continuity | the m0vie blog

Millennium – The Innocents (Review)

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Darren

This July, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the sixth season of The X-Files and the third (and final) season of Millennium.

So, how do you write your way out of the end of the world?

To be fair, it is not an easy assignment. The Fourth Horseman and The Time is Now are two spectacular pieces of television, but they arguably work better as a series finalé than a season finalé. Once Fox decided to renew Millennium for a third season, the biggest problem facing the staff was the challenge of writing around the apocalypse that had arrived at the end of the second season. It is a problem that hobbled the third season of Millennium coming out of the gate. However, it was not the only such problem.

Guess who’s Black?

Millennium is a show that feels particularly disjointed from year-to-year. It has been argued – quite convincingly – that Millennium was really three different shows, and that no two seasons of Millennium convincingly resemble one another. The third season of Millennium would be a different beast than the second. The Innocents and Exegesis demonstrate that clearly and quite articulately. The two-part season premiere made it quite obvious that Millennium was no longer a show particularly interested in ideas of apocalypse – whether global or personal.

Unfortunately, it seemed like the show had no real idea of what it wanted to be.

“Yep, this is what Chris Carter found when he took the show back.”

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Filed under: Millennium | Tagged: Chip Johannessen, chris carter, cliffhanger, continuity, emma hollis, fbi, ken horton, klea scott, Lance Henriksen, michael duggan, millennium, procedural, Television, the innocents, the marburg virus, the time is now, the x-files | 6 Comments »

The X-Files – The X-Files Game (Review)

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

At the end of its fifth season, with the release of The X-Files: Fight the Future looming large, it was the perfect time to cash in the popularity of The X-Files. The show had already branded comic books and music albums, so an honest-to-goodness video game was the next logical step. The X-Files Game was released at the end of May 1998, right between the broadcast of The End and the theatrical release of Fight the Future. Fans who could not wait three weeks to see the big budget feature film would have the game to keep them occupied.

To be fair, The X-Files Game was not the first digital project to cash in on the success of The X-Files. Unrestricted Access had been released over a year earlier – a database of information relating to the show that could be read in Internet Explorer 4. Spanning seven discs, The X-Files Game was a much more ambitious project, a series of live-action sequences stitched together to form an interactive video game narrative. However, the game suffers from a somewhat repetitive design and the fact that, while it tries to emulate the look and feel of the show, it simply can’t.

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: chris carter, continuity, fight the future, greg roach, interactive, storytelling, the end, the x-files, the x-files game | 2 Comments »

The X-Files – The End (Review)

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

The End is a watershed moment for the show.

There is a reasonable argument to be made that The End accomplishes very little in terms of narrative. It doesn’t really do a great job bridging to The X-Files: Fight the Future. It certainly doesn’t do a great job wrapping up any of the show’s long-running concerns. Indeed, it adds two characters who will go on to become major (if controversial) players in the show’s overarching mythology. Even the big dramatic twist at the end of the episode feels familiar, with The End closing on a more memorable visualisation of the cliffhanger to The Erlenmeyer Flask.

Burn, baby, burn…

Nevertheless, The End does feel like an end of sorts. It closes out five seasons of The X-Files. Carter had suggested in interviews that he only wanted to do five seasons of the show before transitioning into feature films, and so The End marks the conclusion of the run that Carter had originally planned for the show. After all, The X-Files had crossed the hundred episode mark earlier in the year. It was ripe for syndication. It was at the stage where Fox and Ten Thirteen did not need to keep the show on the air to keep printing money.

At the same time, The End marks another more definitive sort of end. It would be the last piece of The X-Files to be filmed in Vancouver until The X-Files: I Want to Believe a decade later. Vancouver was a part of the show’s DNA. It had been the show’s production hub since The Pilot. More than two decades later, The X-Files would return to Vancouver for its six-episode wrap-up miniseries. Discussing the revival, Carter argued that Vancouver was “a natural place to make a show like The X-Files.” Certainly, the mood and atmosphere lent itself to the series.

“My video collection!”

