Areida Abandoned

[Contains desegregated sword-and-sorcery SPOILERS!]

Picture this: A gorgeous young woman is put under a spell which compels her to follow every command she’s given without question or pause, and even to forget what’s she’s seen, heard and done while under this spell. Sounds like the set-up for a sleazy stroke story, right? Wrong! It’s actually the premise for a family-friendly fairy tale comedy, called Ella Enchanted (2004).

Obviously our main “person of interest” here is Anne Hathaway, who plays the eponymous ‘Ella’ with her usual charm and gusto, cheerfully throwing herself into crazy slapstick, slushy meet-cutes, wire-work fight scenes, and full-blown song-and-dance numbers, with equal aplomb. It’s impossible to overstate just how damn adorable this woman is… both on-screen, and in the accompanying commentary track. Nevertheless, my major motivation for picking up this DVD was the fact that Parminder Nagra appears as ‘Areida’, Ella’s long-term BFF. Sadly, she scores less than five minutes’ worth of actual screentime, and barely says a word, despite her character’s pivotal importance to the plot!

We first see Areida in a childhood flashback, being bullied by a couple of mean girls in the playground, who make fun of her name and general foreignness. Ella steps in to defend the new girl, and literally sinks her teeth into the lead bully’s arm when she foolishly exclaims “Bite me!” This scene is used to illustrate that even though Ella is obedient to a fault when given a direct instruction, she still has her own mind, and her own beliefs. In the present day, Areida accompanies Ella on a demonstration to protest the royal family’s treatment of Ogres, Giants and Elves, who have all been banished to the forest, and forced to slave away for their human masters. She also criticises Ella for mindlessly doing whatever her bitchy step-sisters tell her to do, apparently unaware that her best friend is actually the victim of a magickal curse… because Ella’s dying mother instructed her never to tell anyone about the curse, foolishly believing that this would protect her daughter from being exploited, even though the exact opposite is true. The baddies simply need to observe Ella’s behaviour for a little while to deduce her unfortunate condition, so having some friends who knew the truth might actually have saved her a lot of hassle (assuming they stayed in close enough proximity to counteract the really dangerous and degrading orders she was given by unwitting or malevolent others).

This is particularly true in the scene where Ella’s step-sisters order her to cover for their own misbehaviour, by telling their mother that it was Areida who peer-pressured the girl into shoplifting… then ordering Ella to tell Areida that they can’t see each other anymore, and that she could never be friends with a foreigner. Nagra and Hathaway manage to sell this disappointingly underwritten “break up” scene, purely through the power of their acting, bless ‘em… and it’s this traumatic split that provides the catalyst for Ella to set off on a quest to track down the boozy faerie who cursed her in the first place. But, once she’s on her way, she gets caught up in all sorts of other screwball shenanigans, including a plot to assassinate the Prince she’s slowly falling in love with (yawn!), and Areida is largely forgotten about. There are a few quick shots of her smiling and toasting the happy couple at the end, to show that all is well again, but no actual, onscreen reconciliation between them. Boo!

Not to say that there aren’t plenty other fine actresses filling that hour-long void between Nagra’s scenes: Minnie Driver is largely wasted in the role of ‘Mandy’, a “household faerie”, with barely any powers to speak of, who can only stand around making snarky comments while Ella is abused by all and sundry. Joanna Lumley is fantastically snooty as Ella’s stepmother, ‘Dame Olga’… while Lucy Punch and Jennifer Higham make for a very funny double-act as her devious daughters. Oh, and Vivica A. Fox pops in now-and-again as ‘Lucinda Perriweather’, the extremely irritating and amoral faerie who cursed Ella in the first place, claiming that it was a “gift”. Feh.

Overall, I enjoyed this flick a fair amount, and I appreciate the way they tried to weave more serious subjects like slavery and segregation into the storyline… but a lot of the jokes were too silly and childish to really bear the burden of the weightier themes, and I doubt it’ll collect too much dust on my shelf before it goes back to the charity shop from whence it came.

