The Return of Time Commanders!

In the Beginning...

Some years ago, to their mutual advantage, the folk who designed Rome: Total War managed to persuade the people at BBC2 to put on a series of episodes based on their game. You can't advertise on the Beeb, so the game engine was not mentioned, but you didn't need to be Hannibal Barca to work out what it was.

There Was A Lot of Shouting

The format involved a team of four people running an army against an AI force. Two of the players were theoretically generals, in charge of the overall strategy, and two were captains, in charge of the tactical disposition of different wings or troop types. In practice, sometimes one general seized the reins, and the second sat around like an inept Roman consul. On other occasions the generals both flailed about, and their adept captains won the day in spite of them. Each pair would bellow at the other across the studio.

Enter the Experts

Dr Nusbacher of Sandhurst and weapons and tactics expert Mike Loades were on hand to set the scene in terms of the wide sweep of history, the reason this battle was fought when it was, and they also kept us supplied with educational snippets about the correct employment of the Roman pilum or Dacian falx or what have you. As the battle unfolded, they would offer a running commentary, complimenting or criticising the players for the benefit of the viewers at home. At the end of the battle, they told us how things actually turned out.

The King is Dead. Long Live the King!

After a long absence from our screens, the show has returned. There have been some changes. In addition to our experts in the studio, some re-enactors in an indoor riding arena (I think) gave us some delightful demonstrations of bashing people with wooden swords, and how effectively a pilum penetrates a shield, and how useless it is for throwing back after it's been thrown once.

More signally, the teams have been cut to three (a general and two captains), and no longer play against an AI. This excellent change to the situation sees the teams playing against one another, each on opposite sides of a huge screen (or rather pair of screens) dividing them. As before, they get to fight a skirmish prior to the main battle, and this is still against an AI.

The Battle of Zama

In the first episode, a team of nerdy Southern board gamers took the field as Scipio's Roman army against three Scottish wrestlers. The production team deserve congratulations for this delightful match-up of two very different teams. It isn't often one gets to watch a chap shouting "By Jupiter!" as he throws in his triarii! Both played a skirmish beforehand in which the Romans had to seize a small town from the Carthaginians, and I don't want to spoil that for you, because even that introductory bit was very amusing. After that they moved on to the main event.

It was truly fascinating to see how both sides reacted to the introductory skirmish. On the one side, ideas were reinforced, and on the other certainties were abandoned. Somewhat frustratingly, both sides responded to the situation with a surfeit of caution. I recalled a passage from Featherstone's Complete Wargaming, in which he remarks on the unreality of the wargame in which both sides "go gaily forth to meet one another", whereas in history one tends to have an attacker and a defender. The experts in the background remarked on the reasons why both sides should be rather more aggressive.

After the initial hesitation, things got a move on. I won't spoil it with any details, but it was just like the old days of this great show. A team would make a move that made sense to them. The experts would criticise their failure to notice this. I would expostulate to myself that they needed to do this or that. All too soon it was over. There are another two episodes, I understand, in this series, and - by Jupiter! - let's hope the viewing figures are as good as they need to be to justify to Auntie the recording of some more shows.

In conclusion, I want to say how wonderful it was to see Dr Lynette Nusbacher and Mike Loades back again. It just would not be the show it is without those two! If you want a rating out of 5, it's 5! If you have access to it, do watch it.

Pseudo-nostalgiafest: Sliders

Last year I fancied a bit of pseudo-nostalgia, and started buying up DVDs of Sliders. If you never saw that show, the premise is that a brainy chap (with remarkably large biceps for someone whose main activity is supposed to be lifting a calculator) invents a device which allows him to travel between worlds. He accidentally gets sucked into a parallel world along with his professor, his co-worker, who has a crush on him, and a down-on-his-luck singer. They keep trying to get home, and fail because that way the show keeps going. Each world they get to is different in some (usually really implausible) way. It's a scream.

The backstory to this particular episode is that the team slid onto a world about to be wiped out - by wandering quasars transiting the solar system, if memory serves - and while there the Professor was murdered by a baddie, Colonel Roger Daltrey from The Who, or perhaps the Professor had some fatal illness and was doomed to die anyway.Anyway, said miscreant fled, having sucked out bits of many other people's brains to sustain himself - yes! - and the team recruited local military officer Kari Wuhrer to help them track him down and stop him. He keeps one step ahead of them, and they get caught up in other adventures. Watching these episodes together produces a lot of comedy, as the writing teams on different episodes either didn't communicate or nobody cared. That was one of the last episodes I watched when I was younger, presumably because I went off to uni shortly afterward, and had no TV. Today's students are doubtless aghast or amused at such a notion.

