The Slayer Who Couldn't

Every superhero has to lose their powers at some point for some reason. Buffy the Vampire Slayer made the most of the tradition in "Helpless", a season three episode from 1999. The second episode to be written by David Fury, he makes good dramatic material from the reason for Buffy's power loss while director James A. Contner takes the opportunity to make a more traditional horror story of the kind Buffy is usually a subversion of.

Buffy (Sarah Michelle-Gellar) almost gets killed during a routine vampire fight, embarrassingly almost being stabbed with her own stake. During the day, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) has been giving her some kind of strange crystal focus training.

He's already acting suspicious while he's doing it but it's not until around one third of the way through the episode that we find out it's a combination of his hypnosis and drugs that are causing Buffy to lose her powers. He does it at a particularly potent time for dramatic purposes as she's heavily hinting she wants him to take her to an ice show in place of her own absent father. But Giles was commanded to suppress Buffy's powers by his superior at the Watchers' Council, played by Harris Yulin, perhaps best known for playing the judge in Ghostbusters 2.

I love the herringbone tweed sport coat with the extra straps.

He's sinister and authoritative enough you forgive his feeble attempt at an English accent, though it makes it puzzling that of his two English assistants, the only one played by an English actor barely has any lines--especially puzzling since it's Dominic Keating, who went on to be part of the main cast of Star Trek: Enterprise.

He does become a vampire, though, a disciple of the very creepy, Cape Fear-ish serial killer vampire Kralik (Jeff Kober). He stalks Buffy through the creepy old house where he's kidnapped her mother and apparently taken numerous photos of her.

They put Buffy in some evocatively vulnerable, juvenile outfits in this episode.

Kralik mentions an unfortunate past with his own mother, implying she castrated him with a pair of scissors, altogether making an episode that doesn't paint the rosiest picture of parental figures. Yet the internal conflict Giles feels as the institution designed to help the Slayer compels him to betray her trust is one of the best story points ever for Giles.

It's great because you can see both Giles' and Buffy's points of view even as her feelings of disgust and betrayal are completely reasonable. Which makes it all the more effective when she softens a little at the end. She gets it, it was the judge from Ghostbusters 2, but everyone would hope our loved ones would do a better job using their own judgement. It's a nice moment in the season arc, too, about rebellious youth and the uncertain reliability of authority figures.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is available in a lousy cropped format on Amazon Prime.

The Ever Culpable Robert Culp

You'd think Robert Culp would have learned not to tangle with Columbo but one year after he first played a murderer on the show he played another one in an episode appropriately called "Double Exposure". He is pretty perfect as an adversary for Columbo. He smoothly transitions from comfortably smug to bitterly exasperated.

This time he plays some kind of advertising guru who kills a client during the screening of a commercial. Columbo (Peter Falk), as usual, goes overboard in praising the prime suspect, even checking out books from the library Culp's character wrote. The two have nice chemistry.

Two other notable scenes feature a projectionist letting Columbo in on a few tricks of his trade and Columbo wandering around the supermarket. Both are nice little slices of that vanished world of 1970s America.

Columbo is available with commercials on Amazon Prime.

Back to Villa Diodati for the First Time

The obvious point of comparison for last night's new Doctor Who would be the series of Eighth Doctor audioplays featuring Mary Shelley as a companion. Certainly the episode, "The Haunting of Villa Diodati", lifts much of its basic premise from those 2011 audio plays, but I found myself surprisingly reminded of The Ghost Breakers, a 1940 comedy starring Bob Hope and Willie Best, aka Sleep 'N Eat. Seeing Ryan (Tosin Cole) in 19th century garb obviously brings to mind attitudes about race at the time while the writers' decision to portray Ryan as goofy and stupid resulted in a surprising moment on the stairs when he reacts to what he thinks is a ghost bumping his elbow, with exaggerated fright. And I thought of Willie Best and any number of black comedic performers in the mid-20th century who were cast in roles that reinforced stereotypes of black people as being stupid or lazy. Funny how this kind of portrayal is now considered progressive. Weird how we come full circle. It should be said Willie Best gave a much better performance, with a better sense of comedic timing, than Tosin Cole.

