Setsuled's Journal

Monday, September 09, 2019

All the Aliens Together

A call back to some of the best makeup and puppet work from Farscape's first season happens when Crichton decides to assemble a team for another raid on the Shadow Depository, this time to rescue D'Argo's son.

Season 2, Episode 20: Liars, Guns, and Money part II: With Friends Like These . . .

The previous episode ended with the crew making off with a lot of loot, ready to bid at the slave auction where D'Argo's son is being held. But when they arrive, they find Scorpius (Wayne Pygram) has beat them to it. He offers a deal--Crichton (Ben Browder) for D'Argo's son, Jothee (Matt Newton).

After being introduced in the first season through flashback, and appearing in a couple more flashbacks and images, Jothee finally properly enters the story here. In the clutches of Scorpius and Natira (Claudia Karvan), he receives some verbal abuse from Braca (David Franklin), Scorpius' second in command, for being a half-breed. Scorpius overhears the remark and asks Braca if he has a problem with half-breeds--a good question, considering Scorpius is himself half Scarran and half Sebacean.

More precisely, as Natira puts it with a kind of sinister feigned innocence, Scorpius' Sebacean mother was raped by his Scarran father--she asks Jothee if that was the same in his case. There's an interesting powerplay behind the way racism is used in conversation here. First Braca reflexively attempts to intimidate Jothee with the typical Peacekeeper attitude about race, then Scorpius knocks Braca off-balance by rejecting the premise of his racism--this functions as a casual display of dominance for Scorpius. And then Natira, an alien herself, picks up on the subtext and makes it clear to Jothee that she'll buy into the idea of half-breeds being the inevitable product of rape by brutish aliens. It makes no sense which is also part of the intimidation tactic--Scorpius and Natira walk into the room and they immediately take control of all of the logic.

This is another episode written by Naren Shankar, whose previous episode, "The Way We Weren't", dealt heavily with indoctrinated Peacekeeper ideas of racial identity. Now he brings the idea to D'Argo and his family. Anthony Simcoe as D'Argo gives a surprisingly passionate performance in a scene where he tells Chiana (Gigi Edgley) how close he came to trading Crichton for Jothee. "Crichton is your friend," says Chiana. But Jothee, replies D'Argo, "is my blood. Why isn't that enough?"

This is a marker of how far the crew's relationships have evolved since the first season. In the beginning, most of the crew would probably have sold out any other member of the crew in an instant for the chance of being reunited with their family, home, or people. But the crew of Moya no longer operate on that level alone--they have become a family.

Meanwhile, the loot turns out to be an infestation of metal eating bugs, an inconvenience since Crichton, Aeryn (Claudia Black), Rygel (Jonathan Hardy), and D'Argo are each alone rounding up cohorts for a raid on the Shadow Depository and these mercenaries need to be paid somehow. Aeryn tracks down one of the more impressive aliens from season one, the fire-breathing Sheyang.

This all starts to come together into a nice Dirty Dozen/Ocean's 11 style plot. In the process, Rygel finally gets his revenge on Durka (David Wheeler). One needs to remember just how long Durka tortured Rygel--around a hundred cycles, if I remember right. It's a sudden and unexpected bit of catharsis for the little Dominar and, as we'll see later, he's happy to carry the memento.

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

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):

Season One:

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
Episode 19: Nerve
Episode 20: The Hidden Memory
Episode 21: Bone to be Wild
Episode 22: Family Ties

Season Two:

Episode 1: Mind the Baby
Episode 2: Vitas Mortis
Episode 3: Taking the Stone
Episode 4: Crackers Don't Matter
Episode 5: Picture If You Will
Episode 6: The Way We Weren't
Episode 7: Home on the Remains
Episode 8: Dream a Little Dream
Episode 9: Out of Their Minds
Episode 10: My Three Crichtons
Episode 11: Look at the Princess, Part I: A Kiss is But a Kiss
Episode 12: Look at the Princess, Part II: I Do, I Think
Episode 13: Look at the Princess, Part III: The Maltese Crichton
Episode 14: Beware of Dog
Episode 15: Won't Get Fooled Again
Episode 16: The Locket
Episode 17: The Ugly Truth
Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari
Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money, Part I: A Not So Simple Plan

Sunday, September 08, 2019

Return to Fang Rock

This past week it was announced that Terrance Dicks, one of the most prominent writers for Doctor Who, had recently passed away at the age of 84. He became script editor on the show in the Second Doctor era in the late 60s but it wasn't until Tom Baker's première serial as the Fourth Doctor, Robot, that Dicks received a sole writing credit. He would later be responsible for other great serials like State of Decay and The Five Doctors. This past week I decided to watch my favourite Terrance Dicks serial, Horror of Fang Rock, the first story of the 1977 season.

