Reviews – Page 41 – Simon’s Incoherent Blog

Dallas (the next generation): Season 1, Episode 10

“I’m gonna tell you something I’ve never told you before. I love you Bobby. And I don’t know who I’d be without you.” – JR

Previously, on Dallas: Last week saw most of the show’s ongoing plots wrapped up, then suddenly dropped a triple whammy cliffhanger to set up one more week of Ewing double-dealing for this year.

Christopher and John Ross buried the hatchet to create a new joint venture, Ewing Energies
Bobby was so pleased to hear this he immediately keeled over with a brain aneurysm
JR revealed that he had a conscience after all by signing the Southfork deed back over to him, rendering everything he’s done this season somewhat pointless
Having compromised her political integrity every which way, Sue Ellen decided to drop out of the race for Texas Governor rather than give in to slimy Harris Ryland’s demands to launder dirty money
Lou the lawyer found Marta/Veronica’s Cloud drive, which just might contain evidence to incriminate everyone involved in the scam to get Southfork – particularly JR
The recovering Bobby, probably flabbergasted at a nice gesture from JR, had another aneurysm and was carted off to hospital
And Rebecca, still being plagued by shifty Tommy, took matters into her own hands in a struggle during which a shot was heard…

This week’s season finale had a lot to do in resolving these and other loose ends, while also setting up the plot for next year’s second season (it starts in the US in January). So we quickly established, in an arty slo-mo shot, that the gunshot victim was actually Tommy, who’d outlived his plot purpose at this point. But it was something of a surprise that Rebecca could so easily summon a shadowy Tarantino-esque figure to help her clean up and dispose of the body.

Well, she did have a former career as a con artist, I suppose. Unfortunately for her, having disposed of the body, she was obliged to spend much of the episode trying to find it again, as Tommy had kept her engagement and wedding rings, which Christopher wanted her to put back on.

Christopher and the rest of the Ewing clan were gathered at the hospital, anxiously awaiting Bobby’s prognosis. Larry Hagman gave us an impassioned speech by the bedside, as the newly contrite JR recognised that the show depended on his and Bobby’s rivalry, like an American archetype: “Wake up and get better. Keep fightin’. Keep fightin’ me.”

Actually it turned out (again) that Bobby’s health scare was no real problem, just a cheap dramatic device; he was on his feet again within ten minutes. But you can be sure those brain problems are tucked away in showrunner Cynthia Cidre’s file for potential later use.

Having last week given Christopher and John Ross the glimmer of a happy ending, the script this week was obliged to summarily tear them apart again to reset the dramatic tension for next year. So John Ross in particular had a pretty bad week which saw him lurching away from his newfound path of righteousness back into JR-inspired darkness.

It all started nicely enough for him; having leased the old Ewing Oil offices to set up their new corporate HQ, he also found time to propose to Elena by giving her an engagement ring that reminded him of dirty oil. What a romantic. But you could tell trouble was a-coming by the dismayed look on Christopher’s face when he found out about the engagement.

John Ross may have missed that, but he could hardly miss what came next as he was told of the video evidence from Marta’s Cloud drive, which incriminated him while, astonishingly, exonerating JR. Everyone was pretty angry about this, which seemed odd until you reminded yourself that the characters in the show didn’t actually have the details of all the dirty tricks John Ross has been up to. Listening at the door, Elena too was disgusted, and the engagement was off – even by soap opera standards, that was pretty quick.

Luckily for Christopher and Bobby, the evidence also gave them the drop on Vicente from Venezuela, unexpectedly back this week. Not only did it prove that the homily-spouting Venezuelan had fraudulently acquired the ranch, it also handily showed his men tipping ‘Marta’ out of a ninth floor window. So Vicente was off to jail, having lost both the ranch and the methane technology. You could tell this made him unhappy from Carlos Bernard’s trademark angry sneer – what’s the betting he’ll be back next year?

Next up for defeat was Mitch Pileggi’s unspeakably slimy Harris Ryland. When Ann learned of Sue Ellen’s plight, she immediately took steps to ensure that her sister-in-law could stay in the gubernatorial race.These steps involved her confronting Ryland in his office, where as usual he was straight in with the creepily licentious suggestions: “…since you’re here, and in the mood… how about it?”

Unfortunately for him, when the seemingly submissive Ann unbuttoned her blouse, it was to reveal a microphone that had recorded their every word, money laundering, blackmail and all. She left with a threat involving shotguns and a more effective clout to Ryland’s smug face than her husband had previously managed, then gave the tape to Sue Ellen. So Sue Ellen’s back in the gubernatorial race; which is nice for her, but may not be so nice for the people of Texas, given that she’s spent the whole season proving how eminently unsuited she is to the role. Still, this is Texas; last night they elected a dead guy to the State Senate, so they’ll probably cope with a soap opera drama queen.

Rebecca, meanwhile, was hunting high and low for those rings, while the slow-on-the-uptake Christopher was beginning to piece together what had been going on. Clocking her bruises, he enquired “did someone hurt you?” before belatedly launching a search for her miscreant ‘brother’; a hard task, given that he was already dead. Nevertheless, turning over Tommy’s hotel room with the ever-helpful Bum, Christopher was somewhat surprised when the room’s phone rang with a call from the real Rebecca – a rather less glamorous young lady in Des Moines.

So now Christopher had proof that Rebecca wasn’t who she said she was. Given that she’s already revealed herself to be a con artist who connived to split up his previous engagement, it was hard to see why this should be such a shock, but Christopher hit the roof. “So who the hell are you?” he angrily enquired. Ah well, that’s the real question, isn’t it? But ‘Rebecca’ had other points she could score: “I never had a chance, because you’re still in love with Elena!”

Of course he was. And handily for him, John Ross had just pissed Elena off enough for her to be single again. So together they got, in a steamy sex scene intercut with the mournful John Ross being handed back his oily engagement ring by Elena’s disapproving mother.

So, to the tune of Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” (they love Cash on this show), John Ross made the inevitable decision to turn back to evil. As his father handed him a glass of whisky and the two surveyed the Dallas night skyline, John Ross entreated JR to teach him “every dirty trick you know”, so that when he took the company from Christopher and Elena, they’d both be partners. “But if you cross me, I will send you straight back to that home.”

JR simply smiled benevolently; “that’s my son. From top to tail.” And so he is; all demons have tails.

Who’s double crossing who this week?

Cliff, Cliff, Cliff! So JR’s machinations weren’t in vain, as his near-mummified rival turned out to be behind, basically, everything. His right hand man Frank had been thwarted in purchasing Southfork and the methane thing from Vicente by the inconvenient arrival of the FBI. Now we discovered that it was Frank who’d cleaned up Rebecca’s murderous mess. And that Rebecca had always been working for Cliff. Because we now know who she really is – his daughter! “Like your Aunt Pamela, I can’t trust you around the Ewings.”

This might have come as more of a surprise if the opening guest cast list hadn’t conspicuously said, “and Ken Kercheval”, although to be fair, you might easily have forgotten that amidst the usual cornucopia of intrigue. The revelation also seemed at odds with much of what we already knew – but then the schemes in this show are so mind-bogglingly overcomplicated, it can be hard to keep track. Nonetheless, we can now safely say that the real villain this entire year has turned out to be Cliff, pulling the strings all unseen like Ernst Stavro Blofeld. If he’s not back next year, I’ll be very surprised.

Season Finale

This has been an unqualified success in reviving a much-loved classic series and giving it a modern spin while remaining true to its original spirit. The new Dallas plainly costs a lot more than the old, with impressive Texas location shoots where the original made do with second unit stuff and a lot of Burbank studios. It looks great, and has a classy cast, even if the youngsters seem chosen more for photogenic reasons than acting talent.

Indeed, nice to look at though Jesse Metcalfe, Josh Henderson, Jordana Brewster and Julie Gonzalo undoubtedly are, the heart of the show, and its charisma, still lie with those original characters, and they’re still the best thing in it. JR, Bobby, Sue Ellen and Cliff might be noticeably older (very noticeably in Cliff’s case), but the actors have stepped back into those roles like they were never away.

With its labyrinthine double-dealing, Texan excess and often hilariously over-dramatic dialogue, the new Dallas is every bit the equal of the old, and its shorter season has allowed so much to be packed into ten episodes that it often felt like an overstuffed melee. That’s exactly as it should be. This has been so much fun, and I’m eagerly awaiting next year’s run.

The Walking Dead: Season 3, Episode 4–Killer Within

“It’s so easy to do the wrong thing in this world.”

Wow.

After three damned good episodes in a row, I’ve been half expecting this much improved Walking Dead to stumble, with a stagey, talky episode like so many last year. I kind of thought this would be the one, with the gang safely ensconced in their new home and the unease about Woodbury still just a background murmur. Instead, this week’s episode served up one of the most unbearably tense, dramatic and emotional hours of television I’ve seen for a long time. Along the way, so many major characters were put in separate situations of jeopardy it was almost impossible to keep track, and by the jaw-dropping, tear-inducing end, we’d unexpectedly seen two of them bite the dust.

Sang Kyu Kim’s expertly structured script started slowly enough, intercutting tense scenes in Woodbury with the relative calm of Rick’s gang at the prison, where the clear up of the felled walkers was continuing apace. But in the precredit sequence, we’d already seen a mysterious figure (presumably the one watching Carol from the woods a couple of weeks ago) unchaining the exercise yard’s penned zombies and setting them a trail of disembowelled deer chunks. Plainly things were going to go wrong for Rick’s group. But I couldn’t have foreseen how frenetically wrong they would go as the episode ratcheted up the tension.

As the gang began their clearup, the mood was jocular; Maggie and Glenn had been off shagging in the guard tower again, prompting guffaws of mirth as a smirking Daryl enquired “You comin’?” Hershel was taking his first stumbling steps on crutches, and things looked good. A slight tension was introduced with the reappearance of convicts Axel and Oscar, who said they couldn’t live in the cell block full of their friends’ corpses and begged to join Rick and the gang.

Some toing and froing about this ensued, with T-Dog surprisingly taking the “group conscience” role left vacant by Dale. But to no avail – Daryl and the new, pragmatic Rick both had experience of these kinds of guys, and neither was prepared to take the risk. So they were penned between the outer fences pending release into the outside world, and things looked stable again. Which was when a horde of walkers showed up, and everything went to hell all at once.

In the chaos, the group were split up into at least four separate parties. Rick, Daryl, and Glenn were rushing to undo the multifarious locks that would get them back through the fences to their friends. Hershel and Beth managed to shut themselves up at the top of a stairwell. Maggie, Lori and Carl dashed for the opposite door leading into the depths of the prison. And Carol was dragged inside too by T-Dog, who in a genuine shock moment had got himself bitten.

In hindsight, I suppose T-Dog’s death was somewhat signposted by the fact that his moral argument with Rick and Daryl gave him seemingly more lines than he’d had in the entirety of the previous season. He’s never been well-used as a character by the writers, which gave him the unfortunate appearance of tokenism as the group’s only non-white character. But for his final episode (too little too late perhaps), he got to step up and be an honest to goodness hero. Having been bitten, it was only a matter of time of course; but even then, he sacrificed what little life he had left to save Carol, literally holding two slavering walkers back so she could escape through a nearby door while they chowed down on him with some really nasty gore.

The stakes just kept ratcheting up as the episode went on. As Rick, Daryl and Glenn reached the yard to put pay to the walkers menacing Beth and Hershel, the prison siren unexpectedly started blaring, basically sounding a dinner bell to any walkers from outside. Then, as a gun-toting Carl led the way through the darkened interior of the prison like the hero of a first person shooter, Lori found the most inconvenient moment possible to go into labour.

Obviously giving birth in a corridor full of zombies wasn’t an option, so Carl led her and Maggie into a nearby machine room conveniently free of walkers. But even then, there was no letup in the tension. We already knew that Lori had had to have Carl by C-section, and would probably have to this time as well. But Hershel and Carol were nowhere nearby. Lori had only Carl and Maggie to help.

And again, things did not go well. Lori wasn’t properly dilated, and the baby couldn’t come out. There was only one option, on which Lori insisted despite the protestations of the tearful Maggie and Carl. They would have to cut her open to get the baby out. And with no anaesthetic, it would kill her.

The death of T-Dog (underused though he was) would have been shock enough for one episode. That the show was prepared to kill off, essentially, its female lead, was a hell of a surprise, and a well-handled one too. Having spent much of the last season whining and setting Rick and Shane at each other’s throats, Lori (through no fault of actor Sarah Wayne Callies) earned more than a share of fans’ ire. But she more than redeemed herself here, with a death scene freighted with emotion.

Stepping up equally well with an amazing performance was Chandler Riggs as Carl. The tearful exchanges of mother and son saying goodbye were almost unbearable to watch. Not to mention the fact that, as Maggie cut deep into Lori’s belly to extract the baby, we couldn’t know if it would survive.

Survive it (she) did, but the ordeal wasn’t over; because Carl had to shoot his mother in the head before she turned. Again, Chandler Riggs’ performance, as he first begged to be spared this then went back into the room to carry out the deed, was nothing short of incredible. The shot happened offscreen, so we might yet see an undead Lori, her guts hanging out, have to be put down properly. But I hope not; to do that would be to undercut the dramatic impact of the scene.

But it was another supposed offscreen death that was to blame for the situation, as Rick and Daryl discovered. Finding the generator running the siren, they also found Andrew, the convict left to die by Rick two weeks ago. Evidently he hadn’t died, and was intent on revenge. The inevitable struggle was less tense than events elsewhere, as it hardly seemed likely that the show would off both its leading roles in the same episode. But it did give Oscar a chance to step up, choosing to shoot his fellow convict rather than side with him against Rick’s group. So the gang has another “token” non-white to replace T-Dog – let’s hope actor Vincent Ward gets a better share of the action.

If all that left you feeling thoroughly wrung out emotionally, it was nothing compared to the final scene as a devastated Carl and Maggie wordlessly handed Rick the baby, and Lori’s fate became clear to him. Andrew Lincoln too gave a gut wrenching performance as the new Ruthless Rick just crumbled, stumbling crying onto the floor. After recent episodes, this had upped the emotional ante by making it clear early on that Rick really did still love his wife. That just made it all the more heartbreaking that she died without them getting to reconcile with each other. And the fate of Carol is still unknown – is she still wandering the innards of the prison, or did the walkers get her?

With all that going on, you’d think it somewhat redundant to keep intercutting such intense action with the slower moving events in Woodbury. Not a bit of it; those scenes functioned as breathers in the action, and also heightened the tension. Each time one of the group in the prison was in mortal jeopardy, the scene cut to the more idyllic setting leaving you gasping with tension.

And those scenes also served to further the narrative of what’s happening in the show’s other setting. Michonne is still highly suspicious of the setup; having found the bullet holes and fresh blood in the newly acquired National Guard vehicles, she sailed perilously close to danger by voicing her suspicions to the Governor himself, who came up with glib but unconvincing excuses.

Andrea, meanwhile, was chatting with the new, mellower Merle, who found common ground with her now that they’d both been ‘abandoned’ by the group. She was also undeniably flirting with the Governor, who revealed his real name to be Philip, as in the comics. And Merle’s newfound eagerness to hunt for his brother led the Governor to comment that he “understood”. Could he have brother issues as well?

David Morrissey and Michael Rooker are well-matched, their scenes together like watching two alpha males head-butting. For the moment, the Governor has the upper hand. But how long will that last against the unpredictable Merle?

This will probably be the pattern of episodes for the foreseeable future, intercutting between the show’s two settings to wring maximum tension out of one, the other or both. This time, the dramatic heart of the episode (and boy, was it dramatic) was at the prison. It was an amazing episode, courtesy of writer Sang Kyu Kim and director Guy Ferland, that has achieved the apparently impossible in continuing to top the previous ones. From last year’s frustratingly stop-start narrative, The Walking Dead has now become one of the most compulsively watchable shows on TV – let’s see if it can carry on with episodes of this kind of quality.

Misfits: Series 4, Episode 2

“What you have is a disease. And I’m gonna find the cure.”

A much better episode of Misfits this week, thanks to a greater focus on what the show does best – its characters. Yes, the whole “ordinary people with superpowers” premise is always interesting (though far from original), but what’s always set Misfits apart from shows like Heroes is its believable, funny, and not always likeable characters.

The main focus of this episode was on new boy Finn, and the reason behind our discovery last week that he’s keeping a girl bound and gagged in a locked room at his flat. I had wondered if this might be strung out over a few episodes to keep us guessing as to whether he was a psycho or there was some other reason, but Howard Overman chose to deal with it early – probably a good idea, if we want to establish whether we like a potentially contentious new character.

As it turned out, this was a ‘domestic’ take on the “standard Misfits plot™” of someone misusing their power. Sadie was actually Finn’s girlfriend, and the reason for the gag was fairly obvious as soon as we realised he was trying to “cure” her – her power was to talk him into being a better boyfriend.

Anyone who’s ever had a partner whose behaviour became irritating to the point of vexation will probably sympathise with her motives, but behind the sitcom-style premise was an interesting meditation on free will. Yes, under Sadie’s power, Finn had become considerate, generous, cleanly and willing to give cunnilingus whenever required (“some days it felt like I never saw the sun”). But none of it was real. He was being forced into it against his will, making him not the real Finn. So when Sadie took a holiday and her influence faded, he’d strapped her to the bed on her return until he could figure out a way to remove her power.

The gaff was blown when the now homeless Rudy “invited himself” to stay with Finn, and began to suspect that behind the mysterious locked door was – a talking dog. It was good to see Rudy’s power being used cleverly again, as “thoughtless Rudy” dragged the truth out of a gullible Finn at the Community Centre, while “sensitive Rudy”, unaware of the situation, ended up setting Sadie free.

With the secret out, it was Jess who best summed up the situation – and the dilemma. If Sadie had to supernaturally force Finn into being a considerate boyfriend, and the only way he could stop that was to keep her a gagged prisoner, their relationship probably wasn’t going to work out anyway. Nonetheless, back under Sadie’s influence, Finn insisted that the loss of his free will was a price worth paying to make his relationship work. But was he saying that out of his own free will or not?

The solution was fairly obvious, considering that Seth was still hanging around – but in the end it was Jess who talked him into relieving Sadie of her misused power. So finally, her power was removed, very much against her free will. Seen from behind the closed door of her bedroom, that was actually a little uncomfortable to watch, like a violation. But she’d been misusing her power, so this was the right thing to do. Wasn’t it?

Interesting meditations on free will aside, the script this week was laugh out loud funny far more frequently than the season opener, as well as setting up some interesting plot threads that will presumably be followed up later. The secondary plot involved the gang being dragooned by tyrannical new probation worker Greg into acting as models for a class of blind sculptors. The obvious similarity was to the classic, and indescribably creepy, video for Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ – and the script did eventually get round to referencing this, courtesy of the ever-charming Rudy; “in the words of the immortal Lionel Richie – hello”.

By far the funnier of the two plots, this set Rudy and Curtis at each other’s throats as they vied for the attention of a beautiful blonde blind girl. Irked at Curtis getting there first, Rudy suggested settling the disagreement “like gentlemen – a game of penis, scissors, twat”. It was just one of many classic Rudy moments this week. Finding himself homeless after refusing to pay his rent, he compared himself to canine kids’ show hero The Littlest Hobo: “Do you know what happened to the Littlest Hobo? He got raped!” Comparing the gang to The Waltons, he reminisced fondly, “I love The Waltons, man. It’s good, wholesome family entertainment. The cunts don’t make telly like that any more” – amusingly breaking the fourth wall from inside a show that is as far from “wholesome” as possible, and much the better for it.

Rudy got his chance with beautiful blind Ally after Curtis made the unpleasant discovery that she was an old-fashioned racist. Of course, the fact that she was able to tell he was black without seeing him immediately set off alarm bells, but the truth only came out after possibly the funniest sex scene I’ve ever seen. Assuming she couldn’t see him, Rudy donned a “condom” that was actually the cling film and rubber bands from her guide dog’s food bowl, then actually discovered some principles – “I am not leaving my penis in a racist vagina”.

At which point the disgusted Ally revealed that she could “see” after all – via her guide dog, which had gained telepathic powers during the storm. Astute viewers may remember this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an animal affected – there was the gorilla-turned-human that Kelly fell for last year. Nonetheless, it raised the interesting question of whether it was Ally or her dog that was racist – or both, perhaps. Still, even if Rudy was white, she made her displeasure with him very obvious with the end product of her sculpting:

It was a hugely funny episode with subtexts based around some interesting moral dilemmas. By wisely keeping the powers very much to the background (integral to the plot though they were), the script gave us some very funny and incisive character studies. Joe Gilgun’s Rudy continues to be the best thing in the show, a constant source of hysterically funny politically incorrect humour, but Curtis got some good righteous indignation at the racist Ally.

With the focus on Finn, we still got a bit more of a handle on Jess too, which was welcome after last week. She’s obviously the sensible, level-headed one of the group, prone to drily sarcastic quips mostly at Rudy’s expense – “you immediately reduce any woman to a hole your penis might potentially enter”. But she’s obviously a little insecure when it comes to the opposite sex, as seen in her awkward attempt to chat up hunky new barman Alex.

Alex may be a plot thread we’ll come back to later; Curtis revealed that plenty of girls had tried hitting on him, all to be rebuffed. It may be, as Curtis thinks, that he’s gay. However, in a show like Misfits, I suspect a more complicated reason.

The other mysterious new character to follow up on was statuesque new “trainee probation worker” Lola, who showed up unexpectedly to flirt with Curtis by the vending machines. Who is she, and what’s her angle? It’s early days, but I’m already wondering if somehow she has Curtis’ old gender-swapping power, and is actually the female alter ego of the fascistic, bullying Greg. Or perhaps she’s the “real” probation worker, and Greg is her alter ego. That could be interesting…

This was a much more assured script than last week, with plenty of chances to bond with our new characters. Nathan McMullen’s Finn, now living with Rudy in the Community Centre, is likeable enough but thus far a little underwhelming. Karla Crome’s Jess (perhaps by dint of having revealed little about herself as yet) is far more interesting. Of the old gang, Seth still seems like a bit of a spare part though – still hanging around to “collect Kelly’s things”, he’s yet to be much involved in the real action. All that may change though, and with my faith in the show somewhat restored by a better episode than last week, I’ll still be tuning in to find out.

The Walking Dead: Season 3, Episode 3–Walk With Me

“Looks like you’re sitting pretty at the end of the world.”

Welcome to Woodbury.

As I suspected after last week’s total absence of Andrea and Michonne, this week’s Walking Dead focused exclusively on what’s happening with them, with no sight of Rick and the rest of the gang at the prison. The splitting of the narrative into two threads (and two settings) that will inevitably converge at some point is yet another of the strengths of this season compared to the last. Last year’s constant setting of Hershel’s farm was at once claustrophobic and boring, with the hints of budget restrictions preventing us seeing anywhere else; the new setting of the idyllic town of Woodbury, contrasting with the grim bleakness of the prison, already gives a sense of a wider world in the story.

It’s a standard trope in post-apocalyptic fiction that, at some point, our plucky survivors will encounter an idyllic, picture postcard perfect community where everything Seems Too Good To Be True. Because of course it is – these places always have a Dark Secret underpinning their seemingly utopian nature. In this regard, Woodbury is nothing new, and to the show’s credit it trades on that trope by giving us a sense of unease throughout, and revealing some pretty nasty aspects of the place in its very first episode.

As in the comics, the introduction of this new story thread was foreshadowed by the crash of a helicopter, presumably the one we’ve been seeing on and off since about the third episode. It was revealed to be military, a National Guard Huey forced down by an engine malfunction, killing all but one of the crew. Andrea and Michonne were drawn to it, but when they got there another group turned up, professionally killing the walkers with a minimum of fuss under a businesslike, black-clad leader. Meet the Governor.

Yes, one of the comics’ best-remembered characters (along with Michonne) has finally shown up in the TV show. Played by Britain’s own David Morrissey (with a somewhat variable Georgia accent), his introduction is pretty faithful to that from the comics, but with the significant deviation that two of the heroes are ‘rescued’ by his party and taken back to the stronghold community of Woodbury, thus setting up a whole new narrative. In the comics, Rick and co stumbled over Woodbury and found out pretty quickly that it wasn’t as nice as it looked; here, it looks like Andrea and Michonne are going to settle in blithely (though Michonne at least is very distrustful already) before discovering the place’s Dark Secrets.

The show’s tendency to subvert expectations from the comics made me wonder if its version of the Governor might be less of a wrong ‘un than previously, but no, he’s established as a cast-iron baddie by the end of this episode. Again in keeping with the tropes of this genre, he’s a lying, manipulative politician, trading on the faith and wilful blindness of his community to carry out ruthless acts in its name. That hanging corpse outside Woodbury was just a hint; inside lies a secret lab run by a slightly unhinged scientist (notably like the one in Romero’s Day of the Dead), where unspeakable experiments are carried out on the walking dead.

And when the Governor found out from the injured pilot that a whole unit of National Guardsmen are just down the road, he gained their trust with a flag of truce before having them ambushed and massacred for their guns and equipment. He followed this up by telling the town of their “heroic sacrifice” before settling down with a drink in front of masses of fish tanks full of disembodied “living” zombie heads – including the (presumably murdered) helicopter pilot. That’s one of the creepiest images in the comics, and it was good to see it faithfully reproduced here, serving the same purpose – to show us that this guy is not right in the head.

Andrea, though, seems completely taken in, enough to end the episode seemingly flirting with him. Asking what his actual name was, she received the reply, “I’ll never tell” – an acknowledgement, presumably, of the confusion over his identity in the comics and the spin off novel also written by Robert Kirkman.

I’m not sure I buy Andrea’s instant trust quite so easily (although to be fair, she’s still pretty ill), given that she and Michonne were initially ‘captured’ by an old friend she would have every right to distrust. Yes, just as the show introduces a comics favourite in the form of the Governor, this week also saw the re-introduction of a favourite character created purely for the TV version. As was pretty obvious from the instantly recognisable offscreen voice, Merle Dixon is finally back – not as a teasing hallucination this time, but in the flesh, large as life and twice as ugly.

Michael Rooker, as before, chews up the screen as Merle – and he got a lot of screentime to do it this week. This is no bad thing, as we finally got to learn what happened to him since we last saw him cuffed to a roof in Atlanta and having sawn off his own hand to get free. He’s constructed a nifty stump attachment thingy which can have a bayonet attached to it, and become one of the mainstays of Woodbury, despite the Governor’s sniffy dismissal of him as a barely tamed animal.

So he and Andrea got to fill in each other’s backstories (helpful for us viewers). Andrea, of course, was unaware that you don’t have to be bitten by a walker to turn when you die, while Merle was unaware of how his little brother Daryl had stepped up to the plate in his absence. “He became a valued member of the group,” Andrea supplied rather tactlessly, implying that before then both Dixon brothers had been useless hangers-on.

Merle didn’t seem offended by that. He actually seems to have mellowed a bit; his previous unreconstructed Southern racism was nowhere in evidence, given that he was working with an African-American doctor, and had no special contempt for Michonne. Could he be being groomed for a slightly more heroic role? I rather hope not, he works best as a villain.

The tight-lipped Michonne (referred to by name onscreen for the first time) got to parcel out a little more of her backstory, courtesy of creepy scientist Milton and a nice civilised breakfast. The conversation turned to whether the walkers actually remembered anything of who they had been (“an echo, perhaps”), a possibility an uncomfortable Andrea dismissed, remembering the experience of having to put down her risen sister.

Michonne, though, seemed even more uncomfortable, especially when the question of her armless, jawless zombie ‘helpers’ came up. She’d put them down herself earlier in an unsuccessful attempt to stay hidden; asked who they had been, her hostile refusal to answer spoke volumes. As everyone present worked out, she had known them when they were alive – but only Andrea was foolish enough to press the point, receiving a contemptuous glare for her trouble. After only two episodes of screentime, I’m very much enjoying Danai Gurira in the part; she has the perfect blend of steeliness and inner vulnerability I expected from the comics.

It was a talkier episode than the first two breathlessly-paced, action-filled instalments, but no less compelling for that. We had a whole new scenario to introduce, as well as several very important characters, and even comic fans were probably kept guessing (as I was) by Evan Reilly’s script. Intrigue in place of action is better than the endless arguing that formed much of last season, and there were still plenty of zombies in evidence. It was excellent to see Michael Rooker back as Merle, and David Morrissey made an impressive debut as the Governor, who looks set to be just as memorable on TV as he was in the comics. Another very strong episode from a much-improved show.

Misfits: Series 4, Episode 1

“I just came here to do community service and now I’m going to die locked in a freezer.”

The end of Misfits’ third season felt like a proper ending for the story – at least as far as the characters we’d come to care about go. Alisha was dead, Simon was off back in time to die saving her previously, Kelly was together with Seth, and all the rest of the gang could do was get on with the rest of their lives.

Given all of that, I was actually a bit surprised to see that it was coming back for a fourth series. But it’s a popular show, and the central premise – that the mysterious storm gave lots of people in the area strange powers – has never been resolved, and leaves plenty of room to introduce new characters.

The trouble is, with Nathan, Simon, Alisha and now (we discover) Kelly all gone, it feels like the human core of the show we’d come to love has been somewhat eviscerated. New characters can come in, but we won’t have the level of emotional investment in them we did with the previous set. This episode faces a high hurdle in accomplishing that. Like the recent series of Being Human (to which it’s often compared), it effectively has to reboot itself, and give us a new set of characters in the hope that we’ll come to like them as much as we did the old ones.

This was helped by the way that we’d already come to like Rudy, who’d stepped in last series to replace Nathan. Joe Gilgun was as great as ever, with perfect comic timing as Rudy got up to his usual un-PC antics. Seth was back too, explaining that Kelly had chosen to stay in Uganda and user her ‘rocket scientist’ power to defuse landmines. He said that he was only back to “pick up their things”, but the fact that he’s there at all makes it seem likely that he’ll be a permanent fixture this series.

For me, though, Seth never felt like a proper part of ‘the gang’ last year, and (through no fault of actor Matthew McNulty) it’s going to take a bit of work before I give much of a damn about what happens to him. For some continuity, original gang member Curtis (the only one left) is still around, but he’d been sidelined so much last year (despite an interesting subplot about his gender-swap power), that he felt like a bit of a loose end. Again, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett has always been great in the part, but since his ‘origin story’, it’s always felt like the writers have struggled to come up with much for him to do, preoccupied as they were with the bigger sturm und drang of the Simon/Alisha epic love story.

So, it’s not all change. We still have Rudy (terrifically funny, but usually incidental to the main action), Seth (broodingly good-looking but with only one previous storyline which is now concluded) and Curtis (whose usual function last year was to sit sulkily on the sidelines and make snarky remarks). Perhaps some entirely new characters will help?

The jury’s still out on that one. Two new characters popped up; seemingly genial, soft-spoken Scouse lad Finn (Nathan McMullen), and piercing-eyed Jess (Karla Crome). They’ve turned up to do community service, as usual. Yes, that aspect of the show could have been dropped; it’s getting increasingly contrived for the old characters to still be stuck doing community service. But then it wouldn’t be Misfits. It’s a central plank of the show that it’s about young offenders forced into comic book situations when they’d rather be out getting pissed, shagging and breaking stuff – the very misfits of the title. Move it into the wider realm of the outside world being affected by superpowers, and you just turn it into Heroes – and we all know how that ended up.

Unfortunately, the new characters didn’t make that much of an impression. Jess seems… well, nice is about the best you can say so far. No idea what crime she committed, but her power appears to be the ability to see through walls. Other than that, the script for this first episode gives us very little of a handle on who she is, and what she’s like, which you’d think would be rather important.

Finn gets a little more depth, and a hint of mystery. He seems a likeable, enough ordinary bloke; his power is an extremely crap variety of telekinesis, which so far has enabled him to shake a plant pot and singularly fail to mind-throw it at Rudy. But we’ve established that he has a tendency to make things up about himself that are often singularly inappropriate – such as telling Jess that he was raped by his uncle to “lighten the mood” when they’re locked into a freezer to die.

And we later discovered that his ‘dog’ Sadie, who he was so concerned about looking after, is actually a bound and gagged young lady strapped to his bed. Interesting idea there – that one of the main characters might actually be a bit of a baddie. Or a nutter, at least. Of course, we still don’t know the full story here, but certainly Finn gets a better shake of the dice in the character depth stakes than Jess, which seemed a little unfair.

With all this weight on the episode to reboot the show, the story (such as it was) felt pretty inconsequential. Rudy, Curtis and Seth had been ‘infected’ by the power of a greedy thief who’d stumbled into the community centre with a briefcase full of money cuffed to his wrist. The effect of his power was to make anyone he touched as fanatically covetous of the money as he was, thus pitting the regulars against each other in an increasingly homicidal, paranoid escalation of mistrust.

It’s basically the ‘standard’ Misfits plot – the gang meet someone else affected by the storm who’s misusing their powers, become affected themselves, find a way to break the spell, and effectively, punish the power-abuser by killing him/her and/or removing the power concerned. True, it was told in an interesting, non-linear way, opening on the rooftop with the gang literally at each other’s throats, weapons drawn, fighting for possession of the case full of money. The story then unfolded with flashback within flashback, with a self-aware Rudy acknowledging that, “I’m what’s known as an ‘unreliable narrator’”. Nice to see he was paying attention in English Literature GCSE.

Along the way, there was a fair bit of fun. Rudy pretending to be the new probation worker (while caught wanking over internet porn) was a laugh, and the script actually had you wondering for a (fairly short) while if he was telling the truth. There was the business of him trying to drug everyone’s drinks left, right and centre, which was played well for laughs (though where did he get these ‘drugs’?), and Seth being somewhat discomfited by Rudy and Curtis wanking themselves to sleep next to him (“it’s a sedative, isn’t it?”).

I said last year that the show was in danger of collapsing under the weight of its complex, massively self-referential time paradox plot arc, so it’s probably a good idea that it’s going back to the episodic, self-contained nature of its first series. The trouble is, not only did it feel inconsequential by comparison, it also felt very much like we’d been here before. It didn’t help that, in a bit of presumably amusingly-intended lampshade-hanging, Rudy kept commenting on the show’s established tropes – “oh, the storm. Yeah, it’s always the storm”, and, of the new, hardass probation worker (an excellent Shaun Dooley), “don’t worry, he’ll probably be dead within a week”.

That last actually points to an increasing credibility gap (insofar as it’s fair to complain about that in a show which features superpowers). The death of the gang’s first two probation workers, back in the first series, led to all kinds of worry about police investigations. But last series they managed to kill off two, one of them in the middle of a major zombie outbreak, and the Thamesmead police don’t seem to have concerned themselves with it at all.

Still, new probation worker Greg is a breath of fresh air, since the show got rid of the lovable, lackadaisical Shaun last year. Given a great establishing scene – “if you cross me, I will fuck you. And it’ll feel like being fucked by a train. Choo choo.” – he’s presumably going to be around for a while, resetting the balance the show lost with no authority figure to hate.

I have to say, as a longstanding fan of the show, I actually didn’t enjoy this very much. It didn’t help that the plot required the regulars to be acting very out of character, and that at least one of the new characters seemed to have very little depth at all. To be fair, if you’ve never seen the show before, this could be an ideal jumping in point, without the heavy burden of all the old characters’ backstories. But on the basis of this first episode, I’m still unconvinced that it was a good idea for the show to carry on after the finality of the third series’ ending. I’ll stick with it, to see if it pulls off the trick Being Human managed of making me like the new characters as much as the old. So far, though, there’s little evidence of that.

Dallas (the next generation): Season 1, Episode 8

“Turns out we’re not so different after all. We’re both just trying to make our fathers proud” – Christopher Ewing

Previously, on Dallas: With John Ross banned from drilling on Southfork thanks to a handy document separating the mineral rights from the land rights, things got a little fraught.

Vicente from Venezuela, restive at the non-appearance of the oil he was promised, threatened to exercise his right to take Southfork in lieu of payment
Christopher learned not only that Rebecca was pregnant and that he was the father, but that she’s actually having twins
Dastardly Harris Ryland gave Bobby an envelope detailing Ann’s Dark Past, which he summarily burned without looking at it
Marta/Veronica took her stalking of John Ross to new levels by pretending to have kidnapped Elena
John Ross had the bright idea of setting Vicente on her, which led to the unfortunate result of her being thrown out of a very high window
And the cops turned up at the ranch to arrest John Ross for her murder.

This week, there was more toing and froing about the land/drilling rights to Southfork, and Rebecca moved closer to a reconciliation with Christopher, while Christopher returned to “the lab” to work on his methane drilling thingy. But the most pressing thing on everyone’s minds (including the good guys) was how to get John Ross out of jail. After all, he’s a Ewing – he may be an asshole, but he’s their asshole, and for this family that’s the most important thing.

John Ross has indeed made an unholy mess out of the situation JR left him to deal with – there’s no oil flowing, he’s about to lose Southfork to the Venezuelans and he’s in stir for a murder he didn’t commit. Just when things couldn’t seem to get any worse, Vicente popped in for one of his ‘little chats’.

With JR still taking a back seat this week, Harris Ryland nowhere to be seen and Marta/Veronica dead, it was up to Vicente to be main bad guy this week, and Carlos Bernard seized the opportunity with relish. “Disloyalty is dangerous,” he purred menacingly at the incarcerated John Ross, adding, “pointing fingers in the wrong direction could be hazardous – to you, and to your family.” And, presumably, to your fingers.

John Ross was probably relived at being spared yet another anecdote about what it’s like “in my country”, but any relief was short lived, because Vicente had a couple of thugs beat the crap out of him in a corridor, promising to kill him the next time if the oil wasn’t forthcoming. Like JR, he still has shreds of decency – he could probably get out if he told the truth about his affair with Marta/Veronica, but he doesn’t want to hurt Elena’s feelings. Very thoughtful, but not much use when you’re being repeatedly kicked in the crotch.

With the stakes clearly outlined by John Ross’ wounds, the Ewing clan closed ranks to find ways to help him. Bobby too was menaced by Vicente, but the “nice Ewing” has a core of steel and isn’t intimidated that easily. Nevertheless, he was prepared (after a chat with his mother’s gravestone) to sacrifice his principles and start drilling if it would save John Ross’ life.

Sue Ellen, once more forced to choose between political integrity and her son, made the wrong choice yet again. “The only way I can see to help John Ross is if I cross a line. A big one,” she agonised to Ann. “And if I do that, what does that make me?” “A mother,” said the sympathetic Ann, having stooped to a few dirty tricks herself. But then, Ann’s not standing for Governor of Texas, a competition in which Sue Ellen seems to be taking victory for granted.

After having previously tried to bribe Harris Ryland with an offer of high office (unnecessarily since he’d already done what she wanted), she was at it again, using a mixture of bribery and blackmail to try and force the coroner to rule Marta/Veronica’s death a suicide. This is obviously going to come back to bite her, especially given the platform she’s running on:

And yet again, she’s ruining her reputation all for naught. It was Christopher who had the answer – placate Vicente with a large ice cube. Yes, the process of “using carbon dioxide to extract methane from hydrates” was valuable enough that Exxon were sniffing around it, so Chris figured Vicente would take it as a replacement for his cherished oil – after a quick demo in the living room that seemed a bit dangerous to me:

Vicente was impressed enough by a man burning an ice cube on his table to favour him with a “where I come from” anecdote; an actually relevant one this time, as he revealed his bigger plan to seize control of Venezuela’s energy industry from President Chavez. Topical! Also probably bollocks…

Never mind, Vicente was impressed enough with the methane to leave Southfork alone and let the police find the secret camera footage showing that Marta/Veronica was alive when John Ross left her. Of course, Vicente removed the footage of his own men chucking her out of a window – in his country, that sort of incriminating evidence can get you dancing the joropo in a Chavez prison.

Family matters

The Southfork cemetery gave us the chance to remember Miss Ellie’s second husband, after Jock’s death:

Clayton Farlow (portrayed by 1950s king of the musicals Howard Keel) was another oilman who was perhaps ill-prepared for the sheer madness incurred when marrying into the Ewings, and for ten years he endured the wrath of JR. Eventually fed up with the dastardly Ewing’s inability to accept a “replacement” for his father, Clayton took Miss Ellie off on a big trip and then returned without her, giving a less than convincing explanation that she was fed up of dealing with all the Ewing conflict. This is the first time we’ve found out when she actually died.

Who’s double crossing who this week?

In yet another all too brief appearance, JR was shown to still be carrying on his arcane schemes to screw over Cliff Barnes by using his henchman Frank to betray him. Even JR seems to realise that this isn’t really going anywhere, as he hotfooted it back to his Dallas to lurk, crestfallen, over his stricken son’s bedside. Now that would be a scary vision to wake up to.

Elsewhere in the family, Rebecca might be mending fences with Christopher, but her stubbly, shifty brother Tommy was having none of it. He’d heard about Exxon’s interest in Christopher’s methane drilling whatsit, and with billions at stake, he’s not about to let Rebecca’s conscience and pregnancy get in the way of his hirsute evil.

This week’s big cliffhanger

And just to hammer the point home, Tommy grabbed an unwilling Rebecca and gave her a big sloppy kiss. But any worries about Luke/Leia incest shenanigans were quickly put to rest when he sneeringly revealed that (gasp!) he’s not her brother after all!

Another satisfyingly bonkers episode, with Vicente stepping up well as main bad guy – it’s just a shame that he’s presumably now satisfied with the methane doobry, as he’s unlikely to take much more part in the proceedings. But with only two more episodes to go, surely it’s time for JR to return from his extended vacation taunting Cliff Barnes and take back the crown as king of the Dallas baddies….

The Walking Dead: Season 3, Episode 2–Sick

“We took out these walkers, this prison is ours.”

Warning – contains spoilers!

Having presumably learned a lesson from last year’s fitful pace, this second episode of The Walking Dead’s third season kept up the level of intense action established last week. There was plenty of gore and, importantly, plenty of zombies; but as in all the best zombie stories, the most dangerous threat wasn’t from the shambling dead, but from the greedy, self-interested living.

Readers of the comics will not have been too surprised at last week’s end-of-episode reveal that some of the prisoners had survived, barricaded into the prison cafeteria for nearly a year. But as usual for the show, it looks like their interactions with the heroes (if you can call them that) are taking a very different path from that in the comics. For a start, in the course of only one episode, most of them have now been killed.

The prisoners’ plight, expecting Rick and co to be a rescue team and not comprehending the scale of what’s happened to the world, was an interesting take on the whole post-apocalypse thing. Imagine if you had managed to wait it out, thought you were being rescued, and found out that the whole of civilisation had fallen.

Even then, they scarcely seemed able to grasp it, which was perfectly credible; wanting to borrow cellphones to call their loved ones rather than panicking. It was only when the group’s de facto leader, the aggressive and hyper-macho Tomas (Nick Gomez) pointed out how bad things would have to be outside for people to break into a prison that the reality seemed to sink in.

Tomas was obviously going to be a problem from the start, with he and Rick squaring off to each other as two alpha males vying for territory – if the show had been in smell-o-vision, you could probably have smelled the testosterone. But Tomas was taking his hard man status a little too seriously; as evidenced at the close of the last season, this is a new Rick, more hardened to Shane’s pragmatic view of needing to do anything in order to survive, and unhampered by moral objections from the group now that Dale is gone.

Fairly early in the episode, he had a cold, matter-of-fact discussion with Lori about whether to just kill the prisoners rather than take any risks, which Lori accepted meekly enough. As it turned out, Rick didn’t even leave it to the last resort. Shane may be dead, but it seems his philosophy lives on in his best friend, who was right to doubt the safety of cohabiting with the prison’s former inmates. That confrontational, “we took it. It’s ours” is virtually a quote from the original Dawn of the Dead, and there, as here, we’re perhaps not meant to sympathise with the man expressing such possessive sentiments. Given the alternative, you see his point; but if Dale had still been around, he might have seen the inmates’ point of view too.

These guys are hardened prisoners, and no clue was given as to why they were incarcerated; it could just as easily have been multiple murder as accounting fraud. The former seemed more likely as evidenced by the ferocity of their attack on the zombies. Completely undisciplined, they went at it violently but stupidly, viciously stabbing at anywhere but the head, contrary to Rick’s instructions. No surprise that, in one of the week’s more inventive gory moments, one of them ended up stabbed in the back by the arm bones of a zombie that had torn off its own hand to escape from a pair of cuffs.

Neither was there much surprise, given what we’d established about him, that Tomas chose to end the debate about trying to save his life by brutally smashing his head to a pulp. It was a surprise, though, quite how much Rick had changed towards Shane’s worldview when presented with Tomas’ sly but unconvincing attempt to kill him by shoving a zombie at him after ‘accidentally’ nearly clouting him with a baseball bat. For a few heart-stopping moments, the two men stared at each other coldly as they’d been doing every couple of minutes since the episode started. Then with nary a change of expression, Rick simply clove Tomas’ head in two with a cleaver. Bet he wasn’t expecting that.

But if viewers were shocked by this display of Rick’s new ruthlessness, it was nothing compared to what happened next. Tomas’ compatriot Andrew (who seemed so upset about Tomas’ death that the implication was they were lovers) made a run for it, with Rick in hot pursuit. And when Andrew stumbled into an exercise yard full of walkers, Rick simply locked him in to be torn apart, listening dispassionately to the screaming.

This is indeed a new Rick, hardening to his situation just as he did in the comics. It makes sense, pragmatically, if he’s to ensure his own survival and that of his group; but it also makes him harder to like as a character. I’m betting that this newfound ruthlessness will be a major plot point in the coming episodes.

It is at least (for now) tempered with a certain sense of fairplay, as he kept to his word in allowing surviving prisoners Oscar and Axel to settle in to the newly cleared adjacent cell block to the gang’s own. This may be a mistake. In the comic, it leads to a very gruesome subplot which looks unlikely in the show as it depends on additional characters not included in the TV scripts. Nonetheless, I can’t see showrunner Glen Mazzara leaving the plot thread of the group’s neighbours simply dangling. Custer-bearded whiner Axel (Lew Temple) seems amenable enough (but is he?), but his compatriot Oscar (Vincent Ward), stubborn enough not to beg for his life with a gun pointed at his head, looks like trouble. Still, my guess is that the show will subvert expectations by showing us that Oscar’s the one who can truly be trusted.

Amid all that action, there was still plenty of time for character moments and development, mostly centring on the rest of the group holding vigil for the unconscious Hershel while Rick, Daryl and T-Dog went off a-hunting. Refreshingly though, the character moments sprang as much from their actions as from sitting around listlessly talking, which seemed to be the main format of season two. Carol, in particular, has become much more self-reliant, partly trained by Hershel in medical techniques. After her mostly passive role in previous seasons, as beaten wife and grieving mother, it was good to see Melissa McBride taking charge here, binding Hershel’s stump and experimenting on a downed walker as practice for Lori’s potential upcoming C-section.

Lori, for her part, seemed to be curbing her tendency to whine at every moment, and even gaining a bit of self-aware humour. And it was she who took charge when Hershel stopped breathing, bravely giving mouth to mouth to a man who might rise from the dead and try to eat her face off. Indeed, it was a genuine shock moment that made me jump when he seemed to lunge for her to do just that; but as it turned out, he was back in the land of the living. This surprised me, as Scott Wilson’s absence from the main cast list, together with daughter Maggie’s heartfelt farewell speech to him, made me fairly certain he was on the way out. The fact that he isn’t is a good example of the show playing with your expectations.

It was a measure of how much better this year’s balance between action and character development seems to be that this week’s cliffhanger centred not on the prisoners, or any threat from the walkers, but on Rick’s ambivalence about his cheating wife, and her eagerness to be forgiven. Rick was at least able to reassure her that she was a good mother, after her earlier shouting match with the increasingly self-reliant Carl; like any good son, Carl seems to be following his dad’s example by hardening his worldview towards ruthlessness in order to survive.

But when it came to talking about where their marriage stood, after some wry discussion on the absence of divorce lawyers after the end of civilisation, the best Rick could offer was “we’re all grateful for what you did”, ie saving Hershel. So much left unspoken and nothing resolved – even amidst the thrills and the gore, it was a quietly powerful moment.

Thus far, I’m loving this new season, which seems to have truly taken the criticisms of last year on board. It’s worth noting that the pace of the previous season flagged as early as halfway through its first episode; here, it’s been breathlessly exciting for two already. Thankfully, though, the writers haven’t tacked to the other side of the balance by giving us nothing but action, gore and zombies; there’s still enough depth and development of character to make these people interesting enough to care about. Because without that, they might as well be the walking dead themselves.

My only disappointment this week was the complete absence of Andrea and Michonne, last seen wandering off towards an unspecified destination. I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more of them next week, as the season’s other major plot thread and location begin to get properly established…

Dallas (the next generation): Season 1, Episode 7

“I really hoped you kids would climb out of the hole this family dug. But JR’s just dragging you down with him.” – Bobby Ewing

Previously, on Dallas: With JR now sole owner of Southfork, and having buggered off leaving John Ross in charge, the first battles were joined in stopping the dastardly plans to drill on the family’s beloved ranch.

Harris Ryland, slimeball and trucking magnate, threatened to expose the saintly Ann’s Dark Past by means of sending her a mysterious necklace with the power to make her dissolve into tears
Bobby found this a bit annoying and went round to Ryland’s office to punch him
Vicente from Venezuela got all threatening with John Ross about the non-appearance of the oil he’d been promised
Marta, whose actual name is Veronica, took her John Ross-stalking to a new level by threatening Elena with a knife through her photo
Bobby and Christopher won the first battle over the drilling when Rebecca pointed them to an old document showing that JR’s ownership of the ranch doesn’t include mineral exploitation rights
And, in tried and tested soap fashion, we ended on the big cliffhanger that Rebecca is (gasp) pregnant.

This week, the focus was mainly on Rebecca’s pregnancy and John Ross’ increasingly frantic attempts to get round the legal obstacle to his drilling before being subjected to Venezuelan vengeance. With JR barely appearing (again), you’d think the show might be losing steam in the absence of its villain. Not a bit of it; John Ross might not be cutting it as a junior JR (yet), but there’s baddies oozing out of the Texan woodwork all over the place. Harris Ryland, Marta/Veronica and Vicente from Venezuela make for a good trio of antagonists while JR takes a break to play double dealing poker with Cliff Barnes.

John Ross had another bad week; JR has really dropped him in it. Has he got what it takes to be his father’s son and come up smelling of roses while screwing over everyone else? On current evidence, no. He may have his oil trucks running again (thanks to Bobby’s Ryland-punching antics), but he can’t drill any oil to put in them. This is a problem, as Vicente from Venzuela, a man with the demeanour of a minor league Bond villain, is not a patient man.

Peremptorily summoned to the black-clad bad guy’s lair, John Ross was all out of excuses. This gave Vicente the chance to deliver his usual style of veiled threats disguised as anecdotes about his home country. This week, it was about dancing. “You know, we have a dance in Venezuela called the joropo…” This was then described in more detail than was perhaps necessary before Vicente reached the point. “I can spot a good dancer when I see one Mr Ewing, and you are not a good dancer.”

Rightly terrified of a man whose idea of a threat is dance instructions, John Ross was getting pretty desperate, so he took Lucy out to lunch. Lucy’s appearances thus far have been fairly pointless cameos, so when John Ross started asking her to help sway her father Gary into allowing the drilling, it looked like she might actually have a plotline for the first time this series. Alas, any such hopes held by avowed fans of Charlene Tilton were quickly dashed as she went straight round to Bobby to blow the whistle on John Ross’ connivances.

Which left John Ross with only the unpalatable option of literally begging his uncle to allow the drilling before Vicente could send some heavies round to teach him to dance. Bobby’s refusal was predictable, but it looked like he at least enjoyed seeing John Ross grovel.

So, like every spoiled little boy in a jam, he went crying to his mom, the only levelheaded one in the family (for now – let’s hope no one pours her a drink). Sue Ellen had the sensible idea of asking for Elena’s help; what with her money funding Elena’s oil venture at “the old Henderson place”, Elena could hardly refuse the loan of a few barrels to keep Vicente in dancing shoes.

But John Ross had more to worry about than just Vicente, as bunny-boiling Marta/Veronica had taken to following Elena about and giving her evil glares. After last week’s knife/photo intersection, this is clearly a worrying development. But John Ross has enough of his dad in him to use one enemy against another; so he told Vicente a quick fib that she’d been creaming money off the deal, and asked the footloose Venezuelan to “put a scare into her”.

Unfortunately Vicente is not a man who does things by half measures. Having found Marta himself at a nearby hotel, John Ross had a bit of a row which involved him calling her a “crazy messed-up bitch” while she uttered things that people only say in soap operas such as “I’ve earned my way out of the slums of Caracas!” Then, just as John Ross finished this delightful exchange and left, Vicente’s heavies turned up and threw her out of the fifth storey window. Evidently her joropo had not been up to scratch.

Ann and Bobby weren’t having a great time either. The problem of Ann’s Dark Past keeps making her burst into tears at inopportune moments, such as Rebecca’s pregnancy scan (it’s twins), and lie to Bobby about shopping while she’s really hanging out at a children’s playground staring wistfully at young mothers.

The logical conclusion to draw is that Ann’s Dark Past involves her having had (and presumably given up) a child when she was younger. Fortunately for Bobby, Harris Ryland had an envelope containing everything about the Dark Past, which for some reason he was happy to give to Bobby (after having threatened him with assault charges). His motives seem inexplicable – maybe he’s just doing it for devilment.

If he was hoping to gum up the works of their marriage though, he hadn’t taken Bobby’s unfeasible decency into account. Showing Ann the mystery envelope, he then threw it onto the fire saying that when she was ready, she could tell him anything. Fortunately for Ann, he didn’t glance into the fire to see the photos of a younger her holding a child; fortunately for us, the camera did. Though why this would be such a cause of shame in this day and age seems perplexing.

