Winning Hearts and Wormholes

In one of the most eventful episodes of Farscape, the series' primary villain is finally introduced, familiar characters return after a long absence, and Chiana continues to distinguish herself.

Season 1, Episode 19: Nerve

There are several Chiana (Gigi Edgley) highlights in this episode where she poses as Crichton's (Ben Browder) servant on the Peacekeeper Gammak base. She aggressively seduces everyone in the officers' lounge; she wears cute, slightly creepy, Sebacean makeup with a Louise Brooks wig; and she incinerates a guy with a makeshift flamethrower.

But my favourite Chiana moment from the episode is when she's in hiding with Gilina (Alyssa-Jane Cook), Crichton's returning love interest from "PK Tech Girl", twelve episodes earlier. Crichton's been unmasked as an imposter but he begs Chiana and Gilina to place priority on getting medicine back to the gravely ill Aeryn (Claudia Black) on Moya.

When Gilina wonders at Crichton's unshakeable focus on Aeryn, Chiana quickly assures her that Aeryn is merely a shipmate, adding, "Crichton is in love with you." I love this moment--you can see Chiana has figured out why Gilina, still an otherwise loyal Peacekeeper Tech, is helping them and at the same time she executes a plan to help insure Gilina continues to help them. But Chiana doesn't fully understand the situation so she misplays her hand, instead accidentally confirming Gilina's already growing suspicion that Crichton's now devoted to Aeryn. You can see it on Gilina's face.

Chiana really has shown herself to be a wily burglar but she's not perfect, she's maybe a little overconfident. She makes mistakes--but not every mistake leads to disaster.

How was Crichton found out? He had the misfortune to pass someone in the hall with a keen instinct--none other than Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), the bizarre and mysterious figure heading up the equally mysterious research on the hidden Peacekeeper base.

We learn a lot more about Scorpius later but at this point what we know is primarily how he contrasts with Crais (Lani Tupu). Where Crais is unhinged and unreasonable, Scorpius is cool and pragmatic. He doesn't want to take revenge, he just wants to figure out who Crichton is and why he's there. When he discovers Crichton has the very thing he's been looking for, the power to create wormholes, he's pragmatic if ruthless in his attempts to extract the information. This McGuffin, which operates for the rest of the show's four seasons, brings an effective context to the show's ideas about misfit characters needing to feel a sense of belonging somewhere while providing a dark distortion of Crichton's former passion for exploration.

We discover the wormhole aliens from "A Human Reaction" had secretly implanted the knowledge for creating wormhole technologies in Crichton's brain, something hidden that's meant to reveal itself in due course which Scorpius unearths prematurely. This helps make Scorpius seem sinister and, combined with his distinctly BDSM costume, darkly sexual. It's appropriate that the episode places so much focus on Chiana's more innocent promiscuity so that the two characters work as counterpoints.

Oh, and in addition to all this, the episode also introduces Stark (Paul Goddard), another main character, though at this point he's just another mysterious mask, vigorously defining the sides of the cell he shares with Crichton. Is this demarcation of territory just the true nature of sentient need, stripped down to madness?

. . .

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass
Episode 18: A Bug's Life

Yet the Wood Lives

I finally caught the first episode of Deadwood last night. I get to these things eventually, this one only took me fifteen years. I like it so far, only one episode in--please refrain from giving me spoilers though I've already looked up some of the real life counterparts of characters portrayed on screen and have a general idea of who's going to live and who's going to die. I'm surprised how many of the characters are based real people, even Timothy Olyphant's character, Seth Bullock, though Bullock had a much better moustache in real life.

There's a wonderful, grimy atmosphere about the television portrayal of the town of Deadwood, about as close to a good Spaghetti Western as you could get on a mid-2000s HBO television budget. I find Olyphant a bit bland but most of the cast is terrific, especially Ian McShane as Al Swearengen.

Based on the show's reputation, I was expecting him to be more about delivering lyrically profane outbursts but in the first episode I was most impressed by his quieter moments. When a land deal he's orchestrated starts going in the wrong direction, he doesn't start screaming at the participants, he becomes stony faced, quietly repeating offers and arguments. It's much worse than an outburst--it's the kind of quiet that presages a particularly deadly storm.