The first serial in Graham Williams' run as script editor, it has some of the nice gothic flavour that distinguished Philip Hinchcliffe's tenure as the previous script editor. It begins with a lonely lighthouse, shrouded in fog, and a superstitious elder lighthouse keeper, Reuben (Colin Douglas), schooling his younger colleague, Vince (John Abbott) on the superiority of gas over the newly installed electric light.

The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) show up, amusingly off course for sunny holiday in Brighton, and at the beginning of the second episode four more new characters show up, wealthy socialites from a shipwreck caused by the malfunctioning lighthouse. An alien menace is stalking the island, picking people off one by one, and the story becomes a curious rumination on what qualities predispose individuals for survival.

Even though Reuben's superstition has prepared him for the appearance of a superpowered beast, he has no real defence against it. Even though Lord Palmerdale (Sean Caffrey) is ruthless enough to extort his friend, his faithlessness also can't protect him.

One of the shipwreck survivors is a woman named Adelaide (Annette Woollett) who obnoxiously plays up an affectation for noisy hysterics. Panicking doesn't do her much good and it annoys Leela who continues to develop as one of the Doctor's best companions in this story. Her relish for hunting and killing doesn't come into conflict with the Doctor's motives until the end of the episode. She has lines that almost sound villainous, as when she directly remarks on how much she enjoys killing her enemies.

Like a horror movie, there are elements of morality conspicuous in the killings committed by this enemy, an alien blob called a Rutan, as when one character is killed because he stopped to pick up some diamonds the Doctor had tossed away. But, like a lot of good horror movies, the punishment seems much too severe for the crime. Even the Doctor seems to notice and feel dissatisfaction when the man who stooped for diamonds nonetheless died, according to the Doctor when he related the event to Leela, with honour. Apparently Dicks was unhappy with the way Baker delivered the line, wanting there to be a pause between "He died" and "with honour". One can hardly blame the Doctor for writing the epitaph of a basically good man in a way that doesn't convey the circumstance of his death with accuracy. This subtly contrasts with Leela remarking to Adelaide that the Doctor had shown her why it's better to believe in science than Adelaide's chosen source of prophet, astrology. Sometimes the story is better than the rational explanation, and certainly Horror of Fang Rock is a very good story.

Twitter Sonnet #1275

The softened rice permits wasabi through.
The fish were Wrapped in outward roasted tides.
Horizons fade from green to ocean blue.
Across the rippled surface something rides.
A flying card deposits decks in ships.
Collected waves became a single sea.
The corp'rate pools deposit fish and chips.
A sickly plastic hardens 'bout the key.
In vain we tried to guess a metal thought.
A glowing jelly moved beneath the house.
A pallid crew await the blood to clot.
A group of five return to chase the mouse.
The hunter's eyes attained electric sight.
A fog concealed a lack of laser light.

Saturday, September 07, 2019

French Trees for Peaks

Somewhere in France, beyond the reach of cell phone reception, is a Black Spot. Or "white spot", the 2017 television series original French title being "Zone Blanche", a term that refers to a place without cellphone coverage. This is the fictional town of Villefranche, which is basically the French version of Twin Peaks. I've watched the first two episodes and have found them entertaining though not extraordinary in the crowded field of Twin Peaks inspired series. So far.

The show centres on a Gendarme named Laurene Weiss (Suliane Brahim). She's missing some of the fingers on her left hand, the result of a kidnapping she escaped as a teenager, the details of which her memory has suppressed. In the second episode, she starts having visions of a wolf who leads her to important clues, similar to Agent Cooper's dreams on Twin Peaks. But Laurene's connexion to a dark, mystical force in the woods reminds me more of Sheriff Truman and the Bookhouse Boys. She is a local, after all, with a deep and strange history with the forest.

