|
|
| Review Supplemental Issue Seven | |
| Got Torchwood - or are you just pleased to see me?
By Cardinal Cox
Please note : not suitable for any small children that may have wandered in. We all had hopes for this Doctor Who spin-off, their own version of Angel. Indeed, that was what it turned into, never too sure of what it was meant to be. But, what happened in the episodes?
1 - The pilot. Rainy, and murders, and one of the members (who had all been featured equally in Radio Times) kicks the bucket. Plus, if Captain Jack is now immortal, are all the others that Rose brought back to life?
2 - Sex gas. Oooh, trying to be all grown-up. It was interesting that, in the build-up to the series, one of the Sunday newspapers was all "how can the BBC show this, children might watch, should be a warning" despite the fact that it was going to be post-watershed on digital BBC3 (where few people would see it) followed by BBC (again, not the main channel). And, just to make sure we knew how disgusting it was going to be, the 'paper ran photographs, where children could see them, on page three...
3 - The time viewer, and Gareth Thomas is now officially typecast. From the trumped-up charges of rape at the start of Blake's Seven to being an old rapist here.
4 - Cyber-woman. In a cyber-bikini and with cyber-high-heeled-shoes... And, we learn that the writer's favourite films are Metropolis, One Million Years BC, and Tetsuo. And Ianto hates Jack.
5 - The one that ripped-off Arthur Machen. Come-on, you could have name-checked him!
6 - Taffy Chainsaw Massacre. Failed to have any suspense what-so-ever. Gwen starts sleeping with Owen.
7 - The one my girlfriend didn't tape (so was probably the best one) and I didn't care too much...
8 - The dead team member comes back. Oh, and Ianto (who hates Jack so much) and Jack are shagging.
9 - So, Torchwood is so secret, despite having the name all-over the sore-thumb SUV, and yet this geek knows all-about them... Plus, it kind of contradicts the previous episode. Still, it was a break for most of the cast.
10 - You know the bit in Close Encounters when the previously taken folks come out of the mothership. Or that rubbish episode of Star Trek : Voyager with Amelia Erhardt on some alien world? Well, those were this.
11 - The Fight Club episode.
12 - The Good Night Sweetheart episode.
13 - The episode where not enough people died.
Sorry, but it must try harder next year. In one of the early episodes, they had padding of Jack teaching Gwen to shoot. But, then the padding has been an occasional problem of the new Who. (Think about all the shots of computers in the one that brought Sarah Jane and K9 back.) And, while we're on the subject... The Sarah Jane adventures pilot at New Year hung together a lot better than the average episode of Torchwood... | | The Whoniverse : Doctor Who, Sarah Jane and Torchwood
By DJ Tyrer Doctor Who fans have recently been spolit-for-choice with an entire series of Torchwood, a Doctor Who Christmas Special and a pilot episode of Sarah Jane Adventures. But, how does quantity relate to quality? Well, based on the feedback of everyone I've talked to - including people who normally have opposite reactions to the latest offerings - the consensus seems to be that quality is, sadly, lacking. Yes, even the fans who can normally find no wrong with the New Who have been distinctly underwhelmed.
As a whole, Torchwood has attracted nothing but scorn - so much potential was seen in the idea, but little made it onto the screen. Even on an individual episode basis, only one or two episodes seem to have had any real positive feedback and even those were seen as rather lacklustre. Overall, the consensus is that Torchwood was derivative and confused 'puerile' for 'adult'. Indeed, it hasn't even excited the same level of debate as the new Doctor Who - where we had some deep divisions as to whether episodes or characters were any good - rather than drawing battlelines, most viewers just yawned. A sad indictment of the series, especially when it was trying to be controversial. Apparently, a new series is in the pipeline - it will be interesting to see how many viewers bother to return and whether it offers them an incentive to stay with it...
The Christmas Special of Doctor Who also failed to receive an endorsement - again, everyone concured that it was naff (especially Catherine Tate who proved that she's not a terribly good actress). My feeling was that it was like watching a spoof - unfortunately, this was the real thing and not a joke like The Curse of Fatal Death... There were about ten good seconds towards the end but they were waaay too late to salvage anything. To be honest, I felt like giving-up on the series altogether at the end of the 'Special' - only the trailer made me decide to keep my fingers-crossed for series three. About the only positive thing I can say about this and Torchwood was that they meant I ceased to play the role of lone voice of cynicism - as I so often was with the new series of Doctor Who - becoming, instead, one of the majority. Sadly, that's not much recompense...
Which brings us to Sarah Jane... After all that negativity, things didn't look good for it - yet, the consensus, a consensus I agree with yet again, is that not only was it close to the 'feel' of the original Doctor Who (unlike the new series or Torchwood), it was actually really rather good! Yes, it could have been better, but so could most things - it would have had to have been a lot worse to match the others in the rubbish stakes. Unlike Torchwood, it lived-up to the potential and promised that the future could be even better. Even if the actual series failed to equal the pilot, it would have to tumble a long way to generate the lack of interest that Torchwood has.
So, I - and, it seems many others - will be tuning-in for Sarah Jane with high hopes - the series is now our saving grace for the Who franchise. Let's hope it can encourage an upswing in the quality of its siblings... | |
| Reviews By Steve Sneyd Transylvanian Eclipse
By Cardinal Cox previously appeared in Star*Line (USA), Mar/April '01
16pp, A5, 2001, Free for postage (from UK send two loose 50p stamps)
Opossum Hollwer Tarot Press, 5094 N. County Road 750 E, Orleans, Indiana, IN-47452, USA
This slim poetry collection is a striking introduction to the horror and dark fantasy poetry of a writer hitherto known for his science fiction and music. It also porovides a brief but intriguing biography; and illustrations include an eyecatching cover, a 'Dark Tower' by Larry Blazek.
