Cast of Characters:

Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeoff) – An annoying human who was somewhat endearing in the first movie and now just irritates when he’s on screen. He doesn’t do much aside from run around, scream and get blown up. Doesn’t have the ability to tell his girlfriend he loves her. Also doesn’t have the ability to make the movie good.

Mikaela (Megan Fox) – Sam’s insanely hot girlfriend. Her purpose in the movie is… is… actually, I’m not really sure. I know it’s something. Oh, wait. It’s standing around looking hot, and also possibly as a Mary Stu for Michael Bay, which is disturbing on many levels.

Sam’s Parents (Kevin Dunn, Julie White) – Exist only to embarrass their son and get some cheap laughs from the audience. Somehow even more stupid and annoying than they were in the first movie, and that’s saying something.

Leo (Ramon Rodriguez) – Sam’s idiotic roommate. He runs a conspiracy theory website talking about how the alien robots are real, man, and live among us! The truth is out there, dude! Mostly he just serves to annoy.

Seymour Simmons (John Tuturro) – The Sector Seven jerk from the first movie who is now here to show his butt off to the world. Also one of about sixteen comic relief characters in the film.

The National Security Advisor (John Benjamin Hickey) – Turns up to make some actually intelligent and interesting comments, but since he’s just a government flunky, he has no business in the movie! After all, the government sucks! Well, except for the military.

Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) – Leader of the Autobots. He stands around and makes grand statements and noble-sounding quotes while reminding the viewer how much better the really crappy animated series was compared to this steaming pile.

Megatron (voiced by Hugo Weaving, though not so you’d notice) – Leader of the Decepticons. Well, sort of. His leader appears to be the Fallen, so I’m not sure what Megatron is anymore. Killed in the last movie, but he’s not quite dead.

The Fallen (voiced by Tony Todd) – Megatron’s boss. Yeah, it’s news to me that he had one. Galvatron had one, you know? In the animated film? Gosh, what a good movie that was compared to this one. I hate Michael Bay so much.

Bumblebee (voiced by your iPod’s playlist) – At the end of the last movie he gained the ability to talk. Naturally following the patterns of sequels such as Rocky II and Ghostbusters II, he has regressed and can’t talk anymore.

Skids and Mudflap (Reno Wilson and Tom Kenny) – Dese be a couple hard workin’ Autobots, yes, dey is! Dey’s gonna work mighty hard for you, massa! You don’t need to worry none about them bein’ uppity, and you ain’t gonna need to whup ‘em none, cause dey keeps to dey place!

The critics rave about Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen!

…Michael Bay’s latest bid to bludgeon audiences into dulled submission, is the reductio ad absurdum of a summer blockbuster. It is loud (boom!), long (two and a half hours!), incoherent (poorly explained intergalactic warfare!), leering (Megan Fox in short shorts!), racist (jive-talkin’ robot twins!), and rife with product tie-ins (Chevy! Hasbro!)… John Yoo would not be able to draft a memo excusing the torment this movie inflicts on its audience… – Dana Stevens, Slate.com

The film is padded by an hour of completely unnecessary, worthless, offensive and repugnant sequences that do nothing but tread water. – Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News

Often bypassing any logic or reason let alone character or depth, this utter mess of an action opus is only sporadically entertaining thanks to all the visual flair that $200 million worth of computer-generated fighting robots can buy, but holds no real value beyond that. – Garth Franklin, Darkhorizons.com

Bay stages battle sequences the way a three-year old plays with Lego’s. He dumps everything out at once in one loud crash, and just starts snapping pieces together and tossing them into each other… And much like a child at play, things get loud, there’s a lot of screaming, and shit gets destroyed. – Capone, Ain’t It Cool News

It’s tempting to dismiss Michael Bay’s long, loud and ludicrous sequel to 2007’s Transformers with one word — hunkajunk. On every level this movie is as bankrupt as GM. But there is more to be said about a movie this gargantuan ($200 million spent on robot hardbodies) and galactically stupid. Transformers: The Revenge of The Fallen is beyond bad, it carves out its own category of godawfulness. And, please, you don’t have to remind me that the original was a colossal hit ($700 million worldwide) and the sequel will probably do just as well. I know it’s popular. So is junk food, and they both poison your insides and rot your brain. – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Though there are more special effects and new ways for machines to turn into ‘bots, the story seems as if it’s about to end at least three times.

If only. – Claudia Puig, USA Today

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination. – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

This is the second version of this recap. You can find the original on my website here. This new version contains most of what’s in the old, along with a bit of the new and lotsa purty pickchurs to look at! Enjoy!

It just doesn’t seem like summer anymore until Michael Bay gets the chance to visit upon us his latest cinematic abortion, and in the case of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the newest bit of diaper gravy to spew forth from his directorial anus, he does so in a way that truly sets a new standard for craptacular films.

Now I liked, or at least tolerated, the first movie. I didn’t think it was great cinema by any means, but it was reasonably entertaining and succeeded despite Michael Bay’s involvement. At the time I figured Spielberg had managed to reign in Bay’s habitual excesses and actually found myself looking forward to the sequel.

How naive I was…

The film opens in the year 17,000 BC. We know this because of a nice caption that tells us this. Quite nice of them to so accurate. Imagine if it had been, say, 17,014 BC! The confusion that might cause! It’s rather like the film 10,000 B.C., . The confusion it caused! True, mostly it was people confused about how the movie got made in the first place, but still.

In the distant past, we see standard Stone Age tribesman (looking like a bunch of Australian Aborigines), hunting a tiger (a tiger? In Africa?). Also, there’s a white guy with them.

Anyhow, the hunters stumble across a large Decepticon outpost on Earth. They get stepped on and the movie goes into modern times with a nice scene showing modern Shanghai’s nighttime skyline illuminated by bright sunlight. I know it’s Shanghai because of the caption, and I know it’s night that same caption informs me that it it’s 2214 hours. Jolly good. It’s possible that it’s meant to be 2214 GMT, but a: it doesn’t say that, and b: several other scenes show this happening in the late afternoon, the evening and in the dark. I chalk it up to Michael Bay’s Second Rule of Filmmaking: Continuity is for losers (the First Rule? “Never shoot an air vehicle on the ground when you can instead film it airborne, against the sun and through an orange filter”).

Ah, the lovely nighttime skyline of Shanghai...

Optimus Prime gives us a little voiceover wherein he explains that the Autobots have teamed up with a multi-national human taskforce called Network Elements: Supporters and Transformers, or NAMBLA. They basically travel the globe hunting down Decepticons while keeping their presence a secret, in this case through a toxic spill cover story. This cover story is required, because apparently even after seeing Los Angeles – er… Mission City – get leveled, likely with lots of video footage both amateur and professional, everyone has “forgotten” the Transformers exist.

Let me divert here for a moment. There’s a common theme in a lot of science fiction television and film that you can have some major, Earth-shattering event (like “Mission City” being trashed in the first movie , London being menaced countless times in Doctor Who , Cardiff being menaced in Torchwood, and supernatural nonsense in Buffy The Vampire Slayer), that happens, gets witnessed, gets filmed/video taped, and then everyone conveniently forgets about it and/or there’s a government cover-up.

This is particularly egregious in the TV series War of the Worlds, an otherwise forgettable show that takes place a few decades after the events shown in the 1953 film of the same name. In that film, we see millions killed, cities devastated and nuclear bombs set off. Yet by the time the TV series rolls around, there’s been a cover-up and everyone has “forgotten” it happened.

This sort of nonsense is the laziest form of writing there is. It’s implausible, insulting to the audience and just plain stupid. It’s like saying that ten years from now all the video footage of the 9/11 attacks and all the news coverage will just disappear and that people are likely to, as a large majority, sit around saying, “September 11, 2001? No, nothing happened that day. Why do you ask?”

Writers like to do this because it means they don’t have to work too hard to try and figure out what the consequences would really be to the events they set up initially. If giant robots had beat the crap out of each other in downtown Los Angeles, that would have massive repercussions worldwide, especially once we found they were aliens. But the writers don’t want to deal with that, so they just say “cover-up!” and that’s all there is to it.

Lazy fuckers.

Back to the story, where we see the Autobots and the humans deploying onto the scene in Shanghai. The Autobots drive there (except Optimus, who drops out of a plane), and the humans drive there, too, in various hummers and on motorbikes and some of them even deploy from the back of a semi for some reason (get used to the words, “for some reason”. You’ll see them a lot).

The two groups start to close in on the (two) Decepticons, who appear to be just sitting around minding their own business. The attack begins and, as you’d expect, most of the humans get quickly killed. I’m not even sure why the humans are there, and why they aren’t carrying high-quality ammo. They’re using rifles which they know don’t work. What, were all the tanks busy or something? We do see some helicopters in the fight. They of course hover at a distance and fire HE rounds and missiles at the enemy. Actually, they don’t. What they do instead is get really, really close, fire their weapons, and then get shot down. Because apparently missiles are melee weapons.

It’s stupid to send these humans into the fight. The way a friend of mine put it is that it’s like sending ants to fight an elephant, and why bother when you have several elephants of your own just standing around waiting to do something?

Anyhow, the Autobots go cashing after the Decepticons. We see some big, exciting battles, which are reasonably well executed, I suppose. There’s one Decepticon who runs around on a huge wheel, and his design is cool. Otherwise, it’s a lot of meh, and the big wheel Decepticon is pretty much owning everyone until Optimus drops out of his plane and joins in the battle. Why he wasn’t involved in the first place is left up to you to guess.

The big wheel bot is eventually brought down, though it takes quite a bit of effort and results in millions of dollars of damage to Shanghai and likely dozens of civilian deaths. Mind you, the presence of the Autobots is a secret!

At the end of the battle, Optimus is standing over the defeated Decepticon, who taunts him a little, mentions something about the return of the Fallen, and then Prime shoots him in the face. Executes him. Murders him. Now, I ask you, does this sound like what Optimus Prime would actually do? No, because Prime is presented as a noble sort of figure, and not the sort who goes in for the cold-blooded killing of a prisoner. A warrior, yes. A murderer, no.

Before dying, though, the Decpticon mutters something about how the Fallen is about to return. One of the NEST people say that doesn’t sound good, and I entirely agree. The fact that they felt he need to make up something new, like the Fallen, instead of using something established, like Unicron, doesn’t sound good at all!

Leaving this happy scene, we move on to Sam, as he gets ready to head to Princeton for college. He has some moments with his insufferable parents (you know, the idiots who in the last movie thought a robot falling down was an earthquake). They serve the same purpose here as they did in the first movie, which is overly exaggerated comic relief. They’re two of the roughly sixteen comic relief characters in the film. No, that’s not an exaggeration. Spoony (and I still can’t decide if I think he’s hot or not), actually counted in a review where he also called Bay a “shit-flinging monkeychild”.

Sam’s parents mostly spend this first scene with his mom running around crying hysterically about her little boy leaving for school, including breaking down emotionally when she finds his baby shoes and insisting he come home for every holiday, including the small ones (do any mothers actually act like this?), and his father making crass sexual remarks about his wife in front of their son. Charming.

We’re also introduced to Sam’s two dogs. His two male dogs. Obviously male dogs. I mention this because we get not one, but two, scenes of them having sex. Thanks for that, Michael Bay. You’ve wrecked sex forever.

Normally I'm all in favor of doggie-style, but... ugh!

Sam calls his girlfriend, Mikaela (isn’t that a female form of the name Michael? Trying to tell us something, Mr Bay?). She is shown on screen for the first time in a shot you’ve no doubt seen in the trailer, sitting on a motorbike in pose that might make most Playboy Playmates feel embarrassed.

I do hope Megan Fox's chiropractor sent Michael Bay flowers in thanks.

They talk briefly about the possibility of her coming with him to college. She says she can’t because, among other things, she has to look after her dad, who was recently released from prison. Now I might be mistaken, but wasn’t he supposed to have had a pardon? Wouldn’t that have resulted in him getting out of prison two years ago? If so, why does Mikaela still need to look after him? Anyhow, he’s working at a bike shop. He seems to be doing ok. Most felons should be doing so well two years out of prison.

While yammering on the phone to Mikaela, Sam is fiddling with the outfit he wore in the first movie and a shard from the Allspark cube falls out. Because Sam’s mother apparently never does laundry. Sam touches the shard, it zaps his brain and falls through the floor, burning its way down into the kitchen where it turns all the appliances into robots that promptly attack everyone.

This brings up a flaw from the first movie that is carried over into this one, which is: why does the Allspark apparently only make Decepticons? Every time it creates some sort of robot entity, the first thing that bot does is attack everyone. Ah, well. If there’s one thing I learned quickly from this movie, it’s not to ever ask “Why?” cause the movie won’t explain it.

Anyhow, a small battle starts up inside the house, which catches on fire. Bumblebee comes out from the garage and tries to fight off the little bots, and eventually does so. He then hides as the fire department and police show up and, interestingly, none of the neighbors notice any of this. All sorts of comments are made about security (cause of the robots being Sooper Sekrit!) and there’s more annoying interplay between Sam’s parents and then Mikaela shows up and shows what her real purpose is to the movie, which is (aside from showing body parts), to engage in “witty” banter with Sam and get annoyed when he won’t say “I love you” to her (and does the camera spin 360 degrees while they are talking to each other? Why yes, it does! Ladies and gentlemen, we have Michael Bay’s Third Rule of Filmmaking: never just film people when instead you can spin cameras around them).

I mention “I love you” thing only because that discussion, the whole “I love you thing” is the entirety of the central emotional core to this movie. No, seriously. That’s the entire scope of their relationship conflict point. Now admittedly, I’ve been single most of my life, and don’t expect this to change anytime soon, but when I have been in a relationship, I haven’t had any problem with saying, “I love you,” to whomever I was involved with. It’s just not that big of a deal. Well, unless you’re in a major Hollywood blockbuster where the lazy writers have to come up with some sort of emotional conflict.

After brushing off his ridiculously hot girlfriend, Sam goes to chat with Bumblebee, and tells him that at Princeton, freshmen aren’t allowed to have cars (I doubt this, but it’s possible, I suppose). Bumblebee responds with… music and clips from movies. He does this because, like in the first movie, he can’t talk. Now that was fixed at the end of the first film, but clearly someone said, “Hey, the kids like him talking in music! So let’s keep doing that! Yeah!”

Also this is the moment when Sam basically tells Bumblebee to butt out, and that he can look after himself. Yes, that makes plenty of sense given that he was nearly killed a few moments ago.

Now we catch up with the military guys, who are busy doing their thing in their little hanger and getting ready for a debriefing with what I believe is supposed to be someone from the Joint Chiefs.

This set of scenes also introduce us to two cringeworthy characters named Mudflap and Skids. You may have heard about the controversy surrounding them. If you haven’t allow me to enlighten you by saying that if you think Jar Jar Binks is the height of funny, if you can’t get enough of minstrel shows, and if you enjoyed Amos and Andy, you’ll love the comic stylings of Mudflap and Skids, two characters who prove that racist humor is alive and well and living in America!

God, these two are awful. They are the worst characters I’ve seen on screen in ages. Now I’ll defend Jar Jar Binks for the most part. He wasn’t well-executed, but I got what Lucas was going for with the character (ie: the awkward adolescent who isn’t comfortable in their own body), but these guys? Painful! They talk in Ebonics (robonics?), they always fight each other, one has a gold tooth (?!), and they can’t read. There is nothing good about these characters at all. They serve no useful purpose to the plot and Spielberg ought to be ashamed to have his name attached to a film where these guys appear.

Now how did two characters like these get created? Let us turn to the words of Mr Bay himself:

Bay said the twins’ parts “were kind of written but not really written, so the voice actors is when we started to really kind of come up with their characters.”

You understand what that means, right? The characters weren’t really written. They made up a rough sketch, had the voice actors come in, and built the characters around their performance. Memo to Mr Bay: This is not how movies should be made. The usual flow of action is to write up the characters and then cast them. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but this is not one of them.

More troubling, though, is this quote:

“I purely did it for kids,” the director said. “Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them.”

So according to Michael Bay, the kids of America are fundamentally racist and will be best entertained by two jive-talkin’ robots presented as caricatures of black people. Well done, Michael, well done. I believe this officially undoes everything good that’s come of race relations since the election of Barack Obama. I am impressed.

Also it’s worth noting that this implies that Bay wanted to have this movie be accessible to kids under 13. The movie is rated PG-13 and was likely made with an eye to that rating. Again, well done, Mr Bay!

Back to the “story”. One of the Marines from the first movie (didn’t bother to learn his name then, don’t care to now. He’s the white one. The one who had cannibalistic fantasies about eating his daughter’s cheeks), is having a video conference with a four-star general discussing recent operations. They go out of their way during this conference to avoid showing Optimus on screen, even when he’s talking to the general. This is because of security. I mean, four-star generals certainly can’t be trusted to keep secrets, now can they?

The National Security Advisor turns up and wanders in. Apparently there’s no problem with him seeing Optimus. Anyhow, he starts bitching at the military guy, and then begins arguing with Optimus Prime, complaining about how the Autobots wouldn’t share any of their weapon technology. Optimus gets all smug and says that basically it’s because humans are too violent. Now I could be wrong, but I seem to remember a bunch of robots, “Autobots”, I think they were called, shuffling off to Shanghai to hunt down and kill some Decepticons who were just minding their own business. I also seem to recall one of these “Autobots”, I forget who, violently executing a prisoner.

Eventually the National Security Advisor tells Optimus that this isn’t humanity’s war and that he blames the Autobots for bringing the Decepticons to Earth and then causing more trouble by inviting everyone else to come and play. This might actually be an area that could lead into interesting discussion if, say, Christopher Nolan had been at the helm, but not in a Michael Bay film, where plot cannot be allowed to get in the way of the action!

In the end the National Security Advisor flat-out asks Optimus if the Autobots will leave if the US government asks them to. Optimus says yes, and I can’t help but think of the large queue of governments behind them that would be happy to have the Autobots come live in their countries. That plus the fact that the Decepticons would be quite gleeful at this turn of events and would promptly take over.

In the meantime, we have Sam and company arriving at Princeton. Sam meets his annoying roommate, Leo, who runs a conspiracy website all about how the government is covering up these giant robots running around (memo to Leo: why not just contact KTLA, who surely would’ve had miles of video tape from the original battle in Los- er… Mission City, and ask to borrow some of their footage?). It’s a big, huge cover up, but he’s able to find out about it due the Rule of Incompetent Omnipotence*. Leo also mentions, in a rather telegraphed plot-point, that another website often scoops him.

We get more of Sam’s parents running around engaging in Komedy!, including Sam’s mom eating a pot brownie without knowing it, which is something of a surprise given that there’s a marijuana leaf prominently displayed on the bag she’s holding and she’s old enough to have lived through the Sixties and Seventies. You know, I’ve never smoked weed in my life, but even I know what a pot leaf looks like. I also know, despite not ever having smoked weed, that it doesn’t make people run around like they’ve just done a line of coke, unlike what happens to Sam’s mom in this movie, but then, this is the kind of movie where humor comes from people being morons.

Are you older than 10? Then you probably know what the leaf is, don't you?

It was at this point I realized something about this film. I’m about ten years too old to enjoy it and about three hundred times too smart. But I soldiered on!

Now we come to one of the few cool parts of the movie as Soundwave, a Decepticon that is a satellite in orbit (and is voiced here by Frank Welker, who really should’ve been given the role of Megatron), drops Ravage down to Earth. Ravage goes to a US military base and ejects some ball bearings into a vent shaft. These merge and form… DEVASTATOR! Well, no, but they do make a fascinating looking two-dimensional robot (giving it more dimension than the screenplay). This, along with a couple other scenes, show some real flickers of imagination, that prove that there could actually be something of substance to this movie if only people had actually put forth the effort. But no, why bother?

Ok, that's just cool looking.

Anyhow, the 2-D robot wanders around a bit until he gets hold of an Allspark shard that the military had. Keep that in your mind. The military had an Allspark shard. The Decepticons steal it in this scene (which includes the 2-D robot jumping through someone and cutting him in half. Ick!), and then spend much of the rest of the movie perusing Sam to get… an Allspark shard.

Now maybe there’s a good, solid reason for why they’re doing this. Possibly they just want to have a complete set. They do eventually stop chasing him to get that and instead chase after him for something else, but their motivations throughout the film are about as clear as… oh, let’s say… rice. Brown rice. Yes, that’s not very clear is it? The analogy doesn’t make a lot of sense, but neither does the movie, so there you go.

Meantime, back in California, we see Mikaela closing up shop. We also see her getting ready for a little video-conference scene with Sam, reminding me of a much better scene in the highly-superior British TV series Skins. Speaking of things I’d rather be watching… Oh, my Skins boys (except Cook)! Where are you when I need you?

Sam isn’t there for the video chat because he’s allowed himself to be dragged to a college party, where he’s starting to hallucinate and draw strange characters in cake frosting while some hot babe (is there any other kind in a Michael Bay film?), is busy checking him out. She then starts hitting on him and riding his crotch, making me very slightly jealous.

Mikaela is shown still waiting for her man to turn up as Bumblebee shows up at the college. Yes, he’d apparently gone clear across country to be with Sam. Aw, isn’t that sweet? Sam and the slutty girl get into the car, but it’s clear that Bumblebee doesn’t like her and eventually sprays what I believe is anti-freeze into her face. Jealousy? Perhaps. Or perhaps Michael Bay just wanted to show a woman getting fluid sprayed into her face.

We go from there to a scene where Prime finds Sam and talks with him a bit about destiny and duty and all the usual boilerplate nonsense. They’re meeting in broad daylight in a nicely secluded public graveyard. Gee, good thing no one ever visits those, right?

Out in the ocean we see a cargo ship carrying some construction vehicles. The vehicles, apparently desperate to avoid being in a Michael Bay movie, jump overboard and sink down. It is not surprise when they transform, thus introducing the Constructicons to the film.

Upon arriving at the bottom of the sea, they find Megatron and rebuild him. Now more than a bit pissed at the universe, he rises up, knocks aside a submarine and heads out into space, by which I mean he leaps out of the water and then he’s at Saturn.

On one of Saturn’s moons, Megatron meets up with Starscream and bitches at him. Interestingly, as the two talk you can see their breath. Cause, you know, it’s cold in space. Also airless. Also, Decepticons exhale when they talk. I do believe my brain just caught fire.

Megatron beats on Starscream for a few seconds and the knocks him to an egg sac out of which drops a baby robot (?!). Then he goes off to bow and scrape in front of the Fallen, who looks like he’s wearing an Egyptian headdress. It’s actually not a bad look, really.

The Fallen, voiced rather effectively by Tony Todd, tells Megatron that he needs to find the location of the Matrix. No, not that Matrix, or even that Matrix, but the Matrix of Leadership. Makes sense to me! Megatron heads out.

Next up we have Sam in astronomy class going slowly bonkers as he puts up with the introduction of Professor Schrute, who dresses like a Time Lord and has a libido that would make Hugh Heffner go “Damn!” He’s rather creepy and disturbing, so of course all the women in his class (all of whom are drop-pants gorgeous, because those are apparently the only women who go to this school), seem infatuated with him. I believe we have a Gary Stu for this movie. The whole scene is really rather nauseating and makes me want to have a shower.

