Category: SF&F TV Show Reviews

SF&F TV Shows reviewed by someone who remembers when Star Trek and Star Wars were actually good.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 5 – Walking Distance

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Gig Young plays Martin Sloane a Manhattan  advertising VP burned out from modern life.  Driving his sports convertible through a rural area he realizes he’s at his home town (of course named Homewood).  He wanders around and realizes he’s back 25 years ago when he was an 11-year old.  He of course, meets himself and his parents.  And he causes trouble.  He accidentally causes his 11-year old self to fall off the carousel and hurts his leg.  Finally, his father realizes that Martin is who he says he is but that retreating into the past is wrong.  So some how or other he finds himself back in the present and although he is wiser he doesn’t appear any happier.

One small detail, a very young Ron Howard is a little boy playing marbles in the street near Martin’s boyhood home.

It’s a slight tale and not particularly poignant but I’ll give it a solid C.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 4 – The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine

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This is the homage to Sunset Boulevard.  Ida Lupino is playing an over the hill actress named Barbara Jean Trenton.  Martin Balsam plays her manager Danny Weiss who wants her to stop living in the past and rejoin the world.  But Barbara Jean wants it to be 1934 forever, back when she was a beautiful young star.  So basically, this is Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard except instead of murder we get urban fantasy.  So, no surprise, after she realizes she was too old for the movies the world no longer had any appeal.  So, of course, she ends up entering into the 16 millimeter film of the title.  She is seen walking off camera with all of her old friends from twenty five years ago.

Obviously, there are no surprises here.  It’s a straight forward wish fulfillment plot.  It’s a good story and I’ll give it a B.  Not bad.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 3 – Mr Denton on Doomsday

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This is a morality play dressed up in Western trappings.  Denton is a former gun hand turned town drunk.  He turned to drink because he had to shoot a sixteen-year old kid who came gunning for his reputation as the fastest gun.  One day while Denton is lying on the ground after being humiliated by the local bully he finds a Colt pistol and picks it up.  When the bully tries to use the gun as an excuse to murder Denton in a shootout Denton accidentally fires off a few shots that each time hit a target that saves his life.  Inspired by his change of luck, he walks away from the saloon and tries to restart his life.  But his success with the gun reignites his reputation and a gunfighter challenges him to a duel.  While preparing to sneak out of town before the fight Denton runs into a travelling peddler named Henry J. Fate.  We’ve been seeing Mr. Fate in every scene where Denton had his amazing luck with the gun and so we already know he’s the source of the gun and Denton’s success.  He’s peddling a “potion” that makes anyone who takes it a dead shot for exactly ten seconds.  Denton accepts the potion and shows up to the duel.  When his opponent also drinks a potion before the gunfight it is of course not shocking that both shooters end up hitting their opponents in the gun hand.  And a conveniently present doctor informs each man that he will never be fast with a gun again.  Mr. Denton tells his young opponent that they are both blessed with being free of the gunfighter’s fate.  Denton is played by Dan Duryea who was a fairly well-known character actor of the Hollywood golden age and the town bully was played by Martin Landeau who was a well known television actor especially from the long running, Mission Impossible series.  Landau shows up in several other episodes of the Twilight Zone.  I would rate this episode as fair.  The storyline is mildly entertaining but hardly original or surprising.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 2 – One for the Angels

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A sidewalk pitchman (the guy with the foldable suitcase/table full of cheap junk) named Lou Bookman (Ed Wynn) is visited by Death.  Not wanting to die he negotiates a delay until he can “Make a Pitch for the Angels.”  Death agrees to this but once the agreement is made Bookman gloats that he’ll stop making pitches forever.  But the consequences involve the death in his place of a small child that Bookman knows.  The little girl is struck by a truck and will die at midnight when Bookman was scheduled to die.  Bookman awaits Death and delays him by distracting him with his most persuasive sales pitch and succeeds in saving the girl’s life.  And of course, that pitch was the “One for the Angels.”  And at that point Mr. Bookman is ready for his journey with Death who really isn’t a bad guy.

Wynn was a comic actor of the vaudeville era.  My only other memory of him was a small part in the original Mary Poppins movie from the 1960s.  The whole teleplay is highly sentimental and affected but it works.  It’s a gentle fantasy that tugs at the heartstrings and appeals to our sympathy for the little guy who also happens to be a nice guy.  For myself, being a rank sentimentalist, it appeals to my childhood view of how the world should be.  So, it feels comfortably familiar.  In other words, it’s nostalgic escapism and sometimes that’s exactly what I want.  You have to decide for yourself if this type of story is acceptable entertainment for you.

