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.

Stuart Monarch of the Doctor

Just give me a whole series with Alan Cumming as James I. To-day's new episode of Doctor Who was easily the best of the season with Alan Cumming as King James I almost everything I'd hoped he'd be. I'd have liked it if he'd been more flagrant with his flirtations with Ryan but I wonder if even now the BBC is afraid to directly acknowledge James' sexual preferences on Doctor Who. Certainly casting Cumming in the role, and Cumming's delightful interpretation of it, was a big wink. It was also in one person everything the season has been lacking; fun and complexity.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The 17th century is my favourite century (I have an infrequently updated webcomic set in the 17th century, you know) and I wish the Doctor would visit it more often. The few examples have not been bad--I like the Fifth Doctor serial The Visitation and the few 17th century scenes in the Seventh Doctor's serial, The Silver Nemesis, are good. The last time the Doctor visited it was during the 1650s, in the Twelfth Doctor episode, "The Woman Who Lived", an episode unfortunately with some big historical inaccuracies and little apparent real interest in the period.

"The Witchfinders", to-day's episode, lives up to this season's mission of being more educational with regards to history, and Cumming's performance just barely saves James' relating his complicated backstory to Ryan (Tosin Cole) from being a pure infodump. Cumming could've played him with a broader Scottish accent--James also had a speech impediment and was incontinent but I get why the episode wanted to avoid these things. In this episode I can see the James described by G. M. Trevelyan in his History of England published in 1904;

In the prime of life, over middle height, a good horseman, devoted to the chase, drinking hugely but never overcome by his liquor: he employed a pithy wit and a wealth of homely images and learned conceits in free and familiar discourse with all . . .

As a man, James was one whom it is easy to love or despise, but impossible to hate. Though every inch a pedant, he was human--far more human than his more noble and reserved successor [his son, Charles I]. His instinct to sympathise warmly, except when annoyed or prejudiced, with anyone who spoke to him, led to rapid and unconscious vacillations in his conduct. The more intimate friendships which were a necessity to his life, counteracted yet more disastrously his excellent intentions as a ruler. Choosing his favourites for no other merit but their charm as companions, he was too fond to deny them anything. Their power for evil was the greater, because he himself hated the details of administration, and loved to live in the abstract heights of a general scheme, oblivious of the monstrous distortions to which a plan is liable in action, and the terrible wrongs for which even a love of justice, if it despises diligence, can easily be made the cloak.

Francis Osborne, a17th century essayist, wrote from personal observation of James:

. . . his favourites or minions . . . like burning-glasses, were daily interposed between him and the subject, multiplying the heat of oppressions in the generall opinion, though in his own he thought they screened them from reflecting upon the crowne . . . Now, as no other reason appeared in favour of their choyce but handsomnesse, so the love the king shewed was as amorously convayed, as if he had mistaken their sex, and thought them ladies; which I have seene Sommerset and Buckingham labour to resemble, in the effeminateness of their dressings . . . Nor was his love, or what else posterity will please to call it, (who must be the judges of all that history shall informe,) carried on with a discretion sufficient to cover a lesse scandalous behaviour; for the kings kissing them after so lascivious a mode in publick, and upon the theatre, as it were, of the world, prompted many to imagine some things done in the tyring-house, that exceed my expressions no lesse then they do my experience . . .

Yep, that's the King James of the King James Bible, a book that's been the bedrock for hardcore Protestants for generations. Reference is made to this bible in "The Witchfinders", sadly for the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) to speak with undisguised disdain for the Old Testament and apparent preference to the New Testament. There are plenty of ways in which the Old Testament is more enlightened than the New; Christ essentially forbids divorce in the New Testament, whereas it's allowed in the Old, something Milton discusses at length in his pamphlets on divorce.

Cumming's portrayal is definitely campy in a very good way but his James also turns out to be the first supporting character this season who's more complex than simply being a good guy or a bad guy--which makes it fitting the Doctor gives him a lecture about how people don't really fit into either category. It was a nice moment--I admit, though, it kind of made me realise for the first time how bland Whittaker is.

Cumming's broad wattage may have been overpowering her a bit but I think Capaldi or even Smith could've delivered a better, more glittering side of the back and forth. Oh, well.

The story is in many ways similar to the Eighth Doctor audio play The Witch from the Well, also set in a 17th century English village, also involving an alien menace mistaken for witches by the townsfolk and featuring local gentry with a sinister secret. But obviously "The Witchfinders" has much better cinematography and, of course, the advantage of King Alan Cumming.

The Many Shades of the Expanse

Last night gave us a new episode of The Expanse that was the opposite of last week's filler episode. Lots of stuff happened this time--really well executed stuff. SyFy already looked like assholes last week for cancelling The Expanse, they look colossally obnoxious now. In the unlikely event that someone else doesn't pick up the series, this one is destined to sit alongside shows like Firefly and Farscape. It'll cement a beloved legacy for the show while crystallising the image of the suits behind the cancelling as clueless dicks.

Spoilers behind the screenshot

Or maybe, like Gillis (Jonathan Whittaker), they'll preserve their reputation by the timely reveal of a powerful traitor like Errinwright (Shawn Doyle). I liked that scene although I didn't believe someone as cagey as Gillis would openly tell Anna (Elizabeth Mitchell) how glad he was to have someone to take the PR hit. But it was kind of worth it for the "Oh . . . shit" look on her face.

Still, she's probably better off with a guy who wants to do the right thing to look good than with the guy who apparently is committed on an ideological level. The Expanse often questions how really constructive it is to be dedicated to an ideal, to be pragmatic, or to be impulsive. One of the weaker points in the episode, Amos (Wes Chatham) with his "I am that guy" moment, executing the doctor who'd experimented on children so Prax (Terry Chen) wouldn't have to, was predictable but again demonstrated how moral purity doesn't get the job done--or possibly gets the wrong job done. But, like John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Amos sees there needs to be Praxes who aren't "that guy".

For some much more effective gunplay, we had Bobbie (Frankie Adams) and her cat and mouse with that poor kid who'd become a protomolecule hybrid. This sequence was way better than anything in the new Avengers movie because the action always made it clear exactly what each participant was capable of and what their motivation was. Bobbie's rear view camera on her helmet was nicely used, trusting an audience probably used to video games to follow it. And everything was coordinated so we had a sense of how fast Bobbie could move in comparison to the monster. A really effective sequence.

The action sequence on the Agatha King was pretty good, too, with that poor plucky UNN sailor (Sydney Meyer) we barely got to know. Meanwhile, Alex (Cas Anvar) and Naomi (Dominique Tipper) made it to the funkiest bridge in the galaxy.

I'm not sorry to see Admiral Nguyen (Byron Mann) go. Not so much because he's despicable as that he's more two dimensional than the villains back on Earth.

The end of the episode was good in spite of what looked like the most awkward post-coital cuddle I've ever seen on television.

I know the bunks are small but those two look like hastily stashed department store mannequins. Not much room for expanse there. I do like how consistently Holden's (Steven Strait) nose has stayed red since it was punched a couple episodes back. I love this show's attention to detail.