P.S. There are some really great FX shots here that Fantasy fans might enjoy… from the insanely epic opening sequence, to the talking book (faced by Jimi Mistry), and a great cutaway of a carriage crammed with Ella’s multi-racial rescue party!

The FBI’s Most Unwanted 2: Belly Up!

[Contains inconveniently procreating SPOILERS!!!]

Often an actress’s ill-timed pregnancy can scupper a perfectly good series, by literally benching one of its main characters and forcing the production team to draft in an inferior substitute. Well, I say “often”, but I’m really just talking about Life there… although you could argue that Seinfeld suffered without ‘Elaine’ and Will & Grace suffered without ‘Grace’ for a few episodes too. Gillian Anderson was already “with child” when the second season of The X-Files began, but her maternity leave didn’t really kick in until ep #2.06 (“Ascension”), when Scully is double-abducted, first by an escaped mental patient, and then by the test-happy aliens who drove him crazy in the first place. Two episodes later, she mysteriously reappears in a hospital bed, comatose and dreaming… allowing the recuperating actress to spend most of her scenes either lying flat on her back, or sitting in a symbolic rowboat. After that she’s back on her feet, cocking a sceptical eyebrow at Mulder’s implausible hunches, just like old times! Bless her. Unlike the detour that Sarah Shahi took in Life, I think this abduction plot was actually a pretty elegant way of dealing with the actress’s absence, and subsequent convalescence, while also giving David Duchovny a chance to stretch his acting muscles, and adding to the show’s overall mythology. The shot of Scully lying prone on an alien operating table, with a strange instrument attached to her bulging belly was especially striking and creepy… and presumably pays off later down the road, in ways I’ve fortunately forgotten at this time.

But enough of this… on with the laundry list! Kimberly Patton (aka Kimberly Ashlyn Gere) appeared in ep #2.03 (“Blood”), as ‘Mrs. McRoberts’, a seemingly harmless housewife who kills the mechanic working on her car, when a diagnostic machine in his garage plays on her fear of being raped, and urges her to launch a pre-emptive attack with a tyre-iron. Apparently Patton was an award-winning “porn star” at the time she appeared here, and pornography isn’t a genre that’s generally praised for the quality of its acting, but I think she does a great job of selling her character’s sweaty terror and psychotic breakdown. This is one of my all-time fave episodes, and I often think of it when I see an LED/LCD display in a shop or on a bus or wherever (the little “Bye Bye” message on Mulder’s phone at the end is especially adorable). CCH Pounder appeared in ep #2.5 (“Duane Barry”) as ‘Special Agent Lucy Kazdin’, the woman in charge of a Hostage Rescue Team, tasked with (safely) extracting the eponymous alien-abductee from the travel agency where he’s holding four people at gunpoint. Her fantastically hard-ass performance here earned Pounder an Emmy nomination… although I like to think that was mostly for the way she gave Krycek her coffee order! Since then she’s played supporting roles in such primo genre hokum as Face/Off, End of Days, and Orphan, as well as voicing ‘Mo’at’, the Na’vi clan’s spiritual leader, in James Cameron’s box-office-busting Avatar. Sarah Strange also appeared in the same episode, as a hostage named ‘Kimberly Monroe’, who comes to believe Barry’s tall-tale, and even sympathise with him. Strange first came to my attention in the Canadian bio-terrorism drama series ReGenesis, which also featured pint-sized acting prodigy Ellen Page.

