The Mask that Doesn't Give

Michael Myers is like an invader from another reality. In John Carpenter's 1978 original Halloween, the man escapes from an asylum and sets about killing teenage girls. Performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence as well as a restrained directorial approach by Carpenter make this film a nice portrait of lives horrifically disrupted by a human being who displays inhuman behaviour. I realise that sounds pretty mild and, yeah, I guess I'd say this is a surprisingly low key horror film.

I don't think that's merely because the stakes have risen so much in recent years for horror movies in terms of gore and shock value. There are plenty of 70s giallo and exploitation horror films that stack up well enough to a violent horror film to-day. This may be because Halloween was intended for a more mainstream audience. The only piece of back story we get for Michael is a prologue where Michael as a prepubescent child murders his sister in a really unconvincingly shot stabbing sequence.

Carpenter has said, and recently reiterated when speaking disparagingly of Rob Zombie's remake of the film, that he intended Myers to be "a force of nature" without the psychological motives typically given to killers in such films. A classroom scene where Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Laurie, listens to a lecture about religious and secular views on fate as an insurmountable, determining force supports this view, especially as it's accompanied by a nicely spooky shot from Laurie's point of view of Michael across the street, watching her.

That mask, too, as I talked about a couple weeks ago in connexion to Donald Trump, has this wonderfully eerie, prototypical man quality, this theoretical blank page that frustrates the instinct of an adult human to find a like creature on the other side of a discourse.

But there's so much that's hard to believe was accidental that suggest things about Michael's psychological issues. The fact that his first murder victim is his sister, who he finds topless right after she's had sex, or the fact that he consistently targets teenagers who are expressing their sexuality, or in the case of Anne (Nancy Kyes), just has the nerve to be topless where he can spy on her.

One might argue that this is meant to be less about Michael's motives than it is about creating a situation of physical and moral vulnerability for the characters. The preoccupation with sex as forbidden expressed by the forces of fate as Michael's assaults. It's really hard to disentangle the effect from interpretations of cause, though. If he quacks like a duck, and murders fornicators like a duck, he's probably a psycho puritanical duck.

I found myself wondering at connexions drawn between Laurie and Michael, too. Although it's really apparent she's not wearing a bra--this may just be a 70s thing--Laurie is established as more chaste than her friends, not even wanting to think about asking a boy out on a date. This gets us to the standard slasher film setup where the survivor girl is rewarded for her sexual virtue but an extension of that reasoning is that Laurie is on some level in agreement with Michael's worldview. A connexion between the two seems further emphasised by that fact that Laurie's the only person who takes Michael's knife from him--twice--and uses it against him. But the weirdest thing is the poster of James Ensor in Laurie's bedroom.

James Ensor painted things like this:

Not the typical painter a teenage girl would have a poster of on her wall. But you would think the atypical teenage girl who did like James Ensor would have a more extravagant example of Ensor's work on her wall. So with this poster it seems less like Carpenter is trying to say something about Laurie as he is just trying to send a clue out to the audience on how to read the film itself. The uncanny, masked and skull faces in Ensor's painters are freer to exist without circumstances that apply motives to them. Their strangeness asserts itself as strangeness, striking in their mystery. And yet, Carpenter's trapped by the inevitable logic in the scene--Laurie has put a poster of Ensor on her wall. It contributes to a feeling of spiritual connexion between her and Michael. The effect of this connexion, I suppose, adds weight to an impression of disapproval towards open sexual expression.

Ash vs. Walking Dead

The busted open skull of a loved one was also a subject broached in Saturday's Ash vs. Evil Dead, though I actually watched it after Sunday's new Walking Dead. It's an interesting contrast. Why does it work better on Ash vs. Evil Dead? I realise I'm coming from a premise not many people might agree with, at least if comparing the ratings of the two shows says anything.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The new Ash vs. Evil Dead episode, "DUI", written by Ivan Raimi, follows up from last week's which ended with Ash's father, played by Lee Majors, getting hit by Ash's possessed car, his brains graphically exposed. In this episode, we even see one of his eyes lodged in the car grill.

