadliest project (on which he worked along with Irwin), Philippe said, "I think why Steve was so excited about it that we were looking at these animals that people think of as, you know, dangerous and deadly monsters, and they're not. They all have an important place in the environment and in the world. And that was what his whole message was about." In the weeks following Irwin's death, at least ten stingrays were found dead and mutilated on the beaches of Queensland, with their tails cut off, prompting speculation as to whether they might have been killed by fans of Irwin as an act of revenge, although, according to the chairman of the Queensland fishing information service, anglers regularly cut the tails off of accidentally caught stingrays to avoid being stung. Michael Hornby, a friend of Irwin and executive director of his Wildlife Warrior fund, condemned any revenge killings, saying that... "We just want to make it very clear that we will not accept and not stand for anyone who's taken a form of retribution. That's the last thing Steve would want." Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors Worldwide was established in 2002, by Steve and Terri Irwin as a way to include and involve other caring people in the protection of injured, threatened or endangered wildlife from the individual animal to an entire species.

It is our mission to be the most effective wildlife conservation organisation in the world through the delivery of outstanding outcome-based programs and projects, inclusive of humanity. It is with this mission that Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors carries on the legacy of Steve Irwin by conducting wildlife conservation projects within Australia and around the world including; the Australia Wildlife Hospital, Tiger 511 in Sumatra, elephant conservation in Sumatra and Cambodia, orang-utan conservation in Sumatra, Tasmanian devil conservation, rhinoceros conservation in Kenya and cheetah conservation in South Africa as well as grey nurse shark research and conservation locally. Our biggest research project in Australia is the longest and most comprehensive study in existence on the saltwater crocodile.

Larger than life Steve Irwin and his wildlife warriors at Australia Zoo Wildlife Warrior’s major sponsor, Australia Zoo, gives vital support to Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors by covering all administration costs and by providing other essential support where necessary. This means that 100% of all donations to the charity can be applied directly to where they are needed most, making an immediate impact in the world of wildlife conservation. Australia Zoo Wildlife Warriors Worldwide Ltd is a registered charity in Australia and is listed on the Register of Environmental Organisations. It is a deductible gift recipient and donations over $2 are tax deductible. Wildlife Warriors USA Inc is a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization. Donations are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. You can help keep Steve's legacy by donating here: http://www.steveirwinday.org/donate Video: A musical tribute to the legendary conservationist & crocodile hunter Steve Irwin. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin http://www.steveirwinday.org/about/steve-irwin http://www.crocodilehunter.com.au/crocodile_hunter/about_steve_terri/ https://wildlifewarriors.org.au/ http://www.steveirwinday.org/donate Read the full article

[doctorwhonews]