Perrey Reeves appeared in ep #2.7 (“3″) as ‘Kristen Kilar’, a young woman who is implicated in a series of vicious vampiric murders… though that doesn’t seem to stop a Scully-less Mulder falling in love with her, while investigating the case. D’oh! Apparently Reeves was Duchovny’s real-life squeeze at the time, though unlike Maggie Wheeler, she doesn’t seem to have worked with him again since… presumably because she’s been too busy playing Ari Gold’s wife in Entourage? Melinda McGraw appeared in ep #2.8 (“One Breath”) as Scully’s sister ‘Melissa’… a role that was written specifically for the actress, and which she would reprise in several later episodes. Normally I’m a big fan of “hippie chick” characters, but I thought they laid her New Age-y-ness on a little thick here. That said, I totally agree with her assertion that “Just because [a] belief is positive and good doesn’t make it silly or trite”. Right on! Aside from her cameo as Lt. Gordon’s wife ‘Barbara’ in The Dark Knight, my most recent exposure to McGraw’s work was her recurring role on Ben & Kate, as Ben’s “Rail Mall” business-partner (and domineering girlfriend) ‘Vera Everson’. Shawnee Smith appeared in ep #2.9 (“Firewalker”) as ‘Jessie O’Neil’, a graduate student working with a team of seismologists, who accidentally extract a malevolent silicon-based life form from the depths of a volcano (in a story that’s suspiciously similar to “Ice”, from the previous season). Smith is currently being punished for her sins in a previous lifetime by starring as the ex-wife of Charlie Sheen’s character on Anger Management…. but she’s also sought redemption by co-founding a country-rock band that with actress Missi Pyle, called “Smith & Pyle”!

The late Frances Bay appeared in ep #2.11 (“Excelsis Dei”) as ‘Dorothy’, a sparky nursing home resident who could see the angry/horny spirits that haunted the building. Apparently Bay didn’t even start acting professionally until she was already in her 50s, but she worked constantly from then on, and racked up credits that actors half her age would kill for… including several appearances in David Lynch’s oeuvre (Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, and Twin Peaks), and a memorable role in Seinfeld (as the irritable old woman Jerry steals a loaf of bread from, who returns in the final episode to recount her story and condemn him to jail… after already quashing his father’s dream of running for condo board president, in an intervening episode). And it’s easy to see why she was so sought after for so many prestigious projects, because she totally steals the show here! Sarah Jane Redmond appeared in ep #2.12 (“Aubrey”) as a ‘Young Mother’ seen fussing over her daughter. Obviously it’s a very minor role, and I only mention it because Redmond subsequently returned in a later season as a totally different character, as well as appearing in the first The X-Files movie, its sister series Millennium, and Chris Carter’s other, far less successful creation, Harsh Realm (as the show’s enigmatic ‘Inga Fossa’). Besides her work with Twenty-Twelve productions, she also played ‘Tibby’s Mother’ in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, and Lana Lang’s ‘Aunt Nell’ in the first two seasons of Smallville.

Christine Willes made her first appearance in ep #2.13 (“Irresistible”) as ‘Karen Kossoff’, a disappointingly straight and serious government counsellor, who recurs in several episodes. Besides appearing as the classic Jack Kirby villainess ‘Granny Goodness’ in Smallville, Willes is best known for her role as ‘Delores Herbig’, an aggressively-perky supervisor at the Happy Time employment agency in Dead Like Me. Speaking of which, another of that show’s stars, Laura Harris, appeared in ep #2.14 (“Die Hand Die Verletzt”) as ‘Andrea’, one of two teen girls lured out into the woods by a couple of highschool boys, hoping to impress/seduce their dates by dabbling with dark magick. It doesn’t end well, as you might imagine… so sadly, most of her screentime is spent running and praying.

