1.13 Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards
Gabrielle is tempted by a cute boy to enter a storytelling contest in the hopes of fulfilling her dream to attend Bard School. There are hijinks.

Oooh AND we find out how Xena and Gabrielle have been surviving. Xena might not sully herself with money, but Gabrielle earns a few dinars storytelling in a tavern.

Basically this is a clip show, but right from the beginning, the Xena production team (and later, Hercules) embraced the challenges of a clip show, making them more batty and ingenious each time, and I swear spending more money on them than any other episode. This one doesn’t quite reach those heights, but it uses clips from Steve Rees Hercules movies and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (yes, Spartacus) to illustrate the stories that the boys tell, indispersed with Gabrielle’s own illustrated stories of her life with Xena, and is lightweight but enjoyable. The script cleverly uses bits and pieces from the Hercules episodes that introduced Xena’s character as well. Ultimately though, it’s a clip show, and nowhere near the brilliance that was to come only a season later to justify the format. But let’s move on, shall we…

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1.9 Death in Chains.

Oddly this is almost exactly the same story as the previous episode, except that it’s the goddess of Death in chains instead of Prometheus, and instead of healing being offline it’s the opposite – thanks to greedy King Sisyphus, no one is dying, even the old and mortally injured. As with other fairly average episodes of this season, this one is mitigated by Xena showing off her heroic chops. Also there is a gang of bikie undead warlords led by the amusingly named ‘Toxeus’. Less awesomely, this introduces the ongoing trope of a dull Gabrielle love interest dying tragically. Well, tragicallyish.

Continuity issues: Gabrielle is wearing a tight little Amazon-style number instead of her usual more modest get up, which she will be back in next episode before Amazoning it up.

1.10 Hooves and Harlots

I love the development of the Amazons as characters and a culture in Xena, combining Maori tribal elements with traditions from Greek myth to create something that feels modern and historical at the same time – and this episode which introduces them is particularly good, featuring some interesting female characters and some kick-ass dance & fight sequences. The editing and filmwork is also excellent, which is saying something for a story with CGI centaurs (the ones in Hercules always looked pretty bodgy). The plot itself is another repetition on a theme, this time the “two families/nations on the verge of war – twist ending, it’s a third party causing the trouble because war is profitable for them” that we last saw in The Path Not Taken.

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1.5 The Path Not Taken
Xena has to go undercover with her old warlord pals to save a princess and stop a war – luckily the bush telegraph passes information along pretty slowly between members of the Secret Society of Warlords. She also gets to make smoochytime with Marcus, a dear “friend” from the past.

The aspect that most jumped out at me in this episode, which is all about the contrasts between Xena’s old and new lives, is her statement to the prince who wants to hire her that she does not work for money. This is a theme that comes up again and again, and in the scenes with the warlords, we see why. Their world is all about victory and profit, and Xena wants none of that. Which begs the question – how does she eat? We often see she and Gabrielle eating in taverns, etc, and she usually has some (though not a lot) of money. While I recall several instances of her refusing or charitably disposing of a reward, though, I don’t remember any of her actually taking (however modest) payment. She seems pretty determined to keep to an oath of poverty – indeed, it’s usually Gabrielle who is in charge of the purse. I’ll be keeping an eye out for further evidence of how the Xena economy works as the series progresses!

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Thanks to  jblum who pointed out that it is Tim Brooke-Taylor’s 70th birthday today

It’s over, finally, and I’ve seen every episode, which means I can stop hiding from spoilers. Hooray! Also, Steven Moffatt’s debut season of Doctor Who has delighted me beyond all reason.

Here is a list of things about the new show which I have loved:

1. Matt Smith. Just generally, Matt Smith. His performance is raw and endlessly good, and I never get bored when he in on screen.

2. The Eleventh Doctor. Character arcs for the Doctor are nothing new – we had Nine girning his way through post traumatic stress disorder, as a manic war veteran learning to forgive humans (well, mostly Rose) for being there when the Time Lords weren’t; and we had the many personal development stages of Ten including smug married (Rose) oblivious (Martha), cruel and bigoted (Jack) pleasantly platonic (Donna), lonely traveller, Time Lord Victorious – but I am really enjoying the way that this Doctor seems to be actively trying to find a different way to handle companion/human interactions as a response to how badly he screwed things up when he was Ten. I see his relationships with Amy and Rory as being direct attempts to not end up creating more damaged soldiers as a side effect of his lifestyle.

3. Amy Pond. Bright, funny, Scottish, fashion tragic, brave, and not that needy. She has changed the face of Doctor Who companions – and in particular I love the creative choice to make her mysterious rather than showing us everything we need to know about her in her first episode.

