craigoxbrow

BBC4 showed Macbeth with Patrick Stewart in the title role. A modern-ish production riffing on the Russian Revolution and Stalin for its imagery, cutting the ever-popular "he has killed me, mother!" but keeping most of the text, with the three witches as creepy wimple-hatted nurses. Good stuff, obviously not a laugh riot.

According to Den Of Geek just about every kitchen-sink genre show hits these six at some point.

The Bodyswap
The Time Loop
Ascension To A Higher Plane Of Existence
Alternate Dimensions
The Doppelganger/Double/Duplicate
The Dream Episode

I only did three of them in the course of The Watch House and the Bodyswap wasn't actually my idea. Mostly because I was sticking with the Buffyverse and there had already been high-profile Ascending, Dream and recent Time Loop episodes. I did do some less common ones, like a Descent Into The Underworld. And admittedly I hit Alternate Dimensions a few times, and that's where our Doppelganger/Double/Duplicate came from. (Which Buffy did as well.)

I naturally had a Time Loop in my Doctor Who game. Who being back as of 2005 might have stopped me doing one in TWH.

I'm watching The Deep on BBC1. Not because it's good, or anything... I'm fascinated by its absolute determination to play every cliché and trope it invokes as straight as possible. It's inspiring by its very lack of inspiration.

For example, by playing a well-worn scene dead straight it made me think of this variation that I've never seen done:

One of our heroes has to go to certain death to save the others. Nobody is particularly qualified to do the certain-death thing, so they draw straws to do it.

And the first guy draws...

"Is this... this is the short straw, isn't it? ... Shit."

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss's modern-day Sherlock started tonight on BBC1. Differentiated itself from other modern post-Holmesian brilliant detectives by pointing out just how mad Holmes is. Pretty much started with the "hitting corpses to see how they bruise" scene. Made me laugh out loud a few times. Did indeed have some decidedly Doctor-y moments. And there can't be many cities where you can catch up to a car on foot by relying on roadworks and diversions, but London would be one of them.

1: I just discovered with a day to go that the kids' Doctor Who comic has five plastic miniatures-scale-ish New Paradigm Daleks as this week's free gift. Yoink. (And I don't even use miniatures or much like the New Dalek Paradigm, but they're too toyetic not to want to grab them and paint them up.)

2: New pretty SW:TOR trailer featuring slomo Jedi parkour and Sith mooks being casually knocked over by non-Force-y soldiers. The character designs do look a bit too similar to the prequel era for a game set a thousand years earlier, and it's an advert for an MMO which will actually look like this, but hey.

3: Al-Rashad page two. I await... monsters or something.

4: The IT Crowd is back next Friday - and Moss is learning the d20 System.

Why? I'm in a "readers remember" sidebar of a nostalgia feature on Ultraviolet where I dismiss it as "remarkably po-faced".

I'm not the only person to bury rather than praise, I hasten to add. And I did go on in the forum thread that lead to it to say that the cliffhanger in episode four was pretty clever. See, fair and balanced...

I find it kind of odd that Flashforward slowed down so much that their "April 29th" episode is still about six weeks away.

Apparently with no fanfare whatsoever one of the channels I get on Freeview (Virgin 1) is showing Jane Espenson's new show Warehouse 23 13.

It might have received fanfare if I watched anything on V1 since Chuck ended, but I know it advertises on some other channels since I was aware Trauma existed well in advance.

It clashes with nothing through the wonders of the +1 channel also being on Freeview, so I guess I'll watch it. But... yeah. Advertising. Not so much...

Edit: Have now watched part one... which I presume was originally the first half of a two-hour premiere, judging by the way it just kinda... stops. Yay Tesla guns but otherwise not sold yet.

Four minutes and seventeen seconds of the US remake of S P A C E D

Click and share my pain. Or, y'know, don't.

Apparently something of interest will be on BBC1 tomorrow at 6.30, between Total Wipeout and Dance For Sport Relief.

By "something of interest" I mean a new trailer. Eeee!