Babylon 5

It was the dawn of the third age of mankind. . . .
 

This week sees the end of Pick TV's rerun of the SF series Babylon 5, this being the show's first airing in the UK since its only appearance around 20 years ago on Channel 4. I watched and enjoyed that original run, but this time round I ended up recording about 80 episodes before I watched the first one as I feared that cold reality would ruin my nostalgic memories.

That trepidation is probably warranted. When first shown B5 was popular, although not massively so leading to it being axed and then resurrected at least once and being seemingly on the verge of cancellation the rest of the time. Then there was the alleged nerd war between B5 and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 fans, who both claimed that their series had been ripped off by the other. As I liked both series I didn't have much interest in the debate, although I tended to think that any two shows set on a space station were likely to have similarities.

Once the show ended, B5's fortunes plummeted rapidly. A lot of the main cast died, and all way before their time. The spin-off series Crusade was cancelled before it aired, the six movies weren't all that good, and the subsequent attempts to make more spin-offs or reboots failed. All this, along with a mixture of studio apathy and production mistakes such as losing the special effects files, led to B5 quietly disappearing.

Other SF franchises have grown ever larger or at least remained in the public consciousness, but aside from Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory deeming that B5 'fails as drama, science fiction and is hopelessly derivative', its largely been absent from popular culture. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, its reputation amongst devotees remains. Many rate it as the greatest ever SF series, while others view it as a flawed masterpiece that was ahead of its time. My opinion was the other popular view that it was greater than the sum of its parts.

It was that rare thing of being an SF series that actually contained some SF. It avoided the approach most other shows used that as long as it was set in space and had some robots in it, it could be called SF. Instead, it appeared to have been made by people who had read Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein and Bester. Even better, it was the first SF show, and arguably the first of any kind of TV series, to do something that is common these days of devoting its whole 5-year run to a single, pre-planned serialized story arc.

Unlike every show that came after it, though, B5 was almost entirely the work of one writer, J. Michael Straczynski, to the extent that aside from Neil Gaiman's episode, JMS wrote every episode from the midpoint of season 2 to the end of season 5. This singular vision enabled an extreme level of foreshadowing, plot development and continuity that made the show deeply involving (and impenetrable if you happened upon it in mid-run). So, for example, it's revealed in the very first episode how a main character will die and it takes the whole 5 year run for the full, tragic context to play out. Heck, you have to wait until season 4 to find out why the narration over the opening title credits mentions the third age of mankind.

 

I guess if the show was being made today the first ten minutes of every episode would be taken up with a 'Previously on. . . .' sequence to help you recall the main plot threads, but B5, aside from a few flashbacks and chunks of exposition, never spoon-fed the viewer. So, with its heady mix of clever storytelling, interweaving plots, complex characters, great twists, memorable incidental music, improbable hairstyles, unexpected deaths and most important, consequences, I ought to have been excited about getting a chance to revisit the show, but I wasn't. That's because of the other stuff, the stuff that got in the way of the greatness.

There's season 1 with the goofy stories in which every week a new alien arrives and for no good reason tries to take over the station armed only with dodgy special effects, but is defeated during a massive punch-up. There's those unconvincing muppet aliens (quite simply the worst idea anyone has ever had). And there's Sinclair. When I first saw B5 I reckoned Sinclair had to be the worst actor ever to appear on screen and his ponderous delivery sapped the life out of every scene he was in, which was a problem as he's the main character.

Even when the alien of the week, the muppets and Sinclair left in season 2 the bad acting continued with guest actors either phoning in their performance or hamming it up like pantomime villains. Even the great Season 3 had Grey 17 is Missing, an episode that was so bad the writer apologized before it was transmitted. Then there's the rushed season 4 with the galactic war that took seventy episodes of rising tension before it finally broke out, only for it to be fought and won between commercial breaks.

And there's season 5 when two popular characters had left and way too much time was devoted to the war of the long-haired, soppy telepaths, which some die-hard fans reckon is so unwatchable they refuse to acknowledge it exists. Even the show's main claim to fame works against it with so many characters making cryptic predictions and having prophetic dreams that by the time you get a resolution, often around four years later, it's hard to remember or care any longer.

With all that in mind I wondered whether to delve back in, but to my relief I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected. As it turned out, B5 is a show that was designed for binge watching decades before the term became popular. Having a seer opine that 'to avoid your fate you must save the eye that does not see' works better when you find out in a week what it means rather than having to wait a year.

 

In addition, season 1 wasn't as bad as I remembered. I don't think it was down to now knowing about the personal problems the actor who played Sinclair was having, but this time round I enjoyed his stiff-backed approach. The other acting also wasn't as bad as I feared, with the scenery chewing performances being fun along with seeing actors I hadn't remembered were in it such as Bishop Brennan from Father Ted and Citizen Smith's dad. In fact there was a strange overuse of English actors, who all had that odd English accent that's only ever used on US TV shows. Even the weak stories were watchable as they usually had a decent B-plot, or a memorable scene, or something that advanced the arc story.

 

I'd also forgotten how funny the show is. Amidst all the angst, pain, suffering, self-sacrifice, unrequited love and the epic battle between order and chaos for the control of the universe for all eternity, there were plenty of good jokes. The docking guard stating that nothing ever surprises him any more only for Elvis to walk past, Ivanova somehow keeping a straight face during her boom-shaba-laba dance, the usually verbose G'Kar working on a swearing-in oath for days and coming up with: 'Do you want to be President?' My favourite joke was one that livened up an all-too-familiar scene in which Garibaldi has to get past a guard to break Sheridan out of a cell. Garibaldi tries the novel approach of telling the guard he's been on TV, only to get the deadpan response of: 'I don't watch TV. It's a cultural wasteland filled with inappropriate metaphors and an unrealistic portrayal of life created by the liberal media elite.'

Season 5 was also more entertaining than I'd expected. Although Byron's hair, the singing and the dopey telepaths were far, far worse than I remember. What I did like is that it gave the characters a long goodbye. Most shows cram a resolution to the story along with tearful goodbyes into the final few minutes of the final episode, but B5 devoted several episodes to letting everyone depart in their own good time. The fact that many of the characters' fates were tragic made them all the better.

Just about the only drawback was that the main storyline no longer feels plausible, as it features the follicly-challenged President Clark ascending to power with help from secretive outside forces and then instigating a Make Earth Great Again policy that involves promoting extreme patriotism, starting wars and victimizing alien immigrants. Then he diverts attention away from his fascist agenda by stirring up race hate and social divisions, and sacking anyone who disagrees with him. After which he imposes increasingly dictatorial policies while using state controlled media to support his alternative facts and to dismiss all opposition as fake news. This sort of stuff is just too fanciful and could never actually happen, but then again I suppose it is SF.

 

Anyhow, I'll stop banging on and leave the final word to G'Kar with his closing speech from season 3, another one of those epic moments I'd forgotten about that got the show its reputation as being the best ever SF TV series:

'There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos. . .  and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born. . . in pain.'

The king is dead. Long live the queen

So it’s goodbye to Peter Capaldi and welcome to Jodie Whitaker. When the news first broke about the identity of the new Doctor I was disappointed. I reckoned Doctor Who needed a shake up and I liked the idea of a change of dynamic with a female Doctor, but I wasn’t sure about the choice.

 

If the new showrunner wanted an actress from Broadchurch, JW wouldn’t have been in my top 3 choices. Phoebe double-barrelled something, the bookies’ favourite, was tall and quirky enough to pull it off, Vicky McClure’s eyebrows are just as watchable as Capaldi’s, and Olivia Colman is great in anything, but having seen Jodie being the Doctor for a few seconds I reckon she’ll work – provided she gets some decent stories.

Seeing PC try his best to spark life into yet another plot-free story just showed that a new take on Doctor Who is long overdue. PC should have been the greatest ever Doctor. Heck, he’s Malcolm Tucker. The guy can do comedy, tragedy, menace and drama, often all at the same time, and yet he just never got the chance to let rip. The ending brought this home to me when his nostalgic look back on his achievements only produced a sick dalek from an episode I’d forgotten about and a couple of dopey assistants looking sad.

