Sanctuary, Season 2 (2009)

Season one of Sanctuary ended with one of their team kidnapped and brainwashed by the nefarious Cabal, who were on the verge of launching an all-out assault on the Sanctuary network.  Dr Helen Magnus and her remaining team aren't going down without a fight, though.

You might think that's the sort of set-up that could easily take up most or all of the second season's 13 episodes, but it's actually resolved in pretty short order, with the team soon back to their previous "weird thing of the week" missions until a double-parter at the end of the season sets up next year's cliffhanger.

The above provides a pretty good summary of why Sanctuary doesn't work as well as it, to my mind.  It's a little too comfortable being comfortable but ultimately disposable episodic SF.  Yes, individual characters have some developments, but they don't really have arcs because arcs require longer term planning than the show seems interested in.

Genre TV was in a very different place in 2009 than it is now, and back then this aura of being "okay if unambitious" wasn't really a big problem for the show.  But a lot has changed the past decade, and I'm afraid Sanctuary has been left behind by a new generation of shows that - even if they stumble from time to time - have the attraction of being ambitious.  Or are just plain more fun.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018)

Thomas and the other Gladers have escaped their prison, learned about the terrible pandemic that turns almost every human being into a deranged and violent lunatic, and about WCKD, the organisation that has been systematically torturing them in pursuit of a cure.  Or so WCKD's agents claim, anyway.  Frankly, given the extravagant resources they've invested in lethal booby traps and nightmarish prisons, I can't blame (most of) the Gladers for being sceptical.

Betrayed by one of their own, the Gladers are now torn between trying to rescue captured friends and to get a small community of 'immunes' to an isolated location where they can rebuild civilisation, away from the infected.

There will come a time when I can talk about the Maze Runner films without mentioning the mind-boggling stupidity of the books they're based on.  Today is not that day.

The first and second films did a fine job of turning James Dashner's drivel into tolerably entertaining action movie nonsense.  This one, alas, can't quite make us three for three.  Just like the characters are torn between multiple goals, the script feels like it is being pulled in multiple directions and to support too many possibilities.  Maybe WCKD really do want to save the world!  Maybe they might even succeed!  Maybe not, though!  This creates a movie where there's a lot of stuff happening, but not much sense that it's effective stuff.  Spectacle over substance, which can work when the spectacle is really smart (*cough* the Fast and the Furious franchise *cough*), but which this script doesn't really manage.

At 150 minutes, it also outstays its welcome a bit, I think.

I've given this a Qualified Recommendation, but the qualification is "only watch this if you have seen the first two films and are invested in the characters' fates".  If that's not the case, I'd say give the whole trilogy a miss.

Boardwalk Empire, Season 1 (2010)

Atlantic City, 1920.  It is the eve of Prohibition, and Nucky Thompson, County Treasurer, eagerly anticipates the country going dry.  Not because he's anti-alcohol himself (though he certainly says the right things in public), but because he's got the right location and all the contacts necessary to become a prime conduit for the illicit booze that's about to come flowing into the country.  There is real money to be made, and Thompson intends to make it.  Of course, when you deal with criminals, you can expect complications to arise ...

Boardwalk Empire is one of a number of highly-regarded shows about criminals that popped up in the 2008-2010 period, along with Breaking Bad and Sons of Anarchy.  Based on this first season, it deserves the accolades.  It's got a great cast (Steve Buscemi is always good value, and while most of the rest of the cast are not as recognisable or as well known, they all know their craft), and the scripts are pretty tight and taut.  I could definitely see it spiralling out of control in later seasons but that's not an issue here.

Are there any reasons you might not like the show?  Well, it is about some pretty unethical people, and a lot of not very nice things happen.  It is also a show set in 1920, so characters express a lot of noxious opinions about race and gender politics.  This is not generally the behaviour of characters we are supposed to find sympathetic, but there is quite a bit of it.

