CAPTAIN'S BLOG: TNG 1.23-1.24

1.23) We'll Always Have Paris

or

'Picard: French for Sexy'

The Mission: They're supposed to be going for shore leave on Sarona 7, but the Enterprise gets diverted to answer a distress call from temporal scientist Paul Manheim.

Planets visited: Vandor 4, an asteroid in a binary star system, that hosts the laboratory for Manheim's experiments.

The Picard Maneouvre: Doesn't like Troi making pertinent observations of his emotions. He prefers to keep it all bottled up. Awesome at fencing.

Sexy Trek: Jenice Manheim, wife of Professor Manheim, had an affair with Picard in Paris over twenty years ago. She's thrilled to see him again, he's more ambivalent. Manehim is aware of Picard, so he tries to keep his name out of things until it's no longer possible and they have to meet. Dr. Crusher is properly jealous.

When he realises he'll be seeing Jenice again, Picard gets teh holodeck to reproduce Paris from their time there (complete with flying cars swooping round the Eiffel Tower.) The simulation includes two hot French girls in scanty dresses. One young lady, Gabrielle, has been stood up by her boyfriend, and asks Picard if she reminds him of someone. Presumably she's suppsoed to be reminiscent of Jenice. Possibly he's just staring at her because her slinky dress barely covers her cleavage.

Phenomena: The Manheim Effect (time hiccoughs): Sudden jumps and repeats in time caused by Manheim's experiments. They ripple out from Vandor for light years. Picard, Data and Riker are briefly duplicated when the effect worsens.

Manheim believes that time has infinite dimensions, and the location of Vandor 4 around its binary provides hte gravitational effects necessary to test that. Several scientists died in his last major experiment. Manheim himself is left split between two dimensions, physcially in our own but somehow aware of another. Once the time breach he created is closed, Manheim recovers. He can't describe the things he saw on the other side.

Future Fashion: Jenice's space pyjamas. Just what were they thinking?

Elementary, My Dear Data: Sees himself as dispensible (Picard puts him right). Having a constant sense of time, he is best equipped to beam down to Manheim's lab and deal with the temporal anomalies he's created. He becomes triplicated by the time effects, but his multiple work together and drop antimatter into the breach in time, closing it. Data can't confirm that it is closed, merely “well-patched.”

Trek Stars: Jenice Manheim is played by Michelle Phillips, a recognisable face on TV at the time but still best known as a member of The Mamas and the Papas.

The Verdict: The time hiccough stuff is pretty cool, but the Picard-Jenice romance plot is scuppered by the complete lack of chemistry between Patrick Stewart and Michelle Phillips. Far too much time is spent on them, when really we want to know what all this talk of other dimensions is all about. It does help move along the Picard/Crusher relationship a little.

1.24) Conspiracy

or

'Invasion of the Puppet Masters'

The Mission: Mission to Pacifica diverted by an urgent call for Picard by an old friend. Something is wrong in Starfleet.

Planets visited: Dytallix B, the fifth planet of the Mira system, a mined out, barely habitable rock with a deep red sky. It is one of seven planets mined by the Dytallix Mining Corps. Also, Earth, although, sadly, we don't get to see very much of it.

Alien life forms: Starfleet has been infiltrated by alien parasites, a “superior form of life” found on an uncharted planet. The aliens have infiltrated Starfleet, diverting ships and resources to facilitate some unknwon plan. The creatures – nicknamed 'Bluegills' by the fans – are wriggly wormy purple things with lots of legs, that enter the human body, attaching at the brain stem and breathe through a gill poking through the neck. Admiral Quinn has been taken over, giving the old guy super strength and controlling his mind. Even a phaser on stun doesn't stop him. Dexter Remmick is the host for the queen, a huge, pulsing maggoty thing that lives in his abdomenal cavity, surrounded by its own young. Picard and Riker have to blow his head off to even get to the creature.

The Picard Maneouvre: Walker Keel was best mates with Picard and Jack Crusher back in the day. Picard trusts him enough to disobey Starfleet. He bites the dust for his troubles; his ship, the Horatio, is completely destroyed. Picard also trusts Troi enough to bring her into his confidence about the conspiracy, eventually involving Riker after Keel is killed. He isn't taken in by the possessed Admiral Quinn.