It's also good to see Brad Dourif and he's already had one interesting moment as the town physician in a scene where he's amazed by a man who's survived twenty minutes after a getting shot in the head. It feels like it's been a long time since I saw Dourif in anything. Looking at his Wikipedia entry, I see he was in three movies last year, maybe I ought to watch at least one of them if I really want a Dourif fix.

The first three seasons of Deadwood are available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1244

A frozen face at centre worked a sun.
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In traded light, the purple systems run.
A youthful bracelet steels a weathered arm.
The magnet fooled a spinning weather vane.
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The Birth of Colour

It was Colin Baker's birthday yesterday so I watched The Ultimate Foe, his final serial as the Doctor. Perhaps more interesting for the behind the scenes drama, it certainly doesn't feel like a final episode for an incarnation of the Doctor, and Colin Baker infamously refused to return for the regeneration scene of the following serial. But as much as The Ultimate Foe really is an ultimate mess, there are elements I really like about it.

Depending on how it's packaged, you might also encounter this two part serial as the last two parts of a fourteen part serial called The Trial of a Time Lord, and it does close-off a season long story arc about the Doctor being on trial on a Time Lord space station. His prosecutor is the mysterious Valeyard (Michael Jayston), who is revealed in Part 1 of The Ultimate Foe to be a future incarnation of the Doctor, from some time between his Twelfth and final incarnation.

Considering Time Lords are supposed to be able to regenerate only twelve times, it's a good thing the Eleventh Doctor was given more regenerations. Now this choice of words makes more sense—they're spoken by the Master (Anthony Ainley), by the way, who appears suddenly on the courtroom viewscreen as a surprising voice in the Doctor's defence.

And here's another thing in classic Who made better by modern Who. The Master's incarnation as Missy makes sense out of all the old pointlessly complicated machinations of the Master. Really, it makes no sense for the Master to reduce the Doctor to a catatonic state in order to trick the Valeyard so that one day the Master has the pleasure of killing the Doctor himself. It makes much more sense that this is some kind of long, ongoing flirtation.

The three way struggle between the Master, the Valeyard, and the Doctor which occurs in the Matrix--a computer simulated world that holds the archive of the Time Lords--seems to be set in the grimy back alleys of Victorian London. Robert Holmes' original script apparently included a subplot about Jack the Ripper. Holmes died before he was able to complete the second episode script and John Nathan-Turner, script editor at the time, apparently was not abashed by circumstances enough to refrain from editing out significant portions of the late writer's script. This despite Holmes being regarded one of the best writers in the series' history, going back to the Second Doctor era. But it sounds like the air of panic surrounding the show's failing ratings at the time prompted aggressive bureaucracy. Which may be why the second episode, ultimately written by Pip and Jane Baker, spends so much time ragging on bureaucracy.

The Doctor and his reluctant ally Glitz (Tony Selby), in attempting to meet with someone who is presumably the Valeyard, are continually frustrated by a series of identical Dickensian clerks named Popplewick (Geoffrey Hughes). Glitz, by the way, is one of the best things to come out of the Sixth Doctor era, and I love how the Doctor decides he's the perfect person to pull along with him into the Matrix. An intergalactic burglar introduced at the beginning of the season in another story by Robert Holmes, Glitz would later appear again in the Seventh Doctor era. Selby's performance is a delight--he would've been a much better companion than Mel (Bonnie Langford). When she inexplicably turned up in the courtroom and trumpeted her own trustworthiness in the flat tone of a five year old at a spelling bee, even now I automatically thought, "Really? This is really going to be a companion?" I didn't feel satisfied until I learned later that Langford was already well known for being on another series before Doctor Who. That explained a lot. I do still like the confusing way Mel is introduced, though. I'm still not sure how much of it was intended by the writers or just a result of the general chaos behind the scenes--how the Doctor first sees her in footage from his future in Terror of the Vervoids and then meets up with her in The Ultimate Foe at a point in her timeline after she's met him.

As for the birthday boy himself--what else can I say about Colin Baker? I do like the bit where he pretends to submit to his fate when the court seems to find him guilty of genocide. It's one of those moments where the Doctor really demonstrates his cleverness and Baker pulls it off.

The Almost Perfect Stone

Unsurprisingly, NetFlix is currently streaming 1982's The Dark Crystal ahead of their release of a prequel series to that movie in August: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. It'd been several years since I watched the original film so I thought I'd take the opportunity to refresh my memory. I'd never seen it in high definition and it looks beautiful on NetFlix.