Sadly, Rainn Wilson's audition tape to be the 11th Doctor was lost in the mail.

Anyhow, during class, Sam starts hallucinating, reads his entire astronomy text book in only a few seconds, runs up the chalkboard screaming about Einstein’s equation of E=MC2 being wrong.

Another short digression here. For some reason every time filmmakers or TV writers or the like want to show someone being super smart, they have them ranting on about how Einstein was wrong and how E=MC2 is just not true. This always annoys me. It’s one of the most proven theories in science. It’s like someone saying the Earth doesn’t really rotate around the Sun or that evolution is wrong, and no one would ever think that!

His mind bubbling and fizzing away, Sam run out of his class and we go back to California to see Mikaela wandering around the garage while a small RC truck tails her. Turns out the truck is Wheelie, who is even more annoying here than he was on the original animated series, and believe me, that’s no small accomplishment.

Wheelie tools around the garage and finds out that Sam’s Allspark shard, which for reasons that baffle me he gave to Mikaela to hold onto, is in a small safe. While doing this he seems to be lusting after her. Yes, apparently Megan Fox is so hot that even alien robots want to fuck her. Alrighty, then!

She captures this annoying little creature and tortures it for information and then crates it, then tells Sam (she’s been talking with him on the phone the entire time this was going on), that she’ll be catching a flight to Princeton.

For his part, Sam is continuing his breakdown. We currently see him back in his room, twitching like a tweaker and… and…

I almost cannot bring myself to type this. Michael Bay has truly exceeded himself here, for young Sam starts scribbling alien characters on a framed poster for Bad Boys II, a movie generally regarded as one of the worst made in the last ten years and a low-point in Bay’s career.

Now from any other director, I might think this is a nice bit of irony. If Spielberg had, say, a shot of a poster for 1941 in a movie, that might be kind of fun, and him having a joke with the audience. But he’d just do it as a quick throw-away thing. He wouldn’t do what Bay does, which is to center it in the screen and keep it there for several seconds, showing the main character interacting with it. I seriously doubt Bay is self-aware enough to do irony; I think he’s just being an idiot here.

Self-aware irony or Bay just being a clueless moron? You decide!

The next sequence brings us another odd little WTF?! kind of moment. As Sam is going slowly- well, rapidly- mad, the slutty woman from earlier turns up. Now she has him in his room, in private and is, again, crawling all over him. Then she sprouts a tail, some spikes and proceeds to toss him around and it turns out she’s what’s known as a Pretender.

Pretenders, for those unfamiliar with Transformers lore, were a group of transformers that human and/or animal shells. They didn’t turn into vehicles; they just disguised themselves in these shells. It was a weak idea and one that was never popular with the fans.

In this case, the woman, named Alice, is a Pretender whose only real job appears to be driving a wedge between Sam and Mikaela and then chasing after them in an exciting, Terminator 3 kind of way, thus reminding me of another movie I hated, but would rather watch than this.

I’m also baffled as to her presence. Basically her being in Sam’s school means that the Decepticons went to the trouble of creating her, giving her an alternate, very slutty, human form, and then enrolling her in Sam’s school, making sure she was nearby and could seduce then kill him. Just in case she needed to. Now that’s some forward planning!

Anyhow, Mikaela and Leo both turn up at Sam’s room just in time to see him about to be probed by this alien robot. A fight ensues and our heroes get away, running off onto a nice little chase through campus not unlike one in a better Shia LeBeouff film. Naturally this is the time Mikaela and Sam argue about their relationship. You know, like you do when you’re being chased by something that wants to kill you.

Also, when chasing Sam, Mikaela and Leo, Alice of course moves at walking speed, cause as we all know, the super-powered bad guy/gal is never allowed to run. She’s eventually she defeated when Mikaela crashes her into a lamppost, thus losing the film it’s only real chance to have a good old fashioned woman-on-woman fight. Given Bay’s track record so far, I’m surprised he managed to avoid it.

As our friends are sitting there chatting, a large electromagnet drops down and picks up the car with them inside. Sam and the gang (now available on LP and 8 Track, Sam and the Gang’s Greatest Hits!). The car is delivered to Megatron who promptly beats up Sam a little and says, “It’s good to feel your flesh.”

Yeah, I’m not saying a word.

Megatron gives Sam over to a docbot who naturally has a German accent. Herr Scalpel is drops some creature into Sam’s brain which then projects images of what the Allspark has stamped onto his medulla oblongata (or hippocampus or pons or whatever other part of the brain I can’t remember from my one semester of psych), and things look grim for our heroes! But then the Autobots arrive to save the day. This leads into a great big fight which leads into…

Well, amazingly enough, it leads into another really well-done scene! Rather like the 2-D robot, this is one of the scenes that shows what this movie could’ve been if it had tried. It’s a nicely done, creative, well-visualized, fight scene in a forest, where Prime fights Megatron, Starscream and some other Decepticon. It’s everything exciting that the rest of this movie is not. It also contains one of the other few emotional scenes as Prime gets killed off. Those of us, like me, who are Transformers fans, know this must be temporary since neither Ultra Magnus nor Hot Rod are around, but it’s still nicely done.

Now we go to a scene where Megatron and Starscream are hanging out on the top of the MetLife building in New York City. It is time to get humanity’s attention, they decide. “No mercy” declares Megatron as they launch off on a rampage where they go to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and… er… knock over an American flag. Ok, that’s… impressive? I suppose? I mean, I would’ve knocked down the bridge and held the city hostage, but what do I know?

Glenn Beck's gonna be pissed!

We see some footage of military stuff getting blowed up real good and Sam’s parents on holiday in Paris where they get captured by the Decepticons. Remember this happening, because it explains why they turn up later in the movie, though it doesn’t justify them doing so.

In a panic, the military minds meet up at the Pentagon which, according to the caption, is in Washington, DC. This is no doubt a great surprise to the residents of Virginia, but amazingly it’s not even the worst geographical error in the film.

Also, the Statue of Liberty is in Delaware and Minnesota is in Florida!

Then the Fallen goes out live to the world, explaining that, yeah, hey, your governments have been lying to you. We’re here, we’re queer (well, Starscream is anyhow), and we’re going to destroy you all unless you turn over Sam, bwa-ha-ha-ha, etc.

Sam and the Gang, now wanted fugitives, try to decide what to do. This includes Sam having to destroy Leo’s cell phone, because Leo is so stupid he apparently doesn’t realize those things can be used to track movements. I don’t even run a stupid conspiracy theory website (I debunk them), and I even I know that! God, these people are stupid.
For those who are curious, we are now at the halfway point in the movie! Oh… joy.

After much conversation and Komedy! from the racist Autobots, Leo says they should go to talk to the man who runs the website that competes with his. There’s brief discussion, and then they head out to New York City. To be fair, since they are on the run, Sam disguises himself with a baseball cap and a hoodie. Yes, that’ll help.

When they get to New York, they go to a deli and behind the counter is, argh, John Tuturorororo, who played the leader of Section Seven in the first movie. His character was annoying then, and is annoying here, though amazingly slightly less so, since he alone of the cast seems to understand that he’s in a very, very stupid movie and plays accordingly.

Through the ensuing conversation its revealed that in archaeological sites all around the world are these same strange letters that Sam keeps seeing. They’re in Mexico, Egypt and lots of other places the movie doesn’t bother to mention (since archaeology happens only in Egypt and Mexico). Somehow, in the roughly 150 years that professional archaeology has been going on, no one bothered to take notice of this, which I find somewhat odd, since that’s the sort of thing that would make archaeologists wet their knickers.

Anyhow, Sam and the Gang break into the Smithsonian (after Michael Bay turns me straight by showing us a shot of Tuturro’s bare ass), where Wheelie (a really, really obnoxious Decepticon who turns into an RC truck. He was also in the animated series, and was annoying there, but even more so here), tells them they can find one of the really old Transformers, and we get a hint of some possibilities. We see pictures of things like WWII bomber planes and an old-time car, which, along with a toy I picked up (transformers from robot to WWI biplane), gives me hope that we might see something really cool.
Instead we get Jetfire.

Jetfire, the toy, was originally a Veritech fighter from the anime Robotech. Hasbro liked the design and so turned it into a Transformer, who had a backstory where he’d been a Decepticon, and friends with Starscream, before setting aside his evil ways and becoming an Autobot. He was one of the few multi-dimensional characters on the TV series (called Jetstorm on there), and when I heard he was in this movie, I got pretty interested!

Then I saw the character.

First, his vehicle form is an SR-71 Blackbird. It seems an odd choice, but doesn’t really matter, since one he turns into robot mode, he stays that way. Second, though, and most irritating, is that he’s played as an old man robot, complete with a “get off my lawn!” attitude, a cane and at least one incontinence joke. Yes, this is how Jetfire should appear.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen...

He stomps around sounding pissed off and then blows open the doors to the hanger. He stomps outside and we’re suddenly a: in the daytime and b: in an airplane graveyard in Arizona. Yes, apparently when you walk out the Smithsonian’s backdoor you travel through time and through space! Well, technically you actually do but generally it shouldn’t be this extreme!

There’s some banter between our heroes and Jetfire who goes on about these damn robots today, no respect for their elders, etc. Then he tells them they are part of his mission on Earth. Of course they are. So he grabs everyone and transports nearer to their goal by teleporting them.

Wait, teleporting? Only one character in Transformers lore could teleport, and that was Skywarp. Why bother having him teleport anyone? He can turn into a frakking plane! Shouldn’t everyone just pile in and fly? The SR-71 was incredibly fast. They’d be in Egypt within a couple hours and it would make a lot more sense to the character and the story! Argh! *brain pops slightly*

Anyhow, he teleports Sam and the Gang to the middle of an empty desert wasteland which Leo, apparently tipped off by all the hookers, bright lights, fountains, money and cars that are failing to appear on screen, guesses is Las Vegas. It was at this point in my notes that I wrote the plot is officially missing, presumed dead.

Welcome to Vegas!

Our heroes are still trying to remain hidden from the authorities, so Sector Seven Guy (hereafter called SSG), calls the military guy and speaks in clever code to tell him where they are headed, so they can have reinforcements. He speaks in this slightly clever code, and then at the end gives latitude and longitude coordinates.

*sigh* I think I just lost three IQ points from that.

The characters are currently in Egypt, which we know by all the camels and shots of the Pyramids. The police are chasing them for no reason that I can assume. Maybe it’s due to a lack of chest hair and 80’s music pumping forth from the cars.

Our characters lose the cops and are now free in Egypt, but they need to go to Jordan. So they hop into Bumblebee and, along with Skids and Mudflap, drive to the land-based border crossing between Jordan and Egypt. Yes, apparently Google Earth is wrong, as is every map in the known world. It turns out Egypt and Jordan share a land border which is, I am sure, news to Israel.

The team crosses the border through the cunning tactic of saying “we’re from New York”. The border guard commander (played by Deep Roy, known to the world from such works of art as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang), apparently thinks that’s good enough, so he lets them cross into Jordan, where they set up camp for the night at the Pyramids.

Like I said, the Pentagon in DC is the least of the geographical fuck-ups in this movie.

Now to be completely fair, no where does it say that this is a border checkpoint, but it sure looks like one and the guards on one side are wearing different uniforms from the guards on the other side. Plus if it’s not a border checkpoint, there’s no point in it being in the movie. Arguably there wasn’t any point it in being in the film anyhow, but that’s another issue.

Our heroes make camp for the night at the Pyramids (in Jordan), making me really wish Jaws would pop up and take a bite out of someone. Then Sam spots Orion’s belt and deduces that under the belt is where the Matrix is located. The stars, I cannot help but notice, are much larger and spaced much farther apart then they are in real life, but what the hell. This is a world where the Egyptian pyramids are located in Jordan, so why not fuck with the stars, too?

Meanwhile in the skies we have shots of various bots, like Starscream, scrambling to get to our gang as the NEST team decides to do the same. They push the National Security Advisor (you know, the job Condalezza Rice once had), out of the plane and head off. Yes, that make perfect sense. Toss the NSA out of an aircraft for no particular reason, putting him into a situation where he could get captured by god knows who and give up intelligence that would put our entire country at great danger. Then again, what’s the lives of three-hundred million Americans up against getting petty revenge against someone you don’t like?

Now we have shots of one of the great archaeological sites in the world; Petra. It is an incredibly beautiful site and served great purpose in Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Here, it’s only job is to be the burial chamber some tomb that was hidden thousands and thousands of years go, which is quite impressive, given that the site is only about 2100 years old.

Petra is, in fact, located in Jordan, and the Pyramids aren’t. Looking at the scenes again, I wonder if maybe someone just wasn’t paying attention in the editing booth. If the scene of everyone crossing the border was shown in the morning, before they got to Petra, it would’ve made sense and shown that they were in Egypt during the night and Jordan in the morning. But like I said before, continuity is for losers.

The tomb itself, where the Matrix is located, is stuck behind a wall that appears to be about an inch thick. I have to believe that at some point some archaeologist would’ve done radar or sonar searches that would’ve shown this, but apparently not. Anyhow, the Matrix crumbles into dust as soon as Sam touches it.

We’ve about forty minutes left to the film. I mention this because there’s a lot that occurs in the next forty minutes, but only about five minutes of actual content. Seriously, when watching it with my friend Rob, he said, “Nothing’s happened for the last twenty minutes”. He’s absolutely right. It’s lots of shots of people moving around and vehicles pulling into position and shots being fired and nothing really vital happening. I’ll do my best to describe it here.

The US military arrives in what I will now call Jor-gypt. They bring all sorts of tanks and planes and hovercraft and make a sea landing near the Pyramids, which is also near the Sphinx and the Valley of the Kings and within walking distance of Petra. Also, there’s no mention of them asking the Jor-gyptian government’s permission. I believe the word for today is “invasion”.

GI Joe! He's a real American hero! GI Joe is there!

Now comes a fight. The penultimate fight in the movie. I don’t really have a lot to say about it. It’s pretty big and, as mentioned, happens over a long period of time. Much of it takes place in a small village where the US military sets up camp (not bothering to ask the locals for permission, and placing civilians in danger by doing so). There’s also a few scenes in a construction area (with people wandering through with goats), near the Pyramids (though at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie showed the Space Needle being near the Pyramids), which leads to the introduction of Devastator.

Devastator, for those who do not know, is what’s called a Combiner. He’s a set of Transformers called Constructicons who, in addition to being robots in their own right, can merge into one larger robot, in this case called Devastator. In the original version of the character, he was just a really big-ass robot, but in this movie he turns into something really, really big that looks like a gorilla and has a large suction device that pulls in people, vehicles and in one shining moment, either Skids or Mudflap (I can’t tell the difference). Sadly, he survives and, at least at one point, looks as though he destroys Devastator.

As the big desert fight continues, we get treated to about three seconds of screen time by fan-favorite, Arcee, the first-ever female Autobot. Now we can go all around about the impossibility to gendered robots, but who cares? She was a cool, interesting, and to some people, sexy character and that’s what matters.

Lots of people, myself included, had been really looking forward to her appearing in this film, hoping that she might do something interesting and cool. So what does she do, actually?

She gets most of one line and then gets blown up.

That’s it. It’s an even more pointless death than the one Jazz had in the first film (you might remember him as the other horribly stereotypical black character, and the only Autobot to die). What a fucking waste of an opportunity.

So Sam gets knocked ass-over-teakettle at one point and winds up apparently dying and going to Silicon Heaven (it must exist. Why, if it didn’t, where would all the calculators go?). While dead he sees three Primes talking to him, and one of them is voiced by Michael York. Oh, Michael. Are the jobs really this few and far between? You disappoint me, sir, you disappoint me. Anyhow, they tell Sam, “Well done! Here’s the Matrix, just stab it into Optimus and all will be well with the world.”

And the iron shall lie down with the lamp. - Kryten 3:6

Sam comes back to life, says “I love you,” to Mikaela, who says the same to him, thus tying that up, and then stabs Prime, bringing him back to life for a bit. But then Prime is newly injured and it’s up to the mortally wounded Jetfire (he got about ten seconds of fight time and then was taken down by freakin’ Scorponok!), to allow some of his parts to be used to Optimus more optimal. Now fully functional, Prime goes off to fight Devastator, the Fallen, Megatron and coherent movie making in an FX extravaganza that left me feeling completely detached and uninterested.

In the end, Devastator is defeated by a rail gun being shot at him while he is busy demolishing one of the Pyramids (he’d already removed most of the top by this point), and, ugh, I can’t help but notice (cause the movie forces you to notice), that Devastator has two large wrecking balls dangling between his legs. Yes, I’m sure the crew who rendered that had a grand old time (and, actually, there’s a rumor that rendering Devastator caused one of ILM’s computers to overheat and melt).

I am standing directly beneath the enemy's scrotum!

Then Prime fights the Fallen, and in the process destroys quite a bit more ruins, thus continuing this jolly rape of Egyptian culture. Finally at the end he destroys the Fallen, Megatron gets away, Devastator is destroyed, thousands of people worldwide are dead and I… just… don’t… fucking… care.

There’s so many things wrong with this movie and so many points at which it could’ve been turned around. For starters, when the next film is written, people writing it need to remember the franchise is called Transformers, not Humans. We don’t need to see the humans running around doing stuff for most of the screen time. We can see that in any movie. Giant transforming robots, however, are somewhat rarer.

I never thought it would be possible to describe a movie as being “aggressively dull”, but that’s exactly what Michael Bay has accomplished with this film. He has made a movie that left me completely bored and uninterested in what was happening on the screen. The parts where I sat up and paid attention consisted of about five minutes of screen time, but otherwise I was starting to feel like Jeddidiah Leland watching opera.

There’s still good material that can be had here for a third movie. It’d be nice to see the Dinobots and to introduce characters like Ultra Magnus, Springer, Hot Rod and Galvatron (ideally with Leonard Nimoy doing the voice), and let’s perhaps move the story into space. Bring on Shockwave, Skywarp and Thundercracker. Move the story to Cybertron. Bring out Unicron. Any of these things could help make the next movie better.

But ultimately what will need to happen for the next film to be better is for the powers that be to tell Michael Bay to take a hike. He’s already made some noise about thinking that two years is not enough time for him to do the next movie, so with any luck they’ll toss him and hire someone who knows what they’re doing. While at it, they can keep the original writers of the first movie and Star Trek and ditch Ehren Kruger, who Harry Knowles blames for most of the problems with this film.

I want the next movie to blow me away and not leave me disgusted and annoyed. Until that happens, I’ll just have to stick with my toys.

* The Rule of Incompetent Omnipotence: the government is all-powerful, all-knowing and sinister. The run the whole world and kill anyone, cover-up anything and do what they please. But there’s nothing they can do that some weird geek can’t unearth on a website with about two seconds of effort.

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

The 6th Doctor (Colin Baker) – The “current” incarnation of the Doctor. He wears a Technicolor dream coat that would have any Biblical prophet blushing with shame.

The 2nd Doctor (Patrick Troughton) – A previous version of the Doctor. Suspiciously older looking than he was at the time he regenerated into the 3rd Doctor. If you expect this to be explained on screen, don’t hold your breath.

Peri (Nicola Bryant) – The 6th Doctor’s American companion. Was most definitely not added to the series as a bit of T&A. Not at all. Why would you think such a thing?

Jamie McCrimmon (Frazier Hines) – One of the 2nd Doctor’s most popular companions. Like the Doctor, he looks strangely older, but fear not. The explanation for this is just the same as it is for the Doctor’s appearance.

Dastari (Laurence Payne) – Your standard megalomaniac scientist hell-bent on doing what he’s going to do, damn be the consequences, those fools at the Academy laughed at me, LAUGHED!, they called me mad, but I’ll have my revenge, bwa-ha-ha-ha, etc, etc. Every bit as interesting as you expect. Also, he looks kind of like Kim Jong Il.

Chessene (Jacqueline Pierce) – An Androgum. They’re some sort of poorly-developed species that exists entirely in this episode as a way of pushing a vegetarian message, and is never mentioned again, thankfully. She’s an “augmented” Androgum, and Dastari assures us that she’s perfectly safe to be around and nothing can possiblie go wrong.

Shockeye (John Stratton) – Another Androgum. For some reason, he has a name like a Decepticon. He’s a humanitarian in the same sense that people who eat vegetables are vegetarians.

Oscar (James Saxon) – An annoying, bug-collecting English actor (but he really wants to direct), who is managing a restaurant in Spain. Serves absolutely no purpose to the plot, except to die well. Vote Saxon!

Anita (Carmen Gomez) – A Spanish woman who, for reasons unclear to anyone, including the writers, seems to have a “thing” for Oscar, which he ignores. Oh, if only the rest of us could. Like Oscar, she serves no purpose to the plot, except to be there when he dies well.

Field Marshall Stike (Clinton Greyn) – A Sontaran who is, for some reason, in this story. Like Oscar and Anita, you could remove him and the other Sontarans from the story without anyone noticing. Looks kind of like a pissed-off Mister Potato Head.

When I first set out to do these recaps, I had planned to do two for each Doctor. I figured that was a pretty solid plan, and indeed it is, depending on the Doctor.

See, there’s a lot of stories for the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th and 10th Doctors. There’s not nearly as many for the 9th and 6th because they filmed so few, and for the 2nd there were a whole lot of them, but the BBC junked most of his stories back in the 1970’s. They did the same with the 1st Doctor, but a great many of those have been recovered. As for the 8th Doctor, he had only one on-screen adventure, and, boy, did it stink.

So anyhow this left me in a bit of a quandary. There’s a couple stink-bomb 6th Doctor stories (this one, “The Twin Dilemma” and “Terror of the Vervoids” come to mind), but I couldn’t think of any really bad 2nd Doctor stories. Oh, to be sure, “The Mind Robber” has its bad points, but it’s so overflowing with late 1960’s strangeness that I couldn’t find it in my heart to dislike it. I understand “The Krotons” is pretty awful, but I haven’t seen it, so I cannot comment.

Thus I was caught in a small trap. I couldn’t find too much to complain about with the 6th Doctor (even his weaker stories still tended to be pretty good), and there’s so little of the 2nd Doctor, I didn’t have any idea how to handle him.

Fortunately for me, back in the mid-1980’s, Robert Holmes sat down and kindly wrote today’s travesty, “The Two Doctors”, bringing together two of my favorite Doctors in one of my least favorite stories. You know that’s gotta get a recap! So let’s get to it!

The story opens with the 2nd Doctor and Jamie tooling around in a suspiciously modern looking version of the TARDIS control room. They’re using the console from the olden days, but the rest doesn’t look quite right for the 2nd Doctor. Still, the scene starts up in black and white before gradually fading to color, so that’s kind of neat. But right off we hit a few snags.

Let’s back up a bit. At the end of “The Tenth Planet”, William Hartnell’s last adventure (which introduced the Cybermen as well as the concept of regeneration. There were four episodes and the last one is missing. Come on, guys, let’s have a DVD release with that last episode animated!), the Doctor died and, before the startled eyes of Ben and Polly, regenerated, changing into a completely new person.

