Another month behind us. April was a bit less dynamic than March from a family perspective–none of my daughters got married, after all. But it’s been plenty busy in other ways. My wife launched out on a trip to Africa to help run some seminars for teachers. And while she is gone, that means I’m a bit busier at home, feeding chickens and watering plants that she usually takes care of.

My newly married daughter got back from her honeymoon to Southeast Asia. Another daughter went on week long trip over to the eastern states of Australia for an intensive study period for her geoglogy class (part of her mostly online palaeontology degree). And my wife launched out on a trip to Africa to help run some seminars for teachers.

I’m also still recovering from back issues that started up in March, which has allowed me to be a bit more productive work-wise than I was last month. Most of that productivity went into The Mt Margaret Story, the documentary I’ve been working on for a while. Still a ways to go, but we’re getting there.

In terms of TV and movie viewing, there isn’t quite as much as there was last time (given that I spent a lot of March sick), but there was still a fair amount. In particular, I went on a bit of a British espionage binge. This included finishing rewatching Slow Horses, as we were showing it all to one of my daughters, and thus finally getting to the end of the most recent season. More about that in a future post, but for now let me mention…

Spooks

I wrote about this last time, at which point I’d just finished the first six seasons. Now I’ve watched the last four. There’s a movie that came out a couple of years after the show ended, and I haven’t seen that, but I did get through the whole of the regular show.

It remained an intensely gripping espionage thriller for its whole run, but as it rotated its way through a lot of cast members, it became a bit more challenging to get invested in the characters as things went along. Peter Firth, who plays the “boss” character, remained for the whole series, and Nicola Walker returned after departing the show a couple of years earlier and stuck with it til the end (although based on what happens, she’s not likely to appear in the follow-up movie!) So these two provided some sense of continuity for the show as a whole, but the newer cast members who actually ran around and went on the missions were harder to invest in. So I’d say it was probably well and good that it all ended when it did.

But having said that, I was still gripped by the suspense and the intrigue until the end, and the number of regular characters who met tragic or bittersweet ends is so massive that I ended writing up a whole countdown about it here.

Notable (for me) amongst the cast in these latter seasons were familiar actors such as Lara Pulver (Irene Adler in Sherlock), Shazad Latif (Tyler in Star Trek Discovery), Sophia Myles (Reinette in The Girl in the Fireplace episode of Doctor Who), and Richard Armitage (Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit trilogy of movies).

Sandbaggers

After finishing Spooks, I filled the British espionage-shaped hole in my life with Sandbaggers a series that ran for three seasons starting back in the late 70s. Where as Spooks was about MI5 (who deal with domestic issues), Sandbaggers was about MI6 (the foreign intelligence service). The show stars Roy Marsden as Neil Burnside, the Director of Operations (“D-Ops”), whose arsenal of agents includes the “Special Section” which is made up of several “Sandbaggers”–highly trained agents who take on the most sensitive missions. I

Interestingly, while we do see the Sandbaggers’ missions from time to time, that’s not at all the show’s main focus. Primarily we are watching Burnside navigate the complex politics of running MI6 operations, which includes navigating potential conflicts with his immediate bosses and with the liaison with the government office whose authority MI6 operates, as well as the head of the London section of the American CIA. It’s fascinating stuff that demands a fairly rigorous amount of attention to the dialogue to fully keep track of (I used to watch this show a bit a loooong time ago and I remember frequently being confused). In that sense, it’s a bit like watching The West Wing if that show was about spies rather than politicians.

Of course, the Sandbaggers themselves are also part of the show, especially Ray Lonnen as Willie Caine aka “Sandbagger One”, who makes an effectively everyman type character, a sharp contrast to the much more reserved and fastidious Burnside.

There are a couple of other Sandbaggers who come and go, but the most memorable one is Laura Dickens (played by Diane Keen), the only female member of the team, whom Burnside actually falls in love with before a disastrous mission followed by a no-win political situation results in her being written out of the show in one of the most heart wrenching episodes of TV that I’ve seen. Her departure casts a long shadow over the characters that persists over the rest of the series.

