Short Reviews – JG Judgementally Comments…

Countdown

Can we count on Coundown to give Jensen Ackles a decent starring vehicle? Um…

What’s The Show? Countdown, Amazon’s attempt to get into the 24 market long, long after that seems like a Sensible Thing To Do.

What’s It All About JG? Starring, let’s say, Jensen Ackles as Detective Mark Meachum, Countdown asks a searingly pointed question – what if thrillers just somehow aren’t dumb enough yet? This one posits a threat which is going to be like 9/11 and Chernobyl, which is quite the thing – Meachum and a collection of the sort of people you always see in this type of thriller have joined a special task force dedicated to stopping whoever it is that’s planning this dastardly and nefarious deed. Not just any task force, see. A special one. Which means they get to do stunts and hacking and jumping and broom-broom fast driving, all while trying to prevent LA being turned into a fair approximation of the dark side of the moon. Oh and then also a potential presidential assassination that needs to be stopped as well, for reasons that seem to have less to do with the story and more to do with having something to do in the last three episodes after inconveniently wrapping up the plot far too early and also curing Meachum. Good luck with all that!

Doctor Who Season 15/2 Episode Seven, “Wish World”

The Rani’s (and also the Ranis) have an evil plan! Who would have guessed?

What’s The Episode? Wish World

What’s It All About, JG? Discovering RTD has seen Wandavision (or maybe Pleasantville) for the most part. But story-wise, we start off with the Rani (Panjabi version) in Bavaria, stealing a baby who can make wishes come true. We then find ourselves on a version of Earth where the Doctor and Belinda are married with a child, Poppy, and the Doctor works at UNIT, now an insurance company. Every so often, when someone doubts something, a cup will fall through a table. This is because the Rani is trying to measure doubt (can one assign a number to such a nebulous concept?). Conrad, from “Lucky Day“, has wished this world into existence, so it’s enforced heterosexuality, disdain for the disabled etc. – the typical right-wing fascist fantasy. Eventually, to get the plot moving, Rogue turns up on telly to give the Doctor a push in the direction of something interesting and he ends up confronting The Two Ranis (Panjabi and Dobson). The “current” version reveals she is trying to find…. Omega. Oh good. Then the Doctor plummets to his apparent death while screaming about Poppy being actually real while the world disintegrates.

Doctor Who Season 15/2 Episode Six, “The Interstellar Song Contest”

Is this what it’s come to?

What’s The Episode? The Intergalactic Song Contest

What’s It All About, JG? Eurovision in space, innit? But fine, the Doctor and Belinda turn up at the Intergalactic Song Contest, shit happens and most of it is really, really terrible (the writing, not the events, though also that). Susan pops in for a cameo (the only bit I actively enjoyed) and Mrs Flood is the Rani. Woo. The end.

Jet Lag: The Game

Can Jet Lag: The Game be a YouTube series that’s worth spending time on? You better believe it!

What’s The Show? A first for this blog – a YouTube series, Jet Lag: The Game

What’s It All About, JG? It’s a travel competition, starring Sam Denby, Adam Chase, and Ben Doyle. Each season of the show centre around a different type of game – Tag, Connect Four, Capture The Flag, that sort of thing. These are played out over different geographical areas, so Connect Four involved capturing four American states in a diagonal or row as per the game, Tag involves trying to tag one of the other players while they each try to make their way to an end point somewhere in Europe. You get the idea. Tag has been done twice, actually – Tag Across Europe – but every other season has been unique in its gameplay. Sometimes the play area is a country, with the most recent series at time of writing playing out across Australia, sometimes it’s the whole planet, as with Race Around The World. Most seasons feature a guest of some description (except for the Tag seasons and Hide and Seek, which just feature the boys), with Ben and Adam comprising one team and Sam and whoever the guest is making up the other. The show is shot on iPhones, giving it an immediate, reportage, feel. In every iteration of the game, though, teams or individuals must complete tasks in order to earn money to allow them to travel. Thus it becomes a strategy of what you can earn and where you can go to secure the ultimate victory.

Doctor Who – Wild Blue Yonder

The Doctor and Donna vs The Doctor and Donna! There’s also probably a “long arm of the law” gag in there somewhere…

What’s The Show? The second of RTD’s Fourteenth Doctor specials, “Wild Blue Yonder”.

What’s It All About, JG? After a brief stop-off to visit Issac Newton for a limp joke, the coffee-defeated TARDIS crashes on an alien spaceship. While repairing itself, it vanishes (thanks to the always-rubbish HADS) and leave the Doctor and Donna stranded in a very long corridor that sometimes reconfigures itself randomly and with an ancient robot slowly making its way down. While exploring the ship, they discover they are on the very edge of existence and that they are sharing the ship with the no-things. They are creatures who slowly take the form of those around them until they can mimic them perfectly. Once the process is complete, they plan to swarm into the universe and plunder. The captain of the ship worked out how to stop them and set the ship on a very slow self-desctruct – hence the robot – while the no-things copy the Doctor and Donna in a bid to escape their captivity in the creepiest way imaginage. The Doctor speeds up the self-destruct to stop them, the TARDIS reappears at a convenient moment to save the day and Donna almost dies after the Doctor takes the fake one on board but then is rescued. And on returning to London safely, Wilf is waiting for them but the world has gone to pot.

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.

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…?

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.