Having been associated with the career-shaping role of Doctor Who‘s Amy Pond for three years, it was always going to be interesting to see what Karen Gillan picked as her first post-TARDIS adventure.
If you turned Episode 4 of The Returned into a drinking game, with the rule of having a shot every time someone discovered a secret, then by the time the credits rolled you’d be lying unconscious on the floor, being eaten by your cats Mme Payet style.
The wonderful thing about the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary is the upsurge in unofficial publications.
Companions by Andy Frankham-Allen takes an in-depth look at the brave souls who have battled at the Doctor’s side, endured the excitement of time travel and crucially, asked the questions on our behalf.
Pacific Rim: Man, Machines & Monsters delves into the production design of Guillermo del Toro’s epic new movie with lots of exclusive content not usually seen in a book of this type.
And so the third series of Sky1’s man-fuelled drama – starring John Simm (Doctor Who), Philip Glenister (Ashes To Ashes), Max Beesley (Survivors) and Marc Warren (Hustle) – comes to an end, in typical Mad Dogs style with thrills, laughs and a Dwarf Zombie.
A prequel of diminished returns, Monsters University is a good but not great film that packs plenty of laughs into a familiar narrative. It’s a strong enough film of its kind, but there’s still a nagging feeling that it should be something more imaginative, something where you can’t sit back and say with certainty ‘It’s like these films.’
Written and read by voice of the Daleks and Big Finish exec Nicholas Briggs, ‘The Dalek Generation’ features the Doctor travelling solo, presumably post-Ponds and prior to ‘The Snowmen’.
Last week The Returned felt like a police procedural with a David Lynch haircut. This week it has the aura of a soap opera wrapped about it. A weird soap opera but a good one, similar in result to if Rod Serling wrote an entire week’s worth of Neighbours. ‘So Paul Robinson’s cursed false leg was an allegory for America’s relationship with Communist Cuba? Wow…’.
Movie novelizations are strange beasts. On one hand, if you’ve seen the film, what would compel you to then read it? And on the other, if you haven’t seen a film yet, why would you want to buy several hundred pages of entertainingly presented spoilers?
Man of Steel: Inside the Legendary World of Superman is the kind of sturdy coffee table book that looks best when casually left open, brazenly revealing one of its many glorious double-page spreads of the film’s pre-production artwork. Or the big photo of Henry Cavill’s bare glistening torso. Hey, it’s all part of the film’s aesthetic appeal.