In the previous episode the evil colonel had persuaded some locals to protect him, and they had captured Kari Wuhrer. First the poor dear was tied up in her underwear, and then she was clothed in some sort of One Million Years BC bikini. My brother and I, in between laughing and feeling sorry for the actress (we are complicated people, clearly), theorised that this might have been an attempt to revive flagging ratings. In this episode she ambled about in denim shorts and an abbreviated t-shirt which exposed her midriff. On the other hand, she did get to beat up the stereotypical foul-mouthed chap who gave her lip.

In the previous episode Quinn Mallory, the aforementioned inventor of the technology, had emphasised the importance of the team sticking together unless it was absolutely necessary that they split up, as they need the magic (ahem, scientific) world-hopping device he carries to move between worlds. In this episode the team have split up so that he and the singer can have a holiday in this world's super-Mexico. Essential stuff, you'll surely agree.

Their plane having been overbooked, they are now unable to get back to the girls in time, and are attempting to persuade a lady with a private flight to let them aboard when suddenly the local police arrive, guns blazing. They get onto the plane, and it turns out that the pretty lady is a scientist, bringing back rare snakes for scientific research to prevent Alzheimer's or something. Snakes On A Plane! Unluckily, a stray police bullet blew off the lock of one of the boxes, and the snake escapes, slaying the pilot, causing the light aircraft to crash-land. They all survive unharmed, although the male snake is now loose somewhere. Quinn and Rembrandt/Remi (the singer) agree to carry the box containing the other snake for the scientist. Small pretty women can't carry large boxes. To be honest, that's a big snake, so the two men should be a bit whiny, but if that were my first complaint, it would be a bit late.

The girls rent an aeroplane, knee its misogynistic mechanic-cum-owner in the lower half of his body when he suggests they "pay" him for fuel, and fly south toward our pair of men. They land at a tiny airfield, locate a handsome fellow called Carlos, who later turns out to be a psychotic criminal waiting for the lady scientist (who is no scientist!) to land. He sends them ahead to the truck, kills and partially dismembers her would-be accomplice, and then leaps into the truck to lead them on.

The two men and the not-scientist accidentally wander onto a criminal druglord's territory. In this world tobacco is illegal, and TEA agents (if you don't laugh at this, you are not British. Frankly, how Americans could keep a straight face is beyond me) were killed storming such a compound just the other week. The male snake handily slays their pursuers, and Remi begins to divine its implausible status. This is a psychic snake, and subsequently we learn it can command or control other snakes. The trio hole up in a snake-infested mansion, where they keep being surprised by snakes. It's a bit like going to pet your dog, and then screaming that a canine is running toward you.

The psychotic Carlos has by now been so odd that the ladies have knocked him out, not left him with vengeful townsfolk, not tied him up, taken him with them, and left him unguarded in the back of the truck. Whichever world Kari Wuhrer is from, their officer training system needs improving. He breaks loose and pulls a gun on them. The villainess lays the blame on the team in a sensible and craven attempt to save her life from the nutter. Fortunately, at this point the psychic male snake causes the other snakes to knock down a door. The snakes just lie there, demonstrating their utter failure to commit to the Craft. The villain is squashed by the male snake, the villainess flees, but the snakes crash her truck, and the team leap to the next world. It's initially clear that Quinn is helping the lady For Science! but then Remi complains, and apparently we're supposed to understand Quinn wants to have sex with the villainess. Conversely, Officer Incompetent wants Carlos for sex, but then realises he's a bad egg, and hits him on the back of the noggin. Disjointed is probably the best summary of this bizarrely bad (and therefore amusingly good!) episode.

Odd Omissions in Education

The identities of the following have all been obscured.

First, the gentleman who was under the impression that DNA was a recent invention, therefore surely it's impossible for there to be a DNA link between someone living and someone dead. Oddly, he was a fairly young person, so one might have assumed he would be conversant with such recent instances as Neanderthal DNA and Richard III. As they say in America, when you assume, you make an ass out of "u" and me.

