Darren

The X-Files (Topps) #17 – Thin Air (Review)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

By all accounts, this was the kind of creative team that Ten Thirteen Productions probably wanted on Topps’ X-Files comic since the start.

Stefan Petrucha and Charles Adlard had done a phenomenal amount of work on The X-Files comic line. They had written sixteen issues of the monthly series, an annual, two digests and a slew of short stories scattered across various forums. However, it was quite clear that their approach to the comic was not quite what Ten Thirteen had hoped for when they licensed the comic to Topps. Petrucha’s scripts were ambitious, bold and playful; they were occasionally downright cheeky. Adlard was a master of mood and expression; he was less suited to likeness.

Here come the men in black…

This had caused no small amount of friction between the production company and the creative team. By all accounts, the working relationship between Petrucha and the production company was quite strained. Eventually they fired him from the comic, making Home of the Brave the last story written by Stefan Petrucha and Charles Adlard on Topps’ The X-Files comics. Given the two had been with the comic from the start, this was quite a radical change.

However, this did allow Topps to put a team more agreeable to Ten Thirteen’s demands on the comic.

“I call it blue steal…”

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: aliens, bermuda triangle, characterisation, conspiracy, cover-up, flight 19, gordon purcell, john rozum, mystery, second world war, ten thirteen, the x-files, thin air, Topps, world war ii | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Home (Review)

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

Home is a big one.

It is an episode that is frequently ranked among the best that the show ever produced. It is an episode that many viewers remember quite clearly, even if they only saw it once years earlier. It was the first episode of the show to receive a viewer discretion warning on initial broadcast and was famously never repeated on the Fox Network. “It had one airing and then it was banned,” writer Glen Morgan quipped. “Jim and I don’t get rerun money for that.” It is also one of the rare episodes of The X-Files that is not explicitly paranormal in its subject matter, instead wandering into the macabre and the taboo.

Here there be monsters…

Home also marks the return of writers Glen Morgan and James Wong to the series, following the cancellation of Space: Above and Beyond. With the debut of Millennium looming, the production team on The X-Files was under pressure. Fox had convinced Morgan and Wong to return to Ten Thirteen in return for producing a pilot for The Notorious Seven, one the duo’s long-gestating ideas. Morgan and Wong would produce four episodes of the fourth season of The X-Files and three episodes of the first season of Millennium.

Home is the first of their four scripts for the fourth season of The X-Files, and it sets the mood quite well. Returning from Space: Above and Beyond, the two seemed to be bristling with an electric energy and a palpable frustration. While not all four scripts are unqualified masterpieces, they each serve to push The X-Files further than it has gone before. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Home is that it is the most conventional of these four explosive scripts.

The mother of all problems…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: commentary, family, fourth season, friday nights, Glen Morgan, home, horror, inbreeding, Incest, James Wong, kim manners, peacock, return, schlock, sheriff taylor, the peacock family, the x-files, viewer discretion, x-files | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Desert Crossing (Review)

Posted on February 2, 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 January, we’re doing the first season. Check back daily for the latest review.

Desert Crossing is an intriguing episode.

It’s a very thoughtful and insightful teleplay from André Bormanis, brought to life by director David Straiton. This is Straiton’s first credit on Star Trek: Enterprise, and he does a good job bringing the script to screen. Although the second half of the episode struggles to engage with any of the intriguing issues broached in the first half, and while nobody seems able to keep the scenery out of guest star Clancy Brown’s mouth, Desert Crossing is a very ambitious late-season episode.

Oh, Archer. What have you Dune now?

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 9/11, afghanistan, desert, desert crossing, monlithic, sailors of the year, star trek, star trek: enterprise, terrorism, zobral | 1 Comment »

The X-Files: Season One (Topps) #0 – Pilot (Review)

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

Given the success of the monthly comic book series, it made sense for Topps to try to capitalise on The X-Files as much as possible. The series was exploding into the mainstream. Chris Carter was launched a second television show, Millennium, to capitalise on the success. Fox were planning to move the series to Sunday nights. There was already talk about a possible movie franchise. This was a great time to be publishing X-Files comics.