Number One: Less easily convinced than Picard about the severity of the situation. Gets some serious ninja time time in against Evil Quinn once he's revealed, though. He fakes possession really well, convincing Picard and the aliens both.

Elementary, My Dear Data: The episode starts with a painful scene in which Geordi tries to tell Data a joke. Data then tries to laugh. Geordi looks hugely uncomfortable. Still, it sounded like a shit joke anyway. Even the computer tells Data to shut up when he's defining something.

Son of Mogh: Worf doesn't like swimming – it's too much like bathing. And they say Worf doesn't have a sense of humour. He's constantly ripping the piss. Totally up for a punch up with Evil Quinn, but doesn't come off well.

Ginger Doc: Crusher gets to do some phaser badassery against Evil Quinn.

Future History: Code 47 = Captain's eyes only. Tryla Scott made captain faster than anyone in Starfleet history (the record holder in the original series being James T. Kirk). Fans often like to suppose some link to Montgomery Scott, but there's no evidence for this.

Sexy Trek: Picard gets a robe scene! Nothing like Jean-Luc in nightwear.

Links: This episode picks up on hints that there's something amiss in Starfleet in 'Coming of Age.' The signal that Remmick sends was originally intended to lead to the introduction of a major new threat in season two. Initially conceived as an insectoid species, this threat eventually became the Borg, and the parasite link was dropped. The parasites are eventually revealed, in the DS9 novels Unity and Unjoined, to be mutant Trills.

Trek Stars: Weird old Michael Berryman plays Captain Rixx, the first Bolian to appear in the series. Apparently he liked the make-up so much he wore it home. Berryman is instantly recognisable under any make-up. As well as appearring in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Weird Science and The Hills Have Eyes, he played an alien console officer in Star Trek IV.

Star Sets: The galactic map behind Remmick in the climactic scene, showing the location of Earth relative to the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, is a fantastic piece of work, and will turn up again and again throughout Trek as set dressing. It even shows up on The Sarah Jane Adventures as part of the set dressing for Sarah's attic. 

Verdict: Excellent. High-stakes stuff in a season that sorely needs some genuine peril. This episode received a poor welcome from a lot of fans on first broadcast. The violence and graphic horror are unusual for TV Trek, and it received severe cuts on its BBC transmission, even getting left out of several repeat runs. Looked at now, it seems very tame, and it's hard to see what the problem is – TNG really needed a kick up the arse, and 'Conspiracy' is an indication of a direction it could have moved in. Making Quinn and Remmick the central villains, after they warned Picard of the plot in the first place, is a nice touch, particularly making Evil Remmick the big baddie. The original version of the story featured no alien involvement, simply a conspiracy by high-ranking officers. Roddenberry objected, maintaining that Starfleet wouldn't behave that way. We'll see similar plotlines play out in DS9 and Star Trek Into Darkness in the future.

REVIEW: Sherlock 3-2: The Sign of Three

As Sherlock belts through its third season, we are treated to a grand old knees up, mere days after the great detective's return from the dead. In TV world, however, six months have passed, with Holmes and Watson taking on cases such as 'The Mayfly Man' and 'The Inexplicable Matchbox'. The Sign of Three bears scant resemblance to its near namesake, the novel The Sign of the Four, although it does follow it in one important aspect. As with Doyle's novel, this episode finally takes stock and begins to humanise Sherlock, making him a more fallible, and slightly more likeable character.


For a primarily comedic episode, The Sign of Three packs a great deal of emotional punch, eclipsing even the previous episode's reunion in its development of Sherlock and John's relationship. The depth of their friendship is, of course, no secret to viewers, but the realisation that he has a best friend is something that profoundly changes Sherlock's character. It's this evolution than allows the episode to move into more outrageous and comical territory than it has before, giving us such unlikely sights as Sherlock taking John out for a precisely calculated stag night, which fails, leading to some of the funniest scenes in a series which has never been afraid to mix humour with pathos and adventure. The drunken sequences are brilliantly played by both Cumberbatch and Freeman, and are sure to be the most memorable sequence of this episode, if not the whole third series.