Second, the married lady in her forties who was asked to juice an orange for an elderly acquaintance. She looked alarmed at this, but a while later returned from the kitchen, saying she had done so. Later on the elderly lady popped into the kitchen and found things were not as she had hoped. Following a conversation with the younger lady the next day, it became apparent she had used a potato peeler to get the skin off, then attempted to crush the orange with her bare hands. A soggy heap of orange flesh sat on a plate.

Finally, there's an entertaining TV show on these days called Gotham. For those of you who have missed it, it's a rambling, weird and thoroughly divisive show which sets out to tell the story of Batman's city before there was a Batman. Viewers are divided into those who, like me, think it's enjoyable - in my case it's largely because of the mixture of camp and seriousness - and viewers who think it's dreadful - seemingly because it's so camp. The show has a grimy, worn feel, and the cars are deliberately big old things, which has led some younger viewers to believe (and declare online) that the show is set in the '70s. The characters have and use mobile telephones.

I hope this brought a smile to your face.

Torn between love and hate

I was just over at io9, reading an article promoting the concept of a TV show which deals with a different story each week, like the Outer Limits, and it compared this to the idea of books which contain a lot of science fiction short stories. I know exactly how I would feel about someone filming something I had already read: conflicted. How about you? Chances are you have already experienced it. Before I was born, my mother was very into SF, and my first exposure to many stories from The Original Series of Star Trek was not on the television, but the printed page. Naturally, I imagined the appearance of characters and things, and they weren't necessarily the same as what I ended up seeing in the TV show. I don't remember finding this disappointing.

When I got older, however, I went through a phase when I would try to avoid seeing a film if I had already read it. Some folk, I guess, never escape this phase, given how much frustration can overcome people when they see not merely is the brunette being played by a blonde, but the reason the killer killed is now a quite different reason. Sometimes this still frustrates me. A few years ago ITV started adapting Miss Marple stories for the telly, and in one of these they introduced a lesbian love affair as part of the explanation for the killer's motivations. That annoyed my family, as it was an alteration to the original. I found it tiresome because it was a change that was done solely with the intent of getting some free publicity. It did nothing to change the story for the better or improve the characters. It was just change for attention's sake.

The show had me raising a supercilious eyebrow because it had been called Marple, not Miss Marple. That isn't cool, TV executives. It's a bad idea. The whole thing about Miss Marple is that she is seemingly a harmless little gossipy old lady. The fact that nobody says "Miss" these days means you should keep it as the title to reinforce that idea. Worse, the actress playing Miss Marple, Geraldine McEwan, was wrong for the role. She's a good actress and I have enjoyed her in other parts. Her cackling crone in that divertingly silly Costner version of Robin Hood remains entertaining to this day. The lady they had as Miss Marple last time I watched, Julia McKenzie, is much more suitable, and even seems preferable to me than the sainted Joan Hickson, who had a wonderful run as Miss Marple, which I fondly remember from my childhood. The theme music from that era can make me nervous even today!

Returning to my original point, there are three responses I can have to an adaptation: enthusiastic, uncaring and downright annoyed. Of course, you don't need to have had any exposure to the original to have these responses. A friend dragged me along to see the first Lara Croft film when it came out. I had not played any of the games. After having to sit through that terrible, terrible film, I had no desire to. I resorted to rudeness to avoid having to watch the sequel, which I hear is even worse. That must have taken some work. Adaptations of beloved things are "taking an awful risk", as Grand Moff Tarkin might say. There was a baffling adaptation of an early Terry Pratchett book the other year. It had none of the wit and humour of the original, seeking to replace them with famous faces utterly unsuited to the roles. Even worse, one of the actors had previously played a different character in a previous adaptation of the same writer's work. I presume that anyone unfamiliar with the universe wondered how Death's cook ended up as a cowardly wizard.

Sometimes adaptations can work excellently. I was very taken with the film American Psycho on its release, despite never having read the book. Indeed, for several years I avoided it, having been told it was decidedly nastier in tone than the film. The film had some fairly nasty things in it, but when I read the book, it was indeed full of even more horrible things. It is a good book, mind you, and the film a good adaptation. So when the idea is not just one thing that might work, but a whole slew of stories, the number of possibilities for error rocket.