On the manly side of things: Anderson’s absence resulted in the expansion of Mitch Pileggi’s role as ‘Assistant Director Skinner’, as well as the assignment of a new partner to Mulder, in the form of a fresh-faced young agent named ‘Alex Krycek’. The part was played by Nicholas Lea, who had appeared in the first season as a victim of a “gender-bending” killer, whose weapon of choice was hardcore sex (ep #1.6). When he first appeared, Krycek kinda reminded me of ‘Kenneth’ the Page from 30 Rock, though that may have just been his voice…? I don’t know. I thought it was a shame that they revealed his true allegiances at the end of his very first episode, because it could have been fun to tease that out for a while, playing on Mulder’s paranoia and making the eventual reveal far more powerful… still, Lea gives a good performance in the “Jekyll and Hyde” role, and I think it was a neat way of covering the cracks caused by Scully’s sabbatical. William Sanderson appeared in ep #2.03 as a jittery ex-postal worker, slowly being worn down by a secret experiment to make him, er, “go postal”. Tony Todd appeared in ep #2.04 as a Vietnam vet, who was part of a sleep eradication experiment, which has given him the power to project nightmares into reality. Bradley Whitford appeared in ep #2.09, doing his very best “Colonel Kurtz” impression as a strung-out, mud-and-blood-stained seismologist. Terry O’Quinn appeared in ep # 2.12 as a gruff police lieutenant having an affair with a woman who turns out to be the unsuspecting grand-daughter of a local serial-killer (much like Redmond above, O’Quinn would go on to make several appearances across the Carter-verse). Dan Butler appeared in ep # 2.17 as a senior member of a cabal of highschool faculty members, who secretly worship Satan. Michael J. Anderson appeared in ep #2.20 as ‘Mr. Nutt’, the diminutive manager of a trailer park where various circus “freaks” are being murdered by a rogue semi-conjoined twin. Tony Shalhoub appeared in ep #2.23 as a frazzled physicist with a lethal shadow… and Gary Grubbs appeared in ep #2.24 as the sheriff of a small town which is home to a cannibalistic cult!

[Embarrassing confession: I still giggle every time Scully announces herself as "a medical doctor". The smarter part of my brain knows full well that there are all sorts of "doctors" around, and that she's perfectly sensible and right to make that distinction... but I still giggle all the same]

The Wed & The Dead

[Contains blind-siding, bushwhacking SPOILERS!!!]

And so we come to the end of another, all-too-brief season of Game of Thrones… one which may well finish with far fewer viewers than it began, after the tragic and traumatic events in the penultimate episode.

While I have no intention of dropping the series myself, I can understand why many might choose to do so… after all, I gave up on The Vampire Diaries for equally outraged reasons… but I think there’s a distinction here that needs to be made. With TVD, I was appalled that such a sweet  and funny supporting character could be killed in cold blood by a main character, who we would still be expected to respect and sympathise with over the following episodes, as some sort of sexy, smouldering “bad boy”… I was equally appalled by how quickly the other main characters forgot and/or forgave his heinous crime. With GoT, however, the massacre of the Starks was orchestrated by supporting characters who were never sold as anything other than sadistic, devious curs… and while no formal declaration of war existed between House Stark and House Frey prior to the ambush, the fact remains that the Starks were at war. They may have been unarmed and unprepared at the time of the assault itself, but that’s largely because they’re too noble and naive to expect the sort of guerrilla tactics that were employed against them.

My point is that they weren’t “innocent civilians” in the same way that Lexi was in TVD… and (regardless of Frey’s own petty motives) they weren’t killed simply to cover a single, selfish a-hole’s back… they were killed to quell a rebellious, treasonous uprising that had torn the entire country apart. Don’t get me wrong, I believe Robb Stark had right on his side, and no one can fault him for taking up arms against a spoiled, sadistic, snivelling, slappable little shit like Joffrey Lannister… but I can’t say I ever had much faith in him as a military strategist or a potential ruler. I don’t want to “blame the victim” and say he had it coming… but, to some extent, he did rather dig his own grave (and then shag Talisa in it). Which isn’t to say that I wasn’t shocked and horrified by the way “The Red Wedding” played out, because I’m still getting rather unwelcome flashbacks to the gorier moments as I write this… but I don’t consider it a “deal breaker”, as far as my appreciation and admiration for the show goes. If anything, it’s a welcome reminder that War isn’t all about dashing young men doing terribly heroic and romantic things for Queen-and-Country… War is ugly and brutal and dehumanising and degrading and icky and not for the feint-of-heart. Fact.

