jgmcquarrie

Forever

What’s the Show? Forever (2018)

What’s It All About, JG? Well, that’s a tricky one. Actually, it’s not all that tricky but this is definitely a show that benefits from knowing as little as possible about it going in and then allowing yourself to be surprised by it. It is, though, a lightly comic drama about relationships and what happens to them, though again saying more is straying into spoiler territory. Spoilers definitely wouldn’t ruin the show (and I’m normally fine with casting spoilers about aplenty) yet at the same time there’s definitely a pleasure to be had from seeing a show start going in one particular direction and then seeing what it develops into. But this isn’t getting us anywhere, so let’s get the basics out of the way.

Knock At The Cabin

Can M Night Shyamalan knock this one out of the park? No. No he cannot.

What’s The Movie? Knock At The Cabin

What’s It All About, JG? A gay couple, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), and their daughter Wen (Kristin Cui) are vacationing at an isolated cabin somewhere in the woods. Wen is approached by Leonard (Dave Bautista) while out collecting grasshoppers. Turns out Leonard and three of his cohorts believe the world is about to end in a religious apocalypse and the only thing that can prevent it is one member of the family killing another. They must decide who should die and they have to do the deed – suicide won’t cut it. So who will die, the gay guy, the other gay guy, or the young girl? And are the four cultists/zealots right in what they say about the end of the world? They believe so fervently that every time the family refuses to murder each other, the zealots kill one of their number while a terrible natural disaster occurs. Eventually, one member of the family does indeed kill another as the evidence for an Actual Apocalypse adds up. Is it real? Anyway, the world is saved but only after all four cultists are dead. Was it all just in their heads? Na.

Quantum Leap (2022-)

Can an old early 90s sci-fi show make the leap into the 21st century?

What’s The Show? Quantum Leap, the unexpected return.

What’s It All About, JG? Well, pretty much the same as the original series, unsurprisingly. But for the sake of completeness, Dr. Ben Song (Raymond Lee), Our Hero, is a physicist working on the Quantum Leap time-travel project thirty years after when the original show was set. Ben “leaps” for reasons which remain murky throughout much of the first season, jumping into various different people across time as he “tries to put right what once went wrong”. You know, saving a restaurant, helping a family get over a tragedy, defeating prejudice, giving Brandon Routh some guest-star work, that kind of thing. He’s aided in his missions by his fiancee, Addison (Caitlin Bassett), who appears to him in the form of an insubstantial hologram, and the rest of the Quantum Leap team. In the present they’re trying to figure out how to get Ben back while also trying to understand what it was that drove him to leap in the first place and what he’s really trying to achieve. In the end, he did it to save Addison’s life, which he successfully does despite the machinations of “Leaper X”, another time-traveller hell-bent on stopping him.

Picard: Season Three

Can the final season of Picard give the Next Generation crew a better ending than Nemesis did? Um…

What’s the Show? The final season of Star Trek: Picard

What’s It All About, JG? Fanwank, largely. But fine, there’s a plot. Beverly Crusher, in absentia for twenty years, turns up on a ship being fired at accompanied by A Mysterious Man, Jack. She needs rescuing, so sends a desperate message to Picard who, along with Riker, attempts a rescue by redirecting the Titan, a ship Seven of Nine is also now serving on (don’t worry about the details – nobody else did). The ship is captained by a spectacular asshole of a captain, Shaw, but Seven redirects the ship anyway against his orders. Arriving at the location Bev sent over, they are attacked by another ship, the Shrike, which is captained by – get your collective gasps ready now – a changeling! The captain, Vadic, wants Jack, Bev’s far-from-inexplicable sidekick.

Luther: The Fallen Sun

Luther’s back! And on Netflix! But can The Fallen Sun live up to the expectations of the BBC show?

What’s the Movie/Show? Luther: The Fallen Sun

What’s It All About, JG? When last we saw him, Luther’s increasingly extreme measures caught up with him and it was to jail with the disgraced DCI. The Fallen Sun picks up with the self-same Luther (Idris Elba, of course) in prison, where he’s broadcast the sound of people being tortured to death. Nice. This is all being orchestrated by David Robey (Andy Serkis), a wealthy psychopath who enjoys using surveillance tech in order to get people to kill themselves and/or cause convenient plot distractions.

Luther escapes from prison to stop him. There is, inevitably, a mole in the police investigation as DCI Raine (Cynthia Erivo) and Luther’s former colleagues try to get him back to jail while also pursuing Robey. The whole thing ends up in Norway, with Robey having build a “Red Bunker” – a torture chamber where Luther and Raine end up having to fight each other for the prurient interests of watching pervs. The police turn up to shut down the bunker, and Robey ends up drowned at the bottom of a lake. Luther is flown back to England to recover to recover from his wounds, but is offered a potential way out of going back to prison, as MI5 are maybe offering him a job. Watch this space…?

