frelling_tralk

The Top 25 Smallville Episodes


Hourglass, Shattered, Transference, and Nemesis were all major omissions to me, personally I would have replaced season 4's Onyx with Transference. And while I agreed with *some* of the finales and premieres that were included (Crusade, Commencement, Odyssey were all unarguably epic episodes) I didn't agree with including the less memorable ones like Phantom and Bizarro. I especially wouldn't have put the series finale in the top five, cause really? It felt like the list was at times just going with the ~obvious~ choices of the bigger episodes, rather than the actual best episodes. Well the best ones IMHO anyway g*


I'm not even sure what my top 25 would be at this point though, it's been so long now that a lot of it is kind of a blur to me, but hopefully I'm going to pick my SV re-watch back up at some point. I watched seasons 1-4 last year originally intending for it to be a complete series re-watch, but there's just sooo much more tv to keep up with every year that I keep falling behind with everything :( I still need to pick my X-Files re-watch back up with season 6, I want to fit in a complete rewatch of Farscape, and then there's Gilmore Girls 7 seasons as well before the Netflix episodes...Oh and I want to re-watch The Good Wife from the beginning soon too when the DVDs for the complete series come out. And maybe Nikita too, I would like to re-watch Nikita...Hopefully I will start on season 5 of SV soon though, next year maybe

Steven Moffat Denies John Barrowman's Hint That He's Holding Up More Torchwood


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Well this all seems a bit awkward! I'm not John Barrowman's biggest fan frankly, but I can understand why he's so frustrated at the BBC seeming to have forgotten Torchwood. It always seemed to do very well in the ratings, so it is a bit puzzling why they just stopped making it. Blaming Steven Moffat is a stretch through, it seems more likely to be because Chris Chibnall and Russell T. Davis have other stuff going on now, and they were the original executive producers?

To be honest I'm not sure quite what to make of Never Again. I think that it was a really interesting idea for an episode to take a closer look at Scully's character and how Mulder's quest has overtaken her life as well, it's the kind of examination of the central character that we expect in shows this days as a matter of course, but I'm not sure it really works as an X-File? Shows today would generally build up to a development like this over several weeks, making sure that Scully's complaints feel organic and we understand where she's coming from, obviously that was never going to happen in a 1990's episode of the X-Files, so instead it feels a little too random for Scully to suddenly come up with all of these frustrations with Mulder out of the blue. Certainly interesting, but with no real groundwork for us to understand why she is suddenly so sick of her life. I've loved past examples of episodes taking a closer look at the main characters, but I'm inclined to say this one is an awkward fit in the context of the show, it's all about Scully expressing her frustration with the current state of her life, and yet we know that it's never going to get followed up on or even mentioned again. I guess you can fanwank it as being part of the cancer arc and Scully reevaluating her life because of that, but the diagnosis is never brought up in this episode (it was apparently intended to air earlier in the season), so it never actually comes across as that being the case idk

I found the episode a bit slow and draggy in parts too tbh, it felt like Scully's ~walk on the wild side~ should have been more exciting than it ultimately was, and it says a lot about CC's view of the character that he reportedly insisted on any potential sex scene being completely cut out, even though the writers have talked about how they (and Gillian) had been excited to create a steamy sex scene for her character in this one. (Complete sidenote, but it did strike me as funny on this watch that the X-Files was the opposite of most shows in that it took pains to never sexualise the main female character, yet Mulder and Skinner are shown shirtless in quite a few gratuitous shots over the years! It really stood out to me just how often Skinner is shown with no shirt on when he's at home, or he'll be answering the door to Mulder in just a towel or something. And the show seemed to *really* like their scenes playing up Mulder being naked and vulnerable, whether it's Scully coming across him shivering in a bath, or she's putting him to bed in his boxers. And then there's the infamous red speedo shot from season 2 as well. Whereas Scully is pretty much always kept in the professional business suits...)

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Home really horrified me, especially when Mulder and Scully first come across the mother screaming under the bed. :is scarred for life: And then the ending :( :( :( It's one of the episodes that I have no recollection of watching before actually, so I'm not sure if it was ever shown on the BBC? Kim Manners did a fantastic directing job with really making it feel cinematic in the way that it was paying homage to old horror films. On this watch it's definitely standing out just how much the success of The X-Files owed to the directors and the cinematographers, it's become a bit of a cliché to say about tv episodes now, but many of them really do have the feel of a big-budget film this season. (And hmm in retrospect that kind of epic we're doing this like a feature film feel was missing from season 10. Apparently all of the writers directed their own episodes, but they should really have brought back some of the original directors)

I liked how Home was so creepy partly because it was all about deconstructing the dark underbelly of this idealised vision of life in a small town/wanting things to stay the same. Even Mulder got nostalgic about wanting to live somewhere like that, but then you get the Peacock's determination to procreate and stay ~within the family~ as a reminder that romanticising the past isn't necessarily a good thing. I especially loved how they juxtaposed the old-fashioned music that the Peacock's car played with the brutal killings that they were carrying out to protect their way of life

One question I did have was that it wasn't very clear to me why the baby was being buried in the opening teaser though (and the alternative audio makes it clear that it was intended for the baby to still be alive when they buried it). Umm this was clearly not a family that cared about genetic mutations, and they were obviously upset and wanting to continue the family lineage, so why would they bury the baby at that stage?