Closer to Agent Cooper may be the eccentric prosecutor Frank Siriani (Laurent Capelluto) who comes to town because of a murder investigation. Though, while Agent Cooper was astonished at how the populace of Twin Peaks could react so profoundly to a single murder, Laura Palmer's, Siriani is interested in Villefranche because the town has an abnormally high murder rate. Considering the town's small population, I wonder who long it could possibly survive.

The similarities to Twin Peaks are in greater abundance than even most other unabashedly Twin Peaks-inspired series. There's a rowdy inn where people hang out that's essentially a cross between the roadhouse and the Great Northern. Laurene's teenage daughter is introduced having chained herself to logging equipment as part of a protest against deforestation, not unlike Audrey Horne near the end of Twin Peaks' second season.

Among the significant differences is the 2010s standard blue and orange colour grading and, if anyone wondered what the third season of Twin Peaks might have looked like were it shot in a more conventional manner, Black Spot might give a pretty accurate idea.

A lot of the story is a little too plot driven, the characters forced in directions to meet the ideas of an outline, but I do like the main character. She's an interesting synthesis of Cooper, Truman, and Laura Palmer so I am curious to see where the story goes. A hint at the end of the second episode makes it seem like Herne the Hunter is involved which I'm certainly down for. Black Spot is available on NetFlix in the U.S.

Friday, September 06, 2019

The Heist at the End of the Rope

As good as season one was, Farscape's second season improved the show tremendously. As the season draws to a conclusion, it gives us an amazing three part episode about robbery, madness, and deception. At turns delightful and harrowing, it's a brilliant piece of television.

Season 2, Episode 19: Liars, Guns, and Money part 1: A Not so Simple Plan

How many elements come together smoothly to make this episode? D'Argo (Anthony Simcoe) is still trying to save his son from a slave auction he heard about from Stark (Paul Goddard) who returns from the dead in this episode with a plan for robbing a bank--or "Shadow Depository". Essentially a bank for the underworld, one Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) immediately tells Stark he's crazy for even thinking about hitting.

But we knew Stark was crazy. I haven't talked much about him yet and by this point his character has become an intriguing presence on the show. The ranting madman Crichton (Ben Browder) shared a cell with at the end of season one also has a strange ability to grant a profound, spiritual peace to people when they're injured or dying. Sort of a holy anaesthetic, an intriguing enough idea when combined with his madness but it takes on another level of suggestive weirdness when this ability is hidden by a mask he wears and appears to be a sort of terrible wound where his right eye should be.

His fascinating mixture of holy and perverse is perfectly complemented by Paul Goddard's frenetic performance. At one moment a sage, the next a paranoid coward, his personality nonetheless makes sense. He sort of reminds me of the priest (or the monk in Kurosawa's film adaptation) in The Lower Depths whose representation of the divine has an appropriate frailty to coincide with the nature of faith.

But that's just the beginning, the catalyst for this story. It turns out Stark has managed to steal the plans for one of these Shadow Depositories from the designer of such a place--a self-interested fringe benefit of conferring peace on the fellow before he died. D'Argo's overeager to put this plan in motion because he wants the stolen currency to buy his son's freedom--he even treats Chiana (Gigi Edgley) like she's against him when she's against going immediately, without a plan. But eventually everyone gets drawn in and every member of Moya's crew has a role to play.

After D'Argo and Stark's original scheme ends with D'Argo's capture, Zhaan (Virginia Hey) poses as an eye-patched hardass with Chiana as her Nebari assistant. Rygel is part of their "short term deposit"--hidden in a hollow Hynerian statue so he can sneak out and steal someone else's valuables. Crichton and Aeryn (Claudia Black), now looking like a very comfortable team in their matching black leather overcoats, keep an eye on things via security cameras. And that's when they spot Scorpius (Wayne Pygram).

Of course, Crichton spots him first when he's not even there. Even Aeryn has started to notice his hallucinations and by the end of the episode Crichton's situation will become crystal clear after an intense confrontation with Scorpius that plays into the villain's S&M wardrobe. When he and Crichton are straining against each other while Scorpius tries to force Crichton to insert a coolant rod in Scorpius' head, Crichton even makes the subtext explicit with the line, "You're not my type!" It's the sort of line that usually comes off as a glib quip but Crichton's in too much physical and emotional distress for it to come off that way.

