Colin Parton's Blog

Poldark - Debbie Horsfield Season Two

This series becomes silly in the second season. Ross and Demelza falling out of love with each other is a ridiculous turn of events.

They were head over heels in love last season, and we are to believe they are just casting that aside?

As usual, Ross is a hothead.

What on earth could have possessed him to sleep with his ex-flame? It is beyond dumb. The death of Francis is heartbreaking, but it also felt silly because it was totally avoidable.

The whole mine saga, money saga, and contraband saga just make Ross look like an idiot because of his wife’s position – AND she is right!

The Doctor and the Heiress was the only redeeming quality this season, and that was not enough.

This is where Poldark and I part ways. Disappointing, as the first season had such promise.

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The Witcher - Lauren Schmidt Hissrich Season Four

Liam Hemsworth (The Dressmaker & Workaholics) is a bit jarring as the new Geralt after Henry Cavill’s (Mission Impossible: Fallout & Zack Snyder’s Justice League) departure. The a bigger shock than it would have been otherwise because Geralt is nursing an injury.

If Liam had been able to enter with all the cool tricks and excellent combat that Henry did, I do not think it would have been such a shock.

The monsters remained excellent. They were fantastic this season. Really scary and varied. The dramatic irony of the fake princess Cerillia was getting old. I am glad they finished that off.

The mages were really disappointing this season. They just felt a bit meh, which is really surprising because this was their chance to shine. Now that they are down they have to fight.

Cerilia’s, Freya Allan (Into the Badlands & Kingdom of Planet of the Apes), side quest with the rats was underwhelming as well. 

It was good to see normal people in this world because that is something that is generally missing from the series.

The fight where Geralt saves the girl from being raped in the barn is one of the best choreographed fight scenes in the entire series—a joy to behold.

Cahir, Eamon Farren (Twin Peaks & The Pacific), felt really strange in this season. He moves from and excellent proxy of the big bad to joining the good guys. The transition is too quick.

Another section that felt very off for me was Milva’s pregnancy and planned abortion. Unsure where this came from, but it was very poorly handled. 

Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix & John Wick: Chapter 2) is great as the vampire. He brings nuance to a role that could very easily have been two-dimensional. 

The interplay between him and Geralt is brilliant.

So there are lots of issues with the series and things that were not handled well. Having said that, I still think it is an 8/10, so the rest of it is rip-roaring fun.

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Derry Girls - Lisa McGee Season One

This small town sit-com focus on the small town things that take up the lives of these girls and their families. It was a very rough start with a lot of the jokes just missing the mark.

The characters were all hot and cold as well. But both the story and the characters grew on me.

It really felt that they were feeling their way a little bit at the start of the season.

The characters were a bit inconsistent but this was all sorted out by the end of the season. One of the girls male cousin is sent to the girls school because their afraid the boys will kill him because he’s English.

He doesn’t really get a look in apart from  being the but of jokes, which is sad because they could have done a lot more with this character.

All of their parents are just as mental as they are. So totally bizzare. One of my favourites is the main girl’s dad

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Castle Crashers - The Behemoth

What an interesting take on the side-scrolling fighting game. You play one of a group of knights who have to fight through hordes of enemies to save the princess.

The level-up system allows you to increase whatever skills you would like, from strength and agility to magic. All of the knights can do similar things, and the ability to diversify your skills is what will make you operate differently from the others.

We found that a diverse party did best. We had a serious damage output who was also super tanky. 

We had a high-agility knight who was excellent at keeping us in the fight. We also had a mage good at long-range damage and freezing enemies.

The magic appeared to be the main way that the knights differed based on their colour. The ice knight and the freeze ability were excellent for the hordes you face towards the end of the game, but we didn’t level up the other magic, so we cannot give you commentary on theirs.

The gameplay was fun, incorporating some slight combos in the fighting to allow you to do some really brutal moves on the enemies. 

The laning that is always important in this sort of game was here as well. You had to position yourself vertically on the screen to ensure you would hit or not be hit.

I don’t recall any levelling in any other games like this, but it was probably there; I just haven’t played any in a long, long while.

Other things you could do include collecting pets that would aid you in various ways. The different items and weapons you could choose had slight variance in gameplay and skill impacts.

For example, the spade allowed you to dig for treasure, and one of the animals scouted for where the treasure was buried. The boss variety was pretty good.

The end of the game was really hard because you couldn’t really see what was happening. 

This was really disappointing because it had nothing to do with gameplay. Another neat feature was that after you finished a castle and rescued the princess, you would fight amoungst yourselves for her hand.

Overall, it was fun but not great. I find the laning stuff hard to judge, so it just gets frustrating. It also felt odd to have to replay levels in order to level up more for the end so our skills were better. It also felt pretty short. We finished the story in 7 hours.

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Dracula - Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat

The mini-series takes us to new places, yet remains true, at least in its form, to the original story. We are told the tale through interviews that have a distinctly similar feeling to the original letters.