So The End marks a fond farewell from the production team to a city and region that had served them well. In that respect, it feels like a more definitive sort of ending. The End opens with a scene that is confident enough to let Canada be Canada. As with the opening scene of Herrenvolk, it is almost comical how hard The End flags its “and starring Canada as Canada” cred, to the point where a mountie rushes to the aid of an assassination victim. The closing scene of The End burns down the show’s most iconic and memorable sets.

While The End is not necessarily a satisfying mythology episode or season finalé in its own right, it does feel like a suitably big moment in the evolution of the show.

Smoking gun…

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: California, chris carter, conspiracy, continuity, diana fowley, endings, history, jeffrey spender, los angeles, metafiction, mytholgoy, mythology, plotting, the end, the x-files, Vancouver, well-manicured man, x-files | 4 Comments »

The X-Files – Unusual Suspects (Review)

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

On the surface, Unusual Suspects looks like quite a clean little episode.

It is an obvious production save – a story thrown together when it became clear that David Duchnovny and Gillian Anderson’s commitments to The X-Files: Fight the Future meant that they would not be available to film even the shortened order of twenty episodes in the fifth season. Although Unusual Suspects aired as the third episode of the season, it was actually the first produced. With limited availability to David Duchovny, Unusual Suspects was constructed as an episode that could be built around a member (or members) of the supporting cast.

Hero shot!

Five seasons in, this is not a radical concept. While Mulder and Scully are still very much the heart of the show, the supporting cast has been developed to the point where the show can turn over an episode to somebody who isn’t Mulder or Scully. The fourth season offered a glimpse of the (possible) secret history of the Cigarette-Smoking Man in Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man and allowed Walter Skinner to act out his own morality play in Zero Sum. After these two characters, the Lone Gunmen were likely candidates for their own episode.

As such, Unusual Suspects also works quite well as “ground zero” for the eventual development of The Lone Gunmen during the eighth season of The X-Files. It is the episode that demonstrated that the trio could carry their own story with their eccentric little dynamic, while still being engaging and exciting. Given how The Lone Gunmen turned out, a particularly cynical commentator might suggest that Unusual Suspects very much over-sold the appeal. Nevertheless, Unusual Suspects is a logical and clear step forward in the evolution of the Lone Gunman.

Peering through the curtain…

And yet, for all that these are the aspects of Unusual Suspects that generate discussion and debate, they are not the heart of the episode. What is most interesting about Unusual Suspects is the way that it allows writer Vince Gilligan to brush up against the show’s central mythology, albeit only fleetingly. Gilligan is fond of arguing that Memento Mori was his only credit on a mythology episode, but that sells Unusual Suspects rather short. Although it does not dabble directly with “black oil” or “alien bounty hunters”, it does allow Gilligan to play with the show’s big central story thread.

Unusual Suspects is not just positioned by Gilligan as the “secret origin” of the Lone Gunmen. The episode is decidedly more ambitious than all that. Without directly acknowledging it, and without explicitly coming out and saying it, Unusual Suspects presents itself as the roots of the show itself. Although nowhere near as boldly and triumphantly subversive as Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” or Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man, the episode allows Gilligan to offer his own sly (and slightly stinging) commentary on the show’s central mythology.

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1989.

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Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: Byers, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, continuity, crossover, Frohike, homicide, john munch, Langly, Lone Gunmen, narrative theory, secret origin, subversive, the lone gunmen, The Tommy Westphall Hypothesis, the x-files, tommy westphall, tommy westphall hypothesis, unusual suspects, vince gilligan | 2 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Season 2 (Review)

Posted on May 7, 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.

The second season of Star Trek: Enterprise is a strange beast, breaking down into roughly three sections.

The first section runs from Shockwave, Part II through to A Night in Sickbay. There is a nice energy to these episodes, with the first appearance of the Romulans in Minefield and nice internal continuity between otherwise stand-alone adventures like Minefield and Dead Stop. Carbon Creek is a fun diversion and A Night in Sickbay at least tries to do something novel and exciting – even if the show can’t quite pull it off. This stretch of the season feels like an organic development from the first season, a collection of episodes of variable quality; balancing the desire to try new things with nods to the franchise’s strengths.