And this is the second sort of sex scene with Scorpius in the episode--the first is with a new villainess established just for this three parter, the owner of the Shadow Depository, an impressive combination of actress and Giger-esque costume and makeup called Natira (Claudia Karvan).

And all this is just part 1!

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Thursday, September 05, 2019

Leaving What You Can't Leave

Why does any gangster think it's possible to leave the life, after so many works of fiction have clearly demonstrated to the contrary? I don't think the central character of 1967's Massacre Gun (みな殺しの拳銃) ever truly believes he'll escape, though. But his life, in this stylish and effective film noir, has been whittled down to only two bad alternatives--continue working for the outfit that orders him to murder his friends and lovers or join with his brothers in a hopeless battle against that outfit.

Joe Shishido plays Kuroda with a grim weariness. The first part of the film has no audible dialogue as he drives into the night with a beautiful woman who seems to adore him--right up until he executes her by order of his boss, Azakawa (Takashi Kanda).

The film has a nice jazz score by Naozumi Yamamoto and the next scene is set in the bar run by Kuroda's brother, Eiji (Tatsuya Fuji), where we see a black piano player named Chico (Ken Sanders). His performance is striking--generally any Westerner in a Japanese film in the 60s is a little odd considering the limited pool casting had to draw from. Sanders gives one of the best performances I've seen from any of these bit players, his mannerisms quick and feminine and his singing voice deep and soulful.

Kuroda's youngest brother, Saburo (Jiro Okazaki), is a boxer. When Saburo is roughed up in retaliation for beating up one of the gang's favoured boxers, Kuroda's finally pushed over the edge and tenders his resignation. It's a polite and calm scene when he does so, as though it's something you can just do--decide to quit being a yakuza one day. He stands respectfully in front of his boss and bows. He doesn't for a moment seem like he has any hope for the future, though.

He has this same quality of numb hopelessness later when he confronts his boss in a restaurant Kuroda and his brothers have taken over. As the territorial war escalates, he never seems surprised, right up to the inevitable end.

Director Yasuharu Hasebe always makes the film visually interesting. A scene where one of the brothers is gunned down by a group of men with machine guns is amazingly similar to Sonny Corleone's famous death scene a few years later. Eiji's apartment is filled with Expressionist paintings that oddly complement his sadomasochistic love scenes with Azakawa's girlfriend.

But it's primarily the music and performances, particularly from Shishido that make this film worth watching. Massacre Gun is available on Amazon Prime.

Twitter Sonnet #1274

Hawaiian shirts arise from closets deep.
Selected ears were peeled for music late.
From lungs the song'll make a giant leap.
It all began around a second date.
For any price a certain hound's misled.
A group of four await a group of five.
Another group of four arrives instead.
The team distribute ties throughout the hive.
Another suit retreats from favoured view.
A mirror lane contained another knife.
A coiled wire thirsts for something new.
An endless shelf restrains a single life.
A bowl of sweat conveys ideas of heat.
A melted shirt assumed the human seat.

Wednesday, September 04, 2019

Humans are Tougher than Fish

It's hard for me to pin down one specific genre for 1965's Murder Unincorporated (大日本殺し屋伝, "Super Japanese Killers"). A story about a yakuza outfit who hire a series of ridiculous hitmen with ridiculous gadgets and gimmicks--all to kill a character played by Joe Shishido who seems to be starring in a serious gangster film grafted onto this one. Sometimes it's a funny movie, mostly it's just impressively bizarre.

At one point, the head of the yakuza outfit is asked by one of his sons why he doesn't just dispatch one of his own vastly more competent men to kill Joe. The gang boss replies simply with a mysterious, "Wait and see." And picks his nose.

First he hires four hitmen. When they don't succeed, he hires eight more. One hitman is obsessed with baseball, particularly the Giants. One is an aspiring chef whose backstory we see in flashback--unable to bring himself to kill a fish lying helplessly on his cutting board, he decides to become a killer of men to toughen himself up. If he can learn to kill a man, he can learn to kill a fish.

One hitman is a poet whose gun is hidden in the book he carries around, another is a little kid who dresses like Oddjob. This is followed by the appearance of a man who calls himself 006, or "007's boss". His only tactic is a briefcase he carries around that occasionally releases toxic gas.