Graham (Bradley Walsh) is certainly no Bob Hope so I guess we could say the white guy, or at least one white guy, comes off just as stupid. Though Lord Byron as portrayed by Jacob Collins-Levy comes off as a broad, idiotic cad, come to think of it. His attempts to flirt with the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) are automatically rebuffed. Wouldn't want sexual tension, would we? Not when we've succeeded in getting the ratings below five million in the UK, back to the levels of Capaldi's last season. Hmm, there wasn't much sexual chemistry between Twelve and Bill, either, was there? Yet at least the writing was sharp in that season, even if it was unpopular. One of the ways in which the Eighth Doctor audioplays are superior to Sunday's episode is that they allow the Doctor and Mary Shelley to engage in intellectual discussion instead of just bumbling about.

But "The Haunting of Villa Diodati" happens to be one of the better episodes of the season, or maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for haunted house stories. The premise of a house where people seem to move continually into the same room even reminded me of the Halloween episode of Simon and Simon that made an impression on me as a child. I also thought the design of the Lone Cyberman (Patrick O'Kane) was pretty good.

Yet one can't help thinking back to the Eighth Doctor audios again and again, especially since, like this episode, they made something of the fact that 1816 also happened to be the "year without a summer" and also had Mary Shelley encounter Cybermen to draw comparisons between them and Frankenstein. This wouldn't be the first time an episode of the revived series was based on an audioplay--the Ninth Doctor story "Dalek" was written by Robert Shearman based on his own Sixth Doctor audio Jubilee, though the stories were different enough that one could still imagine them both existing in the same continuity. A few episodes have even seemed to draw on audios without crediting the source before--the Tenth Doctor story "Fires of Pompei" has noticeable similarities to the Seventh Doctor audio The Fires of Vulcan. But even then, "Fires of Pompei" brought plenty of new ideas to the table where "The Haunting of Villa Diodati" just feels like a partial synopsis.

So now it looks like we have to choose between continuities. Do we consider the Eighth Doctor audios canon or "The Haunting of Villa Diodati"? Hmm. It's kind of like asking would you rather drink champagne or water with the crushed ice from a McDonald's beverage dispenser.

The Doctor had a big speech in this one about how sometimes she's the only one qualified to make a decision and how lonely that is. Which seemed a bit cruel given how obviously deficient her companions are. Though I was surprised last week when the show took so much heat for the Doctor's insensitive reaction to Graham. The Doctor's supposed to be insensitive to the human experience sometimes. Sure, it was badly written and even Twelve would probably have conveyed a sense of being troubled even through a gruff response. But at least it was somewhat in character for the Doctor. I guess we all have our particular tastes as to what qualifies as the worst writing.

It's worth remembering the best portrayal of Mary Shelley on that fateful night remains Elsa Lanchester's in Bride of Frankenstein.

The Old Fashioned Dragon

Well, I hope we all learned a valuable lesson from last night's Game of Thrones, the penultimate episode of the series. I do appreciate audacity though it's nice when it makes sense. But there were some really impressive visuals that came along with the show finally putting some focus on the common people of King's Landing.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Last night was so close to brilliant. If it were just a little different, I'd have been willing to take back every bad thing I said about Benioff and Weiss. If you look back over the series, the signs that Daenerys (Emilia Clarke) might not be the most stable leader are plentiful. Her crucifying all the people in Meereen, her preference for letting her dragons roam around poaching livestock until they inevitably killed some people. And then there's the fact that, despite all Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) says about how Cersei (Lena Headey) having public policies that abuse the people, we never actually see any of it.

The worst thing we actually saw Cersei do was blow up the temple that was full of her enemies, the people who forced her to march naked through the streets while people threw garbage at her. Cersei, who's also been forced to watch all her children die. And yet, after last night's episode, one of the main complaints I saw on Twitter was that Cersei didn't suffer enough. Why did people root for Daenerys and hate Cersei? This is why last night's episode was almost brilliant, because it was the culmination of a hypothetical exercise in propaganda, on just how easily people are convinced to place their loyalty in one faction over an other. Daenerys was younger, prettier, and the point of view was with her in her sufferings.

But it doesn't really make sense that she'd rampage throughout King's Landing after everyone had surrendered. Even if she snapped and let her rage take over, it seems obvious the first thing she'd do was fly straight for the Red Keep and go for Cersei. Just like last week's episode, part of the explanation would seem to be that Benioff and Weiss just don't know how to write dragons. Now Daenerys flies over and above the ballistae, easily burning all the weapons that suddenly weren't as capable of as rapid a fire rate. Why didn't she do that last week?