I watched David Tennant’s regeneration episode over Xmas and his prolonged death scene is annoying, but I have to admit it was deserved as he did have numerous great call backs to be nostalgic about, but sadly PC just didn’t have any epic moments. He was a brilliant Doctor trapped in a poor run. So as even his closing monologue was pedestrian, I thought I’d recall Malcolm Tucker’s closing monologue (edited for language) from The Thick of It, as curiously it works for the Doctor, too. Now that’s how a character should leave a show with his head held high.

"You know Jackie effing Chan about me. You know eff all about me. I am totally beyond the realms of your effing tousle-haired effing dim-witted compre-effing-hension. I don't just take this effing job home, you know. I take this job home, it effing ties me to the bed, and it effing effs me from arsehole to breakfast. Then it wakes me up in the morning with a cup full of piss slammed in my face, slaps me about the chops to make sure I'm awake enough so it can kick me in the effing bollocks. This job has taken me in every hole in my effing body. "Malcolm!" it's gone, you can't know Malcolm because Malcolm is not here. Malcolm effing left the building effing years ago. This is a effing husk, I am a effing host for this effing job. Do you want this job? Yes? You do effing want this job? Then you're going to have to swallow this whole effing life and let it grow inside you like a parasite, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it effing eats your insides alive and it stares out of your eyes and tells you what to do. I'm going to leave the stage with my head held effing high. What you're going to see is a master class in effing dignity, son. The audience will be on their feet. "There he goes!" they'll say. No friends - no ‘real’ friends. No children, no glory, no memoirs. Well, eff them."

Star Trek: Beyond

I’ve just got round to watching Star Trek: Beyond, the latest Trek movie, and I was mildly disappointed.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first of the re-boot movies despite the fact that most long-time fans are dismissive of it. And I thought the second one wasn’t that bad even though die-hard fans tend to spit blood and start screaming abuse about magic blood at the mention of the film. But this one had the approval of the fans, so I was expecting to be entertained and yet I wasn’t.

Maybe on repeat viewings I might grow to enjoy it. Heck, I’ve learnt to find the good in the Final Frontier and even the Motion Picture, but right now I’m at a loss to find anything good to say about it. Yes, it was nice that Nimoy’s passing was acknowledged. Yes, there are some scenes with McCoy and Spock bickering. Yes, it was good that a main character was revealed to be gay, even though I thought this supposed taboo was broken by Jadzia Dax and Garak’s interest in Dr. Bashir over 20 years ago. But having more character moments when, for instance, they involve McCoy flying spaceships, doesn’t get to the heart of why these characters worked in the first place.

The main problem, though, is the flaming CGI, which saps the life out of every action scene and even the quieter scenes. A good example is the now obligatory Enterprise crashing scene. When it happened in Into Darkness it was over-the-top, but there was at least some feeling of peril and of it furthering the plot. Either way, it was vastly inferior to the previous time the Enterprise crashed in Nemesis, or the time before that in Generations. And they were all considerably less interesting than the first time the Enterprise crashed in the Search for Spock. Back then, the scene had only a few seconds of special effects and so relied on tension and plot development and great dialogue so that even the access codes are memorable, along with an iconic shot of the crew watching the ship go down. Less is more, every time.

This time round it took what felt like several hours for the ship to go down with the camera swooping around all over the place running along the walls, ceilings and floors before finally standing still for a millisecond to give us a hint of what’s supposed to be happening, and by the time you’ve figured out that something could be happening in engineering involving someone in a uniform and an alien, the camera swoops off to confuse us somewhere else.

Once stuff has stopped swirling around the screen we reached the point in the story that most Trek reaches before the opening title credits have rolled, and the story that followed could have been a good one if we hadn’t have had to wait for an explanation of what that story was until about five minutes from the end. An old MACO soldier from season 3 of Enterprise getting disillusioned with Federation policy and fighting back is a decent premise, but there’s no reason to keep that a mystery until it’s too late to actually deal with the implications.

The thing that makes the story telling in Trek work is that the moral dilemma comes very quickly in the story and the tale then deals with an attempt to find a solution that in bad Trek involves creating a subspace inversion field in the positronic matrix, in good Trek involves everyone agreeing that tolerance and finding common ground between divergent species is the only way forward, and in excellent Trek has Kirk punching a man in a monster suit and showing a green-skinned woman what pressing the lips means.

Beyond didn’t manage any of that because for most of its length there was no moral dilemma other than how do the main characters find their way off a planet, while being repeatedly interrupted by interminable CGI scenes where yet again I hadn’t got a clue what was going on.

For me escaping from a planet isn’t a great hook for a Trek story. Voyager did the very same plot at the end of season 2, except they had a moral dilemma, had redshirts getting chomped by dinosaurs, Ensign Suder’s redemption, Seska’s demise, with plenty of time left over for the Trek message of tolerance and common understanding. In short, when I watch a Trek movie and I start thinking to myself that Voyager did this better, something’s wrong.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Who

So another year of Doctor Who comes to an end and on the whole I’ve enjoyed this year. Since the reboot I’ve blown hot and cold on the various seasons. For me Eccleston was near perfect, and I dipped in and out of Tennant’s tenure, mainly out while Rose and Martha were there and in when Donna was around. I gave up when Matt Smith arrived when I realized that I didn’t like the Doctor, his companion, or the stories so there wasn’t much point watching any more.

But the joy of Who is that if you don’t like a Doctor, another one will come around again one day, and when Capaldi arrived I returned to the show, and I’ve found him to be a suitably intriguing figure with just the right level of quirkiness and authority. Maybe he was too stern in the first year and too soft in the second, but on the whole he’s always watchable. Sadly, I still couldn’t abide either the companion or the stories, but one out of three ain’t bad.

I never once got the point of Clara. She was given near divine status on the show for no reason I could see. Every week we’d get a speech about her importance and attributes, but nothing she did on screen ever seemed to warrant that, and her ‘death’ was written as if she was the most beloved character in sf history, and so was more gruelling for the viewers than for the character. Spock, who really was one of the most beloved characters in sf history, got about five lines before Trek’s peculiar form of time-dependent deadly radiation got him, but Clara got twenty minutes to bang on about it and then another half-hour after she was resurrected to bang on about it again. I did not get any of that.

I watched the episode on the Horror channel recently where Adric, the previous, and much-unloved, companion to die finally bit the dust. There were no speeches in that episode about how his character was an annoying, know-all twerp who deserved to get blasted away. Adric just acted like an annoying, know-all twerp and let the audience decide for themselves that he deserved to get blasted away. And he stayed dead, sort of.

I didn’t get ‘Me’ either, who also got more screen time than the character warranted. Maybe it was a brilliantly original idea to have an immortal react to the pain of being forced to live for all eternity by mooching around aimlessly with a gormless smirk on her face, but it was lost on me.

But, those minor gripes aside, the thing that’s the most important part of Who is of course the stories. This year every week I found myself wondering if there’d be a story this week, and most weeks the answer was no, despite all the two-parters. There were some weeks that actually had a plot. I liked the Fisher King tale as that used time travel in a good way and there were twists and turns and a solvable mystery. The eye gunk monsters, which I gather is already ranked as one of the worst in the show’s history, played entertainingly with the idea of how stories work. And I enjoyed the hapless Vikings, except for ‘Me’, as, again, it had a plot, but most of the rest weren’t so much stories as situations.

The usual structure to most episodes was to provide a huge amount of set up to create an interesting scene. Everyone then stands around admiring the scene from several angles, and I’ll admit that usually it was worth admiring. Then, just as you’re suitably excited about how this situation might develop, absolutely nothing happens, other than the cannon-fodder characters getting killed, until the episode ends.

The thing about the Davies years that I only now truly appreciate is that he knew how to plot. Stuff used to happen and it then developed and twisted and reacted and did all the things that make a story. Even better, every bit-part character was given a character. Davies used to do it in a painfully obvious way that gave everyone a domestic reality to their existence, but at least you then cared when they got exterminated, but that doesn't happen any more. People are just thrust on to the screen and we’re told to care about them, usually quite literally by someone making a speech about how they are important.