4. Young Amy. Where is my AU manga series where Amelia and the Doctor go off on adventures when she is this age?

5. Every second of the Eleventh Hour. But especially the first ten minutes or so.

[there follows many many spoilers, many many, for the whole fifth season]
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Thanks to Alisa, I am looooving Boxcutters, a weekly Australian podcast about TV. It is my new podcrush. I am particularly crushing on Nelly Thomas, but they’re all just plain adorable, smart and funny. They passed my own personal pop culture podcast test by recently discussing the Bechdel Test with intelligence and respect, plus they rave about things like Press Gang, Doctor Who and the latest HBO shows. Their unapologetic love of sublime AND ridiculous TV shows, and their sharp critical faculties are a pleasure to listen to, so thank GOODNESS I have something to make up for the fact that I have run out of Radio Free Skaro.

The recent eps have involved an ongoing project to assemble a list of the greatest TV characters of all time. They began by putting together a provisional list for discussion and are now asking listeners to send in their own top 10, and are discussing particular characters in each episode. I’ve particularly enjoyed recent discussions analysing the appeal of Daria Morgendorfer, Darlene from Roseanne, the Doctor, Hawkeye and Lynda Day.

One theme that has come up again and again is that when we choose “the greatest” it is actually an intensely personal choice, either because of how we relate to them now, or how we may have related to them in a nostalgic past.

So I thought I’d put a list together for myself, in lieu of doing the whole current 30 days of TV meme that is doing the rounds of LJ lately. I have been enjoying reading everyone’s posts but I kind of feel like I’ve missed the boat to do it myself.

So, Tansy’s Top 10 TV Characters (that I thought of in the last 24 hours) (more…)

What a difference a weekend can make. Check that – what a difference a weekend in which one’s five-year-old is being entertained elsewhere can make!

I ripped through the last thirty chapters of edits on Saturday, and spent Sunday cleaning up the manuscript, checking & creating timelines, compiling & checking the final doc, etc. I emailed the whole thing back to the publishers early this morning, once my brain was together enough to compose an email.

The structural edits were due back this Tuesday, and given that I was so far behind that I thought I was going to be working right up to either 5pm or midnight, depending on how desperate things were (only a few days ago I was seriously considering asking for an extension, gah) I have ended up two days ahead of myself. And you know what that means?

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I’ve spent the last few days wrapped up in the emotions of my characters, digging away at them, making them better, and occasionally turning my back only to find them making out with each other. (seriously, it’s like having a houseful of teenagers, you can’t take your eyes off them for a moment and the hormones take over!)

My honey has gone to bed early. I can’t blame him. Just imagine what it must be like to be partnered with a writer, someone who spends so much time not only glued to a laptop (possibly I would do this even if I weren’t a writer) but also staring into space, having imaginary conversations with people who aren’t there, and occasionally acting out fight scenes in the living room (possibly he doesn’t know I do this).

I think that from the outside, possibly it looks a bit like this:

So was anyone else bizarrely entranced by the finale of Lost, despite having never watched it apart from occasional glimpses and one random episode after it was already universally judged to have jumped the shark?

Or was it just me?

I’ve always been remotely fascinated by Lost, actually, mostly because the first season was a phenomenon that I missed out on entirely, and the waves of disappointment started coming in round about the first episode of season two, and there were so many comparisons to the ways in which X Files both failed and succeeded, and yet… the show kept going. For six years.

And for most of those six years, the two kinds of sayers (doom and nay) have been gleefully reporting that, you know, it was never going to end well. Seriously. It was going to disappoint. All of you who love it? DOOMED to be disappointed.

Now the episode has screened the reports are in, and it’s a mixture of wailing, gritted teeth, WTF, disappointment, and even a few ‘well I liked it actually’s sneaking in here and there. Opinions seem to be divided, depending on expectations – those who never wanted explanations for every event are certainly the happiest! I’ve been fascinated to read the various viewer responses, despite having little to no investment in the show itself.

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It’s been a Doctor Who sort of week for me, which should surprise no one.

I’m still listening my way through the backlist episodes of the prolific Radio Free Skaro podcast. It’s been so entertaining going back to the beginning, in that gap between seasons two and three. They’re just so young and hopeful and uncynical, and so very in love with David Tennant’s Doctor and RTD as a writer. Heh. I think it’s kind of downhill from here. My favourite episode this week was #42, their retrospective on Douglas Adams and his work, which veered well out of Doctor Who territory but was, as ever, interesting to listen to.

Also listened to this week, while I was sorting the final boxes of things into my library, was the Big Finish audio of Shada, the infamous lost story of Tom Baker’s era of Doctor Who, which happens to have been written by Douglas Adams. The story was halted during filming because of strike action, and never completed. I watched the VHS release of Shada back in the day, which is an exercise in frustration. It starts out pretty well for the first episode or so, and then descends into stills, narration, and lots of talk about invisible spaceships..

(not many spoilers for Shada, lots for the first 3 episodes of the new Doctor Who)
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