Television Can Blow Me (24 page)

It seems to irk Dirk that the show was superseded by such a massively superior piece of work, particularly when it took all the risks that the original didn’t in the name of artistic integrity. He’s mad that the world has passed him by, mad that Shilpa didn’t fuck him, mad that Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck has bigger balls than his. He’s fooling no one with this nonsense and just looks a graceless chump.

Don’t fall for any of this revisionist cant - original Galactica sucked balls, was rightly culled before it could inflict any more damage on our culture and everyone involved with it should be eternally grateful to be even loosely associated with the magnificent second coming that Ronald D. Moore brought into being. Dirk Benedict can fuck right off.

Watch, recognize and laud the new improved BSG. Better in every conceivable way than the original.

¹
There is of course the joke about 1978 being a great year for Glasgow Rangers. - two popes died and Danny McGrain broke his leg.

FlashForward midseason report

OK, time out, FlashForward. You really don’t know where you’re going with this do you? Eight episodes in and I still don’t care about any of your characters. 20 million people have died and I cared more when FaceLift misplaced her nail varnish on Lost. FlashForward fan boys clog the Internet forums wondering “how will they square development
x
with development
y
?” I’ll tell you how - they’ll cheat. Because while everyone in the world is either trying to avoid their FlashForward or bring it forth the writers of the show are just relaxing in Lame-Oh Land just spinning the yarn in any direction they feel like.

So yes, some people go to any lengths to avoid their future. Of course Olivia doesn’t want to end up sexing sexy Lloyd Simcoe, so when the bra and panties she wears in her future flash love nest with Lloyd arrive as a gift from husband Mike she takes the only sensible option: she throws them in the bin. For good and all she has solved the free will debate by destroying her future knickers. I don’t see how an identical twinset can end up on her sometime in the next six months - it’s not like they’re mass manufactured or anything.

Also wresting control of the future back is FBI agent Al Gough who took a swandive off the FBI building rather than realise his future: causing the death of a woman he doesn’t yet know called Celia. Gough’s suicide causes big waves in the Already Ghosts community, those unfortunate humanoids who did not receive a FlashForward (the assumption being that they don’t live to see the next six months). These nihilist miserablists hang out at underground Blue Hand clubs where they wear black, play Russian roulette, listen to industrial metal and get their perv on. Welcome to GothForward.

I’m pretty certain none of this amounts to much. FlashForward badly wants to be Lost and to this end they employ the show’s most annoying actor Dominic Monaghan playing Simon, a hugely unconvincing science bastard involved in The Event experiment with Lloyd Simcoe that caused all the forward flashing (and the 20 million dead). Lloyd is having conscience pangs at having killed more men than malaria and wants to go public with what they did but Simon is all “yeh, woteva”.

Then, for no reason I or anyone else can fathom, Simon says he’ll agree to go public if Lloyd beats him at poker. “You want to wager the fate of millions of people on the outcome of a *poker* game?” asks Lloyd. Did I stutter, motherfucker? Lloyd wins by cheating just like the show does.

And it’s because the show is filled with crappy, haphazard, this’ll-do writing like this that I know they won’t deliver over the course of a season. Mike and his FBI buddies kill the guy with the star tattoos on his arm from Mike’s FlashForward. BUT WAIT. In the big end of show reveal there are other dudes with star tattoos ON THEIR ARMS. It’s almost like a star tattoo isn’t like dental records or DNA after all. Talk about phoning a script in. Future knickers and star tattoos are their big continuity issues.

I guarantee you the finale will be a confectionery of fudges, a holding cell of cheats and a haunted house of deux ex machinas. No good will come of it.

The verdict on FlashForward midseason report:
Already strongly making the case for its own extinction.

Marks out of 10:
5

Paradox

Yes, because we need another GashForward. I don’t know if BBC and ABC held hands 18 months ago and vowed to make a dual assault on our senses with clairvoyant detective horseshit but just a couple of months after FlashBoreward premiered we witness the birth of Paradox, BBC’s “high-octane, investigative drama” starring Mel from Eastenders as Detective Inspector Rebecca Flint, a woman on a mission to do the stupid thing in a series of challenging stop-the-future-before-it-happens situations. This? My riveted face.

Nobody knows (or cares) why but astrophysicist Dr Christian King (Emun Elliott) receives images from the future on his computer thing that come FROM SPACE. And in keeping with the rest of the so-called “news” we see these days it’s never good. Take the opening salvo: a dead girl, a frisbee, a wrecked train, a shattered mobile phone - it’s like an exploded Argos catalogue. What can it all mean?