I was born in 1979 so my childhood memories are filled with 80s movies but The Dark Crystal wasn't one of them. I saw Labyrinth several times but it wasn't until after I was 20 that I finally saw The Dark Crystal on a cheap DVD. My general opinion now is much the same as it was last time I watched it--everything about the movie works except for the protagonists. Which, to be sure, is crucial.

They're just so dull, particularly the male Gelfling, Jen, whose puppet was operated by Jim Henson but was voiced by Stephen Garlick. If Henson himself had voiced Jen, I think things would've been drastically different. Even when Kermit isn't being especially exuberant, there are shades of personality in Henson's performance that just aren't there in Garlick's. Kira, the Gefling voiced by Lisa Maxwell, isn't much better, hardly seeming to care when the Podling town is raided.

Those Podlings, though, wow. I love me some Podlings. They're a prime example of that eerie borderland of cute and creepy the film's best qualities operate in. Their party is somehow alarming and their capture horrible in the same way as the Chamberlain (Frank Oz) being stripped is. It all feels very Lynchian and I wonder if it's a coincidence the Podlings look so much like the Gauze Baby from Eraserhead.

The scene where a Podling's life is drained from him is the strongest in the film. I feel bad for the little guy but mostly I feel as though I'm watching some vulnerable part of the human heart I never guessed existed, the alienness of something also so familiar having a deeply alarming quality. Like realising there's a baby under your mattress and you have no idea how it got there.

The movie wisely spends a lot of time with the Skeksis and their backstabbing court manoeuvrings. Much like the Lannisters were always more interesting than the Starks, there's twenty times more energy onscreen with the Skeksis than the Gelflings.

Mainly what I love about the film, though, is the sense of a complete world realised. The incredible work behind bringing Brian Froud's beautiful designs to life--the seemingly endless examples of new puppets in the forests and mountains, things that look kind of like anemones or kind of like hydra, but nothing is really like anything but itself. This upcoming prequel series has a lot to live up to.

Movies Combine for Maximum Stuff

So the Alien frightened you, so the Terminator thrilled you. Now get ready for the Alien Terminator (aka Top Line), a 1988 action/adventure/Sci-Fi film starring Franco Nero, Deborah Moore, and with the friendly participation of George Kennedy. There's a goofy grace in this casually ridiculous mess.

Every big idea the movie delivers seems like it was coaxed out of a reluctant, inebriated old man who just wanted to be left alone. Most of the movie consists of a moustachioed Nero running around Columbia being chased by anonymous guys with guns who may be KGB, mafia, or Nazis. Director Nello Rossati seems to have no idea or interest in how audiences form attachments to characters and events.

One moment, Ted (Nero) is having lunch with a friend--then an abrupt jump cut immediately has Ted identifying the same friend's corpse in the morgue. Deborah Moore (daughter of Roger Moore) is introduced as an assister to that same friend and she starts following Ted around for no apparent reason. She trusts him without question when he tells her he's not guilty of the murders the government pins on him, and doesn't even blink when he tells her there's an alien spacecraft with what he identifies as a "16th century carrack" in the mountains.

Looks more like a 19th century balcony if you ask me. There's business about how alien technology is being kept hidden from the public but it's all very vague, mostly everything is just an excuse for guys to shoot at Franco Nero so he can narrowly escape in various ways. My favourite is when he hops into the back of a truck being driven by a middle aged man and woman, apparently chicken farmers, who are so drunk they just constantly laugh while the vehicle weaves about alarmingly on the road.

They're not even laughing at anything, for five or so minutes of film they're just aimlessly laughing.

Finally, June (Moore) joins Ted on the run and they at last witness the strange, expressionless, apparently invulnerable man. "Russian?" June speculates, maybe wondering if he's related to Dolph Lundgren's character from Rocky IV. But, no--he really is a machine!

So now there's a killer robot for some reason. He's good for another couple chase scenes, anyway, before Ted's icy ex-wife (Mary Stavin, Jerry's Icelandic girlfriend from Twin Peaks) travels from a New York high rise, in person, for some reason, to handle matters. Events occur, occasionally they bear some tentative relationship to each other.

There was always a smile on my face watching the movie, it was like watching a dream someone had while Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, and Terminator played on television. Alien Terminator is available on Amazon Prime under the title Top Line.

