I live for moments like these
Sunday, 22. June 2008, 19:44:48
WARNING: SPOILERS!
If you aren't bang up to date with the latest episodes of Doctor Who and/or Battlestar Galactica - come back later. I don't want to spoil the fun for anybody else!
If you aren't bang up to date with the latest episodes of Doctor Who and/or Battlestar Galactica - come back later. I don't want to spoil the fun for anybody else!
It's been a fabulous week for my two favourite TV shows.
Battlestar Galactica
The Sci-Fi channel have, for reasons that escape me for the moment, taken the bizarre step of splitting their fourth and final year of Battlestar Galactica into two separate chunks. Normal US seasons run to roughly 22 episodes but we'd already had the season 4 pilot as the triumphant, feature-length, straight-to-DVD movie, the excellent 'Razor'. That left 20 episodes, the first 10 of which have just completed as this week saw the release of the mid-Season finale (!), fittingly entitled 'Revelations'.
More than in any other run of BSG episodes, Adama, Roslyn and the Cylons have endured a relentless assault of trials and tests of faith, hope and character, as after 3 long, desperate years, the humans and their merciless pursuers look set to tear themselves apart. At the end of season 3, four popular, trusted characters in the human fleet were revealed as Cylons, 4/5ths of a group of mysterious Cylons reverently referred to by their cousins to as The Final Five, a collective purportedly blessed with the ability to show the way to Earth. Early episodes dealt with these four's attempts to figure out what the revelations of their identities now meant to their daily lives among the humans who would surely kill them if they ever discovered their true natures.
Meanwhile, among the Cylon fleets, serious philosophical divisions appear among the remaining six extant human-like models; some desire to find the Final Five and ask for their guidance, while others doggedly adhere to the strictures set in place that forbid even the merest mention of these legendary beings. When the pro-lobby decide they need to 'un-box' (reactivate) their wayward sister, the 3 model, known by the name Deanna, who apparently learned the identities of the five during a vision she experienced while in the hidden temple of a planet about to be devoured by a supernova, the divisions swiftly deepen into outright civil war.
'Revelations' pulls these threads together providing resolution for many of them – the 4 'Final 5' Cylons stand revealed, the battered Human and Cylon fleets forge a fragile truce...and they work together, completely united for the very first time, in an effort that leads them, at long last, to Earth.
Of course, Battlestar Galactica has ever shunned happy endings and the last long tracking shot of this series until it returns in 2009 shows their long-fabled destination, the paradise they have been chasing since the very beginning, to be a charred, haunted, radioactive wasteland, and a tableau of shocked, broken characters grasping to comprehend the true scale of the horror before them...
My GOD this is wonderful television!
In an episode rife with conflict and tension, the last scenes – tumultous celebration followed by that amazing sledge-hammer blow only equalled in film history by the ruined Statue of Liberty reveal at the end of the first Planet of the Apes left me literally and absolutely stunned. I sat speechless, unable to move from my seat, for the next ten minutes desperately trying to process it all; only one other show has ever hit me emotionally like this one and I can only thank the gods that they have seen fit to grant me the experience of another. The last ten episodes - the last EVER episodes, where I hope many of the remaining questions will be answered – simply CANNOT come fast enough! (Although the shocked producers, having watched audience figures show a significant and unprecedented RISE for this last season, are said to be swiftly preparing another couple of TV movies to tide us over while we wait - woohoo!)
Doctor Who
The Time-Lord and his new companion, the louder-than-life Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) have displayed a spectacular mediocrity in their own fourth year of adventures. While season three had a few duffers among sparkling gems of quality such as 'Family of Blood' and the legendary 'Blink', season four has shown very little in the way of magic, treating us instead to a run of unexceptional, run-of-the-mill fare, although the second episode 'Fires of Pompeii' stands out as a rare highlight. The Ood returned, the vaunted Sontarans came and went in two episodes of racous silliness (Sontar-ha!), and The Doctor and Donna (No no no, we're not a couple) investigated the clever but tedious Mystery of Agatha Christie and the Giant Bee/Alien/thing. Not even the appearance of the Doctor's Daughter – played to charming effect by the lovely actress daughter of former Time Lord, Peter Davison – could bring this series out of what many believed were signs of Producer Russell Davies' collapse into exhaustion and disinterest. The astonishingly bad ending of year three – and John Simm's painful to watch Master, written by Davies himself, had left a very sour taste in the mouths of many fans, and as news of his departure broke many felt this was not before time. Perhaps the show would be better served in the hands of 'Blink' and 'Lonely Child' scribe, Stephen Moffat.
But then a strange thing happened.
Moffats' two-parter, 'Silence in the Library' & 'Forest of the Dead', while displaying elements of the Moffat genius and representing a clear step above most of the prior episodes in terms of imagination and writing, actually came as a disappointment to many. Too many holes existed in the plot, and there was a disturbing sense of stylistic and plot deja-vu haunting proceedings, a sense of elements re-hashed from previous years; had the mighty Moffat started to run out of ideas?