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 1 Episode 1 – Where is Everybody?

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I am embarking on a long voyage of discovery.  And like most long voyages it will be a combination of rare moments of pleasure immersed in long stretches of boredom.  That’s right, I intend to review the whole Twilight Zone series in its original order.  You will benefit from my suffering and will thereby know which episodes to skip, which to give a chance and which to view without fear of boredom.  Greater love hath no blogger than this,  that he lay down his sanity for his readers.

 

Season 1

Episode 1 – Where is Everybody?

Earl Holliman (the guy who played the cook on Forbidden Planet) is a man wandering around a town that seems to have had people in it immediately before but now is completely empty.  He finds fresh coffee, lit cigarettes and running machines but no people.  I guess it’s supposed to be mysterious and claustrophobic but mostly it’s just boring and annoying.  At the end we find out he’s an astronaut in an isolation chamber hallucinating.  This is preparation for a future moon mission.  Granted this was made in 1959 and Sputnik launched in 1957.  That means the Space Race was all the rage.  So maybe this seemed more interesting back then.  But honestly, it’s really dull.  This was the first episode of the whole series.  The fact that they would lead with this should have been a warning to viewers of what was to come.  Not a very auspicious beginning.

The Twilight Zone Revisited

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My hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Last July I posted a review of the Twilight Zone in which I stated unequivocally that all but a handful of the episodes are unwatchable.  Once again, the SyFy Channel featured a marathon of the episodes around the holidays and once again, I found myself watching way too many of them.  I recorded about fifteen of them on the cable box and proceeded to replay them almost obsessively over the last few weeks.  I did find a couple more that I had forgotten were pretty good and kept re-watching the few that I do enjoy.  But what became intolerable was having to deal with the commercials from the SyFy Channel each time I watched.  Even fast forwarding through became so painful I finally deleted all the episodes in disgust.

The one episode that I had forgotten I liked was “Two.”  Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery are soldiers from opposing armies that wander into a deserted city five years after a war has depopulated the world.  Surprisingly, the sparse dialog and minimal action work remarkably well and create a genuinely affecting moment.

Anyway, I buckled under the pressure.  I went on Amazon and bought the whole series on blu-ray, all one hundred and sixty odd, mostly awful shows.  I guess this proves I’m a hopeless addict to bad television.

It showed up tonight and I put on “To Serve Man.”  Oh well, at least there are no SyFy Channel commercials.  That’s one nightmare I won’t have to face again.  That’s at least an improvement.

“Mr. Chambers, don’t get on that ship!  “To Serve Man,” it’s a cookbook!”  Ahhhh, ain’t it grand!

The Flash – A Science Fiction TV Review

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Yesterday, as I mentioned in my review of Aquaman, I had the some of the grandsons over.  After we got home from the movies we played some games and had dinner but later on they got bored and not having much in the way of TV that they were interested in we let them use their parents’ Netflix account to stream a show they liked, “The Flash.”  Wow.  Now, I know that the WB is one of the worst networks for quality and the low budgets they work with mean that things like special effects and scripts and acting skill are brought down to a sad minimum, but I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it would be.  In retrospect I’m a little ashamed at how much ranting I did while they were watching the show.  As much as they share my love of mockery, I’m sure I must have been annoying to them.  But to some extent it was justified.

The plot, such as it was, revolved around the Flash character and his friends and relatives protecting the inhabitants of Central City from the depredations of various random metahumans of which the Flash is one.  Apparently, they were formed by some kind of nuclear incident involving a particle accelerator mishap.  The particular episode involved an unfortunate individual called King Shark.  He has a shark’s head but wears pants.  He’s also about twenty feet tall so it’s not apparent where he shops for pants.  He’s a really bad guy and sometimes eats people he doesn’t like but does it in such a slow fashion it’s not clear why they can’t just walk away from him.  And despite his obvious evil nature, by the end of the show he is captured alive and once again incarcerated in an Olympic sized containment pool apparently being fed chum and awaiting medical treatment to turn his head human again.  Most of the interaction with King Shark is the Flash running around him in circles while the shark head heaps verbal abuse on him.

By the above description you have probably identified the limited dramatic value of the action adventure available in the Flash series.  However, these limitations pale in comparison to the real problem with the series, namely, the personal problems of the characters.  Probably eighty percent of the air time consists of the various actors whining about their emotional problems.  One character is sad about some dead spouse, another about the alienation of not being able to reveal his secret identity, another has feelings of inferiority because he has no super powers, another is worried that a character that doesn’t have super powers might develop them and become evil.  The cast behaves like a whole high school full of neurotic teenagers which I assume is their target audience.  If I’m being objective, the plots are no worse than what passed for story lines in the old Superman tv show from the 1950s that I watched as a kid.  But the emotional immaturity and obnoxious insecurity of all the “good guys” in the stories is appalling.  It may be a generational problem but to me this isn’t science fiction it’s a soap opera.

