As I was anticipating before the month launched out, March has been just crazy. A big part of that was because of my daughter’s wedding.

She got married on March 16th, right in between the Ides and St. Patrick’s Day. It was a beautiful occasion that involved a lot of wonderful visits from family and friends, most notably my 84 year old mother, who made the trip out here for the first time in nearly 12 years to celebrate her granddaughter’s nuptials. It was really wonderful.

But it was busy as anything–a busyness that was compounded by my lack of good health. Specifically, it seems that I have a protruding disc in my back which impinges on a nerve, which thus causes cramping in my leg and results in me limping and also getting tired more easily. I was struggling a lot on the wedding day (especially since this was all new then and I was still trying to get a handle on things), but I’m improving now, thanks to some regular visits to the chiropractor.

It’ll still be a while though.

Incidentally, in all the busyness of the wedding morning, my wife had to grab socks and other things that I needed from my cupboard on my behalf. She just grabbed some socks that were black, but what did they turn out to be?

That’s right–Venom socks! I don’t even really like Venom, but there you go.

Anyway, in the meantime, I’ve doing a lot of resting (when not doing something for the wedding), which means not a lot of work (creative or otherwise), not a lot of blogging, and not a lot of reading.

But I have been watching an awful lot of TV.

Some of it has been shows that are on my “list” this year to view. I’m coming up to another update post about how that’s going. But a bunch have been things I’ve more recently discovered or stumbled across, or for whatever reason were not on my radar when I was considering my viewing plans at the start of the year.

The Diplomat

Maybe my favorite new discovery is The Diplomat, a show with two series so far, and a third on the way. In the wake of a devastating attack on a British warship in Middle Eastern waters, Kate Wyler (Keri Russell) is abruptly appointed the new US ambassador to Great Britain. Accompanied by her husband Hal (Rufus Sewell), a former ambassador who has fallen out of favour with the US Secretary of State. Kate, who is far accustomed to direct action than the sort of pomp and ceremony expected in England, and has to learn how to adjust to doing diplomatic work under the intense scrutiny that her new posting demands. A lot of her work involves attempting to de-escalate tensions caused by the attack, and to attempt to find out who was actually behind it.

And to make matters more complicated, what Kate doesn’t know (at least when things start) is that the she is being groomed as potential replacement for the Vice President, a woman who its anticipated will have to resign when a scandal involving her husband breaks.

It’s a good show that takes us into the interesting world of diplomacy and international politics in a way that feels immersive and consistently interesting. It’s not as funny as something like The West Wing often was, but neither it as sentimental. I like the cast a lot, including leads Russell and Sewell, but also Ato Essandoh as Kate’s deputy chief, and Rory Kinnear as a particularly unlikable British Prime Minister. Alison Janney shows up toward the end of the second season as the to-be-disgraced Vice President, and Pearl Mackie from Doctor Who has a small role as one of Kate’s aides.

This is a streaming series which means the seasons are short–there are only 14 episodes so far. The second season ends with a genuinely interesting plot twist that promises to take things in a very interesting direction as the series continues, which its expected to sometime this year.

Spooks

The Diplomat is maybe my favorite of the new shows I’ve discovered, but it’s not the one I’ve watched the most. That would be Spooks, the incredibly intense British espionage thriller about agents in MI-5 dealing with all sorts of threats to national security. I stumbled across a few minutes of one episode on TV years ago, which happened to be the closing minutes of the first series finale, an incredibly intense sequence where the main character struggles but fails to get his loved ones out of a locked house before a bomb’s timer ticks down to zero. Until now, I’ve never seen what led up to that or how it resolved.

In the end, Spooks ran for ten seasons from 2002 – 2011, and since the March started, I’ve watched. the first six of these (finishing the last one as April began).

Spooks (which apparently aired as MI-5 in the United States) is about the team of agents that work in “Section D” of the British Security Services, headlined by three main field operatives and a host of support staff. The original trio of lead characters are played by Matthew Macfayden, Keeley Hawes, and David Oyelowo, but because this is the sort of show where terrible things can happen to anyone, all three of those characters are phased out in the third series (with only one receiving what can arguably called a happy ending). Fortunately for the series, all of their replacements were as good or better (most of them have met sad ends as well).