This is a good crime drama.  I'm looking forward to season two.

Poseidon Rex (2013)

Several unsavoury types are looking for undersea treasure, but their explosives-based approach succeeds only in revealing an aggressive CGI dinosaur, which promptly eats most of them.

A group of tourists find the one survivor, who persuades them to join his search for the loot, despite the fact that a local crime boss expects the treasure to be handed over to him.  You'd think "killer monster" and "killer mobsters" would be enough to put people off, but not these guys!

Spoiler: most of these idiots (and most of the mobsters) are gonna end up as monster-chow.

Poseidon Rex is a bad film, though I must give it a couple of very minor kudos for occasionally being bad in novel (if stupid) ways.  Novel but stupid feature #1 is the movie's complete disinterest in having an heroic lead.  There is a lead, but he's no hero: arguably he's got more than a tinge of villain in him, but apparently we're supposed to cheer him on.  Novel but stupid feature #2 is that the titular monster is ... well, just a dinosaur.  Sure it rampages around killing people, but as soon as the military turns up, it's all over Rex Rover.

Oh, did I just spoil the end of the movie?  Well, I'm not going to apologise: you are really better off not watching this anyway.

iZombie, Season 1 (2015)

Liv Moore is a high-flying medical resident with a practically perfect fiance. She seems to have it all ... right up until she attends the wrong party and gets turned into a zombie.

Now the only way to avoid becoming a shambling undead monster is a regular diet of human brains, so Liv ditches the doctor fast track to join the medical examiner's team, dumps the fiance (so he won't get infected) and resigns herself to a miserable and lonely existence.

But there are two things Liv hasn't taken into account: the insatiable scientific curiosity of her new boss, and the fact that eating the brains of murder victims gives her visions of their deaths (also some of their personality traits, but that is less useful for Fighting Crime).  Because yeah, the apparently 'pyschic' Ms Moore is about to find herself helping Seattle's finest solve crimes ... while all the time worrying about whether there are other zombies out there and what they might be doing (spoiler: nothing good).

iZombie is a fun and quirky police procedural with a twist.  It has a great cast who play the off-the-wall concept straight (while still recognising that it is off the wall).  Good stuff!

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985)

Paramount made a big deal over the fact that 1984's Final Chapter would really and truly be the end of the Friday franchise.  They may even have been sincere.  But when a movie rakes in ten times its budget, it's hard to leave all that lovely money on the table.  So here we are, back again for more machete slashing action.

I'll give the creative team this much: they recognised that they couldn't just go to the "but wait, Jason's not dead after all!" well for the third time running.  Instead we get a tease of a theme that will return in Part VI before leaping six years into the future to the now adult Tommy Jarvis.

At the age of 12, Tommy helped to finally kill Jason Vorhees.  Now 18, he's being shuttled from one psychiatric hospital to another, where it is hoped they will have better luck treating his tendencies toward being a loner, fits of violent rage, and hallucinating that Jason Vorhees is still around.

Of course, when a violent death at the hospital leads to a series of murderous attacks across the community, the question has to be asked: is Jason Vorhees back?  Or is Tommy even crazier than anyone thinks he is?

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning has lots of violent death (more than any film in the franchise thus far) and several attractive women who remove their clothes or spend a long time in a wet and see-through white shirt, which you might think is all a slasher film needs to be 'good', at least in the eyes of its intended audience of teenage boys.  However, the script is so witless and lacking in tension or engagement that only the most uncritical of slasher fans is likely to be entertained.  I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not the worst Friday film (not even the worst so far - that'd be Part 3), but trust me, avoiding the title of 'worst Friday the 13th'  is nothing to be proud of.

Smallville, Season 3 (2003)

Clark Kent, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor and all the Smallville gang are back for another year of superhero and high school shenanigans, though the "90210 with superpowers" tone of seasons one and two is definitely more muted here.  There's more emphasis on home and work life drama than on high school matters.