The final stretch runs from Judgment to The Expanse. The third season looms large over these episodes, with a sense of impending change in the air. These episodes seem to bid farewell to a version of Star Trek that has existed since the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Judgment gives the Klingons one last epic story, Regeneration checks in on the Borg. The Breach offers a traditional Star Trek morality play, while Cogenitor brutally subverts it. Even episodes like Horizon and First Flight call back to the earliest episodes of Enterprise, as if to offer one last reflection on what might have been.

However, the second season is dominated by a long middle stretch – episodes running from Marauders through to The Crossing. While episodes like Future Tense provide an occasional reprieve, this middle stretch of the season is workmanlike and functional. This is the first two seasons of Enterprise as they are often dismissed: a lite version of Star Trek: Voyager in the same way that Star Trek: Voyager is a lite version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that long and dull middle stretch, it feels like the writing staff might as well be blowing dust off of scripts written for the seventh season of The Next Generation.

Unfortunately, while the first and third sections of the season have a lot to recommend them, it is the middle stretch that sets the mood for the season. The second season of Enterprise has more than a couple genuine stinkers – Precious Cargo, The Crossing and Bounty come to mind – but the season never hits the sustained lows of the third season of Star Trek, the first and second seasons of The Next Generation or the second season of Voyager. However, there is long string of episodes that are just dull and uninspired; formulaic and familiar.

In that extended run in the middle of the season, there are episodes that can be easily reduced to “[earlier episode or pop culture reference] by way of [earlier episode or pop culture reference]” without missing anything much. Marauders is “The Magnificent Seven by way of Star Trek”, The Communicator is “A Piece of the Action by way of First Contact”, Singularity is “Bliss by the way of The Game”, Vanishing Point is “Realm of Fear by way of Remember Me”, Precious Cargo is “Elaan of Troyius by way of The Perfect Mate”, Dawn is “The Enemy by way of Darmok.” And so on.

The result is a second season that is exhausting and draining. Watching it on original broadcast was a disheartening experience; each week seemed to bring more of the same. The long stretch from the end of October to the start of April was unforgiving; each week seemed to offer more evidence that Star Trek was tired and played out, a franchise disengaged from not only the world around it but also from the changing rules of its own medium. Coupled with the spectacular (but entirely foreseeable) failure of Star Trek: Nemesis, the second season of Enterprise seemed to seal the franchise’s fate.

There is a very real tragedy to all this. For all that the tail end of the second season sees a massive up-swing in quality and energy, it is perhaps too little and too late. By the time that Judgment had begun a late-season revitalisation, Rick Berman had already announced a bold new direction for the third season. That last stretch is a lame duck. In a way, the second season of Enterprise plays like a microcosm of the series itself; a dramatic upswing in quality and ambition at a point where fate has already made its decision.

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: continuity, enterprise, episodic, history, production, serialisation, star trek, star trek: enterprise | 3 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Bounty (Review)

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Darren

Just when it seemed like Star Trek: Enterprise was on a roll, it produces Bounty.

To be fair to writers Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong, and showrunners Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, Bounty has all the makings of a network-mandated episodes. It is easy to see the stock plot elements manufactured from a checklist provided by the network. T’Pol in her underwear! Space battles! Klingons! The script also demonstrates a clear reluctance about some of these elements, as uncomfortable to be making Bounty as the viewers are to be watching it.

An enlightening experience?

It is perhaps telling that Bounty was buried as the second half of a “double feature” with First Flight on initial broadcast. Not a feature-length adventure or a two-part episode, the scheduling of Bounty seems a little conspicuous, as if everyone involved is trying to get it out of the way as quickly and quietly as possible. Viewers watching UPN on 14th May 2003 would have tuned in for First Flight as usual. If they were lucky, they simply tuned out afterwards and returned to watch The Expanse a week later.

It is a much smoother transition from First Flight to The Expanse, but that does little to justify Bounty. The last stretch of the second season has generally done a good job of bidding farewell to a particular style of Star Trek. However, Bounty is an episode the embodies the worst tendencies of Enterprise. Sadly, those tendencies that may not actually be going anywhere.

“You’re gonna sit there, and like it.”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: continuity, enterprise, Federation, history, lowest common denominator, mike sussman, phyllis strong, Pon Farr, sexism, skalaar, t'pol, tellarites, upn, Vulcans | 14 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – First Flight (Review)

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Darren

First Flight is a prequel to a prequel.

