“High Sparrow” I admit I was sort of worried when the critical reaction to the first four episodes of this season (you know – the ones that coincidentally ended up leaked online) of Game of Thrones seemed pretty lukewarm – especially in light of the fact that the end of […] Read more
“The House of Black and White” I confess, I broke and watched this episode a day early. But I have a good excuse – my back went out and I’ve been basically bedridden with nothing to do. That makes it even harder to resist jumping right into 43 and 44 […] Read more
“The Wars to Come” Into the great wide open… Our annual wandering through the desert of the soul has ended, and Game of Thrones – as usual – follows hot on the heels of the cherry blossoms. It may last a little longer, but 10 weeks sure does seem to […] Read more
“Death in Heaven” You may remember that I closed last week’s post by saying that “Moffat is sometimes guilty of trying to have his cake and it eat too, and a fear he may do that here”. This is one of those cases where I hate being right, but I’m […] Read more
“Dark Water” Never let it be said that Steven Moffat is afraid to go big on the big occasions. It’s fitting that there’s so much talk of “missing the headline” in this episode of Doctor Who, because it’s really difficult to know where to start when talking about it. What’s […] Read more
“In the Forest of the Night” I’m not sure any of you are still out there, given the lack of commentary on either of the last two episodes (which were among the best of the season). But in case you are I’m going to finish out this season of Doctor […] Read more
“Flatline” Jamie Mathieson has proved himself the most interesting writer of the Capaldi era so far – though there have only been four of them. Only in Mathieson’s hands has Clara’a Mary Sue-ism seemed present to serve a larger purpose – though to be fair that purpose was surely laid […] Read more
“Mummy on the Orient Express” Dear Jamie Mathieson: You may be a new writer for Doctor Who, but you’re welcome back any time. Even next week. For the record, I decided not to do a post on last week’s “Kill the Moon”. I’m simply too far behind in too many […] Read more
“The Caretaker” Brief touch-base on Doctor Who this week, for reasons I’ve already covered. But the usual disclaimer applies – don’t mistake the length of the post for the fondness towards the episode. I thought this was rather a good one – probably the second-best of the season after “Listen”, […] Read more
“Time Heist” I’ll be the first to admit I went into “Time Heist” with pretty modest expectations. The writer, Steve Thompson, has contributed two middling Who episodes – decent but not great. The overall standard of writing this season has been indifferent, and the premise seemed a bit of a […] Read more