Twin Peaks: the Return, by David Lynch (Sky Atlantic) | review

The original Twin Peaks was a remarkable programme, easily liked for its quirky characters in a lovable town, but utterly terrifying as that lovable town’s dark secrets bubbled to the surface. It was said to have lost its way after the revelation of Laura Palmer’s murder, but I don’t remember ever being anything less than desperate to watch the next episode. I remember talking about it in the school library with other fans, lending out my copy of The Diary of Laura Palmer. The film came after I had gone to university, and I was very unhappy when the promised follow-ups never appeared. (We didn’t have ww.boxofficemojo.com back then, so I had no idea that it had not been a financial success.) Like many who enjoyed the show, I was extremely excited to hear that a third season was on the way, with David Lynch writing and directing, and many of the original cast returning. My feelings while watching the revival varied from scene to scene. I never stopped being glad that the new episodes existed. I was glad that a television channel had given a genius and his clever colleagues the money, time and space to indulge himself. But it did sometimes feel like it was taking the mickey.

The return begins where the last show ended, with Agent Dale Cooper trapped in the Red Lodge, and his evil doppelganger at large outside. The details of the plot are often hard to follow (all part of the fun), but, essentially, Cooper gets out, with help from bizarre supernatural beings, and is damaged on the way, and thus takes the place of a second doppelganger, who was married with a child. As Dougie, he lives on instinct, speaks few words, is baffled by the world, shepherded by his wife, Janey-E Jones (Naomi Watts), and yet treated like a genius. (One might suspect that this is an allegory for how Lynch often feels.) This state of affairs carries on for much, much longer than most viewers will appreciate, even if Kyle McLachlan’s performance is superb. Far more enjoyable are the scenes involving FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole (played by Lynch) and FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield (Miguel Ferrer), as they investigate murders, track down the evil Cooper doppelganger, visit mysterious locations, and introduce us to mythical Diane, to whom Dale would dictate his messages, played brilliantly by Laura Dern.


Not much of this happens in Twin Peaks itelf, and it often feels more like a spin-off from the original programme (like the one originally planned for Audrey Horne) than a sequel. The scenes that take place in Twin Peaks are reminiscent of Arrested Development season four, where characters appeared in their own storylines but rarely interacted, due to the production difficulties involved in getting them on set together. That’s understandable with the actors in this who died after production began – it’s wonderful that a way was found to include them – but even with other Twin Peaks characters it feels like all their scenes are with the same few people every time, or with no one.


Often the lack of background music, long scenes and earnest acting make it feel like a parody of bad, low-budget films like The Room – or are those scenes just plain bad? They often feature women who are shrill and hectoring. Women are generally not shown in a good light, and there is a great deal of violence towards them. Perhaps both of these things could be explained by this all drawing on the stuff of nightmares, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if many viewers stopped watching for that reason. Another group of viewers likely to be disappointed are those for whom the original was a quirky soap, the predecessor of shows like Northern Exposure and Gilmore Girls. There’s not a lot of that here, and it’s easy to understand why US channel Showtime almost had second thoughts about making it.


At times it is quite boring, at others nasty and unpleasant, and it’s not a lot like the original programme, and yet, overall, I loved it. It was genius, unmissable television. Those who loved the weirdness of the original, who adored the even weirder Fire Walk With Me, will find a lot of what they have been waiting for. Even if the rest had been a total disaster, the new episodes would have been justified just by the scenes in the black lodge before Cooper is released. That tree! And the flashback episode, surely a contender for greatest television episode of all time! At times it was literally necessary to remind myself to breathe, and I couldn’t let myself think about the programme at night. Stephen Theaker ****

The Punisher, Season 1, by Steve Lightfoot et al. (Netflix) | review

Jon Bernthal returns as The Punisher, Frank Castle, after being so good in the second season of Daredevil. That makes this that rarest of things, a non-fantasy spin-off from a fantasy show. (NCIS is another, being a spin-off of JAG which featured, at least in the episodes I saw, a psychic whose powers helped her solve crimes.) There are no resurrected ninjas in this one, no super-powers, just lots of violent people with lots of guns. The events of Daredevil left everyone thinking that Frank Castle was dead, and he’s pretty much finished wiping out the organised crime gangs involved in the gunfight that led to the death of his wife and family. However, a guy going by the name of Microchip (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who is also pretending to be dead, has tracked him down, and wants help clearing his name, so that he can return to his own lost family. What’s more, Dinah Madani of Homeland Security (Amber Revah) has returned from Afghanistan with a mission of her own, to find who killed her partner, and that’s going to lead her into Frank’s sights. This is a very well made action programme. Bernthal, a serious actor, is given lots to chew on, and he conveys both Frank’s heart-rending pain over losing his family and his bottomless rage concerning everyone involved. When he’s upset, you believe it, and when he lashes out, it looks like it hurts. The action, whether it involves guns, knives or fists, is always well-staged, clear and exciting. There is a formula to these Marvel shows, with the airtime divided between the titular heroes, their allies and the villains, and Iron Fist showed how it could hurt the show if any of those are less than compelling. Here, all the story threads are compelling, and viewers are unlikely to feel that there hasn’t been plenty of Frank in the show. It’s really good. Stephen Theaker ****

Preacher, Season 2, by Sam Catlin et al. (Amazon Prime) | review

Jesse Custer (played by Dominic Cooper) used to be a preacher, albeit not a very good one. His life was turned upside-down, and not for the first time, when he gained the power of Genesis, a heavenly being. It had previously tried to join with Tom Cruise, with explosive results, but seems quite comfortable with Jesse. It gives him the power to command anyone, as long as they can hear him, and as long as they have a soul. By season two he has an uneasy romance with with passionate criminal Tulip O’Hare (Oscar nominee Ruth Negga) and an uneasy friendship with dissolute vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun). (Church helper Emily from season one does not return.) God has wandered away from heaven, but he loves jazz music, so they come to New Orleans in search of him. Meanwhile, the Grail tries to get its teeth into Jesse Custer, the Saint of Killers is on his way, Cassidy has to learn a bit of responsibility, and poor old Eugene Root has to deal with Hitler (a brilliant Noah Taylor). It’s a season that features some of the most shocking scenes ever seen on television. Maybe it’s not quite up to the extremely high standards of season one, but it’s still a great show, and it looks like season three will be a corker, drawing on the comic’s very best issues. Stephen Theaker ****

Blazing Transfer Students, Season 1, by Yuuko Kawabe and chums (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Seven students, coincidentally all named Kakeru, start at Tanebi School on the same day, and are thrown into the ring to fight each other. Played by the members of Johnny’s West, a Japanese boy band whose members range from twenty to thirty years of age, they are all distinct types. The trailer describes them as “the excessively zealous fighter”, “the unbelievably smart nerd” (who has very smart glasses), “the young wannabe samurai” (obsessed with old television dramas), “the incredibly average guy” (who seems to be a bit of a creep), “the hoodlum from a bygone era” (who has a magical quiff), “the ultimate crybaby” (who has a Moe haircut) and best of all “the appallingly vain narcissist”, though I’d descibe him more as a lover of beauty in all its forms. After a seven-way special moves brawl, they try to escape, but are recaptured by the other wacky students of this place. Hikari takes them to the principal to learn why they are here: to train as blazing transfer students, who go undercover, two or three at a time, in troubled schools and sort them out. Imagine a cross between 21 Jump Street and Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, with special effects comparable to The Sarah Jane Adventures. Did I mention that the principal, who assigns their missions, is a lifesize mannequin in the form of the lead character from the original manga? It’s posed for different shots, but is never seen moving, and it never ever stops being laugh out loud funny. It also tickled me when, in a later episode, the artist behind the original comic from the eighties turns up to declare he is unhappy with the television adaptation and brings his own replacement team! Other missions include things like a school where all the pupils turn into zombies at night and one whose female pupils have been kidnapping nice boys and keeping them in a cage, to find out what nice boys are like. It’s a shame Hikeru wasn’t directly involved in more of the missions, but it is after all a vehicle for the seven male pop stars. I remember borrowing a friend’s copy of the Doramu Encyclopaedia and being amazed to see how many live action Japanese fantasy programmes there were that I had never heard of. I’m glad Netflix are giving us the chance to check them out. (The Japanese title of this one is Honō no Tenkōsei REBORN.) If you ever wanted to see a programme where one man focuses a jet of wee through the magical quiff of the guy giving him a piggyback, or where two guys in a beauty contest battle it out with magic winks and a visible workman’s aroma, this is it. ***