Would I have felt differently if Arya (Maisie Williams) had gone leaping feet-first into the bloodbath, as she so very nearly did? Hell, yes! I would’ve cursed GRR Martin as a muthaf*cka, and punched out a ranty blog post with my bloodied fists, while frothing at the mouth… but thankfully she was saved by The Hound, to live another day. Hurrah! Unfortunately, I now have far less faith in her potential “hero’s journey”, and feel a lot more nervous about the long-term prospects of all my favourite characters. For what it’s worth, in an Entertainment Weekly interview about the episode (and its corresponding chapter, back in the day), Martin reiterated that he anticipates “a bittersweet ending” for the (still unfinished) series of novels. Not quite sure what that means for our Arya, but I was glad to see her reconsidering Jacquin’s offer to train her up as a stealthy assassin, so she can eschew the Stark family tradition of gambolling carelessly into slaughterhouses.

Hopefully, we’ll get to see Dany* (Emilia Clarke) and her dragons set foot (and talon) in Westeros someday… because she’s really been making up for a rather lacklustre second season, by stepping up her game and razing slave-cities to the ground! Her obvious sympathy for the oppressed masses, backed up by a willingness to put her own neck on the line in the name of emancipation, makes her a firm favourite for the Iron Throne in my book… but Martin has proudly stated that he likes his fiction “to be unpredictable”, so the very fact that she’s the most obvious and desirable candidate might well count against her in the long-run. And now I have to prepare myself for the possible nightmare scenario of Arya, Dany and Brienne (Gwendoline Christie) all facing-off against each other in some sort of heart-breaking three-way duel to the death, dammit!

It was fun seeing British “character actors” like Clive Russell, Paul Kaye, Iwan Rheon and Mackenzie Crook LARP-ing their hearts out this season, while the legendary Diana Rigg was “keeping it real” as ‘Olenna Tyrell’… but my favourite new cast member has to be Ellie Kendrick as ‘Meera Reed’, another feisty tomboy to cheer on and crush on (while trying not to get too attached, because you never know when she’ll cash out…). I particularly liked her line about helping the weak and the meek: “Some people will always need help. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth helping.” Take that, Ayn Rand! I have to say though, seeing her hiding out in the mill with Bran and company, trying to stay quiet so as not to alert the nearby Wildlings to their presence, did make me wonder if she felt a little déjà vu after playing Anne Frank in the BBC adaptation of her diaries!

Meanwhile, ‘Yara Greyjoy’ (Gemma Whelan) was benched for most of this season, but came back strong in the finale… ‘Ygritte’ (Rose Leslie) got rather brutally dumped, but didn’t go down without a fight (yes, that was an oral sex joke)… I’ve already praised Natalie Dormer’s fine work as ‘Margaery Tyrell’, of course… and Brienne’s wacky “road trip” with Jaime more than lived up to its promise, and delivered a strangely satisfying resolution-of-sorts as they finally found their weary, wounded way to King’s Landing. Lord knows what’s going to happen with them after this, but at least it should give Cersei someone else to say mean things about! Fun!

———–

* Aka: Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Silver Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Lady Regnant of the Seven Kingdoms, Protector of the Realm, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, The Unburnt, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons!

Put A (Pickled) Bird On It!

I don’t really understand how or why these “Keep Calm…” parodies became so prevalent (even my mother has a cooler bag emblazoned with “Keep Cool And Carry”), and some of the wordplay can be pretty painful to read… but I had this idea for a pun on Carrie Brownstein’s name, and I’m desperately trying to avoid my proof-reading duties, so I thought I’d knock it up and put it out there. (Note: The bird and pickling jar are a reference to a recurring sketch character of hers on Portlandia).

Boring fact: I dithered over hyphenating “Brown-stein” for a fair few minutes, before deciding against it, and going with the version you see here… but I’m still not convinced it was the right decision. It seems disrespectful to split her name up like that… but the hyphen looked weird, hanging there at the end of the line… gah! I’m glad I don’t design stuff for a living… details like that would drive me insane…

Before the Buzzshark

As I’ve said before, I believe that Never Mind the Buzzcocks lost its bite when it started dropping a random assortment of unqualified “celebs” into the host’s chair, to limply read quips from the teleprompter. These days, it’s nothing more than a shambling, defanged shadow of itself… so you can appreciate how excited I was to see that the Beeb had commissioned a retrospective series titled What a Load of Buzzcocks, which (according to my TV guide) promised “highlight’s from the comedy music quiz’s archive, beginning with 1996!”