Plane

A throwback action movie! But is it… plane sailing? (Note: This pun better than any dialogue in actual movie!)

What’s The Movie? Plane

What’s It All About, JG? Well, there’s this plane, you see. And the pilot of the plane, Brodie Torrance (Gerard Butler, every bit as convincing a pilot as I am), takes the plane to the place where the plane needs to go to but the plane hits some bad weather and is damaged so the plane has to make an emergency landing on a jungle island and then Torrance and convicted-prisoner-being-transported Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) leave the plane to get help but then the passengers and first officer Samuel Dele (Yoson An) gets captured by… uh, locals (?) and they have to get back to the plane and then fix enough of the plane to take off while under fire and also there are some mercenaries who try to help with the rescue of the the plane and sort-of do but also Garpare doesn’t make it on to the plane and runs off with a big bag of money instead and then the plane takes off but has to do an emergency landing on the next island over but one which actually has an airport and then the plane lands and that’s it.

Plane.

The Rig

How scary can an oil rig and some fog be? Pretty damned scary!

What’s The Show? The Rig

What’s It All About, JG? On a remote Scottish oil rig, the Kinloch Alpha, Something Mysterious Is Stirring. Something, perhaps unsurprisingly, from the deep. Communications with land are cut off when a speedy fog zips in to engulf the titular rig. After surviving what ought to have been a fatal fall during this thick and mysterious fog, Baz Roberts (Calvin Denba) appears to have been infected with something which starts to rapidly heal his body. As he recovers it’s also clear he has, at least in part, been taken over by something. Mysterious.

Doctor Who – The Power of the Doctor

It’s the end of the 13th Doctor. But does Jodie Whittaker’s version get the exist she so richly deserves?

What’s the Show? Jodie Whittaker’s final, 90-minute epic turn as the Doctor.

What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor, Yaz and Dan attempt to stop a space-train getting hijacked by a bunch of Cybermen (alright: CyberMasters). Unsuccessfully, as it happens, and the CyberMasters steal the cargo – what appears to be a young girl. Dan, having had enough of nearly dying, decides it’s time to call it quits while he’s ahead of the game and leaves. Oh yes, and a Dalek wants to give the Doctor the key to destroying his species, like you do. Meanwhile, Tegan (Tegan!) and Ace (Ace!) are investigating the abduction of seismologists and artwork, and the Master is at work in Russia, posing as Rasputin.

He’s brought the Daleks, the CyberMasters and himself together in an attempt to finally defeat the Doctor – he wants to take over the Doctor’s body, then destroy everything she stands for. And he uses the child – actually a Qurunx, an enslaved energy being – to do it. The Doctor fights back from the inside with the help of the 1st, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th in phantom form, and on the outside Tegan and Ace help defeat the CyberMasters while Yaz forces the Master to reverse his takeover of the Doctor and forces him back into his own body. As the Qurunx escapes its bonds, the Master directs its energy towards the Doctor in a final act of revenge, mortally wounding her and forcing her to (not very surprisingly) regenerate into David Tennant. Again.

The Sandman

Neil Gaimen’s The Sandman has finally made it to screen! But is it such stuff as dreams are made of?

What’s The Show? The Sandman

What’s It All About, JG? Well, other than the decades-long attempts to actually get the damned thing on screen at all, its mostly about Dream of the Endless, or Morpheus, who is captured and imprisoned by a cabal of occultists actually trying to snare Death. Trapped for a hundred years, the Dreaming – Morpheus’s realm – deteriorates, affecting the waking world. Eventually gaining his freedom, Morpheus attempts to rebuild his realm while trying to understand his place in a world that hasn’t known him for a century. We also get to meet various members of his Family, the Endless, and their shenanigans, and also the Corinthian, a dream that was made to be the ultimate nightmare and has escaped into the waking world.

Abba Voyage

After forty years, Abba are back with an album and a huge virtual concert. But is the gig worth all the fuss around it?

What’s the Concert? Abba Voyage

What’s It All About, JG? Well, without going through the full history of Abba recording music again after forty years, basically they’ve built a bloody big stadium in the east end of London and filled it with a band and a whole heap of technology and lighting. And in this Abba Arena is a show that really isn’t quite like any other. The band members did a motion-capture concert which allowed projections – Abbatars, if you will – of them to be generated as if it were the real thing. These are, naturally, de-aged so we get a view of the band in their prime. But in using mo-cap to get a genuine performance it means you’re not just watching a CGI version of the band. You’re watching them give an actual performance, but then with a bunch of technical jiggery-pokery used to generate the show.