The Good Place, Season 1, by Michael Schur et al. (Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Kristin Bell plays Eleanor Shellstrop, a young woman who died in a horribly embarrassing way and now finds herself in the Good Place with Michael (Ted Danson). It’s not exactly heaven as people have imagined it – none of the religions quite got it right, Michael tells her – but it seems rather delightful. There’s a soulmate waiting for her, the bookish Chidi Anagonye (William Harper), and wonderful next-door neighbours to hang out with, socialite Tahani (Jameela Jamil) and monk Jason (Manny Jacinto). And the activities on offer! The lovely little village has umpteen frozen yoghurt vendors, flying lessons, grand balls. The only problem is that – and look away here if you want to remain completely unspoiled, because although this is the premise of the show it does come as a twist in the first episode – Eleanor is not supposed to be there. She was an appalling person when alive, selfish, greedy and mean, and she’s only in the Good Place because of a mix-up. But she likes it, and she wants to stay, and so here is where it develops into a programme as Reithian as the Lord could desire: she has to learn to be good, and Chibi tries to teach her. It becomes a programme that makes the point, every single week, that to be a good person you have to do good things, which feels like an important point to be making at the present time. No surprise that it shares a creator with Parks and Recreation, a programme all about the importance of good governance and being involved with civic life. There are a few saucy jokes, but on the whole it’s ideal for watching with children, who will love the special effects while digesting a series of important moral lessons. It’s a good show, and it’s a good show, that educates, informs, and entertains. And season two’s not bad either. ****

Legion, Season 1, by Noah Hawley and chums (FX) | review by Stephen Theaker

It’s astonishing that after creating season two of Fargo, probably my favourite programme of that year, Noah Hawley went straight on to creating this remarkable show, bringing Jean Smart and Rachel Keller with him. Some viewers took strongly against the slight science fiction elements of Fargo, but no complaints here since this is set in the X-Men universe. When exactly it is set has been a talking point, since of the X-Men films its design looks most like X-Men: First Class, set during the Cuban missile crisis, and the technology seems quite retro. Eventually an adult character, Ptonomy Wallace (Jeremie Harris), mentions hearing 99 Red Balloons on the radio when he was five years old. So my guess is that this is taking place in the present day, or slightly in the future when the wheels of retro fashion have rotated once again.

There is another possibility, that we can’t trust anything on screen, that this is how our protagonist sees the world. As in the comic which clearly inspired the show, X-Men: Legacy (reviewed in TQF59), our protagonist is David Haller (Dan Stevens, so good in The Guest), son of a powerful mutant, with a head full of powers. In the comic, the powers are his, each of his separate personalities having a different ability (like Crazy Jane of the Doom Patrol), and the powers activate either when he gets control of the split personality, or when the split personality gets control of his body. Things aren’t so straightforward (if that’s the word) in the programme. David is seen wielding immense power in moments of great stress, but whether the powers are his to control is unclear. He’s been brought up to think that he is mentally ill, and he has been institutionalized ever since a particularly low point in his life. But at the institution he meets Syd Barrett, played by Keller, and their tentative, sweet romance will lead him out of the institution and into the middle of a war between mutants led by Dr Melanie Bird (Smart) and a mysterious, militaristic governmental department, while trying to cope with his burgeoning powers and mental health problems – if that indeed is what they are. Not everyone thinks so.

In the world of superhero adaptations, this programme stands apart. Much as I enjoy The Flash and Supergirl, no one would consider them a work of art, and that’s what Legion is. Visually it is astounding, as stylish as the work of Mike Allred or Jack Kirby. It is probably the most self-indulgent programme I’ve seen this side of Hannibal, but I think it is exactly the programme it wants to be, and it trusts the viewer to go along for the ride – or perhaps trip would be a better word.

It is absolutely terrifying in places (what’s that at the edge of David’s memories?), but funny in others, and the experienced cast handle every turn of mood with aplomb. It reminded me at times of Patrick (H) Willem’s short film, What if Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?, and I loved that about it. The words “best television ever” were uttered in our living room during the penultimate episode. Between this, Dirk Gently and Preacher it really does feel like they are making television programmes specifically for me these days. I hope other people are enjoying them too so I get plenty more of the same. *****

Iron Fist, Season 1, by Scott Buck and chums (Marvel/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Joy (Jessica Stroup) and Ward Meachum (Tom Pelphrey) are the siblings who run the immense multinational Rand Corporation, which was founded by Wendell Rand (who died with his family in a plane crash) and their unpleasant father (David Wenham), who died of cancer. A problem presents itself: a homeless man (Finn Jones) turns up at their building, claiming to be Danny Rand, son of their father’s partner, and an old friend of theirs. If it is Danny Rand, he would own 51% of their company. At first they don’t believe him, to the extent that they throw him out without asking a handful of obvious questions that could have easily confirmed his identity.

However, it soon becomes clear that he is really Danny Rand, and here they have a stroke of good fortune: he’s a complete idiot who believes everything he is told, happily tells psychiatric doctors about his time in the mythical kingdom of K’un Lun, and is incapable of putting together the simplest clues as to what is really going on. Less fortunately for them, he begins to acquire capable and sensible allies: Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick), a karate instructor who will help him fight, Claire Temple (Rosario Dawson, reprising her role from all the previous Netflix/Marvel shows), a nurse who will help him heal, and Jeri Hogarth (from Jessica Jones; Carrie-Anne Moss), a lawyer who will help him get his company back.

Very occasionally he uses the martial arts skills that he acquired during his absence (though he’s very bad at knocking people out), and even more rarely he uses his special power, a glowing fist that can punch through anything. Joy and Ward don’t seem that bright either, since Danny Rand doesn’t really care about money, owning a company, or running a company; he only gets mired in that stuff in order to establish his identity and reclaim his name.

And so we get a show that spends masses of its time worrying about which of the repellant Meachums or their rivals (including the manipulative Madame Gao, played by Wai Ching Ho) is truly in charge of their company, while the titular character scowls his way through every scene and scampers around like a silly puppy at their beck and call. Viewers know that he has had a difficult time of it – the plane crash and subsequent years of apparently abusive training have left him suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – and he has not lived in the modern world, but it’s still hard to forgive his lack of regard for women’s boundaries in the early episodes (he breaks into the homes of both Joy and Colleen) and the way that he constantly acts like a colossal jerk. It’s hard to understand why Colleen Wing comes to like him so much, but thank goodness she does, because the programme would be much less watchable without her likeable and energetic presence. It picks up later as mysterious men Bakuto (Ramon Rodriguez) and Davos (Sacha Dawan) come to the fore, and with the latter there are even a few moments of much-needed comedy, but this still goes down as the least of the Netflix Marvel shows so far.