The colourful lighting and the less realistic physics to the violence gives Ash vs. Evil Dead a more cartoonish feel. I do think this is a problem--it drifts into the territory that diminished Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, the feeling that everything's sort of in a Loony Tunes reality and nothing that happens carries emotional weight. But the sudden death of Ash's father helped divert the show from the impression it was starting to give that certain characters are effectively immortal--this is the main problem with Pablo and Kelly. A big part of what made the Evil Dead movies work was the feeling that the Deadites could basically kill or possess someone at any time, in a seemingly infinite variety of ways, and their motives were mysterious beyond pure malevolence.

I think the main reason this part of the new Ash vs. Evil Dead worked so well is because, once again, of Bruce Campbell and the character he's created with Ash. His emotional reaction to his father's death is pointedly subdued. He seems upset but of course, after all he's experienced, he'd have trouble truly accessing his grief. This is normal for him, as he tells Pablo.

I found the showdown with the car much too cartoonish. But I found myself imagining an Evil Dead/Walking Dead cross-over. Someone like Ash would probably be a good step towards the much needed diversity in ideas on Walking Dead. Just hearing Ash call Negan a primitive screwhead would be worth it.

Ash vs. Walking Dead

The busted open skull of a loved one was also a subject broached in Saturday's Ash vs. Evil Dead, though I actually watched it after Sunday's new Walking Dead. It's an interesting contrast. Why does it work better on Ash vs. Evil Dead? I realise I'm coming from a premise not many people might agree with, at least if comparing the ratings of the two shows says anything.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The new Ash vs. Evil Dead episode, "DUI", written by Ivan Raimi, follows up from last week's which ended with Ash's father, played by Lee Majors, getting hit by Ash's possessed car, his brains graphically exposed. In this episode, we even see one of his eyes lodged in the car grill.

The colourful lighting and the less realistic physics to the violence gives Ash vs. Evil Dead a more cartoonish feel. I do think this is a problem--it drifts into the territory that diminished Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, the feeling that everything's sort of in a Loony Tunes reality and nothing that happens carries emotional weight. But the sudden death of Ash's father helped divert the show from the impression it was starting to give that certain characters are effectively immortal--this is the main problem with Pablo and Kelly. A big part of what made the Evil Dead movies work was the feeling that the Deadites could basically kill or possess someone at any time, in a seemingly infinite variety of ways, and their motives were mysterious beyond pure malevolence.

I think the main reason this part of the new Ash vs. Evil Dead worked so well is because, once again, of Bruce Campbell and the character he's created with Ash. His emotional reaction to his father's death is pointedly subdued. He seems upset but of course, after all he's experienced, he'd have trouble truly accessing his grief. This is normal for him, as he tells Pablo.

I found the showdown with the car much too cartoonish. But I found myself imagining an Evil Dead/Walking Dead cross-over. Someone like Ash would probably be a good step towards the much needed diversity in ideas on Walking Dead. Just hearing Ash call Negan a primitive screwhead would be worth the pleasure.

Because Rebels is New

So Ezra has finally explained the plot behind the prequels in the new Star Wars: Rebels. In yet another episode that harkens back to the Clone Wars series Disney really obviously shouldn't have cancelled, all the male protagonists leave Hera and Sabine on the Ghost to explore and loot a ruined Separatist base where a group of battle droids are surprisingly still active. It's exciting to see all this Clone Wars stuff and the sense of layered time is nice but the mechanics of the plot aren't great and Ezra comes off as even more annoying than usual.

A droid general in charge of this lost group of Separatist droids captures the Ghost crew and then forces them to try and rescue Zeb in an effort to prove who had the better strategy, the Republic or the Separatists.

Ezra eventually explains how the Empire is in fact what used to be the Republic so therefore the Ghost crew and the droids are on the same side. Apparently this fact had eluded everyone for fifteen years. Anyway, it's fun to see battle droids versus the Empire.

