Darren

Star Trek: Enterprise – Precious Cargo (Review)

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Darren

Next year, Star Trek is fifty years old. We have some special stuff planned for that, but – in the meantime – we’re reviewing all of Star Trek: Enterprise this year as something of a prequel to that anniversary. This April, we’re doing the second season. Check back daily for the latest review.

Precious Cargo is a disaster. It is a spectacularly terrible piece of television. It is the kind of episode that fans point towards when they want to belittle or diminish Star Trek: Enterprise.

To be fair, it isn’t as if the show has the monopoly on bad episodes of the franchise. After all, the original Star Trek gave us And The Children Shall Lead, The Way to Eden and The Apple. Star Trek: The Next Generation gave us Code of Honour, Angel One, The Child and Up the Long Ladder. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine produced Let He Who Is Without Sin, Profit and Lace and The Emperor’s New Cloak. Star Trek: Voyager is responsible for Fair Haven and Spirit Folk. When you produce twenty-something episodes of television a year, terrible episodes happen.

We are Trip, of Bored…

Indeed, they will keep happening. Precious Cargo cannot even make an indisputable claim to being the weakest story of the troubled second season. There are fans who will argue that A Night in Sickbay or Bounty deserve that accolade. Nevertheless, it seems like everyone is agreed that Precious Cargo is a disaster from start to finish. It is a collection of pulpy science-fiction clichés that feels overly familiar, a lazy comedy without any solid jokes and a complete lack of chemistry between the two leads.

Precious Cargo is a spectacular misfire, an ill-judged and poorly-constructed addition to the franchise.

“Wait, another Trip comedy episode?”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: charles tucker, comedy, connor trinneer, elaan of troyius, enterprise, Han Solo, Padma Lakshmi, precious cargo, princess, princess leia, pulp, romance, romantic comedy, star trek, star trek: enterprise, star wars, the perfect mate, top chef, trip | 8 Comments »

Daredevil – Rabbit in a Snowstorm (Review)

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Darren

To celebrate the launch of Marvel’s Daredevil and the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, we are reviewing all thirteen episodes of the first season of Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil. Check back daily for the latest review.

One of the more interesting aspects of Daredevil is the way that it wears its influences so confidently on its sleeve. As if aware that the stock comparison for the show will be Batman Begins, the series goes out of its way to hit a number of key points from that particular film – introducing its masked vigilante during an atmospheric attack at a dockland smuggling operation, stopping the import of superweapon into the city by a secret society of ninjas. The show returns to the work of Frank Miller time and time again, knowing that he is the defining Daredevil writer.

In terms of televisual influences, it feels like producer Steven DeKnight was heavily influenced by a lot of prestigious contemporary drama. In particular, Rabbit in a Snowstorm features sequences that feel like they might have been lifted from Breaking Bad and The Wire. This makes a certain amount of sense; those are two very well-respected shows that lend themselves to “binge” watching of (relatively) short seasons. Netflix has even found great success as a distributor of Breaking Bad in Europe. There are worse influences for Daredevil.

To be fair to Daredevil, the show never loses sight of itself. This is a superhero story about a masked vigilante who cleans up Hell’s Kitchen and comes face-to-face with honest-to-goodness ninjas and other possibly supernatural events. Nuance and subtlety have their place, but Daredevil arguably works best when it revels in its theatricality – grand sweeping statements, bold imagery, heightened drama. For all that Rabbit in a Snowstorm tries to expand and ground the world of Daredevil, it is marked by two acts of over-the-top violence at the open and close of the hour.

At the same time, this underscores the biggest problem with Rabbit in a Snowstorm. Daredevil is not a show that lends itself to the same sort of aesthetic as The Wire, and some of the attempts to ground the show feel clumsy and awkward; the show works best when it is big and bold and operatic, stumbling a bit when it tries to present a grounded real-world setting.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: ben urich, daredevil, film, matt murdock, rabbit in a snowstorm, Television, the wire, wilson fisk | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Vanishing Point (Review)

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Darren

Vanishing Point continues the “remix” formula that we’ve come to expect from the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise. In particular, Vanishing Point is a rather heady Star Trek: The Next Generation cocktail. It has shades of Remember Me, Realm of Fear, The Next Phase and even The Inner Light – with a healthy dose of Brannon Braga’s questions about the nature of reality. All of these elements blend together to form Vanishing Point, an episode that feels overly familiar and rote despite an intriguing set-up.