The most prominent killer is Konmatsu (Kon Omura), who behaves a lot like Jerry Lewis. His gimmick is that he takes out an abacus before he kills--and throws it in the air while drawing his gun, killing his target before the abacus can hit the ground. He also, for some reason, demands to be paid or expects to pay 10 yen for just about everything. Even when he's unconscious and tied up, he demands to be paid 10 yen for his own murder.

All of these buffoons are supposed to kill "Joe of Spades" (Joe Shishido) but it's only Konmatsu who's so incompetent he actually befriends Joe without realising it. He even moves in with him.

Shishido plays his character straight--he seems to be caught up in a doomed romance with the yakuza boss' daughter, Emi (Yoko Yamamoto) (she's also an assassin--she likes to poison people). But we only get glimpses of this story between the elaborately goofy hijinks of the Super Killers. Murder Unincorporated is available on Amazon Prime.

Tuesday, September 03, 2019

Respectably Grey

If you're looking for experts on inhibiting unsightly behaviour, look no further than the Nebari on Farscape. Chiana's people finally catch up with her on Moya and soon the whole crew is in danger of being restricted only to positive, pleasant emotions and manners.

Season 2, Episode 18: A Clockwork Nebari

Crichton (Ben Browder) ruefully comments their first clue something was wrong should've been Aeryn (Claudia Black) smiling for no apparent reason. Returning in a transport pod from a narrow escape in an unseen adventure, both Aeryn and Rygel (Jonathan Hardy) exuded a weird air of peace and contentment it took Chiana (Gigi Edgley) only a beat to recognise as "mental cleansing". Sure enough, out from the transport pod emerged a couple Nebari, both with injuries.

The elder of the two, Varla (Skye Wansey), assumes control of Moya, putting collars on people and applying temporary, drug induced mental cleansing. As established in "Durka Returns", and as Crichton points out here, cleansing usually takes a hundred years (cycles). Chiana tells him about the short term drug version, which ends up not working on Crichton, thanks to a still barely suppressed Harvey (Wayne Pygram), but the human astronaut amusingly apes the effects by talking like a slower version of Bill and Ted.

Why would the Nebari go to all this trouble? This is where we learn a lot more about Chiana's past. Her brother, Nerri (Simon Bossell), whose death Chiana heard about back in "Taking the Stone", turns out to still be very much alive and leading a rebellion against Nebari Establishment. It's not just attacks on Nebari vessels, though--Varla and her ilk have a PR mess to clean up. It seems the reason Chiana and Nerri were able to escape Nebari Prime in the first place so easily was because they'd been infected with a lethal STD. The cleaner minds hoped the libidinous Chiana and Nerri would spread death "for the greater good". It doesn't sound far off from the idea of AIDS being spread to wipe out homosexuality. In this case, though, the target is all the forms of sexual promiscuity Chiana's capable of (and, as we know, that covers just about every form).

Since her introduction, Chiana had been distinguished from the rest of the crew as being the one who didn't want to go home. That's still true though the end of the episode has a significant line from Crichton--"Since when do people like us get what we want?"--that does draw a point of commonality between Chiana and the others. For her, Nerri represents the home she does long for and the home that's denied to her.

I love the Nebari stories, I only wish there were more of them. I love the glimpse we get in a flashback to Chiana and Nerri on the run, on some kind of wrecked space station where he's managed to acquire a cure for their STD.

Some friends and I used to make Nebari fan fiction in which we fleshed out the nature of Nebari Prime Establishment and society. My friend Caitlin imagined the homeworld would be very cold, which makes sense given the icy demeanour of Varla and the guy escorting Chiana in "Durka Returns"--or Debra Harry and Elvis as Crichton nicknames them. The more they talk about the greater good and forcing everyone to play nice, the worse they get. One case in point is a wonderful effect in "A Clockwork Nebari", an ode to A Clockwork Orange. Crichton's eyes are pulled out of their sockets for the cleansing in a shot that shows the Creature Shop are great at making more than just puppets:

I love the ruff-like collar, it somehow completes the look perfectly. This episode also has several memorable moments for Rygel whose metabolism also helps him beat the cleansing, resulting in his immortal line, "I'm nobody's puppet!"

. . .