Working together, they come up with the brilliant strategy of having the Jedi swatting droid blaster bolts into the Imperial forces, combining the droid firepower with the Jedi's greater accuracy. Of course, they could skip a step by simply having the Jedi shooting the guns themselves, but whatever. At least this way everyone gets to be involved.

I have to admit, I do find those battle droids pretty amusing. They just can't get any respect. I loved how the stormtroopers just talked right over the group that tries to parley with them.

Class Quota

For years, fans have wanted a Doctor Who spin-off set in London about a gay couple, a human and a non-human. But instead of the Madame Vastra and Jenny series everyone wanted, to-day we got the première of Class, a spin-off series based on the unpopular Coal Hill School subplots from the Twelfth Doctor's first season. It might not be fair to judge from just the first episode but, judging by the fact that the first two episodes were shown to-day and I couldn't work up the energy to watch the second, it's not very good.

Is that too glib? I don't think anything's too glib for this show which had one character mention in conversation with another that they'd just failed the Bechdel test by mentioning a boy. This is a conversation between Tanya (Vivian Oparah) and April (Sophie Hopkins) and although April doesn't seem to understand at first what Tanya's talking about she says Tanya's funny. This is more comprehension than most characters seem to have when one of the primary characters says something really obviously smug and insulting or flirtatious, as when Tanya rambles a bit about how normal it is for her to be talking to a boy on Skype and he doesn't seem to notice her intensely transparent awkwardness. And the characters can't seem to speak without uttering grating Chandler Bing-isms.

This is an intensely self-conscious show, which I suppose directly mentioning the Bechdel Test demonstrates. There's also the fact that the cast looks like they could summon Captain Planet if they combined their power rings.

We've come full circle. In the atmosphere of late 1980s "We are the World" optimism, putting together a group of improbably diverse friends seemed like a great way to promote empathy and recognise our common humanity. But by the late 90s, this looked like painfully awkward pandering that required the writers ignore many of the realities about cultural assimilation for an artificial Happy Land. Now the demand for representation is so great that those who demand it may full well know how artificial it is but consider the benefits of equal representation greater than any artificiality it might entail. I realised, though, the show harkens back to an older hopeful representation of diversity than Captain Planet--all the characters actually work out as pretty solid analogues of the original Star Trek bridge crew.

April (Sophie Hopkins) the Captain Kirk of Class

The leader of the bunch, this is the only white heterosexual apart from possibly Miss Quill. Like Kirk, April does things which would in real life be counterproductive and anti-social but which in the context of the show somehow makes her really endearing, like when she's trying to warn everyone at prom about their impending doom but takes a moment to snap at them about how they'd pay attention to her if she was a commentator on Instagram telling them they looked fat.

Charlie (Greg Austin), the Spock of Class

An alien who finds he has trouble understanding the emotional responses of humans sometimes, frequently leading to adorable misunderstandings. He and April quickly establish a close bond but, since he's gay, like Kirk and Spock they'll probably never hook up romantically. Or will they . . . ? In the 1960s, audiences would have been offended by the idea of Kirk and Spock getting together, and to-day's audiences would be offended by April and Charlie getting together. And yet, such fertile grounds for slash fiction.

Matteusz (Jordan Renzo), the Chekov of Class

Where Chekov idolised Spock, Class takes it further by actually making them a couple. We don't learn much about Matteusz in the first episode--I'm not entirely sure he's Russian. His accent sounds Russian to me but Matteusz comes up as a Scandinavian name in Google.

Tanya (Vivian Oparah), the Uhura of Class

A beautiful young black woman with impressive technical skills. Her mother seems to be Jamaican and very conservative; we don't learn much else about her.

Miss Quill (Katherine Kelly), the Doctor McCoy of Class

The only character I liked, she's older than the other characters and poses as their teacher. Irascible and unafraid to insult them for acting like the morons they are. I'm still not sure if she's supposed to be able to hear them when they talk in their normal voices in the classroom or not.