The focal point of the episode is Sherlock's strained best man speech, an astonishing monologue which manages, somehow, to make the detective even less likeable than usual, before hitting such a poignant conclusion that the audience, at the wedding and watching at home, couldn't help but be moved to tears. It's a truly exceptional piece of writing, at once true to Sherlock's character and a break with it. Along with his bizarre 'Frenchman' jape in The Empty Hearse, it's a moment when the savant acts out of character, but for in character reasons. Sherlock is, slowly, learning to experience ordinary human emotions, and his attempts to interact with his closest friend betray this. His jokey reintroduction to John after a two year absence shows that he is still uncertain how normal people react to traumatic situations, while his painful yet beautiful speech show that he is learning to get it right.


While the episode is credited to all three of Sherlock's writers, it is recognisably a Moffat creation. The interplay between couples and their friends is very much his forte, his use of weddings as a source of drama easily seen, and the humour very much in his style. All three writers contributed scripts to Doctor Who during Matt Smith's tenure, and this episode does, at numerous points, begin to sound like a Who script. There are certain lines that could easily have been delivered by Matt Smith, in precisely the same way as Cumberbatch delivers them. While this isn't a surprise – Sherlock Holmes and the Doctor have numerous similarities as characters and the same writers are scripting them – the characters are not interchangeable and shouldn't become too similar. In The Sign of the Four, it got to the point that I wouldn't have been surprised if he whipped out a sonic screwdriver.


Amanda Abbington, as Mary Morston, continues to be a fantastic addition to regular cast, managing to steal scenes from both Freemand and Cumberbatch, which is no mean feat. Mary can wrap both Sherlock and John around her little finger, and it will be interesting to see how the relationship between the characters goes from here. Not only do we have the 'sign of three' itself to consider (a very clever little moment), but there's the telegram from 'CAM,' which leaves Mary looking distinctly unnerved. Clearly, the shadowy villain of the season has something on Mrs Watson.



The Sign of the Four was a beautifully produced, heartwarming and hilarious production. However, it's the second episode to lack a powerful central mystery. While the 'Mayfly Man'/'Bloody Guardsman' dilemma gave the episode a major crime, it lacked the focus of episodes past. The clear signposting of John's commander, Major Sholto, as the intended victim was also a poor move, robbing the denouement of much of its impact. The length of time it took Sherlock to reason who the victim was to be was surprising, too. Perhaps this is a sign that the great detective's powers of deduction are waning as his emotional capacity develops further. Time will tell... but not too much time, since we speed onto the final episode on Sunday.

CAPTAIN'S BLOG: TNG 1.21-1.22

1.21) Symbiosis

or

'Planet of the Junkies'

The Mission: Investigate the Delos system during a period of stellar activity.

Planets visited: Ornara and Brekka, inhabited planets of the Delos system. Not actually visited, but you know, they're there.

Space Phenomena: The Delos star is undergoing major magnetic flux, leading to solar flares and other stellar phenomena. Look, I know this sounds boring, but if you're an astronomer, this is exciting stuff. The first five minutes were genuinely the most interesting part of the episode for me.

Alien life forms: The Brekkians and Ornarans are identical looking humanoids, with little dippy bits over their noses. They can generate electrical energy throught their hands for use in attack. The Brekkians were less advanced than the Ornarans, but the situation switched when the Brekkians began selling a drug called felicium to the Ornarans to cure their plague. The plague was cured, but the Ornarans became addicted to it, and the Brekkians have been running a racket on felicium for centuries. Basically, the Ornarans are all ripped to the tits on felicium 24/7 (or however long their days and weeks are). It's never mentioned, but the two races must be of the same species, their ancestors presumably colonising the two planets in the past.

Space Bilge: Picard and co. are baffled how someone as incompetent as the the Ornaran captain T'John can have been running a ship for seven years. It's a good point; seeing as they can't even repair the ship and only care about their next hit, it's surprising they haven't blown themselves up yet.

