Science fiction, fantasy, horror, and media (comedy, drama, TV, audio, romance)

 DARK SHADOWS 466 “Yeah, well, I must have a double somewhere.”   “Have you discovered something that Mr. Collins didn’t know about?”   “No, I don’t think we’ve discovered anything that he didn’t know about already.”     “You know your patient could be classified as a member of the living dead.”   “He’s a vampire, isn’t he?”   Grayson. Short reprise. The reprise seems to be about 1 min 20 seconds. No new stuff. It seems to be exactly the same other being shorter.   We see the sign of Collinsport Hospital and it has rooms that look just like bedrooms rather than hospital rooms. A nurse (played by Katherine Balfour) comes into the show.   She has some kind of accent. British? Bostonian? Massachusetts ? Russian? She telephones Julia at Collinwood and tells her the news, mentioning that Barnabas is critical and that the ID on him and Miss Victoria Winters was the same address! Does Barnabas have ID? How? AND why is...

  DOCTOR WHO-PLANET OF THE DEAD   All set to hate on this silly romp but you know what, I just let go and enjoyed it. It was fun and yes, it was silly and stupid in places but not as irritating as the first time or as annoying as ABOUT TIME would have you believe. I even liked Malcolm and the gimmick of the psychic lady telling the Doctor, “It’s returning” and “he will knock four times,” bullshit.   Yes, the first go around, with DW gone for months, THIS was what it returned with and a big red button in a shaft just above a force field in your own ship? And THE FLY monsters? AND metallic exoskeletons on the manta monsters (impressive though they were)? I mean did someone build them? Were they really from nature? With metal as part of their bodies? I guess in this part of DW anything is possible.   ABOUT TIME will tell you how irritating the black woman, Christina and Malcolm are but this time out, I found them engaging, funny, and even charming.   ...

  DOCTOR WHO-THE NEXT DOCTOR   DOCTOR: Jackson, you've got your son. You've got a reason to live. LAKE: And you haven't? God save you, Doctor.     I can’t say that THE NEXT DOCTOR is total garbage, because it’s not. BUT it is a sign of things to come. It’s almost Moffat-sian instead of Dickensian. It has a mystery at the heart of it that’s involving, interesting and a good premise, like most of Moffat. The follow through is shaky at best; 21 minutes in we get the feeling that the execution a total mess and not worthy of the premise;   and after those 21 minutes, the story almost becomes a fairy tale and we’re in fantasy land of things that never were rather than things that might have been with a giant CyberKing marching through London, blasting away, all of this like Moffat (in particular his DAY OF THE DOCTOR bombings that seem to kill NO kids but blow a few adult men around and probably without killing them, either). Repercussions are almost nil. ...