And then there are the feeble bad guys. As a kid it was the baddies that I loved the most about Who, and it was the thing that started the whole sofa hiding myth. You could always guarantee that the bad guys were very evil indeed. Yes, they’d lose in the end but that was the charm of the show. No matter what the Daleks did, in the end they’d end up spinning round with smoke coming out of their grills while cursing the Doctor, but you had a lot of evil to get through before that moment. The baddies would do something bad, the Doctor would react, the bad guys would fight back, there’d be a few twists, a few punches and counterpunches, a few corridors to be chased down and a few captures and escapes until finally the Doctor would save the day.

It doesn’t work like that any more. Now the bad guy announces that he is Rassilion, or the Fisher King, or Me. While the Doctor cringes away in fright, the bad guy says, ‘I am your Nemesis, your worst nightmare. I am the most evil creature in all creation, the horror that will bring this universe to an end kicking and screaming as countless billions of entities burn in the very fires of hell due to the fact that I’m unspeakably evil, and that means nobody can stop me from completing my evil plan to conquer all of creation from the beginning of time to the end of time plus several other dimensions. Oh, and did I mention that I don’t find puppies cute either?’ The bad guy twirls his moustache. Then he promptly disappears for the rest of the episode while doing absolutely bog all behind the scenes, before at the end he reappears, if we're lucky, to announce he’s lost. That just isn’t good enough.

As this feeling, that if the show was half as good as it thinks it is then it’d be twice as good as it actually is, is the feeling I have whenever I watch Sherlock where the build-up is great and individual scenes are a joy, but the whole fails to deliver, I guess that problem won’t go away any time soon.

Anyhow, I should stop whinging as I really did enjoy most of this year's run, and hopefully next year will build on this year by giving Capaldi better material, preferably with a companion who isn’t the most special person in the universe, or if they are special, then they do special things and let us decide they’re interesting rather than have the Doctor tell us to love them. Then there's the arc. Arcs aren't required in Who, but if there has to be one, I'd prefer it to use the Bad Wolf template. Back then, the arc had small, subtle clues that didn't impinge on the story that built to a big pay-off in the final episode. The arcs now are unsubtle and involve contrivances to shoehorn them into episodes that build in annoyance until they fizzle out when they are dismissed with a line of dialogue and zero pay-off. That's not good.

Oh, and some stories might help, too.

Dr Who, the sound and fury and lots of nothing years.

These days I’m a lapsed Dr Who fan. I’m old enough to remember the first Doctor and I watched all the versions from the glory Tom Baker days to the not-quite-so-glorious Colin Baker era. I liked it because the format was quirky and because the stories were involving.

I’ve been less taken with the reboot. I enjoyed Eccleston and the Donna and Tennant partnership, but most of the Tennant era left me cold. When Smith arrived, I quickly gave up on the show. I could just about cope with Tennant leaping around to disguise the fact there wasn’t much going on in the story, but not a new Doctor doing the same routine. But the great thing about Who is, if you don’t like the current Doctor, a new one is just a few years away and so the news that Peter Capaldi is set to take over enthused me all over again. He has the right look and he has an acting style that makes me think he’ll be a great Doctor, so I decided over Xmas to dip my toe in the Who universe again. Unfortunately, that’s dumped cold water all over me again.

It wasn’t all bad news though. Amongst the plethora of recent Who-related offerings there were some gems that demonstrated what I liked about the format. There was a five-minute short featuring Paul McGann, and that crammed in a story along with wit and drama that showed just how great McGann could have been as a long-term Doctor. The five Doctors reboot featuring several old Doctors trying to get a role in the show managed that rare thing of being crammed full of in-jokes while actually being funny. My favourite moment was the Doctors piling into the Tardis and then just standing there until Sylvester McCoy moans that he wants to go home now. The best of the lot was the William Hartnell biopic that told a good story with emotion and with a sense of what makes the show tick. I enjoyed everything about these offerings, so suitably enthused I moved on to watching some recent Who episodes, and if they’re typical of the show now, I’m bemused as to what it’s trying to do.

I watched the last episode of a series thinking that was the most recent series, although it turned out to be from two years ago, followed by the 50th anniversary episode and the Xmas episode. All three stories merged into a surreal mass of light and colour and people running around where I never once cared about anything that was going on. With my mind wandering I longed for the Russell Davies era. I gave up on his Xmas episodes after that one where a giant cyberman invades London, but that no longer feels silly simply because it told a story the traditional way. New characters and the situation were introduced and time was spent letting us become interested in these people’s domestic lives, so when the jeopardy crept up on them we cared about their fate. Problems then mounted and everything the Doctor tried was thwarted until the big ending where the Doctor saved the day. That’s simple storytelling and it works every time, but clearly that’s no longer what today’s kids want. They want running around and soundbites and bogeymen leaping out of cupboards.

In all three stories the characters and situation weren’t introduced and then developed, but just sort of dumped on screen. In the Xmas episode there was a planet in perpetual winter, but we weren't told who these people were, whether they were real people with lives, or whether they were anything other than cannon-fodder. The jeopardy in all three stories was the same one that all of time and space for all eternity along with all alternate universes and anything else not already mentioned previously would be destroyed unless the Doctor does something that doesn’t make any sense and which he doesn’t want to do. And he solves the problem by doing something else that doesn’t make any sense, which is completely lacking in tension and isn’t very involving. To fill in the time before the non-conclusion random aliens turn up for a few moments to provide scary footage for the trailers. So the Daleks arrive and say their catchphrase scarily, and then go away. Then the cybermen arrive and stomp around scarily, and then go away. Then some statues move scarily, and then go away. Then some aliens with a big finger waggle their big finger scarily, and then go away. I assume the reason for this is that kids are deemed to have short attention spans and they can’t sit still through a whole story. But having an involving story worked before so I don’t understand the current style of replacing plot and believable characters and resolutions with running around, loud music, and narration to fill in the gaps in the storytelling.

Yeah, it’s light entertainment fluff for kids, but it used to be good fluff. Now with this desire to be clever and to fill the screen with dynamic stuff in every scene, even the good ideas are lost. There was a running joke about the Doctor and his assistant being naked, and if you’re going to inflict that on families on Xmas day there’d better be a good reason and it’d better work. Except there was no explanation of why they had to take their clothes off beyond the usual clever comment that’s provided whenever there’s no good reason for stuff happening. Worse, the scenes were so badly filmed that I had no idea if they were naked and wearing holographic clothes, or wearing clothes and being naked only on a holographic image, which made the punch line at a Xmas party fall flat as it was hard to tell if it even was a joke.

Anyhow, I’ll give Capaldi a chance because I still hope he can be at the head of a less-frantic and more-involving style of storytelling. I hope his show returns to the old-fashioned virtues of witty, quirky tales where the Doctor arrives somewhere interesting, faces an understandable problem, and solves it by the end, and there’s none of this smug, timey-wimey nonsense.

Star Trek: It’s not particularly dark really

Last weekend I finally got round to seeing Star Trek Into Darkness. Although I’m a life-long trekkie with a deeply-sad love for the franchise, I have no interest in summer blockbusters, so I was in no hurry to see this film. Having done so, I enjoyed it for what it was. As there’s no need for yet another review of the film, I thought I’d offer my opinion on the negative opinion about this film, a backlash against the backlash if you like.

A recent, well-publicised poll amongst one band of trekkies voted this film as being the worst ever Trek movie. This is amusing and says more about the group dynamics in fan bases than about the film, especially when considering that before the reboot the movies started with The Motion Picture and ended with Nemesis.

TMP is the slowest and most brain-numbingly boring film I’ve ever seen, and I like Andrei Tarkovsky’s science-fiction films, which are both about four hours long and mainly feature people staring into space, in black and white, discussing philosophy. But TMP is apparently better than ID because it features important Trek themes, which as far as I can make out are: if a bald-headed woman appears in your shower, make sure you give her a really short bathrobe.

25 years later Nemesis appeared, which is one of the most inane science-fiction films I’ve ever seen. Apparently it’s better than ID, too, because of its important Trek themes such as Picard getting a really cool car to whiz around in and then telling Troi to stop whinging after she’s suffered a sexual assault.

Now, I’d agree that ID lacks these important Trek themes in favour of having everyone run down corridors, but the prevailing criticism doesn’t end there. Apparently, it ripped off The Wrath of Khan, and that’s a bad thing, although that simple assessment isn’t strictly correct. If anything got ripped off it was season 4 of Enterprise. The set up for the manhunt was similar to the Vulcan trilogy. Khan’s plan resembled Brent Spiner’s motivation in the Augments trilogy. The use of Section 31 owed more to season 4 than Deep Space 9, and Robocop played pretty much the same character in season 4, too. I don’t mind this. I liked season 4 of Enterprise and if you’re going to re-use themes, pick the best.

But as it turned out, the bits that were borrowed from TWOK are about five repeated lines and a re-imagined scene, and that scene appeared to me to be more about being a follow-up to Kirk’s father’s scene in the first film. In the end it’s less of a rip-off and more of a homage, and being self-referential is pretty much the whole point of Trek. Nobody complained when Quark stood up for Ferengi culture by quoting Picard and drawing a line in the sand. Nobody complained when Janeway got a retrospective bit-part in The Undiscovered Country. Nobody complained when Worf refused to explain why Klingons no longer have smooth foreheads. Obsessive self-referencing and knowing nods to previous glories are what we sad trekkies are supposed to enjoy. But not this time, it seems.

This time the use of Khan has been deemed a bad idea because the bad guy didn’t need to be Khan and he could just have been John Harrison, a new bad guy. To some extent this is valid. The new actor has none of the glorious campness, the fun, chest-bearing silliness and the cheesy quotes of the original, but I reckon the criticism stems less from the failings of nu-Khan and more from the modern obsession with comic book heroes. Every Batman has his Joker, is the modern attitude to action films. Each superhero film franchise builds up to the superhero taking on his arch-enemy and when he’s done that, the studio reboot and do it all over again. So, the logic appears to be that Khan is Kirk’s arch-enemy and he must do epic battle with Kirk about once every ten years. I say, no he doesn’t. Trek was never so simple as to have arch-enemies, well, except for Voyager and the Borg Queen. Khan was only ever just another bad guy and in this movie he got the level of respect he deserved.

But, I’ve read repeatedly, the new Khan story has plot-holes. Er, yes it has, but for a moment let us look back at the top rated Trek movie, the aforementioned TWOK, the movie that is sacred and which has a story that's so superior to ID’s, apparently. TWOK features this bloke who fought in a war in the 1990s that we somehow all missed hearing about and he got frozen and blasted into space because apparently that's how we deal with war criminals. Kirk finds Khan and being a nice chap he gives him a world to live on.

Twenty years later a nearby planet has blown up, but some top planetary scientists didn’t spot that, even though they're conducting a detailed planetary survey. They forget Khan is on the nearby planet, but uh-oh they got the planets wrong and mistakenly they land on Khan's planet. Chekov, who joined the show after the Khan episode recognizes Khan and Khan being a superior intellect recognizes Chekov. The only other surviving life forms on the planet are bugs that turn people into mind-controlled zombies if the bug crawls into their ear. So Khan uses the bugs to escape and he's hell-bent on getting revenge against Kirk even though it's not Kirk's fault that the other planet blew up and that nobody came for tea in the last twenty years.

Despite being the cleverest man in all creation, Khan's not so clever as to know about starship access codes and he's also so dumb he thinks that stranding Kirk on a moon will somehow kill him because nobody else will come looking for him. Anyhow he gets hold of this device that creates ecosystems because that's what people hell-bent on revenge do and this device, which amazingly was created by Kirk's son and former lover can also destroy...

The point is you can have this sort of fun with any movie, tv series, book, play, comic etc. But it's irrelevant. Good stories are about the strength of the narrative high points, not the depth of the plotholes, and stories don’t become stronger by filling those holes. Attack the high points, if you wish, but don't probe for weaknesses because all movies have them and you’ll find plenty.

But apparently the plot-holes in ID are too large to ignore. The biggest irritation appears to be Khan using a transporter to reach the Klingon home world, which apparently will henceforth render spaceships obsolete. I don't accept this. The transporter was added to the stories in the first place to save the money involved in filming trips down to planets and to speed up the story telling. Only when the show could afford to build a shuttle did we see them and afterwards, we saw plenty of shuttles, despite the existence of a transporter that ought to render them obsolete. The reason for this is that the show created dramatic reasons why the transporter wouldn't work to counter the effect of the magic beam, such as shields and power failures, and deep scientific reasons such as fluctuations in the tachyon thingy field.

I assume Khan's magic beam will also get constraints later. Perhaps it can be used only on supermen, or perhaps if the location selected has shields the transported person dies, thus rendering it as technology that can be used only in extreme circumstances, like several hundred other magic solutions to impossible problems the series has come up with over the years.

But it didn't end with Khan's magic beam as there's then Khan’s magic blood, which single-handedly destroys the franchise’s scientific credentials. This didn’t concern me either, as every Trek incarnation has had its own magic blood. The Next Generation solved most of its problems with DNA. A character could get turned into wood, put through a chipper, burnt to ashes and scattered in space, but a single strand of DNA gleaned from a hair-brush would bring that person back to life, with all their memories intact.

Deep Space 9 had Ketracel White, the magic blood that resolved the tricky problem of how the Founders would control their soldiers in the Dominion. Then there was Voyager and Seven of Nine’s magic blood that could solve any tricky plot problem. Heck, there was one episode where Neelix died horribly, got left in the back of a shuttle for three days until he was going a bit whiffy, and Seven still declared that the nanobots in her magic blood could bring him back to life, and they did. Strangely, she never offered to bring any of the non-contracted actors back from the dead, but I find it hard to accept that her magic blood is never criticised, but Khan’s magic blood makes trekkies foam at the mouth.

Curiously, Enterprise with its low-tech approach didn’t go in for magic blood and trekkies hated that, but then again we trekkies, as a fan-base, hate change. We hated The Next Generation at first because it didn’t have Spock and Kirk in it, until he found we quite liked it because the new characters were good. We hated Deep Space 9 at first because it was dark and it violated Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic vision of the future, except we now love it because it’s dark and because it tested the Trek ideals. We hated Voyager at first because it was crap, but now we quite like it because it didn’t take itself too seriously. We hated Enterprise at first because it was goofy and, well, admittedly that’s yet to flip, but it seems the same thing is happening with the re-boot.

I could bang on some more, but in short, yes, the latest film is big, dumb and silly, but that’s what it tried to be. And yes, it has numerous faults. It’s not as fun as the first re-boot. There’s too much soulless CGI action and not enough character moments, and some characters, especially McCoy, get too little to do, while other characters like Scotty get too much to do. But no matter, the re-boot knows what it’s trying to do, and it does it, so I hope the next film in the series doesn’t take heed of the critics and try to be important. I hope it continues ploughing the same big, dumb trough, although hopefully without the lens flares. Yes, there are still plenty of interesting Trek themes that need exploring, but in-depth exploration of the human condition should be left for a Trek tv series where there’s the time and space to do more. With the 50 year anniversary coming up, I think the time is right for Trek to return to the tv and a few more big, dumb movies making half a billion at the box office will help that happen better than if they were still making movies like Nemesis.

R.I.P. Iain Banks

I've just heard the sad news that the author Iain Banks has died, only a few months after announcing he was officially very poorly. He was one of my favourite authors and I've read all but his last few novels, as I tend to be a few years behind.

I started reading him before he turned to science fiction with Espedair Street, which was my favourite of his non-sf novels. His science fiction mainly featured the loosely connected universe of the Culture that, unusually for space opera, was a utopian vision of the far-future. My favourite of those was Consider Phlebas. I remember at the time I'd gone off science fiction as most new books tended to be depressing dystopian cyberpunk where I never had a clue what was going on or what half the words meant. Then along came the Culture featuring fast-paced, lively, grand old-fashioned space opera that was above all else fun.

For the last 25 years, whenever I'm seeking out a new science fiction novel to read, my definition of good science fiction has been stories that are a bit like Iain Banks. I can’t see me changing that definition.

Today is a good day to rediscover Star Trek: Enterprise - Part 2

Part 1 here

Season 3

After two years of episodic stories, in season 3 Enterprise becomes a serial with every week following on directly from the end of the previous episode. As this is more in keeping with the style of modern television shows, this change works well and the episodes provide consistent entertainment. The longest continual story is the Xindi arc, which starts in the final episode of season 2 and is effectively concluded with episode 3 of season 4. This means it's a 28 part story and as such it's the most ambitious of all Trek's stories, even more so than the Dominion arc in Deep Space 9 that was never allowed to dominate to the exclusion of all else. As a story arc it's a success, but with qualifications as several elements could have been so much better.

The strength of the arc is the plot structure, which gives the impression of being well-planned in advance. The aim of the story is a clear one. The Xindi attack earth and kill lots of people, and they'll be back soon with an even bigger weapon that'll kill everyone. Only Archer and his motley band of redshirts can stop the Xindi, except the moment the crew set out on their mission, they discover that things aren’t what they first seemed. Thereafter, the problems keep on mounting. Every week develops on what came before while revealing a new part of the story, and even the interludes with the various aliens of the week always add another vital piece to the overall plot. Best of all the tension and the pace of plot development increases as the situation grows ever more desperate leading to an enthralling adventure.

What stops the arc being as strong as the Dominion War is the Xindi themselves, as they are poor villains. It's obvious the intention was to recreate the dynamics in the Dominion that had Changelings, Cardassians, Vorta and Jem'Hadar, all of whom had different agendas. As Deep Space 9 only needed to get these alien races together to create strong drama, the Xindi are given the same sort of divergent aims. They have five distinct races. On one side there's the nasty Reptiles along with the enigmatic but probably nasty Insects. On the other side there's the good-natured Apes along with the enigmatic but probably good-natured Fish. In the middle, surprise surprise, is the Humanoids who could go either to the dark side or the light. As a dramatic set up this is promising, even if Big Fish In Space does take some believing, but after creating the situation nothing is done with it.

For the first third of the arc the only thing the Xindi do is sit in an interminable meeting and agree they need to destroy earth, now. For the second third, they potter around while generally agreeing they need to destroy earth, now. And it's not until the third act that the Xindi start getting names and with it character traits that let them become people who are interesting to watch rather than mouthpieces that explain the plot.

If the Xindi had been interesting foes, the arc would have been breathtaking, but as it is, the drama all comes from within by detailing the Enterprise crew falling apart as one by one they abandon the abiding principles all Trek crews have followed. Much is made of Sisko breaking the rules in Deep Space 9's By the Pale Moonlight, but Archer steps past that point in episode 2 and everything keeps on getting darker from there.

The strongest run is the build up to and then the resolution after the battle of Azati Prime. I'm sure this mini-arc within the main arc reuses the year of hell concept originally pitched for Voyager. The idea back then was that Voyager's fourth season would have had half the crew being killed and the ship being left derelict in space forcing the survivors to descend into savagery to survive. The studio thought this sounded too interesting for Voyager and so instead they opted for making the year of hell a time travel story with an in-built reset button. Enterprise rekindles this idea and thankfully it doesn’t press the reset button resulting in the next ten episodes all being played out against a backdrop of debris and repair crews and grimy faces.

The momentum after Azati Prime doesn’t let up and with the Xindi finally being given characters with motivations the closing stages of season 3 is probably Enterprise's finest period. Even then though there are niggles, not least of which is the introduction of a species called The Guardians. They are a mysterious race who dress like the Borg queen, who have prosthetics that make them look like the Changeling race, who live in a realm that looks like the null-space Sisko ended up in, and worst of all everyone talks like the Prophets. Even in the midst of Enterprise's strongest drama, The Guardians made me realize that Trek did need a break as clearly all the original ideas for alien races had been used up.

Highlight: The immediate aftermath of the Battle of Azati Prime which does something that no Trek series has done before and shows sympathy for the redshirts who blindly got themselves killed so that no main cast member need die.

Lowlight: Sadly, it's the filler western episode. Much as I wanted to enjoy six-shooters taking on phasers, the story is the only one with no link to the main arc and the story itself is weak. Heck, I've used every element of its story at least five times so I know it's not very original.

Season 3 ends with what is officially the show's goofiest moment. I'm sure it's never been confirmed, but it's safe to assume that with viewers failing to warm to the Xindi and with the show seemingly as doomed as the Enterprise looked at Azati Prime, the makers decided to end Enterprise with a silly cliffhanger just to annoy everyone. On the other hand, Nazi aliens have a rich Trek history so perhaps it wasn't as barmy as it looks.

Season 4

Season 4 is the final season and it features the last and most successful change of focus. Enterprise's great unanswerable question is what might have happened if the show had been made from the start in season 4's style. Personally I think Enterprise failed to attract viewers because we were all jaded by too much Trek, so it wouldn't have changed anything, but the most striking thing about season 4 is it doesn't look like a show in its death throws. Even though Enterprise was only reprieved for a year to get the episode count up to 100 so it could go into syndication, the lack of faith by the studio and the viewers alike doesn’t show on the screen.

Firstly the Xindi arc, temporal cold war arc and Nazi alien nonsense are wrapped up in an appropriately nonsensical manner. Amusingly when the time lines are reset I noted that Maggie Thatcher's rise to power was one of the key elements in creating the world of tomorrow that needed to be restored, but then again so was Hitler's rise to power.

With the goofy element over with, Enterprise does something original for Trek by presenting a linked series of multi-part stories each lasting 2 or 3 episodes, all featuring in-depth exploration of alien races and ideas from the original series. So there's stories about Andorians, Vulcans, Tellarites, Klingons (both the crinkly- headed type and the greasy moustache type), genetically improved humans, with a side order of Organians, Tholians and even the Gorn.

Most interestingly of all several episodes look at earth and how humans react to the new galactic order. These stories are more complex than anything that was ever attempted involving these races in the other series where the need to wrap everything up neatly in an hour usually ensured a superficial approach. There's even a growth in the fleet with the launch of a second starship, the setting up of the groundwork for the formation of the Federation, and new potential arcs such as a trip to the barking mad alternate universe and a welcome look at the birth of Section 31.

Highlights: Brent Spiner displays a lot of charm playing his maker's granddad, even if his story is let down by the genetic superhumans being so inept. Shran becomes a semi-regular and gets to display a wider range than before with humour and a gentler side. And the alternate universe has the crew on a Kirk era starship, which is fun and nostalgic.

Lowlights: The ill-considered homage to the original series featuring Orion slave girls that invokes the vibe of Mudd's Women, which is a vibe nobody wanted recreated, even if it does let Mayweather explain how he got big biceps as a teenager. And of course the final episode. Like most of the failures in Enterprise, I can see what they tried to do and why, but that doesn’t excuse ending the show with a missing episode from the Next Generation featuring a podgy Riker making pies with holodeck versions of the cast before declaring an end to the program. And Trip deserved better.

Bad final episode aside, season 4 is one of the strongest of all Trek seasons, and following on from the consistent ending to season 3, it's clear that the show was axed in its prime and that it would have only got better. To be fair, any comparison of the show to other spin-offs should therefore only judge it against the other spin-offs' early years: Next Generation before the Borg arrived, Deep Space 9 before the Dominion War, Voyager before Seven arrived. And when that's done, Enterprise fairs well.

Yes, the criticisms usually hurled at the show are valid: the theme song is jarring, the temporal cold war is nonsense, season 2 drifts aimlessly, the Xindi are awful, some continuity errors such as using the Ferengi are ill-judged, and the ending should be condemned. But that's not the whole story. The original series wasn't all like Spock's Brain, Wesley Crusher didn't save Picard's butt every week, while Voyager shouldn't be judged on Fair Haven alone. Enterprise was the same. It wrapped up the temporal war, season 3 and 4 have purpose and focus, and when it got the continuity right, such as the mirror universe being a sequel, prequel and reboot all at once it was very good indeed.

It wasn't to be though, and annoyingly season 5 could have been great. It was planned for the multi-part arcs to grow into a large arc about the formation of the Federation. Shran would have joined the cast as a regular and other ideas planned involved the birth of the Borg queen and a trip to Larry Niven's Ringworld, and if that wouldn't have excited science fiction fans, I don't know what would.

As it is, Enterprise is one of the shorter Trek series, but it's unfair to view it as having killed off the franchise. The franchise was ready to end due to over-exposure and Enterprise happened to be on the screen when apathy finally set in. Its axing didn’t occur due to any failings in the show itself. If anything, its merits hint at what the franchise can achieve if it's ever revived for tv.

Today is a good day to rediscover Star Trek: Enterprise - Part 1

I've just finished watching the last and, in the opinion of the handful of fans who've watched it, the least Star Trek spin-off tv series. Having watched Enterprise in its entirety for the first time I think it's time the series got some of the credit it's never been accorded. Even today in the world of Trekkie fandom, there appears to be only two subject matters on which many fans can agree: that JJ Abrams couldn’t give a stuff about Trek, and that Enterprise was rubbish.

I can't get excited about debating the first subject and in truth I used to agree with the second one. When Enterprise started in 2001, I'd watched over 500 episodes of the franchise during its 14 years of being continually on air, and that's enough crinkly-headed aliens, malfunctioning holodecks and temporal disturbances in the duotronic tachyon matrix for anyone. It wasn't helped that in the UK it aired on Channel 4 as part of the T4 schedule, which caters for gormless teenagers. So every week I had to sit through the single most annoying and smug human in history June Sarpong interviewing boybands before getting my weekly dose of space nonsense.

I watched most of season 1, started to drift away in season 2 and when the Xindi arrived in season 3, I checked out for good. A break of ten years has helped me to see past those irritations and I now reckon the series holds together better than I expected. It's not a masterpiece and it makes mistakes, but then again so do the other Trek spin-offs. Next Generation opens with two dire seasons and closes badly. Deep Space 9 has several dodgy years until Sisko shaves his head and Voyager plumbs the depths in the early years with Kes and Neelix and the Kazon. Enterprise on the other hand presents four solid seasons of entertainment and it has glossy production values and modern story telling techniques that have yet to date. So over two articles I'd like to address the balance and heap some praise on the most maligned of the Trek spin-offs.

Season 1

The series starts promisingly with Broken Bow, probably the best Trek pilot show. It doesn't have The Cage's goofiness, Farpoint Station's ponderous nature, Emissary's filler scenes, or Caretaker's poor use of the Prime Directive. Instead, it provides a lively story and situation that feels as if it is set somewhere between now and Kirk's era. People wear suits and ties and get excited about space travel. Enterprise is cramped and functional. Technology is limited. Transporters are untried, there are no universal translators and there's definitely no holodeck.

Aliens are also in short supply with the Vulcans being portrayed as arrogant and the Klingons as murderous thugs. The only weak note is that the new alien race of the Suliban are uninteresting, which sadly sets a precedent for the show in which all the new aliens are dull. The story gets the balance right for a pilot with the characters being introduced by the way they react to the plot and the plot itself about returning a Klingon to his home world is a strong piece of space adventure featuring numerous set pieces. The Suliban space station built out of thousands of small ships and the ice-bound frontier town both feel like places Trek has never visited before.

After all the excitement in the pilot, it's strange that once the series gets going, individual episodes turn out to be quiet character pieces. One of the strengths of the Trek format was to remove the science from the science fiction so that it could concentrate on the stories. For example the transporter took the characters from the spaceship to an alien planet in a moment freeing up the time taken in getting from A to B. Enterprise turns this on its head and makes stories out of the fact that the technology isn’t available. So alien ships have to be boarded with shuttlecrafts and spacesuits, alien dialogue needs to be translated, and with a maximum speed of warp 5 it takes time to get places.

With the technology being a struggle the show depicts how the characters react to being in space, with some of the crew being wary and others treating the mission as a holiday with a chance to visit alien bars, meet alien women, and make snowmen on comets. Most pleasing of all is the show's colour palette and design. Trek had increasingly become about bright lights and day-glo costumes, but Enterprise is more in keeping with modern science fiction with its grime and darkness. The predominant colours are dirty grey and dirty brown. Every alien ship they meet looks like a cargo ship with rust and oil on the walls. Doors need to be dragged open while to operate anything, levers must be pulled and cogs have to be cranked.

The small scale stories of season 1 are an interesting change to the usual plot heavy Trek stories, but it highlights a problem that plagues the show, namely the uneven balance of time devoted to the characters. I assume the show tried to recreate the three-part act of Kirk, Spock and McCoy with the rest being secondary support, and it almost works. Scott Bakula with his cheesy acting style is for me the perfect actor to play a Starfleet captain. Nobody else could deliver lines like, 'You just don’t know how much I want to knock you down on your ass right now.' and not make you groan. Archer's sidekick Trip, played as an cheerful Chief O'Brien is always watchable, but the third part of the group T'Pol was a bad idea. The thinking behind the character is obvious. Leeta's breasts livened up later seasons of Deep Space 9 while Seven of Nine's breasts were so big they saved Voyager from cancellation. So all Enterprise needed for a great character is even bigger breasts, but sadly the makers forgot that Leeta was a lot of fun and Seven was a compelling character, whereas T'Pol is so quiet and disinterested in everything, she makes every scene she's in drag.

The rest of the cast rarely get the chance to shine. Phlox could have been a great Trek doctor, being an optimistic opposite of Voyager's misanthropic Doctor. His early line of: 'There's a chance he could live, just not a good one.' shows so much potential, but it's never realized. Linguist Hoshi is scared of her own shadow and so is a much-needed antidote to all those fearless Trek officers, except the writers rapidly tired of her being scared all the time and so she only gets to be nervous when the script calls for it. Security officer Reed is such a mystery the first story in which he gets more than one line involves the cast trying to work out why he's so mysterious, and then finding out his big secret is he likes pineapple. The actor should have stayed in the sitcom Desmond's as he got more to do there. The last main character is of course Enterprise's big joke, except it was done better in Galaxy Quest when they had a character whose name nobody could remember. Archer's dog Porthos gets more screen time than poor old Ensign Mayweather, and once you notice the scripts go out of their way to avoid having him do anything, you're left to wonder why he's even there, which he usually isn’t.

Highlights: The episode Doctor, Doctor where the crew help aliens for noble reasons, but then discover their intervention is harming their natural development. Exploring the need for a Prime Directive is the perfect subject for a prequel and this story does it well. Also strong is the developing arc involving friction between the Vulcans and the Andorians, which introduces Jeffrey Combs' recurring character Shran. My favourite individual moment is an episode where Enterprise blasts off a torpedo only to watch it bounce off the alien's spaceship without making a scratch, leaving the crew to just sit there and hope they don’t get killed in retaliation. This scene perfectly depicts Enterprise's lowly role in galactic affairs.

Lowlights: The temporal cold war arc, which is the lamest time-travel idea in all Trek. It's obviously being made up as they go along, so it’s impossible to care about any of it. The worst moment of the year is the Decontamination chamber, in fact it's probably the worst moment in all Trek, evicting the two previous candidates of Paris and Janeway turning into lizards and mating, and Spock jamming with groovy hippy alien chicks. The Decontamination chamber is something you watch assuming it's an ironic joke, except it's not and once you've seen it you can never unwatch it. Here's a clip. You have been warned.

Season 2

The most noticeable thing about season 1 is there are no dreadful episodes and I reckon it can be classed as the best first season of any of the Trek spin-offs. But sadly, season 1's low-key, low-tech, low-action approach to space stories didn’t appeal to viewers and so what would become an annual rethink leads to season 2 increasing the amount of action. So Reed invents red alert leading to everyone running around with phasers instead of interacting.

This new sense of urgency works well for a while. One excellent early development has the ship taking heavy damage in one episode only for the next week's episode to start with the damage still unrepaired, which leads to a story about searching for raw materials. After seven years of Voyager and its reset button attitude to ship repairs, this was an excellent note of realism. But the early promise soon fades away and mid-season 2 presents the worst of Enterprise with the temporal cold war blundering along and the promising Andorian arc stalling.

With the show drifting along aimlessly failing to build on its potential while retelling stories that have all been done before and better, it looked as if the show would be cancelled. So all thoughts turned to re-inventing the format, which I have mixed feelings about as just before the big change, Enterprise unexpectedly comes into focus and season 2 ends with a strong series of episodes. Cogenitor, which deals with a disastrous cultural misunderstanding, should be acclaimed as one of Trek's finest ever episodes, while The Breach highlights Phlox's strengths. Judgement pays homage to The Undiscovered Country with a visit to a famous Klingon prison and the Borg episode is better than Voyager's Borg episodes and the later Next Generation ones too.

Highlight: The annual Hoshi being drippy episode.

Lowlight: The episode where Trip falls in love with an annoying princess, who is played by the single most wooden actor I've ever seen in anything. Oh and the one where Porthos is the central character.

Pondering on what does and doesn’t work in season 2 rapidly becomes irrelevant as with the final episode of the year, everything changes with the show moving from an episodic format to becoming a serial. So in a couple of weeks I'll look at the second half of Enterprise, the good part.

R.I.P. Harry Harrison

I was saddened to hear the news of the death of one of the great SF authors at the age of 87. Harry was still producing entertaining novels right up until the end and as I've read nearly all of them, I'd guess I might have read more of his books than any other author.

His novels were nearly always short, they never outstayed their welcome, and they were always a lot of fun, even the serious ones. His best creation was the Stainless Steel Rat, a brilliant anti-hero comic creation, along with Bill, the Galactic Hero. His most famous novel was perhaps Make Room, Make Room, which stands up as being one of the best dystopian futures even if the film version Soylent Green was a fairly tepid version of the story.

My personal favourite was Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, a send-up of the EE Doc Smith style of space opera and I've just remembered I queued up once back in the 70s to get a signed copy of one his books. I remember he was smiling a lot while he signed, and I did too while reading his books.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

This novel has been on my to be read list since it first came out about seven years ago, but I've only just got round to reading it, and it was worth the wait.

The novel is one of the most old-fashioned pieces of science fiction I've read in ages, reminding me of the books I used to read and love when younger. Most modern sf I've tried recently is either too literate, or too political, or too flashy, or too weird, or very long, or determined to prove that the author knows vast amounts about scientific stuff. The end result is stories that fail to grip and are just too serious to entertain with none of that sense of excitement and wonder that I crave. Thankfully Scalzi's novel is none of these things.

The book starts with an opening line that has been rightly acclaimed as being one of the best:

I did two things on my seventy-fifty birthday: I visited my wife's grave, then I joined the army.

If the main purpose of the opening few words is to make sure you read on, then that works as after that start you have to find out where the tale is going. As it turns out, it's nowhere new as the story is a familiar one of super-soldiers going off to fight a pointless war on a far flung planet. There are several templates for this type of story. There's the Starship Troopers angle of war is great, so let's kick some alien butt with our big guns. Then there's the Forever War angle of war is hell. And there's something in between, which is where Old Man's War places itself. I've never felt even the slightest urge to see Avatar, but I'd guess it used the same story that this novel uses.

The hero gets a new and improved body, learns how to use it, goes to war against some big bad aliens, and gradually learns that there's more going on than he first thought. I gather there's more books that develop and explain the wider story, but I was content with this small-scale vision. Over half the book is taken up with the hero adapting to his new life, but the story never drags as it's told with gentle humour and an eye for interesting scenes. The first person narrative makes the lead character interesting and the story is clever enough to acknowledge the war story clichés it's using without coming over as trite. Best of all for modern science fiction, it's short and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

The biggest problem I have with Fantasy novels is working out when to read them. Most Epic Fantasy these days runs to about ten volumes and usually takes about twenty years to be written, so if I read the first book in a series as soon as it comes out, many years of waiting lie ahead along with an increasing strain on my memory. A good example of this is George RR Martin's series. I read Game of Thrones when it first came out in the mid-90s, leaving me in a bemused state now that A Song of Ice and Fire has suddenly taken off as I can’t remember enough about the early novels to join in any debates with the new fans. Then there's the fact that the last two books in the series have been so brain-numbingly awful I've lost all the enthusiasm that I had for the characters about 17 years ago.

On the other hand waiting until the series is over could take a lifetime. I read Katherine Kurtz's first Deryni novel in the early 70s and that series is still ongoing. Even the middle line is fraught with danger as after massive acclaim for the first book, later books often come out to derision leaving you wondering if you should bother embarking on a journey that'll eventually fall flat on its face. There is no answer to this conundrum, and so I take every series that interests me on its own merits and Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastards series gave me particular angst.

The Lies of Locke Lamora was one of the most promising books I've read in a long time, except when I read it, it was a one-off book and only later did the author announce there would be further books in the series. At the time this delighted me as I reckoned I'd finally found the author of my dreams. Locke featured a fascinating fantasy world in which the author never data dumped an explanation of the rules of the world and instead let us learn about it through the eyes of the hero. It had a twisty plot that to my delight surprised and fooled me every time, and it had bucket loads of action, humour, appealing characters along with brilliantly staged and original scenes. In short it had everything, including plenty of forgivable faults in what was clearly a first novel, leading to the feeling that the series would get even better. If Locke ever gets filmed, I should imagine the pitch would say it's Ocean's 11 meets Lord of the Rings meets Oliver Twist.

With the promise that the series would expand to seven books, I therefore put off reading book two until I was reasonably sure that book three wasn't far off, which now appears to be the case. But after the utter joy that was Locke, Red Seas under Red Skies, despite a good start, is one of the most disappointing tales I've ever read. The book picks up where the last one ended, which in itself is a big problem as the first book ends in a conclusive way. But any feeling that a sequel is a bad idea quickly disappears as the story establishes another twisty plot that lands the hero in another impossible dilemma in which his only chance of survival is to complete an impossible task that is sure to get him killed. Except he has a cunning plan to double-cross the bad guys, except the bad guys know he plans to double-cross them, which the hero has worked out and so his bluff is to call their bluff…

A quarter of the way into the book everything is building nicely into another action-packed twist-laden heist story, but then all the plot pieces that have been put in place are suddenly dumped in favour of a far less interesting story that has nothing to do with the set-up. I like tales that wrong-foot me, and Locke did that numerous times, but the misdirection has to integrate into a complete narrative. In Red Skies, there is no misdirection. After a hundred and fifty pages the story just restarts. The hero leaves an interesting town filled with fascinating characters and goes to sea, where he pretends to be a pirate for obscure reasons that I didn’t understand. Then he spends the rest of the novel having a whole heap of unrelated adventures with various friendly and unconvincing pirates. Every time something interesting starts to develop a new danger is dumped on him that has nothing to do with the previous problems and the story lurches off in another direction while the developing conflicts are forgotten about never to be mentioned again.

This structure of a new danger followed by a resolution every chapter drags on until the author appears to realize that the whole point of the novel has been forgotten about for about 400 pages and the last chapter is looming. So a main character is killed off in a seriously underwhelming fashion, seemingly because the author was as bored as I was with all the 'Ha-ha-ha, me hearties' stuff and the hero hurries back to dry land to face all the unresolvable problems where, in a few pages, with a single bound everyone is free and everything is resolved, and the book ends. I'm used to fantasy series going astray after a few books, but I've never come across a series that started so superbly and descended so quickly. Despite that disappointment, I still hope to read later books in the series, but I'll need to read a lot of glowing reviews first before I risk delving into book 3: The Republic of Thieves.

Dirk Gently: Gentle comedy, but perhaps too gentle

Following on from 2011's pilot episode from BBC4, the first series of three episodes detailing the adventures of the holistic detective was entertaining, although not as entertaining as it could have been.


The problem that many Douglas Adams fans focussed on is that the show had little to do with the books. Apart from mentioning character names and minor plotting points from the two and a quarter completed novels, there's little in the series that actually comes from the novels. I didn't view that as an issue as a BBC4 show doesn’t have the budget to tackle the stories properly. More importantly, the format's premise is that Dirk Gently is a detective who solves crimes based on the fundamental interconnectedness of everything. So to my mind even if the tv stories have nothing to do with the novels, they will still, in some way that may not be apparent yet, be connected!

For me the main problem is that the show is unsure what it wants to be, which is sad as it seems obvious that it ought to pitch itself somewhere between Dr Who and Sherlock. Viewers who find Dr Who's fantasy too fantastic can take solace in Gently's grounded fantasy while those who find Sherlock not fantastic enough can enjoy a show that can incorporate science fiction ideas. Two of the four episodes took that approach (the pilot and the middle episode of series 1) and they worked excellently, while the other two were less successful and came over as a very low budget Sherlock featuring ideas that were too whimsical for that series. In fact even the theme tune sounds like something composed and then rejected for Sherlock.


The pilot featured missing cats and time-travel, which was in the spirit of the novels, while the middle episode concerned robots, artificial intelligence, and body-swapping. The resulting stories were exactly what the show should be, namely a comic, science fiction detective series in which the solution to the murder plot involves an element that a reality-based detective series could never use. Sadly the other two stories prove this point as they could have been told in any other detective show as they centred on such disparate elements as hired guns from the Pentagon, nefarious cleaners, horoscopes and stalkers.

Despite that, all the episodes feature good running jokes (along with plenty of actual running when the story needs padding) concerning Dirk's money troubles, his amoral attitude, his downtrodden side-kick, his downtrodden secretary, and his downtrodden office. Better still, the science fiction episodes have better acting with Helen Baxendale appearing as Dirk's sidekick's girlfriend, and in the middle episode there's some genuine character development and emotion with Dirk enjoying a touching love interest.

I hope the show gets commissioned for a second series as the first series shows a lot of promise. But I hope the makers realize that the unique quality the show can provide for the tv detective genre lies with the fantastic and not with the mundane.

A Dance with Dragons: a slow dance presumably.

This review will be about the 5,439th posted on the Net in the last two months of the most eagerly-awaited fantasy novel in recent memory, A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (Book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire). I hate writing negative reviews and this one won’t say anything different to what 99% of reviewers are saying but, as I've been waiting ten years for this book, I feel an urge to add my ten cents' worth. I'll include mild spoilers although, if you've read the book, you'll know it's easy not to give much away in a review.


In short this novel isn't quite the worst I've ever read, but it is the most disappointing. Fifteen years ago, when I started Ice and Fire, disappointment was furthest from my mind. Martin appeared to be a rare author who would avoid the pitfall that often ruins fantasy of the endless series syndrome, in which trilogies become 4 volumes, become 5, 10, 20 volume epics. More quests are attempted, more parts of the map are visited, more characters are added, more sub-plots are woven in, more description is used until the story grinds to a halt.

A Game of Thrones stomped all over that attitude. Here was the first book in a projected 4-volume epic whose story was big enough to fill four volumes. It was epic fantasy without the dull bits, a high-adrenaline romp through a version of medieval history. It featured charismatic bad guys, flawed good guys and a story in which it was anyone's guess where it'd go and who would survive to the end. This was fantasy for adults, not just because of its adult content, but because it had a character based plot. Before Martin, most epic fantasy used the Tolkien model of the plot-based story in which everyone chases around a map for no good reason other than that the story says they should. But Thrones let the characters drive the story. People weren't just good or bad, they were shades of grey, like real people. Greed, lust, envy and worst of all love could motivate people to destroy a kingdom. It was compelling stuff and it's no surprise that this year's tv version was popular. I never watch filmed versions of novels I like, but I can imagine how good it was. I can also imagine that this book will annoy old and new fans so much that the tv version will ignore it and restart the story at book 6.

The warning signals first appeared in books two and three when the number of characters grew, but they didn't raise concern as the narrative was so much fun. Every time you started to see where the story was going, main characters got slaughtered and the story veered off in another direction. By the end of book three we'd reached only the end of act one of the three act main narrative as the Ice and Fire elements were only then becoming relevant. So even the inevitable news that the series was to be a five, six and then seven volume series was well-received.

Book four started the story's second act and, as often happens in middle sections, the plot stalled. Sticking your hero up a tree in act one is often easy and getting him out of the tree in act three is also often easy. But the middle bit is where you throw rocks at him, and making that interesting can be tricky. The solution chosen in this case was to slow the narrative down to the speed you'd expect from an asthmatic ant carrying a large bucket of swill up a steep hill. To add further strangeness, the story ignored the main characters and detailed the lives of the bit-part characters. And then it added in new characters who lived in ignored parts of the kingdom. Then it sent them off on long and uneventful journeys to irrelevant parts of the map to do uninteresting things.

As an exercise in risk taking and not giving readers what they expect book four should be applauded, but few readers welcomed the change of pace. It was like waiting ten years for a new Star Trek tv series and then instead of it being set on the bridge of the Enterprise, it's set in Starfleet's admin department. And it relates the adventures of a group of filing clerks in their mission to discover filing systems that are not as we know them, seek out new income and expenditure spreadsheets, and boldly track down missing paper clips that nobody has ever missed before. And then when you try it, you find it's even duller than you expected. That was book four. Book five is worse.


First, here's the spoiler that all the reviews say: I can't spoil the story in A Dance with Dragons because there isn't one. This book has no reason to exist beyond the fact that it'll sell. Like with the previous books, it's character based, but unlike with the first three in which the characters drove the plot, this book is just about characters. And they do nothing other than observe passively while thinking about how great it'd be if someone were to film what they can see and make miniature collectibles out of everyone they meet and computer games out of the scenery they pass. Which would be bad enough, except the characters act differently than the way they've acted before. Jon is Up North worrying about the ice zombies beyond the wall, but he does nothing about it. Dany is Down South ignoring her dragons while she tries to get into a slimy new character's pants. And Tyrion is going from Up North to Down South while worrying about what he did in book three, a lot.

Worse, the bold moments that filled the narrative before have been replaced with nervous cop-outs that feel as if the writer was giving himself an easy ride. I won’t spell them out, but whenever something decisive is close to happening, it fizzles away. Characters get killed, but then we find out they're still alive. Characters get clapped in irons, but their captors release them. Characters act brutally, but they were only acting. Characters face a problem, but they ignore it. If the early books had been written in this style, then with a single bound Eddard would have avoided the chopping block, the Red Wedding would have ended with a jolly sing-song, and Tyrion would have invented the Heimlich manoeuvre at Joffrey's wedding. Most annoyingly for me, it's likely that all the insoluble problems will be resolved with magic. Previously I had loved reading about a fantasy world without boy wizards and swords of power and ancient races of elven lords. But all those unreal solutions are slipping into the story to stop anyone having to make tough decisions. Admittedly there's a few compelling sections such as the return of the bit-part, in all ways, Theon, who went missing presumed chopped to bits 3,000 pages ago. But a handful of mildly interesting events isn't good enough in a book that's pushing half a million words, or as I kept thinking while forcing myself to read on, fifteen Black Horse Westerns.

I should say something positive as I wanted to enjoy this book and I tried to accept the story on its own terms. The best I can manage is that Martin can still write a well-constructed chapter. They all start with an arresting image, then they fill you in on the back story, develop with introspection and dialogue, and end on a cliff-hanger. But sadly, they have no tension. Suspense was one of the many things that made A Game of Thrones unmissable. A typical Tyrion chapter would start with the dwarf about to have his head chopped off. He'd talk his way out of that only to be thrown in a dungeon without food or water where he'd be offered a way out, but only if he completes an impossible task in which he's sure to be killed. And so it'd go on with everyone always in danger and with the suspense unbearable because anyone can get the chop.

In A Dance with Dragons a typical chapter starts with Jon worrying that the stores are running low on toilet paper. He meets the storeman who gives him an inventory of every item in the store, and the chapter ends with the cliff-hanging revelation that they might get short of sausages in three years. I accept that the novel is providing introspective angst and descriptive world-building instead of mounting up problems for the main characters with swordfights aplenty. But the ennui and the lack of anything that I reckon most readers find entertaining highlights the annoying writing style that didn’t matter before when the story was compelling in which 20 words (and often 200) are used when 10 would do, and when 10 would be more effective. For example, I longed for someone to just once have a sumptuous feast or a frugal meal rather than having to read about every item in every course of every meal. If the characters ate off-screen instead of breaking their fast every chapter, this book would be about 50 pages shorter.


I could say more to make the pain in my arms seem worthwhile after supporting this monster for so long while hoping it'd lead somewhere, but I'll give up. I still hope that the author or an editor or a tv producer accepts that this once great story has gone astray and drags it back on course. There's still time. I'd recommend that everyone involved prepares for book six by reading a western to see what a story is, and to see how books can tell that story in a twentieth of the length this one used. I know I intend to.