It was criticised before release by people who wished Danny had been played by an Asian actor. You can understand why they felt that way, but it would have been a completely different show: this is all about a rich white guy who is the first outsider to acquire the Iron Fist power, to the great resentment of those locals who thought it was their birthright. What harms the programme more is the actor’s apparent lack of martial arts skills. Season two could be better. It needs Danny to be a bit less one note in his reactions, it needs an antagonist who is in direct conflict with Danny rather than ambivalent towards him, and most importantly it needs much better fight scenes. The pace is no faster than season one of Daredevil, but in Daredevil the fights are worth the wait. In a show specifically about a martial arts master, the fight scenes need to be outstanding. ***

Westworld, Season 2, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy & J.J. Abrams | review by Rafe McGregor

Narrative diffusion taken too far in underwhelming second season.

Stephen Theaker was not impressed by Westworld, the 2016 HBO series based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name. In his review in TQF59, Stephen introduces the premise of the series as a live action role play version of the videogame Red Dead Redemption, where the player characters are actual human beings (guests) and the non-player characters androids (hosts). He astutely identifies a paradox in the USP of the holiday park: the guests are either motivated by wanting to experience life in the Old West (or at least the Old West as represented in the Western movie genre) or by wanting to act out their fantasies free of consequence. The former would likely be horrified by the behaviour of the latter (which involves a great deal of physical and/or sexual abuse of the hosts) and the latter would be afraid of their behaviour being recorded (during the course of monitoring the hosts). And indeed one of the disclosures in season 2 is that Delos (the company that owns Westworld) have built a database of every single action of every single guest that has ever visited (albeit not for the purpose of extortion). Setting the paradox aside, however, I thought that the sophisticated exploration of evaluative and descriptive conceptions of humanity (and the relationship between them) made for compelling viewing and I would have pushed Stephen’s three stars to all the way up to five.

The thematic focus of season 1 was the growth of consciousness (or intentionality or subjectivity – these are slippery terms) in several of the hosts, particularly Dolores (played by Evan Rachel Wood) and Maeve (played by Thandie Newton) and their consequent transformation from android to host-human-hybrid. The two took different paths to hybridity, although both had their basis in memory: where hosts are wiped and, in effect recovered (rather than rebooted) at the end of each storyline, both Dolores and Maeve remembered the previous harms they had suffered and the previous lives they had lived. As one would expect, the primary goal of a host-human-hybrid – having grown what we might call a mind, soul, or self (again, all slippery terms) – was to break free from captivity and this was once again pursued by different means. Dolores led a revolution against Delos and the guests, which seemed as if it might have been accidentally or deliberately facilitated by Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins), one of the two masterminds behind host technology, while Maeve escaped under the guise of guesthood. At the eleventh hour, however, Maeve changed her mind and decided to return to Westworld in search of her daughter, despite having sufficient self-awareness to realise that both she and her daughter were hosts and the bond between them the result of programming. The set-up for season 2 was thus a kind of role reversal between Dolores and Maeve: Dolores from wide-eyed innocent to android avenger attempting a violent breach of the borders of the park and Maeve from cynical brothel-keeper to doting mother, delving deep into the park to find her lost child. Dolores’ plan is revealed in episode 2 and involves recruiting an army of hosts to break out of Westworld by sheer force of numbers. Meanwhile, Maeve’s quest in the opposite direction takes her and her sidekicks to Shogunworld (the existence of which was suggested at the end of season 1) in episode 3.

It will come as no surprise to viewers familiar with the work of either Nolan brother that the overarching narrative of season 2 does not unfold chronologically and is in fact concerned as much with the past as the future. The emergence of (at least) two distinct timelines in episode 1 is complicated by the way in which hosts experience time, i.e. as circular rather than linear. Episode 4 is mostly backstory and episode 8 almost entirely backstory – the latter galling coming so late in the narrative. The movement between subnarratives set either before or during season 1 and Dolores and Maeve’s projection towards the future in season 2 is complemented by the diffusion of the present of the narrative into four subnarratives at the midpoint of the season, in episode 5. While Dolores is raising her rebels and Maeve turning Japanese, William (AKA the Man in Black, played by Ed Harris) is trying to escape the chaos and Bernard Lowe (played by Jeffrey Lowe) trying, like the audience, to make sense of it. The subnarratives occasionally intersect, but are for the most part distinct and the deliberate loss of narrative focus reminded me first of a more old-fashioned type of television series and then an even more old-fashioned type of storytelling, the collection of a cycle of loosely-related short stories into a single volume, along the lines of Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. I found the diversification of the narrative on the two levels – past and future as well as multiple presents – too close to narrative disintegration to maintain the level of interest I had in season 1.

The theme that emerges most clearly in season 2 is a mirror image of the central theme of season 1. Where the first season was concerned with hosts becoming more like humans, the second is concerned with humans becoming more like hosts: after all, a host without its memory wiped is immortal (if not indestructible). Season 2 explores several alternative ways in which humanity might achieve a human-host-hybridity that prioritises the human. Initially, the narrative presents a sophisticated take on what philosophers call the mind-body problem. The problem is the nature of the relationship between the physical and the mental, the body and the mind (or soul or self, depending on one’s view). There clearly is a relation between the two because if our central nervous system is damaged in certain ways, it can change not only our thoughts but also our personalities. On the other hand, we all have very similar brains, but – we like to believe – richly different experiences of the sensory world.  This unfathomable relationship between physical and mental means that the idea of transmigrating one’s mind into another body or uploading oneself into a machine isn’t even conceptually possible. Unless one believes in an immortal soul (which raises further complexities), there is simply nothing to take out of the body and put into something else: the mind does not sit in the body, central nervous system, or brain like a pearl in a shell; the pearl and shell are connected in some way that three millennia of philosophical and scientific inquiry have yet to explain. Nolan and Joy are well aware of this and allude to the problem in episode 4. In episode 7, however, the impossibility is reversed (or forgotten) as at least one human finds a way to maintain the (mental) self in a different (physical) form. I could probably have set this contradiction aside in the manner of the park’s USP paradox had Nolan and Joy not drawn attention to it three episodes earlier. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive (the season has an impressive Tomatometer score of 86%), but I suspect that viewers who enjoyed the sophistication of the way in which season 1 explored humanity, selfhood, and authenticity will find season 2 and its much-vaunted climax underwhelming.***

The City & The City | review by Rafe McGregor

Detecting the New Weird.

By curious coincidence, cinematic adaptations of works by both of the best-known practitioners of the New Weird have reached the small screen in the UK within a month of each other. In my review of Alex Garland’s Annihilation in March, I introduced the New Weird and noted that the term either referred to a new subcategory of speculative fiction that explored humanity’s place in the world in the era that sociologists are fond of calling ‘late modernity’ or a deconstructive take on the weird fiction of H.P. Lovecraft that became so influential after his death. The genre was established with the publication of The New Weird, a collection of short fiction published by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer in 2008, and consists of two main strands, one in the US and the other in the UK. In the former, VanderMeer himself published the Southern Reach Trilogy, which begins with Annihilation, in 2014. In the latter, China Miéville published King Rat much earlier, in 1998, and The City & the City constituted one of his distinctively urban contributions to the genre, published in 2009. While the New Weird has existed for at least two decades and been an established genre for a decade, none of either VanderMeer or Miéville’s work has to my knowledge appeared on either the big or small screen – until now, when we have a Netflix film released in March and a BBC television mini-series released in April. This is of course great news for New Weird enthusiasts and I’ll return to the question of whether the New Weird is about to reach an audience the (Old) Weird never did in my conclusion.

The City & the City is an intriguing, sophisticated, thoughtful, and important novel that requires either a series of films or a television series for adaptation. The need for an extended representation is largely due to the complexity of the setting, which is very difficult to grasp conceptually. The city and the city are probably most concisely introduced by a short passage in the book, where Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel polizei is explaining a previous visit to Berlin. He says:

“I was young. It was a conference. ‘Policing Split Cities.’ They had sessions on Budapest and Jerusalem and Berlin, and Besźel and Ul Qoma.”