The Blu-Rays include a deleted scene from Home that's a cute little moment, but heh I can see why they lost it. Maybe I'm wrong, but it kind of felt more like David and Gillian ab-libbing than it did M/S, I just can't see them joking about Mulder's "pen light" like that




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I'm really intrigued by American Gods, it looks absolutely fantastic in the trailer, and I was already thinking of checking it out anyway because Bryan Fuller is adapting it. (I'm a little bit surprised that it isn't going to be out until 2017 though, I always thought that they start working on it towards the end of 2015 after Hannibal finished, so I was expecting it out this year tbh)





Has anyone read the book, if so how did you find it, and do you think that it would it be worth catching up on before the tv show airs?

I've probably talked about this before (well I feel like I've talked about everything Buffy-related at this point lol), but I've just been re-watching a few Buffy episodes and OAFA does such a terrible job with setting up Dawn's PoV as this neglected child. Firstly the opening seems to want you to feel badly for Dawn because Buffy is rushing off to patrol, so IMO it would have made more sense to then show that Buffy was secretly slipping off to be with Spike or something and covering up, or even just using vampire slaying in general as an excuse to stay disconnected. Instead we immediately see that Buffy *was* telling the truth about tracking down a new demon, in which case we are supposed to feel that she was being unfair to Dawn there how exactly? Or when Dawn asks Xander, Willow, and Anya if they can go shopping at the mall with her, and they explain very nicely that they can't because they have other commitments (work-related commitments for Xander and Anya). They even ask if Dawn is okay going alone, but apparently again we're meant to feel badly for Dawn because her older sisters friends can't make spur of the moment plans with her in the middle of the day, never mind that Dawn should have her own friends if she just wants someone to hang out with at the mall?

It seemed like the final message of the episode was that Dawn wanted everyone's lives to revolve around all staying together in her house all the time playing cards and having a slumber party, even though that's not remotely practical for adults. And it would be one thing if it was presented as Dawn being over emotional because of Joyce's death and having a skewed perspective, but the episode absolutely seemed to endorse everyone else being the bad guys and neglecting her, even though they were talking about having to leave for perfectly reasonable things like work or college classes. We're shown them all looking guilty when Halfrek talks about how much they're been ignoring Dawn, even though most episodes showed Buffy, Willow, and Tara particularly all making a big effort to babysit Dawn and look out for her (and Tara continues with the milkshake dates even after she breaks up with Willow). If anything they were over-protective of ever leaving Dawn by herself.

I can agree that Buffy was emotionally neglecting Dawn in season 6, but that didn't really seem to be what the episode was saying, it was all about them not spending enough of their time with her, even though I don't see how they were supposed to manage it differently when they had their own lives as well? And it ends on Buffy choosing to stay in with Dawn instead, but presumedly that meant that she would then be skipping patrolling for that night, so apparently the message is that keeping Sunnydale safe isn't as important as making time to hang out with her ignored younger sister? As Buffy once argued in Real Me, she only can't babysit Dawn because she's patrolling, it's not like she's not available for her sister because she's going to the sock hop

I really can't work out the perspective of the ME writers at times, one minute they're telling us that 20 year old Buffy is a failure as a grown-up because she's not able to run a household and financially support herself and Dawn without assistance from Giles, but then in other episodes they're telling us that 15 year old Dawn's emotional pain should take priority over the scoobies having work/college/patrolling to do

Not sure how popular an opinion this is, but I think "The Crimson Horror" was among my favourites from series 7, it's certainly one of the very few Mark Gatniss episodes that I've really loved! Ada's story was horrifyingly tragic, and I really found the reveal with the Doctor as the "monster" very effective and unnerving the first time I watched it especially, Matt Smith did a fantastic job with those jerky body movements and the way that he was screaming with his eyes. Most of the time Mark Gatniss seems to produce really ordinary and uninspired episodes (I definitely found 'Cold War' pretty dull), while "The Crimson Horror" was the first time it felt like he was stretching a bit and not just aiming for DW by numbers. The scenes between Ada and her mother got pretty dark for DW actually. And of course I loved "Asylum Of The Daleks" and "Day Of The Doctor", but those two probably go without saying *g*

I also really loved "Dinosaurs On A Spaceship", that seems to be another episode that has a middling reputation, but I just found it really fun. In fact I loved pretty much all of the first half of the year, it felt like every one of those episodes really did live up the hype of feeling more like a blockbuster film. Things mostly fell a little flat for me in the middle section, the direction for "The Rings Of Akhaten" especially was a bit flat and small-scale in comparison. It felt like they were still aiming for a big budget feel with all of the aliens and the effect, but the director really didn't bring much scope to the early corridor scenes on the planet for example, it felt so studio-based with the way that they filmed it.

I did love the direction for "Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis" though! That's an episode that I've seen criticised a LOT, and it's definitely frustrating that it doesn't live up to its potential of being an outright classic, but I still found it had some really fun ideas and looked great. The main frustration was the unnecessary B-plot with the three brothers, I wish that it could have been an episode with just Clara and The Doctor

And I enjoyed "Nightmare In Silver" more than I remembered from my last watch, but it does feel a shame that it really should be a great episode and it just doesn't quite get there. Apparently Neil Gaiman wanted to write it as a two-parter originally? I really loved "The Doctor's Wife" and this episode didn't live up to it for me at all, even though it did have a lot of interesting ideas. I guess that's one thing that stood out to me about series 7 actually, that it didn't have as many classic episodes as you found in series 5 and 6, maybe that's part of why the fandom doesn't look more favourably on it? It started and ended strongly IMO, but the middle section didn't have any really stand-out episodes like "The Girl Who Waited" or "Vincent And The Doctor". I get the feeling that "Nightmare In Silver" and "Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis" were intended to be the stand-out episodes, but unfortunately neither of them quite came together


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