The Original Twilight Zone TV Series – An SF&F TV Review

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Every summer the SyFy Channel features an enormous number of Twilight Zone episodes for no apparent reason.  And every year I watch way too many of these episodes.  It’s a moral failing of mine.  I think it’s because the show was on too late for me to watch when I was young so I felt deprived and therefore overvalued what I couldn’t get.  And watching these episodes every year drives home one fact, that most Twilight Zone episodes are stunningly bad.

To be fair, there is a small number of actually good episodes.  A debate can be had as to whether there are five or ten good episodes.  Opinions and tastes differ but it’s somewhere in that range.  Then there are another twenty or so that are watchable.  The plots are predictable and the acting is mediocre at best but watchable.  That leaves well over a hundred episodes that are actually painful to watch.  Let me give an example.

In the episode “King Nine Will Not Return” a man regains consciousness next to his crashed bomber aircraft somewhere in the North African desert during World War II.  By the end of the episode you find out this is a dream this man has as a result of his feelings of guilt for missing the mission where the bomber was shot down.  So far so good.  Psychological pain, some kind of manifestation where he physically visits this time and place and is allowed to heal.  Sure, why not.  Now what is the scene?  You have the protagonist standing around in what must be the California desert yelling and emoting about his anguish for his missing crew mates.  It’s like some unscripted improvisational method acting workshop.  Five minutes in you’re heading to the kitchen to get some snack or drink just to avoid the whole embarrassing spectacle.  I found myself pitying the actor doing the scene and wondering if the experience of performing this drivel might have driven him out of acting and into some honest profession like loan sharking or leg breaking.  But every time I returned my attention to the tv screen there he was yelling and grimacing and crying.  Mercifully it finally ended and I have sworn a mighty oath to never watch that episode again while there remains any hope at all for intelligent human life to continue on this planet.

Admittedly, not all bad episodes are that horrible.  Some are just stupid and annoying.  These usually involve mannequins or robots that think they are human.  They even did this to Anne Francis in an episode called “The After Hours.”  She’s in a department store and by the end of the episode she remembers that she’s an escaped mannequin.  I think we’re supposed to be glad she’s found her way back to where she belongs.  But it’s all so pointless that you really can’t be sure.

So, most of the episodes stink, but which ones do I admit liking?  Here they are:

  1. Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
  2. Nick of Time
  3. To Serve Man
  4. Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?
  5. It’s a Good Life

And now I’ll tell you what I like about them.  The first four episodes I find comical.  The first two have William Shatner starring.  You can’t go wrong with Shatner.  He was born to act on the Twilight Zone.  The terrible dialog and nonexistent direction actually seem to jibe with Shatner’s bizarre overacting tics.  “Nick of Time” can’t compete with “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” for over the top hilarity but even in the lesser vessels the Shatnerian touch is still a force to be reckoned with.

“To Serve Man” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” are surprise ending stories that I can only think of as jokes.  For each, the whole episode is the set up for the reveal.  I find them amusing.  Let’s say personal preference.

And that brings us to the best and maybe the only truly original story in the whole series, “It’s a Good Life.”  The short story is even better than the teleplay but both are very effective.  Definitely worth viewing.

So that’s it.  If you’re a Burgess Meredith or a Jack Klugman fan there are a couple of episodes you can add and if you’re sentimental there is Christmas episode with Art Carney as Santa Claus that’s kind of cute.  But I’d be kidding myself if I said I watched them out of anything other than force of habit.  Your mileage may vary but this is my take.

A Few Thoughts About Space Opera

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After finishing up my review of Galaxy’s Edge – Galactic Outlaws, it occurred to me that there was more to say about the category of Space Opera.  Some might say that I was a little unfair to social justice fiction fans.  After all there must be a significant audience of fans with blue hair and cats who really enjoy girl power super heroes and their adventures in space.  So, to say that these are automatically bad just because I heartily dislike them might seem arbitrary and unfair.  It might seem that way but it isn’t.  And that’s because I am the final arbiter of good and bad in science fiction.  I earned this coveted status by living long enough to see everything in the world.  So, once again, all Star Wars movies after Return of the Jedi (and even some parts of them before that point) are irredeemably bad and should be cast into the outer darkness where there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  And that lines us up for me to proclaim what does make a good space opera.  What follows is:

“photog’s RULE FOR WHAT MAKES GOOD SPACE OPERA” (patent pending).