Topps had already used the series to sell “digests” packed with unrelated comics, and had published annuals to get a little extra sales revenue into the fiscal year. However, there was a clear desire to publish more X-Files work with more consistency. Ideas began to percolate – Kevin J. Anderson would pen a miniseries based on his Ground Zero novel during the show’s fifth season, for example. The company also decided to publish a series of comic books adapting early episodes of the series.

The truth is out there…

The series didn’t properly launch until the following year, with a series of monthly adaptations of first season episodes running from the start of the fifth season through to the month following the release of X-Files: Fight the Future. Conveniently titled Season One, these comics were only cancelled when Topps folded its comic book division – vanishing quite suddenly from the stands, with little warning.

The adaptation of The Pilot was actually released a year earlier than the monthly series – it was re-packaged and re-released once Topps committed to a monthly series of adaptations. As such, it makes for a strange teaser of things to come.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship…

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Filed under: Comics, The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, Comics, john van fleet, Roy Thomas, season one, the x-files, the x-files: season one, Topps, x-fiels | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Herrenvolk (Review)

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

After Talitha Cumi, Herrenvolk cannot help but seem like a little bit of a disappointment.

Towards the end of the episode, the Alien Bounty Hunter hunts down Jeremiah Smith. Mulder begs for mercy, but the Bounty Hunter will hear nothing of it. “He shows you pieces, but tells you nothing of the whole,” the Bounty Hunter remarks to Mulder. It feels like that sentiment encapsulates Herrenvolk in a nutshell. Mulder goes on the run with Jeremiah Smith and sees a collection of vague but compelling things that may or may not tie into colonisation.

“Now you’re thinking, ‘I hope that’s shepherd’s pie in my knickers!'”

Like a lot of the mythology in the fourth and fifth seasons, it feels like a holding pattern. Talitha Cumi was surprisingly candid in its revelations. The aliens were plotting to colonise Earth in collaboration with the human conspirators. The date had been set, the plot was in motion. That was a pretty big bombshell, confirmed in unequivocal terms. It was arguably the clearest and most transparent that the conspiracy arc would ever be. There was a clear goal, a deadline, and a sense of purpose.

Almost immediately, Herrenvolk works to muddy the water. It stalls, it procrastinates, it delays, it evades. It is a plot structured around a collection of ominous conspiracy buzz words (DNA, smallpox, colonies, clones) without a clear purpose or objective.

A bloody mess…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: alien bounty hunter, aliens, bees, chris carter, cigarette-smoking man, colonisation, colony collapse disorder, conspiracy, DNA, fight the future, hegemony, herrenvolk, honey, humanity, inner space, invasion, jeremiah smith, marita covarrubias, misdirection, mr. x, mulder, mytharc, mythology, outer space, Smith, the x-files, the x-files: fight the future, x-files, x-files: fight the future | 1 Comment »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Fallen Hero (Review)

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Darren

Fallen Hero works quite well. While it isn’t sturdy or tight enough to stand with the very best of this first season, it is an engaging diplomatic thriller elevated by a fantastic guest performance, a nice focus on T’Pol and a surprisingly warm approach to the Vulcans. Easily the strongest episode between Shuttlepod One and Shockwave, Fallen Hero is a solid adventure that offers a glimpse of a more promising future.

I’ll drink to that…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: chris black, continuity, enterprise, fallen hero, Fionnula Flanagan, rise, star trek, star trek: enterprise, t'pol, two days and two nights, v'lar, vulcan, vulcan ambassador | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Wedding Ringer

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Darren

The bromantic wedding comedy is a fairly reliable comedy subgenre; but it is also one that requires a great deal of care. Producing a comedy about weddings can be something of a minefield; it is very easy to play into the familiar gendered stereotypes the controlling fiancée or the disengaged husband-to-be. The Wedding Ringer is an addition to the rapidly-growing subgenre that focuses on a stereotypically masculine perception of “the big day” – wondering what the groom makes of festivities.