From the start, it was clear that the new Doctor was quite a bit different from the old Doctor. He was much more likely to stick himself into situations rather than let events pull him in, his attitude was vastly different, he often acted like a clown (or “cosmic hobo” as he’s often referred), and generally came off a bit more accessible and human than the 1st Doctor. This usually enabled his enemies to underestimate him.

The 2nd Doctor had a good four-year run, and for most of that time was teamed up with his companion, Jamie McCrimmon. Jamie was a Scot from the Jacobite era. Sadly, the episode that introduced him, “The Highlanders”, is missing, so I don’t know exactly how he came to be on the TARDIS. Still, there was great chemistry between him and the 2nd Doctor and his presence on the show was nothing but a plus.

In 1969, as the show was about to transition into color, Patrick Troughton decided to step down as the Doctor. His finale was a ten part (!), story called “The War Games”, which comes out on DVD in North America quite soon. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend picking it up, as it’s really good! Anyhow, at the end of that story, he pisses off the Time Lords who force him to regenerate and send his companions, Jamie and Zoe (a science wiz from the future), back to their own times with their memories erased. The Time Lords exile the Doctor to Earth and the last thing we see of him is him spinning off into the void as the regeneration starts.

Or does it?

See, that’s where things get a little odd. When you watch “The Two Doctors”, you notice right away that the Doctor and Jamie are visibly older and the TARDIS looks different on the inside from how it had looked at the end of “The War Games”. This combined with a scene in another multi-Doctor story, “The Five Doctors”, wherein the Doctor knows Jamie and Zoe had their memories erased creates a massive continuity error.

Thankfully, in steps the “Season 6b” concept. This concept states that right before he was made to regenerate the Doctor was captured by the Celestial Intervention Agency. They left him in his body as the 2nd Doctor and sent him off on various missions with Jamie and Victoria tagging along. As retcon explanations go, it’s not a bad one, and has been the basis for a couple really great novels.

This Season 6b concept explains a lot of what’s happening on screen here. It explains why the Doctor is older, why he has Jamie and Victoria with him and why he’s out running errands for the Time Lords. It also explains how he knew, during the events in “The Five Doctors”, exactly what had happened to Jamie and Zoe. His knowledge of their fates only makes sense if you accept the idea that he didn’t regenerate right away after the end of “The War Games”.

Anyhow, the Doctor and Jamie are tooling along when the Doctor notices some little gizmo on the TARDIS console. Turns out the Time Lords (presumably the CIA), are diverting him off course to a space station where he’s meant to investigate some goings on involving time travel experiments. The TARDIS materializes in the station’s galley and we are introduced, sadly, to the character of Shockeye.

What to say about Shockeye and the Androgums? They’re a horribly done species, really. They exist as Robert Holmes’ effort to get us all to forego meat and become vegetarians, so he made them very over-the-top. Shockeye is constantly hungry, and always talking about how he really wants to sample the meat of a “Tellurian”. It took me three- count ‘em! – three viewings of this story to realize he was talking about humans when he says “Tellurian”. It does make sense that other species would have different names for humans (Tosevites, for example), but no other species in Doctor Who does, so it’s very out of place here.

Shockeye menaces the Doctor and Jamie for a bit and then they wander off to find Dastari as the TARDIS mysteriously vanishes. This leads into Chesene putting in her first appearance. She talks briefly with Shockeye and make it clear at the outset that she has an agenda of her own. Like Shockeye she’s an Androgum, though “augmented” to look more… well, human, I suppose, though it’s never said that Dastari and the others on the station are humans, but that’s ok.

Chesene congratulates Shockeye on a wonderfully tasty poison dinner he’d made for some people. She’s also stolen a prototype time travel device. The two have a bit of a “mwa-ha-ha! We’re so deliciously EVIL!” moment and then we cut to the Doctor and Jamie who have arrived at Dastari’s office.

Dastari seems unimpressed by the Doctor’s arrival, especially as the Doctor is delivering a rather heavy-handed message from the time Lords about how they plan to evaluate the time travel experiments and see if Dastari and company will be allowed to continue to do them.

This implies that time travel technology is a very closely-guarded secret and one the Time Lords don’t want just anyone to have. I guess that explains why they are the only ones who can travel through time. Well, them and the Daleks, the Cybermen, the humans (Captain Jack, etc), the tourists in “Delta and the Bannermen”, the Family of Blood, and many, many more, including, if I’m not much mistaken, the Sontarans, which is ironic given this episode.

Ironic because, only a few minutes later, some Sontaran battlecruisers are spotted on a scanner screen. Uh-oh! Before the tech who sees them can do anything, Chesene comes up and takes him out. Nice. In the office, Dastari faints, the Doctor is captured and Jamie makes a run for it.

We now leave this merry scene and go to the surface of an unnamed planet, where a blinding glow from someone’s coat means we’re about to see the 6th Doctor and his stalwart companion, Peri!

Well, what to say about the 6th Doctor? Colin Baker remains the only actor to have been fired from a role and allegedly was hired because the producer of the series, John Nathan-Turner, liked him after meeting him at a party. Nice.

The character himself was chaotic and, at least initially, very unlikable. This was intentional on the part of the writers who wanted to make him an unstable character that people would grow to love. Empirical evidence seems to indicate this was not the case, as Baker was, as mentioned before, fired after only 18 months in the role.

It’s too bad, actually. I personally rather like the 6th Doctor, and as people have looked back on his performance, many have come to like the character quite a bit. He’s abrasive and arrogant, and more than a little unstable and violent, but also very interesting.

Anyhow, the Doctor is fishing with Peri when he gets a horrible image of the Second Doctor being tortured and possibly killed. He knows this can’t be, since he’s alive and well, and, concerned he might just now be a temporal anomaly, decides to resolve the issue by consulting with his good friend, Dastari.

A little fan-service for those who want it!

You know, this brings up an interesting point, which is this: why don’t the Doctors remember the various events that happened when they met each other? With the exception of the 5th/10th crossover, “Time Crash”, the Doctors never remember information.

For example, in “The Five Doctors”, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 5th Doctors are running around doing various things. At no point does, say, the 5th Doctor remark that, “Hey, I went through all this three times before. I know what we need to do next!”

Anyhow, my point here is that the 6th Doctor should remember all the events of this episode and not walk into the situations he walks into. Though of course I suppose if he didn’t, that’d create it’s own temporal paradox. Ah, the joys of time travel.

Oh, well. Moving on!

The 6th Doctor and Peri arrive at the station only to find it largely in ruins. Wandering around they eventually find information that makes the Doctor wonder if the Time Lords might’ve been behind the attack, and I have to say that Colin Baker actually does a good job of selling his reaction to that. It’s clear the character doesn’t want to believe that the Time Lords might’ve killed everyone, but he’s willing to accept the idea if the evidence points to it.

Meantime, Dastari, Chesene, Shockeye, a Sontaran major, and the Second Doctor have all arrived in Spain, somewhere near Seville. They attack and kill an old woman and take over her hacienda, where they set up shop.

Interestingly, the episode is, in fact, filmed in Spain, which is pretty neat. It’s always cool when the series goes out and films on location. They haven’t done it too often, and sometimes it’s kind of pointless (“The Fires of Pompeii” springs to mind. It was filmed in Italy, but you wouldn’t know that unless you were told. “Planet of the Dead
” was filmed in Dubai, but could’ve been done with a sandbox and CGI set extensions), but generally it works.

This episode, however, was originally supposed to be set and filmed in, of all places, New Orleans! That’s right; they’d planned to do a story here on this side of the Pond, and since they were focusing in part on food, filming and setting in New Orleans made great sense!

Sadly, some of the funding which was being provided by a PBS station, fell through. So they production was moved to Spain. They still kept the food focus, which, I don’t know, seems kind of odd to me. When I think Spain, I don’t think food, but then again, maybe it’s different in Europe?

Anyhow, back to the story, where we’re now introduced to the extremely pointless characters of Oscar and Anita. They serve no plot function whatsoever, except to leave a jar of cyanide laying around (this becomes important later). Really, they could’ve been left out without really changing the story any. Their function here is to see the Sontaran ship land and think there was a plane crash. They go to investigate!

Back on the station, the 6th Doctor and Peri are going through various corridors trying to get some information as to what’s been going on. Peri is convinced they aren’t alone and are being perused by something. The Doctor scoffs at this, but is proven wrong when a shadowy figure attacks Peri! This is unfortunate for the ole Doc, because at that point he was trying to disarm a trap. Peri’s scream startles him and he gets gassed, falling onto some cables, and we go to the credits!

Yeah, ok, episode one isn’t all that bad, actually. There’s a few good moments with the Second Doctor and Jamie, but Oscar and Anita are pointless as is presence of the Sontarans. Shockeye is lightly annoying (he gets worse later), but otherwise, yeah, not too bad of a start.

Sadly, this episode is the high point of the story.

Anyhow! Not surprisingly, the Doctor isn’t dead. No, the Doctor turns out to be ok thanks to his respiratory bypass system. You know, the one the 7th Doctor wished the writers had remembered before knocking him out with anesthetic. Like many of the Doctor’s physical attributes, it’s there when the script needs it and gone when it doesn’t.

As for the thing that attacked Peri? Turns out it’s some obsessed fan, desperate for her autograph!

Ok, it’s not. It’s actually Jamie. He’s gone crazy due to being stuck on this space station. Or something. I’m not really sure why he’s wandering around all weird and sub-vocal. I guess the writer thought it would make for some tension, but it’s actually just confusing. And for the record, I have Peri’s autograph on my copy of “Trial of a Time Lord”, so there.

Jamie tells the Doctor about the Sontaran attack. The Doctor goes and examines some records on the station’s computer and as he does, he sees an image of Peri being tortured. He presses some buttons and cycles through images of the Peri, Dastari, the Second Doctor and himself (though I suppose that’s technically the same as the Second Doctor). He determines this is just a holograph to make it look like someone’s being tortured. Why Dastari has such a device laying around is not explained. Perhaps some questions about his personal life are best left unasked.

The 6th Doctor deduces that the 2nd Doctor and Dastari must’ve been kidnapped and taken away by the Sontarans. He mumbles something about some symbiotic McGuffiin that’s in the Time Lord DNA which allows them to do time travel. The Sontarans apparently want this, though I’m not sure why.

See, during the time of the 4th Doctor the Sontarans invaded Gallifrey in an episode called “The Invasion of Time”. During this they presumably killed a few Time Lords and would have all the DNA McGuffins they need, so why the need them here is puzzling to me, as is the fact that, near as I can tell, they can already do time travel!

To make matters worse, their appearance here is truly pointless. One of the signs of a bad screenplay is an overabundance of villains. Consider, if you will, painful though it may be, the latter Batman films of the early 1990’s. From Batman Returns to Batman and Robin you had two or three villains per movie. It removed the focus and dragged down the storyline.

Same thing here. Had the story featured just the Sontarans as antagonists, it would’ve made more sense, made for a tighter story and removed the need for the Androgums. Likewise, had Dastari and Chesene been the primary villains, with no Sontarans, that could’ve also made for a better, tighter story (though probably not as good, since the two characters aren’t very interesting). Instead the writer, who created the Sontarans, decided to have the two different groups with the result you see here.

Ultimately, had the Sontarans not been in the story at all, the story wouldn’t have changed in any substantive way, and that’s a sure sign they do not belong.

Pardon that digression, but I thought it an important point to make, and it’s also worth noting that, in theory, all they’d need to do is drug the Doctor, take a blood sample and be done with it, but whatever.

Back on the station, the 6th Doctor puts himself into a trance to try and find the 2nd Doctor. He eventually hears the sounds of bells and determines that one of them is the largest bell at the Great Cathedral of Seville. Ok, well done, I suppose. I’m not sure that I buy that even a Time Lord could tell the difference between the bells of the world (or universe, since he didn’t know the 2nd Doctor was on Earth). Possibly it’s a faint memory of his time as the Second Doctor experiencing all this stuff, but that’s never mentioned, so Who knows? (Who! Ha! I’m funny!)

Dastari and pals (you might remember Dastari and Pal, an exciting show about a boy-scientist and his pets, which ran for ten glorious minutes on the CBC before someone realized it didn’t, in fact, exist. It was right after Mister Dressup), are talking about their various evil purposes. The Sontarans want to use Earth as an attack base against their enemies and Shockeye wants to eat some people. Dastari takes great pains to remind Chesene that she’s no longer a normal Androgum and is above the normal desires of her people, letting us know that by the end of the story, she’ll be giving into the normal desires of her people.

Meantime, Anita and Oscar are wandering around and come across the TARIDS. Intuiting that it’s from Interpol (?), Oscar goes up to it and when the Sixth Doctor and friends come out, he figures they’re police officers. Oooookay. I mean, clearly it’s a British police box, and as Anita points out, doesn’t say “Policia”, but rather “Police”. Like I’ve said before, you know it’s a bad plot point when even the characters in the show are nitpicking it.

Dastari, for his part, is now telling the Second Doctor all his wonderful plans, thus entering into the “Talking Villain” trope. Basically he plans to give Chesene the ability to travel through time. He doesn’t really explain why he wants to do this, but I suspect he’s got something of a hard spot for her, if you get my meaning. I’m saying that’s not a sonic screwdriver in his pocket, he’s happy to see her. I mean that he really wants to reverse the polarity of her neutron flow! I’m talkin’ sex! Hell, it’s either that or hubris, but there’s more jokes to make about sex.

The Sixth Doctor, Jamie and Peri make their way to the hideout and plan to enter through a back passage. The Doctor tells Peri to go cause a distraction. She does this by knocking on the front door and claiming she’s there as an American student scouting locations for a student trip, which isn’t a bad cover story, actually.

Chesene, who is for some reason telepathic, reads that at the top of Peri’s mind is concern about the Doctor. To double-check this, she has the Second Doctor brought through the room, and dismisses her theories when Peri doesn’t recognize him. Peri eventually leaves, and Shockeye goes hounding after her, determined to “taste” her “meat”, if you get my meaning… actually, there’s no meaning there. He wants to eat her. If you get my mea- oh, nevermind.

Anyhow, this is as good a chance as any for me to rant briefly about telepathy. What a stupid concept it is! I’ve never understood quite how it’s supposed to work. How would such a thing evolve? What use would it be to sentient beings? And surely you’d only be able to send and receive messages from someone else who is telepathic, right? Otherwise it’d be like a radio broadcast; if you don’t have a radio, you can’t hear it. I know it’s a major sci-fi feature, but I just don’t like it.

Meantime, downstairs the Sixth Doctor and Jamie tamper with the time travel module that Dastari and pals brought with them. The Doctor spouts of some technobabble that basically boils down to: once he’s used it, anyone can. Stike (remember him? He’s in this story), overhears this and takes the Doctor and Jamie captive, as outside, Shockeye catches up to Peri, and we end the episode!

So with lots of padding, we’re now two-thirds of the way through the story. Mind you, this entire episode was pretty much nothing but padding, which really sucks, since the episodes at this point were 45 minutes long. Yes, this means that we just had 45 minutes of padding to suffer through. Argh!

But frankly, I’ll take the padding over what we get in the next episode. Ever wanted to see Patrick Troughton with bushy orange eyebrows? Yeah, me, neither. Sorry.

Back in the story, we see Shockeye knock Peri unconscious by hitting his arm (?!). Yeah, sorry, but that’s what it looks like he did. It’s supposed to be a karate chop kind of thing, but really, it’s just him hitting his arm.

Down in the cellar (and, no, “cellar door” is not the most beautiful phrase in the English language. Someone really hot saying, “Sex? Oh, alright,” to me is the most beautiful phrase), Stike threatens to off Jamie unless the Doctor primes the time machine. The Doctor does and Stike, of course, plans to kill Jamie anyhow, until Jamie stabs him in the leg. Well done, Jamie!

The two heroes run upstairs where we get the part every fan wants to see in a multi-Doctor story; the Doctor meeting the Doctor! The two engage in some rather entertaining banter, but before the 6th can release the 2nd, the bad guys come back. The 6th Doctor and Jamie hide as the Second pretends to be unconscious. I’m bored enough at this point that I wish I could do the same.

Talk about your fashion nightmares... where's Anna Wintour when we need her?

They overhear as Chesene, concerned that now there’s a second Time Lord involved her plans might not go as… er… planned, concocts a new plan to have the Second Doctor implanted with some of Shockeye’s DNA, thus turning him into an Androgrum and putting him, at least somewhat, under her control.

Of course after that’s done they plan to backstab the Sontarans, unaware that the Sontarans plan to backstab them by self-destructing their ship and escaping in the time travel module the Doctor primed. Makes sense, I suppose. Hell, as much sense as the rest of the story does.

Chesene goes to the kitchens where she finds Shockeye about to do nasty things to Peri. She stuns him and hauls him down to the basement so that she can do the DNA switch and make the Doctor an Androgum. Once she’s clear, the Sixth Doctor and Jamie rescue Peri and the Doctor explains that he was bluffing earlier when talking about the need for the travel pod to be primed. In fact it’s not going to work at all due to the Doctor removing some little device called a “briode nebulizer”, but which I am going to call “the flux capacitor”.

Shockeye’s DNA is implanted into the Second Doctor. Partway through the implant process, Shockeye wakes up and frees the Doctor who now… well, now looks like a Scotsman in need of the local free clinic.

Sure, Androgums can cook, but would you want your daughter to marry one?

Orange eyebrows. See? I warned you. You could’ve turned back, but no. Now you’ve seen it, and you can’t un-see it, so there.

Anyhow, Shockeye and the Doctor start talking food and eventually make plans for a dinner date. The Doctor, clearly the top in this budding relationship, explains that they will need nicer clothes.

As they plan out their night on the town, Chesene and Dastari set off some coronic acid bombs, which apparently is a Bad Thing for the Sontarans. The bombs look rather like Roman candles, lending a nice, festive air to the events. Stike’s assistant is killed, but he survives and staggers into the time machine. I flash back to David Warner’s fate in the fine film, Time After Time as it messes up and injures him even further.

Death by... er... Roman candle...

Now really messed up, he heads off to his spaceship. In a very Wile E Coyote move, he forgets he set it to self-destruct. It does what he told it to do, and, well, that’s the end of that pointless subplot. Yes, the Sontarans really did nothing, contributed nothing, and had no business in this story. Well done, Mr Holmes. Well done.

Shockeye and the Second Doctor have been busy in the meantime by getting changed into coats and top hats (?) for their little dinner date. Why exactly an old Spanish woman had two men’s coats and top hats in their size is left to the viewer to guess. My theory is that it’s something like Arsenic and Old Lace.

Sadly, the spinoff series, Ug and Uglier, didn't make it past the pilot.

The Second Doctor and Shockeye have, in the meantime, wandered into the restaurant run by Oscar. Very convenient, that. They have a sit, engage in some “witty” banter about human meat and Oscar then goes around warning everyone that no matter what else they do, they mustn’t talk about the war!

The Sixth Doctor, Jamie and Peri head off in pursuit, wandering around greater Seville trying to find Shockeye and the Second Doctor. As they do, the Sixth Doctor is starting to feel the effects of the change to his DNA inflicted by the Second Doctor’s transformation. This makes no real logical sense, but it does lend itself to some amusing sequences of him wanting to eat a cat. Chesene and Dastari are also trying to find Shockeye and the Second Doctor so they can give him a second treatment and stabilize the DNA transfer.

Back at the foodery, Anita recites a gigantic list of food eaten by the Second Doctor and Shockeye. It’s clearly more food and drink than either of them would actually be capable of eating. I briefly expect Oscar to offer them each a wafer-thin mint to go with the last of their grub. Instead he makes plans to give them their bill, which is much less interesting, though, as it turns out, just as fatal.

'Dear God, it's another Russel T Davies screenplay! Noooooooooo!'

Shockeye stabs Oscar after refusing to provide any viable form of currency. Oscar, who took a rather unconvincing hit to the shoulder, has his dramatic death scene as Anita mourns over him and I doze off. The Second Doctor, meantime, reverts to normal. This includes his eyebrows going back to their usual color.

This is something that often happens in TV and movies. Someone gets aged and when they do, their existent hair, which is dead keratin, changes color. That never made sense to me. Yes, any new hair they grow would change color, but the stuff that’s already grown would not. So basically the Doctor’s eyebrows wouldn’t have changed in the first place and they wouldn’t have changed now. Yes, it’s a minor nitpick, but one that always irks me.

Anyhow, Chesene and Dastari capture everyone (as the diners continue to eat and no police or ambulances appear), and take them back to their HQ. Shockeye wanders off with Jamie to kill and cook him, as Chesene decides to test the time machine. She has Peri sit inside and sends her a bit into the future, pleased with that, she has Peri, the 6th Doctor and the 2nd Doctor tied up. Dastari talks at them for a moment and then leaves, and very pointedly leaves the key where they can get it.

WTF? Why leave the key at all, much less where the people you just chained up can reach it? Why not just carry it with you? Argh, this episode pisses me off!

Once Dastari leaves the Sixth Doctor talks about how he sabotaged the flux capacitor so that it would work once, but never again. Everyone seems pleased, and then the Doctors get the key and free themselves.

The Sixth Doctor, worried about Jamie, runs upstairs to free him. He gets into a bit of a tussle with him which eventually ends up with them both outside. The Doctor stumbles across Oscar’s cyanide and uses it to kill Shockeye. So, there we are. Maybe I was wrong and Oscar did serve a point in the plot. *eye roll*

During the chase, Shockeye managed to stab the Doctor a bit, and now Chesene and Dastari happen on his blood. She gets all gooey and starts licking it up. He gets disgusted and tries to free Peri and the Second Doctor. Chesene gets pissed and kills him and tries to escape in the time machine. We get a repeat of what happened to Stike and she falls out, dead, and turns back into her normal Androgum state.

That’s about it for the story. Everyone says their goodbyes, the Second Doctor and Jamie head off in their TARDIS and the Sixth Doctor tells Peri that from now, it’s going to be a vegetarian diet for them both. I, meantime, have a hamburger.

So that’s it. That’s it for the last big multi-Doctor story. The last appearance of the Second Doctor and, so far, the last appearance of Jamie. All that glorious potential wasted on this annoying, obnoxious story that hammers you endlessly over the head with a “don’t eat meat!” message.

I can’t bring myself to totally detest this story. It did have it’s good points, but it could’ve been much better had they left out the Sontarans, Oscar and Anita, given up the whole meat subplot and cut it down from three 45 minute episodes to just two. All that would’ve helped. Instead we got what we got.

Next time on the Worst of Doctor Who… Hell, I don’t know. Suggestions? It has to be something out on DVD in region one!

Cast of Characters:

Elton (Marc Warren) – A lonely, insular young man with a fetish for dancing to ELO and video blogging. The main character in an episode of a series called Doctor Who.

Ursula (Shirley Henderson) – Elton’s friend/girlfriend. She wears glasses to make her look geeky, but is clearly a hottie. The supporting character in an episode of a series called Doctor Who.

