Tell Me a Story: Madness

A bunch of stuff happened this time, and I'm sort of starting to see where the fairy tale influences come in. It's pretty tenuous and I'm still not sure what the point of it is though. There's definitely not enough there to say that they're based on the fairy tales. And it still makes no sense to have all three stories going on at once.

Doctor Who: The Witchfinders

This episode couldn't have annoyed me more if it had been intentional. The cast is great and the monsters look really cool, but the story is garbage. Nothing makes sense, the dialogue is incredibly annoying, and even the bits that could have worked don't because they take full advantage of every lazy shortcut instead of bothering to come up with plausible reasons for anything to happen.

Tell Me a Story: Rage

This show would be so much better if they'd just done each story separately instead of cutting between them. And also just not done Red Riding Hood's story. But mainly doing each story separately, because then they wouldn't feel so slow. Because each one only gets an average of 15 minutes a week there's just not time for much to happen. The stories aren't even connected. It's basically just three shows cut up and mixed together.

Doctor Who: Kerblam!

This was a decent episode. There are a couple of things about it that I found very irritating, but mostly it was good. For a kids' show, anyway. The "twists" (such as they are) aren't going to surprise any adult viewers, but I doubt the target audience found it quite so easy to predict. My only major criticism is that it seemed like it was heading toward a particular message only to back off at the last moment, which made the point of the episode a little unclear.

Tell Me a Story: Greed

This show isn't actually bad. It's not particularly good, but it's better than some of the shit I watch. It just isn't what it's supposedly meant to be. The stories and characters just have absolutely nothing to do with the fairy tales they're apparently based on. It's also kind of slow - not boring, just not a lot happens in each episode.

Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

In some ways, this episode wasn't as bad as the last one, mostly because it was just kind of boring. And the aliens were completely pointless. If you cut them out of the story it would be exactly the same, you'd just save some time.

Lessons from Lone Wolf: Choice and Consequence

I've been running a group playthrough (or let's play) of the Lone Wolf gamebook series on the Something Awful forums, and I've gone over the books in some depth in order to provide extra information and to attempt to make some bits work a little better (eg. not letting us get into stupid dead-man-walking states). In doing this I've come away with a few lessons that anyone thinking about writing a gamebook should follow. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

Star Trek: Discovery - Calypso

This was the best episode of Discovery so far. It wasn't a unique or original story - I'm fairly certain I've read and/or watched multiple versions of it before - but it was well-executed and enjoyable. My only criticism would be that it ties into the main series in an odd way that I don't think is going to be paid off well, but that's a bit transtextual. Taken on its own, this is a fully self-contained story and you could watch and enjoying it without knowing the first thing about Discovery or even any of Star Trek.

Tell Me a Story: Loss

This show is slooooow. Barely anything actually happened in this episode. There's sort of some escalating tension but it's at a pretty low level. I think a big part of the problem is that we don't know any of the characters well enough to care about them. I'm not even sure who we're supposed to be siding with in the three pigs story. You'd think it would be the guy whose girlfriend was just killed (the wolf?), but the show seems to want us to care at least as much about the criminals (the pigs). And the three stories still seem completely separate, so it's not clear why they're all being told together.

Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

This episode was about 50% mediocre and 50% bad. In fact, if not for the bad bits, it would be utterly generic and forgettable, so basically the only things I'm going to remember about it are bad and if I remember it at all it will be as a bad episode. So actually it's bad episode. I didn't like it.

Tell Me a Story: Hope

"The world's most beloved fairy tales re-imagined as a dark and twisted psychological thriller. Set in modern day New York City, the first season of this serialised drama interweaves The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel into an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge and murder." - TV Calendar.

I assumed, based on the description, that I was in for some kind of teen supernatural action romance. Something like Lost Girl or Wynonna Earp. Probably everyone would look like normal humans most of the time because of budget and there'd be a lot of love triangles and misunderstandings. This show is not that at all. I'm not sure what it is.