And this is why internal logic is so important to the story. Ideally, to-day people should be having conversations about how populations can be misled and manipulated, but you can't make a point about how human nature works by just randomly making things up.

Anyway, it was nice seeing all the ground level stuff, Arya (Maisie Williams) running around, suddenly not seeming as godlike. The relentlessly desperate situation was well conveyed by director Miguel Sapochnik; it was like a cross between Skyrim and Children of Men.

I didn't quite buy that Arya would give up her quest for vengeance so easily but it was still a sweet moment between her and the Hound (Rory McCann).

And I was really sad to see Cersei die, but there was a powerful bittersweetness in her final embrace with Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). I suppose it was the best ending for her I could've expected. And she certainly won the moral victory, if nothing else.

Someone's In the Kitchen with Naomi

There were lots of great character moments in last night's new episode of The Expanse, an episode that used a series of good scenes to show overlapping political, personal, and social issues and the unpredictable ways they play off each other.

Spoilers after the screenshot

There were two someones in the kitchen with Naomi (Dominique Tipper) in two separate scenes that contrast with each other in a nice way. Both are scenes where someone tries to make peace with her, one more successfully than the other. First Alex (Cas Anvar) offers her some food, this coming after a scene where he finally hears back from his wife on Mars.

This was a scene that showed why Cas Anvar is one of the standout performers on this show as the rapid sequence of emotions that pass through him after his wife has told him she's left him are completely clear. So his motive for making peace with Naomi is also clear--he's suddenly realised, without Mars and without his wife and kid, his misfit shipmates on the Pinus are the only family he has. I like that he still made it clear that he's still furious about Naomi for giving up the protomolecule, but there's a basic human need that transcends that. It's a very sweet scene.

The episode began with another Martian, Bobbie (Frankie Adams), in a nice, dialogue-free scene that establishes her own feelings. With a relaxed smile she sits down, happy to be in the familiar Martian surroundings, until she sees the defaced Martian flag and she's furious.

Despite her own experiences that have cut her off from Mars, the symbols are too personal for her, and it's especially a cruel shock coming when she was feeling a sense of peace at being some place, somewhat like home.

Feelings of family and loyalty are too deep rooted and complex to be cast aside even for very clear logical reasons. The other person to have a scene with Naomi in the kitchen is Avasarala and it was a pleasure watching Shohreh Aghdashloo and Dominque Tipper doing a scene together. Outside the more restrictive political scenes and voluminous costumes, Aghdashloo seems to be taking the opportunity to give a more physical performance, her poses simultaneously theatrical and reminding me a bit of Marlon Brando.

She gives a very political line to Naomi about how she understands that not all Belters support the actions of the OPA--it's a familiar line one might hear from someone talking to an Irish person about the IRA or a Muslim about ISIS. There's insight in it and maybe a real effort at sympathy but of course it's patronising and Naomi demonstrates why with her angry reaction--she might not agree with OPA all the time but there's a history of personal and philosophical dialogue that Avasarala's political speak is tone deaf to.

The episode also featured some nice moments of nuance with two of its more villainous characters, Mao (Francois Chau) and Errinwright (Shawn Doyle). Even Mao has a moment of conscience after he, like Alex with his shipmates, has a transference of familial connexion, in his case to Prax's daughter. And in his case, he does allow his personal feeling to influence his policy decision.

Errinwright, meanwhile, shows he really is as conflicted as he seemed last season. He's clearly shaken by the over two million people who died because one Martian missile got past Earth's defence systems. Then he does something really petty with that feeling and goes and tells Anna (Elizabeth Mitchell) that it could've been avoided if the president had had firmer resolve--implying that it was she who swayed him. It's unclear if Errinwright's insinuation is right but we see by the look on her face that Anna knows he could be. And Errinwright walks away with a bitter smile at the knowledge that he's spread some of the misery. So he's not a total psychopath--he does feel bad about people dying--but he's too weak not to abuse others for his own pain management. I think he's an asshole, but then, it's hard to imagine what it would be like feeling responsible for two million deaths.

There were also some nice scenes on the UNN flagship. I love those classic space opera corridors. I definitely like the more complex lighting after the endless blue of the Pinus/Rocinante.