LINDA – A support group of people who are looking for a man known as the Doctor, the star and main character of a series called Doctor Who, but whom we might as well dub Sir Not Appearing in this Story.

Victor Kennedy (Peter Kay) – A KOMEDY! goldmine! He’s fat, he’s obnoxious, he’s offensive and later turns into a hideous green monster which slightly improves his looks.

Jackie Tyler (Camile Coduri) – The mother of the primary supporting character on the series. Has more of a role in this story than either the main or supporting stars of the show.

The Doctor (David Tennant) – The tenth incarnation of an alien traveler through time and space. The main character of the show. Clearly added as an afterthought.

Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) – The Doctor’s human companion. Default state is vaguely weepy. She’s the supporting character in the series. Also added as an afterthought.

And so the Worst of Doctor Who gets ready to drop its first stink-bomb on the new series!

The original series of Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 after 26 years and 159 stories. The last episode, “Survival“, aired in December of that year, and lead to a drought of the show on TV that ended briefly with the backdoor pilot movie imaginatively called Doctor Who. It’s failings are many and have already been chronicled by me, but they did at least keep the show going and introduced the 8th Doctor. But it was still a long wait before the show would return to TV on a regular basis.

Finally in 2005, after years of speculation, starts and stops and general confusion, noted television producer Russell T Davies (known for creating Queer as Folk, and also someone who wrote a Doctor Who novel), finally got a new series into production! With future Destro actor Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, the show took off into high ratings and generally pleased most fans, old and new. Sure, it had it’s failings (farting aliens, anyone?), but it had its good moments and many were disappointed when Eccleston stepped down after only one season to be replaced by David Tennant who, fortunately, ended up being one of the best Doctors the show has ever had.

I like the new series (sometimes referred to as “New Who“, cause that, you know, rhymes. Kind of like New Zoo Revue only with no talking frogs. Well, usually none). It’s kind of goofy and stupid at times, but it has its charms. I don’t know that I would watch it had I not been such a fan of the original series, but perhaps. Some of the stories have, after all, been among the best in science-fiction, with stories such as “Blink” and “Human Nature” leading the way.

Sadly, the series has been saddled with one major problem since its relaunch, and that problem is a chap named Russell T Davies.

See, he’s not a bad producer or even a bad writer, but like many fans, I kind of twitch when I see the episode I’m about to watch is one written by him. Why? Because his episodes tend to be the most self-indulgent, cringe-inducing, vaguely nauseating episodes. All the really good stories are ones he didn’t write, while the worst of the series are ones he did. Those worst episodes include today’s crime, Love and Monsters.

“Love and Monsters” occupies an odd place. It’s an episode of Doctor Who that doesn’t really feature the Doctor or Rose very much at all. They’ve started doing stories like that once per season and it worked well with “Blink” and “Turn Left“. It does not work well with this episode. It’s too bad, too, cause it had the potential to be the best show of the series, and some scenes work incredibly, wonderfully well, but it’s still a dreadful, awful episode, and as we delve into why, keep in the back of your mind: it was written by Davies.

The story begins with a not-unattractive fellow, later revealed to be named Elton, running through some sort of factory-type of place. We are unsure what he’s doing, but we see the TARDIS. He runs over to it, and then hears the voices of the Doctor and Rose. He runs towards the voices and comes to a mysterious door with light leaking out of the bottom of it. It opens, revealing a character illuminated heavily by the Backlight of Rassilon. We cut to the opening credits.

The dreaded Backlight of Rassilon makes its first appearance!

The character turns out to be a rather impressive looking monster, and I’ll say this for both the old and new series: at least they had unique and interesting alien designs, often involving full masks and costumes. When this worked, we got cool looking monsters like the Ood, the Sontarans, the the Daleks, the Cybermen, and Sil. It didn’t always work (the Zarbi are a great example), but it was reasonably creative and daring and far more interesting in many ways than what the higher-budgeted Star Trek series managed to accomplish, since most of their aliens were clearly humans with bumpy bits added.

Anyhow, the Doctor turns up as the monster is about to, possibly, munch on Elton. He distracts the monster with some steak while Rose comes up and throws what appears to be water from a blue bucket at it. The Doctor tells her, no, it was meant to be the red bucket and then we get our first sign that, just possibly, this won’t be a great episode, as the monster, the Doctor and Rose (astonishingly not weeping at the moment), run back and forth through a series of doors in the kind of corridor gag that was old and stupid when Scooby Doo did it. Now possibly it didn’t really happen like that, and Elton is a unreliable narrator. If this were a better episode, I’d presume that was the case. Instead I just chalk it up to Davies’ crap writing.

The chase sequence ends abruptly, thank the FSM, and Elton goes back outside. We then go to him in his bedroom as he talks into a video camera about all the experiences of his life and how it’s intersected the Doctor in various ways. This starts with him seeing the Doctor when he was a little boy and then goes up to reference various new series episodes, like “Rose”, “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Aliens of London” (yeah, thanks, Davies, I really wanted to be reminded of the Slitheen). There were apparently plans to reference various original series episodes, and I’m rather disappointed that didn’t happen, but, oh, well.

Anyhow, Elton talks about his love for ELO (and subjects us to a dance, continuing Davies’ and company’s drive to shoehorn incorporate as many elements of the real world as they possibly can into their stories), talks about the Internet crashing during the Sycorax invasion (which somehow causes his computer to explode), and then starts talking about Ursula and the group they are a part of, a group that meets in the basement of an old library and hangs out talking about their interest in the Doctor.

Apprently denial of service attacks are really nasty in England!

As everyone gets to know each other, they begin to bring in food, start playing music together (looking very much like Elton and the Pussycats), and generally bond. I must say, the character building scenes between Elton and his friends actually work really, really well and work to the point where one can start feeling some response when Bad Things start to happen to them. It’s a great example of what this story could’ve been, if only they’d tried (or shot Davies on sight).

Eventually the group decides they need a name, so they call themselves the “London Investigation ‘n’ Detective Agency”, or NAMBLA. All is going well for these folks, and going reasonably well for the story, until Victor Kennedy (illuminated by the Backlight of Rassilon), shows up and, in true Davies-style, begins to display all the fine attributes that will bring this episode crashing down to Earth.

The return of the dreaded Backlight of Rassilon!

Victor Kennedy is an odd looking fat man with a blonde goatee. He tells the group he’s there to help them and please don’t touch him, as he has a rare skin disease. The group accepts him as their new leader and are soon doing everything he tells them to, including homework and the like. They do this all without question, and I’m guessing they feel guilt over having gotten sidetracked from the original project, but the story isn’t really clear on this.

One day not long after his arrival, the group has a meeting, and when they leave, he asks Bliss, one of the groupies, to stay behind. She does, and we see everyone else leave. We get an exterior shot of them departing when a blood-curdling scream rings out. Clearly there’s no way that the group could’ve failed to notice this loud cry of misery. Just as clearly, there’s no way she could’ve screamed loud enough for us to hear her outside the building. Obviously, it was a scream added in post to make it clear that Something Bad was happening, but frankly I feel that silence would’ve been more effective.

The gang come back for their next meeting and are told that Bliss has run off to get married. They blindly accept this and prepare for new assignments. It’s during this time that Elton has his run-in with the Doctor and Rose at the factory. Back at base, Victor berates him for having frozen-up, and Elton tells him, “Fuck off and die, you fat bastard.” Actually, he doesn’t, but he should. Instead he just meekly accepts the criticism and moves onto his next goal; finding Rose’s mom, Jackie.

Victor explains that due to the “Bad Wolf” virus (cute), the files on Rose that are held by Torchwood (cute), are very incomplete, and for some reason in this scene, Elton is so badly lit that he looks like he’s got hepatitis. Seriously, he’s got this yellow tinge to him. Very weird.

Elton gets into it with Victor and Ursula responds, threatening Victor, who backs down after making some comments about how she’s been considered the one most likely to fight back. Hmmm. If that’s the case, one wonders why he didn’t off Ursula first, but never mind. He does, however, take the time to off Bridget right after we see that her and Mr Skinner are falling in love. Great. Nothing like a little pointless pathos.

So Elton heads off on his impossible quest to find Jackie Tyler. This impossible quest takes all of about a minute. He-he. Then as he’s doing laundry next to her (don’t ask), he’s pondering the four steps he needs to undertake to make contact with her. “Hilariously” as he thinks them, she does them for him. KOMEDY! Anyhow, her washing machine at home is broken, so she eventually entices Elton to come back to her place and fix it. We see it sitting in the kitchen.

I don’t understand this about the English. I’ve watched quite a bit of How Clean is Your House? and invariably the washer and dryer are located in the kitchen. What’s up with that? Surely that can’t be the most sanitary arrangement. It may just be due to the convenience of the water pipes, but a: a newly-built place (like in the last 50 years), would likely take washers into account, and b: there’s plumbing in the bathroom, and if I had to choose between washing my clothes in the kitchen or the bathroom, it’d be the bathroom every time.

So Elton then finds himself spending a lot of time around Jackie with her being painfully obvious about how attracted she is to him, and how much she wants him to tend to her plumbing, if you know what I mean (believe me, I wish I didn’t know what I meant there). She also turns up in a close-up shot of her bum in a miniskirt, giving me a new reason to dislike Russell T Davies.

I should look this good at 39! Or now...

The good thing about these scenes is that it does nicely illustrate how alone Jackie is and how much she misses Rose, and so I can’t totally hate the scenes. I just wish they’d been handled better, with a little more emotion and a lot less attempts at KOMEDY!.

Moving on, we see Jackie make a very clumsy, obvious attempt at getting Elton into the sack, which does at least result in him removing his shirt, so my hatred for Davies’ work decreases slightly. He approaches Jackie shirtless, making it clear that he’s go for the Moon, as it were, only to find her sitting talking on the phone to Rose. Jackie finishes the call, gets as vaguely weepy as Rose usually is, and suggests Elton go home. He instead offers to go buy pizza and spend the evening hanging out with her as friends.

This plan is thrown slightly when, as he’s coming back with the pizza, she approaches him with a photo of Rose he’d been carrying in his pocket for the last couple weeks. He explains that, no, he’s not some creepy stalker after Rose, he’s actually after the Doctor. Oddly, this fails to move Jackie, she tells him where to go, and we have the last, the very last, of the really good scenes in the entire story. I mean it. It’s downhill from here, folks.

Elton goes back to the group disconsolate. He makes a little speech to Victor about how he’s had enough, and it’s not fun anymore. He says he’s leaving, as are Ursula (who he invites to dinner), and Mr Skinner (who he does not). They get ready to storm out and Victor asks Mr Skinner to hang back a bit. Astonishingly, he does, and is of course killed right after Ursula and Elton leave. Proof if any was needed that natural selection is alive and well in the human species.

Ursula realizes she’s forgotten her cell phone. Her and Elton return to find Victor sitting behind a newspaper which he is holding with light green fingers. They don’t believe him when he says Mr Skinner has gone the toilet (especially when they hear his voice), so Ursula pulls down the newspaper and sees that Victor is actually a rather unpleasant green alien who looks not unlike a Vogon. Actually, he really resembles one quite a bit. He also faces sticking out of him, including the faces of Mr Skinner, Bridget and Bliss (who is apparently on his ass. KOMEDY!).

This is a guy who gets a lot of face time. Get it? Face time? Ha-ha-ha-ha! I write better than Davies!

I must say in many ways the design of the creature, which Elton dubs an Abzorbaloff, is actually rather creepy and interesting. It’s apparently based off this picture:

The picture is a contest entry from a nine-year-old boy who won a “Design a Doctor Who Alien” contest. The kid was apparently somewhat disappointed because he’d pictured the creature as being the size of a bus. That’s alright, kid. The rest of us were disappointed cause he was used in such a sucky episode.

Anyhow, the Abzorbaloff apparently absorbs people into itself for… uhm. I don’t know why, actually. It’s never said straight out. Sucking up their knowledge, possibly, since that’s what he appears to want to do to the Doctor. No explanation is offered for why he did it to these people.

Ursula threatens to hit him with his cane if he doesn’t release everyone. He says he can’t and grabs her arm. The act of him touching her is enough that she starts to get absorbed into the monster as well, saying goodbye to Elton and mentioning that she wishes she could touch him one last time before she dies. She also helpfully informs him that he’s next on the chopping block, something someone with the IQ of a turnip could figure out. Then she’s sucked inside, clothing and all, and appears on Victor’s chest as a face… that can talk. And see. And has glasses. And makeup. None of which makes any sense, but ok.

Victor chases after Elton and eventually corners him. Elton is cowering and basically gives up, but then the TARDIS appears, generating some strange wind that it generates when the script calls for it to do so. Rose and the Doctor get out and Rose starts to take Elton to task for upsetting Jackie. Elton and Victor exchange the sort of looks that anyone, including viewers, might exchange under the circumstances.

Rose then makes some remark about how Victor looks rather like a Slitheen. Victor apparently comes from a planet called Clom, which is a sister planet to the Slitheen planet, Raxacoricofallipatoris. Which explains the resemblance, or rather it doesn’t, in fact, since the two species look nothing like each other! See, here’s pictures!

The Abzorboloff

A Slitheen

Nada! Nothing alike, aside from a vaguely greenish skin color. Argh, this show is pissing me off! It can’t even stay consistent within it’s own universe! It’s enough to make me wager that, should we see the Slitheen again, they might be retconned to look like this happy fellow.

Anyhow, Victor is about to absorb Elton when Ursula and the gang realize they have limited control over his body. They pull hard inside him and keep him from killing Elton as Elton grabs Victor’s magic cane and breaks it in half. This apparently reverses the polarity of his neutron flow, or some such, and causes him to collapse into a wet blob that gets absorbed into the dirt, leaving Elton sad that his friends are all dead and leaving Rose looking, yes, weepy, as she tries to comfort him.

After this we have more of Elton sitting in front of his computer talking about how the first time he’d met the Doctor, it turned out he’d been chasing a shadow elemental that had gone into Elton’s house. The Doctor stopped it, but not before it killed Elton’s mother, and then follows a rather touching series of shots with his mum that actually make me feel a little sad, especially when we have the final shot of them in the park together, her waving goodbye and walking off. It’s a very wonderful, and effective scene, as is Elton’s comments after on the nature of life and how darker, madder and better it is than anyone ever tells you.

And this is where it should’ve ended. If the episode had ended there, I would’ve forgiven a lot of what had gone before. I would’ve chalked it up as an imperfect, but actually pretty good, episode with a nice emotional core to it and a sweet, touching ending. But no. Like so many other works of fiction such as A.I. – Artificial Intelligence, Nowhere, and many others. But that’s not what happens. It doesn’t end. It keeps on going.

*sigh* Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for I can barely force myself to type out what happens next.

Trust me, you do not want him to turn that thing around!

See, we hear the voice of Ursula from off-camera, talking to Elton. It turns out the Doctor wasn’t able to save her, but was able to, somehow, reconstitute her DNA with his sonic screwdriver (a bit of whatever tech if I’ve ever seen it). Her DNA is mixed in with a paving stone (which I am 100% sure is impossible), and this turns her into a talking paving stone, complete with a face, makeup and, yes, still glasses. No visible ears, but she somehow hears everything anyhow. Then it gets even uglier as Elton makes an allusion to the two of them having “a bit of a love-life”.

Argh! DAMN YOU, DAVIES!

Oh, almighty Zarquon, did we really need this? Did we really need an oral sex joke on Doctor Who? Yes, ten out of ten for being modern and edgy, but minus several million for appropriateness.

Further, what the hell is up with this paving stone business? How does she breathe? How does she eat and (ulp), excrete? And why would anyone want to exist as a bit of talking paving stone? I’d ask Elton to get a sledgehammer and be done with it.

This ending really, truly kills the story. We didn’t need to see Ursula revived as a paving stone, that’s just stupid. Upon seeing that, we really did not need an oral sex joke. This just pisses me off! It takes what was, at one point, a decent, if not great, story that had a wonderful potential ending and totally ass-rapes it leaving it as a stinking pile of yuck.

New Who has done some wonderful episodes. The aforementioned “Blink” is one of the best bits of science fiction out there. Hell, even this series of the show had a few total winners, like “School Reunion” (cause who doesn’t like seeing Sarah Jane and K-9?), and the really great “The Girl in the Fireplace”, but then it also had this stinking pile sitting in the middle the schedule like a lead weight on a sheet, dragging down everything around it. Argh, I could’ve written a better episode than this in my sleep!

The good news it that Russell T Davies is leaving the show. Hopefully once he’s gone we’ll move past a lot of the stupid, juvenile humor that’s permeated the show since its return. One can hope anyhow.

Next time, on “The Worst of Doctor Who“, the Doctor meets… the Doctor! Yes, friends, it’s “The Two Doctors“! Brace for unpleasantness and food!

CAST OF CHARACTERS:

The 7th Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) – Enjoy the roughly five lines he gets, cause he’s not around long. On the plus side they brought him back for the show so we got a proper regeneration, but on the negative side, they killed him off quickly and stupidly.

The 8th Doctor (Paul McGann) – The one and only TV appearance by this Doctor who later went on to do several of the so-called “Audio Adventures” for Big Finish. Currently the Doctor with the largest number of stories. He’s the only thing that keeps this movie from true awfulness.

Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook) – A Puccini-loving cardiac surgeon called in to examine the Doctor’s heat(s) after an irregular heartbeat is detected. She’s just as exciting as that description makes her sound. She also gets to kiss the Doctor, thus setting the bar for such companions as Rose Tyler and Captain Jack!

Change Lee (Yee Jee Tso) – A Chinese-American gang member who winds up having a rather disturbingly close relationship with the Master. Slash fiction writers, get your word processing software ready, cause the challenge here is not reading anything into it!

The Master (Eric Roberts) – After a great portrayal by Roger Delgado and an ok one by Anthony Ainley, we have… this. Possibly – no, certainly – the gayest Master ever seen on screen. Yes, even more gay than John Simms’ version.

The movie simply called Doctor Who, but known to many fans as “The 8th Doctor Movie”, “The Enemy Within” or simply, “That gawdawful American piece of crap,” occupies an odd place in the history of Doctor Who.

The original series went off the air in 1989, with the 7th Doctor and Ace having beaten the Master and walking off together. The new series, which features the 9th, 10th and soon, 11th, Doctors didn’t begin airing until 2005.

The Doctor Who movie, which aired on Fox in the United States, was broadcast in 1996, so it falls almost directly between the old series and the new. It features elements of both and certain things with are unique to itself. It’s something of an odd-duck to the rest of the show, being neither the old series or the new, and while it isn’t without its charms, it has many, many failings.

Those failings mostly center around the storyline. See, the obvious thing to do with this story, especially as it was directed at an audience who largely had never even heard of, much less seen, Doctor Who, would be to include an accessible villain. Someone out there thought the Master was a good choice, and I guess he was ok, but nothing special. The Daleks or Cybermen would’ve been much more interesting.

To make matters worse, most of the characters behave like idiots, it’s pointlessly set in on New Year’s Eve, 1999, the Master is extremely gay, and the eventual resolution to the storyline is very confusing as well as containing a massive deus ex machina, which really drags things down. There are good things, of course, like the 8th Doctor and some of the throwaways to the fans, but for the most part, the story really drags down the movie.

BTW: For those who want to see this movie, well, you’re outta luck if you live in North America. Due to rights issues, it hasn’t had a region one DVD release and probably never will. The good news is that if you have a region-free DVD player or a DVD ROM with VLC Player installed, you can buy a copy from Amazon.co.uk. With shipping, it only cost me about $11, which isn’t too bad.

Anyhow, on with the show!

We begin with a shot of Skaro. For those of you who thought it had been destroyed at the end of “Remembrance of the Daleks“, think again. A voice over by the 8th Doctor informs us that the Master was captured by the Daleks who executed him (apparently in a helium environment, judging by how high-pitched their voices are as they say “EXTERMINATE!”). The Master’s final request was to have his remains brought to his and the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey. The Time Lord acquiesced and the Doctor picked up the box with the Master’s remains to bring them back home.

Not even to the opening credits and we have several problems. First, the planet of Skaro was, as I mentioned, destroyed in a previous episode. Ok, so maybe this takes place before that, I don’t know; that’s part of the joys of time travel, I suppose. It makes up for sloppy continuity.

Also, the Dalek voices are really high-pitched here. No exaggeration. It sounds like they’ve got Alvin and the Chipmunks driving them. From what I recall in the commentary the director of the movie did the voices. I’m not clear why, but one would think they could processed them to sound, you know, menacing instead of hilarious.

Third, why would the Daleks give the Master a final request and then relay it to Gallifrey? The Daleks aren’t the most loveable, huggable species in the universe. Most likely they would’ve captured him, gloated a little and then killed him without letting him make any last wishes.

Fourth, why would the Time Lords agree to this request? Surely they’d know it was a trap. Ok, perhaps they wanted to get rid of the Doctor by sending him there, but come on.

Fifth, why wouldn’t the Daleks simply blast the Doctor as soon as the TARDIS landed? Showing restraint is not something they are widely known for.

Sixth why would the Doctor agree to do this, and then not make sure he had the box in his sight at all times? The Doctor isn’t stupid; he would’ve known the Master would find a way to come back.

Seventh, why wasn’t this a trap by the Daleks? It’s exactly the kind of thing they would have done.

So, basically, in the first minute of the movie we’ve managed to see seven rather stupid mistakes that are guaranteed to annoy most of the fans of the original series. Well done! It’s seldom a movie manages that many problems. That’s one stupid mistake about every eight seconds! I am impressed.

On the plus side, they did at least reference the Daleks, however poorly, and they showed the Master having cheetah eyes, which makes sense given the events of “Survival“, the last original series episode. That’s about the only success in this scene, though.

Now we move onto the opening credits, which should look familiar to anyone who has watched the new series, since they are quite similar. I must say, the opening titles are nicely done and they kept the original series theme, which really kicked ass! Perhaps they might be getting back on track with the fans at this point?

As the credits clear off, we see the TARDIS spinning through space, looking all CGI and kind of cool. Inside we see an interior that bears a great deal of similarity to the new series interior and none at all to the original series. I actually like this interior; it’s very roomy, spacious and rather cool looking, as well as not being quite as confused looking as the new series version.

Also in the TARDIS we see, hooray!, Sylvester McCoy as the 7th Doctor! I always liked the 7th Doctor, especially once he was teamed up with Ace. He got some of the worst stories (“Ghost Light“, “Greatest Show in the Galaxy”, “Doctor Who: Delta and the Bannermen“, “The Happiness Patrol”, “Paradise Towers”… when it comes to doing a recap of his episodes, I’m spoiled for choice), but he was always entertaining on screen and he and Ace worked wonderfully together. Ace is sadly missing in this story, but so is the Doctor’s question mark sweater and question mark umbrella, so that’s a reasonable trade-off.

The Doctor takes what’s left of the Master, which apparently fits inside a small box, locks it up next to some candles (?), and then retires to the console room to listen to some jazz and read The Time Machine, by writer and former TARDIS passenger, H G Wells.