It is a shame that it doesn’t work better. Vanishing Point brings us back to the idea that Archer and his crew are pioneers in space exploration. The teaser reminds us that the crew of the Enterprise still don’t take the transporter for granted – that it is still something of a mystery to them, despite the audience’s familiarity with the device. Vanishing Point feels like the first time that Enterprise has emphasised this sense of novelty and inexperience since the first season.

Reflections…

However, the episode feels like something of a disappointment. The entire story turns out to be a gimmick and a twist. There is nothing wrong with this sort of storytelling. After all, the franchise has played these sorts of games before. Indeed, some of Braga’s best scripts – Frame of Mind and Projections come to mind – touch on similar ideas with similar twists. The problem with Vanishing Point is that these twists seem a bit too loose or too disconnected to properly resonate.

Vanishing Point feels like the rough sketch of a good episode doodled quickly on the back of a napkin, a collection of connective clauses all designed to keep the story ticking for forty-five minutes before ending on a fairly stock twist. There is a great deal of potential here, but Vanishing Point never quite delivers on it.

Trip Tucker: Space Tourist…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: Brannon Braga, Breaking Bad, character, eneterprise, ensemble, enterprise, focus, hoshi, metaphysics, Rick Berman, sato, star trek, star trek: enterprise, star trek: the next generation, the next generation, the prestige, Transporter, trifecta, vanishing point | 7 Comments »

Daredevil – Cut Man (Review)

Posted on April 14, 2015 by Darren

If Into the Ring skilfully sets its tone in the opening teaser, telling the audience everything that they need to know about Daredevil before the first roll of the opening credits, then Cut Man saves its biggest and most defining moment for the closing seven minutes of the episode. It is almost impossible to talk about Cut Man without talking about the superb action sequence that closes out the episode – a single-take piece of stunt work that sees Matt Murdock tearing through an army of Russian mobsters in a way reminiscent of Oldboy.

That sequence is jaw-dropping, and possibly the visceral highlight of the thirteen-episode season. It is a very visceral demonstration of just what Daredevil can do. The technical skill on display in that seven-minute sequence rivals anything in the big-budget blockbuster Marvel movies. It eschews the clean-cut violence of something like the (also superb) elevator fight scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier in favour of a more low-key and naturalistic vibe. Daredevil might not have the budget for monsters or armour suits, but it has a great stunt team.

In a way, the fact that Into the Ring is defined by its opening scene and Cut Man is defined by its closing scene feels appropriate. These are the only two episodes of the first season to be scripted by Drew Goddard, before he left the production and was replaced by Steven DeKnight. As such, these two episode have a tone that feels slightly distinct and removed from the episodes following on from this point. Although there is a very clear through line running from one end of the season to the other, Into the Ring and Cut Man feel like their own little part of the season.

These two episodes tidy away the broad strokes outline of Matt Murdock’s origin, to the point where the audience knows what they need to know before the actually story can kick in. The show will return to Matt’s early years in both Stick and Nelson v. Murdock, but Into the Ring and Cut Man represent the foundations of a superhero origin that will span the season.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: cut man, daredevil, netflix, Television | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Singularity (Review)

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Darren

Star Trek: The Next Generation casts a pretty long shadow.

Singularity aired over eight years after All Good Things… and it still feels like an attempt to re-capture the mood and atmosphere of that second-generation Star Trek spin-off. Singularity feels like it might have made for a passable seventh-season instalment of The Next Generation, airing somewhere between Phantasms, Masks and Genesis. You would probably only have to tweak Singularity ever-so-slightly for that earlier cast.

“Hai!”

Of course, this fixation on The Next Generation is not unique to the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise. After all, Star Trek: Voyager spent a significant portion of its run trying to re-capture the magic associated with The Next Generation. There were lots of generic aliens- and anomalies-of-the week. The second season of Enterprise is just interesting in this regard because it is really the last gasp of this sort of nostalgic storytelling on so wide a scale.