There's a TV show I have been watching lately called Sleepy Hollow, and it is really inadvisable to subject it to any serious critical thinking. Frankly, though, it works brilliantly. The fact that almost nothing in it makes any sense means that almost everything in it is funny. The lead character, for instance, Ichabod Crane, has a backstory that just doesn't add up at all. He explains that he joined the British Army to help put down the American Revolution. Fine. He names his regiment. Out of interest, I looked it up, and during the Revolutionary War it was in Gibraltar and Britain, having been formerly in Ireland. That's fine. Then in a subsequent episode he is at the Boston Tea Party, helping to steal some evil thing that the Hessians are guarding. Because the Hessian mercenaries are helping to bring about the end of the world, you see. It is glorious fun, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to you with one proviso. My Dad is a big train buff, and gets peeved when a TV show set in the '30s uses one from the '40s. Since nothing in this show makes any sense, exercise caution if you find things similarly off-putting. Baddies using artefacts marked with Viking runes to do something that involves them talking in Ancient Greek to henchmen who speak German about some Egyptian hieroglyphs is too much fun - unless it isn't for you.

Terror on your Television!

SPOILERS  ABOUT CONTEMPORARY-ISH TV SHOWS WILL FOLLOW!









So, y'know, exercise a spot of common sense.










For many folks these days Comic Book Guy has come to dominate their psyche. Our engorged hero declares, "Worst. Episode. Ever." Nowadays, folks often think this, and there's doubtless an argument in support of it. There is a lot of rubbish about these days, and there has been for a while. I have to confess two things now. First, I have just listened to this Cracked webcast about the terrible endings good shows have. Second, I've only watched part of one episode of Lost, so I cannot empathise with those who have suffered worst in recent years. My brother and I have a certain way of approaching TV shows. It relies on assuming a certain comedy. I have been guilty of taking it out of the house, and folk out there don't appreciate it so much.

I assume there's a great emotional connection going on in their cases. I've watched some of Friends. It was silly, but I do remember feeling a connection to Chandler. I watched some Buffy, and thought Xander the bee's knees. Then I went off to uni, and got older. Fundamentally, it's all entertainment, so if it fails to entertain, something has gone wrong. It doesn't have to be fun, necessarily. We can draw something enlightening and beneficial from sad experiences (cf. Lost in Translation). In recent years I became a fan of Dexter, the show about a loony who, driven mad by his mother's murder when he was but a toddler, goes about killing folks.

The TV show is distinct from the book. The literary Dexter is, let's be blunt, possessed by a demon. Or a Star Trek version thereof: an energy being That doesn't make the books bad. They're every bit as enjoyable as the TV show - so long as you don't staple your Serious Cap to your head. The TV version, mind you, is a lot more family-friendly. Dexter does love Rita; his adoptive children aren't also possessed by murderous demons; his adoptive sister and blood brother are not still waiting to kill one another. It's all hokum, and - let's reiterate - entertaining.

But TV shows can go spectacularly wrong. The penultimate season of Buffy saw the writers decide that the "Big Bad" of the season would be not some ancient monster, vampire, demon, crazy robot or goddess, but...life itself. I can't think of a worse idea than that. You've got a TV show you're marketing at teenagers, and who is the baddie? Life. As if kids weren't depressed and moody enough! Inevitably, the season was a huge downer. Dexter made a similar mistake. Season Four had a sad ending. Distinctly sad. Season Five was dramatically effective. Future-Sherlock Holmes led a gang of murderous, misogynistic rapists whom Dexter had to kill. It finally cheered up six or eight episodes in. I'm not checking precisely where because it is too depressing to watch.

There's the rub. Don't make your entertainment too depressing to watch. A message the folks who wrote the last season of Dexter could have learned from their fifth season, even if they never saw that bit of Buffy. In some ways, the TV finale of Dexter was masterly. Personally, I watched it because I was interested in a bloke who doesn't understand interpersonal interaction working out how to do so. But a few weeks before the finale I read some thingy to the effect that there were two classes of viewers of Dexter (um). The one wants him to get away with his crimes, living happily ever after. The other wants that naughty boy to be captured, prosecuted and punished. In the finale they showed the writers managed to accomplish something truly special. They annoyed both of these divisions, since he wasn't captured and tried, nor did he live happily ever after. He just kept living in a very depressed fashion.

It is almost as though they sought to say that this is what the average TV viewer is spending his or her life doing. If you want me, I shall be filling a bucket with my tears.