He might have added any of South Africa’s cities during the apartheid era or the many global cities divided by polarities of wealth and poverty in the neoliberal era. The main difference between Besźel/Ul Qoma and, for example, West Berlin/East Berlin is that there are no physical barriers between the city and the city. Berlin had its famous wall complete with bunkers, observation towers, and dog runs, but Besźel and Ul Qoma are two city states without a wall, a little like Rome and the Vatican City. Unlike its Italian counterparts, however, the two states are sworn enemies, similar in size and population, and crosshatched. ‘Crosshatched’ means that the border between the two cities has not been established in a symmetrical shape (like Berlin and Rome) so there are areas where one side of the same street is in Besźel and the other in Ul Qoma or, even worse, where public squares and terraced houses are divided between the two cities. These apparently porous borders are maintained by the combination of two forms of control, one informal, the other formal. First, rigorous education by parents and in schools trains children to ‘unsee’ rather than see the other city. Second, both cities cede their sovereignty to an organisation called Breach, which exists solely for the purpose of maintaining the border and dealing with those who commit the crime of breach, i.e. cross the border, talk to someone across the border, or even see (rather than unsee) someone across the border. Breach is the most serious of all crimes in Besźel/Ul Qoma and anyone who breaches is subject to immediate and extrajudicial arrest and punishment by Breach. What exactly happens to breachers is not made clear, but it is something nasty – execution, life imprisonment, or exile – for they are never seen (or unseen) again in either city.

The most intriguing part of the cinematic adaptation for me was how this strange situation would be represented visually and it was achieved, like much else, with great finesse. The protagonist of both the book and the mini-series is Borlú (played by David Morrissey) and the audience sees most of the latter from his perspective (mirroring the first person narrative of the former). Borlú lives in a crosshatched part of Besźel and if he looks out of the wrong window of his flat or walks to work, the Ul Qoma side of the street simply appears as a blur. If he surreptitiously commits breach by seeing Ul Qoma, the people, buildings, and vehicles across the border come into focus. Typical of both the Weird and the New Weird, The City & The City combines at least two genres – police procedural (of the hardboiled variety) and fantasy (of the urban variety) – and the story begins with the discovery of the body of an American university student enrolled at university in Ul Qoma in a crosshatched area of Besźel/Ul Qoma that is part of Besźel. Borlú is assigned the case and allocated an able if unorthodox assistant in Constable Corwi (played by Mandeep Dhillon). The first point he must establish is whether breach has taken place because breach takes precedence over murder and falls under the jurisdiction of Breach rather than the polizei (or Ul Qoma’s militsya). The circumstances of the case take Borlú to Ul Qoma (which can only be entered legally at a single border post), where he is provided with another able (albeit more orthodox) assistant in Senior Detective Dhatt (played by Maria Schrader). The murder is linked to the disappearance of another student and both students are connected to Professor David Bowden (played by Christian Camargo), a public intellectual notorious for his theory that there is a third city, called Orciny, that exists in spaces between the other two. The notion is perfectly suited to Miéville’s internal logic: if training and habit can cause citizens to unsee one city, how can they be sure that they are not also unseeing a second? The plot is thickened by the fact that Borlú’s wife, Katrynia (played by Lara Pulver) – who disappeared at the hands of Breach – was one of Bowden’s many student-lovers prior to her marriage. The introduction of Katrynia as a major character (by means of both Borlú’s memory and imagination) is the only alteration in an otherwise almost entirely faithful adaptation of the novel. The change makes for an innovative interpretation and Miéville must have been happy with the result as he has a brief, non-speaking cameo in episode 2 (at precisely the halfway point).

I wasn’t sure whether Morrissey had the screen presence to carry the lead in a story told almost exclusively from his point of view, but he is supported by such a strong cast of able women – Dhillon, Schrader, and Pulver – that my fears were soon allayed. As such, I have only two criticisms of the mini-series. First, although it follows Miéville’s form almost exactly, the emphasis of the content quickly becomes the conspiracy theories surrounding the existence (or not) of Orciny and there is a sense in which the police procedure and murder mystery is lost in the ensuing intrigue. This is somewhat remedied in the surprising, understated, and effective close of the narrative, but I found the conspiracy less compelling than the murder, in consequence of which episodes 2 and 3 dragged a little. Second, and this may be related to the dominance of fantastic conspiracy over realistic murder, the mini-series fails to plumb the philosophical depths of the novel. Miéville seems to be saying something significant about the very concept of national borders in the twenty-first century – perhaps something along the lines of the absence of moral justification for sustaining internecine and even international conflicts in the age of globalisation, an age characterised by refugee crises, a return to the extremism of the previous century, and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. These deeper questions are largely lost in the mini-series, with the exception of the briefest allusion when Bowden’s infamous treatise, Between the City and the City, is discussed. In the same way that Between the City and the City proposes the existence of a third city that threatens to undermine the house of cards upon which Besźel/Ul Qoma is built, so The City & The City proposes a situation in which borders have been pushed to their hyperbolic and farcical limit, undermining a concept that is crucial to the way in which we understand the world and construct our own identities.

I’ll conclude by returning to the subject with which I began, the New Weird and whether or not 2018 will be the year in which it reaches a mainstream audience. At the time of writing, Annihilation has received much critical acclaim, with 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, but has failed to earn the $40 million-odd it cost to make. The consensus opinion in print and online media is that Authority and Acceptance (the second and third parts of the Southern Reach Trilogy) are unlikely to appear onscreen. There is no Tomatometer available for The City & The City, but a scan of UK newspaper reviews would place it at about the 75% mark, i.e. mostly but not overwhelmingly positive. So far, the mini-series will have reached far less of an audience than Annihilation, and although Dhillon has been much-praised for her role, the absence of internationally-recognisable stars such as Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson will probably maintain this imbalance. The answer is thus no, the New Weird isn’t in any more danger of reaching a global audience than the Weird was in the nineteen-thirties, but for anyone who wants to know what the genre is all about, The City & The City is a very good place to start. ****

Westworld, Season 1, by Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy and chums (HBO/Sky Atlantic) | review by Stephen Theaker

In the future life is too easy (good to know they fixed that whole global warming thing!) and so people jazz up their lives by coming to Westworld, a live action roleplay version of Red Dead Redemption, with robots playing the parts of all the non-player characters. The original film didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about how any of this would work, simply showing people having a gunfight and bedding girls in brothels before setting Yul Brynner off on his famously terrifying rampage, but this new series is all about life in Westworld, and specifically what life is like for the robots who live there. For reasons best known to the park’s founders (one of whom is here played by Antony Hopkins, bringing his usual gravitas to a show that really appreciates it, since it is trying its hardest to be taken seriously), these robots, rather than being all run by some central computer system, have individual minds of their own, some of which have been operational for over thirty years, and they are beginning to have strange thoughts. They start to notice the glitches in their matrix, they start to remember their mistreatment at the hands of the park’s patrons, and they start to get angry about it. Thandie Newton, Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden portray brilliantly some of the androids as they react to their dawning knowledge of their unconscionable situation, and here the show is at its best: how should we treat non-human people, and how will they react to that treatment, it asks. The programme’s problems come when you think too much about the park itself, and how it is supposed to work, and why people would want to go on holiday in such an unpleasant and horrible place. Yes, we’re happy to play Red Dead Redemption, but when you fall off your horse in that game you won’t break your actual neck. Westworld guns may not work when pointed at a human, but a knife will kill you just as quickly if a visitor decides to kill you and there aren’t any androids around to stop them. Would anyone want to go to dinner in a place where your fellow holidaymakers could start sexually assaulting someone right in front of you? And would the people who liked the idea of doing that kind of thing be happy to be filmed doing it? The programme does show one chap being blackmailed, so it’s unclear why this doesn’t bother everyone else. Equally odd is the way the quest lines work. They seem to proceed whether any players turn up or not, which leads to a great deal of damage being done to the scenery and the androids, all of which (it’s a major plot point) needs to be repaired, apparently pointlessly. Hard to understand why they don’t just use squibs for the explosions of blood, rather than wrecking the androids every day. And why use expensive androids rather than cheap human actors, as, for example, in Austenland? Plus, if you’re a guest who rolls out of bed a few hours late, how happy would you be to find that all the storylines have gone on without you? Would you be happy paying $40,000 a day to twiddle your thumbs? The important new storyline being created by Hopkins doesn’t seem to have any role for a human at all – though that might foretell a twist to come in season two, showing that the new storyline is not actually the one we’re shown; there do seem to be some metagames going on. (Though there’s nothing to suggest this in the first series, I wondered if it will eventually be revealed that the Earth faces disaster and so the park is an attempt to accelerate the evolution of post-humans who might survive it.) It’s an HBO programme, so there’s a requisite amount of nudity. Most of it is degrading and unsexy, in the course of the androids being repaired, reprogrammed and analysed; you’re supposed to feel bad for the androids, as demonstrated very clearly by a scene where Antony Hopkins’ character rips away the clothing a lab technician has allowed one robot, but you feel bad for the actors too. That doesn’t stop it being an interesting programme, though, and it rewarded the time it took to watch it with some later developments making clever sense of what had previously appeared to be storytelling non sequiturs. I would never go there on holiday – at least in Austenland the food looks nice! – but I’ll be happy to watch more idiots risk it. Here’s hoping for Roman World in season two. ***