Dr Space is being all Scottish and enigmatic and teases Rebecca and her bozo colleagues DS Ben Holt (Mark Bonnar) and DC Callum Gada (Chiké Okonkwo) with what might be occurring the noo. This makes no sense at all. Why wouldn’t you just tell them “look I don’t know what’s going on either - kind of weird though. Makes you think doesn’t it?” Instead, shit for brains starts hinting that he may be a terrorist or a Time Lord. Nice work, smart arse.

We all know that in real life the moment he even mentioned his future bomb photos they’d have a cloth over his face and have him waterboarded into oblivion. So there’d be none of that Sphinxy riddle-me-this shit once he started sicking up his own lungs.

Once the biographical detail in the images check out, the police start to believe that they really have glimpsed a future disaster - much like I did when I saw the previews. They deduce that there’s going to be an oil tanker colliding with a train on a bridge - they even know which train but they don’t employ the emergency anti-terrorist powers we have in this country that allow them to stop and search GOD to, say, stop the train from travelling. No, they just talk to a man on the train on the phone. That’ll do the trick.

Oh this is such a lot of nonsense. Horrible dialogue, gaping plot holes and annoying characters - the shitbird trifecta. Everything is on the nose, nothing is left to your imagination, people say exactly what they are thinking in every situation. Tamzin Outhwaite is the same as she is in everything else, adequately hacking her way through a flailing script. It is difficult to avoid parallels with its recent American forebear and Paradox does feel like FlashForward on dialysis. It shares many of that show’s vices but expresses them in a skanky low-budget manner. Both shows are so implausibly pleased with themselves that their characters have seen the future.

Well, I’ve seen the future. This gets cancelled.

The verdict on Paradox:
No future for you.

Marks out of 10:
4

Doctor Who Series 5 premiere

We’re always telling children not to walk off with strange men yet Doctor Who hightails in with his schizoid time goon routine, offers his hands to a nine-year-old Scottish girl and off they wonder to her bedroom to see some puppies. He’s, like, a thousand years old but that doesn’t matter to Amelia Pond, oddball infant Jock with a “crack” in her “wall” (that’ll be a tear in the very fabric of space-time, my guess). And as strange men go the man who steps out of the crash landed police box in her garden is one of the stranger ones. Suffering from post-regeneration traumatic syndrome, he’s twitching, babbling and jerking like Judy Finnigan in a hairshirt. He flirts with Amelia for a while before leaping into the Tardis and telling her he’ll be back in five. Turns out, he’s back in 12. Years. And he calls himself a timelord?

Amelia Pond is now Amy Pieond (Karen Gillan), sexy flame haired kissogram with a fiery yet vulnerable heart in La Senza police uniform. Together, they are menaced by a shit monster that looks like the Curious Alien from This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Curious Alien’s alien captors decide to destroy planet Earth for harbouring a multi dimensional criminal. Doctor Poo starts quoting intergalactic bylaws and all of a sudden we’re in Hitchhiker’s Guide.

As the doctor gurns, leaps and gambols, Amy spends most of her time pulling her microskirt down and looking surprised. She’ll catch some flak for being sexually attractive but her ginger ostrich chasing around in hen night fancy dress shtick was the only entertaining thing about this opener. Take out the da-daa-da-da-da-daa-daa incidental music and you’re left with a seriously dull plot, depressingly derivative baddies and a palpable phone-this-in-they’ll-give-us-rave-reviews-anyway attitude that infects everything. It’s all quirk and no substance.

How anyone thinks Matt Smith is some kind of fresh take on the Doctor is beyond my ken. There is not a mannerism, character point or idiosyncrasy that hasn’t been done by Tennant or Ecclestone. It’s not like he does it particularly badly. Few actors do a bad Doctor Who because it’s a showy role requiring little nuance or range, just a willingness to show off. How hard is it a find an actor who likes to do that?

Babble about the breathless pace all you like, Doctor Who stopped being good television some time ago and is now sci-fi by numbers hackwork. There is no subversion, no ingenuity and the deux ex machina employed to defeat the CGI Eyeball of Doom clunked like the Lee “Scratch” Perry dub remix of a chain being dropped down a 500 foot toilet in the centre of the Grand Canyon.

Sparky overwritten dialogue that advances neither character nor story abounds. This was smoke and mirrors to deflect attention away from a dying leader. Brezhnev is comatose. And Doctor Who is done. Remember where you were when you first heard it. Aerial Telly called it.

Welcome return? Get the fuck out of here.

The verdict on Doctor Who Series 5 premiere:
Doctor Poo.

Marks out of 10:
5

Doctor Who - Vincent and The Doctor