The Picard Maneouvre: Is bound by the Prime Directive not to interfere with the situation in Delos, so he follows it to the letter, refusing to interfere by repairing the Brekkian ships and thereby cutting off the trade route. He's vehemently opposed to breaching the Directive, just as Dr. Crusher is opposed to letting the Brekkians continue to exploit the Ornarans.

Future Fashion: The Brekkian dealer Sobie has wicked silver shoulder pads and sleeves.

Familiar Faces: T'John is played by Merritt Butrick, who played Kirk's some David Marcus in Star Trek II. Sadly, he died from AIDS only a year later .

Also, the Ornaran ship is a reuse of the Batris, the Talarian freighter from two episodes ago. We'll be seeing a lot of that prop over the next few years.

The Verdict: “What is the matter with these people?” The premise of the episode is sound, but the writers don;t have the guts to let the allegory tell the story. Cue endless preachy discussions about the evils and temptations of drugs. This is sort of insufferable cod moralising that puts people off Trek. Picard goes on about how important the Prime Directive is and why they shouldn't get involved with the aliens, while the rest of us are just thinking “Fuck 'em.”

1.22) Skin of Evil

or

'Tasha Yar's Precious Little Life'

The Mission: Rescue Counsellor Troi from her crashed shuttelcraft on a deserted planet.

Planets visited: Vagra II, in the Z-Lapis Sector.

Alien life forms: Armus, the oil slick beast. At first it looks like a bad video effect, before turning into a puddle of tar, then a bloke in an oily binbag. It has no brain, skeleton, muslces or cellular structure. Armus is just a big blob of badness, with an annoying voice. It's impervious to phaser fire, feeding on it. It prevents the away team from rescuing Troi or the ship from beaming her up, and swallows Riker, keeping him alive within its mass while threatening to kill him.

Oh, and it kills Lt. Yar.

Future History: Aeons ago, the people who lived on Vagra II found a way to remove and condense all their dark impulses, and this residue became Armus. Then the Vagrans abandoned the planet, leaving mad old Armus on its own, stewing in its own nastiness.

Lower Decks: Another chief engineer!

The Picard Maneouvre: Picard subjects Armus to one of his stirring speeches, baiting it with knowledge of its impotence and loneliness until it's mad enough to be distracted and the Enterprise can beam Troi back. He's deeply affected by Yar's death.

Elementary, My Dear Data: Doesn't think he quite understands the nature of a funeral, 'feeling' more sorry for himself and his sense of loss than he does for Yar. Picard tells him that he's got it right.

Yar's Last Stand: After twenty-odd episodes of being woefully underused, Denise Crosby quits the show, and thus Yar gets a death scene. This is the first time a main character had been killed in Star Trek and not been revived or resurrected somehow. Finally, there's a sense that the major characters aren't safe, even if it will be a rare occasion that we see them genuinely imperilled again. A lot of fans, and much of the cast, disliked the way in which Yar was killed, in a pointless, off-the-cuff kind of way, but it's really perfect. Yar's holographic funeral speech is saccharine, but her own attitude to her death is perfect. She knew that she'd be bound to die in action one day, doing her job. Whatever her status as a main character and high-ranking officer, Yar knew she was a redshirt from day one. It's far more believable, and affecting, than some grand sacrifice.

Title-Tattle: Working titles for this episode included 'The Shroud.'

The Verdict: Justly remembered as a significant episode for the death of Tasha Yar, this is, sadly, absolutely terrible in almost every other respect. Armus is badly realised and badly performed, and while I can forgive a crap monster (I'm a Doctor Who fan, after all), the whole episode revolves around him. Troi gets some decent material in her moments with the insane creature, but it's all very throwaway, and the monster just works its way through the main cast trying to rile them. Yar's holo-funeral is so gooey it's barely watchable. The real sin is the production team letting a talented, beautiful actress like Denise Crosby slip through their fingers by not giving her material worth her while. Yar had the potential to become an excellent character, but they never capitalised on this.

REVIEW: Sherlock 3-1: The Empty Hearse

You can't please everyone all of the time.