Holding all this together (at least so far) is the boss of Section D, Harry Pearce, memorably played by Peter Firth.

Because this is a British series, there are loads of other familiar actors who show up in guest or recurring roles, including the likes of Anna Chancellor (Pride & Prejudice), Jan Chappell (Blake’s 7), Steven Pacey (also Blake’s 7), Roger Allam (Endeavour), Anton Lesser (also Blake’s 7), Alexander Siding (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Ian McDiarmid (the Emperor in Star Wars), Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings, etc.), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Dr. Strange), and Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Surface, Loki and all sorts of things).

I haven’t liked the sixth season as much as the previous five. Unlike before, they created an overarching plot line which worked to some degree, but also made things feel dragged out. Also, a couple of the characters that I like got used less and less well. Jo Portman (a journalist turned field agent played by Miranda Raison) became increasingly positioned as a victim to get traumatised and beaten up until the season came to a particular brutal end, and Adam Carter (the second lead character played by Rupert Penry-Jones) spent the last two seasons falling so apart emotionally that it beggars belief that he is still able to do his job.

Even so, the show never fails to be gripping and intense, especially as seasons are coming to an end. If it can keep up this pace, I’ll probably stick it through for the rest of the show’s run, no matter how many changes of cast that there are.

Hell on Wheels

I poked in on Hell on Wheels, a Western series from 2011 about the building of the transcontinental railway. I was drawn to it by the presence of Anson Mount, who is so good as Captain Pike in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. He plays Cullen Bohannon, a veteran from the Confederate cavalry who is trying to track down the Union soldiers who killed his family. It turns out that the show’s second-billed lead is Colm Meaney (O’Brien from Deep Space Nine), who plays the businessman driven to make his fortune by completing the railroad. It’s a gritty show with an interesting setting and characters who might turn out to be interesting as well, but I’m not sure yet. I watched the first five or six episodes of this series and enjoyed it, but I was distracted by stuff with the wedding (and then Spooks) and haven’t come back to it yet. Maybe in the future.

The Gorge

This is an original to Apple TV+ movie featuring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy as two sharpshooter soldiers who are tasked to guard different sides of a mysterious gorge, primarily to prevent the weird creatures that live inside of it from getting out. Part of their brief is to not communicate to each other at all, but of course because they are both so attractive, they end up hooking up and falling in love. When Teller’s character falls into the gorge returning to his side after their rendezvous, Taylor-Joy jumps in after him.

They have a whole bunch of harrowing action scenes fighting the monsters, which turn out to be genetically-fused hybrids of the people, animals and plants that were present in the gorge when an earthquake struck decades previously (a big blurt of exposition in the middle of the film reveals that the gorge was the location of a biological warfare research facility that was developing a potential weapon to fight the Axis powers during World War II). The rest of the movie is their attempts at survival, against both the monsters and the corporation that keeps this whole thing going in order to hopefully weaponise them (led, ironically, by a someone played by Sigourney Weaver).

The Gorge is a dopey movie, with almost nothing to recommend it except for the charisma of its lead performers. The action scenes are fine for what they are, but they’re repetitive and not interesting enough to make the film even slightly engaging. The only real benefit of watching it for me was so that I could appreciate Ryan George’s Pitch Meeting (one of my favorite YouTube series) for it.

5ive Days to Midnight

This was a five-part 2004 miniseries that aired on the Sci Fi channel. Timothy Hutton stars as physics professor J.T. Neumeyer, a widower and father who suddenly finds a briefcase from the future with evidence of his own murder. He has only five days to use the information to figure out who is supposed to kill him and why.

It’s an interesting idea, but not terribly gripping in its execution. Aside from a thin veneer of science fiction, it basically plays out like any other murder mystery–we run through various suspects, unpack motives, figure out who is lying about what, and so on. The climax works pretty well where, with a semi-surprising revelation about the identity of a murderer….

But it doesn’t actually make sense. The person who turns out to be the baddie in the end only is motivated to kill Neumeyer because of what he finds out when Neumeyer starts to investigate his predicted death. So who killed him originally?

Oh well. The movie also includes in its cast Nicole de Boer from Star Trek Deep Space Nine (Ezra Dax) in a small role, so that’s fun.