Ah, but all is not well on the TARDIS as we quickly learn! There’s a faint shaking, some noise and then the Doctor’s teacup falls onto the floor, breaking into a thousand pieces and allowing me to create what I call “The Praxis Teacup Rule”. This rule stipulates that anytime you see a teacup (or coffee cup), suddenly fall over and break, it means trouble’s a brewin’! Examples include this and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (a favorite of mine).The vibrating water cup in Jurassic Park is similar.

The box holding the Master breaks open and out oozes some slime. Yes, the Master is apparently now one of the Founders. He oozes along the ground until he reaches the TARDIS control console, causing a malfunction (I know that’s what it is, since there’s a sign saying “Critical Timing Malfunction”). The Doctor reacts and tries to get the TARDIS to land so he can figure out what’s going on. He also gets to look shocked, surprised, nervous, and scared when he sees the Master’s empty box.

Down on Earth meantime, we focus on three Chinese-American boys who are running from someone/something and my heart skips a beat. Oh, my. My, my, my. Yee Jee Tso as Chang Lee. Goodness, he’s quite hot. Looking at this fellow, I might have to kick Adric to the curb. Sorry, math-boy, but Change Lee’s got it goin’ on!

Chang Lee and his redshirt pals hop a fence, and shoot at a car that’s chasing them. Their bullets make sparks (like fictional bullets do), but cause no real harm. The people in the car drive off. Chang and his buddies celebrate, and some bad guys pop up from behind some boxes to shoot them.

Now, hang on, here. Chang and his buddies were apparently up to something and running from someone in a car. That someone knew they would hop a fence and hide in this one particular alleyway, so that someone had armed men wait for them to shoot at them. Ok, maybe it’s a place Chang and the boys always hide, but I’m still not buying it.

Anyhow, the other two boys get shot (and presumably killed, though Chang seems supremely disinterested in them), and Chang’s about to get his ticket punched when the TARIDS materializes between him and the bad guys. The bad guys kindly wait until it’s done arriving, and then shoot the hell out of it. As soon as they stop, the Doctor walks out, gets shot in the shoulder and falls over.

Argh, did the writers never watch the show?! The Doctor a: would have heard the bullets hitting the TARDIS and b: would have looked at the monitor to see what was happening and c: not walked out into gunfire! This really ticks me off. This is very out of character for the Doctor and such a stupid way to have killed off a beloved character. I mean, yes, he didn’t die right here, but the way he does die is even stupider, so I’m really trying to pretend it doesn’t happen.

Alas, we must move on. Chang Lee comes up to the injured Doctor and tries to comfort him as the Doctor tries to warn him about what appears to be Master-ooze coming out of the TARDS’ keyhole. The Doctor passes out as Chang Lee says he’ll get help. We hear sirens in the background, and it turns out to be the police. They summon and ambulance, which shows up along with a fire crew. The paramedics start to work on the Doctor and check the injured/dead gang members as the police question Chang Lee. Once they find out he has a gun, they take him into custody and haul him downtown for questioning.

Actually, no, my mistake. None of this actually happens. What really happens is the sirens are one single ambulance which Chang gets into along with the Doctor. They then drive off and we see the paramedic inside is the one and only Eric Roberts.

Ah, Eric Roberts. Famous to the world for such amazing roles as… uhm… well, I think he played one of the suitors in a TV version of The Odyssey, right? And probably some other things. Oh, yes, he was in The Dark Knight
. Beyond that? I don’t know, I can’t think of anything and I’m too lazy to look on IMDB. Besides, it’s more fun to push him around here as someone with no talent who turns in a crappy performance in a b-grade sci-fi, made-for-TV movie. It’s not fair, but it’s fun!

In the ambulance, Roberts’ character, Bruce, hands Chang some forms. Chang refuses to sign them and Bruce implies that if he doesn’t, the Doctor won’t get treated. Really? That’s really how it works in a gunshot case?

We arrive at the hospital and they all get out, as the Master ooze gets in. The police are of course waiting to question the Doctor as a gunshot victim and Chang as the only witness to the shooting and- oh, wait. No, they aren’t. Instead everyone just goes inside the hospital.

Back in the ambulance we see Odo – excuse me, the Master ooze- as it slimes around, looking vaguely snake-like and reminding me of a Doctor Who villain called the Mara. Sadly, I don’t think they were going for a reference here; I think they just wanted to have some cool CGI effects.

The Doctor’s shoulder injury is treated (as are a couple bullet wounds in his legs), but the attending physician notices the Doctor’s heart-beat is very irregular. X-rays reveal what appears to be two hearts. Well, that can’t be right! So they call their heart specialist, Dr Grace Halloway. You can bet the only heart she can’t fix… is her own (aw…). What doesn’t get mentioned in this medical stuff is that the Doctor also has a body temperature of 68 degrees, but I think that’s one of those things, like the respiratory bypass system, that exists only when the writers want it to.

Grace was attending a Puccini opera with her boyfriend who is one of those movie boyfriends that’s a total prick and gets entirely bent out of shape that his on-call, doctor girlfriend has to rush off in the middle of an opera to save someone’s life. Right. He winds up leaving her right after this, making it quite clear that there must’ve been deep relationship issues and he was just looking for an excuse.

There’s a lovely, slow motion scene of Grace in her opera gear running into the hospital to the strains of Puccini. It’s a little surreal and actually rather cool. Sadly, it’s pretty much the end of cool for this movie.

Grace gets gowned up and gets the Doctor on the table. He tries to tell her he’s not human and to basically stop what she’s doing. Understandably she doesn’t listen and has him knocked out. He wakes up a couple times, and probably wishes the writers had remembered the respiratory bypass system I just mentioned, but then finally is knocked out.

Grace starts poking around with a cardiac probe while up above we see the hospital administrator and some other people, presumably benefactors, watching. What these people are doing here on December 30, 1999, I’ll never know. Sure, it’s not New Year’s Eve yet, but it will be soon, and I strongly doubt any hospital administration stuff gets done during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. It’s quite clear that this scene exists only to give us a chance to later have a scene where Grace’s boss gets to be a prick to her.

Anyhow, Grace is poking around with the probe. She quickly gets lost (since he has two hearts), and the Doctor starts to flatline. They try to revive him, the admin guy gives her a pissed-off look, and the Doctor dies on the operating table. So after a death that makes Tasha Yar’s look meaningful, that’s it for the Seventh Doctor. Sic transit Septimanus Doctorus. Grace stomps around, demanding to see the Doctor’s x-rays.

In the next scene, Chang, who has apparently been kicking around the hospital for the last couple hours, is woken up by a nurse. He’s brought to Grace who tells him the operation was a success, but the Doctor died. He grabs the Doctor’s bag of swag, tries to bluff Grace, and then goes running out of her office. She shouts for security and tries to stop him, but to no avail. He even runs right past a security guard who completely ignores him! Very nice.

To the left we see a security guard, apparently on his coffee break.

Meantime, we pay a visit to la maison de Bruce, where we find Bruce sleeping next to his rather unhappy wife. As he snoozes and snores, the Master ooze turns into something like a cobra (?!), which oozes along the floor until it oozes into Bruce’s mouth. This apparently kills Bruce but on the plus side, stops him from snoring. His wife smiles, turns over and goes to sleep, unaware that hubby is now possessed by the Mara- er… the Master.

Back at the hospital, we go to the morgue where McCoy practices corpsing. The morgue attendant makes the kind of off-color, gallows humor required of anyone in such a role in a movie like this and stuffs the Doctor into a very large walk-in fridge (??!!) that the morgue has. Now I’d always thought dead people were put into drawers, but no, apparently not. Apparently they’re stuffed, gurney and all, into a walk-in fridge. Okee-dokee.

The attendant goes to sit back and watch a movie and eat some popcorn (rather like I do at work when not writing snarky recaps). He appears to be watching 1931’s Frankenstein, though some of the clips might be from the far superior Bride of Frankenstein. Both are properties owned by Universal, who also made this movie. Nice.

We transpose between the movie and the locker, where the Doctor’s arms spasmed in such a way as to move them from the sides of his body, out of the top of the sheet covering him and then back down to his sides again, but not until after they’d drawn the sheet back from his face. Obviously this was a ham-handed effort at making sure we see the Doctor’s face for the upcoming regeneration. I have to believe there’s better ways to have done this.

Morphing happens and the Doctor sits up, his eyes at a level where light shines in on them, apparently from a slit carved into the opening of the door, or something like that. When we see the door, no such slit exists, but whatever. He then begins pounding on the inside of the fridge, scaring the bejesus out of the morgue attendant. Eventually he pounds so hard that he leaves indentations in the steel, and the door is knocked off its hinges (???!!!///111… oh, crap. I just broke the shift key). The morgue attending pulls some “KOMEDY!” faces and then faints.

Ok, now, I know what you’re gonna say: How did the Doctor turn into Superman? How is he able to bash through steel and break down a door suddenly?

Super Doctor!

Believe it or not, I haven’t that much of a problem with that. It’s been established before that when the Doctor regenerates, weird shit sometimes happens. When the 10th Doctor regenerated, a Sycorax cut off one of his hands, but he grew a new one quickly, so I can accept that, in this case, the Doctor ended up with super-strength for a few seconds.

What I don’t really understand is the morgue attendant fainting. Clearly this happens because the script calls for it and no real rational reason. If I were in such a situation and saw something like this happen, I’d assume that the guy who was put in there wasn’t actually dead, and now has come back to file a malpractice suit. Ok, knocking down a steel door might fill me with a bit of surprise, but I still don’t think I’d overact like this guy and faint. I’d probably nicely ask the superguy what I can do to help him in hopes he didn’t hurt me.

The newly-regenerated (and super strong), Doctor staggers out of the morgue and into… some weird area of the hospital. It looks like it’s a place that’s been damaged by a storm or something, but there’s what appears to be some repair equipment. That would make sense if the place was damaged, but there’s also lots of mirrors and a bouquet of a flowers on the floor, which doesn’t make a lot of sense. You’d think if they were going to repair the place, they’d clean up a bit first.

Either way, the Doctor staggers about some more, finds some mirror shards, looks into them and screams unto the heavens, “Who… am… I?!” Ah, post-regenerative amnesia. Nothing like an old plot cliché.

Across town meantime, the Master is sitting up in his new body and… oh, lord… there’s no way I can describe what this looks like. Just take a look at the pic below.

Now it’s time for a Caption Contest! What’s the best caption for this pic?

A: Sadly, the Master’s forays into gay porn ended messily.

B: You think pink eye is bad? Try green eye!

C: I told you to warn me before you did that!

D: Make your own caption! Win cash and prizes! (not really)

You know, I make a lot of gay jokes in my recaps. Let me make it perfectly clear: I’m bi with a preference towards other guys. I have no problems with gay sex or gay people. But, damn, these recaps I’ve done, and this one in particular… I mean, it’s just so hard to restrain when they practically beg, beg for gay jokes!

Oh, well. Moving on.

Bruce’s wife wakes up to see the Master posing in front of a window. She makes some comments about how wonderful he is now, he agrees and then kills her, and I really start o miss the Delgado version of the Master.

Back at the hospital, the administrator turns up and bitches at Grace for daring to lose a patient, since as we all know, the only good doctor is one with a 100% success rate. He then takes the x-rays of the Doctor’s chest and burns them (?), saying that no one need be aware of Grace’s failings. He’s apparently doing this so he doesn’t have to discipline her and that it’s important to do this so the hospital will stay open, but that doesn’t make any real since. I mean, contrary to my joke, even the best doctor occasionally lose patients. It happens. Doctor House loses patience all the time (rim shot), and I fail to see how losing one patient under bizarre circumstances would cause the hospital to close down.

All this does is, of course, piss off Grace to the point where she says she’s resigning. We see her gather up her things, and then she gets into an elevator and the Doctor (having stolen someone’s Bill Hickok costume. Yes, there’s a costume party planned at the hospital. Possibly to welcome the visiting benefactors?) , who’s been waiting in the… er… waiting room… follows her. He makes a couple comments about Puccini. She blows him off (no, not that way, you sickos! This isn’t the Master we’re talking about!), and goes into the parking lot. The Doctor talks to her as she’s loading up her SUV, she tells him to bug off and then she notices he seems to have disappeared. She gets into the SUV and, of course, the Doctor is in the back seat.

Now we saw Grace loading up the back of the SUV a few seconds ago. She was looking directly inside when the Doctor did his little vanishing act, yet she somehow didn’t see him opening up the back door and climbing inside, nor did she feel the vehicle shake as this happened. Argh! It’s little shit like this that makes me really dislike this film.

Back inside the SUV, the Doctor talks at Grace for a few seconds and then, to her amazement, pulls out the cardiac probe. He casually mentions that he has two hearts and then, with him screaming at her to drive, she eventually drives off, taking him straight to her house. Yes, just the thing I might do under those circumstances (not really).

The Master hasn’t been lazing about this time, no sir! He’s down at the hospital creeping out a nurse by peeling off a fingernail while asking about the Doctor. Turns out everyone thinks the body has been stolen. He asks where the Doctor’s things are. She says Chang took them, the Master says, “Ah, yes. The Asian child,” and I cringe, trying not to picture the Master at a meeting of the Non-Aryan Master’s Boy-Lust Association, or NAMBLA.

Grace and the Doctor arrive at her place. She quickly determines that, yes, he has two hearts, which as we all know is something humans don’t generally have. This still doesn’t help her to later believe that the Doctor is not, in fact, human. I have no problem with skepticism; I’m a big-time skeptic myself. But come on. This is like Scully refusing to believe in aliens and stuff despite all the things she’s seen with Mulder.

The Doctor talks about regeneration and Grace gets all butt-hurt about him treating her like a child when he talks about holding back death. He makes some cryptic remark about her dreaming of holding back death when she was a child, and she seems amazed, though I’m sure many children have a wish to stop people from dying once they become aware of the concept.

Chang meantime has been exploring the Doctor’s bag of holding. Inside he finds several things, including the sonic screwdriver and a pocket watch, which I’m sure will come in handy for both the Doctor and the Master in later years.

Chang also finds the TARDIS key, which he uses to go inside the TARDIS. He has the ususal, “It’s bigger on the inside!” moments that everyone has, and then as he wanders about inside, he finds the Master.

Wait, what? The Master? How the hell did he get into the TARDIS? I mean, he’s the Doctor’s mortal enemy and since the TARDIS is at least partly sentient, so it wouldn’t have let him inside voluntarily, and the Master didn’t have a key, how did he get inside? Ok, maybe he used the key the Doctor cleverly has hidden on the police box sign, but that isn’t explained, and it’s a big plot hole.

Oh, well. The Master hypnotizes Chang and takes the Doctor’s swag bag. Lee protests this thievery and the Master pins him down on the console, looking for all the world like he’s ready to show Lee the sonic screwdriver’s extra settings.

Chang Lee, after the Master shows him his sonic screwdriver.

The Master spins a tale about how evil the Doctor is and how he stole the Master’s body as the Doctor and Grace go for a walk. During this walk the Doctor’s memories return, including life on Gallifrey. He gets so excited about this that he plants a nice kiss on Grace.

Some fans have a problem with that kiss, and I’ll admit, it bugged me at first, too. The Doctor’s relationship with his companions is always chaste, and the closest he came in the old series to getting any was when he shared a cup of erotic cocoa with an Aztec woman. True, in the new series the 9th and 10th Doctors both kiss Rose a few times (during those rare moments when she’s not getting all weepy), and the 9th Doctor even snogged Captain Jack. Given those events, the couple kisses here are no big deal. Plus I figured the Doctor was just caught up in the moment.

Back in the TARDIS the Master has managed to open the Eye of Harmony, which I think is supposed to be the power source for the TARDIS. It’s probably similar to the power source that zapped Rose at the end of the first season of new Who, especially given what it does later.

The Eye projects an image of the 7th Doctor and then shows the 8th. The Master mentions how young the Doctor looks and I flash back to my NAMLBA joke. It’s also at this point that the Master sees the Doctor’s retinal pattern and mentions that the Doctor is half human.

Wow. Well, that’s an unnecessary revelation. It’s possible that the Master was wrong or making a joke but the Doctor makes the same revelation himself later in the episode. Many fans have tried to retcon this and explain away the apparent “fact” of the Doctor’s species. Me, I just ignore it and pretend it never happened, rather like I try to do with the Bush presidency (those eight years were a coma-dream on my part, dammit!).

The Doctor apparently senses that the Eye of Harmony is open and that it’s going to destroy the entire world (?). He tries to convince Grace of this and his alienness, but she’s not buying it and runs off in a panic. Why she isn’t buying any of this is quite beyond me, but she even goes to the length of calling for an ambulance to take the Doctor to a bed in the local loony bin. She then seems him walk through the glass of her door and asks for two beds. Ho-ho. KOMEDY!

The Master and Chang hear the call for the ambulance and figure they should go pick up Grace and the Doctor. They arrive, the Doctor announces that he has to get to this place where there’s an atomic clock that has some MacGuffin he needs to power his TARDIS. Everyone piles into the ambulance… which promptly gets stuck in a traffic jam. Caused by a truck. That’s spilled live chickens onto the road. Cause, you know, on New Year’s Eve, 1999, people were transporting live poultry in large numbers into San Francisco.

The Master, who had gotten in a couple clever lines showing what the character could’ve been had they tried, loses his sunglasses at one point, revealing his evil green eyes. The Doctor reacts and tries to get out as the Master spooges onto Grace, leading to our next caption contest!

A: This is why I gargle with soda after doing that.

B: There’s something wrong with this new toothpaste…

C: Dammit, Chang! For the second time, warn me before you do that!

D: Submit your own caption! Same prizes as before!

The Doctor and Grace go running off and they come across a motorcycle cop. The Doctor distracts the cop, grabs his gun and holds against himself, threatening to shoot unless the cop gives them his keys. This is actually a nice touch and perfectly in keeping with the way the Doctor behaves. They get the keys and go riding off, the ambulance giving chase.

They manage to elude pursuit and end up at the place where the atomic clock is located. There’s some KOMEDY! Exposition, I vaguely zone out and then pay attention again when the Doctor steals the clock part he needs and escapes with Grace after hitting a fire alarm. This alarm causes everyone at the reception for the clock dedication to run out panicking and screaming.

Now I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in buildings, like office buildings, where an unexpected fire-drill occurs. What happens in these situations in real life is everyone looks vaguely at each other, ignores the rules about not grabbing any personal things, grabs their personal things and walks out. People don’t panic, scream or otherwise act like morons. Only in movies does this happen. Sure, perhaps if there were actual flames and smoke what happens in this film might be realistic, but there’s not, so it isn’t.

The Doctor and Grace make it back to the TARDIS where, for some reason, once they have the doors open, a bike cop, screaming about how he has no brakes, rides his bike inside, turns it around and comes back out again. This serves no purpose whatsoever and is amazingly distracting.

Grace and the Doctor wander inside. The Doctor starts to work on the TARDIS and is doing a good job until Grace thwacks him in the face with a large tool (no, not that large tool. The Master isn’t on screen right now!), knocking him out. The camera pans up and, oh, look, she’s been possessed by the black oil. How cute.

Meantime, on the set of X-Files: Killing the Franchise...

The Doctor wakes up in the Cloister Room tied to a gurney. I didn’t mention it before, but I actually rather like the design of the Cloister Room, as well as the use of the Cloister Bell, which is a nice call-back to the original series. The leaves blowing about and the CIG bats are a bit much, but otherwise the room looks cool.

There’s some mild exposition and… oh, dear, lord. If you think the Master looked gay in my spooge-a-riffic screen caps, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

It's raining men! Halleluiah, it's raining men! Amen!

Yeah, he looks just that dreadful. Jesus Christ, what the hell were the producers thinking here? Was this a game of, “Let’s see how gay we can get?” I mean, the producer of the new series is/was Russell T Davies, who is actually gay, and he made a show less gay than this! Hell, even longtime Who producer John Nathan Turner was openly gay and even he wasn’t as gay as this program! This version of the Master makes Bill Kaulitz look butch! Who, you ask? He’s the lead singer of Tokio Hotel and very, very gay (though he says he’s straight). Check this vid:

The Master is gayer than this. He’s also gayer than this:

Well, ok, maybe the Master is slightly less gay than that… anyhow.

The Doctor gets a crown of thorns put onto him (seriously), and gets into a position not dissimilar to crucifixion. He tries to convince Chang that the Master has been lying to him, and Chang is all like “nosway!” until the Master screws up and is proving to be lying. Chang calls him on it, so the Master breaks the kid’s neck and another great romance goes down the tubes.

Chang and the Master get ready for the big NAMBLA convention in Ohio!

The Master turns off Grace’s black-eye blues long enough to make her look into the Eye of Harmony which can somehow only be controlled by a human, which makes sense when talking about a piece of alien technology. Kind of like how alien spacecraft can be brought down using a virus written on a Macintosh. Yes, that’s right, Independence Day , I’m calling you out!

The Master starts stealing the Doctor’s lives as Grace goes up to rescue the Doctor. He gets free, the transference stops, Gloria Swans – er… the Master – throws Grace to her death and he and the Doctor go mano e mano. Eventually the Master flies (?!) at the Doctor who knocks him into the Eye of Harmony where he is killed forever (or until the screenwriters need him again).

The Doctor reverses the polarity of the neutron flow so the TARDIS can travel back in time and prevent all this from happening (which violates some laws of time, I’m sure, but it’s never mentioned). As he does this, the TARDIS brings Chang and Grace back to life. This makes me wonder if the two of them are as immortal as Captain Jack.

Everyone returns to their normal place. The Doctor gives Chang some cryptic warning about not being around during Christmas of 2000. Chang appears to understand this and goes running off. The Doctor then has some hearts-to-hear moments with Grace, she decides she doesn’t want to come with him. He basically goes, “Whatever, I’ve got Rose Tyler to look forward to,” and leaves, thus ending one of the more painful and confusing 90 minute blocks in Doctor Who history.

Like I said at the outset, there’s a lot to like about this movie. It has some nice continuity moments, I liked the TARDIS interior, it felt a lot more expansive since it was confined to quarries, Chang Lee was really cute and it introduced us to the 8th Doctor who has since gone on to be many people’s favorite.

But it also had the gayest Master ever, huge plot holes, a lot of things that just don’t make any logical sense and some very, very cringeworthy moments.

But it did act as a nice bridge between the old and the new. Watching the movie now, after seeing four seasons and a couple movies of the 9th and 10th Doctors, I can see how there are a few things from this movie (like the more expansive feel and the TARDIS interior), that turn up in the new series. Plus it kept the series going throughout the late 1990’s by giving us a new Doctor and an excuse for audio adventures with the 5th, 6th and 7th Doctors (hell, even the 4th Doctor, Tom Baker, is finally doing an audio adventure to be released in September! Yay!).

The BBC apparently considers this movie to be a part of canonical Doctor Who, which is good, since it introduces the 8th Doctor. He’s shown in a couple scenes in the new series, which is kind of nice. In my dreams I’d like to see them bring him back for a flashback episode taking place right after the Time War and ending with him regenerating into the 9th Doctor, but I’m not holding my breath.