Interestingly, the creator of Sandbaggers, Ian MacKintosh, had an intelligence background himself and disappeared while writing the third and last season in a potentially mysterious light aircraft disaster. A few episodes written by others filled out the season, but they are generally considered inferior, and I’d agree that they are amongst the weaker segments.

Appearing in one episode each of Sandbaggers is Steven Grief and Glynis Barber, both familiar from Blake’s 7. The regular cast includes Richard Vernon as the first “C” (the senior chief of MI6), who played Slartibartfast in both the radio and TV versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. An actor named Alan MacNaughton plays the Permanent Undersecretary of the Foreign Office (the government liaison I mentioned above). I’m not familiar with him but I’ve always thought he looked a lot like William Hartnell from Doctor Who, and might have made a better replacement First Doctor than Richard Hurndall in The Five Doctors.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Rounding off my British espionage binge was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the 1970s adaptation of the novel by John le Carré. Alec Guinness stars as George Smiley, a former senior member of MI6 who is tasked to figure out which of his former colleagues is actually a. Russian mole. The story plays out very slowly over the series’ seven episodes, so it took me some energy to “get into” the story. It’s well produced and by the end I was gripped, but does require a bit of perseveran,c,e.

In addition to Alec Guinness, the cast includes Beryl Reid in a small but meaningful part (I remember her from the Doctor Who serial Earthshock), and Ian Richardson (one of the villains in Dark City, see below) as one of the suspects Smiley is investigating. Also, Smiley’s main assistant is played by Michael Jayston, who was the Valeyard in Doctor Who‘s Trial of a Time Lord, and Patrick Stewart–Captain Picard himself–shows up in memorable non-speaking role as the Russian spymaster who is handling the mole. So with Alec Guinness’ involvement, that means the show involves one of the greatest Jedi masters of all time working with a dark amalgamation of the Doctor to ferret out the schemes of one of the most celebrated Starfleet captains ever!

Smiley was written, from what I hear, as kind of an anti-James Bond–he’s older, bald, out of shape, and often looked down upon. In this way, he’s kind of a prototype for Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses, just not as extreme. This is even funnier when you realize that Slow Horses star Gary Oldman also played Smiley in a more recent film adaptation of this same book. I’ve never seen it, but now I am curious to do so.

My viewing wasn’t limited to British espionage though!

Legion – Season 1

I’ve heard about this show for a long time and finally decided to dip my toes in. It’s an X-Men-adjacent series about David Haller, a man who believe he suffering from schizophrenia, but is actually a powerful mutant who has been more-or-less “infected” with a powerful evil consciousness referred to as the Shadow King. Dan Stevens plays David, and Aubrey Plaza shows up as a fellow asylum inmate who is killed early on, but whose form the Shadow King often appears to David in. The story has him escaping one secret organisation that is out to kill him by hooking up with another secret organisation that wants to help him learn how to use his powers.

It’s a weird, weird show–full of disjointed storytelling and confused imagery, designed to mimic David’s own disjointed experiences of life. As the show progresses (the first season is 8 episodes), things are slowly unpacked and made clearer, which is gratifying but also threatens to make it more conventional. My daughter and I enjoyed it but didn’t feel in a hurry to watch the next season (there were three all together). We’ll probably get there someday, but it feels like if it’s just going to be more of a normal superhero story now, that it’s not as interesting, and if it’s going to continue to be super-disjointed and jarring, that it’s going to work hard to have to come up with a compelling reason to do so. We’ll see.

Doc Martin – 2022 Christmas Special

Two of my favorite British shows are Doc Martin and Detectorists. They are both over now, and in both cases I recently discovered the existence of an episode that was produced after what I had previously believed was the series finale. And both of those newly discovered episodes were Christmas specials from 2022. I watched the Detectorist special last month, and this month got to Doc Martin.

Doc Martin, if you don’t know, is about Dr. Martin Ellingham, played by Martin Clunes, a brilliant but withdrawn and socially inept surgeon who becomes a GP of a quirky coastal town in England after developing an unexpected blood-phobia. Over ten seasons, we watched “Doc” Martin confront his personal issues to come to terms with his new environment, fall in love and have a family, and routinely use his brilliant medical mind to save lives. It’s a funny, slice-of-life show with a dose of drama. After ten seasons (over 18 years), Martin had come a long way as a character and was in danger of softening too much to remain interesting, so it was without too much regret that I watched the series conclude.

