Category Archives: TV/Movie Reviews
Doctor Who: Mummy on the Orient Express Review
If you’re The Doctor, there’s no such thing as a quiet vacation. You can’t just TARDIS into a quiet little corner of time and space to relax. Something always goes wrong. Often it’s homicidal robots. Sometimes, it’s homicidal aliens. This time, it was a homicidal mummy that could only be seen by the intended victim. For not getting any time to relax, The Doctor doesn’t look too bad for 2,000 years old.
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Haven: Much Ado About Mara Review
Not to start all of my reviews this week with a question but how do you follow-up on an episode where nothing happens and all your protagonists are spinning their wheels? You make everything happen this week and start pushing this season forward. Sure, it hits reset on a couple of characters but it’s for the best.
This week, The Guard have Mara and it looks like Dwight is about to assume the throne of this season’s Big Bad much like Jordan did last season. Fortunately, that was a red herring and the season is progressing along its logical path.
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Doctor Who: Kill the Moon Review
What happens when you take the training wheels off your bike? You either fall over and land on your head or you ride straight and true.
That was the question on Doctor Who this week. Though it feels like a question that has been asked time and time again, the question was asked again of Clara. Unlike every other time that Clara might have been left to ride on her own, this was the first time that she pushed back.
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Haven: Spotlight Review
Mara might have taken over Audrey’s body and be randomly murdering people about town but that doesn’t mean that Nathan is giving up on Audrey. While the rest of Haven has given up hope of getting Audrey back, brief glimpses of Audrey still being in there seems to be the only thing keeping him going.
This week, the battle lines are drawn. It’s Nathan against the rest of Haven as he tries to get Audrey back.
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Doctor Who: The Caretaker Review
One thing that tends to happen when you tag along with The Doctor on the TARDIS is that you leave your real-life behind for a few months or years. That’s not the case if you’re Clara Oswald. Though she’s done many, many things while a travelling companion on the TARDIS, the one thing she hasn’t done is pack her things and move in.
This week, we finally gotten some semblance of payoff to Clara’s dueling lives as The Doctor becomes The Caretaker (who likes to be called The Doctor) at Clara’s school. Now she has to juggle maintaining her sanity while her personal life and time traveler life collide.
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Haven: Speak No Evil Review
A season premiere has a tough task nowadays. Ever since Star Trek: The Next Generation’s classic The Best of Both Worlds popularize season finale cliffhangers, the practice is now common place in television. The problem is that ST:TNG never had to worry about serialized story telling. You could watch the episodes in a fairly haphazard order and you wouldn’t be missing too much.
The difference between Star Trek and Haven is the nature of the story telling. You have to watch the episodes in sequence for them to make any sense so the story has to go forward and you have to have a reason to carry on. The challenge for writers is to answer enough questions from the previous season finale to satisfy viewers while leaving enough questions to bring you back. In some regards, Part Two of Haven’s fifth season premiere succeeded. In others, I’m not particularly compelled by it.
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Doctor Who: Time Heist Review
If there’s anyway to describe the first few episodes of Peter Capaldi’s run at the helm of the TARDIS, it might be that he’s getting a lot of the standard Doctor Who adventures out of the way. There’s the Dalek adventure. He’s done the adventure with a historical figure. There’s the horror episode. This week, it was timey-wimey genre bending.
The Doctor and Clara were tasked with robbing the most secure bank in the universe. However, this wasn’t the standard bank robbery caper. Of course not. This is Doctor Who.
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Haven: See No Evil Review
When we last left Haven’s version of the Scooby Gang, everybody was in rough shape. Dave shot himself thanks to Dwight’s trouble. Duke was bleeding from the eyes after all the Crocker family absorbed troubles came back on him and started tearing him apart from the inside. Jennifer keeled over dead because of evil supernatural door reasons. Oh, and Audrey’s body is now hosting her original incarnation, Mara. Just another day in the life of Haven.
So with all those plot threads left dangling at the end, there’s a lot that needs to be taken care of in the fifth season premiere.
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Doctor Who: Listen Review
Steven Moffat has two tricks that he really likes to use when writing episodes. The first is creating and/or solving problems through wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey time paradoxes. I’ve lost count of the number of times that we’ve seen that. The second is trying to scare little children of everyday things. We’ve done statues, shadows and this week, we’re supposed to be scared of being alone in the dark.
Moffat decided to hybrid timey-wimey with everyday horror in Listen. In many ways, it’s a spiritual successor to Blink, the first time we met the Weeping Angels. Maybe it was a bit too familiar, though.
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Doctor Who: Robot of Sherwood Review
What happens when legends meet? I don’t mean two famous people but more what happens when two mythical creatures meet. Sure, we’ve had enough cross-over movies, TV shows and comics that cross-overs have warn out their welcome but there’s still the special moment every now and then.
But what happens when two mythical creatures who aren’t all that mythical get in a battle of egos? That’s the question that is being asked and answered by this weekend’s episode of Doctor Who. The Doctor, a myth throughout space and time, comes face to face with Robin Hood, a myth of Earth. They’re very real and very spectacular.
et geekera 