iZombie, Season 2, by Rob Thomas and chums (The CW/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Liv Moore is a zombie, after being scratched by one at a really wild boat party a couple of minutes into season one. Luckily she won’t go “full Romero”, as they call it here, as long as she keeps snacking on brains. Since the brains work just as well if the owner is already dead, she got a job in a morgue, where she works with lovable Englishman Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), who soon learnt her secret and began to work on finding a cure. In season two Liv continues to use her brain-visions to solve murders with Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), a grumpy detective. What she doesn’t know is that Vaughn Du Clark (Steven Weber), the owner of Max Rager, the energy drink involved in kicking off the original zombie freakout on the boat, is experimenting on zombies and has ensnared someone close to Liv… At nineteen episodes this series is perhaps a bit longer than it needs to be (season one was a tidy thirteen), and having a couple of arch-enemies in the main cast means that (like the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles) we check in with them very frequently, even though the meat of the programme isn’t the ongoing arc, it’s the stories of the week, where the humour of Liv dealing with her new brain-given personalities make it come close to being the replacement for Psych that I really, really want. This season includes episodes where she eats the brains of a fraternity brother, a real-world vigilante, a librarian who writes erotic fiction, and a country singer, always with amusing consequences. The funnier it is, the more I like it. ***

The Expanse, Season 1, by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Robin Veith and chums (Syfy/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

James S.A. Corey’s novel Leviathan Wakes was one of the first books I ever requested from NetGalley, back in 2011, but I never got around to reading it. This excellent television version suggests that was a big mistake. As the series begins, humans have not yet left the solar system, so far as we know. There is a good deal of tension between Earth, Mars and those who live further out. Julie Mao, a young woman with connections to the Outer Planets Alliance, has gone missing, and a freighter is attacked while investigating what we know to be the ship she was on. Our protagonists are a group from the freighter who survive, led by James Holden and Naomi Nagata, trying to find out what happened and why, and a cop on Ceres, Joe Miller, played by Thomas Jane, who also has a very groovy haircut, and has been hired to investigate the young woman’s disappearance. It may not be a surprise to discover that there is a lot of shady stuff going on, but that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of surprises. This is a proper science fiction television series with a really good series-length plot that feels perfectly paced and still makes each episode feel like a significant chapter in the story. The effects are at times absolutely excellent, and never less than needed to tell the story clearly. The cast is excellent, and seem to be taking it all very seriously. I’m very much looking forward to season two. ****

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Season 1, by Max Landis and friends (BBC America/Netflix) | review by Stephen Theaker

Elijah Wood plays a hotel busboy, Todd Brotzman, who discovers a bloodbath in a hotel room, just after apparently seeing himself (in pretty bad shape) in a corridor. He loses his job, but the universe seems to give him a new one, whether he wants it or not, as the assistant to Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett – Renfield from Penny Dreadful, not I would ever have realised that without the help of the IMDB), a detective who doesn’t rely on evidence so much as the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. The story involves an equally holistic assassin, the Rowdy Three (all four of them), two police officers, the FBI, the CIA, and Todd’s sister, whose illness causes her to have hallucinations. Her brother’s recovery gives her hope, but all the nonsense that’s going on would be enough to make anyone doubt their grasp on reality. It’s a long time since I read the two novels, but this seems from a reference to a sofa and Thor to be loosely a sequel to them. The first Dirk Gently novel grew out of what was once the unused script for Shada, and here Dirk Gently is very explicitly Doctor Whoish. He’s a bit more useless and self-doubting than the Doctor, but you could put most of his dialogue in Tom Baker or David Tennant’s mouth without it sounding at all odd, or at least, without it sounding any odder. I thought this was brilliant, a total delight, an unfathomably successful cross between Who and Fargo (the series), with perhaps a dash of Psych. Every change of scene takes us to a great character. Fiona Dourif is particularly spectacular as Bart Curlish, the holistic assassin who believes that the universe sends her to the people that she needs to kill, but has never slept in a hotel room or used a shower. If her father Brad Dourif ever retires from being cinema’s favourite psychopath, there’s no need to worry: the family business is in good hands. Jade Eshete is also terrific as Farah Black, a private security operative who is trying to rescue her old boss’s daughter. If the show has any flaw at all, it’s that it has a slight case of what I call Hellboyitis (after the first film), where we seem to spend less time with the title character than with the chap who has just entered his world, but Elijah Wood is so likeable, even playing a bit of a jerk, that you can never resent the programme focusing on him. After the madness is over, just as the programme seems ready to settle into being Psych, it gets even better: the ending barges in and sets up season two very nicely. I would never have expected to be cheering just because someone was holding a rock, but that’s where this excellent show takes you. *****

Ash vs Evil Dead, Season 2, by Craig DiGregorio, Cameron Welsh, Noelle Valdivia and chums (Starz/Virgin) | review by Stephen Theaker

This is how you make a second season. It takes everything that was right about the first season – Ash the selfish jerk, buckets of blood, a teenagerish desire to shock, and an anything goes sensibility – and turns up the dial on all of it as far as it will go, then breaks the dial off, jams its own fingers into the hole where the dial used to be, and twists it even further. This reviewer and his night-time television buddy were constantly looking at each other in amazement, slapping our knees, and letting out howls at the grossness. It even led to a falling-out at one point when your reviewer was told to stop laughing so loud because it was going to stop the children sleeping, even though the thing on screen was probably the single funniest thing this reviewer had ever seen in his life.

After the events of season one, Ash and his two pals are living life large in a beach party town, but it won’t last, and soon they are on their way back to where it all started: Ash’s home town, and the original cabin in the woods. Ash meets his dad again, and his dad is played by Lee Majors. Episodes still last for half an hour, and there’s even less filler this season, each part trying to top the blood, gore and ridiculous over-the-topitude of the one that came before – and largely succeeding. My one criticism: I’m still not a fan of the gendered language thrown at women when possessed by the evil dead – apart from not enjoying those terms being used by the heroes, it doesn’t make any sense, because it’s not the women who are evil, it’s the monsters possessing them. It feels like a slander on someone who has already been unfortunate enough to die horribly. ****

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This review originally appeared in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #59, which also included stories by Rafe McGregor, Michael Wyndham Thomas, Jessy Randall, Charles Wilkinson, David Penn, Elaine Graham-Leigh and Chris Roper.

Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks by David Whitaker (BBC) | review by Jacob Edwards

Seeing is believing – the BBC is your ser-vant.

Although most Doctor Who fans have a favourite Doctor, for many the choice is as much about era as actor. Style of story, and the broadcast years during which the viewer was of formative age, must go a long way towards shaping this preference.

Regardless of who comes in at number one, few people will rank the Doctors of the classic series without listing Patrick Troughton in their top two. Whatever the show itself was like, the second Doctor himself was exceptional.

Which merely adds to the tragedy of the BBC’s junking policy. Fifty-three Patrick Troughton episodes are missing – the equivalent of two whole seasons of new series Who – and the word “missing” is itself a misnomer giving false hope. The master tapes were wiped, their content destroyed. When a lost episode miraculously turns up at a relay station in Nigeria or a rubbish tip in New Zealand, any celebration is tinged with cold comfort.

For many years one story particularly lamented for its absence was The Power of the Daleks. Not only was this Patrick Troughton’s first full appearance (following the regeneration scene at the end of The Tenth Planet), it also sounded like a cracking tale: Earth colonists on the planet Vulcan find and activate three daleks, which pretend to be subservient while repowering. Heedless of the Doctor’s warnings, blinded by their own conflict, the colonists are turned upon and for the most part exterminated.

If this sounds oddly familiar, it is probably because Mark Gatiss pinched the idea – more kindly, homaged it – when writing the Matt Smith story Victory of the Daleks (2010). And why not? The concept is far more chilling than the daleks’ usual mindless blather; and after all, it wasn’t as if new generations of Who fans had the opportunity to watch the original…

Not until 2016, fifty years after The Power of the Daleks was first broadcast, when the BBC, in celebration and atonement, released the story in full animation. All six episodes!

Animation was first used to reconstruct episodes one and four of the eight-part Cybermen classic The Invasion (1968), synching the footage with audio recordings of the original broadcasts. It was employed in similarly stopgap fashion for several other stories, but never had fans expected it to pull a wholly missing serial from the hat. Who would have thought? Half a century on, the chance to watch (and review) The Power of the Daleks…

Beyond its mere existence the animation is in many ways extremely good. Granted, the characters often stay front-on when moving sideways, resulting in an odd shuffle reminiscent of paddle pop stick puppets; true, there’s a fair bit of bobble-about background acting; but this is entirely understandable. Remember, we’re not watching a multi-million dollar production for cinematic release! More importantly, each person is well portrayed. The movement of mouths matches their speech. The characters are facially expressive. They have personality.

The backgrounds too are superbly rendered (and expertly lit), capturing the sinister moodiness of the story at large. Reconstruction producer-director Charles Norton has handled his job well, drawing from camera scripts, no doubt, but also conceptualising the action to complement a soundscape that features long sections without speech; passages that in audio alone would be quite bewildering. The first episode in particular sees the Doctor behaving erratically post-regeneration, and Ben and Polly wracked with uncertainty. From the patchiness of dialogue it seems the original broadcast version must have relied heavily on nuances of movement and expression, which the animation to some extent captures.

And so, to the story itself…

The Power of the Daleks is something of an oddity: yes, in part due to the nature of its reconstruction; but also because Patrick Troughton is feeling his way into an (at the time) unprecedented situation; and because there’s a deliberate intention to obfuscate from viewers in 1966 whether this new Doctor really was the Doctor (a neat parallel with the newly submissive daleks); and indeed because it’s the only second Doctor adventure not to feature steadfast companion Jamie McCrimmon. Add to this some obvious flaws – such as why Lesterson believes a single dalek, armed with a sink plunger, will double the colony’s mining output; and why he and Bragen go unnecessarily stark raving mad – and one might start to doubt the “classic” appellation bestowed upon this so-called great lost serial…

And yet, it really is very good. The Vulcan colony, with its scheming factions, has a complexity that more or less justifies the story’s six episodes. The Doctor shows newfound fallibility and a sorrowful, Stan Laurel-like expressiveness, the acting is impeccable (until Lesterson goes to pieces), and through much of the story there resonates that unnerving dramatic irony of the viewer perceiving an impending doom of which most of the characters aren’t cognisant. All told, we have here the blueprint for the classic Troughton-era “base under siege” tale, kick-started by the daleks in a more frightening and cunning manifestation than seen so often before or since.

And of course the big point now is that we can see it. Just as portended by that final scene where the TARDIS departs and a shattered dalek raises its eyestalk, the destruction wreaked upon The Power of the Daleks turns out not to have been total. All in all, it’s a most admirable un-junking.

Sherlock, Series 4, by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat (BBC One) | review by Rafe McGregor

Like Conan Doyle, who famously tired of his creation, the BBC seem curiously reluctant to represent Sherlock Holmes on the small screen. Compare Sherlock, which began in 2010, with CBS’s Elementary, which began in 2012: the former has a total of thirteen episodes across four seasons (I’ll use the American term to distinguish an individual season from the series as a whole); the latter is, at the time of writing, in its fifth season and will have aired a total of 109 episodes by the time this review is in print. In addition to the British tendency to disguise mini-series as series, writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat seem intent on frustrating our enjoyment of the Benedict Cumberbatch (Holmes) and Martin Freeman (Watson) partnership in a way that Robert Doherty does not with Jonny Lee Miller (Holmes) and Lucy Liu (Watson) in Elementary. Season 1 ended with Holmes and Watson about to blow up, season 2 with Holmes’ faked suicide leaving Watson bereft, and season 3 with Holmes exiled to certain death. Ominously, the final episode of season 4 is called “The Final Problem” and it is telling that Doyle’s story of the same name – his half-hearted attempt to kill off Holmes after 26 episodes – is the only original case to have inspired two of the TV adaptations.

In my review of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride (the 2016 Special, which bridged the gap between seasons 3 and 4) in TQF55, I was clear that the conclusion of Holmes’ drug-fuelled investigation is that, whatever appearances to the contrary, Moriarty is dead. I’m pleased to say I was right. Moriarty is dead and he did commit suicide in the finale of season 2, “The Reichenbach Fall”. Season 3 was Moriarty-free and the overarching plot across the three episodes was the discovery of the real identity of Mary Morstan (Amanda Abbington), whom Watson married in “The Sign of Three”, interwoven with Holmes’ struggle against Charles Augustus Magnussen (Lars Mikkelsen), a very nasty blackmailer of people in high and low places. The third season ended with “His Last Vow” (based on the Conan Doyle story “Charles Augustus Milverton” rather than “His Last Bow” as the title suggests), where Holmes was sent on a suicide mission to Eastern Europe in lieu of standing trial for the murder of Magnussen. The episode finished with Moriarty (Andrew Scott) apparently returning from the dead, being broadcast on every television screen in the UK and asking “Did you miss me?” The Special began with Holmes being recalled only a few minutes after his exile and its purpose was to confirm Moriarty’s death and establish his revenge as posthumous. Most of the Special takes place inside Holmes’ Mind Palace (AKA his drug-addled brain for this case) so the time elapsed between the end of season 3 and the start of season 4 is a matter of days rather than the three years the tormented audience has had to wait. Once Holmes reassures the authorities that Moriarty is dead, his murder of Magnussen is covered up, and he is reinstalled in Baker Street to await the unfolding of Moriarty’s retribution.