I don't suppose it's too much of a surprise that there's been something of a backlash by some of the more devoted Sherlock fans. After two years waiting to find out how Sherlock faked his own death, some viewers were disappointed to not get a definitive answer. Perhaps we will, in time, but until then, the elaborate yet plausible scheme Sherlock describes to beardy Anderson seems the most likely. Those who are desperate for a definitive answer missing the point. It's the speculation that's fun. Starting the episode with an absurd but justabout believable sequence that had us going “Oh, yes, see, I thought so,” before being rudely shown that it was absolute rubbish, is a wonderfully cheeky bit of fun at the expense of the fans and their myriad explanations. Not to mention the shippers – Sherlock/Molly, Sherlock/Watson and Sherlock/Moriarty, they all get their moment. Plus, a Derren Brown cameo. It's such fun.


Still, that's all window dressing. What I've been waiting for is the first scene between Sherlock and John. As well as being quite hilarious, with Sherlock donning his least convincing disguise in all of the many, many adaptations, it's quite beautifully played by all concerned, most particularly Martin Freeman. He truly is one of our great actors, and the series is damned lucky to have him play Watson, and play him so perfectly. The scenes in which Sherlock is reunited with Mycroft, Lestrade, Molly and Mrs Hudson are all brilliantly done, each reacting differently and perfectly in character, but nothing tops that moment when John finally recognises Sherlock.


There are, of course, numerous references to the canon, from the Sherlock fanclub Empty Hearse itself, the name a cheeky nod to the original grand return story, “The Adventure of the Empty House,” to numerous asides to other adventures, even a possible hint towards Doyle's non-Holmes story “The Lost Special,” in which a train goes missing on a section of disused railway. The actions of Sherlock across the world, undoing Moriarty's criminal network, is bound to provide fresh fuel for the fanfictioneers. Indeed, adventures with Baron Maupertuis and the Sherlock version of Sebastian Moran have already cropped up across the web, so it was inevitable that they would appear, even briefly, in the series itself. And, of course, there are the obligatory Doctor Who references. You can ask me if you didn't spot them.


For once, I could really believe in the fraternity between Sherlock and Mycroft, as the highly amusing game of Operation! gave way to both a 'deduction off' and a frank (for the Holmeses) discussion on companionship and loneliness. A rather wonderful scene. Add to that the very sweet cameo from Sherlock's surprisingly normal parents, played by Cumberbatch's own parents Wanda Ventham and Timothy Carlton, and it's a veritable family reunion.


On the other hand, there's the addition of Mary Morstan, beautifully played by Freeman's real life partner, Amanda Abbington. Naturally, there's fantastic chemistry between the two, but also between Abbington and Cumberbatch, selling the beginnings of a friendship between the two characters. It will be interesting to see how the relationship between the three characters develops.


While the character moments are perfect, the humour is spot on and the setpieces are suitably tense (the chase to rescue Watson from the bonfire is terrifying in conception, if a little poorly directed), there is something missing from this episode. It lacks a strong central mystery, instead throwing varied elements into a pot and stirring them around in the hope that a strong narrative will result. Unfortunately, it doesn't, leaving this story rather less than the sum of its parts. It sets off an intriguing new storyline regarding the new villain behind the terrorist network and Watson's abduction. As an episode in itself, however, it lacks something, never reaching the heights of the previous two season openers.



Nonetheless, The Empty Hearse succeeds in reintroducing the core elements of Sherlock and whets our appetite for the events to follow (in rapid succession, the next episode airing on Sunday). Like Sherlock himself, Moffat and Gatiss are adept at manipulating us until we once more ensconced in Sherlock's world, as unable to resist as John Watson.

Doctor Who: Every Story 1963-2013 - A 50th Anniversary Update by Babelco...

I don't know if I mentioned it, but 2013 was the fiftieth anniversary year of Doctor Who. In celebration, the mightily talented BabelColour has updated his hugely popular 'Every Story' tribute video, featuring the wonderful 'WhoRythmics' mix by JeX. The video runs to thirteen minutes, referencing every story from the series' run, before moving on to cover all known visual representations of the series. Not just spin-offs, but in-character appearances by the Doctor and his supporting characters on TV and the internet over the last fifty years. It also features some specially recorded voice work and all manner of intriguing soundbites. Watch it right now.