We get one character’s telling of the tale, which is then taken up by another character’s telling of the tale in the future. It is a beautiful way to tell this story.

The beginning of the series is almost beat-for-beat identical to the novel. Then small details begin to diverge until we are in an entirely unknown place altogether.

Harker, John Heffernan (Luther & Eye In The Sky), survives at the end of this story to tell the tale to the nun in the convent, until we realise that he didn’t survive. He is undead and he doesn’t realise it.

The bridge between the undead and vampires explored in this series is very interesting. Most of Dracula’s, Claes Bang (The Bridge & Borgen), victims simply die. 

Some survive as undead; others become full vampires. When I first saw this, I thought that we were seeing a fatal flaw that had appeared in other vampire stories in the past.

In these stories, any person who is bitten by a vampire becomes a vampire. This makes no sense unless the original vampire hardly ever feeds. Otherwise, the entire world would be overrun by vampires very quickly.

This stepped approach makes complete sense within the narrative and allows for the whole John Harker narrative to play out as brilliantly as it does.

Another fantastic plot mechanic is ‘Blood is Lives’. Everyone who hears this doesn’t quite grasp its full meaning until Dracula explains it.

It is pretty literal. As Dracula drinks the blood of a victim, he can see their life and learn their languages. He takes their knowledge and skills. Fantastic stuff.

What better way to manipulate someone than actually to know everything that they have ever done?

The characters are great and well-rounded throughout. The new additions work well, even if they are a little jarring to begin with.

Sister Agatha Van-Helsing, Dolly Wells (The I.T. Crowd & Peep Show),  is a great example of one of these. She is the vessel that allows Harker to tell his story.

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She carries with her the knowledge of her family bloodline. A bloodline that Dracula is keen to get his hands on so that he can learn more about himself.

The major plot lines continue, including the journey to England. But that is where the similarity ends.

The boat is sunk, and then we skip forward into the future – present day. I did not see that coming. This was a great move, and I really enjoyed it… for a bit.

There were some great aha moments, such as the reveal that the Van-Helsing bloodline continued and was watching over where Dracula had lain at the bottom of the channel all these years.

The bigger issue was that so few of the characters were likeable or interesting.

The end was a bit meh. Very average. Nothing interesting or new. But I guess the question arrises: with such a massive tale, how do you end it well?

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The Sandman - Neil Gaiman & David S. Goyer & Allan Heinberg Season One

The capture of Dream in the opening of this sets the tone and weirdness of this series perfectly. The passing of time as a backdrop to the opening is great and vital for us to understand the world and the rest of the plots we are about to encounter.

I love the interesting ideas that this series integrates. What if there were a collection of eternal beings that ruled over the realms relating to abstracts of existence?

“The Endless” is such an interesting idea. What would the Lord of Desire be like?

The cast is brilliant. With Tom Sturridge (Being Julia & The Hollow Crown) as Dream and Kirby Howell-Baptiste (Barry & Hacks) as Death, what more can we want? They deliver stand-out performances, capturing something unnerving about the bizarre entities they are playing.

When Dream returns to his realm after his long capture, his realm is in ruin. He begins searching for missing dreams and nightmares (personifications).

This sets up some great through plots and characters that we will return to again and again throughout the series.

The narative tied to the big three dreams and nightmares is great. Their stories are touched on and we return to them again and again as other stories unfold. Just great stuff.

The meta plot instigated by Desire, Mason Alexander Park (Cowboy Bebop & Not In My Backyard), is such a neatly tied package. It is tight and believable – beautiful to watch.

The casting of Lucifer, Gwendoline Christie (Wednesday & Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens), couldn’t be more perfect. She embodies Lucifer Morningstar to a T, and we feel the true weight of the crown of hell that sits on her brow.

I binged the first season – so very much looking forward to the next. Love This!

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My Hero Academia - Kôhei Horikoshi Season Four

Everything changes for the heroes this season. All Might’s retirement signals a new age for the villains and heroes alike.

The students on their probationary hero licenses now have the responsibility to participate in hero activities. As the students step into their new role, the world is more threatening than it has been for many years.

A new villain emerges for this season – Overhaul – leader of the Yakuza.

The Yakuza form a tenuous alliance with the League of Villains. In another big development, we learn of a power that can remove quirks.

Overhaul has a captive girl who can take a person or object back in time – essentially erasing the development of their quirk. It doesn’t change their age or anything, so not really sure how that works.

The problem is that she cannot control her ability, so Overhaul is using her blood to temporarily remove quirks and also boost quirks as well. Towards the end of the season, we learn that Overhaul has been able to refine a few blood bullets to by ppermenant quirk removal.

This makes the boss fight extra scary. We also get the introduction of the big 3. UA’s top three students, Lemillion, Sun Eater and Wave Motion. 

The entire end of this season is the probationary heroes, teachers and the big three, along with some of the pros trying to take down the Yakuza. This is epic in every sense of the word.