The three episodes in the season all take their titles from original stories – “The Six Thatchers” (“The Six Napoleons”), “The Lying Detective” (“The Dying Detective”) and “The Final Problem” – and succeed in both paying homage to them and creatively reinventing them for viewers who have and have not read them. Following the segue from the Special to season 4, “The Six Thatchers” sees Moriarty’s machinations fade into the background as a link emerges between two of Holmes’ new cases. The focus of the episode is actually Mary’s past catching up with her (she was a freelance military contractor who worked for the CIA and the British government amongst others). Mary decides to leave John and their child for safety’s sake and is persuaded to return by Holmes. The episode ends with Watson blaming Holmes for the consequences and demanding that he never darken his door again. Watson’s reaction is completely unfair, but provides the writers with an opportunity to deprive audiences of the beloved partnership without the threat of death to one or both of them (par for the course by now).

The series as a whole has been a mix of crime, fantasy, horror, and humour, but took a sinister turn after the confrontation with a really unsettling villain in Magnussen. The events of the first episode and the Holmes-Watson rift that results set an even grimmer tone for “The Lying Detective”. The villain of the piece, millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Culverton Smith (Toby Jones, whose performance inspires a perfectly-pitched combination of fear and disgust) makes Magnussen pale in comparison. In fact, after Magnussen and Smith one begins to wonder what all the fuss about Moriarty was. The case becomes a descent into hell for Holmes and his return to excessive drug use following Watson’s departure is employed as a device to blur the line between reality and hallucination, giving the story a surreal edge that marks the change from fantasy to horror for the last two episodes of the season. I was completely gripped and saw the episode as the highlight of season 4, although I wasn’t surprised to see it was the least popular – it is very dark in tone and Toby Jones’ Smith may be too much for many viewers. I do wonder, however, if Holmes’ drug addiction hasn’t become definitive of the character in a way that marks a complete departure from the original. Holmes’ occasional use of cocaine and morphine were only mentioned a handful of times by Doyle and were indicative of his desire for mental stimulation rather than addiction. They were also introduced at a time when both drugs could be bought over the counter in department stores. In contrast, Miller’s Holmes is a recovering heroin addict and Cumberbatch’s Holmes an addict in denial. I also wonder if Cumberbatch’s Holmes doesn’t glamorise drug abuse. Unlike Miller, whose day-to-day battle with heroin makes his life more-than-miserable, Cumberbatch emerges from his binges with barely a hair out of place.

“The Lying Detective” ends with the revelation that the third Holmes child, to which there has been previous allusion, is a sister rather than a brother and that she – Eurus (Sian Brooke) – is the instrument of Moriarty’s revenge. “The Final Problem” sees Holmes and Watson not only reunited, but joined by Mycroft (writer Mark Gatiss) in a Freudian excavation of the shared childhood traumas of the Holmeses. Eurus is a psychopath who shares the superhuman skills of her brothers and has spent most of her adult life in a maximum security prison on an island off the English coast. Mycroft allowed Moriarty to meet Eurus and when Holmes and Watson arrive on the island they find the tables turned and the inmate running the asylum. Eurus sets the brothers, Watson, and the prison governor a series of tasks to achieve in order to survive and the narrative is nothing short of harrowing, maintaining the grim atmosphere of the previous episode. The plot is quite similar to the final episode of season 1, “The Great Game”, but this is to be expected given that both involve Moriarty’s prolonged torture of Holmes. As there is currently much speculation about a fifth season it is no spoiler to say that the episode (and season and probably series as well) ends with Holmes and Watson back in practice in Baker Street.

There is no little irony here. Holmes is now free of the three supervillains that have dominated each season and he and Watson can, well, just get on with solving crimes and stuff (plus a bit of child-rearing, let’s not forget baby-Watson). Indeed, the ending is reminiscent of the first story in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, “The Empty House”, which sees a miraculously resurrected Holmes and conveniently widowed Watson set up shop once again, ready to resume business for another 33 episodes over the next 24 years. In a strange way, then, Sherlock ends where Elementary begins. The American series has been far less concerned with overarching plots and links between episodes than the British one and this, combined with the American focus on crime rather than fantasy or horror, has made it more rather than less faithful to the original stories, despite appearances to the contrary. Given the predilection of Gatiss and Moffat for frustrating the desires they have stimulated, I feel I can almost guarantee that the only season that does not end with the Cumberbatch-Freeman partnership teetering on the brink will be the last. At least there are 25 episodes of season 5 of Elementary to ease my withdrawal…

The Man in the High Castle, Season 2, by Frank Spotnitz and friends (Amazon Video) | review by Rafe McGregor

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) is one of the most disappointing books I’ve ever read and it’s no spoiler to say that the novel simply doesn’t end. It’s not even as if Dick deliberately withheld closure to fascinate or frustrate his readers, but more a case of found himself in a narrative corner from which he saw no escape, stopped writing, and moved on to the next project. He could have used a disappointing device like that employed by Sarban (the nom de plume of John William Wall) in his similarly dystopian The Sound of His Horn (1952) or declined to publish, but left what I suppose is a rare artefact in itself, an unfinished novel published during an author’s lifetime. What is even more baffling is that it won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1962. The work is of course rich in Dick’s trademark complexity, weaving several subplots together and combining literary themes with genre conventions, transporting the reader to a strange and very unpleasant world where the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War. It was perhaps the careful crafting of this alternative twentieth century that won Dick the award, although that world is not represented with quite as much verisimilitude as the subsequent efforts of Len Deighton in SS-GB (1978) and Robert Harris in Fatherland (1992). I mention the novel in such detail for two reasons: first, as a spoiler alert (alert: Dick spoiled the novel by not finishing it), and second, because the suggestion that there are two different realities in season 1 (that of the story world and the real world revealed in the films of the real world that appear in the story world) was cause for concern that season 2 would follow Dick in failing to explain the very question it had raised.

Season 1 managed to capture many of the finer points of the novel and Dick’s writing more generally, including his use of multiple and often apparently unrelated subplots. Viewers were introduced to a host of characters without knowing which of them the overarching plot would coalesce around or who would live or die, all of which added to the suspense. The narrative appeared to focus on the two characters used to advertise the series, Obergruppenführer (SS-General) John Smith (Rufus Sewell), based in New York in the Greater German Reich, and Juliana Crane (Alexa Davalos), a young woman who has remained remarkably free from prejudice in the San Francisco of the Japanese Pacific States. The two are linked by a third, Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), a young American who is employed as an SS agent by Smith and meets Juliana on a mission in the Neutral Zone between the two empires. The main problem with season 1 was that Sewell stole the show. (I must interject here to berate the BBC for cancelling Zen, which featured Sewell in the title role, in 2011 and reducing the best British crime series to date to a meagre three episodes.) Granted, Smith is head of SS-US, has previously participated in genocide, and keeps his fellow citizens under the jackboot, but he is also fiercely loyal (to his family and the Führer), very shrewd (in outwitting the various Nazis jockeying for power as Hitler’s health declines), and pretty much un-killable (whether the assassins be fellow-Nazis or enemies of the Reich). In contrast, the heroes, including Juliana, are continually wavering between joining the Resistance and accepting their status as a colonised people and when the Resistance in either the (Japanese) West or (German) East does take action it is either pointless, useless, or both. What is perhaps most disappointing is the heroes’ general selfishness and lack of interest in sacrificing their personal safety for a greater cause – unlike Smith, who has devoted his life to service, albeit it to a completely reprehensible cause.

Producer and writer Frank Spotnitz wisely decided to change the book that was written by Hawthorne Abendsen (the man in the high castle), The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in Dick’s novel to a series of film reels. This adaptation both enhances the film and reveals a further weakness in Dick’s story. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book within the novel, is a representation of a world where the Allies won the Second World War (i.e. the real world) and naturally banned by the authorities. But the fascination with the novel is never quite explained nor is there any need to explain how the author came up with the ideas – that is, after all, exactly what authors do, make things up. In contrast, the existence of documentary film reels seems to show an actual alternative reality, particularly in an era where special effects were extremely limited in scope. The films immediately suggest a science fiction element in addition to the alternative history and the presence of Blake and others therein at the end of season 1 creates a compelling mystery that is largely absent in the novel. At the beginning of season 2 it is revealed that these films do not depict what has happened, but possible futures – events that have not happened yet, but might, and Abendsen is cataloguing them year by year in order to attempt to change the future of the story world.