Still, we returned to that world “one more time” with hope and anticipation.

Now, I wrote about the Detectorists episode here, commenting that in some ways I was disappointed by this episode, largely because it went to dark places (relative to the show overall) and provided a much less uplifting note to go out on. The Doc Martin episode, on the other hand, wasn’t like this at all. It didn’t try to act like either a continuation of the show or a finale; it was more just a bonus chapter to a story that’s already complete (it’s worth remembering that the Detectorist episode came five years after the series was over, while the Doc Martin one only a couple of months). We toured through our favorite characters their favorite gimmicks, providing an easily digestible, fan-pleasing experience.

As such, one could argue that the episode is flawed in the opposite way to the Detectorists one–that it’s too insubstantial, too much like fluff. But I think that’d be overstating it. Though nothing substantial happens in Martin’s life, he does go through some personal insight (about his issues with Christmas) that feels meaningfully. And the supporting cast get some extra lines tossed onto their stories that make their endings feel more complete (ie Al and Morwenna are having a baby, Mrs. Tishell leaves behind her neck brace, PC Joe Penhale gets engage, etc).

So on the whole it made for fun and satisfying viewing.

I also managed to get some reading done this month!

New Town by Harry Blamires

As part of my goal to read more I’ve been pulling books off my shelf that I’ve never read. Many of them are Christian apologetics or Bible meditations or missionary stories that probably belonged to my wife from before we were married. This latest one is called New Town and is an actually a short novella by someone I’ve never heard of named Harry Blamires, who was apparently a protege of C.S. Lewis. The book promotes itself as “a fable…unless you believe.”

The story is about a man named Bernard Dayman who spends the entire book dreaming (I forgot it was a dream until the last sentence) that he has died and gone to a place called “Old Heartham”, a once beautiful city which is now falling into disrepair. The citizenry is divided between those who want to stay and effect repairs, and those who are eagerly anticipating moving to the beautiful “New Town”, where homes are currently being prepared. Those who want to go are trying to get their names on a Waiting List which is necessary in order to secure a home once it’s available, but this is a challenging task involving getting references from other people who are already one the Waiting List.

Bernard, who knows he is dead and is pretty comfortable with the fact, meets up with lost love Eve and her (not his) grown daughter Marie (everyone in Old Heartham remains the age they were when they died). This leads to the strange dynamic of Bernard being quickly disenchanted with Eve, but smitten with Marie, who has grown up to be the sort of person that Eve used to be, before she became more shallow and self-absorbed.

I had a hard time knowing what to make of the book. Some of the allegory is a bit uncertain confusing to me, while other parts were very clear. For instance, the whole of this world is under the control of a figure called Sir Alph Godfrey and his son Christopher, who have the best interests of the people at heart in the way they govern, though there are those who are suspicious of their bad management. The system by which one gets onto the Waiting List seems impenetrably confused for a while, and the more subversive elements in Old Heartham seem like they might be justified, but eventually Bernard stumbles upon a loophole by which he is automatically put on the Waiting List when he acknowledges he is completely bereft of any resources and in absolute need. And the plot, such as it was, only takes things up to a certain point until it ends abruptly with Bernard waking up.

Anyway, it’s well written and pretty short. I am a Christian and I love myself a bit of C.S. Lewis-style allegory, but I was more curious, intrigued, and perplexed by the book than I was inspired or moved.

Superman: The Triangle Years Omnibus volume 1

I finally finished reading this mammoth volume which I actually got for Christmas–1376 pages! It covers the beginning of what we know as “The Triangle Years”, when DC comics were publishing at first three and then four monthly Superman books, which under the editorship of Mike Carlin told a fairly seamless weekly (or near-weekly narrative). To avoid confusion, they started printing little triangles (sort of similar to the Superman-style “S” shield) with the year and a number in them so it was easy to know what order to read the books in.

