Cult TV Blog

I have rather bizarrely been put on antimalarial medication for my arthritis. I was telling a colleague at work this, and commented that it was the result of a lifetime in the tropics. She herself is from what used to be british Guyana and made a remark about being Colonial. It was only afterwards that I placed my quotation from this episode. Sidney Street is perhaps exactly the kind of fantasy old world character that I was imitating. He is certainly one of my favourite villains in The Avengers, and I also like that this episode of draws heavily on, well, pretty well every mystery you could ever wish to mention, also of course Street is based on the Maltese Falcon character who is obsessed with obtaining the falcon. This episode is of course not the only time that fictional characters burst into the world of The Avengers, many season 6 episodes take that inspiration from fiction, but my personal opinion is that this is the best. So effectively spoofs the genre of pretend Chinese ...

I can see why a lot of people criticize the turn the X-Files talk as it went on, and certainly in the fifth series I can see that it would disappoint a lot of the hardcore science fiction mythology enthusiasts. Killswitch maybe a perfect example of what people hate about this direction, but I actually think it is my favourite episodes of the entire show. Visually it is a series of tableaux, some of them set in the real world and depicting The X-Files characters we are so fond of, and some of them set in a world of virtual reality created by a computer intelligence which has managed to get loose. Invest the episode embodies another of the characteristic 1990s sears which is actually one I have often written about here and is found in a lot of 1960s television programmes: The fear that our technology will become more intelligent than us, get loose and control us. This is exactly what happens in this episode, although honestly it's probably seems more realistic as a fear in the 1990s...

Apologies if you have left a comment on this blog and it has not been published. I have found that blogger has not been sending me emails to say that a comment had been left and so I have just found a large number of comments awaiting motivation. Apologies too if I have deleted your comment by mistake. There were comments in Chinese and also a lot inviting people to apply to be sexy webcam models. I would apply but I don't think I am what they have in mind!

You will have noticed that I have omitted series 3 of the show. This wasn't actually intentional that was because I found that one disc of my set didn't play and put it back in the bookcase in frustration, so will no doubt find myself talking about the episodes in the wrong order at some point in the future. Demons is a particularly interesting episode in my opinion, but for she apparently wrong reason that while contributing to the show's mythology it's also showcases pretty well everything that is wrong with The X-Files! A common criticism of The X-Files is that if Mulder and Scully we're actually FBI agents they would probably be sacked for incompetence. In this episode alone they don't hesitate to interfere with evidence. I'm no policeman but I know when you find a dead body you leave it alone rather than fiddling with it, moving it, or anything else. In fact this episode makes me wonder whether any management went on in the fictional FBI depicted h...

The series of posts I started recently about The X-Files became dominated by treatments of religion and religious people also that was not my intention to start off with. On the surface this episode is about a man who has a tattoo unfortunately using ink made from rye grass which makes him psychotic. This would make it a rather pedestrian X-Files episode and so surely the main purpose of the episode is the underlying themes of Rebellion, authority because in The X-Files of the outsiders wisdom, a figure represented in this episode by the tattooist himself. The tattooists Wisdom is perhaps a little trite, since it is limited to unfortunately making his own dies from ride grass and telling his customers that people get the tattoo they deserve. In my own opinion, and anyone who has looked at this block at any length will see that I have tattoos myself, deserve is not quite the word. I can see what he means. If you walk into the tattooist and point at a picture on the wall and have tha...

I'm just rewatching this Saint episode to check, because when I first watched it, at one point its dialogue struck me as very similar to dialogue in Escape in Time. To be sure the two plots aren't that different if you allow that The Avengers will naturally also have time-travelling weirdness in spades. I was hoping that the two screenplays would have been written by the same person, so that any similarities in dialogue would be explained by coming out of his own head, but I see Escape Route was written by Michael Winder and Escape in Time by Philip Levene, being broadcast in 1967 and 1968 respectively. The similarities begin around the 20 minute mark (in The Saint) when a man called Harry is introduced who seems to be some sort of fixer for the escape. He speaks with the same sort of stutter as Thyssen in The Avengers, who fulfills the same role. The nuts and bolts of the escape are actually arranged by a woman in both episodes. I realise the connection is very tenuous but...

You thought I'd got distracted from my re-watch of the X-Files, didn't you? Only temporarily because here I'm back with an episode at the heart of the series's mythology. Not only do we see proof of aliens but Scully learns she has been abducted and there is a whole support group. We also learn the international nature of the cover-up. I see that I have already written about the second part of this two-parter here . This episode ironically references a major topic in 1990s therapy: false memory syndrome. 'You're afraid to remember,' says one of the other abductees to Scully. Outside the world of alien abduction there are all sorts of reasons a person wouldn't remember something, a common one being trauma, and of course the controversy in the 1990s was that people were 'remembering' abuse which probably never happened. The X-Files cleverly gives alien abduction a tangible proof - the scar on the back of the neck and the accompanying implant. Th...