It would not be easy. It would take the box office failure of Star Trek: Nemesis, a change of management at UPN, falling ratings and the threat of cancellation. Nevertheless, Enterprise would eventually manage to exorcise the ghost of The Next Generation. In the meantime, Singularity offers a reminder of just how closely Enterprise was hewing to The Next Generation.

“Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: anamoly of the week, Archer, Brannon Braga, chris black, enterprise, frnachise, nemesis, obsession, red alert, reed, reed alert, Rick Berman, singularity, star trek, star trek: nemesis, star trek: the next generation, the next generation | 9 Comments »

Daredevil – Into the Ring (Review)

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Darren

Daredevil is an ambitious piece of work.

It represents an astonishing commitment from both Marvel and Netflix to realise a thirteen-episode run on a superhero character that will be produced and released in one big chunk. One of the unsung features of Netflix’s “full season” model is the fact that there is minimal room for course correction or reevaluation; there is no time for audience feedback or retooling. The model is all or nothing. Before the first episode has been released to the public, the last episode has already been cut and gone through post-production.

That is an impressive gamble, even in this day and age when Marvel has demonstrated that it can pull off almost anything that it wants to accomplish. Daredevil is part of the tapestry of interconnected continuity that forms the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a single unfolding narrative space that dates back to Jon Favreau’s Iron Man back in 2008. In the seven years once, one of the resounding (and effective) criticisms of Marvel’s creative model has been the sense that their projects are drowned in a “house style”, as if the individual works feel obligated to fit together.

These criticisms date back to the sense that Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2 was smothered by its obligations to a shared universe, and was only fuelled by the high-profile departure of respected film-makers like Edgar Wright and Patty Jenkins from Marvel projects, citing a irreconcilable differences. To be fair, recent efforts like Iron Man 3, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy have helped to add a great deal of diversity to the tapestry of the shared Marvel universe.

Into the Ring works hard to establish a clear and distinct mood for its own hero. Released on Netflix, it is not bound by the same set of constraints that hem in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Peggy Carter. The brutality on display in the teaser and at the climax is utterly unlike anything else produced under the banner of this shared universe; the montage at the end of the episode makes it clear that Matt Murdock exists in very different corner of the same universe. Child abductions and drug rings and white collar crime aren’t quite covered by Tony Stark or Steve Rogers.

Although there are a few bumps along the way, Into the Ring does a good job at setting the tone for what is to come.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: daredevil, into the ring, matt murdock, netflix | Leave a comment »

Netflix and Marvel’s Daredevil – Season 1 (Review)

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Darren

Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil owes as much to the work of Christopher Nolan as it does to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe. Taking advantage of the change in platform and format, the thirteen-episode season is a bit rougher and meaner than most of Marvel’s recent output. The show never reaches the excesses of The Punisher or Punisher: War Zone, but the show has a much rougher edge to it than many of its contemporaries. It is very much grounded in an urban noir storytelling style.

With thirteen episodes released to stream simultaneously, Daredevil is a unique venture for a studio that has been experiment in different media and different delivery methods. Daredevil is much more cohesive than either Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Peggy Carter, feeling much more like its own thing. While each of the thirteen episodes is structured as an episode in its own right, the whole season amounts to a single long-form story. Distilled to its essence, Daredevil is the story of the conflict between an emergent vigilante and an ascendant crime lord.

The series is not flawless; there are some pacing and structural issues that do haunt the series. However, it is a bold piece of work that stands unique among the prolific output from Marvel Studios. It is hard to imagine that either Avengers: Age of Ultron or Ant-Man will feel anything like this more grounded adventure, giving Daredevil a distinctive texture and demonstrating that Marvel is willing to experiment with the tone and style of some of its product. Given the volume of the studio’s output, this is inherently a good thing.