Farscape is available now on Amazon Prime.

Season One:

Season Two:

Monday, September 02, 2019

Dekpa Looks for Work and Money

There's a new chapter of Dekpa and Deborah online to-day. This is the 21st chapter and the end of Book I. The comic is now grown to a total of 178 pages since I started it in 2015, pretty slow work compared to Venia's Travels, for which I produced over 500 pages in two years, but in the years I've been doing Dekpa and Deborah I've graduated college and held a few jobs, all distractions I didn't have for my previous comics. In addition, I've done a lot more research for Dekpa and Deborah and I'm working on bristol board instead of sketchbook paper now so it's no surprise it's slower going, even when I do have time. I'll be doing more research for Book II and hopefully by the time it comes out I'll have a nice stockpile of chapters so I can update regularly. For now, I hope you'll enjoy reading back over Book I, feel free to look for any clues as to what may lie ahead. I know I will.

To-day I also read the new Sirenia Digest which features a lovely new short little piece by Caitlin R. Kiernan about murder and a body of water sinister for more reasons than for being a dumping ground for a corpse. It's another dialogue piece in which tension is built with wonderful, dreamlike description that may or may not have something to do with the Loch Ness Monster.

Twitter Sonnet #1273

A verdant book demands a dryer eye.
As pages crack for time again to turn.
Behind the stack we hear a shaky sigh.
Another word and something new was learned.
Observers check to see consistent squares.
A tally mark obscures the counted claw.
The cats establish base for fishy wares.
The truth of flannel mice became the law.
Discomfort chose the flaky chair for fame.
A thousand shreds of phony skin abide.
Synthetic snow submits another name.
An arm and leg as limbs at length collide.
In quarter years the clocks divide a pool.
In tests a timid toe decides the rule.

Sunday, September 01, 2019

Invasions and Burglaries

The Seventh Doctor acquires a new companion in the form of a cat burglar and safe cracker in the 2011 audio play Crime of the Century. The second adaptation from the unproduced 1990 season of the TV show, this audio play is a well written and entertaining continuation of the saga begun in Thin Ice about the entangled interests of the Soviet Union, the Ice Warriors, and the London criminal underworld.

Andrew Cartmel, script editor for the Seventh Doctor era of Doctor Who, adapts his own teleplay for audio. Raine Creevy (Beth Chalmers), a character originally intended to replace Ace (Sophie Aldred) as the Doctor's companion instead joins Ace as an additional companion for the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy). One can easily sense where the story is divided between the original teleplay elements and the new audio elements that incorporate Ace, who was supposed to have left at the end of Thin Ice. While the Doctor's in London getting acquainted with Raine, Ace is on a mission in a fictional Middle Eastern country where the Soviet Union are in the process of invading.

Like Thin Ice, Crime of the Century is critical of Soviet hypocrisy, somewhat ironic after Ace's almost romance with the Soviet officer in the 1989 serial Curse of Fenric. The impression I have is that the Soviet subplots in the audios were added or expanded for the audios but, with the story elements in Fenric, it makes for a pretty good narrative, starting with the optimistic young man in the 1940s of Fenric, then the deteriorating reality in the 1960s portrayed in Thin Ice, and finally, in Crime of the Century, things have come full circle and the Soviets are called "oppressors" by the rebels in the Middle Eastern country. But there's a third player, too, a race of intelligent insects who are attacking both Soviets and rebels, and it's to find out about them Ace has braved the war zone. These scenes are pretty effectively written, featuring a traumatised soldier who talks of the insect "demons" and a rebel leader who's ready to execute Ace as a spy.

This plot is interestingly contrasted with a more amusing caper plot in London where Raine is introduced delivering a narration, a diary, giving intricate details of posing as a party guest, getting upstairs in a big house, and finally cracking the safe. Everything goes according to plan until she opens the safe to find the Doctor inside, on the point of suffocation. The two escape with the loot and there's an effective moment where the Doctor's talent for strategy and misdirection are shown when he insists on going through the kitchen and taking some pepper.

Eventually, the two plots combine, resulting in a neat scene where Ace has to learn how to use a sword in a pinch and an amusing scene where the Doctor tampers with one alien's translator device to make him sound like a surfer. One might expect tone to be a hopeless mishmash but it all works pretty well.