The Wedding Ringer comes packed with awkward gender truisms. At one point, professional best man Jimmy Callahan (head of “TBM – The Best Man Inc.”) is confronted by his assistant Doris Jenkins. Doris explains to Jimmy that male and female relationships work differently; that it is tough for men to acknowledge emotion and to connect with one another. This is perhaps the most dialogue that The Wedding Ringer affords any female character in any one scene.

“Weddings are for the woman,” Jimmy assures his client, Doug Harris, in one scene. It seems like a stock stereotype that the movie is setting up to subvert – that Jimmy and Doug will eventually learn (in a “knowing is half the battle” sort of way) that marriage is a two-person enterprise that becomes shared at the moment of union. Instead, The Wedding Ringer never shifts its position. The Wedding Ringer sticks to its guns, hitting all the plot beats that one might expect from a movie espousing that philosophy.

Kevin Hart works the material as best he can, and The Wedding Ringer works best when it allows itself to drift from its central premise. However, it is weighed down by a clunky script and a decidedly mean-spirited world-view.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Josh Gad, kevin hart, Movie, non-review review, review, the wedding ringer | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Vox Sola (Review)

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Darren

Vox Sola is a rather sedate late-season instalment of Star Trek: Enterprise. Largely designed as a bottle show, Vox Sola has a rake of interesting ideas, but doesn’t offer any particularly insightful exploration. The alien creature of the week is unique and distinctive, but the episode constructed around it feels rather lacklustre. There’s a sense of late-season fatigue at work here, with Vox Sola feeling rather like a more low-key variation on the strange-space-phenomena-of-the-week story template that Star Trek: Voyager would use routinely.

“It’s alive!”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: alien of the week, anomaly of the week, Archer, enterprise, Fred Dekker, fungus, hoshi, roxanne dawson, star trek, star trek: enterprise, t'pol, trip, vox sola, vox solis | 3 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Inherent Vice

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Darren

In many ways, Inherent Vice resembles its central character – former-hippie-turned-private-investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello.

Inherent Vice is prone to ramble and meander, stumbling across its central conspiracies as much by fate as by actual investigation. The logic is fuzzy, but the genius is clear. Navigating a complex web of seventies paranoia, it often seems as if Inherent Vice is playing a game of free association between its themes, stumbling upon some higher meta-physical plane where all the evils of the world (or, at least, Los Angeles) are connected by threads almost imperceptible.

Bad trip…

Both Inherent Vice and Doc are hooked on their own particular drugs. Over the course of Inherent Vice, Doc makes it quite clear that heroine is just about the only dope he won’t take into his body. Inherent Vice itself is drawn the delightfully trippy far-out prose of Thomas Pynchon, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s script pausing intermittently to dump large quantities of existential musing on to the market. If Pynchon’s prose didn’t flow eloquently from actresses like Katherine Waterston and Jeannie Berlin, the audience might complain.

Running almost two-and-a-half hours, Inherent Vice is more than a little indulgent. Luckily, it is more than a little brilliant as well.

Lawyer up…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: cynicism, film, hippies, idealism, inherent vice, los angeles, Movie, non-review review, Paul Thomas Anderson, review, sixties, thomas pynchon | 10 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Detained (Review)

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Darren

Detained is well-meaning, if a little clumsy and awkward.

It is a rather conscious effort to do a “message show” in the grand tradition of the Star Trek franchise, using the show’s science-fiction premise to offer a commentary on current events. Detained is very clearly structured as a response to the 9/11 attacks, even if Archer only explicitly references the internment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar. Detained is full of interesting ideas, and its heart is in the right place, but the execution feels decidedly rushed and haphazard. Detained works much better as a two-line moral than it does as a forty-five minute episode of television.