First Flight unfolds before the events of Broken Bow, providing something of a belated origin story for Captain Jonathan Archer. The tail end of the second season feels like an odd place for such a story. The decision to air First Flight and Bounty as a double feature meant that First Flight premiered only a week before The Expanse, an episode that changed everything that fans thought they knew about Star Trek: Enterprise. Then again, perhaps this is the perfect place for an episode like this.

Ground Control to Commander Robinson… Ground Control to Commander Robinson…

Much of the final stretch of the second season of Enterprise is introspective and reflective. The show seems aware that a big change is coming, and takes the opportunity of these last few episodes to look back on a classic model of Star Trek. Judgment puts Archer on trial; Cogenitor wonders whether old-fashioned Star Trek morality plays can still work in the twenty-first century; Regeneration finds the Borg lying among the (literal) wreckage of Star Trek: The Next Generation. First Flight opens with the death of Captain A.G. Robinson, a character we never met before.

More to the point, First Flight opens with the death of the man who was almost the captain of the Enterprise. On the cusp of a creative change in direction that effectively kills the show as it existed in the first two seasons, First Flight is pretty heavy on the symbolism.

… Take your protein pill and put your helmet on…

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: a.g. robinson, adventure, Archer, chris black, cochrane, columbia, compromise, continuity, dark matter, enterprise, first flight, history, introspection, john shiban, jonathan racher, Keith Carradine, kirk, levar burton, NASA, possibilities, Robinson, space program, star trek, star trek: enterprise, the original series | 8 Comments »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Regeneration (Review)

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Darren

It seems like a bit of an understatement to describe Regeneration as highly controversial.

The blu ray release of the second season of Star Trek: Enterprise includes two commentaries for the episode, a sure sign that there is a lot to talk about. On a track recorded in 2005, writers Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong describe the episode as “infamous.” On a track recorded in 2013, John Billingsley describes how certain segments of fandom considered it a “jumping the shark” moment for the show. That last statement illustrates one of the perverse qualities of Star Trek fandom; one would assume that the viewers turned off by Regeneration would have already tuned out with Acquisition.

We are Borg.

After all, the decision to bring back the Ferengi in Acquisition is hard to explain. Nobody was clamouring for more Ferengi episodes after Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had gone off the air. Outside of Deep Space Nine, the most enduring impression of the Ferengi was that they had begun their life as “villains that didn’t quite work” and bad quickly been transformed into “comic relief that didn’t quite work.” As such, it is hard to account for the decision to bend continuity in order to introduce the Ferengi into the first season of a prequel show designed to escape the baggage of the larger Star Trek franchise.

On the other hand, it made a great deal of sense to bring back the Borg. After all, the Borg were one of the few Star Trek aliens created after 1969 to make a genuine impression on popular culture. The Borg will never be as iconic as Klingons or Vulcans, but they will always be more iconic than Cardassians or Bajorans. They were also stars of the best-loved Star Trek movie starring the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg are a big deal; there is a reason that Star Trek: Voyager ran them into the ground.

“Assimilate this!”

It is no wonder that the Borg are frequently cited in discussions around the future of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. Asked if the creative team would consider bringing the Borg to the rebooted twenty-third century, Roberto Orci answered, “I think we would think about it.” Damon Lindelof was even blunter in his assessment, “You can’t talk about Trek and not talk about the Borg.” While they have undoubtedly been over-exposed and over-used since they first appeared in Q Who?, the Borg are the most distinctive and most successful addition to the Star Trek mythos outside the classic show.

While common sense and experience seemed to weigh against bringing back the Ferengi in Acquisition, it seems that continuity is the only thing holding the Borg back from making an appearance on Enterprise. That said, Sussman and Strong find a clever way around that issue, by remembering the suggestion in Broken Bow that Enterprise is as much a sequel to Star Trek: First Contact as a prequel to the rest of the Star Trek universe.

“Oh no, Cap’n, they’ve discovered the mood lightin’ settin’.”