This was my era of Superman, the 1990s, after John Byrne had left the character he had so successfully rebooted in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths. I used to love reading these books, and so this purchase was definitely a nostalgia-trip for me. Like most nostalgia-trips, there are parts of it which hold up a lot better than others. Trying to read it all in a row as I was doing (and not once a week) somehow highlights the silliness of everything that is going on, but obviously if you can’t accept that than what are you doing reading superhero comics?

The book actually begins slightly before the triangles themselves did, so that it can include Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite, a four (or so) part story of Mxyzptlk answering Lex Luthor’s wish to be as powerful as Superman by robbing Superman of his powers. It’s a very well-written and fun story which ends with the notable event of Lois Lane and Clark Kent becoming engaged to be married.

This is part of what made the era so fun–after decades of relative stagnation, Superman and his world were forever growing and evolving, and there was the feeling that anything could happen.

Soon Lois was clued into Clark’s secret identity and wedding preparations were beginning. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor was dying (apparently) and being replaced by his long-lost illegitimate son from Australia! Superman went bouncing around through time and met up with various versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes (themselves going through a lot of changes at the time), the Eradicator returned, the Daily Planet almost went out of business, Jimmy Olsen became destitute, Intergang got taken down, Bibbo won the lottery, Pete Ross and Lana Lang got together, the Linear Men were introduced, Superman lost his memory, a strange new threat called Cerberus showed up, and we had cross-overs with a big DC event called Armageddon 2001.

All of this came out in about 15 months, which just goes to show the sorts of things you can get to when you are publishing a comic every week. Through it all a bunch of talented creators made the stories a lot of fun, particularly Jerry Ordway, Dan Jurgens, Roger Stern, Louise Simonson, Bob McLeod, Jon Bogdanove, and more.

Flash by William Messner-Loebs Omnibus and Greg LaRocque volume 1

Finishing that Superman book meant that I could finally get into the other book I bought at the same time–this Flash book that is also pretty hefty, although not quite as big (less than 1000 pages). This is the first ongoing book featuring Wally West as the Flash, a role he took over also in the final pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths, so it reprints material only a couple of years older than the Superman book. I’m about a third of the way through it so far.

The volume is named after William Messier-Loebs and Greg LaRocque, but I haven’t gotten to either of those creators yet. Instead this relaunch begins under the auspices of Mike Baron and Jackson “Butch” Guice, and we are introduced to a Wally West who is dealing with newfound limitations to his powers–he can’t run more than about the speed of sound and he needs to eat tons of food to stay conscience. He is also going through a bunch of personal issues, including a lack of money, leading him to hire himself out to do super-speed tasks for money (in the first issue he has to deliver a heart for a transplant across the country as quickly as he can).

The issues are interesting but uneven. Wally goes up against a number super-speed enemies that on the whole, were not that interesting. His main love-interest here is the estranged wife of one of them, one Tina McGee who is notable for 1) being significantly older than Wally and 2) being the character Amanda Pays played on the live-action Flash TV series, as a colleague of Barry Allen. Baron also notably created Chunk, a guy who became an occasional supporting character in Wally’s life and who basically had a black hole leading to another dimension hiding inside his body. Oh, and Vandal Savage shows up too.

Messner-Loebs, I understand, built on the foundation he inherited and began to explore why Wally was the kind of person he is. I’m very interested to getting into his work and seeing how that all plays out.

Incidentally, I just heard about the death of artist Jackson “Butch” Guice this morning. As I mentioned, he’s Baron’s original collaborator on this book, and he also became a major artist on Superman in the years following the collection I mention above. He was one of the modern greats in comic art, and died at the relatively young age of 63, which is sad.

I got a variety of neat games in my month as well. I’m a big fan of detective games, escape games, cooperative strategy games, that sort of thing.

221b Baker Street

Subtitled “the Sherlock Holmes Master Detective Game”, 221b Baker Street is basically a variation of Clue (or Cluedo for the non-Americans out there), in that you roam around a board entering different locations (not rooms in a house, but buildings in Victorian London). You work on different cases (describe on cards) and depending on which one you are playing, you get different clues which help you figure out who is the culprit, how was it done, why was it done, that sort of thing. Some of the clues are simply pieces of information which point you in the right direction, some are red herrings which point you in the wrong direction, and some are more of the cryptic crossword variety of clue–little word puzzles which might reveal the name of the perpetrator, etc.