Daredevil is anchored in a set of terrific central performances and a clear sense of purpose. It might lose focus at points, or stumble into some plotting or pacing issues, but it marks a high point in Marvel’s television output.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: daredevil netflix, marvel, matt murdock, revie, Television | 8 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – The Communicator (Review)

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Darren

One of the biggest problems with positioning Star Trek: Enterprise as a prequel is that the original Star Trek was very much a product of its time. It is very difficult to line-up a television show broadcast in the early years of the twenty-first century with a series that was produced towards the end of the sixties. It is a completely different world, and so the show itself must inevitably be completely different.

This reflects itself in the production design of Enterprise. One of the more frequent fan complaints about the series concerns the design of the new ship. After all, it doesn’t look like anything Matt Jefferies would design. If anything, it looks like the missing link between a modern submarine and the Defiant from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. All the pastels and mood lighting have been replaced with functional grey and buttresses. Kirk’s Enterprise and Archer’s Enterprise speak to two different aesthetics.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate…”

Of course, it is possible to land a little closer to the classic design as Scott Chambliss demonstrated with his work on JJ Abrams’ reboot. Then again, this only reinforces the point. The general mood and tone of design when Star Trek hit cinema screens in 2009 was markedly different from the mood and tone of design when Broken Bow first aired in 2001. It just so happened that one was more compatible with Jefferies’ original vision than the other. (And even then, Chambliss’ update is markedly different.)

However, while the design of the ship itself is a handy indicator of just how difficult it is to line up a show produced in the first decade of a new millennium to a show produced before man walked on the moon, there are more substantial cultural and social differences at play. The Communicator is another second season Star Trek mash-up, this time taking the ending of A Piece of the Action and offering a perfect example of how Enterprise could never be an entirely comfortable companion to classic Star Trek.

“Westmore’s not gonna like this…”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: a piece of the action, andré bormanis, Archer, cloaked, cultural contamination, enterprise, first contact, meddling, Prime Directive, reed, Scott Bakula, secodn world war, star trek, star trek: enterprise, the communicator | 13 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – The Seventh (Review)

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Darren

The Seventh broadcast in early November 2002.

However, production had wrapped on the episode on the 11th of September, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. After the crew finished working on the shoot, they paused to observe a moment of silence in honour of all the lives lost in that attack. That same evening, President George W. Bush would speak about those tragic events in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. It was a very tense and very delicate political and social climate. There was no distance from the atrocity yet.

Public enemy number one…

In January 2002, the United States public still supported intervention in Afghanistan by an overwhelming majority. In October 2002, a survey by the Pew Research Centre would reveal that most Americans supported the idea of war with Iraq, a war that would launch in March 2003. Patriotism surged. In October 2001, the Patriot Act was enacted. In February 2002, the International Olympic Committee asked the Salt Lake Organising Committee to tone down the patriotism at the opening of the winter games.

This was the climate in which The Seventh was produced, an episode about a rogue Vulcan operative who must be tracked down and apprehended for the greater good.

Snow down!

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 9/11, Archer, Bruce Davison, enterprise, gone native, latent image, paranoia, patriotism, repression, star trek, t'pol, the seventh, trust, vulcan high command, Vulcans | 6 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Marauders (Review)

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Darren

Well, it looks like Star Trek: Enterprise used up most (if not all) of its ambition for the second season.

The second season of Enterprise got off to a fairly decent start, Shockwave, Part II notwithstanding. Minefield and Dead Stop weren’t perfect, but they were taking the show in a direction that seemed promising. A Night in Sickbay may have been a pretty serious misfire, but it was still a very ambitious instalment of the series. However, it seemed like that ambition was not to last. The second season of Enterprise becomes fairly conventional from this point out – fairly relaxed and fairly generic.

“We don’t like your kind around here…”

This is the type of approach that producers will frequently describe as “back to basics.” More cynical commentators might use the phrase “back to the well.” The goal seems to be to offer the audience more of what they’ve had before, to repeat what had worked in earlier episodes in earlier seasons in earlier shows. There’s a creeping sense of familiarity to the whole exercise, as if the writing staff are merely filing the numbers (and character names) off old scripts so that they can be recycled. It is very environmentally friendly.

Marauders starts the trend, offering viewers what amounts to “The Magnificent Seven… in space, with Klingons!” It works quite well as a diversion or change of pace. It is significantly less satisfying as a direction for the rest of the season.