Twitter Sonnet #1243

The floating gloves suggest a finger mind.
Remembered eyes at present watch the lens.
Projector wheels would turn another kind.
The future's built in rusty pots and tins.
A podgy lizard fell across the street.
Detectives turned the scales to see the sum.
A giant foot can cover any beat.
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A circle mouth contained a cube and sphere.
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The Pattern of Investigation

A Scotland Yard Inspector's holiday is interrupted by a murder, a murder complicated by the disappearance of the corpse in 1939's The Body Vanished. A "Quota Quickie", the film draws on various familiar plot elements and character types in unremarkable settings but there is a strange charm in how plain it is, making it an artefact of normalcy in 1939 Britain.

The Quota Quickies were a product of the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 which mandated a certain number of British films be produced in the effort to promote the British film industry. As with the quotas imposed on media to-day, the result is often dull, at best merely harmless.

Anthony Hulme plays Rodney Paine, a generic brand Sherlock Holmes, while C. Denier Warren as his chum, newspaperman Pip Piper, is both a Watson in the Nigel Bruce mould and an example of the frequently stymied reporter in a crime film. He's constantly sputtering at Paine's repeated insistence that he not print in his newspaper any of the remarkable findings from the investigation.

Paine's deductive reasoning is assisted by several remarkable coincidences--in one particularly amusing case, a bottle of poison happens to fall out of a woman's purse to land at his feet. The supporting cast make the film a little more worthwhile, though, particularly Ernest Sefton as a local police sergeant named Hopkins and Frank Atkison as Hobbleberry, a local man trying to recover his stolen tricycle. I'd never seen an adult tricycle on film before.

The Body Vanished is available on Amazon Prime.

The Possessed Man Isn't Who He Says He Is

A situation on Farscape where one group is bluffing about their identities to another group is complicated by an intelligent virus taking control of one individual after another. Miraculously, all this destabilisation leads to some solid and entertaining character development.

Season 1, Episode 18: A Bug's Life

Ben Browder employs the phoney English accent that will have improved by the time he cameoed in Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2--in this case it's to pose as a Peacekeeper captain when Moya receives some unexpected guests.

They're some highly specialised Peacekeeper Black Ops commandos. Aeryn (Claudia Black) of course has an easier time posing as a Peacekeeper than Crichton, having been born and bred as a Peacekeeper pilot. We hear a little more about her youth in which she was already training to fly at the age of 14 and at one point, she tells Larraq (Paul Leyden), her advancement was stalled only because her legs were too short to reach the pedals of the more advanced crafts. We also learn that the more disciplined, regular military tends to regard the more free-ranging, seat-of-the-pants style of Larraq's group with some scorn.

Aeryn starts to develop affection for Larraq. It makes sense--she likes Crichton, a man who's so different from the world she's used to. Larraq is part of that old world but he's enough of an outsider in it that it almost seems to bridge the gap to Aeryn's relatively recent outcast status. She's found a context already familiar in her old life where what she's become kind of makes sense.

I like how the climax of the episode doesn't involve Larraq doing something obviously villainous to send Aeryn back into the arms of Crichton. In the end, in fact, he's more of a victim and Aeryn's conflict is left nicely unresolved.

The commandos are transporting a mysterious item to a research base (a base that'll become very important in succeeding episodes). Once again, Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) and Chiana (Gigi Edgley) make a natural team--they run into each other when both decide to try cracking open the crate. This part of the plot nicely helps establish Chiana's cred as a thief--there's a good scene where she flirts with one of the commandos to take an impression of his key with a food cube on the sly.

Of course, Chiana turns out to be a bit of a Pandora here as the box unleashes a virus that works as a possessing demon. It moves from host to host, leaving the previous essentially unharmed. It takes over the personality of its hosts with access to their memories and normal behaviour. This leads to a Mexican stand-off, the revelation of the virus coming to Moya's crew at the same time the nature of Moya's crew is revealed to the commandos. There's so much revelation with new reasons for the characters to distrust each other while everyone's pointing guns that the scene could've easily fallen apart. It holds together, though, and becomes another fascinating facet in the show's ongoing exploration of characters being lost in the galaxy.

. . .

