Xenon's Seventh Circle

I moved house in 2004. This is probably my main memory of the year. Up a hill in the middle of nowhere. Windswept, desolate, silent - if it weren't for the fact that the whole of Gloucestershire seemed to use the local roads as a race track, it would have been damned near perfect. Well - that and if the local landowners hadn't had some kind of psychotic hatred of wildlife. I used to go for long walks with my sister's dog, and spend them disassembling snares and counting illegally shot badgers. It was a nice place to live though. Illegal fox hunts notwithstanding. Got stranded up there every winter, and the power used to go off at the slightest excuse, but the middle of nowhere is definitely the best place to live. Internet speed sucked, mind.

Other than that, 2004 was a quiet sort of year. Sad one too though. It was the year that Christopher Reeve died. Richard Biggs from Babylon 5 too - and he was young and healthy, and had just said good morning to his wife, when he dropped dead. Just goes to show! It was also the year when I rediscovered pop music, by unexpectedly becoming a McFly fan. They brought out their debut album this year, and I've followed them ever since.

Angel came to an end this year, a year after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It should have lasted longer. Frasier ended too, although that one at least had had a chance to run its course. Auf Wiedersehen, Pet aired its final episode in this year as well. It had come and gone since... 1984? Always worth watching. The Magnificent Seven were two men down by that final episode, and they found a lovely way to end that really did the show and cast proud. And it was the year that Lost began. Hmm. Now there's one that went on much longer than it should have! I think it's the year that The OC and Nip/Tuck both started in the UK too, though they'd probably started earlier than that in the US. The OC was a teen drama that hooked me completely, despite me being a good fifteen years above the target age group! It lost me after a bit, but that first season was bloody good. And I fell hard for Nip/Tuck. That tailed off too when the showrunner bailed, and went off to do Glee instead, but for several years I thought it was the best thing on television. Properly clever stuff.

Cinema! This was the year of Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow. I love that film so much. It was a flop, which was a hell of a shame, as they'd intended it to be a new franchise. I could have had lots and lots of Sky Captains, but clearly nobody else wanted them. No fair. It's a glorious film, full of giant robots, and vintage touches that hark back to the weekly cinema serials from the pre-war days. And I wanted a sequel. I shall go away now and sulk.

( ... )

1997. I left college in 1997. Leaving college is decidedly rubbish. One minute you're nice and comfortable, with a well-stocked library and no responsibilities, and the next you're expected to go out into the world, get a job, and be an actual person. This is probably terrifying enough even if you're not me. I wound up working in a factory with a health and safety record that veered between hilarious and non-existent. While I was there, they redesigned the shop floor in such a way as to make it even more obviously life-threatening than it had been previously, which was quite an achievement. It closed down about a year later. I've always felt partly responsible for that. They were going for some sort of European special status, that would have helped them get more contracts abroad, and a top drawer Eurocrat type came and talked to a few of us about our experiences with the company. She asked what it was like to work for them, and we all burst out laughing. They didn't get their special status.

Otherwise, it was the year of my first General Election! I was a bit excited. We were going to drive the ruddy Tories out, at last. Things had got so laughably bad with them, we even had a BBC newsreader randomly standing as an MP in one constituency, just in an effort to get rid of the useless prat who had the job. I soon learned how pointless it all feels though. How your vote doesn't actually count for anything in our stupid system. How the other side soon wind up looking just as bad as the people they've replaced. Especially when the country winds up saddling itself with Tony Blair for the foreseeable future.

Princess Diana died. The country went bleeding insane for a fortnight. Buffy The Vampire Slayer debuted, and the entire internet was chatting about it in an instant. And I couldn't watch it! It was most frustrating. I caught the season one finale courtesy of Sky One when I was at my sister's place one night early the next year, but it didn't come to the BBC until centuries later - at least. Frustration! We did get Dark Skies and Poltergeist: The Legacy that year though. The former was a lovely piece of sci-fi that only lasted one season. Woe. The latter was a great fun paranormal series, that replaced The X-Files in my affections - Mulder and Scully having gone all conspiracy theory in a big way by then. Sadly, P:TL had a massive shake up for season two, and it was painfully obvious that they were now spending less money per season than they once had per episode (literally). And all the good writers ran away. And the grown up, clever elements were abandoned. Still, it was good for a bit.

The first Harry Potter book came out this year. I bought it for my niece's eleventh birthday. Or possibly her twelfth birthday. However old she was this year, that's the birthday I bought it for. Tomorrow Never Dies came out as well. My favourite Bond movie! I love everything about that one. Jonathan Pryce, Michelle Yeoh, the song, the fights, the general willingness of everything to go "boom!" with alacrity. Happy happy happy. And Titanic came out too, but I still haven't seen that.

And some other stuff, probably. And rest assured, that Elton John song is not lurking beneath the cut. I wouldn't do that to myself, let alone you!

( ... )

PS: An early Christmas present from the bods on the Queen YouTube page! Nice. :) Even if it has all been cropped from 4:3 to 16:9...