The Doctor (Peter Capaldi), the Scotty of Class

Well, I like this guy, too, on his own show. He's a deus ex machina here and doesn't do much but wave his screwdriver around, mostly just serving to remind me how much I'd rather have a season of Doctor Who this year than this spin-off.

Ram Singh (Fady Elsayed), the Sulu of Class

In the U.S., people who are called Oriental in Britain are called Asian and in Britain, Ram Singh, apparently from Pakistan or India, would be called Asian. Like most stock Indian British characters, he's really good at football. His girlfriend is also Indian, I think, which is probably why she's killed off so quickly. She fails to make an impression, so much so that when Ram Singh later says he'll never get over what happened this night it took me a moment to remember what he was talking about.

So, wait, you're saying, there's no Oriental character? No-one with ancestry from Japan or China or Korea? Ha! When was the last time we had such character on Doctor Who? The Talons of Weng-Chiang? Tsk. Class! You're so regressive! Muahahahaa! Better luck next time. Why not try something really crazy, like include a character from . . . Ireland?!

I will say this, it's the torquoisest show I've seen in years.

Dreams and Costumes

I had a really vivid dream last night--I was living in a nice home on top of a tall, human-made cliff of stones by the sea--the cliff looked like old Roman walls. The house looked a bit like James Mason's house from the end of North by North West. I was very conscious of the fact that I could only live there because several people had been murdered. I had a tin bath tub filled with water and a young man lay at the bottom of the tub looking up. There was a snail and an a hairless kitten the size of the snail crawling about on the edge of the tub. I had another dream, too, but I can't remember it.

I blame the NyQuil. But at least I didn't feel as sick to-day. I wish I could say the same for half the people at the university. Everyone got sick and of course everyone just had to deal with it and go to school anyway. I bet the Halloween candy I've been eating lately hadn't helped either. I've been sort of toying with the idea of dressing up for Halloween this year, especially since I have class that day. But I don't think I can afford to do it properly. It occurred to me I have almost everything I'd need to dress as Dirk Bogarde from the end of Death in Venice--I have the hat, slacks, and tie, but I'd have to get new shoes, a detachable shirt collar, and a new vest. Plus I'd have to dye my hair and get a good false moustache. If I can't do it right I just don't want to do it at all. Maybe I can think of something simpler.

Twitter Sonnet #924

In treble jalapenos eyes assess.
Important shears alert the hair to fate.
When fortune says, "Neighbours, do not redress,"
There's buckets bound for space to fill and rate.
In cases wet with primitive white paint
A dousing wand erupts in snakes for show.
Graffiti won't select a god or saint.
The shoes were tied without the sneezing blow.
The speaking parts put up atop the bridge.
Hallucinations short the circuit's site.
The number parsed in feet along the ridge.
They bivouacked beyond the callous blight.
The wheels in solid colours pass the ice.
A single moon orbits the fountain twice.

Tied to the Platter

Someone who is loved a great deal early on knows a pretty high threshold of love and may be forever unsatisfied with less. At least one woman goes mad in 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a lusciously shot movie about two sisters bound in repressed bitterness after the emotional highs of stardom. With great performances by both Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, it's a beautifully grotesque portrait of human needs growing uncontrollably beyond the bounds of decency.

While both women are great in the film, the cake really has to go to Bette Davis who completely commits to Baby Jane Hudson. The film opens with Baby Jane as a child star in a vaudeville act and it's a little hard to understand her appeal. Director Robert Aldrich takes pains to establish her show is sold out and that people genuinely seem to love her, otherwise it would seem a joke that this kid with her loud, one note delivery is on the stage.

There was a sort of big, talentless performance style in children that genuinely seemed to entertain audiences--maybe it was funny because of how bad it was but if one looks at films starring young Jackie Cooper or Bobby Driscoll one wonders not only why they were popular but how anyone thought they could carry films to begin with. On the other hand, there were some genuinely talented popular child actors like Mickey Rooney or Freddie Bartholomew. No accounting for taste, I suppose, but in any case audiences of the Baby Jane style of child acting could probably be seen to-day in people who like watching school plays just to see how badly the kids do.

Which of course makes it all the more pathetic that Jane considers those her glory days. The film gives us a brief glimpse into the sisters' lives in the 1930s where, despite clips from successful 1930s Bette Davis movies being used, the studio heads find Jane's performance style totally inadequate for an adult. Her sister Blanche (Joan Crawford), who had before dwelt unhappily in her sister's shadow, is by the 1930s recognised as the greater talent and box office draw.

But most of the movie takes place in 1962 when Blanche and Jane live together alone in a massive house beautifully cluttered with antiques and shadows, which perfectly reflects the personalities of the two women.

The way the film constructs the resentment and obligation that keeps the women locked together is fascinating. Jane resents Blanche both because Blanche became more successful and because Jane feels responsible for hitting Blanche with a car, paralysing her from the waist down. Blanche was told as a child by their mother (Anne Barton) to be kinder to Jane than Jane was to her when Jane was on top so Blanche is bound by a deep sense of moral obligation.

Blanche carries this tolerance so far that she's reluctant to address increasingly vicious behaviour from Jane, who, Blanche learns, has been hiding her mail and has served her a dead rat and her pet dead bird for lunch.

Jane is peculiarly amazing in her garish makeup, performing for herself and then a hired pianist, her madness bringing her to revive that one-note childhood performance, curtseying and singing tunelessly with no expectation that she's not absolutely charming.

The Mask of Joan

Lucy had just gotten the freedom and the husband she wanted but unfortunately she had to murder him and his mistress with an ax. Evidently she had a good lawyer because she spends 20 years in an asylum instead of life in prison in 1964's Strait-Jacket. At times a little too broad and with a twist ending visible from a considerable distance, this film written by Robert Bloch has a magnetic performance from Joan Crawford as Lucy and features an interesting commentary on what kinds of behaviour were considered acceptable for women.

After a loveless marriage to someone foisted on her by her parents, Lucy's finally able to marry a guy she likes--one considerably younger than her played by Lee Majors. Majors isn't credited because she chops his head off before he can stick around long enough. The film jumps over Lucy's time in the asylum to when she's released twenty years later and joins her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker), on the family farm.

Carol had witnessed her father's indiscretion and his decapitation but seems to have no reluctance about welcoming her mother home. She even, oddly enough, wants Lucy to dress like she did before going to the asylum, something which really seems to disturb Lucy. I couldn't help thinking of Vertigo and Scottie forcing Judy to get the makeover that makes her look like she did when she was an accomplice to a murder.

Carol even saved Lucy's noisy dangling bracelets and in addition to being ready to wield an ax to take revenge, Crawford's character was strikingly assertive in her brash, high contrast wardrobe.

Bloch makes a none-too-subtle point when Carol visits her boyfriend Michael's (John Anthony Hayes) home and his father (Howard St. John) flirts unabashedly with Carol. Everyone passes it off as a joke but this is followed by a scene where Michael visits Carol's home and the two young people become uncomfortable when Lucy flirts with Michael.

A series of new murders begin to occur and all signs point to Lucy. The film destabilises point of view a little bit so that even though it's mostly shot from Lucy's perspective, we don't know for sure if she's guilty of the killings. And neither does she so this in itself brings us further into her perspective. The climax of the film is a fascinatingly bizarre scene--the revelation of the killer's identity is pretty obvious but the scene where the revelation takes place is both a very explicit commentary on assigned identities and an effectively creepy set of images.

Two Dreams

I feel like it's been a while since I wrote about my dreams. Last night I dreamt I was trapped in a trolley, like the San Diego red trolleys, travelling endlessly over vast green fields. I could see two other trolleys on other tracks that were gradually diverging from the course of my trolley's track.

I woke up and when I went back to sleep I dreamt a new movie was coming out featuring Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne but it was a romantic comedy. There was a triangle between him, Selena Kyle, and the version of Rachel Dawes played by Katie Holmes, who is revealed to have been a different person from the Rachel played by Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Dark Knight. Bruce has some kind of goofy science experiment cooked up and at one point Selena and Rachel are in baroque costumes and sing the "Poor Fool, He Makes Me Laugh" song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera.

Twitter Sonnet #923

Venetian pounds in bloodless cubes embark.
In merchantmen, in courses winding long.
Gibraltar watched the vacant corsair's lark.
In holds the eyes of guests are numbered strong.
In orlop gloom, a stumbling slops collapsed.
Too bright, a candle jitters out the glass.
A froth impressed a thought outside relapsed.
Neglected hulls careened with briny mass.
The storming curtains lick forsaken rails.
Barrage of ice incites the yards to shake.
A spray o'ertakes the night in punished gales.
The rocks align to fell what sea would take.
But careless frigates sway and dip through rolls.
Her arms extend from masts 'neath pallid gulls.

Crucial Heirlooms

The top two things I really liked about Saturday's new Star Wars: Rebels: Grand Admiral Thrawn and Hera. In third place, I liked how Ezra was marginalised even though he was in almost every scene. He was basically just Hera's lackey and not as whiney as he normally is, which was just about right--if we have to have Ezra, he should be seen and not heard. Or if he is heard, nothing he says should have anything to do with his opinions or feelings. Unless he finally turns to the Dark Side, then: okay.

One of the show's biggest problems is its lack of good female characters. Well, some would say its lack of any good characters, but the women have been especially indistinct, particularly compared to Clone Wars which had many good roles for women even beyond Ahsoka Tano. The writers went so far as to bring Ahsoka onto Rebels in the second season, but for all the impact she had on anything that happened, it really felt like she was never intended to be there and none of the writers really wanted her there.

Hera, in the first season of Rebels, seemed patterned after the mother in Disney's film version of Swiss Family Robinson--a supportive, occasional council for the male characters. This new episode puts her at the centre in a more interesting way than Sabine was in the previous week's episode--which, while I liked it, didn't do much to develop her character and even had a pretty lame, obviously pandering moment when Sabine rescues Wedge and Hobby and, when they say they were planning to rescue her, she replies with an oddly patronising "That's cute."

This new episode, "Hera's Heroes", the title a reference to Hogan's Heroes, brings us into Hera's experience on a more emotional level. Even though it's kind of ridiculous she's risking her life and the lives of others purely for a family heirloom--they could've at least planned on getting intel or sabotaging the base in the process--the sense of character history established and Hera's conflict between the girl she was and the fighter she's become are way more interesting than anything the show's done with Ezra's family history. Though obviously the heirloom, a generational art project of sorts, was invented entirely for Thrawn, one of whose defining characteristics is that he studies his enemies through the artwork of their culture.

The title's reference to a series about a Nazi prison camp compels the viewer to compare the Empire to the Nazis again but stories with Thrawn also bring echoes of European colonialism into the Star Wars narrative. In some sense, he's like the French family in Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl who put west African masks on their wall without really understanding them. The key difference is that Thrawn does make the effort to understand but still with the same goal of dominating and subjugating. I was very glad this episode made the effort to reaffirm his personality as it was in the old Expanded Universe, particularly because it's such a needed contrast from every other villain on Rebels--every other Imperial leader, with the exception of Tarkin and Vader, comes off as ridiculously brutish. Vader's still brutish but James Earl Jones made him effective; Tarkin had a better demeanour but still proved relatively ineffective. Thrawn was genuinely fascinating in a way no villain on the show has been yet.

The episode was written by Nicole Dubuc, the first woman to write for the show. By the end of its third season, Clone Wars had had five female writers. I hate it when writers can't stretch their imaginations enough to write for the opposite sex but maybe this explains why Clone Wars had better female characters. While several male writers have been imported from Clone Wars, like Henry Gilroy and Matt Michnovetz, so far none of the women who wrote for Clone Wars have been brought over.

Nightmares of a Good Vintage

This is a page from a late 19th century collection of Edgar Allan Poe poems, stories, and his essay on writing. I saw it on Friday when I went with the class I'm taking on Horror Cinema and Literature to look at some pieces from the university library's special collection. My camera's battery was dead so my classmate, Megan, was kind enough to send me photos she took with her phone. This is an early 19th century edition of Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho;

Also on display were first edition issues of Weird Tales from the 20s and 30s, several featuring stories by H.P. Lovecraft. I really need to remember to keep my camera charged.

To-day I read the new Sirenia Digest which contains two very nice new works by Caitlin R. Kiernan--the conclusion to her Chartreuse Alphabet, which is a series of vignettes for each letter of the alphabet, and a new story called "Antediluvian Homesick Blues", the title a reference to Bob Dylan I suspect Caitlin came up with before it was announced Dylan had won the Nobel Prize. The story itself doesn't make any explicit reference to Dylan's song that I could detect but it is an extremely effective rumination on nightmare. Focusing on two women having a discussion while drinking cheap absinthe, it juxtaposes analyses of surrealist, apocalyptic art and memories of a childhood excursion to a Pentecostal church where a hellfire sermon was delivered. Caitlin's language is in top form on this one and the worrying feeling of a bearing down doom pervades the piece.

The conclusion of The Chartreuse Alphabet is also great. I particularly liked the vignette for R, "Raven", which is another sort of nightmare as the anxieties of two criminals seemed to be manifested in rows of diseased ravens on the roadside. Wonderful stuff.

The Charley Loop

Charley and the Sixth Doctor were still travelling together in the 2008 audio play I listened to last night, The Raincloud Man, Charley (India Fisher) being a former companion of the Eighth Doctor, something Six (Colin Baker) doesn't know about, and this audio play continues on with teasing this out. Maybe I should congratulate the show for making me impatient to hear what finally happens when the Doctor finds out but I'd rather just hear what happens (no spoilers please). Otherwise, it was an enjoyable story, or maybe it was the mostly tequila margarita I was drinking at the time.

The two go back to modern day Manchester and meet with D.I. Menzies (Anna Hope) again, whom they met in the very good, effectively spooky The Condemned. Most of the plot seems to hinge around Charley's secret, actually, as the aliens they're surprised to meet living hidden lives in Manchester generally seem to react to the fact that Charley's out of place in the timeline--and somehow the Doctor still manages not to figure things out.

Anna Hope, seen here with the mask she wore for a role she played on the Doctor Who television series, Novice Hame, is a lot of fun as the sarcastic and weary Detective Inspector. With a thick Manchester accent she sounds well beyond incredulity and patience for the alien murders and not-murders but rather time anomalies that look like murders.

The title refers to an alien who influences reality involuntarily, making people around him unlucky, so he's used as a cooler in an underground alien casino. A nice concept, but feels a bit backgrounded to all the tension still around Charley. The story begins with Charley and the Doctor eating breakfast in a funny scene that seems an attempt to capture something like the chemistry Charley had with Eight but pretty much fails at this due to Colin Baker's typical flat performance.

Twitter Sonnet #922

A pumpkin's eyes remind the pie to cut.
Confections fill the stomach stretched for gold.
To eat, no mask could say the goblins glut.
The shadows moving now were ever old.
Unmarked, the cigarettes have stopped the truck.
A cherry road is winding round the hill.
Obscuring forest says more than the duck.
Midnight, the hummingbird alights the bill.
A button turned the black to pink in book.
When counting beads, a shoe ennobles foot.
Adrift, the words debate the missing rook.
A lift recalls where crates of knights were put.
In coffee dreams, the choc'late melts in time.
Across the pumpkin field the spirits climb.