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Is Captain UK Irish?
Deep in the 80s, this possibility never occurred to me. The foreshadows of the Captain Britain Corps who turned up in the Alan Moore Captain Britain run – Linda McQuillan herself, Captain England, Captain Albion – suggest that the sheer multitude of Captains just riff on the CB identity with minimal fuss. We’re just meant…
Press Gang Rewatch: The Last Word
A tic in pop criticism that I find aggravating is when a writer says that Show X or Book Y “deals with the topic of …” This promises that Show X or Book Y proceeds somehow from an analysis of the topic; that the topic is not just a Thing in the Story. But the…
Press Gang Rewatch: Monday Tuesday
Let’s start thinking about Press Gang – still, for my money, Steven Moffat’s most sustained, serious work – by looking at two instances of jokes that are not jokes. These are instances of dialogue that have the rhythm of a joke, but are not the emotional content of a joke. To be more precise –…
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
We were talking before about one of The Shat’s typically strange choices in this flim, but I’d like to think about TMP a bit more generally now. What a weird film TMP is! Even in 1979, who used the phrase “motion picture” anymore? – The grandeur! Sometimes I wonder if this is even Star Trek,…
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