Star Trek: Renegade / Renegades: The Requiem

Star Trek: Renegades is an unlicensed Star Trek fan film which involves a lot of “canon” Trek talent both in front of and behind the camera. It’s directed by Tim Russ, who also reprises his role of Tuvok from Star Trek Voyager as a supporting character. The movie stars Walter Koenig as the original series’ Chekov, now an admiral. When a series of mysterious attacks threatens the Federation’s supply of dilithium (the magic space-fuel that makes warp drive possible), Chekov turns to Tuvok, now in charge of the Starfleet “black ops” division Section 31, to put together a ragtag group of operatives who can find out what is happening and put a stop to it (for some reason this has to be done outside of normal Starfleet protocols, but I can’t remember why).

Heading up this group is Lexxa Singh (Adrienne Wilkinson), a direct descendant of Khan Noonian Singh, who captains a mercenary ship full of exactly the sort of misfit ne’er-do-wells that are needed for the mission.

A sequel, Renegades: The Requiem, came out a couple of years later, which continued the story and removed the Star Trek branding because of rights issues.

Neither movie is very good. The effects and design are a mixed bag, but that’s not a big deal when you are watching Star Trek and are used to the days of the original series. The bigger problem is that in spite of the credentials of some of the creators, the acting and writing are just clunky and awkward. It is obviously meant well, though, and there is at least one dramatic moment toward the climax of the first film, when the heroes escape imprisonment by using the abilities that we’ve seen them have, which I found pretty satisfying.

The most notable thing about them, though, is how much they anticipates things we’ve seen in “official” Star Trek since. The original Renegades came out in 2015, several years before Star Trek Discovery reintroduced Section 31 to fans, and a full decade before they made Star Trek: Section 31 with the same basic premise. That movie is so bland and pointless that you can’t really argue that Renegades is worse (kind of like how the official Fantastic Four movies are superior to the unreleased one from 1990’s in many ways, without being definitively better).

Renegades also features a descendant of Khan, like in Strange New Worlds, and brings Voyager‘s Icheb back to the screen, but mutilates him, like in Star Trek: Picard. The follow-up movie even jettisons most of the new characters in favor of bringing back a whole bunch of familiar faces, kind of like the last season of Picard.

Of course, the big draw for many people with Renegades and its sequel is the presence of so many Trek alums, many in their classic roles. In addition to Koenig, Russ and Manu Intiraymi (Icheb), we get Nichelle Nichols, Robert Beltran, Terry Farrell (as a variation of Jadzia Dax who has plausibly survived her character’s death, thanks to cloning), Cirroc Lofton, Robert Picardo and Aron Eisenberg, all as their original characters, or as thinly-disguised alternates. And then on top of that, movies feature other familiar faces from Trek and other science fiction franchises, like Corin Nemec (Stargate), Sean Young (Blade Runner) and Edward Furlong (Terminator 2).

Futurama: Where No Fan Has Gone Before

Speaking of unofficial Star Trek stuff, I got turned onto this one episode of Futurama (from its 11th season) which features most of the cast of the original Star Trek series (except for DeForest Kelly, who had died years earlier, and James Doohan, who had declined to appear), plus Jonathan Frakes.

Futurama, which I have never really watched before, is about a human being who survives into the distant future, and the episode involves him finding out that Star Trek has been outlawed after it caused a bunch of religious wars in the interim centuries. He gathers together the heads of most of the original cast from the Head Museum (apparently a thing in Futurama?) and travels to a forbidden planet where the tapes for the original series were banished. There they encounter a mysterious energy being who turns out to be a huge Star Trek fan, who gives the cast back their bodies in exchange for them agreeing to basically act out his fan-script.

It’s a clever episode that I found really enjoyable. It does right by all the returning cast members, and its Star Trek-themed jokes it nails the balance between fawning reverence and outright mockery.

Paradise

This is the only thing on this list other than The Gorge that is actually new, and it’s much better in almost ever way. Paradise is an eight episode series (so far) which aired on Disney+, whose first episode included an overall concept twist that was miraculously unspoiled by any marketing that I saw, and which took me completely by surprise. If you are going to watch this at all, you might as well check it out without knowing about this in advance, so after this paragraph you should skip on ahead. I’ll just say it’s not necessarily a great show, but it did achieve great moments, one of which is at the end of the first episode, and at east one great episode (#7, which was amazing.