I can’t hate this movie, but I also really don’t like it all that much. One of my friends who loves Doctor Who has said that it’s not any worse than what the new series does on a regular basis and sadly, that’s true. It wasn’t bad, but it should’ve been much, much better.

Next time on The Worst of Doctor Who… uh… I don’t know yet. Probably the Hartnell masterpiece, “The Web Planet”. Stay tuned…

Cast of Characters –

Cloud Strife – Our hero from the video game and the hero in this movie, during which he displays a whole range of emotions; from sulking, to brooding, to scowling, all in an exciting, emo-fashion! Legally prohibited from smiling.

Tifa Lockhart – The girl Cloud should have hooked up with. Her fisting abilities make her very popular!

Barrett Wallace – The man with the silver gun arm! He doesn’t really do much other than show up, swear and shot things. He’s here to kick gum and chew ass… or… something.

Kadaj and the Crunch Bunch – A pack of whinny, annoying, always-crying, emo-ish, Sephiroth cos-players who are somehow great bad-asses. Apparently representing elements of Sephiroth’s personality, though not so you’d notice. Really, just three Oedipal losers, but scary in a Hot Topic kind of way.

The Turks – Reno and Rude are the only ones who matter, and even then they’re just pointless comic relief.

The rest of the good guys – Don’t do much, don’t really matter.

The dead – Sephiroth, Aerith and Zack were all dead at the end of the video game, so of course they are still dead and can have no bearing whatsoever on the plot. None at all. Glad we have that cleared up.

Final Fantasy VII was one hell of a game. Groundbreaking in just about every way possible, it featured a decent (if confusing), storyline, interesting characters, great music, a 3-D environment and wonderful music! It was a system-seller for the Playstation at a time when they kind of needed one.

It also knocked Nintendo down hard. See, originally the game was supposed to be on the successor system to the Super Nintendo. That was going to be a CD-based system (possibly originally made with help from Phillips), and would’ve boasted pretty much all the features that the Playstation had. Well, in the end Nintendo decided to continue with cartridge based games, which really ticked off Square, as it placed limits on them that they didn’t want. Words were said, and next thing you knew, no Square games on any Nintendo systems for several years.

FFVII was great, and left many fans wanting more. Eventually they got Final Fantasy VIII, which made a lot of people very angry, and is generally regarded as a bad move. Other games came along, none of which related to the seventh, and people still wanted to see more of Cloud and his friends.

The game remained quite popular with people at Square as well. When showing off what the Playstation 3 could do, they showed a CGI movie that copied the opening scenes from the game. This left a lot of people hoping and wondering. Could a sequel be in the works? Maybe a remake onto the PS3?

No, instead what we got was Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children (or, to use it’s Japanese title, “Fainaru Fantajī Sebun Adobento Chirudoren”); a broad continuation of the story from the game, done entirely in CGI. Surprisingly it doesn’t suck and has a lot going for it, including a great soundtrack and some really well-done fight choreography. Unfortunately, it also has a muddled screenplay, very uninteresting villains and a lot to do in a short amount of time.

For this recap I watched the film with the Japanese soundtrack and English subtitles. I have no problem with the English dub on this (actually, it’s pretty good), but when watching any non-English film I prefer to hear the original language and read the subtitles (though if I ever knuckle under and watch Incubus that policy may have to change).

Anyhow, on with the show!

Readable titles are for losers!

We start with a nice dedication to the fans. The entire movie is, of course, blatant fan-service, and I’m fine with that. Then we get a caption indicating that what we are about to see takes place 498 years after the other events in the movie that take place two years after the events in the game. So for those keeping count, the movie happens two years after the game, this part happens 500 years after the game, and 498 years after the movie. Right-o.

From the dedication we pan down to a lovely mountain scene showing Red XIII and what appear to be young cubs running along together. Now I’d been under the impression Red XIII was the last of his species, so I’m unclear as to how he has kids, but I could just be remembering things wrong. It’s been a while since I played the game.

Anyhow, Red XIII runs up to the top of a hill and howls. We look down and see some sort of ruins. I’m assuming this is Midgar or something, but the movie is far from clear on this point. Also, it’s really, really unclear why we need this scene. It just creates some vague confusion about when the game takes place and brings up the question of where the cubs came from.

Really, they would’ve been better opening it on the following scene, which shows Reno, one of the Turks, flying a helicopter while listening to reports from down bellow. Ah, Reno… pathetic in the game, not that much better here, but so, so cute… *le sigh*

Yeah, baby, hold that joystick....

Anyhow, we hear lots of gunshots and the helicopter goes down to the rescue. We don’t know anything about who is attacking, but presumably we’ll find out later. The helicopter rescues only one person, apparently, and then goes flying off.

From here we go onto another scene with some voice-over from Barrett’s daughter explaining the events from the video game. So for those keeping count, we have so far three prologues before we get into the movie proper.

This little recap of the video game also brings up something that annoyed me from the game. First, let me say that it does look beautiful, though it makes me sniffle slightly at Aerith dying. But it also brings up what’s known as Gaia Theory, and I really, really hate Gaia Theory.

For those not in the know, Gaia Theory (also called the Gaia Hypothesis), basically state that the Earth is an organism of some sort that engages in a form of self-regulating homeostasis. It’s a silly idea especially once you take it to the logical conclusion of “what does the planet do to compensate for change?” This is of course an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

In this movie, and in the video game, the planet reacts to what humanity is doing by interacting with the lifestream and saving itself and causing geostigma and etc, etc, etc. None of which makes any rational sense. It’s very silly and pointless and, yes, I know it’s just a video game/movie, but it still irks me.

Anyhow, we now move out into the movie itself, introducing Midgar and showing some street urchins hanging about, most of whom apparently have this poorly-defined illness called “geostigma”. From what I can gather later on in the movie, it’s kind of like cancer, but there’s no real explanation. For now what you need to know is that it causes a grey rash and apparently is fatal, but we never see anyone die from it.

The scene changes to the inside of Tifa’s bar, where she eventually answers a phone call with the words “Strife Delivery Service!” Yes, apparently Cloud is working as a delivery boy, thus putting him on the same occupational level as Philip J Fry.

Tifa tells the caller that Cloud isn’t around, and we go out to a shot of the cliffs above the city. Here we see the buster sword sticking into the ground. Damn stupid weapon, but I know the fan-boys love it. After that we move along to see, sitting on a motorbike and listening to his voice mail, our hero, Cloud!

Oh, Cloud. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. You’re really hot.

2. See one.

Cloud is of course looking all broody and emo, as befits a hero who saved the world. You know, once I made up a drinking game based around this movie. One of the rules was that you took a drink every time Cloud looked moody. Alcohol poisoning usually set in around the thirty minute mark.

Say, that's a nice bike.

The next scene features a wonderful chase scene as Cloud rides his motorcycle through a canyon and gets chased by the bad guys. Ah, yes, the bad guys. Kadaj and his gang of pussies.

Kadaj, Yazoo and Loz (hereafter referred to as Thing 1 and Thing 2), are the three chumps who pass for villains in this movie. Most of the time they taunt each other for crying and whine about Mother. They look interesting, kind of, and they have some decent moves, but frankly they do just come off as some sort of wanna-be Sephiroth cos-players.

Anyhow, Thing 1 and Thing 2 both ride down in the canyon to chase Cloud while Kadaj engages in… extreme cell phone conversation! Yeah!

Now the fight scene here is really well done, with Cloud on his motorbike, swinging his sword and looking exciting as Thing 1 and Thing 2 orbit around him, shooting and swinging their swords. It’s a really well-done fight with some great music, and a good demonstration of how the movie, like the game, can mix magic and science.

Of course there’s three problems with this fight.

First, they cut away from the action to show Kadaj on his cell phone. Now this is just my opinion, but I believe the movie would work better just focusing on the action.

Second, argh, gunblades are being used! These are swords built with guns inside (or guns built with swords outside). They look cool, sort of, but are completely useless. This also raises the question of why, in a world with guns, would anyone be using a sword? From Wikipedia, I see that the real-life versions of these weapons died out centuries ago, and that’s no surprise. Don’t bring a knife (or sword), to a gunfight.

Third, Cloud gets shot in the face or rather, gets shot in the bullet-proof sunglasses he’s wearing. This does no damage whatsoever. I can accept that this is basically a CGI anime and these people are basically super-heroes, but along with another scene later, this really pulls me out of the movie.

Cloud gets away and heads off to a place called Healin, where he briefly (and pointlessly), fights Reno. He goes inside a small building, and Rude confronts him. Cloud already has his sword out and ready to go, so Rude puts on a glove in a menacing fashion, whips out his sword and (pointlessly), takes a swing. No reason is given for why these two try to attack Cloud.

Menacing Glove Number One

Rufus Shinra, president of the Shina corporation (which runs the whole world from what I can tell, cause you know how megacorps roll), turns up to exposit a bit at Cloud all about Sephiroth and how Shinra is trying to make up for past crimes. Cloud tells him to piss off and leaves. Why they needed Cloud to drive out to see them for a conversation that could be handled on Cloud’s (product-placed), cell phone is beyond me.

The next bit shows Tifa and Barrett’s daughter arriving at the church where Aerith used to hang out. We find out here that Cloud has the geostigma (big surprise), and that he’s been living and sleeping here (big surprise).

A few moments later we see Reno and Rude getting it handed to them again, this time by Kadaj. Mind you, from what I understand, Reno and Rude’s group, the Turks, is supposed to be pretty bad-ass. This is apparently just an informed attribute, as we see no real proof of this here.

Kadaj and Rufus exposit back forth for a bit. There’s something here about Kadaj being just a memory, or an avatar or something, but it’s not very clear. Then Kadaj kneels in a menacing fashion (?), and his features briefly flicker, making him look vaguely like Sephiroth. I yawn.

Back at the church, one of the Things shows up. He briefly taunts Tifa and then, after she puts on a glove in a menacing way, the two start to fight. It’s a really good fight sequence, though the laws of physics are seriously wounded in the process. We also get a piano remix of the fight music from the game, so that’s pretty fun.

Menacing Glove Number Two

Tifa beats the snot out of the Thing and gives the little girl a hug. Then they hear the Thing’s ringtone which is, hilariously, the Final Fantasy Victory Music! I gotta say, the fan-boy in me just loves this! It’s a great use of the music and quite cool.

The music pulls the Thing out from under the pile of debris he’s currently in. He banters with Tifa for a moment, and then somehow gets behind her, knocks her down and is about to kill her when the little girl throws a bit of materia at his head. It’s a small piece, so he of course glares at her, kills Tifa and then grabs the girl and leaves.

Well, in fact, no that’s not what he does, though that would be smart. Instead he menaces the girl, grabs her and runs off, leaving Tifa wounded (but not in any serious way), and alive. I’m not sure why he didn’t just kill her, aside from the fact that the story needs her alive for later.

Outside in the city we see a couple kids (one of whom is carrying a stuffed moogle! Yay!), getting into a mysterious truck that is, apparently, going to take them off somewhere to get cured of their geostigma.

Now. Call me silly and all, but I’d imagine that an odd, unlabeled truck with a couple creepy guys who are rounding up kids just might attract the attention of the police. However as we learn here and later, Midgar apparently doesn’t have any police or military.

This makes no sense to me. People are people and people need policing if they are together in large numbers. Midgar doesn’t appear to be all that big (probably only a couple thousand people tops), but one would think they would have some police that might come up and try to put a stop to this. Ok, yes, maybe the police already tried and were killed, but wouldn’t that invite more police and make it less likely the kids would go off with Kadaj and the Crunch Bunch?

You know, while I’m on this rant, just how big is this world? It must be about the same size as Earth, since the gravity appears to be about the same, but the amount of land space shown in the game is hardly anything. Further, Midgar is presented as a big city, but as I noted, it seems to only hold a couple thousand people at most.

Oh, well. Enough of that.

Anyhow, Kadaj hauls the kids off to some sort of lake/temple thingy where he is, I presume, about to tell them all about thetans. He takes the kids and leads them into the water, which somehow, I think, cures the geostigma, or maybe not, since we see one of the kids with it later. The water does apparently brainwash the kids so that they become stars in the newest remake of The Bloodening.

Meantime, Cloud has heard that the kids have been taken to a place called the Forgotten City. Yes, it’s actually called the Forgotten City. First, it doesn’t look like much of a city, and second, if people know where it is, why is it called the Forgotten City?!

As Cloud is riding along, Aerith picks this time to contact him mentally or something. He sees a vision of flowers and is standing back-to-back with her. We don’t see her clearly yet, which is a nice touch, but I have to wonder what Aerith is thinking here. Cloud is riding a motorcycle, without a helmet, at high speed and she chooses then to distract him? What the fuck?

Anyhow, Cloud survives this insane moment, though only just, and finds himself in a fight with Kadaj and his cronies. Thing 1 and Thing 2 shoot at Cloud, but they apparently went to the Stormtrooper Academy of Small-Arms Fire, as they completely miss him and his motorcycle (and, amazingly, even avoid hitting something up in the air off screen which would then “squawk!” and fall to the ground).

The ensuing fight is well-staged and interesting even if it, again, brutalizes the laws of physics. Still, these are basically super-heroes in what’s basically an anime so I can bear with it, mostly. Also, we get to see Cloud use a limit break, and that’s pretty cool.

Eventually, though, Cloud starts getting it handed to him. Before anyone has the chance to off him, however, Vincent the vampire turns up in his red cloak and spirits Cloud off to safety. Vampira ex machina, I suppose. We see some footage of Cloud being even more whiny and emo than usual. Vincent exposits on geostigma (still doesn’t make any real sense to me), then basically tells Cloud to get over it.

Speaking of getting over it, Barrett’s daughter seems to think this is exactly the right moment to start bitching about how Cloud doesn’t pay enough attention to her, Tifa and the rest. Cloud flashes back to Tifa basically giving him the exact same lecture. Yes, ok, we get it. Cloud is really, really emo, but there’s a time and place. I don’t really want to see Cloud sitting around acting like Squall.

I'm Squall. I shop at Hot Topic and have a MySpace page with music by My Chemical Romance.

Cloud mumbles something about feeling guilty letting Aerith die, and really, yes, he should feel guilty about that. I mean, why the hell didn’t he just whip out a phoenix down and bring her back to life? Yeah, I know that would’ve nuked the story and stuff, but it’s still a huge plot hole both in the game and in the movie, and one well-addressed by VG Cats!

As Cloud makes up his mind, we see his Panasonic FOMA P900iV cell phone slowly sinking down into the water. Yes, that’s right. Product placement in a movie that takes place in another universe. Well done! Anyhow, it’s apparently waterproof, since it’s we can hear voice mails playing and also there a lot of air bubbles coming out of it. I mean a shitload. I’m not sure how much air these things hold, but I’m betting it’s not that much!

What, me product place?

Back in Midgar we see that Thing 1 and Thing 2 have arrived and set up camp outside a large landmark thingy. They have the landmark thingy ringed with children who are looking all sorts of creepy. Meantime the people of the city are standing there shouting curses at the bad guys, and I’m not sure why. I mean, they haven’t actually done anything yet. Yes, they’re going to, but for right now they’re just standing around. Hey, maybe they’re street performers! Maybe this will turn into a dance number! That could be interesting!

Kadaj is up at the top of a tower hanging out with Rufus, who seems to think it’s a good idea to meet with someone like Kadaj at the top of a building with nothing between him and certain splat except Kadaj’s goodwill. Rufus is apparently very stupid, but about to get stupider.

Anyhow, the Crunch Bunch summon up some demon-dog things that attack everyone as they try to open up this landmark which is, apparently, holding some clues to the location of Jenova, or possibly has Jenova inside it. Reno and Rude show up and engage in some of the strangest banter I’ve ever seen where, from what I can tell, Reno is being dissed on for being a low-level schlub.

It’s strange dialogue that gets even odder when you see Reno’s face, since it looks like’s received the greatest insult ever. I don’t know, maybe this is some sort of cultural thing, but I don’t get it, but another fight happens.

Up on the tower, Kadaj is getting all, “Have you heard the word of Jenova? Are you ready for Reunion?”with Rufus and summons up Bahamut. Too bad Tiamat hasn’t shown up, cause that’d rock. We could have a big old Monster Manual party!

Down bellow, Barrett has shown up and started to fight against Bahamut. After a bit, Vincent, Cid, Red XIII, fucking Cait Sith, and Yuffie (she’s a ninja! Believe it!), show up and join in. A huge-ass battle ensues and it is, for the most part, pretty damned impressive. Some really great fight choreography yet again, along with some very cool music. Really, it’s a nicely done scene and proof that this movie is at it’s best when people are just beating the shit out of one another and not actually talking.

At about this point, Cloud turns up, whipping out yet another sword from his Swiss Army Bike and then joins in the fight.

Elsehwere, Rude’s glasses get broken (he pulls out another pair), as he and Reno continue to fight Thing 1 and Thing 2. In the tower Kadaj continues to taunt Rufus who then, suddenly, whips out a box that apparently has what’s left of Jenova.

Now comes one of the worst parts in the film as far as I’m concerned. Before this moment, the laws of physics have merely been beaten up a bit. Now, however, they get raped, pwned and totally destroyed in a scene that completely takes me out of the film and removes my ability to suspend disbelief.

I’ve watched this scene several times, including just now and what happens is this: Cloud is jumping up into the air to put the pain to Bahamut. This is fine and dandy. At one point Barrett helps him go higher, and then Cid does the same. Then, in quick succession, Red XIII/Cait Sith, then Yuffie and then Tifa, all boost him upwards while in midair themselves.

I don’t know why this breech of physics bugs me so much. I mean, we’re dealing with anime super-heroes, basically, and it still bugs me. It’s like a scene in Superman Returns where Superman is lifting something while standing on it. I can accept him flying around, but I can’t accept that. Same here.

Anyhow, past that annoying bit, we do have a lovely scene where Cloud gets boosted his last way up by Aerith, shown as a reflection in Cloud’s eye, and that’s rather sweet. It almost makes me forget everything that just happened. Almost.

Meantime, back with Rufus and Kadaj, we pick up where Rufus threw the box off the roof. I’m not sure why Rufus throws it or, for that matter, why he was carrying the damn thing around with him to begin with. Me, I’d have found a way to destroy it or toss it into the ocean or given it to Cloud and said, “Don’t let anyone else get their hands on this.” But, oh, well, I’m a logical, reasoning, intelligent person, unlike basically everyone in this movie.

Rufus and Kadaj both end up going off the building and falling as I have flashbacks to The Matrix Revolutions (speaking of movies ripe for the recap treatment). The box gets breeched, Kadaj lands safely and Rufus is saved from certain splat by…

Trinity really looks different for some reason.

Fucking Tseng and Elena?!

What. The Hell? I thought they were dead? I thought Kadaj and the Crunch Bunch had killed them, but apparently not! They’re here to save Rufus’ bacon. Ok, whatever.

Kadaj makes his getaway with Cloud in hot pursuit. There’s another rather nifty motorcycle-based fight, complete with Cloud cutting a bike in half as it flies towards him, and then we see Reno and Rude standing on a bridge together holding bombs. They have a little talk and it’s quite clear they mean to kill themselves and take out Thing 1 and Thing 2 in the process. Cloud and Kadaj zips by, the bombs go off and that’s it for those four (yeah, right).

Reno, about to blown... er, blown up. Anyhow.

Kadaj and Cloud start having their big finale fight. They beat the shit out of each other, Kadaj whining about Mother every step of the way. God, he’s an irritating bad-guy. Sephiroth whined to, but at least he had some style.

We get a view up on Cid’s airship for a bit with the other heroes arguing about what to do with the fight going on beneath them. Eventually it’s decided to let Cloud handle it, and I have to ask: why?

This is an ongoing cliché in fiction. “Let the guy handle it, he needs to sort it out for himself, let him fight his own fight!” It’s stupid. Here these people are, facing the end of the world, and they don’t want to join in the fight in case it injures Cloud’s self-esteem?! Tough! Everyone on the airship should be down there fighting, just like they were in the game when facing Sephiroth!

Speaking of which… just as it seems Cloud has beaten Kadaj, he finds that Kadaj is transforming and he’s suddenly facing… (cue music)… Sephiroth!

Look out! He's emo and carrying poetry!

Well, ok, we all knew this was coming, but I really don’t get it. If Kadaj and the Crunch Bunch are supposed to be aspects of Sephiroth, how come only one of them turns into him? Shouldn’t all three, or shouldn’t they have to combine? Aspecticons! Merge and form… Sephiroth!

I don’t know. It’s cool and all, I guess, but how much cooler would it have been if it had, you know, made sense? Ah, well. It is rather cool seeing Sephiroth back now and, oh, look, he can fly. Of course he can.

Sephie and Cloud duke it out and it’s another really well-done fight scene! They exchange some banter, the celestial chorus sings and, in the end, Cloud kicks Sephiroth’s ass using some really impressive new limit break! Fan-boys around the world cum in their jeans and sit back and light cigarettes.

Cloud goes to Sephiroth who, it seems, has turned back into Kadaj. They have a little moment where Kadaj goes off to join the lifestream. There’s some celebration and we see that, oh, look, Reno and Rude are still alive. I wonder if Thing 1 and Thing 2 are kicking it somewhere? We see that, why, yes, they are, as one of them shoots Cloud.

See, this is one of the biggest problems I have with this movie. There’s no consequences. So far in this film, Kadaj, Thing 1, Thing 2, Tseng, Elena, Reno and Rude have all been, at one point or another, apparently killed only to turn up completely alive, unharmed and ready for action. It’s vexing. I hate it when I can’t trust movies and I know, just know, that someone shown as dead isn’t. Much as I bitch about Cloud not using a phoenix down on Aerith when she died, at least she stayed dead and didn’t turn up at the end, alive and healthy with no reason why!

So, yeah, Cloud gets shot and has a nice little near death experience where we hear the voices of Aerith and Zack telling him that, essentially, he hasn’t dealt with all his thetans, so he needs to go back to the world and smile more (and possibly get laid, though that’s only implied). A strange wolf walks up to Cloud (?), and Cloud wakes up in some water at Aerith’s church.

There’s a bit of rejoicing, all the kids get cured of the geostigma, Cloud smiles just faintly and we finally see Areith and Zack and, I must admit, this scene always chokes me up a little. Even now, just describing it, I have a reaction. It’s a really, really sweet scene and I love seeing Zack and Aerith properly.

Looking good, Zack! Looking good.

Anyhow, they walk off into, essentially, the sunset, everyone is reunited, the Ewok music from the original version of Return of the Jedi plays and we go to the credits (with some of my favorite music in the series).

The end.

I still have a soft spot in my heart for this movie and probably always will. I know it’s a bad film, but it’s a very, very good bad film. Hell, given that I own two versions of it, I can’t hate it that much.

You know, there is a lot that works in this movie. The graphics are impressive, the fight scenes are great and the music is amazing.

But there’s so much fail as well. The plot is a muddled mess, the character motivations are murky at best, the laws of physics get destroyed, death is never permanent and, basically, the film shows that too much fan-service can be a bad thing.