I got this game for Christmas from my daughter and then fiancée, but I haven’t had much of a chance to play it. I got a game in with that same daughter and her now husband, plus my wife, where I made my guess prematurely and as a result lost. I also played it cooperatively with another daughter, where we times ourselves to see how fast we could get around the board to get the clues we needed.

Fun stuff.

Detective – A Modern Crime Board Game

“Season One” of this cooperative board game comes with three mysteries, recently my friends Rod, Michelle and Anna (a little group I played Pandemic Legacy with, plus some other mystery games) got together for the second one of these. In this game you are presented with a mystery via some info a booklet, and then you have a deck of cards which represent different “leads” you can follow up on. Each lead costs time, and sometimes it also costs time just to get to the location from which you can follow the lead. Time is limited, so there is no way to look at every card during the course of the game. The idea is to figure out together which ones you want to tackle and then do your best to piece together a clear picture of what is going on.

The game we played this time was a little different in that the whole thing took place in the same location (a rained-in deserted house) so there wasn’t all the “travel time” to get wasted away. We had quite a difficult time of it–for a long time our investigations were revealing lots of motives for a murder but no clear evidence that the victim had actually been murdered (he was an old man and maybe just had had a heart attack). Right toward the end, though, we hit the jackpot, and found a feasible murder weapon that was hidden somewhere where our prime suspect would have the best access to it. So it we got ’em!

True to what the game says, if we had chosen different leads to pursue we might have ended up barking up the wrong tree. But also, if we had found the murder weapon right off the bat, without first gathering a bunch of clues about the suspects, it wouldn’t have necessarily been so clear to us what it meant.

On the whole, it was a very satisfying deductive experience.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: Oblivaeon

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a cooperative table-top card game that my younger two daughters and I have been playing for a long time, where you take on the roles of different superheroes and fight various villains in different environments. The characters are all original to the game, though many of them resemble people figures from Marvel or DC.

Oblivaeon is a variant of this game that simulates a giant, reality-warping cosmic battle akin to Crisis on Infinite Earths. It’s a huge undertaking of a game that we’ve only dared try a couple of times, and have always been soundly trounced by the big bad and his seeming endless parade of minions. With my eldest daughter now married and moved out (she’s then least interested in this game) and my wife away (she also hates it), it seemed the obvious time for us to try it again.

The game lasted over a couple of sessions (we left it set up in a room that we could lock the dogs out of) and against all hope, we actually won. Maybe we’re familiar with it enough now to know how to strategise. Or it could just be there that there are so many rules and instructions to follow that we missed something which would have caused us to lose. Either way, the multiverse is safe, thank goodness.

Zodiac Killer (escape room)

The last thing I’ll mention is an escape room we did at a place called Fox in a Box. My friend Rod and I have enjoyed doing escape rooms together for a while now (I’ve done them with others, including my family, but it’s particularly something we like tackling together). This one was pretty clever–we play potential victims of the real life Zodiac Killer from Northern California, who was active in Northern California in the last 60s. You start the game handcuffed in a creepy dark room, and then have to go from there to escape.

It’s a little weird maybe that they use a real-life situation to base their game off of, but I guess it’s over 50 years old so maybe its historical enough to be fair game for this sort of thing. The room itself was really good, one of the better ones that we’ve done. If you live in Perth and are thinking you might want to do this, then maybe skip the rest of this paragraph, but for everyone else there was a particularly cool bit where I had to climb inside small space that had been hidden under a bed and have it close me in, only to have a secret door fall open and reveal and even creepier second part of the room, complete with a corpse played by a mannequin. I’m not a particular fan of macabre gruesomeness, but the artificiality of even a well designed escape room keeps me separated enough that it doesn’t really bother me.

Anyway, that was my month, more or less. How was yours? As we get into May and my wife comes home, I’m looking forward to a little less relentless watering and chicken activity, and maybe even the odd bout of sleeping in. But not on the day she arrives–her flight is due at 4:30 am!