Year: 2008

US TV

Season finale: Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles

5 March 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

 

The thing about the writers’ strike is that shows are ending before their naturally allotted time.

Sometimes, the show runners prepared for it and the series ended on a relative high (for example, Heroes).

Sometimes, the show runners were unprepared for it and the series just stopped (for example, Las Vegas, Bionic Woman), although that usually coincided with the series being cancelled (cf Las Vegas, Bionic Woman).

And sometimes the show runners were prepared for it and the show tried to go out on a high, but failed. I’m thinking of Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles here.

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Wednesday’s question-answering news

5 March 2008 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Doctor Who

Film

Commercials

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Audio and radio play reviews

Review: Doctor Who – Max Warp

4 March 2008 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Max Warp It’s a cracking show, looking at the latest, fastest, sleekest models. There’s three guys who present it: an old, politically incorrect guy who’s well known for his outspoken nature and his support of the armed forces; there’s the younger, cooler one, named after a a furry rodent; and there’s the older, duller mechanical spod who likes talking about mechanics.

It’s all going so well right up until that young cool one goes and crashes an experimental vehicle and dies.

Hang on. Dies? That can’t be right.

Did you think I was talking about Top Gear?

No, of course you didn’t. I wrote Doctor Who at the top for one thing. No, this is the spaceship show ‘Max Warp’, starring the vocal talents of Graeme Garden, James Fleet and Duncan James (who used to be a pop star or something). And you can hear it in the latest, and possibly the most tasteless Big Finish Doctor Who play so far.

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Tuesday’s early renewals news

4 March 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Film

British TV

US TV

How do you help someone catch up with Lost?

3 March 2008 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Lost is now up to its fourth season. It’s actually a very good season, so far, and the flash-forwards/time travelling/boaties are working very nicely so far. In fact, I reckon it’s probably the best season of them all.

So the question is, given it’s good now, how do you help people catch up with a show like Lost? There have been getting on for 60-70 episodes, I reckon (without any research). That’s a lot of days of TV viewing for anyone to watch every single episode so far.

Do you just show the curious all the episodes and hope they have the time? Do you get them to rent the box sets one at a time until they’ve caught up? Can they skip seasons – is season two relatively missable, given that all the new characters introduced are dead now (more or less)? Or is there a cheat sheet of redundant episodes somewhere that have unimportant flashbacks and mere padding?

The trouble is what’s padding to one person is glorious happiness to another – after all, the “Nikki and Paolo get buried” episode looks like padding at first, but it explains a lot in retrospect and is wonderfully dark yet silly (Billy Dee Williams!).

Any ideas? Or should the uninitiated simply have put the time in when it was all the craze?