There's also a bit more emphasis on - and in fact some obvious assumptions that the audience will be familiar with - the broader Superman franchise.  Using "The name's Perry White" as a sting right before your credits, for instance, only makes sense if you expect your audience to know that he is adult Clark Kent's boss.  Lois Lane also gets her first name drop midway through this series (and will, I believe, actually join the show in season 4).

So how does it measure up?  Well, if you've found seasons one and two tolerably enjoyable then you should like this one, too.  Lex remains a great character, even if I am much less enamoured of his father Lionel than the writers seem to be, and Lana Lang actually gets to be feisty this season, rather than just a damsel in distress, which is nice.  I mean, she still gets lumbered with the damsel in distress thing a bit, but at least she gets to do other stuff, too.  "Phoenix" and "Extinction" from early in the season are both good "Lana gets to do something cool" episodes.

The season's not all winners, of course.  There are good episodes, but also potentially good concepts that aren't well executed ("Obsession" would have worked a lot better if stretched out over multiple episodes, for instance, but likely wasn't because it would have been too similar to another multi-episode sub-plot), and just plain bad ones ("Legacy", frankly, is terrible in almost every way).

If you like comic book-themed TV, and you don't mind that it's got that "sometimes, it's just not that good" thing that comic books themselves go through, Smallville might be for you.

Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)

Musashi Miyamoto and Sasaki Kojiro are the two most famed swordsmen in Japan, and both are being courted for the role of the Shogun's combat trainer.  In those circumstances, it is perhaps inevitable that they will duel.

For Miyamoto, however, finding spiritual peace is a vital part of his journey as a samurai, and he postpones the duel for a year (and also for most of the run time of this 105 minute film) in order to work as a farmer and try to sought out the love triangle that's dogged him for the previous two films of the trilogy.  Only then (and naturally, also after the odd encounter with bandits and other riff raff to show off his martial skills) does Miyamoto head to the island of Ganryu for what, win or lose, will be his last ever duel.

All three Samurai films have been stately affairs from a pacing perspective, with this being perhaps the most glacial of them all.  Having established its end game, it honestly rather does take its time to get there.  I'd be okay with that if I felt like the events leading up to it were strongly connected and created a growing momentum, but I didn't.  The romance sub-plot and the bandits feel like a separate story from the duel, and in many ways a more immediate and engaging one.

Ultimately, this was not for me.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Season 2 (2000)

Professor Challenger and his team are still stuck trying to find a way off the "Lost World", an isolated plateau somewhere in the depths of South America.  They are still menaced by dinosaurs and dinosaur people and host of other menaces.  In this season this includes werewolves, amazons, aliens, half a dozen different magical curses, and most terrifying of all, lost 21st century tourists.  In fact, I think it's fair to say that the "Lost" part of the "Lost World" appellation is highly misleading, since it seems almost anyone can find it; it's getting out again that's the challenge.

So we're back for a second season of schlocky nonsense that retains only the most minor connection to Conan Doyle's 1912 novel.  In fact the connection is mostly just that crappy CGI dinosaurs turn up on a semi-regular basis to chase the protagonists and/or their enemies.  I find myself unreasonably fond of the show's naff CGI in general, I have to admit, achieving a nirvana of nerdy glee when one episode ends with a crappy CGI velociraptor fighting crappy CGI skeletons.

So does The Lost World have anything to recommend it other than the perverse entertainment of its third-rate effects?  Well, at its best it is silly fun, with a decent main cast mugging gamely for the camera in their stereotyped roles.  At its worst, on the other hand, it is ... well, at times it is pretty bad, to be honest.  I guess one fortunate consequence of the "we are trying to escape" premise is that if you find yourself eye-rolling too much, you can always skip the episode, since the show would be over if the characters ever succeeded, and therefore you already know that they won't.

I like this more than it deserves, but if you appreciate schlocky Hercules and Xena-era TV fantasy in general, you might too.