This entry is part of a series I'm writing on Farscape for the show's 20th anniversary. My previous reviews can be found here (episodes are in the order intended by the show's creators rather than the broadcast order):

Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 2: I, E.T.
Episode 3: Exodus from Genesis
Episode 4: Throne for a Loss
Episode 5: Back and Back and Back to the Future
Episode 6: Thank God It's Friday Again
Episode 7: PK Tech Girl
Episode 8: That Old Black Magic
Episode 9: DNA Mad Scientist
Episode 10: They've Got a Secret
Episode 11: Till the Blood Runs Clear
Episode 12: Rhapsody in Blue
Episode 13: The Flax
Episode 14: Jeremiah Crichton
Episode 15: Durka Returns
Episode 16: A Human Reaction
Episode 17: Through the Looking Glass

A Young Yakuza can Only Sing of Escape

Life's tough for Jiro. In 1958's Red Pier (赤い波止場) he's the handsome young yakuza with a golden voice, born on the wrong side of the tracks, saviour of children, and the object of all consuming passion for two beautiful women. If you're looking for a romanticised take on yakuza with a teen heartthrob, this would be a good choice.

Starring Yujiro Ishihara as Jiro, sadly he only has one musical number, though it's effective. An oddly challenging song he sings on a rooftop by that pier.

There's also a few dance numbers involving one of the girls in love with Jiro, Mami (Yukiko Todoroki), the Bad Girl. In this movie, nothing is sexier than mambo.

The Good Girl, Mami's rival, is Keiko (Mie Kitahara), whose young nephew Jiro narrowly manages to pull out of the path of a careening taxi. Unfortunately, Jiro's gang is also responsible for the death of Keiko's brother, who gets it with a dock crane at the beginning of the movie.

Jiro laments the life which has made him a yakuza through and through but always wears a smile, albeit a bitter one. The movie doesn't really deal him as rough a hand as the heroes of some other yakuza movies, though, and this one isn't nearly as good as another Ishihara movie from the same year, Rusty Knife, also co-starring Mie Kitahara. But Red Pier has a few good action scenes and a recurring, amusing piece of business where Jiro uses firecrackers to counterfeit the sound of gunfire. There's a really effective showdown sequence between two supporting characters at a festival and a nice fist fight between Jiro and another yakuza played by Hideaki Nitani. Red Pier is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1242

A pair of feet appeared above the fence.
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A figure's hat concealed his hairpiece well.
An av'rage day decides a harder cloud.
Acknowledged moves recalled preserve the ball.
Selected horns convey the waltzes loud.
The greatest dancers list along the wall.
Pyjama beans were counted sleepy now.
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A circus thought became a sturdy bow.
A team of cats would take a practised nap.
A sheet of dust creates the tomes beneath.
A language came of light and shade bequeath.

Eight in Four

A couple months ago, NetFlix quietly released an "Extended" version of The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino's terrific 2015 Western. Except it wasn't just a longer version of the film, it was the film recut as a four episode miniseries by Tarantino and his editor:

So about a year after it’s released, maybe a little less, me and my editor, Fred Raskin, we got together and then we worked real hard. We edited the film down into 50 minute bits, and we very easily got four episodes out of it. We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently. Some sequences are more similar than others compared to the film, but it has a different feeling. It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this “chapters unfolding” quality.

So I watched it like a television series, over the course of a week. Ultimately I think I prefer the film version but the miniseries has several fascinating aspects unique to it, the best probably being in the final episode where a scene from the first is shown again from the perspective of different characters. This might have been too much for a film that was already long but sits perfectly fine in a miniseries format. There's a great moment where you realise one character's line has more significance than it seemed to at first. The running gag about the cabin's door needing to be kicked down also takes on a subtly different, sinister quality as the camera switches to focusing on the faces of Michael Madsen and Tim Roth.

A lot of the approximately 25 minutes of new footage is less conspicuously dispersed throughout the film, mostly appearing in dialogue scenes. Samuel L. Jackson's showdown with the Confederate general played by Bruce Dern seems to twist the knife a little more and the dialogue on the stagecoach at the beginning occurs, I think, in a different order. Almost the entirety of the first episode consists of the stagecoach scene, almost fifty minutes, and you get more of a sense of being on a long journey through hard weather with these people.