The Mystery of Father Brown

The BBC is currently showing a series of nine adaptations of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and the series as a whole is something of puzzle. Chesterton's Father Brown is a diminutive man, whereas Mark Williams is a shade over six feet tall. The French detective Valentin has been transformed into the English Valentine, and the strong and towering Frenchman Flambeau has been used as inspiration for a diminutive scamp-cum-chauffeur called Sid. A gossip of an Irish parish secretary and a Polish immigrant cleaner have been added to the mix, because this is a series, and audiences need to be reassured by seeing the same characters every time. An aristocrat has been added purely to provide Father Brown with an excuse to be in some odd places, which is a striking claim, given that he turns up in the original stories without needing a protectrix. There is a short dialogue between the two writers of the series at this link, in which they explain that and other choices.

It has been a long time since I read the Father Brown stories. Indeed, I think it must be about a decade and a half if not two decades, so the memories are not fresh. Consequently, this new show led me to revisit Chesterton's work. Doing so led me to wonder what the heck was going on in this new TV show. Let me say, first, that this is daytime TV, so anyone approaching it with high expectations is over-generous or inexperienced. Having said that, the show is quite reasonable. Mark Williams is an enjoyable Father Brown, albeit one who seems less of a Catholic Priest of the 1950s and more a time-traveller from today, such are his sensibilities toward homosexuality, adultery and foreign religions. Nobody reasonable would expect a modern adaptation of The Wrong Shape to contain such sentiments as the loveable Father Brown expresses in the original. Hinduism, Indian art and India as a whole are damned as sinister and cruel. One would find it hard to sympathise with Father Brown if he had just deliberately insulted a mass of innocent people for no reason other than a dagger being made in "The Wrong Shape", which is what inspires his diatribe in the original.

Changes, I agree wholeheartedly, had to be made. Although the extent of the alterations are such that I am left thinking that this is not Chesterton's Father Brown, nor his stories. The date of the stories has been changed. Chesterton's first story was published in 1910, and at the beginning of The Wrong Shape he sets the scene in the year 18--. The characters have been altered, sometimes radically, or plucked from thin air, as I remarked in my initial paragraph. The geography is different, which is rather sad, as the original Father Brown would turn up all over the place, but is here confined to a little village. Last of all, the stories have been signally altered or, again, cut from whole cloth. If the characters are different, the date is different, the stories are different, and in some instances the solutions are different, is this really Father Brown? No, no, it isn't. The name seems to have been taken purely so that some storylines can be pillaged for elements the writers happen to like.

As to the characters, Mark Williams plays a cheerful, almost boisterous Catholic priest. Poor Hugo Speer plays Inspector Valentine, who has had one opportunity in the first six episodes to be nice, when he allowed Mark Williams illegal access to a confidential file. The whole rest of the time he is stuck playing a very surly Jones from Midsomer Murders. For those who have missed that show, there is an older detective, Barnaby, who is wise because he is old, and a young detective Jones, who is foolish because he is young. I am slightly oversimplifying. The character Sid seems to be something of a wheeler-dealer, which was mainly established by having people declare that "he may have gone too far this time" in one episode, in which he was wrongly suspected of beating up a man on a train and flinging him out the window. I can't imagine anyone would regard that as a spoiler, as the fact that he is a main character in the series establishes that he is not guilty. Well, maybe not in the last episode of the series, which is titled (and perhaps even based on) The Blue Cross, but who knows?

Sorcha Cusack seems to be having a whale of a time playing a frightful old woman. Nancy Carroll is convincingly posh enough for this middle-class man to accept that she is (although someone on IMDB has cuttingly remarked that no respectable lady should be carrying a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 1950s!). Kasia Koleczek has a somewhat perplexing role as an intermittently tragic Polish immigrant. I say perplexing because she ended up thrust into a main role in the adaptation of The Eye of Apollo, which was (again) nothing like the original, reusing only the elements of a mad cult and a rich lady "falling to her death".