I do hope that at some point the powers that be at Square-Enix give us a proper video game sequel or, failing that, at least go back and remake or release the original version. The movie is what it is, but the video game is so much more, and this movie could/should have been much more than it is.

Hmmm… I wonder where I get a good Playstation emulator?

Brace yourself for 50 minutes of pain!

Cast of characters –

The 5th Doctor (Peter Davison) – A thousand-year-old Time Lord who flies around in a device looking rather like a police box. Dresses like a cricket player, which for a change comes in handy. Has a bizarre, unexplained, disturbing celery fetish.

Tegan (Janet Fielding) – An Australian air-hostess who joined the TARDIS crew in Tom Baker’s last episode, Logopolis. Noted mostly for arguing a lot and wanting to go home. Well, until she does go home and then comes right back.

Adric (Matthew Waterhouse) – This show’s very own Wesley Crusher. He embodies all that’s best about teenage boys in sci-fi shows, which is, basically, nothing. A mathematical genius and alien from another universe who, of course, looks human.

Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) – A girl from an alien world, light-years from Earth. Her dad turned into the Master back at the end of the Tom Baker era. Like Adric looks human and specifically, looks a lot like…

Ann (Sarah Sutton) – Nyssa’s exact duplicate. This sort of coincidence is caused by a natural force known as “the producers didn’t want to spend a lot of money hiring someone who merely looks similar when they can have someone who looks the same for free.”

Lord Cranleigh (Michael Cochrane) – Your basic Edwardian upper-crust sort. Largely harmless, largely boring, largely uninteresting.

Lady Cranleigh (Barbra Murray) – Your basic Edwardian upper-crust sort. But she has many secrets!

Sir Robert Muir (Moray Watson) – He’s a cop in the Dirty Harry mold. He’s got two slugs in him; one of them’s lead, and one’s burbon. He patrols the mean streets of Cranleigh Hall, only one step from turning into the men he seeks… or possibly not. Also, he hits on Tegan.

Captain Spooky Feet! (Gareth Mine) – The villain of the piece! He has menacing feet, which is all we see of him for quite some time. This turns out to be something of a blessing, sadly.

Ah, Doctor Who. If you own a reproduction of Captain Kirk’s toupee, all the Babylon 5 tie-ins ever made, one of Dirk Benedict’s old cigars or a sample of George Lucas’ urine, you’ll likely still look down your nose at Americans who like Doctor Who, especially the original series. It’s the ultimate in geekiness, leaving even other geeks looking askance.

The original series of the program ran from 1963 – 1989, with a couple interruptions. There was a movie in 1996 (which most fans try to pretend never happened), and then the new series, which started in 2005 and is still going strong.

Internationally, and especially in the UK, the show has quite a following, and why not? Shoddy production values, cheap sets, lousy SFX, mediocre screen plays; this program had it all! When it was at its best, you got some of the greatest science fiction ever put to screen. Things like The Invasion, Genesis of the Daleks, Blink, Human Nature and others remain some of the most fantastic science fiction ever made!

But when it was bad, oh, when it was bad… then you got stinking piles, like The Web Planet, the aforementioned 1996 movie, Planet of the Dead, anything with the Slitheen and Sylvester McCoy’s trifecta o’ crap: Ghost Light, The Happiness Patrol, and the mind-numbingly awful Delta and the Bannermen. You also got our subject for today: Black Orchid.

Black Orchid is an interesting episode in several ways. First, it’s a two-parter, which is rare. Second, it’s the first “historical” episode since The Highlanders, back in 1966. A historical is an episode that has no science-fiction elements aside from the Doctor and the TARDIS crew. These were never very popular with fans, though I rather like them myself. Black Orchid is the last to date.

The episode starts with the usual, very early-1980’s opening credits sequence, showing the Doctor’s face, the title of the episode and the screen credit showing that Terrence Dudley was the writer. So now we know who to blame for the upcoming 50 minutes of pain.

The story itself opens with the inside of an English country manner, where we witness murther! Murther most foul, as a man is strangled by Captain Spooky Feet until he passes out. Note to future murderers: this is not how you kill someone. If you strangle them until they pass out, they will eventually start breathing again. To really get the job done you need to keep strangling them until their heart stops. Just a little FYI.

Captain Spooky Feet is hauled off by an “Indian” with a large (very fake), lip-plate who throws him onto a bed an ties him up. I’m sure there’s probably slash fiction somewhere that goes from this as a jumping off point, but I’d rather not think about that.

Now we move onto the interior of the TARDIS; the Doctor’s time machine, which currently looks like an old police call box and is famed for being bigger on the inside than on the outside (rather like my ego, but that’s another story altogether). Inside the TARDIS we see the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric all hanging about.

Sadly, the Doctor Who spinoff, Two Girls, One Guy and a Timelord did not make it past the storyboard stage.

Lots of people dislike this group and say that the TARDIS is too crowded during this part of the 5th Doctor’s time. I don’t think I buy that. The 1st Doctor traveled with Ian, Barbra and Susan, and then Ian, Barbra and Vicki. The 2nd Doctor traveled with Ben, Polly and Jamie for a time. Having more than one companion isn’t a problem, provided you have writers who can handle the job. This wasn’t always the case and certainly isn’t the case with this story where Adric and Tegan could have been written as being on vacation or something and the story wouldn’t have suffered a bit.

Anyhow, the TARDIS materializes on Earth, at a train station, in 1925 (11 June, to be exact, though I really don’t care). The crew wanders about for a moment, Nyssa makes some smart-ass remarks about how mass transit systems are “silly”, and then run into a man with a car who seems to be waiting for them. Who is this strange man, you wonder. Why does he know the Doctor? What sinister, dastardly fate awaits the crew of the TARDIS?!

But first a slight, suspense-building digression about the Doctor’s companions.

Companions are humans (generally), and usually attractive women who accompany the Doctor on his adventures. They get to be the “cabbageheads” and ask all the questions that the Doctor doesn’t need to ask. They also get to be targets for exposition and occupy much fantasy time for younger, usually male, viewers.

As mentioned, in the early stages of the 5th Doctor’s stories, he had three companions in the form of Tegan, Nyssa and Adric. Tegan and Nyssa had joined up with Tom Baker in his last story, Logopolis and were written with the 5th Doctor in mind. This leaves fan-favorite, Adric.

Adric had joined up following the 4th Doctor’s visit to E-space and seems to have been written more with Tom Baker in mind. The end result of this is that Adric worked reasonably well with the 4th Doctor, but not quite as well with the 5th. A similar thing happens with Mel, who was created to travel with the 6th Doctor, did one story with him and then spent four episodes screaming her way through time and space with the 7th Doctor. She worked well enough with the 6th, but not at all with the 7th.

Adric had other problems, most of which center around the fact that he’s an overly-smart teenage boy and acts like it. He sulks, he thinks he knows best, he has all the charm and social graces of an elephant in heat and he wears a very stupid outfit. He blazed (some say flamed), a trail that would later be followed by such as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Lucas from the abominable Seaquest and Seaquest: 2021 (hint to producers: never, ever put the year in the title. It didn’t work here, it didn’t work for Galactica: 1980 and it meant that Space 1999 was doomed from the outset).

The main problem with Adric, as well as Wesley and Lucas, is that, frankly, most teenage boys are jerks, and the last thing they want to see is a kid up on screen acting the way they do, since it highlights their own problems and forces them to see themselves as others do, and few people enjoy that sort of thing.

Me, I’ve always had somewhat of a hard spot for Adric. Back when I first saw these stories I was about 16 or 17 and the character was about the same age (though the actor was about four years older). I was just starting to realize that I was something other than straight, and developed a massive crush on Adric (and to a lesser extent Wesley, though not Lucas. seaQuest was so bad I wouldn’t even sit through it for the eye candy).

Adric was not only what I wanted to be (cute, intelligent), but was also what I wanted to hook up with (cute, intelligent). When the events in Earthshock happened after this episode, I was bloody annoyed, but at least they granted the character a certain immortality.

Amusingly, it turns out that I wasn’t alone in my desires. Yes, it seems that in the UK, Adric is something of a gay icon, and apparently the actor who played him, Matthew Waterhouse, is gay (big shock). I saw a recent picture of him the other week. Yeah, I’d still hit that.
But now back to our exciting story!

When we last saw the TARDIS crew (which I keep accidentally typing as “screw”… I gotta get Adric off my mind), they were being loaded into a sinister car, by a sinister driver, going to a sinister, deadly, dangerous…

GAME OF CRICKET! (cue exciting music)

No, seriously.

Honest.

The TARDIS crew goes off to a cricket match.

You don’t believe me? Check this screen cap:

Beware the Krikkitmen!

Yes, apparently some wise soul at the BBC though to themselves, “The Doctor dresses rather like a cricketer these days, so why not have him actually play the bloody game?”

I’m American, so I don’t know much at all about cricket. I do wonder why it’s not more popular here, given that we’re in love with big numbers games (football, basketball), and cricket seems to have impressively big scores. Must be the outfits or something.

Anyhow, we some of the Cranleighs now, and the Doctor gets roped into playing cricket as scenes from The Great Gatsby (not the Michael Bay version), unfold around us, including intense questioning of Nyssa as to how it’s possible she looks exactly like Ann. Yeah, you gotta love it when even the characters in the story are puzzled by a large plot hole.

The Doctor gets introduced, prompting Lady Cranleigh to ask “Doctor who?”, and a little bit of me dies inside. More of me dies as we have some “cute” and “witty” dialogue where the Doctor gets confused by references to “the master” and “the other doctor.” Then we have drinks being ordered, something about Adric getting a “cocktail” in the bath (Down, Badger! You’re supposed to be doing a recap here!), and screwdrivers being ordered. Possibly… sonic screwdrivers? See, I can write things just as clever as the people behind this story.

Tegan keeps busy during all this hilarity by noticing a black orchid, and setting up that Lady Cranleigh’s other son disappeared in Brazil while doing botanical research. To my amazement, Tegan knows all about this, because she apparently keeps up on botanical expeditions in the 1920’s. Me, the only one I can name is Bligh’s Great Pacific Breadfruit Hunt, and we all know how that turned out.

It turns out that George, the son who vanished, had been engaged to Ann, the girl who looks like Nyssa and, let’s face it, the plot points couldn’t be more telegraphed had Western Union somehow sent them.
Meantime, we see Captain Spooky Feet struggling against his bonds! He escapes, clubs the lip-plate Indian and makes his way out into the mansion, no doubt setting off on some dastardly deed!

Meantime, the TARDIS crew is invited to attend the fancy dress ball that’s being planned for that very night. They accept, but don’t have costumes. Luckily costumes are quickly found, resulting in Tegan wearing some weird looking greenish thing that actually is better than her usual outfit, Adric dressing as some pirate. Yes, this does a great deal to put the gay rumors to rest. Meantime, the Doctor is given a harlequin costume and Nyssa rather conveniently gets the exact same costume as Ann.

Pirate Adric! Beloved of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and no one else!

Now I have to call bullshit on this. I mean, come on! Why would Ann order two copies of the exact same costume for herself? It’s made clear later in the screenplay that these are the only duplicate costumes! This makes sense if she knew she’d have her twin there, but she didn’t, and these costumes were clearly ordered in advance.

We have a few more Upstairs, Downstairs moments as Tegan dances the Charleston, Nyssa puts on her costume and we head to the ball, where we get all the 1920’s splendor the BBC props department can provide, and the Doctor finds (and gets lost in), a secret passage. In the room, the Doctor’s costume (one of only two with a mask… get which other costume set has one?), gets stolen by Captain Spooky Feet! Uh-oh! Trouble’s a brewin’!

We go back to the ball, where, sadly, there’s actually a rather nice bit of chemistry that happens in this scene between Tegan and a man named Sir Robert. The two actors seem to have enjoyed working together and the two characters mesh well. Had we seen more of their relationship, this might’ve been a better episode.

Pirate Adric (arr!), meantime, dances briefly with Nyssa, then heads off to graze at the buffet tables. Oh, Nyssa. Trying to make him dance with you is pointless. Either find him a stable boy or play some show tunes, then you might get a reaction.

The Doctor continues to wander about the secret passages, thoroughly lost, until he comes across a book written in Portuguese. He pokes about a bit more and, not once, but twice, manages to find secret passages by the time-honored tradition of giving up, leaning against a wall, and having the door pop open.

As the Doctor snoops, he finds a cupboard, which he opens for some reason, and inside is… a dead body! Eeek! And we go to credits.
Well, actually, we don’t, though that’d be the standard place for a Doctor Who cliffhanger, but, hey, why end the episode on one dead body, when you can end on two?

See, down at the dance, Captain Spooky Feet has appeared wearing the harlequin costume. He finds Ann and dances with her for a bit, then shuffles her off into the house. She tries to engage him in conversation, and he ignores her. As she tries to leave, he grabs her, she screams for help, and a servant carrying a very heavy blunt object comes to save the day! Of course, he starts by setting aside his impromptu weapon and attacks Captain Spooky Feet single-handed. CSF gives the guy a front-facing shoulder rub (?), which kills him (?!). Ann screams and faints, and we go to the credits!

You call this a happy ending?! I want my money- ... argh, argh, ack!

So there’s part one. Twenty minutes of set-up, five minutes of action, and a lot of yawning. Pirate Adric (arr!) and Tegan are completely unnecessary to the plot, which is stupid and contrived, and so far there’s nothing to really make this episode work. Perhaps part two will be better? Perhaps, but do you think I’d be writing about it if it were?

Part two opens with a recap of the last scene from part one. This is great if you, like the original audience, saw it on a different day. Otherwise, it’s just kind of annoying, because you get to see the servant massaged to death again. Oh, the show later claims he died of a broken neck, but I’m not buying it.

The Doctor, meantime, is still wandering around the passages when he runs into Lady Pompadour Lady Cranleigh and the Indian lip-plate guy. They exchange lines for a bit, and the Doctor casually mentions a dead guy in a cupboard. They run off to have a look and, of course, the body is… well, actually, it’s still there, which is a surprise, cause you’d expect that, in a work of fiction like this, the body would be gone. No, still there, so kudos to them not falling into that trap.

CSF drops the costume back off in the Doctor’s room, taking care to fold it neatly. Around this time we also get a good look at the guy, and, I gotta say, his makeup isn’t bad. Oh, it’s not great, but it actually works pretty well and looks mildly scary. I do have to wonder, however, exactly what it was that did this to him. It’s later explained that this is (shock and surprise), George, the missing son, who had been tortured by Indians in the Amazon, which broke his body and mind. I suppose I can almost buy that they did this stuff to his face, but no, not really.

Anyhow, George has now managed to find Ann laying in a bed recovering from the shock of watching him brutally massage a man to death. He advances on her, she wakes up, screams, and Indian lip-plate guy comes to the rescue, bringing out some rope as Ann flees into the arms of Lady Cranleigh.

Sky-rockets in flight... afternoon delight!

We return to Pirate Adric (arr!) grazing (try some of the sausages… yeah, and some milk… oh, baby…), with Nyssa bitching at him for eating so much. Lord Cranleigh, in the meantime, is summoned inside the house where he hears all about the murder and the attack on Ann. The Doctor shows up at this point, of course wearing the harlequin costume, and Ann screams bloody murder.

Sir Robert shows up at this point, and it turns out he’s the head of the police hereabouts. He takes control of things, establishes that there was only one harlequin costume (still two of the costumes Ann had, and I’m still wondering why), and then asks the Doctor to explain himself. Naturally the Doctor says that he’s a Time Lord and came here in his H G Wells-style time machine. Buh?

Well, ok, I mean, I guess there was no possible other way the Doctor could’ve escaped from this mess? Right? I suppose? I know the Doctor’s pulled the whole, “I’m an alien from the future!” thing before, but I don’t really get why he’s doing it here.

Anyhow, he can quickly see that yeah, no one’s buying what he’s selling. He turns to Lady Cranleigh for help and, shock and surprise, she denies knowing anything about a dead body. Sir Robert goes with the Doctor for a look-see at the body and in the cupboard they now find a doll. No corpse.

I take back what I said earlier! Jesus H Dalek on a crutch! They didn’t skip the cliché, they just put it on hold! Argh, I hate this story!

Off in George’s room, we see the Indian sitting around reading a book as George rather easily escapes from his bonds. Apparently being a great native hunter doesn’t train one well in the art of knot-tying. George kills the Indian and sets the door to his room on fire.

Yes, that’s his great plan to escape. The door is locked, so he sets it on fire. Actually, it’s not a horrible idea and it does work, but I’m pretty sure that’s only cause the screenplay calls for it to. In reality if one sets fire to a large, solid, probably oak door, the smoke would kill you long before you were able to kick down the burning remnants of the door.

Sir Robert rounds up the TARDIS crew and hauls them off for questioning. Along the way they stop at the train station, since the Doctor has decided to show off the TARDIS to the police. Well, it’s not at the station, so they continue on to the local constabulary offices, where we find out that, ha-ha, the TARDIS was taken there by some police officers. Cute.

The Doctor takes Sir Robert and an officer into the TARDIS and they all go “ooooo, aaaaah, wow!” for a few moments and then, in one bit that actually was rather smart, Sir Robert basically says, “Yeah, ok, so you’re a time traveler. Big whoop. You could also still be a murderer.” That actually impressed me. It was a good bit of thinking on the part of the writer to have someone say that, and it’s only a pity that the rest of the screenplay wasn’t as good or intelligent.

Back at the old Cranleigh place, Lady Cranleigh has come clean about everything and the dead body from the cupboard has been reported. The Doctor offers to take everyone there in the TARDIS which, amazingly, behaves for a change. This is good, because a few episodes of the Doctor, Tegan, Pirate Adric (arr!), Nyssa, Sir Robert and some other cop in the TARDIS adventuring around would’ve probably sucked hardcore.

Inside the hall, George is menacing Lord and Lady Cranleigh when the TARDIS team show up. He grabs Nyssa and runs off with her, heading towards the roof, which is the sort of thing you just know will end in the type of death certificate that contains phrases like “impact crater” and “splash radius”.

Lord Cranleigh and the Doctor run up to the roof where George gives Cranleigh a very light tap, causing his Lordship to fly back dramatically. The Doctor gets George to look down and see that Ann is on the ground and he has the wrong girl. George gets all, “whoops, my bad,” and releases Nyssa, only to rather pointlessly and stupidly fall to his death when Cranleigh moves to thank him.

We go forward a few days and see the 1920’s people wearing black and bidding farewell to the TARDIS crew. Tegan is holding a big wrapped box and feels the need to ask if the Cranleighs are really sincere in giving them their costumes as presents. *sigh* I mean, I know this was clearly designed to establish what’s in the box, but it seems very ham-handed. I’m sure there’s better ways this could’ve been done or, better yet, they could’ve just left out the point and, indeed, this scene, entirely.

Anyhow, Lady Cranleigh gives the Doctor a copy of a book called The Black Orchid, everyone boards the TARDIS and they set off for their next exciting adventure as I claw my eyes out from boredom.

This was such a pointless, stupid episode. The cliché of two people looking exactly the same has been done to death in far better works than Doctor Who. It’s been done in Star Trek: The Next Generation in a way better than this. Come to think of it, it was also done in Star Trek, and in Star Trek VI and… well, you get the idea. Hell, this was even done during the Second Doctor’s tenure in an episode called The Enemy of the World, where we learned the Doctor’s exact double was an evil dictator!

Beyond that, there’s the entirely pointless presence of Tegan and Adric. Had this story been done with just, say, the 3rd Doctor and Jo, it might’ve worked out a lot better. But, no, since we have everyone we have to use everyone, though mostly what happens is Tegan dancing a little and Adric grazing a lot (and looking oh-so-sexy).

The ending here was sudden and contrived. There was no real mystery as to who the killer was once we knew that George Cranleigh was “missing”. Since it was a two-part story, there wasn’t the usual amount of time to build up any real conflict or suspense and really, the whole thing just came off as a half-assed attempt at doing an Agatha Christie story which, sadly, Doctor Who tried to do with the 10th Doctor running around fighting a bunch of wasps (no, not the Cranleighs; actual insects).

Even the cast hated this episode. One of the benefits of owning the DVD was listening to the commentary from Davison, Fielding, Sutton and Waterhouse as they complained their way through this story. A couple times they apologize to anyone who likes the show, then continue to rip on it. It’s actually pretty funny.

So that’s Black Orchid. Let us never speak of it again.
Next time! The 1996 Doctor Who movie! Prepare yourself for opera, regeneration and the gayest version of the Master ever put on screen!

... and Gloria Swanson as the Master

They've fallen, and they can't get up!

The critics rave about Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen!

…Michael Bay’s latest bid to bludgeon audiences into dulled submission, is the reductio ad absurdum of a summer blockbuster. It is loud (boom!), long (two and a half hours!), incoherent (poorly explained intergalactic warfare!), leering (Megan Fox in short shorts!), racist (jive-talkin’ robot twins!), and rife with product tie-ins (Chevy! Hasbro!)… John Yoo would not be able to draft a memo excusing the torment this movie inflicts on its audience… – Dana Stevens, Slate.com

The film is padded by an hour of completely unnecessary, worthless, offensive and repugnant sequences that do nothing but tread water. – Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News

Often bypassing any logic or reason let alone character or depth, this utter mess of an action opus is only sporadically entertaining thanks to all the visual flair that $200 million worth of computer-generated fighting robots can buy, but holds no real value beyond that. – Garth Franklin, Darkhorizons.com

Bay stages battle sequences the way a three-year old plays with Lego’s. He dumps everything out at once in one loud crash, and just starts snapping pieces together and tossing them into each other… And much like a child at play, things get loud, there’s a lot of screaming, and shit gets destroyed. – Capone, Ain’t It Cool News

It’s tempting to dismiss Michael Bay’s long, loud and ludicrous sequel to 2007’s Transformers with one word — hunkajunk. On every level this movie is as bankrupt as GM. But there is more to be said about a movie this gargantuan ($200 million spent on robot hardbodies) and galactically stupid. Transformers: The Revenge of The Fallen is beyond bad, it carves out its own category of godawfulness. And, please, you don’t have to remind me that the original was a colossal hit ($700 million worldwide) and the sequel will probably do just as well. I know it’s popular. So is junk food, and they both poison your insides and rot your brain. – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Though there are more special effects and new ways for machines to turn into ‘bots, the story seems as if it’s about to end at least three times.

If only. – Claudia Puig, USA Today

If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination. – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

It just doesn’t seem like summer anymore until Michael Bay gets the chance to visit upon us his latest cinematic abortion, and in the case of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, the newest bit of diaper gravy to spew forth from his directorial anus, he does so in a way that truly sets a new standard for craptacular films.

Now I was, and remain, rather sick when I saw this movie. I also saw it at a late showing, which didn’t get out until about 1:15am. So I knew that if I was going to write a review of it today, I’d need to take notes. Eight pages of notes, as it turned out. Thus this review, which is more of a recap than anything else, will be longer and more detailed than most. So brace yourselves.