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Filed under: Enterprise | Tagged: 9/11, acquisition, Archer, Arctic, assimilation, borg, Brannon Braga, brian tyler, continuity, david livingston, Earth, enterprise, Ferengi, first contact, history, horror, mike sussman, paradox, Phlox, phyllis strong, regeneration, star trek: enterprise, star trek: first contact, techno-zombies, the thing, time travel, war on terror, zombies | 19 Comments »

Daredevil – The Ones We Leave Behind (Review)

Posted on April 24, 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.

The Ones We Leave Behind builds off The Path of the Righteous, continuing to declutter the board a Daredevil moves closer and closer to the finalé.

The Ones We Leave Behind features the final appearances from a number of supporting players, clearing the way for Daredevil to focus on the final conflict between Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk. In particular, The Ones We Leave Behind sees Madame Gao excusing herself from the narrative, leaving Leland Owlsley as the last standing member of Fisk’s little cabal following the deaths of Vladimir and Nobu. Gao talks to Owlsley about the necessity of removing distractions from the life of Wilson Fisk; it seems like The Ones We Leave Behind is removing its own distractions.

Of course, Madame Gao is not the only major departure to feature in The Ones We Leave Behind. The closing scene of The Ones We Leave Behind features Wilson Fisk murdering Ben Urich with his own hands. It is a rather shocking twist, particularly given how steady a fixture Ben Urich has been in the comic books since his first appearance in June 1978. Urich has played major roles in the iconic runs of writers like Frank Miller, Brian Michael Bendis and Ed Brubaker. He is a pretty core part of Daredevil‘s ensemble cast.

It is a very effective and very shocking death sequence, and one that really helps to raise the stakes for the season finalé.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: adaptation, ben urich, comic books, continuity, daredevil, source material, the ones we leave behind | Leave a comment »

Star Trek: Enterprise – Cease Fire (Review)

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Darren

It is weird to think that Star Trek was dying in early years of the twenty-first century.

After all, the original series had greatly increased its cultural cachet at the height of the Cold War. The adventures of James Tiberius Kirk offered an optimistic alternative to total nuclear annihilation and a doomsday clock that was rapidly approaching midnight. Logic would suggest that utopian fantasy was all the more essential when contrasted against harsh reality. In fact, it seemed like cynicism and pessimism thrived in the (relatively) peaceful and prosperous decade following the collapse of the Cold War. The X-Files and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were inescapably products of the nineties.

I’m blue dabba dee dabba dii…

So one imagines that the dread and fear that took root in the wake of 9/11 might somehow make the optimism and hope of Star Trek all the more essential. After all, pundits and commentators wasted no time in suggesting that irony and cynicism were passé. Stephen Thompson, editor of The Onion, suggested that the age of irony had ended only a week after the attacks. Graydon Carter, editor of Variety, observed, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony. Things that were considered fringe and frivolous are going to disappear.” In a highly publicised Time article, Roger Rosenblatt rejoiced.

Of course, irony was far from dead, as films like Team America: World Police demonstrated. The Colbert Report became a cultural phenomenon. The Onion is still in business. However, the speed with which these commentators latched on to the idea of the death of irony suggested that the mood had changed perceptibly. Maybe not definitively, maybe not completely, but there was a change in the air. If ever there was a time for the optimism and the utopianism of Star Trek, it would be this particular moment.

“This is the point where everything changed…”

However, it seemed like 9/11 eroded the franchise’s faith in utopia. Understandably – and perhaps inevitably – Star Trek: Enterprise found itself warped by images and iconography associated with the attacks. The tradition idyllic alien worlds associated with the franchise – visible in early episodes like Strange New World and Civilisation were quickly replaced by landscapes evoking the popular mood – apocalyptic cityscapes of Shadows of P’Jem and Shockwave, Part II, the deserts of Desert Crossing, the militaristic settings of Detained and The Communicator, or even the darkness of Rogue Planet.

It was as if 9/11 had warped the psychological landscape of the Star Trek universe, throwing everything into doubt. Far from responding to that real-world tragedy with optimism and hope, it seemed that Enterprise only lost certainty in itself. Cease Fire is an episode that feels plagued by self-doubt and insecurity, even as it tries to find its way back to the franchise’s trademark idealism. It may not quite find its way back to the path, but it makes a reasonable effort.