Spoils for Paradise

Paradise is about a secret service agent–Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown)–investigates the murder of US President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), whom he was assigned to protect. But by the end of the first episode, we realise that the world that these characters live in is nowhere close to normal. The world, we learn, has been devastated by some sort of disaster (the nature of which becomes clear only as the series progresses), and the seemingly idyllic city that the survivors live in is actually a massive underground bunker that has been built over many years, so that a perfectly engineered community of around 25,000 people. Bradford was the US President when all this went down, and has as a result continued to serve well beyond his normal term.

Over the course of the show, Collins investigates the president’s death and uncovers all manner of secrets that are operating behind the scenes in the home of the surviving human race: “Paradise”, as it is called. Along the way we get lots of flashbacks detailing what Bradford was doing in his final days (Marsden, though his character is dead when the show begins, is one of the lead cast members), and also how the bunker came to be built and how Collins came to serve Bradford in the first place. Episode seven spells out the disaster that has taken place that led to everybody to enter Paradise, and episode eight reveals the identity of the murderer. That last reveal is a bit off the beaten path in terms of possible suspects but in hindsight is set up fairly nicely. Part of the reason the show works is that it does in fact tie-up its major questions in its debut season, while at the same time setting the stage for further drama should it continue (and it is going to–a second season has been announced).

As I said, it’s not perfect. There are a couple of shades of 24 that I wasn’t really interested in–particularly the reveal that one apparently ditzy and harmless character is actually a psychotic super-assassin, which is associated with a particularly predictable bit where a character tells the hero that he knows something earth-shattering and important, but he will him tomorrow and not today, allowing ample time for him to be murdered.

But in most ways it succeeded better than it failed, and I’ll be on board for season 2 when it rolls around.

Return to Paradise

Not to be confused with Paradise, up above.

Return to Paradise is the second spin-off of Death in Paradise, the long running British detective show, about a homicide detective from London who finds himself working in on the fictional Caribbean paradise of St. Marie. This time, we have a detective in London who finds herself working in the fictional Australian paradise of Dolphin Cove (which is just about the most cliched name for an Australian beach community that I can think of). Anna Samson plays Mackenzie Clarke, who finds herself reluctantly back in her hometown after she’s framed for tampering with evidence one of her cases in London. Unable to return to her job (for at least the length of the season’s six episodes), she goes to work for the local police solving the typical sort of impossible murders that this franchise always features (ie people murdered in locked rooms, or when none of the suspects could possibly have done it for various reasons, etc).

Complicating matters is the fact that many of the Dolphin Cove residents don’t like Mack for running away on the eve of her wedding to local hunk Glenn, who happens to also be the town pathologist, and the son of the Mack’s boss in the police department. Ardal O’Hanlon reprises his role from Death in Paradise as Jack Mooney, now one of Clarke’s colleagues in London, for about five minutes in a couple of scenes that pop up in this series’ first and last episode.

The whole “Paradise-verse” is a decidedly silly place which is almost completely dependent on the charm of the cast and the local environment to keep it interesting. I didn’t find either element in Return to Paradise to be as engaging as the parent series, even for someone as predisposed to be interested in Australian stuff as myself. But there were cute moments and on the whole it was at least diverting.

The most interesting thing for me to come out of it, though, was my own idea for a Death in Paradise spin-off, or at least one that my youngest daughter and I came up with. We thought it’s time to take the action to the United States! But instead of going to another beach-filled environment, we thought we should head out west, and set the story on some beautiful ranch, maybe in Wyoming or Colorado or something. And instead of a detective from London, let’s import a character from St. Marie itself to be the “fish out of water”.

Our first pick was Joséphine Jobert as Florence Cassell, but she was last scene sailing off into the sunset with Neville Parker, supposedly to find romantic happiness. As much of a drip as we both think Neville is, I can imagine fans being upset if our new show separated them, so my next choice would be Naomi Thomas, as played by Shantol Jackson.

Either way our detective could find herself on the ranch having to contend with horses and snow and the rest of it, as well as a romantic subplot with some hunky cowboy, while also solving murders.

What do we call it?

Riding Through Paradise

Come on people! That practically writes itself!