Tag Archives: Review

Game of Thrones Review – 1.05: ‘The Wolf and the Lion’

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Swords are finally clashing in Game of Thrones and our reviewer Kieran Mathers is on hand to pick over the aftermath. As always, this review comes with a mild spoiler warning. If you’re new to Game of Thrones, don’t forget to check out our primer!

At last we get some meaty and considerable violence! Headless horses, charging knights, sweeping swords, battering shields and brother-on-brother duelling – this is combat at its most graphic, and all the stronger for it. The violence of G.R.R. Martin’s prose is not lessened, and is all the more horrifying to see. In fact, this episode is all about violence and its consequences. You also get noisy blowjobs, but hey, it’s HBO.

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Doctor Who – A Good Man Goes to War – Review

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Amy and Melody Pond

James Willetts reviews the mid-series finale, with a somewhat less positive take than that of this week’s commentary team. Who do you agree with? Let us know in the comments!

If the first half of the episode was all about building the Doctor to be an all-destroying Action Hero, crushing everything in his path, the second was all about drawing him back from that path.

I’ve written a couple of times this season about my unease at the way the Doctor seems to solve problems with battles, and I’m glad that it was addressed here. I recognise that there is an intrinsic problem in television in showing conflict-resolution which doesn’t involve stuff blowing up. The problem many people have with much of Star Trek is the endless diplomacy. No one wants to see the Doctor changing people through dialogue and mediation with no running around and shouting. That’s boring, even if it is a better, more realistic route.

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Doctor Who – The Almost People – Review

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James Willetts reviews the twists and turns of ‘The Almost People’. Let us know what you think in the comments below. Don’t forget to download our commentary!

Cliffhangers seems to be the Doctor Who stock in trade these days, being dropped into episodes whether they make sense or not. Gone are the days when a cliffhanger ending meant an impending disaster to be resolved though, because these are more about setting up the next episode.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this week’s episode. On the one hand, I wasn’t at all a fan. It felt more like a slight miss than a big one and it never felt like a total disaster along the lines of ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’. It’s a big drop off from the greatness of the last few episodes. Yet at the same time this episode lives on unfairly thanks to another game-changing coda, presumably written by Moffat, that undoes much of what we thought we knew about the series so far and completely rewrites the Doctor’s motivation for this two-parter. Continue reading →

Review – Un Lun Dun – China Miéville

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Caleb Woodbridge reviews China Miéville‘s novel ‘Un Lun Dun’, winner of the 2008 Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book:

The idea that the magical or fantastic may be lurking just around the corner is very appealing, and one that science fiction and fantasy uses frequently. A 1960s police telephone box is revealed as a time machine; the barrier between platforms 9 and 10 of King’s Cross Station turns out to be a gateway to a world of wizardry. The fantastic is all around us. In Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, there are two Londons: London Above, which we are familiar with, and the magical London Below. Un Lun Dun revisits the concept for a younger audience, with Zanna and Deeba finding their way into the abcity of UnLondon.
The story gets off to quite a slow start, and seems to follow some fairly well-worn fantasy tropes. As Zanna and Deeba enter UnLondon, they discover that Zanna is the “Shwazzy” (from the French “choisi”, chosen). She is the Chosen One prophesied to save London from the Smog. However, all does not go to plan, and the reliability of the prophecies quickly goes out the window. This leaves the characters free to go trampling over the clichés and conventions of the fantasy genre. Deeba refuses to stick to her role of “comedy sidekick” to Zanna, and determinedly breaks the rules of the quest in a desperate attempt to save London and UnLondon alike.
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Doctor Who – The Rebel Flesh – Review

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James Willetts shares his thoughts on ‘The Rebel Flesh’ – our commentary will follow shortly is now online. Let us know what you think in the comments!

As we kick off the second of this season’s two-parters, it’s great to be able to say that this was a good episode. I feel it’s necessary because the last time we got to this point in the season, last year’s Silurian double-feature The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, I ended up giving up on what had been to that point an uneven start to the series. To say this has been the strongest New Who run ever is now surely a moot point. Further than that though, this episode means we’re now in the almost unprecedented position of having five straight episodes without a single stinker is more contentious but no less of an achievement. For the first time it feels like this is the programme that I have been waiting for Doctor Who to become.

Post-Industrial, low paid workers in peril is a recurring Doctor Who theme, as seen in Waters of Mars, 42 and The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Matthew Graham, this week’s writer, has fortunately managed to remove the majority of what made those episodes uniformly terrible, and in their place has crafted an excellent storyline with an interesting new monster.

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Doctor Who – The Doctor’s Wife – Review

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Idris's new soulWasn’t that astonishingly, astoundingly fab?

It must be noted, before I continue, that I have long been an ardent admirer of Neil Gaiman’s work. That’s not because I’m worried about the Johnny-Come-Latelies hijacking the Gaiman bandwagon. He’s too big for this to be a break out piece of work. Instead, I need to say that because this review will be so gushing, so enthusiastic and so pro-Gaiman that anyone would think I had gone into this with low expectations and been surprised by an unknown and unexpected quantity.

So let it be noted that this is not the case. I am well aware of Neil Gaiman’s talent. He can be directly credited with my love of comics (in the same way that without A New Hope I wouldn’t love Film, without Sandman I would never have discovered, or grown to love, comics). His writing, especially his children’s books and short story collections, is wonderful and his blog is brilliant. I love the films he has been involved with, whether as writer (Mirrormask), translator (Princess Mononoke) or as creator (Coraline, Stardust). He is one of my favourite authors, and I would purchase anything and everything he puts out.

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