Doctor Who Series 10 - Episode 2 - Smile

Latest Review: Doctor Who Series 10 Episode 2: Smile Starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, Matt Lucas With Kiran L. Dadlani, Mina Anwar, Ralf Little, Kiran Shah, Craig Garner, Kaizer Akhtar, Kalungi Ssebndeke Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce Directed by Lawrence Gough Produced by Peter Bennett Executive Producers: Steven Moffatt, Brian Minchin This review contains spoilers.   The tenth twenty-first century series of Doctor Who has been keenly promoted as a new start, but it’s enthusiastic about showing it’s taken old lessons to heart. Smile follows the precedent of The End of the World by taking Bill to the far future, to have (recalling one of the promotional lines of 2005) an adventure in the human race. However, where The End of the World was a celebration of diversity within and beyond humanity, giving the Doctor and Rose a range of different beings to interact with in separate story branches, and a villain who did not appreciate the parable within her own narrative, Smile concentrates much more on how the Doctor and Bill react to each other in an environment where humanity is absent, memorialized by an environment intended to cater to human needs, the murderous machines built to help the last humans, and by the fertilizer made from the skeletons of the slaughtered. Bill’s hope when setting off is to find that the future is a happy one. This is a change from her present, where study with the Doctor provides hope in a background of low aspiration and petty betrayals. The Doctor takes her somewhere which has supposedly discovered the secret of human happiness – and there’s an irony in that the colony building screams its optimism to the Doctor when there are no living (or at least awake) humans present. Bill doesn’t seem to be addicted to crisis and peril in the way that some of her predecessors have been, and Pearl Mackie conveys well her evolving assessments of the situation. Where Rose in The End of the World could phone her Mum when she needed reassurance that her world was still there, it’s the smell of rosemary in the nursery which reminds Bill of home, and that home is the student union rather than her foster mother’s. Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who heroines tend to be detached from family much more than Russell T Davies’s earthly lead characters, and have a corresponding need to build alternative networks. Bill’s search for belonging is not buried so far down as it was for Amy or Clara. Her distress at realizing that the colonists might be the last remnants of humanity bubbles up from Pearl Mackie like an unexpected hot spring on downland. Doctor Who has form for seeing companions bond with abandoned children, which arguably include since Listen the Doctor himself. Here it’s Praiseworthy whose awakening, soon after Bill’s discovery of (I presume) his dead grandmother, gives Bill someone to hope for, and whose protection is the catalyst for the story’s resolution. In the final TARDIS scene Bill has moved on from the abstract ideal of happiness to the more practical question ‘Is it going to work?’ before going on to tentatively accept responsibility with the Doctor for the ‘jump-start(ing of) a civilization’. Given that the Doctor knew the colony by its positive reputation. perhaps she already had her answer, but Bill is still the student working out these questions for herself, perhaps like the young audience at home. The episode sees another accessible, believable performance from Pearl Mackie, immediately well-established in Doctor Who’s soil without obvious need of ground skeletons. Bill’s idealism is balanced by suspicion of deep-rooted prejudice. Her reaction to seeing that the Doctor has been served two algae cubes to her one is to ask whether this is ‘a bloke’s utopia’. However, her sense of the epic survives; even after the cryogenic units have been revealed and the Doctor has acknowledged that he was mistakenly going to blow up the human colonists, he calls the ‘shepherds’ who awoke first ‘those with (relevant) skills’. For Bill they are ‘the brave… the best’. Epic is important, with many of the colonists having names whose meanings are obvious to the listener. Like the warrior classes (at least) of early European cultures, their name patterns claim ownership of their own story. It’s a neat irony, and one which offsets any romanticization of colonization, that to survive the colonists end up having to pay rent to their servant caste. Back in 2003, Russell T Davies’s ‘pitch document’ for Doctor Who emphasized that it should be ‘pioneers’ who take viewers into space in the series, rather than alien creatures. It might be a leap too far to emphasise here the associations of Frank Cottrell Boyce and Steven Moffat with Liverpool and Glasgow, two of Britain’s biggest slave-trading ports, but the case is there for making that connection when considering the story’s shaping of the colonist narrative. Such stories inevitably express debts towards tales of settlement in the American West or in this case, with its intensive agriculture, the American South or European colonies in the Caribbean.  Admittedly, as transposed into Doctor Who, these tropes are rarely left uncriticized. Here the enslaved evolve into an indigenous people before the colonists can properly revive, leaving the claims of the colonizing culture hollow. The Vardy robot murders, however, fit less comfortably into a ‘slave revolt’ parallel, but instead suggest the futility of trying to second guess and avoid unhappiness. Perhaps everyone is on better terms with human folly by the end of the story. So much of the episode is a two-hander between Bill and the Doctor, who gradually reveals more of his personality to her. Peter Capaldi continues in a much more relaxed portrayal of the Doctor which is much easier to watch than his disgruntled, tortured Time Lord of series eight or the most midlife crisis-ridden moments of series nine. He’s someone who enjoys his travels again, which have been cast in a new context now he is sworn to stay on Earth to protect the Vault. Capaldi enjoys or makes us enjoy the multiple levels of denial: the evasiveness, the childlike naughtiness – referring to Nardole as ‘Mum’ – and his insistence that he doesn’t set out to save the day, but just passes by and mucks in, delivered in a tone which suggests the Doctor barely convinces himself more than he fails to convince Bill. As Bill says, he’s a great tutor, but the Doctor’s lessons are often in what he does (or does not) rather than what he says. He’s careful not to betray his suspicions about the absence of people in the colony to Bill, who is too curious and too excited to look at the Doctor’s mood badge and see that he is considerably less happy than she is. At the same time, the Doctor wants to protect her from the horror of the situation, leading to a powerful variant of the ‘Let’s get back in the TARDIS and go’ trope. Here the Doctor pretends to himself that Bill will be happy watching movies in the TARDIS while he dodges the robots again to blow up the city, but at the same time he’s not disappointed that she rebels and comes with him. A tidy parallel is drawn between the mood badges