Day twenty-three, the most annoying character. Hmm... Quite a few options here. Obviously there's Dawn in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Rarely have I wished horrible death upon a character so regularly. Dawn was whiny and irritating and, despite being the same age that Buffy and co were when the series started, horribly immature by comparison. If she was intended to appeal to younger viewers, then that's a bit of an insult to younger viewers. And then there's Wind, the character that The High Chaparral picked up in season four, when they accidently lost Blue Cannon down the back of the sofa. Wind was a Pawnee halfbreed, which could have been great, but he wound up being Wesley Crusher without the redeeming features. And then we come to Angel... It's one of my favourite TV shows ever, but it also has Fred, a character I hated from the beginning (although she did turn into Illyria, so she obviously had some saving graces). And Gunn. He began by irritating me slightly, and got worse with every season. Neither of them comes even close to being as annoying as Eve, though, a Wolfram & Hart employee who may rank as one of the worst characters in anything ever. It's entirely possible that I'm grouchy and misanthropic, and inclined to be irritated by almost everybody, but even so, there really is no forgiving Eve.

But I'm not choosing any of them. I don't need to, because there's somebody worse. I've mentioned before how much I loved Bonanza growing up. In its later years the show was retooled a little, as long-running series sometimes are. In an effort to appeal to younger viewers (because that always goes so well) they introduced a new character. Jamie Hunter was an orphan boy of about fourteen, taken in by the Cartwrights. Why, I have no idea. He was to spend the next three years sobbing and whining and causing trouble for everybody, and even in my youngest days I couldn't stand the wretched child. And they didn't kill him! They had so many opportunities. He fell into a river during the opening credits every week, but did they drown him even once? No. There is no justice in television. So the most irritating character ever is Jamie Hunter-Cartwright. Trust me, nobody else even comes close.

Day eighteen, your favourite title sequence. Oh, brother. So many possibilities. Blake's 7, with that glorious theme music, and the Liberator in all its slightly wobbly glory. Quantum Leap (seasons one to four), with Sam sliding across cars and punching people, all beautifully edited to fit the wonderful theme. Buffy and Angel, both of which have title sequences that I love, and Doctor Who (old, not new), which has several. Wibbly black and white from the earliest days; revamped slightly with the move to colour when Pertwee took over; the slightly jazzed-up Davison era. Anything written by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter (or just Post, after Carpenter died). The second Bonanza theme, which always makes me ridiculously happy, even though Bonanza purists hate it because it changed. But, partly because I can't watch it without a stupid smile, and partly because I'm wearing my A-Team T-shirt today, so can't really go with anything else, I'm choosing this one:



Great music, great pictures, great fun, from the days when TV could still afford to waste a full minute just on a theme. Also, stuff blows up. You can't really go wrong with that.

Day twelve, an episode you've watched more than five times. Well I've never counted, but there's probably quite a few. The entirety of The A-Team seasons one to four springs to mind. Most of The High Chaparral and the later seasons of Bonanza, due to the BBC having them on a loop for much of my childhood. A few Doctor Who adventures, especially when they first started coming out on VHS. I only had a few, and was possibly a bit over-excited by the ability to suddenly watch stuff that had previously only existed as Target novelisations. Look! It moves! Including the bits that probably shouldn't. ;)

But I'm going to go with Buffy The Vampire Slayer, specifically the season one episode "Never Kill A Boy On The First Date". I used to hear so much about Buffy online, back when it first started, but there was no way to see the show in the UK at the time. I'd see little bits here and there; people used to post tiny RealVideo clips of their favourite scenes. Mostly Giles being Giles, as the internet back then was wonderfully skewed in favour of librarians with closets full of weapons. Nowadays everybody's batty about pretty vampires, and Giles would probably be the bad guy. But I digress. Eventually, in January 1999 I think it was, the BBC started airing the show. I used to tape it every week, and keep the best ones. "Never Kill A Boy..." grabbed me from the get go. Buffy falls in love (with a schoolboy who is even more obviously not really a schoolboy than is usual with American TV, but we have to pretend not to notice such things!), and tries to balance going out on dates with slaying vampires. Giles is brilliantly hopeless at understanding her, and all the attempts to keep the boyfriend from finding out about the slaying are wonderful. Arguably season one of Buffy was still finding its feet, but "Never Kill A Boy..." is just about perfect. Great dialogue, great performances and great timing.

There are a bunch of other episodes that I've probably watched enough times to qualify; particularly the ones with Ethan Rayne and Spike and Dru. Those early episodes though, hoarded on crackly VHS tape, have a particular appeal. I think, like with those early Doctor Who videos, it was probably the novelty of finally being able to watch the damn thing. I miss getting that excited about television. Still, that's probably a subject for a different meme altogether.

Day seven, your least favourite episode of your favourite TV show. That's a difficult one, as I tend to block out the bad stuff, and pretend it never happened. And if it didn't happen, I can't mention it here.