The poems, which included both rhymed and unrhymed work, cover such themes as the lamia, pictured with vivid brevity in a nightclub setting - "her coils grow tight/Losing clothes as she'd shed her skin"; 'Maggot in the Fruit' with its darkly romantic picture of a vampire's liberation; the sinister mythologising of 'Step The Maze', six lines crystalising faithless Aridane's "jig of the labyrinth"; and the hypnotic 'From Ammenta', an undead Egyptian enduring the pains of immortality with grim stoicism - "foul centuries I hunt you/Dry, withered, by Horus' ray/Storm across the desert's blue".
Particularly fascinating is 'For Janie', a poem without overt horror elements, yet implicitly redolent of coming tragedy; the voice of a married mill girl's lodger-cum-lover speaks to us with the direct simplicity of a traditional ballad - "place a pansy on my pillow/And I'll come to you at night (..) kiss your fingers in the morning/While birds chorus in the tree."
Anyone interested in original approaches to the themes and possibilities of the dark poem should send-off for this. Colour of Dust
By AC Evans previously appeared in extended form in Twink
320pp, 1999, ISBN 1-900152-28-2
Stride Publications, 11 Sylvan Road, Exeter, Devon, EX4 6EW, UK
This massive collection of poems and prose-poem 'texts' reflects, as the author points-out in his Introduction, the tension of his work between "the fantastic and the realistic".
In practice, this means that something over half the work is 'mainstream'; however, that, in turn, leaves well-over a hundred pages of work which is "in the fantastic mode", ie genre of various kinds. This includes work material which is, again to use the author's own categories for convenience, "visionary apocalyptic", "cosmological vision", "horror", "science fiction", "occult/esoteric", and "ancient myths, legends and The Books of the Dead-inspired".
For the purposes of this reviuew, I intend to look only at the "fantastic mode" material, but even setting that limitation, from a work of this size, it is clearly only possible to look closely in a reasonable-length review at a small selection of pieces, a selection which hopefully gives a meaningful flavour of the whole, or, at least, the "fantastic" part.
Before turning to individual work, however, it is perhaps of relevance to note that Stride Press' guidelines say specifically that the press is not open to science fiction work, and that collections for consideration should include meterial previously published in 'reputable magazines'. So, it indicates the power of Evans' work that he has convinced Stride to publish a collection containing much material which is science fictional, and much which previously appeared in genre little magazines, not generally likely to be considered by the 'litcrit' establishment as falling within the magic circle of the 'reputable'.
Turning to hopefully representative individual poems, the eleven lines of 'Metacropolis' tell us of "an ark/of stone", perhaps from some future civilisation, in which, alchemical-uinionwise, "time/deepens out/of mind".
In the short, Lovecraftian (ie at the cosmic horror end of the SF spectrum of moods/themes) 'Primal Scene Monster', the title entity "lives in the gulfs of chaos", in "a void/within a void", providing a paradigm of "eternal hunger". At the same time, of course, the "primal scene" operates at a human as well as cosmic, scale, at the level of Freudian awakening of sexual awareness through witness - who here is the voyeur, the poet or all of us?
'Not Dead But Changed' recalls the seeings of a 19th C visionary prophetess, an East Anglian villagter who foretold "great pikes and lances" to descend upon the ravaged earth"; her cries come back upon our time when the warning is, of course, too late; these things, like the aerial warships she also previsioned, have already happened, indeed been with us long enough to become wearisomely familiar companions to our Now.
It would seem that, for Evans, only the vast, inevitably remote abstractions so beloved of mystical alchemy, so desperately but vainly sought through the ages by its practitioners, could bridge gaps unbridgeable to ordinary human possibility. And, then those bridgings - as it were like James Blish's unimaginable gravity bridge on Jupiter, built by remote control by humans yet inaccessible and unusable for Man - are bridgings solely linking such vastnesses of megaentities, not joining them and us (or us and them) in understanding.
So, to the extent that the glorisouly all-transfiguring union dreamt of in the search fro the Alchemical Marriage - or modern science's for a unifying Theory of Everything - understanding of All, from greatest to smallest, with the scientist in the grip of the ancient dream of "as above, so below" as s/he atytempts to observe (impossibly, without distorting by observation) the strange "loves" of sub-atomic particles or Black Hole plughole-circling galaxies - can or could exist, in this poet's understanding of the Art, at least - it is in the meeting/mingling/mating of phenomena far beyond humanity, godlike in size and power but certainly not in caring, for us or indeed for any human-scale intelligence.
So, in "Black Hole Binary (Phantom Companion)" - which, illustrating the fluid limpidity with which Evans slipstreams culture/mindset boundaries, speaks of vast astronomical phenomena in the language of gnostic mysticism - there is "glacial ecstacy" for "the two/gripped by radiant/indeterminate/mid-time/dense point".
In such union, a devouring gulf embracing a ghostly star, there are curious echoes, too, of the Romantic/Gothic obsessions with the deadly passion of scarlet maneater or pallid tomb-girl. So, oddly, perhaps one of Evans' most unusual achievements here is also to give striking poetic form to a new variety of the myriad faces lust turns towards impossible objects of affection. | |
|