The film opens in the year 17,000 BC. We know this because of a nice caption that tells us this. Quite nice of them to so accurate. Imagine if it had been, say, 17,014 BC! The confusion that might cause! It’s rather like the film 10,000 B.C.. The confusion it caused! True, mostly it was people confused about how the movie got made in the first place, but still.

In the distant past, we see standard Stone Age tribesman (looking like a bunch of Australian Aborigines), hunting a tiger (a tiger? In Africa?). As they do, they stumble across a large Decepticon outpost on Earth. They get stepped on and the movie goes into modern times with a nice seen showing modern Shanghai illuminated by bright sunlight. I know it’s Shanghai because of the caption, which also says that it’s about 10:14 at night. Very good.

A lovely battle ensues, during which time it’s revealed that a cover story about some chemical leak has been created to keep the public in the dark, because apparently even after seeing Los Angeles get leveled, likely with lots of video footage both amateur and professional, everyone has “forgotten” the Transformers exist.

Let me divert here for a moment. There’s a common theme in a lot of science fiction television and film that you can have some major, Earth-shattering event (like Los Angeles being trashed in the first movie, London being menaced countless times in Doctor Who and Torchwood, and supernatural nonsense in Buffy the Vampire Slayer), that happens, gets witnessed, gets filmed/video taped, and then everyone conveniently forgets about it and/or there’s a government cover-up.

This is particularly egregious in the TV series War of the Worlds, an otherwise forgettable show that takes place a few decades after the events shown in the 1953 film of the same name. In that film, we see millions killed, cities devastated and nuclear bombs set off. Yet by the time the TV series rolls around, there’s been a cover-up and everyone has “forgotten” it happened.

This sort of nonsense is the laziest form of writing there is. It’s implausible, insulting to the audience and just plain stupid. It’s like saying that ten years from now all the video footage of the 9/11 attacks and all the news coverage will just disappear and that people are likely to, as a large majority, sit around saying, “September 11, 2001? No, nothing happened that day. Why do you ask?”

Writers like to do this because it means they don’t have to work too hard to try and figure out what the consequences would really be to the events they set up initially. If giant robots had beat the crap out of each other in downtown Los Angeles, that would have massive repercussions worldwide, especially once we found they were aliens. But the writers don’t want to deal with that, so they just say “cover-up!” and that’s all there is to it.

Lazy fuckers.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, yes, Shanghai. So the Autobots go chasing down one (1) Decepticon, who manages to destroy millions of dollars worth of property and kill hundreds of military and civilian personnel, in what is presented as a fairly routine mission. And their presence here on Earth is a secret. Right.

At the end of the battle, Optimus is standing over the defeated Decepticon, who taunts him a little, and then Prime shoots him in the face. Executes him. Murders him. Now, I ask you, does this sound like what Optimus Prime would actually do? No, because Prime is presented as a noble sort of figure, and not the sort who goes in for the cold-blooded killing of a prisoner.

Leaving this happy scene, we move on to Sam (Shia LeBeouff), as he gets ready to head to Princeton for college. He has some moments with his insufferable parents (you know, the idiots who in the last movie thought a robot falling down was an earthquake), and his two dogs. His two male dogs. Obviously male dogs. I mention this because we get not one, but two, scenes of them having sex. Thanks for that, Michael Bay. You’ve wrecked sex forever.

Sam calls his girlfriend, whose name I cannot number, so I’ll just call her Porn Slut 1 (PS1 for short). PS1 is shown on screen for the first time in a shot you’ve no doubt seen in the trailer. She’s sitting on a motorbike in pose that might make most Playboy Playmates feel embarrassed. She had some role in the previous movie, but no role here, other than to engage in “witty” banter with Sam as to who is going to say “I love you” first.

I mention that fact only because that discussion, the whole “I love you thing” is the entirety of the central emotional core to this movie. No, seriously. That’s the entire scope of their relationship conflict point. Now admittedly, I’ve been single most of my life, and don’t expect this to change anytime soon, but when I have been in a relationship, I haven’t had any problem with saying, “I love you,” to whomever I was involved with. It’s just not that big of a deal. Well, unless you’re in a major Hollywood blockbuster where the lazy writers have to come up with some sort of emotional conflict.

While yammering on the phone to PS1, Sam is fiddling with the outfit he wore in the first movie and a shard from the Allspark cube falls out. Because Sam’s mother apparently never does laundry. Sam touches the shard, it zaps his brain and falls through the floor, burning its way down into the kitchen where it turns all the appliances into robots that promptly attack everyone.

This brings up a flaw from the first movie that is carried over into this one, which is: why does the Allspark apparently only make Decepticons? Every time it creates some sort of robot entity, the first thing that bot does is attack everyone. Ah, well. If there’s one thing I learned quickly from this movie, it’s not to ever ask “Why?” cause the movie won’t explain it.

Anyhow, a small battle starts up inside the house, which catches on fire. Bumblebee comes out from the garage and tries to fight off the little bots, and eventually does so. He then hides as the fire department and police show up and, interestingly, none of the neighbors notice any of this. All sorts of comments are made about security (cause of the robots being Super Sekrit!) and there’s more annoying interplay between Sam’s parents before we have a touching moment between Sam and Bumblebee.

In this moment, Sam tells Bumblebee that at Princeton, freshmen aren’t allowed to have cars (I doubt this, but it’s possible, I suppose). Bumblebee responds with… music and clips from movies. He does this because, like in the first movie, he can’t talk. Now that was fixed at the end of the first film, but clearly someone said, “Hey, the kids like him talking in music! So let’s keep doing that! Yeah!”

Now we catch up with the military guys (apparently part of a team called NEST), who are busy doing their thing and talking with people back home when some suit shows up to yank the rug out from under him. This suit, who again has name that I cannot remember, is presented as a one-dimensional jackass and this brings us to our next lengthy digression.

There is, in a lot of fiction, what I call “The Rule of Incompetent Omnipotence”. It’s the rule that says government agencies are all-powerful and all-knowing. They can track you everywhere you go, they can send agents after you that will find you in under two minutes, they can cover up anything, anywhere, and rule the whole world, but they do all this in a very incompetent way, which means that some slimy internet weirdo can uncover what they are doing. They bumble around like idiots, breaking things and failing miserably so that the hero can come along and save the day. So they’re omnipotent, but incompetent. Please add “The Rule of Incompetent Omnipotence” to your dictionary. Thank you.

We also are introduced to one of the long running standbys in action films, which is that the military is always right and the politicians are always wrong. This combined with Bay’s overreliance on “rah-rah, go America!” patriotism must be the only reason the US military helps him so much in making his films. Given how many military personnel he kills in each one, there can’t be any other reason.

This scene also introduces us to two cringeworthy characters named Mudflap and Skids. You may have already heard about the controversy surrounding them. If you haven’t allow me to enlighten you by saying that if you think Jar Jar Binks is the height of funny, if you can’t get enough of minstrel shows, and if you enjoyed Amos and Andy, you’ll love the comic stylings of Mudflap and Skids, two characters who prove that racist humor is alive and well and living in America!

God, these two are awful. They are the worst characters I’ve seen on screen in ages. Now I’ll defend Jar Jar Binks for the most part, but these guys? Painful! They talk in Ebonics, they always fight each other, one has a gold tooth (?!), and they can’t read. There is nothing good about these characters at all. They serve no useful purpose to the plot and Spielberg ought to be ashamed to have his name attached to a film where these guys appear.

Now how did two characters like these get created? Let us turn to the words of Mr Bay himself:

Bay said the twins’ parts “were kind of written but not really written, so the voice actors is when we started to really kind of come up with their characters.”

You understand what that means, right? The characters weren’t really written. They made up a rough sketch, had the voice actors come in, and built the characters around their performance. Memo to Mr Bay: This is not how movies should be made. The usual flow of action is to write up the characters and then cast them. There are exceptions to this rule, of course, but this is not one of them.

More troubling, though, is this quote:

“I purely did it for kids,” the director said. “Young kids love these robots, because it makes it more accessible to them.”

So according to Michael Bay, the kids of America are fundamentally racist and will be best entertained by two jive-talkin’ robots presented as caricatures of black people. Well done, Michael, well done. I believe this officially undoes everything good that’s come of race relations since the election of Barack Obama. I am impressed.

Also it’s worth noting that this means that Bay wanted to have this movie be accessible to kids under 13. The movie is rated PG-13 and was likely made with an eye to that rating. Well done, Mr Bay!

Back to the “story”. The political guy is bitching at the military guy (the same military guy who had cannibalistic fantasies about his infant daughter in the first movie), who is bitching at the political guy. This is during a video conference with some four-star general who is not allowed to see Optiumus Prime, since apparently a four-star general can’t be trusted to keep a secret.

Eventually the political guy tells Optimus that this isn’t humanity’s war and that he blames the Autobots for bringing the Decepticons to Earth and then causing more trouble by inviting more. This might actually be an area that could lead into interesting discussion if, say, Christopher Nolan had been at the helm, but not in a Michael Bay film, where plot cannot be allowed to get in the way of the action!

In the end the political flat-out asks Optimus if the Autobots will leave if the US government asks them to. Optimus says yes, and I can’t help but think of the large queue of governments behind them that would be happy to have the Autobots come live in their countries. That plus the fact that the Decepticons would be quite gleeful at this turn of events and would promptly take over.

In the meantime, we have Sam and company arriving at Princeton. Sam meets his annoying roommate, Leo, who runs a conspiracy website all about how the government is covering up these giant robots running around (memo to Leo: why not just contact KTLA, who surely would’ve had miles of video tape from the original battle in Los Angeles and ask to borrow some of their footage?). He mentions, in a rather telegraphed plot-point, that another website often scoops him.

We get more of Sam’s parents running around engaging in Komedy!, including Sam’s mom eating a pot brownie (then running around like she’s on speed), without knowing it, which is something of a surprise given that there’s a marijuana leaf prominently displayed on the bag she’s holding and she’s old enough to have lived through the Sixties and Seventies. You know, I’ve never smoked weed in my life, but even I know what a pot leaf looks like. This is the kind of movie where humor comes from people being morons.

It was at this point I realized something about this film. I’m about ten years too old to enjoy it and about three hundred times too smart. But I soldiered on!

Now we come to one of the few cool parts of the movie as Soundwave (happily voiced by Frank Welker), drops Ravage down to Earth. Ravage goes to a US military base and ejects some ball bearings into a vent shaft. These merge and form a fascinating looking two-dimensional robot (giving it more dimension than the screenplay). This, along with a couple other scenes, show some real flickers of possibility, that prove that there could actually be something of substance to this movie if only people had actually put forth the effort. But no, why bother?

Next up we have Sam in astronomy class going slowly bonkers as he puts up with the introduction of Professor Schrute, who dresses like a Time Lord and has a libido that would make Hugh Heffner go “Damn!” Sam starts hallucinating, reads his entire astronomy text book in only a few seconds, runs up the chalkboard screaming about Einstein equation of E=MC2 being wrong (it’s not), and then runs off to his dorm where he starts scribbling on… on…

I almost cannot bring myself to type this. Michael Bay has truly exceeded himself here, for young Sam starts scribbling alien characters on a framed poster for Bad Boys II, a movie generally regarded as one of the worst made in the last ten years and a low-point in Bay’s career.

Now from any other director, I might think this is a nice bit of irony. If Spielberg had, say, a shot of a poster for 1941 in a movie, that might be kind of fun, and him having a joke with the audience. But he’d just do it as a quick throw-away thing. He wouldn’t do what Bay does, which is to center it in the screen and keep it there for several seconds, showing the main character interacting with it. I seriously doubt Bay is self-aware enough to do irony; I think he’s just being an idiot here.

The next sequence brings us another odd little WTF?! kind of moment. Some backtracking here: in an earlier scene, Sam went to a party and met Porn Slut 2, who was crawling all over him. Now she has him in his room, in private and is, again, crawling all over him. Then she sprouts a tail, some spikes and proceeds to toss him around and it turns out she’s what’s known as a Pretender.

Pretenders, for those unfamiliar with Transformers lore, were a group of transformers that human and/or animal shells. They didn’t turn into vehicles; they just disguised themselves in these shells. It was a weak idea and one that was never popular with the fans.

In this case, PS2 is a Pretender whose only real job appears to be driving a wedge between Sam and PS1 and then chasing after them in an exciting, Terminator 3 kind of way, thus reminding me of another movie I hated, but would rather watch than this. Also, when chasing Sam, PS1 and Leo, she moves at walking speed, cause as we all know, the super-powered bad guy/gal is never allowed to run.

Meantime, the Decepticreeps (which they were often called in the animated series… ah, speaking of things I’d rather be watching…), have managed to revive Megatron somehow and he captures Sam and the gang (now available on LP and 8 Track, Sam and the Gang’s Greatest Hits!), and is about to kill Sam and remove his brain when the Autobots arrive to save the day. This leads into a great big fight which leads into…

Well, amazingly enough, it leads into another really well-done scene! Rather like the 2-D robot, this is one of the scenes that shows what this movie could’ve been if it had tried. It’s a nicely done, creative, well-visualized, fight scene in a forest, where Prime fights Megatron, Starscream and some other Decepticon. It’s everything exciting that the rest of this movie is not. It also contains one of the other few emotional scenes as Prime gets killed off. Those of us, like me, who are Transformers fans, know this must be temporary since neither Ultra Magnus nor Hot Rod are around, but it’s still nicely done.

Now we go to a scene where Megatron and Starscream are hanging out on the top of the MetLife building in New York City. I know this, because the shot that shows things like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building helpfully says, “New York City”. The two of them talk about how it’s time to basically out themselves and go on a rampage which they do by going to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and… er… knocking over an American flag. Then they leave. Yeah… ok. That’s… impressive? I guess? I mean, sure, they could’ve gone on a rampage, murdering people and destroying buildings, but why bother with that when you can… uhm… knock a flag down.

Then the Fallen comes along. He appears on video screens world wide and basically says humanity will be destroyed unless Sam is given over to the Decepticons.

In a panic, the military minds meet up at the Pentagon which, according to the caption, is in Washington, DC. This is no doubt a great surprise to the residents of Virginia, but amazingly it’s not even the worst geographical error in the film.

After the brief, useless scene there, we see Sam and the Gang, now wanted fugitives, try to decide what to do. Eventually Leo says they should go to talk to the man who runs the website that competes with his. There’s brief discussion, and then they head out to New York City. To be fair, since they are on the run, Sam disguises himself with a baseball cap and a hoodie. Yes, that’ll help.

When they get to New York, they go to a deli and behind the counter is, argh, John Tutututurrro, who played the leader of Section Seven in the first movie. His character was annoying then, and is annoying here, though amazingly slightly less so, since he alone of the cast seems to understand that he’s in a very, very stupid movie and plays accordingly.

Through the ensuing conversation its revealed that in archaeological sites all around the world are these same strange letters that Sam keeps seeing. They’re in Mexico, Egypt and lots of other places the movie doesn’t bother to mention (since archaeology happens only in Egypt and Mexico). Somehow, in the roughly 150 years that professional archaeology has been going on, no one bothered to take notice of this, which I find somewhat odd, since that’s the sort of thing that would make archaeologists wet their knickers.

Anyhow, Sam and the Gang break into the Smithsonian, where Wheelie (a really, really obnoxious Decepticon who turns into an RC truck. He was also in the animated series, and was annoying there, but even more so here), tells them they can find one of the really old Transformers, and we get a hint of some possibilities. We see pictures of things like WWII bomber planes and an old-time car, which, along with a toy I picked up (transformers from robot to WWI biplane), gives me hope that we might see something really cool.

Instead we get Jetfire.

Jetfire, the toy, was originally a Veritech fighter from the anime Robotech. Hasbro liked the design and so turned it into a Transformer, who had a backstory where he’d been a Decepticon, and friends with Starscream, before setting aside his evil ways and becoming an Autobot. He was one of the few multi-dimensional characters on the TV series (called Jetstorm on there), and when I heard he was in this movie, I got pretty interested!

Then I saw the character.

First, his vehicle form is an SR71 Blackbird. It seems an odd choice, but doesn’t really matter, since one he turns into robot mode, he stays that way. Second, though, and most irritating, is that he’s played as an old man robot, complete with a “get off my lawn!” attitude, a cane and at least one incontinence joke. Yes, this is how Jetfire should appear.

He transports Sam and the Gang to the middle of an empty desert wasteland which not one, but two, characters, apparently tipped off by all the hookers, bright lights, fountains, money and cars that are failing to appear on screen, guess is Las Vegas. It was at this point in my notes that I wrote the plot is officially missing, presumed dead.

Our heroes are still trying to remain hidden from the authorities, so Sector Seven Guy (hereafter called SSG), calls the military guy and speaks in clever code to tell him where they are headed, so they can have reinforcements. He speaks in this wonderful code, and then at the end gives latitude and longitude coordinates.

*sigh* I think I just lost three IQ points from that.

The characters are currently in Egypt, which we know by all the camels and shots of the Pyramids. But they need to go to Jordan. So they hop into Bumblebee and, along with Skids and Mudflap, drive to the land-based border crossing between Jordan and Egypt. Yes, apparently Google Earth is wrong, as is every map in the known world. It turns out Egypt and Jordan share a land border which is, I am sure, news to Israel.

The team crosses the border through the cunning tactic of saying “We’re Americans”. The border guard commander (played by Deep Roy, known to the world from such works of art as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang), apparently thinks that’s good enough, so he lets them cross into Jordan, where they set up camp for the night at the Pyramids.

Like I said, the Pentagon in DC is the least of the geographical fuck-ups in this movie.

They wander about the Pyramids (in Jordan), for a bit, making me really wish Jaws would pop up and take a bite out of someone. Then Sam spots Orion’s belt (in daylight), and deduces that under the belt is where the McGuffin they are looking for is located (oh, haven’t I mentioned what they’re doing out here? Trying to find the Matrix which will revive Optimus). The stars, I cannot help but notice, are much larger and spaced much farther apart then they are in real life, but what the hell. This is a world where the Egyptian pyramids are located in Jordan, so why not fuck with the stars, too?

Now we have shots of one of the great archaeological sites in the world; Petra. It is an incredibly beautiful site and served great purpose in Spielberg’s film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Here, it’s only job is to be the burial chamber some tomb that was hidden thousands and thousands of years go, which is quite impressive, given that the site is only about 2100 years old.

The tomb itself, where the Matrix is located, is stuck behind a wall that appears to be about an inch thick. I have to believe that at some point some archaeologist would’ve done radar or sonar searches that would’ve shown this, but apparently not. Anyhow, the Matrix crumbles into dust as soon as Sam touches it.

Meantime, we see the US military arriving in what I will now call Jor-gypt. They bring all sorts of tanks and planes and hovercraft and make a sea landing near the Pyramids, which is also near the Sphinx and the Valley of the Kings and within walking distance of Petra. Also, there’s no mention of them asking the Jor-gyptian government’s permission. I believe the word for today is “invasion”.

Now comes a fight. The penultimate fight in the movie. I don’t really have a lot to say about it. It’s pretty big. Much of it takes place in a small village where the US military sets up camp (not bothering to ask the locals for permission, and placing civilians in danger by doing so). There’s also a few scenes in a construction area (with people wandering through with goats), near the Pyramids (though at this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if this movie showed the Space Needle being near the Pyramids), which leads to the introduction of Devastator.

Devastator, for those who do not know, is what’s called a Combiner. He’s a set of Transformers called Constructicons who, in addition to being robots in their own right, can merge into one larger robot, in this case called Devastator. In the original version of the character, he was just a really big-ass robot, but in this movie he turns into something really, really big that looks like a gorilla and has a large suction device that pulls in people, vehicles and in one shining moment, either Skids or Mudflap (I can’t tell the difference). Sadly, he survives and, at least at one point, looks as though he destroys Devastator.

As the big desert fight continues, we get treated to about three seconds of screen time by fan-favorite, Arcee, the first-ever female Autobot. Now we can go all around about the impossibility to gendered robots, but who cares? She was a cool, interesting, and to some people, sexy character and that’s what matters.

Lots of people, myself included, had been really looking forward to her appearing in this film, hoping that she might do something interesting and cool. So what does she do, actually?

She gets most of one line and then gets blown up.

That’s it. It’s an even more pointless death than the one Jazz had in the first film (you might remember him as the other horribly stereotypical black character, and the only Autobot to die). What a fucking waste of an opportunity.

So Sam gets knocked ass-over-teakettle at one point and winds up apparently dying. While dead he sees three Primes talking to him, and one of them is voices by Michael York. Oh, Michael. Are the jobs really this few and far between? You disappoint me, sir, you disappoint me. Anyhow, they tell Sam, “Well done! Here’s the Matrix, just stab it into Optimus and all will be well with the world.”

Sam comes back to life, says “I love you,” to PS1, who says the same to him, thus tying that up, and then stabs Primey, bringing him back to life for a bit. But then Prime is newly injured and it’s up to the mortally wounded Jetfire to allow some of his parts to be used to Optiumus more optimal. Now fully functional, Prime goes off to fight Devastator, the Fallen, Megatron and coherent movie making in an FX extravaganza that left me feeling completely detached and uninterested.

In the end, Prime defeats Devastator as the latter is busy demolishing one of the Pyramids (he’d already removed most of the top by the time Prime gets there), and, ugh, I can’t help but notice (cause the movie forces you to notice), that Devastator has two large wrecking balls dangling between his legs. Yes, I’m sure the crew who rendered that had a grand old time.

Then Prime fights the Fallen, and in the process destroys quite a bit more ruins, thus continuing this jolly rape of Egyptian culture. Finally at the end he destroys the Fallen, Megatron gets away, Devastator is destroyed, thousands of people worldwide are dead and I… just… don’t… fucking… care.

There’s so many things wrong with this movie and so many points at which it could’ve been turned around. For starters, when the next film is written, people writing it need to remember the franchise is called Transformers, not Humans. We don’t need to see the humans running around doing stuff for most of the screen time. We can see that in any movie. Giant transforming robots, however, are somewhat more rare.

I never thought it would be possible to describe a movie as being “aggressively dull”, but that’s exactly what Michael Bay has accomplished with this film. He has made a movie that left me completely bored and uninterested in what was happening on the screen. The parts where I sat up and paid attention consisted of about five minutes of screen time, but otherwise I was starting to feel like Jedidiah Leland watching opera.

There’s still good material that can be had here for a third movie. It’d be nice to see the Dinobots and to introduce characters like Ultra Magnus, Springer, Hot Rod and Galvatron (ideally with Leonard Nimoy doing the voice), and let’s perhaps move the story into space. Bring on Shockwave, Skywarp and Thundercracker. Move the story to Cybertron. Bring out Unicron. Any of these things could help make the next movie better.

But ultimately what will need to happen for the next film to be better is for the powers that be to tell Michael Bay to take a hike. He’s already made some noise about thinking that two years is not enough time for him to do the next movie, so with any luck they’ll toss him and hire someone who knows what they’re doing. While at it, they can keep the original writers of the first movie and Star Trek and ditch Ehren Kruger, who Harry Knowles blames for most of the problems with this film.

I want the next movie to blow me away and not leave me disgusted and annoyed. Until that happens, I’ll just have to stick with my toys.