There is one, though. Angel isn't my favourite TV show (except when it is), but I love it dearly. It had some superb writing over the years, and it also had some fine actors working on it. The character arc of Wesley Wyndham-Pryce is one of the finest that I've ever seen, and although Buffy The Vampire Slayer was probably the better series over all, at its height Angel gave it one hell of a run for its money. Which is why, when it failed, it did so very noticeably. I have a particular disliking for two episodes. One's a contraversial choice, but the other most definitely isn't. To begin with there's the final episode of all, "Not Fade Away". The plot hinges on a grand plan of Angel's that's quite the worst piece of tactical thinking ever. This means that everything falls apart, and in the worst kinds of ways. The Angel we knew would not have made that plan. And when your grand finale has the main character do something unremittingly stupid, and do it unceasingly for an entire episode, the result is a dissatisfying conclusion. That would be bad enough for an ordinary finale, let alone for the end of everything. It takes the fabulous build-up of tension from the preceding episode, "Power Play", and ruins it all.

The second time Angel got it wrong was just a few episodes before. "The Girl In Question" might have worked, had Sarah Michelle Gellar agreed to appear in it (so we could have had the real Buffy, rather than a few long shots of the back of a stand-in's head). It might have worked had the show not been axed, and we were not careering towards its final episode. It might have worked mid-season, when a lot of shows let the main narrative slip for a bit. Those are three very big ifs. In the event, with only two episodes left to go, hundreds of loose strings to tie up, and a popular regular cast that had already been badly underused all season for several reasons, "The Girl In Question" might just rank as the most badly misjudged episode of anything.

It's a tough choice, as "Not Fade Away" was a massive disappointment, and I hate it. For me it got everything wrong, although I appreciate that other opinions are available. "The Girl In Question" was just one huge mistake throughout, though. I think I shall probably have to go with that.

A rather silly episode, this one, although everybody is clearly well aware of the nonsense factor, and it all proves perfectly entertaining. Once again, Fleming goes to the International Murder Society, this time to ask for help with The Cape. He winds up hiring an insanely OTT duo called Goggles and Hicks, the one a computer genius, and the other a supposedly lethal killer. Not that we see much evidence of his lethalicity. He mostly just falls off stuff, and does a fine impersonation of a massive chunk of ham.

( Flying machine guns! Explosions! Ice cream! )

PS: I'm writing this whilst watching The Last Days Of Pompeii, a mini-series from 1984. If somebody could tell Malcolm Jamieson to stop trying to get himself eaten by lions, I'd quite appreciate it. For one thing, it would be a shame, and for another, it keeps making Lesley Anne Down gasp in a very distracting manner.

And Brian Blessed is actually being vaguely subtle. That's pretty damned distracting as well.

In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favourite interview, a book) and explain why you love it so much. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

This was incredibly difficult. My first thought was to choose a really good episode of something; but then the full extent of the prompt got me thinking, because there's movies and books to choose from as well. Also, the mention of "a favourite piece of canon" suggests that the choice shouldn't be a favourite episode, but a favourite thing that happens in a particular episode. Which complicated things even further. Eventually I narrowed it down to a shortlist of about twenty episodes, films and books; but since I had no over all favourite, I decided in the end to go for the one that's arguably the least well known. There's too much good stuff out there to try deciding whether one thing is better than all the rest; and small fandoms need support. Shortlist included at the end, just because.

( ... )

True Blood has announced its return date, although I think they actually did that several weeks ago, and I've only just noticed. Also there's a trailer! Well, more of a glimpse, but they call it a trailer. It'll be nice to have True Blood back. I've given up on The Mentalist now, Hawaii 5-0 decided that we weren't going to be friends anymore, and Ringer has gone away. Probably forever, as I was the only person who watched it. So True Blood could be the only television that I watch until Steven Moffat decides to give me Doctor Who back. There are Worries, however. Seasons one, two and three of True Blood were awesome in every way, except for how there was altogether too much Sookie. Season four was rubbish, though. And this will be season five, and I am suspicious of season fives by their very nature. Should that be seasons five? No, I don't think so. Consider the evidence, anyway:

( The rather-too-involved Universal Theory Of Season Five. Also True Blood trailerage in screencappery. )

Sometimes you hate the things you love. I hate an entire season of The A-Team, most of an entire season of Angel, and almost two entire seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. I'm not sure, therefore, why it bothers me so much that there are bits of Torchwood: Miracle Day that I don't like. Maybe it's because I loved season one an insane amount, and season two only a little bit less. Maybe it's because season one, despite being hated by almost every other science fiction fan on the planet, somehow seems to be one of my most favourite things in all the world. I don't know. Either way, it rankles. I want to grab the entire series, give it a big shake, and get rid of all the blatantly stupid bits. Actually, that's unfair. Torchwood has been blatantly stupid since the beginning. Demons, and pterodactyls, and talking fish, and Richard Briers in the middle of a giant, psychedelic octopus... These are the loud, colourful and stupendously silly things that made Torchwood great. Then it went to America, and became about talking very fast. Maybe "blatantly stupid" wasn't the phrase I was looking for. I think I probably just meant "dull".

( Except when it wasn't. )