and the sign on the TARDIS door. The Doctor denies that he travels the universe putting it to rights, but the TARDIS seeks out ‘urgent calls’ anyway where the Doctor can usefully provide advice and assistance. Smile provides a restatement of the Doctor-companion relationship – Bill’s sigh as she leaves the TARDIS reminds me of Sarah Jane Smith’s resigned plodding after the fourth Doctor as he sets off towards problems, or Turlough’s transfer of the Doctor to Peri’s care in Planet of Fire – ‘Look after him. He gets into the most terrible trouble’ – but nowadays the Doctor’s methods and assumptions are questioned much more, and rightly so. I didn’t find the emojibots as ‘cute’ as I felt it was hoped the audience would. There was an innocence about them – they (and the Vardy robots they represented) wanted to smile, they were unhappy without people but unhappiest when people were incomprehensibly sad. They were more compelling when being sinister, staring out of windows balefully like figures in the 1980s Miss Marple television title sequence. Given that the entire city was made of Vardy robots I expected to feel it brooding a little more, but the light and architecture didn’t lend itself in that direction. Instead much matter-of-fact internal photography was broken into by slightly jarring shots, such as the view of the sun through the latticework of the glass roof, as if we’re looking up through a skeleton’s rib cage. The use of the City of Arts and Sciences in Smile plays with both architectural intention and alternative meanings derived from other angles. The Hemisfèric, according to its website, is intended to suggest a huge human eye but we never see it from an angle which would encourage that interpretation. Instead, it sometimes appears like a sunken, skeletized beast. Soaring optimism lives alongside inevitable decline; that the Wheel Turns (to recall Kinda) is a recurring part of Doctor Who. The robots’ loss of innocence, as they reveal they understand the concept of rent (and the pound sign has survived to Doctor Who’s far future) is the basis for a better society than one based on robot servitude. There’s a contrast in the portrayal of the colonists themselves which could have been better managed. The introductory scenes featuring Kezzia and the Vardys outside in their pastoral idyll, celebrating the pollination of crops in a golden field under a blue sky, impress: one warms immediately to Kiran L. Dadlani, and once inside the city, Mina Anwar is a familiar and reliable television face who does not disappoint here. The costumes, with their suggestions of wings and gauze, suggest holiness but are only introduced when we know everything is going wrong: a tragedy in heaven. One could comfortably spend forty-five minutes with Kezzia and Goodthing, and the ease of their introduction and sudden dispatching is a greatly effective piece of misdirection. However, Ralf Little’s Steadfast and his fellow gun-toting revivees could come from an entirely different society. Their outfits aren’t co-ordinated and one doesn’t have the sense the production has the same grip on these characters than it did on the two Shepherds met and lost before the credits. As with The Pilot, the script is dotted with odd nods back to earlier Doctor Who stories, particularly twenty-first century ones. These deliberate references seem to suggest that a phase of the series including both Russell T Davies’s era and that of Steven Moffat is coming to an end. The Doctor’s mention that an algae emperor ‘fancied me’ recalls the tenth Doctor’s memory of Martha in Partners in Crime, and we learn that yes, lots of planets have Scottish people claiming independence from everywhere they land. These are ironic takes but they suggest that the Doctor’s life and the programme’s is a little more complicated now than it once was: glibness has consequences. The Doctor’s method of winning at chess – knocking over the board – is dishearteningly similar to the gameplay of a neoliberal financier of which I’ve read, though The Curse of Fenric’s change of the rules so that the pawns join forces would have seemed as contrived as it did then and even more out of place. The references to The Ark in Space, indirectly through the Doctor’s expository dialogue, and directly through Steadfast’s self-identification as ‘Medtech One’, are nice in a vague sense of suggesting Doctor Who has a long-term scheme for human future history (though one would be hard-pressed to get anyone to agree on what it is) but it must jar for several long-term fans in that although there is an element of specialization depicted, Smile doesn’t quite portray the same kind of stratified society as that depicted on Space Station Nerva. The most disconcerting features, though, were a couple of lines of dialogue. I’m not sure that the Doctor should be rubbishing a society which communicates through emojis as one for ‘vacuous teens’ – he’s more open-minded than that, surely? Towards the end, as the Vardy robots prepare to strike down the survivors of humanity, Bill has a redundant ‘What’s happening, Doctor?’ which doesn’t serve her previous character development well. This review is based on an advance viewing copy, watermarked as a work in progress, and I wouldn’t mourn those lines if it turned out they had not made it to the broadcast cut. A more pleasing recall was the device of linking the second and third episodes together with a cliffhanger, as the TARDIS fails to return to the Doctor’s study and Nardole’s kettle but lands on the frozen Thames in Regency London and the Doctor and Bill are approached by a curious but not that threatening elephant through the presumably freezing fog. We go from a clinical and almost sterile environment to a cluttered one which pre-dates modern hygiene and where exotic animals replace robots. The Doctor’s magic haddock of fable (and the final, ‘face on’ view of the city as giant fish) is about to be realized as a more intentionally threatening undersea beast – or is the season catchphrase of ‘not evil, just different’ to be repeated? Overall, Smile is a welcome addition to the series. It’s by no means as slow as I feared after reading the Radio Times preview, it uses its locations well, and cements the partnership between the Doctor and Bill, both adventurers in contrast with the cautious, rule-keeping Nardole, and where Bill’s wide-eyed enthusiasm reignites the Doctor’s interventionist wanderlust. It doesn’t always quite come together, but there are strong performances and ideas and design ideas which should keep an audience intrigued and entertained until the end of the episode, together with a not-heavily carried sense of myth, as might be expected from Frank Cottrell Boyce on the strength of In the Forest of the Night. The horror is depicted in a pre-watershed friendly way with enough grim humour to amuse enough of the audience while the youngest have the joke ‘skeleton crew’ explained to them. Perhaps it could all have been a little more buoyant, but on the whole Smile is dramatically convincing and sets the audience up well for next week. http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2017/04/doctor_who_series_10_episode_2_smile.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr