all aboard the mighty 200

Planet of the dead started like a cross between Tomb Raider and a James Bond film.  All the while I was thinking OMG it’s Zoe Slater.  She was annoying on Eastenders so I wasn’t holding much hope.  Michelle Ryan’s character Christina had an air of smugness and superiority about her right from the start as she robs a gallery of a golden goblet.  She of course in her get-away ended up on the same London route 200 bus as the Doctor.  Did he really need to be eating an Easter egg as he got on the bus?  I know it is the Easter special but it was all a bit naff.

As one would expect the bus enters a tunnel, drives through a hole in the fabric of reality and ends up on another world with 3 suns.  The bossy boots/little rich girl/dominatrix Lady Christine da Souza proclaims herself leader. The bus driver attempts walking back through the hole and is fried, they realise the bus has protected them like a Faraday cage but of course it is now stuck in the sand and then runs out of petrol.

Back on earth UNIT is called in and mad professor/welsh nutter character Malcolm begins his work.  Of course cell phone coverage between earth and the planet is no problem.  Another bus passenger, Carmen (Ellen Thomas who played the acerbic Liz in Teachers), can hear voices, lots of voices of the dead. Christina and the Doctor head off to investigate and run into a couple of human size fly creatures – Tritovore – turns out they crashed on the planet too. The Doctor and Christina soon learn the sand storm heading towards them is actually a swarm of metal sting-ray type creatures which have devoured everything on the planet.

The Doctor explains his pseudo science to Christina with my fave line of the episode when he describes something as a “super clever out of spacey way”.  Anyway, alien tech scavenged from the fly ship, fly-people devoured by the sting-ray creatures the Doctor and Christina race back to the bus.  With the final element – the golden goblet- the bus powers up and levitates back through the wormhole and over London in a very Harry Potter-esque moment.

Gratitude all round – nutty Malcom hugs the Doctor and can’t stop saying I love you, the Doctor seems fine with that but is disgusted when saluted by the UNIT boss.  Predictably at the end Christina wants to join the Doctor, he says no, she is handcuffed for the theft and led away, he relents and pops her handcuffs, she escapes and flies off in the bus.  Meanwhile Carmen tells the Doctors “your song is ending sir”, that it is “returning through the dark” and “he will knock 4 times”.

 I’m just pleased Christina didn’t leave with the Doctor.

Of curious interest is the title of the next episode – The waters of Mars. It is an anagram of both “The masters of war” or “The war of masters”. Coincidence?

dismal dennis

I’ve just watched the first episode of the new series of the Pretender. It wasn’t un-funny but I did expect a bit more. Dennis is hapless and clueless.  He’s striking out on his own fully confident he has a future. The crazy thing is that this wasn’t a truly original script I was watching, this was history, reality with names changed to protect the innocent. As ridiculous as some of these situations appeared most have happened in NZ’s political history.

 I did admire how well they’d got the set for Bowen House – it the pre-renovation state anyway.

Dennis Plant for Prime Minister

Check out the website of Future New Zealand. With the Election coming up we’ll need some light relief.

trial by media or trial by jury

In any story there are going to be two sides.  Reputable media will try their best to cover both sides.  Sometimes they fail as one side wont talk.  No-one likes being sued so the major papers tend to be pretty sure of their facts before putting something all over the front page.  A newspaper needs to make money though and there are only so many “saved cat” stories they can publish.  They need to hunt out the good, the bad and the simply odd in the world. 

The newspapers need to find some aspect to the story with which the reader can identify.  When that story is a private one, a relationship gone bad, potentially silly actions carried out on both sides as a result how do you make it something the country wants to read about?  Well obviously it helps if you throw in a celebrity.  Better still if you can manage to attach it to a social ill.

So now Veitch has been charged and suddenly his former colleagues are referring to him as “Mr Veitch”, no more matey matey Veitchy any more.  I still don’t understand why he said anything when the story broke and I wonder if the story would have had less fuel without his words.  The other party has remained silent.  All we see of her is the same smiling photo.   Veitch is in a no win situation, whatever he did or didn’t do and whatever the circumstances his story has attracted the social ill of domestic violence.  So now he has to fight the charges and the public preconception.  An the media – how much effort are they putting into the other side of the story?

shhhhhhhh!

The Librarians

Have you seen The Librarians? (warning: music starts unannounced) The Middleton Interactive Learning Centre is the setting for ABC’s comedy set in a public library. Frances O’Brien, the head Librarian is cringe-makingly funny.  A little too close to the bone perhaps. Frances is a devout Catholic and has some wonderful quotes:

“God loves all his children, but especially those who return their books on time.”

“The Library is a place for learning, a place for the mind, and not for other parts of the body.”

In a series which plays on stereotypes, though I must admit I haven’t seen a bun and glasses on any of the librarians, Frances brings a whole set of her own.  She asks anyone who looks vaguely middle eastern to leave their backpacks at the counter.  She picks on Nada who speaks “goggledy-gook”, otherwise known as Arabic, with her friends. Lachlan, who mans the circulation desk is dyslexic and seems to have the job solely because Frances fancies him.  Then there’s Christine, the children’s Librarian who’s only after a ‘respectable’ job while she awaits her court appearance on drugs chanrges. Dawn’s in a wheelchair as a result of a team building exercise and Frances having let go of a rope while focussing a little too closely on Lachlan’s butt.

You really should just watch the programme for yourself. The only thing to annoy other than Frances’ accent and intonation – an irritating beep with scene changes.  It is supposed to represent the scanning of books but it just grates after a while.

kia ora shortland street

How fantastic, Shorty was captioned in Te Reo on Wednesday night. You can view it through TVNZ’s On Demand. A shame they’re not doing it all week but I guess it is expensive. Maybe next year the speech will be in Maori with captions in English.

journey’s end

**Doctor Who spoiler alert**

I’m still so excited I’m not sure I can put these thoughts in any coherent order just yet so this may jump around a bit.

Firstly thank goodness all those James Nesbitt rumours were WRONG. It would have ruined it for me, so yay for wild speculation which turned out to not be true.

Alas poor Donna, not dead, but dead to the world of the Doctor. So sad for him and sad for Donna too but she won’t know what she’s missing. I think it will be hard on Wilf knowing and not being able to say anything. Good on the Doc telling her stupid mother what’s what.  Maybe she’ll ease up on Donna now.

Doctor Donna – delightfully nutty the Doctor and Donna sort of mashed up and reconstituted as two timelord/human hybrids. the constant babbling and gobbiness of Donna combined with the hyperactive gibberish of the Doctor was amusing though I have to say more than a few minutes might just get annoying.  Oooh, two Doctors, now there’s a twist.  How soppily romantic leaving the human version with Rose in her alternate world. Aww they can grow old and grey together. Once she’s made him a more compassionate less genocidal version of himself that is.  She got herself a bit of a bad boy Doctor to deal with and you just know she’d rather have had the one who’s had his edges softened a little.

I’m so pleased someone finally said it.  The Doctor just isn’t as all peace loving as he’d have you believe. Count the corpses in each episode folks.  He might not have putlled the trigger or detonated the bombs but he has an army of dedicated followers who do the deadly work for him.  How many have the time children killed?

OMG, who knew the tardis was designed for 6 pilots?  Insane! How fab to see it full of all his friends.  The minute they came together you just knew it couldn’t last.  The programme’s not big enough for all those egos in the same show fulltime. It was sad to see the Doc end up alone again but the extras had to be dispatched.  Oh how convenient sending Mickey and Martha off with Jack. Well he was needing extra help after the demise of Owen and Toshiko. I did think it was mean though, not letting Donna’s mother help – honestly – she’s not thst bad is she. Loved the hugs goodbye and particular Donna taking her opportuity for a grope of Jack, positively shoving Sarah Jane out of the way to move in on him. Have to feel sorry for her, she was the only person he didn’t flirt with all episode.

Exterminieren – German speaking Daleks – what a blast.  I love these little details.  Of course the Daleks speak many languages – why wouldn’t they.

So Davros appears to live on, no one wants to be responsible for killing him off. You just know that somehow a Dalek will return eventually and appart from the mind-wiped Donna no one of consequence is killed. A brilliant episode and fine final story from RTD.  The cast is intact and David’s hair will bounce back to entertain us again. Now the speculation over the the next companion can begin.

the girls are back

**Doctor Who spoiler alert**

If you’d told me that I’d enjoy a DW episode with barely any scenes with the Doctor I wouldn’t have believed you.

Last week’s single set episode had an air of money saving about it and this week’s “flashback fiesta” was a bit the same.  Money is being stashed away for the finale and it had better be good is all I can say.

I’d also been thinking that by the time Rose finally returned I’d have got fed up waiting but I hadn’t.  She was like a mini Doctor, adopting his habits and behaviours.

The fortune teller was seriously creepy, more than the bug on Donna’s back. That time beetle – looked like something out of a toy shop. I regretted that they showed us the whole thing to clearly in the end as it was just creepier and more suspenseful seeing only small snippets of it.

Another market scene – did that remind anyone of pompeii? It felt a bit samey. And I kept thinking it was earth.  The opening scene just didn’t register and it wasn’t till Donna was talking about time machines and aliens so freely – I kept thinking why is she saying that to someone on earth – but of course she wasn’t.

Flashback annoyance aside I did like the tie-ins with the spin-off series – the Torchwood reference and the Sarah Jane link. A mention of Ianto and Gwen – so much <3 so much sadness.  And then my mind wanders to Captain Jack…

At the end, Donna’s whole realisation that her life was insignificant compared to the survival of the world – I’m still struggling with that. It just arrived too quickly. It felt like the end of the episode was rushed. Even at the moment she realised she needed to jump felt too rushed. The interval between the realisation and the action was so brief and it is in a parallel world so she won’t take that with her. In her “Rose” world she’s gone from ignorance to mind blowing awareness and self-sacrifice but in the “Doctor” world she’s been on the journey of discovery and ading real world emotion and reality to the Doctor’s world. In my head I can’t reconcile the two Donnas.

So overall I really liked this episode despite the flashbacks and woefully too few shots of that fabulous hair.  This “Turn Left” episode is still messing with my mind. I can’t wait for the finale.

midnight mayhem

**Doctor Who spoiler alert**

For the first time ever I’ve just seen an episode of Doctor Who I really didn’t enjoy. It was okay, it just wasn’t spectacular. Midnight saw the Doctor off on a solo adventure, stuck in a transporter with 7 others doing a spot of sightseeing. It was just all a bit naff.  I understand all the subtleties and depths within, the Doctor failing to win over humanity, the fact he came so close to being abandoned by his fellow travellers, how different it is for him to travel without a companion.  I watched Doctor Who confidential as well and I appreciate the difficulties faced by the sound folk in this episode.  I don’t need a big explosion or scary monsters to enjoy an episode. I think after the last two episodes I was just expecting something more.

And as for Rose, we know she’s coming back, all the little entrances which the Doctor doesn’t see are becoming as annoying as Donna’s return was.

gasp, toni, no!

Did you see that coming? Toni, dead, how can that be? You can’t give us Hone and then take Toni. Toni’s been part of the furniture of Shortland Street for such a long time it will be strange without her. Mind you I was over the will they wont they relationship with Chris.  And despite the shock, I’m kind of pleased that for once they didn’t build up to her demise overpainfully drawn-out months.  Hell, by the time it got to Joey’s departure we were bored with it. Suspense was well out the window with that one. Nice too that it wasn’t one of the predictable just before Christmas deaths either.  Hmm, I wonder if they way is being cleared to dispatch Chris and Harry too.  Will Chris be fired by the board? Will the sadness send him to San Fran to be with his brother? Dr Ropata is nicely placed to fight Callum for the top job. Or will Chris take up with Justine again?