Sadly, half of the first episode was taken up with contemporary music-news-nuggets, narrated by Alex-James-from-Blur… and even when they actually got around to showing some clips from the show itself, they were mostly themed around making fun of specific artists (such as Michael Jackson or Take That), with footage taken from various shows across the entire run of the series, rather than the year specified in the intro and episode title. Dammit! Next week’s episode jumps ahead to 2004, so… I don’t know what they think they’re playing at. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as the saying goes.

The only real highlight of the last episode was seeing footage of Lauren Laverne, back when she was younger, cheekier, and still the lead singer of the funnest, sexiest rock n’ roll band of all time! “Rama-lama-lama! Kenickie! Kenickie!” Sigh… those were the days…

P.S. Get off my lawn!

Unreliable Roomers

Frankly, I’m flummoxed by the scheduling of the new series of Ch4’s Four Rooms. The third series began airing on the 29th of April, in an intermittent afternoon slot, which was frequently pre-empted by horse-racing and other such tedious crap. Tonight it moves to a prime time evening slot, for no apparent reason, and the TV guides are tagging it as a “new series”, even though it’s really just a continuation of the series-already-in-progress. I suppose we should be grateful to Ch4 for making such a fun game out of trying to follow the series, but frankly I’m beginning to wonder why I even bother…

As a concept for a television show, Four Rooms is the very definition of a “curate’s egg”: A disparate assortment of Punters enter the building with an item (either an antique, a collectable curiosity, or an original artwork) that they believe is of great value and interest, which they then attempt to sell to one of four expert Dealers, for as much dosh as they can squeeze out of them. The catch is that they don’t know how much each Dealer is going to offer, having only had the briefest communal chat with them over the item beforehand, and if they leave a Dealer’s room without accepting their offer, then that offer dies on the table as soon as they walk out the door, never to return! Dun-dun-dun! Which is theoretically quite dramatic and suspenseful, except for the fact that many Punters choose not to deal with anyone, and just take their item home again, having lost nothing except a few hours of their day. It’s not really a high-stakes, do-or-die situation like in Dragons’ Den… it’s more of a “do-or-die-or-try-again-some-other-day, when-the-item-might-be-even-rarer-and-more-valuable”. Meh. I think it would be more interesting if the Punters were required to reveal how much they paid for an item when they originally bought it, or how much it cost them to make it (for original artworks), so we viewers would have a better idea of how insulting or flattering the Dealers’ offers were, and how well the Punter had done at the end of their run. As it is, there’s a distinct dearth of emotional investment in the negotiations themselves.

In fact, most of the show’s appeal derives from the items themselves, and the discussions they inspire regarding the relative value and worth of material objects. To me, a seat from a famous football stadium that’s since been torn down would be useless junk… but to a fan and follower of the team that called that stadium home, it’s a treasured memento of childhood joy and (vicarious) sporting glory. But what would a Dealer, with one eye on their profit-margin, be prepared to pay for it? (SPOILER: About a tenth of what the Punter was expecting, usually). There’s an awful lot of filler, with items that either no one wants, or items that only stir up a dispassionate capitalist response, but occasionally you’ll get an item that everyone agrees is totally abominable… the prime example being a scale model of the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp, made from gold teeth and fillings (ep #2.7). Shudder. Several dealers tried to convince the artist responsible for this outrage to smash it up (or melt it down) in return for hard cash, but he refused. For all I know, he could have gone to sell it for millions to some equally soulless a-hole, but it was nice to see the Dealers all express their revulsion over the piece, and reject it for moral (rather than monetary) reasons.