With this odd little disappointment floating in people's minds, no-one could have predicted that the pocket-money-budgeted Davies episode to follow, 'Midnight', would actually turn out to be a more compelling and gripping piece of drama then any that had gone before this year so far, depicting a Doctor stripped of his usual powers and saved by the very human inhumanity he has always stood against, an episode some claimed might actually have been the best of New Who to date...
And then came yesterday's episode, 'Turn Left'. Holy SHIT.
Also penned by Davies, we were treated to the long-foreshadowed return of fan-favourite companion Rose Tyler, unceremoniously sealed away in a parallel dimension at the end of year two, but who had been glimpsed or mentioned in nearly every episode to date this year desperate to get the Doctor's attention.
A simple sci-fi device is employed, that of the 'What If?', and Donna is forced to make a tiny change in her past that meant she never met the Doctor. Unfortunately, this also meant that he died in his very next adventure fighting the Queen Racnoss spider lady beneath the Thames: Donna preventing his excesses in that adventure, making him leave, turned out to have saved his life. From there on we watch Donna and her family as the world they inhabit is dealt blow after blow by alien forces that in the original time-line (i.e. the episodes prior to this) the Doctor was around to deal with. And good god, how dark does this episode get!? London destroyed in an immense nuclear fireball caused by the Starship Titanic crashing out of the sky. 7 million Brits housed in refugee camps all across the north of the country, away from the radiation. America's population devastated by the Adipose fat-monsters. Ancillary Who characters – The Torchwood team, Sarah Jane Smith, even his third season companion Martha Jones – all die in or trying to stop various other disasters. And when foreigners start being moved to WWII-style 'labour camps' after a decree of 'England for the English', and Donna and her grandfather experience the horror of a darkness extinguishing stars across the night sky, Donna has nowhere else to turn but to a mysterious blonde girl who flashes in and out of this bleak, twisted reality seemingly at will...
I love bleak, I love dsytopic visions of past of future and I loved this episode from start to finish, but the very very best was saved for the end. Rose Tyler reveals to Donna that it was her choice to go one direction instead of another that led to all this horror, and sends her back in time, using tech scraped from the dying Tardis ("It's still trying to help" - FANtastic!), to make everything right which, Donna realises, will take her death to solve. As Donna lies dying on the road, Rose appears at her side and whispers two words into her ear, a message to take back to the Doctor when the time-line corrects itself. As 'our' Donna recounts her experience to the Doctor, she gives him the message, two words that – to the horrified Doctor - mean the end of the universe is upon us all...
BAD WOLF.
Which, as fans of Who will remember from season one is the omnipotent being Rose became when she stared into the heart of the Tardis and ingested the power of the living time vortex. The darkness is coming, the end of the universe, and only the Doctor and Donna can stop it...
Cue end credits and the trailer for next week, showing Rose, massive Dalek invasion fleets and the tell-tale laugh of one long lost Dalek creator: Davros!
For me, this episode represented not only a massive return to form for Russell Davies but a sorely needed injection of tension, drama, emotion, and the imagination and epic scale for which our humble little BBC show is so famous. Like BSG's revelations, 'Turn Left' picked up dangling plot threads and spun them into an amazingly gripping tapestry and also delighted us with a stellar shock-and-awe ending. Thankfully we only have to wait one more week to see the first part of this calamitous season finale, 'The Stolen Planet' with part two hopefully the week after.
With sci-fi of this quality on offer, it's very hard not to feel utterly spoiled.
More, please!
WIDGETIZE
thejdt # 22. June 2008, 21:46
Could you please post a spoiler warning at the top of this post? Part 1 of "Silence in the Library" is the most recent episode to air in the U.S. (which I *was* enjoying).
And now back to our ragtag fleet...
I, too, just sat there staring at the screen after the final reveal. Then I just decided that wasn't Earth. I sat there trying to figure out how to make it true and all I could come up with was this: In the original series, Apollo (not Starbuck) was the one taken by the "beings of light" to stop a nuclear war that would have destroyed Terra. Terra, not Earth. Earthlike, but not Earth. This, I'm sad to say, is the very thin, frayed thread from which my weighty hopes hang.
GrantTLC # 23. June 2008, 05:44
If it helps, I was a bit hard on Silence in the Library. The follow up ep is good too, I think I just got caught up in the moffatt hype and expected more than it could reasonably deliver. But dear lord, how much have I just given away...! I'm so ashamed.
GoldBug # 23. June 2008, 08:10
With regards to "Turn Left" it has nicely set things up. My only fear is that Davros will be too easy beaten! Will Rose somehow unleash the Tardis power that she had from the ending of series that ended in killing Chris Eccleston's doctor!??! I think that is so obvious and I hope the story is better than that. I also hope they leave the door well and truly open for Davros to return as the new DR WHO seems to have destroyed all but one of the Darleks! Come on in the old days Darlek episodes were spun over 6-7 episodes and true tension and story were paced well, nowadays it's over in 1-2 episodes!
GoldBug # 23. June 2008, 16:29
GoldBug # 23. June 2008, 16:30