Witchy Stuff!
Doctor Who: Joy to the World
“And even in your world, that is not what a star is, only what it is made of” – Aslan, the Dawn Treader.
The Christmas special reminds me of this…one of my favorite lines from Narnia. It should annoy me, too. It brings Christianity into my Doctor Who.
But it’s too well written for me to be mad with except Moffatt please leave it with making random characters immortal. Sorry. Not sorry.
This episode leans in places into horror with the mind controlling briefcase (it’s never explained why everyone dies when they pass it on, but they also get forcibly uploaded, with echoes of Silence in the Library), while touching on friendship. The Doctor has to spend a year in a hotel…and he ends up rather liking the manager.
There’s also brief homages to Indiana Jones and Agatha Christie in here. It’s very Moffatt, but it’s Moffatt at his best despite his…uh…weird obsessions coming back in.
But the Doctor being inadvertently responsible for the star of Bethlehem should really annoy me. It doesn’t. So I will give it points.
(This isn’t going to be the episode I nominate, though. There were better. I’m thinking Dot and Bubble was my favorite of the year).
Also, we have not seen the last of the Time Hotel, I suspect.
And the living star should really tie into the pantheon. Somehow. In a good way.
(As a note, they acknowledged the pandemic, which I hadn’t seen before and most TV shows still aren’t).
Overall, slightly messy, but a lot of fun…
Agatha All Along 1.1 Seekest Thou The Road
Okay, I definitely did have to watch WandaVision first, because this show assumes you did. And even with that, there’s some confusion in the first episode.
We first see Agatha as a cop, but that doesn’t appear to be real. Then we visit Wanda’s sitcomverse, but the heart of the plot seems to be that everyone hates Agatha.
And now she doesn’t have the Darkhold any more, she can die…although there are still rules.
We have a witch war going on, and I don’t even know who to root for. Sure, Agatha’s the protagonist, but she was a bitch to Wanda, so…
Very Goth. This show is very classic Goth in its aesthetic. And a little bit of classic vampire fiction without any actual vampires…
I do think I will like it once I work out what is going on.
Agatha All Along 1.2 “Circle Sewn With Fate / Unlock Thy Hidden Gate”
MCU witches apparently live a long time. And are they always women? The Teen shows that they might not be…he certainly looks like a boy. But the “coven” Agatha assembles…a misfit group of desperate witches…are all ladies.
This is all about power. Risking everything not so much to get power as to get it back. (And in one case possibly one’s mind…one of the coven seems decidedly “off.”
She tries to leave the boy behind, but her enemies show up and he flees down the road. Which you apparently have to tread barefoot.
Makes an odd sense to me.
The a capella performance was a nice touch.
Agatha All Along 1.3 “Through Many Miles / Of Tricks and Trials”
Time to go full blown horror. The coven finds themselves in a very nice house with very nice wine, which everyone but the kid drinks.
It’s poisoned, of course.
They have to quickly brew an antidote. The kid may be Agatha’s son…we’re clearly meant to think so.
There’s some aspects of body horror to this, although kept mercifully brief. The theme here is skill over power…doesn’t matter how good a witch you are if you don’t know what you’re doing, after all.
Is Sharon actually dead? I’m doubting it. Poor Sharon. She didn’t even want to be there or understand what she was doing…
Agatha All Along 1.4 “If I Can’t Reach You / Let My Song Teach You”
The power of rock and roll! Or, at the very least, the power of cutesy pagan ballads. This is the second time the cast go musical and everyone can sing.
They decide to summon a replacement for Sharon.
They get Agatha’s enemy, whom she’s clearly into. Yeah, I ship those two hard, whether I’m supposed to or not.
Here’s a dark thought. The second trial is about freeing Alice from a generational curse.
Did Sharon want to die? She was clearly not entirely compos mentis, so maybe she did. Maybe it was the best thing for her.
Shudder.
But…you know…
Teen gets mysteriously hurt. IS he Agatha’s kid? What is going on with him? I believe we’ll find out in a couple of episodes.
But I’m always there for rock and roll or any variant thereof defeating evil. Literally, in this case!
Cinema Disaster: Blackjack
Fresh off of Face Off, John Woo makes…this. The only explanation I can think of is that he ran this movie past a bunch of major studios and they all told him how much work it needed. He refused to believe them and made it with Dolph Lundgren. Or maybe we can blame the fact that the writer is better known as…an investigative journalist.
Lundgren stars as Jack, a bodyguard with a phobia of the color white (quite common according to the cast-for-her-looks psychiatrist).
The plot of the movie does make sense in broad strokes, and is pretty standard. Jack (why are so many protagonists in these movies named Jack?) is forced out of retirement (due to the aforementioned phobia and adopting a child of uncertain provenance and higher levels of competence than him) by his friend getting shot to take a gig protecting an up-and-coming supermodel. (Despite the blurb, he doesn’t work for the government any more).
She’s named Cinder. As in Ella. Because she’s from humble origins, natch.
Every so often, this movie approaches making sense, then shies away from it like a fresh off-the-track Thoroughbred.
At one point the bad guy goes full blown Phantom of the Opera and does everything short of swinging from a chandelier.
At another, the kid…who looks like she was having fun…like I said, proves herself more competent than Jack.
Bluntly, this movie is a mess. But it somehow manages to be a highly entertaining mess. Lots of people on fire, lots of ridiculous fight scenes up to and including full blown gun fu…
It’s honestly quite a lot of fun, but no doubt in ways Mr. Woo did not, in fact, intend.
Agatha All Along 1.5 Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power
Oh dear.
This is not going well. The coven flee on broomsticks to the next trial, where they have a Ouija board that apparently summons Agatha’s mother.
Which causes a rift, as Agatha’s mother wants to keep her. I blame Agatha’s mother for the entire thing, by the way. Born evil? Nobody’s born evil.
Maybe this is an analogy for awful autism moms?
Agatha accidentally kills Alice. Are they going to try and summon yet another replacement witch?
This was Agatha’s trial and I’m not sure she passed.
Or, perhaps, it was about the coven being true. Next episode focuses on Teen.
Are we ever going to find out the kid’s name?
Agatha All Along 1.6 “Familiar By My Side”
Okay, call me oblivious, I should have called this one. Most of this episode is a flashback that leads into part of episode one…from Teen’s point of view.
We start at William Kaplan’s bar mitzvah, but William Kaplan dies in a car crash. Yup, absolutely dies and is replaced by…the spirit of Billy.
He’s on the road looking for Tommy.
I knew the kids wouldn’t stay dead. The thing about Agatha’s kid was a herring of scarlet hue.
Now he and Agatha, deserted by the other witches, are alone on the road.
Is Agatha evil? I’d say she’s more…she’s done what she has to do in order to survive. And at least the body Billy took over was empty, right?
Side note: This show feels no need to make all the episodes the same length…at all…