Family matters

With Lucy almost having a plot this week, viewers may need reminding who her father, the much-mentioned Gary, is. Gary Ewing was the middle, boring Ewing brother between JR and Bobby when the show first began in 1978. As a third wheel in the nice guy/ nasty guy dynamic of Bobby and JR, he served little function dramatically, so the writers gave him an alcohol problem, forgetting that the show already had one alcoholic in Sue Ellen. That having failed to pique anyone’s interest, Gary was summarily shunted out of Dallas in season 3 and sent to launch lower rent spinoff show Knots Landing, which actually outlived its parent show by two years.

Who’s double crossing who this week?

Given one scene in this week’s episode (shot in the same limo he was in a couple of weeks ago), JR is still scheming to bring down Cliff Barnes, who never did make an appearance in Vegas. His henchman/PI, the bizarrely named Bum, has discovered that Cliff’s henchman was adopted as a child by Cliff and given a wonderful lifestyle, but no inheritance, which might make him feel a bit aggrieved. As JR comments, “a cheated man is a dangerous man”.

Given that we’ve barely seen Cliff this series, and he seems to have no part in any of the plotlines, JR’s obsession with him looks a trifle odd. But at least it gave him a scene in the episode, however perfunctory; he’s still the best thing about Dallas, and his continuing absence from the main action seems a shame.

This week’s big cliffhanger

Having delved deep into the Big Box of Soap Cliches for last week’s “I’m pregnant” shocker, another old favourite was wheeled out this week as the police turned up at Southfork hot on the heels of John Ross. It seems they want to have a word with him about the murder of a woman he’d been witnessed having a furious argument with. Actually, these were the same cops who’d turned up at the ranch earlier to charge Bobby with Ryland’s assault; either Dallas has something of a police shortage, or these two comprise the special Ewing Unit needed to deal with the family’s frequent brushes with the law.

Three episodes to go, and the show’s still entertainingly implausible and mad, though the absence of JR is definitely felt. One or two plotlines – like Ann’s Dark Past – seem fairly pointless and redundant, but this is a show that can never have too much going on. And at least we finally discovered that Bum’s actual name is Steve Jones, which makes it even more bizarre that he’d voluntarily call himself Bum. Perhaps people kept mistaking him for the Welsh TV presenter…

The Walking Dead: Season 3, Episode 1–Seed

“Weapons, food, medicine – this place could be a goldmine.”

Warning – contains spoilers!

After a rather windy, badly paced second season, AMC’s zombie hit The Walking Dead was finally back on our screens last night. The often dull second season, aptly summed up on Facebook as “people argue… and sometimes zombies show up”, was a frustrating mixture of the brilliant and the utterly mundane, with, generally speaking, comparatively few sightings of the zombies that are the show’s raison d’etre.

It also settled into a tedious routine, with all the characters stuck on Hershel Greene’s implausibly utopian farm and settling into tropes of established behaviour. As sure is eggs is eggs, Rick and Shane would argue about the interminable search for little Sophia, T-Dog would struggle to get even one line, Lori would moan about stupidly trivial issues and Carl would wander off unsupervised into mortal danger.

Still, amid the soap opera, there were some good emotional beats and musings on the post-apocalypse scenario the gang found themselves in. And there were some good zombie set pieces; the freeway attack in episode 1, the barn full of walkers at the mid-season break, and finally, a memorably apocalyptic finale which saw a herd of them finally overrun and destroy (thank goodness) the farm that we’d got sick of the sight of by then.

Season 3 gives the show something of a fresh start in all sorts of ways. The alpha male territorial pissing between Rick and Shane is finally resolved what with Shane being dead and all, they’re off the farm at last, Rick has firmly taken charge to stave off the ceaseless arguing, and, refreshingly, the gang has split up into two parties, giving the possibility of separate narratives and settings that was absent last season.

As if to reflect the fresh start, the opening titles have been given a revamp for the first time since the start. They’re still in much the same style, but the sepia-toned rotting buildings are new ones, and obviously, the cast credits have changed to reflect the fact that we’re now free of Shane’s belligerent head-butting and Dale’s endless moralising. And the final building we see is plainly going to be the setting for this season. More downbeat and grim than Hershel’s farm, it’s the prison that’s so well-remembered from a fair chunk of the comic.

I’d have preferred it if they’d got there sooner, by dealing with the farm plotline halfway through last season then moving on. But the last season had budgetary problems, among others; a requirement to make more than twice the episodes of the first season with about half the money. Hopefully, given that it was still a success, AMC has thrown a bit more money at this even longer, 16 episode season.

It certainly seemed like it from this well-paced season opener, which certainly didn’t stint on the zombies but also left room for us to catch up on what the characters have been up to. Clearly, some time has passed; in the wordless precredit sequence as the gang raided a walker-infested house for supplies, it was noticeable that Carl’s hair is now longer and straggly, while Hershel has grown a beard. Everyone else’s hair looked the same as ever, though, making me wonder when on their lengthy flight from the walkers the guys found time to stop and have a shave and a haircut.

Turned out they’d been running all winter from the herd that engulfed the farm, with other herds closing in from all sides. Fortunately for Rick and the gang, a quick scout down the road revealed what was presumably the prison we’d seen in the distance at the end of the season finale. Given that they’d had all winter, you’d think they might have stumbled on it before, but I’ll let that pass.

The prison was heavily stocked with zombies, but had the advantage of several layers of boundary fences, enabling our gang to get in and clear the place out in the manner that was cursorily swept over in the original Dawn of the Dead. Here, we got to see it all, which meant liberal doses of zombie action for most of the first half of the episode as our heroes hacked, slashed and shot at rotting heads all over the screen. Just when they thought they could deal with the dead prisoners easily, out shuffled some riot gear-clad guard like the next level up in a first person shooter, which led to some inventive grue.

The fact that this is, among other things, a gory horror story was not forgotten about, and some of the effects were convincingly gruesome, a mixture of CG and practical work from the legendary Greg Nicotero. Probably the best was the unfortunate rotting guard whose face came off together with his gas mask as Rick pulled at it:

Once inside, there was a bit of time to pause and reflect before the next round of searching the darkened, bleak setting. Lori, predictably, immediately took to moaning about how her husband and son can’t stand her any more (not to mention the audience), but her worries about the pregnancy were inventive and well-founded. What if the baby was stillborn? Would it try and eat her from inside? (That might be interesting to watch) Or if she died in childbirth, would she eat the baby? Hershel reassured her that in any of those scenarios, she and/or the baby would be promptly dispatched. Actually, if she doesn’t stop moaning, that might end up happening regardless of zombification.

Looks like Hershel may not be around too long though, as, during the claustrophobic search of the next block, he foolishly ignored a corpse that the camera kept suspiciously lingering on, which duly got up and bit him. Hustling him into the prison cafeteria, Rick lost no time in hacking his leg off to stop the infection spreading, another wince-makingly gruesome sequence. Whether it’ll work is anyone’s guess, as the show’s still making up its own rules about its zombies.Still, it was good to see another well-remembered incident from the comic book brought to life, even though it happened to a different character there.

Speaking of the comics, fans will doubtless be cheered by the arrival of well-liked character Michonne (though she’s yet to be identified by name onscreen). Memorably introduced as a silhouetted figure accompanied by two chained, jawless, armless zombies in the final minutes of the last season, she’d rescued Andrea from the chaos of the farm’s destruction and apparently they’ve been hanging out together all winter.

Danai Gurira is suitably grim-faced and badass in the role, first appearing here to hack off the heads of some inconvenient walkers as she foraged for aspirin. The katana is her chosen weapon, as in the comics, and she uses her neutered zombies as pack mules, an inventive touch. Unfortunately Andrea was a bit under the weather with some nasty cold-like symptoms, so we didn’t get to see much of a dynamic between their tow characters as yet, but hopefully that’s to come.

So, a promising start which looks like the showrunners may have digested many of the criticisms of the show’s uneven second season, and perhaps AMC have been a bit less stingy with the budget. The cliffhanger, which reveals that our heroes aren’t the only survivors in the prison, is straight out of the comic books, and promises more of a plot than just another year of everyone hanging around in one place and bitching. Meanwhile, Andrea and Michonne being already separated from the main party is a deviation from the comic, but a damn good idea, giving more narrative scope from the off.

Let’s hope the rest of the season maintains the quality here; but I won’t take it for granted, as the second season opener was pretty good too. I noticed that with all the action, T-Dog still barely got a line; though character beats were fairly frugal so far. And at least Carl now seems able to take care of himself with a gun, so hopefully there’ll be less worrying when he inevitably wanders off. The throw forward to upcoming events looks promising too, with the much-anticipated arrival of Britain’s own David Morrissey as the nasty Governor of Woodbury – though perhaps once again, fans of the comic will find their expectations of him cleverly subverted. Either way, this season opener has so far done much to dispel the fans’ anxieties after last year.

The Dwarf and the new season

When I started this blog, I used to do catch-all round ups of TV shows I’d watched recently; but over the last couple of years, it’s tended more towards episode by episode reviews of specific shows. But it occurred to me that, however good it is, there’s not usually enough in each episode of the new Red Dwarf to warrant my usual lengthy musings, and maybe I should use it as an anchor for a periodic return to my older format. So here goes….

This week’s Dwarf, while perhaps not as much fun as the first, was still a successful effort in the show’s ongoing attempt to recapture what made it so loved in the first place. In this, it’s largely succeeded; the cast may look older, but otherwise it feels eerily like a stasis leak back to the early 90s. I’m loving that the new sets have the same chamringly low-budget feel as the original – where once you could identify Ford Granada dashboard panels built into the walls of Starbug, now you can see the backs of old CRT televisions sprayed red protruding from the Dwarf’s inner hull.

This week’s plot concerned Rimmer and Kryten installing a new ship’s computer to replace the much-missed Holly, only to find that it was efficient to the point of (logical) murderousness. Meanwhile, the script dealt amusingly with some recursive concepts that only a sci fi sitcom could do. As established in series 7 episode Ouroboros, Lister is actually his own father, and the episode amusingly showed how this mind-bending paradox might be stretched to accommodate a ‘normal’ father/son relationship.

In keeping with Lister’s personality, this involved him getting drunk and leaving his ‘son’ (ie himself) video messages that he wouldn’t remember from the previous night’s intoxication. Craig Charles’ interactions with his drunken self on the screen were not only funny, but actually felt like they had something to say about the relationship between fathers and sons.

The other recursive subplot (tied neatly into the main plot, as was Lister’s) was Kryten’s attempt to establish, via asking around of the food dispensing machines, whether the term “Chinese whispers” was as racist as Rimmer claimed. Of course, this descended into a game of Chinese whispers itself; as the question was passed around, it became so distorted that eventually the machines, having started with “is Chinese whispers racist?” were asking each other “do Chinese knickers have braces?” All of which was funny, but slightly undermined by Kerry Shale’s astonishingly stereotypical voice acting for ‘Taiwanese Tony’, which sounded like the crudest Asian parody I’d ever heard – and that really is racist.

All of this served to distract attention from the fact that the central plot’s main idea was essentially identical to series 2 episode Queeg, in which Holly’s incompetence triggered his replacement by the Dwarf’s tyrannical backup computer (actually faked by Holly himself). The glamorous jobsworth computer Pree was eventually defeated by a logic trap laid by, surprisingly, Lister – a classic sci fi convention played straight, which seemed to lack the usual clever inversion in Doug Naylor’s scripts.

It was plenty enjoyable still, though it threw Holly’s absence into sharp relief. Yes, his/her role as chief of exposition was largely rendered redundant when Kryten became a regular, and Norman Lovett’s return in series 8 was mostly to deliver a few hit and miss gags that had little point. But Holly did coexist with Kryten for series 3,4 and 5, and the character is missed, by me at least. I’m assuming that neither Lovett nor Hattie Hayridge wanted to return, which is a shame – it’s the one glaring difference from the show’s glory years.

Over the pond, the new US TV season has now started in earnest, bringing back some old favourites and the usual slew of promising newbies whose survival beyond mid-season is perilous in the cutthroat world of the networks.

First back was last year’s critically acclaimed popular hit Homeland. Based on an Israeli show, it was basically a (slightly) more thoughtful version of 24, with which it shares a showrunner in Howard Gordon, in which troubled CIA agent Carrie Matheson (Claire Danes) must determine whether returned POW Sgt Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) has actually been turned in captivity to work for Al Qaeda.

A tense but slightly anticlimactic ending showed that indeed he had, but turned back from his attempted suicide bombing of the Vice President by dint of his own conscience, pledging to advance the interests of the Middle East via political means rather than terrorism. Carrie, driven to ECT treatment by her undeclared bipolar disorder, was meanwhile turfed out of the CIA but remembered a crucial bit of evidence just as she went under the electrodes…

As its inspiration, Hatufim, was a one season show, the problem for Homeland’s return was managing to credibly retain its two main characters despite the divergence in their fates. In this, it was only partially successful. Brody, now a Congressman, is on the up politically while Carrie convalesces in the quiet ambience of her dad’s home. But Brody is called back into the service of Abu Nasir with a visit from Palestinian journalist Roya Hammad, and after a bit of conscience-wrestling, is off to CIA chief David Estes’ office to nick a list of potential terror targets.

Carrie is called back into action by Estes (“this is not you getting your job back”), as one of her former informants in Beirut has info about the forthcoming attack, but Carrie is the only one she’ll talk to. Carrie is henceforth sent to Lebanon despite her Ripley-esque qualms, and it’s all back on.

I have to admit, this does strain credulity a fair bit. Carrie is plainly still very unstable; would the CIA, incompetent though it often is, entrust her with a mission of that importance, with that much jeopardy, after it had (justifiably) thrown her to the wolves? It’s presented as a last resort scenario, but still felt like we were straying into the realms of 24-style improbability just to retain a major character.

Brody (whose wife still calls him only by his surname) had a more believable path with his meteoric rise to political success. But another major plot point was his daughter accidentally outing him as a converted Muslim. Again, it strains credulity that, in the current climate, that wouldn’t be all over the papers within minutes.

Still, perhaps it will be in forthcoming episodes. The season premiere felt a little clunky in its need to catch us up on the main characters’ doings, and credibly get them back into action. But I’ve seen the second episode (on UK TV tonight), and with that out of the way, it’s back to unbearably tense set pieces and thrilling action. If you can get past that initial credibility hurdle, I’m pretty sure you’ll start enjoying this as much as the first season.

New to the current crop of US drama is an interesting post-apocalyptic sci fi effort called Revolution. Its central premise is that, fifteen years previously,an unexplained event caused every electrical device on the planet to stop working, with predictable chaos. The drama centres on the dominant militia, the only ones allowed firearms, and the struggle against their totalitarian rule while a mysterious USB stick might just hold the key to getting the power back on.

It’s an interesting premise, played out with Lost-style flashbacks each episode to the immediate aftermath of The Event which explain how the characters came to be in their current situation. Central to the story are the Matheson family, whose father Ben seems to know a lot about The Event; but he’s killed by militia thugs in the opening episode, condemned to appear henceforth only in flashback. With the thugs having kidnapped his son Danny for reasons as yet unknown, his daughter Charlie enlists the help of her long missing uncle Miles in getting her brother back. But Miles has secrets of his own, and they’re to do with the fact that his old US Marine buddy Sebastian is running the militia.

The post-apocalyptic scenario is well-done, with crumbling cityscapes and rusting (current) cars in evidence throughout. Similar shows often eschew such vistas with the (realistic) premise that, after an apocalyptic event, survivors would probably be better off outside of disease-ridden, corpse-strewn, ruined cities. This is not only credible, but keeps the budget nicely low, as you just have to mostly shoot in empty countryside (see the original Survivors for a good example).

But rotting cityscapes still look damned impressive, and Revolution doesn’t skimp on them, however implausible their inclusion may be. It also has well-drawn characters and a lot of thought put into its particular apocalypse (though so far nobody’s mentioned the problem that the human body also runs on electricity).

With post-apocalypse survivalist drama very much in vogue (see also TNT’s post-alien invasion Falling Skies and AMC’s zombie apocalypse The Walking Dead), NBC has thankfully promised that the enjoyable Revolution will run for at least one full season, rather than being cancelled halfway through. As with all shows since Babylon 5, it clearly has an intended long-running story from showrunner Eric Kripke, so let’s hope that it gets to tell it.

Of course the flipside to that is that sometimes shows have a long-running story, reach its conclusion, but the network still want more. A case in point is the show that made Kripke’s name, Supernatural, now back for its eighth season despite the fact that it ran out of story after its fifth.

Supernatural is a sort of blue collar version of The X Files, in which tormented but photogenic brothers Sam and Dean Winchester traverse the US sorting out (ie killing) various monsters derived from classic myth, urban legend, and increasingly, Judeo-Christian lore. Over the first five seasons, this spiralled into a highly enjoyable sub-Milton epic of angels and demons fighting to provoke or avert the apocalypse, which reached a suitably dramatic climax at the end of season 5.

But then it went on. With Kripke having long since departed as showrunner, it’s been patchy since then, with some excellent episodes counterpointed by mediocre or outright rubbish ones, and suffering from the lack of an ongoing story to match the original one. In its place, we’ve had former good guy and renegade angel Castiel trying to set himself up as the new God, and inadvertently releasing Lovecraftian prehistoric beasties the Leviathans onto the world, while Sam struggled with having accidentally left his soul in the pit of Hell.

And now they’re back again, but it’s very much business as usual; we’ve been here before. Dean is back from Purgatory, much to Sam’s lack of surprise; these guys have been killed and resurrected so frequently now that it would be more of a surprise if they stayed dead. At stake is the fate of a ‘Word of God’ tablet showing how to permanently defeat all demons (again). Two episodes in, and the brothers are already enmeshed in a struggle to get it before king of Hell Crowley (the ever-excellent Mark Sheppard) gets his demonic paws on it.

It’s enjoyable enough, and has some tantalising hanging questions; what did happen to Castiel, what’s Sam been up to for the past year, how exactly did Dean get out of Purgatory and why did he bring a vampire with him? But it feels like old ground, as if the show’s now running on autopilot. Perhaps it’s finally time to let the Winchester brothers retire gracefully, or more likely go out in a blaze of angsty glory.