Also working in the show’s favour is its regular presenter, the gorgeous Anita Rani, whose warm and friendly demeanour helps to smooth over a lot of the rough edges… even if some of the wordplay they feed her can get quite cheesy at times (“Let’s see if this guitar strikes the right note with our dealers”, etc.). I also enjoy seeing her rather naïve, wide-eyed reactions to the more outré or exorbitant items… and I always get a giggle out of the way she says the word “provenance”, for some reason. (She pronounces it “prov-uh-NONCE”, with a slight French accent, whereas I’ve always pronounced it “PROV-uh-nunce”, in a dull English accent). I’ve also really warmed to Tamara Beckwith, a photography-focussed gallery-owner, who’s joined this latest iteration of the series as one of its twelve revolving Dealers. I can’t say I ever gave her much thought back when she was an “it girl” socialite, and don’t really care how she first came to fame/infamy… all I know is that she seems very sweet and funny and honest on the show, and I always look forward to her episodes. I’m also a big fan of her Annie Hall-esque shirt-and-tie style… she’s a good-lookin’ gal! That said, she still has to come (a close) second to my fave Dealer from the first series, Emma Hawkins, a goth-y gallery owner with an interest in taxidermy. Her on-screen persona was an intoxicating blend of otherworldly-eeriness and coy-coquettishness… like a character from an Anne Rice novel come to life! Loved her.

Tara-fying

[Contains grave-spooning SPOILERS!]

In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of sexy, goth-y vampires with wonky accents… so thank goodness for the fifth season of True Blood!

Actually, it seems slightly silly to talk about this show in terms of “seasons”, because the first episode in this boxset just picked up where the finale of the previous batch ended (without so much as a pause for breath or a recap!), and the final episode ended on another pesky cliff-hanger, to taunt and test the viewer’s patience. Gah! Nevertheless, taken as a single (partially satisfying) batch, there were some definite improvements this time around…

First up was the turning of a dying ‘Tara’ by the reluctant and ever-snarky ‘Pam’. In theory Tara should have been my fave character from the get-go, being a ballsy, bolshy woman-of-colour, played by an incredibly cute and athletic actress (Rutina Wesley). Unfortunately, all I can ever remember her doing is whining, crying, and being kind of a dick to everyone… when she wasn’t getting blotto drunk and sleeping with her male friends, that is. It’s a mark of how little I had invested in Tara that I’d actually forgotten about her being blasted with a shotgun last year! Who’d have thought that all it would take to redeem her character is a pair of fangs, a new wardrobe, and the tough-love tutelage of one of the show’s most consistent scene-stealers!

Speaking of whom… the second biggest improvement this season was the fleshing out of Pam’s backstory, with flashbacks to her first encounter with her maker, ‘Eric’, and the circumstances surrounding her own embrace. It really helped to sell her growing fondness for her own (somewhat) involuntary progeny, to see how she had basically blackmailed Eric into “saving her” with the gift/curse of immortality. And it also gave the reliably-hilarious Kristin Bauer van Straten some more dramatic material to sink her teeth into (pun!), which she did with aplomb. The promise of a quasi-incestuous, sapphic relationship between Pam and Tara isn’t something I feel too strongly about, one way or the other… just so long as they keep bickering and bitching each other out, and don’t get all boring and angsty about it.

Rounding out their troika of vampy vixens is ‘Jessica’, who began her afterlife as an annoying joke, but has since grown into one of the strongest and most sympathetic characters in the entire series. Deborah Ann Woll certainly seemed to be enjoying herself this season, saving ‘Jason’ from unwanted admirers, partying with random college kids, and (more importantly) making friends with Tara whether she liked it or not! Again, they have a fun, feisty chemistry, and I loved Jessica’s sweet little peace-making speech after she sought sanctuary at Fangtasia… plus her glee at seeing Pam and Tara kiss for the first time was straight-up adorable. No offence to the rest of the cast, but if these three ladies were given a spin-off series of their own, I might stop watching the main show altogether!

Oh, I also have to give a shout-out to Tina Majorino, who played ‘Molly’, a cute Authority techie, charged with the unenviable task of ordering hunky men to take their tops off, so she can strap on an iStake (a remotely-controlled tracker and staking device combo, to keep wayward vamps in line!). Sadly she didn’t survive the coup… but she did make a very endearing impression.