It needs to appeal to the sense of wonder of the twelve-year-old boy in you.  Now mind you, it doesn’t have to only do that.  It can also be a brilliant philosophical treatise on the dualistic nature of the universe or a psychological study of the impact of technology on the human race, or even a deathless love story written across the stars of the galaxy.  But if it fails to inspire the twelve-year-old boy in you it’s not space opera.  It may be science fiction or anything else but it isn’t space opera.  And this isn’t even an exclusive precinct of science fiction.  Any adventure story has to satisfy that same basic requirement.  Take the literature of the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century.  A quintessential example that comes to mind is Treasure Island.  Here is a story that was tailor made for the sense of wonder of a twelve-year-old boy.  It has all the earmarks of the tale of wonder.  The boy who loses his father, the quest for riches, exotic locales, colorful and dangerous opponents, the revelation of secret knowledge, the coming of age experience of the world and the people in it.  An adventure story is a story for a boy that kindles his interest in the world around him.  It leads him to think there is more to life than school and chores.  It inspires him to strike out on his own and find his place in the world.

Now I can just hear the modern women and girly men screeching, “Girls want adventure too!”  To which I reply “Stop screeching, you’re hurting my ears.”  But also, I would say that what girls want is neither here nor there.  Boys need the adventure story because it fits their brains.  Girls have been told that they want adventure stories so they want them in order not to get left out in the modern #metoo world that they live in.  And in fact, I don’t really care if there are adventure stories for girls.  More power to them, I guess.  What I do mind is that for the sake of inclusiveness they are ruining all the adventure stories that are coming out of Hollywood.  And that is why I look for good old (and new) space opera and other adventure stories for my grandsons (and for me).

Science Fiction TV Series Review – Stranger Things – First Season

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Full disclosure, I am the only one I know who still uses Netflix for DVDs and doesn’t stream.  Oh, the shame of it all!  So last month the first season of Stranger Things became available to rent on Netflix (or as it’s now known DVD.com) and they sent me the two discs.  I was busy with life and the holidays so I watched it after the Christmas during some time off from work.  For anyone who hasn’t seen it but is interested or for anyone who wants my opinion here are my thoughts.

Let me start with the strongest impression the show left.  Almost everyone in the show is not particularly likeable.  Let me expand.  Many of the characters are annoying or worse.  In particular, the character who should most attract our sympathy, the mother of the missing boy, played by Winona Ryder, is hands down in the top three of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen in a movie or tv.  Several times I was hoping the town sheriff would pull out his gun and shoot her or at least pistol whip her to make her shut up.  There was one character I liked.  He was a strong, caring, humorous, warm, responsible, regular guy who used good judgement and compassion to help a troubled runaway pre-teen.  He was shot in the head about six minutes after his first screen appearance.  After that it was annoying nerds, arrogant jocks, clueless suburban parents, alcoholic lawmen and nefarious government officials all the way down.  Eventually the hell-spawned creature makes some appearances, and interestingly, I found myself kind of rooting for him.  At least he didn’t blather on.

The season is eight episodes long and I finished them.  After reading what I just wrote, you may be wondering why I did finish them.  Well, surprisingly, I found myself sucked into the story.  Maybe this was an artifact of having all the episodes in front of me, time available to watch them and post-Christmas-Feast stupefaction.  But for some reason, at the end of each episode I wanted to see the next one.  And even after I knew how it would go I wanted to see it through to the end.

So, what’s my recommendation?  Well, guarded at best.  The plot is some kind of bastard spawn of Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and the X-Files.  The tropes are hackneyed and the characters, as mentioned, are mostly stereotypes and annoying ones at that.  Two episodes in you know how it will go and who will do what.  Honestly if someone had told me this ahead of time, there is no way I would have watched it.  But now that I have watched it I’m wondering if I should wait the year and watch Season 2.  My gut tells me that there is no way to make the next season even as mildly interesting as this first season.  And the thought of listening to Winona Ryder screeching at her unfortunate neighbors again is hard to justify.

I was starting to like how the sheriff usually settled difficult negotiations by punching people in the face.  His timing was really good.  The sheriff, played by an actor named David Harbour, is a big guy who drinks too much and sleeps around with the various lonelier ladies of the small midwestern town where the story takes place.  I found him the only character that I actually believed might exist in the real world.  But is seeing Sheriff Hopper pummel various “men in black” enough of a reason to sit through this thing again?  I doubt it, but it’ll be a whole year before I have to make that decision and pickings are so slim, so who knows.  Anyway, consider yourself warned, if a review that’s a year behind the times can be considered a warning.