In short, when my mother decided not to watch it on the ground that Mark Williams is too tall, I think she had it right. If you have a great affection for the original stories, and want to see them accurately rendered, you would be a fool to expect it of this show. I shall keep watching them for two reasons. First, a sense of curiosity impels me to find out what is going to be changed next, and more specifically, whether the seventh episode, The Devil's Dust, has got anything to do with anything Chesterton wrote. I suspect it of being a bizarre concatenation of fears about radiation resulting from Fukashima and the handy fact that the show is set in the fifties, when nuclear power is becoming a real prospect, and all the world knows the danger of the atomic bomb. Second, I would like to see if The Blue Cross, the last episode of this run of nine, is anything like the original, from which Father Brown is almost wholly absent, or if they have just nabbed the title and done something weird. I would really like to see Flambeau make an appearance, but who knows what the future may bring? Not I.

In conclusion, for daytime TV this would be perfectly adequate were it not for the fact that it purports to be an adaptation of a series of books, and is actually a wholesale reimagining. For it bears about about as much resemblance to the originals as do those Robert Downey Jr. films to anything Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote. Sadly, because it is daytime TV, there are fewer explosions and fistfights to provide a cinematic distraction from the eccentricities of the show. If you do fancy something good with Mark Williams in, having enjoyed him as Mr Weasley in the Harry Potter films, let me recommend the first seasons of Red Dwarf, in which he has a small recurring role as a friend to Lister. Until next time, folks!

Happy Birthday to me!

Another day closer to death! Heh, it should be a nice day. I have nothing special planned. Some friends, I mentioned yesterday, came over at the weekend, as weekday birthdays are insufferable to arrange. M&J and N&B got me some nice presents. Tomorrow I am going to a friend's Halloween party, but today I have no special plans. I may have a game of Star Fleet with my brother, and we shall certainly sit down and watch a spot of telly. He's bought me the second season of the delightful American sitcom Community, and I slept through last night's University Challenge, so he's sure to have recorded it for me. I've been early to bed and early to rise of late, but health, wealth and wisdom remain shockingly elusive. Cheerio for now, folks!

Millennium: a review

This is one confusing show. That would be a generous summary of Millennium. A more accurate appreciation is that this show was strikingly mishandled, rather like The X-Files, and for a similar reason. In the case of the one with aliens, the network threw money at it to keep it on the air, necessitating a wholesale reimagining of the show's mythos. The same sort of thing happened with Millennium, which received an unexpected reprieve after it ended the world at the end of Season 2. This necessitated dropping the end of the world, and led to a poorly handled recasting of the Millennium Group as villainous, and Peter Watts as malign. When the show began, Watts was a good guy and the Millennium Group, although sinister in its secrecy, was on the side of the angels. There is a clear intention in the show to reveal that they are not all that they are cracked up to be, and every bit as much sinners as sinned against.

The problem with this is that they are too evidently on the side of good at the start of the first season, and that in the second season there is too rapid a descent into unconscionable practices. I am currently halfway through the last season, and they have become wilfully obstructive of justice and public safety, acting behind a mask which ironically brings to my mind the French Revolution's Committee of Public Safety, a real body avowedly opposed to evil which perpetrated a great deal of it. Had there been a few more seasons, this could have been done well. It is clear from the introduction of the two factions, Owls and Roosters, in the Millennium Group, in Season 2, that there was a long-term plan to introduce faction, and set one side against the other. The lack of time demanded a swift change of direction, and made the whole business too confused and self-contradictory.

The worst casualty is Peter Watts, who introduced Frank to the Group, and mentored him. By the end of Season 2 his character arc has snapped, and his character barely blinks at having to sacrifice his whole family because the Group refuses to take perfectly reasonable measures. The actor does his best, but no actor who has ever lived could rescue such a situation from descending into farce. Nobody can hold this sort of nonsense together for long, though Lance Henriksen merely has to react to the Group's sudden and inexplicable villainy rather than alter his character to justify it.

This is not to say that Millennium is a bad show. There are some amusing comic episodes, including a crossover with one of my favourite episode of The X-Files, featuring the quirky fictional writer Jose Chung. The dark episodes are nearly ubiquitous, but the striking human (and other) monsters unveiled do make for memorable and compelling figures and stories. The real problem is that one is left wanting more, not in the sense that one is rubbing one's hands for a sequel, but in that one is watching a car crash with a certain knowledge that there is no way out for the victims. I am going to finish this show off in the next day or two, and might add a codicil to this post covering the final episodes, but like so many shows - The X-Files, the new and old Battlestar Galactica - this show could have benefited from the maxim of Augustus: festina lente (more haste, less speed). It was good, but disappointing.