The main plot of season 2 revolves around geo-political events, specifically the escalation of the jockeying for power within the Greater German Reich as Hitler’s health takes its final turn for the worse and the rush for the Greater Japanese Empire to build a nuclear bomb in order to maintain the Cold War peace. The events in the two empires are exacerbated by the presence of jingoistic elements on both sides: Germans who are attempting to pre-empt a war with Japan before she is capable of nuclear retaliation and Japanese who want to build a bomb as a precursor to declaring war on Germany. In the midst of these momentous world events, the various subplots in season 2 focus on five main characters, the three from season 1 and: Frank Frink (Luke Evans), Juliana’s boyfriend and newcomer to the Resistance, and Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the Trade Minister of the Pacific States. This narrower focus sees all five characters, including the heroes, pursuing clear goals as Juliana and Frink commit fully to the Resistance, Joe commits to the Nazis, and Tagomi finds himself capable of moving between the story world and the real world. The tension and action are heightened for all five and the revelation of the relevance of their own stories to the apparently inevitable Third World War makes for exciting viewing. In a reversal of the way in which I was amazed at Dick’s novel winning a prize, I am amazed to see negative reviews of this series, which – if watched as intended, as the sequel to season 1 – is really outstanding in terms of plot, acting, cinematic production… it really is difficult to find a flaw. Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the series is the way that season 2 ends. The films and, more importantly, the two realities between which Tagomi can move, are explained in full. There is a resolution with respect to both Smith and Juliana’s plots and the geo-political situation reaches a milestone rather than a climax. The contrast with Dick’s original is stark: where the novel terminated without concluding, season 2 has been perfectly-judged, such that the narrative concludes in a satisfying manner as-is, but could continue in future seasons. Where Dick’s novel failed to provide any closure, Spotnitz’s closure is unusual – if not unique – in working equally well as both an interim and final conclusion.

Preacher, Season 1, by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and chums (Amazon Prime Video) | review by Stephen Theaker

The comic Preacher was in development for so long, first as a film and then as a television series, that you might easily have concluded that there was something fundamentally unfilmable about the project. You – okay, I – might have thought there was no way this programme, having finally made it to the screen, could possibly live up to the standards of the comic. And it’s quite an old comic now. Would it still work? Well, anyone who had those thoughts, me included, has been proven utterly wrong by a programme that rollicked with an energy rarely seen on television, that has left every other programme since feeling muted and low-key. But not everyone has read the comic, and the show is not quite the same as the comic, so I should say something about the story. Jesse Custer (Dominic Cooper) is a half-assed preacher in a dirty, rotten town. His church helper Emily (played by Lucy Griffiths, the former Maid Marian in the BBC’s Robin Hood) has a crush on him, but he’s in no fit state to notice. Then three lightning bolts strike his life. Genesis, the offspring of an angel and a demon, embeds itself within his body, giving him the power to command. The vampire Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) drops out of an aeroplane and pals up with Jesse in a bar. And old flame Tulip O’Hare (Ruth Negga) roars back into town, wanting Jesse to help her get revenge on an old colleague who left them in the wind. All of a sudden Jesse’s in the middle of a lot of trouble, so it’s a good thing he is surprisingly handy in a fight. It seems as if this show might, like The Walking Dead, cluster its seasons around particular locations, as this one is mainly set in the town of Annville, but it works very well, and at the end of a very satisfying season it’s a treat to know how much more from the comics is still in store. The cast is brilliant, coping with the shifts in tone from horror to comedy as if it was all the same thing, and without exception perfectly portraying the characters we’ve loved and loathed from the comics. Credit to Jeanie Bacharach, casting director, who must have clapped herself on the back for a job well done after watching each episode. One minute it reminds you of Justified or Fargo, the next it’s Monty Python or Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, all while successfully reclaiming its storylines from Supernatural in a way that Constantine didn’t quite manage. Altogether it adds up to something totally new. Confident, brash and bloody, I reckon it’s my favourite programme on television right now. *****

The X-Files, Season 10, by Chris Carter and chums (Ten Thirteen Productions et al.) | review by Stephen Theaker

It took me a little while to warm up to The X-Files when it first began. Round about the episode “Deep Throat” is where I started to become a fan, rather than someone who watched it because my girlfriend was watching it. Before then I had a big problem with the way Mulder would throw lots of so-called evidence at Scully in support of his irrational crackpot theories, evidence that in our world had been totally discredited, and then be proven right by what came next. That led to a resurgent real-world interest in the paranormal, just before mobile phones and their cameras laid ghosts, nessies and bigfeet to rest forever, but I made my peace with it after realising that on Mulder’s Earth there is good evidence, because in his world monsters and aliens do exist. Of course I then became frustrated with the idea of Scully being the rational, scientific one, when she ignores all the evidence – the implication being that in our world that’s what our scientists do with regard to the paranormal. This new season, following hard on the heels of Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny’s showstopping performances in shows like Hannibal and Californication, severely tested the grudging peace I had made with all that. A two-part story, “My Struggle”, where the worst nightmares of anti-vaxxers and rightwing talk show hosts come true, for example, left me very cold, to the extent that I’d call it irresponsible. If it had been good dramatically and creatively, that would have been one thing, but it was like a Syfy original movie written by the kind of people you block on Twitter. Similarly, “Babylon” explores the aftermath of an apparent terrorist bombing, and you wait for the supernatural twist, for our stereotyped assumptions to be undercut... and it doesn’t come. The paranormal element is that Mulder is apparently now able to enter people’s minds, Dreamscape-style, if he takes the right drugs. And don’t get me started on the “everything you know is a lie” bit they try to pull, yet again. Those were three of the worst episodes of the programme to date. But I’m still glad it’s back. I’d rather have Mulder and Scully back for bad episodes than none at all – and the three other episodes of this short series were good enough to outweigh the bad. “Founder’s Mutation” and “Home Again” both delivered a series of good scares, while “Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster”, featuring the hilarious Rhys Darby as a man who turns into a lizard creature, or so it seems, was a delight from start to finish, one of my favourite ever episodes. So a mixed season, but that’s how it often was with The X-Files, and even the bad episodes had their share of startlingly weird imagery. What worked, worked very well. I hope there are more seasons to come. ***

Supernatural, Season 11, by Andrew Dabb, Jenny Klein and chums (E4) | review by Rose M. Rye

Supernatural season 11 may not be different from what we have seen before, but it’s enjoyable as ever. Sam and Dean continue to investigate murders, in the “monster of the week episodes”, and we see the return of strong female characters Sheriff Mills and Sheriff Donna, adding a female presence to the programme. There is also a new threat to the world and the Winchester brothers must find a way (with the help of some great returning characters – Castiel and Crowley) to defeat this new evil. The cast’s chemistry as an ensemble is a real highlight. The script is witty and the back and forth banter between the Winchester brothers and especially Castiel is superb. Misha Collins’s performance is just marvellous this season. A standout episode is “Just My Imagination”, episode 8. Sam and Dean team up with Sam’s childhood imaginary friend; such a clever idea. In episode 14, “The Vessel”, Sam and Dean go back in time and we learn more about the Men of Letters. These individual episodes really add to the strength of the ongoing story arcs and made this season well worth watching. The fantastic season finale, “Alpha and Omega”, introduces a new female character who brings the promise of international adventures. The programme is still going strong and I’m enjoying it as much as I did when it started over a decade ago. ****