One of the pros was All Might’s partner. He can see into a person’s future, and he saw All Might’s death.

This has been an underlying plot point. So, in the end, when we see his vision of Izuka’s death, we are certain this is the end. 

But through the girl’s power uniting with his, not only does he evade death, but he rewrites the future. And we get to see All For One at 100% for the first time.

This show keeps getting better, and this is by far the best season yet! I can’t wait for what Season 5 brings!

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The Secret of Mana - Koichi Ishii

This felt like Square’s response to the Zelda series. For the first time, we have overworld fighting, rather than the typical cut to combat screen that we are so used to in the Final Fantasy series.

They moved to overworld fighting, just like Zelda. The choose to do something completely different with the way items work. 

In both Zelda and the Final Fantasy series, weapons simply get replaced with new weapons. Here we see a move to levelling up items. This was really counterintuitive.

When your group start increasing in size, the combat is extra bad. Because you are only controlling one of the three party members, the other two are prone to get in the way of attacks and are just dead weight. This was game-ruining for me.

The narrative felt odd as well. The typical Final Fantasy plot of a villain wanting to overthrow the world order felt weird and out of place here for some reason.

Sitting between Final Fantasy and Zelda, it surprisingly fails at both. You would have expected the developers to take the good points from both, but it is almost as if they didn’t understand why the other games were so good.

I was surprised to learn that the game had gotten a HD re-release. This wasn’t for me. I gave up at Spikey, about 12% through the game.

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Born Yesterday - George Cukor

Such a simple plot and executed so well. This would be 10/10 apart from a few personal issues.

Harry, Broderick Crawford (Highway Patrol & Rawhide), is a bigshot junker who has come to Washington with his girl. He is here to pay off congressmen to get a bill passed to protect his business.

That’s the situation. The problem is that his girl, Billie, Judy Holliday (The Solid Gold Cadillac & Adam’s Rib), is as dumb as a post. This causes lots of problems early on as they meet with senators and their families.

There is a journalist who is onto Harry’s case, and Harry hires him to teach Billie not to be so dumb. The thing is, Billie likes being dumb.

She isn’t really dumb; she just knows what she likes. There is this awesome scene where Harry and she are playing Gin Rummy.

He is giving her a talking to that she had better smarten up, as she silently destroys him at the game. She realises that she had better learn something if she wants her high-flying life to continue.

The journo, Paul, William Holden (The Network & The Bridge Over the River Kwai), returns. She is interested, and they kiss. She is really excited about everything she is learning.

She starts reading Paul’s articles. Her response to one of them is: “I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever read, but I didn’t understand a word of it.”

As she learns things, she learns more about her rights and how bad Harry is, not just to her.

They get into a big fight, which is a beautiful scene. This is because, as they go at it, they have to pause every few lines as a maid crosses back and forth through the room while cleaning.

Harry begins to glimpse what he has created, and there is an awful scene where he beats her.

She gets her own back. She and Paul get the files that prove his wrongdoing. She has begun to understand the paperwork that she has been forced to sign.

It all comes together in a big final scene, which is just fantastic. They win, and the awful Harry is ruined.

The dialogue in this film is just incredible. The script could be from today. My only gripe is that Billie’s voice is just awful, and as the main character, we hear a lot of it.

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The Children of Hurin - J.R.R. Tolkien

This is the furthest that you can get from Tolkien’s other stories. It is a tale of woe and doom from its outset to its end.

It takes us to dark places that Tolkien has never taken us before. While there are great high points, he never lets you forget that it is a momentary thing.

Happiness or victory will always be followed by sorrow or defeat. The hero is Turin, Hurin’s son.

Turin is a very unlikable character. He is quick to anger and rude, even to his friends. His attitude could well be because of the woe he brings with him wherever he goes.

Despite all these shortcomings, Tolkien manages to get us to like him. This is no mean feat.

We get to see many new stories here that are not told elsewhere. The major battles and plot points are drawn from The Silmarillion, but in this novel the point of view is entirely human.

This is not something we get to see very often in Tolkien’s works. Without looking too deeply into it, the closest I would say we get elsewhere is Aragorn’s perspective in The Lord of the Rings.

And one could hardly call the Dunedain human. Throughout the novel, Turin causes the downfall of three kingdoms, including one he created himself.

He falls in love several times throughout the story, and others fall in love with him. But his actions destroy any possibility of love. His action also causes the end of his line.

The most trajic path that Tolkien talks us on is not for the faint of heart. The final destruction of Turin and his line is because he had never met his sister, as she was just born when he fled Dor-Lomin.

She has her mind wiped by the lord of the dragons. Many years later they are reunited and are married.

We know who they are and it is clear where we are headed. The final scenes of downfall are caused as Turin defeats the dragon in combat and Nienor recovers her memory.

They both take their own lives. It is just tragic after what would normally be a great victory – see Laketown in The Hobbit.

At the end of the day, I thought it was a refreshing look at Middle-earth in this early period from the perspective of humans and not the Eldar.

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