Once again, I thought about how Walton Goggins' character, Chris Mannix, is at the heart of the story's most interesting statement on human nature. We watch him going from being a staunch and earnest supporter of Dern's bitter Confederate general to unhesitatingly allying himself with the former Union Major, and a black man, Jackson's Major Warren. And its completely credible, even with Mannix's vehement use of racial epithets. Naturally for a soldier, there would be no real philosophical beliefs behind his racism anymore than the jeers of football fans against fans of an opposing team. He's a strange mixture of naivete and cunning--he's loyal to the established authority but he's also better at figuring things out than the other characters; he realises the truth about Warren's Lincoln Letter through a very simple process of reasoning and he similarly sees through Daisy's ruse at the end.

It's a story all about naturally occurring contradictions so, in a way, it makes sense that such a long film takes place in such a short space of time, that a television series should be shot in ultra widescreen. I do recommend watching it on the largest screen possible. I was kind of hoping for more footage in Minnie's Haberdashery before Kurt Russell and Jennifer Jason Leigh arrive, in particular I wanted more time with Zoe Bell's character but sadly I don't think there's any additional footage in that segment. I'd love to see Tarantino shoot a Western starring Bell.

A Rampaging World

"Let that be a lesson to you, my girl," says the Fourth Doctor to Romana. "Never take anything at its face value." An appropriate lesson indeed in The Pirate Planet, a 1978 Doctor Who serial, the first to be written by Douglas Adams. People who appear to be villains turn out to be victims--even characters who prey on villains turn out to be victims of another layer of villainy. But perhaps the biggest facade of all is the entire planet in this wonderful serial.

Naturally there are many clever lines but my favourite comes from Romana (Mary Tamm) and is really very mild. After the psychic powers of her temporary allies have failed, she takes up a rifle to blast an enemy officer. Afterwards, she sighs and observes, "Well, so much for the paranormal. It's back to brute force, I suppose."

More than anything, I think it's Mary Tamm's delivery. There's not the trace of the slightest awareness in her voice of how funny the line is. She just sounds vaguely put upon and cool. The second Romana, played by Lalla Ward, is my favourite companion of all time but Mary Tamm, as Romana's first incarnation, could be just so damned cool.

What made Adams think of turning a whole planet into a sort of broad, silly pirate ship? The parody is over the top in places, as when the crowd cheers unenthusiastically for the announcement of yet another "Golden Age of Prosperity". But is it so strange for a society to become complacently accustomed to wealth suddenly turning up out of nowhere and a blustering, cartoonish bully in charge, taking credit for it?

The Golden Age of Piracy, from the 17th century through the early part of the 18th, coincided with the expansion of European colonies. Resources imported to England like sugar and tobacco could enrich society without most people being quite aware of how it was acquired, the cognitive separation resulting in many innocent people unknowingly benefiting from slave labour, or at least without really understanding what slave labour entailed. To-day, of course, it's much harder to avoid being at least somewhat informed about the brutal working conditions in China that supply the world with cheap commodities. But in the 17th century your average European could scarcely conceive of anything like Barbados sugar plantations. But what if those distant lands were right under their feet and the cognitive separation were still there?

Maybe that's why The Pirate Planet involves people with psychic powers, too. The absurdity of the situation suggests a mental playground somehow. Anyway, Tom Baker is great in it, too, especially since Adams' dialogue isn't merely funny it's also very smart and the Doctor genuinely does seem brilliant orchestrating events in the climax.

Deborah Looks for Work and Dekpa Remembers Plunder

There's a new chapter of my infrequently updated web comic, Dekpa and Deborah, online to-day. Deborah brings matters between herself and her family to a conclusion, of sorts, and frets about it. Enjoy!

Happy Birthday to Frank Morgan, Marilyn Monroe, Jonathan Pryce, and, of course, Robert Newton.

Twitter Sonnet #1241

The floating ground was light as packing thoughts.
Surroundings blank as boards contain a drop.
The world resolved from bleeding polka dots.
A helmet changed a store into a shop.
Confusing voices peer betwixt the tie.
To juggle hands the daggers sweetly wait.
A billion fingers spoilt all the pie.
At two the pawn'll stumble home to mate.
Apportioned sand remained exceeding dry.
Tamale boxes hum a flick'ring tune.
Repeated thoughts encourage cats to try.
In ev'ry whisker lives a jelly moon.
The blessed and less assured no less at loss.
The snow supports assorted feet across.